Buffering

by Hannah Hart

  It was great though, being hers. We spent so much time in my bed and in my bedroom that Lana once wrote me a note and slipped it under the door questioning if I was gay, or if I just really wanted to have sex before marriage. The implication being that sex before marriage with a woman simply didn’t count as sex because hey, what’s sex without a penis?17

  Anyway back to being young and obsessed. I couldn’t get enough of Emiko. I was just a clingy and smitten lil’ homo who was by her side as often as I could be. Walking across campus in the middle of the night to hold her while she took a nap from 2–5 a.m. It was more than enough for me though. I was content to be her security blanket because my only need was needing her.

  I shared with her my Faith and my nightly Bible readings. She even started attending Christian church groups of her own. She started attending more sermons than I did. Partly because as we fell deeper and deeper in love I was having a harder and harder time reconciling my two devotions.

  A relationship can be a great mirror for your virtues . . . but also your vices. And one of mine was my total abject denial about what a shitty relationship we were actually in.

  Our relationship was one large red flag. But I couldn’t see it because I was being my own red flag, too. I was trying to match her step for step, but we were walking on different paths. And it wasn’t until six months after being together, when I was packing to leave for Japan, that everything should have been so obvious to me, but I chose to ignore it.

  “I can’t believe this is over. I can’t stop crying.” She is crying on the couch of my sister’s apartment. She gave it to us for the night so we could have some “goodbye time” before I would leave for the airport. I was angry because she kept crying about me leaving and I didn’t understand why.

  “Jesus. Listen, I’m only going to be gone for four months okay? That’s nothing. That’s it!”

  “Yeah but you agreed with me when I said we couldn’t keep dating.”

  “Well, I mean, yeah, but whatever. Just because we aren’t ‘together’ doesn’t mean we are just going to stop loving each other? Dating is just a word! Love is a state.18 Our feelings aren’t changing, the way I feel about you is going to stay the same.”

  She looked at me with wide wet eyes and put her face in her hands again. “Nothing is going to be the same. It’s not going to be the same. We aren’t going to be like this.”

  I was uncomfortable and so confused. She was crying so much and in my mind her pain was proof of her love for me. I started kissing her to distract myself (or maybe both of us) from what she was saying. We had sex on the couch one last time. It was very fast and fumbly and unfulfilling. Nothing like the long gazes and slow soft touching we had been doing since we met. It felt like we were already changing, and I hadn’t even left yet.

  Naomi drove me to the airport and Emiko couldn’t bring herself to go. I texted “I love you I love you I love you” and just before I boarded my flight she wrote “I love you too” but somewhere deep down, I knew it wasn’t in the same way.

  The path to accepting your sexuality has to start somewhere. For those who identify as heterosexual, the childhood bliss of an early crush is typically encouraged and praised. Milestones such as your first date and the prom are celebrated by parents and friends.

  But when you’re anything other than straight, it’s more complicated; your growth gets shrouded and stunted. That’s why a lot of queer people, when they fall in love and get into a relationship for the first time, revert to a kind of prepubescent puppy love: spontaneous, impulsive, obsessive, and ecstatic. I’ve heard many people express annoyance at friends who “just came out and it’s totally cool and whatever, but do they have to talk about it all the time?” My answer to that is “Yes. Yes, they do. Don’t you remember puppy love? Well, imagine if you had to hide it for twenty years. So yeah, if they wanna gush about it, let them gush. There’s a first time for everything.”

  For me the path to self-acceptance meant accepting heartbreak. Emiko and I dated for only six months or so, but it took me years to get over her. I devoted hundreds of journal pages obsessing over every detail of every interaction we had postbreakup. What I’ve learned from rereading those pages and the countless retellings of our story is that our relationship had become a kind of microcosm for my struggle to accept my sexuality as a whole. Looking back, accepting heartbreak really meant accepting who I was.

  Before Emiko, I’d convinced myself that I was fractured and could never love. Figuring out that I’d actually just been raised super homophobic and thus really tortured about being a gay person. That was it. What a relief!

