Sinister Wisdom 45
Winter 1991/1992
Publisher: Elana Dykewomon
Guest Editor: Caryatis Cardea

Editorial readers and advisors: Betty Dudley, Cath Thompson, JanetCapone, Jasmine Marah, Max Dashu, Monifa Ajanaku, Naja Sorella, Sabena
Stark, Sauda Burch, Suz Fields, Terri Fredlund
Contributing editors: Gloria Anzaldua, Irena Klepfisz, Melanie Kayel
Kantrowitz
Typists and proofreaders: Angela Koenig, Cath Thompson, Laura Tow, Susan
Goldberg, Susan Levinkind, Valerie Stoehr
Office help, correspondence, ads and accounting: Dolphin Waletzky,
Laura Munter-Grabona, Leslie Rome, Sauda Burch, SJ Kahn, Susan
Levinkind, Valerie Stoehr, Valerie Valuch
Thanks to Bobby Rothschild and Rebecca Kutlin of Tamed Technology
Distribution and mailing crew: Angela Koenig, Betsy Getaz, Betty Dudley,
Cath Thompson, Denise Leto, Dolphin Waletzky, Elana Dykewomon,
Jasmine Marah, Joan Margaret, Jessica, Judith Masur, Laura MunterGrabona, Leslie Rome, Lisa Carlin, Nicole Appleberry, Mary DeLorenzo
Pelc, SJ Kahn, Susan Goldberg, Susan Levinkind, Val Valuch and friends
Reader for the Womyn's Braille Press: Judy Freespirit
Cover art: Celia Rodriguez: This design is based on pre-columbian motifs:
the flower I cruz combination symbolizes womon, the hand symbolizes workl
changel effect, the eye within the hand symbolizes consciousness. You canthink of this work as a prayer for the continued good work of Sinister Wisdom
and the womyn who give their energy toward making it happen.

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976
Former editors and publishers: Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines)
and Catherine Nicholson 0976-81)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich 0981-83)
Michaele Uccella (1983-84)
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz 0983-87)
Copyright© 1991 Sinister Wisdom, Inc. All rights reserved to individual artists and authors.
ISSN: 0196-1853. Printed in the U.s.A . on recycled paper.

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

__________________ Contents
3
8
9
12

Caryatis Cardea • Notes for a Magazine
Upcoming Issues
Calary Blue • Attention Class (narrative)
Terri Fredlund • I'd Rather Have a Running Vehicle
Than Therapy (poem)

§§§
16
23
30
31

Max Dashu • Most Women (theory)
Jasmine Marah • Spit Shine (fiction)
Nanette Herbert • Invisible Barriers (poem)
Felicitas & Debby Earthdaughter • Anonymous Money
Redistribution: ProIa Dykes Making Real Change inWest Berlin (interview)

§§§
34
40
41
43
49
53

Elliott· Funeral Food (narrative)
Adrienne Lauby • Denial (poem)
Adrienne Lauby • Ulcer Surgery (poem)
Janet Capone • East 50th Street Scream (fiction)
Carie Winslow • A Poor Girl Comes Clean (narrative)
Sabena Stark • Two Short Pieces on Home (narrative)

§§§
56
58
72
78
79
84

Anonymous Dykes • If You Could Say Anything ... (graffiti)
Naja Sorella • Lies, Lies & More Lies (narrative)
tova· ellen teban (fiction)
Debby Earthdaughter • SHE Land Trust (narrative)
Alien· Fried Pies on the Fourth of July (narrative)
Mary Frances Platt • Andover Inn Land (narrative)

88
93

98
105

118
120

Martha Courtot • Confessions of a Working-ClassIntellectual (narrative)
Nona Caspers • In the Clouds (fiction)
Caroljean Coventree • Full Time Debt, Part Time Money(narrative)
Caryatis Cardea • All the Pieces I Never Wrote About
Class (theory)
Betty Dudley • Heart Beats (poem)
Response· Letters to 5 W§§§
ARTcover Celia Rodriguez • untitled (pen & ink)
15 Terri Fredlund • untitled (pen & ink)
29 Jasmine Marah • Dove chick (pencil)
39 Contributed by Corie Lamere • Corie feeding chickens(photo)42 Max Hammond Dashu • Midge and Kendra (pen & ink)
52 Corie Lamere • Elaine Bliss (photo)
77 Max Hammond Dashu • untitled (cartoon)
83 Debby Earthdaughter • Big kitties encounter theconcept of rent (cartoon)
87 Suz Fields • Benicia (pen & ink)
97 Corie Lamere • Alex Alexander (photo)
104 Suz Fields • ceramic drums
119 Suz Fields • thermos (pencil)

Apology _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __We inadvertently omitted Judith Katz's name on the cover of 43/
44, for which we apologize profusely. Judith's work appeared inissues 19,21 and 34.

- - - - - -______Notes for a Magazine
ThiS issue of Sinister Wisdom was edited by lesbians from lowerclass backgrounds: poor, working-poor and working-class. We arerural and urban; African-American, Jewish-American, EuropeanAmerican; mostly in our 30s and 40s, from the Midwest, South, andNortheast. About half of us are ongoing members of SW' s editorialgroup; about half came on just for this issue. Our present situations
differ much from our own backgrounds and from one another. We
are in agreement on one thing: the tremendous impact of poverty
and classism on our lives as lesbians.
This is not a special issue about class. This, like all issues ofSinister Wisdom, is about lesbians. It is about the ways in which
lesbian communities and their working-class and poor members
are touched by class, that is, by our cultures, manners, families,
jobs, and dreams; and by classism, the discrimination we experience because of our cultures, manners, families, jobs, and dreams.
It contains fiction, poetry, essays and personal narratives from dykesof lower-class backgrounds about our past and present lives, about
how we think privilege can be shared and oppression combatted.
It could also have been about how the lives of the middle- andupper-class dykes in our communities are touched by class, how
they think privilege can be shared and oppression combatted. But
it is not. When we were approached at Sinister Wisdom by the Bay
Area group, Revolting Lesbians, about doing this issue, I was
reluctant. Lesbian journals having been largely the province ofclass-privileged dykes, I anticipated being deluged with articles
which could accurately carry such subtitles as How to Succeed in
Business Without Really Caring, Stop the World I Want to Go
Shopping, The Effects of Mega-Bucks on Moon-in-Virgo Lesbians,
and A Funny Thing Happened to Lesbian Feminism on the Way to
the Postmodern Academy.
Well, I was wrong. It wasn't that bad. But much of what we
received from dykes of class privilege was about the ways in which
they had been denied the full benefit of the privilege they had beenborn into, the ways in which they believe they have lost or
relinquished that privilege now, and the ways in which theirsorrow about the existence of deprivation is as great as that known
by the people who are actually deprived. Or, it was about poverty
3and hardship portrayed through imagination. But scarcely a word
about living on the right side of the proverbial tracks, or what they
thought could be done about class oppression among us now.
Much of the writing we received from middle-class lesbians was
excellent, and by no mean class-oppressive. But none of it advanced the discussion of class in our communities and, in the end,
when we discovered we had selected mostly work by povertyclass dykes anyway, we decided to use only that.
SW did receive two letters from middle-class dykes expressing
their feelings about their class privilege today. The call for submissions we ran months ago specified that we would "particularly
address the concerns of working-class and poor lesbians." Bothletters protested this exclusion of their experiences. One said she
wasn't surprised, it was "practically compulsory." Naja's reaction,"Oh, gag!" pretty much summed it up for me. Elana had suggested
that lesbians with class privilege not confuse an "embarrassmentof riches" with the "shame of poverty." One correspondent said
we had failed to take into account her suffering over the guilt andshame of class privilege. How can I explain to her that lower-classdykes reading this are already groaning?
Many dykes assume that any issue (or anthology or workshop)
on class must allow for full participation of lesbians of all classes.
A complete dialogue must be established, mustn't it? What thisoften means is that we can speak of the grief you inflict on us only
if you can tell us how much it hurts you to hear it. And the two
pains must be treated as being of equal import. I can't get my mindaround a sense of entitlement so great that one issue of a journal
being "primarily composed" of the writing of one group would
make me feel utterly excluded.
And anyway, every poem about a first crush met while vacationing at the seashore is an articulation of the privilege of class.
Every narrative about the dread that old age will bring about afirst-ever encounter with poverty is an articulation of the privilegeof class. Every letter which opines, 'While I support the right ofpoor lesbians to have a voice ... " articulates the privilege of class,panicking at momentarily not being at the center of things. In all
the books, conferences and journals containing only class-privileged voices, ours aren't even missed. In any issue containing onlyclass-oppressed voices, how one-sided it is to have a single point ofview represented. This has never prompted anyone to put an end to4

our exclusion, though. Maybe they think we can live stifled because
we're used to it. Or because we're braver than them. Or because they
don't really think we have anything to say to them anyway.
Most calls for submissions, including the one for this issue,
leave plenty of space for class-privileged dykes to write; this one
contained about as much discouragement to them as many othercalls, through their phrasing, present to us. Here, as in any issue of
any lesbian publication, the middle-class community could choose
to talk about class. They never do. (There's no need to write to me
about the exceptions. I'm aware of them. Scarcity is a world of
absolutes and I'm trying to acquaint you with its language: never,always, nothing.) Left to their own devices, they have had virtually nothing to say for the twenty years of this movement about
their privilege or our oppression, except to accuse us of exaggerating both. Each and every time we weary of this attitude, which
ignores, insults, shames and excludes us, and try to take a space forourselves, they claim we have shoved them aside.
When we say we want to talk about class, we do not want you
to tell us how you're not really that privileged, how you're tormented with guilt about your new house and yearly vacation in
Hawaii, how the lesbian tenants in your guest house failed to do
the yard work and you had to evict them. And most of all, howreally bad you feel about all these things, and how your therapist
is helping you feel better about yourself.
When we say we want to talk about class, we mean the kind oftalk you will find in this journal: a discussion of poverty andclassism with other lesbians who have lived both. We want toremember, and grieve, and celebrate. We want to accord respect tothe values we developed and the ways in which they still foster oursurvival efforts today. We want to acknowledge the damage weendured, and how that sabotages our survival efforts today. Then,and only then, we want lesbians with class privilege - and you doknow who you are - to pay attention.

---

The experience of editing this journal is one I will never forget:
a summer spent with other dykes from poor and working-classbackgrounds in intense discussion about the·uses of language, thevariety and the meanings of our experiences, the lack of opportunities we have had, in our lives as lesbians, to explore those5

meanings; about the power of writing, of publishing, of editing.
Every dyke in the editorial group made herself available to me forlong, impromptu discussions, helping me figure out how to challenge certain writers on certain issues, what things to bring up inthese notes, and what to do with all the feelings this journal and our
discussions have stirred up. (They'll have to share responsibility
for the unusual length of this essay. Each time a new issue arose,
one of them would say, "Put that in the Notes!") In contrast to
mixed-class setting, where the class division is seldom acknowledged to be more complex than middle-class-or-not, we had thechance, in this editorial group, to grant some recognition to the vastdifferences in the levels of the lower classes. The texture of our
discussions was, if you'll pardon the expression, rich. And theauthors, who had submitted their work not even knowing (as we
had not) that it would be selected by a group containing no classprivileged dykes, frequently made the work of editing its own
reward, responding to difficult political challenges, not with defensiveness, but with appreciation for the effort.
Our greatest regrets about the issue were the lack of racial
diversity in the work submitted, and the low number of submissions in general. In an anthology, with a year or more to gather andsolicit work, we could perhaps have achieved greater diversity; withajournal,we have available only what lesbians send in the space of the
6 months between announcement and deadline. Although we do feela little embarrassed about it, you'll find that a good deal of writing is
by lesbians who edited the journal, partly in an attempt to fill in thegaps in what we had received. We also accepted as many latesubmissions as we could, and eventually did have to edit for space.
Betty proposed running a blank page to represent all of you wehaven't heard from yet. Jasmine suggests that we sponsor a workshop on writing for lower-class lesbians, because we know how
hard it is to feel that we can and should write. Not only because weare muffled in our present communities, but because our backgrounds never, as Elliott points out, led us in this direction.
Because it has so often been used to exclude our writing, we
decided to edit for Standard English spelling and grammar only if
the author wished it, or if, by coincidence, that usage would help
to express a thought more clearly. We received a great many morelengthy pieces than are usually submitted by poor and workingclass dykes. Sauda noticed that several of us write our long prose6

in short segments, which made me wonder if we had stumbled
onto a style uniquely suited to poor and working-class folks. A
style which, like poetry, can be completed in the short spaces ofactual and mental time we have left overfrom our work lives. This
is not to say that middle-class dykes don't work long hours also, but
we are more likely to lack the education that can lead tojobs where ourtime, our environment and our work-flow is in our control.

---Some of what I have written here, and much in my article, wassparked by conversations last summer with JMax, who was guestediting the class issue of Lesbian Ethics. She seemed to be on theother end of my phone every other week last August and September, asking if I'd finished anything about class. I tried, but I was sotired of it all that I couldn't seem to complete anyone piece.
Moreover, I felt that my last effort, in 1983, might have contributed
to the way the community had altered its language and a few
attitudes and done zip about lesbian homeless ness and hunger,
isolation and exclusion. I didn't hear from her for several weeks,
and figured that she and Lee and Shoney had gathered enoughmaterial. In December, I learned that JMax had taken her own lifeand everything changed. There would just have to be time. We
would have to find the energy. And even though the class issuesof LE and SW would not come out far enough a part to form a direct
dialogue, both journals and their editors are committed to continuing the discussion. This is not the last time Sinister Wisdom will
accept work on the subject of class. It is past time, as Max points inin her essay, for our institutions to include a concern for class andfor the lesbians most affected by it. It is also past time to acknowledge and confront the meaning of this difference among us andstart building a community founded upon all of our dreams.
- Caryatis Cardea

I am deeply indebted to each of the lesbians with whom I edited this journal,
which may be the first-ever all-lower-class-dykepublication . Much gratitude to
Elana for advice and counsel, and computer-wizardry, especially on the graffiti
wall.
7

Upcoming Issues _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __#46 Open Theme issue, will be out in early May, 1992.
#47 Lesbians of Color: will be edited entirely by a collective of
Lesbians of Color. We are a diverse group of writers, artists,
community activists and readers. Our responsibility as editors is toserve as advocates for and supporters of the women who submit
work for consideration. All contributors must identify as Lesbiansof Color. Please submit a short bio with your work, including yourethnic and/or ancestral background so that we can show the
wonderfully diverse peoples we come from. Submissions may bein any language. Please include an English translation if possible,
for editorial purposes. If we are unable to find adequate translation
for review, we will return your work. Submit two copies of written
work on white paper, one side only, double-spaced. Include name,address, day and evening phone on the title page. Include title,
name and page number on each subsequent page. Art work
should be b&w or easily translatable into b&w. Send photographs
or clear photocopies. Please include title, media and dimensions.
SASE required. See back cover for more submission details. Deadline: February II, 1992.
#48 Resistance: How do we Dykes resist, do political work, findways to make the planet a better place for womyn, animals and theearth itself? If we don't go to political meetings and groups, how
can we still contribute to the struggle? What ways besides going todemonstrations can we be politically active? Why have so many
Dykes put emotional/ physical/ political energy into men with AIDS,
and how do we encourage them to re-focus it on the Dyke community? What ways do our lives - our racial/ ethnic and class identities,
whether we are young or old,live in rural or urban areas, are disabledor able-bodied - reflect in our political work? Do we judge
political work by its merit or by the status of those doing the work?
How do we define effective? What have we felt as effective andencouraging? What are our success stories? Deadline: June 1,1992.

8

Calary Lynn Blue, Ph.D., MSW, MD, CPA, RN, LSD

Attention, Class
She's got class.
ooh what a classy joint.
this is some high class livin'.
don't you have any class?
yeah, I got class, you got class, we've all got at least one class.
but some of us are ashamed. some of us are guilty. some of us areembarrassed. some of us are angry. some of us are scared. some ofus don't want to talk about it. some of us are talking about it too
much. and much too loud!
.
well there's my class and your class and if they're different
levels then we get to take a look at class differences, also known as
hunting for classism in all the small places. see, classism affects us
all but it's usually the ones who are getting stomped on that are
yelling about it. so where do we start? well, for me it begins at a gut
level. am I comfortable being myself around this person? not am I
comfortable showing her my tough dyke in the world self but am
I safe showing her my mother's daughter self? the part that wasn't
trained in the proper way to do. the one who feels ashamed when
the whole gang chooses to go to a restaurant I can't afford. the one
who avoids talking about my family. what they do for a living. theneighborhood I grew up in. how we ate out at Burger Chef when
we ate out at all. it's knowing who will dismiss this information
and who will identify. it's taken years of coming out about mybackground to people who pass it off, dismiss it, erase it with one
fell swoop of turning the conversation elsewhere, to gain the skillof testing who is safe and who is not.
it's like when the women who come from privileged classes
make decisions, make assumptions and basically run the show totheir benefit and if I say anything I'm labeled angry and frustrated
and if I don't say anything I feel angry and frustrated.

9

it' s when some women are living off their families' money andsome of us are working for everything we have. it's when they own
their houses, businesses and land purchased with their families'
money. or perhaps they are taking a sabbatical to write their latest
book (suggested title - "Confronting class ism or taking all the funout of those cruise vacations").
it's when they are taught their whole life to exploit the labor ofothers so they can have more power, money or possessions.
it's when they shop for a woman to do the job that needs doing
because she'll be cheaper.
it's being dishonest by not talking about where they get theirmoney, how much money they have and what they are spending
it on. the keys to success in this class are dishonesty and profitingfrom exploitation.
it's the women who talk a lot, take up lots of space and time atpolitical groups, social gatherings and 12 step programs. the world
was meant for them after all.
it's the women who raise the rent on their property without
thinking about the financial situation of their tenants. it's thewomen who oppose rent control. it's the women who know how
to dress for the occasion, speak the proper english and laugh at theappropriate times. it's the women whose anger comes out behind
your back, or smooth and manipulative.
these are my sisters from privileged classes.
but wait, there's more. I have sisters from poverty level too.
those are the women whose daily grind with survival comesclose to being on the front lines of a battlefield. it's the women who
face humiliation standing for hours at the welfare office with theirchildren if they have any. but since we all know how society
doesn't bother to educate poor folks about birth control, safe sex
and choices and who can afford an abortion anyway when she'sbarely putting food on the table for the children she's already got.
and given that a lot of poor folks are african american native
american latina and asian american we also can see how the big
factor of racism grinds what little patience there is down to justabout nothing.
you see, all this stuff costs money. food, public transportation,
clothing, utilities, medical needs, cars if they have one.
10

these are the women who don't go to political meetings. who
has time when she's holding down two jobs at minimum wage andtrying to get her GED at adult school? these are the women who
don't go to mixed social gatherings. what would she wear? bringto eat? or talk about the other people will appreciate? these are thewomen who may go to 12-step programs (because living with an
addiction is a total drag) but she is the one who doesn't talk(doesn't stay afterwards to carve out 2 hours in a life of trying to
make ends meet to sit and listen to the privileged women talkabout their lives and the car they just bought that cost more than
4x her annual income. all in the name of recovery it's revealed that
we have major differences, of how much money we have in thebank, how much property we own, how large our wardrobe is. but
it's never directly addressed. it's never openly discussed withoutsome heated argument ensuing.
yeah we're all supposed to be equal now that we're in a lesbiancommunity, but we're not. we'll never be. but becoming willing to
be honest about our privilege and power will be a start. to stop
looking at other women as the enemy (if she knew I got an
inheritance she'll try to get some of it) . it's not always about money(tho it often is), it's attitude and assumptions and not educating
ourselves about classism. it's being willing to take a look deeper atconflicts instead of passing them off as an issue of codependency
or not important. some of us are assimilated, unable to put words
to the pain because we're trapped in a privileged class world. someof us are beginning to take a look at class. some of us have known
all this a long time. some of us are finding each other and growing
stronger and giving fire to these long silent voices.

11

Terri Fredlund

I'd Rather Have a Running Vehicle
Than Therapy

Driving
through soft hills
a valley outstretchedrevives me
I'm grateful
to be here
"Privileged" I almost say,being one accustomed
to scarcity"Healing"
privileged wimmin say"Is a matter of priorities.
You must choose
to commit time, energy,
money."
Don't they know eating
is not a matter of choice?
The laughter of friends
I travel far to see
my kitty's company
a womon's touch
campfire all night
drumming.
Nebraska buttes
enjoying community
teaching wimmin
self defense
creating change
These are my healing12

I am a van dweller
have no debt, pay no rentor electric billshare with cat
and occasional guest
bed, drawers, heater, stove
in my home, prizeof my tree planting laborand luckon the day of purchase.
Landlords, bus stops
restaurants, bad jobs
don't hold me for ransom.
But looking for a place to lightpolice hassles
late at night
remind me
I have not escaped.
Try therapy?
Both fascinatedand wary
I'm seeker
desiring
insight
healing
personal powerand skeptic
questioning
accuracyof theories
and interpretations
recognizing power
imbalance
potential harmthrough abuseor well-intentioned
ignorance.
13

Submit to a professional's
speculation
manipulation
attitudes;
choose thisover a sunset?
But seeker prevails,
the search begins
fora womoncompetent, trustworthy
affordable
I commit time, energy"Forty dollars minimum"
see some therapists twice,
before I am curedof gambling
such large wagers
on long shots.
One quarter the costof her van wasted,
the poor womon
reevaluates
her priorities.
"Positive attitude
can help carry us
to our dreams."
Until thenwhat are your ways,
when being poorand surviving
are against the rules?
Let's share our secrets.
How do you juggle
limited choices
which needs
do you trade
for which freedoms;
14how have you escapedrunning mazes
integrity intact?
I want to know.
Healing, travel,
shoes that fit,
food, music,
shelter, fun
Shall we share our "secrets?"
Were it nota matter of priorities
we would choose
them all.

This poem is dedicated to all wimmin, who, when there's nothing else, run oncourage.
Thanks to Sabena Stark and Jasmine Marah for editorial critique.

15

Max Dashu

Most Women
How do you put the issue of class on the table? For it to meansomething, not to be totally abstract and general, you have to give
particulars and get personaL This is hard to do. Too many truths
unspoken. You risk being insulted by someone who doesn't evenknow they're giving offense. If you are angry then you will tend to
hold it in, knowing you will be taken as the aggressor. Raising theissue means being exposed yourself.
You may have a hard time speaking about the things that bother
you the most. Because of the way class sets things up, these things
reflect badly on you. Are used to shame you, define you as lacking
in some way. Why are you complaining - must be something
wrong with you. Your expectations are too negative. 'We" assume
that everyone has money like "us." ''Why don't you just ... " Create
your own reality, choose prosperity. If only you were hardworking
and responsible, you would have money. Those who do have more
initiative and talent. If you don't have their sense of entitlement,
it's a problem in your psychological makeup; a good therapist
would be helpful in figuring out why you haven't succeeded.
We are expected to shut up. We don't and we pay a price.
(Troublemakers.) Or we swallow it and we pay another price.
Experience predicts a defensive reaction, or a hostile one. Painful
silences, shifting, redirection, undermine your intent and meaning by
characterizing you as wrong, weak, failing to show proper initiative.
The assumption is that if you were a worthy human being, then yourworth would not be questioned nor would you question it. What are
you "worth?" Possessions and professions are not the measure of thewoman. The center of gravity should not follow privilege.
I'm choking on the bitterness of class and the way it's shut up
in this country, even as it stares us all in the face . It is about how
much money your family has, what work they do, or do they getwork at all, where they live and how much space they have. It isalso about resources, networks, social ranking (who is your family), whether what you do is prestigious or despised (a teacher or16

a doctor, a choreworker, a clerk, manager or business owner) or, atthe harshest levels of the class system, are you struggling tosurvive on welfare or otherwise outside the official economy.
There are also mixed-class, upwardly and downwardly mobile
people. In the women's community (and in the left) we've seen theparadox of middle class values predominating even as people
downplayed their privileges.
The United States denies that a class system exists, and upward
mobility is the official model. At the same time this country
operates on a racial caste system set up to downgrade people ofcolor even when they achieve professional or wealthy class status.
Racism makes for huge differences in the way white women anddark women experience life in various class backgrounds, andcreates more intensely oppressed classes among communities ofcolor. Having said that, the women's community often assumes
white women are middle class, or that their class is irrelevant. This
follows assumptions of the U.S. caste system in which class is madeinvisible except when it's tied to race. But white women do live inpoverty, and many raising children on welfare, or homeless, arewhite. Even though race oppression sends far larger proportions of
women of color to prison, poor white women are doing time in prison.
They are also poisoned in toxic worksites, go without medical treatment and die for lack of it, and live other unaccounted-for realities.
It is good to see efforts to reflect racial diversity, and way pastdue, but still white women often treat that as a symbolic effort
without changing underlying structures of racism. What's more,
the white middle class women who are trying to achieve "diversity" in their events and organizations seem content to think onlyin terms of race and ethnicity. They take no account of white
women raised poor or working class, and don't seem to miss ourcontributions and voices, blocking our greater participation by
sheer inertia. When events are being produced, their formula fordiversity equals some women of color, maybe an old woman or
disabled woman, but the majority of white women will be middle
class and up. I find it disturbing that class is almost never a factor,
or considered to be of any consequence.
.
This is hard to say, though I know it's true, because some mightchoose to take it as an attack on racial parity, or a denial of white-17

skin privilege, or an attempt to cash in on women of color's hardfought progress against racism. It isn't. Racism is a more severe
consideration, and it does not have to be a given that dealing with
it precludes any discussion of class. Women of color have been
most vocal about class issues in the context of their struggle against
racism, and everyone knows it. I am addressing class-privileged
white women who tend to smother consideration of any otherwhite reality but their own. Overturning this assumption of middle
class privilege is long overdue in the women's movement. Especially since the Reagan decade, things have gotten worse andsurvival is harder than ever. I'm appealing to class-oppressed
women to talk to each other, to assume that there are others like us
in this movement, and to speak up for ourselves. Our visibility has
been nil, and we've had a hard time getting our issues out there, oreven allying with each other across the barriers. Too often we've
spent our energy trying to convince the middle class that things
aren't right.
Out of all the feminist anthologies, where are the ones on class?
As few articles as get published on the subject, there's been lessaction. Class was not mentioned in any of the materials I saw for
the National Lesbian Conference. Michigan and many other important feminist events work along the same lines: it's a total nonissue. Allowing those who can afford to go to put on their own(unpaid) workshop is not the same thing as access, for which there isno substitute, and does not take affirmative steps toward change.
Just lately I picked up a brochure for a group called Women's
Alliance, which charges $625 for its women's solstice camp. That's
expensive any way you look at it, even for a week. They do havea Women of Color scholarship fund, though I can't say how many
are able to attend as a result. Technically, there is a work-exchange
program, but you still have to pay over $300 while working during
the conference! The brochure says, 'We aspire to represent diversity among women in terms of age, race, sexual preference, ethnic
background and beliefs in general." This is a good example of thelimits of diversity as many feminist institutions practice it today.
I can't help but question the value of economically elite gatherings
that systematically exclude most women. Do they think that lowincome women have nothing to offer? Are lacking in insights and18

skills that could be of spiritual benefit? (Do they have any idea
what $300 means to us?) How can this exclusion "support thedevelopment of women's inner self as a foundation for personal
and planetary healing and consequent social action?" Actually
that's it right there, the social action comes later, afterwards.
I would not be as angry about this if it wasn't for the fact thatthese kinds of events have become powerful institutions in thewomen's movement. I have been working in this movement for 21
years and I refuse to be passed over. But we are being passed over,often by women who are relative newcomers but whose class privilege catapults them over our heads. And if they haven't heard of you,then what you accomplished does not count, does not exist. They get
to define what is important because they are propertied, can publish,
have startup capital, can afford to take off work, fly around thecountry, attend expensive workshops and conferences and havetheir own elite networks funneling opportunities to them.
Access. Are we going to judge each other on abilities, or byincome and professional titles and other privileges? We have to
make sure feminists are not kept locked out by class-createdbarriers. I see those barriers all around us, affecting who speaks
from platforms of events, is invited to perform, receives grants, canafford to attend conferences, is interviewed in feminist papers, oris hired to do professional work in the movement. This is an
example of the kind of statement you can't make without somehow becoming suspect: she must want to be invited to speak fromplatforms, that's why she's saying this. Most class-oppressed
women just tighten their jaws and keep quiet because they don't
want to be insulted by this type of attitude.
If this state of affairs .continues, we will fail to build the firm
alliances that the women's movement needs to succeed. And our
movement will not survive without the broadest range of alliances. Although white working class women are the largest groupof women in this country, you wouldn't know it from the feminist
press. Nobody seems to really know who we are, certainly not themass media, not academia, not middle class leftists. Denying theexistence of poor white women is more than counterproductive, itdoes harm. Lives are being violated, women's power wasted anddefiled when they have crucial contributions to make. Both groups19

or rather this continuum of poor and working class whites do havesome common ground with women of color, even considering thedifference race makes in the u.s. class system and acknowledging
our racism. Sometimes we are working the same jobs, breathing
the same fumes, lugging groceries on the buses and clothes to thelaundromats. In building such alliances, it is now for white women
to prove ourselves.
,
Feminism has evolved under a state of siege. While fighting for
women's rights and sovereignty, we've grappled with this society's
oppression on many levels. Hard work, not finished. Meanwhile
the attacks from outside did not lessen, and I hear from the young
generation that feminist is taken as a dirty word. I think that the
feeling of being on the defensive, criticized from all sides, was afactor in creating today's image of the feminist who desperately
tries to be politically correct. I have often read comments in thepress from men (straight and gay) calling feminist lesbians"stalinists," or "fascists," and so on.
This trend is booming in the mainstream media nowadays,
and one interesting thing about it is that the accusations of politicalcorrectness are being hurled at people of color, multiculturalists,
feminists and lesbians alike. It has become a club used to silenceprotesters against oppression, who are now being compared to
McCarthyites. We're not unfamiliar with these clubbings: who
could forget the years of taunts about ''bourgeois feminism?" Thisrefrain functioned to drown out the voices of women of oppressedclasses who spoke up for women's rights. The New Left insisted
we did not exist and tried to define class issues without reference
to women's oppression, or worse, in opposition to women's interests. In the early 70s, when feminists took over RAT (a leftist paper
in NYC) one of the male editors ordered a battle plan to unseat
them: "This is a class fight. Don't give in. Argue class against
feminism."* As if they had heard and agreed, leftist journals allover the country claimed us (class-oppressed women) as theirideological property, a weapon to be pitted against feminism.
They would not print the words of poor feminists or working class*Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, by Abe Peck,
Pantheon Books, NY 1985, p. 215.

