The V-Word

by Amber J. Keyser

  We moved fast. After two dates, we had this conversation, which I recorded in L.B.B:

  Dear L.B.B.—

  Robert asked me what I was afraid of. I said:

  “Is this an all-embracing question or—”

  “Context, dear, context.”

  “I thought so—I don’t know—going too fast, I suppose—all the classic things one is supposed to be afraid of.”IV

  Now I see that what I am really afraid of is the next logical step in this processV—or at least I am at this point. I want to stay where we are now for a while at least. Of course, looming off in the distance is the perennial concernVI which I’m not even going to think about until this has lasted much longer than it has and “things” have gone much further. Robert says “I’m not in this for a ‘quick one’—I do care about you and I am patient.” Homemade italics are mine.

  Two entries after that one:

  Dear L.B.B.—

  I do love Robert and I decided that if I was protected, I would make loveVII with him. But I want a second opinion, really. Help me, L.B.B: what’s a convenient and conversational way to say “Excuse me, Reverend, but is premarital sex a sin in God’s eyes? And as long as we’re on the subject, how about in yours?”

  And the next one after that:

  Dear L.B.B.—

  The more I consider it, the more certain I become: I want to share allVIII with Robert. Does this make me immoral? Define morality. I am biologically, mentally, and emotionally mature. Age is irrelevant. Sex is not sin. And this is anything but a sin. I love Robert and he loves me. We are both responsible. I can see no danger. Certainly I am nervous, but eager. And I know he is. I will not be a tease saying, “This much and no more.” There is no reason to be. I dislike the fact that I must be practical—I don’t like the idea of “coupling without touching”IX—but that is the way that it must be if it is to be.

  I don’t think my reasons are the classic teenage ones—I’ll list those I think of offhand and shoot them down.

  • Everybody’s doing it. I don’t know if they are, I don’t have the data, and in any case it is irrelevant.

  • I’ll lose him if I don’t. No. The conviction I have against that is so deep I won’t even dignify it with further answer. That is a main reason in my decision to anyway.

  I have found out an interesting thing: not only, when it happens, will it be my first time, and collectively our first time, it will also be his first time. This surprised me somewhat. Don’t laugh (hypothetical future reader to whom I am speaking)X but I’m thinking seriously about finding a copy of the Kama Sutra or other similar work and studying it.

  It was about this time that Ursula invited me to dinner. Ursula had her own apartment and a commitment to sharing useful information with younger friends. I don’t remember what we ate but I remember what we talked about: birth control, in more detail than my health classes had ever covered, with a copy of Our Bodies, OurselvesXI accompanied by her commentary on the pros and cons of various methods.XII We didn’t talk at all about sex itself; the entire focus was on what to expect if I didn’t want to be expecting.XIII

  We’d had previous discussions about sexuality; she was bisexual, she’d told me, and I filed the information away. The term illuminated possibilities, although I didn’t immediately connect it with, for instance, the girl in my junior high choir whose solos and dark eyes I’d found equally riveting. I was a shy and frequently embarrassed person, and as such it was sometimes difficult for me to pinpoint the reason why I might at any given time be blushing. Besides, that junior high choir soloist was more popular than I was; if I allowed myself to think at all about why her lovely voice and face made me flush and shiver, no doubt I concluded it was due to a desire to be more like her, rather than more near her.

  After that dinner with Ursula, my nervous, giddy anticipation of the impending event with Robert coexisted with a sense of responsibility. I was embarking on something serious, something that required equipment. Also, I was preoccupied with my weight and apt to be overtaken by paralyzing self-consciousness. What, aside from my desire for Robert and my confidence in his for me, made me able to seriously consider being sexually intimate so quickly?

  I never wrote about this then, but I think his blindness helped. Of course, I knew intellectually that he’d learn the contours of my body via touch, and, less intellectually, I knew that I wanted him to—but there was also something comforting about knowing that whatever we were doing, he wouldn’t be able to see me.

