This new awareness started at a recovery weekend in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. One woman told me she loved my shirt and smiled at me in a way that made me blush. I was invited to coffee with another woman, and again I blushed as I made up some excuse to back out. And finally, a woman asked me for my phone number so we could stay in touch, following that up with, “Do you have a partner?”
The people who were with me also noticed the attention I was getting and found it all pretty amusing. “It’s gotta be the hair,” became the inside joke of that three-day weekend.
Ah, the hair. My hair.
Since turning 30, I had begun to get my hair cut in what can only be described as a butch style. Shaved on the sides and short and spiky on the top.
I first cut it that way to get back at my mother, who’d kept me in straight blonde tresses that were so long, I sat on them throughout my childhood. I had been a devout tomboy all my life, and the battles with my mother over my hair and clothes had been many and epic.
But now my hair was short, and I wore the jeans and baggy flannel shirts I’d always wanted to wear. For the next ten years, there were plenty of people who assumed I was gay, but I would always laugh it off and correct them right away.
“Oh, no,” I’d say with firm conviction. “I just like it that way. It’s simple and easy to take care of. Besides, I’m happily married to a man and have two kids. Straight as they come.”
My hair knew I was gay before I did.
So now I’m noticing women noticing me. And I’m noticing them. And I have no idea what to do with the confusing feelings and thoughts running around in my head. Part of the difficulty came from the fact that I had never even been attracted to a woman, at least consciously, and I had never had any kind of a sexual experience with any woman.
None. No college experimenting. No drunken interludes with any of the dozens of gay women with whom I played sports; no dalliances with either of two very close gay friends.
Looking back, that’s hard for even me to believe. But it’s the truth. I’m pretty sure it had everything to do with the fact that my boyfriend-turned-fiancé-turned-husband and I had simply grown up together. We’d been together from age fifteen to forty, and in all that time, I’d never cheated on him—with a man or woman—and had never really been inclined to do so. (A degree of loyalty I painfully discovered later he did not share.)
I am also not one of those women who have fought and suppressed natural urges their entire lives before finally coming to a point of strength, or desperation, about their sexuality.
But now I knew that something was different. So I went to my therapist with the information first.
In a halting, shaky voice tinged with both excitement and terror, I tried to explain what was going on. And this beautiful, insightful woman who had already saved my life in myriad ways (and on whom I developed a complete crush, of course) listened quietly and only interjected when I paused before actually saying what I wanted to.
“You’re doing great,” she said softly. “Go on.”
So I did. I told her I was attracted to women. That I thought I might be gay. And I cried. Tears of joy. Not shame. Not confusion. Just joy.
“What do I do now?” I asked, sure she had a distinct path for me to follow.
“I’m not sure.”
Excuse me?
She went on to explain that it was not unusual at all for women at my age and stage in life to finally figure out they are gay. She said that most often, they’ve found themselves attracted to a certain woman. Or had a sexual experience that caught them by surprise and opened up new feelings inside. I had neither of those situations going on.
So what now?
“I’m not sure what to tell you.”
Her usual suggestion, she explained, might be for me to go to gay bars and pay attention to how I felt and what kind of women interested me. The problem with that idea, of course, is that any bar is an unsafe setting for a newly sober woman—let alone one where I was consciously exploring my sexuality.
Then she told me about a support group a colleague of hers led. And I swear it was called something like The Middle-Aged, Newly Divorced Moms Who Think They Might Be Gay Group. Seriously. I looked them up online and discovered they were hosting a cookout at a park very near my house that next weekend.
I drove to the park and circled past the cookout no less than six times before finally turning into the lot and parking a safe distance away. They were impossible to miss with several grills fired up, and a raucous volleyball game going on—and a GIANT rainbow flag. They were clearly having fun, and I was immediately drawn to their energy. Then I looked closer.
There were coolers everywhere. And on every picnic table, there were long-neck, brown bottles. Even from that distance, I could recognize the Miller Lite and Bud Light labels.
I almost joined them. But I was certain that I, already uncomfortable and with no accountability, would never be able to resist the first time someone said, “Can I get you a beer?” And as I had used up my life-time supply of cereal malt beverages, that was simply not an option.
So I embarked on a coming-out tour.
I told my sponsor. My closest recovery friend. My recovery roommate. That woman from my group who had moved to Arizona and who I just knew was gay. My best friend since childhood. I couldn’t tell people quickly enough; I was trying to say the truth as often as possible so it didn’t slip away from me.
And as each and every declaration drew near, I got the same anxiety, the same nervous excitement, the same need to rehearse the entire scripted conversation in my head. I felt certain I knew how each of them would react to the “wow” bomb I was about to drop in their lap.
Not so much.
Almost without exception, the unanimous response to the sharing of my mind-blowing, fundamental truth?
“Duh.”
At first, each conversation brought huge relief. Eventually, it just got old.
“I was hoping you’d figured that out,” my recovery sponsor said.
“I thought that was what you were going to say,” my closest recovery friend admitted.
“I’ve always kind of thought you might be gay,” my best friend confessed.
Duh. Duh. And duh. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or pissed off.
