Whatever...Love Is Love (14 page)

MY FIRST ORGASM HAPPENED WAY BEFORE I KNEW IT WAS CALLED
an orgasm. It wasn't with a man or a woman but with a pillow. I just felt the sensation in my body and I liked it. So back then I didn't know if I was straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, or a “pillower.” I am thinking maybe we should change the label to LGBTP?

Yes, let's add a P. But not for
pillow
. Let's add a P to honor a great Black, Gay, Transgender AIDS Activist. Her name was Marsha P. Johnson. When people asked her what the P stood for, she said it meant “Pay It No Mind.” To me, she was proclaiming herself a whatever.

In July 1992 I was sitting on a cement wall overlooking the Hudson River with a sweet boy from Long Island that I had been dating for a year. We were looking at the water on a sunny day, just minutes from breaking up. I was very into my full moon Goddess circles and rituals at the time and the down-to-earth Catholic boy was freaked out by that. I had told him I was a witch the day before. He didn't think his mother would approve and was about to tell me good-bye when I pointed at something bobbing in the water. “What's that?” I asked. He said, “A log.” I said, “No, it's not. I think it's a head.” When I walked closer to the pier I could see it clearly. “It's a fucking head!” It was a head attached to a bloated, fish-bitten gray-colored corpse. I asked a passing biker to get the police. My boyfriend ran away spooked, as he was sure I had conjured it.

Turns out the floating body was none other than the magnificent, black American, gay, transgender AIDS activist Marsha P. Johnson.

Afterward, I saw her photo on every street corner around Christopher Street where I lived. I remembered seeing this always-smiling, flamboyant, beautiful woman, but I never had the fortune to meet her. Her friends and supporters came forward to say that she was not suicidal as the police had theorized, but the police refused to investigate. The poster campaign said she had been harassed and gay-bashed in the very same spot where she died. It wasn't until 2012 that the New York City Police Department reopened Marsha's case. They now think that most likely she was murdered. I am currently trying to find out where the case stands, and to find ways to honor her.

Marsha was a true revolutionary for gay rights and for human rights. Marsha was one of the transgender folks who led the 1969 Stonewall Riots, at the bar in the West Village that was a half a block from my apartment. Marsha was at the forefront of that fight, and the many that followed in New York City as the LGBT community fought for equal rights. She started an organization to bring food and clothes to the young trans women who were living on the docks and nearby Christopher Street. She used her voice and her tremendous stilettos to create a better world.

Marsha is one of the reasons I became part of the LGBT community long before I slept with a woman. She taught me even after she was gone that it's not about who you sleep with, it's about who you fight for and who you love.

Let's be honest. Not everyone who sleeps with someone from the same gender cares about the great LGBT struggle for equality. They'll wink and nod at you like “Ooh cool, you're sleeping with a woman.”

After my article, a woman came up to me at a luncheon and said, “Welcome to the club.” She was a well-known lesbian in the entertainment community. I had known her a bit over the years and found her sneaky, hard, and a bit mean. I wanted to say, “I don't want to be in
your
damn club, you're an asshole.” The club the woman was talking about was just about sexuality. And then I saw a man across the room, apparently a straight man who plays a gay man on a television show, and I thought, “The LGBT club he belongs to is the one I want to be a part of.” A club that includes anyone who believes in human rights and allows anyone, regardless of what they call themselves.

The club I want to belong to is full of revolutionaries, fighting for theirs and other people's rights to love who they love. But like any club, I won't like everyone in it. I won't be interested in being identified with them.

Clare has never been part of a club and maybe that's why I fell in love with her. She never knows how old people are and never identifies anyone as black, white, Asian, etc. Sometimes I think she doesn't even know an elephant from a giraffe, and I love her for this. And she has always been a revolutionary. From a young age she was a part of the underground in Zimbabwe, working to help both black and white folks fight for their rights to choose their own governments and their own identities. She thinks many of them were probably LGBT, but as I've said, she's not one to label much.

