Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma by Ronni Sanlo Read Free Book Online Page A

of Jeannie; Hogan’s Heroes; Days of Our Lives; The Dating Game
    Best songs : Ticket to Ride, Day Tripper, Back in My Arms Again, Wooly Bully, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Downtown, Come See About Me, The In Crowd, I Got You Babe, My Girl, Hang on Sloopy, I Feel Fine
    Civics : First US troops into Viet Nam; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrested in Selma, AL; Malcolm X killed; Watts riots in Los Angeles: Edward White first American to walk in space; Voting Rights Act; Medicaid and Medicare enacted; Detroit Race Riot
    Popular Culture : Bill Cosby in I Spy becomes first African American to headline a TV show; The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader published; Mattachine Society leads first gay rights rally at the UN.
    Deaths : Winston Churchill, Nat King Cole, T. S. Elliot, Adlai Stevenson
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    That old Frank Sinatra song All the Girls I’ve Loved Before still rings in my ears. I knew I was a lesbian at a young age but I had no language for it, just crushes. I tried to find reflections of myself in the Sabal Palm Elementary School library, in the North Miami Beach Junior High School library, and in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the World Book Encyclopedia that my parents bought. (One of the ways Jewish parents in my neighborhood showed love for their children was to buy a set of encyclopedias. We had two! ) But I could find nothing. The H sections—for homosexual because I somehow knew THAT word—in both encyclopedias were well worn with my continued attempts to find myself, hoping that if I kept looking, even in the same place, something would magically appear.
     
    Finally, something did, in the 1962 yearbook of the Britannica. There it was: Homosexual: a man who has sex with another man. See Lesbian. I went to the Lesbian entry. Lesbian: a woman from the Greek Isle of Lesbos. See Homosexual. Swell. I had no idea what any of that meant. The next mention of homosexuality was in the 1969 Reuben book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. More about men, nothing about women. I really was queerer-than-queer, I believed. No woman felt the same way I did, and what did the Isle of Lesbos have to do with it anyway? I was terribly confused and felt so alone.
     
    I spent lots of time reading, escaping, seeking. I was always drawn to books about Margaret Meade or Amelia Earhart or Babe Didrikson, strong women who defied society’s conventions of…what? Expectations? I was never quite sure why those women spoke to me. They just were different. And the 1960 movie Spartacus, so homoerotic! I couldn’t identify that homoeroticism back then when I was 12, but that movie called to me. I felt so connected to the relationship between Spartacus and Marcus. I bet I saw it 20 times.
     
    I remember the girls and women in my life from my very first crush: Miss Falloon, my third grade teacher. Maybe it was because I thought she looked like Sophia Loren in that cool convertible in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, wearing those leather driving gloves and that big hat and a long silky scarf blowing in the wind. I loved Miss Falloon, never mind that I was eight years old and a girl. That didn’t matter to my young heart which broke when Miss Falloon married some really old guy who was maybe 25, but I had another woman waiting in the wings. Even worse than being my teacher though, Mrs. Greenstein was my mom’s best friend, with kids MY age! Apparently I was attracted to older women, which wasn’t a good idea on several accounts, so I told no one. Ever.
     
    I turned 11 in the spring of my fifth grade, 1958, that awful year, the year it really hit me that I was different. I fell head over heels in love with Annette Funicello, the best Mousekateer EVER, and I got my period that year. So did my friend Olivia who was a year ahead of me in school. Olivia lived on my block and had her own bedroom. She often