SEX, LOVE, AND ART IN THE SUBURBS
IT’S A STRANGE THING, INHABITING A LIFE YOU never would have imagined for yourself.
I turn 44 this spring. For the past nine years, I’ve lived in a small city in eastern Iowa; for almost as long, I’ve been in a relationship with a man I met soon after moving here. Six years ago we moved in together, and three years ago we bought a small Dutch colonial. In many ways, our lives are typical of one kind of midwestern American life. On nice evenings, we sit in our yard and say hello to our neighbors; in the autumn we rake leaves. A year ago we adopted two cats.
This is a life that no one I knew in the pre-Internet, pre–marriage equality South I grew up in, at the height of the
