Jennifer Finney Boylan

<h1>(Stonewall: 50 Years Later): Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the uprising at the Stonewall Inn, we asked Jennifer Finney Boylan, Moisés Kaufman and Danez Smith to reflect on the episode’s impact on the global LGBTQ community and to look to the promises and challenges of the future.</h1>

I did not know that the world had changed.

It was the summer of 1969, and I had sneaked out of my bunk at my boys’ summer camp on a hot New England night to stare at the waters of the lake, and to wonder whether I was going to make it to adulthood.

Marsha P. Johnson — she said the “P” stood for “Pay It No Mind” — had stood upon the bar at the Stonewall Inn a few weeks earlier and thrown a shot glass at a mirror on the wall. Johnson called it “the shot glass heard ’round the world.”

But its sound had not reached 11-year-old me. As a young trans girl, I could only assume that the odds against me were long. What would happen, I wondered, if I spoke aloud the thing that was in my heart? Even worse: What would happen if I did not?

As I stood there, I heard distant voices from a neighboring camp — the one for girls. I heard them singing.

It was the moon landing summer, and it was impossible not to look up into the night sky that July without imagining the tiny craft hurtling away from the gravitational pull of Earth. To me the moon didn’t seem all that different from those girls across the lake: so near, but so unknowable.

Thirty years later, I sat next to my mother on a white linen love seat in the house I’d grown up in and began, in my inarticulate, awkward way, to tell her the truth.

Mom was an evangelical Christian, a conservative, a Republican. I was pretty sure that coming out to her as trans would not strike her as the best thing that had ever happened to her family.

I poured her a gin and tonic. Then, somehow, I spilled the beans. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I was a child, I said to my 84-year-old mother. But I was afraid you wouldn’t love me anymore.

That was when my 5-foot-tall mother got up out of her chair and put her arms around 6-foot-tall me. “I would never turn my back on my child,” she said, and quoted First Corinthians: “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I said: “But when everyone learns that I’m your daughter, won’t that be a scandal? An embarrassment?”

She said, “Yes. But I will adjust.” Then she wiped the tears from my face and said, “Love will prevail.”

In my life, love has prevailed, mostly. I’ve been married to my sweetheart for 31 years now — 12 as husband and wife, 19 as wife and wife.

One evening, I was driving through central Maine with our older child, when they announced that when they got out of college they wanted to move to Australia, to help develop anti-venom for the world’s most poisonous snakes.

I offered my opinion: No. I hadn’t logged all these years as a parent to have my firstborn dead of a snakebite on the other side of the globe.

“You said you’d always support my dreams,” my child said. “You said you’d always stand behind me.”

I sighed. “OK,” I said. “Fine. You can become a herpetologist. I’ll always support your dreams. Even when your dreams ... are stupid.”

My child did not, in fact, become a developer of snake anti-venom. But it was not the last time I would think about whether I could support their dreams. Two years ago, in fact, my child sat next to me on the couch and told me she, too, was transgender.

I felt, in that moment, as if I had been struck by lightning. Dear God, I thought. Anything but this. Given how hard being trans has made my life, it was the one thing I hoped my own child might be spared.

In the time since she came out, though, my daughter has mostly been treated with love and support by her friends and the people she works with. I think I’ve gotten better at expressing my love and support, too. But it still shames me that at the moment my child first came out to me, I reacted in a manner not dissimilar from the one I used when she told me she wanted to milk the venom from snakes.

Why was my mother able to open her heart, when my own heart, in the exact same circumstance, fought to just stay closed? Why is my daughter’s generation better than mine when it comes to accepting abundance and variation in human sexuality and identity? Why, to them, is being queer a delight and a cause for celebration, when for me it was something for which I felt I had to apologize, over and over, and to endlessly explain?

Maybe it’s that the shot glass that Marsha P. Johnson threw is still traveling through space. Maybe it moves at different speeds, depending on where the sound is going, and who it is that’s doing the listening.

For my daughter’s generation, Stonewall is history, and queer culture is a fact — even if it’s a fact that certain people keep trying to erase.

For those of us who lived through it, though, it still seems like a miracle that the world has changed so profoundly. There are times — especially since 2016 — when all of our progress feels very much at risk. There are times when it feels as if Stonewall were still going on and the battle that began that night can still be lost.

Was it really 50 years ago that I stood by the side of that lake in such sadness and listened to the voices of those distant singing girls?

It occurs to me now that at that same moment my opposite number might have been standing on the opposite bank, a young trans man looking with longing at the lights from my camp, wondering how he was going to survive.

I wish I could have told him then the thing my own mother would tell me years later, the thing that I eventually got around to telling my own child about the world we all would share.

I will never turn my back on my child, she said. These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/jennifer-boylan-transgender-woman.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Jennifer Finney Boylan: Love prevails, mostly

I did not know that the world had changed.

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Jennifer Finney Boylan

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Jennifer Finney Boylan: Love prevails, mostly