Confessions of a lesbian

I can only speak for myself, not other lesbians or homosexual people: The whole homosexuality thing is complex enough without my personal experiences being taken to represent everyone.

            I never imagined I would be a lesbian one day. There isn’t a single day when I felt attracted to another girl or woman prior to my current relationship with Yvette which makes me a lesbian I am sure: She is female and I am female and our relationship is romantic and sexual. The road to me being a lesbian was long and painful. I was raped at least ten times before I turned twenty. This I know in retrospect because at the time it happened I never thought of it as rape:

            I lost my virginity at an early age. When Uncle Tom inserted his finger into my vagina at age ten, I did not tell anyone and I didn’t complain: After all, life was meant to be rough. He took away my virginity the following year. I grabbed and pulled at his shirt out of sheer pain; it was unbearable. When he was done,

I had a button from his shirt in my hand: I had not meant to have his shirt button in my hand. I watched him as he pulled up his trousers and he glared at me:

“You will not dare tell anyone about this. Keep your little mouth shut if you know what is good for you?”

He went away, perhaps to the shebeen. He would come home after midnight singing at the top of his lungs.

I clutched Uncle Tom’s button the whole day and that button came to represent heart wrenching pain. That button represented what I could not explain, what I could not comprehend. My mum was already sickly then from years of abuse and something else that was never really openly discussed. She died a year later and I became the mother of the house.

            When my mother died, my father began to have sex with me. I was indifferent to the whole thing: I didn’t fight, but I didn’t participate freely and willingly in the whole thing. Now that I think of it as an adult, I realise that it was rape and he could have gone to prison for a very long time if I had known enough to report him to the police. The events that led to me being lesbian are many, but the beginning set me on the wrong path and there is no way I could have turned from it:

            My father remarried. She was only two years my senior and we were best of friends. I heard her screaming in pleasure night after night and she always had a smile on her face each morning. And then out of the blue my Dad kicked me out of the house. It was without warning and no reason or explanation was ever given, although the young wife hinted that he didn’t want me to negatively influence her. It was years later that the truth dawned on me. Many years later after his death that

I realized he had kept me as a sex slave and now that he had a wife, he didn’t have much use for me.

            I moved in with a friend and after only a few days she passed me onto a much older man who was a total drunk. He provided for me for two days and that was it. I had a roof over my head, but if I didn’t do anything, I was going to starve to death. I believed I was married, so I couldn’t sell my body for survival.

I started off with five juice cards and they became twenty and one day a Mercedes Benz stopped next to me and asked what else I was selling. I hesitated and the guy behind the wheel told me to get into the car.

            That’s how I became a prostitute and for many years I survived and I met my demise on the street. It wasn’t exactly the final nail in the coffin but it pushed me towards the cliff.

            I thought I had gone through it all. My thoughts always were that it couldn’t get any worse. And that kept me going: If it couldn’t get any worse, it could only get better. But then, the one above had an ace up his sleeve.

It was a BMW with South African plates. I don’t know what model it was. They all look the same to me. I only noticed that it was a BMW because I had cohabited with someone who was obsessed with BMWs for one whole week.

When the car pulled over, I did not run towards it as I usually did. Four of my colleagues rushed forward, but the youthful looking driver gestured towards me and I slowly walked towards him as my colleagues looked at me in envy. I didn’t feel like going with the guy. My instincts were spot on and I should have followed them, but hey, things like instincts, morality, guilty conscience and all the related nonsense had not played any part in my life at all and I wasn’t going to start behaving like a spoilt wife now.

He detoured to OK supermarket and bought expensive whisky and picked up two of his friends and we proceeded to a city lodge. He slept with me for hours. He was at it literally for hours. I am not saying it seemed like hours because he was so rough and I was as dry as a piece of biltong: He was at it for hours as his friends drank whisky and were strangely detached from what was going on. When he was done he silently walked away and one of his friends replaced him. It all was so unreal and a bit eerie. I must have passed out during the whole ordeal.

The lodge manager found me the next morning; a splash of water on my face woke me up. I was totally naked and my vagina was on fire and the lodge manager was stroking my naked breasts. I tried standing up and realized I could not stand. And the manager got to his feet and walked away. I am sure he had seen enough of these kinds of situations.

            To escape the trauma of what I gone through, I travelled to the rural areas; my grandmother still lived there and would take me in any time. That trip to the rural areas sealed my fate. Unimaginable horror awaited me:

            I got to my grandmother’s homestead at midnight, sneaked into the kitchen and slept. Gogo found me there the next morning.

Gogo showed me around the homestead and there was something very strange, it took me a while to put a finger on it. But it finally dawned on me: Gogo’s rearing skills were legendary, but instead of the usual hundreds of chickens, I only saw a few sickly ones.

“Ngabatwana labana mntanami. Kanti ilizwe selingenelwe yini bakhithi?” It’s those children my child. What is becoming of this country?

Gogo meant the boys and girls camped in our village, the ones who were being taught various subjects of national importance including a curious version of patriotism. They let me be for two days, but they came for me at midnight on my third night in the village. I needed reorientation, they said. They were taking me to the pungwe. I was found the next morning by the river, a few meters from the pungwe site. I needed stitches to my vagina…

            I woke up in the avenues clinic. I don’t know how I got there. Yvette, a slim young woman with very long hair was assigned my counsellor. She looked like a slimmer version of Jennifer Lopez and she was very nice and very patient. I don’t know how our sexual relationship developed, but all I know is that for the first time in my life I am enjoying lengthy and guilty free sexual experiences. There is something liberating about getting your orgasm from another woman. With a man there is a feeling of guilt, of being used if the relationship does not develop into marriage. That terrible feeling is not there with another woman. It can be said I am not a real lesbian. But I am having a fulfilling sexual relationship with another woman: What is that?