Naturally, I will always remember my first time with a woman in sexual terms. It exceeded my high erotic expectations. But beyond that, I remember it as what it feels like to be myself. Me sleeping with a woman turned out to be about as natural as it is for fish to swim, and Jo really took such a legitimate unfolding of my true self as something to be celebrated. At the same time, there was also a big pill of reality for him to swallow in knowing that his wife had fully unleashed herself this way. In the context of our relationship, it felt like the peaceful silence that comes after someone has said something brutally honest. I will always remember my husband’s response to that experience: he felt that it was more important for me to be myself than for him to feel secure. I had never felt more myself, nor more loved.
Yet now there was no denying it. It was no longer theoretical. The facts were these: my sexual orientation was toward women; I loved and enjoyed my husband; and he loved and enjoyed me. While we were both grappling with what this meant for us as individuals and as a couple, it was, in many ways, also a relief. While our relationship had been often foggy and bogged down during the bulk of this transition, there was now a sense of clarity and ease between us that was refreshing.
So began the long process of weaving together a marriage tailor-made to uniquely fit the above components. Our marriage remained open, as did our hearts toward one another. In time we slowly outlined the parameters that worked for us: what we were each comfortable with and so forth. For him, the insecurity that I will leave him for a woman has, naturally, taken many conversations to sort through, and is something we expect to always cycle through as we continue to dialogue about our needs. For me, coming to peace with the very real loss that I am not partnered with a woman has taken much time to accept. We are each choosing to sacrifice because we love being together. Is it complicated? Yes! But I believe that coming out and sexual rights are, at their core, about the right to freely be our full selves.
Some days my life is white-picket-fence heterosexual. I’m a writer, and a mother, and a wife . . . to a man. When my husband and I drop our little boy off at preschool together, the general assumption by the planet is that I’m hetero since I don’t always think to wear my “Mixed orientation marriages can work” T-shirt on such occasions. Some days this all feels very natural to me, and like the kindest version of my life I could imagine. Other days, I feel pigeonholed and start wondering if anyone is selling an “I’m not straight” neon sign on eBay that I could somehow hang over my head. In terms of public perception, I constantly feel like a case of mistaken identity.
The interesting thing about this is that it makes me value my identity all the more. It keeps me aware of how important it is for all of us to have the room we need to freely be ourselves. And then, of course, there are times when it all seems pretty darn close to being in balance. As I was getting ready to go to the Pride Parade this year, my little boy looked at me and said, “Happy Pride, Mama.” Wow, I thought, how wonderful and complicated this all is. Perhaps I can find a pocket of the world where all the pieces of myself co-exist in harmony. And perhaps it is true that you can give more to the people you love when being fully who you are.
For the most part, all of these choices have left me with a very clear sense of self. I know who I am and the realities of the life I have chosen. And while some of those realities put me in a tight spot sometimes, I accept them in exchange for the ways that they open up my life to live broadly and freely. In terms of labeling myself, I forever have an identity crisis. To say I am bisexual entirely overstates my relationship to men. I do not equally desire men and women. Yet, to say I am a lesbian cuts out the fact that I am still happily married to a man and enjoy sex with him. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, who seemed to know a thing or two about this sort of situation, it’s hard to fix labels on things in such a way as they don’t fall off. So far, no label has seemed to stick comfortably to me. Everyone seems to have their own take on who I am, as well.
Many heterosexual married men refuse to take my orientation seriously. They need to believe that I am straight and just sort of playing with this whole thing. “But you’re married to a man; that makes you straight!” they defensively exclaim. I can sniff out their fear that perhaps things don’t always fit into nice, neat boxes.
The gay community, by and large, has been very accepting of me. Most people seem to realize that coming to terms with oneself and coming out take tremendous courage, no matter how you choose to live out your orientation.
On the downside, more than one lesbian has directly or indirectly shunned me. After all, I don’t have to deal with the stares of holding your same-sex wife’s hand as I walk down the street, or the biological or legal swirl around having a child. I can, and sometimes do, drink from the well of heterosexual privilege.
My knee-jerk first response is defense. I want to tell them that I too fight for gay rights. When I have extra bucks, I support my favorite GLBT groups. I want to explain that my husband and I are an interracial couple. While, thankfully, that is becoming less of an issue these days, fifteen years ago when we were dating in rural Indiana, it was a huge issue. I know what it’s like to have angry, judging eyes staring you down for a little hand-holding. I’ve done the wedding where half your family won’t show up because they disapprove. “Aha!” the protesters say, “but you can and did get married. See, you are not one of us!”
This brings me to my second response: They are right. No matter how much I protest, the fact remains that I am different. I get it. And if the tables were turned, I would struggle with understanding someone who was making the choices I have made. It would seem sort of, well, half-assed. A kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too life built on a desire for convenience and social conformity. While this judgment from my peers makes me feel like a seven-year-old girl standing alone at the edge of the playground, I appreciate the sacrifices and journey of these other women too much to fault them.
