Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (16 page)

I am still open to dating men, but I am more excited about dating women. There may be men out there with all of the emotional nuances that are quite comparable to the characteristics I like in a woman. If I find one, then maybe I’ll keep him. Until then, I’m open to what comes my way.

I opened up about my experiences to free myself and partly in defiance of the stereotypical myths. I am including women in my private life
not
because I was molested, am a man-hater, didn’t have my dad in my life, secretly wanted to be a man, was promiscuous, was confused, was raped, loved rainbows, didn’t receive enough hugs, am a feminist, had short hair, coached, preferred pants over skirts, liked sports, didn’t attend enough church, am running out of options, don’t have children, or because I am now over thirty-five. I welcome women now because my horizons have expanded. Women are beautiful. I listen to my spirit.

Memoirs of a Wanton Prude

Sheila Smith

L
aughter, feasting, talking until midnight. I invited guests from my Unitarian Universalist congregation, my writing group, my dog club, my neighborhood, and my family to my seventieth birthday bash. My new love threw the party for me. Nothing unusual except at age sixty-nine, I’d fallen in love with a woman.

Sick! Immoral! Perverted! That’s what the psychiatric and religious authorities proclaimed homosexuals to be back when I was a teenager in the McCarthy years. Gays and lesbians were persecuted along with Communists and considered just as subversive. Since homosexuality was outside the range of my experience, I absorbed the experts’ attitudes. I expected to live a conventional life of marriage and children. Having a career outside the home was the most radical thing I could envision for myself.

Mother taught me that women need men to survive. That seemed logical. In those days, no one questioned women being paid less than men for the same job. It was perfectly legal to ban unescorted women from bars and restaurants. Personally, I wanted to be able to live well and have access to public accommodations.

My journey away from the prevailing ’50s views began at a girls’ high school. I fell in love with biology and I adored my female biology teacher. I hung around the lab looking for opportunities to wash glassware. One day I was railing to her about Mother’s efforts to turn me into a girly-girl. According to Mother, acting stupid and helpless was the way to capture the necessary man.

“You can be a girl and a scientist,” my teacher said, taking my hand. I still remember the warmth and acceptance it conveyed.

Girls’ high school meant little association with boys. Unlike my classmates, I wasn’t boy-crazy. I didn’t even socialize with boys. The one exception was when Mother persuaded her friend’s son to escort me to the prom. What would I say to Hughie? Turned out he didn’t know what to say either. That one endless, awkward evening of sweaty-handed dancing composed my high school dating experience.

My emotional life centered on other girls. My best friend, Margaret, wrote in my senior yearbook, “You know how I feel.” I felt the same about her; we spent a lot of time together and had a deep emotional connection. However, I had no sexual feelings for Margaret and we had no physical contact.

After high school, I worked as a counselor at a girls’ camp. I remember two of the counselors spending all their time together, which seemed altogether natural and right to me. I never speculated on what they did inside their tent. Looking back, maybe they were more than friends.

At college, I found myself a man. I expressed my rebellious nature by choosing one with a beard. After we married, I continued my love affair with biology by working in a fruit fly lab.

Although I enjoyed our physical relationship, the marriage lacked emotional intimacy. I sought close emotional relationships with other women. When I was a young mother in the early ’60s, I had a best friend I saw nearly every day. I could confide anything to Sarah. I loved her so much. I wished I could give her sexual pleasure, but at that time I believed only men could do that for women. I was so naïve I didn’t realize that heterosexual women don’t think such thoughts. In retrospect, I realize I was in love with Sarah.

We talked about living together when we were old ladies, although I had no frame of reference for women forming lasting partnerships with each other. The only all-woman household I knew of was that of my unmarried aunt who shared a home with my grandmother. After Sarah followed her husband to another state, she stopped writing or phoning. I grieved for years.

In 1961, there were anti-sodomy laws on the books in every state. Sometime during that decade, my husband’s department hired its first woman professor. She wouldn’t accept the job unless her woman friend was offered an administrative position in the department. There was talk that May and Liz were lesbians. I protested. How could such gracious women be lesbians? Looking back, I think they must have been life partners, and very brave women as well.

