We successfully completed that first summer of graduate school, but the added curriculum of learning what it was like to have an active libido, learning how to be a lesbian, and learning how to function when all I wanted to think about was Michele and sex with Michele meant I slept and ate little. I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t hungry. Life outside the confines of the Mormon Church was good; I felt as if the shell that had encased me had cracked open and fallen away. That summer, I didn’t attend church meetings, I didn’t pay my tithing, I drank coffee and beer, and I had a lot of sex outside marriage with a woman. But I did not feel miserable, lonely, sinful, or unclean. I felt no shame or remorse. And I knew I would no longer greet each day vowing to try harder to be someone I was not.
Fifteen years later, Michele and I are still together. She is my second sex partner, and she will be my last. We share our birthdays, good friends, a love of reading, an enthusiasm for Coen brothers movies and William Trevor novels, and a preference for staying at home in the evening. We earned graduate degrees in the same field, and we write and teach together. And every night, I fall asleep with my head on her shoulder, or we spoon, using only about half the mattress in our double bed. We fit.
Wanting
Vanessa Fernando
I identified as a heterosexual throughout my growing-up years. In elementary school, I had a crush on a boy named Alec; he had a mushroom cut, red hair, and freckles. I wanted a boy to be nice to me, to call me on the phone and ask how I was doing, to hold my hand.
When I was eleven, I fell in love with my dance teacher. Her name was Kelly; she had a long face and green eyes, and her shiny brown hair fell straight to her shoulders. In class she wore spandex tights and leotards and made us spin and move in unison to Janet Jackson’s “The Velvet Rope.” At night, I’d lie awake, too strung out with craving to fall asleep.
My diary from that time says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I keep having all these weird feelings about Kelly, about Jennifer Aniston, about Alicia Keys. There’s no way I’m a lesbian. But what’s wrong with me?”
I also thought about men. My friends and I ripped sexy photographs of male models out of CosmoGIRL! magazine and passed them back and forth. We read Judy Blume’s Forever when no one was watching, shocked at the thought of a boy naming his penis Ralph. We went online and assumed fake identities, posing as older jezebels ready to give the desperate, leering chat-room men what they had been searching for. In our pop-up chat windows we described our DD-breasts and our long blond hair, doubled over in fits of nervous laughter while confronting our own dubious power.
My friends and I never talked about other girls in the visceral terms we reserved for boys, but we admired them. We saw breasts peeking out of spaghetti-strap tank tops and thongs riding up backsides in the hallways at school. We looked at all the so-called perfect bodies around us, and pretended to be disgusted. “They are all so slutty,” we’d say. “Such whores.”
I wanted to be beautiful so badly. I wanted to be like those girls, the ones that were tall and thin and could spend all summer at the beach, wearing bikinis, being tossed around in the arms of stringy teenage boys. But I wasn’t one of those girls. My skin was darker, and I had to pluck my upper lip, and my stomach didn’t look like theirs.
I spent years trying to be the kind of girl a boy would want to toss into the air. I wish I had realized earlier that I didn’t want to be like those girls so much as I just wanted them.
Because opposite-sex partnerships are the institutionalized norm, I never questioned the fact that I was destined to share my life with a man. It just was, independently of my musings, a solid fact like puberty or divorce. I thought about men in the dark fantasies of my childhood, daydreaming about an aggressive male sexuality wanting me, craving me. I fantasized about men’s impatience and my power to grant or withhold. It was always about them, about those shadowy men in my mind, even as I masturbated at six years old, rubbing my clit against the corner of the bed, hungry for friction.
Everything began to change once I graduated from high school. Needing time away from my mother’s townhouse, I scoured the Internet for “roommate wanted” ads. A month after graduation, I went to meet with Sarah, who lived in a squat white plywood building, two levels with three bedrooms upstairs, nestled close together off a corridor littered with dust and cat hair. The room she showed me was painted hot orange, and crammed with end tables and two broken-down television sets.
Sarah spoke quickly, and when she grinned her two front teeth stood at odds, crooked. Her hair was short, dyed red, and stood up in gelled spikes. Next to her, I felt awkward and too young.
“We’ll get everything out of there by the time you move in,” she said. And then she leaned against the door, stood there and studied me. Her left eyelid was the slightest bit droopy, and her lips were as dark as her hair, chapped. She wore a white tank top and no bra. I felt too conscious of the way her low-slung breasts pressed against the fabric.
We went into the living room. It used to be a bedroom, and so the space was enclosed, crowded. A small bookshelf stood by the door: Whores and Other Feminists, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, The Ethical Slut. I wanted to ask Sarah if she was a lesbian but my mouth wouldn’t open, couldn’t form the word. A cat, wide and short-haired, lay on top of the bookcase, licking its genitals.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
I shook my head, even though I minded. Sarah sat down on a worn, green couch and, twisting sideways, pulled a battered tin from her pocket. The lid creaked as it opened; inside were four hand-rolled cigarettes, the tobacco spilling a little. I watched her fingers shake as she lit it. “Come sit down,” she said, looking at me. “We should get to know each other if you’ll be living here.”
