F!@#$%&

(this is kind of an essay, but not a good one. I've been thinking a lot about sex lately due to Spring Awakening and other things that are none of your business. So. Enjoy. I should mention this is quite a few years old, too.)


Saturday I showed up, right on time, threw my bat bag in the dugout, swirled the rest of my tepid mocha and finished it off. As I walked to the trash can, I saw Adam, a team member who, a week after knowing me hinted that his wife was in Iraq and they were cool that way if I knew what he meant. I did. He was wearing a shirt, bright white and a simple statement across the front: I Love Lesbians. I threw my coffee cup into the trash and said, “nice shirt, bitch.” He was very proud, his smile grew and his tight blonde curls bounced a little when he laughed. “You only love porn lesbians; real lesbians don’t have sex like that.” I said. He shrugged, a so what.

I hate him. I hate him because of what he said to me as soon as he realized I was a lesbian, that my wife’s outta town thing. I hate him because he’s kinda cute and charming in an asshole fratboy way and probably gets lots of women to come over while his wife’s off fighting for oil in the desert.

Not an hour later, Tuffy, a guy with little man syndrome yells to me from the first base coach box, “Chris, ya know I could flip you. Just gimme one time and I bring ya ‘roun to the otha side.” He does that cocky chin in the air nod, lips starting to pucker. I tell him not to flatter himself; he isn’t the first man to think of that.

And when I get home to tell Mindy about it, well, that’s when I finally get mad and think of those things I should have said like, “Fuck you.” Or “would you say that shit to your best friend’s girl?” But it seems no matter what I say, they don’t care, don’t listen. Mindy suggests I should tell them I’m in a caring, loving, long term, committed relationship. Somehow, I don’t think these guys care about that. And I couldn’t imagine turning into that person who sits them down to express my real feelings. I would never tell them how it hurt so deep each time anybody said those things to me, how every time I was sure I was getting through to someone, was on equal ground, they said something like that and everything I’ve worked for failed.

But sometimes I feel like I’m part of the problem. I can turn into one of the guys without even realizing it: making fun of girly girls, pretending I know about cars when I don’t. If I’ve had enough beer I’ll listen to the men who tell me horrible things about the women they’ve slept with. For some reason, I want these guys to accept me.

There is a Saturday Night Live skit where a man is granted his most desired wish. He wishes to see two lesbians in bed together. Suddenly Ellen Degeneres is there, with a mullet wig, and another, more butch woman with a mullet. They’re in bed together, wearing flannel shirts and jogging pants, reading books. When I told Adam this earlier, after the porn star comment, he just said, “Ellen’s ugly. I wouldn’t hit that.” Confused I say, “Well, she wouldn’t wanna hit you.” Is sex really the only thing he thinks about?

Last week I was on deck during a game, swinging a bat when Adam asks, “You ever seen a grown man naked?” I scrunch up my face, raise my eyebrow. “Yeah,” I lie, “Why?” He was just wondering. The umpire laughs and shakes his head, I knock the dirt from cleats and spit. The truth is, I haven’t seen a grown man naked, not in person, anyway. But I’ve watched t.v., and more importantly, I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in forensic books. I have a good idea of a man’s body. I wonder if he thinks that if I saw a grown man naked I would suddenly become straight. This logic astounds me, but most men are sure of themselves like this. I fail to tell him that I would be interested in seeing a real live penis because I know he’ll drop his pants right there to show me.

I don’t hate men. This is one of the first questions I’m asked when people realize I’m a lesbian. I’m not even a little angry with them in any way, but guys who act like this try my patience. Not all men act like Adam, but I’ve found that most do.

One guy in my graduate program who seemed quiet and pensive, wore John Lennon glasses and a ponytail, begged me to have sex with him. Of course, we were at the bar, with a large group of people. It was late in the night when he’s had enough to drink when he leans close to my ear and asks if I’m a virgin. I laugh and say no, of course not. And he says, “So, you’ve been with a guy, then.” And I laugh and again, say no. This is my first mistake. But I won’t lie to people, and in the lesbian world, it’s a badge of honor to say you’ve never been with a man. He bites his lips, contemplating what I’ve just told him. There is a wooden beam between us supporting the ceiling, he grabs it for stability and leans closer, this time his white Russian splashes on me. He has to yell over the music, “I’m the best, Christina. Just give me one chance!” I shake my head hoping he’s joking. But he spends the next ten minutes trying to persuade me that he’d treat me right and show me things I’d never seen before. I thought he was different.

