How to Become a Lesbian in Your Thirties by Catherine Buck
Catherine Buck’s “How to Become a Lesbian in Your Thirties” is no typical how-to guide. Buck offers no precise instructions or detailed illustrations to point her reader toward the right path. The voice is direct—a call to bravery, a confession, an order to break out. Buck’s visuals are clever and light but the emotions and decisions aren’t. Children are involved, as well as a man and a father. So many people. But also, you. You are there too. “You could, if you chose,” she writes. “You could, if you chose,” she beckons. —CRAFT
The first step is realizing that you just can.
Do you look at the other trendy queer people in your life, consider that they possess something so freeing and joyful and good, wish that perhaps you were as lucky as they were to be born not-straight? Do you scroll aimlessly through photos of the gay couples in your life and think they have it all figured out, gawk at a passing stranger with an undercut and understand that this is the coolest person you have seen in your entire life?
You could, if you chose, be that person.
Does brushing up against a woman on the subway reading that book you’ve meant to get to fill you with chills, and do you obsessively refresh the page of your ex-best friend on the day of her wedding just to see if what she wore was the suit you’d pinky sworn on in the third grade, knowing that it wouldn’t be, knowing that seeing the person who stood beside her would fill you with rage and longing?
You can have all these thoughts, but understand they are not straight ones.
The process here is simpler if you are unattached, free, without a lifetime of religious constraints or physical traumas. If you have been lucky enough to date men but not marry them, to coo over babies but never create your own, if you are surrounded by friends who experience gender as art and not a chorus of mirrored and ancient opposites, you may be able to take a leap with minimal scarring.
Minimal, of course. Never none.
If you have been, however, recently inducted into the role of matriarch, you may encounter additional hurdles. You can take it slow. You can draft note app speeches to the man who has held your hand through every riptide; you can write letters to your children that you rip into a thousand pieces and flush down the toilet; you can text your sister and in the long pause after an open-ended question, swallow the words you know only she would understand.
Or you can rip off the bandaid. You can drive three hours after midnight, sing karaoke at the last remaining lesbian bar in your time zone, call your father in tears and ask if he might have time to watch the kids, if it was an emergency.
Because it is an emergency. If you have arrived in this place your blood is boiling. The crossroads before you is not a leisurely decision between a road less traveled and one well worn with easy signposts. It is a rope bridge that has swayed itself into fraying, and once you have arrived at this bar and looked into the eyes of the woman playing bass and felt every chemical in your brain activate properly for the first time ever, you are most definitely going to fall. You understand now why they call love falling.
You are going to fall more spectacularly than you thought possible. If you make this choice there is a very good chance that everything will crumble. Your husband, your children, your father, your sister, your friends, your neighbors, your children, your children. You will hurt them. You are not the originator of the hurt. This is the final step to remember. When you stand at the precipice and your phone is ringing, and your head is pounding, and your babies are waiting and the child you once were is wailing and the future you want for your children is predicated on the one you must have for yourself—if you are going to survive and you are going to survive—you must leap.
Congratulations. Now you can begin.
CATHERINE BUCK lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, with her partner, pets, and plants. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Camden and was a member of the Tin House YA Workshop. Her work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, Bending Genres, Vestal Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction 2024. In her free time, she attempts to bake bread and explore new places. Find her on Twitter @buckwriting.
Featured image by Brendan Church, courtesy of Unsplash.
