Melissa and I met on the 25th of September 2006 and eloped to Niagara Falls a year and three days later. She was everything I always looked for in a woman – jaded, curvy, horny – and when it appeared we might make love, I outed myself to her (I was always good with the caveat emptors). She didn’t care. I fell particularly hard for Melissa, fifteen years my junior and my perfect complement: level headed, grounded, goal oriented, and responsible. She loved me despite my identity, and, more importantly, she gave me a greater freedom to express who I was than anyone ever had. That wasn’t enough, though, and, when it became apparent I would have to transition, she took one hand in mine and raised the other into a fist for anyone who dared stand in my way. It didn’t matter that she was a -2 on the Kinsey scale or didn’t even like women as friends:
she was going to support the birth of her partner. So here I finally am, Juli, the woman whose life I was willing to sacrifice so many other women for. Today, I am everything I ever wanted to be: a beautiful, confident, strong, fierce, woman, a lesbian, and it scares the hell out of me that I’m not finally finished with hurting the women who love me. High maintenance doesn’t even begin to explain me. For 43 years, Jimmy was a shy, withdrawn, dickish misanthrope, content to sit in his darkened room and hate the world and all around him; but Juli is a force of nature, never still, never quiet, as up as she is down, as here as she is there, full of life and, most important to this tale, an as-yet untapped libido that promises to be epic. 36