A New Sensation
Was I
ready for what was about to happen? It
was 1959, I was almost 19 years old and starting my sophomore year at the University
of Kansas (KU). I moved into my dorm room in Carruth-O’Leary,
the first coed dorm on campus. My high
school friend, Carol, asked me to welcome another girl from Wichita, Pat, to
KU. I called her, and we decided to go to
the movies. What happened next would begin
a shift in my perception of the young women around me.
I walked
across campus to meet Pat in the freshman dorm.
She invited me into her room, I sat on one of the beds and, in the dim
light, watched her finish getting dressed.
All of a sudden, I found myself gazing at this girl with great
interest. She was still naked from the
waist up. She was small, as were her
breasts. Surprisingly, I found her image
very interesting, very sexually arousing.
Something new and unusual was happening to me. I didn’t know how to process my feelings;
what should I do with them? Had she been
posing for me? Did she want me to admire
her? Or was there something really wrong
with me?
We left
her room and went to the movies. I did
not tell her about my arousal. When I
walked her back to her room, for some reason she loaned me the book, The
Price of Salt, and told me it was a book a friend had given her about two
women who had a relationship. Did that
mean she was attracted to women? She
didn’t say one way or the other. I read
the book, published in 1952, and found it was a romantic lesbian novel. I later realized that the relatively happy
ending was almost unheard of at the time. Much later the book was made into the movie
“Carol.”
Whenever
Pat called me, she would innocently ask, “How is the price of salt today?” On another occasion, we went to a local
drive-in movie with two other girls. Pat
and I were in the backseat of the car, I moved toward her, and she pulled away.
Did that mean she was not interested in me; why did she keep asking me about
the price of salt? Soon we both got busy
with our school years and did not stay in touch.
Rock Chalk, Jayhawk: Freshman Year
It was difficult
for me to understand what happened at the beginning of my sophomore year. Looking back, my freshman year had been so
different. Then, I was really excited to
be going away to college, including the opportunity to see seven-foot-tall Wilt
Chamberlain play basketball in his senior year, not knowing that before I got
to campus, he would leave college to play professional ball. It felt like I was starting a great
adventure, living away from home and being on my own. Here was the chance to make the most of my
own decisions, good or bad.
My
academic prospects were great. I had
graduated from the largest high school in Kansas at the top of my class of over
1,000 seniors. I was a finalist for both
the Watkins Scholarship at KU and the National Merit Scholarship, but did not
win either of them. However, with my
high mathematics scores, I was awarded the U.G. Mitchell Mathematics
Scholarship and qualified for the Freshman/Sophomore Honors College at KU. When offered, I could enroll in classes with
an H after the number which meant smaller classes taught by more senior professors.
It turned
out that my social prospects were great too.
Unlike in high school, the smart boys at KU liked me. In high school, boys were friendly enough in
class, but never expressed any interest in socializing with me outside of class. The boys at KU didn’t know anything about me
or my previous history, academic or social.
I was no longer the smartest student in any of my classes and was now one
of the very few girls in my honors math class.
I was asked out. It was a nice
change from only having a date when a girlfriend’s boyfriend arranged it.
I liked
one boy in my math class in particular.
He had an apartment in an old house very close to my dorm. Richard taught me how to play chess, drink
wine, and make out in a friendly, comfortable setting, although I don’t
remember that we ever made it past “first base.” I finally learned chess well enough to
eventually win a game. He still liked
me, unlike how some boys might have reacted.
He took me on a date to Kansas City where we ate at a nice restaurant;
no boy had ever asked me on that kind of date before. By the end of my freshman year, Richard
proposed marriage, although without offering a ring. No way!
Accepting
Richard’s offer implied a future I couldn’t contemplate. In the 1950s, marriage for a woman usually
meant settling down in the suburbs, having children and taking care of them and
her husband. If the wife had a job, she
still had most of the house work to do as well.