That same night another guy in my program pointed to some tiny, thin, girly girl and said, “If you’re a lesbian why don’t you kiss that girl?” There are many reasons I won’t kiss that girl. 1) she’s not my type 2) everyone will watch me and get off on it 3) I don’t know her 4) I don’t love her 5) I’m in a relationship. Instead of trying to explain any of these I put my beer to my lips and muse, “I wouldn’t want to blow her mind.” I don’t know why I say these things.

The sad thing is I’ve been in their position. I’ve been that drunk guy begging for just one chance.
Teri and I were living in an apartment in Miami together for our archaeology field school. I was twenty; she was a few years older. A curvy Mexican , she took me to different restaurants in the Hialeah area of Miami and forced me to speak Spanish when I ordered my food. Once she snuck me into Tobacco Road, the oldest bar in Florida. It was late on a Saturday and there were a couple of people from the field school, all of them old enough, except me. We found an old gate around the back, music vibrating the latch on the gate and we walked right in. I couldn’t believe it was that easy. Inside, she ordered me a Dos Equis and offered her lap as a seat since it was so crowded. The band played southern rockin’ blues and I tapped my foot more aware of the thighs under me than the sweating man on stage. At one point she kissed my cheek. I thought I’d die.

Until that night I’d been writing poems about her in my journal and talking about her with our other roommate, asking her if she could find out if Teri was interested in girls or not. But when her lips touched my cheek, I figured she couldn’t tell me what she wanted, but guessed that was how she chose to express it.

The next day we were swimming in the pool at our apartments and she came up behind me while I was hanging on to the edge kicking my legs. She wrapped her arms around me and I could feel her body through the bathing suit, warm and wet. A strand of her black hair fell on my shoulder and she whispered something in my ear, giggled, and swam away. It happened so fast.

The next week she decided she wanted a tattoo, so our other roommate and I went with her. I offered my hand in the tattoo parlor in case she was in any pain. When we left it was dark, the neon lights of art deco and South beach were like cotton candy. At one point, she held my hand and swung her arm as we walked down the street. I had to let go and walked behind the group instead. I gave her one of the poems. The day before our field school was over she told me she was sorry, but she wasn’t interested in girls. “Don’t think of me as a girl, just Christina,” I begged. She giggled and we drove a day and a half back to Houston because she didn’t want to pay for a hotel room. And that night I was planning in the in hotel room was my last chance.

Teri was a tease, for sure. She teased boys that way too. But there seems to be a group of women who enjoy teasing other women more than men. I assume it’s psychological. Maybe women are less threatening, or harder to impress. And then there was Megan.

She joined the rugby team I was playing with at the University of Missouri. My girlfriend, Kat, and I played on the team, but she wasn’t at practice one night because she was working at the local brew-pub. I’d only known Megan from rugby for a few weeks and that night, when Kat was at work, she asked me to get a drink with her.

Sitting across from me at our team’s bar she smiled and blushed and acted embarrassed. I asked her was what wrong. Her face fell, hair across her right eye. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been with girls before.” Straight women like to tell me these things. Sometimes I hear, “I kissed my best friend once,” or something like that. I don’t really care. They tell me because it seems they want to align themselves with me, say, “we have something in common,” as if there were nothing else I had to talk about. I let Megan tell me the story and asked at the end, “are you bisexual?” She says she doesn’t know and then says, “I’ve had two crushes on girls, one was [her best friend] and the other is sitting across from me.” I nod and take a sip of beer and then it hits me. To be funny, I turn around in my seat and look behind me, then from side to side. Finally I say, “Me?” And she’s so cute when she’s embarrassed. And I say thank you.

We start dating, though we have little in common. I was so flattered, having never been pursued by a woman before, that I don’t know what to do.

