ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 weaves in the author’s own discovery—how she dealt with feelings of anger, grief and blame, before reaching acceptance—with stories of other women going through their own coming outs. It touches on women who never understood the significance of their feelings, women who had questions but no information, and women who put their feelings on hold and did what society expected them to do. It also touches on those women who feared being ostracized and tried to conform to society’s accepted standards, those women who knew about their feelings for other women but believed that if they kept active, their feelings would go away, and those whose marriages served as temporary antidotes and distractions. Included are interviews with psychotherapists.
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