PEGGY: I said, “Now I’m going to make love to you.”
KAY: I said, “I don’t know anything about this.”
She said, “Don’t worry, just let me love you, that’s all.”
I said, “Do you know what you’re doing?” She said she did. I wanted to know if she had ever done this before. She said that she had. I was full of questions but she kissed me again and told me not to talk, and then she made love to me. She took off my robe and I lay down on the bed and she stretched out alongside me and kissed me. While we kissed she took off her own clothes and when she was naked and our bodies touched I just put my arms around her and held her close and felt contented in a wholly unfamiliar way. I had never had any feeling remotely like this. I was very frightened in a part of my mind, but I somehow knew that everything was going to be good.
She kissed me and touched me for a very long time. It was fantastically exciting. I had never been aware of my body in this way before. Finally she curled up with her mouth on my breast and used her finger to bring me to orgasm. It was a sensational orgasm. It left me feeling utterly at peace. I had never felt like this after screwing.
Also, whenever I was with a boy, as soon as the act was over I really couldn’t stand the sight of him. Whether I liked him or not, whether I planned to see him again or not, I just wanted to get away from him for the time being and be by myself. And I invariably had a compulsive desire to take a shower. Not a hard compulsion to interpret, is it? I always felt very dirty, and I had none of this feeling with Peggy, and no desire to be alone, away from her. I wanted her to be right there with me.
I was filled with questions, overflowing with them. I had to know absolutely everything. When had she done this before and who with and what did it mean and were we both lesbians and what other things did lesbians do with each other? I must have been a dreadful bore.
PEGGY: You were a delight. I couldn’t get over how sweet you were, and how beautiful it had been. I felt such complete love for you.
KAY: I probably would never have run out of questions. But eventually Peggy grabbed me and kissed me again and I decided to shut up. I put my hands on her body and began to relate to her flesh in a sexual way. To regard her as desirable and to want to caress her.
This, too, was new. I had never desired boys as such, had never found them physically desirable. I had wanted to screw them for one reason or another but their bodies were never love-objects for me.
That first night, that was really incredible. Utterly incredible. We didn’t get any sleep at all. I really had no idea what I was supposed to do in bed. I had read novels with lesbian scenes in them but they were mostly rather vague as to who did what and with which and to whom. I more or less understood that lesbians went down on each other and rubbed their boxes together and used dildos on each other—
PEGGY: Ugh.
KAY: —but I was still very vague about it.
We fooled around at the beginning, and touched each other, and kissed each other’s breasts, and then Peggy went down on me. Some boys had done this briefly as a prelude to intercourse. The word seemed to be that if you did this to a girl she would go out of her mind with delight and then you could throw her a fuck with no trouble at all. I had never gone out of my mind with pleasure because I guess they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and didn’t much enjoy it, and all it ever amounted to was a lick and a promise, so to speak.
When Peggy went down on me I thought I was going to die of pleasure. No joke. It was as different from what I had experienced as, I don’t know, night and day? Not a particularly original way to put it, but make up your own image, it hardly matters. It was just fantastic.
The whole night was fantastic. We did everything to each other, everything we could think of. Some things Peggy had never done with her bosom buddies at school. We made up things. We were in this great rush to do everything there was, to play with this brand-new toy to the fullest before somebody came and took it away from us.
PEGGY: It was really a very wonderful relationship that we had. I think one very important thing was that it didn’t start out with sex. We were very close friends long before we became lovers, and I think this made a considerable difference. If it had been a sexual thing from the beginning I think there would have been a great deal of guilt involved on both sides. And the whole thing would have been cheapened.
KAY: Of course there was a certain amount of guilt anyway.
PEGGY: Of course. Kay and I are both basically moody people. Introspective. She particularly tends to brood. There were times when one or both of us would worry that we were into something abnormal, and that what we were doing was wrong for one reason or another.
KAY: But it felt so good—
PEGGY: It was good that we had both had experience with boys beforehand. This kept us from being too quick to pin the lesbian label on ourselves. We knew we could make it with boys, and somewhere along the way we realized that it wasn’t heterosexuality per se which was a bore, but that the whole dating system conspired to make our relationships with boys basically superficial. I gather that kids nowadays are a lot cooler about this sort of scene, but when we were in college dating was very much an exploitive process. On both sides of the line. The girl wanted to make sure that she was properly treasured before she opened her legs. She would try to hold out for an engagement ring or a fraternity pin or a declaration of love or a batch of dates with the same boy before giving in to him, and the boy would try to get as much as he could for as little as he could.
KAY: This wasn’t universal. There were certainly a lot of kids who had real relationships, but neither of us were that sensational at relating to boys at the time. I was especially unequipped for it, so the scenes we were in were always bad ones. The kids today seem to be a lot more honest. I don’t know if this is true at the cow colleges as well, but among the hipper kids it’s certainly the case. They’re able to admit honestly that they screw each other because they want to. The boys aren’t as obsessed with the idea of scoring and the girls are freer of the kind of hang-ups that most of our generation went through.
PEGGY: I don’t know how clearly we saw all this at the time, but I do know that we grew to look on our love affair as something temporary. There were times when we would talk about being together forever, but most of the time we both knew very well that we were going to outgrow this, that we would grow apart, and that we would ultimately graduate and get married and live essentially traditional middle-class lives. We didn’t intend to get caught in the same binds our parents did, we wanted more out of life than the fucking Marjorie Morningstar trip, but we knew we also wanted the bit of a husband and children and stability and security.
As a matter of fact, our relationship itself wasn’t exactly a love affair.
KAY: We did love each other.
PEGGY: Of course. But we weren’t particularly possessive or jealous or anything.
KAY: I would have been jealous if you were with another girl. Insanely jealous.
PEGGY: I never even considered going with another girl.
KAY: I did, at the very first.
PEGGY: I wasn’t enough for you?
KAY: At the onset, I had this big urge to be a lesbian to the hilt.
JERRY: I love the choice of words.
KAY: What I mean is that this whole thing was very new to me, and I would think about not only making it with Peggy but with other girls as well. I would see girls on the campus and wonder if I would enjoy kissing them or eating them. I was thinking in those terms, but I never really planned to do anything about it, and before very long I realized that this was something between the two of us and that the last thing I wanted was to get anything going with anybody else. But I would have been jealous and hurt if you went with another girl, and I think you would have been the same way if I did.