Sinister Wisdom 50
Summer /Fall1993
Publisher: Sinister Wisdom, Inc.
Guest Editors: Caryatis Cardea and Sauda Burch

Editorial readers and advisors: Jamie Lee Evans, Kit Quan, Mady
Shumofsky, Monifa Ajanaku
Contributing editor: Gloria Anzaldua
Production: Elana Dykewomon
Volunteer Coordinator: Susan Levinkind
Office Coordinator: Caryatis Cardea
Advertising Coordinator: Jamie Lee Evans
Fulfillment: Dolphin Waletzky
Typists, Proofreaders, Layout: Angela Koenig, Barbara Selfridge, Jessica
Bucciarelli, Mady Shumofsky, Susan Goldberg, Susan Levinkind, Suz Fields
Office help, correspondence and accounting: Janet Pettini, Laura MunterOrabona, Linda Shear, Nina Wouk, SJ Kahn
Thanks to Bobby Rothschild and Rebecca Kutlin of Tamed Technology
Distribution and mailing crew: Aimee Waldman, Angela Koenig, Anna
Livia, Carol Ann Baker, Caryatis Cardea, Judith Masur, Hadas Weiss,
Leslie Levy, Lisa Horan, Mady Shumofsky, Susan Goldberg, Susan
Levinkind, Susan Wittcoff, Suz Fields
Reader for the Womyn's Braille Press: Judy Freespirit
Cover art: (Front) Ka Yin Fong, Transformation: Retrospective stages of aperson going back to fetal form.
(Back) Julia Youngblood, Kenya Women's Conference 1985: Kenyan women
waiting to participate in opening celebration of 1985 Women's Conference.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976
Former editors and publishers: Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines)
and Catherine Nicholson (1976-81)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981-83)
Michaele Uccella (1983-84)
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983-87)
Copyright © 1993 Sinister Wisdom, Inc. All rights reserved to individual artists and authors.
ISSN: 0196-1853. Printed in the U.S. on recycled paper.

Sinister Wisdom, Inc. • PO Box 3252 • Berkeley CA 94703 • US

Li!lILa LO]_________________ Contents
3
11
13
18
28
29
38
41
4S
46
S6
60
62
66
73
76
81
86

Sauda Burch and Caryatis Cardea· Notes for a Magazine
Upcoming Issues
Sally Bellerose • Dancing Sisters (fiction)
tova. community circles (poems)
Susan Stinson • Tell (novel excerpt) Melissa Farley • Ten Lies about Sadomasochism (essay)*
Lucy A. Tatman • Untitled (p'oem)
Anonymous. In Our Hands: a memory of assisted dying(narrative)*
Joan Cofrancesco • Blocked Writer (poem)
Elana Dykewomon • The Words for It (novel excerpt)
Kirsten Backstrom • Call (fiction)
Neta C Crawford • Thoughts of the Wise Men (poem)
Pamela Gray • 3 out of 4 (or more): a lament for 3 out of 4
(or more) voices (poem)
Elliott. Lesbian Legal Theory: a review of Ruthann Robson's
Lesbian Outlaw (review)*
Julie Blackwomon· Late Anger in A Cathedral (poem andnarrative)*
Naja Sorella • Paying Up! (narrative)*
K. Ellen Kerr • Mirror, Mirror (fiction)
Jamie Lee Evans • ''I'm no Poet (poem)/I

Sinister Wisdom is a multi-cultural, multi-class, womon-born lesbian
space, We seek to open, consider and advance the exploration of community issues, Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect
our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical
judgment, as lesbians evaluating our communities and our world,

89 Monifa Ajanaku • Dissillusioned, Dismayed - Ready for

Revolution: Without Ethics Community Cannot Exist (narrative)*
96 Aspen. Muscle Fetish (poem)
98 Aspen. Loving Song (poem)
99 Deb Hipp • Loneliness Smokes Too Many Cigarettes (fiction)
101 Zoe Rhine • Beyond the Sway (fiction)
105 Jen Benka • Tracing (poem)
108 Emily Ballou • Corn Moon Sister (poem)
110 Contributors' Notes
114 Books Received
117 Announcements and Classified Ads
128 Notes on Scents

§§§

ART
cover
back
cover
12
20
40
59
61
85
95
97

Ka Yin Fong • Transformation (mixed media)
Julia Youngblood • Kenya Women's Conference 1985
(photograph)
Dawn Rudd • Untitled (cut paper)
Carole Graham • Untitled
China Marks • Barefoot! (1990) (mixed media)
Kathryn Kirk • Alison, Brooklyn, NY 1989 (silver print)
Peni Hall • Untitled (pen and ink)
Peni Hall • Untitled (pen and ink)
Dawn Rudd • Once Upon A Time (cut paper)
Peni Hall • Crip Companions (pen and ink)

*See Notes for a Magazine, p.3, for explanation of asterisks.

Summer/Fall 19933

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Notes from the Editors
Sauda Burch and Caryatis Cardea

In February 1992, we had discussed guest-editing an issue ofSinister Wisdom. Some time in the future ... on some topic to be
decided later ... a loose discussion. Then we learnedElanawould
be away during Spring 1993, and someone else would have toedit that issue of the journal. We decided that might as well be
the one we did, and chose Ethics from the list of future topics.
To select the material, we wanted a guest group of editorial
readers, high on ideas of what constitutes ethical behavior, lowon the class and race privilege most commonly found amonglesbian editors. It would be a group not predominantly white,
not predominantly class-privileged. A year later, we had Kit
Quan, Mady Shumofsky, Monifa Ajanaku, Jamie Lee Evans andourselves to review material for the journal on ethics. It was a
new kind of group for Sinister Wisdom,having a majority of lesbians of color, and a majority of lower-class lesbians, on an issue
not exclusively related to race or class.
This is the Ethics Issue. :.Not! So little material was submitted on ethics, we were forced to cancel the theme. At deadlines,
when we customarily have 75-125 authors submitting 1-3 pieces,
we had received submissions from exactly 24 lesbians: not an
auspicious begining. We convened the group and read the material. We decided on fewer than half-a-dozen pieces as being
truly applicable to the theme. We advertised, sent out questionnaires, begged by mail and telephone all over the country. We
received two more pieces. We discussed book reviews, interviews, collections of quotes from various lesbians in various
communities. We received one more piece. Finally, with thegreatest reluctance, we acknowledged defeat. There would be
no Ethics Issue as #50 of Sinister Wisdom.
Each part of this was a separate disappointment. There was
the work we would miss doing together, the journal we had
hoped to make. And, there was our feeling that the 50th issue of

4

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTSW should be a landmark, signifying the social, intellectual andartistic range of lesbian community. Why hadn't folks written?
What we had wanted was simple. We wanted lesbians to tell nthe ethical foundations on which they build their lives, and wewould tell them ours. But, we asked our questions, such as:
What are our ethics? What does an ethical lesbian look/
act like? How do we treat each other? What is our
responsibility to om communities? How do our communities handle abuse? How do we impose justment?
How does racial, ethnic or classs identity affect yourethical outlook?
and got very few replies. We used the pieces we had selected(indicated by an asterisk in the Table of Contents), and completed the issue with other availble material, including many
excellent stories and poems. We're grateful to Elana and SW forallowing us to raid the reserve material. Each of us, Caryatis andSaud a, have written some thoughts on the significance of ourfailed Ethics issue and of SW #50.

Summer/Fall 1993

5____________ Notes for a Magazine
Sauda Burch

M y coeditor, Caryatis, and I joked about the cover for this issue.

Why not call Sinister Wisdom #50, "Lesbian Ethics ...NOT"? Although "NOT" is a bit passe, it's descriptive. It tells you that you
aren't holding the Ethics Issue, but something else. It tells youwhat our intent was and what it ended up being. You are holding
the pieces chosen for the Ethics Issue and a good deal of everything else-an Open Issue. And, though ~e are disappointed
that this is not the ethics issue, the work that specifically addresses ethics is inspiring and inventive, creating a solid foundation for further work. This issue is a strong showing of "lesbianart and imagination."
I think many lesbians were waiting for the Ethics Issue towrite itself, or for it to be written by "those other lesbians," thephilosophers and academicians among us. Imploring my friends(some of whom I consider philosophers) to write was a monumental task. They wanted to know what we meant by "ethics,"
and what we meant by "community." What we wanted werewritings on what they meant by ethics, and how they definedcOmrri.unity. It became clear throughout the process that ethics
wasn't the priority at our potlucks, social gatherings or politicalrallies. We continue to struggle to articulate our responsibilities
to our lesbian "community." As editing of this issue drew to aclose, I got the distinct impression that talking about ethics wasthought of as dull, passionless and judgmental.
I admit that I too was initially whelmed by the task. I felt
vulnerable. Thinking about ethics found me examining myself,
uncovering my most unethical self, the behaviors that I havebeen least proud of. It wasn't enough that I could point my finger
at some other dyke - how was I contributing to an ethical orunethical lesbian community?
I can easily recall when I have been unethical- being silent
in the company of oppression, talking about other dykes behind6 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

their backs, the way I have left relationships ... I want to erase
these episodes, and finally and dramatically wrench free of thepatriarchal baggage that separates me from my essential self.
Yet, if I refuse to pinpoint where I have benefitted from unethicalbehavior, where I ''buy-in,'' I also refuse the lessons that may
help me make ethical choices in the future.
Two months ago I suggested a free writing exercise to mywriting group. For ten minutes we wrote on what an ethicallesbian looked like. I looked down at two pages of scribbles. I
found my "ethical lesbian" nestled comfortably on another planet.
I had placed my ethics outside myself - so distant that they
were unreachable. In doing so, I shifted responsibility. If I can't
define and articulate my own ethical standards, or if I am unaware of my ''bottom line," someone will set those standards forme. Placing my ethics outside myself also distances me from andhelps keep me distrustful of my self - from the instinct whichalerts me when I am moving away from my ethics.
In my writing, the ethical lesbian was free of concepts ofseparation, violence, limitation or misogyny. I thought that inorder for a lesbian to be ethical she had to be untouched by fear
or violence. Did I really believe that because of our victimization
we cannot make ethical choices? Or that victimization itself
makes one unethical?
Yet, back on planet earth, I am consistently making ethicalchoices. I struggle to work with other lesbians instead of against
them; I maintain confidences, I own the ways I am oppressive I am doing the work. Ethical and unethical attitudes and actions
are different sides of the same coin. It is the balancing, the moving
towards continual ethical decisions that is my goal.
I have begun to approach the question of ethics the way I
have approached my work around dismantling oppression. First,
I remain open to the fact that I can be unethical, that I live in asociety that devalues. Indeed, the values that were handed down
to me weren't all useful or harmless - indeed many were destructive. The land that many of us consider home was stolen
from Native peoples; I am here because my people were stolen
and sold from the shores of Africa. These and other atrocities areSummer/Fall 19937

the legacy which we have inherited. Second, I must define andbe able to articulate what my ethics are. I must ally myself withlesbians who share my ethical outlook. Third, I must identify
where I benefit from unethical behavior and choices. Fourth, I
must believe that being ethical is possible, with work and increased consciousness. I must notice when I and other lesbians
make ethical choices, and I must understand the benefit to thelesbian community in our doing so. Fifth, I must choose to act
ethically and to continue to choose to act ethically. I must act on
my articulated beliefs. Finally, I must continue this work until
there is no more work to do.
Maybe next year we'll try this again. Perhaps some of. thepieces in this issue will inspire enough of us to think about
ethics. Maybe then you will want to write, to create art, to haveyour voice heard, to visualize lesbian utopia. We can hope.

8 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

Notes for a Magazine ____________
Caryatis Cardea

Each time we act from privilege, we act without ethics. This was
my starting point in preparation for this issue. Most lesbians I've
asked have agreed that an ethical lesbian is one who is, at least,honest and just. But lesbians exercise privilege, which is dishonest, and inflict oppression, which is unjust. Our communities, ourrelationships, our lives, as lesbians, are, therefore, lacking in ethics.
I wanted to talk about that.
I had hoped that lesbians would write about the ways inwhich their class background and racial! ethnic identity, theirage, dis/ability, cultural experience contribute to their ethicalperspective. Value differences are ethical differences.
This is the 50th issue of Sinister Wisdom, the journal for thelesbian imagination in the arts and politics. It was to be focused on
ethics in the lesbian community. Living, as dykes do, outside themainstream, we invent our lives as we go along. We ought to havebeen flooded with material about our trials and errors: the middleaged dykes who trivialize your experiences because you're 23;
the middle-aged dykes who maternalize you because you're 63;
the white lesbians who stage all-white conferences but ask you
to speak about racism because you're of color; the class-privileged dykes who offer financial help because of your poverty,
but withdraw it when their homes need plumbing repairs; theyears-long friend who abandons you for your abusive ex-lover;the gentiles who speak against the anti-Semitism you experience, then invite you to their Xmas party; the lover who abandons you for a fling with your best friend; the best friend. These
acts are dishonest and unjust. They are unethical. Talking about
them is talking about ethics.
.
In planning this issue, my co-editor, Sauda Burch, and I
discussed what ethics means to each of us. One of the things
Sauda said was, "treating each other as if we mattered." So far, no
one has said it better. If lesbians treated ourselves and each otherSummer/Fall 19939

as though we mattered, we would be well on our way to an
ethical community. Not to mention a revolution.
In the United States, only white men of class privilege matter:
Not to us, it's true - but to the dominant culture, that's who isconsidered important, worth thinking about, worth recording.
They are treated by each other, and most other people, with deference, courtesy, respect. They are treated as though they haveintelligence, as though they are entitled to good things. As though
their health is of concern to everyone. As though their futures areworthy of consideration, because it is in the sum of their individual lives that their culture finds its meaning.
We must believe that, despite all messages to the contrary,lesbians matter. And our belief must be manlfested in our behavior. Our health, safety and futures matter. Our relationships witheach other matter. Our communities matter. We deserve courtesy,deference and respect, at least from one another. Because it is in
the sum of our individual lesbian lives that our lesbian culture
will find meaning.
The construction of ethical lesbian community requires aconstant, conscious evaluation of ourselves and the culture surrounding us. Each of us must ask in what ways she has contributed to the furtherance - or the demise - of lesbian community.
We don't need to agree on every political issue, but our behavior
must be consistent with our political beliefs, and we must be
accountable for the consequences of our actions. (Personally, I'm
particularly tired of hearing I-fell-in-love as the excuse for every
reprehensible action taken in our communities. Explain such
politics to me: how does falling in love revoke our politicalaccountability to other lesbians? In what way does falling in love
rescind the obligation not to cheat, lie, exercise classism, racismand even physical violence? Lesbians need to talk about ethics.)
Every politically conscious lesbian must make certain thather presence is not one of the things that red uc~s the sense of
belonging, the right to belong, of other lesbians with less privilege than hers. My presence, as a white lesbian, cannot be one
which makes a lesbian of color feel at home. But I can struggle to
make my presence one which does not makes every dyke of color

10 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

in my community say, "Damn, not her again. I can't work withher." I can avoid smoke and fragrances that exclude many disabled lesbians, I can refuse to stage events in places with chairs
only for thin folks, with stairs and no ramps. I can speak up when
I witness anti-Semitism; I can report my own racism to otherwhite lesbians, so that we all learn from each other's mistakes.
I can fight my own defensiveness. I can try, damn it. I can struggle
and work, and take joy in that work and that struggle.
Lesbians with privilege too easily assert that a community
which doesn't tolerate prejudiced remarks (as if we have eventhat) is an ethical community. But if words, or even beliefs, wereenough, the european-descent founding fathers of this misbegotten country would not have owned human beings of African
descent. Their words, after all, were consistently on the side of
freedom, human rights, human equality, human dignity. But
they stole this land, and bought and sold the people to work it,
and it is not they who suffered from the contradiction.
An ethical lesbian can't tolerate a community in which dykes
live in squalor (housed or on the streets), in isolation from one
another, kept from public gathering places by inaccessibility, orby the community's ongoing embrace of dykes who batter otherdykes. An ethical lesbian must do something. Not something
about everything, but something about something.
Ethics is conscience. Conscience requires the willingness
both to remember the past and to anticipate the future. Memory
for perspective, and to learn from errors, pass on acquired wisdom; anticipation to judge the consequences of our actions, what
our communities will be like, and how we will live with ourselves and with each other if we do or do not take certain actions.
These are ethical choices.
Fifty times, lesbians have created Sinister Wisdom: this combination of artistry and drudgery, satisfaction and frustration, as
much a part of, as a reflection of, our communities. I wish her 50
more, but with ever-deepening analysis of our lives and how to
improve them. I never again want the response to a request for an
evaluation of our ethics to be a near-empty mailbox. This is ourlives we're (not) talking about.

Summer/Fall 1993

11_____________ Upcoming Issues#51 Open Theme: all forms and styles. Out in December 1993.
#52 Allies: The words are easy: "none of us is free until all of us are
free," "an injury to one is an injury to all." Are these true statementsof our community ethic? How do we enact that ethic in our lives inboth daily and exceptional ways? Do we "walk our talk"?
We understand oppression as the systematic, institutionalized perpetuation of misinformation and mistreatment of a groupof people. This doesn't just happen" out there," it happens amongus. Our liberation lies in the unlearning of attitudes, assumptions and behaviors. How, as a community, as individual dykes,
do we live out our commitment to each other, how do we articulate the politics of being true allies? What do we require of ourallies? What do we offer as allies? How do we respond to eachother's oppression? Do we actually experience another lesbian's
pain as an injury to ourselves? How do we acknowledge and use
our privileges? Do we take initiative to intercept oppressive
behavior when it's in our faces? Do we understand the difference
between (cultural) sharing and appropriation? Do we, as allies,
use what we've learned from our own oppressions without ranking or generalizing ("I know just how you feel") that experience?
- These are just the beginning of our questions. We say we're acommunity that wants to fundamentally change attitudes about
race, class, age, ability, size, appearance. As allies, how are wemaking that happen? Deadline is October I, 1993.
#53 Tentative theme: Old Dykes, details to come. Deadline isFebruary I, 1994.
#54 Tentative theme: Lesbians and Religion (or: fuckxmas), to beedited by lesbians from other than christian backgrounds; alllesbians welcome to contribute. Deadline: June I, 1994.

12 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

untitled
Dawn A. Rudd

Summer/Fall 1993

13

Sally Bellerose

Dancing Sisters

I ~ depressed. My girlfriend left me. Then I got cancer of thecolon, so I had to have my large intestine removed, cut out, thewhole thing, gone. I'm a lesbian alone with no large bowel andan ostomy bag hanging off the front of my abdomen. Who's
going to love me now?
O.K., so my girlfriend left me four years ago, long before my
ostomy, for reasons that have nothing to do with cancer. That
doesn't make it any easier. It was hard enough trying to findsomeone to love me before this damn bag of shit took over my life.
I don't have the kind of family that talks things out, but
they're all being nice to me, because I'm depressed. My family
never talked to me about having a girlfriend when I had a girlfriend. They never talked to me about her after she left. My
family never talked to me about having a colon. Now that I don't
have a large intestine, they don't talk to be about the fact that it'sgone.
I go to my parents' house for dinner. I'm not quite ready forsolid food yet. My mother cooks a special meal for me. No one
complains about all the vegetables being mashed or the lasagna
being bland. Except my sister Jane. ''This is stupid. Why are weall eating mush?" she asks. My brother's wife shushes her. Sheleans over to me and whispers, "If you were still on intravenous
feedings we'd stick needles and tubes in each other's arms and
Ma would hook us up to LV. bags to eat."
After I mope around for a few months, Jane decides that it's
time for me to start getting out more often. She says nobody whomatters is going to care if I have an ostomy or not. If they do, tohell with them. She says dinner once a week with the parents
doesn't count as getting out. My sister Jane is married. She's
happy. She thinks that I should be happy too. She thinks that I
should work a little harder at it. She thinks that I should avenge
myself on the cancer and my ex-large intestines by being happy.