The first night I stay at her apartment (with her sorority sisters) I see a picture of her straddling this handsome black man’s lap, kissing him. She tells me his name and says, “he plays football for mizzou. My parents shit.” The town she grew up in was only a little larger than mine. She was prom queen and home coming queen and other types of queens. A couple of months later I’m in Germany when I get a phone call and have to guess what’s happened. She’s slept with my best friend, a girl. I’ve only been gone a week. After that she dated one of the rugby coaches, a girl. They had a rough go of it before Megan finally graduated and became a police officer in Kansas City where, I hear, she’s slept with the entire male population of the police force. I don’t know if it’s true, but I like to think it is. And I just realized I was one of her many “black football players.” Her dad called him a nigger, and I wonder what he would call me. If he ever knew.

Again, at the softball tournament on Saturday a male team member walks into a crowd of girls and one tells him he’s a fag. I cringe at the word. He makes a remark about dicks. I ask, “Have you ever been with a man?” “Nooooo,” he says. “Well, then how do you know you don’t like it?” He walked away. He was also the guy who thought I was dating another guy on our team, a 23 year old veteran, who, though he’s a nice guy, always tells me about the fights he got in over the weekend in the parking lot of the place he bounces. He grabs my throat and says, “there ain’t a lot a guy can do when ya got’em like this.” I imagine not. He’s actually one of three guys who hasn’t said anything stupid to me. In fact, I borrowed his phone once to call Mindy and ask if I could have a beer. He grabbed the phone and said, “I’m stealin’ ya girl!” I was flattered because he understood I could be stolen.

Mark and I worked at the dude ranch together one summer. He was from Virginia, a real southern gentleman. And we were stuck on a couple of hundred acres, the cabins we bunked in not fifty feet from the other. For a month we were the only two people on the ranch. Late at night, he’d come in to my cabin and we’d drink Hamm’s beer and smoke a bowl. He taught me how to smoke pot, really. The whole time I’d be bundled in my sleeping bag like an oversized name brand caterpillar because the cabins weren’t heated. He’d tough it out, though. Sit there in his khaki shorts and his white Virgina Tech hat, his thick bottom lip shivering with every sip.

And one night we were drunk, a month after the other workers had arrived, and I’d gone in to use his bathroom and sat on the bed beside him and we ended up on the floor. Thin carpet that had never been vacuumed under me, and Mark on top. He kissed me, wet and sloppy. I hadn’t felt facial hair on my lips since I was seventeen. He leaned toward my ear, the smell of pot and beer on his mouth, “How was that?” I tell him the truth, “Bad. But I can teach you.”

There were times when I wanted to sleep with him so badly, but couldn’t let myself. Instead, I led him on all summer. Wore tank tops with no bra because I knew he’d like it. Let him believe he might be the first guy I ever slept with.
* * *
I have no doubt that being fucked by a man is enjoyable.

I don’t say this to people because they insist on persuading me to do so when they find out I haven’t, because, they say, I’m missing something. Others wonder at me, “Well, aren’t you curious?” Of course I am. And still there are others who believe when two women are together there can be no sex, “How do two women have sex?” I can see their faces trying to put these two like body parts together; two electrical sockets face to face trying to generate electricity.

Despite what some people think, though, I’ve been fucked. Legs wide, fingers streaking white marks down backs; there were times when I thought I would die with a woman between my legs. But, yet, I am told that I am missing something by not having sex with men.

I’ve had sex with men in my head. I’ve had sex with men the way straight men have sex with men in their heads; to see what it would be like, dipping a toe in, testing the waters of sexuality. I’ve had this dreamlike sex with every man I’ve ever taken a slight interest in. I had too much sex with boys in my head when I was a teenager, after listening to morning after stories my friends whispered during lunch. My friends told me that it hurts, you bleed, he’s fast, you won’t like it for a long time, it smells down there, he’ll try to put it in your mouth and you’ll choke and it’s salty, he’ll try to put it “back there.” I had enough sex with men in my head that I didn’t feel the need to have actual sex with them.

