Something's up.
I just listened to Mariah Carey singing 'All I Want for Christmas' voluntarily.
I might, under ordinary circumstances, be compelled at least once in the festive season to listen to the adorable kid on Love Actually sing it. These are not ordinary circumstances. When you realise you really like someone new, it makes you like everything you like already a little bit extra. It can even make things you didn't really like all that much seem not just tolerable, but enjoyable. Like jingly jangly Christmas love paeans.
I even like the dog more. I got licked on the face twice from hugging her. She's probably the only one here who knows something is up. If I'm at work in the kitchen (the majority of daylight hours) and I feel that huge, lopsided, unstoppable silly grin of happiness start to creep onto my face I just go to the fridge, open the door and beam quietly into the light.
Showing posts with label girls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label girls. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Sahti
Hey there.
You know that feeling when you think of someone's name and you get a goofy grin slapped on your face that can't be removed no matter how hard you try to pull a sombre expression?
It's irresistible. I should know, because I tried to resist it.
I tried, on the basis that said person was 12 years old at the turn of the millenium, on the night I drank peach Bacardi Breezers (never again) and broke the pub clock. It's no use because every time I think of her name I get the kind of look a crazy person might have that makes everyone avoid sitting next to you on the bus.
You know that feeling when you think of someone's name and you get a goofy grin slapped on your face that can't be removed no matter how hard you try to pull a sombre expression?
It's irresistible. I should know, because I tried to resist it.
I tried, on the basis that said person was 12 years old at the turn of the millenium, on the night I drank peach Bacardi Breezers (never again) and broke the pub clock. It's no use because every time I think of her name I get the kind of look a crazy person might have that makes everyone avoid sitting next to you on the bus.
Friday, November 5, 2010
In, Out, In, Out, Shake it all about
Dear Beloved Readers,
I've started feeling really self-conscious about the direction in which my writing is going. It's reflecting my life in Van of course, so the gayer life here gets, the gayer this blog is likely to get. I love you for reading this and I don't want to alienate you. Mimi is the only person for whom this isn't weird, because when we met I was busily living with one girl while falling in love with another. She introduced me to all her friends and they had a mutual friend with the same first name as me. They differentiated between us by naming her the German one and me the Lesbian one.
I recently met a woman who sounded thrilled to be bisexual, she talked about it positively, while I have hidden from it for years because the reaction the word gets mortifies me.* I never once went to Gay Pride with my friends in London, even when I lived with a woman. Why? Because I'm too lazy to march? Because I was afraid people would look at me and wonder what the heck that straight girl was doing there? The simple answer is, I didn't go to Pride because I wasn't proud. As much as I stolidly held to my high expectations of everyone around me, looking to them for support and acceptance, I was busy raging against homophobia while realising I harboured internalised homophobia against myself.
This seems deranged.
It has only recently struck me though, that I actually don't know what it's like to be straight. You think everyone thinks like you until you find out they don't. My newly minted bisexual friend recently married a dude and only later she realised her love of girls in not something all straight women have on the side. She's happy with that, the self knowledge and understanding and experience of meeting other women who feel the same way is enough for her.
Being bisexual for me is like doing the bloody Hokey Cokey for the rest of my life. I wish I knew where it would lead. I wish I didn't have to follow my heart because it is suddenly expansive and wide and taking me places I am afraid to go. And I'm taking you with me. Maybe it'll be fun, think of it as an anthropological case study.
I hope I'll learn to embrace being the unicorn of sexuality; that mythical creature: the bisexual. The gayness is actually not a problem for me, nothing makes my heart jump and down in excitement more than the realisation that the whole world makes sense to me from that perspective, it's just the alignment of it with my ungay self along with all my expectations of growing up to be like Samantha from Bewitched, minus the magic.
In related news, I recently saw WK for the first time since my birthday and told him he was off the hook, that while most of my heterosexuality is currently used up on my crush on him (the rest is still for Lee Min Ho) I would be exploring other avenues henceforth. I didn't actually use the word henceforth, because who does? There's something delicious about employing fancy pretentious language in the written word that you can't get away with in real life speech.
