Riding Fury Home (18 page)

Fear made my legs heavy and weak, and I held on to the oak banister as I descended the staircase. I had never been in a room filled with lesbians before. As far as I knew, I had never met a lesbian. I couldn't remember anyone ever saying anything about lesbians, but there must have been something half-heard and half-forgotten, because somehow I'd soaked up the culture's disgust and repulsion. I thought I was too enlightened and progressive to be affected by such stereotypes, but lurking in the recesses of my mind were noxious images of bulldaggers—rough, swaggering women with slicked-back hair—rousing fear.

And then I was in the room. Sixty-some women were gathered: lively, laughing, all absorbed and facing the speaker in the front of the room. It was easy to unobtrusively slip in and sit on the floor at the back of the room. I looked around. The place was packed. Women were seated on the couches, chairs, and floor, spilling between the living and dining rooms; most were in their twenties, many with long straight hair, wearing bell-bottom jeans or green army surplus pants. Some were in hippie regalia of tie-dyed T-shirts or colorful Indian embroidered tunics laced with little mirrors; there was a smattering of girls in their late teens and older women in their thirties, forties, and fifties. An ex-nun in blue jeans and a flannel shirt was standing in the front of the room, telling her story of leaving the convent. Her tale was greeted with a wave of friendly laughter, as if the group were saying,
Yes, yes, we hear you, sister!

I sat among the group and heaved a sigh of relief and joy. These were just women, wonderful women. Women who seemed vibrant and self-assured, laughing deep belly laughs. Many looked just like my feminist sisters from Freedom School. Many looked just like me.

 

 

ALTHOUGH MY FIRST meeting of Gay Women's Liberation brought a startling recognition, I didn't feel any sexual arousal for women, so it seemed impossible to really call myself a lesbian. I signed up for a one-afternoon course given by Breakaway, a grassroots feminist school, titled The Woman-Identified Woman.

We met in an actual classroom because the teacher, Bev, was a full-time professor at a community college. She wasn't supposed to use her room for an outside meeting, but there we were. Bev, in her thirties, was, in my eyes, an older woman. Her dark hair was
cut short around her ears, wire-rimmed glasses resting on her pale, angular face. She wore a white tailored shirt tucked into brown corduroy pants with a thick leather belt and heavy black work boots. Before she started her talk, Bev sat at her desk, tamping pipe tobacco into a pipe bowl, lit up, puffed deeply, and then stood to begin her talk, pipe in hand. The sweet scent of pipe tobacco filled the room.

The lecture began. “Because what uniquely identifies a woman as a lesbian is sexuality,” Bev explained, “society has defined lesbians solely as women who have sex with women. But this is too narrow,” she continued, waving her pipe as she spoke, “and misses the richness of lesbian experience. Let's think about what are the aspects of being a lesbian.”

Bev moved to the blackboard and began writing a list in her neat script, each item given its own line. She'd write a line, then turn and repeat it while facing the class, scanning our faces with her brown eyes that seemed to me deeply intelligent. Along with each of Bev's statements, a gong began ringing in my head.

“A lesbian is,” she intoned, “a woman who loves women.”
Yep, that's me.

“A woman who gets her primary emotional support from other women.”
Another yep.

“A woman who shares intellectual ideas with other women.”
Check.

“A woman whose life centers around women, whose daily passions are with women.”
Check.

She kept going, my head nodding enthusiastically, until she got to the final point:

“A woman who has sex with another woman.”
Well, nine out of ten. Close enough.

I left the class joyous. Permission given—I was a lesbian! Phooey on straight society's narrow definition. Now I felt fortified, more sure that my woman-identified love would carry me along until I opened sexually.

During that afternoon, something else shifted in me: The disdain for manly women that I'd absorbed began to lift. Although Bev looked the stereotype of the old-style butch, I found her terribly handsome, beautiful in her confidence, compelling in the assured way she lit her pipe. She was so bright, so alive. I could watch her forever.

