God, she was certainly good at it! She knew a tremendous amount about sex, and she had what I guess you could legitimately call a natural talent. Her eyes were a tremendously seductive instrument. She could get me wet just by giving me a long look. I could melt just meeting her eyes. And she had slender hands with very long fingers, and she let her fingernails grow, and she would play her nails along the tops of my thighs and sometimes I could come just from that. And she loved to eat me, and I adored being eaten, and sometimes we would be together like that for hours and I came more times than I could possibly keep track of.
Of course, I wanted to do the same for her, and although at the beginning of our relationship she made it clear that she didn’t want to switch roles, we did so occasionally. I was very anxious to find out what it was like, how it felt to do it to someone, and it wasn’t as though she disliked it, just that she preferred the butch role. I was able to make her have an orgasm, but she evidently got more pleasure out of making me come than of coming herself. I didn’t understand this at the time. In later relationships with other girls I found the same thing happening myself. It would depend on my partner, on the type of person she was and how I felt about her. I do know, though, that the relationships with other women that have had the most devastating effect on me, the ones that have injured me most when they turned sour, were ones in which I preferred a butch role and got my greatest pleasure from the pleasure I was able to give the other person.
Of course, not all relationships have a butch-femme division, and for me personally, I think I’m most genuinely comfortable when there’s no such distinction, or a vaguely defined one. I have a theory that the butch in a relationship plays a dominant role on the surface but is actually very subtly dominated by the femme, and is the one who does most of the giving and sustains most of the pain.
I still think of Barbara from time to time. I can remember just what her body was like and just how she made me feel. I’m not usually like that; I have a tendency to lose interest in partners once they move out of my life, and I cease to think often of them or to care a great deal about them. But Barbara was special, if only because she was the first. A couple of years ago I learned that she had killed herself. I don’t remember the details. I hadn’t seen her or heard from her in I don’t know how many years, and I had ceased to believe that she was still important to me in any way, but when I heard she was dead it went through me like a dose of salts. I was shaky and weepy for days.
• • •
Despite its impact, Erica’s relationship with Barbara lasted only a matter of months. It ended with the close of the school term, and after summer vacation, spent partly with her father and partly with an aunt and uncle, she was entered at yet another school.
For the next several years her contacts were exclusively homosexual. Although she knew rather little about homosexuality at the time she began with Barbara, she was to learn a great deal about it during the following years, through both firsthand experience and considerable reading. She had several intensive affairs and a great many casual conquests.
• • •
Lesbians don’t usually go in for hit-and-run sex the way so many faggots do. Not all faggots, of course, but for a great many of the ones I’ve known there’s a great kick in having sex with total strangers in the park or a public toilet, and another kick in keeping score and seeing how many numbers you can run. I don’t think there’s any equivalent of this among gay girls. I’ve known guys who would talk dreamily about some time when they were on their knees in a lavatory taking on all comers, maybe going down on two or three dozen men in the course of a day. I’ve never known a lesbian who wouldn’t find that concept distasteful in the extreme. Possibly it’s because the idea of compulsive loveless promiscuity is compatible with male sexuality but not with female sexuality.
This doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a one-night thing. I can, with either a man or a woman. But only if I have some sort of feeling for the person, not necessarily an emotional feeling, but something that makes the person special to me, if only for one night. There was a time when I was a lot more aggressive sexually than I’ve ever been since. My last year at school and my first two years in college—my only two years in college, actually. I took a special pleasure then in spotting a girl who had never had homosexual relations and bringing her out. I behaved more or less like a female Don Juan in such occasions. I wasn’t like that constantly, but if I saw a girl, preferably a younger or less experienced girl, and if she turned me on, I would launch a long campaign to get her.
You would be surprised how often I was successful. In this respect I would say that it’s easier for a female homosexual than a male. There’s not as much inhibition about lesbianism, and girls who are fairly sure of themselves as heterosexuals may be willing to give it a try just to see what it’s all about.
As for my own motivations, I’m not too sure what they were at the time. A large part of it, I’m sure, was a desire to reassure myself of my sexual expertise and my attractiveness. I had grown up thinking of myself as unattractive, and it’s taken a lot of sexual success to show me otherwise. I was never fond of my body or of my facial appearance, I didn’t think I was pretty, and being accepted on a sexual basis does a lot to improve anyone’s self-image.
For another thing, I was having a lot of trouble defining and accepting my sexual identity. I had no understanding of the concept of bisexuality at the time, and was ambivalent in my feelings about being a lesbian. I didn’t doubt that I was a lesbian, but wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Sometimes I tried to assert myself as homosexual, to behave in an unmistakably homosexual fashion, as if to prove that I accepted my place in life—which is one reason I went to quite so many schools. It was all right to be gay, they didn’t dare expel everybody who was like that, but it was emphatically not all right to be so patently obvious about it.
Still, this was obviously a method of proving something to myself, and something I didn’t entirely believe. If I was so sure I was gay, and so content to be gay, I wouldn’t have been going to bed with boys.
