Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (20 page)

I would like to think that I’ve come to a realization about myself: that I’ve lived in fear and shame for too long and that my relationship with K. is the catalyst for me to live a more honest, authentic life. I would like to think that I can offer her “forever,” but one of the lessons that I’m taking away from this situation is that I’m not sure that I can offer that to anyone. It’s far more important for me to focus on the day-to-day relationship than to make a long-range plan for the future. Life happens.

My husband and I have been forced to educate ourselves about different marital options, and come to a compromise, even if it’s temporary. It’s not financially feasible for either of us to dissolve our marriage at this time. We can’t sell our home due to the current economic conditions, so we have made the difficult decision to leave it and live under different roofs. We are slowly untangling ourselves from this marriage, one step at a time. It’s all about keeping the peace right now.

I know that relatively soon, my marriage will end. It will end for a number of reasons. I will be forced to start over, create a new identity for myself, and undergo a number of changes and adjustments within my relationships as I come out to more and more people in my circle. Leaving a marriage to a man for a woman is not “just a phase.” It’s a tremendously difficult situation. But, it happens to be necessary to be true to this woman’s soul.

Credit in the Un-Straight World

Trish Bendix

I
’ve always felt like I was somewhat of a fraud in the gay community. It took me a while to feel as if I were actually a part of it, like I had to do something to earn my lesbian credentials other than date a woman, or simply have feelings for one.

I didn’t come out until I was twenty, and that’s because I really had no idea I was queer until then. When I look back on it now, I can see some signs. There had been times I’d thought,
I could probably be with a girl—no problem,
as if it were a dare or something I’d be willing to do at gunpoint.

Growing up, I don’t recall having any crushes on girls—and I played sports. (I guess I quit softball too soon.) I attended schools in two different cities in Michigan throughout my adolescence. One was a diverse college town where I lived until I was fifteen, and the other was a small town that had a history with the KKK. I wasn’t finding my soul mate in either one. In both places, I was adamant that I’d be getting out of the state when it came time for college. That’s where I’d meet the one who was destined to be my match, someone who had interests in film and music, rather than pigskins and pickup trucks.

I’d always assumed this “one” would be a guy, although any semblance of a relationship I had in high school ended in heartache, and my last real boyfriend now dances on cruise ships. Looks like we were a match made in Gay Heaven. It’s no wonder we didn’t like making out.

Thinking of myself, my education, and my career made me feel empowered, like my peers just didn’t have it together like I did. They’d be on the fast track to marriage, babies, and boredom, while I was in Chicago drinking coffee and having intelligent conversations, working on novels, networking, and feeling well-connected. Eventually this dream would involve a partner, and someday, I’d meet him when the time was right.

But by age nineteen, I hadn’t met him. I had met several “dudes,” who were fun to kiss while drunk at parties, but I usually followed that up with frenching my friends. And when my friends schemed about how to go home with said dudes, I was slipping out the door to catch the train home. My subconscious had no plans to bed a man. My conscious mind said
I’m just not that kind of girl
.

The thing is, I’m totally
that kind of girl.
I’m just that kind of girl for a girl.

The summer before my junior year, I applied for a position at my college newspaper. The first interview went well, so I was called in for a second. I walked into the office and took a chair by the front door, waiting for my turn to talk to the two editors of the paper. Then a girl came walking by me, and I recognized her face from her column in the paper. She had what I thought was a totally gay face, or maybe it was just her dykey haircut. Nonetheless, she was a lesbian, and I was now seeing her in the flesh.

“Hey, how’s it going?” she addressed me nervously, walking out the door toward the bathroom. I barely had time to say, “Good,” and process that her presence had made me feel a little excited. In one split second, the sight of this person, this girl, had made me a little shy. I could have been blushing.

She ended up being the editor I’d be working under. Needless to say, I got the job.

Working together made it all the more apparent that I had feelings for this person, this girl. She was smart and a great writer, she liked the same kind of music I did, and also liked consuming lots of caffeine. She had a girlfriend whom she lived with, but ended up breaking it off because she had the same kind of feelings for me that I had for her. She was even willing to put up with going out with “a straight girl.”