Ten years and one son later, my husband and I separated because he fell in love with his graduate student. Perhaps he was seeking emotional intimacy; I know I was. I still missed Sarah. Was there another woman with whom I could be close? That summer, 1972, I was working in a greenhouse as a lab tech. I met a coworker twelve years younger than me. Caroline and I hit it off—we talked and talked. Our friendship grew intense. I cared for her as much as I had for Sarah.

One day, Caroline confessed she was gay. I was surprised, but I’d heard of gay people by then. I could accept whatever Caroline was, although I told her I was straight. Our relationship heated up as the sun poured through the glass roof of the greenhouse and sent the inside temperatures to steaming. We talked for hours, went for long car rides after work, and wrote poetry to one another. Soon she told me she was in love with me, and therefore wanted to go to bed with me. Aghast, I turned her down. I was a girl from the ’50s, a time when love didn’t automatically lead to sex. Caroline protested my edict, but we continued to see a lot of each other.

Late one evening, we were lying on big pillows on my living room floor, listening to a Joan Baez record. The beauty and yearning in Joan’s voice kindled a similar feeling between us. Caroline drew me to her and kissed me; I kissed her back. I wanted to go further but I wouldn’t. I was still married and I reasoned that I would be committing adultery, just like my husband. Although Caroline gave up trying to bed me and moved to San Francisco, I was a changed woman. My relationship with her, truncated though it was, had opened a door, but I wasn’t quite ready to go through it.

The following year, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, but my upbringing held sway. It was bad enough raising my son in a one-parent family, but saddling him with a lesbian mother? No way! I could lose custody of him if my ex found me out, even though Oregon’s anti-sodomy laws were off the books by then. I had to take the cure. I found a man to have sex with, responded, convinced myself I was “normal,” and married in haste—possibly to stave off those “bad” feelings about women.

Over the next fifteen years, I realized that in an overpopulated world, sex was meant to cement relationships, not to reproduce. So it didn’t matter which sex you did it with as long as it wasn’t with someone else’s partner. Also, in the ’90s, the customs, the psychologists, and the law no longer pushed same-sex love into the shadows. By the time I reached fifty, I admitted to myself I was a lesbian, at least in theory.

But I was living fairly happily with a nice man. In coming-out stories I’ve read, the narrator leaves the opposite-sex partner in order to live a more authentic life. But for me it was more true to who I was to keep commitments. I didn’t believe it was right to break up just because I wanted to seek greener pastures, any more than it would be if he left me to chase twenty-year-old bimbos. So I stayed with him. I lived the life vicariously by reading lesbian books, and I kept my feelings about women under wraps.

A few years later the marriage foundered because of too many disagreements over money. About then I met Dora. We were somewhat attracted to one another, but I sensed we wouldn’t be right together. Also, the timing was all wrong. I needed to learn to live alone so that I would enter a new relationship out of want, not need.

I used my hiatus between relationships to explore lesbian culture. I went to potluck dinners, book discussion groups, women’s music concerts, gatherings in restaurants. My new lesbian friends seemed like independent, kind, fun, loving, generally fine women. At first, going out with a bunch of lesbians was pretty scary.
What would the serving staff think? What if I saw someone I knew?

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all state laws against same-sex relations. I’d been having coffee and lunch dates with a variety of gay women, but I didn’t click with any of them except Bonnie. We talked for hours. She confided so many intimate things to me that I thought she wanted to progress to physical intimacy. When I confessed I had feelings for her, she told me she was a committed celibate. Rejected, I wailed “Greensleeves”: “Alas, my love, you do me wrong . . . ”

Over the next few years, I learned to savor solitude. I had interests, activities, a part-time job, and friends. Although the romantic aspect of my life was on the back burner, I was content, if not ecstatic. On Christmas Day of 2007, when my son and his family were scheduled to visit his father out of town, I spent the day happily alone. I’d made it! I expected to stay single for the rest of my days.

The following year at a gay fundraising event, I met a self-assured woman about my age with dark, knowing eyes. We introduced ourselves and chatted a few minutes about upcoming movies. I asked if she planned to see
Milk
when it came to town. She nodded. “I’m gay,” Diana said. “You, too?”

“Sort of,” I said. After all, I hadn’t really ever done enough to earn my lesbian stripes.

