Authors: Ginny Gilder
Sex had never been a big thing with me. Take it or leave it. I knew it was supposed to be important, but it had never been all that. Now, all bets were off. Deep-seated desire hijacked my body and left my brain in the dust. It wasn't just the sex, but the experience of being
wanted and treasured, adored. I didn't want to think about meaning and implications, truth and consequences.
All I wanted was Strayer. Simplicity, not complexity. Give me the girl. I blotted out the big questions about sexuality and identity. I didn't know what was happening, who I was becoming, but I loved being with her.
I didn't want to think about the path I was heading down, but I knew I couldn't stop others from observing, wondering, judging. That was a problem, a big one. I couldn't bear to think about what the world would do to me, about me. The hell with the world: my father would disown me.
I needed my father. Yes, he left my mother and left us kids to take care of her. Yes, he taught me to buck up and shut up. And he introduced me to baseball, taught me how to throw, played box ball and running bases. He wrote me countless notes and letters when I left home for boarding school, filled with the Yankees' box scores, news of his business trips, and musings about the companies he'd visited and whose stock he'd purchased or sold. He came to my races, paid my college tuition, got drunk with me at Yale football games, gave me reams of unsolicited advice, and mostly cheered me on.
Falling in love with rowing had never fit his picture of what I should do. Falling in love with a girl would destroy his picture of me. He would toss me from his life, I was sure.
But none of that could stop me.
Seven months later, I broke up with my boyfriend, under the guise of supporting him in a move to New York for his career. He knew without asking that I would not accompany him there, or anywhere else. He asked me directly about my relationship with Strayer. “Nope, there's nothing between us, just friends,” I assured him. Strayer was dating a guy in Princeton, but following graduation, she moved to Boston to train. She left her boyfriend behind, but maintained the pretense of their relationship.
Ten months of a honeymoon existence ensued, starting with the selection process for the 1982 World Championship team. We both raced in the single trials, held at Camden, New Jersey, in early summer. I
came in second, losing to Judy Geer, who earned the right to compete as the US single sculler at the Worlds. I was only mildly disappointed, as the prospect of rowing in the quad with Strayer consoled me.
We ended up as the bow pair in the quad and traveled to Lucerne, our daytime status as teammates and roommates obscuring our secret life as lovers at night. Our crew came in fourth, just out of the medals, and yet I returned home happy, blissful, my life filled with all that I loved.
In September, we became housemates, continuing our charade with separate bedrooms to show the world. Strayer not only took over my heart, but moved into my life. We spent the next seven months training together for the 1983 National Team by day, sleeping together by night. We cooked together and shared expenses. She struggled through the transition from college student to gainfully employed adult, while I kept on working at my day job and focused on my training. I kept improving in my single, even as we trained together in the double. No matter the rigors of the daylight hours, nighttime would find us lying side by side, safe and secure with our secret, bolstering each other in the special way that only lovers can, smoothing over the rough spots of the just-completed day, and paving the way for the one to follow. We learned all there was to know about each other, keeping no secretsâexcept the giant one we both sheltered from the rest of the world.
Strayer expanded my established training repertoire. On the water, we regularly alternated between rowing our singles or together in our double. I even purchased a sleek, wooden racing double, specially made for women our size, from Stämpfli, the Swiss boat builders in Zurich. My father named the shell
Mobile Bay
, recalling the famous Louisiana Civil War battle when Colonel Farragut had decreed, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Dad had no idea how appropriate I found that name.
Somehow Strayer coaxed Harry Parker into coaching us. It wasn't my idea, that's for sure. We already had Lisa Hansen, who had begun coaching me in the single the previous autumn when I decided to train seriously again and then agreed to include Strayer in the bargain. Lisa possessed her own impressive résumé, having raced and medaled internationally as the stroke of the famous Hansen and Hills double in
the late 1970s. But in the early summer of 1982, just as Strayer arrived in Boston to live and train, Lisa left town for an extended break. She would be gone until the fall. We needed a replacement.
Strayer sought Harry out and put him on the spot. “We need a coach, Harry. Come on, how about it?” She teased him into submission. “Please? It'll be fun. You can try to teach a Yalie how to row.” She prodded him gently, offered home-baked cookies, promised good behavior, and swore we would be fast and make it worth his while.
As for me, I was too proud to ask for help from a god. I wouldn't risk the humiliation of rejection. Besides, I didn't have the greatest track record with coaches. I doubted their utility, so kept my expectations low.
Harry had ample excuses to refuseâhis varsity program with about thirty men, National Team coaching obligations, and a passel of heavyweight men's scullers, Olympic aspirants who'd flocked to Boston to train under his near-silent direction. But he said yes.
And he meant it, allowing us to slowly worm our way into his daily life. We started out by joining some of the male single scullers on the water so Harry could check our technique. Then Strayer cajoled him into taking us out separately so he could watch us row more closely. In the early fall, after we returned from the Worlds in Lucerne, Strayer and I stalked Harry at Newell Boathouse, across the Charles from Weld, and begged him to design our training schedules. Strayer's sense of humor must have been a deciding factor. Her joking and easy banter often made Harry tip his head back and laugh, which was good, because I was always challenging him. I couldn't help my Yalie self; Harvard and Harry Parker were my alma mater's nemeses, and I could not traipse to the dark side without some semblance of a fight. Nonetheless, Harry was generous with his time; for the first several months, I repaid him with smart-ass comments.
Harry's influence started to show up quickly, starting with the Head of the Charles. Strayer and I raced twice in that regatta, a flagrant violation of the rules, which my former college coach, good ol' Nat, pointed out to the race officials when he lodged an official protest. We joined our other quadmates from the Worlds to enter the elite women's four event, which we won, although our entry, and victory, was disqualified, and then we all raced our singles. This time, starting
in the second position instead of back in the pack, I not only kicked butt and won, but set a new course record, beating Judy Geer, who'd raced at the Worlds as the US single. Luckily, the race officials allowed me to keep that medal and the course record.
