A few years later, with postpartum depression pressing me flat to the floor, I told a psychologist that I thought I might be gay. I asked her why this pesky festering feeling would choose now to rise to the surface after my successful years of ‘keeping a lid on it.’ She said that the PPD wiped out whatever resources I was using to suppress it and that I should do something. It took a few years, but eventually I did make it out of the marriage, carrying with me one of the two bookcases, one of the two beds, and a great weight of guilt about the broken man and tiny children I was leaving behind.
That year was the first time I financially supported myself. It was a time of struggling with a new sexual identity, for which I was prepared; and also a time of struggling with a new feminist identity, for which I was not. It was the first year that I saw how entrenched the gender roles of childcare are, with the boys’ dad quite prepared to hand over childcare responsibilities to the next available woman (his new partner), in spite of the conversations we’d had about “equality” early in our married life. It led me, despite years of antipathy toward women who whined about their men, to start saying, “I’m not a man-hating lesbian, but sometimes I am.” Those arguments with the boys’ dad over childcare made me feel lost. He felt my demands were excessive, evidence of my new fierce lesbian politics. I just wanted to make sure the father of my children took day-to-day care of them and taught them that men are capable of working and parenting, just as are women the world over. I am still surprised that the father of my children is so locked into these gender roles that he will not tolerate my view on this at all. It reminds me of Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
There were some light moments along the way. As is common in small towns, the scandal filtered down through other families, into the flapping ears of their own children. In that first year I visited the boys for their birthday, and was walking about the garden supervising the small groups of seven-year-olds that had congregated under trees and on the trampoline. A bunch of them had their heads together over some secret, and I overhead one of them say, “Their father? He’s a lesbian.” I was in such foreign territory—kids I didn’t know talking about me, my boys’ birthday party that I hadn’t organized—that I walked away, giggling to myself, without setting them straight. Another time, I was sitting with someone at work who was a colleague of a colleague. While trying to make small talk she said automatically, “So, what does your husband do?” I stuttered something about not having a husband, but I was struck afterward by how acceptable it was to open a conversation that way.
In the first few years I found myself learning a new kind of militancy, a new understanding of how ingrained societal roles are. I was learning about the connections and differences between lesbian and feminist politics, which seemed to be like a sisterhood: a deep-rooted affinity marred by occasional instances of back-stabbing and much sniping. My politics, although much bolder than previously, were far too timid for those rabid lesbian women who wouldn’t let me bring my sons—by then eight years old—to the Reclaim The Night march. The way some of these women spoke about men disgusted me, and this reception from the “true” lesbians was the most surprising thing about coming out.
I moved to a town in Australia that is famous for its lesbian population, but I found it hard to make friends. At first, there didn’t seem to be any other women who had children, but in my years there many lesbian couples conceived, using friends or formal institutions to provide sperm. It became such a phenomenon that one disaffected woman, reciting her poem at an open mike night, described the town as being full of “sperm-hungry lesbians.” It got a laugh, and some women made cat-claw motions in half-jest. Although I was surrounded by the people I had been looking for all those years, I still couldn’t find myself reflected in those faces.
About halfway through my time there, I spent a few months in England and managed to find the local group of women who met for coffee once a week. That group was entirely different. Many women had come out of marriages and had children. I really identified with conversations about how to negotiate these past relationships, and I enjoyed not having the “analysis to paralysis” and pop psychology I had seen at home.
They were a stark contrast to the hometown women, who had another language, and a whole system of categorizing people that I had known nothing about. It was eye opening when they told me about butches, femmes, baby dykes, hippie dykes, OWLs, lipsticks . . . but it was also limiting. If you couldn’t be placed immediately into a category then there just wasn’t a place for you. You had to sell yourself, bedazzle them, to fit in. My partner, who I met in that town, also remembers the feeling of having exactly one and a half minutes to pass the test to get into the clique. She was smart enough to realize immediately that she didn’t want to be part of a group that operated that way, but it took me a bit longer. I understand the need for identity tags, I just expected that lesbians would be able to use them to include people, not exclude them. I feel old enough now to see how naive that was of me.
It’s a small cost for all that I’ve gained. It was such a revelation for me to have sex with a woman, to touch and smell a woman, to feel so connected. I still remember a dinner scene from the boarding school days, when I was in grade eight and almost the youngest at the table, and two girls were “eeewww”-ing and “grroooossss”-ing over the question “Can you imagine what it would be like to kiss a girl?” I remember thinking to myself, Anything you say now is going to get you in trouble. Just shut up. I could very well imagine what it would be like. I’d had some practice at imagining it by then. The stress of maintaining that facade, of watching what I say, who I look at, and how I respond, has gone.
I look back to that day at the kitchen sink, and I wonder now what was on that list of points in my head that I needed so badly to remember. I think they had something to do with not allowing cancerous secrets to eat me away, something to do with modeling courage for my children, and a conviction that people have the right to be who they are. The beauty of remembering that moment now is that it doesn’t matter what was on that list. I got here.
