I'm in Love with a Monster
I’m in Love with a Monster
Written by: Jules Telfort
Photographed by: Emma Fisher
Growing up, I described myself as three things: Black, female, and Christian. No one ever asked if I was straight, because what else would I be? Sexuality in a religious Haitian household is a taboo topic. If you aren’t heterosexual, you’re deemed an abomination that was living in sin. And there’s no room for discussion on that.
Imagine my surprise when, within three days of arriving at Emerson, I discovered I was less straight than I thought. And I had feelings for the gayest person I knew: one of my roommates, who we’ll call “Blue.”
What do you do when you find out this new revelation about yourself? You tell your friends, of course. I knew no one at Emerson yet, so my trusted confidants were my two roommates. And yes, that included Blue, the one I was crushing on. As a part of the community, Blue and our other roommate, “Red,” were supportive and encouraging about my coming out. I even trusted Red enough to tell her who gave me my “gay-wakening”: Blue. The days after were spent taking “Are you gay?” quizzes, learning about the different types of lesbians (what is a “femme butch”?), and my roommates sharing their own “gay-wakenings.”
As weeks went by, I became aware of something that had always been right in front of me: they had experience, I didn’t. Both of them had known this part of themselves since they were little, had past partners, and had time to come to terms with their identities. I didn’t. I tried to rectify that by poring over articles, and even a few diagrams, on what being bisexual meant.
When I told my roommates I was reading about what it meant to be a part of the queer community, they started poking fun at me. At first, I was okay with it. Friends joke with each other about that kind of stuff, and maybe it was a little weird that I preferred to do online research rather than talking about it with someone. But the more they joked about it, the more annoyed and self-conscious I became. It went from them joking that I was a “freak” for looking up Cosmopolitan articles about lesbian sex, to telling me I should just start watching porn if I was really that curious.
It hurt. It hurt even more because a lot of this was coming from someone I had feelings for, who had initially made me feel safe enough to want to learn about my sexuality.
As the the only one who didn’t know what the hell she was talking about when it came to sex—much less gay sex—I felt alienated among my roommates. It wasn’t the three of us; it was them and it was me. Whenever I brought up the topic or made some horrifically ignorant comment on sex, they talked down to me like I was a child. Maybe I didn’t know much, but did they need to be so condescending about it? I found myself feeling dumb and embarrassed about the stupidest things, like saying “clitoris” instead of “clit” or asking what a dental dam was. When I eventually worked up the nerve to (somewhat awkwardly) tell Red how isolated I felt and how difficult it was for me to talk to them about my feelings, she initially reassured me. Later, I overheard her saying to a mutual friend that my lack of communication skills probably just came down to my crush on Blue.
After that, I stopped talking about it. I didn’t want my curiosity to be labeled as freakish, weird, or stupid, so I shut myself up. It’s ironic: here I was at a place where I was supposed to be comfortable being myself, yet I had never felt more uncertain about my identity. Less than two months in, my mental health deteriorated. I felt alone, ashamed, and pathetic.
The last straw was when they chastised me for walking out in my pajamas—a simple pink long sleeve and shorts—at night in the Boston Common, but not being able to change in front of Red’s boyfriend. The utter ridiculousness of that statement was enough to make me move out. I chose to do it on a weekend where I knew both of them would be in New York. A few hours after they left, I told them I would be moving out over text. Their response? “We figured.” That was all they had to say as I packed my stuff into Trader Joe’s bags with the help of my friends.
I took everything: my projector, the Halloween lights, the vacuum, the food in the fridge—all of which I’d bought for us. Every single thing that I bought I took, and I didn’t give a damn if they were angry at me.
As my friends helped me unpack in my new dorm just down the hallway, I felt balanced. The anxiety and the emotional wreck my late-night panic attacks left me in couldn’t reach me in my new sanctuary. A week later, I was on a video call with my new therapist—recommended to me by my floor’s Resident Director—and she validated my feelings. I wasn’t asking too much, I wasn’t weird, and I wasn’t a stupid child. Talking to her, I just felt like a kid trying to figure some things out.
Now, almost a month after I moved out, I am forever grateful that I had people in my corner who picked me up when I didn’t want to get off the floor. My friendship with my old roommates didn’t work out, but my relationship with my new friends did.