Interview
Redefining the Straight & Narrow: An Interview with Julie Marie Wade
by Amanda Baldwin & Carly Szabo
2015

Julie Marie Wade, author of such works as When I Was Straight and Small Fires, explores the nature of homosexuality and its social recourses through her incredibly thought-provoking and emotive works. Growing up under strict, biblical parental figures only adds fuel to Wade’s fire as she moves through each piece describing how gender stereotypes affect a child’s understanding of what it means to be a man or woman. In an interview with Glassworks, Wade was kind enough to offer insights into these issues as well as her personal experiences with them. Her responses make one thing clear: a change needs to occur in our sensitivity and language (especially towards children) in regards to what it connotes to be on the “straight and narrow.”
Glassworks Magazine (GW): In your book When I Was Straight you talk at great length about language and how it shapes our definition of the world around us, especially in regards to homosexuality and favoritism shown towards the word “straight.” How do you think this affects children’s understanding of the world around them? How do you think this affects adults’ understanding of the world around them? Do you think there is a way to make language sexually neutral?
Julie Marie Wade (JMW): I remember hearing the story of Little Red Riding Hood read and recited aloud many times as a child, and one of my strongest impressions was of the mandate that Red was not supposed to “stray from the path.” I assumed the phrase “straight and narrow” came from this story, and as I grew older, I began to inspect the connotations of that phrase. What did “straight and narrow” really mean? It suggested adhering to the safest path, the most traditional and non-confrontational way of life. When I began to think about sexual orientation and identity, I was alarmed as I realized that “straight” connoted much more than a neutral synonym for “heterosexual.” It was not a neutral word at all (perhaps there is no such thing), but rather a synonym for “appropriate,” “conformist,” and even “narrow,” with which it was so often paired. The most surprising part of this realization for me, however, was that “straight” didn’t seem to describe accurately many heterosexual people I knew either. In contrast to queer identities, “straight” often suggested “good” or “right” rather than “twisted” or “deviant,” but there were other limiting connotations to “straight” that implied “unimaginative,” “rigid,” and “closed to possibility.” I think children and adults alike internalize the complexities of language, the multi-valence of even the simplest-seeming words, and all of us can no doubt benefit from examining the insidious aspects, as well as the powerful and inspiring aspects, of our language. I don’t honestly know if it is possible to make a more sexually neutral language, but as a writer, I think I have an obligation to investigate the language as thoroughly as I can and ideally to help create an empowered awareness of the many, often contradictory ways that words can mean.
Julie Marie Wade (JMW): I remember hearing the story of Little Red Riding Hood read and recited aloud many times as a child, and one of my strongest impressions was of the mandate that Red was not supposed to “stray from the path.” I assumed the phrase “straight and narrow” came from this story, and as I grew older, I began to inspect the connotations of that phrase. What did “straight and narrow” really mean? It suggested adhering to the safest path, the most traditional and non-confrontational way of life. When I began to think about sexual orientation and identity, I was alarmed as I realized that “straight” connoted much more than a neutral synonym for “heterosexual.” It was not a neutral word at all (perhaps there is no such thing), but rather a synonym for “appropriate,” “conformist,” and even “narrow,” with which it was so often paired. The most surprising part of this realization for me, however, was that “straight” didn’t seem to describe accurately many heterosexual people I knew either. In contrast to queer identities, “straight” often suggested “good” or “right” rather than “twisted” or “deviant,” but there were other limiting connotations to “straight” that implied “unimaginative,” “rigid,” and “closed to possibility.” I think children and adults alike internalize the complexities of language, the multi-valence of even the simplest-seeming words, and all of us can no doubt benefit from examining the insidious aspects, as well as the powerful and inspiring aspects, of our language. I don’t honestly know if it is possible to make a more sexually neutral language, but as a writer, I think I have an obligation to investigate the language as thoroughly as I can and ideally to help create an empowered awareness of the many, often contradictory ways that words can mean.

GM: You examine the different interpretations of words frequently such as in your poem evaluating the word “straight” in When I Was Straight as well as in works included in your book Small Fires. Have you always paid this much attention to language? Has this always been a source of interest?
JMW: Yes! I have always loved language as a subject in and of itself, not merely as a means of probing other subjects that interest me—though yes to that, too. For as long as I can remember, I’ve savored the sensuous qualities of words—how they sound, the colors and tastes and textures they evoke, et al. From an early age, I competed in local and regional spelling bees, and I enjoyed immensely picturing each word in my mind, examining the letters and sounds that comprised it, reciting those letters and sounds aloud, practicing strategies to remember the spelling of particular words, and then reading about the words in my dictionary and thesaurus. I liked to ask my mother, who usually quizzed me on my spelling words, and the judges at various spelling bees, to give the definition of a word and its part of speech so I could think about the relationship between how it sounded, looked, felt, tasted, etc., and what it meant. And I especially loved to ask my mother or the judge to use a word in a sentence. This was the best part: imagining all the different ways a single word might be used. And then of course, putting those words I was learning to spell into literary action, writing for myself those sentences I had once solicited.
GW: In When I Was Straight, you speak about the pressures young girls face when growing up and how the expectations of young girls are different than those of young boys. How did this affect your understanding of what it means to be a woman? In what ways do you think this form of stereotyping still exists? Have you noticed any definite changes in the ways parents are handling gender with their children?
JMW: Well, first I should say that I’m not a parent, so I can’t speak in any authoritative way about how parents are addressing gender with their children. I’m sure there is also tremendous variation among parents on that front. But I do know that my own parents sent and endorsed very fraught messages about what it meant to be a girl. I was born in 1979 and raised during the conservative 1980s by Republican parents who identified with the values of the Religious Right. In my parents’ view, one of a girl’s greatest virtues was her virginity. Her essential “goodness” was defined in large part, not by what she did, but by what she didn’t do: no drinking, smoking, cursing, drugs, and certainly no sexual activity. Inexperience, lack of worldliness, was part of what made her pure and worthy of love, both by a future husband and by God.
At the same time, though, my parents were raising an uptight overachiever, teaching me that I should become as successful as possible, as cultured as possible, etc. The right kind of man would be attracted, not only to my purity, but also to my accomplishments. So unlike some girls raised by conservative parents, I was never told I could only cook and clean and take care of my husband and children. Rather, I was told that in addition to cooking and cleaning and taking care of my husband and children, I should also play piano, be knowledgeable about the arts, and have a distinguished career as a doctor or lawyer. I learned that I needed to be everything for everyone, diligent and successful in the romantic, domestic, and professional worlds, and of course I was supposed to look good performing my many roles. This idea of the superwoman didn’t originate in my family, by any means. I can remember reading about the phenomenon in essays that date back to the 1980s—notably, Jean Kilbourne’s “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.”