Anyone I knew that married had at least one child right away. I had never held a baby, changed a diaper, or
babysat, and I wanted no part of it. I
liked boys and enjoyed going out with them, however at this point in my life I
couldn’t fathom marriage. My mother
expected her daughters to be able to support themselves and not be financially
dependent on a man; she was a budding feminist and so were her daughters.
When I
was back in Wichita for the summer, I met and started dating a boy I liked,
Lou. He got along with my parents and
the family cat. One evening he took me
to College Hill Park where we sat under a tree and drank some home-brewed
cherry wine. Lou was a gentle boy and
taught me how to kiss with soft lips which felt more sensual than the hard
kisses many boys wanted (earning him my nickname “Limber Lips Lou”). The wine must have been powerful, as before
I knew it, his hand was in my pants exploring my privates. I had fought off boys for years who had
attempted to do that. However, I did
find the experience exciting with Lou. It was my first occurrence of actual
sexual arousal, and I was fascinated that I was at last having those kinds of
sensations. I was 18.
Lou and I
had one more encounter. I lied to my mother and told her I was spending the
night with my friend Carol. Instead, I spent the night at Lou’s house while his
parents were away. We shared a bed, in the nude, but I still would not allow
intercourse. When Lou was aroused, he
went into the bathroom and masturbated. For me, it was just an OK experience. I don’t recall any great positive or negative
reaction. Lou’s other girlfriend allowed
intercourse, so I didn’t expect to hear from him again, and I didn’t. That was OK with me.
Looking Even Further Back
Was there anything in my past that could have predicted my attraction to another girl? I look at family photographs taken while on a summer trip to my father’s family in Ohio. In some pictures, in which the other girls are wearing dresses, I am in overalls, shorts, or pants. I didn’t like to wear dresses and must have been allowed to dress differently than the other girls. I was also daddy’s little tomboy, but I never wanted to be a boy. My father mounted a basketball goal on our garage where he and I played H.O.R.S.E together. On family vacations, I stayed near him on our hikes. We climbed structures while my mother and older sister looked on. All through high school, I played on girls softball and basketball teams in church leagues. There were no school leagues in the 1950s. I was never the best player, but I enjoyed the sports and being with the other girls.
At summer
camp, I usually had a special interest in a particular girl. I got jealous if she paid more attention to
someone other than me, but I never said or did anything. In junior high, my girlfriends and I traded
ID bracelets with our boyfriends from our dance class. The best part was practicing kissing with one
girlfriend. We used the excuse that we
needed to be prepared to kiss a boy, though I admitted to myself that I enjoyed
the practice, particularly when I was initiating it.
One night
after a softball game, one of my teammates, Nancy, wanted to find someone; I
suspected it was one of our school’s physical education teachers. Nancy drove us to a house where there was a
party going on in the basement. Music
was playing, there were no men, and the many women were slow dancing with each
other, having a good time. It didn’t
even occur to me that they were homosexuals, or that my friend was one,
too. I later found out she was.
In Camp
Fire Girls we learned that bundles of twigs, or faggots, were used to start
fires; then I eventually learned that the term “faggots” was used to describe
what we called “queers” in those days. I
never thought of women being homosexual, just men, and only in a negative way. I never heard of the terms gay or
lesbian. Society, particularly in
conservative Wichita, Kansas, was not ready to name different kinds of
sexuality. One night, I was a passenger
in a car that one of my girlfriends was driving. One of the other girls pointed to a bar that
she said queers frequented. As we drove
by, I yelled “Queers” out the car window.
Shame on me! I did a lot of
things when I was young that I regretted as I grew older and wiser.
It didn’t
seem to me that my behavior as a young girl or teenager could have predicted I
would be a homosexual. I didn’t want to
date girls. I wanted to date boys! Where did this new feeling come from?
Time for Research
By my
sophomore year at KU, I did know that attraction to the same sex was called
homosexuality and such a person was often referred to as a homo or queer. However, in conservative Wichita, Kansas, the
words lesbian or gay never passed my ears.
It was 10 years before Stonewall in NYC put “gayness” in the news. Whatever trends were happening on either
coast were very slow to make their way to the conservative middle of the
country.