She was my first everything, and I had to grapple with the feelings that I assumed I should have felt much sooner in life.
How can I be gay?
I thought, instantly feeling bad that I questioned it. Some of my best friends were gay, but they’d known it forever. My friend Kevin has a videotape of himself at age four answering that his favorite Christmas gift was his sister’s curling iron. Where was my gay history?

Now knowing that I’m a femme, through and through, I can’t take my cues from fashions and bad haircuts. I’ve always preferred dresses, skirts, makeup, and dyeing my hair to jeans and T’s. I also quite enjoyed “girly” things like fashion and boy bands and anything else that safely falls under the category of “Things Straight Girls Are Prone to Like.”

Maybe, I thought, I’m bisexual. That would make sense, and make me less fraudulent. I could count some girls that I possibly had crushes on but never really acknowledged the feelings for: the hot singer of a band I skipped my high school prom to see; the girl with a lip ring whom I desperately wanted to befriend in a music class my freshman year; the one I wanted to get high and play Truth or Dare with all the time in hopes we’d get dared to make out.

Okay, getting a little gayer.

I tried to put things in perspective, which was possibly made easier by the fact that I was taking two women’s studies courses at the time, and sexuality was part of our weekly discourse. It’s also possible I was even more confused. But my feelings didn’t lie—I liked a girl. I kissed her. I didn’t die. I felt breasts, and I was into it. It felt awesome, in fact.

While in high school, I had taken my gay best bud to prom with me. I had argued passionately in speech class that gay marriage should be legal.
But I’m a Cheerleader
was one of my favorite films. And I did sometimes grab my friends’ asses, just for fun.

The hardest part about coming out in college is that it made me feel a bit cliché. It’s considerably easy for friends and family to think it’s a phase or some sort of liberal college social science experiment. But I would not have frivolously chosen something like that for myself if I knew it’d cause my mom to ask, “But what am I supposed to say when people ask me if you have a boyfriend?”

Maybe if I had known I was a lesbian at age twelve I could have been prepared for this answer a little better. But I think I did pretty well in saying, “I’m sorry, Mom. I forgot this was all about you.”

Also, I never had a boyfriend to speak of, really, so it shouldn’t be much of a change for her to say, “No.” She could feel free to answer, “She has a girlfriend,” but at the time, saying that seemed like it might push her over the edge. Eventually, she’d come to introduce my girlfriend as “my other half,” and that was good enough for me. Baby steps.

In my first real relationship, I was with a woman for four and a half years. We did everything I’d hoped to do with a partner, and even though it didn’t work out, it wasn’t because she was a she. And in being with her, I realized that being bisexual was sort of out of the question. My attraction to men was (and is) non-existent. Somehow my sexuality was just not tapped into until I met the first person that I was really and truly attracted to, mentally and physically. And since then, that has happened several other times. (All female. It’s true—I’m official.)

One of the things I came to accept was that I came out at the perfect time for me. I had crushes on boys because they were closer to my type than the femme girls I palled around with. My type is an andro-butchy one, and I did not go to school with any of those kind of girls, unfortunately. Had that happened, this would likely be a completely different story.

Maybe coming out at twelve or thirteen would have given me a different coming-of-age story, but it could have also made my experience much harder. I would have embraced it, sure, but it’s easier said than done. I have many friends whose realizations came along with gay bashings, being called “dyke” in the hall at their all-girls’ school, or sleeping with a lot of guys because they thought they’d need to “get used to it.”

Luckily, that never occurred to me as a good idea. To quote from
But I’m a Cheerleader,
“It’s easy to be a prude when you’re a homosexual.”

I have finally found myself, and my coming-out experience has been instrumental in my authenticity and my happiness. After coming out, I wanted to write about life as a lesbian, or about lesbians doing cool things that are otherwise invisible to the straight world. I’ve actually become a “professional lesbian” of sorts, as my day job is to make sure every facet of queer femaledom is written about and analyzed by as many people as possible.

I actually feel like I’m a better person as a lesbian. I think the only time I wasn’t being myself was when I was clueless about my sexuality. I have never once been closeted in any situation since coming out. In fact, I think I’m probably considerably annoying to some people because I talk about my girlfriend all the time. I like to give lectures on lesbian sexuality to people who ask, “How do you guys do it?” or “Who is the boy in the relationship?” I’m really proud to be gay, and never having the gay shame that some people I know grew up with, I am trying not to feel like I missed out on an imperative experience. Everyone’s experience is different, which is something I learned after reading an eighty-year-old woman’s coming-out story in
Newsweek
a few years back.