14 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

I think she should back off and let me wallow in depression until
I'm damned good and ready to be happy.
Jane loves to dance. I used to love to dance too. She harasses
me until I agree to go dancing with her. I'm afraid she's going totake me to that place with the phones where she met her firsthusband. You sit in a booth with a number on it and hope thatsomebody thinks you're cute and gives you a call. I don't ask
where we're going. I just want to get it over with. I'm asleep ina chair in my living room, dressed in my best T-shirt and the only
jeans I own that fit over the ostomy bag when she blows the horn
for me.
She drives straight to the parking lot of the GirlsClub, theonly lesbian bar in town. She jumps out of the car like she's here
every Saturday night. "Come on," says happily married heterosexual Jane. "I haven't been here in twenty years."
We were in high school the only other time Jane has been to
the GirlsClub. We were on our way home from a basketballgame. My father let Jane drive his car. I made the honor roll andshe convinced him that I deserved a ride in a '67 Buick. She
claimed that the GirlsClub was the bar where all the dykes hungout. The place was taboo, so Jane wanted to be there. I told her she
was full of shit, how would she know where dykes hang out? Ishould have known better than to challenge her. She drove into
the parking lot with her ponytail swinging like she owned theplace, same as tonight, except that now the pony tail is gone. Thatnight we got carded and thrown out at the door, but we got an
eyeful. It made a bigger impression on me than it did on Jane.
It's after ten and the place is filling up. Women are joking
around, checking each other out, making noise. Jane grabs the
only table left and makes herself comfortable. She cranes her
neck to get a good look around the room. She pays no attention
to me. I'm happy to be left alone. Finally she gets her fill and asks
me what I'm drinking. "Bud" I say. I shouldn't be drinking beer.
Yeast. It's going to bubble up and make noise when it empties
into my ostomy bag.
She walks up to the bar. I take a good look at her. She's
wearing tight acid wash jeans and a french-cut tee shirt. I'm used
to taking good looks at her. She's my sister. I've spent all my life

Summer/Fall 199315

helping her decide which jeans make her ass look good andwhich color blouse shows off her blue eyes best. Usually when
I look at her it's like looking at myself in the mirror. You get soused to yourself that you never really know what you look like.
You never really get the big picture. Now I'm looking at her
saddled up to the bar of the GirlsClub. What I see wakes me up.
Sister Jane is pretty good to look at. It never really hit me before.
I must be seeing what other people see when they first lookat her. She's a sexy, plump, ripe looking white woman. All curvein tight clothes, but that isn't what gets my attention. Whatamazes me is that you can see her personality in the way she
moves, the way she carries herself. I always, knew she had guts,
but I never knew you could actually tell by looking at her. I'msure of it. You can see who she is by the way she moves aroundthe bar. It's all over her. She's a hot shit and she knows it. I'm surethat the other women in the bar see what I see. I keep watchingher. She's older, she's smaller and she's got on tighter clothes, but
she looks a lot like me. She looks the way I used to feel.
"Quit staring." She plunks down two Buds.
"You look pretty good," I say.
"Pick out a nice woman who's not your sister, stare at her, andtell her how good she looks.""Shut up. Since when are you afraid of a compliment?""See anybody you like?" Jane asks, loud, turns around in her
chair and takes in every woman in the place.
"Jesus. Will you shut up?"
'Why? You're in a bar and you wouldn't mind meeting somebody nice. Big deal.""No. You're in a bar and you'd like me to meet somebody
nice."'What's the point of going through all the trouble of being
q-u-e-e-r if you can't even look at women in a bar? Pitiful."
I decide to sulk. She's being an asshole. What would she
know about how much trouble it is to be a lesbian? What does
she know about how it feels to have an ostomy? She's neverdepressed. She's too busy poking her nose in other people's lives
to get depressed about her own. She keeps looking around.

16 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Watching women on the dance floor. She doesn't even notice that
I'm sulking.
Suddenly I've got all her attention again. "Let's dance" shesays.
"Dance?"''Dance. See all those women shaking around? They're dancing.""I'm worried about my ostomy." I lie. I'm not particularly
worried about my ostomy. I had a light supper and I emptied it
before I left. It hasn't come loose, fallen off or leaked in months.
I don't want to dance. I don't want to dance with Jane.
"You're afraid to dance in a room full of lesbians/' she grins.
"You don't know a damn thing about it." I want to hit her.
"I've danced here hundreds of times."'When?" she says. "When was the last time you danced?
Even alone in your apartment. Or at Ma's. We used to dance withthe kids at Ma's."
She stands up and takes my hand, dancing with me stillseated. "Up" she says. She should be struck dead by the look I'mgiving her. I'm depressed enough without dancing with mystraight sister in a dyke bar. She knows I'm pissed but she
ignores it. She dances around me even though I'm planted in mychair. She won't let go of my hand. It's getting embarrassing.
She's making a scene. I get up and move around a little on thedance floor. They're playing some whiny new age music with nobeat. I'm making plans to kill her as soon as this dance is over.
Then a miracle happens. Without so much as a fraction of asecond between songs Aretha Franklin comes booming over the
speakers. Aretha, RE.S.P.E.CT, Franklin. No two white-girls
have ever danced to Aretha Franklin as well, as often or. as
devoutly as my sister Jane and I. We danced to Aretha at both ofJane's weddings. Jane brought Aretha and head phones to thehospital after my operation. I can move to RE.S.P.E.CT. I wonder
if my ostomy bag can move to RE.S.P.E.CT.
Jane squeals, "RE.S.P.E.CT find out what it means to me,"and pulls me to the middle of the floor. She dances and shakes
her sisterly ass at me. I try to stay pissed off but my ass shakes

Summer/Fall 199317

back. It takes no effort at all. I can do it without a girlfriend. I can
do it without a colon. I can do it depressed or not. Our asses shakeback at us from three mirrored walls. We admire ourselves. I gain
new respect for the lighting and mirror arrangement at theGirlsClub. I'm sure that women of good taste are admiring us.
We display ourselves generously. We know when to shake ourshoulders. We know when to grind our hips. She knows how
many steps I'll take to the left. I know how many steps she'll taketo the right. We meet in t~e middle, shake our asses some more,then step back the same way we've been doing since 1964.
Jane wipes the sweat off the back of her neck onto the backof my jeans and laughs. I'm sure that someo?e in the room must
be admiring me. If I wasn't depressed I'd wish that it was the cuteredheaded woman sitting at the table across the room. I walk up
to the bar and order a Bud and an orange juice. I try leaning on
the bar with my butt sticking out but the bar cuts into my ostomy
bag. I sit on the stool and hear a gurgling noise. My ostomy bag
is beginning to fill. My hand slips inside my jeans. I know I'm
alright, but I can't help checking. A woman on the stool next tome says, "You O.K.?""Adjusting my ostomy bag," I answer.
I can tell that she has no idea what an ostomy is and she isn't
asking. She plays with a big silver ring on her baby finger. Aftera minute she turns to me again. ''Wanna dance?" she asks.
"An ostomy bag is an appliance that you wear on your abdomen," I say. No response. "It's kind of a heavy duty plastic bagthat catches your waste." She looks at me blankly. "You know,
your feces, if your bowel can't do the job." She gives me a weaksmile. "I don't have a large intestine," I say. It feels so good to say
it out loud that I decide to repeat myself. "My whole large intestine was removed.""Oh" she says. "You sure can dance. So can your girlfriend."
She's ruining my big moment. I'm coming out to her andshe's not taking notice. I don't correct her about the girlfriend.
Maybe I will, if she starts paying better attention. But Aretha ischurning out "Chain, Chain, Chain. Chain of fools," so I say,"Thanks, I'd love to dance."

18 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

tova

community circles
1. doorways

the women of my family
are in a tenement kitchen
my motherwith one handeats a pickle sandwich
frays the edges of the t.v. guidewith the other.
my grandmotherleans her face
into her handclucks with her teeth
pats her knee
as she tells a storyof her first try
at baking prune strudel.
my sister
listens and laughs
over a face of fear
she's had for forty plus years
put there by abusefirst from the family
then from her husband
and now from her children.
streams of womenof my family float in
as if there was a hora
they needed to dance there isaunt sophie who speaks incessantlySummer/Fall 1993

aunt sadie who pinches everyone's cheeksaunt ethel endlessly complaining
aunt betty with the deep red lips and moleaunt bella small and shy and religious
aunt jean doing her needlepoint
and of course the cousins
and by now the nieces
are all there too.
i sit in the frame of the doorway
not in or out of the room
as if wanting safety
from an earthquakethat can bring down the house
if i readmy poems and storiesof the women of my family
i have tried to kidnap their lives
for a ransom of words
i have tried to seize
their laughter
their sewing and their lips
their abusivenesstheir immigrant selves
their assimilated selves
their lives and their deaths andtheir spirits coming todance a hora
in a tenement kitchen.
i sit in the doorway
unable to form a wordin their direction
my silence meets
what they refuse to hear,
and the earthquake erupts
only in my belly

19

20

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

i tell their stories
to the world
but not to themand from the safety of a doorway
i take notes of their lives
as i watch themdance their 'hora
without me.

untitled
Carole Graham

Summer/Fall 1993

21

2. unnamed hologram
the essential feature of a hologram is that each piece of the hologram contains
the entire structure of the entire hologram; each piece is not just a part of thewhole, it has the entire pattern and way of functioning of the whole embedded
in it. - ann wilson schaef

if i could hold it in my hand
all at once if i knew
what it was
maybe i could begin
to understandhow to havecommunity filledwith each pieceof a childhood
filledwith immigrants
who came on a boat
looking for distant aunts and uncles
familyblood
thicker thanthe ocean water
they came acrossleaving europe behindbut not a brooklyn neighborhood
they refilled itwith jewish
everything
and despite everything
they stuck together
with phone calls holidays cousins clubs
political groups unions bar mitzvahs
funerals i've attended
they're mostly dead now
these immigrant families
that i left too
because of abusebecause I was a lesbian
because amerikachanged us all.

22

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

if i could hold it in my hand

all at once if i knew
what it was
maybe i could begin
to understandhow to have community
filled with each piece oflesbian jew working-classa family not of blood
but still of survival
not one neighborhood
but from one city to the next
like immigrants off the boat
we arrive still searchingfor distant relations
didn't you know her
who lived there
in that year
who was lovers withmy ex-lover's lover.
connection, you say
across phone calls political groups
festivals moves parties lovers and ex's
funerals and births andsomeplace to stay when you're away
is what we've learned
to ask ourselves
to build homes around.
if we could get our blood
to course through each otherwould we be thick enough for each otheror would we move place to placestillsplit in pieces butable to contain each otherhold it in our hands all
at once if i knew

Summer/Fall 199323

what it was
maybe i could begin
to understandhow to have community
filled with scattered piecesof this unnamed
hologram

3. passages
kabbalah, on the planet of the deontologocial megacrisis, is the inheritanceof circle drawers; of awakened dreamers who will seize the real in the name ofthe possible and transform the given through the magic of mutuality.
whatever tomorrow is, if it is not all shards in the whirlwind of tohu andbohu (chaos and emptiness), it is the ontology of circles, where soul infuses mind
and i says to thou 'i am present within you.' - martin buber
I.
bowl-l . a hemispherical vessel, wider than deep, forfood or fluids. 2. the contents of such a vessel.

the bowl
is wooden
i've had it fori don't remember
how many years
i've carried it
house to housecity to coasti've eaten ricewith butter and yeast
macaroni with ketchup
ice cream with fruitfrom its circle i24sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

drank herb mixturesof moon tea rituals
to find new lovers
and hot soupon cold loverless nites
i dunked it in rivers
poured its waterover my bodya mikvah" to bringme spirit i soakedpeas and corn in it
hoping its majik
would bring a good crop.
the bowl
started to crackon the left side i held on
drinking bowls of soupcarefully filled below the crack,
people would laugh why do you eat
out of a cracked bowl?
why do you bring it
to potlucks on trips
so i wandered alone. through se asia
the bowl wedged
in my pack packed fulli barely even looked
at it when i got homethe crack had widened
come full circle i triedfor days to use it
the thickest salad dressing
wouldn't stay*a traditional jewish cleansing and ritualistic bath for wimmin done monthly.

Summer/Fall 1993

ketchup ran out its sides
it wouldn't hold anything
it wouldn't split in two
so i let water seepout the crack
over my used hands
then put it
on a shelf to see

but

II.

ring -1. any circular object, for, or arrangement witha vacant circular center. 2. asmall circular oand, generally made of precious metal, often set with jewels, andworn on the finger. 3. any circular band used forcarrying, holding, or containing something: a napkinring. 4. a circular movement or course, as in dancing.

"when i'm deadyou can have it."the nurse took it off
before her fingers got
too swollen she gave it
to me she said
when she was dead.
a simple gold bandeight years pass
everydayi wear it but there
i was packing
to go home andit was gone i yelled
and screamed and criedat my lover all through the nite
unpacked and repacked
looked under the bedon the floor
in the car.

25

26 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

what is lost?
the meaning the object thetime to let goof the deadmarried with thisvacant circular centercontaining spiritof i and thou likequeer nuns married to god
are we jewish queers married
to dead grandmothers it couldn't befound so unconsciously
i played with the shadow of a ringon my finger iand who are thoulike a bowl with a crackthat won't split
it appears days later
on top of a shirt
laying still after
twelve hours on a planecustoms and cars
it waits for me
to learn to let gothen let back inalive with the deadi want to dream
what is possible.
III.
equator - 1. the great circle circumscribing the earth's
surface, the reckoning datum of latitudes and dividing
boundary ofNorthern and Southern hemispheres, formedby the intersection ofa plane passing through the earth's
center perpendicular to its axis of rotation. 2. any
similar great circle drawn on the surface of a celestial
body at right angles to the axis of rotation . 3. this areaor belt of earth as, most often, warm or torrid region

Summer/Fall 1993

i went below the equator
cut my world in two
to get to the other sideof people and spirits andi crossed a line
to a torrid region
a hot jungle
standing alone
moving back and forthacross the dateline
days came and went as i
sweated out memoriesof megacrisis
dreamers transformers majic.
i left a home
so i could remember
how to love it
i passed a line
so i could remember
i am part of many circles
i lost a day
so i could find a different
tomorrow
not all chaos and emptinessbut a vessel
to hold and crack but not split
vacant ring of spirit
to put myself through and danceacrossa boundaryis only a line imagined
through the ontologyof circles i come throughpresent
within all of you.

a

27

28

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

Susan Stinson

Tell

I realized I had to tell Martha.
She'd given this gift to me: sex and an outpouring of words. I
wanted Martha to be an adamant vision in the world, with her lowslung belly swaying in the morning of a culture. Martha: the woman
standing on the scalloped shell emerging from the sea. Martha's
hair is red foam, her fist is tight, her knees are dimpled. She poured
water on my feet, and there's no part of me that can forget that.
I changed under the water and under her hands to an outspoken
woman. It was inspiration. She brought me to sex and to voice.
She gave me a mouthful of wine. I drank, oh, I put my tongue
along her tensed lips.
The way I feel when I'm moving the words is so close to what
she gives me with her knee between my legs, her fingers spreading me.
Please and thank you.
She's talking.
Rich. Reach me.
Reach inside me.
My uterus has tongues and they are lapping at her knuckles.
My cervix swells a story.
Her own breasts fall, cascades of fat and nipple, over her
padded ribs. She is mammoth. She haunts me. My soul is myown, but when I write I find only Martha, the miracle, riding agold cow. Much moaning and lowing, many small hairs.
There are three forces. One is the body and my movements,
need to eat, desire for Martha. Another is the spirit and the leaves
and the way it moves in the leaves. Another is the spirit and thewords and the way it moves in the words.
It moved me. It woke me. It caught me. It disturbed me. ThenI had a moment of absolute presence. Martha.

Summer/Fall 1993

29

Melissa Farley

Ten Lies about Sadomasochism
1. Pain is pleasure; humiliation is enjoyable; bondage is liberation.
2. Sadomasochism is love and trust, not domination and annihilation.
3. Sadomasochism is not racist and anti-semitic even though we "act"like slaveowners and slaves, Nazis and Jews.
4. Sadomasochism is consensual; no one gets hurt if they don't want toget hurt. No one has died from sadomasochistic "scenes."
5. Sadomasochism is only about sex. It doesn't extend into the rest of therelationship.
6. Sadomasochistic pornography has no relationship to the sadomasochistic society we live in. "If it feels good, go with it." "We create our own
sexuality."
7. Lesbians "into sadomasochism" are feminists, devoted to women,anda women-only lesbian community. Lesbian pornography is "by women,
for women."
8. Since lesbians are superior to men, we can "play" with sadomasochismin a liberating way that heterosexuals can not..
9. Reenacting abuse heals abuse. Sadomasochism heals emotional wounds
from childhood sexual assault.
10. Sadomasochism is political dissent. It is progressive and even "transgressive" in that it breaks the rules of the dominant sexual ideology.

A number of articles in this issue of Sinister Wisdom are about
ethics, and I see ethics as nuts-and-bolts ideas about how to live
life; how you treat other people, even when your back is up against
the wall. Although formulated by its current advocates as an issueof sexual liberation, minority rights, or even healing, I consider
lesbian sadomasochism to be primarily an issue of feminist ethics.
I believe that lesbians who embrace sadomasochism either theoretically or in practice, are supporting the lifeblood of patriarchy.
''The symbols, language and style of lesbian sado.,masochist chic
are the symbols, language and style of male supremacy: violation,

30

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

ruthlessness, intimidation, humiliation, force, mockery, consumerism." (De Clarke, in press) Choosing sadomasochism, given our
oppression, is an act of profound betrayal. The ideas I'm writing
about are not new (please see the references at the end of thisarticle), but hopefully they will be a useful summary which can beused by feminists in the 90's to see that all that sadomasochists
claim is just not true.
Lie #1: Pain is pleasure; humiliation is enjoyable, bondage is liberation.
This is the big lie. Part of the reason that we are vulnerable tothis lie is that many of us were raised with religious notions thatpunishment is love and that suffering is redemption. A young
acquaintance who rowed on a crew team showed me a t-shirt which
said: 'What does not kill me will make me stronger." As women
we are taught that love is selfless devotion regardless of the pain
suffered. We believe that love is pain because we keep getting hurt.
Women are taught not to believe our senses or intuition. We aretaught to believe that pain, suffering, and humiliation are challenges which we should look forward to because they teach us theimportant things in life. After that, what can't they do to us, what
can't they get us acclimated to? We've learned to "consent" to subordination, even become culturally enthralled by it. If chains and acollar represent rebellion and "being in control," then Madonna is
our "rebel" Barbie and Ted Bundy her Ken. (from Morgan, 1993)
Lie #2: Sadomasochism is love and trust, not domination and annihilation.
Sadomasochism has to do with annihilation. Contrary to the
popular legend that sadomasochism expands one's sexuality, it
restricts and ultimately destroys one's sexual being. Subordination, humiliation, and torture are means of deliberately destroying
the self. I recently read an article about the way Texas patriarch
Koresh entwined "sex, violence, love and fear" in order to control
cult members. These techniques are not new; people have long
harmed others in the name of love, religion, or politics. Today's
lesbian sadomasochism is all dressed up in a new coat: the coat of"lifestyle choice," "oppressed minority," "sexual liberation."

Although the violence turns my stomach, I appreciate Jan
Brown's candor which cuts through the liberal rhetoric about theSummer/Fall 1993

31

delights of sadomasochism, and gets to the core of the matter. In
an article from Outlook, 1990, entitled, "Sex, Lies and Penetration,a Butch Finally 'Fesses Up," Brown writes: "Sex that is gentle,
passive, egalitarian, does not move us. [Remember when we]emphasized the simple difference between fantasy and reality?
Well, we lied. The power is not in the ability to control the violent
image. It is in the lust to be overpowered, forced, hurt, used,
objectified. We jerk off to the rapist, Hell's Angel, daddy, theNazi, cop. We dream of someone's blood on our hands, of laughing at cries for mercy. Sometimes, we want to give up to thestrangler'S hands. We want to have the freedom to ignore 'no' or
have our own 'no' ignored."
Lie #3: Sadomasochism is not racist and antisemitic even though we"act" like slaveowners and slaves, Nazis and Jews.
My silence about lesbian sadomasochism ended when I saw
two anti-Semitic sadomasochists at a women's festival. One
woman, who wore a yarmulke, was being walked on a chain
around her neck, by a woman in -Nazi "leathers." When I protested, the woman in leather politely listened, and agreed toremove her own Nazi insignia, and her captive's yarmulke. I had
the impression that she had never even considered the political
implications, that is, the anti-Semitism, of the "scene." Identifying as Nazi, in any context, is to identify not only as a sexually
dominant sadist, but also as one who hates Jews, one who wants
Jews to suffer and to be annihilated. Masquerading as a Jew, by
wearing a yarmulke, chained with a leash, is not only to identify
as a sexually submissive masochist. It also embraces the humiliation and torture of Jews under Nazi anti-Semitism: the Jew is
the one who gets hurt, and here, see how much she likes it.
Some liberal gay newspapers "censor" ads for the KKK but
still publish personal ads for readers looking for Black, or Latino
or Asian sexual slaves. Racism seems to be more acceptable to them
if it is eroticized. Somehow, if eroticized, the humiliation, sadism
and torture of racism and anti-semitism become acceptable. Torturealways has a sexual component to it. If a radical feminist were tochallenge the same newspaper on the issue of sadomasochism,

32 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

she'd be called "censors." The whole issue of censorship is used to
intimidate us and silence critical dialogue about sadomasochism.
Lie #4: Sadomasochism is consensual; no one gets hurt if they don't wantto get hurt. No one has died from sadomasochistic "scenes."''It is the focus on the bottom's desire that distinguishes
sadomasochism from assault." (Califia, 1992) Is it ever OK toconsent to one's own humiliation and victimization? I do notthink so. Just because we "consent" to domination or abuse, does
not mean it is not oppressive. "Has a woman who has run awayfrom sexual assault by her father and ended up turning tricks fora living consented? Has a woman who learned sexual lessons fromincest consented to a sexuality in which she can get no pleasureunless she has no power?" (Cole, 1989) Has a ritual abuse survivor, having been through her own Inquisition in childhood,consented when she reenacts sexual torture in adulthood which
trigger her memories as an adult?
The ability of words to hurt should not be underestimated. The
threat of rape is backed up by words, the weapons which define us
as objects and which tell us we deserve whatever we get. Women's
self-hate arises as much from verbal assault as from physical assault. Some form of verbal abuse is involved in most sadomasochist
scenes. When these vicious words are delivered in the context ofsexual arousal, they have a powerful impact. Sexually sadistic
words contribute to women's self-hatred.
Sadists pa y lip service to consent, but ignore the power sys terns
which create inequality and make meaningful consent impossible.
In this culture, we have no experience of equal power relationships. ''It is not the acknowledgement of the hold sadomasochism
still has over our psyches that conflicts with feminism, what wehave a problem with is the unwillingness to reflect on its politicalmeaning." ( Fritz, 1983)
Extreme violence sometimes occurs during sadomasochistic"play." I have been informed of many instances where "safe"
words were ignored during a sadomasochistic "scene." I also knowthat women have died during sadomasochistic activities and thatthese deaths are only whispered about - they are not openly
acknowledged.

