thoughts and no love and old pains rise again in me.

That is why I am tired. This is the thing I suppose I really wanted to tell you about. That I am twenty-six and very tired. I can say, like most people, that I have never done or thought anything which was harmful to my community or its people, my nation or its security, or its intelligent, useful mores. And yet I have had to indulge in subterfuge in one area of my life which is the most personal and, one would hope, the most private. And I know, sensing some of the things which I am going to write below, that I will not sign my own name to this letter and it is that that I am tired of.

It is because I am a woman, a woman who has loved other women, who loves one now and knows the return of that love that I am most weary. I, like so many others, know what it is to sit in on those conversations with our most precious friends and hear them allude to their beliefs that the thought of one woman loving another is a pitiful and ugly thing (and, somehow, if one is also attractive as my friend most certainly is and some think I am, that it is even more "obscene"!). And all I can feel of late is this dreadful weariness. Weary of not walking into her apartment building too often with a bouquet of roses, lest the doorman notice the frequency; of not appearing in slacks too often (and not knowing sometimes just how one determines what "too often" is, since they are so mercifully comfortable, and of late chic). I am tired of not touching her hair in certain impulsive moments in restaurants, those moments we all know about when one wishes most to touch; I am tired of the eyes of cabdrivers in mirrors that force us to sit like frightened, humble mice in the corners of taxis and speak only of the movie until the fare is paid. and the living-room upstairs is achieved. I am tired of speaking in obscurities to the rest of my fellows with whom I share this world about that which I want to sing about and giggle about and, oh God, just feel free to blush about! Most of all, I am tired of the days between when we must not see each other because it would be "too much" in one week and because we have not the courage not to give a damn yet....

So I say that I am tired and you read this and say as I do: that it is clear that I am not tired enough yet; that rebellion, utter rebellion is the only true clarion of the truly weary. But I answer you and myself and say that something has begun. That some things have changed within me. That I have taken a ring off my finger and promised and sworn to myself that never again will I ever lie nights (despite the comfort of legality and the blessings of a church I do not believe in) beside another human being whom I cannot, after years even, seem to love or desire as a mate. Never again will I promote deception and dishonesty in myself to that measure because "society wills it" never. Do forgive the rhetoric but it is a slow and painful trek, the march to oneself. But I suppose it is only in the experience of doing it that the freedom at the end of the journey seems quite as precious as it really is. And it is FREEDOM, you know? Other generations in an indisputable future to come who openly swear their love to whomever they please will not perhaps understand the detail of our present agonies any more than I imagine we can fully grasp that hostile, feudal universe of Romeo and Juliet, but I intend that they shall be able to say of those like myself "Well, they began it!"

Yes, I intend that they shall be able to say it of me. For as I have said there is the weariness that is so old in me though I am young. And the reason I can speak of it, write about it has to do with you out there and a second thing which has come of late to sit beside the fear and the weariness in my heart. It is something which has begun to quicken and stir in me and let me know that it exists, that it might have been there all along awaiting some stimulus. The stimulus has appeared in my life among a group of people who have this other thing which is new to me and who put out a life-giving little publication once a month in spite of hells I can only surmise.

I believe, dear friends, that it is courage.

Bless all of you.

Miss J.