I kissed a girl and I liked it
Lil O’Brien was attracted to women as a teenager and at university decided she was gay. But when her parents overheard her discussing this exciting new aspect of her identity, they kicked her out of home. In her memoir, the 36-year-old (who writes under a pseudonym) describes the pain, beauty and even hilarity involved in claiming who she was meant to be. She speaks with Britt Mann.
BRITT MANN: How did your book happen? LIL O’BRIEN: When I was in my early 20s and I was in advertising and really unhappy, I started writing a column about being gay, for NZ Girl, which was this really cool online platform that was quite unique at the time. I wrote about a year’s worth of articles. I loved it so much. But I kind of put that aside.
I’ve always been quite invested in the queer community – I volunteered for the Queer Film Festival, and I got involved with Rainbow Youth, telling the five-minute version of my coming out story in schools.
I was by no means the most interesting or outrageous. My story is quite common, I
think. Not everyone’s parents behave badly... But there are lots of people who have been seriously kicked out of home, become homeless, been kicked out of the church, were put on drugs to stop them from having sexual feelings...
The high school kids were captivated; they just wanted to hear more. And they also really responded well to being talked to like adults.
I went to a couple of hui, one of which was where a whole bunch of leaders from various high schools who were interested in not just gender and sexuality, but community wellbeing, had gathered. We had this super emotional day – I told my story, lots of coming out stories were told. We talked about all kinds of things in a really open and raw way.
[Eventually] I felt like I was getting too old for that, but I wanted to keep talking about it. I thought, I need to write this down, in full. I started writing the book eight years ago.
BM/ I haven’t read something like this before. So many gay memoirs are written by men... LOB/ Male voices and stories are always elevated above women’s voices, just like white voices are elevated and white authors are given chances, over people of colour. It’s a cliche but I wrote the thing I wished I’d had when I was a teenager, when I was looking for information in the pre-internet era...
When I started writing, I kind of veered between being too flippant or being quite bitter. It took me a while to get that emotional distance. It was very cathartic to work through and make sense out of all the things that happened. So partly I wrote it for me, and partly I wrote it for people who are queer or questioning, because there aren’t enough queer stories. I never found an indepth look at the coming out process that explored someone’s experience – my experience is by no means universal – of the back and forth that could happen. You don’t just know – some people do – but you [can] take two steps forward and one step back; you question yourself. Feelings just aren’t clear. And that is the most interesting part of a lot of queer narratives for me. Because coming out is such an important part of the queer experience, and I think sharing coming out stories is so important and valuable...
I do think a lot about my privilege, and how that enabled me to kind of get through what I got through without the most dire consequences – like, my family continuing to financially support me. I do, despite everything that happened, feel lucky to have had that, and a lot of people don’t.
I am very aware, particularly with what’s going on, that I’m a cisgender white woman, who has been given a chance to be published.
BM/ You write about being kicked out of home, early sexual experiences, being rejected by your first love, exploring the boundaries of female friendship – how was the process of putting that personal stuff on the page?
LOB/ I think maybe going through the coming out process made me feel really confident in who I was. I stopped caring so much about what people thought. But on the flip side, the idea of my parents finding out about the book stopped me from writing for like, a year at a time, because we just didn’t talk about my sexuality in my family.
BM/ For me, the great mystery of your story was why your parents reacted in the way they did. You touched on ‘‘South Island
There are so many expressions of sexuality that labels can’t keep up. It’s all about how you’re feeling and as long as you’re respecting other people, then there’s nothing wrong with exploring your sexuality.
values’’, and things like them not having a wedding to go to, or being worried you’d be discriminated against. You infer that they’re not religious...
LOB/ I wish that there was a clear reason why. It would have helped me a lot. But I think, you know, prejudice doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t always have a single reason or a rational reason. I think it’s probably something to do with their past experiences and how they process emotion. They’ve never been great at dealing with emotional topics. I think a large part of it was [related to] what people would think. I’ve never got an answer, and I’ve had to learn to be OK with that.
BM/ There is a quote in the book from Brene Brown, about empathy being the opposite of shame. You have found empathy for your parents...
LOB/ It’s hard, because I love them, but I’m disappointed by them. I always feel torn between wanting to protect them [the book is published under a different surname and omits her hometown’s name from the text] and wanting to just tell them how angry and hurt I am. When you’re writing a book, you have to be compassionate to all your characters, even the ones that behave badly. And so I really tried to paint them as 3D characters, and talk about the things in which they were so great.
