Alice

The following is an interview that appeared on the now defunct Technodyke website. 

Out in the western U.S. lives a legend among women drummers. Her name is Alice de Buhr and she was the drummer for Fanny, the first all-woman band to be signed to a major record label. After my interview with June Millington, I was fortunate enough to find a way to contact Alice. I emailed her and asked if she would be willing to do a telephone interview with me. She agreed to the interview and one November day last year, we spoke about her life before, during, and after being a part of this legendary band as well as what it was like to be a lesbian during that time. This is what she had to say.

Technodyke: So, why don’t we talk about your early life before you joined Fanny?

Alice: It’s pretty boring stuff, but I can do it. It’s not a problem. I was born and raised in Mason City, Iowa, the youngest of four children. I left home after high school and headed to California in 1967…I moved to Sacramento…and saw an ad in a music store looking for a female drummer, and I called and it was June and Jean, the band The Sveltes, and their little sister took the message and it got lost. So I spent that summer cleaning apartments and selling vacuum cleaners, and I joined a boys’ band and did some gigs around Sacramento. June and Jean had gone to Canada on a tour, during which time they went through five drummers. They got home and somehow connected, found the message, whatever, anyway, we connected and I auditioned and got the job as it were. We played some gigs around Sacramento, and then they had a gig set up in Portland at a place called Dantina’s Lounge. We did five sets a night. Horrible job, horrible gig. I’m not sure if it was real quickly after that but we broke up. Addie, the lead guitar player and I, started a band called Wild Honey, and June and Jean continued with the band The Sveltes. Wild Honey stayed up in the northwest. We went to the Midwest for a little while. But in less than a year, we got back together again under the name Wild Honey. That’s the band that went to LA and did “Hoot Night” at the Troubadour, and did another gig at the Experience on Sunset. Richard Perry called us in to play for him, and he signed us to Reprise, and the rest is pretty much history.

TD: Where had you learned to play drums? Was that in high school?

A: No, I started in second grade. The choir master at my church, I was in junior choir, apparently felt I had a sense of rhythm or something. They had a shortage of drummers in the school band. Band was a really big deal in Iowa. He called my mom and asked her if I wanted to learn how to play drums. I remember I was playing outside on the jungle gym. My mom stuck her head out the window and said, “Alice, do you want to learn how to play drums?” I said, “Sure, okay, fine.” So I started in school then, and I went all through high school. I started a girls’ band in Iowa in my junior year called The Women. There were five of us. Then the two girls that were seniors went away to school, and we became a trio. As the trio, we played weekends. We used to play in East Dubuque, Iowa in the bars because Dubuque, I mean East Dubuque, Illinois, because Dubuque, Iowa is dry. So everybody would come across the bridge on Friday and Saturday night and get loaded. We played in one of the bars there, and then we would go home and go back to school on Monday…that was Iowa.

TD: It’s my understanding that even before you got to California and joined Fanny, you knew what your sexual orientation was.

A: Well yeah, I came out when I was a senior in high school. It was pretty traumatic. The woman was an older woman who had children. She managed our rock band. She went to California, after I had a nervous breakdown. I think it was in large part due to the fact of being in a small town and the fear of being different. I didn’t know, I felt dirty. I felt that there was something really, really wrong with me back in, this was ’67. I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the pressure. The woman said, “Come to California with me” and I said no. She threatened to kill herself, and I just fell apart. It was pretty ugly. I spent some time in a hospital and left home the day after I got out of the hospital. She had come back from California and picked me up, and with my mother’s blessings. She said, “Okay, I’ll be here for you if you need me”. She has been all my life, my whole family has. On one hand, I think I’m very fortunate to have come out at such an early age, because I have had the support of my family. They don’t always understand my life or the circumstances surrounding some of the discrimination that I encounter, but I have had their support. So that was a blessing.

TD: When you joined The Sveltes (which later became Fanny), did you pretty much tell the group, right off the bat, “Hey I’m a lesbian”?

A: No, I don’t remember ever saying anything to them, but they knew that my partner was my partner. They knew, and they didn’t want her around. They said that they wanted me in the band, but they didn’t want her to come to the gigs. So when we left Sacramento to go to Portland, we were all under the impression that I was going alone, and my partner was staying in Sacramento. I got a phone call a couple of weeks later from my partner saying, “I’m on my way, I’m half way there”, and it created quite a bit of problems with the band, which is one of the reasons why we split up.

