by Jan Clausen
I spent the next few days being friendly and high-minded, even after Benjamin declared his interest. On the last night in Managua, the Fourth of July, we fell into each other’s arms in Sandino Airport, across the road from our hotel, where we’d gone to escape our companions’ scrutiny. I was having to think of everything at once, and I recall being glad that we were in a country where the fact of our two so very different colors was almost neutralized by all we had in common—the English language, our middle-class shoes and watches, our being so obviously from the overprivileged North. According to Benjamin, we “hadn’t done anything” because we hadn’t gone to bed; but I was a lesbian, and used to rating sex more by the heat it generated than by the standard checklist of maneuvers that culminates in going all the way. By my criteria, we went far indeed, making out fully clothed in the tropical dark of the courtyard adjoining the airline terminal.
Back in Brooklyn, we met for dinner at a trendy restaurant, the white dyke writer and the straight Black legal aid attorney nibbling goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, for all the world like a yuppie couple on a date. Conversation at first was stilted, and I winced at Benjamin’s comment that perhaps what we’d experienced in Nicaragua had been the equivalent of a shipboard romance, best forgotten once the boat is back in port. We loosened up as the meal progressed, however, and I invited him to walk back with me to my shabby Eleventh Street apartment, much neater than usual with Leslie out of town and Emma off for six weeks at sleep-away camp. Sitting primly on the massive blue couch that Leslie had inherited from her marriage, its upholstery much the worse for the fact that the cats insisted on using it for a scratching post, we agreed that our situation was difficult indeed. Then I moved closer, took his hand, and that was that. In a way, it felt like high school all over again, how fast he managed to get my bra unhooked, how I was the one to have to think of consequences.
We had two nights together, and they did make me happy, despite my premonitions of disaster. I need to be touched by a desiring someone, to hold and be held. Passionate intimacy—which I tend to equate with love—is, in my book, the best thing about being a grown-up, the closest we ever get to adequate compensation for a loneliness it’s useless to bemoan, given that it comes with being conscious and having to die eventually.
Somehow, passion had gone wrong between Leslie and me. When we were first together, we’d made love a lot. I reveled in her capacity for pleasure, which conformed better than mine to the newly expert-sanctioned norm of female insatiability. But after several years, sex became a problem.
I blamed her, and cited her frequent rejections of my overtures. But though her skittishness was real, so was my own ambivalence. It was nowhere near as simple as that I wanted and she didn’t; increasingly, we wanted different things. She wanted to feel “safe” to have sex, and to me that meant a cloying sentimentality, a denial of aggression. I wasn’t interested in the sex you have to work at—dutiful, mature. I wanted the sort you work so hard to resist, keeping your legs crossed, hands folded in your lap, while your mucous tissues swell, heat blossoms in your gut, and a touch might send you rolling on the ground, an ecstatic animal. I craved a love affair. Now, in true fairy-tale fashion, I was punished with wish fulfillment.
On the day after that second night with Benjamin, I drove to Kennedy Airport to meet Les’s plane. I remember vividly—and hope I never taste again—the peculiar dread that flavored that journey, an aura of doom only slightly relieved by the merciful illusion of distance from the future that comes to one’s aid at such times. I suppose I also felt an undercurrent of excitement—change was about to happen, and I would be its author—but mostly I wanted to not be who I was, going where I was going.
Les came toward me through the glass doors, distinguished in the stream of anonymous passengers by her shambling, slightly bowlegged gait and the brusque expression, almost a scowl, that kept at bay a world she basically mistrusted. Me she did trust, alas, and I got a strong, soft hug. (Of the two of us, she had the more womanly breasts, in lovely counterpoint to her basically butch demeanor.)
I told her in the car, somewhere on the Belt Parkway, that I’d slept with Benjamin and didn’t know where that left us. I could see no way around an immediate declaration; brutal honesty was part of our pact. Her response was, as I’d expected, incredulity and outrage.
