by Marc Stein. Copyright © Marc Stein 2026. All rights reserved.

Introduction

I interviewed Alvia Golden at the home she shared with my Ph.D. supervisor, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Smith-Rosenberg, who makes a brief appearance in the transcript, had encouraged me to interview Golden to incorporate the experiences of married suburban lesbians into my research on Philadelphia gay and lesbian history. By the time of the interview, I had met Golden a dozen times, often at dinners or parties at their home or mine or when I was meeting with Smith-Rosenberg. In the late 1990s or early 2000s, I stayed with Golden and Smith-Rosenberg for a few days while doing research at the University of Michigan, where Smith-Rosenberg was working after leaving the University of Pennsylvania. After they moved to New York City, I saw Golden once more, around 2008 or 2009, in their New York City apartment. Golden died on November 23, 2025.

Date of Birth: 9 December 1930

Place of Birth: New York City

Place of Mother's Birth: New York City

Mother's Occupation: Housewife/Mother

Place of Father's Birth: Columbus, Georgia

Father's Occupation: Businessman

Race/Ethnicity: White

Religious Background: Jewish

Class Background: Upper Middle Class

 

Residential History

1930-47: New York City

1947-53: Pittsburgh

1953-58: New York City

1958-60: Rydal (Montgomery County), Pennsylvania

1960-61: Wyndmoor (Montgomery County), Pennsylvania

1961-70: Michener Ave, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1970s: Cheltenham Ave., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1970s: 1500 Locust Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1970s: 1810 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

 

Work History

1951-53: Radio Station Copywriter

1959-61: Radio Station Copywriter

1961-67: Advertising Agency Copywriter

1967-82: Advertising Agency Owner

1982-93: Marketing Executive at Smith-Kline

Interview Transcript

Marc Stein Interview with Alvia Golden, 7 October 1993. Transcribed by Lisa Williams, Marc Stein, and Jennifer Zoland.

MS: This is Marc Stein and I'm interviewing Alvia Golden on October 7th, 1993, in her home on Delancey Street in Center City. And I just thought I would start by asking you to say something about your early years, some basic background. I know you were born in 1930. Could you say something about what kind of family environment you grew up in?

 

AG: I grew up in a fairly traditional family of that time. Two children, father and mother. It was a family intactus. Nobody had had any divorces or anything of that nature. I had the usual swinish older brother. And it was a fairly ordinary life. The only mildly unusual thing about it was that I was ahead of myself in school so I got to college at the age of sixteen.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: But aside from that, everything seems to have been fairly ordinary in my childhood.

 

MS: Were there any signs that you recognized at the time that you might be sexually different or headed for a different kind of life than was more typical?

 

AG: Yeah. I sort of don't remember a time when I didn't realize that I was headed for a life that wasn't typical. Whenever I double dated, I dated very early, which I think is probably not uncommon in those days. In the '40s and '50s, the object of anybody in the middle class, I mean woman or for that matter man, was marriage. And in fact I think it was not uncommon, as it was certainly in my case, for women to be sent to college with the view that they would get a better educated husband. That they would end up with a better product for marriage. But whenever I double dated starting in high school, actually I started dating in junior high, but I remember double dating in high school, I was always more interested in the woman the other guy had with him.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Even though I went steady in high school with a guy. Always went steady in college, and I was prom queen, all that kind of stuff. Very traditional heterosexual stuff. But there was never any question in my mind that I was always more interested in the other girls.

 

MS: Did you ever have any kind of relationships with young women in high school or college?

 

AG: No. I had a flash memory return to me when I was in my forties one day, and the memory, which was 100 percent valid, I mean it was a true memory, it wasn't a constructed recollection, was that I had had sexual relations with a camp counselor when I was about nine years old.

 

MS: Really?

 

AG: Which I had repressed and buried and it suddenly came back to me. I remembered her name. And it was a terrible name, but nevertheless it was her name. It was Sarah Kancer. And I don't know how it was spelled. It might have been with K-A-N-C-E-R or something. But anyway, I remembered when the memory came back to me, lying in the sun beside the pool one day, in a pool in the backyard of a home, that I had wanted to repeat the experience. And the counselor had gotten anxious about that.

 

MS: Uhhuh. So she would have been in her teens? Late teens or something?

 

AG: I would guess, yeah. I mean it's hard when you're eight or nine years old to figure out how the hell old an older woman is. But my guess is that she would have been eighteen, nineteen, twenty, something like that.

 

MS: Mmmm.

 

AG: Although I mean at the time I would have thought she was thirty or forty. But I know now that that's highly unlikely.

 

MS: Do you recall knowing any lesbians or gay men when you were growing up. Or later on did you think back and think, “Hey that person might have been gay or lesbian?”

 

AG: Well I had a very unusual college career in that I went to Carnegie Institute of Technology drama department. Everybody was something. And we had a special house called the Castle. I went to college from '47 to '51. And the gay men bought a house for themselves. It was called, as I said, the Castle. And they segregated themselves because they wanted to live with each other and not with anybody else. So they had this huge place. Aptly named, because it was just a great big mansion on a hill near the school. And we went there for lots of parties because I mean they were fellow drama students. It was a very small drama department. There were, for example, twenty-five people in my class. So there were no big secrets. And nobody wanted to keep any secrets. And it was the era of Noel Coward and it was the gay life, which was not called gay then. In fact, we were called queers. And I've always thought that that's a perfectly lovely term for us. And it really offends me now when I call myself queer and young gay and lesbian people are offended by my use of the term, because we were perfectly pleased to be called, I mean not to be called, but to call ourselves queers. I think it's a little bit like Black people who when they talk to each other call each other niggers.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: When they want to be amusingly insulting.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: We called ourselves queers.

 

MS: So do you recall the first, say, openly gay man that you met in college?

 

AG: There were so many of them all at once I really can't remember the first one. I remember that I longed for one of the women because I thought she must be gay or lesbian. But nothing ever happened. There was a rumor in the school that lesbians, and we all lived in dormitories then. And that was absolutely required until senior year, that you live in a dormitory. And in fact in those days, most people, most women, lived in dormitories for their entire four years in college. It was a much, simpler is not the word but more conventional time. And the rumor was that lesbians left their doors open and wandered the halls at night looking for each other. And after I heard that rumor, I always slept, first of all, I immediately stopped having roommates. From my sophomore year on, I immediately had a single room.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And my specific reason for that was that I could leave my door open every night. So for three years I left my door open every night, waiting for somebody to find me, which needless to say never happened.

 

MS: So all this time you were dating men?

 

AG: Oh absolutely.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: And did you ever talk with them at any time about your desires for women?

 

AG: Oh absolutely not. Of course not.

 

MS: And did you ever talk to anybody at that time about your desires for women? Did you talk to the gay men about it?

 

AG: Nope. Oh no, no, no. No, no. It was really very clear to me from early on that society was not thrilled with queers. I was thrilled with queers, but the world was not thrilled with queers. And my family would certainly not have been very thrilled with queers. And by the way, when I was a kid, and it was clear to me that I really preferred all things boyish to any things girlish, it used to drive my mother nuts. Because my mother was devoutly into raising me into a lovely, feminine mate for some guy.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And preferably some rich Jewish guy. And she always wanted to dress me in her idea of sort of the come-hitherish sexy character. And I had a very beautiful figure. And I was not an unattractive kid. And she used to buy me these absolutely outrageous clothes. She had at one point bought me a special brassiere so that she could buy me a plunging neckline dress. And this all, mind you, before and around the time I was sixteen years of age. And fur coats and all kinds of things of that nature. And I was always plea bargaining for peacoats, which were very big then because the Second World War had just ended. And these peacoats were really great jackets. They were not high fashion as they later became. I mean they were really boyish and I really wanted one.

 

MS: Did you ever get teased when you were a kid for being boyish?

 

AG: Never.

 

MS: Or name-called?

 

AG: Never.

 

MS: Nothing from your mother, ever any sense that?

 

AG: Never, never. I was a pretty kid. And I had a nice figure. And I was always considered an appropriate, sexy girl.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: I dated Marty Duberman in high school. He was considered an appropriate, sexy boy, and I was considered an appropriate, sexy girl. And I recall, though he may not, that we behaved that way when we dated. There were no cracks in the picture window. Nobody ever said anything, nobody, certainly not to me. If anybody thought anything, they didn't tell me. And when I was in college, I was nominated by another woman in my dormitory to be a [?] queen. So I mean clearly I was seen as a womanly woman.

 

MS: You're not the first lesbian who's told me of dating gay men. And vice versa.

 

AG: Right. Remember they asked us.

 

MS: Well do you think anything was going on with you and Marty or in general with those kinds of experiences?

 

AG: I mean since the date turned out to be sort of a very ordinary date for the time, and I mean he didn't say to me, “Can I tell you something? I have a sense that you will understand this.” It was just like the usual rough and tumble in the backseat of a car. It's hard for me to think it was anything on a conscious level.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And it did not leave me thinking, “Oh thank god, I’ve finally found somebody I can go out with and be safe and feel that nobody will ever know, but I'll be O.K."

 

MS: Now through your college years, do you remember ever reading anything about homosexuality?

 

AG: Yeah. When I got to college, it was the first time that I read The Well of Loneliness. And I don't remember a thing about the book except that I remember it fondly. I have since been told, I've never bothered to reread it, but it really says that it's a very tragic thing for a woman to be a queer. But for me, all it said was that it's a very possible thing and a very real thing.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: So I thought, “Oh great.”

 

MS: Do you remember how you came upon it?

 

AG: I'm sure I came upon it because people were talking about the subject for the obvious reason that our school was always talking about the subject.

 

MS: You mean the drama school?

 

AG: Yeah.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Yeah. The drama department.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: But to this day, I have no sense that there was even one other lesbian. And nobody has ever indicated to me that there was another one. And all my friends now know, all my classmates now know, that I'm a lesbian. And nobody has ever said to me, “My god did you ever blah, blah with someone.” No that's not true. I was at a party once with one of John Berryman's many wives. And this was about three, four years ago, in fact. And she said that she’s a lesbian, that she was in college, and that she was having a relationship. She was about two years behind me in school, and that she was having relations with another woman in college who has since, who was apparently bisexual in college and has since become heterosexual. And she said they knew that I was. But nobody ever said anything. I mean they never approached me, they never spoke to me, they never said anything. It would have been decided relief.

