He hadn’t felt the urge to cross-dress in a long time. He wasn’t willing to risk that with Elizabeth, nor did he think it necessary. He’d shared this with a girlfriend once, and within a week the woman had insisted he move out. She quickly got over the fact that he’d lied.ĭan never even considered telling Elizabeth his other secret, that for years he’d worn women’s clothing when he was alone at home. Elizabeth was surprised by this revelation, but if that was the secret Dan had been hiding, she could live with it. He wasn’t, he explained, actually the age he’d told her he was when he’d been trying to get hired he was four years younger. Six weeks later, they were driving around looking for wedding venues when Dan pulled the car over and said he had something he needed to tell Elizabeth. “Yeah, we were both a little drunk, too, as I recall.” “We just decided there in the middle of the sidewalk,” Diana says. They agreed that they should spend their lives together while walking home from dinner in the West Village one night.
It was just like that, an epiphany, and that was the moment I knew we’d get married.” “And she’s holding a lamp up to the ceiling to make sure there were no streaks and her glasses were all dotted with paint, and I thought to myself, I think only my father would do this for me. “It started to get dark out,” Elizabeth explains. They’d been dating only a few months when he offered to paint her apartment. “Her consciousness was very raised, and that was important to me,” Elizabeth says, “to be with someone who saw women as equal.” Still, it was Dan’s kindness that ultimately won her over. She had admired Dan’s gender politics, too. Dan was bright, politically liberal, agnostic - all traits Elizabeth sought. The second time, they went to dinner and a movie, and she invited him up to her Manhattan apartment to spend the night.
The first time he asked her out, she turned him down. They got to know each other at work after she hired him. When Elizabeth, who chose not to use her real name in the story, met Dan in the early 1980s, she was in her 30s, successful and self-sufficient. Despite the years, she looks remarkably similar to that pretty young bride, but in her mind, her transformation has been just as dramatic. In many ways, she wishes Dan had never existed at all.Īs Diana talks about her response to these images, Elizabeth stays silent. It’s not that there’s no continuity between that bookish man and the boho-chic woman Diana is now, sitting on a sun-dappled burgundy sofa, thigh to thigh with her wife of almost 33 years it’s that the continuity is uncomfortable, painful even: She’s glad beyond measure that she married Elizabeth that day, but she wishes Dan never did.