Have you ever had an all-weekend sleepover? You know, the kind where your parents were going out of town, so they’d dump you on your friend’s doorstep to play surrogate sibling for a few days. I loved it. I loved the strange pretend play of being absorbed into that family for the weekend, getting accustomed to their nuances and quirks. I would eat pasta with ketchup (a combination my mother would find utterly sacrilegious), toy with later-than-usual bedtimes, play games I’d never played before, and explore rooms I didn’t know were possible: private bathrooms and indoor pools, attics and playrooms.
Her name was Lindsay. She wasn’t my best friend, but she was a good friend for a short time. I liked spending time with Lindsay because she was quiet and shy but had a capacity for weirdness. I remember understanding that she was uniquely pretty; when she smiled, her face would erupt in dimples, like the surface of the moon. During my 10th year, my parents went away for the weekend and plopped me into Lindsay’s family. I had countless sleepovers like this, but the memory of this one has always flickered and shined in the back of my brain with a curious magic I didn’t have words for…until now.
It was 2000, and Nickelodeon had just released a movie called Snow Day. I don’t think I gave much thought to the film itself, but its soundtrack featured a song by an artist named Hoku called “Another Dumb Blonde.” The words didn’t land with me in any resounding way; my hair was an inky brown, and my only relationship had been with a boy I did not speak to but would wave to from the hallway. He once gave me a bracelet from his family vacation to some tropical place. Nonetheless, Lindsay and I had somehow encountered this song and were obsessed. The music felt electric and effervescent, driven by rudimentary synth sounds that bubbled over with an “anything can happen” brightness. It just felt good to listen to it. So we signed a silent contract in which we agreed to love this song all weekend together. I remember being in her basement, a sort of essential aspect of East Coast sleepover culture, and she kept feeding me this incredible drink called “Orangina.” In my memory, she had made it herself; I even have a distinct image of her pouring orange juice and seltzer into a cup; what’s more likely is that it was the drink Orangina, an actual commercially available beverage. I remember thinking: “This is the most delicious thing I have ever had.” It was refreshing and sweet, but most importantly, it was unfamiliar. It was something new.
We sipped Orangina, listened to “Another Dumb Blonde,” and danced around until expiring into hot pink bean bag chairs. At some point, I looked at her and thought, “I love you.”
During my School Age years, I dabbled in a variety of sexual experimentation with some of my friends, who were girls. I kept my sessions of the feel-good game immensely private and compartmentalized; I remember how terrifying it felt to think someone might witness these acts, and while I didn’t understand why, I knew they were punishable. One time, mid-rubbing on ’90s carpet, my friend’s mom entered the room in horror; our cheeks pink from the shame aerobics, she scolded us with brazen confusion. My fears had been confirmed, so I retired from the Dry Hump Collective.
With a bit of research, I learned that this kind of play between peers of the same sex is common and does not exist as an indication of sexual orientation—and, of course, the precursor to this experimentation was setting up the imagined context that we were “boyfren girlfren.” Still, I can’t help but hold space for the significance of my earliest sexual experiences being with other girls. While I held onto the probable truth that this was simply normal experimentation, I continued to tip-toe around a small cellar door in my brain, which I reserved for certain activities. Activies like waiting for the premium cable channels to turn to Dark Mode, switching between them until there were two women, for example. It remains confusing. I didn’t have the vocabulary for crushing on girls, so I didn’t identify it. My desires were split into categories: 1) I need every boy to be obsessed with me, 2) Adam Brody, 3) I want to be agonizingly inseparable from my girlfriends and 4) I really like watching the show The L Word for some reason. It was a painfully obvious Bisexual mish-mosh, but because society said, “Pick a lane, bitch” I chose the road more safely traveled with a nightmarish fervor.
As a teenager, I began to build a small arsenal of girlfriends who (often with a bit of alcohol in our systems) would be open to making out with me for what was usually a group of horny boys. I looked forward to rounds of Hot Tub Truth or Dare, my teenage frontal cortex ingesting the narrative, “This makes boys think I’m hot.” I was aglow with validation, but in the back of my mind and at the bottom of my gut, I knew there was more to the story: I actually just…liked it.
