She looked and me and she goes, 'Well, Nicole, that's a really long time.' " And I have to give her so much credit, because she didn't make fun of me. "I sit down at the bar and I say to my friend, 'I'd just like to tell you: I'm gay!' I tell her my plan, that I'm going to stay married for another 10 or 15 years and then do all these other things. When she arrived at the restaurant, Nicole, who has the maturity and emotional perspective of the 41-year-old psychotherapist she is, but the manner of a sugar-high six-year-old, giddily announced her revelation. "I started having this fantasy that I'd just stay married until I was in my sixties, and one day I'd meet some woman and she and I would adopt old dogs and, like, live on a ranch," she says, laughing and shaking her head. It's who I am." At the time, Nicole had been separated from her husband for a year and had begun exploring same-sex relationships but was in the midst of one last reconciliation attempt with him. "I'm going down the parkway from Westchester, and it's very beautiful, very scenic, you know, the trees blowing in the wind, the sun coming through the clouds-and I had this crazy epiphany." "I was driving to the city to have dinner with a friend I've known since we were 19," she says. Nicole Sachs remembers perfectly the moment she realized she was gay.