Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Read online

  “Do you have a hard time meeting people?” She looked at me, unsure. “Because I do. If I feel comfortable with someone, I’ll just start talking, but there are a lot of people who make me nervous, you know?”

  She nodded. She knew.

  “At least the view is incredible,” she said.

  “On a clear day you could see forever,” I joked.

  She brightened immediately. “Do you know that movie?” I nodded. “I love Barbra Streisand,” she added.

  “Well, hello, Terry,” I sang.

  Our interaction was the only substantial one I had that weekend; still, when the fall semester arrived, our friendship was postponed. I would spot her in the company of the guy she was dating—a skinny preppie with thick hair and a stuck-up attitude—and I’d think, We were supposed to be friends. But I—not yet out, even to myself—was also absorbed with a new love, Petra, a moody film student who took my virginity and made me over in her image. Petra introduced me to Fellini, Plath, and the Violent Femmes; she wouldn’t abide Streisand. Then she dumped me without explanation before spring break.

  During a melancholy campus walk, I ran into Terry. She was in the midst of her own blue mood; her romance with the preppie was on the skids. Already nostalgic for the summer before, we decided to take the elevator to the top of the Tower to see if the view had changed.

  I fell for Terry over a single conversation; I fell for April before I even met her.

  Long before she started hosting Southern California dinner parties, April was a theater producer in Marin County, and I was a receptionist at an arts nonprofit in San Francisco. The organization was searching for a development director; it was my duty to process the applications. One after another, I scanned the staid cover letters, each outlining, in workmanlike prose, a commendable level of experience. Then one day I opened a letter beginning, “There are several reasons why you shouldn’t hire me, but by the time you’re through reading this, I hope I will have dispelled them all.” The paragraphs that followed were saturated with so much personality that I walked the letter directly to my boss, announcing, “Here’s the one.”

  April’s first week on the job coincided with our annual two-day staff retreat. She showed up in overalls, with her shoulder-length auburn hair in pigtails, as if ready for summer camp. In the midst of one of those getting-to-know-you activities, she revealed that at age twenty-seven, she’d already been divorced, remarried, and excommunicated from the evangelical Lutheran church. April, it turned out, was fond of costumes, games, and self-disclosure for the sake of a story.

  She quickly became my confidante at work, where she would escape from her desk to join me in the reception area with a bottle of blue nail polish. We’d fan our wet fingertips, gossiping in a cloud of cosmetic fumes. Soon we were hanging out after work as well, usually at my apartment. The first time she sat down on the toilet to pee, and left the door open so we could continue our conversation—something Maria used to do at our apartment in New York—I knew this was a friend I’d hold on to.

  April and Dean’s marriage was that rarest of things, a heterosexual union with a degree of permitted sexual openness. This meant April was free to pursue an occasional fling; she usually chose a butch, brooding dyke. Soon she developed a crush on Lucy, one of our part-time technicians. They would disappear together after work, and the next day I’d hear about the charmed, urban adventure April had cooked up: an evening walk through Golden Gate Park, a cliffside visit to watch the sunset. One morning, April arrived at the office in the clothes she’d been wearing the previous day—overalls again—her hair looking storm-ravaged. The night before, she’d been knocked over by a wave on a beach walk with Lucy. Drip-drying back at Lucy’s apartment, April fell asleep. She awoke in the morning to an empty bed and a note from Lucy reporting that she’d run off to be with the woman she was really in love with. Then April somehow managed to lock herself out of Lucy’s apartment without her shoes. I looked down, and sure enough, she’d come to work in her socks.

  April didn’t last long as our development director. Within a year, she had given notice and returned to what she did best—producing theater.

  I’ve never wanted to be a woman, but I’ve often emulated the women in my life.

  Maria was outspoken when I needed to discover my own strong voice; she was already the fearless activist I was determined to become. Theresa was able to articulate emotion in the midst of the superficial, party-centered life of a college campus. April brought me outrageousness when I was locked into routine. My women have unearthed in me the very qualities that I admire most in them.