We made a date for coffee. At Starbucks, we bonded over our love for movies, and animals, and our twisted senses of humor. We’d grown up on opposite coasts, but we had similar values. Diana had even begun attending my Unitarian Universalist church about a month earlier. She seemed to be what I was searching for: smart, kind, generous, emotionally open, attractive. The kind of woman I could live with the rest of my life.

Yet I didn’t trust myself. After all, I’d made mistakes before. I needed another set of eyes and ears. I invited her out with a couple of trusted lesbian friends to see what they thought. “She’s a keeper,” my friends said. “You go, girl!”

“Am I being vetted?” Diana asked. Yep, she was sharp.

Still, before my mind became clouded by passion, I had to get to know her better. We had coffee, lunch, and dinner dates for a couple of months. Diana told me it wasn’t so much she wanted to go to bed with me; it was that she wanted to wake up with me. Was this woman handing me a line? Diana added, “Lesbians are about intimacy.” Intimacy was what I’d been seeking all my life. With a woman I could have emotional and physical intimacy in the same package. I let down my guard.

More worries arose. It was all very well and good being a theoretical lesbian, but going to bed with a real live woman who might have needs I couldn’t fulfill? Who might want me to do things I wasn’t comfortable with? I wouldn’t be able to refer to my books in the heat of passion. Finally I screwed up my courage and told Diana I’d like to be more than friends.

The next step, one that many gay people accomplish in their teens or twenties, was coming out. A sandwich board proclaiming, “I’m Gay!” wasn’t necessary, but I wanted to share this significant development with the important people in my life. My annual Christmas letter let me come out to my long-distance friends. In town, it went over better when I said I’d fallen in love with a particular person who happens to be a woman, rather than baldly stating that I’d become a lesbian.

Folks you expect to be tolerant aren’t; folks you expect to be disapproving aren’t. A friend with whom I’d been having dinner every Friday night for ten years made excuses to cancel our standing date. One of the women in my writing group attends a conservative church that disapproves of gay marriage. I took her out to lunch, told her of my new love. Not only was she not shocked; the first thing she asked was, “How did you meet Diana?”

The most significant coming-out hurdle was my son and his family because they had the power to keep my grandchildren away from me. Rather than tell them “Your mother is a lesbian!” I sent them a copy of my Advance Directive, which gives Diana the authority to pull the plug if I’m near death. They figured out that she’s the most important person in my life and are happy I have someone who cares for me.

In contrast to many people of faith, coming out to my Unitarian Universalist congregation was effortless. In every Sunday’s “Order of Service” these words are printed: “This Unitarian Universalist community welcomes and celebrates the presence and participation of transgender, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, and bisexual people.” Diana and I always sat with each other, acted like a couple, and soon people recognized us as such. It’s a blessing to be open.

Recently, we attended a gay choir concert at our church. Diana sat beside me, our thighs touching. I opened my eyes to see friends from town in front of me. I turned around to glimpse friends from the church community behind me. I sent out a prayer of gratitude for finding love in the winter of my life.

I Knew What I Was Giving Up

Sara C. Rauch

I
left my boyfriend of three and a half years for a woman whose name I didn’t know.

All I knew was that when I saw her, when she took my order for coffee and handed me back my change, our exchanges were more intense, more vivid, more real than the life I came home to every day.

And it was a good life: a beautiful apartment, part-time work I enjoyed, an attractive, intelligent, hard-working boyfriend my family loved. Everyone assumed we would get married, buy a house, have kids—and I did not disabuse them of this notion. If anything, I encouraged it. To everyone concerned, I was happy and I was lucky. Those two words were like a noose around my neck, because I was neither, and I was suffocating.

I knew I wanted to be with women; I’d known for years, had even indulged in college when I was far enough from home to keep it secret. But to my family, and to my new friends, and my coworkers, and every stranger on the streets of Northampton (ironic, if not self-torture, that I would choose a lesbian mecca to call home), I was straight. No one doubted my sexuality, no one questioned my choice of boyfriends, no women ever hit on me. I was very good at keeping my longings secret.

Until she appeared.

