Sinister Wisdom___ fourteen_ _finifTE"""R wi/Dom 14
A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian
Imagination in All Women
Publishers: Harriet Desmoines & Catherine Nicholson
Editors: Catherine, Harnet, C. ColettePoetry Editor: Susan Leigh Star
Reviews Editor: Julia Penelope
Contributing Editor: Sarah Hoagland
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Claire, Vicki Nogle, Janet Niland.
For this issue: Special thanks to Tracy Moore andJudith Pendleton for help with typesetting and paste-up; and to Emily
Levine, Helen Moore, and Maria
Muzelle for help with the cover;and to Debbie Alicen, Barbara Bradford, Kelly Flanigan, Cheryl Simmons for general support and aid.
Cover concept by C. Colette
Cover photograph by Helen Moore
Printed by Iowa City Women's Press
ISSN: 0196-1853

MESSAGE FROM THE SW STAFF:
This is a SPECIAL ISSUE!
We are naming SW14 a special issue
because those of us who have put it
together have found it especially
exciting, provocative, and delightful.
Copyright ©Sinister Wisdom, 1980. All rights reserved to individual authors and artists.
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CONTENTS
Assignment : NWSA-Bloomington-1980, Speak on
3.
"Lesbian Perspectives on Women's Studies"
Marilyn Frye
8
Female Bonding and Sexual Politics
Jacquelyn N. Zita
17
the dorothy poems
Karen A. Snider
28
Home Movie
Jane Rule36
Frankie: a short story
Joan Gibbs
39
something you should know
Anita Skeen
40
Vicissitudes : a short story
Harriet Malinowitz
43
Transformer : love poem for a vibrator
Lorie Dechar
44
The Nut House
Joyce M. Latham
49
Heart Dance
Oriethyia mountain crone
52
Re-membering Lesbian Lives
Sarah Lucia Hoagland"leude behauior each with other vpon a bed.":The Case of Sarah Norman and Mary Hammond
JR Roberts 57
It's Important to Believe
Joanna Russ
63
Proud, Disputed Names
Barbara Grier64
A TasteJoan Larkin
70
The Day My Father Kicked Me Out
Sandy Boucher
72
Daughters and Mothers : An Autobiographical Sketch
Evelyn Torton Beck76
Dear Mama
Eileen Pagan
81
Hannah at The Elms at 79
Mary Sojourner
85
The Death of My Mother
Joan Nestle
86
The Class and the Closet
Carol Seajay
88
Review of The Coming Out Stories
Marilyn Frye
97
Responses:
Marion Zimmer Bradley99
Susanna J. Sturgis
101
Ruth Douglas
103
Adrienne Rich
104
Graphics :Nancy Fried
2,7,27
Jan Hansen
51,96
Lynda Koolish71
Emily Levine
68,69
Helen Moore
8

SEE INSIDE BACK COVER FOR IMPORT ANT ANNOUNCEMENTNancy Fried"Flying"_ clay. acrylic 1980
4" x 4"2

photograph by Mary McNally

Marilyn FryeNWSA - BLOOMINGTON - 1980:
ASSIGNMENT:
Speak on "Lesbian Perspectives on Women's Studies"

Looking at women's studies from my Lesbian perspective and with myLesbian feminist sensibility, what I see is that women's studies is heterosexual.
The predominance of heterosexual perspectives, values, commitments, thought
and vision is usually so complete and ubiquitous that it cannot be perceived,
for lack of contrast. (Like the air on a calm and moderate day; the way sexism still is for many people.) Sometimes , usually because of the interruption
and contrast imported by my own presence, the basically and pervasively heterosexual character of women's studies is very clear and perceptible-overwhelming
and deeply disappointing. It is also, usually, unspoken and unspeakable.
Some of my colleagues in women's studies say they cannot really tell thetruth or ''be radical" in their teaching because it would alienate the students.
I tell them not to worry about alienating people; I say that the truth is challenging, interesting, compelling and very effective in the classroom. I also saythat when one attempts just to tell the truth, the responses, whether constructive or hostile, honest or dishonest, will be the best clues to one's errors.
But in my dealings with my heterosexual women's studies colleagues, I do
not take my own advice: I have routinely and habitually muffled or stifled
myself on the subject of Lesbianism and heterosexualism, feminism and women's studies, out of some sort of concern about alienating them. Some ofthese women are tangibly peculiar about Lesbianism and are already offended
by my being uncloseted and blatant; I do not think they have noticed that I
avoid discussing Lesbianism and heterosexuality with them for fear their already-nervous association with women's studies would become simply untenable for them. Much more important to me is a smaller number who are mydependable political co-workers in the 'university, the ones in the academic
world with clearest and strongest feminist and anti-racist politics, the ones
I am grateful to Sarah Lucia Hoagland for organizing the panel "Lesbian Perspectives on
Women's Studies" for the 1980 National Women's Studies Association conference: what isprinted here is a revision of the speech I made. My thoughts reflect discussions with mylover Carolyn Shafer, and she gave help and suggestions in the revision process.

Jwith some commitment to not being homophobic and to trying to be comprehending and supportive of Lesbians and Lesbianism. If I estrange these
women , I will lose the only footing I have , politically and personally, in mylong-term work-a-day survival in academia. They are important, valuable andrespected allies. I am very careful , over-careful, when I talk about heterosexuality with them .
But the situation is asymmetrical , as it always is with minority or marginal
people and majority or dominant people. What is a topic for them, whichsome can and some cannot attend to fruitfully , is a condition of life for me .
I avoid "alienating" them, but they constantly and (usually) unconsciously
alienate me by their mostly uncritical and apparently unalterable , to me unfathomable , commitment to heterosexuality-by which I mean deeply boundemotional and intellectual commitments to men , to reform , to integrationand to the centrality and natural necessity of heterosexual genital sex. The
unwelcome weight of this heterosexualism is a salient fact of my life, and its
manifestations in the politics of women's studies are coming very clear to me
and should be stated .
In my experience with women 's studies it seems common and characteristic for the women instructors to assume that widespread heterosexuality
and the dominance of heterosexual conceptions have always been and will
always be The Way It Is for humans on this planet , in particular, for womenon this planet. Lesbianism is seen by most of them (but not all) as an acceptable , plausible alternative for some women and is understood (not by all) at
least at a verbal level to be clearly coherent with feminism . But they all believe that it is only realistic to understand that most women are and most
women will be heterosexual, at least for the duration of any era that ourpractical politics can concern itself with . Women 's studies programming isgrounded on the assumption that the vast majority of the students are andalways will be heterosexual . Hence we give them almost entirely heterosexual
women 's literature , the history of heterosexual women* and analysis of theroles of heterosexual women in work , business, the arts and heterosexual
domestic life. It is also assumed that we should support (not just tolerate)
speakers, fIlms, workshops , classes , whole courses, which encourage women
to prepare themselves to cope with life in the "dual career marriage ," teachhow to be married and a feminist , and train them in the tricks of legislativereform so they can try to ensure that abortions will be available to themwhen they need them , since they obviously will not practice the .only safe
and sure method of contraception .t We presume the students are hopelessly
heterosexual and cater to the interests and needs we assume heterosexual women to have , instead of assuming they are educable to other ways of living,different needs and interests, and some non - or anti-heterosexist sensibility
and politiCS .

*...or the li terature and history of women presumed to be he terosexual. The evidence thatmany of the women we study were Lesbians is generally overlooked - an erasure that builds
in added security for the assumption of natural near-universal heterosexuality.
t By "the only safe and sure me thod ," I do no t mean only exclusive Lesbianism, but wh atever would add up to to tal female control of reproductive sexual intercourse.
4

Women's studies, as an institution, as I know it, actively and aggressively
supports women in becoming and remaining heterosexual; it actively seeks
to encourage women to believe that the personal, political, economic andhealth problems associated with heterosexuality for women should be struggledwith rather than avoided - that these problems are inevitable but more-or-lesssolvable (with great endurance and much work), rather than that they are
unsolvable but definitely evitable.
I am notorious in my town for my recruitment of women to Lesbianism
and Lesbian perspectives. But what I do is miniscule . Imagine a real reversalof the heterosexualist teaching our program provides. Imagine thirty faculty
members at a large university engaged routinely and seriously in the vigorous
and aggressive encouragement of women to be Lesbians, helping them learn
skills and ideas for living as Lesbians, teaching the connections between Lesbianism and feminism and between heterosexism and sexism, building understanding of the agency of individual men in keeping individual women in line
for the patriarchy. Imagine us openly and actively advising women not tomarry, not to fuck, not to become bonded with any man. Imagine us teaching lots of Lesbian literature, poetry, history and art in women's studies
courses, and teaching out of a politics determined by Lesbian perception andsensibility. Imagine all this going on as actively and openly and enthusiastically as the program now promotes the searching out of careers and "feminist
men," the development of "egalitarian marriages" and the management ofheterosexual sex and the family. *But the politics which women's studies purveys, even when some material
by or about Lesbians is included in some courses, is heterosexual politics.
And according to heterosexual politics, Lesbianism could never be the norm,and promoting Lesbianism for women generally is somewhere between unrealistic and abusive.
The people who are the primary agents in determining and promoting
this politics in women's studies are the heterosexual feminists in academia.
These women are (not without exception) quite good in their relations withthe few Lesbians they work with-supportive, tolerant, useful. But this friendly, open-minded, even appreciative attitude camouflages their continuing andfirm commitment to our marginality. Their being friendly and supportiveand respectful to a few Lesbians (who inevitably serve as tokens) has obscured
from me and from them the enduring fact that they never take seriously any
idea that Lesbians and Lesbianism should not be marginal.
I want to ask heterosexual academic feminists to do some hard analyticaland reflective work. To begin , I want to say to them :I wish you would notice .that you are heterosexual.
I wish you would grow to the understanding that you choose heterosexuality.
I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexualand that you choose to be heterosexual- that you are and choose to be amember of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not
to notice.
*For a sense of the magnitude of this, consider: at Michigan State the women's studies
classes account for well over 12,000 student-<:redit-hours each year.

5

1 wish you would stop and seriously consider, as a broad and long-term
feminist political strategy, the conversion of women to a woman-identified
and woman-directed sexuality and eroticism, as G way of breaking the gripof men on women's minds and women s bodies, of removing women fromthe chronic attachment to the primary situations of sexual and physical violence that is rained upon women by men, and as a way of promoting women s
firm and reliable bonding against oppression.
Some heterosexual women have said in response to these sorts of sayings,"I see the connection between Lesbianism and feminism, but I cannot justdecide to be a Lesbian ... I'm not sexually attracted to women: women just
don't turn me on." And I want to ask, "Why not? Why don't women turnyou on? Why aren't you attracted to women?" I do not mean these questions
rhetorically . I am completely serious.
The suppression of Lesbian feeling, sensibility and response has been so
thorough and so brutal for such a long time , that if there were not a strong
and widespread inclination to Lesbianism, it would have been erased fromhuman life. There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and thispressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied , that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women; I think that widespread
heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy.
I suspect that it is not true at all that we must assume that most women are
and most women will forever be heterosexual : I think that most women haveto be coerced into heterosexuality. I would like heterosexual women to consider this proposition, seriously. I want heterosexual women to do intenseand serious consciousness-raising and exploration of their own personal histories and to find out how and when in their own development the separationof women from the erotic came about for them.* I would like heterosexual
women to be as actively curious about how and why and when they became
heterosexual as I have been about how and why and when I became Lesbian.
At this point it might seem that I am demanding of heterosexual women
their respect for my choice but that I am unwilling to respect theirs . I think,though, that it is respectful of autonomy to genuinely inquire into the history
and grounds of choices, and disrespectful or negligent of autonomy to let unfreedom masquerade as choice or let the declaration "It's my choice" close
off rather than open up inquiry.
Millions of heterosexual women give no thought to what heterosexuality
is or why they are heterosexual. Heterosexuality is understood by them tobe sexuality, and they assume uncritically and unthinkingly that it is simply
the way humans are; they do not perceive heterosexuality as an option. Where
there are no perceived options, there can be no such thing as choice, andhence one cannot respect the choice. But well-educated, worldly , politicallyastute, thoughtful , analytical, feminist women do know perfectly well that
there are options, and that Lesbian life is an option that coheres very wellwith feminist politics. They do choose to be heterosexual. Respect for thatchoice (on my part, and on their part) demands that they make that choiceintelligible .
*This phrase is due to Adrienne Rich. My thoughts on these things have benefitted from mycorrespondence with her.

6

Many feminist Lesbians have thought and reflected and written and worked
very hard to demonstrate that our choice makes sense. We have gone forthand participated on panels and in workshops , and appeared on television explaining ourselves . We have, over and over, at great personal risk and considerable cost, worked as hard as we knew how to make our choice intelligible
to audiences ranging from the idle curious to the skeptical to the openly hostile . Respect for heterosexuals' choice demands equally that they show , within the gentle standards of rationality recommended by womanly sensibility ,that their choice can be understood as a reasonable choice. Until this has beenshown I will not grant the assumption that heterosexuality can make sense
for feminists , and I am not willing to continue uncritical acceptance of women's studies programs promoting heterosexuality for women .
Unless many heterosexual feminists start working as hard at making theirchoice intelligible as Lesbians have worked at making ours intelligible , theyshould refrain from teaching and publishing and other work which openly or
implicitly encourages other women in becoming or remaining committed toheterosexuality , and Lesbians should refrain from supporting women 's studies.

Nancy Fried"If You Go A way"
dough , acrylic 1980
4 " x 4"

7

FEMALE BONDING AND SEXUAL POLITICS

by Jacquelyn N. Zita

We have always had a women 's liberation movement. Throughout thehistory of patriarchal civilization , our struggle has taken on various formsof communication and bonding between women . These alliances and net·
works have been strung by a furious intelligence, born in a female bodyand borne between female bodies , thrown together by our mutual discovery of a common theft and our mutual refusal to continue the ruse of womanhood as defined by males in power. We have been revolutionaries andreformists , social critics, and volunteer workers, angry mothers and defiant
daughters. We have also been lovers of women - all in the name of struggle ,since our love and passion for one another did not find easy entrance in aworld where mothers belonged to men and daughters to the next generation of mothers .
We have already in the making a long narrative of woman-to woman
bonding. There has been the theme of rupture , of betrayal, rivalry , pain ,and violence. There has been the theme of continuity, of love , friendship ,and solidarity. These female bonds constitute our strength and identity . I
prefer to believe in the power of these bonds and the possibility of ourcontinuity , but I also know that this possibility is yet to be truly born inThis paper was originally presented at the National Women's Studies Association conference,
Bloomington , Indiana, May 18 , 1980, in session 109, "Feminist Philosophy and Consciousness." Since then many women readers have helped me reconstruct my ideas. I am especiallythankful to my colleagues Sue, Madonna, Nancy , Kris , and my partner Hilary for their insightful criticism. Even more thanks should be given to my students in Phil. 33 2, Washington
University, where the idea for this dialogue originated , and to my friend Kathy , who helped
me live through the pains of what I am trying to say.

8

our words and carried into the world by our actions . Tolerance is respect
for persons; truth, agreement in language . Until we learn to speak thesame language and until our creativity and anger spring from a commonly
understood experience and appreciation of women 's lives , we will continue to narrate ruptures and continue to tolerate long silences between
us.
The following is an imaginary dialogue on the nature of these womanto woman bonds. It takes place in America during the early 1980's between two women - a lesbian feminist and a heterosexual feminist. They
are white middle-class women without children or husband or secured
career. How much of the dialogue is particular to these two women andhow much useful to all of us, I have left to the reader's rumination. It is adialogue not uncommon for the time or place. I will not put more specificlabels on these women , since such devices too often engender an inability
to listen and understand. Suffice it to say that both women think of themselves as feminists, by which I mean women interested in understanding
the causes of women's oppression , women interested in confronting andeliminating patriarchal power in their lives, and women committed to caring for the victims of patriarchal violence and allying with other women
to put an end to such violence. They are also women who perceive capitalism as a system inimical to their interests as feminists, but who refuse tobelieve that working for socialism in the traditional ways will automaticallyresult in the liberation of women. They are women of many battles whichshare a common enemy. This common enemy stands for the interests ofcapitalism , racism , and sexism , and - more often than not- appears in theform of a male. Given this general area of agreement, the differences between the two women derive from the lives they are living, as one woman
is heterosexual, and the other a lesbian. These sexualities are at once personal and political in meaning , an event that belongs to this dialogue ofwords shared between them.
Emma Goldman once said, "Ever since I had come into the anarchist
movement, I had longed for a friend of my own sex , a kindred spirit
with whom I could share the inmost thoughts and feelings I could not
express to men . . . . Instead of friendship from women, I had met withmuch antagonism, petty envy and jealousy , because men liked me ...
there was no close personal, intimate point of contact."* For me, Emma's
words resound with memories of my own, almost forgotten , lamentations.
I am a lesbian woman. I am a woman who lives with, for, and in the presence of women-loving women. I am woman-bonded and unbound. Emma's
lamentations are of a time past when women turned against women because of servitude to men. Emma's loss was her own. I have not acceptedsuch a loss in my own life. Coming to life as a lesbian feminist, my energies are centered on women-I draw strength and courage from our bonding and insight from a politically directed anger toward all that historically
opposes our discovery of what we can be and what we can do. This freedom, both contagious and dangerous, has pushed us to the edges of life,
where we stand amazed by forbidden visions and insights. As creaturesfrom the outside, we also face our other sisters, only to feel the frustration of bonds never made , trust never fel t , and sinceri ty never fully shared.
*Living My Life (New York : Dover Publications, 1970), p. 157.

9

There is something missing. We long to tell you about this, but we standout of bounds and too far away to be believed, or perhaps even heard.
This situation puzzles me and brings me to dialogue with the other as
woman, a kindred spirit still in bondage to men. Why has sisterhood become such a difference between us?
I am a feminist woman. I am also heterosexual and hopeful, hopeful of
merging the best of two worlds. I enjoy the intimacy and companionshipof women, just as I enjoy the company of sensitive and loving men. I
relish the physical, cultural, and emotional differences that men bring into my life. Their presence constitutes a sense of completion that I cannot find in my bonding with women. On the other hand, what I respect
most in other people has nothing to do with sexuality; it has to do withthe honesty of commitment to political struggle, especially feminist struggle, that I see carried into a life. I respect this regardless of the sexual
identity or preference of the person, since my experience has shown methat not all lesbians are feminists and that some men are more feminist
than some women, even some lesbians. For me ideals, convictions, andcommitments take precedence over other aspects of the person. For thisreason, I have a great admiration for my lesbian sisters, those who aretaking a courageous stand on their rights to love and live in the open. I
will do what I can to stop the violence designed to liquidate them . We ,as heterosexual feminists, want to reach out to our lesbian sisters, but
attempts to do so are aborted by lesbian militants , who automaticallylabel us heterosexist and homophobic. As I see it, sexual politics involves
two struggles: one against compulsory heterosexuality and the other against
patriarchal heterosexuality , two struggles that can be carried on simultaneously as one movement. The division between us seems unnecessary. I
want us to get back to the real issues . I am who I am. If only you could
understand this, sisterhood would not become such a difference between
us . I really want to understand you, my lesbian feminist friend . Believe
at least that much .
Your desire to understand me is dishonest. The woman you don' t understand is yourself, the woman who for some mysterious reason has not
become a lesbian . I am no different from you except that I have chosen
to love women with the same intensity, attention, and intelligence you
bring to your love for men. To understand me you would have to cometo a new understanding of yourself. It is dishonest to turn what should
be an introspective project onto someone outside yourself-the lesbianother. In doing so, you have already dispossessed part of yourself in thename of "objective" patriarchal truth , a "truth" that women have perpetuated by lying to themselves and to each other with their b(,)dies. I see
you in your body pretending to want the truth , pretending to understandme, pretending not to lie to me, but I refuse to share with you what you
seem able to study only at a distance , only in some other woman 's body.
I will not engage your contemplative self-deception. This is why understanding has become so difficult between us.
You are accusing me of turning you into an object of study, but if anything, your ridicule and condemnation of he terosexuality has rendered
my life strange and bizarre . I feel just as much objectified by you as
10you feel by me. Wouldn't it be easier to let go of these differences andcreate an arena of tolerance and respect? As for my understanding of
you as a lesbian feminist, I really don't understand why you insist on
my genital allegiance to lesbians as a prerequisite for understanding you . .
I don't feel that my relationships with women are necessarily dishonest.
I feel that my bonding with all women is more enduring and meaningful
because it is non-sexual. It is a special kind of bonding that does not callfor genital completion and a special kind of understanding that comesfrom words and touchings, there for themselves , devoid of other destinations. I cannot endorse the fetish you place on sexual preference , as if
my identity is completely fashioned by my genital urges. Sexuality is incidental to other parts of my personal identity and commitments. Why
do you insist on creating difference where there should be indifference?
The differences between us are the social differences of power and privilege, awarded to you because you are heterosexual , acceptable , "normal ,"protectable, and willing to service mens' needs. By participating in theinstitution of heterosexuality , you become part of the daily quota of violence against lesbians that I experience in my life. The violence is difficult for heterosexuals to see because it belongs to the way things are.
Only by stepping outside the institution of heterosexuality coulrl you
begin to see how heterosexual women perpetuate this incontinent violenceagainst lesbians-only then would you understand what it means to be a
"wo-man," to be kept in bounds by the patriarchy. Becoming a lesbian
is self-clarifying because the enormous violence that must be used tokeep ''wo-men'' in line suddenly becomes visible. Such violence cannot
be treated with indifference .
But surely I have done nothing to harm you. You seem to have no othertest for my sincerity except my conversion to lesbian feminism. If I can't
do this , then I am one of the enemy. But there are lesbians who oppress
women, which means to me that the issue is not one of genital preference ,but one of political values and commitments . If I can share these values
and commitments with you, isn't that enough? Why must I bond withyou sexually to prove my sincerity? Isn't this how men have always
tested us?
To be lesbian and feminist involves more than sleeping with other women.
There is no contradiction between celibacy and lesbian-identified feminism .
To me, lesbian feminism is an ever-present willfullness to accept the intensity of emotional and sexual feelings we have for women , and an ever-present resistance toward the self-diminishing categories of "otherness" thathave always defined women under patriarchy. It is choosing to take ona lesbian identity by refusing to remain invisible and silenced by heterosexual sensibility , refusing to limit lesbianism to a bedroom issue , andrefusing to contribute to the erasure of our experience . Lesbian living isa constant testing of our lesbian convictions, a life of sexual disobedienceagainst the patriarchy. It is to know that we are real and that the divisionthat historically exists between you and me is not in our best interests.
To know that we can love one another , both sexually and emotionally ,if we so desire , is to know of our lesbianism. It is to know ourselves.
Lesbian feminists carry this knowledge into political action . I'm not sureIIthat you can share the same values and commitments with me in thesame way, and that makes all the difference.
You romanticize your sexuality . You romanticize your sexual refusal
next to mine. Your no to patriarchy is abstract. It breaks their taboos,
and in reacting to their power , you get a thrill - you indulge in a thrillseeking that assumes the charm of politics . This kind of esoteric romanticism becomes a substitute for politics. Why do you take their taboos
so seriously , so seriously that breaking them becomes an end in itself?
My resistance, my no to patriarchy, is less romantic, more tedious , much
more concrete and daily . They are going to have to deal with me. I will
not cut myself away. I will not make myself invisible and incredible tothem by labeling myself "lesbian" -that is the easiest way for me to undermine my legitimacy. My reasons are practical . If the entire movement
becomes identified with lesbian feminism , then I think all women will
have lost more than we could have gained.
My 110 to patriarchy is hardly abstract! Nor does my avowal of lesbianism
make me invisible to them. It makes us dangerously visible to the patriarchy and dangerously visible to ourselves. Of course, men use our lesbianism to split the movement , but if they succeed, it will only be because
we have failed ourselves, because we have failed to recognize the divisions
between us as their creation. Why should we consent to such destruction?
You say that you want to get beyond the categories that now separate
us , but I see you as captive to those categories. The antagonism between
us does not belong to us - it is part of a patriarchal lie. Why do we persist in believing the myth that personal truth has anything to do withour body's sexuality , as if the victory of seduction reveals the real truth
about women? The categories " lesbian " and "straight" are a patriarchal
way of sorting our differences. Why should we adopt their way of seeing
us? I wonder if we don 't diminish ourselves and our pursuit of self-knowledge by taking so seriously the stigma of their categories? You talk of
truth-telling between women. Perhaps the categories themselves create
an unnecessary un tru th.
The truth I am trying to find begins with the lies between us. Have you
never felt that pull toward a woman? Have you never wanted to touch
another woman and receive the same from her? What stopped you? Bywhat authority have you tumed away from women? What tugging haveyou smothered deep inside? Honesty between women demands that wetalk about this.
I will admit that I have at times been sexually attracted to other women ,that I have been curious about sleeping with my women friends , that I
have flirted with the possibility of my bisexuality . But my reasons for
not acting on these desires had little to do with my honoring of heterosexual norms . The choices I make in life are largely determined by responsibilities , commitments, and desires already set in motion by thelife I am living. It is clear to me that I am not terrorized by the possibility of sleeping with a woman . It's just that my personal life has moved
in a different direction . Because I am involved with men sexually , myfeminist politics must take them into accoun t.
You can continue to call yourself the educator of men , the mother of12men, the lover of men, the daughter of men, the liberator of men, but
your personal idiom turns into an immense dwelling of self-deception.
All of these choices are predicated on a commitment not to do the samefor women. What you fail to see is the betrayal of women carried out inyour life. Do you know what it feels like when our attraction toward
you is turned to. pain because of your withdrawal, your fear, your unwillingness to give women a chance in your life? It is a mother's betrayalof her daughter, replayed in the daughter's betrayal of other daughters,
replayed in our womanly betrayal of our selves. What you so generously
give to men, you can't even begin to give to women-because we are
women. It is this kind of impersonal violence that a lesbian woman sooften experiences from straight women like you.
You say that I exercise an impersonal violence toward you because I
cannot love, in some immense sense, a woman in my life. But I feelthat you exercise a similar impersonal violence against me because I cannot love one of you or because I can have that love with a man. Don't
assume that I am homophobic just because I don't want to sleep withyou. You flatter yourself by turning me into a stereotype dishonest toboth of us. You don't respect the choices I have made, simply because
they are directed toward men. You harbor an impersonal violence toward
all men, because they are men, which I in turn experience as an impersonal violence toward me. I will not choose to turn my back on a weeping son, husband, brother, or father. I choose to nurture my sons sothat they will grow to love women as courageous as myself. I choose to
be with male lovers, sensitized to my desires and needs. I choose toshare my mothering with a male of good will and compassion. If I became a lesbian, I would have to give up the choices I would rather make.
I cannot choose categorically to disregard the suffering and joys of half
the human race.
You say you want to hold on to your heterosexual choices, that becoming a lesbian would take away your sense of freedom. To me , the lesbian
option opens the way to new freedoms , to new definitions of self andautonomy. As lesbians , the only choices we refuse to make are those thatenslave us sexually and materially to men. We can still become mothers
if we so desire. Isn't chOOSing when , how , or if we shall mother a rightthat belongs to every woman? Only when every woman can make thesechoices freely, without fear of social punishment, will the hold of patriarchy on our bodies be broken. I know that it is difficult to separate
ourselves from existing heterosexual knots , but the knots can be unwoven
with the loving care of many women together. Sometimes the break away
can be as immediate as a glance , once we see the great emptiness of an
existence emptied into the lives of others and the desperation with which
the lies are passed on to the next generation of daughters.
You make it sound as though lam doing something wrong in loving men.
But I don ' t feel gUilty. I don't feel that I have done anything wrong.
Both lesbians and heterosexual women are victimized by pa triarchy . We
as heterosexuals , more often than not, are beaten, raped, psychologicallyand physically abused, but our conviction is to stay on, and that has
not been all that easy for Ill any of us. SOllle of liS are stuck . There is13

