There is plenty of science explaining how homosexual impulses might run in families, and my family was no exception. I have a “bisexual” aunt. Our Cajun roots hold more fantastical secrets, really.
I knew this juicy nugget of family gossip, which generally remained tacit, clamped in secrecy that permitted no public examination, because my mother had mentioned my aunt’s “relationship with a woman” vaguely and passively when I was in high school. My father had also mentioned how he once went to Southern Decadence, New Orleans’ gay pride festival, with his “bulldyke” friend, who from the context I gathered was my aunt’s girlfriend.
At first, I knew only that my aunt had had such a liaison and that it had been difficult for my grandparents to grasp. My mother spoke of that conflict more than any other aspect of the relationship.
The previous Christmas, I had found my aunt drunk and I broached the subject, asking I think whether her husband knew about her stint as a lesbian. As always, I was curious, but, much to my dismay, she did not elaborate. She just said, “Of course he knows.”
This Christmas I pushed harder, sweatpanted and bare-faced, sitting around the remains of our Christmas feast on the dining room table. I was given the perfect opportunity. During dinner, my grandmother (not my aunt’s mother) commented as she so often does about how much she hated smoking. My aunt responded by saying that yes, she had smoked two packs a day for years, and she had decided to quit.
“But how did ya quit?” my grandmother asked. She was always fishing for techniques to suggest to my smoker father.
“Well, it wasn’t easy, I tell ya that. But I was seeing someone who quit for New Years, actually, with your daddy.” She jutted her chin toward me. “And then after they quit, I was talkin’ ta my coworker, and he told me bout how he was datin’ this gal that smoked, and how she stank ta high heaven. An, I tell ya, if it’d been a month before or a month after, I don’t think I woulda cared, but for some reason jus then I was jus in that right place, and wantin’ to impress this person, and I quit. And I tell you it was not easy, and I think I never started back cause I didn’t think I could quit again.”
The pronoun game. I’d played it before. I knew you only described a significant other as “them” or “that person” when you couldn’t accurately say “he.” But I took another bite of my sweet potatoes and kept my mouth shut.
Then I waited until the table had cleared of everyone else, out of the presence of my Baptist grandmother’s prying ears, and I cornered my aunt without moving.
“So I noticed you were playing the pronoun game earlier.”
“What?”
“The pronoun game. ‘They…’ ‘this person…’”
She looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about.
“That was your girlfriend, that you quit smoking for, right?”
“Oh,” she said, and her eyes darkened, “yeah.” She paused. “Ah jus… well ya know not everyone… some people…” She stopped trying to talk and took a sip of her wine.
“I know.” Oh god, did I know. “So what was her name?”
Of the fifteen or so mentions of this woman in my family, no one had ever said her name.
“Bette. Her name was Bette.”
“How long were you together?”
“Six years.” Six years! I figured the relationship had to have been serious for her to tell the family about it, which generally translated to quite a chronological duration, but that was longer than she’d been with the man she’d married before she’d met this Bette.
“Mom told me it was hard… that Gram didn’t take it well.”
She laughed an ironic, angry laugh. “Your momma an daddy were da worst.”
I was shocked at this. My father has always referred to Bette (without naming her) as his “lesbian” friend, or, that once, his “bulldyke” friend. But, always his friend. My mother never said anything about not being okay with my aunt’s relationship. Looking back, perhaps she knew I would be angry with her for not being okay with it, and, most likely, the time had come when she was okay with it. I wondered if she was lurking in the adjacent kitchen, listening.
“What? They were?”
“Yeah.” Face still dark, tipsy, she sipped the wine and continued, “ya mamma was pregnant wit chu, an ya cousin had jus been born, wit da downs syndrome and an all, an everybody was all worried, an she was all upset.” She paused, looked down at the table. “Ya daddy said…said that if somethin’ was wrong wit you it was my fault…”
Her voice trailed off, and she swallowed. Our silence revealed the jovial conversations piping down the hallway from the living room. Across the table, my head was spinning. When my parents divorced, it had seemed my father’s fault, his unwillingness to work on the relationship, that had finished it, and I’d hated him for it. Then I was shocked to discover that our time alone, after my parents were separated, was really the first time he’d been willing to talk about himself, as a person, to me. In the process, he and I had actually gotten to know one another for the first time, and we found, as adults, that we were very much alike. We became friends, though, more than father and daughter. I knew he made mistakes, but I had always been proud of his open mindedness, and always identified with his ability to allow people to be whatever they were going to be without making judgments or comparisons. I’d tried to emulate him that way. Or maybe because I wanted him to be those things, I projected them upon him.
I couldn’t imagine him saying something so hurtful, so awful, so ignorant. Or, I didn’t want to. When I did, when I thought of him and my mother being so horrible, I was more disappointed in them than I ever thought I could be.
“I… that’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe…”
“An I get no credit now!” she hooted, “You turn out beautiful and smart and nobody sayin’ nuthin’ about me now!” she was laughing suddenly, ironically, slapping the stem of her glass back down onto the table.
I smiled at the irony. Perhaps she did give me something after all.
