Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma Read Online Free PDF

Magazine had just listed the University of Florida as the top party school in the country. But my mother knew it was time for me to leave home, and she made sure my father agreed. Thanks, Mom.
     
    Mine was a good and stable childhood, with a large loving family and strong Jewish roots. The painful events of 1958, however, would guide the choices I made for the rest of my life.
     
     
     
     
    3. The Worst Year of My Life and I’m Only 11!
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    1958
    U.S. President : Dwight D. Eisenhower
    Best film : Gigi; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Auntie Mame
    Best actors : David Niven; Susan Hayward
    Best TV shows : Your Hit Parade; Ozzie and Harriet; American Bandstand; The Today Show; The Milton Berle Show; Captain Kangaroo; Leave It To Beaver
    Best songs : At the Hop, Great Balls of Fire, All the Way, Short Shorts, Get a Job, Tequila, Poor Little Fool, Purple People Eater, Yakety Yak, Volare, Tom Dooley
    Civics : first US satellite launched; NASA formed
    Popular Culture : Elvis inducted into Army; Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote, Exodus by Leon Uris ; first gay periodical, One, distributed through US mail; Barbara Gittings founds Daughters of Bilitis.
    Deaths : Alfred Noyes, Michael Todd, W C Handy, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Tyrone Power
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    I was the biggest kid in the fifth grade. You can see it in the class photos. Kind of fat, kind of tall, and, well, just sturdy. There was one other girl close to my size but nobody else, not even Big Mike, was bigger than I. In that year:
     
    I started my period almost immediately upon turning eleven, as if that magic age were the ON button for my life. Actually, I think it was, but maybe not so much in a good way;
     
    My beloved Grandma Frances died after her battle with colitis and cancer;
     
    I developed ulcerative colitis myself. My mother already had it;
                     
    I fell in love with another girl.
     
    If this is what it’s like to be eleven, I’m really scared to be twelve!
     
     
     
     
    4. I Hate That Word!
     
    I was different. So aware at such a young age. My gut felt the horror of the difference but my young head was baffled.
     
    My uncle often talked, no, bragged, about the guy, the faggot, he beat up when he was in the Navy. The queer. The guy in the dress at the bar who flirted with my uncle, with whom my uncle wanted to have sex until he realized he was about to have sex with a man, not a woman.
     
    And the boys on my block in North Miami Beach, the junior high school boys, and then the high school boys, sometimes called each other queer. I always heard them. Whichever boy was the target du jour seemed to hate it. Sometimes the boys had a collective target, probably an imaginary person—named Sir Richard—who, as the story goes, pranced around Bayfront Park, that lush green expanse of park with fishing boat docks on the western shore of Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami. (Today it’s called Bayside.) Sometimes the boys would tell and re-tell the not-so-funny joke about police putting up a fence around Bayfront Park “to keep the fruits from picking the people.” Sometimes the boys would sing the Puff the Magic Dragon song but they changed the words:
     
    Puff the magic faggot lived in Bayfront Park
    And frolicked with the other queers as soon as it got dark.
     
    I had no idea what queer meant, but I could feel it in my eleven year old gut, the colitis beginning to take charge.
     
    Every time, I heard.
    Every time, I felt.
    Every time, I knew.
     
    I knew, and spent the next twenty years hiding, pretending, agonizing in a sick silent hell. It took twenty years before I could finally…
    Really…
    Know…
    Accept...
                 
    Queer…it meant me.
     
     
     
     
    5. The Jewish Princess
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    1959
    U.S. President : Dwight