Amazon.com (ISBN 1555834760, Paperback)

This collection of nine life stories can be seen as part of the larger project instituted by Joan Nestle and others to gather an oral history of lesbian life in America in the 20th century. Although some of the memories here stretch back to the 1920s, most date from the repressive postwar years and describe the difficulties of finding community--let alone lovers--when there were no safe, established meeting places for gay people. Many of the women interviewed ended up marrying men as a cover or to make their lives easier, while some married before they realized they were lesbian, the most remarkable of whom is Jane Stevenson, a California housewife and mother of two, whose suburban household in the 1960s came to include her female lover as well as her transvestite husband. Their need for secrecy and their joy in finding each other kept them happy together for many years, yet her story is countered by several in which the women never found lasting love, or grew so discouraged that they stopped trying. Although not all of these interviews are intrinsically interesting, they offer an essential glimpse of a dark past and spur on the struggle for civil rights. --Regina Marler