Idlewild

by James Frankie Thomas

People who don’t attend Quaker schools often remark, upon learning about Meeting for Worship, that speaking during Silence sounds like a terrifying prospect. They are correct, which is why, in practice, most Meetings for Worship consist of twenty minutes of unbroken Silence.

HI THIS BOOK IS SO CLEARLY WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO IS QUEER AND WENT TO A QUAKER SCHOOL I CANNOT HANDLE HOW SPECIFIC IT IS

Silence falls. No one ever calls for Silence: it simply comes over us, like a cloud. It starts out thin, but within the

Silence knits itself back around the hole Bottom poked in it and slowly re-envelops us.

This is exactly what it’s like!!!!!

If the first person to laugh inappropriately is gay, then we are all flaming homosexuals on this fine September morning.

“So you’re Quaker?” she said uncertainly. I could see her adjusting her idea of me based on whatever she knew about Quakers, which she was possibly confusing with the Amish—picturing me dressed like the guy on the oatmeal box. That’s happened before.

Literally me anytime I tell someone I’m a Quaker!!!!

Beautiful girls belong to the world. But Fay—scruffy, slouching, fast-talking Fay—Fay belonged to me.

Although I’d known this about myself since middle school, that was the first time I’d said it aloud, and it felt so unexpectedly intense that I burst into tears as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

I was fully prepared to graduate without ever having spoken to her. I was happy to adore her from afar.

Even then, I understood But I’m a Cheerleader to be a bad movie that young lesbians have to pretend to like, so they can invoke it to each other as a sort of mating call.

The air is so pure, the sky so blue, it makes us gasp. The sparkle of the sunshine feels almost violent. All beautiful days hold a certain horror now.

I knew I liked girls, but if I hadn’t arrived at that knowledge via soft tender girl smooches, did it even count?

But I continued to suffer from lesbian impostor syndrome even after I got older and racked up some lesbian experience points. The

So real

If Nell and I couldn’t be gay together, we could—we would, we did—create for ourselves a separate world in which gayness was ambient and immanent and unrelated to us.

As he snipped off ten inches, I could almost hear my mom screaming. But then I felt a breeze on my neck and saw a butch girl in the mirror and my head felt light enough to float away like a balloon set free.

OmiPalone212: But how could the Marble Faun possibly be unaware of that? OmiPalone212: Noticing people, observing people – that’s his whole thing. m k fantastico: i thought his whole thing was NOT observing people m k fantastico: that’s why his “impressions” are funny, right? cuz they’re wrong OmiPalone212: But intentionally wrong. OmiPalone212: You have to study people closely to get them so wrong.

But this queer-coded villainy relied on a gender transgression that moved in only one direction. During that first read-through, I made the sickening discovery that I could not perform effeminacy—I physically couldn’t.

They have repeatedly attempted to teach the Coffeepot warm-up to the rest of us, but no one gives a shit.

Me

We close our eyes and wait. The squeeze comes to the F&N unit through Juniper, who squeezes the left hand of F, who squeezes the right hand of N, who squeezes the left hand of Christopher. In the ripe, humid silence, we imagine Christopher passing the squeeze to Theo. We imagine Theo kissing Christopher, Iago kissing Cassio, Othello kissing Iago, girls becoming boys who kiss boys who look like girls. We imagine how much the crowd is going to love us out there. We imagine how good we’re about to be.

and I realized Smith was full of lesbians—real lesbians, not just the Schrödinger’s lesbians I used to imagine when I looked at any random girl.

Yes, I wanted the lead in the musical. I had not been conscious, until Ms. Spider brought it to my attention, of another, incompatible desire; nor of how relentlessly I had been trying and failing to satisfy it; nor of how obvious both the desire and the failure were to the world.

Up till then I had never been forced to confront my own inability—an inability so total it bordered on the neurological—to picture myself as an adult. I couldn’t fathom being anything other than what I currently was. I couldn’t be what I currently was anywhere other than at Idlewild.

No one ever falls asleep during Silence,

Not true at mfw with old people on sundays!

a rare Quaker standoff occurs: two people stand at once,

One time so many people stood up during meeting that at the next one the teachers had to be like “guys be more chill about this”

I’ve found myself psychologically barred from access to collective displays of emotion.

There is so much here! 1) I relate lol, when everyone is crying at the end of a show I’m in my ability to feel emotion disappears 2) such an interesting thing to say given that part of Quakerism is sitting in silence with a group of people and feeling collective closeness in the silence

Maybe, I thought, this was just how it felt to have a cool gay friend group. Maybe it was always this exhausting and destabilizing. Maybe, in that sense, it was like being in love.

I felt a surge of pure loathing for her. Juniper too. I couldn’t believe how effective their little gimmick was, especially since it was so obviously fake. Maybe, I thought bitterly, the fakeness was what made it effective. After all, Idlewild boys didn’t act like this around me. Not that I wanted them to. I wasn’t jealous—not exactly—that Daylily and Juniper were doing a fake-lesbian act for attention. It just made me feel invisible. No, worse than invisible—I felt ugly. I imagined how my classmates would react if I announced in the Meetinghouse that Fay and I were hooking up. They’d probably be weirded out, or altogether grossed out. Then I was mad at myself for caring. Besides, I was never going to hook up with Fay anyway.

Articulated very well

big moments rarely live up to the fantasy versions of themselves,

Because of all the lesbians. Because I was a lesbian and starting to understand how important it was to me—important enough to make major life decisions around.

I like to think I make most important life decisions around being a lesbian

Just the look on Ms. Spider’s face goes against Quaker principles of nonviolence.

Sometimes I wished there were some kind of final Fay exam I could take, something where I could use up all the knowledge I’d crammed into my brain over the last four years and maybe make room for something else.

Something huge was blooming inside me, or maybe something huge was blooming in the world and I was just lucky enough to witness it. Gay kissing, right here at Idlewild!

Me in high school when I watched Love Simon and cried at the end

The world had cracked wide open and you could kiss your best friend and you would still be yourselves, the music would keep playing, the show would go on.

Theo and Christopher were beautiful, and the togetherness of their boyness was what beauty was, and my own existence was the negative space where beauty was absent.

There seemed little point in trying to convey to them what was at stake for me—that no place existed where I could make myself understood as I was understood at Idlewild. When I left Idlewild, I would cease to exist.

Reminds me of friends I’ve had who still reference our Quaker school as the last and only time they ever had a community and felt truly respected for who they were

The idea that Daylily Jones and Juniper Green, of all people, had a better claim than I did to homosexuality—it was unbearable. Unsurvivable. I

So REAL

Idlewild wasn’t the kind of school where kids got bullied for being openly gay. Idlewild was the kind of school where theoretically it was okay for kids to be openly gay, but no one was dumb enough to test this in practice except me, and now I would never be known or remembered as anything but Nell the Lesbian.