If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
George Orwell, 1984
1996
The last time I see Angel, I’m sweating in the July sun on the grounds of a Mormon church. Dozens of other tired 15- and 16-year-old girls snatch their belongings from the belly of the bus. In the chaos, I stand rigid as a Queen’s Guard over my three days’ worth of gear, suffused with the after-smell of campfires. I watch Angel weave between the duffels, pillows, sleeping bags, and those asthmatic foam mats that fashion a momentary maze.
She says, Found you. I release a breath. She smiles, her blonde, unwashed hair falling past pale blue eyes. I mirror her smile. She drops her stuff next to mine, swipes stray locks, and tucks them behind her ear. I track each movement.
We turn to search for our rides as our cabinmates exchange their promises to keep in touch and teenage goodbyes, gushy and garrulous. Angel and I share a smirk: what girls.
I definitely want to stay friends with you, she says, tilting close, her breath puffing into my ear. Her interlocked fingers twist and strain. Or are those mine?
When we met during cabin intros, she scared me a little: her black hoodie, the tough stance and tight nods, were those four or five earrings in her left? How did we go from strangers to giggling over the grapes that had gone a little fizzy, leaning in, our long, blonde hair falling into one curtain? To tapping and passing in the Cup Game at the picnic table, pressed together, our shoulders and thighs melded?
Trotting dusty trails two by two, Angel amassed my secrets. I gabbed about my school crush, Nathan, and the rustic ring he gifted me. Shaped from a horseshoe nail, the ring derived from his summer pilgrimage to Nauvoo, Illinois—a Mormon holy land on the Mississippi. When I’d learned the ring’s nickname and origin, “prairie diamond,” an Oregon Trail era substitute for a proper engagement ring, my torso had surged with a fresh thrill. I toted the ring around months after Nathan’s affections had waned. Prattling on about my undying love, I conjured the trinket from my pocket, showed Angel, then slipped it onto my ring finger.
That hot morning on the church grounds, I spot Dad in our green minivan. Angel asks for my number. She grabs my hand and writes her number on my palm, or is that a moment my memory formed? We live ten minutes apart along the I-15 corridor, but attend different high schools; arbitrary borders bifurcate the suburban sprawl.
I for sure want to see you again, she says.
An unpleasant chemical sensation flashes from my chest to every extremity. A guillotine slices the air between us, severing the bond. My face burns—not from the sun. My legs crave to sprint but refuse to budge.
You coming? Dad’s voice pierces through the standstill. I can’t muster words. Bobbing my head like a boxer dodging under a jab, I collect my things and trail after Dad.
A week later, Angel calls—only once. She says something about getting together. The phone cord stretches to the kitchen. I stand motionless in the dark hallway. I don’t remember what I say. What does she hear in my voice: Apathy? Loathing? Fear?
The third night of camp, we snuck out under the moonlit pines to leave our sigils in drying cement. We knelt on the uneven ground, and I twirled the head of Nathan’s ring palmward to achieve the deepest imprint. Pushing my left fist down to apply extra pressure onto my right starfished hand, I felt Angel’s fingertips stretch to mine within a hair’s breadth. I peeked up at her. She gazed back, the moon reflecting in her eyes. I didn’t breathe. The silence passed between us. The aspens quaked their whispers in the wind.
1997
My best friend Heather and I lounge on the tan leather couch in my family room, our legs entangled like denim snakes. The TV plays a black-and-white movie, Casablanca or Citizen Kane, to feel sophisticated. She dips her fingers into her thick brown hair and flips a section over her head to form a new, casual part. On the cusp of graduation, with Heather off to college in Idaho and me staying in Utah, we pretend our paths won’t soon diverge.
Isn’t it nice how girls can be like this without it being gay? she says.
I half smile, silent.
1999
Raymond and I meet my freshman year in Utah at Brigham Young University, the Lord’s university. His black hair, brown eyes, and handsome olive complexion contrast with my ash blonde, hazel, and pinkish pale. Fresh-faced and glowing from his Mormon missionary service, his predestined path is to secure a wife, start a family, and finish school—in that order. Adventurous, intelligent, and moody, he is my first boyfriend. He claims attraction to my unadorned tomboy style while he presses me to wear Barbie pink nail polish and gifts me jewelry. I am apathetic about an engagement ring. But he insists, so I hint: simple, white gold.
My heart pitter-patters at the orchestrated proposal, but when he brandishes the diamond ring, yellow gold band, a rock drops in my chest.
