For almost as long as I’ve had this website I’ve enjoyed sharing author Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail columns. I often said, if it’s a new month, it’s a new Amazon Trail. I looked forward to each and every one, offering Lee’s wisdom, experience, humor, and passion, as she shared her perspective on the world she’s lived in and the world we share. Lee is not shy, and her candor is among the most refreshing things about her. She’s also a legend in lesbian fiction, most deservedly so, with a Golden Crown Literary Society award named in her honor. My appreciation for her wit, her talent, and her personal generosity is boundless, and I’m most pleased to call her a friend. Some people lead by simply being who they are, and Lee has always been, and will always be, one of them.

You can read many of her collected columns in her book, An American Queer: The Amazon Trail

“This collection of Lee Lynch’s columns chronicles over a quarter century of queer life in the United States, from the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

“From the beginning of my writing career, I just wanted to write about lesbian/gay life as I experienced it. Like so many, I came from a place of great isolation. At the same time, being gay filled me with great pride and joy. Writers Jane Rule, Isabelle Miller, Radclyffe Hall, Valerie Taylor, Ann Bannon, and Vin Packer gave me inspiration and even the lesbian companionship I needed as a baby dyke. More than anything, I want to give to gay people what those writers gave me. And I want to do it well enough that my words might someday be considered literature and, as such, might endure because, as open as some societies have become, there are always haters, and cycles of oppression. Our writers strengthen us, offer a sense of solidarity and validation that we are both more than our sexualities and are among the best that humanity offers.”

About Lee Lynch

Lee Lynch is the co-curator, with S. Renee Bass, of the recent collection, Our Happy Hours, LGBT Voices From the Gay Bars, available from Flashpoint Publications. Her  novel, Rainbow Gap, is available from Bold Strokes Books and other outlets. Her book, An American Queer, a collection of “The Amazon Trail” columns, was presented with the 2015 Golden Crown Literary Society Award in Anthology/Collection Creative Non Fiction. This, and her award-winning fiction, including The Raid, The Swashbuckler, and Beggar of Love, can be found at http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/Author-Lee-Lynch.html.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Standing On My Own Two Feet

I’ve always wanted to outgrow the travails of youth. Now I have, and it turns out that the body wears out as the mind wises up. Where is the balance in that?

Since childhood, I have been looking forward to growing old enough to know pretty much which end is up in life, to reaching Social Security age in order to write full-time, and to tackle mature subjects in my work. I find it strange that just when I’ve reached something like that balance, I’ve lost my relatively reliable physical balance.

I’ve never been with a lover this long, and now I’ve pledged a permanence, called marriage, that I’ve learned to respect. Since the age of eighteen, I’ve never lived in one home this long. My recent stability has enabled me, I believe, to write more complex stories that feature more thoroughly developed characters and, because of my years of travel along the roads of lesbian culture, especially with my sweetheart, I can offer readers more varied and detailed settings.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Notes from a Homebody 

It’s finally here. The end of total lockdown. Am I ready? Absolutely not. I like my burrow. I don’t wanna play with others.

We’ve fashioned a comfortable little routine. Week days, work. Evenings, spend time alone together. Weekends, yard and house work and, sometimes, an adventure.

The adventures are mostly food and view related. They require us to travel along Highway 101 thirty to forty-five minutes south. Which is a mini-vacation in itself. People come here from all over the developed world to drive this highway. My sweetheart and I, we just buckle up and go, the little dog in her back seat safety perch and the cat at home, guarding the house from whatever intrusions he fears. Probably a bug. Talk about privileged lives. We ain’t got much but we’ve got it all.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Notes from a Homebody 

It’s finally here. The end of total lockdown. Am I ready? Absolutely not. I like my burrow. I don’t wanna play with others.

We’ve fashioned a comfortable little routine. Week days, work. Evenings, spend time alone together. Weekends, yard and house work and, sometimes, an adventure.

The adventures are mostly food and view related. They require us to travel along Highway 101 thirty to forty-five minutes south. Which is a mini-vacation in itself. People come here from all over the developed world to drive this highway. My sweetheart and I, we just buckle up and go, the little dog in her back seat safety perch and the cat at home, guarding the house from whatever intrusions he fears. Probably a bug. Talk about privileged lives. We ain’t got much but we’ve got it all.

