Feel the Yearn
Confirming my lesbianism by unconventional means
I am a lesbian. I’ve known that from a very early age. (Although, to be fair, I didn’t understand what that meant at the time.) Sure, I was into comic-book superheroes from the time I was three or four years old, but aside from Spider-Man, my favorites were Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Catwoman. I liked their male counterparts, too, but I was the only kid in our playgroup who owned the female character action figures.
I had my first girlfriend at the age of six. We were deeply into each other. I wasn’t concerned about being interested in girls at an age the other boys thought they were gross. We were unabashed in our pleasure in each other’s company.
Our relationship ended not with a breakup but with a move. My family relocated to a different part of town, ending any chance for us to be one of those fairytale couples who fall in love as children and grow up to get married. Such is life.
As an out and fully transitioned trans woman, I have felt my lesbianism drift a little towards pansexuality. The spectrum of people I consider attractive has definitely broadened, though I still can’t imagine myself with a cis man.
But these flirtations with extra-lesbianism notwithstanding, my preference largely remains girls. And this sapphic predilection was recently confirmed for me by pop cultural writer Jill Gutowitz. In her 2022 memoir-style collection of essays, Girls Can Kiss Now, she asserts (among many other things) that the very definition of lesbianism is yearning. She dedicates an entire chapter to this concept, and after I finished reading it, I was fully convinced of my own lesbianism.
Because, oh, do I yearn. Yearning and I have shared an intimate (and potentially toxic) relationship for more than fifty years.
It began with those superheroines in toddlerhood. Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl on the old Adam West show that I saw in reruns after school dazzled me. Wonder Woman – first on Superfriends and then on her own TV show with Lynda Carter – was so cool, because most of her adversaries were men, and she could defeat them easily. I was struck both by their beauty and by their power. They were everything I yearned to be.
But they were largely forgotten in the wake of my introduction to the ultimate beautiful superhero: Princess Leia Organa.
May the Yearn Be with You
Seeing Star Wars for the first time at the age of nine changed my life. The spaceships and laser pistols and action-adventure all lit my brain on fire. But there was a singular force around which this magnificent space opera revolved.
It wasn’t Luke Skywalker. Sure, he’s the main character. But nobody I knew wanted to be Luke. He was whiny and insecure and unaware of his potential. Even as children we all recognized these things about him on some subconscious level and eschewed him as the character to admire.
It wasn’t Han Solo either. He might be handsome and cool and clever, but he was a pirate. He constantly had to be persuaded to do the right thing. He twice tries to put the Rebellion in his rearview with the Empire about to destroy it.
No, the heart and soul of Star Wars, the character around which everything orbited was Princess Leia. She is the very face of the Rebellion. She risks everything, including her life, time and again to fight tyranny. She always did the right thing, no matter what.
And she took shit from exactly no one.
Leia metaphorically spits in Darth Vader’s eye when she is captured in the opening sequence. She tells Grand Moff Tarkin where he can step off, even though he’s just signed orders for her execution and is about to destroy her home world. And of course, after her rescue, she puts Han Solo in his place. Repeatedly.
My young, lesbian heart fell head-over-heels for this perfect woman. Sassy, beautiful, confident, steely, and determined to bring freedom to the galaxy, she was the very model of the woman I wanted to be. What more could a girl want?
And so, the yearning began.
I got the Hildebrandt Star Wars poster, hung it on my closet door, and stared at the (over-sexualized) image of Leia for hours. I collected Star Wars trading cards and delighted in each pack that held a card depicting the heroic princess. Hers was the first Star Wars action figure I bought when they began appearing in my local ShopKo. I imagined all sorts of adventures she and I would have together.
We were inseparable, Leia and I. My admiration for her was the closest thing to love I had ever experienced. I had no ability to understand this crush. It was obsession of an innocent nature. It was yearning so deep and powerful I could only imagine it as being in love.
Gutowitz maintains that “yearning is an inherent part of the queer female experience.”1 She claims that yearning used to be everything for her, and I’ve rarely felt more seen. When I was a child, I lived in the yearn. I wanted Princess Leia to rescue me from my dull, suburban life and whisk me into adventure, where we fought evil, restored freedom, and stood side-by-side through danger and triumph alike.
It’s possible to dismiss this claim of lesbianism as being the typical behavior of young boys seeking to be heroes. But how many boys do you know who wanted to have their adventures with a woman? How many boys wanted to be the strong woman in those scenarios? None that I knew.
No, this was the yearning that defines lesbianism by the Gutowitz Standard.
And it was all just a warmup, a training sequence for the real thing. Yearning for a fictional character is one thing. But the IRL experience is so much more intense, so powerfully sapphic.
