I watched her closely as she spoke and studied her — her innocence, her enthusiasm, her curiosity. I was falling in love with each gesture and utterance. I watched her full lips as they surrounded her words, and her strange laughter that broke out into a loud cackle. I wanted to put my face next to hers and feel her soft cheek against mine. I never expected or hoped for anything more than a renewed friendship, and I was just so happy that we reconnected.
In 1979, George Segal, the famous Pop artist, was commissioned to create a sculpture to commemorate New York City’s Stonewall uprising in 1969 — the seminal (although not the only) event to kick-start the gay liberation movement. The bronze sculpture, covered with a white patina, was finally unveiled in Christopher Park in Greenwich Village in 1992, after years of controversy. It depicts a life-size male couple standing a few feet away from another life-size female couple sitting on a park bench. Beth Suskin, my partner of 35 years, and I, Leslie Cohen, were the models for this sculpture. This is our love story.
One night, during a particularly volatile outburst, he pinned her on the floor while shaking his finger threateningly in her face and shouting at her to “Shut up.” At that frightening moment something finally clicked. While he was at work the next day, she packed one small suitcase and left.
Beth has since told me, even though I suspected it back then, that when she was with me it was the only time she did not think about Lance. She was socially uncomfortable, a loner of sorts who did not have many friends, but, she said, when she was with me she felt safe and calm. The problem was that she wanted to be only with me and did not want any of my other friends around. I remember one night lying down together on my dorm bed. Beth was spooning me from behind and playing with the back of my hair. She said it reminded her of Lance’s hair. I remember feeling awkward and uneasy — a bit frightened. Beth was sexually precocious, having been with Lance since age 13. It came very naturally to her, and, frankly, I was afraid of what she might do. Nothing happened, but I remember it clearly.
It seems we did not talk to each other very much, because we can’t remember any of our conversations, but we definitely communicated through other means, especially music. Beth had sung professionally in high school and was well known on Long Island as the lead singer of a group called the Valiants. They played the beach clubs and even had an invitation to play at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. I had won “best dancer” in my high school and reveled in the attention I received from dancing in college. So music was our way of being intimate.
Beth Suskin; Leslie Cohen Plastered Segal casting his subjects in his New Jersey studio, 1979.
After my love affair with Suri ended, I no longer felt shame about being a lesbian. Accepting my sexuality helped unleash me from society’s constraints of gender and role playing. I was ready to direct my own life. Making up for lost time, I took lovers, both male and female, while I pursued my career in the art world. Overextended, I decided to settle down with one of my lovers, Michelle Florea, or rather Michelle decided to move in with me. Michelle lived at 120 miles an hour and, as they say, could sell ice in winter. Before I could give it too much thought, her clothes were hanging in my closet.
August 1965. My mother and my friend Lois have accompanied me on the 400-mile drive from Bayside, Queens, to Buffalo State, a teacher’s college, where I am to begin my freshman year. After we unpack and settle in, we decide to explore the campus. As we walk past room after room, my mother suddenly stops at an open door. Uh, oh. Her Jewdar has picked up familiar accents. Before I can stop her, she sticks her head into the doorway. Beth’s parents look up from the large trunk they are unpacking. Beth is preoccupied — giving instructions. My mother greets them as if they were long lost cousins, and we begin sharing our information. “Where are you from?” “N.Y. — Queens — and you?” “Hewlett Harbor.” “Oh, really?! Did you just arrive?” “Yes.” “Is Beth a freshman too?” “Yes.” “Oh, maybe you two can be friends,” my mother says. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” I self-consciously look at Beth and see that she is beautiful — way beyond ordinary beautiful. She is elegant, like Catherine Deneuve. We smile. “I’m sure I’ll see you on campus,” I say. And we move on. She was the first freshman I met at Buffalo State.
