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I think I fall in love a little bit with anyone who shows me their soul. This world is so guarded and fearful. I appreciate rawness so much. —Emery Allen

Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences. —Emery Allen

We were all wounded in some domestic war. —Melissa Etheridge

I could fill this whole issue with quotations on the order of: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Wouldn’t that be fun? No? OK, I’ll have to find my own words.

I went down a giant slide once, years ago, and I remember it vividly. The slide was so slick and so long, and the ride so fast, that halfway down I felt like I was going to hurtle into space, overcoming gravity by the greater force of centrifugation. It was as helpless a feeling as I have ever known.

Oh, fickle gravity, which hurts so bad when you fall out of a tree but keeps you more or less moored to the earth or to a slippery metal slide.

My new love, which I recounted in great excitement in mary’zine #68, was about to transcend gravity in its own way…. I was going to travel to visit her, we talked about things we would do while I was there… when something happened…. Isn’t it always the way? Something happens, you’re not sure what, even after extensive back-and-forths where you alternately praise, accuse, justify, plead, and despair of getting back to the used to be…. It’s what you both want, but somehow you’re going in different directions, you can’t seem to make it work, so many tears. One or both of you announce your imminent departure, then you come back, please, let’s work this out. The ambivalence is palpable, on both sides. The two of you have promised to be honest and open, not to disappear without a word. But you’re both caught in a morass of misunderstanding, seeing facts and implications with completely different eyes. What had begun as an uncanny simpatico, a field of blue flowers open to all outcomes, is suddenly charged with doubt. It’s a wonder true love ever succeeds: How do two people navigate that swampy land of differences that were such a delight in the beginning?

One night, in an e-mail that seemed to come out of nowhere, she decided we had to “redefine the relationship.” Apparently I had been taking too much, expecting too much. I read on with disbelief and increasing dread. I didn’t know how we had gotten to this place. I wanted to tell her, I am not Hitler and you are not Czechoslovakia, but the time for jocularity seemed long past. I had believed that I could say anything to her and she would understand. (From which naïve forehead of a Greek god had I sprung?) We had both said we were in it for the long term. But I didn’t know what to do with this new development.

Can a lesbian and a heterosexual woman ever be completely in sync? … maintain a close friendship, let alone a mutually declared sense of being “in love”? It seems crazy now. But I am still in it for the long love, the love that cares more for the well-being of the other than for one’s own selfish desires.

I had been in love before, and I had grown into love, but I had thought that, for the first time, I had met my match and found my equal, that we were in the same place at the same time. I felt infinitely adaptable, willing to make room for her primary relationships, feeling I was at once on the outside and on the inside, in her heart. Her daily life could not include me, and I knew that. We were not young, we had histories, and we felt we could create a relationship that was out of the bounds of normality, personally crafted to connect on the levels that mattered and careful not to trample on what had come before.

Women can do this. Lesbians especially can do this, because we were born into a lawless land already. I never wanted to have a socially respectable relationship, one that followed the rules of courtship and betrothal, china patterns and dinner parties. When I fell in love with my roommate in college, it didn’t faze me. Oh, I’m this horrible thing called a homosexual? Fine. In my late twenties, I found myself in a menage à trois with my then-partner and a young woman with two kids. How crazy, you think. Yes. But that’s what I mean. When you’re making your own rules, anything seems possible, and you believe you can overcome all manner of unlikelihoods. Of course, the threesome didn’t last or, rather, it never really got off the ground. The strangest thing about it was that my mother—my mother—after taking to her bed a few years earlier when I told her I was gay, accepted this new relationship and even sent Christmas presents to the kids from their “other grandmother.”

So that’s where I’m coming from—and now, in my sixties, when I should be done with all that nonsense—I mean, exploring—I fall in love with a married woman and honestly believe, once again, that anything is possible and love will conquer all.

I think that American gay people have, in a sense, put one over on society by seeming to be “just like them,” with all the raising of children and family values and respectable clothes and modest romance (chaste kisses for the cameras at the marriage ceremony). The thrill of acceptance—old hatreds transmuted into new laws that seemingly free us from the prejudices of the unimaginative—may or may not be transformed into the platitudinous tedium of real life. Lesbians, like heterosexuals, can cheat on each other, leave each other, do all sorts of terrible things in the name of love. One thing that seems to be different is that lesbians tend to rearrange relationships in a group so that eventually everyone at the table has slept with the hostess. This can be awkward but is, in the end, rather endearing. We are loyal, and we are not just about sex. One of my best friends was my partner for 12 years (and one of the threesome), and she has been with her current partner for longer than that. She is now as much my family as my sisters are.

 

Although I accepted that lovemaking with my new love would never happen in reality, I kept the fantasy going in my head, loving each endearment she spoke, responding to her hints and innuendos. She was enjoying the flirtatiousness, too, but apparently didn’t know how close to the fire she was playing. I wanted to believe in the endless unfurling of a miracle. Is this not the essence of romantic love? The relationship itself had felt like a miracle. But now it was as if Cupid had pricked us both with his sly arrow and then pulled it out again, leaving us gasping for air like fish flopping on dry land.

