Jealous

On My Behalf

Last week I was jealous.

Its quite an ugly emotion isn’t it. One that we are taught to swallow or at the very least hide. Allow me to be clear, this green monster that lives inside me isn’t to do with wealth, success or status. It isn’t about having a Netflix special, designer shoes or a garden that manages to look good all year round, its not about travelling the globe, turning left into first class on a plane or affording a custom made suit. Indeed this jealousy is to do with the version of me that didn’t have the confidence to wear something so masculine. I am jealous on behalf of 15 year old me. That version of me that was deeply lonely in her closet.

A few weeks ago I was walking Devils Dyke (an actual national trust trail near Brighton) with my wife, our daughter and three of our very best friends. Its worth pointing out we are all lesbians, except for my five year old, we don’t know about her yet but the way she looks at Kristoff in Frozen suggests she might fancy boys when she’s older, which is fine because Love is Love. I digress. I was walking devils dyke with my best dykes and we were chatting about the rise of lesbian culture, a favourite conversation of ours, with the brilliant Cat Burns on The Traitors, the collection of unapologetic queer heartthrobs in the Women’s Super League and Renee Rapp, Cat and Chapelle Roan filling our ears with sapphic anthems.

We all imagined our 15 year old self and what this visibility might have meant to us. How different it must be now for girls realising their queerness. I remember sitting in my teenage bedroom Fame Academy’s Alex Parks on my CD walkman, so starved for representation I listened to her album of cover songs multiple times a day. In secret of course, always in secret. The girls at school said anyone that liked her was obviously a lesbian which was disgusting. No one can know the truth. Or watching my taped recording of that Sex and The City episode where Carrie kisses Alanis Morrisette while playing spin the bottle. The colliding feelings of lust and shame, the thrill, the disgust. The shrill scream of my TV/VHS combo rewinding to watch that scene just one more time.

And I tried, I really tried to be straight. There was a brief period where my mum thought I was boy crazy, always out on dates, boyfriends changing like the weather. Always kissing boys with chapped lips, tasting of rolled cigarettes, on an old sofa in someones parents garage that we’d managed to convince ourselves was a cool place to be. Always avoiding the ones with sporadic whiskers of a hopeful moustache, favouring the ones who’s boyish good looks were something close to feminine. Trying to force a stirring within me. Willing a feeling of want. Blue WKD’s, Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory playing out of tiny tinny speakers, me trying hard to assimilate, to be ‘normal’.

An hour of kissing, a bulge in his trousers, was that expectant? Hopeful? Again I willed myself to feel something close to excitement. Nothing. Less than nothing. My knickers were dryer than washing on the line on a summers day. Like my libido had taken a sabbatical.

We laugh about these moments now, as we walk, these odd sexual encounters that have now become stories we tell, comedy bits, we have perfected the jokes, the timing. The laughs roll. The time I took a pretty famous male actor back to my shitty little flat in Clapham after a drunken snog, tugging at each others clothes as we fell through the front door, only to lose confidence the moment we made it into my bedroom when I announced standing in just a sports bra and boy pants ‘I am so sorry, I don’t know what I am doing, I am a lesbian’. His response ‘Yeah I thought you were to be fair’ it was awkward, then funny, we had a cup of tea and a slice of malt loaf, we talked about the girls we fancied, he borrowed some PJs and we slept next to each other in platonic bliss.

And while me and my friends laugh at the ridiculousness of my messy early twenties, I edit out the tears, the hollowness that comes from pretending to be someone else and the sex I had, that I didn’t really want, in an effort to be like my college friends. The jealousy switches, it switches to joy for girls like me coming out now. The girls that won’t have to have those confused, degrading moments on old stained sofas because they didn’t know another life, another love, was possible, The girls who have footballers, musicians, the social media of Sarah Paulson, that photo of Cate Blanchette and Aubery Plaza on the red carpet which is so hot it gave me third degree burns, Brandi Carlisle on the One Show. I am not saying coming out is easy for everyone these days, I know there is a myriad of reasons that can make it really hard but I am pleased theres a roadmap, hope, some really good music and did I mention Sarah Paulson?