Coming Out Of The Closet - To Be Straight

Coming out of the closet -- to be straight

I used to wonder why coming out as queer had never felt liberating to me. Now I know.

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By Melissa Levine

July 25, 2001 | After 12 years and two children, Julie Cypher leaves Melissa Etheridge, claiming that she's not gay and she never was. Melissa throws up her hands. Many lesbians, understandably, are outraged. Not gay? After years with a same-sex partner? Who is she trying to fool?

Herself, perhaps. And perhaps not. At the age of 28, after eight years of dating women -- that is, never having dated men -- I realized that I wanted to be with men. And that, in fact, I had never wanted to be with women -- not sexually, anyway.

I'm straight. There, I said it. And for me, coming out as straight has been significantly more difficult than coming out as gay. It has meant confronting old, powerful and deep-seated fears about who I am, what I'm capable of and whether intimate love is available to me.
I'll summarize my romantic/sexual résumé in one word: Sparse.

In high school, I had long, obsessive crushes on boys who didn't want me, and barely noticed the few who did. In college, ditto, with a year of romantic bliss in the middle. We spent every waking moment together. We shared a bed, chastely, until her fiancé flew out from the West Coast and broke it up.

In graduate school, I began dating a woman and came out as queer -- a self-proclaimed "closer to gay than straight" bisexual woman. (Sometimes I called myself a lesbian, willfully ignoring the false note it struck.) But soon after we started having sex, my girlfriend was hospitalized for depression. There were long months of sad, impossible love (sans sex), and then a breakup.

After graduate school, I moved to San Francisco, where I went through a spell of two-week relationships -- manufactured and meaningless -- with women. Then a male friend and I confessed mutual crushes. When we met to discuss dating, I could barely speak. I thought, "I want this so badly." It was the kind of experience commonly described by newly out gay people: "So this is what it can feel like." But for me, there was something else, a long-held terror of men. It was a struggle to let him touch me. Wisely, my friend backed off.

Then I met a woman and fell in love. She had a crush on me. For months, I fretted over whether I was attracted to her. I knew I loved her; wasn't that enough? We kissed. I panicked. We spent time apart, but I couldn't take it. We slept together. I panicked.

I realized that I wanted to date men. And only men.

I love women; I connect with women. Three times in eight years, I have fallen in love with women -- women I would have committed my life to, if I could have. And for me, this love translated into romance, and then into sex, though only briefly.

I wanted the lesbian life, complete with herbal tea, incestuous friendships and golden retrievers. I cherished the emotional intimacy and craved the freedom, power and joy of the queer community, which looked like home. But when I finally had that dream within my reach, I couldn't do it. I was in love with my girlfriend, but I didn't want to have sex with her.

Meanwhile -- and I know how sad this is -- I'm afraid of men. In my family, men were angry, unpredictable, judgmental and unavailable. They were far more interested in the development of my body than they were in the development of my spirit. It did not feel good to be with them; it did not feel safe. Boys at school ignored me, or I ignored them; occasional friendships ran up against the iron shield of my entrenched defenses. Given this experience, why would I want to date men? Where was the evidence that a relationship with a man could be loving and important and deep?

I'll tell you where: Nowhere.

For me, accepting my essential sexual attraction to men is akin to accepting that I might not ever date again. If my past has anything to say about my future, I might not experience romantic love at all. When I was finally ready to say I wanted to be with men, I had to acknowledge that I couldn't be with them -- I was far too frightened -- and that would it take time and a great deal of emotional work to get to a place where I could.

Frankly, I had little choice.