My first and only queer relationship was kept a secret, but not for the usual reasons. Rather, my first and only queer relationship was kept a secret because when I was twenty-two and a senior in college, I had an affair with a well-known dean at my university—a married woman twice my age. The dean was a school celebrity—charismatic, adored—and I was the kind of young person who craved attention from powerful people. When a close friendship between us turned physically intimate, I was convinced I was in love and so I lived a double life. It was a lot for a young person, especially in this particular collegiate environment—going through the pomp and circumstance of senior year, meanwhile secretly sleeping with one of the most public figures on campus.
Our affair was both a sapphic Nancy Meyers film and a tremendous amount of stress for a twenty-two-year-old. It does something to your soul to carry a massive secret; there’s a weight of not being fully known. My friends didn’t know, my family certainly didn’t know. We weren’t breaking any rules—she checked the university’s policies—but it was clear that what we were doing put her job at risk, so I told no one. Meanwhile, I drifted from my peers. What would they say if they knew? Only one friend ever expressed skepticism about my public closeness to the dean.
“IT’S WEIRD,” she shouted as we danced at a house party, drunk on cheap alcohol.
I wanted to tell her. Can you believe it? Instead, I just laughed.
In my creative writing classes, I crafted fictionalized versions of our story, feeling very grown up to have such a secret. One day as I flipped through printed copies of my draft, I saw a classmate had scribbled “are you sleeping with the dean?” in his margin notes. The metadrama of his question thrilled me, but I said nothing. When I told her what had happened, she asked me to be more careful.
Her husband knew. I learned early in our relationship she had told him about her feelings long before she confessed them to me. Everything she did with me, he supported.
“Just don’t buy her a car,” he once joked to her.
To me, he remained a pale, benevolent shadow, a background character who benefitted from the energy I brought into her life and weathered the storms of her love for me. At the time, I didn’t understand how someone could be happy for their spouse to have other sexual partners, but I rarely interacted with him and found I could mostly put him out of my mind.
One late night after dinner and drinks off campus, we realized she had locked her keys in her car. She called her husband at their home a few miles away and he met us outside the bar with a second set, his visible impatience sobering our tipsy giggles. Even with this momentary annoyance, I wanted what they had. “I find it so hot how much they are in love,” I wrote in my journal. From what I knew of their marriage, they lived in a fairytale of endless passion and affection.
Neither the dean nor I had slept with a woman before. Despite all the porn I had watched since discovering it in high school, I didn’t even know what to call what happens between two women.
In the early stages of our friendship, as I became more and more obsessed with her attention, I had told myself I couldn’t be attracted to her because I was definitely not a lesbian—I had written as much in the pages of my adolescent journals until I believed it. I was the child of liberal artists who had raised me alongside their gay male friends, but I didn’t understand what I was feeling, what I had experienced in middle school toward my English teacher and her silk scarves, why I felt a tug between my pubescent legs while looking at the women’s bathing suit section of catalogs.
I’d had sex for the first time the summer before my senior year while interning in New York City, with a burly male grad student I met in drama class. He was attractive and sweet and the event was cinematic: the steamy elevator ride up to my Village sublet with a view, our clothes on the kitchen floor, his bare arms and sturdy body on the balcony. This is happening, I had said to myself, turning my mental camera on every moment so as to not forget. But the intercourse wasn’t the spectacular experience I’d been promised by magazines stolen from doctors’ office waiting rooms. This is it? I thought as he thrusted. I didn’t come and his mouth stayed above my navel.
Whatever might happen with her would be different, I could tell.
The first time she and I slept together—in a rustic cabin on a coastal mountain hours south of campus—I didn’t wonder what to do. I did what I had watched countless times, close-up shots of tongues and lips. I barely knew my own body, but I did what I imagined felt good, what I wanted done to me. I had worried I wouldn’t like the smell, that bodily fluids would interfere with my eagerness to please. They didn’t, though, and I wasn’t deterred by the slickness that spelled out her desire. She craved mine, marveling at my scent. She wanted me on her fingers, in her mouth. Now she understood, she said, how her husband could love it so much, could want her the way she wanted me. I came twice.
We showered together after, becoming less shy in our nakedness. Like me, she longed for the self-love we believed existed on the other side of a thinner body. But with each other, our soft folds were safe. To each other, we were beautiful.
