Queer people aren’t strangers to shame, or to reclaiming one of the darkest feelings a person can carry deep in their gut. Shame is distinct from guilt in that shame is about doing something nonnormative, whereas guilt implies a breach of morality. Still, the consequences of shame can be profound — isolation, stress, secrets. Shame is relative to our surroundings, to the people who have power over us or to the communities we try to find homes in. For this A+ personal essay series, writers wrote about things they can barely whisper to aloud, things they thought was once a blemish that they’ve turned into crown, things that make them feel like a “bad queer”, or the ways that other peoples’ shame has woven itself into their life and existence. Answers to nagging questions, positive conclusions from difficult times and happy endings are not necessary, and you might not find them in every essay in the SHAME series. But I do hope you fill find something that challenges some shame you might be feeling, that is too relatable, that leaves you questioning whether it is actually serving you to hide whatever it is you’re hiding. As always, thank you for the support that allows Autostraddle to publish the breadth of pieces that we do, whether we’re celebrating the bright spots or descending into the basements of our psyches — this is a space where queer people can pitch, write and publish work like nowhere else.
xoxo,
Nico
“I am a nice person; I’ve got good manners. But I am not a nice person. Let’s be clear.” – Dorothy Allison
I started stealing again on a summer morning when my oldest son was still small enough to ride in the car-shaped grocery cart that barely fit the local co-op aisles. We stood in the checkout line as I aimlessly pushed the cart back and forth, trying to keep the kiddo entertained, when I noticed he was clutching a large purple bottle of shea butter lotion.
Around me, people in yoga pants were selecting Tuscan kale and organic cucumbers from the produce section. The registers beeped continuously and the espresso machine whirred in the distance. No one had seen my son pull the lotion from a lower shelf.
He lifted it with both hands.
“Do we need dis?”
We definitely didn’t need it. The Co-Op was only good for bulk kids’ snacks, organic chicken nuggets, and natural pull-ups, which they didn’t have at Safeway. I was an underpaid copywriter and my wife, a social worker.
That lotion was easily $20 a bottle and it was not in our budget.
“Put that down,” I told him.
“Did you find everything alright?” the checker asked.
My skin prickled with anticipation, alarm. I realized she couldn’t see the lotion. It was just one bottle, I thought. And my wife loved shea butter. I swiped my credit card and wheeled the cart out of the store.
Walk slowly, I told myself.
No one came after me. My son kept knocking the bottle of lotion against the inside of the cart, its soft thunk drowned out by the automatic doors. The guilt hit me, momentarily: I didn’t want my son to realize I hadn’t paid, I didn’t want my wife to worry, and I’d given in to an old habit that marked me as poor, needy, and deviant, no matter how far I’d climbed, no matter how outwardly stable my life as a Nice White Lesbian. Another part of me savored the victory.
You know who isn’t included in that picture?
Me.
Sure, I’m a sexual deviant who has a crush on Socialism (we’re just friends), but I’m also white, femme-presenting, and I pay my taxes on time. I don’t make enough money to fix my water heater, but I make enough to be repeatedly solicited for donations to the PTA. I’m chubby, middle-aged, and my colorful plastic glasses say “liberal arts, not name-brand.”
Oh, and I’m a mom.
That invisibility made it easy to steal from the grocery store for years.
In my case, my father was prosecuted and received prison time. We had some kind of justice, but we didn’t have enough food, which also would have been nice. We didn’t quite go hungry; when we ran out milk, we had evaporated milk to mix with water for our cereal. But we could never have a second bowl.
I trailed my mother through the aisles of the discount grocery, kneeling beside her as she examined the price per pound of the bulk cereal. She’d stock up on whatever was on sale: margarine, hominy, fish sticks. I daydreamed about writing bad checks so we could buy toys or treats, having noticed that you could write a check without anyone asking whether you actually had the money in your account.
A connoisseur of consignment stores, my mom bought me a used purple purse with tassels when I was in third grade. It was made of fake leather with a strap long enough to wear across my chest, and it zipped up tight.
One day I was bored in the aisles of Payless, restless in a way that, in elementary school, I couldn’t name but felt down to my toes. I wanted to scream when I had to be quiet. I had to wear itchy tights for church. I had to sit still in the pews, and say the Apostle’s Creed, and ignore my brother if he poked me. I couldn’t be too upset about my dad hurting me, because that would upset my mom. I couldn’t have a room of my own or a Barbie. I couldn’t take more than one free donut after Mass. I had to wait for lunch until we got home.
