Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (5 page)

We continued to visit the psychiatrist for several months, and in the course of our therapy, the doctor also showed us videos of straight couples making love. I found these less enjoyable and not as sexually stimulating as the video of the woman masturbating, and my husband found them embarrassing, so we discontinued our therapy. Shortly after that, I realized I enjoyed having sex with myself more than I enjoyed having it with my husband. Then I found myself imagining making love with a woman, even though I had never even seen a movie in which two women had sex. For some reason, I remember one day in particular: I was dressed in a denim maternity jumper and red knee socks, standing in the middle of the living room, contemplating driving to Corpus Christi to find a female prostitute. Learning how to have an orgasm had made me begin to think of what turned me on the most, and evidently that was women’s bodies. So, the frequency of John’s and my lovemaking tapered off, and bedtime once again became fraught with tension, guilt, and, sometimes, anger and recrimination. I consented to sex every few weeks out of guilt and obligation, and I lay there hoping it would be over soon. When we did have sex, I envisioned the woman in the video. I did not share these fantasies with anyone, but for the rest of my marriage, which was about fifteen more years, I fantasized about women when I was fantasizing at all.

By June of 1994, those fifteen years had come and gone, and I began a doctoral program. I was forty-four years old. My husband and I had divorced the previous year, and I felt stronger, smarter, and more beautiful than I had ever felt in my life. I no longer woke up every morning with the loop playing over and over in my head that said, “I’ll do better today.” On the first day of classes, I walked up the hill to campus feeling powerful. That morning, our linguistics class met for the first time, and I have a clear memory of one member of our cohort, Michele, sitting at a desk after class as the rest of us stood around her talking about our reading list. I also have a clear memory of her looking up at me. She held my gaze for just a second or two. Her eyes were green, and I thought, “I’d like to know this person.” Lightning did not strike. The earth did not move. It should have, though. In that instant, my life was changed profoundly and irrevocably.

I was fascinated by Michele—I had never known anyone like her. She swore, smoked Camels, drank bourbon, and told dirty jokes. At one point during that first week, I mentioned I was not getting enough hot water to finish my shower in the morning. Michele offered to check out my water heater—it seems she had been a plumber in another life. Knowing that bit of information was strangely exciting to me, and watching her work on my water heater made me feel something I could not define.

A few nights later, Michele and I met in a fellow student’s apartment so the three of us could study. When we finished, Michele and I walked to my apartment (we had decided to share a few textbooks to save money, and she needed one to prepare for class the next day). On the way over, she complained of a backache, so I offered to give her a backrub. We were hitting every cliché in the book, but it all felt fresh and dangerous and exciting to me. She lay on the floor of my apartment, and I sat astride her back, making the massage last as long as I could. It began to rain, then pour, so I suggested she hang around—we could do some work until the weather cleared up. She sat at my desk, ostensibly reading a text about research methods, and I sat on the couch, pretending to read about linguistics. When we heard the rain stop, Michele said she’d better go, and she left. I sat on my bed wondering how I was ever going to get any work done that night. I thought I had seen her writing something in the book she was reading, so I leafed through it hoping to find her handwriting. What I found was a yellow sticky note that read “Hey.” I turned pages in a frenzy and found nine more notes. The second said “Kami,” and the third read “would.” The remaining seven read, one word at a time, “it be intimidating to you if I.” I was frantic. “Would it be intimidating to you if I
what?”
Michele had given me her phone number, so I punched it in and she answered immediately. “I need to talk to you,” I said with no preliminaries. As soon as I heard “Okay, meet me in the oak grove,” I was out the door.

The most famous landmark on the campus is the oak grove, a quad surrounded on three sides by old university buildings, criss-crossed by paths, and populated with huge, old oak trees. I ran most of the way to the grove, and when I got there, I saw Michele entering it from the opposite side. We came together like lovers do in those cheesy movie scenes—the only thing missing was the swelling musical soundtrack. Not one to waste time on small talk, I blurted, “I’m in love with you.” She walked me back to my apartment and asked if she could kiss me. I was terrified, but I submitted to a small kiss and then backed away. “That’s enough,” I said. “I have to think about it.” She just gave me a look that implied she knew something I didn’t know yet and said, “Okay. We’ll see.”

