So what prompted this diary? In part, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the initial reaction to his arrest by many here in the U.S. and in Europe. Oh, he couldn't have done that to that maid--I bet she's here illegally and just wants money! Talk about a sickening shock. I'm not a woman of color, and I never tried to sue the one who molested me--for what, public humiliation and maybe a few nickels?--but hearing the attempts to wave away or whitewash an event whose details weren't even exposed just turned my stomach.
It's why many abuse victims don't report their abusers. One, we often know who they are--they live with or near us, they're trusted by our families, and we're smart enough to pick up on the narratives about ourselves. Not just in the family, but in society and the media. I can remember picking up a Reader's Digest just before my ordeal screeched to a halt, and reading how a judge in Florida refused to convict a child molester because his five-year-old victim looked "too seductive." At five years old. That chills me through even now.
So here I was in my mid-twenties, having found a way to reach and unleash my rage, and beginning to understand just what I'd done to myself. I'd kicked the Vicodin with ease, but I believe that was due to the fact that I was only taking it twice a day. But I now weighed nearly 300 pounds. I was so horrified when the needle reached 287 and kept rising that I stepped off the scale. My self-loathing at my emotional state quickly transferred to self-loathing at my physical state. Not only would no one ever want me because I couldn't really have sex, no one would ever want me because I was so fat.
And I lived in Southern California, the capital of, "If You Women Don't Look Like We Can See Through You, We'll Pretend You Don't Exist."
Joy.
My bosses at work had changed. Jack and Elaine had two sons--one a Navy vet on a medical discharge, the other just 17. Jack was also ex-Navy, recovering from multiple bypass surgery, and still smoked like a chimney in spite of it. He was a mean-spirited, bad-tempered man who thought re-writing "The Turner Diaries" with an environmental slant would make him a liberal. His wife, Elaine, outweighed me easily by 100 pounds, had lovely blue eyes, and a hair-trigger temper that, when she unleashed it at a customer in front of me, made me cower in a corner--and I am not usually a coward.
Jack constantly derided Elaine for her weight and referred to her as an idiot, until I wondered what made this (mostly) sweet woman refrain from picking up the asshole and punting him through a wall. She could have done it; she had half a foot and definitely more weight over her miserable little husband. Their younger son got work halfway across Southern California just to avoid them. Their older son came and went, almost like a ghost.
One of our people at work got fired after she was discovered taking money out of the register--$50--and Elaine hired a young woman I had to train. Her name was Francesca, and her first words to me, when Elaine left the office, were, "You have such a beautiful smile."
I have crooked front teeth. No one had told me before that I had a beautiful smile.
Francesca and I had different shifts, so we didn't spend much time together--but I started arriving early on the nights when she had the shift before mine, so we could talk. We liked the same music and writers. She loved flowers and taught me about the language of different blooms. We discussed religion; she had been raised Catholic, and her ex-husband in Idaho was Mormon, but she herself was an atheist. And then, one night, she leaned in toward me and gave me a kiss before she left, on the lips. It was just a brush of her lips on mine, and Chris Matthews would have had seven heart attacks if the tingle running up his leg were one-tenth as strong as the tingle that ran through my entire body from that kiss.
She tried to apologize the next night. I urged her to come back into the closet off the office, and I kissed her. It wasn't just a brief brush, either.
We didn't become lovers. I believe Francesca liked me, and I was infatuated with her--but although we held each other, and kissed, and held hands when I finally started driving over to her apartment on the one day we had off, we never did anything more. Part of it was me. As wonderful as it felt to be with Francesca, I spent weeks agonizing over the fact that I was attracted to a woman--that I was now probably a lesbian. (Yes, I'm laughing even now.) And what made it worse in my mind was that I felt I now fit the stereotype--I was fat, ugly, and unlovable by men. I doubt that if Francesca did find me attractive, she was able to get it past the atmosphere of doom and, yet again, self-loathing I'd wrapped myself in.