Meanwhile, I had gotten back together with my milquetoast college boyfriend. He was my first boyfriend, something I’d ached and longed for without understanding what I actually craved and why. I dated him our sophomore year because, unlike my family, he was calm and unreactive—and eager to please even as I didn’t know what to ask for. I had broken up with him because I was bored, but now two years later, my hunger for affection was louder than anything. His arm draped tepid yet sincere around my shoulder was enough to convince me he and I made sense together.
My relationship with him felt legitimate and publicly validating. When I couldn’t be with her, I was with him. With her, I learned about German wines and sent explicit mid-day texts. With him, I had a date to the senior formal.
She knew about him—I often shared my doubts about him with her. All he knew about my connection to her was that she and I were close friends.
I changed her name in my phone.
From a very young age, I imagined myself fabulous and single as an adult, living a glamorous life in Manhattan where I would win Tony Awards and own small dogs. I had started my senior year of college with the energy of this envisioned future, but as I became more invested in the story I was living in real time, my focus blurred.
“Why aren’t you applying to writing programs?” my department chair asked me. “You should be applying to writing programs.” A play I wrote and directed had just received high praise from talent scouts.
But I wanted to be an actress. I thought I was too tall, too big, my voice too low, my chin too weak—yet I ached to be on stage. The dean’s attention was like a special spotlight. We went away again, this time to a luxury hotel nearby. Another late night, a motel two miles from campus. The graduate school application windows closed as I relished in her affection.
We told ourselves she was teaching me how to love myself, how to act on my desires. This is what love looks like, we said, and I became adept at anticipating her desires—which I fulfilled, eagerly. She was my audience; I was her secret star.
After graduating, I landed an underpaid theater internship in New York City, where I quickly became overwhelmed from working more than full time for little money while pouring my effort and energy into maintaining two long-distance relationships, one still a secret. She wrote to me from across the country nearly every week, never signing her name. Sometimes, inside her cards were folded pieces of white printer paper containing poems she had written for me—about missing me, about longing for us. As I swiped my EBT card for groceries and juggled multiple Manhattan side gigs, the potency of her desire fed my hunger to believe I was special. In the absence of my self-love, her attention reassured me that anxiety and financial stress were just the backstory of my character’s future triumph.
I had moved to New York to do theater, but now I found myself without the time or energy to perform or write. On the rare night off, a booth at a 24-hour French cafe held me as I stretched a single boozy hot chocolate into hours of people watching and what little journaling I could muster. I made plans to submit to writing competitions, but the deadlines slipped by as I ran between side gigs.
I sent her things, too, writing brief love notes on the theater’s letterhead. Once, I mailed her a pair of my unwashed underwear. I wanted to compensate for how my messages often fell short of her libidinal desires. Rumbly, I called it—when she wanted to sext. Distracted and overwhelmed by my surroundings, I often didn’t have enough or the right words to feed her appetite.
“I’m here like a prisoner,” she wrote one night.
“Being fed broth
One spoonful
At
A
Time.”
That fall, she flew to visit me, arriving outside my apartment building with a bouquet of irises. We crossed the river in her rental car and stopped at a market for weekend provisions. Our destination was a cottage upstate—the kind of dreamy place I had only ever seen in movies. That night we belted Les Mis as we ate hard cheeses slathered with fig spread and washed dishes together. We slept naked, waking up to wander through tiny art galleries and cozy shops in town, where she bought me a ring set with garnet and amethyst stones.
As a surprise, she had ordered me expensive bras—push-up, leopard print, black lace—delivered to the cottage before our arrival. I tried them on in the bathroom, sheepishly emerging to announce they were too big for me. Because I often wore shirts that accentuated my breasts, she assumed my cup size to be larger than it was. I was embarrassed—though for whom, I wasn’t sure. The pink and red striped box got tucked in a corner, its tissue paper as tossed as our sheets.
Beneath the cottage’s cathedral ceilings, I forgot about my small, dark room back in the city with its warped door that only locked from the outside. As I gorged myself on warm bread in the mornings, dressed in nothing but her soft white button-down with delicate nacre buttons, I didn’t think about my scary landlady who sent threatening texts that read like ransom notes. Or my boyfriend, who would soon be flying across the country for our own romantic weekend.
