Who Do You Love?

I contemplate sending out a request for lesbian fiction and films. Then I debate if the request should contain a request for "feminist" fiction or the fact I have committed to reading only novels by people of color this year. Among the books I read last year, reading exclusively women writers, only Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music narrated the lives of queer women, and honestly the Alaya Dawn Johnson's YA dystopia was more interesting with the heroine tangled in a bi-male love triangle. I wonder if reading the suggested texts would offer a roadmap to re-imagining how I move among men and women in the world.

I never met (to my knowledge) an openly queer woman until after I married. By then I had made out with a handful of women, but it had never occurred to me that a lesbian or a bisexual was something I could be. 

Lesbian was a slur thrown by classmates when me and my bookish bestie wore matching Renaissance Festival pendants. In my tiny, stoned teenage social circles in the rural Midwest, the performative flair with which girls kissed girls made me uncomfortable. My boyfriends asked alternately excited and worried questions when I floated my hypothetical interest.

Around the time television’s early iconic gay characters shifted public opinion, I unplugged from television. By the time my younger sister went to prom, she could go with another woman, but I had a man, so I read books and watched boys play video games. I married. I birthed and raised two children, earned a master’s degree, and read feminist theory while stoically watching a whiskey-wrought spider grow on my husband’s back.

This was the work of a decade: a supreme court ruling that legalized gay marriage and a salaried white-collar job when a newly single mother needed it the most.

In most versions of that story, I emerge from that decade smarter and wiser, grieving the loss of a man I loved, but regretting few of my choices. We had a good run. I am grateful, but now I am free.

If I lived in a big-hearted Netflix original, I would play the plucky, poetic woman in her 30s bumbling her way toward lesbian love. My show would have such a splendid, thoughtful soundtrack and folks would honor one another’s emotions between gags. My face would be capable of making more than three expressions.*

In the real, I have no idea how to be. I’ve written at length on heteronormativity among the American naturalists and the ways dancing bodies inscribe a literalized Écriture féminine in space—thereby escaping some problematic essentialism of early French feminism. In other words, I am an armchair lesbian. It is embarrassing, but since I may also be living in a syndicated comedy, that information is comparatively safe to make public knowledge. The part that unravels me lives in my muscle memory where shoulders hunched against raised fist and the perpetually snarled “whore.” 

If as a teen, I did not know queer women existed, I learned as a married women that being a queer made me an easy target for drunken rage. If as a teen I shied away from physical contact with other girls, as a woman I policed my interaction with my growing network of sister-friends fearfully. I composed endless explanations: I was not actually bi. Our culture’s infatuation with girl-on-girl action and early internet exposure to internet pornography made me think I was. Alternatively, our society hyper-sexualizes women the way modern scholars misinterpret the economically savvy, chaste women in Boston marriages. I rewrote my identity by deciding that an angry person’s accusations had re-written my desire.

Being single again, having dated a handful of men in divorce land, I wonder: who could I be loving a woman? I wonder if after having lived quietly closeted for 30 years, anyone would have been surprised if I had made some digitally public declaration on National Coming Out Day. I worry the results both ways: with a big yawn (drama queen) or a sudden shift in public opinion (particularly at my children's school or my workplace). After all, this is a time when people joke "everyone is bi," but bi women experience increased threats of intimate partner violence and mental health problems.

Somehow articulating this long-hushed aspect of myself seems both trivial and cataclysmic, and I have reached the point in my life where I am bored or wary of any event at the extremes of the emotional spectrum. Meanwhile, the ever-critical voice in the corner of my brain wrestles with years of internalized shame and bi-phobia. I agonize over how to interact with a woman I love and the crippling shyness that paralyzes my hand every time it reaches out for hers. In a more playful mood, I contemplate cutting my hair or buying a dapper lady-suit in hopes the world might occasionally see the shift I have made in how I see myself.

It all feels so painfully childish, like this wrangling with identity belongs to folks half a generation younger than me. At 30, a mid-life crisis is the only practical alternative--and what working mother has time for that? I don’t have time to dye my hair, visit my lady as often as I would like, or unravel my image as a (formerly) married femme. Instead I curate a Pinterest board of mostly asexual lesbian art and contemplate asking folks for recommendations on lesbian fiction.