“They still don’t accept our relationship,” she says. ‘They still don’t accept’ Photos by Mary Gelmanĭuring the lockdown, Russian photographer Mary Gelman and her partner, Leo, both came out to their parents as a queer couple. In comparison, I had no idea who I was, and I was afraid of everything. In fact, she was adamant about her sense of self.
In the face of constant discrimination and bullying, she wasn’t afraid to be who she was. “Lisa” explained how, as I would later summarize it in my profile of her, she had acquired “a growing sensitivity to the nurturing, supportive energies of a lesbian consciousness” and had “come to grasp what she feels now ‘was always inside.’ ” As I listened to her and took notes, a lump began to grow in my throat. By then, there was a new editor, and it turned out the paper needed reporters for a special issue they were putting together on “Homosexuality on Campus.” I was assigned to interview a lesbian former student who had to be renamed Lisa for the article so she wouldn’t be harassed. It took me three years to work up the courage to go back to the newsroom. I had clips, but they were from high school: The senior class literary magazine was positively littered with my poetry, but I didn’t dare show my writing to a college newspaper editor. My first year, I tried to write for the paper - going so far as to walk to the office and introduce myself to the editor in chief - but because he asked for samples of my work, I was too intimidated to follow up. By the time I graduated from high school, I was grateful to be alive, relieved to be moving away and, despite the deep-seated suspicion that I was irrevocably damaged, genuinely hopeful that I might fit in to this new and unfamiliar college environment. They had divorced when I was 10 years old my mother remarried within a year, and her new husband regularly brutalized me physically, emotionally and sexually. These criteria were not vetted by my parents, who provided little to no guidance. I had chosen SUNY Albany for two reasons: I could only afford a state school, and my best friend Tammy was already attending. I was fascinated by the myriad voices of the writers and eagerly waited for each issue to be dropped in front of the campus center. There was coverage of edgy European films and, because Albany was the state capital, smart reporting about the local government. Publishing twice a week, the paper was opinionated, political and provocative.
Back then, in the early 1980s, it was considered one of the best student newspapers in the country. The long road to my pandemic wedding By Debbie Millmanĭuring college at the State University of New York at Albany, I dreamed about writing for the Albany Student Press.