Greetings From Janeland Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Candace Walsh and Barbara Straus Lodge.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Laura M. André

  Cover photograph: Jenn Huls/Shutterstock.com

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-234-0

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-235-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword • TRISH BENDIX

  Introduction I • CANDACE WALSH

  Introduction II • BARBARA STRAUS LODGE

  Sir, May I Have a Pack of Marlboros? • BK LOREN

  The Hemingway • ADA SCOTT

  On Being a Queer Jewyorican • SHARA CONCEPCIÓN

  Seeking My Whiptail Clan • EMILY WITHNALL

  The Dealer’s Gift • LOUISE A. BLUM

  On the Track • KATE ARCHIBALD-CROSS

  Unexpected Expedition • K. ASTRE

  When Did You Know? • TRISH BENDIX

  Here’s to Me • JEANNOT JONTE BOUCHER

  Spring Weddings, Australian Style • RUTH DAVIES

  Enough • VANESSA SHANTI FERNANDO

  Kama Sutra • KRISTA FRETWELL

  White Horse Optional • G. LEV BAUMEL

  Whatever Happened? • ELIZABETH J. GERARD

  Well, You Look Like a Lesbian • SHERRY GLASER

  Birth Day • LEAH LAX

  Broken and True • JEANETTE LEBLANC

  Just One Look • DARSHANA MAHTANI

  No • AMANDA MEAD

  Straightening Myself Out • PAT CROW

  Pregnant with Myself • CASSIE PREMO STEELE

  In Defense of Family • CARLA SAMETH

  Wife • AMELIA SAUTER

  The “Duh” Diaries • JOEY SCHULTZ-EZELL

  Swept Away • EMILY J. SMITH

  Strong Like Her • STAR MCGILL-GOUDEY

  The Flipping of the Switch • M. E. TUDOR

  Teaching Out • SUSAN WHITE

  About the Editors

  About the Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  BY TRISH BENDIX

  FOR MOST OF MY ADULT CAREER, I HAVE WORKED AS A professional lesbian. It’s been my job to immerse myself in lesbian culture and write about everything related to queer women in pop culture, entertainment, and the media.

  I wasn’t always so steeped in sapphic knowledge. Once upon a time, I assumed I was straight—but as a journalism student working at my college newspaper, I met and subsequently fell for my first girlfriend. Coming out in my early twenties was almost a surprise to me—I’d always assumed I was heterosexual, like I imagine, most people in my small hometown—but it also propelled me into a surprise career. I spent ten years working at AfterEllen, the largest website for LGBTQ women, where I had the opportunity to meet, work with, and detail the complex, diverse lives of queer women. And as I continue as editor in chief of GO Magazine, I can tell you confidently that the process of realizing one’s sexuality is as different as the stars in our astrological charts. But we also share some common experiences—including that first time we start to question ourselves, sensing, perhaps unexpectedly, that we might not be 100 percent straight.

  Some women know early—they can pinpoint preschool crushes on classmates and prepubescent desires for their P.E. teachers that clued them in they were different from the rest. But there are just as many, including me and the writers in this book, who were surprised by the appearance of an unanticipated sign. And when you realize something so significant about yourself after having heteronormative relationships, it’s easy to ask yourself the invasive questions you’d never allow someone else to get away with: “How could I have not known?” Questions that insinuate you either knew and kept it a secret, or worse, are too daft to truly know something so integral to who you are.

  Because, as most of us know, once you acknowledge that you are a woman who loves other women, a lot of things change, including how you see yourself and how other people see you. It’s a new framework through which to view the world, which is, in many ways, as scary as it is exciting. When I shared my coming out story seven years ago in Dear John, I Love Jane, I detailed how I felt like a fraud among lesbians who acknowledged their homosexuality much sooner than I had. It was a deep insecurity I held, trying to prove myself to the community I joined.

  Now, having spent more than a decade deeply entrenched in the lesbian community, I can confirm, dear reader, that there is no ideal time to truly become—or acknowledge—who you are, and any stigma that might have once accompanied being a “late in life lesbian” is fading with every story shared in both the private and public sphere.

  In 2009, one year before Dear John, I Love Jane was published, The Oprah Winfrey Show dedicated a show to “Women Leaving Men for Other Women.” Despite Oprah’s best efforts as a long-time LGBTQ ally, the episode was very much about the secret lives the guests were leading; women who were on track to have the perfect existence (houses in the suburbs! children! charmed lives!) but couldn’t resist temptation. What was seen only a handful of years ago as an illicit lust that demanded explanation is now perceived as less about vice—it never was about vice to the women living through such revelations—and more about a person’s claiming of their own identity. Someone’s sexual orientation, stagnant or otherwise, has become less of a stigma, an indication of their character or worse, self-sabotage. Rather, it’s finally being recognized for what it is: self-exploration.

