I had lots of friends at camp, but my heart belonged to an older woman.
I suppose my parents tried to raise me just like other little girls, but it was soon apparent that I was different. Even at two, when the other little girls in Flatbush, Brooklyn, posed in pink lace crinoline dresses and white patent leather shoes, I stood ready for the reflex lens Kodak in my black cowboy hat, boots, floral Western shirt, and holster complete with shiny metal gun. I threw my dolls into the corner of the room and played only with a teddy bear I'd named Corey because he was the color of an apple core that had sat on the table for a long time. I put Corey in the doll carriage my mother had purchased for me, while my brother made off with the dolls and performed major surgery on them. They returned, if at all, as amputees, their heads literally on backwards or their hands gone. Occasionally, a blue eye drooped disgustingly out of a bashed-in porcelain face. Meanwhile, Corey and I paraded up and down St. Paul's Place with the doll carriage. When I got tired, I pushed Corey to one side and crawled into the carriage with him. Still in a crib at home, I was good at sleeping in tight places.
My mother wanted a clean, pink, passive child, one who adored her sterilized apartment and pretty clothes, but I adored chocolate, which made lots of lovely splotches on anything pink. My mother tried hard to keep the world pale velour and crinoline for me, but I was always brown as ice cream and dirt and red as cut knees and elbows. She soon gave up trying to keep me pink; instead, she created a totally pink room for me, with pink French Provincial furniture, hand-made pink beds with posters and canopies, and a pink high-gloss toy cabinet built by one of the carpenters who worked with my father.
The beds came at the same time as our housekeeper Nene, when I was four. Nene was brown like me, but a lot darker. Even though she tried to toilet train me and teach me to sleep in a bed - which my mother had not bothered to do - I loved her dearly. I was a failure at both and wound up black and blue: every night I rolled out of bed as I tried to curl against the crib bars I dreamed were still there.
Summer was my favorite time, when I could play unencumbered by snowsuits, mittens, and, worst of all, hats. And summer was when Nene and I took the BMT to Ebbetts Field to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play. Her passion for the team was undiminished by their losses but ultimately destroyed by their treacherous abandonment of the East Coast for Los Angeles. We never forgave them.
My daily trips to Ebbetts Field ended when I was five. My mother needed intestinal surgery, so my parents sent me to Camp Swatonah. It was there that I had my first love affair.
The camp was in Pennsylvania, just across the border from Calicoon, New York. The bus snaked up Route 17, the so-called "Quick Way," but the trip was long and miserable because the kids my age kept throwing candy and gum at me, or vomiting up their lunch, while the older girls sang a bunch of songs I had never heard before:
"R-A-T-T-L-E-S-N-A-K-E spells rattlesnake" I couldn't spell, but if this was what camp held in store, I didn't like the sound of the whole thing. I held onto Corey and told myself that we were going to be brave in the woods. I prayed someone would be in the woods to tie my shoes for me.
The ride seemed to take days. I was the only one in the Junior group not crying, throwing up, or both, maybe because I didn't know I was supposed to be sad. We finally reached the camp and I rushed out ot the gum-bedecked bus.
Camp Swatonah lay in a valley between two hills. in the very center was small lake, supposedly formed when the mythical Indian Princess Summer-Spring-Winter-Fall sacrificed herself for her people, who were threatened by neighboring tribes, probably the Cohens and the Levites. But, thank God, the bunk - made of crude wooden logs sealed with mud, cement, and straw - wasn't pink. The bathrooms were primitive but working, and there was one shower for all fourteen of us.
Mick greeted us at the door. She had a short d.a. ("duck's ass") haircut, slicked to a perfect point in the back. She was lean, with sharp features; a slow smile lurked on one side of her mouth. She wasn't like my mother, Nene, my grandmother, or my mother's friends. She spoke in a deep, soft, lilting voice, and when she lifted my duffel bag, hauled it over to my locker, and gave me a long hug, I was instantly in love.
Mick loved me too, or so she soon said, because I was just like her. I wondered what she meant. From the moment I arrived in camp I was always having accidents; maybe she was a clod, too. The first week, I slipped on the swimming crib stairs and skinned half my leg. No one understood how I'd done that in the "safety crib," and Mick said she wouldn't mention it in the weekly letter she wrote home for me since I couldn't write at all myself. The second week, I got a huge splinter under a fingernail when I was playing jacks. The doctor had to remove the nail to get it out, and he asked me why I didn't cry.
