Copyright © 1994 by John Stoltenberg.
All Rights Reserved. Reprinted from Lambda Book Report, May/June 1994, by permission of the author.
When I was 29, in the spring of 1974, I walked out of a poetry reading in Greenwich Village because it had turned hateful toward women (a benefit for War Resisters League no less). Outside on the sidewalk I ran into Andrea, then 27, who had walked out for the same reason. We began to talk, then talk deeply--and our conversation has continued until today.
Andrea and I had been introduced earlier by a mutual friend, a theater director, at a meeting of the then-fledgling Gay Academic Union. Her first impression of me, she has told me, was as a rather dim blond beach bum. We were an unlikely match.
That spring Andrea's first book, Woman Hating, was published. One day she visited me at my Upper West Side apartment, thrilled to have received her first author's copies. She gave me one, and I read it immediately, enthralled and laughing out loud with joy. I especially remember where Andrea writes that "'man' and 'woman' are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs" and that "we are . . . a multisexed species." As I described it 15 years later in my own first book, "that liberating recognition saved my life."
Who can explain how anyone recognizes that they have fallen in love and that life apart is simply unthinkable? All I know is that's what happened to me. Our conversations seemed to want to go on forever--so we decided to live together. In August 1993 we celebrated our 19th anniversary--with orchestra seats to Angels in America.
We never make a big deal about our personal relationship--in fact we are always quite private, even among our closest friends. Without a private life, one does not have a private life. I have used autobiographical material in my writing--both obviously and obliquely--and so has Andrea. But often in respect of Andrea's privacy or ours, I make decisions I might otherwise not if I lived alone.
Once we agreed to give a joint interview to the New York Times Style page-- surely not the smartest thing we have ever done. Its editor refused to allow the writer to identify us as gay and lesbian, as we had asked. The article appeared on Women's Equality Day 1985; the photo and excerpts later showed up in pornography magazines. Once Andrea was defrauded by a woman into giving an interview that touched on our private life and that then appeared sensationalized in Penthouse. So I state only the simplest facts publicly: yes, Andrea and I live together and love each other and we are each other's life partner, and yes we are both out. <SNIP, BLA, BLA, BLA>
-- Michael Pugliese