Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women (12 page)

Once I finally admitted it to myself, much of the work was done. What held me back from being fully out for much longer was the reality of what would happen next: losing everything. Obviously my relationship with Reggie would end if I officially declared myself homosexual. But I also knew I would lose my mom, and likely the rest of my family, and many of my friends who would feel betrayed by the news. My job and home security would be jeopardized, and everything else that comes with heterosexual privilege. When I finally came to terms with all of that, there was still one roadblock to overcome: I enjoyed being in a partnership with Reggie. I felt fulfilled in so many ways on a daily basis, and I was terrified that coming out would mean spending the rest of my days alone or unsatisfied. By that point I had met many lesbians, but none of them were partner quality. I feared settling for something less than what I already had with him. So I waited. I convinced myself that perhaps I could be satisfied with this life. After all, people had been doing it for hundreds of years. I am sure Reggie sensed I was settling, but he still loved me enough that he could live with that.

Then one summer everything changed. I was a devoted viewer of the show
Brothers & Sisters,
which featured a gay character named Kevin. One special Mother’s Day episode, Kevin married his boyfriend, Scotty, in a touching ceremony surrounded and supported by his family. While watching the episode I contemplated the possibilities for my own future: coming out; getting married, or rather, not being able to legally marry again; and most painfully, I thought about losing my mother. The room began to spin, and I ran to the kitchen for water. Reggie came in to find me clutching the counter, doubled over and hyperventilating. He rushed to me and asked what the matter was, and suddenly all that had been consuming my mind for two years—the words I had never dared to speak out loud to him—came tumbling out of my mouth: “I think I am just gay.” Instantly, I felt my stomach churning. I turned to the sink and vomited. He rubbed my back and told me the words I so desperately needed to hear: “I do not blame you, this isn’t your fault, it just is.” A week later, one of my dearest friends died after slipping in the shower. The grief of it all was too much, and I needed more time to be sure.

Thankfully, I had a great summer job working as a crew leader on a trail restoration crew to keep me looking forward. I was flown to Pittsburgh that June for job training and decided to try an experiment. I wanted to know what it would feel like to be known by complete strangers as a lesbian. I would not openly lie, but simply omit pieces of the truth. After my lesbian bunkmate, Jacqui, noted the rainbow-colored star tattoos on each of my hips, my colleagues assumed I was a single lesbian, and I didn’t correct the assumption. It felt strange but exhilarating to take on that identity. Jacqui and I shared fun stories of ex-girlfriends and blind dates. I felt like a different person; there was no shame or guilt weighing me down.

On the last night in Pittsburgh we all decided to head to a local bar for a last hurrah before we embarked on trails around the country. A group of locals entered the bar, among them a statuesque woman with a definite lesbian swagger. After Jacqui and I remarked on how attractive she was, I joked with her that she should chat with the local girl. Jacqui said
I
should talk to her instead, then forcefully turned me around and pushed me into the girl. I did have a few drinks in me, and what did I have to lose? So the local lesbian and I chatted about Montana, the West, and my job. I was enamored of her within minutes. She was vivacious, strong, funny, intelligent, and absolutely full of life. When she laughed, she threw her head back and let the joy consume a room. In her presence, I felt more alive than I had in years. We spent the rest of the night talking, and kept on talking once I got back to Montana, oftentimes for two or more hours. When I was on the trails, we wrote letters, sometimes three a week. By the time the summer was over, I had come to terms with all of my fears, and what I knew needed to be done. The day after I arrived home, Reggie and I sat at the kitchen table and I ended our seven-year partnership.

I moved out of the home I shared with Reggie, and we were divorced by December. I came out to my family and friends, which resulted in exactly what I envisioned: my mom and I did not speak for nearly a year, and I lost some dear friends forever. However, I didn’t lose Reggie. It was tentative at first, but we still have a strong relationship, based on honesty and a decade’s worth of love. I also lost my teaching job. The town I worked in was a conservative small town in Montana, so I knew it was best if I kept my mouth shut about my sexuality. As is the case with most small towns though, secrets don’t last long. Once again, whispers filled school hallways, and my sexuality was the topic of the week. Remember the girl from the bar in Pittsburgh? She moved to Montana that fall. Abbie and I were seen together all over town, and I quickly became a liability for the school district. Montana does not offer any discrimination protections for gays and lesbians, despite seventeen years of valiant efforts by local legislators. I was asked to resign, and I did so quietly and without argument.