It’s not as if I haven’t asked myself the very same questions. Am I taking the easy way out? Perhaps I am just the laziest lesbian on the planet, so wiped out I can’t even be bothered to divorce my husband. At the end of the day I have to come back to my perspective on my life, and the reality of my experience. I chose to stay with my husband because I love him, and he loves me. Enough love, I might add, to make room in our life and marriage for all of who I am. The work it takes to sustain that kind of relationship is not the easy way out. I’ve sewn my life together as it is because such is the authentic reflection of who I am. My choices raise questions about what marriage is, what it is based on, and how it survives. Does love trump orientation? Most days I’m pretty sure it does. Some days I don’t know. But either way, I believe in continuing to discover where love and a little honesty can take you.
A Hushed Blue Underworld
Lori Horvitz
Unlike other arty middle-class friends I made at the small state college I attended just north of Manhattan, Jessie came from a working-class background, a beneficiary of a federally funded program for disadvantaged students. For Jessie, college was a place to escape from the burden of family life, a reason to quit her full-time customer service job at JCPenney’s, a ticket to a better life than her mother’s. Although Jessie had no pretenses of being an artist, she fit right in with the spiky-haired dancers and hip film guys who wore thick black-framed glasses and knew all the lyrics to Elvis Costello songs. Jessie—pale-skinned with henna-red hair—had a tendency to barge into campus apartments of people she knew and scream, “You be fugly!” before slamming the door shut and running away.
Senior year of college, I lived in an apartment with a working phone line, even though no one ordered service. My roommates and friends took advantage of this complimentary line. My Ecuadorean roommate curled up in a chair and spent whole evenings talking to family in Quito, my roommate’s boyfriend often phoned Finland, and Jessie spent hours on the phone chatting with her heroin-addict boyfriend and pregnant mother, both living in nearby Yonkers.<
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One day I showed Jessie my latest art project: sepia-toned transparencies of nude women in the school’s locker-room shower. Jessie inspected each image with the eye of a jeweler. Before lifting her gaze off the last image, she inquired about Joseph, my boyfriend who attended a college three hours north. “How’s the sex?”
I looked downward, felt my face turn red. “It’s good.”
Jessie lightly slapped my shoulder and cackled. “You’re such a prude!”
Although she made me nervous—I stumbled over words and occasionally bumped into walls in her presence—I felt like a rock star around Jessie. She was my groupie. When I talked, she stared into my eyes and listened intently, whether it was about my family poodle that got mauled to death by a great dane at a Veteran’s Day Parade, or my art history paper about Jackson Pollock. She told me about her mother, who had a bevy of children by different fathers. On weekends, she took the bus back to Yonkers to help out with the kids. The concept of someone my age having a mother who kept having kids was foreign to me. But Jessie made light of it, even laughed about it.
Now, focusing on the little birthmark just above her lip, I asked, “How good is the sex with you and your boyfriend?”
Jessie gathered the photos in a neat pile and handed them back to me. “It’s all right,” she mumbled, her eyes fixed on the top photo of a lean-bodied woman lathering her hair. “That’s my favorite.”
I showed Jessie more photos I’d taken of friends posing by the communal gym shower. Fascinated with the steel, space-age structure, I had attempted to demonstrate the contrast between the human form and modern technology. Underneath the rocket-like shower, I captured my subjects soaping their bodies, their arms extended, legs flexed, water swirling over flesh. In one image, the multi-headed shower appeared to be gushing out rays of sunlight onto the subjects; in another, the steamy haze made it difficult to tell where the edges of the imposing steel cylinder ended and the human body began.
Since I printed the photos on large sheets of see-through film, I could manipulate the setting. I highlighted certain sections of each image with silver paint and used aquamarine paper as a backdrop. Each rectangular image was now part of a hushed blue underworld of curves and steel and muscles and mist.
Jessie studied the photos of Liz, Belle, and Mandy washing their nude bodies. She looked straight at me. “If you want, I can pose for you too.”
“Maybe,” I said, keeping my eyes on the images in front of me. I ran into the kitchen to check on the pizza I was heating up. Jessie picked up the phone and called her boyfriend.
My shoulders stiffened. Was Jessie trying to come on to me? Why did she offer to pose? Did she think I was like that? Yet secretly, I liked that she liked me. In fact, I craved her presence; she made me feel desirable, attractive, and talented. On the other hand, part of me was repulsed by the idea that Jessie liked me. Later that afternoon, I typed a poem on my Olivetti manual typewriter:
I’m not that way, you’re a good friend,
I’m not that way, you’re out of luck.
I like you a lot, but the buck
Stops there.
A week later, I made plans to take more photos of two friends by the communal gym shower. I asked Jessie if she wanted to join them.
She lifted her legs onto the mustard-colored chair in my living room and held her knees. At first she agreed, but five minutes later, she looked out the window. With her back facing me, she asked, “How about I pose for you with my clothes on?”