• • •
Erica had sex with several boys before she entered college. One was a boy she met on a dance weekend. The others, including an older man, were liaisons arranged during summer vacation and semester break.
• • •
The first time was terrible. I didn’t know the boy, he wasn’t attractive or personable, and I was just using him in the same way that he was using me. He wanted to get laid and I wanted to find out whether or not I was Dumb Dora Dyke. It was a fiasco, of course. He didn’t know anything at all about exciting me. A little kissing—I remember his breath was awful—and a little cumbersome breast-squeezing, and then zoom for the main target. I don’t suppose he knew what a clitoris was, or where it was located. He just jabbed his finger in and out in an annoying way. Then he got his cock in me, and it hurt, and he gave a couple of thrusts and considerately took his cock out in time to squirt all over my skirt, which was bunched up over my belly.
The whole thing was more distasteful and unpleasant than it was painful, and there was absolutely no pleasure in it. I think it would have been an awful enough introduction to screwing for a totally inexperienced girl, but it was considerably worse in my case, because instead of having to worry that I was frigid, well, I knew I wasn’t frigid. I had been with girls who really knew how to excite me, and I had had very enjoyable sexual relations with them, and on the other hand I had had this terrible experience with this clod. I came to the obvious conclusion that I was a lesbian, as I’d always thought I was, and I came to the further conclusion that no woman really enjoyed having a man fuck her, because, after all, what was there to enjoy?
I thought the sperm was awful, too. Coming all over my skirt like that, the whole idea made me want to gag, and I developed a distaste for sperm that lasted for a long time.
Even now, when I’m going down on a man, I have to love him quite a bit in order to want him to come in my mouth. A
nd even then I have to almost consciously suppress the gagging reflex.
The fact that I kept trying with other boys certainly indicates I wasn’t that secure about being a lesbian. And I had better luck with other lovers. It wasn’t until I picked up an older man, though, that I really had any reason to expect that I was bisexual. I did get a certain amount of pleasure with some of the boys I balled, but it was nothing spectacular, nothing to compare to the pleasure I received from female lovers.
The man—I’m sure it’s a weird mental block that keeps me from remembering his name—was someone I met on summer vacation before I started college. I had a job at a children’s camp in New England, not as a counselor, but as a sort of Gal Friday to the Camp Director, typing, and answering phones and running errands. I took the job because a girl I was close to was also going to be working there, and then she came down with mononucleosis, and I took the job anyway because I didn’t know what else to do with the summer. But I didn’t have anything going for me in the way of sex and I wasn’t interested in anyone on the staff, and also was afraid to come on to anybody because I didn’t want to lose the job.
I used to get one day a week off, a day and a night, and the usual policy was to hitch into the nearby town and catch a movie or something, and usually hitch back the same evening, rather than pay for a room anywhere. This one afternoon I went to a movie and then went somewhere for a cup of coffee, and this man and I got to talking. I don’t really think his main objective was to pick me up. I think it just started as an ordinary conversation.
He probably reminded me of my father. I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, but I can’t think of any other explanation for the fact that at one moment we were having a perfectly innocuous conversation about nothing important and the next minute I was baring my soul to him, telling him everything about my sex life and how I was a stone lesbian and like that.
He wasn’t really that old. I suppose he was in his mid-thirties. Which gives you an idea how young I was, thinking of him as an Older Man.
He was marvelous at drawing me out. I told him absolutely everything, and he said it sounded to him as though I was more likely to be bisexual than exclusively homosexual, both because of my personality and the fact that I had not always been a hundred percent turned-off with boys. We talked about this, and eventually he said he’d like very much to make love to me, if only for the sake of experimentation.
I wasn’t surprised when he said this. I was already thinking of him in sexual terms. Possibly this was an oedipal thing, or it may have been more a case of his being the first man I’d ever had an intimate conversation with. He was the first man I’d ever had sexual feelings about, certainly. I’d responded after a fashion to other boys in the course of sex, but I’d never had a specific urge for any of them before getting down to business.
We went to a hotel, and I discovered the difference between making it with a sensitive and experienced man and making it with a crude and inexperienced boy, and I found out it was all the difference in the world. He took a great deal of time to excite me, and actually brought me to orgasm several times before we got down to the serious business of fucking. When he was inside me I experienced real pleasure. It was the first time I’d ever experienced true pleasure in feeling a penis inside me. It was a wonderful feeling. Most important, it was a completely new kind of pleasure, and one that was categorically different from any sort of pleasure attainable with another woman. It was different. Not better, necessarily, but different.
