Role Models Help Us Grow
By Jennifer Bame

Recently at an Icebreakers meeting, we were discussing our role models.  I remembered reading how essential it is for people just coming to terms with their non-heterosexuality to have positive interactions with other non-heterosexuals, to essentially have positive role models. I began to remember this process for myself.

I remember being 17 in high school and being aware of my exceptionally strong feelings for my best friend, Fran.  I was cast the lead in one of our school plays (not because I have any talent, but because I was responsible enough to learn the lines).  Anyway a group our "theater group" were back stage when someone said that someone in that very room was gay! I looked around and didn't see any gay people.  Everyone looked pretty normal to me.  Then I began to fear they meant me.  As it turned out they were talking about someone other than myself.  After my paranoia wore off, I realized my theater group was talking about being gay in a respectful manner.

The Fall of 1991, my freshman year at K-State, I was determined to find those gay people.  Until I met the rest of West Hall.  I realized I was surrounded by some pretty closed-minded company.  The big event of the day was joking about the bi-girl who lived down the hall.  I never laughed at the jokes, but I sure didn't feel that I could stand against them either. At that time, my only refuge was the Collegian.  There was a young lesbian writer named Kelly on staff.  It was her strength transposed through words that kept me sane that year in West Hall.

The next couple of years were the worst.  As I became surer of my feelings for women, I also became more and more anti-social, insecure, moody and suicidal. I couldn't talk to anyone, so I talked to God.  I prayed that God would turn me straight or help me find a way to live my life as a healthy gay person.  I told God, I couldn't do it alone and I would certainly take my life without help.  Every night, I prayed, sweated, cried.  A few months after I started praying, someone invited me into the Manhattan lesbigay community.

As I started going to functions, some people welcomed my shy, quiet face; others stayed away, wondering what trouble this young baby dyke would bring them.  I clanged to those who welcomed me, and tried my best to ignore those who seemed more afraid of me, that I was of them.  It was then that my greatest, most influential role models emerged. (I could name names here, but the list would be too long.) I found that lesbians can be athletic, witty, funny, smart, vegetarians, meat-lovers, petite or stocky, or wonderfully round, or Asian or African-American, White, stupid, liberated, bigoted, clean, sloppy, allergic to animals, dog lovers, separatist, integrationalists, feminists, capitalists, christians, buddists, atheists . . . God, I love our diversity!  In it, I found a place to be me.

Later through my work with BGLS and Icebreakers, I met a number of fantastic men who have become role models to myself as well.  These men, most of whom don't even know it, have helped me to accept and understand a lot of the difficulties that go into being a human being who is socialized as a member of the male gender.

I don't want to whine at you and tell you to become somebody's role model. You already are.  Somebody, you don't even know is looking up to you and thinking what a fine person you are, with all your crazy quirks.  If you happen to know who they are, spend a little extra time with them.  You don't have to be perfect.  You just have to be human.
 

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