*I wrote this in 2011, which is – unbelievably – already over a decade ago. Wow. Thanks for reading…
She died of a cerebral hemorrhage. I read it on Wikipedia. Weird, looking someone up because you’re thinking about them and bam, they’re dead, have been for a few years, and suddenly you’re mourning a person who you haven’t seen for 3 decades, sitting on your couch staring at a screen in the middle of a summer day, weeping, simply because curiosity and – memory – spurred you to look them up, just for fun.
Her name was Julia Wilson-Dickson, and she taught acting and speech in London, where I met her in the fall of 1979 as a junior studying abroad for a semester that turned into a year away from the states and my family. She was tall and brilliant and funny and charismatic and warm; Julia was also not driven by ego, as many of our instructors up to that point had been, or so I felt, and because of all of this, we, her students, fresh off the plane, fell in love with her. She spoke occasionally of her mother, a former actress and great beauty; her mother was everything she, Julia, was not, petite, feminine, fragile and desirable in every way required. This was disconcerting, because we were all of us, all of the students, smitten with the living, breathing woman in front of us, and whose idea of feminine doesn’t include a 5’10” juggernaut of humor and expertise and precision and intellect and warmth? Or if her height and intensity (she was intense) were less than traditionally feminine, who cared? Who could not love her? She could not. This became clear over time, as did the fact that neither could her mother love her, her mother whom – it seemed – shamed her tall, awkward, terribly bright daughter every chance she got.
That semester flew by, and was revelatory in every way. I didn’t know it then, but being away from my family was one of the greatest gifts I could have been given, was given, by myself. Being away from family, though I missed everyone terribly, and missed the farm, was liberating, freeing, re-defining, definitive, a breakthrough, even if I didn’t see it until I returned, when the blinkers of habit, having been dropped by necessity somewhere over the Atlantic, were no longer in place, and I could see them, and myself, clearly. More clearly. The benefits of foreign travel, indeed.
Julia had a partner, and until one of my gay male (clearly just a phase!) classmates spelled it out for me, I didn’t realize she was gay, was a lesbian, whose existence as a group I was pretty sure, to that point, was apocryphal. Huh? Women don’t do that, and even if they do, why would they and how would they? Ew. And men – look, everyone is like my mom and dad, ultimately, right? No. I was twenty years old, very inexperienced, and very dumb; I was a theatre major – a theatre major – who didn’t believe homosexuality really and truly existed. Hilarious, when you think about it, as I have. Complicating and speeding up my education in these matters, Julia Wilson-Dickson fell in love with me. I was flabbergasted, flattered, but most of all I was frightened. She was older, a teacher, British, and a woman! She had a live-in girlfriend, even if two weeks prior I hadn’t believed such people and arrangements existed. Sheesh. I was also thousands of miles from home. Redefining myself sans parental oversight and sibling side-eye is one thing, being romantically pursued by a woman was another. Yet, I had nothing to fear as Julia was too ashamed of who she was to pursue me openly or aggressively; she also felt shame because I was her student – what a change that was. Having been sexually assaulted by two of my male married with children teachers within days of my high school graduation, I was struck and made safe – or safer – by her hesitancy, although my whole body shook as she confessed her feelings for me, in a noisy, crowded pub over tea (mine) and some dark ale (hers). Of course my body shook: I had been primed and programmed to encourage, seek and want male desire, as well as to fear it, ignoring my own desire, my own wants, my own sexuality. This experience, however, was a horse of a different color, but still I wanted to please, to be compliant, to be kind and affirmative of the person in control who was not me, never me, who was by definition the other, the one who desired me and who could be, it seemed, male or female, holy shit! And I did love Julia, as a person, for to me she was beautiful and wonderful, a marvelous human being, so worthy of love.
But. I didn’t want to sleep with her, and I wasn’t gay. I loved her but I could not return the love she felt for me and unlike the many male assholes who, fast forward in life, could not accept I was not attracted to them or into them ‘that way’, she took it like, well, like a woman.
A decade later I would go through a ‘maybe I am gay’ phase after a string of lousy relationships with men. I wrote to Julia – ohmigawd I cringe when I think of what I must have written to her – and she, typically wrote me back, long letters updating me on her life. I have long since destroyed the evidence of my asininity and her generosity, and that brief phase ended when I realized that the real problem was not that I dated shitty men (well, not the central problem, anyhoo) but rather that I didn’t feel good about being a woman, that being female felt less than, and that feeling needed to change. I needed to change it.
Funny that. Julia and I shared not feeling good about who we were as women, the kind of women we were, and both of us weren’t our mother’s idea of a proper, and properly feminine, woman. Sometimes I wish I had taken that leap with her, because she was that special, and to be loved by anyone is a gift, and miracle. But I didn’t, and I don’t regret it, although I still weep thinking of the girl I was, and of that woman who taught me and us all so much about how to be a good and passionate human, full of warmth.