TD: So, all of you started this group that became historic. Even though there were a lot of girl groups around, Fanny were the first one to be signed to a major label. Did you and the others feel a lot of pressure at that time being the first, all-female group to be signed to a major label?

A: No, I didn’t feel that kind of pressure. I think June may have. Drumming came naturally to me, so it wasn’t something that I really felt I had to work at. It was an absolute joy. I loved it. I mean, there’s no feeling in the world like playing drums. But we signed the deal and we started recording, and that was just kind of it. I didn’t feel like, oh we’re the first ones to sign a deal and we’ve got to be good at all. We got some pressure from women’s lib organizations to do concerts and come out and speak for women’s rights, and we said, “Listen, what better job can we do for the movement but do it. We’re here, we’re playing, and we’re in a man’s world.” That was the only pressure that I remember was from the women’s movement.

TD: When Fanny signed to Reprise, there was a fifth member on percussion, am I right?

A: No, there was not. There was just the four of us.

TD: Okay, I was thinking of the picture I saw with Brie (Berry).

A: No, Brie came down after we had gotten the recording contract. The weakest part of Fanny was always the vocals. We did not have real strong vocals. Brie had a killer voice. She came down to LA to sing with us. I don’t remember Brie ever really being “a member of the band.” I think we talked about it, and we tossed the idea around, and she sang with us, and she did play percussion, tambourine and stuff. She didn’t play like full percussion, congas and cymbals and all that stuff. Although June probably would have loved that. Then it was either her husband said, “No, we gotta go, this isn’t right”, or Richard Perry said, “No, we need to keep it a four-piece band, modeling it after the Beatles”. I don’t remember exactly how it ended, but I remember Brie vaguely being a part of the rehearsals in the basement. I don’t even know if she ever did gigs with us. We played some gigs around LA under a different name so that people wouldn’t know we were Fanny, but I don’t know that she even did that. I think her time with Fanny was pretty short, but I could be wrong. I’m not sure.

TD: So the first album was released. What was the response that the group got initially from audiences and radio? I know there was not a “big hit” off the album, but “Badge” got played a lot.

A: Audiences liked us a lot. When they saw us play live, they liked us. The radio, Warner Brothers promotion people, they didn’t know how to promote us. They didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t know how much to play on the gimmick part of it, All girls, Rock and Roll. They couldn’t just say, “Hey, it’s a band”. They tried to say, “Hey it’s a band of girls”. I don’t think that they were able to separate the sexual politics of the ’70s. I don’t think they were able to take that out of it at all. When I quit, I still had people that laughed at Fanny when I went to work in the record industry. They didn’t know who I was and Fanny would come on and they’d say, “Yeah, girls right there playing. Right. Who were the studio musicians on the album?”, which burned me up, but it also made me stay very quiet about having been in the band.

TD: The impression that I got was that some people almost thought of Fanny as being like a live action Josie and the Pussycats, or the Monkees, or something. Was it just because it was an all-woman group, or the promotion, or what?

A: I really couldn’t tell you. I think that all of those pieces played a part in it. They always talk about being at the right place at the right time. I think we were ten years ahead of our time. Musically, I think we were a real hot band. Again, I think our vocals were a little weak. I think that when I listen back to those old albums, that it’s a lot more vanilla sounding than we were. I think Richard Perry on one hand worked miracles, and on the other hand took the raw edge away from us that I think was attractive. I mean, it kind of homogenized it.

TD: The impression that I got from listening to some of the live recordings on the set, it almost sounded like he sweetened the sound, whereas live, you girls kicked ass.

A: Yeah. Richard did sweeten the sound. That was his trademark. I mean, if you look at any of the things that he did in those days, the Ella Fitzgerald and Streisand and the Pointer Sisters later on, I mean always big heavy strings. To me a good producer is a producer that takes the sound that you have and tries to duplicate the reality as best he can. Instead of trying to make it a Richard Perry production, it should have been a Fanny production. It should not have been so sweet.

TD: Did any of you feel that you knew enough that maybe you could have produced some of the stuff yourselves?

A: Not in the beginning. In the beginning, I think that we were really naive. We were young. We really did not grasp all of the intricacies that we could have done that, made changes, and I think June in particular probably. June and Nickey both later on would have loved to be a part of the mixing and producing ourselves. I don’t know why we were never allowed to produce our own album, except for the fact that June and Nickey didn’t get along, and maybe that could have been a little difficult. But with a mediator maybe? I don’t know. It’s interesting. In today’s music, everybody’s producing their own albums, but even back in the ’80s and ’90s when I was still in the record industry, you’d have so many albums and then you’d produce your own album. Fanny was never given that privilege.

