TRANSCRIPT:

The summer of 1963, I turned 18 that summer, I had been planning, and my parents were all in favor of leaving the family home, and moving to San Francisco. I was living in Berkeley with my family and commuting to San Fransicso State. Because I was going to move to San Francisco and my friend and I were going to share an apartment and I was going to be recognized as an adult and working a part time job and going to school and everything was cool.

She was on an archeology field trip that summer and was writing me letters. The letters were very cautious and very innocent, but they implied that we really cared about each other. That was it. It could have been just between two friends who were looking forward to a coming adventure of sharing an apartment, but one day, my stepfather…

Well, one day I got a letter from her, was really excited about it, put it in my private place. But nobody was suppose– my family all respected each other’s privacy, so I put it in a desk drawer in my bedroom, went back to read it later, and it was gone. And my greatest fear came to life. My stepfather, who had been abusive, walked into the doorway to my room holding that letter, and he says to me, “I always knew you were sick.”

Which didn’t refer to what he was doing to me. It referred, of course, to the fact that I loved a woman, and she loved me, and that was “sick.” But the thing is, I knew that that’s how it was going to be looked at, even by my mom, and that it was going to be looked at by anybody.

That’s how when I looked at it, I had internalized homophobia. Although it was kind of latent at that point, because I was in love and I was very happy and my life was moving forward. So, my mom was at work at that point and he worked afternoon shift and he was saying, “wait until I tell your mom” she was going to come home before he left for work.

That’s the way the days went. And I was there that time. And I knew I knew I needed to talk to my mom myself. That wasn’t all that she got hit with was what he was going to tell her. So, I called my doctor. And this is a professional, medical professional who was with it for the times. We’re talking 1963– what we know is the sixties didn’t really start until the next year, except for the civil rights movement had begun. But we were still in the dark ages and he was part of it. He was part of the medical establishmen, and when I called him, got him on the phone, he said, and I was hysterical. “And what am I supposed to do?”

He–was the only adult I had ever talk with about these things– said to me, “I’ve been meaning to talk with you. I don’t think you should share an apartment with her.” So I hung up the phone. Why should I listen to him say that when I knew that everybody else was going to say that, too? I had nowhere to go.

None of us in those situations, most of us feel we have nowhere to go, including today young women and men who are dealing with these things in an atmosphere that is not completely supportive. Fortunately, more people have more support now than they did then, but it’s still like this for many people. So anyway, my mom, poor mom, drove home from work in the factory, standing on an assembly line all day, she pulled into the driveway. I ran out and jumped in her car and said, “Mom, I’ve got to talk with you. Please drive away.” He comes out on the porch, says, “don’t go anywhere.” She did drive away. She said she’d be back. And so I had to hit her with both things at once: what he had been doing… But I didn’t start there because to me, the most important thing also was “Mom. I said, I guess what you might call bisexual.” That was my hope anyway, that that would be better. And maybe there was hope for me evolving out of this thing that somehow I had inherited or somehow had happened to me. And then I told her the stuff about him.

She chose to focus on the homosexuality because it was something she could do about that. And so she also realized that I couldn’t stay in that house. So we drove back. He had gone to work. She helps me pack. I call a guy who was a good friend of mine in San Francisco. He invited me to stay with him, which was great.

He was a really good person and I moved out that day and my mom says, “Don’t worry, honey, um we’ll get you some help. And the help that she was, I will say more about my mom in a minute, but the help that she got me was the kind of help that people like me got back then was a shrink to help me work through this arrested development so I could become a full person.

And meanwhile, my little brothers, who had always had to look up to me more or less, or at least do what I told them to do, were sitting, snickering about, you know, this downfall of me in their eyes. My stepfather had won this, I left and spent the night with my friend in San Francisco and knowing that this was something that I had to overcome.

And I tried. And my friend with whom I had fallen in love, I had to tell her I couldn’t. I didn’t think that we should keep seeing each other.