Strayer and I lifted weights; ran stadiums, which involved racing up the steps of every section in Harvard's football stadium; rowed ergs; slogged through long, slow runs; and spent hours talking technique and racing strategy. We flexed our biceps and compared measurements, tussling for bragging rights over the strongest arms. We discussed the future, speculated about our speed, and dreamed of standing on the victory platform, medals around our necks, hands clutched tightly in victory.
We talked about each other incessantly when we weren't together, which raised some eyebrows. Our parents heard about our friendship and thought nothing of it: both our families had met their share of female rowers over the years and understood the close bonds that formed in training and racing. Strayer's best friend, Barb, however, wasn't so easily conned.
Their friendship went all the way back to their high school years at Exeter. They attended Princeton together, too, and Barb stroked their varsity eight with Strayer right behind her. Barb noticed her friend's near-total preoccupation with our friendship at the start of their senior year. Strayer attempted to describe our closeness as a “special” friendship, but her explanations left Barb suspicious and unsatisfied.
Barb also moved to Boston in pursuit of her lightweight National Team aspirations and continued to push Strayer to define our relationship. Strayer described countless conversations peppered with Barb's oblique but probing questions. But Barb never asked the one question that would force her best friend to lie outright.
Strayer had Barb to manage, and I had my friend, boss, and mentor, Paul. I first started working at my company in customer support, identifying problems with our mainframe software product and reporting the bugs to the programmers. Paul worked in the programming group, where I transferred after a couple of years. By then, we were friends outside of work.
“Ginny, how far does your friendship with Strayer go?” he asked me one day at lunch. We were eating pizza, one of his favorite foods.
Strands of mozzarella cheese dangled from his mouth for a few seconds as he chomped them free from his pizza slice.
A hand reached into my gut and started squeezing. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry anymore. I kept my eyes on his slice of pizza. “What do you mean?” I said.
“You've been talking about her for eons. You broke up with your boyfriend and moved in with her ⦔
I took the last bite of my slice, chewed precisely and swallowed. “I needed to live with someone. Besides, I like her. We're good friends. We have a lot in common.”
“Well, is there more to it?”
I reached into the box for another slice. “Like what?”
“It just sounds like you're really close.”
I dropped the slice back in the box and got up. “Yeah, I guess. I gotta get back to work. I'm leaving early for practice this afternoon.”
We kept our hands off each other in public, but we couldn't hide our closeness from our friends in the rowing community. Everyone knew we adored each other, but no one pushed for details. Certainly we weren't the only gays training for the US rowing team, but sexuality was not exactly an open topic of conversation, even among friends. Besides, many of the men training for the US team blithely assumed that most, if not all, their female counterparts were dykes. It was hard enough fighting the assumption that “athlete” and “femininity” were oxymora without providing any evidence that could be construed as proof of that. If lesbians populated the top echelons of women's sports, that state of affairs would pretty much kill any mainstream embrace of female athletes as healthy and normal. Thus, even in our own small, aquatic world, we lived our own agonized version of “don't ask, don't tell.”
Of course, our epic arguments about rowing may have diffused questions. Demanding and picky, I was often dissatisfied with our rows in the double. We developed a reputation for our on-water yelling bouts and earned a platonic nickname, the Heater Sisters, which, in its own way, helped us hide in full view.
Living in secret proved tough: showcasing the acceptable me and shoving away the part that charcoaled my insides with the burn of shame. Held hands in private; scoffed at the idea of our relationship
being more than “just friends” in public. Smooched in the dark; wrestled playfully in broad daylight. Melted by the secret caress of her hand between pieces during our workouts in the double; frozen on the steps of Harvard's football stadium in icy weather, trying to kick her ass like she was just another training partner. Crept into her bedroom at night to fight off the loneliness of despising myself; yelled the girl in the mirror into silence during the day to distance the swell of self-hatred choking up my throat.
In rowing, we say fly and die. Start the race at an impossibly high cadence and don't settle. Hang on for dear life, fight the oxygen debt, and row as if you can maintain that anaerobic intensity beyond the human body's limit, even though it's not possible.
Starting high and not settling is a recipe for disaster. You can't fight your body's limits. You will cave, against your will, perhaps, but your technique and your power will fail if you attempt to race above your capacities. And it will hurt. Ignore your limits and you will pay.
And I paid. The ecstasy of loving Strayer blurred with the agony of my shame. I had swallowed the world's party line: being gay was sinful, criminal, and in my father's eyes, unthinkable. My identity should have been mine to define and declare, but I didn't dare. I traded my independence for social safety and my father's love, a transaction that positioned me to live at odds with myself. A master of deception in training, I followed in my parents' footsteps, living one way in private and acting another in public.
I couldn't stay my own course. Try as I might, I could not step away from the familiar and the sure. Eighteen months of wildness was all I could take. The ups of being with Strayer in private couldn't balance the downs of facing myself everywhere else. To make matters worse, we progressed in our on-water training into a competitive double. Our goals ran in parallel: National Teams, the Olympics, medals.
I fed myself many lines, many lies, to create some separation, mis-applying logic in my clumsy attempts to regain the control I had lost. I don't want to be the only egg in her basket. I don't want to be responsible for her. I want to race the single and she wants me to race the double. I want to have kids. I want a normal life.
I was starting to hate myself. When I looked in the mirror, even
my bulging biceps couldn't distract me from the lies I saw staring back at me.
I had buried myself before. Swallow hard and it will all disappear. Ignore the suffocating effects of the world's judgment; no one cares. I'm comfortable with struggling to breathe.