no way out. For others it has become easier to leave, to join the charmed
elitist circle of lesbian separatists. But I still see that choice as a privilege
and one often abusive to women still left inside . We cannot forget the
bleeding and wounded women who still need our help . Strong heterosexual women can become models of resistance for other women stillon the inside-most of them mothers , most of them poor, helpless , andhungry . We have to nurture a vision that speaks to their needs, as wellas to ours. I hope I don 't have to remind you that most of the world's
women are still on the inside and that hunger , poverty, and early death
are sometimes issues of more gravity than lesbian feminism.
There are lesbians also among the most oppressed peoples. It is you whowants to see us as a privileged, elitist group so as to make us peripheral
to your life , but we stand at every escape point on the boundaries. We
are asking you to leave-especially women like you who can engage inthe privilege of this sort of dialogue . You are correct in saying that many
women do not have the choice , but women like you, who have surfaced
on tlw back side of mjddle-class privilege and heterosexual hegemony,
do have the choice.
But what about the many other women left burning in the burning
house?
The issues of hunger , poverty, and unnecessary suffering are not peripheral to the politics of lesbian feminism . If anything, a lesbian 's careand concern for those burning women is strengthened by our lesbian
legacy . Our caring, is radical and patient. We see all of us as incapacitatedby capitalist patriarchy. We bring patience to the pains of burnt skin andradical interrogation to the consent that women give to their continued
mutilation. We are firmly committed to the belief that it is much more
empowering for women to disown an oppressive world that claims them,than to continue nurturing the oppressor in the name of love.
All of what you say seems to assume that I can choose to love womenin my life, and that in some sense, I am living a life that has alreadymade that decision for me . But what about desire? It seems so rational ,so masculine almost , to think that I could somehow choose to have an
overwhelming sexual desire for another woman , that I could have thatmuch control over my body and its sensual playfulness. I don't thinkthat my heterosexual preference is just a bad habit , a capitulation topatriarchy. Nor do I think that I could choose to be a fully lesbianidentified woman. If I were to force myself to sleep with another woman, in the name of lesbian sisterhood , I would be prejudicing andslighting my real sexual desires . It would be an ideological dishonesty
much more self-destructive than what you have accused me of. You
seem to want to liberate desire by making it a tool for political struggle ,by using it for an end outside itself. I feel it's more important to accede
to the genuine desires of the body.
I refuse to believe in the mysticism of 'pure desire .' Your desires are
already part of a political agenda that belongs to patriarchy , and thatis how they should be named . I was once like you , but my experiencehas shown me that my desires for men were far from pure - they had
14everything to do with the institution of heterosexuality and the powerthat belongs to men. My inability to feel sexual love for women had
more to do with my perception of their powerlessness and dependency,
than with the mystery of desire. Why mystify powerlessness with mystery? In changing my perception and understanding of women and ofmyself as a woman, I have grown toward a bonding deeper than anything
possible with a man. Myoid heterosexual self hangs like a mask in mypast, my heterosexual history like a false narrative that didn't belong tome, and myoid sexual needs like an empty carcass unfit for desire . My
heterosexual needs were dependencies born from my oppression as awoman .
Your radical rejection of the past disturbs me . It seems to rob you of
an authenticity that you lived at that time . In cutting yourself off fromthat past, you have cut yourself off from women, who represent to you
a form of self-deception . This seems a rather grand projection. I preferto believe in the continuity of my self. I prefer to believe in the possibility of different narratives for different women. I don't want to disown large parts of my life. Is wanting to hold on to one's past the originof self-deception? How do you know that you haven't spun another narrative of lies between us? In ceasing to lie with our bodies, must wenecessarily turn to other women?
It is not that our desires are true or false. Our desires are simply there .
The interesting question is how they got there. We must attempt to understand the genesis of our desires and resist the temptation to see themas hit-and-run mishaps passing through our bodies. Impulsiveness can enslave us. Our impulse to buy a particular brand or to have a particularsexual experience has been planted and cultivated in our bodies. We experience a life that has already been planned for us, and we call that life
a life of freedom. This is the most insidious form of self-deception. It
seems to me that the first step toward real liberation comes from anattitude of studied caution toward the unmediated impulses and desiresof the body. This does not denigrate the body -it celebrates a new
possib iii ty .
You are lying to me. Your words are part of a seduction which is personal rather than political. You want me to be one of you, like you, in
bed with you. You are always forcing me to say no. How can I not resent your judgment of me? For totally impersonal reasons you are asking
me to turn away from everything that has personal meaning in my life.
Unlike you, I don't perceive anger and open warfare between the sexes
as a given at all times. Unlike you, I have been lucky enough to find afew men, sensitive and generous enough to share a feminist way of life
with me. I cherish my life with such men and will not be seduced awayfrom it by a group of disapPOinted man-despising women. You are incompetition with men for women. Your self-righteous moralism is partof a seduction. Woman , sister, listen carefully. Why is my loving so
painful to you?
My pain is both personal and political. It is you who perceives us assexual predators , you who feels questioned and threatened by e ur pre-15

sence, you who wants to see us in competition with men, you who feels
uncomfortable by our touching. For me this is painful. It feels like a
failure in imagination, part of a cycle of reproductive terror that will
not let us imagine anything more to life.
And my pains? My pains belong to the distance that words have put
between us. My pains have hardened to a life that will not let go of me.
At the root of it all, we find a dialogue between us that continues toquestion the meaning of our sexual politics. How much of our personal
life is political? How many of our political choices are really part of apersonal drama ; of many personal dramas and many personal seductions?
When does a persuasion become a seduction? When does a seduction
begin to replace a persuasion? "Love me." "Believe me." "I love you.""I believe you." These are not rational ends to rational arguments, but
radically new beginnings of a different form of life . Women say thesethings so easily to men , but do women stand persuaded by patriarchyor seduced by its power? Does change come from persuasion or seduction? What is it we want to know about ourselves , our bodies, our sexuality , and our deepest political commitments, those that come from themost intimate resources within us? Of course, we must begin with desire
and end with a different kind of body-a dialogue of political seduction.
Truth is agreement in language ; seduction , agreement in sentiment anddesire. Both have to do with who has the power to speak and who has
the power to be believed. As women have seldom spoken of themselves ,to themselves , about themselves, in the total absence of men , we don't
really know who we are or how to believe what we are saying. We haveto begin with desire-with the desire to know. Perhaps we have to begin
with seduction to get at the truth about ourselves.
I want to stop their violence against you, but I cannot share your wayof seeing the world. I do not consider this another form of violenceagainst you. You obviously cannot see what I am able to see. We are
women of two communities, two forms of life, two different kinds ofstruggle, two different ways of overcoming a commonly shared patternof socialization. I see my role as an insider, as one trying to re-educate
the oppressor and rescue the victims of his violence. I am also on alonger voyage to rescue myself, but I will not eliminate his right toexist. I cannot categorically dismiss half the human race.
Neither will you eliminate these differences between us. Our differences
in body and politics will be obscured by easy forms of tolerance andbanners of coalition strung between us. Somehow , we have to stay connected, but the ambiguity remains . You are not my oppressor; you are
my sister. You are not my sister; you are my oppressor. I trust that our
painful silences will be heard. We as women belong to different 'worlds.'
We speak different languages. We live a different body of a common
struggle. It would be dishonest for me to erase my experience for thesake of sisterhood.
Why must we turn against ourselves when we have as yet so little? I
will not eliminate your right to exist .
But will you eliminate the might of your existence ...

16the dorothy poems

Karen A. Snider

The following poems are from a collection , the dorothy poems, that I havebeen working on for four years. Th ese poems , written mostly in persona , are
my attempt at a lesbian and feminist transformation of the original Oz characters. I am not attempting to re-write the whole, but rather allowing my
imagination to spin a new thread amid the old, ever presen t , echoes . It was
my obsession with mid-western imagery and intuitive search for a land where
witches rule that led me to recognize dorothy's spirit rising up again throughme. Since then , many discoveries have enriched and inspired my work upon
the material. For instance , L. Frank Baum , author of the Oz collection, wasthe son-in-law of Matilda Joslyn Gage , who was not only a well-know suffragist, but also a woman whose research into the gynocide of witches led her
to write Woman, Church and State - a book which documents the vast numbers of women murdered as witches [reprint by Persephone Press , P.O. Box7222 , Watertown, Mass . 02172 , 1980 ; includes introduction by Sally Roesch
Wagner and foreword by Mary Daly ; 294 pp ., $7.95 ] . Baum , himself, wasinterested in the occult sciences , published pro-suffragist editorials (including
the work of Gage and Susan B. Anthony) in his dakotan paper , Saturday
Pioneer, and spoke of his desire to create a 'non -sexist' children's story in
his writing of the Oz.
As with all such attempts , however , one who is thinking as a crone/hag/
spinster , will slowly become aware of the false polarization created among
the women in his sto ry . As Mary Daly has so aptly described in Gy n/Ec%gy,
false polarization is the result of male-defined feminism set up against maledefined sexism . Thus , on careful examination , we experience the need to retell , re-write , transform , myths and fairy tales where 'good' witches triumphover 'bad ' witches and the virgin (dorothy , in this case) must destroy theraging crone (w icked witch of the west) in order to re-unite with her mother(aunty em). In the poems within this particular se lection, Mable the Able is
the good witch of the north, a so litary crone in the city on Hallnwmas anda pagan witch of Demeter. I\unty cm is the estrangcd Illothcr of dorothy :and Dyke Diana, the wickcll witch of thc west , is a lesbian separatist.
17

auntyem
stewing on a saturday
well i neverthought i'd see the day
so many young ladies
would be turning
their heads insuch a male fashion
painting picket ,signs
instead of nails
struttin' blue jeans
through my kitchen
prayer whistlingin the house likea gaggle of cacklinggeese on a saturdaynight without a dateamong you to getdolled up fordorothy tell me
when was the last time
you sang amends
in your father's houseor asked the good lord
to forgive your fresh
mouth without a doubt
dorothy we women
don't want to benothing like men
so why begin fighting
when you're older dear
you'll understandwomen's rights are somethinga lady carries on the insideknowing what's wrong is wrong:a man has his boyish ways
and his foolish pride
his mind is like a brickonce it's set you can't
unstick it until the years
wear it thin or crack
the foundationsit's up to the weather

18

is no joke dorothy
you suffer alone
to build a good home are you listening???
i said i never
put much store in politicians dorothyand everyone of you
girls could be pretty
if only you tried.

Mabel the Able
good witch of the North
I am an old woman bending on Halloween
I drop my last plum into your paper bag
wishing it would rain a spell
The supplies have dwindled sorely
I have looked upon my hands opening
their cupboards to rummage sale china
lifting that which in turn goes down
on a new list- Is there time to gather
up treats for the children, I ask
Will they hold the shops open
for my late selection or shall I summon
dorothy to weigh the economy for me?
I am an attic head among winter spaces
windy ... some rooms quite vacant :a metaphor vandalized by my timein the city when I could have drifted
into rifts on a strong breath in the country
when I could have curled about your housea sort of cold insulation my isolation
never coming then to this twilight tracking
down what clutter can be foundbeneath the rafters . .. the house grows thin
the sun sucks the sparkle out of everyone
today as if the sun had returned to blister
my war paint , dorothy, in kansas reaped
the plowed land cracks the edge of the sky
in all directions grey like a clean slate
waiting for a ritual harvest . . . perhaps
there will be no rain for the wishingon again ... the floorboards creak out
their steady inquisition . . . perhaps, I am slowly
evaporating on the north wind , yet
I can still blow my confessions onto thisside of the window- a smoky mist
covering the landlord's glass eye with what isleft of my breath- some condensation :Yes I would say to the bus riders now though
there be at any given moment those
thousands of thunderstorms resounding
descent across the earth's surface : yes
I have known my own evaporation

IQI have taken to the air - was it
by self discovery or circumstancemy ele ment changed - I dissolved to speak .. .
Yes now, though there be at every corner
those church bells ringing, I amold, woman, face parched, cracked; I have seen
my share of martyr temples and turned back.
II.

Smelling of smoke tonight like a lesbian bookburnt in a basement flame I have heard an absenceof many words hushed or forgotten in my time
the neighbors have lost the urge to readany further connection to what may not be
anymore the struggle of one heart pressed to page
the season's rituals . .. reduced to love songs
and I on Hallow's Eve without a purple plum
to cheer the masquerade of children on ...
aged. processed. my 'nap' insured - have I
turned into the city. the grease of itslipping each mind in and out of control?
Will my hand shake a burnt wick onto my candle?
Will my hair catch on fire before\ my altar?
I have felt the old igniting ... It would not be
the first time my fingers combed throughthe singes - I stood before my mirror thenhumbled like a soup hen. counting my pin
feathers. plucked clean and thinking
it was the genius in me that kept my headout of the oven . .. [t is true I have been my own
voyeur at times in determined rhythms[ must admit. I have tied my apron about my heart 's
exhibition as if to strangle those hungers in me.
If my living is an art and at that political
I have declared my heart my home [ have woven
thick wool ruffage in to my hangings like secrets
ready to unravel ... I have dropped my share of
stitches , challenging my mind's expansion
I have refused to hem my sky-blue dress . . .
[ confess the collected details have been forced
to address themselves into a natural order. a dove s
ink landscape my needle has slipped its stitch
to save something other than time - years now
I have stood ambiguous in food stamp lin es
noting scars on winos - Was [ misunderstood?
Would it matter if I told you that witches are good?

20

I have heard a subtle division of lines
drawn to erect new altars it comesas no surprise . . . the numbness of doorways
after foundation ceremonies
after spades rework the dirt after shovels
break the earth - Are we going fishing? Is it Sunday?
Would you bait an old woman on your hook?
It is true I have shaken cold in choir lofts
I have hot-flashed in balconies vomiting
my comfrey tea amid alleluias over oak railings
flooding naves of congregations singing"may the kingdom come"- I am not one of their society.
Am I not an able angel, a fairy godmother?

III.
There was a time I too was afraid of witches
an unkept fierceness leapt out their eyes
angry like the ancient creaking in their curses
as if the fires had never burned down
as if their blood boileq , bolted before
the old wailing rang in their ears, a silent collusion.
Curious now that once I thought them masochists
to claim the death branding: were they waiting
for rain to stun the crowd , to leave them simmering?
Did they dream they would vanish in the steam?
What is at stake today?
my own reflection flushed - its beauty
seasoned , effaced, before barren city streetsa spinster woman birthing her early winter bitterness
Will I haunt the land with Indians?
Will my spirit stampede buffaloes? Obliterate
executives in gynocide factories? I do not know
if I wiU return to do the dishes, to blow
against these dusty windows ... My breath disperses
my orgasms lengthen ... my head wobbles to and fro
as if my neck were a wand of wiUow Shall I leave a ghost behind me? You ask.
the floorboards creak.
Will dorothy suddenly appear, crashing
through the air illY' remote doorways?
All day she lands on herself, provoking a stlHIll .
Will she collle in time to gather me in her l·l' untryarllls pitting her youthful miracll's
against Illy sagging breasts will she prl'ss Illl' tll tl's t
my magic again : will shc bring Illlmt' a ncw list
~ Ithe rapists, make it rain . .. drizzle .. . spellboundthigh to thigh? Will I find new strength
inside this darkness . . . will the rage unfold me?
I am an old woman, a spinster, a crone,
my candle burns low, my skin flakes
a sacred hag among winter spaces
dreaming of cows with wings.

Economy of Affection
Oh the Father who tries to comebetween a Mother and a Daughter
is given his own parish
Is made Wizard of the land!
Oh the little people will praise his name
And the munchkins sing along his patha trap of shiny coins ...
Yes once upon a time which is still true
a woman is raised with love
as commodity
And dorothy , sadly, was no different
The sun was sandpaper on dorothy's troubled face
Nothing but economizing her heart
could erase the precarious conditions
that defmed her passage home
home, then , to aunty em!
LIONS and TIGERS and BEARS 0 MY
You know the refrain: It's the patriarchy's gamewhen dorothy is told she must lose her soulthat union with the Motherthat ticket home to aunty em
or liquidate the assets of a wicked witch
with one eye , like a third eye
powerful as a telescopethat separatist loving women in a no man's landof hope , planting catnip in her garden~roping with the weather
Oh once upon a time which is still true
a woman is raised to fear
violent women22And dorothy, ideally, was no different"how am I, orphaned child of kansas, to change
the mind of this stormy one
with her cackling laughter and her silver
tongue of charming curses?"
Oh the Author who tries to comebetween the revolting hag and the virgin
is given his own fan clubis made pop prophet of the land.
dorothy herself was confused :"how in Hades did I inherit these spinster shoes?
Was it my fault the anxious houselanded on the sister of a witch and a lesbian?
aunty em always said I have no mind
for practical consequences:
good witches, bad witches ...
how does one choose?
Whatever else happens my innocenceis bound to lose . .. "EPPE PEPPE KAKKE , HILL-LOW HELLO HOLY
(Mother must I fly solo?)ZIZZY ZUZZY ZIK?
(Where are the other separatists?)
asked the wicked witch
in her house below the hillside
dreaming up spells to end the womyn gynocide
LIONS and TIGERS and BEARS 0 MY
All day dorothy sought out womyn's landwith her shadow band of androgynous accomplices
And a breast full of self doubt :"peaches are fuzzy and plums have pits,"
said dorothy, "but that isn't half of itwe have come through the forest
the poppies sigh beside us
And still I don't knowwhat great love can guide us ... "The tin man would keep the wolves from dorothy
40 times a wolf he killed the beasts in himself
Still the bees swarmed like angry workers
and crashed their stingers, their pOinted
protests against his heartless tin flesh
He questioned such abrasiveness23

and left for New York City, bi-sexuality
and a job at a 'refined' publishing house
The strawman would keep the Moon's beakout of dorothy's wandering eyes
40 times a natural threat he twisted
the raven's feathered neck Reading Sexton, despising Plathhe mapped out the one ecstatic deathand left for California's cut and curls
Beautician in a Beverly Hills hotel
As for the cowardly lion, all he wan ted
was a good night's sleep - he made a scienceof dissecting sheep and studied the languageon the 'old dump heap,' hoping to merge
masculine with feminine pronouns. AH BUT
nothing could ease the stress he felt
over the spinster woman who picketedwith her broom and terrified the kingdom
laughing predictions of doom
he offered dorothy a Veteran's Day poppy
and a little cocaine to quiet the pain
Still she left him there in the gay nursery
pontificating courageous acts
to his fellows on the university staff
Oh the loving friend and brother
who tries to comebetween the separatist and the feminist otheris given over to his own pre-occupationand procession"What's a warring crone to do?"screamed the wicked witch as she stitched
up the holes in her poverty, mending
her worn out overalls ...
And the resounding echo brought dorothy
around to her senses, down the steep pathto the door of her fated antagonist's
wind-blown, jewel-box homejust as the moon bowed
over a country shitter ...
"Well, here you are, in time for dinner!"said dyke Diana (the wizard's sinner)"come here my beauty, my ruffled sword
princess . Shall I annoint your temple
with rosemary, pour you angelica tea and show
you where the Amazon altar grows?

24

AH -ha -ha -ha -ha -ha -ha
as far as you can see , my dear, this land
is in collusion with Amazons , witches
uppity womyn and me a man who tries to comebetween the daughters of the earth
is bound to lose his way on our path
The wizard (now he is a deceptive critter)has sent you here as a spy and a sacrifice
but you will return with hidden knowledge
a sybil sparkle in your eye to mock his deadly rule
Nature teaches us all we need of the 'truth 'the plants and animals move in psychic
communion (as will you) , the land at our feet
opens up and heals us , we speak without words
we move through all space and time, we hear ,my nervous dear , beyond the wizard's interference And personally , dorothy , I'm sick of human interaction those dishonest atrocities, those social hierarchies
the patriarchy has imposed upon our brains!
Even dear sweet Glinda has turned her back on me
one too many times- she condemns my 'violent' tongue
she says , '''Cut it out or well cut it off!'
will never win us our women's rights!" 0 fiddlesticks
and snakewort , dorothy! She may be right , but not'for naught have I worshipped the grey-eyed goddessthat walks in the dark . .. ' Medea is my sister , tooand she says her story was twisted, twisted TWISTEDLong ago I gave up trying to control
the furies ... I'll unleash them on anyone
who stands in our way (after all my anger
wasn't forged in a day , a mere day , of firings!)
Doesn 't Good Glinda understand that creationand destruction are sister consorts of change?
why am I always to blame?
In truth I have no social grace . .. AH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
But I am not your enemy, dorothy,
just another scapegoat
clawing at the patriarch's throat :patience and kindness get me nowhere
I share my love with witches!
We spin out our revenge!
Now is your chance to join us dorothy .
If you deny me you are denying yourself

25

the primary love of a womyn for a womynwithout which you can only survive
separated from yourself ...
If you raise your hands against my rage
call it 'unhealthy' or 'in poor taste'
you are writing another pagein the wizard's journal of 'salvation'
his story of division among womyn
Believe me, 'my little pretty,' he understands
and would gleefully destroy our eternal union
exhausting the earth for his 'kingdom come'
There are no good witches, no bad witches
without his control of the definition .. .
(Glinda martyrs me! And they call her good!)
Listen , dorothy , mark my words
aunty em is a prisoner in Kansas!
surely the mother you seek lives inside you My sister is dead.

Whether it was the house of prostitution
the house of representatives
the house of the lord
the collective houseor simply domesticity
that landed on her , it doesn't matter
she was as wicked as me
and she is dead.
silent as a doorknob.
you, sweet dorothy, have inherited her shoes
claim the universe as your homeand do something besides whining for innocent Kansas
or you, my virgin
will inherit her death as well
AH -ha -ha -ha -ha -ha -ha
you know the refrain : it's the patriarchy's gamethe dying god that tries to comebetween the virgin, the mother , and the crone
is given his own perish

26

FICTion & POETRY

Nancy Fried"Our Midnight Comfrey Bath"photograph by Mary McNally

dough, acrylic 1980
5" x 5"27

Jane Rule

HOME MOVIE

Alysoun Carr sat at a table in a street cafe in Athens drinking ouzo. Directly across from her, through an open window and onto a far wall a homemovie was being projected . A young couple grew larger on the wall. Suddenly the enormous head of a baby filled the whole window as if it weregoing to be born into the street. Alysoun , careful in a foreign country
never to make so melodramatic a gesture as to cover her eyes if she could
help it, looked away. She added water to the ouzo and watched what had
been clear , thick liquid thin and turn milky . She did not like the licorice
aftertaste, but she liked the effect, which was a gentling of her senses sothat she could receive things otherwise too bright or loud or pungent at alevel of tolerance, even pleasure. In another ten minutes, if the movie lasted
so long , she could watch it without dismay.
At her own home , such a show could go on as long as an hour if absolutely everything her father had ever taken was resurrected for the occasion
and supplemented by an ancient cartoon or two he'd bought for a forgotten
birthday of one of the children. At least two of the fIlms were always
also shown backwards , causing an hysteria of giggles in which at least for
Alysoun there was an element of alarm. It was daunting to see how without
effort the projector could do what all the Icing's horses and all the king's men
could not, the diver's feet breaking the water and restoring him by impossible
magnetism to the board, the child toppling up onto the chair "to keep thepast upon its throne ," where did that come from? Another wall. The camera , particularly the movie camera , is reactionary. It doesn't have to run
backwards to prove its point. Alysoun always dreaded most the moment
when her own baby face would fill the frame and her father would say ,"Well, you're all good-looking kids, but Alysoun was the prettiest baby I eversaw." Alysoun could never see why, a head with that little hair , offering up
not a smile but a silent snort as if blowing a nose without a handkerchief directly into the camera. The remark could have made the others jealous if
the past tense weren't emphasized as a rebuke. Her father seemed to see theprocess of her growing up like some horribly disfiguring disease or mortal
accident. Only the camera could give him back that pretty baby , who snorting out at her adult self made Alysoun feel as disoriented as if she had been
physically dragged by the camera back up out of the water and onto thespringing board . Others of her siblings had reproduced ; Alysoun had not.
Perhaps her father was only complaining that she hadn't given him the plea-

28

sure a second time in life, a granddaughter about whom he could say , "She'salmost as pretty as her mother." Only by having children were you allowedby such a parent to go on living in the present.
Alysoun looked back through the window at remarkably bad views of what
what might have been a flower garden. A film maker has no business trembling with awe before anything, but what ten minutes ago would have madeAlysoun mildly nauseated now amused her . People talked about the universality of great art, but far more universal is the mark of an amateur , trapping
all he loves in the cage of his own unpracticed seeing and letting it run backwards out of time. If she had watched long enough, surely a Greek diver's
feet would break the water , a Greek baby snort, but Alysoun could not wait.
She was due at a rehearsal , and she had to stop at the hotel to pick up her
instrumen t .
The walk back down the steep street , loud with Greek and aggressive automobiles , would dissipate the mild sedative her drink had been and leave her
ready to do what she always did very well , whether alone or before an audience.
"Don 't you ever have stage fright ?" her father demanded before her firstimportant appearance with the San Francisco symphony. For Alysoun to beable to go into the high calm she could always achieve when she was about
to confront any music was, if not inhuman , shockingly insensitive for awoman .
She did not tell him that she was frightened of nearly everything else:what most people were afraid of like getting on an airplane or meeting vicious
dogs ; what some people were afraid of like sex or fortune tellers ; what noone should be afraid of like eating or her father. She did not tell him because at the moment before a performance she did not have to be afraid ofanything.
Everyone with whom she must play had practiced , as she had, for years,
read from the same score, followed the same conductor. Together they werein agreement , in control of what happened . Having discovered that co-operative security very young, Alysoun never wanted to leave it for the reality outside music at which she'd never known how to practice, for which there
seemed to be neither agreed score nor conductor. Each time she played , she
was inside that universal harmony toward which life and even the other arts
struggled but only music achieved .
Only after the rehearsal , on her way to a midnight dinner, listening to aflamboyant concert master say , "Such control! Such feeling! You play to
my soul! " Alysoun wondered if she would vomit or faint in the street or
burst into hysterical tears . More often, like tonight , she managed to control
herself enough to make it to the restaurant only to stare at a dinner no hunger could have forced her to eat while the concert master protested at American vanity that made their women thin as even the poor would be ashamed
to be in Greece .
"You are no bigger around than your own clarinet! "The criticism was modestly reassuring; it meant her dinner partner was
more offended by her skeletal thinness than attracted by the novelty of her
blond hair , and she could soon go to her bed without argument.
"But she is famous even in her own country as the lady who does not
eat ," said a young wo man sitting across from Alysolln, who had bee n intro·

duced as the sister to the first viola.
"How do you know that? " Alysoun demanded.
"I read about you at the American Information Center. I work for theAmericans as a translator."
There had been a hushed-up episode when , after one of her collapses, anordinary doctor rather than a psychiatrist had been called. Instead of being
diagnosed as an unfocused phobic for whom little could be done or being told
she suffered the absolutely normal anxieties of a career woman who should
marry , stay home , and have a baby , she was informed that she was sufferingfrom malnutrition . She went into the hospital to be fed intravenously until
she could tolerate the sight of food . In the protected environment of thehospital , Alysoun had done very well. She put on ten pounds and left withthe knowledge that , though she had not found a cure , she had found a retreat. Then her doctor, pleased, no doubt , with the shadow of breasts that
could now be discerned under her blouse , feeling in a creative way responsible for them , asked her to marry him .
Alysoun had learned not to say in response that she didn 't like sex; it was
too much of a challenge . None of her other real reasons was much help
either, for men could easily delude themselves that , servile in pursuit, they
could be servile masters. She had to invent her excuse.
"I not only read you do not eat but that you have a mysterious lover.
Some say a great head of state , some say a reclusive millionaire," sister to theviola went on , and her eyes, though not unfriendly , were disbelieving.
"I must try to get some sleep ," Alysoun said . "I haven 't got over thetime change ."Their immediate , effusive sympathy might have been a taunting protest
the way her throat soured. She was trembling.
"I will take you ," the young woman offered. "I have a car right there .""Thank you . I didn 't even catch your name.""Constantina. It must be dreadful for you, having to do this after every
rehearsal , all over the world . Oh, they play like angels , I am the first to admit, but they eat like beasts and talk like men. Tomorrow night I'm goingto kidnap you and take you somewhere quiet where you can have fresh fishand salad , and I will not talk to you or even look at you if you prefer. I
hope you have forgiven me for gossiping about you to you, but it did stopthem , yes?"
Because Constantina was concentrating on moments of inexcusable traffic ,Alysoun could watch her throughout her monologue , a high , very white forehead against her dark hair and straight dark brows, a rather sharp nose , a very
wide mouth with handsome white teeth. No one would call her pretty; noone would easily forget her face . She was about thirty, Alysoun's own age.
"And lunch. May I take you to lunch? Before you decide, I warn youthat it is because I want to make use of yo'u, and I can tell by looking at youthat you know what I need to know.""I know about nearly nothing but music," Alysoun said.
"You know the names of flowers," Constantina said .
"Yes ," Alysoun admitted.
"Then you must have lunch with me , as an official duty, a matter of good30

will between nations.""Thank you . I'd like that."
In a strange bed , where she could be afraid of sleep in certain states of exhaustion, Alysoun wondered why such overt flattery had pleased rather thanoffended her , why she had responded so confidently about her knowledge of ·flowers when it was her habit always to deny anything that she could , toavoid being known, to avoid obligation. Enduring the endless novelty ofanxieties was, if not easier, at least less humiliating alone. She could always
resort to practicing, even just the fingering if other people might be disturbed.
Something in Constantina's confidence was specifically protective of Alysoun
without a trace of inevitable male condescension , and Constantina had had thegood sense to ask a favor, one it would give Alysoun pleasure to grant , forshe had learned the names of flowers very early in her vocabulary where they
stayed certain and bright , a gift from her mother , who could forget the nameof a child or neighbor but never the precise definition of a tulip or rhododendron or rose. In memory no mm had ever picked from her , Alysoun , not much
more than flower high, walked with her mother naming the last of the daffodils - Carlton , King Alfred - and the early tulips - White Trimphator , General
Dewett. Naming was better than counting which could start tomorrownight 's concert in her head . She was walking , nearly hidden in rhododendrons ,saying, "Unique , Pink Pearl, Sappho ..." when she slept. It was noon when
she woke.
Constantina was waiting for her in the lobby, rose and came to her quickly , embraced her formally and stood back. "You have slept."" Yes, thank you , very well ," Alysoun said, "thinking of my mother's
flower garden .""Very good. I have a plan. We can walk, shall we? It is all right for you?
It is not far , to the old Placa . We will have lunch, very simple , nothing much.
Then we will do our work . We will go to the flower vendors. I will tell you
the name of the flower ; you will pick it out, and then the vendor will tell me
its name in Greek""What is this for?" Alysoun asked.
"Oh , I am translating a collection of Eudora Welty's short stories for theAmerican Information Center. They are full of flowers ."Alysoun was grateful to have heard of Eudora Welty, remembered that she
had read a story or two of hers but could not remember what.
" I am embarrassed not to know the flowers in Greek. When Yay a taught
us , I had my head in a book," Constantina confessed without guilt. " Andthey are not listed so particularly as I need in Greek-English dictionaries.
Alysoun had to concentrate to hear what Constantina was saying because
they were also negotiating the noon crowds along the narrow sidewalks, up
onto which cars swerved without concern for pedestrians . Constantina had acautious aggression Alysoun felt she could trust; so she followed , let her arm
be taken , even allowed herself to be pushed ahead of Constantina until theyescaped through a dark doorway and down a narrow hall. There had notbeen a sign Alysoun could see.
"How does anyone know this is a restaurant?""I don't know. It's just always been here, and we have always come toit ," Constan tina said , directing her into a room of perhaps eighteen tables,31

