Introduction
You often inherit the unexpressed trauma, poverty, and survival instincts of the generation before you. Growing up in the 1940s Bronx and post-war Los Angeles meant carrying the heavy psychological weight of an immigrant mother marked by Holocaust survivor guilt. You might wonder how to escape the cycle of extreme deprivation, familial dysfunction, and the constant threat of social erasure.
This text explores a harrowing personal journey from poverty, domestic turmoil, and underground survival into pioneering academic achievement and queer self-realization.
You will see how artistic ambition, hidden subcultures, and relentless educational drive forge a path toward autonomy. The following questions guide this exploration:
- How do you survive extreme poverty and parental trauma without losing your identity?
- What role do underground subcultures play when you discover your queer desires?
- How do you balance survival jobs, front marriages, and rigorous academic pursuits?
- Can you reconcile with a troubled family while claiming your own independence?
1. Early Life and Migration
Growing up in extreme poverty in the Bronx under the care of an exhausted factory worker mother and affectionate Aunt Rae shaped early resilience before migrating to Los Angeles.
You discover that life in the Bronx during 1940 depended on relief and moving constantly between cramped furnished rooms. Your mother worked alone as an immigrant draper in a garment factory.
Bronx Poverty and Maternal Burden
You spent your early days visiting the Automat for lemon meringue pie and Katz Deli on Delancey Street for huge corned beef sandwiches. Aunt Rae offered warmth by singing Yiddish lullabies and feeding you homemade prune compote and potato and carrot tzimmes before you started school.
At school, classmates noticed your unkempt hair and dirty clothes while you navigated an unfamiliar world. Miss Huntington helped you master reading phonics when you shouted out the word enough.
Your exhausted mother threw off her clothes after long hours near hot pressing machines and pleaded with you to save her from the shop. A final street meeting by the El train tracks ended when your biological father denied paternity and walked away.
Train Ride to California
You boarded a train west with your family for four days, singing Al Jolson songs in the aisle.
- You arrived in Los Angeles at Union Station to find green lawns and warm spring weather.
- You left behind the bitter poverty of the Bronx and the relief lines of New York.
2. Holocaust Trauma and Childhood Coping
The psychological shadow of the Holocaust deeply affected the household, forcing the young author to adopt a caretaking role and deploy strict compulsive rituals.
Survivor Guilt and Parentified Child
Your mother was consumed by grief over her missing brother Hirschel and the events in Europe, leading to severe mental breakdowns and superstitious anxieties. At the Breed Street Synagogue during yizkor, your mother furiously hissed at her aunt Rae for reciting memorial prayers for Hirschel, screaming that he was not necessarily dead.
You constantly monitored her moods, engaged her with poetry readings, and performed soothing routines to calm her down during her severe psychological episodes. When your mother lay staring blankly at the ceiling in despair, you recited poems like Casey at the Bat and performed Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny impersonations.
Escapism and Daily Labor
To prevent perceived mortal danger, you developed strict verbal trinities and crossing-the-street rules that both you and your mother were forced to repeat precisely. You used daydreams of becoming a child star, a tap dancer, and a superhero named Lilly the Kid to gain a sense of control. You imagined flying through the air as Lilly the Kid alongside muscled heroes, rescuing emaciated victims from concentration camp ovens.
3. Acting Lessons and Early Ambitions
Pursuing theatrical training at the Theatre Arts Studio provided a path toward professional performance while stirring early same-sex attractions.
Studio Work and Contracts
You pay for private acting lessons by working at the studio office, viewing the tasks as sacred duties. To afford your training when singing lessons are added, you offer to work on Saturday mornings handling chores, answering phones, and writing receipts.
Lillian arrives before 8:00 A.M., picks up Sid's dry cleaning, and buys coffee for Irene at the Elite. Private acting lessons cost 1.50 dollars per hour, while a Tanner Grey Line Bus Tour ticket costs 3.50 dollars for the mother and 1.50 dollars for the daughter.
The studio management offers gifted students a personal management contract and demands a new stage name. Irene and Sid draw up a contract lasting for seven years and renewable in perpetuity, requiring a ten percent cut of earnings. When you suggest Lilly the Kid, Irene rejects it and proposes Lillian Foster instead. The studio forms a touring troupe of young performers to entertain at various institutions under Irene's direction. Eddy sings torch songs, two young girls shake maracas as the Starlets, and Lillian acts as Mistress of Ceremonies.