Even young women today growing up in more secular homes likely experience a lot of the same pressures to be pretty, thin (especially thin), well-groomed, good-smelling, etc., and to be first-rate students, athletes, volunteers, employees, and so on. And of course, no matter what they accomplish, many young women learn that their most laudable “accomplishment” is marriage and motherhood. For most, this prospect does not include marriage to someone of the same sex, or partnership of any kind without a marriage license, or other variations on “the traditional family.” I was raised with the keen awareness that, of all my potential failings, the greatest would be the failure of heterosexuality. I’m sure this is why I’m especially concerned about children being raised under the constraints of presumed heterosexuality, seeing the possibilities of who they might love and how they might come to know themselves sharply curtailed as a result.
GW: In what ways do you feel children internalize gender-specific language and its connotations?
JMW: In virtually all ways, I think. Our language is deeply gendered, but my objection isn’t to gender. My objection is to binary notions of gender, those dangerous either/or formulations that limit all of us—transpeople, women, men—and our possibilities for freely loving others across the gendered spectrum. Children in American culture don’t just learn gender binaries and gender stereotypes; they imbibe them from birth. Femininity and notions of “being a girl/woman” are associated with weakness, frivolity, and the need to be protected and taken care of. Masculinity and notions of “being a boy/man” are associated with physical strength, seriousness of purpose, but also a certain social ineptitude and lack of intuition and sensitivity. I think male persons should be as outraged as female persons by the limiting language and limited representations that surround and reinforce what it means to be “all boy” or a “real man.” But of all the gendered limitations of our language and the binarisms of our pronouns, I have to say I don’t share the objection that sometimes arises in response to the word “man” appearing within the word “woman,” or “men” appearing within “women,” etc. Isn’t this a linguistic manifestation of a certain kind of androgyny? We are all such complicated beings in terms of how we experience and perform our genders. “Real women” and “real men” are rich and unique amalgams of all kinds of so-called “feminine” and “masculine” traits, so why shouldn’t our language reflect that blending?
GW: How do you feel the male gaze affects developing females? Do you think men are aware of these effects?
JMW: In terms of the male gaze, I’d say that it affects everyone, not just developing females. To measure up to cultural notions of what it means to be a “real man,” developing males learn to perform a masculinity that is relentlessly heteronormative and often aggressive. Their “gaze” may have less to do with their attraction to any particular female and more to do with performing the kinds of behaviors that earn them respect by other males. We’re a homophobic culture, so most young males don’t want to be thought of as “gay” (often even if they are gay), so they always have something to prove in terms of their attraction to girls. And being desirable to boys, and later men, is perhaps the most dominant message American girls internalize from our cultural rhetoric.
GW: In what ways do you feel we as a society can work to solve the issues associated with gender-specific language and the male gaze?
JMW: A few years ago, when my niece was only three years old, she was playing with some “pretend make-up.” (Why does such a thing exist? I couldn’t tell you.) She suggested to me that I should apply some of this fake blush and fake lipstick and fake eye shadow to my own face, and when I declined, she informed me that I could even “wear the real thing.” I remember thinking, Oh, this is one of those teachable moments they tell you about! But she’s only three. What can I say that will make sense to her and not just seem like grown-up nonsense? I said that some people like to wear make-up, and others don’t, and that it’s a matter of personal choice. My niece thought about this for a minute and said, with a look of concern in her eyes, “You don’t like to wear make-up?” I shook my head. Then, resting her little hand on my knee, she asked: “But how will anyone know how pretty you are?”
Clearly, I don’t know about solving these issues. I’m not sure we can solve them exactly. But I do think we can challenge rigid gender training and presumed heterosexuality and all kinds of xenophobic rhetoric by calling attention to it in conversations we have with kids and with other adults and by paying attention to it in the literature we choose to read and write. I believe that the human capacity for empathy is enormous, but people need exposure to subject positions that differ from their own in order to grow their empathy and awareness. After all, it’s hard to care about language that isn’t directly connected to other human beings, their personal narratives and reflections. I’ve been galvanized by the writings of so many poets and essayists who examine language in light of lived human experience and make that experience accessible to and powerful for their readers as possible. A few who come to mind are Toi Derricotte (The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey), Stacey Waite (Butch Geography), Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary), Daisy Hernandez (A Cup of Water Under My Bed), A. Van Jordan (M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A), James Allen Hall (Now You’re the Enemy), and Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—and no doubt Citizen, which I’ve just ordered today). Likewise, I’m continually moved by the documentary projects of Darryl Roberts (America the Beautiful series), who braids socially lived theorizing into his investigations of American beauty culture and gender and sexual stereotypes.
JMW: Yes! I have always loved language as a subject in and of itself, not merely as a means of probing other subjects that interest me—though yes to that, too. For as long as I can remember, I’ve savored the sensuous qualities of words—how they sound, the colors and tastes and textures they evoke, et al. From an early age, I competed in local and regional spelling bees, and I enjoyed immensely picturing each word in my mind, examining the letters and sounds that comprised it, reciting those letters and sounds aloud, practicing strategies to remember the spelling of particular words, and then reading about the words in my dictionary and thesaurus. I liked to ask my mother, who usually quizzed me on my spelling words, and the judges at various spelling bees, to give the definition of a word and its part of speech so I could think about the relationship between how it sounded, looked, felt, tasted, etc., and what it meant. And I especially loved to ask my mother or the judge to use a word in a sentence. This was the best part: imagining all the different ways a single word might be used. And then of course, putting those words I was learning to spell into literary action, writing for myself those sentences I had once solicited.
GW: In When I Was Straight, you speak about the pressures young girls face when growing up and how the expectations of young girls are different than those of young boys. How did this affect your understanding of what it means to be a woman? In what ways do you think this form of stereotyping still exists? Have you noticed any definite changes in the ways parents are handling gender with their children?
JMW: Well, first I should say that I’m not a parent, so I can’t speak in any authoritative way about how parents are addressing gender with their children. I’m sure there is also tremendous variation among parents on that front. But I do know that my own parents sent and endorsed very fraught messages about what it meant to be a girl. I was born in 1979 and raised during the conservative 1980s by Republican parents who identified with the values of the Religious Right. In my parents’ view, one of a girl’s greatest virtues was her virginity. Her essential “goodness” was defined in large part, not by what she did, but by what she didn’t do: no drinking, smoking, cursing, drugs, and certainly no sexual activity. Inexperience, lack of worldliness, was part of what made her pure and worthy of love, both by a future husband and by God.
