Family Proclamations: “All the Closets,” with Jessi Hempel

About the Guest

Jessi Hempel is author of The Family Outing: A Memoir. She is also host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday, and a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. Her features and cover stories have appeared in Wired, Fortune, and TIME. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. Hempel is a graduate of Brown University and received a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and children.

Transcript

JESSI HEMPEL: I started reading the section about homosexuality and I was like, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Then I thought, "Oh my goodness, they're gonna come home and see me reading it and they're gonna know."

Now I'm, you know, fourteen or fifteen years old. I was so nervous they would discover what I was researching, that I was reading for personal gain, that I was trying to figure something out. So, I immediately turned to the section on menopause because I think, "Well then they'll just think I'm reading for curiosity because there's no way I'm going through menopause."

BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel wasn't going through menopause. She was figuring out she was gay in the late 80s in a family where that wasn't particularly safe. She could keep it hidden for a while, but she knew that someday it wouldn't be a secret anymore, and she was afraid. So, Jessi managed to stretch the secret out.

Then one day, her sister discovers something on their father's computer that will turn the whole family on its head. There was more than one secret closet in this family, and the closet doors would swing open again and again.

In this episode, Jessi joins us to talk about her incredible memoir, The Family Outing.

There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

The Family Least Likely to Keep in Touch – 1:38

BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel, welcome to Family Proclamations.

JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you so much for having me, Blair. I love what you're doing with the show.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited to talk to you about this book, The Family Outing. You're a professional writer, you didn't just write a book because of your amazing experiences. You also have technical skills with this, so people might not think twice about the fact that you've published a book.

But I do think this particular book is sort of surprising if we look at your other professional stuff. Like your career focuses on tech reporting, and this is a really personal memoir. Talk about what it was like to kind of transition to a different mode of writing to get this book done.

JESSI HEMPEL: You're very correct, Blair. For the first 25 years of my life as a writer—and that's a lot of years, by the way, I had been writing for a long time—I thought that if I ever wrote a book it would be about technology, artificial intelligence, or the rise of social networks, or any of the myriad things I geeked out on related to business and tech. I had spent my entire career until that point writing for magazines like Business Week, and Fortune, and Wired about the kinds of things that kept me up at night, which were and are things having to do with things like the evolution of new technology. And that was my identity.

And I start there, Blair, because I think what happened to me actually happened to a lot of people.

In March of 2020—and I should start by saying, if you just say “March of 2020” most people get this dour look on their face, right? Yeah, we can all think about where we might have been. And for me, I was living in Brooklyn, New York. And I was this technology writer, and I was a fairly new parent, my wife and I had a baby, he had just turned a year old, and I had a real strong sense of my identity, right? I traveled all the time, I was out in the world, career focused.

And then overnight all of that changed. My job was thankfully safe, but there was a question as to whether it would continue. And suddenly, there was no traveling. In fact, there was no office to go to. There was no daycare, which meant that I was home with my child all day. And New York was a particularly scary place to be. My wife and I finally got to a point where we said we gotta get out of here.

Bear with me, because this does have to do with the book. I know, Blair, right here that you're like, this not the question that I asked. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: I'm following, I'm following!

JESSI HEMPEL: Okay! So, my wife and I put the baby and the dog in the back of the Subaru—because those are the lesbians that we are—and we hit the gas and started driving south. Her parents lived in Tupelo, Mississippi, and we drove all the way to their house, which was 18 hours. And when we got there, we thought we'd stay for 10 days, and—you know where the story is going—we stayed for months.

Those first couple of weeks that I was living in my wife's childhood bedroom, you know, I did the things that we did at the very beginning of the pandemic. Like I got Zoom-crazy, right? I did Zoom happy hours and Zoom yoga and I Zoomed with friends I hadn't talked to in a while.

And then very quickly, I just grew so tired of Zoom and really tired of talking to anyone. I was depressed. I was super down. And while I was so down, I discovered that there were just a few people I wanted to talk to. And I wanted to talk to them every single day. And that was my brother, my sister, and my mom, and my dad. And I thought that was pretty wild because if you had known us in our youth you would have voted us the family least likely to keep in touch with each other. We were just a hot mess, right? But here we were in the middle of this global emergency, and these were the people I was reaching for. And we were quarantining in five different houses in four different states. And we were texting and in touch with each other every day.

So all that was going on, Blair. Back in New York, I had this very commercial literary agent who kept calling me and saying, "Jessi, now is a great time to write a book." And I would say, "Have you seen my life? There is nothing great about this moment. I'm kind of busy trying to keep my head above water. It's not a good time.”

And she kept saying, “No, no, this is a great time. There are not a lot of writers bringing books to market.” She was right about that. “And so if there was ever a moment when you had a real dream, like the dream project, this is the moment you could get that project done.” And so I said, "Okay, I'll think about it."

And I came back to her, and I said, "Well, how about I write a tech book about the business of tech?" and she said, "Boring." She said, "Go back and bring me the book that you would be most afraid to write." So I thought about it. Then I came back to her. And I said, "Well, what if I interviewed everybody in my family and wrote the story of how we all came out? Because here's the thing, I think the reason why we like each other so much right now, and why we depend on each other so much emotionally, and why we are close, is because things were so hard and broken. And we all did this internal work of coming out. And that work—not only did it help us each to realize ourselves, but it helped us to realize something about each other.”

