No matter who you are or who you love, you are seen, you are loved, and you matter. Happy #Pride, Oregon! 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
— Governor Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) June 1, 2022
We live in much better times than in the years and centuries past; that tweet by itself is an evidence of the progress that we have made. Our governor, Kate Brown, is openly bisexual, though initially a part of her had to stay in the closet.
Decades ago, even as a high school student, I had no idea about anything, and especially about gay and lesbian love and sex. There was nothing even remotely like a sex ed class, and all we learnt was couched in the context of reproductive biology. Later, when I first came to know about gay sex, it was, like almost everywhere, talked about with a whole lot of negative connotations.
Fresh off the boat in Los Angeles, I was stumped, frozen, when I saw two young women kissing in public. It was news to me that a graduate school mate was gay, and that a graduate student from India was bisexual. I watched Torch Song Trilogy when it was screened on campus. One day I was in a traditional and conservative India, and the next day I was in the land of the free.
Over the decades of life in America, I have come to understand human sexuality a lot more. It is all about the emotion deep down that calls us to find a person whom we can trust, with whom we can share memories, with whom we want to share a bed every night. The particular gender matters only to the person in a relationship.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club is about a Chinese-American high school senior coming of age and understanding her sexuality. Malinda Lo's fictional narrative seems real perhaps because of the extensive research that she has done--through her graduate studies and explicitly for this book. When the story is presented against the backdrop of the 1950s when homosexuality was not legal, when same-sex marriage was beyond the wildest imagination, a reader like me cheers on the sharp, smart, teenager in her life as she comes to understand that she doesn't like boys but girls, one girl in particular. Fictional it might be, we can easily imagine such lives having been lived a mere couple of generations ago.
Governor Brown cannot run for the office this November because of term limits. Early on as candidates were lining up to replace her, I donated to Tina Kotek's campaign. Kotek is now the Democratic Party's nominee, which means that in a deeply blue state like Oregon, she will likely be the next Governor, unless something catastrophic happens. If elected, Kotek will become the first openly lesbian governor in the country, which is something that the Chinese-American teenager in Last Night at the Telegraph Club would not have thought possible.
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