TD: But then again, Fanny was kind of like the forerunners for everybody else.

A: For women, yeah.

TD: The album was Charity Ball, and from that album Fanny had sort of a Top 40 hit with the title track, right? Did that kind of help the group? Did that increase your popularity; make people more aware of you?

A: I think it made people more aware of us in certain pockets of the United States. We had a number one hit in Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C. In those markets, we were very well received, but you go 500 miles down the road, and they haven’t heard of you. The United States was just too big. We were very big in England. People welcomed us with open arms in England. We had fans that followed us around the country, and we had a lot of press. It was a whole other thing. It felt like, you really felt like you were a rock star in England. In the United States, it was not like that at all. It just too spread out for any of the headway that we made with Charity Ball to really last, to really matter. We never did get extensive air play, and that’s what would have made the difference.

TD: OK, and for that album, Candice Bergen took the picture of you all for it, didn’t she?

A: Yes, Candice Bergen took the pictures, and the dresses were from My Fair Lady. You should have seen the dressing room, “I have to wear this? What?”

TD: You had the really long hair at the time. It looks like it went down almost to your butt, if I remember the picture correctly.

A: Yeah, I sat on it at times. It was great hair. It was beautiful hair, but I hid behind it. And eventually I got to the point where I really wanted to cut it, and management didn’t want me to cut it. It took a year of negotiations back and forth. Finally, I just went and got it cut, and they got all upset. So they tried to figure out a way to try to make me stand out as much as the long hair had, falling around and catching it in my drumsticks and what have you. So they made be streak it, and I looked like Leon Russell for a little while. That wasn’t enough, so then they gave me a perm and colored it…I looked like a curly copper penny. I hated it. I just hated it.

TD: I remember there’s a quote in the booklet about somebody who went to see you play and was constantly amazed that you didn’t trap your hair more in the drumsticks and the pedals and stuff like that.

A: Yeah. Management loved that. I think they had erotic fantasies or something.

TD: You were talking earlier about the response that you all were getting from fans in England — is that part of what prompted you all to go to England to record the third album, Fanny Hill?

A: I think that management probably thought, you know, recording the album at Apple would be, you know, such a big coup and it would really help with fans in the United States, “Oh hey, they recorded at Apple”. It was more of a publicity thing than anything I think. And also to trade on that Beatle mystique. If you can attach yourself somehow to that band and use it, I think it was definitely a ploy by management, aside from the fact that it was an excellent place to record.

TD: So, the group was in England for several months?

A: Yeah. We were in England a number of times. I think we did three tours there, two or three tours. Fanny Hill was recorded very quickly. We recorded the album in less than a month, 21 days or something like that.

TD: Well I have something here that I got this off of eBay. It’s an English music news thing called Disc. And the centerfold was a poster of Fanny. Well, actually it’s a poster of Jean. And there is an article by a guy named Brian Southhall who followed Fanny around Germany for a couple of days. And it seems, based on the way it reads, that you were the one he talked to the most.

A: Could be. You know drummers, never in the spotlight, always with the mouth.

TD: But he’s talking about a night in Hamburg, Germany, whenever all of you went out to the club. He sat with you because, according to this, you were the only smoker in the band. And that he sat talking with you and how, whenever Fanny was touring Europe, pretty much all of you had a chaperone?

A: Oh yeah. We didn’t go anywhere without managers. We never were allowed. I don’t think that anybody really chafed at that until later, at least for the first couple of albums. It didn’t matter if it was in Europe or the United States. One night I wanted to go out after a gig in Boston, and the road manager went with me. Yeah. Like what, I can’t take care of myself? “Well, you know, you might get lost. Something might happen”. So we did, we had chaperones.

TD: There was one other question based on that article by Brian Southhall. He’s talking to you, and it’s the part about the manager who always watched out for you all.

A: Mark, yeah.

TD: Yeah. It says “in the club in Germany, Alice stayed on determined to get in at least one more dance before being led off to her hotel.” And then you’re quoted as saying “I’m always the one who keeps Mark out til four or five sometimes. The only time he let me go out unchaperoned was with Mick Jagger.” And then he adds “She related no more of that tale.”