My whole life, I’ve carried my Queer identity like a double joint—knowing it’s there but treating it like a party trick. My female friendships were codependent; they felt intense but short-lived, and I cycled through them like a riveting novel. I was boy-crazy and obsessed with validation, and having a boyfriend was the only thing that mattered most of the time. I became so swallowed up by my need to be adored by these men that I forgot all about my double joint - I couldn’t even hear it popping. Sometimes, when I did listen to it, I thought: “everyone has a double joint somewhere.” I failed to realize that no…no, they don’t.
I grew up with parents who were liberal enough, but my understanding of Queerness was squeezed through the problematic tiny hole of 1990s and 2000s media, where being a Lesbian often felt like the butt of a joke. When your clothes looked a certain way, you might have been told, “You look like a lesbian.” I remember asking my friend in 5th grade if she liked my new sneakers, to which she replied: “they’re kinda gay.” On the surface, her assessment hit me like an insult, and I recoiled at the tone; I knew that by “gay,” she meant…well, I’m honestly not sure, but something comparable to “weird” or “uncool.” On the inside, however, I felt the pang of understanding: calling things you find weird “gay” was fucked up! I began to brew a defensiveness over these episodes of homophobia, which intensified after attending a performing arts camp (duh). I was not a member of the Gay-Straight Alliance, but if a gay person needed me, I was ready to fight for them. In college, this deepened even more, and I thought of myself as an honorary member of the gay community and a fierce ally. I had, and continue to have, several gay male friends, but I remained somewhat afraid of Queer women. It wasn’t a discriminatory fear but a fear of seeing myself.
When I saw two women kiss in film and TV, I experienced a medley of tingles and shame. It went like this: I’m excited by this—> Wait, can people tell I’m excited?—>I feel uncomfortable—> Is that homophobic?—> Act normal. Just act normal. It was a layered experience that I locked away, like an intrusive thought or a disturbing dream. The first time I saw a bisexual relationship represented in media was in the second season of The OC. My brain went into the aforementioned tingly discomfort at the sight of their first kiss. Sadly, their relationship was coated in a thick layer of “Male Lens” and a heavy implication that this relationship was more hot than it was real. In the end, it felt reduced to a phase for a rebellious teenager. I can’t help but wonder if it had been handled with care, would I have felt safe enough to inch toward self-discovery? Instead, it added data to the “gay for male validation” and “everyone’s a little gay” folder in my brain, and I clung to that docket for years to come.
I will give some credit to Josh Schwartz; he did the best he could under the climate of the Bush presidency and pressure from the network to keep their relationship sexless and quick. In a piece for NYLON, Sophia June points out that upon looking back at Marissa and Alex’s 4-episode arc, she sees a more “assertive” and “realized” Marissa than she remembered, who looked genuinely happy listening to “Portions for Foxes” by Rilo Kiley with Alex in her jeep. There was a glimmer of representation there, but their relationship was cut so short it fell victim to the “experimentation” narrative that keeps Bisexual women from embracing their truth. Sophia goes on to quote Jill Gutowitz who sums up what the 2000s felt like for Queer women:
Speaking to this era of the 2000s that we pass over a lot, I feel like the narrative for queer women was that was we were just starting to have barely some representation,” Gutowitz told me in March. “For someone like Lindsay Lohan who was visibly queer and dating a woman in the tabloids, Marissa Cooper, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” all of it had this narrative that it was under the guise of doing something wild and crazy, like ‘f*ck you, mom.’
Operating under this narrative, my passive attraction to women felt par for the course; it suited me and my manic pixie-ness. Being sexually fluid simply felt like an “alt” thing to be, so I pushed the gravity of it under the rug. Then I rolled around on the rug with a desperate hopefulness designed for men, and luckily, eventually one came along with an extended hand that said, “What are we rolling for?”. I’m happy with my partner, but it’s hard not to wonder what life would have been like had I felt the invitation to take my sexuality more seriously. I could have thrown the rug away to reveal some truly breathtaking hardwood.