  But who am I to call these women “mine,” even casually? Isn’t possession exclusive to the lover, whereas friendship is ecumenical? Naked and kissing, hands roaming, skin wet: Put two bodies together like this and, yes, you make of each other a possession. But I have not made these women mine in this carnal way, except one, once—an isolated, delirious incident in an otherwise platonic friendship.

  Yet these three women are to some degree mine, just as I am theirs. Doesn’t Maria send me Valentine’s Day cards? Doesn’t Theresa leave plaintive voice mails saying, “I miss my Karly”? Doesn’t April start conversations with “Hi, honey” and end them with “I miss you” in the most adoring tone? Meeting each of them had the dizziness of falling in love.

  My earliest friends were the girls in my neighborhood. There was always more than one sharing “best friend” status. Even when I dated girls—they tended to be Catholic virgins whose overprotective fathers waited up with the light on—we spent more time on the phone, talking out life’s troubles, than we did in person, getting busy. I related to these teenage girlfriends as I would a best friend. Now I treat my best friends with a romantic devotion usually reserved for lovers.

  In college, only one friend’s opinion really mattered to me: Terry’s. Feelings were complicated, and Terry was my feeling friend. Never before had I known someone who could guide a conversation so quickly into the hilly terrain of the heart. One night during junior year, sharing a contraband bottle of wine in my on-campus apartment, I stuttered through the news I hadn’t yet told her: “Paul’s not just my friend, he’s my boyfriend. I think I’m bisexual, but I’m with him now, so that probably makes me gay.”

  She responded by telling me of a night in high school when she dove naked into a swimming pool, followed by a girl named Carol and Carol’s boyfriend. The three of them wound up fooling around. “It was Carol I was most excited by,” Terry said. “She was definitely hot.”

  “Would you do it again with a girl?” She admitted she would. “Have you?” I prodded. In the delay before she said no, I guessed that there was perhaps more to this story, more to Terry’s sexuality. Just how much more I wouldn’t learn for another six months.

  We were in London, spending a semester abroad, living in a tiny flat with four other students. Privacy was nonexistent. Terry and I discovered a dimly lit creperie in Soho that we’d steal away to, drinking glasses of port and pecking at a single dessert crepe for hours. Here, Terry confided that the excessive homesickness that had overtaken her in England had a secret cause: She’d left behind a lover back home, an older woman, a kind of mentor whom she’d been involved with since high school. This woman, Marguerite, held a prominent position in Terry’s hometown, and had set the terms of their togetherness: No one was to know.

  I was dumbstruck. The affair seemed to me politically retrograde and logistically untenable. Yet it also revealed a side of Terry so complex that my own sexual confusion paled in comparison—an ordinary weed alongside a night-blooming, bloodred flower. I wanted to know how this Gothic love had continued for so long, rooting itself in the shadows. I predicted it wouldn’t last—surely Terry, a founding member of a college club called Feminists for Awareness and Action, would chafe against Marguerite’s control—but I was wrong. It was a relationship with no future that showed no sign of ending.

  I’d imagined Terry a substitute college sweetheart, our l
ate-night shared desserts akin to old-fashioned malteds sipped through two straws at once, when in fact she was living the intricate, compromised life of an adult. In singling me out as the keeper of her secret, she’d bestowed adulthood on me, too. In return I offered a kind of antidote—an increasingly free-spirited playfulness made more wild through drinking binges and multiple bong hits, under the influence of which Terry was at her most carefree and nonsensical. During a weekend in Amsterdam, stupid on hash brownies, we explored the nightlife arm in arm, bug-eyed and laughing uncontrollably. “I’m not myself tonight,” Terry proclaimed, adding thoughtfully, “although I am,” which made us laugh even harder.

  After college, living in different cities, we entered a period in which we clashed repeatedly. As much as I wanted Terry to explore her sexuality, I simply couldn’t approve of Marguerite. When Terry asked me to lie to her mother about her whereabouts so that she and Marguerite could vanish for a weekend—their first vacation together, to homo-heaven San Francisco, of all places—I refused. My life at this point was an ongoing, vocal crusade, not just among ACT UP’s activists, but as a journalist at Outweek, the magazine made famous for “outing” billionaire Malcolm Forbes upon his death. The women I was meeting, Maria most prominent among them, were didactic and commanding, aflame with righteousness. They were knocking down walls, not keeping secrets. Their influence was a gift I needed to pass on to Terry.