  I’m still working on letting go of many of the dark pieces of my past, but I’m proud (out and proud!) to say that being a lesbian isn’t one of them.

  If you’re reading this and you think that maybe you could love someone of the same gender (or nongender), all I have to say to you is this: Congratulations! You’re perfect and wonderful and more alive than you ever knew. Be proud of who you are because you’re already more than enough.

  1 There was always something to be done for the house: gardening, home repair, building, or organizing. I loved it because it meant going to Home Depot and maybe we could get one of those incredible hot dogs. Hope hope hope!

  2 Ya know. Falling in love and finding a partner and living an honest and whole life. No big deal.

  3 Dad’s House was Dad’s House. Mom’s House was Home.

  4 It wasn’t until middle school that I learned about pubic hair. The only frame of reference I had was my own body. When I first learned that “pubes” were a thing, I was revolted. Little did I know that that would be the beginning of my lifetime battle with sensitive fair skin and thick body hair. Oy.

  5 Whatever that means.

  6 Homophobia is a big, strong indicator of gayness: “How dare they be gay! And kiss each other . . . with those soft full lips . . . and maybe then they hold each other . . . and maybe even go to a farmer’s market after exchanging mutually gratifying acts of oral sex . . . How terrible to imagine!!”

  7 My best friend’s mom was the first one to call out my gayness. It was after I described an MTV performance in such detail that she asked, “Do you wanna be her or do you wanna do her?”

  8 . . . in my pants.

  9 Much.

  10 Which eventually switched to English Lit.

  11 Which eventually switched to Japanese.

  12 Which . . . actually, no, that stuck around for a bit longer.

  13 King James and NIV; I’d read and compare. Made it through both.

  14 : naruhodo : When you suddenly, or deeply, understand something or some mechanism of what someone is saying.

  15 Only her friends could call her Jeliz.

  16 Before she graduated, she finally told them. They came to graduation and celebrated with her and her girlfriend, now fiancée. All very warm and fuzzy.

  17 It’s hard for me to explain how much I love having sex with a woman without being labeled as man-hating. Which I find to be rather funny because I know plenty of men that don’t want a dick inside them so are they man-hating too?

  18 Love is a verb.

  BODY LANGUAGE

  Now that we’ve explored some tales of the human heart, I’d like to take a broader look and talk about the body itself. Blessedly, I’ve always felt aligned with my gender identity, but it took me years to understand my relationship between the presentation of that identity and presentation of myself: specifically my personal grooming and style. For me, I like to pay attention to this sort of thing because I am a lover of language and the words exchanged before any word is spoken at all.

  WILDCAT

  I identified strongly with my grade school mascot, the Washington Wildcat. Powerful and untamed, yet collected and docile when necessary, wildcats were aware yet unconcerned with what the other animals in the jungle were thinking. That was who I wanted to be. Unfortunately, in elementary school, I think I was more Grumpy Cat than a Wildcat—basically
summed up in this photo (I’m the one in the purple shirt):

  Or maybe more accurately in this photo:

  Yeah, that’s me.1 Now look at the girl next to me, all shiny and bright in her flowered skirt.2 That was not me.3 Growing up, I was a tomboy. My mom didn’t force us to conform to anyone’s preset notions of how girls should dress, and that was kind of a blessing. The exception was the four days a month we spent with Dad, when he and Jenny would force us to wear itchy dresses with suffocating tights and shoes that pinched. At home with Mom, the options were limited and we had no rules, which usually led to my wearing the same thing for a week at a time.

  In second or third grade, a kid I’ll call Andy pointed out to the whole class that I had only one pair of jeans. He could tell because he had been there when I fell on the playground and the asphalt had ripped them at the knee. It was clear that they hadn’t been washed and the hole hadn’t been sewn up. What he said in front of the class was something like “Ew! Why do you keep wearing the same pants?” I was silent and mortified.