Discovering Adolescent Crushes
Confused by your overwhelming obsession with an older woman, you turn to library books for answers. You experience intense feelings that do not match conventional attractions, reading psychology books and medical texts that frame same-sex attraction as an inborn trait. You look up information at the Malabar Public Library and read Attaining Womanhood by Dr. George W. Corner.
While maintaining your fixation on your mentor, you begin dating an older market worker who writes you poetry. Chuck is 24 years old when dating you. He waits for you after school, takes you to malt shops, recites verse by heart, and eventually initiates physical romance. Chuck gives you a gold-colored heart on a chain and writes a poem starting with Its Crazy But Its Grand.
4. The Matchmaker and Mother's Courtship
Finding a Shadchen
You watch your exhausted mother labor in the sweatshop under punishing heat. Realizing your own entertainment career cannot save her immediately, you decide to find her a husband. You locate a penciled message in Yiddish and English tacked above pickle barrels in a grocery store. It is signed by Mr. Yehuda Cohen, Shadchen.
You visit Mr. Yehuda Cohen, who charges three dollars per introduction. You hope this transaction will secure a better future and bring a besherteh to your household.
Failed Suitors and Final Engagement
Enlisting a matchmaker to find a husband for her mother introduced various troubled suitors before a stable engagement was reached.
The first matchmaker-arranged suitor, Jake Mann, takes you and your mother out for cocktails and dinner. During a swimming lesson at Ocean Park Beach, Jake Mann forces an unwanted kiss and rubs his body against you. You fight back and scratch his back.
Subsequent suitors include Shmuel Glatt, a German-Jewish survivor with camp tattoos. Shmuel introduces a companion named Falix Lieber, a fellow survivor from Bergen Belsen, who makes inappropriate advances during a park outing.
The mother ultimately accepts a marriage proposal from Albert Gordin, a hospital worker who is seven or eight years younger than her. Albert arrives with a bouquet of pink carnations and a small box, promising that neither you nor your mother will have to work. Albert's successful brothers, Jerry and Marvin, arrive in a pastel blue Cadillac convertible to warn the mother. They reveal that Albert spent three years in a mental institution after suffering a heat stroke in Vera Cruz where the temperature reached one hundred and fifteen degrees.
5. Adolescent Identity and Transition to Hollywood
Adopt a tough exterior and deliberate style as a protective mask when feeling like an unprotected outcast in a hostile environment.
Faderman shaved her eyebrows into high rapiers, drew on red lipstick, wore tight pachuca clothes, and measured herself to defy her surroundings.
Faderman stared at herself in the gym mirror wearing a see-through nylon blouse and pachuca-tight skirt, measuring 36-22-36, ignoring the disapproval of her aunt.
Carlos gave Faderman a red and green plastic heart he made in shop, but after they lay together under a willow tree in Hollenbeck Park, he acted like a stranger at school the next day.
Geller Theatre Audition
Seek out professional environments in cultural hubs independently when local mentorship reaches its limit.
Faderman scoured the Yellow Pages, rode multiple buses across Los Angeles to Wilshire Boulevard near Hollywood, changed her appearance in the restroom, and successfully auditioned for a work-study scholarship at Geller Theatre.
Faderman auditioned with a monologue from The Member of the Wedding, earning applause and a scholarship from Mr. Lord and a talent agency worker named E. J. Smith.
You can navigate this transition systematically:
- Look through the telephone directory under Theaters to find professional schools.
- Travel west via connecting bus lines from East L.A. to the border of Hollywood.
- Scrub off neighborhood makeup and restyle hair to fit a professional standard.
- Audition with a strong monologue that highlights vulnerability and lost adolescence.
6. Modeling and Economic Realities
Financial pressures and the pursuit of career entry led into pin-up and nude modeling, exposing hidden dangers and causing family crises upon discovery.
Pin-Up Modeling and Nude Figure Work
You must construct elaborate disguises to bridge ordinary school life and the glamorous Hollywood world you desire. Lilly maintained a double life by wearing a babushka at Fairfax High School while transforming into a Veronica Lake lookalike for her time at Geller Theatre. Trading pin-up modeling hours for portfolio stills with Wes Martin provided publicity pictures for the Mel Kaufman Agency.
