Audrey Bilger

At around 6 a.m. — I couldn't wait longer — I rode my red Schwinn Cruiser to deliver the treasure enclosed in its plastic case. (I didn't have a car at the time because a few weeks earlier my husband of 14 years had left, taking the VW Beetle with him, along with most of our record collection.) I stayed up all night working out the ideal segues, pulling records and dropping the needle just so. I calculated minutes and seconds for the perfect track list.

WHEN I FIRST CAME OUT as a lesbian in my mid-thirties, I looked for books. It’s what I do any time I make a change. A decade before that, I stopped eating meat, and I read every book I could find on being a vegetarian. If I was gay, I wanted to do my homework and make a plan. I was and am a literature professor, so reading is my job, and books help me make sense of the world.

AS PROPOSITION 8, my home state of California's ban on same-sex marriage, makes its way through the courts, it leaves behind a trail of documents that will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now that Prop 8 has been declared unconstitutional for the second time and the Perry case may be headed to the Supreme Court, we can pause to take stock of this work-in-progress. The Prop 8 trial is, in fact, one of the greatest stories of our time.

Virtually every significant romance in my life has revolved around music. My first boyfriend was a singer/songwriter, my first girlfriend was in a band with me, and my wife rocks my world on a daily basis (they were/are all guitar-players, but I’m sure that’s beside the point!). Each relationship has had its soundtrack, the sharing of tunes, and much musical exploration.