Sinister Wisdom 36
Winter 1988/89
Editor and Publisher: Elana Dy kewomon

Editorial readers and advisors: Barbara Ruth, Betty Dudley, Caryatis Cardea,
Cath Thompson, Dolphin Zelda Waletzky, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasmine Marah,
Joan Drury, Laura Post, Lisa Carlin, Lisa Gerick, Naja Sorella, Susan Jill Kahn,
Valerie Stoehr, Winn Gilmore
Contributing Editors: Gloria Anzaldua, Irena Klepfisz, Melanie Kayel
Kantrowitz
Typists and proofreaders: Cath Thompson, Cindy Cooper, Joan Drury, Kit
Quan, Susan Goldberg, Valerie Stoehr
Office help, correspondence, ads and accounting: Joan Drury, Nina Wouk,
Barbara Dinnerstein, Peggy Krouskoff
Thanks to Bobby Rothschild and Rebecca Kutlin of Tamed Technology
Distribution and mailing: Anita Schriver, Caryatis Cardea, Cath Thompson,
Debbie Fier, Dolphin Zelda Waletzky, Elizabeth Fides, Jasmine Marah, Leslie
Baker, Leslie Levy, Lisa Carlin, Tavie Tipton
Intern: Samantha Elin
Reader for the Womyn's Braille Press: Judy Freespirit
Cover design: Louise Rafkin
Cover art: Ellen Oppenheimer

SlN1SI'ER WISDOM, founded 1976
Fonner Editors and publishers: Harriet Ellcnbc:rger (aka Desmoincs)
and Catherine Nicholson (1976-81)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981-83)
Michaele Ucce11a (1~)
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983-87)
Copyright © 1988 Sinister Wisdom. All rights reserved to individual artists and authors.

ISSN: 0196-1 853

Sinister Wisdom· PO Box 3252 • Berkeley CA 94703

A Journal for the Lesbian Imaginationin the Arts and Politics_________________ Contents
Elana Dykewomon • Notes for a Magazine
8 Notes on the Themes (upcoming issues)
9 Margaret Robison • Because of These Things (prose poem)
11 Tryna Hope • In Her Voice (poem)
13 Rebecca Ripley • Don't Call Me Crazy (prose)
15 Mary Moran • 1st Admission (poem)
16 Winifred Eads • Brain Damage (prose)
18 J0- Ellen Yale • Shock (poem)
19 Maggie Kazel • Scarves (poem)
21 Laura Post • Holding In (poem)
3

§§§
22
23
25
26
29
30
33

Bethany. Untitled (poem)
Diane Averill • Center for Delinquent Girls (poem)
Rosario Caicedo • Letter From a Friend (poem)
Kendall· Like Your Other Callers (poem)
Katharyn Machan Aal • Jane Ann Dunton (1888) (poem)
Katharyn Machan Aal • Emely Dunton (1888) (poem)
Joan M. Ward • Therapism and the Taming of the LesbianCommunity (essay)
§§§

42
46
59
62
64
71
76
87

Feral Willcox • I Used to Live in That House (narrative)
Bea Loud • The Dead of Winter (narrative)
Chiah Heller-Zbloki • for michiyo fukayo; april 25, 1953july 8, 1987 (poem)
Chiah Heller-Zbloki • to the women who weep (poem)
Elana Dykewomon • The Story I Never Write (narrative)
Bettianne Shoney Sien • My Mother Played theAccordian (narrative)
Dee dee NiHera • Money Changes Everything (essay)
Mary Moran • Breeze Inn (narrative)

91
92
94
100

103

117
118
119
123
125
130

flyin thunda cloud rdoc • iz it 2 hard to admit thatwomyn hurt womyn? (prose)
Batya Weinbaum • Oasis (prose)
Diane Hugs • Therapissed (prose)
Rikki Westerschulte • Cutting (prose)
Testimony Section • Excerpts from the work of: Sharon
Sumpter • Kathy Moorhouse • Karla K. • Maria
LaVara • Yvonne M. Moonstorm • Bethany • Lynne
Yamaguchi Fletcher • Ruta (Mazelis) Windstar •Cheryl Marie Wade • Linda Stalker • Linda Marie •Janelle Lavalle • Mary Lou Daugherty • Louise
Wisechild
Barbara Ruth • Song of the Womon With Rope in Her
Hair (poem)
Marie Cartier • The Naturopath (poem)
jodi. Gretel (narrative)
Janet Aalfs • Branded (poem)
Rebecca Ripley • Still Sane, by Persimmon
Blackbridge and Sheila Gilhooley (review)
Letter from EI Cenote Writers' Workshop§§§ARTcover Ellen Oppenheimer • Bed Quilt (79" x 60" quilt)
10 Linda Marie Nolte • Untitled (drawing)
31-32 Persimmon Blackbridge and Sheila Gilhooley •Strackuille: the nurse and The Royal Hospital:
unladylike behaviour (photographs from Still Sane)
63 Linda Marie Nolte • Untitled (drawing)
90 Myra Fourwinds • City Life (photograph)
102 Judy Springer • head & heart line connection (drawing)
122 Judy Springer • Witch II (drawing)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Notes for a Magazine
Surviving Psychiatric Assault &Creating Emotional Well-Being in Our Communities
Writing the introduction for this issue has been harder than any
other. The material is difficult, painful; the issues are complex; alarge number of lesbians participated in selection, editing andkibitzing. I have friends and ex-lovers who were locked up; I havefriends and ex-lovers who are therapists, ex-therapists and antitherapists. They all had valuable things to say. During production, I dreamt frequently that I was locked up again; that themental institutions were left standing while the coffee-shops
where inmates planned our rebellions were razed. It was hard to
keep perspective on how personal the political canl shouldl does
get; how politically to interpret personal experience. I hope mylibra nature and the work of the other lesbians involved havebeen successful in creating an issue that bears witness, offers
analysis and criticism, gives hope and suggestions, sparks dialogue.
The call for submissions stated a dual intent: one, to provide aforum for women who have suffered psychiatric assault both inmental institutions and within the wider framework of any formof psychiatric therapy. And two, to ask and answer questions
about "sanityI craziness," "appropriate behavior," the nature ofhealing, the creation of values within our lesbian communities.
We received a tremendous volume of writing by women who
had been locked up or abused within therapy relationships.
These women are generally invisible on a day to day, meeting toconcert level. The last things we are likely to know about them(about each other) are that they got locked up, what happened tothem there and how they live with that experience in a daily way.
We have included as much of this writing as we have room for.
Much of it has been edited - condensed, excerpted, re-formated.
Nothing was edited without the author's consent, and wheneverpossible, participation. There is a wide range of opinion about theusefulness of labeling ("diagnosis"), drugs, different forms of3

therapies. The opinions of the authors don't necessarily reflect
the opinions of the editorial dykes.
I have believed for a long time that a radical analysis of what's
called madness has to be a major cornerstone of lesbian theory.
Every womon, of every age, color, class, ability, is threatened by
the existence of mental institutions. The place they "put you
away" when you "go crazy" - or when you "misbehave," refuse
to acknowledge male authority. Womyn are encouraged, more
and more, to seek "professional help" in order not to go crazy.
Why the idea of "losing control" is threatening deserves a paper
itself - groups who have very little power are afraid of losing
what privileges they have, police each other to avoid retaliationfrom their enemies, retreat from a world clearly out of control byprojecting the perfect self-image. Still, almost every womon I
have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge ofmadness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she
must be on guard constantly against "losing control" - of her
temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her
ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.
What is "crazy" of course changes from culture to culture,
between classes, over time. It is evident that governments andmen have a tremendous stake in defining what is and isn't real,
what can and can't be allowed. Though we know this, we haven't
successfully incorporated it into our personal and political lives.
As lesbians, we know what it means .to be called "sick,""deviant," "unnatural." Books and articles have been written
about how social control works - how labeling independent
women "crazy" keeps the majority of women in line. Separated,isolated, paid less, little or nothing for our work in and out of thehome, threatened with rape, incest, ostracization; trivialized,slighted, ridiculed; romanticized, idealized, sentimentalized we get stuck between cycles of outrage and fear of brutalization.
Next to the physical war against women (incest, battering, rape
within the family and on the street), there is the psychological war- the war against women's minds. For centuries institutionalized religion has been the most effective agent of the state in defining and enforcing "appropriate" behavior for women by class.
Where religion has lost some power or credibility in the 19th and20th centuries, psychology has stepped in to control how women4

