Even though there are still so many small minds in the world today, I’m happy to live in a time where books are no longer banned in the United States as a whole or blacklisted from being published at all. Even OJ Simpson’s If I Did It can be found on eBay or elsewhere on the internet. And we’ve certainly come a long way in lesbian literature. Grab the nearest copy of Best Lesbian Erotica and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s almost been 100 years since Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned in the UK and on trial in the US. It’s kind of inconceivable that the novel was worth the time and energy used against it, considering the most sexually explicit the book gets is some hand-over-hand holding and a standing-embrace. I’m pretty sure that if I had read the book while I was a “young impressionable mind” I wouldn’t have been corrupted; I would have been bored.

Luckily, my parents didn’t act as censors when I was young and an avid book reader. I was really into Judy Bloom when I was 13, so I had my dad buy me Forever, one of her more mature titles. When I started getting to the sensual parts, I began hiding the book so my parents wouldn’t suddenly figure out it was full of pre-marital sex. I don’t know how they would have found out - a TV news alert: “Parents, it’s been found that a Judy Blume book published 20 years ago includes some sexual activity in its pages. Please destroy any copies of Forever you find on your children’s bookshelf.”

I also read Go Ask Alice and a plethora of violent Christopher Pike books, which I am pretty sure I found in my junior high and community libraries. 

There were a lot of books accessible to me with drugs and sex and other kinds of debauchery, but none with LGBT themes. I don’t think it occurred to me that I should seek out The Well of Loneliness, but its deceiving title wouldn’t have interested me anyway, even if it were available at my school. 

But to think, I could have gotten away with it, had I found some lesbianish books at the bookstore I visited on a weekly basis. I was apparently censoring myself.

I contributed an essay, “Credit in the Un-Straight World” a book of essays called Dear John, I Love Jane, which will be released on Seal Press in October 2010.

Here’s a brief description of the anthology:

Dear John, I Love Jane is a collection of essays by women who have left relationships with men to pursue or begin relationships with women. As Dr. Lisa Diamond’s book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire makes clear, Cynthia Nixon, Carol Leifer, Wanda Sykes, and countless others have done just this. Some knew all the while that they felt robust same-sex desires, but, due to cultural, familial, and other pressures, first tried to make a sustainable life in the straight world. Others fully identified as heterosexual before finding themselves in situations where the most natural and appealing next step was to begin an intimate relationship with a woman.

The essays candidly and powerfully reveal the internal and external process women go through as they come to their moment of personal truth about what they want and need, and make it a reality.

You can pre-order it on Amazon, or keep up with relevant issues on women coming out on the book’s Facebook fan page.

I still need to contribute a bio photo to the page, but I’m in desperate need of a new one! I need to get on top of that, next time I look intentionally fabulous (Those occasions don’t happen as often as I’d like.)