The next evening I tried to study before Michele arrived, but it was hopeless, and she and I had no illusions about studying together. She kissed me. I liked it. And then we went to bed. We left the lamp on so we could see each other in its warm light, and as we lay on my favorite patchwork quilt, Michele filled my vision and I thought about nothing else. I admit, though, that the details are not clear—I feel more than I remember. Fear, desire, excitement, wonder. Amazement at how our bodies worked together. Delight in Michele’s body, so different from my own. Fascination with the matter-of-factness of her desire, her acceptance of her own body and what she wanted and enjoyed, her lack of shame. Relief that I could enjoy sex with another human being so much. My strongest memory of that night is being held very tightly, and even fifteen years later, being held is still one of the things I love in our physical relationship. Her roundness fit my hollows, her parts matched mine. We didn’t spend the night together that night, but inside of a week, we were sleeping together every night, spooned in a single bed.

After Michele left, I forced myself to perform the ordinary ablutions of brushing my teeth and washing my face, even though I was feeling so extraordinary. I tried to sleep, but it was a long night. I didn’t think about what would happen the rest of the summer, or, indeed, anytime in the future. I didn’t think about whether I was a lesbian. I didn’t think about what my family would say if they knew I had had sex with a woman. I didn’t think about anything but what making love with Michele felt like and how much I wanted to do it again. I finally slept, but I awoke the same way I awoke every morning for the rest of the summer: after a few seconds of blankness, I remembered Michele and I began to feel as if my body was literally buzzing. I was besotted and I was horny, but I was sure there was something more. I knew it might be best if we thought of our relationship as a summer fling, but I didn’t believe that was going to be possible.

We successfully completed that first summer of graduate school, but the added curriculum of learning what it was like to have an active libido, learning how to be a lesbian, and learning how to function when all I wanted to think about was Michele and sex with Michele meant I slept and ate little. I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t hungry. Life outside the confines of the Mormon Church was good; I felt as if the shell that had encased me had cracked open and fallen away. That summer, I didn’t attend church meetings, I didn’t pay my tithing, I drank coffee and beer, and I had a lot of sex outside marriage with a woman. But I did not feel miserable, lonely, sinful, or unclean. I felt no shame or remorse. And I knew I would no longer greet each day vowing to try harder to be someone I was not.

Fifteen years later, Michele and I are still together. She is my second sex partner, and she will be my last. We share our birthdays, good friends, a love of reading, an enthusiasm for Coen brothers movies and William Trevor novels, and a preference for staying at home in the evening. We earned graduate degrees in the same field, and we write and teach together. And every night, I fall asleep with my head on her shoulder, or we spoon, using only about half the mattress in our double bed. We fit.

Wanting

Vanessa Fernando

I
identified as a heterosexual throughout my growing-up years. In elementary school, I had a crush on a boy named Alec; he had a mushroom cut, red hair, and freckles. I wanted a boy to be nice to me, to call me on the phone and ask how I was doing, to hold my hand.

When I was eleven, I fell in love with my dance teacher. Her name was Kelly; she had a long face and green eyes, and her shiny brown hair fell straight to her shoulders. In class she wore spandex tights and leotards and made us spin and move in unison to Janet Jackson’s “The Velvet Rope.” At night, I’d lie awake, too strung out with craving to fall asleep.

My diary from that time says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I keep having all these weird feelings about Kelly, about Jennifer Aniston, about Alicia Keys. There’s no way I’m a lesbian. But what’s wrong with me?”

I also thought about men. My friends and I ripped sexy photographs of male models out of
CosmoGIRL!
magazine and passed them back and forth. We read Judy Blume’s
Forever
when no one was watching, shocked at the thought of a boy naming his penis Ralph. We went online and assumed fake identities, posing as older jezebels ready to give the desperate, leering chat-room men what they had been searching for. In our pop-up chat windows we described our DD-breasts and our long blond hair, doubled over in fits of nervous laughter while confronting our own dubious power.

My friends and I never talked about other girls in the visceral terms we reserved for boys, but we admired them. We saw breasts peeking out of spaghetti-strap tank tops and thongs riding up backsides in the hallways at school. We looked at all the so-called perfect bodies around us, and pretended to be disgusted. “They are all so slutty,” we’d say. “Such whores.”

I wanted to be beautiful so badly. I wanted to be like those girls, the ones that were tall and thin and could spend all summer at the beach, wearing bikinis, being tossed around in the arms of stringy teenage boys. But I wasn’t one of those girls. My skin was darker, and I had to pluck my upper lip, and my stomach didn’t look like theirs.

I spent years trying to be the kind of girl a boy would want to toss into the air. I wish I had realized earlier that I didn’t want to
be
like those girls so much as I just
wanted
them.

