Nancy had her first experience with a woman when she was twenty-one. At the time, she was living with a man, planning to get married, and working as a bartender at a place in Pasadena called the Sawmill. Somehow a girl she knew from junior high school tracked her down and made a pass at her. Their one drunken night together scared Nancy so much that she left town. The next day she packed up her things and enrolled at the University of California at Santa Barbara, abandoned her marriage and physical education plans, and refocused as an art major.
Once at UCSB, she did one of the things she does best: she made friends. On the Fourth of July, she went to the local softball field, sat in the stands, and tried to pick out the team that had the cutest girls on it. Then she asked if they needed another player.
Through the softball team, she met a group of girls who called themselves the Cowgirls after Tim Robbins's novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. They surfed together. They went on vacations together. They drank together. They went to women's music festivals together. They were her posse.
In 1977, I was on Family, the mother of three, and struggling to make my second marriage work. In 1977, Nancy was young, experimenting, and running through lots of girlfriends. You tell me which of us was having the better time.
It was after an art professor suggested she take a woodshop class that Nancy discovered she loved knowing how to run a table saw, how to use tools, how to make things. That led to her dropping out of school, driving to Santa Rosa in Babs--as she called her red Volkswagen van--and working as a no-pay gofer on an all-women construction crew. She showed up in khaki pants, a Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops and was greeted by a group of hardworking, muscular gals in flannel shirts and crew cuts.
At first they just had her drag lumber from one side of the construction site to the other. Six months later, when she returned to Santa Barbara, she had acquired all the necessary house-building skills, but no one would hire her because she was a woman. So she started as a laborer, often the only woman on a construction crew, and kept at it until she was supervisor. By the time I met Nancy, she'd had her general contractor's license for more than twenty-one years and had built Nancy Locke Construction into a successful company that specialized in residential home remodels.
Once we finally got together, we took it slow. Very slow. High school coed slow. We were each seeing my therapist, Sarah, independently and she told us to get to know each other first. There was a lot of kissing, but we waited five weeks before we actually slept together, a personal record for us both. Even after that, things moved at a glacial pace. I never let her sleep over--and her commute from my house to her home in Los Feliz involved three freeways and, at best, a forty-minute drive, often in the dead of night or pouring rain.
As you can tell, I wasn't exactly prime girlfriend material. See, because my feelings were engaged, I felt at risk ... to myself ... to my own thinking. With David and with Michael, I'd witnessed evidence of their undesirable behaviors, which I ignored, to my detriment. I had pretended not to notice how I was spoken to, pretended that I wasn't aware of how they perceived me or treated me. This time I was with a woman, but it was still me in the equation. And I was afraid I'd start pretending again. Whenever Nancy and I spent time together, I was vigilant. What am I seeing? What is she saying? Is she consistent? Is she getting too close? Am I making up stories about her? What am I pretending not to see? I didn't want to reveal too much about my feelings. Aloof felt just right. I was not going to give her anything. I did not want to be taken advantage of. I didn't want any presumptions. I couldn't ask her to stay over because I wasn't anywhere near ready to wake up next to another person.
Poor Nancy paid the price. When I finally did ask her to sleep over, I wouldn't allow her to keep so much as a T-shirt at my house. She was constantly in a state of unpacking and packing her things. She'd venture, ever so shyly, "You know, it would be a lot easier if I could leave a few things here. Maybe sweatpants. Do you have maybe a shelf where I could leave a pair of sweatpants?" Now, I live in a five-bedroom house, but the question felt too invasive and panicked me; I blurted, "I don't have any room." And the subject of Nancy bringing her dog, Scout, along with her so she didn't have to race home to Los Feliz in the morning to feed or walk her? Forget about it!
As a contractor, Nancy drives a big Ford F150 4x4. She has to haul lumber. I was worried about my neighbors seeing a truck parked out in front of my house overnight and then a woman climbing into it in the morning. I asked Nancy to park her truck around the corner so no one would get any ideas. What? I was so loony. Was I afraid they'd think I had a friend with a truck? This was the one time I remember her balking. Her eyes narrowed. "My truck is part of who I am. Deal with it." Right.
