HISTORY

I forgot to mention last month marked half a century since I "came out" and became a Gay Rights activist (already being a Women's Rights, Civil Rights, and Anti-War activist). I was 29 and it was March 1972 when homosexuality was still considered a mental disease and homosexual intimacy a crime. It led to my losing some friends and family and my then job teaching at Trinity College, a Catholic women's school in DC.

I was what most people called "bi-" but I called "pansexual" because I didn't see my sexual relations as only two kinds but as varied as each encounter was. I was part of The Gay Liberation Front but backed away in later years when the movement fragmented into opposing positions on various goals, and because in the latter 1970s I was raising a young son in New York on my own and didn't want to lose custody.

I wrote poetry about it from that March moment on, including some graphically sexual and sensual poems and suffered exclusion from some literary scenes and magazines, but was embraced by others. Some bookstores refused to carry my poetry books grumbling to the publishers that they didn't know where to shelve them: "Is he gay or straight orr what?" etc. I always preferred the term "queer" because it encompasses so much, and I wish we'd had the term "fluid" back then too (we called it gender bending).

Here's three photos of me in DC shortly before I came out, shortly after, and two years later [the steely-eyed one was taken by Len Randolph, the Madame Binh tee shirt one by Tom Wilson (tee shirt by Jimmy Fouratt) and me in the chair by I don't remember] (I wish someone had photographs of me when I wore dresses at protests and public events etc.) .