One month after she and I licked whipped cream off strawberries upstate, I greeted my boyfriend at the midtown high-rise apartment he had booked. Between theater premieres and fancy cocktails, we scarfed down dollar slices of pizza, trying not to drip grease on our nice clothes. I wore the same lace-top thigh highs I’d worn in countless photos texted to her (and him—two audiences for the price of one bedroom cell phone photoshoot).
As I padded around the rented apartment in nothing but his dress shirt, I started to imagine a life with him, and I fantasized about the lifestyle afforded by someone with his job in tech. It was not unlike what I knew she had with her husband: an airy house in an expensive neighborhood, secret horny eye contact during business functions, seaside vacations. The role appealed to me.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he said at one point.
In college, I hadn’t seen a future with my boyfriend—we were such different people—but in the loneliness of our long-distance relationship, a future started to coalesce in my imagination. I, who had never daydreamed about my wedding, saw us dancing our first dance and longed for the stability he represented. As we lay in bed on the second to last night of his visit, I decided to finally be honest.
Thinking my confession would lead to a swell of strings in a climactic scene of profound connection and self-actualization, I shared my secret. Maybe he would be turned on, I hoped, like her husband. Instead, he sobbed and wouldn’t touch me.
I didn’t sleep that night, taking refuge on the couch as he shut himself in the bedroom. “I don’t want to lose him,” I wrote on a scrap of paper as he slept, my nervous system screaming with fear. “I don’t think I can continue with her. I’m mad at her. For having enough and wanting more. She already has the love of her life. And now I’m losing mine. I’m scared. Please wake up.”
I let my boyfriend fuck me without a condom several times between when he eventually woke up and when the weekend ended—something we, ever responsible, had never done. To my supreme relief, he didn’t break up with me, and we decided to try and repair the damaged trust. But first, I had to end my relationship with her.
The next day, I called her and struggled to keep my voice monotone. She cried, though she knew the end was inevitable. After hanging up, I wept. Later that week, I writhed in pain from an untreated UTI.
The abrupt loss of our attachment was devastating and the need to fix things with my boyfriend was daunting. Overwhelmed and distraught, I gave up on my nascent starving artist life. I moved back to California to live with my parents where, after barely a week at home, I finally told them everything.
They were horrified. Suddenly words like manipulated and abuse of power were being used and shame started to calcify in the parts of me that had desired her—tremendous embarrassment—as I began to see my great love story through a very different lens. I had felt like such an adult, living this beautiful, sexy adventure of intimacy and growth, swirling in a soft glow. But I told my parents and in an instant it was now closing time at a grimy bar—blinding fluorescent lights revealing makeup caked on cheeks sweaty from too many cheap shots. All at once, I was too drunk, my clothes were too tight, and I was very exposed. What happened was shocking; I had been groomed. Yet I couldn’t forget how I had pursued her and I hated myself for having been so desperate.
I was relieved to no longer be keeping this secret from my parents, but also flooded by the intensity of their reaction. I needed to be comforted, held. Instead, my dad expressed his grief through rage, thinking he could scream away the shock of my confession. I responded with my own fury, rampaging through the house like an addict whose substance had been confiscated. I demanded my parents have no contact with the dean and do nothing in response to my disclosure as I sobbed that I was still in love with her.
She used you, my mom insisted. I’d never seen her this sad. You can’t see that she used you.
A few weeks after I confessed to my parents, my mom told me she had anonymously informed the university about the dean’s actions. As a result, the dean would be leaving. This was profoundly upsetting because I felt, at the time, that I had ruined her life—that I was entirely responsible. Stuck in the liminal space of regret, I returned again and again to my memories with her, haunted by my own choices, still reeling from attachment withdrawals.
The next month, I received an email from a reporter with the student newspaper. “We have top secret information.” Panic flared in my stomach. “The dean is leaving to pursue an MFA and will be announcing her departure tomorrow. We know you two are close—can you give us a quote about what she means to you?”
An MFA? She was leaving to pursue an MFA?
From the depth of my own struggle to find creative focus, rage began to boil. I declined to give a quote, blaming schedule conflicts.
