WBLS-FM had a strong signal and the station ran in my sister Kathy’s and my Stamford bedroom whenever I was alone there and wasn’t doing homework or sleeping. Once, the DJ mentioned a spot in Central Park, where people gathered for disco roller skating. I had to be one of them!

The summer I turned 14, the Summer of ’79, my mother let me take the train into New York from Stamford. I told her I was going to the Met, not that I was going roller skating in Central Park behind the museum. She never asked why I was wearing a backpack–for my skates, of course!

When I got to the park, I hailed an NYPD officer, who was headed into the park on a motorcycle. He stopped. “Do you know where the circle-skating happens?” I asked. He looked at me sort of suspiciously, but then said, “Get on.” The day was gorgeous and the ride ended too soon.

I want to say that Billy Preston’s “Will It Go ’round in Circles” played, but I’d be embellishing. I do remember skating delightedly to “…clams on the half-shell, and roller skates, roller skates.”

How was everyone else, all adults, able to be there, I wondered. Maybe they were like my dad, who was, unfortunately, chronically unemployed. Now, I realize they might have been actors, or dancers, or people on the night shift.

I was newly 14 in white-trimmed gym shorts, my mouth slathered with Bonne Bell lip smackers, or a knock-off brand. A Bi-Cultural Jewish day school alumna, I felt ready to enter Stamford High while hoping to keep my lesbianism masked. That afternoon, I skated in my Caldor dept.-store-bought sneaker-skates among almost exclusively Black, adult skaters of who knows which religions and sexual orientations. Their sneaker-skates were the real thing, and so cool!

No one spoke to me, but all of us smiled as we repeated our revolutions. Joy in the midst of an otherwise often lonely adolescence. I took the train home, spent from my day “at the museum.”

I wouldn’t come out to my family until my senior year of college in 1987, but after having had my first sexual experience with another girl in Israel over the summer of 1980 when I was 15, I went searching for my people. I took the train into New York City, and some city buses to 2

Greenwich Village, where I had heard the gay people lived. I thought I’d see them everywhere, like the immigrants who believed America’s streets were paved with gold.

Four years prior to my Village jaunt, I had figured out that I desired my female best friend, a Bi-Cultural Jewish day school classmate, but had not yet found any lesbian literature, and there was no LGBTQ youth group in Stamford, even if I had been brave enough to sneak out to one.

My search in the Village started at B. Dalton Books and ended at the erotic bakery, which offered an array of dark or white chocolate male and female candy genitals. I was too scared to buy any of the women’s candy, so I bought some men’s. I also picked up a copy of “The Village Voice,” and on the back page, saw personal ads that proved the neighborhood was a gay haven, if not also a lesbian one. I took the train home, frustrated at not having witnessed anyone like me.

Adam Ant, the ‘80s new wave artist, might have reminded SHS classmates of me when he sang, “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what *do* you do? Subtle innuendos follow. Must be something inside.” That was my high school reputation because my brave, amorous adventures were all secret, and though some classmates drank at parties, I never did.

The summer before my college senior year, in 1986, I lived at home in Stamford with my widowed mother and worked as a temp, which I did each summer, helping pay for school. I did not yet know how to be my lesbian self. I’m not talking about sexual activity, but about existential next steps.

One day, after finishing my temp assignment and stuffing my work clothes into my backpack, on the way home, I rode my bicycle to the liquor store at Bull’s Head. I bought a wine cooler, and with the bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag, chugged it. Then I got back on my bike and rode the remaining five and a half miles up High Ridge Road to the house where I grew up. I hardly felt the hills I had to climb.

When I got there, my depressed mother didn’t notice a difference, and then the phone rang.

My high school friend Leslie, who went to Rippowam, was also home from college for the summer. She called to say that she and a couple of her friends, who were lifeguards with her at the Italian Center, were driving into the city, to South Street Seaport, and did I want to come? Yes!

