Best Sex Writing 2010 Page 15

  At the time of all this media commotion, I worked in a coffee shop and was blissfully unaware of the estrogen-charged atmosphere. To the right of the coffee shop was a radical feminist bookshop (their words) and to the left a lingerie store. Between the two I washed dishes while listening to my Walkman, ignoring the lesbian folksingers who invariably occupied the stage. My indoctrination into the fresh obsession of bedding lesbians, or more to the point, attempting to bed lesbians, occurred in that strictly appropriate context of menial labor betwixt feminist tomes and fancy pants.

  A coworker as unfriendly as myself explained with grave matter-of-factness that she was a lesbian who had never been with a man of her own volition. Further (and this was shared over a conspiratorial cigarette by the Dumpster in the alley), she had recently come under the sway of a rather militant group of women whose very earnestness, not to mention hate, made her want to rebel out of sheer cussedness. If, she reasoned quite reasonably, she was to stay true to the cause for the rest of her life, then she wanted to know what she was missing. It was not the warmest of romantic approaches, but that only made me the more enthusiastic. The implicit suggestion was that for my colleague sex with a man was the ultimate taboo, the kink to beat all kinks, a mind-fuck more potent than any physical act, something to challenge and perplex her reading list, rallies, convictions and beliefs. Talk about performance anxiety! But I reflected that though I would be judged solely as I compared to the fairer sex, I also barely figured in her equation at all. I just happened to be washing dishes in the right place at the right time.

  What struck me most in that heretofore gay bedroom with its posters of Jodie Foster was that for all intents and purposes I was with a virgin, a sensual and accomplished virgin, well-trained, as it were, but fresh to combat. It was the first time I’d been with someone technically chaste; that she happened to be an able partner only added to the thrill. My technical usefulness did not last long—friendships based on decontextualizing social parameters tend not to be the firmest of foundations—and this young woman exited my life as brutally as I suppose I had entered hers.

  That first encounter, hot and heavy though it may have been, was a tease, a drug dealer’s first free taste of his (or her) narcotic, after which one has to pay for one’s pleasure. The taste had been acquired. The metaphor is apt, and I hasten to add that this was a taste, not a sport. I did not fancy myself as so irresistible that straight girls became too easy for me. Neither did lesbians present themselves as some worthy challenge. I was not so vigorously heterosexual that I felt the need to personally welcome each and every gay woman I came across back to more traditional frontiers. As with any addiction (and I write in a culture in which anything pleasant is deemed an addiction), there was no plan for the course things would take. I merely became aware of an itch that had to be scratched.

  For my dishwashing colleague, sleeping with me had been a way of pushing the boundaries to their farthest extreme. For myself, the scenario appealed to my inherent conservatism. Concepts such as courtship, wooing and flirting entered my life for the first time, the notion of a delicacy of exchange between the sexes being utterly new to me. Most of the gay girl flings I had subsequently were, by their very nature, a shade too chaste for my hormonal wishes, but it was that very factor of the sex act being an impossibility that I found most enticing. One loves what one cannot have more fiercely than anything, especially at that age. And so, in my own way, I constructed a reality close to my perception of a bygone era where clothes were never shed and a glimpse of bare ankle was considered risqué (never minding that skin was on constant display).

  My love of lesbians had little to do with an appreciation for any cause or belief and everything to do with objectification. Here were women who could be romanticized and idealized out of all human recognition. They were the princesses that boys with horses might dream of finding, untouchable and therefore perfect.

  Flush and smug with success I began to make friends with the impenetrable crew of trendy downtown dykes who frequented the coffee house I worked in. Cambria was the first to allow me into her life, a hardy woman far tougher and more manly than I ever wanted to be. We whiled away one summer at sidewalk cafes comparing women and engaging in such sordid physical exertions as tennis, softball, kayaking and hiking, all of which she excelled at far more than me. I was endlessly inquisitive, fascinated by her existence, her friends, everything. She told me once that the problem with being gay, even in a community such as ours, was that once she had established attraction it was always difficult to know if the object of her affection shared her bent, let alone the affection. The dilemma was made more acute by the fact that she was taken with feminine women. It was in the course of this conversation that I began to gather a rudimentary, working vocabulary, an emotional fluency.