BM/ You had at first recognised OK, I like girls, not that keen on boys. But for you, that wasn’t necessarily the same as being gay. Then you did a ski season in Colorado where you decided to try out being openly bisexual. Back in New Zealand, you came to the conclusion that ‘‘gay’’ was the best fit for how you felt. I know some people can be quite anti the idea of labels. Can you explain the importance of them for you?
LOB/ For me, being able to label myself meant that I was embracing myself for who I was, and rejecting the shame and embarrassment around it. So it was kind of like an achievement for me to be able to use a label.
But I totally understand, particularly these days, that labels don’t fit [everyone]. I think the way we use labels has evolved, and I think we should think of them as much more flexible. I kind of use ‘‘gay’’, ‘‘lesbian’’, and ‘‘queer’’ interchangeably. It’s helpful to me. For some people it’s not helpful. I think we also have to embrace fluidity – people change their minds or identify in different ways.
That can be hard for people to understand, because they’re like: ‘‘I thought you were this.’’ We just want to put people in boxes.
BM/ You went to a support group at Otago Uni for women who were coming out or questioning their sexuality. You write that it was a political awakening in some ways…
LOB/ I think it was the first time I was confronted with my own privilege. And confronted by a lot of the insidious messages that I’d been exposed to all my life. It’s when I first started questioning these kinds of narratives, and started realising how critical I could be about other people – in terms of how they present and, I guess, what their passions were. I grew up in a pretty conservative place and I had my bubble of people and even at Otago, we all were quite similar. We thought of ourselves as the cool kids. I think I judged some of the other people in that group, [like I was] better than them. Ultimately I realised that they were a lot further down the track of knowing who they were.
BM/ What did you do with that realisation? LOB/ I started to question my snap judgments more. It also made me start doing a lot more reading about things that I didn’t know, that I had so much to learn about – the LGBT community, and what it meant to people. It was kind of like this whole world opened up.
I probably at that point, having gained more confidence in myself, started challenging other people more, or kind of messing with them a little bit. I really enjoyed when people were visibly uncomfortable around me, after coming out. It wasn’t my friends – it was friends of friends, who’d heard. They’d be in a small space with me and I could see they were uncomfortable and I would just kind of move a little bit too close. I was quite naughty. Even just saying the word ‘‘lesbian’’ out loud, or taking about gay things, in this very heteronormative culture and friendship group I was in, felt quite radical. I always thought of it as being good for them. I kind of wanted to share what I’d learned with them, as well as wind them up.
BM/ There was a line near the end of book – ‘‘sometimes being a lesbian and a feminist is tricky’’. What did you mean by that?
LOB/ I guess [it was about] being attracted to girls in a sexual way, and enjoying looking at girls, but also wanting to respect them as people, and not treat them as objects. I often found after I came out when I was in very male-dominated environments, I got treated like one of the boys. I kind of saw behind the scenes a lot, where they would make jokes that they wouldn’t make around straight girls. I saw a lot of the sexism and chauvinism firsthand. It was kind of exhilarating to feel like one of them, for a while. But there was always a line that sometimes would be crossed, where I would feel like they were actually being really disrespectful towards women.
BM/ One thing I have always wondered about, which I was pleased you brought up in the book, is about women who don’t identify as being gay but are interested in experimenting sexually with other women. What are the protocols around that?
LOB/ It’s a pretty tricky one because I’m all for women exploring their sexuality. It’s kind of like, where do you start? A lot of my queer female friends would never go there, because sometimes you can feel a little bit used... You’ve personally gone through a journey of accepting yourself and coming out and you’ve dealt with living out as a queer woman and sometimes, you don’t have the energy to educate someone else. You don’t want to be someone’s teacher, whether it’s about a physical/sexual thing or whether you’re going to have to manage them if they start freaking out about their feelings.
BM/ So it’s kind of like a take it at face value thing – if someone’s acting interested in you, you’re not questioning whether they’re ‘‘truly gay’’...
LOB/ I can only speak for myself – I don’t really care what they are, in that situation. I actually find everyone’s sexualities super interesting, and the way they express themselves...
There are so many expressions of sexuality that labels can’t keep up. It’s all about how you’re feeling and as long as you’re respecting other people, then there’s nothing wrong with exploring your sexuality.