Unmasking Family Secrets and Fierce Truths: Jackie Domenus’s Raw, Unfiltered Memoir Challenges Everything You Think You Know
I remember my re-imaginings as a child, picturing Ponch and Jon from television’s CHiPs, for example, as a loving couple instead of mere coworkers, and deeply agree with Jackie’s conclusion within that essay, “perhaps I might have known myself.”
There are other moments of queer recognition. In “Sexually Active,” an essay powerfully centered — using the present tense for greater impact — on Jackie’s experience with a homophobic nurse in a gynecologist’s office, Jackie describes the moment they share news of their first relationship, one with another woman, with their coworkers. As is so often the case, the heterosexuals to whom queer people come out treat the revelation as an invitation to ask about even more personal details. I’ve yet to ask any of my straight friends for details of their sex lives, yet Jackie is asked, as was I, “…which one of you is the guy?”
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