On first awareness
and first relationships
There was this girl I went to school with. She used to write me letters all the time and wanted to come spend the night. She wanted to hug and kiss me. I didn't know much other than what I was taught – that women didn't do things like that.
I kept thinking I had feelings for her that other girls had for boys.
When I was thirteen, I discovered who I was. I mean, there was no question. I knew that I was different, but I found people like myself. I found other "lesbians". That's my life, you know. That's where I belong. I finally found my place in the world.
I dated the captain of a football team from another high school, yet I knew from the time that I was seven years old that I preferred girls to boys.
I was a freshman in college and came out with a senior. She wasn't experienced but she was aware. She just hadn't met anybody she wanted to be involved with.
He says to me, "This woman has a homosexual interest in you." I replied, "You are so full of it! You know, you have a great imagination." It took two years more for she and I to figure out a label and what was going on.
When I was a junior in high school I taught health and P.E. as a teacher's assistant, and she was two years behind me. After I graduated, a friend took me and we picked her up for the evening, and I never put her down!
And, of course, there were lesbians there. And, of course, I didn't have any vaguest notion. I call it a failure of imagination.
I was just barely 21 and I had just finished nursing school and I met Bunny. And that was it. She knew the score, because anything I had learned, I learned from her.
I went a couple of miles away to the high school and I began to find other girls like myself. We never really talked about "it", but we knew about it. Now I had this whole secret world that none of my other friends knew about. So I had two separate worlds… had the world of ordinary people, and I had this other world with girls I had discovered in high school who were not the same as the rest of the world.
I taught… and I cooked up a course called "Women to Women Dialog." It was in 1974 and feminism was just hitting. MS magazine was just coming out. There was this — something in the air. And out of the blue, I fell in love with a woman, one of the women in the dialog class, another married woman who herself had had a relationship with a woman. She was a, bless her heart, a high school gym teacher.… It just came out of the blue to me but at the same time, it all seemed to be part of the fabric of feminism.
I knew I never fit. I tried very, very hard to fit. I went on dates, I did everything.
I liked her a lot. And I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I wasn't trying to do anything.… Well, she went home and told mama. And mama told my mama. And my mama said, "Elaine won't be coming over to play anymore." And I somehow figured out what had gone on and what had happened and all this kind of stuff. And that was when I learned never to tell anybody about anything again.
I knew. I was positive that I wanted to be alone with women in a room at night.
It wasn't my first awareness; it was my first time sleeping with a woman. I knew from the time I was, I guess, some time in my teens, that I would form these crushes on older women. As I told you, my relationship with my mother was so difficult that I, as a junior psychologist, convinced myself that it was because… what I couldn't get from my mother, I was going to get from these other women. I had just enough information to make a diagnosis. But at the same time it always seemed to me there was something different there. These feelings are so intense, you know.