Summer/Fall 1993

33

Lie #5: Sadomasochism is only about sex. It doesn't extend into the restof the relationship.
Sadomasochism has everything to do with sexism, racism
and class in the real world. It is very much related to internalized
self-hatred. One Samois member wrote: "To be a good bottom[masochist], to please my mistress, is a very powerful feeling.
Those lessons I have learned in my bed, I can take into otheraspects of my life and see how that makes me powerful ... toenjoy every moment of what I'm doing." (Linden et aI, 1982) I see
lesbians embracing the dominant/ submissive hierarchy that feminists have spent their lives trying to eliminate in heterosexual
relationships. Just the way racism and anti-semitism are eroticizedin sadomasochism, so the domination, the sexism itself, is eroticized in sadomasochistic relationships. The sadistic sexual relationship sets the tone for the rest of the relationship. Submitting
and giving in during a disagreement, for example, becomes asexualized act. And real physical violence can and does occur asa natural extension of the inequality of the sexual relationship.
Hitting someone is usually a sadistic act. Assault and battery do
occur in lesbian relationships - and it is normalized by the patterns laid down sexually.
The dominating, coercive mockery of the sadist is sometimes
forced on our communities. In 1988, I posted a notice for a workshop called "The effects of sadistic/violent sexual practices on
nonparticipants: a support group; closed to sadomasochist participants and advocates." As a small group of us sat on the groundand talked, six or seven women with whips came and stood, arms
folded, behind us. They said nothing; the intent to intimidate
was clear. Another example of the pervasive effect of sadomasochism on a community occurred in 1990, when the organizers ofa large women's festival wrote about how the sadomasochistic
activity of some women infringes on other women's rights "tomove freely and safely without fear or horror."Lie #6: Sadomasochistic pornography has no relationship to thesadomasochistic society we live in. "If it feels good, go with it." "We
create our own sexuality."34 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

We internalize sadomasochistic fantasies because it is thesexuality which has been shoved down our throats from the day
we were born. As women we're raised to be "bottoms:" lesbian''bottoms'' tend to outnumber "tops" [sadists] by 10 to 1. ''Whatfeels good" is largely constructed by social oppression: racism,sexism, class ism. We are not born with an innate sexuality where
no elements of it are learned or manipulated. Yet many liberal,
pro-pornography advocates deny any relationship between sadomasochism and the violence in the rest of our culture. It is nolonger possible to discount the causal effect of pornography on
violence against women. Diana Russell has recently publisheda summary of research about the ways in which pornography has
been shown to cause women harm. (Russell, 1993) I believe that
her argument can be applied to lesbian pornography in exactly
the same way: pornography, whether straight or lesbian, promotes inequality and eroticizes that unequal relationship. Actually, sexuality is utterly conditionable. When we rehearse sadistic abuse in fantasy, pornography, and sexual games, we legitimize its authority in our own minds, and may end up helping
other authorities in our lives keep us in bondage in other ways.
Sadomasochism is everywhere in this culture - just take a goodlook at your workplace, your family, your church.
Lie #7: Lesbians" into sadomasochism" are feminists, devoted to womenand a women-only lesbian community. Lesbian pornography is "by
women and for women."
Pat Califia has said that she'd rather be stuck on a desert
island with a masochistic boy than with a vanilla lesbian. Bottoms are seen as "generic, interchangeable, and replaceable."(Califia, 1992) Califia is committed to the role of sadist, not to any
particular sexual preference. "Sex defined as a commodity [sadomasochism] leads to a marketplace where the gender of whore andclient is irrelevant compared to kind and cost of services provided." (Clarke, in press) While lesbians who are "into sadomasochism" define themselves as lesbians, their sadomasochist practices are bisexual. I have no political criticism of bisexuality what I am criticizing is sadomasochist posturing as devoted
lesbian members of the women's community.

Summer/Fall 1993

3S

Pseudolesbian pornography, that is, pictures of women who
are imitating lesbians' sexual behavior, has been a favored element in straight male pornography since it was first published.
It sells. Despite the fact that it is often advertised as being owned
and distributed by and for women, "lesbian" pornography sells
briskly to straight men.
Lie #8: Since lesbians are superior to men, we can "play" with sadomasochism in a liberating way that heterosexuals can not.
I do not think that women are biologically superior to men.
In fact, I see that notion as dangerous and reactionary. "Anatomy
is destiny" is not exactly a feminist idea. Sadistic and masochistic attitudes and behaviors among lesbians, -in fact, are a good
example of how we internalize abusive ideas just like everyone
else does. We're seduced by domination because we see that thatis where power lies. Yet we delude ourselves if we think it ispossible to "play" the rapist without becoming the rapist.
Lie #9: Reenacting abuse heals abuse. Sadomasochism heals emotional
wounds from childhood sexual assault.
This lie really disturbs me. A greater percentage of women"into sadomasochism" have histories of childhood sexual assault, than those women who do not participate in sadomasochism. However, sadomasochism obscures the real pain and abuseof women. How can you tell the difference between "real" and"pretend" when someone has a flashback and becomes a childagain in the middle of "consensual" sexual torture? Some feel an
intense, even compulsive drive toward sexual annihilation thatis expressed in sadomasochistic activity which mirrors the abuse
suffered as a child.
The notion that acting out abuse helps to heal and eliminate
abuse arises from the catharsis theory: do it once, just get it outof your system, then you will get over it. There is no evidence thatcatharsis works as a solution to social or psychological conflict,
yet this theory is used to rationalize the dissemination of pornography. Pornography does not seem to have served as a pressure-cooker-release for men, thus freeing women from rape. On
the contrary, pornography seems to have functioned as pro-rape
propaganda. Sadomasochistic catharsis does not seem to heal

36

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

sexual abuse either: one women wrote, "after seventeen years ofalmost continuous [childhood sexual abuse], the lesbians I met
just wanted to do more of the same. I have nightmares anddamage from both." (Anonymous, 1990) Sadomasochism is arepetition, not a healing, of childhood sexual assault.
Some have suggested that sadomasochism can actually bephysiologically addictive. I have heard women describe themselves as being "in recovery from sadomasochism," the same
way they speak of alcohol addiction. Perhaps the physical addiction to certain kinds of trauma begins with complex physicalreactions to prolonged abuse in childhood which is then rekindled in adult sadomasochistic relationships.
Lie #10. Sadomasochism is political dissent. It is progressive and even"transgressive" in that it breaks the rules of the dominant sexual ideology.
The posturing of sadists and masochists as "transgressive"can be confusing to those not familiar with feminist theory. By
definition, the ultimate goal of feminism is to end sadomasochism. Our system is sadomasochistic to the core; how is celebrating it any kind of true rebellion? (Fritz, 1983) The political valuesof sadism are blatantly anti-feminist, totalitarian and right-wing.
Sadomasochism is business as usual; power relations as usual;race, gender and class as usual. Sadomasochism is one ritualversion of dominance and submission. Sadomasochism is not acreative deviation from normal heterosexual behavior. It is thedefining quality of the power relationship between women andmen. Sadism is the logical extension of behavior that arises outof male power. (Wagner, 1982)
We live in a misogynist world, and women have so little
political power, that it's easier to fantasize about absolute personal
power than to politically organize for change. (Clarke, in press)
Several young lesbians recently said to me that their fantasies
about sadomasochism were their "salvation" in a world where
they see no possibility of attaining real power. Sadomasochist
dykes play-act power and prestige in a world that crushes any
attempt to organize for real power. The piay-acting helps us toforget how much we are hated and hurt. And forgetting that is thereal danger.

Summer/Fall 1993

37

References

Anonymous, letter to Lesbian Con nection , January-February 1990, V0112,
Issue 4, page II.
Atkinson, Ti-Grace. Amazon Odyssey, 1974.
Brown, Jan. "Sex, Lies, and Penetration, a Butch Finally 'Fesses Up,"

Outlook, 1990.
Califia, Pat. "The Limits of the S/M Relationship," in Outlook, Winter,
1992, pages 16-2I.
Clarke, De. "Fascism, Sadomasochism, and Pornography," in Unleashing
Feminism: a critique of Lesbian Sadomasochism in the Gay Nineties." in press,
HerBooks, Santa Cruz, CA.
Cole, Susan. Pornography and the Sex Crisis, 1989.
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing· Women, New York,
Putnam's, 1979.
Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating, 1974.
Fritz, Leah. ''Is there Sex after Sadomasochism?" Village Voice, Nov. I,
1983, pages 24-25.
Linden, Robin R; Pagano, Darlene R; Russell, Diana E.H.; Star, Susan
Leigh (eds.) Against Sadomasochism, a Radical Feminist Analysis, 1982.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics, 1970.
Morgan, Robin, Editorial, Ms, May-June, 1993, Vol ill, Number 6.
Morgan, Robin. The Demon Lover: on the Sexuality of Terrorism, 1989.
Reti, Irene. Remember the Fire: Lesbian Sadomasochism in a post-Nazi Holocaust World, Her Books, PO Box 7467, Santa Cruz, CA 9506I.
Russell, Diana E. H . Against Pornography: the Evidence of Harm, Russell
Publications, 2018 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, Ca, 94704,1993.
Wagner, Sally Roesch, in Linden, et al, Against Sadomasochism, 1982.

38

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Lucy A. Tatman

Lke a woman I
labored to change
the furnishings of this house
carried away the over-stuffed sofa
the lines of up-right hard-back chairs
sentinels on guard before polished hard tables
like a woman I
stripped off imitation flower wallpaper
scrubbed clean away the horse hooves blue
long stuck beneath fake lilacs
and like a woman I
kept onripped out stained panelingknocked down grey sheet rockbegan to know
in those hammered moments
two different strengths
my unfamiliar muscled own
and that of the ashen taste of chalk-dry mockery
that comes with a destruction
only partial
now as bare as open as empty as one back two hands
strong arms legs can make it
I leavefor I cannot myself remove the foundation
cannot find to destroy the blueprints
tacked to some architect's wall
safe from these calloused hands

Summer/Fall 1993

I leave this pre-planned confine
take what tools I have paid foror have stolen
wrested away from the tight-fisted graspof those who would have me build as 'they
with neither thought
nor visible distinction
monument and mausoleum
like a woman I
take from the stoop
one last long lookat three potted plantsroot-bound and dying

3940 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Barefoot! (1990)
8"x6"xl" - mixed media on gessoed masonite

China Marks

Summer/Fall 1993

41

Anonymous

In Our Hands
a memory of assisted dying
When my spouse was dying of metastatic cancer, she hastened
her death with thirty capsules of Nembutal (a barbiturate). Because she was dying she required assistance in this act. Givingsuch help is a crime.
We are in the kitchen. Jane's relative and I, feeling giddy,
simmering like the water on the stove. We are emptying yellow
pods, some to the tea cup, some to the yogurt. The empty capsules
are evidence we will dispose of later, far from the house. In the
bedroom a visitor pulls up a chair for intimate talk but Jane is
impatient. "Let's get this show on the road," she calls, but too
weakly for our hearing.
Jane's relative has had only one night to understand how
Jane will die, but we have been discussing it for all the years of
her illness.
Bianca was a friend, a young woman whose cancer had been
showing signs of spread to the brain. She refused to be tested formetastasis. When she went into a coma, the doctor treated heraggressively, bringing her back to brain-damaged consciousness
for a final two months. Jane and I had careful talks about our own
futures - careful on my part because I did not have cancer andspoke with a luxury of conjecture Jane did not have, and care on
her part because she had entrusted me with decisions for her lifeand death, and she needed to be sure I understood her will. She
did not want to be surrendered prematurely to death. She did notwant to live the way Bianca had in the end.
We followed her cousin's dying long distance on the telephone. Chris was slowly suffocating from the cancer in her
lungs. She hallucinated large ants crawling on her. She wished,
she said, that she had the health to live but she didn't, so she
wished instead that death would hurry.

42sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOTJane visited an acquaintance dying in the hospital. Rachel
woke twice from the morphine, moaning. Both times Jane asked,"Can I do anything for you?" "Kill me," Rachel said, "please killme."
We had gathered pills but doubted we would use them. Jane
wanted every second of her life. She knew I was committed tohelping her have them. Now I am in the kitchen stirring the tea.
Jane has had two weeks of dying. Not the slow inexorable dying
we had been almost accustomed to - the years of loss accelerating
to months of fragility - not that, but two weeks of active dying
which began with intense pain, vomiting, and long periods ofsleep. She has decided to stop because there is no life left in her.
The articles and books on care for the dying which I'd read so
avidly all year assert that with proper pain control people don't
need to end their lives "prematurely." We discovered they were
wrong. After the first week, jane's pain eased enough to switch
medications and her vomiting calmed more often into nausea.
She sleeps the sleep of exhaustion and drugs: there is no life leftin her ... no food, no drink, no sunsets to enjoy, few words
between us. And some of those words are coming out wrong, or
lost altogether. She says "death" and mimes the swallowing ofpills. We make a list of people she wants to see, and she names
the day she will die.
This is a love story closeted for fear of arrest. But it is not an
uncommon story: in hospitals, doctors, with and without theirpatients' knowledge, are prescribing morphine doses which
suppress breathing to the point of death. In private homes, nurses
are teaching caregivers: this much is safe, that much could kill.
Many, I assume most, get no medical assistance. They guess; they
hope; they ask around, carefully if their community is able':bodied, less discreetly if the epidemics of cancer and AIDS havealready been felt. Sometimes the dose is too low. Sometimes the
body may not function well enough to absorb the poison. Deathis a terrible place to have to enter in such ignorance.
We gather in her bedroom, five of us related by our love ofher. I remind Jane that the effects of the drug will be immediate.

Summer/Fall 1993

43

We all bestow hurried goodbye kisses on her, as if we wereseeing her off at a station, the train already there and whistlingto go, not daring to hold the moment back, not willing to believe
what this moment is. Jane's focus is not on us but on what needs
doing.
I hand her the cup. She takes it: her two hands and my one
still there to steady the cup, to catch it if need be - she is that
weak. She drinks the tea while I murmur encouragingly - yes,
good, there you go honey, wonderful. Her hands relax on the cup.
"L' chaim," I say. "L' chaim," the others echo me. I move the cup
away. She pulls it back to drink the dregs.
I get all the yogurt into one spoonful: here it is, just this, that's
good, you've got it, mazel tov. "Mazel tov," soft voices support
mine. She presses a tissue to her mouth and firms her lips as her
stomach threatens to undo her labor. She is successful; in aminute or two her eyes slide apart and her breathing becomesdeep and labored. We sit with her. In three hours she is dead.
Jane is dead. She died of metastatic cancer, the moment hastened by drugs. She chose not to spend her last weeks in mental
and emotional confusion, not to spend any more days without
her life. This is not a choice everyone would make. It certainly is
not a choice one person can make for another. It is a decision as
deeply personal as becoming a mother or having an abortion, as
fundamental as the right to control one's own body.
I am leery of moves to legislate euthanasia. I have read ofhealth insurers encouraging patients into hospice care, where
the standard is comfort-measures only, so they can refuse themore costly treatments. The cancer specialists I've met throughthe years are an arrogant lot over all, uncomfortable with questioning clients and unable to deal with death. The world moves
too easily to fascism for us to offer doctors, judges or professional ethicists the yea or nay over people's requests to die.
Instead we need to decriminalize the "good death." As a society
we won't be able to understand the needs of mortally ill people whowant to die, and how to best assist them, until we are allowed to hearfrom them and their survivors. We need to discuss euthanasia not44 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

as a sensationalized court case but as something your neighbor
has participated in, something your mother might ask from you,something you might want for yourself.
I can still see our hands on the cup. This image lifts the painof her final weeks into an emblem of our love, the last gift we
exchanged. Such moments need to be recorded and honored, ourstory not whispered but broadcast: love and death and personalautonomy were joined here, speak of it.

Summer/Fall 1993

45

Joan Cofrancesco

Blocked Writer
to Terry Stokes& now I am so worried I cannot
write a line without thinking
am I fucking it up?
& this is only the title,& I've taken every writing course& I've listened to every poet writing in America& I've memorized all of Grimm & I'm rightback where I began, in my mother's womb,
banging, weeping, wiggling my little
finger, searching for a key

46 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTElana Dykewomon

The Words for It(excerpt from a novel in progress)
The following is from a novel (a quest for my Jewish lesbian ancestors) set
in the Russian Pale and New York City between 1850 and1920. The Pale wasan area in western Russia in which Jews were confined, forced to live underhundreds of laws regulating their every movement, routinely brutalized andkilled. This section is from the midwife's diary, covering the period1880-84. At
40, Gutke decided to follow the example of Gliikel of Hameln, who had recorded
her life story at the end of the 17th century.
Gutke and her mother, Feigele, were forced from their village when Gutke
was a toddler, due to scandal surrounding Gutke's birth. They were taken in by
Pesah Kohn, wife of the owner of the Kishinev bathhouse, who became theirbenefactor and employer (Kishinev was a small city, roughly the size of Eugene,
Oregon). When Gutke was 11, she was apprenticed to the midwife Milcah .
Milcah discovered Gutke's talent for "seeing things" - having small visions
that indicate a doorway between the world we know and the worlds we senseand gave her the tools to control and hide her sensitivity. In Gutke's world, thespiritual realm and "god" were palpable daily companions who shaped hercommunity's understanding of self, place and time.
In her adolescense she witnessed lesbian relationships in the bathhouse andwas befriended by one of those lesbians, Golde, a seamstress. After Gutke's
mother died she decided to board with Golde.

I was happy living with Golde, as happy as I could be in thattime. It wasn't that Golde had ever changed her mind about me.
Often I wanted to kiss her, but I was ashamed to ask again. Her
father had died not more than six months before my mother; he
was an old man. She had the extra room, she said it would begood to have a border, if I wanted to come by her. As much as I
hated to leave Pesah, the decision was almost made for me.
Golde had the knowledge I needed next - how to be an unmarried Jewish woman, a rare thing.
Golde made up with Yetta, but it's not between them likebefore. Just after I moved in, Golde started to see a teacher fromSummer/Fall 199347

the gardening school, Vera, a German. Vera heard there werebeautiful lace trimmed skirts in Golde's shop; she came to see.
Vera was a very modern woman, handsome, tall. I neverreally took to her, but Golde was smitten from the minute theshop bell tinkled and she looked up. Who can afford such feelings in this world? Of course, Vera couldn't live with us, what
would people think, a wealthy goy moving into a Jew's little
house? So they would take a walk in the evenings by the river ormaybe go to a concert. Sometimes Golde would suffer a fit oflonging during the workday, and if we knew Vera wasn't teaching, we'd make up a little bundle from the shop, like a delivery,and Golde would go by Vera's apartment. Saturday nights Goldespent there, after shabbes. Sunday the girls didn' t come to work
until eight, she was always home in plenty of time to prepare
their work for them.
There were new clothing factories which could make a dress
much cheaper than from Golde's little shop, but many people,
Jews and others, bought from her. Her work was good and ofcourse much was made to order. Some bought from pity, I think,because it was a house of old maids and poor working girls, butthere was no need to pity us. Golde was good to the girls, they
worked usually only twelve hours a day, she paid a few kopeks
a week better than the factory and we did our best to make thelight good for sewing. She encouraged the girls to know about
the Russky Zyuse workers' union and the seamstress' self-help
society, and they in turn told the girls who were going to work in
the factories.
This kept the girls from gossiping too much about Golde. Tothem she was more like a patron, a teacher, than a boss. And
Golde kept the sabbath, contributed to the all the Jewish funds
for orphans and burials, always went out with a babushka
wrapped around her hair even though, as an unmarried woman,she didn't have to. She was a good businesswoman, an honest
Jew, and to most of her customers, an unfortunate. The marriage
brokers pestered both of us, but we managed to always put them off.
If Golde likes to touch the bodies of women, and I liked tothink of her touching them, what difference could it possibly

48 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

make? I knew there were a few other women like us. Some of themarried women even, I could tell, after awhile, how it was between them and their best friend who assisted at a birth. I wasyoung and hungry for touch, but I couldn't see how it was going
to come to me.
Besides, there was so much else happening. Alexander II, thetzar, was assassinated. Then suffering was the air in our lungs.
The uprooted filled the streets of Kishinev for more than ten
years, so many cold houses in winter where the families had toborrow even coal to boil water for the newborn. Pogroms throughout the Pale - one year of misery, then maybe a little break;families moving from one town to another; then there is a faminein the north, more homeless; tzar Alexander III enforced the May
Laws, more Jews got thrown off their land, out of their shtetls; wegot used to so many poor in the streets, living on less and less.
There was a little calm, then a worldwide depression and the tzar
took it into his mind to expel all the Jews from St. Petersburg andMoscow - they arrived here chained together like criminals doctors and businessmen.
You see, I get distracted. When you tell the story of your
youth, there is only yourself and the way the world unfolds infront of you. You are a full figure walking among cut-outs ofbuildings and people, never knowing exactly what's behindthem and you don't care. But gradually ·we grow smaller andsmaller, until we are part of the landscape in which we move, andwe see all around us others, moving, becoming part of time.
The whole catalog of human misery paraded before me andmy own life began to seem like a blade of grass that's escaped thescythe - fortunate and insignificant. Golde worried about me.
She took my hand, turned my gaze away. "You must find a little
joy where you can, Gutkelle." She was the only one who calledme that.
"And where does this joy live?""Saturday night you'll come by Vera's. She has guests from
Odessa and Kiev, it's a party.""I don' t want to go to a party with goyim."''Not just goyim, Jews too. Only women will be there."Summer/Fall 199349

I stop and look at her. Of course. If men have secret societies,
then there must be some for women too. Only so secret no one
knows until they're invited.
"You'll come then?"
Saturday afternoon a Mrs. Simkhovitch on Asia Street de. cided to deliver at least a week early; it was a protracted, difficult
birth, thank god the mother and daughter are fine. Only midwives work on shabbes! So I was late for the party, Golde hadgone on ahead of me. She left me a note, so sweet, I shouldn't
forget to come.
To tell the truth, I was worn out, I needed a little shabbes rest.
Then I thought again about Golde and Vera, how their hands
find each other whenever Vera comes to the shop. I liked to watch
their hands. How they try to keep them still, behind their backs,
in their pockets. Suddenly a finger is pushing a curl back fromthe temple, a palm is against a cheek that blushes, turning to see
if no one's looking.
I put on a clean skirt and a multicolored shawl. Pesah herself
knitted it for me, it reminds me a little of Joseph's coat of manycolors, although I have no one to be jealous of me for wearing it.
There are four shades of red, one pale gold, a light blue andpurple. I stand by the doorway playing with the fringe, for aminute unable to cross the threshold. Of course I do.
It's a long walk to Vera's, and dark already. I know the spirits
look out for me, but still, I don't like to walk alone at night. I am
lucky, no one notices me until I am just in front of Vera's apartment.
Suddenly my skin feels dry and hot, my palms wet. Nervous,
this is what nervous is. Me! Brave enough to talk to demons, andI'm afraid to go to a party. But from Odessa and Kiev, goyim andthe daughters of wealthy Jews - I'm only a midwife, Feigele ofKamenka's momzer daughter, what will I talk about with such
women? Pacing up and down in front of the building, I don't
notice there is a man in a carriage watching me.
"Is something wrong?" I hear a voice as he steps out of thecarriage. There are only street lamps and shadows, but for asecond I have the image of a flame. Just for a second, the crackleof fire in branches.

