Unconditionally Loved

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Nicole R. Zimmerman

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My brother believes I was created to find ultimate fulfillment with a Godly man, not a woman. “Many parents of homosexuals embrace their children,” he said one evening at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. “But that’s the wrong way to love them.”

Our father, who had accompanied me from California to celebrate my nephew’s first birthday, met my gaze across the table and rolled his eyes in commiseration.

“You’ve really brought our parents to the other side,” Michael noted. His wife touched his forearm in mild rebuke. The tension in my lower back tightened. I was accustomed to his moralistic tirades, but now was he outing me? About five years earlier, when I was in my mid-twenties, I told my brother I was bisexual. He called my attraction to women perverted, thinking the sin of my sexual orientation was rooted in an injured relationship with our dad, causing me to resent men. Until then, he’d managed to keep my sexual identity secret.

Our father dipped another slice of bread into a dish of olive oil and waved down the waitstaff. My nephew’s dimpled hands patted my palm, calming me as he cuddled on my lap. I kissed the top of his soft brown curls, breathing in the sweet aroma of baby shampoo.

“I know I’m judgmental,” my brother admitted. He said that during high school in San Francisco he often hung out in a gay neighborhood—and loved those people! That is, until he was hit on by another guy.

“Typical homophobia,” I said, shaking my head. It infuriated me whenever queerness was linked to exploitation, reinforcing the stereotype of gay men as predatory.

“I’m not saying they’re any more evil,” Michael explained. “Many straight guys are unhealthy spiritually, lusting after women. I’m guilty of this, too, but I’m working hard to purify myself. It helps to be in a committed, loving marriage,” he said, nodding at his wife. “But homosexuals can be very aggressive in their tactics.”

“Well, it’s not as if we’re trying to recruit people!”  

In 1995, a decade after my brother was coerced into the Unification Church (aka Moonies), he was matched to his wife in a mass wedding called the Blessing. Coincidentally, the following year, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was signed into U.S. federal law, banning same-sex marriage. Before the church moved Michael to the east coast, he transferred to U.C. Berkeley from a community college, but when his studies competed with his campus ministry “witnessing” to students, he dropped out of school. With a women’s studies degree from Santa Cruz, I lived across the bay with our father. I never disclosed my quiet pining for a coworker who accompanied me to a lesbian bar in the Castro, where I soon moved. I maintained a steady simmering for a riot grrrl who toured with a Queercore punk band and accepted my poetry in her zine but around whom I could barely speak, my hunger cocooned in held breath. While my brother amped up his proselytizing efforts I attended the city’s inaugural Dyke March, coined a Celebration of Lesbian Survival, Resistance & Visibility. I went to rallies for reproductive rights and marched down Market Street to protest government apathy to HIV (10,000 SF deaths and rising). I danced at Pride parades, wearing T-shirts that read: I Can’t Even Think Straight or Nobody Knows I’m Bisexual. PFLAG parents walked past with signs like: I raised my child with love and pride, and on this day I’m by her side. With her lover we march today to tell the world I’m proud they’re gay!

I remember my relief when my father, who once visited the third-floor flat I rented with roommates, stood in my small room and glanced around, either not seeing or ignoring a poster on the wall above my single mattress: safe sex is hot sex. Two women with shorn hair lay facing one another, one’s pelvis lifted as she took the other’s head in her hands, her tattooed upper arm flexed against her naked breast. I had just begun my first relationship with a woman, but I didn’t dare to introduce them.

So, when he and I walked back to our D.C. hotel after dinner, I couldn’t close the door that had just opened. “It’s kind of obvious Michael was referring to me. You know I’m bi, right?”

“I thought it was a possibility,” my father said. “No, a probability.”

He said he had a lot of tolerance—with limitations: he still felt uncomfortable seeing people of the same gender kiss. I appreciated his candor, which also confirmed my hesitancy to come out. He shocked me, however, when he said he figured we all fall somewhere on a continuum between gay and straight.

“Some people are more open to that aspect of themselves,” he said. “Others, who are fearful like your brother, spend a lot of energy repelling it.”

Michael so fervently protested my queer proclivity that I sometimes wondered whether he shared it. Might there be suppressed desire behind the dogma—an undertow more powerful than he could admit? If his life had taken a different direction might he have, in his own words, gone to the other side, too?

