I cannot understand a society that is more afraid of a man in a dress than a man in a soldier’s uniform.

As a woman, as a lesbian, as a Jew, much of what I call history, others will not. But answering that challenge of exclusion is the work of a lifetime.

I cannot understand a society that is more afraid of a man in a dress than a man in a soldier’s uniform.

Flamboyance and fortitude, femme and butch-not poses, not stereotypes, but a dance between two different kinds of women, one beckoning the other into a full blaze of color, the other strengthening the fragility behind the exuberance. We who love this way are poetry and history, action and theory, flesh and spirit.

To live without history is to live like an infant, constantly amazed and challenged by a strange and unnamed world.