“What do you mean, no?” Celia said.
“You’re not going down there,” John said. “You can’t. None of us can.”
“Of course I can,” she said, looking to me to back her up.
“Sorry,” I said, giving her the cigarette back. “I’m with John on this.”
“Harry?” she said, hoping to make one final successful plea.
Harry shook his head. “We go down there, all we do is attract attention away from the cause and toward us. The story becomes about whether we’re homosexuals and not about the rights of homosexuals.”
Celia put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled. She had a sour look on her face as she blew the smoke into the air. “So what do we do, then? We can’t sit here and do nothing. We can’t let them fight our fight for us.”
“We give them what we have and they don’t,” Harry said.
“Money,” I said, following his train of thought.
John nodded. “I’ll call Peter. He’ll know how we can fund them. He’ll know who needs resources.”
“We should have been doing that all along,” Harry said. “So let’s just do it from now on. No matter what happens tonight. No matter what course this fight takes. Let’s just decide here and now that our job is to fund.”
“I’m in,” I said.
“Yeah.” John nodded. “Of course.”
“OK,” Celia said. “If you’re sure that’s the way we can do the most good.”
“It is,” Harry said. “I’m sure of it.”
We started filtering money privately that day, and I’ve continued to do so the rest of my life.
In the pursuit of a great cause, I think people can be of service in a number of different ways. I always felt that my way was to make a lot of money and then channel it to the groups that needed it. It’s a bit self-serving, that logic. I know that. But because of who I was, because of the sacrifices I made to hide parts of myself, I was able to give more money than most people ever see in their entire lifetime. I am proud of that.
But it does not mean I wasn’t conflicted. And of course, a lot of the time, that ambivalence was even more personal than it was political.
I knew it was imperative that I hide, and yet I did not believe I should have to. But accepting that something is true isn’t the same as thinking that it is just.
Celia won her second Oscar in 1970, for her role as a woman who cross-dresses to serve as a World War I soldier in the film Our Men.
I could not be in Los Angeles with her that night, because I was shooting Jade Diamond in Miami. I was playing a prostitute living in the same apartment as a drunk. But Celia and I both knew that even if I had been free as a bird, I could not go to the Academy Awards on her arm.
That evening, Celia called me after she was home from the ceremony and all the parties.
I screamed into the phone. I was so happy for her. “You’ve done it,” I said. “Twice now you’ve done it!”
“Can you believe it?” she said. “Two of them.”
“You deserve them. The whole world should be giving you an Oscar every day, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I wish you were here,” she said petulantly. I could tell she’d been drinking. I would have been drinking, too, if I’d been in her position. But I was irritated that she had to make things so difficult. I wanted to be there. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she know that I couldn’t be there? And that it killed me? Why did it always have to be about what all of this felt like for her?
“I wish I was, too,” I told her. “But it’s better this way. You know that.”
“Ah, yes. So that people won’t know you’re a lesbian.”
I hated being called a lesbian. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with loving a woman, mind you. No, I’d come to terms with that a long time ago. But Celia only saw things in black and white. She liked women and only women. And I liked her. And so she often denied the rest of me.
She liked to ignore the fact that I had truly loved Don Adler once. She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.
People were just starting to talk about the idea of bisexuality, but I’m not sure I even understood that the word referred to me then. I wasn’t interested in finding a label for what I already knew. I loved men. I loved Celia. I was OK with that.
“Celia, stop it. I’m sick of this conversation. You’re being a brat.”