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Chapter 1: Laying the Foundation

Chapter 1: Laying the Foundation(The Ellen Trainer Experience)

I have developed a theory over the years that gay people are even more afraid of rejection than straight people because it is highly likely our very first experience of interest in another was with someone straight. What that means is most of us had our first experience of “love” with someone unavailable to us. It’s a setup to be denied and feel rejected from the very beginning.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had my first recognizable crush on someone in the eighth grade. Later in life I understood I’d had crushes on teachers, my sister's friends, the checkout girl, etc. But this girl actually existed in my universe, which was school, and was someone I actually had conversations with and interacted with. I found myself thinking about nothing and no one else. There was a constant internal movie of where she was, what she said, how she looked, what she smelled like. At the tender age of eleven, I had not one clue what it all meant. All I knew was I sought her out, and I looked forward to running into her in the hallways with great anticipation. Her name was Ellen Trainer; her friends and sports team companions simply called her “The Train,” or just plain “Train.”

The Train seemed to enjoy the attention she got from me. I was called upon to run many an errand and perform multiple tasks for my beloved, all to my great joy. There was the borrowing of money or my Walkman and the carrying of books. Every now and then, for five minutes at a time, we’d be alone together, talking. It would take many more years for me to identify the feelings I had in those moments—I was falling in love. That is, whatever the eleven-year-old version of falling in love feels and looks like. Once in a very great while, she allowed me to touch her, hug her, or stand behind her and rub her shoulders. I knew nothing of s****l arousal, only that touching her was very intoxicating, even addictive.

I was a nerdy kid. Too smart for my peers, I sought friendships with my teachers. It just so happened that the eighth grade English teacher was a neighbor of mine, so I had occasion to befriend her long before I would be in her class. A writer from the time I was six—I have an old photograph of me at that age in front of a manual typewriter—I had already learned how to express myself and communicate through the written word. Spurred by my obsession with Trainer, I had what I believed at the time was a stroke of genius. I would write a short story about my love for The Train, and I would get Mrs. Johnson to read it to her class, thereby reading it to Ellen. Of course I would change her name, but she would know it was about her. Then, magically, she would come to me to fulfill my innocent crush fantasy once she understood how utterly devoted I was to her. It was perfect.

I wish I had that short story today, but I don’t. I can’t recall the details of what I wrote, only that the climax of the story was a long awaited hug full of meaning and emotion. Had I known I would have a future of writing for and about other women ahead of me, I might have tucked it away to remember where it all began. You know what they say about hindsight. In any case, I wrote my masterpiece.

The other part of this drama I will never understand is why Mrs. Johnson, a grown-up person, agreed with me that this fashion of proclaiming my love for Trainer was a good idea. In her defense, I’m quite sure I was a precocious child, and my eleven-year-old reasoning was bound to be passionate and irrefutable.

The day came when I knew Mrs. Johnson was going to read my story to her eighth grade class. How she worked that into her syllabus, I will never know. I couldn’t concentrate in any of my own classes, awaiting what I was certain would be a miraculous turn of events. Visions of Mrs. Johnson’s entire class moved to tears and brought to their feet with applause filled my head.

However, what really happened was The Train slowly sank further and further into her seat in that classroom, embarrassed in that way only teenagers can feel. The fact I had carefully changed names to hide both of our identities didn’t matter—everyone in the room knew who the story was about. All of Trainer’s friends had watched me follow her around like a puppy for months, standing by awaiting orders to fulfill her slightest demand. It never occurred to me I was being mocked, or even pitied. Her friends only ever saw one side; they were not there in our beautiful moments alone, and didn’t see how she made me feel special, even chosen. They didn’t understand.

Apparently, neither did Ellen Trainer.

In my adult life, the feelings of that time have all but washed away. Surely there are things about then I have blocked from my memory entirely. What I do remember is Ellen Trainer never spoke to me again, and from that moment on there was snickering in the girls’ locker room when I went to gym class. The words “dyke” and “lezzie” worked their way into my vocabulary by the sixth grade. Well, not so much my vocabulary as the vocabulary of others directed at me.

Growing up gay is hard—it’s amazing to me how many of us survive. When I was that young, and what made the Ellen Trainer experience so devastating was, as far as I knew of myself, I was straight. Having many other emotional defects at the time, the last thing I needed was another strike against my mental health. I had never had what most children have, that kind of life-long best friend that is so common in most people’s lives. The classic American buddy, the one who accompanied you to the movies and the mall, slept over your house, took all the same classes in high school. I was deprived of such a playmate, save a few fragmented variations of such a companion. As a result, even when those kids began teasing me in the sixth grade, calling me by homophobic slurs more often than my own name, I truly believed all I wanted was a best friend like everyone else. Today I understand that masked the desire to not so much have what they had but to be like them, never comprehending what made me so different.

So I thought I wanted Ellen to be my best friend. My homosexuality was obviously apparent to a great number of people long before it was recognizable to me. I know that’s not an uncommon phenomenon among us queers. Was Ellen an unsure? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt she knew any more about her own emotional and s****l inner workings at fourteen than I did at eleven. More likely she was just a bully teenager taking advantage of a younger child. However, although my own understanding of matters of sexuality did not come until I myself was sixteen, there was a pattern born from the Ellen Trainer experience. I met a girl who was not like me, became very attached and, at the cost of my own emotional well-being, pursued her in whatever way I knew how. Yet, as would be the case in many experiences to come, she was unavailable.