50 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT''No, I'm just catching my breath.""Are you going up to Vera Lessing's party?"
I nod and look again. He is just a little taller than me, very
dark, a neat little mustache, no sidelocks, probably a Jewish
merchant from Europe, his Yiddish is formal, he doesn't comefrom Kishinev, that's certain. He smells of cologne and cities.
Then I understand. We look at each other closely. The gas lights
flicker. Her eyes are a light golden brown that shine from theolive of her face.
''Dovida Greenbaum," she says, "though mostly I am called
Dovid.""Gutke Gurvich." I don't know what else to say. I keep
staring at her face, the little mustache.
"Are you shocked by me?""Oh. No. Not shocked, surprised.""Surprised! Welt that's honest. May I have the pleasure ofescorting you upstairs?"
Such manners. Now I really feel like a peasant, but I can seethat Dovida means to be charming, not to shame me.
Vera's three rooms are stuffed like kishkes with women.
Because of Dovida, I assume they're all women, though if you
saw them on the street at least six or seven of them you would
think are men. I thought I had seen every possible kind of
woman in the bath house. Maybe these women were all from outof town, or they didn't bathe with other women? Did they bathewith men? No, they couldn't. The point, really, was to make men
believe they were men, wasn't that it?
I had never spent more than a minute thinking about what it
would be like to move in the world as man. A long time ago I divided
men up into patriarchs, demons and ghosts. Patriarchs are worse
than demons, because they make the rules, demons just torment
you with them. Ghosts mouth rules, but they have no spirit in them.
Now here is Dovida, and women who look like Turks andGypsies. Women who can walk where they want at night. Who
could attend any university, if they had the money. Most of thewomen here look as if they have rubles enough for anything,although there are plenty of ordinary working women.

Summer/Fall 1993

51

'What are you tis king about?" Dovida comes up behind me.
I sigh. Well, I am what I am, I'm not going to pretend different. "I have never been at a party like this."
Dovida examines me closely, "How did you get invited?""I board with Golde - over there - who is with Vera twoyears now.""And you?"
And me what? Oh. I want to look at the floor but I look in hereyes instead. Then I want to look in her eyes for a long time, andnot speak. But I do. "I - I am just a midwife.""A midwife! Well, well. That's a very important trade. But-"
she takes my hand. She is wearing white gloves, what a thing!
"- that's not exactly what I was asking.""I know. I just have never talked about such things withanyone. Just a little with Golde.""Ah," she lets go of my hand and I feel ashamed for nothaving words. It was with words God made the world, and now
I can't find the words to make my life. ''Then you're just here asa friend, an observer?" Her tone is arch, and her voice deepens.
''No.'' I don't want her to misunderstand me. "No, not that atall. I just - " How do you say this? What words can a person
possibly use? "I just am innocent of my own desires." Oy, now
she's going to laugh at me.
And she does. But she takes my hand again. "That's charming! You mean, you have never had the opportunity to act on yourimagination?/I. She says something else in French, which of course I don't
understand. Heat is spreading through my face and legs. Embarrassment, shame, anger, longing. Is that what desire is? "I'm nota joke." The anger wins. Anger is cool and relieving.
"Please forgive me. I didn't mean to laugh at your expense. I
have seen many women with desire and no opportunity, and that
seems like a sin to me./I
A sin? I look around me. For a moment I am glad my motheris not alive to see such a party. Then I am ashamed for thinking
any bad thoughts about these women - how amazing for themto have found their way here, how difficult. "I suppose you have52

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

taken it upon yourself to right this sin?"
She laughs. "You know the Talmud says that we will have toaccount to God for the pleasures we did not take."''The Talmud says that?""I don't suppose they intended us," she gestures across theroom, "but every generations of Jews has to make its own interpretations, nu?"
Golde comes up behind me, puts both her hands on myshoulders. "Already you've made a friend! Introduce me!" Sheshakes Dovida's hand, moving beside me, putting her arm aroundmy shoulder. I can't remember when she has been so affectionate
or happy. Who could have known she'd come alive at a party?
"Now don't take advantage of my roommate, she's an orphan!"That she had to say! I'm furious but before I can even give her alook she is off to another part of the room.
"An orphan. I'm sorry.""Please don't be sorry for me. I loved my mother, may she beblessed by God, but she is dead seven years now, I have my own
life.""Yes. I apologize. I seem to just be blundering here, perhaps
you'd like to meet some of Vera's other guests?""No! I mean, if you like." But instead we just stare at eachother.
"Perhaps some wine?" Yes, we go over to a table which is fullof pastries and cheeses, very nice. Kosher, even, it looks. Well, theplates can't be kosher but it is all dairy and I think this is very
respectful of Vera. In fact, suddenly I like Vera much better.
"So, now you know I'm a midwife, an orphan and Golde's
roommate. But all I know about you is that you dress like a man.""Is that anyway to ask me about myself?" We get a little wineand cheese, we make our way over to the corner. I notice theinnkeeper's wife is in the middle of the room with Golde's
second cousin. Who would have guessed?
"I'm sorry if I'm rude, but I am curious, how did you-""I ran away from my home- in Krakow- when I was 16. My
father got me engaged to marry a furrier, ten years older than me.
Oy, how disgusted I was!"Summer/Fall 1993

53

"He was ugly?""Really, I don't know. He was ugly to me. My parents were
orthodox, it was against my father's wishes that my brothers
taught me Hebrew, and I used to sit in the back of lectures at the
gymnasium, to learn German. I couldn't imagine to be stuck athome with a man who deals in animal skins. I left.""You just ran away, a sixteen year old girl?"''No, not a girl. I stole one of my brothers' pants and jacket,
his hat, everything. I took every penny I could find in the house.
Well, it would have been my dowry, right? And I got on the train
to Warsaw. I wanted to go to Berlin, but I didn't think I spoke
German well enough yet. I never meant to pass for a yeshiva
bucher, like my brother, so I went into a tailor's shop and got anice, modern suit. My breasts were still very small then and if the
tailor thought something was odd, he didn't let on. This is what
I've learned, though I hate to say it, money is freedom."''Why do you hate to say it?"
"Because it means so many are slaves. Do you read Marx?"
I'm embarrassed. I don't read much, medical texts and oncein a while pamphlets the socialist mothers give me. Last year I
read The Travels of Benjamin the Third, but I don't really care forthe shlemiels of Yiddish fiction. "I don't have much time toread." Then I am mad at myself for lying. "Besides, I'm not an
intellectual. I read just biology, for my work.""I read for my work too.""For what kind of work do you have to read Marx?" At least
I know who Marx is.
"I'm a banker. Not a banker, exactly, but I work drawing up
and transferring negotiable instruments, especially between
banks and companies in different countries."
Now I am almost frightened. What does that mean? How cana Jewish woman do such a thing? But I am confused as well,''What kind of banker reads revolutionaries?"''Bankers who want to understand what they do. The more I
know, the easier it is for me to move around in the world. And
that's what I really want, the freedom to travel and do what I please.
Even I myself don't exactly approve of what I do for a living."

54 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTThis is the most interesting person I have ever met, evenmore than the prostitutes who came to the bath house on Mondays. All over Europe, she goes, speaking German, Polish, French,
Yiddish, who knows what? She knows intellectuals, revolutionaries, the daughters of barons and now a midwife. I am afraid she
will find my little life - just that, little. You could take my life
like a pinch of snuff to clear your nose and never think about itagain.
I must have talked to other women that night, Dovida musthave left me and come back at least once, but I don't remember
it. She offered to give me a ride home in her carriage. On the stairs
she looked at me and said, "but perhaps you might like instead
to come to my hotel?"Almost everyone else has been afraid to hold my gaze. But for
her, my eyes were a doorway, a scene where there is a mountainand lake and she could never decide whether she wanted to rest
staring at the mountain or the water. Back and forth her eyes go,
into mine, so far I can feel her walking inside my breastbone. She
has strong legs, but each step is gentle. .
"I am afraid to make a scanda1." Of course what I reallywanted was to make such a big scandal that I would have to leave
Kishinev in the morning and never come back.
"Gutke, in 1884 it is not such a big scandal for a woman to go
to a gentleman's hotel room. Besides, I have a feeling not too
many of your patients live by the hotels on Alexander Street."
So I went.
Even now, sixteen years later, it was the best decision I evermade. But the words for it? I believe things can come into being
without a word, because didn't God make Adam name everything in the Garden of Eden? So even if God had the words
already, people didn't. Every tree, every animal had to have its
own name. Every part of the body has a name. Sometimes I lie in
bed with Dovida, she'll be asleep, she sleeps sound and late, andI will name each knuckle on her hand, I name the crease behind
her knee, I trace the big muscles of her forearms and I call the left
one Simcha and the right one Latke, it's good enough to eat.
"What are you doing?"

Summer/Fall 1993

55

"Just talking to Simchalle here./1"Should I be jealous of my forearm?/1'Well, you, you've known so many women, I have to make it
up somehow. If I find twenty women in your body, will that eventhe score?/1
She's sleepy, chuckling, pulls her arm around me. "Are we
keeping score? You're the one who gets to look between other
women's legs. You can't fault me for what I did before I met you./1
Once something comes into being, shouldn't there be a namefor it? I could call this love, like the rich goyim do or young girls
dreaming about who they'll marry, but to call it love would be
like to call it God, no offense to the Creator. Everything is God's,
isn't it? And all pleasure in life is love. That is not enough. What's
between me and Dovida must be very close to God, because even
if there is a word for it, you couldn't say it out loud. Just like thename of God, you must not speak it. You can look at it, writtenout, but not even the whisper of it should cross your lips.
"So serious, my Gutke, always wanting to understand whatmakes us love. Maybe it's not such a serious thing. Don't your
medical books tell you human beings are mostly water? We arejust water, moving towards each other. Like thisshe rolls
towards me and takes my lips in her mouth. Her lips are soft andexpanding, until I think my whole face is inside her, so much
excitement, sensation, I have to pull back, look at her.
I have to pull back a little, so often she's away on business.
Now we keep an apartment together in Odessa, as if we are man
and wife, but I keep living with Golde in Kishinev, bringing new
lives into this world. I love my work. Dovida does hers for theadventure of it. I suppose I could say the same, though it's a
different adventure. Once in a long time when a girl is born I see
that flame I saw when I first looked at Dovida. This one, I think,will be like us.
Even if I have no word for it.
_/I

56

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Kirsten Backstrom

Call
The phone rang around ten o'clock, and I got up to answer it
because Catherine was pinned under two cats and the Sunday
paper. I set aside my textbook, roused another cat off my bathrobe, and went downstairs. I thought it would be my sister
calling. She'd been having husband-trouble again. I answered
the phone, expecting a familiar voice.
Will you accept a collect call from Molly Humphrey?" There
was a cat leaning against my leg in an attempt to buckle my knee
so I'd sit down and provide a lap. The name didn't click, but I was
distracted so I thought I might be forgetting someone I should be
remembering.
"Just a sec," I said, then covered the receiver with my handand hollered upstairs, "Hey, Cath! You know a Molly Humphrey?""Don't think so ... No."
"Sorry." I hung up.
As I came into the bedroom, I had that easing sensation in mychest that I often get when I step onto the domestic scene andsuddenly realize that this is my home. It still astonishes me that
I'm a grown woman living safe and happy with another woman,no catastrophe looming over us. Catherine was sitting in thewarm circle of lamplight, with her glasses shoved down to the tipof her nose so she could squint over the top of them at me.
''Wrong number," I said, ''Maybe Bea won't call tonight after
all. You want to sleep? I'll get up if the phone rings.""Sleep would be great. You don't mind taking care of things?""Nothing to take care of. I'll just tuck you in ..."
"Sweet," Catherine murmured. She let the newspapers slideto the floor as she sank down under the covers. The cats shifted(but not much) to make room, and I leaned across them to shut off
the lamp on Catherine's side of the bed. I was debating whether
to turn off my own light, when the phone rang again.

Summer/Fall 1993

57

This time none of the cats followed me downstairs. I noticed
how cold it seemed in the dark living room, with strips of stark
white light from the street-lamps seeping through the blinds. I
fumbled for the ringing phone, dropped the receiver, picked it
up and answered, flustered, "Hello? Yes?""Aunt Edith?" It was a girl's voice, maybe a fourteen-yearold voice. It wasn't my sister, and it wasn't a voice I recognized.
''No, sorry... ""Is my aunt there? I need ... can I talk to her? Please?"
There was music blaring in the background. Heavy metal, I
thought. When I was a kid that age, it would have been acid rock.
It would have been some kind of bar with a bunch of people I
hardly knew. Or it would have been a big party that was out ofcontrol. I'd be slightly high, and not admitting I was scared. No
one to drive me home; no one to come get me. I'd sleep on
somebod y' s floor if I were lucky, in somebody's bed if not. Or I'dend up on the road in the dark with my thumb peeking from myclosed extended hand, tentatively hitching a ride. Between cars,
I'd hide my hands in my pockets, hunch my shoulders in thatthin denim jacket I always wore. I'd walk to keep warm.
"No, listen, I'm sorry but you've got the wrong number." Ihesitated, then asked, "Is this Molly?"
There was a short silence at the other end of the line, and a
muffled sound that might have been a sob or somebody taking
a gulp of something from a bottle, "Please ... I thought this was
the number... If you know me ... Just let me talk to ... ""I don't know you, but you tried to call this number a minute
ago ... That's how I knew your name. Listen, can I help? Where areyou? What number are you trying to call?""Something and South Main ... Norwood. I don't know.
They're going to kick me out in a minute. Who is this? Maybe
you can ...""My name's Terry. I'm at 12th and Christopher... But you're
calling long-distance aren' t you? What city?"''Norwood ... I've got to go ..."''Wait, don't hang up ... If it's riot too far ... Are you in Oregon?""Massachusetts."

58

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT"Oh, god. I'm sorry. That's three thousand miles from here.
But what if you ... "She hung up. My hands were shaking as I fumbled thereceiver back into the cradle. It was really cold in the living room.
There was a chill in my chest, like I'd just swallowed an icy
fizzing drink of something. Headlights streaked across a wall asa car passed in the street outside. Then it was dark again.
I felt my way upstairs and Catherine spoke softly, sensitive
to the anxiety I was bringing into the room with me. 'Was it yoursister? Is it bad? Do we need to go over there?"''No,'' I whispered back, "Don't turn on the light. It's ok. Just
let me get in with you. It's cold." I burrowed in among the cats.
I nestled close to Catherine.
She held me, tugged my ear gently, said, "Tell me."
"It was Molly Humphrey. The wrong number. She was justa kid, in some kind of trouble. She was trying to reach her aunt.
It's so damn cold down there.""It was long distance? Too far away?""Massachusetts. It's past one in the morning in Massachusetts.""I hope she's all right."
I nodded against my lover's shoulder, but didn't answer. The
warmth between us made me sleepy. I wanted to sleep. Somewhere in Massachusetts, Molly was probably leaving the bar or
the party, trying to find her own way home. I couldn't stay awake
to explain what I needed to explain to Catherine about the call.
I half-dreamed of myself telling my sister Bea about it, about
how cold it was when I couldn't reach her, when I couldn't reachanyone.
I imagined cars whizzing past a phone booth where Molly
was trying to reach someone. She tried a few more numbers
before she used up the last of her change and started walking.
She wrapped her arms around herself and walked quickly, making for the next streetlight, the next stark bright spot on the darkroad. I imagined that she made it to some warm place eventually.
Maybe she was stronger than anyone expected her to be, in spiteof those who couldn't be there when she needed them.

Summer/Fall 1993

Alison, Brooklyn, NY, 1989
llx14 Silver Print

Kathryn Kirk

59

60 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTNeta C. Crawford

Thoughts of the Wise Men
god I wish she'd
shut up
I mean who is thislight skinned
black girlwith her light lips
flapping
rapping
relevance
I mean who does thisblack girl think she isshe should just listen
to us
wise white men
as we talk in quiet
quite measured tones
starvation isafter allnothing to raise our voices about
and how dare she accuseuswise white menof racism!
she should be happy
to be here
happy
grateful and silent

Summer/Fall 1993

starvation isafter allnothing
we'll just let her finish
but ignore her comments
ignore her
but she is beautiful
so articulate
look at her forearms flex as she gestures
I wonder what she's like in bed

untitled
Peni Hall61

62

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Pamela Gray

3 out of 4 (or more):a lament for 3 out of 4 (or more) voices

t hey left us with ghosts

who rise up when we're touched

they left us with memories
like Medusa's snakes
twisting and coilingaround our hearts
they left us with hunger
for a normal life
as clear and untainted
as river water
cry for the woman
who always wears scarves
over her breasts
cry for the woman
who trembles
when she smells whiskey
cry for the woman
whose womb is too scarred
to make babies
cry for the woman
who always has to be
the center of attention
cry for the woman
who goes numbbelow her waist
when she starts to feel passion

Summer/Fall 1993

they left us with ghosts
who rise up when we're touched
they left us with memories
like Medusa's snakes
twisting and coilingaround our hearts
they left us with hunger
for a normal life
as clear and untainted
as river water
cry for the woman
who dreams of her father
throwing babies off rooftops
cry for the woman
who can't look at candles
or the color red
cry for the woman
who can only have orgasms
when she thinks about rape
cry for the woman
who can't walk in the woods
cry for the woman
who assumes all fathersmolest their daughtersthey left us with ghosts
who rise up when we're touched
they left us with memories
like Medusa's snakes
twisting and coilingaround our hearts
they left us with hunger
for a normal life63

64 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

as clear and untainted
as river water
cry for the woman
who eats cold spaghetti at 2 a.m.
if someone desires her
cry for the woman
who calls herself
damaged goods
cry for the woman
who hasn't had sex
with her lover for eleven years
cry for the woman
who can't take a bathwithout locking the door
cry for the woman
who wishes she could cut off
her hips and cunt with a knife

they left us with ghosts
who rise up when we're touched
they left us with memories
like Medusa's snakes
twisting and coilingaround our hearts
they left us with hunger
for a normal life
as clear and untainted
as river water
cry for the woman
who can't climb stairs
without thinking someone
will pinch her ass

Summer/Fall 199365

cry for the woman
who can't get a massage
cry for the woman
who won't wear a bathing suitin front of her father
cry for the woman
who can't cry for herself
cry for the woman
whose ghosts led her flying
off the Golden Gate Bridge

let your tears give us
Medusa's power
let your tears turn our ghosts
and memories to stone
let your tears wash over us
like river watercold (cold)
clean (clean)crystal (crystal)clear

Rya Philips
from Oregon Cuntree Dykes clip art

66 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

Elliott

Lesbian Legal Theory
a review of Ruthann Robson's Lesbian (Out)law:
Survival Under the Rule of Law, Firebrand Books, 1992, PB 185pp, $9.95

A t the end of my interview with Ruthann Robson in Philadelphia last fall, I asked her what else she would like to say about
Lesbian (Out)law. She replied, "My real desire is that when I am anolder lesbian outlaw, younger lesbians will look at me as quaintand not nearly radical enough."N ow, with an attitude like this, how could the book not begreat? Actually, when Lesbian (Out)law first appeared, I avoided
it, assuming, very incorrectly, that it would be more garbage
about lesbians' fights to get legal rights in the institutions mostantithetical to lesbian existence. But Firebrand has yet to publish
a book that I hate, so I gave it a chance. I was astounded, andcontinue to be. Ruthann has not produced a book about the law;rather, she, as a lesbian, has used her training and experience as alawyer to write about lesbians.
Ruthann is a white, working class radical lesbian, a woman
who was never really meant to survive (she says about her childhood, "Let's just say that no one ever would have expected that
I would have graduated high school"*), much less to survive as
an academic, as a lawyer. Not surprisingly, then, the subtitle, andthe main theme of Lesbian (Out)law, is survival, both in the senseof daily necessities like food, shelter, safety and love, and in thesense of preserving lesbian self-definition. Throughout Lesbian(Out)law, Ruthann examines the ways the rule of law, which is, shesays, of course the rule of men, affects both types of lesbian survival,
and the ways it creates tension between the two:For example, in order to ensure our economic and physical survival, we may argue in a court of law that a lover isequivalent to spouse and should be entitled to health"Interview, Philadephia, PA, Oct. 92.

