Gilda

This is the third attempt I've made at this; the computer ate the first two.

Forgive me if I get a bit long winded; I don't know how to tell a story any other way.

I dated guys in high school. I was never comfortable in those relationships, but could never figure out why. I went to the prom with a very nice Catholic boy, just the kind of boy my parents approved of and wanted me to marry shortly after high school, just like they did.

I met and dated, and brought home the perfect man when I was in college. He was an honors graduate student in the MBA program, from a nice, middle class family, and was destined to be a successful young business lion or possibly go into politics when he graduated. He was a great catch, and everyone told me so. He was a take-home-to-mom boyfriend, and he charmed everyone. To this day, he's by far my parent's favorite of all the people I've dated. I think they might like him better than they do me.

That relationship didn't work out; we weren't sexually compatable, and, as much as I tried, I couldn't love him. I discovered in grad school why. My roommate wanted to experiment with another woman, and because it was part of a normal college “experiment” that many women go through, I was willing. She moved on afterwards, but I didn't. I knew what it was that had caused all of my previous relationships to fail, and why no relationship with a man ever would. I just wasn't wired that way.

I met my SO, (let's call her Grace) while I was finishing up my Master's degree and teaching middle school. She was training to be an EMT, and was working as an aide in the nurse's office at the school where I worked. All the guys, students and teachers alike, noticed her, and lusted after her. I did too. One of the cool things about being an in-the-closet lesbian is that you can openly ogle the 19 year old teacher's aides without being noticed. Unless the aide happens to be a lesbian herself, and does notice the attention. Grace did, and made it known that the attention was not unwanted and she was prepared to reciprocate if I was indeed interested. I was. We clicked almost immediately.

I'm always hesitant to label anything early in a relationship as “love” but I recognize now that it was there, under the lust and the growing friendship, I was growing to love this woman. We were careful not to show anything at work, and worked out a plan for her to meet my parents without revealing to them my secret. I hadn't come out to my family yet. You can see what's coming, I suspect.

We went home for spring break. We'd been together for about four months by that time, and we were deep into the “new lovers” stage of the relationship, where we couldn't keep our hands off of each other and it was annoying our friends to no end.

There was already some turmoil regarding my sister's sexual identity struggles going on (and that really blew up a few months later but that's another story), and it was definitely not the time to be coming out and introducing my parents to my lesbian lover. The plan was that I'd just be bringing home a friend from school. Her family was in Hawaii, and she couldn't afford to go back there to visit, so she was coming with me (this part was true). The advantage to this plan was that because we were girlfriends, but not Girlfriends, we'd get to share my old room and bed. It was the perfect cover.

We went home, my brothers drooled over and flirted with Grace, and she returned as good as she got, which made her very popular. We were descrete, or at least thought we were, and had our fun mostly at night behind closed doors. We spent the days playing games, swimming in the pool, playing computer games, and just overall goofing off, but we were almost always together.

So we're at dinner one night, there's tension in the air about my sister's situation, and we're trying to make small talk. And one of my brothers starts making homophobic comments regarding, I think the issue was at the time, gays in the military. And my father joined in, my mom amening things, and I was remaining silent. This isn't my typical nature. Grace decided to take up a “devil's advocate” position for the purpose of debate, something fairly common at dinner time at my house—the dinner time debate was a right of passage for my and my sisters boyfreinds, and gave my brothers an opportunity to show off for girlfriends. Girls were not normally expected to participate as full debaters, but Grace jumped in with both feet, and the guys loved it. To watch it, you'd have thought they were in a heated argument, but that's just how dinner goes in my family—the men were expected to debate big issues without really hoping to find some resolution.

Visitors didn't always understand this, and sometimes had to be calmed down, but we usually ended up cooling things off for their sake before things went too far. Grace understood it, but didn't quite get it at an emotional level, both the idea that the girls didn't debate the way the guys did, and that it was more of an intellectual exercise most of the time than anything else. She kept getting more and more heated in her defense of gay rights, and I could tell that she was a bit peeved that I wasn't joining her. They began to suspect that maybe there was something else going on with her, maybe she was gay. They asked me when they got me alone, and I avoided the question without outright lying.

But they began to watch her more carefully, and because I was with her, and because we had difficulty hiding how we felt, they began watching us. And the clues began to add up, and one of my brothers managed to put it all together, or most of it anyway.

They had an “intervention”. Grace and I walk into the den one night to find that the whole family is there, and they're all gathered around in a semicircle, chairs brought in from the kitchen and dining room. They were there to help me. Grace, they told me, was a lesbain and was attracted to me, and they felt I needed to know this before things went to far. It sounds funny now, but they thought they were saving me from an evil lesbian stalker. I was dumbfounded both that they'd figured it out, and come to such an incredibly stupid conclusion. It all came out, that I was gay, that Grace was my capital G Girlfriend, that we were lovers and intended to move in together in the summer.

And my parents told Grace she was evil, that she was going to hell, and that they wouldn't let her take me with her. They told me that they were determined to “save” me and that God would still forgive and accept me if only I were to denounce Grace and the wicked lifestyle she had led me into, as if I were Luke Skywalker and all I had to do was choose between the light and the dark sides, and if I chose right—them—I'd be saved. When I refused to choose, telling them that I would be with Grace, and how they lived with that was up to them, they in essense disowned me for as long as I'w with her or any other woman. And they blamed me for my sister's sexual identity problems. Even though I've since shown them proof that Sissy's condition is entirely a physical one, they still blame Grace for corrupting me and me for corrupting Sissy. My mom's brother, who did things with us that I won't talk about here, didn't get a mention, but Grace and I were evil corrupters not welcome in their home.

And we still aren't. My family consists of me, my sister (who now lives with me) Grace, and her parents, who, god bless them, have decided if my parents don't want me, they'd be more than happy to have a new daughter in their family and would be quite willing to adopt me and make it legal if you could do that with an adult. When we go to visit, whenever I'm with them and Grace is elsewhere, I get introduced as their adopted daughter.

Dang it. Now I'm going to have to go back and update my entry in the “last time you cried” thread.