Eighth Grade
Outside of Princess Leia, I crushed on a few real real-world individuals. The feelings my aforementioned first-grade girlfriend and I had for each other were as real as six-year-olds could manage. In fifth and sixth grade, I carried a torch for a classmate named Jean. We hung out at school all the time. The attraction between us was obvious. But at ages 12 and 13, we didn’t dare to speak of such things. We simply yearned.
But eighth grade would teach me the true shape of IRL yearning. I fell for a classmate named Pam solely because she cheered for me when I caught a pass during a football game. I’d thought she was attractive from the moment I met her in sixth grade. So when she showered me with verbal praise for three seconds from the sideline, my silly, sapphic heart went into full-time yearn-mode.
Of course, I never dared to really speak to her. She was so much cooler and more popular than I. I was much more comfortable wishing for us to be an item than I was risking making it happen.
The closest I ever came to acting on my feelings was buying her a necklace for Christmas. Of course, I couldn’t dare to take credit for such a thing. That would be too forward. That would reveal that I liked her. So I slipped it into her locker with no note. I believed she would be moved by this powerful gesture and begin asking around, wondering who might have thought enough of her to buy her a pretty necklace. She would eventually learn it was me, and we would live happily ever after.
Instead, she assumed it was from her Secret Santa. I never even got on her radar.
Disappointing though that was, it is the very essence of yearning. Could anything confirm my lesbianism more?
Yes. Yes, it could. Eighth grade wasn’t done with me.
As summer began, a friend held a graduation party. The feature event of this soirée was slow-dancing to popular love songs in his garage. And in that darkened environment, Tracy draped herself over me while Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” played through the speakers.
I’d danced with my most of my classmates at our official graduation dance and at my friend’s party. But being good, little Catholic-school kids, we left plenty of room for the Holy Spirit between us.
Tracy didn’t give a good God damn about the Holy Spirit. She held me closely, her arms flung over my shoulders so far, they dangled completely against my back. I felt another person’s body against mine for the first time and was blown away by the sensation. All Pam had ever done was cheer for me catching a pass. Tracy acted like she didn’t find me repulsive. She was willing to press herself up against me.
Naturally, my lesbian yearning went into overdrive. Tracy and I lived in the same neighborhood. We saw each other frequently over the summer. We swam in a friend’s pool. We shot baskets in my driveway. We rode our bikes around town together. I dreamed of her at night.
But once again, I could never bring myself to say I liked her as more than a friend. That might ruin the perfection. She might not like me back. And I worried all the time that this was the case. Better to have an ache in my heart akin to a twisting knife than experience the true heartbreak of rejection.
Eventually, I started dating. Though I yearned for Tracy throughout the first year of high school, I did eventually have real girlfriends. I dated a variety of young women. None of those relationships lasted more than a few months, and I mourned only briefly when they ended.
But all that was before Sherri. Despite my experiences with Princess Leia, Pam, and Tracy, I had no idea what real yearning was until it happened during an actual romantic relationship.
Tremble When We Touch
I was 16 when we met. She was two years younger. We were both in the chorus of an entirely awful school musical (No, No, Nanette). Consequently, we spent a lot of time together in the seven weeks of rehearsal and performances. I found her charming and funny. We clicked.
And then the show was over, and I didn’t see her again for months.
But for Valentine’s Day, student council was selling candy that you could send with a note to another student. And I got one from Sherri.
This turned the mild crush I’d been feeling into a full-blown yearning. She was thinking of me. She’d made a gesture, and this wasn’t a random cheer from the sideline. This was deliberate.
For a month, I did what my previous yearnings had taught me to do. I thought about her constantly. I dreamed about her regularly. I replayed every encounter from No, No, Nanette in my mind, looking for the clues that might mean this tiny bag of candy was a romantic gesture.
Finally, my brother got sick of listening to me pine for her while refusing to do anything about it. (He had, after all, seen this pointless strategy at work multiple times.) One afternoon, he looked up her number, called her, and forced me to take the phone.
I thought I might die. I couldn’t talk to her on the phone! That’s what people who were dating did! It wasn’t safe!
But I couldn’t not talk to her either. The phone was in my hand. She answered. Oh, God, what was I to do?
Obviously, I spoke to her. We chatted for half an hour, the conversation flowing as easily as it had in person. Towards the end of the call, I asked her out. She accepted.
That first date was one of those nights that changes you forever. I’d invited her to my show choir’s big cabaret. I was performing, of course, so it gave me the excuse of making her one of my three friend-guests (most of each student’s table at the event was reserved for family). In this way, I had the safety of it not exactly being a date-date, so that if my feelings were unrequited, it had just been a fun night of music.
