Today I have posted what you might expect to be Ch. 3. But it is more likely to turn into a much later chapter, or will be when I finish drafts on what must come first in the story: the chapter in which I leave my husband and lover, enter law school, and come out as a lesbian, leaping into my Contracts Law class waving a lavender flag the night after the big event, shouting "I'm a lesbian!" And so must come next the chapter about the non-profit, all-woman law collective in which I first worked as an intern and lawyer. Oh, the cases this great gaggle of female lawyers tried: part of a team defending protesters of the Trojan Nuclear plant, poor renters suing slum landlords, and one of the first sex discrimination lawsuits filed in Oregon. Feisty women holding all-afternoon collective meetings every Thurs. where bold and behemoth decisions were made: from strategies for representing lesbians trying to get custody, to whether lawyers with children should get paid more than those single lawyers with dogs, to how to share the work equally when typists couldn't go to court and lawyers couldn't type.
       But this posted chapter on English & Metcalf, the first LGBT law firm opened in Oregon in 1980 by my partner and me, came to me first. And as any writer will tell you, when you have to write, you have to write what you have to write, though good writers will tell you that in fewer words.

CH. ___ English and Metcalf

The Lavender Shingle

Ch. __ 

English and Metcalf

All four lines on each of the three phones were ringing, bright yellow buttons flashing like a line of sparklers. This should have thrilled us—two lesbian lawyers, beginning a new law practice in Portland.  The sky had dawned blue and promising on English & Metcalf’s opening day in 1980. Oregon’s “first openly gay” law firm was about to do serious business. 

The problem was that the phones were on the floor, and other than those phones, there was no furniture in the three rooms of the rented office space. Naked and bare, on the barren carpet, the phones yelped like a stuck record of bings and bells.

            We had expected to have time to go to City Liquidators and choose desks and chairs for the two of us, file cabinets, a couch for the waiting room, office supplies, a microwave and fridge, and phony plants. We hadn’t even installed a message machine yet to tape the call or two we expected to receive that baptismal morning.

            Panicked, I answered each line, faking a best nasal receptionist voice, while Janet frantically read the directions for hooking up the tape recorder.

        “English and Metcalf, may I help you?” “Yes, we do.” “No, she’s on the other line, but may I take a message and have her call you?” I imagined that other line—a clothesline, my own self hung up with wooden pins, a hangman’s noose with Janet dangling at the end of it. “Certainly, Let me repeat that number.”

Janet waved her success and I let the next line switch over to the machine, and quickly called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church on the line I had just freed. I was sweating.

Pastor Troy listened to me babbling, trying to explain the crisis.

            “We have just the legal secretary for you, Katharine,” he soothed, eager to help. “She just quit Sshoemer, Williams because she’s sick of working for a major law firm. She’s been filling in here. We all know about your new venture. I know she’d be thrilled to work for you.”

            “Send her over ASAP,” I cried in relief.

            “There’s only one possible problem.”

            There couldn’t be any problem as far as I could see. We desperately needed a secretary. We would find a compatible lesbian secretary at MCC,  and the phones would be answered! But best to check. “She’s a Godsend,” I shouted, oblivious to the irony, “What could possibly be a problem?”

            “ She’s TS,” Troy said neutrally.

            “Not a problem, Troy.” I nearly shouted, “We don’t discriminate at this law firm against anyone. Of course!”

            In Hawaii, my friends, Judge Frances Wong and her husband, Bud Grossmann, had two children with disabilities—David, who had MD and Elizabeth, who had a learning disability. Very close to the children, I visited often, and I’d seen the struggles David had with his wheelchair, his inability to walk well because of the progression of his muscular dystrophy, and the difficulties Elizabeth had in school. It was inconceivable to me that we couldn’t accommodate woman with TS. Whatever we had to do would be done. I felt the warm glow of self-righteousness fold over me like a sacrament scarf.

“I’ll send her right down,” Troy enthused. What a miraculous solution. Janet was pleased.

            Two hours later, phones still ringing, messages filling up the machine, Paula Nielsen appeared in our door.

            “Hi, I’m Paula,” she said, bright with smile.

Now, thirty-six years later, I have remembered the scene, imagining it over and over, recounting it time and again, each time more dramatically, exaggerated to fit what I felt, not necessarily what I saw.  Janet assures me the events occurred much more benignly than I recall, and that the apparition in the doorway, which was Paula, was far less profound than I vision. But my whole being imagines it this way, and so this is the way I tell it.

Her voice—HI, I’M PAULA— was thunder, deep from the belly of bulging, ominous rain clouds, rumbly and damp. Startled, I looked up from the floor, where I was taking down messages on a pad borrowed from the Sierra Club office next door.  What I saw was a woman blocking the doorway, a massive rectangular pillar, like a large, concrete form holding up a freeway.  A wig sat slightly sloped on her square head, which nearly touched the door lintel. There was no air between her and the frames. 