Summer/Fall 1993

67

insurance benefits .... Our argument is essentially that ourlover is "just like" a wife/husband .... In making thisargument, we might lose our own definition of our lover.
If we refuse to argue this way, based on the belief that our. lover is nothing like a wife or husband, we might preserve our lesbianism but probably lose the benefits.
Lesbian (Out)law is the only book on gay, lesbian, or feminist
legal issues that centers our survival as lesbians in this way. Thisin itself makes it worth reading and owning, but there is so much
more here.
.
Lesbian (Out)law begins with Ruthann's explanation of her
vision of what a lesbian legal theory might be. She rejects bothfeminist legal theory, which, as it stands, can never meet theneeds of lesbian survival, and queer legal theory, which, as it isdeveloping, is not including dyke voices. A lesbian legal theory
must consider both types of lesbian survival while not co-opting
lesbian meaning:
To have a lesbian legal theory is not necessarily to havea theory that puts law in the center of lesbianism, oreven lesbian efforts at lesbian change. While we havebegun to speak about the "therapization" and even the"professionalization" of lesbianism, we must also begin to notice the "legalization" of our lesbian lives[which] occurs when we substitute legal categories
and concepts for our lesbian ones.
The dangers to lesbian meaning from unthinking acceptanceof the boundaries of the rule of law are central to Ruthann's
thinking; she introduces the term,"domestication,"chosen partly
because it is a gendered term, to describe the result of legalization. Lesbians are domesticated when we have so internalized
the dominant culture's views that they seem like common sense.
"Post-domesticated lesbian existence," she says ,"is one purposeof a lesbian legal theory."
Lesbian (Out)law is not about creating a set of rules, or laws, oreven a single strategy, for lesbians to follow. Rather, she is creatinga theory that will meet lesbians' needs and expand lesbians' choices.

68 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Her work, she says, is only the first part of a dialogue, the firstattempt to consider lesbians and the law from a lesbian perspective:
If a lesbian legal theory is a theory of law that has as its
purpose lesbian survival; if it is relentlessly lesbian andputs lesbians rather than law at its center; if it distinguishes between intralesbian situations and nonlesbian
situations; if it is not feminist legal theory and not queer
legal theory; if it does not seek to explain the entire
enterprise of law, then some of the preliminary work
toward developing a lesbian legal theory has begun.
For the rest of Lesbian (Out)law, Ruthann writes about thehistorical and current state of lesbianism and the law, examining
the kinds of arguments that have been used, asking questions
based on a lesbian perspective, and theorizing about what any ofit means for a lesbian legal theory. (The word "lesbian" appears
in this book more often than in an Alix Dobkin song, one reason
why I like it so much.) In the section ,"Outlaws," she examines
crimes of lesbian sex, from ancient Greece until now. In"Privacy", Ruthann considers the tension between argumentsfor our sexuality being public and being private, especially theways the courts have claimed either that lesbianism is an identity or a sex act, depending, usually, on which view will notprotect us. "The Regulation of Lesbianism" addresses three
institutions with definite policies about lesbians: the military,immigration, and prison. "Lesbian Relationships" considers
lesbians as lovers and as parents. "Lesbians and Violence" looks
at the violence against and among lesbians, especially hate crimes
and lesbian battering. The final section takes up alternatives to
traditional law, including mediation and a survey of lesbianlegal workers. All of this is in 185 pages; the ideas come fast andfurious here, in a direct, working-class no bulls hit way.
The quality of Ruthann's questions, and her commitment toalways center lesbians, anchor the book. Reading it excited me;
my copy is full of underlining, notes, highlighting, and questions to myself about some of my own work based on her methods and ideas. I interrupted my girlfriends' lives for days to read
sections to them, and worked something about it into conversations with my friends for weeks.

Summer/Fall 1993

69

My excitement started in Chapter Two, where Ruthann takes
apart the conventional historical view that European culture has condemned male homosexuality while ignoring female homosexuality.
Ruthann's research belies this; lesbians have been persecuted, although often the lesbians found guilty were poor or working class,and their crimes were categorized as vagrancy, moral insanity, prostitution, crimes against chastity, or lewd behavior.
Ruthann also discovered the importance of looking for lesbians
in silences, such as a Swiss court's declaration in 1568 that a woman
be executed by drowning for a "detestable and unnatural crime,
which is so ugly that, from horror, it is not named here." But beyond
the historical record, Ruthann asks that we question what we "know"
about lesbian history, especially reconsidering the way banishment,
in which one lesbian would be forced to leave a city forever while
her lover would be forced to stay, has not been treated as a severe
punishment. She also urges lesbians to question "all comparisons oflesbianism with male homosexuality, especially where the results
make men the measure of all things and make women's experience'invisible' or 'less' or 'pale'." Furthermore, she adds:...if we put lesbians at the center of our theories about lesbians in legal history, then it becomes important whether evena single lesbian was punished for her love for another
woman .... One woman executed for being a lesbian, one
woman banished or pilloried or flogged or incarcerated, is
not incidental. It is not incidental even if that one lesbian was
illiterate or dark-skinned or lower class, even if the "crime"of that one lesbian was prostitution or transvestism or lewdness. The punishment of one lesbian is a matter of great import.

This emphasis on the value of each lesbian life is central to
Lesbian (Out)law. In discussing lesbians and the military, Ruthannmoves the debate from whether or not lesbians make good soldiers
to whether or not soldiers make good lesbians:
When a lesbian officer in the United States Army trains alesbian recruit to think of current unpopular foreigners as"enemies," she is training one lesbian to hate another. To
disregard the survival of lesbians because they live within70 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

the national boundaries of Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador,
Nicaragua or Iraq is to disregard the survival of lesbians.
In "Lesbians and Prison," Ruthann considers how the
professionalization of a few lesbians as "good" administrators
who "follow the rules" pits lesbians against one another, withless privileged lesbians always losing:
It is horrific to contemplate even one lesbian correc-

tional officer or prison administrator pursuing disciplinary actions against one lesbian for hugging herlover, or recommending the transfer of one lesbian ...
away from her lover, or confiscating a lesbian magazine, or taunting an insufficiently demure lesbian.
Ruthann's commitment to centering lesbians influences her
discussions of lesbian battering, lesbian sex debates, lesbian
marriage and child custody. Her commitment to the inclusion of
all lesbians influenced the very structure of the book itself. It's
style is meant to be concrete and accessible, without unnecessary
legalisms and endless notes (although it is well documented).
And, she adds, her politic of accessibility extends to choices she
made about publishing:
While several university presses are publishing books
exclusively in hardcover for lesbian audiences who
can afford to pay large sums for slim volumes, Lesbian(Out)law is meant to be more widely available. For thatreason, it is published by an independent lesbian andfeminist publisher, reasonably priced given market
conditions, and meant to be read outside of law libraries
as well as within them.
The opposite of such lesbian-centered lesbianism is domesticated lesbianism, in which lesbians' self-understanding is basedon the rule of law, threatening lesbian survival. Ruthann does
not believe that it is creating or using legal reforms that harms us;
many of these reforms, she points out, are very useful legal"tools" that can help us meet our daily survival needs. The harmto lesbians, the domesticating, occurs when we confuse reformSummer/Fall 1993

71

and when lesbians unthinkingly adopt legal categories as our own,
therefore limiting our survival as lesbians.
In "Lesbians as Lovers," Ruthann examines legal tools as
they affect our relationships, measuring them against her own
statement that "the challenge is making the law serve lesbian
relationships instead of having lesbian relationships serve thelaw." On this basis she rejects relationship contracts because
they domesticate us by turning us into bargaining parties, because they rely on a rule of law meant to enforce the market
economy, and because contract ideology legitimates privilege
through the invention of neutral-sounding rights. She carefully
considers the prospect of state-approved marriage, discussing
the advantages, such as economic benefits and avoiding custody disputes such as the Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson battle, but also giving one of the most informed critiques of
lesbian marriage in print:
While there might be many practical disadvantages for amarried lesbian couple depending on their circumstances,~cluding increased tax liability, decreased financial aid
including public assistance, and the costs of any divorce,the opposition to lesbian marriage by lesbians is mainly
rooted in concerns about the less tangible aspects oflesbian survival. One aspect is lesbian solidarity and theperception that state-approved marriage divides lesbians. A class division is evident in observations that thebenefits of lesbian marriage mainly accrues to lesbians ofa certain class . .. .A sexual division is evident in observations that state-approved marriage draws lines between
good lesbians and deviant ones. An acceptable lesbian is
one who has a state-approved marriage and limits her
lesbian sex to the marital bed.
Ultimately, Ruthann rejects marriage and marriage-likedomestic arrangements because they domesticate lesbians, limit
lesbian choices, and create divisions between lesbians .
Ruthann also discusses false divisions between lesbians when
she examines the concept of the "good" lesbian and of "the whitest
and the brightest." In "Lesbians with Children," she discusses, as72 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTan example of this, the case of Jane Doe, described in court documents as "an exceptionally well-ed ucated, stable, responsible, andsensitive individual" and mother of an eleven year old "welladjusted and above average" son. Jane is allowed to maintainparental rights, in spite of her "unnatural lifestyle" , partly because
she is so wonderful, and partly because she promised to give up
her lover, if needed, for the best interest of her son. Although Jane"won", her type of case sets up an impossible standard, one mostlesbians could never hope to meet. Or would wantto meet; Ruthanndiscusses other lesbians who lost custody because they weren't
willing to sacrifice their relationships for their children. The category of" good" lesbian (agreeable, not radical, domesticated) also
harms all of us in instances such as EEOC cases where a businessmight list its "good" lesbian employees in order to prove that it
wasn't discriminating against lesbians as a class by firing a "toodykey" dyke. Or, as Ruthann explains in "Lesbians and Prison":
The rule of law's divisive violence that domesticates all of
us by institutionalizing some of us can appear rational
because we have internalized the categories criminal, incompetent, and delinquent. These categories appear especially rational to us as lesbians when we believe ourlesbianism is not the cause of the institutionalization.
There are so many other ideas in the book that I find intriguing and/ or exciting that I could go on and on, but then you might
think you didn't need to read it yourself. You do. Lesbian (Out)law
made me think, but, more importantly, it made me re-think somuch. And have I forgotten to mention that it is gracefully written,
with spatterings of a wonderful dry humor? To me, Ruthann's
work is the best kind of lesbian theorizing: it centers our understanding, includes our great diversity, insists upon our continuing
ability to make our own choices, and never forgets that we have to
eat and pay rent.

Ruthann has also published two works of fiction, Cecile and Eye of a Hurricane,both from Firebrand.

Summer/Fall 1993

73

Julie Blackwomon

Late Anger in a Cathedral

I wear stockings and dresses to work,
as protection from people in a hurry
who do not look,call me "sir"without intending harm.
But she was a woman.
presumed to be lesbian.
I am not used to thisSo I stare at her lipstick and long hair
until she notices my earrings,
then I look away.
Later she apologizes.
Again.
explains:''That happens to my daughter, too.
And I hate it.""Yes," I say,"I hate it too."
The woman sitting next to her
also in long hair and lipstick
decides it was an honest mistake.
attributes the error to my "higher evolution
on the way to androgyny,"
As if androgyny were something I craved
and did not know I had achieved.
I correct her.
"I am partial to looking like a woman/' I say.
Pooh poohing my objection as modesty,
she assures me of my successful transformation:"You have reached the higher plane," she says
"sometimes we have to accept these things."

74

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

I say nothing tum back around in my seat,
the conversation over.
Bitch.
Sometimes
It takes me a while to realize
I have been insulted
by a woman.

Late Anger II: And as Close as I Can Come
To An Apology
I have been a feminist for twenty years. Although I might feellike it, I would not call a woman a "bitch" to her face any morethan I would punch another human. I am almost fifty years old
now and have learned to handle my anger in less aggressive
ways. What I did was to write this poem.
As a feminist the idea of calling woman a "bitch" in a poemor piece of fiction is repulsive to me and crosses an an enormous
amount of boundaries. If someone else wrote this poem and I
read it in a feminist journal it would stop me cold. I would
challenge her right to call herself a feminist. I would stop to see
who wrote it and remember her name. My decision to submit itfor publication anyway has to do with personal integrity and a
refusal to submit to self censorship. I wrote the poem and although it causes me some personal embarrassment, I will handle
the negative feedback.
So what could I have done instead? I might have turned
around again, continued the conversation, explaining that I felt
particularly insulted by her because the conversation was noteven between the woman who insulted me and myself. She
intruded into my conversation with another woman in a misguided attempt to smooth things over and only made it worse.
I could have not written the poem. No, I lie. The poem wrote
itself. I borrowed paper from a friend and wrote the first draft

Summer/Fall 199375

within five minutes. I wrote the second version on the train backto Philadelphia.
I could have written the poem,hidden it in a drawer and notshowed anybody except my friends, the women in my writer'sgroup who know how difficult it is for me to call a woman a''bitch'' in writing: which would smack not only of self-censorship but cowardice again.
I considered changing the word ''Bitch'' to ''Heifer.'' But that too
is not what I feel. That also smacks of my fear of negative feedback from my sisters.
It is Monday morning, I am home sick from work and bored.
To entertain myself I read issue #47 of Sinister Wisdom from cover
to cover. Right there on page sixty-eight are requests for material
on Lesbian Ethics. Today is February eighth, which means I am
at least eight days late. If I am lucky, either these pieces will not
be accepted, or the poem will be too late for the deadline and I
will be spared the angry letters in the Editor's Column.
Peace.

76

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOTNaja Sorella

Paying Upone of the most physically, emotionally draining things for me to
do is constantly educate other Lesbians around different issues of
oppression. For a bunch of years I did lots of education arounddisability issues, especially Environmental Illness (E.I.). Now, I
mostly relate to other ill/ disabled Dykes 'cause it's too exhausting
relating to able-bodied ones.
Class is the issue most in my face these past several years.
Even for Lesbians who're committed to dealing with theirclassism, I'm horrified by their amazing number of off-the-wall,
totally outrageous statements and behaviors. Here's a few doozies.
• An upper-middle-class Dyke insists there's no class difference between her and a working-class Dyke. I want to shake thehell out of Lesbians when they say that shit.
• Two business Lesbians tell a workshop of business womynthat one way to keep business expenses down is to find a lowerclass womon who'd be more than happy to work for a very low
wage. The example they offer is their own secretary who happily
works full time for $700 a month. In reality, the "secretary" (alower-class Dyke) is the office manager, and fought with themfor years to get a raise. Which of course, she never got.
• Recently, a lower-class Dyke was at work when her uppermiddle-class Lesbian boss walked up to her after just dealing
with a delivery man, and exclaimed, "Working class men always
smell so sweaty!" She turned and walked out of the room, leaving the lower-class Dyke stunned.
• This one is an example of what me and my lover, Frieda, call
"empty middle-class offers." A class-privileged Dyke says to alower-class Dyke, "I'm having a few friends over for dinnertonight, why don't you join us?" The lower-class Lesbian accepts, shows up, and there's no place set for her. She's told there's
not enough food, and the class-privileged Lesbian is totally
surprised the lower-class Dyke is there. The lower-class Dyke isSummer/Fall 1993

77

totally humiliated in front of this ,Dyke and her friends, andhightails it out of there.
• Another example of empty offers: A lower-class, disabled
Lesbian gets what appears to be a sincere, from-the-heart, "Ifthere's anything I can ever do to help you, let me know, really, I
mean it, just call me," offer from a class-privileged able-bodied
Dyke. They're in a support group together. A few weeks later, thelower-class Dyke needs some belongings moved and takes her
up on her offer. The class-privileged Lesbian agrees to help, but
acts distant and bothered when they move the belongings. So thelower-class Dyke asks her what's wrong, and is angrily chastised
for assuming she had the right to make demands on the classprivileged Dyke's time and energy.
Sometimes I confront Lesbians on their classism, sometimes I
don't. It depends on a number of factors: How much investment
have I got in this Dyke? I don't consider it worthwhile confronting
a casual acquaintance. Yet it's scarier with a close friend . I always
fear the loss of the friendship. How open has she been in the pastwhen approached about an issue of oppression? I'm not going tochallenge a Dyke about her class ism when she's been an asshole
about other issues. I don't need the grief. Does she have anyawareness of class issues at all? I don't waste my time on the kindof Lesbian who'd insist her upper-middle-class background is nodifferent from a working-class Dyke. How often does she makeclassist comments/behaviors? If she spews classist shit every time
she opens her mouth, I consider her hopeless and don't botherconfronting her. I carefully choose who I'll confront because it
takes an incredible amount of time and energy to:
1. Deal with the emotional trauma inflicted.
2. Talk with friends to get support, feedback.
3. Figure out exactly what issues I need to cover, decide what
I want from her, etc.
4. Take time processing with the Dyke who made the comment.
5. Call my friends back to report how it went, and possibly get
more support if the confrontation didn't go well.
6. Deal with the fallout.

78

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

I've got an average of 2-4 hours of functional energy a day, and need
it for things other than tutoring class-privileged Lesbians. I'm fed
up with giving a free education to these Dykes.
I know this frustration isn't mine alone as an ill/disabled
Lesbian. Even for able-bodied lower-class Dykes, time and energy is an issue. The poorer one is, the less free time and energy
one has.
To class privileged Lesbians: it's time to pay up! It's not our. job to give you free lessons on how to stop oppressing us. Everytime a lower-class Dyke calls you on a classist remark or behavior, the education fee is $50 (no sliding scale!) After all, you'd pay
far more than this for a workshop. Paying lower-class Lesbians
for ,t heir time and energy is the ethical thing to do. Otherwise, it's
exploitation.
Where should the $50 go? My favorite is for it to go into a
Lesbian money fund (for poor Lesbians, not for the class privileged to buy a vacation home.) Here in the S.F. Bay Area, there are
two funds that I know of, that serve the local community. Other
possibilities: pay it to the Dyke you just offended (or clean herhouse!); pay it to a poor Lesbian in your community; send it to a
local clinic, group, etc., that serves poor Lesbians; ask the Dyke
who just enlightened you where she wants it to go. Get yourcheckbook out on the spot and write the check. You just got a
private seminar on class issues, you pay the fee now.
Paying up still applies even if you already give money tofunds, clinics, poor Lesbians, etc. The $50 fee relates specificallyto what you did or said, and the precious time and energy a lowerclass Dyke spent educating you. There's no two-for-one specials
or discounts. Just because you've paid up before, doesn't excuse
your next classist act, or exempt you from paying again.
The next step is to talk with other class-privileged Lesbians.
Tell them about the classist comment/behavior you did, the issues
brought up to you by the lower-class Dyke, what you learned, etc.
Explain the concept of paying up. Tell them they must pay $50
when they' ve offended a lower-class Dyke. As well, when you
call another class-privileged Lesbian on a classist remark or
behavior, she still pays $50 to a money fund, clinic, poor Lesbian,Summer/Fall 199379

etc. Make sure she writes the check out there and then. True, thistime you did the work, but you know that many times a lowerclass Dyke instructed you for free.
Don't wait to be called on your classism, call yourself on it.
If you suddenly realize you offended a lower-class Dyke lastmonth, don't hope she won't notice! She has. Apologize to her,and pay up. Even though she didn't expend her energy confronting you, she spent time and energy dealing with the hurt you
caused her.
Other thoughts about paying up: I originally thought of the$50 as a fine, but decided it felt too related to punishment, police,
courts, etc., and I didn't like that connectiort. If other lower-class
Dykes think of it as a fine, that's up to them. My lover, Frieda,
says she thinks of paying up as an amends. We talked about theexample of a class-privileged Dyke who isn't confronted on aclassist behavior, but later calls herself on it. Frieda says she pays
up as an amends for the pain, hurt, humiliation, etc., her classism
caused the lower-class Lesbian. Within my concept of money fortime and energy, I say she pays up for all the time and energy thelower-class Lesbian expended dealing with the trauma causedby the classist behavior. As well, the reason the class-privileged
Dyke called herself on her class ism was probably due to freelessons in the past from lower-class Dykes. Whether paying up
is considered a fine, amends, or a fee for time and energy, it needs
to be paid. It's still the ethical thing to do.
More thoughts: Whatever the oppression is, we suffer fromit. It often has devastating effects on our lives. We get fed up
trying to educate other Lesbians. Paying up is so satisfying, I
tried to think of how to apply it to other oppressions. Not sosimple to do. Money and classism fit like a hand and glove, butmoney doesn't easily translate to other oppressions. I ran into
conflicts as I tried to come up with other ideas. For example, I
thought that an able-bodied Lesbian could give 4 hours of attendant time to the disabled Dyke she offended. Yet if the ablebodied Dyke was lower-class, and the disabled Lesbian classprivileged, that's a conflict that makes that idea unworkable. I
realized that in applying paying up to other oppressions, there80 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

isn't one easy solution, like there is for classism. Each situation
will demand its own ethics. I can't begin to presume what'll
work for Dykes who're Jewish, of color, fat, old, etc. They're theones to decide what form of paying up they want.
Although paying up has a fun element to it, because we've
turned the tables on a usually humiliating and powerless situation, this is no joke. After my most recent run-in with classism,
I did the usual work involved in a confrontation, which includes
telling the other Dyke what I want from her. This time I explained the concept of paying up and stated, "I want you to payme an education fee, and I want it to go into a Lesbian money
fund." I didn't ask if she was willing to do it, because I wasn't
giving her a choice. I just firmly told her she needed to do it. To
her credit, she didn't take it as a joke. She agreed, and paid up.

Thanks to Frieda and Caryatis for their good ideas, feedback, and advice.
Thanks to Caryatis for her editing work.

