By the time I understood that I was queer, that habit of hiding was deeply set in me, so deeply that it was not a choice but an instinct. I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who are destroyed or dismissed to make the "real" people, the important people, feel safer. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I loved, and having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself. We were the they everyone talks about-the un-grateful poor. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed it, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me. I pressed my bony white trash fists to my stubborn lesbian mouth. 'Who are my people? We die so easily, disappear so completely-we/they, the poor and the queer. 'Who am I? I wondered, listening to that recruiter. I don't want you talking to them." Me and my family, we had always been they. When I was six or eight back in Greenville, South Carolina, I had heard that same matter-of-fact tone of dismissal applied to me. They, those people over there, those people who are not us, they die so easily, kill each other so casually. I had heard the word they pronounced in that same callous tone before. The man speaking was an army recruiter talking to a bunch of boys, telling them what the army was really like, what they could expect overseas. The first time I heard, "They're different than us, don't value human life the way we do," I was in high school in Central Florida.
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