ABSTRACT
By the time I headed to college, in 1974, I identified as bisexual. For my seventeenth birthday, earlier that summer, my helpful-yet-clueless friends from summer stock theatre had bought me Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation-a present intended to support me in my bisexuality, though all it really did was confuse the boys in my theatre troupe who might have been straight or bi enough to want to have sex with me. If the idea that getting support from actual lesbians would be easy was what the book was supposed to convey, that was the clueless part, but it was indeed lesbians I went looking for when I got to college. Somehow I imagined bi-ness as an amalgam of straight and gay, and I figured I had the straight part down already.
