I remember a writing teacher who began her class by saying there is an as-yet-unidentified part of the psyche that softens and opens when it hears the words “Once Upon A Time.” I remember being a child, asking an adult to “Tell Me A Story.” I remember arranging my body against theirs, wanting to touch them, touch the story, have everything be connected.

The stories I was told and those I eventually was able to read myself led directly to my own attempts to create my own. I wrote adventure stories about Twisty Woman, who could shapeshift to solve crimes astonishing and confounding the police. I wrote in my diary, confessing in great detail what it was to be me. Then, such confessions were intended to be private. Only much later did I begin to understand the value of describing and defining my life in public. I saw that if I didn’t use my own words to describe either what it was to be me or what I saw in the world around me through my lesbian eyes, the descriptions of us, of me, of our world, wouldn’t be the truth of things. I wrote letters to my grandfather ( the only grandparent who could read) and planned to be a writer and perhaps also a friend of Ava Gardner’s when I grew up. I’ve been writing all my life, and at 86 now, that’s a long time!

Stories are at the heart of my lived and writing life. The hundreds of life histories I’ve invited from women with whom I have worked, those I have written describing what has been to be me and us—and by us—I mean LGBTQ us, a rich and wide-ranging cohort of folks who changed American life in the late 20th century. Stories hold the paradox that while each of us is unique, it’s only when we write and tell our stories that the commonalities that connect and bind us to one another become visible.

I write to startle myself, to unearth the unexpected, to delight in taking my life seriously, and to find the language that honors who I and we are. My words are for us.
I’ve written about many things over the decades, but now, in my 80s, I’m writing about being old. I write about the limitations of aging bodies. The freedom to release all the responsibilities that shaped the earlier decades of our lives. The tender foolishness of worrying that our car keys may be in the freezer. ( they never are). The proper nouns that continue to disappear. The freedom to no longer care about the things that once mattered so desperately. The pleasures of our own company. The truth of us. Funny. Bawdy. Vulnerable. Fearful. Ridiculous ( that’s where my pedicures come in.)
Being old is a life stage like any other, and my writing is an extension of my young diaries. What is it to be me? And how is being me connected to all the other old lesbians being themselves? In offering my words, my hope is that it will invite the reader to their own. I write to be evocative, to broaden the landscape of what is possible to say and what needs to still be written, read, and lifted up about us old LGBTQ people.

There were no words, no language that honestly and respectfully described who we are and what it was to be us in all our rich variations—until we wrote them. Our words honor us and create a history for those who come after us. Our words are a legacy, a gift, a chronicle of our lives. They matter. I hope my readers will not only find the places they identify with but stretch and expand to enter realities that might be unfamiliar. That’s what language allows. They’re portals into worlds that sometimes echo and at other times invite us into landscapes we never knew existed. Then, after spending a few hours in that place with the writer, we return richer, wiser, and fuller. Our words are for us as well as an inheritance for those who will enter the worlds we created—with our lives and our words.