I never thought I'd write my coming-out story because I never thought of myself as "in" - as in: in the closet, in hiding, meognito. If I was any of the "ins," the only one that fit was indiscreet. Though, in truth, I didn't realize this at the time, either. There was no need to. I grew up in a family where the kids could pretty much do as they pleased. Out of sight, out of mind - this worked pretty well for all concerned.
My early "cross-dressing," far from frowned upon, was convenient. I could wear my brother's hand-me-downs. This saved money. Something important, because my father spent wildly on luxuries, which in turn made necessities hard to come by. While Dad leased two vintage Bentleys and a Rolls Royce, Mom drove a VW bug. I paid the household oil bill, which ran at least $1000 a month - more, once the five-car garage had to be heated along with that leviathan house and its out buildings. How did a kid that age come up with that kind of money? Don't ask, don't tell.
My brother and I lived a childhood full of the freedom that comes with neglect. That I got away with tomboy clothes was one thing, but he got away with skirts. No small feat for any young boy, though he knew enough to wear them only at home. I always figured we were lucky. From an insanely early age, we could do whatever we wanted - drink, do drugs, have sex. My parents traveled a lot, were hardly ever home, and were not the best at arranging childcare. They had larger concerns.
I remember the time one of our babysitters discovered our pot plants. Not that they were hidden. We'd never seen the need. She came to confront me, I suppose. Had my brother in tow, carried one of the baby plants. I was watching Mike Douglas, and - as was my habit after a hard day of fifth grade - sipping at a large glass of vodka I assumed passed for water. She backed away from this sight without uttering a word. My older and wiser eleven-year-old brother stuck around long enough to tell me I wasn't fooling anyone. He knew it was vodka. The message was hide it better, keep it under wraps. Something he was always much better at than I was - no doubt from necessity, given the skirts.
So looking back, it's probably not altogether surprising that what stands out are those times I suddenly and unpredictably took center stage. And while these times did revolve around "curing" me, straightening out my kinks, even then I understood I was a sideshow, a diversion. Something to take my parents away from their own considerable and mounting troubles.
This is where Richard Nixon comes in. If he hadn't been caught, I wouldn't have either. Though "caught," while it might be the right word for him, wasn't really the right word for what happened to me. Noticed was more like it. The whole story here, the long one, would take years to write, so this is the short one, the highlight show. Suffice it to say my father'd gotten in tight with Nixon. Wound up in the deep end.
At first, Nixon meant trips to the White House, not just for my parents, but sometimes my brother and I went along, too. For these excursions he wore one of those little boy suits - gray flannel, short pants. I wore little girl suits, handpicked by a saleslady at Saks. But when Nixon came to us, when his helicopter dropped him off for a power dinner party, followed by a sleepover, it was me, not my brother, my father decided should dress up in uniform. An FAO Schwarz admiral suit to be exact. Another instance where my crossdressing was convenient.
These were strange times, surreal even. That visit especially, what with Secret Service there days in advance. When they scoured the property, the toy rifle that gave them a scare was mine, not my brother's. I didn't know until after Nixon left that there'd been protestors at the foot of the front driveway. That they'd camped there for weeks. That this was why we kept taking the back driveway. Maybe my parents were afraid that if I knew I'd run down and join them.
My politics were already a complex mush of Joan Baez liner notes and nightly news horror. I went to a small Quaker school because they had nursery school, while the pony private school started with kindergarten. My mother wanted us out of the house that extra year early. At school, the teachers wore moratorium armbands - the men had long hair and beards, the women wore miniskirts. The kids wore uniforms, but nearly everyone, it seemed, had a guitar, or beads, or a POW bracelet. I wanted to be older. By fourth grade, I could argue either side politically.
And I did argue - at home and at school - though my position and intensity depended entirely on location. At home, dinner was warfare. My father and I became enemies in battle. I wouldn't know for over two decades that I'd intuitively picked hobbyhorse causes to match operations in which he was directly involved. The bombing of Cambodia, various coups in South America - I didn't know I was hitting nerves, but somehow I did know. The personal wasn't political, the political was personal.
What somehow slipped by me was Watergate. Perhaps the same instincts that knew where to hit knew what not to touch. And, too, I had my own distractions - women, chief among them. By twelve or thirteen, I couldn't get girls, but I could get women. The girls I knew at that age, at that time, were scared of other girls when it came to sexual encounters. And, truthfully, I wasn't much interested in girls anyway. I was already more used to grownups, more comfortable with them.