By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: How to Write a Book

I’m not giving away any secrets here. Not saying it’s simple or that anyone can do it if they send $25.00 to Post Office Box 1,2,3. Nope, it’s a personal journey and every story has a story. Here’s mine, about the writing of my newly released novel, Accidental Desperados.

This goes back to about 2007. I was living on the Oregon Coast, grateful to be renting a cottage on the property of the Pianist and the Handydyke. I was, and am, part of their lesbian family. I thought about that a lot, how gay people grow families of choice whose members nurture one another in minimal to large ways. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool, maybe even important, to write a multi-volume, intergenerational, lesbian family saga.

By Lee Lynch

I thought there could be no good news.

Not in the midst of a pandemic and the mass selfishness that hastens and continues its spread.

Not when the abiding depth of U.S. racism bubbles to the surface without shame or remedy.

Not when the vainglorious puppet of the far right “that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” continues to assault everything we’ve done right as a country and tout as successful every evil we continue to perpetrate.

By Lee Lynch

It’s that time again. I need to find a healthcare provider.

I live in a rural community where there is a large turnover of medical professionals and a constant shortage of qualified staff. The health organization that provides these services seems to have difficulty attracting talent. It’s common knowledge in the communities it covers that it’s a tough employer to work with.

Which isn’t to say there are not entirely competent professionals devoted to their patients and performing at least as well as their big city peers. I’m the one who’s chosen to live where the question, “Is there a doctor in the house?” may well go unanswered.

By Lee Lynch

“We lost a giant today,” tweeted California State Sen. Scott Weiner, who is chairman of the LGBTQ caucus. A giant is exactly what the ninety-five-year-old Phyllis Lyon was, along with her partner Del Martin, who died at age eighty-seven in 2008.

My friend the sailor broke the news to me. She e-mailed, Del and Phyllis made a difference in my life. Yours too? No finer compliment could be given.

I responded: Oh, this hurts. They certainly made a difference for me. I was able to read their creation, “The Ladder,” from age fifteen on. They were role models as a couple and in their activism. Thanks for breaking it to me.”

Yes, with my hair slicked back by my father’s Vitalis, in the hand me downs from a boy across the court, hoping to someday own a pinky ring, and waiting to reach an age when I could frequent the rough and tumble gay bars downtown, my girlfriend Suzy and I spotted the magazine founded by Phyllis and Del.

The Amazon Trail: Mick’s Potato Fertilizer
By Lee Lynch

When I asked for advice about growing potatoes, our friend Mary wrote, “Here is what Mick does: blood meal, green sand, or wood ash, bone meal, a handful of each above item for each potato you plant, mix in wheel barrel with dirt and some peat moss, and steer poop. Love M&M.”

Or, said Mick, who grows blue and other exotic potatoes, we can just buy an organic fertilizer. Whew. I found the prospect of mixing manure with soil a bit unappetizing. Which is why, last year, when a neighbor gave us her handmade wooden raised bed, I put off loading it at all and used it only as a support for plastic planters and grow bags. Not exactly best practice.

By Lee Lynch  
The Amazon Trail

I have the patience to write a novel, but not to read directions. Especially when something comes along like the OBD2 which, she had to explain to me, is an automotive onboard diagnostic tool.

It’s a shame, the things they don’t teach us at Butch School. In the Femme Gadgets class, I learned the basics of eyelash brushes and powdering noses and hoop, stud, drop, climber, and jacket earrings. The femme who has been cutting my hair for about twenty years was today appropriately made up and earring-ed, her own hair mostly blue with a complementary green streak along the part. She obviously has great fun with her various girly tools.

But that’s not what she was all excited about. It was Vector, her Kickstarter miniature robot. Vector is not without its useful functions, but is mainly an adorable, irresistible gadget that has learned to say her name.

The Amazon Trail: What Is Lesbian Literature?
By Lee Lynch

“… when teachers, editors, agents and awards administrators, among others, hold mainstream writing as the standard, and all but ignore books with an exclusively lesbian focus, they lead us away from serious, in depth examination of our lesbian selves.”

It’s nice that some non-gay writers include us in their stories. I’m thinking of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder detective novels in which he has an amusing lesbian friend who is a dog groomer. Very respectful and matter-of-fact that she’s a dyke. But that doesn’t make the novels lesbian any more than the presence of Robert B. Parker’s gay male bartender and strongman in his Spenser series makes the books gay male.