Michele Forsten, writer

Family lore has it that when I was 4 years old, I used to be my grandfather Misha’s little nurse — I knew exactly which pills to give him and when. We lived in the same building, and I’ve been told I spent a lot of time with him. My only personal memory of that time is of standing across the street from a hospital and seeing the faint image of someone at a window high up in the building waving to me. “That’s grandpa!” my mother said to me. And I waved and waved until the person disappeared.

Growing up in Coney Island in the sixties, I had a lot of experience with cars–bumper, also known as scooter –the kind one drives for the sheer pleasure of ramming into others. Lying in bed at night, I could hear the recorded bugle blaring a rabble-rousing tune, drawing people to the Surf Avenue ride two blocks away.

The eight of us sitting around the large round table in the restaurant are as boisterous as any group of women can be. But the unique roll call we perform before even looking at the menu sets

Just weeks after Melissa Etheridge’s public discussion of her breast cancer diagnosis helped put “a lesbian face” on the illness, the November election’s same-sex marriage backlash provided a disappointing setback to the cause of enhancing lesbian access to health care in this country.

It started with the photographs. Whenever I come back from vacation, I use up the unfinished film in my camera on my two 14-year-old cats, BJ and Charlie. This time, when the photos came back, my partner noticed that one of Charlie’s eyes was bloodshot. We shrugged it off to forgetting to use the red-eye setting.

I was what they called “a late bloomer,” so when women were burning their bras in the sixties, I was buying padded ones to stop being called flatchested by the girls in my class. At 16, I was taller and skinnier than any of them, had unruly curly hair while other white girls wore theirs long and straight, and I wasn’t interested in boys. I didn’t need one more thing (no tits) to set me apart.

n October 1987, when Nancy Reagan decided to have a mastectomy instead of a breast conserving lumpectomy, I remember thinking, “once a reactionary, always a reactionary.” Even back then it was clear that there was no survival advantage to having the more disfiguring surgery.

Unlike cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, New York City does not have a lesbian-centered or mainstream organization offering an active cancer support group for lesbians.

Right now, in a town somewhere in America, a young girl is wondering if she’s the only lesbian in the whole world. And right now, in New York City, therapy capital of the world, I, too, wonder if I’m the only one–the only lesbian seeking a lesbian cancer survivor support group.

An Orthodox Jewish doctor and a lesbian feminist patient? It didn’t seem like a great idea to me back in 1996 when I first starting seeing Dr. A., a breast radiologist who specialized in lumpy breasts like mine.