Thank You, Ex: For the Baseball Jersey I Wore Constantly as a Baby Gay
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
Not everyone was surprised when I came out as a lesbian, but a few people were. Most notably: my boyfriend at the time. People — him, myself, everyone around us — were definitely surprised and confused that my coming out as a lesbian did not immediately lead to a breakup. We stayed together for a few months, and I even somewhat accidentally ended up living with him in his mother’s townhouse in Houston for three weeks, which was originally only supposed to be a few-nights stay on my way out to Los Angeles where I planned to start my post-college life.
He didn’t technically buy the baseball jersey for me; his mom did. The three of us went to an Astros baseball game, and she saw me eyeing it in the men’s section of the gift store. It’s just a standard baseball jersey: gray, buttoned down the middle, HOUSTON embroidered across the chest. She didn’t look at the price tag when she insisted on buying it for me (but I did, and nearly $100 on a jersey for someone who doesn’t really follow baseball seems absurd). She didn’t question my desire to get it a couple sizes up.
She didn’t, of course, know I was gay. I was still a little hazy on that detail myself, too — hence my inability to end my relationship with her son. But when our relationship did end a few months after that baseball game, I finally let myself act on all the desires I’d been silencing for so long. I leaned into lesbianism hard. I spent hours every day swiping on Tinder for women around Los Angeles and then, when LA didn’t work out, in Chicago where I moved in with two friends. I quite literally brought a photo of Kristen Stewart to the hair salon and asked for her undercut. I rewatched The L Word (because, yes, I had already seen it all when doing a very bad job at being in the closet). I had no idea how to be a lesbian, so I clung to cliches. I went to gay bars. I started writing for Autostraddle. I said “I’m gay” as often and as loudly as possible.
Even though femme lesbians were really the only representations of queer women in the media I consumed then, femmeness felt out of reach then. I thought that in order to be seen as gay, I had to shirk femininity, even moreso than I already had been doing rather deliberately for a few years prior. I associated femininity with the heterosexual costume I was wearing before. I wanted a new costume, so I constructed one: black leather-look leggings, a sports bra or tank top and, as the pièce de résistance, the Houston Astros baseball jersey, unbuttoned.
I took mirror selfies in this new costume and posted them on tumblr, on Tinder, on the short-lived Chicago-specific dyke dating app called, I kid you not, Scissr. I wore it to improv shows, while biking, to Musical Mondays at Sidetrack. The look wasn’t all the way butch, existed somewhere in a futch realm. I wore black or dark blue lipstick and floral Doc Martens. Sometimes I wore a single dangly earring in my left ear. I acquired more sports jerseys, including a bunch of long-sleeved Real Madrid soccer jerseys that I wore over mock turtlenecks. I was not and have never been a jock. The only sport I’ve consistently followed in life is tennis. But this futch jock fuckboy image I constructed was my entry point into queerness.
It was easily just as much of a performance as when I was playing the role of girlfriend to a nice boy from Texas. Even though I was more authentically expressing myself as a lesbian by trying to date women, there was so much artifice and contrivance to the way I dressed. I undeniably felt hot, even if I didn’t feel entirely like myself — perhaps…especially because I didn’t feel entirely like myself. I clung to that baseball jersey, ironically a remnant of my recent heterosexual past, as a way to prove my own queerness to myself, reconstructing my image to match the way I felt unmade and made new by coming out.
Does anyone come out of the closet knowing exactly who they are? How they want to be seen?
I tend to drastically change the way I dress during moments of upheaval, and if I’m being honest, coming out sometimes did feel like an upheaval even as it did liberate aspects of my self. It was hard moving through the world as a queer person. It was easy to change the way I dressed.
I returned to a version of futchness after during my drawn-out and painful breakup with the girlfriend who followed the boyfriend. The baseball jersey briefly reemerged. I loaded up on oversized t-shirts and preppy long-sleeved striped tees and polo shirts at thrift stores, wore chains, cut my hair dramatically again (this time, cribbing the cut from Timothée Chalamet). I borrowed and never returned a pair of my friend’s Adidas track pants. These, along with a white Uniqlo men’s t-shirt my guy friend accidentally left behind after staying with me for a weekend, became the new go-to costume. It’s fitting that the look I cultivated that year hinged on things I took from other people. I wanted to feel like anyone other than myself.
