[The Virgin Dorms of Sarah Lawrence College]

I often think back to college and I am surprised by how much of it feels nightmarish. There was the drugs—I was at my elite liberal arts school at the height of heroin chic—and there was my lack of drive and there were so many bad friends. I wasn’t prepared for a school made up of mostly rich white girls. I had no idea how difficult it would be to fit in and how suburban Los Angeles—a place I always wanted to run away from— would feel universes away.

I first heard of Sarah Lawrence from the only two lesbians I had ever met til I got to Sarah Lawrence: Sasha and Khara, the cool goths of my high school. They were so beautiful with their dyed hair and homemade weird dresses and lace and Converse, and they held hands and thought the rest of us were so basic. We were. I became friends with Sasha when she joined the newspaper staff, where I was Editor-in-Chief, and she told me she dreamed of going to New York just to attend Sarah Lawrence. I kept thinking she was saying Sara Lee and I was confused. I remember looking it up one day and it was apparently known for two things: being the most expensive school in the country and lesbians. Sasha ended up going to UC Santa Cruz, while I ended up at Sarah Lawrence.

I applied on a whim after I got the flyer in the mail: You Are Different, So Are We. I loved this motto. I never forgot how Sasha dreamed of going there—I wanted to be her dream. I didn’t think I’d ever go there because who could afford it, but when the acceptance came, along with it came my generous scholarship package. It would be cheaper than a state school. They were known for creative writing, they were just 30 minutes from New York City, the campus looked magical. It would be my great escape. I would run away to New York and never come back.

As it turns out, decades later, I am still in New York.

Part of the reason I never admitted to anyone was I was curious about exploring my own sexuality. Queerness was in vogue in the Nineties but it was something that troubled me since I was a child. What if I was. I had no idea. No one was really “out” at my high school—Sasha and Khara were just speculations at best—and my whole hometown was very homophobic. So was my family. I had never met a gay person. Not that I knew of.

When I got there I was housed in the main mansion in the main quad: Westlands. It was also knowns as “the Virgin Dorm.” I was not a virgin—just that summer I had had my first boyfriend, a Chicano gangster named Ricky who worked with me the my local bookstore. He never doubted my straightness but being with him made me doubt it the most.

In the first week I met dozens of lesbians. My closed friend Natalya was also a scholarship kid who grew up in the Lower East Side projects and she had a black lesbian girlfriend we used to hang out with late at night in the West Village. She did not doubt my queerness and declared it before I did. I was also friends with Lindsay, a blonde Texan with thick glasses who loved the Beat writers like I did, and she was also sort of queer like me. She became the first girl I made out with, the first night I smoked pot, which I stupidly mixed with red wine. The next morning we both silently washed our wine stained clothes in the laundry room, smoking cigarettes glumly with nothing much to say to each other.

One of my best friends from my hometown, a kid named Andy, came to visit. He was also a lit nerd, and a little punk like me, Slovakian and from a strict household too. He was always running away. He was one year younger than me and so he was coming to visit in some illicit way. He had told me he was in love with me and that he was coming to win me back. I was embarrassed of him. He and Lindsay ended up hooking up which was the end of our friendship and a huge betrayal for me.

Reader, they ended up married and still are, living with their kid in Houston. I don’t talk to either of them.

At Sarah Lawrence we had a thing called the Coming Out Dance, which everyone attended. Everyone was out, so it didn’t make much sense, just another night to celebrate everyone’s ubiquitous queerness. I called myself pansexual then—Natalya taught me that—but it was still hard to deal with there. I remember dreading this dance every year. I now miss it so much.

What was it that made it a struggle at Sarah Lesbian College too? I remember myself in my glasses and Docs walking up the main hill of the quad, trying to escape the leers of the butch aristocracy holding court at the picnic tables. All the cool girls were butch and white. They looked like extras from an Outsiders movie, all in white t-shirts with cigarettes rolled in their sleeves, loose jeans with chains dangling from them, Timberlands or some other tough boots. They didn’t sit with anyone but each other and you could feel them judging you. I had a crush on all of them but would never dare say a word. They were as untouchable as any one of the many rich white girls who made up the school—under all that swagger, that was their real authority. They could own you not by their sexual prowess but by their money. I had nothing to do with that.

In the summers back in Los Angeles, I would suddenly feel relieved to be there. I would be among other poor kids again, kids of color, kids who had to work. I was working at the local Urban Outfitters for money to save up for returning to college. Everyone knew I had changed. I had cut my hair short inspired by Winona Ryder in Alien, and I wore cargo pants and camisoles and had what they used to call an ear project. I had never considered many of my coworkers were lesbians too but suddenly I had the gaydar. One night I slipped a note into the bag of my coworker Gwen, what we used to call a “soft butch.” It was essentially a love letter, in cursive, like something a teen would write except now I was 20. Gwen and I never spoke much about the letter but she’d drive me all around LA with Danzig and Morrissey blasting on the radio and buy me milkshakes and mac’n cheese at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. She was Chicana and smiled and laughed a lot and thought Sarah Lawrence sounded like a psych ward. I felt more comfortable around her than anyone.

Then I’d return back to Sarah Lawrence, soon realizing drugs could make it all bearable. I got pursued by a DC socialite named Hanna. Her parents had worked in the Clinton administration. She wore a black vinyl bodysuit like Catwoman and left giant chocolate rabbits with pouches of cocaine inside their bellies outside my hall door. She would invite me to the Yale Club, where her parents were members, and get me drunk on Chartreuse, all she ever drank. She was very femme and when I kissed her it felt like kissing myself, which I hated. I had to push her out of my room and out of my life until the school made us suitemates my senior year. We both had journalism internships and for years after in New York City we were friends.

Crushes came and left but I always felt the hot stare of the cool campus butches and the feeling that I could never make it with them, that this school was another experiment I failed.

Years later in writing about Sarah Lawrence in my memoir Sick I thought about all this and I wondered why I never cared about coming out. Who would I come out to? My family’s feelings on this didn’t matter to me. My hometown friends would ridicule it but they would not be surprised. I guess the reason I never felt okay in owning queerness was because I was forever trapped in walking up that hill with those butch girls sending me the signal that I wasn’t worth their time, and every other girl that came and went seemed like a fleeting experiment gone wrong.

The Nineties often gets a reputation for being open and accepting and fluid. But you still had to play a part, fulfill a role. Who was an Iranian writer girl going to be if not rich or exceptionally beautiful? If not married, if not one her way to having kids? Who was I going to be but someone who had to create a self for myself.

I remember a few years ago seeing queer teens on Instagram post photos of their mustached faces and hairy legs proudly. I remember being mortified of mine during that era they longed to imitate, my Nineties. I wondered what it would be like for me to be young now, would I be non-binary, gender fluid, what shade of queer would I opt for and who would let me in.

On a dating app, I scroll over shirtless men posing with beer bongs and happy dogs, I also scroll over the same butch girls who long ago looked past me. I still can’t imagine myself with anyone, now at 42. When I was young I had my whole life as a writer planned out and I ended up achieving every dream. What I could not see, no matter how hard I tried was my romantic life. I’d chop the hair off my Barbies, paint their lips purple, pray they could run away to New York City and belong to no one, without wondering what that could really mean—although I’m not sure I’d do it differently even if I did.