A Roadmap For a Queer Happily Ever After

On Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls, The L Word, and queer grown-ups who are still growing.

When I decided, in my mid-20s, that I should maybe, perhaps, perchance, take a cursory look at my sexuality, I did it like every other lesbian my age living in rural America: I went to Blockbuster and stashed The L Word season one DVDs between a whole bunch of super straight movies, took them to the register without making eye contact with anyone, and also tossed a bunch of microwave popcorn and candy onto the checkout counter to obfuscate my exploratory homosexual rental even further. And then I watched them all, locked in my bedroom, hidden in a blanket fort under my bedcovers. A week later I was filling up my gas tank at the QuickTrip and broke down in tears when I saw my sister's name pop up on my phone. 

"Where are you?" she demanded, as soon as I answered. "What's wrong? Who did something to you?"

"It's Bette and Tina," I wailed. "Bette cheated on Tina with a contractor from the museum and I thought they were going to be together forever and I don't know why I care so much!" 

My sister said, "Babe, slow down. Who did what?" 

"Bette cheated on Tina!" I sobbed back. 

"My love," she said, so gently. "Who are Bette and Tina?" 

"FROM THE L WORD!!!!" I snorfled. 

If I'm being really honest with myself, the noise she made right then is the exact moment in time I finally realized I'm gay. It was, simply, "Ohhh." 

Not like, "Ohhh, thanks for explaining." Or, "Ohhh, that new Showtime series." Or even, "Ohhh, right, of course, you've always been over-invested in fictional characters." No, it was: "Ohhh, you've finally realized you're a lesbian and you're doing TV about it, because of course you are, and the main couple is hurting you worse than TV's ever done before because they're your first gay couple and you've imprinted on them like a closeted baby duck." My sister didn't push, she didn't mock, she didn't even excavate that "Ohhh." She simply went to Blockbuster and got The L Word for herself and sat down and wrote me a fan fiction to mend my wounded heart. 

I often say I was raised by wolves, which isn't true, of course. I was actually raised by TV and movies and books. I didn't know I was gay as a kid because I'd never even heard of being gay, but I did know, from a very early age — like kindergarten early — that there was something really different about me. It wasn't just that I liked girls more than boys. Or that I cried to the point of hysteria every time someone made me put on a dress. I just didn't fit. And I especially didn't understand the life lessons my family sometimes tried to teach me, because so many of them involved the foregone conclusion that I would one day become some man's wife. I'd nod along whenever anyone offered advice about cooking pot roasts or ironing men's shirts or hanging up men's slacks in a way that "wouldn't make my husband mad," but I knew for an absolute fact that I would never have a husband, and also that if some man got mad when I was doing him a favor, like an actual chore, he could jump off a cliff. 

As a kid, I went searching for stories I could see myself in, so I could try to figure out if it was even possible to live a happy life that was so different from the lives I saw the grown-ups around me living — but even Jo March and Anne Shirley ended up married to men! Even Jane Eyre, and after she discovered that her betrothed had a whole other wife in the attic! Even Dorothy Zbornak, whose marriage to a man ended The Golden Girls, the greatest love story between women I'd ever seen! The only wild-haired, pants-wearing, bossy tomboys who didn’t get husbands were the ones who stayed kids. Scout Finch and Peppermint Patty were really all I had to work with. 

After I accepted that I'm a lesbian, I spent hundreds of hours of my life walking back and forth between the History and Religion sections at Barnes & Noble, occasionally working up the courage to sneak toward the shelves between them that housed the LGBT books. It took months before I had the courage to actually stand there in front of two sparse rows and browse, and a whole other month after that to reach out and touch any of the gay writing. But even after summoning all that bravery, I still couldn't find what I'd been looking for all my life. I still couldn't find the story of happy gay adults. I was starving for something that seemingly did not exist.

I was, in fact, 43 years old before the story I'd been chasing finally discovered me. It came in the form of a purple paperback book, two women standing coyly together, holding hands, on the cover. One was wearing a purple polka dot dress and vintage eye glasses, all curves and kindness. The other was wearing a black tank top, jeans, and boots, wrapped in a colorful sleeve of tattoos, a camera in her free hand. Delilah Green Doesn't Care, by Ashley Herring Blake. It's the story of four women, really: Three best friends since childhood — Astrid Parker, Iris Kelly, and Claire Sutherland — and an outcast stepsister, the titular Delilah Green. It's a romance, yes, between crunchy shell/gooey caramel center lesbian photographer Delilah and sweet single bisexual mom/ bookstore owner Claire. But even more than that, it's the story of two queer grown-ups who are still growing.

Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls Series

Delilah Green Doesn't Care takes place in Bright Falls, a small town in the pacific northwest, which becomes the setting for Ashley Herring Blake's follow-up books, too: Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail and Iris Kelly Doesn't Date. Astrid's a buttoned-up perfectionist with an overbearing mother, and realizing she's bisexual also helps her realize that she's not living her own dreams. She falls for a butch carpenter named Jordan Everwood from Savannah, Georgia, who drives a truck named Adroa and who has a cat named Catra and who is convinced she's ruined her entire life because her wife has left her and she lost her career in the grieving aftermath. Iris Kelly is the ginger-haired, flame-hearted, bisexual life of the party; she refuses even the idea of a relationship, until she meets anxiety-riddled aspiring Shakespearean actress Stevie Scott, a lesbian who flips her entire world upside down with aching sincerity and a desire for more.

All of these queer women have suffered heartache, have hurt and been hurt. They trip over their trauma sometimes. They're brave and also terrified and full of hope and contradictions and love. They're striving to be their very best, for themselves, and learning, clumsily at times, how to be their best for their partners. As couples and as friends, they comfort and sharpen each other. Delilah and Claire hold hands and roller skate. Astrid and Jordan twirl around on swings on the playground late at night. Iris and Stevie dance together on the beach, in a hot air balloon, in the living room, everywhere. They all stretch and compromise, and remain authentically who they are, as they find their way into each other's beds and into each other's hearts. All the while: still growing. They're soft with each other. They bring out the best in each other. They mess up, and they learn from it. They temper their selfish impulses, and apologize when they miss the mark. They hold valiantly still and allow themselves to be seen. 

When I finished reading Delilah Green Doesn't Care, I flipped back to the first page and started right over. I did the same with the other Bright Falls books, too. Because these women allowed me to see me, at last — and the life I built with my own wife, from scratch. 

I've written so much about the idea of "queer time" over the course of my life. About how it moves differently than regular time, than heterosexual time; about how we’re on our own schedule; about how we exist outside the rigidity of the patriarchal space-time continuum. Despite what we've been told, over and over, there’s actually not a cosmic clock counting down the minutes we have to meet someone and fall in love and build a life together. The hours aren’t melting away for us to choose our careers, or uncover our desires, or chase our dreams. There's no finish line; we never really arrive. We grow up, we get better, we fall down, we learn, we grow up even more. 

Being a grown-up, for real, is choosing to do the hard work. Not once, but perpetually. It’s unpacking the way our experiences inform our behavior and how that behavior rubs up against the people we love in good and bad ways. It’s figuring out when and how to put other people's needs and desires before our own, and figuring out how to accept the grace of other people doing it for us too. It’s not getting what we want sometimes. It’s not getting what we need sometimes. It’s making ourselves trustworthy and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to trust in return. It’s respecting the people in our lives enough to constantly take extra care with our words and our actions. It’s tough but gentle honesty, especially with ourselves. It’s especially apologies and it’s especially forgiveness. There is absolutely no way human beings with their own insecurities and longings and pain and hopes and fears and ambitions and trauma can join our lives together — in any way — without an enormous amount of friction. And there’s no way to ease that friction without a constant commitment to keep showing up, to keep working. 

No one could ever have convinced me on that fateful day all those years ago, crying at the gas station, that the characters of The L Word would live even longer than their original series, that they would meet me again, 15 years later, on a whole new show called Generation Q — and that I would scorn them. But that's what happened, because Bette and Tina and Alice and Shane may have changed my life by knocking me out of the closet, but I was the only one of us who did the hard work of growing up. The L Word gave me fighting, fucking, crying, cheating. But Ashley Herring Blake's Bright Falls gave me what I'd been desperately searching for since I learned how to read, how to turn on the TV. Real, deep, empathetic, tender, profound, empowering, comfortable grown-up connection. A roadmap for a queer happily ever after.