Anyone in her right mind would have seen that it couldn’t last. Three- or four-hour phone calls, long chats online, checking for messages in the middle of the night…. But neither of us was in her right mind. Love—the booming fireworks that often begin the opening and sharing of the heart—is not a logical, clinical process. Nor is it a regular friendship, which proceeds in cautious steps, building trust and camaraderie as you go. No, this was sheer craziness, a ride not unlike the long slide of my youth that threatened to catapult me into the atmosphere.

 

In the stream of humanity, we are but a collection of molecules, held together by friction and desire, trying in vain to individuate ourselves from the masses. It’s an odd desire, this wanting to believe we are separate, that we are not what we, in fact, are: members of a species who will float downstream until we reach the end of our run and disappear into the froth and spray of an undifferentiated ocean.

But even as we try to individuate, we are looking to meld hearts with another. It’s one of the most fulfilling things in life. It is like a miracle, finding another person who sees you for who you are, who loves you despite all the practical difficulties, the fallen limbs that often lie across the path to true union. When a new friend declares she loves you, that she is in love with you, there is no headier feeling.

 

 

scared straight

I am the delinquent who will never steal again.

“Scared Straight” was a 1970s documentary that evolved into a TV series that has now turned into a program called “Beyond Scared Straight” (“because scaring teens is no longer as easy of a task”) that introduced young offenders to the reality of prison life. The idea was that the kids would be scared out of their incipient lives of crime, which must seem so glamorous and freeing when they are first attracted to it. The toughest-looking and -acting prisoners put on a convincing show for these kids, who tried to seem above it all but were mostly terrified at the thought of being passed along from rapist to rapist. I don’t know if this program worked, or if “Beyond…” scares them more efficiently, but I’m only using it as a metaphor, so let’s get on with it.

My love(r) was questioning the relationship because it was too intense and draining (as friendships between women tend to be) (you rarely hear about drama kings), and I was forced to see that I could lose everything if I didn’t stop wishing for what I couldn’t have. I had wrongly thought that wishing could remain an exciting part of this homemade, crafted-on-the-fly relationship, a personal quirk that she could accept because she would know it would never come to fruition.

But it was not to be. I was scared straight, all right, and I do not shrink from the double meaning in that term. As far as she’s concerned, I’m as good as heterosexual now. When faced with the possibility that I would lose her, I discovered that all fantasies had fled for higher ground. It was a sobering realization, and I’m still not sure how things will ultimately change between us. But it’s probably the best thing that could have happened, if we are truly destined to be close friends who enjoy and love each other for a lifetime.

 

Am I capable of writing about this experience honestly? I wonder. I’m not writing from the point of view of the future, after a relationship is lost and I can extract hard-earned lessons from it, free to describe and analyze what happened in the spirit of a past love well fought for but not to be. I’m still fighting for it, and for a myriad of reasons I can’t offer up all the details, all the things that would identify her, all the theories of, not only what I did wrong, but what she misunderstood or projected onto me from her own past.

She will read this, of course, as she read the “love letter” that was mary’zine #68. In the throes of blooming romance, there is nothing to tell that isn’t flattering, seductive (she says I “seduce with words”), and in the service of continuing the experience.

But is seduction even possible? It sounds so manipulative, intended to dominate, to force the issue. But isn’t it more a matter of the seducer happening upon a willingness to be seduced? Cupid shoots his arrow, but the receiver must be ripe—primed—hopeful even, looking for it—to receive it.

I don’t want to consume her, or merge with the hearth fire of her everyday life. I want to be a small, bright flame that burns in her heart of hearts, like a pilot light that is contained and respectful, that honors and supports life rather than destroys.

How can I be truly honest about what happens between a lesbian and a heterosexual woman when the lesbian can dream all the possibilities and the straight woman cannot?

 

 

Be the person you needed when you were younger. —Ayesha A. Siddiqi

When I opened up Facebook one morning, that quotation was the first thing I saw. I had just posted my mary’zine #69 called “Daddy’s girl,” and I thought, sure, I could have used the person I am to help me through my difficult childhood, but who’s going to help me now? Where is the person I might be when I’m 85 and can look back on this period of my life and send good thoughts down through the ether of time? It’s as if a lifetime of hard-won lessons has been flushed down the drain and I stand before you, as defenseless as a lamb.

 

After reading my lover’s e-mail about redefining the relationship, I sat there for I don’t know how long, paralyzed, with a feeling of utter hopelessness. Blood really does run cold at such times. Cold-blooded. Check it and see. I had a fever of a hundred and three but I’d been plunged into the icy depths of a love gone cold—or so it seemed to me at the time. To make it worse, she was not going to be available for several days, so no amount of frenzied typing would even reach her, let alone get a response for a long weekend’s eternity. So recently hot blooded, I was unable to respirate let alone think lucidly.

Love is never smooth, but it’s never so rough as when you’re trying to explain a position you held days ago but did not express well and that has now been through the wringer of her perceptions and your own fears and reactions. Love starts with excitement and surprise and ends with a surfeit of words, often at cross purposes. And when you’ve been hurt by love—as who hasn’t?—you may suddenly see manipulation and plotting where once you saw only innocent attention.

