“Dario? That’s so funny,” she mused. “We fuck. That’s it. He’s actually jealous of you—says I put you first.”
We both looked at each other and laughed.
“What happens when my pussy wants dick? What if I’m attracted to a man and want to have sex with him?” she asked. My chest tightened.
Maybe I wanted love to win because I’d spent nine years fantasizing about this. Yet, she was right—we would not work out. I didn’t know how to love openly, and as long as I lived under my parents’ roof and rules I’d be trapped. That was the moment I knew I had to break free. Unchain myself from the shackles of responsibilities passed down through generations of my family.
I had to create a new kind of reality. A life where I was free to love who I wanted. Where I could make decisions based solely on my heart. Where fear wasn’t a subtle intruder in every experience. My own utopia.
In that moment, we saw each other with new eyes. The vision of requited lovers. Her eyes were full of sadness and love. She kissed me. It must’ve lasted less than a minute but in that moment, we were together. In that moment, we lived out a lifetime of love. We were twin flames reunited. We were borderless, timeless, fearless, and present. We were beautiful.
One week later, I came out to my parents. We were having our monthly family meeting in our mother’s bedroom. My father discussed the monthly plan for the business, our health, allowance, and savings. My mother made a comment about having to put aside extra money since she had a feeling my wedding day would be coming up soon.
“Your sister is getting married this year. Just watch,” my mother declared.
“I don’t think she’s interested in men,” my father added.
“No. That’s not true. Right, Dolly? That can’t be true. Right?” she looked at me half bewildered and half terrified.
This time I wasn’t going to hide.
“It’s true, Ma. I have never been attracted to a man. Ever.”
“You have a problem. I vote we take you to the doctor, get a few tests and see what can be done,” she added without much surprise or outrage. It was clear she’d planned for this long in advance.
“This is not a disease that medication can cure. I’m not sick.”
“Um, Dolly, that is not true,” my brother said.
“It is true.”
“You don’t know because you never got checked. There are people who take medicine and are no longer gay, so if you haven’t done your research about it then you’re very wrong, because people do take hormone medicine and they change back to normal,” he continued.
“I’ll take you to the doctor and you’ll be back to normal,” said my mother.
“It’s not that simple,” I said. “There are gay animals.” I was getting mad and desperate.
“Which gay animals are there?” my father asked.
“Look at programs on National Geographic. There are gay penguins and dolphins and birds.”
“No!” My family replied in unison.
“In our books, Vishnu is neither male nor female,” I yelled.
“Now you’re really being dumb,” my brother said.
“You’ve been in the wrong company. I’ll take you to the doctor and you will be back to normal,” my mother begged.
“There is nothing wrong with me. You are hurting me.”
“What do you think you’re doing to us?” she asked.
“The problem is, she’s been like this her whole life,” my brother said.
“Well then, it’s your fault,” my father said to my mother. “If she had told us when she was ten or eleven years old, maybe we could’ve fixed it.”
“Did you ever see Dolly with a boy?” said my brother.
“She had boyfriends in Chile,” my mother said.
“I had no boyfriends in Chile. Where are you coming up with this?”
They looked at me, waiting for a glimmer of hope. This was the moment I was supposed to mention a boy’s name. If I had, they would continue to trust that I could be fixed.
I remained silent.
“Okay, fine, what are you going to do?” my father asked with rage in his voice.
“I’m . . . I’m going to live my life, Pa,” I said, with pain, yet total conviction, knowing I was standing up for happiness.
“Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t do that here. If you are going to insist on living this way then you need to do it elsewhere,” he said.
Losing my family was always a possibility. I agreed to make a plan, but they still insisted I had to leave home immediately. I felt disowned. I took my pain and shame and turned it into purpose. I decided to move to a more gay-friendly country, and chose Argentina. I hoped I would reunite with Chloe there—eventually.
And that’s what I did. I left and made myself into someone who could settle down with a girl I loved someday. I made myself into someone who could be happy and gay, out and proud, authentic. It wasn’t easy. My freedom and happiness came at the price of losing my family (temporarily), but it was worth it. I was willing to take the risk of being hurt or rejected or unloved or defeated. Whatever comes my way, I’ll face it. My happiness is worth the risk.
No
BY AMANDA MEAD
“NO, YOU’RE NOT.”
That was how my mother responded when, at age twelve, I told her I was gay.
Of all the responses in the world, that was not the one I expected. As I sat slack-jawed at the kitchen counter, she continued stirring a simmering pot. Then she turned to me and asked a follow-up question.
“Why in the world would you even think you’re gay?” she said as she rolled her eyes.
A million thoughts ran through my head, most of which involved pornographic images of girls’ bodies. I certainly couldn’t tell my mother about that, I thought, so I said the next best thing.
“I like to look at other girls?” I said, uncertainly.
“Oh, Amanda,” my mother said in true exasperation. “Every girl looks at every other girl. That doesn’t mean you’re gay.”