Faced with high costs for cosmetic improvements, Lilly took up nude modeling for figure magazines through an agent named Andy. Mario Parma paid fifty dollars a day for magazine spreads, earning Lilly two hundred dollars for four days of work.
Danger and Mother's Discovery
Veterans in the agency shared grim stories about missing models who fell victim to violent amateur photographers. You must heed warnings from colleagues:
- Watch out for amateur photographers who do not pay well and pose serious dangers.
- Never let creeps take beaver shots because they sell them illegally.
The Silent Film Star invited Lilly to a private mirrored room in Harry Houdini's old mansion and offered to triple her shoot fee to one hundred and fifty dollars in exchange for sexual favors before she pushed him away. Using money earned from a Japanese photographer at Paradise Cove, Lilly treated her mother and aunt to a pricey meal at the Café de Paris.
Family conflicts erupted when Lilly's mother discovered figure photos stored at home, causing her to wail about the shame and ruin of her reputation as a nice Jewish girl.
7. Underground Subcultures and Queer Life
Exploring underground lesbian bars in Los Angeles provided a vital subcultural community despite police harassment and intense romantic dynamics.
The Open Door Bar Experience
Eddy and his boyfriend Zack take you to the Open Door on Eighth and Vermont. You discover women dressed like pachucos or actors like James Dean and Elvis Presley.
Venues like the Open Door and the Hearts and Spades provide a community for women adopting masculine clothing styles and tough personas. You fall into a consuming relationship with Jan, an older non-working butch woman who lives in a transient hotel. Jan relies on hustling or borrowing from johns and exerts tight psychological control.
Police Harassment and Family Anchors
Law enforcement frequently targets and harasses patrons of underground queer clubs through arbitrary stops, arrests, and intimidation. A police officer pulls up in a black and white car when you and Jan are jaywalking near the If Club, drives you to a residential street, and interrogates you about why you are with a dyke.
Faced with Jan's pressure to engage in sex work to fund a move to New Orleans, you recognize the danger of following that path. You run back to your family court bungalow on Fountain Avenue and collapse into a heap of tears with your mother and aunt, vowing to be a good girl.
8. Educational Recovery and Gay Culture
Mentorship from community counselors and participation in high school speech activities helped rebuild academic prospects alongside engagement in gay culture.
Traditional immigrant stories often failed to provide practical guidance for young people coming of age in America. Your mother and aunt passed down tragic tales of pogroms and sweatshops or impossible romantic fables rather than practical survival wisdom.
Guidance from Maury Colwell
Without traditional family or religious patriarchs, troubled American youth sought guidance from community counselors and unconventional mentors. You met Mr. Maurice Colwell, a gap-toothed counselor at the Hollywood YMCA who used Jewish jokes, tough love, and book recommendations to steer her back toward education.
Maury Colwell instilled a philosophy of hard work, the pursuit of education as economic survival, and the moral imperative to fight injustice. He arranged for you to attend high school part-time so you could work and study, lent you paperbacks, and taught you that America allowed individuals to rise through brains and effort.
Speech Club Success and Arrests
Joining the Hollywood High Speech Club allowed you to channel your passion for dramatic reading into competitive events, earning recognition and trophies. You won the Grand Prize in Oral Interpretation at the Southern California Forensic League Regionals among fifty high schools, reading a piece about war horrors from John Dos Passos's USA.
Hollywood Boulevard housed a thriving, semi-secret underground gay culture where young people found community despite the surrounding societal hostility. You and your friend Denny frequented coffeehouses like Coffee Dan's and the Marlin Inn, where patrons mingled in the open while maintaining their secret community.
Meeting other young lesbians navigating transgressive lives highlighted the harsh economic and social vulnerabilities faced by non-conforming women. You met Nicky, an aspiring writer traveling with a nomadic magazine crew, who dressed as a man and faced severe family rejection and economic exploitation. Nicky earned 1,265 dollars through the magazine crew since July, but her crew boss claimed 1,215 dollars had been spent on her upkeep and gave her a final payout of only 50 dollars when she quit.
Visiting the Club Laurel and watching a professional singer project commanding power and elegance gave you a clear vision of the kind of independent woman you wanted to love and eventually become. You were mesmerized by Beverly Shaw performing at the piano bar in a tailored jacket and bow tie.
