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The Hook Up: Welcome to the Club

I am 24 years old and deeply in the closet. Over the past year I have stopped lying to myself and have come to the realization that I am a lesbian. I know that in the age of marriage equality there should be no reason to be terrified to come out (especially to my super liberal, gender-studies-major friends), but I am. I do not feel ready to come out to those who I am most close to.

In a couple of months, I’ll be moving to a completely new town to finish my college degree. When I move, I want to be out; I want to be a lesbian. I want the new friends I make to know that I am gay, and I want to date women (finally!). But I have two major concerns with this plan: One, It feels like it would be a betrayal to be out to a bunch of strangers/new friends while I am not out to my close friends and family. I would be leading a double life. Two, I feel like I have absolutely no credibility to say that I am a lesbian. I have had sex with men, but other than kissing, I have never been intimate with a woman. How could I tell someone I am a lesbian when no one close to me knows I’m gay and, for all intents and purposes, I am a virgin in my mid-twenties? And, perhaps more important, who would want to date someone who fit that description?-Trying to Come Out

Dear Trying,

I was almost 21 the first time I had ladysex. It was with a gal I went to high school with, though we didn’t really know each other then. She’d been macking on girls since she was 14, much to my dismay. The only experience I had with women was when I drove three hours to meet a girl at a hotel and it took us six hours to kiss and by the time we finally got around to it, it was morning and we had to drive back to our schools/places of employment and she ended up falling asleep at the wheel and crashing her car in a ditch and then not speaking to me for a month. I was a ladykiller ALMOST LITERALLY.

Did my inexperience matter to my first girlsex companion? Not a jot. Because we were far too busy smashing our faces together in awkward lusty bliss and then getting stoned and going to Wendy’s for a Frosty. All this is to say, you don’t need “credibility” to say you’re a lesbian. No one is going to make you recite Adrienne Rich or quiz you on the textural differences between tempeh and seitan. And, unless whoever you’re talking to is particularly tactless, they aren’t going to pronounce you UNGAY for not already having banged a bunch of chicks. Your sexuality is not a Sub Club card. (Bang 10 ladies, get a free month of couples therapy!)

We don’t ask straight ladies to prove they’re straight by blowing a bunch of dudes in an alley, you know? We simply take their word for it (unless we are in love with them, but that is another story). So if anyone should have the audacity to question your identity, or say to you: “But how do you KNOW you like girls if you’ve never scissored one on an auspicious day in the lunar calendar while listening to Enya?” You can say, “I just do.” And leave it at that. Or feel free to use the alley blow job analogy above. That also gets the point across.

But remember that inexperience is not necessarily a liability. Good sex is about showing up, knowing what you want, and being able to communicate those wants with others (and reciprocate, obvs.) It has very little to do with whether you’ve banged all the forwards from the local women’s rugby team. Your effectiveness on the Lust-O-Meter scale is dependent on many random, important, trivial, strange, compelling, worthless things-Is she single? Does she wear glasses? Have tattoos? Ride a motorcycle? Is she kind to her mom? To waitresses? Good at poetry? Good at math? Good at knitting? Does she even lift, bro? Et cetera. Choose to not let yourself be ruled by a silly number. A better question to ask, my dear, sweet, mid-twenties virgin, is not “Who would want to date someone who fit that description?” but who WOULDN’T want to date you?

(For more on inexperience, see this column.)

As for coming out, it’s always a little scary, especially if you’ve never done it before. You’ve got all these stories in your head, expectations, imagined conversations about what will happen or won’t happen. The good news is there’s no “right” way to come out. Everyone does it a little differently. Some do it piecemeal, conversation by conversation, until they’ve hit all the necessary bases. Others make a YouTube video announcement or a cake. (It gets batter!) Still others come out a little bit, to one or two people, and that’s it. Still others only come out to their liberal, supportive relatives and friends. Still others never come out at all except to the people they are sleeping with. It takes all kinds, in other words.

If for you it’s easier to come out to strangers than it is to those close to you, then that is a-OK. We don’t have a deep personal investment in strangers, and hence if your hairdresser/barista/gender studies TA has a negative reaction to your sexuality, it won’t hurt as much. The point is to try. The point is to be who you are. To dip a toe into those sparkly waters of your glorious self and realize you’ll still be loved and liked and celebrated as a lesbian. Test some waters. See how it goes. I’d swear on a stack of Tegan and Sara albums that after you come out a few times to a few strangers, you’ll find that coming out to one or two people from your past will become a possibility. Because coming out does get easier the more we do it. Most things do. And because coming out is a lifelong process, you’ll have lots and lots of opportunities to perfect your elevator pitch. Welcome to the club, sugar shoes!