Of course, it's not unusual for girls to harbor crushes on older women. It's practically expected, possibly even accepted. I do admit that actually getting involved at that age, with a woman of a considerably different age, might be somewhat unusual. But it seemed I had a knack for turning these girlhood fantasies into realities. And there seemed no end to the elaborate entanglements I'd wind up in.
In part, this kept happening because I was always looking for a place to stay - to get away from my parents if they were home, or to get fed and have some company if they weren't. If I couldn't get something together it meant either endless fighting or too mcuh time alone in that big empty house, scrounging for food. So getting involved with older women - ones with cars and houses and who knew how to cook - solved multiple problems.
This system actually began very early and innocently. I'd worked versions of it since I was eight. My parents liked to tell their friends I rode horses, so I'd been hanging around stables since I was four. By eight, I'd started staying with my riding instructor and her husband - they'd let me drink, but there wasn't any sex. Or I'd stay with the families of friends from school, but let's face it, no one can stand a houseguest for months, especially not one with chronic bronchitis. I needed to keep moving around. I needed to keep looking.
By about twelve I'd found what I was really looking for: women. Women who provided a much more interesting solution to my housing problem. These women ranged from mid-thirties to forties. Some were newer, hipper riding instructors, or other women who hung around horses or horse shows. They were usually married, or had boyfriends who were.
I usually managed to play multiple roles: surrogate daughter, lover, confidante, whatever. And it helped that I'd fuck the men, too. When I was older I learned to make money off this particular flexibility; moved up from what you might call "trading" or "being kept," though I didn't think of it that way at the time. So this system, for the most part, was quite pleasant and lucrative, though not exactly risk-free. I would eventually find myself subpoenaed in a particularly nasty divorce, labeled as the wife's other woman. The wife's solution to this problem was that I protect her through perjury. Let's just say that, by then, I'd wised up.
But what I did away from home, to get away from home, isn't really the point. What was happening at home - what I knew and didn't know, couldn't know or couldn't let myself know - led to my own peculiar outing. However improbably, Watergate led to it. As I went from preteen to teen, Nixon crossed a line, too. Now there was a ceasefire, an end to dinnertime warfare. And while I'd always been the smartass, I was suddenly dumbstruck and dumbfounded.
The outside tensions mounting on that big showy house put all internal disputes on hold. Watergate brought our family together in a heretofore unheard-of way before tearing us irrevocably apart. I remember that time in confused moments. I remember that time fondly. Only much later would I learn the extent of my father's invovlement, and I would learn it from books. At the time I assumed I exaggerated his role. Later, I discovered I'd minimized it.
There was a lot of traffic in and out of the house. Bebe Rebozo would come in the middle of the night. So would the others, but they're still alive, so I'm not going to name them. If I learned nothing else from this time, I learned paranoia. After these visits or a phone call, my father would disappear. When I asked where he was, my mother invariably gave one of three answers: Washington, Zurich, or London. Unlike my father, she wasn't much of a liar.
When put on the spot about whether he was having an affair, she was similarly blunt, saying, "It's a woman in London." Actually, I hadn't asked if he were having an affair. I'd asked if the affair he was having was with his secretary. An unintentional trick question. I think I was eleven.
It turned out that the "woman in London" was just one in a long line. Again, much later from books, I'd learn he'd siphoned company money for her. As CEO of Reader's Digest, he'd used his position to advance hers, just as he'd done with Nixon. He set her up with work, an apartment.
I'd learn later, too, from books, that he'd run money out of the country. That a call from Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, arranged the most damning of these trips. He'd flown down, picked up $100,000 in cash from the White House safe. Next he took it to true safety in Switzerland, depositing it in a numbered account. By now, Carl Bernstein, under Deep Throat's instructions, was following the money. This in turn meant trailing my father, who managed to dodge Bernstein's repeated calls. Bernstein was endlessly told my father was out of the office, out of town, out of the country. At least this was true. He was busy in Zurich again.