From her thick shoulders to her thighs a chiffon-like dress floated, as multicolored as a giant prayer flag, messy and floating around her in disarray, as if billowed by a wind. She wore flats on which she was rocking back and forth, waiting for our welcome.  I stared at an alarming five-o-clock shadow on her chin. I felt the air sucked out of the office.

            Cool as a stalk of celery, Janet moved toward this apparition and held out her hand “Hi, Paula, I’m Janet,” then looked at me pointedly, “and this is Katharine.”

No, I thought, this is definitely not Katharine, not the radical lesbian feminist about to fight the bastions of suppression in anti-gay society, not Katharine, the brave and righteous dyke determined to win lawsuits against moguls and monsters that discriminated with blatant aplomb. No, this is the real Katharine, electrified from shock, sitting sizzled to the carpet shag. This is the Katharine who is longing to run through a door blocked by an unbreachable Paula Bunyan of a woman/man, who stood patiently smiling a frozen dare.   

I stumbled awkwardly to my feet and stood as straight as possible, yet I came hardly above her waist. I looked up at what I remember as her double chin and croaked, “Hi.”

“Paula, would you mind if we all go off to Old Wives Tales for a cup of coffee and an interview?  If you’ll wait here, we’ll be just a moment.  Janet said smoothly. “And, Katharine, can I see you in my office?”

 Paula nodded cheerfully. “Certainly.”  

 “Certainly,” I said primly.

I turned and marched behind Janet into her bare office; She shut the door.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked quietly, but intensely.

My face was red and hot; I could hardly catch my breath. “Never!” I shouted. “He’s a man! I won’t work with a man in this office.”

“Katharine, settle down” she said, going to the window, pounding it open a crack.

Air. I needed air. I followed and pounded the window up higher.  I turned to Janet defiantly. “We need to get the windows fixed.”

 “Pastor Troy told us.” Janet ignored the windows. “ She’s a transsexual.”

“TS? TS? I thought it was a disease. I can deal with a disease. But she isn’t a woman,” I was apoplectic, shaking my fist at the door. “Did you see that beard?”

“There’s no beard. Even if there was, that has nothing to do with how she can type.”

“Type? You’re worried about typing? What about when she answers the phone with that meatloaf voice? What about when clients come into the office and notice her helmeted hair and those sausage arms? “ I don’t know if I used those adjectives. I would not use them today. I remember feeling the adjectives, sickened by the idea of men being women.

“And what kind of…of…frock is that she’s wearing? Oh, my God, Janet, this is terrible, terrible.”

Janet walked to the window, pounded it up some more, until finally it was all the way open. She looked out, to the other old buildings in this run down, but historic, part of town. She was quiet. I paced back and forth in that empty room, snapping the straps on my de rigueur overalls, running my hands through my now lesbian -styled, short-cropped hair and, in a pout, every three steps or so, stomping my leather boots (having thrown aside any shoe that could be taken as a symbol of femininity.) “Goddess, what’re we gonna do?”

“Katharine,” Janet turned, spoke calmly. “We’re going to hire her.”

“Arghh.” I choked on an exhale. Water. I needed water. Where was the fridge we were going to buy. “We need a fridge,” I croaked.

I finally sat down on the floor, spent. Spent? I had spent the last few years getting rid of men. Divorced my husband. Cast off my lover. Tolerated having sons, now six and nine, marching them in every gay rights protests, teaching them chants (“Two, four, six, eight. Gay is just as good as straight,”) taking them to women’s music festivals, to the Mountain Moving Café where lesbians gathered to celebrate womanhood, where the boys played on the floor with their stealthily sneaked-in GI Joes and squirt guns, otherwise not allowed. Janet and I went with other women to the Portland State campus to lectures on the origins of sexuality, separatist doctrine, and female orgasms.

Now I was faced with having to work with not just a man, but a man pretending to be a woman, who was twice my size, had a voice like a pile driver, and wore lipstick thick as cherry cheesecake. Never!

I was beside myself, panicked with a panoply of inarticulate questions. Did she have a penis? I mean, did he have breasts? I mean, which bathroom did she-he use in public?  Did she have a partner Man? Woman? Hermaphrodite?

Janet brought me back to reality. She sat beside me, took my hands and said. “We do not discriminate. We fight against discrimination. She is a human being, a good secretary, probably types 110 words a minute, and can answer – the - phones.”

The phones. I can relate to that. Still ringing.  I can see it. We can borrow a chair from the Sierra Club office next door. Paula, can sit on the chair in the waiting room.  She can answer the phones. Janet and I can go off to City Liquidators, buy furniture, breathe.

 Randomly, I think of the song in “Guys and Dolls:” “Marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow.”  We could. Hire the man today and fire the woman tomorrow. Possible.

Janet fingered her necklace, a small turquoise stone she always wore and fussed at when she was thinking. “Sweetheart,” she said calmly, “here’s the deal.” She stood and pulled me to my feet.

