A Continent Engulfed

Your world opened up at the exact same time as it collapsed. It was as if someone had taken their thumbs and dug into your world like a ripe peach and removed the pit, leaving emptiness where there had once been substance and no hope of bouncing back to form, yet exposing new, tender areas as well.

One day you were standing in your new apartment surrounded by friends and acquaintances welcoming in a new era in a new city and feeling so full of love and warmth and joy that you felt it might all spill out of your mouth and fall right onto the floor in front of you.

The next day you were waking up to a brutal hangover and the phone call you dreaded.

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For years you had come to fear that any phone call might be the one, even the robocall that didn’t leave a message. Your mother’s name on the phone was the worst. Was this it? You couldn’t shake the feeling that this time it was, time after time.

That morning you reached for the phone and you saw the name: Mom. “Hello?” Your mother was an early riser. Was she calling just to chat? “What’s up?”

“So,” your mother said. “Dad died last night."

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***

Six months and the cloud of grief was beginning to clear. But as you began to move forward with your life, all the while getting closer and closer to coming out, you could not help but think of him.

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It feels strange knowing that you’re in this significant period of your life and that he won’t be a part of it, that he won’t be there, for better or for worse.

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What would he have said and done? Would he have surprised everyone with a warm, progressive welcome? Would he have understood? (Once, when you were in middle school, he saw you sitting on a female friend’s lap and asked you if you were a lesbian.)

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It simply feels so bittersweet that you are finally allowing yourself to live out your life in the way you have wanted for so long, and he won’t be there to see it.

It of course was not a surefire bet that he would respond well. It may have been difficult for him, even considerably so. You still wish you could have given him that opportunity. Instead, you have to balance feeling so free, so fulfilled, with feeling such emptiness and loss. 

And you do feel free. The euphoria of finally acknowledging and living in your queerness cannot be understated. It’s nourishing, exhilarating. You feel like a new person.

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Or you don’t. Not really. You feel like the person you always should have been–always have been–but never let yourself be.

It may have been losing him that actually spurred the change in you, that allowed you to surmount the fear enough to really start living. It feels cliché and a little trite, but when someone close to you dies you really do reflect on the fragility and preciousness of life. You hate to admit it, you hate to feel so pedestrian, but it’s true. You don’t want to feel like when the time comes you’ve wasted your own life, perhaps even more poignantly (at least to you).

If there’s something you can do to change that, and if you’ve known that the whole time, then don’t you owe it to yourself and to them to be out there doing just that? 

Since the first time you fell for a woman, the issue has never been that you weren’t sure. Instead it’s been that you’ve been afraid. Afraid of the unknown, afraid of your inexperience, afraid of the reactions of your family and friends, afraid of abandoning the comforts and confines of heterosexuality even as you chafed against them and they made you feel isolated, inadequate, and even insane.

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At the same time that it makes perfect sense that something as earthshattering as losing your father would jolt one out of one’s patterns and cause one to question her delusions, it also feels wrong to you to attribute this change to his death. It feels like you’re making it about you. It feels selfish that during a time where you should be filled with grief instead you are filled with new life.

You think he would have wanted you to be happy, but you also feel like there’s something perverse about speaking for the dead. Maybe all you can do is hope that he would understand. But maybe that’s selfish in its own way.

***

You’ve been thinking about the first time. When you first met her, you felt on edge around her, and mistook that feeling for dislike. You kept your distance.

By the time the spring came around there was an undeniable bond. You worshiped each other, you brought out each other’s best, and unfortunately your worst.

Your friends couldn’t stand it. But you didn’t care. You never cared. You just wanted to be close to her.

Sometimes you felt like you were losing your mind. You craved her approval. It was all you wanted, and you would go to any lengths. You felt so special when she let you into her world.

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In the end it grew so intense that it couldn’t continue. You walked away feeling hurt and betrayed and never understanding precisely why.

She will always be the first one, the first girl to make you realize that you’re not like the other girls.

***

You were always seeking out men who treated you poorly. Was there something about these men that appealed to you that had nothing to do with sexual attraction? Were you just working out your issues with your father (a phrase much preferred to “daddy issues”)? Maybe you needed someone who was hot and cold, quick-tempered and unpredictable. Maybe you needed someone who would criticize you to show he loved you, because maybe that’s just what love looks like. Or maybe you thought you could fix it, conquer it, if you found the right man. But what if finding the right man was never the issue?

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Every time you did find a man who was kind, and interested, and open, and giving, you ended up feeling a primal urge to run away. You always thought that was because you had the issues, that you couldn’t handle intimacy and you were too cold, too closed off. Maybe the problem was not that you were cold or feared intimacy, nor that you closed yourself off from others, rather you feel that way towards men. Maybe you sought out these ill-fated relationships because you knew you didn’t really want to find one that could succeed. Indeed, you sabotaged the ones that might. You have suspected this was a possibility before, but you always banished the thought from your mind. You never questioned whether your sexuality might extend beyond a simple attraction for or interest in women into the realm of disinterest in men.

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In fact, until recently, you had almost exclusively been with men. Your entire formative teenage years you had no idea you were even attracted to women. How could your attraction for men be illusory, then? How could you say now that you didn’t find them attractive or compelling as partners, even if it felt like the truest thing you’d ever said? Could you have been so deep in the trenches of this compulsory heterosexuality that you didn’t see the truth? Were you too busy working through your maleinflicted trauma–sexual, emotional, and so on–to understand true desires?

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Adrienne Rich said that one of the means of enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality was the “rendering invisible of the lesbian possibility”. In her words, “An engulfed continent which rises fragmented to view from time to time only to become submerged again.”

