Nancy Garden

Female Homosexuality, by Frank S. Caprio. Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, by Abbott and Love. Patience and Sarah—our old friend—by Isabel Miller. The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall.

Dear Annie, It’s raining, raining the way it did when I met you last November, drops so big they run together in ribbons, remember? Annie, are you

Annie, are you all right?

Are you happy, did you find what you wanted to find in California? Are you singing? You must be, but you haven’t said so in your letters. Do other people get goose-bumps when you sing, the way I used to? Annie,

to imagine what it would be like if people always reacted to Annie and me that way—being hurt by us, or pitying us; worrying about us, or feeling threatened—even laughing at us. It didn’t make any sense and it was unfair, but it was also awful.

“Right now I just want to feel you close to me,” I said, or something like it, and in a few minutes we were lying down on Annie’s bed, holding each other and sometimes kissing, but not really touching. Mostly just being happy.

what I could say that wouldn’t sound phony.

Ms. Widmer, who taught English at Foster Academy

raining, Annie.
Liza—Eliza Winthrop—stared in surprise at the words she’d just written; it was as if they had appeared without her bidding on the page before her. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania,” she had meant to write, “is one of the earliest and finest examples of an architect’s use of natural materials and surroundings to …”
But the gray November rain splashed insistently against the window of her small dormitory room, its huge drops shattering against the glass as the wind blew.
Liza turned to a fresh page in her notebook and wrote:
Dear Annie,
It’s raining, raining the way it did when I met you last November, drops so big they run together in ribbons, remember?
Annie, are you all right?
Are you happy, did you find what you wanted to find in California? Are you singing? You must be, but you haven’t said so in your letters. Do other people get goosebumps when you sing, the way I used to?
Annie, the other day I saw a woman who reminded me of your grandmother, and I thought of you, and your room, and the cats, and your father telling stories in his cab when we went for that drive on Thanksgiving. Then your last letter came, saying you’re not going to write any more till you hear from me.
It’s true I haven’t written since the second week you were in music camp this summer. The

cause she interpreted the charter differently from most