Do you love it? he says, standing there in his T-shirt: He-Man Women Haters Club.
I love it, I say, and smile.
2005
Through my living room window, I spot Jamie and her toddler in the apartment complex playground. Beside me on the hand-me-down couch, my son imitates Buzz Lightyear, declaring ‘finity an’ beyon’! before leaping. Jamie is bundled in a jacket against the remains of the Connecticut spring, her short, ash blonde hair moving gently with the breeze. Jamie chats with Stacey, a redheaded mom from our church, as they waddle after their toddlers, scooping them up before they reach the rain puddles. Around my finger, my thumb rotates my wedding ring.
Many of the moms (and all the Mormon moms) in the red brick student housing complex are, like me, wives of grad school students. But some of us Mormons— Jamie and I—have career ambitions. With her MFA, she researches for her World War II-era novel and teaches English at a small Catholic college. I clock a few hours weekly as a research assistant and in the fall will start a double master’s in public health and African Studies. Jamie and I swapped babysitting for the past school year, lingering for long conversations, laughter, and chaste companionship.
Then our schedules changed, making it harder for me—and easier for Stacey—to babysit and spend time with Jamie. The change corresponds with my leaving Mormonism: painful, quiet chaos. I lose many of my church friends once I stop attending services, and they stop inviting me to their wholesome social gatherings. But the waning friendship with Jamie stings. I can’t tell her about the weight she leaves in my chest. I can’t tell my husband about the weight Jamie leaves in my chest.
I ask my online ex-Mormon friends if the weight is jealousy, if, maybe, I could be bi? A straight woman writes that unless you want to eat pussy, you’re not a lesbian. I try to picture it—my body ripples with disgust, embodied, visceral.
2007
When business brings me from California to New Haven, Amber endures the Amtrak up from Manhattan to accompany me overnight. It’s our first meeting IRL, after months of mutual processing and raging in the online DisAffected Mormon Underground, the DAMU. We eat Indian food on York and get happy-drunk on cocktails, then reveal desires we withheld from our web personas and swap stories about faltering marriages and post-church shenanigans. Like me, her husband is her first and only; we married too young. Divorce would be simpler for her, without children. I have my kindergartener.
She rests her hands on the table, and I raise an eyebrow about her bare ring finger.
She says, I don’t need a ring to know I’m married. Men don’t always wear rings. Stupid patriarchy. Fuck that.
Laughing, I pull my ring from a secure pocket in my purse. I haven’t been wearing mine, I say. Arthritis flare-up. Happens when I’m really stressed. Raymond is just going through a hard time, I say. He’ll get back into grad school. We’ll come back to New Haven. Everything will be ok. We’ll be ok. I’ll be ok.
Later, I sneak Amber into the hotel room that my office booked for one. My ears tingle as we change, our backs turned in modesty, my body sensing her body. Neither of us wears the unsexy Mormon undergarments anymore; her secular pajamas expose her shoulders, most of her thighs. My jammies are a baggy T-shirt and gym shorts. I climb into the soft king-size bed, thinking nothing of two straight women under one comforter. That’s not weird, right? Raymond and I use separate blankets, but he runs hot, I run cold.
Amber turns away, Good night.
The ceiling swirls. I imagine grazing her arm with my fingers, scooting close, kissing her bare shoulder, spooning. Our husbands would never know—it would still be cheating—I’m just drunk—I don’t know how—not with a woman.
2009
Cait and I find each other in the crowd, halfway up the mini staircase to the raised study area, beaming. After nailing our final public health presentation, I relish the adrenaline revving through my body. The last final for my master’s degree—I’m free until graduation.
Graduation. Goodbyes.
My heart races, my cheeks burn. I won’t see Cait again. I enjoyed hours in her passenger seat while she drove us to Hartford for a syringe exchange project. We sometimes stopped for dinner, Guinness on tap, and easy conversation. A soft butch, she is the first lesbian I know to get married, when marriage equality is still a patchwork quilt of states. Her mention of a fiancée incited a pang of jealousy, and I blurted out question after question about the wedding, her partner, same-sex relationships. She entertained my earnest but ignorant inquiries with kind patience.
Loitering close to Cait in the study area, I consider proposing we get a celebratory beer, just a couple of pals. It’s Raymond’s turn to put our six-year-old to bed; I can get away with it. I part my lips to ask and notice her light brown hair down from her usual ponytail—what a cliché—I long to dip my fingers into all that hair, cradle the back of her head, lean down and—I almost topple forward from the urge to kiss her. I white-knuckle the railing as she says goodbye, and I say nothing. How could I say nothing?