The only
way I was going to learn more, was to begin an investigation. I needed to do some research! Honors students, like me, were given free
access to the Watson library stacks. I
used the card catalog to look for books on the topic of homosexuality. These books were in the psychology section,
and they described it as a pathology.
Adult
homosexuality was viewed as a disease, a condition deviating from “normal”
heterosexual development. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) is the handbook used by healthcare professionals as the
authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders, including homosexuality. From its first edition in 1952 until 1973,
homosexuality was included as an abnormal condition needing treatment. The sources I read in the library described
the theories about homosexuality as follows.
“The presence of atypical gender behavior or feelings are symptoms of a
disease or disorder to which mental health professionals need to attend. …
Theories of pathology tend to view homosexuality as a sign of a defect, or even
as morally bad, with some theorists being quite open about their belief that
homosexuality is a social evil.”
Wow! I didn’t want to think of myself as a sick,
abnormal person; I didn’t want to be unacceptable to my family and
society. I rejected the label.
Please
understand that positive portrayals of lesbians or gays in books, movies, or
music were not available. Even in The
Price of Salt, the couple parted ways in the end. I was beginning to understand the meaning of
the title of the book. Maybe “Salt” is
what seasons a same-sex attraction, makes it tasty. Maybe “The Price” is the penalty society
charges for having such an attraction.
Was I a homosexual? As much as it scared me to think I was, I still
found other girls in my dormitory of interest, primarily Jane, who lived across
the hall. My brain and eyes had changed
their focus and therefore my perception.
Unlike Pat, Jane was full-figured; she had a great smile, and, being
from Little Rock, Arkansas, a slight southern accent. We had a class together, and she was always very
friendly with me. One night while I was no
doubt under the influence of alcohol, I wrote her a note expressing my
admiration, saying that I didn’t expect her to be nice to me after she read the
note. Much to my amazement, she came to
speak to me, said she was not interested in me the way I wrote about, but
reassured me we could still be friends.
Maybe being a homosexual didn’t always have to be bad.
I continued dating boys my sophomore year. I very much wanted to find a male who would
prove to me that I was not a homosexual.
More research. My roommate asked
me to go on a blind date her boyfriend would arrange. I was not attracted to my date. When we got back to the dorm at the closing
hour, he wanted to neck and keep going; I fended him off and let him know I
wasn’t interested. He was very cynical
and said, “Just look at all the couples standing around making out before the
girl has to go in. Isn’t that what you
girls expect?” I could have asked, “Is
that all you think girls are for?” I
never went out with him again.
I dated a fraternity boy who introduced me
to the common drink served at fraternity parties: grain alcohol mixed with
grape juice. He was taking a theater
class for which he had to direct a short one-act play. His leading lady got sick at the last minute,
and he asked me if I would quickly learn the part. I got to be an actress! I memorized the lines and performed them on
stage in a black sheath dress, delivering a dramatic soliloquy directly to the
audience. One line stuck with me: “…
Those words pecked at the wounds in my heart like doves with bloody
beaks.” In that moment, by portraying
someone else, I gained some understanding of heartache, though I had yet to
experience it myself.
I went on a date with Glen who had been a
classmate in Wichita. We had a pleasant time,
walking along the Kaw River sharing a romantic kiss by moonlight. I was at ease with him, but I didn’t care
deeply for him. In 2008, I took my wife
to my 50th high school reunion and a dinner/dance. When Diane and I danced
together, it was obvious we were a couple.
Glen soon came to the table where we were sitting with some other
couples. He asked me, “Did you know at
the time we went out that you were a lesbian?”
I thought he was implying that I had gone out with him under false
pretenses, already knowing I was a lesbian.
Or perhaps he thought his behavior was responsible for turning me into a
lesbian. Either way, I didn’t appreciate
his question. I just answered no, and he
went away.
When I visited Wichita, I continued my
research on whether I was really a homosexual.