20

feminists, preferring to create the impression that all of us foundwomen's oppression irrelevant to our lives.
I bring up the siege because I know how discouraged andfragmented many women feel, and I am trying to talk about class.
Oh no, more divisions, hands thrown up in the air. Just listen. The
survival of feminism is staked on our ability to deal with race andclass. Are we serious? Can we afford not to deal, or have you
decided women's oppression is over? It won't be unless we canunify large numbers of women. Elite, media-visible women can
not be allowed to define what feminism is about, as the dress-forsuccess episode has shown. That, along with you-can-have-it-alljob-&-family, became people's concept of feminism. When more
women than ever staggered under a double work load, feminists
got blamed, not husbands.
Professionalization has undercut feminism. (Place here all disclaimers about how I amnot attacking individual professional womenwith honorable principles around class.) After this decade of backlash, rank and titles have gotten to be very important again, to thepoint of who are you without them. Political collectives have been
replaced with administrators and consultants. Where once self-help
and peer groups flourished, now women with letters after their names
charge hefty sums to lead groups and workshops. The takeover ofmany women' s shelters from activists by boards of directors and cityadministrators is another example. With feminist theory too, thecenter of gravity has swung heavily toward academia. Doing feminist
scholarship outside university affiliation is nearly unthinkable tomany. The climate is worse than it was ten years ago. Inside theacademy, it's not unheard of for nonfeminists to get appointed as
directors of women's studies, or to retitle it gender studies. And
let's not even get into the classism of the new age stampede.
Because of the complexities and evasions around class, it isdifficult to come up with criteria that would ensure better representation of poor and working class women in our movement. I
don't have easy answers, because unless class-privileged women
are willing to open their hearts, we can't make them change. They
can continue to withdraw into their privilege, hide and hoard theirresources, resist. I would like to see them realize tha t sharing skills,
knowledge, opportunities, job information, contacts and privileges

21will strengthen feminism. It's rightful access and has nothing to dowith generosity or charity.
Look around: how many of the women who are invited to
speak or hired for movement jobs are class-privileged, and how
often behind-the-scenes (crucial) work gets done byus "others." It
doesn't have to be like this. Publicize opportunities, extend information networks. Don't assume everyone has regular jobs, cars,credit cards, financial resources, health insurance, or disposable
income. If you don't know about poor women's issues, find out.
Add your voices to theirs, protest cuts in AFDe and no-cash
voucher systems, GAIN's enforced "training" without childcare,and fraud prosecutions of women attempting to survive far below
official-poverty-Ievel. For example.
Honor the spirit of sliding scale. (The low end is not designed
for professionals back from vacation or recovering from a down
payment on a house.) Make feminist conferences accessible to lowincome women, and seek out their participation, not only as
attendees but as presenters, performers, and craftswomen. Policies for waived / reduced fees for conferences, etc., should beclearly and fully stated, and carried out with decent respect for
women who need them. These women should not be shunted
aside as if they were lesser beings, and shamefully, this happens
more than you would think. Work exchange participants shouldhave a chance to participate, not made to work more hours than theactual fee would come to if they were being paid a fair wage.
This talk about class is tough going. I feel vulnerable talking
about it but no way around it. Just have to risk it. My chosen allies
are deeply prowoman, antiracist commoners, grounded in Eorthan
Mother, alongside all her international peoples, lands and beings.
Justice is the only real feminism. I want to hear silenced classes,
have the realities that we are living be known, feel them acknowledged in a way that involves recognition rather than permission.
(It's not about convincing the classes "above" you of anything.)
Recognize too how we stand in relation to those more oppressedthan ourselves and figure out what and how we need to change.
For us to speak to each other and hear and establish a consensus
that takes these realities into account, so that we don't have to startfrom zero over and over again. We need unity and community.

22

Jasmine Marah

Spit Shine

Sal sat on the pumpkin colored cushions of the bench in her
kitchen, and propped her foot on the table. She was pleased withthe harmonious pattern her khaki trousers made in the fading
sunlight. She wasn't pleased with the way Fran was questioning
her about her work history.
Sal had agreed to talk with this well-meaning interrogatorbecause Fran and Carmelita, Sal's oldest friend, were sweeties. The
improbable relationship seemed to be working, despite cultural,class and age differences.
Miriam reached over and took Sal's foot in both her hands. Her
touch relaxed Sal and helped her to concent·rate. Miriam and Sal
had been lovers since Rosh Hashana four years ago.
"Look, Fran, I don't really know what good it will do to talkabout this stuff, but I'm at the end of my line.""Sal, I do this all day long. I like doing it and I'm good at my job.""How - I mean what - what is it that you exactly do?" Salplayed for time.
"Yes, Fran, please tell us about your work." Miriam shiftedslightly and rubbed Sal's ankle.
Carmelita brushed at crumbs with a teal napkin, as though tosmooth the interchange between Sal and Fran. "Fran's job is quite
interesting. I was surprised to find out that someone working in asocial work agency could actually help people.""I don't know how other job counselors work, but whensomeone comes to Fran Shapiro for career counseling, I find out
what strengths that person has, and what she could do to fit into a
position that she likes and can be effective in." Fran beamed.
Sal tried not to be annoyed. Social workers!
'Well,like, you know, the first job I had was cleaning people's
houses. I was employed by the State of California to go into oldpeople's houses and clean. The State was supposed to pay me. I went
to a lot of different houses. Sometimes once a week, sometimes only
once a month. I had papers everywhere to get signed by the people
I was cleaning for. They signed the papers, but I never got paid."
23

'Why not?/I"The State just dragged their heels. They just never issued any
checks./I"Are you sure you turned them in properly filled out? And tothe correct department?/I'Well, Fran, after all these years, how can I be sure? I was 19
then and I'm forty now.
''But there weren't enough hours allowed to do everything. I
always worked extra time, so that I could leave the people comfortable. At the same time, I was working modeling for art classes, butthat got weird. One of the professors tried to rape me, so I quit./I
There was a silence. Fran yawned and stretched. Miriam
jumped up and Carmelita went to open a window. Sal suddenly
felt exposed. 'Would you care for some tea or something else?/I
Miriam was already taking down cups, gathering up spoons, andgetting out the milk.
'Well, I'd prefer coffee, if you have it./I"Sure, Fran, no problem. Sal has coffee./I Carmelita worked
companionably with Miriam, setting out pots of coffee and tea,
toast and sliced cheese.
"Thanks for the coffee, Miriam, Carmelita, this is great bread,but I never eat butter./I"Sal, you had a hard time when you started out, a lot of
uneducated girls do; but what is really more important is what
you've been doing recently. Didn't I hear that you went to someschool or was it a training program or something?/I"Sal attended the University, and she holds a degree in architecture./I Sal shot Miriam a grateful look, her own mouth was full,and she was embarrassed at the question.
"Architecture.. .isn't that very difficult?/I"Yes, it was hard to do, especially as I had to work full time
while I was doing it. I hadn't graduated from high school when I
started to work./I"And you have different disabilities to cope with, too./I"That's true,/I Sal answered Carmelita, "but I worked aroundthem with the help of you and Miriam. Anyhow,/I she said, turning
back to Fran, "I was supporting my sister during that time, she wassick and there were the three kids that I was mothering a lot24because she was so sick. The school was not too fond of an out dyke
either. But I got my diploma in May two years ago. For a while I did
my own business, trying to get jobs designing, and doing theconstruction, but you need a network for that.
"One day I metthis dyke at a support group. She was just a little
younger than I, and we became friends. She was a single woman.
It was during the time that Miriam was away in Japan studying,and I had a lot of weekend time. Lynn - that was this woman's
name, Lynn Reed-White- she understood that I could spend thetime as long as Miriam was away, and we were just friends. Well,
she had a lot of money, and a big house in the Marin headlands,
view of the ocean, three bedrooms, huge garden, all to herself andthree cats.
"She started talking to me about how she wanted to have some
remodeling and some redecorating done. I'd never been to herhouse, she always came to my house, or we met somewhere else.
She knew that I had been working on and off as the jobs came in,and that I hadn't worked in a while, and I was still taking care ofthese five people. She knew I was in dire need of work. She looked
at some photos of the work that I had done before. I guess she liked
it a lot, she asked me to come look at her house. Only thing was, she
didn't want me to be offended by the mess, she said.""I can never understand why people say that," Miriam offered.
'1 either will be offended or not, but it is not helpful for them to say ... ""Yeah, and if they think that you're going to be offended, they
can clean it up," Carmelita responded.
Carmelita and Miriam exchanged glances. Fran tapped hercoffee cup, and encouraged Sal to go on with the story.
"When I got there, the first thing that I noticed was theoverwhelming smell of cat pee. Next, I noticed that there was no
furniture, or hardly any. There were seven cat boxes in that house,
all full. She said that shewas training the cats to go outside, because
the cat boxes led from the third floor down to the side door into thegarage from the kitchen. But shit ...
"So, I was talking with her about doing the remodel. I sketchedout a few plans, and we talked about fabrics, colors, the kind oflook that she wanted to have. Lynn said that she was waiting fora big bonus check, and for the dividends on her stocks to pay on the25

first of the month. In the meantime, I spent about six hours with herlooking at fabrics and furniture, paintings, antiques.
"Three weeks went by, we talked on the phone, and I went out
to her house again. The mess was still there, dishes all over theplace, a loaf of bread scattered from one end of the house to theother, and books! She had literally thousands of those - how do
you call them, dime paperback romances - thrown all over thehouse. I was trying to set up a crew to do the remodel,line up times.
I was really needing the work by that time. So I asked her, 'When
do you want to start?' And she tells me that the checks have been
delayed, but we can work on the drawings. But I needed a deposit
for the drawings, and she wouldn't agree to that. Finally, I sketchout a rough plan for her, and write down a schedule of work. Then
I begin to feel like she's not trusting me. So I say, 'Lynn, get yourself
some other estimates.' You know what I mean?""A very wise suggestion, and very ethical, to be sure," Fran
commented.
''Yeah, that's what I thought. And she tells me, 'I can't have othercontractors come here with the house like this.' So, I tell her that I
have another job that will take me a couple of weeks, and can she
clean the house during the meantime, and call the other contractors?""And didn't she say that she'd check at her job to see who her
friends had used for their remodels?" Carmelita added.
"Right. So, a few more weeks go by, and in the meantime we'regoing to the movies once, and talking on the phone, like that. Everytime I ask her about the other contractors, she's evasive. Finally, I
pin her down. She hasn't cleaned the fucking house! So, I say I'll
clean the damn house for her, just to get the ball rolling. And I makesure that she knows that I'll charge her. We agree on a price, andshe leaves me the key, and I spend two-and-a-half days with
Carmelita here, cleaning. Right?""Right. That house was disgusting. Sal did bathrooms andkitchen and the cat boxes. She said it was because it was for her
benefit. And I did vacuuming and the laundry. We both polished
all that teak trim. And gathering up the books, and sorting out her
clothes and putting away her jewelry. I was always afraid that she
wouldn't be able to find something, and then blame us. Sal said
she'd make sure that that didn't happen."26

'What I did was leave her notes about where I put everything,"
Sal said. "So, she loved the clean house, and she paid us. But she
never called the other contractors, and she didn't want to go ahead
without the other estimates. She was paying me and Carmelita
about $300 every other week We cleaned and shopped and did thelaundry. Did windows inside and out."
Carmelita laughed. "Yeah, I scared Sal, cause I climbed out on
the roof and did the second floor windows. The roof made a ledge.""And that's when we discovered the roof damage. I left adetailed note and drawings.
"So, Lynn kept putting me off, and one day I got angry. I began
to get a premonition that she wasn't going to have the work done.
And when I asked her about it, she hemmed and hawed and told
me the check was late, and she owed her ex money. Shit like that.
Then there comes this convention she has to go to. She needs aformal dress for a dance, and she pulls out a gorgeous piece of sarifabric. She asks me to design a dress to match the fabric. Again, we
set a price - $100 for the design, $200 for the sewing."'Why were you still dealing with this woman? It seems likeyou're angry even now as you tell it. I've never understood why
you went on with Lynn," Miriam asked.
'Well, you know ... ""That's a good question, Miriam," Fran interrupted."But before you answer, Sal,let me guess. You wanted to recoup some ofyour professional status. Dresses aren't houses, but design is design."''Thing is the twit went out and spent $450 for a dress off the rack"'Well, by then was I ever angry." Carmelita sat up straight.
"It's true what you say, Fran, but more to the point is that I
make money in chunks when I'm working as a designer/builder.
I hadn't worked in a while. I had five people to support and I wasdesperate for money. Any work was better than no work So wecleaned her house every other week for three months. Also, if I kept
encouraging Lynn to get the estimates and start the job, I would
make a big chunk of money.""Sal and I were really pissed at Lynn," Carmelita exp lained. Sal
confronted Lynn about how she was jerking us around. She asked
her when she was going to get the job started, and told Lynn that
we were housecleaning because we were desperate.

27

"So how did she respond?" Fran asked.
Carmelita continued. "She called Sal and said that she'd talked
to her therapist about it. Her therapist said she wasn't in the space
to be confronted. Said to tell us to accept her as she was.""Then what did you do?"'Went on feeling angry and working for her. At first, it was that
we just couldn't stand her sheets. Her sheets were really ugly andwe knew if we had the money, we'd have better taste. So, we'dspend the day trashing her behind her back. Then, we decided to
put the sheets on inside out to see if she'd even notice. She neverdid. We wanted to see how little she cared about her own surroundings. We moved everything. And finally, we felt she couldn't
tell clean from dirty. We used the bath towels to clean the sink andbath tub, and mop the floor.
"Then, we just threw them in the dryer, folded them and put
them away. She never noticed.""She never noticed?" Miriam asked.
'Well, they did match the dark blue bath tub." Miriam laughedwith Carmelita and Sal. Fran crossed her legs and stirred her coffee.
"Tell the rest, girl.""OK, so I decided the chrome in the three sinks, two tubs andshower, and the handles on the toilets ought really to shine. So
what better than a toothbrush? The only toothbrush handy was
Lynn'S.""She did say the bathrooms really looked great.""Yeah, and her teeth were whiter, too."Fran put down her spoon. '1 can understand how you felt, but
do you really think behavior like that is going to get you anywhere?""Fran, we didn't want to get anywhere as housekeepers. Don't
get me wrong. I have great respect for wimin who work as maids,
as housekeepers, and/ or as attendants. It's hard, honorable work.
Getting an education is hard work also. I want my training to be as
meaningful and useful to me as a middle-class womon's is to her.
Anyhow, Carmelita got accepted to the master's program a couple
of weeks later. The point is sometimes middle-class women can't
see lower-class women as anything beyond personal servants tothem. Lynn saw me as a personal servant, despite my six years ofuniversity training. Nothing feels changed."28

"N othing?"'Well, something has changed. I've stopped blaming myself.
I know that until lower-class women have access to the same
resources and get the same respect as middle-class women, every
achievement will be at a greater cost, a more concerted effort, than
the same accomplishment for middle-class women.
"You know, Lynn did recommend me to one of her co-workers.""She did?""Yeah, and when they called me, I said I don't know how you
got my number. I'm not a housekeeper, I'm an architect! I would
have given Lynn hell for that if I'd ever seen her again."Fran asked if anyone wanted more tea. She scalded the cups,
and poured.

Dove chickJasmine Marah29

Nanette HerbertInvisible Barriers

There is the love that dare not
Speak its name,with the all pervading
Saturating
Fearof theUnknown,
then
There is the class that dominates,
With confidence and silky speech,
And the class with noConfidence and no words
To speak
Of powerlessness
And despair.
As women we are united
But divided
By sexuality
Class
Race andReligion.
There can be no united action
From a divided people30Felicitas and Debby Earthdaughter

Anonymous Money Redistribution:
Prolo Dykes Making Real Change
In West Berlin
Debby Feli has been telling me about a poor and working classlesbians' group she is in in West Berlin. The group made a bankaccount. Lesbians who couid spare money put it into the account.
Lesbians who need money then could take it out. It's open to all
lesbians. Feli, what does the name of the group mean?
Feli It originally comes from the Marxist word "proletarian," butnow "prolo" is used in a classist way to put people down. We
wanted to reclaim it for ourselves and also 'to find a word that
includes all of us - from typical working-class, from poverty
class, from impoverished farms, and some even come from mixed
middle and working class. Because that all would be too long, we
called it prolo.

Debby How did the idea of redistributing money come about?
Feli From a joke! We would sit in our prolo lesbian group and talkabout class differences and it would so often come down to money.
There's this downward mobility scene among middle-class women- it's easy to be oblivious to classism because we all look alike andhave similar lifestyles. But if you look closer there are majordifferences in how we manage to survive. For us, it was hard tolearn that there were women who could get resources from theirfamilies but would feel bad about using them. It was too much!
We'd say, if they have money and they don't know whatto do withit, they can give it to us.
We kept going and it was a fun group with lots of ideas. We
tried to figure out a way it could work. We wanted it to beanonymous. Of course, a prolo lesbian may really need money, butdoesn't want to go and say can I have some money, I really need
it. So we tried to figure out a way to make it work because our basic
idea was that it is a politically good thing to share privilege.

31

Debby And you wanted to break out of the charity way?
Feli Yes. It's too hard to have it be on an interpersonal level- it
affects relationships. We tried to think of a way it'd be easy for awoman in need to be able to ask for it. And that it'd be anonymousand the women with money wouldn't get these strokes for giving
it. So we came up with the idea to make a bank account.
Debby How did you put the idea out so women would put money
in?
Feli It's a small community, a network. We thought of it as a big
experiment. When it went from a joke to an idea with the details of
how it could work, we presented itto the big group. It was received
really welL We wanted to try it, but not set up some legal organization. We didn't intend to make it some alternative to welfare. We
just wanted to deal with some of our class differences - to makechange on a real level in our community. Of course, it was typicalthat coming out of a prolo group, it would be more practicaL
Debby Did women come with mor.ey and make donations?
Feli No. When we made the bank account we made it that anyone
who had the number could make a deposit, so we don't even know
where it came from. Then three prolo dykes are authorized to havethe checks to give out.
Atfirst, there was quite a lot of money - no one would take anyout. We tried to keep it just within our community. If it wasstrangers we'd have to ask more questions.
In the first 3 months, we said it was only for very basic needs- rent, food, health care. It's open to all lesbians. But we encourage
middle and upper class lesbians to think if they really need it or ifthey could get it from other resources. Of course, equalizing accessto money doesn't break down lifelong oppression. The attitudes ofdeserving and not deserving will affect whether or not a dyke willtake out money.
Only the three lesbians who are authorized with the checks
would know who took money, and they are not to talk about it. The
lesbians who came for money had to be personally known, but
don't have to say what they use it for. You wouldn't have to be
directly in the network, but be known by someone so there is no32

abuse. We want the money to be for lesbians. When a lesbian is in
need, she gets referred to one of the women with the checks. They
tell her how much is in the account and that we like to keep a certain
amount for emergencies. We don't know how much the woman
takes out or for what - she writes that part of the check. The
individual woman makes all the decisions for herself.
Debby What's the status of the account now?
Feli It's been used a lot more. It's still working. We can't provide
for long term things like therapy because the money's unstable we don't know how much will be there next month.

Debby So the money from the account goes more for things
beyond the basics?
Feli It's still the idea to use it for basic things. From my involvement, I know it hasn't been abused. We don't know what it's used
for. And a woman can also get out a loan or take money for an
emergency.

Debby What's making it work so that women are actually putting
money in the account?
Feli One reason is the political consciousness of the networkthese are dykes committed to change. Especially in the beginning,
there was a lot of enthusiasm around it. Personally, I wonder if it'sa good idea to have it open to all lesbians, because after a while,when everybody gets used to having the account, lesbians are
more likely to use the money and it's usually a lot easier for middleclass lesbians to do that. Especially since a lot of them are broke all
the time too, but their situation is still very different. It would takea lot of education about class to make it clear, and that hasn't
happened so far. But it is working anyway and it's been really good
to see it happen - see real change.
Money is one of the most basic differences and this is truly
affecting lesbians' lives. It's helped me not feel so frustrated or
resentful to see that lesbians are really willing to share privilege
instead of just talk about it. It's still working now and it's been
almost two years.

33

ElliottFuneral Foodfor Mari on our 5th anniversaryof talking each other from silence to survival

I didn't necessarily wantto be a writer. I wanted to be an artist, but
in a way that counts, like being in a bluegrass or string band, or
having the best garden, or sewing everything I needed, including
quilts, or keeping a truck running after it has rolled 100,000 four orfive times. But I never learned to playa banjo or dobro or fiddle,
much less a mean one, and I don't sing or sew or garden or fix stuff.
Instead, words pour through me; I'm a writer, from a world thatjudges you by what you do, not what you say. How the hell am I
supposed to write out of my experience and values when writing
itself was not part of them? At home, our lives didn't have to bereflected in print to have value to us and so it never occurred to me
to want writing by working class and poor wimmin until college
prep and college english, when I was suddenly alone. I still havea hard time valuing my ability with words; this is neither a false
modesty nor a problem with my self-esteem.
¢¢¢¢¢
I really swear that one of these days, after I've said something
about being working class and some womon comes up to me andstarts talking about how she really understands what it's like beingpoor now that she herself is broke or about how hard it's been for
her to understand and confront her class privilege, and she doesn't
even know me, that I'm going to turn to her and say, "Look, bitch,"- which will prove to her, depending on who exactly she is, either
that 1) I am hostile, 2) I am not really a Separatist, 3) Separatists are
hostile, or 4) working class wimmin are hostile and not reallyfeminist- but anyway, I'll say, "Look, bitch, unless you are goingto pay me either as much as you pay for tuition or as much as you
pay your therapist, I don't wanna hear you whine." Later, I mightfeel a little bad about how I treated her, but only if it doesn't happen
again that same day.

34

How much control do you have over whether or not you makerent, bills and food next month? How refined are your money
management skills?
Egg Noodles
1 lb. frozen egg noodles
2 cans Campbell's cream of mushroom soup
salt and peppermilk
To cookMix soup with milk in large pan until smooth. Add salt andpepper. Add package of noodles. Cook over low heat until noodles
are tender.
To deliver
Put mixture in large glass noodle bowl. Cover with two layersof saran wrap. Set on a plate and cover the bowl and plate with tin
foil. Take along a serving spoon with your initials on masking tapeon the handle.
To reheatCut some of the noodles away with a fork. Place in a bowl witha pat of butter in the bottom. Salt. Microwave until hot.
¢¢¢¢¢
It seems to me that my middle- and upper-middle-class friends
spent their entire childhoods being trained to leave home summer camps, religious/cultural camps, sports camps, music
camps, prep schools, trips abroad, trips alone to see grandparents
or divorced parents, and so on - to get them ready for their adult
lives of going away to college and away to follow their, or theirhusbands', professional lives. Somehow, once they were grownup, physical and emotional and economic independence were to
be interchangeable for them (all polite lies, of course, that coverwhat class privilege actually does for you).
The only leaving I ever witnessed was about death or violence,
including the economic violence of losing a farm or a job. I grew up
six blocks from where my dad was born, a mile from my grandparents, and a hoot and a holler from my aunt and cousins. WhenI did go somewhere I borrowed a suitcase, since I'd always be
coming back.

35

Now I've left home, to join the ranks of "orphans by choice."
ButI, too,left because of violence, not by choice, and I didn't get out
with my heart whole. Sometimes I wonder if there will ever beenough dykes in my world to fill the emptiness of leaving home.
I know there will never be enough family - dykes will be there
when I'm in trouble, even if they don't much like me, just because
that's what we have to do to survive.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

I'm on my way to being a bitter womon. I write because I can,because I enjoy it. But! always write knowing that what I say might
never be taken seriously by the community I perceive myself aspart of. My words won't get into academic journals and be a hot
topic; women's festivals won't pay me to lead workshops andlesbians with their notebooks ready won't flock to ones I participate in; I won't be getting big name, big bucks grants (check the
biographical notes in any feminist / lesbian/ gay anthology if you
don't already know what I mean). What does it mean to be creating
theory and stories that won't be read, or understood and valued
even if they do get into print?
It's so easy to just stop writing, to be angry and to refuse to give
any more of myself. Times when I need all of me just to get by, thisis not a self-defeating attitude. I've had strength and integrity
when I've been joyful and included; I've also been strong andhonest when I am bitter and cynical and removed. What I do bestat anyone time is whatever I need to do to survive; calling this selfcentered implies that I have a choice.
I could live a long time without having some middle classlesbian tell me how much "our" community needs my words.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

Greenbeans
Dump a couple quart jars of greenbeans in a large pot. Add aquart of so of water, a hambone, some chunks of bacon and salt.
Cook over low heatfor about an hour. Pour the beans, the juice andthe bacon into a deep bowl; serve with a slotted spoon.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

Two years ago I was at a Society of Women in Philosophy
conference in Minnesota. During one session when they were all36

talking about owning their privileges, I fled outside to be appalled
and snide with my girlfriend, who is middle class but willing tothink about it. I started the "Middle Class Academics' Theme"
which I've been working on ever since. Here's what I have so far.
It's sort ofbluesy, set vaguely to the tune of "Cause I'm a Woman:"
I don't want to own my classism (ba da da da dat)
I want to sell it for a profit (ba da da da dat)
You might work for your money (0000000)
But my money works for me (let me tell you baby)
and so on. To be sung only when appropriate, of course.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

I was 27 and in grad school before it clearly dawned on me that
I grew up "rural." After all, my parents didn't farm, and I lived in
the second largest town in my county (more than 1,500 people). I
don't find my shock of realization charming 'or quaint.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

At a Young Separatist/Young Radical Feminist Lesbian conference this spring, we went around the room introducing ourselves. One of the first dykes talked about where she was in college
and what she was doing there and everyone after her did the same.
Partway around, a dyke named Mary spoke out about how identifying ourselves by our educations was really elitist and made her
uncomfortable and sad. Most of us agreed but we kept doing it,
and I was part of that we. I've thought a lot about that ever since.
When I'm in a group of mainly middle and upper class wimmin,
I don't want to talk about college because it pisses me off tha t of all
the things I've done school is the only one all of them will value. Ina group of all working ciass and poor dykes I don't want to talkabout school because it is such a privilege and gives me a status I
don't like. But I also want to talk about college with these dykes
cause they get it, they don't treat it as a given, they understandwhat it meant for me to be there. So mainly I hang out with otherworking class and poor dykes who also went to college, in a world
where we are always balancing between home and strangeness. It
seems to me that we are always tired.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

37

Ham Sandwich
Take leftover ham, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese,butter and pickles from the fridge. Get bread or hamburger bunsfrom the breadbox. Spread mayonnaise on one slice and butter on
the other. Slice some ham, salt it, and put it on. Unwrap a slice or
two of cheese and add it. Put on some lime pickles, some lettuce,
and some salted tomatoes. Serve it with a coke and potato chips.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

Since I came out I've written about all kinds of wonderful andhorrible things, but almost nothing about my birth culture andeven less about the moments of shock, confusion, embarrassment
and shame that too often surround me in my now mainly middle
class world. The stories I have to tell don't fit on a page, because thelanguage isn't right, forced into Standard spelling and constructions or mangled by the apostrophes and quotation marks thatscream, "Warning! Substandard dialect ahead!," and if I leavethese little marks of deviance out, some well-meaning editor lover, friend or stranger - is bound to put them in, assuming, I
spose, that I don't know what I meant to do, and even if this doesn't
happen the written form is still only an approximation of real talk,anyhow, and my story lines and logic don't seem to work, cause if
I don't put explanations in someone will say, "I don't get it, what
does this mean?" and if! do putthem in then it's no longer the story
I'm tryin to tell but a story about the story I'm tryin to tell, and thatmakes me a translator when what I want to be is a writer.
Whenever a dyke asks me why I think there hasn't been a really
good anthology about class and classism (the kind of dyke I'm
thinking about would probably use the word" definitive"), I wantto turn to her and not say a thing and see if she gets it.
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

If you were reading this because you have an investment in thelesbian community, do you feel that it has been worth your time?
¢.¢.¢.¢.¢.

In order for any oppressed group to get through life with theirhearts whole, their culture must be able to replace what the world
strips from them every day. I don't know how much lesbian

38

cultures do this. Are we, as Dykes, willing to sustain each other?
And I mean really sustain, not just entertain, challenge, instruct,appease, or even please and delight each other. Stopping class
oppression isn't about needing a better philosophical understanding of privilege. It's not about being anti-oppressive or being amore effective ally, because class isn't about theory. Class is about
survival, about which of us will and won't make it.
In order for any oppressed group to get through life with theirhearts whole, their culture must be able to replace what the world
strips from them every day. So that is why funeral food is salty.