I knew “the deal” was coming. It would be reasonable, as always. Janet was a rock, the rock for me. In the year we had been together she had insisted I stop yelling at the children, had insisted I re-write my poorly written legal memos and briefs, and had insisted I stop shoplifting small, unimportant items. I stood up, planted my feet and crossed my arms like a tree-hugging protester barring the entry of lumberjacks in the spotted owl’s territory.

“What.” I pouted.

“If you won’t work with Paula, I won’t work with you.”

Wow! Really? No! Really?  I stared past her, past the wrought iron fire escape, out the window across Portland’s 2^nd Avenue. Our office space was in the old Governor Building, sought and found after the very scary decision to leave our jobs. She had been a law clerk at the Oregon Supreme Court, and was with the Oregon State Appellate Division where she was an Assistant Attorney General. I had been an intern and a lawyer at the all-woman collective, the Community Law Project, a non-profit law firm where our lawyers had represented the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant protesters, poor tenants against slum landlords, filed the first sex discrimination lawsuit in Oregon, and fight for gay rights.

Janet and I had decided to open our own law firm, in which we intended to represent men who had been diagnosed with what was then called HTLV3 and eventually named AIDS, gays and lesbians being discriminated against in housing, employment, and public accommodations; and gay men and lesbians seeking a contact with their children.  Janet would be the appellate lawyer; I would be the trial lawyer.

I had been dreaming this dream since I entered law school in 1974; Janet had begun dreaming it as well, when we met in 1979. And now the dream was about to become a reality.

Except that we had no furniture, no secretary, a man-cum- woman-cum-man sitting in the outer office waiting to be hired, and my partner threatening to shatter the dream.   Had I done something to offend the Goddess to deserve this fate?  And had She really given me any option? I was trapped.

“OK. Sure. No big deal.” I said, nonchalantly, to save my dignity.

We hired Paula. How little did I know then how I would come to appreciate and love this fabulous woman.* And how little I knew of the adventures that awaited us all.

*(Note) 2016: See  “Sister Paula, Trans Evangelist” on YouTube. Her sites include an interview with me in 2013.

Ch. 2 Lavender Shingle: The Rising Moon

Ch. 2  The Rising Moon 

1973

When I first “came out” a common question was “How did you become a bisexual?” It’s a fair question asked by generally intelligent and curious folks, but now, in hindsight, since so much study has been conducted on the origins of homosexuality, it seems naïve of those who asked, and naïve of me, who tried seriously to answer it.

            Of course, I knew the answer was: “I was born.” But that sounded specious and rude.

            But was this any better? “I fell in love with a woman.”

            My favorite riposte, aimed at known bigots and homophobes, was  “How did you become a heterosexual?”

            But for serious inquirers—colleagues, my ex-husband, and my sons’ girlfriends—I tried to explain.

“Well,” I began, “A straight woman and two lesbians walked into a bar…”

It’s a true story. In 1973, eight years after my exodus from Utah, was “very straight” (as I repeatedly assured all who cared or didn’t care), married to Wink, the mother of a 3-year old son, Greg, and eight months in progress toward producing yet another, when Gayle and Schobeth persuaded me to go with them to The Rising Moon, a local lesbian bar. The moment I entered, lesbians who wanted to feel the baby in my stomach surrounded me. 

So, how did this happen—me in a lesbian bar?

You may be too young to remember the Second-Wave women’s movement of the 1970’s, but I was so there.  Dissatisfied housewives (including me) were reading The Feminine Mystique and going to “consciousness raising” groups at each other’s houses, where we talked about unpaid housework, unhelpful husbands, and unrealized dreams. We confessed what we’d really wanted to be. We examined our mirrored vaginas in an effort to love our bodies. We examined traditional assumptions about women and tried to learn to love ourselves.  

Sex roles and behavior were predetermined, and we played them well. Sex discrimination (it wasn’t even called that yet) was not yet a reasonable cause for complaint, and the first of such lawsuits was laughed out of court by a humored, ruddy-faced judge. 

Women were rising and demanding attention to their needs. Wives began asking—asking! — husbands to “help” with the children and dishes in a tone of voice that should have warned the men that their time was almost up. "Radical bra-burning feminists” in New York and Chicago were attending conferences about domestic violence, equal pay, and the “modern woman.”

In Portland, Oregon, it was an advertisement for just such a local conference that attracted my attention. “A planning committee is forming,” the posters announced:

Come and join the planning committee for

Portland's First Annual Conference on

The New Woman

 at The Woman's Place Bookstore

on SE Grand

Monday night, _, 1973  7PM

 I had ideas. I would go. After all, there was a place for married women in the burgeoning women’s movement, no?  Polyamory and wife-swapping were welcomed trends with the men; childcare was a problem for the women. Women were trying to wear heels and the pants in the family at the same time, trying to work both outside and inside the home, trying to be the many-armed, multi-tasking Goddess depicted on the cover of Ms Magazine—such acrobatics called for discussion and a clever teacher. By now, I had some experience. Wives needed tools to manage husbands resistant to change. Children must be raised in non-sexist, non-racist milieus.  Such a conference needed me. And I needed such a conference.

