Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

What I am grateful for...

Abby Glazer Robinson has died

Abby Glazer Robinson, my college roommate at Boston University in 1965-66, has died. Abby and I were assigned to a shared room; we figured it was because we were both Jewish. We were each 17 years old – and this year I turned 77 and Abby didn’t quite make it. Although we were always very different, we bonded right away, and she really saved my sanity.

She was a bit more worldly than me and much more cut-and-dry. I was coming off several traumatic months after having been caught as high-school seniors with my girl lover of two years. Those were the days of dire consequences for queers.

In Boston, my mental health was threatened by my attempt to become heterosexual, while adapting to a college full of wealthy students 1,000 miles away from my hometown, and compounded by my taking the brand new and dangerous birth control pills (which were illegal and I got by slipping a $5 bill through a window). The pills then had such high doses of hormones that the side effects were drastic. Today’s pills have a tiny fraction of that amount. Abby bore the brunt of the side effects, not the least my frequent tears. With her warmly brusque manner, she would settle me down.

Abby gave me the first cup of coffee I remember tasting, having grown up in a tea-drinking household and having just drunk pop out in the world. She would brew it in the room and feed it to me, promising that it would calm me, and because of the power of her conviction, it did.

The opening chapter in my (as yet unpublished) memoir tells how Abby and I navigated the Orientation Week which, unbeknownst to us, attracted predatory grown-up men who cruised the freshwomen. We started going out with a pair of non-student friends – Louis and Everett – and although I lost my hetero virginity to Louis (wearing a nightgown Abby lent me since I only ever wore my dad’s cast-off pjs), Abby kept Everett at bay. This photo is of that night: We were out at the famous Blinstrubs nightclub, seeing The Supremes in person. The photographer insisted Abby sit on Everett’s lap in order to get all four of us in the shot.

Abby transferred to another college and ended up with a brilliant career as a photographer and professor, as outlined in this obit. When I moved abroad in the ‘70s, we lost touch but she remembered my father’s name and that my parents lived in Pittsburgh, and she found me again in the ‘80s. We have stayed connected since then. When I was living in London in the ‘90s and traveling for work, it happened that she was going to be in Seoul, Korea on the day that I was landing there for business. Just a couple of hours after I arrived, I found myself meeting her in a Korean market and being dragged, jet-lagged and exhausted, for a wonderful mini-tour of that odd town.

She had a violent heartbreak after being betrayed in a ghastly way by a man she thought she’d spend her life with, and that experience changed her. It brought a bitterness into her otherwise straight-forward view of the world. It was the only time that I really worried about her.

I generally stayed in her amazing Tribeca apartment on the rare occasions that I visited NYC, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the entryway. In the last few years, after her best friend and life companion, Barry, moved into the apartment below her, she gave me her bed if he happened to be away and she slept downstairs. The last time we were together, we went to the opening of the photo exhibit of my friend Donna Gottschalk. 

Abby’s work was eclectic. She did a lifelong series of fearless and fanciful self-portraits, she did copious street shots in Asia, and she did complex projects, including a fake medical office, which she explains in this clip.

Abby wasn’t one to chit-chat weekly on the phone. Although she traveled the world, she didn’t want to come to Boston and I rarely went to NYC. When I did, we would talk for hours. But she never ever missed my birthday. We always talked on the phone in October for mine and in November for hers. This year I didn’t hear from her on my birthday, but I put it down to the fact that I had just moved and wasn’t getting all my communications. But I sent a card and left a voicemail, and through that Barry was able to track me down to let me know that Abby had died in July! I am grateful to Barry and her sister Joyce for looking after Abby to to the end. It is hard to get my head around the truth that this woman who has been part of my life for 60 years had died four months earlier. And so, in lieu of her comfort and coffee, I write.

Rest in Creativity, Abby.