1. The first question someone like me obviously has to ask herself is how are you going to do it? Making love with a man, even if it were done as impersonally as a medical exam, was abhorrent to me. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many men I had kissed on the lips, much less permitted to touch me anywhere intimate. It was always difficult for me even to imagine a relationship with a man. It never took me long to discover who I was. I never had to go in and out of any closet. It was my parents who kept themselves shut up, and still did. I hated to think of the excuses, the rationale they used to explain my lifestyle. They chose to live in some illusion. I supposed I should be grateful. They could have considered me dead and gone the way some of the parents of gay people I knew considered them.
Of course I realized that there were women who got married just to have children. The years were nicking away at them and they panicked to the point where they considered themselves sufficiently in love with a man to marry him. Afterward, after the children were born, these women lived what were practically separate lives. Their husbands were just a different sort of deliveryman. But even that was clearly not for me.
What's more, there was the matter of inherited genes, resemblances. Whenever I looked at our child, would I always see the man I had employed, reminding me of what I had done? I could end up resenting my own child.
Employed was the kindest word I could use to explain it. It would make me feel like a john, not a prostitute. I'd be paying a man to have intercourse with me. If I didn't spend actual money, I would spend my self-respect.
Nevertheless, I realized it might be interesting to consider whom of the men we knew we would choose. He certainly wouldn't be anyone we had worked with or who worked for us. Would we choose on the basis of his personality or his looks? Money wasn't a concern.
Willy and I ran a successful catering business in Palm Springs, California. We had both begun our lives here as waitresses. Her first restaurant went out of business just before the end of the tourist season, and my first restaurant was set on fire either by the owner or by someone who hated him. It was definitely an unsolved arson.
Nevertheless, both Willy and I wanted to remain in the desert. It had become a comfortable place for the gay community. There were gay people involved in the local government and more and more gay entrepreneurs were opening their own restaurants, clothing stores, bars. There was even a small supermarket owned by two gay men right in the downtown area.
I didn't meet Willy in any gay watering hole. We both were hired by the manager of a new restaurant chain that was already known nationally to be a restaurant catering to gay people. The manager himself was not gay, but he did make an effort to staff it with as many gay people as he could find qualified. It was ironic because any restaurant not hiring someone because he or she was gay would be subject to a lawsuit.
Willy was not quite sure about me when we first met. There was never anything butch about me or anything else that would immediately give away my sexual identity. I wasn't particularly good at any sport. I had enjoyed acting in high school and during my first two years of college, but I dropped out after that, mainly because I had a disastrous love affair with another girl in my dorm. I liked gourmet cooking, and I was admittedly obsessed about my appearance, chasing a variety of skin products that claimed Fountain of Youth capabilities. I paid a lot of attention to my hair and wore it long, or at least what was considered long, which by now was merely down to the nape of my neck. I was also a clothes junkie, reading fashion magazines as obsessively as some members of the religious right read the Bible.
In short, I was what is called a femme, a feminine woman who is attracted to masculine women or butches. I was really a high femme, a femme who dresses very femininely, high heels, skirts, makeup, the whole enchilada.
Whenever we sat around talking about ourselves, Willy enjoyed practicing amateur psychology and accused me of battling myself.
"You're still in denial about your sexual identity," she insisted. I knew she was just trying to bait me, but I couldn't resist arguing.
"I am not. That's ridiculous, especially in light of my personal history, where I am and whom I'm with, Willy."
"Not really. You're still carrying more baggage than I am or ever was. You came from a far, far more conservative world than I did. No matter how independent we claim to be, we still mourn the loss of parental approval. Your brother doesn't even talk to you anymore, Kate. You told me yourself that he and his wife are too embarrassed to admit you're related. Don't sit there and claim none of that wears on you."
"I'm not."
"It's all right. We both have our own demons. Just don't go any deeper into denial. You're still struggling with this heterosexual, good-girl thing," she insisted.