Another call from Woods, late in the game - by now everyone knew what we'd known for some time - was answered by my brother. He asked if her foot could reach the pedal for the tape recorder. The tapes, and the famous erasure, were common knowledge by now, as was the contortionist's stretch Woods had performed to explain it. My mother, who quickly took the phone, couldn't help laughing. Though afterwards she reminded him and me both that Rose Mary Woods had always been so nice to us kids at the White House. That it was mean to tease her.
As I remember it, the three of us - my mother, brother and me - were on some sick, giddy high. She'd whisper that the phones were being tapped or loudly announce that Martha Mitchell was the only one telling the truth. My mother got quieter after Martha Mitchell had her phone yanked from the wall while talking to Helen Thonuas. So did Mrs. Mitchell, who was drugged and locked up. She briefly resurfaced, calling herself a political prisoner, saying she knew all about Watergate and would leave her husband, former Attorney General John Mitchell, if he didn't get out of politics. Mitchell by now was running CRiP, a.k.a. CREEP - the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
John Mitchell would, of course, later be a prisoner himself, go to jail. Not so my father who, like Rebozo, eluded indictment despite the efforts of prosecutors to trace the mysterious movements of that same hundred grand Dad had spirited out of the country. A grand jury was impaneled. It would be years before my father would attempt to explain away that hundred grand. In an interview with Bob Woodward, my father steadfastly proclaimed his innocence, employing a logic even more circuitous than the path he'd taken to hide the money in question.
By the time he gave that interview, it was 1976 and I was fifteen. The giddy highs of the early seventies had long since passed. Watergate had wound down, and we were all wrung out. Nixon had been forced into resignation two years earlier. Now my father was about to be forced into mandatory retirement, and I was about to be forcibly removed from boarding school. He and I had embarked on a collision course. But before we collided, our simultaneous disgrace provided one of the handful of tender moments of our embattled relationship.
Right before Christmas vacation, I'd gotten caught at school not with a girl, but with drugs and boys. Probably an inevitable turn of events - the drugs, at least. I'd come back to school after a summer on the horse show circuit, strung out on smack and hung up on a woman twice my age. I was neither the star athlete nor star student I'd been the year before. Now, I spent most of my time trying to feed both my habit for the drug and my hunger for the woman.
The first day home after this debacle the family went out to dinner. Not just the immediate, but the extended family. The dinner was painful. I was waiting to hear my fate, slated to be delivered that same night by phone. My father looked at me somewhere between entrees and coffee, and said something like, "You want to get out of here, don't you?" We drove home together. The way I remember it, the phone was ringing when we came into the house. I answered it, hearing the voice of my field hockey coach. She was yet another woman I had a painful hunger for, which in part led to her catching me with drugs I quickly hid.
If anyone else had caught me I might not have confessed. She lived in our dorm, was responsible for what went on there. She heard noises, came to investigate. The boys partying with us literally jumped from the third-story windows. I got caught on the stairs with the stash in my hand. I knew she knew. I had to come clean. So I went down to her apartment, where I stood in the entryway and gave up the goods, oblivious of her attempts to shut me up.
It turned out another faculty member was there. She tried to persuade him to let it go, cover it up, it was just a little bit of pot. But he wouldn't budge. Now she was the one who got to deliver the news. I knew it was bad when she asked to speak to my parents. I made her tell me. They'd booted me and the boys; the other girls were off the hook.
Now both my father and I had been booted. Again I'd learn later from books that he'd kept his CEO job this long only because his boss, DeWitt Wallace, had decided it was safer to keep Dad on salary, under his control, until the outcome of the grand jury investigation. Nixon's resignation marked the end of Watergate for most, but not us. Things had changed, though. My father now dodged Nixon's calls, not Carl Bernstein's, and he'd actually talked to Bob Woodward, however evasively. While certainly no fan of Nixon's, I remember feeling Dad should've stuck by his friend. Good thing it'd be twenty years before I found out his exploits had landed Lila Wallace - DeWitt's wife and Reader's Digest's cofounder - in a hospital with a perforated ulcer.
She was my godmother, I was very fond of her. I sat enthralled, watching her drink martinis from a solid gold goblet that came from King Tut's tomb. She gave me my name. And during that infamous Nixon visit, she sat me on her already frail lap in my full dress admiral's uniform and told me she owned me, could take me home whenever she pleased. Admittedly the wording was a bit odd, but I wished she'd done it - taken possession.