Carie feeding chickens
Contributed by Corie Lamere (photographer unknown)
39Adrienne Lauby

Denial(from "Disability Series 1")
The day had one hourof effortless calmand still I pushed until
those minutes dissolved.
I had to work.
How else to live?
Had to labor every day
sit shaking at my desk
too tired to stand,forgetting once I lifted
a telephone receiver easily.
Janet passed out
at the hardware store.
Someone stepped on Yvettein the subway entrance.
Carman drank every night
to forget her accounting mistakes.
We were sick and hoping
we still had use.
Illness drew us further
from ourselves yet
we chose the familiar
over the unknown
and our bodies pursued us.
Toiling until we dropped,
dying on our feetwe swayed andwent to work.

40Adrienne Lauby

Ulcer Surgery
Years of stressshe guessed
It was mothering
Qr worrying about the shapeof the world we're in
It was daughtering or too muchbrilliance, the lie of high LQ.
It was poverty, the pack a day,the newspapers, baby boom .
generation hypeIt was cold winters, auto grease,
you call these friends, rurallate nights, the Europa Cafe
Now, like the sensitive nerve
years cut, by-passed,
forgotten with the pain,
Traded in on a spice of plans,a tangy new town,
a full gut of battered cars,
one more chance,
the free way

41

MidgeKendraPortraits
Max Hammond Dashu
42

Janet Capone

East 50th Street Scream(Chapter 12: Excerpt from a Novel in Progress)
Franny Martimucci is a young working class dyke trying to make atransition in her life. She's a New York Italian-American, living in theSouthwest, and trying to move out to the Bay Area. In a fog of love, she left her
family behind in New York and followed her first girlfriend, Dee, to Texas on
a Greyhound bus. But soon afterward, their relationship "went to shit."
Recovering from the break-up, Franny takes a room in a little house with
one other woman, "in the middle of the frigging airport flight path, but hell, therent isn't killing me. I'm saving my dough so I can get the fuck out of Texas
altogether." She quits a relatively secure clerk job with the idea that she's
moving to California, "where all the lesbians are." But her moving plans fall
through, her finances are drying up, and she has to start working immediately
to raise money to survive. "Trapped again by the goddamn almighty dollar!"
She wonders: "Am I ever going to California or am I just bullshitting myself
and everybody else?"

I flopped on my bed in a depressed stupor the minute I got homefrom work. I was exhausted and needed a thirty minute nap. I knew
I should be using this hour and a half break between shifts to wash
my uniform at the laundrymat, but I was too exhausted. I'd justhave to smell like French fries for another twenty-four hours.
Somehow, using my precious hour and a half to wash my uniform
felt too much like I lived and died for Burger King. I hung theuniform from my bedroom door on a clothes hanger, where I could
observe it from a safe distance on my foam mattress. It was suspended there, a rust and gold polyester pants suit right next to mymap of Italy, with Napoli highlighted in red.
I lay there staring at my uniform. The top was a loose-fitting
gold tunic with rust-colored flecks on the sleeves and collar. The
pants were solid rust. A flare-legged number with an elastic bandin the waist. To top it off, they issued the women these two-toned,
perky little hats. It was a visually stunning ensemble, to say theleast. I lay back on the foam and stared and stared at those rustcolored flecks in the sleeves.

43When I wore my uniform, I matched the plastic trays and theupholstery on the chairs at Burger King. I subtly echoed thedesigns on the cardboard cartons of French fries and salt andpepper packets. I was the walking, talking, color-coded extension
of Burger King, a fake food empire of international proportions. I
was one of a multitude of Burger King minions, all dressed alike.
What a capitalist mind fuck uniforms are! Then I thought, hell
people wear uniforms in socialist countries too. But at least having
a uniform job, I never had to put on high heels and a dress, which
was another kind of work uniform for women. Hell, I'd take thepolyester pants suit over the dress any day.
Thank Goddess, I finally got drowsy, turned over, and fell
asleep. I slept soundly for a few minutes.
Expecting the roar of the mid-day TWA, even in my unconsciousness I had burrowed my head under my pillows. Sureenough, as regular as clockwork, the big aluminum bird exploded
over my roof, grazing the god damn treetops. The cracks in thewalls of the cinderblock house lengthened a few invisible millimeters, accommodating the blast. It was no good; pillows or not,I was shaken from my sleep. I rolled over, facing the ceiling as thelast few vivid images of a dream shimmied like cobwebs, disintegrating. I had been walking in a palace. My bare feet touched thecool stone of the floor. I was aware that before me was a throne ona raised platform, and I was walking toward it. I raised my headslowly, gradually moving my eyes up the jeweled chair to meet theeyes ofthe seated figure. It was Dee! She was sitting calmly, a smileon her face. In one hand she held a silver sparkled baton, in theother, a labrys on a cord, which she swung in circles above herhead. I couldn't believe it! Shit, we had some class differences, but
this was a little extreme. I raised my head to get a better glimpse of
the palace hall. The stone floor was polished to a shine and there
were enormous, circular throw rugs here and there. I looked moreclosely. The rugs were actually giant hamburger patties six inches
thick. Slivers of green pickels sat in the middle.
I shook it off, forcing myself to wake up the rest of the way.
Crawling forward on my belly, I propped on _my elbows andlooked out the bedroom window to the street. Jesus, was she gonna
haunt my dreams now? It had been almost ten months since the44relationship went to shit. This was the fifteenth dream I had of her.
She was always some weird ass figure: queen on a throne, screeching parrot with a human head, Quaker on a Quaker Oats carton.
She wasn't the Mona Lisa yet. I guess that was a plus.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I was wide awake
now, and got up to throw some water on my face. I had less than thirty
minutes before I had to be back to work. From one nightmare to thenext. Why was I alive? My grandmother's voice came into my mind.
She was singing mournfully in Neapolitan. ''Miseria! Miseria!" I
heard her sing that sometimes when we would visit her in the nursing
home toward the end of her life. She hated it in there, isolated from herfamily. I missed my family too. Texas was no place for an Italian.
As I passed my aquarium, I stopped to shake some food flakes
into the tank. I tapped the glass with my fingernail. At least myangel fish were doing fine, swimming through the floating stemsof plants. Their little world seemed like it was in the same peacefulstate it always was. I turned toward the window to get my uniform
off the hanger and I saw it. Dee's pale blue Volkswagen bomb was
passing by the house at a slow cruise! I ran out the bedroom to thefront of the house to catch her in the act. What the fuck was she
doing? Just as I made it out thedoor and to the edge of the grass, her
car turned the corner and disappeared. I caught a last glimpse of
it. It was definitely her car. She lives way the fuck on the other sideof town. Why would she drive by here? I knew it! No wonder I'm
dreaming about her. She's been vibing me. I'd recognize that pale
blue old bomb anywhere! I walked back inside. Pale blue car. Paleblue house. Why was everything wrong with my life pale blue?
I stuffed my uniform in my backpack, locked the front door
behind me, and got on my Honda. I stopped to plug my ears. A
second TWA was exploding in the sky up a few yards above myhead. You could almost see the heads of the passengers bobbing as
it passed. Even with my ears covered, I could hear one big blast,
followed by a second smaller one, which someone once told me
was the air rushing to fill up the vacuum created by the first blast.
I put my bike in first gear and rolled out of there for work, stillobsessing on Dee. Rumor had it she was seen dancing with someguy at a het bar on a Friday night. It was a bunch of bullshit, I'msure. She was a screaming radical lesbian.

45

As I rolled outta there, I noticed three cans of housepaintbehind me at the top of the dirt driveway. Well, holy hell! The
landlord finally got off his ass and picked up that paint! He said hewould give me a break on the rent if I painted the house for him.
He must've come by when I was asleep. Hope he got the color I
wanted. Dark turquoise, the color of the Mediterranean Sea.
Back at my work station, I was counterperson today, chained
to the cas register. Thankfully it was a slow afternoon. Ire-stocked
plastic cups and caps into their dispensers. Small, medium, large,
extra large. Small, medium, large, extra large. It was very meditative. Because it had been so slow, I'd already finished my countercleaning routine. I had finished washing out the shake machine, restocking the ketchup, salt, and pepper packets, and refilling thenapkin dispensers. Two fresh pots of coffee, one regular, one decaf were already made. I was all caught up. It looked like one ofthose rare days when I actually had time to take a ten minute break.
I leaned back against the counter, grabbing a couple of French fries
from the salted, freshly cooked pile in the rack.
'Who left the cheese out?" Neil was yelling from the backroom. He walked into the front, holding a package of unwrapped,
sliced American cheese. "Did you leave the cheese out on the
counter?" He stood in front of me, his plastic manager's badge
drooping from the pocket of his white shirt.
''Not me. Maybe Roosevelt did. I haven't been back there."'Well, what are you doing?"'Whaddaya mean what am I doing? I'm running the counter.""Standing around?"''There aren't any customers. Should I be tap dancing?"
He looked at me this time. "You know, you have a smart
mouth, but you're gonna learn a few things if you expect to work
here!" He pointed his index finger at me threateningly. "Have you
been eating French fries?"''No.'' I met his stare without hesitation, wondering if there
were French fries in my front teeth.
"409 those countertops," he said, turning around.
"1 did already. Everything is cleaned and re-sJocked.""Clean them again," he said, grabbing a rag and stuffing it in
my hand. "1 can see grease."46

He stomped off. "Dickhead!" I said under my breath as hewalked away. Goddess forbid I should have a few minutes break.
Fucking makes me clean something that's already clean! Petty fucking
asshole! '1 can see grease!" I said, mimicking him. Whenever it's slow,
he either makes me clean things twice or I have to clock out early andgo home. He doesn't care if you need the fucking hours. All he cares
about is whether Burger King is making or losing money.
I was bent down, under the counter, looking for the 409 andcursing that son of a bitch when somebody rapped on top of thecounter for service. I came up too quickly and banged the back of
my head.
"Shit!" I stood up, holding my head in pain.
,"Oh no! You hurt yourself?" I heard a woman's voice say as I
straightened up. I had barely a moment to feel grateful for the
sympathy before she launched into a long ord~r. "Listen," she said,"I'll take three cheeseburgers to go, two chocolate shakes, one diet
Sprite, and-If She stared at me, stopping in mid-sentence while I
still clutched the back of my head, my two-toned hat sitting lopsided. "I recognize that face," she said, scrutinizing me. It was
Betsy, my supervisor from myoId clerk job at the university. I
could have died. She was the last person I wanted to know I was
now working at Burger King. Well, maybe not the last person. My
seventh grade English teacher, Miss Barrett, who always had suchgreat expectations of me, was the last person. But, Betsy McMeyer
ran a close second. "Frances Martimucci! What are you still doingin Texas?" She stared at me. Her bleached strawberry blonde,
poofy hairdo and thick blue eyeshadow had a macabre cast under
the fluorescent lights.
"How ya doing Betsy?" I said, rubbing the back of my sorehead. I could already feel a knot forming. My face heated up and wasprobably bright red. I repeated her order back to her as I punched it
into the cash register. "Three cheeseburgers, two chocolate shakes,
one diet Sprite to go. Anything else? French fries?""Large," she answered me, still looking stunned as I was
bagging her order. "Why don't you see if James will give you yourold job back?" she whispered. "He hasn't filled the position yet."
Behind her, the line was lengthening halfway into thediningroom.
So much for slow afternoons.

47

"It's okay, really.""I'm sure he'd hire you back," she continued. "You were justabout the best we had." A worried look spread across her face as.
she took in my surroundings.
''Betsy!'' I said, my patience wearing thin. "1m leaving for
California in one week. Right after my next paycheck here." Iglanced over my shoulder to make sure Neil wasn't within earshot. He didn't know shit about me quitting. "Ketchup?" I held up
three "to go" packets.
"Yes, thanks," she said, paying me. She snapped her purse shutand grabbed her bag of food. "I'll put in a good word for you withJames," she said, in a conspiratorial whisper, walking out the front
door in her heels.
''Don't bother Betsy, really!" I called after her. I smacked thecountertop with the palm of my hand. "Goddammit!" I walked up
and then down in the six feet of space behind the counter.
"Hey!" some bald-headed guy from the back of the line yelled
out. "How about shaking a leg up there? This is the slowest fast
food I've ever seen!" He poked his head outfrom behind a long lineof bodies standing in front of him.
'Wait your turn Bud!" I snarled, stopping to shovel somebody' s
large fries into a cardboard carton. "I only got two hands!"'Where's the manager?" he said, indignantly. "I wanna see themanager.""I'm the manager," I said, pointing at myself. I turned to facehim. "Next question?" He didn't answer. The other people in line
shifted uncomfortably. I went back to stuffing French fries incartons, bagged an order, and rung it up. I looked up. Three morecustomers came through the front door. Shit! So much for slow
afternoons. I spun around and jabbed my thumb into the buzzer
under the counter, ringing the back room for more help.

48

Carie Winslow

A Poor Girl Comes Clean
This friend is sitting in my living room. Her face is red, her voice
is.high pitched, and she is clearly angry. She's angry about lesbians
not working together. She's angry about poverty. Mainly she's
angry about her poverty and she's pissed at lesbians who aren't
helping her enough. Normally I get a kick out of her free floating
anger: tonight I'm not amused. I move around her, I change a lightbulb here, I straighten a doily there. Something is getting underneath my skin. I already know that the something is the oldbitterness I feel towards middle class girls who complain about
being poor. I can usually tell what class they came from by how
loudly indignant they are about doing without and how shocked
they look that poverty has actually happened to them. This is apretty normal scene for me, most times I just shrug it off. Sometimes I'm dishonest enough to commiserate with them. Tonight I
don't feel very normaL Tonight I know what is expected of me. I
just can't seem to pull it off. I want to slap this woman. I want tobreak glass and make a lot of noise. I tighten my mouth, but an old
sardonic look swims out from the corner of my eye before I can stop
it. It's too late, she has seen the look and stops midsentence. I leave
the room in a hurry. Why can't I say something. There are so many
garbled half said things racing behind my eyes. I have swallowed
all these words and all the rage that makes them remain. I havesubdued myself with bargains hastily made. "Shut up and you will
be respected and loved." "Shut up and you will be rescued." "Shutup or they'll talk about the time you stayed at the Pagoda anddidn't pay."
I still have a high investment in not being found out. My momtaught me that it was important to hide being poor. I can see mymom sitting tentatively but starchily upright in the rich relatives'chair. She is arching her ankle, clearing her throat, flourishing herpinkie with every dainty sip from her China tea cup. She is bristlingwith animation and armed with a whole repertoire of gestures.
Maybe if she works hard enough, the group of refined ladies sitting
49with us will ignore her 10 year old fortrel dress and the last minutemending job on the run in the nylons that she never throws out.
So what if my mother had to wear old cheap clothes? Wellthat's not it.
The sadness in this picture is that! am only 6 years old and even
I can see that we are only allowed to talk as long as it suits thecharity of these women. I can see that for all my mother's effort she has failed at this illusion of gentility and that at the hostess'convenience my mother will be exposed and put in her place.
What's even sadder is that neither my mom or I will see anything
wrong with this nor will we mention it. That's the trick of charity,
it's designed to make only the recipient feel squeamish. I haveincorporated this lesson so well that even around friends that I
have known for years (who are almost always middle class) I am
almost always on guard. I am a well trained captive of the tone ofvoice dripping with the power of a woman who knows how tohandle the servants caught stealing.
My silence is the price I've paid for acceptance all these years.
So the loudness of the nouveau poor is unsettling to me. I want toscream you have no right to lay claim to poverty. You don't know
the price poverty exacts. Some people don't choose poverty, someare born to it. Some people spend their lives trying to get out ofneighborhoods they grew up in or occupations they were slottedfor by grade 4.
I remember the countless old women I worked with behindcountless counters. We all had to wear stupid hats and silly aprons
in institutions colors. I loved many of these women. They taught
me alot about doing what you had to do. But the only way that I
could stand to look at them smiling and serving all day is if I told
myself that I was going to get out of here. My life was going to bebetter than this.
Now I'm a grown woman and I clean houses and lots of myfriends clean houses. We still talk about doing other things, but it'sdifferent for me. Those old ladies show up in my hips and my knees
when I look at myself in the mirrors I clean. I am doing what I was
built for.
When I think about it deeper I don't want my friend to stop
being angry about being poor. Everyone should be angry about50

poverty. lt stinks. What I resent and envy at the same time is that
I have no voice unless it accompanies hers. lean talk about not being
able to afford food now and I have people in my life who understandthat. But its not the present that eats at me. Where do I go to talkaboutthese things I have no words for? Who do I tell the stories thataren't about good, strong, contented poor people. Oh, there might
be one or two dykes. We'll be in a crowd and we'll make brief
reference to "the neighborhood I grew up in." But we never reallytalk about our lives back there in those neighborhoods. Or there aredykes who I don't even make eye contact with but I've heard in low
tone voices that so and so "had it tough growing up."
I know that I had it tough growing up. Sometimes I see myself
with a desperate look in my eye and my hands flapping. I'm trying
to convey what it was like but I draw a blank. I don't remember.
N ow I'm sitting in my bedroom, still so angry and not knowing
why. There is a difference, there is a big difference between the way
most of the women I know grew up and the way I grew up and it
has to do with class. But what is it? What's eating me? I'm thinking
how my house used to be full of people; full of big grown men. I
always tell other people that Uncle Ted and Uncle Bill and later
Billy and Raymond and Jimmy and Lome all lived in our little
house because we were helping them get on theirfeet. Tonight I am
remembering that this generosity is right around the time mymother dates as 'When your dad was laid off from the railroad" or"when your dad was laid off from the clean towel delivery" or"your dad was sand bagging." I've never bothered to think about
this but tonight I put together that this list of lay-offs is long andthey all happened shortly after my parents bought their very firsthouse and Uncle Ted and Billy and Raymond and Jimmy and
Lome all came to live there and Jimmy and Lome and Billy andRaymond gang raped me around that same time and they kept on
living there after they raped me.
lt is a fact that my mother knew they raped me. lt is a fact that
she threatened to literally bury me alive if I told the secret to myfather or anyone else. Buttonight, for the first time, I realize that mymother was faced with the choice between my safety and the only
money that was coming in, while my dad was laid off. She chosethe mortgage and our food.

51

There, there is the bottom layer of this rage I have neverunderstood. There is one of the little secrets I have been trying tohide behind my self-righteous silence about poverty. I would
rather not call attention to the decisions my Mother made under its
tyranny or the ones I will make as I stand in her shoes. Tonight theburden of the chasm between me and most of the lesbians in mycommunity weighs heavy on me. All the times they "just don't getit" makes me ache with loneliness.
The telephone rings. My friend wants to apologize for dumping on me. I take a deep breath and I say"I think this is about class."
She begins to whine "I know." I get brave and tell her ''No, not ourclass, my class - where I came from and you didn't." She shuts up.
I talk. We make a good beginning.

Elaine Bliss (color photo)
Corie Lamere

52Sabena Stark

Two Short Pieces on Home1

She was sitting on the floor rocking, holding her stomach where
the hurt was. The air was wet with chicken fat and carrots fogging
up the windows with endless boiling. Her braids, once tightly
woven on each side of her head, hung limply, one in front, one inback,' with several stray hairs flying wildly and unrestrained
around her face. Perry Como was singing faintly in the background, a dull bluish-grey light from the "livingroom" where her
crib was still living in the corner. The evening explosion had comeand gone. Muffled voices, feet stamping, doors slamming, thesound of pots crashing from the floor above and the many floors
below seeped through the walls. This was silence.
She was already six, but still banished at night to her crib after
another terrible chase, threats, the belt being removed, as a final
warning, from Daddy's pants - "GAY SHLUFEN!"* - thislouder and louder was the nightly lullaby. Her face was burning,a familiar feeling, from getting slapped. But tonight her belly, hertender, soft belly, hurt and hurt. Because Daddy got so mad, he
forgot to stop hitting. Even when she layed on the floor, pleadingin Yiddish, in English, for him to stop. His rage was bigger than her
tears or pleas could reach. She couldn't believe this was possible;
this man that colored in her coloring book with her at the park
didn't even know who she was. She rocked and rocked, with a cold
numbness, and the imprint of the tip of a leather shoe in her
precious, round, soft little girl belly.
2

The cord didn't reach across the floor to the outlet behindthe bed, so they didn't watch television that night. The TV was too*Go to sleep!

53

heavy to move again and the boxes of books and the nightstandstood between it and the outlet which was much closer. Her backmuscles ached and her hands started to swell and tingle fromcarrying furniture and boxes down the stairs from apartment #4
into the borrowed truck. The bed was the only island in the sea ofchaos, and she didn't care about anything else when she finallylanded there. Her lover was still taking an extended shower when
she fell asleep.
The landlady wouldn't refund all of her deposit money because, she said, there were extra costs involved since she had lived
there so long. The a partment would have to be repainted, she said,
but the owner never got around to having this done for the four
years she lived there. But this womon, who owned four otherbuildings, all of them equipped with historic electrical wiring andgreenish-brown rugs, did promise to return a month's worth ofrent and $125.00 of the original deposit. This seemed like freemoney after all of these years, since most landlords had found a
way to steal her deposit money in the past with typical landlord
excuses. The check would be sent to her new address in ten days.
When she stood in her emptied apartment, it seemed that thepromise of that gesture barely compensated for paying for the
mortgage on a building that was long past paid for and barely alegal domicile. She wanted so badly to line all the walls with honeyand invite the bugs to finally and forever take over her apartment.
She did, however, think mercifully about the next prisoner of thishovel and restrain that impulse. She had found a job she liked nearher new home so it was possible to drop the key in her mailbox on
the way out without hesitation; her survival didn't depend onwhether or not she got that damn check.
Her lover did most of the driving for the first hour or so,
because her hands were not sore and she loved driving long
distances. The radio sang out above the growling of the surrounding traffic. Feeling so tired and so excited left them both in a daze.
This ride was the resolution of such a deep longing. Anything moreverbal than hollering out the window of the truck was unnecessary. When they stopped at their final destination it was truly an
act of love that gave them both the energy to unload the truck of
their belongings.

54

Creating instant order was not possible at this point in the day. She
did remember to open the living room windows before barricadingthat side of the room with unruly stacks, but the lamp was out ofreach behind a dresser and a stuffed chair that faced the wall. Herlover reminded her that the light switch was behind a picture
leaning against the couch, just as the room greyed into early
evening. This space had shrunk considerably in size since theirfirst visit here. But there were many rooms, with doors that could
lean open or swing shut into their own thresholds, and that's whatmattered.
The heat lingered in the room despite the breeze entering fromthe opened windows. The walls were thick. The difference between
inside and outside was not just an illusion created by a combination of modesty and a rent check. When they left to get something
to eat, she notic'e d that there was only one lock to turn on the door.

She drifted out of a dream into panic and couldn't remember
which way her head was facing. Every muscle felt worn. Her
hands were asleep, painful. Slowly the sounds of birds trickled in
the window. U nti! this moment, she hadn't really left Oakland. The
smell of trees and quiet soaked into her head. She cried awake andwatched her lover sleeping so deeply, finally home.

55

If You Could Say Any;thing ... ~~~~
We asked lesbians from the lower classes to say anything they wanted to, incomplete anonymity, to the class-privileged dykes in their communities.
Solemn, sarcastic, sincere: this is what came back. - ed.
Embrace Lesbian solidarity - we are each others' strongest potential allies. Learn to appreciate sarcasm. At least learn torecognizeit, and don't accuse us of threatening
violence every time we make a wise crack.
No honest work is below anyone's dignity.
Sometimes I wonder if the community attitude that we can never truly
understand each other doesn't come partly from the fact that the dominant
middle-class lesbians don't know how to understand anyone but themselves.
I refuse to revere or glorify your bourgeois trappings.
Don't tell me how you wish you were from a family like mine, so
you wouldn't feel so driven by family ambition to get your Ph.D.
Is your greatest aim asociety or world consistingof only the upper,
privileged classes?

Lesbians: Demonstrate yourrecovering class guilt, share yourfinancial and other resources.

Your class privilege prohibits you fromworking for total destruction of patriarchy!
Dropping your father's and former husband's names andrenaming yourself doesn't alter your economic reality or
your access to financial well being.

It's one thing to change your food habits or to make someconscious choices about what's good for you to eat; it's anotherto ridicule the foods that poor people have no choice but to eat.

