Melissa Carter

Melissa Carter: A note from the past resonates today

When I first saw the list I had written, I didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until I saw when I wrote that list that I teared a little.

Everyone has their weakness when it comes to housekeeping. For some, it’s clothes everywhere, others it’s piles of dishes in the sink and for those like me, it’s the piles of paper that seem to spread into every room and on every surface. I’ve spent some of my time off going through those endless piles of paper and files that needed recycling many moons ago.

One such file included notes I have written over the years for use in potential articles or broadcasts, and a piece of paper fell out that had my old business logo stamped across it. It was from a personalized memo pad back when I was an administrative assistant at Turner Home Satellite, a now nonexistent arm of Turner Broadcasting. Back then, I was still in the closet, even though most of my co-workers knew about my sexuality. It’s obvious I was arching my foot to kick firmly through the closet door and into the public light as a lesbian, but not yet. So, here is my private message, scribbled on this notepad sometime during a random workday, after my heart had been threatened somehow by something I saw beforehand:

There’s a new generation of lesbians coming…

They will be the ones who have access to lesbian history, lesbian movies, lesbian books…

They will be growing up in the age of AIDS and are not participating in the sexual revolution…

They will be the ones who question why homosexuals have the reputation of sex-craved predators, then open lesbian/gay publications to find sexually explicit ads and classifieds…

They will be the ones who won’t need drag queens to come and perform in their bars…

They will be women and everyone will know who they are…

They will realize that having sex with men is not a right of passage to be a woman…

They will be the ones who realize the next step in the lesbian revolution is economic presence, not the idealistic question of morality…

They will be the prom queens, the sorority girls, the class presidents, the member of the PTA…

They will contribute diversity and add definition to the term “lesbian community”…

They will cause controversy, both with heterosexuals and homosexuals…

But, a new generation of lesbians is coming, and we need to welcome them since progress is never easy…

Like the aforementioned, I wondered why on earth I wrote down something so obvious until I realized I was 22 or 23 years old when I needed to get it out. My eyes welled up at this distant woman, newly on her own and in her first adult relationship, who was angry that she didn’t fit in among her straight friends or even her gay ones. A woman who didn’t know her health was failing and was scared of her own shadow. But the fire inside of her is still in me, and I appreciate her message to her future self that allows me to appreciate how far we all, and I, have come. We did it, girl.

Somehow I think she always knew we would.