What makes a family. (reader forum).

Thank you for B. Ruby Rich's column "Lesbian Without a Nation" [Frames of Mind, October 9]. I have often believed that lesbians are called upon, like dykes in shining armor, to cheerfully defend the spineless specimens of womanhood. Only we're never given any honors for our courage and often treated as the enemy when women would rather go back to their wife-beaters and sell back their rights as human beings to feel "loved." After all this, what have women done for lesbians as far as proliferating our rights to be in spousal relationships or parents? Instead, lesbians are branded as the enemy of the family unit simply because we refuse the traditional roles of women. We need to develop support networks to take care of our own needs and put the "oxygen masks" on ourselves first, or we'll never get the community support we need and deserve.

Deb Aloisi, Indianapolis, Ind.

Rich wonders when being a lesbian became "exclusionary." As I remember, it was shortly after the word gay became the euphemism for homosexual. Gay meant male and female, period. It was not too long afterward that separating out the lesbian came along, and it was not men who did it Most of us were mystified as to why a gender-neutral word like gay was so offensive; it was "inclusive" of all of us. Maybe Rich should find some older women (excuse me, lesbians) and ask them, "Just what was wrong with being gay?"

Tyler Lambert, Greensboro, N. C.

I don't understand: What part of excluding anyone not a "biodyke" from an organization isn't exclusionary? Rich cites several organizations that lesbians have helped in the past, and not a single example she listed excluded lesbians as part of its mission as the 100s excludes nonlesbians. If I were to extend her logic with regard to the 100s, Take Back the Night should have excluded anyone who wasn't a heterosexual female, including men, who some might claim were the focus of the protest.

Craig Dill, via the Internet