Dear John, I Love Jane

by Candace Walsh;Laura Andre

  My husband taught me about unconditional love. Even after we divorced, his love for me as a person remains; as does mine for him. All along he loved me for who I am, even if I was changing and evolving into a person that needed to be with someone other than him. He and my daughter are true constants.

  My transformation has been the product of love. Zoe introduced me to raw emotion. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself not love her. It was only after my separation and months of processing my emotions that I decided it was the right time to tell her, to let go, and free my heart up to give and receive love. We got together for dinner one night, and I asked her to join me afterward in my car for a private conversation. She was aware that my issues started when I fell in love with a particular girl, but I took a deep breath and revealed to her that she was that girl. I broke down and cried while she listened, genuinely unaware of the impact she had on my life. There was some noticeable tension in the car, but neither of us would allow the drama to overshadow the reality of our friendship. Finally liberating myself from that emotional baggage gave me the closure I needed to move on, putting Zoe behind me and focusing on my budding relationship with KJ.

  I met KJ on a Lipstick Thursday, two months after I separated from my husband. Our relationship took a fast course and I found myself in a committed relationship much sooner than I would have anticipated. We are complete opposites, but we balance each other in a way that complements us perfectly. With her, I am able to experience a deeper level of being. And I know that completely sounds like I made it up, but if I didn’t experience it myself, I would be just as skeptical. With her, life is more vivid. I can actually feel our love.

  I remember the moment I fell for her. She laid her head on my chest and in one fantastic moment, my heart absorbed all I would feel for her in my lifetime. I could see her face aging with the years in my mind, and I knew . . . KJ was “the one.”

  If I died without ever knowing that feeling, I would have been cheated. I have no doubt I made the right decision to leave my husband.

  It took over two years of processing to get here, but I am now safely on the other side: where my family includes my daughter, KJ, my ex-husband, my ex in-laws, and my new in-laws. The support I received from family and friends has been humbling. I can only hope I would’ve provided that same positive support if this had happened to someone else I knew. But it happened to me. And if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. I was stable. Focused. Responsible. And this thing hit me like a brick wall. But I recovered. And I am proud of my resilience. You could say that I am gay. But all I really know for sure is that I am in love.

  Wedding Gown Closet

  Katherine A. Briccetti

  The summer I was fifteen, mymother pulled her ivory wedding gown from the closet. She placed the oversize white box onto her dressing table and pulled back tissue paper before lifting out the satiny gown. I took it from her and, holding it in front of me, studied my reflection in the floor-length mirror. My braids flopped across its bust, and dirty sneakers poked out from below its hem, but it looked as if it might fit. Posing in the mirror, I imagined wearing it on my own wedding day. I loved the idea of tradition, a mother’s wedding dress becoming her daughter’s.

  Fifteen years later, in 1987—the era of the Moral Majority—my lover Pam and I climbed our favorite trail in Point Lobos State Reserve near Monterey. On that fogless morning in May, cotton ball clouds hovered over the horizon, the sun so bright it made the ocean glitter. Resting at a lookout, we gazed at the boulders below sprinkled with cormorants and dozing sea lions. The water swirled and waves battered the boulders, sending spray up almost as high as our perch.

  At that time, lesbian and gay couples were just beginning to celebrate unions in churches and temples, but it wasn’t common practice yet. Representative Barney Frank had just come out publicly. Matthew Shepard’s murder was still a decade in the future. To our families, we were only roommates. Pam and I had left our friends behind in the Bay Area, opting instead for a private commitment ceremony; our only witnesses that day were the terns sweeping past overhead. Next to the ocean, we inhaled the warm scent of the Monterey pine trees, the cool, briny breeze, and the baked mulch of the path.

  Wearing jeans, sweatshirts, and hiking shoes, and with the whoosh of the ocean as background music, Pam and I exchanged gold and black jade rings. I caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers, still surprised at its softness, so different from my whiskered lovers of the past. After scanning to make sure the trail was free of hikers, I leaned over and we kissed.

  Pam and I met at the public school where we both worked and quickly became friends over lunchtime chats about books. On visits to her cozy Berkeley house, I perused the tall bookcases filled with novels and poetry. At lunch, though, our interests turned to Shirley MacLaine’s reincarnation memoirs, Jane Robert’s Seth books on psychic channeling and ESP, and anything we could find about past lives, astral projection, and communicating through dreams—phenomena we called “woo-woo.” We were not gullible, we reminded each other, rolling our eyes to show we hadn’t been truly converted. But we were still fascinated, something drawing us both into the past, to the possibility that we had lived before.

  After my fiancé and I broke up for the final time, and I moved out, Pam and I met at the movies, for dinner, and once even braved a psychic fair in Berkeley. I began to feel like a high school girl around Pam, restless and eager for our next meeting, when we could embrace in greeting and parting. When she brushed my arm in conversation, a warm blush traveled across my skin. Some mornings, she left a miniature bouquet of pink Cecil Bruner roses tied with a rubber band on my desk before I got to work. We exchanged Hallmark friendship cards and talked on the phone late at night, drunk with sleepiness and promise. “Good night, sweet friend,” she said, and inside my chest something shifted. But even in my journal I was afraid of admitting my feelings. “We’re just friends,” I wrote.