  Less than a decade later, what seemed like a fascinating trend for celebrities has become more commonplace, and I believe that it’s because of the openness of the women who contributed their experiences to the conversation. Public figures like Carlease Burke, Elizabeth Gilbert, Meredith Baxter, Maria Bello, Kelly McGillis, Cynthia Nixon, Tatum O’Neal, Kristen Stewart, and Wanda Sykes have all spoken publicly about how love has surprised them, how their feelings for another woman hadn’t been particularly expected and snuck up on them in a way that was at once terrifying, exhilarating, and comforting. Yet their shifts have prompted think pieces and fascination from a world that still sees things as binary—straight or gay. Any inability to commit to one for the entirety of your lifetime is just too mind-boggling for other people to comprehend. It’s important to remember that while it’s so very kind of them to dedicate such time and energy to your sexual identity, their concern is more about themselves than it is about you.

  In 2014, writer Lauren Morelli came out about leaving her husband for actress Samira Wiley in a piece she penned for Mic, titled “While Writing for Orange Is the New Black, I Realized I Am Gay.” In it, she details how she’d previously assumed she wasn’t a very sexual person and how childhood flirtation with other girls wasn’t any indication to her that she’d be interested in women. And when she came out, she had been married for only a few months—happily, she’d thought, until she started to ask herself, “Am I gay?”

  Coming out to yourself later in life is an experience not specific to actresses and authors, of course—but those people make head-lines when they come out, and those headlines have gone from expressing shock and awe to serving as pu
blic celebrations or, in some cases, normalized nonchalance, all of which indicates that these kinds of announcements are becoming less about sensationalizing lesbian sex and sexuality, and more about acknowledging respected relationships.

  What used to be a death knell for public figures—coming out at any point in one’s career, generally after having had a publicly known relationship with a partner of the opposite sex—has ultimately shifted to being less of a scandal and more of a shrug.

  It’s incredible how much can change with time—especially if you measure it through public opinions and temperaments—and how society’s shifts in a matter of years can feel like it took both seconds and centuries. In the last five years, attitudes and legislation around marriage equality in the United States have changed as much as they have in the last five decades. Despite the tragedies and hateful acts that are still part of American culture, homo-sexuality has never been more legally and culturally accepted. At the same time, those of us who cherish marriage equality and equal protection under the law have gone into a stunned, defensive crouch after the 2016 presidential election. The people who voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence (many of them family members, coworkers, neighbors, and even friends) have shown us the limits and the myths of their acceptance. We—and other vulnerable groups—will be fighting to hold our ground instead of coasting toward more safety, tolerance, and freedom.

  Much of our power to dissolve prejudice and bigotry is in the stories we as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people tell. The simple truths about ourselves and our lives can break through walls of rhetoric—because even the most disappointingly homo-phobic people are human. People with the capacity to hate or fear have been directly affected by what they come to know about us through someone in their lives, or someone of whom they have an acute awareness, such as a celebrity or a character they come across in a movie, a television show, or a book. And interestingly enough, a public figure or figment of fiction is often the first way that a lot of people—LGBTQ included—encounter a queer person.

  But no matter how other people or society feels about some-one’s shift in sexual identity, what matters most is how you see yourself. In this book are fantastic first-person narratives that detail what it was like for women who didn’t always know they were bisexual or queer or lesbian, or even that they had the capacity to fall for another woman—regardless of what label they would take on or reject completely. But besides the new label (or lack thereof), there are so many other things to take into consideration. Aussie Ruth Davies shines a light on the lack of equality she still faces in her country. Pat Crow details life as a newly minted baby dyke on the cusp of sixty in “Straightening Myself Out.” Vanessa Shanti Fernando discusses how she found the confidence to stop trying to find herself in lovers and see that she, herself, is enough. And Jeanette LeBlanc writes, “I was gay and I loved him and both things were equally and impossibly true,” a sentence so heartbreaking and hopeful at once, that defines how contradictory self-discovery can be.

  Just like Dear John, I Love Jane, this book is an offering of true stories that shows that whenever you find another piece of what you are, you can more fully become who you are. And if that piece is based in and inspired by something as universally desired as love, there is less and less room for criticism, and more for respect and understanding.

  A woman who finds herself to be gay later in her lifetime is lucky to have found herself. We’re all lucky to find ourselves at all.

  Introduction I

  BY CANDACE WALSH

  I WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION SITTING ON THE COUCH IN the house Laura and I have shared for five years as a married couple. We produced Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women when we were still just girlfriends, madly in love, but living in two different cities, aiming to make our two lives into a shared one but still figuring out exactly how to do it. Things have changed since then. The world has changed, too.

  When Greetings from Janeland hits bookstore shelves, seven years will have passed since the publication of Dear John, I Love Jane, a groundbreaking exploration of sexual fluidity through intimate, firsthand stories. It remains a crucial resource for women who find themselves floundering in the knowledge that although they have (mostly) identified as straight, they are now madly in love with another woman.

