Even though it was speaking English, I wanted the voice in my head to go away. “You’re forgetting something,” it murmured as I stepped off the train in Shijiazhuang. “Didn’t you have another bag?” it asked, more insistently, as I dodged touts and money-changers on my way to the bus stop outside the station. By the time I was boarding …

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Northampton, MA, a town the National Inquirer once called “Lesbianville USA.” You wouldn’t think there would be a downside to that but I managed to find one and it was this: I saw lesbians every day. Big, beautiful, brash women with radical haircuts and confrontational t-shirts were all over Main Street …