            I wrote all of my ideas on index cards, with possible names for workshops addressing the problems. “Child-Rearing in the New World,” “Training Your Man About the House,” “He Loves You and Her and Her - Is Polyamory Possible?" 

             Preparing for these creative programs was easy to problem-solve. The dilemma for me, however, was what to wear to the planning session. I landed on my blue, sleeveless, cotton jumper dotted with red and white stars; it flowed smoothly over my huge protruding belly. Festive, patriotic, yet daring for its time in how it exposed my pregnancy. Nylons, of course, of a tan shade (it was late summer, hot in Oregon, but I hadn’t been able to “lay out,” because my three-year old didn’t care to do so with me.)  Shoes: not too high-heeled, modest, patent leathered. A charm bracelet. Flag-red lipstick and Color Me Sexy mascara. 

        My husband said I looked very nice.  “I’ll come, too,” he announced. “After all, I’m a planner.” A rare joke from him, but apt—he was an urban planner for the city. “I have ideas, too,” he said. “Men are getting a raw deal with this ‘new woman’ stuff.” He drove.

 The Woman’s Place Bookstore was a hole in the wall on Grand Avenue, tucked between a laundromat and a pub, books stacked and T-shirts hanging under a hand-painted sign in the window. I had expected Powell’s Books, or some such larger venue, but conceded that we women had to start somewhere. Wink parked the car and we entered.

The bookstore was small but comfortable-looking.  To the side, several bookshelves held neatly signed sections of books: Fiction; Adventure; Politics; Gay/Lesbian; Nonfiction. In a small reading section, telephone wire spools served as coffee tables, and racks of journals and magazines leaned against the walls. A big, overstuffed chair covered with chenille spread was lighted by a floor lamp with a faux Tiffany shade.

 A short, robust woman with huge biceps and skinny legs walked toward us, lifting an arm and waving, “Hi, there, you here for the meeting?”

“We are,” I said, cheered.

“Great, OK, wonderful. We’re meeting right through there.” She pointed to a door opening at the back of the store, the entrance strung with long strings of colored beads. The scent of cannabis wafted in.

“Right.” We moved toward the door.

She looked at my husband and put her hand up. “Hey, no offense,” she said with a smile, “but men aren’t allowed. This is just for women.”

How awkward. I was sure he expected me to defend his presence. We would say thanks anyway and leave, go to the Cheerful Tortoise for a beer and some dancing, maybe pay the babysitter more to stay later. But something propelled me forward. I had come this far.

“No problem,” I replied, turning to him. “Look, dear, you can wait here in that chair. There’s stuff to read. I’m sure I won’t be too long.”

Don’t you think he should have known then? What the year ahead had in store for him? But, then again, how could he know when I didn’t?  I hugged my purse a little tighter under my arms and marched forward toward the beads, not waiting for his reply.

I entered the back room. The shock!  What had I expected? Folding chairs lined up in rows? A podium for a speaker? A black board on which scribes would chalk our ideas in columns?

Ten or so women sat in a circle, dressed in jeans, sweatshirts or Tees, sock-footed or booted, cropped hair, no make-up. Low light from various-styled lamps seeped into dark corners.  No chairs, everyone lounged on the floor, cross-legged or head resting on an angled arm. A joint passed languidly between them. Snacks on plates.  I was a cruise ship in a fishing harbor, a peacock among pigeons, and suddenly I trembled in my high heels, as though balancing on a construction beam high off the ground. 

We all froze, looking at each other. “Well, hey,” a woman named Joan jumped up. “Maybe you’d like a chair?” She gestured to the woman next to her. “Sally, get a chair for the lady.”

Sally jumped up and moved to a closet.

“No, no,” I braved, “I can sit on the floor, too. But have you a pillow?” Sally tossed a tasseled pillow to Portia, who handed it gently to me. I sat, pulling my jumper down over my bared but nyloned knees, legs cuddled decorously beneath me, like spoons.  “My name is Katharine,” I cleared my throat, which had suddenly become wet with phlegm. “I’m here on behalf of married women.”

Several weeks passed in a flurry of preparation.  We discussed my ideas, which met with some doubt. I held my ground, however, and the committee members relented, though they suggested revisions, and though at times I thought they smiled behind my back. Even so, we all worked well together. These new women, these lesbians, one and all as I learned, welcomed me kindly and sometimes even enthusiastically. 

They designated me to rent the venue, to arrange for the rental of chairs, and to hire childcare workers from Fruit and Flower.  I set up the non-profit bank account and negotiated a fee at the printer’s. I worked with the librarian at Portland State College to print the flyers, the programs, and the postcards on the college’s new-fangled copy machine. We plastered the flyers on telephone polls and bulletin boards, and mailed them to members of “the community,” as the gay membership was called, and to the YWCA’s mailing list.

It didn’t occur to me then that I was handy to use as the conservative-looking front-woman assigned to deal with the traditional public.  I felt important and needed.

