Fear kept Penny Severns’ lesbian relationship with editor hidden

Raw.

Terry Mutchler’s memoir about her love affair with Sen. Penny Severns is brutal in its honesty. Shining in its love. And raw in its pain.

Mutchler puts her whole heart on public view in “Under This Beautiful Dome,” the story of a relationship the two tried mightily to keep secret back in the ’90s.

The ’90s.

As near as those years seem, how far away they are.

Severns was an attractive, immensely popular Democratic lawmaker from downstate Decatur. A “single” woman, some would note quietly.

Mutchler, the Associated Press’ first woman statehouse bureau chief in Illinois, was single too.

Some suspected they were gay. But “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was an unspoken code governing far more than the military. It reached everywhere. Certainly into politics.

And so they hid in plain sight.

“The best years of our lives were written in invisible ink,” Mutchler writes.

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