By Mariah Cruz
When I was a kid growing up in a small steel town in the early 1980s, the only “out” public figure I knew about was Martina Navratilova, the champion tennis player. Trying to figure out my own gender identity and sexual preference was pretty tough without any friends, relatives, or teachers to talk to about the subject. I didn’t know any gay, bi, or genderqueer people and the internet hadn’t been invented yet. Musicians, sports heroes, and fictitious characters in a few books were the only guides I had in trying to navigate the maze. In my pocket-sized world Martina was the definition of a nonheteronormative woman for me—muscular, sporty, and driven.
I wasn’t muscular, sporty, or driven so maybe that meant I wasn’t gay. But why couldn’t I stop staring at the blonde girl who played trumpet in my junior high school band? Why did I wait by my tennis partner’s locker every day after class so I could talk to her even though it meant missing the bus home half the time since my locker was at the opposite end of the school?
Well, if I wasn’t like Martina, maybe I was like Martina’s girlfriend. Rita Mae Brown was an author and I was a writer so… but no. I didn’t see myself gazing back from her image either.
When I finally got to college and met actual in-the-flesh women who identified as gay or bi, I still didn’t find the feeling of recognition I assumed I would. I didn’t look like them. I wasn’t attracted to any of them. And I didn’t want to be like them.
Years passed and I continued to ping-pong my way from side to side—attraction to men, attraction to women, finally settling into a bisexual space as a good enough place to land. I’m not this, I’m not that, but maybe I’m something in between. Or maybe I’m none of the current choices. I don’t really know, but at least I can call “it” something for now.
And that worked well enough until I heard the first snarl of Sleater-Kinney’s “Start Together” from their 1999 release The Hot Rock. The ferocious pounding drive was like a dark star pulling me into its unyielding grip. Feverishly digging up any information I could find about the band (thank you internet for being invented), I learned about the intimate relationship Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker had with each other in the band’s early days.
And then everything started to make sense. Staring at Carrie’s dark, smokey eyes, taut profile, and 100-watt smile, I finally saw myself. That’s what I look like! In Corin’s curvy, gutsy, doeeyed pose I saw the blonde trumpet player from junior high band, my tennis partner, and every other girl I had ever had a crush on. In listening to their songs, written by women about relationships with other women, I finally heard what I’d been waiting to hear all of my life. My feelings. My wants. All real. Finally, I found the affirmation I had searched so hard to find. That was enough for me!
But what was I supposed to do with this…this… information. It wasn’t exactly a revelation since I’d known about it for a long time, but it was somehow closer to the surface than it had ever been. I listened to “Good Things” every day on my drive home from work and felt my heart squirm. I scoured YouTube for clips from S-K’s CBGB’s performance where Carrie puts her head on Corin’s shoulder towards the end of the show. I couldn’t look away.
When the band went on official hiatus in 2006, I breathed a huge gasp of relief. Safe at last! I could finally close this chapter and get back to real life—my marriage and living on a farm in rural New England. Sure, there were occasional crushes (my ice hockey coach and the dairy farmer’s wife down the road) which seemed to spring up every few years or so, but for the most part, I felt I had made a “decision” I could stick with.
After an unexpected economic upheaval forced me to relocate for work, I found myself living alone in another city. It was then that I heard the angsty gut wrench of “Nineteen” by Tegan and Sara and I started to cry. And cry. Buckets and buckets of years of tears came flowing out over the lyrics to that song. I might have been way past the age of 19, but my heart sure wasn’t. It was still full of teenaged longing for… her. I could feel “her” in my legs. In fact, I could feel “her” everywhere, but who was she? Where was she? How could I find her?
I stayed up late every night until two or three in the morning watching T&S videos, reading about the Quin twins, inhaling their song lyrics, gazing at their beautiful faces. In their unapologetic, bold postures I felt myself growing a little more courageous. More solid. Something was gathering strength in me.
By this time, I knew plenty of other gay/bi women, played hockey with lots of them, and worked with several daily. But I still didn’t identify with them or feel a sense of kinship. My sorting out was still being played out in song, images, and TV shows. Bette and Tina’s relationship on The L Word seemed more real to me than any of the ones I casually observed around me. I saw myself in Piper on Orange is the New Black and definitely could imagine myself with someone like Alex, but where were those people in my day-to-day life? How do I know there even is a “her” out there for me? How do I know she’s real and not something that’s only on TV? And if she really does exist, would she even be interested in me?
As more and more out and outed celebrities began to make their way into media headlines: Kristen Stewart, Annie Clark, Kate McKinnon, the list goes on—I felt my spirits lift. Maybe there were a lot of awesome queer women out there after all.
And then it happened. I fell hard and fast for a cute girl at the local bike co-op where I volunteered on Wednesday nights. She was smart, funny, totally adorable, and, best of all, queer. A bike nut just like me. Half my age. And living with her boyfriend.
“It’s so embarrassing,” I cringed to my born-again-Christian friend Jennie over lunch one crisp fall day. “She’s HALF my age. And she has a boyfriend.”
I didn’t expect her to understand at all, and I’m not even sure why I was talking to her about it, but she surprised me with her reply.
“How long are you going to wait to be happy?” she asked. I didn’t have an answer to that question since It had never occurred to me that I wasn’t already happy. I mean I knew I was tormented, sure. And conflicted, definitely conflicted. But not happy? I had a pretty good life, why wouldn’t I be happy?
The crush felt more like a curse that was crushing me. I tried to make it go away. Listed all of the reasons why our situation could never work out. Told myself to just get over it. Scolded myself for being foolish (after all, she’s half your age, unavailable, and probably NOT interested anyway) but nothing I did seemed to stop my heart from dropping into my stomach when I saw her. Nothing stopped my hands from sweating when she was wrenching on a bike in a stand next to me. Damn, damn, damn.
I told my therapist, expecting her to almost laugh at the implausibility of it all. But she didn’t. Instead, she read me a poem. I don’t remember the title, or the author, or even what the poem was about, but when she read it, I felt the tenderest acknowledgement of the importance of this crush to my life, as if a feather was being used to anoint it. My crush was being blessed, not judged or scorned. The Bike Shop Girl, as I referred to her, was my catalyst. She was the zephyr that moved the cold pile of leaves, rocks, and roots from the top of my daily tomb. Once I started to feel the warmth of life within me, I couldn’t go back to the frozen existence I had endured for so long. I knew there was more for me and I went on the hunt for it like a wild animal and I didn’t stop until I found… her.
And yes, she is real.
Mariah Cruz, a pseudonym, lives, writes, and bikes in Portland, OR.