Does My Love for a Straight Man Change My Queer Identity?

Rachel’s sexuality provides her with a clear sense of self and community—until she falls for Nick and questions everything she thought she knew about herself.

With just 4 days left to submit your story to the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize, we’re sharing a crowd favorite: Rachel Parsons’ fascinating finalist essay in our 2023 Memoir Prize. Enjoy this riveting read, then polish your own personal essay and submit by Sunday!

Illustrations by Kenny Wroten

“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.”    

—James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

I’m 33 years old, walking with nowhere to go. The monastery grounds are lush, adorned with creeping dogwood, hawthorn trees and bee balm. Queers are spread across patches of earth: pacing, breathing, silently repeating metta phrases. “May all beings be happy. May all beings be free.” We gather at the Garrison Institute in the Hudson Valley, holding each other for four days in silent meditation. I’m dressed down, in yoga pants and an old Close Guantánamo T-shirt, relaxed with people who’ve become spiritual family. It’s a refuge I seek every year, a place for me to experience who I am beneath my social identities.

My favorite spot’s down the stone steps, past the vindictive rose bushes, at the bottom of the hill, where forest greets manicured grounds. There’s a dirt path there, widened from years of travel. I take 20 paces forward: stop, turn, repeat. 

I’m alongside a mossy upturned tree. Her trunk’s soft on the ground, roots unearthed and gloriously reaching. I try to concentrate on soil under toes, but my mind wanders. I let it. I broke up with my fiancée, Sin, a week before; she’s still in our creaky rent-controlled Park Slope apartment. She won’t move out for several weeks, after the screaming, the dent in the wall and the bloody commas on my knuckles. But this battle hasn’t happened yet. Right now, I’m here in the quiet, waiting for grief that won’t arrive.

Where the sorrow should live I expect emptiness, but there’s burgeoning peace. I’ve been in anticipatory mourning for months now, this the quiet climax. “I’m ready for my person,” I pray as I pace, laying my invocation at the tree’s roots. “I’m ready to meet her and build our life.” 

The gong rings in the distance, calling me back to the cavernous womb of the meditation hall. I bow to the tree, sealing my intention, and start up the hill.

I’m 19 years old. Janelle and I sit in the top of a small lake house: cross-legged, bare knees touching, her hands on my thighs. We’re in jean cutoffs and rib tanks, salty from Michigan summer heat.

“Do you want me to wipe off my ChapStick?” she asks. She’s wearing strawberry Lip Smackers. “Will it be too weird for you?”

“No.” My eyes move from her gaze down to her lips, scared but wanting. No.

“Are you ready?”

I nod. She gives me the softest kiss I’ve ever earned.

“Oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like,” I think. I taste the plastic nectar of her lip gloss as the kiss stretches out time, caressing every cell in my body. 

The relationships I’d had with men were muffled. I followed a script and mimicked my friends on the phone, whispering excitedly about first blow jobs. I feigned interest. 

But with Janelle, I find my desire and integrate into queer community: cook vats of lentil stew for lesbian potlucks; dance sweaty with strippers at gay clubs; lead direct-action trainings to prepare for political protests. I buy a pair of black leather motorcycle boots and pierce my nose, coveting more visual markers of my queerness. It’s revelatory. I feel wanted for who I am, not for who I think I should be.

It’s easy falling in love with women. I’m enamored with their curves, their tangy sweetness, their resilience. I date across the gender spectrum, delighting in a hard butch as much as a high femme. I love being queer. It’s a portal into a world unlike the one I’m born into; a journey promising me that I, too, can be free.

I’m 27. I’ve been sad so long it’s become part of my appearance. My girlfriend Emma ended things months before. I drag myself around Brooklyn, sobbing on the subway. Strangers hand me crumpled tissues or offer sympathetic half-smiles before turning back to their train reading.

I’m on my way to a friend’s barbecue. It’s here that I meet Nick, a nerdy, cute cis man visiting from Baltimore. He still describes our first moments with lustful excitement.

“I couldn’t take my eyes off you,” he says. “You were so beautiful. I wanted to know what you felt like underneath your Smooth Criminal T-shirt.”

We spend the evening talking over warm white wine and salt and vinegar potato chips. He’s funny and flirty. I’m drunk on his intoxication. 