I perused the candy aisle, trailing my fingers over the wrappers. I looked around; no one noticed me. So I slipped a bag of lemon drops into the purse. The plastic crinkled but I managed to pull the zipper across it.
I’d been to my first confession and I’d been told about sin, but I didn’t feel bad about taking the lemon drops, just as I didn’t feel bad later when I climbed my favorite tree and savored them until they’d rubbed my tastebuds raw.
Later, I would steal gum, chocolate bars, tiny toys, scented crayons, stickers, and whatever else I could fit into the purse.
There was so much that would not fit. The My Kid Sister doll that my cousin had, the Esprit sweatshirts at Ross, enough ice cream for my whole family to have dessert every day, or the shiny lives of the popular girls with boyfriends and braces.
My mom caught me once, and made me tell the store manager. I trembled, I couldn’t meet his eyes, and I said the rosary for forgiveness with my mom after.
That was all. I was still the good oldest daughter; I could dodge harsh punishment most of the time. Meanwhile, my younger brother was punished constantly. He wouldn’t have been able to steal candy, I realized, like I was able to. It troubled me. I gave him a lot of the candy that I took, at least for a while.
It was the next weekend, the heat still clinging to everything, and I decided to make a quick run to the store, this time without the kid. I liked to do the shopping, not just because I was the family cook, but because it made me feel more in control over our finances. We often came close to overdrawing our checking account.
After paying bills, student loans included, I’d often be greeted in the morning by our bank’s app flashing a low balance warning.
My wife didn’t grow up with money, but her relationship to it was more practical and less anxiety-ridden. She’d offer a rueful smile. “Let’s just call it hashtag checkingaccountfail.”
Meanwhile, I’d bite back a string of f*cks. Our financial instability felt like betrayal. I had chosen the arts. What had I been thinking? And my queerness added another layer of risk. We had no family wealth to fall back on, no savings account, and no cultural script to follow.
At Safeway, I slid the expensive cat litter and laundry detergent onto the bottom of the cart. After unloading everything else onto the conveyor belt, I nudged the cart forward, blocking it slightly with my body.
“How are you?” I asked the young Somali woman scanning my groceries, admiring how she punched in produce codes from memory, hyper-conscious of the items I hadn’t paid for.
I would have paid for them if she’d asked, I told myself. I wouldn’t get her in trouble.
The security guard gave me a casual wave when I passed him.
The opposite of Pride is shame. As a teenager, I channeled all of that shame into the fact that I didn’t have a boyfriend, and that I couldn’t muster up enough gumption to get one. (Meanwhile I wrote fan mail to Jodie Foster and listened obsessively to the Indigo Girls.) I didn’t know a single queer person—or, I didn’t know that I did. It wasn’t that I was suppressing my secret desires; I wouldn’t allow myself to notice them. They were buried like a web of roots beneath soil I couldn’t afford to disturb.
I wish I could say that my queer awakening in college came with great pride and liberation, but it was hesitant, a slow unfurling.
It would be so much easier to be straight, I would think. I remember standing on the grounds of my college, when I was a conference assistant one summer, witnessing a very white, very straight wedding.
I stood next to my friend, another work study student, and I said, “I’ll never have a wedding like this. My family wouldn’t come.”
She nudged my shoulder. “Your friends would.”
But I didn’t want that, not then. If I couldn’t have the kind of wedding my grandmother would be proud to attend, then I didn’t want one at all. That didn’t stop me from sleeping with women, though. Let’s be clear.
The push-pull of wanting approval from the straight world while rejecting its nonsense would stay with me through jobs, apartments, relationships, and when I “settled down.” You can’t afford to mess up, the world seems to say. You can be a lesbian, but you’d better be nice.
I want to say, vehemently, that I’m not sad because I’m a lesbian. I’m proud of the life that I have forged, of the wedding to my wife that some of my family did attend (no, not my grandma), of the family we’ve created, the home and community that we nurture. For my kids, having two moms isn’t very interesting; they would rather talk to you about Nintendo.