“So what was she like?”
Now, her eyes softened, and her lips cracked into a smile, and the voices down the hall seemed somehow quieter.
“Crazy!” she giggled, “Crazy crazy. We was both crazy, we had some wild, wild times, her an me. We liked all da same things, all da same movies… neitha one a us watched television… we only ha one lil biddy television, in our guest room.” She smiled faintly and leaned backward in the chair. “Ooh, we had some fun together,” her eyes lit now with the memories passing behind them, “we lived in da Quarter, across da way from dis boy couple, and da four a us were like this.” She held up her right hand, four fingers pressed next to one another. “Ooh, we had some good times,” and she chuckled.
Funny feeling, hearing about a past remarkably similar to a future I’d previously coveted, walking through life with my partner alongside Jackson, who was walking happily with his.
She picked her wine glass up again and swirled the liquid around, looking entranced by its motion. Her voice was darker when she began speaking again. “People were horrible. You know, then, I was this big” she made a loop with her hands, about eighteen inches around, “and young, and people just – ”
“Just thought you needed to find the right man?”
“Yeah.” Even Jackson had said that to me once, to discourage me from defaulting to women when men became difficult. People who knew you could like men usually failed to understand that a woman could be the right person, period. They failed to see that some people are better off with women even when they like men too. They thought the easy way would be better, but didn’t realize the value in knowing that something is worth the trouble.
My aunt sipped her wine before she continued, her voice still gloomy. “People said some horrible things ta me. These guys at work, the things they said… they were… they were abusive, really.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds horrible.” I had never seen her like this, so exposed. I wanted to kno
w more, but I didn’t want to push, and I didn’t know how long the rest of the family would remain occupied by the football game on television down the hall without wondering why we remained isolated at the empty table. I figured we’d have plenty more conversations about this in the future, but there was one essential thing left to ask.
“So why did it end? After you’d gone through the trouble of telling the family…”
Now, her face dropped again, and she looked down at the emptied glass on the table. “It was all me.”
“It was?”
“Yeah. Ah wanted children. See how well that worked out!” Her eyes squeezed from the bottom, and her tone bordered on belligerent. As it turned out, she couldn’t have children by the time she tried.
“Things were different then… invitro fertilization was jus… jus an experiment… and ah wanted children so badly. Ah mean, that wasn’t da only thing. We was fightin’ all da time, and there was somethin’… jus somethin’ not right about it…”
“Something missing.” I knew that feeling too. I’d fallen in love with the first girlfriend I had, but had eventually come to recognize that our relationship lacked something essential. Later, I’d see pieces missing, after the fact, in others, too.
“Yeah, you know, she wasn’t… it wasn’t the soulmate, and I knew it. Bobby and I are much more tha soulmate type thing. But, woooo, I tell you, we had some crazy times.”
“Yeah, I understand.” That was precisely why I had never been ready to tell anyone about my first girlfriend, why I was still looking around while we were together, however ineffectively. I never felt she was a soulmate. Of course, I didn’t understand that without the benefit of hindsight.
And, what a difference a generation makes! My aunt had grown up in a world where babies only came from male-female sex, where being in a relationship with another woman made your sister so stressed out she thought she’d make her baby retarded, where life with another woman would always be publicly uncomfortable. I had grown up in a house where being gay was always considered a perfectly acceptable thing to be (or at least, so it had appeared to me), where artificial conception was so common I knew oodles of lesbians who’d used it successfully. Where being a lesbian at the office was, at least in California, more beneficial in that it released you from the workplace tension of sexual hierarchy with your male coworkers than it was harmful for the discrimination you would face. Of course, there are assholes still discriminating everywhere.
But, all the obstacles that had been overwhelming to her barely existed now, to me. They were barely speedbumps. There was nothing to stop me from being with the right person if that person happened to be female, nothing that I cared about – at most I would face the judgment of some maniacs I didn’t respect anyway.
I’ve never believed there’s a gay gene. I think your brain can be structured in a way that makes you attracted to women and/or to men, and I think the structure isn’t dependent on which sex you are. So I think the same basic neural organization in a woman and a man can make both interested in women to a certain extent, and that numerous other biological and social factors drive how much those same two people are sexually interested in men. I also think the gender of a person affects brain structure and makes it so that the same alleles for a brain cell will have different effects when expressed in men and women. Calling all of that a “gay gene” is far too simple, as I suppose most laymen’s summaries of genetic mechanisms are. Nonetheless, I feel strongly that such things are heritable and immutable. Sometimes same-sex attraction is so immutable that transgender persons find themselves attracted to same-sex partners of their new gender. But all of my conclusions are a consequence of a tolerant upbringing, I suppose. In any case, I was prepared to admit that I’d inherited my tastes from somewhere.
I should have thanked my aunt for breaking my parents in. It certainly doesn’t sound like it was easy for her. But it was perhaps because of her experience that my mother and father could respond to my confession, over two decades later, by saying simply, “I just want you to be happy.” They and so many others had to work up to that, it seems.