 I began to like these strange women, who didn’t seem so strange after a while. In fact, they seemed admirable. Astonishingly, they all worked in what I called “outside the home,” in non-traditional jobs. Gayle was a photographer for the Oregonian, though a man carried her cameras for her; Schobeth was an ENT doctor, and Portia administered two shelter programs for women escaping domestic violence. True, after having put Wink through college, I had returned to school and become a middle-school teacher, an acceptable job for a woman, though Wink had chafed and preferred that I stay home. Now, I was earning my masters degree in education, with Wink's begrudging approval, taking women's studies courses for social studies credits. Still, I continued to maintain the home, cleaning and cooking, washing and ironing, and taking major responsibility for raising our son. 

Caligula (the short, big-bicepped woman) operated a backhoe for Thomas Landscape Design—the only woman on the crew. For her first six months, men had posted crude posters of naked women inside her locker at work; not to be intimidated, she had posted on their lockers pictures of naked men and of penises wearing hats. The coup de grace occurred the morning Caligula came in waving a battery-operated vibrator at them, chasing them around the locker room. Eventually, they slapped her on the back, began to call her “Cal,” and called off the hunt.

 I liked these lesbians, but I was repulsed by the fact of lesbianism, and feared for my safety among them. My rules were clear, and I made them known by issuing a printed Declaration of Rules: 

1) I was not to be touched, even inadvertently

2) no hugs (they were a hugging bunch); 

3) no putting our heads together (they were a huddling bunch, grouped too closely for my comfort, looking over floor plans, studying menus); and 

4) no attempting to seduce me (“Heyyyy, Kath, ever thought about…?” – NOT allowed.) 

For the most part, they seemed to find my Declaration of Rules amusing. But Caligula smarted. "I'm so sick of this shit," she said. "Why would we want to touch you.”? I felt oddly hurt. 

I am embarrassed now at my arrogance then; saddened that I so well-reflected the tenor of the times, the hatred of gays; and amazed at how tolerant these friends were of my homophobia. 

The YWCA was the chosen venue because it had a large conference room, several breakout small rooms for workshops, and a fully stocked kitchen with dishes, pots and bowls, folding tables—everything needed for the simple lunch we would serve. I set up the sound system (a record player and some ‘45s and a couple of LPs) and assigned a “music director” who would make sure appropriate music played during the lunch, though I lost the contest between classical music and the new mail-ordered women’s music (I recall Alix Dobkin’s Lavender Jane Loves Women. Or Cris Williamson’s The Changer and the Changed. The Deadly Nightshade, for sure.)

We were all very excited.  Over 100 women signed up and paid the $10 registration fee. More came and paid at the door. A few brought children, who were lodged in the front lobby. I had been in charge of stocking the childcare room; I brought my son Greg's play garage, Etch-a-Sketch, books, plastic animals, and Mr. Potato Head.  Gayle brought her niece's dolls—Baby Tender Love and Raggedy Ann and Andy. A conflict on the planning committee had been whether or not to bring the ever-popular GI Joes (I didn't) Barbie dolls (Gayle didn’t) or a toy kitchen (she did.)  The favorite – Greg's Big Wheel – raced through the lobby until a stiff-lipped volunteer put an end to the noise.

I lay awake most of the night before the conference, practicing my presentation for my workshop, “Married Women in the Women’s Movement - How Do We Fit?” I had compiled a packet of handouts, like “Family Management is a Full-Time Job,” “Quick 3-Minute Meals Any Husband Can Make;” and “Hairdos Without Bothersome Curlers,” all designed for the housewife on the go. 

No one came to my workshop. I waited ten minutes but not a single woman showed up. Disappointed, devastated really, I was also interested. What had happened? Was there no role for married women in this movement?  The problem for us, as we had eagerly explored in our consciousness-raising groups, was where do we belong, and doing what? How can we combine our busy lives as mothers and wives with the realization of other dreams, other goals, work, professions, and the like? 

Over the past months of introspection and confessions, some of us realized we were deeply unhappy with the direction our lives were taking. I, for one, had wanted to go to New York and become an actress, or become a lawyer and fight for people’s basic rights, but here I was married, at home, going to graduate school in a respectable—for a woman—field; education. I had come from a broken, crazy childhood home and hadn’t planned on having children, but here I was with a three-year old son, conceived to save a breaking marriage, and another child on the way. My husband, like me, had been raised with traditional expectations: he would make the money to support the family; I would make babies, dinner, and a happy home. What had happened to my dreams?

I wandered into the YWCA hall, looking for comfort. Next door, in a much larger room, women were packed, sitting on the floor or in folding chairs, listening to Schobeth speak. The name of the workshop? “ Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.” I went in and sat down. Schobeth had computed the time it takes for women to shave their legs and under their arms during the course of their lives. She proposed that in that amount of time, a woman could have become a doctor, or built a log cabin from scratch. At the Q and A, a woman added to that computation the time it takes for a woman to coif her hair: style it, color it, put it in curlers, and rat it, during which she could have driven on an adventure cross-country in a convertible, or planted, harvested, and sold a fortune in marijuana. The workshop erupted in a wild, wonderful exposure of time lost in cooking, cleaning, dressing up, putting on nylons and makeup, and attending hours-long concerts of untalented little children. One woman even produced a pair of scissors and clipped off her braids. It was a sparkling pandemonium. I never shaved my legs or under my arms again.  Or wore that blue jumper. Or high heels and make-up.    