And she said, "Perfect, we'll call it The Family Outing." And literally, from there I was writing the book.

Framing The Story – 6:44

BLAIR HODGES: And it was in the course of starting those interviews that you started to wrap your head around the story of your family, because the easy story to tell, which you say in the introduction is, we had this family, there was all this dysfunction, and then we all came out of the closet, and now we're all okay. And that's an interesting story in and of itself, but you weren't entirely satisfied with it. Why wasn't it satisfying when thought about framing your book and the story you wanted to tell?

JESSI HEMPEL: I love that sort of overview of it, because that is how I kind of have been telling it my whole life and it was a great cocktail party story. Like, "Hey, I've got the gayest family. My family can out-gay your family. Listen to how gay we are. We all came out of the closet.”

And I should say when I say that, Blair, I came out of the closet first. I came out at 19. Just straight up gay. I would even call myself a little bit of a boring gay. I'm very in the box, like, you know, fairly heteronormative in presentation, like, just discovered Ani DiFranco at 19 and was like, "Yeah, there we go." [laughter] Shortly after, my dad came out as gay, which forced him to leave his marriage. My sister came out as bisexual, my brother came out as transgender, and later went on to carry a child. And that whole process caused us to do a great deal of self-reflection. And my mother came out as a survivor of a series of crimes so heinous, I could really only learn about them in little bits over time.

And all of this change happened over the course of three and a half, four years, a very short period of time. And while it was happening, I've got to say, it was terrible. It was terrible. And it was hard. And terrible and hard—once you get to the other side of them—forge character, right? And so what I was interested in was, I wanted to figure out not just what my version of the story was, but what every member of my family thought happened. I wanted to see if I could get to one common narrative that we all agreed upon, like, "Hey, here's what happened."

So I kind of pitched the story to everybody. I was like, "Hey, you know what we could do is, I could interview you, we could do a whole lot of interviews, you could tell me your side of the story. I could figure out where they line up. And then I could just come up with one common narrative." And everybody agreed to it, which, God bless them that they all agreed to it because, especially for my parents, it was a huge leap of faith. They were essentially agreeing to allow me to air all my family's dirty laundry, and to live through that.

BLAIR HODGES: Because for interviews they have to be involved with it, right? Like not just your parents telling you, but they have to dig—

JESSI HEMPEL: Right. I mean, there was so much digging, and subsequently so much healing in the writing of the story. And I should say, by the way we're talking about it you would think this is like an encyclopedia about my family. But I also endeavored to write a beach read. I wanted to write something that would move so fast you would sit down and start to read it, and if it was a book that spoke to you—and I will say books are very personal, not every book speaks to every person—but if those books spoke to you, that you would sit down, open it, and want to finish it right away and just fly through it.

But you know, when I started to try to get all of our stories to line up, the only thing I really learned, Blair, is that even when five people endeavor in good faith to tell one story, memory is really crappy. And people remember things differently and nobody could get the details right.

Jessi’s Father – 10:17

BLAIR HODGES: Part of your project, then, was to get a narrative thread that worked, but also that would be satisfactory and representative of the perspectives of your family. You were juggling a lot of different stories here.

One of the most interesting for me was about your father. He was a young man in the 1970s. He was the son of a very religiously devout minister. And he's thinking about maybe entering the ministry himself. But things aren't really clicking, his mission work gets cut short, he finds himself in this meeting with a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, and he's listing off all these ways he feels lost in his life. And then he just tosses out, "Oh, also, I think I might be gay."

Tell us a little bit more about your dad in this moment and what that must have been like for him to be a gay young man in the seventies from this devout family.

JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, I think so much about this. Because if you had met my dad as a 10-year-old child, you would probably have identified him—especially in our contemporary culture, maybe not back then—but even from his youngest years, he was somebody who people probably identified as, "Oh, that kid's probably gonna grow up to be gay." He just had a manner about him. And I think that really scared his parents.

My grandfather was a German Methodist minister who even felt like the Methodist Church wasn't quite strict enough. So he would bring his family for extra churching on Wednesdays to the Baptist church down the street. He really took his relationship with God seriously, and was somewhat panicked you know, he had three children, he had two daughters, and then he had this son, and in their family, I mean, everything was about the son. They just really wanted the son to accurately represent the family and take on the tradition, which was a religious tradition, whatever that was.

And there was my dad, this young gay kid, and they became so worried about him being—I mean, they never used the word “gay.” Let me be really clear, Blair. But you know, even in middle school, they had a couple of experiences where—and this isn't in the book, but just from my dad talking to me, you know, his parents found him like trying on his big sisters’ petticoats. And they just were concerned enough that they figured out how to get him into a rigorous Christian boys boarding school.

And all that time, my dad knew in his heart that he was gay, or that he liked boys. I don't think he had a word for it.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's a really important point, too, that it wouldn't have been thought of in terms of an identity, but rather as sinful inclinations, or temptations he was supposed to fight. So it wouldn't have been, “Oh no, my son's gay.” It's, “Oh no, he's going to struggle with these temptations. How are we going to Christianize them out of him? How are we gonna fix that pathology?”

One of those solutions then was to get married, like, "This'll fix it."

