The girls next door
Subtitle: into the heart of lesbian America
By: Lindsy Van Gelder, Pamela Robin Brandt.
Contributors: Brandt, Pamela Robin.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 314
Subjects: Lesbians -- United States -- Social life and customs; Lesbians -- United States -- Identity; Lesbians -- United States -- Sexual behavior
Description: Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with women around the country, and on their own keen wits and eyes, Van Gelder and Brandt have composed an unprecedented portrait of how gay women today - "born" and "made," lipsticked and flannel-shirted alike - think, feel, love, and live.

Three major "tribal" events - the long-running Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, "Dinah" (the annual Dinah Shore Golf Tournament and party circuit, a mecca for upwardly mobile luppies), and a cross-country trek with the activist Lesbian Avengers en route to the 1994 Stonewall commemoration - provide points of entry into an exploration of lesbian identity, social dynamics, and politics that's as entertaining as it is revealing.

The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait that will resonate with lesbians themselves and reveal to their "neighbors" a world of unsuspected vibrancy and depth.