  Looking back at this photo and my dirty jeans, I’m kind of shocked that the school never said anything. I can only imagine we must have smelled pretty ripe at times since we didn’t have a lot of underwear in our house. We didn’t own brushes either, and I can remember sitting in class and using pencils to explore the mats in my hair. Eventually my mom would just cut them out. I’ve always had thick hair, so it was never really a problem. There were always plenty of layers to hide the missing chunks.

  And I remember those shoes. God, I loved them. When we would go to Goodwill or look through the donation bags that filled our house, I always kept my eyes peeled for shoes with Velcro. I thought Velcro was the height of technology at the time, and clearly those were the shoes of the future. Someday everybody would be wearing them, and frankly there was no reason to learn how to tie shoes.

  I remember my dad and stepmom being frustrated because I didn’t really learn how to tie my shoes until some years after this picture was taken. I finally learned more out of embarrassment than necessity. Much of my education in body presentation came this way.

  Things were more complicated for Naomi in the style arena since she was older and cared more about her appearance than I did. She cared more about everything than I did, frankly. Our mother was never taught much about self-care (her own childhood marred by more extreme abuse and neglect), so she had no wisdom to share with Naomi. But Naomi never gave up hope that she could get it right. Every time she went to school excited about an outfit and came home crying after being bullied, I vowed to never care that much about the way I looked. Seemed like a whole lot of suffering for very little reward. The nineties grunge-era style arrived and it was kind of a godsend for us. Baggy ill-fitting clothes? Don’t mind if I do.

  So aside from wanting to make my father love me and think I was smart enough to tie my own shoes, as a kid I didn’t pay much attention to what others thought of my clothes. And then I got to middle school (cue the horror film sound track).

  TALK MORE, SMILE MORE

  Middle school was a different world. The kids in my class started showing up with lunch money instead of lunch bags. Kids were showing up in outfits from a place called “the Gap” and wearing makeup and talking about bands and brands. I never listened to music, didn’t own any CDs. I hated getting dressed, but I couldn’t wear an outfit for a week at a time anymore, because now people would gossip. I still didn’t brush my hair, but nobody ever teased me about that. I may not have had lunch money or good hygiene or nice clothes, but I began to realize that I had something else: I was funny. It didn’t matter how I looked or how I dressed as long as I could make people laugh. In sixth grade, a bully at school tried to get everyone to start calling me “pit stain” because of all the, well, yellow pit stains on my T-shirts. Once, when I was wearing one of my favorite shirts, he pointed out that he could “see my titties through my shirt.” I replied blankly, “What titties? Oh. These aren’t titties, I’m just fat.” The whole class laughed because I was very obviously, and unabashedly, chubby and flat-chested. With the laughter from my classmates on my side, I proceeded to point out that the only reason he could see them was because he was so short.

  That was the first and last time I was bullied in middle school. It was also the first and last time I bullied anybody else. Humiliating that kid in class didn’t make me feel any better. It didn’t feel good at all. I liked making people smile, and I didn’t like seeing the hateful/hurtful look in his eyes when he knew I had bested him. I would rather have made him laugh, too.

  But let’s get back to clothing. I had narrowly escaped being labeled “pit stain,” and suddenly I was well liked by my classmates and no one teased me about my appearance. I had a core group of friends, and at the center was my best friend, Rachel. All the families in Burlingame were well off, but Rachel’s was very well off. And everybody knew it. From the outside, I’m sure we seemed like the Odd Couple, but the truth was that we had a very deep bond. We gave each other so much in terms of love and companionship. Rachel’s family was incredibly generous, and Rachel’s mother, Jane, was especially compassionate to my situation. She was a beautiful woman both inside and out. She’d had a tough childhood herself and had worked her way through it to be the woman she is today. It was inspiring, really. Her daughter was inspiring, too. I was kind of in love with the whole family.

  With thick, dark hair, pale skin, and strong (these days people say “fierce”) eyebrows over piercing green eyes, Rachel was the prettiest girl in whatever room we were in. There was something powerful and passionate about her. I “wasn’t gay” at the time, but boy, was I supergay at the time.