Abbie and I have been together for almost two years, and we are still going strong. We moved to Washington and started over. Despite losing my home, two pets, a partner, a job I loved, friends, and much of my family, I am unreasonably happy. That isn’t to say I have it easy. I feel the burden of inequality every day. Sometimes I miss being able to hold hands with my partner in public without stares, or sharing weekend stories with coworkers without worrying over pronouns. However, I make no efforts to hide my sexuality or my relationship. I have worked too hard to get here to let someone else’s prejudices become my problem. I am working in the school system again, and I am teaching writing classes at the local LGBTQ youth center. Even my relationship with my mom has improved—she finally acknowledged my current relationship and has let go of my past marriage. Lately though, I am especially frustrated that I can’t buy a ring, hop a plane to Vegas, and legally call Abbie my wife. But no one has it easy, and this is our cross to bear at the moment. What I do have now that I didn’t have before is a guilt- and shame-free me. Authenticity is priceless.

Walking a Tightrope in High Heels

Michelle Renae

W
hen my husband and I got married nearly thirteen years ago, I would have never dreamed that seven years later I would find myself in the process of coming out. Nor did I foresee during that process that I would still be married to him five years later as an out member of the GLBT community. You never know where love and a little honesty might take you.

My husband and I met at our small, liberal arts university, which also happened to be filled entirely with Evangelical Christians just bursting at the seams for Jesus. The school was located in isolated, bumblefuck Indiana, and was like a petri dish for growing the conservative, right-wing leaders of tomorrow. He and I were the leaders of the pack, as we were two of three students to have received the coveted Christian Scholarship; there were high hopes in our Jesus-filled tomorrows. To seal the deal even further, we were both pastors’ kids: Christian full-breeds leading the charge. To say I was not well acquainted with the lesbian lifestyle would be a comical understatement.

In fact, growing up, I was really only aware of “gay” in reference to men. I knew it was wrong and such people did not go to heaven to receive their divine reward of spending eternity singing praises at God the Father’s feet. Past that, I had no idea what these people were like. I could only remember meeting one gay person in my entire life, a man from San Francisco who had moved back to our small town to be with his family while he died of AIDS. My dad had “pastored” him through his last days and I had gone with my father on one such visit. This was the only interaction I had with a gay person until I was well into my twenties.

Nonetheless, I did know that I had always been different from the other girls. The “boy crazy” stage was entirely lost on me. I simply couldn’t understand it. While I did feel some attraction to men, they more or less just didn’t seem to hold my interest. I had no desire for a man to come in and save me. And despite my socialization, I did not daydream away the hours thinking of my wedding, and the babies Mr. Wonderful and I would make, nor did I practice writing my first name with his last name. I just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

In hindsight, clues like this were everywhere. There was the little girl I had a crush on in kindergarten, then the little girl I had a crush on in grade school, then in college, and so on. I tossed all this in the pot of the unique relationship and warm feelings you have for your fellow sisters in Christ. But any gal with a short haircut and comfortable shoes could have recognized the signs a mile away.

On top of that, as I waded through the layers and layers of misogyny taught at my Christian university, I was bouncing back by becoming an “egalitarian.” For those of you who don’t speak Evangelical, that’s a conservative Christian who holds all the usual beliefs of the group, except does not believe in male headship of the church and home. In other words, you believe that men and women are equal, a sort of radical feminism for the community I was in, and foreshadowing of my real self.

Yet during my junior year of college, I still fell head over heels in love with Jo, the man who would eventually become my husband. After being best friends for three years, we moved way out of the friend zone. We were crazy about each other. We got engaged nine months after we started dating, and married about nine months after that—just two weeks after our college graduation, at the tender age of twenty-two. We were both virgins.

To say I was not well acquainted with my sexuality at this point would be yet another comical understatement. God literally knows that I had never masturbated. I understood the woman’s sexual experience to be for the purpose of reproduction and to emotionally connect to her husband. I did not even realize that women could orgasm. Female sexual pleasure was a foreign concept to me. Fortunately, it was a priority to my husband. From the earliest stages of our relationship, it was important to him that I got off. Not only that, he wanted me to know my own body and be free to explore. Jo’s openness to my sexuality was revolutionary when you consider the way we were raised.

