Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (23 page)

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I am attracted to people regardless of their biological sex or gender identity. The commonly accepted parameters of sex and/or gender are simply not important to me. They aren’t really all that important to my wife, either, which is probably why we are not part of the local lesbian parenting scene. We attended a few meetings, but we never felt like we fit in, so we stopped going. So much of the focus there was on the lesbian part of the relationship, and since we’ve never focused on that, we’re outside the sacred circle. In fact, my “yeah, okay, whatever” attitude toward identifying myself first and foremost as a lesbian has resulted in some lesbians claiming that I am not, in fact, a “real” lesbian. If living with a woman for ten years and having sex with her and kids with her and going to the courthouse and getting legally hitched and going through the process of having her adopt the kids doesn’t make me a “real” lesbian, then I am not sure that wearing a T-shirt that says, “I HEART PUSSY,” and forswearing men forever and ever amen is going to really make all that big of a difference. In some circles, the fact that I would not kick Hugh Jackman out of bed for snoring is the deal breaker. I am just never going to be lesbian enough. I find I can live with that.

We’ve come across very little in terms of discrimination in Finland. Same-sex civil unions, adoption, and immigration are already legal here, so we don’t need to go out and fight for those rights. It’s already against Finnish constitutional law to discriminate based on sexual orientation, and the one time that we experienced homophobia on an official basis, we complained, and the person in question was immediately required to undergo sensitivity training and we were assigned to someone else, with official apologies. Nothing to get worked up about there. On a cultural level, telling someone that God doesn’t approve of their relationship is considered unspeakably rude in this country, so I’ve never had anyone but American missionaries or immigrants from more conservative developing countries spout religious dogma at me. Most Finns I come across don’t seem to care one way or the other that I am a lesbian, and it’s not like everyone doesn’t know. We’re not exactly in the closet. The neighbors have pretty much figured it out, my coworkers at the community college where I teach English know, and Kia’s family is so grateful for the grandchildren they never thought they’d get that they practically worship at my feet. We are not, as a family, in the fight-or-flight mode that so many lesbian couples find themselves in all over the world. Because of that, we find we are, for the most part, able to just live life like everyone else.

It may not be possible to pinpoint the sudden realization that I liked girls—or boys, for that matter. It’s just always been a part of me, and it’s never caused me undue trauma. I know who I am, and I’m good with it. I’ve been lucky enough to have an accepting and open-minded family, and I got rid of any friends who didn’t accept me for who I am. I had the opportunity to relocate to a country where my sexual orientation is legally protected and accepted, and I don’t have to worry that my lesbian family will be legally treated any differently than if we were a straight family. So long as I am left alone to live my life in peace, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether others think I am not straight enough or gay enough or even thin enough. The death of my father taught me that life is too short to spend living it constantly worrying about whether or not others approve of me.

Annie Lennox, though? Yeah.
Whooo
. I’d still hit that.

Counting Down from Ten

Candace Walsh

Y
ou know, the last thing I wanted to do was like Jill.

“Jill is a goddess,” said Sam. “She’s an incredible artist, she goes to Vassar, and she’s really, really smart.”

Sizzle went my jealous streak. I had met Sam in the bathroom line of my first college off-campus party. Fall semester, freshman year. Homecoming weekend. Parents tucked into their sleigh bed at the cutesy bed-and-breakfast downtown. Little did they know that at the same time, I was drinking keg beer from a big plastic cup, within a gaggle of my shiny new dorm-hall friends, about to embark on a disastrous and knotty romantic endeavor.

Sam wore a charcoal J. Crew rollneck sweater, a shaggy bowl haircut, and a huge incandescent grin. We were both English majors. He was a sophomore. I was a goner.

We had a fling, but I kept on getting flung out and back, like a boomerang, by the something that aligned within me and decided he was it. It. My seventeen years had delivered me to that bathroom line, a hatched chick ready to imprint, hard, on the first tall, lanky, preppy, vaguely literary, sardonic, honey-haired, blue-eyed boy to cross my path. Reckless public necking ensued.

Shortly after he quizzed me on my musical tastes, and I both named the Smiths and was able to list an actual album, he brought me back to his dorm room. As we walked across the chilly, postwar, upstate New York campus, he clinched it by correcting my use of the word “anachronism.” I spent the next several years trying to make up for that error, and countless others registered by his gimlet-eyed gaze. At the time, striving for loving acceptance in the face of disapproval felt like home to me. But he was not impressed by my idolatrous show-offery. Additionally, his heart belonged to Jill.

The balance of freshman year, I jejunely fluffed my naturally curly hair, carefully applied the right amount of Dee-Lite inspired eyeliner, and pulled on my John Fluevog boots, because I had been taught that the prettiest and most decked-out girl got the guy. Maybe back on Long Island. Not here. I was chagrined.

As far as Sam was concerned, Jill, of the unkempt, slightly witchy home-bleached hair, who disdained makeup and wore a uniform of faded jeans and black T-shirts that came in a three-pack, left me in the dust. She had been his first back in high school. Every time we left college for breaks, he hung around her like a puppy dog, even if she had a boyfriend along. I only knew what she looked like from a photograph.