Because opposite-sex partnerships are the institutionalized norm, I never questioned the fact that I was destined to share my life with a man. It just was, independently of my musings, a solid fact like puberty or divorce. I thought about men in the dark fantasies of my childhood, daydreaming about an aggressive male sexuality wanting me, craving me. I fantasized about men’s impatience and my power to grant or withhold. It was always about them, about those shadowy men in my mind, even as I masturbated at six years old, rubbing my clit against the corner of the bed, hungry for friction.

Everything began to change once I graduated from high school. Needing time away from my mother’s townhouse, I scoured the Internet for “roommate wanted” ads. A month after graduation, I went to meet with Sarah, who lived in a squat white plywood building, two levels with three bedrooms upstairs, nestled close together off a corridor littered with dust and cat hair. The room she showed me was painted hot orange, and crammed with end tables and two broken-down television sets.

Sarah spoke quickly, and when she grinned her two front teeth stood at odds, crooked. Her hair was short, dyed red, and stood up in gelled spikes. Next to her, I felt awkward and too young.

“We’ll get everything out of there by the time you move in,” she said. And then she leaned against the door, stood there and studied me. Her left eyelid was the slightest bit droopy, and her lips were as dark as her hair, chapped. She wore a white tank top and no bra. I felt too conscious of the way her low-slung breasts pressed against the fabric.

We went into the living room. It used to be a bedroom, and so the space was enclosed, crowded. A small bookshelf stood by the door:
Whores and Other Feminists, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, The Ethical Slut
. I wanted to ask Sarah if she was a lesbian but my mouth wouldn’t open, couldn’t form the word. A cat, wide and short-haired, lay on top of the bookcase, licking its genitals.

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

I shook my head, even though I minded. Sarah sat down on a worn, green couch and, twisting sideways, pulled a battered tin from her pocket. The lid creaked as it opened; inside were four hand-rolled cigarettes, the tobacco spilling a little. I watched her fingers shake as she lit it. “Come sit down,” she said, looking at me. “We should get to know each other if you’ll be living here.”

I sat down. She asked me how old I was and I told her. She laughed, then. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked me.

“No. We broke up,” I said. My first-ever boyfriend had been tall and thin and full of bones too big for his frame. He wore ratty jeans and combat boots and let his hair grow long. When I cut off my hair, stopped shaving my arms, and started preaching feminism, he stopped calling.

“Are you straight?”

I nodded. There was a pause, then, and Sarah smiled as though she knew something I didn’t. I looked at the white cat, which had jumped off the bookcase and into my lap.

I thought Sarah was the most intriguing woman in the world, because she kept a larger-than-life Rabbit Habit vibrator propped on her bedside table. It was bubblegum pink and swiveled in circles like a carnival ride.

The sex I’d had by that point was perfunctory and a little painful. I’d take off my shirt and my bra, and then he would be aroused, and maneuver his penis past my labial folds and into my vagina with varying degrees of accuracy. I’d lie back and let him push into me, and after a while he would have an orgasm, and I would lay my head on his collarbone and hope that he’d hold me for a little while before falling asleep. I got some satisfaction out of being desired—I felt, for a moment, like the sylphlike girls I’d admired at the beach—but in the quiet moments afterward I felt empty.

Unlike me, Sarah seemed to have a succession of fascinating lovers. There was Roman, a twentysomething genderqueer with close-cropped blond hair and a septum piercing; and Zana, who left her bicycle chained to the fence outside whenever she spent the night. There were also men who came and left quickly, never staying to chat.

Sarah told me that it was better to spread your abundance of love among many people. This was her philosophy of the world: monogamy wasn’t righteous, but selfish. Still, there were moments where I caught glimpses of the complications. There were moments when she was angry. Once, I found her sitting quietly at the bottom of the staircase, and when I sat next to her she said, “All men want is pussy. Cunt is fun; cock is work.”

I lived with Sarah and worked at a natural foods store, volunteered on the weekends at the anarchist bookstore, and helped organize a feminist music festival. Everyone I met was polyamorous, or queer, or non-normative in some shape or form. They fled the heterosexual trappings—marriage and 2.5 kids—traded the stereotype for radical resistance, chosen families, and polyamory. I met them and I felt jealous that they had somehow managed to extricate themselves from the conveyor belt model of adult life. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be like them; wasn’t them. I still believed in the middle-class cult of romance, of happily ever after, despite my own cynicism.

I cut my hair shorter and wore ripped-and-patched clothes in an effort to become more like them, these untouchable queers with purpose and community. At night, I wrote in my journal about how I could never fit in. I was too young to go to bars, and I’d never slept with a woman. I remembered the night in high school when my friend and I wailed that we wished we could be lesbians, because sometimes being in love with men is the most frustrating thing in the world. We’d looked at each other, a sparkle of tension in the air between us, and laughed it off. “Too bad we’re straight.”