The previous year, the parties I attended with my friend, Carol, were with
her fellow art students and beatniks.
This year, the parties were different, including local whites and
blacks, a first for me. I began to
figure out that she was having sex with one of the somewhat older black
men. Maybe I should follow suit. I reasoned that if I had intercourse with a
boy I was attracted to and enjoyed the experience, that would mean I was not a
homosexual. You might wonder why I didn’t
just have intercourse with Lou the summer before if I thought that way. However, remember that was before I had the
experience of being attracted to a girl and becoming concerned about being a
homosexual.
I decided to try out my idea with a
good-looking boy I met at one of these parties.
He had been in my class at East High, was on the swim team and not in
any of my classes. He seemed to be a
good candidate for my “experiment.”
These were the days before “the pill,” so I needed to be very
careful. The Food and Drug
Administration didn’t approve the first oral contraceptive until 1960. I asked him if he had protection. He drove to his house to get a condom which
he put on as we sat in the backseat of his car.
He had difficulty penetrating me, and it hurt. I didn’t know it was usually that way the
first time; no one had ever talked with me about it: girlfriends, parents, or
teachers. The backseat of the car was
not the most comfortable setting either.
Since I didn’t enjoy it, did it mean I was a homosexual? I was going to have to do even more research.
Go West Young Lady, Go West
In letters I wrote to my friend, Carol,
during my sophomore year, I mentioned that I was concerned about my new feelings
for girls. She wrote back advising me to be careful and cautioned me not to
pursue my attractions. Then came the
summer of 1960 after my sophomore year.
Carol had her mother’s permission to drive her car to Los Angeles for
the summer. She invited me to come along
with her to LA, and, much to my surprise, my parents agreed.
Before I left, I took Carol’s letters and
put them in the garage trash barrels thinking that safely disposed of them
since they were not in my room. I found
out much later that my mother had made a thorough search, found the letters,
misinterpreted them, and believed that it was Carol who was attracted to girls.
My mother went to see Carol’s mother at
her house and told her off.
Carol and I spent the first month in LA in
a small furnished beach shanty in Venice.
We swam and sunned on the beach during the day. Nineteen sixty was in the later years of the
beatnik period, but it was still going strong in southern California. We explored the entertainment offered by
coffee houses at night: flamenco
dancing, guitar playing and poetry reading.
However, we needed money to rent a better
apartment. Carol wasn’t having any luck
getting a job. I applied for and was
hired as a “figure” clerk for an insurance company. We found an apartment above a retail store in
West Hollywood on Santa Monica Blvd, an area popular with gay men.
I continued to have small “crushes” on
women. At the insurance company I looked
forward to viewing the full-figured female clerk delivering the mail each
day. A lesbian couple that Carol knew
from Wichita visited us, and I got their contact information (that I later
used).
After Carol and I moved to West Hollywood,
we visited a man Carol knew from Wichita who was a radio announcer. We saw Don in his apartment often as we were
too young to go to bars. On the first
night we met him, we stayed late, and Carol and I fell asleep. I heard Don get in next to Carol, and I
thought they were having sex. He later
confirmed it when we were alone and could be frank with each other. He told me that he and his roommate were a
gay couple, but he didn’t want Carol to know.
He thought by having sex with her, he had prevented her from outing him
in Wichita. Nobody from Wichita wanted
their family to find out they were a homosexual.
I enjoyed my independence in LA and told my
parents that I wanted to drop out of college, thinking I could eventually go to
college somewhere in California. My
parents rejected that idea. My father
flew to LA and told me I could lead my life “the easy way or the hard
way.” The easy way was for me to go back
to KU where my parents would pay all of my college expenses; the hard way was
for me to stay in California, work and pay all my own college expenses. By that time, it was clear to me that any
crushes I might have in LA were going nowhere.
It was easy for me to decide to fly back to Kansas with my father and
return to KU in the fall. What a smart
decision that turned out to be!
Junior
Year: Back to Kansas and My First Lover
Now it was 1960, I was almost 20 and starting
my junior year. It turned out to be a pivotal
one, with many traumas along the way.