Kind salutations,
Me x
* I am possibly referring to the reaction the word gets from me, myself. Go figure, as they say on this side of the Atlantic.
p.s. edited to add this note - sometimes I just love people so much, like the people who created Bisexual Index, it makes me want to do a better job of not disparaging my own people.
p.p.s. it would be easier not to disparage my own people if their t-shirt section did not look like this. (Although I may have spat something onto the screen laughing at the 'Bi-furious' one, WTF?) Totally 'mo t-shirts are way cooler. Please get me one for Christmas or I could be single for yet another year/the rest of my life.
I've started feeling really self-conscious about the direction in which my writing is going. It's reflecting my life in Van of course, so the gayer life here gets, the gayer this blog is likely to get. I love you for reading this and I don't want to alienate you. Mimi is the only person for whom this isn't weird, because when we met I was busily living with one girl while falling in love with another. She introduced me to all her friends and they had a mutual friend with the same first name as me. They differentiated between us by naming her the German one and me the Lesbian one.
I recently met a woman who sounded thrilled to be bisexual, she talked about it positively, while I have hidden from it for years because the reaction the word gets mortifies me.* I never once went to Gay Pride with my friends in London, even when I lived with a woman. Why? Because I'm too lazy to march? Because I was afraid people would look at me and wonder what the heck that straight girl was doing there? The simple answer is, I didn't go to Pride because I wasn't proud. As much as I stolidly held to my high expectations of everyone around me, looking to them for support and acceptance, I was busy raging against homophobia while realising I harboured internalised homophobia against myself.
This seems deranged.
It has only recently struck me though, that I actually don't know what it's like to be straight. You think everyone thinks like you until you find out they don't. My newly minted bisexual friend recently married a dude and only later she realised her love of girls in not something all straight women have on the side. She's happy with that, the self knowledge and understanding and experience of meeting other women who feel the same way is enough for her.
Being bisexual for me is like doing the bloody Hokey Cokey for the rest of my life. I wish I knew where it would lead. I wish I didn't have to follow my heart because it is suddenly expansive and wide and taking me places I am afraid to go. And I'm taking you with me. Maybe it'll be fun, think of it as an anthropological case study.
I hope I'll learn to embrace being the unicorn of sexuality; that mythical creature: the bisexual. The gayness is actually not a problem for me, nothing makes my heart jump and down in excitement more than the realisation that the whole world makes sense to me from that perspective, it's just the alignment of it with my ungay self along with all my expectations of growing up to be like Samantha from Bewitched, minus the magic.
In related news, I recently saw WK for the first time since my birthday and told him he was off the hook, that while most of my heterosexuality is currently used up on my crush on him (the rest is still for Lee Min Ho) I would be exploring other avenues henceforth. I didn't actually use the word henceforth, because who does? There's something delicious about employing fancy pretentious language in the written word that you can't get away with in real life speech.
Kind salutations,
Me x
* I am possibly referring to the reaction the word gets from me, myself. Go figure, as they say on this side of the Atlantic.
p.s. edited to add this note - sometimes I just love people so much, like the people who created Bisexual Index, it makes me want to do a better job of not disparaging my own people.
p.p.s. it would be easier not to disparage my own people if their t-shirt section did not look like this. (Although I may have spat something onto the screen laughing at the 'Bi-furious' one, WTF?) Totally 'mo t-shirts are way cooler. Please get me one for Christmas or I could be single for yet another year/the rest of my life.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Wino Forever
As mentioned in the previous post, my lengthy Kevin Costner fantasy was replaced when Jordan Catalano came into my life when I was 13, the exact age that he leaned his way into Angela Chase's life in perhaps the best celluloid interpretation of teenage angst ever: My So-Called Life.
