I hardly know anything about love and certainly less about weddings and marriage, but you can still dream about things you don't personally experience...and know that love, fidelity and commitment are as part of your make-up as your eye and hair color. If you can't find someone else who is made up like that as well, then searching for love is incredibly (incredibly!) difficult.

Having been torn most of my adult life between trying not to be something my parents despise and longing to find true love, I honestly believe it's only circumstances and stereotypes I wish weren't true that have kept me single and celibate. I have never ever been an advocate of generalizations and smear campaigns, but it seems to me it's very hard to meet other gay women who believe in old-fashioned love and romance, not to mention marriage.

I have spent much of the past few years replacing my non-existent love life with romance novels. Some times, I'm lucky and find ones that reflect my values. At others, I find ones like these...

While nowhere near as good as her Forbidden Passions, Ruth Gogoll's L as In Love is fast-paced, interesting and like a much less dramatically draining PG version of Showtime's L Word. Major pet peeve: lack of character descriptions and the character of Marlene (with her verbal abuse and use of sex as the answer to everything) is so unbelievably dislikeable it's hard to fathom anyone going near her. I keep reading because Ruth Gogoll and Susan Way make a great writing team.

The lack of being faithful to their girlfriends on the part of most of the characters is why I found L Word so hard to watch at times. The amount of people in the novel keeps any one story from being fully realized, so this is part of a four book series. I suppose I'll start the next one in the hopes that someone finds true love. :)

And on the themes of love and marriage (ideally together and never apart), this is a little story I wrote from my heart and imagination:

 

 

Wedding Night Jitters

 

My brand new wife was finishing up in the bathroom and as I waited for her in our honeymoon suite bed I became a nervous wreck.

There was no guidebook for this, despite how many romance novels I had read in my lifetime. Andi and I had been a couple for over a year and our situation was so uncommon that if we had told anyone else about it they would have thought we were insane. These days who waited for their wedding night to have sex with each other for the very first time? And how often were at least one of them still a virgin?

Andi had sworn the whole time we dated she was okay with it and I had believed it, still believed her. It seemed incredible, looking back now, that she had never once given me even a moment’s lip about my being a virgin and wanting to wait for marriage.

So the fact that she was hiding in the bathroom and I was the one eagerly waiting for her to come out would have made it all a bit funny if I wasn’t so damned nervous.

“What’s wrong?” I’d whispered during our quiet and very intimate oceanside dinner, the waves a wonderful soundtrack to our heightened emotions. “Your hands are shaking.”

Andi had put her wine glass down and stared straight into my eyes in this way she had that completely undid me every time, made me believe we were each other’s home, always and forever..which given how each of our families had permanently abandoned us upon coming out was no exaggeration. She laughed, but it was a bit hysterical, the way she laughed when she had something unpleasant to tell me. “It just hit me.”

“What?” I asked gently, taking her hand in mine, loving that she didn’t hesitate to take it in her hands, never hesitated, no matter where we were.

“That I’m going to be your first.” She paused, then laughed again, even more shrill this time. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“What?!” This time I wasn’t so gentle, panic and fear choking my throat. “Are you suddenly sorry that we waited? Are you sorry about-”

“No! No, sweetheart, of course not. I love that we waited and I think it’s very special that you feel how you do about…you know,” she leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “love and sex and marriage.” She paused as she straightened back up a bit.”But it just hit me that I-I have never felt less jaded or been more scared about being with someone that way. It just…it just really hit me. That’s all. I’m shaking because it’s here, our night…it’s here. You and me. Tonight. Together. In one bed.”

“Wow.” I felt like Christmas morning and Happily Ever After and all the other wonderful things that didn’t last long had buddled themselves up together, ready to stay put for as long as I wanted.

“Wow?”

“We’re finally here in Hawaii and all I want is to go back to our room. Right now.”

“But our food hasn’t gotten here yet.” Her eyes twinkled.

