Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar online on 6/29/2022.
The first words Nan McTeer ever said to me were, “I’m currently in hospice care. I have lung cancer, it has metastasized to my brain, but my mind is still okay! You’ve got a while to pump me for information.”
Back in the '50s, Nan had been the girlfriend of a woman named Virginia McManus—a substitute teacher, sex worker, and celebrity, who’d written a tell-all about her life called Not for Love in 1960. Not for Love was the reason I’d called Nan. I’d suspected that Virginia (“Ginny,” as Nan called her) was a lesbian the moment I read her book, but it was a thing I thought I’d never be able to pin down, a message sent in code words and pseudonyms, received 60 years too late…