Academia Lesbiana

      They asked us if we smoked, slept with the window open, or stayed up late at night, but it didn’t take us long to figure out that first-year roommates were assigned based on height.
      My roommate didn’t quite crack five feet, and I towered above her at 5’2”. We were the two shortest freshmen in the dorm. Other than our height, and owning one-half of Page 218 each, we had nothing in common. She was a little Barbie doll; I couldn’t apply lipstick well enough to pass muster at a tea party. She got the perfect match for a shoe date; I drew some overly grabby type who had our marriage planned before the afternoon was over. (1) She trotted off to class each morning, big hair, heavy makeup, little skirt, while I schlumped along behind, chamois shirt buttoned unevenly, papers spilling behind me. By the end of the first semester, I had convinced Dean of Women Judith Isaacson that I was miserable enough that I deserved a single room.
      My new room was Page 303. That’s where I fell in love with the girl next door. Her roommates were two women of impeccably matched heights; the three of them became six reflected in the bathroom mirrors down the hall and had a way of scaring me, as all six foamy smiles turned to greet me during the morning brush. But something was different about D., I could tell. I could sense a bit of desperation in her eyes, a desperation that said, “Yes, I admit, I once was a cheerleader too, just like them, but I want out—I want out, I tell you! Teach me your ways, you wildly closeted lesbian, you!”
      That was me, the wildly closeted lesbian. It was, after all, 1970. The Stonewall Riots had happened barely six months earlier, and, even though I lived but 20 miles from Greenwich Village at the time, I knew nothing of them. (2) I didn’t even know I was closeted. A closet implies a door, an exit, something that can be opened through which one can step into the relative light of day. But I was indeed closeted; I just hadn’t bumped around in it enough to discover it had walls, let alone a door.
      Before college, my understanding of myself and of lesbianism was incredibly inadequate. I had defied my parents and seen the movie, “The Killing of Sister George,” which left me shocked into silence. I had snuck a look at my mother’s college psychology textbook, which, dating from the benighted 1940s, called things “sexual inversion,” and insisted that acne resulted from such desires. Since my skin was preternaturally clear, I eagerly stormed Coram Library in September of my first year, looking for a more enlightened view nearly 30 years later, only to find that the librarians at Bates hadn’t given this portion of the Dewey Decimal System much of a workout.
      But there was D., even less informed than I, sneaking into my room at night, finding excuses to climb into my lumpy skinny bed: chilly Maine night, sharing a book, etc., etc. On one of those nights we kissed goodbye when she left to return to her room, and that pretty much opened the floodgates, except neither of us was certain what it was that was flooding, and it took us—I am not exaggerating—six months to get all of our clothes off.
      After an unendurably long summer mostly apart, we returned to Bates destined not only for separate rooms but for separate dorms. She was supposed to room with J. in Page while I had chosen a triple (I chose a triple!) in Rand with two women a good six inches taller than I. That lasted about a month, when J. grabbed an open single and I moved in with D.
      The advantage of a room in Page was that you could lock the door. This wasn’t the case in other dorms. And it hadn’t been the case in Page until Dean Isaacson arrived. (3) The previous dean of women was reputed to have said, “You never know what two women will do behind a locked door,” which seemed nicely prescient of her, and D. and I set out to find out everything that could be done. (4)
      In between explorations, our conversation invariably turned towards the big questions: Does Anyone Know? Do You Think There Are Others?
      We confidently decided that no one really knew, although I suspect our deserted roommates knew exactly what was going on. And we were certain that we were the only ones!!! Really!!! Even K. and R. who were never apart!!! And who locked their door!!! They weren’t like us!!! Our love was special, never to be repeated, impossible to occur anywhere else!!!
      By our junior year, D., my beloved D., was showing overt signs of heterosexuality, prompting me to retaliate with a little walk on the mild side myself, my last, feeble attempt to be straight. It didn’t work. But hers did, and by the end of the year we were barely speaking to each other.
      We had spent that junior year as proctors in Rand. The fancy term nowadays is resident assistants. We chose Rand because we could have a two-room suite and a private bath, and so could our friends, plus Rand had its own gym and an unused dining hall. What it didn’t have was locks on the doors.
      The power of denial at Bates was strong and kicking then. One day, a friend of ours entered our outer room in Rand—the room with the desks, etc., and then opened the door to the bedroom off it. There were D. and I in the lower bunk, naked in each other’s arms, flushed and startled. “Oh,” the friend said, “I didn’t know you were taking a nap. Sorry!” She turned and left the room. We never spoke of it. (5)
      So D. decided she was straight, and, just to prove the point, took to sleeping with her boyfriend in my bed. No matter: I had fallen in love with S.
      S. and I shared many interests. Both English majors, both musicians, both cyclists, both nature nuts. Lots of legitimate reasons to spend time together. And by now, my senior year, there was starting to be some discussion about gays and lesbians on campus. S. and I heard that a certain woman had come out at a Women’s Council meeting. I was thrilled at her daring. (6) And there were many rumors about two friends of mine, A. and M., who liked to stroke each other’s tired limbs and fall asleep on each other’s shoulders, returning from athletic events on the bus.
       “What do you think about them?” asked another friend. “Do you think they are homosexual?”
      “I don’t know,” I replied.
      “Well, it’s not like you and S.,” the friend said. “We know you two are just good friends.”
      Yes, she really said that: just good friends.
      S. was a year behind me, so following my graduation we got an apartment off campus. We were very circumspect: twin mattresses on the floor in the one-bedroom apartment. I never spent the night on her mattress, or she on mine. She had her limits. Our relationship troubled others. There was one man in particular, P., who raised the subject with us whenever he could, referring back to A. and M., discussing in detail why such a relationship would be wrong—wrong! He was relentless. I endured his analysis, which he backed up with Bible texts and readings from a book associated with the church we all attended. But I could tell S. would soon be lost to me. And so she was, the day following her graduation, when she left our apartment and moved halfway across the country to take a job.
      She married, had two children, and died before she was 30.
      P., on the other hand, married, had some children, and then came out.
      M. has never come out, but A. did. We remain close friends. I’m in touch with D. from time to time. She let a straight man break her heart years ago, and she has yet to recover. I can still see her foamy smile in the bathroom mirror in Page, and I can still feel the thrill that raced through me when she slipped into my room at night.

