Out with a Vengeance

My first sexual experience was when I was eleven and a half. We didn’t go all the way but we did make it to second base. Maybe it was the Peach Schnapps and orange juice we drank from her parent's liquor cabinet, maybe I was promiscuous and developing a high sex drive or maybe it was experimenting. I never tried to analyze it; I just knew that what we were doing was wrong and I knew intuitively that it was something that had to remain a deep secret. I would be horrified if anyone knew about it- especially my parents. I never even entertained the thought that I was gay. It simply wasn’t an option. But I was gay. It took me 13 more years to realize it.

I didn't grow up around any gay people. My parents didn't have friends that we ever met so I never knew any gay adults. No one in my family was gay. No one in any school I was ever in was gay. I don't even remember seeing anyone gay on television. It was just a known fact in my sheltered life and in my sheltered home that being gay was a horrible, mortal sin. It meant hell. It meant being disowned, unwanted, and unloved. It meant a life of evilness and deviance.

For years, I knew something was wrong with me. Something was terribly wrong and missing. I had this void that I tried to fill with alcohol, sex, drugs, and food. Nothing filled that void. I only became an overweight and then bulimic drug addicted alcoholic. After I lost my virginity at seventeen painfully, I gave up. I slept with a variety of men; black, white, and Hispanic; young and old; the bad asses and the nice guys. I was craving something but had no idea what it was. Obviously, nothing was wrong with them so it had to be me. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t be good because it wasn’t natural for me to have sex with men. I had heard all about sex and how great it was and couldn't understand what I was missing. Sex was something I did when I was drunk because that's what I was there for. That's what I was good for. That was something I was actually good at. I didn’t usually sleep with a guy more than once. What was the point in that? I had many occasions that I would get up from the bed, off of the ground, or out of the car and be physically sick. I felt nauseous, I felt disgusted, I felt used, and I felt worthless. But this is what sex was. All those stories of love and romance were just fallacies. They didn’t exist, that was just for the movies.

My downward spiral continued until I became pregnant by my new boyfriend at eighteen. The drug use stopped. The alcoholism stopped. The pointless sex stopped. I graduated high school and two weeks later, miscarried my baby at eleven and a half weeks. All I wanted in my life was to have children and my own family. My self destructive spiral came back full force after a devastating blow to me. I began to consider myself bisexual after a threesome when I was eighteen. I spent a lot more time exploring her body than paying any attention to him. I ended up in jail and attempted suicide several times. I got pregnant again at twenty, enrolled in and graduated business school with an Associate’s degree and had my beautiful son. I moved in with his father (who went from my new boyfriend to my on again-off again abusive boyfriend) when he was seven months old.

I married James at a courthouse when Koty was two and a half. It just seemed like the next logical step. After having my son, my self esteem remained low, I still felt like something wasn’t complete in me and I was still self destructive by staying with an abusive person. But I was stronger. I voiced my feelings more. I dared him to fuck with me when it came to my son. I was fierce. I got pregnant with our second child, Ryley, very soon after we were married and he was born the following year. I now had two beautiful little boys and was in a very deep depression due to my marriage. James had a very high sex drive and if he didn’t get it, he got very mean. I put off having sex with him whenever I could. It was such a brief relief to me when I started my period or after I had the boys and had doctor’s orders to not engage in sex for six weeks. Six weeks was heaven for me.

Finally unable to deal with the life I was in of depression and wanting something better for my children, I left James on January 28, 2001. It was the best thing I had ever done. I found out I was pregnant with my third and final child with James about a month after we separated. I lost my telemarketing job about two months after I moved out leaving the children and I at poverty level but our home was our home, uncontrolled by James. Out of the blue one day, my mom made a fleeting suggestion that I get a job in Activities. I decided that I wanted to be an Activity Director for the elderly. I had never done anything like that but it sounded fun. The certification class was in two days and my best friend lent me the money to take the class. My life began to completely change when I entered that class.

I met Alexis. She worked at Garden Terrace as an Assistant Activity Director and they were looking for an activity coordinator. The hours were good, it paid well, and after I graduated from the class, I would be certified to be a Director if a position came available. I moved from my tiny duplex to a larger two bedroom apartment close to my job. I was about seven months pregnant when I became friends with a very intimidating department head, Teresa. Maybe it was her confidence and arrogance, maybe it was her warmth towards me and not many others, or maybe it was just fate but she intrigued me. She was an older butch who had been out her entire life. She had been with her partner for eighteen years and had two children, conceived through artificial insemination that were the same ages as Koty and Ryley. Their lifetime relationship had become more of a friendship having not been intimate for seven years. On the other side, I had been seeing Sarjo, an African Muslim, for about three months and would talk to Teresa about my relationship with him. Sarjo helped me to understand that not all guys are bad guys. He was sweet, good to the kids, and honest. We were officially together for about a year and a half and he was one of my best friends. We never had sex.

I had Zach in November of 2001 and went on maternity leave until the beginning of January 2002. When I returned to my job, now as the Assistant Activity Director, something changed between Teresa and me. We began to spend more time together and my attraction to her grew on a daily basis. I began to fantasize about her. One day, during a conversation, I told her I was bisexual. And the challenge was on.