behave.
I like to think this is women's liberation 101 - but it's insidious. For instance, I don't remember the phrase "dysfunctionalfamily" falling so easily off so many womyn's lips five years ago.
It seems to me that as the women's and lesbian movements
developed a radical analysis of the family - and as more andmore child abuse and incest was uncovered - something had tobe done to re-establish the "natural goodness of family life."
Somewhere along the line we stopped saying every family is adysfunctional family because the family is where women getfucked. Instead we started saying, my family was dysfunctional,
individualizing the experience and holding out hope that somewhere there is a happy mom-pop-kids sitting around the thanksgiving turkey middle-class-family that lesbians can use as a rolemodel for lesbian families. Now we share with other survivors ofdysfunctional families endless stories of disappointment andendless hope for repair. Our sense of outrage on behalf of ourselves and all women is dulled.
I hear a story of a young Black woman who cannot be convinced she doesn't smell bad; she scrubs her armpits with steel
wool. She has been sent to a rich, white therapist. I hear stories of
lesbians who put glass in their vaginas. They're in therapy. I hearstories of teenage girls who can't believe they're thin enough eventhough they're starving. They're in therapy. I know talented,
smart, engaging womyn who don't believe they can do anything,
who don't feel they can be effective. They're in therapy.
When we hate ourselves we think we should be cut, mutilated,
starved. We no longer seem to see these as social patterns but asindividual problems. What has stopped us in our tracks and has
us wandering from therapist to guru to astrologers and back,caught up in perpetually getting our shit together? Why aren't
bulimics radicalized and picketing Nutri Systems? Why aren't
womyn pulling deodorants off shelves? What happened to study
groups, to action groups, to rape speak-outs, to spray paintersand saboteurs? Women are the majority of psychosurgery's
victims, shock therapy is coming back as a treatment of choicewhy aren't there monthly (annual?) demonstrations at state
inental hospitals? Why aren't all the feminist therapists, who say
they are concerned with a radical analysis and new forms of5

healing, refusing to use the diagnostic labeling system that gives
power to the system? What happened to the spirit of rebellion?
Did it have an unhappy childhood, does it need bodywork?
Therapy. When we talk about institutions, and traditional male
psychiatry which teaches women to "accept our place," it's
relatively easy to maintain a rigorous criticism. But there are hundreds (thousands?) of lesbian therapists practicing what many ofthem believe is an alternative to traditional woman-hating psychiatry. This issue has two articles that are highly critical of theinfusion of psychotherapeutic values and models into the lesbiancommunity. Some of the other contributors are therapists, butthey have either written about their own experiences of psychiatric assault or their participation in it. We didn't get work fromlesbian therapists on radical analyses of healing relationships.
It may be that all therapy relationships, by virtue of both theircontent and form, de-politicize, pacify and condition womyn toaccept hierarchical models and individual solutions. It may bethat believing therapy can fix us is akin to believing the nuclear
family can be salvaged if only we can find the correct terminology
for it, or a professional authority who will give us the answer. Although well-intentioned, it may be that feminist therapists arecolluding with the reactionary trends of the '80s.
On the other hand, women I love and respect, with whom I
have shared two decades of political work, argument, analysiS,
have become therapists and social worker~*. Many are lesbians
who found themselves no longer physically able to hold careers
as carpenters or mechanics, who now work with recovering• The majority of the womyn I know who have become therapists are working
class. Many folks believe that therapy is an indulgence ofthe middle class, thatworking class people don't have the time or money to sit around talking about
what their mothers did to them when they were three. In the Bay Area, at least,
there are numerous working class and lesbian of color therapists, and many
working class womyn who make going to therapy a priority, as well as low andno-fee clinics for lesbians. Poor and working class womyn remain more likely to
get locked up in state institutions. One of the major questions about class andtherapy is how therapy takes white middle- and upper-class behaviors as thenorm, and uses tha t norm to rna ke working class people and people of color feel"deviant" for having different class and community values. Is the proliferationof therapists and therapy-goers in working class and minority communities
more evidence that they are being politically chilled out, or that they're taking
their emotional well-being in their own hands? Or both?

6

addicts, gay and lesbian teenagers, lesbians who have been stuck
inside cycles of welfare and state institutions all their lives. While
I believe that womyn will never begin to be free until we give up
on romantic love and stop going to therapy, there is a part of me
that hopes anyone determined to get therapy has the good fortune to find a healing relationship with lesbians like my friends.
It's clear that other things motivate lesbians to go into therapy(as healers and seekers) besides having given up on politicalactivism. Therapists say that they can provide us with new analyses of social dynamics - I haven't seen a lot of evidence of this,but I believe it's possible. Right now, we (mostly) depend on
therapists to interrupt behavior which we can't handle within ourfriendship networks. We don't have many ways to deal withlesbians who hit or slash or break the windows of their/our
houses, who call us names when we want to talk to them, who say
they're ready to kill themselves, who sit alone for weeks staringout the window. As long as we are not prepared for the days (ormonths) when some dyke can't "keep a grip" anymore, we will
all rely on therapists to take care of "inconvenient," threatening
or unendurable behavior.
And it's also clear that introspection and self-awareness are notluxuries, but part of a full and productive life. We -lesbian therapists and the rest of the lesbian community - need to find ways
to explore our depths outside of the fifty minute hour. I'd like to
see consciousness-raising groups make a comeback. I'd like to seegroups of ex-inmates form to share information*, support, encouragement, without "professional guidance." I'd like to see
forums on mental health in which therapists and the rest of us
participate as equal members.
More dream circles, more picnics. More talking, more writing,more issues like this one, where we can show each other not only
our center, but our farthest edge.

"Women working in the madness movement (in W AP A -Women Against Psychiatric Abuse, and Madness Network News, among others) have been here allalong. They ha ve done tremendous ground-brea king work on these issues, andare still offering su pport networks in some places. It has often seemed as if other
women's, feminist and lesbian group s feared getting too close to "those crazies."7

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Notes on the Themes#37. Open. As well as providing space for material that hasn't fit
our theme issues, we plan to publish papers on Lesbian Theory
that were presented at the 1988 NWSA Conference in Minneapolis, and possibly some work from the 3rd International Women'sBook Fair in Montreal. Due out in Marchi April.
#38. Italian-American Lesbians. Guest edited by Rose Romano:"What does it mean to be an Italian-American Lesbian?
There's an Italian-American culture, distinct from the Italian
as well as the American, yet many non-Italians don't seem to havenoticed-including some Lesbians, who make a special effort torecognize and respect other forgotten cultures. Why?
Italian-American Lesbians remember the witchcraft of their
grandmothers and mothers and still wear evil-eye horns, yet arethought by non-Italian Lesbians to be followers of a womanhating church. Why?
Non-Italians consider Italian culture to be patriarchal, yetmost Italian-American Lesbians grow up in families run, without
question, by women. Why?
Non-Italians believe a Lesbian is never tolerated in an Italianfamily, yet the Italian-American Lesbian most often finds herself
accepted as Blood according to Italian tradition, only ostracizedby families trying to Americanize themselves. Why?
What is the difference between north and south? What doesit mean to be Sicilian? What is Omerta? Omerta American-style?
How does it combine with Lesbian silence? What is l'Ordine della
Famiglia? La bella figura? La miseria? II Mezzogiorno? La via
vecchia? II mal occhio? La commare? Why don't you know how
to speak Italian?
Given the strength and self-sufficiency of the Italian-American woman; her place of importance in the family; her memory of
the Black Madonna; the tradition of Sappho in Sicily; and her
determined urging of guests to eat, don't you think she's a natural
as a Lesbian?
Basta! Write!" (Deadline: February 15, 1989)#39. An issue on Disability. (Deadline: June 15, 1989)
See the inside back cover for submission guidelines.
8Margaret Robison

Because of These Things
Because the old woman/ was possibly dying and I said,/ "Sheneeds a hand to hold," her breathing/ shallow, eyes dosed; - I
was standing/ in the hall outside her room/ in the insane asylum;
Because/ of the nurse who was efficient and cruel,! the nurse
who sat filling out forms, who rushed/ to block the doorway withher body/and I repeated: "I only said/ she needs a hand to
hold;" / Because the nurse shook a furious finger in my face/ andshouted: ''You're only a patient/ and don't you ever forget it;" /Because of these things, I write/ to say that it is true,! I am only
a patient/ and sixteen years have passed and II still cannot
forget. I cannot forget/ the woman who might have been dying/or how roughly two male orderlies/ straitjacketed a frightened
woman. II cannot forget her screaming/ or my own as I lay tied/
spread eagle to a bed. II cannot forget/ the macho nurse whostood/ scowling as she watched me shower/ while I felt helplessand invaded. / (But the water, how grateful I felt then/ for thestrong rush of water on my skin.)/ I cannot forget sitting in a
pool! of my own menstrual blood/ while visitors came and wentand gawked/ while I was not permitted/ to go down the hall tothe bathroom.
There is much I can't forget:/ barred windows, pigeons/ pecking
in the dirt/in the walled-in courtyard, smells/ of urine and pine
oil,! the stairs to the dining hall,! the greasy stairway railing,!
shattered glass on the steps.! I cannot forget/ the woman who
walked the halls all day/bouncing a red rubber ball/ or occupational therapy/and the woman turned away/because she usedprofanity, West Side Story/on the phonograph, "Somewhere/
There's a Place For Us." "Maria." / And the woman who masturbated/ in the bathroom with the handle/ of the toilet brush. I cannever / forget her blank face.

9Because of these things, because of the nurse/ who said I was only
a patient and the woman/ who needed a hand to hold,! I havenever forgotten./ Nor will I ever forget,! because of the pale
hospital walls/ with the secrets they hold/ of the lives of so many
women./ I am amazed those walls stand silent year after year./
I am amazed that blood/ doesn't leak through the paint/ like a
Rorschach/ of terrible roses.

untitled Linda Marie Nolte
10Tryna HopeIn Her VoiceOne night during a fire drill
weeds grew over the hospital walls
pulling pushing squeezing tightlywoven
until no one could get in
to turn on the heator the wateror the shock machines.
Choking crumbling
like time-lapse photography
while all of us stood there
our mouths and eyes like perfect O's
the building cracked and broke.
Bricks became rocks and sand.
The walls sagged and fell in a rush.
The ground shook huge and far.
I did that.
I called the weeds and I said,"Do this for me."and feetin my legs
I called on the strengththat goes
down
into the earthand becomes tangled with the fire
raging in its center.
Do this for mefor every Black woman who has been angry
who wanted to cry out
to beatto lift the chair and bring it
crashing downon the head of the white manat the end of the hall who
raises my meds until all I can do is whisper,
11

"Stop.

