In 1998, I sat down in my stylist’s chair with a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow with the pixie cut she made popular in the film Sliding Doors. You may remember the film; in it, Paltrow’s character’s life splits in two. In one version, she makes the subway as the doors are closing; in the other, she does not. In the version where she makes the subway, she arrives home early, certainly earlier than her boyfriend expects, to find him in bed with someone else. She leaves him, cuts her hair short, begins a new life. In the other version, she returns home as planned, keeping her long hair and her illusions.
My stylist first staged a mini-intervention. She told me that while she could give me that haircut, it would not look exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow because I did not have Gwyneth Paltrow’s hair. I did it anyway. She was right.
Anytime I get my hair cut, then and now, no small part of me believes that a new me is about to emerge. Then the next day, I realize it’s just me… with a hair cut. It’s a hard lesson: You can improve and change. But you are still you. With highlights. A new job. A bolder lip.
Last year, I ended a four-year relationship with a man, a NYC police officer. It was the longest relationship I’d ever had. And that was long enough. I’d lived alone for 25 years and guarded my time and independence. And so I was honest with him from the jump: I had never lived with a man and had no intentions of living with one now. But he had beliefs, too, about how love would change a person, and if not, that a gradual and predictable merging of lives was inevitable. But the truth was, I was still me… with a boyfriend. I called it off, perhaps later than I should have.
They say you can’t just flip a switch and decide to be gay. And to be fair that’s not exactly what happened: I’d had strong feelings for different women over the years — kissed my best friend in college, developed a crush on a folk singer in my 20s, even slept with a few bored, bisexual wives in my 30s — but considered them occasional feverish exceptions at best.
After all, I’d dated men all my life and never questioned it in any real way. Nor did anyone else. And this is how the idea of who you are can set in: zero evidence to the contrary. Even the women I did find appealing for reasons I couldn’t articulate seemed to reinforce my heterosexuality: I was so straight, I was even attracted to women who look like men.
Yeah, that’s not what that means.
A month after my breakup, and interestingly, a week after I officiated my friends’ gay wedding — coincidence? — I flipped my dating search to women. Just to see.
Most of the profiles did not appeal to me. And then I saw her: a woman with a bleached pixie cut, a wing of blue hair over her eyes. She looked less like a woman and more like a nymph, a fairy who’d seduce you in a yellow wood and keep you as her lover in the belly of an old elm for a hundred years.
We matched. I gave her fair warning that I was the very last person she should meet. First off, I was not gay — and what’s worse, I had just broken up with a long-term boyfriend.
“If I were one of your friends,” I wrote, “I’d tell you to run.”
We met for coffee anyway. Then a week later, for brunch. I felt like I was applying for a job I was not qualified for. We kissed shyly on the corner of 72nd and Broadway, and I trembled the whole way home.
“Do you like her?” my friend asked. “I mean, do you want to date her or go shopping with her?”
I didn’t know. Part of me believed there was no lesbian on the planet who would take me seriously. How could they? When I had so many years of men to account for?
The blue fairy texted me the next day and said I’d been on her mind. “I was thinking of your hair,” she said. “I like it.”
“Why don’t I come over tonight?” she said.
“Sure,” I replied. “Should I make dinner?”
“Let’s skip dinner,” she said.
SOS, I messaged my friends: “She’s coming over in an hour and we’re not having dinner. All caps. THERE IS NO DINNER.”
“You’ll be fine!” they told me. “Have fun!”
She arrived at 6 p.m. I had to climb down from the ceiling to answer the door. I know you don’t drink, I said, but I’m going to need one.
I shook a dirty martini nearly to death in the kitchen and then sat beside her on the couch. It felt like swinging both legs over a fence and preparing to jump.
And then she kissed me. I’m going to try to resist all hyperbole when I say that it felt like I had just surfaced from ten leagues under the sea. As if I’d never breathed before, and would never get enough air.
The next day was April 8th, and I remember that because it was the day of the solar eclipse. And while Manhattan wasn’t in the path of totality, the light went down like a dimmer switch, the colors flattening to sepia tone. My friend Kim and I were sitting on a wall in the park, taking turns peeking at the sun through those flimsy glasses as it waned to a bright cuticle.
“So, this is happening,” she said. “Right?”
It seemed a gross understatement to say yes. Of course, yes. I had never felt more yes.
A few minutes later, the sun waxed to fullness, the colors returned, but nothing looked the same.
When I say I “came out,” it’s not like I’d been harboring a secret. More like I’d stumbled upon something unbelievable, like a unicorn in my kitchen. How did that get there? What do I do with it? And then wanting to tell every single person I ever knew about it.
I can’t speak for all late-in-life lesbians, but I think I had it pretty easy. When I told my friends I was dating women now, it was like I’d shown up to brunch with bangs. They’re like, Whoa wasn’t expecting that, but what’s important is that you like them.
People were also quick to give me an out — saying things like, “You may not be gay, you may just be in love with this person.” But I didn’t need to be protected from it. Gay felt right. It’s like saying, maybe you just like this omelette; it may not mean anything else.
No, pretty sure I like eggs. Period.
I fell so head over heels for this blue fairy, it shocked me and everyone else. Me, who’d always been historically slow to claim the girlfriend mantle and loath to let go of my single status. Yes, I wanted to be her girlfriend. Right now. When she mentioned possibly moving out of her apartment 10 blocks from mine, all the way to Brooklyn, I was inconsolable.
I was different with my girlfriend than I’d been with any man: gentle and accommodating, treated her like glass. I told her she was the only one for me, and I believed it.
Maybe this was my problem! I wasn’t aloof and commitment phobic — maybe I was just gay. And now that I was embracing who I was, surely this would fix everything.
But deep down, that part of me who’d always worried I wasn’t smart enough, good enough, pretty enough, simply had a new fear: That I was not gay enough. That I was only gay because of her, that I was simply… gay by association.
It didn’t take long, a month or two, for red flags to emerge and for the blue fairy to reveal herself as a master manipulator. In July, things built to a frenzied state: She accused me of having the “wrong attachment style”; I accused her of asking for more than any person could give. We were probably both right.
You know where this is going. It ended as fast and furiously as it began. It was the most excruciating breakup of my life.
My whole life, my fear of commitment had boiled down to the belief that I would disappear into a relationship with a man and cease to exist. And what was causing me anguish now was that I thought if I let her go, this gay version of me would go along with it.
It took me a while to recognize that I could and would still be gay without this person. That what I was really crying about was the loss of something I could not actually lose: myself.
I didn’t need a girlfriend to be gay, and I also didn’t have to change. In short, I was still just me… with a new sexual identity.
A year later and I’m happy to report that I’m still here. I’m still gay. Same hair; new day.
Terri (right) with her sisters.
Terri Trespicio is the author of Unfollow Your Passion: How to Create a Life that Matters to You. Her TEDx talk, “Stop Searching for Your Passion,” has been viewed more than eight million times. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and lives in Manhattan. She is also the founder of The New Rules Studio, a live writing workshop for getting your work done.
P.S. “What nine movies and shows with gay characters meant to me,” and the “little gay house” in Portland, Oregon.
(Illustration by Julia Rothman for Cup of Jo.)