I knew she liked to tease me about it, but I think she was at least half serious when she suggested my sexual confusion was also a major motivation for my wanting to have a child.
"Nothing makes you more of a heterosexual woman than motherhood," she said. "Don't give me that word parent. You don't want to simply be some generic parent, Kate. You want to feel like a heterosexual woman inside as well as outside, and nothing will do that for you as well as pregnancy and birth. Otherwise, you would be talking about adoption. You don't even mention the concept."
I suspected that part of the reason why she brought these things up in discussion, whether she did it in a teasing manner or not, was to get me to develop a tougher skin. She wanted me to be more prepared to handle those demons she saw circling our wagons.
"Face up to this," she insisted, "otherwise, you'll spend your life in one form of denial or another and never be happy or comfortable. Believe me, I've seen it. It can destroy you."
She was always working at getting me to commit fully to our relationship, which ironically was one of my prime motivations for wanting the child in our lives in the first place. Why couldn't she see that as clearly as I could?
At times I thought I was so distasteful to her, I wondered why she remained with me. Because of her commitment to me despite my inner conflicts, I felt more assured about her love for me and I loved her more because of it. Although she could be as cold and as cruel to me as she was to anyone else, she wouldn't permit any other person to come close to saying these negative and nasty things to me.
She was butch.
She walked with a prizefighter's swagger. Her body was as tight and firm and muscular as any gymnast's body, and as a matter of fact, she had been one in high school and had won awards. At times I thought she could metamorphose into a steel arrow and shoot herself into an argument. I was probably the only soft, feminine thing she had ever permitted in her life. She often took a lot of heat because of me, but she never minded it or complained. In fact, there were occasions when I thought she looked for the arguments, the fights. She could just put on that sort of angry mood the way someone would put on a blouse. After we had been together a while, I confessed to having been afraid of her when we first met. I told her she entered the restaurant like a gunslinger searching for a duel in the street and looked at me with some disdain.
"I thought you disapproved of everything about me, detested me, and made fun of me behind my back."
"I should have," she said.
Willy wasn't exactly the romantic type. Squeezing affectionate words out of her was as difficult as squeezing juice out of a dried, old orange, but when it came, it was sincere, so sincere, it took my breath away and made all the frustration and waiting worth it.
About six months into working at the restaurant, we had been with each other long enough to consider moving in together. Once she saw how well I cooked and how our friends raved about my gourmet meals, she came up with the idea of our starting our own catering business. We didn't have enough money saved, but one of our still-in-the-closet bisexual friends, the wife of an attorney in town, convinced her husband to capitalize us so we could rent a small warehouse, equip it with stoves, walk-in refrigerators, dishware, etc., and rent a delivery vehicle and we were off and running.
We advertised a little, but it was truly word of mouth that built our business until we had to take on some help. Our service area expanded, and we even began to prepare dishes secretly for a Palm Springs restaurant. A number of magazine write-ups, some television exposure, and a few celebrity testimonies made it necessary to find a bigger warehouse and hire more employees.
Soon after, we bought a home in the Indian canyons of Palm Springs for over a million dollars. We could now service the mortgage. It had a drop-dead view of the mountains that boxed in the canyon, and at night we could see the light of the Palm Springs Tramway nearly 11,000 feet high. With a sizeable income, valuable property, and continually expanding business, I found myself thinking more and more about having the child.
Willy was right about my feelings concerning adoption. I never seriously considered the option even though most other gay couples we knew who had children had adopted. Our child had to be part of me. Maybe she was right in saying that was the heterosexual longing in me talking.
Willy was certainly right about the aftermath for these gay couples with children. They had so many new interests and demands that they moved away from our circle of friends. But I couldn't think of a friend with whom we were so close or upon whom we were so dependent that I wasn't willing to risk that friendship in the name of our own child.
However, up until relatively recently, I wasn't fully convinced gay people should have children. There were so many argument...
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