  There were two distinct camps, butch and femme. While my male contemporaries were judging women’s hair color and bust size, I was getting hung up on gender bias within one gender. I would see a girl I liked the look of and be told she was too girly-girl, too fluffy to be a proper femme (the same problem Cambria tended to have). The distinction became ever more subtle; college girls were especially suspect serving as they were their four-year terms with a trendy alternative lifestyle only to become that most dreaded of creatures, what I myself was, a breeder. A traditional lesbian relationship was distressingly familiar. There would be the butch or daddy dyke and the femme or lipstick lesbian. Then there were the leather dykes, a supposedly hardcore faction of the butch set, given to edge play such as piercing, branding and old fashioned S/M. I recall seeing some of these women at play once and having the immediate, unkind thought that they were like little girls playing at Cowboys and Indians and getting it all disastrously wrong.

  There were other terms: women were wimmin or womyn. Girls as such had ceased to exist (unless they went to the local colleges) and in their place had risen grrrls. Instead of a girlfriend one’s beloved was referred to as partner. And then there were the two terms that defined me: het and beard. A beard, it transpired, was just a fuzzy name for that old traditional standby, the walker, socially acceptable and unthreatening.

  My agenda, odd though it may have been, was clear, at least to me. Quite why I was considered socially acceptable by these womyn was more mysterious though. We did have much in common: alienation, unfocused rage, various aesthetics. But there was something more binding, more definitive of our characters, stretching back to childhood. Helplessness, powerlessness produces the most profound rage. Phrases such as “There are no victims, only willing participants” had a particular resonance in our group. Further, the lightest of lives tend to be built on the heaviest of pasts, roses from manure, if you will. What we all had in common was gaiety, hard-won, in the old fashioned sense of the word.

  All went well for a dizzying time, the only obvious problem being that once I was in a relationship with a lesbian she wasn’t really a lesbian anymore and my interest would soon wane. Despite Gore Vidal’s maxim that there are no homosexuals or heterosexuals, only homosexual and heterosexual acts, I soon found that the only people who were making sense to me were the die-hard gay grrrls. One after another my sexual relationships (mostly with these same college girls) would tumble into the horrifying regularity of het dullness and I would spend most of my time with my newfound set, much to the relevant girlfriend’s annoyance. She had, after all, left that group, or one like it, for me (often to considerable disparagement) while I remained a part of it.

  This was masculine callousness, to be sure, to meet womyn within a group of lesbians, woo them and have them turn into women, into girlfriends, and then leave them, bit by bit, by sticking with the grrrls. The women I was attracted to, the women who were my friends, held that penetrative sex was completely beyond the pale and so they found it hard to relate or identify with anyone who would willingly be penetrated or, god forbid, perform fellatio. Penetration was a violation, clitoral orgasms would suffice (separating them from the dildo-wielding leat
her daddy dykes). They were the nonpenetrative majority and in the same swift certain way they had entered my life socially and emotionally, so too did I begin to get steeped in the culture involved.

  There were the bands that provided the soundtrack for those days: Scrawl, Lunachicks, 7 Year Bitch and Babes in Toyland, all as angry, churning and unmelodic as myself. I attended comedy revues wherein the comedienne’s entire act was built on her sexual identity. Lea Delaria is the only name I recall of that ilk. She was, it was whispered, about to become famous and indeed, for a time, her face would appear on television. This was the early to mid-1990s when lesbianism per se was making its biggest cultural foray. Radio shock jock Howard Stern noted loudly and often that the very word lesbian was a boon to ratings. Movie stars and singers were variously outed and the sin of pride became the watchword for alternate togetherness. (The symbol was a pink triangle, an image that graced every second or third car that would drive by.) None of this was new, of course—lovely Sappho had gotten the ballslessness rolling a couple millennium beforehand—but there was a zeitgeist in effect and I was squarely in the right place at the right time.

