When did "Alex" (or "Alix") become the Official Name of Lesbians?

 

Eeek! BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY -- remember when that was all the rage? I had numerous friends tell me it was such an amazing love story, so I bought a copy and cleared an evening to read it. If it wasn't for the unintentional laughs it provided, I would have hurled it out the window of my high-rise apartment. I almost skipped the movie because the book was so awful, but I was relieved to see that almost all of the book's horrifying dialogue had been scrubbed away by the screenwriter. Your description of THE KING OF LIES reminds me of some of the dreadful work I used to have to plough through in fiction writing workshops. There were so many stories from unhappy housewives who wrote about unhappy housewives who had come back to college because ther husbands and children didn't understand them, or bitter, failed former athletes who wrote about promising young football/baseball/wrestling stars who were treated badly by everyone around them. They gave "Write what you know" a bad name. Plus, I tend to shut down automatically whenever I read something in which all the female characters are bitches, victims or sweetly supportive doormats; the same is true of any book in which all the men are either callous, weak-willed or flawless dreamboats. Some writers seem to be influenced much more strongly by bad TV than they are by real life (in which not every lesbian is named Alex or dresses in leather).