I moved through the conference that day in a trance of thrill. The months that followed were a miasma of chaos and revolution.

Following advice from the workshop “And Why Shouldn’t He?” I refused to do the dishes or cook every meal. “You want dinner?” I said querulously to Wink. "Do you have hands?" He would ask, "Where's breakfast?" and I would snipe, "Do the dinner dishes, so I have something to serve it on.” Poor Wink. He was befuddled and sad.

The workshop “We are All Lesbians,” terrified me, and I had overly defensive arguments with other participants, who kept asking “Why not?” I still maintained my distance, though I puzzled the answer.

The workshop “Give Credit Where Credit is Due” led me to a blistering fight with Nordstrom’s over whether I could have a credit card in my own name.

 “What’s In A Name” was the workshop that set me off on the road to my eventual name change—from my mother-designated given names (Kathleen Bahen), my father’s last name (Welch), and my husband's last name (Brooks), to my new, agonized-over, then carefully chosen “name of my own”—Katharine English: “Katharine” after my favorite actress, Katharine Hepburn—would it make me tall, svelte, and sophisticated? Only in my own mind. And “English”—I had just finished Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy and loved the serene and enigmatic English countryside. (I must have forgotten the book's scene in which flocks of sheep had stampeded and leapt over a cliff to their deaths.)

The First Annual Conference on The New Woman conference was over.  “A great success” everyone cheered. We cleaned up, sang songs as we did the dishes, and rehashed salient moments in the workshops. Caligula took a spin on the Big Wheel. We turned out the lights, locked the building, and loaded Greg's toys in my car. “Let’s celebrate,” Gayle suggested. “Beer is half-price tonight at The Rising Moon.” She turned to me, “Come on, Kath, and join us for once.”

I wanted to. I liked these brassy women with whom I had been working so closely for weeks, wanted to spend the evening with them, longing for a cold beer. "OK," I conceded, "But only on one condition.” 

They all laughed. “OK, hit us with it.” Portia rolled her eyes.

“I don’t want any of you to ask me to dance.”

————

The Rising Moon was a dark, smoky, red-velvety bar, unmarked on the outside; a brutish bouncer sat on a stool at the door, turning away men. The Byrds blared from the jukebox, two booted, overalled, short-haired dykes named Lou and Les) hunched at the pool table, sinking balls like pro. A long-haired femme fatale named Sappho shot darts into a poster of Nixon; and two beauties kissed at the bar—Ocean’s hand simultaneously cupped her beer on the counter, while her other hand held Angel's waist. Cigarette smoke curled around Angel’s long chestnut hair. 

Women packed into red-vinyled booths—some sitting on laps, others sitting backwards on chairs at a booth’s end, feet tapping to the music. To order drinks, a woman shouted at the bartender-owner, “Sally, over here, two Heinekens and a Bud Light.”  “Comin’ up,” Sally yelled back, over blasting music and squeals from somewhere. The mood was festive, invigorating; several couples hip-bumped on the sawdust-strewn dance floor.

             Two women were locked together on the dance floor, swaying to “Desperado.”  A slinky blond in high boots was at the pool table, her long hair brushing the green felt as she sunk the #3, then #2, then #1, slowly chalking her cue between strikes.  A stocky woman in overalls and climbing boots stepped up to the bouncer, said "Hi" to Schobeth, then waved a dart she was holding at my red, white, and blue jumper, and yelled out friendly-like, “Nice duds.”

“Hey, Portia,” a short, pony-tailed woman shouted at us as we entered. “Finally got her to come, did you? ‘Bout time. I'll join you?” She joined us as we headed for a booth. “How’d it go, the conference?”  We sat. The dart woman, Hera, pressed into me as we squished into the booth, looked at my protruding stomach.  “Wow, girl, can I feel that babe kick? “ She hailed the bartender. “Hey, Sally, come on over. We gotta baby here.” Women followed Sally over. 

What was I to do? They wanted to feel the baby kick. They wanted to feel the taut skin under my jumper, the roundness, and the quickening life. I let them. When they placed their hands on my belly, they quieted, as though they would hear bells ring and horns blow. They started at each kick, then oohed and aahed, called more friends over for a feel.

I had heard and had believed that lesbians were out to convert straight women, so I was vigilant. I imagined these hordes of lesbians molesting me, a disgusting depravity. I was ready with a slap, an alarmed “Stop that!” The Exit was in sight, and I had money for a cab.  I was nervous and afraid.