Anti-masquerading laws were actively enforced by police to harass and humiliate gender-nonconforming individuals in public spaces. Nicky was arrested by a police officer inside Coffee Dan's for allegedly violating anti-masquerading laws because she was wearing three articles of men's clothing, leading to an invasive physical inspection by a police matron in the ladies' room.
9. Front Marriages and University Life
Entering a front marriage with a psychologist provided a social shield and the freedom to pursue higher education while managing domestic turmoil.
The Concept of Front Marriages
You can use a front marriage as a practical social shield to gain independence and familial approval. You decide to marry Mark as a front marriage so you can move out to attend college and satisfy your mother's expectations without revealing your homosexuality.
Nicky takes a strenuous job on the lipstick assembly line at Max Factor of Hollywood, standing eight hours a day mixing vats for low pay at $1.25 an hour.
Mark's Background and Wedding
Mark works as a child psychologist at Children's Hospital, holds a Ph.D., and maintains a refined home filled with art objects, classical music records, and high culture. Mark invites you to his five-room home in the Los Feliz Hills, where he showcases his ivory statues, lithographs, and extensive record collection at thirty-four years of age after three years of working at the hospital.
Mark and Lillian drive to Tijuana to get married quickly, and later Rae stages a traditional Jewish wedding with guests singing in Yiddish three days after the decision.
10. Academic Striving and Self-Realization
Juggling rigorous studies, sleep deprivation, and travels to Mexico solidified the realization that personal autonomy was incompatible with traditional wifely subordination.
Sleep Deprivation and Societal Bias
You study Latin, trigonometry, physics, and advanced composition late into the night. You get only four or five hours of sleep most nights, which causes vivid hallucinations.
While taking your SAT early on a Saturday morning, you see Genghis and Khan parading down the auditorium aisles and stop to watch until the monitor calls time.
Teachers display blatant bias against married female students. Miss Brooks questions why you want to go to college since you are already married, and despite receiving an A+ on an essay, you are passed over for Hollywood High alma mater scholarships.
Mexico Travels and Independence
You travel to Mazatlán, Mexico, and immerse yourself in the local ex-pat scene. You frequent O'Brien's and befriend Stefano, an ex-pat from Newark who has not been back to the States in seven years.
While walking through Mexico City and watching university students protest a bus fare hike from 5 centavos raised to 7 centavos, you reflect that you must have somewhere to go in life and cannot simply be someone's wife.
11. Burlesque Years and Academic Success
Balancing exotic dancing and intense university coursework provided the financial means to survive while navigating volatile relationships and pursuing degrees.
Burlesque as Financial Survival
You apply to the President Follies in San Francisco under the stage name Mink Frost. D'Or acts as your agent, initially securing a job paying $250 a week, which is later reduced to $125 a week. You work 17 total shows per week while taking 15 academic units per semester at Berkeley.
Mara Karrara performs at the President Follies earning two thousand dollars a week, using a live green snake in her routine. You discard admirer notes and leave the theater disguised in a soiled coat and a babushka.
Literary Salvation and Completing Degrees
Dr. Jackson delivers lectures on Victorian literature emphasizing that art and literature serve to alleviate social injustice. You sit weeping in a Berkeley lecture hall after hearing this, making you realize you must abandon the idea of touring as a stripper and pursue graduate school immediately.
Rae and your mother arrive unexpectedly at Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley, promising to send money so you will not have to make yourself sick with work and school. You help D'Or resolve her academic incompletes and enroll in a late French reading class.
To overcome institutional barriers to degree completion, you follow specific administrative steps:
- Order transcripts to identify missing requirements like incompletes and foreign language credits.
- Petition the dean's office for late enrollment in required classes.
- Collaborate on writing papers to make up academic incompletes.
You answer 'Present' during roll call for D'Or's French reading class, helping her secure a grade of B so she could graduate.
12. Graduate School and Academic Leadership
Entering graduate studies at UCLA and advancing into administrative and academic leadership positions laid the groundwork for pioneering multiethnic and feminist scholarship.
UCLA Graduate School Terror and Hiring Discrepancies
You enter the UCLA English graduate program with intense terror and unworthiness, constantly fearing discovery of your supposed ignorance. Aunt Rae pays a cutter for millionaire-style fabric patterns and sews custom clothes so you can appear wealthy and blend in.
