Without Hiding and Shame

What if you could experience first love all over again?

Going through puberty, I had sexy dreams about girls in which I was a boy. Or, at least, I would be flirting with a girl or kissing her or otherwise romantically engaged and she would think I was a boy, and I would be afraid that she would realize the truth. I didn't have such dreams because I was born in the wrong body. I wasn't. I love being a woman who loves women. In fact, (yes, I'm biased) it's the best kind of human animal it's possible to be. To have this curvy and sensual and sensitive body with all its textures and talents and variability and ability and to combine it with another of its kind —oh, the vistas of creativity and possibility! The ecstasy that abounds. I won the biological lottery in that sense. I digress.

The reason I had such dreams is because I was ashamed of my very natural budding sexual feelings. I was being programmed to believe that only boys should have such feelings for girls and because I had the feelings, logic dictates therefore that I should have been a boy. It didn't yet occur to me that the programming was wrong, not me. When I read the novel A Sharp, Endless Need by Marissa Crane, I found it aptly titled because it put words to that singular pain of hidden and homophobic first love. Mack, the protagonist, is shocked to discover that her secret lustful feelings for her female teammate are reciprocated. That shock, and how flattered she is by the reciprocity, are heartbreaking .

When I was a baby dyke of twenty-something, I was perpetually awe-struck to discover another woman's attraction to me. I was also newly sober and my mentor in recovery said something to me that lodged itself in my brain in the way that few things do, but they form you and shape who you will become going forward forever (shout out to Iudita, I love you): "Stop being so surprised. You're beautiful and fascinating and talented and smart. Just take for granted as a baseline that everyone is attracted to you. Then you can be discerning and make wise choices."

I wish it would have been like flipping a switch, that her words just made it so, but self-love and worth has been a journey and a state of mind that comes as a byproduct of self-care and right living, acting with integrity, and being very brave. And it's not a permanent state, but a conscious contact I move in and out of depending on what I call my spiritual fitness. I digress again.

I wrote about my first love in my forthcoming nonfiction debut, Little Deaths All in a Row, Essays on Sex and Death, and will share an excerpt that gives color to this phenomenon.

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It is the summer after your senior year of high school and before mine. You have a college ID already and at your orientation, you get invited to a keg party at a fraternity house.

“That’s amazing! We have to go.”

“You think? I don’t think I can go.”

“You’re an adult! You’re eighteen! Of course you can go!”

“My parents won’t let me have the car.”

“I have a car, we will take my car.” After saving up an astonishing $800, I had bought my first car at sixteen: an orange Toyota Tercel hatchback. The pride and love I felt for that car was such that I stood on the back porch just to watch it sit there, shining in the driveway. `

In the basement of the frat house at the keg party, I am on my umpteenth large plastic cup of beer, and you haven’t touched a drop. We sit on inflatable couches across from each other and college boys sit beside us, one with you and one with me. The one with me keeps talking, but I can’t hear anything he says because I’m staring at the one with you. It starts with mild annoyance, and as he moves closer and says something that makes you smile, it blooms into fury. Part from simple jealousy, but part from what I know from experience drunk college boys will do, given the chance. I burst from my seat and charge over, grab you by the arm, and pull you up, drag you toward the exit.

“Let’s go,” I growl.

We ascend some stairs, and you’re asking what’s wrong. We burst out into the soft summer air of the night, and I pull you toward my car.

“Wait, you can’t drive,” you say. I reach into my pocket and give you the keys. We start toward the car when a male voice calls, “Wait, can I get your number?” We turn and it is the boy who was with you. He approaches and I charge him. The alcohol unleashes a new angry-dog energy inside me. With both hands, I shove him hard.

“Leave her the fuck alone.”

He stares at me half-scared, half-amused. Just when I’m about to swing a fist at his face, you pull me away and toward the car. I stumble and start to fall, and you squeeze an arm around my waist to steady me. I hang on you and lay my head on your shoulder, stumbling toward the car, playing drunker than I am to ease my shame.

In the car, I continue to hang on you, stretching my torso across the small center divide, and looping my arms around your shoulders as you drive. The car is silent except for the whir of motion, the passing cars that sound like gently shoring waves. My face is close to yours and I can feel the hotness of my breath on your cheek, your neck, your ear. I look to your eyes and see pleasure surface there, your lips parting, teeth glinting in the oncoming headlights. Emboldened, I breathe more directly into your ear, kiss your neck, lick the slope of your shoulder and up the length of your neck to your ear, kissing and licking and nibbling, feeling the desire build in me with a force and ferocity I’ve not yet known, my body squirming with the heat, the urgency, the truth of it. This continues for the whole ride, the wet clicks and soft smacks of my mouth and the intermittent small pleasure noises from both our mouths the only sounds in the otherwise white-noise silence.

We reach your house too soon, and you pull over, park, turn off the car. You turn to look at me for the first time and I open my mouth to say something, but no words are there to meet me. What is unsaid and unsayable is there in my eyes, I can tell, because an expression of pain and fear falls over your perfect face and you turn and flee, jump from the car, run toward the dark of your house. Sobered by the intensity, I drive myself the short distance home.

The next day, we see each other at the high school, where we’d planned to meet at a volleyball game. We sit on the floor in the hallway outside the gym and marinate in awkward silence. Eventually, I look at you and smile and elbow your side.

“What happened last night? I was so drunk, I don’t remember.”

You look at me first with alarm, then you can see, and I can see, you don’t believe me. You know that I remember, that I have endlessly revisited every moment, every touch. I look at my shoes and feel my face get hot. You grab my hand and squeeze it. What I think I read in your face then is something like pity, like you know I am desperately in love with you and you feel sorry for me because you would never, could never, reciprocate. A rush of anger animates my body and I shoot upright. Accusingly, I glare at you and huff a mocking burst of a laugh and say, “Wait, are you attracted to me?”

You cringe and drop my hand and say, “No!”

///

The tenderness of that time. The openness and vulnerability. The underbelly of lust. The wince and swoon of desire. The reel of rejection and rebound. What if I could do it all over again without the shame and the hiding? Without the false programming and homophobia?

Perhaps I already am — living now in a body I no longer apologize for, letting it curve into another body without flinch or disguise. I taste the sweetness I once thought forbidden, feel the press of skin against skin without the shadow of guilt. Each sigh, each gasp, is a reclamation — a hymn sung in flesh and heartbeat to that younger self: you were never wrong to want, never wrong to touch, never wrong to love. You were the miracle all along.

Little Deaths All in a Row is available for preorder here.

(A photo from my engagement to my betrothed on a bridge in Paris over the Seine in front of the Eiffel tower sparkling at night <3.)