I enjoyed reading last week’s “A Girl Who Likes Boys Who Like Boys: The Joy of Dating Gay Men.” I know from my colleagues, students, and friends that “Feminist Dating Blogger” is hardly the only heterosexual woman with a penchant for pursuing gay men. But there’s a male equivalent to this, and it’s one I know all too well. I’ve fallen for more than my share of lesbians, including my second wife.
Lots of people have “types” to which they are consistently attracted. From the time pubescent hormones started surging through my body, I found that I was particularly drawn to female jocks. It’s not as if my attraction was limited to athletes alone; I was a horny teen boy who could be turned on by almost anything that moved. But I tended to get crushes on the same type of girl: the star basketball player, the soccer forward, the swimmer. Some were lesbians. Some weren’t.
In several classes during my junior year of high school, I sat next to “Kendall,” the statuesque multi-sport star. A year ahead of me, Kendall was nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a jawline that could cut glass. All-League in three sports, she wore her letterman’s jacket almost every day, and would often come to class with her short dark hair still wet from the post-workout shower. Her signature scent was chlorine with a hint of sweat.
I was a nerd; she was a jock. We both liked history. We became fast friends.
It was rumored that Kendall was a lesbian. (This was a homophobic small town high school in the early ‘80s. No one was “out.”) She certainly didn’t seem to date anyone. When I worked up the courage to ask her to the Homecoming dance, she gave me her dazzling smile and said, “Aww, Hugo, let’s not spoil our friendship, okay?” She told me later she didn’t like school dances. “A waste of money, and the music sucks.” Kendall headed off to college on a swimming scholarship, and in that pre-social media era, we quickly lost touch. Years later, thanks to Facebook, we reconnected. And I learned that Kendall was happily married to a woman.
My attraction to androgynous jocks continued in college. I dated a couple of athletes at Cal (a friend labeled me, rather unkindly, a “sports bra sniffer”). At one point I developed a huge crush on Meg, a club soccer player and a freshman year housemate. Meg soon set me straight, as it were, by introducing me to her girlfriend. I knew perfectly well that not every female athlete was a lesbian. But I was developing a pattern of falling hardest for girls who liked other girls-or who, at the least, were far from boy crazy.
What is it that drew me so often to women who were same-sex attracted? It certainly wasn’t the stereotypical male fantasy about what they were doing in bed, and it certainly had nothing to do with a macho belief that I could turn a gay woman straight. And though I dated and slept with women who were straight as arrows and whose interest in competitive sports was nonexistent, I kept getting little crushes (and sometimes much more) on lesbians.
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A college roommate of mine (a psych major headed for a career as a Freudian analyst) offered a theory: perhaps I was scared of being with a woman who would really be in love with me because of the harm I might do to them. As Terry put it: “If you’re with a woman who is primarily attracted to other women, then even if she does sleep with you, you can’t really break her heart. That makes you feel safe, like you’ll never be the truly bad guy in her life.” There was a grain of truth in that, I felt. It was certainly better than Terry’s other theory, which was that my mother was a closeted lesbian and that chasing Queer women was my way of drawing close to her.
Another friend, Sheila, was more inclined to scientific explanations. She wondered if I might be chemically drawn to women with high testosterone levels. Sheila, who was not gay, was convinced that there was a specific “lesbian biochemistry” and that many lesbians had discernible facial features (especially around the jaw) that marked them out from other women. I wasn’t so sure about the specific physiognomy of gay women, and knew damn well that lesbians didn’t all have higher testosterone levels than straight women. But maybe Sheila was right, and this attraction was more chemical than anything else.
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