  There were Take Back the Night Marches, complete with candlelit vigils for those taken in the night. There was an annual lesbian festival that drew thousands from across the country. There were art exhibits of hardcore lesbian erotica and one artist in particular, Yohah Ralph, looked set to make a huge splash on the scene. There were magazines—Bad Attitude, Off Our Backs (and the cheeky On Our Backs), Bikini Kill and Yellow Silk, all as happily pornographic as they were vitriolic, all of which I happened to come across as the required reading list for a university course on gender. And then there were the speakers, the “sex positives” who did the lecture circuit. I met Lydia Lunch, Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle, the highlight of whose show consisted of a personal viewing of her cervix with aid of a speculum. One happy day there was what I came to think of as the sex-negative speaker, Andrea Dworkin, who was as fiery as she was contradictory. She was anti-men and married. She was antipornography but had written a pornographic book called Fire and Ice, intended, she said, for women only. “A woman on the street for twenty-four hours is safer than a woman alone at home with a man,” she roared to riotous applause in a packed Smith College auditorium.

  And so to the bearded, fire-eating lady and the topless, nipple-clamped singer. The band was called Tribe 8, the verb “to tribate” apparently having something to do with the rubbing of female genitalia on their partner’s leg. Their singer, a Ms. Lynn Breedlove, provided my favorite songs, “Fem Bitch Top” and “Neanderthal Dyke.” She also endeared herself by railing against the likes of Ms. Dworkin. Feminist theory made us both uptight, but she had a particular eloquence, not to mention credibility, that I lacked. “Fuck you middle-aged white woman who tells me how to fuck,” she roared. That moment in the club relaxed me utterly. Though it would bring Ms. Breedlove no comfort to know it, she let me know that I did fit in even as she took a knife to her already mutilated dildo.

  Defining moments have a way of destroying conviction, the certainty one fit into a world where nobody fit and, more to the point, fit into a world I could never really fit in. I started to lose the thread. In the topsy-turvy scheme of things, I had finally thrown caution to the wind and fallen for a straight girl. She had promptly moved to San Francisco, the gay men’s capital of America. At the time I was hanging out almost constantly with three womyn: Angie, Vicky and Kate, all three gently swaying from butch to femme as the feeling moved them, and all three very approving of my newfound love. (Lesbians, after all, have some interest in turning het girls.) Angie was an eminently adorable young womyn, who had moved from California for no discernible reason with her girlfriend. We had become the best of friends, with the help of our dogs (mine female, hers male) and a shared passion for running. Every morning Angie would come to my house, wake me and take me out running before I’d gained consciousness. On a whim, she agreed to drive to San Francisco with me, clear across the country. The Great Het Adventure, she called it.

  She told me at the outset that I was exhibiting all the male traits that reminded her of why she’d never wanted to be with a man—machismo, pride and some obscure sense of ownership (my plan was to bring my girlfriend back to Northampton). Oddly, this didn’t keep her from liking me enough to join me. En route we were sleeping together, as we did from time to time, in the manner that perhaps brothers and sisters might. She woke me, as was her wont, with a chaste kiss. I was still somewhat involved in an unchaste dream concerning the San Franciscan object of my affections and with my eyes still closed I reciprocated the kiss lasciviously. It was returned in kind. By the time I opened my eyes and allowed the world to come a little into focus, I found myself furiously making out with my best friend. I do not exaggerate when I say that I recoiled in horror, in the manner that two homophobic men might on finding themselves in some unexplainable compromising position. We disengaged immediately, shaking off the moment over a long run. We never spoke of the moment again, yet when I think of that one good-morning, teenagelike snog it remains in my mind’s eye one of the most romantic, forbidden and charged moments in a not entirely charged life. I had, through no effort of my own, been offered exactly what I wanted and I had shrunk back, not wanting to break the spell. Needless to say, the Great Adventure was a disaster, the San Franciscan lady less than receptive to my entreaties and Angie and I drove back to Northampton in total silence, crossing the country in some forty-nine hours of nonstop driving.