It’s all documented on Instagram, this folding back into a previous self. It’s strange to look at the photos — not unpleasant, but strange. This, apparently, is what I do when I feel lost. I put on a futch costume. But I always come back to my femme self eventually. I think she’s the most authentic version of myself, but it took me a while to get there.
I know I’m supposed to be writing about something an ex gave me; I know I’m cheating by writing about something his mother gave me. There are, I suppose, some intangible things I’ve held onto from him. My fondness for the subgenre of indie rock I call “sad white boy music.” The fact that I can’t look at tuna without thinking of the “Too Much Tuna” sketch from The Kroll Show.
But the jersey is the only physical thing I’ve held onto from that relationship, and even though it doesn’t at all match my high femme gender expression these days, I can’t get rid of it. The soccer jerseys have all been given away. I have only been to Houston the one time. I can’t remember the last time I even wore the baseball jersey. But it’s hanging in my closet as I write this. It has moved with me from LA to Chicago to Brooklyn to Las Vegas to Miami to Orlando. It’s long enough to wear as a mini dress, and perhaps that’s how I could style it to fit my new look. It’s the only object that’s tethered to two distinct past versions of myself: to my straight girl era and to my baby gay futch era. It’s unique, almost sacred in this paradoxical alchemy.
Thank You, Ex: For the Practice of Making Monthly Playlists
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
I don’t know how to relate to someone without first asking, “Hey, what kind of music do you like to listen to?” It flows naturally in most courses of conversation — first dates, pillow talk, the text you send to keep the conversation going. Into your pillow, sighing the lyrics of a song that suddenly has new meaning. It matters significantly less now that I’m an adult, but as a teen, the music that my friends and girls I liked (not always mutually exclusive) listened to mattered a lot.
Just because you’re Julie.
Just because I finished my earth science homework early.
Just because I love you.
Just because these songs are life changing and you should hear them too.
Four of these CDs are from my ex. Three of them previously had their track listings yanked out and ripped up. The lone survivor with its paper still intact lists 15 tracks with a simple “juj (3)” as the title. I either got too tired and sad on my post-breakup rampage or it slipped to the bottom of the pile and I forgot about it. I think it’s okay that I left this one untouched. The CD is metallic purple and the date written is June 2015. My favorite song on the CD is Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality.” It’s part of a succession of CDs my ex burned for me in the early stages of our relationship. There are many missing from this collection, but I think that’s okay as well. It’s sweet that at one point, these songs reminded her of me.
The just because of these specific CDs is the fleeting nature of unconditional love.
P’s best friend was my ex. I’d always admired the love they had between them. There was a deep understanding. A love tender, even in the ebbs and flows of hormonal teenhood. Before I even knew anyone was queer at my school, I had seen the clever nicknames they had for one another and wanted that for myself. On Free Dress Fridays — this is a Catholic school thing apparently — the cool girls would wear sparkling jelly platform shoes and a mix of American Apparel and things they found at the thrift stores.
That year was the first I’d heard of Spotify, having spent my hours after school downloading songs from YouTube to mp3. It was the answer to my growing desire to relate to others via music. P and I would message each other songs on Spotify’s now nonexistent inbox feature, sharing playlists and new finds. My ex and I were just friends back then, but I distinctly remember her creating these monthly playlists of music she was listening to. It was a great way to share what had been found and memorialize it in time.
Step One: You must unfollow her on Spotify to ensure that you cannot see what she’s listening to anymore.
Step Two: Convince yourself you don’t need her monthly playlists to find new music, you did it by yourself before and you can certainly go it alone again.
Step Three: Sob relentlessly to any song that remotely reminds you of her.
Step Four: Take a year. Take a breath. You’ll be creating monthly playlists again in no time.
Step Five: Be bitter. Notice a nostalgic fondness and roll your eyes at your sentimentality. Date around and share songs with other people.
Step Six: Find stability and passion. She’s hot too.
Step Seven: Live through a global pandemic and start creating monthly playlists again for pleasure.
Step Eight: Write it down.
