Activist, artist, and parent Dominique Dibbell is intimately familiar with how difficult it is and has been for LGBTQ+ kids to come out, from both sides.
“I came out in the late 1980s, an extremely different time. My family was luckily open and accepting and it was a big help that my town was also open-minded. I wasn’t the only lesbian in my town, but we were all ‘DL’— on the down low—so I didn’t take my girlfriend to prom. When I was coming up, there was so much societal pressure to be straight. Being gay was still considered bad, sick, and immoral.”
“I have a son, so I know what being in school is like now. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of societal pressure and negative ideas about being queer. I thought we left it all behind, but it’s still there. I was appalled when my kid was in elementary school and they wouldn’t mention gay people at all, even in a historical context. I don’t get it—that’s not teaching children about sexuality, that’s talking about American history. These are the people who shaped this country.”
Still, Dominique describes the difference between the cultural climate of her upbringing and now as night and day: “When I was growing up, there were no images of LGBTQ+ people in the media that weren’t negative, or portrayed you as evil or sick, if you were there at all. When I was coming out, nobody was out. It would be the end of whatever you were trying to do. Or, if you were out, you just didn’t say it.”
“Though I had a girlfriend in high school, I didn’t come out truly until college. I tried to be straight, thought I hadn’t met the right guy.” When she met more LGBTQ+ people, she finally began to overcome her fears and understand how homophobia had impacted her self-esteem. “As soon as I truly came out, it was just like stepping over a threshold. There was no longer a process, there was nothing else I needed to do—I’m out and I’m never going back in.”
But as she forged a career as an artist, writer, and performer, she still had to face a world of judgement from the straight world. “As a kid, you could play characters of any gender because gender norms weren’t so important. But those gender norms came crashing down in high school.”
Dominique felt boxed in by the opportunities granted to women in the world of theater. “There was so little representation of queer experience in culture. I felt there was no place for me in the world of theater and performance. I realized I didn’t want to be an actress, because actresses largely played feminine roles, and that wasn’t me. And you certainly couldn’t be out as gay. So, I felt many doors were closed to me already.”
“Thankfully, my journey led me to a theater called WOW.” WOW was Women’s One World, an independent theater and social club founded by artists Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. WOW primarily consisted of lesbians and queer women exploring theater from an expressly queer point of view. They didn’t have to pretend to be straight, or feminine; they could draw from their lived experiences. “When I got to that theater company, I met other people who were like me, who understood me. That was a real moment of becoming for me.”
“We later formed our own theater company, Five Lesbian Brothers, and wrote, published, and performed original plays together. We didn’t have mainstream success, but we made it to off-broadway and were produced a couple of times. Still, earning a living was difficult.”
The discrimination Dominique and her collaborators faced made it much harder to create work and gain recognition. “If we had been willing to hide ourselves,” Dominique explains, “to conform to gender and sexuality norms, we may have had more success. And we weren’t willing to do that. That difficulty wore on us and we disbanded.”
Now, when Dominique sees lesbian and queer artists being out and proud, and loved for it, it brings her joy. It reminds her of some of the obstacles she had to face, still present but not as daunting. “We’re experiencing a lot of backlash in terms of rights for transgender and gender nonconforming people. But of course the internet made everything accelerate, which had some good and bad effects.”
“Still, I love the revolution in gender. I love that more and more people are brave enough to be themselves now. I never thought this would happen in my lifetime.”