Growing up, my parents were very liberal. My dad’s gay, he’s been with his husband now for over 40 years. That was my normal. My mom remarried a guy who’s very liberal. I was taught that everybody is equal. But when I was at school, I heard the N-word dropped. I heard Jewish people spoken of very negatively. My step-dad’s family was Jewish. So what do you do? You kind of laugh it off to fit in. In high school, I also had a major drinking problem, but I got great grades so I could fly under the radar. Fast-forward, I was an art major at this big university where I really didn’t fit in. All these girls had curling irons and were rushing sororities, but again I didn’t want to rock the boat. So I just kept partying more. Then at the end of the year, I was raped at a fraternity house and didn’t say anything about it.
So I go home and I meet this guy. I’ll call him Geoffrey. He was a big Republican, and I wasn’t, but he was also a big drinker, like me. We started dating. It was a kind of revenge, that I could get a guy like the guy who raped me — I could get him to be nice to me. Looking back, it was all very strange. But then [Geoffrey and I broke up], and I got married and then had my son, and that relationship lasted for about 14 years. After we got divorced, I got sober, and then in 2010, I found Geoffrey on Facebook. It looked like he was single and had grown up a lot, and we started talking. We had a good time together. I didn’t really want to get married again, but I didn’t want to make anybody mad. So I said, “Sure, let’s get married.”
