The first ever Scots Pride Alumni/Student Mixer (SPASM)
Halfway to campus, I start feeling fraudulent. I'm a little old married lady with two cats and a crochet hook. The fuck I can tell undergraduates about LGBT life in the Twin Cities.
I hold my own at the first table. The students, two juniors and a senior, have practical questions about housing discrimination and being out in the workplace. But after we switch tables midway through, I find myself facing the entire lesbian contingent of the Mac softball team, and they want to know about bars and clubs and dear god where can we go 'til we're 21?
I tell them what I believe: because the Twin Cities have so many queer folks, we don't have to confine ourselves to strictly queer venues and events. Find a group doing what you love to do, and I guarantee you'll find other queers in it. But they don't want to hear this. They want to know where to meet girls, and don't understand that this is exactly what I'm trying to tell them.
Another alumna at the table claims she has no straight friends. I tried that life for a while, right after college. It isn't for me. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd already been out when I got to Mac. I might've run straight to the Queer Union and befriended no one else for four years. But by the time I started coming out, end of sophomore year, I already had a group of amazing friends, and almost all of them are straight. When I tried to cleave only to "my tribe", I missed those other friends too much. They are "my tribe".
My LGBT friends are incidentally queer. We're friends because we're both Pagan, say, or both writers. Shared membership in the queer community is a bonus, rather than a raison d'etre for our friendship. My relationships need a sturdier foundation than a rainbow flag.
A very nice man from the class of '72 tries to recruit me into the Minnesota Freedom Band. The woman who claims to have no straight friends also claims the greasy spoon half a mile from my house is a secret dyke hangout. I think we've all learned something here tonight. Class dismissed.