Mostly, I wondered how I was going to explain any of it to my family. "Hey, guys! I'm not only fat and underemployed, but now I'm gay! You still love me, right? Right . . .?" I could just imagine what they'd tell me, especially my oldest brother--right around that time, his third wife left him for her college roommate, another woman. I told myself no one had to know about Francesca and myself.
As sweet as Francesca was, I began to dread spending time with her--but not because of my own dilemma. She and her ex-husband had a little girl, about five or six. When Francesca divorced, the judge had awarded sole custody to her ex due to Francesca coming out. Her ex never sent the little girl to see her, and never allowed Francesca to see her--all Francesca got, in a horrific defiance of the court order, was five minutes once a week on the phone with her little daughter.
Five minutes. And if Francesca begged for more time, her ex sometimes wouldn't let her speak to their daughter for two or three weeks to punish her.
I dreaded our time together because those days were when Francesca could talk to her child. Five minutes. "How are you, sweetheart? It's Mommy. I love you so much . . . I miss you . . ." And the tears would start to run. She'd grip the phone in both hands, tears streaming as her daughter would talk to her for that small amount of time. Then, she'd manage to gasp, "Bye, baby," or "Wait, not yet--" And it would be done. And Francesca would curl up on the floor and sob as if her heart had been cut out.
And there was nothing I could to do comfort her. I tried. I'd hold her sometimes while she wept bitterly. Her ex had told her he would never let her near their daughter if he could help it--and Francesca didn't have the money to get a lawyer and go back to court. Besides, as a gay woman in the 1990s, she might as well have just given up; gays and lesbians were treated as "morally unfit" in family courts across the country, with physical custody of their children given to former spouses who ranged the gamut from vindictive to abusive.
I have to cut this short because it's still painful, but Francesca decided she was going to do what she could to regain her daughter. That meant a basic recanting of her sexuality. She was going to tell her ex that it had all been a mistake, that she was still straight, and hope he would forgive her to the point of letting her see her little girl again.
And I felt like I was watching her walk to her own death.
How many women did the same thing, not just in the '90s, but before? Willingly killing such a vital part of themselves, to escape the ostracism and prejudice directed their way? I had never deluded myself that we could have a life together, and that too was due to the fear of what we'd face--what I would face. But I would gladly have faced it all, if I could have convinced Francesca not to try to live a lie. I'd just escaped from one I'd told myself for years, and I never wanted to step back inside it. But I couldn't explain it to Francesca. She knew what she was doing, and that it would kill something inside her--but she also thought it was the right thing. For herself and her child.
I never heard from her again.
# # # #
I grieved for her. I hadn't loved her, but it was unavoidable: I could have loved her, and fully. My head spun from, "Well, now what the hell do I do?" to "Heh, guess I'm more like Celie than I thought." You see, one of my favorite romances was that of Celie and Shug from The Color Purple. Most of my classmates in high school wanted a love story from John Hughes' playbook; I wanted Celie and Shug's relationship of equality, unconditional love, and encouragement--never mind that it was between two women.
I had time to consider what I would have done if Ruth, not Ian, had kissed me that night after some bad tequila and sweet sherbert. I had to admit that while I drew the male nude figure with appreciation, I also squirmed and shook when I drew a female nude. I had enjoyed kissing Francesca as much as I had Ian.
I decided to test my theory that I was no longer straight by going on a few dates. Either I had really foul judgment when it came to men, or it was a sign: Every one ended disastrously. One creep even had the gall to tell me he could give me multiple orgasms without having to touch me. After I stopped laughing, I got up and left him at the restaurant.
# # # #
About this time, Jack and Elaine's son David began to stay with them permanently, and I struck up an acquaintance.
David was heavy, like me, with a head of strawberry blonde hair. I have a fatal weakness for redheads and blonde girls, if you can't guess . . . but on to the story. David had served in the first Gulf War, and was suffering from what the media had termed "Gulf War Syndrome." The VA fought him tooth and nail on that diagnosis, and had placed him on anti-psych medications to control his out-of-control temper. He had PTSD, an alcohol problem, and severe insomnia; that was how he came to talk to me, as I was the only one awake from 11:00 p.m. till 4 a.m.