Thank You, Ex: For Teaching Me To Save for Retirement
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
I don’t think I’ve ever written something so practical and unsexy about a relationship, but I’m here to say that I am forever grateful to my ex who taught me what a Roth IRA is, convinced me to open one, and encouraged me to start putting away money toward my retirement fund ASAP. We did not last as a romantic connection, but her straightforward life advice helped me in both a materially beneficial way and also in a “okay I can pinpoint this moment as one where I’m growing up and learning a thing” kind of way.
When I was 25, I started dating a babe who was about eight years older than me. She had her shit together in a lot of ways that I did not. When we met, I was living on a lesbian commune in a tent (lol) and she was the tech director at a big company based out of California. I was going through a romantic breakup, multiple friend breakups, and a general crisis of confidence in queer community, and she had grown up in Portland, lived her entire life there, had strong ties to community and an equally strong acceptance of the conflict that can arise amongst people who love each other. I was questioning if polyamory was right for me and she’d been wrestling with that question for more than a decade. And, most relevantly for this particular essay, I was very into spending money I had in the moment and not worrying about the future whereas she had been saving for retirement for years.
Or I should say, I was not thinking about my finances for the future until one specific conversation I had with my ex and her best friend. They were both the same age, and they both had impressive full-time jobs. Meanwhile, I was nannying part time and trying to figure out how to freelance successfully. My dad had always encouraged me to open a retirement savings account, but I’d rolled my eyes. Getting older felt far away. I was literally paid in cash every week by my nanny families. My rent was cheap, and I felt like I had More Than Enough.
The three of us, my ex, her best friend, and me, decided to take a road trip in late August, and found ourselves next to a fucking gorgeous lake in Glacier National Park one afternoon when the two of them started comparing their contributions to their Roth IRAs. I had nothing to contribute to the conversation; I was clueless.
A Roth IRA is an Individual Retirement Account to which you contribute after-tax dollars. While there are no current-year tax benefits, your contributions and earnings can grow tax-free, and you can withdraw them tax-free and penalty free after age 59½ and once the account has been open for five years. (Yes I did take that directly from the Charles Schwab website.) I feel embarrassed to share this now, but I was genuinely so shocked to learn they each had accounts like this. I remember thinking — I thought we didn’t believe in big banking! I thought we wanted to say fuck you to The Man! I always thought of my ex as more radical than I was — why was she investing her money in a Roth IRA?
Bless my ex, and her bestie, because they both patiently explained why actually, there’s nothing punk rock about not taking care of your future self if you have the means to. They’d both grown up with significantly less financial privilege than I had, and I think they were both a little unimpressed with my ignorance. And that’s fair. When you’ve never worried about having enough money growing up, it might not occur to you to save for the future, and it’s a huge privilege to have that mindset. They helped me realize that and unpack it, and they also helped me with the practical next step: I opened up my own Roth IRA and started making tiny contributions.
You can contribute $6000 total to a Roth IRA over the course of a tax year, which breaks down to $500/month if you want to max it out. I couldn’t imagine ever having that much extra income to invest when they taught me about this specific retirement savings account, and frankly, almost ten years later, I still can’t. I just don’t make enough money for that to be realistic. But they encouraged me to put away whatever I could, and I started out with $50/month and a few years later bumped it up to $100/month. That’s where I’m still at, though I do try to put extra money in at the end of every tax year. Every little bit counts, and like my ex taught me, saving to take care of my future self is both an act of self love and community care. The more okay I am in the future, the more I’ll be able to use my resources to help others. I do feel dumb that it took me 25 years on this planet to learn that, but we don’t know what we don’t know. Thanks to my ex, I learned.
Thank You, Ex: For (1) Set of Ghost Hands
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
Author’s Note: This essay contains mentions of self-harm, sexual abuse, alcoholism
Thank you, ex, for your (1) set of ghost hands.
Before I went to spend a few days with my ex, I was forced to really sit down with the fact that all the ways I’d been sexually touched, or close to it, had been nonconsensual up until I met her. Logically, I knew this, but when you’re trying to survive them, you’re not tallying up the violences your body is carrying. Even though we’re not together anymore, the hands I’ve, blessedly, kept since we’ve broken up are no longer my ex-manager’s, my family members’ (living and dead), ex-coworkers’, and past customers’ anymore. They are hers.
It goes like this.
