Spark Notes is a recurring series about the lightbulb moments in sexual development.
One month into my senior year of college, after a breakup with a long-term boyfriend, I asked my roommates for a favor. They were all some flavor of queer, and I had an inkling that I might be, too. I begged them to devise a kind of lesson plan for me, a semester of personal exploration to help me figure out what I wanted and who I was.
In a way that I consider endemic to college hookups, my queer tastes at age 21 were less informed by any innate sense of attraction than by whoever was around and down. By that point, I had been with a handful of women, all of them slight and pretty. Each time had been soft, sweet, and gentle, leaving me with the sense that I’d had a sexy slumber party with a friend rather than a hot date with a crush. I wasn’t sure my feelings for women could ever match the intensity I craved, which I’d sometimes experienced with men.
If that were true, I was fully ready to accept my fate as a straight woman. I considered my encounters with women a diverting side hustle, while my long-term career plan lay in heterosexual pursuits. But I still suspected the existence of a more erotically compelling corner of the queer universe that I simply hadn’t uncovered yet.
My roommates eagerly accepted their assignment. They took me to Jell-O wrestling night at the local dyke bar, to a “gender-funk” social at the student center, and to a house party where I clumsily hit on a lesbian heartthrob destined to become a celebrity journalist. Because it was 2009, and because no one in this story was too proud to embody a queer cliché, my friends also suggested I audition for a campus production of The Vagina Monologues.
The director of the show was a junior named Jess. (I’m using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, though this account will be uniformly, rapturously complimentary.) She had a mane of tight curls, impossibly thick eyelashes, and a gravelly voice that made my stomach twist. She was thick and strong, with the solid frame of a rugby player whose moves on the pitch had landed her with an ACL tear. When I met her at our initial rehearsal, she was hobbling around in a knee brace, still recovering from the surgery. I remember thinking, as I found myself on the receiving end of her sly smile for the first time, that she might be the first person in the world to exude swagger on a set of crutches.
Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred me that I could be gay and still have a type—that queerness didn’t demand a desire for all or even most women. The lesbians I knew growing up were limited to a few ancient (thirtysomething) teachers and the studiously sexless Ellen DeGeneres, none of whom had sparked any attraction in me or modeled a life I wanted to emulate. Even if I had seen a racier, infinitesimally more diverse aughts-era pop-culture depiction of queers, as in The L Word (which I didn’t watch until it was screened for me by those very same roommates, the true heroes of this story), I would have observed women swapping sexual partners indiscriminately among themselves for dramatic effect, as if any lesbian might be expected to swoon for any other.
It didn’t help that, in mixed-company discourse, the language of top and bottom is usually reserved for gay men. Having barely peeked beneath the surface of gay life, I had no sense that there might be an entire ecosystem of queer species loving living fighting breathing in all kinds of different ways down there.
Under the spell of Jess’s loud laugh and bold charisma, I told my friends that they had done good, and that I had a budding interest in rugby. With her bum knee, Jess had to rest in a chair backstage during rehearsals, which conveniently obliged me to sit on her lap—it was just so crowded back there!—whenever I had to whisper a blocking question in her ear. After several cans of Keystone Light at the Vagina Monologues afterparty, I took her home with me.
That night, I felt like the emoji with the top of its head exploding in a cloud of smoke. There is a running joke in mainstream culture that no one knows how lesbians have sex; they should ask Jess. She was confident and attentive, with more physical power than any of the artsy boys and reedy wannabe-intellectuals in my past. If she could do all this with a damaged ligament, I marveled, what miracles could a lesbian pull off with full knee mobility?
Plenty, I would learn, as Jess’s recovery progressed in the months that followed. Working valiantly against a lifetime of heterosexual conditioning, my fantasies began to change shape. Instead of imagining various sexy situations with men, my daydreams drifted to what it might feel like to find myself in the center of a women’s rugby scrum, or be mercilessly tackled on the pitch. I had zero interest in joining the team; I hate competitive sports and prefer my joints intact. But the brawn of a woman athlete’s body and the magnetism of butch energy opened up a new realm of desire for me. For years, I’d considered myself too cool and too much of a weirdo to fancy someone as basic as a football guy or soccer star. Now, I gave in to the pleasures of falling for a jock.
The realization that there was a type of woman out there who could have this effect on me sent me into the ecstatic spirals of what felt like a first crush. I set aside any doubts that I was legitimately queer and turned my attention to the thrilling and terrifying project of visualizing a brand-new gay future for myself, which would seem to require I familiarize myself with the world of women’s sports.
Jess and I casually dated until I graduated, then hung out a few more times before losing touch. I know I was neither the first nor the last person for whom she turned the “Q” in LGBTQ from questioning to queer. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a deep gratitude for people like her, who take on the holy work of initiating the inexperienced into queer life, which I have never been willing to do. Nothing sounds less sexy to me than going to bed with a partner who lacks expertise, and the thought of shepherding someone through the first wide-eyed phases of a gay awakening gives me hives.
So I give thanks for Jess and those devoted roommates, whose ministrations continue to pay dividends. Some years after my turn in the Vagina show, I met a doe-eyed queer in a button-down and boots who, I learned through a friend, had her own history in collegiate athletics. Instantly taken with her quick wit and two functioning knees, I had the perfect come-on ready to go. “I heard you used to play rugby,” I said. “So did the girl who turned me gay.” Eight years later, I married her.