Suburban Love Stories

What happens when the best behaved girl in Sunday school falls in love with the worst behaved girl in Sunday school?

Suburban Love Stories, a memoir about growing up and coming out in the Grass Seed Capital of the World. 

Set against the backdrop of the most famous anti-gay political campaign of the 1990s, Suburban Love Stories is a tribute to the unexpected tolerance of small-town America, to youthful eccentrics, and to the people who protect them. 

(Currently unpublished)   
Suburban  Love Stories
The Lutheran church had a music hour and I was asked to hold the tambourine because I never rattled it out of turn. When I was a mere parishioner seated with my parents in a middle pew, I found the service boring. It was different when I was an acolyte. I felt called. I was ready to sell my soul for the class president’s acceptable face. My complete transformation to goth chic took four years. I had to outlive who I used to be. In part I knew it was all artifice. I wrote in my diary: I’d like to be goth. I think I’d feel better if I wasn’t trying to be popular. At the same time, I felt like a dark acolyte, a sinister queen. I was the death’s-head gliding past the couples kissing in the hall . The Blue Bird of Happiness, as my parents incongruously dubbed the Cavalier, grew old like a smoker.My date looked like a mermaid on steroids.The sunny afternoon when the class of 1994 would strut out of the high school in a haze of illicit cigar smoke... My happiness is a golden thread that ties me to Isabel and to our childhood, so that as time moves inexorably forward, I will never be lost. I shaved my head. I streaked the campus. I shot pool in bars. I hit on straight girls. I sung “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with beers in both hands and my arms around strangers. The distinction that so clearly placed me outside the shipping channel of high school life mattered slightly less than which dorm I lived in.
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