One minute I'd be drawing Nancy toward me and we would have the absolute best time, laughing, loving, and the next minute I'd get cool, step back. I'd get triggered and think I was going to lose my voice, so everything had to be on my terms. It was totally, patently, desperately unfair. It must have been horribly confusing to Nancy; I don't know how she tolerated it. But it was the only way I knew to do it.
About a year and a couple of months into our relationship, Nancy reached her breaking point. We'd been to a meeting together where Nancy had rested her hand on my thigh. This was more PDA than I was comfortable with at the time. We hadn't even told many people we were together. On the drive back to my house, Nancy made a comment about a sober women's retreat we were planning on attending. She said, "I'm looking forward to being somewhere where we don't have to hide who we are." I told her the truth. I said, "I'm not ready to tell people who we are."
Being out was where Nancy's world and mine collided. There was never a time Nancy proclaimed, "Hey, world! I'm gay!" She just stopped hiding it. She felt that if someone were uncomfortable with who she was, that was his or her problem. On the other hand, she didn't have to worry about photographers or tabloid reporters or working in an industry that isn't necessarily terribly accepting of gay women. Either way, Nancy hated our being in the closet and she hated my vacillating behavior toward her. Everything she'd been keeping inside tumbled out. That night we argued, got into bed, didn't touch, didn't talk. The rigid stillness was oppressive. At one point in the night I reached out to her to cross the divide and she didn't respond. She ignored me. The next morning, Nancy got up and left without so much as a good-bye. I felt utterly abandoned. Once again, I felt old family rejections and the emotional abandonment in my marriages. My wound. I had long ago decided no one would ever make me feel that way again, and that no one included Nancy.
Nancy called after two days of silence. I asked her to come get her things and give me back my key. I was completely shut down. I was gone. I'd decided--and apparently so had she--that we were not together anymore. That was it.
Over that next week, I took walks with friends and coldly reported Nancy's crimes. Then I started writing, trying to see what I was feeling besides wronged. I talked to my therapist, Sarah, who helped me see that I was reacting to old feelings from situations in the past, not necessarily to Nancy's actions. She thought that Nancy and I had felt deserted by each other and we each spun off into our own orbits of pain. I cautiously took contrary action. I wrote Nancy an e-mail and said, "I have come to realize that you are not the wound. You are the sword in the wound."
I had to go out of town for some business and talked to Nancy while on the road. She mentioned that she'd been to see Sarah, who had asked her what kind of relationship she wanted to have with me: was Nancy just looking for a gal friend to go to dinners or movies with and have casual intimacy? Or did she want a spiritual relationship, in which we both could grow together, have a real intimacy by being thoroughly open and honest and have trust in each other?
Nancy wanted to know what my answer would be. Apparently I sat in silence on the phone and eventually said I wasn't really interested in any spiritual relationship. I was going with the movie kind. I neither understood nor saw the attraction in the other; it seemed like a tou
gh road with little promise. I could hear the dispiritedness in her voice, but I was afraid I wasn't equipped to offer or accept more than that. Once home, in my next session with Sarah, complaining about feeling like I was disappointing Nancy by not being emotionally available to her, Sarah put the same question to me about what kind of relationship I wanted to have. "Oh, the movie kind. Really," I said again, without a moment's hesitation.
Then I had to think about most of the previous relationships I'd settled for, where I'd been so lonely, lying to myself, pretending I wasn't hurt, trying not to feel, not being able to share, not showing up. Now I was with someone who did want more, who was ready to share that path with me. Would I never let go and be willing to be known, even though I was frantic with longing in the isolation I'd created? Was it possible ... might there be a power greater than me who could guide me, give me the courage I needed? I was willing to consider there was. It was at that point we began to slowly repair our relationship. We started going to couples therapy together. We worked on communicating. I told Nancy, "This is very difficult for me. I know you're not getting what you want. I'm asking if you can be patient with me." And she said, "I can."