With that one statement, my mother created a not-gay monster. If looking at girls didn’t make me gay, then kissing girls also didn’t make me gay. I was sure that every girl kissed every other girl. It was just something we do. Neat! I made sure to let my kissing partners know that we weren’t gay. When the kissing morphed into fondling, I knew that wasn’t gay either. We were just experimenting—learning, even—so that we would be better for the boys once they came knocking on our doors. Some nights, I slipped my fingers past the delicate band of my friends’ underwear. That was also not gay. Nope. Not gay at all. Or the friend who had an obsession with being “almost caught,” and so would make me lick her on the loveseat in my parents’ living room as my mother cooked dinner in the adjacent kitchen? Perfectly hetero.
I didn’t just live in denial. I lived in an entirely different universe, one in which I had been given implicit permission to be as gay as I could possibly be and yet not be gay. I had boyfriends, therefore I was not gay. And while I was in those relationships, I didn’t fuck girls, so I was easily able to pat myself on the back for my not-gayness. It wasn’t until I was in college that I started to waver in my steadfast belief that I was definitely not gay.
I had a great boyfriend. He was sweet, cute, kind, ambitious, and an excellent student. My mother adored him. He knew I liked to look at girls. In fact, for our very first Valentine’s Day, he gave me an Angelina Jolie calendar. I started to claim the title “bi-curious.” However, I still wasn’t gay. Being gay meant you had to be in a relationship with a girl. There was no way I could ever date a girl. Girls were so dramatic, and obviously I was above that. All of my friends were boys! Girls were just too much.
As obnoxious as this made me, it worked, at least for a while. I was able to placate both my desire for women and my desire to be good. I fantasized about women when I had sex, but that didn’t make me gay. Eventually, I married the boy who gave me the calendar, even though every cell in my body was screaming
at me that something wasn’t right.
We had stopped having regular sex even before the wedding. Our wedding night filled me with dread. I knew I would have to have sex with him. I bought lingerie, we rented the best hotel room my tiny Montana hometown had to offer, and we had perfunctory sex. As soon as it was over, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Over the course of the seven years we were together, our sex life dwindled to nothing. I started to wonder if I was, in fact, actually gay. I was so fundamentally unhappy that my husband agreed to have an open marriage with me. I think in his mind two girls having sex wasn’t “real” sex and therefore I wasn’t “really” cheating on him.
Then I met a girl, a messy college freshman who was still a teenager. I was in my final year of college (my sixth, in fact) and had no business being an adolescent again, but there I was, reliving what it was like to fall in love for the first time.
I was at an impasse. No longer could I deny that at least part of me was definitely gay. I was sure that not every girl fell in love with other girls. Deep down I wondered if I wasn’t all gay.
So I did what I always did. I turned to my best friend for advice, who happened to be my husband.
One afternoon we tried to have sex. He couldn’t maintain an erection, and I was crying. We were a fucking mess. He laid back on the pillow and put my head on his chest. He quietly sobbed and explained that he was under a lot of pressure at work and school. He asked me why I cried during sex. I turned my head up to him and I said maybe I was just gay. I meant that I thought I was all-the-way gay, no-turning-back gay, this-is-over gay. But I used the word maybe and my voice lifted at the end of the sentence, as if I was asking him to confirm or deny it.
“I don’t think you’re gay,” he said. “You just aren’t.”
My mother said I wasn’t gay. My husband said I wasn’t gay. Soon enough, my therapist told me I wasn’t gay—she insisted that I had a twisted view of my own sexuality because I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Friends insisted I wasn’t gay as well. I had worked so hard at proving I wasn’t gay that everyone believed it. Everyone but me.
When I finally worked up the courage to come out once and for all, I had distanced myself from everyone I loved. I prepared for the blows, and the blows came. I lost those friends who insisted I wasn’t gay. I lost my mother, whose dismissal of me was swift and brutal. She felt as though my coming out was a personal attack on her. She largely stopped speaking to me, but when she did, it was through clenched teeth.
My husband tried to continue to stifle his own pain in order to be the gracious man he always was, and to help me be secure and happy in my new identity. Eventually, though, having a relationship of any kind with me wasn’t healthy for him, and I lost him, too.
Those losses, though, were eclipsed by the relief of finally being free from the prison of uncertainty about my sexuality. I felt stronger and more confident every day. I stopped listening when people said, “No, you’re not.” No was not an option. No could fuck off.
I met a woman in the summer of 2008 while I was in Pittsburgh for a job orientation. Abbie was charismatic, intimidating, masculine, and sexual—and she had the best smile I had ever seen. We had intense and immediate chemistry. The night we met, she was out with her best friend, a man she had known since they were both in diapers. In the loud, crowded karaoke bar that would later become her uncle’s restaurant, she leaned over to me and told me her best friend was going to be her sperm donor when she was ready to be a mother. In an email early in our relationship, she told me that her coming out didn’t change a thing—she still wanted the picket fence, the kids, the house, the classic American dream, just with a woman. She knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.
One visit to Pittsburgh, during dinner with her mother and stepfather, Abbie off-handedly mentioned something about her vision for her future family, when her mother stopped eating and looked at her.
“You’re gay,” she said. “You don’t get to have a family.”