I didn’t think to thank her then. Instead we just kept drinking, me still rocking sweatpants in protest. In the night, I dreamed my recurring dream of the Terme Suburbane, but I could not yet step to the fifth panel.
My sleep that night brought a renewed enthusiasm for my generation, and the next evening, growing stir crazy, I decided to venture out and give Mississippi a chance. There were good people here who were good at their lives, different as those lives might be from my own, after all.
Google begrudgingly revealed all of two gay bars in the whole city. After nightfall, I donned my jeans and picked a bar, then borrowed my mother’s car. Neither bar had a single Yelp review, nor a website.
I still knew my way around, try as I might to forget, and the empty roads crossing through complacent architecture brought me to one of these bars in fifteen minutes despite the remote location of my ancestral home. The parking lot was empty, but two twentysomething men were approaching on foot and proved that the address unadorned with signage or light was, in fact, an open establishment. I surprised myself by approaching cautiously – it had been a long time since I hesitated to stroll into a gay bar – and swung open the plain wooden door. No one waited inside to check my ID.
It was, in almost all respects, an archetypal Southern dive, cramped with a couple of pool tables and an unassuming oak bar. Upon the vinyl stools sat the two men who I’d seen walk in. A few other groups of men were tucked chatting in corners, and my arrival met with astonished glances from each. I smiled at them as best I could.
I stepped immediately to the bar to meet the bartender’s passively expectant stare, and I ordered a Bourbon and Ginger Ale, growing more uncomfortable every second.
“Sorry, we don’t have Ginger Ale,” he told me. I sighed, and changed my mixer to Diet Coke.
Placid, I sat. My world pooled before me and I thought on that especially impressive boy, another grad school classmate of mine – the great boy “love” of my past. I realized suddenly that I hadn’t thought about him in months, not since my last desperate, disagreeable sext, which was unusual. There was a time when we were sleeping together periodically and I’d itch for him every day. I’d thought he was the male version of me, although perhaps a bit more elegant and much, much smarter. He had a deservedly egotistical Randian bent, several graduate degrees, and I still find his brain so sexy it makes my clit tingle just thinking about it. Life in the Bay Area brings a shocking number of moments where one can look around a room and think my god, there are several geniuses in here, and he participated in several such moments for me.
He was certainly more sexually active, more predatory, than I, which was somehow similarly hot. I literally chased him for years until he was single of his own accord and gave in to the idea of fucking me for sport. That fucking was really quite nice, and I wanted more of the fucking timeshare he was renting out. But between when I met him and when I’d gotten the opportunity to fuck him single, I had become my own worst enemy, Dorian Gray off in San Francisco, whining about feeling unwanted but indulging devious tastes. I was my own portrait, though, growing ragged with lascivious exertions, and who would want to give that more fucking timeshare? I told myself, indignant, that he could enjoy some recreational sex and date, but if I enjoyed it made me less like girlfriend material, and that was, well, bullshit. I told myself. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I didn’t have any reputable foot to be putting forward. He probably just wasn’t that into me, and maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if I had felt on my proverbial game at the time. He’d tapered off contact, putting months between our liaisons, until one night when I sexted him my desperate, disagreeable sext. He didn’t respond. I’d hung my head and tried to give up on it, and I think I mostly did. But I would have still jumped excitedly to answer the phone if he’d called. Sitting at this poor gay dive bar in Jackson, I started to wonder if he might have gone f
or me if I were what this town wanted me to be, mainstream and obedient. Would I have been wife material then?
I took to indelicately slurping my newly-arrived drink from the straw, glancing over my shoulder at the couple beside me, trying to observe the scattered groups. Someone had chosen country music from the jukebox, and the slow, drawling melody amplified the melancholy bubbling in the place. I told myself it was Christmastime and the normal clientele was occupied with holiday festivities. I told myself Jackson’s lesbians were just uber-domestic, drinking at home if at all, and not to fault the city for their absence. I was two-thirds of the way through my cocktail when the bartender took pity on me and asked whether I’d been here before.
“Nope,” I told him, “just in town for the holidays.”
“Where are you from?”
“I grew up here,” I explained, “but now I live in San Francisco.” The two heads next to me turned in my direction.
“I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco!” one of them said. For all its flaws, the South couldn’t be called unfriendly.
“I recommend that you go as soon as possible,” I said. “There’s nowhere else like it.”
“Have you been to the Castro?” he asked.
I chuckled. “I spend most of my life in the Castro,” I said, neglecting to count my job.
“What’s it like?” he asked.
I grinned widely at him. “It’s like gay Disneyland,” I replied.
“What’s gay Disneyland?” he asked.
I spent the rest of my drink telling him about the same sex couples filling streets holding hands, the naked guy(s), the lights and the swirl of activity, and by the bottom of my glass he and his (boy)friend were telling one another they had to make a trip.
“You really should,” I said. I put twice the price of my drink on the bar and excused myself, resolving that I needed to get myself back to San Francisco as soon as possible, and also that I’d not come back to this town and this muted anxious discomfort – at least not until I had some sexy companion to perform impulsive sociological studies of its perversions with me. I was homesick.
No Church in the Wild Page 9