 

 

A MONTH OR SO AFTER MY first Gay Women's Liberation meeting, Kate and I both proclaimed ourselves lesbians. Neither of us had had any kind of sex with a woman, but that didn't stop us, now that our nineteen-year-old bravado was filled with women-identified lingo.

The meetings began breaking into small discussion groups halfway through each session so that women could develop a stronger connection and share more. Kate and I joined a group of eight who were to become an ongoing unit. Both of us were vocal in our opinions. On the topic of coming out, we declared that women should deal very directly with parents and straight friends, something neither of us had yet done. When, after a few weeks, relationships and sexual experiences became the topic, we both had to admit we'd never had any. “What!” several members burst out. Group discussion grew heated: Was a woman a lesbian just because she said so, even if she'd never slept with another woman? Did we get to stay? Two women said they felt unsafe. I burned with embarrassment and I longed to slip out of the room. But by meeting's end, votes for inclusiveness prevailed.

 

 

IT WAS A RELIEF WHEN AN attic suite became available and Kate and I could move out of the ornate master bedroom. The plainer room felt more fitting, with its sloped ceiling and bare wood walls and floor. Kate slept in the large main room, and I had my own turret alcove jutting out from one corner. With curved windows all around, the turret was like a bird's aerie perched above San Francisco Bay. I loved that tiny space. Sleeping on my twin mattress on the floor, I felt wrapped in my own magical nest.

A couple of days before New Year's Eve, Kate and I admitted to each other that each of us had been looking for some experienced dyke to initiate us.

“Kate, um, don't you think it's, you know, oppressive of us, to expect some older lesbian to bring us out?” I asked, glancing at her sideways. I was too ill at ease to look at her directly. And then I did. Right into her startling green eyes, set deep in her pale face. We smiled awkwardly.

“Yeah, it's really not cool,” she replied.

I gazed at Kate, the friend who now shared almost every minute of every day with me. We were living very cheaply on our savings, which hadn't yet run out, so we still had the luxury of not working. Our days consisted of feminist classes and events, explorations of the city, Gay Women's Liberation meetings, rehearsals of our newly formed street-theater group, communal dinners, and life in the house, and through it all, we shared a running commentary, digesting our experiences. A shiver went through me; I'd never been this close to anyone.

I opened my mouth, and what poured out was “I love you.” I'd startled myself, but there was no going back now. Once I'd said it, to my astonishment, I felt it—something buzzing in my belly, vibrating up into my throat, breaking my face into a smile.
I love her
. Of course. How simple: Kate, right there in front of me all the time.

“I love you, too,” Kate smiled weakly. “Sex can't be that difficult to figure out, can it?”

“Nah. You're right, how hard could it be?” Suddenly, I was so scared, everything numbed up again, like a shovelful of dirt dumped on a campfire.

Neither of us made a move. Instead, we both agreed it must be time to go down to dinner. After dinner, we lingered in the living room for a couple of hours with several of our housemates. From a distance, I heard most of what they were saying, and sometimes my mouth moved in response, but my nerves were so jangled I could barely register anything. Finally, the talk ebbed and we all retired to our rooms.

Kate put on her yellow flannel pajamas. They matched her fine blond hair, cut bluntly at chin length. I put on my red flannel nightgown. It was cold in the uninsulated attic. Outside, a thick fog had settled on the bay, and we could hear the foghorns bleating rhythmically. Kate clambered into her twin bed, sat with her knees up as she leaned back against the wall, and pulled the blankets up.

“How about some music?” I asked. Kate nodded. I put Laura Nyro on the record player and sat down in the rocking chair next to her bed. We listened to Laura croon,
“Come on, come on and surry down to a stoned soul picnic. Surry down to a stoned soul picnic. There'll be lots of time and wine . . .
” I was rocking double-time.
Get a grip! Just calm down.
I stilled the rocking chair. Kate was twirling a piece of her hair with her index finger, round and round.

I couldn't stop shivering, I hoped just from the cold. I got up from the rocking chair and went to my pot stash in the cigar box on my dresser. I returned, sat back in the rocker, damped a line of pot into the joint roller, inserted a paper, and concentrated on rolling it out the other end. I lit the joint and handed it to Kate. We passed it back and forth, not speaking.

