In daylight and in the eyes of others, I began to understand there would be no easy way out. Following the rules of the child's game Red Light, Green Light, I ran and froze, a chameleon seeking cover and seeking meaning for myself, not yet understanding there would be no security or winning way to deal with the world's opinion of who and what I was. As a child, one of my favorite things to do was spy. I watched house traffic quietly from under the kitchen table and ran experiments to see how long I could go undetected, protected by silence.
Green Light: Run. The figure begins to turn and I begin to freeze. Gather strength, see another fight ahead. Our shadows are tied together and I breathe hard, sweating and trying not to fall forward as my body yearns to, as I am watched for one false move and as in turn I learn to watch for the red light marking constant betrayal and danger.
I dreamt many lovers, took excursions in my dreams where I flew alongside the wind and descended from the sky to press full-length against the body of my music teacher, her full chest held tight under a white button-down shirt, khakis smoothing her hips. I would wake surprised, aroused and wanting to rediscover the heated sensation leaving my pelvis. I was very happy, and of course wondered if she knew that we met at night, hips clasped hard against each other, while in the daylight hours I sang as loud as I could in the chorus she gustily conducted, her arms rising rapidly as the sweat grew and dampened her shirt and her chest heaved and sighed to our communal song. I was eight or nine years old when I discovered she could move me beyond song and into the forbidden and delicious realm of sexual obsession. I learned to pay close attention to my dreams and to her every excited movement as she conducted the energy behind the music into the collective achievement of our all-girl chorus.
My clarity and sense of self never lived long inside me, a stuttering flame, and I often wondered why, even as I strove to find a way for inside and outside to fit together in fluid relation. My heart reached one way only to be dead-ended by isolation. Red Light, Green Light. As I searched for others, I kept up a double vision, always watching the outside and monitoring the effects of my behavior. I wanted to fit together, and I felt shapeless and sharp, torn and flickering, hidden under a surface of fluctuating needs, a sense of duty and finely tuned sociability. Red Light, Green Light became a metaphor for my progress as a young person seeking my lesbian sexuality. Control of my own path would not often be in my hands. The stop-start dance mimicked the frustration I felt in the world, the constant interrupting of my explorations of lesbian life.
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Beatrix Gates has published a new collection of poetry, In The Open, a Lamibda Literary Award finalist from Painted Leaf Press, as well as two previous volumes, Shooting at Night and Native Tongue. She edited the anthology The Wild Good: Lesbian Photography & Writings on Love, which called on her years of experience as editor and designer of Granite Press. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony, and scenes from The Singing Bridge, a collaborative opera with composer Anna Dembska, were performed at the Ceres Gallery. Organizer of A Different Light's Poetry Series, she has also served on the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press Transition Team. She has worked as a freelance editor and taught writing, literature, women's studies, book arts, and literacy in many settings, including Goddard College, the Writer's Voice, NYPL, the New School for Social Research, and NYU. She is currently writing autobiographical prose and working on collaborative translations of poems from the Spanish with Electa Arenal. She lives in Greenport, New York.