Two Lesbians Diving Into the Earth

With not a single word, she sat gazing at me with a tenderness in her brown eyes, glancing at the banana trees behind me, then looking up at the sky, blue as could be – absorbing the orbit we found ourselves in.  Her sighs, quiet as soft breezes.  It was her faint smile and the delicate dangling gold labrys earring in her left earlobe that kept my focus.  That’s when she reached effortlessly for the camera and captured this snapshot of me.

It was our first trip as girlfriends, as lovers, as two gals dating. We’d chosen a special place – Isla Mujeres, a tiny island in the Caribbean, off the coast of Cancun.  At the time – late summer of 1986 when the photo was taken – Isla, as some of us called the island, had become one of the favored destination spots among lesbians.  No surprise!   And apparently, to this day, it’s still a queer friendly spot. 

And about the gal who snapped the shot all those years ago – let’s call her Storm.  At that time, she and I had not known each other for long – maybe six or so months – when we escaped Dallas and headed south, down Mexico way to the Isle of Women.

Storm set the camera on the table where we were sitting, absorbing each other’s company, floating in the meshing of each other’s energies.  There were two empty Carta Blanca bottles soaking up sun rays.  It was my favorite Mexican beer at that moment.

“Hey,” she said.  “Want to walk to the beach?  Get wet?”  Her smile and body language – sensual whispers.

“Good idea.  Let’s go.”  Lazy soft waves greeted us. The Caribbean waters were clear, coolish, certainly inviting.  Storm shedded the top part of her two-piece before swimming towards me.  We were under the spell of lively, luscious libido.  

Storm and I first met in the spring of 1986 at The Bronx Restaurant on Cedar Springs in Oak Lawn, Dallas’ gayborhood. We were part of a small group of lesbians involving ourselves in local gay politics, stirrin’ things up by simply uttering the word lesbian in public or outright expecting a seat at the table with the gay boy politicos and saying so to their face.  That collective was a tough nut to crack.

Less than a week following the Bronx encounter, she and I met at a Mexican diner, the name of which I’ve long forgotten.  It was close to downtown in a neighborhood affectionately known as Old East Dallas, a historic neighborhood full of elegant homes from the early 1900s, decked out with splays of colorful blooms nestled under brawny trees perfectly made for shade.  

When I arrived at the restaurant I was hungry for Mexican food and conversation about the lesbian movement taking hold in our gay community.  

I was also very interested.  In her.  The first time we met we spent a good bit of time sitting at the Bronx’s bar sipping drinks and sinking into conversation about lesbian politics, then the segue to the telling of stories about coming out of the closet.  She was smart, skilled and sexy.  She had been on my mind.

Walking in the door, I took note instantly, and spotted her sitting just a few tables away. She answered my glance with a slight smile, eyes on me as I walked her way.  Temptation whispered in my ear.  My entire body felt her energy, her essence, nudging the inside of my thighs.  I walked over and sat down.  Couldn’t get my eyes to avert.  That soft smile of hers, so penetrating and tempting, and the piece de resistance – her voice, “Hi there,” whispery, smokey, so frickin’ sexy.  The allure of her.  The velvety rush of it.  But, as I would later learn, the bewitching was her modus operandi and ultimately led to broken hearts, and not just once or twice.   

But at this juncture – my feelings driven by lust – I sat down at the table across from her, smiled, and said hello.  “Have you ordered yet?” 

“No, I was waiting for you,” the temptress in Storm replied.  

Her gaze beckoning, I knew I had been swept into a flashing light danger zone, steppin’ out further than was prudent.  My attraction and the chemistry at work with this gal named Storm was quite candystore-like.  Me, the kid.  Where was my adult? 

For three years, I had been sharing a home with a woman I admired and very much loved.  We saw ourselves as a couple and enjoyed traveling through Mexico – San Miguel de Allende, Monterrey, and San Cristobal de las Casas, to name a few. We just all around had a fabulous batch of fun together.   While she wasn’t much interested in living the life of a political activist, my partner was very supportive of my yearnings in that direction. 

