Written by:
Kim Foster
Photographer:
Q100 Atlanta
If you’re a lesbian in San Francisco, you’ve got a lot of company. You’d probably blend in with the crowd in New York City, too. But how would it feel to be the best-known lesbian for miles around way down in Atlanta, Ga.?
You might be surprised.
“It takes no courage,” insists out lesbian, drive-time radio personality Melissa Carter. “Courage is when someone in a hostile environment decides to come out and to talk. Being in a friendly environment takes no strength whatsoever.”
Carter has become Atlanta’s favorite lesbian-next-door. The 32-year-old member of pop radio station Q100’s morning program “The Bert Show” is the first full-time on-air gay personality the city has ever known. Last year, she was named Grand Marshal of the local Gay Pride parade, and she was also recently named the best DJ in Atlanta by Creative Loafing, a local entertainment newspaper.
One might expect at least a little homophobic backlash from someone in the show’s target audience of 18- to 34-year-old females. Surely there has been a complaint from an overzealous Bible-thumper out there somewhere in the Deep South?
“Never,” Carter insists. “I have never once received hate mail. There are people who have e-mailed to say they don’t agree with me, but the most aggressive listeners I’ve come across — the ones who’ve started out acting hateful — have ended up having to ask my advice because they have a gay brother or a gay son, or a sister or an aunt. We end up having a conversation where we agree to disagree, but they learn that they have to accept the person for who they are.”
Carter describes herself as “very open” about her sexual preference and has been out to the public since 1997, when she participated in a radio dating segment while employed at Q100’s sister station, 99X.
Being out is not a platform, she says, but just one facet of her life that she mentions when the subject arises. “I find that I fight my battles indirectly,” she says. “I just live honestly, and sometimes that can influence people without having to shout, ‘Look at me, I’m gay!’”
Carter lives with her Siamese cat and golden retriever in an apartment near the radio station. It took her more than a year after moving in to fully unpack. She has a pretty good excuse, though. Her schedule includes rising at 3:40 a.m., writing news reports for herself and a colleague, being on the air until 10:30 a.m., making personal appearances and spending time with her girlfriend.
And then, last year, her schedule was turned upside down when she had to make room for dialysis — and, eventually, a kidney transplant.
When Carter went to a doctor for cold medicine in 1997, her shockingly high blood pressure led to the surprise diagnosis of chronic renal failure. Though she was largely asymptomatic for several years thereafter, “We knew that eventually my kidneys would fail,” she says. “I didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it at the time, but my doctors knew it.”
Within four years, Carter’s kidney function had dwindled to 20 percent, and the situation became grim. “Kidney disease is a death sentence,” she explains. “I would not be alive without dialysis.” Even so, dialysis was not a permanent solution. Carter needed a transplant.
Since kidney patients endure an average of five years of dialysis before a kidney from a random, deceased donor becomes available, the obvious solution was to find a living donor who could provide the necessary tissue match. Carter’s immediate family members were eliminated as potential donors, and she felt a bit reticent about asking for volunteers among her extended family. Since none resides in Atlanta, “Nobody saw how sick I was,” she says.
Rescue came in the form of a cousin, Pam Price, whom Carter had always admired for her adventuresome spirit and general “coolness.” Price had e-mailed Carter to say, “I want to test.” The cousin proved to be a match, and a kidney transplant was successfully performed in November 2002.
On her last day at work before the surgery, her cohorts joked about getting “the Melissa Carter lecture” from the boss. “You try to call in sick with the sniffles after this,” one said, “and you get, ‘Melissa Carter had kidney failure and she was here every day.’”
It’s been a long hard road from the diagnosis to the transplant table and the subsequent recovery, but, Carter insists, “Nothing -- not even kidney disease -- is as hard as 14.” That was the age at which Carter, who grew up in Columbia, Tenn., realized she was “different” from her friends.
“All you want to do is hang out with your friends,” she says. “And all they’re doing is talking about guys and wanting to impress guys.” Carter recognized her difference for what it was, but kept it to herself throughout high school, where she was twice elected president of her class. She was also the vice-president one year, as well as a member of the student council and a high school sorority. “And I lied,” she says. “I lied about who I was.”
By doing so, she enjoyed the social acceptance that means everything to a high school student, and yet, at age 32, she still seems ashamed to recall another student who “got busted sleeping with a girl, and didn’t lie about who she was. She said she was a lesbian and was ostracized and ridiculed and never allowed to be a part of any of those groups.
“Now who was the better person?” Carter demands. “Was I the better person because I was popular and elected to be the leader of my class? I lied to ’em, I lied to ’em all, and I did it to survive.”
Perhaps because of this experience, Carter feels empathy and acceptance for gays and lesbians on either side of the fence. “If there had been a gay DJ on the radio when I was that age, it would have meant so much to me,” she says.
This empathy is the reason she takes seriously her opportunity to assist and to be a role model to the young people who contact her. “Kids sneak me e-mails,” she says, “and they say ‘I wanted to tell you, but please don’t say my name on the radio or answer me at this e-mail address.’
“If you come out to your family, it’s like a huge weight is lifted, and you don’t care what anybody else thinks,” Carter says. Still, she advises young people to carefully consider the timing of their revelation. “You can’t take it back,” she says. “Your whole life will change from the moment you say those words. Even if people know, as long as you don’t say it yet, it’s not real yet. As the gay person, you have so much more to lose than the other person. That’s why it’s so difficult to come out, because there’s nothing you can do to change it if it goes bad.”
While she acknowledges that young people often go through an “activist phase” and want to underscore their identity with rainbow gear or the lesbian “uniform” of “short hair, combat boots and flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off,” she is also empathetic to those who can’t show anything at all of their lesbian identity.
Carter’s girlfriend is a prime example: “She honestly would be fired if [her employer] knew she was gay,” Carter says. “There’s no doubt about it. So she’s under that strain at work.” Though the two women don’t live together, they have been a couple for more than a year, and there are frequent references on the radio show to the girlfriend known only as “Not-Lisa.”
Carter related a story wherein Not-Lisa was riding in a car with a co-worker, listening to “The Bert Show.” The chatter among the DJs on that particular day was peppered with references to Not-Lisa, who sat in silence, revealing nothing. Carter mentions, too, that Not-Lisa felt unable to ride with her in the Grand Marshal’s convertible during Atlanta’s pride parade.
And yet, Carter says of her girlfriend, a pretty, strawberry-blonde: “I’m proud of her for being a lesbian because she’s so mainstream. She’s just like anybody else, she just happens to date women.”
Carter is a proponent of legalizing gay marriage, both for the financial protection of the parties involved and for reasons closer to home: she and her girlfriend had to say they were sisters so that Not-Lisa would be allowed to spend the night in Carter’s hospital room, for example.
She acknowledges that “as long as ‘gay’ is an insult, as long as you can sue for libel and slander [for being called gay], then we’re not where we need to be.” For this reason she routinely advises the young people who seek her counsel to “come out only for yourself, if you are ready.” Yet she says she is happy to be on the radio every day. She’s an understated reminder to straight Atlantans that lesbians are just regular folks.
More importantly, she’s a representative the lesbian community can feel proud of — especially the young, the fearful and the closeted. “I’m out for the people who can’t be,” she says.
“I’m out there for you. You take your time.”
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