Les had always been a woman of firm principles, among the fiercest a concept of personal loyalty that brooked no deviation. Included in that concept was an ideal of sexual fidelity that, while not absolute (after much unhappiness she had acknowledged in theory that our relationship might be able to withstand my involvement with another woman), certainly ruled out my sleeping with a man. This proviso seemed so obvious that we had never discussed it, any more than we would have thought to specify that one of us shouldn’t open the other’s mail or strike the other in anger.
Accordingly, she read my action as betrayal. She focused her outrage where it would remain, on what we called “the man question”—often, indeed, on details that seemed insignificant to me. I’d defiled our apartment by taking Benjamin there; he and I had made love on two separate occasions. (“You must have enjoyed it,” she said scathingly, as though that clinched the case against me, “since you went back a second time.”) With more justice, she berated me for having had unprotected sex; uneasy, I tried to argue that it hadn’t been so unsafe, given that my partner had minimal risk factors. She treated what I’d done as a terrible disgrace—somehow a reflection on her—that we’d have to hide from our community at large.
I thought then—I think now—that my unforgivable choice was simply to forsake our long intimacy, the deep monogamy of it, for connection with another. She insisted that gender was the heart of the matter, telling me that if I’d slept with a woman, she’d have felt betrayed as my lover, but that because I’d slept with Benjamin, she felt betrayed as a lesbian. “Because of you,” she said, “I can’t think positively about the word fuck anymore.” That was shorthand, I knew, for the unanswerable accusation that I’d sold our lesbian secrets to the Man.
As I recall these scenes now, Leslie seems like an enemy, someone brimming with hate and vengeance. That is the face she’d have me remember; yet I also recall that our war of attrition (which dragged on dreadfully into a lethal fall, while I adhered to the letter if not the spirit of her dictum against having sex with Benjamin) was rendered doubly agonizing because we each remained for the other the one in whom it seemed only natural to confide. To the end, we’d sift each particle of feeling in a dense mesh of talk. Our relationship was a tour de force of process.
Maybe I could have gotten off the hook if she’d been bad to me in the past, if I could have said she didn’t love me or wasn’t my closest friend, if the aloofness that contributed to my restlessness in the first place had signaled real indifference instead of prolonged depression. The truth was, I’d initially been attracted by her pain. She was a smart, unhappy woman, and I’d hoped to comfort her, to be worthy of that tough, proud, stubborn helplessness. I had meant to care for her in both senses of the phrase, and in doing so to care for myself. In my arrogance, I’d wormed my way into her heart. So how could I now complain about needing elbow room?
Besides, I knew how badly I would miss the companionship of the critical bent we shared, the excitement of her insights into politics and writing. We had made a world together, raised a child, founded a magazine, been each other’s editors. She knew me, as she told me, better than anyone. (But whom did she know? That was a looming question; it appeared that I could only become the person she thought I was already. “My lover doesn’t sleep with a man,” she said, making me furious.)
When I left, I left cleanly, though not soon enough. I had tarried mostly out of cowardice. I kept hoping something would happen to release me from admitting the unpardonable fact that I wanted my own life, separate from hers. I remember, after months of indecision, picking up a women’s magazine I found lying around and glancing at an article on divorce. I
could just go! I thought. Straight people do it every day! And the world opened up.
I suppose that most divorces are experienced as symbolic, the singular misfortune of two individuals blurring into intimations of universal disappointment. For Leslie and me, as for other lesbian couples who shared our brand of feminism, this effect was hugely amplified by the political expectations with which our relationship had been freighted. Our union was never just about us, but about women together defying patriarchy. Like the poet Elsa Gidlow, we lived in orange country, but had opted for fidelity to apples. So our failure seemed tantamount to letting down the side.
