I’m gonna stand up and let myself be counted for

stand up now

I’ve got my one life and what’s it to amount to

if I don’t learn how

to love you and love myself beside you

mix the gentle and proud

I want to love life. the vision in the window told me

stand up.

– Ferron

Holly hated it when Jen was right! She was sitting at her desk uselessly trying to concentrate on the report in front of her.

Damn you Gail! How did you get under my skin so thoroughly!

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes in an unsuccessful attempt to hold back the tears of anger, frustration and fear. Yes, fear. In spite of it all she was still in this way over her head, which is why she had gone back to the station, only to be rejected by Gail in a moment of severe gay panic.

Damn her!

She knew that that wasn’t exactly fair. Sure, Gail had kissed her. Well, more than just kissed her, made out with her actually, like a pair of hormonal teenagers in the heat of the moment. She understood that people did funny things when they thought they were going to die though. Or as her university biology professor had said, all mammals react by acting on the four Fs of basic genetic programming when under stress, Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… um… engaging in sexual behavior. And now here she was, left to reel it all back in if she wanted to stay friends.

Of course she did, didn’t she?

Holly had been out for well over ten years, and she would be damned if she would let anyone, even Gail Peck, push her back in to the closet! She had come too far, fought too hard, and lost too much to ever go back. In her senior year of high school, she had been forced to admit, if only to herself, that she was attracted to girls as well as boys. One night her best friend had passionately kissed her in a moment of drunken abandon. It had made her knees actually buckle! Something she thought was just the stuff of the trashy romance novels some of the girls liked to read aloud during lunchtime, until that moment. When her BFF had feigned amnesia and then teased her when she tried to talk to her about it the next day, Holly had dutifully reeled back in all of her feelings, or tried to, and gone on like nothing had happened. But nothing was ever the same. It wasn’t until she fell head over heals in love with her lab partner in her junior year at the university, that she realized what she had been missing with the guys she was dating. Even though that affaire was short lived, it had changed her forever! Holly knew that she could easily pass for straight, but she refused to become a silent minority. She wanted to feel comfortable where ever she lived and worked. She was determined to have a good, if not great life and not deny who she was, if only by omission. If people in her life were going to talk about their relationships, so was she! It was only normal.