"Little girls are allowed to cry," he said.
"I'm not really a little girl," I replied.
He picked out the remaining splinters and gave me a candy bar for my bravery.
Maybe Mick had always been in trouble, too, as I always was. I had a talent for catching frogs and toads, and when I couldn't find a place to keep them, I placed them in someone else's bed. I also kept a good supply of crickets and salamanders ready to launch at any older girl who threatened me with force. Though I hated to start a fight, I didn't hesitate once someone else threw a punch. Somehow, I usually wound up tangling with the older girls. They had long arms and would grab my hands, but I butted them with my head until they let go. Mick nicknamed me "Billy the Goat," a name everyone at camp called me for years, without the goat part, of course.
Maybe Mick and I were alike, I reasoned, because we were both unafraid. Mick was the only person who didn't scream when I appeared armed with frogs or snakes. She laughted when I led a fawn into the bunk one night and fed it peanut butter sandwhiches, which it ate with gusto, smacking its lips when they got stuck on the gooey concoction. The only girl in the junior group who rode horses instead of ponies, I would gallop after Mick into town, about two miles away, buy Cokes for a nickel each, and then head back.
I was also the only one unafraid of the water: I followed Mick into the crib, hesitating at first only because the water seemed oddly nonsaline to someone like me, who had spent the first two summers of her life playing in the Atlantic Ocean. I would have followed her anywhere. She taught me how to swim, holding me in her strong, well-muscled arms. I became nothing; I floated without weight. The liquid of the crib joined us; I was no longer sure where I left off and she began. With such a teacher, how could I be afraid?
It was bad enough when I got into fights with the older girls, but when I started butting around my peers, the camp owners got worried. The one we called "Uncle Eddie," a kindly, lean man with a stubbly face, took me aside and gave me a long lecture on being nice to small kids. Since I was one of the youngest campers, it was hard to take him seriously. It was hard to take adults seriously. Despite my immediate positive response to anyone who was affectionate, I felt I couldn't let myself be bullied by an adult. As the toughest kid in the junior group, I had my reputation to protect. I continued fighting until Mick made me "hold boots" to punish me. Standing in the middle of the bunk, I held out her riding boots, stretching out my arms until I felt they would drop off from the searing pain and fatigue. Worse than this was the thought that Mick was punishing me, that she would no longer love me because I was such a monster.
One day, while Uncle Eddie was busy reprimanding another kid at the waterfront for swimming without her "strong buddy," I pushed him into the lake, clothes and all. He pretended to he terrified of coming back onto the shore. He swam out to the raft and tossed his waterlogged shoes onto it before hauling his dripping body out of the water. He made faces at me from afar. He made my reputation.
Finally, he came back to shore and gave me a soggy hug. Then he realized everyone was laughing, and knew that we had set a had precedent for the camp. I was sorry that I had made him wet, he stood there like a drenched hen as he decided what to do with me. After a moment he announced, "I'm going to hang you!"
My execution was set for dinner the next night. Mick told him not to go ahead with it, but the kids in my bunk pleaded against a stay of execution, reminding him that he had to keep his word. I was that popular.
Somehow, I wasn't worried: I tended not to take things seriously. Death itself was unreal to me: the only time I had seen someone die was in Bambi. When Bambi's mother was destroyed in the forest fire, Nene had to take me from the theater. I'd had no idea mothers could die. And my mother was clearly unwell.
That night, however, my main thought when I walked into the dining room was whether the meal would be any good. It was usually chewy meat, overcooked vegetables, and the most disgusting thing of all - milk. I hadn't seen other movies besides Bambi, and the only television I had watched was Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo. I had no idea that I was supposed to relish my last meal or make a request.
When the meal ended, Uncle Eddie called me up to the front of the dining room. He read off my offenses and my sentence. Everyone cheered, and I began to feel a bit queasy. I think Uncle Eddie did, too; we had both gone too far. He slowly finished his reading and then swung a rope over one of the huge rafters. Finally, he put the noose around my neck. This was going to be a hard one for either of us to get out of gracefully. Fortunately or unfortunately, at that moment my mother chose to make her one visit of the summer - maybe (it's hard to remember) her only visit during all the years I was at camp.
"It's all a joke," Uncle Eddie said to my mother.