56

my are your wallets and bank accounts full,nd your hearts empty of compassion?

~~~~~~w~e~'re tired of talking about this too, y'know!
~Your inability to acknowledge the benefits
derived from your class privilege hurts me.

I'm tired of insulting dynamics, to wit Prosperity/New Age: Take responsibility for the world's classo~pression, create your own reality and live in another world.

::~§~~g§~g

Therapy Model: You have to adjust to middle class norms and values.
'I' OK, you're not OK, but I'll never cop to this attitude."
The magic momma myth: The middle class woman who cries trashing "from below"
when inequalities of privilege are questioned.
Stop scolding - the humiliations dished out to us are never dlgnified with any notice.
Abunda t money does not equate to abundant joy.

75.

Aw c'mon, don't be so hoity toity!

Keep your stereotypes to yourself.
1'/iT) mad as hell but it doesn't mean
I don't have any fun!

I hate when I talk about
my difficulties due tobeing working class andI get advice from a
middle class woman.

Stop pretending to be working-class when you're not, goddam it!
I don't want your damn car, I want you to stop stepping on my face.

Give me your car!
When we want you to change your attitudes, you're afraid wewant your money, and then, when we tell you we need money,
you offer to clean up your attitudes. Talk about a class act!

57

Naja Sorella

Lies, Lies & More Lies
Being disabled, living on SSI and Medi-Cal * is exhausting to say
the least. I'm worn out with everyday survival. The attitudes ofsome Lesbians towards those of us who're poor, on government
assistance programs, and/ or disabled, makes it that much harder. There's so many societal lies and myths about those of us on
assistance programs, and Lesbians seem to have swallowed them
whole.
One of the basic attitudes that influences how America ingeneral, and Lesbians specifically treat us, is that work equals
worth. How much a person works, the type of work they do, andhow much they're paid for it, determines their value. Along withthis goes the Great American Myth: the USA is the land of plenty
and there's equal opportunity for anyone to be successful if only
they work hard enough. Not only is this classist, but ablist (andracist, and ageist, etc.). Along with the Great American Mythcomes the lie that the government is taking care of all the poor,
disabled, and old people that need it. The government has plentyof assistance programs for everyone who really needs it and eventakes care of a lot of people who don't really need it but are gettin
free rides off the government. There are plenty of Lesbians whobelieve these myths and lies.

The Myth of "One Simple Phone Call"or What's Taking You So Long?
Lesbians, along with everyone else, believe that the government is waiting with open arms to give you assistance, and all you
need to do is make "one simple phone call," or "just apply," andpresto! you're on Welfare, Food Stamps, 551, etc. I fought for four
years before I finally got 55!. Lesbians kept asking why I wasn't on"SSI is Supplemental Security Income, a federal program for poor disabled
people, and Medi-Cal is a California state medical program for poor womynwith children and disabled people officially on SS!.

58

it yet, and when I'd explain the difficulties, they were suspicious.
Again, along with the rest of society, some Lesbians believe that if
you're not getting government help, there must be something
personally wrong with you. Mter all, the government takes care ofeveryone who really needs it. Maybe you're not as poor as you
claim or as disabled. Or perhaps you didn't really try hard enough,or you didn't do it right. Or the best one of all, you don't even want
to help yourself, and you're so lazy you didn't even bother to apply
in the first place. If you'd really applied like you claim, then you'dhave it by now.
The truth about any assistance program is that it's damned
hard to get on. It's almost a 24-hour a day job, and requires
incredible health and stamina (which we don't have) to do all thework involved. I've lived on Welfare, Food 5tamps, 551 and MediCal. Mostly I'll refer to 551 and Medi-Cal, since I've dealt with themlonger and am more familiar with them. It's estimated that 30% of
the disabled people nationwide that are eligible for 551 actually getit. 551, like other assistance programs, sets the criteria so as toeliminate most applicants. There are very few disabilities andchronic illnesses that are in the code book 551 uses to determine
who gets 55!. Basically, they want you either totally paralyzed ordead in six months. If your illness or disability isn't in their code
book, you're outa luck. And from my experience, I tell you, thatcode book ain't worth shit. My experience, and that of most
Lesbians who try to get 551 for something not listed in the code
book, is that we fightthemforyears before finally getting accepted.
And not all of us win. I've heard of middle-class Lesbians that usedconnections (a family friend who's a lawyer, psychiatrist, politician, etc.) that got them on 551 quickly, but I don't know of any
poor/working-class Lesbians who've had this kind of privilege.
If you're sick/disabled and apply for any kind of assistance,
you gotta have a doctor fill out forms that verify you're not fakin.
If you can't afford to see a doctor, you don't get the forms signed.
Usually, many, many visits to different doctors, mostly highpriced specialists, and expensive tests are required before a diagnosis is found. And this can take years. And until you have anofficial western medicine diagnosis, don't even bother hoping tofind yourself in 55I's code book.

59

Let's say you're a poor Lesbian and can't afford all those fancy
doctors. You end up at community clinics or county hospitals,
which are underfunded and offer minimal care. The misogyny
inherent in traditional western medicine is reflected in the lack ofknowledge and research about womyn's diseases, and the tendency of doctors to not believe womyn's physical complaints andmisdiagnose them, or more commonly, tell them it's all in theirheads. Clinics and county health programs don't provide any
alternative health care such as acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, herbs, etc. Instead, they offer surgery (which can belife-threatening), and drugs (many are highly toxic). Once you
refuse these treatments, your refusal goes into your charts, and theclinic or hospital is no longer obliged to offer you any further
services. Now your goose is really cooked! When you apply forcounty, state or federal assistance programs, they get your medical
charts and can deny you assistance because you refused a treatment that supposedly would make you healthy/able-bodied, andable to work again. The attitude is that you refused the surgery
and/or drugs because you don't really wanna get better and go
back to work, you just wanna free load off the government.
When you're rejected by assistance programs, you can appeal,
but appeals take years, and some kinda lawyer to help you figureout how to do the damn appeal. Who can afford that? Meanwhile,
you got no money to live on. So you force your butt to work, while
the appeals slowly grind their way through the bureaucracy, butthen, they consider you able-bodied because you worked. If you're
totally unable to work due to illness/ disability, and are fortunate
enough to have a family member or friend to live with while you
wait for Welfare or 551, then you're disqualified for the assistancebecause you have someone who can support you. Of course, if
you're not fortunate enough to have some place to stay while you
wait, your butt's still in trouble, because you can't get government
assistance without a street address!
The myth of making "one simple phone call," or putting in one
application for assistance is a joke. Anyone who's had to deal withthe system knows better than that. When I went to Welfare, I got
up at five in the morning, took several buses for an hour or more,
to arrive as early as possible before the office opened at eight. If you

60arrive at eight, too bad for you. There'll be 70 to 100 people in line
before you. They go in first, get their number first, and if you're
number 106, you might as well take the bus back home. The firsttime I went, I didn't know this. I sat from eight in the morning until
four in the afternoon in a smoke filled room, sick as a dog, andwaited and waited and waited. At the end of all that waiting, I
didn't even get to fill out an application. I was too ill to make it backthe next day, so weeks later when I could deal with the buses,
smoke, and sitting all day, I got there at seven~ I did get myapplication in that day, but that wasn't the end of that. Over the
next month or two, I went back many more times, again spending
the whole day there, before I got the Welfare. On top of all that, I
had to sign a form sayin I'd pay the Welfare back whenever I got
any money. When Ifinally got 55Iin 1988, every dime Welfare had
given me was automatically taken out of- my retroactive 551
payments. So much for a free ride!

The Disappearing File Act
It's not uncommon for applications and complete files to belost. About two years into appealing 551, I discovered they'd lost
my file. They'd never heard of me, had no file anywhere on me, andI had to start over. Workers will also say they've lost your file when
they don't wanna get up and go look for it. It's also not uncommon
for workers to give you wrong information, if you' re lucky enoughto get ahold of them at all! (I've left messages for weeks before
getting my worker.) Workers will tell you to do such and such orcall such and such department and when you do that, the workers
at such and such a department say no, that's not what you're
supposed to do, you're supposed to do this and that instead. This
game can go on for months. The one I hate the most is when I callperson and/ or department A who tells me to call person and/ or
department B, and when I call B, they tell my they're the wrong
person/ department, I'm supposed to call A. I explain that A told
me to call them, but B insists A is the right person/ department. I
call A back, and of course, A is emphatic that B is the right person/
department. And they both insist there's nothing more they can dofor me, after all, it's not their department. This can also go on formonths.

61

On top of all this, workers out and out lie. I've been told certain
information by a worker, who'll later tell me she/he didn't say thatat all. Or, they'll promise to do a procedure that's vital to yourapplication, or your continuation of a service, then they either
forget to do it, or refuse to do it, and deny they promised to do itin the first place. The worker is always right, they're never, neverwrong. It's us vyho eat shit. Confronting a worker on her/his lying
and/ or incompetence (which is rampant in assistance programs)
is very dangerous. They have all the power. You rub your worker
the wrong way, and forget the service or program you've applied
for or are already on. Workers make up their own rules. It may not
be legal, but they do it. If they don't like something about you, or
if you haven't properly grovelled or kissed ass enough, watch out!
In 1985, I was on Welfare when my father suddenly keeledover one night and died. My sister bought me a plane ticket, andI left California to be with my family in Denver. I asked my lover
to call my worker to cancel an appointment I had with her thefollowing week, and to also tell her I'd left due to a death in thefamily. The worker informed my lover that unless I was back inthree days, she was terminating my Welfare. In the middle of afamily crisis, I had to make days worth of long distance calls tostraighten this mess out. After realizing my worker wasn't gonnabudge on this three day business, I asked her for her supervisor's
name and number. She flat out refused. Clearly against the rules,
but she was making up her own rules. My lover had to get a Legal
Aid Worker to obtain the supervisor's name and number. The
supervisor allowed me to stay out of state for three weeks (the legal
amount oftime) but I had to furnish proof that my father had reallydied when I returned to California. As well, my worker continuously punished me for the rest of the time I was on Welfare, fordaring to question her power and authority.

"The Community's There For You!"
Besides believing the lie that the government takes care of all
who need it, some Lesbians also believe that the Lesbian community is taking care of all poor and/ or disabled Lesbians. Over theyears, both my lover and I've been told (usually, but not always, bymiddle class, white, able-bodied Lesbians) "the community will62

do that for you." Among other illnesses and disabilities, I'm
Environmentally III (E.!.). Living in the Bay Area is extremely toxic,
and we want to move to a less toxic, rural area. Some Lesbians are
not only shocked, but angry to discover I'm still in the Bay Area 7
years later. They demand to know why I haven't moved and when
my lover or I try to explain the complications, they'll emphaticallystate, 'Well ... the community will help you move!" As if there's
offers to help me move pouring in every day, and I'm turning them
down! Another example of this was when a Lesbian came to myhome to give me health care. She saw my paintings on the wall andasked if I' d been exhibiting and/ or selling them. I briefly describedsome of the difficulties for me as a homebound, mostly bed boundwomon (with only a couple offunctional hours a day) livingoffSSI
and paying almost half of it for rent. Again, 'Well. .. the community will help you get your paintings out in the world. There's
plenty of Lesbians who'd love your art and want to help." So I told
her to feel free to give my name and number to all those Lesbians,
and now, over 9 months later, I haven't gotten one call.
There's all kinds of attitudes underlying those comments. Firstis the assumption that just like the government, the Lesbiancommunity is taking care of everyone who needs help. They're justsitting on our doorsteps waiting for us to pen the door and invite
them in. The belief that since "the community" is waiting to help
us, there's something personally wrong with us, if we're notgetting help. Or perhaps we don't really want help, we don't want
to help ourselves, so we haven't asked all these willing and waiting
lesbians. Or, maybe we don't deserve the help. Maybe we're notreally poor and/or disabled, and that's why all those Lesbians
aren't there for us. I'm so fed up with this attitude of something's
wrong with me if I don't have all those helpful Lesbians on mydoor step, that I want to scream at the next Lesbian that spouts thatshit to me.
"The Community?" Huh, what?
Who is "the community" that these Dykes claim is waiting andwilling if only I'd open my door and let them in? I asked my lover,'Who do you think these Dykes are talking about when they tell us'the community' will do this or that for me?" She said, "These are
all middle and upper class Dykes and they're talking about the63community they have around them, other middle and upper class
Lesbians." If this is true, if their definition of "the community"refers only to Dykes with physical and financial resources, then I
don't know these Lesbians. The community that continues to begenerous and supportive of me after all these years of being sickand poor is a small number of Lesbians who're mostly poor anddisabled themselves. This means they have fewer physical andfinancial resources to share. This is my community.
There are small pockets of Dykes who're devoted to disabled
and/ or poor Lesbians, but the truth is, there isn't much of "thecommunity" available to us. Valuable Lesbian energy has been lostto men with AIDS. Lesbians who might've given free health care,massages, housecleaning, personal and/or political energy to poor
disabled Dykes ten years ago, now give it to men with AIDS instead.
Another attitude that keeps some Lesbians from sharing theirresources is this prosperity consciousness bulls hit. It comes inmany forms: "willingness to manifest your life," "just go for it,""you'd be healthy/have money if you really wanted to," "yournegative thinking prevents you from having prosperity," "youcreate your own reality," an on and on ad nauseam. Many years
ago, a Lesbian was giving me extremely low fee therapy in myhome. That she was willing to do that was great. About a year into
it, she told me she couldn't work with me any more because I
wasn't "willing to manifest my life." What she based this decision
on was the fact that I was often too ill to make the phone calls
necessary to get information about the assistance programs I
wanted to apply for. My physicalinabilityto make phone calls waschalked up to a lack of "willingness to manifest my life." Of course,
she never offered to make some of those phone calls for me. Both
my lover and I've had Dykes tell us to "just go for it," after we've
explained how no money and my incredibly complicated illnesses
and disabilities are the reasons we haven't moved yet. It's easy to"just go for it," when you have health and class privilege. Class
privilege not only gives someone the money to "just go for it," butthe know how, and perhaps more importantly, valuable personaland business contacts.
Class privilege also determines which Lesbians are more likely tohave "the community" (middle and upper class Dykes) available to64them. Middle and upper class Dykes know more middle andupper class Dykes than do us poor/working class Dykes. These
Lesbians have beneficial work contacts. Those of us who got shit
jobs, or no jobs at all, don't have the same number of classprivileged friends in our lives. For Dykes like myself who're
mostly homebound by illness/ disability, our contacts with "thecommunity" are fewer as the years go by. The number of middle
class Lesbians I knew 8 years ago when I was first becoming
disabled by my illnesses, and the number of them in my life now,
has decreased dramatically. A few years ago, a close friend of mine
got cancer. Being a professional, she had tons of professional
friends and contacts. The help and support she received on alllevels, was very different than what my current group of mostly
poor, ill/ disabled Dykes are able to give me. Some middle class
Lesbians who'd known of me for years, but never offered any
support, donated time and energy to her though some of themhadn't known her previously. My friend and I talked about thedifference in how "the community" was there for her versus forme, and we acknowledged that cancer is a more recognized illness
than the types of immune system illnesses I have. But we neverdiscussed how class played a role as well. That was scarier for me.

"Well ... Then, What Do You Do All Day?"
Like mainstream society, many Lesbians believe the lie thatpeople on assistance programs sit around eating bon-bons, watching soap operas, and painting their nails. They think that once
we're on assistance, it takes care of all our needs, and we don't haveanything to do with all our "leisure" time. I can't begin to counthow many times Dykes have asked me what I do all day, since I
don't "work." I must admit that all those years I busted my butt to
get 551, I thought that once I got it, I could relax a little, not have towork so hard every day fighting the bureaucracy. The truth is, once
on an assistance program, you work as hard to keep it as you did
to get it in the first place.
5ervices and programs that are supposed to be available to you
once you're on 55I and Medi-Cal, don't come automatically. Yes,
I qualify for Section 8 housing (federal housing subsidy for poor
people who are disabled, old or got kids) but six years after

65

applying and being approved, I still don't got it. Even though I've
been approved for it, I do continual work to make sure they don'tlose my file again for the umpteenth time, that I'm still on the list
(it's amazing how one minute your name's on the list and the next
minute it just up and walked off the page) finding out new
information and rules, etc., etc. When Lesbians demand to know
why I don't have Section 8 after all these years, and I explain it tothem, they give me that look that says, "I don't believe you, youmust not be doing it right." After all, if! was doing it right, I'd have
Section 8 by now.
My various illnesses/disabilities give me an average of twohours of functional time a day. Dealing with my illness itself, as
well as trying to obtain medical care I need is something I work at
every single day. Some Dykes don't believe me, saying that I haveMedi-Cal and it pays for everything. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Medi-Cal is funded by the state and each year thestate makes cuts in Med~-Cal funding. Very few doctors take MediCal as they pay so low that doctors can't recover the money it takes
to pay their office workers to fill out the Medi-Cal forms. Also,
Medi-Cal has a bad track record of not paying health providers,even when they do send in the piles of forms. Mostly, Medi-Cal
covers western medicine, but there are many types of doctors,
tests, drugs, surgeries and other treatments they won't cover.
I struggled with Medi-Cal for several years to get them to pay
for my oxygen (which they're supposed to cover). They maintained EI wasn't a valid reason for oxygen. I need oxygen due to my
EI, and they maintained EI wasn't a valid reason for oxygen. They
wouldn't pay, the oxygen company wanted to cut me off, and I put
countless hours and months into dealing with the oxygen company, Medi-Cal and a Legal Aid worker. It was another situation
where I'd do weeks of work and think I' d resolved something, only
to find out it'd gotten screwed up one way or another. In the end,
I was lucky. Medi-Cal approved the oxygen two years into thebattle, because they messed up the paper work and didn't want toadmit it in court. It took four other womyn with E.!. another two
years to win their oxygen case in court. The amount of relief I felt
over no longer worrying about having the funding for my oxygen
cut off, and no longer fighting the daily battle with Medi-Cal over

66

I

,

oxygen, is hard to put into words. As well, the time I'd spen t fighting
them was now freed up to fight for some other service I needed.
Medi-Cal will cover a total of two alternative health treatments,
such as acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, etc., a month. Again,
the fee they pay alternative health care providers is so low, hardly
anyone takes Medi-Cal. For those of us with chronic illnesses, twotreatments a month often isn't enough. Many of us need treatments weekly, and sometimes 2-3 times a week. Both my lover andI spend a lot of time contacting alternative health providers, asking
how low their fees are, if they make home calls, and if they're willingto use safe products (personal care products that won't make meill) in order to come into my home. Many months of calls go into
finding the one or two health providers that are willing to do it.
Once you've done the months or years of work to obtain aMedi-Cal service, you're not home free yet. I've been getting inhome intravenous (IV) gamma globulin for two years now. It took
an unbelievable amount of work to set up. After two years of doingit, you'd think things would go smoothly. Guess again. There's
always a glitch somewhere. I call in orders for new gamma globulin,
IV needles, tubing, etc. The supplies are sent to the company the inhome nurse works for, she picks them up there and brings them
here. We're told the supplies are there, and she goes to pick themup on the day of my infusion, and of course, no supplies. I spend
the next four hours making desperate phone calls. Better yet, I'm
told I never ordered any supplies, despite the fact I've written
down the day I ordered them and who I talked to. Of course, as theclient, I'm always wrong. Like with case workers, don't challengethem, don't confront them on their incompetency or lying, if you
want to keep your service. Another glitch; the nurse doesn't showup, she's sick, her kid's sick, or she forgot she was supposed tocome, etc. More hours and days of phone calls to get another nurse.
Every time my treatment is late, ittakes two months to catch up on thebenefits it give sme. Late treatments only happen 3-4 times a year, but
times two months each time, that's over half the year.
Recently, my lover and I decided to ask the company to train
her to put the IV needle in. We felt this would give us more
independence, cut down on late treatments, and remove the risk ofreacting to toxic nurses. In their quarterly magazine, the company

67

bragged about training patients or their family members to self
infuse. So we called them up and said we wanted to do it.
Suddenly, nobody has heard of training for self infusion. They
don't offer it. We- must be mixed up, it's the company they
subcontract to (for the in-home nurses) that does the training. So
we call the company that hires the nurses and they say no, we don't
do it. Back and forth and back and forth. Weeks later I think I've
finally got it all set up, and again, they don't remember talking tome and promising to set the training up.
What else do we do with all our "leisure time?" Ask just about
any chronically ill/disabled Dyke and she'll tell you she learns
more about her illness/disability, new doctors, tests, and treatments from her similarly ill friends than she does from her doctor.
Instead of eating bon-bons and planning our next cruise, we'reconstantly searching out new information, asking other womyn ifsuch and such a product helped or not, what they've done for thisor that problem, etc. This is a full time job. When my brain works,
I read anything I can get, about the various illnesses I have.
As if there wasn't enough to do, there's the ever continual
search for attendants. In Home Support (IHSS) is the Alameda
County program that supplies money for attendants. If you're
lucky enough to get it. It's another one of those programs whose
funding is continually cut. Fewer and fewer people receive it, andonce you do get it, you fight every year to keep the number of hours
they've given you, if you're not outright cut off altogether. Once
you're on IHSS, you don't sit back, watch tv, and pick lint frombetween your toes. Finding an attendant is a perpetual pain in the
ass! IHSS pays minimum wage for attendants. It's hard work, low
pay and no sick days off or holidays. It's the type of work college .
students do, people who're in between jobs, and people in the
country illegally. In other words, transient work. Noone goes into
attendant work as a career. A few womyn are lucky enough to keep
attendants a year or two at a time, but most of us lose them every
month or two. Being as E.!. as I am, I need attendants willing to giveup their toxic personal care products and only use safe products.
This is extremely difficult. Most people, even Dykes, are attachedto their hair permanents, dyes, mousses, gels, etc., or to their makeup, hand lotion, deodorant, fabric softener, incense, and so on. I

68keep ads in the local papers for attendants and do phone interviews every week. Sometimes every day. Yet the only person I've
been able to keep as an attendant is my lover. Besides constantlyinterviewing possible attendants, I spend hours making up lists ofthings for my lover to do when she works for me.

Welfare Bums, Free Loaders, Scammers,
and Taking a Free Ride at Tax Payers Expense
None of the assistance programs, whether it's Welfare, SSI,IHSS, AFDC, Food Stamps, etc., provide the bare subsistenceneeds for poor and/or disabled people. No program begins tobring recipients up to government stated poverty levels. What thismeans is that folks gotta figure out how to get the rest of their basic
needs. Since it's against the law to have more than what the
programs give you, you gotta scam. Assistance programs call thisWelfare Fraud. People living on programs call it survival. It takes
much time and energy scrambling to get survival needs met thataren't covered by assistance programs, and learning how not to getcaught. Obstacle courses, catch 22's, and impossible criteria arebuilt into every assistance program as a way of eliminating mostpeople who need the help. As a result, time and energy must be
spent learning what these traps are, and how to get around them.
For instance, the Food Stamp Program asks you where you
live, if you share a kitchen, and if you share meals with anyone. If
you so much as eat one meal with a lover, roommate, or friend,
tha.t's considered meal sharing, and disqualifies you for foodstamps. The rationale is: if someone shares their food even oncewith you, then you don'-t need the stamps because you havesomeone who feeds you: And if you share your food with someone
else, then you must not really need food stamps, and as well, you
might share food you've bought with Food Stamps, and that's
fraud. Of course, before the worker asks you if you ever eat meals
with anyone else, they don't tell you why they're asking thequestion. Also, if you answer no, you don't share food withanyone, they come back real fast at you with, "Never! You never
have a meal with a roommate orfriend?" So you think about it, andyou say something like, "Oh yeah, once a month my best friend
and I get together and cook a meal." They gotcha! Instead of then69

telling you that meal sharing isn't legal, and asking you to agree
not to food share when you get Food Stamps, they just quietly
disqualify you and months later when you receive your letter ofdenial, you wonder what the hell went wrong.
Every interview for assistance, and every application form ischocked full of questions like this, meant to trick you into disqualifying yourself for the program. Before any interview or filling out
of forms, it's important to call everyone you know who's gone
through it, and find out what traps to avoid. Besides having impossible criteria, and trick questions, there isn't anyone inassistance programs that tells you about other programs andservices you're eligible for. I've never had a worker inform me
about a service that not only did I need, but that I qualified for. Thisis the kind of information we must seek out, mostly by calling otherfriends who've more experience surviving on assistance programs. One more thing to do with all that "leisure" time we're
supposed to be wasting on eating Food Stamp bon-bons while we
paint our nails ~herry red.
This myth that those of us on assistance get free rides off
taxpayers' money while we do nothing all day is so infuriating.
Nothing is ever free. I once figured out that I get paid less than 2cents an hour (based on my month's SSI check) for all the work I do
every day, just to get or keep services.
Some Lesbians think, at least we can rely on the monthly
checks, we don't have to worry about our basic survival. Not so.
Quicker than you can say jack shit, you've got a letter in the mailinforming you they're cutting you off for one reason or another.
Usually, they've made another stupid mistake, which takes you
weeks of phone calls to straighten out. (By the way, I talk so, muchabout phone calls because I'm homebound. For those nothousebound, they make you come down and sit and wait.) Sometimes they find some minor technicality to bust you on. There's
always the fear they'll find out about some scam you're pulling justto have the bucks to pay your light bill. And then there's the jealousor angry former friend, lover, or neighbor, who reports you out ofspite. People are quick to say, "Oh, but I just read about a case ofreal fraud." When I ask about this case of "real fraud, "1 find out it'ssome womon who's getting twice the amount she's supposed to70get from AFDC. She also has 12 kids! No one can live offa AFDC
with 12 kids. Even the extra amount she was getting wouldn't
begin to support that many kids. Real fraud is when temporarily
broke class-privileged people or able-bodied people easily get on
assistance programs while the poor /working-class or disabled are
denied. People are willing to believe this shit the media puts out.
Every year the assistance programs lose funding, and they start
looking around to see how they can cut clients. Every year comesa reevaluation of one or more of your services, and since funding
gets cut each year, it gets harder and harder to keep qualifying forthe services you already got, let alone get new ones.
Those of us on programs are a small percentage of the people
who need services. Compared to people who're unable to get the
programs, yes, I'm lucky. It should be a right, not a "privilege." I
acknowledge this advantage that others need-equally as much andhave worked equally as hard to get, but have been denied. But for
healthy, able-bodied, class-privileged Lesbians, don't you dare tellme I'm getting a free ride, or you wish you had it so easy, or thatit must be nice notto work, or thatI' m lucky to get a monthly check.
Not only do I work harder in my two hours per day than many ofyou do in your eight, I also live with the fear of being thrown off
programs, with the degradation and humiliation dished out witheach service and contact with workers, and lastly, I don't have theprivilege you have of choice. I don't have the class or healthprivilege to keep me off assistance programs.

Thanks to Caryatis for explaining the difference between privilege and advantage, and for all her help with editing.
Thanks to my lover Frieda for the title and some of the subtitles, and for all her
input and critique.

71

tova

ellen teban(excerpt from novel, transfusions)one of the main characters, katherine, has leukemia and gets many bloodtransfusions. each time, she makes up a story about who she thinks was the donor.
these stories are scattered throughout the book.

ellen teban felt her life had been full. second generation american,
she'd been lucky not to totally buy into the assimilation scene, but
had been able to blend with american culture enough to survive.
her parents had enough political awareness to find pride in theirculture and their class. for the most part, ellen had always been a
proud working class jew.
there were moments of doubt, of course, for her and her family.
she remembered when her father was offered the job as foreman of
the print shop. the fights seemed endless, and not just with hermother, but with the whole mispacha - aunts, uncles, cousins,
grandparents, nieces, nephews - as well as friends, neighbors,and political comrades who all seemed to have something to say on
this matter.
joseph, her father, thought he should take the job. ellen was ten
and natalie, her mother, was pregnant. joseph thought they coulc;luse the money and no one could argue with that point. josephthought maybe if he was foreman he could do some good for theworkers by being in a position of power, by getting in closer withthe bosses. natalie, who was for sure the more radical of herparents, would shout, "hal! what kind of rationale is that? youwant to get in with the bosses? you think that's good? what will
you want next? to be the boss? to oppress the workers?" then thearguing would start and would include anyone who happened to
be around. joseph didn't take the job as foreman, though for many
years arguments ensued about whether or not that was the rightdecision. natalie had a bad miscarriage which left her unable tohave any more children.

72

all her mother, or anyone else for that matter, had to say was"ha!!" with the proper intonation, and large debates on any issue
would begin. ellen got so used to this that when she would playand have contests, instead of saying "on your mark, get ready, getset, go," she would say "on your mark, get ready, get set, ha!!" it
was fine when she was by herself, but most of the kids in school oron the block didn't seem to understand. ellen didn't mind muchwhat they thought. her house was pretty much a community initself, with adults and kids from their large family or from the"society" floating in and out all the time. most of the time ellen
liked the debating. it was the stuff oflife, she would tell people who
didn't seem to understand why she argued so much when she wasan adult.
even as a young child, ellen would notice the glimmer in everyone's
eyes when a hot debate was brewing. sometimes people were so
excited they would stand on the furniture to try to get their point
across. later in life when people would accuse her of standing on
her soap box, she'd laugh and think about the people from her past
who stood on the furniture. she'd thank them for the complimentand they'd stare at her quizzically. sometimes, if it was someone
close to her, she'd try to explain that standing on things to speak
was an old finely honed family tradition of many generations.
often she'd leave them thinking.