Yet no woman moved her hands up to my breasts or down to my crotch. Their hands were soft and gentle on my stomach. Angel laid her head on my belly, and her hair swept over my hips and tickled my nyloned leg. A woman whose name I never learned, sang and said that the song would bring the baby luck.  Hera tapped my stomach and talked at it, "Hey there, little one. You have no idea!"  I began to relax, blooming with pride. While the ladies lined up to check out this baby, Cal got me a beer. Unaware, back in the early ‘70s, of the damage alcohol can cause to a fetus, I relished the cold liquid, the frost on the mug, and the strong smell of hops. We began to talk about babies, about bringing them into this world of the '70s, how by the turn of the century—the year 2000—this new human would be twenty-seven years old. What would it be like then?  One beer went down pretty fast, and someone stuck another in front of me.

“What’s it like, carrying that dude around?” Helen (“Harpy” they called her) asked, as though it might be like carrying the Queen’s crown on a pillow. I didn’t tell her it was a bitch; it was like carting an anvil hanging from your belt.

 “How do you sleep? What position?” Naomi asked. Ha! Sleep? Eight months pregnant? In your dreams. “On my side,” I answered.

"Whatcha gonna name it?" I would name a girl Cean, because she was conceived at the ocean. They liked that. I would name a boy Nathanael, after the writer Nathanael West.

"Oh my God, why?" exclaimed Hera, who, as I found out, taught English at a magnet school. "A writer who had four failed books? Wrote about scummy Hollywood? Died young in a car crash?" 

I smiled. "West was a great artist. Take Miss Lonelyhearts. What a soul that man had." 

"Ha," she laughed. "We'll see what your son thinks about that."          

As it turns out, my son Nathan, a geo-chemist by profession, was not happy about that.

“Shit, “ Portia said sadly. “Margo and Sabrina tried getting pregnant with a turkey baster. Her ex- gave them the sperm.” I should have been shocked, but the smoky air, the women squashed happily in the booth, the raucous shouts of “Bulls-eye!” floating from the dart players, cast a spell.

“Don’t any of you have kids?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, some do,” Cal said. “But none of us gets to see them. The Courts, you know.”

A definite pause fell over the women. Then Hera said, “You know, that’s gonna change someday. You wait and see.” She turned to me. “Hey, you’re taking that Women and the Law class at PSU, right? Maybe you should become a lawyer.”

“I’ll drink to that,” the singing woman cheered, raising her mug in the air. Several women, myself included, clinked our mugs and cheered, “Hurrah! Here's to our future lawyer!”

I slipped comfortably down a bit in the booth, opened my legs under the table, for air, to unstick my thighs. Another beer appeared before me. The women were telling jokes now. 

I told a joke: “How many lawyer jokes are there?” 

A pregnant pause. "OK, tell us. How many," Schobeth asked.

“Only one. The rest are true.”  We all laughed. The Eagles crooned from the jukebox. 

I wanted someone to ask me to dance.

Ch. 1 Lavender Shingle: Moving 1965

Ch. 1. Moving

1965

 In late September, in a delirious cloud of sizzling heat, the magenta sky swept by, and a hot desert breeze, redolent of sage, blew through the window, I was a twenty-one-year old bride. I wasn’t starry-eyed, but cat-eyed, like a panther crouched on a limb ready to pounce on a gazelle.

Utah furled far behind me on Interstate 5 like the narrow tail of a kite in a fortuitous wind.  Goodbye to Utah, land of Zion and the Mormon faith in which I grew up, home of my crazy, carbon-dioxided, smothering mother and, farther away, my once-loving, once Utah-settled, but now Alabama-flown father.  My siblings, like fellow prisoners too feeble to make the escape, stayed locked in my latest and last Salt Lake City home and, like the escapee who bounds across the open fields toward the sheltering forest, I could not afford to think of how I had left them behind. I sped across the desert. In pursuit. 

The Wasatch Mountains, to which I would come back thirty years later, and about which I would write my first book—Salvation – A Judge’s Memoir of a Mormon Childhoo—now funneled my exit from the beautiful Salt Lake Valley, a land in which I had been birthed and raised from pioneer stock.

The Karmann Ghia was metallic —baby blue, a sun sparkle of a car I had purchased with money from my night shift job at Western Airlines.  Winslow and I I had packed this thimble of a car full of everything I owned and now, newly husband-and-wife, were humming through the pungent autumn pine and brush of eastern Oregon to a fir and cedar-wooded resort called Fiddlers Green, overlooking the McKenzie River, where we would get happily drunk on bad sherry, run naked on an isolated hilltop overlooking the river, and welcome our new life with arms open to the sky.

How I had longed to escape Salt Lake City, my sullen mother and my sullied childhood, the claustrophobic house, and my still suffering siblings moving stealthily through the unpredictable weather of home, waiting for a chance to leap away. I longed to leave with that fierce longing that comes from years of wanting and the sudden realization that there is a window of opportunity.

I had stumbled in a daze through my first year of the University of Utah in 1963, pummeled by my failure to raise the money to go to New York and become an actress, or to go to Northwestern University in Illinois  to take advantage of the drama scholarship I have been awarded.

