I was breathless with excitement when I first went to college.

I’m a small-town girl, and I was going to one of the best universities in the country. It was a chance to meet new people and shrug off my former dull life. I broke up with my high school boyfriend, sure that I would meet some exotic guy from some remote corner of the world who would dazzle me with his intellectual brilliance and bedroom eyes. Well, I did have an affair with someone worldly, someone exciting, someone exotic, but it was with my art history professor — a 55-year-old woman.

Isabelle, as I have come to call her, was the instructor of an upper-level course on the depiction of the female form in painting. I didn’t have the prerequisites, but because I had AP credits I was able to apply for a waiver to enroll with the... Read More