I recently discovered that my ex-boyfriend is gay. Which is not all that an unusual experience for a woman in her 30s in 2004. But I found it to be quite a shock.
The thing is, being a lesbian myself, I had always imagined that I would be the one telling him something he didn’t know.
Again, it is not all that unusual for gay people to have gone through a heterosexual phase in their youth — and also not unusual for them to have dated someone else not altogether straight.
It makes sense in a strange kind of way. For one thing, such a ”couple” (as we were considered to be) could quite happily go without sex with neither party feeling particularly concerned about the issue.
Certainly, we kissed and fondled, but never quite managed to go ”all the way” — we never could get desire to overcome the fear of disease and pregnancy. It was the early 1990s when Aids was an immediate death-sentence and abortion not a legal option for us. Whenever we got close, there never seemed to be condoms about and the very process of attempting to procure them seemed to kill the mood.
Not that ”the mood” happened often. Not often enough for me to take oral contraception, or for us to stock up on condoms ahead of time. I suppose I thought we were just part of a group of conservative young people who were scared into still being virgins by the time we entered our 20s.
Yet there was an attraction between us. In this era of lipstick lesbians and muscle Marys it’s not so obvious (and probably not politically correct to say) that gay people do usually have some degree of gender confusion. My ex probably liked me because I was more like a man than women were supposed to be (I liked sport and maths and had arm muscles), while I see now I liked him partly because he was more like a woman than men were supposed be (he liked art and hugging trees and had beautiful eyelashes).
Our dating ended not because of any big break-up, but because he had to move away — first to another city, then another country.
So yes, it does all make sense — in fact a whole lot of sense. Why then did I find the news, which was conveyed by chance through a third party, so disturbing? Am I a closet homophobe? You know, the kind who says, ”some of my best friends are gay, but please, not my son, not my brother, not my ex-lover”? Was I getting a taste of how it feels to be on the other side of a ”coming-out” process?
Well, some of my best friends are gay men. In fact, I have more close gay male friends than lesbian friends. Do I really secretly disapprove of their relationships? I can’t believe that I do — most of their partnerships seem healthier than my straight friends’ relationships, but even if they weren’t, there’s nothing in principle that feels wrong to me about it.
Is it the sex then? Well, obviously, visions of gay male sex (as varied as I understand it is) are not exactly a turn-on for me; but neither are visions of roast-chicken-position heterosexual sex. But just because I don’t personally identify with the mechanics of what turns other people on doesn’t mean I despise them. I mean, it doesn’t appear to bother me that my straight women friends lie back and ”think of England” occasionally.
But does the closeness of the relationship change that? You know, the brother, son, ex-lover thing? And then it hit me: actually, this ex-boyfriend is not on the level of brother, son, ex-lover. We had a relationship — more accurately, a friendship — more than a decade ago. In real life, this news should have been no more than a morsel of juicy gossip. The shock I felt had very little to do with the reality of him in my life — and much more to do with the impact of the news on how I understand myself.
This is because in my own personal mythology, he was significant. He was the one-and-only boyfriend. In my personal mythology, the story goes: ”Once upon a time, I had a boyfriend. We really liked each other and did everything together. But we were really young. We could have been the perfect couple and had the perfect straight life. Maybe some time in the future, it could still happen with him.”
The knowledge that he is gay — and most emphatically so, having reportedly had a steady boyfriend for five years — destroyed this myth utterly and forced me to consider why I had continued to cling to its nice fuzzy image — more especially, to consider why the process of uncovering my own sexual identity as a lesbian had not been similarly effective in destroying the myth.
It could be because society has programmed me into believing that women are more likely to harbour bisexual tendencies than men. It could be because I very much want the possibility encapsulated by the myth to exist, because the ”picket-fence” scenario of conventional married-life-plus-children still holds enough allure for me to want at least to imagine denying my sexuality in exchange for it. It could simply be because everyone likes to know they could have had what they didn’t want, if they’d wanted it.
Whatever the reason for the initial shock, after thinking things through, I set about rewriting my personal mythology. The story now goes: ”Once upon a time I had a boyfriend. The reason we were attracted to each other is because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that we are both gay. We were very young. We never would have worked out as a couple, but the relationship helped us find the way to our true identities. Maybe some time in the future we can meet up and laugh about it.”
Funny how this creates a much clearer image. And oddly, leaves me feeling very free.