The sun falls below the stout apartment buildings and I realize it’s time to go. To deal with my breakup, I’d made post-barbecue plans to meet an unavailable woman I’d been crushing on for months. I wink at Nick and bat down his requests to stay. 

My date’s a predictable dead end, but my connection with Nick is not. A month later, he comes back to the city. We have dinner on a Red Hook rooftop, kiss at Sunny’s Bar and end the night in his hotel room. 

I don’t quite know what to make of it, but it’s fun. I relish his hands and taut back muscles. The way his lips trace my breasts wakes something inside me that’s been dormant since Emma left. 

The next morning, I wake Nick with a soft kiss. “Thanks for a fun night,” I say.

His eyes are heavy with sleep. “Yeah, it was great. Let’s talk soon.” He reaches for me, but I offer only my hand, squeezing his briefly before walking out the door. I participate in one obligatory phone conversation and stop taking his calls.

I’m 29, careening down Ocean Avenue with a half-filled suitcase. I’m carting clean clothes, a fresh tube of toothpaste and leftovers from last night’s Zen Vegetarian dinner. I’m ragged after a tumultuous love affair with Jade. We just had sex, followed by an hours-long argument at what was — until last week — our shared apartment. People stare at me, a dangerously thin, slumped-shouldered white woman, barreling teary-eyed down the street in the mostly Haitian neighborhood where I live. 

I’m staying with queer friends down the block, a grounded couple who hold me in my brokenness with late-night talks, warm food and their dog’s head in my lap. They were gone last night, though, and I snuck out like a teenager, down six flights of stairs, over two city blocks to where Jade was waiting, both seductive and cruel, for me to enter her. I left, swearing this would be the last time.

Three months later, I’m with Nick, naked, in a Baltimore hotel room. I’d finally extricated myself from Jade and was traveling for work. At the prompting of a friend, I called Nick and asked him to take me out. It’s soothing to be with him — uncomplicated and temporary — after the protracted power struggle that was Jade and I. 

In the spectrum of sexuality, I’m mostly lesbian. I’ve dated a few men over the years but didn’t take any of them seriously. My politics and emotional landscape don’t hold space for them, and I quickly grow weary of deciphering how their hearts are wired. So there’s no vulnerability here with Nick. He can’t split me open because he can’t get close enough to try.

This becomes our pattern: Nick appearing after each heartbreak. We go out a couple times, me in costumes of skin-tight dresses and red lips. There are flirtations in dark bars, shots of cheap whiskey and plates of spicy chicken wings. We have sex and then don’t talk for months or years. He sometimes broaches the subject of dating, but I stop him.

“Just consider it,” he suggests. 

“I won’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. You knew what this was going into it.” 

“I know,” he says. A heavy sigh. Then silence. 

But there is always a next date, a next fuck, and without me realizing it, Nick has become a lover. I tell myself I remain ethical by being clear about the physical nature of our relationship. Isn’t this what men do to women all the time? 

Nick plays along, but I’m not totally fair to him. When I’m rooted in my integrity, I know I’m acting from a place of imbalanced self-interest. I don’t want to be unkind, but if I sit too long in this truth, I won’t be able to continue coming in and out of our coupling — and I want to. So I keep him close enough, drawing him in only when it’s time to disappear into his adoration.

I’m 33. It’s two weeks after I prayed to my tree, and several years into Nick’s and my accidental lovership. We attend a mutual friend’s wedding and, predictably, I end the night in his suite wearing only thigh-high stockings. 

We lay in bed, my fingers playing with the curls on his chest. His body’s both different and familiar in the ways I need. I decide not to spend the night, but before I get up, Nick tightens his arms around my torso and speaks into the dark.

“I really like you, Rachel,” he says. “We don’t have to be together like this if it’s not what you want, but please don’t disappear on me again.” 

I look up at him, caught off guard. My breath hitches in my throat, but my heart loosens. His vulnerability’s disarming and I dip briefly into that well of hope and yearning I shared with my tree not long ago. Surprised, I shake it away — Nick’s not the one to fill that space. But I suppose he’ll be good company while I get my life back together. 

“I won’t,” I say. “I’ll call soon.” 

Three weeks later, Nick visits. Sin has just moved out the week before. I tell myself to wait, take time to transition — but I don’t want to.