Falling for Leah
Amelia Sauter
The first thing I noticed in Leah’s apartment was the photo of the smashed-up white Dodge Daytona on her refrigerator. The front end was wrecked and twisted. Leah explained matter-of-factly that she had intentionally driven into a bridge railing six months ago after she caught her then-girlfriend in bed with another woman. Of course she didn’t want to kill herself, she told me, she just wanted her girlfriend to see her die, which was totally different because the act was intended to make her girlfriend feel bad, not to hurt herself. I began to wonder if coming here was a good idea. When Leah opened her lower kitchen cupboards to show me how all five of them were brimming with empty cheap vodka and Gilbey’s gin bottles, I was sure I’d made a mistake.
“Maybe I should go home,” I said, referring to the ashram-turned-wellness-center where I was living and Leah was working in the kitchen.
“I’ll walk you,” Leah said.
Two months earlier, in the cold belly of winter, I had landed at Kripalu Yoga Center, not long after the guru jumped ship when he was caught doing the hanky panky with some big-bosomed disciples. My arrival in the Berkshires marked the end of a year living out of the back of my bright yellow pickup truck, which was decorated with flower power stickers and a fat padlock to keep out other wanderers.
During most of my travels, my boyfriend, Spud, accompanied me. I was only twenty-five, and I did not know how to be alone yet. But I wanted to explore the country with someone. He didn’t know how to drive and eventually he drove me crazy, so I finally I ditched him on the last leg of my trip, which included a four-month work-study at Kripalu, where I planned to (insert cliché here) find myself.
I noticed Leah right away. She had chin-length strawberry-blond hair that fell into her face when she placed the food pans in the buffet, and
she carried herself confidently, like, well, a lesbian. For a straight girl, my gaydar was spot on. Attending an all-girls Catholic high school in the 1980s did not encourage alternative thinking, but from an early age all of my friends were girls, and starting in college, they were all lesbian-identified or bisexual. I, on the other hand, was boy-crazy. Sure, I fooled around a couple times with girls to see what it was like, but everyone does that, right? Right? I even slept with a close friend after college, which pretty much freaked me out and simultaneously wrecked our friendship. Each awkward experience with a woman made me more certain that I was just a curious straight girl, cursed to spend her life in bed with the guys. Those lesbians had it made.
Leah followed me down to the laundry room one night at the ashram and offered to carry my laundry basket back to my dorm for me. On the stairs, she turned and said, “You wouldn’t want to go out with me sometime, would you?”
“Okay,” I responded hesitantly. She was so cute in the way she asked, expecting that I would reject her, I just couldn’t say no. I would tell her I wasn’t gay later.
And I did. On our first date the following week, I blurted out at the Dos Amigos Mexican restaurant, mid chip-dip into the salsa, “I’m not gay, and I’m not going to sleep with you.”
Leah paused for a moment, then said, “Who said I wanted to sleep with you?”
Leah asked a lot of other questions, too, about my family, about my upbringing, about my hopes and desires, about my slew of boyfriends. I was flattered by the attention, but after I saw her apartment I was sure she was crazy, or an alcoholic, or both. And then something happened. I got the flu, and lay in bed with her for ten days, and well, I found that I liked crazy. Maybe it was the doting, or the high fever, or her most excellent round, perky breasts, or her impulsive nature—but I liked her. She said that she wasn’t a psychologically damaged drunk—that it was just a phase—and I wanted to believe her. We watched B-movies in her one-room apartment, on her futon that dangerously doubled as both a couch and a bed. A few weeks later, she was dropping me off at the ashram in her no-longer-smashed-up car and she asked if she could kiss me. I said yes, and experienced the most sensual kiss of my life. I floated to my dorm room.
Cut to the climax: we slept together and it was fantastic. “You should have warned me that you were a screamer,” Leah said, as we lay on her futon and listened to the couple upstairs snickering.
“I didn’t know I was a screamer,” I said honestly. It had never happened before in the six years I had been having sex with boys. This was my first clue that my life was changing. At the same time, I had an ex-boyfriend back in Ithaca who still thought he was my boyfriend and was waiting for me to change my mind and come back and make babies with him. I did want to go back to Ithaca that summer, but not to Spud. Either way, I let myself dive into the relationship with Leah since it was safely temporary. The end was already in sight, so why not have some fun, because, damn, the sex was good.
We had been dating (read: having daily sex) for only six weeks when Leah blurted out she was in love with me. I could not say it back. I felt like a freaked-out adolescent in turmoil, newly discovering and exploring my sexual identity for the second time. I was fascinated by the differences between men and Leah. Men’s bodies were hard and resistant. Leah’s was soft, and it made space for mine when I pressed up against her. Men felt like foreign creatures from another country, or another planet, and Leah felt so familiar. Men smelled like sweat and gym shorts. Leah’s sweet scent reminded me of peaches and honey.