How could I say anything? We’re both married.
Later, I lie next to my husband, my body thrumming in my first queer fantasy: Cait accepts my offer, and halfway through the second pint, the chemistry overrides sensibility. Leaning her up against the wooden panel wall in the windowless basement of Anna Liffy’s pub, my fingers sliding through her hair, inhaling her exhale, I dare to bring my lips to hers.
2013
Maria, a 5-foot-nothing Filipino American poet who teaches English at the international school, answers my knock. She raises her glass to beckon me in, mediocre wine sloshing over the rim onto the wooden floor. She is wrapped in black cloth from armpits to upper-mid-thigh. I’m not sure why my ears burn.
In Tanzania, a Tuesday evening party at the schoolteachers’ apartment isn’t out of form. No need to stall the adult Halloween costumes and drinking until a Friday. My draft dissertation is on my advisor’s plate, and I am keen to let loose, flattered that the single expat teachers thought to invite me, a PTA mom. I concoct a costume by raiding my closet and my preteen son’s dress-up bin: black skinny jeans, fitted white button-up, Gryffindor tie, Sirius Black wand, biking gloves, a rustic broomstick, a shortened graduation robe, a whistle, and my pixie-cut hair sticking out at all angles: a fantastic Madam Hooch. I chat with a cat, a witch, an athlete—teachers’ school parade costumes reworked into nighttime versions, skimpier and sexier.
Two, maybe three, glasses in, I focus on the cardboard-and-tin-foil Apple icon taped on Maria’s back. Oh, you’re an iPhone, I say, like I’ve won a prize for cleverness. I then spot the bull tattoo between her shoulder blades and say something stupid like, Have you always had that? and brush the black ink with my fingertips, entranced.
Tingling pulses through my chest, up into my head; my ears prickle, my fingers itch. Alert to her body, her smooth, tan skin, her short-cropped black hair, the cloth stretched across her hips, disjointed bits of data try to click together in my brain.
Maria peers over her shoulder and stares up into my eyes like we both carry secrets.
Eye contact is so intimate—I’m an ally—I’ve never noticed how hot you are—I’m drunk—pretty sure I don’t say that out loud.
Later, Maria asks me if kissing a woman is allowed in my marriage. Would your husband care? She knows him; all the expats know each other. Is this question hypothetical or practical? Have they talked about me, about this?
I say, He very much would care, a kiss is a kiss, even if it’s a woman.
It’s not the first time someone has questioned my orientation. I figure I’m in good company, even if they are mistaken.
2014
The Pride outfits enthrall me—skimpy, sequins, lavish, leather, raunchy, rainbow explosions. Feet pump, hips gyrate, and breasts heave to the bouncing beat of a distant bass. Sun-kissed foreheads, chests, thighs glistening. Open displays of affection. Hands smacking asses. Fairy-winged preteens with their parents. Luscious lips.
I’m not in Utah anymore, Toto.
Back in the States for my postdoc, I volunteer at the Human Rights Campaign booth rather than wander the block party solo. My HIV work has sparked my curiosity in LGBTQ rights. For a $5 donation, passersby earn a branded HRC tank top—a bold yellow equals sign on a blue square. I’m wearing mine, sweating in the shade. A young woman carrying many booths’ worth of swag stops and hovers.
What do I gotta do to get a shirt? she says in a Baltimore drawl.
Contributions fund the fight for employment non-discrimination at the state level, I recite.
She crinkles her face, What?
People can get fired just for being gay in thirty-two states, I say.
Oh! That’s awful. Do I gotta be gay to sign up?
I brandish a pen. Nope, I’m straight, I’m just an ally.
When tomboys, butches, and smooth-cheeked androgynes pass by, my head swivels, eyes glued to them strutting up the Mount Vernon street and out of sight. Flitting like a butterfly: do I want to be them or fuck them?
2017
On the washboard ridges of the dry-season road, our ancient Land Rover clanks and jerks my body around like a ragdoll. The engine roars, my bucket seat vibrates. Raymond navigates over the orange dirt, focusing on the embedded rocks and deep hollows. After five years of living in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, he and I both wrangle stick-shift SUVs on rough, rural roads, but the Land Rover’s clutch is finicky.
We are en route to Mufindi, a hilly district an hour south, to a luxury guesthouse. Raymond won the grand prize—two nights at a farm lodge—at the PTA fundraising gala. We’ve saved the getaway for our wedding anniversary, eighteen years.