Before her, for the past decade, the hands that have held fast to me have been my ex-manager. He was tall, an ex-Marine, known for shooting squirrels and at one point, holding a box cutter to my throat asking if I wanted him to end it all for me, when I went to the back freezer to get oatmeal for a customer’s breakfast. He kissed me in front of my coworkers, customers, and God, and nothing changed. I was serving a customer behind the counter where we hand you your food, and he was standing behind me, his hand in my pocket massaging my thigh and creeping closer to in between my legs, and I stood shocked because there were the coworkers. There were the customers. There was God. All watching and nothing changed.
Those are not the only violent hands my body has carried, but up until her, they were the hands I’d felt the longest.
Before her hands even touched me there was this:
I love the idea that after seven months, the skin that the person has touched is no longer there, but I can never feel it. Trauma feels in my bones, you know? When I was in outpatient, my psychiatrist said, you know it hurts because we’re fixing it, right? We are pulling back something that healed wrong and we’re digging the stuff out of the bone and we’re making sure we heal it right this time. That’s why it hurts.
I could never get to my bone with my blades, and I knew I shouldn’t try, but that was the closest I could get to that seven months new skin feeling. Outside of my body, few people believed me. Here, in the places where I tried to heal myself from the hands and the other body parts that made me wrong, here, where I had to carry what those people had done to me, with a blade I chose, my body could try to be mine again. Violence was done to me, and so I thought, at least let me choose the violence that can be in retaliation to it.
When I met my ex, even after months of her telling me she liked me and me telling her I liked her back, I just assumed it was a bit we were doing. In high school, we did this all the time. That’s my wife. Are you coming to our wedding? Leave my wife alone. I knew they didn’t mean it back then, and I was just confused as to why they pretended. I assumed, that’s also how it is outside of the school. It was safer to assume that.
What convinced me that this wasn’t a bit we were doing was her hands. One of our friends was moving toward me, because, quite honestly, it is more often than not, funny to see me try to navigate being flirted with in real time — and her hand gently but firmly stopped her from moving too close. That’s when things finally clicked.
Most of what I remember from her hands, in the beginning, are holding mine at the con, gripping her fingertips before we were about to meet Javicia Leslie, and she was going to take my pictures for me, brushing against mine as she said “Let’s go through the pictures we took” while we waited for our friends outside a meet and greet, pulling my arm around her when we sat on the couch. Her hands locked behind my neck when she hugged me goodbye.
In between this and the next part is when I started to panic. When I sat up in panic attacks remembering that sure, virginity is a construct, but I wish mine and anything even close to the losing of it had been consensual. How all I had to look back on before losing my virginity consensually was violence and violence I never asked for, violence plenty of people would never believe me about, violences I couldn’t even name without reaching for a drink, a pill, a blade — anything to make the knowledge of it disappear. For two or three or five weeks, all I could see was my lack, and the fear that being found out would only give more room for pain and humiliation to move in.
When I was down there, what I remember are: her hands behind my neck when she hugged me meeting me at my hotel, us walking close but not too close when we walked around the park and how all I could think about were her hands (I loved her smile, but I couldn’t look at her too long without wanting to do something about it) and how I wanted to reach for them but I wasn’t sure if she was okay with that, if it was safe to do in a place where I could leave and she could not. Her hands reaching for mine in the back of the Uber, her head on my shoulder. Her hands grabbing for my dufflebag on our date, hands intertwined with mine as she led me from each exhibit in the aquarium, gripping my hand when we were seated too close to the dolphins and we got soaked. Her hands running through the buzz of my fade during our first kiss and after. After, when her hands circled the spot above my left hip that I haven’t been able to cut him out of. After, when her hands grabbed my butt, where that coworker pushed her pelvis in. After, when her hands interlocked with mine, and she kissed my knuckles, my finger tips. Her hands still holding mine, steady, even when I was far from it.
I don’t like to think about the endings, which is probably why I’m always haunted, always clinging to things that return even when I should pretend I do not see them (My mom told me, “When you see a ghost, do not talk to it.” I don’t talk, but they think my body does, especially when I glance at it.) But out of every ghost that pushes itself past a whisper into something more solid, something that hugs me from behind in the broad daylight of my room, something that sits on the edge of the bed and tells me, “[deadname], I raised you better than that”, these are the ghosts I want the most, that, at one point, wanted me too. How do you let go of a love like that?