Nick rides the train up from Baltimore. I head out to meet him, having just left a tutoring gig on the Upper West Side. I’m wearing new red flats, a white bodysuit and a high-waisted black-and-white-striped pencil skirt. I pretend it’s my work look, but I’ve dressed up for him. I picture him slowly peeling off my top and kissing his way down my abdomen. 

I’m excited, but nervous. This isn’t an out-of-town wedding hookup I can explain away with a broken heart and open bar. Nick came here on my request and is staying, for the first time, in my home. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but here I am, doing it.

Nick emerges from the 86th Street station and my stomach dances. He has a fresh shape-up and is wearing a fitted plaid shirt with crisp jeans. He’s boyishly handsome. I feel our pull toward each other. It’s not the hungry lust I’ve had with so many women, but it’s sexy and I want him. 

“Hey, pretty lady,” he says.

“Hi.” I rise to tiptoe and kiss his soft lips. Desire ripples through my body down between my legs. Lighter than I’ve felt in days, I take his hand and guide him across Broadway toward Central Park.

We spend the afternoon uptown, then take the 2 train back to Brooklyn. We have sex and linger naked under the sheets for hours. We order tacos, eating in our underwear around my small dining table. We laugh and talk, slipping into comfortable ease. I’m too wired to sleep that night, but I’m comforted by Nick’s warm body and the groggy way he pulls me to him the next morning.

Another invitation follows, then another. One-night rendezvous start extending over weekends, then into the following week. Between visits, we text often and talk on the phone for hours. 

My friends notice my smile when I say Nick’s name.

“Rachel, are you falling for this dude?” they each ask. 

“No,” I say. No.

But I wake up next to him one morning and realize the safety of our emotional distance is gone. This man who loves computers, mountaineering and garage rock has wriggled his way beneath my skin. We’re quickly moving into the euphoria that pulls you out of the ordinary and into the first stages of love.

There’s more at stake here than loss of sleep and productive work time that evaporates when new relationships begin. Every step closer to Nick feels like a step away from myself. I’m restless, disoriented from the question casting a shadow over even our most luminous moments: How the hell did this happen? 

I’m 22. My partner Mel and I are on the floor of our new apartment, eating $5 Little Caesars pizza. The apartment costs $575 a month, expensive for our Detroit neighborhood, but it’s got two bedrooms, French doors and a clawfoot tub. Our cats, Gizmo and Oliver, are off sniffing every corner and closet. We’re almost completely broke after paying the security deposit and first month’s rent. We spend days watching reruns on her mom’s old TV and scouring the newspapers for jobs in our underemployed city. We’re stressed, but we’re together.

We finish our pizza and get dressed. We’re going to a free show at the Trumbullplex, a long-standing housing collective populated with punks, activists and artists. I apply thick eyeliner, pull on black leather chaps and lace up my scuffed motorcycle boots. Mel tightens a belt around her thrifted floral T-shirt dress and pushes sparkling tear drops into her earlobes. We circle our necks with feather boas acquired from a clothing swap and head out the door, defiantly holding hands as we cross the empty boulevard and make our way to Mel’s car.

We find fierce queer community in Detroit, defending each other against homophobia, which has a special acerbic quality in an early 2000s Midwestern city. Mel and I hold each other up through it all. We’re trying to figure out who we are, as fresh adults and as a couple. 

It’s healing to have the space to explore this; it’s something I can only do with another woman. With men, I can’t get out of my head. I’m vigilant, waiting for the moment they try to define me in a manner I can’t identify myself, their patriarchal training appearing in both predictable and unexpected ways. I take up less space when I date them, subconsciously centering them, as we’re all taught to do.

But here with Mel, despite the world’s hostility, I feel unshakable safety. Not having to nurture a man’s ego — or protect myself from it when it’s threatened — frees me up to experience joy. Relax. Love deeply and well. Make sexual and emotional requests that fill me up and change my shape. 

Mel and I find parking easily on a main city thoroughfare and kiss in the car before stepping out onto the cracked sidewalk, palm-to-palm for reassurance and bravery. We travel beneath an irregular pattern of broken and working streetlights as we half-skip, half-walk to our destination. Our hands unclench as we reach the sprawling house on Trumbull Avenue and start up the steps, held and protected in our queer utopia, at least for the night. 