two or three already taken by groups of men. "I am sorry we may be theonly women here , but we will be left alone , and the food is safe for Americans. Shall I order for you?"
As in the car the night before , Alysoun had an opportunity to study Constantina's face while she read the menu, behaving as if it were in a foreign
language she must translate for herself. She had the kind of face that registered every small perplexity and pleasure but might be a busy mask fordeeper moods and needs . When she had made a choice , she described it indetail to Alysoun, who agreed at once .
"You know , it's not that I don 't like to eat. It's just sometimes I can 'c'"I understand . I understand exactly ," Constantina said. "One can feelsuch a victim to food .""Do you often have to take visiting Americans around?" Alysoun asked,
for she knew how notoriously small Greek salaries were against their social
obligations; the only country that was worse was Japan .
"Unfortunately , no . I am no one of importance , after all. I met you because my brother is kind to me , and he understood my urgency. He evenallowed me to use his car. I do not want to sound like a school girl. I haveyour record. I admire it very much , and you. That is enough of my confession. Are you who you are because you obeyed your parents ' wishes?""No ," Alysoun said. "Oh, they've come round by now , of course . And
they might have come round sooner if I'd played the violin or the viola or
the piano or even the flute .""Or the harp?"
Alysoun laughed and said , "That might have seemed to them a little excessive. And the clarinet isn 't as bad as the cello or French horn would havebeen.""I can hardly bear to watch a woman playing the cello myself. But what
could be the objection to the clarinet?""It probably didn't have to do with the instrument. I wanted to learn toplay it because my best friend did. My father never liked influences on hischildren other than his own .. .or Mother's, of course ."''What was her name?""Bobby Anne. I haven't thought of Bobby Anne in years!""How faithless you are when she inspired your whole career! ""But I discovered in the process that it was the clarinet rather than Bobby
Anne I loved .""The true obsession is always work," Constantina said .
"Do you know that?" Alysoun asked, surprised. "It isn't really like a disCipline at all. It's much more like a habit , impossible to give up . Not that I
want to give it up, but I don 't think I could . My father said it was giving mebuck teeth just as if I were sucking my thumb. My brother started calling me
Bugs Bunny . Even Mother thought I should have braces .""And you did? ""No, as you can see . My music teacher said minor vanities had to be sacrifked, and I didn't really care as long as I could go on playing, and that was
before I even learned to like music .""You have beautiful teeth ," Constantina insisted . "How different it is for
my brother . He is doing what my parents want. He never learned to like32

music . It is nothing but work, work, work, and he is bored, bored to hissoul.""How terrible!""Yet he is loved, oh so loved! And they go on helping him .""Don't they help you?" Alysoun asked. "Don't they approve of what
you're doing?""No. Oh , they don't mind so much now , but my father used to call English the devil's tongue, probably because my mother speaks it well. I simply
outlasted him. My greatest strength is my atten tion span. He finally just lostinterest in his own objections and let me come to Athens ... to keep house formy brother, of course.""Will you marry?""Never!" Constantina said . "My brother , he wants to marry , but I tell
him incest is all he will ever be able to afford.""Do you have to live with him?""I don't mind ," Constantina said. "He is a kind man , but one day , when
he does marry, I look forward to living alone ...or with a friend.""A friend?""You have no lover ," Constantina stated, suddenly changing the subject.
"I like the way you make statements rather than ask questions. I let people think I do. It's the only refusal that seems to make sense to anyone.""You have enjoyed your lunch.""Yes, I have, and, Constantina , I'd like to pay for it and for dinner , too.
I have a generous travel allowance for this tour, thanks to the State Department, and there 's no reason for you .... "Constantina put a hand out to stop this attempt. "If I told you I had
saved for months, looking forward, if I told you what a privilege ... ?""If I told you I have such a horror of obligation that I usually refuse all
invitations ... ?"" If I told you the waiter would judge me for failing in Greek hospitality ... ?""If I told you .... " Alysoun tried to continue, but she was laughing andcould think of nothing more to protest.
"Come," Constantina said, "and name me the flowers. Then I will be obliged to you."
The crowds had thinned now , and they had no difficulty strolling arm inarm. Alysoun did not even care that they turned heads and inspired com ments. Sometimes Constantina answered back at some length.
"What are you saying?""Sometimes I say, 'Go home to your mother and kill a pig ,' sometimes
much worse .""Isn't that dangerous?""It is nothing. It is like , in a village , saying 'good afternoon.' It is a circumstance where it is rude not to be rude. They are only admiring yourhair ."
Alysoun , accompanied by a man , felt not so much protected as invisible,
and she sometimes wondered if her need to vomit or scream was a fear notof the dangers of the street but of obliteration. With Constan tina she had
the odd, light-hearted sense of being conspicuous and safe.
When they arrived at the Placa , some of the flower vendors were closing

33

their stands for the afternoon , but there were still at least a dozen open forbusiness , displaying a remarkable variety of flowers.
"Of course , it's May ," Alysoun reminded herself. "Greece is like California : absolutely everything blooms in May .""One story is set in San Francisco . She is describing the San Francisco
flower stalls .""Give me your list."
Looking down it, Alysoun had not seen quite that style of script before
and realized Constantina must have learned to write English script once she
was old enough to control it and form a conscious style of her own .
"What is the matter? Is it hard to read?""No, not at all . I was admiring it. It is very like you ," Alysoun said ,aware that she was falling into Constantina's habit of compliment.
There were twenty flowers on the list. At the first vendor , Alysoun foundfive of them , and , when Constantina explained to the man what they were
doing , he gave Constantina not only the Greek name but the flower itself andrefused payment. With the second vendor , where Alysoun found another four,
it was the same . Soon all the vendors in the Placa knew what the women
were doing and called out their specialties in hope of offering the rarer , thelovelier, but only when Alysoun actually saw what she wanted were the Greek
names any use to them . The bouquet in Constantina's arms grew larger andmore absurdly various , fragrances of rose , iris , phlox, a startlingly perfumed
orange tulip more pungent. In a short while they had all twenty kinds offlowers, sometimes as many as half a dozen specimens . The vendors shouted
in pleasure .
"Oh, it's getting late ," Constantina said , in sudden distress, "and you must
rest before the concert.""I'd forgotten all about the concert ," Alysoun confessed , but what would
have been truer to say was that she had not needed to think about, consciously keep it in mind as a safe goal to get her through the anxieties of the day.
" A Eudora Welty bouquet," Constantina said, her face disappearing into
the blooms . "I am a little in love with her , too .""By now , so am I," Alysoun said . "I wish we could send it to her or atleast let her know. It must be odd to be a writer , never in the presence ofthe pleasure you give."
At the hotel , they lingered a moment in the lobby .
"I've had such a lov.ely time," Alysoun said .
"You must have the flowers ."Alysoun began to protest ; then instead she simply smiled and took them.
"I'll come for you tonight after the concert ," Constantina said , and she
was gone .
Alysoun went to her room and rang for room service for a vase. The maid
looked critically at the flowers and returned with three vases , but the flowers
could not be separated . Alysoun chose the largest and began to arrange thebouquet Eudora Welty had called to life. Perhaps when Alysoun was through ,she would actually sit down and write Eudora Welty a letter. Constantina
would know her publisher. A tulip , deep purple enough to be called black
named Queen of Sheba , was the color of Constantina's eyes, an apricot rose
the texture and color of her skin . Now walking along the street , she would34

be carrying the fragrance that fllied this room. Alysoun imagined herself
saying to Constantina that night , "If I could have a perfume made ·of this ,I would wear it the rest of my life." And some time after that Constantina
would say, "You have loved a woman." And Alysoun would say , "Yes, butsuch a long time ago she is even less real to me than Bobby Anne ." "Howfaithless you are!" And Alysoun would say ....
Fear woke in her womb, feeling so like desire that if someone very loving ,very skillful had been there at that moment to hold her , to touch her , shewould not have resisted . Constantina.
"Dear Eudora Welty ," Alysoun began a letter she knew she would neither finish nor mail, "Perhaps it is as well you don't know all the pleasure
you give or the insight you bring . I have no idea whether you 've ever written a storY about this , but because of a bouquet of your flowers (I'll explain what I mean about that in a minute) I've discovered that fear ·is desire, not shame or guilt or inadequacy or any of those other .things. The
question to ask about fear is not what are you afraid of but what do you
want. If you know what you want and you can have it, then fear doesn't
seem like fear at aiL .. "If Alysoun could walk out at the end of the concert tonight not betrayedback into the threatening loneliness of people who only moments before belonged to the same great affirmation of order and harmony and now had nothing to share but petty , conflicting appetites , if instead she was to be with
Constantina, who read a menu like a score , who turned an afternoon into abouquet of flowers, Alysoun might practice to live as she had learned to workin the high calm of anticipation and presence.
She did not walk out for her solitary drink to watch a world behaving as
if everyone were taking part in a home movie , jerky and self-conscious, tobe projected over and over again so much larger than life on the flawed wallof childhood . She stayed alone and quiet in her room until it was time to go.
Alysoun Carr played that night as well as she had ever played in her life.
Only when she was taking her bow was she aware of the cameras. The concert was being televised not only for the Greek audience but also Jor Americans who at that moment were watching her image by satellite on their television screens . Her father , her mother , her brothers and sisters would all be
together , and for one dangerous second she was tempted to snort before
instead she smiled her full , buck-toothed , professional smile through a rain offlowers her mother had taught her to name .
"Home Movie " is part of a collection of short stories and essays by Jane Rule, entitled
Outlander, to be published by Naiad Press.

35

Joan Gibbs

FRANKl E: a short story

When Frankie's Mama found out that she was pregnant all hell brokeloose : dishes were broken, flowerpots came out of the windowsill and Isadora, their cat, picked that evening to jump from the Browns' bathroom win dow into Agnes' diner across the alleyway. Even in our apartment, threeflights down and across the hall , you could hear them: Frankie crying andMrs. Brown screaming so loud that old Mrs. Flora on the first floor who hadn 't heard a non-megaphoned word in years co uld hear her.
It was a Wednesday night and instead of doing our homework, Roberta
and me were playing cards , half-a-<leck gin rummy. As usual , Mama wasfalling asleep, to the seven o'clock news.
"I told you this would happen, hanging up out in the street at night 'till
all hours of the morning . I told you this is what it would lead to. God don't
like ugly and this proves it. Whose child is it?"If Frankie said anything, we didn't hear it; but Mrs. Brown's next words
were as clear as if she was standing right in front of us .
"If you would have listened to me, this never would have happened: gone
to church like Mrs . Birtha's children and stayed out of trouble. No, you had
to have it your way, do as you please like all the other child ren of no-goodparents aro und here. Whose child is it?"
Then Frankie gave what apparently was a wrong answer.
Whack!
"Yo u trying to sass me , huh. I asked you a question and I want an answer. Whose child is it?"
Whack!
Now Frankie was crying and talking too , just as loud as Mrs. Brown was
screaming and just as loud as the sound of Mrs. Brown's hands touching her
body.
"Don' t hit me in my face , Mama. Don 't hit me in my face. What you
want me to tell you for - so you can try and put the police on him? I'm notgoing to tell you no matter what you do ."Mama had gotten up, turned off the tv and was now standing with wideopen eyes in the door of our room.
"What in the hell is going on? Who is that?""Frankie, just told Mrs. Brown that she was pregnant ," I answered , notgiving Roberta a chance to be first again . Roberta and Frankie had beensort-of friends for years and last week she. had said that Frankie was pregnant.
"You made your own bed now you are going to have to lie in it , lezebel.
And you are gonna tell me whose child it is or else. I brought you into thisworld, took care of you when your fat her went to seek his fortune and fameand I got a right to know who the father of my grandchild is . But may be
you don't know whose it is , is that it? You been shacking up with so many

36

that now you don't even kTIow who the father is. You crying now but just
wait until Charles gets here, you gon be begging."
Charles was Mrs. Brown's husband and no truer words had ever been spoken . Mr. and Mrs . Brown were both Sunday to Sunday Christians. Mr.
Brown had a church somewhere over in Brooklyn and both he and Mrs.
Brown spent most of their time there. Roberta and I could never figure out
how Frankie stood it: sitting up in church all day Sunday , Youth Choirpractice on Tuesdays and Thursday night prayer sessions. And still that wasn't enough. Frankie had just gotten back from vacation Bible school somewhere down in Georgia and Mrs . Brown wanted her to go to Bible trainingclasses on Saturday mornings.
"Barely sixteen and here you are pregnant. What you think you going to
do now? I hope you're not planning on me and Charles supporting the twoof you-Charles is building a new church and we're going to move out of thisneighborhood. Whose child is it?"
Whack!
Mrs. Brown still hadn't let up . Outside windows were rising and nearly
the whole neighborhood, for once secure that no garbage would fall on theirheads, were listening.
"Lord, Edward, Mrs. Brown is going to kill that girl," Mrs. Baker on thesecond floor said. Mrs. Baker was a retired cook and spent most of her days
making cookies for the children in the building. Everybody loved her.
''We should call the cops on her , serve her right if they put her self-righteous ass in jail for child abuse. Figures her Frankie would be one of those
who got caught, anybody else's child would have known what to do." That
was either Lou, Marge or Katie - none of them liked Mrs. Brown and they
didn't waste no time in letting you know it. Just a few days before, while
Mama and me were on our way upstairs from the supermarket, and with Mrs.
Brown right out front waiting for the bus, Katie had stopped Mama and said,"Mrs Brown thinks she's better than the rest of us , walking up and down thesame dirty streets we are acting like her shit don't stink. If it's anything
like that fart she just passed it does," Katie continued, despite the fact that
Mama had kept on going after the first sentence and was now halfway up thestairs and I was the only one listening. "You know what she said to me theother morning when I lowered myself to speak to her? I only said 'good
morning' and the heffer turned around and said 'God makes all of my mornings good. You should go to church sometimes, Katie. He might do the samefor you.' Now wasn't that nothing but some b-s? That was the last thing I
needed to hear after I been standing on a street corner all night long. But
you know what I told her? I said, 'if it pays you, honey, do it.' That
woman got just enough sense to fit on a needle head and no more."Frankie was still crying.
"I ain't going to tell you, Mama. I'm old enough to do what I please andI don 't have to tell you anything. Charles ain't my father."
Before Charles came on the scene with what Manla called his "religious
words and dirty eyes" Mrs. Brown had been just like everybody else. But
after she met Charles every tIling had changed - she didn't talk to anyone in
the building anymore.
"So what you gon do now? Drop out of school and get on we lfare?"37

"Maybe I 'will and maybe I won't. That's for me to decide not you.""If I was you, I would start praying to God right now for him to help me.""Well you aren't me and God don't have anything to do with this , whoever He is.""Don't talk about God like that in my house." Whack! "You gonna
start packing your clothes right now and in the morning you're going down
to South Carolina to live with Charles' folks until all of this is past anduntil you finish high school. He said that we should have sent you down
there and he was right."
Then Katie, Lou or Marge was banging on Mrs. Brown's door and in avoice just as loud as hers yelling, "Shut it up."
The next day , Frankie ran away ; or so Mrs . Brown thought: she moved inwith Katie. At night after everyone had gone to bed, she would come down
the fire escape, knock at our window and ' sit and talk with Roberta.
''What you gonna do, Frankie? You gon have the baby?""I haven't figured out exactly what I'm going to do yet. I do know that
I'm never going to set foot in Mama's and Charles' apartment again in mylife . Maybe I'll have the baby and maybe I won ' t. Katie says she knows
somebody that will help me get rid of it , if I want to.""You gon have an abortion , Frankie?"''What's an abortion?"
I had never heard the word before but from the way Roberta said it , fast
as if it shouldn't have been said , I knew that I should find out what it meant.
Neither of them were paying me any attention .
"Maybe."Frankie had told Roberta how after Charles came in and Mrs . Brown
told him that she was pregnant, he had beat her. Tied her mouth up so
nobody would hear her and with a Bible in one hand while uttering theLo'rd's Prayer beat her black and blue. If she hadn't left , she said , he would
have killed her and she had the marks to prove it: her body looked likesomebody had ran a hot comb over it. If it wasn't for Katie she said that
she would have died .
That same night, I looked up "abortion" in the dictionary. Webster's said
that it was "1. the expulsion of a nonviable fetus: as a: spontaneous expulsion of a human fetus during the first 12 weeks of gestation - compare miscarriage . b : illegal abortion 2. monstrosity 3 . a: arrest of development(as of a part or process) resulting in imperfection b: a result of such arrest."
All of it sounded terrible and the definition of the next word "abortionist"was "producer of illegal abortions."
When I fmally got up the nerve to ask Mama what she thought she said
"it wasn't that bad. The monstrosity is that poor women have to go toquacks and rich women go to a hospitlll "For several weeks, Frankie came every night to talk to Roberta. She wasstill going to school and living with Katie had worked wonders on her - now
she smiled alot. Everybody thought that the sign that Mr. and Mrs. Brown
put in the window was one big joke:"Wanted - information leading to the finding of Francine Brown . Reward
offered."38

Then Frankie stopped coming and none of us ever saw her again . Roberta said that she had had an abortion.
Joan Gibbs would like to receive feedback on her writing. Her address is 360 Lafayette
Avenue, Brooklyn , NY 11238.

something you should know
I became a poet because I was in lovewith a writer of short stories
who loved (she thought) a malcontent
scholar who loved (we discovered)a beautician named Jackie in Toledo ,Ohio. It is at that point
my life begins . I abandoned my marriedlovers for younger ones of the opposite sex,
swore never again to have midnight encounterswith irate wives in local bars, tried to give up
drinking, and promised myself a new startin a new place. Moving brought meto the midwest ; a job and a lover
kept me here . The first is now boring,
the second is gone. Better that way
than the other , I suppose . I am readyfor a change. I have rediscovered
choice and I plan to use it :I am the old hound sitting on the back stoop
barking all night because I want to,
the young girl climbing the tall wooden fence
because it is there , the woman who will takeyour hand when it is offered (avoiding
pertinent questions) , prune the rings
from our fingers one by one ,drink from the ripe openings of your eyes.

- Anita Skeen

39

Harriet Malinowitz

VICISSITUDES: a short story

For t1uee hours we have been sitting in the Ironhorse Cafe , talking. For
much of this time I've been feeling , yes, we can be friends , we are friends :this is what we're excellent at being . I dictate to my body what my demeanor shall be, and obediently it poises in the figure not of a lover , but ofa friend: the eyes slightly vacant , legs absently crossed, shoulders reclining
against the chair-not hunched forward over the elbows planted on the table ,eagerly fondling a coffee cup. My demeanor is changed, and my feelings
scramble to accommodate it. Almost frantically they jump inside this newskin , assembling themselves ; and then they hover expectantly , tautly strung,waiting for me to come like some stage director and declare that they are accepted, naturals , perfect for the part.
I am trying to do this but something in me is unwilling to commit itself
to such a declaration . I can 't yet altogether believe that the actors for whom
the script was written will not make an appearance after all , that somehow
their talents cannot be used and applauded . I think I am willing to settle,
only not yet.
We have been talking as we haven 't in months , in the old style which had
atrophied during all these weeks of resistance and recrimination . For so long
now we have been nothing but policy-shapers : this is what I want , this iswhat you want , therefore we will be this , we won 't be that , although we
could be that other thing twice a week. Words preceding meanings , demeanors preceding feelings: everything going in reverse. Now apparently a treaty
has been signed , and once again we are simply understanding one anotherwith the old clarity and immediacy of connection.
It is all very fille until the thought creeps up on me that this is what wewent through last year; this is what made us fall in love with each other tobegin with. Our honesty used to beget so~ething ; we spent many hours
honestly talking about honesty , looking at each other in increasing amazement , like artists writing poems about art. It hurts me to realize there isn 'tthat future now. Honesty isn't rocks to climb any more ; we have woven it
into something larger than us which in the end has birthed us. We have tolive with it now , no longer of our own choosing; we can't escape it.
We go back to your apartment and move into separate rooms to work. I
know that now there will be no interrupting each other with brilliant thoughts
which require instant corroboration. My demeanor takes a deep breath andgathers itself into a position of deep abstraction and concentration. I read foran hour or two . Then you come into the living room , where I am , with abook , and sit in the chair by the kitchen. I'm not exactly sure of the rulesof the game we are playing but without admitting my ignorance I am mutely
learning them. We read for a little while longer and then abruptlY you begin
to talk . You tell me you are depressed. I put my book down and listen to40

you as you tell me the reasons you are dissatisfied with your relationshipwith Gloria, your new lover. I offer advice or therapy or whatever you wantto call it-as a friend . At first I believe in the role. Then , as it goes on andon, I start to feel disturbed ; at the same time I feel I can't show it. My demeanor is impassively watching; it is lying through its teeth .
At one point you come over and you hug me. You lie down on me - I am
sitting on the couch-and you put your head in my lap . I hold you almost
mock-soothingly, saying "Poor Mia" and patting your head , but what I am
doing seems to be coming from another person. It is in no way reflective of
the real feeling that is inside me, which is an all-encompassing urge to holdyou very passionately and for a long time. The way I am holding you is sucha bastardized form of what I am really feeling that I begin to feel dissociated ,like a third party watching. Then you let go and get up and walk back toyour seat, before I am quite ready . I am still aching to hold you. I still
haven't shown this. I think you believe that you are breaking the rules andthat I might be angry or annoyed with you.
We read again and soon you sigh restlessly, turning your open book pages
down so it straddles your knee. You randomly begin to tell me the things
you need in someone with whom you are in a primary relationship. You say
it frustrates you sometimes not to fmd these things in Gloria. Gloria , you say,
is not intellectual enough , she has little ambition , she has no interest in literature , and she is often maddeningly not on your perceptual current. I lookat you quietly as you say all this , my face once again a polite blank of listening attention . An impatience is beginning to boil in my blood. Everyfactor you mention is something you have specifically , emphatically , and repeatedly professed to have found in me . It does not seem, appropriate to
make that connection now. You , certainly, are not making it. Why are you
telling me these things? I can only respond with a strangely contrived mental
dullness, an obliviousness to the obvious. Is this what you want from me?
Am I supposed to play dumb? We both used to be rather fond of sayingthat we were a Bloomsbury Group of two . A pompous pronouncement , true ,but the act of saying it was an act of love, an assertion that amid all the divisions between the souls of people , amid the incongruous latitudes and longitudes that people lived on, we two , we, found ourselves perched on a common
speck of dust. What was important was that we shared the view from thisspeck of dust, and that as its only two inhabitants we created the esthetics,
the politics, the mythology of our speck. Oui religion was what a professorof ours once called "passionate provisionalism"- a strange theology which accounted for the intensity behind every belief, while still remembering thatknowledge is always incomplete, that the perspective of any given moment isalways flawed . Together we were brave enough to admit the provisionalismof our ideas and of the passion which informed them ; but we did not admit
the provisionalism of our honesty , True things cannot be transmitted througha false medium. Now I look at you across a gulf of flawed integrity,
Our conversation moves away from such personal concerns. You are steering; I go with the flow. We have turned to the subject of racism, and I can
see that our dynamic interests and arrests you . I see your e yes locking aroundthe thoughts which hover and vibrate between us , and I have a sudden senseof possession : I possess my own thoughts and my own way of articulating41

them , which I can give or withhold at will . I know that you value thesethings , that you attempt to draw them out of me, that you grow frustrated
when I choose not to dispense them . I know , and I know you know, that
separately our ideas come slowly , that often they remain half-formed or they
spontaneously abort. Together, we go somewhere with them; we lead eachother always onto new planes which in themselves become exciting. I thinkthat perhaps when we manufacture these things together I bring in the raw
materials, and you supply the technology to make them useful and alive andfunctioning . Yet we have come to work together on this so closely and theprocess always happens so quickly that we are not conscious of performing
these particular tasks . We just know that things move and spring into existence, and we are learning. I don 't know if you are able to run the plant on
your own any better than I am. I know that each time in these last few
months that we tried to separate, I became overstocked on raw materials andthey just sat in my warehouse , rotting .
As we sit here taiidng about racism , the look on your face tells me thatyou are compelled by what I say and by the electric charge of our thoughts
spewing and hooking up in midair. Sensing my power , I get up to leave; yetthere is your power , too , and afterwards I am paSSionately depressed . The
more I am with you, the more I cannot extricate myself from your gravity ,from the weight of our coalescence . I try to escape you, and it is a lie that I
want to escape you , although it is also a lie that I don 't want to escape you.
I have lost all attempts to sever this tie. You have won ; now we are "friends,"
and as such we may see each other often. Yet I don't know how to be withthis person who is my best friend , who I want to hold and kiss and cry withand make love to and who only wants now to talk to me and write bookswith me and be my friend. I try to block these things out of my head when
I am with you. Up to a point I can do it very effectively , but then they havea way of sneaking up on me and hitting me in the stomach when I'm notpaying attention . I am so angry with you for forcing me to suffocate mydeepest humanity and pervert my deepest truth ; but I love you for having
collaborated with me on the expedition to discover them .
The redeeming aspect of this pain is that by its very nature it contains thepossibility of its opposite . It is a gentle pain; it protects me ~gainst easy ignorance , telling me relentlessly who I am , what I can feel , what depths ofpossibilities lie inside me , not un fathomed and untouched, but known . I
think that in this , more than anything , lies the power and the paradox of lesbian relationships : that we are friends and lovers, that we are fused together
through knowledge and mystery , that the boundaries which might have been
comforting refuse to exist for us . As you said to me many times : " I talk to
you about the vicissitudes of life. And yet you are the vicissitudes of life."

4~

Transformer
love poem for a vibrator
Electric
power lines
lope between the trees.
Branches scan
the sky like nerves.
Lying in this fieldI have becomea circuit for the hum:a path of less resistance.
The cables snake
around my thighs .
Magnetized
the juices passthrough brassarc
into flesh .

I'm risingon a thread of steel
wired
to a hundred tonsof water. beating on a dam .
I rush against the flow.
Salmon roe slides down .
I ride the dragon's
fire licking tongue
I have becomea circuit for the hum .
I hold the spin
as long as I can standand then I gather all my trucks
and buffalo
and gush
Niagarathrough the falls.
- Lorie D echar

43

Joyce M. Latham

THE NUT HOUSE

To tell the truth of this story I have had to move deeper and wider
than the actual events. There is the actual truth: that at a younger
age I was shot up and locked up and beat up at some famous institution that labelled me an hysteric. There is the learned truth:that it was unnecessary, and a violation. And finally the truth I
have struggled to touch and to know: that in and of ourselves weare strong, that with and through each other we are stronger.
They released her from seclusion early, wordlessly , before the other patientswere even up. The rising sun threw a shadow of the heavy black grillwork acrossher face as she walked down the hall. In her room she loosed the single stringof the hospital gown and it fell to her feet. She kicked it under the bed. Someone knocked - Jean, her nurse - and came in and sat casually on the edge ofthe bed. She spied the gown and pulled it out, bunching it in her lap.
"Well, you made it to the inner sanctum of the great temple. How does it
feel ?"
Danci placed a hand above her left breast.
"I am truly purified: anger burns as the great fire purging me of acquiescenceand all guilt."
Jean sighed.
"Danci, everybody knows you aren't nuts .""Then let me go ," she shot back.
"You have to stop acting nuts."
Danci buttoned up her shirt.
"To borrow some of your own jargon, my behavior is not inappropriate to
my situation. This place sucks·."" 'And motherfucks.' I heard. You chanted that for hours last night.""Maybe somebody got the messa~e." she muttered , closing the bureau drawer.
"Pomeroy said you called him a rapist."
Danci raised an eyebrow.
"Did he believe me? ""Does it matter so much?""Hunh," she grunted, slipping into her boots, "If men like him would recognize their rapacious appetites, women like me wouldn 't end up in institutions
like this. Pomeroy should stop jerking off in my doorway at night."
Jean jangled her keys and frowned.
"Does he?"Danci walked over to the door.
"Does it really matter?" she asked lightly , and turned the knob. "I'm goingin for breakfast."