You are killing me.

And I want you to stop."

Shock me?
Shock me?
I won't have it.
I don't want your demons in my brain.
You keep them.
They're yours.
Not mine.
I closed my eyes
and I prayedbut not out loud where they could hear me.
I pulled those weeds up out of the center of the earth,dripping grease
and flames .
coiling
Up they cameshooting from the groundwrapping around those hospital walls
until they fell
like the icefrom my eyes
like the glassfrom my tongue
The cornfield out back trembled and danced.
And so did I.

Tryna is a social worker. This poem was inspired by her relationship with
one of her clients, a 58-year old Black woman.

12Rebecca Ripley

Don't Call Me Crazy
What do you mean when you call me "crazy?" That what I do
makes no sense to you? Then you mean you don't understandsomething. That's a statement about you, not me. Why do you try
to make it sound like you're saying something about me? Why
blame me for your limitation?
Do you mean you're scared of me? Do you mean you don't
trust me? Then why don't you say so instead of hanging a label
on me? If I've done something that makes you scared or distrustful, then you can say so outright. Or is it that I haven't done
anything? Are you reacting only to the labels you've heard others
use about me?
I took the labels seriously once, before I learned some history.
The medical profession made them up, the same medical profession that got its start in Europe by burning nine million traditional
healers as witches; that made death in childbirth commonplaceby delivering babies with unwashed hands; that keeps going by
cutting the wombs and breasts from women both sick andhealthy; that helped the Nazis by declaring psychiatric inmatesand physically or intellectually disabled people to be candidates
for extermination - before going on to "diagnose" the "disease"of Jewishness. It has found many ways to declare Lesbianism andhomosexuality diseases, and heterosexuality a treatment. Why
should I trust these casual killers to define a mind as "sick" or"healthy?" Why should you?
Are you really in a position to judge the quality of my mind?
I'm free to define myself as "mentally disabled" if I choose, but noone else can define that for me. In fact, I don't think I am mentallydisabled. I have mental abilities others lack. Plenty of social
disabilities have been created around this. In some cultures, it's
not safe to advertise oneself as a visionary.
And even if I sometimes act or feel in ways I don't understandmyself, does that make me different from everyone else? If I act
or feel ways I don't like and can't control, don't you think I feel13

scared and ashamed enough without your judgements? Do you
think it helps me w hen you casually dismiss me as meaninglessor useless? Or do you think it helps you? Does it get you out of
having to face my particular problems along with your own?
Does it give you an excuse to ignore or discount anything I say inthe future? What good do you think it does you to call me Crazy,
Psychotic, Wacko, Borderline, Emotionally Disturbed, Bananas,
Insane, Nuts, Clinical, Schizophrenic, Sick, Manic-Depressive,
Mentally III or any other cutesy or professionalized insult? Even
if you think it does you some good, it doesn't do me any.
I've been locked up plenty of times because some people didn't
trust me free. For reasons of their own, they didn't like how I
dress, how I talk, how I show feelings, who and what I likesexually, who I think should run the country, who I think does
run it. I've been locked up for lots of things that aren't supposed
to be crimes in a free country. The only excuse ever given was alist of long, latinized words that mean "crazy." Are you saying I
should be locked up? Forcibly addicted to dangerous drugs?
Electroshocked? Lobotomized? Those are the punishments forbeing labelled "crazy." I don't think you mean those things
because I doubt you think about them. But I do.

off our backs the best in feminist journalism-,,=r.n ',~h is inremational in scope and focuses on dil'use topics dealingpoor walnt'n, working class womell, minority women, priSOIl.

custO<-ry. and abortion. It's n~'er bun simple-minded. II's what I
think of as It-minism "_ M~nlyn Frye. alil/KIrorThc Po lilKs O( Reality• news from every conlinent - working
women's issues. health, reproductive
rigbts, Black women's issues. lesbian andgay rights• blow by blow reports of women's
confere nces
It book rcv;cws, ce mmelltIDes, tellers'
open to all feminist sides of tbe cun ent
debates on sexuality, reproductive
technology, and more ",A bargain · $15 for 11 issues a year.

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Name - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Addreu _ _ _ __ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ __I.~c~~~\s:'a'~'~~~=========================_~I
14

Mary MoranFirst Admission
Diagnosis
psychotic
catatonic
paranoidschizop hrenic
manic depressive
borderline personality
alcoholicthe professionals
recite litanies of labels
to name it everything but
what it is
INCEST
1.

2. Treatment
thorazine
elavilstelazine
etrafonmellaril
tofranilprolixin
sinequanlithiumcogentinseconaldalmanevaliumyou arelike a diabetic
and will need
to be drugged
for the restof your life
I'M NOT CRAZY

15

Winifred E. Eads

Brain Damage

Drive in the car with old white cadillac he won some oldbusiness deal he lost and won the car, my dad: me in the front seat,
marna in the back, me the bad girl spoil-spoil whole family taptap trapeze dance, I wanna fly back into heat of the. I look over at
him and say, "what would you do if I jumped out of this car rightnow?" He says nothing but sadness inside his eyes still shell inshock from world war was it two?
We're on his-their-my way to the mental hospital, local in the dust
teaching hospital for where they do-drop off the queers eachbatch that ends up where they should not end up at the inevitable
universities inevitably trying to kill themselves which appears tobe the only option in Indiana in when?
JUNE,1966

Drugged on stelazine, wherazine? eyes so blurr I canna read/
Zina, I call myself a secret name of Zina tell no one my real name/three times a week the shock treatments, all the roe does inIndiana in 1966, the current brood of. Sit in a circle and talk a tonof talk none of which makes that much.
no, don't talk, just sit and tweee. Circle of queers only nobody
says, nobody talks about what there is to talk about, us all beingthat which is reprehensible, there is not even thralldom of ashadow of gray lavender upon the walls, just shock of ourtreatment of ourselves and shock of theirs.
sit there inside that place and cat arch a preen for exactly one year,
don't care what happens to me after twenty-six of cat arch theirtreatments of me are not great arcs of light inside my heads but
instead low-down to the ground bitters in my throats and neobitters and no sign whatsoever that ever
could I live as
myself alive O?
16

JUNE,1988

Sitting among the pro-creee spills of this new dynamo dayroom:
home, I call this neo-house a home these days anyplace I lay myheads is house a home.
This particular bode-a bode the red magenta castle house a home:
YWCA lived here myself five years now. Before that six years inthe barn over on Vashon Island. Before that goddess only knows
where this or that building spread-eagled across a plaza andcasting me adrift. Haven't been locked up since I was. Today I am
forty-two years old and remarkably well-preserved in good
shape smiling and full of attributes I can't I - still can't yet
calculate all my attributes. To put it bluntly I am full of splendors.
I mean catch as catch can a whole passle of ruby color eyes forexample.
Been this way off and on high and mightily among my swabs.
Laugh a little cry a little. I can do both those things now and gladly
after ten years of sit-sit therapy sit inside one big chair or anotherbig chair. One time after four years it was a white couch. Most
uncomfortable couch ever I did sit on: white and hard with nogive and full of little mews like a herd of lowkey wildcats lived
inside that white on white couch but wild of the cats never didcome out to greet the light of day and neither did I although I viedfor change of scene and movement thereof. Best time worst time
was the time when 1.
bled my period all over that couch. Dependable deep claret colorof burnt silences of rust-rust my reds and on white of that couch
whew!
this day I draw up all my foreheads and.
this day I live inside this spot guess girlshed room. I am truly
better off now than never I was before like I am now. Writing.
Drawing. Doing my yin-yang yogas over all traces of my stars
hang dangle from the ceilings of old worlds. There is the threat
screee they do re maybe lock me up if 1.
but I won't and I don't. ferrycart them-me across deep of mywaters, I will not blood drown I will live each day catch as catchas. can.
17

Jo-Ellen Yaleshock

the hot poker moves
gradually
from the fire of my consciousness
to that deep placebehind the eyes.
searing the flesh attached
to bonetracing circles in charcoal
where once was young skin,
skin grown ancientpulling its own weightacross the white-hot pain.
those twin blue holes now
are ashes,
gray piles of litter, debris
of once healthy dreams.

18

Maggie Kazel

ScarvesTo Michelle and the Lexington Control Unit inmates

You look calm, she said.
And I do - I took a week off.
Hold on to it, she said, the warning
flash in her eyes,
as she left me there,
up to my ears in teenagers,
confined due to crisis,on this mental ward.
I lasted two shifts.
Six and a half hours into the first
we restrain a young girl.
My blood chills as we proceed.
I am violating some higher
code of ethics. The one they
do not pay me for, the one
I pay for in moments like these.
I go home on time, watch t.v.,
do not tell my lover anything
remarkable about this nite of work.

