Knowing Lou
By Frankie B.
I’m a firm believer that you are who you are, even if you don’t know exactly who that is at a young age. Your inner self knows from the jump that sometimes it just takes a while for the soul and the brain to get on the same page.
That was the case for Lou.[1] His inner self knew who he was all along. It just took some time for his soul and his brain to catch up to one another.
My cousin Lou and I are fairly close in age and have been close for as long as I can remember. We come from a HUGE extended family. Lou is the baby of his immediate family, and I’m the younger sibling in mine. Our moms were thick as thieves back in the day, so it only seemed natural for us to develop a bond of similar strength. I was the first to hold him when he was born. I was 4.
We grew up playing in the mud, doing cannonballs, and playing on construction equipment, and we never passed up a game of kickball. I would play with Barbies if the mood struck me just so, but he refused to play with them and always wore boys’ clothes. I would hang posters of the Backstreet Boys and draw hearts around Aaron Carter, but Lou would never ooh and ahh at any of those teen heartthrob lads in J-14. On Lou’s walls were WrestleMania and Monster Truck posters. He’d placed them in desperate attempts to cover as much of the pink surfaces as possible.
Family labeled us both tomboys. It suited me—I wore boys’ clothes and liked to get dirty, but I would also play spa day and do my nails if the moment arose and there wasn’t a more exciting tackle football game happening. But I could always tell “tomboy” didn’t sit right with Lou.
Everyone was always on Lou’s case, telling him to get cleaned up, brush his hair and act “more like a girl.” The look on his face when they would say such things to him was always chilling.
At some point in his mid-teens, Lou (Lilly[2] at the time) came out as gay. It seemed to help other family members finally begin to “understand” him. But every time I looked at him, all I saw was sadness. I saw a caged lion begging to be freed. The despair in his eyes shone like 1500 lumens. I still don’t understand how the others couldn’t see it.
It was just after his 19th birthday. He and I had gone out to dinner. On the drive home, he asked me if he could confide in me.
“Of course you can!” I exclaimed. What a silly question. But then something in my gut told me that this must be a super sensitive topic, if he felt he had to lead with such an unnecessary query.
He told me that he was tired of trying to fit into this small-minded box just so that everyone else could feel okay about themselves. Then he told me that he wasn’t gay or lesbian or a tomboy. He wasn’t any of those labels that everyone had always seemed to feel the need to assign to him. He looked at me and said, “I like women because I’m a straight man, and I don’t know how to make everyone understand that.”
A wave of bone-rattling shivers rolled through my body, carrying with them a joy that swelled to bursting. With those words as they had left his lips, I had felt the lion escape.
I exclaimed, “Screw everyone who can’t accept you for who you are! What would you like me to call you? Lilly isn’t so fitting for you anymore, my guy!”
He was grinning and overcome with tears. He hugged me so tight that I swerved the car a little. I was laughing with joy. The ding, ding, ding, ding from his quickly removed seatbelt was our version of a paper party horn. I told him to get back on his own side of the car so that we wouldn’t accidentally hurtle off the road. It was late and raining and dark but there was something so soothing about the rapid splash back from the water on the tires. Almost as if the precipitation was the excited weeping of Mother Earth, joining in on our hoorah.
I said with such a cheesy, ear-to-ear smile and my own sense of relief, “Let’s figure out your life going forward.”
He smiled and replied, “I’d like to be called Lou.”
At his wedding to his beautiful wife a few years later, Lou and I shared a dance. We cried together as he said softly, “Thank you for accepting me from the beginning even before you understood. You were the first person to truly know Lou.”
[1] pseudonym
[2] also a pseudonym
Frankie was a SUNY Canton student through Spring 2019. She hopes to return in Fall 2025. She took time off to pursue a job opportunity. She has since changed her course of action and hopes to finish her degree and work in the healthcare field, as she enjoys helping others.