My mom, despite her momentary freak-out, is supportive. My dad has always said that whatever makes me happy, makes him happy. My sister and I love to joke about our family of diversity, as I’m the lesbian and she’s in an interracial marriage and mother to a mixed-race baby. Our parents are happy with us, the way we are, and that’s something I couldn’t feel better about.

I still like to hear other lesbians’ coming-out stories. I want to know when they knew, who their first crush was, when their first kiss was, and I love to see their scowls and eye rolls when they describe a failed attempt at a sexual experience with a man. It might be the only thing I have going for myself in the official lesbian department: I’m a gold star. Now where’s my card?

First Date with Ann

Meredith Maran

April 27, 1984

I’m barely awake when the clenched fist in my abdomen sends me an unmistakable two-word message: bladder infection. “Fuck!” I swear aloud, naming at once my reaction, the cause of my condition, and the activity I’m afraid this condition will preclude.

I planned to become a lesbian today, and while I’m pretty sure lesbians don’t call what they—we—do “fucking,” it’s what I’ve always called sex, and will, until someone teaches me something better. Which is what I was hoping a semi-stranger named Ann would do, about five hours from now.

Sitting on the toilet dribbling pee and wincing at the all-too-familiar searing sensation that follows, I curse my ill-fated decision to give sex with Richard one last try. Was it two nights ago, or three? I can’t remember . . . as usual. Which is one good reason that my ten-year, two-child, one-mortgage, two-car, one-checkbook marriage is ending. I’m counting on Ann to give me another one (good reason, not marriage—that fantasy will come later).

“Not bloody likely,” I fret, noting the bright drops of blood in the toilet. Is that a smidgen of relief I feel at the thought that a medical restriction might come between me and my long-anticipated new sexual identity? I grab the bottle of sulfa pills out of the medicine cabinet, promising myself, as I’ve done each morning since my husband left our home six weeks ago, to scrub out the razor hairs and dried-on shaving cream blobs once and for all.

Before I can set off for my rendezvous with destiny, I’ve got to get the kids to nursery school. Tying their sneakers is so painful I’m wondering how I can possibly pull off a tryst. I explain to their teacher that Peter and Jesse’s dad will be picking them up tonight, limp stiff-legged out to my car, and struggle to stand up straight—so to speak—long enough to pump a tank full of gas.

So far, I admit to myself as I head north out of San Jose, the big day isn’t going terribly well.

By the time the San Francisco skyline comes into view, the drugs have kicked in. So has the high anxiety. Ending a marriage is one thing. People do that every day. Becoming a lesbian is another. People only do that every day on
Donahue
.

I barely know this woman. We spent three days together, along with twenty thousand other people at a publishing convention in Dallas, eleven months and one marital separation ago. I thought she was a boy until I saw her name on the book she was at the convention to promote:
One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth
. She thought I was a married straight woman until she caught the lusty look in my eye. Until she read the poem I sent her as soon as she got home to Boston and I got home to San Jose—ambiguous in intention, but undeniably horny in inspiration. We exchanged equally ambiguous letters and phone calls throughout the next year. When Ann called to say she was coming to visit her brother in California, we began a series of awkward negotiations to determine the nature of our impending liaison.

“I’ll stay with my friends in San Francisco. You and I could meet for lunch . . . if you have time,” she offered.

“You could stay with Richard and me; we could all hang out together,” I countered.

“I could just come meet the kids,” Ann responded, beating a hasty retreat around the bush.

And then, six weeks before Ann’s scheduled arrival, four years’ worth of marriage counseling came to an end and Richard moved out. Days after his departure I called my one lesbian friend, a therapist, and asked her where someone would go if someone wanted to have an affair with someone of the same gender who was coming for a visit from an unnamed East Coast city. And someone’s house wasn’t a possibility because it was where someone’s husband would stay with someone’s children while someone went off for the weekend to have sex with someone she’d never had sex with before (who happened to be a woman).

“It’s about time,” applauded my adviser, who’d had not-entirely-covert designs on me herself. “Go to a gay resort on the Russian River. Try Fife’s or The Woods. And tell someone I hope everything . . . everyone comes out great.” She was still chuckling as I hung up the phone.