 

MS: If you had to guess, how do you think they knew?

 

AG: That's a hard one. I have no idea. I suppose I looked like a lesbian to them. I mean I've never understood that 'cause I can't see anyone. I mean all the gay men I've ever known, and I've known lots and lots of gay men, have always said to me that they could spot a guy a million paces away. They walk into a room, they look around, and they know every gay guy in the room instantly. I mean at straight parties, I've never been able to spot anybody. My assumption always in any room is that everybody in it is as straight as an arrow. And unless somebody comes up to me and says, “Can I see you outside for a minute.”

 

MS: So should we go back to your marriage? And that period? You met your husband in college?

 

AG: Where did I meet him? Yes. He was older than I and he was coming back for an alumni dance at the fraternity house. And I was at the fraternity dance as somebody's date. And the guy I was dating was an extremely nice, innocent young fellow, always my preference not to be out with some older experienced guy. And this was a kid in my class. And Edmund was there, my husband. He was, he is seven years older than I. And this was an alumni dance. He'd graduated the year before. He asked me to dance, blah, blah, the rest is history.

 

MS: And when were you married?

 

AG: 1951.

 

MS: Which was just when you were finishing college?

 

AG: I got married three days after graduation, which I did not attend. I went home to get married instead.

 

MS: And you lived in New York City at first, right?

 

AG: No. We settled down in Pittsburgh.

 

MS: Oh I see. And I know you were telling me before, you got a job with some radio stations at that point?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Yes, I got a job with two radio stations. One was a summer replacement job. I had never done any copywriting or anything of that nature, but I went to a theater one night and a friend of mine was at a theater in Pittsburgh and she was pissing and moaning and complaining that she wanted to go into summer stock, but she couldn't because if she gave up her job at the radio station, she wouldn't get it back. I was at that time working in a steel mill, a strange little job having nothing to do with steel making, an office job. And it was a loathsome job so I said to her, “Why don't I take your job in the radio station and hold it for you 'til you come back? It would get me out of this stupid steel mill and you can do your summer stock thing.” She said “great.” I said, “What do you do at the radio station?” “Sit in the copy window.” I said, “What’s that?” She explained it. I went home and I practiced it, listening to radio commercials and reading newspaper ads and converting them to radio commercials. And then I went out and I took her job in Kittaning, Pennsylvania, for two months while she went to summer stock. The people who owned the Kittaning station owned a station in Pittsburgh, so when I said I wanted to go back home to my husband, whom I had left for two months, they said fine. And they transferred me to their Pittsburgh station.

 

MS: I see.

 

AG: Then I got pregnant with my first child, Greg. And I quit work because I got sick as a dog.

 

MS: With the pregnancy?

 

AG: Right.

 

MS: When was Greg born?

 

AG: By the time Greg was born, we had moved to New York and he was born on November 15th.

 

MS: Do you remember your early years in marriage as happy ones?

 

AG: No.

 

MS: What was wrong?

 

AG: No part of my marriage was happy. My husband was an angry young man who was unpleasant. He had a vicious, nasty temper. He thought he had married a rich woman. I thought I had married a talented man. He was a graduate of the Institute of Design in Chicago and had studied with Moholy-Nagy and people whom I revered, respected. All of my life I have had friends who were artists. So I was terribly impressed with that. But he wasn't doing any of that at all. His talent was lying fallow and I guess he really thought that he was gonna' work for my father or something. Although I never thought about that 'til much later. But in any event, he never really held a job for very long. And he was always very ugly and unpleasant when he was out of work. And I had the typical attitude of wives of that era, “Oh what have I done wrong? What can I do to make this better?” Which, in that era, primarily was to have more children. “All right, well maybe if I have more children he'll be happier.” And needless to say, that didn't work, since poverty was the first problem we had going for us. And so finally, after nine and three-quarters years, he was seeing a therapist, and I called his therapist one day and I said, “What can I do?” And he said, “Well he probably needs a good jolt like a divorce.” So I gave him a good jolt.

 

MS: Now you were divorced in what year?

 

AG: '60. By that time I was having an affair with a woman.

 

MS: Right, yeah, I know. I wanted to get back to that. And you had two other kids, right?

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: Born in '55 and '57?

 

AG: '55 and '59.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Yeah.

 

MS: And because I know you a little, I know that while you were married you started having relations with other women.

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: How did that happen? How did that come about?

 

AG: Well, while I had been in high school, one of the women I had double dated with was an artist. And I really adored her. She was one of the funniest people, is one of the funniest people I've ever met. Just absolutely funny and enormously talented as an artist. I continue to think she was practically a genius. And I was in love with her. When I got pregnant with Greg, I wasn't feeling well. And my mother said, “Why don't you come home and see the regular family doctors and have some tests.” So I did that. And while I was home, Susan, who was unmarried at that time, came over to visit. And it turned out she had had a lesbian relationship. And we made love. She stayed overnight. It was traditional in my family's home that whoever stayed overnight was going to sleep in my bed from the time I was a little girl.

 

MS: So no one would think that anything untoward was?

 

AG: No. In fact, the night that Susan was coming, the night she was going to stay over when I was pregnant, I was enormously excited because I guess I was really in love with her. And I wasn't going to make any moves. I mean 'cause I was just, didn't know what to do or anything or how to go about it. And I don't know what made me think she was. I guess just plain wishful thinking. But my mother and I went out, and I said I needed a new nightgown, so my mother bought me a lovely nightgown. And nobody thought anything at all about the two of us going to bed together.

 

MS: And so did she initiate things with you?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

MS: Do you remember your first reactions?

 

AG: Delight.

 

MS: Yeah?

 

AG: Oh yeah, you bet. She said, “Don't be frightened.” And I thought, “Oh are you kidding? Frightened? I'm delighted.” But I didn't say that.

 

MS: And those first experiences, was she something of a teacher or did you not need any teaching?

 

AG: I'm sure she was something of a teacher. And I needed probably not a whole lot of teaching. I mean it's not exactly rocket scientry, is it?

 

MS: So you got up the next morning and went down and had breakfast with the family?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Sure. We both did, of course. And that was the beginning of doing that for years and years and years and years and years.

 

MS: With her, you mean?

 

AG: No. Well, with her, yes, but I mean that whole double life of being in the closet. Where you get up in the morning and you just go right back into whatever straight world you're in. I mean compartmentalization always seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable way of life. It wasn't until I stopped doing it that I realized the incredible price you pay for it.

 

MS: And what was the price when you realized?

 

AG: Horrible repression of huge pieces of your mind and feelings. But I didn't realize it until I retired barely, not even a year ago.

 

MS: Hmmm. So you saw Susan regularly then over the next few years?

 

AG: No. I lived in Pittsburgh, she lived in New York.

 

MS: So you saw her occasionally or was it pretty much just a short?

 

AG: Well we moved back to New York, and I bugged the shit out of her 'cause I wanted to be with her all the time. She was a working artist. And I was a mother at home with a kid and I didn't have shit to do. And she was building a career. And I was all over her, all the time, trying to seduce her back into the relationship any way I could. Dancing naked on her drawing table.

 

MS: This is her?

 

AG: That's she.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: It was taken, I think, at my son's wedding.

 

MS: Now did your husband ever suspect in those years?

 

AG: I don't think so. Once I tried to tell him because I sort of had some faint hope that he might be. You see I change. She doesn't.

 

MS: I don't know that I would say that. So you tried to tell him?

 

AG: Yeah. I tried to get him to confess that he was queer, because when I realized that I really was queer, I thought, “God, if he's married to me and he's queer, wouldn't that be wonderful.” So I tried delicately to have conversations suggesting that he deal with it. He ain't.

 

MS: And did he react very defensively?

 

AG: No, he just sort of fell asleep, which is mainly what he did a lot of.

 

MS: Uhhuh. Who was the person after Susan? Do you remember?

 

AG: Mhmmm. I guess Betty was the next person. She's fourteen years older than I. And that was when we got to Philadelphia. And I seduced Betty. She was a neighbor. And I was living alone in this absolute, Rydal is really far removed from anything. And in those days it was even further removed from anything. And it was kind of the last outpost of civilization. And I was awfully lonely there, and I just kept sort of looking around and saying, “Isn't there anything out here?” And I went to a party one night. We were the new kids in the neighborhood. This was a neighborhood of millionaires. We were living in the only rented house in the neighborhood. It was a servant's cottage.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And these were really the kind of people that they write novels about. These were the bored, jaded rich. They had all fucked each other so many times by the time we got there that there was no sport left around. And then suddenly we came in. And they were all much older than we, because they had all built these huge fortunes or inherited them and they were all at least fourteen years older than I was, at least a generation or two ahead of us. And immediately we moved into this neighborhood, we began to get invited to all of these posh parties. And it got to be somebody's turn. Betty had just, I think, been divorced or was in the process of getting a divorce. And somebody, I remember, a woman who's now on channel seventeen or something, or was on channel seventeen, Dorie Lenz, had a home in the neighborhood. And she invited us to a party. And Edmund couldn't go. He was working that night. And so I went. And I was like twenty-seven years old. And it was right near us. I mean it was walking distance. I don't think I even had a baby-sitter. I think I put the kids to bed. And I thought I'll walk over for an hour or something like that. And I got to this party and they were all drinking and doing mad cap and carrying on in their rich, rich roles. And I went in, it was a bit heady for me. Nobody wanted to have a conversation about anything. I mean it was all lots of repartee, but they were older people. And I mean between twenty-seven and forty is a big chunk of time.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And they were talking about stuff that didn't interest me any. I mean it was not art conversation. It was not theater conversation. It was local gossip conversation. Who's schtupping who and those kind of things. So I sort of went off to the library, or maybe the sunroom. to kind of look around and see this posh house and take a breather. And there was this woman sitting there. And I said “hi.” And she said “hi.” And we introduced ourselves. And suddenly she turned to me and she said, “This is pretty terrible, this nonsense.” And I said. "It's relatively grim.” And she said, “You need to get me out of this place.” And it didn't even strike me at the time that that was an odd request at all, so I said, “Yeah, I mean what's the problem.” She said, “Just get me. I can't. I know these people too well. I just can't say goodbye. Can you get me out of here?” But I don't know these people at all. I can say goodbye. I said, “Yeah, do you have a coat or anything?” She said “yeah,” so she got her coat and I said, “I'm going to walk Betty home now.” And we left. And that was the start of a twenty-two year relationship.