  The bond between gay men and the significant women in their lives has often been painted as neutered, and thus safe: You both desire the person who’s not in the equation, the straight guy over there. I first heard the term for this type of woman—“fag hag”—in college, tossed off by bitchy theater students, whose conversations rippled with barbed phrases like “drama queen,” “beard,” “breeder,” and “bull dagger.” The fag hag’s cultural currency was so devalued that her only refuge was the company of girly men, who exploited her devotion for their own gain. This was disorienting news. Was it supposedly true that gay men kept women around in order to feel superior to them? Every woman whose friendship I’d sought seemed in some way superior to me.

  I have shared with the women in my life a kind of perversity, a willingness to push at sexual limitations. These are women who have cast the net wide, sexually. They can be crude and challenging and sophisticated and compassionate. These are no withered hags. These are women to be desired.

  By the time Maria and I became roommates, the headiest years of our activism were already behind us. For Maria, grassroots politics were replaced by the stimulation of N.Y.U.’s graduate filmmaking program, and in this new environment, she found her next lover. She had quietly begun seeing a man named Hal. In our queer circle, heterosexuality was deemed by some as “sleeping with the enemy,” but I found Maria’s situation romantic, a love seeking expression against the odds. And I was pleased that she’d chosen someone gentle, even dorky; a man, yes, but one who wasn’t interested in screaming at her on the street, as her last two female lovers had done.

  I, too, had a new boyfriend—Benedict, the letter writer I’d left Paul for. I recall the night the four of us—Ben and I, Maria and Hal—sat on her bed watching news coverage of the racially explosive L.A. riots; whole neighborhoods were burning, sending up wartime clouds of smoke. We talked about politics and fear of the other, trying to understand. Afterward, we slipped to our separate beds, Maria’s just around a doorless corner of the apartment from where my futon sprawled on the floor. Beneath the Duke Ellington music that we occasionally blared to create a curtain of privacy, I listened to Maria getting fucked at the same moment I was.

  It wasn’t long after this that I moved west, inspired by Maria to make my own leap to grad school. A few nights after I departed, she called me in tears. She was standing over a kitchen sink filled with dirty silverware; washing silverware was a task that she abhorred, and so I had always taken it on. Only now, wiping off forks and spoons, did my absence fully hit her. But there was never any doubt that our friendship would continue, in intensity if not immediacy. My future with Ben, on the other hand, wasn’t so clear. I came to realize I was more invested in a life-of-many-lovers than I was in a life with him.

  I continued to visit New York in summers, when Maria rented a vacation house on Long Island, where she worked on her new career as a screenwriter. On one fateful visit, she and I found ourselves at an open-air bar for happy hour, taking in the sunset over the bay. We chatted up a couple, married New Yorkers visiting for the weekend. Greg had sleepy brown eyes and thick curly hair that bobbed as he nodded, listening earnestly. His wife, Gina, was a brunette with a lithe body and large, laughing mouth, who worked for a design magazine with a guy Maria and I knew. The discovery of a mutual friend and the two-for-one vodka martinis warmed us into camaraderie. After sundown, we invited them back to Maria’s.

  We opened bottles of red wine, as marinated chicken sizzled on the grill. The corn on the cob, fireflies, and cut-grass smell of summer lent a timeless, wholesome air to the proceedings, but there was nothing innocent about our intentions. Maria and I had decided to seduce them—separately or together, we weren’t sure. We’d giggled conspiratorially as we’d driven back from the bar, Gina and Greg tailing us in their car.

  After dinner, I announced that I had a joint in my bedroom. Greg drunkenly followed me. We sat on the edge of the bed inhaling smoke, while I lobbed out flirtation, but I soon understood that earnest Greg wasn’t any more seducible high than he was sober. The pot on top of the wine on top of the vodka, plus the chicken in its tangy sauce, was a lethal recipe; the only physical intimacy I shared with Greg that night was our side-by-side puking into the toilet. Gina quickly took her messy husband away.

