On language and terminology
I didn't know the word lesbian. I looked up the word homosexual and found out it was this horrible thing.
Dad was perceptive. I think he knew. He watched. He would have been there if I had needed him. Probably, he was just waiting to see.
In high school, I couldn't put a label on my feelings. But here I get to college — all these powerful women, faculty and students!
A friend said, "There's a place in San Francisco that is for lesbians." No, I think she said, "for gay women." We didn't use the term lesbians in those days.
During my high school years, I was trying to be so butch. I really wanted to go into the Army but my mother wouldn't let me. My mother said, "Nothing but queers and whores in the Army."
There was one word… queer. The first time I heard the word "gay" it was in a joke that said, "Is so and so gay? Well, yeah. I think he's happy."
We had fun together, but there was no talking about, let alone even know, that there was such a word as lesbian. Well, I knew there was such a word. I had heard about it from time to time when I'd been a child. Lesbian was a bad word.
The word lesbian has been used by society in such a punishing way and there is so much internalized homophobia about it. It is very difficult for women, especially in my generation, to be comfortable with the word. It was a discounting, punishing word.
I don't think of myself as butch or fem. I think of myself as an androgynous person, neither dominantly one nor the other. I'm just who I am.
I was far more on the butch end of the scale. From the day I first put on my brother's clothes, that's what I wanted to be.
I didn't understand all the butch-fem stuff. I think being a woman is just fine.
Lesbian or gay? It was homosexual. Homosexuals. That was sick, you know, and nobody talked.
I had a short affair with a woman that always called me a Nellie Butch. That was offensive to me because that's how she meant it. I was neither fish nor fowl and you can't live like that; you have to be one or the other.
I grew up with the queer thing. It wasn't like we use the word queer now, it's become a good term, and it wasn't then. Lesbian was a word we knew of but we didn't normally use.…
I'd take the bus home, get out of my girl clothes, get into my boy clothes, get into my car and hurry back to make the bar scene.
I had NO words for it until I was 17.
My mother said to me, "Women like that are worse then men like that."