That August, two months after moving in with Sarah, I followed her to a radical queer gathering on Vancouver Island. For a week, the hundreds of participants functioned as a single organizational body, making decisions in consensus-based meetings and cooking all meals communally. The goal of the festival was to put anarchist theory into practice, and work to create a queer community, decentralizing heterosexuality and allowing for an alternative social structure. At the festival, submerged in an entirely new society, I met Lucy.

Lucy was small, with black hair cut bluntly across her forehead; she wore a peaked cap and tight jeans. Her voice was melodic, coquettish. She called me a “dreamboat” in her Brighton accent. We met while waiting in line for supper; we spent the week together, and by the end we were holding hands. Lucy was twenty-nine years old and pursuing a Ph.D. in women’s studies, writing her thesis on gender-neutral pronouns. I couldn’t believe the way she looked at me—softly, the way I used to look at my boyfriend. She batted her eyelashes and purred at me; it made me feel so masculine, so desired, so in control. I didn’t know what to do with the power Lucy gave me.

On the last day of the festival, Lucy left me a note saying that she wanted a kiss goodbye. I was terrified. I contemplated hiding, but before I had the chance I saw her, standing at the edge of the festival grounds with a friend. She was wearing a shirt patterned with tiny hearts. Our eyes met, and we drew together. I pulled her in for a hug, so conscious of the fine bones beneath her skin, savoring the feeling of this stranger now pressed close against me. As we came out of the hug, I leaned close and we kissed; it felt so natural that I was relieved. Lucy looked naughty and interested. The girlish, flirty way she looked at me still felt alien, unexpected. I felt dizzy, drugged. I wanted to move my hands all over her body. I loved, more than anything, the feeling of freedom, of moving through time and space without chains or walls, and just enjoying all the infinite possibilities of being together in that one, simple moment.

I don’t want to give the impression that I began to love and desire women because I was imitating Sarah or Lucy. In all honesty, I don’t know what shifted. I wouldn’t define myself as one of those lesbians who knew since childhood the “truth” about her sexual orientation. But I do feel that I defined myself as a heterosexual because the society in which I grew up never affirmed the other parts of me. I was able to play the heterosexual game. I was able to dress myself up, to play the role of attractive, available female, and so I never let myself experience the vast expanse of my own sexual desire until I found myself in incredibly new territory, where love, relationships, sex, self-definition, gender, and identity became much more multi-dimensional than I would ever have expected.

Today, three years later, I am with the most amazing person in the world. She identifies as a woman, as a lesbian, but I don’t think of her in gendered terms. To me, she is my partner in crime. She has a masculine presentation, in the sense that she feels most comfortable wearing clothing tailored for men, and my mother always asks me if this means that she is the man in our relationship. My mother doesn’t seem to understand that sex and gender are completely different things, and that dichotomous gender roles do not operate in our relationship.

Occasionally, however, I feel uncomfortable that my gender presentation tends to be more feminine. I wonder if I am dressing this way because it is how I truly feel comfortable, or whether I am still trying to play the role of the desirable girl, suppressing my own wants in order to play the femme to my partner’s butch. Am I still trying to be that girl on the beach from my adolescence, beautiful because she is wanted? But then I remind myself that nothing is so simple, and that outward appearances often obscure complex truths. This relationship is unlike anything I have experienced before because of the emphasis my partner and I both place on communication. I now feel comfortable saying no, and saying yes. I am capable, for the first time, of being clear if I am not enjoying a certain sexual act; of articulating my needs; of setting boundaries; of exploring my sexuality in a context that feels safe.

My experience identifying as a heterosexual was always about trying to be the kind of woman I believed would appeal to men. I wanted to be the “right kind of woman”: white, skinny, able-bodied, and hungry, with high cheekbones and pursed lips. Now that I identify as queer and am in a relationship with a woman, however, I feel more comfortable expressing and experiencing my own desire. It’s true that my current relationship is not affirmed by mainstream society the way it was when I was dating men; my current partner and I are two women of color who love and sexually desire one another, and because of this we frequently attract hostile glances and comments. But existing outside of the heterosexual Hollywood romance script also has the potential to be empowering, because it allows us to live by our own standards, and redefine romance and courtship to suit our own needs. I may not be the “right kind of woman” in society’s eyes because I am mixed-race, queer, and don’t believe in the binary sex/gender system, but I much prefer living on the margins of “respectability” to the alternative of suppressing my desires, my needs, and my voice. Living as a whole person, and learning to accept my own messy contradictions, is not only politically powerful, but much more sexually satisfying.