He didn't just talk to me; I talked to him. I didn't share my past trauma or my current confusion with him, but I did tell him about Ian, and my battles with my weight. He, in turn, confided about the training he'd gone through in the Navy, the cruel pranks and the bar crawls at different ports--I learned from him about the "kamikaze" shakes you can apparently get at different McDonalds' in Japan--and brief glimpses of what had happened during the Gulf War.
David didn't talk about battles. He avoided the topic. He talked about the heat. He talked about riding through the desert after Iraqi troops had been cut, not in half, but practically in thirds and fourths, by gunfire. He told me about the so-called protective gear they'd been issued that was utterly worthless. He was sure he'd been exposed to some kind of chemical agent, and remarked with a grim kind of cheer, "I'm definitely fucked in the head from all the movies they made us watch."
His troubles with the VA didn't just include the endless tests they ran to try to prove, somehow, that he was just a goldbricker and not genuinely ill and disturbed. David's back molars began to crumble, and he went to a VA dental clinic 18 miles from home. Two residents extracted his teeth, handed him a napkin, and told him to check out downstairs. David was feeling light-headed from the Novocaine, and his gums were bleeding freely; yet he went down the stairs--either the elevator wasn't working, or there wasn't one--and asked the receptionist, once he got there, if he could please have another napkin, as the one he had was dripping with blood. She got her boss, another dentist, who on finding David's gums hadn't been sewn up, helped him back upstairs and stood over the two residents while they gave David another shot of Novocaine and sewed up his gums. His father had to come get him and bring him home--which, David told me later, Jack did while complaining all the way that he was just being a 'pussy'.
No, we didn't have more than just a friendship, and it didn't sadden me the way I thought it would. I was finally beginning to get the rules; I'd found Francesca attractive physically, but not David, just as I'd found Ian and Ruth attractive, but not the men I'd dated just once. So, I told myself, maybe I was bisexual. Maybe I was more of a lesbian than a straight woman. I'd deal with it all when the time came. Right now, I had a friend I could help, and I could bury myself in someone else's problems for a change.
That changed within a week. I came to work to find Elaine crying quietly at the desk. With a little prompting, she told me that David was gone. She and Jack had had a bad fight, with Jack unleashing a torrent of invective at her, and David had picked up his father by the shirt, spun him around, and then slammed him hard enough into the wall to punch through the drywall.
"You ever say anything like that to her again," he told Jack, "and I'll kill you."
Jack called the police.
David ended up in a hospital for "observation."
Within a month, Jack and Elaine applied for a transfer up in Bishop.
# # # #
So. No more hiding, or so I thought. I didn't change my eating habits, but I did change jobs, and started taking a paralegal course. My brother and his girlfriend had a baby boy, and our mother moved in with us to look after him when my nephew's mother said she had to go "find herself." That was a two-year process.
In two years, I had my paralegal license, and reached the breaking point with my weight. I had a pier mirror on my closet door, and when I stood before it, I couldn't see my sides. My oldest brother gave me a NordicTrack machine, and I began using it daily. I lost 40 pounds that year, another 20 the next year, and another 20 the next. By 2002, I had dropped to 225. But a sudden drop to 206, followed by my second migraine post-Vicodin use, led me to have a diagnostic test for diabetes. I came up as Type 2.
I now had a reason to take care of myself. I was taking care of my mother then as well, and working to the point where I still had no social life. It was better that way. I knew I was bisexual; there was no need to shout it when I had no one to point to and say, "And here's proof!" Besides . . . there was still that fear that if I did, people would either reveal their bigotry, or snicker and say, "Well, of course you are. Can't get a man, isn't that it?"