I glance at Raymond. We like to check in on our anniversary. Once a year is better than nothing, anyway. The muscles around his eyes and jaw are relaxed. It’s time.
I say, Hey, babe, I’ve got something to share with you. It’s not a bad thing!
He says, Okay, drawing the word out.
I’m gender nonbinary.
Okay. What does that mean? His voice pitches high on the last word.
It means I don’t see myself as a woman, but I also don’t see myself as a man.
Well—Then—How do you identify, if not a man or woman?
As a person, I say. I’ve never been, ya know, a girl girl.
His eyebrows scrunch. Does this—does this mean you like women?
Nope, I say. I’m still into you. I explain the nuances of gender identity (who you go to bed as) and sexual orientation (who you go to bed with).
Well, you’ve never been the most feminine of women. And I’m still very attracted to you, he says. Does this change anything for us?
Nope, I say.
2018
At the campus coffee shop where we arranged to meet, Casey might as well be glowing: a shaved-head, androgynous enby among dozens of cishets. I see Casey see me, and I read the muscles around their brown eyes as pleasant surprise. Before greeting them, I peek at my feet, concealing a smile. We explain our situations: I’ve recently come out as a trans man and relocated to Baltimore, while my husband, still in Tanzania, refuses to budge. Casey, divorced, has kids a little older than mine and is pursuing a public health master’s for a second career. Insisting I am monogamous and gay for men, that Raymond and I are managing long distance—we are house shopping—my platonic friendship with Casey blooms.
On a Friday night, Casey presents a bottle of red to commemorate my new home in Station North. My corkscrew hides in a basement box. Casey and I have heard of the shoe trick to open wine. We pound the bottom of my dress shoe against the door jam, leaning in and giggling. The cork pops. Wine splatters. I grab the paper towels and wipe the floor as we cackle. They point out the red droplets on my face. An invisible net draws me toward Casey. Why does this feel like a date? Is that why I never hug them, never touch them?
For two years, the gray wall displays faded burgundy splotches.
In therapy, months later, I say it out loud. I guess I’m a bit more bi than I thought.
My therapist nods. It’s common among trans people to discover their sexuality expands.
Right. But I’m married, so. I exhale a shaky breath.
2019
In my red theater seat at Center Stage, I lose myself in Fun Home. The protagonist Alison revels in her first queer bedroom scene with a college classmate, Joan. On stage, they kiss, kiss again, make out, tumble onto the bed. The pair shifts together under a dorm room bedspread, suggestive and enthusiastic. Then, while Joan sleeps, Alison belts her ballad “Changing My Major (to sex with Joan).” I gawk. Up and down my chest, legs, and head burns a frenetic energy.
On my left sits Casey, my secret crush. They bought two tickets to the show months ago, planning to ask a date, but invited me.
On my right sits Raymond’s sister Amelia, visiting for tomorrow’s Women’s March.
In between them, I am a statue. Every nerve hums.
I’m married. To a man. I’m married. To her brother. But I’ve never felt like this before, not in the 20 years with Raymond.
Frozen on the outside, I am hyperalert to Casey’s presence over the armrest, their knee a centimeter from mine, my left hand mirroring their right. If I tilt toward them a bit—a stage light glints off my wedding ring—I stiffen.
On stage, at the foot of the bed, Alison purrs the last line, parachutes the blanket off Joan’s legs, and plunges headfirst under the covers, and—scene! Blackness.
How can the audience applaud in the darkness, oblivious to this epiphany, this ecstatic explosion? Can Casey feel my heatwaves pulsing? I command myself to remain immobile as the thrill rushes into my head and back down to my toes, radiating Knowledge: I want to do that.
Two months later, Casey and I stand face-to-face on the corner behind Penn Station. Breathless, I gaze into their eyes. The waxing gibbous moon is bright but lost behind the train station’s glowing 50-foot sculpture, Male/Female.
Last week, Raymond and I agreed to divorce. Yesterday, as Casey snapped pictures of my smile, I injected my first dose of testosterone. Tonight, we celebrate. It’s after 2 a.m., and we have shut down the last Queer Crush dance party—my first queer dance party. It’s time to wave good night, where our paths diverge. But tonight, my body aches for more. In a flash, I encircle them in a snug, hungry hug. We linger, heads resting on shoulders. Small, surprised moans escape our throats. I yank at the bottom of their canvas coat and tighten my grip around their waist. Tracing fingers through their buzzed hair, inhaling their exhale, I dare to bring my lips to theirs.
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Photo by Robert Reyes on Unsplash