Since my decision to return to KU was so close to the start of the fall
semester, I had no choice about where I lived or with whom. I was assigned to one of the new dormitories
on the edge of campus, Lewis Hall. My
roommate, Salwa, told the women in the next room that on her way to Lawrence
from her home in Lebanon, she read a book about lesbians and was afraid I was
one. She slept with an umbrella by her
bed in case she needed to fend me off. I
had no idea my appearance was so scary, or that I looked like a lesbian. I came back from California with bleached
blond hair (saying goodbye to my mother’s permanents). I was tall with a slender tanned female
figure. I was amazed and happy to learn
she would move out at the end of the semester.
I was required to have five more credit
hours in foreign language, even though I had quizzed out of 10 credits in
German. By now, I thought my German was
too rusty, so I enrolled in Honors French and found out how bad I was in that
language. However, it did enable me to meet
Janet, a younger Wichita girl who was in my French lecture class. She was a poetry writer and liked to give me
poems she had written. After I got to
know her, she shared with me that she had a relationship with another girl
while in high school but wasn’t gay herself.
I let her know that I was wondering about myself. She evidently thought that meant I wanted a
sexual encounter with her and would vaguely say that when we got together, she
wouldn’t do “this thing” with me but would do “that thing” without any
elaboration. Since I had not even kissed
a girl to whom I was attracted, let alone gone past kissing, I had no idea what
her “this” and “that” meant, nor was I interested in finding out with her.
Janet invited me to a party at Tommy’s
apartment. He was a black, gay man who
was the window decorator for the largest department store in Lawrence. There, I met two gay boys, John and Mike, but
no gay girls. One of the married couples
I met at Tommy’s parties asked me to lunch.
The man seated me next to his wife and got around to asking if I would
go home and to bed with them. I got the
idea that he wanted to watch me with his wife.
She was very noncommittal. I had
little knowledge about what two women did together, was not attracted to his
wife, and certainly didn’t want his involvement in a three-way. That was the last I saw of that couple. Good riddance!
The Dean of Women sent me a summons. She wanted to know about my attraction to
girls. I trusted one of the girls in my dorm
enough to talk with her about my attractions.
It seemed that she had been concerned about me and gone to the Dean. I never knew whether my friend thought I
needed help or whether she thought I was a danger. I sat in Dean Emily Taylor’s office, denied
everything and was “sentenced” to see a psychologist in the medical
office. I wouldn’t talk to him about it
and was put in group therapy. Reflecting
back, I wonder how many of us in the group were there for the same reason, as
none of us had much to say. Were the
others kindred spirits? I put in the
required number of sessions and that was that.
I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t draw a
conclusion about sex based on my one previous experiment with a male I had just
met and didn’t know well. Time for more
research. Previously I had become
friends with John. He was an interesting
German boy who had grown up on the streets of Berlin during WWII. John
had a steady girlfriend, but he thought I should have sex with his friend
Carl. I had a few dates with Carl, who was
a pleasant boy to spend time with. Eventually,
Carl and I had a date in his apartment.
It was a very comfortable setting, and the intercourse didn’t hurt, but
I found the experience itself very boring.
Carl, however, was impressed with me enough that after a few more dates
I received my second marriage proposal while at KU. I did not love Carl, and began to believe
that I was not able to love members of the opposite sex. He looked at me with puppy dog eyes, clearly
smitten, but it just made me feel smothered.
I did not accept his offer of marriage.
I felt badly that I had used him in my research.
I was disturbed about the visit to the
Dean’s office and lack of sexual pleasure with heterosexual intercourse. What did it mean? I definitely was sexually attracted to
females, not males. Did this mean I was
really a homosexual? If so, what was my
life going to be like? I remembered the
lesbian couple from Wichita who had given me their names and phone number
during their visit in Los Angeles.
Wanting to learn what their lives were like, I called and asked them if
I could visit. I didn’t want my parents
to know about that trip, so I arranged a ride with some other KU students from
Wichita who would drop me off and pick me up at the couple’s address.