  The next morning, Maria and I groaned about our foiled attempt to play Paul and Jane Bowles on the prowl in Tangier. That night we found ourselves curled together in my bed, the same one that had failed to lure Greg into a horizontal position, this time with no one to seduce but each other. One of us leaned in for a kiss, and who knows why, but ten years into the friendship, we decided to keep going, like lovers would.

  All along, there have been women whose friendship might have lasted, but didn’t. I think of my rowdy college pal Melanie, who ended up at a desk job she despised, insisting it was the right choice for her career. Each time we’d speak, she had only complaints about her life and jealousy about mine, which she deemed more exciting and “real.” When I would suggest changes she might make, she inevitably answered, “I can’t.”

  To say, instead, “I can,” is something that my women share. For Terry, this came, at last, when she summoned the courage to cut Marguerite off. She marked the moment with an even more elemental shift. She stopped calling herself Terry and reclaimed Theresa—“Big Theresa” was our nickname for the still diminutive but more self-assured woman who stepped forth. Her next significant relationship was with a man, a gentle giant named Guy who treated her with great care. They were married in a Quaker-style ceremony, at which guests were asked to stand and testify when the spirit moved them. When I stood, I told the story of meeting her that first day of college. I wondered aloud what that vista would have looked like through the confident eyes of Big Theresa.

  For my thirty-first birthday, April took me out for a fancy meal. We ate quail and drank wine suggested by the sommelier. The dessert arrived on a plate with “Happy Birthday” penned in liquid chocolate. From there we ventured tipsily into the Fairmont Hotel, sneaking onto the ancient glass elevator for a look at the San Francisco skyline. We hit last call at the campy tiki bar in the hotel’s basement, where a band sang “Celebration” on a floating island as sprinklers spat rain onto indoor palm trees. On the walk home, I spotted a copy of the Book of Mormon in the street, and I eventually stopped kicking it obnoxiously along the curb and picked it up to bring home.

  Back at my apartment, the romantic flicker of our four-star dinner morphed effortlessly into a raucous slumber party. April slipped into pajamas, and I took the opportunity to don what s
he’d been wearing, a mod minidress with a harlequin print. I pulled on a wig and heels from a recent outing as my drag alter ego, Brianna Cracker, and I posed like a drunken stripper against the orange walls of my apartment while giving a dramatic reading from the Book of Mormon.

  The next morning, April walked to the corner for coffee while I cleaned up the night’s detritus. She returned in under ten minutes, armed with a story about the stranger who had chatted her up at the café—a gay, homeless blues musician who had escaped from Czechoslovakia during the 1968 uprising. When she finished, I marveled, “Your story lasted longer than the actual time you were gone.”

  To adore this quality in April is to encourage her to nurture it. And it’s also a way to grant permission. Because when April left my apartment that day, and went back home to Dean, I knew that she would tell him stories about me.

  At each crucial stage of my life, almost without being aware of it, I have looked to women to help define the contours of my identity. Extraordinary, complex women have always appeared. Does some elemental characteristic unite them? To answer “complexity” is to suggest that there is no answer at all.

  For Theresa, I am and have always been the one gay man in her life, though she recently reminded me that she didn’t pick me because I’m gay, but because I helped her “drop her armor.” Of course, it was she who helped me drop mine; throughout twenty years of sentimental education, knowledge has flowed both to and from. April seems to give any gay man she meets the benefit of the doubt, assuming that with him she’ll find some rollicking adventure, some shared, misfit laughter. She’s also been the person who, at my low moments, has accompanied me to a church service, the better to stimulate discussion about belief, contemplation, spirit. Maria has lived more deeply inside the queer community, though as her identity has shifted from lesbian to “hasbian,” from activist to filmmaker, she has concluded that the only label that really fits her is “Maria.” My most recent visit with her was in L.A., where she now lives and works, and where despite the numbing California sunshine, she has found stimulation among a new group of friends.