44Danci sat at the table with eight men around her and Jean perched by thecoffee pot. Over the weeks she had learned the routines and realized today must
be chart day , the day patients could read what others were saying about them.
Danci never did; somehow they always missed one basic truth.
She played with her rubbery eggs and drank her milk while the men aroundher talked .
"Noisy last night."" Yeah , real noisy.""How's anybody supposed to sleep with some hysterical woman mouthing
off . . ." The speaker slurped his oatmeal , sucking it through a crack be tween
his front teeth.
Jean commented : "Gross , Harvey . Eat your food right. ""Yes, Harvey ," someone mimicked , " and don 't forget to wash behind yourears ."The men chuckled. Harvey snarled .
''Well at least I don't go around pissing on floors , hunh , Miss Fancy Danci?
Pis sing on floors and making Pomeroy clean it up .""Should 'a made her lick it up ."''Wish I'd'a been there. I'd'a given her something good to lick."
He didn't see it coming but Jean did ; she yelled , but too late. Without awasted motion Danci landed her fist on the guy's still-open jaw. Blood trickled
down and he bawled , "Yah! Yah! Stop her! She's after me ."Which was not quite true. Everyone but the bawling victim was moving.
Danci was up and crouching, her chair flipped back behind her. She saw Jeandash out of the room .
"Typical ," she thought , and then felt herself being lifted off the floor. Someguy flung her against the wall.
"You bitch! Filthy bitch! " a deep voice blasted at her. Oatmeal hit her facebut she shook it off, jumping back up . She snapped a white plastic spoon andhad something like a weapon . She tried to angle to get the wall behind her. A
grabbing hand pulled open her shirt and she was bare-breasted. Her eyes flashed .
She whooped , and brought the heel of her boot down hard on a shin behindher. Someone yelped , and let go . She spun away and was able to leave a longscratch down a hairy arm . It was fruitless , she knew . Soon they would be on
top of her. Someone pinched her exposed breast and she jabbed the plasticedge at his eye, just missing , ripping open his cheek. He stared at the blood on
his hand , disbelieving, but someone else jumped her from the other side , holding
her wrists and pulling her arms back behind her. She kicked back with her feetand they both fell.
"Get her feet! Her fe et! "It was Jean 's voice . Danci screamed in outrage.
"Traitor! Traitor! " She tried to catch the woman 's eyes but her own were
blurred , with blood , or tears. She kicked out aimlessly. The men respondedwith relish , holding her legs , yanking Off her boots. Someone worked at thebuckle of her belt ; Danci screamed in fresh rage , unintelligibly . She almost
broke free . Then someone climbed onto her stomach , gleefully , laughing , provoking her .
"Now you 're gonna get it , bitch! Now you little cock teasing butch!"
His eyes glinted. Danci tried to focus and spat. He spat back , over and over.
45

Je2n yelled at him to stop, called him off. Danci tried to dislodge them with one
last surge of strength and rage. But her pants were down. The needle shot into
her hip and she howled one last time as the thorazine or mellaril or whatever shit
it was leaked into her. Someone giggled. She heard a stern voice order everyone
out just as she slipped into unconsciousness.
The sound of bolts scraping roused her. She tried to sit up, but could not.
She was bound tight in a straitjacket. Jean entered with another woman. Dancihardly saw her, but the woman told Jean to remove the restrainer.
"How are you?" Jean asked , working at the clips. Danci felt her shoulders
give with a twinge of pain but said nothing . The woman knelt beside her.
"Do you remember me? I'm Dr. Helen Fox. I'm going to meet with you later.
Why don 't you drink this and 111 be back in an hour."She set a paper cup on the floor and stood up ; it steamed. Jean slipped thesleeves off her arms and they left. She heard mutters outside the door . She sat
up slowly. Her arms and shoulders were sore , wrenched. Her ass hurt , bruisedfrom all the shots - how many? One eye was swollen, almost shut , and her knuckles were scraped raw . More bruises covered her arms and legs . She smiled grimly;
she'd made it. Officially mad . She looked around the room. More mattresses lined
the walls . It was true, then. She 'd caved in, lost the delicate balance and slipped
into their pit , their snake pit. Fitting image , snake ... Nut house, nuts .. Where
they wanted her. She laughed shortly at herself, and rested her forehead on theheels of her hands.
What could she do now ? She 'd fought the best way she knew and lost.
The thorazine , and whatever else , was still working on her ; she was slowed ,dulled. Her body was weak . Righteousness remained but no strength for it.
She realized she hadn't eaten for awhile, and still she had no appetite. The
drugs , she remembered. Another beneficial side-effect. So why would they giveher coffee? She could smell it ; it cut through the odor of shit and urine. She
picked up the cup, held it in both hands , and took a sip . It wasn't too hot; it
was strong , though , too strong for hospital coffee . But she sat hunched overand sipped it.
She caught Jean looking in at her once , but she turned from her in distaste .
There were things she remembered , not yet in the front of her mind . But withtime , she promised herself, she would recover them , and with them her anger ,and she would begin again .
When the cup was empty Jean came back in.
"Want more?"
Danci nodded , not looking at her. Jean took the cup and left with only aclick of the lock. She returned soon , the cup full . She set it on the floor andleft without a word , only the sound of the clicking door.
The doctor returned as she worked on her second cup . She cane into theroom and the door locked behind her. The bare light bulb went out. Danci_ watched her walk over to the window where the light barely glimmered and. flick a finger against the fancy grillwork.
" Bars would be more honest ," she observed , and pulled out a cigarette. " Do
you remember how you got here? ""A fight ," Danci muttered.
The doctor snapped her lighter and blew the smoke at the window . She46

spoke quietly.
"You were right , you know . They were after you , and , I'm sorry to say ,they got you right where they wanted you."
Danci gritted her teeth.
"I know, I know, I blew it, I lost it . . ."She balled her hand into a fist and brought it down hard on her leg. The
doctor frowned .
''What are you beating on yourself for? Haven't you been beat up enough?
Aren't you tired of it yet?"
Danci laughed , disbelieving.
"As though there's a choice, hunh? " She laughed again. "The only choice
is how you go down, really, kicking or sucking. Either way , either way, you getbeat."
Dr. Fox smiled.
"You know, you have a real fine anger, and I think it could be very usefulto us."
Danci smirked .
"Really? So, who's 'us'?""Do you mind if I sit down?"
Danci shrugged and fmished off her coffee. The doctor sat beside her on themattress.
"Cigarette?" she offered.
Danci tried to eye her suspiciously but it hurt too much to squint. She winced.
"Do you want some ice for that? "Danci just shook her head and took the offered cigarette . The doctor lit itup for her.
"Out there," the woman jerked her thumb towards the window, "and also inhere , in the too-many places like this , are women like you , like me, whose anger
burns pure and hot , and rightly so , but who have it robbed from them by somemedical Prometheus who passes it on to serve men, and their needs , never mind
ours."
Now she laughed.
"But , but . .. we're learning. We're learning to say 'No , we have our own use
for this. You can't have it .' And our anger becomes an energy source for fighting
back.""How?" Danci asked drily.
"I'm not the only subversive in my profession. We've learned we can't do it
all alone . There are others who are teachers, lawyers, social workers - librarians,
even . We haven 't been uncovered yet. On the surface we play by the rules . Now ,Jean is an example ... ""Jean shot me up!"
The doctor nodded.
"I know , 1 know. And it's regrettable we don't have our own resources yet.
But you were in danger ; those men were playing for keeps. She knew that. She
did what she could. And she is the one who called me; that's what she's here
for."Danci took a long drag on the cigarette .
"You can get me out?"
Dr. Fox nodded emphatically.
47

"I can get you out, put you in touch with a social worker I know who canline you up a job, an apartment ... whatever you need.""And what do I do?"
The doctor shrugged.
''That's up to you. Although," she paused, and looked at Danci from thecorner of her eye, "there is this half-way house we'd like to infiltrate, and if
you were my patient, we should be able to get you in there and find out what's
really going on."Danci sat thoughtfully, then asked, "How do I know this is for real?"''Well, Pomeroy is under investigation for the charges you made against him.
All the director needs is a statement from you, and another from me, and he'scanned."Danci's face twitched, and fmally a slow smile slipped across her lips .
"Alright, alright," she said softly, and then, turning to the doctor, "You got
a deal ."The woman met her eyes.
"I'm glad. Now I can see about getting you out of here."She pushed herself smoothly up from the mattress.
"How soon?" Danci pressed.
"Come on," she said, offering her hand. "111 walk you down to your room."
Danci dropped the cigarette in the cup and, after a pause , reached up . She
rose stiffly ; the doctor steadied her as she stood.
"You got it now?""Yeah, yeah," she answered , her breath short.
Dr. Fox rapped on the door and Jean opened it from outside. Some men sat
in the rec room , visible from the angle of the doorway . Danci hesitated.
"Don't worry ," Jean winked at her , and slipped one of her arms throughDanci's. Dr. Fox took the other , and as they walked the length of the hall, theeyes of the men slid away.

THE NAIAD PRESS, INC.
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48

Oriethyia mountain crone

HEART DANCE
She thought as she lay there about the fact that she was dying . Not theway she had been dying since the moment of her birth; not even the way
she had been dying since learning of the sickness that was raging like an august brushfire throughout her body. But dying. Really dying . Within minutes, half an hour at the most, this life, her only remembered life, would beended.
She refused to spend these last few moments going over, again, the scene
at the hospital: her refusing treatments, her father cursing , her mother trying to understand. It was her brothers who had walked her to the parking
lot. They didn't agree with her , they said, but it was her life . She hadlaughed. They corrected themselves. Her death. They hugged.
Her lover waited in the car. She had said that she just couldn't be partof what would go on in that consultation room ; knew as well as her cancerfilled friend how the family, the physician , would respond . . ..
She forced the memories from her mind, chided herself for wasting timeon what was already. I must think about what is , only what is . What was
doesn 't matter any more, nor what will be. The future , now , is defined aswhatever happens in the next twenty minutes.
The pressure on her chest brought her back to her immediate reality .
Kira , Kira who had been with her since she had come, crying , to her backdoor , a seven-week-old kitten . Kira on her chest purring , kneading, nuzzling
against her cheek . The familiarity was almost devastating. The simpleness.
The warmth.
She opened her eyes , stroking Kira under the chin , starting at the baseof the neck . She looked around the circle she lay in , looked one by one at
the faces of her friends , and smiled . Several smiled back. They had red ,wet eyes. And smiled. A warm , friend smile . Their smiles said
i will miss you
i love you
i don't want thisi respect thisi love you
i miss you
don't leave me
i love you
their mouths did not move .
There was a drum beating. A long slow beat. Not sad. Not mournful.
Constant. Like the beating of a heart set to music . She liked that.
She thought of what it was like to be dying. Truly dying. In her circle
of friends. Some of these women had been lovers. Some had been coworkers . All were close. All people whom she had loved and cared about.
All people who cared for her. Years ago they had taken to calling each otherfamily. Month by month , crisis after crisis , sharing after sharing , the naming
had created a reality . They were family" . In ways that amused and touched
and shook them. Family when one of them needed money ; family when one
needed a safe place to heal , a safe place to be ill ; family when one needed
to be held , go crazy, stop being crazy, give birth.
And now , she thought , to give death.
Not one of them had given an excuse . Not one of them had refused her
invitation . She had called , written , to each woman in this circle . And they49

had come. From allover the continent. She had told them each that she
could not explain this thing, this need, to them one at a time . She did
not have the energy. She said that she needed them to come together , allat once, and she would speak to them of her need , her fantasy , her desire.
They came. They came because they loved her ; they came responding as
much to their trust in her, in each other, in their connection , as to the urgency , the intensity , of her request.
To die , not in a sterile, white , arrogant , soul-less cubicle in some hospital.
but in a circle of trees. in a field. outside. under a sun-lit sky . in a circleof trees. a circle of friends . a circle within a circle.
They had asked questions : was her death certain. yes . how long. anothermonth, maybe. a slow month. a painful month. no control. no power.
They understood .
She asked questions: are you prepared to deal with the legal red-tape .
yes. even if accused of negligent homicide. yes. will you give the burial instructions to my parents . yes . will you help me find the best way, something
fast, painless, an easy , gentle death. yes. will you sit with me while i takeit . yes . while i die.
yes .
They met for the rest of that week. Sometimes with her, sometimes without her , talking , exploring their feelings about what they were agreeing to.
How they felt about her dying , about not trying to stop her, not trying toconvince her , force her to try something, anything else. They began to truly
deal with her death, what it meant to each of them , the fact that she would
no longer be accessible to them in this familiar , physical way. They spent
their days, their nights , discussing all of this; discussing, too, that there would
be need of more and continued discussion when she had , in fact, died.
They came together on the day she had chosen. She gave them information: the car goes to joann. the books go to the new women's library. thejournals to whoever , here, wants to read them, then on to anyone who would
use them in some way.
Her parents had been informed of her wishes in terms of the funeral. They
had already agreed, verbally. to all her demands. They had agreed to help
with any legal problems. They knew that she was sending a notarized statement via her friends . Her tlnal bit of control. The written version of what
they had agreed to: no christian ceremony . something tribal. leave it to thewomen. they will know.
The drum continued. There was another sound, a gourd with its seeds
being shaken about. And a flute. A tambourine. The voices of the women
she loved. They sang.
She listened.
She looked at all of their wide open faces. She cried a little. They criedmore than a little. They sang. She listened. The drum continued , a heartbeat set to music. The drum will beat after i have stopped. They had promised her this.
The sun shone . The grass tickled her arms. Kira purred. The drum beaton. She looked around the circle; wondered at the opening and closing of
the mouths of living creatures making noise, singing songs. She watched thehands that beat on drums, fingered flutes , shook tambourines , rattled gourds.
The drum continued , a heartbeat set to music, drawing her own heart into adance , a dance that would be carried by each of the women here ; a dance
that would last as long as the circle , the family , continued .

SO

LEfBIAn 11ERfTORY

Jan Hansen
Untitled
aery lie pain ling30" x 30"51

Sarah Lucia Hoagland

REMEMBERING LESBIAN LIVES
discipline . .. n. I. Training intended to produce a specified character orpattern of behavior. (The American Heritage Dictionary )Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprin t to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse itwith any kind of absence(Adrienne Rich , "Cartographies of Silence" )Feminist process must become sensible (in actions, speech , works of all kinds)
in order to become. The journey requires the courage to create, th at we maylearn from lucid criticism, that we may re-member the dismembered body of
our heritage, that we may stop repeating the same mistakes. Patriarchal erasureof our tradition force s us to relearn what our foresisters knew and to repeat
their blunders. (M ary Daly, Gy n/Ecoiogy )You say there are no wo rds to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But
remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing th at, invent.
(Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres)~/ I was never confused about whether I was male or female . I always knew'\,..../" I was female. But for most of my life I did not believe I was a woman .
I liked climbing trees ; at age nine when the wind blew against my face andbody , I would think of the title words and tune of the song " High and Mighty"
and feel powerful. I would lie for hours in the grass and gaze up into trees ,watching leaves and sparkles of sunlight dance . I watched clouds pass in constant transformation. I held conferences with the neighborhood dogs , and mycat sat opposite me in a lawnchair. Solitude and I were best friends.
I knew perfectly well who I was , so much so) mostly never thought about
it. And I knew I wasn't a lady. I didn't like skirts- they meant you couldn't
do back bends or cartwheels or climb on the monkey bars during recess , oryou couldn't sit with your legs in all kinds of delicious positions because theprincipal didn't like your underpants showing . It wasn 't ladylike . Neither wereshorts.
I knew I wasn't a lady also because I hated sitting indoors and gossiping.
Yuch . What a waste of a day . Mr. Gruff, my teddybear , didn't like gossip
either. We thought ladies silly .
Sometimes I thought ladies worse than silly. Some of Mother's friends
would play up to men in the most embarrassing ways - they acted like twoyear-olds .
It was carefully explained that Mother 's friends (white) were ladies while
the cleaning women (black) were women . I liked the cleaning women .

52

By fifth grade I had a best friend and would become furious if she evenspoke to another girl. Then we moved, and at twelve I found another bestfriend. We became blood sisters . Our friendship crossed borders , enduring
distance and time, and lasted into our early twenties when her dissolution
became complete in marriage and her societal role.
As a teenager , I thought most girls ridiculous; they stayed at home waiting
for beys to ask them out. I went out golfing. I was one of the boys .
...:./In college I made unsuccessful attempts at friendship both outside sororities"l(nd then, at twenty-one, inside one. Repeatedly they dissolved around boys,
leaving me betrayed; female bonds always came second to boys. By graduate
school I began to restrict my friendship to males, still thinking friendship themost important relationship, but knowing I could not trust women- I knew
how fickle they really were. By twenty-five I hated women.
Having lost solitude and descending into loneliness, I came close once toseriously considering "giving up and getting married" though ·1 had no one
particular in mind . Instead, I sniffed at a book someone shoved under mynose, The Feminine Mystique, and voraciously devoured it. (I especially liked
the way she exposed the Freudian traps.) By twenty-eight I was solid in feminism , having detected in my new-found concept, sisterhood, a source forloyalty among wimmin who choose to become friends and a recognition of
my long-held belief that no man was worth the dissolution of a friendship.
Soon I was discovered by lesbians and I came out at twenty-nine. Now I am
thirty -fi ve.
Have I been a lesbian all my life?
l/'TClon't Know: was a tomboy , very much my own person, but withoutmeans of protecting myself from becoming self-conscious (conscious of andaffected by others' perceptions of me). I grew up, bowed somewhat underpeer pressure. I was willing to think of marriage, just not to this one, andcertainly not now. While having the requisite slew of boyfriends , I managed
to keep them in other states or countries . Once I fell in romantic love andhad an abortion. When I did try living with a male, I chose one I was notparticularly attracted to. For a long time I was essentially celibate. Sometimes
I am very slow .
Have I been a lesbian all along?
Certainly I never fought the battles prefeminist dykes have. Mine are adifferent set of scars . Until I was twenty-eight, I did not have the concept,
lesbian, with which to evaluate myself. I only knew I wasn't a lady. And formost of my life that meant I wasn't a woman-not one of them. I was unique.
Have I always been a lesbian?
Actually, the answer doesn't much matter ... at least, the answer didn't
much matter until I began to think of historians. When I think of historians
talking about me or about wimmin Hke me, or about all kinds of other lesbians, the situation begins to change. When I think of a historian 's approachto the question of whether I've been a lesbian all my life, or whether tomboys are lesbians or whether prefeminist loners are lesbians, when I think ofa historian's questions (as opposed to the ridiculous questions scientists haveasked) , I begin to care.

53

V

The work of re-claiming lesbian lives is enormously biophilic; it is part ofour survival. To re-claim our tradition is to begin to heal our Selves. Becauseof the deafening silence surrounding even the concept, lesbian; because of the
distortions , burials, violence, committed by male historians; because of ourown near death by starvation at the hands of phallocratic scholarship, discovering even one lesbian life is profoundly enspiriting.
Still, I want to know about the focus of a lesbian historian . Is she truly
after Sinister Wisdom , the lesbian imagination in all wimmin? Is she a Croneologist, "unmasking deceptive patriarchal history, rendering it obsolete?"l Or
is she merely attempting to prove that some wimmin in history were lesbians,
attempting merely to include "lesbian" as a historical category? When I thinkof a historian talking about my life, or the lives of other lesbians , I wonder
about the arena of her inquiry. When she is meticulous and exacting about
detail, whom is she trying to convince? If a lesbian historian is an apologist,
to whom is she apologizing?
We know that left in a patriarchal context without hard and fast evidenceof lesbian bonding , the intricacies of a womon 's life will be cast in heterosexual concrete. That is the nature of phallocratic heterosexism . But we mustalso remember that even with hard and fast evidence of lesbian bonding, male
historians will neurotically manipulate , distort , and discard that evidence . That,
too , is the nature of phallocratic heterosexism . Even though we have broken
the silence surrounding some lesbians for ourselves , we still live in a worldthat will re~stablish that silence as soon as possible.
It is vitally important ~e never forget that masculinist scholarship and thepatriarchal naming of wimmin as "feminine " go hand in hand . The conceptof femininity defines wimmin as passive, and in relation to men , so pervasively that scholars bury or otherwise render invisible women who do not relate to men , as well as wimmin who resist male domination . By the very act
of naming us, these scholars determine the limits of female hehavior. Female
autonomy , female resistance , and female bonding do not exist within patriarchal
ontology. If there is mention of these phenomena, they are named "madness." 2
J When we attend to their disciplines , we must keep in mind that the malesocial constriction/construction of reality emerged in the name of objectivity
and universality . The presumption that spinsters and old maids are heterosexual
now strikes us as ludicrous. Once it did not. Men recast the concepts in aheterosexual light , suggesting wimmin who could not get men rather than
wimmin who chose to live without them . To successfully reverse male reversals , Crone-ologists must take risks. Regardless of what a lesbian historian
uncovers , the way she approaches her material and the academic criteria she
accepts as appropriate to her work can contribute to phallocracy. Wimmin's
Studies arose because of distortions and fabrications in the patriarchal canon ,not just because of omissions. We must be wary that our re-search does notpreserve a masculinist context.
\ .:For example, lesbian historians have found themselves expected to facilitate male voyeurism by responding to demands for exacting proof of "genital
contact" so men can consider whether that contact might Dossiblv be evidence
that some womon was more than likely, though not for certain , but quitepossibly, not heterosexual. And so the strength and vitality of a womon 'slife again crumbles in the face of male questions and feeds male fantasy.
54

Lesbian historians are beginning to shift our focus from male questions to our own conceptual clarity , vision . In an enormously re-membering
article on Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman, Judith Schwarz discusses problems of lesbian re-search. Arguing that genital contact is not anecessary condition of lesbian identity , she offers Del Martin and Phyllis'Lyon's defmition : "a woman whose primary erotic , psychological , emotionaland social interest is in a member of her own sex." 3 She also points out theimportance of focusing less on evidence of sexual contact among wimmin involved in female partnerships at a time when married wimmin acted as if conception were an act of a god , and the importance of focusing more on discovering and analyzing how these wimmin survived without heterosexual
privilege.
Nevertheless , the question of the burden of proof looms large . In the process of her discussion , Judith Schwarz makes a problematic claim . Noting
Carol Smith-Rosenberg's silence surrounding the naming of lesbian relationships, she states, "In effect, the standard of assuming all women to be heterosexual until positively proven otherwise is at least as biased and historicallyincorrect as declaring all single women who ever enjoyed a close friendshipwith another woman to be lesbians."4 Why is it biased and historically incorrect to think all single wimmin lesbian who ever enjoyed a close friendship with another womon? And what does that have to do with heterosexism? What is the purpose of this statement?
We know lesbians have passed as heterosexual . A more reasonable statement reads : " In effect, the standard of assuming all wimmin heterosexual
until positively proven otherwise is no more biased and historically incorrect
than declaring all wimmin heterosexual who were ever married and had children ." In fact , given patriarchal constriction of wimmin , it is not clear we
can ever say positively that any womon in patriarchy was ever truly heterosexual.
Lesbian Feminist sociologist Susan Cavin offers an en-lightening perspective on prehistoric wimmin:

It is my position that patriscientists must prove their assumption that all
prehistoric dead women are exclusively heterosexual before they can correctly conclude that no lesbian , asexual , or bisexual females exist in earlysociety . These heterosexist generalizations cannot be proved regarding living women in present society, much less the dead of prehistory. Yet heterosexists still function under the impression that the burden of proof is on
lesbians to prove lesbian existence, when they have yet to establish theveracity of their assumption that all historical and prehistorical women are
straight .... Perhaps the most interesting point to be grasped in any theory of sex and society is that until the actual incidence of lesbianism, celibacy, bisexuality , and male homosexuality is known , the actual incidenceof heterosexuality remains unknown .5
Our history is our memory, and Crone-ologists are charged with "remembering the dismembered body of our heritage ," a heritage which has toa large degree been snuffed out. This involves dis-covering facts and revaluing them in light of the primacy of wimmin , getting beyond femininity
to dis-cover femaleness. It involves a willingness to approach phallocraticscholarship with nothing more to go on but the question , How have they
distorted/destroyed our lives? It involves seeing through masculinist conceptual coercion .

55

For example, patrihistorians claim wimmin have remained content with
our lot and have accepted male domination throughout time with the exception of a few suffragists and now a few aberrant feminists . Attending to thework of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton rather than listening
to the boys, Crone-<Jlogists can dis-cover fact and show that suffrage and suffrage-related activity , for example, was widespread . But Crone-<Jlogists cango still further.
My own current work involves an argument that even wimmin in isolation have resisted male domination ; that not only is "femininity" not characteristic of real wimmin, but that even the stereo typic behaviors that fall under that umbrella term do not indicate female submission to male domination. Instead they indicate female resistance. Similarly, I argue that thestereotypes surrounding slaves- "shiftless," "lazy," "clumsy," "childlike"are not indicative of passive acceptance of domination, but rather of resistance, of separating from the will of the master, of sabotage .6
So much deeply challenging work needs to be done . It is argued, for example, that lesbianism did not exist in Africa until the European invasions.
The basis for this claim seems to be a lack of African female erotica. Yet
how could we expect female erotica to emerge among wimmin who have had
their clitorises gouged out and their labia scraped and scarred?
Was a British womon who showed signs of doing anything but what fellwithin prescribed stereotypic behavior not a lesbian? Was a womon who succumbed, heterosexual? Are there any grounds that could support the hypothesis that such a womon was heterosexual? How can we dis-cover lesbianidentity among poor European and American wimmin of the 19th century?
If a womon resisted but found herself isolated from female support networks,
was she thus not a lesbian? And what about the loners?
I
Have I been a lesbian all my life? Within the confines of my life as Ilive it now, the answer doesn't much matter. But I want lesbian historians
to attend seriously to the question and turn history inside out.
NOTES
1. Mary Daly, Gy n/Ec%gy (Boston : Beacon Press, 1978), p. 16. For insight into thefollowing words and others that appear in this paper, see the "Index of New Words,"
pp. 469-71: 'biophilic,' 'survival,' 'dis~over,' 'en spiriting,' 'Crone-ologist,' 're-member,''reversal.' For the use of the words 'womon' and 'wimmin,' see "A Rose by Any Other
Name Would Smell as Sweet," Lesbian Connection, IV,S (December, 1978), p. 5.
2. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, "Naming, Describing, Explaining: Deception and Science,"
paper delivered at the panel "Feminism and the Philosophy of Science" of the annual
meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, January 6, 1979,
Houston, Texas.
3. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (NY: Bantam, 1972) , p. 1. A friendof mine tells me she picked up Lesbian/Woman in an airport and when she saw this definition, she knew for certain that she was a lesbian.
4. Judith Schwarz, "Yellow Clover : Katharine Lee Bates,and Katharine Coman,
Frontiers, IV, 1 (Spring, 1979), p. 60.
5. Susan Cavin , "Lesbian Origins Sex Ratio Theory," Sinister Wisdom , 9 (Spring,1979) p. 15 .
6. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, op. cit., also, "Lesbian Ethics ," work in progress.

56

JR Roberts"Ieude behauior each with other vpon a bed":
THE CASE OF SARAH NORMAN AND MARY HAMMOND .

In recent writings, Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough cite a rare courtcase involving sexual activity between two white immigrant women in seventeenth-century America. In 1648 in Plymouth Colony , Sarah White Norman
and Mary Vincent Hammond were charged with "leude behauior each withother vpon a bed." The Bulloughs maintain that this "seems to be the only
prosecution in American history for lesbian activities."lThis statement , however , is debatable on two counts . First, there havebeen other court prosecutions in the United States for lesbianism. 2 Secondly , the two women were not prosecuted for "lesbian activities" per se butfor "leude behauior." Still , a closer examination of the historical record
does confirm that the two women were charged with committing some kindof se~ual act or acts with each other, although it is not clear what those acts
were.
The earliest mention of Sarah Norman is in the marriage records of Plymouth Colony. Sarah White married Hugh Norman October 18 , 1639. 3 In
1642 a daughter , Elizabeth , was born. Ship passenger lists indicate that Hughcame from Orchard Putman Parish, Somersetshire, England, but there is norecord of Sarah's origins, circumstance, or date of arrival. 4 She may havecome to the New World with her family since later records concerning Sarah
mention a "Goodman White," possibly her father.
Other records show that the second woman named in the case , Mary Vincent Hammond, was born in England in 1633, and came to the New World
with her family, the John Vincents, who originally settled in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her husband-to-be , Benjamin Hammond , arrived in 1634 from London with his mother and other brothers .5 These four families were part of
the Great Migration during which thousands of Europeans poured into theNorth American continent.
In May 1648 , while living in Yarmouth, tragedy came to Sarah and HughNorman. Their daughter Elizabeth, then age six, drowned in a well .6 This
may not have been an unusual accident as the court on varying occasions
cited farmers for leaving wells uncovered . Later that same year on November
8th, Mary Vincent , who was 14 or 15 years old, married Benjamin Hammondof Sandwich, a nearby town.? It was not uncommon for young colonial
women still in their teens to marry and set up a household since there was a
shortage of women , especially in the Northern colonies, and wives were muchin demand. It appears that few women escaped or resisted this fate .
At one point , we find the Norman and Hammond families both living in
the town of Yarmouth. Here , Sarah and Mary might have met, perhaps whilegathering with the other women to perform community chc~es . Their lives
up until then had been like those of many other white European colonial
57

women - they came to the New World with their families , married , set up a
household , and gave birth to children. Existing records do not indicate thateither woman was of a wealthy or prominent family . Like other colonialmen, their husbands served in the militia and sometimes held minor government posts . They appear to have been quite ordinary , everyday people .
Yet the Plymouth court records indicate that in 1648 the two women,
Sarah and Mary , did share an experience quite uncommon in the lives ofother white colonial women : they were charged in court with committing
lewd behavior with each other. The record for the court session of March 6,
1648 8 reads: ''Wee psent the wife of Hugh Norman , and Mary Hammon[d] ,both of Yarmouth for leude behauior each with other vpon a bed. Of thismore is entered in the conclusions of the court held 2cond of October 1650
p226 ." In the margin was written : "Mary Hammon[d] cleared with admonision."9
We do not know who discovered or reported the two women , nor underwhat circumstances . We do know that most colonial homes of this period
consisted of one large hall which served as kitchen , working , living, and sleeping space. Neighbors were also known to enter each other's homes at will andto look through windows . Privacy was a concept virtually unknown to Plymouth inhabitants.Io Twentieth-<:entury concepts of "privacy of the bedroom"
had no meaning since "bedrooms" per se did not exist. Thus, either of thewomen's husbands or a neighbor could have discovered and reported Sarahand Mary.
Neither do we know what was considered ''leude behauior" between two
women . The prompt dismissal of Mary Hammond is also puzzling. Why didn't she stand trial, when it is obvious that the court, in giving her a warning,
did consider something amiss in her behavior? A possible explanation may be
Mary's age. If we accept Mary's unverified birth date as 1633, she would
have been about 15 years old when the incident occurred . Sarah was obviously somewhat older as she had married nearly a decade earlier. In Puritan society , an individual was not legally responsible until age 16, the "ageof discretion." It was the responsibility of the family , rather than the courts,
to punish underage offenders. l l On the other hand , the records say Mary was"presented" to the court and "cleared ." Did she perhaps accuse Sarah ofleading her astray? Whatever occurred , Mary was dismissed and Sarah stoodtrial. The content of the court's warning to Mary, which might have shed
more light on this question, was never recorded .
The Norman-Hammond case was heard as a "Presentment to the Grand
Enquest," before Governor William Bradford and his seven male assistants ,among whom were Miles Standish and John Alden. According to the Plymouth legal code there were certain grave crimes punishable by death . These
included arson, witchcraft, murder , rape , adultery , and sodomy. Other ''lesser crimes" or misdemeanors were to be investigated by the Grand Enquest,
and the court was to use its own discretion in meting out punishments. Concerning "misdemeanors presentable ," the law read : ''That all such misdemeanors of any person as tend to the hurt and detriment of society civility
peace and neighbourhood be enquired into by Grant Enquest and the persons presented to the court that so disturbers there of may be punished andthe peace and welfare of the subject comfortably preserved."12 The code58

also noted that fornication and other "uncleane carriages" were also to bepunished at the discretion of the magistratesP However , there was no specific law calling for the punishment of sexual acts between two women.
Technically, Mary and Sarah were charged with "lewd behavior" not "lesbianism."
Certain contemporary members of the Puritan clergy , both in Plymouth
and in neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony, had their own ideas about sexual acts between two women . Cotton and Chauncey considered sexual acts
between two women to be an "unnatural lust," or "unnatural filthiness ," tobe punished by death. One clergyman considered such acts to be " sodomy." 14
Although members of the clergy were often instrumental in formulating colonial legal codes, their proposals were not always adopted by the civil governments. As was noted, the Plymouth legal code did not make lesbianism per sea crime. In contrast to the harsh views of the clergy, sexual activity between
Mary and Sarah was considered by the court to be a "lesser crime," a disturbance of the peace and order of the community , a misdemeanor to be investigated by the Grand Enquest.
The period between her first court appearance in 1648 and her sentencing
in 1650 brought more trouble for Sarah Norman. The following year, 1649 ,Richard Berry of Yarmouth accused Teague Jones , also of that town, of
sodomy. Berry also accused Jones of "uncleane practices" with Sarah Norman. Later, Berry confessed to having lied on both counts. The court ordered Berry to be punished by whipping for the defamation of Jones. Nothing is said concerning the defamation of Sarah. Perhaps her earlier court appearance for ''leude behauior" had already irreparably damaged her character?
Maybe that is why Berry implicated her in the first place, so as to add credence to his lies. 1sFinally, in October 1650, Sarah Norman was sentenced by the court.
Court records indicate that various difficulties in Sarah's life had prevented
her return to court prior to that date. The entry for October 2 further elaborates on the charges against her :Whereas the wife of Hugh Norman of Yarmouth, hath stood psented diuers
courts for misdemeanor and leude behauior with Mary Hammon ld J vpon abed, with diuers lasiuious speeches by her allso spoken, but shee could notapeere by reason of som hinderances vntell this court, the said court haue
therefore sentenced her , the said wife of Hugh Norman, for her vild behauiorin the aforsaid pticulars, to make publick acknowlidgment , so fare as conveniently may be, or her vnchaste behauior , and haue allso warned her totake heed of such cariages for the future, lest her former cariage come in rememberance against her to make her punishment the greater .16
There is little doubt that Sarah's behavior with Mary was of a sexual nature. The words used by the court to describe that behavior-"leude," "lasiuious," "vild," "vnchaste" - all had one common motif in seventeenth-century
usage-uncontrolled , impure, and unlawful sexuality P Clearly, the languageof the court conveys a negative value judgment ; yet the leniency of the court
is also evident in the understanding of Sarah's long absence from court and inallowing her public confession to be done as was convenient. Yet the court's
warnings and treats of greater punishment make it very clear that such activity
between two women was not to be tolerated .
59