  My paralyzing self-consciousness meant that even though I was able to make a mature decision about the need to acquire birth control, I initially didn’t go to a pharmacy. I went to a gift and novelty shop.

  Dear L.B.B.—

  I made a purchase today. One of the items will be a hostess gift for Marie who is, in theory, having a “hellacious bash” when her parents go out of town later this month. The other is for personal use. They are identical. Okay, slavering scandal-seekers, this is the product: “CondomintsTM, Sex that’s truly tasteful! Practice safe sex and fresh breath—Now that’s sex in good taste! The product that says ‘Don’t give me something to remember you by.’* In our opinion, truly safe sex can only be achieved by locking yourself in a room with yourself.” This resembles a large matchbook; when opened, contains a package of two breath mints and a prophylactic.

  While I was acquiring Condomints, Robert was working on another necessary element in the sex equation: securing a time when the tiny bedroom he shared—he, fortunately I think in retrospect, had the bottom bunk—would be vacant. Robert, like Ursula, had an apartment—a basement apartment close to campus—but he had two roommates, both of whom were, while mostly amused by and approving of his rapidly developing relationship with me, also not always inclined to disrupt their own schedules to grant us privacy.

  Then I steeled myself to get hold of another form of birth control to supplement the novelty condom. Ursula had told me that it was better to have multiple methods of protection, and in case this isn’t already clear from the journal entries, I was, while gung-ho, very cautious.

  Dear L.B.B.—

  I am extremely proud of myself. I walked to the pharmacy. I looked at the foam.XIV I read the label. I took the container out of the package.XV I said, “Oh, shit,” and walked out of the pharmacy. Down the street. To the traffic light. Then I said to myself, “Sara, snap out of this. It’s worthless,” turned around, marched determinedly back to the pharmacy, picked up the foam and bought it.

  Thus, we were prepared.

  Preparation, however, did not ensure that the consummation we devoutly wished for would occur without difficulty. We were interrupted by one or another of his roommates multiple times, one of the hazards of undertaking intimacy in a tiny shared apartment. (Another hazard: the bedroom’s decor included a Bruce Lee poster that sometimes seemed to be staring with disapproval at our endeavors.) Even when we were able to proceed without interruptions, things didn’t go smoothly:

  Dear L.B.B.—

  “How to Get Fucked while Remaining a Virgin!”

  In our last episode, as you no doubt recall, well, anyway—Our story opens in Corsica, where out on the veranda is a bearded man in glasses, conducting a small choirXVI—Sorry. No. Wrong. Let us start in fact at the beginning. Well, after more debate, a lot in fact, I went once more to foam myself and got foam all over myself. Hysterics began there. Then we once more made the attempt and the goddamned thingXVII still wouldn’t fucking stay on (or wouldn’t stay on for fucking). This was very frustrating but still hilarious.

  Eventually we managed. Although I shockingly failed to document this, I’m pretty sure I remember that after we’d struggled passionately for a while to position ourselves in an optimal fashion he asked if I knew the definition of a nice girl, and when I didn’t, he explained that a nice girl puts it in for you, and we laughed some more and then I did.

  Dear L.B.B.—

  My God, I can’t believe it, it finally happened. It
was beyond description and I did not want to move, but we had to, to take off the condom. Well, I’ll go on the pill ASAP and then we won’t need to worry about that.XVIII

  . . .

  I’m a mutant or something ’cause it didn’t hurt the first time. No virgin’s blood either—I don’t know, perhaps it’s a myth perpetuated by the opposition.

  2.

  Between ages fifteen and nineteen, I determined that “bisexual” was a reasonable description of my sexuality. (I was uninformed at that point about the limitations of the gender binary.XIX) I recognized my crushes on girls as such. I sought out books and comics and movies that featured relationships between women. (They weren’t easy to find.) My journal was a larger version of the same black notebook, and so, inevitably, I called it Big Black Book, abbreviated B³. Some entries from the summer before I started college:

  B³—

  Now I am reading The Diary of Anaïs Nin, the first two volumes. She certainly has a more literary style in her diary than I do here. But that is okay. I came to the conclusion that I haven’t quite lived enough to write a lot of things. [...] Nin’s writing has made me consider my bisexuality in a new light. She defines lesbianism as self-love. But I cannot agree with any theory that presupposes gender-specific characteristics. I don’t think that man is this and woman is that and that one can describe sexual traits. That in fact explains my own idea:XX I am not attracted to a sex;XXI I am attracted to people.

