Family, Friends, and Allies

Alliance (noun): a connection based on kinship or common interest

I walk into the room with my hands shaking, which is most ridiculous thing to have happen, and the rational part of my brain knows it—I've been walking into this same group for nearly three years, and we've been meeting in this room for two of them. Still, the prospect of walking through the door this morning scares the living daylight out of me, and the argument I had yesterday afternoon doesn't help.

My best friend walks up next to me as we wait for the room to empty out, and I see the same look of apprehension on her face.

“I feel like I'm about to barf,” she tells me, and I have to agree. We have never been in charge of this before. The sense of impending doom and drama, as well as the weight of a huge responsibility, seems to wrap itself around us like a wet wool blanket in the middle of the summer. We share a sparse, stressed look, and then another friend comes up and bursts the bubble of swelling tension.

“Isn't the Gay-Straight Alliance meeting today?”

Somehow this makes us feel a little better, or at least reminds us that our focus is on them, not ourselves. I feel her take a deep breath in unison with mine.

“Yeah,” I answer. “We're just waiting for the room to clear.” It does so a minute or two later, and at this point, our regular group is beginning to congregate around us. Our third leader and the last part to our own personal Three Musketeers joins us just as we start through the door.

We storm the room and set the chairs up in a circle in record time. As we do, I see a stream of faces come in to join us—some I have known for three years, some for less, and some I have never seen before at all. Five minutes later we're sitting in a circle and I'm trying to tear my eyes away from the flat purple-gray carpet and make myself look at the people who are sitting in a spread-out circle with us. They are all looking at us with some degree of expectancy—they are here to listen to us talk to them, at least for today.

We do talk. For a good eight or ten minutes, that's all we do: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the group? What are the rules? During this entire thing I alternate between wanting to continue staring down at the floor and wanting to speak a million words a minute. Finally we are done with our spiel and can hand it over to them, let the words we all know are waiting there be spoken to a room of people that will actually listen.

“Usually we start meetings with a check-in,” I say. “But today's a little out of order. Our question for today, though, is 'why are you involved with GSA?'”

The question travels around the circle, and after each person speaks, I am more and more sure that my case of the jitters was for nothing. “We want the support,” they say. “We are the support. We love in different ways. We are comfortable here. We love it here.”

The new, glittery talking-stick that has made its way around the circle comes to me, and I am so overcome that I can hardly speak.

“I'll say it the only way I know how to,” I say, and I'm slightly alarmed to hear a tremor of emotion in my voice. I pray that I won't choke up completely. “I want to be here for anyone who's ever felt like the freak in the room.”

I pass on the glitter stick to the other leaders, and I feel bad later, because right now I'm not listening to what they're saying. I am looking around the circle and seeing the people I love, people I've known for years now. People who were with me on my own journey of self-discovery before I even know that was what it was. People who have seen me laugh and cry and scream and hurt. Suddenly my anxiousness is gone, not as if it never was, but as if they have all been sending me a silent reassurance that they love me and trust me and have faith in me.

The bell rings and we put the room back together, laughing and talking as if we had never been apart, and as I leave the relative quiet for the surge of people in the hallway, I am smiling—I have a family here.

And I am so proud to have them by my side.