But again, I digress, it's hard not to. Back to the end of 1976. Conventional wisdom still said my father was headed for jail. The aforementioned grand jury was still impaneled, but would soon be dismissed. Now off that hook, he was out of a job. Not that he'd actually been doing his job during these years. As one account puts it: "His only memorable achievement, in the twilight of his career, was to drink champagne from the shoe of retiring editor Audrey Dade." And it turted out that the girlfriend in London would do him in, provide the proverbial last straw. The second question DeWitt Wallace put to my father's successor before handing him the job was: "You can get rid of Hobe's girlfriend, can't you?
An editor would be assigned to deal with this woman, who was by now reading manuscripts and insisting they be delivered to her by limousine. Perhaps this woman's extravegant tastes had something to do with why I paid the utility bills, while my father wore custom-made shirts from Turnbull and Asser.
Now retired, Dad busied himself for a time, as did I. I plunged back into horses, drugs and the woman. But he soon grew bored with his activities and began meddling in mine. He tried, I guess, to play country gentleman, exhibiting a newfound interest in horses. But while his pension was generous this front was impossible to maintain, way beyond his considerably scaled-back means. That monstrous house and anything else with any conceivable value was being sold, all at bargain basement prices. We were liquidating, liquefying.
Meanwhile, I was having similar trouble keeping up appearances. Keeping up at all. Now at public high school - at least my disgrace saved my parents the expense of boarding-school tuition - I played mild-mannered A student in the morning and championship rider in the afternoon. But nights I devoted entirely to scoring drugs and the woman. By now it'd become impossible to determine which had the greater hold, the two were inseparable. Things were getting harder to juggle, but I managed.
I managed until my father's still-wandering eye landed on this same woman. Goes without saying his London girlfriend would have little interest in an ex-CEO. Turns out my girlfriend was similarly disinclined, which meant disaster was imminent. Dad was jealous, though whether of me, or this woman, that's still hard to gauge. The simple answer is both. It's probably the right one, too. All of a sudden, after years of who cares, my penchant for women, or at least for this particular woman, had become not only a problem, but my father's pet problem. And what with his so-called retirement, he had considerable time on his hands. Given the circumstances of that retirement, he also had plenty of fury, frustration, humiliation, you name it.
You could say "curing" me became an eccentric man's hobby. One he worked at with vindictive precision. And one he could afford because his pension plan included extremely good health insurance. It began with sending me to a shrink. This guy told me my fhther had said I was in love with a woman. Before I could say anything to this, he said not to worry, I wasn't gay, just rebelling. He then said he'd beem told I'd got kicked out of school for pot. He pulled out his prescription pad. As he scribbled, he told me I was addicted to pot. That the pills he'd prescribed would take care of that.
Adimmittedly, I was confused. I'd been diagnosed as addicted to one of the few drugs I'd never much botherd with and told I wasn't gay. Maybe the shrink was confused, too. In any case, I left his office with that little piece of white paper. I liked drugs. How bad could it be? I had no idea what I was in for. My father, however, had accomplished several things at once. I just didn't know it yet. I still don't know whether he knew it, whether this was design or luck, or again some combination of the two.
The pills turned out to be old-school anti-depressants, meaning the kind that depress you, flatten you, literally cloud your vision. I was advised not to drive on them. Driving was another thing my brother and I had been doing since we were kids. And now, when I actually had a driver's license, I suddenly couldn't drive. Any suburban teenager's nightmare, but in this case catastrophic. My life up until now had been almost entirely unsupervised. I hadn't even lived at home in years, what with boarding school and life on the road with the horses and the woman. Now one visit to a shrink and I was under a microscope and marooned in my parents new and much-smaller house.
Worse still, I was cut off from the woman. I guess if he couldn't have her, I couldn't either. This in itself was agony, but add to it being cut off from Quaaludes, our then drug of choice. I learned later, again from books, that what ensued was classic barbiturate withdrawal. Maybe begging my terrified drug-phobic mother for a Quaalude should've tipped me off sooner, but it didn't. I thought I was truly mad, truly insane, I thought I was going out of my mind.
My mother was assigned to dole out the pills - a blessing in disguise. She didn't quite believe in them. And she was the one who figured out they were the reason I could no longer read. She had cause for suspicion - another thing I would learn years too late. This same shrink blamed her for whatever he couldn't pin on me. He'd tried to get her hooked on Valium.