As part of my medical regimen, I went in for a Pap smear. My OB/GYN was younger than I was, and terminally chirpy, but when I explained that the reason she had trouble getting two fingers in was due to my childhood molestation, she not only commiserated with me, she handed me a set of dilators. They're hinged plastic speculums, and they're meant to help you . . . well, to help you open up.
I'm ashamed to say I threw them out after a month. Friends I confided in joked that I just needed to have a bubble bath, champagne, and the right partner to help out--jokes I resented at the time because, frankly, there's nothing sexy about dilators. They look like speculums, and the last place I feel sexy is in the stirrups of a gynecologist's chair. Plus, they still hurt.
I also bought "The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide For Survivors of Sexual Abuse," by Wendy Maltz. I haven't read the book since 2003, but it helped me to make the last step in my transition. Maltz's message was almost hammered into the ground, but it was clear: To deny myself a sexual life was to give in to the unconscious message left by the abuse--that I had deserved it; that I should be ashamed; that all sex was filthy and disgusting, and I was just as filthy and disgusting for wanting it.
I didn't get angry this time, but I did cry. The therapist had never mentioned sex being a wonderful, joyous activity for its own sake; she'd always spoken of trust, and that once I could trust someone, I could "let" myself have sex. I'd learned to deal with my anger at being abused and robbed, but not with my own sexual feelings. And the root of my fear of being outed was of having people think, or even say, "God, is that what you want? You're sick."
It's reinforced in our society, through jokes and outright hatred, that sex between the same genders is sickening. Nice girls don't do that. Manly men don't do that. Yet reading Maltz's book pushed me to make some conclusions. One, women have loved women, and men loved men, as long as human society has existed. The very acts condemned by society as unnatural when they're between partners of the same sex are considered erotic, or even part of the conjugal duty, when they're between hetero partners. Oral sex, anal sex, fingering, toys, different positions and kinks . . . they all bring pleasure, and pleasure can create emotional intimacy. So what's so wrong about them that two women or two men can't enjoy them together?
Oh. Wait.
Sex is dirty and wrong. Men are animals for wanting it, women are whores for doing it.
I knew that voice.
And so I began to delve into erotica even as I started a real exploration of my body--no stupid dilators, please!--and finding out what I liked, what I didn't, and asking myself what it was I truly wanted from any partner. As I did so, if I felt the least twinge of guilt or disgust, I would stop, and visualize the Voice in my head as a physical presence. I pictured myself strangling the Voice, at first. Then I pictured myself damping it with a candle snuffer, and finally, covering it with a black cloth.
It hasn't stopped, but it very seldom lifts its voice in my head any more.
# # # #
Some years ago, I went on a date with a woman named Kim, and it was an utter disaster. Declaring your kink on a first date is one thing, but attempting to get it satisfied on the first date without telling the other person is just not done. At least, not with me. I mentioned it to a few friends, and one of them wrote me a letter afterwards, telling me she would have been happy to explore anything with me as long as she had my consent.
We ended up having a long-distance relationship that was composed of correspondence and a few phone calls. She ended it in 2009 because I'd become too distant, but added she didn't blame me--I was caught up in Mom's final illness, and had no real time to share with her. Too, she found someone who was right there, so to speak, although that was something she told me up front. I'm happy for her. I hope they enjoy each other.
Caregiving took up my life in ways I never expected, and while I would do it again, I know now the sacrifice I made in my life to do it, period. On the one hand, it saved me from having to come out of the closet, as well as provided me with the time I needed to truly discover who I was, and what I am. On the other . . . well. Still in the closet.
It's taken nearly 20 years, and I can say this. I am Gemina13. I am bisexual, with a strong leaning towards women rather than men. I am comfortable with my body. I am living with Type 2 diabetes and managing it well. I deserve to love and be loved, physically and emotionally, and to take care of my needs and wants without recrimination.
I am not filthy. I am not a whore. I am a woman, whole, strong, and alive.
And this is the year I leave the closet behind.
Love.