Because I had forgotten .
The significance of thisforgetting slaps me in the faceduring my next evening's work.
I call home.
I say what I saw, what I did,and did not do for the
young woman during her
res tra in t."
II19But there aren't enough words.
Next morning I cut off all myhair. It's been a bad winter.
It wasn't just the girl.
I weep, looking in the mirror.
For all practical purposes
I have quarantined myself.
I call in sick. I take aleave of absence. I wear
scarves, because it's still winter,
I live in a drafty house,and people will stare.
The shame of being part of her worldis in the funny bald spots."
As I wrap my head eachmorning in my woolworth's
3 for 2 dollars scarf I findmy humility, my courage to
go on, my memory.
I did not lay a hand on her.
I did not say to her stop acting
out, this is inconvenient, thisis not allowed, you are being dangerous
to us. Never mind we rubbed salt in yourmost private wounds.

reprinted from The Evergreen Chronicles, Sept. 198620

Laura Post

Holding In

My biggest fear
Is to be like them
Enjoying their helplessness
Judged by all
Given in to their distance
It's called schizophrenia
Actually I fear psychosis most
Loss of control
Letting people see my insides
It might happen if I burp or fart
So I don't
And feel tight all the time
Drinking relieves me
But then I'm paranoidThat I've let too much out
And have fleetingly thought
Of killing those with whom I've shared
I want to be able to make love with a stranger
Without feeling guilty, odd, distantEscapist
Peeling pleasure and communication
And not see my mother in all people21Bethany

Untitled

I~e never had a masturbatory fantasy and
now I probably never will.
Long before I masturbated with any regularity
my psychiatrist wanted to know what I
thought about when I did.
Every time I saw him he would turn tothis subject.
I thought it was a little strange, but
those days I thought everything was strange,
so I let it pass.
Now I know - I was the schizophrenicand he was the doctor and the books
told him
if he wanted to cure me,what he had to analyze were my masturbatory
fantasies.
If he'd only told me; I would have cooperated.

I would have gone right home,
played with my clit andfantasized for hours.
Anything to be cured in those days.
Now when I'm coming,
if a fantasy starts to surface,

I push it back.
How could I possibly experience
anything so heavy as
THE KEY TO THE CURE OF MY MADNESS,
while flat on my back,panting and shivering under the covers?

22

Diane Averill

Center for Delinquent GirlsIna dirt-dark room
suitcases flow in rows.
Folded flowers. Snapdragons.
Sun's locked outside like a pimp.
At odd angles to each other,some suitcases look likebroken limbs.
At the Glass Club last June
Deanna watched people
dance the Black Lint.
She'd go home. Practice. Comeback.
But each timethe dance had changed.
She never danced there.
Here, Deanna can't talkto Linda. Each with a recordof prostitution, caught
in a plot to run.
At night they dance to records,
mirror each other. They practice.
On dish duty, one girl turned
the sprayer on Susan
to see her breath quicken
to watch her
small breasts swim
under the wet blue
surface of her teeshirt.
Outside on smoke break
the girls play Ring Around theRosie,

23

circle the girl who sprayed
Susan.
They sing and linkarms like a wire fence.
Teresa sits alone,
webbed smoke in front of her
face .
Teresa keeps a dreamjournal. Always dreams
in color. Whitelines on the black top
remind her of cocaine.
"Can't cross those lines."
Beyond, the fence
seems painted on landscape. A
prop.
"Some girls scale it when theyrun."Wind blows the leavesof the Sunburst Locust
so far to the right'
the trunk begins to spin.
Ashes ashes we all fall down.
But the girls keep singing.

24Rosario Caicedo

Letter from a Friend

From my cage I watch them they fly around the empty bird feeders.
In this place they starve any creature
to death. They hate not only birds
but all kinds of animals and people.
I've tried to run away twice
since the last time you saw me.
No success. The first attempt was after
my cagemate tried to jump from thesecond floor window and two nurses
caught her by the feet and she managed
to break a piece of glass and began
to cut her wrists and the resident
on call came and he almost fainted and
I was watching it all from the door of
my cage that leads into another cage.
I figured if I waited too longaround here I might do the samething. That's why I've tried to leave. Twice.
But the gates of this cage are difficult
to break and I don't want to try the glass
on my skin - not yet anyway.
This is a big cage. Big and expensive,
my family reminds me. From the outside
it looks like a country club. Lotsof grass and tennis courts. Even shops
where I (can you believe it?) bought
makeup to hide the dead color of my face.
There are guards called clinicians whotake us for walks. Once, while we were being
led from building # 1 to building # 2
my cagemate peed right in front of every one.
Took down her pants and did it. Right there.

25

Near the pool. That's when I tried to run
away the second time. No success that time either.
I overheard a guard telling another that I wasa born loser. Sometimes they can be right.
Often I take the notebook you sent me andwrite my first and last name several times.
Pages and pages filled with the same words
so I won't forget. If I have to ask again
who am I? in the morning, they'll
keep me here forever and I'll go nuts
with one more get well card frommy relatives. God, I somehow didn't
realize I had so many. Relatives andcards, I mean. After I finish writing
this letter I'll go back to my notebook
and my name. But who wouldn't forgetwith so many drugs given at night
when one is always weak and the knot
is growing in the stomach and I am afraid
it'll end up all tangled up in the head.
So I take all the drugs they give me.
I even smile at the nurse. A sweetchildlike smile and after I swallow
everything she pats me on the headand says "good girl, good girl."
It was good to see you the otherday. Good to know you also noticed
the empty bird feeders. So nice to
see you laughing when I said thatthe birds were giving us angry looks You've been the only one so far who
realized I was just making a joke.
Thanks for the postcards and the record.
And come soon. I am not so far away from you.
But next time bring food for the birds. Promise?

26

KendallLike Your Other Callers
The nurse treats me like your othercallers. "She's not receiving calls.
She refuses mail. She wants
no contact with anyone
while she is here.'f I say you
might change your mind.
"She will not change." ButYou need my touch. You need my handsmoothing your hair back from your face.
You need your shoulders held, you needto rest your head against my chest, mybelly, you need to lie beside me
while I kiss your hands, your breasts,
your neck. I know. I am Alone among your things in what was
just two weeks ago, our home. I lean
my face into your blooming paperwhites,
I play the Pavarotti tape we made love toin the summer. Ave Maria, I dust yourtables, I wipe my tears in the neckof your coat, I empty your ashtrays andmove the boxes you were packing up
to leave me when you lost Your voice, thick and soft, yourvoice that tells poems: I listen
to the radio tapes on which
you read about your dolls.
I rescue from the mouthof the vacuum a satin rose
the size of a tooth. This makes -27

You lie protected now, riding out the wavesof the illness you knew would come again.
the one you hid from me. Were you
afraid I'd be too small to hold you? Did
you think I'd run away? Did you makeyourself invisible and resent me for notseeing? Were you leaving to protect me,
or to protect yourself from me? I wantA song, Gracias a la Vida, to cradle
you in my arms: I want a dancefor you with angels over that
hospital bed. I want a voice
for you to hear me say this cannot
stop us. This is smaller than we are,we can ride it out together, we canheal each other, I can love you morethan you have ever dreamed. I'mIn your heart. If you lose yourway, my flat feet will be
here, anchored, waiting. As yours
have been for me when I was lost.
My flat feet will be stomping
their own rhythms while the windblows through your heart and howls you
home to sleep again in the empty spacebeside me where I flail against a nightmare
in the long, in the long long night.

28

Katharyn Machan Aal

Jane Ann Dunton(1888)

They took Emely away last week.
They said she needed rest, could nottake care of herself as she should.
"A grown woman shouldn't act like that,"they said, "getting so frightened and sad."Yes, there were days on end she didn't
smile, wouldn't change her collar, hardly
touched the food on her plate.
But she'd speak to me: "Dear sister, don't
despair. There's more stars in the sky than you see.""She's always read too much," said Mother,"when she should have been making friends and met
young men, the right young men."
Father just stared and shrugged and muttereda few vague words about weak blood.
It happened fast: the day they found herburning her hair in a china bowl.
She'd cut it off, first timein her whole life, and there it lay,
black nest aflame in stinking air.
Now she's gone to someplace quiet,
no books or papers allowed, no scissors
and no pens. "A poem
is like a part of you set free,"she told me once. Oh, Emely.

29

Katharyn Machan Aal

Emely Dunton(1888)

I hear his horses clop on cobblestone,
their harnesses' brief music all that breaks
the silence of my days. In here alone
I know a special kind of time; it takes
my breath and makes new stories no black bookhas ever held. "And how are you today?"he asks, his crow's face taking on a lookmy heart screams out Trust not! I've learned to say"Much better, Doctor, thank you, very calm"- while sharp within me my rage grows, a knife
I'd use to cut away these walls no balmof medicine can make me call good life.
Look at him now; I see it in his eyes:
he fears and hates what waits beneath my lies.

30

From Still Sane, by Persinunon Blackbridge and Sheila
Gilhooly, see review on page 125. Photos courtesy of Press Gang.

I told them what he did to me but they said I was making it up, I was
crazy, that I secretly wanted him and I was going to get in bad trouble
for telling stories about people who were only trying to help me. I never
told again even though it happened again. And again. And again.
What I want to know now is-do you believe me? Do you?