ellen felt like shaking things up for people was another finefamily tradition she wanted to hang on to. like her parents, ellenmarried "late" in life, at 33. she and ira got along rather well, but
ira wanted to have children and ellen didn't. as much as ellen
would pine over babies, she knew it would interrupt her life.
although they argued the point much, it wasn't too difficult forellen to win these arguments, since ira didn't like having sex withellen. shortly after their marriage, ellen found out ira preferred sex
with men. ellen didn't mind since she was happier pleasing herself
than trying to explain to ira what to do. abstinence also was the bestbirth control method she knew.
five years into their marriage, ira was killed in a freak accident.
he was walking home at about 2 a.m. from one of his male lover's
homes in greenwich village. he went to cross the street and got hit
by a cab. not hurt too badly, he started to get up when a cab from73the other direction hit him again and killed him. both cab companies immediately declared bankruptcy and ellen was left with nomoney. luckily she had a job and didn't have children to support.
having done her duty as a married womyn, it seemed people
didn't care as much how ellen lived. she moved in with two wimmin
friends of hers, lucy and millie, in a house lucy owned in the upper
90's. she lived in the attic, which gave her the privacy she needed,
but was close enuff to these two wonderful wimmin to havecompany when she wanted that too. ellen became close with different wimmin in her life, but none of it seemed to last. occasionally,
one of these wimmin even came to her bed with her, but ellen wasessentially a loner when it came to close personal ties. she didn't
want to make those kind of commitments. ellen didn't have any
personal relationships with men, only political ones. she didn't
make much of this though and neither did anyone else.
ellen and her roommates got along wonderfully, and it was theperfect setup for ellen. she continued working in the shops andorganizing the wimmin, and tried to keep the "society" going,
though it died out. she had social events at the house, which wasplenty huge. even after she retired she continued working for theunion, organizing picnics and trips to the united nations. she knew
the union was now sometimes run by people"as bad as the bosses,"
but she felt it was important to keep the people, and the families ofthe people, organized.
when ellen was 70, millie, one of her roommates, had a stroke.
at first, ellen and lucy, millie's "companion" as she was called,
tried to take care of millie. but lucy didn't seem to be able to do it,
and though the doctors said there was nothing technically wrong
with lucy, the worse millie got, the worse lucy got. millie diedsoon after and lucy lost touch even more, sinking into her own
depressed world where she was unable to come out of the past andinto the present long enough to do things like take a shower ormake herself a cup of coffee. ellen tried to care for lucy, but lucy'sson, robert, thought this was a ridiculous setup. robert, with his
general rude manner told ellen it was time for lucy to go to a home,even though it "killed him" to send her there. "what can i do," hetold millie, "she can't even make herself a cup of coffee. she couldn't
move in with me. i can't expose my kids to something like that."74

lucy went off to a home. every time ellen visited, lucy would
cry and cry and cry some more and hold ellen's hand real tightwhenever she tried to leave. the nurse told ellen that robert hardly
ever visited and when he did it was only for a few minutes. usuallyrobert would yell at lucy for crying so much. according to thenurse, the only other visitor lucy had was one of her grandchildren,a young teen girl with a purple streak in her hair and a leather
jacket she was never seen without. ellen knew that was miranda,
who used to come to the house a lot and loved her grandmother.
ellen was glad someone aside from her was there for lucy. fourmonths later lucy died. ellen was sad, but glad lucy was out of her
misery and out of the home.
while lucy was in the home, robert let ellen live in "lucy's
house" and pay her rent to him, though he raised the amount quite
a bit. ellen had to scrape her money together to have enough foreverything. as robert was lucy's sole survivor and would inherit
the house when lucy died, ellen knew the axe would fall soon
enough. there was nothing she could do, and she wasn't going tosuck up to robert. she couldn't live with herself if she did; besides
she didn't think it would make any difference.
two days after lucy's funeral, robert called. the body's not evencold, ellen thought to herself. robert in his always patronizing tone
told her he was sorry, but he was going to sell the house, for a pricehe knew ellen would never be able to afford. "what can i do," hetold her, "my hands are tied." of course, robert didn't care thatellen had lived there over 30 years and it was more her home thanhis. she knew-lucy and millie would want her to have it. what could
she do? she had no proof, they had no contract, they had no nothing. who thought of such things? robert said he didn' twant to force
anything, but ellen had thirty days to move and he was going tostart showing the house the next day. he hoped that didn't invade
her privacy too much. sure, why would it, having strangers troop
through the house you lived in for over 30 years, after one of yourbest friends who lived there had died a few days ago. what was it
worth to say to this young fool? at least he produced miranda, ellen
would tell herself so she wouldn't feel so bad.
of course, ellen couldn't find any apartment she could afford,
what with rents being what they were these days. luckily, she

75found a room and a half in a hotel/boarding house with a rent she
felt she could pay regular. if she was careful with her money, andgot those free lunches at the union hall, she could make it throughthe month. the room wasn't much, but it had a bed and a chair anda kitchenette with a stove and a small refrigerator. she missed her
attic, but at least it was something. and there was a library aroundthe corner, so she could always get new books to read. she was stilla passionate reader and it was a very fine library. she knew it could
be worse. she walked by as many homeless people as the nextperson.
ellen continued to do some union work, but it was getting
harder for her to get around, and the streets were getting moredangerous. still and all, when one of the big wig union people
called and asked if she would help organize a union blood drive tohelp people with AIDS, she couldn't refuse. she needed a project,
and whenever she heard about AIDS, she couldn't help but think
about ira and what he and his friends would've gone through ifthey were alive. yes, she would do it.
she worked hard and became the liaison between the bloodbank and the union organizers. she liked all these people and they
seemed to like her. she even gave blood, which she had never done
before, just so she could see what it was like. even though ellen wasworking harder than she had in a long time, she thought she wasmore tired and had more pains in her stomach than was right. she
went to the clinic and the doctor told her she had stomach cancer.
he told her about all the options, about chemotherapy, radiation
treatments, extending her life, medicines, side effects, chances,
statistics, and her strong will. she told him she'd think about it all.
the pains and the tiredness got worse, but ellen was driven by
her union project, so she tried not to think about it too much. theweekend of the blood drive came and it was a huge success. notonly did tons of people come to give blood, but there.was lots ofmedia attention too. they even interviewed ellen at the blood bank.
one of the journalists seemed enchanted with her and thought she'd
do a series on her. ellen laughed, but still the journalist gave her her
card and asked her to call.
at the end of this long and exciting day, ellen slowly walked
home. she stopped at the library and took out a book. the librarian76

excitedly told ellen she saw her on t.v. and she was great. ellen
shook her head and thanked her. the librarian wondered why ellen
was only taking one book out, instead of her usual six. ellen didn't
have much to say, except it was all she needed right now. ellen
went home, stuffed sheets and towels around the door frame,
window frames and all the other cracks she could find in her room.
she turned the gas oven on, lay down on the bed, and began to read.
a neighbor smelled the gas eventually and by the time they brokein, ellen was dead and only half way through her book.
the union people took care of the funeral. she had a plot in thesociety section of the cemetery with the rest of her family. ira wasburied elsewhere. some friends from the union, a couple of union
big wigs, some people she'd met at the blood bank, miranda, andthe journalist came to the funeral. the journalist still wanted to doa series on ellen. her editor thought it was sentimental crap, but
finally agreed to let her do an extended obituary on ellen teban. it
appeared in the paper the next day with an old photo of ellen at aunion rally.

Max Hammond Dashu

77

Debby Earthdaughter for SHE Land Trust

Landowner-Tenant Problems
on Lesbian Land

We are 7 residents/evictees of a woman's land owned by one
woman. We have either already been evicted or have been asked
to leave by the owner. The landowner received an inheritancewhen her parents died. She bought the land 11 years ago. The
women's land :;;tarted when she allowed 2 women to camp. They
had an idea of a women's village and she liked it. The land grew.
The owner collected money from the women living on the land
to pay the taxes and to support herself. Women also contributed
money and much work energy to put in utilities, a bathhouse,
common house, and several living structures. Women held meetings to make decisions on the land.
Some residents had learned about land trusts. This would give
more security to permanent residents and would eliminate theexpensive taxes once the land trust became a nonprofit tax-exempt
organization. The owner liked it and agreed to put the land into
trust if other women wOlild help with the legal work. They did, but
she changed her mind when they were in the final stages, This was
not the first time that she had broken an agreement she made, or
broken an agreement made by all the residents in a meeting. There
was an appearance of equality, butshe retained her control as landowner. Because of this, several permanent residents decided tostop going to meetings.
At a mediation the owner announced that she was changing
the land to a private campground. She would be in sole controL She
might ask many or all of us to leave.
We are low-income women without a lot of access to money.
We are working to create a land trust, but we don't have the money
to move right now. And we have disability access needs that are
not easy to satisfy. We hope to raise support so we could raisemoney to either buy a portion of the land or another piece of land.

78

AlienFried Pies on the Fourth of July
I'm writing this on the Fourth of July. Fireworks going off in the
background, facing an eviction notice when I get home. I've been
gonna write something about "class" for a while but somehow in
the flurry of my life it always gets pushed aside. That's a lie ... mylife isn't that hectic. I'm on "vacation," sitting in an apartment
visiting my oldest nephew, typing on his computer that he boughtwith blood money (Air Force pay), trying to figure out where to
begin. My beginnings were 31 years ago, the fifth unwanted childof a sharecropper & his wife in rural Missouri. Daddy always
called himself a farmer. But everybody knew he was just a sharecropper cause he didn't own any land. My J?:lom never described
herself as a farmer or a sharecropper, but always as his wife. We
lived out in the country in an old run down house that belonged
to someone else. It was the kind of house that always had broken
down cars sitting up on cement blocks in the front yard, and tallweeds growing up around them. It was the kind of house thatgives meaning to the words "white trash."*Thirty one years later things haven't changed much. I still live
in a run down house on land that someone else owns. I still live
on food stamps & stand in the same welfare lines each month.
Yeah, they are in a different state, but the look on the faces behindthe counter hasn't changed. Contempt, USA style. Still, my life
compared to my mom's is much different. She came out to visit
me after the doctors found a tumor in my throat. It was the size ofa lemon but fortunately benign. My mom stayed out on the landwith me and one night I suggested she go out to dinner with abunch of wimmin who were going into town. Later that night shecame back full of herself, told me it was the first time she has everbeen to dinner without a relative, first time in sixty-five years.
So our lives are different. Mainly cause I'm a radical lesbian
separatist and she's not. I don't know how to explain why I'm*The white racist rural semi-Southern community that I grew up in assumed
White supremacy. Being white trash put us at the bottom of the pile of whites,
but cause we were white it meant we were superior to all other racial andcultural groups regardless of their economic status.

79sitting in my nephew's apartment other than to say that he'sfamily. He's in recovery & that makes it easier. I must say it feels
weird, his hetero life and all, but he's still family. Something
about sitting in his vinyl recliner with the splits in the seat eating
fried pies - the kind ya get 4 for $1 on special at Fagans makes it
feel less weird to be in his hetero world. At this point in my life
there's not many members of my family that I can still hang out
with. But I'm a lucky dyke, my family hasn't disowned me theway a lot of other wimmin's families have. My family knows
what a lesbian is, and they've always known I was radical, so my
not liking men just seemed logical to them. But I'm still family.
This means a lot to me. Even though I have a very fucked up"dysfunctional" family, I know it's a place I can belong. This is
another lie I tell myself ... that I can still belong to my family. I
can't, I don't and I never will again. Not because I'm a radical
lesbian separatist, but because I went to college. So far I'm the only
one in my family that has went to college. Going to college was a
way to escape. Escape poverty, abuse, shame and my family. But it
didn't work. I became a dyke instead. I don't think I would havecome out if I hadn't gone to college simply because I didn't evenknow of lesbians until then. That's the best thing that I got out of
my college experience. Lesbianism 10l.
My BA didn't get rid of the shame & guilt of poverty. In myhead I know being poor is a type of political oppression. That it is
not a reason to feel ashamed & guilty, but I can't quite get my heart
to understand that. I can't seem to shake that feeling of being an
outsider, never fitting in, like a square peg. You know the rest ....
In my head there's a constant voice pointing out to me all theways I don't fit in. For years in college I tried to silence her bybuying the right clothes, joining the right women's groups, volunteering at the right dyke events. At first glance, I fit right inwith all the white middle class lesbians who surrounded me. I felt
trapped, caught in something I couldn't taste, smell, touch, hearor see. That's another lie. I could taste my exclusion each day I sat
alone eating my bologna on white bread instead of joining myfriends at the local restaurants for lunch. I could smell the difference between leather coats & designer perfumes and my bluejeans and clearance A von. I could touch difference when I laid on
my army cot and them their water beds. I could hear the difference
in my ami fm radio and their wimmin's music playing on stereos.
80I could see the difference all around me. I thought about dying.
alot during those years.
I thought I'd found something different when I "discovered"wimmin's communities & lesbians' land. With a bad taste still in
my mouth, I started reading about lands, talking to wimmin, andeventually visiting. The idea that there was a movement of wimmin who were trying to deal with the oppressions of patriarchy intheir real every day lives thrilled the shit outta me. I spent years
arranging my life so I could go visit these places of wonder.
Four and a half years ago I arrived at Adobeland in the sonoran
desert outside Tucson. I had survived watching WhipperWillow,
a wimmin's land in Arkansas, destroy herself and eventually get
repossessed. Repossession was not a new idea to me.!' d seen that
number many times before. I knew that wimmin living together
in these ways, AND trying to buy land was too much. My own
family had taught me how hard it was to try to live outside ofmainstream white middle class america & survive, let alone buy
land. Ha.
So when I arrived at Adobeland I knew it wasn't gonna beparadise or anything like a fairy tale, but I had hope. The land was
paid for, some of the wimmin had lived there for years, and it
seemed like the community was working out ok. It took me twoyears to realize that things weren't as I had first thought. This iswhere my family shit, my class shit, and my lesbian shits hits thefan. I had scrimped and saved, and worked crappy jobs to getenough money to build a one room house and it had just burnt
down. Of course I didn't have insurance.
I knew things weren't great at Adobeland but where was I
supposed to go? Where was another wimmin's land that was in a
climate my body could tolerate, where my daughter would be
welcome, and close enough to a job source? I couldn't find one or
I wouldn't have rebuilt after the fire. Needless to say I didn't havethe money, or at cess to money to buy land of my own. Some of
my friends have asked me why I didn't move into town and get
an apartment. My only answer is I don't think I can survive theisolation that I feel living like that. The next time someone asks, I
think I'm gonna give them a copy of this to read. If they still don't
understand then I don't know how I'll explain it better or any
different. Besides, living in town would mean eating beans fourtimes a week.
81

Anyway I did rebuild. Many great things all came together atonce and I was able to build a three room house for my daughter& I. My family helped me out as much as they could. A couple ofweeks after the fire I got a check from my Mom for $1200 from myhometown savings and loan where I knew she had her savings
account and I sat down and cried. Then I called her and asked if
she was sure she could give me that much. She answered, "1' m 63
years old. That's my life savings. If something happens to me
how far is $1200 going to go? Take and build your house. I'll sleep
better knowing you all gotta place to live." So I took her $ and it
helped re-build my house.
Compared to the lean-to's and tents that other wimmin live in
at Adobeland, my house is a condo. But when I applied for acounty housing re-hab program I was denied because my house
would take too much work to bring it up to code (things likeplumbing, electricity, & running water). I was busy trying to put
our lives back together, working a 4O-hour job, raising my daughter & trying to work out community politics.
It had become obvious that things needed to change at
Adobeland. Conflicts between Adobe, who owned the land & otherresidents were numerous. Taxes were unbelievably high. We decided to form a land trust. Adobe refused to give up control of herland. The land trust was dropped. Things got worse. And worse.
After two years of fighting, mediation, and now lawyers, I'm
facing another eviction. So much for change and class oppression.
I might lose my house and definitely my home ... because
Adobe owns the land and she doesn't like me any more. In theeyes of the law and the words of the lesbian community, it's her
right to evict me and the six other wimmin that she's trying toevict. I never expected the law to be on my side, it never has been.
But it hurts that a lot of wimmin who've heard about the situation
apparently feel like it's OK that we're getting evicted. I've been
told things like "after all it is her land" and "you should be
grateful she let you live there as long as she did." Ad nauseum. I
think the wimmin who are saying that are reacting out of fear of
losing their own status quo. They also must be forgetting that wewere living in a lesbian land community that was supposed to bedealing with oppressions. Obviously I wouldn't expect my slumlord to change his shitty attitude but I do expect wimmin who put
out that they are willing to change to put their money where their82

mouth is & Adobe simply hasn't done this. (And she's got plentyof company on that score.)That voice inside my head is at it again. She's screaming, "I
told you so. I told you so." Over & over. She's right, she did tellme not to trust. She told me not to hope. She told me not tobelieve that I could ever belong.
But you know what? In spite of it all I still have my hopes &dreams. In spite of that eviction notice in my face, I still believethat living in community on land with other lesbians will work. I
ain't sure why I still got my hopes & dreams. Maybe since I don't
have an inheritance to look forward to, I gotta hang onto mydreams to get me through the rough spots. I admit, I'm a little
shaky as far as belonging is concerned, and my trust is cracked,
but I know patriarchy. And when patriarchy struggles this hardto destroy something, it's because it's a threat to the big P.
I don't know where my daughter and I are gonna live. I don't
know where the other wimmin who are getting evicted are gonna
live. I look at homeless people & try to swallow the lump of fearin my throat. I remind myself to breathe. I listen to the fireworks
outside the window & wonder if I'll ever belong.

B1(n(o U~~~("

K'ltti(!>C 01\4 I't-JIIrf,,-t."83

Mary Frances PlattAndover Inn Land
So, my Mother and I were having our weekly Saturday morning
conversation when the topic of budget cuts in Massachusetts cameup. We were especially appalled atthe cuts in elder and child care.
Each in her different words we expressed concern over what working
Moms would do with their kids.Which led to what my Momdid withher kid-me!
My Mother was a waitress at the Andover Inn in Andover
Massachusetts. An Inn connected to Phillips Academy, you know,
the snot school where wealthy kids from all over the world go. No,
not Phillips Exeter, Phillips Andover. Anyways, mostly her and my
Dad would work different shifts in order to ensure someone
would always be home with their often sick, asthmatic kid: me. Buta few times a week my Mom would work the breakfast or lunch
shift and I would get to go to work with her. That's right, get to. It
was a real adventure for me. My first exploration into the world of
the wealthy.
Even though I grew up in Andover, my parents managed toprotect me from the ravages of the elite by ensuring that we always
lived on the wrong side of the tracks (lithe Vale," a part of the town
where a lot ofthe working class families lived), orin West Andover,where all the farmers were. Before the age of five I didn't have tocome in contact with people from other classes and assumed
everyone lived and acted like we did. You know, small houses thatalways seemed to need painting, lots of dogs, neighbors' homesthat I treated like my own, Peggy's Mom who yelled at me as muchas my own did, lots of great leftover restaurant food, one parent
home at a time, loud loving voices, open bickering and disagreement, overt tiredness and frustration.
Anyways, back to the adventure. According to my Mother I
was livery well behaved, not a brat or anything." Part of that wasprobably due to my being so overwhelmed by everything I saw.
Deep, bright, many designed carpets (oriental rugs), ceilings thatwere at least a hundred of me high; plates with lots of tiny flowers(imported china), and flashing, dripping, beautiful lights (crystal

84

chandeliers). I often felt like I was in an enchanted land; andprincesses in enchanted lands did not act like brats. They floatedthrough the halls of the castle in long flowing dresses with all theservants admiring them and letting them do whatever theywanted to do. Which is exactly the way it was in Andover Inn
Land. I pretended to float through the halls and all the staff kept awatchful kindly eye on me to make sure I was o.k. I became
everyone's kid, the child care responsibility of all the working classfolks there. Johnny the chef let me lick spoons from huge pots that
had bigger bellies than my Grandmas'. The desk clerk always hada piece of forbidden chocolate for me. The bell boy, George, satwith me and colored and told stories. The maids were always
dusting off my head or my bum with huge feathered dusters.
Waitresses scurried around and crooned at me or pinched myapple cheeks. What wonderful attention I got! And it all seemed
quite normal to everyone there to have this four year old roaming
the halls while her Mom worked. Now remember, this was 1957,
and white women weren't supposed to be working, never mind
bringing a kid along. But then again my Mom was always doing
things she "shouldn't" be doing - just like all the other working
class Moms I knew.
Upstairs where all the patrons were served was amazingly
beautiful. Velvet walls that I stroked for hours. Woodwork so wellshined I could make faces in it. And the grandfather clock. This
clock was its own being. It clicked, and chimed, and buzzed, andhad moons on its face that all looked different. Even though it wascalled a grandfather clock, I knew it was a Grandmother. Sometimes, when I gazed admiringly up at her I could even hear her
speak to me in wisdom and love.
And if you happened to be there on a party buffet day you'd get
to see the stuffed pig on the table with the apple in its' mouth. And
all that food. I couldn't imagine anyone ever eating it all. First of all
because there was so much of it. Rooms full! Secondly it was all so
pretty, who would want to ruin the way it looked by eating it? But
it did get eaten, and at a very young age the princess from thewrong side of the tracks learned about and tasted such delicacies
as filet mignon and lobster thermador, cherried cheese cake andmint julep, baked alaska and glazed duck. But it wasn' t till I moved85

to Boston and started hanging out with middle class feminists that
I learned that there were other kinds of cheese besides Velveeta,
Crackerbarrel, and Land 0' Lakes American.
Another place the princess liked to visit was the ladies lounge.
Not bathroom,lounge. I was obsessed with bathrooms in generaland everywhere I went my first tour stop would be the toilet. Now,
you have to imagine what a ladies lounge in a place populated byrich people would look like to a four year old. Mirrors for days. I
could see every side and part of me, and sometimes got dizzy fromall the contorted positions I would find myself in. There were also
ornately designed toilet paper holders that you could run yourfingers over to feel the designs. At home we had the splintery
wooden kind that always made such crass noises when you
unrolled the paper. And there was a special smell too, not like theone that came out of the bottle with the green wick in our bathroom, but something sweet and subtle.
Eventually I would find my way to the gift shop. This is where
all the people in the kingdom would bring their presents for me,
the princess. I would judge which ones I liked and which ones I
didn't. Which were pretty and which were insulting to royalty. I
know now that every item there was handcrafted art and very
expensive. When the shop closed the staff got to buy stuff that had
been reduced greatly. My Mom bought a driftwood lamp that now
sheds light on my bedtime reading. The only gift the princess"chose" to keep.
There was a scary place in Andover Inn Land too. When I was
tired and had to take my nap I had to go down to the "dungeon"- the staff quarters in the basement where there were unlit,
smelly, winding halls and tiny ugly rooms with no windows andjabby, metal beds. I hated this part. It totally destroyed my fantasy
and made me face the fact that when it came down to it upstairs
was for rich people and downstairs was my real world. Usually
after I woke up from my nap it was the end of the shift and myMother would come and get me and we would quietly leavethrough the basement employee entrance, which was advantageous because I was already back in my own reality and could
transition much better for my next destination - home. Home wasnever as wonderful as upstairs in Andover Inn Land but it certainly

86was tons better than the dungeon. I knew people would neverchoose to live in a place like the dungeon and wondered who had
made it be a place for people like us, and why they had createdsomething so horrible and ugly downstairs when there was somuch beauty upstairs.

Benicia
Suz Fields

87Martha Courtot

Confessions of a Working-Class Intellectual

I am the daughter of a taxi-driver and a beautician. Two of mythree siblings did not finish high school. I grew up in a lower
working-class neighborhood in industrial Cincinnati where economic survival was more important than education. We lived in asmall gray shingled house next to the railroad tracks. Trains shookthe house several times a day. Because my father was Catholic, I
went to a Catholic grade-school and later a Catholic high school.
For some reason I was an intellectual from an early age. I wrote
letters to the editor of the local paper when I was 12. I objected to
the racism against Black people that permeated every level ofcultural life in Cincinnati in the 1950s. Although my mother often
threatened to take my library card away from me because of theoverdue fines I was always having to pay, the local branch of the
Public Library probably saved my life, as it gave me a way out of
the racist/ classist propaganda that was poured into me.
Also poured into me, by Catholic institutions, was a strong
ethical system which the very human members of the institution
did not actually practice most of the time, especially in regard tosocial justice issues. My father's family looked down on mymother because she was not Catholic, because she was divorced,
and because her hillbilly roots made it impossible for her to even
try to pass as middle-class.
From this distance of forty years, to describe my family'svalues requires some guesswork. Certainly they would have been
based on the necessity for survival. My father earned about $30.00
a week at his job which required him to be out at odd hours of the
day and night, and my mother's job, although our main support, did
not allow for luxuries. I know my father valued the family name Courtot -and insisted we respect our mother. He also thought about
the political world from the viewpoint of a workingman.
After his death when I was 10, it was my mother ' s values which
predominated. She valued her hillbilly pride, hard work for its
own sake, self-reliance to the point of destructive pride, silence andstoicism. She did not value acquisitiveness, things in themselves,order, cleanliness, or submission in women. From a matriarchal
family herself, she exhibited to her children her own matriarchal
strength, and in an era which had terrorized millions of white88women into staying in their homes, she worked six days a week inthe beauty salon. If she was bothered by neighbor women's
judgments she did not let us know about it.
When I slammed shut the door of my house as a child to go out
into the world, I had to leave behind my parents' values to enter the
middle-class institutions of school and church, which had been
designed in all their parts, sometimes intentionally and sometimes
not, to foster in me a hatred of those values, a hatred for my self. In
order to succeed in the world I would have to deny my deep rootsystem and to become something different, a social construct of an
upwardly-mobile working person who would succeed or fail depending on how much of myself I could remove, forget, leave behind.
Perhaps because of my turning to books to save me, and per haps
because of my lesbian self which I knew from an early age, and which
would not permit me to accept all the lies that were poured into me,
I never succeeded in leaving behind me my parents' values, or theworking-class person I am. I have brought her into everything I havedone, even when I did not have a name for her. This is not to say I
escaped without damage. The damage is deep and life long.
On July 4,1960 I left Cincinnati for a new life in New York City. I
left behind the girl I had loved all through high school, my family, anda future in one of the soap or tool and die factories of the gloomy city.
I believed I was also leaving behind my working-class self, although
I would not have been able to articulate it at the time. Actually, it
was not so much my working-class self that I wanted to jettison,but the entire class system. For many years, I was able to bury myrecognitions of the injustice of the class system in the u.s. It was notthat I was ever upwardly mobile, it was only that I believed somehow
as an artist, I was immune to the ramifications of the class system.
After I had my children, and returned to my lesbian self, I musthave been even more convinced that I was escaping once andforever the deadly class structure. My lesbian self arose again in thesame moment that feminism found its voice: for me, my lesbian
self and my feminist self married forever. It seemed to me that theessence of feminism, with its emphasis on equality, was a refutation of the class system. All that I did arose out of my own workingclass understanding of the world. Into every room that I walked I
brought the shame that is given to working-class people early on.
My pain and my triumphs were tinged with my woundedness asa working-class woman.
I struggled with other lesbian/feminists, we had land wars
and we had sex wars: we had triumphant beginnings and strife-89filled endings, and in all of this my class and the class of the women
I worked with dominated everything. Yet it was unacknowledged.
Slowly my damaged self began to speak. It accused, it cajoled, it
pleaded with women, mostly middle-class women, to see it, torespect it, to make space for it. When I realized that this would not
happen, something changed in me forever. No longer can I remain
innocent to the place that class has in our system. No longer can I
pretend a solidC!Iity with middle-class women, when their privilege
and my powerlessness prevent true communication, true equality.
Perhaps one of the dirtiest secrets I have kept from the world is this:that I cannot trust middle-class women. Although I have loved them,worked with them, hurt with them, intimacy is impossible.
Unless you have been covered in shame for what you are at the
deepest core of your being, you cannot imagine what it is like forme as a working-class woman. I recognize other working-classwomen in this way; by the shame they carry with them into eachroom, each situation of their lives. There is so much confusion
about class in this country; so many women in the Seventies
wanted to proclaim themselves working-class, mistakenly believing this would make theni.morally superior to middle-class women.
Women searched in their childhood histories for any evidence toprove their right to call themselves working-class - and for some
women, it is true that their working-class history has been obfuscated by their families' upward mobility.
Contemporary lesbian culture seems to be based on the ideathat lesbians share a solidarity which crosses all lines of race,
ethnicity, class and economic station. This illusion has createdconfusion and pain for many lesbians.
One incident in my class struggle with lesbians is prominent in
my mind, because it was so well-meaning, and so foolish andhurtful. In 1980, a class war erupted in Santa Rosa, California at the
women-owned Moonrise Cafe. It was generated by the racism andclassism experienced by the women who were part of the collectiveof the cafe. In order to try to connect with each other, and to heal the
separations, we began a series of community discussions of racism
and classism. Women of color, justifiably, refused to participate in
the racism discussions, and white women in the community neverconfronted ourselves on our racism. An ongoing meeting of many
women in the community to "deal" with class issues did happen.
Ultimately, I think we only managed to injure each other further.
I understand better now some of the factors which wereinvolved, not the least of which was working-class self-hatred.
90One of the things we did was try to define stereotypes about
