Letting Go of Guilt to Live My Truth as a Queer Woman

My partner Candice and I drank an entire bottle of Bartenura Moscato while looking hopelessly for a movie to watch. We were in her childhood home in Brooklyn; the building’s internet was down and the only movies she had were burned discs she kept in a black booklet. She suggested we watch Spider Lilies, a movie she’d been trying to get me to watch for the past half-decade, but which, because of a knee-jerk embarrassment I often experience at watching queer women on screen, I had refused to see.

Released in Taiwan in 2007, the film follows two women—one a cam girl, the other a tattoo artist—as they fall in love. It’s a strange film, both in tone (it’s hard to gauge when something should be funny) and form (it jumps back and forth in time). To make matters more surreal, the copy Candice had was pirated, which meant the hardcoded subtitles were often syntactically skewed.

Candice had first seen the movie many years earlier, when it first came out—and when she first came out. She had known she was gay since she was thirteen, and spent the subsequent decade searching for queer art and experiences. I’d known since I was thirteen, too, but had spent the subsequent decade denying it.

In the film, the tattooist, Takeko, also knows from a young age that she is gay. Yet when Jade the cam girl comes into her shop with clear romantic interest, she balks. In a flashback, we learn that Takeko’s first queer sexual experience coincided with a devastating earthquake that killed her father and traumatized her brother. What happens, the film seems to ask, when the awakening of the self occurs alongside a world-shattering catastrophe? How does one overcome the guilt and shame of the seemingly inextricable link between the two? I hadn’t realized, until I watched the movie with Candice, five years into our relationship, that I’d been asking myself the same question for the past ten years.

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, my mother became sick with the illness that would eventually kill her. I first learned of her condition in May of that year, when my father and uncle came to take me home for the summer. When I asked where my mother was, my father said, “She’s not feeling well.” He left it at that until halfway through the car ride, when he told me that instead of going straight home, we would be stopping at the hospital. I remember thinking how inconvenient this was—I had just finished final exams for the semester and was looking forward to relaxing outside on our house’s screened-in porch.

When we arrived at the hospital, my mother was lying in the bed braced by railings; she looked like a baby in a crib. I was surprised by how the woman who gave birth to me looked so infantile. My hands as they held hers seemed large.

A few days later, I went to Barnes & Noble and picked out a few books to keep me busy over the summer. One was Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, a five-hundred-page saga I became wholly engrossed in. I brought it to the hospital with me whenever I visited my mother. The novel’s sweep shielded me from her illness. I read it only when I was at the hospital; I didn’t want to finish it at home and risk facing my mother without it.

Cal, the novel’s narrator, was formerly Callie, a precocious young girl. When Callie is a teenager, she has a pseudosexual relationship with a female classmate, who narrator Cal refers to as The Obscure Object. Middlesex was the first book I’d ever read to feature sex between two girls. It was, weirdly enough, the novel that made me finally admit to myself that I was gay.

*

A girl who I’ll call Alex was my first kiss, in eighth grade. I still remember how soft and light her lips were, how smooth her tongue was as it slid into my mouth and found mine, how she smiled and laughed while she kissed, imbuing the act with glee.

We spoke on the phone almost every night. I had a landline in my room, and I would lie in bed as her voice tickled my ear. She would say things like, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” My body knew what she meant but the “I” who inhabited that body didn’t. It was nice just to be thought of at all.

My mother picked up the phone one night and heard Alex say something indelicate. She suggested I stop talking to her, that Alex was “weird” and a bad influence. I’d already thought of myself as weird; if there was something I could do to lessen that weirdness, I’d do it. Because I was seen by myself and others as an ugly tomboy, I believed I was a girl only a mother could love—the last thing I wanted was to upset that love.

So, for the next half-decade, I wore makeup and dated boys, had sex with boys, complained about boys, talked on the phone with boys within earshot of my mother. I ran up the phone bill one month, and when questioned about it, I simply told my mother I liked the boy so much. All was forgiven. The ruse came so easily I even tricked myself. I forgot all about Alex.

Reading Middlesex on the ugly green couch in my mother’s hospital room unearthed what I had buried. I read feverishly as Callie pursued The Obscure Object, as she began to touch The Object, not seeking gratification, but confirmation. Nothing much happens during their sex scenes, though their chaste furtiveness aroused me. The characters being teenagers brought Alex back to me; often, while reading, it felt as though Alex was there kissing me on the couch, the ghostly imprint of her lips not caring about my mother’s judgement. Despite being in a hospital, my underwear would become damp. I was ashamed to be turned on this way in view of my sick mother. I began to think of being gay as being in direct opposition to her.