At the same time, though, my parents were raising an uptight overachiever, teaching me that I should become as successful as possible, as cultured as possible, etc. The right kind of man would be attracted, not only to my purity, but also to my accomplishments. So unlike some girls raised by conservative parents, I was never told I could only cook and clean and take care of my husband and children. Rather, I was told that in addition to cooking and cleaning and taking care of my husband and children, I should also play piano, be knowledgeable about the arts, and have a distinguished career as a doctor or lawyer. I learned that I needed to be everything for everyone, diligent and successful in the romantic, domestic, and professional worlds, and of course I was supposed to look good performing my many roles. This idea of the superwoman didn’t originate in my family, by any means. I can remember reading about the phenomenon in essays that date back to the 1980s—notably, Jean Kilbourne’s “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.”
Even young women today growing up in more secular homes likely experience a lot of the same pressures to be pretty, thin (especially thin), well-groomed, good-smelling, etc., and to be first-rate students, athletes, volunteers, employees, and so on. And of course, no matter what they accomplish, many young women learn that their most laudable “accomplishment” is marriage and motherhood. For most, this prospect does not include marriage to someone of the same sex, or partnership of any kind without a marriage license, or other variations on “the traditional family.” I was raised with the keen awareness that, of all my potential failings, the greatest would be the failure of heterosexuality. I’m sure this is why I’m especially concerned about children being raised under the constraints of presumed heterosexuality, seeing the possibilities of who they might love and how they might come to know themselves sharply curtailed as a result.
GW: In what ways do you feel children internalize gender-specific language and its connotations?
JMW: In virtually all ways, I think. Our language is deeply gendered, but my objection isn’t to gender. My objection is to binary notions of gender, those dangerous either/or formulations that limit all of us—transpeople, women, men—and our possibilities for freely loving others across the gendered spectrum. Children in American culture don’t just learn gender binaries and gender stereotypes; they imbibe them from birth. Femininity and notions of “being a girl/woman” are associated with weakness, frivolity, and the need to be protected and taken care of. Masculinity and notions of “being a boy/man” are associated with physical strength, seriousness of purpose, but also a certain social ineptitude and lack of intuition and sensitivity. I think male persons should be as outraged as female persons by the limiting language and limited representations that surround and reinforce what it means to be “all boy” or a “real man.” But of all the gendered limitations of our language and the binarisms of our pronouns, I have to say I don’t share the objection that sometimes arises in response to the word “man” appearing within the word “woman,” or “men” appearing within “women,” etc. Isn’t this a linguistic manifestation of a certain kind of androgyny? We are all such complicated beings in terms of how we experience and perform our genders. “Real women” and “real men” are rich and unique amalgams of all kinds of so-called “feminine” and “masculine” traits, so why shouldn’t our language reflect that blending?
GW: How do you feel the male gaze affects developing females? Do you think men are aware of these effects?
JMW: In terms of the male gaze, I’d say that it affects everyone, not just developing females. To measure up to cultural notions of what it means to be a “real man,” developing males learn to perform a masculinity that is relentlessly heteronormative and often aggressive. Their “gaze” may have less to do with their attraction to any particular female and more to do with performing the kinds of behaviors that earn them respect by other males. We’re a homophobic culture, so most young males don’t want to be thought of as “gay” (often even if they are gay), so they always have something to prove in terms of their attraction to girls. And being desirable to boys, and later men, is perhaps the most dominant message American girls internalize from our cultural rhetoric.
GW: In what ways do you feel we as a society can work to solve the issues associated with gender-specific language and the male gaze?
JMW: A few years ago, when my niece was only three years old, she was playing with some “pretend make-up.” (Why does such a thing exist? I couldn’t tell you.) She suggested to me that I should apply some of this fake blush and fake lipstick and fake eye shadow to my own face, and when I declined, she informed me that I could even “wear the real thing.” I remember thinking, Oh, this is one of those teachable moments they tell you about! But she’s only three. What can I say that will make sense to her and not just seem like grown-up nonsense? I said that some people like to wear make-up, and others don’t, and that it’s a matter of personal choice. My niece thought about this for a minute and said, with a look of concern in her eyes, “You don’t like to wear make-up?” I shook my head. Then, resting her little hand on my knee, she asked: “But how will anyone know how pretty you are?”
Clearly, I don’t know about solving these issues. I’m not sure we can solve them exactly. But I do think we can challenge rigid gender training and presumed heterosexuality and all kinds of xenophobic rhetoric by calling attention to it in conversations we have with kids and with other adults and by paying attention to it in the literature we choose to read and write. I believe that the human capacity for empathy is enormous, but people need exposure to subject positions that differ from their own in order to grow their empathy and awareness. After all, it’s hard to care about language that isn’t directly connected to other human beings, their personal narratives and reflections. I’ve been galvanized by the writings of so many poets and essayists who examine language in light of lived human experience and make that experience accessible to and powerful for their readers as possible. A few who come to mind are Toi Derricotte (The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey), Stacey Waite (Butch Geography), Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary), Daisy Hernandez (A Cup of Water Under My Bed), A. Van Jordan (M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A), James Allen Hall (Now You’re the Enemy), and Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—and no doubt Citizen, which I’ve just ordered today). Likewise, I’m continually moved by the documentary projects of Darryl Roberts (America the Beautiful series), who braids socially lived theorizing into his investigations of American beauty culture and gender and sexual stereotypes.

GW: In your book Postage Due, there is an apology poem to the man you planned to marry. Later in the same book, there is a poem in which you address your daughter deeming men “blood thirsty dogs.” What accounts for this shift in positively to negatively charged language towards men? Has your relationship with men changed as a result of ending such a serious heterosexual relationship? How would you like your children to relate to men as they grow and develop?
JMW: You know, this is one of the greatest challenges of being a writer who identifies as “autobiographical” or “self-referential” in her work. I do work from lived experience in my writing, but one of my greatest lived experiences is as a reader of others texts, including literature, the visual arts, film, commercials, and television. Postage Due is very intentionally a book of artifacts, a coming-of-age scrapbook of sorts. I have epistolary poems like the one you mention--“Vertigo (Or a Letter to the Man I Almost Married)” in which I am, as you say, “apologizing” to my former fiancé for leaving him. It was the most honest thing I could have done, but it was no less hurtful as a result, and I wanted to own the pain I inevitably caused him while coming to a fuller understanding of myself as gay.
