Welcome to Interviews With My Ex-Girlfriend in which Autostraddle writers get back in touch with their ex-girlfriends to ask them Five Simple Questions:

1. How long did we date?
2. Why did we break up?
3. What did you learn from our relationship?
4. What do you miss most about me?
5. Would you invite me to your wedding (why/why not)?

Once upon a time, I was just a lesbian who didn’t know she was a lesbian but was lesbian-ing all around the rural Georgia stomping grounds of my youth with an intensity usually reserved for dying black holes. One such experience of lesbian-ing was falling in love with my gal pal from college and hating her boyfriend and acting generally bonkers in every way imaginable. But that was a long time ago and both me and my gal pal have grown up and come out and she even agreed to sit down with me to relive the way we burned up so hard and bright so long ago.

Pre-iPhone life

Jo: Hello, Heather Hogan!

Heather: Hello… can I call you by your full name?

Jo: Ha, no. Please do not use my name at all. I don’t need anyone tracking me down via Facebook to yell at me for breaking your heart in 2001.

Heather: No one’s going to yell at you about that. To get people to yell at you, you have to insult their favorite fictional characters. But I can make up a code name for you, and the code name will be… Jo March.

Jo: Fine.

Heather: Fine? I just gave you the greatest compliment.

Jo: I think you gave yourself the greatest compliment.

Heather: Haha, okay okay. So, hello, Jo. Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with an ex-girlfriend with me, despite the fact that you are not technically my ex-girlfriend. So let’s just get right into that. The first question is: How long did we date? But we did not and the reason is that —

Jo: The reason is that you were desperately in love with me and I had a boyfriend.

Heather: Oh ho ho! I don’t think so. You were desperately in love with me too!

Jo: Ha! You are living the dream of every brokenhearted, closeted college lesbian who’s in love with their straight best friend — confronting them years later to demand they admit they loved you back.

Heather: Oh man, I’m going to bring Maya Rudolph out like The Good Place and present my evidence of your gay infatuation and have her make a ruling.

Jo: I’ll save you the trouble: Yes, of course, I was in love with you too. We were in love as much as two 20-year-old closeted Baptist girls from the deep south could be in the late ’90s and early ’00s.

Heather: And how long would you say that your gay love for me lasted?

Jo: Two years or something right? A long time. We met and immediately hit it off and started spending every second together. We took all the same classes. We studied together. We waited for each other after class when we didn’t have class together. We ate all our meals together. We went home with each other some weekends. We slept in your bunkbed — on the top bunk of your bunkbed together.

Heather: Just straight girl stuff.

Jo: So straight.

Heather: And that went on until people started talking about it, which you realized was happening and I did not.

Jo: Right yeah. You and I never talked about it. We weren’t — it was a… how do I say this? It was 1999! In Georgia! I didn’t know any other gay people, did you?

Heather: Oh no absolutely not. And the only thing on TV at that time had been Ellen’s coming out, which was, where we lived, villainized like —

Jo: Yeah Ellen was Satan.

Heather: Right. We were both kind of working backwards, I think. Or I was. Being gay made you Satan. I loved Jesus. Therefore I did not love Satan therefore I was straight.

Jo: Yes, me too. So we — we never even kissed. We cuddled a bit. We just said we were really really good friends. Then I started to hear all these rumors about us, which didn’t make me pull away from you, but it did make me go get a boyfriend.

Heather: God, I hated that motherfucker.

Jo: He was a motherfucker.

Heather: I got a boyfriend when you did but mine was nice!

Jo: He was.

Heather: To be fair, though, I would have hated him anyway; even if he had been nice. Which leads us to my next question, which is: why did we break up? And I’ll answer that. It’s because your boyfriend compelled me to act like a psychopath.

Jo: Hahahaha!

Heather: It changed my entire personality. I felt sick all the time. Sick and jealous and nauseous and jealous and just sick. All the time. I started picking fights with you. I started being needy and clingy and asking you where you’d been and what you’d been doing and were you, like, SINNING with your new boyfriend. I’m so embarrassed even thinking about it. I remember so clearly being like, “Jesus is going to be PISSED if you give him a blow job.”