My wife likes to tell the tale of our beginnings: how she courted me for four months before I admitted it wasn’t just a stable foundation of friendship we forged. The initial spark of attraction isn’t easy to pin down. Maybe it was the morning we spotted a coyote hunting across the street from the school, each of us standing at her classroom window before the second graders poured in. Perhaps it was over appetizers at a wine bar while I shared my online dating woes. I’d only searched the site for male profiles since the website made you choose genders. Kristen listened to my anecdotes with amusement. Then she leaned back in her chair, knees spread wide, adopting an air of nonchalance. “Maybe we should date,” she suggested. I shrugged.

We continued to meet for dinner, a movie, a stroll on the beach, all under my getting-to-know-you pretenses. Until one evening, as I was getting ready to drive the half hour from my granny unit to her farm cottage—later ours—I watched my fingers weave a braid down the side of my hair. I knew she liked the silky look of them. Who was I kidding? I wanted to win her affection!

That night we sat close together on her sofa without touching, but we both felt the heat of connection. Kristen dug her hands into the pockets of her puffy vest while she gathered her courage. “You have an effect on me that I’ve never felt before,” she admitted. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”

Her vulnerability, typically masked with bravado, moved me. Her revelation loosened hold of a longing tangled up in me for decades, about to unwind. Taking her hands in mine, I answered with a kiss and stayed the night. Within weeks we knew this one was for keeps.

Coming out to my father seven years before was one thing. Seeking his approval while seriously involved with a woman was another. Yet I had no doubt he would like Kristen. They shared a sense of humor and had several interests in common—politics, strategic board games, and young adult fantasy novels, to name a few. My anxiety abated when, the morning of their introduction, he handed me a New Yorker cartoon. The opening line: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay.” The illustration showed a guy kneeling at his parents’ graves and a caption that read, Boy, that was easy.

Sitting at her kitchen table, he stuffed Danishes into his mouth and brushed the crumbs from his shirt. They made jokes at my expense, which I maximized for comic effect. I knew their teasing was lighthearted, something to bond over. On his way out, Kristen joked that he had special privileges since she let him keep his sneakers on despite her no-shoes rule.

“Well, I’d better stay in good standing with my future daughter-in-law,” he replied, winking at me as he hugged her goodbye.

During our first year together, we celebrated each month with dinner or a coastal weekend away, always accompanied by handwritten cards detailing our compatibility. You soothe my heart and soul, I wrote after seven months. So much sexiness, generosity, and humor, she wrote at ten. When I sought comfort, Kristen cradled my head against her chest, calling me her “precious cargo.” Each time she expressed another endearment I replied, “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

The next summer my father invited us to join him, his wife, and my stepsister with her two kids at a vacation house he rented for the week. He also invited my nephew, then nine years old. But my father advised me not to tell my brother about Kristen. Although my nephew had met her briefly on his first trip west the previous year, I hadn’t introduced her then as my girlfriend. This time she would accompany me. I wondered if my brother and his wife had a right to be informed, but I was afraid Michael would instill revulsion in his three boys, guised in religiosity. My father thought that if I told them beforehand then it wouldn’t be fair to his grandson if my brother kept him home.       

“Just don’t hold hands,” he suggested when I shared my dilemma.

Kristen wasn’t crazy about concealing our relationship with a keep-it-in-the-bedroom mentality. Her mother’s reaction to her own coming out in college was to cry, believing her daughter was hell-bound. Yet even she who still held faith in her evangelical Christian convictions had welcomed me to home-cooked weekly dinners where I was treated as an equal to her son’s lawfully wedded wife.

I didn’t like the idea of staying closeted either. Pretending to be friends put everyone in a compromising position, including my stepsister’s young children, who knew us as a couple. Shouldn’t we provide a model of healthy self-respect, not shrouded in shame, I questioned. 

That week, we compromised. We neither displayed nor withheld our affection, but we never explicitly revealed that we were partners and felt ill at ease with the restraint. One afternoon my nephew entered the studio where we stayed and asked, “You both sleep here? In the bed? Together?”

“Yes,” I replied, without explanation.

Two years into my relationship with Kristen, I still hadn’t told Michael. With the exception of my estranged mother, all of our family, friends, and coworkers knew we were cohabitating. I had recently exchanged email with my brother while helping him with his latest job search, but the personal information I withheld spoke volumes. While I still felt protective of my partnership, I was tired of tiptoeing. I didn’t want a life controlled by a fear of repercussions. Secret-keeping was taking a toll. I couldn’t hide forever. At some point, I’d have to face him. I had granted him power over me for too long. My therapist suggested that for something to become possible we have to make room for its possibility. What if I met my brother from a place of compassion rather than anticipating his reaction? Instead of allowing his displeasure to diminish me, what if I drew upon a source of inner strength that outweighed any negative outcomes?

