LAURA IS THIRTY-THREE. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba. It was the Prairies: everything was flat, there was a lot of sky, and it all felt very wide open. The nearest city was Winnipeg, an hour away, and even though Steinbach was surrounded by even smaller towns and villages, it felt self-contained. It seemed to exist apart from everything else, not following the progression of other towns to get more modern. Steinbach wasn’t the smallest town, but it was pretty conservative and small-minded.
Laura didn’t conceptualize of herself as queer until a bit later in life. As a kid, she felt artistic. She thought the world was big, in a way that her parents didn’t. They couldn’t see eye to eye. Laura’s experience of Steinbach was that her family, and other good Christian Mennonite families, would go to church. For a lot of teenagers, it seemed like rebelling and not going to church was a phase, a way to assert yourself in a typical teenage way, where you’re figuring out your life and how your beliefs are going to look as an adult. That’s something Laura got from older peers who grew up with religious backgrounds. But then they came back to organized religion. It wasn’t the same for Laura. Her parents’ church was the lens through which she saw things that were wrong in Steinbach.
Laura only realized after leaving Steinbach that part of the problem is that it’s a well-to-do town. People at her church always seemed to have more money than her family. They were part of an Evangelical Mennonite Conference congregation where it seemed as though wealth was considered a symbol of your being a good Christian. It was only later that she realized that a lot of the Mennonite communities in Winnipeg purposely try to live in a more earth-conscious, socially conscious way. The perspective of Laura’s church really rubbed her the wrong way as a kid, but without any comparison, she had a hard time figuring out why.
Laura’s family was very conservative and quite religious when she and her brother were growing up. There were a lot of TV shows she couldn’t watch. One of Laura’s best friends in high school was gay. Laura’s mother would say stuff to her like, “I can like him. I just don’t have to like what he does.” That old chestnut.
Her family has changed completely in the last ten years. Her brother got married about seven years ago, and then he got abruptly divorced a couple years into his marriage. Laura’s parents also divorced about a year after her brother got married. Even after that, Laura’s dad thought that Laura dating women was not going to be something that they talked about. And he made Laura’s brother and Laura’s sister-in-law feel bad that they’d lived together before they got married. Throughout his divorce, Laura’s brother was a bit more open than usual—he’s a fairly private guy. Her brother’s divorce, and going through his own divorce, eventually changed her dad.
Laura feels like she’s culturally about twenty years ahead of her parents. Her mom has acknowledged this. There were a lot of situations where Laura was like, “Um, this isn’t healthy,” or “This isn’t productive for me,” or “I think this is straight-up wrong.” And then fifteen to twenty years later, her parents were like, “Oh, she was on to something.”
When she goes back to Steinbach now, it feels like her parents’ town. She goes there to see her dad or her grandma, and that’s about it. If she has to go to a store, or see people, it can feel quite strange. Because inevitably she sees folks that she remembers going to high school with, and everyone has a child. But she feels fairly vehemently that she’s not going to have kids, and she’s probably not going to partner up. When you live in a small town, it feels like that’s the only thing you can do. If there was just a little bit more ability to become a person enough to realize that you might not want that, there might be more variation. There could be single people there, single people in their thirties. The thing about religious small towns is that you have to get married to have sex.
That being said, no one in Laura’s immediate family is religious anymore. Her dad stopped going to church when her mom left, because he didn’t want to go by himself. And then everything else sort of relaxed. Leaving the church, Laura thinks, enabled her family to take a more clear-eyed look at a lot of things.
Laura doesn’t date a lot. She had her first serious relationship a few years after she went through a serious self-reckoning, a self-coming-out. When she was having her coming-out moment, there was no significant other attached. So in some ways, that laid the groundwork so that when she was dating someone she didn’t have that strong anger, that self-conviction, like “This is who I am!” When it came to her relationship with her parents, the earlier single self paved the way for the later coupled self.
When Laura first moved to Winnipeg from Steinbach, it was a very lonely time in her life. It took ages for her to start hanging out with people. She would go to her classes and go home in between them. She’s introverted and moderately anti-social, so she wasn’t sure how many friends she wanted. She didn’t really take things very seriously in her first year, but after that she decided she had to stick to her studies. One of the next classes she took was Women’s and Gender Studies, and that sort of opened everything up. She graduated with a major in English and a minor in gender studies.
Laura was always motivated to do well in school, but what she learned from books always felt at odds with what she was being taught in school and at church and at home. Going to university really undid all of those teachings. Books are about opening your world up, and life in Steinbach was about keeping your world closed.
Going to university opened up a whole world for Laura. She came out to her mom by phoning her in the middle of the night, when she was walking home drunk from a bar. Even today Laura doesn’t quite understand why she phoned her in the dead of night. Laura has no idea exactly what she said. She doesn’t know if she said, “I’m a lesbian,” or “I’m not straight.” Her mom cried, but she also said, “I knew.” This happened near the end of her parents living together. Laura’s dad woke up because her mom was on the phone, and then her mom just told him. In hindsight, it’s a bit embarrassing. Maybe she had to be drunk to come out to them.
Today, Laura’s mom would call herself liberal, and could claim some familiarity with gay people and issues, but that was a journey. When Laura came out, her parents had some difficulty with it. Looking back, she thinks they were just worried for her. Laura also has a chronic illness. Her parents had been worried for her from the time she was a kid, and then it was like, “Oh, another thing.”
Being queer then was not zeitgeisty, like it can feel now. It was a risk to talk about going to the gay bar. This would have been in, maybe, 2007. Laura remembers talking to her cousins about it, and her cousins being a bit closed-minded. It feels a bit weird that certain members of her family now pick up on aspects of queer culture that are in the mainstream. They get to feel like they’re part of something—but when Laura was younger she was legitimately scared. She definitely feels like she’s part of a middle generation of queer people, coming out just before things really started to change.