When Touch Becomes Political

My 3-year-old daughter is finally asleep, the dog curled peacefully beside her bed in the halo of light cast by the lamp. I creep out quietly and tiptoe toward the living room where I know my wife, Sarah, is waiting to hold me on the couch, to settle her body comfortably into mine.

We cherish that hour or two after bedtime when we can be a couple again, without little hands tugging at sleeves or a high-pitched voice calling for more orange juice. And my body craves it instinctively—as I make my way down the hall, I’m already imagining my head tucked into the crook of my wife’s shoulder, the easy intimacy of her body relaxed into mine.

But when I find my spot beside her on the couch, something subterranean within me shifts, like a tectonic plate beneath the ocean’s depths—unseen, but deeply felt. Sarah reaches out to touch my knee, and I stiffen. She leans into me with her shoulder, and I pull further into the cushions. I feel her thigh pressed against the side of my own, and quickly rearrange my whole body so that I am facing her cross-legged rather than curled beside her, two inches of upholstery dividing us neatly and visibly from one another.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. But she knows what it is because she feels it, too: the nauseating yet unshakeable sensation that, even inside our own home, we might be seen.

This was eight years ago, and we’ve traveled a long way—both geographically and emotionally—since then. But at the time, we were transplants to the deep South, and had been there just long enough for the creeping feeling of fear to have entered our home like tendrils of those notoriously difficult to eradicate kudzu vines that line the roadsides south of the Mason-Dixon.

When I say that we were afraid of being seen, I don’t just mean with the eyes. I also mean seen as known, possessing the visual insight that would allow someone to box or brand us as what we were in that small Alabama town: queer. Even with the curtains drawn, the sense that it wasn’t safe to demonstrate physical affection of any kind toward each other was a pervasive presence in our minds and, most disturbingly, in our bodies. The fear had entered us, and rather than our home being a reprieve from that anxiety, it was a space where we had begun to live as closeted a life indoors as we’d learned to live outside.

When we’d first moved to the South the year before my daughter was born, we were fresh off a years-long break from our relationship. Newly in love again, we had still been in the throes of our romantic reunion, touching all the time, performing our new-found love for ourselves, each other, and anyone who cared to look. But it hadn’t taken long for us to become self-conscious about who might be doing the looking.

And yet, the source of that self-consciousness is surprisingly hard to locate in retrospect. In all the years we lived there, we never heard a slur, no one ever threatened us, and we felt surrounded by a community of supportive and generous straight peers who were glad for the opportunity to be our allies.  Our neighbors, an elderly couple who were life-long Southern Baptists, embraced our ready-made family and never let go. My colleagues at the university where I taught—the reason we’d moved to the South—were more than delighted to count a queer couple among their friends. As my daughter grew, I employed a series of nannies, all young sorority sisters who seemed to have no trouble reconciling their closeness to our family with their more conservative politics.

So where was our fear coming from? What was its unaccountable genesis?

In the earliest iteration of our love affair many years before, we had been two straight college girls with boyfriends. We were regulars on the frat scene, and had often relished playing against each other at the ubiquitous beer-pong table. But after one such night out, we told our male companions we were tired and turning in for the night. Instead, Sarah had crawled into my bed—the first of what would become many nights of sneaking off together, leaving our boyfriends behind and very much in the dark.

In those early days, the headiness of our clandestine affair possessed a darker twin: the stifling secrecy and obfuscation that was far less fun than making out on the green felt of the pool table in the Phi Psi basement when no one was looking. We never thought of performing our desire for each other as entertainment for the men we knew, though we could, of course, have offered its slippery feminine shimmer as a titillating distraction from the true attraction that burned underneath. Instead, we’d understood that the pleasure we found in each other could quickly gutter out if given over to someone else’s fantasies of our two bodies together. At the same time, having no previous experience with being queer and out, we instinctively doubted the tolerance of our community, worrying that othering ourselves so abruptly—and without apparent benefit to anyone else—would be a disturbing revelation for our peers.

Which is where we found ourselves once again, adrift in uncharted waters of potential intolerance. The unfamiliarity of our new cultural surroundings plunged us back into a place we thought we’d left behind. Even though we’d eventually come out to our very-suddenly-ex-boyfriends, and had experienced their blasé reaction to our news without a ripple of disgust or anger, we still knew that there was a person somewhere—many persons, in fact—who would hate us, want to hurt us even, if they saw us for what we were, two women madly in love.

