K: And you knew she was?
T: Oh, yeah, I met her partner. She sat me down and said, “You can have this career, you can be beautiful and a leading lady. And if you come out, you will have nothing. You will wait on tables for the rest of your life.” I already came from a home where my mother had to wait tables when she was 40. Sometimes we didn’t have electricity and sometimes we didn’t have food. So having that childhood, I was ready to make choices to make sure that I didn’t have that issue in my adult life. And so, I climbed in the closet. I had a girlfriend at the time who wasn’t all that anxious to have me come out either. I had every single area of my life encouraging me to go about this or I would ruin everything. And that’s a lot to pressure. I was only 21.
K: So, what did you learn?
T: I learned that I can’t live to make other people happy. That’s a nice big lesson to learn. That is something I can put in my pocket and use the rest of my life.
K: Backing up a bit here, when did you come out to yourself?
T: I knew I was different when I was in first grade. I remember looking at my teacher and thinking I need to grow up and be a man so I can marry her. Then that kind of awareness went away until I was about 12 or 13 and all my girlfriends were getting crushes on boys. I just didn’t get it until I had a delicious softball coach. And she could hit a grounder like nobody’s business and she could throw that ball… It made me all sweaty.
K: Like the Meg Christian song, “Ode to a Gym Teacher.”
T: It’s all about the gym teachers! They save our lives when we’re starting to wake up and deal with our own sexuality. I was about 13 when I went, uh-oh, the thing in me that’s different is the thing that goes with that word “gay”. That’s when I spent several years in a dark period of my life. I was very suicidal. I was one of the lucky ones that didn’t have successful attempts. When I was growing up in Indiana there was nobody to look at. I had never heard of kd lang, I didn’t know that the Indigo Girls were gay. I hadn’t heard of Melissa Etheridge yet. I didn’t know if there was such a thing.