For the Puritans, social control was achieved by inducing shame and by taking preventative measures. The warnings, threats, and public punishment
were being used to deter the two women from continuing their sinful, disruptive activities, which were apparently considered harmful to both the individual and the community. We will never know when or where Sarah madeher public confession, nor what she said, and certainly not how the community or family reacted to her. There is no evidence to indicate whether Sarah
ever engaged in "leude behauior" with another woman , or not.
Sarah's story, however, does not end with her sentencing and punishment.
During the period of her trial and sentencing, her husband, Hugh Norman,
abandoned her and their children and returned to Old England. Purital society placed high value on the cohesive family unit; both wife and husband
had an obligation to cohabit regularly and exclusively with one another. If
one left the other, the courts could force them to reunite. If the deserting
mate left the country, the courts usually took no action. Willful desertion
by a wife or husband over a period of years was grounds for divorce. IS How
Sarah and her children got along after the desertion is not known. Women
without husbands, such as spinsters, often lived with fathers or other male
relatives , unless they were of the upper class and had the option of remaining
independent. There is evidence too that single working women went fromtown to town in search of work, but this type of mobility was discouraged
for both sexes. 19 Sarah and her children may have tried to support themselves, or possibly they resided with her father. Apparently Sarah received
no economic support from Hugh, and Goodman White, probably Sarah's
father, was concerned about the situation as the following documents indicate .
Around 1649 , while in Old England on business, Thomas Allyn of Barnstable , a town near Yarmouth , had been requested by others to inquire concerning Hugh Norman's situation . Later in 1654, Goodman White asked Allyn to testify in writing concerning the situation of Hugh Norman. What
prompted this request is not known, but for some reason legal testimony
was needed. Perhaps so Sarah could prove desertion and thereby obtain adivorce. Thomas Allyn and Hugh Norman's English cousin, Thomas Richards,
both testified as follows in 1654:
1654 a writing apointed to bee recorded
These are to certify all whom it may conserne , being requested by Goodman
White to re late in what condition I found hugh Norman to bee in att mylast being in ould England ; which was about 5 yeares sence , I being ymployed by Diuers ffrinds to enquire him out and to goe unto him about busines of my owne as well as of other mens ; I had intelligence wher hee lived ;and being in the co un trey , att Orchyard a little Parisse about 2 or 3 miles
from Tauton wher hee lived in a great house that had been plundered ; andas I was credably Informed hee kept there with 2 or 3 whores and none
else in the house and had spent all hee had that hee had not clothes to were
thing to companie with men soe that I could not come to speake with him ;where uppon haveing understood that Mr Richards lived ther abouts I went
unto him hee being his cozen and brought him over to New England soe hee
tould mee of his wickedness and his bad life hee then lived in as I had been
tould by many ; and the yeare before his mother died and left him sixty
pounds of money and a tenement hee sould for an undred pounds all which60hee spent in less than a yeares time; Mr Richards was Diuers times with him
hee tould mee ; and pswaded him what he could to reclame and send something to his wife and children but could not gitt soe much as six pence from
him and tould him that hee had noe wife and would not owne her nor would
goe more unto her; Truly for my Pte I would not relate anymore than I
heard and found to bee true for I know I must one Day give account for yt ;to the truth heer of I can take my oath ; this witnesse my hand
Barnstable the 26th of
the first month 1654
Thomas Allyn
Another to the same effect ordered alsoe to be recordedThis is what I can testify conserning hugh Norman if I should be called therto; first that hee could not come to his wife and children anymore neither
could I gitt him to send them anything but spent all his estate as I was enformed by one which was an honest man (who me I ymployed to inquire
about him) upon a naughty 'woman.vhom hee would have married as theypretended, for they kept company together very unseasonably while under hedges and other base places; But hee having spent all hee had sheeleaves him (and as they say) is gone to barbadoes and I heard him say andothers also that hee would go to Barbadoes; Thus for prsent I remember
me Thomas Richards 20
Because the date of Hugh's desertion coincides with the dates of Sarah's
trial and sentencing, we might surmise that the two are related. At thispoint , we lose contact with Sarah White Norman .
Little is known about Mary Hammond. She later gave birth to a numberof sons and daughters, with all the daughters dying young. Mary's earlier
involvement in the court case with Sarah did not seem to adversely affecther husband's status in the community. Benjamin Hammond owned land andserved in several minor posts such as constable, juror , and member of theGrand Enquest. In 1684, the Hammonds moved to Rochester , another earlycolonial town . Benjamin died there in 1703. Mary lived · on as a widow until her death in 1705 at the age of 72. 21
Although fragmentary, the documents relating to the Norman-Hammondcase may be the only existing records of lesbian activity among white womenin seventeenth-century America. We can conclude from the information available that sexual activity between two women was not only disapproved ofby the clergy as a sexual sin but was also discouraged and punished by thecivil authorities as a threat to the social order , "a hurt and detriment to society civility peace and neighbourhood."
NOTES
1. Vern Bullough , Sexual Variance in Society and History (New Yark: John Wiley andSons, 1976); pp. 521-22 ; Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, "Lesbianism in the 1920s
and 19308: A Newfound Study ," Signs 2:4 (Summer 1977) : 895-904.
2. Johathan Katz, Gay American History : Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A . (NewYork : Crowell, 1976) , pp . 127-28,405-6. .
3. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., R ecords of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England,
8 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855-61), 1:134 .
4. Charles Edwards Banks, Topographical Dictionary of 2885 English Emigrants to New_
England 1620-1650 (Philadelphia: Elijah Brownell, 1937), p. 144.
5. Simon Deyo, ed., History of Bam stable County , Mass. (New York : Blake and Co.,
1980), p. 266; Philip Battell, "Descendants of Benjamin Hammond" New England Historical and Genealogical Register 30 (J anuary 1876) : 28-32 .

61

6. Robert Sherman and Ruth Wilder Sherman, Yarmouth, Mass. Vital Records to 1850,
2 vols. (Warwick, R.I.: Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Rhode Island,1975),2:841.
7. Clarence A. Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, 12 vols. (photocopied
manuscript, New England Historic Genealogical Society), vol. 6, unpaginated .
8. When working with early colonial dates we must be aware that the British colonies
before 1752 operated on the old-style Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian Calendar,
which had already been adopted by the Catholic world in the late 1500s. Thus in colonial
times the first month was March rather than January, the last month was February rather
than December, and the new year began on March 25 tho This must be kept in mind when
considering the proper chronology of events. In this case, both May 28, 1648 (when Sarah's
daughter drowned) and November 8, 1648 (when Mary Hammond married) occurred be·fore the court appearance of Mary and Sarah on March 6,1648, which was near the end of
the year. Around 1700 the discrepencies between the two calendar systems resulted in thepractice of "double-dating" in which both Julian and Gregorian dates were supplied, andseparated by a "slash." Then in September 1752, when the Gregorian was adopted by the
British world, eleven days were lost and September 2. was immediately followed by September 14.
9. Shurtleff, 1: 137.
10. John Demos,A Little Commonwealth : Family Life in Plymouth Colony (London:
Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 43, 4647.
11. Demos, pp. 101, 148.
12. David Pulsifer, ed., Records of the Colony of New Ply mouth in New England, vols.
9-12 (Boston: William White, 1855-61), 11 : 18 .
13. Pulsifer,l1 :12.
14. Katz, pp. 20-22 .
15. Shurtleff,2:146,148.
16. Shurtleff, 2: 163.
17. James A. H. Murray, Oxford English Dictionary, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1933).
18. Demos, pp. 92-95.
19. John 1. Waters, "The Traditional World of the New England Peasants: A View
from Seventeenth Century Barnstable," New England Historical and Genealogical Register 130 (January 1976), pp. 3-21.
20. "Plymouth Colony Deeds," Mayflower Descendant 6 (January 1904): 102-3.
21. Battell, pp. 28-32.

A Pl.fC£ Or OUR own. , • _A W~n-\DenrIFliO€nreA~
701 P Street P.O. Box 82041
Lincoln, Nebraska 68508[402] 423'{)821

62

Joanna Russ

IT'S IMPORTANT TO BELIEVE

That they plucked her from the muddy pond where she lay, b€eathing
life back into her. That they emptied the stones from her jacket pockets.
That they took off her clothing and dried her , wrapping her in something
invisible and warm. That the one with the fur and tail and six fmgers opened
the walls and showed her the shining dance floor of the Heavens. That they
fed her and she didn't refuse , no longer believing the body to be horrible.
That there were vines and little creatures like chickens. That there was softlaughter. That King George did not talk in the shrubbery. That she was notshut up. That she wanted her books and they got them. That she asked forher manuscripts and they had them. That she loved one who loved her.
That they went there.
That it was a good place .
(For Allie Sheldon, who wrote "Beam Us Home," and for Jessica
Amanda Salmonson , who had the idea that it would be marvelous iftime travelers or aliens went back to England in 1941 and rescued
from suicide by drowning You Know Who ... )63

Barbara Grier

PROUD, DISPUTED NAMES

I want to talk about the joy of lesbian literature and the fact that wehave come full circle. We have gone in our movement from a time when a
few women were coUecting and writing about lesbian literature with that
weUing up of joy, that feeling of discovering something new and never known
before, that terrible excitement that comes each time you fmd a lost lesbian
jewel in writing, and that equal joy when one finds a lesbian writer whom
no one seems to have known is a lesbian-we have managed somehow in a very
few short years to take the joy out and turn this pursuit into an academic
one wherein we examine and dissect and perhaps appreciate but certainly don't
express well the excitement and wonder of it all. This woman was a lesbian,and that woman. We are somehow forgetting all the fun of this and making
it dry and dusty and duU, instead of joyous and exciting and new. We needto recapture some of this excitement.
I want to talk about Gladys Taber, who died on March 11, 1980. She waseighty years old and had spent her life being one of America's most popular
women's writers-a long-time syndicated columnist , and a veritable wellspringof endless homey, loving, good books about life, love , death , children , flowers,
dogs, cats, gardening, cooking-everything. And millions of women all over
the U.S .-many of your mothers, your aunts, your grandmothers - bought her
books, went to libraries and checked them out , adored her , looked forward
to each new book, apparently never recognizing that she spent the vast majority of her life in a loving relationship with another woman , Jill. Now how
all these women managed not to realize this, since it was the central topic inalmost all of her work , I will never know . When I spoke very recently here
in Kansas City, I was asked about the fact that none of the popular women's
writers seem to be lesbian. I hadn't thought for some years about Gladys
Taber. So I talked to this audience briefly about her.
About a week later , one of the women in the audience called me at work
to say, "I was in an airport and picked up the New York Times, and readthe obituary of Gladys Taber. And there's absolutely nothing in her obituary
to indicate anything about her life as you told it." And that's true- the obit:
uary says she made her home at Stilimeadow for many years where she raised
her family and lived with her sister's family (note that it says. sister's family,
not lover's family). It says she is survived by her children and her husbandher husband whom we know to have been dead since the middle or late 30s.
The New York Times, because of its stature and the fact that it is found inevery library in the world , will go on perpetuating this myth about Gladys
Taber, and there is very little that can be done or will be done to combat it,
but we need to make every effort we can .
Gladys Taber was born April 12, 1899, in Colorado Springs. Her parents
were New Englanders, and she early developed a love for Massachusetts. In
one of her books, Harvest of Yesterdays, we learn a little about her early intimate life with Jill-that she and Jill first met at summer camp when they64

were fourteen years old, and what bound them immediately was that they
were both set to go to Wellesley College and both hated the idea. Gladys
preceded Jill at Wellesley by a year , since Jill was held back owing to scarlet
fever; but the minute Jill arrived at Wellesley, Gladys changed her room sothey could be roommates . After graduating , Jill went to Europe to study ,and married Max . Gladys graduated in 1920, obtained a master's degree in1921 from Lawrenc<e College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and between 1921 and1926 she taught English at Randolph Macon Woman's College. In 1922, shemarried Frank A. Taber, J r., a music professor.
In 1934, her first novel, Late Climbs the Sun, was greeted by the reviewers
as a feminist tract. Late Climbs the Sun brought her to the attention of novelist Helen Hull, herself a lesbian, who greatly encouraged her work. During
the next four years , a series of Gladys Taber novels appeared-all light , popular women's fiction . After a hiatus of se~eral years (which might coincidewith her final move to the country with Jill) , another novel appeared in 1943,
two in 1944, and another in 1946. She also joined the staff of the Ladies'Home Journal that year, although her monthly column, "The Diary of Domesticity ," had been running in the Journal since 1937 . But none of this writing brought Gladys Taber the fame that her later works did , and for us thereal story of Gladys Taber begins with the books she wrote about her life
with Jill at Stillmeadow Farm .
The first really important book in this series is Stillmeadow Daybook(i 946). The dedication is simply "for Jill, the mainstay of Stillrneadow ." In
the book 's foreword, she tells how she came to own the small , white farmhouse called Stillmeadow, built in 1690. She also talks about two families.
She talks about Jill, who had a doctor husband, a son, and a daughter; andshe talks about her own husband, although she does not refer to her husband
or Jill's husband by name . She names her child (Connie) and names Jill's children (Don and Dorothy), and she names all the animals, the neighbors , andso on. The only people without names are the husbands . They are referred
to only as husbands or by their professions. In Harvest of Yesterdays welearn that both husbands died after long illnesses. No details are given; thisis said in a single sentence because, as is always true in Gladys Taber's work,
the men-with the exception of her father, whom she talks about at somelength-are more or less ignored. The husbands were lost , but the life that
Gladys and Jill created at Stillmeadow apparently wouldn't have had roomfor husbands in any case. The story that Gladys tells about their life together
at Stillrneadow is about herself and her love for Jill.
In the introduction to Stillmeadow Daybook, she says, "Through the kitchen window I could see Jill striding down the road, training Tiki . . . , thesmall compact black and white cocker trotting along so earnestly, so eagerly,
the tall straight woman with her hair blowing in the wind, looking absolutely
content." She goes on to talk about picnics and children and foraging forbutternuts and black walnuts and says, "No I could never add up the riches
we acquired by striking our roots down firmly into the kind earth in ourlittle valley." The remainder of the book is a day-by-day, month-by-month,season -by-season , event-by-event chronicle of a year at Stillmeadow . Twohundred seventy-four pages later , we are told: "As I close the garden gate
and follow the crooked flagstone walk to the house on an amethyst evening,65the dogs run before me , Jill is bending over in the garden, planting young
lettuce, pressing the earth gently around the pale roots. And the ancient splendour of the evening star shines above Stillmeadow. And this is the first of
the Stillmeadow books ."Stillmeadow Daybook was followed by a seemingly endless series of titles ,each one on a different aspect of the endlessly delightful life they led at Stillmeadow. Gladys Taber also published a number of collections of poetry, manyof them containing what Jeannette Foster and I refer to as "variant poetry,"
poetry clearly directed at women and probably lesbian, but subtle enough tobe open to interpretation.
My few letters from Gladys Taber are from 1966, after Jill died, and while
I was reading everything I could lay my hands on for the "Lesbiana" columnof the Ladder. They say very little except for details of future books, somepraise, and some thanks; in one of the letters she thanks me for mentioning
Jill to her . So I do not know how Gladys Taber defined her relationship with
Jill beyond saying in print that it was extraordinarily loving. And that in itself is very important. I think every woman in our movement would be enriched by going back and reading Gladys Taber's books about her life with
Jill. What I find astonishing is that a whole marching army of women did
not rise up- because they obviously were reading her work-and follow in her
footsteps to that blind and real joy of Stillmeadow. All those days, all those
years, all that happiness.
Another Path, which came out in 1963 , from Lippincott in Philadelphia,
was Gladys Taber's first book after Stillmeadow Road (I 9 59) . (She was anextremely prolific writer , and a four-year hiatus in such a rich career means
simply that it took her a hell of a long time to begin writing again after Jill
died.) It is a confused-at least in terms of what happened when - account of
the death of her "beloved companion of thirty years" and of how she survived
the grief of which she says , "For me , the world had ended";
After years of listening to her special voice I found I could not say asingle sentence that sounded like Jill. Some of my friends who have been
bereaved say they have trouble recalling exactly the face of their dear one.
This was not my problem, probably because I have acute visual imagery .
I could not only see Jill, but I could see her as she looked when she was14, and at 20, and at 40. So I began with that first step of feeling nothing
mattered , and almost at once I was thinking , I must not lose the sound of
Jill's voice. Even during the funeral I was trying to catch her voice saying
firmly, 'Don't make a fuss about this.'
Everything that Gladys Taber wrote in that book, and from that time on , isa celebration of how she learned to live without Jill - just as everything she
wrote before that book was a celebration of living with Jill.
As far as I know, no one in our movement has paid much attention to
the work of Gladys Taber. I'm not certain if her work is ignored because it
is , after all, popular and light in many senses. She talks a great deal about
the kind of living that results in happiness for people . And she talks about
how wonderful it is to be alive, what a pleasure life is , and these are things
that seem to be ignored a great deal. But mostly she talks about the extraordinary strength and happiness that come from households that consist of
two women because - from some indefinite date in the mid 1930s untiJ the66

death of Jill-hers was a household of two women, several children, and theanimals they enjoyed raising together.
What still remains for me is the amazement that all these women in allthese communities all over the U.S., all these librarians and all these reviewers,
read all of these words and talked about these books , and not once, ever, did
anyone of them notice that this was a lifetime of two women not just living
together and loving one another dearly but also yattering about it at length .
At least Gladys Taber yattered about it at length. She talked and talked andtalked, in print, constantly, about the loving, beloved, wonderful relationshipwith Jill.
I think what we need to do at this point is to celebrate Jill, and to celebrate Gladys Taber. Everything about Gladys Taber was wonderful. She's aperfect example of living propaganda-blind, living propaganda. And it's timethat everyone knew. It's time that everyone knows that Gladys Taber loved
a woman named Jill, and lived much of her life with her, and made an entire
career of writing lovely, delightful, popular books about her life with another
woman.
Author 's note: The only biographical information about Gladys Taber-apart from her own
work, which does not give explicit detail, particularly dates-is in a book called American
Novelists of Today, edited by Harry Warfel and published in 1951 by the American Book
Company. Virtually every library in the United States, including the small ones, has thisparticular book, and if you're looking up obscure people, this is a good place to search.
Public libraries would be the best places to find Gladys Taber's books.

: '~,. . .

J.J.

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67

"gilda capello/Catherine Deneuve N. Y.c. "photograph by Emily Levine68

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69A TASTE

I thought the sweetest fruit must be a plumwith its dark-veined polishinside there were gold , green , pink
the taste : lush unripe teasweet salt-sour
suck of wholeness I don't tire of- Joan Larkin70FAmlLIEf- photograph by Ly nda K oolish71Sandy Boucher

THE DAY MY FATHER KICKED ME OUT

It 's Sunday evening . We 're sitting at the table in my parents' house in
Columbus, Ohio, and I've brought a friend with me . I've invited my friend
Nyla to dinner , honestly. as protection . It's been eight years since I've comeout from San Francisco to visit my parents , and I'm having difficulty beinghere.
So anyway, we're sitting at Sunday evening dinner , which is tuna salad.
as always , and my father begins his lecture on John Dillinger and Pretty Boy
Floyd . This discourse is really about law and order , with these two renownedbank robbers of the thirties as villains . He rambles on about their exploits ,and then he asks Nyla, Do you know what they did to Dillinger and Floyd
when they caught up with them?
Nyla : What?
My father : They shot them.
My father is a big man , and he leans in on you physically when he talks
to you . You can feel him pushing on you. Now he leans in on Nyla and says ,And do you know what I would do these day s with people who break thelaw?
Nyla has just gotten out of the hospital , where she had surgery: she 's a
bit weak and not quite in control. I notice when he asks her that question
she starts to twitch a little , her face begins to tremble and the corners of her
mouth jerk. And I remember that when Nyla and I had lived in a women 's
liberation collective in San Francisco , I had received a barrage of letters frommy father, and the lecture on John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd had beenin those letters, word for word as he is giving it right now. So Nyla is having
a bit of a hard time here, and my father repeats the question.
Do you know what I would do with the people who break the law thesedays?
She : I think I do.
He: What?
She : You'd shoot them .
That's right , he says.
And she goes over the edge in a cascade of giggles.
I'm appalled . This is surrealistic, for as soon as Nyla begins to laugh, I
lose control too. We giggle and snort like ninnies , and neither of us can stop.
Caught in these convulsions, I realize how trying these three days withmy father have been . When he wasn't criticizing me for the way I live , heluis been lecturing me about Richard Nixon 's innocence and how the press
always persecuted that unfortunate man. He 's obsessed with Nixon , and set
72

on convincing me of his views , and he has pushed me out to teeter on theedge of hysteria.
Nyla tilts me right over.
My mother's action at this historic juncture is to get up from the tableand go out on the front porch to sit on the porch swing.
My father tries to go on with his talk , but pretty soon it's obvio us that
we're laughing at him , even though we pretend we're choking and we holdour napkins over our mouths . As soon as Nyla gets herself in control , I startagain, and then when I stop , she starts .
So my father gets mad . He stands up , bangs against the table , knocks hischair over on its back , and calls us some names . (It's a funny thing, I can't
remember the words he used . He may have said weirdos , and I wonder if hesaid queers : at that point in time he wasn't sure about me . .. ) Finally , hegoes stomping out to the porch , and he sits down next to my mother andstarts to swing back and forth .
We're left in the dining room , Nyla and me , and we cannot yet stop laughing . We're helpless , the tears are running down our faces . It feels so good, itfeels wonderful, yet we kno w what we 've done .
We can hear the swing out on the front porch . Scree, scree. They're nottalking , but the swing is squeaking.
At last we are calm, only an occasional giggle buzzing like a crazy hummingbird through our now-earnest talk . How are we to get Nyla out of thehouse?! I mean, they're on the front porch : she has to get past them somehow. Sneaking out the back door would be too gross. We sit here . We don't
know what to do. And Nyla has developed hiccups.
Finally I agree to go with her to the front porch. We stand up and checkout our faces for telltale signs of mirth ; Nyla hiccups , claps her hand overher mouth , and holds her breath , bugging her eyes at me. With a long lookat each other, we start for the door .
On the front porch , my parents swing back and forth - scree, scree-and
my father stares into space as if we do not exist.
Thank you very much , hic , for having me to dinner , Nyla says .
My mother replies, You 're quite welcome . We enjoyed having you .
Nyla walks down the porch steps , gets in her car , says goodbye to mewith a sneaky little wave , and drives off.
Here I am , left. I go back in the house , clear the table , start washing thedishes, and I think , Well , now , what am J going to do about this? The longer
I stay in here washing the dishes , the harder it's going to be to go out on
the porch. Finally, I decide that I must go out right now to say something.
Through the dining room and living room I go , and step out on the porch .
My father swings back and forth , back and forth, staring straight ahead. Scree,
scree.
I'm sorry we laughed at you . (This is the truth , I am sorry .)And he starts in , You bring your weird friends here and you laugl1 at a
man in his own house , and etcetera on and on , very loudly , and he makes me
mad.
Ever since I arrived you been laughing at me! I yell . Everything I do you
pUI me down you don'l like whal I do, yo u laugh at me, it 's about timesomebody laughed al you!
And my mother says, Please , we do have neighbors .
7J

Well, the argument goes back and forth between me and my father, because I feel outraged, and he feels outraged . And finally he says to me, If
somebody laughs at me in my own house, I'm gonna kick their ass out thedoor, and yours too!
I see my chance. Does that mean you'd like me to leave? I ask .
Now that really puts him up against the wall. What can he say?!
Yes, it does!
I get up from my chair and I spit out, Well, it's a relief!
I go in and slam the screen door and stamp upstairs to pack my bag.
Now I'm up here putting things in my suitcase and I begin to feel ridiculous.
This reminds me of a scene in a C-movie.
But Mom will be down there on the porch talking to him, saying, Now
Jack, you know how Sandy is , and the two of you don't get along, but, etc.,
etc. She'll be busily smoothing the whole thing over. So I listen , but I don't
hear a word from downstairs. What's going on? That's her role , to smooththings over: she's not smoothing things over, what's going on? So I keep on
packing. Pretty soon the suitcase is all packed and I still don't hear any
voices downstairs.
Now I have to go down there with my suitcase. My father's still out on
the porch , but he's alone; my mother is sitting in the living room. As I comedown the stairs, she says to me , Can I drive you to the bus?
Is it true? Have I heard the words properly? Yes , no way to get aroundthem. With those seven words she defines her loyalty, her limits , her selfinterest, her temperamental proclivities . That phrase is a masterpiece. The
inevitability of it! The many layers of significance. At once simple and pithy ,it does the job.
When I recover sufficiently to speak, I manage a belligerent Absolutely
not! I'll take a taxi!
Then I lean down to the screened window that separates the living roomfrom the porch where my father 's swinging back and forth, and I come closeand say, loudly, Do we really have to play this scene? He acts as if he doesn't
hear me.
So I let my mother drive me to the bus.
On the way, I'm ranting in the car, saying, How can he really believe that
nonsense he's talking about Nixon's innocence! I can't understand why he's
saying those outrageous things! And she says, Of course he believes what he's
saying. I certainly do.
There isn't anything to do but leave . I decide right now to go to New
York City on the greyhound , and I announce (not to be dismissed so summarily), When I get back I'll come to see you before I go on to California.
So I go to New York City where I have business with some magazine
editors and several old friendships to renew. My time there is tolerably pleasant, and when I come back to Columbus , just an hour before I'm due atthe airport to fly back to California, I get Nyla to drive me to my parents'
house, where she insists on waiting in the car. I've called beforehand , andthe excuse is that I am going to pick up some old pictures. We have to havean ,.excuse: it isn't possible to say we are going to try to make up . So we sit
and look at the snapshots, my mother and me , at this very dining room table
where the blasphemy occurred, while my father paces like a disgruntled bear74

behind us.
Here is little Sandy sitting on the back step in her sunsuit , age two. Hereare my sister , brother and I lined up stiffly against the living room wall looking like the czar's children staring down the barrels of a firing squad . My
mother and I ponder two family dog pictures : this is Ham and this is Freddy ,beings immured forever in our hearts. Is that blur in the background my cousin Carolyn? Honeysuckle perfume wafts seductively in through the screened
windows, as it ·has and ever shall in Columbus in the spring .
When it is time to go, I decide to make a gesture of reconciliation. What
have I got to lose?
I hug my father. He embraces me with arms of heavy wood , saying, Be
a good girl.
Then I go to hug my mother, and I murmur to her, Be a good girl.
I always am , she replies .
And I leave , and have not returned .