Looking back, I see it was all or nothing for me.  My partner’s support, while genuine and loving, was not enough – which, in my rearview mirror, reflects rationalization, the ultimate permission for me to say adios.   

I was an impatient thirty-five year old moving swiftly, often with abandon, which some have interpreted as recklessness or wildness.  I would choose wild, as in: not fenced in. In order to do the political work, I convinced myself I needed somebody by my side who was pledged as passionately to the cause of lesbian and gay civil rights as I felt myself to be – the prelude to that included busting out of the closet, getting a divorce from my husband, moving out from under the shadow of my high profile investigative TV reporter self and begin living my personal life. 

The idea of partnering up with Storm as political activists, but not lovers, never crossed my mind. 

I was absorbing lesbianism and gay culture as voraciously as possible given the smothering heterosexual world I was familiar with navigating.  The longer my orbit through the lesbian galaxy, the more out and visible I wanted to be.  I was fast approaching Planet Politics, and spending more and more time in community with lesbian and gay folks.  I especially wanted to be around lesbians, an unquenchable thirst I still harbor.  

The decade of the 1980s embraced some of the spirit and energy that shook things up in the 1970s when federal civil rights laws started to level the playing field – discrimination in the workplace was outlawed, for example.  Although sexual orientation was not specifically mentioned in these laws, gay men and lesbians continued to push their rainbow envelope through the 70s, and it appeared to be working.

Lesbian and gay activists successfully lobbied the Democratic Party in 1980 – a presidential election year – to add “sexual orientation” to the non-discrimination clause of the party’s platform.  Agitate, agitate, agitate.  The clarion call to gay men and lesbians:  Come out of the closet!  It was imperative that we show up as a constituency.  Seeing is believing, ya know.  

Dallas was ripe for agitation.  I wanted to be part of the uprising.  I wasn’t exactly sure at the time what that looked like, but I innately understood that it would unfold and reveal itself.  My self-assuredness was sturdy, cinched in by the practice under my belt from the prior decade of the 70s, when I turned myself into that investigative television news reporter in a man’s world and cracked some glass ceilings.

So, here I am midway into the 1980s at a Mexican restaurant in Old East Dallas sitting at a table with a gal I’d been introduced to at a recent meeting of lesbian minds filled with notions of political doings, which ostensibly, was what our meet up was for.

We sipped our beers, shared a plate of yummy nachos and talked about her group, Lesbian Visionaries, and various plans to build community with pot lucks and participation in an upcoming Pride parade.  Storm spoke a little bit about the lesbian information line, affectionately known as LIL.  “Just call Lil” to find out what was going on in Big D’s lesbian land. 

She followed up with a story about the time she was walking up and down Cedar Springs, the gayborhood’s main drag (bad pun intended) while posting signs on telephone poles advertising LIL’s phone number to the world of dykes, femmes, and gay women who routinely wandered The Strip searching for community.  

“One of the days when I was out putting up the signs… stapling them on the posts,” Storm explained, “I heard a man’s voice behind me going on about bull dykes and lezbos and ‘not normal behavior.’  Then he threw in the ‘It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ chant…”

 I stepped in.  “Those Christians think they are so clever when they can concoct a rhyme. Like to see them pen a limerick!”   We both chuckled, then groaned with annoyance that we had to put up with this religious shit.

“After the name-calling, he yanked off one of my signs.”   Storm laughed.  “I wasn’t tall enough to get it up past his reach.”  She told me a Dallas police officer she had befriended happened by on his regular walking rounds of the gayborhood and suggested to the man that he go on his way.  That was the end of that.

My turn to give Storm an update on what my group, Among Friends, was up to, in particular, building a contact list of lesbians – because diving into politics meant reaching out to like-minded folk in order to build our community, our base, making sure we stayed in touch. It wasn’t easy back then, what with no internet, no online realm filled with links and apps leading to lesbians.  The first move I made was collecting names and addresses at Big D dyke bars like Jugs, Desert Moon, Sue Ellen’s, and High Country, just to name a few.  Always wore my cowboy boots for these excursions. They gave me a little bit of the dyke swagger I enjoyed.

