Disgusting lesbians.

The year I moved to Los Angeles, I went to the lesbian bar du jour and met Lisa, the woman who would become my girlfriend. The bar was called something like “Muse” or “Fishbowl” or “Minx,” and it was full of hot women, half of them execudykes with shiny hair and the other half scruffy Joan Jett lookalikes. I was having a fine old time making eye contact with Ellen DeGeneres and her coterie of sultry young butches, when this pretty woman with a Swedish accent walked toward me and held out a glass of wine. “You’re really beautiful,” she said. Note to shy lesbians: directness works. We chatted. We laughed. We left the bar and made out in the bushes near my car. When I got home that night I had twigs in my hair.

On my first official date with Lisa, we drove up on Mulholland to watch the Leonid meteor shower. We parked along the side of the road and hiked up a hill to watch the sky, then we went back to my car and starting making out again. We were deep into it, oblivious to anything else, when we gradually became aware of a blinding light shining into the car. At first I thought it was a spaceship landing. It was that bright. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” bright. We blinked and squinted and saw two guys in uniform coming toward us. They had parked their giant off-road vehicle directly in front of us and had left on the headlights – the brights, not the regulars.

I could hear them expostulating at each other as they approached. One fragment rang out loud and clear: “...the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?” They were talking about us. Us, kissing. I thought straight men liked seeing pretty girls kissing. Clearly they weren’t used to seeing full-on genuine lesbian mackage.

Anyway. They shined a flashlight at us, knocked on my window and told us in no uncertain terms to get out of the car. Lisa reached for the door handle, but I told her not to open it. She gazed at me with wide-eyed alarm. I locked the doors and rolled down my window an inch. “What’s the problem?” I wanted to know. “What have we done wrong?”

Evidently we were parked in a no-parking zone. That’s no reason for us to have to get out of the car, I argued. Plus some part of my brain registered that they weren’t real cops, just park rangers. Beige uniforms. They started verbally abusing us again, walking around the car, commenting on my New Mexico license plates. “Are you from the rez?” they kept demanding, their voices getting shriller. “Did you just come from the REZ?” They saw my dog’s striped Indian blanket on the back seat and repeated the knee-slapper about the rez, cackling at each other’s wit. Then they ordered us out of the car again.

We were alone in the middle of nowhere, and except for their headlights, it was pitch dark. I was unnerved, but pissed. “The way you’re treating us is completely unprofessional and inappropriate,” I enunciated loudly. I picked up my cell phone. “I’m calling my dad. He’s a cop,” I said, “and I’m going to report you for harassing us.” My dad was, in fact, a police detective, but in New Mexico, not in Los Angeles. There was nothing he could have done to help us in that moment.

But invoking his name did the trick. Just like that, the inquisition was over. The puffed-up rangers shrank down to size, slunk away, slithered into their ATV and disappeared.

Lisa sat staring at me. “You’re my hero,” she said, or something to that effect. We laughed about it, a little shakily, and went back down to West Hollywood where all the other queers were. But it threw a shadow over the first sunny days of our relationship. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” The words echoed for years.

This is how it feels to live in the pseudo-religious quasi-theocratic Puritanical brothel of American culture. This is why we need gay pride parades. So many heteros mouth the tired old canard “I support the gays, as long as they don’t flaunt their lifestyle in my face,” as if we all don’t spend our lives muffled in the bland suffocating embrace of heteronormativity.

When I first was coming out, I was afraid. Although I knew no lesbians in particular and very little about lesbianism in general (this was pre-Ellen and way pre-Ellen and Portia), I was afraid that my feelings made me monstrous, unlovable, a social outcast who would never have a family of my own or be able to keep a job. Nebulous fears of workbooted hairy women in tool belts, of growing old alone and abandoned, made me stifle and hide my feelings from the age of 13.

The lumbering beast of monolithic tribal culture wants us to be afraid. It posts warnings like so many flashing red hazard lights or the glaring headlights of park ranger trucks, like the signs on antique maps warning “Here be monsters.” To be fair, the tribe originally policed its boundaries for reasons of safety: against outsiders, marauders, saber-toothed tigers. But those monsters don’t exist anymore, so the culture has cast its own children as alien. Some cultures have embraced their outsiders and boundary-crossers: the native Americans with their berdache and two-spirited ones, for instance, but American culture doesn’t love its freaks.

At my high school of 2,000 kids, there was one out gay boy. He was flamboyant and dramatic. He tried to bring another boy to prom, but the school said no. Those were the days when schools could say no and not be slapped with lawsuits. It was the talk of the lunchroom, and we cool art kids agreed that he was brave. I didn’t dare reveal to even my closest friends, though, that I was prone to intense feelings about girls as well as boys. I was lucky to go to a college inhabited by lots of gay men, and more importantly, beautiful, entrancing lesbians. The scales fell away from my eyes. Once I broke down one boundary, it opened my eyes to the falsity of them all. And they fell like dominoes: female inferiority, male standards of female beauty, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.

And that’s what the keepers of the tribe do not want, what they fear the most: that its wayward children will discover that it’s all a sham, put in place by people (read: straight white men) who like their power imbalance just as it is. The man behind the curtain is just an acne-pocked little dude with a combover.

For years Lisa and I asked each other “Are you from the REZ?” and burst into giggles. But I’m just glad we never had to find out what would have happened if we’d gotten out of the car.