I threw on my best disguise: a purple, floral-printed, cotton Laura Ashley dress that had a white bow in the front, which I tied sailor-style, and I ran down the driveway to wait for their car. As I ran, the breeze cooled my back in a way it never had before. Refreshing! I still felt the breeze after I stopped running. Oh. I had forgotten to zip it up in the back. Whoa. The effects of a single wine cooler? 3

We went to a South Street Seaport bar and I ran into a Bi-Cultural classmate from Grades 1-8. As he chatted up my friend and her other friends, I recalled his sloppy Spin-the-Bottle kisses at bar mitzvah parties years prior. He was the boy who salivated, as opposed to another boy who kissed me not long after shoving a fistful of Doritos in his mouth. (And that’s why I’m a lesbian!)

Sitting at the very straight bar, listening to my bravado-filled, former classmate and my friends, I started feeling despair again, like I’d felt while chugging the wine cooler. At some point, thank God, he moved on.

Leslie wondered what we should do next. The prior summer, my heterosexual, secret girlfriend—who did not yet identify as heterosexual, and then who did, and who never identified as my girlfriend—introduced me to Danceteria because she was a New Yorker and cool enough to frequent it, but that’s another story. I said we should go dancing.

In high school, Leslie was the smartest girl I knew, but she never lorded it over anyone, and she swum breaststroke on her swim team, and was sweet, and also Jewish, and liked me, as a friend. I didn’t find her attractive because, like all of the girls whom I knew, she vocalized her interest in boys. She danced well, though, including in groups.

The most fun song while we were at Danceteria? Bananarama’s “Venus!” For the first time the whole night, I felt loose and free. No inner conflict. No despair. No catastrophizing with what ifs, like, what if peers learn my secret? Just dancing. And even feeling a bit beautiful.

We returned to our respective colleges shortly after that ultimately fun night, and Leslie and I stayed in touch only through sporadic letters from then on because I moved to Chicago after graduation, so that I could be myself without running into Jewish day school classmates, and she stayed in Virginia for Med. School to become an ear, nose, and throat surgeon.

After moving in with my girlfriend, I decided to write Leslie about life in Chicago and my lesbian identity. Leslie didn’t write back, but we weren’t best friends. Besides, she was a busy surgeon. I let it go.

My girlfriend and I broke up, and then I dated every single Chicagoland lesbian until meeting Pat, the woman who became my wife 32 years ago, and 13 years ago, legally. But seven years after Leslie’s and my Danceteria fun, my mother called me and said a drunk driver killed Leslie:

One pre-dawn morning, at just 28 years old, Leslie drove to a surgery when a drunk man, if I remember the story correctly, somehow mounted her Honda with his car and crushed her in it. During my next trip to Stamford, several months after Leslie’s death, I paid a belated shiva call to Leslie’s mom.

I walked in the house and Leslie’s mom effused, “Leslie was fine with your news [that you’re a lesbian]. She meant to write back,” she told me. “Really.” I thought: Your daughter’s dead and you’re thinking of *my* feelings? Leslie came from especially kind stock! 4

Leslie’s mom asked me to follow her. She opened Leslie’s bedroom door. I had never entered Leslie’s room without Leslie. Reaching under Leslie’s bed, her mother pulled out a box containing letters.

“Look,” she said, pulling my letter from the pile. I don’t know that Leslie ever told her mother about my news or letter, or that she planned to reply. I think, after Leslie’s death, Leslie’s mom found the box and read my letter along with all the others, and did a kindness, but no matter.

At their front door as I was leaving, her mother said, “I remember you liked to write. Are you still writing?”

“Kind of,” I said, because I worked as a technical writer then, but I knew technical writing wasn’t what she meant when she asked the question.

As the mother of a child whose early death nipped her child’s options, she said, “You better be!”

I wish I had photos from our night in New York City. My older sister took the photo included here eight months later on my college graduation day, after I had come out to my family and was on my way.

I hope Leslie’s mom would be glad that at age 59, I am still writing.