For someone who has made her sexuality a top priority, it is surprising how much of it still had to fall into place.
And also a bit disheartening to be honest.
But when you’re ready to look past that, it’s also fascinating how the latest revelations make an even more complete picture.
Even if that picture is 1991, and you’re on a timeline project.
Something no one, not even me, knows what it is exactly.
So let’s recap:
I’ve started this (second) timeline project last year, our 2025 and her 1990.
Contrary to my real past, this Lauren 1990 did not go for a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.
And contrary to my earlier retro timeline project, Lauren 1990 also did not get something going with a boy called Bear, missing out on 8 years of spectacularly good sex, but also avoiding the pain of 8 years of getting spectacularly little of anything else.
Which means it’s now 1991, Lauren has just celebrated her 19th birthday, and she is still a virgin.
You may wonder why am I on a timeline project, and keep returning to the 90s?
The reason is that I left something there. Something went wrong, when after an unlucky combination of circumstances, fear and social pressure surrounding the Aids pandemic cornered me.
In reality/ my real past, 1990 was the year I chose my path, which was the one of solid relationships.
Which was great but it did mean that around 2005, I started to understand I had bypassed a whole part of my sexuality.
Like bisexual people who have an option to mask as straight if their circumstances demand it, I too had used an option to go with a traditional, less-dangerous and certainly less socially pressured path of heterosexual relationship(s).
I cut out everything I really wanted, because the pressure for girls was enormous.
Like it had been for thousands of years, just that the 80s gave it a new cover of being concerned for her physical safety and a pressure for her to have safe sex.
But underneath it was concern of her being sexual.
A thirst to control a teen’s sexuality, and keep her from developing her own sexual autonomy, plain and simple.
Aids was new, and the brutal anxiety disorder I developed appeared like a hypochondriac phobia, but I was suffering from the same social pressure all generations of women had before me.
There was nothing new under the sun.
In my opinion, the Aids pandemic came at a time when the babyboomer generation had already stopped developing their new way of doing love. In the 70s they all knew couples, cults, or had firsthand experience of the downside of their liberated lifestyle.
Although queer culture kept progressing, the emancipation of family structures seemed to have come to a standstill in the 70s.
Without wanting to downplay the babyboomer’s accomplishment of freeing us from religious dogma and sexual repression;
Their sexual revolution had done little, if anything, to break the cycle of shame, fear and unprocessed trauma being pushed down to the next generation.
But of course, I did not know that.
None of us did, and everything seemed just normal and mundane, and Aids just a minor inconvenience to navigate before we all turned into good boys and girls, settling down and living the exact same lives our parents were living.
Just without the brief stint of free love and sex, that had come before it.
I apologize for this incredibly long blogpost, but understanding the context of my youth has become one of the few ways for me to reflect on why all these things are taking forever to find out.
Why my sexuality, despite having what appeared to be broadminded parents, is taking a gazillion years to figure out.
Every time I find a new hook, unearth a new layer, or discover that nothing was as it once seemed, I have another go at what happened, who kept things from me, and where they were hidden.
The 80s and 90s landscape, where teen sexuality was presented as something mundane and hardly worth setting guidelines for had it not been for this one virus, was the context.
Me making a management decision in 1990 to settle for the level of sexual relationships that were socially supported, the wound.
My early 2000’s breaking away from it and reinventing my sex life, was the hero’s journey.
Finding out I am a mistress and a lover, never a partner, was the destination.
And then just when you think you’re done it’s 2025 and you realize;
“Fuck!
I need to go back to 1990, I left something there.
This whole journey, this whole thing, it needs to be redone. Yes, again.”
And we’re one year in, 2026, and I recently made two new discoveries.
And despite the disheartening effect definitely being there, I think most of all I love it. And it confirms I made the right choice to go back and rebuild myself with this strange timeline project.
So:
Let’s revisit and review these two new keys to my sexuality, and see if they need further translation to the 1991 (sexual) timeline.
Or not, of course.
Gay man in a woman’s body
(BLOG 9 AUGUST 2026)
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I’m still so excited about finding this!
And it will definitely be integrated in 2026 conversations in my love life.
I am a gay man in a woman’s body, and it has made for a click with men in my love life I have not seen other women have (but there’s no way of telling of course).
The way I see it, is that we directly tapped into the Ancient Greek recipe where the love between men was the norm and heterosexual union merely a social construct.
Or at least that’s the impression I got anyway (but I’m no scholar).
Now there definitely seems to be another dynamic or trait underneath it, that explains why it took so long before I saw it.
Which is that I do not identify with my body.
To me, my body is like a car, a suit, or even a pet. Something to love, to admire, and to marvel over, but that is not me.
I am not my body, I have a body.
Had my body been male, that would have been cool too.
I have loved this female body through 5 different sizes of clothing, and through 5 decades.
She, my body, it is now aging, and it shows. And even though I too am negatively influenced by youth culture, I do think never having identified with her/ my body, is what’s helping me accepting my aging body too.
I love her, like I have always loved her.
But my body is not me.
The identification with the homosexual spirit/ identity on the inside, however, is much stronger.
I can see it in my preference for gay literature when I was a teen. I respond physically when I see two men kissing, even when neither is my type.
I find drag queens absolutely irrisistable.