JESSI HEMPEL: Super interesting, right? My father didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life. He's a very bright guy. He graduated top of his class at his Christian boarding school. He went off to Middlebury College and he got a scholarship. His family had no money. He finished Middlebury College a semester early and he had no career path, no idea what he wanted to do. He was kind of like, as bright as he was intellectually, he was kind of a dud socially. Couldn't figure out dating, couldn't figure out anything, and so his parents really kind of pushed him into the mission. And that seemed like a thing to do. His older sister had become a missionary.

And by the way, it was a great lifestyle for her. It worked really, really well for her. She has continued this lifestyle for her entire life. I mean, she eventually got married and had children. But this lifestyle did not work for my dad.

And here's where I have to give the Methodist Church some credit. It seems from what I could figure out—and again, I wasn't able to talk to any of these people personally—but just from reading diaries of my father and picking up stories and reading my grandfather's notes. You know, my grandfather pushed the Methodist ministry to invite my father into the mission. I think that they knew he didn't want to be a missionary, and they knew that he was a really lost kid, and that he needed some guidance. And so they finally said to him, "Look, we're just going to let you out of this commitment and we're also going to pay for counseling for you. So go get yourself settled somewhere. And we the church are then going to pick up therapy for you."

And that's really cool. The other side of that was that when my father finally got himself settled somewhere, he went off to live with his sister for a couple months, he got a Christian therapist who listened to him and assured him when he mentioned that maybe he could be possibly, I mean, there's a potential that he could be gay—you know, mumbled the word, didn't even say it loudly—they said, "No, no, no, no,” you know, “a lot of young adolescent men feel this way during one stage of growth and adolescence, and you just need to get married. Just get married, that'll take care of it."

Jessi’s Mother – 15:11

BLAIR HODGES: And so then he does. He meets your mom. And your mother—you found out in the course of writing the book, and throughout your life, your mom had experienced some trauma around the time she met your dad. She was going through some things.

So your dad's sort of trying to find his way, deciding to get married and this and that, and your mom was trying to figure out her future family life at this time, too. She was working at this department store. And she had a coworker there that she kind of had a crush on, who was actually revealed to be a friend, and maybe even an accomplice of a serial killer in Michigan. I didn't expect this in The Family Outing. Talk about that for a sec.

JESSI HEMPEL: In the late 60s, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, there was a man who preyed upon women in my mom's community. And it was still the early sixties you know, this was before the heyday of serial killers in our culture, back when that was still sort of a new idea.

But women started disappearing, probably when my mom was in about ninth or tenth grade. And, you know, there would be women that my mom knew. It would be like the assistant art teacher at the high school, or the church deacon's secretary, and they'd be people that were about my mom's age and that looked a lot like my mom. And the town became increasingly fearful as these disappearances and subsequent murders happened at a cadence of like once a year, and then once every six months, and then moved into a cadence of happening quite frequently. And all of the men in town became volunteer neighborhood watch folks, including my grandfather, and all the young girls were put on curfews.

And this was the backdrop against which my mom attempted to live her adolescence. I think it's probably true when anybody experiences something as persistently scary as that, you become immune to the fear, and you just have to live your life. And my mom did that. She worked at a department store downtown, and she developed a crush on a guy. And there was actually a moment when that guy scared the bejesus out of her in a way that suddenly—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, he corners her in a back room.

JESSI HEMPEL: And he throttles her throat, and he threatens her! And she was looking at him and she was trying to get him to stop. And then she realized, "Oh, my goodness, I actually don't know anything about this man." And then he lets go. And he's like, "I'm only joking. But, like, what would you do if I were the killer?"

And my mom goes home with this information. She's trying to process it. And she doesn't even have time to process it because that’s when this man and his best friend are arrested for the murders. And he later gets off in exchange for testifying against his best friend.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, which is kind of sketchy because he could have been more involved. But he's the one who talked to the cops, basically.

JESSI HEMPEL: That's exactly right. And most people in Ypsilanti, Michigan who were alive at that time and paying attention believe that he was, if not in on the murders, he certainly knew about the murders. And so my mom lived with this. And this shaped her.

Her parents loved her very much. But in our popular culture in, you know, the late sixties and early seventies, I think what love looked like in white middle class American families was, “Hey, we're not going to talk about this. We're just going to try to put this behind us. We're going to focus on something else.” And so my grandparents encouraged my mom, “Hey, let's not talk about this.” Then the guy was arrested, he was taken away. There was never any further discussion about it.

My mom continues to work at this department store, her life goes back to some semblance of something like normal, whatever normal is. And a year later, maybe a year and a half later, she meets this effeminate son of a minister who wants to get married right away. And he's safe and lovely. And it's no surprise to me that they found each other in that moment.

Buried Secrets – 19:07

BLAIR HODGES: And so they do. They get married, and they have three kids—you and two younger siblings. It seems like your classic American family at this point. You've got two churchgoing parents, you got Dad as the breadwinner, Mom is the primary caregiver to the kids. And in fact, Dad's actually sometimes a bit too distant because of his work obligations. And that's how their relationship actually starts to fray.

JESSI HEMPEL: They're trying so hard, right? And they're trying to check off the list of things you check off in order to qualify for the Olin Mills picture in like the eighties that would go on the Christmas card, and they're doing a great job at it on the surface.

And here I think it's important to remember that at the beginning, my parents really were in love, and I think when one tells these kinds of stories and the end of the stories is that a marriage dissolves, we forget that before there was bad, there was a lot of history in the good that is worth considering. It wasn't like my parents lied to themselves in any overt way when they fell for each other. They actually did fall for each other in a moment.