Yet, realizing I was a lesbian also brought me a kind of delight. I had lived for so long feeling just a little bit off, each kiss with a boy bringing with it the uncomfortable sense of mismatched lips, each interaction with a girl an incomprehensible charge—now it all clicked, not unlike seeing a concise German word elucidating a complex, messy emotion. It was a feeling of, yes, that’s it. Having the words for it was a relief.

Now, when I was alone, which was often, I watched pornography and masturbated. I had never done either of these things before. My body felt alive to me, and I wanted to use it. It was as if I had a crush on myself and wanted to spend all my time with her. I was with her in bed, in the shower, in the car at a red light.

As euphoric as this epiphany felt, I’d had it as my mother lay sick. In a way, it felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it. Understanding my desire brought with it the possibility of new life—something increasingly unavailable to my mother.

Once my mother died, I thought it would be in poor taste to tell anyone. Even though it had felt monumental to me at first, my sexuality now seemed frivolous. I imagined friends and family members asking, “Your mother is dead, this is what you’re thinking about?”

When I began dating women, five years after my mother died, I did so in secret. I went out only with women who were not out: a preacher’s daughter, the daughter of conservative Russian immigrants, a single mother with a six-year-old daughter. When this last woman told me about her child, I asked her, “What do I have to do?” She said, “You don’t have to do anything. I don’t need or want your help.” Despite the coldness of her tone, I was happy. I was barely a part of my own family; the thought of becoming a part of someone else’s was nightmarish.

For over a year, I luxuriated in the loneliness of a closed off life. I was so fearful of making a life with someone that I sometimes went on dates with different women on the same day. I thought of myself as inevitably doomed—so many of my formative years alone spent thinking, out of fear of who I was and who I wanted, that aloneness was what I deserved—and with these dalliances, I thought that doom could be controlled.

In a way, it felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it.

Then I met Candice. We met for the first time at the Stonewall Inn, a place I had never been to before. The location was her choice. Walking into the bar, I felt an acute sense of imposter syndrome. I was struck by how historic the bar was, how much it mattered in the grand scheme of gay life. For so long, I’d denied my own queer history, and thus saw myself as even farther removed from the community’s.

Candice’s company dispelled some of my initial discomfort. She was genuinely curious about everything and quick to laugh. I mentioned a movie she hadn’t seen, and she asked me to explain the characters’ motivations and backstories. We had a long, surprisingly philosophical back-and-forth about whether the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color were pornographic or exploitative. We talked through three rounds of drinks before going back to my apartment. After she left the next morning, despite having a good time, I decided I wouldn’t see her again. I hardly ever went on second dates.

A few weeks after our date, I went on a trip with two guy friends. We were all single. They asked me, with salacious straight male interest, about my dating life. In recounting it, I felt tired. At some point during the trip, I began to feel very homesick. A large part of this longing, I realized, was for Candice, for the possibility of a life with her when I got back.

Two years into our relationship, at the wedding of one of my closest childhood friends, Candice and I slow-danced to some sappy song neither of us had heard before. It was the first time either of us had been romantic with another woman in public. I was happy, a feeling so foreign to me that as soon as I was aware of it, it went away.

Suddenly, I realized I was holding another woman closely surrounded by people I’d known since I was a kid. Were they upset with the kind of life I had chosen to live? Were they repulsed? Their gazes were the closest thing I had to my mother’s, and in that moment and I searched them for signs of what she’d feel.

I couldn’t figure out what they felt—probably they weren’t thinking about me at all—but what I felt was joy jostling, as it always would, with a form of survivor’s remorse, the guilt of living a life my mother may not have approved of while she lived no life at all.

Three years later, Candice and I watched a bootlegged copy of Spider Lilies with inaccurate subtitles, and I felt as though rainwater I’d been collecting in a bucket for a decade had been dumped on my head. In the wake of the earthquake that kills her father, Takeko confronts the girl she slept with, telling her that what happened was their fault, particularly her brother’s injury.

“He can’t recognize me now,” Takeko says; both Takeko and her brother have changed.

I thought of my mother, and of the family of my childhood friend whose wedding I attended. Like I did, Takeko spends many years post-trauma denying herself real love, because why should she get to receive it? Candice echoed what the girl Takeko had been with said: it’s not your fault. I felt as though the film was offering me a gift. Live your life, it said.

The movie ends happily, which in and of itself feels like a small miracle. Jade and Takeko sleep together and the morning after, in the early dawn light, Jade walks to Takeko’s shop to get a flower tattoo—the same flower tattooed on Takeko and her father. The last shot of the film is Jade emerging on the horizon, like the sun itself.

When grief and the emergence of identity are so entwined, as they often are, it’s difficult to imagine such a sunrise; yet the only true thing in life is that the sun will come back up.

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