FICTION
Portrait of a Grandmother by Nathan Elliott
I was looking at an old Polaroid when it dawned on me that my grandmother might have been gay. Keep in mind that she had been dead for nearly ten years when this finally occurred to me. She might have commented, had she been given the chance, that I never had been that bright. On the other hand, she might have been shocked that anyone would dare to say that about her. Not so much that she was gay or that she wasn’t: being gay, or not being gay, was simply not something she ever thought about much. I say that, at least in part, because of a conversation I had with her about three years before she died. A lesbian had hit on my extremely gorgeous cousin—this had upset my cousin, who is religious and conservative–and it also threw my grandmother a bit, or at least I thought so at the time. All of my cousins are (a) women, (b) completely gorgeous, and (c) to my knowledge anyway, completely straight and about as heterosexual as women come. But that being said, if I was a lesbian rather than a gay man, and one of my cousins walked MOUNT HOPE • ISSUE 12
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