Politically Romantic

Tarra and I have known each other now for seven years. It took us awhile to even fall in love. Actually, it happened when I wasn't even paying attention. She was my best friend, we would literally spend five hours over Skype: me doing homework in Davis, her cleaning her room in Sacramento. We would even watch TV together over Skype. When we weren't near a laptop, we would Facebook Chat, all day. We did everything together when we could drive out to see one another. We were the closest, most intimate platonic friends. It took six months of this to realize I loved her. I realized it on the bus back to Davis and cried and cried. I wasn't allowed to love her, she wouldn't love me back. It seems obvious reading this that we were in love for far longer than we knew, but Tarra wasn't "out" yet, not even to herself.

As has become a habit, I confessed my love to her in a public place, a barbecue restaurant actually, I couldn't keep that secret long. She said she loved me too. Turns out she wasn't gay, just "gay for me". This, I guess, was easier than coming out all at once. We had a long road of her actually coming out to her ex-catholic friends and being tortured with hate messages and rejections. Then, it was her parents. They told her they'd rather she said she was dead. I would have hidden deep in the closet if that's what I had faced. It's been five years, and her family and old friends are still causing emotional wreckage. My family was glad she was normal, we've had a long history of violently abusive partners, so that Tarra didn't hit me, yell at me, or control me trumped her being a lady. We've had to close in, surrounding ourselves with people who love us for who we are and couldn't care less that we were both ladies. They love us because we're both really great human beings.

Much of our relationship has been political as much as it's been romantic. Tarra's upbringing in a conservative Catholic home closeted her deeply and tortured her coming out. When we married, it was because Prop 8 was in the Supreme Court and we were going to New York anyway, we shouldn't miss a chance in case they decide no marriage for gays anywhere. At least we'd have that piece of paper. We missed out on the Peace Corps because we couldn't serve together at the time, even thought they sent married couples, just not gay married couples. We had to fight with the DMV, the Social Security Office, drivers' insurance companies... and even when we registered our business with the City of Davis- we had to ask them to change their system. We marked our business was run by a married couple, then checking online it read "husband and wife" we had to write and say no one identified as "husband" we were both wives. When we got married in NYC we were taking pictures on the Brooklyn Bridge and had a foreign couple ask us "where are the husbands?". What a story they had to tell themselves! "Oh, these American girls got married, left their husbands at home and went for pictures alone, making out in a few of them, you know, because that's what newlyweds do, make out with other couples in America".  After we were married in NYC we still had to come back to California and get a domestic partnership because California didn't recognize our marriage. We had to file a "Mock Marriage" tax form the first year we were married. Yes, it was actually called that. Every time we were asked about our marriage, we had to give everyone a legal brief on the state of marriage in the US.

My point here is it was not ok to be a lesbian when we met. It wasn't legal to marry. It was really hard to gain basic rights that came with being straight and conforming to the "norm". The landscape has changed so much in the few years we've been together, I wanted to preserve and share our story as it is about to undergo another change: we're trying to get pregnant. I shared the story of our marriage before in this blog, if you'd like to go back in time to the long ago 2012 and hear what it was like for us. This time, the political landscape is clear for marriage and everyone is so happy Homophobia is over. Right?

Tarra and I find ourselves at the edge of the gay frontier of rights, access, prejudice, and unexplored territory of creating a baby as two ladies in love. We're obviously not the first, but there are so few of us, and we've been closeted for so long, there just is so much left a mystery. I wanted to share this story because it is happening in a unique moment in time in our political landscape and our social acceptance of queer people and queer families. I also want to share it because it is a unique experience that requires us to do things many people don't think about when they think of how babies are made. It's also selfishly motivated. This is a really difficult experience emotionally for us, and I need an outlet.

Mostly, I want to share this to show that two women in love can have and raise a beautiful, healthy family. I want to be out, proud and visible. I want other queers to see us and see that it's ok to be gay. That maybe they can have the family they want. I want this to show up in Google when someone else is looking for solidarity while jumping through hoops to become pregnant as two ladies. I hear it's not polite to talk about infertility, and we're going to do a lot of that too. I want to normalize our family, because we are normal, no, you know what, we aren't- we're extraordinary people with extraordinary love and concern for everyone and everything about us. We're wildly interesting, smart, talented, generous, kind, human beings. We just happen to be gay.