Storm and I lingered over lunch, talking.  We each drank a beer and then split one.  More talking, and learning personal bits and pieces about each other.

I remembered from our first conversation at The Bronx that she had been in the “women’s music” – code for “lesbian” music – scene in Denton when she lived there.  That hadn’t been very long ago, maybe a year or so. I asked Storm to tell me more about her connection to the music scene in this small university town north of Dallas, where an abundance of lesbians and lesbian wannabes were known to be living, loving, and dancing to the music.  

Many were students at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) and, most importantly, so very many of Denton’s lesbian population were attending Texas Woman’s University, long a beacon in the state for women drawn to the sapphic way of life.

Storm told me she managed one of the more popular women's bands that called Denton home.  Her ex was in that band, she said.  With that, her story about the ex, etc., stopped.  Just the facts, ma’am.  I let that one slide.  Any associated drama from her band days would wait in the wings for the future to come around. In the here and now, at the Mexican restaurant, I was drenched in limerence.  

Before lunch ended, she invited me to “come over and see her bungalow.”  I responded, “Okay,” thinking, while this was not a very good idea at all, it was offering up some intrigue, a notion I should have dismissed but instead used as an excuse to go. “It’s close by,” she said.  “Actually, I walked over here to the restaurant.”

“Would you like me to give you a ride back?”  I was a bit buzzed on the beer and her mention of the bungalow.  I told myself we would probably just end up talking and processing, like lesbians are wont to do on a regular basis.  But I knew that was a big fat lie – the part about talking.

“Sure, I’ll take a ride home,” she said with a smooth rich bourbon flavor.  

Her bungalow was inviting – good vibes from the old wooden beams and door frames.  There was a hint of patchouli hanging around.  The open windows let in a balmy wind that kept the curtains floating on air.  They were the light beige of unbleached linen, which my mother would describe as ecru.  

There was music, but I don’t remember if it played before or after.  My memory of that time with her in the bungalow that afternoon is one of passionate exchanges that happened between the before and after.   Storm’s first kiss had time standing still. After that, I fell on the bed, I suspect.  

I recall a sweet, salty sweat rolling gently down her spine.  Her hair sensually askew.  Wetness everywhere.  My lips on her thighs.  The fitted sheet was soaked, the top sheet tangled, played out, laying on a corner of the bed.

I had definitely stepped out on my partner.  My cheatin’ heart was leaving one love for another, parting ways with the woman I loved and shared a home with, transforming at that very moment when I stepped inside this other universe that was Storm’s bungalow.

That first month was driven by double doses of lust bathed in a typical Texas summer, humid and steamy, a lovely reflection of us, and our winsome days – balmy wind, azure blue sky, wickedly dark green leaves all around. 

About a week or so later, the two of us found ourselves in the shade of a large tree, slouched in wooden chairs with well-worn wicker seats. The wood was a faded chocolate brown with pokes and small crevices carved out in a few places by a pocket knife probably.  The chairs belonged in the living room of Storm’s bungalow but she had nestled them in a corner of the backyard of the big house – both house and bungalow were 1930s vintage that helped define Old East Dallas.  

Storm was renting her place from a gay man who lived in the big house with his partner.  She befriended him when she moved from Denton to Dallas to be in a different scene, as she had explained to me.  

The details associated with Denton came later in whispers from those who claimed to know that she got around, that flirty and sexy defined her, and that she was culpable of luring someone else’s sweetheart into the sensuousness of her orbit.  As for the band Storm managed in Denton – the one her ex played in –  it would be much later when I found out the details, that her ex was her ex because Storm played with fire and stepped out on the soon-to-be ex with one of the band’s two other members.  I’ll stop there.  You lesbians reading this get the picture loud and clear. 

Like most gals who encounter similar situations, I was confident she would not be steppin’ out on me. Until she did.  It would take a couple of years before the dots got connected.  

For now, I was the one steppin’ out on my partner – one month into lesbian ecstasy with Storm, sitting in a backyard drowning in humidity and heat with coolish shade offerings coming to us from the many trees planted decades earlier – Chinese Pistache, Red Oak, Pecan.  This particular natural habitat surrounding her bungalow was where she spent much of her time. Filled with robust plant energy.  By her own admission, she soaked it up.