 

MS: Twenty-two years?

 

AG: Twenty-two years.

 

MS: So you said she had just been divorced?

 

AG: She was in the process of getting divorced. And it was really a horrendous divorce because there was a lot of money. And her father was a very, very well-known Philadelphia figure, Albert Ambresio. And so her husband really wanted to sort of destroy her and make her pay a lot for getting a divorce. Not that he was poor. He was quite well-off himself. But I mean he was very vindictive, is what I'm trying to say. It was not financial gain that he was looking for, but he was very angry with her for a lot of reasons. And then of course he found out that I was around and he gave testimony on the stand in their divorce case that she was queer. But since her father was an extremely powerful man, he had owned newspapers in his town and owned a whole lot of the city. He simply called his good friend Annenberg who ran the newspaper and said that “no, I don't want that story in the paper.” So that story never appeared anywhere.

 

MS: Hmmm.

 

AG: So I sort of got off kind of scotfree on that one.

 

MS: And did you start the relationship that very night that you took Betty home? Or did it take some time?

 

AG: No, no, no. It took a long time. But anyway I believe in relationships taking a long time. I mean I always wanted to go to bed with friends. I just never was that enthusiastic to hop in the sack that I couldn't wait to get home with somebody, to get somebody home. I mean I had known Susan, my first lover, for years and years and years.

 

MS: Right. So can you describe your courtship with Betty? Did you just start seeing a lot of one another?

 

AG: Yeah. She lived around the corner and I was nailed to the floor with these babies. And she would just come over every day and talk with me. And Edmund, my husband, was building a boat. He was building a sixteen foot foot outdoor motorboat from a set of twenty-five cent plans. And he was out every night until three, four in the morning in the driveway building this boat. And I was always sort of sitting alone 'cause you couldn't really talk to him while he was building his boat. He was busy working on his boat and didn't want to have little chatty conversations. So I was reading myself blind in the house every night and I was alone every day and so I was alone for all intents and purposes every night. So she would come over and keep me company, which made him very happy because it got me off his back.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And so he was very thrilled with that aspect of it. And then I don't even remember the first time we went to bed. I don't know whether it was the daytime, the nighttime, or where it was or anything else about it. But it just evolved over time.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Into a sexual relationship.

 

MS: And this was the first relationship?

 

AG: Well it turned out that she had previously had a relationship with a maid in her home.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: But she, of course, being fourteen years older than I, meaning she was born in the teens, the nineteen teens, she was much more repressed. She came from a family that put tin mittens on the kids' hands so they wouldn't masturbate. And she claimed not really to have quite understood what was going on with her maid. I understood what was going on with her maid.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Well of course the real problem was that when I met her, she was seeing a psychiatrist because she was an alcoholic. She had a spontaneous remission of her alcoholism, according to the psychiatrist, when we became lovers. But that didn't last very long. Not more than a year afterwards she became once again a very serious alcoholic.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I deeply regret that I could not extricate myself from that relationship as long as I could not extricate myself from Edmund.

 

MS: Mhmmm. And you said Edmund never knew during the '50s or ‘60s.

 

AG: I think he knew by the time that relationship was over because of all the stuff that had gone down around her divorce. And really one of the reasons I divorced him is he had a habit of doing what I call getting himself fired. He would provoke whoever he worked for until they fired him. And he did that one day after Betty and I had been having an affair for a couple of years. He came home one night and announced that he was packing up his tools and we'd be moving because he was getting fired and there were no more jobs in the Philadelphia area for him. And I knew I was not moving. And we had a fight. And I knew that if we had a fight that I would end up in not great shape because he was a slugger. And he slugged me. And I said that's it and divorced him. But I really mainly divorced him because I had no intention of moving out of Philadelphia.

 

MS: Hmmm. Did he move?

 

AG: No. He did not.

 

MS: And was it right then that you left him?

 

AG: I threw him out. I don't know what the laws are like now. I mean I don't know what it's like with no-fault, but in those days, if you left the house, if you were the party who left the house, you lost all rights to the property.

 

MS: I see.

 

AG: And I had no intention of leaving the house 'cause I had the two kids. But I did send the two kids away. I sent them off to my mother's house with the housekeeper.

 

MS: And did your husband ever make any threats then or afterwards to out you as a way of getting the kids?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

MS: You want to tell me about that?

 

AG: Mhmmm. He threatened to call. He knew I had been seeing a psychiatrist in New York during a certain period of my life. In fact, when I became pregnant with Greg, I was having an affair with Susan. And we were still living in New York. And I went to see a psychiatrist because I was afraid. I had never known any babies and I thought maybe I'm gonna' be a lousy mother 'cause I'm this queer. And I don't know what effect this is gonna' have on my kid. And the psychiatrist, I don't remember what the hell he did or how he helped me at all, but anyway Edmund, referring back to that period, said he was going to call the psychiatrist and find out what I had been treated for. And use that as a means of getting custody of the children, which of course he never wanted. He did that just as a threat. I called the psychiatrist and he said, “Don't be absurd. This is privileged communication. I won't even talk to him.” That ended that concern on my part. My father at that time refused to have anything to do with me at all, with the whole divorce thing. He didn't like my husband. Neither did my mother. But they didn't want to get involved in the ugly scene, so they stayed out of it.

 

MS: I see.

 

AG: So it was a very, I mean the divorce went, the grounds were incompatibility or something. No the grounds were indignities to the person.

 

MS: Was that out of the physical violence?

 

AG: I couldn't prove the physical violence but he had been unpleasant enough in enough situations that there were plenty of witnesses to say that he had not been a really generous sweetheart of a guy.

 

MS: Were you and Betty ever--in the '50s I want to focus on for a little bit--ever around other lesbians? Or was it just pretty much a one on one?

 

AG: This all takes place in the '60s. We're in the '60s now.

 

MS: O.K. Your divorce was in '61, right?

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: Oh so your relationship with Betty started just before that.

 

AG: Right. No, it started in about '58.

 

MS: O.K. So late '50s, early '60s?

 

AG: Never. Never.

 

MS: It was just the two of you?

 

AG: I never knew a lesbian that I wasn't created with ever at that period of time.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I was terrified of lesbians.

 

MS: Uhhuh. What was your picture of a lesbian in those years?

 

AG: Well the typical picture of a lesbian in those years was somebody who wore a D.A. haircut, a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and a pack of cigarettes in them.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Man's clothing, boots, and went to bars, and was decidedly lower class.

 

MS: Did you ever see any?

 

AG: And would beat you.

 

MS: Did you ever see anyone that fit that description?

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: Could you tell me about that?

 

AG: But it was years later.

 

MS: Oh.

 

AG: Well in the Village, which I was terribly drawn to as a child, as a young woman, because I knew that's where all those people were who were essentially my people. There were lots of those who looked like that. Crossdressing butches, I guess you would call them now.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: We didn't have any such phrases for them in those days.

 

MS: So you would have seen them in the '50s?

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: In the Village.

 

AG: In the '40s.

 

MS: In the '40s.

 

AG: Yeah. But they were all queers. Later on as I read more books, I knew that they were called bulldaggers.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: But none of that meant anything to me either. I just knew that if you were a lesbian then that's really who you had to associate with. And so there wasn't any sense really being a lesbian, in any out sense, 'cause you would just be associating with people you wouldn't normally associate with.

 

MS: Were you reading any other novels during those years?

 

AG: No, no, no, no.

 

MS: Nothing like that?

 

AG: No, no, no.

 

MS: So it was pretty much you and…?

 

AG: I had really no interest in it at all. I mean later on I began to realize, I began to get a sense of the Natalie Barney stuff and all of that, that there were two classes of lesbians, neither of which I belonged to.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And through Betty an attempted seduction was made on me by another millionaire lesbian, while I was in the early years of my relationship with Betty. And so I did have a sense that there was this group of humongously wealthy lesbians and then this group of bulldaggers who were truck drivers.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: And god knows what the hell else they did. But there were no middle class lesbians.

 

MS: Can you tell me a little bit more about that incident with...?

 

AG: The attempted seduction?

 

MS: And Betty setting it up or something? Is that what you're saying?

 

AG: No.

 

MS: You said through Betty?

 

AG: Yes, but not in that way. Betty's circle were all very wealthy people. Actually they were mostly very wealthy Jews. Like the Rosenbachs, that kind of wealthy Philadelphia Jews. And she and I had a big personal issue in the early years because she thought that her crowd was not ready for her relationship with me. And I felt that I was not ready for a relationship where I was going to be hidden by somebody. So I was very determined that if she got invited to a party, she had to take me with. Which made her very uncomfortable, and she complains about it to this day. But I just didn't want to be a tootsie, a kind of hidden away, backstairs tootsie. And so I insisted on going with her wherever she went. And it pretty soon got around, because it was one of those crowds. It was like our crowd. I mean it was a tight group of people and so it pretty soon got around that Betty....

 

MS: Should I pause this for a second?

 

[tape turned off and then back on]

 

MS: So you were telling me about this millionairess.