When I met Clare, I had been with men almost exclusively. I fell in love with Clare from the first moment I met her, but not in a sexual way.

Five years ago, I was standing in front of a beautiful half-Chinese woman with short black hair at a fancy art gallery in New York City. She ran an organization that I hoped would donate to our work at We Advance in Haiti. I liked her very much, so I said yes when she asked me to join her and her girlfriend for a drink later that night.

Her girlfriend turned out to be the beautiful, curious, blond, blue-eyed Zimbabwean, wearing a bowler hat, who would be in my life from that moment on.

As I was looking through my photos while I was recovering from the parasite, I saw so many of the two of us, beaming with real love and laughter. And when I finally reached that black-and-white photo booth shot from New Year's Eve, a hummingbird magically appeared. I took it as a sign.

When I next went back to New York, I decided to proclaim my love to her. After spending a whole day together walking the streets in SoHo, we sat in a little Italian restaurant. I didn't know what to say at first. She and the girlfriend had been in therapy and were breaking up. I certainly didn't want to hurt her girlfriend, but I needed to admit my truth. When I finally had the courage to speak, I got all teary-eyed.

“There's something I need to tell you,” I said.

She was concerned, as she thought I was going to tell her that I was dying of cancer or had gotten accidentally pregnant.

I finally said to her between my tears, “I think I'm in love with you.”

It was a long, painful transition, going from friends to lovers. The process was tough for us and our mutual friends. And here we are, years later, with Clare sleeping soundly inside of our bedroom as I write outside on our balcony.

Clare has always been a whatever, having relationships with men and women, sleeping with some and not with others. It just doesn't matter to her. But it mattered to me when I saw that photo and realized I could in fact love her. I hadn't pictured living my life with a woman until then.

Here's the thing I got: she's not a woman or a man—she's Clare.

My mother taught me not to pray for a certain way a relationship should go, but to pray for a relationship to be the best that it is meant to be.

I hope that in the near future saying that you are LGBT will be just like saying what you prefer for breakfast. Why should we care who is having sex with whom? Or who is attracted to whom?

When I first kissed a girl at 21, it wasn't because I wanted to have sex with her. I just thought it would be fascinating to kiss a beautiful woman with bright red lips in a bathroom. It was a secret, so very sexy. But was that sex? Was I officially bisexual when I kissed the girl? Or was I officially bisexual when I was turned on by seeing two women kissing in a movie? Does the fact that I have had sex mostly with men in my life and have mostly fantasized about men mean anything?

I've wondered whether a man who has been married for 40 years but kissed a boy once when he was 10 because he was curious and attracted is bisexual. If a woman has only had sex with men, but fantasizes about a woman to have an orgasm, is she bisexual? How often and how far do you have to go to consider yourself bisexual? And if you
have
had sex with a woman and enjoyed it, but years later are only having sex with men, can you call yourself gay?

When people ask how long Clare and I have been together, I don't know what to say. Was it from that day at the bar when she gave me her hat? Or years later when we kissed? Or when we first had great sex? Or when we shouted our love out to the world?

I knew that the gender of the person I loved didn't matter, it was the love itself that mattered.

There are no labels that can define my relationship with Clare. This relationship, like all relationships, constantly evolves. Call it destiny, God, or whatever. . . . Clare was meant to be in my life. We teach each other and push each other to grow every day—and though the form of our relationship changes, the love is always the same. By the way, when people say to us, “You are a perfect couple,” we always correct them and say, “It's mostly perfect.”

So many people in the LGBT community have sacrificed so much to change policy, hearts, and minds. The entire world has benefited from their sacrifices beyond LGBT rights. The community has fought, marched, shouted, laughed, cried—all to move policies and to show the world it shouldn't matter to anyone who you love or who you sleep with. That's the part of the LGBT community I respond to the most. The struggle to love whomever you want without being disenfranchised.