I sat down. She asked me how old I was and I told her. She laughed, then. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked me.
“No. We broke up,” I said. My first-ever boyfriend had been tall and thin and full of bones too big for his frame. He wore ratty jeans and combat boots and let his hair grow long. When I cut off my hair, stopped shaving my arms, and started preaching feminism, he stopped calling.
“Are you straight?”
I nodded. There was a pause, then, and Sarah smiled as though she knew something I didn’t. I looked at the white cat, which had jumped off the bookcase and into my lap.
I thought Sarah was the most intriguing woman in the world, because she kept a larger-than-life Rabbit Habit vibrator propped on her bedside table. It was bubblegum pink and swiveled in circles like a carnival ride.
The sex I’d had by that point was perfunctory and a little painful. I’d take off my shirt and my bra, and then he would be aroused, and maneuver his penis past my labial folds and into my vagina with varying degrees of accuracy. I’d lie back and let him push into me, and after a while he would have an orgasm, and I would lay my head on his collarbone and hope that he’d hold me for a little while before falling asleep. I got some satisfaction out of being desired—I felt, for a moment, like the sylphlike girls I’d admired at the beach—but in the quiet moments afterward I felt empty.
Unlike me, Sarah seemed to have a succession of fascinating lovers. There was Roman, a twentysomething genderqueer with close-cropped blond hair and a septum piercing; and Zana, who left her bicycle chained to the fence outside whenever she spent the night. There were also men who came and left quickly, never staying to chat.
Sarah told me that it was better to spread your abundance of love among many people. This was her philosophy of the world: monogamy wasn’t righteous, but selfish. Still, there were moments where I caught glimpses of the complications. There were moments when she was angry. Once, I found her sitting quietly at the bottom of the staircase, and when I sat next to her she said, “All men want is pussy. Cunt is fun; cock is work.”
I lived with Sarah and worked at a natural foods store, volunteered on the weekends at the anarchist bookstore, and helped organize a feminist music festival. Everyone I met was polyamorous,
or queer, or non-normative in some shape or form. They fled the heterosexual trappings—marriage and 2.5 kids—traded the stereotype for radical resistance, chosen families, and polyamory. I met them and I felt jealous that they had somehow managed to extricate themselves from the conveyor belt model of adult life. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be like them; wasn’t them. I still believed in the middle-class cult of romance, of happily ever after, despite my own cynicism.
I cut my hair shorter and wore ripped-and-patched clothes in an effort to become more like them, these untouchable queers with purpose and community. At night, I wrote in my journal about how I could never fit in. I was too young to go to bars, and I’d never slept with a woman. I remembered the night in high school when my friend and I wailed that we wished we could be lesbians, because sometimes being in love with men is the most frustrating thing in the world. We’d looked at each other, a sparkle of tension in the air between us, and laughed it off. “Too bad we’re straight.”
That August, two months after moving in with Sarah, I followed her to a radical queer gathering on Vancouver Island. For a week, the hundreds of participants functioned as a single organizational body, making decisions in consensus-based meetings and cooking all meals communally. The goal of the festival was to put anarchist theory into practice, and work to create a queer community, decentralizing heterosexuality and allowing for an alternative social structure. At the festival, submerged in an entirely new society, I met Lucy.
Lucy was small, with black hair cut bluntly across her forehead; she wore a peaked cap and tight jeans. Her voice was melodic, coquettish. She called me a “dreamboat” in her Brighton accent. We met while waiting in line for supper; we spent the week together, and by the end we were holding hands. Lucy was twenty-nine years old and pursuing a Ph.D. in women’s studies, writing her thesis on gender-neutral pronouns. I couldn’t believe the way she looked at me—softly, the way I used to look at my boyfriend. She batted her eyelashes and purred at me; it made me feel so masculine, so desired, so in control. I didn’t know what to do with the power Lucy gave me.
On the last day of the festival, Lucy left me a note saying that she wanted a kiss goodbye. I was terrified. I contemplated hiding, but before I had the chance I saw her, standing at the edge of the festival grounds with a friend. She was wearing a shirt patterned with tiny hearts. Our eyes met, and we drew together. I pulled her in for a hug, so conscious of the fine bones beneath her skin, savoring the feeling of this stranger now pressed close against me. As we came out of the hug, I leaned close and we kissed; it felt so natural that I was relieved. Lucy looked naughty and interested. The girlish, flirty way she looked at me still felt alien, unexpected. I felt dizzy, drugged. I wanted to move my hands all over her body. I loved, more than anything, the feeling of freedom, of moving through time and space without chains or walls, and just enjoying all the infinite possibilities of being together in that one, simple moment.
I don’t want to give the impression that I began to love and desire women because I was imitating Sarah or Lucy. In all honesty, I don’t know what shifted. I wouldn’t define myself as one of those lesbians who knew since childhood the “truth” about her sexual orientation. But I do feel that I defined myself as a heterosexual because the society in which I grew up never affirmed the other parts of me. I was able to play the heterosexual game. I was able to dress myself up, to play the role of attractive, available female, and so I never let myself experience the vast expanse of my own sexual desire until I found myself in incredibly new territory, where love, relationships, sex, self-definition, gender, and identity became much more multi-dimensional than I would ever have expected.