But, you know, as life went on, my father—it becomes harder and harder for him to bury this truth about himself. So he just becomes more and more distant. He just checks out. And my mother then is in a marriage that on the surface looks like everybody else’s, and she thinks she should feel happy. But truthfully, she's so lonely because she's trying to raise these three children kind of all on her own.

And then her own flashbacks and memories start to come up and she becomes extremely depressed. And I think about this long period—ultimately my adolescence, right? For me, it was age ten to twenty or so—as the closeted period in my family's life. And we were all pretty miserable and pretty unhappy and often emotionally violent to each other, and my parents in particular to us, and sometimes even physically violent. And that is the product of living in the closet. That is what it means to have to hide yourself. You become your worst version of yourself.

Jessi's Childhood Secret – 21:11

BLAIR HODGES: Seeing you grow up in the book, I love this. I loved reading about little Jessi. You start getting called “Jessica” in the third grade. This Jessica seems so precocious, and that she really needs to be seen in some ways. But also, she says she couldn't be seen. Here's something you write:

"When I was a child, I believed there were things I couldn't reveal about myself, things that made me despicable, unlovable."

So on the one hand, you wanted to connect, you wanted to be seen. And on the other hand, you had what you felt like was this dark secret about yourself. Talk about what that was like for you.

JESSI HEMPEL: Well, you know, I was gay, and by that, I mean, I also didn't have a word for it. But I knew by the time I was in early elementary school that my desire was programmed differently than other people's desire. And that this was something I needed to hide. I don't even know exactly how I knew that. But I knew that. And that if anybody ever found out, that would be bad for me.

I think one thing about the eighties and into the early nineties was that this was a time when maybe you could be gay, but you just didn't talk about it. And none of the people we knew on television came out on television. You know, Ellen DeGeneres didn't come out of the closet on TV until 1996.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I was in high school.

JESSI HEMPEL: You probably remember it. Do you remember it, Blair?

BLAIR HODGES: I do! I do. And at the time, I was in a place where I thought something was very wrong with that. I was unsettled by it. But I think I didn't know much about what it meant. And the thing is that growing up, we would say all the slurs, we would say “queer” and stuff like this without really even thinking about what it meant.

I did get the sense that I was expected to become a man, I always had heteronormative cultural expectations, but I didn't know that I knew any gay people. So Ellen was one of the first people where I was like, oh, there's gay people. Okay, there's one in real life.

JESSI HEMPEL: Completely. And that was so profoundly important. It started a cultural change that grew into the movement that we have today, right?

But, you know, before all that happened, I was like, "Queer" was the word we use to describe things that were strange and not cool in high school. And I used it all the time before it became the word that was my identity. But I knew I also had these crushes on girls starting in middle school and into high school that I could kind of get away with because I think this kind of friendship is more sanctioned between women than it is between men.

BLAIR HODGES: Can we read about one of these? There's an excerpt on page 80 I thought would really speak to that. Just to the end of the page there.

JESSI HEMPEL: Okay. Yeah, awesome.

In sixth grade, I love Becky Orr. She's my best friend. She has long brown curly hair that she parts in the middle and pins back with two barrettes, and a face like a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, round with dimples on her cheeks. We spend our time doing things that border on little kid, like running through the sprinkler and watching the Mickey Mouse Club. Then we go to our respective homes and talk on the phone.

When we're not talking, I'm thinking about talking to her. I can find a way to weave Becky into any conversation. For instance, if Dad mentions going to the beach next summer, I might say, 'You know who loves the beach?' 'Who?' he'll say, even though he knows the answer: Becky Orr.

Being a closeted gay girl in the 1980s involves hiding out in the open. It's constantly declaring your feelings to the object of your affection and getting away with it because girls are allowed to love each other. Loving is entirely condoned. Lusting is something of which we don't speak.

I don't have a name for this way that I'm drawn to Becky, I always longed to be closer to my best friends, but I don't even know what I'm longing for. To feel more? To merge into them more? To crawl inside their heads? This merging desire feels most possible when a friend is most vulnerable, such as when she is falling in love with someone else. In this way, I learn to lie to myself. When Becky calls to tell me David kissed her at the St. John's Dance, I feel the universe cleave into sections, see her spinning backward from me. She’ll like David better than me, differently than me. But just now, it’s me for whom she reaches to share this new experience and I want to hold onto her attention.

'I'm so excited for you, Becky,' I say, 'Tell me everything.' It's always this way for me with a best friend. For a brief period, I will inhabit them, and then I'll lose them."

BLAIR HODGES: We get to see more of that as you tell more of your story. A couple of years after this, you still haven't really got a word for it, you haven't really nailed it down for yourself. But a couple years later, you're babysitting for some neighbors a few houses down. And there's a book they have there. And I recognize the title of this. It's called Our Bodies, Ourselves, this book is on the shelf there and you're curious. So you pick it up and you start to read it. And this book really brings some things home.

JESSI HEMPEL: It really does. And I just remember, Blair, I was so nervous they would discover I was researching, that I was reading for personal gain, that I was trying to figure something out, I started reading the section about homosexuality. And I was like, "Oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh, dear! Wow, that really..."

And then I thought, "Oh, my goodness, they're gonna come home and see me reading it. And they're gonna know."

Now I'm, you know, fifteen years old, fourteen years old. So I immediately turn to the section on menopause because I think well, then they'll just think I'm reading for curiosity, because there's no way I'm going through menopause! [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: But you knew then, right? You say you knew. In fact, read the end of that chapter there.