But after the show, I somehow found courage I’d never had before. I didn’t slip an anonymous necklace into her locker. I didn’t ride my bike around town with her like we were just friends. I actually confessed my feelings.
And to my enormous relief, she reciprocated them.
After I drove her home that night, we lay on her living room floor wrapped in each other’s arms. We spoke of how we couldn’t believe this was happening. We discussed how we’d been secretly crushing on each other but never dared to do anything about it. We reveled in the pleasure of simply being together.
But something else happened that night that would turn this moment into the greatest yearning of my life – the thing that would confirm my lesbianism on the Gutowitz Scale. As I held her, with her head resting on my chest, she trembled. Another woman actually trembled with emotion for me.
At the time, Survivor’s “I Can’t Hold Back” was a big hit on the radio. It instantly became “our song” for the line, “I can feel you tremble when we touch.” This deeply emotional and physical connection was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
Like my previous relationships, this one lasted only three months. But during that glorious quarter-year, I was in love. I’d never been in love before, and it was the most intoxicating thing I’d ever felt.
Now, it’s not like I didn’t have friends at school who were in love. A few of my classmates managed to date the same girl for four years. Whether that was love or habit, I couldn’t say. But all my guy friends were much more invested in being cool than in love.
I, on the other hand, expressed my feelings like the girl I hadn’t yet realized I was. I wrote her initials all over my notebooks. I drew lovey-hearts around them and next to her name. When we weren’t together, I thought of her. We spoke endlessly on the phone. I was not the casually cool dude, keeping her at arm’s length so she wouldn’t think I was too serious. I was all-in the way my female friends wanted to be with their boyfriends.
So naturally, I was devastated when she ended it. And unlike previous yearnings, this one persisted.
It took me awhile to get over the pain, but I did eventually. I went back to dating. I had two more girlfriends my final year in high school, and several in college before meeting the woman who would become my first wife.
But despite all those relations, my heart was really just marking time. Sherri and I reconciled as friends a few months after the breakup. She began to see me as an older sibling on whom she could rely for advice and comfort, and I embraced that, because at least she felt something for me.
We attended the same college, and when she broke up with her longtime boyfriend, she showed up at my door in tears. I held her as she cried, running her makeup onto my white sweatshirt. Though I yearned to have her for myself now that we were both available, I instead gave her what she needed – true friendship, an older sibling she could run to when things went sideways.
We didn’t get back together like I desired. But the yearning followed me for years. For a long time, I refused to give up on this life-changing yearn that had so thoroughly confirmed my lesbianism. I dreamed of her into my thirties.
And the funny thing about it is what we had was next-to-nothing. There was nothing special about our relationship when we dated. We went out a few times. We talked on the phone. Afterward, she kept me at arm’s length while simultaneously trusting me with her fears. In no way did we have one of the Great Love Affairs of All Time, even by high school standards.
This is what yearning is. It’s manufactured by a simple gesture that’s not nearly as significant as it seems – a cheer for catching a pass, kicking the Holy Spirit out of the dance, even a girl trembling in your arms on a cold night in March or ruining your sweatshirt as she cries over her broken heart.
Yearning is the energy of being lesbian, according to Gutowitz, because it is wanting something we’re certain we cannot have. We’re queer. The objects of our desire are unattainable. We want so desperately for reality to work differently than it does. But what we want cannot be.
The After-yearn
I don’t yearn anymore. I found everything I wanted in my current spouse. Everything I’d been looking for is right in front of me now that I have learned to stop wanting and simply be.
Sherri is no longer a part of my life. Occasionally, she comes across my Facebook newsfeed – usually by commenting on a mutual friend’s post, occasionally as someone “I might know.” I never friend her. She is a part of the past, a yearning I no longer need or desire.
But this is how I know I am a lesbian. I experienced the energy that all sapphic women know, the yearning for things that cannot be. The feeling, so deep it seems as though you might drown in it, that in another, better world, you could be the person you wish you were, have the things you desire.
And what cures this pain, the salve we all seek, is love. When you find it, the yearning finally stops. The distance between hope and peace closes. And you’re still a lesbian, because that is how you got here. That essential nature brought you to the promised land.
I like to believe Jill Gutowitz would agree.
Phoebe Ravencraft is a transfemme author of queer fantasy. She writes here about life as a trans woman, seeking magic, and how those things intersect with philosophy. Her latest series, a trans fairytale, launches soon on Kickstarter. Follow the campaign here.
(Jill Gutowitz, Girls Can Kiss Now, Atria, New York, 2022)