  The first time I went over to Rachel’s house, my mom dropped me off and commented on what a beautiful home it was. She loved the manicured lawn out front. The way the flower pots framed the door. “These are the type of people we belong with,” she said. When I rang the bell and heard the melody that chimed, I was in awe. Even the entryway sang songs of your arrival. This was the pinnacle of life. Rachel’s house was big and smelled like a fancy store. It reminded me of walking into a Nordstrom or a Macy’s, where everything was cool and clean and hinted of perfume. But it was cozier than a store. It was a home. With two stories and carpets. Rachel and some of our other friends answered the door. She was excited to show me her room and mentioned that before going upstairs I had to take off my shoes. My stomach dropped.

  If underwear was hard to come by in my house, socks were scarcity itself.

  The socks we did have were so overworn that they held the shape of your foot when you took them off, hardened at the toe, stained, and smelly. I really didn’t want to take off my shoes, but Rachel’s room was upstairs, and the second floor was covered in a pristine white carpet. So there wasn’t much of a choice.

  I took off my shoes last and tried to lag behind as much as possible as our group walked up the stairs to Rachel’s room. I made it to the bedroom without incident, and as we sat on the floor, I positioned myself to hide my socks from view. Why I kept them on is beyond me. I really should have just taken them off and stuffed them into the soles of my shoes.

  “Rachel!” Jane called from the stairwell.

  “Yeah?” Rachel called back.

  “Come here please!”

  Rachel rolled her eyes and got up and went to talk to her mom. I followed because, well, probably because I didn’t have the social graces to know that she was supposed to be talking to her mother alone. I was kind of like a puppy.

  Jane was kneeling on the floor pointing to brown smears that were tracked on the freshly cleaned carpet.

  “Honey, who wore their shoes upstairs?”

  “Nobody!” Rachel was exasperated. She was a good daughter and knew the rules.

  “Well, then, where did these come from?” she asked, pointing to the stains.

  “I don’t know! Maybe it was Minnie.” Minnie was the family Maltese.

  Jane looked as if she wasn’t buying it, a
nd I don’t think Rachel knew the truth, but I did.

  “I think that it was my socks,” I spoke up and pointed to my feet. Jane looked up at me and then down at my feet and laughed. It wasn’t unkind, it was more like an exasperated, suddenly sympathizing laugh. We all stared at my two mismatched, once white socks with a tiny pinky toe barely showing to one side.

  “Okay, you take those off, those are filthy. We’ll just throw them away, and Rachel can give you some socks.” Jane was smiling.

  I bent down to take them off, and Rachel said “I can clean the carpet!” but I insisted that I could clean it, too. Rachel said we would clean it together. From that point on, we really did everything together.

  Rachel’s family did their best to help me out with anything I needed, from food to school supplies. Rachel and I had such an organic and immediate friendship that it never felt like charity to me. It felt natural. And of course, years later, I would end up living with them as I finished high school. They were all impeccably dressed and well manicured, and they offered to help me with those things, too. But I didn’t want to learn to do my own makeup—because I loved it when Rachel did my makeup for me. I’d sit on the sink in her bathroom, and she’d stand between my legs and gently paint my eyes and face. She’d line my lips and tell me to look up or down or to the side, and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her in those moments. She wasn’t typically an affectionate friend, so that was the most we’d ever touch. And when she was done, she would tell me I was pretty.

  Why would I ever learn to do my own makeup?

  WAXING AND WANING

  Middle school turned into high school, and high school for me was the dawn of my adulthood’s battle against body hair. Our mother never told us to shave our legs, instead insisting that if we never did we’d never grow dark hairs. This was true for her perhaps, always a woman with fine hair and barely visible brows, but for Naomi and I our situation was the opposite. Our father’s Jewish roots were embedded deep under our skin and were sprouting up with ferocious tenacity: thick black hairs that seemed to contradict the fairness of our eyes and face. Once, when I was talking to Naomi about the sheer volume of hair I was producing, she suggested that it was because I had too much testosterone and maybe I would need to get my hormones checked. “After all, you’re really strong and you’ve basically got a beard.”