JESSI HEMPEL: From this point on, I know the thing about myself I have been trying not to know. I understand that it cannot be changed, that it is innate, like my eye color.

I'm gay.

One day I will need to accept this, and I believe it will end the good part of my life. It will end my ability to get along with the people I know and love. I am gay. I will spend my adult years in a dirty city living with men I do not like. I won't have kids. But hopefully also, I'll know women that look like the women in this book. Would that be so bad?

Maybe, I think, I can stave this off until after high school. Maybe I can buy myself a few more years of the good life in which I think I can be like everyone else. Maybe no one else has to know."

Kicked Out of The Closet – 27:42

BLAIR HODGES: And as you're dealing with all that, your relationship with your mother is deteriorating. People who read the book will see how that plays out. You're struggling, things in your family feel disconnected, and things are going to come to a head eventually here. Chapter 14, I think, was probably one of the most painful chapters to read. This is when your sister makes a discovery on your dad's computer.

JESSI HEMPEL: My dad was outed. We like to say that he was kicked out of the closet more than he came out of the closet.

I was just out of college. My sister, who's four years younger than me, had just finished her first year of college and she was home for the summer. And things were not great between my parents by this point. Years and years of not taking care of their relationship had led to a situation where, you know, Mom watched TV all evening long and Dad disappeared into the den and they didn't really talk to each other. And Dad would get on his computer.

So my sister is in her bedroom. And she is IM’ing—one of those early chat programs, with her boyfriend. They're sort of newly in love. And then her computer dies. It runs out of batteries. It's an early laptop. And so she gets frustrated with it. And she goes into the den to use the family computer to pick up the conversation. And when she goes on the computer, somebody she doesn't know pings her back. And she quickly discovers this person she doesn't know seems to be a man involved with my father. And she puts it together very quickly that this person messaging her is some man that my dad is having an affair with.

And then everything blows up, Blair. In that particular moment, my dad and my mom were hosting visiting relatives—

BLAIR HODGES: I know. It was such a bad moment!—

JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, is there ever a good moment, though? Could you ever plan, could you ever be like, you know, "On July 20th—" [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: No, but maybe on a quiet weekend, though, with no visitors!

JESSI HEMPEL: That would've been better, but no. [laughter] They were just waiting for my aunt and uncle to arrive. They were driving home from, I think, shopping for furniture, and my sister calls my dad—we had one of those early car phones, it was sort of a bit before cell phones, and they were like these big bricks, and you didn't really want to use them because it was super expensive, but for emergencies, right?

So my sister calls and wants to talk to my dad, my mom picks up and my sister basically intimates to my mom, she says, "Tell Dad that So-and-So says hi." And in that moment my dad knows exactly what has happened. And he panics, and he just thinks, “I can undo this, I can fix this, I can fix this.”

So he races home, he tries to get time with my sister, but my sister's not having it. And she leaves. She goes to her boyfriend's house, he lives in Vermont. She basically says, you know, “You tell Mom, or I will.”

And so my dad has to tell my mom, you know, “Hey, I've been doing these,” you know—his understanding of what's happening at this point too is really important. Because I think it is like the process of coming out of the closet is not a light switch that you flip on and off. It's a gradual awakening or awareness. And so his thought at this point is that he has been afflicted by something, rather like he might be afflicted by some form of cancer that's surely curable if you get the right treatments.

And so his first sort of revelation to my mom is like, "I've been afflicted by these unhealthy desires, and I've acted upon them and broken the covenant of our marriage. And I'm going to fix this. And we can fix this. And I'm so sorry that I'm sick."

Luckily, for everybody involved, that's not where his emotional work ended. But that's where it started.

BLAIR HODGES: And Mom wanted to hang in there for a minute, like they really thought they could figure this out. She became invested in making this work, and it sort of starts getting drawn out, and you're seeing your parents try to make what is appearing increasingly to be a sham, they're trying so hard to make it work, and your dad is experiencing what you call the "Rainbow Phase." He's kind of finally started to embrace his gay self, but he's also trying to not be gay. He's also trying to maintain this mixed-orientation marriage at the same time, which is so strange.

JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, imagine it, though, because he loves my mom, and he loves this family we have created. He also has a pretty intact relationship with his religion and with God at this point. And stepping outside of the framework of those things is completely unknown to him.

This is also the summer of his fiftieth birthday. He turns fifty about two weeks after all of this happens. So imagine if you live the first fifty years of your life with one identity and then you are called to ask to rethink it. It seems impossible. You think you know who you are. How could you also be this other person?

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think there was some excitement in it, too? Like the Rainbow Phase part of it?

JESSI HEMPEL: Coming out is great, okay? Blair, let me tell you, coming out involves coming into a community of people who have been waiting for you, many of whom have also experienced rejection and hurt and hardship from their families of origin. And when you finally get brave enough to figure out how to bring a dish of macaroni to the potluck at the LGBT center, what you discover is a whole lot of people who are like, I want to be your friend. You want to go to the theater with me? You want to join my biking club? He joined a church for a little while that was composed of people who had left their churches because they couldn't be a part of it. He walked into opportunities for belonging.

And I think it's such an important distinction, Blair, because when you are the spouse being left in that situation, you don't walk into belonging. You have to rethink everything, you have to reconstitute your identity, and there's no flag waving for you.