I’m 34. Nick and I are in a Baltimore business complex that could exist in many American cities: a parking lot ringed with a wine store, Home Depot, Starbucks, a Potbelly Sandwich Shop. Lots of concrete. I’m staying at Nick’s for the weekend, and we’re getting a bottle for his friend’s party. Nick’s leaving Baltimore soon, moving to Brooklyn so we can feel out what life is like lived together. 

His friends have been cordial in the past, but I haven’t spent extended time with them. I want a sense of what I’m getting into at this party. 

“What do your friends think of me anyway?” I ask as we walk toward the Chesapeake Wine Company. “They’ve gotta be skeptical of me, no? After all these years?” 

“Nah,” he says. I give him the side-eye. “OK, maybe a little.” 

“I get it,” I say. “I don’t blame them.” 

“It’ll be fine,” he says. “I told them I’m not worried, so they shouldn’t be.”

He’s calm and unbothered as usual. I envy his clear sense of self. 

“Do they know I’m queer?” I ask. My body and gender expression is such that I pass in many spaces. When I’m with queers, I’m not questioned in any way. With my half-shaved head and femme-tomboy style, I look like a lesbian. I move like one, speak like one, am assertive like one. But with Nick, I’m read as straight, which means I become invisible.

I hope the answer to my question is yes. That would mean he rendered me correctly. But Nick assumes the opposite.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not a big deal if they do.” 

“How do you not know?” I ask. “Did you tell them or not?”

“Meredith knows,” he says. She’s lesbian, the only one. “I don’t remember if anyone else does.”

“Well, it’d be helpful if you’d figure it out.” 

I’m getting heated. Nick notices. He stops when I’m halfway over a parking block and grabs my hands. I’m 5-foot-7 to his 6-foot-3, but the elevation of the small concrete structure brings us close to eye level. He offers a sympathetic look. 

“There’s no need to be nervous,” he says. “They’re gonna be nice to you. Besides, what does it matter if I told them? You’re not queer anymore. You’re with me now.” 

I stare at him, stunned. 

I yank my hands away. “What the fuck, Nick? That’s what you think this is?”

He’s taken aback, confused that his crooning, which I usually lean into, isn’t working. I turn around and storm off, my large hoop earrings banging against my cheeks.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he says, reaching for me. But I’m gone. “I’m just trying to make you comfortable.” I keep walking. “Where are you going?”

“Not here!” I yell over my shoulder, running from the sting of him. If Nick was queer, this would be different. Different if we shared cultural touchstones or he had any concept of what it meant to be socially situated anywhere but at the top. I’ve been trying to convince myself for months that I’m not in a heterosexual coupling, but it’s clear now that the only thing queer about this relationship is me.

Being with Nick demands repetitive coming out, explaining basic shit to straight people, holding my tongue so as not to cause a scene or having to justify my anger when I won’t. I’m dealing with it, but I don’t want to deal with it from him.

Nick jogs to catch up. “I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry. I messed up.” He reaches out and touches my arm. I pause, mostly because I have no idea where else to go. Defeated, I let him hold me.

Eventually we untangle, call a truce, buy our wine and return to the car. Nick’s able to admit he doesn’t understand me but wants to, and I agree to share what I need him to know.  

Post-party, we have makeup sex at his place. Afterward, I stare into the darkness while Nick breathes evenly beside me, satiated and dreaming. I’m rigid with questions. Confused and slightly drunk, I turn over and finally succumb to sleep. 

Things are calmer the next day. We’re in bed, a crisscross of bare legs and tangled sheets. Nick smooths my hair and draws circles with his fingertips on my lower back. “Maybe I can do this,” I think, enjoying his warmth and the sun sparkling on his whiskers. But I’m aware this feeling’s strongest when we’re locked away in our private world. It’s reminiscent of being closeted: the stark difference between two lovers enraptured in a bedroom and the self-consciousness of being seen on the street, wondering if people know.

Nick pulls me from my reverie with a kiss. I kiss back, hard, and try to feel only the parts of this moment that have nothing to do with me and my questions; just us, and how his hands cherish my body and cradle my exposed heart.

I’m 33, at G Lounge in Chelsea. I’m inhabiting my most lesbian self and verbally processing for the hundredth time.

“Girl, why do you stay with him, if it creates so much drama?” my friend Eric asks. He throws his shot back with a flourish. “Just go get some pussy and be done with it.” We laugh.