Heteronormativity, though, just won’t go away. I’m tired of coming out, constantly. I make a point of referring to “my wife” firmly and quickly within five minutes of any getting-to-know-you small talk. I’m like some kind of 50’s television dad staking my claim: “I’ve got a woman!”
I’m tired of explaining that my wife is not my sister.
I’m tired of questions about the kids’ dad (or sideways questions about who got pregnant and how). I’m sad that I will never be listed on my oldest son’s birth certificate. I’m angry that I had to pay a social worker to inspect me and our home so that I could adopt my own son. I’m annoyed that I have to answer questions about birth control every time I have a physical. I am hurt, still, that some relatives didn’t even acknowledge my wedding invitation.
So, it’s not as though shoplifting was a direct response to being queer, but it was a response to the deep-seated feeling of never quite belonging.
Why not take what I would never be given, even if it was just a new 12” skillet and a pack of organic cotton dish towels?
Even when I promised myself I wouldn’t, I kept doing it. The self-checkout line was a big help. A pack of diapers would slip into my bag unnoticed, the employee buzzing me through the “Unexpected item in bagging area” alert without a second glance. Cat food at the bottom of the cart? Passed through, no payment. If my son was clinging to a MatchBox car, I didn’t bother to tell the cashier. Every trip, I left without paying for at least a few things.
Stealing calmed me down. I added discount home goods and clothing to my repertoire – a new paring knife, plus-size jeans, rechargeable batteries.
A corporation doesn’t need my money, I rationalized. Plus, I was saving us money, wasn’t I? Even though $20 here and there wouldn’t make a true difference when it came to the water bill, the broken furnace, the vet bill, the preschool tuition…
What bothered me most was the secrecy. My wife and son didn’t know; no one knew.
The guilt crept up when I unloaded the groceries in the kitchen, stolen and paid-for alike.
We were privileged, and I knew it, which amplified the guilt. We had graduate degrees, a car, a mortgage, and good credit. We could and did use our credit cards for whatever we couldn’t quite afford. In fact, we put our entire second baby on that credit card: fertility clinic intake, sperm, meds, IUIs, pregnancy testing, swipe swipe swipe.
Someday, we’ll pay off the balance. Someday.
My best friend would order her entire set of school clothes from J. Crew. I’d sit next to her while we drank fizzy glasses of Thomas Kemper root beer, the expensive bottled kind, and flipped through the pages.
“I would never wear that,” my friend would say.
“Me either,” I would echo.
Her family had regular sailing excursions in the summer and skiing expeditions in the winter. She had a hiking backpack “built to last” (no, she’s not a lesbian, it’s confusing), and she introduced me to things I’d barely known existed: flavored chapstick, espresso drinks, Thai food, photography, hot springs, red wine, fashion.
I can still feel tears well up when I think about those J. Crew catalogs, piled in fat stacks on the coffee table, and how certain I was of not belonging to their world.
That same feeling still washes over me, sometimes.
I might be standing at a PTA mom’s kitchen island, snacking on almonds, listening to chatter about emotional labor or stock options, and a surge of tears will come unbidden. I’ll feel like I’m outside my body, watching someone else drown in a sea of straightness and money. What am I doing here, I’ll think? I need to get out. Now.
Stocking up for the trip, we gathered up cheese, bread, fruit, and wine—and gin, and tonic, and more wine. The bottles were loaded onto the bottom of the cart, where they clinked lightly against each other. I had my younger son with me, plumped into the child’s seat.
I realized that the checker hadn’t yet rung up the alcohol when she began to print the receipt. My friend was teasing my son, who was laughing, and I was worried about getting back in time to have dinner before the late ferry. But I knew, full well, that at least $100 worth of alcohol sat at the bottom of the shopping cart.
“Are you a member?” The checker asked me.
I demurred. “Oh, and I forgot my bags,” I said, which was a lie, sort of, because I had forgotten them, but in the cosmic sense that I always forgot them.
So the bagger began to put away our items, and I carefully paid and collected the receipt, all while carrying on a half-conversation with my friend about the time.
I wheeled the shopping cart out of the sliding glass doors with the alcohol bottles still clinking against each other.
I never once thought of turning back. It wasn’t until we were putting the groceries in the car that I leaned down and laughed out loud, saying, “the wine!”
