My fourteen-year-old self did get all breathlessly tingly whenever I watched the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox in the “Sweet Dreams” video; what with her angry orange buzz cut, sharkily seductive grin, and smacking pointer. However, I also spent much of the time I should have been studying algebra in Mr. McGlynn’s class writing stories with my friends about our imagined love affairs with various members of Duran Duran. While this might explain why I could barely manage a C in most of my math classes, it doesn’t really help me locate that stereotypical earth-shattering moment when I realized that girls were hot.
I didn’t date in high school. Not because I was against dating, per se, but I had the distinct teenage disadvantage of being both a brainiac and an introvert. My poor mother—herself well known as a boy chaser in her days of purloined cigarettes and Catholic school uniforms—could not understand it. I think she was in a state of despair over me. “Relax,” my father told her, “She’s got other things going on. She’ll date when she wants to.”
Never mind dating a boy. Dating a girl in my tiny hometown of less than three thousand people was not really going to happen either. That would have been the mark of rebellion, and frankly, I was too busy trying to keep my grades up so I could get the hell out of Dodge to bother with any of that. I had places to go and things to see. The way I figured it, all of the normal teenage rebellious drinking and drugging and screwing hoopla could wait until I was safely away in college. The closest I ever came to being a rebel was going stag to my senior prom. No one asked me, and while I didn’t care so much about going, I knew my mother would be dreadfully disappointed if I didn’t go. (I didn’t quite realize at the time that going stag would actually disappoint her even more than me not going at all, but we’ll chalk that up to youthful naiveté.) As it turned out, I ended up having a blast, which is more than can be said from one of my friends who had a showy and hysterical breakup with her boyfriend, and later drunkenly vomited all over her prom dress.
Once I actually arrived at college, I found that there were so many things to see and do and learn that I didn’t actually care too much about dating (or drinking or drugging or screwing, for that matter). I did go out on a single date with a fellow student who drove buses for the university, but he showed up late and automatically assumed he was going to get laid just because he bought me pizza. He learned the hard way that I’ve never been a woman that you want to assume anything about. There was also the roguish Brit in my Italian class whose charming accent and green eyes meant I spent less time on learning Italian and more on learning him (which again led to a less than stellar grade, and you’d have thought I would have learned by then to keep my head in the game, but alas). Sadly, I was far too tongue-tied to actually speak to the man, so that never got off the ground.
However, there was also my friend Angela. Ah, Angela. Adorable and sassy and funny and oh-so straight as can be. I was too uncertain of myself to even dream of approaching her romantically. Instead, I followed her around like a puppy dog, keeping my feelings most firmly hidden. I never tried anything with her, despite the torch I carried for her in my poor little gawky heart.
Do I regret my agonized silence? Oh, honey.
Here is the part where we interrupt our tale of my non-existent love life to make sure that you understand that I am notoriously clueless when it comes to the romantic intentions of others. My friends and family have, with a great deal of patience, informed me of numerous occasions when prospective romantic partners attempted (and failed) to attract my notice. I am always completely blindsided at the very idea that so-and-so might have had the hots for me. Really, I am that obtuse. To get my attention you’d have to be willing to hold a neon sign up over your head that reads “Sabrina U R Cute & Can We Do It K THX” or something. My lack of sexual entanglements is due far more to this cluelessness than any sort of frigidness or snobbishness toward potential partners. Or as one of my dearest friends put it, “For such a smart woman you are pretty dumb sometimes.”
I met my would-be husband during my third year at college. He was a new graduate student in our department. After a few months of getting to know each other, he told me to my face that he liked me and asked me out directly (a necessary step, as we have established). He was smart and witty, along with a plethora of other qualifications that made for good boyfriend material. I was appreciative of the attention, and my neglected heart jumped at the chance. I wasn’t aware that anyone else might have wanted me, and I was too inexperienced and too shy to ask anyone out on my own. I was, as they say, ripe for the plucking. He plucked me, and I plopped right into a relationship that would last me most of my twenties.
While it is true that we had a good relationship together for a few years, we never did have much of a sex life. I don’t attribute that to me not enjoying sex with men, however. (Although, as I have only had sex with one man, I could be wrong on that account.) Mostly I attribute it to him not being as much of a tiger in bed as he seemed to think he was. For many years I just figured it was my fault. How would I know any differently? He was the first person I had sex with, so if, as he claimed, all of his former girlfriends were more than satisfied, the fact that I never had an orgasm must be my problem, right?
My boyfriend and I did get married after the inevitable moving in together, but it was a bad idea. My father died unexpectedly three months before the wedding, and I was devastated. My entire world was turned upside down, and I did not come out of the grieving period the same woman who went into it. Death changed me, and my husband never seemed very comfortable with the person I had morphed into. The post-parental-death Sabrina was blunter and less inclined to deal with other people’s failings. I had become, as one of my friends so succinctly put it, the No Bullshit Woman. And the No Bullshit Woman? She was not altogether sure that having only one lackluster lover for her entire life was really going to cut it.
