Ch 14: Straightening Up
Anne and I quickly learned that being together meant hiding who we were to each other to the outside world.
As soon as I heard her voice on the phone, I knew something was wrong. Afraid that she had been in an accident or something, I didn’t hesitate, “Hon, what’s up?”
The phone line fell silent and then, “They fired me.” Her voice was devoid of expression—no affect, only words.
“What!?” I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I must have misheard her.
“They fired me,” she repeated it in the same hollow tone. “The dean called me into her office and said, ‘we’re letting you go.’”
“Why? What for?” I shouted—my throat tightened. Just the week before, she had brought home a stunning performance appraisal. We’d gone out to dinner to celebrate. Even shared a bottle of champagne. As my legs started to shake, I sat down.
“She said ‘I, I didn’t,’” Anne gasped like she couldn’t get air. “‘represent the moral standards of the school.’” I could hear the emotion now. Anne didn’t cry often, and I could tell from her wavering voice that it was taking everything she had to fight off tears.
“What!? Are you kidding me? That’s absurd!”
“I think Laura must have said something,” she whispered as if someone might be listening. Maybe they were.
Anne worked as the Director of Residential Life at a prestigious women’s college in Massachusetts. It was her dream job—counseling and mentoring women in an academic setting. A few years earlier, another college in West Virginia found out she was a lesbian, or at least suspected she was, and dashed her burgeoning career in academia. She fought her way back from that abrupt termination to a better position at a highly ranked school close to her parents and her beloved family home in Maine.
But it hadn’t been an easy recovery. After she was fired, she lived with a friend in Pennsylvania for a couple of years, taking odd jobs where she could. When she finally built up her courage to apply for another professional position, she did it at her friend’s encouragement. She harbored no hope of being hired. When a school, and not any school—the top school on her list—said yes, everything fell into place.
She moved into a lovely old house on a tree-lined campus where she could walk to her office and then return home to her cherished rescue cat named Skipper. She hosted gatherings with students and staff where she could indulge her love of cooking, and during the summers, she joined her parents aboard their sailboat to cruise the Maine coastline. It was her ideal life, and she couldn’t have been happier.
![1. Two women standing with hills and water in the background and 2. a woman at the helm of a sailboat with a man smiling behind her](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a2e2469-5736-4cc6-b716-a51de9558d93_2715x1822.jpeg)
![1. Two women standing with hills and water in the background and 2. a woman at the helm of a sailboat with a man smiling behind her](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6e7b5075-d312-4237-966a-d3998a3a621c_2107x1945.jpeg)
When we fell in love, she described it as the proverbial frosting on the cake. She was living the life she fantasized about. She really did have everything. The devastation she felt from her earlier firing became a distant memory—not eradicated, but also not something that controlled her. She was on a new course with a gentle wind filling her sails.
After we made the decision to end our other relationships and be together, our plans crystallized. I would finish my master’s at the end of the school year and get a job nearby. In the meantime, we’d move into together—even though that meant leaving her precious on-campus house—and we’d live happily ever after. But to her, hearing her dean cast aspersions on her moral character because of our love felt like the mainsail had been ripped from the mast during a violent storm. She was instantly unmoored.
I sat in silence with her for a couple minutes at the other end of the receiver not knowing what to say, then finally asked, “Are you coming home?”
“Yeah,” she answered without hesitation, “but I need to make a stop first.”
OK, I’ll see you when you get here.” I had no idea where she was planning to stop and didn’t ask. I was grateful for a few more minutes alone to prepare myself for whatever might come. Fortunately, I didn’t have anywhere to be that evening. I had been looking forward to a night off. Not anymore. My stomach felt like it did when we were sailing with her parents and the waves started bouncing us around like we were plastic bottles thrown out to sea. I needed time to collect myself before Anne got home.
When I finally greeted her at the door, I positioned myself to hug her, but when I saw she was clutching two bottles of wine, I stepped aside and let her in. Her intent for the evening became instantly obvious. She pushed past me, put the bottles on the counter, grabbed a glass, popped the corks on both bottles, and poured herself a generous portion.
“Help yourself,” she said, waving her hand toward the wine as she grabbed one of the open bottles and plopped down on the couch.
