I don’t watch much TV. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived beyond the reach of cable or broadcast, in the sticks of Vermont, in a time when your only option if you had to watch Beverly Hills 90210 was a satellite dish that could easily hold a Volkswagen bug. Also… I didn’t care. I was contentedly clueless about whatever sitcom or sexy drama everyone was talking about. Now,…
My first real date with a boy was complicated – as all such dates are bound to be when you are a fourteen-year-old lesbian. The first date itself wasn’t even that memorable (although my mother certainly made a big deal of it), but it set off a sequence of events that was extremely memorable. I was a freshman. My friend “Suzy” had a boyfriend, a senior, whose real name I…
Okay, the truth is, I am a pretty dull person. I don’t get into barroom brawls, have a secret heroin addiction, cross-dress, carry a concealed weapon, or plan to overthrow the government in my spare time. Still, I haven’t lived my life in a cookie-cutter kind of way, and have always hovered proudly outside the boundaries of authority and tradition. I suppose being a lesbian puts me there automatically, but…
It’s 1985. My grandmother buys me a white Camaro with red interior. The car is hot. It has a red front vanity plate with my name in curly white script. I smoke Carlton cigarettes and each pack comes with a plastic rose attached to a loop of elastic. These hang from my review mirror. I’m going way too fast through suburban streets, rocking out to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and…