Mother was not amused. She carried on so much that the camp instituted regular assigned visiting days, limiting them to only twice a summer. Despite my mother's threat to bring a lawsuit, I somehow managed to stay at camp that summer. I was more willing to risk my neck than my relationship with Mick, and I felt that had my mother failed to appear (and who knew she would?), Mick would have saved me. I pictured her riding up on Sunshine or one of her other favorite horses and whisking me, noose and all, off the table and into the saddle, even though horses weren't allowed in the dining room. I was a tough kid, but my fantasies were all femme.
Next summer, I returned to Camp Swatonah. As the bus pulled up the red clay road, and parked in the hillside lot overlooking the camp, I felt as if the winter had just been some hazy and prolonged dreams which filled the gap between last summer and this one.
Of course, Mick was there. She was no longer my couselor, since she had been promoted to group leader of the entire Junior contingent. This meant that I would have to share her attentions with a larger group of girls, but it also meant that she had more power.
Unfortunately, authority didn't sit well on Mick. Everything she planned turned out wrong, starting with the first cookout of the season. Cookouts were held every Thursday night so the kitchen staff could have a night off. We trudged up to a cleared field on which were scattered lots of open stone pits covered with grills. Hamburgers were cooked on top and ears of corn were tossed, husks and all, into the ashes.
The dinner bugle sounded. Bugles rang out for every conceivable occasion - reveille in the morning, flag-raising before breakfast, the beginning and end of all group activities, and then taps at night. By the end of the summer, the bugler was blue in the face. She was replaced every year by a fresher, younger mouth, until finally a phonograph record banished those strained notes once and for all. When the cookout bugle call rang out, the older girls bolted up the hill. Since they had longer legs and could run faster, they always got the best pits at the best locations in the middle of the hayfield. We younger girls were stuck on the periphery, where, if you took one wrong step, you were attacked simultaneously by wild raspberry bushes and the poison ivy lurking under them. It was a camp axiom that the younger you were, the itchier you were.
Mick always grumbled when we got the worst pit in the field, but she never made nasty comments about our unbearably short legs or deserted us on the path to run ahead and claim squatter's rights to a better pit. For one thing, she had been the counselor to some of the older girls during their first years at camp. She simply pretended that even though we were farthest from the place where the truck dropped off the food, we really had the best pit and could eat as well as the others.
Of course, her version was never true. We always got the last box of food. Although the older girls had left our corn untouched - they were either on diets or had braces on their teeth - they had already swiped half of our hamburgers.
Since Mick was the group leader, she had to cook our food. Mick was no Julia Child. She could never get the hamburgers to stay on the grill: they either slid into the ashes when she wasn't looking or flew into the poison ivy when she tried to flip them. All twenty-four girls in the group screaming "Rare! Medium! Well-done!" didn't help her concentration much, either. She would threaten us with her spatula and try to coax the mutilated hamburgers into their buns. The corn refused to come out of the ashes when it was done, and by the time she got the ears out, the kernels looked like blacked-out teeth. She didn't have a good sense of which way the wind was going to blow either: The smoke always got into her face so that at the end of dinner she looked like a leftover hamburger.
One Thursday, Mick was given frozen veal cutlets by mistake. Instead of returning them to the kitchen, she assumed they were breaded hamburgers and tried to cook them. Barbecued veal cutlets were not very popular that night, and neither was Mick.
If Mick's cooking had been the only thing that went wrong, the rest of the group might have forgiven her. Unluckily, everything else she touched went wrong, too. One day she planned a boating trip down the Delaware River. She arranged weeks in advance for the rowboats to be trucked to a spot she had chosen for its gentle currents and scenic beauty. She hand-picked the best counselors to row and, auspiciously, a day on which the sun shone brilliantly. There was, however, something she hadn't counted on: drought. When we arrived at the Delaware, the river was bone dry, and the only way to get a rowboat across the river was to carry it across the stony bottom, now occupied by a group of contented rattlesnakes sunning themselves.
Mick was not discouraged. Instead of a rowing expedition, she proposed a long nature hike which would end in a campout on top of a nearby mountain. She chose a sheltered spot and instructed the truck drivers to deliver our sleeping bags and food (precertified as veal free).
After a long trek, we arrived at the campsite. We were all nearly starving, so we urged Mick to make dinner as soon as possible. She went over to a pile of cinder blocks left over from last year's campouts, but the blocks were filled with hornets' nests. Mick was less afraid of hornets than of twenty-four screaming, hungry girls, so she heroically took several rolls of toilet paper, draped them over the nests, and lit them. Naturally, Mick had misplanned the assault. We were upwind from the smoke but downwind from the hornets, who flew at us in a rage. We stampeded down the hill, but not in time. We were all bitten, and Janet, who was allergic to insect bites, had to be rushed to the infirmary.
Finally, we crawled back to the campsite. Mick was standing there covered with hornet bites, making hamburgers with her ususual lack of grace. We were so hungry that as soon as the meat hit our mouths we forgave her. Less forgivable was her burning the S'mores - a magical concoction of Hershey's chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers. Mick somehow got herself covered with the melted marshmallows, and her body looked as if she had been attacked by web-weaving spiders.
After dinner, we looked for the outhouse. When we found there was none, we were not amused. Mick directed us to the trees. "Over there, girls. And, uh, I used the toilet paper for the hornets. Use some leaves, and make sure they ain't poison ivy." We shrieked and protested about lurking bears and snakes, but Mick and Jean, another counselor, accompanied us. Afterwards, we were all too glad to crawl into our sleeping bags and go to sleep.
I awoke in the middle of the night, feeling very cold. I had been told there were a million stars in the sky, but I was too near-sighted to see any of them, and anyway they clearly weren't much good at keeping people warm. Finally, I decided I was blue enough to arouse sympathy, so I got out of my sleeping bag and crawled over to where Mick was lying. She wasn't asleep. Maybe she was counting stars or sheep. Maybe she was secretly afraid that bears would come to eat us all in the middle of the night.
"I'm cold!" I whispered desperately and shivered to give emphasis to my statement.
"Go back to your sleeping bag and you'll warm up," Mick growled.
"That's where it's really cold."
Mick unzipped her sleeping bag and gestured for me to climb in. I tucked my head between her two small, hard breasts and breathed in the musky smell of her body and dead smoke from the campfire. I put one arm around her neck and, as I moved up to try to kiss her, I fell asleep.
---
I was ready to take my first swimming test. The best swimmer in the crib, I wanted to swim in the lake. To be allowed to do this, you had to swim to the raft and back without any help.
Brenda, though she wasn't as good a swimmer as I was, was also ready to take her test and insisted on going first. She jumped in the water after Mick, who went along as a "strong buddy" to guard us. Brenda swam really fast for about a hundred yards and then announced, "I'm tired!" She clutched Mick around the neck and started to sink, taking Mick with her. Mick came up choking and spitting water, but quickly loosened Brenda's grip and pulled Brenda, one hand cupped under her chin, to shore. Another counselor plucked poor Brenda, now sobbing hysterically, out of the water. When Mick got out of the water, Brenda collapsed in her arms. Mick held her and tried to cumfort her.
I was furious. Couldn't Mick see that Brenda was a jerk and just wanted Mick to hold her? If Mick didn't like "scardey cats," she sure wasn't acting like it.
I told Brenda to hurry up and stop crying - I wanted to take my test. Brenda sobbed even more loudly, but eventually Mick turned her over to another counselor and climbed back into the water.
I climbed in after her. The water felt much colder than the crib, especially when I put my feet down. I couldn't see the bottom, except for some vague, mossy shadows that looked like rocks. I was afraid the fish would bite my toes when I swam, but I was determined to do better than Brenda.
I swam slowly. Mick was a few feet in front of me. With her there, I could have swum the ocean! I made it easily to the raft and swam back almost as easily.
Shivering, I strutted up the ladder and onto the deck. All the counselors congratulated me, and Mick hugged me and crowed, "You're another Esther Williams!"
"Who's Esther Williams?" I asked.
Mick laughed and pinned a small gold star on my swimsuit.
---
"I guarantee it will work, Billy," Andi assured me. Believe me, it's foolproof."
She had to be right. After all, Andi wasn't in the older group for nothing: she had to know by now all the tricks which were best for total revenge. Besides, I was mad enough now at Mick to try anything. After all, Mick had been showing Beth an awful lot of favor lately. She had even let Beth fold the flag when it was our group's turn. I would teach her a lesson.
I did just what Andi said. I got up before the bugle one morning and checked to make sure that Mick was sound asleep. Then I went into the bathroom and got some cold water, which I heated up with some matches I swiped from another counselor. When it was body temperature, I took it to Mick's bed and poured it into her outstretched palm. This was supposed to make her pee in her bed, but something went wrong. Mick woke up.
"What the hell, Billy!" she screamed, shaking her hand.
I tried to look innocent. "Your hand was dirty. I decided to wash it.
"Like hell you were. I know the trick. Why did you do it? You've turned on me.
More like you turned on me - letting Beth fold the flag."
"So that's it!" Mick smiled. "You can't do everything, you know. There are twenty-four girls in the Junior group, and you ain't them. Next time, maybe Teny or Randy will fold the flag. You've got to learn to share things with them. You know I love you best. I'm not sharing that.
This was Andi's fault. I, who never cried, was about to burst into tears, but Mick wasn't going to let me wet her shoulder, too.
"Hey, I get enough tears from Brenda every day. Cut that stuff and shine my shoes for what you done."
I polished Mick's saddle shoes with joy, trying not to get black polish on the white parts. It was challenging - like a coloring book; I liked to work on things that I could look at very closely. Yes, I felt better, and I knew that I would feel even better once I had stuffed some green apples down Andi's lying throat. I contemplated the idea and waved the shoe brush menacingly.
"What are you planning now?" asked Mick.
"Oh, nothing. Just admiring this brush."
"Sure."
---
When I had graduated to the last bunk in the Junior group, we were allowed to go with the Middies to a social at the boys' camp. Without my bunk, there would be too few girls. The ratio of boys to girls, it seemed, had to be equal.
"What's a social?" I asked Mick.
"Well," said Mick, blushing and drawling, "it's a party where you'll get to meet the boys from the other side of the lake, and you'll get to dance with them."
I was suspicious. "Dance with them? Who wants to dance with them? Who wants to dance, period? Why can't we challenge them to a game of newcomb, instead?"
"Uncle Eddie thinks that a dance will be fun for a change."
She wasn't convincing. Square dancing couldn't be much fun if we had to take baths first.
Cleaned up and miserable, we were all dressed in stiffly starched skirts or shirts and then marched around the lake to the boys' camp.
We were put into squares and assigned partners. I got stuck with Tim, a little boy with a blond buzz cut. He said that he hated all this dosie-do stuff (he was an older Middie and had been to one social already) and that he'd give me a piece of gum if I'd sneak out with him. He knew a place where they'd never find us.
I liked Tim immediately. At last I knew that some boys could think as well as I could. I told him to wait until old eagle-eyed Jean went for a glass of punch and then we could sneak out. We pretended to dance, while the counselors stood by, explaining the calls on the scratchy square-dance records. It was going to be hard to get out of there: one counselor was watching every square of eight kids. But the hope of escaping kept me doing all those silly motions.
Intermission came, and while Jean was getting some punch and Mick was talking to Tad - another female counselor who was always hanging around when Mick wasn't on duty - Tim and I headed out the door. We stuck close to the walls and scampered over his bunk - the last place, he said, that his counselor would look for him.
He showed me the bunk, which was exactly like ours, except that the boys already had indoor plumbing - bathrooms as well as running water. Then he showed me his cubby. He took out two pairs of white socks and stuck them under his tee shirt. He said that that was what his sister looked like, adding "And you're going to look like that too in a few years."
I knew that he was lying - Mick was older than his sister, and she didn't look like she had two socks stuck under her shirt, and neither did my mother - so I punched him. Tim said, "I never hit girls," so I punched him again. Then I knew that Tim was a down-and-out liar, because he punched me back.
"I thought you don't hit girls," I said, wiping blood from my nose.
"You're an exception."
"Good. In that case, we can be friends."
We shook hands, and I wiped the rest of the blood onto my shorts.
Mick spotted us as we came back into the social hall. "Where were y'all?"
"Oh, we were just out on the porch getting some fresh air." I hoped my nose had stopped bleeding.
"Well you must have tripped down the stairs then, 'cause your pants are covered with blood," she laughed, and then added, "I can see you've had a good time at your first social."
I had. If this was what socials were about, I could hardly wait for the next one.
Tad didn't like me because Mick was so fond of me. One day when Mick wasn't around, she told me that Mick was dead. I shook my head in disbelief: though Bambi had shown me that mothers could die, I refused to believe that cousnselors, too, were mortal.
I ran wildly around the camp looking for Mick. I asked several counselors where she was, but they didn't know. I was in despair. I moped in the bunk, saying I was too sick to go to group activities. I refused to go to the infirmary.
I sat in the bunk until it was time for dinner, and I sat there while the rest of the bunk went off to eat. It was rare for me to miss anything involving food. Corey tried to comfort me, to no avail.
Suddenly, Mick walked in. By this time, I really believed that she was dead, so I screamed, "It's a ghost!" and ran like hell out of the bunk. Mick saw how white with fear I was, but she thought I might be up to another one of my pranks, so she laughed and gave chase.
Finally, she caught up to me and grabbed me by the arm. "What the heck is going down here?"
"You're dead. Let me go!"
"Why do you think I'm dead?"
"You're a ghost! Don't haunt me! Tad said you're dead. She even showed me the rock they're going to bury you under." Despite my frantic explanations, I was beginning to calm down.
"Now who are ya going to believe, her or me? I say that I'm alive and that Tad is a doggoned liar. Now ya got to believe me. Y'hear?"
I saw for myself that Mick was alive and unchanged. She was in the dark blue denims she wore on her day off so she must have been in town while I ran all over the camp looking for her. I grew quiet.
"Then why'd she say that?"
"She was just joshin' you. But it was mean, and I'm going to tell her so."
"Are you going to beat her up?"
"No."
Mick didn't beat Tad up, but I noticed that Tad didn't hang around Mick so much anymore, and I was glad.
The last day of camp, we all had a skinny dip - a tradition supposedly due to the fact that our bathing suits were already packed, along with everything else that was going home, in the trunk. Some wise girl in the Inter group, however, suggested that the skinny dip tradition had originated in Uncle Eddie's dirty mind. That story was followed by another suggesting that our entire skinny dip was being observed by telescopes strategically placed in the boys' camp. I countered that no boy could see that far, no matter what he was looking through, and even if they could see, I, for one, was not going to be deprived of a last swim.
My reasoning made sense to the juniors, who unanimously threw off their shorts and T-shirts and jumped into the water. The seniors were not so sure, or maybe they just had more to hide, so they sat miserably on the shore while we swam around in the buff. The counselors also had their clothes on and had to be rowed out to the rafts. Several juniors pretended they were drowning so that counselors would have to jump into the water and get their clothes wet, but the counselors weren't having any of it. "Go ahead and drown," said Jean. "It will be one less trunk to pack." We stuck out our tongues at her and went to annoy another counselor.
Mick stood on the shore with a safety pole. She was in shorts like the other counselors, and I remembered that last summer, too, she had refused to go skinny-dipping. I dog-paddled over and tried to taunt her into getting undressed.
"How come you ain't skinny-dipping like the rest of us? Are you chicken?"
"Nope. Don't feel like it."
"Come on. Admit it. You're scared like the seniors."
"Nope."
Mick was getting monosyllabic, and that was a sure sign that she was pissed off.
"Spoil sport!" I called and swam off before she could reply.
---
The night before we left, the harvest moon was shining bright and orange in my window, and that brought home to me the contrast between camp and the life I would be returning to. I was sad and hugged Corey closer. He was never sad. I held him tight and fell asleep.
The next day we ate a quick breakfast and were packed into the waiting buses. Mick rode back to the city in my bus, and she said that in the city she had to get on another bus which would take her home to Virginia. I asked her why she came so far every summer, and she said that she didn't like the ways of the South, even though she lived and went to school there.
The ride home always seemed faster than the ride up to camp, maybe because I never wanted to go home to the gray city. The others, too, were less boisterous than on the trip up to camp, even though they still sang color war songs and other camp ditties.
Soon we arrived in New York City. I saw Nene and my father in the crowd ready to pick me up; as usual, my mother wasn't there. Mick and I were the last ones to get off the bus. She took my hand and helped me down. Then she leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead.
"So long, sport," she said, and then she disappeared into the crowd.
---
Karla Jay has written, edited, and translated ten books, the most recent of which is Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation. Her anthology, Dyke Life, won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in the category of Lesbian Studies. She is editor of NYU Press's series, "The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature." She has written for many publications, including Ms. magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Lambda Book Report, and the Haward Gay and Lesbian Review. She is a professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City.