One day my brother emailed about a gay instructor he had. He wrote of loving “the other” regardless of their way of life. Although he didn’t agree with his “choices,” he valued his personhood. Then he told me about a church elder he’d trusted, someone who molested Michael when he was nineteen—one of the worst experiences in his life. My brother ran into him years later with the man’s wife and kids. “I felt sorry for them because I’m sure he was still living a double life. It wouldn’t be right if I was living ‘another life’ in the shadows, like that brother, never telling my family what I was up to.”

I immediately responded, reminding my brother that all people have the potential to cause harm, gay or straight. I understood about living in the shadows and disclosed that I, too, had not been transparent. Finally, I unveiled my relationship with Kristen.

My brother replied that he and his wife accepted me, even loved me unconditionally. However, they did not approve of my “unprincipled lifestyle.” He was still hopeful I wouldn’t give up on men completely and wished I’d find one good man who could love me forever. He had a “previously homosexual” friend who “turned himself straight.” He offered professional help—“Just as there is a movement for gays to ‘come out,’ there’s also a movement for gays to ‘come out straight’”—while acknowledging that I might be offended by the idea.

After fearing the worst, I was honestly relieved. At least he didn’t threaten, as he’d done years before, that I’d never see my nephews again. But he did make one thing clear: he and his family refused to engage with Kristen. They would not talk openly with their children about it, not at least until they were much older. They wanted to shield them from this type of “unnatural and unhealthy” relationship at all costs: “We teach them homosexuality is a direct violation of Heavenly Law. NOT THAT WE DON’T LOVE YOU. WE DO!!” Michael encouraged me to try to break things off with Kristen, reminding me that what we do on earth will be carried into the Spirit World, which is eternal. He signed his missive: “Love forever, despite our divergent beliefs.”

Five years after our first kiss, Kristen and I climbed over a fence separating our backyard from the fields beyond. The grass, still green from February rains, made good pasture for sheep that grazed. On a knoll above the cottage we put down a beach blanket and sat under the shade of a cork oak her father planted as a boy. Kristen used to play under these trees, she told me, searching for acorns and making pinch pots from clay. “Never would I have dreamed that someday I’d be here with the woman I love, ready to share the rest of our lives together.”

She handed me a Champagne flute before popping open a bottle of Iron Horse Wedding Cuvée. That afternoon we’d registered as domestic partners—the closest thing approximating the rights and privileges afforded heterosexual couples since voters in the state of California outlawed gay marriage in 2008. Making our union official was a serious step we had contemplated for months, a commitment with legal significance, though the informality of signing a document with a notary public at the local UPS store was hardly commemorative. So we created a private ceremony.

I lit a candle and read a poem by Dawna Markova: “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.” Kristen picked up a flat skipping rock, worn smooth by river currents, which she’d brought home from a fishing trip near the start of our relationship. It reminded me of streams in the Eastern Sierra where we camped, hiking to glacier lakes, soaking in hot springs, and sleeping below snowy peaks surrounded by the scent of sagebrush. The rock symbolized the steadfastness of our love; whenever we experienced turbulence, one of us removed it from its perch on a bookshelf and placed it in an open palm—a solid reminder that our loyalty was unshakeable.

“I will always treasure and care for you,” we promised, clinking our glasses in a toast and basking in the golden light turning toward dusk, just the two of us on the hill and a red-tailed hawk flying overhead as witness.

Six months later, Michael brought his middle son, who was ten years old, to our paternal grandfather’s funeral. We stayed in the same hotel as our father and his wife, several aunts and uncles, and ten cousins. Kristen had already met some of our relatives at a cousin’s Bat Mitzvah in Chicago—officiated by my uncle, a rabbi with two gay adult children—followed by a family reunion held in Cleveland to celebrate Grandpa’s birthday not long before he died. When she and I walked toward the dining area for the hotel’s complimentary breakfast, I watched my brother’s face drop. Maybe he had forgotten she existed. Or it just hadn’t occurred to him that my partner would accompany me across the country. When I introduced them, he offered a cursory nod. Then, without a word, he left my nephew alone with us at the table and escaped to his room.

My father, who was writing the eulogy, also stayed behind closed doors. While he and Michael kept to themselves, my nephew ran around the atrium with his cousins and took the glass-walled elevators up and down as I kept an eye on him. At the chapel Michael sat by himself in the back row, his head bowed and eyes closed tight while he rocked slightly with his hands between his knees. His son, looking uncertain, stood alone to the side, so I invited him to sit next to us.