Summer/Fall 1993

81

K. Ellen Kerr

Mirror, Mirror
Mirrors frighten me at night when I let myself think of you.
I thought of you the second I walked into Thackeray's andsaw the woman across the room. I glimpsed her profile. She wasstanding in front of a bookcase, intently reading part of a thickvolume. I hid behind the children's section to watch her. The
woman was tall with grayish hair and hazeLeyes. Those were theeyes, those very same eyes, that stared unblinkingly up from thedriver's license I had saved out of your wallet. I had tossed theworn leather pouch into the trash bag with everything else, but
I saved your driver's license. What did you used to call it? Oh yes,
your 'ticket to freedom.' I sat on the corner of the bed that day,working, grinding it into my brain, memorizing your every feature.
That woman's features are yours. Her purple and white pants
and blouse fluttered a little as she stepped closer to an open
window and the warm breeze rippled the fabric across her abdomen. The outfit resembled a pantsuit you once wore to a PTA
meeting just to add a little flair to the gathering. You walked into
the church basement-turned-library with your silk swishingprettily around your legs and a halo of Tabu cologne lingering in
the crest of your wave. You navigated around the room full ofparents, nuns, and priests, to seat yourself next to the chairmanof the board. The meeting was already in full swing. "Please,proceed," you indicated permissively, uncapping your good fountain pen with the gold flecks. Several years later I walked intothat very same lib;rary. In my arms I carried a box filled with yourbooks, dusted and packed slowly over a period of days. The last
few boxes were filled with all my Nancy Drew stories, childhood
picture books, and Henry Higgins books. I saved the Dr. Seussforeign language dictionaries and My Book About Me, books you
chose for me in your children's librarian wisdom. I also saved the
copy of Cinderella from when you were a little girl. The other82 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

books were unpacked and cataloged by the new schoollibrarian, and marked with a label inside the front cover that thesewere a gift from, with my name typed in. If you
knew that I had given most of my childhood books away too
along with yours, you would frown.
The woman's frown puckered her bottom lip and drew thecorner of her mouth up into a grimaced smile, just like yours. I
had seen that frown in a half a dozen places since the day I gave
those books away and it had always startled me. In the bus
station when I left North Carolina the first time with my clothes
crammed into a bag, those last children's books and your driver's
license underneath it all. I caught a glimpse of your frown out of
the corner of my eye. You were standing by the front window,
gazing out between the cement posts, watching a man in a blue
car drive away. What were you doing here? And why did it haveto be now, just when I had finally decided that it was okay? I had
stopped having those dreams, the ones that woke me up in themorning, unable to remember if you were dead or alive. I would
finally decide that you were alive after all and feel relieved anddisappointed and think about the books I had given away, wondering how I could ever get them all back. Then I would realizethat wait a minute, no, you had died, not lived-weren't thoseobituaries and that glass sealed casket real? Or were those inventions of my nights too? Those dreams-the ones that confusedme and manufactured feelings in me at random-those dreams
had finally drifted into nothingness. And there you were standing in a bus station watching a man drive away.
The woman across the room glanced down from the window,
turned more pages and looked at the back of the book, fingering
her hair. Gray wisps strayed around her face. Those gray wisps
first appeared on your temples and then worked their way backuntil all of your hair was salt and pepper. That, like your lupus,
had happened so gradually that neither of us noticed at first.
Then one day you were sitting up in my bed and had managed
to stretch and grab the hand mirror from the dresser. I walked incarrying your lunch tray and tears were running down yourcheeks, skin now wrinkled around your eyes. You looked at meSummer/Fall 1993

83

reproachfully and asked When did I become an old woman likeyour grandmother and why didn't you tell me? I honestly had
not noticed before. Now I can pinpoint the gray hair as starting
those first few months that you had been in pain but refused to
go to a doctor. Insisting that it was just a touch of early arthritis,that all the women in our family had developed joint pain in
their mid-thirties. By the time the gray was mixed evenly withthe rest of your hair, we were spending Thanksgiving in darkness and silence because you couldn't stand the light or thesound. You lay in my bed and I lay on the floor because you wereafraid for me to leave the room for long. When you were breathing deeply, I quietly stood up and crept out 'of the room, throughthe living room, and into the kitchen just to turn the blinds andlook out the window. For dinner we picked at some turkey andstuffing that the ladies at the church brought by. You didn't wantthem to see you now. I had said you were asleep.
The woman put the book back on the shelf, folded her arms
across her chest and stifled a yawn with her hand. Blue veinsstood out against the paleness of her hands, forming dark purple
mountain ridges. I used to place my finger over one of your veinsand press down just to feel it pop back up under my finger. Whenit did, I would jerk my hand back and shake it, saying something
about being 'grossed out.' Well then, don't do that, you'd snap
and turn the page of your book. I saw your hands again after I had
left for school and was attending a play with a date. I stood at the
ticket window and my date pushed the money under the open
half circle. The hand pushing the ticket back was yours. The skin
was very pale, almost abnormally so, and the purple ridges stoodin stark relief against your skin. I reached for the ticket and myhand touched a vein. The hand jerked back under the opening
like a retreating turtle. Next please, you shrilled, and I let my datepull me away on his arm. Had you just moved away? Had you
found my father and borne new children? Would I keep seeing
you everywhere I went?
The skin on the woman's arms was no longer firm and taut,but lay against the arm below it as she stood with her arms
crossed, studying more books lining the wall. Behind her arms,

84 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

her body was roundish, flattening downward with gravity. Like
the body I saw changing into the swimsuit at the Y, bright withcolor and ruffles. You had been so delighted when you found asuit that fit and that looked cheerful and fun. It was because ofthat swimsuit that we began going to the pool every couple ofdays that summer for the mother-daughter swim. I studied you
while you slipped out of your cotton slacks and shirt and into theswimsuit and wondered if your body was going to one day
become mine. I wondered this again the last time I saw you, lying
flat with tubes and wires and a monitor beeping, your arms
bloated yellow and hot. Your eyes crusted almost closed, but notquite. Your hair patchy and flattened, unwashed for weeks withno one to brush it for you. I wonder if you heard me talking to thedoctor as I assumed you were already gone. I wonder if you
waited for me to speak to you as you lingered.
The woman turned from the bookshelf and looked directly
at me before I had a chance to look away. Her features wereyours-her eyes, her mouth, her hair, her hands, her body. She
was you standing there looking me straight in the eye, unmoving, unblinking. Waiting. I touched my face and she touched
hers. Like when I was little and you'd stand across from me andtell me I had an eyelash on my right cheek, touching the spot on
your face opposite mine to show me. I would automatically reachup to my left cheek, reading your face like a map telling me You
Are Here with a red arrow. You'd say No! The other side. And
finally this turned into a friendly argument we shared until you
died.
Yesterday was my birthday and I've lived my whole life withyou, with mirrors frightening me at night as I step through thehouse, no longer capable of sleeping. Somewhere, from somestorybook you read to me as a child, I remember that people
whose souls have been stolen have no image in the mirror. And
I know this might be true.
I've tried to evade your touch, yet I am unable to escape you.
Unable to do anything but think of you as I noticed the first wild
gray hairs creeping into my life. My eyes fill with dread and I
count the hairs that fall out with each brushing.

Summer/Fall 1993

85

The woman facing me is the configuration dominating mylongings, dominating my worst nightmares. And her features are
not yours-the eyes, the mouth, the hair, the hands, the body. Herfeatures are mine. She is only my reflection, unwavering at last.
When I was little you told me that you had been unable toimagine continuing to live after your parents' deaths. But thenyour father died and you kept on living; later your mother diedand you kept on living. You just do, you said. I wonder if you
knew how no book could prepare me for this.
Yesterday I turned twenty-six and I've lived half my life
without you.

untitled
Peni Hall86 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Jamie Lee Evans

I'm no Poetfor Lisa Horan, my lover,
who always introduces me as her poet-girlfriend

I am not a poetmy hands are not strong
the pen slips as I write
the words strain.
I don't handle languagewith gracebalancing itsmoothly sliding across a marble tableunaware of its spoken eloquence.
Not memy words are deliberate
forceful
my poems are simple
first personme
My truth
My tongue
My soundMy life.
I come at poetry
like a hungry bear
to a loaf of breadleft out by careless campers.
I leap at words
as if to tame a lion.
Come here,
I yell at her
as if, in the struggle,
I will somehow gain control
or poetic ability.

Summer/Fall 1993

I have to trick myself
into writing poems(much like this one)done backwards
under my bed
contorted,
still questioning itself,a journal entry?
self-indulgent rambling?
a poem?
No, I don't write poetry
and my heart doesn't race
when my lover shows up at my door
with flowers and smiling.
No, I'm no poetand I don't feel my blood clot
when I hear news thatmy alcoholic mother is missing
10 days gone
20 days gone
Last seen with a strange man
and sleeping in her car.
What does it mean
to be a poet nowwhen words are used
as weapons against women
weapons that steal away
our voices, keep
us from speaking our truths,
telling our stories.
And then I hear women
all the timereading poems that say
they will speak for the voiceless women87

88 sinister wisd om #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

and I wonder how they
think they knowwhat these women would say anyway?
And I'm no poet
but I have never felt better
than listening to the r-h-y rhymesof another woman,the rhythms of her songdelicately placedin the framework of a poem.
The poem
would whisper my name Jamie Lee Evans, the writer,
say hello
and ask me over for tea.

Summer/Fall 199389

Monifa Ajanaku

Disillusioned, Dismayed - Ready for Revolution
Without Ethics, Community Cannot Exist

My ethical outlook is affected by my ethnicity. I am a womonidentified, lesbian-identified, female-born, out lesbian. I am
personally empowered, outspoken and assertive. I have a poverty class background and have hidden disabilities. I am a lesbian of dark hue, and because of this I am not supported on many
levels. For a code of ethics to be guiding principles that influence
my daily reality is sometimes difficult, when I encounter intentional, repugnant behavior from Caucasian lesbians presenting
themselves as allies and espousing a feminist politic. I remember and feel anew the rage and bitterness that is the legacy ofdark-skinned peoples in this country. This behavior includes
condescending, paternalistic attitudes, ethnocentrism, classism
and downright sarcasm based on race and class privilege.
When lesbians of dark color believe the feminist rhetoric ofthese lesbians, it can be particularly demoralizing. Racism isincompatible with feminism. Lesbians who talk feminism andact out racism are pseudofeminist.
It is painful to have one's political thinking jeopardized
because of interpersonal ethical violations. I wonder if someCaucasians are feeling beings when they seem barely capable ofexpressing love and compassion for me as an African American
womon. Is this entrenched emotional illiteracy? After many tears
and much anguished questioning, I still wonder when, or if,
Caucasian lesbians will take responsibility for their role in perpetuating the status quo and in keeping lesbians of Color oppressed?
If I sound angry when I speak of my ideas and ideals concerning lesbian ethics, I am. And hurt, many times over, by theunethical behavior and attitudes of so-called progressive lesbians. However, these feelings do not preclude my ability to think

90 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

about or work toward manifesting a world where wimmin canlive honorably - using a code of ethics exemplifying the depthof understanding, compassion and integrity necessary to createsuch a society.
How many of you with skin privilege have considered thecumulative effect that unethical behavior has on a dark womon?
When it happens again and again, would you not expect that ourtrust level for light-skinned European descent wimmin would
diminish? Not to mention that we would withdraw from certain
spheres to maintain our emotional integrity in the face of blatantracism. I don't like losing faith in one of the movements I've
worked hard in for over twenty years.
Yes, my recent and painful political disillusionments in the
San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community' shape my current
thinking on ethics. Within the community, it is not acknowledged that interracial relationships take a greater toll on lesbiansof Color than Caucasian lesbians, or that long-time friends who
switch loyalties from a lesbian to that lesbian's ex-lover cause
pain. It is not acknowledged that an African American lesbian
being pursued from a wimmin's establishment and publicly andfalsely accused of a theft which did not occur is distressing news,
as is the discovery that Caucasian lesbians take the incident
lightly. We all lose when lesbians act out of a lack of integrity orconsciousness and are untrue to the politics they claim to support. We lose because there is one less lesbian to do work. Faithin our possibility and potential as a community is deflated,
undermined or lost.
What is required to develop lesbian ethics so that such community can even be pursued? We need to put a premium on honesty,
ethics and principles. What are Lesbian ethics? We do not have
any well-defined or articulated standards of ethical behavior.
There is too much pain, insensitivity, emotional mayhem andturmoil among us. However, there are individual lesbians who*Although I use the word community, I do not believe that we presently havea lesbian "community." If we do have community, it is dysfunctional at best.
I believe we have the potential for a community.

Summer/Fall 1993

91

possess viable feminist ethics and would like to discuss at length
what this means.
An ethical lesbian acts like a warrior, possessing a quiet,
gentle strength. She appropriately addresses lesbophobic andhomophobic statements, attitudes and acts. She is actively committed to the causes of lesbians and heterosexual wimmin andbehaves with the good of all lesbians or a particular segment of
lesbians in mind. She understands that the personal is political.
She takes seriously sisterhood and all that it can encompass.
An ethical lesbian never intentionally causes another lesbian or group of lesbians emotional or physical pain. An ethicallesbian is aware of the benefits of her skin privilege, if she is
Caucasian, and relies on her personal integrity to prevent her
from doing reprehensible acts to satisfy her personal wants,needs and desires. She promotes goodwill. An ethical lesbianallows a feminist philosophy of principles to dictate her behavior, particularly toward other lesbians. She prioritizes lesbians
and takes her politics seriously. She lives by them, consistently
and concretely working to expand her spiritual and political
growth.
A philosophy of ethical behavior includes a constant critiqueof one's self and a commitment to expand growth in all areas. You
can't be brutal and humane at the same time.
If we perceive ourselves as lesbians with political consciousness, then we have many responsibilities. We have the responsibility of being role models. We must never consciously perpetuate
racism, ageism, anti-semitism, looksism, lesbophobia, ableism, sexism - all of the damaging "isms" that impact on wimmin daily.
Overall, we are responsible for keeping our community safe.
Our most vital responsibility is to create positive change bywhatever means necessary, short of hurting each other. Thismeans committing to change based on principles of sisterhood.
These principles are revolutionary because this society, like most,devalues wimmin. We are not conditioned to love ourselves andeach other, and doing so subverts the system. Loving ourselves
and each other constitutes revolution, not reformism. It sometimes means taking an unpopular position. This might mean not92 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

succumbing to bulls hit propaganda, not allowing vicious racist
attitudes and b~haviors to persist and prevail in our existinglesbian milieus. Remaining silent in the face of oppression is
betrayal. Our silence is perceived as approval of destructive acts
or attitudes.
People attempt to destroy what they fear, and Caucasians fear
people of color; therefore, those of us who are feared are constantly under attack. This happens within the African American
community as well as in the dominating culture for different
reasons. Not battling internalized racism reduces self-esteem,
confidence, and the ability to create self-loving and supporting
environments.
Caucasian wimmin, feminist and nonfeminist must actively
and consistently engage in anti-racist struggles. Although lesbians of Color struggle with issues of sexism as women, Caucasian
women should not automatically expect support from lesbiansof Color unless they are willing to recognize and work towards
elimination of racism internally and externally. For African
American lesbians, especially those of dark color, the greatest
gift we can give ourselves, and what is imperative to our survival, is to believe in and love ourselves.
Reputable and credible anthropologists, historians, geneticists and other physical and social scientists speak of indisputable evidence that African women are the progenitors of thehuman race. If we believe in ancient female wisdom and hope toreclaim our connection to this source, it makes sense to honor thearchetype which dark skinned lesbians hold. If hopes for sisterhood guide our hearts, each of us must accept our interrelatedness. In this way, we learn to know and share the knowledge of
all our female ancestors.
I am not interested in communities, however, where Caucasian lesbians directly or indirectly hurt dark-skinned wimmin
through their thoughtless behavior. A genuine lesbian community reflects the social and political harmony that comes fromself-determination combined with empathy and ethical treatment of others. It also reflects a level of trust that enables thecommunity to resolve its problems without the intervention ofSummer/Fall 1993

93

outside powers. A community in its fullest sense reflects VIPS:
the Values, Interest and Principles of all its inhabitants. Solidarity cannot exist if we are motivated by fear, or the need to control
and have power over others.
Fear and the need for control and power create imbalanced
and hurtful relationships. Communication theories suggest that
there are three basic ways of handling communication difficulties in all relationships: confrontation, avoidance and cooperation. In order to have honest and nonthreatening confrontationand cooperation, we need to respect each other as human beings .
worthy of dignity. This is one of the key ingredients necessary.
for building trust.
How are lesbians to build trust politically if we are fraudulent in what we say and therefore how we live and treat eachother? Unless our political convictions are expressed throughour attitudes and behavior, we can never understand and accept
how our differences contribute to the richness, beauty andstrength of diversity. The flaw in the ethic of treating each otheras we treat ourselves is that many of us often treat ourselves very
foul.
Treating ourselves as inherently beautiful beings, instead of
our own worst enemies, depends on our being connected withand caring for our inner spirits. Being a lesbian is a spiritual
reality and phenomenon. From this connectedness comes mynotion of sisterhood. It entails maintaining bonds with otherwimmin that involve a warm feeling, understood dependable
support, trust, involvement on some level with one another's
growth, a shared interest in the goals and values of the other, andmost importantly, a compatible understanding of what constitutes ethical behavior. In this way, we can deeply connect on
many levels while remaining free to explore our differences.
Community arises from connection; it comes from the heart.
To live from one's heartfelt integrity it is necessary to create ahealthy community. It's important to take risks with other lesbians and ask for honest feedback. We must take responsibility forthe choices we make. Let us not be fooled by empty rhetoric but
instead evaluate situations on the basis of attitudes we hold and94

sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

the actions we take. Arrogant ignorance is the cornerstone of
patriarchy. Wimmin who fall back on the excuse of ignorance tocause and maintain pain in the lesbian community are the enemies among us.
If advocating a strong belief in karma, or following the golden
rule or the ten commandments, or even following a guru or a
UFO would prevent lesbians from doing harmful atrocious things
to each other, then so be it. When dykes act unethically and hurteach other it makes a mockery out of my political faith in ourability to create community or impact positive change in theworld.
Are wimmin afraid of revolution, even a spiritual! emotional .
revolution? Can we cease being a burden and terror to ourselves
and to each other? We must, because we can't organize, agitate,mobilize or raise our community consciousness while our spirits
are broken or shattered.
We must take our rightful places and clean up this failed
democracy and institute a femi-cratic society. Only in this way
can we create new ways to govern ourselves. We need to make theplanet safe to make living even possible. There is so much disorder that needs to be rectified.
If we are to advance into the 21st century with ideals andconvictions that will facilitate positive change, we need to put
our spiritual and political houses in order post haste. What are
we doing and what do we need to do today to make the world abetter place? Will we leave a lesbian legacy of integrity or will we
die embracing our fear of revolution?

Summer/Fall 1993

Once Upon A Time
Dawn A. Rudd95

96 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Aspen

Muscle Fetish
A dyke said to me,'don't you love it when thosetasty women athletes
all pumping blood and oxygen
power through some personal hurdle?'

I love itwhen my friend asks me to comb her hairso her strength is free to paintthose intricate visions just for herself
I love it when she singstaking minute gasps of air between
each tiny voiced sound, each cascadeof melody so light it's almost gone
before it reaches my ears.
I love it when her worn-out, pressured
muscles, trembling with the onslaught
of a workout she never chose, the burnwhich hardly stops, feels a hiatus
which allows her to move and dance
Dykes dribble over the muscles of dykes
who walk the hills
who mend cars
who dance till dawn
but ignore dykes
who lie all day in bed
who cannot direct their muscles
whose muscles tire easily.

Summer/Fall 1993

Patriarchy told us we mustn't have muscles
but when they bowl, we don't have to bat ...
we can refuse to play cricket.
You lust after muscles
I lust for spirit.
Watch out for the spirit of disabled dykes
you may not be able to takesuch strength.

Crip Companions
Peni Hall97

98 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOT

Aspen

Loving Song
Stretch marks
silver lines
pattern of twigs
and shadowson your breasts
smell ofthe forest
wet dew
soft and toughgrassbeech buds
open out softly
into leaves
aroundmy lips.

Summer/Fall 1993

99

DebHipp

Loneliness Smokes Too Many Cigarettes

I dreamed one night that I was in my bed beside a woman that I
knew in the dream, but not in my waking life. We were talking
quietly. We stopped talking. I was propped up on one elbow,
looking down at her head on my pillow. I moved slowly,
tenderly, until my body was against hers. She put her hand up
saying, "No, I don't want sex."
I just looked at her, then fell back onto the bed beside her. I
was suddenly tired of having to explain myself to people who do
not understand what I am about. I had not wanted sex, but only
to feel the warmth of her body, her life, close against my own. I
needed to listen to her breathing, close to my ear, and put myfingers into her hair. I needed to feel someone else's heartbeat in
the dark. I didn't say anything to her. I could not explain it to her.
I knew that the only way someone can know that feeling is to live
it. Even though she was beside me, I felt alone, and deeply
saddened.
When I woke, it was 4 A.M. I got up and brewed a cup of tea,
walked over to my desk, and turned on the lamp. I could notwrite, so I turned off the lamp, and lit a green candle. I smokeda cigarette, watching the white smoke escape through the open
window, into the night with little noise, above the streets with notraffic. I felt that terrible sadness again, but now I was awake.
This time it was real.
I felt lonely, but I wasn't so sure lonely was such a bad way
to be. Loneliness isn't constant, but when it shows up at mydoorstep, it hangs around for as long as I allow it. Loneliness has
a message. It is a teacher, a mirror of the soul - of what lies
dormant, as well as what moves around crying or screaming or
just being. It is the naked self. The scary thing about lonelinessis its voice. It is a baby crying in the night, and a child afraid of
the dark. It is the whispers of the unknown.

