Does My Love for a Straight Man Change My Queer Identity?

A Guest Post From Rachel Parsons via Narratively

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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There were so many passages that I loved in this memoir piece from

Rachel Parsons

that I couldn’t just restack it in my Substack Notes. So much of it spoke to the late-blooming queer experience, though from the unique perspective of someone who had long identified as queer. Bi erasure is just as easily inflicted upon those who have tended to keep their bedfellows within their own sex, not just those who have long identified with mainline heteronormativity. The fact that Rachel writes so beautifully about her experience was further impetus to share it with you all.

Rachel’s piece was one of two finalists for

Narratively

’s Memoir Prize last year, and the contest is currently open this year if you want to submit. In fact, if you subscribe to Narratively, you’ll get free entry to the contest.

Finally, many thanks to Rachel and Narratively’s

Jesse Sposato

for their graciousness in working with me to bring this piece to you.

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Does My Love for a Straight Man Change My Queer Identity?

By

Rachel Parsons

“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.”

—James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

I’m 33 years old, walking with nowhere to go. The monastery grounds are lush, adorned with creeping dogwood, hawthorn trees and bee balm. Queers are spread across patches of earth: pacing, breathing, silently repeating metta phrases. “May all beings be happy. May all beings be free.” We gather at the Garrison Institute in the Hudson Valley, holding each other for four days in silent meditation. I’m dressed down, in yoga pants and an old Close Guantánamo T-shirt, relaxed with people who’ve become spiritual family. It’s a refuge I seek every year, a place for me to experience who I am beneath my social identities.

My favorite spot’s down the stone steps, past the vindictive rose bushes, at the bottom of the hill, where forest greets manicured grounds. There’s a dirt path there, widened from years of travel. I take 20 paces forward: stop, turn, repeat.

I’m alongside a mossy upturned tree. Her trunk’s soft on the ground, roots unearthed and gloriously reaching. I try to concentrate on soil under toes, but my mind wanders. I let it. I broke up with my fiancée, Sin, a week before; she’s still in our creaky rent-controlled Park Slope apartment. She won’t move out for several weeks, after the screaming, the dent in the wall and the bloody commas on my knuckles. But this battle hasn’t happened yet. Right now, I’m here in the quiet, waiting for grief that won’t arrive.

Where the sorrow should live I expect emptiness, but there’s burgeoning peace. I’ve been in anticipatory mourning for months now, this the quiet climax. “I’m ready for my person,” I pray as I pace, laying my invocation at the tree’s roots. “I’m ready to meet her and build our life.”

The gong rings in the distance, calling me back to the cavernous womb of the meditation hall. I bow to the tree, sealing my intention, and start up the hill.

I’m 19 years old. Janelle and I sit in the top of a small lake house: cross-legged, bare knees touching, her hands on my thighs. We’re in jean cutoffs and rib tanks, salty from Michigan summer heat.

“Do you want me to wipe off my ChapStick?” she asks. She’s wearing strawberry Lip Smackers. “Will it be too weird for you?”

“No.” My eyes move from her gaze down to her lips, scared but wanting. No.

“Are you ready?”

I nod. She gives me the softest kiss I’ve ever earned.

“Oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like,” I think. I taste the plastic nectar of her lip gloss as the kiss stretches out time, caressing every cell in my body.

The relationships I’d had with men were muffled. I followed a script and mimicked my friends on the phone, whispering excitedly about first blow jobs. I feigned interest.

But with Janelle, I find my desire and integrate into queer community: cook vats of lentil stew for lesbian potlucks; dance sweaty with strippers at gay clubs; lead direct-action trainings to prepare for political protests. I buy a pair of black leather motorcycle boots and pierce my nose, coveting more visual markers of my queerness. It’s revelatory. I feel wanted for who I am, not for who I think I should be.

It’s easy falling in love with women. I’m enamored with their curves, their tangy sweetness, their resilience. I date across the gender spectrum, delighting in a hard butch as much as a high femme. I love being queer. It’s a portal into a world unlike the one I’m born into; a journey promising me that I, too, can be free.

I’m 27. I’ve been sad so long it’s become part of my appearance. My girlfriend Emma ended things months before. I drag myself around Brooklyn, sobbing on the subway. Strangers hand me crumpled tissues or offer sympathetic half-smiles before turning back to their train reading.

I’m on my way to a friend’s barbecue. It’s here that I meet Nick, a nerdy, cute cis man visiting from Baltimore. He still describes our first moments with lustful excitement.

“I couldn’t take my eyes off you,” he says. “You were so beautiful. I wanted to know what you felt like underneath your Smooth Criminal T-shirt.”

We spend the evening talking over warm white wine and salt and vinegar potato chips. He’s funny and flirty. I’m drunk on his intoxication.

The sun falls below the stout apartment buildings and I realize it’s time to go. To deal with my breakup, I’d made post-barbecue plans to meet an unavailable woman I’d been crushing on for months. I wink at Nick and bat down his requests to stay.

My date’s a predictable dead end, but my connection with Nick is not. A month later, he comes back to the city. We have dinner on a Red Hook rooftop, kiss at Sunny’s Bar and end the night in his hotel room.

I don’t quite know what to make of it, but it’s fun. I relish his hands and taut back muscles. The way his lips trace my breasts wakes something inside me that’s been dormant since Emma left.

The next morning, I wake Nick with a soft kiss. “Thanks for a fun night,” I say.

His eyes are heavy with sleep. “Yeah, it was great. Let’s talk soon.” He reaches for me, but I offer only my hand, squeezing his briefly before walking out the door. I participate in one obligatory phone conversation and stop taking his calls.

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