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…