"As a writer myself, I must believe that Barbara's attention to the "other" (who used to be called the stranger) was an organic part of her life as an artist-the writer's natural business is a long stretch toward the unknown life. All Barbara's "others" (the world's "others," too), the neighbor, the cop, the black woman or man, the Vietnamese, led her inexorably to the shadowed lives of women, and finally to the unknown humiliated lesbian, herself. It was hard when this knowledge forced her to separate her life and work from other comrades, most of whom believed themselves eternally connected to her. "Why leave us now?" friends cried out in the pages of WIN magazine. "Now, just when we have great tasks. She explained: "Because I realize that just as the black life is invisible to white America, so I see now my life is invisible to you." Of course she was not the separator. They had been, the friends who wrote, saying, "We know it's okay to be a woman," but hated to hear the word "feminist" said again and again. She stubbornly insisted that they recognize Woman, and especially Lesbian, as an oppressed class from which much of the radical world had separated itself-some for ideological reasons, some with a kind of absentminded "We'll get to that later." (And many did.)"