An extraordinary thing the LGBT community has done is take back labels that were used to demean and disempower, and turn them into proud badges. Queer, Gay, Dyke, Lesbian, and Transvestite. Pretty much the terms I knew growing up.

So here we are today, calling our community of revolutionaries Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender. Will we have to add more initials to honor all the communities who are defining their own identities, such as asexual, gender-neutral, trans-bi, etc.? And why not? These are people who ought to have their own rights, too. We own the URL www.wlgbt.com so we can honor whatevers—as a chuckle and a tie-in to my book, but also to be respectful to whatever anyone wants to call themselves.

So I consider myself a W, a whatever, and I am lucky enough to have found another W to love. I also take the label of LGBT and whatever other letter you want to add. But I will especially take P. Or we can just get rid of all the letters and instead use the phrase “Pay It No Mind.” Because it's no one's business anyway. Thank you, gorgeous Marsha P. Johnson.

12

AM I RESILIENT?

W
hy can some people withstand so much hardship and still continue to find joy and bring joy to others?

Recently, my mother received a call from her doctor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He told her that her cancer was back.

She's had a peaceful three years without chemo, radiation, and worry. She should be a wreck. She should be crying. But, instead, she's making pierogies, that Polish specialty full of the most evil and delicious carbs. And she's laughing. She's not in denial. She's as joyful as she always has been.

My mom makes me laugh often and hard. The bellyache type of laugh that makes it hard to breathe. She laughs so hard she pees her pants. Mom has always had a lack of bladder control, especially when she laughs. You would think in these moments that she must be stoned or drunk. She has never smoked, rarely drinks, and has never done an illegal drug. When she had a double knee replacement 10 years ago she made the nurses stop giving her morphine on the first day after the operation. She said it made her sick. The nurses were in awe, as they rarely had anyone refuse the pain drugs, especially just one day after surgery. I had a dose of morphine last summer when I was in St. John's being treated for the intestinal parasite. And I can say that without it I would have shot myself in the head because of the pain.

But Mom didn't want the drugs. Instead she listened to meditations on her iPod every day and did affirmations to get herself well. “I am healthy,” “I am vibrant,” “I am joyful,” she would say over and over again as she took her first steps the day after the operation. She was in excruciating pain. She drew power from these mantras, and from her inner strength.

My mom, Kathleen Antoinette Urban, was born in a kitchen. She and her parents lived in a small apartment above the Brown Derby, the bar that my grandparents owned. This was in a small steel town 20 minutes outside of Philly.

Her earliest memories were of Mary, the mother of Christ. When she was two years old, my mom fell down a 12-foot staircase in her house. She says that she saw Mary at that moment, gently holding her and guiding her down the stairs. My grandmother was spooked when she heard this, as she couldn't explain why her two-year-old had fallen down the stairs and remained unharmed. But my mother could explain it. Mary had kept her safe.

Mom slept on the pullout couch in the kitchen and as my grandmother explained, “She never complained.” My grandfather was a happy drunk. Always singing and laughing after shots of cheap whiskey. My Gram was always yelling at him to stop. She paid so much attention to him, that none really went to my mom. Mom was on her own, but never bitter about it. My grandfather, PopPop, was what you would today consider a highly functional drunk. He drank from morning to night with his buddies from the steel mill. Often he would bring his brothers and a few guys upstairs after the bar closed to sit around the kitchen table and play the accordion and drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes and cigars, and play pinochle. This was the best time of my mom's day. She would get up from her couch bed in the kitchen and serve the men Cracker Barrel cheese cut into perfect slices, along with salami and Ritz Crackers. She didn't do this because PopPop told her to. She just loved the music, celebration, and joy of family. By the time she was seven years old, she was making more complicated dishes like scrambled eggs for all the adults hanging out and singing at 2
A.M.
She loved it. Cooking and sharing food was her passion and joy and continues to be so today.