In the book, I collage experience in other ways besides the explicitly autobiographical, though. I have two ekphrastic poems where I respond to specific paintings from MOMA, for instance. And then I have a series of persona poems in which I write as various literary and pop cultural figures who mean something to me from my reading and viewing life. I included a pair of persona poems in the voices of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. I saw these two characters from The Scarlet Letter as deeply tragic. I was so moved by their narrative of loss and self-flagellation and repression and impossible purity that I wanted to give each figure a chance to speak in first person, the way Hawthorne does not permit them to do in the third-person point of view in the novel. In “Arthur Dimmesdale, Alone in the Closet with a Bloody Scourge,” I imagine Arthur’s lust for Hester and also his shame. Lust and shame are certainly important themes in any coming-of-age, and mine was no different.
I imagine his father warning him “A woman is a grave,” given how strict and misogynistic Puritanical culture was. Strangely, though, no one ever assumes that I, as a gay woman, believe “A woman is a grave,” or at least I’ve never been asked why I hold such negative views toward women as a result of this poem. But “Hester Prynne & the Palinode of the Anti-Love” has come up in reviews of my book as a poem of man-bashing. It is an angry poem, but it’s a poem in which I imagine the rage and distrust Hester Prynne must have felt being exposed as an adulterer in her community, her co-adulterer’s identity protected/never revealed, and then being left to raise their child alone, ostracized from her community. I wanted Hester to have the freedom to express her inevitable anger—to break silences, which is one of my greatest concerns as a writer—and to speak directly to her daughter, Pearl, about the challenges she will face as she grows into a woman in Puritanical society.
This is Hester’s voice, conjured by me, yes, but it’s my attempt to understand her, not my attempt to speak as myself about men. I’m not a mother, but I think mothers inevitably pass on their experience of womanhood to their daughters. I wanted to explore how a much-wronged woman like Hester would speak to her child about the gendered inequalities of the world in which she lived. In so doing, the reader may also recognize by analogy certain gendered inequalities from our own world. I hope the reader will sense my investment in feminism but also see that I care about Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne equally. I see them both as victims of the Puritanical values of their world.
GW: What inspired you to take the leap and write When I Was Straight? How have others influenced your writing style in developing this work?
JMW: When I Was Straight came about because one of the very first poems I ever read by Denise Duhamel—quite possibly the first poem I ever read of hers—is called “When I Was a Lesbian.” For years, I carried a typed copy of that poem with me as a reminder that I wanted to try my own version of writing about another time in my life that didn’t ultimately define who I was, e.g. “When I Was Straight.” Denise’s poem is a witty narrative, but it also contains a thoughtful reflection at the end that suggests sexuality may be more fluid than we are taught to recognize. I liked the idea that a woman who identifies as heterosexual could have had a “lesbian period” in her life and that neither identity could wholly define her. For people like myself who ultimately identify as homosexual, it occurred to me that our “straight period” is a given in a culture that presumes everyone is straight until proven otherwise. Reading Denise’s work led me to the work of her friend and collaborator, Maureen Seaton, a poet who has written a number of poems titled “When I Was Straight” and whose poems, as it turns out, preceded Denise’s “When I Was a Lesbian.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I didn’t begin to write my collection until I moved to south Florida and came to know both of these poets personally. Their inspiration beyond the page, and the permission they gave me to enter into a subject they had each separately and expertly plumbed in poetic form—in other words, to take their music and transpose it into my own key—allowed me to write the collection over just a few brief months between fall 2012 and spring 2013 in time to debut the first poems at the Queertopia reading at the Boston AWP.
GW: You speak about the different reactions of those around you after you’ve come out to them. Many verbalize homophobic misconceptions about your lifestyle. How did you handle these ignorant comments? Were you able to continue with your relationships afterwards?
JMW: I suppose writing is a way of “handling” ignorance in general, for me, and also a way of combating my own. I’m genuinely interested, from a sociological/psychological perspective, in the phenomena that I write about, even as that interest clearly stems from personal experience with the phenomena in question. I’m always trying to understand why. Why is someone else’s sexuality a potential threat to one’s own? Why do so many people claim foreknowledge of another person’s sexual orientation after that person comes out? I’ve been tracing patterns in my own experience for years, jotting down observations about how disclosing my lesbian identity changes the dynamic of a given conversation, etc. I think it was Thoreau who wrote in Walden--and I’m paraphrasing--I shouldn’t speak so much about myself if there were anyone else I knew better. Unfortunately, I am confined to this topic by the narrowness of my experience. I agree whole-heartedly with the first sentence. Experiential research of a kind—close noticing and reflection on what happens in my life—fuels the kind of poetry and prose that I write, my impulse toward the autobiographical as opposed to the fictive.
The second sentence, while likely a bit tongue-in-cheek anyway, doesn’t seem “unfortunate” to me at all. I don’t think anyone’s experience, including my own, is “narrow.” I’ll go with Whitman here that we all “contain multitudes.” I want to reckon with what happens in my life, and in reckoning with other people’s ignorance, I also have to confront my own. I try to think by analogy about my own blind spots in terms of race and class. What presumptions and expectations do I hold about other people because I am white and middle-class and granted unearned advantages in many social situations as a result? And then, studying experience this way, I realize that I too participate in presumed heterosexuality!
I’m not immune. I’ve thought some of the same things that people have said to me in a poem like “When the Whole Office Learns I am a Lesbian.” I might not have voiced aloud my thought, but the line “Really? You don’t look it” stands out. I’ve thought this same thing about other gay people whom I didn’t initially “recognize” as gay. As frustrating as it can be when other people can’t “see” my gayness, or when they hold an expectation that I don’t look “gay enough,” etc., I am not immune to these same stereotypes in my consciousness. We were all forged in the same cultural fire.
GW: What is the most ridiculously misinformed thing someone has asked or said to you regarding your sexual orientation? Do you think this relates to the lack of conversations had about homosexual culture? Have you noticed a correlation between the type of people saying these things and the kind of language used? What do you think accounts for this?
JMW: I remember coming out to my mother, one of the first people I told. I didn’t say specifically that I was “gay” or “lesbian.” I said the simpler truth: “I love a woman.” This wasn’t something my mother wanted to hear, and I knew that when I made the call. It was something I felt she needed to hear, and something she deserved to hear from me. Her response, after a painful pause, was “This explains why you don’t wear make-up.” It sounds ludicrous to many people, and it certainly did to me, but as is often the case with moments of deep misunderstanding, this response reveals a lot about where my mother is coming from. Make-up and all that it represents to her—femininity, attractiveness, desirability to men, etc.—was something I had always resisted and ultimately rejected. My mother, like many mothers, wanted her child to follow in her footsteps. My not wanting to wear make-up hurt my mother because she interpreted that preference as a rejection of her. I was never able to convince her otherwise. I think similarly, my loving a woman was experienced by my mother as a rejection of something about her chosen life, her values. I was following my heart, but she felt I was trampling on hers.