My ex-best friend and I met four years ago, and we really hit it off. We hung out 24/7 and got really close really fast. It was a bit of a whirlwind, and something I’d never had in any other friendship. My friends, parents and sister basically shipped the two of us. In fact, my sister would constantly make jokes about us getting married, or say things like “just make out already.” This really stressed me out, since I was sure they’d discovered my true feelings, but it also encouraged me to explore this with my best friend. But the thing was, I was in a relationship with a guy I didn’t even like. We remained friends though, and it seemed like she knew about my feelings. I remember one time when we were sitting on my bed together, and she started playing footsie. We stopped immediately after my sister came in with a homework question and never mentioned it again.

I came out to her freshman year of college. By that time, I was convinced my crush was mutual. She told me she was “jealous” of my boyfriend because he was “hogging me” all to himself. She constantly wanted me to lie to him in order to spend more time with me, and I gladly went along because I was blinded by love. We hung out on campus, sitting with our legs intertwined, teasing each other nonstop. She even watched me as we lay together that first night, “making sure I was getting a good night sleep for class the next day.”

After that first meet-up when she came to visit, I finally had the courage to tell her how I felt. She rejected me, saying that she doesn’t feel that way about girls. I was utterly heartbroken and confused as hell. How could she not like me? There had been so many signs! Was she just denying her feelings? Why would she lead me on like that?

After that, she became closer than ever with me, constantly texting and saying she wanted to be best friends forever. And then, that all stopped the summer of sophomore year. We barely hung out, when we used to talk and hang out every single day. I assumed this was because she could tell I wasn’t over her, and backed off as well. I asked her about this, and she said her life was “busier now,” but that she still wanted to remain friends.

She “broke up” with me a few months ago, after we barely talked for several months in a row. Her parents were divorcing, and she told me we needed time apart to sort out our issues. She said she wants to be friends again when the divorce is all water under the bridge, but I don’t know if I want that. I know this time apart is good for us, but if we get right back into the same dynamic, or even at all, I’m afraid my feelings for her will resurface. I suppose I don’t really have a question, but I was wondering what you thought of all this. -Hopeless Romantic

Dear Hopeless,

What do I think? I think it’s always hard to lose a friend, even if it’s just temporarily, and for that, you have my sympathies. I think it’s even harder when love feelings are caught up in that friendship. I think you should respect her decision to take some time apart and sort out whatever issues she is having with her life and with you. And I think you should take this time to do a similar sorting for yourself.

How do you feel about this person taking up prime real estate in your heart, my sweet? How are you adjusting to her rejection of your love confession? Are you holding out hope she’ll change her mind? Are you putting your life on hold perhaps? Not dating other people just in case the blinders of heteronormativity come off and she comes dashing into your arms? If/when she has a boyfriend, are you genuinely happy for her? Can you love her in a way that is selfless and not destructive to you?

You know the answers to that better than me, Hopeless, but from your letter, I don’t think you’re quite ready to throw in the love towel and accept the perfectly nice, albeit less stained, platonic friend towel. And for that, I think time and distance from her are important.

Years ago, I had a friend (the same girl who crashed her car into a ditch in the first question, actually) with whom I was madly, desperately, urgently in love. I wanted to be around her all the time. I wrote poetry for her-desperate, mad, urgent poetry-and even, to my great embarrassment, a song for her pet rat Penelope, who died. We kissed one time and very lightly felt each other up, as if we were tentative, blind moles who had never touched another mole before. And in a way, we hadn’t. I was her “first,” and she was mine. And then, just as quickly, she wasn’t. A month after our sweet mime-kissing and ensuing car crash, she had moved on. She had a boyfriend, and I was left with a ballad composed to a dead rat.

This went on, more or less, for years. We remained friends, but it was obvious my feelings were not abating (though, mercifully, the songs were), and I don’t at all blame her for pulling away from me when she did. In doing so, she was giving me the space and the kindness to move the fuck on. And though I wasn’t at the time, I’m very very grateful to her now for doing so. Because the space enabled us to remain friends (which we still are). It might not have been possible if I had snuffed it out with all my gay feelings and terrible poetry!

This isn’t to say our situations are the same. But I will say that we can rarely ever see things clearly when we’re in the thick of it. So I’d encourage you to see your time apart as an opportunity-to move the fuck on, yes, but more than that, to figure out how to exist in her life as a friend. Take as much time as you need. As Octavia Butler once said, “Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.”

Which time is yours?

Hailing from the rough-and-tumble deserts of southern Arizona, where one doesn’t have to bother with such trivialities as “coats” or “daylight savings time,” Anna Pulley is a writer living in San Francisco. Find her at annapulley.com and on Twitter @annapulley. Send her your The Hook Up questions at [email protected].

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