A: It was a funny night. It was, I believe, after a gig, I’m not sure if it was or not. But June and Bobby Keys, the saxophone player, and Mick Jagger and I went back to Bobby Keys flat and got stoned and sat up talking all night.

TD: So what was Jagger like back then?

A: He was very sweet. He’s a nice guy.

TD: Oh, so he didn’t try to hit on you like his reputation always says?

A: If he hit on me, I was so stoned that I didn’t notice it, you know. We were talking music, and I do remember that June and Bobby Keys, we were all four together the whole time. They wanted to go out to breakfast, and I was just really loaded and said, “You’ve got to take me back to the hotel.” They did, no problem. I think Jagger even asked June if he had done something to upset me, you know, offend me, and no he hadn’t. I was just really loaded.

TD: So was Jagger a fan of the group?

A: I think maybe he was curious as to who we were and what we were about, you know.

TD: Because I know that David Bowie was a fan of the group.

A: David Bowie was a fan of the group. One thing I should mention…The going out and dancing and keeping Mark out until four o’clock in the morning. Totally untrue. I was trying to make myself sound like I was a real party girl. Hah. Not, not, not, not, not.

TD: Now, at some point during one of your English sojourns the group did some recording at Mayfair Studio and you’re listed as producer. Tell us about those sessions.

A: Well, there was a guy that connected with me, and I don’t know how he connected with me, and I don’t know where he came from, I don’t remember his name. I remember vaguely him being kind of short with blondish hair, kind of cute, and he had a studio, and he either wanted to be our engineer or he wanted to promote his studio or something, and said, “Come and play, jam, record. I’ll record it free. Just come have a good time.” And that’s what we did. We got really loaded and just played and played, and the next day I went back and mixed it down. That’s why I was given credit for producing. I didn’t really actually produce it. It was just us jamming, and nobody else wanted to go back and mix it.

TD: I understand that you’re the one that hung onto those and some of the other previously unreleased recordings in the new box set, am I correct?

A: Correct. I’ve been traveling around with a box of reel-to-reel tapes for the last 30 years.

TD: Out of curiosity, how did you become the repository of all this?

A: I’m a Virgo. And a pack rat, and unlike June, when I quit Fanny, it wasn’t with “I hate Fanny, I will never talk about Fanny, I will never play rock and roll again as long as I live.” I kept the music, I kept a box of memorabilia and stuff, ‘cause it was an important part of my life. I thought maybe someday I’d get my reel-to-reel deck out and play the tapes and then it got to be so many years that I was afraid to play them, that the magnetic would fall off and ruin the tapes. So I sent them in when Mike Johnson from Rhino contacted me, and we started talking about doing this Fanny set which is in concept more of an archival attempt than anything. I said, “Well, I have these tapes,” and he said, “Oh man, it would be great if you’d send them,” and I said, “You know, that makes me really nervous. I’m not really sure I trust you guys to be really who you are and what you’re doing and that I’ll get them back. I don’t have copies. It is one-of-a-kind stuff.” So I took a leap of faith and sent them my tapes, and they used what they could and sent them back to me.

TD: Is there other stuff in there that might see the light of day someday, or did they use all that was feasible to use?

A: There’s other stuff in there. There’s nothing that is of, I would think, any real value. I think they got most of the stuff that was usable.

TD: I wanted to ask you about a song off of the Fanny Hill album. The one that you sing the lead on, “Rock Bottom Blues”. That has got to be one of my favorite songs off the set.

A: It’s a great song.

TD: Now I know based on looking at the songwriting credits, I think during the course of Fanny, you’re listed as being a co-writer for about four songs, and that’s one of the songs that you’re listed as co-writer. I was just wondering, are the lyrics based on your own experiences?

A: No, but they could be. I mean, they certainly could be. I look at my life, and it’s like, yeah, that’s real close. But no, it wasn’t.

TD: So how did you come to sing lead on it? I mean, you weren’t known as one of the main vocalists.

A: Oh, I couldn’t sing either.

TD: I thought you did a really good job on that song.

A: Well, it’s pretty much a one note song. I wanted to sing. I wanted to be able to sing, and I don’t know how it was decided that I would sing that song, except that Nickey probably had me in mind from the get go.

TD: I love your whole take on the song. I love the line that you have in the song near the end, “It’s so fucking hard”.

A: Thank you.