  Vicky was my other running partner, less given to good-morning kisses. She was also the heartbreaker to beat all heartbreakers and to walk down the street with her was to walk with a star. Were it not so wildly inappropriate, the word stud might fit, but in any event, we would walk down the street together and she would point out her many conquests, some smiling back, some turning away pained and others wondering what the hell she was doing with the likes of me. She mentioned her friendships, as she called them, as casually as a gardener might extol the virtues of his (or her) gardenias.

  We had tried to have sex just once, but her body was too well trained to allow it; still we were, in high school terms, dating, spending all our time with each other. Occasionally she would drift into someone’s arms and I would feel bereft and ridiculous. Once she spent a few days with the ex-girlfriend of one of my best male friends and there was an unhappy afternoon when this man and I sat in the park watching the two of them together across the way. We smoked and brooded and offered much bitter conjecture to each other about the nature of women who could leave men for other women. For the man who loves lesbians, lesbian sex is not enticing in the least. It is a threat to one’s dearest hopes. To watch the object of your desire cavort with another woman is to feel more than unmanly, it is to feel irrelevant.

  If it seems contradictory to pine for the girl one would not kiss, the girl one would not have sex with, it should. There were layers upon layers of contradictions and confusions, a sea of mismatched identities identifying with one another. Of course it was strange but it was utterly within context. Half the businesses in town appeared to be lesbian-owned, from the coffee shop where we all commiserated to the hot tub emporium and the social center for that set, a fish restaurant cum nightclub called the Northstar. It was on a date with Vicky that things began to fall apart yet further. We were at the Green Street Cafe and quite unaccountably I found myself unable to tear my eyes off our waitress. Vicky humored me for a short time, filling me in on the gossip. Courtney was the waitress’s name. She was also known as a glamour dyke (she looked a little like Claudia Schiffer) and psycho, due to a public altercation with her last girlfriend that resulted in a knockout punch delivered on the dance floor of the Northstar. Presently Vicky wondered aloud if I might like to pay some attention to her instead of staring at the psycho glamour dyke. A scene developed. I didn’t care about her, she said, and before I could respond Vicky had stormed out, her food untouched.

  In an essay in Esquir
e, the gay writer Jonathan Van Meter posited that the 1990s is the “Post-Gay Era.” His point was borne of personal experience; most of his friends had switched back and forth between gay and straight and he reasoned that after two decades of encroaching androgyny people had gotten down to liking people as opposed to genders. My own experience bore this out. My obsession had kept me firmly on the female track but most of my friends began to veer uncertainly. Courtney rather immediately settled into happy heterosexual domesticity with me and I reflect that of the three longish-term relationships I had, all three women stayed with men—a poet, a fireman and a yoga guru respectively.

  By the same token, my own propensity for the gay girls began to wane. Courtney certainly had much to do with that, or rather falling in love with her did. My friends, however, remained steadfast. I moved to New York and only kept up with Kate as the months went on. She would visit every few weeks and I would half-heartedly be her beard for the evening, going to such clubs as Meow Mix and the Clit Club. She introduced me to a coterie of women called, thanks to a newspaper article, the Muffia, a group of successful womyn (publicists, club owners, musicians and the like) but I failed utterly to feel a part of things. The playfulness was not there; we were all aging, or growing up perhaps.

  One evening Kate asked me, plainly, to fuck her. “To spread her legs as wide as possible and to fuck the shit out of her” was her indelicate turn of phrase. I could barely muster the enthusiasm to say no, let alone explain my rejection. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Her request had been made in the same plaintive yet icy tone as my first lesbian; everything had come full circle and I didn’t want to be there anymore.

  I’ve visited Northampton a few times since then. Everyone has dispersed, changed, grown. Some sobered up, many married their partners in genuine ceremonies. Two couples had children by means of fertilization and one of those couples decided they needed a man in the house and a woman formerly known as Karen became, quite wholly, Ken. I reflected that there ought to be another button saying I’m a man trapped inside a lesbian’s body (politic). Or perhaps just, I’m a human being.