  B³—

  How could I just blithely say “I’m bisexual?” That was very easy for me. Didn’t have to come out to my parentsXXII didn’t have to get into the lifestyle,XXIII just thought, okay, I’m attracted to women, how about that?

  This minidiatribe springs from reading Rubyfruit Jungle.XXIV

  Am I promiscuous??XXV

  I’m not just saying I’m bi to be politically correct, I have ached, sometimes, looking at women.

  Why am I so fucked up? How can a book get to me this much?

  Deciding to have sex with Robert had involved some debate with myself—Was I the kind of girl who had premarital sex?—but deciding to date him had been nothing but thrilling; a smart, funny, attractive person was into me! Cultural reinforcement about the swellness of being a girl with a boyfriend was all around.

  Being a girl who wanted a girlfriend was not so simple.

  When I made my first lesbian friends—a couple—they smiled and nodded at my tentative attempts to assert nonheterosexual status. They tried to set me up with one of their friends, a gorgeous, self-effacing grad student. We smiled and nodded at each other but nothing happened.

  By then, sometimes I even said out loud that I was bisexual. (“You’re a dyke,” my lesbian friends said, comfortingly.) But I also felt that until I had sex with a woman, it would be somehow dishonorable or dishonest to really claim the sexual identity that seemed to best describe my patterns of attraction.XXVI Sure, I’d look at women, sometimes strangers, sometimes, more confusingly, friends, and find myself overcome (and aching, as that overwrought journal entry states) about the things I was imagining us doing. Women with short hair and short nails, strong arms and unshaved legs, leather jackets and swagger; women with filmy scarves, intriguing perfumes, silk skirts, multiple bracelets; women who mixed it up: dresses and combat boots, T-shirts and crinolines.

  But until I was in her arms, or hers, or hers, how could I say all that desire really counted?

  I started wearing “freedom rings”XXVII on a ball chain necklace to publicly signify my queerness. T-shirts proclaiming Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian were popular with the proud dykes in my college town. When I spotted my first Nobody Believes I’m Bisexual shirt, I laughed out loud but was too shy to buy one of my own. I did, eventually, buy a shirt emblazoned with bisexual pride slogans as a tiny consumer act of identity-claiming—but then I was too shy to wear it, since many of the slogans seemed to me to overly emphasize the sex in bisexual.XXVIII

  I was so shy, in fact, that my second first time might not have happened without The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d been painfully attracted to Remedios since we’d met. Some of the attraction was mental—she knew so much that I wanted to know, about surrealism and literature and fashion and music and bigger cities than I’d ever lived in or even visited—but I was also desperate to touch her.

  She said, “You were born to be Columbia.”

  She was an expert; she’d played another of the Rocky characters, Magenta, and would be dressing up accordingly when we went to the show with other friends.

  Looking back at my journals, I see that I’d first heard about Rocky way back when I was fourteen, my first year with the theater group, because I wrote about the possibility of inviting my new friends to Rocky Horror for my birthday. (I didn’t, in part because my curfew and the midnight showtime were simultaneous.) But all I knew about the film before Remedios told me how crucial it was included: (a) you were supposed to dress up somehow, it was (b) sexy, (c) scary, and (d) in addition to dressing up, you had to participate in other ways that remained obscure. If I’d had more information, I might have been given hope by the fact that, in the film, Columbia and Magenta make out.