One June morning, on our way into town for the farmers’ market, there she was, talking to customers in the coffee shop where she worked, and when I saw her—short brown curling hair, tattooed arms and legs, toothy smile, and these unthinkably large eyes that stared right down into me—I knew I was in trouble. My heart started pounding so hard I could barely say I wanted a small coffee, to go. My boyfriend, clueless as ever, didn’t even notice the strain in my voice, didn’t notice how quickly I walked away from the counter, grabbed my coffee, and left. I was embarrassed and exposed. Not to anyone else, but to myself. The part of me that I wanted so desperately to be hidden had just emerged. It felt like an unruly monster, something I had to avoid at all costs, lest I disturb my life’s delicate balance.

But it was too late. I couldn’t keep myself away from the coffee shop, hoping she would be there behind the counter, for the little electric shock that I got when she smiled at me, or just the pleasure of seeing her behind the counter making drinks. I started dreaming about her, and would wake up happy, only to realize I was still in my real life—still finding my boyfriend in his study, still sitting down at my own desk to write (more and more often about her, pieces I could not show anyone, that I kept in a separate folder, pieces I loved as truth, but was also completely afraid of), still showering and going to work, holding my breath, wishing I could go back to sleep. My (already tiny) sex drive collapsed, and terrible fights ensued, where I told my boyfriend to go find someone else to sleep with—what I wanted for myself—and he told me he never would. I struggled and pushed and he wouldn’t let me go. I began hating him for trying to make our relationship work, thinking if only he would end it, he would be to blame. I wanted to not feel so guilty, so indecent, so wrong.

I felt like I couldn’t say a word, not even a peep to my best friend, about what was happening. When I finally let it slip in a poem I gave to a friend to workshop, she said, “You need to leave him.” But I couldn’t, or thought I couldn’t, because there was a lease, and shared furniture, and cats I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t have the money to pay first, last, and security on another apartment, I couldn’t tell my family I was unhappy and needed their help. I was scared they wouldn’t help me if they knew what was truly going on.

I had spent three and a half years in a relationship that sucked up all my energy and gave me nothing in return—isolated and lonely and faking a happiness that no one could see through. Honestly, I had spent my whole life there, so afraid of how I felt that I couldn’t even admit it to myself. I was so envious of the women I saw every day who were living their lives the way they wanted to. I was fascinated by women who could never “pass,” the way I did, as straight. After I left my boyfriend, it took me months and months to forgive myself. Forgive myself for suffocation by my own hand, forgive myself for holding myself hostage with an idea of perfection (straightness) that was my own creation. Looking back, I still have a hard time understanding why I was so driven to make myself fit into the lifestyle that I thought was expected of me. Despite my youth, my progressive education, my liberal upbringing, I still wanted to turn away from the truth: I liked women.

When I confessed to my mother that I was unhappy, that my relationship was failing, that I wanted to move out, but needed to borrow money, she said, “Of course. How much do you need?” An offer of help. No questions asked. A life raft in the vast ocean of my difficult decision. She came to look at new apartments with me, took me to lunch, asked no questions.

And so I moved out. It wasn’t the first apartment where I’d lived alone, but this one was a new start. It was my first ever expression of independence. A third-floor attic apartment with steep, pointed ceilings and skylights and carpeted stairs.

I scrubbed every inch of it, vacuumed, and with the help of my brother, brought the furniture up the twisting stairs. I was in a great mood the day I moved; I had a set of keys in my pocket; I could breathe for the first time in years. I brought both cats over, and we were immediately at home.

I left my false life behind me, and confessed to my friends and coworkers and family why I was leaving. One of my friends said, “It’s about time.” My coworkers asked for updates: Had the girl in the coffee shop smiled at me? Spoken to me? Would I introduce myself? My family said they only wanted me to be happy.

My best friend put it bluntly, “I knew you weren’t happy. I haven’t seen you smile in years.”

Of course, after the commotion of moving settled, and the last box was broken down, I was left with myself and my strange longings. No more distractions or shackles. I wasn’t really sure what to do besides introduce myself, via coffee cup with a note on it, to the woman whose very presence behind the counter of a coffee shop had provided the impetus for me to find happiness. As it turned out, she was already taken, but she was kind to me and acted flattered by my awkward attention, and always stood ready with a smile and wink when I went in for coffee. Without even knowing it, she saved me from something akin to death—not physical, but mental, emotional, and spiritual, all before she’d ever introduced herself.

