Do you have certain days of the week that you work and days off? 

I try but it’s so tempting. It’s hard to.  I always try to have Sunday and Wednesday but it’s just so tempting, it’s hard to maintain that just because I feel like well I’m not doing anything…  

Do you find it exciting that it’s kind of like a double life? 

Sometimes, yeah.  There are some aspects that I enjoy.  You feel like the outsider and I can embrace that somewhat and because I always felt that way anyway.  I didn’t fit in anyway.  I was an atheist.  So go all the way, why not embrace it!  Why even try to fit in anymore just cross the line completely?  And I…this sounds terrible to say it - I don’t usually but, you know, you’ll be standing around and every once in a while you feel kinda uncomfortable or something and you look around at the people around you and think, 'Hmm, ha, please!  Please people!' 

Do you feel good having a little secret?  Your friends might know, but if you’re at a party where no one else knows and no one else is going to know...

Yeah, it’s like, ‘I’m special, you’re not! Fuck you!  And you’re telling me this really fascinating story about your computer, yeah, hmmm.’ 

Guess what I did! 

Exactly!!  ‘Oh, that’s a great story!  Dude, I’m so winning.  I’m not even playing and I’m winning’…There is some excitement to it. 

Out of your friends, I don’t know how many friends you have… 

Not very many. 

Let’s say, you have a small group of friends, out of those friends, how many know? 

Less than 2%. 

Would you ever consider telling the rest of them? 

You know, now that I’m divorced, maybe.  It was always something that made my husband very uncomfortable.  It depends because how much do you want to live in the real world, how much on the grid do you want to be?  This is not something I cannot just pick up and take off, there’s a stigma attached to you and it’s there forever.  And especially for him, this could be a problem for him at his job so we were always concerned about people he works with finding out.  And don’t get me wrong, I chose this, I’m not trying to hide my sexuality or my religion; I chose this.  But still, it is somewhat of a burden to have to hide all the time.  But on the one hand, it’s just not practical.  The social stigma and the consequence for coming out is so great that it’s just not worth it a lot of the time.  And you think I should be out for the cause but there’s a price to that and the price is really high, so, no. 

And as far as legal wise, how would that go?  Do you ever worry the wrong person will find out? 

I do. 

Have you ever had any close calls where you think, ‘Whoa!’ 

One time…not ‘whoa,’ but it’s amazing, and I don’t know why because it’s a big city, but it’s not that fucking big, right? One time, there’s been two actually, three maybe…one time I met a guy, I was still a student at OSU, and he was in one of my classes and he didn’t recognize me and I thought, hmm.  And he said, ‘Oh, you look familiar.’  So, what do you do? I thought, ‘Okay, I could get out of here right now but what if tomorrow in class he realizes it?  What am I going to do? Not go back to class?  Never have a class in that department ever again?  What’s my plan? I can’t control at what point he’ll figure it out so I should come out right now because even if I walk out right now he might see me tomorrow in the hallway and be like, ‘Hey!’’  So that was kind of humorous.  He was like, ‘You look very familiar,’ and I said, ‘Professor Tree, 5:30, yeah, I sit in the back!’  He gasps and says ‘Yeah! Yeah!’  But he wasn’t a problem.  And one time I was at a department store with a friend and one of my clients was a cashier there and I could tell he recognized me because he winked at me and I was just like, hmmm.  And we left and my friend said, ‘I think that cashier was flirting with you.’ And I was like, ‘Hmmm, maybe.  I don’t know…’ 

That’s one of the reasons why I don’t do facial pictures, because I figure, okay I’ve seen you, you’ve seen me, we both have some incentive to keep this to ourselves here.  I don’t feel like there’s too much of a risk there but it is a little bit awkward.  And I guess it’s less of a risk because you can tell your friends, ‘Oh my god, I was at a strip club and I saw that woman!’ And there’s not that much social stigma attached to you but there’s a lot of social stigma attached to hiring a prostitute.  So I figure there’s not too much of a risk there but you never know and I’m actually surprised that doesn’t happen more often.  It’s only happened once in all these years. Then one time, and this actually freaked me out, I saw this guy who knows my mother and I came home and said to my husband, ‘Oh my god, I think this guy knows my mom.’ And he says, ‘He doesn’t know your mom, he knows a fictional character’s mom. And she doesn’t have a god damned mom!’  And then I have this client that I’ve had for years and I just figured out a few months ago that he went to college with my dad…just because he told me when and where he graduated and there’s no way they didn’t know each other but I can’t ask!  But nothing big has ever happened and I don’t think it ever would just because... but I wonder.