“Oh my god!” My friend gasped.
“I don’t think they billed us,” I said.
“Their bad,” my friend cackled.
My son paused, and I hurried to buckle him into the car seat, not wanting to explain, worried that he’d think we were about to get in trouble.
It was time to stop, I’d think. I’d even told my therapist, who continued to give me unconditional positive regard afterwards. That reassured and confused me, both.
But it was so easy. I’d be at the self checkout on a sweaty afternoon after work, grabbing whatever small essential had been forgotten in the last grocery run, and I’d skip scanning one or two or five things.
Here’s how it’s done. Let’s say you have a block of cheddar cheese and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios which are overpriced (when did cereal start costing $%?!) and the self checkout area is busy. Keep your face calm, your movements unhurried. Hold both items in one hand. The cheese hides under the cereal. Then swipe just one barcode and quickly put both items in the bag.
Sure, you might get called out for “unexpected item in the bagging area,” but nine times out of ten, nothing happens.
If it does start blaring, the stressed-out grocery store employee whose unfortunate job is to monitor the self checkout area is more than likely to swipe away the warning without a single glance your way.
I thought the checker would be easy. It was a remote register, upstairs near the back entrance. The woman was bored and chatty.
I hummed and smiled while she talked about her cat’s recent surgery, even as I gently, quietly, shifted the fluffy pack of Pride-themed towels to the bottom of the cart. They were too expensive for what they were.
“Let’s see, did I get everything?” the woman asked.
I shrugged, acting flustered. “I think so? Gosh, I don’t know!”
The woman didn’t smile. She craned her neck and peered down. “Oh, those towels,” she said flatly. I lifted them up to be scanned, trying to look confused.
The checker pursed her lips.
“It’s so easy to forget about stuff when you put it down there,” I said.
“It’ll be $77.80,” she said.
I was sweating, my shirt sticking between my shoulder blades. I was annoyed by the knowing look the checker gave me, as if she were my grandma seeing right through me.
I imagined her giving me a referral for a social worker, or talking to her friends at church about me. The damn towels had to be from the Pride collection, I thought, and now I’ve given her proof that queer people are a “problem.”
I stood a little taller and handed over my credit card.
“Have a nice day,” I said, trying to seem very respectable.
“You too, honey,” the woman said.
It occurred to me that I had no idea if she even went to church, and if so, was that church anything like my grandmother’s? I felt bad, but she was already waving me along, watching the hours between her and the end of her shift.
My mom and stepdad didn’t have the money. I debated about what to do, but in the end, I really just had one choice: to ask my father’s parents.
Like some kind of Victorian heroine, I had wealthy grandparents I hardly knew. After my parents’ bitter divorce, and my father’s near-decade in prison for child abuse, we were estranged from his family.
Perhaps “estranged” is too gentle. My mother wrote to them asking for help to cover our medical insurance — just the four children — and my father’s mother wrote back in anger that she would not, ever, pay.
She did pay for my dad’s defense attorney, a fact of which I was keenly aware, at age nine.
But over the years, some contact remained: Christmas gifts via mail, a strange visit or two, birthday cards. And when I was applying for colleges I wrote a cheerful email to my grandmother with a list of my choices: Amherst, Stanford, Lewis and Clark, Scripps, Whitman. I was proud of myself for this list, and I thought it would please her, but instead she wrote back, “you have expensive taste in colleges.”
Which, fair.
But I was determined to get a piece of those brick-walled campuses and I wasn’t about to join the Navy to do so (my stepdad’s idea; he had the recruiter call the house).
So I got into Scripps; I got financial aid; I lined up a work study job; I saved money from my summer job as a dishwasher; I moved into the dorms that looked like something out of Club Med. And I just needed that final $1800.
My father’s mother wrote the check in her spidery, graceful cursive. I signed it over to the financial aid office, located in a courtyard with a bubbling fountain and white archways.
Two weeks later, I got an email in my newly minted Scripps College inbox from my grandmother. “Because we have not received a thank you card,” she’d typed, “we are going to put a stop on that check.”
I borrowed my roommate’s bike and pedaled furiously in the 100 degree heat to the drugstore, where I scrambled to purchase a Hallmark card embossed with flowers, and wrote the most heartfelt thank-you I could muster.
She didn’t cancel the check.