I lost my virginity when I was eighteen. Candles flickering around the room, soft music in the background, a fluffy down comforter on the bed. And foreplay and kissing and rolling around for hours. Foreplay, I heard, is quite rare when having sex with a man. I’d heard, in fact, they didn’t even know what it was. But my pants weren’t off a couple of minutes before I felt a finger flick and then quickly slip inside. I came, with a blue-eyed blonde girl perched on top of me; like I was a teenage boy. Seconds and it was over, and it was beautiful. But it didn’t hurt, I didn’t cry, I didn’t bleed, and I wasn’t drunk at some party. I bragged about my first time for years (that and the fact that I’ve had an orgasm every time).

It was only a year after my summer crush on Mark that I tried to have sex with a man.

I had a crush on him for three months. I called him by his last name. It was a real and true crush, though. I’d go to sleep every night picturing Schumann thrusting between my legs, the strained look on his face I imagined from watching movies, the area of skin and muscle right below the top of his jeans, those two v-lines that boys have. I had convinced myself that was what I wanted, a sweaty man thrusting over me. He was a runner, thin and wiry. He was also my boss, and I would touch myself and pretend it was him almost every night. I had to see if it was something I wanted to do.

We were in a tent, this thirty year old man and me, a sort of vacation, a float trip in southern Missouri with other people we worked with. He kissed me earlier that day minutes after we jumped twenty feet from a toppled tree into a natural cold spring in the river. A brown river in the Ozarks, and there was a blue spot of cold water swirling in an alcove of trees. We jumped. It was forty-five degrees in that one spot.

In the tent, I was wearing a tank top. We were both wearing boxers and lying on top of our sleeping bags, waiting for sleep. Or something. I stared at the tent roof as anxious as I was in high school every time my boyfriend, Corey, pulled into the driveway and leaned over, his hand on my thigh. He was seventeen when I dated him. I was aggressive with him, climbed on his lap and kissed him hard; like women in movies, like people my age said I should. I would kiss him and touch his upper thigh, being careful not to touch the mystery under his jeans. His face was always rough and mine would start to burn. I was still confused about the location of a penis, would it be on top of his thigh, in the middle or further down? “How ironic,” I would say in between awkward kisses, “You’re at your sexual peak and you’re still a virgin.” I had him by the balls, but didn’t want anything to do with them.

So I looked at Schumann, my boss, my boyfriend, and felt bad for every time I teased Corey. I had never felt sexual desire until I was with a woman. Lust meant nothing; boys were silly to me. All they wanted was to fuck you, take your virginity. They didn’t care if it hurt, they didn’t even care if you didn’t have an orgasm because most boys I knew didn’t understand that girls actually had them. I never knew what it was to want someone so badly until I had experienced it myself, with Jenny. She was six feet tall with a skater hair cut and smelled of coconut lotion. I was nineteen and she was twenty-seven. I’d convinced myself that my first girlfriend, the woman I married, the woman I still cry about, was worth leaving for Jenny. I slept with her when I was supposed to be in class. Drove to the beach and didn’t come home from work on time so I could feel her breasts against mine.
And Sarah, we dated for nearly three years, off and on. I knew she was made just for me; a curvy, dark-haired woman who listened to NPR and donated money to Amnesty International. Her paintings full of sensual lines and colors, we took a bath on Saturdays while listening to techno-trance music. Sarah, who finally cheated on me in a hotel in Muskogee Oklahoma with a girl who could be my sister. She left me days before she was supposed to move in and start a life with me and didn’t have the balls to tell me any of this.

I’d decided girls were nothing but trouble because I cared about them too much.. Men were easy to understand, easy to get along with, easy to laugh with. Schumann, in particular, made me laugh, held the door for me, never tried to touch me without my initiation. And it seemed after Sarah, there would never be another woman made for me. I figured I had nothing to lose.

I smiled inside Schumann’s tent by the river after the pool of cold water.

It started the way it starts with women. We are both lying on our sides, kissing, hands running up and down and everywhere it doesn’t matter. His kisses taste different than those of women; more earthy, less sweet. With him there is a roughness around his lips that I can feel from my nose to my chin, something I haven’t felt since I was in high school. He has just shaved he says, just for me, but I feel dull hairs making my face hot and irritated.