So then I told my roommate, the young woman who was one month ahead of me in sobriety and renting my basement with her boyfriend. Her response? “Yeah.”
Or at least that was her initial reaction. It was closely followed with, “I’m sure I’ve told you that I consider myself bisexual.”
No. I am positively certain you have not mentioned that fact. Things suddenly got very interesting.
Would I like to kiss her?
I completely surprised myself by saying yes.
And so I kissed her.
It was incredible. Truly. Such soft, full lips. So gentle. No probing, aggressive tongue. No overtly sexual overtones. Just sensuous. Pleasurable. Warm. Inviting.
“How was that?” she asked.
“Nice,” I stammered.
After one more passionate kiss in the kitchen, our flirtation was over, but there were no longer any doubts. I liked girls. And I really liked kissing girls.
Then there was the woman who had moved to Arizona. Given that she was 1,366 miles away, she seemed like a completely safe option to explore all these new-found feelings with.
Weeks of emails and hours-long phone calls followed, fairly innocent at the beginning and progressing into something resembling phone sex. Since she was also in recovery, she would have nothing to do with having a real relationship with me until I had a full year of sobriety.
Once I did, I made plans to treat myself to a trip to Colorado. I invited her to meet me there—in the same place I consumed my last beer—to celebrate my new life.
The four-day weekend started with a long, wonderful, very public kiss at the airport in Denver. An even deeper kiss just inside the hotel-room door, where I was g
rateful for the wall’s support, because my knees were complete jelly. And then a conjoined stumble around the corner to the bed.
I had imagined I would be shy. Or nervous. Or at least polite. I wasn’t. We rolled around on the bed, trying to get each other’s clothes off, and after she had struggled for what seemed like an eternity with the belt on my pants, she swears to this day I said, “These pants have got to go,” and I removed them myself.
Being intimate with a woman was so comfortable. Second nature. I knew what felt good. I had all the same parts. And there was so much tenderness and passion and connection, right from the very beginning.
We spent the next three days in the mountains. Seeing beautiful sights, eating great food, and having incredible sex. Lots of it. As the trip drew to a close, I asked, like some twelve-year-old boy, if she would be my girlfriend.
“What does that mean to you?” she asked. I had no idea. But I did know that I didn’t want to see anyone else—and I didn’t want her to, either. We at least agreed on that.
She flew to Kansas City two weeks later for a visit. I flew to Phoenix and met her family. She flew back to Kansas City and, on that trip, met my kids, although to them she was introduced only as a friend from Arizona.
As that visit was drawing to a close, I was lying face down on the bed, and she was lying on my back. I asked if she would consider moving back to Kansas City.
“My lease is up in Arizona next month.”
Yes.
We agreed she would move back. To my house. And now I had other people to tell.
My parents’ reaction stunned me. I was completely unprepared for instantaneous acceptance. At one point, my dad had been one of the most homophobic people in my life. When my oldest cousin died of AIDS, he began to change, but I had no idea how much.
My mother, with the exception of asking me repeatedly if I had ever been with a girl before (Not Amy? Sue? Cindy? Tina? Mom, no one. Really.), was also amazingly supportive. My father went so far as to say that he had told my mother that he knew what I was coming to tell them.
Holy hell, even my ex-husband seemed unsurprised. “I always thought you were kind of into girls,” he said.
What? A quarter of a century together? A relatively healthy sex life? Never been with a woman? How could his response be nothing more than “duh”?
And there was no way I was going to have my “friend from Arizona” move in without my children understanding the nature of our relationship.
I started with Jessy, then twelve.
“I kind of figured it out, Mom,” she said. “I mean, you talk on the phone like two hours every night and you’ve flown all over to see each other.”
But Jason was only eight. And he remains the only “non-duh” response I ever received to my big news. Once I explained that I’d realized I was attracted to women and that I had a girlfriend (“The lady from Arizona?” he asked), there was about a fifteen-second pause. And then he burst into tears.
Huge sobs wracked his little body. There were actual snot bubbles.
Decidedly not a “duh.”
Once I calmed him down enough to speak, I asked if he knew what was upsetting him so much.
“The k-k-kids will all m-m-make fun of me,” he said.
“We won’t tell them.”
“We can do that?” he said, beginning to relax.
“Of course.”
“Oh. Okay. Then that’s okay.”
I told him he would probably think of questions later, and he should feel safe to ask as many as he wanted. He said he wanted to be left alone.
I heard a small, timid tap at my door about twenty minutes later.
“Mom, does this mean you hate men?”
“No. I’m just not attracted to men. I’m attracted to women. It’s called being a homosexual, which means I’m attracted to someone the same sex as me.” He had been studying Latin roots to words, so this explanation made perfect sense to him.
My relationship with Arizona lasted eight years. Parts of it were amazing and parts were not. I continued to grow and get stronger and develop a healthier sense of what I wanted and needed in a relationship. I became secure enough to ask for and expect those changes. But when counseling and talking and fighting couldn’t fix it, I made a decision to end it.
And then, almost immediately, I fell in love with Lauren. Really in love. You have to love yourself first to do that, and I did.
