“One sort of unexpected thing that came up for me in writing is there’s so much policing of what women, lesbians, queer people wore — and that policing actually became a way of just policing queerness in general,” Possanza says. “Today we have drag bans in certain states. And before those existed — before explicit terminology to ban these things — a lot of it was based on what you wore. And I think the beach was somewhere to be free of that, especially if you found a nude beach, if you could be in the water.”
Possanza did not grow up with many stories about lesbians. But, she says they’re right there, even when the word is not used, even when that part of their story is erased.
“I come from a really nerdy family of readers. My father is a classicist and my mother is a librarian. And I think they very much raised me to believe that if you’re going to have an experience and you’re nervous about it or you don’t know about it, you can go read a book about it,” she says.
It’s easy to find books about transitions that everyone goes through — getting ready for school or moving away from home. Now Possanza’s memoir fills a space long absent from bookshelves.
“I realized that there actually weren’t a lot of stories that I had about lesbians to guide me. And so I think doing this project made me start thinking about what gets you remembered, what generates records,” Possanza says. “You know, prisons generate records, governments generate records. Sometimes being in love doesn’t generate records.”