My mother’s impulse to “explain” my sexual orientation is interesting to me because we are a culture obsessed with explaining why gay people exist. It might seem ridiculous to reduce an entire complex identity to whether or not one wears make-up, but so much energy is invested culturally—some of it by gay people themselves—in proving that gay people are “born that way.” I distrust this rhetoric because it seems to suggest that only if gay people “can’t help it” are they valid and acceptable as human beings. Being “born this way” or “not being able to help it” sounds suspiciously like “this is not my fault,” which sounds suspiciously like “I would change my identity if I could, but I can’t,” which sounds suspiciously like “please forgive me for not being heterosexual.”
I couldn’t care the least bit about why I’m gay, or why gay people exist in the world. I’m interested in why certain subject positions are marginalized and how we can expand the center to encompass the margins. I’m interested in a genuine, not a tokenizing, inclusivity. Tall order, I know. But my concern is that you don’t build a genuine inclusivity if you predicate inclusion on the idea that one group of people is inherently “normal” and “natural,” and all others are consequently “deviations” from that norm. If you say, “Well, we’ll include gay people and transpeople and intersexual people because they can’t help it,” the implication is that they are failed heterosexuals, failed gender-normatives, failed one-or-the-others. Much of what I hear in interpersonal and cultural responses to queerness is not even malicious; it simply continues to privilege a certain relationship to gender and sexuality as “right” or “successful” and all other expressions as, by implication, “mistakes” or “deficits.”
GW: There are very few comedic lines in this particular book and very few breaks from the mostly solemn tone that encompasses this collection. Why include these moments of levity at all? How were you hoping your audience might respond to the tone of your works?
JMW: You know, this is one of the greatest challenges of being a writer who identifies as “autobiographical” or “self-referential” in her work. I do work from lived experience in my writing, but one of my greatest lived experiences is as a reader of others texts, including literature, the visual arts, film, commercials, and television. Postage Due is very intentionally a book of artifacts, a coming-of-age scrapbook of sorts. I have epistolary poems like the one you mention--“Vertigo (Or a Letter to the Man I Almost Married)” in which I am, as you say, “apologizing” to my former fiancé for leaving him. It was the most honest thing I could have done, but it was no less hurtful as a result, and I wanted to own the pain I inevitably caused him while coming to a fuller understanding of myself as gay.
In the book, I collage experience in other ways besides the explicitly autobiographical, though. I have two ekphrastic poems where I respond to specific paintings from MOMA, for instance. And then I have a series of persona poems in which I write as various literary and pop cultural figures who mean something to me from my reading and viewing life. I included a pair of persona poems in the voices of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. I saw these two characters from The Scarlet Letter as deeply tragic. I was so moved by their narrative of loss and self-flagellation and repression and impossible purity that I wanted to give each figure a chance to speak in first person, the way Hawthorne does not permit them to do in the third-person point of view in the novel. In “Arthur Dimmesdale, Alone in the Closet with a Bloody Scourge,” I imagine Arthur’s lust for Hester and also his shame. Lust and shame are certainly important themes in any coming-of-age, and mine was no different.
I imagine his father warning him “A woman is a grave,” given how strict and misogynistic Puritanical culture was. Strangely, though, no one ever assumes that I, as a gay woman, believe “A woman is a grave,” or at least I’ve never been asked why I hold such negative views toward women as a result of this poem. But “Hester Prynne & the Palinode of the Anti-Love” has come up in reviews of my book as a poem of man-bashing. It is an angry poem, but it’s a poem in which I imagine the rage and distrust Hester Prynne must have felt being exposed as an adulterer in her community, her co-adulterer’s identity protected/never revealed, and then being left to raise their child alone, ostracized from her community. I wanted Hester to have the freedom to express her inevitable anger—to break silences, which is one of my greatest concerns as a writer—and to speak directly to her daughter, Pearl, about the challenges she will face as she grows into a woman in Puritanical society.
This is Hester’s voice, conjured by me, yes, but it’s my attempt to understand her, not my attempt to speak as myself about men. I’m not a mother, but I think mothers inevitably pass on their experience of womanhood to their daughters. I wanted to explore how a much-wronged woman like Hester would speak to her child about the gendered inequalities of the world in which she lived. In so doing, the reader may also recognize by analogy certain gendered inequalities from our own world. I hope the reader will sense my investment in feminism but also see that I care about Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne equally. I see them both as victims of the Puritanical values of their world.
GW: What inspired you to take the leap and write When I Was Straight? How have others influenced your writing style in developing this work?
JMW: When I Was Straight came about because one of the very first poems I ever read by Denise Duhamel—quite possibly the first poem I ever read of hers—is called “When I Was a Lesbian.” For years, I carried a typed copy of that poem with me as a reminder that I wanted to try my own version of writing about another time in my life that didn’t ultimately define who I was, e.g. “When I Was Straight.” Denise’s poem is a witty narrative, but it also contains a thoughtful reflection at the end that suggests sexuality may be more fluid than we are taught to recognize. I liked the idea that a woman who identifies as heterosexual could have had a “lesbian period” in her life and that neither identity could wholly define her. For people like myself who ultimately identify as homosexual, it occurred to me that our “straight period” is a given in a culture that presumes everyone is straight until proven otherwise. Reading Denise’s work led me to the work of her friend and collaborator, Maureen Seaton, a poet who has written a number of poems titled “When I Was Straight” and whose poems, as it turns out, preceded Denise’s “When I Was a Lesbian.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I didn’t begin to write my collection until I moved to south Florida and came to know both of these poets personally. Their inspiration beyond the page, and the permission they gave me to enter into a subject they had each separately and expertly plumbed in poetic form—in other words, to take their music and transpose it into my own key—allowed me to write the collection over just a few brief months between fall 2012 and spring 2013 in time to debut the first poems at the Queertopia reading at the Boston AWP.
GW: You speak about the different reactions of those around you after you’ve come out to them. Many verbalize homophobic misconceptions about your lifestyle. How did you handle these ignorant comments? Were you able to continue with your relationships afterwards?