“I’ve worked so hard to get back into higher ed. Then they pull this shit.” She slammed her fist down on her leg and took a long swallow from her wine glass. “Damn it! Those bastards!”
I sat down beside her and reached for her clutched hand.
“Why do you think it was Laura?” I asked. “I thought she was fine with us.” Memories came flooding back. A few weeks before, Anne and I had gone to San Francisco with Laura, one of Anne’s colleagues. Anne and Laura went to attend a professional conference, and I went along for the ride. Anne liked Laura and trusted her. She thought we could take the risk of letting her know about us. So, when we decided to share a hotel room to save costs, it was Laura who suggested that Anne and I take the queen bed.
“I’ll have them bring up a cot for me. I’ll be fine,” she assured us. Maybe the cot wasn’t so comfortable after all.
Anne took another swig of her wine and refilled her glass. “She proposed a reorganization plan today that eliminated my position and gave her a big, fat promotion,” she said. “She threw me under the bus.” With that, she let go of my hand and turned her body toward the door as if she imagined running out of her life—our life—and back to the fantasy that sustained her before me.
“Oh, hon! I’m so sorry.” As I mouthed the words, I knew they fell flat. Did she blame me? If I had left her alone to live her dream, none of this would have happened. Sure, her cake wouldn’t have had icing, but it still would have been a sweet, delicious cake, one she could have savored for the rest of her life.
As I sat next to her, but not with her, my guilt fed my shame. I shouldn’t have gone to San Francisco with her. We shouldn’t have told anyone. If I were stronger, or better—or SOMETHING—I could have protected her. My mother’s voice screamed in my head, “Don’t let anyone know who you are. Fit in, be normal.” I knew I would never suit Mom’s definition of normal, but I had learned enough from her to know how to keep a secret. We had violated the first precept of how to stay safe by letting our secret out, letting Laura know the truth. Damn it! I knew better! At that moment, as Anne stumbled to the kitchen for the second bottle of wine, I made a commitment to myself that I would never let that happen again.
Because the school announced Anne’s departure as a casualty of a reorganization plan, despite the immoral example they claimed she set, they let her finish out the semester, as if that was some kind of gift to her. But the woman who dutifully reported to work each day was an empty shell of the woman they’d hired a few years before, the one I had come to know and love. When she came home each night, she cursed their hypocrisy, their homophobia, and their ignorance, and then got up the next morning and reported to work again.
Any hope that the doors of limbo would open soon, and we could live in a world accepting of our love, shattered with Anne’s termination. I dove into caretaker mode. I couldn’t stand to see her hurting, so I had to figure out a way to help. Although I applied for jobs in Massachusetts to start after my graduation, my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted out of this place that had caused her, and us, so much pain. I didn’t know what Anne wanted—and neither did she.
I figured if we moved to Michigan, where I already had an established safety net of friends, she could re-invent herself professionally. I didn’t know if she’d go for it, and I was afraid to broach the subject.
A few months later, when I was offered a position as the director of a women’s alcoholism program in Lowell, just north of Boston, she seemed genuinely happy for me, so I accepted it.
Then two days later, I received a call from an old friend and colleague in Michigan offering me a different position as a consultant, a position that could turn into permanent employment. It’s what I wanted to do, even though the risks surrounding the job were a lot greater. I’d be back with my friends and out of this place. But would Anne give up New England, the place she had fought so hard to get back to, for Michigan farm country, especially when she’d already lost so much? I didn’t know.
When I finally ginned up the courage to ask, Anne replied without a second thought. “Yeah,” she said, shrugging her shoulders as if she didn’t care what we did. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” So, we did. Within a month, we had packed up a U-Haul, drove out of New England, across New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and into south central Michigan where we would make a new home and, hopefully, find a fresh start.
In our new life, secrecy became a ritual. We had failed at it in Massachusetts and suffered the consequences. We would have to be more cautious. Could we? Could we keep our secret as well as Mom and Dad had kept theirs? Did I really want to live like they had lived? For now, I was going to have to try.