31

On the behaviour mod ward they had this system where they gave us
tokens for doing what they wanted, and took them away for being bad.
You had to pay tokens for anything you wanted to do, even taking a bath.
I remember I had this green plaid skirt and matching sweater I used to
get tokes for wearing' cause they were trying to change me into their ideaof a proper woman.
So this one morning I decided to put on my exalted outfit and net a few
tokens. I appeared at breakfast all tar ted up and this nurse said, "Oh! Youlook very nice!" in this really phony voice she always used for the patients. Then she told me I'd look better if I shaved my legs. I remember
feeling all embarrassed and stupid even though I'd decided long before
that shaved legs were silly. After breakfast I signed out the razor andwent off to the bath. I think at that point I was planning to shave my
fucking legs.
I remember the rush of blood as I slashed as hard as I could, sort of notlooking and then looking, seeing the skin all white and puffy-like, splitting, and then blood welled up and I sat there and let it run in the bath.
After a while someone knocked on the door to use the bath so I got up.
I went to the desk and slapped the razor down in front of the nurse withmy bloody hand and said, "I'm finished with the razor." She looked atme real angry-like and said, "You'll be sorry for that." They stitched me
up without anesthetic and I remember it hurt like hell but I pretended it
didn't.
32

Joan M . Ward

Thera pism and the Taming of the
Lesbian Community
1

Introduction
Therapism is not a word you'd probably find in the average
Lesbian's vocabulary.2 But oh, how it permeates our communities. Therapism overtakes a community when too many of its
members undergo therapy. Actually in this day and age therapism is like herpes - all you need do is rub up against it a little
and you've got it. Although preferred, no personal experience
with therapy is required. Since so many Lesbians have turned totherapy, those of us who haven't are also influenced by the behaviors therapy teaches. So therapism is more than just the behaviors
learned by women who have undergone therapy. It has become
the standard of behavior by which our community judges all of
its members.
Therapism emphasizes feeling - having and expressing feelings. Because of this focus on emotions, therapism encourages
nurturing, tact and acceptance - all traditionally feminine ways
to behave. According to stereotype, women are the emotional
gender and men are the rational gender. There are several common ways that oppressed people fight stereotypes. The way
therapism has adopted is to say, "So what if we're emotional.
Emotional is the best way to be, and you're just jealous. Womanhood is superior. Worship the goddess. Revel in your menstrual
blood. GlOrify your emotions." Now our community embraces
these stereotypes with a zest. This makes me more than just a little
suspicious.
Standards of Behavior
It is important to point out that therapism does not necessarilyequal therapy. Perhaps the goal of therapy is for us to be morehonest about our emotions, for us to learn that it's OK to feelcertain emotions that we've been conditioned not to feel (e.g.,anger, pride, etc.). This may even be a good idea in certain
33

situations. Whatever the goals of therapy, therapism is the resulting doctrine in our community. And therapism says you must feel
- usually at the expense of rational thought. There is an entire setof standards of behavior that follows this basic premise. Of course
these standards were not devised by some devious Lesbian who
wanted to harm the community. They are an attempt to establish
ethical ways of dealing with one another. Unfortunately they
have been far from successful.
I have said that therapism requires you to feel. I know thisbecause everyone is always saying how they feel. ''When you
interrupt me, I feel as if you aren't listening to me." ''When you
raise your voice, I feel frightened." ''When you are late, I feel you
don't care."I find it redundant for someone to continually use the phrase
I feel as a disclaimer before every opinion. Why say, "I feel you
don't understand," rather than, "You don't understand."? I've
never credited anyone with infallibility. When you continually
use these disclaimers, I feel insulted. (That's a little therapy joke.)Or, equally annoying, I think you're a self-effacing wimp. And,believe it or not, when you say, "I feel you don't understand,"some of us hear you call us "stupid" anyway. For all your attempt
at tact, there are those of us who are good translators and don't
buy the sweet talk.
This I feel language encourages us to judge everything by how
it makes us feel. If we go to a lecture or read an article on somepolitical topic, therapism encourages responses such as, "Theauthor seemed very hostile to me," or "She made me feel very
frightened." Rather than encouraging us to evaluate the substance, therapism encourages us to examine how her words madeus feel. This promotes a microscopic view. It encourages us to lookat most events in terms of one person's behavior affecting anotherperson's emotions.
Of course, once one has recognized and expressed how she
feels, process begins. After all, you have made yourself vulnerable
by sharing your emotions. It would be cruel for the other person
not to reciprocate. Process becomes the means by which women
either singularly or together dissect their feelillgs surrounding an
incident. I recall the first time a woman explained to me that theprocess of getting there was just as important as reaching the goal.
34

I agree with this idea. It is important to be ethical in the means we
use to achieve our ends. It is also important to recognize that welearn things in the struggle along the way. But today, we frequently process ourselves to a standstill. Process now is the goal.
FriendshipIn the good old days - pre-therapism - friendships weremade in a variety of ways and were various in nature. We spentendless hours exchanging opinions, brainstorming ideas andtelling life stories. During that era, bad times were the exception,
not the rule. We knew tha t friends were there for us in times ofcrisis just as they were there in good times and even in boringtimes. This knowledge assisted in getting us through bad times.
And we were further assisted by knowing that our friends would
not be there if the crisis went on indefinitely. We expected that ourfriends would overcome their problems in a reasonable period oftime. In other words, our friendships were based on the belief that
we were strong. And, because we assumed we were strong, we
also assumed that we could triumph over difficult situations.
Therapism teaches us quite a different way to be friends. In thefirst place, one must take one's problems to a therapist so as not
to overburden one's friends. If one doesn't have any friends, one
doesn't have to make any. Once in therapy, women come back totheir friends with a whole different set of expectations. Now wehear a lot about "getting needs met." We hear ad nauseam how
our actions make our friends feel. Friends don't ask friends foradvice. They have their therapists for that. Friends ask friends totake care of them, not to advise them. Friendship is now based on
the assumption that we are weak rather than that we are strong.
Instead of being a delightfully varied experience, friendship now
consists almost entirely of nurturing or being nurtured.
And let us not forget about "safe space." A major problem withthese therapistic means of communicating is that they can be sodamn manipulative. "Safe space" is perhaps the biggest manipulator. At one time safe space for Lesbians meant space where we
could show affection for each other without fear of heckling orverbal abuse. It meant space where we could dare to look like
Dykes without fear of physical assault. This kind of safe space
was particularly important to working class Lesbians and Les-35

bians of Color who did not enjoy the relative safety that academic
communities offered white Lesbians. 3 However, today the term
"safe space" indicates something entirely different. It means
safety from each other. As far as I can tell, "safe space" is now anenvironment where a woman can express her emotions or
feelings without fear of criticism. Safe space is a good example of
how therapism has taken away our ability to discern theappropriate application of political ideas - sometimes
popularizing these ideas past the point of significant meaning.
Political Ramifications

Let's talk politics. Politically speaking, what has therapism
done to the Lesbian Community? Do you remember what theexpression the personal is political originally meant? It meant that
all those small, personal day-to-day things we did had political
impact. Where we lived, who our friends were, where we worked
and how we spent our money were all political choices whether
we liked it or not. Now it means that working on personal
problems equals political activism. The more time you spend
giving or taking support or nurturing, the more politicallygroovy you are. As a result our community has become politicallyimmobile.
When a lesbian judges everything in terms of how it makes her
feel, she becomes very emotionally vulnerable. She cannot take abold stand on anything for fear of being criticized. Or she cannot
criticize for fear that the community will disown her. Althoughsupport and safety have always been important to us, our community used to be based on movement. Now, we are so "safe" wecannot move.
Therapism has taught us to find everything equally upsetting.
I see Lesbians respond to minor disagreements with other women as if they'd been raped. How did we lose our perspective?
We are so emotionally vulnerable that we cannot distinguishbetween a philosophical difference and a physical assault. Lesbians seem to be spending most of their time being upset witheach other rather than recognizing and fighting the real enemies:
male dominance and violence.
Therapism also tells us that we cannot trust our intellects
because they have been corrupted by male-dominated society.
36

