Television interviews, newspaper articles, and a trip to England, as well as $1,000 prize money, followed, and I was appointed a unit head at Manpower – a job that was, coincidentally, not unlike the one I do today. A client would request a service, and I would satisfy his wishes by supplying the right person to do the job. That was when I discovered my best skills were administrative, in an intermediary capacity. I also learned another valuable lesson from that job. That if you have real initiative it is best to work as an independent if you can, because others tend to sit back and reap the profits of your hard efforts.

For relaxation after a hard week, I would go with friends on weekends to a white-sand beach not far from Amsterdam named Zandvoort. This beautiful beach stretched along the entire Dutch coastline and had little terraced cabanas and gaily decorated restaurants where you could sit out front and have meals and refreshments. Each little restaurant had a name and a number, so when you wanted to make a date with someone, you would say, “See you later at Wilhelmina’s number twenty-four.”

One weekend I went to Zandvoort with a drummer friend named Kuuk, and we both had a brand-new personal experience – we discovered Seaview number twenty-two, and the colorful and gay crowd that hung out there.

The men were all beautifully dressed in minuscule bikinis which hardly covered their emphasized assets, designer T-shirts, Pucci or St. Laurent scarves. There were also lots of manicured poodles jumping around that belonged to the gay boys.

The girls, as I soon found out, were all gay as well.

The only really straight person there was my friend Kuuk. Extremely handsome and well built, he had all the gay boys swarming over him.

Left alone, I introduced myself all round until I came upon a girl whore face seemed strangely familiar, although as far as I was aware I didn’t have any dyke friends.

“Hi,” the pretty red-haired girl said to me; “how have you been these last few years?”

“Me? Are you sure you mean me?”

“Yes, you little ‘butch’,” she said, laughing.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.

“My name is Hellen Karf, and I was your teacher in high school, and I used to see you lusting after Helga at the same time I was dying to have an affair with you.”

Hellen Karf, who taught us art and designing, was not exactly what you could call a schoolmarm type. She was dressed in a chic way and had told us she was engaged to the country’s top actor. Still, I was informed enough to know her fiancé was definitely gay, but I never imagined that for her part she was a lesbian.

“I could tell you were a little ‘butch’ in those days,” she volunteered. I was surprised to hear that I may have been strong and well built, and I had shortish blond hair, too, but when I look back at pictures taken in those days, I would say I looked like the average attractive, but sporty, schoolgirl.

Hellen now took my arm. Pupil and former teacher went around and talked to all the gay girls. And from this time on I willingly got into the female homosexual scene.

My first affair was with a girl called Liesbeth, who looked very feminine when we started going together but became more and more mannish as our relationship progressed. She cropped her hair, wore jeans, shirts, and sneakers, and started drinking and smoking like a man.

At that time I didn’t smoke or drink because of a truly sincere agreement I had made with my parents while a teen-ager. They had said that if I didn’t drink or smoke until I was eighteen they would buy me a motor scooter, and at eighteen they promised me a car if I could abstain from both these things until I was twenty-one. I got both the scooter and the car and, astonishingly enough, to this day have never taken an alcoholic drink and have smoked only an occasional cigarette without inhaling – at the request of a kinky customer, which I’ll come to later.

Liesbeth, the little dyke, was madly in love with me and considered herself my male partner, but as I got more into the lesbian activity, I discovered I was definitely “butch” and so we had a “supremacy” fight and broke up.

I met many more girl friends through my female hairdresser, who was also Hellen’s lover, and my sex life soon became part heterosexual and part homosexual, and sometimes a happy mixture of both.

It was also around this time that I was taken under the wing of a sophisticated older couple who lived in a magnificent seventeenth-century house in the artists’ colony on Amsterdam’s Prinsen Island. Daedo, the husband, was a man of forty-two, and Silva, his wife, was eight years older. Nights and weekends I would often sleep over and spend a lot of the time gossiping with Silva, an attractive, vivacious woman, while Daedo, who owned an advertising agency, worked in his study.

One evening in her bedroom she asked me would I give her a back-rub. She was fresh out of the shower, and she lay face down on the bed. “Why don’t you take your clothes off, Xaviera?”

I was rather surprised at her approach, and to tell you the truth, the idea of making it with a fifty-year-old woman did not appeal to me. As I rubbed her she started making low moaning noises and was getting sexually stimulated. “Xaviera, take off your clothes and make love with me,” she pleaded. She turned over, and I saw her nice big firm boobs – I have always been intrigued with beautiful breasts, and even as a child I had fantasies about sucking my mother’s breasts- I recognized quite early that I was a natural bisexual and have completely enjoyed both homo- and heterosexual encounters. There is no guilt where I live. So I undressed and started making it with her on the bed.

I was worried in case her husband walked in, but she didn’t seem to be concerned. And as she lay on her left side with me facing her and eating her pussy, I heard Daedo walk in.

He didn’t say a word, and the next thing I knew, his big penis was against my back. And for a while I neglected Silva and freely started sucking Daedo’s penis. Then I went back to her, and he put his penis inside me from the back while I was giving it to her with my vibrating tongue.

Everybody was having a ball, and even the dog joined in and was licking our feet and legs and jumping around all excited. Then the three of us, happily minus the dog, worked ourselves into a frenzy and all climaxed simultaneously, screaming, moaning, and laughing.

Now and again, after that, we would swing together, because basically I had no steady romantic interest happening at this time. And, in my way, I was still in love with Helga, who had in the meantime married the well-to-do owner of a travel agency and was expecting a baby.

I had sex at least once or twice a week with my casual boyfriends, but to be quite honest, Dutchmen more often than not bored me stiff. I have never enjoyed or been part of the dull, serious Dutch mentality. I was more like my father, a bon vivant, and needed something more in my life than unromantic, stingy Dutchmen with their famous “dutch treats” on dates.

Friends of mine who had visited me recently, just arriving from South Africa, had told me about the beauty of this country, and the warm all year round climate. In case I would be interested in immigrating there, the South African government would pay the airfare completely. So… away from cold and misery and rainy summers. Down to the sun and my sister, who lived there as well. In fact, I was getting a bit bored with the Dutch mentality, even though Holland is a very charming country and Amsterdam lately has become one of the swingingest cities in Europe. Maybe it was not so much Holland itself, but my inner hunger for someplace new and exciting. The fact that I had my stepsister (a daughter from my father’s first marriage) living in Johannesburg with her husband and children made it more encouraging for me to go there.