Lesbian liability.

It's 2006. Rosie's cruises are going gangbusters and The L Word is raking in television viewers. So you'd think that lesbians would feel a little easier about coming out these days.

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Not so. At the launch of an excellent new anthology of Canadian lesbian writing, entitled No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction In Lesbian (Insomniac), I learned that some literary dykes don't want to identify, so much so that they refused to participate in the project. I can't name them, of course, because, though I don't respect their choice, I'm not into forced outing.

But come on. It's hard to grasp exactly what the problem is here. This …