June 4, 2024

In The Closet

“Wow, your sexual orientation is a real problem for you, isn’t it?”

My therapist’s office, haphazard but tidy, always smelled faintly of Patchouli incense. During our weekly and sometimes twice weekly sessions, we sat opposite one another in velvet easy chairs. All around us were overburdened bookcases crammed with metaphysical books, psychology books, feminist nonfiction, classic novels from the lesbian canon, and a special section for tarot-style card decks. I always felt peace walking into Emily’s crowded office that more resembled a parlor than a psychotherapist’s office. That office was a safe place for me to hammer out and work through the last thirty-nine years of my life…from the beginning until each moment that came before the moment I sat in the chair. I rehearsed with her the water-stained and dog-eared stories from my childhood, navigated my oldest son’s adolescence, the uncertainty of being a mother, the conflict of a nurse forever on the brink of burnout. She knew the story of my divorce—but not the whole story. I mean, I told her, but she didn’t hear it. Instead, she heard only what she wanted to, the saucy bits about an emotional affair at the end of my marriage. How this affair harkened back to my early twenties when I was proclaiming lesbianism.

It was an early spring day, the sun was almost warm and flowers were threatening to make an appearance in the small beds near the door of her bungalow office. I was feeling triumphant because, a few days before, I had taken a brave step and accepted a date with a man who happened to chat me up in a local coffee shop. Not a manufactured online meet cute. Organic. Something real and hopeful. That’s when my lesbian therapist remarked about my apparently problematic sexuality— and this was close to the last thing she said to me. I don’t remember what I said to her after she proclaimed I had a “problem.” What I do remember is I never spoke to her again. I remember leaving her tiny patchouli-scented, crystal- and trinket-filled office that last time a little stunned and probably shattered I could no longer trust this therapist. I remember stopping to admire the tulips but I don’t remember crying or sharing with anyone what had happened. My silence was no doubt shame I had this new “problem.”

Looking back, my time with my therapist was a haven where I healed broken places. I spent countless hours over a year and a half hammering through all sorts of guilt, remorse, grief, and depression. She knew me. It’s a miracle her declaration that spring afternoon in 2004 didn’t undo the good work, the needful, hard work we had accomplished. She helped me come to terms with my guilt over avoiding a custody battle—which stood to further damage my young children—that led to their father having full custody and relegated me to Disneyland Mom status. This woman knew about my mother’s mental illness, my sister’s emotional and physical abuse. She guided me through difficult inner child healing exercises, helped me confront physical abuse. But somehow, a coffee date with a man was just too much for her. She was a forthright woman with a delightful blend of gestalt and woo-woo energy. Her balance of masculine and feminine energies led me to believe her mind and heart would be open to a variety of lifestyles and experiences. If my sexuality was too much for her, it must really be a problem, so I had to pick a side. I broke the coffee date so I could be an authentic lesbian. Not some wishy-washy bisexual who couldn’t make up her mind.

This wasn’t the first time a lesbian had dismissed my sexuality. I mean it’s one thing if random chicks are telling you your sexual identity isn’t real, right? There must be something seriously wrong with me if a licensed therapist is telling me this. And it wasn’t like I lied to women I met and dated. I was always honest about my decade-long marriage to a man. Still, my history with women in college and beyond made me a legit candidate for the Girls’ Club. So yeah, I’m a lesbian, I guess.

Except I wasn’t sure this was true. And yet…I had to pick a side—and that’s how I became a closeted bisexual. Me, who started delivering a “Closets Kill” manifesto sometime in the mid-eighties. My closet made it possible for me to take codependent people pleasing to the point of erasing my authentic self. I didn’t have the courage to say fuck all y’all to the naysaying straight people and lesbians forcing me to pick a side.

The first time I came out, I was bold as brass at nineteen informing my parents I was “gay.”

“You both should know I’m dating women now. I’m a lesbian. I hope you can deal with it.”

I’m pretty sure that’s how I laid it out. Just vomited my feelings and left them no room to ask me how I could do this to them. Surprisingly, that wasn’t their reaction anyway.

My mother, a woman who never realized her amazing gifts and moved through the world with an air of timidity and fear paused and managed, “This is a hard way to live. And how do you really know? I bet this is just a stage. Why are you rebelling like this?”

I stopped listening. How the Hell did she know? Her comment bristled my young and ridiculous bravado.

My mostly grave, taciturn, and larger-than-life father was silent for a long time and then turned to his work for an example and weird half-assed support, “I’ve got gals like you working for me and they are good people. Hard working. But I think you’re just kinda fickle with people. So you probably aren’t gay.”

This truth annoyed me and I brushed past it in that moment. But looking back, he was partially right about me. I was seeing men as well as women. But this “fickleness” was my bisexuality. I didn’t fit into the Dallas lesbian scene because I was transparent about living with and dating men. But luckily, the men and the woman I lived with were all as bisexual as I was and for six months I enjoyed a sexually fluid household in an impossibly ramshackle house plopped in the middle of a barrio near the hospital and medical school. The house, the company, the neighborhood was unlike anywhere I had ever lived. I felt at home for the first time in twenty-two years.