 

- Christine Terp Madsen ‘73

(1) A shoe date is by now, I hope, an ancient Bates tradition where, on the first day of freshmen orientation, all first-year female students toss one shoe into a pile and the first year male students grab one and find its owner; the couple thus formed has to spend the day together, including forced attendance at a barbeque. Rumors abounded as to shoe dates actually getting married. I was contemplating murder-suicide by the end of mine. I have often wondered how they made the numbers come out right: were there sophomores standing nearby, ready to surrender a shoe, if a first-year male was left over? And what happened if there was an extra shoe? Talk about rejection!

(2) I would later become friends with Craig Rodwell, who was a major figure in the Riots and the events that followed, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

(3) “Dean Judy,” as she was called, made enormous progress in bringing the women’s side of campus into the modern age. I am sure our contrived angst confounded her at times: were we really complaining that we had to buy our own trashcans for our rooms? She was a prisoner at Auschwitz when she was our age.

(4) It was this same dean who reputedly assigned roommates based on height.  A tall, rawboned sort of woman, she supposedly had lived in fear of being assigned a petite roommate, and sought to save Bates women from the same fate. All stories about this dean are completely unverified.

(5) That friend, once a Kennedy Democrat, is today a judge in an anti-gay rights state. Her husband, also a Batesie, is a right-wing politician. I take special delight in sitting at the table with them and my partner during Reunion.

(6)Years later, I ran into her at a pickup volleyball game in Boston, and told her how excited I had been at what she had done. She gave me the wonky eye and said it never happened.

- home -

©OUTfront 2006 | design by jemufo