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.

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

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.