Jordan was replaced by Winona Ryder. I had forgotten about Winona. I thought of her just the other day as I was vacuuming the hall floor. I have forgotten a lot of things, a lot of early influences, which is why I am re-hashing them now. It occurrs to me that who you once were is not irrelevant to who you are now. Like the first time you realise that the reason you keep getting your heart wrecked is because of the people you choose to sail it with. It's just the same person, again and again, in different incarnations.
See this post for an introduction to this topic, but lately I have been playing an ongoing game with myself called 'How gay am I really?' It's a very intresting game. Try it yourself! I know I fit between the two big categories of hetero and homo which is why this game interests me - I'm just like everyone else, pushing myself to see if I can swing it over one way and pick a side. Wouldn't that be easier for everyone? Most of all for me. I'm kidding. To be honest, I'm just curious. And surprised.
I was once told by my very lesbionic friend 'You are the gayest person ever' and it just so happened that the majority of my cultural leanings, thoughts and influences were, upon closer inspection, really very gay indeed. I read Stella Duffy and Carol Ann Duffy avidly. I listened to Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill. I watched every movie Winona had been in, and when her portrayal of Jo in Little Women made me believe nothing could make me love her more, I wrote to her to tell her so. I don't actually remember anything I said in the letter. I blocked out that I wrote a love letter to a woman when I was 14 (14!) and didn't think there was anything remotely gay about it.
I went to a girls' high school and never once noticed any of the girls in it. I was never in the closet; I lived in Narnia. I was so deeply entrenched in my own world (where I never once questioned my sexuality - why does that word sound like a disease?) that I wasn't even aware a closet existed.
Of course Winona had to move over for River Phoenix who in turn (once reading not one but two of his biographies had influenced me enough to turn me into a vegetarian for the next 10 years) had to make room in my adolescent heart for Dave Grohl (awesomely talented and bearded frontman of the Foo Fighters who had been the lanky, long-haired drummer in Nirvana when I fell for him).
Now Dave was the real deal. I spent hours comtemplating our future together, how I would meet him at The Laundry Room in LA, (his recording studio) how we would sit in a diner and he'd sing 'Big Me' from the Foo's first album (which I had borrowed from the library, ha!) and most of all I worried about how much he smoked and whether I'd be able to get him to stop. These were my real concerns. I never imagined kissing him even though I was sure we would be married. I just wanted to stare at him and listen to him sing. Eventually I had a boyfriend who was incredibly cool (he still is! and he's getting married, but that's a whole other post) and he took me to see Dave play live. I wore my favourite dress, a little black number with an empire waist (adds boobs) a mesh overlay and adjustable spaghetti straps. I bought it with my first ever wages/paycheck (bar what my brother paid me for picking raspberries for him at his summer job and the five quid I earned for forging his signature dozens of times on his personalised business cards in his Ferris Bueller days). When I saw Dave on stage I actually cried a bit.
I was 20!
Ha! Just a year later I was confounded when during a flirty conversation with my not-yet first girlfriend, she declared I would have to fight her for Dave, whom she adored. I didn't understand; she was a giant homosexual, she had said so herself. Surely the rights to Dave would be all mine. Even then I knew I liked her so much I would allow her to encroach on my long held Dave Grohl fantasies. On the street where the bus stopped nearest her house, there was a shop I always wanted to go in to. It was a cute, adorable looking little boutique in Stoke Newington in North London. I saw it every time I got off the bus to go to see her, and I never went in. Going in would have meant reaching her later. Even if I just went in for a minute, it would mean I would reach her a minute later. I couldn't do it. I literally walked as fast as my legs would carry me.
That seems like madness now. Much later, when she was gone and all my longing belonged to another girl who seemed to give me an electrical charge every time we were in the same room, I went back to that neighbourhood. I visited that little boutique and spent an entire week's salary on an Orla Kiely handbag. (It was in the sale even then.)
Now of course, I understand it all completely differently. Probably no one is completely blinded to the attractiveness possibilities in each gender. Kind of like, I can see that Jude Law is attractive, but that's as far as I'd take it. My crush on Dave did not inherently have more value in it that my crush on Winona, merely because he's the opposite sex. My attachment to a man is not superior to an attachment to a woman. This is true for me, and and that is all I can say. I know it's not true for the world.