My father went blameless. These two men became a formidable tag team. I'd listen to the shrink tell me to go on dates with my father, that he wanted a "relationship" with me, meant well, and on and on. Meanwhile my father'd slip in and tell the guy whatever he felt like - all, of course, with my best interests at heart.
Some things eased up. I got through withdrawal, regained my senses. Having me around was a bit of a bother, let alone driving me around. My mother stopped doling the pills. I started going to CBGB's, Danceteria, and that afterhours club Berlin. Things went back to semiabnormal, but they weren't over. The worst was yet to come, only I didn't know it - no doubt a good thing.
A few years prior, my ever-contradictory father had put me on to Patti Smith. Because he'd suggested I'd like her, I was determined I wouldn't. But being all of thirteen when her first album came out, and having come out myself way before then - androgyny, drugs, bisexuality - she naturally presented an irresistible package. I'd gone to CBGB's back then, too. I'd gone wherever she played. Another thing nobody'd much noticed.
This time around, though, my father cast her as not just a threat, but the threat. He'd convinced himself I was fucking her. He also convinced the shrink. I wish, but my groupie skills were not yet that well developed. I didn't talk to the shrink, but based on my father's delusions, I wound up on Thorazine. From here things got more aggressive, and given this drug, which I knew nothing about, I was fast losing any means of self-defense.
I graduated from high school, much against the advice of this same shrink. I'd carried a large course load after getting kicked out of boarding school, so by senior year I could make it through on very few classes. But the shrink did make sure I didn't make it to college. By now it was hard to determine how much this guy acted on his own and how much in collusion with my father. It still is. Add to this a terribly tangled relationship with this shrink's young, pretty, and inexperienced protégé, who I'll call Beth. While I talked, and flirted, and soon wound up having sex with her, my father made strategic strikes.
I'd been assured by Beth that what was said between us stayed between us, unless it presented a danger to me. Somehow, though, drinking, taking nonprescription drugs, or even the occasional single-person car wreck didn't seem to qualify as dangerous. But my reunion with the aforementioned woman - or sex with any woman other than Beth - got immediately reported back to the shrink and then to my father.
I'd find this out only when the shrink would call me in. First came the threats to lock me up. Next, scared-straight style visits to loony bins. Next the first lockup. Against both the judgment and wishes of Beth, our hapless young therapist, I was sent to a "therapeutic community/school". One of those "your bags are packed" ambushes where you either comply or get stuck with a syringe. My new roommate cheerfully informed me she'd been raped by an older woman, too. Presumably this meant we had much in common, would get on just great.
It didn't take long to learn that the so-called teachers who'd been advertised as therapists were actually all in therapy. A not-so-subtle distinction. My chemistry professor often came to class catatonic, clutching a teddy bear. Meanwhile, Beth's attempts to visit were blocked, our phone calls first cut short, then cut off entirely. It was not out of the question that the object of this little foray might be to separate us.
I managed to get out in three months. While out on parole for Christmas, I begged my father not to send me back. In another of our few tender moments, he caved. And he was the one who went to collect my stuff from this place. He returned so shaken he couldn't talk about it beyond mumbled regrets. He'd never actually seen the place. These mumblings marked a third tender moment.
I had a reprieve, but not for long. I still hadn't learned my lesson. The cure hadn't worked. And I was still under the care of this same shrink, which meant still seeing Beth. I made the same gaff, telling Beth about yet another woman, and again she reported back. My father, having been informed, made his last strategic strike. This time he told the shrink that his sister was manic-depressive, and perhaps I was, too. Eureka, they'd solved it, solved me.
Once more I was called into the shrink's office. I listened to a masterful pitch for Lithium. He made it sound like a drug addict's dream. That it would allow me to manipulate my mood at will. Next he described me as a Virginia Woolf type time bomb. I'd certainly kill myself by forty. Now I was some kind of suicidal genius. But through the miracle of Lithium I could be saved. The flattery worked, the pitch worked. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Took another script to the drug store, this time believing in magic.
I didn't know you needed a blood test for dosage, but presumably the shrink did. For the next ten days I didn't eat or sleep. No need to, this stuff made me high as a kite. Unlike most actual manic-depressives, I had no experience with mania. And while I'd done speed, of course, and coke, downers were always more my thing. I'd never gone so hyped for so long. You could say my judgment was a bit impaired. This set the stage for the last act.
