By Paige Hoffer

The smell of one family’s comfort soured in our noses. Despite the credits rolling, I can’t seem to leave.

Though it now happens frequently, I am still surprised when I find queer moments hidden like pieces of old, spilled glitter found across exaggerated distances in my memory—scattered in dirt outside my house, wedged in the cracks of the sidewalk, caked in my hair and stuck under my nails. Memories from when I knew something, but buried it.

Before I saw myself as gay, I had to leave a lecture hall when a professor discussed the point of clarity in her own queerness when the wool sleeve of her friend’s cardigan exposed the friend’s wrist as she laughed, how this mundane moment pulled her from reality and deeper into a desire to tell the truth.

The truth: she wanted to do anything besides continue on like the world wasn’t altered by the wrist. It didn’t matter how she did this. Trace the wrist, leave the room, scream. There had to be some change within her to match the intensity of the moment, or at least call attention to the altered world. Time slowed enough to draw out the warped importance of specific details: the warm halo radiating from the kitchen light, the depth of deep black eyes, the coalescing of the fuzzy light in two unmoving, burning stars suspended in the deep black. 

This made sense to me, but I could not reconcile these feelings with what I knew about queerness.

I learned about lesbians from whispers of my outed friend in middle school locker rooms and the don’t ask, but do tell speculations on the relationships of my volleyball coach by parents. Being gay, I knew, meant having a public-facing image built in secret which you had no power to shape.

So, the solution: I wasn’t gay. Or maybe, this point of clarity mentioned in the lecture would just happen to me. I’d get a girlfriend and wouldn’t have to explain what I thought to anyone else, it would just be accepted. The concept of coming out without a girlfriend seemed painfully embarrassing to me.

I had tried it one time before. Through waves of tears I cried to my friend Simi that I might be umm…well…different…I didn't really know before college, modeled after a Degrassi episode.

Going to college did not magically reap a girlfriend. In fact, everything I understood to be true about being gay was at least 10 years out of date against the experiences of my peers. The queer people I met never viewed a clichéd, tearful coming out as a prerequisite to unlocking their identity: my peers dated girls in highschool; they had explosive friend-breakups ending in confused kissing; they used hook-up apps; they referenced lesbian influencers and read Adrienne Rich on the toilet.

I took my feelings of misalignment as a sign I wasn’t actually gay, or this gay part of me wasn’t as real for me as it was for other people.

More than having one moment of clarity like the lecture mentioned, I became jaded by how often my experiences with the specific men I chose to date were slightly wrong.

This past summer, I stopped dating. I lived at home, away from Austin. On a Friday night, I watched old home videos and was struck by one in particular — my dad zooms in: on me, in a boat, holding the hand of a girl at summer camp, hair braided with blue glitter. The video revived the exact sounds and colors of a crush.

Abby was my bar partner on the war canoe team.

The entire 250 person girls’ camp viewed war canoe with a strange reverence. The most athletic girls tried out for one of two camp-wide, rivaling teams of 12 girls.

We had to weigh in to try out. Once you made the team, you were sworn to many secrecies. The details of practices were meant to be kept entirely private, even from your best friends, although there were physical signs of how well the two boats were doing in practices.

The higher on your arm your bruises were, the more weight you were pulling in the boat; if you bruised on your forehead, you were a good bow; if you lost your voice, you were a good stern; if you showed up to your next activity in wet clothes, it meant your team was enduring a rough patch. Everyone in the camp understood these signs.

Like older girls did, one night, Abby invited me to her cabin to practice dry sweeping ahead of tryouts. We both straddled her trunk like the bar of the canoe and used brooms as mock paddles. Another girl called commands like the stern of the boat.

Paddles Up, One Two

Paddles Ready, One Two

Stroke!

We pushed our torsos forward at the same time, and pressed our weight against each other as we guided the brooms backward against ceramic red clay tiles in unified, liquid motions. We were told to sync our breathing. Mine was faster.

You’re off tempo. Try without the brooms. Here.

She linked our arms so that there was no space between our shoulders as we modeled the way our backs should move in practice. When the mock-practice was done, I balanced on the wooden door frame underneath scattered, stubborn stars, and reflected that stubbornness as I extended my goodnight, see you tomorrow, promise we’ll walk in together, okay. She said, okay, I promise.

There’s a song we sang at camp:

Mmm-mmm, I want to linger
Mmm-mmm, a little longer
Mmm-mmm, a little longer here with you.

Many heady, summer nights stretched out this way, sitting in the open door under stagnant stars with our drooping eyelids and half-untied shoelaces. I felt like those stars, emitting light as long as the night would allow.

Mmm-mmm, it's such a perfect night
Mmm-mmm, it doesn't seem quite right
Mmm-mmm, that this should be my last with you

As the bald cypress branches sank lower, they swung the Guadalupe River into stillness. Buzzing cicadas lulled into a hazy thrum of white noise, and the marriage of our daily routine with the motions of the Texas Hill Country — never rushed, never wrong — allowed me to sleep through the night.

I wonder now if camp had instilled in me answers to questions before I knew how to ask them; patches of spilled glitter. The more I see them, the more I see the ways I found queer places and people unknowingly.

Though I loved camp, I stopped going because of something like volleyball summer workouts. If I had stayed, I would have gone from camping to counseling — most people who stayed did. Last fall, I had called on a whim to see if they still were taking applications, and they were. I didn’t apply.

Writing this, I reached out to an old camp friend who put me in contact with her roommate, a counselor when I was at camp.

I meet Rebecca on a fall morning in a sun-soaked, wooden-paneled coffee shop. Like being at camp, the tiding of the sun breaking through the window with our conversation makes me feel a familiar sense of harmony with my environment — never rushed, never wrong. On a slow morning, she expands the webs of hidden connections between people I knew in the past. Another girl on the team had a crush on her bar partner; two girls who were on the other team are dating; one of my old counselors has a girlfriend; Rebecca had a brief romance with another one.

She tells me about the flood of people who approached her as one of the first openly out counselors. She shows me a message she received from a mom of a camper who thanks her. The mom shares that she and other counselors from the ‘90s found solace in each other when they came out. Now, campers and counselors can be queer at camp. And, when that notion was challenged by the camp, Rebecca and some of the campers and counselors replaced the American flag with the LGBT flag as the sun rose on the Guadalupe.

When we finish talking, I meet Rebecca’s girlfriend who is working at a table outside. I pet their dog, whom they are training to be less anxious in big places. They leave together so Rebecca can write at home, and a week later she sends me one of her books. I think: I am happy a life like that exists. And then, without questioning it: I can picture it for myself. ■