And so now, even though I will continue to defend the many hideous hairstyles Lee Min Ho deigns to wear in his Korean TV performances, Min Ho must move aside, for my current celebrity crush has a face that lights up like no one else. She also has a pony tail.
The reason I am boing your arses off with a post practically idenitical to one I wrote recently is that I can't keep this stupid smile from spreading across my face every time I think about this. It's like I've been set free. My to-ing and fro-ing over WK, and all the date-ish non-dates I had over the last year with perfectly fine gentlemen (where I kept hoping they wouldn't kiss me) left me feeling as if there was a hole in my heart space that was never going to fill up again, not quite to the brim.
I was wrong. The space isn't empty after all. I've just been barking up the wrong tree.
Jordan was replaced by Winona Ryder. I had forgotten about Winona. I thought of her just the other day as I was vacuuming the hall floor. I have forgotten a lot of things, a lot of early influences, which is why I am re-hashing them now. It occurrs to me that who you once were is not irrelevant to who you are now. Like the first time you realise that the reason you keep getting your heart wrecked is because of the people you choose to sail it with. It's just the same person, again and again, in different incarnations.
See this post for an introduction to this topic, but lately I have been playing an ongoing game with myself called 'How gay am I really?' It's a very intresting game. Try it yourself! I know I fit between the two big categories of hetero and homo which is why this game interests me - I'm just like everyone else, pushing myself to see if I can swing it over one way and pick a side. Wouldn't that be easier for everyone? Most of all for me. I'm kidding. To be honest, I'm just curious. And surprised.
I was once told by my very lesbionic friend 'You are the gayest person ever' and it just so happened that the majority of my cultural leanings, thoughts and influences were, upon closer inspection, really very gay indeed. I read Stella Duffy and Carol Ann Duffy avidly. I listened to Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill. I watched every movie Winona had been in, and when her portrayal of Jo in Little Women made me believe nothing could make me love her more, I wrote to her to tell her so. I don't actually remember anything I said in the letter. I blocked out that I wrote a love letter to a woman when I was 14 (14!) and didn't think there was anything remotely gay about it.
I went to a girls' high school and never once noticed any of the girls in it. I was never in the closet; I lived in Narnia. I was so deeply entrenched in my own world (where I never once questioned my sexuality - why does that word sound like a disease?) that I wasn't even aware a closet existed.
Of course Winona had to move over for River Phoenix who in turn (once reading not one but two of his biographies had influenced me enough to turn me into a vegetarian for the next 10 years) had to make room in my adolescent heart for Dave Grohl (awesomely talented and bearded frontman of the Foo Fighters who had been the lanky, long-haired drummer in Nirvana when I fell for him).
Now Dave was the real deal. I spent hours comtemplating our future together, how I would meet him at The Laundry Room in LA, (his recording studio) how we would sit in a diner and he'd sing 'Big Me' from the Foo's first album (which I had borrowed from the library, ha!) and most of all I worried about how much he smoked and whether I'd be able to get him to stop. These were my real concerns. I never imagined kissing him even though I was sure we would be married. I just wanted to stare at him and listen to him sing. Eventually I had a boyfriend who was incredibly cool (he still is! and he's getting married, but that's a whole other post) and he took me to see Dave play live. I wore my favourite dress, a little black number with an empire waist (adds boobs) a mesh overlay and adjustable spaghetti straps. I bought it with my first ever wages/paycheck (bar what my brother paid me for picking raspberries for him at his summer job and the five quid I earned for forging his signature dozens of times on his personalised business cards in his Ferris Bueller days). When I saw Dave on stage I actually cried a bit.
I was 20!
