pseudonyms include Renegade Hearts, Between the Lines, and A Woman of New Orleans. Degnore explains on her website that she wrote the books to pay for graduate school as she sought her doctorate in psychology, and used pseudonyms to keep her careers separate. Degnore's early practice of psychology involved "working with artists in specialized creative block therapy". In 1987, Degnore received her doctorate in psychology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She now works in the Department of Social Sciences at the Fashion Institute of Technology, teaching a course in fashion choices and gender expression, and conducting research in positive psychology, social psychology and applied psychology with a current focus on gender expression and perception in fashion. Degnore also holds a Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting from the University of California at Los Angeles. Friendship with Sam Wagstaff Degnore met photography collector and art curator Sam Wagstaff while she was working on her dissertation for her PhD in psychology at the City University of New York. Her artist girlfriend had taken her to his apartment and bid her not talk to "the great man", but while her girlfriend fell into conversation with Robert Mapplethorpe, Degnore and Wagstaff bonded. In spite of the difference in their ages and socio-economic backgrounds, Degnore soon became his confidant. "I shouldn't have fit into Sam's world," Degnore remembered. "But we were obstinately and ruinously close...until AIDS murdered him in 1987." When Wagstaff died of AIDS, Degnore was entrusted with destroying a cache of Wagstaff's intimate photos, including some taken by Mapplethorpe. When Degnore completed her doctorate in 1987, she dedicated her dissertation to Wagstaff. Degnore read an excerpt of her memoirs about her friendship with Wagstaff at the 2019 Rainbow Book Fair in New York City. Later novels and short films In 1989, under the pseudonym Roslyn Dane, Degnore published The Assistance of Vice, a novel about the downtown New York dyke scene in the years before AIDS that she later described in autobiographical terms. In 2004, Degnore made a short film called F*Stop based on the novel. Degnore's other film writing and directing credits include HairZ (2009), and Heatbeat (1993). In 2013, Degnore published Invisible Soft Return:\, a feminist science fiction novel that was named as a finalist in the science fiction category of the 26th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. References 1946 births Living people 20th-century American novelists