“I know. But I don’t think I can wait another second. We’re married now. It’s official. And I love you so much I can’t see straight. I think my eyes are actually starting to cross.”

“You know, now that you mention it.” She still held my hand.

“I’ll be a good girl and wait, if you like.”

“I can’t wait another second, either. Even if they can’t send the food back, I don’t care. Let them bill us. I just want to get back to the room.”

 

And we had gone back. But Andi had been in the bathroom a long time and I was starting to worry it was because she couldn’t face me, that she was wondering what she’d gotten herself into with this.

I had just slid out of bed and started to the other side of the room when the door opened and she stepped out.

I swallowed so hard at the sight of her you could hear the sound all through the room. “Oh, Andi.” I paused, searching for the right words. And I could do was say was her name again.

“I’m sorry I stayed in there so long, Teddie. I’m so scared. I didn’t think I would be. But I am. Terrified, actually.”

“Terrified?” By now I stood in front of her, reaching out to stroke the side of her face, loving that she looked so hearbreakingly vulnerable in her sheer but stately floor length nightgown.

“Before I met you, I slept around a lot. I…I never ever thought I would want to wait like we have and now here we are, waiting, and I am both so ready and so scared and I…I feel like the virgin. I do.”

“You do?” I kissed her cheek. “Really?...And…and you’re not sorry that I am?”

“No, not at all. Do you mind about my past?” For a second, fear seemed to flash in her eyes…fear in my Andi’s eyes!!

“Of course not. No way. I love you and I hope I can always show you how much. Tonight is one of the ways I hope to, but I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“You could never disappoint me, sweetheart.”

“But…”

“Maybe it’s time we both stop talking.” She took me in her arms and that was it. My trembling took over and all I could see was her mouth moving closer to mine.

“This is it, isn’t it? Oh, Andi.”

“Shush,” she said and I could feel her smile against my mouth as she walked us backwards to the bed and we started falling, in slomo, it seemed.

When we hit the bed it felt like Cloud 9, below, above and everywhere else, not because it was straight of Hollywood, but because each of us, in her own way searching and wading through loneliness, had finally found our elusive, perfection connection with another soul.

 

 

 

 

 



 
 



I don't know why exactly, but something about Al Green's voice makes me feel less alone, less like emotional black holes would suck me right in if I weren't more careful.

Though I have loved the Bee Gees since I was a little girl, it was always Al Green's cover of "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?" that truly got to me. It is so deep and rich and, if you're listening to it during a particular trying time, his voice seems to envelope your soul in warmth and comfort.

A writer for Q music magazine once referred to Al Green as the "authentic voice of love's pain and purity on such wonders as "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?" and that "his cover took the soul ballad to new levels of artistry and refinement."

Doves, Lost Souls Album..Oh.My.Gosh!! This is outstanding and a great cd to sink your soul into, especially "The Cedar Room": "a psychedelic slow-trance groove number, introduced by an electric, stutter-tremolo guitar."--The Big Takeover, 2000

I could try and write about just how great this album is, but I wouldn't be able to do is justice. As Lionel Shriver writes in the New York Times: Much like smell (it’s all very well to say that something smells “like an orange,” but how do you describe the smell of an orange?), music is notoriously difficult to evoke on the page. The fact that language has musical attributes — rhythm, melody, tone — isn’t much help when you’re trying to express Bartok or Captain Beefheart in words. Even when music has lyrics, its essence is antilanguage, or at least in another language — and an inability to translate explains why so many album and concert reviews are unreadable.

Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover, however, does a pretty darn good job of capturing the amazingness of Lost Souls:

Honestly, I sometimes think insomnia and a need to reach out and easy access to the Internet make for the worst possible combination.

You know that horrible half sleepy/half wired where you're too jumbled to get anything functional done, but too alert to fall asleep? And you want to talk with someone kind and interesting, but you don't have a cat (or any creature with a heartbeat, for that matter) so you do the next best thing. You watch Lucy! I will always be grateful for the legacy she left behind. Nothing cheers me up quite like a mini-marathon of I Love Lucy!