Combine his high sex drive with my desire to explore, our love for each other with the fact that it all felt so damn good, and toss it with years of repression waiting to be released, and you get a pretty satisfying sex life during the early years of our marriage. We learned and figured it out together. He continued to champion the cause of my sexual awakening, buying educational books for me, as well as my first vibrator. I finally started having orgasms regularly when I began to masturbate about four years into our marriage. When you come from such repression, it takes a long time to learn how to let yourself go.

Running parallel with this sexual awakening was a spiritual one; I often find that the two go together. As we got to know ourselves better, our corset-like religious upbringings increasingly rubbed us the wrong way. We were living in Chicago’s spiritual and artistic cornucopia. Being “good” started to be less important than being truly alive. We slowly and painstakingly tiptoed our way out of the church. It was not one single epiphany, but rather a thousand subtle moments that finally led us there. Leaving the church remains one of my greatest reliefs and most hidden sorrows. The relief of it stemmed from an obvious source: I was going to get myself back. As for the sorrow, the church had been my home—however abusive—for the first twenty-seven years of my life. You never quite get over the loss of your first love.

The city and its arts were like an intravenous drip line to our starved souls. As we interacted with the world without the barrier of the Evangelical Right, we began to see reflections of parts of ourselves that we had previously thought were either sinful or sadly unique to us. While this seems so basic, it was a shock to us to find characters in movies, musicals, and literature that were as sexually curious and complex as we were—or equally desperate to find their true voices. The realization that we were not alone in our desire to birth our real selves provided a new and deep source of courage. As I took in the world, and the parts of me I found there, my conscious attraction to women began to grow. At first it was subtle glances and musings as a woman walked by. But subtlety gave way to desire as things moved into the open.

Jo and I had always talked about our sexuality and needs. This was no new language to us. My desires for women, at first, seemed small and playful. I developed a crush on a woman I worked with. I told Jo and we laughed and talked about it often. Then there was the time when we were at a restaurant and joked about who we would want to sleep with most if given our pick; he and I chose the same woman. As my interest in women became more obvious, I began to gawk and turn my head when a lady caught my eye. Jo teased me, saying that I was such a novice, and I had to learn to be more subtle when checking gals out.

When I ask him about all this, he simply says that he has always deeply believed that when you encourage someone to truly be themselves, you end up getting more than if you try to make them be what you want them to be. Even so, to this day I do not totally understand why he didn’t try to put the kibosh on it all right then and there. Sure, a fun little game, but clearly we were playing with fire—why not nip it in the bud and start discouraging this curiosity of mine? In some ways, it would have made life a lot easier. Instead, he began to encourage more serious discussions about it.

I, however, was starting to shut down. As I became aware of the deep desires I had for women, and started to put together the missing pieces in my personal story, I became totally overwhelmed. Talking about it felt like going through puberty with somebody watching. It was just too awkward for me to have an audience. I wanted to go off alone and figure this out very, very privately. On the other hand, Jo was my love and I did not want to shut him out. I settled into what would become a few years of therapy, as I tried to find a solid place to stand while unfolding myself.

Jo was less afraid of my orientation at this point than of my shutting down and pulling away. We had always been one of those tell-each-other-everything couples. This was entirely new ground for us and I was struggling to include him in my process. I wanted to be sensitive to his experience, yet some days I felt powerless to do so. Years of pent-up emotions and desires were flooding out of me at breakneck speed. Some days it just felt impossible to deal with anyone else’s feelings. We both held on for dear life, some days to each other, other days simply to our history together, and hoped something good was on the other side.

Divorce was a thought, but never something either of us wanted to pursue. We were, in fact, happy together and wonderful partners. Ironically, our sex life was never a problem. It was broader than that. It was about who I was and my broader needs for sexual expression. At the time, we had no kids, so that wasn’t a reason to stay together. It just seemed like such a waste to throw away a perfectly good marriage if there was a chance that it could expand enough to accommodate our natural growth.

I can’t say it was an exciting, fun-filled journey. I generally felt terrified daily. As the months and hours of therapy passed, some degree of clarity began to form about who I was. Jo and I started to develop the skills and tools to interact with this. The idea that I was not heterosexual was becoming a more gentle reality as opposed to the slapping uncertainty that it was before. Yet, I had never had one single romantic or sexual encounter with a woman in my straight-arrow life . . . and I was dying to.

