memoirs

Growing up in Wichita in the forties, I didn't even know gay people existed until I moved to New York City in 1950. I'd just turned twenty. A year later when I enrolled in the Art Student's League, a woman in my class had a crush on me. When she flirted it made me uncomfortable, so I mostly avoided her. Still I was curious, so one night my girlfriend Cindy took me to my first gay club. The Purple Stem had one floor for men and another for women. After dancing and drinking a lot with many different women, I ended up back at my place with a big breasted lesbian and we had very drunken sex. The memory is still terribly vague, but I do recall her boobs were like soft pillows. I had enough problems without being a lesbian so I put that experience in the "forget" file.

By 1966, my primary lover Grant and I begin talking about having a threesome. I felt more comfortable doing it with a girlfriend I knew and liked. Revealing my interest in three way sex to my friend, Ginger O'Keefe, came easily.

The year was 1982. I was four years past menopause and at fifty-three, the hormone levels were still dropping. Marijuana had always been an aphrodisiac, but I no longer smoked pot to keep my short-term memory sharp while writing my Sexual Memoirs. Along with my yearly sexual adventure as an anonymous prostitute and running the Bodysex Groups, I continued to be interested in ways to be erotically entertained during the many years that lay ahead.

One evening over dinner, my friend Suzanne was talking about a new support group of SM lesbians that had just started up that year. She had only been to one meeting, but when she described the kinds of topics discussed, I was transfixed. Here was a group of outrageous lesbian feminists who were enjoying the most politically incorrect sex imaginable. When I asked if she could bring me to their next meeting, she said she'd be happy to introduce me to them.