I knew that I was expected to take the lead because I was the one with sexual experience. Never mind that I barely knew my own body, that I had never had an orgasm, that sex with my boyfriends had been unadventurous and pretty unsatisfying.

“Want to dance?” I blurted, when we had finished the joint down to the roach. Kate nodded slightly, pushed back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. Laura Nyro was singing, plaintive and slow, “
Emily and her love to be, carved in a heart on a berry tree . . .
”

Kate stood next to the bed, hesitating. I'd gotten out of the rocker and was facing her, but my legs were shaky, leaden, so I just reached out my hands toward her. She took one step forward, reached her hands toward mine. I felt dizzy, faint. Fear had me holding my breath. Another step and our hands met, and then our arms wrapped around each other as we leaned our bodies one against the other. We began swaying, then moving slowly in a trancelike two-step. Under my hand, the cozy feel of flannel, the arch of her back moving underneath. With touch, my fear ebbed. The breath I had been holding released. The smell of her neck, salty sweet, mixed with the scent of herbal shampoo. I could feel her large, soft breasts pushing against mine.

We slowed until we were rooted, pressed together. She was short like me, and we fit right together. I kissed her neck and she leaned her head back, sighing. I worked my mouth up her neck, leaving wet marks against her skin. A great heat rose in me. Trembling, I halted, overwhelmed by the intensity that was stirring. And then she moved her face forward and we were kissing, stiffly at first, then softly, then more fiercely.

I took Kate's hand and led her into my turret, with its single mattress on the floor. She lay down on the bed while I lit the sand
candle on my dresser. I stripped off my nightgown and lay down next to her, unbuttoning her pajama top, stroking her back. She ran her fingers through my hair, and my scalp tingled, electrified. I ran my tongue along the edge of her ear, down her neck, and along her collarbone.
Now what do I do?
In that moment of awkwardness, I looked up at Kate's face—her eyes were closed, mouth in a blissful smile—and I imagined what I would want: tongue moving slowly around my nipples, then faster, then teasing to slowness, then harder. For a moment, the insecurity held me suspended, then I let go:
Yes, her breasts, yes, I could live here, forever.

I sat up and tugged Kate's pajama bottoms down from her waist. She lifted her hips while I pulled the pants off. Stroking down her belly, my fingers entered the wetness beneath her soft blond pubic hair. Kate moaned, as the long-forbidden touching released a chorus of hallelujahs in me. She reached for me as well.
Oh my God, her hand caressing me, inside me
. I rolled on top of her, pressing, rocking, gathering momentum, our throats crying out as I lost track of whose moans and sighs were whose. There was a great tightening roar and then a glorious floating.

 

 

IN THE SHOWER THE NEXT morning, I found myself grinning one of those goofy grins, remembering the double delight: first time with a woman, first orgasm of my life.

I couldn't wait to go downstairs and proclaim my new status: no longer the lesbian virgin. Kate was still asleep, so after my shower I went to the kitchen. Donna was standing at the toaster, plopping two slices of toast onto a plate. I must have still been beaming, because Donna stopped buttering her toast, holding the knife in the air. She stared a moment, then smiled. “Well, good morning, I guess!”

“It sure is!” I paused, not from shyness, but to add drama to my announcement. Donna, at thirty-nine, was one of the two “older women” in the house, and a puzzlement to me. I understood very little of the pain of her early life as a closeted lesbian in Texas in the'50s, how as a practicing Christian and a teacher she had felt even more pressure to hide and pretend not to be queer. Now, she was an activist within the homophile movement, working for civil rights. I often argued with her about her approach. “Donna, why waste your energy? Working within the system is useless—the whole thing has to come down and we have to start over. Revolution, not revisionism.” She would smile indulgently at me, the teenage whippersnapper.

Now, Donna simply looked at me expectantly.

“Kate and I became lovers last night!”

Donna's smile deepened so that her eyes crinkled at the corners. “Well, congratulations! I'll bet you two are sweet together. Wonderful!”