We did not speak over the summer break. During the first semester of our sophomore year I would occasionally see her in the halls, and my heart would feel heavy. It was difficult because I missed her and, even worse, I knew she missed me and she had no one else that she related to or wanted to be with. In the brief moment our eyes would meet I could see her confusion, her questioning look as if she were asking what happened to us. What did I do? It was sad because our youth and immaturity left us too unprepared for an explanation of what had transpired between us.
Dotty had told Beth that I was gay, and gradually she started asking me questions about my sexuality. Her curiosity intrigued me. What is it about women that you like? I answered, “Their skin — the softness of their skin.” I heard my friend Ellen in the background say, “You never told us that.” “You never asked,” I responded.
Beth told me that she had transferred to Hofstra because she was lonely for Lance. In spite of everything, she was obsessed with him. She mistook his pathological possessiveness for love and caring. She really believed in her mind that she was going to change him, and they married in 1967. Instead, her life became worse. His paranoia increased, and his possessiveness and emotional abuse became more acute. In defense, she shut down, her social phobia magnified, and she withdrew from the world. She spent the next six years basically in bed. She became agoraphobic, isolated and deeply depressed.
It was our unrealized attraction for each other that created that elusive, charged atmosphere, but back in 1965 we did not have a clue. Not only was I sexually naïve and totally inexperienced, but “gay” was also not on the radar screen. It was not discussed or acknowledged by anyone in the media or elsewhere. Even if I wondered about myself at times, it was summarily shoved back into the “do not touch” recesses of my mind. So Beth and I played together unaware of what was really transpiring between us.
After the party, Carlo and Harriet invited me back to their tiny studio on Charles Street for a glass of wine. With only a double bed against the wall and a flattened beanbag chair, I had no choice but to sit on the edge of the bed. Carlo lay down on the bed beside me and made himself comfortable. Harriet poured us a glass of wine, put on an exquisite album of Argentine mass music, “Misa Criolla,” and climbed onto the bed on the other side of Carlo. We talked for a while, and then Harriet got up to go to the bathroom. Carlo suggested I make myself more comfortable. I felt awkward but I convinced myself that he was just trying to be cordial, so I leaned against the wall with my legs dangling off the side of the bed. As more time passed, I wondered if anything was wrong with Harriet when finally I heard the bathroom door open and saw Harriet standing there stark naked, her eyes locked on mine. I turned away, jarred by the sight of her. My mind resembled a television screen that suddenly loses its picture and is filled instead with noisy static. What was going on? My mind raced. Then Harriet lay down, leaned over Carlo and took my hand. My body went stiff like a board. I could barely breathe. Finally, I said, “Look scarpe nike, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I think I have to leave. I’m sorry.” By the time I made it downstairs and into my car, I was screaming in the dark, like a valve that was opened to let the steam escape.
Suddenly, it was 1968 — that watershed year that caused a planetary shift. We mourned the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Vietnam radicalized us, and mind-altering drugs were changing our consciousness, making it easy to test the new cultural realities. I remember going to SUNY Buffalo one night to see a rock band called the MC5. They were from a commune in Michigan. The university gym was packed with more than a thousand students, many tripping on LSD. The band looked like wild animals on acid. Their barefoot girlfriends, with dresses to the floor and blue-white complexions from ingesting too much psilocybin, swayed hypnotically onstage to the deafening music. One of the band members started bellowing orders at the audience: “I want you to hold hands,” and astonishingly we did. “Now,” he continued, “I want all of you to take a deep breath in. . . .” and again we did as we were told. “Now exhale,” he yelled. “Now inhale.” Long pause. Exhale, inhale, over and over again until the large gymnasium started to sway in a kind of hallucinatory daze. It went on and on for what seemed like an eternity until someone threw a chair in the air and immediately others followed. Chaos descended, with chairs flying and crashing against the bleachers. I saw one young man get hit in the head by a flying chair, and blood began to pour down his forehead. Shockingly, the spell was broken. And the world as we had known it had irrefutably changed.