Les, of course, might hope to find a better apple. But my own case was rendered exceedingly problematic by the way in which my very womanness had become entwined with lesbian politics. My involvement with a man reacquainted me with a species of self-hatred that I’d expected to put behind me once and for all by coming out. I’d revised my estimation of what it meant to be a woman by making love with women—not by virtue of any quality intrinsic to particular sorts of bodies but because of how I interpreted that act as honoring female strength and beauty. In a world where masculinity equals power, where heterosex is pushed on every corner, and where my own early experiences with men had been drenched in the bitterness of my second-class gender status, how could I now explain my interest in Benjamin as anything other than backsliding?
The intense self-doubt I felt upon leaving Leslie received massive reinforcement from public opinion. There’s a poem by Judy Grahn that sticks in my mind, one of the Common Woman Poems, made famous via the underground press and the poster versions that used to paper the walls of women’s centers and bookstores. The one about the common woman rising like bread was the most famous. But the one I’m thinking of now begins, “She has taken a woman lover / whatever shall we do.”
“She has taken a man lover, whatever shall we do.” Ordinary enough, though lamented, for a publicly known lesbian couple to split messily, with third-party involvement. As a matter of fact, Audre Lorde, by this time not only a renowned lesbian poet but a beloved community hero, had recently left the lover with whom she’d raised her children and taken up residence with a new female companion. The loss of an icon of long-term couplehood was regretted by some but treated as a basically private matter. Similar things had happened with less famous pairs. My case was otherwise: I would be exiled from the Garden of Dykedom. I’d also be dropped from the unofficial roster of “approved” lesbian writers, a harsh blow given that my volumes of poems, a short story collection, and my two recent novels were all centered on lesbian themes. Branded with a scarlet “H” for “het,” I’d henceforth be denounced as a lapsed woman lover, pitied as a tragic mulatto of sex.
Disoriented by my separation from Leslie, unsure whether Benjamin and I had a future together, I nevertheless kept having to come out in reverse. There was always one more person who hadn’t heard the news. Innocent assumptions put me in a quandary; requests for my lesbian signature on a petition, my lesbian contribution to a gay anthology, required awkward caveats and disclaimers.
I had helped make all these rules, so I couldn’t be too surprised when an artist friend told me she just hoped I wouldn’t start putting down lesbians and gays, because she knew someone else who’d done that after sleeping with a guy. Far-off gossip made a beeline for my burning ears. “Of course she wasn’t invited to the party. You don’t know? She’s gone straight.”
In time the uproar faded, though the echo of scandal lingers. I still wonder when I run into certain old acquaintances—or am introduced to dykes I’ve never met but who I know will know about me—just what they think of me. What hasn’t faded is people’s curiosity. Both gay and straight consider it rather weird that I inhabit the social space of “former lesbian.” It’s a little (just a little) like being a transgendered person, or maybe one of those super-scrutinized mothers on welfare: someone on whom the burden of explanation falls disproportionately. I think people want to know which version of me is real. And how to locate other leopards who might be prone to change their spots. When all’s said and done, they are sexually curious, though they hardly have the nerve to come right out and ask, “So what’s it like to move from Vaginaland to Penisville?”
What most do not imagine is that the biggest shock has little to do with sex. My experience has made me acutely aware of the ways in which, in a modern urban setting, erotic inclinations intertwine with culture, a word I am using here in the anthropological sense. What one “is” sexually in a place like New York may largely determine one’s friendship networks, the novels one reads, one’s spiritual community, the ocean beaches one frequents, the demonstrations one attends, the way one’s hair is cut, the jokes one finds amusing. My post-lesbian life straddles two minimally intersecting universes. The fact that I can pass quite comfortably in either doesn’t do a thing to kill the pain of loss.
All of us, once past a certain age, have pieces of ourselves that have gotten detached, that float around in the world and can confront us unawares—reminders of bungled friendships, strained family ties, love that ended in a cul-de-sac. Like so many breakups, my rupture with Les created a host of such fragments. Though I’m by no means finished with the consequences, at least I’ve begun to reckon with a level of emotional chaos that, in a culture of divorce, passes for a sort of structure. My guilt and sorrow can be accounted for, are mirrored in other people’s messed-up lives. A language exists in which to talk about them.
