Nancy Garden

Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?

And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?

And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again. "Inaccessible." "Not," I said to her softly, "to unicorns. Nothing's inaccessible to unicorns. Not even--not even white birds.

And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again."Inaccecible.

When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.

My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we're as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.

Real, but sometimes beautiful.

We were what seemed important then, not some label.

It was like a war inside me; I couldn__ even recognize all the sides. There was one that said, __o, this is wrong; you know it__ wrong and bad and sinful,_ and there was another that said, __othing has ever felt so right and natural and true and good,_ and another that said it was happening too fast, and another that just wanted to stop thinking altogether and fling my arms around Annie and hold her forever. There were other sides, too, but I couldn__ sort them out.

There__ a Greek legend__o, it__ in something Plato wrote__bout how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That__ why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.

And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the streets.

The 1st day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.