I’m aware of the femaleness of my experience; I’ve never met a gay man in my predicament. It’s curious. There’s a lot of talk about the fluidity of female sexuality, but it’s often presented in a jejune way: Women don’t have clear desires, we just fit into the mold we’re given. But this is false. Because we’re given societal permission to explore our emotions and don’t have the rigid constraints of performing masculinity in order to access and maintain power, it means that when we tap into our divine right of pleasure, some of us can find sexual connection with many different genders.

It is heartening to watch these dynamics change as younger generations come of age; things are already a lot more fluid than when I grew up. But still, I feel lost in my relationship with Nick. I often ask myself the very question Eric posed: Why don’t I just leave? 

I’m here because I’m in love. Despite my preference for women and trans bodies, I am drawn to Nick’s gentle nature. He makes me laugh even when I’m angry and he is learning how to hold me when I cry. There is a deep knowing he’s my person, but a profound confusion as to what kind of person this makes me. 

It takes me months to fall asleep next to Nick. As is the case for so many others, cis male bodies have been a site of trauma for me in the past: bodies that touched me too forcefully, bodies that ignored my nos. Sex with Nick was fun until I dropped my guard. Then, the vulnerability triggered a post-traumatic stress response: hypervigilance, an inability to rest. 

We’re in my apartment one night a couple of months into dating. I’m 33. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m awake in the living room, watching Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos. Nick comes out of the bedroom and finds me in my boxer briefs and his large UMass T-shirt, lying on the couch.

“What’re you doing out here?” he asks. 

I’m quiet for a moment, not sure what to say. He sits next to me and I lay my head on his shoulder. I try the truth. 

“I don’t sleep when you’re here.”

“Ever?” he asks me.

“Ever,” I say. I’m embarrassed, but too exhausted for pretense. I’m sniffling, then sobbing. 

He holds me. “What can I do?” 

“I don’t know,” I say. 

We’re silent for some time. He kisses my head, then pulls a pillow onto his lap, pats it. I lay down and he strokes my back.

“What are we watching?” he asks. 

We stay like this, awake until the sun comes up, even though he has a four-hour drive back to Baltimore the next day. Sometimes I doze off, but every time I startle awake, he’s present, his palm on my hip. His soft eyes are on the screen, smiling while we take in the astounding power of the ever-expanding universe. 

So many queer women I know partner with straight men. I support them, but the relationships make me sad. “We’ve lost another one,” I used to joke with friends, as we’d laugh and mime pouring one out for our fallen comrade. 

I think of all the anti-bisexual and queer-phobic sentiment I’ve absorbed: that those who live in the undefined spaces of sexuality, that resist the dichotomy of being gay or straight, are dishonest — untrustworthy. I know this isn’t true, but why is it that so many of us who have the capacity to love a spectrum of genders end up in heteronormative relationships? Is it societal pressure? Biological drive? I’m not sure.

I’m 38. I spend weeks reading queer theory, looking for answers. It’s a relief to gain intellectual distance. Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde and others allow me to connect with identity and culture in the most delicious way.  

I look for myself on the page. I have to be in here somewhere. My queerness exists in multiple layers and shows up in the ways I approach work, build community and — now two years into parenthood — raise my child. My life story, politics, history, favorites — all queer. I have ex-girlfriends like family, and I’m most comfortable in queer space. It’s interesting to draw on my gender studies training to theorize queerness and apply it to my life.

Eventually, though, I need to leave the books. To live in my body that wants what it wants. It can’t be controlled or demanded to conform to what I want to portray on the outside. I enjoy the sexual explorations I have with Nick, but I miss the queerest desires I hide away. I know this suppression is only hurting me, but I feel protective. These longings are too dear, too foundational. I’m not sure we can recover if he misinterprets these parts of me too. 

I’m 39. I have sex with Nick. I’m pregnant again, big, so it’s logistically complicated. We laugh at the awkwardness of it, but I’m hungry for his touch. I try asking for more of what I want: teasing fingers, lips in neglected places, dirty talk. I think of the women before Nick who knew exactly how to suck on my clit, instinctually finding my pleasure until I was yelling their names, begging. 

I’m quieter now. Make love with less abandon. I worry our daughter will wake up. I wonder if the bedroom window’s open and the neighbors will hear. 

But I love when Nick fucks me. I love putting his dick in my mouth and feeling him moan. This is new — only with him. What else will awaken if I let it?

