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In 1998, I sat in my stylist’s chair with a photo of Gwyneth Paltrow with the cutter cut that made popular at the sliding doors of the film. You may remember the movie; In it, Paltow’s life is divided into two. In one version, she makes the subway when the doors are closing; In the other, she doesn’t. In the version where she makes the subway, she arrives home early, certainly before what her boyfriend expects, find him in bed with another person. She leaves it, cuts her hair, a new life begins. In the other version, he returns home as planned, maintaining his long hair and illusions.
My stylist first organized a mini intervention. She told me that while I could Give me that haircutIt wouldn’t look exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow because I didn’t have Gwyneth Paltrow hair. I did it anyway. She was right.
Every time I cut my hair, then and now, there is no small part of me believes that a new self is about to emerge. Then, the next day, I realize that I am just me … with a haircut. It is a difficult lesson: you can improve and change. But you are still you. With prominent aspects. A new job. A bolder lip.
Last year, I ended a four -year relationship with a man, a New York police officer. It was the longest relationship he had. And that was long enough. I had lived only for 25 years and kept my time and independence. And then I was honest with him since the jump: I had never lived with a man and had no intention of living with one now. But he also had beliefs about how love would change a person, and if not, that a gradual and predictable fusion of lives was inevitable. But the truth was that I was still … with a boyfriend. I canceled it, perhaps later than what I should.
They say you can’t simply turn a switch and decide to be gay. And to be fair, that is not exactly what happened: I had had strong feelings for different women over the years: I kissed my best friend at the university, he fell in love with a popular singer in my 20 years, I even slept with some boring and bisexual wives in my 30 years, but considered them occasional febrile exceptions in the best of the best.
After all, I had left with men all my life and I never questioned it in a real way. Nor did anyone else. And this is how the idea of who you are can establish: zero evidence otherwise. Even the women I found attracting for the reasons that I could not articulate seemed to reinforce my heterosexuality: it was so heterosexual that I even felt attracted by women They look like men.
Yes, that’s not what that means.
A month after my breakup, and curiously, a week after officiating my friends’s gay wedding, coincidence? – I turned on my search for quotes to women. Just to see.
Most of the profiles did not attract me. And then I saw his: A woman with a bleaching cutter cut, a blue hair wing on her eyes. It looked less like a woman and more like a nymph, a fairy that would seduce you in a yellow wood and keep you like her lover in the belly of an old elm for a hundred years.
We agree. I gave him a fair warning that I was the last person I should know. First, it was not gay, and what is worse, I had just broken with a long -term boyfriend.
“If I were one of your friends,” I wrote, “I would tell you to run.”
We met to have coffee anyway. Then, a week later, for Brunch. I felt that I was requesting a job for which I was not qualified. We kiss timidly in the 72nd and Broadway corner, and I trembled all the way home.
“Do you like her?” My friend asked. “I mean, do you want to go out with her or go shopping with her?”
I didn’t know. Part of me believed that there was no lesbian on the planet that would take me seriously. How could they? When I had so many years of men to take into account?
The blue fairy sent me a text message the next day and said he had been in his mind. “I was thinking about your hair,” he said. “I like it.”
“Why don’t I come tonight?” She said.
“Of course,” I replied. “Should dinner prepare?”
“Let’s saute for dinner,” he said.
You are, I sent a message to my friends: “She will come in an hour and we are not having dinner. All the caps. There is no dinner.”
“You’ll be fine!” They told me. “Enjoy!”
He arrived at 6 in the afternoon, I had to get off the ceiling to respond to the door. I know you don’t drink, I said, but I’m going to need one.
I shook a dirty Martini to death in the kitchen and then sat next to him on the couch. He felt like swinging both legs on a fence and preparing to jump.
And then she kissed me. I will try to resist all the hyperbole when I say that I felt that I had just appeared from ten leagues under the sea. As if I had never breathed before, and never had enough air.
The next day was April 8, and I remember that because it was the day of the solar eclipse. And although Manhattan was not on the path of totality, the light fell like a more attenuated switch, the colors are flattened to the sepia tone. My friend Kim and I were sitting on a wall in the park, turning in the sun through those straight vessels while decreasing a bright cuticle.
“So, this is happening,” he said. “Good?”
It seemed a great underestimation to say yes. Of course, Yes. I had never felt more Yeah.
A few minutes later, the sun approached fullness, the colors returned, but nothing looked the same.
When I say that “I left”, it is not as if I had been harboring a secret. More as I had encountered something incredible, like a unicorn in my kitchen. How did that come? What do I do with him? And then want to tell each person who knew him.
I can’t speak for all lesbians of life in life, but I think I had it quite easy. When I told my friends that I was dating women now, it was as if I had appeared in Brunch with bangs. They are like, Whoa did not expect that, but the important thing is that you like them.
People also hurried to give me an exit, saying things like: “You may not be gay, you may be in love with this person.” But I didn’t need to be protected from that. Gay felt good. It’s like saying, maybe you like this tortilla; You may not mean anything else.
No, quite sure I like eggs. Period.
I fell so bad with this blue fairy, I was surprised by everyone else. I, who had always been historically slow to claim the bride’s mantle and the hatred to set aside my unique status. Yes, he wanted to be his girlfriend. Right now. When he mentioned that he possibly moved from his apartment to 10 blocks from mine, to Brooklyn, he was inconsolable.
It was different with my girlfriend from what I had been with any man: gentle and complacent, I treated her like a glass. I told her that she was the only one for me, and I believed it.
Maybe this was my problem! It was not distant and phobic of commitment, maybe it was only gay. And now that I was hugging who it was, this would surely fix everything.
But in the back gay enough. That it was only gay for her, that it was simply … gay by association.
It did not spend much time, one or two months, to emerge the red flags and that the blue fairy was revealed as a master manipulator. In July, things built for a frantic state: she accused me of having the “incorrect attachment style”; I accused her of asking for more than anyone could give. We were probably right.
You know where this is going. It ended as fast and furiously as it began. It was the most unbearable breakdown of my life.
All my life, my fear of commitment had been reduced to the belief that it would disappear in a relationship with a man and would cease to exist. And what was causing anguish now was that I thought if I let her go, this gay version of me would accompany him.
It took time to recognize that I could and continue to be gay without this person. What I was really crying was the loss of something that I really couldn’t lose: myself.
I didn’t need a girlfriend to be gay, and I didn’t have to change either. In short, I was still alone me… with a new sexual identity.
A year later and I am happy to inform that I am still here. I am still gay. Same hair; New day.
Terri (right) with their sisters.
Happy month of pride!
Terri Tespicio is the author of Stop following your passion: How to create a life that matters to you. His Tedx talk stops looking for his passion, he has seen more than eight million times. She is also the founder of the New Rules Studio, a real -time writing workshop to do the job. He obtained his MFA in creative writing of Emerson College and lives in Manhattan.
PD “What nine films and programs with gay characters meant for me” and the “Little Gay House” in Portland, Oregon.
(Julia Rothman’s illustration for Jo’s Cup.)
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