Daytona Beach, 1950
Lori Horvitz
In the living room of my grandparents’ Brighton Beach high rise, the Coney Island skyline in the horizon, I leapt and twirled and performed unrehearsed pirouettes, while Aunt Irene, my only unmarried adult relative, clapped and stomped her foot. At the conclusion of “Sunrise, Sunset,” I bowed. My parents, siblings and other relatives limply clapped, but Aunt Irene, her red lipstick smile taking up half her face, whistled and hugged my seven-year old body. Not used to getting this kind of attention, I didn’t know what to do but cry. Tears streamed down my face, leading to a full heaving weep. My grandma handed me tissues and asked what was wrong, my grandfather told her to leave me alone, and Aunt Irene rubbed my back and told me how talented I was.
A year later, Aunt Irene died of Raynaud's disease—a debilitating autoimmune disorder. After the funeral, relatives looted her Long Island City apartment, full of souvenirs from Russia, Cuba, South America. My mother picked out a balalaika from Moscow and two serapes from Mexico. Uncle Joe, Aunt Irene’s brother, said, “She was a beauty. So many men proposed to her. No one was good enough.”
“And look what happened,” Grandma Becky said. As if Aunt Irene’s single life brought on an early demise and the pilfering of her possessions.
No man was good enough because I’m pretty sure Aunt Irene was a lesbian. She traveled the world and wore a permanent smile, unlike her morose older sister, Grandma Becky—who shuffled her legs, every step a hardship, as if just disembarking from a Russian steamer; fifty years before, both had stepped onto North American soil for the first time. Their family had settled into a boarding house in Montreal, where sixteen-year old Becky met a young tailor, Harry. They had a brief romance, before his family moved to Brooklyn. Three years later, when Becky’s family moved to Brooklyn and the couple reunited, she no longer felt the same passion. But she married him because, she told me a few years before her death, “He bought me a ring.”
In 1989 (Aunt Irene had been dead for twenty years), soon after Grandma Becky passed, I inherited a box of Aunt Irene’s photos, including a picture of my aunt, arm in arm with another woman in front of a big ol’ Chevy, written on the back: Daytona Beach, 1950. Both women were feminine and Katharine-Hepburn pretty—an image that would imprint on my brain, deep as the comment made by Uncle Joe. Although I had suspicions about my aunt’s sexuality, now I had evidence.
Unlike other relatives, my aunt exuded a thirst for life. Although I tried to channel that positivity, at the time I found the photo, it wasn’t possible. My girlfriend of three and half years had just broken up with me. I couldn’t blame her. I had refused to come out and wouldn’t go to therapy. I wouldn’t even hold her hand in public. “We’ll get gay-bashed,” I had told her. In truth I felt shame for being with a woman. My internalized homophobia and self-loathing overpowered the reality that Aunt Irene might have been a happy lesbian. Holding onto an ancestral glimmer of hope through Aunt Irene hadn’t occurred to me.
Now I tried to convince myself that at twenty-eight, I needed to meet the right man and settle down. A friend and I placed personal ads in the New York Press, a free weekly paper. At least we’d have each other to compare notes. My ad started out: SWF, 28, seeks creative male who hates television. My friend’s ad: SWF, seeks male who loves television. We had to call into a voicemail number to retrieve our messages. I met up with one man—a filmmaker who said, “I hate television too. We have a lot not to talk about.” We chatted for hours at a small café, but I felt nothing. Was this how Grandma Becky felt on her wedding day? Was this my choice? A passionless marriage with a decent guy?
Back in college, I did have a boyfriend. After graduation, we lived together on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He called himself an anarchist, had a temper and punched walls, but charmed me with his cooking skills and use of big words. Our passion for social justice, Frisbee, food and each other kept us together, despite his anger and anti-Semitic quips. This was love. At least the love I had known. A typical scenario from my childhood: following an argument between my parents, my mother sat on a turquoise kitchen chair, head in hands, and sobbed, while my father mentioned the $99 no-fault divorce advertised on the radio. I never saw affection displayed between my parents or grandparents, in contrast to the carefree, smiling Aunt Irene on the beach with her “friend.”
After four years with the anarchist, he broke up with me and moved around the corner. As a cure for heartache, I sublet my apartment, traveled through Europe for five months, and for the first time, at twenty-three, had an affair with a British woman I met on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She also claimed to be an anarchist and advocated for non-monogamy. “It’s so bloody boring to sleep with the same person every night,” she had said. I agreed. My world opened up, as if having corrective eye surgery. Before that time, I might as well have been walking in a daze, as if I were an emigrant stepping off the Russian steamer, not knowing the language or customs. Three days later, when I returned to New York, the anarchist pleaded to get back together, apologized for his bad behavior and charmed me by spending hours cooking an Indian meal. I said only if I could see other people. He agreed. I came out as bisexual. “I always knew,” he said, “you were a lesbian.” His rationale: I wouldn’t date him when he first asked me out during my freshman year.