As I comb through my years of orbiting around Planet Gay, more flashes of comically obvious indicators pop up in my head; my favorite recent memory being that this was my desktop background in my late teens:
Sienna Miller, W Magazine, 2006
I recently discovered that Facebook serves as a pretty remarkable chronicle of interactions to look back on and cringe at; in doing some nostalgic excavation, I came across a number of “wall posts” and photo captions that are…kinda fruity, in hindsight.
I continued to kiss my friends when I was drunk, I called women “hot” like a straight woman would, and I had one blurry night with my college roommate, which we never spoke of again. I expressed my attraction towards women in a cloud of “duh” with the people I was closest with, but not in a “sound the trumpets” way; it didn’t seem necessary. By the time I started to hold the weight of my Queerness, thanks to the TikTok algorithm mostly (eye roll), I was happily partnered with a cisgender straight man. Why do I need to engage with it? I can know it, and that’s enough.
And it was, for a while.
I talk a lot about my therapist, and that’s because my current therapist is helping me do something I’ve never done before. I find myself individuating—breaking patterns of codependency and setting boundaries I didn’t know I could. As a result, I feel myself integrating and genuinely getting to know myself, and surprise: When you start to fortify your sense of self from a healed place, you can’t keep those parts hidden anymore, or at least that’s been my experience.
As I continue to amalgamate this part of me, I find her erupting out of me like a werewolf during a full moon. On a recent Saturday, my friend texted me asking if I wanted to meet him at a popular Queer bar in our neighborhood. I said yes and felt safe from my primal desires because usually when I went to this spot, it was a sardine tin of gay men. I arrived and bantered and laughed but also made an error: I had had a martini at dinner before coming to the bar. Martinis are famous for getting me into trouble; one New Year’s Eve, I had three of them, and I called my parents black-out drunk at midnight. Later, I sobbed hysterically because I repeatedly exclaimed through tears, “I don’t remember talking to my dad!” I arrived at the bar with a martini buzz, which opened the door for several tequila sodas. And then something unexpected happened: the Gay Man Bar started to fill up with…women. “Should we go dance?” someone said. I felt my heart beating in time with the thumping bass, and my eyes began to dart around with a frenzied thirst. After a few drunken twirls, I could feel my friends leering toward “over it.” I went to the bathroom to pee and received a text: “We’re leaving, but you should stay!” In my heart of hearts, I knew I should leave with them, but in my heart of heart of hearts? I wanted to kiss! So I told him to go and that I would take an Uber.
A funny thing about life: your choices create little grooves that change the course of things, like tree bark. A funny thing about drinking: your choices create little grooves that change the course of things in one night. Like life, but truncated. Trunk-ated. The tequila led me to a state of drunkenness that begged for a bummed cigarette, so I stumbled onto the sidewalk, where I asked a group if I could steal one. They looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Here, sweetie, just finish this one.” I inhaled the nicotine/tobacco and stranger saliva combo while discussing where we were from and who knows what else. One of the people in the group was particularly chatty. She was a stunning Transgender woman who I must believe was a professional model; I’m sure this is ground we covered in our evening of emphatic chatter, but all I remember is nodding and saying words. She told me about her life, which I thought was cinematic and fascinating. She carried an opportunistic loneliness with her, but it wasn’t sad. She seemed like someone who collected people, spreading her stories to strangers like a message in a bottle. She spoke with urgency and speed, which I realize now was because of the cocaine she later inhaled from my car keys. She offered me a bump, and I asked her if it had been tested, to which she replied, “Yeah, of course, my sister died from an overdose.”
