She read "Gestalt at Sixty," a poem that evokes the hard struggles of a watershed year. The house becomes, for the poet, a sanctuary, a safe space where questions are both welcome and scary. Another film, May Sarton: Writing in the Upward Years (1991), further explored her feelings about aging.

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In both films and in her writing as well, the symbol of the phoenix shapes and centers the work. The bird that rose out of its own ashes parallels Sarton's own career. The journals inform us of a woman who often had to fight for publication, let alone recognition. All of her career, she claimed to want an inclusive readership, one that was not limited to any group, but to which she was free to speak and to give an honest reflection of her life.

Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have one word in common: courage. One of her best journals, entitled Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), may be as much of a reminder for its writer as for its readers: Dreams need time to clarify and grow. In the deep places, the seed emerges.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen sprinkled her fiction with people and relationships, usually coded, of either clear or ambiguous homosexuality.

Actress, director, producer, teacher, and memoirist, as well as translator, Eva Le Gallienne was one of the most successful figures in the American theater for several decades; she had many lovers, but was never comfortable with her lesbianism.

Writer, actress, and intellectual refugee from the Third Reich, Erika Mann was one of the twentieth century's most intriguing nonconformists, noted especially for her anti-fascist cabaret satire.

By writing the earliest novel to respond directly to AIDS and subsequently producing innovative journal and sex writing, American author Paul Reed made several significant contributions to glbtq literature.