In the pre-Stonewall era, and for many years thereafter, I was scared of everything but my shadow, and that was suspect. Reminiscing about that time with friends who also came out in the 1960s, I see that I was not alone.
Beds gave us anxiety. There was no way, if we dared cohabit, that we could share a double bed. While it's true that in even earlier times friends might sleep in the same four-poster, for a couple of women who made enough money to buy mattresses and box springs, there was no excuse to bunk with each other. The concept of sharing a bed was so alien to me that I never even thought to move twin beds together. People might think we were queer.
And bedrooms. Later, when I shared a double bed with a woman, we always had a second bedroom we could claim belonged to the partner. It was kind of a four-feet-on-the-floor rule. There were those, of course, who just never gave nickel tours of their digs and kept the sleeping arrangements in the dark. But there was no escaping parental visits. Dread stalked though rentals furnished with brick-and-board bookcases and decorated with thin Indian bedspreads. My mother arrived twice yearly. Once, my partner, under the influence of her lesbian so-called therapist, insisted we sleep as usual in our bedroom—in our bed and without clothes—while my mother visited. Too petrified to sleep, I heard my mother coming up the stairs in the middle of the night. Never before had she ventured into our sleeping quarters, but that night the furnace blower was keeping her awake and she wanted it turned off. I dove out of bed and yanked on my clothes to meet her in the hallway. Could a beach walker, seeing a tsunami, be more frightened?
Books were another source of unease. Where to safely hide The Well of Loneliness? Although every home I have ever lived in has been filled with shelves and stacks of books, in my mind, it was inevitable that the one book a visiting non-gay friend/parent/co-worker/landlord or F.B.I. agent would pick up would be the one with two half-nude women on the cover. 'Heh, heh, heh,' I would imagine saying. 'Where did that come from?' Some lesbian families simply did not keep our kind of books around or didn't own them in the first place. Some didn't know they existed—by hiding the books from straights, we hid them from one another.
Money matters were a plague. My friends reminded me how scared we all were to have joint checking accounts. The fearsome tellers might question us or at the very least look funny at us. We would have to make up stories about being cousins or banking for our book club or keeping the coffee fund at our jobs.
My friends mentioned that, 37 years into their relationship, they both use the words 'I' and 'my' a great deal more than most couples. Schoolteachers ( even now my habit hides where or what level for fear of exposing them ) who reared a child, they had to be careful with language, as well as everything else. I remember wrestling with pronouns myself, weighing truth against safety in nearly every conversation, in every poem and story. I was afraid of the consequences when, as a college senior, I wrote a long paper on the then-obscure writer Djuna Barnes, who created lesbian characters, but I lucked out, sort of. My non-gay instructor had a leering fascination for Barnes. I was exposed as a lesbian, but he smarmily invited me to work with him on a study of her work.
Driving each other's cars raised insurance fears. Applying for mortgages wasn't even an option. It was a given that on the death of one partner, the other's family would take everything. Even a few years after Stonewall, what message could safely be left on an answering machine and would our parents see us on the evening news as we marched in pride parades?
There was no relaxing. Every act, decision and, walking like a butch, step I took, was a risk. We lived this way because of love, but not much love could survive the way we lived.