But more than this borderline inappropriate objectifying or even fetishizing of homosexuality, I can feel “it” (my homosexuality) in my bones when I am in love, and in those first months or that dance between “man and woman”, which we now know in my case is really “man and man”.
We don’t discuss things I imagine a man and woman would need to discuss, and instead we dive in. In wordplay, in jokes, in in-jokes.
We can be physical without danger, and without having to discuss boundaries or desires, because both of us have figured out what we need to know between the lines.
We know enough, trust that the rest will figure itself out, and hope a few fantasies will play out but are equally okay if they don’t.
It’s brotherly, it’s equal, and it’s the most precious thing I’ve known in this lifetime.
(Amen.)
Question: Does this new insight need to be translated to 1991?
No. I don’t think so. In 2026 where we are so much more familiar discussing gender and conflicts between the inner-and outer identity, I think , generally speaking, it’s interesting that I may have discovered something new.
And new lovers will be hearing about this at some point, because they’ll feel it happening. They always have, just that neither one of us knew what we were dealing with.
But they’ve loved me for it, and they’ve left me for it.
And how much of that leaving was due to a confusion that now has a name;
That’s what I look forward to finding out.
Less curious about the aspect of men freaking out and running away, but counting on that as well of course.
Either way I think the nuance of this gay spirit in a female body, requires a level of 2026 maturity and basic knowledge on the topic of gender.
And in 1991 we didn’t have that.
However, what I will say is that 1991 was a lot more inclusive. Although trans-care was practically non-existent – and I have seen the devastating effects of this, things I could not understand with the little we knew then-
in general the 90s also offered more opportunities for when you were somewhere in between.
If I look back to being 19 in 1991, we had girls dressing as tomboys, think of the cartoon Tankgirl.
And even the ones who didn’t were far less feminine than they are today. Polished nails were combined with leather jackets, and all-feminine outfits where even jeans were renounced, were extremely rare. Skirts even rarer.
There was so much everyday masculinity available for girls, feminism had really normalized teenage girls either being comfy or being badass in some way.
My impression was that in 1991, being a girl came with more authority and power than in later decades.
Another impression I got was that bisexual men, and gay men who slept with women, were more common.
All to say that my (to me) significant discovery of being a gay man in a woman’s body, is for the 1991 timeline not relevant.
Which brings us to the second revelation I had these last weeks
My Sexuality Is different
(Blog 10 July 2026)
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This discovery predates the one mentioned above, so we’re definitely seeing overlap here.
Because obviously, my sexuality has become more clear from the gay man/ woman’s body perspective.
But in particular because I’ve said I’m not going to bring that gender issue to the 1991 timeline, I think it is relevant to look at this earlier discovery again.
But the label of being (sexually) different offers a good starting point for Lauren 1991 (=me), this second time around.
This is her new baseline, now that she has decided she isn’t going to settle for the socially supported structure of boyfriend/girlfriend (which is not her thing), but also not going for Bear being her lover either.
The post paints a picture where staying true to both her sexual gay-adjacent nature (because she/I felt attracted to bi-men);
As well as acknowledging the reality of Aids and her anxiety disorder around it;
Would have meant her embracing she was different.
And letting go of the cover of unquestioned heterosexuality.
She would have needed to acknowledge her preferences for men who can be bisexual, and for non-monogamous relationship styles, as well as the level of protection and shielding she would require, to prevent debilitating anxiety.
She would have to accept abstinence at times, a choice some gay men also made in that era, although I didn’t find that out until 2015.
What I will bring to my 1991 timeline project, where many of us were scared and almost no one had the luxury, vocabulary or resources to really ask for what they needed to develop their sexuality;
Is this truth.
Being different is never easy.
But not being yourself is always harder.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living
The story behind this time travel project has been added below, and adjusted to the format it will have in 2026..
Subscribe to this blog for my letters to Sara;
The series Harteveld 2026*
And these Behind the Scenes of my 1991 timeline.
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About: the 1991 project
For an indefinite time, I will be moving to the, I assume fictional, timeline of (re-)living 35 years ago.
Making the current year 1991, and I’m switching to a new shorter format:
The number of characters will be my fictional age on this timeline x 100.
This means until summer 1991 (2026), they will be 1800 characters, representing 18 years old.
And after that 1900 characters.
This project has a predecessor, where I wrote as if I was in 1994 – 2000;
But this was mostly a literary (diary) undertaking.
I’m cutting back deeper into time, and do not intend to keep a diary. It is the living in the past itself, that is the art.
In September 2025 I came up with these goals, covering the first 8 years.
My 8 year goals are:
📵 to live a 20th Century life
🎸 to be a 20th century-inspired Rock journalist.
But on the current timeline.
So this means I make money creating content and speaking about rock music and 20th century things
📚 publish Lauren Harteveld work 2010-2025
📢 to make the Lauren Harteveld legacy visible
Books
My diaries are available at LULU
New books will be added.
The best way to receive updates on when these books are ready,
is to subscribe to this blog.
Button on this page, probably on the top right.
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/ Twitter: @LSHarteveld
Years? Decades? Last weekend I had the first weekend without doing any work in any way. I wrote a blogpost, but writing blogposts is basically as leisurely as it gets around here, so that does not count.
I have no idea if this is a disappointment or a relief, but this timeline experiment seems to be leading to redoing everything I thought I regretted.
Babysteps, according to some, are an inefficient and even dangerous way to move around.
LS Harteveld 