How to Be Multiple by Helena de Bres & Julia de Bres

Author:Helena de Bres & Julia de Bres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

My own first experience of queer romantic attraction didn’t go very well. Like Julia, I’d fallen in love with a straight woman who was a close friend, so things were super awkward and hopeless from the beginning. My gay best friend, Coco, assured me that this was often how it went. You begin with a straight femme, she said, as a kind of starter drug, and next thing you know you’re living in an ecofeminist separatist community with a butch with a buzz cut and five cats. I wanted to believe her, but in the meantime I felt terrible. All loved up, with nowhere for that love to go—and, also, maybe I was a little homophobic after all.

I was very into this particular woman, but was I into being gay? Unclear. When I imagined Julia’s and my hopefully more successful romantic futures with women we hadn’t yet met, I had complicated feelings about it. The idea that neither of us would have to deal directly with the patriarchy under our own roofs was super appealing. Our husbands had been feminists, but they were still cis men, and Julia and I had taken up roles with them that struck me in retrospect as pretty traditional. Imagine ditching that fraught setup for good, I marveled, and having romance be more like—well, like Julia’s and my relationship: fundamentally equal and marked by a depth of understanding that maybe just wasn’t attainable with a guy.

But, if I was honest about it, that vision of us parallel nesting in our woman-on-woman households also set off a buzz of alarm. What was this midlife tandem conversion really about? I found myself wondering. Were Julia and I retreating to intimacy with another female as some kind of cowardly regression, after simply failing at adult relationships with men? If we found these future women, would it feel too comfy? Would all four of us get lesbian bed death, take up knitting, Patagonia fleeces, and homemade vegan meats and watch our lives grind to a general halt? Were Julia and I trying to retire to Camilla’s three decades early, as a result of just, you know, giving up? Or—worse—were we trying to date each other in some fucked-up sublimated way?

With a little distance, I can see these feelings track the Poe/Mann model: more than a little internalized twinphobia to match the internalized homophobia. Twinsies.

The low-key tendency to treat twins as kinda, sorta gay—in the Poe and Mann stories, in the common sexual fantasy of identical twins making out, in my own inchoate feelings about the matter as a baby gay—is matched by a tendency running in the opposite direction. Writing of queer couples, the literary scholar Joseph Bristow says, “Whatever our differences . . . we have historically been regarded . . . as twins.”26 In the latter case, the association probably springs from overemphasizing the role of gender in defining a person’s identity. If the most salient feature of Adrian is that he’s a man, and the same

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