Last Night at the Telegraph Club

The novel with an image of Shirley at age 13 standing on the Miss Chinatown stage and Lily wondering “if this was what a Chinese girl should look like” (8-9). However, as the novel jumps forward to the girls’ last year of high school, Lily realizes that something’s different about her. She collects pictures of women, including Katharine Hepburn dressed in decidedly unfeminine attire, female pilots, and, perhaps more mysteriously, male impersonator Tommy Andrews. However, when she discovers the novel Strange Season, a love story between two women, she feels that “she had finally cracked the last part of a code she had been puzzling over for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had started deciphering it” (42). This sense of finally figuring out who she is excites her despite her concerns of feeling shame for being lesbian in a society that marginalizes those who aren’t straight.

However, she faces a challenge to decide what being honest means for her. Shirley warns her about Jean and Kath, urging Lily to avoid rumors by staying away from Kath. Even before they kiss, though, Lily knows that she doesn’t care about rumors enough to stop hanging out with Kath. Then, when they come back together after Christmas break, Lily recognizes that in actively choosing to be with Kath at school, “they were making this choice together, and Lily felt the seriousness with which Kath touched her” (280). In this moment, she opts to be honest with herself, and she continues to do so throughout the rest of the story even as she admits to herself that she loves Kath. In the epilogue, she reveals this to Kath as well.

However, Lily’s family (and Shirley) don’t want her to be honest. Lily knows what will happen when she tells her mother, thinking, “You will never look at me like this again” (325). Nevertheless, she knows that she wants to be the one to tell her mother, rather than letting them hear about it as a rumor. Despite her mother’s reaction, she refuses to give up what she has discovered about herself. She knows that agreeing with her mother—calling everything that happened with Kath a “mistake”—would lead to “erasing all her trips to the Telegraph Club; it would mean denying her desire to go at all” (327). Her feelings for Kath are too strong, so she continues to be honest even when her parents urge her once more to call it all a mistake when they bring up her father’s citizenship papers and the danger that he’s in.

However, Joseph’s refusal to lie to the FBI about his patient’s affiliation inspires Lily to double down, to stay strong in her conviction that lying would mean ignoring not only who she is but also the importance of Kath in her life. She knows that the government will come after her father regardless of whether she lies about her sexuality. She has met enough people who support her and who have affirmed who she is that she knows to stay true to what she feels.