Customer Reviews

Outside the Lavender Closet: Inspired by True Stories

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I have known women just like the ones described so well in this book. The women are all different but the stories are much the same. It was hard for me to put the book down. It's well written and honest.

The issue I had with the book is that the author attempts to find an answer to the naive question, "Are people gay by choice or chance?" Please. That's so old and so basic. The book would have been better if it just told stories and left the psychology out of it.

For the answer to this age-old question, buy the book "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire". In truth, yes, some are born gay. Some, most, can love either sex. The opportunity must exist. That's all. It's simple.

The one common thread in the lives of all these women is the initial loneliness that exists before they know why they're lonely. The loneliness in a crowd or within a marriage, in a family.

The women the author chose to write about and include in the book make for very intriguing reading. They're older lesbians and not the young, chic lesbians. Perhaps including a couple of them would be a good idea. They arrived at a good place on the shoulders of the lesbians you'll read about in this book. They don't do labels, most don't smoke and drink very little, if at all. They exercise and take care of themselves and they love who they are. They are totally unashamed or afraid. They owe that to the older lesbians who fought for them.

Highly recommended.

- Susanna K. Hutcheson

Martha A. Taylor embarked on a quest to determine if lesbianism was a matter of "chance or choice". In her efforts to find the answer, she compiled some rather amazing stories of women who, sooner or later, faced their lesbianism and accepted it.
Taylor presents the stories of women who seem to be more caught up in the general struggles of everyday life than they are with their sexual orientation. This is not to say that none of these women struggled with their homosexuality, but rather that their sexuality was not always the main battle.
. The stories Taylor presents this book are attention-grabbing and quite emotional. Taylor does a good job of bringing out the joy and pain of these women without interjecting herself for the most part.
Taylor seems rather wishy-washy in her concluding chapter. Chance or choice? She isn't any more certain at the end of her book then she was in the beginning. Although she does try to exit with the premise of what really matters most is that life be lived to the fullest, she does not end with a definitive conclusion for the argument she set out to resolve.

The lavender closet refers to lesbian women who keep their sexual preferences hidden from the public, so this book is about women that are publicly open about their lesbian practices. It is not a rendition of a group of people happy and secure in their lives, quite the contrary, in general the women are polygamous, frequently moving from partner to partner. However, that it not due to inherent problems in the "lesbian lifestyle" but to other factors in the lives of the featured women.
In most cases, their relationship with their parents was strained and those that announced their lesbianism were generally rendered into familial outcasts. Their attempts to find a replacement, often in a hurry, led to poor choices and expressions of deep insecurity. With only a few lesbian women featured, this book is not an accurate depiction of how lesbian women live and no person, whatever their position on the gay lifestyle, should use it in any attempt to generalize. All people have problems and the problems described here happen to be a bit different from others, specifically the gender of their partners. It is interesting to read about the struggles, but there was little here about the lesbian lifestyle that could not be discerned using only a little bit of thought about how the human animal operates.

Regardless of lifestyle or age, this highly anticipated book is a delightful journalistic novel to be enjoyed by all women. Written from the viewpoint of a fledgling author, Margaret sets out to write her first book about a subject she thinks she knows well; life inside the lesbian community. Once she begins her interviews she discovers that these women have carved out their lives and lifestyles from the hard crusts of life, circumstance and opportunity. Discover the lives of eight women as they share their stories, struggles and tender moments. You'll discover, as Margaret did, there's a lot you don't know.