The Amazon Trail: What Is Lesbian Literature?
By Lee Lynch

“… when teachers, editors, agents and awards administrators, among others, hold mainstream writing as the standard, and all but ignore books with an exclusively lesbian focus, they lead us away from serious, in depth examination of our lesbian selves.”

It’s nice that some non-gay writers include us in their stories. I’m thinking of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder detective novels in which he has an amusing lesbian friend who is a dog groomer. Very respectful and matter-of-fact that she’s a dyke. But that doesn’t make the novels lesbian any more than the presence of Robert B. Parker’s gay male bartender and strongman in his Spenser series makes the books gay male.

By Lee Lynch

Oh, yes, we had fun this year decorating for Halloween. For a couple of hours, I didn’t once think about the ghouls in D.C.

We don’t get trick or treaters here, but we have a lively neighborhood of adults from 55 to 95, ourselves included, who get a kick out of holiday trappings. Our plastic Frankenstein mat screeches bloody murder when we open or close the garage door. Half the time we scare—and laugh—ourselves silly.

It had been many full moons since we last dragged out our spooky paraphernalia. My sweetheart exhumed it from the treasure chest that is our garage and instructed me to decide what should go where. Me? Organize? The prospect was scarier than an army of menacing phantoms.

I somehow coped.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Remember Summer?

I mean serious summer. When the season was all fireflies and sandcastles, ice cream trucks and taking the train to visit relatives for two whole weeks. It was hours of reading, amusement parks, and hitting tennis balls against the apartment building next door for hours. It was the public swimming pool and cool sheets for sunburns and the ice cream truck. It was freedom.

I’m not exactly sure what happened, or at what age summertime was stolen away, but it sure ain’t what it used to be.

I am not a social person and I don’t have the energy I had when I played vigorous games of handball (with myself) at the P.S. 20 playground once school let out in June. These days, an interview fries me. My summer started with 3 of them in two weeks.  The interviewers were terrific and the subjects dear to my heart. In one of them, I talked with Natasha Frost about what pulp novels meant to us: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lesbian-pulp-fiction-ann-bannon.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: A Poem and a Plant

The day was typical for the Pacific Northwest. The brightening sky had stopped sputtering its fine dewdrops for the moment, the wind had blown itself out, and the development where I live came to life. People took advantage of the disappearing dreariness to walk their dogs, scurry to our centrally located mailboxes, or meet their step goals.

I dropped off a copy of New York Magazine in the common room. The cover quoted Melissa Shusterman, who’s running for the Pennsylvania state legislature. “My 16-year-old turned to me after the election and he said, ‘America doesn’t want a smart, qualified woman in office.’ By Friday, I was running.”