Ha! Just a year later I was confounded when during a flirty conversation with my not-yet first girlfriend, she declared I would have to fight her for Dave, whom she adored. I didn't understand; she was a giant homosexual, she had said so herself. Surely the rights to Dave would be all mine. Even then I knew I liked her so much I would allow her to encroach on my long held Dave Grohl fantasies. On the street where the bus stopped nearest her house, there was a shop I always wanted to go in to. It was a cute, adorable looking little boutique in Stoke Newington in North London. I saw it every time I got off the bus to go to see her, and I never went in. Going in would have meant reaching her later. Even if I just went in for a minute, it would mean I would reach her a minute later. I couldn't do it. I literally walked as fast as my legs would carry me.
That seems like madness now. Much later, when she was gone and all my longing belonged to another girl who seemed to give me an electrical charge every time we were in the same room, I went back to that neighbourhood. I visited that little boutique and spent an entire week's salary on an Orla Kiely handbag. (It was in the sale even then.)
Now of course, I understand it all completely differently. Probably no one is completely blinded to the attractiveness possibilities in each gender. Kind of like, I can see that Jude Law is attractive, but that's as far as I'd take it. My crush on Dave did not inherently have more value in it that my crush on Winona, merely because he's the opposite sex. My attachment to a man is not superior to an attachment to a woman. This is true for me, and and that is all I can say. I know it's not true for the world.
And so now, even though I will continue to defend the many hideous hairstyles Lee Min Ho deigns to wear in his Korean TV performances, Min Ho must move aside, for my current celebrity crush has a face that lights up like no one else. She also has a pony tail.
The reason I am boing your arses off with a post practically idenitical to one I wrote recently is that I can't keep this stupid smile from spreading across my face every time I think about this. It's like I've been set free. My to-ing and fro-ing over WK, and all the date-ish non-dates I had over the last year with perfectly fine gentlemen (where I kept hoping they wouldn't kiss me) left me feeling as if there was a hole in my heart space that was never going to fill up again, not quite to the brim.
I was wrong. The space isn't empty after all. I've just been barking up the wrong tree.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Spirit Level
When I consider my own sexuality (gasp!) I always visualise a spirit level.
In our house when I was little, we had an orange spirit level with a yellow bubble that sat in the middle when the spirit was level, as it were. This is a memory I am not certain of, perhaps I invented the orange colour, but it's what comes to mind.
When I let myself (or make myself) consider it, I know I am not straight. I also know I am not gay. As Al Gore might put it, this is an inconvenient truth.
My Fellow European hit the nail on the head for me by using one word in reference to this over a glass of wine the other day:
Coherent.
The reason it is inconvenient is it is difficult to build a coherent identity, an idea for yourself and also an idea for others (especially other people you love) to have of you when they can't be certain where the bubble on your spirit level lies. This is due to the impossibilty of separating your sexuality from every other facet of your life. It's true that it impacts other areas, but I know truly and completely that I am exactly the same person, in essence, as I was before I ever found out I could be in love with someone of either gender.
And this issue is not about what you do with someone, not for me. It is about who you do it with. It is about love. In the absence of any faith that grips my heart except the faith that love inspires, I am beholden to it and spend my life in it's joyful and heartbreaking pursuit.
I can say without any doubt that when I have truly loved someone I have never doubted that they were the 'right' gender for me. For me there is no right answer, no right team to play on, just a right person. I think I've loved the right people so far. (Of course I would eventually like to love someone who is so right for me, who I am so right for, that we stay together for a billion years and have 27 children.)
I think my gayness (I'm single so I don't have anyone to sway the balance; let's call it 50%) is more deeply rooted than I first thought when I fell in love with a girl at university. I thought it was just her - the way her hair smelled like rosemary, her contrasting boldness and sensitivity, her fine bone china tea cups and the floral, lavendery Earl Grey tea that they always held. It didn't occur to me before that I was different from a lot of girls way before then. I'm still not sure now, because I have no one to measure myself against. I don't know if my childhood devotion to Rosemary Ford (the glamorous assistant on the Generation Game) and passionate support of Jennifer Capriati at Wimbledon in 1991 when I was 10, was just a normal growing-up thing, or if it meant I always saw girls differently than most girls do. That girl at school in the year below, with the pale blonde sheet of hair that waved to me like a white flag after a fight and made me happy each time I saw it; did I just admire her lack of frizz or did I have a crush on her? Does it make a difference now? Why am I thinking about it at all?