middle-class women and working-class women by sitting together in the room and shouting out stereotypes. The general idea
was that once we had flushed the stereotypes out of our systems,
perhaps we could meet each other on common ground. The
working-class women were stunned and hurt to discover thestereotypes that not only middle-class women harbored about us,
but that working-class women ourselves believed. The stereotypes
about working-class women were centered on shame, failure, anda general sense of uncleanness, while the middle-class stereotypes
centered on the opportunities they had and the things they owned.
There was no discussion then about the paucity of values in the
middle class, or how damaging the stereotypes about working-classpeople were compared to the ones about middle-class people. Rather,
we sat stunned. We could not go on. Here is the result of the exercise.
WORKING-CLASS STEREOTYPESMIDDLE-CLASS STEREOTYPES

working class women steal
can't handle their money
don't know how to drive properly
have rundown looking cars
are often guilty of bad judgment
are very wastefuldie in debt
work for wages
marry into trouble
have quick sex
often experience incest
are noisy
have sex all the time
are ignorant about contraception
like to hang out at bars
are better lovers
are earthy and in touch
don't work
are lazy, unskilled, stupid
once a con always a con
can't get jobs because they didn't
study hard enough in school
do not have stress in their jobs
are unreliable
accident prone

are more sensitive lovers
can get abortions
must drink before sex
go to encounter groups
live on women's landafraid of commitment
have credit cards
are able to get vacations
have allowances
buy "things" with their money
can buy new cars
buy houses
have salaries
have careers
go to college
get their way paid throughcollegemarry money
run factories
have secretaries
have stress on their jobs
job security
work not for money
can be volunteers
eat balanced diets91will do anything for work
work for lower wages
they do not know which fork to use
eat lots of sugar and starch
do not know good nutrition
eat out of cooking pots
eat out of canstalk with their mouths fullhave their elbows on the table
are welfare mothers

dress for dinnerhave dining rooms in theirhouseseat dinner at 6
the family eats together
they eat breakfast
have extra foodhave fresh orange juice
drink wine with dinnerhave enough to eat

Working-class lesbians internalize the shame that is used to damage our spirits. When we get a good job, or make it to college, or areable to pass in middle-class society due to a special gift or interest,
somewhere deep in us we believe we are impostors. This belief
limits our ability to make strong choices in our lives, choices forourselves that come from the very root of our being.
Although lesbians have tried to develop a solidarity with eachother, a community of loving women, the truth is that classdifference, damages, and middle-class privilege and workingclass shame are among the things that have prevented this fromhappening. My own task these days is to continue to work on myshame and my self-hatred. I was a little girl "too smart for her own
good" who had a great yearning for a wider world, but who
refused to leave her parents and her own class values at the door.
By middle-class standards I have had no great jobs, and I have notaccomplished what was in me to accomplish with my writing. The
injuries of the class system have damaged and informed my life. I
am grateful for a lesbian identity, but I do not delude myself that
I share a universal solidarity with lesbians because I have been
actively oppressed by middle-class lesbians.
The road I have taken away from my root system has neverbeen able to take me away from both the love and the shame of mychildhood. It saddens me that my granddaughter, and all the
granddaughters of the working class, will continue to experience
this assault on their loving selves, and will be forced, by an acquisitive society and by middle-class institutions, to carry a shame withthem because they do not measure up to standards which havecreated so much havoc in the world.

92

Nona Caspers

In The Clouds

I work on the fourteenth floor of the Medical Research building in
Minneapolis. I have my own office with a big window so I canwatch the birds. Once a day at two-thirty p.rn. I drop to the second
floor to pick up the Doctor's mail. Twice a week I pick up lymphocyte culture. In between I xerox photographs of lymph cells, typearticles on the discoveries the Doctor makes about bone marrow,and organize our patient files. I've been part of the BMT team forthe last ten years.
''Bone Marrow Transplant program, this is Angela."
Before I became a secretary I was a paleontology major, MESOZOIC era. I studied bones. Mostly dinosaur bones. In my senioryear I realized there was not much of a future in dinosaurs. I signed
up for one excavation. We went looking for the Apatosaurus in Utah.
We didn't find any. For two months I graded the earth with a small
steel spade from six in the morning until six at night. When I cameback I quit school and became a secretary. How could I know thenthat in ten years the MESOZOIC would be in fashion - the year of thedino, the dino-fest. I flew to San Francisco for that, came back with
dino-magnets, balloons, buttons, and dino-pins for everyone. The
Doctor was surprised to find out I knew anything about dinosaurs.
''Bone Marrow Transplant program, this is Angela."
I believe dinosaurs carry the sacred code to life. They areancient gods; we could learn a lot from them. For one thing,patience. Dinosaurs are like secretaries that way. Most humans
don't understand patience anymore, we want everything now. We
don't understand evolution, time. Look how long it took the dinosaurs to get any recognition. I happen to know that in a billion years
anthropologists are going to dig up all these file cabinets anddiscover that secretaries were the bones of this civilization.
''Bone Marrow Transplant program, this is Angela."
Not that I mind. It seems sort of cosmic that I ended up in BMT,
really, considering my previous interest in bones and then mychildhood. I used to suck the marrow out of pork chops. Once a93

week my motherfried pork chops. The whole family (I have elevenbrothers and sisters) passed their hip and shoulder bones to me. I'dstick my tongue in the hole and suck the marrow clean; it tasted likesweet baby food. (I don't eat meat now; it's bad for your heart andcomplexion. Six years ago I went on a high-protein diet and mynose broke out. Before that I'd had a beautiful complexion, smoothas a vinyl couch.) Then, when I was in sixth grade, my parents
thought I had leukemia. It turned out to be constipation but in myown small way I'd faced death all the same and I know how itfeels.
The people in my files face their own individual extinction every
day for years. Now that's patience. Not that I've ever met any ofthem-not in person. This floor is strictly research. I've thought ofit, though, of looking them up. Maybe some day. They'd probably
think it was strange.
"Bone Marrow Transplant program, this is Angela."
Each patient moves from a referral file to a candidate file to apatient pending file while the doctors prepare for a donor. When
they've got one and the patient has been admitted to the hospital
they go into an active file. I draw a little happy face on those, little
happy marrow-faces. I memorize all their names and keep track of
their transplants and progress. Some bodies may try to defend
themselves against the foreign marrow, and vice versa. In each of
my cabinets I put herb-filled sachets for good luck. A-F gets fenneL
G-L gets lemon mist. L-P gets potpourri, and so on. Every threemonths I replace the sachets.
''Bone Marrow Transplant, this is Angela."Some patients never find a compatible donor. Marta Gataran.
She was a patient five years back. Blood type 0, Rh negative. Dateof birth 8-21-29. She had no relatives here, only cousins in East
Berlin and the government wouldn't let them over. Our government. Marta didn't want her cousins' marrow anyway; she said
she'd rather eat snake skin. That statement wasn't on the chart. I
overheard the Doctor repeat it to another doctor. I couldn't tellwhether he thought Marta was being silly or patriotic. The Doctor
doesn't have time to put inflection in his voice. Some days when I
pick up the mail I'll see him in the hall thinking or discussing newtransplant techniques with the other doctors. I walk right by andhe doesn' t blink or say hello. The first times this happened I

94thought he didn't like me; then one day I realized he didn't know
it was me. He doesn't recognize me when I'm not behind my deskor associated with the file cabinets. Associative memory. The
Doctor has never had to make room for people and things hedoesn't think are important. Every brain is different. His has
evolved that way. He doesn't have extra room for new combinations that don't help him save lives. What can you say to someone
with all that responsibility?
''Bone Marrow Transplant, this is Angela./I
The Doctor has one twelve-year-old daughter who's a genius.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth goes to a special school where they teach hermathematics and science. She calls every day after lunch and since
the Doctor is never able to come to the phone she talks to me. We
discuss dinosaurs, birds, cold fusion and military strategies toprotect the planet from aliens. Elizabeth says we have no reason tobelieve aliens are going to like us. No reason to believe they won't,
I tell her. Can't always count on the worst. I try to help Elizabeth
make room to see things in new ways, but she's already being
trained in preparations. What's it going to look like, I say, when thealiens come and here we are all ready to extinguish them. Whatkind of way is that to start a new relationship? And if they're so
advanced as to fly all the way over from another galaxy, we'regoing to need them more than they need us. Elizabeth doesn't
answerthat;shedoesn'tthinkshe needs anyone. She only sighs
her heavy twelve-year-old sigh.
Elizabeth also worries that I'm not getting all my amino acids. She
likes to name them. Proline, Histidine, Isoleucine, she says. If I havetime I tell her about the Apatosaurus. The Apatosaurus was a vegetarian and one of the largest of all the dinosaurs, seventy-five feet longand sixty thousand pounds. The Apato was so large it had to evolve
two brains. One in its small head that connected up all the messages
from its spine and neck and then another one in its large posterior tocontrol its bony tail, which was thirty feet and twenty-four thousand
pounds in itself. The Apato's amazing size kept the saw-toothedcarnivorous dinosaurs like the Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus at bay.
(Smaller dinos like the Ankylosaurus were armed with steel-like skinand clubbed tails. Others matched the terrain completely. Everydinosaur had its defense mechanisms but I don't tell this to Elizabeth.)95

''BMT, this is Angela."
I start workevery morning at eight. On Mondays and Wednesdays I come at six in myoId jeans and sweatshirt when no one ishere. No waiting for the elevator. I sit in my office chair and I leanback, watch the sky open and the birds awaken. Up here they fly
level, float around and around. Sometimes two birds fly so close
together their wings touch. Just the tips. They glide past my big
window and peer inside at me. Scientists used to think dinosaurs
were wiped out by asteroids, radiation, or glaciers. Now the theoryis they evolved into birds. Only the dino had that special hinged
bird-ankle and bird-hip bone that points down and backwards.
The Archaeopteryx, whi~h was half dino half bird, had a long bony
tail but from its shoulder bone sprouted feathered wings.
''BMT, this is Angela."
I can still see the grace of the dino in them. They shed all theirheavy defenses for flight. I saw one bird that must have evolved
from an Ankylosaurus. Her eyes flitted and she wagged her tail as
though she still thought she had a club on it. I called that bird
Annie. Once I invited the Doctor's daughter to come watch withme. We pulled a chair in from another office and we sat here
looking up at the sky while the birds floated around and around in
the clouds. The dawn cracked open with pinks, yellows andsalmon oranges. Wow, is all Elizabeth could say; we didn't talkabout aliens that morning. Later Elizabeth left for school. I changed
into work clothes for another day at the office.
''BMT, this is Angela."
Hard to believe that without that little bit of sweet meat in ourbones we can't survive.
''BMT, this is Angela."
It all starts with that referral file. That's when their trouble
begins. Jackie Richards, Norman Meyer, Michelle Barrone. The
youngest one was Clara Hutton, six months old. Leukemia. The
transplants went all right but three weeks later an infection leaked
into her system. Clara died. October 2, 1987. Weight 11.7 pounds.
I came in early that day. The sun was a creamy white dipped in thecolor of ancient red clay. It pushed up inch by inch, raising its bighead slowly and gracefully until we faced each other through thew indow. For 4.6 billion years the sun has been doing that. Now
that's patience.
96

"BMT, this is Angela."
Patients always die. Ian Bolevecheck, Marta Gataran, Clara
Hutton. I'm supposed to move them straight from the active file tothe closed file but I do a little something special for them. While theDoctor sits in on status meeting, I close the door. Then I roll mychair back from my desk and take off my shoes. I climb on the deskon my knees. I remove the top yellow paper from their file, with
their name on it, and I press the paper flat against the window
pane. Sometimes the birds come. Sometimes they don't. But it
makes me feel better. I imagine that the patients' souls are with thedinos.
During times like this, I just let the phones ring.

Alex Alexander (color photo)
Corie Lamere
97

Caroljean Coventree

Full Time Debt, Part Time Money

I grew up in a white, rural and working class home. At seventeen
I left my blood faj mily and the Iowa countryside for a nearby town.
I moved in with a stranger and got a job waitressing at a truck stop.
With some help from friends and no help from blood family, I havesupported myself since then. I've earned money doing farm work,
legal work, secretarial work, child care, waitressing, teaching, andfacilitating workshops about internalized oppression. Due to achronic illness and my beliefs I work part time, no matterwhatthejob.
"Personal Income"Like rainfall ,figures, my annual gross income varies from year
to year. Sometimes there's plenty of rain, sometimes it's dry. Like
most creatures, when there's plenty, I recover from the drought
and prepare for the next one. In 1986 my gross income was $16,900,
my lifetime high. In 1987 I was ill and moved acrpss country;
income sank to $5,000. For part of 1988 I made $20 per hour,another lifetime high. That year I earned $16,400. In 1989 I got fired,
moved across town, and couldn't find work that would not makeme ill. This resulted in $8,600 income. Last year I moved backacross country and still earned $15,000.
I'm a paralegal with a law degree and a decade of experience. I
work for a straight feminist attorney in private practice. She pays
me $17 an hour plus parking costs. I work about twenty-five hours
a week on a flexible schedule. Four wimmin work in the office andnearly all our clients are wimmin. These are my fringe benefits.
"Family Money"
Annual income figures explain only part of how money flows
through my life. Lesbian family members have always been part of
my money scene. Consider how I get around. My then partner,
Marilyn, loaned me $1500 to buy a van. It took me a year and a half
to pay her back. She did not charge me interest and never made me
feel guilty about the loan. When I bought my current car a dear98

friend named Emma co-signed on the loan. She had a credit history,
I didn't. I make the car payments and both of our names are on the title .
. If anything happened to me, I'd be happy for her to have the car.
Emma values clothes and how she feels in them; that fits her
fancy job in city government that requires them. When she changes
wardrobes, she gives me many of her cast offs. I appreciate this. It
significantly increases the money I can spend on books for the lesbianarchives I maintain. I seldom buy clothes even though I sometimes- feel strange in Emma's. Her clothes don't quite fit either my styleor my body. But clothes simply aren't that important to me and I
hate shopping for them. Going through closets at her house is fun.
Over the years my lesbian family and I have often loaned or
given each other money. The amount loaned or given was determined by how much the one had to give and how much the otherneeded. We have negotiated terms. By sharing .our money wecreate bonds with each other. I'm proud of how we have sustained
each other in times of need.
I remember one such sharing a couple years ago. I had lost myjob and my partner. Heat and humidity were choking my body and
I was depressed and suicidal. I applied for job after job and evengot a few interviews, but unemployment, savings, and the will toconfront further public assistance forms dwindled away. Sheila, afriend and ex-lover, gave me $1500. I lived on that for three months
until I finally got a job.
Despite all this give and take I have never pooled money withanyone. One lover and I bought a picnic cooler and a record
together, just so I could say I have jointly owned something withsomeone. I'd like to pool money with someone I trusted just to see
how it felt. I suppose I haven't ever pooled money because I have
only once lived with a lover, Marilyn. She and I were from different
class backgrounds, she had a child, and we weren't together long.
I have never had a friend who seriously considered pooling moneywith me although I have suggested it.
Like everyone, I suppose, I have struggled about money stuff
with loved ones. This was true for Marilyn and me. I tradedgrocery shopping for her cleaning the house. This was a class anddisability based decision. I have numerous allergies to nearly all
cleaning products. She doesn't. She sometimes wanted to pay her

99

friends to clean the house for $35. I didn't. I also didn't like the way
she spent money at the grocery store. In theory, the trade seemed
to settle our differences. In practice, it didn't.
First we bumped into differences over what produce and othergrocery items to have in the house at anyone time. I was used togoing to the grocery once every two weeks and buying what I
could afford. If I came home one night and didn't have the thing I
really wanted to eat, I ate something else. I ate whatever was there
until everything was gone. Like most working class people, I
learned to make do with what I had and didn't make special trips
for specific things. I waited until the next grocery trip.
Marilyn was raised solidly middle class. She was used to eating
pretty much exactly what she wanted each night so she didn't likerunning out of anything. If we didn't have what she wanted in thehouse, she would often jump into her car and go to the store for one
or two items. She grew up in suburbia with grocery stores down
the street. I grew up on the farm with the nearest store miles away.
While living with her, I struggled not to pick up her habit of goingto the grocery store every few days.
She wanted her refrigerator and cupboards full, all the time. Asa general rule of thumb, she wanted three cans of each item westored in the cupboard.When she said this I remember being stunned.
I noticed she kept rolls and rolls of toilet paper on hand. That mademe smile from all the times I had cursed myself for running out.
She wanted that familiar feeling of abundance around her.
Having that much food around was overwhelming to me. I did
nearly all the cooking and felt responsible for the food not going towaste. For many months I had to remind myself to buy more foodthan I thought we needed. Initially I shopped at a discount supermarket that had limited brand selection and low prices. I soon
learned that the brand of an item was also important to her. I againchanged my habits to fit her needs, I regularly shopped at stores
which carried her preferred brands. As you can probably tell fromthe tone of this writing, I never quite got over my resentment that
I had traded her whipping out $35 once a month for someone else
to clean the house in exchange for my spending hours and money
to satisfy her food needs. I never valued her ways as deeply as
mine.

100

"Government Spending"
My friends and I do not charge interest on our loans to eachother. Interest is yet another way the wealthier make money off thepoorer. I hate paying interest and avoid it when possible. For
instance, I've avoided credit cards. The notion of paying 18%
interest makes me livid.
My disgust hasn't kept me from paying interest. I pay 10%
interest on a $5,000 car loan and 9% interest on the $10,000- remaining on my school loans. I once sat down and figured out
what interest would mean in my life. On paper it says I borrowed
about $23,000 for college and law school. After bank fees andgovernment charges, I actually received only $19,000. I will pay
back nearly $45,000. This boils my blood, especially when I hearstories from more affluent friends who defaulted on their schoolloans and later cut deals with lenders to make one much lower,large payment. In other words, they didn't have to pay interest. I'm
glad they didn't have to pay interest, I wish we all didn't.
Attending law school and working in law gives me certain
privileges. At the same time, those experiences oppress me andothers. I discovered too late that law is about power not justice.
Law work drains my heart. It also pays the debt and allows me tomaintain a way of life which supports my well-being. I have a hardtime perceiving which way the balance tips.
In 1995 I will be debt free if I make all my payments at current
rates. My history makes that seem unlikely. I've deferred payments while in the Peace Corps, while ill for months on end, andduring a period of unemployment. Still, four years feels so tangible. Having the debt shapes my sense of freedom. I wonder what
not having it will feel like. Will its end somehow finish what law
school meant to me? Will I choose a different lifestyle which
requires less income? Will I leave legal work?
"Personal Spending"
So what do I do with my money. In part it depends on whether
its a wet year or a dry year. Its rainy this year and I have the highest
standard of livinq I've ever experienced. This means my rent,
phone bill, and travel adventures are up.

101

As usual I purchase new and used stuff for the lesbian archives
that I started years ago. The archives is mostly a lending library oflesbian non-fiction and a collection of lesbian newsletters. I value
it above many things. The percentage of my resources that havegone into it reflects that valuing. As usual I also spend money onmusic making stuff. I play various instruments which I own andmaintain. To listen to other wimmin' s music, I have a record
player, a tape deck, a tuner, and speakers.
In writing this article I thought back over the years about someof my bigger purchases. I've owned three record players in my life.
The first I bought from a high school music teacher for $50. I used
it for nine years and then gave it away. I bought another which I
used for the next nine years. It broke and was unfixable. It's sittingin the closet until I discover a place to recycle it. The third record
player,! just bought last month for $130. I sure hope it lasts nine years.
About once every season I check to see what my current income
is and what I am buying with my resources. I jot down a budget
and consider what things I need to save for in the next six months.
My current monthly net income of $1400 goes out something likethis on a monthly basis:
Debt payments for school and car ........ ............ ......... $380
Rent, heat, electricity, and clothes washing costs ............ .... .... 375
Food ..... ...... .......... .. .. ....... ... ........ ........ ... .. ... ... .. .... ........ 125
Automobile gas, oil changes, maintenance, insurance .......... 100
Telephone services . .. ... ... ... ... .... ..... . ..... ..... .. . .. ... ........... ..... 90
Archives materials ... ... ..... ...... ... .... ... ......... ... .... ....... ...... 70
Furniture, Musical instruments & Electronic equipment ........ . 50
Travel and Moving Expenses ....... .......................... ...... ............ 50
Savings .. ... ........... .. ... ..... ..... ..... ........ .. ... ....... ... .. ................. 30
Donations to Lesbian Groups .... ......... .... ... .. .... .. .... ... .... 25
Health Care (e.g., massage, vitamins, meditation tapes,
state park tag) ............................... ......... ......................... ....... 25
Gifts to individual lesbians .......... .............................. .......... .... .. .... 25
Home and garden maintenance .... ..... .. ......... ... ... .. .. .. ....... 20
Spiritual aids (e.g., candles, tarot decks, spiritual books) ...... . 10
Lesbian cultural supplies (paper, postage, art supplies,
blank tapes) .......... ....... ........ ........ .... ...................................... ... 10
Quilting / sewing stuff ......... .......... ........ ....................... .. ... 10

Clothes ........................ ..................... ............ .... ................. 5102

Each month's expenditures don't look like this because one mustsave and save before making big purchases or paying big bills. I'save for everything from my car insurance payments to dental exams.
"The Bottom Line"
Writing this, I wonder if my spending habits are as unusual as
they feel to me. Never having had children, domestic animals, orhouse payments distinguishes me from many other dykes. In- addition, I don't entertain myself the way most dykes do. I don't
own a TV or a VCR. I rarely go to movies or "cultural" events. I
don't give money to religious or AIDS organizations. I seldom eat
in restaurants. These habits make me feel "other." Perhaps its thewarp between my working class background and my middle classeducation.
Throughout my adult life I've spent most of my resources on
education, travel, books and music. I look at this list and feel how
upper-middle class it is. That label makes me feel ashamed eventhough I value my choices in the context of my life. For instance, theformal education may not have been that valuable in and of itself,
but it was valuable as a means for me to increase my self-esteem.
When I've asked dykes about their incomes, debts, and money
sharing activities the conversations usually end rather quickly
with uncomfortable silences. Perhaps a dozen lesbians have shared
their complete money situations with me. Is that common? I haveno idea. I hope all this detail about my money will inspire otherlesbians to talk specifically about their money. Too often we don't
share enough detail with each other about what resources we haveor how we really spend what we have. My real hope is the more weknow, the easier it will be for tis to experience sharing.
At this time I have a comfortable standard of living and am
thankful for it. I share resources of some sort or other with everyone
I meet and many I do not meet. That sharing allows me to give tomyself, too. 1'm glad for wha tI have been able to give myself, I needit and I still feel guilty for saying that. I hope to shed the guilt, keep
the peace, and increase the sharing.

103

Ceramic drums
12" high, 15" diameter

Suz Fields
104

Caryatis Cardea

All the Pieces I Never Wrote About Class
These are all the pieces I've never written about class. Because
they are too hard to think about. Because no one wants to hear it- anyway. Because it is overwhelming in its complexity and I can'thang with it long enough to get the depth we need for real
understanding. Because it is overwhelming in its simplicity, and I
can't understand how it can go on year after year. I may neverfinish any of these pieces, but I can tell you what they're about .

•••There's the one about language, and the terms we use to
discuss class. Classism and poverty are not the same thing. Working-class is not poor. And broke is not poor. Doctors are notworking-class, just because they work. Plumbers are not middleclass just because they make money. Preachers and teachers are
not working-class just because they don't.
Working-class is not a working-class term.
Class is not money. And class is not the same thing for whitelesbians as for lesbians of color or Jewish lesbians .

•••Poverty is not-having-money, not-by-choice. Not-havingmoney has an impact on one's growth, health, education; nothaving-money limits access to food, clothes, beds and bedding,health care, transportation. By this last, I do not mean having a
Chevy instead of a Lincoln. I mean, having no means of escaping
the ravages of weather for which you already lack protective
clothing.
Poverty, that is, not-having-money, can limit or eliminate theability to grasp that choices exist. They don't exist, or are very
circumscribed, in the deeper realms of poverty in the U.S. Nothaving-money erases the future before it can be imagined. You cansee how things could be different if you had the money to makethem different, because you can see that people with money have105

things different, and they're not smarter or better than you, they
just have this money, see, and if you had it too, you'd make things
better, but you don't have money, and you already work as many
hours as there are in the week, and so does everybody else in thehousehold, and things still aren't any better, so what possible
reason could there be for even thinking about it?
Poverty erases the future before it can even be imagined .

•••There's the one about how we always write about our fathers.
The indignities they faced, the jobs they died from, the freedoms
they never knew. It's all true, but where are the womyn? It neverseems the same when we talk about our mothers. The indignities
they faced, the jobs they died from, the freedoms they never knew.
Women being denied pride just isn't as photogenic. Only men are
expected to have dignity anyway.

•••

And then there's the one about casually-thought-out barter
systems. Lesbians are fond of this idea. Only certain artisans andprofessionals have skills which can easily be exchanged. You can't
swap what you do in a factory for what someone else does in a
restaurant. So the dykes likely to be making the most money, i.e.,
those with artisan skills and professions, trade with each other.
They were the only ones who could afford their services to begin
with, but never mind, I'm being picky. They would get to keep
their cars and property in good repair at no loss of cash. This would
increase their disposable income for the purchase of more consumer items which they can maintain for free through the lesbian
network of repair-dykes. So they can buy even more things. Electronics. Cars. (Cruises?) The folks who wait tables, stock shelves, capbottles on an assembly line, answer phones at businesses or crisis
centers have nothing negotiable in most community barter systems. And if you're already on GA, has your lesbian community
ever made you feel so welcome you'd sign up for this? Or would
they make you feel that, for you, it's just another form of welfare?
Of course, many people who are unemployed, on government
assistance, or in low-income jobs have valuable talents, but thatinvolves time spent working in the community for barter, plus

106

their 40 (or more) hours for survival. Some lower-class services are in
demand by others. I guess a toilet cleaner can trade with a therapist,
but I don't imagine they'll ever feel like equals. Most lower classdykes are considered just as "unskilled" by the barter system as
we are by the monetary system. Different classes exist, and an illconsidered barter system would contribute to the gaps among them.

•••

And another one about language. The language lower-classdykes use about ourselves. Working-class is not a working-class
term. We think of ourselves as regular folks who would go right on
being regular if we somehow acquired the money to keep bodyand soul together. (I often think we are mistaken in this.) Sometimes we know that we are The Working People, as opposed tothose whose careers consist of managing our working, or those
who haven't even the advantage of employment. But, labeling usby the jobs we hold is something imposed from the outside. It is nota badge of distinction, only a mark of inferiority. Those who nolonger labored, but held professions or management positions,gave us a name that really only m~ant them-not-us. Do we cling to
it to distance us from the really poor?
Which brings me to the really poor. Being poor is not the samething as being working-class. The latter term refers to those whohave an income, however insufficient it may be, and whose income
is the result of labor. Those whose lives are spent in chronic
unemployment, for instance, or on welfare, in subsistence farming, or in the cycle of capture-and-release from the systems ofincarceration are poor and face an entirely different set of circumstances. The determination of who will be working-class and who
will be poor in the U.S. is in many respects a racial determination.
All people of color are not poor and all white people are not
middle-class. Large groups of each live in what I refer to as thelower classes.
Lower-class is my current preferred term for working-class,working-poor and poor. I use it to combat the sole use of the term
working-class, which renders everyone else below middle-classinvisible. I recommend use of the term lower-class with considerable caution, though, because, like all supposedly generic terms, it
could be abused to create yet another we-are-all-alike myth.
107

•••

And one about middle-class language used to discuss class.
Too often, middle-class discussions of class and classism quickly
devolve into efforts to establish that they don't have as muchprivilege as others (that would be us) seem to think they have.
But being broke is not not-having-money. It is only being unable
to locate the amount of spending money one wants for a specified
time. Low-on-cash is a temporary state within a life of being inpossession of sufficient, if not abundant, cash. This is not poverty.
And, as briefly as is lesbianly possible, I would like to discuss- no, let's be honest, I would like to dispose of the term "chosenpoverty." I grant no quarter to lesbians who think they've joined
the lower classes in America by selectively saying no to theirprivilege. Sometimes they do this because they believe it to be theconscientious means of achieving class equality; but sometimes it's
because they don't want to work with men, or because they feelbetter about themselves by withdrawing from the imperialist
economy, or because Mercury is retrograde. (No slur intended
against astrology, only against the use of knowledge we acquire in
our leisure to claim that we have no leisure.) Poverty is not-havingmoney due to conditions beyond one's control. To choose to berelatively moneyless within an essentially self-controlled life issimply not poverty. You'll just have to come up with another term(or, preferably, knock it off!) and disabuse yourselves of the notionthat your lives in any way resemble the lives of poor people.
And gray areas. The dreaded gray areas. You know. The
people who had servants and went to private schools, but whose
third-cousins-twice-removed lived in tenements in another part ofthe country a generation or so back? They're very uncertain about
what this confusion of values brings to their class identities.
OK. OK. I got that out of my system. I know there are people
living on the borders of the class worlds. And they need to findeach other and work out the contradictions in their lives. And to beacknowledged by the rest of us. As border-dwellers. But they
aren't lower-class any more than bisexuals are lesbians. Some classprivilege is some class privilege and we had none. The gray areas
I'm really referring to are the ones created by the smoke screens the
middle-and upper-class lesbians in our communities throw up to108

conceal their privilege and their eagerness to retain it. Having one
parent who was raised with class privilege and one who was not
is not a mixed class childhood, if you were raised by two teachers,
or a lawyer and,a housewife. My grandfather was a coal-miner, but
I was raised in Buffalo, New York. I'm not Appalachian. Your senseof yourself in the world comes only partly from money. The rest