Nancy always says that I changed so quickly, it was almost alarming. I wanted to change. I had started praying to be open to Nancy, to be able to love her fearlessly, and my altered perception triggered an immediate transformation. Hearing that she would stay and be patient while I worked to change gave me such hope and relief and freed me to race to meet her halfway. She created a safe place for us to grow together, which I had never had before. We were on equal footing. Slowly I started to understand about intimacy; I could see its appeal and came to desire it for myself. In the past, when I had revealed myself, my thoughts and feelings, which I had thought was intimacy, I was really opening myself up to attack and manipulation, because of who I had chosen to be with. Small wonder I found it threatening. But someone who hears you without judgment and makes space for the way you feel without taking it personally, reflects back what has been shared, and then shares herself, understands intimacy; that is what I've come to experience with Nancy. I wasn't scared of Nancy. I totally trusted--and still trust--where she was coming from. We're close in a way that doesn't happen ordinarily; it is spiritual, singular, and precious.
There were still complications. While I never hid our relationship from anyone I felt close to, I wasn't out to the public at large. In February of 2008, when Gary David Goldberg and the cast of Family Ties celebrated the show's twentieth anniversary on the Today Show, Nancy came with me. Gary and Diana flew us out to New York on a private jet (which was just so fucking cool I couldn't believe it) with Michael Gross and Marion Ross, who had worked on Gary's Brooklyn Bridge, and her husband. I took this opportunity to be intrepid in the face of my old friends and introduced Nancy as my girlfriend. Michael Gross and Diana had known Nancy for some time; everyone else yawned and said welcome. Well, that was lovely and uneventful, but my intrepidity stopped there.
This story was the biggest standout for me from that trip: It was Nancy's and my first time in New York together and we were delighted to be put up at the Four Seasons. Justine Bateman and Tina Yothers, the Keaton youngsters, and their husbands were at the hotel; Michael Gross, too. The Family Ties cast was to be picked up by limos early the next morning and taken to the NBC building for the Today taping. Michael Fox was going to meet us there. We were all so excited. To avoid unexpected questions, Nancy decided to stay and watch the show from the hotel room.
Very early the next morning I'd gotten dressed with care, black slacks, lovely white blouse, and was making a protein drink in the bathroom. Nancy was in the bedroom, watching the news in what I call her breakfast pajamas. They have toast, eggs, pancakes, and a toaster on them. I was using one of those clever Cuisinart hand mixers that comes in two pieces for easy travel. I was in a rush, as I perpetually am, had made my yummy drink, and was cleaning up after myself. At home, since I mix it at the kitchen counter, I'd have to unplug and take the mixer to the sink for washing. Here, in the hotel bathroom, the counter is conveniently right next to the sink, so I started washing up immediately after use, neglecting to either unplug or remove my thumb from the on switch. Whatever possessed me to do this is long forgotten in the spray of blood, my shriek for help, and the certainty I had cut off my fingertips. "Oh my God! Oh my God, oh my God!"
Nancy appeared in the doorway in a panic that almost matched my own. She told me later she thought I'd cut my fingertips off; there was blood everywhere, spattered across the mirror, the counter, on my blouse. She ran to the phone to get a doctor and I screeched for her to find our contact for the Today Show and tell them not to wait because I wasn't going to make it, picturing myself in emergency surgery. Nancy barked some orders into the phone, then, unable to reach our contact, raced out the door, still in her pancake pajamas, to catch the limo waiting downstairs and out front. Apparently during the off-hours, hotel security officers are sent to handle emergency situations. Two fellows appeared at my door with a very small medical case and endeavored to address the index and middle fingers on my left hand, which I could not even look at. They were trying to wrap them up but seemed comically inexperienced. If the bed were on fire, I'm sure they would have known what to do. One guy wrestled my left arm into a headlock while the other spun gauze loosely over the ends of the fingers, which now revealed themselves as intact but with multiple deep slashes through the nails. When they were through, a large silly, turban like cap that kept falling off sat atop my bound fingers and required the assistance of my thumb to stay in place.
Nancy had returned during the gauzing, having sent off the Today limo. Now, of course, I was calmer and not in surgical need, all ready to go to the Today Show, so again the poor girl was drafted, still panting and in her breakfast flannels, to go back down and grab me a cab while I changed clothes. I made it to the Today Show in plenty of time, asweat and fingers throbbing, but otherwise just fine. We had a great time on the show; no one noticed my fingers, but if you ever take a look at a clip of the Family Ties NBC reunion, you might see that bandage wad in my hand.
