The Supreme Court and me: A response

Heather at Lez B Vegan Moms has some reflections on my post about the Supreme Court’s impending gay marriage decision.

Heather is (unlike me) an actual lawyer law school graduate.

I particularly agree with one of her thoughts: Marriage is three different things:

• a collection of legal rights and obligations
• a commitment between two people
• a ceremony, religious or not

It is a category error to confuse the three things, as opponents of gay marriage often do. As Heather says, I don’t need a lawyer for the latter two. I don’t need God for the first.

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PS: She called my post “very intellectual”! My dear, I’m just an engineer.

PPS: Heather’s post reminds me that my hero is Roy McDonald, a conservative Republican from a conservative, Republican upstate district, who committed political suicide by voting for the New York gay marriage law. Roy said,

[Y]ou try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, f*** it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing. … They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.

My story: First date

I have a very good friend at the church I attended out West. She loves to talk about her genius sister, who has an advanced quantitative degree from an Ivy League university. The sister founded a successful firm that uses quantitative tools to model clients’ business alternatives.

The sister comes out from New York every summer to relax for a few weeks on their parents’ ranch. My friend brought the sister to Sunday services.

The sister had just come out to her family. My friend, who has a puckish sense of humor, introduced her sister to the minister as her “New York lesbian sister”. I think she expected that to fluster the minister and her sister.

Quite the contrary. The minister was delighted. He asked the sister whether she was comfortable in her faith. If so, would she talk with a woman who was struggling with coming out? (That would be me.)

She agreed. She reserved a table for a dinner at a romantic little restaurant.

The only person I had come out to was the minister. He was a professional, bound to confidentiality. This woman would be the first ordinary person to whom I would come out.

I was nervous, but all the reticence of more than 30 years in the closet evaporated in minutes. I talked freely with a woman for the first time in my life.

She was beautifully dressed, a subtly tailored, simple, classic grey jersey designer shift, pearls, sapphire studs, impeccable light makeup, blonde hair to her shoulders – and cowgirl boots.

At first I thought she had a speech impediment, but I came to realize that she was taking the time to craft each perfect sentence out of a perfect vocabulary.

To any observer, we were two women having a business dinner. We didn’t touch. We didn’t flirt. We talked seriously about our lives, about our families, about growing up in the rural Rockies, about our faith, about our home state, about having kids someday and about coming out. She talked about things of which I knew nothing: literature, the opera, places I’ve never been – New York, London, Paris, Singapore, Rio.

I am self-confident to a fault, but her self-confidence was unnerving.

She would have been intimidating – brilliant, beautiful, beautifully dressed and coiffed, a distinctive personal style, cultured, cosmopolitan, a successful entrepreneur, a New York sophisticate to beat all New York sophisticates. But she carried it all with down-to-earth ease – just a girl from a ranch 10 miles outside of West Jerkwater, amazed at her good luck. She was the friendliest, happiest, least conceited, least self-absorbed person I have ever met. Her self-deprecation was charmingly amusing instead of falsely modest.

She would have seemed unattainable, but she was genuinely interested in me. In me. It was incredible to me then, and it is incredible to me now. She plainly saw me as an equal, as if it were incredible that I might be interested in her.

As we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, taking our leave, she touched my cheek. I nearly fainted. I understood what it means to see fireworks: Pricks of light flashed in my eyes. All the years of suppressed emotion exploded at the tip of her finger.

It was a few minutes before either of us could talk.

And she became my Love.

My story: Childhood

I have always been attracted to women, particularly to traditionally feminine women of conservative taste. I never felt attraction to men or boys.

The ideal of my attraction was Miss B, my fourth grade teacher.

When the other girls started to take an interest in boys, they spoke of it in the way I would have expressed my interest in women. I had the good sense not to express that interest.

I didn’t know there was a word for my interest in women. I didn’t know (or know of) any openly gay women, and I didn’t fit my home town’s stereotype of lesbians.

I was also a child of the Catholic Church. Being a lesbian was a sin. (Even though it’s not.) My interest in women was so innocent that it couldn’t be sinful.

It was only later, when I saw that lesbians are as diverse as straight women, that I realized that I was gay.

And that was the start of Hell.

Style

I am a woman who loves being a woman and loves being with a woman who loves being a woman.

My Love is a woman who loves being a woman and loves being with a woman who loves being a woman.

And by “woman”, I mean “traditionally feminine woman”. Brainwashed by the heteronormative patriarchy? A PhD engineer and a woman with an advanced quantitative degree and the founder of a successful enterprise? A couple of highly successful women in overwhelmingly male fields? If you say so.

We both wear dresses or skirts to work every day. We wear them on weekends, too, unless we’re doing something that calls for something a little more rough-and-ready.

She wears designer shifts and sheaths, which she has subtly tailored. She wants to send the message that a woman is in charge. She wears flats, except when she wears her cowgirl boots.

I wear Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, pencil skirts and loafers. I dress that way for Miss B.

I’ve never seen my Love wear anything with a heel higher than her cowgirl boots. I don’t wear heels.

We wear makeup. Not much, though. You’d never notice it.

She wears her hair shoulder-length. Mine is bobbed at the neck and tucked behind the ear.

We are feminine, but neither of us is girly.

When we’re out West, we wear Pendleton shirts and blue jeans. It’s not lesbian code, however; it’s what everybody wears.