Photo by Donna Pollach

I’ve said before that I could never run for office in this country because there are too many naughty photographs of me out there. It’s not true. It’s true that there are those photos, but photos like that can be prominently displayed in the First Lady’s wing of the White House right now, or they could have before it got demolished. You can plump up your lips and paint your face and pose with assault rifles next to the family Christmas tree now, and all it will get you is a cabinet post. Nobody cares. Nobody cares if I’m naked as long as I’m not a naked atheist. I’m not. I am fully clothed these days, in the daytime.

And I have no interest in running for office anyway because I hold to an old-fashioned belief that, as an elected official, I should work hard for the people. I’d rather not. I’m retired. Screw the people. It’s an uphill battle working for the people nowadays, what with all the needy billionaires out there who would be demanding my attention, as an elected official. If the people weren’t smart enough to have money dumped on their heads from birth or acquired through scandalous means, they don’t deserve my attention anyway. I’ll slip a fiver to a homeless lady on the exit ramp and tip big and shovel cash to the public radio station, but the rest of the riffraff are on their own.

There weren’t, all told, all that many naughty photographs. Percentage-wise, yes, but that’s the beauty of growing up pre-digital. If you had to take your film to the drug store and pay to have it developed, you were destined to have photo albums with fifteen photos a year in it. Some of the naughty ones would end up in a shoebox until your parents were safely dead. But they exist.

Photo by Donna Pollach

Recently, though, I was alerted to the fact that there was an exhibit of photographs that dated to the mid-1970s, Portland, Oregon, and I might be in them. They represented a haloed sliver of time during which the women’s movement and the anti-war movement were in full roar, and the gay liberation movement was just getting its Birkenstocks under it. I’d just moved to Portland and a woman I met invited me to be on this new softball team just for women who’d never played sports before—either for lack of opportunity, or lack of any talent whatsoever. Sappho’s Sluggers was coached by a member of the much more talented Lavender Menace team, and I, for one, learned a lot. You can do that when you’re starting at zero. The nascent Portland lesbian community was devoted to teaching women how to do things they’d never learned how to do, so they could be fully independent humans.

The Sappho’s Sluggers experiment was of a piece with that community philosophy of knowledge-sharing. And by gum, we learned how to play positions and back each other up and anticipate plays and the whole works, but we still sucked as a team, and I sucked even harder as a team member. The only thing I was worse at than playing softball was being a lesbian. I was totally open to the idea in my mind, but I discovered the rest of me failed to get on board. Unfortunately, that meant I had to stay in the closet for an uncomfortably long time, at least among my teammates. That’s not good for a person. There are a lot of things, like telling yourself the truth, you need to learn when you’re basically just a kid. Starting near zero.

Also at the Oregon Historical Society

All of which is neither here nor there, and there’s nothing shocking about any of the photographs I’m in, except for one thing.

They’re on display at the Oregon Historical Society.

The Oregon Historical Society.

I understand how this works. World War II was an item of dusty history to me, as a child. It had ended only eight years before I was born. My mother and father both grew up without indoor toilets. All my grandparents were born before 1884. Two of my great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War. It doesn’t even take that much time to be historical. It just takes a little, and it takes forgetting. But know this:

Only a few minutes ago, I was a 23-year-old right fielder.