The No-Fault Line, by Gillian

Fault, with it's many meanings, is not a positive word. It's not my fault! It's all your fault, or The Government's fault, or my teacher's fault. Electrical faults can cause plane crashes, brownouts and blackouts. The cry of fault on the tennis court means failure; a missing of the mark. We find fault with other people, and occasionally admit to our own. We fault others for their errors and disclaim responsibilities by proclaiming not to be at fault. And these days we even must have no-fault car insurance. But there are of course the biggest, baddest faults, those gashes in the bedrock which suddenly, or sometimes not so suddenly, jerk into violent movement causing earthquakes and occasionally tsunamis, and the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people.

I have a major fault in me. Within me. Ok Ok, I've got lots of them, I'm full of failings and faults, but I'm talking of a geologic type of fissure; my very being torn asunder. At a very young age, I couldn't say when, social pressure started to build up stress on the fault line between a straight me and a gay me - my Straight Shale and my Lesbian Limestone. The building stresses finally caused the fault to give way, allowing the Straight Shale to be forced up and over that Lesbian Limestone. It got buried. It disappeared. But of course it was still there, as are all things invisible beneath the surface of the earth or of our psyches.

Shale is not a good foundation rock. It cracks and breaks and splits and crumbles. It slips and slides. With these qualities, it tends to weather and erode away quite rapidly. And my Straight Shale layer was pretty thin to begin with! After forty years or so - happily it was eroding at human speed not that creep of geologic time - it was all but gone.

The fault line was exposed at the surface. And on the other side of it, a mere step away, lay a vast stretch of Lesbian limestone, glittering in the sunshine. I pulled my feet free of that cloying clinging Straight Shale mud and stepped across the fault onto that wide open, welcoming, slab of Lesbian Limestone. Only I prefer to think of that line as a no-fault line. It's not my fault, it's not my parents' fault and it's not a fault at all.

Crossing that line is, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, but a small, simple, step, for man or woman.  But perhaps, just maybe, as endless numbers of people continue to cross it, it will become, in terms of acceptance and understanding, a giant leap for mankind.

© 20 Apr 2015 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 28 years.