Abstract

This article contains the personal account of an aging lesbian. The author tells about her own feelings of shame (feeling defective) as a result of the effects of society's prejudice against women, lesbians, and the old. She illustrates this with examples from her own life of how our culture's hidden and unconscious messages of unworthiness promote feelings of shame for the subjects of such discrimination. The particular prejudices examined are sexism, homophobia, and ageism. The author's background as a physician, first in internal medicine and later as a psychiatrist, gives a special perspective.