Somewhere in a place I didn’t think about when driving near cliffs, I thought maybe the God I was trying so hard to not believe in had found a way to fuck me.

* * *

—

Then I was transferred to Shaw, but nothing really changed. Some people cut themselves or hit walls or fought. I fucked random guys. There wasn’t a single moment wherein I thought, This is fucking ridiculous. You’re gay. Christ. There was a phone call from my sister in Massachusetts who said, “Come visit.” So I did.

She’d left the Family with her husband and their two kids. We spent the weekend peeling smoke-stained wallpaper off her kitchen walls while her son and daughter played in the living room. And I told her I was gay. I didn’t say “I’m gay.” We were standing in a pile of shredded wallpaper, drinking cheap wine from paper cups. I said something like, “Hey, what if I’m a lesbian?”

She dropped her scraper in the sink and said, “I knew it! Lauren! I knew it!” She was shouting and ran into the living room like she was looking for someone to tell she’d been right about me, someone to confirm.

   Upside of sisters. It doesn’t really matter what you just confessed as long as they were right. She came back in after deciding not to explain lesbians to the three-and one-year-olds and said, “Remember when I told you and you started crying?” I just stared. She called me a Pisces. I started crying, to prove her point. Goddamnit.

I didn’t tell her everything. I couldn’t then. But once I said it, once I knew at least I wouldn’t lose my sister, once I said it out loud and nothing changed between us, I figured maybe I’d be all right.

* * *

—

Though I’d achieved a degree of self-acceptance, I was still paranoid. I already had one secret, the Family, and now another. Or maybe I’d always had that secret. Either way, I wasn’t risking any more than I had to. So I waited until I was twenty-one, until I found that gay bar in Florence, far enough from base, to go home with the first of many women who’d play that Sarah McLachlan CD while we fucked. Sometimes I’d go home with them more than once, which is practically marriage if you’re a lesbian.

But that night, I didn’t hit on her. She came over to where I was standing at the end of the bar, nursing a Bud Light, the label crumpled somewhere on the floor. She said her name was Dana. She was cute, but I don’t think it mattered by that point. I was clinically horny and would’ve convinced myself I was attracted to anyone. I couldn’t hear a word she was saying over the music and just nodded dumbly while she talked. Then she kissed me and I’d like to say the world disappeared, but the world remained. I kept thinking, This is what it’s supposed to feel like. We made out against the bar, then on the patio, then against her Ford Escort with the missing bumper. She said I should follow her home. It was all I could do to not shout, “Oh, fuck yes. Finally.”

   The moment we stepped into her shabby living room with the cat-stained beanbag chair and the trucker-blanket-covered couch and the cigarette holes in the carpet, she said “Hold up,” and dropped that fucking CD into the player. You know the one—“I would be the one to hold you down…”

I was thrilled because I’d always wanted to fuck to that song and didn’t know I’d be fucking to that song for years to come. I don’t know if we talked. I couldn’t understand her well anyway. The Jack and Cokes she’d been downing at the bar dampened her accent into an unintelligible slurry of sounds. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t in a position to make decisions. By which I mean, I’d accidentally gone home with the rarest of all lesbians, the femme power top.

I didn’t know about tops and bottoms yet. I didn’t have gay friends yet. I didn’t know that, as Jay would eventually tell me, “Girl, you just ask if you can’t tell. But trust me, you can always tell.” I asked him if he was a top or a bottom, and he giggled, ruining his entire butch persona that he nearly managed to pull off anytime we were around other military. We were eating dinner in the chow hall at the time, so I gave him a minute to get his bearing back. He told me I was an idiot. But that was long after I met Dana. Or he might’ve warned me and ruined everything. For a kid from nowhere, he somehow knew an awful lot about being gay.

   Again, even if I’d owned a computer, what were the options for research then, Ask Jeeves? You had to go into a physical store to rent porn. And lesbian porn isn’t made for lesbians. There were lesbian movies, sure. But the common theme of lesbian movies in the ’90s was: There’s this lesbian who’s in love with Mary-Louise Parker, who’s nice to the lesbian. Then Mary-Louise Parker dies. That was the dream back then: one day you might have a straight friend who isn’t shitty to you. The other lesbian movie, released just that year, was Chasing Amy, in which Ben Affleck, who draws cartoons and has questions about fisting, proves the thesis of the film, of my entire sexual education: lesbians just need a good deep-dicking. Wasn’t the most helpful storyline to hand a generation of men.

I’ve rarely found it in me to respond with, “I have tried dick, Greg. I have tried so many fucking dicks. So many.” I’ll grant you that younger guys just don’t know how to fuck. But you’d think I’d have managed a single orgasm, even accidentally, after fucking…(I really don’t know how many. I tried to make a list one time, but it’s hard to come up with a definite answer when number thirty-eight is “dude in red shirt with chipped tooth.” Let’s go with fifty.)