Escaping Long Island, 2000

It’s been ten years since I’ve ridden the Long Island Railroad. I’m heading to my friend John’s house in East Hampton. The Hamptons are about an hour further out on the island than Bellport – where in 1987 my ex-husband Russell and I bought a summer home. A decade later I lived in the house with Mary, my female ex-husband, and my two children before selling the house and moving to Northampton, Massachusetts in August 2000.

A lot and not so much changes in ten years. Mary was a train fanatic, a "rail fan." I think she had a touch of Asperger’s -- characterized by a fixation on trains, high intelligence, and social awkwardness; she had all those traits. When the diesel engine pulled into the station I could almost feel her presence. I sent a quick text to my dear friend Jenny to say, "on LIRR. Weird." She texted back, "Mary Burns."

The same conductor from when I commuted to NYU a decade ago just collected my ticket. She’s an unpleasant skinny woman with curling-ironed blonde hair and a down-turned mouth creased from years of pulling on cigarettes. I once saw her bowling at the Patchogue Lanes, a town over from Bellport. She had a crazy jerky skittish way of moving down the lane and releasing the ball. One of those things you never forget.

We’re coming up to Sayville now. This is where Mary and I would drive from Bellport to take the ferry over to Fire Island. The wealthy, super-fit and tan gay men take their ferry to the Pines and the dykes, femmes, butches, lezzies, drag queens and assorted marginal riff-raff take our ferry to Cherry Grove, a short walk down the beach, but economically a planet away from the architectural wonders and gourmet food stores of the Pines. I’m watching an older lesbian get off the train and look for a cab to the ferry. She has a telltale rash on her arm. The dunes are full of poison ivy.

Once when Mary and I took the kids to Cherry Grove, we ran into the principal of Theo’s elementary school. I had the hots for her; she was short, Italian, athletic and tough, but closeted because while Suffolk County is full of liberal weekenders from NYC, the locals are conservative and God-fearing, and an out queer principal would never fly. It freaked her out to be spotted by us on Cherry Grove. That’s what Long Island conservatism does to people. Another time Mary went to what we were told was a lesbian-owned barbershop in Sayville to get her usual butch buzz cut. There were four barbers, two male customers, and two empty chairs. We were told, sotto voce, that she had to come back on "Tuesday. Afterhours." When she protested, the woman barber took us outside and said they can’t let the men see them cutting a woman’s hair. Wow.

I’m so completely unable to be closeted. My appearance doesn’t relay much about my identity but my desire does. My attraction is for very masculine females. Not farm-wife masculinity and especially not suburban wife "because it’s easier" androgyny that reads as lesbian, e.g., super-short hair, khakis, no makeup, SUV-driving, punching-a-mother-on-the-opposing-soccer-team type which you see all over Long Island. (When I first moved to Long Island with Mary, I asked her in the Waldbaum’s parking lot, "what are all these lesbians doing here?!") My desire is specifically for queer butch masculinity.

We’re now at the Bellport station. Europeans are getting off the train. Bellport is characterized by extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It has the largest population of the poorest black people on Long Island. It’s really awful. They’re separated by railroad tracks from the middle-class, which is mostly locals and a few intrepid weekenders like I once was, and then the main street separates the middle-class from the wealthy, who live near the bay. Good god, everything is so familiar from the train window.

Mary, the kids, and I moved to Bellport in 1997. I had recently come out, was still living at Russell’s loft; we were unable to find a suitable apartment in the city that we could afford, and the kids had to start school somewhere. At first it was idyllic. I had a female partner who wanted me to be the wife that I always wanted to be, my kids were in well-funded schools, we lived near the ocean, there were good restaurants, fun people who breezed in from the city -- the city only an hour and twenty minutes away. My house was a lovely airy cape with a white picket fence and a half-acre backyard. I was in grad school at the time working on my PhD in Performance Studies at NYU and teaching at Hofstra University. When I’d get off the LIRR at Bellport I felt relaxed and happy to be home.

But not all was idyllic. My daughter, Rae, came out as a lesbian in middle school. She was tormented. Someone carved "fag" into her desk, she was pushed in the halls, taunted every single day, and her locker was defaced. I became an overnight activist. I joined a Long Island gay and lesbian youth organization as the parent spokesperson. I had conferences with the principal, teacher, counselors, school cop (another closeted dyke) and convinced them to go to a sensitivity training workshop for school administrators about gay and lesbian youth. Rae and I appeared on an HBO special called Middle School Confidential about the harassment she endured and the school district’s inability to handle it.

Then she ran away from school. She didn’t get far before a parent called to say that Rae showed her daughter a small bag she packed to take the train to the city. In it she had a comb, a snack, the lunch she saved, and some change. She walked 5 miles to the station. She got on a train to Manhattan and the conductors let her ride for several stops, and then she got off the train because they wanted her to pay for a ticket. I still do not understand why no one called the police to report a child riding the train by herself with no money. Eventually a deli owner called the police to say my daughter was sitting for hours in his deli by herself. He convinced her to call me. I wept with relief. I had the police at my house earlier and there was an APB out for her. The policewoman told the station that we were, "an alternative family." I was petrified that social services would take my daughter from me. You’d think it was 1969, not 1999.

After that I told Mary I wanted to move. I was exhausted defending my daughter and she was miserable. I had given a talk about butch/femme gender at UMass Amherst and Mary drove me through Northampton. Like in the Waldbaum’s parking lot a couple years earlier, I asked, "what are all these lesbian’s doing here?!" only this time they were lesbians. We moved to Northampton the next year and my daughter still lives there. It was a terrific place to raise my children. Only three hours away but a world away from Long Island.