But there’s another unhealed wound, the ache of lost identity, that has taken me much longer to begin to come to terms with. Often enough, I’ve tried simply to ignore it, the better to affect a show of brave insouciance when confronted by the guardians of dyke morality. Besides, it’s in my character to fear that interrupting the grim slog of life to dwell on pains and difficulties not only isn’t going to mend matters, but will probably make them worse. “You seem like a tough cookie,” commented one reader of an early draft of these pages. What she didn’t grasp—what I shrank from admitting—was that when my sexual history comes under scrutiny, I’m never far from panic. It’s the sense of being on trial for my identity that floods me with this moral vertigo, leaves me inwardly defenseless against others’ opinions, even as I hum another chorus of “Je ne regrette rien.”
Like many an ex-believer, I retain many elements of the worldview that crystallized around my vanished faith. I sometimes act as though I still believe that women loving women are a superior breed. Being queer meant so many things to me that were not about sex exactly, though they were connected to it. Besides investing woman’s mediocre estate with unprecedented promise, the lesbian label served me as a powerful metaphor for my lifelong sense of outsiderhood—and got me in the door of the best club I ever joined. Les and I used to joke about being card-carrying dykes. Now that my card’s been revoked, I can better appreciate how a band of brilliant outlaws satisfied my paradoxical cravings for belonging and resistance.
The paradox was underlined for me when Emma came out at the age of twenty. After a lengthy era in which Leslie and I were the dykes, allied against the putatively heterosexual values of a teenager embarrassed to have deviants for parents, we entered a phase where the two of them are paired and I’m odd woman out. They’re roommates in the funky lavender mansion that flies the rainbow flag, while I hang out on the porch, staring through the picture window.
When I was a lesbian, my habits of thought seemed authorized by my identity; my reactions and opinions were lesbian reactions and opinions, at least as good as anybody else’s. Now I monitor myself, guarding against reversion to straight-mindedness. This scrutiny extends to the tiniest gestures, the most trivial remarks: I mention “a couple” and a lesbian friend corrects me: “A heterosexual couple.” Or I slip and refer to RuPaul as “he.” (When I was a lesbian, the reference might have come across as a feminist position on gender; now it only sounds retrograde.) I know I’m more grateful than I ought to be at the faintest signs of impending rehab
ilitation: an invitation by a prominent gay historian to contribute a volume to a gay and lesbian series for young adults (it’s the first time in years that anybody queer has asked me to contribute anything to anything); acceptance by the queer faculty in a writing program where I teach. Appallingly, I’m secretly overjoyed to be dyke-baited on the street (it happens rarely, but it happens). I’m thrilled when students assume I’m a lesbian.
In public places, I watch lesbians, not as Les and I used to do, playing the time-honored game of dyke-spotting, but with a queasy mixed feeling of kinship and estrangement that intensifies radically when I’m with Benjamin. A few months ago we were in a restaurant with my parents, and I found myself seated facing a table for two, its occupants white women, thirtyish, each a marvel of dyke chic, one butchly tailored and wearing a tie, the other also suited but with subtly femmier accents, both with impeccably sculpted hair (a shaved nape, an artful lock in front) and wearing pinky rings. They dawdled over their coffee and biscotti, seemingly oblivious to the world at large yet so studied in their handling of visual effects, their conspicuous consumption of the meal and of each other, that it was hard to think they weren’t intent on being noticed. As they stood up to leave, they kissed ceremoniously. If I’d been with Les, we’d have laughed at their preening: “Who was that, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge? I thought I was going to have a class attack.” Now I felt simply dated, frumpy, because I was with a man. My fantasies running wild, I imagined them watching me, inwardly mocking straight social rituals, comparing their sexy freedom to the banality of our dull hetero foursome. In that moment, I projected onto two hapless diners all the smugness of identity I myself used to cultivate, all the self-righteous scorn aimed at me when I defected.