In 1974, I was working as a curator at the New York Cultural Center. I met dozens of famous artists, writers and rich people who lived in fancy Park Avenue apartments. I say this only because it made the contrast between the other part of my life even more apparent. My friends (who were eventually my partners in Sahara) and I were going out to girl bars that were seamy, run-down, often mafia-owned joints that lacked any semblance of style whatsoever, a holdover from when homosexuality was considered abnormal and criminal. Here we were — young, hip, well educated — feminist and post-Stonewall gay. What were we doing in these clubs?
Beth was also running away from home. She was trying to free herself from her boyfriend, Lance, whom she fell madly in love with at the ripe age of 13. His love was all encompassing, controlling and crazy possessive. Beth decided to go away to college, at her parents’ urging, to see if she could live without him.
Sahara closed after three and a half years. It represented a paradigm shift — a time when women took control of their destinies. It was against this backdrop that Beth and I fell madly and blissfully in love. I remained in the nightclub business for many years; Beth became a successful singer but decided to give it up a second time when it required her to be on the road away from me. In our 40s, we both went back to school. I became a lawyer, and she became a social worker. So that’s the story: two women sitting on a park bench who really love each other.
The second semester I went abroad to study in Italy. When I returned, Beth was gone. She had moved back to the city and was attending college on Long Island. I would not see her or speak to her again for 10 years.
One night, John took me to his friends’ downtown loft on Canal Street. I had brought a bunch of peacock feathers, commonly sold around the city at the time, as a gift. (Calla lilies would have been much more their style, but how was I to know — I was so wet behind the ears, I was leaving puddles at my feet.) David (who is one of the standing male figures in the Segal sculpture) was an artist and Manuel was an assistant at the Sidney Janis gallery, which represented some of the leading artists of the time: Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, George Segal. Their gatherings usually included someone I had heard of or read about. That night, Marisol and Teeny Duchamp, the widow of the great Marcel, were sitting on a couch across from me. Here I was, the borough bumpkin, trying very hard not to let my total lack of sophistication show. I was filled with wonderment and intimidated at the same time, but David and Manuel took me in and I became part of their circle of friends. Clearly, my life was beginning to change.
It was my first love affair — intensely passionate and emotionally eruptive. It was the romantic love I had always looked for but that had eluded me for all those years. Now it was my turn, and love poured out of me like a broken spigot. But after about three months, when we had to find another sublet, Suri told me that she wanted to find her own place. I did not understand. I thought she loved me. But I guess not enough to be in a lesbian relationship.
We became close friends, and yet our friendship ended abruptly after freshman year. To understand why requires some background information. When I went away to college I was, in a sense, running away from home. Like a battle-fatigued soldier who served back-to-back tours, I needed a long leave. My mother and father had been at war since I was about 12 years old. At least that is when I became aware that my parents’ marriage, which had always been volatile, was disintegrating. (Before that, I was too young to know better.)
When the women entered the club for the first time, they gasped. Sahara was housed in a two-story building. On the first floor was the cocktail lounge with sleek Italian sectionals facing a bar and a small stage in the back. On the second floor was another bar and the dance floor. Fantastic contemporary art by women hung on the walls, groundbreaking in itself since women artists, with the exception of a few well-established ones like Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson, had little opportunity then to show their work. Pat Benatar was our most frequent performer. We threw fund-raisers for politicians, and everyone from Patti Smith to Jane Fonda appeared at Sahara on one occasion or another. It was a heady stew.
We lasted three years, and when it ended, so did my faith in everlasting love. But one great thing came out of our friendship: our idea to open a club for women. We teamed up with two of our closest friends — another couple, Barbara Russo and Linda Goldfarb — and opened Sahara in May 1976. But more on that later.
Upon graduation, I moved back home to study art history at Queens College. I read about Surrealism and Dada and fantasized living that kind of life, out of the norm, daring and irreverent. One night in 1971, a fellow grad student, Harriet, invited me to go with her and her Swiss boyfriend, Carlo, to a party in a penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue. This was very alluring to a girl from Queens. I rarely went to the city, and it sounded so sophisticated and urbane.