  Growing up in Indianapolis, I had known only one openly gay person, a florist who rented the apartment above our garage, sharing it with his woolly mammoth-like St. Bernard and an occasional boyfriend. I don’t remember conversations about homosexuality in our house, but the unspoken message had been that our tenant was a good person, a welcome addition to our social circle.

  When I was in college in Indiana, Anita Bryant had begun her “Save Our Children” campaign to fight an anti-discrimination ordinance in Florida. I don’t remember boycotting orange juice, but I knew she was a bigot and I enjoyed seeing her get a pie in the face on television. When my Grandma Rose heard I was moving to San Francisco, though, she cited a news magazine article referring to the city as the “Sodom of America.” I had to look up the word “Sodom,” and although I didn’t understand all of its connotations, I took her words as a grim warning.

  When I moved to San Francisco at age twenty, the owner of the downtown office supply store where I first worked was an older gay man, and the manager was a lesbian. I hadn’t known any lesbians before, and she both intrigued and frightened me. Once, when she reached in front of me to collect extra bills from the cash register, her bare arm brushed against mine, and I recoiled, stepping back so we wouldn’t touch again.

  Except for one other straight woman, the sales clerks were young gay men who wore creased khakis and Izod sports shirts over their muscular chests and biceps. In certain sections of town, gay men walked with their hands in their boyfriends’ pockets, an intimacy that had surprised me. When they kissed in public, I was both fascinated and appalled. Some of them flaunted it, precisely because people like me were trying to send them back into the closet with our moth-eaten morality, and—a novel realization for me—because they were not ashamed. San Francisco had been a brave new world for me when I arrived. I wore a beige London Fog raincoat with its belt tightly cinched and rode on the outside of the cable car, my waist-length, blond hair blowing behind me. I was so straight, so naive.

  Almost ten years after moving to Californ
ia, and a few weeks after the psychic fair in Berkeley, Pam and I met after work for dinner at the 4th Street Bar and Grill, a seafood restaurant near the Marina. The young trees outside the restaurant sparkled with white lights wound around their winter-bared branches. Inside, warm scents of spices and colognes intermingled. Seated at one of the tables next to the windows, we smiled at each other, as if it were impossible to stop.

  “This is nice,” she said, her curls shimmering in the candlelight. I tuned out the people on either side of us as we talked, gradually aware of the flip-flopping, tingling sensations in my stomach and rushing heat connecting my face, gut, and groin—something I’d felt only with men before.

  “Hey, let’s send a message in our dreams tonight,” I said. “Just one image or one word. Want to?” There was an even stronger charge between us that night, and I was sure we could communicate this way, too.

  “I’ll send it,” she said, her stare boring into my eyes, “and you concentrate on receiving it.”

  “And tomorrow at work I’ll tell you what word or image I get.” I met her intense gaze, and felt giddy. I was eager to get to bed, to carry out our experiment, so I could be with her in my sleep, too.

  When we parted outside the restaurant three hours later, we held our embrace longer and tighter than I had with other female friends. This was different from friendship; I didn’t want the evening to end, didn’t want to say goodnight to her. But I didn’t know what I meant to her, or whether she behaved this way with all her straight, female friends. Even though she had lived with another woman for many years, and someone at work had spelled it out for me, I even began to question whether she was gay. Lesbians had boyish haircuts, wore clunky boots, and didn’t shave their legs. She didn’t fit the stereotype.

  At home, I fantasized about kissing her and tried to imagine what it would be like to make love with a woman, how it would work, how it would feel. But this was not in my life plan, and I didn’t know how to understand my feelings. Was I enjoying a temporary diversion? Was I experimenting, resisting expectations? I had always believed I would marry a man and have babies. I didn’t want a relationship I’d have to keep secret. Time was running short, I was almost thirty, and I needed to find my life’s mate. I wanted those babies. This, falling in love with a woman, was not supposed to happen.

  At seven o’clock the next morning, Pam’s 1970 VW Bug buzzed to a stop in front of my San Leandro apartment. She had never dropped in like this; my apartment was not even on her way to work.

  “Did you get my dream message?” she asked when I opened the door and saw her standing there next to a spray of calla lilies. Tiny wings inside my chest fluttered. I’d gone to sleep the night before desperate to receive her words, but it wasn’t words that had appeared to me. Instead, I’d dreamed about swimming, finding her underwater and kissing her, the two of us hidden from the rest of the world beneath the mirror-like ceiling above us.

  “No, I didn’t get it,” I said. “I really tried. What did you send?”

  She smiled, shook her head slightly. “You try sending me something tonight, okay?” Pacing my tiny kitchen while I sliced tomatoes for my lunch, she said nothing for several moments. “What’s happening here, with us, I mean?” she said finally, smiling with her mouth and frowning with her eyes.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I wasn’t looking for this—falling in love with you.”

  My stomach flipped over. “Me neither.”