Note: To be clear, my ex and I are over, and I know this. I just want to thank her for giving me something good, something other than bloody blades and boxcutters and hands too big for my too small too quiet too crazy to be believed. For teaching me that I am deserving of good, and that is what I should be moving toward.
Thank You, Ex: For the Ring Dish That Reminds Me I’m Hot
Thank You, Ex is a series of essays about the good things we were gifted by exes and kept.
On my half-broken IKEA dresser sits a delicate cream-colored tea dish with a pink rose in the center and a gold rim around the edge. When I first acquired it in a little thrift store in Headingly (Leeds, England), it made me feel pretentious and fantastical. Now, it’s tarnished, the colors have faded, and there are a few permanent wax stains from the time I burnt a handmade candle in the shape of a naked body.
Over five years ago, when my ex bought it for me because it made her think of me, I clung to the little dish through all our arguments, and eventually, a nasty breakup which ended with me moving back to the States and her staying in England. Throughout the course of our relationship, I got used to waking up to see a growing collection of tea dishes on her nightstand holding various objects: rings, tiny pieces of jewelry, keys. Until I met her, I had never seen someone use these little teatime essentials for such a utilitarian purpose. I guess everyone I ever slept with either left their things around in disorganized chaos or didn’t have a nightstand. I found the whole ritual endearing, so when she gifted me this little £5 plate, I used it to hold my own rings.
I was never much of a ring-wearer until I came out. Up until my gay awakening, rings only held two purposes: marriage and chastity. I begged my parents to buy me a purity ring when I was 14. Super religious and influenced by the Jonas Brothers, I took pride in my choice to show the world I was off limits until the man of my dreams came around to swap out cheap metal for elaborate diamonds. It took me until my early twenties to rid myself of this chastity ring once and for all in a very gay and dramatic burning ceremony I describe in this essay I wrote about rings. Around the same time, I noticed all my gay crushes had one thing in common: atypically placed rings. My very first in-person real-life girl crush I acted on wore colorful minimalist pieces around both thumbs, pointer fingers, and middle fingers. Every time I spoke to her, I noticed these shiny distractions catching the sun and making their presence known in my reproductive organs. Every time she touched me, I felt the rigid pressure against my soft skin and yearned for more. I saw these rings and fantasized about what the fingers inside them could do. Maybe it’s not as clear as bandanas or carabiners, but rings can be an excellent entry point into the “is she queer?” discourse running through your head at the Trader Joes checkout counter.
When I eventually met my ex at a queer coffee shop in downtown Leeds, I instantly noticed the thin silver ring adorning her middle finger. I knew she was queer, of course, because we met on Tinder, but something about this ring made her extra enticing. It didn’t take long for me to learn about her stash of rings, stacked in a messy pile on her nightstand tea dishes. It certainly didn’t take long for me to figure out where those rings had been. The more she switched out her rings, the more I equated them to badges of honor — gold and silver medals to flash for all the queer world to see. Those fingers made her hot, because they were mine.
Just as I carried the ring dish with me from one relationship into the next, so too did I carry my ring theory. As I passed people in the grocery store or on a walk, I noticed a well placed ring always lured me in. To put it bluntly, a middle finger ring, on anyone of any gender, could instantly take a 4/10 to an 8/10. As I started to crush on people solely based on their ring placement, I collected rings here and there so that I, too, could award my own fingers. If I thought ring people were hot, maybe I could be hot too? Maybe what my ex had given me was a resting place for my own sexuality. I made concerted efforts to take the rings from my rose tea dish and place them strategically on my fingers before going to a coffee shop or night out. People needed to know the feats I’ve accomplished with those fingers. The dish reminds me that someone once thought I was hot, and someone will think I’m hot once more.
What used to be an inanimate ode to my ex quickly became the temple for well-earned phalange awards I bestowed on myself over years of dating and hooking up with other queer folks. I’ve lived in five different states and countries over the past five years, and this dish has made it with me through the eight-hour flight where I sobbed my water weight in tears, the four-day cross country drive from California to Florida, and my couch-surfing days in Los Angeles. My intentions in carrying it with me, at first, were sentimental; I kept it because it reminded me of her. After healing from the breakup, the dish morphed from a space of desperate longing to an opportunity to remind myself of my sexual power. I can wear rings. I can be hot.