JMW: I suppose writing is a way of “handling” ignorance in general, for me, and also a way of combating my own. I’m genuinely interested, from a sociological/psychological perspective, in the phenomena that I write about, even as that interest clearly stems from personal experience with the phenomena in question. I’m always trying to understand why. Why is someone else’s sexuality a potential threat to one’s own? Why do so many people claim foreknowledge of another person’s sexual orientation after that person comes out? I’ve been tracing patterns in my own experience for years, jotting down observations about how disclosing my lesbian identity changes the dynamic of a given conversation, etc. I think it was Thoreau who wrote in Walden--and I’m paraphrasing--I shouldn’t speak so much about myself if there were anyone else I knew better. Unfortunately, I am confined to this topic by the narrowness of my experience. I agree whole-heartedly with the first sentence. Experiential research of a kind—close noticing and reflection on what happens in my life—fuels the kind of poetry and prose that I write, my impulse toward the autobiographical as opposed to the fictive.
The second sentence, while likely a bit tongue-in-cheek anyway, doesn’t seem “unfortunate” to me at all. I don’t think anyone’s experience, including my own, is “narrow.” I’ll go with Whitman here that we all “contain multitudes.” I want to reckon with what happens in my life, and in reckoning with other people’s ignorance, I also have to confront my own. I try to think by analogy about my own blind spots in terms of race and class. What presumptions and expectations do I hold about other people because I am white and middle-class and granted unearned advantages in many social situations as a result? And then, studying experience this way, I realize that I too participate in presumed heterosexuality!
I’m not immune. I’ve thought some of the same things that people have said to me in a poem like “When the Whole Office Learns I am a Lesbian.” I might not have voiced aloud my thought, but the line “Really? You don’t look it” stands out. I’ve thought this same thing about other gay people whom I didn’t initially “recognize” as gay. As frustrating as it can be when other people can’t “see” my gayness, or when they hold an expectation that I don’t look “gay enough,” etc., I am not immune to these same stereotypes in my consciousness. We were all forged in the same cultural fire.
GW: What is the most ridiculously misinformed thing someone has asked or said to you regarding your sexual orientation? Do you think this relates to the lack of conversations had about homosexual culture? Have you noticed a correlation between the type of people saying these things and the kind of language used? What do you think accounts for this?
JMW: I remember coming out to my mother, one of the first people I told. I didn’t say specifically that I was “gay” or “lesbian.” I said the simpler truth: “I love a woman.” This wasn’t something my mother wanted to hear, and I knew that when I made the call. It was something I felt she needed to hear, and something she deserved to hear from me. Her response, after a painful pause, was “This explains why you don’t wear make-up.” It sounds ludicrous to many people, and it certainly did to me, but as is often the case with moments of deep misunderstanding, this response reveals a lot about where my mother is coming from. Make-up and all that it represents to her—femininity, attractiveness, desirability to men, etc.—was something I had always resisted and ultimately rejected. My mother, like many mothers, wanted her child to follow in her footsteps. My not wanting to wear make-up hurt my mother because she interpreted that preference as a rejection of her. I was never able to convince her otherwise. I think similarly, my loving a woman was experienced by my mother as a rejection of something about her chosen life, her values. I was following my heart, but she felt I was trampling on hers.
My mother’s impulse to “explain” my sexual orientation is interesting to me because we are a culture obsessed with explaining why gay people exist. It might seem ridiculous to reduce an entire complex identity to whether or not one wears make-up, but so much energy is invested culturally—some of it by gay people themselves—in proving that gay people are “born that way.” I distrust this rhetoric because it seems to suggest that only if gay people “can’t help it” are they valid and acceptable as human beings. Being “born this way” or “not being able to help it” sounds suspiciously like “this is not my fault,” which sounds suspiciously like “I would change my identity if I could, but I can’t,” which sounds suspiciously like “please forgive me for not being heterosexual.”
I couldn’t care the least bit about why I’m gay, or why gay people exist in the world. I’m interested in why certain subject positions are marginalized and how we can expand the center to encompass the margins. I’m interested in a genuine, not a tokenizing, inclusivity. Tall order, I know. But my concern is that you don’t build a genuine inclusivity if you predicate inclusion on the idea that one group of people is inherently “normal” and “natural,” and all others are consequently “deviations” from that norm. If you say, “Well, we’ll include gay people and transpeople and intersexual people because they can’t help it,” the implication is that they are failed heterosexuals, failed gender-normatives, failed one-or-the-others. Much of what I hear in interpersonal and cultural responses to queerness is not even malicious; it simply continues to privilege a certain relationship to gender and sexuality as “right” or “successful” and all other expressions as, by implication, “mistakes” or “deficits.”
GW: There are very few comedic lines in this particular book and very few breaks from the mostly solemn tone that encompasses this collection. Why include these moments of levity at all? How were you hoping your audience might respond to the tone of your works?

JMW: Well, you know, every reader is different. I’ve been told by some that When I Was Straight is “hilarious” and by others that it is “heart-breaking.” Some people have told me the collection is both at once. It’s hard, but I try not to obsess about how readers should respond to anything that I write, be it a poem, an essay, or a collection of such. Since I also teach poetry and creative nonfiction, I know how much richer the discussions are when my students understand that I’m not fishing for “one right interpretation”—that I mean it when I say there are “multiple valid readings.” Sometimes I wish the authors we read in class could listen in on our discussions, and I realize that if I were listening in on a discussion of my own work, I would want a variety of responses. I would choose even an impassioned disagreement among readers about the significance of some element of the text over a passive concurrence that everyone “gets it” and “agrees” about what there is to “get.” That said, I think I wanted to include some comic relief in When I Was Straight. Life is often funny, and a good deal of the time I find myself incredulous and also amused by what I witness and experience. Sometimes the saddest and most frustrating moments make me laugh—maybe as a coping mechanism, maybe because laughing is more enjoyable than crying. But for me, it’s always about some notion of a mosaic. Each poem is a tile or a fragment of tile, and together I’m hoping they create a vivid impression of what it’s like to come of age as a presumed heterosexual and then, in your twenties, to begin the process of reintroducing yourself to the larger world as a gay person.
GW: How have people in your life reacted to your work? What do they find surprising in your writing that they wouldn’t expect from the you they know in “real life?” What kinds of comments have you gotten as a result of publishing your work? How do you think your relationships have changed as a result of your published works?
JMW: The reactions are disparate, of course, but the most common reaction is that I seem “so happy” in real life, “so cheerful.” My explanation for this is that I am a happy and cheerful person by nature. I’m generally perky and upbeat, and I have a certain built-in mechanism (nothing I’ve earned or learned, nothing I can take credit for) that helps with resilience, even in the face of loss and pain. I don’t suffer from depression, but I have struggled, as all people do, with painful events—particularly the loss of many family members and friends in the aftermath of coming out. I think my writing, often described as “poignant,” even “sorrowful,” is the place where I channel my sadness. I don’t want to walk around with a cloud over my head all the time, and yet I’m not cheerful because I’m not aware of many lived and witnessed reasons for dismay. Writing is where I go to try to make sense of the sadness, as well as the anger. All the most difficult emotions have a place in writing, I think—a place in any art-form, for that matter.
