Preface: Myrna's story

Summary

I would stay on the phone … that was my lifeline.

“I came out as gay in 1945—the year that the war ended,” Myrna Kurland told me from her home high in the Hollywood Hills of California. “I was dating a softball player that I met at the gay bar. I met her at Mona's or else it was the Paper Pony. My first night in a gay bar was—freedom. I had a gay male friend and he took me there.”

Myrna was in the gay bars for eight years. She showed me her “treasure from the 40s”—a gold softball on a necklace chain from her first lover— inscribed with the initials from the professional softball league to which women belonged while the men were in the war. “We went to the bar all the time. My entire social life was there—there was no other place.” However, that night she first went to the bar—something else happened. Her father died that night. And she blamed herself, even though she knew that was irrational. She couldn't get over it. Also she told me that, “I'm Jewish and we lost so many people in the Holocaust. I felt it was my duty to have children. There was no other way to have children in the 1950s without getting married to a man. I married someone I disliked—that's what I felt I deserved because I was gay and I felt so guilty.”