For me, that first year at college was joyous. I felt like confetti on New Year’s Eve. I was totally carefree and elated. I danced all the time. I was full of mischief and life. I was on my own. And, of course, there was Beth. Ours was an unusual friendship, different from the rest — it was loving, deep and fun, but it was also mysterious and confusing. When we were together, we did not socialize with other friends. We spent our time alone. Yet when we were together it was strange and wonderful. It was like the air currents around us slowed down, became electrified. Everything we did together had this otherworldly charge to it, like we were in some sort of radioactive bubble.
In the days that followed, I was totally absorbed with what had happened and my reaction. I had been tempted with a key to my sexual freedom, and somewhere deep inside me I knew that by discovering that, other doors would open — both good and bad. I thought about how fear had contained me in my life and I felt like a coward. Was I all talk — what was I so afraid of? Wasn’t I ready to start living life on my own terms? When I saw Harriet at school, we made plans to get together again and this time I would not run away.
Four women opening a club for women was unheard of at the time. The State Liquor Authority made my mother and brother sign affidavits stating that I wasn’t a hooker or a front for the mafia. After many trials and tribulations, Sahara opened in May 1976 on Second Avenue and East 65th Street — a very visible, out-of-the-closet location. No more hiding for us. “A club created by women for women” was what our opening invitation read.
Harriet asked me if I wanted to stay in her apartment while she and Carlo were in Europe, and I jumped at the opportunity. I was ecstatic about living in the city. As it turned out scarpe nike, another art history student from Queens College, John, lived a few blocks away on Cornelia Street, and we started to meet up regularly. John revealed that he was gay, and I told him about Harriet — I still rationalized that I was straight, that I had had a lesbian experience — and we became immediate cohorts. We were the perfect culture vulture team. New York was the art capital of the world, and I could not get enough.
When Harriet returned from Europe, I sublet an apartment in a six-story walk-up on East 69th Street. It was the summer of 1971. I slept in the tiny bedroom, and my roommate, Suri, slept in the living room on a couch. One night, during a long discussion about life and love scarpe nike, she started to talk about sex and “bisexuality.” As she talked, I became more and more uncomfortable. “Stay calm,” I told myself. “If she thinks that you’re a lesbian, she’ll be uneasy about sharing the apartment with you.” But when she asked me directly if I had ever slept with a woman, I grudgingly told her I just recently had an “experience.” She said she would like to have that “experience” too.
Three weeks before Sahara was to open, my college friend Dotty called from her showroom in the garment center. “You’re not going to believe who’s here with me right now,” she said. “Who?” I asked. “Beth Suskin. She came in for a job interview and I hired her!” Beth got on the telephone, and after a brief and excited conversation, we decided to have a get-together at my apartment with other college friends. When the day arrived, Beth and I, having not seen each other for 10 years, became so immediately focused on each other it was as if no one else were present.
Leslie Cohen Heads last The nearly finished sculpture in Segal’s studio, 1979.
I loved her. I loved her unique sense of humor and her creative metaphors. She was poetic and theatrical. I loved her talent and her beauty. But it was her depression, her isolation, her need to be alone with me that ultimately drove me away from her after that first year in college. I longed for freedom, joy and happiness and to be surrounded by friends. I had had enough darkness before I escaped to college, and I did not want to go back there. So I pulled away.
George Segal Source material The author and her companion, Beth Suskin, posing for Segal in 1979.
Stefan Ruiz Permanent residents George Segal’s sculpture commemorating the 1969 Stonewall uprising was installed in the Village in 1992.
Rilke wrote, “Love consists of this — that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
After 1968, everything about our parents’ values was questioned and challenged, the first wave of a tsunami washing away established ways of thinking about who we were and who we should become. We could no longer travel the pathways previously constructed for us. It left too many of us out.
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