Copyright 2013 Carolyn Gage Thinking About Julia When I think of Julia Penelope, I think of lesbians, linguistics, and

rocks. One was her passion, one was her vocation, and one was her avocation. In my mind, the three have many things in common. Their commonness, for starts. Lesbians, and words, and rocks. Prevalent, universal, not rare, ordinary, without rank or position, of familiar type. But to someone who has made a life study of them, lesbians, words and rocks are full of secrets, packed with history, and freighted with potential. Julia knew history. She knew the stories. She knew where lesbians came from, starting with herself. And she generously shared that history a history of sexual abuse, of being a kept butch and a stone butch, a history of patriarchal attitudes. And she shared her emergence into a world of radical lesbian-feminist values. She understood where words came from and how their uses evolved and were evolving. She understood the significance of story to the lives of women, and how words could be manipulated to control that story. She understood the structure and the politic of language unlearning the lies of the fathers tonguesas her book Speaking Freely is so aptly subtitled. And she studied and collected rocks. She loved to go rockhounding. Where others would see just an uninteresting pile of rocks, she would find her treasures. She knew the history of rocks: which ones had evolved their distinct characteristics under centuries of compression, which were the result of cooling magma, which were aggregates of minerals bonded together over time. She knew which rocks were precious and semi-precious, which would be enhanced by polishing, and which were likely to prove geodes with secret, crystalline fairy structures hidden under their crude exteriors. Lesbians, words, and rocks. She leaves a solid, living, individual legacy. Thank you for your dedication and your integrity.