We must trust our "natural" feelings because they are our essence
as females. What makes us think our emotions have not beenequally corrupted by male culture? It is certainly true that while
we remain emotionally vulnerable, refusing to use our intellects,
fighting among ourselves in our safe space, we pose absolutely nothreat to our oppressors.
Therapism teaches us to make our actions consistent with our
feelings. No longer do we try to make our actions consistent withour beliefs. One example is the Lesbian baby boom. I refer, ofcourse, to the explosion of Lesbian motherhood we've been experiencing lately. I can see several problems that make this baby
boom politically unwise for us. Yet there is an appalling lack of
discussion in our communities about the politics of having children. Remember, Lesbian motherhood "feels right." And safe
space means no criticism of feelings.
Therapism has encouraged us to do what "feels right" to the
exclusion of political analysis. As a result our community is tolerating behaviors we used to find abhorrent. The resurgence ofbutch/femme and sadomasochistic activities are good examples.
Women who demand the right to play butch/femme and/or
sadomasochistic roles because it feels right are failing to accept
responsibility for the larger political ramifications of their personal actions .. .a perfect example of therapism's approach to thepersonal is political.
Support Groups & AA
Many Lesbian mothers are forming support groups, as are
Lesbian incest survivors, Lesbian adult children of alcoholics,
Lesbians battered by Lesbian partners and on and on. If it begins
to sound like a list of victims, it's no wonder.
The support group is a direct manifestation of therapism in ourcommunities. Where we once formed CR (Consciousness Raising) groups, we now have support groups. The difference between the two types of groups is striking. The goal of the CR
group was to raise our awareness of our oppression so that we
could fight it. The goal of the support group is to band women
together to take care of one another. Although they may claim
differently, one can see that the majority of women in support
groups spend most of their time nurturing one another. Perhaps
37the original intent of the support group was to give women thestrength to overcome their specific hardship. However, I see littleof the overcoming or moving on to action. Support groups havebecome self-perpetuating systems of dependency, once again
encouraging weakness rather than strength.
A good example of the support group phenomenon in ourcommunity is Alcoholics Anonymous. Certainly no one can deny
the importance of Lesbians overcoming drug and alcohol dependencies. Still, the method one uses to overcome these dependencies is important. AA, like many other therapistic ideas ourcommunity has adopted, escapes with amazingly little examination. I think it's time we had a look.
A concept fundamental to AA is that of alcoholism as a disease.
The first of the twelve steps proclaims the alcoholic's inability tocontrol her drinking.4Like other manifestations of therapism, AA
once again teaches us that we are weak, that we are victims ofsomething beyond our own control. For Lesbians to believe that
we have no control over selected personal behaviors is politicalsuicide. In order to overcome our oppression it is vital to recognize and believe in our own individual strength. Most of us haveheard the idea that to be truly strong one must know when to be
weak. This paradox is very misleading. Yet it is a basic concept for
AA people. Alcoholics Anonymous promotes the idea of strength
through weakness in its insistence on a "Higher Power."
AA stresses the idea that its members can believe in God inwhatever form God might take to them. For example, Lesbians
are free to believe in the Goddess rather than God. On the surface
this sounds very open-minded. However, there is no hiding thefact that AA wants its members to believe in an all-powerful,external deity. Those of us who believe that we are the goddess
and that the only deity in existence is the one within ourselves areshit out of luck. AA material is full of submissive suggestions like#7 of the twelve steps, "Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings."s Needless to say, I find this spiritual advice to bequestionable. It further insures the timidity and passivity of those
Lesbians involved with AA.
Quite frankly, AA solves the problem of alcohol dependency
by replacing it with a dependency of another sort. In order toovercome alcohol abuse one must depend on a "Higher Power."38

Additionally AA makes its members dependent on the AA
group. Frequent attendance of meetings is expected of members
lest they start to drink again. As long as AA convinces its members that one drink will do them in, they will cling to the group outof fear of their own fragility.
The bottom line is that AA doesn't offer any real improvementfor our community. In that it may offer sobriety, it might wellbenefit some individual Lesbians. But the ideal solution to Lesbian chemical dependency would benefit both the individual andthe community. As long as we remain convinced that the AA
method is the most successful one, we will not look for a betterway. By encouraging weakness that needs continual support
rather than strength that enables us to move on to other things,
AA contributes to our oppression. Rather than looking at AA asa temporary solution until a better one can be found, our community is now using 12-step programs for all kinds of things including drug addiction, eating disorders and "loving too much."
Lesbian Spirituality
Although AA clearly teaches a Christian spirituality, therapism in the Lesbian Community really teaches more of thepagan beliefs. A combination of Dianic Wicca, Eastern philosophy and "new age" spirituality seems to be popular today.
However both the AA spirituality and the more popular''Woman's Spirituality" teach helplessness. Many of you will sit
up at this point and loudly object. Woman's Spirituality claims toteach strength. But this claim can be deceptive.
Those of you who have been in therapy recently or haveobserved your friends go through it (just about all of us) havewitnessed how many therapists are into Woman's Spirituality.
You need not shop around much to find therapists who'll guide
you through creative visualization, teach you self-hypnosis andmeditation, clear your aura and clean your chakras. There areeven therapists who've started ritual groups.
But once again there has been little political analysis of thisphenomenon. At first glance one sees the idea of powerfulness.
We are told we can create our own reality in a very tangible way.
Light a candle, say your words of power and that new job, newcar, new lover can be yours. But with power comes endless39

personal responsibility. So Woman's Spirituality teaches thethreefold law which basically says that whatever you do comesback to you threefold. This leads us to another concept common
to Woman's Spirituality, karma. Karma is sort of tied into thethreefold law but approaches it backwards. Since everything you
do comes back to you threefold, it only follows that whatever
happens to you is the result of something you did previously. You
are responsible for everything that happens to you. It is nowonder that most Lesbians I've know who are into Woman's
Spirituality are amazingly passive - particularly when it comesto political action. According to karma, a woman who has been
raped has no one to blame but herself. Furthermore, the threefold
law teaches us to leave known rapists alone. Any harm we dothem will only hurt our karma. And the rapist will eventually"get his" threefold some time later anyway (if not in this life, ina future life). These beliefs are almost identical to what our maledominated, Christian society has been telling us for years.
Women are responsible for the abuse they suffer at men's hands.
Bad things will happen to women who try to hold men responsible. If this is teaching Lesbians to be powerful, I fail to see it.
As a woman who believes much of what Dianic Wicca has toteach, I am appalled at the transformation of this information
within a therapistic community. It once seemed logical to me thatradical politics and Dianic Wicca would go hand in hand. But myexperience with the women of my community has been quite theopposite. Those Lesbians who are into Witchcraft usually claim
not to be very political (and believe me, they're not). Furthermore, most Dykes I know with radical politics (and granted they
are fewer these days) find Lesbian Witchcraft to be a joke.
Therapism has caused this schism. So it is not until we solve theproblems of therapism in our communities that our spirituality
will fuel our activism again.
Conclusion
It becomes very clear as we analyze further what's going on in
our community that therapism is doing us harm. It has taught usthat we are basically fragile and weak. The language of therapism
is full of talk about empowering or enabling because we assume
that on a personal level we don't have power to begin with. True,40

as an oppressed group, Lesbians lack significant political power.
However, therapism doesn't address Lesbians as an oppressedgroup. It addresses us as individuals. And it tells us that asindividuals we need to have personal power because we ain't got
it to begin with. In addition, therapism teaches us to judge everything in terms of how it makes us feel emotionally. It tells us thatfriendship and caring must be expressed primarily throughnurturing. It teaches us to be tolerant, passive and apolitical.
I remember one day when I was very young, my grandmotherexplained to me her amusement over the corruption of the wordsquare. Calling someone a square was to ridicule that person forbeing too conservative, too cautious, too old-fashioned. But whenmy grandmother was a child, calling someone a square was acompliment. It meant the person was well-rounded, balanced
and level-headed. As individuals, we need to become moresquare in my grandmother's sense of the word. As squares we'dtake for granted that we are innately strong. We'd start dealing
with specific political topics once again rather than just vague
personal "issues." We'd start to "empower" ourselves in moretangible ways like owning more women's businesses or thwarting rapists rather than simply solving individual emotional
upsets. As squares we'd have less therapy and more friendship.
Our friendships would consist of excited philosophical discussions and work on common projects as well as support during
difficult times. Our friends would challenge us as well as listen to
our troubles. And as friends we would show each other what itmeans to be strong individuals committed to being a communityof Lesbians.
1. 1'd like to thank Tara Ayres, Lori Saxe and Edie Dixon for theirthoughtful comments and ever stimulating conversations.
2. Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female
Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 155-160.
3. Conversation with Tara Ayres.
4. Alcoholics Anonymous, third edition (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1976), p. 59.
5. Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 59.
Note: this essay has been substantially edited. The full manuscript isavailable from the author. Send SASE to Joan Ward c/o Sinister Wisdom.

41

Feral Willcox

I Used to Live in That House

I used to live in that house, the half of it with the screen porch.
Mrs. Macassar lived in the other half, still does, and rented myhalf, still does, to two women I know well, Millie and Lee. I
imagine they don't think I know them anymore. That's because
they don't know I sit under their window every night and listen
to them. They could know if they wanted to know. People could
know about lives different than their own (different meaning not
as good). But mostly they don't want to know, like they don't
want to know about me.
I can hear Millie and Lee pretty clearly through the window by
their bed, and through the other one by their couch in thesummer. During the cold months I listen through the heater ventsfrom the basement. Mrs. Macassar never locks the basement; I
remember that from when I lived there.
It's not like Millie and Lee are the most interesting people in theworld to listen to. They go on about politics, about saving theworld, and about how great Lesbians are (except the ones they
happen to be down on at the time). I remember conversations liketheirs; I used to have them in that very house. This morning theytalked about Rae. I saw Rae today, Millie says. Oh yeah? Did she
speak to you? ... No, she crossed the street as soon as she saw me... Good thing there wasn't any traffic. I can't believe she still doesthat ... It's been two years .... Then they talked for an hour about
groceries and their plans to go out West.
Millie used to be my best friend and some years back I waslovers with Lee. Yeah, I was one of the girls, one of the "community." I even worked at the bookstore part-time. I went to potlucks
and meetings, therapy, dances and events. I read Adrienne andMary Daly. I listened to Meg and Chris, Alix and Sweet Honey in
the Rock. I recovered, discovered and uncovered the patriarchy
within and without. I protested, refused to protest, created myown reality, ate macrobiotic, celebrated solstice and healed my42