Since this was secret research, I did not
sign out from the large dormitory. I
didn’t think my absence would be noticed.
The couple was very nice and seemed to be happy with each other and
their lives. One of them wrote me a
sympathetic poem. They seemed to have a very comfortable,
loving relationship. I also got my first
view of the fem/butch dichotomy. Their
role distinction wasn’t something I was interested in as I didn’t want to play
a man’s role and didn’t want to be in the woman’s role. I just wanted to be me.
Arriving back at the dorm Sunday afternoon,
I found that my absence had been discovered.
It was probably another instance of a student reporting me “for my own
good.” This time, the Dean of Women said
one more report to her and I would be kicked out of KU. I definitely didn’t want that to happen. My parents were also informed. I easily deflected their questions as they
were not real direct and on point.
I was totally unprepared and unwilling to
discuss homosexuality with anyone, including my parents. Although they probably knew about my
sexuality even before I did, they also showed no interest in a direct
discussion about it. I couldn’t believe that yet again I was getting in trouble
before I had even kissed a girl to whom I was attracted. I asked myself if I should just relax and let
it happen.
Then I Met the Girl Across
the Hall
Karen was similar to the girl that prompted
my first sexual attraction to a member of the opposite sex. She was small, had a pixie haircut, and an
infectious smile. Not only was she very
cute, but she was also very studious and smart, qualities I valued. I wanted to know her better and visited her
room often. Her roommate was Page, yet
another Wichita High School East classmate.
Even though I used the pretext of studying for the Sociology class Karen
and I were both taking, Page began to look at me with a smirk that revealed her
growing suspicion. I didn’t care.
It was time. I desired Karen. My roommate was gone for the weekend, and I
had the room to myself. I asked Karen to
visit me when she got home. I prepared
the room, dimming the lights, arranging the candles, queuing up records by
Julie London, Nat King Cole and Ray Charles on the record player, and making
sure the wine and glasses were on hand.
Karen walked in the door and gave me a quizzical look. I could tell she was no stranger to
seduction. However, she sat down and
after a few glasses of wine, her body relaxed enough so that I could lean over
and kiss her.
She kissed me back. My, oh my.
My body had never had such a reaction.
My heart palpitated, my ears rang, my breath was taken away. She was an eager participant, but we went no
further that night. At long last I knew,
for better or worse, I was one of those “perverted homosexuals.” I felt wonderful!
Over
the next few weeks left in the semester, we spent a lot more time
together. We were both serious students,
but there was time to share our backgrounds and steal a few soft, sensual
kisses. She was from Western Kansas,
and her father was in the banking business.
Since my Lebanese roommate had requested a room change, it was natural for
me to have a new one. The next semester
started with a new roommate, Karen, my lover.
Karen and I were so in lust that we slept
together in one of the small dorm beds.
We explored each other’s bodies and made love using our imagination
about how to produce more pleasure, exploring every nook and cranny of our
lover’s vagina. Fingers are much more
flexible than penises. One morning our
know-it-all next door neighbor, Sally, burst through the door we had somehow
neglected to lock and caught us in a lustful embrace. She had a very pale complexion with dark
black hair, so my nickname for her was the “Black Bitch,” even before she told
me that she was the one who had snitched on me to the Dean of Women. She
claimed that I had come home drunk one night and tried to lie on top of her. I
didn’t believe her. I wasn’t attracted to her, and I don’t have that type of
pushy personality.
Unfortunately, Sally took the same course I
did in Field Work in Sociology. We were
supposed to be practicing asking people questions for a survey when she asked
me how I liked eating at the Y. What did
she mean? I had no idea, but from her
expression I figured I should be embarrassed, so I was. It was a few years before I learned about
cunnilingus. What a bitch!
