Hello, Aileen!

My high school girlfriend, Aileen Querry looks better at 39 than she did at 16.

She made the Society Page of the ‘Huntingdon Daily News’ recently-- a hometown newspaper.

My mother always mails me Aileen clippings from the ‘Daily News’.

The black and white daily informs readers of south central Appalachia that my girlfriend from high school was voted “most changed” by the class of 1985 during a 2005 class reunion.

She’s a lipstick lesbian, but the ‘Daily News’ will not import that bit of information into its long- winded homepages.

We have both appeared in the ‘Daily News’ over the years. I’ve guest written in Jo’s column, “Along the Juniata” several times. Aileen is a bit of a county celebrity. She frequently captures the lense of the paper’s photographers while visiting back home.

It’s odd that we both turned out to be gay and put ourselves through uncomfortable moments during puberty.

Life is like that for children of the press.

We don’t see each other often in person, it’s much easier to catch- up with each other’s lives in that hometown newspaper.

Who would have ever guessed that Aileen and I were both gay? We had each other fooled.

I was the younger brother of the quarter-back of the Rocket football team. I didn’t have to act butch, everyone assumed I was because I was Bill’s younger brother.

Aileen had a huge crush on Bill. He called her a fat-ass ugly bitch and told her to get lost, so she ran right into my blossoming gay arms.

She was Dolly in our high school musical and I was Cornelius Hackle.

We kissed backstage during after school rehearsals of ‘Hello, Aileen’, but that’s as far as it went.

I allowed her to rub up on me and sense my desire to get out of Yonkers, but Miss Levi would never get into my Levi’s!

I resisted her personal match-making ventures better than my brother Bill.

I never put out because I never really wanted to and Aileen thought it was adorable that I wanted to save my virginity until I got married.

In 1994 she came to visit my lover and I in Brooklyn.

I called her one day out of the blue and decided to “come out” to her.

She laughed and told me she ate pussy and she thought I knew.

She laughed some more and told me that she and her best friend Dorella were lesbian lovers, not best friends.

She admitted to having an affair with me while being my girlfriend.

When she arrived in New York City to visit my happy gay home, I met her in the subway underground of the World Trade Center.

She was a sight for sore eyes. It was like watching Dolly sing while walking down a spiral staircase carpeted in red velvet when I first noticed her sticking out from the crowds of thousands shuffling home from work up those escalators.

She came to town on New Jersey transit and the Path Train.

I met her at the top of those long mechanical stairs which once carried thousands of commuters from the base of the Twin Towers.

She allowed her brownish-red hair to grow almost to her ass. She lost some weight and her tits could finally be seen for what they really were– the spittin’ image of Dolly Parton’s.

I expected to spend the weekend reminiscing about our lives as children and how silly we once were.

I was prepared to laugh about the lesbian affair she had while dating me.

The strangest thing happened after we had both came out and got over it quickly while sipping bottle after bottle of white wine in my Brooklyn back yard.

We made love in my laundry room downstairs while my gay lover Anthony slept unsuspectingly in a bedroom above our heads.

It felt downright sinful and was glad that I had never married when I had an affair with my high school sweetheart.