Loving Freely

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/opinion/loving-freely.html

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I LOOKED up for a moment, and there he was: holding a bouquet of roses, checking his watch, looking down Tottenham Court Road for a girl who said she’d meet him there. Then he dissipated like mist. It didn’t surprise me that he’d vanish like that, though. That young man had ceased to exist decades ago.

The pub across the street had been my regular outpost back in 1979, when I was a 20-year-old student in London, studying British literature. I couldn’t believe it was still there. But then, there are times I can hardly believe that I’m still here, either.

It’s inevitable that an American traveling in Europe might find her thoughts turning to her own romantic history. For me, this was not only because travel is inherently romantic, but also because I had the great fortune, half a lifetime ago, to fall in love for the first time in this very city, in this very place.

I walked through the door and to my surprise I found the place remarkably unchanged. Which is more than we can say about some people.

I was in London on business for Glaad, the L.G.B.T advocacy nonprofit organization. I stood at the bar and had a pint of bitter. There were a lot of couples: some gay, some straight, watching a rugby game on TV. So far as I knew, I was the only transgender woman in the pub. But then, what did I know? Even for a person for whom the gender business is often the only business at hand, other people’s gender is still, sometimes, none of my business.

One of the rugby teams scored a goal, and everyone cheered and hugged: men and women, women and women, men and men. As I drank my pint, I thought with wonder how the world had changed in the 36 years since I had been here last.

During my visit, I had found many Brits fully accepting on the issue of lesbian, gay and bisexual equality. But transgender issues, as always, seemed to stop people short. My host at the House of Lords for a Glaad board meeting was the legendary Michael Cashman, a man rightly revered for his civil rights work, and not least for his cofounding, with Ian McKellen, of Stonewall, an L.G.B.T. advocacy group. When I said, speaking of trans issues, “It’s not about who you want to go to bed with, it’s who you want to go to bed as,” Mr. Cashman stopped me, looked at me thoughtfully, and said, “Say that again?”

A week later, in Paris, I asked my wife if she ever felt unsafe in a foreign city expressing her love for me. We were walking past the École Militaire late at night, holding hands, the rotating spotlight at the top of the Eiffel Tower cutting through the dark above us. She said: “No. Not anymore. The world has changed.” Then she said: “Anyway, we’re middle-aged women. We’re invisible.”

I wish that I shared her optimism about those changes. Violence against gay people is on the rise. In France there was a 78 percent rise in homophobic acts in 2013, according to a French watchdog group. My spirits hadn’t been raised by some of the conversations I’d had in London, either. There, I met the activist Bisi Alimi, who came out on a Nigerian television show in 2004; three years later he had to flee the country in the wake of threats to his life. Sometimes it feels to me as if the odds that we will ever live in a world in which all men and women are free to live their lives without shame or suffering are long indeed.

And yet, as I drank my pint, I looked out the window at the Great Portland Street station, where my younger self had waited for that girl 36 years ago, holding flowers. She and I had walked that night through London after rain had fallen, mist rising up from the cobbles below our feet. Later I’d put her in a taxi, and we placed our hands on either side of a rain-streaked window before the taxi drove off in the fog.

I’d stood there in the mist for a long time, wondering if it was going to be impossible to love, or to be loved, in this life. A clock in a nearby church had chimed the hour.

Many of the L.G.B.T. people I meet continue to ask themselves variations on this question throughout their lives. In my own case, it turned out that love would, in time, give me the courage to come out and live my truth. A few years later I met the love of my life, Deirdre Finney, and she and I have spent 27 years together now: 12 as husband and wife, 15 as wife and wife.

But not everyone is so lucky, in Europe or in America. And living one’s life without fear or shame ought not to be a matter of luck, or of nationality. All of us — men and women, gay and straight, cis and trans — deserve to be loved.

I finished my pint and walked out into the London evening. The bell in the old church rang, and I stopped to listen to the sound. I had heard it before.