 

AG: So this woman had a party. She had a penthouse apartment. And I lived not too far away. This was when Cedarbrook Apartments were first built. They were in a very good area. They're in a very crappy area now. And they were built by her husband, who was a real estate tycoon. And she had a penthouse apartment. And I lived not far from there in my tacky little rowhouse on the other side of the tracks. And she lived in Montgomery County. I lived in Philadelphia County. Cheltenham Avenue was the dividing line. And she called. As I said before, it took a very short time before everybody in Betty's crowd knew that I was there, that Betty was queer, that she had this kid. So this woman called about three hours before the party and she said would I, since I lived closer, be good enough to come over and give her a hand setting some things up for the party. It didn't occur to me that she had more money than god and she needed a hand setting things up for a party about as much as I need a [?]. I mean she just didn't. That didn't occur to me. I was just enchanted with the idea that I was accepted, included, wanted. I was probably twenty-eight by this time, mother of two. So off I went. It was really only about three blocks away, about two hours before the party. And zipped up to the penthouse. And I remember she had the most gorgeous original art on the walls. Man Ray, she had things by Man Ray. Gorgeous things. Anyway, she was married, and I asked how I could help, and she said I could help zip up her dress. It had a zipper back. She was also about fourteen, fifteen years older than I. I said great. Step into the bathroom where she was dressing. I stepped in the bathroom, totally innocent and entirely unsexually affected by all of this. I mean I was sort of excited about the idea of being part of the crowd. In the bathroom she shut the door and slammed me against it and started to kiss me. I was extremely surprised. I was massively unturned on because I was taken much, much too much by surprise by the whole thing. And I was more scared than anything else. Her husband was dressing in his wing of the penthouse and I thought we're going to be shot to death. I mean some terrible thing will happen to us here. I mean it did not occur to me what I realized later, which was that these people were all into absolutely everything and none of them gave a rat's behind what anybody else in the crowd was doing, including husbands, wives, and animals. I affected to be enormously surprised and flattered. I had been raised in a kind of traditional stand up when older people enter the room kind of thing. So my response to all of these people who were fourteen, fifteen, twenty years older than I was one of extreme deference in any event. And I did say what I said, which when I think about it now embarrasses the hell out of me. I quoted Shakespeare. I mean there was Betty and I really could not do anything to offend the relationship with Betty. The next day, I mean the party went on and she just kept looking at me smolderingly from all corners of the rooms. Eventually, of course, it got to me a lot. I mean the idea of having yet another affair seemed extremely exciting. Betty was a very, very tough cookie. I knew that it would have to be very much on the sly. But I began to feel sort of more up for it as this woman continued to eye me. And then I began to flirt back. But nothing happened at the party. The next day, when I got to my office, my office was filled with orchids. And they kept being delivered all day long. I mean it was really, at first it was sort of funny and then it got to be totally embarrassing, because about every half hour throughout the day more armloads of orchids would be delivered until literally--I was working at an ad agency--the office was just loaded with orchids. And they all came from this one flower shop. And I thought, “Goodness, the florist must know she's queer.”

 

MS: Did anything ever happen with her?

 

AG: One of the funniest experiences of my entire life happened with her. I called and I thanked her very prettily for all the flowers. And she invited me to lunch. And so whenever it was, I later went to lunch at her penthouse apartment. And she was extremely, I mean part of the sensual excitement of it was that she was massively indifferent to the servants and so forth. I mean the place was crawling with people serving us and so forth, but it was as if they weren't there. I mean it was kind of a royal approach to life. And there's a kind of performance modality that sets in when you do that, that sort of includes the audience.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: So that the sexual excitement is heightened. And so she got me into the living room after lunch. She invited me to sit down and talk and she put her arm around me. The next thing I knew I was sort of lying down with my head in her lap and she was stroking me, unbuttoning me, and suddenly as she was unbuttoning me, her hands to the back, and she jumped up and my head bounced unceremoniously on the sofa. And I said, “What's the matter?” And she said look. I had chicken pox. My entire body was covered with red spots.

 

MS: Which you had probably gotten from one of your kids?

 

AG: Undoubtedly. I jumped up, buttoned my clothing again, and she said, “Out, out, out!”

 

MS: So that put an end to that.

 

AG: That was the end of it. The absolute end of it.

 

MS: That's really very funny.

 

AG: I think she was very angry because I didn't want to go home because I had by that time two kids, one of them was a baby. And I didn't want to bring the chicken pox back. Nobody had it at that particular moment and I figured well the baby hadn't had it yet or Maggie. So I went to Betty's house. So Betty could take care of me until I got better. And I left the housekeeper that I had in charge of the kids for four or five days until I got over the infectious part of it. And I think that Winnie, the woman, was very annoyed that I went from her sofa to Betty's apartment with my chicken pox. I don't know. The thing never went anywhere. I think she's still alive, although she got a very debilitating disease of her central nervous system.

 

MS: Hmmm.

 

AG: Last time I saw her she was in a wheelchair.

 

MS: I have a few questions that are just stabs in the dark.

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: Did you know anything about the controversy surrounding the naming of the Whitman Bridge in the '50s?

 

AG: Oh sure.

 

MS: You did?

 

AG: Everybody did. It was headline news.

 

MS: Can you tell me your memories of it?

 

AG: All I remember is I used to write letters to my friends saying, “I'm writing to you from Philadelphia, the only city in America that has a banned bridge.”

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And because everybody was deeply offended that a bridge was going to be named after a queer. And I just thought it was hysterically funny and everybody I knew thought it was the dumbest fucking controversy. I mean we just considered it was a typical sort of redneck piece of crap to be worried about that.

 

MS: Well it was mostly the Catholic Church, I gather, that was….

 

AG: Oh I'm sure it was mostly the Catholic Church. I remember learning at that time that supposedly he had fucked young men right under where the structure was being built. That was part of what I think I remember learning at that time. I mean I don't even remember knowing that Walt Whitman was queer until the bridge controversy.

 

MS: So that exposed it for you?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm. Mhmmm. Right.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Exactly.

 

MS: And so among your friends, people were overwhelmingly in support of naming it for Whitman?

 

AG: Among my friends, people were overwhelmingly amused that anybody gave a shit about naming the bridge for a queer. I mean I suspect that I was unique among my friends in not having known all along that he was a queer.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: I mean I had much more erudite friends, literate friends, than I was at that time.

 

MS: Let me try something else. There was an annual Halloween night drag queer parade in the middle of Center City.

 

AG: Really?

 

MS: And supposedly a lot of people came in from around the city and suburbs to see it.

 

AG: Nope.

 

MS: O.K. And what about the coffeehouses that emerged in Philly at the end of the '50s? Humoresque, the Proscenium, the Gilded Cage. Around Rittenhouse Square?

 

AG: Mmhmm [dissent].

 

MS: You weren't part of that set at all?

 

AG: Mhmmm [dissent]. In the '70s, the Women's Coffeehouse opened.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: And I heard about that. But I was afraid to go there. Because by that time I think I owned my own business. And I didn't want to be seen anywhere where I could be identified as a queer. It would have adverse effect on my business.

 

MS: Maybe we should talk about that some. I know you started your business, you told me, in....

 

AG: '67.

 

MS: '67?

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: And you said you had one gay partner…

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: ...and one straight partner?

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: How did the business come about?

 

AG: I had been working in an ad agency. One of our clients worked for Industrial Valley Bank, a bank that no longer exists in this town, but was then a big bank in this town. He was the ads manager. In the ad agency where I worked, the aforementioned Boakley and Capham, there was a media guy named David Phillip. When I was working at Boakley and Capham and living with Betty, not living with her, I always had separate homes with lovers, never lived with them until Red and I moved in together. But we were lovers. And we always were in one or the other home. We didn't really live apart; we just maintained separate homes so that we would not be identified as queers really essentially. I was totally in the closet and I knew no lesbians. And one day one of my partners came in, and he had had a party, and he asked if I'd like to see the pictures of this party, and I said I'd love to. And he lived in Bucks County on a big spread and so he showed me his pictures and his pictures were all of guys and many of the guys were in drag, including my partner. And I didn't, you know, scream, run, and carry on. And he said, “You know what this is?” And I said, “Yeah, of course I know what it is.” And he said, “How do you know?” And I said, “Well I'm queer, too, David.” And he said, “We thought you were. Paul and I thought you were.”

 

MS: Paul was his partner?

 

AG: Yes. And is his partner. They've been together like thirty-five years.

 

MS: Wow. And they said they thought you were?

 

AG: Yes. And he said, “You know I told Paul she has this friend Betty and she keeps talking about Betty and we thought you were, but we couldn't be sure.” So then David started inviting me to these parties I think I told you about one time where there were 150 men and us. I mean these guys cut across class. They were everybody from truck drivers to corporate executives. And some of them had absolutely gorgeous homes in Bucks County. One home had a huge swimming pool and an entire theater of its own. The guy who owned that was a big executive with AGFA, the film and whatever company. There was a vice president from Dunn and Bradstreet was one of the people in that crowd. One of the guys graduated with a doctorate from engineering school at Penn while we were all friends together and we went to his graduation. So it was a very disparate group of people. But they were all guys. There were about 150 of them. And they would have shows in the theater, big, huge drag shows with really elaborate stage settings. David had a swing hung and he put on a gown and he would swing out over the audience from the stage singing "There are Fairies in the Bottom of My Garden" in a lovely falsetto. He had been a choirboy when he was young. And Joe and Jerry, Joe, Jerry was, no Joe was at Dunn and Bradstreet. Jerry was somewhere else in a very good position. Very highly paid position. They wore sailor suits and they danced to "Has Anybody Seen My Ship." And we always ended everything with a song, a few lines of which I remember. Everybody stood up, everybody held hands, and everybody sang. I can't sing, but it was like [singing], "Stand up and cheer for gay liberation, end segregation in this nation.”

 

MS: When would you have been singing that song?

 

AG: In the '70s. And so finally I said to these guys. And we were called the girls. They called each other the boys and all the femme partners had girls' names, which was the first time I knew of that and David was always called Daisy.

 

MS: Were most of the couples….

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: ...role playing?

 

AG: Role-playing, butch, femme, role-playing.

 

MS: They were?

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: Most of the male couples were?

 

AG: Yes. They were. And we were the girls; they were the boys. And we were the only girls. And finally I said to David one day, because Betty was fourteen years older, she came from another world, another life, and it was very boring to her. I loved anything. Anyplace where I could go and be queer in a relaxed milieu was jake with me. But she really wanted to have some intelligent conversation going on, and in typical fashion, typical bigoted fashion, we felt that if there were some other women there we would have a higher level of conversation. So we asked them to invite some other quote girls quote. And so the next time they had a party they absolutely must have laid themselves out flat; they finally dredged up two other quote girls. And they were two stone dykes from god knows where in Jersey and one of them was an elementary school teacher and the other was a truck driver and the four of us sort of looked at each other. And we knew the minute we looked at each other we hadn't two fucking words to say to each other. And there we were, and the guys were all sort of standing around us like proud mothers, beaming at us. They had brought girls together. And they expected something wonderful to happen. Parthenogenesis or something, you know. We tried personfully to look happy and rewarded with each other, but I think they knew because that was the last time we ever saw those two girls.