I knew I had to sift down through the layers of desire and confusion and be as honest as I’ve ever been in my life. I had to answer her accusations—that all I wanted was to make a sexual conquest, that I have issues with straight women and create scenarios in which I will be rejected or abandoned because “that’s all I know.” This is Psychology 101 and not a bad guess, but I am a different person now. I have been there and I have done that.

She is not a mother figure to me. She is my equal. We are well matched in intelligence, humor, and creativity. Like all lovers, we had tried to remember exactly how this thing had happened. It’s love’s favorite game:

• When did you first notice me?
• When did you start to feel like you were falling in love?
• I knew you loved me, but when you said you wanted to make love to me, that’s when it really hit me.

 

I have lifelong friends, proven friends. I do not want for love: true love, not the sexy, new kind I was enjoying with her. But sexy and new, when going up against the old and true, has the advantage of youthfulness and a flowering in the blood that can’t be denied.

***

When I say, “I love you,” it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You’re a hell of a woman.

I came upon this quotation when I was googling something else, and I recognized how I was feeling. But then I was embarrassed to see that it’s from a TV show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So: —Joss Whedon.

 

My lover’s theory about my self-sabotage via the next attractive straight woman I came upon bothered me like the pearl grinding itself into beauty inside the oyster. Only I suspected there was no goddamn pearl in there, just more pain and self-recrimination.

I imagined myself going down, down, down into the inky void of my own soul. I wanted to face the truth rather than make up stories and offer excuses or apologies.

 

Being honest with another person can be difficult, but it’s nothing compared to being honest with yourself. I wanted to reach the rock bottom of my deluded self, push the illusions aside like so much clinging brush, and see myself with true eyes. We only half-understand ourselves under the best of circumstances. But it seemed crucial to face the hard truth or truths that would tell me which way to go—to attempt to rescue the relationship, or let it go. But going down to the rock bottom of your self is a fitful process, and you can’t help but look for footholds or a ledge upon which to rest, or reasons why this person who is angry at or disappointed in you cannot possibly be right. I kept letting go, and letting go, trying to forget the specifics and focus on the elusive truth. It was more important for me to find it than to convince her of it. I was only half of this equation, and x was still a complete mystery.

I could hardly move, could hardly breathe. I had days in front of me with no resolution, and, worse, no hope of resolution even when the time was up.

I had thought we were committing ourselves to working through the inevitable issues. We were embarked on a “friendship for life”… a friendship that she described early on as “an affair of the mind and of the heart.” We had had a wonderful time learning about each other for several months. There had been a hiccup or two, but we had got through them, which seemed to assure us that with honesty and perseverance we could get through anything.

But my desire for her—even in fantasy—had reared its ugly head enough times that she had had enough. She had thought it would “fade with time”—I’d “get over it”—an attitude with which I was very familiar. But we were each being true to our respective nature. To me, our relationship was new and exciting and had an unmistakable air of the sexual or at least the romantic. To her, it was the beginning of a long friendship—still new and exciting, but with a different result.

Finally, it was not about convincing her (or myself) of anything. Each of us had our own history that led us to this promising, intense relationship, our own feelings and the actions that could or could not follow. Consequences.

In time, she softened enough to say that she didn’t know what to do, that she wanted this “friendship for life” but didn’t know how it could work. The best scenario for her was to go back to before our used to be. We would see each other online and interact briefly. And that’s what we have done.

But I missed her so much; the feeling was palpable, visceral. There was a real connection there, and it looked like it was going to be cut off out of fear—a fear that we seemed to engender in each other, the panic of the lover wanting to rescue the drowning love but ultimately unable to save it.

I hope it works out. I love that woman.

 

 

 

postscript

I wrote most of this issue a few weeks ago, when things between me and my love were still up in the air. They have come down to earth now, I am happy to say. Again, it was a mysterious process, what she went through, what I went through, to get to the point where we can say honestly that we don’t want to lose each other. As friends. Because we are both emotional, intense people, that will still be a factor in the relationship, but I think we are over a major hump. I couldn’t put her in a sexual fantasy now if I wanted to. And I don’t want to, because I want her loving friendship more than a dream. That is so mature of me, I know, and it was getting scared straight that finally made the difference. As my father used to say, “Wake up to the fact that you’re alive!” I had to wake up to the frightening possibility of losing this new friend, this woman I admire and cherish so much.

Maybe we will always be not far from that edge, that big, deep feeling that can turn on a dime and become scared, whether straight or not. I told her once that I felt, with her, that I was riding a bucking bronco and just wanted to stay on long enough to… what?… well, just to stay on. You don’t always know with a metaphor like that if you’re truly staying on or if you’ve landed back in the stands and can only watch the rest of the rodeo go by. I have never used a rodeo as a metaphor before, and I hope I will never have to use it again. If she’s the bucking bronco and I’m the hapless rider, I think I’ll be better off standing a little bit apart and convincing the bronco that there’s no reason to buck, I’m off her back and she is free to live her life. Hopefully with me in it.