He put up with me dating other people, including the British woman. One night, during her visit to New York, the three of us dined together. Since they were both self-proclaimed anarchists, the two had a lot to discuss. I didn’t call myself an anarchist, yet I unwittingly practiced anarchy of the heart by being involved with a woman who had other lovers, by convincing myself that this was the cool thing to do. I would have never invited another man I had been dating. And my boyfriend never would have joined us. After all, he had a tendency to storm off if I merely ran into a male friend. By inviting him out with a woman I loved, how could I have taken my relationship with her seriously? Most likely, my boyfriend and I looked at the situation as an edgy curiosity; at least I had the pretense of this. In retrospect, not only did this cause me pain, I hurt others by lying to myself and denying what I truly wanted, which was what I saw, or at least imagined, in Aunt Irene’s photo—two women who loved and supported each other without shame or obligation.
A year later, I cut off my relationship with the boyfriend and embarked on my first committed relationship with a woman—the girlfriend who broke up with me because I wouldn’t come out. I didn’t tell close friends, or lied and said I was still with the ex-boyfriend. Mostly I hated myself for lying, for feeling like I had to lie. Back in the 80’s, there were no out and proud lesbians in the mainstream media, no role models. In fact, when my girlfriend had mentioned to a neighbor that we were a couple, the neighbor—a liberal Jewish woman, said, “Can’t you just be friends?”
Despite the hypothetical resolve to find a man after the breakup with my first girlfriend, I frequented lesbian bars, sometimes with my straight guy friends. One night I met a woman who had just split up with her girlfriend of twenty years. In all that time, she told me, they had never mentioned the word “lesbian.”
When I hid the most basic part of who I was, self-hatred ran deep. It made sense though, because what I learned about lesbians from the media—they were ugly, hairy man-haters who looked like men (or nuns). Not until I was in my late thirties did I feel comfortable enough to talk openly about my romantic life with friends. Prior to that, when my heart broke over and over, a piece of me felt like I deserved it, my punishment for liking girls, and I needed to suffer in silence. Yet I managed my shame by taking off to foreign countries every year, to distract myself, to explore new cultures, to wipe my identity slate clean. I wonder if Aunt Irene traveled for the same reasons. At home, however, she managed to be light and stomp her feet and smile.
After the breakup with my girlfriend, I traveled to Eastern Bloc countries, including Poland, where I visited Auschwitz. I learned about gay men imprisoned in concentration camps. Targeted for persecution, they were viewed as corrupting German values and didn’t contribute to the growth of the “Aryan” population. Yet the Nazis weren’t as concerned with lesbians: they could still mother as many babies as possible—a German woman's primary role. Some say the Nazis didn’t persecute lesbians to the same degree because women in general were not seen as sexual beings.
Maybe my own internalized homophobia had been rooted in this notion. And if a woman took ownership of her sexuality, she’d be considered a whore, a slut, easy. What I’ve learned all my life—women need to be coupled with a man or else they’d be miserable and die alone.
In my late-thirties, my father asked, “Don’t you meet any men? Why don’t you find a man and get married and get it over with?” As if marriage is a hurdle to get over. Is that what he did? What Grandma Becky did?
“I meet lots of men,” I said, and changed the subject. At the time, I dated a devout Christian. She carried a bible in her knapsack. Her parents said she was in the grips of Satan after she came out to them. On Christmas Eve, an uncle who she loved and respected handed her ex-gay ministry pamphlets. That night she attempted suicide.
In the 1940’s and 50’s, when Aunt Irene explored the world, few women traveled alone. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, when I did a bulk of my foreign travel, I seldom ran into women traveling solo. Yet maybe Aunt Irene didn’t travel alone. Maybe she traveled with the beautiful woman in the photo. Maybe she followed her heart as best as she could, given the times. Maybe she was happy because she didn’t marry a man and live a “normal life,” like many lesbians back then. I want to believe that the woman in the photo was her life partner, that she was able to live a happy life without compromise.
Before the beach photo was taken, I imagine the two women checking into the bottom floor of a dank Daytona Beach motel. They’re tired and excited after two long days of driving from Brooklyn. With motel key in hand, my aunt’s partner parks the car in front of the room. Excited to feel the ocean breeze, they unload their bags, put on bathing suits and grab a couple towels from the bathroom. Before exiting, my aunt grabs her partner’s hand and pulls her on the springy bed and they wrap their arms around each other and kiss. My aunt doesn’t know her lipstick smears slightly, not until she gets to the beach, where her partner raises her finger delicately and rubs the mark off.
Maybe the joy Aunt Irene exuded and the perpetual smile on her face was genuine, the same grin she wore while I leapt across the blue carpet and performed pirouettes in my grandparents’ twentieth floor high-rise. Perhaps she saw a glimmer of herself in me and gave me the encouragement she knew I wouldn’t get otherwise. After I calmed down and wiped away my tears, she clapped and begged for another. “Brava!” she yelled. “One more!” Once again I twirled and jumped and beamed at Aunt Irene, the Coney Island parachute jump standing tall and proud in the distance.