Our time together ended with college graduation and we went our separate ways. That transition was difficult and I found myself even further adrift my first year after college. I declared myself all in all out and all lesbian but despite this, my dating life was composed of one night stands with a variety of women and a couple of men on the downlow. I knew something had to change one night at the bar I overheard my very first girlfriend remark to my next conquest, a tall lithesome woman, from out of town, "Watch out, Laura is fucking her way through Dallas.” Those words hurt but even then I knew she was right and I started asking myself what was I trying to prove?

My “next conquest” proved to be my future girlfriend who I shared a tumultuous two years. She introduced me to her friends in Lubbock Texas and I was smitten with her and them and most importantly the idea of starting over in a new place. I was completely bored and over a relationship with men because how I related to women felt real and authentic. Her friends embraced me into their household. They were funny, smart, feminists who didn’t give a shit if I had dated both men and women. We were a ragtag mix of lipstick lesbians, hippies, wiccans, dykes, and jocks mostly joined together by our sexual identity. When I moved in with two of the women. I was twenty-three and for the first time in my life my heart felt open. I felt free to be myself. And my parents finally got it. Not a stage. They shunned and deemed me “too difficult to deal with”.

But Lubbock was a desolate place, in the middle of an ugly red clay prairie with endless wind that was either too hot or too cold. It wasn’t the best place in the world to ride a fence between “am I a lesbian or not?”. Not a place people would pick to live unless they were escaping actual Hell, held a deep desire to go to Texas Tech University, or felt as if they had finally found their people. What a time I had in that desolate desert experimenting with separatist feminism, mysticism, hallucinogenic, music, and art. It didn’t matter my parents disowned me, I had my chosen family. I was a loud, proud, and an out lesbian. When the AIDS epidemic reached Lubbock, I got louder and prouder, deep diving into activism.

My parents had washed their hands of their “gay” daughter by now. It was too difficult to share holidays and our communication was limited to random phone calls. Mostly my mother checking to make sure I was alive. They never asked about my girlfriend or friends. Never invited themselves to Lubbock for a visit. I would love to know what they told their friends about me. I was the forgotten daughter and without a family aside from my chosen lesbian family. And then I took a ski trip with high school friends and met a man in Colorado. It was the first time in four years I had been smitten by a man. Lucky he didn’t care I had been in relationships with women, didn’t make asinine remarks about watching me have sex with a woman or inane three-way suggestions. He didn’t care because he was as bisexual as I was. I triumphantly called my parents and we spoke for the first time in six months. I caught up with them, the grandson news, my sainted sister’s pristine life as wife and mother, my mom’s hobbies, and my dad’s new very important prestigious job. I buried the lead.

“I went skiing in Colorado last month and of all things on the day the Challenger crashed, I met a man and I really like him.”

I’m sure my mother swooned with joy and relief. Suddenly they were interested in my life in Lubbock and visiting. I was back in the family. Oh my God it felt so good to be back in the family again. I was included for the first time in years in family events and no longer “too difficult” to be around. My parents loved me all over again and I didn’t have to hear how they didn’t “get me” or my “lifestyle”. I was no longer told to stay away from family funerals or weddings or dinners because I was “too hard to explain”.

Simultaneously falling in love with a man and being welcomed into my family came at a huge price. Things didn’t go well when I told my lesbian family about him. My chosen gay and lesbian family decided they couldn’t love me. For several months, there was outrage and even public scenes. My favorite was in the middle of a grocery store when an acquaintance—not even an ex-lover—grabbed my arm and shoved me.

“How can you do this to us?” she exclaimed, fingers digging into my arm. “How can you do this to us?”

I heard that a lot. I was told I betrayed them. I was called a liar. But weren’t they betraying me? I thought I had found a family who would love me for me. But no. Those lesbians reduced me to body parts—a vagina, mouth, fingers. I only belonged because I liked to have sex with chicks and lived in Lubbock. I didn’t fit in their box and so now I was “too difficult” for them, this time. My heart and my soul didn’t matter. I didn’t matter. At the root of it, my biological family reduced me to an acceptable—for them—social construct of wife.

The day I left Lubbock, it was cold, weirdly damp, predictably windy. There was no going away party of squealing girlfriends wishing me well as I made plans to move to Colorado to be with my love. Only Jamie. A remarkable woman with an open heart who simply wanted me to be happy. Months later, Jamie even came to my wedding. She remains the only lesbian I’ve known who doesn’t make my bisexuality an existential betrayal. I am simply Laura to her and who I slept with didn’t trouble her. Mystified her maybe, but it didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

After a few months of long distance dating this man and then moving to Colorado, marriage had seemed like a good idea. In retrospect, his proposal was half-assed at best and should have been a big red flag.

“My parents are upset about our living together and if we get married, my parents can stop fending off the rumors I’m gay.”

The wheels started to turn, I was already back in my parent’s good stead, me getting married would prove I was the straight daughter of their dreams. Perfect plan.

I said, “Ok, let’s do it. My parents will be thrilled they no longer have to make excuses for me.” It was a win-win for everyone one but us.

