She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [54]
After she left Fort Worth for Austin and the University of Texas, Tracey began to understand why she felt so distant from other young girls. As a freshman in the mid-seventies, she walked into a salon owned by Alice, a beautiful gay woman. Alice took one look at Tracey and recognized something Tracey hadn’t yet realized about herself—a kinship and a mutual interest.
The next day, Alice sat with a group of friends outside a friend’s rented house near the university. She’d invited Tracey to join them, and when Tracey walked up, it took her a few minutes to realize the attractive, bright women laughing and bantering between each other in lawn chairs were all lesbians. “It was like a light went on,” says Tracey. “It was like suddenly I realized, hey, I’m like they are.”
The other women recognized immediately that Tracey belonged. “She was like a young, handsome Kurt Russell,” says a woman who was part of the clique. “Tracey wasn’t trying to be a boy, it was just the way she was. She seemed to have an overload of testosterone. She had a husky voice, wore khaki pants, Ralph Lauren shirts, and Top-Siders. She carried herself and had the attitude of an adolescent boy, a splash of machismo.” The women soon noticed that Tracey and her mother had a strained relationship. When she talked about her family, Tracey always referred to her mother as Mickey. “It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word mother,” says a friend.
Most of the women were UT students, and it was a time in Austin when gay men and women were coming out, acknowledging their sexuality and looking for others who shared their lifestyle. For a while Tracey lived a double life. Sororities ruled at UT, and Tracey belonged to Kappa Alpha Theta—the Thetas—which boasted girls from the wealthiest families in the state. “We called the gay sorority girls the Tah Tah’s,” says a woman who attended UT. “They were flighty and cute with lots of money.”
One friend, Nancy Pierson, brought Tracey onto her team and taught her to be a goalie in the Austin Soccer League. She’d often tell Tracey that she was good because she was just crazy enough not to worry about getting hurt. “She was a star on the team, strong and athletic,” says a friend.
Looking back, Tracey would say she never regretted coming out, but it did cost her dearly. She was drummed out of her sorority for “consorting with undesirables,” which she translated to mean the clique of women she circulated the gay bars with at night. The day after she was kicked out, she saw a friend on the street, a woman she’d known since camp. Tracey said hello, but the woman walked by without acknowledging her. “That’s the way it works,” she says. “People pretend they don’t know you.”
In the rush of coming out, Tracey flitted from one relationship to another. While many of the women preferred to look androgynous, Tracey liked feminine lovers. “Tracey was a cute young thing, butch. She was into girlie girls,” says a friend. “She liked them with curves, hips, and in dresses.”
It was a fluid and lighthearted time in Austin’s gay community, after centuries of living in the shadows and before the devastation of AIDS. “We weren’t coming out making a statement. We didn’t care,” says Becky Odom, an artist and one of the original group. “People experimented, multiple partners, wild scenes. It was just the way it was.”
Despite the new freedom, there was still an undercurrent of pain, of not fitting in, that many within the community didn’t even like to acknowledge. “It’s tough being gay. Most people wouldn’t willingly put themselves outside the norm,” says Odom. “We had a lot of abuse in the community, drugs and alcohol.”
For Tracey, it was alcohol. And when she drank,