When you play for both teams, you always win
Technically, I always lose but that's not as funny.
This newsletter is about to turn three! It is incomprehensible to me that for almost 1000 days, people have opened their email to read words that basically just tumble from my brain with very little editing.
If you’re one of the OGs, you know this newsletter got its name because my dad called me radical—less an insult than a dismay — that I decided to reclaim. (Not gonna tolerate any dad slander here, I’m a daddy’s girl forever & always)
In retrospect, I may not have written the post that made him call me that in the same way, but the sentiment would have stayed the same.
This is not that. This is about joy.
Always.
I don’t talk about my sexuality a lot (is sexuality even the appropriate term anymore, I don’t know?! I’m old?!) for a lot of reasons but mostly because it feels irrelevant. I “came out” 20 years ago. Two decades! A whole lot of life related and unrelated to who I am loving/dating/fucking has happened since then. Being bisexual is the least interesting thing about me.
Although in my mind the list of interesting things about me is
has vast knowledge of birds.
reads a lot.
enjoys whiskey and wine and documentaries.
Perhaps I am not the best judge of what is interesting.
I have written a lot about the pain I’ve experienced in those twenty years— an exposure to religion that made a way too young person picture herself burning in hell (not that any person of any age should ever be subjected to picturing this), slurs, and an internalized homophobia that has never gone away.
But I am not going to write about that here.
I read an article by a conservative commentator recently, talking about trans activist and entertainer, Dylan Mulvaney , in which she said (I am paraphrasing) she understood why Dylan had so many followers, why people were drawn to her. She espouses joy. And why would you not be drawn to that, when the other side is offering unending rage?
I couldn’t stop thinking about that quote, that moment of clarity from someone who still calls herself a conservative. Oh, they aren’t angry all the time over there. Huh.
Rage watching Fox News seems like a miserable existence. Sometimes it feels like a place I could have arrived at given the area I grew up in and how little diversity I was exposed to. (And I shouldn’t need to say this but not everyone who lives in a small town is prejudiced, the same way not everyone who lives in a city is accepting. I know a lot of people who grew up where I did, and they are fierce allies, and I am grateful they remain rooted there. My baby sister is one of them.)
But for me, I Thank God, He made me a little bit gay.
When I was in college, I joined the GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) and met a man that had walked in one of the very first Pride parades. He told me about how the women all wore dresses, and the men all wore suits, so they seemed “normal” and “acceptable”. A hey, we’re just like you! Twenty-year-old me was inspired and appalled, not yet realizing she would spend years contorting herself to fit in spaces she didn’t want to, that she would spend the next twenty years internally screaming YOU ARE NORMAL!! at herself.
It was my first exposure to the history of what I was now a part of. That despite the difficult conversations and pain I had felt up until that point, I’d never been afraid of violence, of being jailed. That even if I didn’t know it, when I enthusiastically slapped a rainbow sticker on my car’s bumper at age 18, many people paved the way for me to feel comfortable doing so.
I don’t know at what age you become an elder (I think the threshold should be when you find over 25 grey hairs and so far, I am at like 6, so…) but I do know, being out and visible for so long has enabled me to be a safe space. Friends from high school reaching out to me about how to talk to their own kids, friends of my younger siblings, strangers that when I casually mention an ex-girlfriend— without fail— will tell me about “that one time” or “I’ve felt like…too”.
That first one though; to be able to say, look you are doing great, and you obviously love your kid but also, here is how you don’t fuck it up. What a gift to be trusted with that information.
The best cheeseburger I have ever had was made by a lesbian in a dive bar in Baltimore. She is not a generic lesbian; she is my friend and has been for almost my entire adult life. I’ve lived with her. I was in her wedding. She was in mine. I’ve babysat her kid. But before she became my SM (short for Soul Mate and if this confuses you—didn’t she say they were friends?? did they date??, — there is not enough space here to explain gay culture and nicknames and chosen family, do a Google), she was a cook in the first lesbian bar I’d ever been to.
Just a girl and her Soul Mate and her other Soul Mate.
The only Soul Mates I acknowledge.
From this bar I also met BF Liz, Brain Surgeon Shan, my Gem and a plethora of other women who have enriched my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Two Gems and a BF
That time the Brain Surgeon got married.
This was never more evident than when my mom died. By that point, our bar was closed—we were older, changed, everywhere. But they came. They traveled hours to a small church in Pennsylvania on a Friday. They came from Baltimore. Virginia. New York City. I was 31 when my mom died and my very first serious girlfriend sat in a church basement eating little sandwiches and potato salad beside Jay, the man I was currently dating. They talked for hours.
During the procession of people coming into the church, as soon as I saw my ex-girlfriend Keesha, I collapsed into her arms and everyone, including Jay, just let me stay there for as long as I needed.
All of these women have held me, in big ways and small, since then.
I’ve told this story before, but I met my best friend Erin because she told me she was bi and I said I thought I was too. I was seventeen. By this time, I had had crushes on girls for years. The first time I can remember thinking something about another girl, I was eleven. I am tempted to be defensive about this, the skeptics who might read it and think 11?!. I want to ask when they had their first crush. (Was it when, as a baby, you smiled at another baby and your weird heterosexual parent said, “looks like someone is a flirt!!!) ?
But it doesn’t really matter. I am 28 years removed from 11-year-old me and I am proud of that girl who braved her feelings at such a young age, even if she didn’t know what they meant or where she could go with them yet.
My most significant relationship has been Erin and without that smoke filled car confession, I don’t know that we would be here; several girlfriends, several boyfriends, 1 divorce, 1 kid and 1 billion laughs later.
For that alone, I am grateful for this path of my life.
A few years ago, a kiddo I love requested some LGBTQ themed books for their birthday and up until then I had no idea they felt any sort of way or why they would have asked for those books and immediately I thought BUT ARE THEY OK?! WHY DIDN’T THEY SAY ANYTHING TO ME?! and quickly realized this old lady probably didn’t need to give them any advice on how to navigate the world.
But I could definitely buy some books.
I’d like to believe I’d be an empathetic person regardless of my sexuality, but I don’t know if that is true. Maybe my empathy would have been conditional, had I not known what “othering” felt like.
And to be clear, my othering has been minor compared to what many people experience. Most of my othering these days is negative self-talk. Even now, I want to convince you that bisexual is what I really am, I swear, and write two whole paragraphs about how I am mildly obsessed with men’s arms.
I used to play the What If game a lot. What if I’d ended up with my first love. What If my mom hadn’t died. What If I’d never gotten married. What if I’d been normal.
But here is a story: When I moved to Maryland, shortly after my mom died, I didn’t have a job. At some point I joined a Baltimore lesbian group on Facebook and saw a posting for a part time job at a nonprofit. I got that job. And then two years ago, the woman who gave me that job (hot lesbian, friend extraordinaire, officiant at my wedding and Boss Lady) recruited me to come to her new employer.
That is the job I have now and the one that enabled me to start choosing myself and to move to North Carolina.
What If, indeed.
"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains" — Tennessee Williams