The marriage was a dumpster flashfire fueled by his alcoholism and ended after a mere sixteen months. But lucky me, my family scooped me up and allowed me to be the prodigal daughter despite a divorce at the tender age of twenty-eight. This made dating men easy, and it was easy to pretend my love and desire for women wasn’t important. I wrapped up all those beautiful memories of the women I had shared my life and love in a box and set it in my closet. Dating men meant assuring myself it was for the best. My parents were happy and to hell with what I need and want, the most important thing I can do is please them. I was the poster girl for “People Pleasing Codependent.”

My newly found straight life in Denver was busy with work in a busy intensive care unit and volunteering at the art museum where I met the man I share children with. After a brief courtship, when I told my mother we were going to marry and have a child.

“It’s so soon after that divorce but you and Ed have a lot in common. What did you tell him about the other things?”

“I told him I dated women, of course I did!”

I listened too carefully to the straight world and the gay world when he acknowledged my truth telling with acceptance as that being in the past with my least favorite phrase summing up fluid sexual orientation: “I’m sure it was just phase.” A decade of my life reduced to a phase.

Looking back I wish my therapist, Emily, had been able to accept me as I am and rather than pointing the judgy stick at me, I would love to know and understand if my decade married to a man left me feeling swallowed whole and silenced because of his desire to control me as a third child rather than partner with me as a wife or was it more complex because I was quelling my authentic self. I ended up in an emotional affair with a woman, praying Ed would leave me. Our marriage was already in tatters because I felt silenced and never felt like a partner. But this need was what he chose to fixate on and blame. This divorce moved me back out of the closet and once again out of the good graces of my parents for a few years. Oddly enough, despite my codependent need to make everyone happy, it wasn’t until my therapist’s edict that spring day that my equal attraction to both men and women made me uncomfortable. I stepped out of the People Pleasing Closet for a few months until I allowed myself to be forced back into it where I lived for another decade.

My people pleasing and the closet I lock myself into has not been without collateral damage. My sons were put squarely in the middle of their parents’ divorce. I hurt the woman I shared a rich and happy decade with was terribly hurt when I finally owned I was a bisexual. She knew about my history with men but I didn’t tell her the whole story of feeling forced to choose by a therapist and not feeling entirely confident I was a lesbian despite being completely sure I wasn’t straight. I censored this because I was afraid I would lose her. I had been rejected before because I was attracted to men. Our relationship started a few months after my therapist told me I had a “problem” and I picked a side. For years I betrayed her through a lie by omission. When things were unraveling between us, she was understandably crushed I felt something was missing and I needed more than women in my life. It was a truth I had known all along that I marked off the “B” in that string of letters. This lie of omission and the deep hurt I inflicted was the wake up call I needed to finally say, “Fuck all y’all, you can love me, hate me, ignore me, just don’t ask me to go back to the closet because who I love and fuck makes you uncomfortable.”

This past decade owning my bisexuality has been tricky. Not only is it problematic for lesbians but I’ve been hypersexualized by straight people, my bisexuality reduced to visions of girl-on-girl porn. The reality is the actual sex is secondary to my identity. When I crashed through the closet door, I crushed the closet and opened my heart to a whole new way to love and accept myself. I spent my adult life approaching everything with reluctance, conflict, and minimal self-worth. Was this why? Was it as simple but as complex as who I am drawn to love with my body, mind, and heart? Was black and white approach to love and sex the root of all my handwringing second guessing?

The twists and turns, lost friendships, estrangements, and uneasy steps towards self-forgiveness led me to self-acceptance and my most authentic life. Because that’s what shitty horrible sad things ultimately do, they put us exactly where we are supposed to be. Isn’t it lucky? But what a damn shame a decade ago I had to hurt myself and someone else to reach the point of accepting my authentic self and create my family of choice. This beautiful chosen family feels undeserved and daily I bask in the grace this heart-opening gift of having a bi and pan family who accept me as my authentic self. About a year after I burned down the closet, I was lying next to a lover and a friend. We shared the same values, similar childhoods (his without the toxic elements of mine), and an uneasy road to owning we were neither gay nor straight but bisexual. In the dark room, laying on our backs and holding hands, we chatted in hushed tones as if there was a sleeping child nearby.

“You know, people—lesbians—have said terrible things to me when I come out as bi.”

“Gay men can be awful, too.”

We volleyed the ugly things said to us by people we thought we belonged with.

“‘How do I know you won’t leave me for men?’”

“‘There’s no such thing as a bisexual.’”

“‘Oh you’re a lesbian just afraid to admit it.’”

“‘I don’t fuck bi guys I prefer the real thing.”

“‘I don’t date bi, call me when you come out of the closet.’”

Our call and response helped me realize I would never retreat to a closet again. I would never compromise on this need to relate to both sexes on a physical and intellectual level, which meant bending the monogamy rules. In that moment in the dark with this gorgeous human, I knew If I was given the chance at another relationship, our shared bisexuality would be on the table in front of us every day and would not be an elephant in the room or a dirty secret we didn’t speak of. I also knew in that moment if I had missed my chance at long-term happiness with someone, while it wouldn’t be my first choice, I would make a happy life because I loved and cherished who I was becoming.