A Letter to the Young Queer Girls in the Future Who Use Silver Pens

In the mid-80s, I was a young lesbian who read a lot and, naturally, was looking for books about people like myself. There weren’t many, although I found Jane Rule, Katherine V. Forrest and others’ work. Some of it was good, much of it was terrible. The Well of Loneliness wasn’t just a book title…it was the feeling that a library had thousands of books and almost none of them had anything to do with me.

I was a frequent visitor to the County library. It was a little further than the local library, but it was bigger, and more anonymous and I had (and have) a lot of pleasant childhood memories of it. So there I was, trawling the shelves for fiction about lesbians. When I realized I had read the, perhaps half dozen books classic and new that the library had, I nervously went to the reader’s service desk of the County Library to ask about other writers. The person there was not hostile, but was dismissive. I was told, “There aren’t that many people who were looking for books like that.”

I went away, annoyed and frustrated. Being me — a person who would one day become a professional researcher — I came back and looked up the population of my county. I went back to reader’s services, my heart in my throat. The librarian who had benevolently dismissed me wasn’t there. Instead it was a librarian with whom I had had disagreements previously. I was terrified. I didn’t want to confront this person, but I didn’t want to have to ask for the other librarian either. I walked up, explained my request, the first response I had…