The shrink suggested I sign myself into a hospital, just for a couple of weeks to stabilize the dosage. Even impaired, I didn't immediately bite. So Beth was brought in for bait. Unlike me, she'd learned her lesson, was on board this time, though I didn't know it yet. She coaxed me and I began to waver. I don't remember why, but I was at my brother's house when I called her. I do remember I was alone, staring into his kitchen, which had this amazing pile-up of empty Dewars bottles. The same scotch my parents drank by the gallon. The sight of all those bottles seemed to be what made me call.
It was night, a Friday. I think. I know Reagan had just been elected to his first term. Time had passed. I'd later joke it was his election that tipped me over. Beth came and picked me up. Took me to this place. I signed myself in. My parents didn't even know. The weekend meant two more days of no sleep or food, even so I realized I'd made a mistake, a big one - been duped.
My father bailed me out, took me home. That might have been that, but it wasn't. I was still on the stuff - the lithium. By now it'd turned me into some punk girl version of Travis Bickle. For reasons I don't recollect, I was wearing army fatigues, combat boots, and a lot of those heavy silver biker rings. My mother was in the kitchen cooking dinner. My father and I were watching the news. As my kind of luck would have it, Cambodia, perhaps then still Democratic Kampuchea, was news that night - the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, the killing fields - they were dredging it all up again, showing old footage.
That's all it took. The fuse was lit. The only question now was who'd explode first - me or Dad. I think it might've been simultaneous combustion. But he was the one on his feet first. When I hit him, I believed it was self-defense. If I hadn't been wearing the damn rings, I might not have done damage. My mother tried to break it up - a first. Somehow she and I wound up on the stairs. But how she fell, honestly I don't know. I only know I didn't intend to hurt her. I think I was just trying to get her attention.
She wasn't badly hurt, not physically. But she sat at the foot of those stairs yelling she never wanted me inside their house again. Meanwhile my father was on the phone to the cops - or rather a cop. A friend/employee of his. This guy drove me back to the snake pit. This time they took my jewelry, hell, they took everything. This time they doped me to the gills. This time it was progress when I finally got out of a tiny cell to roam a locked ward with women who'd had lobotomies, and I assure you I'm not exaggerating.
I'll spare you the gorier details. Things you'd expect but might not believe. After all, nobody believed Martha Mitchell either, at least not until it was way too late to do her any good. So let's just say that given the condition of the other inhabitants, I was a real find for the night nurse. She made a bundle pimping me to the orderlies. I did eventually engineer my release, aided and abetted by a young woman working in occupational therapy. She was the only person who knew or rather cared that I didn't belong there. She coached me.
For added insurance I managed to get a guy I knew to come pose as my boyfriend. We went so far is to announce our engagement, and I was released shortly after. At the time I believed the engagement stunt was what cinched it. Now I assume it had less to do with the insurance I'd arranged than with my parents' Blue Cross, which no doubt had been bilked to the max.
The doctor who released me was the same one who'd been there the night I'd signed myself in. I hadn't seen him or any doctor since, save the one time he'd called on me to act as playmate for a wealthy woman friend of his who was there taking a much-needed rest from the jet-set. If my whole time there had been like that one week with her - good booze, good drugs, good food, and good sex - I might never have left. But it wasn't. It was a beautiful fluke amidst grueling ugliness.
As this guy released me, he laughed, even gloated about the amount of Thorazine he'd managed to pump into me. I'd remember the number. Again, I learned from a book that this dose was more than double what was considered safe for an actual psychotic. I got the point. I resolved never again to display an emotion, never again to state an opinion, and never again to fall in love with a woman.
Needless to say, I got away from my family. But I still kept those resolutions for nearly two years. The first two fell away first. The last one was lost to a woman I'll call Ingrid. And while falling for Ingrid would begin yet another sordid story, it's the end of this one.
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Heather Lewis is the author of House Rules, which won the Ferro-Grumley Award, the New Voice Award, was a Lambda Book Award finalist, and was optioned for film. She was the guest editor for Best Lesbian Erotica 1996. Her work is included in Living with the Animals, Surface Tension, and Best Lesbian Erotica 1997. Lewis returned to New York in the fall of 2001, after a year in Arizona. She ended her life in May 2002, in New York.