This chapter was assembled in 2007, a little more than a year after Finding Voice and Community. It was addressed to the members of the Daily Kos feminist community. Given the title, I was not surprised that few people entered.

So backing up just a bit...

Towards the end of 1992 I came out to me daughter Jen and her partner Julie. It went very well. Julie hopped on to the internet and asked the members of her email list, Sappho (which at the time was the largest lesbian email list on the Net), for any assistance they might provide for Jen's father...me. I was given a couple of transgender email list names and did join one, called Transgen. It was literally a llifesaver. I had community. I had peers.

But I also joined Sappho...on January 12, 1993 and entered women only space...

From one of my readers:

I would be very much interested
in all the dynamic you and your family went through, in detail. I bet it would make for a lot of drama and sell more books because of it, if it ia published. Without that it seems a little too abstract and philosophical for me anyway. But maybe I missed some of what you have posted.

The graphic is entitled Being Different.

All righty then...

This chapter was written while I had taken a hiatus from Daily Kos and begun front paging at Docudharma. I published five days before Docudrama opened to the public. It was the first entry of my Friday Philosophy column.

To give some context, this essay was written in response to some folks ragging on gays who live in the closet.

I've updated it just a bit to bring it into the present.

News Flash: Joel Gray came out as gay. That's a shocker.

It has been brought to my attention that many of my autobiographic series are considered just too long to read.

For those with a more limited attention span, I have a couple of past attempts at ameliorating that.

The graphic to the left is entitled Not Quite Balanced

In the wayback, when I first began transition in 1992, we had this newfangled email thing which I hd been using, but I was using it less than efficiently. My daughter's partner persuaded me to join the Sappho email list, claiming that might be helpful to stem the tide of isolation I was beginning to feel. Sappho was a list started by a straight woman for lesbians. Shortly after I joined that list, I learned about the Transgen email list for transgender people which had been established by Julie Waters, so I joined that as well.

And I got extremely busy on those lists. I used to check the site usage for the college and found that it was not unusual to have about three quarters of the incoming email for the site headed in my direction.

About three months after I transitioned, the Mosaic web browser was released. So One could go look at the webpages available...but they were pretty sparse. By 1995 a company called GeoCities was created which allowed users to build their own websites.

I was an early adopter. I homesteaded in the WestHollywood neighborhood (number 8440). I began publishing some of my writings there...Including the diary of my last month before surgery (blogging, as it were), which I had shared with members of the Owls (Older Wiser Lesbians) email list which had been spun off of Sappho in 1994 (I was a founding member).

The piece I am sharing today was created during that period. I've dusted the mold off of it and repaired a few rips here and there. Last weekend in my Spirituality diary I posted that I was searching for my list of Life Lessons.

Found them :-)