Jo: I’m embarrassed too but it’s because I think I made you spin out much worse that you would have anyway because I pretended you were overreacting, that we were OH MY GOD JUST FRIENDS. Invalidating what we’d been doing — even if neither of us had named it — was cruel.

Heather: We were so mean to each other that spring. I don’t think I have ever been that mean to anyone in my life. I am sweating thinking about it.

Jo: We were terrible.

Heather: I wish we could time travel and go hug our little selves. But that’s why we “broke up.” You Regina George-ed me.

Jo: Haha, what?

Heather: Regina George! “So then in eighth grade, I started going out with my first boyfriend Kyle who was totally gorgeous but then he moved to Indiana, and Janis was like, weirdly jealous of him. Like, if I would blow her off to hang out with Kyle, she’d be like, ‘Why didn’t you call me back?’ And I’d be like, ‘Why are you so obsessed with me?'”

Jo: Hahaha, yes. I Regina George-ed you.

Heather: What did you learn from our relationship?

Jo: That I’m a lesbian.

Heather: No you didn’t.

Jo: No, I didn’t. I don’t think, in the moment, I learned anything from our relationship because I was too scared to look at it closely, especially after people started talking. But after our relationship, years later, when we were both out, you sent me that letter. It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. You apologized and forgave me — without saying that exactly, that you were forgiving me — and said some really sweet and charitable things. I think that’s the most grown-up thing I’d ever seen at that point in my life, even more than what was modeled for me by my parents and step-parents. I thought, “Okay, this is what it’s like to be a real adult. It’s about taking responsibility for yourself and trying to make amends because it will heal the other person, not because you want to feel better about yourself.” I still have that letter. Seeing who you are now, I look back on that and can see you were in the process of becoming your real self.

Heather: That’s such a generous thing to say. Thank you. Your response was equally kind.

Jo: Anything was kind compared to the way we tried to destroy each other in college.

Heather: Still, though. I’m 41 and I only know a handful of people who can actually apologize.

Jo: Yeah, me too.

Heather: What do you miss most about me?

Jo: What I miss most about that time in my life is having elasticity in my face skin and being able to get up off the floor without making an involuntary moaning sound.

Heather: Ahahaha! Can you imagine sleeping in a twin bunkbed with another person now?

Jo: No, my wife would divorce me if I suggested it.

Heather: Stacy and I have a Queen size Casper mattress and I’m never going to sleep on anything else again. We have this thing at Autostraddle called A-Camp, which is adult summer camp and these grown-ups sometimes get up to shenanigans in twin beds and I’m like, “…how???”

Jo: Really. How.

Heather: Would you invite me to your wedding? You didn’t!

Jo: I didn’t. It would have been a scene.

Heather: How do you mean?

Jo: I’ve stayed friends with some people from college and stuff, but when you burned those bridges, you really burned them. You know how people are with you. You moved to New York and you became a writer and you hate men and you antagonize people on Facebook about politics. A lot of people from around here—

Heather: Are obsessed with me.

Jo: Kind of yeah. You’re the prodigal daughter. Are you going to invite me to your wedding?

Heather: Oh, it’s going to be very small.

Jo: Hahaha!

Heather: Sorry!

Jo: No, don’t be. We shared something really special and terrible and then special again when we were able to forgive each other and ourselves and that’s more than most lesbians like us get from their first loves.

Heather: You weren’t my first love.

Jo: What? Heather Hogan!

Heather: I tried to run over my first love’s boyfriend with a truck in my high school parking lot.

Jo: So you had a pattern of being psychopath!

Heather: Well, I haven’t tried to murder anyone in years. I’ve grown.

Jo: You seem very content, Hogan.

Heather: I am happier than I ever thought I could be. Even when things are hard, I’m like, “Man, I fell in love with the most wonderful woman and she loved me back and we have built such a warm and fun and supportive life together where we’re both pursuing and achieving our dreams!”

Jo: Gross.

Heather: Thank you for talking to me today… Jo March.

Jo: You’re welcome… Laurie.

Heather: Okay, that’s gross.

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