Who Needed “Girls Gone Wild?”

When I was 10, I learned a new word:  Lesbian.  My mom called me one.  And it was not meant the way kids call each other “gay” today, even though that isn’t nice either.  She was genuinely worried…

 
But first, let me back up.  In my three-part post on Innocence Lost and Found, I described the difficulty I had in 3^rdgrade with navigating the white water of love and friendship.  Before I left the New Jersey town that I felt was ruining me, I did finally make a BFF whom both my mom and I liked.  Sharon lived in the blue-collar part of town and therefore was not part of Jersey high society that my mom had hoped I would aspire to.  But her parents were nice people, and Sharon herself was quite engaging.  In fact, we looked a lot alike, which was really funny in school when the teachers got us mixed up.

Eventually we had sleep-overs.  And we did a lot of fun things.  We read comics.  We experimented with makeup.   We even invented a verbal game of Clue that we could play in bed in the dark – how cool is that!  We talked about boys.  And sometimes things got kind of racy.  After our bath we would play strip-tease with our towels, belting out pop tunes as we pranced around in the bathroom.

 

(Beautiful actress Natalie Wood playing classy stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.  My book in progress, Licking the Spoon, discusses the biological and historical underpinnings of males viewing erotica, and how women can turn it to our enjoyment.)

One night as we lay in bed after a particularly steamy strip session, I noticed that Sharon was on her belly, hands under her hips, and the bed was shaking.  I realized – OMG she’s doing that thing that I do!!!  We talked about it and discovered that each of us thought we were the only ones who knew how!

We also started something that it turned out a lot of girlfriends did.  We called it “play pretend.”  We would pretend to be a male/female couple, one of us playing the boy and one the girl, and make out.  Today I know that this is normative behavior called sex rehearsal play, previously discussed in my post Of Perverts, Prophets and Posts.  Not all kids do it, but many do.  Boys sometimes do it in a group called a “circle jerk.”  Whereas me and my girlfriends preferred serial monogamy, no jerking.

One day I had a friend over, and we were mimicking a couple of attractive teachers at our school who were known to be dating.  We were in the closet in case my mom came in my room.  She must have come in without us hearing her, because suddenly the door was yanked open.  No doubt our hair was mussed and our eyes slightly glazed over.  We had been deep into playing amorous Miss Rice and Mr. Cheski.

Mom sent her home.  And sat me down.  “Are you a lesbian?” she asked.  As if I knew what a lesbian even was.  “A woman who loves other women,” my mom explained.  Today I think that’s a nice description, but her tone of voice let me know that she didn’t think it was nice at all.

She forbid me to see that girl ever again.  Which was kind of a joke because my other friends played pretend, too.  But that ended it for me.  All I could hear was “Are you a lesbian?  Are you a lesbian?  Are you?”  And I didn’t know the answer.

It was about that time that a book called Female Sexual Perversion appeared on my mom’s bookcase.  I looked up “Lesbianism,” and here is what it showed:

 (Illustration from the book by Morris Chideckel, MD )

AACCKKKKK!!!  Was that me? Eventually I would find out.