All the Closets (with Jessi Hempel)

When Jessi Hempel came out of the closet she had no idea her whole church-going family had been hiding in there with her. And things got complicated fast when the closet door kept swinging open. 

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.

REFERENCES

Jessi Hempel, "My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family," TIME (Sept. 12, 2016).

 

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. M