We discussed opening up our marriage for a good seven or eight months before actually doing it. The whole idea generally felt like trying to walk a tightrope in high heels. You might pull it off, but there was a bigger chance you would fall. There was still a chance, if ever so tiny, that you might make it to the other side.

Thank goodness my sexual awakening happened in the age of the Internet, since it was there that I was able to connect with other women, many of whom were in the same heterosexual marriage boat I was in. Jo and I were making every effort to keep him involved in the process as much as possible, yet it was a bit of a stretch at the time to saunter up to our local gay bar, hit on a gal, and then introduce him. Online it was easier for us to “meet” women together, and we felt much less intimidated by the whole thing. It took barely a New York minute for me to find a woman I hit it off with and was desperately attracted to.

Naturally, I will always remember my first time with a woman in sexual terms. It exceeded my high erotic expectations. But beyond that, I remember it as what it feels like to be myself. Me sleeping with a woman turned out to be about as natural as it is for fish to swim, and Jo really took such a legitimate unfolding of my true self as something to be celebrated. At the same time, there was also a big pill of reality for him to swallow in knowing that his wife had fully unleashed herself this way. In the context of our relationship, it felt like the peaceful silence that comes after someone has said something brutally honest. I will always remember my husband’s response to that experience: he felt that it was more important for me to be myself than for him to feel secure. I had never felt more myself, nor more loved.

Yet now there was no denying it. It was no longer theoretical. The facts were these: my sexual orientation was toward women; I loved and enjoyed my husband; and he loved and enjoyed me. While we were both grappling with what this meant for us as individuals and as a couple, it was, in many ways, also a relief. While our relationship had been often foggy and bogged down during the bulk of this transition, there was now a sense of clarity and ease between us that was refreshing.

So began the long process of weaving together a marriage tailor-made to uniquely fit the above components. Our marriage remained open, as did our hearts toward one another. In time we slowly outlined the parameters that worked for us: what we were each comfortable with and so forth. For him, the insecurity that I will leave him for a woman has, naturally, taken many conversations to sort through, and is something we expect to always cycle through as we continue to dialogue about our needs. For me, coming to peace with the very real loss that I am not partnered with a woman has taken much time to accept. We are each choosing to sacrifice because we love being together. Is it complicated? Yes! But I believe that coming out and sexual rights are, at their core, about the right to freely be our full selves.

Some days my life is white-picket-fence heterosexual. I’m a writer, and a mother, and a wife . . . to a man. When my husband and I drop our little boy off at preschool together, the general assumption by the planet is that I’m hetero since I don’t always think to wear my “Mixed orientation marriages can work” T-shirt on such occasions. Some days this all feels very natural to me, and like the kindest version of my life I could imagine. Other days, I feel pigeonholed and start wondering if anyone is selling an “I’m not straight” neon sign on eBay that I could somehow hang over my head. In terms of public perception, I constantly feel like a case of mistaken identity.

The interesting thing about this is that it makes me value my identity all the more. It keeps me aware of how important it is for all of us to have the room we need to freely be ourselves. And then, of course, there are times when it all seems pretty darn close to being in balance. As I was getting ready to go to the Pride Parade this year, my little boy looked at me and said, “Happy Pride, Mama.”
Wow,
I thought,
how wonderful and complicated this all is.
Perhaps I can find a pocket of the world where all the pieces of myself co-exist in harmony. And perhaps it is true that you can give more to the people you love when being fully who you are.

For the most part, all of these choices have left me with a very clear sense of self. I know who I am and the realities of the life I have chosen. And while some of those realities put me in a tight spot sometimes, I accept them in exchange for the ways that they open up my life to live broadly and freely. In terms of labeling myself, I forever have an identity crisis. To say I am bisexual entirely overstates my relationship to men. I do not equally desire men and women. Yet, to say I am a lesbian cuts out the fact that I am still happily married to a man and enjoy sex with him. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, who seemed to know a thing or two about this sort of situation, it’s hard to fix labels on things in such a way as they don’t fall off. So far, no label has seemed to stick comfortably to me. Everyone seems to have their own take on who I am, as well.