Over the following months, I watched the university and my peers celebrate her commitment to authenticity and commend her bravery for pursuing this calling. Meanwhile, I was drowning from the distress of ending the relationship and my own inability to launch a creative life as I hydroplaned across heartbreak and a newfound anger.
While completing her MFA, the now-former dean published a book that became a New York Times bestseller and as her public platform skyrocketed, this secret burrowed deeper and deeper into my DNA. Sometimes over the years it appeared as bitterness, often as a quiet grief.
At this point, enough time has passed that I’m not sick to my stomach every time I turn on NPR and hear her voice or I see her on the news. I used to listen to her podcast interviews, wondering if I would hear our story in her conversations, jealous and resentful she appeared to have moved on in such a spectacular, successful way. Once, she alluded to a midlife crisis and I felt gross, like I’d been caught stalking her. I stopped listening to the interviews.
Part of this grief, I think, comes from wondering where I might be now if I’d poured all that energy and effort into my own story instead of ours. Another part—I know—comes from mourning the fact that my first queer relationship was shrouded in so much silent shame. Since her, I have only dated men. Are these things related? What will authenticity feel like on the other side of finally releasing this secret?
More than a decade has passed since our affair. My life—while different from the dream I had of it then—has been meaningful, even creatively rewarding. And yet this piece of my past has stuck to me, a specter of self-loathing. I cringe when I revisit my emails to her, when I scroll through the countless messages I once sent. In my words I see a performance of authenticity and I squint from the glaring evidence of how obsessively I pursued her attention.
A handful of years after our relationship ended and the cultural conversation about consent shifted, I didn’t see myself in the clear-cut wrongness of the stories that made headlines. Yes, she should have known better. And yet, I had agency. She showed poor judgment. And I made poor choices. She misused her power. She made me feel beautiful. For years, I thrashed between the simplicity of right and wrong, lost in paradox, needing to cast a villain. How do you reconcile a story that exists in the gray space between love and abuse? She has done much good for many people. She did something inappropriate with me. I eagerly sought her affection. I was very young.
As I grow older, I am learning to surrender to the possibility of both/and. I do believe she loved me, that we can love someone and harm them without meaning to. I often resent my secret, and yet from it, I have developed a relationship with integrity. There is a version of this story that is a queer mistake, there is a version that is a cautionary tale. What if it’s both? How do I hold both?
A soft voice emerges from the heart of my growing wisdom.
Forgive yourself.
A few years ago, she emailed me out of the blue. “I’ve been so ashamed,” she wrote. A knot of tears formed in my throat. My strange loop of shame and longing had turned into a nostalgic sadness that hummed in the background of my life. I assumed we would never speak again, that she wanted nothing to do with me.
“I shouldn’t have told you I loved you,” she continued. “I shouldn’t have been in a romantic relationship with you. I shouldn’t have done any of that given my position and I am deeply sorry. I hope one day you’ll be able to forgive me. Maybe when you’re a forty-something, clinging…although I do not wish that for you.”
I sat on my bed and cried. “I forgave you a long time ago,” I replied. The early months of COVID-19 raged outside. “I hope I can say that to your face someday.”
Her email led us to get back in touch, although some days I’m not sure we should be. She’d rather not run into me, she said, but she supports me telling this story because she knows it’s quite a thing, what happened. I am sorry, too. For all the ways I have abused myself. For hurting her. I do not wish her harm.
Sometimes, though, I think about my young self in all her potential and momentum and I ache with the oceanic depth of my mother’s protective outrage. How could she? How dare she? But eventually the churning tide recedes and in the space created by forgiveness I am learning how to hold myself, how to give myself the love I have so desperately sought from others.
Until recently, I lived just a few miles from her house, a logistical coincidence resulting from unexpected career moves and my preference for tree-filled streets. I never ran into her, but my pulse always quickend when I would pull into the parking lot of the grocery chain where we both shopped. She drives a different car now, the make and model of which I know from reading about her life.
One late winter night while on a walk, I crossed the main road and headed against what little traffic lumbered down the dark street. Shoving my icy hands into my coat pockets as a familiar vehicle whizzed by, I looked up and thought I saw her behind the wheel. I froze. Did she see me? Was that actually her? But the car and its driver were long gone.