I haven't thought about girls in a long time, about the way I feel about some of them. Last weekend I went to see a band play and it is not an exaggeration to say that it rejuvanated my zest for, well, absolutely everything. There is still a spring in my step that had been lacking for months before. The music was awesome, I had fun sharing it with a friend and seeing Stanley Park for the first time. But that wasn't it - the magical part was that it made me remember something I like. When you forget what you like, you forget who you are.
I have been here, swamped and wading around, directionless, forgetting all the tiny things that make me who I am. No wonder I have been so miserable. Since the show I have set myself the task of remembering them; I want to chart the influences on my life since the first time I went to see that particular band play when I was 21, to now, till I saw them on my 29th birthday and felt like something in me was bursting open.
This is a totally self absorbed project that I don't plan to write too much about (but hey - if I turn out to be self absorbed enough I might change my mind on that later). The point of it stems from seeing this woman on stage, singing to me as I stood in the mud in a crowd of 2000 people, and remembering the first time I saw her. It was in the bathroom of the Metro Club on Oxford Street in London and as I was washing my hands I noticed a petite, dark haired girl wearing a parka with a furry hood washing her hands next to me. It was Sara Quin, one half of the band Tegan and Sara. When I realised I recognised her I wanted to hug her I loved their EP so much. I was absolutely too shy to say hello, or thanks for coming to London, or your new album rocks, or anything like that. I loved that show and the one I went to 2 years later, both venues so tiny that they played in front of me as close as Sara had been to me in the bathroom that time.
Six years after that first Tegan and Sara show I saw them play in LA and was astonished to discover their rise to fame meant fans were sleeping outside the venue to catch a close up glimpse of them (in Hollywood! Instead of being synonymous with 'glamour' it should be synonymous with 'dirty on the ground', don't sleep outside!). Within a few weeks of seeing that LA show I had the utter pleasure of bumping into another woman in a bathroom, who's music and attitude and face I have loved since university. You can bet your sweet anything I didn't let the opportunity of meeting Pink (or Alicia as she's known to good friends like me!) slip by, I said hello and chatted to her for a good five minutes in the bathroom of Hotel Cafe. I didn't faint or anything!
How things have changed.
When I bought Tegan and Sara's EP (before I had even heard their voices - I admired the cover) I didn't know they were both gay or that it would be important for me later. Or maybe I did, maybe my gaydar was so super duper and subconscious that I knew without knowing.
Either way, it's knowledge about myself that can't be undone. I don't want it to be. I don't know where it's going to take me. I'm going to try to stop fretting about that part.
p.s. I remember one of the most confusing things anyone ever said to me regarding my gay behaviour; she asked how I ended up being friends with a girl I had just met (who was also exploring her own signs of gayness at the time) in the manner of 'how come you don't fancy her? she's gay too, so how do you know who you fancy and who you are just friends with?'. This was useful for me as it really gave me the idea that maybe some women grow up without their version of Rosemary Ford, maybe some people have no capacity for empathy with that. To me it's obvious - straight women (and me too) are able to distinguish which men they fancy and which they don't. It's even more pronounced than that, we can distinguish which men we fancy, which we don't mind, which we are repulsed by and which we view in an asexual manner (i.e.brothers). I can do the same with women too. Instead of being all in one group of 'don't fancy' there is a scale and my friends all fall under the 'not attracted to, at all' category while Pink comes under 'definiftely attracted to but can maintain composure during surprise meetings'. It's not that you aren't totally beautiful, my friends, I just don't fancy you.
