The lost World War II letters of Edythe Eyde, who started America's first lesbian publication

Edythe Eyde was a secretary at a war dog training center in California in 1944 when she encountered a wounded veteran. He was on crutches after suffering injuries in the Pacific and Eyde invited him to her family's house and baked him a chocolate cake. Edythe described the encounter in a letter dated Aug. 23, 1944, one of the many times she wrote to her cousins as World War II raged overseas. Her letters are part of The Washington Post's 'Letters from War' project, which traces the journey of a family of brothers from Rockford, Ill., as three of them served in the military and the fourth assisted in the war effort by working at a defense factory in their home town. The story of the brothers has been detailed in a long-form story, but Edythe's role in the story has not yet been told. In addition to being a first cousin, friend and pen pal to the brothers, she would go on to start what is believed to be the first lesbian publication in the country in 1948. She used the pen name Lisa Ben, an anagram of the word "lesbian" that she'd stick with for years. As The Washington Post detailed in a piece last year, she designed and templated her magazine - Vice Versa - on RKO machines because under California law at the time, the publication of any lesbian publication was illegal and could have landed her in jail. Edythe described the experience in her later years in a podcast called "Making Gay History."