The next day, in my living room, I set up lights and umbrellas and a black velvet backdrop. Jessie, wearing a red silk dress, placed her hands on her hips and puckered her lips. From behind my camera, I zoomed in on her elegant ears, her green eyes, her head-on gaze. Snap. I moved in closer, focusing on her angular profile.
Suddenly she broke out of her serious stance and laughed. “So, what do you think?” she asked.
I glanced out from behind the camera. “About what?”
Jessie looked out the window. “Do you think I’m sexy?”
I jerked my camera in front of my face and looked through the lens. “You look great in that dress.” What kind of answer was she expecting? I could hardly turn the focusing ring on the camera.
Two days later, after printing an image of Jessie’s profile, I highlighted her ear with silver paint; it looked like a conch shell.
That spring, Joseph visited more often. Jessie stayed part-time with her mother. The phone company got wind of the free line.
At the end of the school year, I graduated and moved to New York City with Joseph. Jessie graduated a year later and moved to New York City with her junkie boyfriend. Months later, I heard she had broken up with him and joined the army. Soon after, I broke up with Joseph, saved up money, sublet my apartment, and signed up for a month-long, dirt-cheap trip to Moscow and Peking on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I knew I’d get to see Red Square and the Great Wall of China. What I didn’t know was that I’d meet Rita, a British woman from London. We shared a compartment on the train, and she talked of philosophy and feminism, had a mane of strawberry blond hair that she flipped back every now and then, and made me say to myself, over and over, I’m not like that! Wouldn’t I already know this by now?
When the train stopped at tiny Siberian stations, we ran out to get cakes and Lenin pins, and I thought, No way! I’m not a lesbian! Back on the train, I played my crappy guitar and she sat by my side, and I sang Joni Mitchell songs and she touched my knee and said, “You’re quite good.” I felt my face blush, looked at the Siberian landscape, and thought, Am I like that?
Rita spoke about Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist writer who had a life-long relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. “But they never lived together,” she said. “And they both took other lovers now and again.”
“Sounds complicated,” I said. Cleavage spilled from her tight burgundy sweater. I steered my eyes to the floor.
“It’s the ideal situation,” she said “Marriage is so bloody ridiculous. Imagine sleeping with the same person every night for the rest of your life. How boring!” She gripped the railing by the window until I could see the whites underneath her fingernails.
I never thought marriage was such a bad idea, but maybe Rita had a point.
Perhaps it was her gentle British voice, or the way she looked in my eyes when she spoke, or the way she flung her wrist in the air when speaking about marriage or how “bloody annoying” some of the other train passengers were; I wanted to spend all my time with her. I told her about Joseph’s supposed left-wing, anarchist ideals. “But when it came to cleaning the apartment,” I said, “he refused to lift a finger until it got too dirty for him.”
“Bloody men,” Rita said, rolling her eyes.
I let out a loud laugh. “That’s right!” I said.
On the third day, Rita invited me to explore the train with her. “Don’t you want to practice your Russian?” she asked.
It didn’t matter that my knowledge of Russian was limited to basic greetings and single-digit numbers. Of course I wanted to explore with Rita. As we moved deeper into Siberia, I couldn’t stop thinking of her, the way she caressed her hair when she talked to me, the way she touched my shoulder when making a point.
One night, while the rest of the group went to a dance performance, Rita and I swigged beer in her hotel room. She showed me her new acupuncture kit. “You could practice on me,” I said. Rita demonstrated where each meridian point was on my hands and arms. When she touched me, my body tensed up. Goosebumps rose from my arm. She continued to touch my arms and show me meridian points. For a moment, we locked eyes. I told her I needed to use the bathroom. Afterward, I asked her how long she’d been with her ex-boyfriend.
“Two years,” she said. “And you?”
“Too long,” I said.
Now when I looked at her, all I could see were her sensual lips. All I could do was turn away and imagine my lips on hers.
But nothing happened.
“Will you go back with him?” Rita asked.
“Probably not,” I said. Before I could think about what I was doing, I moved my body next to hers and wrapped my arm around her waist. She turned toward me and held me. We kissed. Kraftwerk’s album played over and over and over again as we felt each other’s bodies, our arms and legs intertwined, our hands moving, gliding up and down, and finally, I felt at ease, in a foreign land, with a foreign woman. For hours, but not long enough, we kissed and touched, until the doorbell rang. Rita jumped up and ran out of the room to greet her friend Martin. The three of us went for dinner, two of us with flushed cheeks. “We took a nap,” Rita told Martin.
“A very nice nap,” I said.
When I arrived home, Joseph begged me to come back. I agreed, with the stipulation that we could see “others.” Others including Rita. But my long-distance affair ended a year later, after Rita invited me to the Black Sea. On the day of departure, I learned she also invited a boyfriend.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 12