p.p.s. This does not even touch on the anxiety produced in me by the term 'bisexual'. I can't deny the real meaning of it about myself, because it's true, yet the term has been hijacked so completely by society, by both gay and straight communities, as being a purgatory for people who are sitting on an imaginary fence, people who are polyamorous (this is so not what it means - 'bi' should stand for 'either' not 'both') or people who want to have their cake and eat it too, who are confused or lying to themselves and everyone they know. That's why I rarely use this term in reference to myself, but if you need a term to process me with, its the only one I've got to offer you. If you are reading this and were not already aware of it and think that I should have mentioned it to you before, please know that I often forget that the fluidity of sexuality is a big deal to some people, and that to some others it is a foreign concept altogether. I wouldn't imagine regaling everyone I know with intimate details of my early 20s if they concerned a boy, because I don't think it matters. (Except you Robin and Mimi, you get to hear all the fun stuff, sorry!) The fact that much of that time concerned girls, I tend to think is only relevant to me. Oh goodness it has taken so long to organise my thoughts for this post it is past 3am and I am now ravenously hungry. Either that or my basement-fellow's pot smoking session earlier has given me the munchies. I must go and sacrifice the last Dairy Milk in my stash. Thanks for listening.
In our house when I was little, we had an orange spirit level with a yellow bubble that sat in the middle when the spirit was level, as it were. This is a memory I am not certain of, perhaps I invented the orange colour, but it's what comes to mind.
When I let myself (or make myself) consider it, I know I am not straight. I also know I am not gay. As Al Gore might put it, this is an inconvenient truth.
My Fellow European hit the nail on the head for me by using one word in reference to this over a glass of wine the other day:
Coherent.
The reason it is inconvenient is it is difficult to build a coherent identity, an idea for yourself and also an idea for others (especially other people you love) to have of you when they can't be certain where the bubble on your spirit level lies. This is due to the impossibilty of separating your sexuality from every other facet of your life. It's true that it impacts other areas, but I know truly and completely that I am exactly the same person, in essence, as I was before I ever found out I could be in love with someone of either gender.
And this issue is not about what you do with someone, not for me. It is about who you do it with. It is about love. In the absence of any faith that grips my heart except the faith that love inspires, I am beholden to it and spend my life in it's joyful and heartbreaking pursuit.
I can say without any doubt that when I have truly loved someone I have never doubted that they were the 'right' gender for me. For me there is no right answer, no right team to play on, just a right person. I think I've loved the right people so far. (Of course I would eventually like to love someone who is so right for me, who I am so right for, that we stay together for a billion years and have 27 children.)
I think my gayness (I'm single so I don't have anyone to sway the balance; let's call it 50%) is more deeply rooted than I first thought when I fell in love with a girl at university. I thought it was just her - the way her hair smelled like rosemary, her contrasting boldness and sensitivity, her fine bone china tea cups and the floral, lavendery Earl Grey tea that they always held. It didn't occur to me before that I was different from a lot of girls way before then. I'm still not sure now, because I have no one to measure myself against. I don't know if my childhood devotion to Rosemary Ford (the glamorous assistant on the Generation Game) and passionate support of Jennifer Capriati at Wimbledon in 1991 when I was 10, was just a normal growing-up thing, or if it meant I always saw girls differently than most girls do. That girl at school in the year below, with the pale blonde sheet of hair that waved to me like a white flag after a fight and made me happy each time I saw it; did I just admire her lack of frizz or did I have a crush on her? Does it make a difference now? Why am I thinking about it at all?
I haven't thought about girls in a long time, about the way I feel about some of them. Last weekend I went to see a band play and it is not an exaggeration to say that it rejuvanated my zest for, well, absolutely everything. There is still a spring in my step that had been lacking for months before. The music was awesome, I had fun sharing it with a friend and seeing Stanley Park for the first time. But that wasn't it - the magical part was that it made me remember something I like. When you forget what you like, you forget who you are.
I have been here, swamped and wading around, directionless, forgetting all the tiny things that make me who I am. No wonder I have been so miserable. Since the show I have set myself the task of remembering them; I want to chart the influences on my life since the first time I went to see that particular band play when I was 21, to now, till I saw them on my 29th birthday and felt like something in me was bursting open.
