Our production played one Friday night only. Everyone in my family, extended and otherwise, came. We thespians were beside ourselves with excitement. We put everything we had into this thing and made a plan to drink real wine during the final betrayal scene that closes the play. We wanted to be crying real tears, and we were pretty sure we couldn’t unless we were tipsy.
Ed played Jesus, Chris was John the Baptist/Judas, and along with being in the ensemble, I played the hussy who sang “Turn Back, O Man.”
I was now a part of the magic that had so mesmerized me when I was a kid seeing my first stage play. I actually lost my balance I was so excited—I almost fell over several times the day of the show—and I smelled funny. I would have this smell many times in the future and would come to know it as the pungent odor of pure, unadulterated fear. But because it was mixed with pure, unadulterated joy, I survived.
We were all swept up in the electricity of putting on this show. We were more focused, disciplined, and committed than we had ever been in our young lives. We had all pitched in to build the set together, and showed up after school for rehearsals. When we finally performed, no one missed a line or a cue. We were a team, and we supported one another. Being a part of this group of fellow actors, feeling needed and valued and there for one another, was a high I would chase for the rest of my life.
We were playing pretend, but we were sharing the experience. I had always felt so different and thus “less than” my peers. I remember thinking that even if I, Jane Lynch, wasn’t worthy of friendship, then at least I knew the character I was playing was. In everyday life, I second-guessed myself relentlessly. But in a play, my difference was hidden and I was worthy. I was needed. Because it’s written—it says, I am.
And that was the heart of the matter: on stage, playing a role that was written in black and white—I could not be rejected. The only place I felt safe from that possibility was on stage, and I loved it. In fact, I still get joy from it, even today. In any movie, TV show, or play that I’m in, I’ll still have that fleeting thought: These people might not want to be my friend after this, but for the next 8.2 seconds, they’re all about me and I’m all about them.
Finally, I had found my place.
But unfortunately, right in the middle of this transcendent, fantastic experience, disaster struck. Jesus and John the Baptist, also known as Ed and Chris, started spending all of their time together, without me. I didn’t know what was happening—or didn’t want to. All I knew was that now I was the odd man out.
In response, I acted as cold and mean as I could. With this, I was starting a pattern that I would rely on for far too long in dealing with what felt like rejection. My hope in acting this way was that the person I felt had wronged me would ask what he’d done wrong. Chris didn’t, of course—I’m not sure he ever even noticed. My mom noticed, though, and she became worried that I had fallen in love with Chris—not a surprising conclusion, since I was acting exactly like a jilted lover. One afternoon, she finally gave voice to the fact that I was still too stubborn to admit.
“Honey,” she said, “I don’t want you to get your heart broken. But I think maybe Chris likes boys. Don’t you think that maybe he and Ed are boyfriends?”
“No, no, no!” I snapped. “Chris isn’t gay.”
It was getting harder to deny it to myself, though. I mean, even my mother knew. It was hard to miss. My wild and free-spirited Chris had always stuck out in our little suburb, but by the time we were seniors, he was taking it to a whole new level, with an afro and parachute pants. It was the late seventies, but still: to say he stood out is an understatement. But I still didn’t want to acknowledge that “gay” existed. Now it was right in front of me. Chris and Ed were having an affair. Chris even wrote “I will love Ed forever” in my yearbook.
In the pain of feeling dumped, I wrote Chris a scathing letter telling him that he looked like a freak and I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. I was a stereotypical closet case, rejecting him for his open homosexuality that got him a boyfriend and left me alone. I pushed him away for what I was afraid of in me. Maybe I was also afraid of guilt by association, that other people would think I was gay, too. Whatever it was, I felt that he needed to be punished for flaunting his gayness. Didn’t he understand you were supposed to keep it under wraps?
But also, deep down, my heart was broken. I felt rejected on a soul level. In some ways, Chris was my first true love. I trusted him like I trusted no one else in the world, and I showed him parts of myself that no one else saw. Now he was gone. All that had been good in those final months of my senior year of high school was suddenly buried under despair.
After graduating from high school, I reluctantly set off for Illinois State University, which at that time was where the B and C students in Illinois went to college. I had absolutely no academic curiosity or drive, and I didn’t particularly want to go to college, but that was what people did. With my impressively low ACT score ISU was the only school that admitted me, so I packed up my things and headed for Normal, Illinois (of all places).
I was assigned to a room in an all-girls dorm, and at any given moment, I had at least three very severe crushes: I was obsessed with the ladies of Hamilton Hall. Perhaps getting out of Dolton and away from my family allowed me to admit these feelings … sort of. I still put them in a mental file labeled “intense feelings of friendship,” managing to continue to ignore the pounding refrain of “You’re gay!” knocking on my psyche’s door.
Before I left Dolton, my mother had said, “Jane, don’t major in Theater. Major in something like Theater but where you can get a job, like Mass Communications.” In her mind, a general smear of media would satisfy my need to trod the boards. I desperately wanted to be an actress, but wanting also to please, I followed my mom’s advice.
Unfortunately—or, really, fortunately—when I tried to register for Mass Comm 101, all the classes were closed. So instead, I started taking acting courses on the sly. It was truly luck that the one state school with low enough standards to admit the likes of me had one of the best undergraduate theater departments in the country. Several original Steppenwolf Theater ensemble members had been recent graduates, including Laurie Metcalf and John Malkovich. The professors were treated as minor celebs themselves and managed to inspire both respect and fear in their students. Freshmen weren’t allowed to audition for shows during their first semester, but as soon as second semester started, I tried out for Lysistrata, a very cleverly updated musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ classic about the Peloponnesian War.
The play had been rewritten with a Southern theme: the Athenians were Gone With the Wind–style upper-crust Southerners, the Spartans a big old tribe of hillbillies. I managed to land a speaking role, which was a huge coup for a freshman. I’m sure there was nothing subtle about the way I played the country bumpkin Karmenia of Kornith, but I also added a minor twist to her character—one that, in retrospect, seems a bit odd, considering how deep in the closet I was. I made her an open lesbian.
There was a line where the lady warrior from the Isle of Lesbos said something like “You know, we women hang very close on Lesbos,” intimating that island’s Sapphic past (as if the name of the island didn’t make that clear enough). So I thought it would be funny to be super-obvious and ad-lib, “You told me weren’t gonna say nothin’…” When I first delivered the line, the director cracked up. Which I guess wasn’t surprising; there was a lot of whispering that she was a closeted lesbian herself.
As far as I can recall, there was only one open lesbian student in the theater program. She was burly, with a deep voice and hairy legs and armpits: the perfect stereotype of a butch lesbian. She also had a chip on her shoulder and a demeanor that said “Fuck you. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” Looking back now, I can appreciate how brave she was.
Our theater department was full of closeted homosexuals. We were too afraid to look at this aspect of ourselves, so of