But the gap between real danger and perceived danger can be so wide that anyone might fall in. After moving to Alabama, our loving and well-intentioned friends there and afar asked after our safety with such consistent concern that, eventually, their heartfelt worry fed our own. And once that worry had taken root, it flourished with very little additional fuel. In the seven years that Sarah and I had been apart, I’d grown out of practice with being out. While she had exclusively dated women and honed the skills of living queer in a straight world, I had gone back to dating men. I now found myself swimming in perceived risk that, unlike my wife, I hadn’t yet become inured to. And so I brought my fear into our house, into our bedroom, and into my own body where I cut myself off from intimacy as a safeguard against losing it altogether.

But what I saw as protective measures soon made for a self-fulfilling prophecy as our public discretion began to dictate our private antipathy. In trying to protect ourselves as individuals, we were giving the homophobes exactly what they wanted: for us to disappear, not just from the public eye but from the planet, self-vaporizing our existence from even the most private corners of our lives. At some point, it stopped being an act when we walked through our door and refused even the brush of a hand. The internalized shame had won out not only over my love for my wife and my attraction to her, but also over my most innate instincts for physical affection and touch. Gone was the intimacy we’d once so easily found together when it had just been two girls in one twin-size dorm bed.

Eventually we left Alabama, but it would be wrong to blame the pain of our extended physical cooling all on that place or to say that once we’d left it behind our intimacy quickly returned. To make the South, or any external factor like geography, the reason for being closeted is to deny the ways in which our society’s perceived prejudices feed our own fears and grow rampant within us. While we had previously experienced homophobic hate from strangers in cities as cosmopolitan as Barcelona and New York, no external sign had indicated that we would suffer the same in the Southern college town we’d come to love. When there are no signs of legitimate external threat to our safety and well-being, it is the fault of our own feedback loops—well-meaning friends and family, as well as what we may have thought of as long-conquered youthful fears of individuation—that are to blame.

When we finally moved away, I was glad to be back in the West, which is my true home, and to send my daughter off to kindergarten at a school where the kids of a variety of families—multiracial, single-parent, and immigrant, to name a few—flourished and made our own unique family just one of many different and wonderful kinds. My wife eventually gave birth to our son, and, through therapy, she and I have crept our way back to each other over the intervening years. But we’ve had to work to regain the inside-the-house comfort level we’d lost. And, like many things, it was easier to slide down that hill than it was to climb back up. We ultimately regained the pleasure of performing as a couple together, too, with public displays of affection once again fueling our sense of connection to each other.

A few months ago, my wife and I found ourselves stranded and waiting for a tow truck in a small rural town in Montana. I’d spent some time in the area a number of years ago, and suggested that rather than waiting in the roadside heat, we walk the two dusty blocks from the gas station past the Dairy Queen to the only other dining establishment in town which is an unpainted double-wide trailer that serves as the local bar. When we rounded the corner and she saw our destination, Sarah stopped in her tracks.

“I don’t think this is a great idea.”

But I took her hand and pulled her into its dim interior, where we found a friendly bartender working a quiet afternoon shift and one clearly faithful local drinker in a Stetson, Jim, who immediately said our drinks were on him and then promptly invited us to join him at his high-top. Gamely, I grabbed our drinks from the bar and headed over, and again, Sarah shot me a look of warning. But this time, I knew better.

We were soon comfortably chatting with Jim as he told us about the family farm, his time serving in Vietnam, and his wife who’d passed away ten years earlier and who he could barely mention without tears filling his eyes. Wiping them away with back of one of his giant hands, Jim asked, “Are you two married?”

“Yes, to each other,” I replied quickly with a grin.

Jim’s jaw dropped. “No,” he stammered, “You’re kidding me.” 

I assured him it was no joke. That we’d been married almost ten years and that we had two children waiting for us at home. As shocked as Jim was to discover he’d bought drinks for a middle-aged lesbian married couple, he recovered his composure almost immediately—and with its recovery came something else: warmth.

“Well, my best friend is gay,” Jim said. “We served together in Vietnam, and he and his partner come and visit me now. I call them my ‘happy’ friends,” Jim added with a newly discovered twinkle in his eye.

When my tiny radar system for imaginary danger throws up a tentative antenna, I still feel shame. The difference is that now I’m ashamed to hide myself and my love for my wife from the world. And the shame that I feel when that fear occasionally wins out, causes me to want to make penance to my wife for hiding what is most beautiful between us: a deep and abiding love built on mutual respect and a glorious and infectious affection. And so I work to root it out. Just like any other invasive plant—kudzu in the South or knapweed in our forever-home in Montana—you’ve got to eradicate it as soon as you see it on the property. We dig it up by the roots. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.