I’m 37. It’s the Chicago Dyke March. We’re in the park, celebrating our freedom to be. I’m wearing the gayest outfit I own: black tank top with CUNT inscribed on the tits, gold booty shorts, long metal turquoise earrings, my well-worn motorcycle boots. I’m chatting with a femme next to me, and I share that I have a daughter.

“Oh wow, so sweet,” she says. “How’d you get sperm?” 

I feel unexpected grief. I understand I have the accessibility to conceive that a lot of queer people don’t, but this doesn’t change my emotions. I love the idea of queering pregnancy and childbirth, creating a way outside of heteronormative mechanizations of parenthood. But that’s not how life played out. Instead, Nick and I got drunk at a friend’s wedding, had unprotected sex and he knocked me up. There was no “spuncle” or syringe, just Nick’s penis inside my vagina.

The initial reaction was not joy. At least not from me. As was our pattern, Nick was sure about the baby and I was reeling. This pregnancy was another assault on my identity and autonomy — another journey into a world I wasn’t invested in. But after the shock wore off, I sat in the middle of what my life was, not what I thought it should be. In the quiet, beneath the fear, I felt an unexpected happiness. I kept the baby. Nick and I got married, moved home to the Midwest and are raising our child in a mostly nuclear family structure.

Here in the park, I try to make a joke of my new reality. “Oh, I have a free sperm bank in my bed.” The woman looks at me, confused. “My partner’s a cis man,” I admit.

“Oh!” she says, then laughs. “That makes it easy.” 

And that is that. With no malicious intent, she turns away, our conversation over.

I’m sad. I’m not ostracized, but I’m different. 

I’m upset by my pain because I thought I was fine. That I’d moved through my bewilderment and made it to the other side. But it always returns. Not comfortable, really, but no longer novel. It quiets at moments, when I let Nick be a nuanced person and not just a stand-in for men and their wrongdoings. When I choose queerness — radical love, liberation, curiosity — within our relationship instead of needing validation or witnessing from people on the outside. 

I call on queer ancestors when I’m unmoored. Today, at 40, I’m sprawled out on an armchair, next to my thriving monstera plant, reading Baldwin. I’ve been sitting with his writings on identity in The Devil Finds Work for some time now: “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self. … This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.”

I think I understand now. There are times we change our garments to align with the current season of our lives — the weather both inside and out. We’ll change again. This isn’t hypocrisy or self-delusion, but the opposite. It’s a courageous move to sew new clothing from scratch; to allow our garments to reveal ourselves more fully. We should wear our adornments loose. Wear them proudly.

And it’s not just that we’re not our labels. Sure, we can throw off the uncomfortable identifiers — the robes — and feel like we’ve done the work. Or we can understand that it’s not the clothing we need to attend to so much as it is to learn to love the fat, skin, tissue, scars and muscle we accrue over a lifetime of growing into who we are. 

Some days I can live into this and some days I can’t. I’m queer and still becoming. 

I’m 35. It’s four months before Nick’s and my wedding, seven before we leave New York. We take the Metro-North up the Hudson River to Garrison. I’m not here for a meditation retreat, or to mourn the end of a relationship. I’m here to show Nick a place that’s special to me.

We trek the quiet wood chip trail from the station to the monastery grounds. The dirt path takes us to where my tree spreads even wider than I remember, verdant and dripping from a recent rain. “This is her,” I say. 

He’s heard the story many times. My pleading through stunted sorrow. My belief that love would materialize. The surprise that it was Nick who appeared instead of her. 

Nick comes up behind me and encircles my waist, puts his chin on my shoulder. Our cheeks touch. I lean back and relax into his earthy scent. 

He kisses me on the temple.

“Thanks, tree,” he says, admiring her. “I always knew we’d be here someday.” I can feel his face rising into a smile. He thinks he’s about to be funny. “Rachel should have listened to me years ago.” I swat at him, but he’s already drawn back.

“I didn’t want it then,” I say. “Besides, you weren’t ready for all this.” We laugh, taking in the soft strength of my tree, her magnificence and power, enjoying the quiet. We kiss.

We’ve done a lot of work to claim love. I’ve almost run. He sometimes misinterprets me. I’ve hidden and still sometimes hide. He’s not sure he’s feminist. I get angry and he withdraws. He’s met my queerness and loves me for it. I struggle to let him know me in places I resent him, where he can never understand. We miss each other but find our way back. And here we are now, by the tree. At least in this moment, I let him all the way in. 