Like a woman when she shaves. Your face is there getting scratched but then soothed by the wetness. Your tongue moving, teasing her, your hands grabbing her thighs. Until she begs you to slip fingers inside.
This kissing grows heavier, between Schumann and I, and I allow him to move on top of me. He’s lighter than I imagined; maybe he weighs less than Sarah, definitely less than Jenny. I am ready for his thigh to come between my legs, to give me something to rub against, to hold on to. I expect to do the same for him, can’t wait to watch him ride my thigh. I’ll push and push with my knee and suddenly let go.

This is how it happens with women. Thighs are interwoven. We rub and tease with thighs.
He spreads my legs and pushes himself in close to me. And this feels good, and there is something there that feels like a woman’s pelvic bone, something there that I won’t think about. I wrap my legs around him though: I can’t deny that I like a person between my legs. His kisses my neck, his stubbled chin scratches me, makes me push the back of my head into the sleeping bag, the tent floor, the root of the tree on the ground. A long, tanned hand finds its way under my thin tank top, lifts it up exposing my breasts. No man has ever seen them, or touched them like this before. It’s like losing my virginity all over again.

Women do this too. A woman goes slowly, pinches a nipple, rubs it between her fingers as gently as a cricket rubs his legs. A woman will put her lips there and flick with the tip of her tongue, looking up to see if you’re enjoying it, correcting slight movements if you’re not. She’ll kiss your neck, lick it slightly and tease your earlobes while she pushes her thigh in harder and smiles. She always smiles.
He puts his mouth there, his lips move quickly; scratching and sucking, his teeth biting hard. I run my hands up his stomach; it is flat and smooth and has little hair. I squeeze him tighter with my thighs and pinch his nipples, wait for a sigh, some sort of reaction. I open my eyes to see his face, pinch again, and finally ask, “Does this feel good?” He laughs, shakes his head, and I feel a bead of sweat fall on my chest. This is the sweat of a man who is hovering above me.

I run my hand up his back, along his spine, tickle him.

This would make most women sigh and lean into your lips.
He smiles and shakes his head at me, I can smell him now, like hot river water and cheap beer. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable on top,” he says. Yes on top. On top of this man. He gives me control, this sensitive man that I’d often pictured doing just this with.

I straddle him; feel something between my legs that is only two thin pairs of boxer shorts away. I am curious. I am turned on. I kiss him harder, and try to decide if should use my mouth or my fingers, or both.

I slide onto my left elbow and place my thigh between his legs expecting him to gasp and smile and flirt. I run my hand up his thigh expecting to feel soft skin and soft hair-warm and wet. I realize instead I’m dangerously close to a real penis.

I was never afraid of men, just what was hanging between their legs. It has a mind of its own, I hear. The first time I pretended to have one, I understood. There I was, with this purple thing protruding from me, and I just wanted to put it somewhere. I felt a need to hide it. “How convenient,” my girlfriend and I said, “Boys always have both of their hands free.”

Schumann’s penis is not detachable. This penis can not be taken off an on at will. It does not hide in my sweater drawer. I can’t put it on like a climbing harness and giggle. This man who has slept in my bed for a month, this man who patiently watched foreign films with me; he is not soft. And he is not sighing and flirting and smiling. Instead, he looks so serious, so sweaty, so determined—just like I’d pictured. And I take my hand away. I roll back onto my sleeping bag and apologize to him, “I don’t think I can.” He says he understands.

I lay awake that night, cursing myself for being such a coward. I had spent three months trying to get to that very point. Why wouldn’t it work? It wasn’t about power any more, he couldn’t really hurt me or take my virginity (these things bothered me in high school). But it was about power; mine.

I wanted to fuck him. I wanted his legs wrapped around my hips. I want to feel how excited he is.

I would move slowly at first, with one hand twisting his nipple, the other hand stroking his soft inner thighs. And then I’d flip him over on his stomach, tease with fingers, kiss his back until he begged me to go inside. I would then, just then, harder than before; pull him up into my lap and squeeze his neck a little with my hand watching his mouth open. After a gasp and a long silence he would fall to the ground, exhausted and smiling and giggling. I would kiss him all over and hold him until he stopped quivering. This is what you do with women because it’s what they do with you.

But I realized I could never do this for Schumann.

And so I’ve never fucked a man.