BLAIR HODGES: No. Your mother had such difficulty and talked about a suicide attempt even. She came to the point where that was on the table for her. What was it like writing about that? And how did she feel about that being part of the book?

JESSI HEMPEL: It was really hard to figure out how to write about it. She was pretty unhappy at first with that being part of the book. She felt, you know, she is a mental health practitioner. And she worried that—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That's a community she fell into, like, figuring out mental health and becoming a therapist and all that, so to speak, she needed a place to fall. But we're talking about what happened before that. Sorry, just wanted to interject that—

JESSI HEMPEL: Right. But in her moment of crisis, and you asked specifically about how she felt about me writing about it, she was scared that if she revealed exactly how vulnerable she was, people would think less of her. And so that was her fear in the book.

And yet, she was really honest with me about what that moment of crisis felt like. And I was able to really reflect both how she thought and felt about that moment of crisis, but also how it affected my brother who was still in high school, and my sister who was at college.

When an event like that happens in a family system, it happens differently to everyone, and hopefully the book sort of captures that.

When Siblings Come Out – 34:53

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, it sure does. I think this is one of the main strengths of the book because it shows how coming out can be such an involved and connected and networked process, that it's not an isolated thing. And people that experience it, there are shockwaves—there's joy, there's grief, there's so many different emotions. And it's not an isolated individual experience. It has repercussions for everybody around.

We certainly get to witness that with you, and your siblings, and your mom, and how it impacted your dad, and how it impacted their religious faith and their connection to different religious communities, and how it connected your mom to communities of therapy and research and how to be in therapeutic relationship with others.

I think that's such a central strength of The Family Outing, that we get to witness how that felt. With that in mind, let's take a second to talk about your siblings. So Katja is the middle child. And then the youngest is Evan. Evan was assigned female at birth. And Katja comes out as bisexual.

It was interesting, your reaction to that. Because you had come out as gay. And when your sister came out as bi, you seem sort of like, "Oh, okay." Maybe talk a little bit about the bi erasure that kind of happens, right? Bi people often talk about bi erasure, that they're sort of dismissed, or that it's sort of looked sideways at, like, "Oh, okay, interesting…"

JESSI HEMPEL: I'm so glad you brought that up. You know, my wife identifies as bisexual, and people can be somewhat callous of that being like, "Well, you and Jessi have been together for twelve years. Why do we have to call you bisexual?"

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I hear this with people that are married, too. I know a woman who's married to a guy, she gets the exact same question a lot, and she came out as bi later in life, and they're like, "But you're already married, and you have kids and stuff. Like, what's the point?" So that bi erasure is real.

JESSI HEMPEL: One hundred percent. The other piece there that I really wanted to figure out how to highlight is that this book is about coming out, but it's also about how to receive people who come out to you. I wanted to call attention to the fact that, you know, I came out first. I thought I knew a thing or two about what it was to be queer and who got to be queer. And I actually, unfortunately, I thought I kind of owned it in my family. And I was not great to my sister or my brother when they came out.

In both situations my first response was to belittle the experience, to say some version of, "Well, I mean, you know, okay, fine." Like with my sister, "Oh, you just want to be like the rest of us. Sure, you're bisexual, like you were the popular girl in school, you always had a boyfriend, like, I know, this is a passing fad."

And with my brother, you know, a couple years later, I did the exact same thing. He said, "My pronouns are going to be he and him, the name I choose is Evan. Please call me that when I come to visit you." And my first response was like, "But you just wore that beautiful dress at Christmas. I'm sure this is a passing thing. Like, what's that about?"

I think, you know, having some compassion for myself and for anyone in that situation, what's true is that when the people we love most, who are closest to us, family members in particular, but also good friends, reveal something about themselves that is so outside of what we think we know about them, it threatens our own identity. And sometimes our immediate first reaction is to get so wrapped up in the threat to our own identity that we can't receive what they have to tell us.

BLAIR HODGES: We might even think like, how could they not have told me? There's perhaps also a trust thing, too, not honoring the reasons why people come out when they do. I also think this sort of a cultural experience might become less common, right, the more acceptable it is, the more people are coming out. Some people don't even need to come out. They're growing up in a family or culture system where like, that's just the thing.

But as long as there are people coming out, the ways that they're received, especially by the people that love them the most, matters the most, and you're vulnerable in the way you talk about your own missteps and things you wish you could have done differently. You straightforwardly tell us those reactions. Like when Evan comes out and says he's trans, like you just described it, you're kind of like, “Okay…” and coming to grips with that yourself and being able to talk about it, again, I think it speaks to the strength of your book.

I want to remind people, the book is called The Family Outing, and we're talking to Jessi Hempel. She's host of an award-winning podcast called Hello Monday, and also a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. Her writing usually focuses on work and meaning in the digital age. And you might have seen her on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, or CNBC, talking about culture and business of technology. She graduated from Brown University, got a Master of Journalism from UC—Berkeley, lots of education, lots of experience, a lot of writing.

And you've got this whole family background behind all that, too.

Seeking A Cure For The Emotional Flu – 39:30

BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite scenes, by the way, was when you were talking about being on CNN at one point, and you just went blank in the mind at this point. I can't believe it. You talk about the dead air. And that was kind of a crisis point for you, right? What were you doing there?

