Wishin' and hopin'.

Dusty Springfield may be gone, but memories linger on. And mine are not of her alone but of a whole generation of magical women who sang songs and inspired passions that could not yet be named. I sit here remembering a time not so long ago when lesbianism was still that love that dared not speak its name and guessing was a way-hot part of foreplay. A generation of sexy, mysterious singers made pulses race and hopes soar: Was she or wasn't she?

In a sense it didn't matter. In those days of sexual ambiguity, it was (almost) enough to enshrine her as a receptacle of fantasy, secure that at least she'd do nothing to disrupt our investment. A global lesbian sisterhood could fall asleep at night listening to her voice crooning from the turntable, free to imagine her there in bed. The truth about her? That could be a long wait. Like forever.

The first time Laura Nyro was ever named as a lesbian in print was in her obituary. But we knew. My friend Kate remembers going to New York in 1971 with a friend, both smitten with Nyro and dying for a glimpse of her. They had an address passed through a chain of friends. Full of hope, they staked out the place. And were rewarded. She appeared up on the roof. "Laura, Laura," they called. She didn't yell back. But she leaned over the edge of the roof, lowered her head, and shook her hair at them, like Rapunzel. They never forgot the night they were teased by Laura Nyro. To seal the memory there was "Emily," the hardly ambiguous love song that Nyro next released.

When I was in high school, I went to bed listening to Francoise Hardy. Long forgotten in the United States (but never in France), she's now being rediscovered in San Francisco's hip new revival of French pop. Hardy had her first hit in 1962; today she's got so many Web pages that I only made it through the first 50. My French friend Marie-Pierre confessed that she was in love with Hardy for, oh, ten years. Unrequited, of course. "She wasn't a lesbian!" But there was the little matter of her style: She appeared always in pants (unusual for a babe of that time); she refused makeup, played her own guitar, and was notoriously "private" about the details of her life. And there was that song, "Only Friends," in 1964: "If we are only friends, why do you kiss me like you do? / If we are only friends, why do you hold me all night through?"

Imagine, today, how that sets my gaydar going. In spite of all the Web-page devotion to Hardy's husband and her 25-year-old son.

In that pre-Stonewall era of hopes and dreams, one singer stood out: Chavela Vargas, queen of them all, ruling the roost from the '50s to the '90s. I first heard her music in Havana in 1985 in the tiny living room of a Cuban lesbian couple. The lyrics to "Macorina" saturated the room, growled in Chavela's phenomenally suggestive voice. I couldn't believe my ears. "You've never heard this before?" asked Myrta, astonished. "It's the lesbian anthem of Latin America": "Ponme la mano aqui, Macorina / Ponme la mano aqui" ("Put your hand here, Macorina / Put your hand here").

And that's just the beginning, before she's singing about finding this woman at a dance, telling her how she's so hot that the sugarcane would throw itself at her feet begging to be crushed, as though she were its sugar mill. And then, the woman rising from her arms at dawn, leaving her only with the smell of mango and young sugarcane, Chavela's voice getting sexier and more desperate with every verse, rumbling with desire.

She's still alive, Chavela, 80 years old and as proud and butch as ever. I finally saw her sing in a Mexico City cabaret. And Macorina? Was she a real woman? Chavela claimed the song was inspired by a gorgeous mulatta she once saw driving by the Malecon seawall in a white convertible in pre-Fidel Havana.

Chavela Vargas embodies the past as well as the present. She's a reminder of the power of music to sustain our identities across time and across borders and languages. Dusty, Laura, Francoise--some of those singers were lesbians, some aren't, and some, well, we may never know. But their voices and words and sexy good looks have given us hope, sustained our trust, and hey, sometimes even helped us get some gift into bed. What more can we ask of our music?