TD: It’s one of my favorite ones to listen to. I’ll play it over and over. But that one line, did you have a lot of trouble getting that one line past the company or getting them to okay it?

A: Well, you notice that on the album itself, you can hardly hear it.

TD: Yeah, they mixed it down.

A: Mixed it way down, yeah. And also on the album, I think it’s June doing the “it’s so fucking hard,” when on the original…vocal (that) was recorded in London at Apple, it was me. When we got back to the United States, Richard wanted me to do it over again. I had a cold, and I did it over again, and I hated it. He sped the track up so it was a higher key. I don’t know why he did that. I never understood that. I like the vocal from England much better. It’s more relaxed. I don’t sound like I’m straining so hard to hit the notes, and it’s me saying “it’s so fucking hard.” (Note: Both versions are included in the new Fanny box set.)

TD: Out of curiosity, why did you all have it in in the first place? Was it just for a laugh?

A: Probably. I don’t know that it was a conscious. When I first did it, I don’t know that it was, “Now Alice, here say it’s so fucking hard.” I might have just thrown that in ad lib. It’s not something that stands out in my head as a real strong memory. It was 30 some years ago.

TD: Let’s talk about the last album, Mother’s Pride. That’s probably the album that all of you thought the least of in terms of how it sounded after Todd Rundgren got through producing it.

A: No, I disagree. I think Jean said to me that when she listened to it, it was just as bad, it was just as homogenized as Richard’s production. June got the most upset at the time, because we had been told that we would be allowed to mix with him, and then he locked us out of the studio and said, “If you change this, take my name off of it.” The management wanted to use his notoriety, obviously, use his name “as produced by Todd Rundgren”. I liked the fourth album. I’m hard pressed to pick a favorite, but there are parts of the fourth album that I absolutely love. The production as well. I’m not a guitar player, I’m not a keyboard player, I’m a drummer. I don’t have the same mind set. I don’t have the same requirements that June and Nickey might have. Tweak it here and tweak it there. I would tweak it differently obviously. The tapes that I mixed down in London, I think we sound great. Now how much of that is just trying to make the music speak for itself, or the actual raw material that I had to mix down, because we were relaxed. We weren’t doing anything as a conscious effort. This isn’t going to try to be a hit record. It was just us jamming. So the feel, the raw material, was better than studio stuff. Cause we were always trying to come up with, what’s going to be the thing that pushes us over the edge, the top, that makes people aware of who we are. Maybe if I had been a guitar player or a keyboard player, I might have had stronger feelings about the albums. I’m 53 now, and when I listen to them, I hear places where I would have done something differently, both as a drummer and as a producer. But at the time, I felt damn lucky to even be recording.

TD: I thought you were a great drummer. You had a great sense of rhythm; you had some good fills and good tom work. I don’t know that Fanny would have been the same without you. Do you still drum?

A: No I don’t. Thank you. I have my drums, but I don’t drum. I don’t think Fanny would have been the same without any of us, and it wasn’t.

TD: Going back to Mother’s Pride, there are a couple of songs from the session that you produced were later recorded for Mother’s Pride. Personally, I think that the versions that you all did informally in that studio sound better than the over-produced versions later done by Todd.

A: I agree. I agree.

TD: So when June left the group after the fourth album, were you all kind of aware that she was having all these internal conflicts, or had she kept so much to herself that it was hard to tell?

A: I had no idea until about, within the last year. I had no idea that June had a “nervous breakdown.” She said she had a nervous breakdown. I had no idea. When I left the band, they didn’t talk to me for years.

TD: Why is that, if I may ask?

A: They weren’t too happy with me leaving. June had gone and Patti Quatro had joined (for the fifth and final album Rock and Roll Survivors). God, what a mistake. I loved June’s guitar playing. I really did. I think she’s a great lead guitar player, and she is even a better rhythm guitar player. When you get somebody who has a hard time tuning their guitar to replace her, it was pretty hard to stay serious about it. When you play with the best, it’s really hard to play with a beginner after that, in my mind.

TD: So that was why you left shortly after June?

A: Yeah, I left shortly after June. There are a number of reasons why I left, but, yeah.

TD: I understanding that you did continue on as a drummer for at least one more project with somebody else?

