She took off my blindfold. No one was left except for us.

“Are they going to come back? You tell me who they were!” I knew she wouldn’t tell me. “How can I go out and work or call my friends when I have no idea who was here making love to me?”

Honey gave up nothing. “Did you like your birthday, Susie?”

The next week, I pulled a couple of handwritten envelopes out from among the bills piled in the mailbox. I opened the first one and found a polaroid of my friend Miranda doing something outrageous to my toes, surrounded by seven other busy pairs of hands. “Your feet were divine,” she had written on the border. Similar envelopes followed.

“I wonder how many photographs like this are in circulation?” I said out loud. But O wouldn’t have asked such a thing. She would have written her story in all its detail. And so I did.

SUSIE BRIGHT

on “Story of O Birthday Party”

I wrote this the day after my thirtieth birthday. I’m turning fifty this year. Everything in it is exactly as it took place. There’re some beautiful photographs that accompany the story—too bad this isn’t a picture book! I still don’t know how Honey Lee convinced that cop to do a scene with me. It’s a love story about dykes in San Francisco, and a time when we thought anything was possible.

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