Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-08-08 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

This is about Stacy Weibley, whose education at the Johns Hopkins University helps tell us how far we’ve come with our acceptance of other people’s sexuality.

Pretty far, says the scholarship she received. Not so far, says her life.

She goes for her doctorate in public health with financial assistance from the Point Foundation, a publicly supported organization whose scholarships are granted to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. The California-based foundation not only grants aid — its public relations literature proudly announces the recipients’ identities and their accomplishments.

That’s a pretty good trumpet blast that used to be a whisper. It says sexual minorities — once forced to closet themselves in shame — are now declaring their full citizenship and not feeling they have to hide from anyone.

Though Weibley’s life suggests how far the country still has to go.

She is 32 now and finishing her doctorate on sexuality and mental health issues. It’s been a pretty rough journey, growing up with little money, a single mother and a father who abandoned them when Stacy was a child. The father went to the cleaners one day and never came back. He subsequently had nine wives.

So much for heterosexual family values.

Stacy, the first in her family to go to college, learned about the Point Foundation scholarships about a year ago — which was about a year after she had finally telephoned her mother, in Delaware, to say what she’d been struggling to say for a long time.

“I guess I’d been consciously aware of being a lesbian since early college,” Weibley says. “But, raised in a devoutly Catholic family, I was steeped in denial. And so was my mother. I remember the last meal the whole family had together, and an uncle saying to me, out of the blue, ‘A faggot’s just a faggot, Stacy.’ There was a lot of homophobia in the family. So when I finally got up the courage to tell my mother, I had to do it over the phone.

“I said, ‘Mom, I’ve been dating women.’

“She said something about knowing it, about not being surprised,” Weibley recalls. “She seemed embarrassed. But then, when we talked about it a second time she said, no, no, of course she didn’t know. She said, ‘How could I know?’

“I think what she was telling me was that if she had known, she was somehow to blame. And, if she didn’t know, it had nothing to do with her. So I said to her, ‘It’s not your fault.’ And she said, ‘Of course not. It’s your fault, not mine.’

“Rejection,” Weibley says, “it gets worse by the day.”

We live in a culture where some people still imagine homosexuality a casual lifestyle choice, like picking out a new wardrobe, and not a reflection of human DNA. And it’s a culture where some people still think it’s their business what goes on in the privacy of others’ bedrooms — as though this defines someone’s value as a human being.

The Point Foundation, which awarded 38 scholarships across the country this year — the average award was $13,600 — attempts to say otherwise.

“It’s changing,” Weibley says, “but our society doesn’t let us neatly wrap it up in a box. I deal with it on a daily basis.”

Just applying for the Point scholarship represented a challenge: It amounted to an announcement, beyond close friends, of her sexuality.

“I was in such desperate need,” she says, “for a feeling of family and community that it trumped all the challenges of applying for a scholarship. I mean, I’m out of the closet to everyone I know. But my mother’s still too embarrassed to tell her friends. But I see myself as an advocate. I want to share my story and help others with their struggles.”

She says she has a girlfriend, a massage therapist named Jenn Dragstra. They’ve been together for two years.

“I’m femmy, she’s not,” says Weibley. “We had rocks thrown at us one night in Washington. Some people screaming, ‘What are you doing with that dyke?’ A police officer hit her one night. People at work ask about my sex life. ‘How do you have sex?’ they’ll ask. Would they ask a heterosexual woman that question?”

The world changes, here and there. As she writes her doctoral dissertation — “The Relationship between Internalized Homophobia and Sexual Risk Taking Among Self-Identified Gay Men in Washington, D.C.”

At Johns Hopkins, Stacy Weibley’s a measure of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

molesker@baltimoreexaminer.com