 

I love the episode ("Return Home From Europe") where Lucy smuggles cheese on board a plane so she doesn't have to pay fees for it being over a certain weight. Pretending it's a baby since she thinks they fly free, she is soon caught up in yet another wacky adventure. 



Reading Forbidden Passion I felt the characters come alive. I understood their situations and the feelings of liking someone you shouldn't all too well, of dealing with inappropriate feelings and desperately trying to channel them into something else entirely, something more productive and feasible. ("It was endless...and hellish," one woman thinks as she longs for someone who is emotionally and logistically out of reach.) Yearning for the impossible and having it somehow happen (eventually) is often a favorite theme of mine, especially in romantic fiction.

But everything here that makes this a gripping read also makes it a frustrating one: two completely different people connect unexpectedly and then spend the rest of the novel coming together and separating, coming together and separating, the one woman totally committed to understanding and accepting how aloof, and even cold-hearted, the other woman (the love of her life) is, both of them often behaving in a way that makes you want to yell a little.

We suffer for love, surely, and many of us would do most anything to get and keep it. Yet I found the dynamics between Kim and Sonja often very exhausting. Not a lot of people would put up with the nonsense Kim does. She's either a fool or exactly the kind of person you'd want to be in a relationship with.

Crisp yet heartfelt writing, great dialogue and fully fleshed out characters keep what should have been a ludicrous plot a very compelling one. Another selling point for me is the uncomfortably realistic attitude that desperately trying not to acknowledge how you feel about someone can be a twenty-four hour a day job. In a way the very things that made me uncomfortable with Forbidden Passions were the things that kept me reading.


........................................................................................

When I first read Forbidden Passion early last year, I didn't have much patience for the characters. But having just finished this novel a second time (and finding it to be a much better book than I had previously thought) I found (unfortunately) more than my share of quotes with which I could relate, not (of course) on a relationship level like the women's in Gogoll's novel (even if they don't know they both feel the same about each other until well into the story), but in a completely one-sided way.

Using Kindle Highlights more this time around, I saw a lot that struck me as emotionally familiar. You can see both what you like and what other readers favor when you activate digitally underling functions on ereaders, as well.

Seeing some people have picked the same passage can give you an eerie, but not unpleasant feeling, of being less alone...I also believe (however pathetic or 'nuts' this may sound) that a lot of the reading I've done this past year has somehow saved me (whether it be lesfic or mainstream.) Sometimes, without my choosing it at all, the right book seems to fall into my life and heal little part of me. 

Kim had nearly fainted. She immediately began working out a plan for how, “for reasons of strategic importance to the company,” she could move the department head’s office. (The main character is half joking/half serious about relocating when she realizes her new boss is someone she likes.)

She watched Sonja as much as possible without staring openly. I have got to stop doing this! Kim squared her shoulders and forced herself to look in the other direction. It made no sense whatsoever to become attached to a woman like that, or to even waste time thinking about it. She glanced over at her and enjoyed watching her laughing, relaxed profile. What a wonderful woman. (It made me feel slightly better this passage had been highlighted several times by other readers. It's awful when you catching yourself looking at someone, almost against your will.)

My God, she must be afraid of me! What did straight women really think of lesbians? That they had nothing better to do than pounce on unwilling partners. That's how it looked anyway. (This both saddened me and made me laugh because there are actually people out in the world who believe lesbians are out to "get" every woman in the world. Yikes!)

Kindle Highlights has helped me both personally and with research for book club related materials. Even though Sleep Donation by Karen Russell is about as far away as anything I've read this past year I found myself underlining many wonderful passages in it. Also, oddly enough, H.L. Mencken's In Defense of Women has some highlight-worthy lines in it, too! :)

"It is a special kind of homeless, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams."