Free Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried

they were gay or not.”
    “She was the most perfect woman, and the most perfect lesbian ever,” recalled Keith Gentile, a gay club habitué from South Philadelphia who met Gia and Ronnie at the first Center City gay club they all frequented, Steps. “She wasn’t masculine and she wasn’t feminine. Guys liked her because she wasn’t that prissy kind of woman, women liked her because she didn’t have the worst qualities of women or men. And she had that I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude and it wasn’t fake.”
    That sophisticated androgyny led her to a new style of dressing. She had recently jettisoned her glitter clothes for a wardrobe of army fatigues and men’s pleated slacks, worn with a tee shirt or men’s oxford cloth shirt and army orcowboy boots. And she never wore makeup, unlike all of the women, and many of the men, she knew. It was a fashion statement that nobody in Philadelphia—man, woman, straight or gay—had even
thought
of making.
    Although she didn’t really want to, Gia went to see the therapist recommended to her mother. The male psychologist turned out to be more sympathetic than Gia could have ever dreamed. She did not tell him much about her life, and delighted in making up stories for him that she would later recount to her friends: at fourteen, Gia was already legendary for spinning seamless yarns that added years to her age and mature substance to her wild life. But the therapist was not totally unsupportive about her feelings toward women. Two years earlier, the organized mental health community had officially changed its mind about homosexuality, which previously had always been described in the literature as a “disease.” In 1971, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association announced that homosexual orientation was not, by definition, a mental illness. They identified something called “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—which described those patients who were deeply troubled about being gay. But homosexuality itself was no longer to be routinely discouraged or looked at as a condition requiring a cure. The counselor basically told Gia it was okay to be gay. So at the end of one of their sessions, Gia decided that the real problem was that she couldn’t confront her mother about her feelings.
    By this time, Gia had any number of older male friends with cars who would take her places. It was one of the fringe benefits of being a pretty girl, a prerogative she was not about to give up just because she preferred women. She had arranged for one such young man—a classmate with a well-established crush on her—to pick her up after the session. Karen and another guy were with him in the car. Gia asked if they would all come back to her mother’s apartment. She was, once and for all, going to tell her mother she was gay, and she needed moral support. She cajoled them all into agreeing to do it, although none of them really believed she would go through with the plan.
    The four walked into the apartment, sat down on the powder-blue velveteen sofa and love seat in the living roomand began to chat. Kathleen came in and joined the conversation. Suddenly, in the middle of a completely unrelated topic, Gia turned to Kathleen. “Mommy,” she said, “I have something I want to tell you.”
    Karen and the two teenage boys immediately turned their eyes floorward, stiffening, staring at their shoes and mentally chanting “Ohmigod, ohmigod.”
    “I like women,” Gia said. “I’m gay.”
    Kathleen stared at Gia and started to cry, her runny mascara streaking her powdered cheeks. Then Gia started to cry and soon they were all crying. After a few weepy minutes, Karen managed a feeble, “Well, I think we better go now,” and they sneaked out the door. Once out of earshot of Kathleen’s living room, they hollered in disbelief over what they had just seen. Even in outrageous times,
that
was truly outrageous.
    Kathleen and Henry had bought a cabin in the