When it comes to the lesbian community, Nancy is my trusty guide. Nancy has seen it all and done it all. Meanwhile, because I am a total neophyte, she has to indulge me. In 2009, she decided it was time for me to experience the annual alcohol-soaked gay girls gone wild extravaganza that takes place in Palm Springs during spring break, known as The Dinah (officially Dinah Shore Weekend). She said to me, "This is something that is really fun. It's geared toward drinking but if we could stay away from that element, would you go?" The truth is that I really wanted to go! I just wanted to see; I couldn't imagine what it would be like. I had never done the spring break crazy that so many kids did in high school, so again, I had no frame of reference. I was a know-nothing dweeb.
The problem was that I didn't want anyone to know I was there. I would be really exposed. Any person with an iPhone or a digital camera had the ability to take pictures at any time with no one the wiser. If I could have worn a paper bag over my head, I would have been so happy.
Nancy was more pragmatic. She sent an e-mail to a close friend, Mariah Hanson, the woman behind Club Skirts and one of the founders of parties at The Dinah. Mariah very thoughtfully decided on a red velvet rope strategy--we enjoyed the Indigo Girls from the privacy of a special VIP section. I thought, Okay, this is what celebrity is for. I'd often wondered.
And Nancy was right. It was wild, with good music that we took in from afar; I slipped in and out fairly incognito. We avoided the boozy pool scene that I felt thirty years too old for anyway and spent most of the time by ourselves, reading in the sun. Like we'd do at home.
As concerned as I was about incriminating photos surfacing, I had absolutely no trepidation about playing a lesbian therapist in a couple of episodes of the lesbian comedy web series We Have to Stop Now. No one thought I was a murderer just because I played Betty Broderick, I reasoned; I'm an ac-tor! The writing was rea
lly good and everyone in the cast--Jill Bennett, Cathy Debuono, Suzanne Westenhoefer--was amazing and wonderfully funny.
I met the whole cast when we gathered for the reading. Each webisode is only ten minutes long so we could easily go through the entire season in one sitting. Afterward, amidst laughter and character discussion, Cathy said to me, "You know, we'll be shooting some of this on a lesbian cruise; going to Mexico, Belize, Honduras.... Would you like to come?"
As you know, I called her later and said, "We're in!"
Epilogue
With Nancy at Outfest, 2010.
So. The deed was done. The good thing, I realize, about coming out on national television, is I never have to come out again. Ever. It was horrible, magnificent, life-changing, and done. So, in many ways, that's all behind me and my job is to get on with my life, which is not just about being gay. The love of my life, Nancy, and I get up pretty early every morning and we usually have some quiet nongay coffee and newspaper time before she's off to the gym; I usually head to a heterosexual meeting and hit the equally hetero gym afterward. Our lives are exactly the same as before the Today Show and People magazine, just freer. I do experience some relief in the capacity to live without interference or censure, real or perceived. I hadn't known I was looking for this kind of emotional balance and could not have anticipated the sense of relief I've enjoyed.
Three of my first public post-Today Show events were speaking at Human Rights Campaign gala dinners in Raleigh, N.C., Houston, and Los Angeles. I loved being there with Joe Solmonese, who represents total commitment to sustaining equal rights for gays and lesbians and transgenders. I felt grateful for the opportunity to participate in the gay community and felt welcomed with open arms. I had an opportunity to talk about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the government military program that practices prejudice in the guise of protecting heterosexuals ... because they must need it. I got a lot of juice for the Today Show appearance (as if I'd elected to do it as a supreme act of in-your-face brio) and that's when it really sank in just how much bigger than me this whole experience has been. Whenever anyone comes out, prominent or not, it lays the groundwork for social change and acceptance. That's why it was a political act. I may be the only lesbian you know (although this is quite doubtful) and I am here to dispel, if only to a small degree, whatever fears, misunderstandings, and apprehensions you might have about the threat of a homosexual agenda. (That idea is amusing. The only agenda I know of is ... leave us alone; don't make choices for us that we wouldn't make for you.)
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