  I placed the paring knife in the sink and wiped my hands on a kitchen towel, trying to steady my hands. As she passed me, I reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. She spun to face me, and I leaned down to kiss her, shocking myself with my audacity. It was a gentle kiss; we joined tentatively at first, then more passionately, releasing the tension built over the weeks. The softness of her lips amazed me.

  “Wow!” she whispered after we stepped apart.

  I clasped my hands behind my back to keep them from trembling. “What are we going to do now?”

  She shook her head, kissed me softly again, and left for work.

  “I’m not attracted to women,” I wrote to my friend Nancy in Indiana; the friend who in high school had known me as boy crazy, who had taken me to get a pregnancy test in college. She was married now, pregnant for the first time. “But I’m falling in love with this person,” I wrote. Instead of mailing the letter, though, I hid it in my journal.

  Over the next months, I was torn. On weekends, Pam and I walked our dogs together on the Berkeley campus, ate dinner in town, and held hands in the dark watching art films at the UC Theater. We sat kissing in one of our cars before parting for the night.

  The excitement, novelty, and temptation to act out, to radically part with what was expected of me fought with my need to keep things unencumbered and safe. “I just want a normal, happy home life and family,” I wrote in my journal. Normal. But normal was changing. I’d become friends with the gay men at the stationery store, had been called a fag hag one night outside a disco by a carload of boys cruising by. I was no longer afraid of a lesbian brushing against me, but I still couldn’t share this with my family and friends. My Indiana friends and family did not openly disdain gays and lesbians, but I think we had shared an unacknowledged sense of superiority, even relief, that we were not that way.

  As my friendship with Pam deepened, I wanted to believ—needed to believe—that my parents thought life was more interesting, more harmonious, when differences were embraced rather than dodged. But it was one thing to rent an apartment to a gay florist, another to learn your daughter was kissing another woman and contemplating making love with her.

  Even after kissing Pam, I didn’t feel “gay,” and I didn’t think being gay happened like this, so immediately. Everything I’d read suggested that people suspected they were gay at least by adolescence, and that was not my experience. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me. I also couldn’t understand what was wrong with something that felt this good, this right. How could it be wrong to love someone? Eventually, I even began to feel slightly superior to heterosexuals. Look what I’m experiencing, I thought, I bet you aren’t as enlightened as I am. But I was still confused, and sad that I couldn’t share what was happening to me with anyone.

  After several weeks’ titillation, kissing, and tentative touching, one evening I took Pam’s hand and led her to my bedroom. Clothed, we lay next to each other on my bed, and with fingers, lips, and tongues, explored skin hidden under shirts and slowly unzipped jeans.

  I stopped dating men. Every Friday evening, I loaded my laundry basket and my dog into my Nissan Sentra and drove the ten miles to Pam’s house for the weekend. We were in what we called Phase One of our relationship: in love and hot for each other.

  At work, we behaved with collegial reserve. We feared that telling the truth could have caused us irreparable harm. Although it was hard to imagine, I believed my family might disown me, and I’d read about gay teachers being fired, even in the late ’80s, even in California. When people at work asked about my love life, I shrugged and laughed. Sometimes I invented boyfriends, conjuring up men I’d dated in the past. While I was more in love than I’d ever been and wanted nothing more than to be with Pam seven days a week instead of two, inside I was a mess. I had a huge secret, and I hated keeping it. I asked my mother to call me on Thursday evenings instead of Saturdays, making up something about a ceramics class so I wouldn’t have to tell her why I wasn’t home on the weekends.

  On Sunday evenings, I reluctantly packed up my clean laundry, led my dog to the car, and returned to my apartment. I had many friends, a strong sense of community in my adopted state, but this secret disconnected me from my circle. I began to grind my teeth in my sleep, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by the return of the dream that had chased me since college.

  In the dream, I can’t find my way back to the dormitory after classes. I wander outside, my breath quickening; I can’t locate the right building. Then I’m inside a dorm,
roaming its halls looking for my room. The building is usually a tower, often the halls are circular, and I trudge around and around looking for a door that looks familiar. I climb the stairs to try another floor, but I never find my room.

  Months after our private oceanside ceremony, Pam and I were still giving each other monthly anniversary cards, calling each other “Sweet Love,” and spending hours in bed exploring each other’s bodies. Falling in love with her had fulfilled me, excited me. And it still confused me. I was still unsettled by the way my life had strayed off my carefully plotted course: love, marriage, baby carriage. As a teenager, I’d had crushes on boys in school and infatuations with male rock stars and movie stars. I’d covered my bedroom walls with magazine posters of long-haired, smooth-faced boys with sharp jaws and baby-blue eyes. I loved Shaun Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, Davy Jones.

  I read everything I could find in the library about how sexual orientation develops, and most anecdotal evidence was consistent: From a young age, gay men and lesbians had some inkling of being different. For most, falling in love with someone from the same gender did not come as a surprise, but felt as if something finally fit.

  Not me. As a child, I sat on my bedroom rug orchestrating elaborate weddings for my Barbie doll, staging my own future ceremony, directing the action, and dressing her in glimmering gowns and those ubiquitous spiky heels; my brother’s G.I. Joe doll waiting for her at the end of the aisle.