I had a 6:00close relationship with my mother. Almost every night I would cry myself to sleep, this went on for a month or two. You made a mistake." It was so much pressure and I thought I would hide it and never say anything. I was like, "God why did you give me this gift?" Oh, my goodness and I'm like, "I was so born on the wrong planet, in the wrong galaxy.
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Being raised Catholic, to me it was a gift from God. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? I thought, "I have to be the only one here in this area." 5:00I thought, "Well you're gonna have to keep quiet about this and you're gonna have to marry, have children and live a normal life." I felt like I had been given this gift.
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But these two women that had formed this group called the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco area had written this book and within it there was a definition of a lesbian is woman who is capable of loving another woman and I had a lightbulb moment, "That's it, that's me that's me" and I went to the mirror and was like, "You are a lesbian." Oh my god and I was freaking out. It was a couple of women in California and I think the title was Lesbian Women, I can't remember exactly. Nobody's going to know, and you just borrow 'em and bring them back at your leisure." Two days went by and I went and got those books and in it was a book the Daughters of Bilitis had written. At one point I called the crisis center in Fitchburg, Massachusetts the Luk Crisis Center and they happened to be just two streets over from where I lived and I said, "I'm a lesbian." This young man talked to me at the other end and he goes, "Well how do you know?" So, we had this conversation and he says, "Look, I'm going to tell you whenever you feel 4:00like coming down here, I'm going to put in a paper bag a couple books for you to come get them within the next couple of weeks whenever you feel comfortable. I was like, "oh my goodness that's not me, that's not me, that's not me-I'm a good person." I knew there was something with homosexuality and I couldn't find myself in that. Sometimes I'd borrow a book in a Catholic school library and put it in my backpack and I'd bring it back and I would go through this literature at home. So, I would go to the Catholic school library, find everything I could on homosexuality, and it was very very negative and so I couldn't relate to anything. I knew at a very early age I was gay, and it was-I was absolutely tormented inside when I discovered within myself I was gay and this is early 70s, early 70s, and I went to Catholic school 3:00for twelve years. I was fifteen years old when I came out to my parents.
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V: I went to a junior college first, it was just a two-year college and the reason I came-it was a lot much more than just the animal science thing. It was at the time I liked horseback riding and I liked animals and that's why I was drawn to that. She was she was jumping a fence with a horse and I was just drawn to that. Junior College, but it was a small women's college of three hundred and they had sent me a brochure about animal science, and it was a on the cover there was this girl that was jumping a 2:00fence. It wasn't a seminary, it was really called Southern Sem. Spoke French first and- I went to school at Southern Seminary Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia. So, I was raised in very much the French-Canadian culture. She came from a large family of fifteen and six of them had immigrated to Fitchburg, Mass. But it was six of my mother's brothers and sisters that immigrated. V: Thank you, I'm Helene Vachon and my official name is, I was born in Quebec City, Canada and my parents are from a small town in the 1:00eastern townships Lac-Megantic, Lake Megantic and we immigrated to Fitchburg, Massachusetts when I was three and a half years old.
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Welcome Helene, would you give a short introduction of yourself? It is the ninth of February at 11:10 in Newman Library on the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech. I will be the interviewer for this segment.
#GAY SEX PARTY NEW YORK FEBRAURY 9 SERIES#
F: This is a recording in a series of oral histories being gathered around the 40th Anniversary commemoration of Denim Day, an event sponsored by the, what was then called the Gay Student Alliance in 1979 at Virginia Tech, and we're speaking with alumni who participated or somehow were adjacent to that event.