Coming out to a ZX81

[steepholm]

This image has been floating around Facebook recently: "Aren't you thankful that your childhood happened before technology took over?"

I can see what they're getting at, of course. This LJ has contained many a fond reminiscence about the 1970s, and I don't suppose I'd have liked being for ever available at the end of a mobile phone then any more than I would now. But for LGBT kids and other people who might find themselves isolated (as I was) in small-town and rural communities, with little information available and no visible* peer support, the internet in particular has been transformational. Don't expect me to yearn for the days when the only way people like me could find out about ourselves was by reading the two or three vaguely relevant books in the local library, all of which assured us that we were mentally ill, evil or both. (That, admittedly, wasn't just a technology problem.)

In fact, it occurred to me the other day that although I first came out to another human being only ten years or so ago, I came out to a machine a quarter of a century earlier. That was when I bought my ZX81, with its colossal memory (for the time) of 1kb. (I would later go to London especially to buy an expansion pack that took that up to a mind-blowing 16kb.) While I was teaching myself BASIC, I wrote programs that allowed this computational behemoth and me to have affirmational conversations on these lines:

Me: Am I a girl?
ZX81: Yes, you are a girl.
Me: Really?
ZX81: There's no doubt about it.

It was nothing sophisticated, as you can see, and of course I'd written the code, so in a sense it was no more than talking to myself; but it was very comforting to see those words outside my own head, appearing in someone/thing else's "voice". I was careful to delete the programs afterwards, of course.

Yes, I know it's sad (in more than one sense), but in 1981 that was as good as it got. I'm glad to say that things have advanced considerably since then on quite a few fronts.

* I stress "visible", because it turns out that a large percentage of the kids in my year were in fact gay, and desperately hiding it. Witch Week was my classroom!

Comments

[lilliburlero]

I'm glad that some of the more vicious personalities in my school didn't have social media to do their bullying on, and to an extent that my adolescent affectations are not preserved for eternity on a server. But I'd much rather have had the sources of information and potential community. In fact, I'd have settled for not being told, by every source of information that I did access from the age of 14 to 20-odd, that people like me occurred in such statistically insignificant numbers that we might as well not exist. Being the sort of child who believes books, I believed them. (I completely loathe those rose-tinted 'in my day we played from dawn to dusk in the streets/fields' memes, but I'll spare you my rant about that.)

[steepholm]

Being the sort of child who believes books, I believed them.

Me too. :(

[hunningham]

My childhood happened before technology took over, but it didn't look like that.

[colorwheel]

i've been thinking about this, and the more i think about it, the surer i feel that it was only the situation that was sad, not your action. your action was self-care, of the type that was possible at the time. you were validating yourself, and i am so glad and impressed you did that.

and i am so sorry that there wasn't a better atmosphere around you to come out to.

[steepholm]

Thank you so much. If I were writing about anyone else I suspect I'd say the same, but there's a residual bit of self-devaluing grit in my mind's eye that leads me to put myself down - a little. I'm working on it!

[colorwheel]

i'm working on that exact thing -- judging myself for things i'd never dream of judging a friend for. that's a hard one to get over and a good one to ask each other for help with, imo.

using my ida icon again because look at her pose.

*hug*