 

MS: I'm gonna’ ask you to try to put some dates on this. When did you start going to these parties?

 

AG: Oh god. David will be able to tell you much better than I when you talk to him.

 

MS: Was it in the '60s? Was it in the first couple years of your partnership or was it later on?

 

AG: I think it was. I think it went all through that time. I think it was late '60s to mid-'70s.

 

MS: So they would have brought those two other girls sometime in the early '70s or so?

 

AG: Yes. Exactly, exactly.

 

MS: Did you encounter any kind of sexism among the gay men at these parties?

 

AG: Oh! I really began to dislike gay men as a result of those parties. I mean really seriously began to dislike gay men. You know after twenty or thirty drinks, which was how the evenings went. The evenings were, regardless of what else was happening, it always ended up as a drunken evening. And later on there were drugs. Pot-smoking, primarily. But in the beginning there was just booze. And there was always a certain point where it became very, very clear that these guys really genuinely didn't like women. There was always an enormous amount of trashing of women going on at these parties. And after awhile it really got to me very badly and that's when I just stopped going because it was decidedly uncomfortable. I mean there was always a point in the party where there would be huge imitations of women and unflattering imitations of women. And for every gay man at these parties who was absolutely crazy about his dear mother, there were ten of them who loathed and detested and hated their mothers. And by derivation, all women thereafter. And I used to say in those years that I didn't like gay men because they really thought they could do us much better than we could do ourselves.

 

MS: So did you find the drag itself to be offensive?

 

AG: No. Not at all.

 

MS: Could you explain to me the difference?

 

AG: Well drag is not an intellectual attitude. I mean all drag expresses to me is an enjoyment of difference. But difference is not per se anti-woman. Not to my mind. I mean I don't feel if a woman dresses up in male drag that it means she hates men.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Quite the contrary, in point of fact. If it meant anything, it meant that she envied and wanted to be like a man, to have some of the attributes of a man or to be seen as a man.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: I was very shocked to find out the depth of disaffection with women that I found in these parties.

 

MS: Do you remember the kinds of things that were said? 'Cause you're saying you were offended, but I'm wondering if you can give any materiality to it.

 

AG: Well women were routinely called bitches for one thing.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I don't want to say anything I don't really remember. And all of the take-offs were very hostile take-offs of women. But that's really all I can say.

 

MS: Were there specific types of women you think that were especially put down? Career women or single women?

 

AG: No.

 

MS: All kinds of women?

 

AG: Yeah. Yeah. They just didn't like women, those guys. They really didn't. Now guys don't.

 

MS: Now your friends as well? The ones who invited you?

 

AG: I really didn't want to know much about that. I really did not want to plumb that area. I didn't want to know how David felt. I think David is an extremely sweet and gentle and lovable person. And I don't think that he's as hostile as I am about anybody.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: But he would hardly be called a feminist.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: None of these guys would. And most of them were Republican, which I never understood either.

 

MS: Hmmmm.

 

AG: I never understood how any self-respecting queer has ever been a Republican, given what they have in mind for them.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: But I soon of course would discover that there are. There's the Log Cabin Club.

 

MS: Right. So getting back to [crashing noise]....

 

AG: Oops! Sorry.

 

MS: Getting away from the boys, I guess. Through the mid-'70s, did you start to be in any kind of lesbian environments where it was more than just you and your partner?

 

AG: Yeah. It happened very accidentally. I went to work for another ad agency. After Boakley and Capham then I went to work for something called Spiro. And the woman who was my boss at Spiro, the copy chief, and I had an affair. I was living with Betty. I had a number of affairs after Betty became a quite falling down drunk and I couldn't bring myself to leave her, but it didn't make me faithful. It made me, in fact, unfaithful. I sort of was a lousy wife and I think I felt I couldn't get out of it but somehow by some magical double-standard, it gave me a right to screw her. Which I then proceeded to do. I mean I went home every night, but sometimes quite late. I was not nice. I should have got out of the relationship. One of the real relationships I had was with my boss at Spiro. And who has now passed to her reward and therefore shall remain nameless. And I seduced her and it was not a long-lasting relationship. I think it lasted about three nights.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: The friendship went on for years, but the sexual relationship was not exciting. And so I introduced her to somebody else I had had an affair with and who was also not very interesting to me. And the two of them then became lovers and went on into the dusk together. But I was sitting at my home one night and this woman, my boss, called me and said, “There's an ad in the CityPaper or Welcomat or something for a women's coffeehouse. And how would you like to go?” And I said no way in hell would I go. I'd be absolutely terrified. Oh, I forgot to say, that woman I worked for, with whom I had the affair, was very badly treated by the agency we were both working for. And after I opened my own agency, I hired her.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: We never again had any relationship at all. But she was a genius of a copywriter, so I hired her. And I made her the copy chief of my agency. And that's where we were when sometime in the early '70s, she called me and she said, “Would you like to go to this coffeehouse?” And I said, “No, I don't dare. I wouldn't be caught dead going to anything lesbian in this town.” So she said, “Well I'm gonna' call the number.” So I said, “All right but be careful.” She called me back and she said, “It was the home phone of the people who were opening it and I got someone named Cynthia Secor. And she's at Penn and she was very annoyed that they had left the home phone number, but we had a very nice conversation and she's invited me to have a drink with her. She says that she is a lesbian separatist feminist.” I had never heard a notion like that. So I said, “Well it sounds like bad news to me. Lesbian feminist separatist. Honestly, that sounds to me like somebody who's gonna’ come wrapped in chains.” I said, “Are you meeting her for a drink?” “Yes.” “Where?” She said, “I don't know. I said I'd give her a call. I'd suggest someplace.” I said, “Well why don't you suggest the Barkley. It has a nice bar and it's a nice public space. It's dark, so if she's some really bulldyke-type person, it's not exactly brilliantly lit and it's a public space where you're not gonna' get killed. Don't let this woman up into your apartment, 'cause this sounds like somebody who may be trouble.” So she made the date with Cynthia Secor to have a drink at the Barkley. And then Cynthia Secor, of course, turned out to be this sort of quite innocent type soul. And she showed up. I mean her lesbian separatist guise was more of a political bullshit than having anything whatsoever to do with her being or doing anything. And she was somebody at Penn.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Yeah. But the woman, my friend, was very taken with her. 'Cause she's absolutely brilliant, she's really smart, she's at Penn, you'd really like her. And so she invited me to dinner to meet Cynthia Secor. And then we began what turned out to be a seven-year affair.

 

MS: You and Cynthia?

 

AG: Cynthia and I. I was still living with Betty, but one or two nights a week. I had by that time, Betty had moved to Bucks County, and I had an apartment in the city.

 

MS: Can you give me approximate years? Early '70s?

 

AG: Early '70s. '72. And one or two nights a week I would stay in town with Cynthia. It was through Cynthia that I met lesbians for the first time. She knew lots of lesbians.

 

MS: Well I want to come back to that in a second. I have one specific question, though, about the story you just told. Your hiring the woman who had been your boss. I'm very interested, from your perspective, in the question of whether gay men and lesbians helped one another in the business world to find jobs, advance in the business world. Things of that sort that other communities have been known to do.

 

AG: I think most of us were desperately in the closet. But I think without any question that those of us who knew each other would have done anything to be helpful to each other in those years. If there was any question in my mind, and in fact, Joe, John, who is at IBM, got a job for his then-lover, Paul. He offered to be helpful when my kids were looking for jobs. I think without question, I don't know what the hell it's like now, but in those years, we knew we were a frightened, unloved band of brothers who would really do anything for one another. We were, it must be said however, not thrilled with people who were liable to give us quote a bad name.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: It's like what's the name of the group now? ACT UP.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: It was like when I was a kid, loud Jews were terribly unloved. I mean if Jews were speaking loudly, other Jews were liable to look very acutely embarrassed about being associated with them. We felt that way about people who were swish or dykie. There was a real effort by people who were in the business world. David had a voice about four octaves lower than any normal guy. He would talk like that when he was in business. And that's one of the reasons why going to the parties was such enormous relief, because David could be Daisy at a party. And he did ultimately come out, but it was years and years later. And everybody could be who they were. And that was why I prized those parties, despite the offensive politics that went on.

 

MS: But you said that the men were mostly in couples, sort of butch/femme couples.

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

MS: Do you think the femme in each of these couples had more trouble, had more work to do to disguise themselves in the business world?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Yeah. Yes I do. Absolutely.

 

MS: Do you think they tended to shy away from the business world?

 

AG: I don't know the answer to that because all the people I knew were in it.

 

MS: O.K.

 

AG: Yeah.

 

MS: So to get back to Cynthia, then, so you began to meet lesbians through Cynthia, you were saying?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Lots.

 

MS: And were these at house parties?

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: At other public events? Coffeehouses?

 

AG: I went to my first public event as a lesbian with Cynthia. I don't remember the date, but it would be easy enough to find. I went to my first gay bar, lesbian bar, with Cynthia.

 

MS: What was that bar?

 

AG: The Duchess.

 

MS: The Duchess? Where was that?

 

AG: What! I can't believe you're even saying that. Are you a New Yorker?

 

MS: Yeah.

 

AG: And you don't know about the Duchess? You're putting me on.

 

MS: I didn't grow up in the city. Is the Duchess in New York?

 

AG: Not anymore. The Mafia closed it down supposedly. I don't know where the hell it was. It was right on the biggest corner of Greenwich Village. But if you talk to any other lesbians from my era who knew New York at all, the Duchess was absolutely it. It was for years I think maybe the only New York dyke bar.

 

MS: And you would have gone in the '70s, right?

 

AG: Mhmmm. You can tell the exact date of this one.

 

MS: Should I pause this?

 

AG: [yelling] Red! Red!

 

MS: O.K.

 

AG: He never heard of the Duchess.

