Masculine

Viewpoint

Open Letter to a Lesbian

i was most sorry, that day on the train, whon you started to take the set behind me and saw the popular book on Lesbiana I was reading. To see your sturdy little body strain as you lifted that heavy suitcase and marched off to another caremado mo want to cry out to you, "Please don't go." go." Of course I'm a big, formidable looking man. I can't help looking like this, but I'm different. I do understand and admire you and all your follow Lesbians. I want you to consider me your friend. I'd like to help protect you against those who would whisper facts they should take for granted, whispering because they think something essentially clean is dirty. I'd like to say to them, "So that's how limited is your mind! Because these sensitive people, these often good and useful people, have ono quirk in their makeup that makes them different from you BUT NOT INFERIOR, you have tho audacity to be malicious and to impart hurt. How

much better to have their quality, which entails a high degree of understanding and tenderness and love, the richness of soul it takes to give, than to have those other qualities you so casually accept. I mean cruelty and meanness, smallness and bigotry. If you could see yourself really objectively, you'd squirm with self-contempt."

But you were gone, in your trim, close-fitting Jacket and four-in-hand tie, your short-cropped hair and flat heels, and I didn't want to embarrass or frighten you. Perhaps this is what I most would like to tell you, though:

I'm jealous of you.

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