“Dad was small in size, but a giant in stature,” our father began, a hanky in hand while he stood at the podium. “He was gifted in relating to people. He could communicate so much with less than a dozen words. In his quiet way, he led an exemplary life.”

I had come out to my Grandpa during his first year of widowhood, when he was ninety-one. I told him I was bringing “someone special” to that Bat Mitzvah. “A girlfriend,” I clarified. He didn’t miss a beat. “I understand,” he replied. As long as I was happy, he told me, that’s what mattered. When I described Kristen as funny and intelligent, he said he’d expect my match to have such positive attributes. When I mentioned that we met at the school where I later stopped teaching, he chuckled and said, “You got a lot out of that job after all!” 

As I stood at the gravesite with Kristen’s arms around me, Michael stood beside us and placed his hands on his son’s shoulders. One cousin spoke about naming the eldest of his three children after our grandfather and choked up as he recalled the wonderful times they’d all spent together. Then my brother rambled on, confessing his regrets that his own kids never knew our grandparents, despite only living a six-hour drive away. Reflecting on my father’s eulogy, I recounted my coming out to Grandpa and told our small gathering about his magnanimous response. “In my eyes, you can do no wrong,” he had reassured me. I was aware of breaking my brother’s taboo against truth-telling in the presence of my nephew. Even then I felt the strength of my grandfather’s unconditional love, unwavering.

Opening a cedar chest under the window seat in the farmhouse, Kristen’s mother selected tablecloths for crystal vases we’d fill with roses for the commitment ceremony we planned that summer. She even hired a few of her church friends to pass out sparkling wine and clean up after the reception. My father paid for the taco truck.

A friend played a violin rendition of Bach’s Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring, a piece from Kristen’s parents’ wedding, as they accompanied her down a garden aisle to our chuppah, held in honor of my Jewish heritage. Supported by four poles and open on all sides, the cloth canopy signified the home we shared. Our guests gathered around this symbolic sanctuary to demonstrate their community support.

“You have the responsibility to hold in your hearts the best intentions, love, hope, and health for these two wonderful people,” our officiant announced. During several premarital sessions she counseled us in performing nuptial rites that would be meaningful to us both. She’d introduced the concept that as two individuals we created a third entity, our relationship, which needed our nurturing attention in order to thrive. In lieu of exchanging rings, we held our river rock between us. We vowed to encourage, inspire, cherish, and sustain one another—and this entity—throughout our days. My aunt and uncle offered a blessing. Then came the pronouncement:
            “By the power vested in me by the State of California to marry
            some people, and by the power that should be vested in me to marry 
            all people, it is my deepest honor to declare you equal and wed.”

When we planned our ceremony for late June 2013, we couldn’t have predicted that just the day before, the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down DOMA as well as restore marriage equality in California, making our matrimony both state-sanctioned and federally recognized.

Our reception was held under the sprawling branches of a coast live oak Kristen’s grandmother had planted from a seedling. We stood on the raised front porch and faced seventy wedding guests under its majestic canopy. My father raised a glass. To hardly a dry eye, he toasted our marriage and the legal reversal that legitimized it. My mother-in-law spoke of love not just as a feeling, but as action—made in an atmosphere of protection and perseverance. Then she gave us her blessing: “May you find your way together as you have committed yourselves to each other in love.”

The evening news, which previewed that weekend’s Pride festivities, showcased couples just like us, making history.
           
Two months later, right before I flew to D.C. to visit my nephews, my brother called. I told him about the wedding we had, which we didn’t invite him to. He called it disgusting. “Well, all the relatives and friends who showed up to honor our love disagree,” I said. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave out his family, to not even tell them, but his hostility was unwelcome. “For nearly three decades you’ve made your position clear,” I stated, “and I will no longer tolerate your belligerence.”

After that phone call, my brother softened his stance. The following summer our youngest nephew, at age eleven, stayed overnight with us in the cottage. His visit set a template for many to follow. Each time we hosted our nephews thereafter, my brother expressed only gratitude. Eventually, one holiday season, he addressed a card to us both. He even drew a heart over Kristen’s name.

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Nicole R. Zimmerman (she/her) is a queer Jewish American writer with an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her writing appears in the New York Times (Tiny Love Stories), Longreads, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction, among other publications. Nicole lives with her wife in northern California where she leads workshops using the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. She is working on a memoir entitled Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About.

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