'~~~
~~~
CPEMINA~YA

FEMINIST
JOUR,NAL

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SOUTH 'Emphasizing the Lesbian Vision
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75

Evelyn T orton Beck

DAUGHTERS AND MOTHERS: An Autobiographical Sketch

I have a piece of lesbian history I haven't quite known what to do with .
Sometimes you know someth ing is important and ought to be shared, andyet the uncertainty of where you might find the right place to publish it andthe fear that it might not be accepted anywhere keeps you from putting it
down on paper . This has been true for me and the story I've been carrying
around in my head for a long time now .
The story is the story of my life. My life and my daughter's. I am EviB .
(the lesbian name my lover gave to me). It is a name I especially like , with
its warm and playful evocation of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas . In
that name I am both Gertrude and Alice . I am a community woman and auniversity professor . I am Jewish and a mother. I am a Jewish lesbian who
is the mother of a Jewish lesbian . And if the world were a different place ,and my mother not so hooked into the patriarchy. I'd be the daughter of alesbian too.
It was my mother who taught me to love women . Not by loving me or byencouraging me to love women. but by her own unwitting example - the intense, life-long ties she shared with her women friends . I saw the closenessand the caring. even as she faithfully spouted what she believed to be her
truths : Love men. they are our only salvation. Fear men. they are the dangerous enemy. She dreamed of male heroes. yet lived in a safe world of
women . In real life. my father provided protection and sustenance; my memory is, other men were there only as essential backdrop and for occasional
nirta tion .
My daughter was an active lesbian in her teens . I envy her the freedom
she took - I did not give it to her. If I had not been so fearful ; if I had lived
in other times; if my own mother had not been so watchful or so judgmental ,especially when I was in my early teens , I'd have been freer to be the lesbian
I was. I would not have had to spend long hours in the library agonizing ,proving that I wasn't what I feared I was , knew I was and talked myself outof being; loving women intensely , passionately , often obsessively , yet denying
what this meant.
The best friend of my childhood years turned out to be a lesbian . I didn 't
know it in the years we shared a great passion for our seventh grade English
teacher , saving our money to buy her a costly gold bracelet , planning andwriting about it all summer long , she at camp and I at home . (My friend
spent twenty years in therapy, she later told me.) When she "came out" atage fourteen it was a neighborhood scandal , talked about at length and in detail, at least in my home , primarily by my mother , who seemed to know everything about it. I can no longer clearly differentiate what I knew for myself
from what my mother to ld me ; how much my mother really knew from what76

she made up or guessed. I do remember some fragments. My friend was involved with an older woman who lived on the next block with another woman.
(How old was older? 25? 35?) Did my mother really suggest they seduced
her? Probably. Were they really gym teachers or am I making that up? My
friend herself told me that the police frequently bothered them when they
were together in the car . Sometimes they were able to use someone 's apartment. Did I know what they did? Did I guess or imagine? I distinctly remember one detail. She told me they always needed a lot of tissues . I didn't exactly know what for , but I've never forgotten that detail either. I musthave known something. Sometime later my friend told me her friend had deflowered her and that she bled. I sensed she was proud of this detail , but
I'm not sure I believed she was telling me the truth . Did I think she invented
these details just for my sake? How much did I really grasp? I myself wasstill totally sexually inactive at the time (except for masturbation which I
had learned young and liked a great deal and was terribly ashamed of). I intensely disliked what seemed to be the necessary making out at parties andalways tried to get out of participating. Usually , I succeeded. At home, over
and over again , my mother repeated that my friend was disgusting. What she
did was disgusting. When I was disobedient , it was my friend's fault. She
was a bad influence. Her mother was a communist, a divorcee who worked
outside the home, what else could you expect?
In spite of my mother , we remained friends . A few years later she told
me the details of her love affairs with women at college. How her lovers
would touch her in the dark in bed , how they would touch her in bed but
refuse to kiss her. How they would , in the daylight , withhold their love andpretend they didn't know her. These stories have stayed with me (till now I
had no idea how indelibly) for nearly thirty years. I found it hard to understand why these lovers acted so strangely . If either of us had any inkling , we
did not say . I doubt that the word lesbian ever crossed our lips , even while
she was telling me these stories. I only remember clearly that she was badly
hurt and terribly confused. We had no analysis , no names , no vocabulary (notin the early fifties on the streets of Brooklyn) with which to talk about
women's love for women. The best I could offer her (and this I did willingly ,eagerly) was to listen . In thinking myself back to those years it dawns uponme that her stories with their muted eroticism must have aroused me then ,mildly , as they do now in the retelling. And I feel ashamed at feeling pleasure from what caused her pain . And at my own cowardice.
We 've more or less lost touch now , but she was resigned and a Little bitter
when I last saw her , a few years ago , after a lapse of fifteen years. The longtherapy had not erased the hurt. "I am neither ," she said when I asked her
if she was still involved with women. " I cannot dissociate women fr0111 how
bad and crazy I felt all those years." I remembered then how desperately
she had tried to make life with a man work for her. More than once she hadseriously contemplated marriage , but it never happened. I knew it was all
wrong , but never once in the many years we exchanged letters did I dare ~x·press my doubt , did I dare say what I knew in my guts to be true , "WI)y are
you trying to be what you are not ?" No , I remained dumb, fooli shly ptllit~ ,frequently encouraged her in her pursuit of marriage , amI was di saPI1llillted
with her every disappointment. Now she daims tll haw fllund \'l'al'l' ill with·drawing from sexual intima cy altl1gethcr, and I feel all!!ry flH hl'r , I'lli' m\··self, for all of us. Of course she is still a lesbian . Has never been anythingelse. It doesn't seem fair for her to have to believe she is "neither."
In a way , I was luckier. I masked myself in ways that protected . I think
if I had come out then, as my friend did , in the late forties, I would be worse
than "neither." I feel sure I would have cracked. My mother would haveseen to that. She was so 1 elentless and I so tied to her approval. I fully believed she would lock me up or throw me out (the latter now doesn't seemvery likely- she was too fiercely possessive to let me go). Being poor andnew immigrants , we did not believe in or have access to psychiatrists. Instead, thinking to save me , she would not have hesitated to destroy me herself. My need for protection was very real, and for a time my mask worked.
True , I continued to fall in love with women all my life (I never did outgrow
that passion) , but I was able to marry a man . And live with him for twenty
years. And bear two children , one of whom is now a lesbian and has been
since she was thirteen .
It feels hard to have to say I didn't help her become one . No , if truth betold , I'd have stopped her at the time if I could have. I did try . And so did
her father. This is the hardest thing to admit , to set down on paper : I tried
to keep her from becoming a dyke . I thOUght it would ruin her life . I reallydid. We treatened to call the police if she continued to see her lover. (I had
no idea then of the power of the law or the enormity of our threats.) I didn't
even really believe that they were lovers- my thirteen year old child and thetwenty-one year old woman who was her mentor. 1 only knew that they
loved each other and had made plans to sleep together. We kept them apart(or thought we did) . We joke about it now , she and I. Her friends all told
her I must be a closet case to know so much and care so passionately. They
were right , of course , but I was exceptionally obtuse. It took me years toreally take in the fact that my daughter made love with another woman(not merely love, sex), even after she and her second lover had been living
together for two years . And sleeping in one bed . And appearing with agroup of Jewish lesbians in a protest at Hillell. I was utterly naive and heavily
defended . Ridiculously, after I came out , I kept it from my daughter for awhole year (or thOUght I did) . In fact , she knew and the whole community
knew. (Was I ashamed to admit how very wrong I had been when she wasthirteen?) One of the mothers I had run to in a panic about my daughter washerself the lesbian mother of a lesbian , only I didn 't know it at the time , inspite of the fact that she was sharing her life with a woman. I can hardly
bring myself to imagine how she experienced our assault ; she met it with silen;e. We wanted her to do something , anything , to warn the other parents,
to stop the affair. We did manage to call the youth-group parents together ;I don't remember how they calmed us down . From the relatively safe distance of a decade I can almost see the humor of the situation. That the lesbian mother (who is now also a colleague) speaks to me at all often amazes
me. We almost never mention those times. I think they embarrass us both.
Today my daughter is twenty-three. That she is a lesbian comforts me .
Whatever her struggles , I don't worry that she will give her power away to thepatriarchy. I trust and respect her and her lover and the many women who
are her friends; I count myself among them . We share much these days. [also know that her example paved the way for me . In trying to understand
her , I found myself facing myself and my marriage. I clearly remember the
day when our family shrink (a patriarchal but sensible man who knew she

78

was a lesbian) said of my young teen -age daughter, with particular emphasison the first and last words , "She's OK , but what about the two of y ou?"That day marked the beginning of my liberation and my slow return to thelesbian self I had abandoned years ago.
Of course it didn't happen all at once. The process was slow, sometimes
painful, and helped enormously, crucially , by my growing economic independence . First , I had to free myself from the mask of heterosexuality I had
so earnestly assumed . Only then could I begin to explore my love for women .
But I was not going to burn all my bridges at once . Comical as it now seems ,I prepared the way by systematically announcing my intentions to my heterosexual friends. It worked. Making love with a woman felt like the most natural thing I had ever done . (That makes me angry, since all my life I had
been led to believe the very opposite.)In one sense , the transition was easy ; my emotional life had never ceased
to be with women . That fact had caused me some discomfort while I was
married, since it did not fit my picture of marriage . (Now and then my husband complained about it , but I didn 't admit it to him . It must have madehim feel just slightly crazy.) On the whole , it was a problem I could dismiss
with relative ease . Some kindly , well-meaning shrink had once told me , inthe early years of my marriage , that if I was successful in having orgasms
with men, I could not possibly be a lesbian. I'm not so sure how deeply I
believed him. It continued to seem strange to me that I always wanted toexpress my feelings for women by touching them , but I dutifully held back .
(I don't think I ever mentioned these details to my shrink, which may havehelped him in his diagnosis.) It also seemed odd to me that the only words
that seemed accurately to describe certain of my feelings for women were the"inappropriate" words, "I am in love with . .. " Instinctively I knew better
than to mention these feelings to anyone but my oldest , dearest , most trustworthy , unquestionably heterosexual friend. I don't think she really knew
what to make of my confession either , but I know it helped me enormouslythat she listened and did not say it was a terrible thing. (Very like the role
I played in listening to my childhood lesbian friend .) The word lesbian, ofcourse, was never mentioned.
Fortunately , I had never fallen "in love " with my confidante , though I
loved her deeply (and still do) . No doubt that saved our friendship. I remenber how relieved I was (even at age 18 when we first met) that I did not have"those" feelings for her. I so much wanted to be her friend, and knew fromexperience how burdensome those feelings could be and how peculiarly theysometimes made me behave . lMy passions for women always felt like somedread disease I had contracted and could neither control nor get rid of.) I
was terribly ashamed of these feelings and at the same time , treasured themas my most valued possession , my secret source of joy , comfort , and nourishment, right through the years of my marriage .
As I read and re-read these pages , I realize how long and cumbersome theprocess of cOming-to-myself has been. I am now 46. I came out five years
ago. It frightens me to think that without the lesbian/ feminist movement ,without the example of my own daughter (and other brave women I admire
and respect) , I might still be in the closet to my self, might still believe in theabsolute normality of heterosexuality , despite the strong evidence of my own
feelings. I ask myself as I read this : Is it possible that without the support79

of a movement I might never have come out? Merely continued inexplicably
and inappropriately to fall in love with women? A part of me believes this
could have happened , unless I had ever fallen in love with a woman who knew
herself to be a lesbian (and knew me for one too). Or would I have run awayfrom even such an opportunity?
Recently , one of the women I was in love with years ago told me that I
had once asked her to go to bed when I was still married and that she hadrefused. I have absolutely no recollection of such a conversation, but thelonging and the desire were certainly there , perhaps for us both; I suspect
more was communicated between us than either of us ever acknowledged inwords. But as I said before, even as an adult, I was exceedingly naive. She
was a painter. I modelled for her , both in the nude and while nursing myson . Over the years she produced hundreds of portraits and sketches of me.
In oils, in pencil, in pastel. For hours , each day , for days on end, I sat while
she painted and we talked. I understood well what this time meant to me I never thought to ask what it meant to her. (perhaps we made love after
all, without touching .)I have no way of knowing what shape my life might have taken without
the influence and support of a lesbian/feminist movement. I only know withcertainty that the last five years of my life have been for me the most fully
lived . The years of greatest growth and deepest opening ; of real congruencewith myself. And for this richness , this happiness (unexpected, but actively
sought for) , I am grateful.
I came out to my mother about three years ago. She knew before I told
her. (Her antennae are ever up.) In fact, I did not tell her. She asked . Thevery first thing she wanted to know was which of us was the man , I or mylover? When I told her we were not at all into roles , she was incredulous,particularly about sex. How was it possible, she wanted to know. "Whodecides what to do? " She constantly brings up the subject of homosexuality(sometimes playfully) and as constantly puts it down. Just the same , letting
her know was the most freeing thing I have ever done for myself. I no longer wait for her approval . She accepts me , as best she can, with some severe
reservations- what she refers to as the "big big BUT." Her sense of humor
saves her for me . I have come to understand that she is not simply judging
me , that she is also jealous- of the obvious closeness with my lover , of thenurturing we give each other. In her ironic vision , she faults our love as a"mutual admiration society." She is slightly peeved. If we can be so gentle
and loving to each other , why can 't everyone else (in the heterosexual world
she knows) be equally so? She says this in tones that could be called accusing. It was not the model for her marriage nor one she ever envisioned. We
do not talk well. She has not learned to love me , nor has she ever loved herself. About these things , I am sad.
As for me , in coming out, I finally gave birth to the woman I had been
carrying for decades . She has learned to love herself as she has allowed herself to love and be loved by another woman. I am glad to share her life. I
like her and am glad she finally told her story. My story .

kO

Eileen Pagan

DEAR MAMA

Th e following are eycerpts from an unpuhlished volume entitled "Dear Mama, ..
a collection of lellers and journal entries. The introduction hegins:In the spring of 1949 my 57-year-old mother-in-law Anna wrote on several
pages of a small address book what she titled "A Diary of My Life." Thissecret volume was found among her things after her death in 1969 .
"After being married for 30 years , thoughts come to me of what I want
to be, and what I should have been ," it began. She briefly chronicled herlife: childhood, immigration from Poland to America , her feelings about her
mother , young womanhood , marriage, her own motherhood - and then welearn what had impelled her to take up her pen that day .
"It is the most vital question in my life now , at this age, to break up ahome and leave a family. But until now I didn't realize that it could go onthat long ... The reason I want to run away is because I get no friendship,no kindness of the man that was gentle and I looked up to him .. . we havenothing in common . .. It is hard to kill everything that I once possessed .
The result is that I am alone , utterly alone . . . I have a great yearning for apeaceful life , not have a person in the form of a man degrade me to such an
extent ... I cannot laugh or sing, or even converse in his presence ... I am
ashamed of myself, how low I have stooped. All these years have made nothing of myself. However , with all my might I intend to fight and struggle
and see what I can accomplish for my existence ... I have ambition to study
and to meet people above me that can teach me, but now to my regret, it islate because my health is poor . .. Often I feel it isn't even worth to think
about it ... wherever I turn and look for a friendly hand , I get slapped at .. . "I met Anna soon after she had written these words. I married her only
living child, her son. She remained with her husband for the following 20
years of her life. For several of those years she worked as a part-time salesgirl in a women's and children 's apparel shop. She used the money she earned
to buy presents for her three grandchildren - my children.
On an odd page at the back of this small , terrifying booklet was the following textbook statement , copied in Anna's handwriting:
The brain does not create thought. It is
an instrument which thought finds useful.
Th e following is excerpted from the middle of the volume. Eileen is making
preparations to leave her husband, Irv. Lois is Eileen's lover.

81

II September 1976
Dear Lois,
It's Saturday morning now and I am up in my room of my own. Holly isin her room next door. Irv's downstairs . He's oeen acting foul and angry andbanging things around since he got up shortly after I did, and found no coffee
made in the family coffee machine . When he yelled, "Christ, isn't there any
coffee in this goddamned house!" I heard an echo of that old existence in
wh-iGh I no longer feel trapped - all that yelling and· banging like a big, darkcloud funneling toward me . It no longer blots me out. Soon I will be free of
even the sOWld of it.
When Alice was 15 and broke.lrtto tears and had a piece of rope in her
room , I dragged him to the local neighborhood shrink . it took this beautiful
child's intense pain to make me demand going out for help - to break out of
his dictated realm of privacy in which I was always the one at fault ...
Irv yells up the stairs, "Are they going to keep the cleaner! " Alice andJohn borrowed our vacuum cleaner earlier this week. I look up from my desk.
Holly's beaming, smiling face silently appears at my open door , looking in atme. I smile back while the hysterilogue continues between lower and upper
levels .
"I don't think so," I call down.
''Well, for Christ's sake, they've had it long enough! When are they goingto return it?"
"I don't know ," I answer, wondering at his concern .
His voice escalating, ''Well, don't you think we should have it back?""If you're worried about it, why don 't you call Alice and John and fmd
out their plans?""I have no time to call them. I'm going out shopping now ." He is in the
kitchen near the refrigerator. "Are we out of milk? Should I get some?"
Holly's hand moves to her mouth , stifling a gasp . Her eyes brim with merrimen!.
"Yes," I answer. The door slams behind him, loud .
15 September 1976
Dear Lois,... And then , Richard comes downstairs. With Irv's tone of voice , "Hey,are you going to do some wash today?""No," I answer. "I'm not planning to wash again until tomorrow." Hestands, glaring at me. ''Why,'' I offer , "is there some emergency?""Yes, " he answers in that loud voice. "Yes, there's an emergency. I haven't

had clean underwear for three days. Why can't you do it today!""Because I have other things planned for today."He stalks upstairs, slamming doors. I wonder why he doesn't run a load
through the washer-dryer himself. I get knots in my belly and want to pickup the clothes he deposited on top of the washer and throw them at him. I
do not speak any more. I am afraid of his violence. Holly does her own wash
when the need arises between all the loads I do every week. But Richardlearned his right to demand women's services. He assumes the same arrogant
mode of voice and body dominance as his father .

82

I am getting out of this.
I hear a chorus of humanistic therapists singing: but Eileen, you must
learn to be assertive . It's a simple matter of establishing clear communication.
It is your responsibility.
Fuck off, all of you!
Questions not asked: Why is all responsibility for human services laid at
my doorstep? Why is it permissible for a 21-year-old male to yell at his 50year-old mother laundress? .. .
I am without a car to get to the store. Alice borrowed it this afternoon .
I ask Richard if he will go to the store and get some milk before dinner time.
"171 go out and get milk as soon as 1 h(]lle some clean underwear to wear. "We are deadlocked . Why aren't they both bending over backwards to findways to help me find my life, after sucking all from me for so long? Hey you ,all you wise prick doctors with all your good advice for women-I listened to
all your advice all these years. I tried to do everything you said. But you
never mentioned the boredom, the belittlement of my sexuality, the lies, thewoman-hating. You didn't tell me that what you really wanted was for me
to remain a cheap-priced, docile, fuckable doll.
I better move very soon.
It is a matter of life and death .
The following excerpt is taken from the last piece in the volume. a letter from
Eileen to her mother. Eileen has left husband and former life behind. and isliving in a cabin with Kady .

. . . Not so long ago I gave you a book called Of Woman Born. I doubtthat you've read it. Somewhere in there, Adrienne Rich wrote about how she
had given up the fantasy of having t!'at one, final, healing conversation withher mother. She's a fine poet who has won awards and has good credentials
in that "old culture." That's what Kady and I call that strange man's worldback there. The world where we try to live most of the time-in which women can speak freely and with dignity-we call the "new culture." These
terms can be deceptive. Some days we use "death" and "life" cultures. Somedays we say "closed" and "open," some days "prison" and "free." The words
are imprecise. We do the best we can to keep aware of the sources of ourenergy.
Anyway, Adrienne is a woman about my age. Like me, she has three children born during the 50's. She, too, realized that she is a lesbian . She's writingsome wonderful stuff.
Well, last year when I read her book again, and I reread the part where she
said she had given up on the possibility of having that all-inclusive conversation with her mother, I said right outloud, ''Well, I haven't!"
So here I am, mama, trying to have it with you. For some reason, I am
seeing a red and brown coat. You made a coat fOl me. Do you remember it?
It was when we liVed on Sixteenth Avenue and were very poor. I was probably 14 years old. Was it that Donald got some material free from the place
where he worked? And you used an old blanket for a warm lining. I neededa winter coat. It was red on one side and brown on the other. Reversible.
And each side was just perfect. Flapped pockets and all. Goddess, what abeautiful job you did on that coat! I loved wearing it. Felt proud. It was
beautiful. And warm. And : remember how perfectly the collar was made. I83mean to say that the points were executed with such precision . When I wore
it on the brown side, there was no red showing. It was a hrown coat. And
when it was red, it was red.
Well, why is that coat looming up in my mind now? Because you havesuch excellent talents . Because you are beautiful. Because you have a strengthand a daring in you that I have always admired. What a perfectionist you
were. How clever you were .
And I hate it that when I tell you this, you will shrug your shoulders andsay, oh well, I just did the best I could . No need to make any fuss. I hate it
when people make a fuss about me.
I hate it because you're not angry .
I hate it because your life was used up serving and sewing. and you never
could speak about the rage which you cast blue. to get through.
I hate it because you have just turned 87 and I may never hear from you.

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84

HANNAH AT THE ELMS AT 79"We are not very different, my dear,
when' was Director of Nursing,, had to listen to people complain
as much as you do. Do you ever tireof it? "Her fingers , slender ,bent by age into something less rarethan roots at shore line,lie, for a moment ,still in her lap.

'" suppose the only thing' haveleft to dreadis being moved into the Infirmary.
One has so little control over one's
life
there. "Her room, hung with silk and parchment ,rich as the inside of an old Chinese trunk ,smells of wintergreen
and dust.

"Store up something for your old age, my dear.
I watch these old women,
bickering,fault-finding,and I am grateful that I have my books
and writing. "Her letters ,written in script fragile and clear
as gull tracks ,so often, are returned,
marked,"Moved , no forwarding address."- Mary Sojourner

85

Joan Nestle

THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER

Mother, I brought you Colette and My Antonia to read, strong caring
women voices you wanted to read, but I knew you would not be able to.
You are lying on your death bed , plugged into small television screens thatrecord in orange lines when your heart bleeds or screams or stops. Since
Tuesday you have been a captured woman ; your mind chained to a blooddrenched body. When I was very small , lying in a hospital bed , scared andwanting you there, you stood above me , dressed for business , a working
woman who could not miss a day. You .looked down at me and said , "don't
worry, I'll stay," while at the same time you held the phone to tell the boss
you would be in as soon as I fell asleep . We both knew you could not stay .
I grew up knowing that your work at the office kept us in apartments , gave
us food and clothes. I knew it because every time you lost a job or got introuble, we lost the apartment. Now I can't see you. You lie in the mostcritical bed-a place of honor. I see down the long blue corridor; yellow
lights shine at the end and white coats swing as they go in and out of yourroom. You waited for me to get home from work before you would accept
the heart attack. You waited for your working daughter. I found you dying,and now I go to work every day before I come here . I don't want anything
to take away the details of these moments: the click of heels in the halls,
the singing doctor who told me you were dying. I sit across from the door
that swings open to show me the blue hall that is your own tunnel. In every
hour I will have ten minutes to give you my love. Your eyes beg me forhelp. You are tired and in pain. The machines are pumping at you, liquids
are flowing in . The doctor turns down your stained sheet to show me where
the heart burns from electric shock, but all I see is your pink nipple . We
are joined now in your waiting. I am still outside your tunnel of blue lights;
you as always sit with horror and do battle.

86

"'i!

pecember 22nd Thursday Night 1977
Tonight , dear mother , you died. I reach out to you with 'words , words
the source of your redemption. Your spirit pouring forth into words that noschool taught you. Where are you now , my dear woman . We all spoke to
you today. Mabel who will play your room number to sing you on yourway . Rose your beloved friend who saw to the heart of you and stayed . I
who was thinking uneasily of your return . You laughed with each of us , andthen at 6 :30 you rose from your chair and died . Where have you gone , mybeloved woman? I saw you yesterday sitting on your bed, head bent down
reading your last poem to Deb and me , about your encounter with death andyour gratitude to the nurses whose hands covered you with caring. You had
been dead twice and had returned to look with bright eyes upon the living
world , to look with wonder at the way you had come. We had time to touchand hold ; I combed your hair and held water to your lips. And every day
you grew stronger - so strong that tonight you once again encountered theplace of mystery and this time you did not return to write a poem about it.
But dear Mother all your poems are within me- the bookkeeper poem, thedreamer poem , the outrage poem , the woman loving poem, the stealing poem,the child poem . Ride well , Mother. You will explore every corner of theworld you have entered . You will fmd the quiet tired people sitting at longcounters , having cups of coffee , and you will hear their story and tell yourown. You will follow no rules, and in the end they will run you out oftown. Dear, dear Mother , what mystery have you found?

Joan Nestle , daughter of Regina Nestle

87Carol Seajay

THE CLASS AND THE CLOSET

She didn't know why these thoughts preoccupied her but they did . She kept
coming back to them , kept thinking about Class and living in The Closet.
Maybe she was thinking about Class and Closet as a way to distract her attention from her lack of a lover. She had , after all , known herself to pull somepretty outrageous numbers to distract herself from that reality in the past. But
no, she would decide each time this thought occurred to her , she went to outrageous numbers, not to political meditations. But what did Class and Closet
have to do with each other?
She didn't suppose she had much more class than she had lovers when she
looked at it that way. She had left her family early on, while still in high school,
and had supported herself through college, so she didn 't feel that she had muchof her family's class in her. And just as she had begun working " professionally"and establishing her own class standing, she had dropped out and become a movement worker (albeit feminist) and done shit-jobs to support her real work or
worked movement jobs for shit pay. So what kind of class standing do theygive to revolutionaries and movement workers? Not much. And she hadn't lived
in The Closet for years. Budding feminism and gay liberation had opened thosedoors eight years ago. Then she left the whole contraption behind her when
she moved west to The Dyke Capital Ut The World.
So why was she thinking about Class and Closet all the time? Like lovers ,were they something to be mused over when she didn't have them?
Sometimes she laughed when she found herself thinking about class. "Nowclass, honey, is something you just ain 't got ," she would jive herself; "you justweren't there when they passed it out." And it was true. She'd look down at
her pass-me-on jeans and her second-hand-store shirts. She knew what Suaveand Sophisticated were and knew that she was neither. She couldn't even pulloff Dyke-Dressed much less Well-Dressed Lesbian , politically incorrect as thatwas. And it wasn't even a matter of money. Other dykes pulled it off on thesame income that she had . Not that she hadn't managed to "pass" in her closet
days. Without pizazz, of course, but what lesbian wanted the attention thatbeing a good-looking straight woman brought down on you? She certainly
didn't , but she had to admit that she just didn't have the class to do it, even
if she'd wanted to.
Or maybe she did. Actually , she did when she got right down to it. She
remembered her last years in high school. The color-coordinated skirts andsweaters she had loved so much. New feminist friends in San Francisco had
given her a hard time about them when she first moved out there. They said

88that she looked too middle class in her still color-coordinated clothes (pants
now, instead of skirts, of course); they refused to sit next to her in politicalmeetings. And she remembered the ranch style house, two-car garage and big
yard that she 'd left. Then she had to admit that she really was middle class.
Even in her present life she was acting like a good middle-class girl working
off her guilt doing movement work. "Ah, well," she comforted herself, "guilt
or no, I'm doing good work."
Now The Closet was something else. She knew she'd lived in The Closet.
How and when it began and every painful minute of it . It began at fifteen ,just thinking about women . And at sixteen, falling in love with her best friend
and keeping it a secret right under their parents' noses. The Closet began in
the school lunchroom the day Cindy B. came screaming down the hall, sayingthat she had just called Jem a queer, and he'd gotten real mad. So Steve told
Cindy what "queer" really meant and she hadn 't meant anything like that!
Sitting there (queerly) silent, praying no one would notice her red face, hernothing-to-say. That was the beginning of The Closet in earnest.
Closeting grew in complexity at seventeen when she moved into a lesbian
household as a boarder and into her first gay community, right there in her
hometown . Before she had found that gay community she had thought that
she could just be herself, by herself. But when her equally young lover left
her saying she wasn't strong enough to be a lesbian all her life, she knew sheneeded the gay community for support. She tried to talk about all this withher friends, now, but she always ended up telling stories - stories of how it
was Before Feminism , which was a lot different than talking about it. Herfriends had all come out with the women's movement. Hadn't played roles ,butch/femme, seduced/seducer. They were all righteously "out" to their parents .
Things were different now , they told her. And she, too, was clearly Different.
But she could still have a good time and was a good friend and tried to live
as a good feminist, too .
But sometimes it wasn't so simple as all that and she was just lonely . Alone .
Unlike any of her friends. Thinking about Class and Closet in those times didn't
help, either. Though sometimes she knew that she was lonely for someone tospeak Closet-ese with. And she knew that the best affair she'd had in years waswith a woman who had lived in the closet, too. She had thought that theyspoke a common language when , in fact , they were just seducing each other in
the Old Tradition. But they'd had a wonderful time of it and she 'd felt more
alive than she had in years.
Class would pop into her head at odd moments. Like when this psychic wastelling her about this fight her parents had when she was seven or eight. Her
mother was saying to her father, "I don't know how you expect me to feedthese kids , even. Much less clothe them. 1 slept with you , 1 married you, 1 bore
your children, I've done my part. Now you get out there and do yours. Earn us
