It also means that when I talk about my husbands, of which there are two and of which there will only ever be two, I don’t mean my legal/matrimonial husbands. I mean two men with whom I have a connection that goes deeper than friendship. My fiancée accepts their roles in my life and she knows that when I call them my husbands it’s because there isn’t really a word that can explain my connection with these two men better.
One of my husbands is a gay man I shall call SR. SR is younger than me by a few years and was my first husband. He is the man whom I share a spiritual level with and who fake cringes when I talk about how women make me feel in the same way I do when he talks about how men make him feel. We would dance together and laugh together, share a level of communication that didn’t really need words. I don’t talk to him as much as I used to, because we’re several hundred miles apart, but I still love him in the same fierce way and I think of him daily. He just gets my quirky.
My other husband, GC, I have never physically met, and yet he is the one who is the focus of this blog post. We’ve known each other for ten years via the internet. I often joke with him about how he’s a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, and who can blame me. He’s a published author and if you read his lesbian work you would be shocked to find out he is a man. GC and I share one main fandom that brought us together and yet our friendship has developed to be more than that. He gets on with AH as well and we both adore him. He’s the one who makes me smile when he suddenly drops me a dm or an email for no apparent reason. He writes us fic on our birthdays or for Christmas, he talks to us about his current non-fandom work and he shares things with me that I suspect he wouldn’t necessarily share with others.
GC is the one who when I’m having a particularly hard time expressing myself or my feelings I can turn to and say “Husband, this is going on…” He’s never judged me in ten years of friendship and he has always made me feel welcome. He’s the one that when people say that internet friendship isn’t real I think of. Because GC has meant more to me than a lot of people who have walked in and out of my life. In ten years I’ve never lost his friendship and he’s never lost my trust, only taken more of it. He’s the one whose shoulder I cried on repeatedly about a mutual friend whom I’ve blogged about before doing a runner. He’s been there through both of my long term relationships. He’s always known just how to make me smile. And so yes, GC is my husband. He’s a lesbian trapped in a man’s body and I adore him for who he is.
You’ll sometimes here “If I was straight he’d be the one.” come from a lesbian’s lips when they talk about their male best friends. GC is my husband, but in all honesty, I don’t think we’d have this level of love if I were straight, and honestly, I’m ok with that. Our relationship, the way it is, allows for honesty and love and a mutual respect that I find very hard to cultivate with men. I’ve witnessed too much, dealt with too much, to trust men easily, especially heterosexual, cisgendered men. Yet with GC, that trust is unconditional. He’s one of those rare men whose first thoughts are not of his needs or feelings but of those around him. He’s a feminist whose lesbian fiction could well be written by a woman, even though I know it’s not. And it’s because he truly puts himself in the other person’s shoes. He has a rare talent.
So to my husbands, and particularly to GC, I say thank you. Thank you for giving me a level of trust with men that I never thought would be possible. You two and my Fairy Godfathers are the reason I have learnt that some men can be trusted.
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