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How could you be so deluded when you’ve been so comfortable with and felt such an affinity for gay people, gay culture, gay community, gayness your entire life? And when you had already accepted yourself as bisexual years ago? But then again, acceptance led to very little action, so perhaps that was illusory too. Perhaps the fear and shame ran deeper than you thought. Perhaps it’s just different when it comes to accepting yourself. 

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Ever since you had that first queer awakening when you were 18, you always wished you could be with a woman. It was a silent through-line of your relationships. You were too afraid to speak of it, but deep down you wanted to be with a woman. Even before you came to terms with your attraction to women, you felt a desire to be gay or bisexual so you could be with a woman instead. If only, you told yourself. It would be easier. You didn’t ask yourself why. But you fantasized, and you imagined; at the same time, you were so afraid, and maybe ashamed, and even more than that your self-image had become so tied up in being some sort of comically boy-crazy, sexually-liberated maneater type (a femme fatale, a Samantha through and through) that you felt like you couldn’t decouple that from your persona now. That’s how everyone knew you, and that’s how you’d come to know yourself.

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But after going to grad school, you felt like you could start anew. You decided to simply tell people you were bisexual as if it were longestablished, which in turn gave you the motivation to go back and come out to your friends from before. And of course, everyone was supportive and incredible because you’ve spent years cultivating a community of people who have kind hearts and good values and you love them all for that. Yes, you had one relationship with a man, perhaps the last one where you felt any attraction, though it wasn’t the last.

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After that, you more or less stopped dating, except a few times here and there where you “felt like you should” go on a date, whatever that means. And you dated women a few times, even! But you were too scared to let it go anywhere and then, of course, the pandemic hit. That prolonged your semi-voluntary celibacy and by the time everyone was starting to date again, you were afraid of your queerness once again.

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You tried, but you couldn’t make attraction to a man happen. You got “the ick” over the smallest things, especially so when he would really like you and, worse, start being nice to you. These men seldom made it past the first date.

And then you met someone who was kind and stable and older, and he seemed to have so many positive qualities that you thought you should be looking for and that your previous male partners had lacked.

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So you chose to move forward with him. You thought it was what you wanted, but you nursed doubts and you were constantly fighting to suppress it, this “ick”. It was almost a challenge for you, to try to get past some of the things that made you cringe and wince. He’s a good guy, you said, you can do this. (“The lie is many-layered,” Rich wrote.)

You never felt comfortable when he touched you. You enjoyed his company and respected him as a person, but you never felt comfortable opening up and letting your guard down. You only did so once or twice, and when you did the blunt emotional rawness made you feel like you two were getting closer.

Yet you communicated sparsely, and you were OK with that. And his touch continued to feel foreign and make you somewhat queasy. You hoped that it would fail. You wanted something different, something more. And you knew exactly what that was.

***

When you’re with her, you have no doubts. When you’re with her, you don’t think about anything else. You could gaze into her eyes endlessly. You trace your hands over her satiny skin and hold her pliant body in your arms. Then you run your hands through her silken hair and pull her radiant face towards yours. And when you kiss it feels like coming home.

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Time collapses when you’re with her. You miss her before she’s gone. You can picture the next time you’ll see her before you’re even apart.

You lay next to her and feel all the times you’ve laid with her before, and all the times you have yet to lay with her, and will lay with her again. You want to hold her every chance you get. You pull her towards you from behind, squarely within your grip. You rest your head on her shoulder and take a breath, savoring the moment. She faces you, and you kiss her on the cheek, and then the lips. And then you embrace. It’s beyond what you’d imagined. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s what you were too afraid to let yourself have.

She’s beautiful, she’s alluring, but she’s also intelligent, clever, witty, kind, caring, special. She’s like nobody you’ve ever been with. She’s a revelation. You savor every moment you have with her because you’ve never been so lucky before. She makes you feel safe to open up in a way you didn’t know was possible. She makes you feel seen in a way you questioned you’d ever find. Being in public with her makes you feel like you’re doing something right with your life. It makes you feel like others can see it, too. It makes you feel like you’re finally embodying the self that lives within. The self you buried, with whom you were so unacquainted, of whom you were so afraid.

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Your relationship adds to your life in a way you’ve never experienced, a way that takes nothing else away. And you are proud to introduce her to your friends and can’t wait to bring her into your world. And you are honored to be introduced into hers. You want your lives to intertwine. Nobody has to consume anyone else. Nobody has to shrink or shy away.

When you kiss her you feel so right, yet you can’t help but mourn for what could have been. You think about what life could have been like if you could have come out at 18, 19, 20. If you had more courage back when you were so young, so clueless, and so in love. If you had been able to recognize and articulate your feelings, and summoned the bravery to act on them. You mourn for the vast bulk of your twenties lost to fear, and all the time you spent in relationships with men passively waiting to be freed.

You are finally the person you have longed to be. When you say you have a girlfriend, nothing has ever felt more right. It doesn’t matter that you’re 28. It doesn’t matter that you’re inexperienced and new, or at least it feels like that compared to every other queer person you’ve ever met. What matters is that you finally feel at peace with yourself. Friends who have known you for years tell you they’ve never seen you so happy or relaxed. Even you, notoriously plagued with life-long neuroticism and anxieties and self-doubt, can feel the difference.

You used to be worried when you would tell people you were LGBTQ that you were an imposter. Maybe you were just an exceptional ally and got yourself confused. Maybe you are just a person who has felt a deep, lifelong, unexplained connection with the queer community and gayness and gay culture and there’s no deeper reason than that! Maybe everyone finds women beautiful and alluring, and maybe every woman would rather be with them in the end, if they had a choice, of course. Is it possible that wanting the choice already means that the choice is yours? How long did I wait, to make the right choices, how sublime to make them now.

In the end, for that alone, I hope my father would be proud. 

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