I'm writing this letter to a friend and not to a colleague. I just wanted to give you some background information that may shed light on recent events. I'm not asking you to do anything, and nothing herein needs be forwarded to anyone else. In the future, though, I'll make sure that anything I email to you can indeed be shared with anyone you choose. If I ever need to have a private chat, after all, I can always call you up.

Thanks for the heads-up about Pam's complaints. I really appreciate the fact that you're trying to protect me. I don't want to let her misgivings about my interest in her go unanswered, though. It would be easy to think she's being a spiteful adolescent striking a low blow, but I want to think that the problem is much simpler than that. It may be that she's just so shy that she doesn't know people very well yet, especially people my age. For example, she may think that, because she spends so much time on her hair and her makeup, all men find her irresistable. She's indeed very pretty and, when I struggle to find something nice to say about her, I'll usually mention that and enjoy the beaming smile it elicits. But pretty comes cheap these days. At my age, pretty isn't enough. I would never consider anyone even a remote candidate for a romantic relationship unless they showed a real and consistent interest in me and the world I've chosen to live in. I'm relatively flexible otherwise. I don't care about plumbing, for example, and I don't care much about age — but they have to have what you might call a depth of focus that is well beyond where Pam is at the moment. She seems very overwhelmed at this point in her life with her job problems and her landlord problems — and has never expressed to me any personal enthusiasm about anyone at all. She's all about recuperating from exhaustion, taking vacations, and worrying about her cat. At first I thought she might be gay and in the closet, but I can't see why she would need to feel secretive about that with me since she knows that I've been a public figure in the gay community for many years.

I've encouraged her to protect herself from overstimulation so that she can find enough inner peace to sense where she needs to go next with her life. People in her age bracket are often struggling with a career that hasn't quite taken off the ground and are wrestling with doubts about the lifestyle choices they've made. She's currently a social worker and, like many of her colleagues, finds it much more tiring a job than she thought it would be. I don't blame her for feeling a bit disillusioned about this. I was almost drawn into social work myself and, in retrospect, am very glad that I resisted. She's applying for different types of jobs these days in this field and hopefully will find something that doesn't seem so oppressive to her. And she's a genuinely altruistic person, as witness the volunteering she continues to do for several local services for the poor.

I think Pam will feel a lot better now that her working relationship with me has been clarified. When she first volunteered I sensed how little self-confidence she had and encouraged her to feel that I was giving her carte blanche. I said I would do everything in my power to prevent others from nibbling away at her independence. That was a mistake. As month after month dragged by I began to realize that her interest in the project was not what I had imagined. And I resented the fact that she wouldn't answer my emails and doesn't answer her phone in the evening when she comes home from work. (The only time she answers her phone is before going to work in the morning. Since she still uses a dialup modem, though, her phone is often busy. And if you ask for her cell phone number she'll tell you that she doesn't know it.) Hence my gentle hints that, if she wasn't going to get back to working on the project, at least she should let me go on alone — hints which she found inappropriate and intimidating.

Finally I decided that I should write a profile myself to give Pam an example of what interesting writing might look like — hence the Denny interview. I would have eventually done this without her consent (as long as you approved of this plan), but fortunately when I asked her about this she said she didn't mind my preparing one. So all of a sudden I realized that the solution to our embarrassingly vapid profiles page was at hand and had nothing to do with Pam at all. From that moment on I've no longer cared much what Pam does or doesn't do, because the few profiles she may hand in from time to time can't really detract from the quality pieces we'll also have on the site. In a recent phone call she has also told me that she doesn't mind if I recruit other contributors to this project as well. So Pam need no longer feel that I'm pressuring her, because I simply won't expect much from her from now on.

It's sad that Pam would stoop to complaining to you that it's uncomfortable for her to think that I might like to date her. It seems like something a vindictive teenager might do, and I'm not even sure she's serious about it. When Pam introduced herself to me in March and suggested that since we are fellow alums and live so nearby we really ought to be friends, I thought sure, why not. But while I've tried to be as friendly as I can towards her, the fact is that I've never asked her out. When she invited me over to her place in May I said something like, "So, Pam, are we going to be friends as well as neighbors?" Her eyes darkened and she said, "I don't know." And that was the end of it. As for liking Pam, I only really liked her for about a week until I found out how incommunicative and unfriendly she really can be. I sympathise with her unhappiness and would like to help her, but she is so closed off that this is not likely to happen.

You can often sense beneath her pleasant exterior a brooding resentment that can become bristling hostility when you least expect it. For example, at the prospective student event, she suddenly got up and moved to the back of the room. She seemed quite upset and looked as if she were holding back tears. Later she told me that she was angry because Robert George said he as a Republican. I didn't like some of the smugness and sanctimony that was wafting around the room either, so I feel I'm in the same camp as Pam on many issues — but clearly it's not in her best interest to overreact like this.

Like many extremely sensitive people, Pam seems to nurse perceived slights that may not even have occurred. She's convinced that people are criticizing her behind her back and pick on her whenever they can. Sometimes it's like walking on eggshells to be around her. I like to be effusive and funny, sometimes even rambunctious — and she clearly doesn't know how to handle this. Nowadays, for the sake of the work that we need to collaborate on for the chapter, I try to accomodate her personality and she tries to accomodate mine, but it's an uphill battle sometimes.

When I struggle to say something nice to her it's easy to point out how pretty she is. But Angelina Jolie is a lot prettier, and I don't want to date Angelina either. It's good that Pam doesn't know me better because, if she did, she would realize that, when the best I can say about someone is that they're good looking, it usually means I really don't think much of them.

Oh, well, they're all our children and we must do what we can to help them. I think it's important to make a place for her despite her limitations — as you've done. If she were to resign in anger, she would feel personally defeated and that would add to the burden of disappointments she already seems to carry. We don't need to enlarge the chip on her shoulder. If all she can do is prepare short profiles with little substance, that's okay by me.

Thanks for hearing me out on this matter, Dan. I just wanted my day in court.

The picture is of my new brand kitten, by the way. She can't write profiles either, but I love her anyway.