Shattering Illusions

The other day, you said to me, "Well, you were abused as a child, and that's what turned you off of guys," as though it were matter of fact, a simple principle that everyone understood, and that if that asshole hadn't interrupted the course of a fairly normal childhood, I'd be unable to control myself from swooning at the thought of your cock.

Hardly.

But how to explain this to you, how angry this connection makes you. You made the connection in a phrasing about your own security, annoyed that everyone we knew that that you'd made me gay. . .I asked you if they were concerned as well that you'd made me interested in theatre, in eating, in politics--the other things that are vital parts of my personality that are just inherent in my nature and pulled from the world around me. You didn't seem to grasp the parallel.

But these are the connections that you did make: because a man hurt me sexually, I cannot or do not care to function sexually with men and because of that, I desire other women. And perhaps it's also related to the fact that I'm deeply attracted to women who have been hurt by men as well.

The fact that 25% of all women have been hurt by men also left no impression upon your consciousness.

I just don't take that as an accurate assessment. I look at women and feel desire shooting through my body. When I tried to pass as a straight woman--even to myself--I felt like I had to create an image where men were an object or site of desire. I looked at men and felt fake. The desire was something that I knew that I was supposed to feel, but it never felt right. It didn't seem to fit me. Although why it took me so long to flip this concept over into the thought that women were desirable was beyond me. . .But, hell, as Adrienne Rich has been quoted again and again and again, in our society, heterosexuality is compulsory. Or at least largely so. We're seeing a greater queer presence in popular culture, but the representations of queer identity are still lacking. It seems that culture is acknowledging queer presence in mainstream society, but it's still an oddity--not an actual life decision that's acceptable. At least not yet.

And heterosexuality was decidedly compulsory for me. When at the age of ten, my grandmother found me in the library looking at a copy of WHEN SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS GAY, she equated the words homosexuality with filthy something stuck. I buried my desires along with a million other things that escaped me from that lifetime until I found a safe place to deal with them.

I am learning to be a home to myself. The home is becoming filled out, where it once consisted of a shaky skeletal frame. I have gutted the rickety structure formed by anorexic guilt and sleeplessness and replaced it witht he solidity of a life worth having. With muscle, bone, fat. . .And with stronger things--love, compassion, honesty at all costs, and it is on this foundation that I'm re-learning my past and reconstructing my future. My perspectives are shifting as a result and I realize the difference most profoundly in the manner of my love.

Art and lies, art and lies--you'll have to decide for yourself what this is. But the difficulty lies in the phrasing--it always does. How to explain the wreckage of my soul to the one on whom I had verbally pinned my heart's desires? To tell you that it was sheer manipulation, sleight of hand is a lie. My love for you was a truth that I let us both believe because it was easier. Easier to throw my emotion outward and pin the richocheting release of pain onto you rather than onto tidal waves of memory that I didn't understand. . .