Of course many of us were loaded with self-hate and wanted to change. How could it have been otherwise? All we heard and read about homosexuality was that crap about how we were inverts, perverts, queers — a menace to children, poison to everybody else, doomed never to be happy.

To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women.

Some women who married and also had lesbian relationships were genuinely bisexual. Many others married because they could see no other viable choice in the day.

A woman who dared to live as an overt homosexual in such unwelcoming times might well have an ego of impressive strength and health that permitted her it know her own mind and to be true to her conception of herself.