Before Anne’s parents came to visit, we “straightened” up the house. Anne moved everything on her bedside table to the room we had designated as a guest room. She switched out enough of her clothes to make it appear that she used that closet. We hid away envelopes with both our names on them, cards we had given each other, books about lesbian life. I stuffed photo albums into my closet so they wouldn’t find any incriminating photos of us kissing or hugging each other, or even worse, photos from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, an annual refuge where thousands of lesbians gathered each August in the Michigan woods—a place where we looked forward to being completely ourselves for one week of the year.
When her mother expressed concern about Anne having to give up her room to them, Anne had a quick retort, “Oh, we don’t mind, Mom and Dad, you go ahead and take my room; Annette has generously offered to share hers with me while you’re here.” She winked at me behind her mother’s back.
“Here’s my bedroom,” Anne said, as she moved out of her parents’ way and let them peer into the room on the left side of the hallway. “And this one’s Annette’s,” she said, pointing to the room on the right.
We played this “straightening up” charade when anyone other than our lesbian friends came to visit. And they all played it too. We laughed and joked about it when we were together, but deep down, it ripped pieces out of my heart, like the way Mom must have felt when she threw away photographs of her life with her first husband and daughter because my dad, Norm, wanted her to (see Chapter 4: Whisperings for more about this). I would be anxious for days before anyone visited, always looking, evaluating, identifying anything in the house that might raise suspicions.
We even checked the TV listings for shows that might have gay content in the upcoming lineup. We wanted to avoid those if we sat down to watch TV together. Network television didn’t have a plethora of gay content in the 1980s but inevitably, whenever our parents visited, some TV news show would report on the “militant homosexual rights movement,” or “the rise of GRID,” i.e., gay-related immune deficiency, sometimes referred to as the “gay plague,” (and now understood as HIV/AIDS).
If we happened to be watching TV and something gay appeared, a force-field locked on to all of us. We sat there stoically, without anyone saying a word or even moving a muscle, praying to be delivered from it. When the force-field finally released us, someone would jump up and say, “How about some ice cream?” or “I’m really tired; I’m going to turn in,” or “What should we plan for dinner tomorrow night?” Anything to distract from the truth.
“Dear,” her mother asked a few days into their first visit, “why does Annette have that lovely photograph of Buck’s Harbor on the wall in her room? I would think you would want it in yours.” Buck’s Harbor was the site of the family’s house in Maine.
Anne stumbled for an answer, “Oh, um, I’ve told her so much it, and she thought the photo was pretty, so I let her put it up. We thought it looked nice on the wall in there.” Anne glanced at me with a whoops-we-missed-that-one look.
What she didn’t tell her mother was that I had already been to Buck’s Harbor – several times. It was our first visit there that Anne and I admitted we were in love with each other. The photo was one I had taken that weekend. I hadn’t even considered taking it down. Like Mom holding on to that one remaining photo of her daughter Marlee, I realized how hard it was to hide such a significant part of one’s life.
I found myself angry that I had to and, at the same time, began to wonder why I was hiding myself. Sure, society’s level of acceptance of our relationship bordered on nonexistent, but why did I care so much? Was I replicating my parents’ pattern of secrecy because I was too afraid to face recrimination from others? Because I yearned too much for approval?
After the house was ours again, I returned books and photo albums to the bookshelf. As I did, I flashed back to that kid standing in the country store, fingers sticky from rummaging in the candy bins, when Aunt Babe swooped in and stole my typical answer about my red hair out from under me (see Chapter 5: Pardon for this story). That had been the first time I felt what had now become an all-too-familiar feeling. I felt dirty, irredeemable, not because of who I was but because of the lies I told to keep others from knowing me. Was this the way I was going to live my life? What would it cost me if I did?
As I placed Sappho Was a Right On Woman—the book that first taught me about what it meant to live my life as a lesbian—back on the shelf, I sighed. Things were back to normal again—until the next time.
Read Chapter 15: Duck! Duck!
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By the time I came up in my first relationships - in the 1990s - this sort of hiding was over (at least in San Francisco...) But the shadow of that sort of thing remained when my husband and I visited my parents, and they were uncomfortable with our sharing a bed in the guest room and asked us to stay at a hotel instead.
Heart breaking for both of you- incredible unfair and cruel especially from someone she thought she could trust.