I can’t tell you what made me say yes, but I did. We all met in Shaun’s tiny apartment above his grandmother’s house. She was blonde with one side of her head shaved. I wore a white leather mini-skirt. I’m not sure what he told her about me, but she burst out in declaration as if to counter anything he’d told her, “She’s beautiful.” We all ended up at the house of probably another woman Shaun was seeing. He disappeared into a backroom with her to do drugs while Lauren and I sat in the living room, chatted, and fell in love. She introduced me to punk music and a punk lifestyle. Most of her words were, “Fuck this.” I remember early on sitting in a diner with her and she threw sugar packets across the room at people. She was rude. She taught me to eat bananas and chocolate with coffee, and that dessert could come before a meal. She broke rules.
In the way that Joshua changed and became a man when I returned to him, I became a woman with Lauren. I changed overnight. It was my love for her that made me stand up and challenge my father.
On one particular eve, I was going to meet her. I was ironing my clothes, a light blue man’s shirt. My father was lying on the couch, drunk and angry, noticing all the changes in me and said, “You’re not going out, you’re not to leave this house.”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“You’re not,” he commanded. Our fight escalated. He had a history of violence against women, his wives, but never with me. “Look at you, you’re a goddamn lesbian,” my father yelled. “You’re wearing men’s clothes.” He was referring to all the ways my style had changed after meeting Lauren. The fight continued to escalate. He followed me into my bedroom and shoved me hard into the window. The large glass pane broke and formed jagged edges. With one sudden or false move, I might have fallen out or been sawed in half. But I fell forward. As I lay on the floor my father kicked me furiously in the stomach. That day, I left my parents’ house and never returned.
After Shaun and Lauren, and moving to New York, I met Cheryl.
Cheryl was short, light brown, stocky, athletic and middle class. I was tall, elegant, working class from the suburbs. I pretended I was tougher than I was. I swore a lot. Moving to the city from Boston, I might as well have had a cow and a pail. I was that naïve.
Cheryl and I were opposites. She was introverted. I was extroverted. She was perceived as a good girl. I was perceived as a bad girl. I suppose we both needed some of what the other had. We met at the same YMCA on 34th St. where I met my best friend Michael. Cheryl and I became lovers. At the time she was dating a man and I know I must have seemed like Shaun to her—bold and beautiful, an out lesbian. There was a fear of me, too. Cheryl and I moved in together and we were each other’s first lesbian relationship. We were able to consummate in a way Lauren and I did not. We were two Black women in a white school, and we negotiated that terrain together.
When I think about Cheryl there is a lot I don’t want to talk about. There is pain and betrayal. At the beginning of our relationship I had gone with Cheryl to meet her brother. We both assumed we were playing it straight, keeping our physical distance, but later Cheryl’s brother confronted her. “She’s your lover,” he said. He could tell in the way we moved together.
People have asked who I was at this time. Flipping through a journal I kept during those years, I read page after page that I felt numb. I numbed myself through partying. Michael, my new best friend, would call me at all hours of the day and night and ask me to go party. I always answered the call.
Of the two-and-a-half years we spent together, the end was the most important part with Cheryl. I’d outgrown the relationship, but I couldn’t leave, coming from where I’d come from, having been orphaned as a child, it was unspoken that you never left someone. If you want to understand me, want a window into circumstances that shaped me, watch the film What’s Love Got to Do With It, loosely based on Tina Turner’s abusive marriage to Ike Turner, an abuse she eventually overcame. Return to the film’s beginning, go to Nutbush, Tennessee, and meet a boisterous little child singer named Anna Mae Bullock. In the film’s first scene she is a rebellious child singing in the church. In the second, she is being left by her mother, who is trying to escape an abusive marriage, which also happened to me. In a scene that exists in almost darkness, little Anna Mae asks her grandmother in utter bewilderment, “But why did she leave me?” The grandmother, unable to respond with any viable answer says in an effort to comfort, “Just don’t you worry about it.” In the third scene, Anna Mae is eighteen years old, reuniting with her mother and sister. She is resentful for having been abandoned. She meets Ike Turner in a nightclub and they share a love of singing. Later in the film, he renames her Tina.
Being left by her mother is the event that forms the basis of Tina Turner’s marriage to Ike Turner. After the initial honeymoon, for years afterward, she is kicked, beaten, stalked, and raped. I believe no matter how monstrous Ike was, even if she were raped and beaten, she never wanted him to feel as bad as she had growing up, to feel that alone. She never wanted him