Everything about this new relationship was “too much, too soon, too fast.” And we both knew it. But our response to those warnings eventually became “too bad.”
Lauren also has a son and daughter, and together our kids range in age from twenty to twenty-five. At one point, they all lived here with us and we called ourselves the “Gaydy Bunch.” We also had six cats, three dogs, four turtles, and couple of “spare boys” along the way (friends of my son, who came to stay “for just a couple of weeks” and left years later). Our home is filled with recovery and love and second chances.
On September 4, 2016, Lauren and I were married. Our kids stood with us, our parents sat in the front row and hundreds of our closest friends and family joined us to celebrate.
That day. This life. All of it. This is the precious gift given us by the hard-fought battles of the tens of thousands who came before and for whom I am eternally grateful.
Because after getting engaged, Lauren and I had agreed that we didn’t want to travel to Hawaii or Canada or even nearby Iowa to get married. We wanted to be married. And that’s what last summer’s Supreme Court ruling provided us. Married. Legally. In Kansas, of all places. And there is nothing—absolutely nothing—“duh” about that.
Swept Away
BY EMILY J. SMITH
AT DINNER WE TALK ABOUT TINDER. MY FRIENDS AND I are always talking about Tinder. It’s our teenage dream come true, twenty years later: knowing when someone you like likes you back. It’s addicting, like a slot machine of confidence. We’re racking up chips and swiping our way toward someone we can spend time with because an “other half” will make us whole, and that half must be in there somewhere if we just swipe fast enough.
I’m swiping right in all the right places, matches are being made. But when I think about waking up next to the people on my tiny screen—the man with a dark beard who’s a fan of witty banter, or the skinny tall one who likes beer and board games—I panic. My stomach drops like I’m waiting to give a speech, preparing every inch of my body for a performance.
My body is tired of performing. My twenty-something self was shards of a million other people’s selves. Paul with his records and Peter with his philosophy. Mike and his hikes, John and The Wire. All of them and David Foster Wallace. Some girls like eyes, others go for height, I wanted interests. I wanted to make them mine, leech onto these men and suck the passions right out of them. I obsessed over Yo La Tengo and Immanuel Kant, learned guitar and how to cook, because those pursuits were not just preapproved, they were purposeful. If I was interested in these men’s interests, then by some property or another, I, too, would be interesting to these men.
It’s not that I silenced my own interests—I wasn’t aware of their existence. I wasn’t aware of their lack of existence, either. Maybe I did like Yo La Tengo, hiking wasn’t that boring, but the line between what I wanted and what they wanted me to be was so thin and blurry it was impossible to discern. I was a reflection of men’s desires and it felt like enough; more than enough, it felt like the point. Following their lead made sense—it had come in handy for so long.
To fit in, my voice shrank from curious, thoughtful comments to cheerful confirmations. My interests shrank from sketching and music and gadgets, to just gadgets, then watching boys play with gadgets.
And my body shrank. I stopped eating. I think I resented my body. I think I wanted to fit in. The more I learned, the more it seemed that a woman’s body existed for others. A child, and a man, could run fast, climb high, and move easily. As a woman, I had no use for my breasts or my curves. M
y period was unbearable. And it gave me a clear, measurable target. Beauty standards were clear: thinner was better. If that was the goal, I could achieve it. I clung to this new, measurable standard because its execution was entirely under my control. I was too committed to notice that its definition had nothing to do with me. That this standard of success stood in the face of every one of my natural desires.
I forced my body back, away from the woman it had grown into and reversed it into a pile of sharp, sexless edges. I lost my period and much of my hair, neither of which ever returned. My veins were visible on every part of me, but hidden under oversized Old Navy fleeces and baggy boyfriend jeans. I became unburdened by size or shape. I wanted to prove that I didn’t need my body as a woman—that maybe I was better off without it.
I wish I could use this space to describe one big, dramatic event that allowed me to stop caring, to sweep the shards of other people away and fill up with my own chunky pieces of self, but there was no event. There was no start and no end, just a slow layering of my own needs. I built habits and routines that allowed me to grow, to survive, within the safety of my own carefully constructed terms. With no one watching, I let myself eat meals without counting. I bought clothes that fit my body instead of fitting my body into clothes. I learned to enjoy what I wanted. I learned what wanting even meant. My routines served as padding between who I was and who they wanted me to be.
I built walls. Walls protected me from the careless men who judged the curl in my hair or the fit of my jeans. Men who didn’t want me to worry, wanted me to drink their beers and eat their burgers and laugh, but still be small, so small. Men who wanted me to care about something passionately, but didn’t care to hear what I cared about.
Walls helped. I needed walls.
I move across the country because what I want is to be back home in New York. It feels right, the changing seasons, the direct conversation, my parents just a train ride away. I find an apartment, start a new job. I meet new friends because I have no old friends here.
I don’t realize it’s happening, because it hasn’t happened in years, but the new friend across from me makes every second feel better than my seconds alone. She listens. She smiles. She talks with me, not at me. I am to her what she is to me: an interesting person. She looks at me curiously, wanting more than the simple validation of her words. I want her face close to mine. I want her body close to mine.
Greetings From Janeland Page 20