comes from saying, My mother is a teacher, as opposed to, My mothercleans the toilets after school closes. This is true regardless of how_ many children the teacher may have been raising on her one salary.
Then there are those charming terms like disaffected. As in thedisaffected middle-class dykes. Or the ones who call themselves
traitors, turncoats to their class. Fugitives, runaways, escapees.
Those who divorced it, absconded, left it behind, recovered fromit. The only problem is it's all done with mirrors. They no longer
look at their privilege and believe it, therefore, to have vanished.
We clearly perceive it propped up right behind them, lending its
support to everything they do, whether it is what their parents
intended them to do or not. It is in our faces all the time.
You not only can't go home again, you can never completely
leave in the first place.

•••
And this one. I was sure I'd never risk talking about this in
public. The one about the middle-class socialist-feminists with
their manifest privilege and their secretarial jobs. Have you evernoticed how they never will tell you their childhood class identity?
They just say they're working-class secretaries. (Practically all ofthem are secretaries. Can this be a coincidence?)
N ow, I myself am a secretary, and I consider it a working-classjob. Relatively clean, yes, but not the free-of-physical-labor position many believe it to be. It can be very humiliating, when you
know you can't escape it, and high-stress, and it doesn't pay all tha t
great for most of us. The difference between me and the middleand upper-class socialist-feminist secretaries is that for me, secretarial work was as high as I had ever dreamed I could go; while forthem, it is as low as they would dare descend. We're not equal here.
I feel the same about middle-class dykes holding blue-collar
jobs. Designed to feed a wife and kids, trades pay what unions
used to call a "family wage." It would always have been nice for109

womyn to get those jobs, but middle-class womyn are not the ones
the unions kept out all those decades. This is not working-class.
This is middle-class lesbians with blue-collar jobs .

•••I might as well mention the one I was going to write about
computers about 6 or 7 years ago. Computers are making offices as
deadly as many factories. But their popularity is unstoppable. (I'mwriting this on one right now.) Bosses like them. They even likeusing them. In fact, it is absolutely astonishing how many middleand upper-class people, including dykes, now own computers.
Not just because of the money involved, but because it used to bethat almost the only folks who could type were lower-class womyn.
Therefore, all the shit paperwork involved in lesbian/feminist
organizing fell to us for the last two decades. Then, when typing
machinery became high-tech and chic - dare I say yuppie? - thearcane mysteries of the keyboard were suddenly unveiled .

•••Oh, yes. The one about the difference between poverty andclassism. They are not the same thing, you know. Poverty is only
not-having-money. Classism is how we are treated for not-havingmoney by those who do have money. Under poverty, pride canexist; under classism, poverty becomes a matter of shame.*•••

The one about how different our basic self-concepts are, even
within the umbra of poverty, when we are of different racialethnicities. This is because poverty is not class ism. Not-havingmoney is not-having-money, no matter who you are. How you aretreated for it is class ism, and that intertwines with many otheroppressions, notably racism and anti-Semitism.
In the U.S., if you are white and poor, these are two separate
factors in your life. Everything around you in the culture is a

*1 arrived at this particular distinction between the essence of poverty and theessence of classism in discussions with the editorial group of this journal, whosenames are on the inside front cover.

110constant display of white affluence. To have enough money isportrayed as being a natural consequence of being white. If you·don't have it yet, it can only be a matter of time. Maybe you justaren't trying hard enough. In other words, while it always feels
personal, it is not racial, not connected with your whiteness, withthat particular part of your core identity.
If you are of color and poor, society works very hard to keep
you aware that these two things are inextricably intertwined with_ each other. Not-having-money is made to seem a natural consequence of being a person of color. Everything in the media says thateach attribute, racial-ethnic identity and poverty, is due to theother. You are poor because you are of color, and because you areof color, you will be kept poor, all the while being made to believethat it isn't anything being done to you, it's just who you are.
If you are Jewish and poor, society works equ~lly hard to tell
you you just don't exist. Jews have money, and if you don't, maybe
you're not Jewish. If you insistthat you are, then you must be lying
about your resources.
All of these attitudes and beliefs are alive and well in thelesbian community. What are you doing about it?

•••This is a hard one: the one about boycotts.
I am uncomfortable with our intense eagerness to boycott allthat we dislike. If we can't stop it from happening, we can withdraw our stamp of approval: our cash. Only how did cash come tobe our stamp of approval? If a dyke opened a restaurant in myneighborhood tomorrow which was not accessible to dykes withwheelchairs, I would boycott the business. This makes sense to me:
the way she runs her business is the thing I hate and won't support.
If she is also a singer, what is accomplished by boycotting her records
and performances, if they are accessible? I understand applied pressure. But we boycott people and events we can't possibly stop without
organizing. And we don't organize, we just express our disapproval.
Is it just that if we can't stop her, we can at least refuse to contribute to her sustenance? If so, then I guess having a livelihood isonly for the righteous. It is in keeping with the tenets of whiteProtestantism that only the undeserving are deprived. Is thiswhere U.S. lesbians get the idea that money sanctifies? Of course,111

it would follow logically from this that poverty is somehow
deserved; or that poverty is a fitting punishment for politicaltransgressions. But that doesn't seem to worry us much. I'm asecretary. If I fuck up tomorrow, are you going to picket my office
to make sure I starve until I comply with your wishes?

•••
And the related one about how it is believed that havingmoney should give greater emphasis to one's opinions. Earlier thi$year, for example, there were some letters in a feminist newspaper
about music festival controversies. Two dykes wrote companion
pieces enumerating all the income that would be lost to the festival
owners, the craftswomyn, the artists, etc., should these letter-writers
opt to boycott the festival, which they were threatening to do if theirpolitical agenda was not administered. If the festival owners chose tofavor the other side of this dispute, they would suffer economically.
It was the very strong suggestion of these dykes that the festival
owners look at the numbers, and decide their politics accordingly.
This was bad enough for my taste, but they got worse. Theyemphasized that they pay top of the sliding scale because they canafford to, but that by doing so, they "subsidize" lower-income
womyn. Funny, I thought you were supposed to pay top of thescale because you could afford to, period. The inference here seems
to be that the center of the scale is the "real" price but some can't
afford it and we let them pay less. Then there are others, who canafford the middle of the scale and then some, which they offer outof the generosity oftheir spirits. They could have paid less, you see,but they were class-conscious lesbians and they elected to donate
some of their money for the charity dykes. Gee. Thanks. But, it
didn't say on my ticket that your moTtey paid for me. It said mymoney, however much of it I could afford, paid for me. It also
didn't say that paying the low end of the scale (which I,like many
lower-class dykes, seldom have the courage to do) entailed theforfeit of my right to be considered equal in political disputes. How
have we let things come to such a state?

•••

The one about working-class dykes and pride. How proud weare of what our parents earned, of what depths of poverty they112

avoided, and how nobly. For some of our folks, this was because
they had quite recently emerged from real poverty, and wanted.desperately to keep themselves and their kids out of it. I understand the clinging, butIknowthat they often knew their escape was
not solely a result of hard work. It was chance.
The one about how we maintain our pride now. How it's OK
if we own things as long as we can show how hard we worked toearn them. As if we had suddenly come to believe that hard work
_ is a thing that gets rewarded in this culture. We do need torecognize that a stereo or a tent or a camera or a dinner out means
something different to people who always have had and always
will have some money than it does to those who haven't and won't.
It takes something different for us to feel OK about buying it,
owning it, enjoying it. And the money - or whatever else- it takes
to get it is something different, too. We generally get less per hour,
and/or work less steadily. But what are we trying to do here except
fend off whatever it is we fear from above and below? We don't
want our existence negated by the upper classes just because of afew possessions. And we want a distance between us and thepeople below us, who work just as hard as we do and get nothing.
Only if we have to admit they work as hard and get nothing, thenwork isn't rewarded and what we have is a fluke and we could loseit. By the first act, we sell our souls to the middle class. By thesecond, we sell our poorer sisters' .

•••And this one. The really hard one. Not the one about money
itself. That's still too hard. This is the one about abuse. Not theviolent and sexual abuse we suffer in childhood, though. The
lesbian battery that no one wants to hear about.
This is the one about how I have observed that more abusedlesbians are from lower classes. About the way our current poverty
and our fear of it being worse makes us more easily manipulated
into abusive relationships. Poverty makes us easier to trap.
How we misunderstand middle- and upper-class expectations
in relationships. Where I come from, if you provide financial
assistance to someone, you make it seem like its something thatwould be better for you, too. It isn't considered a lie because
everyone knows what you're doing, you're refusing to encroach on113someone's dignity. You take the sting out of it. Some years ago, alesbian with whom I had been involved for a very short time told
me she'd lost her house and could she stay with me. I said yes. She
continued to ask, over and over, if I was sure it was all right. I did
what I had been taught to do. I said it was perfectly all right, I was
new in town, and could use the company. She moved in, outed me
to my family, stole my money, read my journal, destroyed mypossessions, sabotaged my schoolwork, eavesdropped on my phone
calls, hid my prescriptions, threatened my friends, and kept me
exposed to the constant threat of violence to me or to herself if I
tried to get away, which I couldn't do anyway being newly disabled
and extremely poor. She hadn't, she later confessed, lost her house;
the day of the move, her mother had sent her money for the rent.
But she didn't pay it because she thought I needed her with me.
When I said she'd come in under false pretenses and ought toleave, she said 1'd led her to believe I needed not to be alone andshe'd moved in as a favor to me. It took 9 months to extricate mylife from hers. I lacked the resources to leave. I was easier to trap.
How no one makes any attempt to help because we're tough,working-class dykes and we're used to violence. In fact, she didn't
scare me at first, and I said so, because I was, indeed, more than alittle accustomed to violence. When it really began with her,though, lesbian friends came right into the apartment and left
again with her screaming and threatening me. Everyone figured I
could handle myself. And, anyway, most of the dykes I knew weremiddle-class and she did scare them. They weren't used to it, you
know. My class background made me easier to trap.
And afterwards, for the four years she haunted my life, themiddle-class dykes ostracized me and embraced her in the community. She emphasized she had no hard feelings and would
gladly be friends with me. Of course. There was no risk involved
for her. But our community's middle-class make-nice attitude
places tremendous pressure on abused lesbians to forgive andforget. So my former friends became hers, while I, insistent about
avoiding her, was closed out. Class ism made me easy to abuse .

•••And the distance again. That distance we try to place between
the working-classes and the poor. I have never yet been in a114

discussion of class among lesbians from the lower classes where
the subject of the "value of education" did not arise. I question this'assertion of the value our parents placed on ed ucation, even withindifferent racial-ethnic groups. Many immigrants to the U.S. didcome from cultures which esteemed education for its own sake. In
this country, however, education is presumed to lead to work. The
value we seek when we send our children to school is employment.
This business of our parents' belief in education has a defen- sive ring to it. I believe that we are, once again, appeasing the
middle and upper classes and distancing ourselves from the lower
classes. I know lots of dykes who acquired considerable education
which they did not use to further careers, and their parents
consider the education essentially wasted. So of what value iseducation? Rich people, who don't need a degree to get ahead,
have stated that education is a thing to be sought for.its own worth.
Why are we buying into that?
We probably also say it because it means our parents weregood parents who wanted good things for us. Looked at moreclosely, though, good parents comes to mean parents who sought
middle-class benefits for their children, and who were not likepoor parents, who let their kids drop out of high school.
None of my aunts or uncles finished high school. None of mycousins, either. Neither of my parents did. My father never started.
My two half-brothers graduated, but my sister left to get married.
I hung in to the bitter end, only to learn that I would have tosurrender my scholarship to college. I was needed among theworking adults if we were to eat that year .

•••Unemployment. Joblessness. These are matters of very different import to lower-class than to upper-class lesbians. But nothingis universal to the lower class. Some of us have spent much time
unemployed because we are subjected to more sexual harassment
than womyn in middle-class jobs. Middle-class men assume lowerclass womyn will be available to them. On the other hand, somelower-class womyn will keep a tenacious grip on the most hideous
job to try to keep their heads above water. Whether we haveworked or not worked, we have done so for reasons other thanthose which determine middle-class womyn's work records.
115

•••

I identify as coming from working poor people. In my childhood, I sometimes thought of us as poor, because we had no money.
Then, with age, I came to understand the difference between getting
a paycheck that didn't stretch far enough, and getting no paycheckat alL My father's monthly salary wouldn't have fed us for a week,
but as a disabled veteran, he received a check which stood between
us and abject poverty.
My mother worked, and scammed, and worked some more.
She taught me to kite checks from one bank to another, she begged
old food from local stores, cruised the better-off neighbor hoods forfurniture left by the curb, and raised hell. I still remember the time
she encountered a grand piano sitting on a front lawn with a large
plant in it. She was so incensed at the extravagant waste that she
knocked on the door and screamed at the man for his arrogance.
The dishes we ate off had been lifted from the bar and grill
establishments where she waited tables at night. When my cousin
married a sailor, my mother began shopping with her at the PX and
we discovered the joys of powdered eggs.
The old rug in the dining room gave out, and she knew thenoise of all of us running around on bare wood would wear herout, so she begged the samples from the nearest carpet store. Whilewe were at school, she pulled out the grommets, turned over theold rug for a pad, and glued the damn things down in a patchwork
pattern which so delighted her she went back for more and ran it
all the way up the stairs. My sister and I, teenagers, immediately
vowed we'd die if any of our friends ever saw it. She didn't care; she
had good, strong carpet -or, at least, good, strong carpet samples which would last longer than any cheap rug we could afford.
I have said, on many occasions, we were working-class, wewere never on welfare. True enough, but not because we didn't try.
Most times, there were just too many adults of employable age inthe house for us to qualify. That we couldn't live on what theybrought in didn't matter.
When they were first married, my mother pressed my father to
use the GI bill to buy a house. When there were four children, we
moved into the 3-bedroom house they found, and they proceeded
to have five more children. Then there were the boarders, the116cousins and uncles down on their luck, the runaway friends of myolder brothers and sister, the baby my mother brought home from't he bar where she worked because the mother and grandmotherleft it in a carriage on the sidewalk all day while they drank. (After
18 months, they decided they'd like her back, please.) And the boy
my sister was going out with, whose parents threw him out for
dating trash. They followed my sister around, spitting on her,drove past our house at all hours screaming obscenities, all to make- the pointthattheir son was from a better family and much too goodfor the likes of any of us. He and my sister eventually broke up, sheleft the state, and he remained in the house as another brother.
And the owner of the candy store from my mother's oldneighborhood. He'd retired and was living alone. So what if we
had nowhere to put him, that wasn't the point anyway, she wasonly going to visit him, she protested. My father knew better.
While she was over "visiting," assuring the man it was because hewas so good with kids (to take the sting out), my father brought thecot out of the basement and the candy-store owner - who was,indeed, good with kids and a terrific addition to the household slept there until his death a few years later.
The point of all this is that I knew we had no money and thatwas called poor. But we were related to people who were poorer
and we'd heard of people who were rich. (When I encounteredfeminism, I thought this meant we were middle-class. Get it? Not
rich, not poor. Somewhere in the middle. Made sense to me.)Anyway, we knew the difference. Then, too, my mother neverwavered from what has been called the First Rule of Irish Families:
there's always room for one more. The idea is that if you haveanything, you have more than those with nothing, and that's
enough to share. Lesbians have enough resources to alleviate
much of the poverty in our communities; and the information tostop the class ism. Are you listening?

117

Betty DudleyHeart Beats

Burning blood flows angrily,
Like a precursor
Through the heart it may one day attack.
Downed by my own anger,
My own power.
Why don't I just let it go?
Chill out, California cool,Live in the here and now
Where my income puts me
On par with you.
Or why don't I just kill you?
You act as if I'd tried.
Be myself you say.
But to show a self you can handle,
I have to lie.
You work at reclaiming your anger,
While I am to erase mine.
As if we're playing with the joystick
To a video game, arranging the players at will
With a button to start over anytime.
The kills aren't real.
Well, fuck that shit.
Anger is a power line.
One that life has handed me.
The kills are real.
I have a heart,
Warmed by anger,
Dragged through places
Love could not pull me through.

118

And if I am afraid of anything,
It is of women who will not own their power,, Afraid of their own heart beat,
Who believe that blood should be pumped by a mere Valentine;
Women who would kill a heart like mine without even knowing
what they've hit.
Yes, I love you.
_ I don't wish to dump this all on you.
You wanted to come close enough to hear my heart beat.
Well, that's what I've let you do.

Thermos
Suz Fields
119

RESPONSE-------------------------JustreceivedSW43/44*WOW* SW43/44 succeeds in celebrating thebreadth, depth & diversity of the lesbian identity. Skimming &sampling - I only got home a few hours ago - I find the issue fresh,even the contributor notes are funny, fascinating and revealing.
Nothing is stale.
Thanks for the emotional and spiritual recharge. I spent 3 hours
last night moaning to a friend that lesbian-feminist culture was, must
be a mirage - that the definition of "lesbian" was too loose to build
a consensus or nurture expression. Thank you for reminding me thateven flowers can survive & bloom in the desert. The energy spent wasworth it.
- Valerie Beasley
Dear Sinister Wisdom Women, ... I am glad to support your magazine
and look forward to future issues, however I want to register mydispleasure about issue #43/44. When I subscribed last I was signingup for a series of separate issues ... I assumed new material each time.
I do not like retrospectives, and resent my subscription having to pay
for one. I've already read the material when it was originally published. And why cuttrees for paper for what has already been printed
before? If you must do a retrospective, I think you should ask yoursubscribers if they want one and then sell it separate from thequarterlies. So that's my disgruntlement. The rest is my love.
- Madrone (of Fly Away Home)
Dear Elana and everyone, Just a note to let you know I received my 2copies of the Retrospective and was absolutely thrilled. My god, you
did a magnificent job. I loved the selections you made, couldn't
believe the amount & carefulness of labor - the whole thing isbeautiful. And I think the timing is perfect somehow. Loved the Notes
for a Magazine & also Notes on Language. Thank you from thebottom of my heart. Love,- Harriet Ellenberger
Dear Elana and all SWDykes: Thank you for issue 43/44 - it was theanswer (hell, I didn't even know what the question was). I wasespecially moved by Audre Lorde's writing on silence-exactly what
I needed to hear. It all inspires me to write and perhaps to renew someof my diminishing faith in the good sense of the Lesbian "community."
I know that putting out S Wis a difficult job - I hope a day doesn'tgo by that you don't get to hear that we readers out here love SWour lives would be diminished without it. Thank you.
- Shoney Sien120

Dear Editors: I am writing to protest the editorial politics involved
in selecting articles to be reprinted in your fifteenth anniversary issue ...
Specifically, I protest the systematic erasure of Mary Daly and herco-thinkers from the retrospective. The deletion of Mary Daly's piecefrom the reprint of Julia Penelope's 1977 MLA panel on Lesbians andLiterature was glaring, as was the inclusion of Elly Bulkin's attack on
Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology without any of the original letters which
protested Bulkin's smear tactics.
Mary Daly's thinking was a guiding force in the launching of S W.
- Indeed ... the original editor's notes for the fledgling magazine, state
explicitly: "We want to print what Mary Daly calls 'ludic cerebration,
the free play of intuition in our own space, giving rise to thinking thatis vigorous, informed, multidimensional, independent, creative,
tough." ... It is an outrage that the radical feminist contributions of Jane
Caputi and Andree Collard, both early and out-of-print material, werealso not deemed worthy of reprint.
_
The omission of these materials is not simply a loss, it is a falsificationof Lesbian herstory. The erasure of an influence as profound as Mary
Daly's reminds me ofa Stalinist photograph, retouched to delete the facesof those purged ...
Tragically, such erasure of Mary Daly's thinking comes at a time
when her worldview needs most to be heard. We are witnessing a
growing movement oflesbians away from feminism and towards gay
male values. Sexist behaviors such as SIM, pornography, butchfemme, and sexual fetishism are increasingly tolerated in a Lesbiancommunity tha f used to be the vanguard of feminism. Mary Daly has
been a brave voice against the patriarchal tide, practicing the "ludic
cerebration" with which SW used to identify.
I urge SW to reclaim its original values and re-chart a truly radical feminist course. You can start by reprinting Mary Daly.
- Crystal Chemris

Editor's note (Elana): Aside from her section of the 1977 MLA panel(material included in the recently reprinted, widely available Gyn/Ecology), Mary Daly has not published in SW. We consider thoughtful
criticism, such as Elly Bulkin's in her essay "Racism and Writing" (ofwhich only 1/4 addresses Mary Daly), an indication of the importance of awork, not a smear. Jane Caputi published an essay "Jaws: Fish Stories andPatriarchal Myth" in #7 and Andree Collard a speech "Random Thoughts
on Victimization" in #11 . We have no intention of erasing these lesbians'
contributions - but we did have to choose from thousands of pages. And the90+ radical lesbians and lesbian/feminists we did reprint - what are they,
chopped liver?

121

Dear Elana and every Lesbian who worked on S W43/44: I began this
9th day of my 51st year by opening my contributor's copy of SW 43/
44 only casually, intending to flip through its pages to find out what
was included, what omitted (I already knew, from several Lesbians,that Mary Daly had been left out). I would leaf through, delay reallyreading it for a later time. But this double issue thwarted my casual
intent. I couldn't not read it, cover to cover, exactly as I read every
issue from 1976-1980.
Now, I sit at my keyboard dazed, touched, moved beyond words,
but committed to writing this letter to all of you. I've learned many thingsfrom my 50th year: one of them - if I delay an impulse too long, I rarely
act on it. And so, I want to act on my impulse to write this letter, I wantto convey, somehow, my feelings as I read the contributors' notes andknew that with them the retrospective issue had come to an end, for now.
Fifteen years of Sinister Wisdom, 15 years of Lesbian/feminist visioning,
Harriet and Catherine's rash love of that visioning, making of it something we lovingly held in our hands ... pondering, searching, exploring,making connections, arguing, disputing, challenging, asserting, rebutting, healing, wounding, healing, going on ...
In my hands the tangible, concrete realizations of our dreams anddoubts. I couldn't put it down. It was so thick and heavy; it smelled sogood. I read every word, article, poem, searched every graphic ...
knowing I'd read them all at least once, some many times, with fullrecognition, savoring, remembering.
SW 45 is a great gift, a wonderful gift, holding 15 years of my/ourlife/lives in my hands .... When I say I couldn't put it down, I mean thatliterally. When I finished reading it, I sat thankfully and let the full weightof those years envelope me and let myself cry for joy, for gratitude, for
who we've been and who we are, for what we have managed to giveourselves, each other - for our continuity, for our breadth, for our
stubbornness, for our keeping on. For our sheer tough determination, forso much. And I ~ave lived to hold this gift in my hands. Too many
Lesbians, some whose words were reprinted there, not so lucky as 1.
To all of you, all of us, thank you. Thank you very much.
- Julia Penelope

Dear Elana, The 15th Anniversary Retrospective is an issue I'll pickup again and again, not only for its herstorical value, but also becauseof its coverage of the multiplicity of issues affecting us then and now.
Congratulations !
- Terri de la Pefla

122

To the Collective: I received your guidelines for submissions in the
mail today and while I have nothing to offer you in the way of material, at this time, per se, I did want to respond to the way in which theinformation on the Lesbians and Class issue is worded.
While I think it is important to empower all women, the language
in which you address these issues seems only to further division. For
example, ''We urge middle-class and wealthy lesbians to rememberthat an embarrassment of riches is not the same as the shame ofpoverty." There's a world of difference between the lifestyle of the
middle-class and working class or raised poor families, and theinherent feelings and meanings of the words "embarrassed" and"shame." To use words such as "embarrassment" versus "shame"(and it is set up in a kind of us versus them mentality), women of
middle-class backgrounds in particular are always being called toaccount for their class backgrounds by working class and raised poor
women. Consciousness raising, as sometimes happens when white
women are confronted about their inherent racism by black women,
is often thrust back into the faces of middle-class women withstatements such as, "Do it yourself." This closing of the doors ofcommunication helps no one and certainly doesn't foster an atmospherein which people can come together and explore their differences.
To say this letter made me angry would be an understatement.
I'm tired of people pointing to my class background, over which I had
no control, and blaming me for inherent attitudes that I wish to
explore and change. Rarely is my desire to change these attitudes, tobecome more sensitive to working-class issues even acknowledged.
How are we going to find common ground if a reasonable dialoguecannot even be established?
Most of my friends are working class, certainly the class in which
I find myself currently Iiving is working class (as well as the neighborhood), but I accept that I bring with me assumptions about the worldthat are grounded in my class background. But the assumption on
your part that middle-class women (and wealthy women) only feel"embarrassment" about their places in the world is, I feel, a leap into
the unknown. This statement makes it almost impOSSible for a womanof middle- or upper-class background to even feel comfortable submitting work to this issue. Of course we remember these things, ofcourse we're aware of them. Do you think we don't also feel shame
when our working class friends point up our shortcomings? Do you
think we don't feel shamed by the inequality of the class system? Of
our own backgrounds? Many middle-class women try to hide theirclass backgrounds, especially in situations like attending a State
University or College where to be middle-class is to be an outsider.

123

While this experience is valuable, it doesn't negate the feelings this"outsideness" brings with it. This feeling of "outsideness" is essential
to the true transformation of our belief systems - just as I was an
outsider as a white woman in a literature class on black women's
writings, just as I am an outsider being a lesbian in a straight society.
Lesbians already know this feeling of being outside the mainstream.
If we could draw on that to create a dialogue about class it would be
so much richer, so much more valuable than simply creating anotherus versus them value system and dialogue .
... If any kind of a meaningful dialogue is going to emerge about
these issues, it has to be one in which inclusiveness is the primary
focus. I understand that working class and raised poor voices havebeen left out of this dialogue for too long, just as women's voices andthe voices of people of color have been eliminated from literature,
history and art. The list is endless. I urge you to be more careful withyour word choices. It is only through these painful kinds of dialogues
that real learning, real understanding can occur. We cannot be afraidof our shame, our anger. But don't assume that middle-class andwealthy women are simply "embarrassed." This is not the case. For
while I agree with the premise of this issue and applaud it, it isessential that w e take care with our language and open doors insteadof closing them. This kind of division is what keeps us splintered andun-unified. It need s to stop. You have the opportunity to let thishapp en. Don't l~t it go to waste. Thank you for your consideration ofthis and letting me speak my mind.
- Cris Newport

Dear Janet Capone and Denise Leto: I recently bought a copy ofSinister Wisdom #(41), ''II Viaggio Delle Donne." I thought it was
fabulous! "ll Viaggio" is the first publication I have ever seen that deals
exclusively with the experience of Italian American lesbians. I grew
up in the North End of Boston (Boston's Italian neighborhood), andI currently live only a few miles from there. I never knew any other
Italian American lesbians when I was a child, and I have yet to meetany. When I read "ll Viaggio," for the first time, I heard voices thatechoed my own experiences....
- Lucille L. Petringa124

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTES, Adrienne Lauby is a 42-year old disabled mix-class (upper-working, lower-middle) feminist raised in rural Nebraska. Currently I
am writing a novel about young lesbians to complete my master's
degree in English from a California State College.
Alien: I'm a poor white disabled Gemini with pink hair. I eat Cheetosthat I buy with food stamps and watch tv with my daughter. I- spend my time rescuing myself from patriarchy by acting out myfantasies, going to therapy and support groups, and by telling thesecrets of my soul to anyone who will listen.
Betty Rose Dudley: I' m39 (really) and a white working-class bitchfrom Missouri who grew up to be a state worker in California.
Calary Blue is a working-class woman who lives in,Oakland, hangs
out in San Francisco and has a heart in Alaska.
Carie Winslow lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Caroljean Coventree: I live in an old, old house where two widerivers join. My blessings here are many, from lesbian neighbors
who nurture profusions of wildflowers to the cedar waxwings andmule deer who live down the county road out front. Lesbianfriends and wildness are often at my door. I am thankful.
Caryatis Cardea: I am a lesbian separatist. I was born in 1950 in
Buffalo, New York to a French-Canadian, Irish-Catholic workingpoor family. I have 5 brothers and 3 sisters, only one of whom
speaks to me since I challenged my parents on incest. These are all
the things I never tell in my bio: I am an accident-disabled,vegetarian, card-playing, Scorpio, aging-hippie, rock In' roll dyke
who plays classical piano. I laugh more than anyone I know.
Celia Rodriguez is a working-class Chicana lesbian and artist
living, teaching, and painting in Chicago.
Corie Lamere: Born 5/21/57 and raised on farms in Minnesota.
Father worked as a pipefitter/welder, farmed in his spare time &raised seven children with my mother who was always at home.
Left home and lived on my own at 16. Graduated H .S. 1975 andjoined the Navy. Discharged at Treasure Island and stayed in
California. Worked as a psych. tech. 17 years. Recently disabledfrom working as an electrician apprentice.
125

Debby Earthdaughter: I'm 30, U.S. citizen from a German/un-

known heritage, from mixed working/middle class, living withenvironmental illness disability and the low-income that goes withnot being able to work. I currently live as a renter at a private
women's campground near Tucson and am working with SHE Land
Trust to establish land for dykes with disabilities and our allies.
Elliott: I'm a mainly white, more able some days than others, Midwestern Dyke Separatist who's been temporarily transplanted toPhiladelphia. In times of need, comfort food overrides my analysis ofprivilege and health in food choices. My writing has also appeared inCommon Lives/Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Ethics, Hag Rag, and Wanting
Women: An Anthology of Erotic Lesbian Poetry. My poetry chapbook,Songs from the Separatist Revolution, is available through MHL Press
at 5902 McCallum St., Philadelphia, PA 19144 for $5-10 sliding
scale and $1.50 postage. These days, talking and surviving are prettymuch the same thing for me, so let me know if you live in my area or
if you know a way for me to make free phone calls to my families in
Madison and Minneapolis.
Felicitas: I'm a 29-year-old working-class lesbian German citizen
