Today I have posted what you might expect to be Ch. 3. But it is more likely to turn into a much later chapter, or will be when I finish drafts on what must come first in the story: the chapter in which I leave my husband and lover, enter law school, and come out as a lesbian, leaping into my Contracts Law class waving a lavender flag the night after the big event, shouting "I'm a lesbian!" And so must come next the chapter about the non-profit, all-woman law collective in which I first worked as an intern and lawyer. Oh, the cases this great gaggle of female lawyers tried: part of a team defending protesters of the Trojan Nuclear plant, poor renters suing slum landlords, and one of the first sex discrimination lawsuits filed in Oregon. Feisty women holding all-afternoon collective meetings every Thurs. where bold and behemoth decisions were made: from strategies for representing lesbians trying to get custody, to whether lawyers with children should get paid more than those single lawyers with dogs, to how to share the work equally when typists couldn't go to court and lawyers couldn't type.
       But this posted chapter on English & Metcalf, the first LGBT law firm opened in Oregon in 1980 by my partner and me, came to me first. And as any writer will tell you, when you have to write, you have to write what you have to write, though good writers will tell you that in fewer words.