  Remedios explained that in order to experience Rocky Horror correctly, I needed to dress appropriately, which in this context meant conforming to a sexy Goth aesthetic very unlike my usual look of T-shirts and jeans. It would be fine, though, since Remedios had garments I could borrow: fishnet stockings, a bustier, and a semitransparent black lace skirt. Another friend provided high-heeled boots, and I made myself up with theatrical whiteface and baby powder and a lot of black eyebrow pencil and bright, bright red lipstick. The outfit was tricky to get into, featuring many intricate fastenings located in difficult-to-reach places. But it was a costume. I understood about costumes. You put them on to perform.

  I watched the film; I watched Remedios. I followed her and my other friends’ prompting about the audience participation, shocked and thrilled to sing the alternative lyrics to There’s A Light (Over At The Frankenstein Place): “There’s a dyke . . . over at the Frankenstein place/There’s a dy-i-i-i-i-i-ike/Sitting on her girlfriend’s fa-ace/There’s a dy-i-ike, a DY-ike, in the closet of eh-eh-vree-hee-body’s wife.”

  I wasn’t totally clear on why sitting on a girlfriend’s face would be pleasurable for either party, but just loudly singing the word dyke multiple times in some version of public made me feel triumphant.

  My ensemble was not very comfortable, especially after a couple hours’ worth of enthusiastic audience participation, including a kick line that did the fishnets no favors. But I was grateful for it and all its fastenings because when we got back from the movie, it gave me the excuse to ask Remedios: “Um, could you help me take my clothes off?”

  Both of us, I think, pretended I was asking purely because I didn’t want to inadvertently damage the outfit’s components.

  The room was so small, and that made it easier: the bed was right there. Her hands unhooking hooks. Me hoping against hope that the ploy I couldn’t even quite admit to myself was a ploy would work. The scent of her hair. Her breath on the back of my neck. The moment right before we kissed.

  I wish that I’d written as much in my journal about us as I did about me and Robert, but by the time Remedios helped me take my clothes off I was writing fewer journal entries and more fiction.

  I don’t think either of us knew exactly what we were doing but we were enthusiastic about figuring it out. I’d read Dykes to Watch Out For.XXIX She’d seen Liquid Sky.XXX We extrapolated, an exercise in juxtapositions. Hands here? Lips there? Breasts! How do we arrange our legs to enable maximum friction? I felt like I was getting away with something, giggly and smug. When we curled together, finally, to sleep, I was content, exhausted, and relieved that we’d arrived at delightful solutions to the clichéd mystery: what do women do together?

  I will also admit that I felt I’d become real as a queer person.

  And I lasted, if I recall correctly, one whole entire day be
fore I started worrying about what it meant, what we meant to each other, and whether it would happen again.XXXI

  Okay, I imagine you asking, but was the sex, you know, hotter with him or with her?

  It was different, and the ways in which it was different are not reducible to differences in anatomy. Every time I’ve acted on an attraction, I’ve had a constellation of reasons, from a person’s scent and strength and stance to the kind of heady thrill that comes from feeling simultaneously understood, appreciated, and challenged.

  Sometimes people ask, “Why do you still call yourself queer?” As though my queer passport has expired. As though my husband erases my history.

  Honestly, it makes me tired.

  But it also makes me aware, over and over again, of the importance of remaining visible. I don’t know who created my Wikipedia entry, but despite my preference for the word queer as a descriptor,XXXII I’m glad it includes the phrase openly bisexual. I no longer feel an insistent need to prove my sexual identity, but it doesn’t hurt to have a reference source to cite.

  * * *

  I. As of this writing. By the time this book is published, it’s entirely possible that I will have had several more versions of the conversation.

  II. Via Wikipedia: Cisgender and cissexual (often abbreviated to simply cis) describe related types of gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender match the sex they were assigned at birth.

  III. Both in the sense of “fret” and in the sense of “drag around with the teeth, as of a dog or other carnivorous animal.”

  IV. Yes, we actually talked like this.

  V. By that I think I meant touching below the waist.

  VI. Sex. Or maybe birth control?

  VII. As an adult I am not a fan of the phrase “make love”; it seems cheesy. At the time, I thought it conveyed the deeply meaningful nature of the activity.