In 1961,
there were no sexually explicit books or films about female homosexuals. It was many years later before happy books
about lesbians were published, like Patience and Sarah in 1970 and Rubyfruit
Jungle in 1973. The first movie that had any hint of a lesbian plot was The
Children’s Hour in 1961. It was a sad
movie as two school teachers are viciously accused of being lesbians by a
schoolgirl. In 1985, the film “Desert
Hearts” was released. It was one of the
first sexually explicit, positive portrayals of lesbians in a wide-screen
film. In my day, if you hadn’t been
brought along by someone who had experience, you learned by your own trial and
error, and I had usually been a slow learner.
My once rosy love life’s decline might
explain my academic issues in the second semester of my junior year. Even as I had finally accepted the fact that
I was a homosexual, it developed that Karen refused that label. She continued to date boys, a practice she
kept up as long as we were together. She
slept with and made love with me, but dated and made out with boys on her
dates. I didn’t always stay in the dorm
and sulk. I attended concerts by musical groups that stopped by campus, like
the Kingston Trio and the Weavers. I attended a classical movie series with
foreign movies like the 1931 German movie “The Three Penny Opera” (loosely
based on the 1928 musical theatre by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill) and the
Swedish film “The Seventh Seal” directed by Ingmar Bergman. I
attended parties at Tommy’s, spent evenings with the two gay boys, with Janet
from Wichita, or with John the German boy.
I was monogamous, and I wished Karen was too.
Last Summer at KU: I Fell in Love With a Computer
The summer of 1961, Karen and I went to
summer school, staying at North College, the dorm of my freshman year. I took a new class being offered, Programming
for a Digital Computer. Earlier that
year KU purchased an IBM 650, an unusual computer with a magnetic revolving
drum. This was my introduction to
punched cards and a programmable computer, and it was my first experience
learning to program. It was so logical
and predictable. I realized that I had a
very achievement-oriented personality.
If I ran a program with test data and it worked, I felt so
rewarded. If I failed, I searched for my
mistakes, and kept correcting them until the program ran with no errors. Then I had really achieved something! I loved programming the computer, and it
turned out to be very important for my future.
Senior Year: My Future Becomes
Clear
During the fall semester of 1961, IBM was
on campus conducting interviews. They liked my math studies and scholarship,
and the fact that I had taken a computer course. I couldn’t believe the man conducting the
interview stated that he would substitute my sociology degree for not having
been in a sorority. Why would being a
Greek make you a better IBM employee?
And what was the correlation between being in a sorority and having a
sociology major? I was baffled but
grateful. The Kansas City IBM office
offered me a trainee job after I graduated.
My major professor in Sociology, Dr. Bauer, asked me to continue studies
in Sociology by working with him on a Master’s degree at KU. Instead, I took the job offer from IBM. Yay!
Karen and I continued our relationship as
before, enjoying each other’s company, studying hard, sleeping together, but
she still dated boys. I was upset every
time she came home from a date. She
would spend time with me, such as putting my hair up in a bouffant style. Unlike me, Karen told me that she was sexual
from an early age, enjoying masturbation.
I resented the fact that she couldn’t be satisfied with me alone, and
wondered if by continuing to date boys, she was exploring several types of
sexual behavior. Maybe she was doing
what I had done, testing whether she was really a homosexual. I guess I wasn’t enough for her to decide she
was.
In my senior year, the rules for girls’
dormitories were relaxed for the first time.
We could sign back in much later, and I was able to experience more of
Kansas City. I went with Tommy to a black dance club on Troost Avenue. My hair
had been dyed blond ever since my summer in California. Tommy got a lot of attention dancing with
this tall, blond white girl in her form-fitting black sheath dress. There were great bands; we danced up a storm
and had a very good time. I had always loved to play my LPs of Buddy
Holly and Chuck Berry, but these live bands were the real thing, and the dance
floor was crowded and busy. At the
end of the evening, Tommy asked a couple of his lesbian friends to look after
me while he went off and entertained himself (with a guy?) for a while before
we headed back to Lawrence. I just took
a nap in their apartment.
My two gay male friends, John and Mike,
invited me with them for a visit to the Gaslight bar near downtown Kansas City.