It took time, and some stumbling, to figure out what I was doing. I kept looking around at all the women I saw, and I soon began understanding their fear, their insecurity, their lives, just as complex and difficult as my own. I tiptoed slowly into a community of women who like women, making little connections here and there, trying to gauge the learning curve, which was steep. It was strange to me, and a lot less safe than the straight world of lies I knew how to navigate so well.

I had spent my whole life being straight—the stories, games, books, movies, role models: all straight. That is not to say that loving someone, truly loving someone, differs from one gender to another. Love remains essentially the same. But the social world of things, the terminology, the flirtations, the kissing, the who-calls-who, that was all different. Being the kind of woman who had always been pursued by men, I wasn’t prepared for taking on the role of pursuer. I still went out with my straight friends, and I still got hit on by men (it was life-changing, learning to say when pushed, “No, thank you, I’m gay”), but women didn’t come near me. It was frustrating, and lonely. There were a few times when I called up a friend and said, “You know, I’m not sure I’m cut out for being a lesbian. Maybe I’ll go back to dating men.” And quickly that friend would remind me of all I had told her, how miserable I had been, how I hated the mask I’d been wearing my whole life, how I needed to be brave, and how brave I’d been so far.

A friend suggested I look at the personal ads on craigslist. She found one that read “Seeking low-maintenance, high femme,” and said it was perfect for me.

I said, “But I’m not a high femme.”

She said, “Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not girly at all.”

“Sara, you paint your nails, you wear dresses and lacy underwear, you put on eye makeup, and you like pink. If that’s not femme, I don’t know what is.”

“But I fix my own toilet when it breaks, and I drive a standard, and I know the difference between a Phillips and a flathead screw driver. I keep my nails short!”

“Yes, that’s the low-maintenance part.”

We both laughed. She was right, and so was I. But that word—femme—doesn’t come close to defining me. It is a label that perhaps suits my appearance (on the days I choose to wear a miniskirt, or paint my nails hot pink), but doesn’t suit my attitude. “Butch” and “femme” are desperately inadequate terms, and yet they are so ingrained in the common culture that I don’t think they’ll ever disappear. And I am no more drawn to one type of woman over another; if anything it is women who resist any kind of categorization that are most appealing to me. There is beauty all along the spectrum, and now that I am free enough to admit it, I see that beauty everywhere.

Since others see me as femme, despite my resistance to the word, I am given some reprieve in a world that still, despite all the progress made, likes women to look a certain way. Standing alone at a busy intersection, I can almost guarantee no one would identify me as gay. And I can’t change that, so maybe what bothers me most is that I still “pass.” It both amuses and annoys me when I tell someone I’ve just met that I’m gay, or mention my partner. The look on their face gives them away. I was seeing a specialist recently, and after a short exam, he sat down to write out a prescription, saying, “So, tell me about yourself—Are you married? Single?” When I replied, “Well, neither, but my partner and I just bought a house,” he actually stopped writing, looked up at me, and said, “You’re gay?” I nodded my head, not knowing whether I should be angry or if I should laugh at him. “Well, congratulations on your new house,” he said, trying to cover his embarrassment.

I met my partner at a dinner party one early November evening—cold enough to wear boots and sweaters, the beginning of another New England winter. She was sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in, and when she looked at me and smiled, I was so embarrassed that I tried to hide behind the friend I had come in with. We made introductions, and I spent the whole night, and much of a month after, wondering if she was flirting with me. She had touched my arm, did that mean something? She had followed me into the room where I was putting on my jacket to leave; certainly that meant she liked me. Or at least wanted to talk to me. Over and over, these questions, asking my friends, what did they think? I wanted to see her again, but I didn’t know how. I tried wishful thinking; I tried hinting to the host of the dinner party; I hoped I would run into her on the street. Nothing. So, I tracked her down on MySpace. A friend of a friend of a friend. I felt silly, I felt like a stalker, but I woke up one morning and realized that if I didn’t see her again, if I didn’t express some interest, I would regret it. As I pressed the friend request button I thought, if she’s not interested, at least I tried.