"The Evolution of Me"
By Paula Smith, PA
Biography: Paula is currently attending Community College of Allegheney County. She is planning to major in Nursing. In the future, she would like to work in the cancer research or organ harvesting environment.
Why Karen Liked It: I liked it because I related to being married and having the children. It is an interesting point of view of if there were gay resources available earlier in her life, whether she would have found the courage to come out. The story was told well as it related back to events from 13 years old to her current situation, which she identifies now as a femme dyke.
You see I started to dabble with boys about the age of thirteen. You know the normal first and second base type things. We would be at school dances and they would "feel you up." As my mother stated, I was "boy crazy" at that stage in my life. What my mother did not realize at that time was that at the age of fourteen, I was also "girl crazy."
Sports were a major focus of my young life. My father coached each one of the six children in my family in either baseball or softball. I always said that I was born with a baseball glove on my hand. The small town, where I was raised originally was a coalmining town at the turn of the century. There were a lot of duplex houses along the main street, three churches, and a bar nearly on every corner of the town. It certainly was Smalltown, USA. Everyone seemed to know everyone, even in the outlying tiny communities.
Our girl's softball league in the town of Herminie, where I lived, played the other leagues in the nearby towns. We traveled to tiny communities like Hutchinson, Lowber, Yukon, Rilton, Sutersville and a myriad of other towns with ball fields. It wasn't hard to know all of the girls who played on the other teams since summer after summer we congregated at the same fields.
The high school that I attended once had been a small school called Sewickley High School. We were the home of the Bisons and had a huge Bison head hanging in the entryway of the school. Three years before I was slated to go up to high school, they merged three of the local school districts to make one big district named Yough High School, after the Youghiogheny River. This brought together all of the girls who had played softball against each other for all of those years.
The year that I was a freshman, they created girl's soft pitch softball as a lettered sport in our school. You have no idea how much we were elated with that decision. The cream of the crop of all of the local town teams made the high school team and I was fortunate enough to be one of them. This also meant that I was thrown into a sudden world of lesbianism, something that I had no clue about at that point in my life, but was soon to find out about.
Oh I knew that these girls were all major league tomboys. Heck, I had grown up a tomboy as well. I was the only girl in our neighborhood. I built cabins in the woods with the boys, played two games of ball every day in the summer, and played tackle football in the fall and winter with the guys.
I have always marched to the beat of a different drummer. This isn't something new to me. It started at a very early age. Even in school, I would wear my short skirts to school with my platform heels and then go to the softball game that night with my uniform and softball spikes on. The girls seemed to get a kick out of it and I loved their attention. There was nothing like having an entire group of girls flaunting over you.
There was a girl named Geri who I had become friends with whenever we played local softball. We both had made the high school team and once we started traveling to away games with the high school team, Geri and I got to be even closer friends. We'd sit together on the bus and sink down low into our seats and converse in low, intimate voices. We had overnight sleepovers at one another's homes. We talked on the telephone constantly. Suddenly we were inseparable. Then one day on the bus, she kissed me. I was so taken aback; I didn't know what to do. I do have to admit though that I liked it. I liked it so much that I allowed it to proceed forward. Soon enough, our sleepovers consisted of our exploring one another's bodies further and further. Even though I was considered a virgin because I had never had sexual intercourse with a male, I certainly wasn't a virgin with females. I knew that I liked what she did to my body and what I could do to hers. It was very natural to know the landmarks of her body since I knew my own so well. I guess that's why I don't view homosexuality as so foreign. It all seems very normal to me that same sexes would be able to please one another more easily.
I came to realize that more than half of our team was lesbian. I will never forget the wild crush that I had on one of the girls on the team. Even though Geri and I were together, I secretly lusted after yet another female. Suddenly, girls were such a focus of my young, sexual life.
The most confusing thing for me as a teenager in 1974 engaging in a lesbian relationship was that there was no one to turn to. There was no one that I could ask questions of. No literature was easily obtainable. Being gay at that time was about as taboo as ever. The flower child era may have created sexual freedom for the heterosexual world, but there certainly wasn't anything freeing in my small town about being gay or even being different.
Here I was exploring my sexuality with males and females and I liked them both. At that time, there was no such thing as bisexuality or I may have considered myself bisexual. I knew that what I was doing with Geri was what everyone around me considered wrong. Once she and I broke up, as most young loves do, I turned my back on my desire for sex with females. I went through the remainder of the 1970's in a major quest to sleep with as many men as I could. I'm not sure if it was to dispel the fact that I might be gay or whether it was just my way of striking out. It's interesting now to me that I see so many similarities to my sleeping with all of those men in the same way that I view my drug addiction. I was always chasing that ultimate high. Perhaps I thought that I would find the right heterosexual relationship to make me forget my homosexual longings.
I married in 1979 and remained with my husband for 16 years. The sex was great, although he and I grew into our kinkiness together. We reveled in our newfound freedom of wild, crazy sex and added becoming swingers to our repartee. Once again, women were back in my sex life and my bed. I felt as if I had been released from a dark prison back into a world, which I desired.
I often wonder now that I have embraced my sexuality and my desire for women sexually that if I had accepted it back in 1974, would I have ever married? Would I have had my children? Would I have been satisfied to live my life as a dyke or would I have continued to explore until I felt that I had exhausted all that there was to find, living out my days unsatisfied and bitter.
No one can answer those questions. Not even me. I can simply accept who I am at this point in time and enjoy life. I may also be thankful that there are resources out there now for young people who are wondering about their own sexuality. They no longer have to pretend to be something that they are not. They do not have to turn their backs on their sexuality or end up feeling used or bitter.
Thank heavens that evolution has come full circle and that I am finally able to celebrate me.