GW: Do you find it difficult to write about these traumatic events?
JMW: I will say that it’s deeply problematic to write memoir, to write confessional poems, and I’m aware of this fact, even as I continue to work in the self-referential arts. What worthwhile thing isn’t deeply problematic? I can only hope and trust that my genuine desire to understand, or more modestly at least, to gain insight into lived experience and the culture at large, comes through in my work. I don’t believe in writing for revenge. I’m not out to expose people and hurt them as a consequence. I write about anger sometimes, but I don’t write in anger. I do my best to translate experience into art, and therein, to create distance from the inciting events themselves. Sharon Olds famously wrote, part credo, part rallying cry—“I love them but/I’m trying to say what happened to us/ in the lost past.” There is a whole world in just those enjambments. I’m writing from love, but I’m writing from the belief that real love doesn’t hide the truth. Real love seeks to uncover/discover it. I trust those I love most, who love me most, accept this as my honest intention.
GW: The first half of your collection exhibits a certain amount of distance from your subject while the second half is deeply personalized and more specific. For example, the first half of your book utilizes reflection on things in general (feelings about men, feelings about women, sexual identity, hiding oneself from the world, etc.) while the second half of your book recalls specific people’s reactions to your coming out and specific pieces of dialogue that have affected you. What accounts for this shift in writing strategy? How do you feel this structural choice affects the reading experience of your audience?
JMW: Well, my intention was to try to capture the range of experiences that accompanies the process of coming to recognize yourself as a non-heterosexual trapped in a world of heterosexual presumptions and expectations in the first half of When I Was Straight (hence, why all eleven poems in that section bear that title). Then, in the second half, I wanted to document the responses and reactions to life after coming out (hence, all eleven poem titles follow the pattern of “When So-and-So Learns I am a Lesbian”).
There is something mimetic about the impulse to structure the collection this way, with a BEFORE and an AFTER. Always, I have in mind Thomas Wolfe’s insight that “You can’t go home again,” and inevitably, once a gay person lets the heterosexual cloak fall away, life is different. Mostly, I have found it to be a more liberating and authentic existence, but there are social penalties (and legal ones as well) for veering away from a heterosexual course. If home was defined largely by heterosexuality as a sacred truth—the only acceptable way of being in the world—then coming out is often experienced, by everyone involved, as a rejection of home and family and the past. I wanted to capture that shift in the book. The first poems are much more internal because they are a reflection of what I came to realize but, for a long time, didn’t or couldn’t say. Once I began to say it—to announce myself as a lesbian—then the story of my life became more public, and the poems are more external for that reason. When you out yourself, you change your life, but “outing” is also a life-long process. You meet new people, move to a new city, join a new workplace or club, and most of the time, you are presumed straight until you say otherwise. Once you reveal that you are not straight, however, what happens next is out of your hands to some degree. You don’t know how people will react, and you can’t control their reactions. You can’t control how people from your past who knew you “as straight” will react when they find out either. The whole experience is a little like publishing a book. You put forth your truth—hopefully, the most skillfully crafted version of your truth—and then you are forced to make peace with the fact that the reactions that follow are not yours to control.
GW: For a long time it seems as though you did not know how to transition from men to women. There seems to be an obvious absence in the description of this transition in your works that are otherwise descriptive of your personal struggles. How did you finally cross the line from men to women? Do you feel that writing has in any way helped you in the discovery of your personal identity? Do you feel that writing is therapeutic in any way? Why?
JMW: You know, I had a professor my first year in graduate school, a brilliant, compassionate man named Steve VanderStaay, who mentioned to me in his notes on a lyric essay I was writing for his class that I wrote very sensuously about my friendships with women but that I never included any sensuous details when I wrote about my male fiancé. Could you say more about why you love him, why you are drawn to him? he prompted. And I realized that I couldn’t. So many aspects of my relationships with men, even those I deeply admired and loved, were cerebral. I had experienced the proverbial “meeting of the minds” with various boyfriends and romantic interests. I had enjoyed the company of men, our conversations about subjects that mattered to us, but when I thought of our physical interactions, I realized they were largely powered by psychological rather than physiological impulses. When I was drawn to a man intellectually, I could will myself toward a more physical relationship because it was psychologically satisfying. I liked the idea of being desired and of having a significant other, of fitting in and being one of the “coupled” people. So I asked myself a hard question in revising that essay for Steve’s class: “If there were no other people around to validate my relationship, no places to see and be seen with a man—if I were stranded on a desert island, let’s say, with a man I liked as a person and shared a certain intellectual chemistry with—would I be likely to pursue a sexual relationship with that man?” My gut and my heart told me no.
Writing that essay was not only therapeutic for me; it was epiphanic. I had begun the essay almost as a rationalization of my close friendship with the woman who would become my life-partner and spouse, Angie Griffin. The writing betrayed me, in some sense, but it also saved me by revealing my deep longing for this woman I called my friend. I loved her as more than that. I loved her with my mind but also with my body and spirit. It was a more complex love than anything I had felt for any other person before, and the essay made clear to me that I would not be able to ignore those feelings and continue along my way toward the marriage I had planned with my fiancé.
That essay is unpublished today because it didn’t succeed, by my own estimation, in moving beyond the therapeutic space into a more polished essay shaped with an audience in mind. Sometimes, I find, this happens. We write something that is more for ourselves than for others, even if we had set out to write something more public. In 2002, I wrote that essay that exposed my deepest feelings and desires, and I pursued them, leaving the essay behind. In 2008, I felt ready to return to the question you’re raising here—how I crossed over from my heterosexual life into a new life with a same-sex partner—and the result was a very long essay that translates (hopefully!) lived experience into literature. In 2012, I learned that Tremolo, this essay made with an audience in mind, had been selected by Bernard Cooper as the winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize. The essay now exists as a stand-alone book, published by Bloom Books in late 2013.
GW: How have people in your life reacted to your work? What do they find surprising in your writing that they wouldn’t expect from the you they know in “real life?” What kinds of comments have you gotten as a result of publishing your work? How do you think your relationships have changed as a result of your published works?
