Being Gay or Lesbian in America Since the 60s

I never spoke of my feelings to Diane. Never in all the time we were friends, even though the strength of that love remained intact for many years, through many actualized relationships with both women and men.

Ironically, in 1960, in the Berkeley I lived in, with all its Bohemian attitudes and sexual and political experimentation, here was no way to articulate to anyone the way I felt, no way to understand it myself, to visualize in concrete terms what it meant, much less to act it out. The numerous sexual encounters I had by then with men held no clue about how to behave in this strange new situation.

So, at the age of twenty, I fell in love for the very first time. It was almost a decade before the activism of the "second wave" of the women's movement and the gay liberation movement. There was no support system, no literature, not even a hint of what I was supposed to feel, or more importantly, do with my new discovery. I didn't think of mysef as being "gay" or even "bisexual." I was in love with Diane and coud not see beyond he to anyone else, male or female. (Susan Sherman in her memoir, America's Child---a woman's journey through the radical sixties (Curbstone Press, 2007), p. 24.

Gay and lesbian readers (only) are invited to share their own experiences and/or insights about living in the 60s and beyond and to propose links to pertinent web resources. Other readers are welcomed to read these entries, but not to comment on them.

Some possible topics include:

• My life before Stonewall and/or Women's Liberation and how it changed afterwards
  
• Comparing my life today with the lives of my gay or lesbian friends before Stonewall and/or Women's Liberation
• Being gay or lesbian at work: then and now
  
• Same sex relationships: then and now
• Relationships with members of the opposite sex: then and now
• Discrimination and gay-bashing: then and now
  
• AIDS
  
• First sex and first love—"two very different things"—as Susan Sherman writes in her memoir