Nakedness, Story 3: Okay with the Gay

Growing up with Indian immigrant parents in a Wyoming college town, Aru was used to the tension of what her parents expected her to be and the person she was actually becoming. In this story, recorded at First Person Story in April of 2024, Aru takes the risk of emotional nakedness with her mom–even though it may leave her feeling exposed.

Transcript for Nakedness, Story 3: Okay with the Gay

Show Theme Opening

Destiny: This is State of the Human, the Podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode we take a common human experience, like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Destiny Cunningham, and in this series we’re looking at the theme of nakedness.

Each of the stories in this series has explored the transformative process of revealing ourselves, and the shame and freedom that can come from it. Today’s episode is a live story about the emotional nakedness of exposing our true selves with the people closest to us. It was recorded in April 2024 at First Person Story, a live storytelling event created by Harriett Jernigan, who teaches at Stanford and created First Person as a way to center the stories that are often pushed to the margins.

Here’s Aru with that story. 

Aru: The feeling had finally sunk in. The night that Kylie and I were watching a horror movie, we were sitting on the couch in our living room, which at this point had become familiar to me. Her walls were adorned with hand-painted canvases over two cats, cross stitch scenes of studio Ghibli movies, and line art of the female form.

Our hands innocently sat next to each other, and then in the most baby gay heart stopper. Never been kissed kind of way. We linked our pinkies and then full on started holding hands. My heart was pounding faster than it should have been, given the fact that I wasn't even paying attention to the woman being stabbed on screen, and all I could think was, fuck.

I guess the gay allegations I'd been avoiding my whole life may have some truth to them. I realized that being gay in theory was a whole lot different than being gay in reality, and it was gonna be a huge pain in my ass to deal with. Now obviously the fact that Kylie and I had merely held hands was grounds for me freaking out and avoiding her for the next two weeks 'cause I was so shit scared. And I was just feeling the panicked desperation that in our most vulnerable times, leads us to just wanting to talk to our moms. 

My favorite place to talk to my mom is in the sunroom of our home. It's where we'd share a meal and chat during lunch breaks. My senior year where when her dad died, we talked for hours about everything but what had just devastated her life. It was where I grew to love her, not just inherently because she's my mom, but because of who she is as a person. I would lay with my head in her lap, rays of light streaming through the big bay windows, and it was the safest that I'd ever felt.

During the first year of the pandemic and the first year of online college for me, we'd sit inside and watch as the seasons passed through the window. After nine long, arduous months of the ball's ass cold weather, the air was finally warm and balmy, and it was finally summertime. 

It was during that first part of the summer of 2021 that I first met Kylie through one of my old friends, Sam, who was newly queer. Sam introduced me to their partner Tate, who was roommates with Kylie, both of whom I'd never met before, which I thought was truly impossible given the fact that I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, which is a place where basically everyone is at most one degree of separation away from each other.

Getting to know Tate and Kylie and this new side of Sam felt like I was opened up to a whole new community of queer people, which I'd never really had before.

I should probably tell you that people have always thought that I was gay. Ever since the sixth grade, it was the number one allegation that I could never beat. I never took it to be anything more than just a joke or, you know, a truly deep appreciation for women. But with my new friends, it felt like I didn't have to make a decision or label myself yet. Sometimes it's easiest to come out to people who don't quite know you or don't have who you are, and your life story set in stone just yet. They don't have to change their existing perception of you. It's just a new facet of yourself that they didn't know about before. And getting to know Tate and Kylie, I felt comfortable, but I still was scared about figuring this out on my own, and I felt like I just needed to talk to my mom.

But I knew that wasn't gonna be easy to do because we come from two completely different worlds. She grew up mainly in India where the colonial law criminalizing the very act of gay sex was only repealed in 2018. You know when you have those older people in your life and they're not quite up to code on what you can and can't say, and you know, for their own protection and maybe selfishly your own peace of mind, you start them off on a kind of protection program, you find ways to gently correct them or at least try to start a conversation on whichever group it was that they might have offended that particular day.

Well, when I knew that I was gonna tell my mom I was queer, I decided to start her off on a new protection program that I'd cleverly called the “Being Okay With the Gay Campaign,” and I had it all planned out. The first step of any good campaign is understanding the political landscape, and for me that meant understanding where my parents fell on the being okay with the gay spectrum.

I knew that they were implicitly okay with it because while it didn't take a mastermind to look at some of my friends and realize that they didn't–how do you say, shoot straight? 

But we'd never really had an outright conversation about it. And I thought, what better way to start them off on their journey than where I started my journey that summer? So I told them, “Sam is using they/them pronouns.” 

Now, watching my parents stumble over Sam's new pronouns was kind of like watching a kid try to figure out how to use a new word that they just learned and they're not quite sure how to use it, what part of speech it is. By which I mean to say that they weren't perfect, but they were trying, which meant a lot.