JMW: The reactions are disparate, of course, but the most common reaction is that I seem “so happy” in real life, “so cheerful.” My explanation for this is that I am a happy and cheerful person by nature. I’m generally perky and upbeat, and I have a certain built-in mechanism (nothing I’ve earned or learned, nothing I can take credit for) that helps with resilience, even in the face of loss and pain. I don’t suffer from depression, but I have struggled, as all people do, with painful events—particularly the loss of many family members and friends in the aftermath of coming out. I think my writing, often described as “poignant,” even “sorrowful,” is the place where I channel my sadness. I don’t want to walk around with a cloud over my head all the time, and yet I’m not cheerful because I’m not aware of many lived and witnessed reasons for dismay. Writing is where I go to try to make sense of the sadness, as well as the anger. All the most difficult emotions have a place in writing, I think—a place in any art-form, for that matter.
GW: Do you find it difficult to write about these traumatic events?
JMW: I will say that it’s deeply problematic to write memoir, to write confessional poems, and I’m aware of this fact, even as I continue to work in the self-referential arts. What worthwhile thing isn’t deeply problematic? I can only hope and trust that my genuine desire to understand, or more modestly at least, to gain insight into lived experience and the culture at large, comes through in my work. I don’t believe in writing for revenge. I’m not out to expose people and hurt them as a consequence. I write about anger sometimes, but I don’t write in anger. I do my best to translate experience into art, and therein, to create distance from the inciting events themselves. Sharon Olds famously wrote, part credo, part rallying cry—“I love them but/I’m trying to say what happened to us/ in the lost past.” There is a whole world in just those enjambments. I’m writing from love, but I’m writing from the belief that real love doesn’t hide the truth. Real love seeks to uncover/discover it. I trust those I love most, who love me most, accept this as my honest intention.
GW: The first half of your collection exhibits a certain amount of distance from your subject while the second half is deeply personalized and more specific. For example, the first half of your book utilizes reflection on things in general (feelings about men, feelings about women, sexual identity, hiding oneself from the world, etc.) while the second half of your book recalls specific people’s reactions to your coming out and specific pieces of dialogue that have affected you. What accounts for this shift in writing strategy? How do you feel this structural choice affects the reading experience of your audience?
JMW: Well, my intention was to try to capture the range of experiences that accompanies the process of coming to recognize yourself as a non-heterosexual trapped in a world of heterosexual presumptions and expectations in the first half of When I Was Straight (hence, why all eleven poems in that section bear that title). Then, in the second half, I wanted to document the responses and reactions to life after coming out (hence, all eleven poem titles follow the pattern of “When So-and-So Learns I am a Lesbian”).
There is something mimetic about the impulse to structure the collection this way, with a BEFORE and an AFTER. Always, I have in mind Thomas Wolfe’s insight that “You can’t go home again,” and inevitably, once a gay person lets the heterosexual cloak fall away, life is different. Mostly, I have found it to be a more liberating and authentic existence, but there are social penalties (and legal ones as well) for veering away from a heterosexual course. If home was defined largely by heterosexuality as a sacred truth—the only acceptable way of being in the world—then coming out is often experienced, by everyone involved, as a rejection of home and family and the past. I wanted to capture that shift in the book. The first poems are much more internal because they are a reflection of what I came to realize but, for a long time, didn’t or couldn’t say. Once I began to say it—to announce myself as a lesbian—then the story of my life became more public, and the poems are more external for that reason. When you out yourself, you change your life, but “outing” is also a life-long process. You meet new people, move to a new city, join a new workplace or club, and most of the time, you are presumed straight until you say otherwise. Once you reveal that you are not straight, however, what happens next is out of your hands to some degree. You don’t know how people will react, and you can’t control their reactions. You can’t control how people from your past who knew you “as straight” will react when they find out either. The whole experience is a little like publishing a book. You put forth your truth—hopefully, the most skillfully crafted version of your truth—and then you are forced to make peace with the fact that the reactions that follow are not yours to control.
GW: For a long time it seems as though you did not know how to transition from men to women. There seems to be an obvious absence in the description of this transition in your works that are otherwise descriptive of your personal struggles. How did you finally cross the line from men to women? Do you feel that writing has in any way helped you in the discovery of your personal identity? Do you feel that writing is therapeutic in any way? Why?
JMW: You know, I had a professor my first year in graduate school, a brilliant, compassionate man named Steve VanderStaay, who mentioned to me in his notes on a lyric essay I was writing for his class that I wrote very sensuously about my friendships with women but that I never included any sensuous details when I wrote about my male fiancé. Could you say more about why you love him, why you are drawn to him? he prompted. And I realized that I couldn’t. So many aspects of my relationships with men, even those I deeply admired and loved, were cerebral. I had experienced the proverbial “meeting of the minds” with various boyfriends and romantic interests. I had enjoyed the company of men, our conversations about subjects that mattered to us, but when I thought of our physical interactions, I realized they were largely powered by psychological rather than physiological impulses. When I was drawn to a man intellectually, I could will myself toward a more physical relationship because it was psychologically satisfying. I liked the idea of being desired and of having a significant other, of fitting in and being one of the “coupled” people. So I asked myself a hard question in revising that essay for Steve’s class: “If there were no other people around to validate my relationship, no places to see and be seen with a man—if I were stranded on a desert island, let’s say, with a man I liked as a person and shared a certain intellectual chemistry with—would I be likely to pursue a sexual relationship with that man?” My gut and my heart told me no.
Writing that essay was not only therapeutic for me; it was epiphanic. I had begun the essay almost as a rationalization of my close friendship with the woman who would become my life-partner and spouse, Angie Griffin. The writing betrayed me, in some sense, but it also saved me by revealing my deep longing for this woman I called my friend. I loved her as more than that. I loved her with my mind but also with my body and spirit. It was a more complex love than anything I had felt for any other person before, and the essay made clear to me that I would not be able to ignore those feelings and continue along my way toward the marriage I had planned with my fiancé.
That essay is unpublished today because it didn’t succeed, by my own estimation, in moving beyond the therapeutic space into a more polished essay shaped with an audience in mind. Sometimes, I find, this happens. We write something that is more for ourselves than for others, even if we had set out to write something more public. In 2002, I wrote that essay that exposed my deepest feelings and desires, and I pursued them, leaving the essay behind. In 2008, I felt ready to return to the question you’re raising here—how I crossed over from my heterosexual life into a new life with a same-sex partner—and the result was a very long essay that translates (hopefully!) lived experience into literature. In 2012, I learned that Tremolo, this essay made with an audience in mind, had been selected by Bernard Cooper as the winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize. The essay now exists as a stand-alone book, published by Bloom Books in late 2013.