 

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (CSR): Oh, oh dear!

 

MS: Well that's what happens when you focus on Philadelphia. You ignore everything else.

 

CSR: It was very large.

 

AG: Yeah, it was very large.

 

CSR: And it was just down from Sheridan Square. And I don't know, it was sort of the place for--I think Audre discusses it in Zami, as I recall.

 

AG: Everybody must.

 

AG: So, come on.

 

CSR: O.K.

 

MS: I should just pause this.

 

[pause]

 

MS: So the Duchess.

 

AG: Well no. John Lindsay had a man named Brown.

 

MS: Howard Brown?

 

AG: Howard Brown. You will be able to find the records, if you care to, at NYU. And I think at the Loeb Center I think it was called, there was a memorial service for Howard Brown. Cynthia took me to that.

 

MS: I see.

 

AG: That was the first time I was openly lesbian in a large public space.

 

MS: O.K.

 

AG: When I walked into that room, it was the most amazing, emotional experience for me, as you can tell. I felt, for the first time in my life, I am here with hundreds and hundreds of men who are not afraid to be here and they are not ashamed to be here. It was extraordinary. And that was when I discovered Marty again. He was speaking that night. And I stayed afterwards to speak with him. That was when we met again. That was the first time we had seen each other since high school.

 

MS: You must have been shocked to see him there.

 

AG: Well he had come out on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

 

MS: Ahah.

 

AG: And there had been a lot of conversation in my home at that time about him being a fagele. My parents, in whose home I slept in my childhood bed with a variety of women over the years, never acknowledged or wanted to know anything about my life at all. And therefore they felt no constraint whatsoever about speaking very crudely about gay people all of their lives. And Marty was one of the people who had been spoken of very crudely. And was it Black Mountain he published when he came out in the Times?

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: So I knew that he was gay, but I had never seen him and I had no reason to see him. And no reason to write him a note saying, “My goodness, guess what.” But that evening we did go to a party afterwards and I saw him and I saw his sister, Lucille. Cynthia and I went to the party. And we went to the Duchess. And I danced with a woman there for the first time. And that was also extremely exciting and just being there where that was acceptable behavior, expected behavior, was just really astonishing and very, very exciting for me. It must have been in the early '70s, but you can find that out.

 

MS: Do you think you were still scared at that time about doing anything like that in Philadelphia? Going out to any public events?

 

AG: Yeah, but the funny thing is that night, at the Howard Brown thing, Cynthia and I were sitting in the third row. And the cameras came in. And they stopped the proceeding and they sent the camera people, there were television cameras from the newsreels, networks. And they sent them out of the room. And they said, “O.K. we're gonna' let these people in to cover the event. We have an agreement with them. Their overshooting may take in the first four rows. Right now, anybody who does not want to appear on television move.” And all around us people moved their seats. And Cynthia said, because my parents lived in New York, she said, “You want to move your seat?” I said “no.” And that was a huge moment for me. In Philadelphia, I kidded myself for years that I was afraid because I was afraid it would destroy my business. And then at Smith Kline I was afraid it would destroy my career and my ability to earn money and the living at Smith Kline. I think really what it would have meant would have been an extremely unpleasant work milieu. There was one out man at Smith Kline and he didn't get a promotion during the ten years that I was there. He was not a pleasant person.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: I disliked him intensely. So that may have had something to do with it, but that was not a chance I wanted to take. I'm not sure it would have made a goddamn bit of difference in my company. I was not respected in advertising because I was straight. I was respected because I was good, so I think I could have come out and I sometimes wish I had. But not at Smith Kline.

 

MS: So did you go to any Philly gay bars in the '70s?

 

AG: There was one on South Street. I'd know the name if I heard it, but I don't remember it now. And I went there once in fear and trepidation. And I was very disappointed.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

AG: Because I had sort of wanted there to be a lot of action, and if I was making this terrifying sacrifice, I wanted there at least to be a lot of fun and excitement. And it was sort of just this stupid bar. And I guess I must have been with Cynthia and she said, whoever I was with said, “Well the action doesn't start 'til later.” Which I have since, I don't drink much, so bars are problematic for me to begin with. And they were even more problematic because, of course, at gay bars, maybe in all bars, the action doesn't start 'til after ten o'clock at night, and sometimes not 'til after one o'clock in the morning.

 

MS: That's right. I have that problem, too.

 

AG: And if you're not a drinker, sitting around in a smelly hole, waiting for one o'clock in the morning to strike is really pretty boring.

 

MS: So where were you meeting people in Philly through Cynthia? Was it at her home or house parties or dinner parties? Things like that?

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm. Mhmmm. Exactly. Yes. A lot of people in the academic community, primarily people in the academic community.

 

MS: Some people have said to me that they think that it's true that lesbians, in the '60s and '70s, tended to meet one another more in their homes.

 

AG: Mhmmm.

 

MS: Gay men, more in public places like bars.

 

AG: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

MS: Do you think there's something to that?

 

AG: Unquestionably. Gay men are much more daring than lesbians. And they always have been. I don't know whether AIDS will put a crimp in that, but David was telling me stories that would make my hair stand on end. But in a way I envied him. I would never have the guts. There was a period in my life when I used to think you could have any woman in the world if you just had the guts to say “let's go.” David used to ride down the turnpike. Truck drivers would signal him. They'd jump off into a parking area, I mean one of those rest stops, fuck, and be on their way.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: I'd say, “Well David, how did you know when one of those guys signals that he's not gonna' rob you and kill you?” “Eh.” Although on the other hand, he did have stories of having been beaten up in hotel rooms in New York when he was younger.

 

MS: Uhhuh. Right.

 

AG: But guys always just seemed to be much more willing to take a chance and let it happen. I mean Strangers in the Night is not a song women are singing.

 

MS: Uhhuh. Uhhuh.

 

AG: Women really are very much less daring about it.

 

MS: Through the mid-'70s, did the women's movement have much of an effect on your life?

 

AG: In 1972, I went to a party with a femmy straight friend. And there was another woman at the party. And she said, “What women's groups do you belong to?” My life is marked by these wonderful ignorant moments. At that time I owned my own business and I was quite full of myself. I said, “I don't have time for fringe activities.” I said “I would be happy to donate my energies to any organization that I thought was going to last more than five minutes, but I'm not interested in working for fly-by-night operations.” Next day, this woman who I met that night sent me a list of organizations which were not fly-by-night. They included the Girl Scouts, the Y, and so I went out and I became a member of the board of the Girl Scouts, a member of the board of the YM and YWCA and the board of the Jewish Y and a couple of other organizations. In that same period of time, right around those same few months in 1972, I wrote a billboard for our client, Industrial Valley Bank. The assignment for our agency--we were their agency, as I said earlier--was to do something that would stabilize the employment of tellers. Their women tellers were being hired away by other banks who paid more. And they wanted us to do something to increase the loyalty of the women tellers to I.V.B. And I wrote a billboard for I.V.B that had the legend, "Our girls are prettier than theirs." And that was my idea of saying something that would make women tellers more loyal. When that billboard went up, our agency was picketed by members of NOW. And I was deeply offended by that. But I began to think about the issue. Shortly thereafter, another bank for whom we were doing work decided to open an office in New York. And they thought they would capitalize on the nascent women's movement by opening an office called the First Woman's Bank of New York. And they asked us to come up with a slogan for that bank. And I came up with the slogan, "Women mean business." I subsequently got a request from the Business and Professional Women of New York to use that as their slogan, a request which I of course granted. It was someplace in there that I began to see what the woman who asked me if I had time to give to feminist organizations had in mind.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: When I was on the board of the Girl Scouts, Cynthia Secor had been recruited by the same woman who recruited me, who was by the way a straight woman. And Cynthia had written a lesbian badge. Girl Scouts, like Boy Scouts, get badges and Cynthia had written a lesbian badge. It has frequently been suggested that it was Cynthia's activity to have a lesbian badge accepted that caused the Campfire Girls, the Catholics' Girl Scouts, to leave the Philadelphia Girl Scouts and ally themselves with the Campfire Girls.

 

MS: Uhhuh. Uhhuh.

 

AG: And I'm not sure that that's terribly far from the truth, because the Girl Scouts were sort of seriously entertaining the idea of having this diversity badge, or whatever the hell it was that had this large lesbian component that Cynthia had written. But when I got into it, either it was suddenly huge or the world I got into was suddenly huge with it. But when I got into the women's movement, it suddenly became, I mean I was, I couldn't even begin to think how I had ever not been part of it. Or at least seriously interested in its principles.

 

MS: I want to shift gears a little bit and ask about your being a mother during those years as well. Did your kids know about your relationship with Betty at the time?

 

AG: Everybody knew, but they didn't know what it was. I always said I will treat my kids around my homosexuality the way I treated them around the issue of sexuality. The minute anybody asks a question I will give them the answer to whatever question they ask. Absolutely straight up and honestly. I really seriously did not understand that it was impossible for them to ask that question. And they had all said “where do babies come from.” So I just assumed at some point somebody would say, “How come you and Betty go to bed together?” Nobody ever asked anything.

 

MS: So they certainly knew that you went to bed together?

 

AG: We didn't make any secret of it. I was always a very physically affectionate person. I always called Betty darling and dear. I always hugged her and kissed her in front of them. I never made a secret in my home life. I just never talked about it. And the reason I told myself I never talked about it was because I was working on that old principle that I had been given when I was young that you don't load a child up with information. You tell a child exactly what it asks. If it asks “Where do babies come from?,” you don't tell it, “Well the daddy gets on top of the mom.” You just say babies come from the mommy's womb. Period. Then when they get to the point of saying how does the baby get into the mommy's womb, then you tell them that. That was the theory that was prevalent when I was having babies in the '50s. So I never said anything. Finally, during the feminist movement in the '70s, my friends began to get very annoyed with me. They wanted me to tell my children. They couldn't believe my children didn't know. They couldn't understand why we had never discussed this. And I stood them off for a very long time, 'cause I figured I knew how to raise my kids better than they knew how to raise my kids. Then finally one summer, Margaret decided to take a summer abroad program and she was studying abnormal psychology in England.

 

MS: Approximate year? '70s?

