My Place in the World
In my new home, I can admit I'm gay.

By Fannie Harris

Last year, an agency supervisor suggested I speak on a panel in Harlem about the experiences of kids in foster care. In the hallway, I noticed a woman with short gray hair wearing a rainbow watch. Her name was Mary Keane. She pulled me aside and asked me to speak on a panel she was hosting on “Being Different.”

I’ve always been different because I’m black but the only rap star I like is Eminem, and I prefer rock and roll to r&b. So I wasn’t surprised that she asked me.

Then Mary asked me if I was gay. Unlike the kids who ask me on the bus if I’m gay, Mary didn’t seem to be asking so she could make fun of me or so she could say something vulgar or rude. I wasn’t entirely sure what to tell her. I said I thought I was straight, but I wasn’t sure.

Even though I’ve always felt different and have been attracted to girls as far back as I can remember, I resisted accepting that part of myself because I didn’t want to be gay. Admitting that I might be gay scared me because when I was little, another girl tried to molest me and once, when I was 5, I saw my mom having sex with a woman and it felt strange and upsetting to me.

Realizing the Truth

Even so, it was finally dawning on me that I was gay. A few months before, I had gone to the gay pride parade in Greenwich Village with some friends. I went just for fun (I had never been to the Village before).

The scene was wild and crazy and I loved it. I never knew the gay community was so large and filled with so many different people. A voice inside my head said, “The time to realize my sexuality is now!” After the parade, I thought that there could be no other place in the world where I could fit in and say, “This is me, this is who I am.” I was wrong.

At the panel, Mary told me she was an open lesbian, and it didn’t bother me because she seemed so normal. Then I met some of Mary’s foster kids and soon went to visit them at Mary’s house in Yonkers, New York.

The house was huge! It had four floors, 11 bedrooms (some of which aren’t even used), six bathrooms, a library and three living rooms. She had seven kids in the house, and there were gay rainbow flags all over the place.

Living My Destiny

All the kids living there said, “This is the best place I’ve ever been in.” At the time, I hated my foster home. My foster mother made me do almost all the cleaning, so I felt like Cinderella. She picked favorites and treated her biological daughter better than me. I wanted to leave there because she made me so stressed out I cried myself to sleep almost every night.

The more I visited Mary’s, the more comfortable I felt. “Oh my God, this is my haven,” I thought. My inhibitions about gay people started to fall away.

I moved into Mary’s house in November. That’s when I found a place I could be my best self, my true self. It feels like living my destiny.

About a month after arriving, I stopped caring about what other people thought of my sexuality. I was left with a decision to make—what was my sexuality was going to be?

For a while I maintained the straight gig. I didn’t quite want to label myself as gay, even though, in my heart, I knew there was a deep reason why I felt so comfortable in this new place. Mary didn’t flaunt her sexuality, so she didn’t really influence me in coming out. But the kids. . . they helped me hit the nail on the head.

Feelings for a New Friend

The kids mainly hung out in the basement, where there’s a television. One day a Jennifer Lopez video came on and one of the girls said something complimentary about her rear end. In my head, I found myself agreeing. “OK, there, I made up my mind,” I thought. “Telling everybody else is going to be the hard part.”

Amanda, a friend of my foster brother and sister, often spent the night at the house. Sometimes I don’t notice even obvious things, so when my foster sister told me that Amanda liked me, my reaction was, “Stop lying!” and, “She doesn’t even act like she’s attracted to me!”

But one night after a party, Amanda handed me a letter telling me that she liked me. She also wrote that it was OK if I wasn’t gay, but that she hoped we could at least become good friends. That threw me off. I was shocked and afraid because I didn’t know if she was serious or just playing around.

I didn’t want to get caught in a love jones that turned out to be a hoax. But the more I got to know her, the more I realized that she was trustworthy. My feelings for her started to grow and grow.

Out in the Open

It took about two or three months of continuous letter writing before we actually got to the point where we both understood that we were going to go out. We were pretty much writing about little third grade things like how our day went and how we felt about one another. She was the first girl that I’d ever gone out with.

Dates with Amanda don’t really happen much because we’re both really busy, but when we do get to spend time with each other, it’s usually at her house or going to the movies.

At first, I was a little weirded out by the fact that I was going to be seen holding hands with a girl. But I’ve had to adjust to a lot of different scenarios in my life, and it only took about a month to get both myself and everyone else used to my relationship with Amanda.

We express affection toward each other in the same way that any couple would: hugging, holding hands, kissing and all such. Being with her feels right because my mind and heart say so and I agree with them both.

A Role Model for Me

Moving in with a gay parent has given me a positive outlook on what being homosexual is all about. It’s not so much because Mary is gay, but just because of the kind of person she is. You’d have to know her to understand the feeling for yourself.

Mary seems like she’s been around since the world began, and when you talk to her it seems like she has the answers to everything. She’s also able to handle both parental roles and control all the kids with no problem. She’s a role model to me.

So far I’ve chosen not to talk to Mary about my sexuality because, seeing me with Amanda, especially, she already knows, and because I don’t think it really matters. But I know that, if I ever needed to, I could go up to Mary and tell her something about girl problems and not have to worry if she’s going to judge me or ridicule what I’m telling her. I don’t have to worry that Mary would take me to church trying to get this “demon” out of me.

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