I went out with boys. And dumped them for Sam. He literally went for me the way a woman will binge on chocolate when she’s PMSing, and then completely avoid it until the next perfect storm of hormones rolls on through. He was only consistent in the way that he both reeled me in and dispatched me. Our crowd of friends steadily lost respect for both of us as we engaged in this particular two-step. But I think they lost more respect for me, because at the end of the weekend, he was a guy and his behavior could fall under the category of laddish. I should have had more self-control, more self-respect.

Poor me, I know. I was entirely complicit. I was stubborn (
I would get him to love me
), threw good money after bad emotions-wise, and I did capital-L love him, or my idea of him. I come from a long line of passionate Spanish and Greek, throw-everything-under-the-bus-for-love women, and once we’re in, we don’t do anything halfway. So I threw myself under there, too.

It would have been highly useful for me to get therapy, instead of working out my childhood wounds so unproductively. Especially since instead of being cathartic, it ripped the scabs off those childhood wounds and gave them a good fresh repetitive pick-axing.

I went once. The campus therapist I was assigned looked like the police sketch of the guy who had raped and killed a dorm-mate of ours. Plus it was $30 a session and I was broke, so that didn’t last.

One weekend during my junior year, Jill came up to visit. Turns out Sam had been talking me up to Jill the whole time he had been talking her up to me. Turns out I could be praised and lauded by him, but just not to my face. Jill and I ended up drinking forty-ouncers beside each other in the circle that wound around a campfire in the dark backyard that Saturday night. I was no longer the freshman girl Sam met in the bathroom line. My preppy wardrobe had gone bye-bye, replaced with raggedy Seattle grunge jeans and flannel shirts over camisoles. I had chopped off my long, thick hair, and dyed it crayon-red. My dad thought I was on drugs. What had happened to his track-running, wholesome-looking, church-going girl? I
was
admittedly engaged in the kind of osmotic collegiate drinking that lands you an F on an “Are you an alcoholic?” test. But I digress.

Talking to Jill felt like a giant dose of soul medicine. This threat wasn’t scary at all! She had cute, slightly gappy teeth, burbling unguarded laughter, and bright blue eyes under quizzical eyebrows. She was funny, and clever, and a great listener. She threw back beer and smoked cigarettes like the beautiful no-nonsense German girls I remembered from my junior-high summer abroad—without any posturing or vestigial sheepishness. She had paint on her fingers (not her fingernails), and her rolled-up jean hems revealed muscular cyclist’s calves.

Tacitly, Jill and I progressively talked more and more exclusively to each other, mirthful grins revealing what we didn’t come out and say: out of the corners of our eyes, we saw that our connection to each other was slowly driving Sam apeshit. Pacing around our periphery, he veered in sideways to lob carefully casual non sequiturs our way. They bounced, gnat-like, off our bubble; and so did he.

When nature called, we went to the bathroom together, as chicks do. We took turns peeing, then, in a flash of devilry, we decided to ditch the party. She opened the bathroom window, climbed out, and I followed her. We ran off laughing into the night.

We walked to my apartment and sat in the candlelit dark, cross-legged on my settee, facing each other, like Jake and Andie at the end of
Sixteen Candles
. The phone began to ring off the hook.

“It’s Sam,” she said, with a grin.

“I know,” I said, and disconnected it with theatrical aplomb.

I was intoxicated, only as the until-recently impotent are, on the power of it all. I had run away with Jill. Now what?

Well. We both knew what would make for a really good story. It was just a question of how we were going to get there. I took her foot in my hands and began to rub it. Her foot was callused and rough, but I was used to that, given that I’d been hooking up with guys for two years. Probably mainly to stop me touching her manky feet, she grabbed my hands, leaned over, and kissed me. Her lips were delightfully full, although she’d later confess that she thought they were ugly, thanks to middle-school boys who told her so. I wish I could say that we kissed in that way where we forgot to breathe, everything fell away, and we melted inside. It wasn’t like that. We were kissing because we had run away from Sam. We ran away from Sam to break whatever spell we thought he had on us, and to rub his face in it. Hooking up with someone to get back at someone else is complicated because they’re still at the center of it, even if they’re not there. It wasn’t a soul connection, it was an act of defiance. In the defiance was burgeoning power; action in place of feminine passivity. That was hot. As was she—whether the chemistry was there or not. And as I leaned in, and our hands moved to each other’s waists, I was very aware that I was kissing a girl. Setting a certain power dynamic on its head. Kissing a girl. With a faint dusting of blond hair on her arms. Her ample breasts—minimized under two running bras, because she was so not a big-boob person—were a magnificent surprise when they came tumbling loose like Uma’s in
Dangerous Liaisons.

Although Sam probably gnashed his teeth and pulled out chunks of his lustrous hair thinking of us having full-on sex—and without him(!)—Jill kept her jeans on. “I have my period,” she said, and that was that. It was booty enough to have kissed and held her for hours, to have bedded Sam’s goddess.

Additionally.