who lived in West Berlin for the last 10 years and who has been
living in the U.S. for the last 9 months.
Janet Capone is a working class Italian-American poet and fiction
writer. Both sets of her grandparents came from villages near
Naples around 1905. "East 50th Street Scream" is part of her firstnovel, which is soon to be completed. She also co-edited with Denise
Leto the Sinister Wisdom issue on Italian-American women: nViaggio
Delle Donne. Her work has appeared in various journals such as
Lesbian Ethics, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, and La bella figura, and will
be in a forthcoming anthology on Catholic girlhoods to be publishedby Penguin.
Jasmine Marah: (working poor) enigmatic, eclectic, elastic, eccentric, enthusiastic, fat, forty-four, furious fotomaker.
Martha Courtot: I am an exile in many worlds. I write and love outof my deep woundedness and my belief in the holiness of connection.
I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in August, and am amazed at theinterior changes this new age brings. Class for me is perhaps thedeepest wound. I have been published in many lesbian and126

feminist journals, struggled in class wars in the lesbian community
for ten years before wearing out, and am enjoying being a lesbian, grandmother. My worst struggle is against the voice that tells me
to keep silent.
Mary Frances Platt: I am a fat lesbian with disabilities who wasraised mixed class (poor & working) with the dominant values being
working class. Currently I am a master's educated financially poor
woman living on 551 with a strong working class perception of the- world. I "do" anti-oppression education & am still looking for the
butch of my dreams.
Max Dashti: I am a railroad-tracks-child and tract-housing-in-theshadow-of-nuclear-factory-girl. I have been checkout clerk fired for
epilepsy, agricultural laborer, scholarship student, homeless dropout, waitress fired for epilepsy, housepainter, public schools clerk,eldercare worker, chardyke and janitor. I am a working-class historian supporting myself mainly as a laborer, and teach international
women's studies, freelance and "uncredentialed," ateveryopportunity.
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. If I'd had the medical care class privilegebuys, I wouldn't be as ill and disabled as I am now. If I wasn't so
ill and disabled, I'd have a better chance of not being as poor as I
am now. The loves of my life are my 7 year lover/best friend/life
companion Frieda, painting, writing, reading, collecting stones/
crystals, and talking with other separatists.
.
Nanette Herbert lives in London, England.
Nona Caspers was raised in a working class neighborhood in rural
Minnesota and now works asa secretary and attends the creative
writing program at San Francisco State. Her first novel, The Blessed,came out in the spring of '91 by Silverleaf Press. In it a young
lesbian is abducted by a motherly older woman who wears a gun
on one hip, and a Bible on the other.
Sabena Stark: Raised by two survivors who arrived in this country
broke and died broke 30 and 40 years later. I spent two of myteenage years in a Jewish home for girls. I am a bird that flew outof the ashes of the Holocaust to have a child, write music, love
women, and pay for a therapist.

127

Suz lives in California, with Kodiak. She's working-class. Still.
Terri Fredlund: I am a 33-year-old dyke with strong nomadic
tendencies, and of Italian/Northern European descent. My sisterand I were raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by our mother, whoworked for years in the same electrical plant. I am a wimmin's self
defense journeywomon, though I do a variety of work to survive.
lova is a working-class jewish lesbian. she is on the core editorialgroup of bridges, a journal for jewish feminists and our friends. thisstory is an excerpt from her yet-unpublished novel, transfusions.
she's glad tonight starts the ten days of awe, so she can remember
to be awe-full.

The radic a l feminist magazine• 00 You N~ Facts
About Menopause?

Issue 21 Summer 1991

• Does the Sterroiyplnll or Older Women
Make You Angl)"?

• Women abusers: the femi nist
response• Tanzonla : b ride wealth a nd
wom en's poverty• Wilful neglect: wome n a nd Aids
• 'Vlrgln births' exp osed
• Why La uro Pa lme r d ied- ' A formidable femi nist mogozlnenot for the faint-hearted. ' The
Guardian• Do You want to be Pa rt ora n Older Femlnls ls ' Nelwork?

BROOMSTICK
A Quarterly National MagazineB)\ For, & About Women Over Forty
Annual Subscrtptlon

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Canada 520 :Qv.,,,,,,as 525 :For your free sample copy send toTrouble & Strife (free) at the address
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San Francisco. CA941 10

128_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Books Received
A Few Words in the Mother Tongue - Poems Selected and New (1971-1990)
is a superlative, long-awaited collection by Irena Klepfisz whose poetry
infiltrates the slick surface of the modern world withandentmeaning, depth
and resonance; with an Introduction by Adrienne Rich. 1990,$11.95, Eighth
Mountain Press, 624 SE 29th Ave., Portland, OR 97214-3026.
Dreams of an Insomniac - Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes isthe companion to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue by Irena Klepfisz,
dedicated "tsu der bavegung - to the movement and the lesbian/feminists who made this work possible"; with an Introduction by Evelyn
Torton Beck. 1990, $11.95, Eighth Mountain Press.
Incidents Involving Mirth, Anna Livia's most recent short story collection,is the first to be published in the U.S., and is a wonderful introduction toa great lesbian imagination. 1990, $9.95, Eighth Mountain Press.
Her, an exciting new novel exploring relationships between Black women
set in '50s Detroit, by Cherry Muhanji. 1990,$8.95,Aunt Lute Books,POB
410687, SF, CA 94141.
Daughter of the Mountain: Un Cuento - a mestiza in a southwesternborder town faces the 20th century with her grandmother's wisdom fromthe 19th - a profound and beautiful first novel by Edna Escamill. 1991,$8.95, Spinsters Book Company, POB 410687, SF, CA 94141.
The Lesbian Erotic Dance: Butch, Femme, Androgyny and Other Rhythms isabout reclaiming the diversity and depth oflesbian sexualities, by JoAnn
Loulan. 1990, $12.95, Spinsters.
Modern Daughters and the Outlaw West - rural lesbians battle fundamentalists and other intruding male forces - a gripping first novel by Melissa
Kwasny. 1991, $9.95, Spinsters.
Lesbians at Midlife: The Creative Transition -lesbians in their 40s and 50s
have a lot of things to say and this is a wonderful, multi-culturalcollection of them, edited by Barbara Sang, Joyce Warshow and Adrienne
J. Smith. 1991, $12.95, Spinsters ..
Final Session - this engaging mystery of the murdered psychotherapist
won Spinsters' 1990 fiction contest, by Mary Morell. 1991, $9.95, Spinsters.
The Montreal Massacre - feminist essays, poems,letters to the editor on the1989 mass murder of 14 women at the Univ. of Montreal, edited by Louise
Malette and Marie Chalouh, trans. by Marlene Wildeman. 1991, $12.95,
gynergy books, POB 2023, Charlottetown, P .E.I., Canada CIA 7N7.
Telling It: Women & Language Across Cultures - a Canadian compilation
on racism, cultural appropriation and homophobia, edited by Sky Lee,
Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. 1990, $14.95, Press
Gang Publishers, 603 Powell St., Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V6A IH2.
Sojourner's Truth & other stories "transform Native oratory into written
word, " by Lee Maracle. 1990, $10.95, Press Gang.

129

Dream On - a wonderful, accessible, inspiring collection of Chrystos'
poems - don't miss it! 1991, Press Gang.
Drawing the Line -lesbian sexual politics on the wall - 40 postcards fromthe traveling photo show, by Kiss & Tell: Susan Stewart, photographer,with Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones. 1991, Press Gang.
Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices - Audre Lorde's poem with a
new introduction, published as pamphlet #6 in the Freedom Organizing
Series. 1990, $3.50, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, POB 908,
Latham, NY 12110.
Beneath My Heart - ''1 was a live seed planted by a woman / in another
woman's womb. / All things insatiable belong to me" - poetry rooted
in a Native American and lesbian landscape by Janice Gould. 1990, $8.95,
Firebrand Books, 141 The Commons, Ithaca, NY 14850.
Making It: A Woman's Guide to Sex in the Age of AIDS, in English andSpanish, by Cindy Patton and Janis Kelly, trans. by Papusa Molina, illus.
by Alison Bechdel. 1990, $4.95, Firebrand.
Sacred Space: A Feminist Vision of Astrology, by Geraldine Hatch Hanon.
1990, $9.95, Firebrand.
Just Say Yes, a lesbian romance with an edge, set in Provincetown, by
Judith McDaniel. 1991, $8.95, Firebrand.
The Women Who Hate Me - Poetry 1980-1990 is an expanded and revised
edition of Dorothy Allison's first book. 1991, $8.95, Firebrand.
Food & Spirits, eight substantial stories by Beth Brant (Mohawk Trail andeditor of A Gathering of Spirit). 1991, $8.95, Firebrand.
The Gilda Stories - Jewelle Gomez's long-awaited, sensual and political
Black vampire novel. 1991, $9.95, Firebrand.
Artemis in Echo Park - clear, strong lesbian poetry by Eloise Klein Healy.
1991, $8.95, Firebrand.
Cats (and their Dykes) -over fifty lesbians contribute to this examinationof the cat in lesbian culture in stories, poems, essays, photographs,
drawings and cartoons, edited by Irene Reti and Shoney Sien. 1991, $10,
HerBooks, POB 7467, Santa Cruz, CA 9506l.
Take Back the Night - a beautiful 1992 13-month multi-cultural womon's
lunar wall calendar, created by Terese Armstrong and Mary Blaettler. 1991,$10, Full Womoon Productions, POB 1205, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.
The Chant of the Women of Magdelena & the Magdalena Poems - a multi-cultural
lyric adventure, with biographic poems of the participants and a preface on''Tradition and Poetic Memory" by SDiane Bogus. 1990,$9.00, Women in theMoon Pub., 2215-R Market Street, Box 137-CWM, SF, CA 94114.
Gaudf Afternoon is Barbara Wilson' s inviting mystery, set in Barcelona.
1990, $8.95, Seal Press, 3131 Western Ave., Suite 410, Seattle, WA 9812l.
Ceremonies of the Heart - Celebrating Lesbian Unions is an anthology ofdifferent pairs' ceremonies with a short "History of Lesbian Partnerships," edited by Becky Butler. 1990, $14.95, Seal Press.
130

The Children's Crusade - a novel journeying through the hazardous
landscape of family relations by Rebecca Brown. 1991, $8.95, Seal Press.
Lesbian Bedtime Stories 2 - for those of us who like to read something
short, sweet & lesbic to ourselves or our bed-mates before dropping off,
these 30 stories are a sequel to the first volume, thanks to "gatherer" Terry
Woodrow. 1990,'$9.95, Tough Dove Books, POB 184, Willits, CA 95490.
The Ship That Sailed Into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered Sonia Johnson muses on the various things lesbians do in "relation Ships."
1991, $12.95, Wildfire Books, Star Route I, Box 55, Estancia, NM 87016.
Death by the Riverside - a lesbian mystery-thriller set in New Orleans,with a subtext about grief, repression and healing, by J. M. Redmann.
1990, $8.95, New Victoria Press, POB 27, Norwich, VT 05055.
In Unlikely Places - historical romance: "This is a story about Africa,
because at my root depth, it is Africa I love - yet I do not assume to write
it as anything but a European. And always in search of wholeness" - by
ReBecca Beguin. 1990, $8.95, New Victoria.
Woman with Red Hair - Magalie searches France for her birth mother,and finds mystery; by Sigrid BruneI. 1991, $8.95, New Victoria.
Cody Angel is the story of a Wyoming lesbian's early love and later
initiation into SanFrancisco life, a story of struggle for self-esteem, independence and love, by Joanne Whitfield. 1991, $8.95, New Victoria.
Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking - the fourth and last of "working
class Lesbian poet" Karen Brodine' s books of poetry, published after her'deathfrom cancer in 1987, a deep and important volume. 1990,$8.95,Red
Letter Press, 409 Maynard Ave. South, #201, Seattle, WA 98104.
Voices of Women in Dialogue: On Politics, Religion and Culture in Israel feminist interviews in Israel, by Batya Weinbaum, in spiralbound format.
1991, $16.50, YPS, 151 Main St., Northampton, MA 01060.
Sasha's Harlem - The Making and Breaking of Israeli Americans - magicalrealism and lesbian politics, set in Jerusalem, by Batya Weinbaum, inspiralbound format. 1991, $16.50, YPS.
Tea for Thirteen - Candice J. Gr.a ham's first collection of lesbian shortstories, and Impertinent Press's first title. 1991, $9.95 (U.S.), Impertinent
Press, Box 23097, 2121 Carling Ave., Ottawa, Ont., Canada K2A 4E2.
The Blessed - an intriguing lesbian suspense-love-spiritual quest novel by
Nona Caspers. 1991, $9.95, Silverleaf, roB 70189, Seattle, WA 98107.
Getting Away With Murder - a Cynthia Chenery Scott mystery by Pele
Plante. 1991, $9.95, Clothespin Fever, 5529 N . Figueroa, L.A., CA 90042.
Are You Girls Traveling Alone? Adventures in Lesbianic Logic is a wonderfulcollection of columns that appeared in L.A.'s Lesbian News in the '80s,
entertaining, affirming, illuminating; by Marilyn Murphy with an intro
by Marilyn Frye. 1991, $10.95, Clothespin Fever.
Ninth Life - a Caitlin Reece Mystery set among the enemies of the animal
rights movement by Lauren Wright Douglas. 1990, $8.95, The Naiad
Press, POB 10543, Tallahassee, FL 32302.
131

Players - an erotic field of gamesdykeship by Robbi Sommers, theauthor of Pleasures. 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
Staying Power: Long Term Lesbian Couples gives us survey results, interviews, advice, social history and analysis in a well-conceived and interesting format, by Susan E. Johnson. 1990, $12.95, Naiad.
Slick, a lesbian mystery centering on the theft a precious, symbolic Sou th
American statue, is Camarin Grae's fifth novel. 1990, $9.95, Naiad.
Side by Side-lesbian romance in NYC at the time of the Stonewall Uprising,by the author of Patience and Sarah, Isabel Miller. 1990, $9.95, Naiad.
Southbound - the sequel to Faultline promises to be one of the funnierlesbian novels of the year, by Sheila Ortiz Taylor. 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
The Providence File - an internationally set espionage thriller by Amanda
Kyle Williams. 1991, $8.95, Naiad.
I Left My Heart -lesbian mystery by Jaye Maiman. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
Touchwood - a cross-generational lesbian romance by Karin Kallmaker.
1991, $8.95, Naiad.
Bayou City Secrets - a hard-boiled, comedic lesbian mystery set in 1936
by Deborah Powell. 1991, $8.95, Naiad.
Cop Out - #4 in the Detective Inspector Carol Ashton mystery series byClaire McNab. 1991, $8.95, Naiad.
Zeta Base - love triangles under a dying sun in the distant future by
Judith Alguire. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
Benediction - love and adolescent angst in a Catholic girls' school by
Diane Salvatore. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
Black Iris - a story of lesbian relationships and suspense when Denver's
lesbians band together to find a brutal rapist. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
Lodestar - suspense and romance with a lesbian therapist, judge, FBIagent and an evil commune, by Phyllis Horn. 1991, $8.95, Naiad.
Second Chance - regular, white middle-age lesbians confron t the trials oflife and family, by Jackie Calhoun. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
Passion's Legacy - a lesbian gothic romance setin pre-Victorian England,
by Lori A. Paige. 1991, $8.95, Naiad.
Calling Rain -legendary lesbian primatologist finds Big Foot and love,and has to guard both against the patriarchy, by Karen Marie Christa
Minns. 1991, $9.95, Naiad.
No Language is Neutral - a new book of poems from Black, lesbian,Canadian poet Dionne Brand. 1990, $12.95, Coach House Press, 401
Huron St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 2GS Canada.
Language in Her Eye - Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women
Writing in English, essays by 44 lesbian and straight women, including
Anne Cameron, Jane Rule, Betsy Warland, Lee Maracle, Dionne Brand,
Himani Bannerji and Margaret Atwood; edited by Libby Scheier, Sarah
Sheard and Eleanor Wachtel. 1990, $18.95, Coach House Press.

132

Hanging Fire is Phyllis Webb's 11th book of well-wrought, thoughtful,political and imaginative poetry. 1990, $12.95, Coach House Press.
Invitation to a New Yarn - compelling poetry by Yoko Shima, in Japanesewith English trans. by Barbara Summerhawk.1989, $4.95, pub. in Japan.
Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila is a collection of beautifully crafted,
illuminating straight stories by Filipina writer Marianne Villanueva.
1991, $8.95, Calyx Books, POB B, Corvallis, OR 97339.
Idleness Is the Root of All Love - fascinating poetry / journal! novel of two
old lesbians, written in short stanzas, by Christa Reinig, translated from
German by llze Mueller. 1991, $10, Calyx Books.
A Queer Question: Selected Poems - a chapbook by Charon. 1991, $7.50.
Changing Your Story -well-made multi-cultural but very male-centeredpoetry by Patricia Clark Smith. 1991, $8.95, West End Press, POB 27334,
Albuquerque, NM 87125.
Southern Women Writers - The New Generation -essays on women from
Margaret Walker to Anne Tyler, edited by Tonette ~ond Inge. 1990,$28.95, Univ. of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487.
Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood - A Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lorefrom Around the World, updated with new preface, a reprint of Merlin
Stone's classic. 1990, $12.95, Beacon, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108.
Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose - radical, exciting essays, naming
the perpetrators of global disaster, critiquing "new age" ideology, pushing
us to rethink; by Cristina Thiirmer-Rohr, trans. from German by Trivia ed.
Lise Weil, highly recommended. 1991, $22.95 (cloth), Beacon.
The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969-1989 by Bonnie Zimmerman
won the Lambda Lesbian Nonfiction Award in 1990 and is out in paper.
1991, $14.95, Beacon.
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, the 1978 classic, has beenreissued "With a New Intergalactic Introduction" by Mary Daly. 1990,$14.95, Beacon.
Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality is a large-format
collection spanning cen turies, sodal classes, ethnic groups and sexuali ties,edited by Marilyn Sewell. 1991, $16.95, Beacon.

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in 19th Century Americahow seances and trance speaking empowered a generation of American
women to claim their own voices, by Ann Braude. 1991, $12.95, Beacon.
All of the Above - accomplished prize-winning poetry, occasionallylesbian, by Dorothy Barresi. 1991, Beacon.
Territories of the Voice: Contemporary Stories by Irish Women Writers, most,
if not all, straight, edited by Louise DeSalvo, Kathleen Walsh D' Arey &Katherine Hogan. 1991, $12.95, Beacon.
The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s - British socialistfeminist Sheila Rowbotham takes a look at the international women's liberation movement, looking towards renewal in the '90s. 1991, $14.95,
Beacon.

133

Gays in Uniform: The Pentagon's Secret Reports wherein the military reveals
that queers can act effectively as agents of the state. We may not be as
surprised as they were, but we can share their horror. Edited (and uncovered) by Kate Dyer. 1990,$6.95,Alyson,40PlymptonSt., Boston,MA02118.
Gloria Goes to Gay Pride is Leslea Newman's second children's book, forvery young children. 1991, $7.95, Alyson.
How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay? - regular kids cope in thischildren's book by Ann Heron & Meredith Maran. 1991, $9.95, Alyson.

Lavender Lists-New Lists about Lesbian and Gay Culture, History and Personalities,
by Lynne Yamaguchi Fletcher and Adrien Saks. 1990, $8.95, Alyson.

The Alyson Almanac - A Treasury of Information for the Gay and LesbianCommunity, from slang words to congressional voting records, by the
Alyson staff. 1990, $8.95, Alyson.

Happy Endings Are All Alike- high school seniors (girls) fall in love in thisreprint of Sanra Scoppettone's 1978 classic. 1991, $6.95, Alyson.
Bushfire: Stories of Lesbian Desire -16 stories by diverse lesbians, editedby Karen Barber. 1991, $8.95, Lace Publications, an imprint of Alyson.
Order in the Universe and Other Stories, about (apparently straight) people
who have lost and triumphed by Veronica Ross. 1990, $12.95, The
Mercury Press, Box 446, Stratford, Ontario N5A 6T3 Canada.
SKY - A Poem in Four Pieces in which the drama is child-rape, by Libby
Scheier. 1990, $8.95, The Mercury Press.
Wanting Women: An Anthology of Erotic Lesbian Poetry from 43 poets,
edited by Jan Hardy. 1990, $9.95, Sidewalk Revolution Press, POB 9062,
Pittsburgh, P A 15224.

Different Mothers - Sons and Daughters of Lesbians Talk about their Lives
includes 38 "children" from five to forty, edited by Louise Rafkin. 1990,$9.95, Cleis Press, POB 8933, Pittsburgh, P A 15221.
1 IN 3: Women with Cancer Confront an Epidemic - more than 40 lesbianand straight womyn confront the political and survival issues of cancer
in this important anthology, edited by Judy Brady. 1991, $10.95, Cleis.
Truth Tales: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of India, 7 stories
edited byKaliforWomen. 1990,$12.95, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 311
East 94 Street, NY, NY 10128.

Bamboo Shoots After the Rain - Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of
Taiwan - 14 stories from three generations of women, edited by Ann C.
Carver and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang. 1991, $14.95, The Feminist Press.
Women Writing in India: 600 B.c. to the Present - Volume I: 600 B.C. to the
Early 20th Century - an impressive volume offers over 140 texts from 13
languages, many never available in English, certainly not in this context,
edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. 1991, $29.95, The Feminist Press.
Women in Film - an International Guide, comprehensive and crossreferenced, edited by Annette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone. 1991,$12.95, Ballantine Books.

134

Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference,edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe. 1990, $14.95, Univ. of Mass. Press, Amherst,. MA01004.
Women, AIDS & Activism, incl. data, essays on lesbians, drugs, prisons,teenagers, racism, more, by The ACT UP/NY Women & AIDS Book
Group. 1990, $7.00, South End Press,116 Botolph St., Boston, MA 02115.
Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice, essays exploring womanhating in politics, religion, literature, history and popular culture, by
Joan Smith. 1991, $16.95 (cloth), Ballantine Books.
- All Contraries Confounded - The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna
Barnes, & Marguerite Duras is a critical approach to ambivalence andcontradiction in "difficult" women's writing, by Karen Kaivola. 1991,$9.95, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, IA 52242.
Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet, the "first full-length study integrating
Dickinson's homoeroticism with a comprehensive interpretation of her
poetry," by Paula Bennet. 1991, $9.95, Univ. of Iowa Press.
The Homeplace, poetry chronicling the history of ari. Afro-American
family through slavery to WWII, by Marilyn Nelson Waniek.1990,$7.95,
Louisiana State Univ. Press, Baton Rouge, LA 70893.
Sermons Seldom Heard- Women Proclaim Their Lives is a collection ofcontemporary liberal women's sermons, edited by Annie Lally Milhaven.
1991, $15.95, Crossroad, 370 Lexington Ave., NY, NY 10017.
More Lesbian Etiquette - humorous essays by Gail Sausser, with cartoons
by Alice Muhlback. 1990, $7.95, Crossing Press, Freedom, CA 95019.
Tales of Magic Realism by Women: Dreams in a Minor Key is a collection ofstories that explores the fragile borders between the expected and theexceptional event, edited by Susanna J. Sturgis. 1991, $10.95, Crossing.
Women of the 14th Moon - Writings on Menopause - a landmark collection of 90 lesbian and straight womyn's writings, edited by Dena Taylorand Amber Coverdale Sumrall. 1991, $12.95, Crossing.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America, from romantic friendships to lesbian nation, a controversial study by Lillian Faderman. 1991, Columbia University Press.
Silence and Power: A Reevaluation ofDjuna Barnes -essays, reminiscences& illustrations examining Barnes' career as a ground-breaking lesbian
writer from 1913 on, edited by Mary Lynn Broe. 1991, $13.95, Southern
illinois University Press, POB 3697, Carbondale, IL 62902.
Tapes Received:True Life Adventure, songs of risk and reality by Sue Fink. Frostfire
Records, 2658 Tilden Ave., L.A., CA 90064.
Voices of Battered Lesbians - a political tape of testimony, put together by
the Lesbian Caucus of the Mass. Coalition of Battered Women Service
Groups, 107 South Street (5th floor), Boston, MA 02111.

135

Announcements and Classified Ads _ _ _ _ __PUBLICATIONSMAIZE, A Lesbian Country Magazine. $10 for 4 issues from Word
Weavers, Box 8724, Mpls. MN 55408.
WORD WEAVERS, a Lesbian publisher, offers these classics: Ripening; Dreaming; Awakening; Lesbian Land; Spirited Lesbians. Write forbrochure: Box 8742, Mpls. MN 55408
PALLAS ATHENA provides a network for women veterans, regardless of race, creed, religion or sexual orientation, and resource information as well as letters, fiction and creative works by women
veterans. Contact: Pallas Athena Network, PO Box 1171-T, New
Market, VA 22844.
TRWIA: Erin Rice and Kay Parkhurst have stepped forward to takeon Trivia. Issue #18, due out in early fall, will carry more information
about their plans. We need your tangible support to help us throughthis period of change. Also, if you are a writer, whether previously
published or not, or know other women who are writing, please send
us material. "Trivia is a place where women's ideas can assume their
original power and significance." - Lise Weil, Linda Nelson, Editors.
THE CUTTING EDGE is a lesbian produced newsletter for women
living with self-inflicted violence. New mailing address: PO Box
20819, Cleveland, OH 44120.
LE SBIAN INTERNATIONAL from the Lesbian Information Service in
Lancashire, England, has ceased publication.
CALLS FOR SUBMISSION
Poetry, fiction, essays wanted for SISTER/STRANGER, an anthology
on lesbians loving across differences of age, race, class, size, dis lability,
ethnic & religious backgrounds. Lesbians who are of color, old,
disabled, Jewish, poor or working class encouraged to respond. Send
SASE with mss. or query to Sidewalk Revolution Press, POB 9062,
Pittsburgh, PA 15224. Deadline: 1/30/92.
LESBIAN MSS SOUGHT. Novel-length fiction, cartoons, comics.
Prefer upbeat romance, adventure, sci fi, erotica. Will respond toqueries w/in 8 wks. For ms. guidelines send SASE to Madwoman
Press, POB 690, Northboro, MA 01532.

136

CALL FOR WRITINGS OF EX-MENTAL PATIENTS. Poetry, personal journal, stories - any form of writing sought concerning, women's experiences with mental illness: abuse as inpatients, successwith alternative therapies, experience of mental illness, what it was
like for you. Send submissions or queries to Jinie Lind, Box 6337, Fall
River, MA 02724. Include SASE for return.
SHORT FICTION FOR WOMEN now accepting short stories, novellas and novel excerpts from published and unpublished women- writers. Payment will be based on length and funds available. Rachel
Warden, Editor, Short Fiction by Women, Box 1276, StuyvesantStation, NY, NY 10009.

SEXUALITY IN MIDLIFE AND BEYOND AN1HOLOGY seeks stories, personal accounts and poems by women. Previously publishedwork considered. Send w /SASE to: Dena Taylor/Amber Coverdale
Sumrall, POB 334, Capitola, CA 95010. Deadline Dec.15, 1991.
COLORADO LESBIANS, DYKES, QUEERS, BUTCHES, FEMMES,SPINSTERS, AND WOMEN-IDENTIFIED-WOMEN! I'm interested
in finding out about the history of Lesbians in Colorado (and perhaps
neighboring states as well) during the 1940s, 50s and early 60s.
If you wish, your confidentiality will be strictly preserved. For more
info, write to Katie Gilmartin, POB 1246, Nederland, CO 8046q, or call(303) 258-7060.
AT THE CROSSROADS seeks submissions of written and visual art
for new arts journal for women artists of African descent. Especiallyinterested in submissions from women in the Maritimes region andwriters who have not yet been published. Send to: c/o Karen Augustine, At the Crossroads: A Journal for Women Artists of African Descent,
POB 317, Station P, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S8, Canada.

BOSTON MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG LESBIANS.
Clinical psychologists Esther Rothblum and Kathleen Brehony areresearching this romantic but nonsexual relationship. If interested in
discussing your experiences and feelings on this, please contact
Kathleen Brehony at (804) 671-2273, or Greenwich Psychological
Associates,5555 Greenwich Rd., Suite 506, Virginia Beach, VA 23462.
SURVIVORS OF TRAUMA SHARE THEIR SUCCESS STORIES.
Recovery stories and ways to deal with after effects of trauma;emphasis on thriving. For info, guidelines: SASE to Leslie Aileen
Ross, Box 51, 2 S. 727 Rt. 59, Warrenville, IL 60555.

137

QUICKIES: LESBIAN SHORT-SHORTS sought for new pamphlet/
periodical series. App. 500 words, queries with SASE to Irene Zaha va,
307 W. State St., Ithaca, NY 14850.
C.O.W.A.S. (Communities of Women Art Shows) PART III: Woman
As Survivor. All art on survival issues welcome for show in Chicago.
Deadline: Jan. 4, 1992. Query or submit with SASE to: Dianna C. Long,
Urban Art Retreat, 1833 NE 2nd, Portland, OR 97212.
CONFERENCES & COLLEGES
9th BERKSHIRE CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORY OF WOMEN
seeks proposals for "Transformations: Women, Gender, Power,"
June 11-13, 1993. Submit in triplicate by February I, 1992. Send
proposals on U.S. topics to Elaine Abelson, New School for Social
Research, Eugene Lang College, 65 W. 11 th St., NY, NY 10011; on nonU.S. topics, to Margaret Hunt, Amherst College, 2254, POB 5000,
Amherst, MA 01002-5000. Comparative U.S./non-U.S. proposals toeither co-chair.
YORK UNIVERSITY has a newly-established graduate program inwomen's studies. First students admitted 1992. Contact: Karen
Shopsowitz, Dept. of Communications, 4700 Keele St., No. York,
Ontario, Canada M3J IP3, or call 736-5010 or 736-2100 X22084.
CONTESTSPAT PARKER MEMORIAL AWARD of $250 is given annually to an
African-American feminist poet. Submissions season for 1992 award
is between March 1 and 31. For rules of submissions, write: Woman
in the Moon Publication (WIM) Box 137, 2215-R Market St., San
Francisco, CA 94114.
(AD)VENTURESSALLIE & EILEEN'S PLACE, vacation cabins for women. A safe,
comfortable place for women in the woods, three miles from thebeautiful Northern California coast. Box 409 Mendocino, CA 95460.
(707) 937-2028.
LESBIAN PARADISE! With 20 charming rooms, 100 mountain acres,pool, hot tub, hiking/skiing trails, spectacular fall colors, peace andprivacy. We' re your perfect vacation choice year round! HIGHLANDS INN, Box 1185R, Bethlehem, NH 03574 (603) 869-3978.

138

BUSINESSES, JANE IRIS DESIGNS, INC: Empowering Images for Women. Goddesses, sculptures, pendulums & more. Send $2 (refundable withorder) for NEW 1991 CATALCX;. POB 608, DEPTSNS1R91, GRATON,
CA 95444.
RED RIVER, 100% Cotton Menstrual Pads, comfortable, ecological,
economical. Made by Land Dykes. Write for brochure: Red River,Box 130, Serafina, NM 87569.
LAND
SHE Land Trust is set up as a nonprofit corporation to hold land forthe use of wimmin always. Wimmin without the means to buy land
can still make their homes there. Decisions will be made by thegroup(s) of wimmin living on the land(s). Let us know if there is any
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My name is Brenda Aris. I am currently incarcerated at the California
Institution for Women, serving a sentence of 15 years to life for killingmy husband of 10 years. I ama battered woman who killed her abuser.
The governors of Maryland and Ohio have granted clemency to anumber of women who were in prison for killing or assaulting theirabusers. I have written to Governor Wilson, asking that he consider
reviewing my case. If you feel that you might be able to lend yoursupport to my request to the Governor, I would be most grateful.
The Berlin Archive for the Discovery & Preservation of the Love of
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and contributions. We appeal to women to donate money, books orother documents of lesbian and woman-related life. Contact: SPINNBODEN e.V., BurgsdorfstralSe 1, W-I000 Berlin 65, Germany or call
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WAGES DUE LESBIANS is fundraising for a lesbian teacher in
London, England, who has been harassed under Section 28, a billwhich outlaws any positive discussion of homosexuality in schools,
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139

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'sinister wisdom
Some Current & Back Issues#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 alI-lesbian issue, with work on legal theory,
racism, Israel, hair, surgery, the effects of rape on relationships, much more.
• Bogus, Warland, Parks-Satterfield, Negr6n-Muntaner, Seto, Sapphire, Robson •#41/Italian-American Women's Issue. Guest edited by Denise Leto & Janet Capone.
• Azpadu, Guido deVries, Tavormina, Capra, fides, Cuomo, Veno, Tornatore •#40/Special Focus on Friendship. Essays, fiction, editorial discussion transcript.
• de la Pena, Hardy, Svirsky, Gray, Stinson, Dambroff, Mi Ok Bruining, Hauptman •#38/Emphasis on Lesbian Relationships. Fiction and poetry.
• Jewell, Clarke, Anzaldua, Gage, Schaffer, Spisak, Taraoa, Devora, Louise, Knight •#37/Emphasis on Lesbian Theory. With work on consumerism, spirituality, politicaltheory, children, racism, anti-Semitism, lesbians in prison.
• Lee, Tallen, Evans, Pratt, Robson, Quinlan, Livia, Hardy, Gray, Green, Justicz •#36/Special Focus on Surviving Psychiatric Assault/Creating Emotional Well Being
in our Communities. Includes testimony, prose, poetry and essays.
• Hope, Aal, Caicedo, thundercloud, Robson, Sien, Moran, Ward, NiHera, Willcox.
#35/Special Focus on Passing. Includes work on/by Black, Jewish, Native American,
Latina, Italian, White, disabled, working class, butch, fern lesbians.
• Jewell, .Frye, Pratt, Rosales, Bogus, Ruth, Gage, Barrington, Davis, JEB, Romano •#34/Special Focus on Lesbian Visions, Fantasy, SciFi. Includes work on Disability,
Separatism, Building and Transformation.
• Katz, Ortiz Taylor, Hoagland, Allegra, Livia, Louise, Rios, Danaan, Marah •#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.
• AnzaTdua, Ruth, Rich, Chrystos, Kaye/Kantrowitz, Hardy, Gilmore, Brody, Rakusin •#32/Special Focus on Illness, Death, Mourning, Healing, the Disappeared, Hunting
Season, Dealing with Suicide, Cancer, New Ritual Observances .
• Maia, Allegra, Sears, McDonald, Waters, Hansell, Rosenblum, Butler, Stinson •#31/Special Focus on Sex and Fiction, Coming out in the South, Found Goddesses.
• Smukler, Blackwomon, Romano, Davenport, Dykewomon, McNaron •#28/ Special Focus on Women & Work; Body Image, Size & Eating.
• Klepfisz, Clarke, Heather, Sturgis, Gould, Boucher, Gomez, Sardella, Moran •#27/Special Focus on Girlhood, Sexuality and Violence, Office Work, Navy Dykes,
White Trash, Women of Color/Women in Israel/Women in Lebanon.
• Adnan, Felman, Grahn, Schalet, Bogus, HaMa'avak Touch, Quintanales, Anzaldua •#26/Special Issue: To Go To Berbir by Jill Drew, a book-length journal written by an
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#25/Butch/Fem in the 50's, Native American Roots of White Feminism, Haitian,
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• Allen, Cotrell, Root, Stecenko, Love, Paz, Smukler, Hall, Lipstadt, Brant •#211 Separatism Revisited, Jewish Survival & Defiance, Black Lesbian Writing, Photos
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BOOK ORDERS: SINISTER WISDOM BOOKS HAS CLOSED• All orders for The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, edited by
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, should be sent to Beacon
Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108. This is a new, expanded editionof Dina, retailing for $12.95.
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• Irena Klepfisz collected essays and poetry have been reissued in two
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97214-3026.