I want to finish this essay here, kissing by the tree, a tidy ending to an eight-year journey of defining myself outside all the ways I understand. There are still moments I want everything to be different; I can be quick to fantasize escape. “Why did I give up my life for you?” I spit at Nick once when I’m angry. I know it bites him. I want it to.

And I know the loudest voice questioning my queerness is my own. But my community keeps me accountable. “Love is love, Rachel. Remember?” Sometimes I do. 

My queer family knows the nature of our identity: its nebulousness; how it breaks through binaries, white supremacy and disconnection from our true selves. Sure, there are lesbians and gay men invested in identity politics in a way that casts me outside their impressions of enough. And I know there are more privileges in my life when I pass. But rigid definitions of man/woman, in/out, gay/straight do not create the world I want to inhabit. And those that would discount me are not people I’m interested in knowing, as our politics and queer identities are so divergent they are incompatible. 

And yet. 

I’m still troubled with questions. Am I scared of who I am underneath this label that is, at its core, undefinable? Does shedding this title, this queer identity, make me less interesting — less special? And if queerness is a process of occupying liminal space, then aren’t I queer even with Nick? These inquiries are often unresolvable — it’s part of the richness of our queer lives. Is my need to find resolution, then, part of what keeps me anchored in suffering? 

I sit with all this, and I can’t end at the tree, proclaiming on the page that I’ve come to acceptance. I’m not there yet, and maybe never will be if my life continues on this trajectory. For now, I keep writing.

I’m 40, visiting a friend in Indiana. It’s late Friday night. We’re each snuggled into a corner of a faux suede sectional, talking in front of a stone fireplace under a high ceiling with hollow eaves. Both of us are queer and in relationships with cis men. We’re naming our desires and the places we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. 

“You talk about how you’ll be non-monogamous one day,” they say. I nod. Nick and I’ve discussed this many times. We want to stay together but feel the limits of our partnership. “What if you don’t?” they ask.

“What if I don’t?” I pause to think. Non-monogamy is always something we’ll do later. I proposed it when Nick and I first got together. He said he was up for it, but would have to love me less, so I declined. We went through a tough time the winter before our daughter turned 2. Our therapist asked us if we considered dating other people. Nick was down, but then it was March 2020, and everything was tinged with death. Now I’m pregnant with our second child, due in 33 days. Once again, we’ll open things up later.  

“What if we don’t?” I repeat, after some time, to my friend in the cabin. They wait for me to find the words. “Then these parts of me I’ve ignored for so long will stay hidden. I won’t ever be completely alive.” 

It’s the first time I’ve articulated this so plainly. The gravity of it hits me and I toss and turn in my bed later that night, afraid. I wonder how committed I am to living in my queerness. 

It’s easier in some ways — this life in which I’m given accolades and safety for merely existing in a heteronormative couple. I can keep living in the comfortable world Nick and I create in our vintage condo in Hyde Park, parenting our kids, growing herbs and lavender flowers in our window boxes. We’re a closed unit, loving and tender. There’s care here; roots, laughter, safety. Things could remain and I’d live a good life.

But would I disappear?

I’m running late this morning, searching for my kid’s Baby Shark umbrella. We’ll miss school drop-off if we don’t leave now, but she’s insistent. I swing open the coat closet door and stare at the mess. Underneath the jackets, jumbled yellow vacuum and pile of unpaired mittens are my motorcycle boots, chafed and resoled, worn in from years of life. I linger on them for an unavailable moment before sighting the umbrella behind the small step ladder. I grab it.

I hesitate before closing the closet door, contemplating wearing my old boots. But I settle on a brown and cognac pair, the ones that collect compliments from queer women at my daughter’s school. They’re stiffer than my old boots, but sturdy. They’ll do for today. 

Don’t forget to submit your own memoir story by Sunday, December 7!

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Rachel Parsons is a queer teacher, writer and mama living in Chicago. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s M.F.A. writing program, her work has appeared in multiple venues, including Yes! Magazine, Guernica and Mutha Magazine. She loves big cities, is calmest near water and thrives in community with other troublemakers and shapeshifters.

Kenny Wroten is a freelance illustrator and comics artist.

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This post was originally published on January 31, 2024.

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