Finding Myself After 40: A Lesbian Journey Before We Had Words for It
Up until I was 43 I would have said, “I know exactly who and what I am and I am not a lesbian.” In a heterosexual marriage for 25 years, I had been so preoccupied with my husband and children, and their needs, that I was oblivious to my own.
And then I met Toby.
We became fast friends and soon I couldn’t imagine Toby not being a part of my life. We shared long walks and heavy conversations about intimate parts of our lives. We felt free in each other’s kitchens and comfortable with each other’s families.
One evening, while we were sitting and talking, I found myself looking, really looking, at Toby. She smiled at me and a strange and powerful feeling rushed through my body. My heart began to race. I realized I was in love with my best friend.
She didn’t feel toward me as I did toward her, and the question, was it just Toby I was in love with, or was I a lesbian, lingered in my head.
While I had always been able to accept people who were different, now I was one of them. At home, with great difficulty, I functioned as though nothing had changed. Privately, and in great pain, I mourned the loss of my best friend. Feeling totally alone, I had to contend with not only my loss but also the realization that I might be one of ‘those women.’ I could barely say the word lesbian.
My awakening began in 1988, before the internet became our research go-to. I searched library catalogs and found lesbian-related books listed, but the shelves were bare of them. I came back month after month but they never reappeared, and I was too timid to ask the librarian for help. I came to find out years later that anti-gay individuals would take them and destroy them. The librarians, not knowing they were missing, did not replace them.
Who could I talk to? Where could I turn for help? I knew of no one in the lesbian world so I turned my thoughts and feelings inward and picked up my pen,.
I never believed I would come out, but what began as a catharsis for myself became a catalyst and a guiding light for a great many other women when my writings and interviews became the benchmark book, Married Women Who Love Women.
But for the book to be taken seriously, I needed to take myself seriously and that meant I had to come out. Deciding that, and then deciding to actually have my book Married Women Who Love Women, published, took a tremendous amount of courage. What about my family? How would they deal with my coming out? Would they be safe? Would I be safe? There are lots of crazies in the world.
Finally it came to me that I was supposed to write this book when, while doing an early reading, a woman came up to me. She was clutching my book and sobbing. She said she thought she was the only married woman ever to have fallen in love with a married woman. This was in the early 1990s. She thought the best thing she could do for her family was kill herself. She planned her suicide on a night her family was going to be out late and was coming home from work for what she thought would be the last time when she passed a bookstore. They were just putting my book in the window and when she saw the title she knew she wasn’t alone and changed her mind.
When the first edition was published in 1998, women discretely purchased copies and hid them under their jackets, or changed the book covers so no one would see what they were reading. We have come a long way since then, and this book is as relevant today as it was more than 25 years ago, although many of the women going through their same gender discoveries now are older women. Thanks to social media platforms, and just the sheer number of celebrities who have come out, society’s attitude has become more progressive and inclusive.
In the years that followed, I felt compelled to write a second edition of Married Women Who Love Women, and then a third, which has the words “and More” added to the title, because so much has changed, and continues to change with regard to the way people are redefining their relationships and themselves.
The last time I stood in front of two hundred women at a writer’s conference to give a reading. I paused briefly to reflect. It had been at this very same conference back in the early 90s that I had timidly come out by reading what would eventually become the introduction to my ground-breaking book. A feeling of well-being came over me now as I announced loudly and clearly, “I will be reading from my latest book, a lesbian, paranormal romance, Tangled Ribbons.”
My journey was not an easy one. I went to a therapist, hoping for an easy fix, but I could barely say, “I fell in love with my best friend and she’s a woman.” Ultimately, at a party several years later, I ran into her and she told me that she was now using my book in her attempt to guide other women.