She led me through the crowd by the hand that night, with a protective grip usually reserved for close friends and family, and eventually, we ended up back on the dance floor. With numb nostrils and spinning head, I couldn’t help but howl at the moon. So I started talking to everyone around me. One of those people was Kate. Kate was a petite angelic blonde with a thrifted purse. Our conversation started because I overheard her friends telling her they were going outside to smoke weed, and she told them she would stay because she didn’t smoke. We bonded over our bad experiences with edibles. I told her my birthday, which she said was a “red flag,” so I said, “You’re not wrong,” and I told her I was partnered but exploring. We started to inch closer to each other, but our arms just brushed awkwardly; we swayed with the tenseness of a middle schooler’s first dance. And then, cue record scratch, she told me she was twenty literal two years old. I felt my body rapidly decompose like one of those time-lapse videos, suddenly becoming 100 years old on the dance floor. She had just graduated from college and was applying to medical school, of all places. I became disgustingly aware of my 33-year-old frame and lack of purpose. Throughout the night, I aged more; when a Carly Rae Jepsen song came on, I asked, “Do you know who this is?” And she said, “Of course! I’m not that young.” But she was. She was so young.
Against my better judgment, I followed her and her friends to another bar. It was 2 AM, and we teetered down Sunset Boulevard to a 200-square-foot Tiki bar that was closing. It was quiet and awkward, but I ordered a Piña Colada and sat down with three 22-year-old strangers. They were all geniuses. I can’t remember the specifics, but all three were doing something in the scientific or medical field and moving to different cities to start their lives. Something about me: when I’m drunk, I am a good time. When I’m really drunk, I start telling everyone I’m psychic. And I’m not not; I practice Tarot professionally, but not everyone is open to a 33-year-old stranger telling them they’re a witch. My stomach churned thinking about how I had become the person in their crazy story. I had so many nights in my 20s encountering characters who I’d never see again, recalling their bizarreness for years to come. I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself telling this young man that I knew he was supposed to move to Louisiana to work as a rocket scientist, thanks to my powerful intuition. This is when I felt the energy shift. Texts were being exchanged rapidly across the table, laughter was being suppressed, and silence filled the lights-all-the-way-on bar. They began to do the unthinkable: they were humoring me. I became so abruptly aware of my role in their night that I started apologizing vehemently and repeatedly for crashing their evening. I couldn’t even look at Kate, who was practically ignoring me. I’m not even sure she was Queer herself. I broke their wide-eyed silence by telling them I had to leave, and they offered concern about my ability to get home. I told them not to worry; I would walk for a bit and then get an Uber, and I practically ran out of the bar.
Thoughts about my age, life, and a lingering need to kiss swirled around my head like a frozen Piña Colada machine, sludgy and thick. I found my way across the street to the original bar, where I waited for my Uber and swayed with embarrassment. I woke up to “R u ok” from my friend, to which I replied, “A truly great question.” Because…I was. But was I?
I’m using DBT as a modality in therapy, which is rooted in the concept of Dialects. According to the DBT handbook:
Dialectics is based on the theory of ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”. In simple terms, the belief that everything is composed of opposites and that when one opposing force is stronger than the other, it results in change.
This concept is helpful for me as I wade through the waters of exploration. In the past, I might have looked at that night as a story about me being a mess, as a story about me being disrespectful or sneaky, as a story about me being irresponsible (a classic). But now, I can hold space for multiple ideas to coexist: it was reckless but exciting. It felt like a breach of trust, but I was honest with my partner. I am getting older but also learning a lot, which makes me feel young. I’m undoubtedly young in ‘Queer years’; some might even say I’m around…22.
Blah blah, it’s a tale as old as time. These themes and stories might resonate with Queer people with an “Aw, that’s cute,” which is totally understandable. I don’t see myself and this story as particularly special. Still, to the girl whose teeth marks lightly patterned a plastic cup full of Orangina, who felt like her heart might burst out of her chest with an unknowable euphoria, it might feel special to her. It might feel powerful for her to know that there is not only growth in opposition but an expandable joy. It might be vital for her to feel the “welcome home” of the grey areas, not to choose one way or the other, but to have it all. I am holding space for multitudes: misguided late-night Piña Coladas and the truth in curiosity. I hope you, reader, can meet me here too—hypermobility and all.