This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. It worked on me like a silent bombshell: this revelation that a whole group of people β enough for there to be a word for it β were powerfully drawn to members of their own sex. As I looked at Life 's sinister pictures of sad, scared men walking down long, dark, deserted streets, I saw that those feelings echoing, reverberating in me meant a life of loneliness and alienation.
This knowledge overwhelmed me, so that I pushed it to the back edge of my brain, where I developed a secret homesickness β maybe I had always had it β for these people I could love, a conviction that some day I would find them.
I resolved to travel. I got as far as Durham, North Carolina. When I fell unmistakably in love with another woman, in Durham, in at the age of 24 , I was not sure that I had come far enough for this.
But my brain was in open rebellion, not to mention the entire rest of my body and spirit. I sneaked over to the Intimate Bookstore in Chapel Hill to see what books they had on the subject I had developed a habit of approaching books first, then proceeding sometimes to life.
I was afraid to go to my favorite bookstore in Durham, because someone I knew might see and tell. There sat a whole roomful of lesbians, including two novelists Bertha Harris and June Arnold, flown in from New York and Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines, the editors of a lesbian magazine in, of all places, Charlotte, North Carolina.
