Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.
I grew up in Atlanta and went to a very traditional private school, where there were no openly gay students. To be in that world and want to be a womenswear designer—well, I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions, but I started equating that with being gay. They kind of merged in my head: Telling someone I wanted to go to design school would have been just as traumatic as coming out to them, so I bottled all of that up and applied to all the other schools like everyone else while secretly, at night, going home and sketching dresses and trying to make an art portfolio. And then one day I came down to my dad, who was watching TV, with all these drawings.
When I was little, I would always rather play with Barbies than with sports equipment—like, from day one—so I don’t think the concept of me being gay was a shocking thing to any member of my family. Internally, though, I made it a very scary thing for myself. The outcome was that my parents were amazing and so supportive.
When you look back with hindsight on the things that you were anxious about or scared of, you see how unnecessary it was. Having a child with my husband, Paul, I realized that every cliché is true: You love your baby more every day, and who they want to date or marry or kiss in no way comes close to changing that. The idea that our son, Henry, could be scared to tell me something about himself—that he’s nervous and it consumes him for years and he’s having to pretend to be something he’s not—would be crazy. Because there’s nothing he could tell me that would make me not love him.
Courtesy of Wes Gordon.
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