“Passing” as Straight at Work Didn’t Protect Me from Homophobia

I privately couldn’t get over the fact that she’d even felt comfortable speaking to me that way.

My favorite part about working at JCPenney was getting to choke men.

Though I was hired in the home department—hawking Martha Stewart–branded knives to suburban moms who called me dear—about a month after I started, my manager promoted me to the men’s suits section. Other than a five-minute video I watched on a company iPhone, I wasn’t given any real training. She simply handed me some measuring tape, then sent me off.

Fortunately, it turned out most of my customers were equally as unprepared as me.

“Um, what shirt do you suggest?” they often asked, bewildered by all the options we offered.

It wasn’t as simple as small, medium, and large. Aside from fabric choices that ranged from silk to cotton to sweat-resistant, wrinkle-proof polyester, there were the sizes, which were taped onto the front pocket of each shirt. Chests came in 34″–36″ and went up to 50″–52″. There was also sleeve length: 32″–33″ to 36″–37″. And, finally, neck.

The majority of men were happy to let me eyeball them, but on the rare occasion they wanted to be measured, I’d wrap the tape around their throats tightly and add an inch to the number so they’d have room to breathe. I wasn’t sure if that’s how real tailors who worked in stores that didn’t sell microwaves did it, but my way worked fine enough.

Or so I thought, until one busy afternoon when I was on the clock with Yolanda. Yolanda was a short, bitter Puerto Rican woman who’d been in the suits department forever and who I immediately felt kinship to as a short, bitter Puerto Rican myself. Because of a spinal disability that caused her to be perpetually hunched over, she was in a near-constant state of pain that was only exacerbated by our customers. The first time I saw her, she was picking up shirts some rowdy teenagers had scattered all over the floor, huffing and puffing about how no one ever helped her, how exhausted she was from her other job at a bank, how no one appreciated her. I knew right away we would get along: She sounded exactly like my mother.

Usually I worked Suits alone, but this Saturday Yolanda was with me for extra support. I’d been in the middle of measuring a man’s neck when she saw the sloppy choking system I’d improvised. (Okay, no one was actually choked, though after I discovered a shopper had pooped in the dressing room, I did have my fantasies . . . ) Yolanda snatched the tape from my hand and shooed me away from our frazzled customer.

“Just let me do it,” she said. “You probably don’t like doing this part anyway.”

I didn’t read too much into it and assumed she was referring to the fact that I was still new and awkward, but then, a week later, something happened that made me see her words in a different light.

It was a Saturday again. Yolanda and I were folding shirts behind the register when a gay couple wandered into our section. They stopped to admire some ties fanned out on a display table, and as they stood there deciding on a color, one of the men leaned over and kissed the other on the lips. It was a casual, boring thing. The kind of kiss that happens a few years into a relationship, as automatic as double-checking the front door is locked after leaving your house. Gross, I thought, the same as I did whenever I saw my parents kiss as a child. Love is embarrassing.

“That’s nasty,” Yolanda whispered to me.

I stopped breathing. I didn’t realize she’d been watching them too.

“What? Why is that nasty?” I asked, feeling suddenly defensive, my heart racing, and before I could wimp out I added, “I’m gay.”

“No . . . it’s just . . .” she stammered. “Kissing in public. I don’t like that.”

“You and me both know that’s not what you meant,” I pressed on.

“I swear,” Yolanda said. “I love all people. Really. You’re not going to tell on me, right?”

Maybe it was because she reminded me of my mother, who worked at Starbucks and would have been ruined if she lost her job and the health insurance that came with it, that I didn’t.

But after that, I kept Yolanda at a distance.

Obviously Yolanda thought I was straight. I was wearing the outfit I specifically put on when I wanted judgmental old Catholic ladies to think I was.

“You’re good,” I told her when she started bringing me home-baked sweets, and I said it again every time she tried to have a conversation about how much she enjoyed the Ellen show.

Nasty was hardly the worst thing gay people had been called, and I wanted to move on. Still, though things eventually returned to semi-normal, I privately couldn’t get over the fact that she’d even felt comfortable speaking to me that way to begin with. It wasn’t her blatant homophobia that irritated me, but that she’d thought we had it in common. She’d thought I was . . . straight.

I think I know why. When I worked in the home department, no one cared if I showed up in skinny jeans and my favorite Cyndi Lauper T-shirt. In Suits, however, there was an expectation for employees to dress up. I would have loved to have been able to afford one of the colorful, immaculately tailored tuxedos RuPaul wears on Drag Race, but I wasn’t about to spend a cent of my minimum-wage paycheck on an outfit I could only wear at work. Instead of buying anything new, after my “promotion” I dug into the back of my closet and pulled out the business casual pieces I already had, my church clothes: khakis and a few plain button-up shirts.

Obviously Yolanda thought I was straight. I was wearing the outfit I specifically put on when I wanted judgmental old Catholic ladies to think I was.

In the weeks that followed, I became determined to change that, seeking out professional clothes within my budget that would help me express my queerness more visibly. Nothing ambiguous. I wanted people to see me and have no doubt that I pee sitting down. That ended up being nearly impossible. All the cute dressy shirts at the mall were in the high-double-digit price range. All the online brands that exist now that specialize in making unisex clothing didn’t exist back then. It was easy to find cheap, femme outfits for my everyday life at places like Forever 21, where I could turn a look out of a woman’s extra-large top and size 12 jeans and have money left over for a mall pretzel. But queer business casual, a concept that both mortified and engrossed me, seemed only to exist in the world of rich gays.