self with crystals, the whole bit. What happened? I don't reallyknow, to tell you the truth. I still basically believe in all those
things. I don't really know what happened.
Millie and Lee know, though. For them it's simple. I went
CRAZY. Otherwise, how would a white middle class college
educated political dyke end up on the streets. CRA2Y, a word
used to cover more territory even than the word LOVE. I treasure
the times I hear them talk about me. They are rare and usually
brief. I memorize the words and savor them like lozenges. I repeatthem over and over like mantras: "She just went crazy. I tried tohelp her, found a therapist to see her for free. I tried to feed her."It's true, Millie did try to feed me for a while. So did a few other
women but finally they all stopped. It was too much of a strain tosee me. More and more I wasn't like them. So I'd do something tooffend them, one by one. It amused me to figure out what it was
I did each time. Maybe I laughed too loud or said something tootrue. Maybe I wore something I found in their trash. Who knows.
Finally they all stopped.
The only contact I have anymore is with a woman named Roseann. She works at a restaurant around here called Frank's. Every
day she works (six days a week) she bags up some of the leftovers
carefully in a small bag and throws them out with the others in abigger bag. The small bag she always throws out at the edge of thedumpster a little to the right of the door. Every night, after myvigil under Millie and Lee's window, I walk over to Frank's andget the bag. With that and with what I scavenge and lift, I get by.
There's really a lot to eat in the city. For instance, the people at thebagel store over at Ansley Mall do a similar thing. They bag up all
the old bagels to keep them separate from the other trash, not thatany "street person" I know would mind eating a dirty bagel, still
it's the gesture that counts. Roseann's gesture counts. It means
she knows I exist.
There are many weeds you can eat. I only know two of them,lambsquarters and little purple violets. Some time in her life
Millie had been near the edge I went over and lived partly on
weeds, wild pears and crabapples. The two weeds I eat I remember Millie told me about back when we were friends. She told mea bunch more but I only remember those two. I get great pleasurein the summer from making a big salad out of lambsquarters and43

purple violets. I eat them with my fork and smile with every bite
thinking about all the vitamins I am getting.
I was in a group once with a rich dyke, an heiress. I remember
thinking how weird it was for her to be in a room with me, who
couldn't pay car insurance (it seemed important at the time) andHally who needed serious work on her teeth, and Liz who lived
in two rooms with two kids. We all pretended we didn't needanything and Jean pretended she couldn't walk out the doornight or day and buy a new Porche with cash. Later I thought
about how I pretended spending $5 on breakfast out couldn't
feed a lot of people a lot of beans. Jean wasn't in that group long.
Maybe I did go crazy, though. Maybe that is what happened.
I remember feeling like I was on a stage doing a silly dance thattook all my energy. As long as I was doing this dance, theaudience watched me and I existed. The more I danced the moremoney I had. The closer I danced to the audience, the more they
applauded. If I danced away from them, the applause grew faint.
The back edge of the stage was a cliff. Some days I would wakeup and rush toward the audience dancing fast and hard. Other
days I'd hit middle stage at middle speed. More and more days,
I'd slow down and move back waving my arms, occasionallytapping a foot just enough to keep hearing them, knowing that if
I stopped altogether I would fall off and the audience would
never see me again.
That's what it felt like. The reality was that I stopped taking all
those part-time jobs I pieced together to cover my days and pay
my rent. At the bookstore they said I didn't seem very happy
anymore. I started being hostile to customers, especially the men
looking at Lesbian picture books and the women in fancy suitswith long lists. I got angry when Lesbians called needing helpthat wasn't there. I was angry that they needed it and angry that
it wasn't there. If they expected it I was angry that they did, if they
didn't I was angry that they didn't. That was the last job I quit.
People go crazy every day. They get up, have a cup of coffee
and go crazy. They take all of the little particles of themselves andput them together according to someone else's prescription andthey act all day like it was their idea to wait tables or sell books or
put together car engines. Then they go home, get in the tub, disintegrate, and rebuild themselves around their own life. But
44

never completely. There's not ever time for that. Part of themstays ready for that alarm clock. Complete disintegration is not allowed.
And that's just the job kind of crazy. Consider for a minute how
Millie and Lee are crazy (and I'm not just saying that to get even).
Millie and Lee do the married kind of crazy. They live together inthe same house (something I always considered a mistake). Every
now and then they have a huge fight. They scream and yell andget really vicious. Then at last they take a little time apart. While
they're apart they feel terrible. They thought the other one loved
them, but how could someone that hateful love them? For aminute the big R relationship disappeared and they could notorganize all the little tiny pieces of themselves around it. For aminute Millie was just Millie and Lee was just Lee. But not forlong. Reconciliation awaits like the alarm clock, not to miss it andfall off the stage.
So I fell off. I fell for a long time. Friends' faces became blurry
and their voices hollow. I realized there was nothing they could
do for me. When I came up for air, I was here, outside myoId
window, listening to Millie and Lee talking in soft voices about
definitions, blueprints and plans, the old dyke cabin in the woods
dream, a place where nobody had to do anything they didn't
want to, a place right outside their window.
My life isn't sadder than most. I cry a lot now that I have thetime for it. I cry over any little thing, things I read in the paper,
people I see. I don't ever have to smile when I don't feel like it. I
miss the girls, though. Sometimes I imagine myself in someheated, lighted living room, laughing with a bunch of friends. I
wouldn't make the mistake of defining myself by those friends.
I wouldn't expect them to be the "community" I once thought
they were. I would just be happy to be there, accepted, in a warmroom.
Last night when I went to the restaurant to get the bag of food
I found a book beside the dumpster. It was titled Edible Weeds andWildflowers in the Southeastern United States. Inside the cover in old
ink was Millie's name. When I went by their house the next day
there was a pickup pulling away full of stuff. Inside the cab was
Lee and a friend. All night long I listened to Millie cry. For aminute, sometime near dawn, I thought of going up to the door.

45

Bea Loud

The Dead of WinterThe north side wind sneaking through the kitchen walls, as wellas the mound of silently waiting dirty dishes, prompt me to starta pie dough. A brief search in our otherwise orderly kitchen
quickly reveals the new lemon meringue recipe. It'll be great
made with our own honey and eggs fresh from the coop. As I
stand rolling out the dough my mind rolls over the events of theweekend, slowly, methodically, finally having control over the
shape of something. I begin to feel a little soothed.
All four of us in the house had been a bit nervous about
throwing the party - our first together. I was still mad at Adeline.
Shit, we all thought it was scary to try and party without drinking,but there has to be a first time if we really are going to get sober.
I know it's scarier when it's only been three weeks since your last
drunk, but there can't be much temptation when the nearest
drink is a twenty minute drive away, especially when it's sodamn cold out. Be lucky to even get a car started to go get one.
Damn you, Adeline, was your bad headache just an excuse? I
know part of you wanted us to be worrying over you all weekend
and feeling bad because you weren't here. You could prove that
nobody really cares, 'cause we didn't call and beg and plead withyou to come on and change your mind. Nora said she alreadyencouraged you plenty before she left, and your mind was madeup. Sure would have brightened up the party for her if you'dcome. She seemed pretty low all weekend. No matter how I try to
let it go, it nags me that you deliberately wanted to put a damperon the party.
Josie points out that my pie dough has gotten paper thin andI'm stewing again. ''Yes,'' she agrees, "it sure was typical of
Adeline not to come. She was probably hoping we'd feel bad. 01'
misery loves company routine, you know."
When you live in an isola ted area like ours, and the TV only gets
two channels, you have to be a lot more creative about providing
entertainment. So our party was billed as a sober, wear your tie,46

bring your pajamas and old photos party. Ruth, Jean and I, in thesafety of this group, were comfortable enough to wear our knots
at the throa t, at least until abandoned in favor of comfort. I'd have
loved to see how Adeline would have dressed, besides her longjohns and jeans. Would she have dared to wear a tightened tie?
Would she have felt as validated as I did by the pictures of thebutch girls and teenagers? Would she have felt supported by thetalk, by everyone of us sharing how hard it was to be in ourfamilies? Someone was always trying to inhibit us until we took
over the task and began to inhibit ourselves.
The temperatures didn't inhibit us much. Well, perhaps wewould have tobogganed longer if we weren't so bundled up.
Anyone watching from a far hill would never guess the sober
dyke in the powder blue stocking cap covered with snow wasplaying in her 69th winter, or me in my big green parka in my
43rd.
It would have been so great if Adeline could have shared all of
this with us; it sure helped me feel more OK about my butchness.
There just isn't another good word that says it so concisely. Butch,
such a loaded word. Everyone has her assumptions about us, butrarely from straight talk with us. I know it's gotta be one of themain reasons Adeline is drawn to me as I am to her. We can neverhide our queerness. Everyone showing pictures of her youth lastnight sure turned out to be an affirming experience. Some of us
just weren't very believable girls at any age, no matter how hard
we tried. All the other girls seemed to be doing just fine at being
girls. It never quite fully leaves you, knowing you've just got to
be with them, but you're not like them. We took on a tougherthan-you-feel kind of posture so early in life that it's as much usas the jackknives in the front pocket, the wallet on the hip, and thequiet fear in the gut that we'll be discovered.
Seemed Adeline and I were beginning to break down a few ofthe barriers between us. Both of us sure had a big need to betalking real about our class and roles stuff. We were both raw
from it, but talking sure wasn't easy.
Those weeks of house painting together last summer seem solong ago now. Adeline and I were riding home one day, exhausted, when she points out the home of this woman she'd
dated a couple of times. I remember her trying to describe to me47