So I deemed the political landscape to be pretty positive overall, but as many of you know. In order to truly get voters on your side, you have to acquire voter data. You have to learn their demographics, I'm telling you. And so you have to figure out a way to bridge the gap between where they're coming from and where you're standing. And in my case, that meant figuring out where being gay fell in regard to the Not In My House policy. And I'm sure some of you might be wondering what that is but from the laughs in the room, I'm sure there are some children of immigrants here. And as many of the children of immigrants would know, the not in my house policy is something that many immigrant parents have instilled in their children from a very young age that essentially states, well, some things may be okay for other people to do as long as you're living under their roof, it's gonna be a no go for you. 

I found that it's most often weaponized against me when I'm talking about my white friends. So my parents would say something like, “oh, you think just because Mikayla talks back to her mom that you can talk back to me? Not in my house.” Or “yeah, Colin can become a starving artist and he can, you know, figure that out for himself. He'll be fine, but it'd take you 10 times as much effort to get to the same place.” 

I think at its core, the Not In My House policy is a reflection of the immigrant mentality in America, playing it as safe as possible, because why would you wanna make your life harder for yourself? 

This was a crucial step in the campaign, and I had to play it safe. So I used my cousin as a scapegoat. Basically I was in the sunroom one day and in the most nonchalant, playing it cool kind of way, I told my mom, “oh, well what if one of my cousins was gay?” She whipped her head to me, eyes widened, and immediately asked me which one it was. 'cause obviously that was the most critical question to ask at the minute to which I responded, no, obviously it was just a hypothetical, you're crazy, you know, employing the expert gaslighting skills that were passed down to me.

But honestly, the fact that she wasn't hostile and hostility wasn't her first reaction was a really good sign. And so I deemed the initiative of success and concluded that being gay does not in fact apply to the not in my house policy. The next step in the campaign was one of the most crucial ones.

As many of you know, a strong political campaign means absolutely nothing without putting in the hours of doing door to door canvassing. So my version of that was having critical conversations in the sunroom on key queer issues, like, can girls have hairy armpits and should boys be allowed to wear dresses?

And the more that I thought about it, the more I was like, you know what? The person who taught me to have such a deep appreciation for women in the first place was my mom. Whenever we were out and about, we would gab in Malayalam about how this girl's outfit is cute. And that woman's makeup was super elegant. And as far as I was concerned, she was as closeted as I was.

But all jokes aside, I was finally starting to feel some semblance of hope. I knew that she would still be upset and hurt at first because it was all so new. But I also was secretly hoping that she'd be happy for me that this was this new thing that I finally figured out about myself and how excited she would be for me, that I wanted to share it with her.

It was finally coming to the end of the campaign, to the moment of truth, which way was she gonna vote? So that evening I made plans with my close friends for a movie night as an escape plan. And 10 minutes before I left, I sat my mom down in the same sunroom, on the same couch, and I finally told her, “Hey, you know, when I told you about that hypothetical gay cousin?” I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and I just blurted out, “it's me. I'm the gay cousin. Well, I'm bi, but basically, yeah, it's me.” 

I was met by a stunned silence. And it was a rare sight to see my mom speechless, but I still had a little bit of hope 'cause I knew this might be her initial reaction.

So I walked to my friend's house for our movie night, but that was when I got the call. My mom told me to come home immediately and to tell my dad because she couldn't do this and handle it on her own. I'll never forget that feeling, that pit in my stomach when I realized that this wasn't just gonna be a rough patch for us. It was gonna fundamentally change our relationship and what she thought of me. I thought how foolish I was to tell her so quickly after I'd just figured it out all for myself, how naive I was to think that maybe she'd come around. It's like that feeling when you're trying to tear the tag off a new top and you end up ripping a hole in it instead. The feeling of regret so intense that you think, wait, wait, what if I just go back five seconds before I fucked everything up? 

I ended up having to cancel that movie night with my friends, and when it finally came to tell them why it happened, I was finally honest with them. I told them I was bi and they had the best reaction possible, and when I went home, they flooded my inbox with a bunch of Tumblr memes about how being bi usually means that you have twice as many prospects, but zero times zero is still zero, which was a great feeling to have. 

And a few weeks later, I finally started college in person and I started building my own chosen family, starting with Dev and Krishan, who are two of the most incredible people that I've gotten to experience life with so far. They taught me what it meant to have pride in myself. Pride in being both brown and queer, and I'll never thank them enough for it. 

I'll admit that things are still strained with my mom. I'm fairly certain that being gay will always fall under her Not In My House policy. She sacrificed everything coming to this country just so I could get the chance to choose who I wanted to be. But I don't think She'd anticipated that I'd turn out to be someone so far beyond what she could ever imagine. 

I love my mom and there's still a lot of good there, but I don't think it's fair to expect either of us to change. And I've realized that you can't spend the rest of your life hoping and wishing for your parents' acceptance.

It's painful, I know. And we want it. But we don't need it. 

And yeah, I still definitely have my tough days, but I know one thing, I'm building my own house now and I know damn sure what is and isn't gonna be allowed in it. Thank you.

Closing Credits

Destiny: That was “Okay With the Gay” by Aru Nair. This episode was produced by Laura Joyce Davis, Jim Lively, and me, Destiny Cunningham. You can learn more about First Person at FirstPersonStory.org.

For their generous financial support, we’d like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, The Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden.

You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events, and courses at storytelling.stanford.edu. You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts. 

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Destiny Cunningham. Thanks for listening.