100 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Loneliness is letting go of something, whether that something is a person, or an idea, or a way of being. It is a mediator
between what was and what is. It is the journey between that isloneliness. Loneliness follows you like a shadow in the afternoon, then slips under the covers with you at night without
saying a word. It's all in the look. The eyes of loneliness are
your own.
At that moment, the only emotions I had to deal with were myown. No one would be walking into my living room asking me
why I was up in the middle of the night, burning a candle in thedark, staring at empty streets. I had to explain nothing. In myaloneness, I remembered that the only relationship I would haveforever is this relationship with my self.
Perhaps that woman in the dream was an aspect of myself. The
part of me that tires of always having to understand everything. I
wanted to go back to sleep that night and dream something wonderful- perhaps that I was flying so close to the stars, so close tomyself that I would know I had always been able to fly.
I don't remember what I dreamed when I went back to sleep.
I know only that there is a part of myself that is now more patient,more sure. When I can hold that part in my dreams, when it
doesn't put up its hand and stop me, I will have learned my lesson
about loneliness. And the next time, when I dream, I will fly.

J
At HomeRya Philips
Oregon Countree Dykes clip art

Summer/Fall 1993

101

Zoe Rhine

Beyond the Sway

It is Saturday morning and I am walking uphill on Aston Street by

the Frances Apartments where Church Street crosses. I stop in frontof the red brick church where the cypress trees are. I'm thinking
about fate. The yard of the Trinity Episcopal Church is soft andshaded, with thin lime-green grass and a new layer offal1en needles.
I've never thought about fate before. I'm tryipg to decide if! believe
in fortune and final outcomes? It is Saturday morning and walking
uphill I am thinking about love and loneliness.
N ow that I live downtown, I walk a lot. I amonly working parttime so it feels like I'm loafing. I feel it first in the top of myshoulders, small circles of nerves bursting, as if I'm losing somepart of my self. But I've read that both Lao Tzu and Walt Whitman
saw loafing as inviting the soul. I try to think of it this way. I makevows to myself never to walk again as if I'm going somewhere.
I slow myself down now even when it is cold outside. I told afriend this, and then I didn't say anything, waiting to see if her
knew what I meant.
"You want to see," he said quickly, like passing me safely
through a gate at wartime.
"Yes," I said.
The roof of Trinity Church is green. I think of the ocean when
I notice it, of some wavy, vulva-like sea animal lying on the ocean
bottom. I think of my father or of his mother, my grandmother,both dead; the color of mints, it was their favorite color. The
green church roof is the color of hard curly mosses that grow atthe bottom of trees. It is copper plate that has tarnished.
The three domes of St. Lawrence's are green, also. So is thecopper weather cock on the top of the First Presbyterian, and theflat roof of the Federal Building uptown. There were spots on thewood of my floor that had turned the same green when I firstpulled the brown linoleum up. Green like an old copper penny. I

102 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

am living now in a room on a second floor. The building was
originally a bank. It was built at the turn of the century, and I've
seen a picture of the building when there were cobblestones
reaching across the muddy, yet unpaved street. Sometimes, I lie
in bed and picture the large safes, full of pads of money, that werein my room long ago, and the desks with secretaries typing, sucking
on red and yellow candies, watching the same shadows from thecast iron window frames, crossing the wall, early mornings.
I am in love with a woman. Her name is China. She has black
hair, which I always notice first when I see her, and what I liketo look at when she does not know. The blackness of her hair isdefinite, and I like to believe that it symbolizes the unequivocalness of her love for me, and that our lives will soon join. We don't
live together. She lives in a separate life, in a house with anotherperson, and comes to see me. Sometimes we are not honest, because when we are honest we get close, and that jars against theother side of China's life that she is trying to make work.
"I am not in love with her," China tells me. "It is more like abusiness relationship."This other person makes a lot of money; buys China imported
cheese and lace lingerie. China works part-time in a sandwich
shop, to have something to do ... One day China handed me a small
piece of folded up paper. I was to read the note after she left, but not
to ever mention it to her. It was something she had never told
anyone. the secret she had written to me, folded over and over itself
like she must have done with it inside herself, was that she longed
more than anything in the world, to be an orchestra conductor. She
had wanted to be the first woman conductor at the Met, but that had
already gone on and happened without her.
At night, I think there must be more than only four ways tolie in bed. I never hear people talk about this. Last night I slepton my back with my arms and legs spread out, trying not to let
any part of myself touch. I was trying not to lie on myself. Lao
Tzu says. not to have edges that catch. He says to remain"untangled," as well as "unconfused." Lying in bed this way
seemed healthy, although it made the small of my back hurt.

Summer/Fall 1993

103

Walking up the sidewalk, I think about walking into fate,
and find myself wondering if this is how fate is? It is a rushing
thought, the way new things run themselves into the mind. "I
could take things as they come," is what I stand there on the
sidewalk thinking, some new sense of courage occurring inside
me. I take a deep breath. I realize that I seldom see things how
they are. I've been living inside hard edges inside my mind,
wanting things to be a certain way. Standing there under the highblue sky, I feel myself more. I feel the soft area inside the edges.
I look up Church Street to the corner past the Swannanoa Dry
Cleaners, and feel my life sweep open, as if my small lighted
world becomes wide sideways, too. With what seems like clear
insight, I say, "I will find my way with things exactly as they are."I step off the curb excited by the light in the grass and the strengthof my own thinking. I feel larger inside. I will tell these things to
China. I will tell her how much I love her.
There is rain and it is Monday when she comes. We drink
jasmine tea from my blue china tea pot, and I talk to her all
morning. Then she stands up to leave. She says, "I need to go
think. .. I don't know what to do with my love for you." - Shesays to me, "It's as if there is no place."
It is in the middle of the first floor, below the blown up
dinosaur left over from a Halloween party, where we stop hugging, and kiss each other, softly, like telling small stories. Ourtime always has a largeness to me like a long piece of sound, but
I start feeling time fall off, into sections. We are struggling. Ourbodies stop moving into each other. I feel time failing. Ourcloseness is a thin strand pulled tight between us. I do not say
anything. Then she starts touching me. I lie in close to her, us
standing up. She turns me around and pulls me close, my backagainst her. I think she is trying to say something to me, somejammed up feeling inside her. We kneel down to the floor withher back sliding against the wall and I rest on her bent leg andwith her hand she reaches under my shirt and touches my stomach, and then she reaches between my legs and makes love to me.
At first I think I will lose my mind and I say this, then I sob. The
sobs are large like bowls. I turn and lay my head in her lap and104 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

she puts her arms around me. First I feel the way it feels insideme when I feel how much a part of her I am. Then, secondly, I feel
directly how I've been keeping away from my own life. Truth,
like a lighted field, opens up across the inside of me. Here, unlike
before when I thought I understood, there is no falseness, and I
understand it is a place deep and always inside me, where thesethoughts had already been. Where, inside, do words come from,is what I lay there on the floor, learning, China holding me. Then
China leaves. I lock the door behind her.
I stand at the middle window in my room. There is a single
pigeon sitting on the peak of the old Fine Arts Theater across thestreet, where they used to show dirty movies. The pigeon isstanding still, looking out over the edge. "To be unconfused is tofind balance," even beyond the sway of love. The pigeon has, I
think, the high post of the world.

Summer/Fall 1993

105

Jen Benka

Tracing

H ad no blood on the wood boat creaking
white sail full with air
puffed out proud like the chest of the cock crowing.
I own no Mayflower stock.
My blood crossed on steel
liners slicing ocean in half
parting to the promised
land of opportunity Lady Liberty
Let Freedom Ring.
We lived along the Czech borderin a mining region, Silesia.
Lung dust malnutrition cave labor coal.
With thick hands we dug into mountain bowels for soft black rock
(I dig I sift I chisel I pick I dust I piece together)Dug until our hands didn't come clean.
Dug until we died in the dead dark.
I am alone sitting in my Grandfather's parlor.
I pronounce Silesia and it sounds like Silence.
I pronounce my Grandfather's name which is my name.
It is a short quick one-two name and ends with Ka
like someone has hit me in the gut.
I rub rose lotion into my hands
rub out the tension locked in my knuckles
with a kneading dough rhythm
these joints starch stiff rusted hinges
Grandma gave me her hands.

106 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

I am alone looking into the reflection
my face is a quarry cut, drilled, excavated.
I see Grandma's hard silver-blue gun-barrel eyes
cold iron tunnels loaded with temper.
But I know my eyes are from two places.
They are points of lineage.
They are the other women who are somewhere inside of me.
Phoebe gave them to Elzora, Elzora gave them to Sis(who is my mother) Sis gave them to me.
Women buried in a recessive blue-eyed gene
twirling beneath my skin.
I am a product of my own past
but I have also inherited whole condensed pasts.
I am a past within a past.
A context within a context.
A world within a world.
Only in flashes fast and bright as lightning
can I imagine the totality of myself, of anyone
and of this galaxy.
Everything I see is turned upside-down
then right-side up again.
This past, these women are secret codes
I don't know how to crack
stories I don't know how to spill.
Even Watson and Crick can't tell me.
(I dig I sift I chisel I pick I dust I piece together).
I pricked my finger with a straight pin
squeezed until I had a bubble of bloodsmeared a silent scarlet streak
across the clear glass sliderolled back the lens.
I was pretending I was Marie Curie
but where she found radium
I would find connections
inroads to the women who are me.
I saw only small circles.
I was no closer.

Summer/Fall 1983

The car door is locked
I am driving south.
I think about movementand dislocation.
How when I'm moving I am anywhere
nowhere everywhere at once.
how there is no such thing as destinationor conclusion. No such thing as timewith markers sign posts hands fingers
pointing telling.
How there is no toward no forward
only movement amidst constancy.
I am driving to the house I have a key to.
I am again looking for clues.
I find Aunt Genevieve's genealogy chart.
N ames on lines connected to lines with names
no faces no hands no eyes no knuckles
no pri.m ary sources.
I am tracing lines
trying to locate histories
my skin speaks incessantly(I dig I sift I chisel I pick I dust
I piece together).

107

108 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Emily Ballou

Poem for Corn Moon Sister:what I learned among women. I was forced to change
the assembly of my bones.
- Janet Lark

I am different.
The sky is pumpkin tiger
lily sexy, closing
up at night, never reopening
quite the same.
Who is this woman?
Who owns these bones?
birthday-sunset-walking into the corn(husks rising, husks falling away)
husky bones entwinedin everything that has changed me.
I fall in
as if this field were a lap
held in a chant:
Corn-Mother, Corn-Sister.
Some leave her in the field to be buried.
some wrap her in moon.
Some crush her to make perfume for their necks.
What I have learned is that first
there are buttercups and daisies
then tiger lilies(all at once, they explode overnight)
then loose strife purple sucking queen
anne's lace.
Some bathe her. Some bathe with her.
Some play her fingers, make music.

Summer/Fall 1993

Some plant her and grow tomatoes.
I have learned to pick broccoli
before it flowers bitter and yellow.
I have learned to let out my body,I have learned to crush
herbs, to recognize cilantro,
cumin, basil, turmeric.
Some drink her and see rose flour and fire.
Some let her be eaten by the birds.
Some hold her under their dresses and pretend
to be pregnant. I have learned to love
my body. I have learned that women,
like fire made with sage, cedar or pine
smell differently.
I have learned that women my mother's age
are women like me.
Some sing to her on that mother-swing.
Some lock her in a box of treasure.
Some lick her forever.
'.

I learn and walk to blackberries
at the abandoned house of thread
and antique lace. My hands
are loved blackberry hands,
they are marked with this place.
Some fall into her and never want out.
What I have learned is that bones
do not always movethe way you want them to.
That the Blue Heron body in the pond
exists only for the motionof water and fish
darting fists, dark waves
under the loose strife;
can only move in certain ways:
smoke stretching and folding
stretching and folding.

109

11 0 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Contributors' Notes ____________
Anonymous asks that people refrain from speculation about her
identity. In each of our geographical communities, there are
women who could have written this, and whose peace and legal
status should not be disturbed by curiosity. Thank you.
Aspen is a lesbian writer living in England.
Carole Graham was a radical hellraiser ... an artist, playwright andpoet. Still raging against injustice and the medical establishment,
she took her own life in June 1988, a victim of cancer.
China Marks: A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships,
China Marks makes sculptures and drawings that have beenshown in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries
in New York and elsewhere in the country.
Dawn Rudd: I am a 30-year-old artist, activist, poet and healing
warrior woman, committed to truth and integrity. I believe women
are the healers and saviors of this planet, with the power totransform our lives and the lives of others through vision, loveand determination. I am proud to be a woman, proud to be ofAfrican and Native American descent and determined to share
all that I am with my communities. My creativity is a celebrationof my love, my spirit and my diversity.
Deb Ripp: I'm a 34-year-old white lesbian, living in Kansas City. I
grew up in a small middle-class town in Illinois, being told I should
be like everyone else. I write for the child inside me, who never
had a voice. In writing, I find the freedom of knowing who I am
Elana Dykewomon is grateful and pleased when other dykes
edit Sinister Wisdom . She remains a middle aged, middle class
Jew out on a limb and waving.
Elliott: She is a white, working class lesbian, just turned 30 anddisabled. She said too much already. She can think of nothingelse to say.
Emily Ballou: I'm doing my Masters in Women's Studies at the
University of Sydney. Just returned last year from Kate Millett's
farm. Struggling white poet, 24-years-old, raised middle-class.
Jamie Lee Evans is a 26-year-old Mixed-Blood Asian Feminist
Lesbian from the lower class and makes her living with two part-Summer/Fall 1993

111

time jobs: as a volunteer trainer at San Francisco Women Against
Rape and as the marketing director of Aunt Lute Books. She
writes and lives in Oakland, CA. .
Jen Benka: I am a 25-year-old, middle-class Polish lesbian-feminist poet and performance artist living in Milwaukee. I have
performed in Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago and New York City.
I try, with my work, to combat denial, repression and silence.
Mine and yours.
Joan Cofrancesco lives in upstate New York. She has a bookcoming out in June, entitled Walpurgis Night, by San Diego Poets
Press. She grew up in a middle-class Italian background. She
lives with her lover and two cats. She enjoys walking through thewoods, reading poetry, listening to classical music.
Julia Youngblood is a southern transplant photographer andwriter living in San Francisco. Other publications featuring
Youngblood's work include Outlook, Feminist Art News, Matrix,
Bay Times, The Louisville Review and the Louisville Times. Photography exhibitions include solo and group shows at The Mission
Cultural Center, Tula Gallery in Atlanta, The Brick Hut, S.P. City
Hall, 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 Fotogalerie in Amsterdam, Sargent Johnson
Gallery, La Pena, Fresno Art Museum, The Photographic Archives and Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
Julie Blackwomon is a 49-year-old, working class, black Lesbian
feminist who lives and works in Philadelphia. She seldom submits material for publication and submitted these pieces only
because she is home with the flu. She is the author of a poetry
book Revolutionary Blues, and co-author of Voyages Out 2. Most
recently she is published in Riding Desire, Women's Glib and soon
to be published Parenting Anthology. She is working on a bookof short stories.
K. Ellen Kerr is my pseudonym. I am a 28-year-old, middle-classfat dyke writer of German descent. I am a displaced Southern
writer living in Chicago with my three cats. I am finishing mydissertation on women's writing about incest. My work has been
published in Out/Look, The Heartlands Today, and Sanskrit.
Ka Yin Fong is a photoartist living in Toronto.
Kathryn Kirk: I became a lesbian and photographer almost simultaneously seventeen years ago. With roots in the Midwest and112 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

after ten years in Northampton, MA, I arrived in New York citywith Hurricane Gloria in 1985. I will stay until I have experienced
and photographed more of the beauty and complexity of city life:
Kirsten Backstrom: I am a 32-year-old lesbian, white, from thelower-middle class. My fiction and essays have appeared mostrecently in The American Voice, Trivia, Hurricane Alice and the new
Papier-Mache Press anthology If I Had My Life To Live Over I Would
Pick More Daisies. I live in Seattle, where I teach community
service writing classes, work in a bookstore and make sculptural
baskets to supplement my writing.
Lucy A. Tatman: Age 27, white, uncanny resemblance to bespectacled, befuddled lesbian academic, with WASP-from-hell background.
Eternally intrigued by the rhythm, taste, texture of words. Reads
lesbian theory to stay sane, poetry to keep dreaming, and does thedishes cause she likes to. Has a fondness for incomplete sentences.
Melissa Farley is a 50-year-old feminist psychologist in San Francisco.
She has taught home altarmaking, feminist performance art, andgroup therapy, and is currently doing research on long-term physicaleffects of childhood sexual assault. An activist for 25 years, she has
been arrested 13 times, most often for shredding mainstream pornography. She is middle class, many of her ancestors were Celts and she
has a green-haired feminist daughter.
Monifa Ajanaku is a 40ish, African American, Southern-born,raised poor Lesbian.
Naja Sorella: I was born in 1952, and grew up working-class, witha mother from an inner-city working-class background and afather from rural poor. Frieda, my wonderful deliciously roundlover of almost 9 years, helps make life with chronic illness morebearable. The other loves of my life are painting, writing, reading, collecting stones/ crystals and talking with other Separatists.
N eta C. Crawford is African American, in her 30s, and is a university professor. She is from the lower middle class and has beena vegetarian for 18 years.
Pamela Gray is a 37-year-old Jewish lesbian poet, playwright,
screenwriter and comedian living in Santa Monica. 1/3-out-of-4 ... "won the first place Woman in the Moon Poetry Prize for 1992.
Pamela wrote the ''Violations'' episode of Star Trek: The Next Gen-eration.

Summer/Fall 1993

113

Peni Hall is a visual artist, video producer and technical coordinator for theater and video who resides in Berkeley, CA. Since 1985
she has worked as Technical Coordinator and has beena performer
with WRYCRIPS Disabled Women's Theater. In 1991, she createdMigraine 2000," her first art video with Melanie Media. Peni is theoriginator of Hallways Productions, a series of disability-relatedart and cartoons. Her art has been featured in such journals as
Sinister Wisdom, Belle Lettres, Hikane, This Brain Has A Mouth, andthe upcoming disability anthology, Range of Motion.
Sally Bellerose: I am a 42-year old, white, working-class lesbian,
writer, mother, nurse. My work has been published in various
places including the anthologies Women 'On Women Two, Sister/
Stranger, The Poetry of Sex, and The Persistent Desire.
Susan Stinson's first novel will be published by Spinsters, Ink
in 1994. Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women, a chapbook, will
also appear in 1994 (Orogeny). She is a 32-year-old, raised middleclass, European-American who lives with joy in Easthampton,
MA.
tova is a Jewish, working-class dyke whose poems have been
published around and about over the years. She is an editor of
Bridges, the magazine for Jewish feminists and our friends. She lives in
Seattle, where she has been dealing with the mud pile she used
to call her garden, before it rained every single one of the last 30+
days, except for today, when it's sunny and near 80, and she has
to be inside at work 411 day.
Zoe Rhine: I'm a 36-year-old Francophile, living in Asheville,
North Carolina, who loves gardening; animals, coffee, books,
and Lisa. I am white and working-class.
1/114 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Books Received ______________
About the Books Received Ust: We list (almost) all the books we get in themail. Unfortunately, we never have room to review everything we thinkshould be reviewed. I tend to list books here by books / authors / presses
I think are important (although all books from one press are listed together),with an emphasis on lesbian-owned presses. If I've read all or part of a book
I may add subjective qualifiers like "read this." While the presence ofadjectives can be interpreted as editorial endorsement, the absence ofthem only means I'm going by the publisher's press release - Elana.

QUICKSAND! African American Lesbian Erotica - the poetry of sex,
coming out and celebration by Folisade. 1992, $8, Black Angels Press,
POB 14785, Oakland, CA 94614.
The Black Back-Ups - this first collection of poetry, spanning work overthe past 20 years, reflects the faces, voices, feelings, words, and stories ofan African-American family, neighborhood and town, by Kate Rushin.
1993, $8.95, Firebrand Books, 141 The Commons, Ithaca, NY 14850.
Stone Butch Blues - a novel about a working-class lesbian growing up in
the '50s, coming out in the '60s and deciding to pass as a man in the '70s,
by Leslie Feinberg. 1993, $10.95, Firebrand.
The Solitary Twist is the first detective novel where the PI uses Sinister
Wisdom to pick up a client! Elizabeth Pincus' second engaging Nell Fury
mystery. 1993,$9.95,SpinstersInk,POB300170,Minneapolis,MN 55403.
Ronnie Gilbert on Mother Jones: Face to Face With the Most Dangerous Woman
in America is a one woman musical of the life of Mother Jones, written andperformed by folk singer and actor Ronnie Gilbert. 1993,$9.95,ConariPress,
1144 65th St., Suite B, Emeryville, CA 94608.
Can't Keep a Straight Face, A Lesbian Looks and Laughs at Life - collected
essays by activist and social commentator Ellen Orleans. 1992, $7.50,
Laugh Unes Press, POB 259, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004.
Childless by Choice: A Feminist Anthology - stories by women who see
their decisions not to have children as positive, empowering and creative,
edited by Irene Reti. 1992,$8.95, Her Books, POB 7467,SantaCruz,CA95061 .
Alma Rose is a debut novel, set in the West, of "life and love off the beaten
track," by Edith Forbes. 1993, $10.95, Seal Press, 3131 Western Avenue,
Suite 410, Seattle, WA 98121.
Smokescreen - a mystery "probing the dangers of counterfeit passions in
LA," by Lynette Prucha. 1993, $10.95, Clothespin Fever Press, 655 Fourth
Ave., Suite 34, San Diego, CA 92101.