A: Yeah, The Peter Ivers Band. It was very strange, I don’t think, you can’t even call it rock and roll. I mean, it was really strange music. Peter was a harmonica player. We did the one album, and I think we played one gig. When I realized that my problems at home with my girlfriend, my girlfriend (at the time) had said to me, you know, “hey, it’s either me or the band.” I said, “Okay, fine, no problem”. I realized that it wasn’t just the band. It was me being the “star” if you will. She had aspirations to be a movie star.

TD: After the Peters Ivers’ Band, did you consider being a drummer with anybody else, or did you pretty much decide it was time to get out of it?

A: Well, at the time, I had to kind of hang it up, because I was still with that girlfriend, and I needed to make a living, and obviously being a drummer wasn’t going to happen because the light still shown too brightly on me and not brightly enough on her. So I put the drums in storage. Actually, I used them as furniture. The bass drum was my coffee table, and I used my floor toms as end tables. They made for great furniture. I then went to work in the straight world. I worked at a telephone answering service at night and a veterinarian’s office during the day.

TD: At some point, you went to work for A&M Records?

A: Yeah, after (the other jobs). I got a job in an independent record distributor, and two of the lines that they distributed were Motown and A&M. It was Record Merchandising in Los Angeles. I was hired to do inventory control for Mercury-Phillips. I was the warehouse person with the steel- toed boots and, you know, climbing the stacks and counting the records, and eventually got hired at A&M as a retail marketing coordinator, which in LA was visiting the record stores and trying to get them to play the albums and getting tickets to concerts and trying to get the Billboard reports and, you know, that kind of stuff.

TD: And it was during your time at A&M Records, that you met the Go-Go’s, right?

A: Right, they were on IRS Records, and I was working the market, and I did an in-store with them. They knew who Fanny was. I have one of their gold records for Beauty and the Beat with their signatures on it. “Thanks Alice. If it hadn’t been for you guys, we wouldn’t be here” kind of a thing. It was interesting to me. It was kind of interesting to watch myself work through the emotions of watching them become stars, you know, and it should have been us. But at the same time, every song they wrote had a hook in it.

TD: You mentioned earlier that you had a point shortly after leaving Fanny when you didn’t even like to acknowledge that you were in the group. How long did it take before you were able to get past those kind of feelings and feel proud of it?

A: In the early ’80s, there was a period of time when the Fanny footage from the Beat Club was being shown on Nick At Night, and I would go into my Tower stores, and the kids would say “Hey Alice, I saw you last night on TV.” “What, what are you talking about?” “I saw you guys on the Beat Club. Man, you guys were good.” And it was just a little reaffirmation that, yeah, we had done something. It made me re-think it.

TD: Let’s talk a little about the recent reissue. How did you feel whenever you were first contacted by Rhino about putting this set together? Were you like, it’s about time or what?

A: Well, I thought it’s about time, but I also didn’t believe that it was really happening, because the guys who were doing it weren’t actually employed by Rhino. Mike Johnson and John Gwatney did this project entirely on spec. They kind of had a verbal go-ahead from Rhino, but there was no budget. You have access to the Warner Brothers’ vault, but no, you can’t go and take the 16 track masters and re-mix them. You can re-master the masters, which affords you the ability to tweak a little bit but not a lot. When John Gwatney first contacted me, I thought he was maybe just a fan that had a pipe dream, because a few fans have been contacting me over the last couple of years and talking about “let’s buy the albums, the masters, and put out a Fanny anthology”. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think they were for real at first.

TD: There was something else I wanted to ask you. Now back in the days with Fanny, I’m assuming that you kept very quiet about your personal life and sexuality.

A: You bet, we had to.

TD: I’m just guessing that your manager knew and Richard Perry probably knew?

A: Oh yeah.

TD: So was it kind of hard when you’d get interviews from like the teen magazines and such? Did you just not say anything at all, one way or another, or did you just kind of go along and make up something for the teen magazines?

A: We would kind of make up something. It was more like Alice is taken, or Alice is seeing someone, or June is seeing someone, or, you know, we just didn’t mention it. We just didn’t talk about it. But we were never able to be honest. We either avoided the subject or we lied.

TD: How long was it before you felt that you could be honest about your life and such?

A: I still have a problem with coming out in some areas. I got an email after the Fanny box set came out from a guy in Denver who apologized at the beginning of the email for being politically incorrect, and he was disappointed and jaw dropping stunned that I was gay. “No, not my Alice”. I sent him back an email saying, “Hey, I appreciate your attempt to grow and expand your horizons and I’m sorry that you were disappointed but I like who I am.” I’m okay with who I am.