The entertainment consisted of two women, Bev playing the drums and Shy playing
the piano and singing. The boys wanted me to say which one I was attracted to,
telling me they would try to set up an encounter. I was totally not interested
in either woman, but it did give me an insight into the behavior of gay men in
bars. It seemed the purpose was to pick up someone for a sexual encounter. Strangely enough, almost 20 years later, one
of the female performers, Shy, lived in my house as a roommate of my ex.
One Saturday, Karen and I took the bus from
Lawrence to Kansas City. As we walked
from the bus station to the shopping area, I saw a handsome woman with short
hair. She walked with such confidence
that I wished I could follow and meet her.
In the afternoon, I decided to stay and go to the movie “Walk on the
Wild Side” with Jane Fonda. Karen wanted
to go back to Lawrence, so I went to the movie by myself. I sat near the aisle. My feet were sore after walking around all
day, so I took off my heels. After the
movie was over, I couldn’t find my shoes.
I had to stand while everyone filed past me. After searching under the seats, I finally found
them kicked a distance away. By this
time, I was feeling very unsure of myself, being alone in the big city. I walked the dark streets to the bus station,
got my ticket for Lawrence, and sat down on a wooden seat for the wait. I woke up to find some man’s head on my
shoulder. He had also fallen asleep, at
least I hoped that was all.
After we graduated, I would be living in
Kansas City, working for IBM. Karen would
be going to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. It didn’t seem like they were so far apart,
but it took several hours to drive on Highway 40, as the construction of
Interstate 70 was just beginning. I
continued to naively hope that Karen and I could have some type of
relationship. But I soon found that she wouldn’t give up on men. I only wanted to be with a woman who was
comfortable being a lesbian. Karen and I
simply ended up being friends.
I was 21 years old. I was book-smart but
had little emotional intelligence. I had
completed my research about my sexuality.
Even though I wanted a loving, faithful partner, I had no idea what
other qualities I should be looking for in a partner, and I didn’t know how to
find her. I had no role models to learn
from. After my first great romance with
a woman, it turned out I was just at the beginning of a long bumpy journey
toward having a loving, long-lasting relationship. What was the next leg of the journey going to
be like?
EPILOGUE
It Had Been Right Under My Nose
When I was in high school there were girls
who knew they were interested in other girls, I just wasn’t aware of it then. In 1963 I was working for IBM, living alone
in Kansas City and lonely. Nancy was the
girl who took me to the house where there was a party of women who were slow
dancing with each other. She later told
me she knew several girls in high school who dated other girls.
In June 1983, I visited my parents in
Wichita and attended my 25th East High School reunion. The first night there was a cocktail party
held at a facility on the grounds of Beech Aircraft. One of the owner’s daughters had been in my
class. I was wearing a goddess symbol
necklace. One of my classmates’ gaydar
was working. She asked if I wanted to
leave, follow her to her house and meet her partner, which I did. Her partner, Peggy Bowman, worked as a lobbyist
in Topeka for a Wichita abortion provider, George Tiller who was a year ahead
of me at East High School. I had known
this classmate in passing, but my class was very large, and we had not
circulated in the same circles.
That made two
other girls in my class who were also lesbians.
Was that all? It turned out it
wasn’t. After I broke up with my third
girlfriend, Ruth, she lived for a while with a woman who had been in my high
school class, Lee. Ruth and Lee met when
they were both playing on softball teams in Kansas City. Recently, I was worried that I hadn’t heard
from Ruth for a while and called Lee. I
asked her if there were other lesbians in our high school class. She named the girl who had been her special
friend and a couple of others. I was so
naïve back then.
Whatever
Happened to Karen?
I recently
discovered Karen’s obituary. She died of
cancer in 2020. After she received her
Master’s in Sociology from Washington University in St. Louis, she went on to
work for her doctorate at Washington State University in Pullman. I was not surprised to discover that while there
she met and married a fellow student who was male. What surprised me was that she loved to
travel; that was a subject we never talked about.
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