by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara

A Caveat: you cannot go into this expecting joy. Joy is some hard, rare metal, its faint, glimmering veins buried way down below the surface. Go into this the way you do anything that is necessary and painful and generative: the first real fight with a lover, the last three miles of a marathon, childbirth.

If your parents are divorced, prepare yourself. At some point they will both manage to slip it into a conversation. Well, your mother might say, it's probably because your father is gay. And he may well be. Never mind the new wife and children. Never mind that somewhere in his forties he lost interest in wetlands restoration and adult literacy and he began collecting hunting knives and playing war games. Never mind how, for six years, he has spent Sunday mornings in the basement, hunkered over the ping-pong table which is covered by his war game, smoking cigars, and farting as he uses eight inch tweezers to move the tiny cardboard pieces which represent infantry divisions and air squadrons. Never mind these things. And don't get into them with your mother, because soon she'll be speculating that you're gay because you never learned to trust men, which is also your father's fault. Save these details for your friends, who will understand that no self-respecting gay man could behave the way your father does.

If your parents are ex-hippies, it will be easier. You can trust that good intentions are buried under the things they manage to do. When you first tell them, they might pass out, get in a car accident, start crying, pretend they didn't hear you, go mute. But no matter what they do, you will still be lucky. They simply won't be able to get the words disown, immoral, shame out of their mouths. Even through the haze of these early conversations, they'll remember that in 1968 they pledged that they would spend their lives fighting the capitalist pigs. They'll remember flashes of stories they have heard on NPR, they'll think of their annual donations to the ACLU, of the co-worker who just adopted a baby from Thailand with her partner. Again and again, they will say that all they want for you is a safe, easy life.

In the first three years, you should expect long silences on the phone. When you mention the woman you're dating, there will be an awkward pause when they can't bring themselves to do what they know they're supposed to, which is ask one or two simple, innocuous questions about her. If she's the one who answers when they call, they will be cordial and restrained and she will wince as she hands the phone to you.

And, then, five or six years into it, after they have met and been gracious to two serious girlfriends, after they have a few P-FLAG meetings under their belt, and have read up on the logistics of what will be involved in the conception of their grandchildren, then, then comes the fallout.

At Christmas, you will fly from San Francisco to Raleigh. It will be lightly snowing as your plane lands and the woods surrounding the airport will be coated by a fine dust. You will be surprised by how much it moves you, how certain you feel in this moment that this is your home. When your mother meets you at the gate, she will pause before hugging you and say, you look different. In the next few days, you will catch her staring at you with an expression like someone is pinching her. She will try to wipe it off her face, but it won't go anywhere. As you get ready to go to a cousin's house for Christmas dinner, she will mention that your voice sounds different, that you're walking differently. A few nights later, as you're telling her a story during dinner, she will interrupt you and slam her fork onto her plate and say, What happened to you? You look like a man. What did you do with my daughter?

This next part will be hard.

There will be drowning fights in which they will confess that in order to accept you, they first had to grieve you. Yes, that's how it goes. P-FLAG (god bless them) tells parents to approach this process as they might a death. Who died, you'll ask. And your mother will pause and her body will tense up and she'll close her eyes and then blurt it out: the person you used to be. The life they were counting on from the minute you popped out, wailing, slick, slit-eyed, and, for many, but not all of us, immediately recognizable as either a boy or a girl.

Sometimes, they will forget to speak of you with love. They will fancy themselves detectives in search of evidence, doctors in search of etiology. That child you were—the one who changed her name at daycare and lined up with the boys whenever they said, boys on this side of the room, girls on that side—will become Exhibit A. There is a picture of that child on your fridge, wearing a football helmet, no shirt, a fake tattoo smudged on the slight bulge of her shoulder, no smile, big eyes. You put this picture up because every time your girlfriend sees it, she wants to kiss you and you like it when she kisses you.

One Sunday afternoon, your father will find another copy of the picture in an old album. He will stare at it and then he will thumb through the DSM IV he bought a few years ago and he will find pathologies to associate with this child. In the interest of his own processing, he will read this list to you the next time you talk on the phone and you will sit at your kitchen table, 3,000 miles away from him, and force yourself not to cry until after you've hung up.

In a subsequent conversation with your mother, that dogged loyalty you had for your junior high soccer coach will finally be revealed for the crush that it was. The countless nights you slept over at a friend's house during your senior year of high school will suddenly be called into question because your friend's mother showed up at a recent P-FLAG meeting. During the post-meeting social hour, the two mothers will have sought each other out. They will have chatted, about work, about the weather, finally, and just briefly, about their daughters. Driving home from the meeting, your mother will have put the pieces together and realized that the strict curfews she enforced on the nights you were out with your boyfriend were all for naught. She will feel duped, betrayed. My God, she'll say to you, I used to drop you off at your girlfriend's house for the night. I used to come inside with you and have tea with her mother.

But if you're committed to doing this honestly, you will tell her that it wasn't like that. Yes, you'll say, the two of you were in love. But you never said anything and neither did she. You were chaste and tortured in the constancy of each other's company. And if you really want to push things, if you're willing to go to that place where being honest means being chased through dark, tangled woods, you'll say that instead of the two of you holding hands and going to movies and fucking like the 18-year-olds you were, what happened was that she got drunk before first period every morning and, late at night, alone in your room, you used to scrape fine parallel lines across your thigh with a drugstore pocketknife.

Later, when things have cooled down, you will at least consider telling your mother that two years ago you and this friend met up again at a party. You were both awkward at first, shy about rediscovering each other as adults who understood their desire, who knew what to do with it. But you couldn't stop talking to each other and when it got late and people started to leave, you went home with her. And when you kissed her for the first time, she tasted like salt water and you felt as overwhelmed and innocent as you had at sixteen, which is the first time you'd realized, as you watched her doing shooting drills in the middle of soccer practice, that your eyes followed the lines of her body, and that somewhere in you, a place you could not name or reach or know the shape of, was the desire to put your hands and mouth on her body. And, later that night, as you moved under her and felt the weight, the reality, of her body, you realized how unbearably lucky the two of you were, to have made it through years seventeen to nineteen.

And if you've managed to say all of this, you'll be pretty worked up and if you're anything like me, you'll be crying, snot running over your lips, fury and regret drenching you like rain, pushing you on like adrenalin, and you'll keep going. You'll say, remember my prom date, the basketball player, the one who got straight A's and was president of the Honor Society, who was farm-boy handsome and never went on a date with a girl more than once and carried the goddamn Bible in his book bag so he'd always have it for FCA meetings. Your voice cracking loud by now. The one who shot himself in the head after his freshman year of college. He was gay. And your mother will look at you and she will remember standing next to you at his funeral before she knew about you or you knew about you or you knew about him and she will remember your pulling away from her, your face broken and flawed. She will remember thinking, this is where it stops being simple, thinking my child is crying and I cannot comfort her.

And I think that's when it happens. When she understands the full, crushing weight of what's at stake. When she understands why you, with your quiet voice and easy blush, have punched holes in walls and made yourself hoarse. When she understands that when she looks at you and sees someone who, from a distance, she might take for a man, it's like what used to happen when she was doing union work in an all-white holler in Kentucky—how at the end of a shift the elevator doors would shudder open, and, even though she knew the miners by name, in that first second, they always looked like strangers, like Black men who she'd never met before.

And if you can, find some way to tell her that down there, underground, the air is different and after awhile all you're aware of are the shapes of the bodies around you and the labor of cutting deeper and deeper away from the surface of the known world. Tell her, what we're after is joy.