  Why Janeland? As I conceptualized this book, I kept having a vision of a shared land that came into existence because of the first book. Janeland is occupied by the essayists, of course, and everyone who read or will read the first book. It is occupied by all the women who have lived the book’s premise. It’s very inclusive—it understands the fluidity of sexuality, and offers shelter to women who have previously identified as straight, who consider themselves to be in love with women but not gay, as well as to women who identify as gay, bi, poly, or queer—that is, if they don’t eschew labels.

  In the first book, one writer maintained an open marriage with her husband and had a girlfriend. One woman wrote an essay about how she left men for women, but years after the book was published, as I write this, she’s expecting a baby with her new husband. Desire is full of surprises. In concert with our society’s greater ability to comprehend and accept that the gay/straight binary is as ridiculous as a slender crayon box with room for only two colors inside it, Janeland also holds space for unconventional versions of an already unconventional story line: girl meets boy, girl meets girl, boy loses girl, girl finds true love. One of our writers encountered Dear John, I Love Jane as a cloistered young wife who later fell in love with a trans woman, came out, and transitioned to a non-binary gender. Another woman left one heterosexual marriage in search of love with another woman, but surprised herself by marrying a man who not only satisfies her soul’s needs, but understands that she needs to have the freedom to have a girlfriend, too.

  And there are the many, many stories in Janeland that throb with the incandescent power of brave emotional truth.

  When I pitched this book to Cleis Press, I didn’t know that the deadline for this book would coincide with the day the electoral college would be voting for the next president of the United States. And I didn’t know that those votes would not be for the woman I believed would be carried into the White House on the tide of progress that had granted same-sex couples marriage equality in the U.S.

  To be fair, there were signs that our path would not be a breezy, linear one. North Carolina’s HB2 law, commonly referred to as the “bathroom bill,” which prevents local governments from expanding anti-discrimination and employment policies; threats to reverse marriage equality; and the brutal massacre at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, that killed or injured over one hundred people preceded the night Hillary Clinton’s Javits Center celebration turned into a shocked wake.

  In the tearstained blur that followed Election Day, I turned to editing essay submissions for Janeland and felt the first stirrings of strength and hope, an inner surge of pushback, that reminded me that I (and each of us) have the power to change minds, shake up the status quo, and dissolve hatred by telling our stories.

  That may sound very ambitious, but the dozens of women who wrote to me after reading Dear John, I Love Jane are the ones who proved it. Before Dear John, I Love Jane, several of the women who reached out said they had felt devastatingly alone, even saying they felt “freakish.” After finding the book, readers have been passionately grateful; many have told me that the book saved their life. Emboldened by reading stories like their own, these women started finding each other online and formed private Facebook groups to connect—I’ve even noticed people using the word “Janes” to refer to women who left men for women.

  After Election Day, I felt fortunate that I could do more than sign petitions, tweet, and share articles. I was in fact, legally contracted to deliver a manuscript with 80,000 words worth of truth bombs.

  Anxious women—who have little or no framework for understanding or acting on their radical, disruptive feelings of love—have
a tendency to Google. And this searching, which accompanies inner searching, and tossing and turning, and guilty feelings, and dizzying imaginings, has led thousands to Dear John, I Love Jane. Now it will lead them to even more stories like their own in Janeland, too.

  Introduction II

  BY BARBARA STRAUS LODGE

  They packed their cars and left the next week.

  Yes they did, just like that.

  Then there I was, whoever that was. Sliced wide open and left for dead. While Verena was in Utah holding [her ex-girlfriend’s] hand looking at the red rocks, I was in the wake of the storm holding a mirror looking at a stranger. The woman I saw was tired and scared, yet remarkably athletic for her age. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her and wanted to know more.

  That’s where the story really begins . . .

  Leigh Stuart, “Mirror Image,”

  Dear John, I Love Jane

  I WROTE “MIRROR IMAGE” UNDER A PEN NAME, LEIGH STUART, still reeling from all that had come before and ever so grateful to be contributing my piece to such an important book. While my essay about being married to a man and falling in love with a woman didn’t end wrapped in a happily-ever-after, lovingly coupled red bow, writing the truth of my experience gave me strength.

  After my “catalyst” (the beautiful, dreadlocked German lesbian with emerald-green eyes who shook me from my marital stupor) left me, I learned that my husband of fifteen years had been cheating as well. His object of desire? Bags upon bags of cocaine. After divorcing him, I embarked upon a year of field research to determine whether I was interested in dating men or women. I didn’t trust my instincts and needed to slow down, explore and observe. The scientific method I used was dancing in lesbian nightclubs with a group of new friends vs. dating a man every now and then. My experiments yielded an unsurprising result. I was undeniably drawn to women. Soft, communicative, strong, brave, outside-the-box women. Good with children and pets. Self-reflective and secure in their sexuality.