I called Fife’s. “I’d like to reserve a room for two . . . ” So far, so good. I was pretty sure the guy on the other end couldn’t tell I wasn’t really gay. Yet. “ . . . with twin beds.”

Long silence. “Twin beds?” he repeated, incredulously. Clearly, this wasn’t a request he got often. “All we’ve got are queens,” he’d answered imperiously, sounding very much like one, even to my uninitiated ears.

“Well, it’s for me and a friend,” I stammered, “and we don’t really want to sleep in one bed . . . ”

“Hold a sec,” my tormentor snapped. I heard his muffled voice, then another man’s. Then laughter.

“Turns out we have a couple of twins we can roll into a cabin,” he said. I hoped fleetingly that he meant twin beds, and that I wouldn’t be charged extra for a menage-a-twins. This was going to be enough of a challenge with just Ann and me in the room.

“I’ll take it. Thanks,” I said, and promptly broke into a full body sweat.

But all that was weeks ago. Before I’d prepared my still-husband, my best friend, my uncomprehending two- and three-year-old sons, and my journal for my upcoming journey to The Other Side. And before I’d managed to get this goddamn bladder infection.

And now, bladder infection and last-minute terrors notwithstanding, I’m on my way. Slowly. I’m having to stop every few minutes to pee, and the truth is, heterosexual marriage—especially the kind I had, in which sexual encounters were easily prevented by bladder infections, nonspecific apathy, or imperceptible shifts in the atmospheric pressure—is looking pretty appealing. I’m not sure what’s less appealing right now: the thought of letting the seam of my jeans, let alone a new lover, touch my lower chakra—or the thought of embarking on yet another new phase of my thirty-four-year-old life.

I pull up in front of the house where I’m to meet Ann, and practice my Lamaze breathing. It doesn’t do a bit more for me now than it did when I was screaming for mercy in labor. I knock on the door, and the woman I’ve imagined myself in bed with for the past eleven months answers it.

She’s very small. She’s smiling. I think of a photo of herself she’d sent me, ten years old, with braids down to her waist. I wish she still had those braids. I wish I had those braids. We hug, stiffly, unembracingly. I realize she is exactly the same size as I am. My bladder aches, my heart pounds, my brain’s taken the last train out of town. “Hi,” we both say. “So you were really there all that time,” I say. She nods and smiles again. When she’s not touching me, she seems so small.

Ann slings her knapsack over her shoulder and we get in the car. “I’ve never been to the Russian River,” she says. Having spent seventeen years as a heterosexual woman grappling with the ethics and feasibility of faking orgasms, I am faced—and so early in my career as a lesbian—with deciding whether or not to fake previous homosexual experience. “Me neither,” I say.

Fortunately, Ann initiates small talk as we head across San Francisco. I, meanwhile, have been overcome by acute respiratory distress. My lungs seem to have collapsed, and I’m desperately trying to suck some air without making my condition—this new condition—apparent to my unsuspecting suitor . . . suitress?

The next words I speak are to an Alhambra Water delivery truck driver, twenty minutes later, when I finally get enough oxygen to my brain to realize that somehow the car I’m driving is heading south—back to San Jose, and away from the Russian River.

“How do I get to the Golden Gate Bridge?” I manage to squeak out. The truck driver glances at my license plates; he seems surprised to see that the car isn’t a rental. “Do you have a map?” he asks. I glance at Ann to see if the weekend is over yet. She seems quite unconcerned. I realize then that she and I are very much unalike. By this time, I would’ve asked, snidely, just how long she’d lived in the Bay Area (twenty years, in my case). I would’ve asked, ever-so-patiently, if she wanted me to drive. I would’ve told her to let me off at the nearest lesbian bar so I could find myself some competent, real lesbian worth spending a weekend with.

“I’m getting to see more of the city than I’d thought I would,” Ann says, with no detectable sarcasm. I apologize, she shakes her head and smiles, and we fall silent. Once we’ve left the city and are zooming up the right freeway in the right direction, I steal a surreptitious peek at her chest. Pay dirt! Her pale blue button-down shirt is gapped between the middle two buttons, providing me a clear view of her bra-less, petite, but undeniably female breasts. I allow myself a moment of disappointment—they’re not quite the voluptuous kind I’d dreamed of—before acknowledging that, like her body, her breasts are about the same size as mine.

