Excerpt from Who We Are By Lillian Faderman

The lesbian world that I first came into, here in Los Angeles almost forty years ago, seemed to me to exist only in darkness. Our world seemed to have been invented in that moment of time. We had no past--or if we did, no one knew or could tell me about it. Because we had no knowledge of those who came before us, our isolation and loneliness felt tragic and inevitable. It is no wonder that the few books that were written had sad titles such as We Walk Alone or Odd Girl Out.