I never told her I was angry; I never told her I was scared; I never asked for money from her ever, ever again.
Maybe it was, always, a little bit, about money. Because as soon as I started making more, riding an upswell of tech salaries and a phenomenon called “content marketing” that put me in demand, I slowed my roll at the self checkout.
As we’ve opened back up after the start of the Covid pandemic, I’ve slowly returned to downtown like the rest of my compatriots, a small army of jeans-and-blazer-wearing professionals wielding slim backpacks and keycards. On my way to work I pass unhoused people in sleeping bags or on benches, sometimes with swollen feet, or open wounds, or in the grips of psychosis. I can’t look away.
Remember that little brother who was always in trouble? I lost him at age 26. He lived on the streets for years before that.
What a hallucinatory place that I live: Seattle, land of tent cities and burned-out buildings adjacent to leafy lakeside neighborhoods with Biden yard signs. Somebody’s family bungalow is listed for a million dollars, then torn down for a rectangular Cubist construction. The schools are bankrupt but we have more people with Masters’ degrees, proportionally, than any other U.S. city. People smoke fentanyl on city buses while Teslas pass on their way to the corporate garage.
Recently, in the Starbucks near my building, a mumbling, confused young man broke down in angry tears and all the office workers waiting for their macchiatos looked down at their comfortable footwear.
“Get him out of here,” someone muttered.
That snapped me out of it.
I stepped towards the crying man, his dirty clothes, his palpable distress, and quietly asked if he wanted breakfast.
He said yes; I bought him some. He walked away with a hot coffee and a sandwich.
Two women behind me said, “thank you,” and I told them about how I’d had a brother who died unhoused. Their eyes widened but they didn’t respond. I don’t know. Maybe they won’t forget that everyone comes from somewhere.
Later that day, I couldn’t bring myself to hide anything at the bottom of my shopping cart. It wasn’t guilt. I just knew it wouldn’t make me feel better. The cranberry-encrusted goat cheese that my wife needed for a themed charcuterie board? I would purchase it, full price.
I felt so pleased with myself. Gold star.
Outside the store, I bought a copy of the Real Change paper from the unhoused woman in the neon vest with a lisp. I gave her ten dollars. I wanted to give her more. Would she like the goat cheese? But no, it needed crackers, and that charcuterie board awaited.
I could see if I still had it, I reasoned.
I could give away whatever I took.
Inflation was such a scam: three dollars for one apple!
Swiping each item across the scanner, I casually held both an inexpensive single-serve yogurt and the pistachios in one hand. I scanned the yogurt and dropped both, neatly, into the grocery bag to the left.
As predicted, the self-scanner blared annoyance at me. “Unexpected item in bagging area!”
I waited, as I was accustomed to, for the employee to look over, glance at my placid face, and clear me.
This time, however, the skinny white guy with the beanie strode directly to me. Before I could react, he dug into the grocery bag, shifted the items around, and pulled out the pistachios.
I broke into a cold sweat.
“Looks like these got missed!” He said, cheerfully.
“Whoops,” I replied, and my voice sounded weak to my ears.
He scanned the offending item; I thanked him; and then I felt him watching me as I paid for each remaining item.
“Glad I could help!” He called out as I walked towards the sliding glass doors and the rainy evening.
“I appreciate it!” I called back, and held my chin up.
It was time, I thought. Really.
“We can’t forget these,” he’ll say earnestly, removing a giant pack of dog treats from the bottom of the shopping cart.
He’ll confront me with concern if I say to my 13 year-old that it’s okay to order from the kids’ menu.
And he asks me, as we drive by the tents below the freeway overpass, why we can’t just give people a place to live.
“I wish we could, bud,” I tell him, and later I make sure to have cash we can give out.
I like giving money directly. I give to mutual aid requests. I give to my down-and-out cousin. I give to my old friend. I give, and if it’s not necessarily easier than taking, it feels better.
It quiets that angry, ashamed child who cannot fit in, who cannot be safe, and who longs for the shiniest object on the shelf.
I give her my hand to hold, and I buy her lunch.
This is an absolutely incredible piece. I’m going to have to look for more of your writing!
I am going to sit with this for some time. Thank you, this was honest and vulnerable
This was fantastic. I’ll be thinking about this piece for a while.