Back in the day, I used to visit my sister at college in DC. She’s five years younger than me, and we’re different as sunshine and rain. My college days involved Simpsons and Phish concerts, while hers involved… clubbing. And not the type of clubbing where people offer you little white pills.

It was quite common, on such evenings, for me to be the only legal drinker, and I would gamely swill vodka while fending off heavily-perfumed men. They all wore dress shirts, it seemed, and sweater vests, and medium wash jeans. They would appear out of nowhere, taking form on all sides, and coax you, in a heavily-accented voice, to dance with them. Now, number one, I’m not a great dancer, and, number two, I prefer to dance alone. So I grew quite adept at extricating myself from such would-be advances.

One night, at a bar called Hawk n’ Dove (“It’s a MARINE bar!” squealed my sister, as though this should be meaningful), I was approached by a large, heavily perfumed black man. He asked me if I’d dance.

“No thanks,” I replied, “I’m gay.”

“You WHAT?”

“Gay. Lesbian. Sorry!”

“You mean, you don’t like DICK?”

“Not really. No offense.”

He was so intrigued by the notion that a woman might actually NOT LIKE DICK that we wound up spending a good twenty minutes talking about it – much longer than I would have spent dancing with him. And then, in the end, he asked me if I’d like some cocaine. So maybe my sister’s ‘clubbing’ *was* the kind where people offered you drugs, after all.