By November, you have sixty-three dollars remaining in your name and seventy dollars in monthly rent owed to your landlady. You take a job at the Hollywood Advertiser taking phone advertisements in narrow gray-board cubicles. You work there in the summer of 1962 until you secure a teaching assistantship.
Paula notes that out of sixty English faculty members at UCLA, only two are female, Florence Ridley and Ada Nesbitt. Male graduates from the UCLA English department secure prestigious positions at places like the University of Texas with light teaching loads. Female graduates are hired at regional state colleges like Northridge and Hayward to teach four undergraduate classes per semester.
Feminist Awakening and Department Chair
Reading the March 1970 Newsweek article on women's liberation transforms your isolation into a sense of collective movement. You teach feminist literature and poetry seminars at Fresno State College in 1970, where four women serve in the English department compared to twenty-eight men.
Stepping into departmental leadership allowed you to counter male warrior politics with a calm, institutional approach aimed at advancing women and minorities.
You win the departmental election for chair by a vote of 28 to 4. You secure the unanimous hiring of Judith Rosenthal to replace Ingrid. You become a dean in 1972, consciously wearing a neuter-gendered costume to blend into the somber environment. President Baxter chooses an older Texas administrator for the permanent deanship, and you are offered the position of assistant academic vice president and director of the Experimental College at age 32.
13. New Horizons and Family Building
Gay Studies Resistance and Artificial Insemination
Four years after the Stonewall riots in New York, you attempt to introduce gay studies in the Experimental College at Fresno State. Local colleagues express total ignorance, hostility, or outright panic.
When asking fellow professors if they would consider teaching a gay studies course, one colleague asks where to begin looking for material, another questions what gay has to do with studies, and a female professor hisses and hangs up the phone.
At thirty-three years old, you consult a fertility specialist named Dr. Rich. You undergo an endometrial biopsy, take Clomid, and use a donor profile matching a mesomorphic, light-complected Jewish man with a medical degree to perform artificial insemination.
To maximize success, you apply specific tracking methods:
- Chart basal body temperature daily to track ovulation.
- Undergo an endometrial biopsy to ensure regular ovulation.
- Take fertility drugs such as Clomid if nature needs assistance.
- Perform artificial insemination three times per cycle: at the start, middle, and end.
Family Building and Final Reconciliation
Rabbi Schwartz and his wife Bea provide daily care for baby Avrom at your home. Phyllis and you share parenting duties, leading Phyllis's father to suggest adding the Irwin surname to the child.
Leaving administrative ambitions behind, you turn your research focus toward lesbian literature and history. Prompted by Phyllis's encouragement, you write 'Surpassing the Love of Men', securing bids from major New York publishers like Random House and William Morrow.
During her mother's terminal hospitalization with pneumonia, you repeatedly kiss your mother's face and offer reassuring words. You abandon your aunt's hygienic warnings to restore the intimacy of your childhood before she passes away following three months of chemotherapy treatments.
10 Key Ideas
- Growing up in extreme poverty in the Bronx under the care of an exhausted factory worker mother and affectionate Aunt Rae shaped early resilience before migrating to Los Angeles.
- The psychological shadow of the Holocaust deeply affected the household, forcing the young author to adopt a caretaking role and deploy strict compulsive rituals.
- Pursuing theatrical training at the Theatre Arts Studio provided a path toward professional performance while stirring early same-sex attractions.
- Enlisting a matchmaker to find a husband for her mother introduced various troubled suitors before a stable engagement was reached.
- Seeking out professional environments in cultural hubs independently when local mentorship reached its limit allowed the author to transition to Hollywood through a Geller Theatre scholarship.
- Financial pressures and the pursuit of career entry led into pin-up and nude modeling, exposing hidden dangers and causing family crises upon discovery.
- Exploring underground lesbian bars in Los Angeles provided a vital subcultural community despite police harassment and intense romantic dynamics.
- Entering a front marriage with a psychologist provided a social shield and the freedom to pursue higher education while managing domestic turmoil.
- Balancing exotic dancing and intense university coursework provided the financial means to survive while navigating volatile relationships and pursuing degrees.
- Entering graduate studies at UCLA and advancing into administrative and academic leadership positions laid the groundwork for pioneering multiethnic and feminist scholarship.