Underneath a pile of very powerful reasons I felt driven to date and be in relationships with guys was a simple truth, like the princess’s pea under all of those mattresses—here comes the cliché—lesbian porn turned me on way more than straight porn ever had, at high school sleepovers, when the Playboy channel inevitably got switched on and we got giggly and quiet and still. “Eeew,” we said, rolling our eyes, ostensibly waiting for the straight porn to come on, but
come on.
It was during the early ’80s. The male porn actors were not yet buffed-out Adonises with waxed chests and butts and fluffers. They were mustachioed, cheesy, and had to get the job done while
boom-chicka-bow
music played in the background. Not hot. I was all about the beautiful girls getting it on . . . without Dorky McDorkerson happening to drop by with a bag of plumber tools in hand. I thought I would have liked hetero porn more if the guys were good-looking. I was wrong about that, but that was my self-reassuring little note to self.

So back to the very powerful reasons I felt driven to date and be in relationships with men, not in any particular order:

1) There was the fantasy of lesbians on Playboy, but my sheltered, fundamentalist born-again, and homophobic Long Island childhood (albeit in the shadows of Manhattan and Fire Island) showed me no lesbians. Not one that I knew of, although they were probably all over the place, closeted and/or under the radar. The only, only idea I had of lesbians was an unfortunate one. They had hairy upper lips, rhombus-shaped bodies, looked mannish in a bad way, and wore unfashionable, dreary clothing. If they were lesbians, well, they didn’t do it for me. And would admitting I was a lesbian morph me into such a creature?

2) People made gay jokes. It was not okay to make racist jokes, but it was acceptable to make jokes where the punch line had to do with people being gay.

3) Telling someone they were gay or a faggot was an insult. “That’s so gay” was an acceptable dis. I used it all the time.

4) When someone anonymously wrote a letter to my high school paper about being gay, the school exploded into a violent fervor. “Kill the Queers” became a commonly seen piece of graffiti. We had to have an assembly about it. And I’m not sure that during the assembly, anyone onstage came out and said that being gay was actually okay.

5) My church pastor preached sermons against being gay.

6) I was afraid of losing my parents’ love, and the ability to inspire pride in them.

7) Oh wait! Let’s not forget that I thought that I needed to prove that I wasn’t one of those pathetic women who ended up with another woman because no men wanted her.

8) I wanted a fancy wedding like my cousins had. With the plastic figurines on top of the sugary cake with Doric columns. In a church, with a reception afterward that included my entire extended family and friends, all awash in a glow of uncomplicated familial pride.

9) I couldn’t handle being identifiable as any more different than I already felt. I was already the child of a woman who witnessed about Jesus to people in parking lots on the way out of Sears Surplus. My family had too many kids, we moved a lot, and my parents got divorced. My mom remarried a tall weirdo way too soon after the divorce. He said “terlet” instead of “toilet” and had bad grammar and a gray front tooth. I was also ashamed that everyone in my community was Catholic and we were (emphasis on
were
) born-again Christians. Different. I also felt ashamed that my step-dad got mad one day and grabbed me by the neck and almost broke it, and that right after that I was thrown out of my house and had to go live with my dad. I couldn’t bear to be embarrassed or uncomfortable about one more thing. I could barely leave the house each morning as it was.

10) I liked guys. I mean, I was attracted to them. I was. They were usually feminine in one or more significant ways. But that just meant they were in touch with their feminine side, right? Which would make them more sensitive and emotionally available. Because that was really important to me.

Jill and I did not have the happily-ever-after story you might expect, although something else transpired. She woke up the next morning, all smiles (she’s a morning person). Unruffled, she made coffee and hung out with me for a little while before she ran off to do Jill things like paint, make soup, and talk about Teilhard de Chardin.

The following fall, she decided to go to grad school at my university, and after my housemate pulled out at the eleventh hour, and she needed an apartment, we sheepishly agreed to move in together. I with trepidation and excitement, she with pragmatism and boundaries already in place.

“I’m not gay,” she said to me matter-of-factly. “I hooked up with you because it was an excellent prank on Sam.”

Right. Me too. Yeah. Thus began the year of bittersweetly living with the straight girl I was in love with. Isn’t that a lesbian rite of passage? I got to notice exactly how gay I was, as I plangently yearned for the missing piece of an otherwise ideal domestic relationship. We ate cheap soup made from a bag of dried peas, an onion, and water. We drank jugs of Carlo Rossi wine. We wound a string of white Christmas lights into a ball and hung it from the ceiling as a light fixture. We bought a piece of sunflower-printed fabric and placed it, unhemmed, on our kitchen table. We dropped acid that Jill’s MIT-student friend cooked up and sent our way, and lay on our bellies and did charcoal and pastel artwork on huge pieces of paper for hours. We played Shawn Colvin, and the Story, and
Beleza Tropical
. And Belly. We read each other stories and poems that we had written, and I dressed her and put makeup on her if we went out on the weekends. We were such perfect lesbians, except we weren’t. She had boyfriends, and I didn’t. I put up with them gamely, although seeing her with a boyfriend felt like my heart was being rapped with the business end of a cat hairbrush. But.