What studying abroad in Edinburgh taught me about coming out.
Happy Pride Month! All June long, we'll be sharing long reads, personal essays, and recipes from LGBTQ+ writers. This week: Max McDonough on pride, shame, and coming out.The oil lobbyist is smoking an e-cig on the edge of the bed. Glowing blue tip in the dark, the vapor plume smudges the light. Winter in Edinburgh. “You thirsty?”The first thing you remember, getting out of bed in a place like that, is the warm floor, your bare feet that suddenly exist.
Let me begin again. The first time I remember feeling alone, really alone, was in the first grade. I left for the bathroom in my Grim Reaper robe. The teacher, Snow White in her yellow and blue gown, corralled the class of ninjas and cowboys and princesses and M&Ms to the cafeteria where the Halloween parade would start its march around the school, though I didn’t know this. I returned, confused, to an empty classroom.
“Like in your primary school story,” he says. I lift the watch from its bed of linen in the wooden gift box. Beveled, polished steel, the watch is heavy as a small fish in my hand. “Though no death shrouds please.” His accent is a strange fusion of Russian and Scottish.“If I had a phone in this country, I’d be able toI wore that watch everywhere I went.
Proud little left wrist, weightier-than-usual left wrist, I wore that watch to the supermarket, clenching the basket’s handle, scraping the side back and forth against my jeans. Potatoes were the cheapest vegetable, and heavy too. I’d stuff bags with spinach, red peppers, tomatoes, even pineapple—the whole run of anemic, imported produce marked up for the cargo flight in. And then, at the self-checkout, I’d ring them up as potatoes.
“An exciting one,” I say, then tell him the story of my mother’s computer room, the French doors clicking shut behind me. I needed to use her computer, a bulky black Dell, for my school assignment about the upcoming presidential election. I was alone. A faux-Tiffany ceiling fixture threw shadows on the walls. A moth overhead thrashed against the light.In class, we had divvied up the candidates. My guy’s name was Dick Cheney. Eager, I sat down in the computer chair.I glanced over my shoulder.
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