Today, three years later, I am with the most amazing person in the world. She identifies as a woman, as a lesbian, but I don’t think of her in gendered terms. To me, she is my partner in crime. She has a masculine presentation, in the sense that she feels most comfortable wearing clothing tailored for men, and my mother always asks me if this means that she is the man in our relationship. My mother doesn’t seem to understand that sex and gender are completely different things, and that dichotomous gender roles do not operate in our relationship.
Occasionally, however, I feel uncomfortable that my gender presentation tends to be more feminine. I wonder if I am dressing this way because it is how I truly feel comfortable, or whether I am still trying to play the role of the desirable girl, suppressing my own wants in order to play the femme to my partner’s butch. Am I still trying to be that girl on the beach from my adolescence, beautiful because she is wanted? But then I remind myself that nothing is so simple, and that outward appearances often obscure complex truths. This relationship is unlike anything I have experienced before because of the emphasis my partner and I both place on communication. I now feel comfortable saying no, and saying yes. I am capable, for the first time, of being clear if I am not enjoying a certain sexual act; of articulating my needs; of setting boundaries; of exploring my sexuality in a context that feels safe.
My experience identifying as a heterosexual was always about trying to be the kind of woman I believed would appeal to men. I wanted to be the “right kind of woman”: white, skinny, able-bodied, and hungry, with high cheekbones and pursed lips. Now that I identify as queer and am in a relationship with a woman, however, I feel more comfortable expressing and experiencing my own desire. It’s true that my current relationship is not affirmed by mainstream society the way it was when I was dating men; my current partner and I are two women of color who love and sexually desire one another, and because of this we frequently attract hostile glances and comments. But existing outside of the heterosexual Hollywood romance script also has the potential to be empowering, because it allows us to live by our own standards, and redefine romance and courtship to suit our own needs. I may not be the “right kind of woman” in society’s eyes because I am mixed-race, queer, and don’t believe in the binary sex/gender system, but I much prefer living on the margins of “respectability” to the alternative of suppressing my desires, my needs, and my voice. Living as a whole person, and learning to accept my own messy contradictions, is not only politically powerful, but much more sexually satisfying.
Watershed
Veronica Masen
It was dark in the kitchen; the party was loud on the other side of the closed door. We leaned toward each other and I slid my hands up the nape of her neck, into her hair, holding the back of her head, this woman I had known only a short while but with whom I had been flirting shamelessly all night. Our eyes locked, her lips parted and tipped toward mine, and my knees literally went weak. There was a full two- or three-second pause (which feels like forever when you’re about to kiss a girl for the very first time, and you’re thirty-seven years old, and you have wanted this your whole life, and here she is right here in your hands, and it’s really going to happen, it’s not a dream this time) during which I just let myself revel in the delicious thought of you’re about to do it. Finally. After all this time, all those men, all that longing, all that want and curiosity and fantasy and imagining: here she is. Now. Feel it? Feel your heart slamming against your chest? Feel her breath, slow and shuddery? Feel her cheek brush yours? A little closer. There. Closer. Her lips, on yours; yours, on hers. So soft—a mouth like velvet. The tongue—delicate, polite. Her skin—no stubble, no roughness. My hand slid down her body, her waist, her curves, and came to rest on her hip—no roughness anywhere, no hard, no angles. All soft.
I’m home.
I almost fainted.
That was a year ago.
A year of therapy and tears and sex and kisses and books and arguments and sleepless nights and angst and long phone calls and more passion than I ever knew existed. A year of falling down a rabbit hole, of peeling off my skin, of being thrown off my axis, or any one of a dozen other phrases that would still never come close to describing what it’s like to have your whole existence shaken upside down and called into question. It’s been a year of wondering a
nd discovering and poking and prodding at my soul, my belief system, my fear, my desires, my identity. I have laughed harder, loved deeper, and cried more this year than any other time in my life. I have wondered if I have finally discovered my true sexuality, or am simply going through my own late-bloomer experimentation phase that everyone else went through in college while I was dutifully studying and living off-campus. I have asked myself the following questions a million times a day, every day: Am I gay? Or is it just her? What should I do? What now? What next? What if? What if I stay married, and stifle my inner lesbian (who, now that I have let her come out and play, might not want to go back inside)? My husband is the greatest guy in the world—what if I break up our family over a temporary sexual revolution and regret it forever? My commitment to our marriage is strong; my desire to provide security, consistency, and dependability to our children is even stronger. How would I feel about myself if I threw all that away for a kiss? But what if it’s the most incredible kiss in the whole world? What if it’s a kiss that woke up my whole being, made me believe in all the sappy love songs and fireworks and fairy tales? What if I can no longer even contemplate kissing my husband, let alone allow our naked bodies to entangle the way hers and mine have? What if now that seems so wrong, so icky, so intrusive?
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 5