 

AG: '70s. Early '70s. Maggie, after all, was born in what, '55, so she was out of high school by the ‘70s. Cynthia said, “What has to fall on you? She's telling you she wants to know.” And Margaret was twenty years old. By this time I was pretty bored with nobody asking me. And I thought they are now past the age where this is going to have a significant deleterious effect upon them to discover their mother's queer. I had thought all during their adolescence, “I don't need to add to their adolescent burdens by telling them they have a queer mother. They're going through their own sexual discovery. I don't need to load mine onto them.” Twenty seemed to me, so when Margaret came home from England one night, I said to her, “Sit down dear, there's something I want to talk to you about. Mother lives an alternate lifestyle.”

 

MS: Were those the words you used?

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: Then I had to explain what that meant. So I explained what that meant. Her first comment was, “I always thought you might be, but I never thought Betty was.” Her second comment was, “When's dinner?” And that was that. I think we have never discussed it since.

 

MS: What about the two boys?

 

AG: The second thing that happened was Greg was in law school. He went to Georgetown. And I guess he was about twenty-three. And he called one night. It was at the Christmas vacation. And I was scheduled to have, in those years I used to give huge parties. I think it may be the year I broke up with Betty.

 

MS: When was that, when you broke up with Betty?

 

AG: I was forty-nine, so that would have been...

 

MS: '79?

 

AG: '79. Exactly. '79. And Greg was born in '53, so he was what, twenty-six?

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: Let me, just a minute, he graduated from college, then he went abroad. He had a fellowship. It may have been a little earlier than that. I don't know. I may have been having a New Year's Eve party without Betty, because she was in such bad shape. But in any event, I had about fifty women coming to my apartment on Rittenhouse Square for a gala New Year's Eve party. And Greg was to have spent Christmas with my parents in the New York area. And he called between Christmas and New Year's to say that he had decided to bug out of Mount Vernon and he was going to bring some of his chums, some of the guys from Georgetown, home for New Year's Eve. So I said, “Ah well I don't think that's going to work darling because I'm having a party here New Year's Eve.” “Well they won't bother me. They'll just come in and throw their clothes down and have dinner and go out and after they've done their New Year's Eve thing, they'll come home. If the party's still going on, they'll just join the party for awhile. After all, they're all grown-up people and they're not gonna' bother anybody.” “I don't think it's going to work, dear. I think you can come home and I think you can drop your clothes and you and your friends can have dinner. My party doesn't start 'til nine or thereabout. But I think that you cannot come home then 'til about two o'clock in the morning, 'cause my party is scheduled to end around one, one thirty, two o'clock, and you can come home after two.” “Where the fuck are we gonna' go 'til two o'clock in the morning?” I said, “Well your sister has an apartment in town. Why don't you take your chums over there? I'm sure your sister would be happy to meet some of your law school chums.” Very masculinely annoyed. I said, “Well darling, I'm afraid it's time for you to understand something. Mother lives an alternate lifestyle.” Well that didn't bother him. “So what?” “Well the so what is that it's O.K. with me, but I'm not sure it's going to be O.K. with you. My New Year's Eve party will consist of about fifty women and when the clock strikes midnight they will all kiss each other. Now if that's O.K. with your friends from Georgetown, that's O.K. with my friends from Philadelphia, then you may want to think about that.” He was very annoyed. I don't think he gave a good flying fig that I was a lesbian. He didn't want his fucking plans upset. And I don't think he's ever quite gotten over that. I don't think it bothers him that I'm a lesbian. I think it bothers him that in some way it makes it somehow more difficult for him. I'm not sure in what way. He's married. I mean his wife now goes to Penn and stays here two nights and it doesn't seem to bother her. Now Rod, the youngest, came home one night and found me and Carroll in bed together. And I went in the next morning and I thought, “Well I think now I have to….”

 

MS: This must have been the '80s, right?

 

AG: Yes, tell him. So I told him. In the morning he woke up and I said, “Carroll is the woman I love and I am very happy.” And he said, “Then I'm very happy for you.”

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: And that was that. I mean he has taken it the most easily.

 

MS: Youngest sons always do.

 

AG: Yes. Is that true? It was just sort of a roll-over for him. I mean Greg is still the angriest in some way.

 

MS: Hmmm.

 

AG: But he's also the most chauvinist pig.

 

MS: Now in subsequent conversations with your kids, if you've had any, have they talked with you about what they knew and didn't know as children in those years?

 

AG: They all claim they not only didn't know anything about me being a lesbian, they didn't know Betty was an alcoholic. I told them Betty was an alcoholic. And they know I told them. I told them that because she was a bad drunk and she was drunk every single day. She was always drunk when they came home from school and she was always reaming them out for something. She just always believed that a house should be kept just so. I mean she had this incredibly Victorian upbringing. And she just kept, I mean she wasn't nasty, she wouldn't smack anybody or hurt or do anything mean, but she was always there saying, “Pick this up, pick this up.” And she had little things, like “if I find any money I am keeping it, so don't leave your money.” She had a list of rules on our refrigerator like this. And so I just think they never thought of her as. Finally I said to them, “Betty's an alcoholic. When you come, the reason she behaves this way is she's drunk when you get home. She's drunk every day. She's drunk when you get home. Go to your room, be smart, do your homework 'til I get home. Just do your homework 'til I get home. Don't subject yourselves to it. You don't need it. It's bullshit. Stay out of her way. You have plenty of work to do, do it. When I get home, I'll handle Betty. And you won't have a problem.” They all remember that. They all didn't believe it. I mean they all never thought of her as an alcoholic and they never thought of me as a queer. Now Margaret had a school chum who became a lesbian, a high school chum. She became a lesbian in college and then she became a straight woman after college. Got married and had children. And when Margaret met her while she was still a lesbian, before she got married, Margaret had known her during that period, brief time from being a lesbian to getting married. She told Margaret she knew I was a lesbian.

 

MS: Mhmmm. We haven't talked much about your homes, but you just sort of touched on that, so maybe I'll ask a few things about that. Did you ever move to a particular neighborhood or to a particular home for any reason related to your alternate lifestyle?

 

AG: No.

 

MS: No? So it wasn't that parts of the city were more comfortable than others.

 

AG: No. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no.

 

MS: Nothing like that?

 

AG: No, no, no, no. I can't even imagine a part of the city, I mean in the area in which I grew up, no part of any place was comfortable.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: The only comfortable place was your inside world.

 

MS: Some people have said they moved to Center City because they could be more open.

 

AG: Mhmmm. I mean, as I said, I was never open until after I retired really.

 

MS: O.K. So never any trouble?

 

AG: Not only that, but Cynthia Secor, the lesbian separatist feminist, one thing, in the area that I grew up, women holding hands, women holding each other's arms, was not a sign of anything except affection.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: It didn't mean lesbian. My mother and I always held hands and held each other's arms from the time I was a little girl to the time she died. Taking a woman's arm has absolutely no signification to me. Cynthia Secor premierly leveled me with a right the first time I took her arm when we were walking down the street. I mean it she hated it. I don't know whether she was scared or what she felt about it, but the idea of women taking each other's arms or holding hands to her said lesbian in big letters and drove her crazy. But that little trouble, the reason I'm more recently out and being out, I mean it doesn't, it was years before I ultimately came to feel that taking a woman's arm meant that, because the social milieu changed.

 

MS: Right, right.

 

AG: But as an older person, it had never meant anything to me.

 

MS: O.K., aside from where you lived, in the '70s say, did you begin to think of any parts of the city as being sections where lesbians were likely to live?

 

AG: South Street as it began to burgeon seemed more like what I always called the Greenwich Village of Philadelphia.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And Powelton, the area around the university. West Philadelphia, I should say. Not Powelton, West Philadelphia was where all the lesbians that were university-type lesbians all lived.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: And they all had these disgusting, huge houses which were never clean.

 

MS: And the gay men who you knew like through your partner, you said before they lived in the suburbs.

 

AG: They all lived in the country. They all lived in the country.

 

MS: So you didn't know like a Center City gay male crowd at all?

 

AG: No.

 

MS: So those businessmen were in the suburbs?

 

AG: Yeah. They all lived out where they could have acres and acres and acres around them. They really wanted privacy.

 

MS: For lesbians, any other part of the city? Some people have said Mount Airy, Germantown, Center City?

 

AG: Yes. Yeah. Mount Airy and Germantown. Yes. But it was always where you could get a big, cheap house. You have to remember that there was a huge commune culture in the '60s and '70s. Huge commune culture and a huge lesbian commune culture.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And the only way you could have a commune was to have one of those big, old houses and those big, old houses are West Philadelphia, Germantown, Mount Airy. The ones you could buy cheap anyway.

 

MS: Uhhuh. Uhhuh.

 

AG: So yes, those areas too.

 

MS: And it sounds like though you were mostly socializing in West Philly?

 

AG: Yes.

 

MS: With Cynthia? Is that right?

 

AG: I think, yes, I think there were some people out in the Mount Airy area also. People like Judy Newton lived out in Mount Airy.

 

MS: Mhmmm. You remember how you marked the Bicentennial? The celebration? Were you involved with Betty still at that time?

 

AG: I don't know who the hell I was involved with 'cause some of those people were certainly overlapping. I mean in those years I had affairs with lesbians from Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, during the years that I was living with Betty.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I don't remember much about the Bicentennial except that I tried to stay the hell away from town because Rizzo was gonna' bring tanks in. That was his big boast.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: If there was any carrying on.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: And I thought “I think I'll miss that one.”

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: But Frank Rizzo, in those years, he was supposed to have a gay son. The Rizzo thing was a very difficult thing, politically speaking about Philadelphia, because it was, whether true or not, it was certainly a gay myth in those years. When I use gay, in the early years, you know gay and lesbian were totally the same. Everything was gay.

 

MS: Right.

 

AG: It was later that the atmosphere became so charged that they had to be permanently separated. But when Rizzo was mayor, you see, it was part of the gay myth that he was good to queers.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Is that right?

 

AG: Yes, because it was believed that he had a gay son. I mean it may be true. I don't know. I never looked into it. But I was conscious of the fact that when it came time to vote that there was a riff about voting for Rizzo because he had a gay son and he was good to queers.