We continued to flirt madly. One night, I couldn’t stand it anymore. We had an evening banquet at work. The lights were out as we watched a film on Alzheimer’s. I was standing in the back of the room and Teresa was standing beside me. I could smell her cologne and feel the sexual tension bouncing back and forth from my body to hers. She had her arms crossed and began to lightly and very discreetly run her fingers up and down my side. It drove me insane. After the banquet, we cleaned up the hall and I found reasons to stick around after the rest of the activity department left. Soon, the only non-nursing staff that remained was Teresa and I. I followed her back to her office for her to gather her things and stall leaving her. Finally, the arrogant butch looked at me with a silent challenge, “You really wanna kiss me, don’t you?” I drew in a breath and weighed the consequences in a split second. Flirting was one thing. This was entirely different. This wasn’t a drunken threesome or one night stand. This wasn’t a twelve year old experimenting. And Teresa knew that in her years and wisdom. I stepped towards her and did what she wasn’t expecting. I kissed her. It was a beautiful, life altering, earth shattering kiss that I always envisioned it being like. Our friendship became a very difficult relationship with her still living with her partner. We would sneak time together in her office and I would come in early to spend some precious moments with her. I would back off and then come back. I was scared of my feelings and of this relationship becoming serious. Attraction, kissing, and flirting were okay. A serious relationship was not. It took seven months after that first kiss and start of our relationship before we made love.

Knowing what was to come that day, I was terrified. That’s the only word I have to describe the feeling. I had never made love to a woman sober and during the day before. With my kids at school, the apartment was quiet. I covered the windows in my room with blankets to make my bedroom pitch black. I was ashamed of my body and didn’t want her to see me naked and lose her attraction to me. It had been a long, long time since I had had sex with anyone- let alone another woman whom I already knew I was falling for with mutual feelings. I was shaking with anticipation, fear and excitement when she arrived. She immediately put me at ease and we began kissing. Kissing led to the pitch blackness of the bedroom and we made love for the first time. It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to that point. Finally I got the fireworks, the magic, the romance, and the tenderness. This was what everyone was talking about. At long last, that feeling I had harbored my entire life was gone. I was normal. It was a foreign feeling to me but I was finally, honestly, really normal. Sex with a woman was natural. It was wonderful. Joking, I said to Teresa post coital and after the tears had ceased, “I’d make a pretty good lesbian, huh?” She smiled and said, “Oh sweetie, that bisexual thing is out the window.” I realized she was right.

It took a couple of days to let it sink in. Then came the breakdown. All that I had been taught and drilled into me flooded my brain. I dropped to my knees in my living room and sobbed. I begged God to take away my feelings. I couldn’t be gay. This wasn’t an option. I couldn’t go against everything that I had known. For the time that followed, I came to realize and understand that this wasn’t something I could will, wish, or even pray away. This was how God made me. This was who I was. I was no longer abnormal. I no longer had the feeling of being incomplete. I never had to sleep with another man again. I was living true to my authenticity. I was a lesbian.

After coming to terms with it, I came out of the closet that had been my home for twenty five years with a vengeance. I put several rainbow stickers on my car, I preached gay rights, I was very in-your-face about my sexuality and I created enemies. People found out about Teresa and I at work and I was shunned. I came out to my son who caught Teresa and I kissing one evening. I came out to my ex husband who thought it was a joke. And I came out to my mother on Christmas who disowned me. My coming out to her was worse than I could have ever imagined it to be. She screamed and called me a deviant. She said she would not have a lesbian for a daughter. She compared me to a pedophile. She doomed me to hell and she threatened suicide. I left that night with a feeling of incomparable sadness. My father was killed in a car accident in 2000 so I didn’t have him to turn to. My mother didn’t want me anymore and I was forbidden to speak to any of my relatives for fear that they would look at my mother badly because of me. And my sister joined the side of my mom, only speaking to me on rare occasions. I was alone and the woman who led me out of the closet was still in a nineteen year relationship. My six year old son said to me that night, “Mama, why don’t you just tell Grandma that it’s okay to love whoever you love.”

After receiving threatening notes on my car, sexual advances from guys wanting to prove they could turn a lesbian straight, and disrespectful opinions on a daily basis, I left Garden Terrace and vowed to be extremely careful in who I came out to from then on. I wrestled with this decision because I didn’t want to hide, I didn’t want to deny Teresa and I didn’t want to be closeted but I also didn’t want any more hate spewed at me.

After Elaine found out about our relationship, she took the girls from Teresa. Being the biological parent to them, there was nothing that Teresa could do about it. Teresa moved out and my apartment began to hold a revolving door. She would move in with us and then move back out to live with Elaine again. She would move back in with us and then move back out again. With the stress and turmoil from what was going on, it put an incredible strain on our relationship. We fought constantly and Teresa became controlling and abusive.

During one of our many breakups, I went out with this incredible woman I met online. Her name was Michelle and something between us connected immediately. We went out a second time and she was amazing with the boys who were two, almost five, and almost eight. After two dates, I broke it off with her because Teresa wanted to move back in. I made the decision I would come to regret and let her move back in. Things were good with us for about two weeks and then they went back to how they were and then some. Every night, I would look at her and wonder how the day would have been different if I had stayed with Michelle. I didn’t want to waste any more of my life with someone who seemed incapable of change. . I came to find out that Michelle still wanted and thought about me as much as I still wanted and thought about her. After three years, Teresa left for the final time and Michelle moved in two months later. We were married in August of that year in our church surrounded by friends and surrogate family.

When you’re gay, you don’t come out only once. You come out over and over for the rest of your life. Each time gets easier though. I no longer fear if someone will stay my friend once they know. I know which jobs I can come out in and which ones I can’t. My mother and sister slowly began to talk to me again and this past year, Michelle was welcomed at her house with the boys and I for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She still doesn’t like the fact that I’m gay but she loves me for me. No matter what difficulty, discrimination, or hate I’ve faced in my coming out process, I wouldn’t change anything. I am normal, natural, and whole. Women are the most beautiful creatures God ever created and I have the extreme pleasure of loving them.