VIRGIN?

I don’t know how many months passed before I went back to the student hospital, but I did—partly because I had a terrible secret to tell. I knew that therapy wasn’t going to help me unless I was prepared to be completely honest, yet the weight of my shame was so crushing it felt impossible to reveal this particular truth: that sometimes I lay beneath the flow of water from the tap during my bath. Many years later I would learn that I wasn’t the first to do this, but at the time, I thought it was a perversion.

Dr. Camarer, the psychiatrist I began seeing at the student hospital, was a middle-aged man with a rather fierce expression who listened intently and didn’t say much. When I finally made my excruciating confession, he suggested—quite matter-of-factly—that I should get some birth control before I went to Spain. In a single stroke he undid much of the anguish and conflict I’d been feeling about my sexuality.

Because from the time my mother first told me about sex—when my period started—she issued an absolute prohibition against sex before marriage. Much later she would tell me that she’d embraced a theory in psychology at the time which held that to help teenagers deal with their burgeoning libidos, parents should take a hard line against sex. But what she communicated to me was a reality in which females didn’t have sex drives, which made me feel grotesquely abnormal. And part of the reason she was so convincing was that she lied about herself. Actually, she kept on lying to me all the way into my middle age. From the beginning, she insisted that she was a virgin when she married my father. It was only after he told me the truth—decades later—that she finally owned up to it. What she’d been hiding all those years was the fact that she’d slept with her fiancé, Jimmy—the one who had all but left her at the altar—and she’d been date raped as well.

Why, oh why, I’ve often asked myself, do parents think the truth isn’t good enough? Because for the most part, the platitude is apt: The truth will set you free—and often, others as well.

Little did I know at the time that the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco and the start of the sexual revolution were right around the corner—and that my childhood best friend, Kathy, who’d grown up in a conservative family, would visit me in the Language Lab stoned—a new convert to psychedelics and free love.