some decent money! " The psychic said that's where her stomach problems camefrom, her fears about food . But her own mind had flashed : "This is a classfight. My mother is telling my father that he has to get a better job . A middleclass job . One with more money and a Future." Then all week long little memories popped into her head to hassle her: Her father had gotten a new job soonafter. Then all of a sudden she 'd had eight appointments worth of dental work
done , when she'd never even been to a dentist before. Worse , the memories of89her mother's sickness, her achey tiredness came crashing in. It had- gone on foryears, then suddenly (at almost exactly the same time as the new job), hermother was well. She remembered her mother's trip to the doctor that very hotsummer day, the scariness of it. Her diagnosis of "anemia." What a difference
that white powder in her mother's orange juice at breakfast and liver for lunch
made! Then, like a thunderclap, like a noise she couldn't bear to hear, came therealization that the next child born after her own self must have been conceived
within months of that white powder appearing at breakfast. that her mother had
been too sick, too debilitated to conceive , for lack of an office call, a few
blood tests and a little liver. For nine years . She refused to believe it, then fmallyremembered her mother saying that she had never used any kind of birth control until the sixties. Then she remembered that her older brother's tonsils had
been removed in that same year and he had stopped missing so much schooland started doing better . Shivers rattled her spine the day she heard herself
giving her own standard rap decrying the injustices of the patriarchal/capitalist
system that denies health care to the poor and realized she was talking about her
her own family and herself as a child . And yes, the second car, the lot in the
country where her parents had built their house had all come later, in the following years when her father had settled down and "flown right ," as her grandmother used to say. Those years , the ones after , had been middle-class years.
The ones before were not.
Then she felt nauseated for a while. For weeks. She didn't like remembering
these things . Even equipped with a class analysis as she was , finding her own
pain, her family 's poverty, their many lies , pushed her into silence , into gUilt
and shame that would not be articulated. But it was true. It was all true. [fmiddle-class had come to her family when she was in high school , just a coupleof years before she left them , what kind of class did that make her?
Memories continued to flash on her, though she might have stopped them
if she could. She remembered the school she attended until fourth grade. How
fine and tough they all were. For three years the basic playground game was"war." That and kickball. Your side against my side. Boys against girls .
Westside against eastside. The teams didn't matter , just the fighting . Then theschool board had redrawn the school boundaries to separate the black kids andthe white kids, and she had to go to the rich-kids school. It was farther awayfrom home and the other kids made fun of the kids from her old school. They
were called "tough kids" and "dirty kid" and "trash." After the first few girls'
mothers wouldn't let them go home with her to play after school , she had quit ·asking. Reading was harder at the new school. So was everything. They had aclass called "phonics" at the new school and she didn 't know how to do it at all .
The new teacher called her a liar when she said they didn't have phonics at theold school. There it was enough that she had learned to read. Here she was justdumb.
But she had recouped herself. Learned phonics enough to get B's where before
she had always gotten A's easily. She figured out that you had to have a boyfriendin this school , so she chose and won the cutest , most popular boy in the class,even though she had to share him with the cutest , most popular girl. She didn 't
know until later that what she had done ensured her a certain status. She remembered pushing away the boy from the old school who had genuinely liked her ,who was at least interesting to talk to , just because he was from the old school.
That year her mother had started buying her store-bought clothes and that made90

a difference, too.
Innocent afternoons turned into profound realizations. Feeling loose and freeriding home from a day in the country with an ex-lover turned friend, she heard
herself jive, "You just drive on and turn when you get a mind to and we'll
get there all the same." She wouldn't have noticed how she said it , but she
felt her friend stiffen beside her and look over at her out of the corner of hereye. One of the rules of their relationship was that there be no such clowning:
no slipping into dialects or roles or characters. Her rules . Those kinds of things
had always left her uptight. She didn 't know why, but they did, and here she
was, breaking her own rules. "It's OK," she told her friend. "This is my dialect," she added lightly.
Then her heart sank. She flashed on Uncle Dale riding her on his lap on the
big tractor. All the aunts . Nameless faces . Sunday afternoons on the farm where
her grandpa grew up. Other relations . Aunts and cousins . All her mother's relatives. What had happened to them?
"Don't you talk like that, Carol Jean." Her mother's voice broke in. When
had her mother ·used her middle name? When had she stopped?
Thoughts, ideas . People tumbled in her head so quickly she could hardly touchthem . Memories . She was a little girl. Four. Five . Six years old.
Seven. Why didn't they go see Uncle Ken and Aunt Vivian any more? Why
couldn't she play with her cousin Sherry anymore? Eight. "You know better
than that, Carol. Your mother raised you better than that," her mother's bestfriend had said, angrily . What had she done wrong? Her mind exploding, herstomach sinking - she knew after all these years. It was language. It was herwords. She had talked wrong . "Don't you talk like that, Carol Jean" meant"Don't you talk like the relatives ." It meant "Don't you talk like we used totalk." They had stopped seeing the relatives at the same time her mother started
pushing her dad for a better job . Her mother had just up and left her wholefamily behind.
The pieces started to settle. That was why she was so afraid of languages , ofdialects, even theater and films - because the language, the language she had
first learned to speak, was "wrong." She had learned to talk , and then withoutanyone even saying what was going on, they made her unlearn her first language
and learn a different one and speak that second language only. By the time
she was ten, they had cut her off from everyone she had ever known who spoke
her first language .
She mulled over this question of language for a long time after. She tried toremembel what her first language had been like and couldn't. She tried to makeit up, but she kept coming up with black dialect. Sometimes it was from books
and movies , and sometimes it was from the black kids in her class when she wasseven and eight , from when she was learning how not to talk. She tried to findbooks where the characters spoke Michigan Dirtfarm and couldn 't find them. *She found that not having the language and words of those years of her life
made her real life harder to recall.
She saw that by the time she was nine , she had to learned to "pass" for the
next higher class. Had learned to lie , in some way , and to choose her friends
accordingly and that she never even knew that she was doing it. And she felt
very scared. Frightened , as if she didn't know who she was , or who she had*untiJ November 1979 wh en she found o ut th a t the dialec t used in Patience and Sarah(Isabel Mille r/Alma Routsong, Fawcett) really is Michigan Dirtfarm!

91

been, or who she might have been if she hadn't learned to be something else.
If she hadn't started lying. Why had she started this lying? This passing? she
asked herself. And her self answered: To survive. She felt queasy on and off
for months this time.
She thought about all this and reflected that in many ways passing for middle class was a lot like passing for straight. Saw that the ease with which she
had moved into the gay life came from already knowing how to "pass" in another situation . That in both cases she had learned to "pass" to survive. Thatlying was essential to passing, though when she was passing for Class she had
lied to herself to survive. To pass for straight, to Closet, she "only" had tolie to straight people. She could speak true with her own gay community once
she had found them and herself. She realized that by the time she had to , or
could (which? she wondered) pass for middle class again, she was already sobusy passing for straight that passing for middle class was just pulling an old
trick out of the hat and she hadn't even much noticed that she was doing it.
"At least with The Closet ," she thought to herself, ''you get to keep yourown self intact even if you have to cover it up with lies sometimes." That madeCloset easier to remember than Class. She remembered that they had been witty and outrageous and sometimes daring in their Closet keeping. She remembered the deal she had with one of the gay fellows, an elementary school teacher:
He Went with her to her office parties, and she passed as his all-but-live-in girlfriend for his fellow teachers. One night they were entertaining one of his coteachers and his wife for dinner , and she had excused herself and walked into
the coat closet instead of the bathroom (the doors being right next to eachother and she not being very familiar with the house) and had had to stand in
the closet for the presumed period of time , then ext,icate herself and returnto the table, bladder bursting. Jim sitting there choking back his laughter forthe rest of the meal. She hardly dared look at him for fear she'd crack up andpee her pants. She hooted just to think about it now! What a story that had
been to tell in the gay crowd! Everyone had such stories, one topping the otheruntil they had a whole folklore and humor, too, to sustain themselves.
"The trouble with the closet," she thought, not being able to remember whenthese thoughts began coming to her, having no conversations to tie them to,having read no books that sparked her thinking on this question (except a novel 4by a black woman about passing for white,) "is that you never knew where theedges were. Never knew how much not to say." It was pretty clear that she had
had to lie to everyone at her data-processing job. But had she really had to Closet
to everyone at the university? Might it not have been OK with some of her more
liberal professors if she had been "out" to them, then, there in the midwest at theend of the sixties? What would they have done if they had known that she an!!
her "housemate" were lovers? Had they figured it out for themselves? If they had
known, would it have cost her lover her graduate assistantship? Both of them theircareers? She never would know. The only way you ever knew was if you didn't
closet well enough. Then it all blew up in your face.
At nineteen she had witnessed the painful results of not closeting well enough.
A friend , a high school counselor, had not been careful enough. Had been reported to the school authorities as a suspected lesbian, setting off a lesbian witchhunt in that tiny rural school district that hqd cost three lesbians their jobs andtheir teaching credentials. The gym teacher she didn't know and never knew what
*Passing, Nellie Larsen . Macmillan

92happened to her. The librarian, a Quaker and once her girl scout leader, fought
the charges and got her record changed to read "misappropriation of school funds"(meaning theft) and "not recommended for rehire in pu~lic schools." After two
year-s of searching she found another job in a big-city public library and moved away. The counselor committed suicide a few years later. One never knew how just"
one slip-up would turn out. Never knew until it was too late if you were going
too far. So she had learned to lie all the time. To keep her fronts up , her lies
intact and consistent and to always juggle her real life and her covers.
And then there was the danger . The overt physical danger. She and her lover
hadn't closeted well enough one summer afternoon. Had forgotten to pull ashade when they were rough-housing , tickling , kissing on their bed. One of themhad happened to look up and saw the man across the street looking into theirwindow with binoculars . That wouldn't have been too bad - they had thoughtthemselves liberated by then and didn't much care what anyone thought - but
the next day his little boy came over while she was watering her wiridow boxes.
He said, "How's your flowers growing, lesbian?" and "My daddy's cleaning
his shotgun on you." Not such an idle threat. There'd been one stabbing comeout of that house already that summer. A gay boy had just been beaten to deathin a neighboring town , for holding hands on the street with another boy. She
wasn't saying, but maybe the whole episode had something to do with her moving
to California a few months later.
So it was that she had learned her lessons well - had learned to lie with apparent spontaneity, to duck and dodge , to be evasive. She had learned to be
exquisite in her closet keeping - an art form and survival skill no less important
than milking cows , spinning wool or putting food by were to other women inother times . She had learned to live with the closet's constant tension in her
body and her soul and only now wondered if it would follow her - haunt her for the rest of her life.
Would she always fmd herself with a lie/an evasion/a dodge about her lesbianism , her lovers, her real life, ready on the tip of her tongue? Perhaps notalways. But it still happened under stress . The stories and the evasions just popped
out, as if through no control of her own. Sometimes it took months to clean
up the damages . And when her mother called , those times when she summoned
up all of her courage and said , ''Well , Carol, how's your life?" the habit of silence was too long and even these years later she always found nothing to say .
She had been thinking about the last time her mother had asked how she
was and she hadn't been able to answer. She wanted to answer (she thought) so
she started practicing things to say - honest things like "I'm very happy ," or"I'm in a hard place," or "Sherry (Mary, Katherine, Patty) and I are just coming
to an understanding," or "Our relationship is this . . . and it contents me."Underneath it all she was thinking, "I've been out to her for five years - whyis it still so hard!?" She fell to musing over the time when she had come out
to her folks. It was in her fust year in San Francisco. Those times had beensuch bright times, full of richness and promise. She had felt so free to be lesbian here in this big city twenty-one thousand miles away from everyone she
had ever had to closet to. It seemed the adventure of her life to explore thisbig lesbian community . It was such a year - ! It seemed as if all of San FraJlcisco was exploring the connections between lesbianism and socialism and feminism . The study groups kept her hi gil for months - interweaving lesbi an tenderness with a philosophy that would end everyone's oppression , poor pe ople
93

and black people and women and even gay people's oppressions, if they were
careful enough with it. And the oppression of these Asian people she was justbeginning to meet. And the Chicanas ... All this interwoven with the tenetsof feminism as well ...
In the midst of all that she had come out to her parents, quick, before she
became a flaming revolutionary and they'd have to deal with that, too! She
got to laughing, fondly remembering that year. She saw that she'd left her
closet and her middle-classness behind in that same year. Or left them behind
as much as one could . Hindsight is pretty funny-that year she had so stridently left her middle -class ideals and identity behind was pretty funny because
all through that year she had truly believed that she was totally middle class.
Once she had seen that she had left her "class" (middle) and her closet
behind at the same time , she began to see how intermeshed Class and Closet
had been for her all those years .
One of the first things her first gay community had taught her was that
she was going to have to fend for herself all her life. The boys were especiallyadamant. "Girl, there ain't gonna be no sugar-mammas for you in your life.
Daddy ain't gonna be there to pick up the pieces, neither. You might just as
well get used to taking care of yourself right now! You better start making
plans right away!" The way to take care of herself was to get a good middleclass job-Sick leave, retirement, vacations and all . She opted for university
teaching, trusting that she could closet well enough to get tenure and trustingthat the "liberal nature" of the university community would make her life alittle easier.
Her new gay community was as middle class as her mother . Not totally
middle class by a long shot, but everyone knew , just as her mother did, thatthe people with the middle-class jobs were the "lucky" ones. They had moresecurity, seemed to closet easier. Had easier lives . It was something you envied
if you didn't have, so she studied hard, learned to closet and worked towardgetting it for herself.
It meant working nights in the data-processing factory and going to schooldays. Always being too tired and not getting good enough grades and trying
to carryon with her lover(s) in between.
There was always some temptation-to just haul off on Friday night andsneak into the bar. To spend carefully hoarded tuition money on a cocktail
dress because someone was having a dress Christmas party and she needed
desperately to go-to touch and dance and be with the women and the men
who were all week as silent and well behaved as she had been and to cutloose and be outrageous . To dance cheek to cheek with her lover if she had
one and to dance sexy and "nasty" with the women if she didn't.
Dress parties or dinners . Drinks or pizza or recreation-room parties. Always
the need to be ''with'' her own people, even when she didn't go out for months
at a time because of the work and the need to study. Because of the money
it took, the time and the conflicts. Partying late with people she didn't necessarily even like . "One thing about the gay life," her friend M. would say, "isthat it cuts across all the race and class lines , for better or worse ." And A. ,M's lover , would hiss "For worse ."Sometimes she couldn't decide who she liked less or disliked more -- thecareful almost prissy "professional" women or the tough macho energy she kept

94

running into in the bar. The ones who always said they had their jobs to thinkof were basically boring. They had no sense of adventure in their carefully planned lives, carefully bought houses (blinds carefully drawn against their straightneighbors), carefully discreet love affairs. She didn't think she could always be
so careful. Besides , they were always drinking (or drunk) because they couldn't .
stand it either. And she just couldn 't drink very well.
She had the same problem (not drinking so well) in the bar. There she had
to deal with a ready emotion, almost like an intense drama to fill the boredom ,that erupted into fist fights and passionate love affairs. She ran from her fi{stfist fight and didn't talk about it for seven years. How to go to work with ablack eye? To school? The other problem, and more serious one, was outside
the bar: always having to park far enough away from the bar so that the local boys in blue didn't take down her license-plate number with the rest of theregulars , then having to negotiate the distance between the bar door and her
car without being followed or beat up or raped or whatever were the horrors
outside the bar doors. There weren 't many incidents outside her bar , but still
she worried . She couldn't ask someone to walk her to her car mostly because
she was too ashamed to let anyone know she was afraid to park in the bar
parking lot. And that got in the way when she wanted to proposition someone.
("My car or yours?" ''Well, mine 's two blocks away." "What for?" End of proposition.) It wasn't a matter of who she liked, but a matter of safety. Where
would she not get busted, beat up , found out? She knew that class was integrally connected with survival (her mother had taught her that) and that asa lesbian she already had two strikes against her . To be "caught out" being
queer was , if nothing else, a lot less violent in the middle class than it was else
where.
So the der.ision to be middle class was no decision at all . It was a survival
tactic . Being carefully middle class was a part of citJseting for survival. Being"nice" to "pass" because the roles were a little looser (it appeared) in middleclass America and a woman attracted less notice working in a "nice" profession
than being independent in a working-class world. Class and Closet had cometo her hand in hand, literally, one feeding the other as she left her parents'
home to find the gay sub-sulture and to create a life for herself there. Then
she tried to put them down together that first year in San Francisco - ohthat politically correct and liberating year - only to find that she wasn't as
middle class as she had thought and that the closet was within her (instead ofher in the closet) and finally to see th ~t almost everyone ~he knew was stillcloseted in some way (to their grandmother or Aunt Mary , if not to their bossor the postman or the teenaged boys on the bus).
No wonder she kept thinking about class and closet as if they were connected. As if they were passions that would fill her when she had no lover.
No wonder she was thinking about them both now , in the tim p. when she wastrying to find out more clearly (again) who she was. As if these ideas had something to do with the basis and foundation of her life - for they did.
Then she thought about how neither feminism nor class analysis had evpr
talked to her about this connection between Class and Closet. She thought
about survival , the very high costs o f survival in patriarchy , about the silence
that had always surrounded consciousness of class in the closet ; and she knewthat silence would never be quite so pervasive in her life again - beca use she
had a lot to say.
95

Jan Hansen"Philosopher, Marilyn Frye"oil pain ting18" x 18"

96

REVIEW

A review of The Coming Out Stories, edited by Susan J . Wolfe and Julia Penelope .
Stanley, with foreword by Adrienne Rich. Published by Persephone Press, P.O.
Box 7222, Watertown, Mass. 02172. 1980,251 pp ., $6.95.

When I found out this book was going to be published, finally, and by
Persephone Press , I was delighted. The book arrived ; it is physically pleasing;
Carolyn pOinted out the subtle delight of the cover (flat ink/glossy ink). I
eagerly commenced reading. I fully expected to consume it, cover-to-cover,in a single banquet of insights and "aha's." But it is not that sort of feast.
I bogged down in the middle , sated , even bored . It is interesting and gratifying
to discover how much we have in common, but the data of such a discovery
finally have too much of a sameness to sustain excitement.
I should have known . The individual contributions are deliberately not edited, the pieces are on a common theme, and one of the themes of the bookis how much we have in common. Of course the writers, unaided and unedited , will not always say their similar things in artistically dissimilar ways. But
perhaps the editorial restraint is partly responsible also for one of the great virtures of the book- the authenticity. Even our inauthenticity is authentically ,tangibly available in this book. The experiences are real; our particular waysof seeing ourselves and presenting ourselves are accurately presented; the conception - a book of coming out stories-is real home-grown 1970s American Lesbian Feminist ; the book is invaluable .
Our coming out stories are our tribal lore ; they are our heroic odysseys, ourtall tales, our adventure stories, our "origin" stories . They fill us with images, bothfabulous and believable , of fantastic feats of courage, endurance , creativity, bra ·vado, intelligence , madness and stubbornness, and of beautiful wicked schemes
and magic eyes . Where another culture has stories of knights and tycoons becoming men by inventing things to overcome and then overcoming them, our culture has stories of amazons and witches creating themselves out of nothing. And
we have the inestimable advantage of knowing that each of us has done it andcan do it over and over; each of us is a Mother.
Different women have different uses for these stories. I have a long list of
women I want to give the book to , all for different reasons. Closeted lesbians ,not-yet-out lesbians, the first woman I knew I loved , young women, old women.
What I myself find fascinating here is the metaphysics of being a lesbian. Thisanthology provides a picture of what it is to be something which there is nosuch thing as. And of what it is to make it the case that there is such a thing
simply by being it , definitively, perversely, and with no extraordinary power. *The artlessness of some of the writings and the artfulness of others combine todisplay and convey what it feels like to live on the boundary of the conceivable,on the loose and frayed edge of what is.
One thing the stories reveal is that, among other things, cOl1lillg out feels
good; we are obviously , and righteously, quite pleased with ourselves. We ex* I'r<lm "Natural Re~ource~," in Till' Dream oj" a Comllloll l .olIgllagl'. Adrienne Ril"h(Norton , 1978).

97

perience our insistence on our lesbianism as integrity. We also tend to interpretthe inability at a certain point to name oneself a lesbian as dishonesty. I think
there is a mistake here; a conflation of a conception of metaphysical integrity
with a conceptioI?- of moral integrity, a confusion of a metaphysical split with(cowardly) self-deception or self-denial. We need some concepts which ~I enable us to see that the struggle for integrity of being is in some sense and inpart a moral struggle, and yet to see that lack of metaphysical integrity is not
to be understood simply (and written off) as a personal moral flaw. Many things
besides moral weakness contribute to our not having come out yet when we
hadn't come out yet. To see coming out in a simple way as a matter of personal
moral courage nourishes contempt not only for certain other women but for ourown earlier selves.*
The temptation to disown our former selves can encourage us to falsify our
histories. For instance, a clear majority of the coming out storytellers tell us
they never had any interest in men, or that men repulsed, overwhelmed, orbored them, and I am not sure whether this presents a true picture of lesbians
in general. I, for one, was very interested in men for quite a number of years,
particularly in powerful , eccentric, intelligent men from whom I learned a lot
about philosophy, music , wine, food, and drugs. Either I am a quite unusual
lesbian , or the anthology represents a skewed selection of lesbians, or we areinventing a myth about ourselves, which , in the end, really could do us no good .**If we do misrepresent our pasts , perhaps after all it would be just because we
don't remember very well . The coming out stories are, among other things , stories of forgetting . We come out , and then forget we did. We come out ; andthen forget when we did . We forget how we came out. We forget the intense ,dramatic, ecstatic passions we suffered before we learned not to. We have tolook back at our diaries and journals and letters to recall. The excerpts fromjournals are beautiful and immediate , and they contrast quite strongly withthe stories, which in many cases are strangely stylized . It is as though tellingthe stories , for all that we usually enjoy it , is nonetheless something of a discipline-something we have to do, and something that may be required of us
whether we are really in a storytelling mood or not.
Our stories may be required of us when we are establishing new friendships
and bonds. They establish. that we have common names for common feelings ,and this linguistic agreement is a necessary ground of meaning. Naming is acommunal activity; a shared naming of what we knew all along , and of thepassage to recognition, is the essential foundation of lesbian community. Our
coming out stories establish the matrix of meaning for the word 'lesbian.'
The Coming Out Stories is limited in the scope and variety of storytellers ,and it therefore does not display the meaning of 'lesbian' in all its richness .
Most of the writers seem all too obviously to have been reading too many of
the same books , and they say "for too long" all too often . But it is an important book, even so. If we want more stories from more different women ,we will just have to write them ourselves and/or go find the women we want
to hear from and do what Julia and Susan did - offer them a book to put theirstories in.
*Recall "It's All Dixie Cups to Me," Rita Mae Brown , QUEST: A Feminist Quarterly,Vol. I, No.3 , Winter 1975.
** Of course, the selection is not fully representative of lesbians of all races, classes, ages,
etc. But this sort of narrowness should not select for born manhaters and aga inst converts.

98

REfPonfE
A FEW COMMENTS ON THE GENTLE ART OF REVIEWING IN THE
FEMINIST PRESS(These comments were touched off by reading the review by Joanna Russ of Donna
Young's Retreat in SW 12. -Marion Zimmer Bradley)I once knew a woman who had earned her living as a lady wrestler in oneof the nudie night-clubs in San Francisco. Since this woman was not a feminist,
but rather the reverse, I was surprised when she gave up the job; she had also
worked as stripper, go-go girl and belly-dancer, as well as other things to makeeven the most rudimentary feminist cringe. But, with a flicker of enlightenment,
she said that she didn't mind being ogled by men herself, but found it distasteful to think of standing, stripped, in a ring of leering males who took pleasure
in seeing two nude women tear one another limb from limb.
Well, this is just about the way I felt when I read Joanna's clever and artful
dismemberment of a first book by a young and not terribly competent writer.
I too, from my earliest days as a writer , have had the experience of standing
stripped and bare before the harsh winds of criticism, and in general I advocate that if a young writer can't stand the heat, she had better keep well outof the kitchen , or develop a well-insulated ego. Maybe I am just squeamish. Or
maybe I have read too heavily of the writers, woman writers in a tough commercial world , who get very angry because a woman writer is expected to beat least twice as good as a man before she can get published. Here we have ayoung writer whose book is probably , let's face it, not a terribly good book.
Most first novels are not. But all of us (present company excepted , of course,)
have written bad books before we learned how to write good ones, and someof us would never have managed to write good ones if we had not been encouraged by finding someone to read our early efforts. So we have a small press,
the Naiad Press, which makes it a point to publish young feminist writers who
have something to say, and generally help them along until they develop theskill to say it well.
I have often been accused of being insufficiently feminist, and in general I
plead guilty ; I'm too old to get worked up about rhetoric, which is, after all,the art of making the worse cause appear the better ; nor, in general, do I enjoy seeing political expediency supersede objective fact. But I have been present so often when the commercial presses are criticized because they judge feminist writers by hard, objective, commercial and masculist standards, paying
more attention to ''Will it sell" than "Does it have something to say?" Here wehave a small feminist press which accepted a first novel because it had something to say instead of rejecting it out of hand as ninety-nine out of a hundred
ordinary publishers would have rejected RETREA T. Naiad Press brought us afeminist fantasy. I freely confess it is not to my taste; but I consider personal
taste the worst possible measure of criticism. Joanna Russ has been very severely criticized because her books are not to the taste of many readers. That's irrelevant.
But , like my ex-lady-wrestler friend , I have a distinct distaste for the spectacle of a circle of women , sneering rather than leering as two of their sisters

99

tear one another to bleeding shreds in public. . . . One of the most unpleasantmemories of my entire career , and one of the reasons why , in general, I havefled from the entire feminist press, is a memory of a time when Joanna Russand I were (figuratively) pushed into the center of a yelling crowd while theentire lesbian-feminist science-fiction establishment stood around shrieking on
their typewriters to the effect of "Let's you and her fight." . . . Now , Joanna
Russ and I are philosophically at opposite ends of the science fiction spectrum.
I admire but in general do not much enjoy her work , and while I don ' t knowwhether she likes mine or not , it's absolutely certain that from a philosophicalor political point of view she finds it worse than deplorable. Which, of course ,is her privilege ; .. .. I would feel distinctly distressed if Joanna praised my work ,because I find that if she praises a book , in general I will find it unreadable , and on
the other hand , if she wholly damns a book . . . I am likely to find it jolly goodreading.
Well , anyhow , there are novels by women which I love , and those which I
don't much like, and others which I fmd absolutely offensive , and others which
I find , in general , of a silliness unutterable . For instance : hearing Sally Gearhart
read an extended excerpt from Th e Wanderground , I was seduced by her personal charisma and the interest which her fine reading gave to the story, to buying
a copy to read at lei.sure ; and later discovering that I couldn't read three pages
in succession without breaking into the kind of giggling fit I usually reserve forthe more fatuous novels of Lost Atlantis and priestesses of dawn and beauty ,or for the sillier effusions of Theosophy. However , I am able to recognize thisas a matter of taste , and refuse to set up my personal likes and dislikes as theparameters of a critical aesthetic. I know that Sally's book has become something of a classic, and I'm delighted for her , and for the pleasure she has given
to readers.
And so , when I read Retreat , and found it much the same sort of sweet
romantic stuff, I shrugged and decided that anyone who could read The Wanderground - and there are a lot of them - would really enjoy this book, butthat it wasn 't for me, and so what? There is no arguing about matters of taste ,and I don 't expect anyone to be bound by my dislikes . . . .
In general it seems to me that Russ has simply been guilty of using her own
enormous prestige in the feminist AND in the commercial press to tear a lessskillful writer limb from limb. If a male writer of great prestige had done thishatchet job on a woman writer published by a small press , I think she would
be the first to cry out in outrage and accuse the male writer of prejudice against
the small or feminine-oriented. To do this is an abuse of one's personal charisma
and a petty show of private malice. Even if R etreat were as bad a book as she
seems to think , she has no right to imply a self-serving on the part of Naiad
Press : I once offered Barbara , at Naiad Press , my then-unpublished The Ruins
of Isis , and she turned it down because she felt it did not meet the self-chosen
standards of Naiad , of being absolutely lesbian-oriented. If Naiad were as opportunistic as all that , they could now be ~eriving enormous prestige from publishing a book which , to be modest , has aroused really huge interest and controversy . She could have made some money , too . Integrity, rather than commercial expediency , marks Naiad 's publishing history , and I think we should
all be grateful to her for giving- as I said back at the beginning of this review :.tn opportunity to writers who have something to say, even if they cannot command enormous fees in the commercial press.
100

Well, on the occasion I spoke of before, when Joanna and I were pushed tothe center of the circle , with everybody cheering us on, Joanna reproved thewhole lot of us for making an unedifying spectacle, in something like these words :''We find we can't take on Dad or big brother, so we start kicking Sis in thepants." I venture to remind Joanna of these words; her review of Retreat is
kicking a very young and vulnerable Sister .. . .
Granted , we can't all like one another's books .. . . I am not qualified to