He was able to sustain intercourse for a long time, an amazingly long time, and I had a very strong orgasm before he was finished. I don’t know if there’s any such thing as a vaginal orgasm, or if it’s better or worse than a clitoral orgasm, or any of that bullshit. I do know that I’ll go along with Germaine Greer to a degree when she says that a clitoral orgasm feels even better if you happen to have a cock inside you at the time. I think that’s more or less the way she put it. I never saw him after that night. I stayed all night with him in the hotel room, and he gave me a lift back to camp the next day, but he never suggested getting together again and I didn’t want to bring it up. Actually, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I wanted to see him again or not. I’d had a wonderful time and learned some important things about myself, but I think at the same time I was afraid of getting deeply involved with him. I’m almost certain he was married, although he never said so and I never asked. I’m sure he was, though, and I was generally nervous about getting hung up on him. I did go back to the place we met a couple of times, and of course I was hoping to run into him again, but as it turned out, either he was avoiding me or we just never happened to be at the same place at the same time.
He did give me one thing that was more important to me than a night of pleasure. He made me aware that there honestly was such a thing as bisexuality, and that I was bisexual myself. The discovery was both good and bad.
I wonder if I can explain that intelligently.
Well, it was good to know that I could respond to a person independent of their sex. It was good to know that I had the option of sex with a man or a woman, that I wasn’t cut off from the “normal” life of marriage and children. It was good to know that I could pick my own life-style without being automatically limited to life as a homosexual.
But it was also very difficult when you realize that I was having a lot of trouble establishing an identity in the first place. At least before this I had a certain tenuous hold on my identity as a lesbian. Now I wasn’t absolutely gay and I wasn’t absolutely straight, and that made it harder than ever for me to know just who in hell I was.
• • •
Her experience with the older man ultimately launched Erica into a sexual life-style which she has essentially pursued to the present. She alternated between male and female lovers, turning almost automatically from man to woman and back again. Neither relationship alone seemed to fulfill her sufficiently. An affair would be fully exciting at its onset, but before very long she would feel a strong urge for sex with a partner of the opposite sex from her lover.
Sometimes these pendulum swings from homosexuality to heterosexuality and back again involved nothing more than a change of partners. At other times they were accompanied by dramatic behavioral changes; once, upon taking a shy younger girl as a lover, Erica begun dressing in extremely masculine garb, all the way to jockey shorts. And on another swing of the pendulum she got married.
• • •
Getting married was absolutely the worst thing I could do, and at the time it seemed absolutely essential. I’d just had a very rotten time of it with a girl who was something of an emotional sadist, and I was rocky and suicidal, and I interpreted all of this emotional pain as being inherent in homosexuality. I decided that bisexuality was simply not a viable option, that you had to be all one thing or all the other. That a person might legitimately have bisexual impulses, that it was highly probable that everybody had bisexual impulses, but that somewhere along the way, consciously or unconsciously, you had to decide which side you were on and spend the rest of your life being one thing or the other.
And I decided that I couldn’t be happy as a lesbian, and thus that I had to put homosexuality out of my life once and forever. I knew I enjoyed sex with men, and it didn’t seem impossible for me to find a man and marry him and have his babies and be a good wife and find satisfaction in that sort of life.
I was twenty-two at the time, and I suppose that’s not necessarily too young to get married, but it was certainly too young for me to get married. I think before you get married you ought to have a very clear idea of who you are. I had a very clear idea of who I intended to become, but it didn’t jibe with the facts that well.
He was a nice-enough guy, I guess. I don’t really feel like talking about him.
It’s a funny thing. While we were going together—and we lived together for a couple of months before we got married—well, all during that time, the idea of sex with a woman was absolutely unthi
nkable. I was perfectly sure that it had all been a phase I had gone through. I even worked up a theory to support it, that adolescence was a time for bisexuality, but that when you grew up you either blossomed into adult heterosexuality or got sidetracked into a permanent unhealthy pattern of homosexuality. And I was convinced I’d blossomed as no one had ever blossomed before, and all those girls I’d gone down on were already receding in memory, slipping like shadows into the dim depths of the past.
Then we got married and signed a lease on an apartment, and in very little time I began to get weak in the knees every time I saw a reasonably attractive woman on the street. Well, I told myself it was a perfectly understandable case of being slow to adjust to the idea of marriage, that I was a little nervous at having committed myself to live with this one man for the rest of my life, and of course I was not morally prepared to entertain desires for other men, so I was sublimating by having these unreal desires for women, since I knew I didn’t really want them and thus wouldn’t really attempt to do anything about them. In other words, it was a safe way for me to dream of cheating on my husband, and I would never actually do anything about it, and as I became more adjusted to the idea of marriage these desires would go away and everything would be fine.
It was a sensational theory. It sounds sensible doesn’t it? The only problem is that it bore no relationship to the actual circumstances.
It took a year and a half for the marriage to break up. In the course of it I had three very casual affairs. One with a man, a good friend of my husband’s. That was the first, and it was very purposeful on my part. I was still in love with my theory, you see. And I managed to sell myself on the idea that if I went ahead and violated this big taboo against adultery with a man, I would eliminate the reasons for this false desire for women. Obviously, the reason I tried this was that I was willing to accept myself as an adulteress but not as bisexual.
Sex Without Strings: A Handbook for Consenting Adults (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 12