This is a totally self absorbed project that I don't plan to write too much about (but hey - if I turn out to be self absorbed enough I might change my mind on that later). The point of it stems from seeing this woman on stage, singing to me as I stood in the mud in a crowd of 2000 people, and remembering the first time I saw her. It was in the bathroom of the Metro Club on Oxford Street in London and as I was washing my hands I noticed a petite, dark haired girl wearing a parka with a furry hood washing her hands next to me. It was Sara Quin, one half of the band Tegan and Sara. When I realised I recognised her I wanted to hug her I loved their EP so much. I was absolutely too shy to say hello, or thanks for coming to London, or your new album rocks, or anything like that. I loved that show and the one I went to 2 years later, both venues so tiny that they played in front of me as close as Sara had been to me in the bathroom that time.
Six years after that first Tegan and Sara show I saw them play in LA and was astonished to discover their rise to fame meant fans were sleeping outside the venue to catch a close up glimpse of them (in Hollywood! Instead of being synonymous with 'glamour' it should be synonymous with 'dirty on the ground', don't sleep outside!). Within a few weeks of seeing that LA show I had the utter pleasure of bumping into another woman in a bathroom, who's music and attitude and face I have loved since university. You can bet your sweet anything I didn't let the opportunity of meeting Pink (or Alicia as she's known to good friends like me!) slip by, I said hello and chatted to her for a good five minutes in the bathroom of Hotel Cafe. I didn't faint or anything!
How things have changed.
When I bought Tegan and Sara's EP (before I had even heard their voices - I admired the cover) I didn't know they were both gay or that it would be important for me later. Or maybe I did, maybe my gaydar was so super duper and subconscious that I knew without knowing.
Either way, it's knowledge about myself that can't be undone. I don't want it to be. I don't know where it's going to take me. I'm going to try to stop fretting about that part.
p.s. I remember one of the most confusing things anyone ever said to me regarding my gay behaviour; she asked how I ended up being friends with a girl I had just met (who was also exploring her own signs of gayness at the time) in the manner of 'how come you don't fancy her? she's gay too, so how do you know who you fancy and who you are just friends with?'. This was useful for me as it really gave me the idea that maybe some women grow up without their version of Rosemary Ford, maybe some people have no capacity for empathy with that. To me it's obvious - straight women (and me too) are able to distinguish which men they fancy and which they don't. It's even more pronounced than that, we can distinguish which men we fancy, which we don't mind, which we are repulsed by and which we view in an asexual manner (i.e.brothers). I can do the same with women too. Instead of being all in one group of 'don't fancy' there is a scale and my friends all fall under the 'not attracted to, at all' category while Pink comes under 'definiftely attracted to but can maintain composure during surprise meetings'. It's not that you aren't totally beautiful, my friends, I just don't fancy you.
p.p.s. This does not even touch on the anxiety produced in me by the term 'bisexual'. I can't deny the real meaning of it about myself, because it's true, yet the term has been hijacked so completely by society, by both gay and straight communities, as being a purgatory for people who are sitting on an imaginary fence, people who are polyamorous (this is so not what it means - 'bi' should stand for 'either' not 'both') or people who want to have their cake and eat it too, who are confused or lying to themselves and everyone they know. That's why I rarely use this term in reference to myself, but if you need a term to process me with, its the only one I've got to offer you. If you are reading this and were not already aware of it and think that I should have mentioned it to you before, please know that I often forget that the fluidity of sexuality is a big deal to some people, and that to some others it is a foreign concept altogether. I wouldn't imagine regaling everyone I know with intimate details of my early 20s if they concerned a boy, because I don't think it matters. (Except you Robin and Mimi, you get to hear all the fun stuff, sorry!) The fact that much of that time concerned girls, I tend to think is only relevant to me. Oh goodness it has taken so long to organise my thoughts for this post it is past 3am and I am now ravenously hungry. Either that or my basement-fellow's pot smoking session earlier has given me the munchies. I must go and sacrifice the last Dairy Milk in my stash. Thanks for listening.
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