When No Means I Didn’t Know It Would Be Like This

I fell out of the Bed Race at the University of Arkansas

I don't get very many opportunities to speak in the Bible Belt. When a graduate student named Lorraine invited me to speak to gay and lesbian students at the Univerisity of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I was curious.

"How many people are in the Gay Student Union?" I asked.

"Well, I'm just about it," she said. "I mean, there's lots of folks who will come hear you, but most people here aren't out of the closet."

"Anybody besides you?" I asked again.

She thought for a moment. "No."

The leaflet for my talk was bright pink, but it didn't include the words lesbian or gay.

"If you put ‘gay' on it," Lorraine explained, "then none of the gay people will come."

I began to worry whether anyone would have a clue about the subject of my lecture.

"Well, then how will they know it's not a cooking or pottery demonstration?" I asked her.

She laughed at my apprehension. "Don't worry, the place will be packed."

And it was. Word of mouth brought out every possible lesbian within a hundred miles of campus, plus a whole contingent of Bohemian heterosexuals. I haven't spoken to such a warm, familial college group in ages. It was so different at Yankee schools. The typical outspoken Ivy League lesbo of the Northeast hates all the other queers on campus, except her girlfriend, and they are so bored with porno debates and fistfucking techniques that the most invigorating thing they've done all semester is open their mouths for a great big yawn.

A lesbian couple came up to me after my Fayetteville talk, both women with cheeks as pink as my compact, and honey blond hair. "They're Episcopalian," Lorraine told me later, whatever that implies.

My mother always told me Episcopalians were upper-class Catholics. Here, I wasn't so sure. Most of this Southern audience, queer and liberal as it was, belonged to a church; it wasn't just these two.

Elise, the taller one, introduced me to her sweetheart. "Mary had a vision as you were speaking," she said. That didn't sound very Episcopalian.

Mary's eyes were indeed shining, and her head bobbed up and down. I took a step back, bracing myself against a folding chair. I nodded at her like I heard this sort of thing all the time.

"It's her third one," Elise explained. "She saw the face of Jesus, once here at home and once at Lourdes, but this one was different."

Mary finally spoke for herself. "You were in the middle of your talk," she said, "and it was all so interesting—I don't remember which part it was—when I saw something bright shining over your right shoulder and, as I stared at it, I saw that it was a cross, a very ornate white cross that grew more and more luminous. I tried to stare further into it so I could figure out the nature of the design, but it grew too bright, and then it disappeared."

This woman was very articulate and her gaze was as steady as a rock.

"What did that make you think?" I asked her.

"At first, I thought that it meant that you were protected, and then it also occurred to me that it might mean you were a martyr."

I made a pained face at her last suggestion.

"But how does it make you feel?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I really don't believe in visions, but I like the idea of being protected, especially here. Yon must’ve been moved by what I was saying to experience something like that, so it's a very big compliment, at the least . . ." I trailed off.

I had a lot of hard decisions to make when I got home from this trip. But if I had a white cross sitting on my right shoulder, maybe I would slay my dragons easily. I grabbed her vision like a good luck charm, a bulletproof vest.

After my talk, a few of us went off to the town's—no, make that the state's—only gay bar. It was a huge warehouse, with no windows or ventilation, surrounded by a muddy parking lot. Ford LTDs were the model of choice.

"Takes me back," I yelled out the car window. I never thought I would get nostalgic about the old California gay bars with their queers, fag bashers, and cops all together in the same mud parking lot, waiting to score.

The cutest boy at this watering hole was tending bar. "He's straight," moaned one of my companions, and I was struck by the scrapbook-perfect scenario this was turning out to be.

Lorraine saw the look on my face.

"If you want to talk, let's get out of here," she gestured, and we exited past the posters for Statewide Gala Empress Coronations.

Lorraine didn't have an LTD; she had a VW bug. She rolled down the window so we could feel the wet air on our faces. "Some of the women from campus wanted to know if you would be willing to ride ‘on the bed’ for tomorrow's bed race," she said. "It's a political thing—you'd carry a sign—no one is doing it to win."

"A bed race?" I asked. Was that like being the princess on the pea?

"It's an annual spring event," she said. "They close Main Street, and everyone races each other on rolling bed frames. All the fraternities and pizza parlors and such sponsor a bed, you see, and this year the Women's Center at the U. wanted to enter a special bed that would say something about date rape."