I wasn’t sure why this mission was so important to me, but I get it now. Truthfully, though nasty didn’t compare to being called a fag, Yolanda reminded me of how openly and unabashedly some straight people say fucked-up things about queers among each other. That hurt me more than I’d led on. I’d thought of us as work friends. The idea of finding myself in the middle of another conversation like the one I’d had with her made me want to pull my eyelashes out.

It wasn’t just Yolanda I wanted to shake; it was also the endless customers who laughed at our more flamboyant selections, cracking jokes to me about the floral-print dress socks and asking what kind of person would ever buy the red velvet tuxedo jackets. I needed to present as gay; that way, she and our likeminded clients could go back to the old system I much preferred: talking shit about me behind my back, while I got my frustration out on the universe by pretending to choke men.

That didn’t change the fact that I was broke. Still unsatisfied with my church clothes, I went to Goodwill and picked up a few professional-ish women’s blouses that reeked of baby powder and had funky geometric patterns. After cutting out the shoulder pads, I even felt like a real tailor. At home I gave myself a once-over in my bedroom mirror and believed the fantasy. No one could tell me I wasn’t professional. I looked like a secretary in an ’80s movie. I smiled, thinking maybe the incident with Yolanda had been a good thing, if it resulted in me being more authentic.

It couldn’t have been more than two weeks later that the mannequins appeared.

The couple were standing on a table in the break room. The man had a pair of black slacks and a polo shirt on, and the woman wore a skirt and a polka-dot top. At their feet was a sign with a paragraph about what clothes were appropriate to wear at work, suggesting we use them as an example. Below that was a line encouraging us to take advantage of our employee discounts. As I looked around at my coworkers, who were already dressed like the happy mannequins, it became clear to me who the message was for.

Part of me was grateful my manager didn’t pull me aside to relay this in person—to be essentially told something was wrong with me again, to my face, would have broken me. The few times we’d spoken, she’d been kind, and I genuinely think she chose this route so I wouldn’t feel personally called out. Yet sitting there eating my ramen noodles, I couldn’t fully appreciate that small mercy. All I could think was that the problem of my appearance would never end.

I could go back to my church clothes and force myself to swallow the homophobic comments I’d inevitably overhear from straight people who believed they were among their own.

Or I could make another trip to Goodwill and try to find something slightly less queer, perhaps that belonged in the current decade, and pray it would be good enough; if not, I could keep searching for the perfect blend of not too gay and not too straight without wasting too much money.

I felt like my customers, dazed by the selections before me, wishing there was someone who could help me dress up. Instead there was only me, and no one had trained me for this. I pulled on the neck of my blouse. I was suffocating.

As I looked around at my coworkers, who were already dressed like the happy mannequins, it became clear to me who the message was for.

I can’t tell you something magical happened, that the perfect clothes fell into my lap, or that I forgot about the mannequins as soon as I left the break room that day and pushed ahead with my life with the confidence some of my bolder queer friends. The truth is I went back to work feeling bad, and I probably did a bad job that day. The next day I was scheduled to come in, I put on my khakis and basic button-up shirt, and for the duration of my shift I kept my head low. The mannequins were gone by the end of the week.

It’s possible something magical did happen, which is that sometime during the following month, while going through the motions at work, I realized there were no benefits to staying at JCPenney, so there was no risk leaving. The one silver lining of a job barely paying you is that it costs nothing to go somewhere else. I say this with the caveat that not everyone has the luxury of quitting. Just like I have queer and transgender friends who refuse to make themselves more palatable for employers, I know many who are so grateful to receive a steady check that they’ll tolerate nearly anything. And then there are women like my mother, like Yolanda, women who aren’t given many opportunities because of language barriers or their race or their disabilities and would be in immediate danger if they lost their health insurance.

I do wonder if my manager would have let my wardrobe slide if I’d been able to afford the more respectable kind of queer business casual rich gays wore, as opposed to my inexpensive Goodwill drag. Maybe she wouldn’t have called me out and I’d have stayed.

Or maybe I’d have stayed if there had been a way for me to report Yolanda without worrying about her getting fired. Frankly, I had no desire to be magnanimous. My decision to not speak to my manager about her homophobic comment was more a result of not wanting to carry the weight on my conscience of what would have happened to her. She wasn’t a victim in this scenario, but I also didn’t want her to have to suffer because of me. A therapist might say something like, “She wouldn’t have gotten in trouble because of something you did, but because of something she did.”

And to that I’d cross my arms and say, “Girl, I’m a double Pisces. Everything is my fault.”

So I kept my mouth shut. I did that for the rest of my time at JCPenney, until a friend helped me get another job at The Gap. It was at the same mall, earning the same wage, but I hoped the younger crowd there would be more open-minded. Even if they weren’t, I could wear jeans.

My last day at JCPenney was a blur. After clocking out, I passed through the home department where I’d started, a strange nostalgia coursing through me as I transitioned from employee back to customer. When I reached Suits, I stopped to run my fingers through all the fabrics, and while there I saw that the floor was littered with shirts and ties that Yolanda would have to reorganize before she could go home. Teenagers or tourists. I picked a tie up and slid it back into a fan with dozens of others, then stood back and admired my handiwork. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I must have looked just like one half of the gay couple Yolanda had called disgusting.

“Thanks, baby. You didn’t have to do that,” she said, shuffling by with an armful of shirts.

“See you later,” I told her, watching as she took the shirts to the register and added them to a mountain of clothes. We weren’t family, not at all, but there was something familiar about her I couldn’t deny. For a little bit of time, we’d been at this place together, overworked, underpaid, surrounded by people trying desperately to look their best.