One of the people I love best rejects any kind of essentialism: gender essentialism, "born that wayâ conceptions of homosexuality, everything. Everyone is born and made, of course. I was born a dyke but I became one too. I learned to be one. I learned words and history and style, ways of talking, standing, looking, dressing, wearing my hair. I read novels, I watched films, I went to bars. I looked at myself in the mirror. I became obsessed with certain images. I didnât even read the books sometimes. Intuitive, sometimes instantaneous attachment. Could it have been otherwise? She, against essentialism, played a crucial role in this becoming. She was my professor, and she was the very thing I was becoming, wanting to become, although this too I had to learn. Wanting, that isâI had to learn this. As we all do, though it may not always seem so. Does this mean that we are born no way, born neutral? Where do ways originate? The neutral is desire for the neutral (Roland Barthes). Everything we know is paradigm: not both. The woman-loving woman goes against the paradigm: the natural pairing, the forbidden object. For our younger selves: the unknown other way, the nonexistent option. We donât like to say that knowledge is the requisite to intimacy; we donât like to leave desire in the hands of conscious choosing, or reason. We like to get a little crazy, or something. Youâre incurable, she said to me. She didnât mean my sexuality, she meant how much I care about ideas. I was born that way. And made that way, in part by her. Being made to be and learning how to be is what sheâs all aboutâshe is a teacher. She believes in things and tells you, if she loves you, what youâve got to do. You care too much about ideas, she told me, youâd never make it in civilian life. No, I wouldnât. The notion that this, all this, could not have been otherwise âcan reassure profoundlyâ (Eve Sedgwick). I could not have been otherwise than queerâhow wonderful! Of course, we want things to be otherwise. We want possibility. But we donât want worlds without gay people in them. I am, I think, âunalterablyâ lesbian (ES). A lesbian per se. I will change Eve Sedgwickâs language here: the gay kid who was born that way is not a âgapâ in the discursive fabric but a fold (okay, this is her language too), where the impossible gives way to contact: or, where what is not supposed to touch does touch. âWomen together!â the maternal character in Desert Hearts exclaims. Sheâll never understand it. Something reassuring in that too. My professor, she doesnât understand why people hesitate, go slow, feel tentative, reluctant to attach. Why donât you just have fun, she says to me, like having funâs as simple as which ice cream flavor to select. She sort of scolds me and I sort of frown and shake my head. Because itâs her, unalterably her. I think of our relationship and my attachment to her, and of what about me is unalterable, including that which she has shaped. I think about her person and her way of being and the way it oriented and reorganized my ownâthis orienting and reorganizing was my life in college, and some days I still wake up there. Iâd be a stranger to myself without it, her, desiring, desired. How could anything be otherwise?Â