I decided to postpone my exodus to Ithaca until the fall. Instead, I took an evil slave-like job at a bed-and-breakfast in Provincetown for the summer, three and a half hours from Leah and Kripalu. I was eager to live in a community that would support my newfound relationship. Leah came with me to help me move. I still can’t explain what happened the day we said goodbye on the beach. We were sitting side-by-side as the sun set, tasting the salty air and listening to the waves crash. I was building spirals of pebbles and seashells on my bare thigh when suddenly our connection hit me in the head, in the womb, and in every nerve of my body like a bolt of lightning. It was like a floodgate opened inside of me, a gate that I didn’t know was there, holding back waters that I didn’t know existed. With seagulls and surf as the soundtrack, I started to cry. I realized I was madly in love with Leah. In three short months, I had gone from A (a hopelessly straight girl) to Z (hopelessly in love with a woman). I was ecstatic and overwhelmed and terrified.
I don’t remember swimming in the ocean that summer, or eating fried oysters at the Lobster Pot, or getting ice cream in the middle of the night at Spiritus, or anything else I might have done in the few hours each week that I wasn’t working. All I remember is having sex. On the beach. In my truck. In the tiny closet that masqueraded as my bedroom, kitchen, living room, and love den. Leah and I saw each other every weekend. She drove a hundred miles an hour in her speedy sports car to make the three-and-a-half-hour trip in two and a half hours, and I tried to do the same in my ancient pickup truck that staggered along at sixty miles an hour and left me stranded on the side of the road twice.
When I wasn’t with Leah, I worked. Kathy and Kathleen, the cranky lesbian couple who owned Smuckers Bed and Breakfast, were in their mid-forties and retired from their day jobs as lawyers. They were thrilled that a college graduate had applied to clean for them and had hired me on the spot, but my brain would not be required for the rest of the summer. I spent my mornings tidying up after happy vacationers and making up advertising slogans for the B&B like, “Fuck Her at Smuckers.” My sink, shower, and hot plate were down some back stairs in a dank, windowless basement that had low ceilings and a bulb hanging in the center of a bare room, giving it the homey feel of a jail cell.
I had never met so many wealthy people before, nor had I ever been surrounded by so many gay people. But I was an outsider looking in. Women tended to visit Provincetown to vacation with their lovers, and gay men came to Provincetown to pretend women didn’t exist.
I met one single, older woman who was vacationing alone at Smuckers. She paid attention to me, sympathized about coming out, and bought me pizza and Corona. I told Leah over the phone, “At last, I made a friend.”
Leah flipped. “She’s hitting on you!”
“But she knows I’m with you,” I argued. “I talk about you all the time.”
“She doesn’t care! Lesbians have no boundaries with friends, don’t you know that?” Clearly I had a lot to learn.
Now, let’s pause for a minute to talk about being young and gay in the Berkshires, which was where I moved at the end of the summer so I could be near Leah. What seemed to be true was that kids ran off when they turned eighteen and did not return until they could start collecting Social Security. The snobby New England towns were dominated by elderly, art-gobbling senior citizens who visited for the summer and drove so slowly that you felt yourself aging as you sat behind them in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Homosexual sightings were uncommon. The gays were either in the closet, at the theater, or in the dive bars.
Leah liked to tell me that I wasn’t a lesbian. I didn’t notice hot girls, but I was acutely aware of how men interacted with me. She told me I was a “Leah-bian,” and I wondered if she was right, that I was not gay but rather a straight girl with a girlfriend. She also liked to tell people that when she met me, I was a vegetarian, non-drinking heterosexual and that she corrupted me, turning me into a meat-eating, imbibing lesbian, which was essentially true. But I could not relate to her lesbian friends who were smoking-drinking-cheating-swearing-lying softball players, a couple of whom I rented a room from. I did not have any of my own friends. I tried to start a coming-out peer support group but the only people who showed up were middle-aged, transgendered men who looked like they’d been accepting fashion tips from Tootsie. I found a lesbian support group an hour away in Northampton, but I turned around and left when I realized the facilitator was the woman that my housemate was having an affair with
behind the back of my other housemate. I was in love, and I was terribly lonely.
Fast-forward two and a half years: Leah remained impulsive, zooming through life in the fast lane, and I was still madly in love and lonely. Leah and I were now living together, renting an artsy, renovated barn in the country. I graduated from SUNY Albany with a master’s degree in social work (I had started a boring grad school program shortly after relocating since I did not want to admit I was moving to the Berkshires just for a girl). Coming out to my parents was awkward and required an adjustment period, but they were not surprised. They told me they suspected I was gay for a long time, which was funny, because I hadn’t known yet. Most everyone else in my life (none of whom lived in the Berkshires) took the news that I had a girlfriend as if I had informed them I got a new haircut.
Coming out to people I didn’t know was much more complicated. I never knew when or how or if I should tell them. Inevitably, I had to come out, to landlords, x-ray technicians, employers. As a therapist at an all-girls residential treatment program, I was expected to keep my sexuality a secret, though the other staff had spouses and children who would visit them at work and interact with the girls in the program. Was I married, the girls would ask me, or did I have a boyfriend, and I would feel the frustration and awkwardness of not knowing what to say and having no one to help me find the words.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 24
