“Oh, my God, you’re pregnant” was her mom’s first response, before running through a litany of parental fears. “You can’t hate me after I say this,” she pleaded when, alarmed to be receiving a call in the middle of the night, her mom picked up the phone. So while Jackie hoped for the best, she knew the call she was making had the potential to not end well. “I was convinced somebody was going to blast it on Facebook.” (“You’re living in the same house together,” she says, “and, of course, to close-minded people, if somebody’s gay, that means you’re automatically interested in all 80 of them.”) Eventually, she went before her chapter’s executive board and became the first sorority girl at her college to ever come out, at which point she realized that if she didn’t tell her parents, someone else would. Toward the end of her sophomore year, Jackie got a text message from one of her sorority sisters who said she’d been seen kissing another girl, after which certain sisters started making it clear that they were not comfortable around Jackie. “I honestly thought my whole life I was just going to be an undercover gay,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.įor better or worse, that plan was never to be. “I knew what I wanted, but it was never something I ever envisioned that I could have on a public level.” And yet, as her friendship with this woman turned physical and their relationship grew more serious, Jackie saw her future shrinking before her: a heterosexual marriage, children, church and the knowledge that all of it was based on a lie.
“I was just playing it off as ‘So maybe I’m just gay for you – I mean, I don’t have to tell my boyfriend’ kind of thing,” she says. By her sophomore year, she was dating a fraternity brother but was also increasingly turned on by a friend she worked with at the campus women’s center. When Jackie got to college, the “typical gay sorority encounters” she found herself having didn’t seem to qualify as anything more than youthful exploration she thought all girls drunkenly made out with their best friends. We called people ‘fags,’ or things were ‘faggy.'” Her only sex-ed class was taught by a priest, and all she remembers him saying is, “‘Don’t masturbate and don’t be gay.’ I didn’t know what those words meant, so I just hoped to God that I wasn’t doing either of them.” “I grew up in a household that said ‘fag’ a lot. “Growing up, I knew that I felt different, but when you grow up Catholic, you don’t really know gay is an option,” she says.
In fact, it took the freedom of college for Jackie to even realize who her “own person” was. “It was the first time in my life where I could just go somewhere and be my own person.” “I remember walking out of the sorority house to go to Walmart or something, and I stopped at the door and thought to myself, ‘Should I tell someone I’m leaving?'” she says. She chose a triple major of which they approved. After graduating, Jackie attended nearby University of Idaho, where she rushed a sorority at her parents’ prompting.