We arrive at Fife’s. I park the car. Together, silently, we approach the registration desk. It is not just my heart and bladder that are pounding now. My fingernails are pounding. My eyelashes are pounding. I say my name to the man behind the desk.

“Ah, yes!” he exclaims loudly enough for all the real gay people in the fifty-acre resort to hear. “The ladies with the twin beds!”

Without looking at Ann, I snatch the keys from his hand and slink back to the car.

“I just thought . . . ” I mutter in Ann’s direction as we approach Cabin 7. “It’s okay, Meredith,” she says, her smile a bit stretched now. “Whatever you want to do is fine.”

What I want to do, I realize as we let ourselves into Cabin 7, is lie down. With Ann. I don’t care about the food I’ve left to spoil in the car or what my husband will think or all the years I’ve spent longing for sex with a woman, or even the resounding pain in my bladder. I don’t know what I want to do, once we’re lying down together. I just want to do it. Just like I wanted to with John Melnikoff in fourth grade. Just like I wanted to with Paul when I first saw him hawking his underground newspapers outside our high school. Just like I wanted to, at one time, with my clearly soon-to-be-ex-husband.

The most unexpected thing about this feeling is that it’s so utterly familiar. I always thought lust would feel different when it wasn’t heterosexual.

I really do want to have sex with this person,
I realize to my own great surprise.
I really do want to have sex with this woman.

But not just yet. Before I can cross the line that I have approached and avoided for thirty years or so, I must avoid it a while longer. I say I need a nap. Ann says she’ll go for a walk. I declare that I’m not really tired. I jump up and suggest a walk together. Ann and I walk along the narrow sandy path to the river, and there, on the rocky river bank, I am overwhelmed again by the magnetic pull of gravity, or lust. So I do. Lie down. On my back, with my too-small breasts and my fantasies pointed at the sky. Because I simply cannot stand up when I am this close to Ann, this close to my dream.

She stands with her left foot brushing my right thigh, skipping flat rocks across the slow-moving, muddy river. She places three sun-warmed stones carefully on my stomach. She might as well have reached down and caressed my clit. I’m sure she can hear the gathering and dripping of juices between my legs. I wonder if this is lesbian flirting. If she feels what I feel. If she would believe that I feel what she feels.

We go to a restaurant for dinner. She eats a burger; I toy with my tortellini. “I thought most lesbians were vegetarians,” I comment. She winces but says patiently, “I’m not.”

It’s getting dark out. Ann orders a beer. “Are you an alcoholic?” I ask. (I restrain myself from confiding that I’d read that many gay people are.) She asks why I’m asking. I ask how old she was when her father died. She asks if I’m nervous about going back to our cabin, about going to bed. I nod. She says, again, “Meredith, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” We go to the cabin. What do I want to do?

I unpack the nightgown I’ve purchased for this occasion—a flannel one, to prove my intimate knowledge of lesbians’ affinity for flannel. I go into the bathroom to put it on, peeling the sopping, sticky underpants off my inflamed genitals. When I come out Ann is in one of the twin beds, wearing a white cotton T-shirt. I wonder if that means I won’t get any points for the flannel. I wonder what else, if anything, she’s wearing.

I climb into the empty twin bed. I’m shaking; my teeth are chattering. I think of my husband, my children. I close my eyes and see a movie of me getting up, getting into bed with Ann, her arms folding around me, her fingers doing things between my legs no man could ever know to do, my hands squeezing her breasts, her nipples against my nipples. If I ever had a bladder infection, I can’t remember it now. If I ever thought I was kidding about this lesbian thing, I was wrong.

I kick the blanket off my legs, leap up, and slide into bed with Ann. She puts her arms around me and breathes deeply. I am quaking inside and outside. She says, even now, “It’s okay, Meredith. We can just hold each other.”

My body has a need that’s burning a hole through the mattress. My brain is hanging on for dear life to what remains of my heterosexuality. Ann strokes my arms with her soft, small, hairless hands. I think of the night, just a few short weeks ago, when Richard and I told our sons we were separating. I think of how Peter asks every day when Daddy and I are going to live together again. Ann’s hand brushes past my breast. My cunt clutches. I pull away slightly.