QUEER LOVE COUNSEL FROM RUTH & NAOMI

New WLW Advice Column Brought to you by the King David’s Boyfriends Website

Q: Dear Ruth and Naomi,

I am a queer teenage girl in a loving situationship except that the situation is that the girl I am in love with says that we’re soulmates but she also has a long term boyfriend named T who will propose to her on graduation day. He’s not the one who stays up with her at night beneath childhood bedroom blankets, though, translating and untranslating her fairy pink Bible until it reassures her that God could maybe love the gays. He’s not the one who knows that language is no small thing, that it can be the difference between unconditional love and undead hatred. He hasn’t held the trembling proof of that in his hands as she cries herself to sleep thinking of what it means to exist in a same-gender-loving body while attending church and school and communion and dance and life with Jesus-is-my-boyfriend girls and Generation Joshua boys who will become premarital-sex-before-marriage-is-sin women and it-isn’t-rape-if-it’s-your-husband men. I don’t think I can save her from the salt pillars they will become.

Where we grew up, if you love someone, you marry them. My childhood is drunk on wineless weddings, white dress days where the bride and groom were both too young to drink legally. I don’t think she and I will ever jump the broom, though, not even when we’re old enough to graduate from grape juice communions. What advice would you give me when it comes to loving her while also loving myself? What could I possibly be to her if not her wife-in-training? And what Bible verses would you recommend to me for strength and discernment?

Sincerely,
Silly Over a Sapphic Situationship

A: “Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.” (Ruth 1:17)

Dear queer,

Or maybe dear queer girls, or dear women in the time after times when dear meant severe. Meant sore. Meant more. More and more the men between you may shrivel, acidic soil-fond geranium heads dried out by your alkaline mouths. May talk to God about and never with you. Or may wake up in a paradise where you don’t exist, find your name in the back molars of his mouth, and choose to swallow it.

But you never leave the women who love you. For better or for redacted verses, you will adore the sweet rounded backs that press purple maypop night into your chest. Or you will root yourselves in one another’s heart-break. Or else the swish of their shaking off sand will season your sleep. When the beginnings of classically southern mothers on a man-hunt fever-shimmer around their bodies, treating your heated breasts like a plot of land to emerge from with renewed thirst, let them stay behind you.

Only do not forget your lengthy desert of longing is worth crossing to follow you. Only do not cross yourself. It would dessicate the greatest gay heart of all time. When She took a rib from adam, a woman stranger grew around the bone with the great grandmothers of passiflora and lavender whorling beneath her skull. So do not be surprised when the women who have seemingly graduated from your side, who held your hand and who took it, introduce you to their baby daughters, who hold your finger exactly the way you’d expect someone formed from it would.

Dearly and queerly,
Ruth and Naomi