After some discussion and negotiation on the part of my husband and myself, I took a lover. A woman lover. And it was fun. I liked it. In retrospect, she was a pretty selfish and unimaginative lover herself, but I enjoyed getting to know a woman’s body. I wasn’t orgasming, but I was having a blast. After a few months, my husband suggested that she come and live with us, and we moved into a larger home to accommodate a third adult.
Because she was now living with us, I decided that it was time to “officially” come out to my friends and family. I drove up to my mother’s house, nervous as hell, hoping that she would not freak out too badly at what I was going to tell her. I sat her down, and in my most serious voice told her that I needed to talk to her about something life-changing and important.
She looked very nervous.
I explained that what I had to tell her was difficult for me, and I hoped that she would listen and remain calm.
She started to look scared.
“Momma . . . I am a lesbian. Or at least bisexual. I am sleeping with a woman.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she stared at me for a moment before leaning forward and walloping me a good one on my upper arm.
“JESUS CHRIST! I thought you were going to tell me you had CANCER. I don’t give a shit if you are a lesbian! Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
And that was that. My mother was not keen on the whole idea of the threesome—she was afraid it was going to lead to nothing good, and of course she was right, in that infuriating way that mothers are—but the fact that I was sleeping with a woman? She just did not care. She still doesn’t, and in fact, has photographs of my current family on her bulletin board at work. Coming out to my mother helped me to understand that all my mother had ever wanted for me was my happiness, and she did not care about my sexual orientation or anything else, so long as she knew that I was content in my life.
The rest of my family and my friends were fairly blasé about the whole thing. I come from liberal folk on both sides of the family tree, and if any of them discussed my sexual proclivities then they didn’t do so in front of me. On the contrary, my m
aternal side made a special effort to be very welcoming to my lover, and I will always be grateful for that. My friends were also firmly in the bleeding-heart-liberal camp, and were already aware that I liked women, and were not at all fazed by it. The only negative reaction I had came from one friend, who tried to dismiss my attraction to women. She suggested that the only reason I was attracted to women was because I was sexually unsatisfied with my husband. She went on to further suggest that if I had the “right” man to satisfy me that I would no longer want and/or need a woman. You’d think that this sort of attitude would only come from the stereotypical macho blowhard trying to get into a woman’s pants; but that’s where you’d be wrong. The funny thing is that she’s not the only woman who has suggested that to me. I’m not sure if it is due to plain old garden-variety homophobia, or if it is due to the mindset of the kind of woman who relies upon men to define her own self-worth; but it still throws me off whenever I hear it.
The downside of taking a lover was that my husband was not as comfortable with it as he said he was. After my lover moved in with us, we tried a threesome. That was a disaster. My lover was not bisexual, and wanted nothing to do with my husband sexually. He thought himself intellectually superior to her, and looked down on her. I was looking for someone who would take care of me both emotionally and sexually, and neither of them was up to that task. Our house fell apart, but I managed to drag myself out of the wreckage by sheer force of will.
When I made the choice to divorce my husband, I unsaddled the lover as well. Truth to be told, we were not suited for a long-term relationship. I had very little in common with her, and didn’t even really enjoy her company all that much. Despite her violent and angry reaction to my news, she managed to find herself a new lover within weeks. In retrospect, if not for the insistence of my husband that she come to live with us, I think our affair would have been fairly short-lived. I was being ignored sexually and emotionally by my husband and was so gratified to have any kind of attention paid to me at that point that I mistook my own gratefulness for love.
It was after I had moved out and started the divorce proceedings that I met my current wife. We met on the Internet. Not only was it on the Internet, we didn’t even have the decency to meet up on an Internet dating site. No, we met up on an X-Files fansite messaging board, and she was from Finland, of all weird places. She was straight. She was happily childless. She even had a former runway model turned psychology professor for a live-in boyfriend. But oh, she was funny, she was full of passionate justice, she flipped all of my switches and I hadn’t even seen what she looked like yet. None of it mattered. I wanted her. I did. I wanted her, no holds barred. And me, shy little gawky Sabrina, Sabrina who never dated, Sabrina who spent all of her free time reading and rarely drank and who had never traveled or done anything remotely daring? I went for it. I went for it, and I used every single weapon in my arsenal: I used my humor, I used my intelligence, I used my charm as the No Bullshit Woman and I went after that woman until I had her turned upside down and inside out. Who knew I had it in me? I was relentless. I ignored her when she told me she was straight and was not interested in women. I ignored her when she told me that it would be better for everyone if the former runway model and I got together and left her alone. I waved aside her insistence that she would rather die than ever be pregnant by assuring her that I would be responsible for the baby birthin’. I simply dug in my heels and waited out all of her protests and excuses and flashes of temper and finally, after nine months of a very, very bumpy ride, she gave in. She flew to California and right into my life. A year later, I followed her back to Finland.