Her energy was soft and magical.  She possessed knowledge and wisdom I embraced.  When we met, she was reading books titled with powerful words like dreaming, magic, sex, politics, spiral, and dance.   Many were penned by Starhawk.  She had been reading this stuff at the same time I was reading Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, or something similar, given my penchant for that genre.

From Storm I learned about fetishes — inanimate objects inhabited by a spirit with allegorical powers.  She introduced me to power crystals she claimed were the source of high vibration and energy – amethyst for spiritual awakening, rose quartz for love and compassion, black tourmaline as a protective shield.   She would be the goddess bird who gifted me with a small bouquet of Guinea Hen feathers and a single Red Hawk feather in the early years.  Later down the line, she would describe me as “the rightful keeper of flight” for Red Hawk’s feather.

Awash in Storm’s spiritual vibes, I reveled in the sweet trippy-ness she cultivated, and simultaneously found myself wholly grateful that I was connecting to a deeper level of lesbianism and my dormant spiritual side.  I was very open to the initiation and attribute that to my ambivalence towards organized religion. Growing up, my mother, raised Methodist, was on again, off again with the church thing when we were growing up, and that informed my healthy skepticism – a dash of cynicism, a sense of distrust. 

On the other hand, my mother’s mother – Nana we called her – was a faithful servant, and I’ve always been thankful she leaned into one of the more reasonable choices for indoctrination and took me and my sister to the First Methodist Church in Brownsville – at the tip of Texas – on Sundays, where she made sure to give me and my younger sister each a quarter to put in the offering plate as it was passed from person to person, up and down each row of pews.  

When all of the coins and bills were in the hands of the ushers, the organist’s dancing fingers gave us our signal to stand up and let our voices go.  I enjoyed the singing part, and got goosebumps from the whoosh that came forth from the pews and consumed the sanctuary as each of us stood up in unison to sing a song praising God, from whom all blessings flow.  Little did I know at the time that God had blessed me with whatever it is that makes a female a lesbian. 

Meeting up with Storm took me to another level of lesbianism beginning that summer of ‘86, when our paths crossed and we ended up at her bungalow, in the backyard under a leafy canopy.  

On this particular day, our chairs were facing a noteworthy tree, which became the focus of our shared attention as we soaked in moments of sexual tension and palpable plant energy.  She stared at the tall trees’ lean limbs, spoondrifts of the green and leafy, and touched the drip of perspiration in the valley of her small breasts, tilting her head to look up into the branches.  This tree was actually two trunks intertwined at the base.  Her eyes followed the lines of the branches down the trunks.

“I see this tree as two lesbians diving into the earth, wrapped in each other,” she said, her voice wispy.

“Ahhh,” is all that I uttered as I took in the tree.  It was a soft “ahhh,” and I was slowly nodding my head, yes.  “ I could see the two entwined trunks, then I began to feel them and to dive down with them.  

The hits we shared off a joint did nothing but enhance the mood. The visualization Storm was ushering us through had remarkable staying power and clearly remains part of my deep-rooted memory of her.

In our conversations, her words often wrapped themselves in a spiritual context, and were soft and gentle to the ear.  I was captivated.  Her soft Texas drawl, a tender lasso pulling me in.  Now, the sacred, the divine, and the holy were goosebumps running up, down and all around my inner thighs.  And I was diggin’ it.  Spellbound somewhat.  

That summer of ’86, we were still early into the discovery of the passion we brought out in each other, amour fou.  Crazy love, the French call it.  Towards the end of our relationship, I would use the term tumultuous as the descriptive.  At this early stage, infatuation and lust still applied.  

And it was this blind, willful ardor that made me oblivious to my partner’s broken heart, at least in the very beginning.  It’s not pretty how our situation played out a couple of weeks before Storm and I made that trip to Isla Mujeres.    