JESSI HEMPEL: In my late twenties I was always very career-forward. And in my early adulthood, I just really wanted to be a business writer. I started writing and I got a job at Businessweek, and I became a TV commentator. And I learned, Blair, that you don't actually need to know very much about whatever they're asking you on TV to be pretty good at this job. All you have to do for the most part is master the art of the bridge.

So whatever question you ask, no matter how hard it is, or how little I know about it, what I can say is, "Blair, it's so interesting, you would ask that, but what people really want to know about is—" whatever I want to talk about, and then I started talking, and the TV viewers never even really put it together if I'm confident enough. And this was my trick for actually talking about a lot of things I really didn't know much about in my twenties on television.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I would always call it “the pivot.” [laughter]

JESSI HEMPEL: The pivot. But also during this period, I really hadn't dealt with a lot of the trauma that had happened in my family. And what would happen is that just every once in a while it would catch up with me. And I had a name for this, I think the modern-day version of it would be something like a panic attack, but I called it the emotional flu. And I would literally just check out for some period of time and be completely unable to manage.

The way out of this, by the way, was therapy—a really great therapist that I saw weekly for nine years.

But we're before that here. And this happened to me, this set of panic attacks that landed me in a place where I suddenly checked out, didn't show up for work for a day and didn't prepare for anything. And then I needed to go in to CNN, I was booked on CNN. So I put my makeup on and went into the studio, the car came and picked me up and brought me in, and they put me in the chair. And I kind of was like, I was so fragile. But I thought the question they were going to ask me was, “what did we do when we learned that the Olympics are,” wherever they were, I think I believed at the time that they were going to be in London. I was ready to talk about that. I had, like, one thing to say.

And then it turned out that the Olympics were in Paris, and they asked me the question, you know, what do you think? What does it mean for Paris that the Olympics are going to be there and, Blair, I said, nothing. Just looked at the screen, panicked. And there's nothing more terrifying than silence, like, dead air on television.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, everybody probably panicked right then.

JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, they made a little note in the book that said, “Don’t book her again.” [laughter] It was probably four years before I went on CNN again. But that also was the moment when I realized if I didn't turn my attention to this, it was going to take something really important from my future. And so it was the reason why I think I finally got into therapy.

BLAIR HODGES: And that made a profound difference for you. We also see you just trying to find meaning and connection, too. You got kind of wrapped up in these sort of personal improvement groups, people might be familiar with these like, I don't know, I won't say cult, some people would, but there are these groups you get involved with, and you have to pay money to do these levels of trainings.

And so you're also trying to find connections, it seemed like, beyond your family, to just have your feet on the ground and also feel empowered yourself. We see you searching a lot. And that's another vulnerable part of the book, is where you talk about sort of getting connected to some of these self-improvement groups.

JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, I mean, I think the most notable group like this is Landmark, people may be familiar with it. The group I did was sort of a radical offshoot of Landmark. And what's true about these groups is they can be really problematic in the way they build, but they also contain really great learning. And for me—and I hope I conveyed this in the book—it was a little bit of both.

In the end, I got so wrapped up in these that I needed somebody to step in and help me get out. But I also learned a lot about the idea that I could be responsible for my own happiness, and that I could make things happen for myself in my life. I took so much self-agency from this experience. And I'm grateful for that.

BLAIR HODGES: It was nice to see you talk about the importance of “found family,” the people you connected with. There's a group, an organization called COLAGE—Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere—that you were connected to in some ways, but also that group can be kind of challenging, too, because you didn't necessarily see your own experience there.

JESSI HEMPEL: That group is a great group that still exists and is a pretty wonderful resource for any child whose parents have come out. I stumbled upon it in my early twenties. It was wonderful to be part of a community of other people whose parents were also queer.

The thing I found confusing at that point was that in those years I wasn't proud of my parents. Their marriage was coming apart. They were a mess. They were not in good shape. And I would be part of this group where a lot of the children in this group came from families more like the family I have gone on to create, where both parents were queer at the origination of the children, and they'd sort of grown up with queer parents.

And it was hard to figure out how to be truthful about my own family in the smaller community, when also the public narrative I felt compelled to uphold was that gay families are great. We've got everything figured out, we raise good kids, because there's so much vitriol directed toward families with same-sex parents that I felt compelled to be defensive of them in public. Does that make sense?

BLAIR HODGES: It certainly does. Your parents end up separating and your father has relationships—he finally kind of embraces that side of himself and meets a man to share his life with. And your mom gets into therapy and begins helping others. And then you came around to having kids through your connection to your partner, Francis.

It didn't seem like something you were super excited to do throughout your life. But then through this partnership, you decided, "Oh, this could work for us." Do you think that's in part because you didn't have a lot of models to look at? Like, there weren't a lot of lesbian women obviously having kids. You didn't get to see families that look like that. So did you sort of just grow up thinking, "Well, I'm just not going to have that. It's just not really a thing”?

JESSI HEMPEL: Yes, and I think it wasn't so much because I was gay that I thought, "Oh, I don't want to have children." But because I didn't trust myself to be a good parent because I did not feel I had been parented well. And I worried I would parent a child like I had been parented. And so rather than even creating the possibility that that might happen, I just moved right to "I don't want kids. I'm a person who doesn't want kids."