 

MS: And what did good to queers mean?

 

AG: It meant that the cops didn't kick the shit out of you, they didn't close gay bars down, they didn't drag you out in the street and beat the crap out of you. They didn't round up gays and beat the hell out of hustlers.

 

MS: I see.

 

AG: It meant an atmosphere of permissiveness towards a gay existence.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

AG: Treated like white people.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Mhmmm. I guess we haven't talked much about the affairs that you've brought up a few times, but it sounds like there were quite a lot of them in your later years with Betty?

 

AG: I never had any when I was a kid kid. So I guess there suddenly came this moment when I realized that I was irresistible.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And in retrospect, I had lots of money, really big bucks from my daddy. And I was not bad looking. You know I had a nice figure and I was smart and funny, but mostly I think I had a lot of money.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And so it was easy for me to go anywhere and do anything and be anyone. And looking back now, it was like being in a candy store.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I'd never been in a candy store before. I mean my childhood, my youth, my growing up years had been spent dating people I didn't want to date and marrying people I didn't want to marry. And then by the time I really started to be a lesbian I was having kids and having to support my own family because I had no alimony ever.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Mhmmm.

 

AG: I was awarded alimony but my husband left the state and went to New Jersey, which is why I said before he didn't move. He only moved far enough that it would have been tough to find him to get alimony. So I was working hard to support kids, two very small kids, all under the age of seven when I was divorced. And it was not too easy to be running around having affairs, but then when I got into my forties and my kids were pretty much grown up, and I had the agency and I had money, then it got to be a lot of fun.

 

MS: Mostly same class, same race, was it?

 

AG: All same race. That's when I met Audre Lorde and she came on to me. And I really didn't know what to do about that. I still have a book inscribed to her from her from that era. Inscribed to me from her. And I think I would have loved to have had an affair with her, but she was certainly far and away the single most powerful person, woman, I have ever met in my entire life. And I was absolutely terrified of her. It had nothing to do with her color at all.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: But did you ever meet Audre?

 

MS: No but I certainly have heard.

 

AG: Yeah. Wooh!

 

MS: How did you meet her? Did she come to Penn to speak?

 

AG: Through Cynthia. She came to speak at Penn and Cynthia invited me to go to hear her read.

 

MS: That's funny. Just last night I was interviewing someone who was telling me about meeting her that same visit.

 

AG: That same, who was it?

 

MS: Anita Cornwell?

 

AG: No. I don't know her.

 

MS: She interviewed Audre during that visit.

 

AG: And Cynthia had a lover at that time named Elsie Greene and there was a party at Elsie's house for Audre. And Audre was ensconced on what really was the bed--I think it was one of those day bed type affairs--sort of holding court. And I was relatively cool about the whole thing. I mean I was sort of laid back mainly I think because it was a kind of lifestyle that was not mine. I mean an academic apartment with a day bed in those days was not [?]. And so it seemed to me that everybody thought themselves infinitely more [?] than they looked from a cool distance. But Audre really was a compelling character, and when I got close enough to really feel the heat I was scared out of my britches. Well I didn't get scared out of them. I sort of wish in some ways ways I had, but I backed off on a bicycle.

 

MS: Of same class, the affairs that you had? Mostly other middle-class women? Upper-class women sometimes as well?

 

AG: Yeah I think so. I think so, yeah. Trying to remember all of them. But I think so, yeah. I mean who the hell else would I have met?

 

MS: Mhmmm. Well you mentioned one of your partners had had an affair with her maid.

 

AG: Yes. She had indeed.

 

MS: And I guess you've mentioned a couple times age differences.

 

AG: Yes. There was one period in my life when I was having affairs with people who were twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty. I remember thinking about it one day and thinking, “Wait that's quite a spread.” I myself was at that time about forty-eight.

 

MS: Uhhuh. The late '70s?

 

AG: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I guess Stacy would have been as close, her father worked in a grocery store. She didn't have much money. I guess she would have been as close to lower middle-class or upper lower-class as anybody I ever had an affair with. We had an affair in one of the dirtiest holes I've ever been in in my life. It was a New York apartment and it was pretty awful. It was pretty awful. But that was a period in which I was experimenting. I had a brief fling with being butch. And so I really wouldn't care much about the apartment. I remember when she said she wanted to cook for me and she pulled out the oven and it was crawling with cockroaches. I said I thought we could go out to dinner, that she should really not bother cooking for me. But that would have been as close as I got to being with somebody who was not either middle-middle, upper-middle, or upper-class.

 

MS: Some people have said to me that they feel that lesbians learn sexual styles from gay men and vice versa. Do you think that had anything to do with the period in your life when you were having a lot of affairs?

 

AG: That's a very, very strange question that I have never even thought about before. When I was a little girl, my fantasies were all, do you know who Virginia Mayo is?

 

MS: No.

 

AG: Well if you ever look her up you'll find out she is a decidedly second-rate actress, movie actress. A buxom blonde who appeared usually as the love interest of Errol Flynn.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: She was in costume dramas of the time where somebody is playing a lord of the city and she is a captive beauty who is a princess or certainly some member of the nobility or the gentry who ultimately gets her brains plucked by somebody who is a rapscallion. But she's happy about it. When I was growing up I never wanted to be Errol Flynn. I always wanted to be Virginia Mayo. All of my fantasies were of some wonderful guy. Over the years it became clear to me that the wonderful guy was really a wonderful woman. When Susan and I became lovers, I really didn't know anything at all about how to do this. But it wasn't, as I say, rocket science. It was real quick. It was real obvious that what it was sort of some elements of masturbation carried to extreme lengths.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: By somebody else. That seemed real easy. When I started to have lots of affairs, what became clear to me was that it was easier to have affairs if you were the aggressor, that I had spent all my life hanging around waiting, in a uniquely female model, for somebody to come find wonderful, lovable me. When I began to have money and power it occurred to me that I could be the aggressor in relationships and have many more relationships just by being the aggressor. So I became a real butch-type person. And it just worked brilliantly for me for years. But I got very tired of it. It got to be very, very boring. For one thing, I had a reputation for being an absolute killer lover. People would come to me and say to me literally, “So and so said that you make love great and I have problems having orgasms. Would you go to bed with me?” And it got to the point where I was scared to death to accept an invitation. When Red first asked me to go to bed with her, I didn't want to because I thought she has heard. She's got a problem. She has heard from somebody I'm gonna' solve her fucking problem.

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

AG: I mean I really got to the point where anytime a woman said “let's go to bed,” I thought, “No, I don't want to go to bed with you. I don't want to go to bed with anybody because all anybody wants is for me to perform like this spectacular lover.” And I'm not really interested in that. In fact, that's how Cynthia and I broke up. I said, “I just feel like I'm running and killing myself to be some sort of sex object. I don't want to do that.” And she bought me this salmon-colored monkey to prove that she didn't feel that way. But of course she did feel that way. And that's when I got off that merry-go-round, when I left Betty and then I split with Cynthia. And I just said, “I can't do this anymore because this is not who I am.”

 

MS: Hmmm.

 

AG: Yeah. But I do think, since you asked the question, that there was some strange chemical mixture of the power that I got from making money and being a businesswoman. I had a very powerful business experience because I was one of the few women entrepreneurs in Philadelphia in the early '70s. And that was when the women's movement was coming into its own. So whenever the women's movement wanted somebody to speak, to go out there and say something from a position of a powerful woman, they would frequently come to me.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: I did a lot of public speaking to children and to women's clubs and to organizations of women in those days, identified as one of the few powerful women entrepreneurs in Philadelphia. But the whole aggressor scene, butch is a word you can use. I mean I never really adopted it, but I did adopt a very masculine approach. And I got very into that sense of, “Oh I can satisfy anyone.”

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: Kind of thing. And it really just really got to be a burden.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: A really heavy-duty burden.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: If that answers your question. But I don't think, it didn't start that way at all. I mean it did not occur to me that there was. In fact when I first met the woman that I characterized earlier as my boss, who subsequently has died, she asked me, she said, “In your relationship with Betty,” she said, “who is the man and who is the woman?” That's what she asked. And I said to her, at that time, I said, “That's bullshit. Straight people say that but that's not true.” I mean and I confidently believe that, as I said before, I am sort of notorious for making sweeping statements that are total crap. And I said to her, “That's just a lie that straight people make up. Sex is one of those mutual things where first somebody makes love to you, then you make love to them, and people make love simultaneously. I mean there is no such thing as who's the man and who's the woman. That's a game that straight people play because it makes it all seem more exciting to them.”

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I believed it in those days.

 

MS: Well, any final thoughts?

 

AG: Well I was trying to remember before you came over here, if I remember any political names, and the only name that I remember really from that era is Barbara Gittings.

 

MS: Mhmmm. How did you encounter her?

 

AG: I never did.

 

MS: You didn't?

 

AG: I've never seen the woman. It's just that whenever anything political is going on, it seemed to me that that was a name that was always in the air.

 

MS: I've interviewed her a couple times.

 

AG: But that's the only name I remember as being a political name from that era. No final thoughts, except to say that I think that we are, that gay men and lesbians, are more separated now than they were then. My sense is that, well this may just be a lesbian vision, but my vision as a lesbian in those years was that gay men were my natural allies against the straight world.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And I no longer feel that way. I was reading Pat Califia, who is really rabid on the subject. And I have to say that I am almost as angry as she is at how little gay men have seemed over the years to care about issues of women's empowerment.

 

MS: Mhmmm. When do you think that view of yours changed? Has it been a slow changing process?

 

AG: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. I think that around issues of equal rights, of the E.R.A., that I began to have a keen sense that guys didn't give a shit about women.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: It was not one of their issues at all.

 

MS: Mhmmm.

 

AG: And then, as the horrific AIDS era has advanced, it has been increasingly [?] on me that women have been expected to care desperately about gay men and there has never been anything close to a quid pro quo of gay men towards lesbians.

 

MS: Hmmm. So you find it much more separated now?

 

AG: I do. Yeah. But then again, that may just be in my head.

 

MS: Mhmmm. Well I'm hoping to put together everyone's experiences and come to some sense. Thank you.

 

AG: You're welcome.