It’s no accident that one of the first major lesbian relationships in television history began in an episode where no one was able to talk. That night, while the town sleeps, people’s voices will wisp out of their mouths and fly to the clocktower, where they are locked in a small box. The next morning, Buffy and Willow wake up speechless. The next twenty-seven minutes are a wordless ballet…
One foggy afternoon, sitting on a perch that overlooked a soccer field, hallucinating on mushrooms, I called my mom and told her that I was doing meth and that I might be a lesbian. I don’t remember what she said. What I do remember is the soccer field, which looked like it was breathing.
My earliest letters laid out all of my cowboy-even-though-I’m-a-girl theories, supported by outlaw country lyrics flowing over pages of yellow legal paper hand-delivered every morning as she arrived at the door of her classroom. I played the cowboy’s game, testing whether she understood me. She told me I was 17 going on 30.
She would know what 30 felt like because that was how old she was.