It wasn’t just the money that stopped me—also fear. Some children reach eighteen mature and wise in the ways of the world, but I arrived naïve and incapable, not knowing how to negotiate, not having been trained by my abusive and neglectful parents, nor by my maternal grandmother, Ninyah, whose unrealized dream for my mother became her dream for me—to be a good Mormon wife and mother who might work in the church offices as a secretary, but who would be better off to marry a rich Mormon man.

“Actress? Dear me, no, ” she tut-tutted. “That’s not a ladylike profession, dear.”

I was lost then, as if wandering in one of the burgeoning suburbs of the city, roads winding akimbo, ending up on themselves, in circles, cul-de-sacs, or dead ends. It was there, on those strange, unmanageable roads, that I discovered beer and boys and sex and sororities lurking, and abandoned the structured, platted roads of academics to wander wild in the streets.

I drank at night, usually Jack Daniels, Coors, or Screwdrivers, and in the mornings, to clear my head,  Bloody Marys, made with a bottle of Mr. &  Mrs. T. and a stick of celery I kept cold and veined in the fridge, alongside my only other food – fish sticks and V8.

I drove madly in cars I purchased with money from my after school and night jobs—first, a rattling old 1953 Ford stick shift in which the wipers would only work when I pressed on the gas pedal, then in a spanky 1960 Fiat my great-aunt let me use, until tearing around a corner I lost a hubcap and punctured the tire, driving on the wheel rim until sparks flew up through the window.

I lost my “real” (as I saw it) virginity when I slept with Snappy Gordon, the top debater and bottom catch at the university, a fraternity man who smooth-talked me down a rose-strewn path at Saltair Resort, rolled me over to my delight on the beach, and then accused me of having already popped my cherry because I didn’t bleed. For that adventure, I got sand in my pants and a rash from the rough rub.  

Are we all lost like that at some point in out youths?  Is there something genetic, hormonal, and cruelly unavoidable in being a young human?

In November, on my way to the Pi Phi house, a blast came on the radio “We interrupt this program …” I turned it off, irritated at the break in my favorite song.  At the sorority house,  I huddled with my  sisters to  watch coverage of the Kennedy’ assassination and later, the funeral, rapt and saddened. Somehow chastened by the enormity of death and the destruction of hope.

“We don’t know when we will die.” Helen had said, watching the cortege. We still don’t, I think now at age 72, my friends dying, so much political disappointment and personal sorrow behind me. 

By spring of 1964, I was “pinned” to Snappy, now a graduating ROTC senior, assigned to a post in Germany, from where he proposed at Christmas, and then abandoned me in March.  I got drunk at the Red Belle most t evenings thereafter, carousing and lost myself in the miasmic bar scene. I was notified in May that I had flunked out of college.

During my brief stint in college, I worked the midnight to eight shift at Western Airlines, plotting trips for the night owls who called and dreamed. But now, free during the day, I went back to my old job at The House of Music where I had worked from the time I was  sixteen until day classes at the U prevented regular hours. Once again, I was the “record girl, choosing and stocking the store with standards and projected hits.

One day, not long after I had been jilted by Snappy, a handsome fellow walked in and browsed through the classical albums. He was leaving when I, reluctant to ever let a customer leave empty-handed, caught him at the door and said, “You didn’t find what you were looking for?”

“No,” he said, turning and smiling a flash of light, “you don’t have what I’m looking for.”

            “I’m sure we do,” I flirted.

            “Really?” he challenged. “I’m looking for Bach at Zwolle and you don’t have it.”

            Smugly, “It’s Bach at Zwolfe,” I said, “And we do have it.”

            “Really? I don’t think so.”

            I led him back to the classical section. Rather than filing the album under Bach, I had filed it under organ music. I pulled it from the rack and handed it to him, grinning. “See?”

            “Ah,” he said, “Yes, you have it. But it’s Back at Zwolle, as I said.”

            I looked, surprised. He was correct.

            “Well, then,” I said, “I guess we’re both right.”

            “Indeed,” he said, “You do have what I want.”

            In short, I did. Or so we thought at the time. He was a college dropout, a “ski bum,” traveling from ski resort to ski resort, getting jobs as a ski repairman, an optical company delivery boy, a short order cook, to support his travel and skiing. He was in Salt Lake, to ski the upcoming season at Alta, Brighton, and Park City.

“How about lunch?” he had smiled.

“Well, sure. I’m Kathi, by the way.”

“And I’m Winslow,” he shook my hand. “But my friends call me Wink.”

Wink? This was a man with the courage to be called “Wink.” How could I go wrong?

We skied, listened to Brubeck, danced to the orchestra at Lagoon, cheered Peter, Paul and Mary at the Rainbow, ate at The Hofbrau, and engaged in long conversations about Viet Nam, Kennedy’s death, politics, and economics. I saw him as exotic, learned, and passionate. He met my discombobulated family and seemed not to hold them against me. They liked him. We made love in a haze and a hurry.  By June we were engaged and living together  By September, married.

But even before June, I had raced from my house to his apartment, desperate to find somewhere else to lay my head.  Any place but home.  And now, I was free to move.