I imagined my own little iron poster number flying down the street in a blur. "What are they going to do, exactly, on this bed?"

"This is a long story, but you'd better hear it now, I guess," Rainy said. "This is the biggest thing that's ever hit this campus.

"This university's pride and joy is the basketball team. . ." she began. She looked pained. I knew what was coming.

"That's why all the alumni give money," she went on, "and that's why, when you asked me what this university was known for, I told you basketball."

"There are lots of schools like that," I said. Big sports, rape scandal swept under rug.

"So what would I do on this bed?" I asked.

"Mostly just hold up a sign," she said. "'When I Say No, It Means No!'— something like that."

"I couldn't carry a sign like that," I continued. "It sounds like something Nancy Reagan would say. How about if I carry something that says, 'Why Can't Women Say Yes Without Duress?'"

"Well, it hardly matters anyway," Lorraine said, "because I don't think they're going to get their bed together in time. Besides, some of the Women's Center people don't think you are appropriate, being a ‘feminist pornographer’ and all."

I was quiet for a little bit. We were almost to my hotel parking lot. I felt defensive about being rejected by the local feminist powers-that-be, and Rainy wasn't even breathing down my neck. Why do I always feel like I have to show them the blood left under my nails from when I said "No" to some man?

L. didn't seem to be in a big hurry. We sat in the dark of the hotel lot and she lit a cigarette.

"Look," I said. "I'm trying to tell you that I can't stop the basketball team from going apeshit, but I'll be damned if they—or anyone else—will destroy my sexual spirit. I am not going back to the fifties."

I had to shut up before the white cross on my shoulder fell over and cracked. Maybe I could show Lorraine what I meant. "Is there a strip joint in this town? The women there might have a float I can get on."

"No way!" She laughed, and reached for my hands. "You are getting to me," she said. "Can you tell?"

So that's why I felt so nervous. She didn't care about my political diatribes.

"What about how in love you are with your new girlfriend you told me about?" I asked. Her new lover was her first femme, sex was the best ever, true love, etc. . . .

"I know, but I talked to Mary about you," Rainy said. "—About how if we weren't monogamous. ..."

"Oh, I don't even want to hear this—that means you were talking about me before I even got here!"

I hate it when couples use you as fodder for their make-believe peccadilloes and then tell you about it—as if you could play an equal third in the fantasy.

She brushed my nipples her palm. There were no bucket seats between us. "We could kiss," she said.

"No means 'No'!" I made a face at her.

But I did not move away. I felt bored, aggravated, curious, and pressured all at the same time. "You'll just go tell her, and then she'll be upset, and when I see you again in our extremely small world, I will feel like I've violated your perfect little relationship." A vomit-green diatribe against couples was rising up.

"I won't tell her," she said.

"No?"

"Not if you care so much."

My white cross was wavering. Her fingertips on my chest made me feel defiant, reckless. I lifted my head towards hers. What Means Kiss Me?

She did. She ran her hand under my legs. And then . . . She stopped.

"I just can't," she said. “Shit.”

"What do you mean, are you kidding?"

She wasn't. My stomach cramped.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I can't do this to Mary."

The shame of the predictable overwhelmed me. I wanted to say, "We're not in that silly bar anymore; we don't have to read our lines."

But instead I got out of the car and asked her when she would pick me up to go to the airport the next morning.

That night in my room I saw the REM video, "Losing my Religion," on MTV. I'd overheard somebody use that expression that morning in the breakfast place where Lorraine had taken me. It's Southern for going too far, getting out of hand.

"Connie lost her religion over that one," they'd said, and I had smiled and wondered whether it was an extramarital affair or a closet case on the rocks.

But maybe Connie was a woman who had just lost her false sense of security, like me, or like a woman who walked into a bar and flirted with the wrong bunch of guys.

That white cross could make you into a martyr, no problem, or even just a fool. It offered me no protection, but it sure was an impressive reminder of the risks.

The next day Rainy couldn't stop apologizing and I couldn't stand it.

"Hey, I didn't know it was going to be like this," I said.

Make a sign that says that and I'll carry it anywhere.

"I'll see you and your girl in San Francisco," I promised, though I never would. I picked up my bags and my cross, and flew back home.

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