When she got over the immediate shock, Abbie explained that there were many ways she could have children—though she knew that wasn’t what her mother meant. They argued over the subject, with her mother repeatedly letting her know that her choice to be gay meant she was choosing not to be a mother. Her mother was rejecting her, just as mine had.
From that moment on, I was determined to prove her mother and my mother and everyone who felt the same way wrong. I had listened to “no” too many times before and wasn’t keen on backing into another closet. As soon as we were financially stable enough, I was going to make Abbie a mother. I had never had a desire to be pregnant or have a baby, but she did. Even before we married, I started researching fertility clinics and sperm donors and home pregnancy methods for lesbians and the costs of artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization (in case we ever wanted to extract and fertilize one of my eggs that she would then carry). We looked into foster care, foster-to-adopt, and private adoption. But we didn’t move forward. Not with any of the options. We had started a business that was struggling, and we were mired in debt.
In the spring of 2015, we made the decision to become foster parents. I had been working as a public-school teacher for eight years and had been really affected by the students with difficult home lives. I wanted to do more than just listen to kids’ stories at school. I wanted to be able to help a child, or many children, in a tangible and significant way. And becoming foster parents, we felt, would honor this personal obligation while allowing us to “try on” parenting.
When Abbie first told her mother about our decision, she was vehemently opposed to it. Over the years since that initial conversation at the dinner table, Abbie and her mother had made significant progress towards repairing their relationship and finding ways to connect, but her reaction to our decision to foster was hurtful and disappointing. She later recognized and apologized for her negative response, but in the meantime, it fueled us to be the best damn foster parents the world had ever seen, just like in the show The Fosters. We were going to be the real life Steph and Lena.
Our first child was placed with us that fall. He was a former student of mine who had been abandoned by his birth family. At age thirteen, he was extraordinarily polite and well-mannered. He held open doors and said, “Yes, ma’am.” We swelled with love for him.
The honeymoon period was short-lived, however. Our parenting styles clashed, and I believe that our foster child took advantage of opportunities to pit us against each other. My years as a teacher helped me recognize when and how he was manipulating both of us, and I tried, desperately, to help Abbie see it too. Even though she understood what he was doing, she couldn’t bring herself to be mad at him or call him out. She said he’d been hurt enough. I told her that we weren’t hurting him by teaching him right from wrong. She understood this in theory, but she couldn’t bring herself to hold the line. Our relationship was crumbling under the weight of how bad we were at parenting together.
I started to ask myself if I actually wanted to be a parent, or if my desire was borne out of my quest to prove our mothers wrong. On an even bigger scale, I wondered if I was trying to show the world that we were just like straight people; we were just as good. If that were true, if it were true that my motivations for becoming a parent were inherently selfish, then maybe I shouldn’t be one, I rationalized. And if I truly didn’t want to be a parent, then maybe Abbie and I weren’t meant to be together, because I knew from the very minute we met that’s who she was and what she wanted.
Finally, one night, I let it all go. I told her how I felt about everything. To my surprise, she told me she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a parent either. She liked us as just the two of us. Plus, our business was starting to do well, and she wanted to devote herself to it. The idea of pregnancy was no longer something she really wanted. We were just starting to climb out of our mountain of debt, and we could see vacations in our future. We could maybe buy a house, visit her family once a year, and go to so
me of the places we’d always wanted to see together. That is, if we didn’t have children. We held hands, we cried a bit, and we were thankful our foster son was visiting his father overnight.
Our foster son moved in with his father permanently in June 2016. The process of reuniting with his father was painful for everyone involved, but especially for our foster son. He had never lived with his biological father, as prior issues with addiction and illness had rendered his father unable to care for him. But after seven years of sobriety and stability, he was pursuing custody. The judge in his case unexpectedly asked one of us to share with the court whether or not we supported reunification with his father. Foster parents, by design, do not have a voice in the court system, but there we were, forced to stand up in court, face our son, and tell him we believed he should leave our home for his father’s. He felt deeply betrayed.
“Well, I guess you got what you wanted,” he said to me on the car ride home. I bit my lip, gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter, and tried not to notice his stifled sobs. There was a certain amount of truth in what he said. We were ready for him to leave.
Abbie and I are still actively involved in his life, and in some ways we’ve grown closer to him since he left. This, I am convinced, would not have been possible if he still lived with us. I’m not sure there would be an us if he still lived in our home.
We considered all of the scenarios of parenthood again. Maybe if we changed our age range to younger kids, we would have better luck. Maybe if we raised a child from infancy it would be easier. Or maybe if the child were biologically ours. . . .
We haven’t completely answered these questions; we decided we wouldn’t make a final decision just yet. But we’ve stayed up late many weekend nights discussing how much we enjoy each other’s company, without interference. It’s a selfish point of view, of course. But that’s okay with me now. It took us a while, but we realized that our hesitancy to move forward with parenthood sooner was a sign that perhaps, deep down, we never really wanted that for us. We are still trying to sort out the complicated mess of what really are our individual desires and which ones we created out of rebellion or the need to feel good enough. Queers are used to being told no. No, you don’t belong here. No, you can’t have that. No, you aren’t worthy. This time I’m the one saying no. No, I don’t think this is right for me.
Greetings From Janeland Page 16