So there I was, in an “official” lesbian relationship. No man around. We could go to Gay Pride and everything. I expected it to feel different than my straight relationship—and it did—but not for the reasons I was expecting. It felt different to be in a relationship where my partner actually loved all of my shortcomings instead of mocking them, where I was encouraged to be who I was instead of being molded into a person that made my partner look better, where the sex was mind-blowingly fantastic. It felt different to be in a relationship with someone who actually wanted children and was willing to work hard at parenting. The relationship felt different, but it wasn’t because my partner was a woman. It was because my partner was Kia. It wasn’t her sex or gender that made things different. It was because I had chosen the right person, the person who loved me for me, and who wanted to be with me.
I’ve heard other women say that they wished they had a wife. When I’ve asked why, they’ve said it is because they want a good coparent, or someone who is emotionally available, or someone who will be nurturing, or any number of things that have far more to do with socialization than biology, in my opinion. There is no denying that men and women are socialized into certain roles. However, I’ve known men who were fantastic parents, who do the cooking and cleaning, who are emotionally available. We associate those qualities with women, but my wife will be the first person to admit that she isn’t one to be pigeonholed into the good wife category. Neither am I. While to outside appearances my wife may seem to fall into the more “butch” role while I take on the “femme” role, that’s only via a casual glance. Anyone who knows us well knows that she’s the hands-on parent, the gentle one, the one who looks out for everyone’s safety, who feeds and nurtures the children, the one who keeps all of our finances in place and makes sure appointments are met, and who will spend hours on the floor playing. I’m much quicker than she is, full of drive and impatience, the hands-off parent who cleans and occasionally bakes something decadent and delicious, who sings lullabies and makes fart jokes and can’t remember what day it is, no less when the kids need to go to the dentist. A friend of mine has asked me on several occasions who the “boss” is in our family. The answer is that there is no boss. We don’t do stereotypes well in this house.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I am attracted to people regardless of their biological sex or gender identity. The commonly accepted parameters of sex and/or gender are simply not important to me. They aren’t really all that important to my wife, either, which is probably why we are not part of the local lesbian parenting scene. We attended a few meetings, but we never felt like we fit in, so we stopped going. So much of the focus there was on the lesbian part of the relationship, and since we’ve never focused on that, we’re outside the sacred circle. In fact, my “yeah, okay, whatever” attitude toward identifying myself first and foremost as a lesbian has resulted in some lesbians claiming that I am not, in fact, a “real” lesbian. If living with a woman for ten years and having sex with her and kids with her and going to the courthouse and getting legally hitched and going through the process of having her adopt the kids doesn’t make me a “real” lesbian, then I am not sure that wearing a T-shirt that says, “I HEART PUSSY,” and forswearing men forever and ever amen is going to really make all that big of a difference. In some circles, the fact that I would not kick Hugh Jackman out of bed for snoring is the deal breaker. I am just never going to be lesbian enough. I find I can live with that.
We’ve come across very little in terms of discrimination in Finland. Same-sex civil unions, adoption, and immigration are already legal here, so we don’t need to go out and fight for those rights. It’s already against Finnish constitutional law to discriminate based on sexual orientation, and the one time that we experienced homophobia on an official basis, we complained, and the person in question was immediately required to undergo sensitivity training and we were assigned to someone else, with official apologies. Nothing to get worked up about there. On a cultural level, telling someone that God doesn’t approve of their relationship is considered unspeakably rude in this country, so I’ve never had anyone but American missionaries or immigrants from more conservative developing countries spout religious dogma at me. Most Finns I come across don’t seem to care one way or the other that I am a lesbian, and it’s not like everyone doesn’t know. We’re not ex
actly in the closet. The neighbors have pretty much figured it out, my coworkers at the community college where I teach English know, and Kia’s family is so grateful for the grandchildren they never thought they’d get that they practically worship at my feet. We are not, as a family, in the fight-or-flight mode that so many lesbian couples find themselves in all over the world. Because of that, we find we are, for the most part, able to just live life like everyone else.
It may not be possible to pinpoint the sudden realization that I liked girls—or boys, for that matter. It’s just always been a part of me, and it’s never caused me undue trauma. I know who I am, and I’m good with it. I’ve been lucky enough to have an accepting and open-minded family, and I got rid of any friends who didn’t accept me for who I am. I had the opportunity to relocate to a country where my sexual orientation is legally protected and accepted, and I don’t have to worry that my lesbian family will be legally treated any differently than if we were a straight family. So long as I am left alone to live my life in peace, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether others think I am not straight enough or gay enough or even thin enough. The death of my father taught me that life is too short to spend living it constantly worrying about whether or not others approve of me.
Annie Lennox, though? Yeah. Whooo. I’d still hit that.
Counting Down from Ten
Candace Walsh
You know, the last thing I wanted to do was like Jill.
“Jill is a goddess,” said Sam. “She’s an incredible artist, she goes to Vassar, and she’s really, really smart.”
Sizzle went my jealous streak. I had met Sam in the bathroom line of my first college off-campus party. Fall semester, freshman year. Homecoming weekend. Parents tucked into their sleigh bed at the cutesy bed-and-breakfast downtown. Little did they know that at the same time, I was drinking keg beer from a big plastic cup, within a gaggle of my shiny new dorm-hall friends, about to embark on a disastrous and knotty romantic endeavor.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 22