There was a knock on the front door.  She and I were just sitting down on the living room floor to watch TV and eat take-away Thai from a restaurant in East Dallas.  The garish red boxes remained unopened.  A second knock.  I glanced at Storm, a questioning look on my face.  I had just moved into one side of a small duplex in University Park, a Dallas enclave of the semi-wealthy, a couple of days earlier.  And wondered who might be knocking since I hadn’t told anyone my new address.

Opening the door, I drew in a breath when I saw my ex.  She gasped, staring past me to Storm, then turning her back to walk away – crying, sobbing, heaving.  I followed after her, closing the front door for privacy as she took steps across the front yard, falling to her knees on the grass lawn.  Her fists pounding.   Her breaths deep and uneven.  In and….out.

“You….didn’t tell me.  About her.”    My ex had come to see if we could work something out.

I exhaled, my heart beating hard and fast.  There was anguish there and it wasn’t going to go away soon enough. I lacked the wisdom to know I would never be absolved of my actions.  

“I’m sorry.  I am so sorry.”  I was empty of any other words to  speak.  I had not considered this consequence.  How could I be so dense?

The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may not plan or invent her lying.  She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way.”  – Adrienne Rich

While I was out-and-out cheating on the woman I lived with, it had not occurred to me to have a conversation with her that included the complete context of the situation – that I was attracted to another woman. The story I ran with was that I was leaving her so I could devote my total being to lesbian politics.

“Well, you can do that with me, in our relationship,” she said.   With that statement alone she opened the door for me to speak the truth.  She “raised the subject,” as feminist writer Adrienne Rich refers to it in her 1977 essay – Women and Honor:  Some Notes on Lying. 

Instead, I chose to remain silent, my offering a lie, an omission.

“Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is or ought to be.”  – Adrienne Rich

I may have said I was sorry, but it wasn’t enough.  Hardly ever is.  Even so, I apologized on numerous occasions through the years – offering up regrets, crawling on hands and knees across broken glass, making amends, lighting candles, smudging my surroundings.  It was all so very long ago, but it still stings.

I’d like to believe that stepping out with Storm and then leaving my partner was fueled by the lesbian energy that ran through me.  While there is truth to that, it’s not the whole of it and is not justification.  The consequences of a broken heart do not just wrap themselves in a billow of smoke from a bonfire before floating into the dark depths of infinite space, never to return. 

As we humans wade through time collecting acumen we eventually may land at a place allowing us, almost begging us, to hark back and puzzle out the behaviors we harbored in youth – lessons we can perhaps learn from.   In my case, when I was most certainly blinded by the joy of what came when leaving the closet, I didn’t grasp the gravity of my exploits when my youngish self was swept up in that grand coming out – permission to understand myself as a lesbian, which translated to mingling, touching, talking, kissing and perhaps enveloping a gal in your love orbit.  Even if one or the both of you were with another.

Back in those days few of us knew much of anything about lesbian sex – elixir that it was.  So, as we quickly discovered it, our learning experiences were explosions of ecstasy vibrated through to the deepest roots of Mother Nature’s vast array of trees.  We also had a stay or two or three at Heartbreak Hotel.

Those were heady days, when women were coming out of the closet en masse.  In that time period when I stepped out on my partner, women who loved women were having a heyday and what stands out now like a sparkling, spinning disco ball gone wild, is all the lusty lesbian libido that was blowin’ in the wind, manifesting for future times, an army of ex-lovers.  But I digress.

And that reins us back in – to Storm. And an old adage:  What goes around comes around.  

Storm eventually stepped out on me.  With a mutual friend.  Came home at 3:30 in the morning smelling like sex.  That’s no way to start the forgiveness conversation.  

“Get away from me,” I said with my TV news reporter voice.  “What were you thinking?  That I would want you back?  Go away.”  

And she did — her leave-taking a heartbreaker for me. Likewise, the whole thing really, really pissed me off for a good while. Bottom line here, though, is simple.

Before our relationship collapsed in a heap of shreds and shards and angry voices we did magical transformative stuff with our bookstore, Curious Times, by creating an affirming space for Sappho’s gals and then some. Indeed, those were the days, my friends.