Selma’s grin was pure sunshine. As we left the store, she whispered, “Did he give you a discount?”

He hadn’t, but I fully support the concept of an L.G.B.T.Q. discount or rebate, especially at Barneys. As my mother might have said, with regard to centuries of discrimination, “It would be a nice gesture.”

Some years ago I had a play being produced in London, and John and I invited Selma to accompany us. She was excited but wary, fretting about, as she put it, “cramping your style.” My mother had read far too many articles on the rowdier nature of certain gay lives, and she would sometimes picture John and me enjoying a nonstop whirlwind of leather dungeons, masturbation societies and drug-fueled circuit parties (and to be honest, my plays, if not my life, occasionally included these activities).

Our London hotel installed my mother in a room right next door to ours, with a connecting door. This terrified Selma, both out of a concern for everyone’s privacy and a fear of what she might accidentally witness. “I will never use that door,” she vowed. “Even if I knock, you don’t have to open it. And I won’t listen!”

Selma’s imagination could get the better of her. John, Selma and I shared a cleaning person, and through a miscommunication Selma decided that John and I had headed off for a week in Cancun, Mexico, a place I’ve still never been to.

My mother mysteriously refused to speak to either John or me for quite a while, until I asked her what was going on. Barely suppressing her outrage, she asked: “So how was Cancun? Why couldn’t you tell me? What were you doing there?”

Despite constant reassurances to the contrary, she still insisted that John and I had fled to Cancun to avoid having lunch with her, or maybe to attend some forbidden international orgy. (I’m not sure how Mexico became implicated, but I should also mention that Selma hated Donald Trump before anyone, rolling her eyes at the news of each of his weddings.)