And it wasn't until I had been in my relationship with my partner, Francis, for many years, that I came around, and even when she told me, "Hey, I'm ready to have kids," I still was like, "Oh, no, I guess we have to break up because I would be a horrible parent." And she had to really press me and say, "Well, are you saying you don't want kids?" And it was like, "No, I'm not saying I want them or don't want them. I'm saying I would be bad at it." And it caused a sort of crisis of my sense of self.

I ended up writing to the woman who had really helped me in high school, the assistant principal of my high school. She'd known me since my youth. And I wrote to her and just basically said, do you think I can do this? Is this a really bad idea? And she was the one who wrote to me and said, "You don't have to be your history. You can be a new version of yourself. You have learned what you need to learn in life, and you can be good at this."

Evan’s Story – 47:38

BLAIR HODGES: I was also really moved by your brother Evan’s story. There's a conversation you had with Evan at one point where he pointed out that your parents' secrets and your secrets were a little bit different. Evan was talking about how your parents' generation and your generation experience secrets differently. He said they are fundamentally different because your secrets aren't secret from yourselves.

Like with your parents, they kind of had to keep it—especially your father—had to keep that from himself. For you all, it was more about keeping that secret just from your family. You actually kind of knew and were more ready to embrace it than the family was. And perhaps that's a different thing to experience.

JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think what my brother was really trying to push me to think about was how this might impact our kids. Because, you know, when my brother and I had this conversation, we were both new parents. He had two little kids at home, and we had just had our second baby. And we were talking about what this might mean for our kids and what we hope for our kids. And he was saying, "Well, look, we've made it this far. But they're gonna have to do the work of figuring out what their secrets mean to them, and what their truths are. We can't do that work for them."

BLAIR HODGES: And for Evan, I also enjoyed reading about his experience being pregnant and having children as a trans man. It's not terribly common. There aren't a lot of people who have written about it or spoken about it publicly. There's still plenty of prejudice and misunderstanding about trans folks today. So it was nice to see in your book an example of a trans man who went through that and gave birth to kids and wanted to have this family and has this family.

So that's a story... I mean, your book obviously wasn't the Book of Evan, so you didn’t get into it a ton. But I loved learning the little bit I learned about him.

JESSI HEMPEL: I so appreciate that. And you know, the whole book owes itself to a story I wrote about my brother's pregnancy for Time Magazine, about his decision to get pregnant, what that experience was like for him carrying the baby, what the rest of the world thought as he did it. So if you're curious about it, also, if you Google my brother's name and the word "Time," I guarantee you it will be the first five things that pop up.

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 49:47

BLAIR HODGES: Perfect. I'll put a link to the show notes too, so people can check that out, and that'll fit well with some other episodes in the show as well.

All right. That's Jessi Hempel, and we're talking about the book, The Family Outing: A Memoir.

I wanted to conclude, Jessi, with regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is the part of the show where you get to talk about any of these things, or all three—something you regret or that you would change about the book now that it's out, what you would say was maybe the most challenging thing about writing it, or something that was revealed to you—a surprise you discovered along the way.

JESSI HEMPEL: I love this question. And you know, Blair, I feel very complete in this book. I feel like it was the best story I could tell. The surprise, and the challenge, was in publishing. I thought once I sold the book, you know, I had the good fortune of selling this book before I wrote it, and then I had to go write it. And I thought, well, the hard part will be writing it. And then it will go out into the world, and I'll get to talk about it and that will be great. And in fact, I loved every day of writing it. It was the biggest gift of my life. And then it was published, and I found the process of publication very disorienting. And it's only now, about a year after publication, that I feel like I have my footing again and have a relationship with the book again.

BLAIR HODGES: What do you think that vertigo came from? What happened?

JESSI HEMPEL: Well, you know, the publishing industry is made up of people who dearly love books. And that is the best thing about it. But it's pretty broken. And so you know, even for me, my book came out from HarperCollins. It had an editor who loved it and was consistently the editor the whole way through. And it had a marketing team who were just spot on. But they had so many books to represent, and my book got a little sliver of attention, and then the attention meter moved on. And when it didn't become a bestseller in the first seven days it was out, the resources to promote it immediately went down. And it was hard not to take that personally because it was my family’s story that was selling or not selling.

And I managed that proactively in advance by doing two things, Blair. One is I decided before I began that I never wanted to know the sales numbers, because writing this book for me was not about sales numbers. And so I don't even have the login to the portal that would tell me how well it sold. If you asked me, I could guess but like my guess and your guess would be about equivalent. I don't know. And that felt important.

But then the most important thing I told myself then, and that has proven out now, is getting to have conversations like this. Individual people who respond to the book. Because the book is helpful. That's the point. But it's taken me a year to pull back enough from the process to connect deeply to that.

BLAIR HODGES: That's hard. As you said, there's a lot of different pieces, not just the writing of it, but pitching it, selling it, going through the editing process, going through the promotional process. It's something we don't talk about often. I don't really dig into this part of it a lot in the interviews, but I think it's a really important aspect of what it's like to be vulnerable like you were in writing this book and navigating the emotions that it all brings.

JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you, Blair. This was such a joy of an interview. I don't take it for granted when people really spend time with work, and I just appreciate it. So thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. It was such an easy book to spend that time with and I really strongly recommend it. I hope everybody checks this book out: The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel, and checks out your podcast as well: Hello, Monday. I'm glad you took the time to join us, Jessi. This has been really fun.

JESSI HEMPEL: Take good care, Blair, I look forward to talking again sometime.

BLAIR HODGES: There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it? Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.