Summer/Fall 1993

115

We Oughta Be In Pictures - "two light romantic comedy screenplays thatshow lesbians as real, fun people," by Julia Willis. 1993, $9.95, Alamo
Square Press, p.o. Box 14543, San Francisco, CA 94114.
Silverlake Heat - a novel of suspense, passion and intrigue, set in LA's
gay Silverlake District, by Carol Schmid t. 1993, $9.95, Naiad, POB 10543,
Tallahassee, FL 32302.
Saving Grace - a lesbian murder mystery with corporate suspense, by
the author of Passion Bay, Jennifer Fulton. 1993, $9.95, Naiad.
The Year Seven - in some near future everyone but a scattering of women
up and die, by Molleen Zanger. 1993, $9.95, Naiad.
Curious Wine - a tenth anniversary edition of a classic lesbian novel, byKatherine V. Forrest. 1993, $9.95, Naiad.
Chautauqua -a romance and mystery novel setin Louisiana, by Catherine
Ennis. 1993, $9.95, Naiad.
A Fucking Brief History of Fucking - poems by Janet Mason. 1992, Insightto Riot Press, c/o 2300 Pine Street, #9, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
First Refrains, Selected Poems of 1984 (Part One of A Seven-Course Feast) by
Kay Stoner. 1992, Stoner Productions, POB 8116, Santa Rosa, CA 95407.
Eating Our Hearts Out, Personal Accounts of Women's Relationship to Foodprovides the comfort of community for women who struggle with thisissue and reminders of how society oppresses women's bodies, edi ted byLeslea Newman. 1993, $12.95, Crossing, Freedom, CA 95019.
The Time of Our Lives, Women Write on Sex After 40, edited by Dena Taylorand Amber Coverdale Sumrall. 1993, $12.95, Crossing Press.

On Intimate Terms, The Psychology of Difference in Lesbian Relationshipsargues that lesbian relationships are not patterned on heterosexual ones,
but are a way of supporting personal growth and development with apartner who is different in some individ ual meaningful way, not in termsof gender, by Beverly Burch. 1993, $27.50, Univ. of Ill. Press, 54 East
Gregory Drive, Champaign, IL 61820.
Elizabeth Bishop, Life and the Memory of It traces Bishop's development asa poet from her childhood in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, by Brett C.
Millier. 1993, $28, UC Press, 2120. Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Seeing Through Clothes is a reprint of the 1975 work examining body andclothing in Western art, by Anne Hollander. 1993, $18, UC Press.
Protest & Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen argues that the mostsubversive function of Olsen's writing is the assertion that life can be otherthan and more than it is, by Mara Faulkner. 1993, Univ. Press of Virginia.

116 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Living in the Margins: Racism, sexism & feminism in Australia analyzes
commonalties and differences in the lives of Australians, particularly
Aboriginal women and women from non-English-speaking backgrounds,
by Jan Pettman. 1992, $19.95.
The War Against Women proves that women's oppression is an intrinsic
part of our cul ture, "a feminist call to arms," by Marll yn French. 1992, $12,
Ballantine.
He, She and It is a novel of morality and courage in the 21st century, byMarge Piercy. 1991, $5.99, Fawcett Crest/Ballantine.
Coping with Chemotherapy - revised and updated information on thelatest treatments and newest drugs, nutrition and exercise, emotional
aspects, by Nancy Bruning. 1993, $5.99, Ballantine.
The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times - New YorkTimes, by Nan Robertson. 1992, $10, Ballantine.
The Women's Room - a new edition. of the 1977 straight feminist classicby Marilyn French, with an Afterword by Susan Faludi. 1977/1993,$12.00, Ballantine.
Mothers and Daughters - many women cartoonists explore that very
special relationship, edited by Liza Donnelly. 1993, $8, Ballantine.

In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformationof Pagan Myth - interesting, scholarly excavation informed by feminism
by Tikva Frymer-Kensky. 1993, $10.00, Fawcett/Columbine.

CAROL N. LEVINSALLY B. OWEN

J~'~I!rlj~
I{ () 0M

Books for Women & Their Friends
68 1 W.shlnglon Street N.Y., N.Y. 10014(2121727·7330

H""", Tues·Thurs Noon.lJPM: F" & Sat Noon-9PM: Su1 Noon·7PM Closed Moo

Summer/Fall 1993

117

- - - - - - Announcements and Classified Ads
PUBLICAnONSESTO NO TIENE NOMBRE, revista de lesbianas latinas en miami, isa new quarterly creative forum for latina lesbians with a Miami
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MAIZE, A Lesbian Country Magazine. $10 per year (4 issues).
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WOMEN FIGHT BACK - monthly national newsletter to "tell it
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WE ARE HERE - national resource guide for lesbian and gay
youth, pub. by the Gay Youth Comm. Coalition of the Bay Area, $5(pay to We Are Here) from: 2215 Market St., #479, SF, CA 94114.
SEP - publication for lesbian separatists only since 1986. Ask alesbian separatist how to reach us. Be a part of the contagious
spread of dyke separatist courage!
TEEN VOICES - by, for & about teenage and young adultwomen, $2 for a sample to: Women Express, POB 6009 JFK,
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CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONSLESBIAN ADVENTURE STORIES anthology: wild women,
eccentric characters, sexual exploits, fiction/ nonfiction. Mikaya/
Tough Dove Books, 11101 Eastside Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482. Deadline: January 1994.
Call for submissions by BATTERED LESBIANS. SASE for
guidelines. E. Hodge/J. Malott, Univ. of Cincinnati, ML374,
Cincinnati, OH 45221.
SPINSTERS INK is seeking feminist writing by women of color- full-length novels and non-fiction works. For more info: POB
300170, Dept. C, Minneapolis, MN 55403 (612) 377-0287.

118 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue .. . NOTBLACK LESBIAN CULTURE: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Putting alII/correctness" aside, let's be honest and claim ALL weare, have been and will be for centuries! All and every form
(photos, bios, hers tory, songs, jokes, rumors, anecdotes, fashion,art, names, organizations, bars, poetry, essays, stories, radical
and separatist material) welcome. For guidelines, info: SASE to
Terri Jewell, POB 23154, Lansing, MI 48909, running deadline.
MULTICULTURAL LESBIAN RELATIONSHIPS anthology.
First-person, cassettes, interviews O.K. Topics are: racism within
and outside relationships, having/raising children; socializing/
friendships; language differences, etc. For guidelines, info: SASE
to Rene Dawson & Terri Jewell, PO Box 23154, Lansing, MI 48909.
ARAB FEMINISTS: Arab-American, Arab-Canadian, Arab/
Middle Eastern women now living in the U.S. or Canada, for ananthology to be pub. by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,
in order to promote visibility, provide a forum and sustain
political activists. All forms. For more info, SASE to: J. Kadi, POB
7556, Minneapolis, MN 55407.
RISING TIDE PRESS, a new lesbian publisher, seeks fulllength lesbian novels. For guidelines, send SASE to: Rising Tide
Press, 5 Kivy St., Huntington Station, NY 11746.
AT THE CROSSROADS, new magazine combining feminism,
spirituality and new paradigm science seeks essays, reviews,
theory, research, narratives. PO Box 112, St. Paul, AR 72760.

LIKE WRITING ABOUT WOMEN? We need your stories! LAVENDER LIFE, 215 Cleveland Ave., Endicott, NY 13760.
BAD ATTITUDE is a new radical women's newspaper seeking
international reports of women's struggle on every front. Info:
121 Railton Rd., London SE24 OLR, England.

EVENTS/ORGANIZING/CONFERENCESIFESTIVALS
OLOC - Old Lesbians Organizing for Change helps form newgroups of lesbians over 60, provides ageism education, stimu. lates existing groups to confront ageism. Contact: OLOC, POB
980422, Houston, TX 77098.

Summer/Fall 1993

119

AUSTRALIAN LESBIAN FESTIVAL AND CONFERENCE, Oct.
15-18,1993. Write PO Box 985, Fremantle, Western Australia 6160
for info.
INTERNATIONAL MARCH on the UN to Affirm the Human
Rights of Lesbian and Gay People, June 26, 1994, called by theInternational Lesbian and Gay Assoc. (ILGA) & U.S. organizers
Stonewall 25. US org. meeting Jan. 15-17 in Dallas. Much more
info: Stonewall 25, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, NY 10011-7799.
MICHIGAN WOMYN'S MUSIC FESTIVAL, August 10-15, 1993,
oldest and largest of womyn's music festivals, 6-day all camping
event.ContactWWTMC,POB22, Walhalla,MI49458,616/757-4766.
NORTH EAST WOMEN'S MUSICAL RETREAT, Labor Day
Weekend, September 3-6, 1993. Contact NEWMR, PO Box 550,
Branford, CT 06405,203/293-8026
GRAILVILLE, an education center conducting programs for
women in SW Ohio offers residential semester, New Women,
New Earth, January 25 - May 18, 1994. Contact: 932 O'BannonvilleRd., Loveland, OH 45140, 513/683-2340.
(AD)VENTURESLESBIAN ART RETREAT on beautiful Oregon Coast. Toxicfree, safe, creative environment in a rural setting. $175/week
includes meals with other working artists, separate living andstudio spaces. Private instruction available. RIVERLAND, PO
Box 156, Beaver OR 97108503/398-5223.
SALLIE & EILEEN'S PLACE, vacation cabins for women, in thewoods. Mendocino, CA (707)937-2028.
LESBIAN PARADISE! With 20 charming rooms, 100 mountainacres, pool, hot tub, hiking/skiing trails, yummy breakfasts,
peace and privacy. We're your perfect vacation choice year
round! HIGHLANDS INN, Box 1185R, Bethlehem, NH 03574(603) 869-3978.
YELLOW BIRCH FARM. Small cottage on working farm in
Downeast Maine. Beautiful, remote, unspoiled Cobscook Bay.
B&B or weekly rental. Brochure, 207/726-5807.

120 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

AUTUMN ON CAPE COD! Bicycling, whale-watching andcanoeing. Enjoy the autumn colors and the company of women.
For free brochure: Woodswomen, 25 West Diamond Lake Road,
Minneapolis, MN 55419, 1-800-279-0555.
BUSINESSESRED RIVER, 100% Cotton Menstrual Pads, comfortable, ecological, economical. Made by Land Dykes. Write for brochure:
Red River, Box 130, Serafina, NM 87569.
SUPPORT

SAPPHO'S, a program providing safe, affordable, transitional
housing for women of all ages and incomes in San Francisco, CA.
Information, volunteers, donations, contact 859 Fulton St., SF,
CA94117,415/775-3243.
PARADISE RECOVERY CENTER, new facility for treatment ofgay, lesbian and bisexual alcohol and drug abusers. 611 Truman
Ave., Key West, FL 33040, 305/293-9929, fax 305/293-0587.
SPINSTERHAVEN, INC., a retirement haven for older women
and women with disabilities, promoting physical, cultural andspiritual well-being of women. Membership info and donations, PO Box 718, Fayetteville, AR 7270l.
OROGENY, a new lesbian press, is committed to finding thepowe.r and joy in fat women's bodies and lives, and seeks donations toward first book Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women, by
Susan Stinson. POB 433, Northampton, MA 0106l.
SHE - Sister Homelands on Earth has purchased its first two
acres - Saguaro Sisterland - to primarily provide accessible
space for lesbians with mobility/or allergy/chemical sensitivity
disabilities and low-income wimmin. Money and support services are critical to SHE's survival- write to SHE at POB 5285,
Tucson, AZ 85703, inc. SASE for reply.
WHIPT AIL WOMYN'S COLLECTIVE is trying to organize awomyn-only dyke-identified, drug-smoke-alcohol free space in
S.F. & needs all the help it can get. Send $, questions, energy to:3543 18th St. Box #29, S.F., CA 94110.

Summer/Fall 1993

121

LAVENDER L.E.A.P. is the Lesbian Emergency Action Fund ofmoney given anonymously, available to any S.P. or Alameda
County (CA) woman-born lesbian of poverty or working classbackground who needs it. Lavender L.E.A.F.'s long-term goal is
to diminish economic disparities among lesbians. Send checks,. queries to: L. Leaf, POB 20921, Oakland, CA 94620.
WOMYN'S BRAILLE PRESS - desperately needs money tocontinue, as well as volunteers to read and type. WBP provides
over 750 titles to blind, partially sighted and print disabled women,
and publishes a great newsletter. Tax-deductible donations, queries to: WBP, POB 8475, Minneapolis, MN 55408, (612) 872-4352.
THE LABYRIS PROJECT: Helping Lesbians Heal from Incest wants a safe home for all lesbians having trouble surviving due
to incest memories, as well as a meeting place for local survivors.
Community-based, holistic, realistic, feminist healing. Send
checks or SASE for info: New Mexico REEF / Labyris Project, POB
40097, Albuquerque, NM 87196.
LESBIANS IN CRITICAL NEED have been sending us increasing
numbers of requests to run announcements for their personal
funds. Instead of printing these individual appeals, we urge you
to contribute frequently and generously to local organizations.
Imagine it as if we just told you your childhood best friend, yourfavorite gym teacher, an admired dyke activist or your first lover
had metastatic cancer and couldn't pay the doctor bills; or had
developed E.!., could no longer leave her house and had no way
to get or pay for groceries. Then make a contribution to Lavender
L.E.A.F., The Dykefund, the Charlotte Maxwell Clinic, The
Women's Cancer Resource Center (these are Bay Area resources,
find the ones in your community). We need full support networks as well as money - dykes willing to shop, drive, talk, 'listen, organize.

AD RATESClassified: 40¢ a word, $5 minimum.
Display: $200 whole page, $100 half, $75 third, $50 quarter, $35
2x2, for camera ready copy. Write for deadlines & size sheet.

122 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT• Do You Net'd Facts

About M~nopau5e'?

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• Incest and Lesbian Identity• The Politics of Ritual Abuse·Survivors' Forum.:. $6.00.Mother Perpetrators• For Lesbian Partners• Ethics of Confrontation
Or subscribe:
3 issues $14 u.s., $16 international su rface, $24 intntl. air. Institutions add $4 .
Lesbian Ethics or LE Publications
P.O. Box 4723, Albuquerque, NM 87196

an Older feminists' N~lwork ?

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AUSTRALIA-WIDELESBIAN NETWORKQUARTERLY MAGAZINE
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Disabled Wimmin's Magazine
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Summer/Fall 1993

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126 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

sinister wisdom
Some Current & Back Issues#49 / The Lesbian Body: here's where flesh and theory meet! Includes lesbians of color,roles, disability, body image, fat, childhood & adult sexuality, menopause and more.
o Laurenz, Raffa, Tanigawa, Ruth, Kivi, JEB, Hyder, Halliday, Hershey, Moore, Franeta 0#48 / Lesbian Resistance: investigations into the heart and practise of our courage!
o Rosenburg, Whitehorn, Kadi. Gilhooly, Klepfisz, Stinson, Ajanaku, Leto, Guilbert 0#47/ Lesbians of Color: Tellin' It Like It Tis'. Special 160-page edited by lesbians of color
includes important new work in all forms-essential reading!
o Villanueva, Manyarrows, Sapphire, Tanigawa, Sayyed, Omosope, Rudd, Li, Tiamaya 0#46 / Dyke Lives. New fiction and poetry from Russia, Canada, France, Australia, Germany and the U.S. on topics from Palestinian identity to Lesbian weddings.
o Krause, Kadi, Sprecher, Lim-Hing, Duncker, Freespirit, Hawthorne, Schaffer 0#45 / Lesbians and Class. The first issue edited entirely by poor and working class dykes
includes analysis, personal narrative, challenge, poetry, fiction & a graffiti wall.
o Cardea, Blue, Dashu, Marah, Elliott, Lauby, Sorella, Platt, Courtot, Caspers 0#43 / 44-The 15th Anniversary Retrospective. 368 pages, over 90 lesbians' work fromthe second wave. An amazing source collection-inspiring and thought-provoking.
#42 / Lesbian Voices. Our first intentional all-lesbian issue, with work on legal theory,
racism, Israel. hair, surgery, the effects of rape on relationships, much more.
o Bogus, Warland, Parks-Satterfield, Negr6n-Muntaner, Seto, Sapphire, Robson 0#411Italian-American Women's Issue. Guest edited by Denise Leto & Janet Capone.
o Azpadu, Guido deVries, Tavormina, Capra, fides, Cuomo, Veno, Tornatore 0#40 / Special Focus on Friendship. Essays, fiction, editorial discussion transcript.
o de la Pena, Hardy, Svirsky, Gray, Stinson, Dambroff, Mi Ok Bruining, Hauptman 0#36/ Special Focus on Surviving Psychiatric Assault / Creating Emotional Well Being in
our Communities. Includes testimony, prose, poetry and essays.
o Hope, Aal, Caicedo, thundercloud, Robson, Sien, Moran, Ward, NiHera, Willcox 0#34/ Special Focus on Lesbian Visions, Fantasy, SciFi. Includes work on Disability, Separatism, Building and Transformation.
o Katz, Ortiz Taylor, Hoagland, Allegra, Livia, Louise, Rios, Danaan, Marah 0#33 / Special Focus on Wisdom. Lesbians of Color, Non-violence, War Stories, Incest,
Leaving a Will, Assimilation, The Real Fat Womon Poems, Coming to Terms.
o Anzaldua, Ruth, Rich, Chrystos, Kaye/ Kantrowitz, Hardy, Gilmore, Brody, Rakusin 0#32/Special Focus on Illness, Death, Mourning, Healing, the Disappeared, Hunting
Season, Dealing with Suicide, Cancer, New Ritual Observances.
o Maia, Allegra, Sears, McDonald, Waters, Hansell, Rosenblum, Butler, Stinson 0#311Special Focus on Sex and Fiction, Coming out in the South, Found Goddesses.
o Smukier, Blackwomon, Romano, Davenport, Dykewomon, McNaron 0#28 / Special Focus on Women & Work; Body Image, Size & Eating.
o Klepfisz, Clarke, Heather, Sturgis, Gould, Boucher, Gomez, Sardella, Moran 0#26/ Special Issue: To Go To Berbir by Jill Drew, a book-length journal written by an
American nurse working in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion.
#211Separatism Revisited, Jewish Survival & Defiance, Black Lesbian Writing, Photos
of Dykes in Drag, Suicide, Bars, Letters about Anti-Semitism.
o Arobateau, Segrest, Simpson, Tomes, Addison, justice, Klepfisz, Foley, Crawford 0

Sinister Wisdom #1-19, 27, 38 & 39 are out of print. Photocopies can be provided-$5 forthe first article, $1 for each add. in the same order. Allow one month for delivery.

Summer/Fall 1993

essaysgraphics

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WI.lDOm

Since 1976...

" One of the most popular and widely read
lesbian periodicals in existence"
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127

128 sinister wisdom #50, The Ethics Issue ... NOT

Notes on Scents,_______________
A few weeks ago, I picked up the mail for Sinister Wisdom one of my jobs here - and, when I tore open one of the newsletters I'm always glad we get, I thought perhaps a tiny little lesbian
was in the manila envelope smoking a non filter. I quickly sealed
it up, washed my hands, went outside to cleanse the smoke frommy nose, and went back to the mail. A few moments later, I
opened a letter asking for subscription information, and discovered there was apparently a tiny little department store employee
in there with a spray bottle of cologne. This time escape washopeless: I had a headache the rest of the day.
Of course, it turned out not to be a honey-I-shrunk-the-dykes
situation, just paper sent to S Wby some dykes who smoke, or use
perfume or scented stationery. Yes, it's true, I'm here to harangue
you about fragrances, and the deadly impact they have on people
with allergies, EI, or a host of other health problems. Especially,
I want to let you all know - which, it seems, most folks do not- that paper sucks up odors like a sponge, and then releases
them just in time to poison the recipient on its arrival at, forinstance, SWs mail box. And, it is poison, just as if you slippedsomething into somebody's drink.
So, please, sisters, be considerate. If you smoke, stop it! OK,
OK - if you smoke, keep a supply of paper in plastic; when you
use it to send to other people, don't smoke from the time it comesout of its package until it's in the mail. (Not just sealed, but outof the building.) Those of you putting out newsletters, journals,
etc. must be aware that smoking while creating the final productmakes that product absolutely inaccessible to many of the dykes
receiving it. It also makes them ill. And, scented stationery is apretty bad idea, in general: toxic to folks who receive it, and usually
not recyclable.
I know, I know, it never ends. Politics is hell. All that stuff.
But it will be appreciated.
- Caryatis Cardea

MANUSCRIPTS, SUBSCRIPTIONS, BACK ISSUE ORDERS &CHANGES OF ADDRESS
Please send all to: Sinister Wisdom, POB 3252, Berkeley, CA 94703.
Submission Guidelines
All written work should be mailed flat (not folded), with your name andaddress on each page. Submissions may be in any style or form, or
combination of forms. Maximum submission: five poems or two stories
per issue. We may return longer submissions. We prefer you type (orsend your work on 3W' discs, ASCII or Mac, with a printout). Legible
handwritten work accepted, tapes accepted from print-impaired
womyn. All submissions must be on white paper. SASE MUST BE
ENCLOSED. Selection may take up to nine mO"!ths. If you want acknowledgment of receipt, enclose a separate, stamped postcard. GRAPI-llC
ARTISTS should send B&W photos, stats, or other duplicates of theirwork. Let us know if we can keep artwork on file for future use.
We publish only lesbians' work. We are particularly interested in workthat reflects the diversity of our experiences: as lesbians of color, ethnic
lesbians, Jewish, old, young, working class, poor, disabled, fat. We
welcome experimental work. We will not print anything that is oppressive or demeaning to lesbians or women, or which perpetuates negative
stereotypes. We do intend to keep an open and critical dialogue on all theissues that affect our work, joy and survival. See page 11 for details on
upcoming issues. We are open to suggestions for new themes.

Sinister Wisdom, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We provide
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We need lots of lesbian energy to keep printing. • We particularly needvolunteer or commission grantwriters and ad sales reps. • Our equipment
wish list includes (in order) an office-quality Mac-compatible laser printer,a scanner & OCR software, a CD drive, a fax or fax-modem. Thanks to eachof you who participates in reading, writing for, building Sinister Wisdom.