We Walk Alone

Book excerpt: The 1950s queer-life groundbreaker by “a literary pioneer . . . [who] forever changed perceptions of same-sex love and desire” (Advocate.com). Ann Aldrich flung a provocative assertion at her readers in 1955 when she opened her landmark account of lesbian life in New York City by saying this book was the “result of fifteen years of participation in society as a female homosexual.” After the release of We Walk Alone, Aldrich became both a heroine and a scapegoat in some of the period’s most contentious public debates over what exactly “lesbian culture” was. Her non-fiction pulp literally transformed the landscape overnight, and “the effect on women was electric. From every corner of creation, they wrote wrenching letters of relief and gratitude” (Ann Bannon, author of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles). Part Kinsey-esque portraits of real people, part you-are-there reports on the scene in bars and offices and at clubs and house parties, We Walk Alone is revealing and compelling composite of an alienated yet amazingly self-aware community—one that Aldrich would revisit three years later in We, Too, Must Love. Today, “these essential cultural artifacts” (UTNE Magazine), as Stephanie Foote explains in her afterword, are “as rich and conflicted a look at the formation of lesbian urban culture as that of any contemporary queer historian.”