say whether or not Retreat is a good book, a bad book, or a book best left totime to judge. But I know there are better books which I could NOT read, so
I don't venture to judge it.
But one thing I am qualified to judge is common courtesy. I really think
Joanna should be a little ashamed of herseif. She has a right to her opinions ,as we all have . She could have said, flatly, "I found this book so unreadable
that I stopped trying after the first chapter," and some people would have refused to read it on her advice, and others would have rushed right out andbought it. . . . In my younger days I was also guilty of writing brilliant essays
scoring off young writers because I had elevated my personal aesthetic into awhole Art of Higher Criticism and felt myself called to the vocation of Stamping Out Books Of Which I Did Not Approve .
And so, having been gUilty myself, I say it flat-out ; this is not nice behavior.
I think that may be why no one except feminists seems to take feminism seriously. Almost all men , and an unconscionable number of women , say "Oh,women-let 'em alone long enough and they 'll tear each other to pieces." Andthen stand around , hot for fresh blood , like those men watching the lady wrest lers, while we do it.
Let's be glad we have a feminist press to publish books, good or bad, andremember what it was like when we didn 't, instead of destroying it because its
standards aren't those of commercial publishing! Joanna Russ is not as old as
I am. But she's old enough to know what I am talking about, and to remember
the days when women were not altogether welcome in the fantasy/science fiction press. And so she , too, should know better.
.

- Marion Zimmer Bradley

Joanna Russ 's review of Donna Young's Retreat: As It Was! (Sinister Wisdom 12) has been giving me no end of trouble. Yes , the writing in Retreat
is abominable . Yes , Young's imagination is so limited that her book is pretty
close to antifeminist. Yes, the characters , relationships , story , science, economics , and traditions of Retreat are unforgivably mushy. Yes , a thousand times
yes, Naiad Press should not have published this book. But.
Enough is enough . Joanna Russ 's reView of Donna Young's book is overkill on a grand scale. It 's no news to me that the author of The Female Man
and We Who Are About To ... can blow the author of Retreat out of thewater - and without taxing her abilities in the least. The first half of "Listen ,There's a Story for You . . ." is less a piece of criticism than an exercise in escalating ridicule , and ridicule is no more constructive or justified in a lesbianfeminist publication than it is on a school playground.
lOl

I recently reviewed Retreat for off our backs, and I think I can understand
Joanna Russ's apparent anger with Young's book . Reviewing Retreat was an infuriating , frustrating, incredibly long and drawn-out process that resulted in aterrible cop-out of an article that now embarrasses the hell out of me . It also
prompted some hard , overdue thinking .about feminist criticism and my weaknesses as a feminist critic. What became especially obvious was that, somewhere
along the way , I had lost the ability to write, "This is a bad book."
When I came out in the mid-1970 's, the incidence of trashing in the earlier
Women's Liberation Movement had generated a reaction, an ethic that named"judgmental" a negative (patriarchal , male , heterosexist, academic , WASP , elitist ,left-brain , etc., etc.) attribute . Being WASP and having a long history of demonstrated academic, elitist , and left-brain inclinations, I nervously tried to curb , atleast in public , my penchant for sarcasm and caricature .
Our collective striving to be "nonjudgmental" may have eased the impulse totrash , but it also seems to have encouraged a tendency to uncritical (public) acceptance of every female endeavor , especially those that declare themselves feminist. Writers and artists should be the first to recognize the uselessness and thepotential liabilities of such an attitude (in theory at least ; a lot of us struggle
with the fear that the first discouraging word is going to reduce someone totears), but the publication of Retreat suggests that it 's still around - and influential.
Maybe the "if it 's lesbian , it 's got to be good " credo has started its own backlash. Maybe some critics believe that they have to use scathing sarcasm and/or
ridicule to prove that their work isn 't mush and puffery . Maybe it's just thatwriting unbridled polemics can be more fun than laboring to say hard things
in a gentle way. A part of my initial response to Russ's review was jealousy,that she had done the razzle-dazzle I hadn't dared to do , that she had probably gotten that book out of her system while I was still brooding about it.
Susan Wood-Thompson's article "To Know Each Other and Be Known . . ."also in SW 12, quotes Beverly Tanenhaus on her contribution to her women's
writing workshops : "to figure out what I know about [a woman's] work that
she can use." I think that feminist critics ought to be keeping this in mind
and addressing their reviews to the creator of the work under discussion as wellas to their own following (if any) and to potential readers or viewers of thework. Joanna Russ offers plenty that Donna Young and Naiad Press can andshould use, and I hope that the tone of her article doesn 't drown it all out.
But I still remember with bitterness my fourth-grade teacher , who used to announce it to the entire class whenever I got less than an A on a paper andthen speculate about what had gone wrong . She didn't teach me anything all
year . I hope Russ is more effective.
Thanks, incidentally , for the mention of Motherlines. I discovered the paperback last fall by hit-or-miss browsing through the science fiction shelves at local bookstores. Feminists who are already reading fantasy/sf are fmding Charnas's book ; may it now fmd a well-deservedly wider audience.

- Susanna f. Sturgis

102

RESPONSE

In reference to the current issue (SW 12) I enjoyed the book review by J 0anna Russ, and although she seems to have something to do with the writing .
and publishing of Sally Gearhart's Wanderground, I wonder if it is quite fair todraw a comparison with [Suzy McKee Charnas's] Motherlines. I have read Motherlines and reread it-and also the first volume of what I assume will be a trilogy- Walk to the End of the World. And I would without any hesitation at
all give my vote to these two books as by far the best science fiction futurist
novels ever written by a woman (and far superior to almost anything written bya man in this line) . Every woman with a brain should read both these books
and keep them nearby . . . However , Wanderground is not a novel nor is Gearhart a novelist. She states this herself in that very interesting conversation she
has with Baba Copper in the (sad to say) last issue of Country Women. .. .
Wanderground is a series of Sufi type tales and Gearhart considers herself ateacher- not a novelist. I think that comparing the Cham as books and Wanderground is like comparing apples and oranges. Of course, one may prefer to eat
apples rather than oranges-or vice versa ; but you can't say that a good apple
is better than a good orange . They are simply not the same thing. I love the
Wanderground and am one of its readers who limited herself to one story per
day to make it last as long as possible . . .. It is a master work in its own genre
and if it had the power and the terror . .. of the Charnas Books, it simply would
not BE.
- Ruth Douglas

LESBIAN CORRESPONDENCE CLUB .
Directory of sisters arranged by state codes.
Join fastest growing club of its kind withmembers all over the U.S. Inexpensive but
effective. Send S.A.S.E . for free details :The New Dawn, P.O. Box 907
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103

RESPONSE

Dear Sinister Wisdom ,I feel that Elly Bulkin 's article in no. 13 is a contribution of utmost importance , deserving respect both for its ethical and political courage and forits scholarly thoroughness and care of execution. I hope it will be used, seriously discussed , and incorporated into lesbian/feminist processes of thinking
and reading . To this end , I would like to add several points .
I do not believe it was in any sense Elly 's intention to isolate Mary Daly
as a sole target or scapegoat of racism among white feminist writers ; it would
be a great pity for her essay to be read as a form of " trashing ." It is truethat the magnitude undertaken by a book like Gyn/Ecology opens it to morethan ordinary critical expectations. I feel , though, that readers of EUy's article
may need to be reminded of the fact that Gyn/Ecology was not written inhermetic intellectual isolation but with acknowledged feedback and responses
from other white feminists - including myself- who read or heard parts or thewhole in draft . The stature and the flaws of any book are finally the author's
own ; however , lesbian/ feminist theory has typically been created in a climateof collective support and critique , a climate which may have its own specificlimitations as well as its own flashing gynergy. Critics of a manuscript in draft
mayor may not offer the rigorous kind of challenge that any thinker needs
to test and refine her own original insights. I want to point out also that I
was one of the lesbian / feminist reviewers who (in Th e N ew York Times Book
Review) praised the feminist daring of Gy n/Ecology without questioning its
racist blinders .
But , perhaps more to the point : after my own book, Of Woman Born, waspublished in 1976 , I received a number of letters and comments from Black
women , criticizing my extremely brie f and cursory references to Black motherhood . These communications led me to reassess my own process in writingthat book. I had indeed been aware that the dimension of Black maternal
existence- in so many ways profoundly different from white maternity - andso relentlessly affected by white racism - was to a large extent missing frommy analysis of both "experience" and "institution ." I had let myself off thehook by telling myself that this was a subject that could only rightly be written about by Black women; that someday a Black woman would write "that"book . In fact , I could have delved into the wealth of fiction by Black women
who have eloquently described the experience of mothering- Margaret Walker ,Lorraine Hansberry , Sarah E. Wright , Ann Petry , Toni Morrison , Alice Walker ,Toni Cade Bambara , to name some writers then in print - just as I quoted
from Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, Margaret Atwood , or other white novelists
for illustration or amplification. White ignorance, and the unconsciously held
racist belief that white experience is the quintessentially real experience andcan therefore be infinitely generalized with a few liberal qualifications here
and there , undeniably weakened my book; and Of Woman Born, which lesbian/feminists generously defended against attacks in the anti-feminist press,
could well be cited as another example of white feminist theory impaired by
racist attitudes , however "unintentional." In the literature of white lesbian/feminism , not to mention the writings of nineteenth-century white feminists ,104

there are plenty of other examples, of course; this is the legacy which , likeit or not, is ours as members of white culture .
My hope is that Elly's challenging, honest , and thoughtful article will help
activate a climate in which every white feminist writer will seek and find the .
challenge and support she needs to combat her own conscious and unconscious
racism. Our researches, if we are scholars, will frequently bring us face to facewith white male and female racist sources, to which we need to develop highly
sensitized antennae equal to our sensitivity to the language-deceptions of misogynist texts which Mary Daly has identified.
It would hardly serve the interests of an anti-racist lesbian/feminism to deny
Gyn/Ecology its authentic insights and connections ; but neither will our deepest purposes be served by refusing to consider the critiques brought by Elly ,who has obviously read Mary's text with uncommon attention and concern .
Gyn/Ecology, as Elly implicitly shows , is a book which offers important critical tools, not just for the dissection of patriarchal deception but for our movement as well : such concepts as "pattern-detecting" or "false inclusion" have avalue wherever we turn our eyes , trying to break through the seeming paradoxes of life on the boundary . I believe we need a clear sense of how ideas
impinge upon and feed each other in our movement, and a trust that, as regards racism , no seriously committed white feminist need be locked in a selfentrenched position. Nor can any of us, white feminists, however excellent
our anti-racist intention, shed our mental chains of racism overnight : they
are among the oldest inventions of patriarchy.
I hope we can now begin to use , test, practice, and refme the critical guidelines Elly offers at the end of her article (and the criteria she quotes from
Minnie Bruce Pratt's letter to Chrysalis), whether as readers seeking a tougher,
more enduring vision of female integrity , or as writers attempting to enlarge
the meaning of global feminism to its outermost limits . Both reading and wr·iting can be forms of action which can change lives, but both , if they are to
become so, require unremitting caring, attention , and critical responsibility.

In sisterhood,
Adrienne Rich

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105

PUBLISHING

Self-Interview

OUT & OUT BOOK!
Editors of Out & Out books, Jane Creighton, Joan Larkin, and Ellen
Shapiro , talk about the press's origins, growing pains, survival, andfuture plans.
Joan : Origins . In January 1975 I went to California carrying with me
manuscripts of two books . One was an early version of Housework, the othera huge anthology of poems by members of my lesbian writers' support group .
I visited Judy Grahn , then of the Women's Press Collective , and Alta of Shameless Hussy Press , naively assuming that one of them would have to want topublish the books . (laughter) But then I saw the courage and stamina of these
women who had produced thousands of copies of beautiful books on the
shakiest of material bases . Alta said , "Publish it yourself. I'll help you distribute it." What a gift that was! Her encouragement and support sent me home
ready to research costs and techniques . I couldn 't think of acquiring and running a press , so I had to find a printer.
Meanwhile, Elly Bulkin suggested we collaborate on A mazon Poetry: An
Anthology of Lesbian Poetry. Jan Clausen and Irena Klepfisz, like me , hadmanuscripts , and within six months we had four books ready to print.
Jane: I remember the home-made light table you used to paste-up Housework on - a piece of plastic on top of bricks and a high-intensity lamp underneath that was making bubbles in the plastic.
Joan : Two of the books were typed; all of them had press-type covers(Amazon Poetry still has a wobbly title page) . We printed 1000 copies ofeach book . The four author/editors each took turns filling orders- which we
obtained through reviews and some fliers (again home-made) sent to addresses
culled from The New Women 's Survival Catalogue. The name "Out & Out
Books" got invented because the Print Center told us we had to have a publisher 's imprint.
Jane: When did you start seeing it as a publishing company and make thedecision to publish other people's work?
Joan : I got a $600 grant from CCLM [Coordinating Council of Literary
Magazines] because I wanted to publish a book by Jacqueline Lapidus. We
had gone to the same college but had been out of touch for fifteen years ,and when I saw her poems in Amazon Quarterly, I wanted to know the storyof her evolution into a lesbian/feminist poet.
At that point the other authors weren 't interested in further publishing,though later of course they did found Conditions, along with Rima Shore .
Perhaps their sense of the problems of running a business were more vivid
than mine.
Ellen: Why did you want to go on?
Joan : My whole life had changed , was changing. I had come out publicly ,which released all the energy I had wasted trying to pass as straight. And I
had given up the idea that women's self-publishing had anything to do with106

vanity presses . This was a big change for me, since I was then - as now- teaching in a college English department. And then the process itself of making abook has always interested me. And there was support from women allover
the country. We sold the first thousand Amazon Poetrys in four months.
Ellen: Joan asked me to be her coeditor in 1977. There were periods when 'we worked with other womenJoan : Ellen stuck around for more of the nitty-gritty than anyone else.
Ellen: True. Out & Out had unmet commitments and backed-up orders.
But what was attractive to me was getting women's writing into print andworking on the physical production of books. And there seemed to be a lotof room to try out new ideas. We heard Adrienne Rich's speech at the Lesbian Pride Rally [NYC, 1977] , and it was literally floating off in the air, so
it seemed a very good idea to document it. Then we thought about how many
speeches and articles-very important things that women were writing and saying- were getting lost in the shuffle , until a whole series of pamphlets seemedto blossom in front of our eyes.
The pamphlets were a great idea from a production standpoint because
they're short and quickly put together and you can get a real feeling of "hotoff the presses." They're also inexpensive and focused. My vision is to havethe pamphlet series cover a range of disciplines and viewpoints about wherelesbian/feminism is going and where it's been . And by putting a lot of perspectives out there, I think we can help to break down the traditiollal waysthat knowledge has been organized. I want the pamphlets to be purposely
eclectic.
Joan : Jane, what made you want to join the press?
Jane: I had a good offer that I couldn't refuse. It would have been 1979
when you two approached me with a glass of wine and said, "We've discussed
it and we were wondering if you 'd consider stepping into the pack?" I considered, then leapt into it, though it was unclear just then where the press
was going. But the time was ripe , as it were . in my history. I came out of
the woods having done a lovely little poetry magazine for five years (Sailingthe Road Clear) with very little sense of who might be reading it, other thana handful of cowboy poets and poets' poets scattered across the country . So
going into feminist publishing meant , in a very personal way, moving from aworld of post-Beat, post-Black Mountain poets-as I saw them , competentpeople separated from their inspirational source-into a context where writing
once again exists to clarify and illuminate the activity of the world. I feellike I've left a ghetto.
Joan: Could we say something about our collaboration? We've agreed toempower one another to make decisions in each of our own spheres, which
eliminates hours of hideous meetings and gives each of us the opportunity
to get creative pleasure from what we do for the press. We do operate byconsensus on financial and editorial d~cisions , but primarily , I've been working on distribution while you both have been working on production anddesign .
Ellen: The next phase is to make a contract with each other. Maybe weshould list our responsibilities.
Jane: Right. That'll be our next publication : "Martyr List " by Out & Out
Books.
107

Joan: But really, decision making has naturally fallen into an order which
seems surprisingly strong . And a turning point came for the press when we
decided to hire Laura about forty hours a month. [Laura Kramer, a publishedwriter of short fiction and buyer for the now defunct Eighth Street Bookshop,is the office manager for Out & Out.] Laura's extensive experience with buying and selling books meant that we got enormous help in getting systems set
up, and we actually established an office . This occurred just after we had gotten our first grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. And seventeen women writers gave a benefit reading for Out & Out in 1978. These
things made all the difference. We had support from other women publishers,
too : Judy Grahn , Coletta Reid , and June Arnold especially. Judy once ·told
me, "Publishing is like pushing a train uphill!"
Ellen: Morale and economic support helped us to reorganize practically.
We hired Laura and published a new catalogue. We did inventories, mailings,
and accounts . We started cautiously to buy advertising.
Jane: It's important to say that we're paying our authors now, that thebooks are generating a little money beyond what 's needed just to keep themin print. That's progress. When we started out , the authors had to raise themoney themselves .
Ellen: We still donate our time , but we're looking forward to a day whenless of what we do will be unpaid.
Joan: We really couldn't have survived without the support of those whohave written and published reviews, and the women's bookstores who stuckwith us in our chaotic period. It meant more to me than almost any otherletter the press ever got when SisterWrite Bookstore in London wrote something like, "We assume you've been going through the usual growing pains ofa women's business ; we look forward to getting our order when you can shipit."
Ellen: We should say that we're not in a position where we can respondto unsolicited manuscripts. We just don't have the time. That's a real fact oflife, and it isn't meant to be anything other than that.
Joan : I think that women see us as publishers of poetry , and while we arecontinuing our commitment towards poetry , our main emphasis in the futureis going to be pamphlets.
Ellen: Is there anything else we want to say about poetry versus prose?
Joan: It's a false distinction now. I've just read Marilyn Hacker's sonnet
sequence , Taking Notice. What could sound more archaic and literary than
that? But actually it's a radical statement examining problems of relationships
between women , so it's as political as a prose speech on history or philosophy.
Ellen: I would like the press to continue to publish a lot of different things
and to demonstrate that those distinctions are not so solid.
Jane: Poetry and prose are different ways of thinking out the same problems , and what I love is to have the distinctions between those two forms
stand up and coexist in a vivid way.
Ellen: What about defmitions of lesbian writing?
Joan: When the press first started in 1975 , Out & Out defined itself as anindependent women's press with an emphasis on lesbian writing.
Ellen: I think that since 1975 there's been a real growth and diversity inthe kind of issues covered by lesbian writers.
Joan: Do you mean there's a diversity in the way we define ourselves or108are you referring simply to a diversity in the concerns expressed in writing?
Ellen: Those are not unconnected, so it's hard to be specific unless we 're
dealing with specific pieces of writing . Maybe we could talk about how we
tried to define lesbian/feminist writing a few years ago and how it looks to
us now. It's a big question.
Joan: I think one small contribution is that since the publication of thefirst edition of Amazon Poetry, a large number of women whose work we
couldn't include have now come to us with work for the next edition. Thissays something about larger numbers of writers feeling that the identificationof themselves as lesbian has an important connection with the meaning of
their work. The sense of its importance has made them willing to take therisks involved in that identification.
Ellen: It's wonderful that there seems to be a new kind of play with definitions of sexual identity. In 1975, the women's movement was still immersedin that first onrush. And along with that onrush was an essential attempt todefine lesbians in a community of lesbians for purposes of strength, for purposes of survival , for purposes of presenting ourselves to an often hostile world .
There's a letting go of some of the need to justify ourselves to the world.
There's less defensiveness , and I think that's giving writers a real freedom because we don 't have to care so much about acceptability. We can explore thesubtle ways that lesbianism works and the whole range of thought and feelingthat's within that definition. I want the press to mirror this with the kindsof writing we publish. I would like to encourage controversy.

ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD
prose by Joanna RussCERES IN AN OPEN FIELD
poems by Jane Creighton
xerox prints by Martha Gever$3.50 ea. plus 65¢ mailing cost
(N.Y. residents add 8% sales tax)
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109

ANNOUNCEMENTS
BECOMING VISIBLE: The First Black Lesbian Conference, October 1980.
... to educate and create a National Ne twork for Black i.esbians ...not toseparate our fight from the struggles of other women.
If you are interested in attending or contributing to the conference, write:
BECOMING VISIBLE , c/o Pacific Center for Human Growth , P.O . Box 908
Berkeley , CA 94701.
2nd NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GAY & LESBIAN ISSUES. October 10-12 1980
Bismarck Hotel , Chicago, IL. Sponsored by Oasis Center for Human Potential andDignity/Chicago. Fees : $70 Sept. I-Dct. 1; $80 Oct. 1-10; $90 Door Registrations.
Mail to Oasis Center for Human Potential , 7463 N. Sheridan Rd. ,Chicago , IL 60626
WOMEN IN FOCUS is a non-profit feminist arts and media centre. Our distribution
library of video tapes and films, on women's and other issues, is available for rental
or sales. We are also looking for new material by women to add to our library .
Women producers or anyone interested in our free catalogue can contact us at:
Women in Focus , 645 Kingsway , Vancouver, B.C. , Canada, V5T 3H7
TOP RANKING: A Collection of Articles on Racism and Classism in the LesbianCommunity. Compiled by Joan Gibbs and Sara Bennett. Copies available from :February 3rd Press , c/o Joan Gibbs and Sara Bennett, 306 Lafayette Ave. , Brooklyn , N. Y. 11238 @ $3.50 (more if you can/less if you can't) . Free to women in
prison. (Make checks payable to Joan Gibbs & Sara Bennett.)

JUMPCUTa review of contemporary cinema
No. 23/24

Double issue, $2.50

LESBI.ANS AND FILM . This Special Section offers an in-depth
analYSIS of the lesbian image in cinema, lesbians' demands on
feminist film criticism , and independent lesbian film production
by Barbara Hammer and Jan Oxenberg. Lesbian vampire films,
current Hollywood depictions , Celine and Julie Go Boating,Maedchen in Uniform. Interviews about adolescent identification
with film and tv . Filmography .

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110

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTESEvelyn Torton Beck teaches (among other things) courses in Lesbian Culture, the Jewish
Woman, and Women ill the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She recently coedited an anthology of feminist essays, The Prism of Sex (U. Wisc. Press, 1979), and is currently putting together an anthology on Jewish Lesbians, for use in Women's Studies classes,
to be published soon by Persephone Press.
Sandy Boucher is a novelist and short-story writer living in northern California, and iscurrently working Qn a book about midwestern women.
Marion Zimmer Bradley is a well-known science fiction writer.
Lori Dechar lives on Long Island, is a poet and also teaches poetry workshops for children, and is a co-partner in a women-run horticultural business called Arathusa.
Ruth Douglas lives in S t. Helena, California. "I am old now, so I won't see the end of
the soap opera. But I hope and work as best I can for that hope of the future-a world of
women ."
Nancy Fried. "My work is about the celebration and documentation of lesbian love andlife . . . It is the journal of my life."
Marilyn Frye is an older dyke, trained in the academy as a philosopher. She has the usual
sordid past and uncertain future, an old car, a perfect cat, and an ambition not to become a
Crone prematurely.
Joan Gibbs is a 27-year-old Black lesbian feminist and a member of the collective publishing Azalea- a magazine by Third World Lesbians. She is the author of Between a Rockand a Hard Place and compiled with Sara Bennett Top Ranking: A Collection of Articles
on Racism and Classism in the Lesbian Community. Her poetry has appeared in several
lesbian publications. "Frankie" is from an unfinished collection of short stories, A Gathering
at the River.
Barbara Grier is editor of Naiad Press, the largest feminist press in the United States.
Their fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth books, published in 1980, are The Black andWhite of It by Ann Allen Shockley, Lesbian Feminism in Turn-ofthe-Century Germany
by Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Erikkson, and Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality
by Pat Califia.
Jan Hansen is an artist living in Lansing, Michigan.
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is a lesbian activist and philosophy teacher, living in Chicago.
Emily Levine. "I am a 24-year-old groundskeeper at the University of Nebraska. I've
been taking photographs for eight years. Most of my pictures try to create an image, as
opposed to recording one."
Lynda Koolish lives in San Francisco and is working on a book about feminist poets.
Joyce Latham. "I keep recovering and am writing, singing, and making love in ole'
Balto - the great plastic city of the South."
Helen Moore does teaching and research in feminist studies at the University of Nebraska
and enjoys photographing her friends .
Harriet Malinowitz is a writer living in Mon tague, Massachusetts, and has co-created acourse in Lesbian literature at the University of Massachusetts.
Joan Nestle is one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City.
Oriethyia mountain crone is a writer living in Albany, N.Y. (and sometimes on the road).
Her fust book of poetry is Love Song to the Warriors.
Pagan is a bearded hag who never tires of seeing photos of The Great Haircut at the'79 Michigan Women's Music Festival. "Let's remember-like the snakes-to continue emerging into our new skins," she says.
Adrienne Rich's most recent book is Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose,1966·
1978.
JR Roberts lives in Cambridge, Mass.
Jane Rule lives in British Columbia, and is the author of Lesbian Images and several
novels and short-story collections, including Desert of the Heart and Theme for Diverse
Instruments. Her coliJmn "So's Your Grandmother" appears in Body Politic (Toronto) .
Joanna Russ lives in Seattle and is the author of numerous feminist science-fiction novels;
Kit Meets the Dragon, an adventure story for younger women and older women ; and On
Strike Against God, a volume of lesbian feminist prose.
Carol Seajay birthed Old Wives' Tales Bookstore in San Francisco and still works there.
She edits the Feminist Bookstores ' Newsletter and tries to find time to write in between
the two.
Anita Skeen is a poet and teacher living in Wichita, Kansas.
Karen Snider lives in Milwaukee, is a member of the national steering committee of the
Feminist Writers' Guild, and a co-founder of the Milwaukee Feminist Art Salon. Her work
has appeared in Amazon, a midwest joumal of women and Bansher. Journal of Irish Wall/en
Unit ed. She is especially fond of the oral tradition and performs her work whenever theopportunity arises.

IIIMary 'sojourner 'lives in Rochester, New York, and is a columnist for New Women'sTimes.
Susanna Sturgis is an occasional con tributor to off our backs, the Blade, and In Our
Own Write, the newsletter of the Washington Area Wom~n's Center. Lesbian Heritage/D.C,
a daughter of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, is her primary nonwriting commitment.
Jacquelyn Zita now teaches in the women's studies program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Joan Larkin is the author of a collection of poetry, Housework, a co-editor of A mazon
Poetry, and a founder of Out & Out Books.

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In the spring of 1977, a Tee Corinne solarized photograph of two women
making love appeared on the cover of Sinister Wisdom 3, followed by adeluge of requests for a poster. The poster was printed in the summer of
1977: a duplicate of that cover, black on gray, 17" x 22". You can haveyour own for a contribution of $3 .00 toward the survival of Sinister Wisdom
plus 50 cents to cover mailing costs. (They make nice gifts for friends, too;bulk rates available.)
Send $3.50 per poster to: Sinister Wisdom, Box 30541, Lincoln, Ne. 68503 .
Also available in feminist bookstores.
Sinister Wisdom
Box 30541
lincoln, Ne. 68503
I would like to subscribe to Sinister Wisdom.
_____ Enclosed is $7.50 for one year (4 issues), beginning with issue_____ Enclosed is $13.00 for 8 issues, beginning with issue

14.

14.

NAME ___________________________________ _ _ _ _ ___

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ADDRESS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - ZIP - - - - - - - - - - - Enclosed is ________ . Please send SW to my friend.
NAME _______________________________________________ _ADDRESS---- - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -____________________________________ ZIP ____________ _For out-<>f-U.8. subs: $9 for one year; $15 ~or two years; U.S. dollars only112

We are very happy to announce that next year the new editors andpublishers of Sinister Wisdom will be Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne and Michelle will begin reading manuscripts on January 1,
1981 . In the meantime we have selected enough prose and poetry tofill up the last two issues that we are publishing. We ask you please to
wait until January first to send more poetry, prose, or artwork to SW.
-Catherine and Hamer

SW BACK ISSUES, WHILE THEY LAST
Issue 4 (Fall 1977): stories of mothers and daughters and witches and lovers;
Joanna Russ's tale for the girlchild in all of us; Lesbian separatism from theinside; photo-essay; interview; reviews, letters and poetry. 96 pp., $2.25.
Issue S (Winter 1978): Susan Leigh Star, "Lesbian Feminism as an Altered
State of Consciousness"; Judith Schwarz, "Researching Lesbian History";
Michelle Cliff on speechlessness; Lesbian Day speech by Barbara Grier; fiction;
poetry; photo-essay; reviews; interview. 104 pp., $2.25.
Issue 7 (Fall 1978): myths, monsters, teeth, etc. Jane Caputi on patriarchal
fish stories; Judith Schwarz on being physically different; self-portraits inprose and poetry by Alice Bloch and Susan Wood-Thompson; feminist musings by Melanie Kaye; plus a wealth of fiction, poetry, reviews, drawings, andphotographs. 104 pp., $2.50
Issue 8 (Winter 1979): "did you say lu-uv?"; storytelling by Sherry Thomasand Audre Lorde; photographs by Deborah Snow; poetry by Judy Grahn;notes on deafness; essay on "that place where nothing is"; interview; reviews;"Scrambled Eggs"; and much more poetry and fiction. 104 pp. $2.50.
Issue 10 (Summer 1979): Special issue on being old and age, guest-edited by
Susan Leigh Star . Includes Barbara Macdonald and Baba Copper on their 65th
and 59th year, respectively; Audre Lorde on surviving cancer; interview with
Mabel Hampton; essays on nursing home women, the time trip, being under21; poetry; photo-essay; fiction. 104 pp. $2.50.

Issue 13 (Spring 1980): Special issue on Lesbian writing and publishing, guestedited by Beth Hodges. Elly Bulkin on racism and writing; Melanie Kaye on
Lesbian classics; graphics by Jerusha and Kaymarion; Frances Doughty and Charlotte Bunch on women's publishing; Linda J . Brown, Anita Cornwell, Ran Hall,
Felice Newman, Cris South on writing and publishing; reviews; interviews with
Lesbian publishers, and lots, lots more. 112 pp. $3.00.
(Add 60 cents postage for every 1-2 copies ordered)evelyn tor ton beck •sandy boucher

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manon zimmer

bradley • oreithyia mountain crone • lorie dechar • ruth
douglas • nancy fried • marilyn frye • joan gibbs •barbara grier • jan hansen • sarah lucia hoagland • lynda
koolish • joan larkin • joyce m. latham • emily levine •harriet malinowitz • helen moore. joan nestle • adrienne
rich • jr roberts • jane rule • joanna russ • carol seajay• anita skeen• karen a. snider • mary sojourner•susanna j. sturgis • jacquelyn n. zita • evelyn torton beck•sandy boucher • marion zimmer bradley • oreithyia

mountain crone • lorie dechar• ruth douglas. ~ nancy

fried • marilyn frye • joan gibbs • barba~a.; grter • janhansen• sarah lucia hoagland • lynda koolish • joan

larkin • joyce m. latham • emily levine· -harriet malinowitz• helen moore • joan nestle • adrienne rich • jr roberts •jane rule • joanna russ • carol seajay • anita skeen •karen a. snider • mary sojourner • susanna j. sturgis •jacquelyn n. zita • evelyn torton beck • sandy boucher$3