how she felt whenever she was with her; with her in the semibiblical sense, that is. It wasn't so much that she was unclear about
her feelings - she, like me, just wasn't very used to talking about
them. It made more sense to us just to feel your feelings and talkabout things and thoughts.
This day, breezing along the highway, she talked about how it
made her feel good about herself that Vivian, a professional,"normal" looking woman liked her and wanted to spend timewith her. She also knew something was wrong. In spite of being
embarrassed she confided, ''You know how you're in bed andyou think she's so wonderful and so beautiful and being together
feels so good that you want to melt inside her skin and you feelyourself going in her and it's like you're lost in a storm? But, it's
not scary. You let your heart out while you're exploring her withyour whole body, making her feel as good as you can. And then,when it's over and you're lying there, she says something that lets
you know that she thought of you as ... ah ... well ... ah ... like a
stud . ... "I had the clear feeling that she wasn't only talking about
Vivian, that she'd felt it many times with many different girlfriends. Just as I had. As she talked my armpits were ripe withrecognition. But by then we were almost home and the momentof being vulnerable was past. Both of us retreated to our toughexteriors.
On one of our other rides home from work, Adeline asked me
did I have a gun? She was afraid of her neighbor, who was writing
her love letters, calling her up and generally scaring her pretty
bad. She'd reported it to the sheriff, but knew that was no protection. Last winter this same guy had entered her house and beaten
up another of our lesbian friends who had been staying with her.
The "authorities" did nothing about that, or about Adeline's
other complaints. She wanted to borrow my gun because she wasterrified to walk into her house alone - afraid he'd be in there.
She knew he had been sometimes, that he'd even been in her
bedroom. Since I happened to be in possession of a friend's gun
at the time, we went out into the hayfield and she practiced with
it before taking it home. A few weeks later she returned it because
she'd gotten her own with a permit to carry it.
Every time we talked there was a new drama going on in her
48

life. She was lonely since Silver moved out and until Nora moved
in. Then if she was lonely, I didn't know it. Nora and Adeline got
fall jobs at the local pumpkin packing plant. Everyone who works
for them gets screwed over real good but Adeline was getting
doubly screwed. She got one of the "men's jobs" but was only
getting wages as a woman. She was the second lesbian we knew
in this situation at the same plant. No coincidence, I think, thatthey're both butch. Finally Adeline and Nora quit and Adeline
took the brave step of bringing a suit against them for sex discrimination. Usually her dramas got pretty complicated by her
drinking, but her drinking never got in the way of her hardworking.
1'd only been sober about a year so this was a pretty big issue
for me. Adeline was constantly going on the wagon and fallingoff. She was going to a group therapy session, and had been doingsome one-on-one counseling. She was also in a group for PMS
sufferers, so she was trying real hard to make her life work. I wasoften frustrated with her 'cause I knew that at a gut level we had
similar experiences (both lesbians all our lives, butch, working
class and still living at subsistence levels), but I rarely felt supported or listened to by her. She was so needy that she hardly
noted that I had feelings too. I'm kinda notorious for bringing up
hard stuff; well, not necessarily bringing it up, but for calling it
when I see it, instead of brushing it aside. I think that reallyfrightened her 'cause she always wanted to have everyone be
happy and get along good, even if we weren't. We could at least
look like we were.
She was pretty turned off by our household's open distrust of,and disdain for, the male of the species. Bottom line she felt thesame way, but she drank beer and played cards with her het
neighbors, and would stop in at the local tavern and have a few
with the boys. For awhile she had this "real nice guy who needs
a place to live" sharing her house. He was always owing her
money. I recall, we had a pretty good fight one day when she told
him to leave money off at our house to save him a ride. We were
all pissed that she'd give a man directions to our safe women-only
haven, especially without our consent, and I was extra angry that
I had to go out early one morning and deal with him. She, ofcourse, didn't understand what the big deal was, after all, she49

trusted and liked him, why couldn't we? There was no reason tobe so unfriendly and hard on him, or her.
Nora had recently confided that Adeline would go to him for
comfort and solace after they would have an argument or fight.
Nora was feeling real betrayed as she thought lesbian stuff
should stay in lesbian circles. We're starting to get to know Nora
more lately, feeling a lot of understanding and support goingboth directions. So it was real sad to have Nora come to the party
alone. All of us sure were in need of a light fun time together.
Next time we hear from Nora is while I'm still rolling that pie
dough and thinking about her and Adeline. Just before hanging
up I can hear Sylvia say, ''We'll be right there." Coming into the
kitchen, "That was Nora," she begins. I think the three of us knew
by the look on her face what was coming next. "She found
Adeline dead, in her bed. She killed herself.""Oh, my god, No!" Jean runs screaming up the stairs, pounding the walls, hurling defiant "NO! NO! NO!" into the icy dark.
The others of us take no time, now, to feel. We need to get toNora. We decide Sylvia and Josie will take one car and leave
immediately. We might want to have two vehicles in case someof us stay longer than others. I will stay, bank the fire and wait 'tilJean is able to go.
Sylvia, as she's going out the door says, "Can you think ofanything we should do?" I know she's swung into thinking likea dyke, not just a neighbor and friend. This is not her firstexperience. Hadn't been but a couple of years ago that one of her
former lovers was found dead in her home. Dead of an overdose.
Never was a satisfactory conclusion of whether it was intentionalor accidental. Or was Sylvia remembering the hassles around theattempted shooting suicide of one of our other friends? The police
had come into her home then and taken lots of her personal stuff,
including journals and letters - dyke stuff, meant only for theeyes of trusted friends and lovers.
That was what I thought of immediately, that cops would bepouring through her intimate belongings, violating her in the
only way left to them now. So I suggest to Sylvia removing anyof her dyke personal things that are laying around.
While Jean was collecting herself and getting the truck warmed
up I wadded my pie dough back up into a ball and stuck it in the50

fridge. I don't know what to say to Jean. I don't know what to say
to myself. I open my mouth and what comes out is venomous,"Dirty rotten trick to pull on your lover." I feel no compassion for
Adeline. "How can she say she loves Nora? She knew she'd haveto come home and find her, and live with it, live with it the rest of
her life. Damn you, Adeline, you could have called, you could
have come over."I am furious and know I've got to cool out before we get there.
As we pull into her drive I'm immediately relieved that there areno cop cars yet. When we finally make a way through the fourbarking dogs and countless cats all gathered around anxiously
waiting to be fed and comforted, I'm surprised and disappointed
to find the nearest neighbor woman there. They quick fill me inthat her husband has gone to town to try to find a sheriff because
they can't raise one on the phone. Nora called the neighbors after
calling us because she was afraid being there alone so long.
Sylvia and Josie have already been upstairs and seen her, but
Sylvia offers to go up again with me. A big part of me, right off,wishes I hadn't'ca use of the memory of her lifeless face with grey
stuff, that I think is brains, oozing out of her nose, and the blood
all in her hair. Well, I know I'm not going to get that picture off myeyes for a long time. Then I focus on the gun. It's still in her handbut it looks wrong to me. It looks almost like she laid it there,
casually across her stomach. I don't like it. ''Was there a note?" I
inquire of Sylvia.
"No, there wasn't. But there was a blank steno pad and pen on
the stand beside her bed." Sylvia confides that she'd picked up a
few things around the house and taken them to her car. She'spretty sure Maude saw this but said nothing. No note seemedstrange. We try not to get ourselves spooked. We all know
Adeline was very capable of suicide, that she'd talked about it
more than once, that she definitely had been depressed. It was thepreferable thing to believe, as horrible as it was.
We are all together back downstairs, but being careful not to
say too much in front of Maude, when the deputies finally arrive.
Then soon the coroner, a woman, and about an hour later theundertaker.
The cops want to question Nora. I go with them into the front
parlor so she won't have to be alone. Thinking back on it, I

51

suppose I pretty much switched into a "take charge" mode. I
made all of the necessary phone calls except for the initial one tothe sister, which Nora had already made. Seemed like then I wason the phone most all evening and a big part of the next few days.
The neighbor farm lesbians agree to be responsible for all theanimals until other arrangements can be made. It's so hard for us
to comprehend that Adeline would leave her animals unattended. It makes us think it must have happened late in theweekend. Nora said she was pretty apprehensive as soon as she
got home because the door was locked from the inside so she
couldn't get in. She'd tried pounding on it and calling to Adeline.
Even now my balled-up stomach and tightening throat recognize
the fear she must have felt, struggling to remove a storm window
from the porch, raising the inside sash and lowering herself into
the cold darkening house.
Refusing to acknowledge something's wrong, she quiets thedogs and stops to warm her hands at the wood stove. It is stone
cold, silent and empty, except for a few flickering coals and a pileof ash. Spotting Adeline's car battery confirms she must be here.
Dreading what she'll find upstairs, she slowly, summoning her
courage, drops her overnight bag off in her own room and follows
the sound of a hyperactive football announcer. Her horrified
moans and cries of shocked disbelief fill the grey, cold room as herarm, like a remote control, silences the TV, leaving her completely
alone.
The sister, Lois, calls back. Unable to accept it, she presses me
to call an ambulance and a doctor. Gently I try to tell her it's much
too la te for tha t. She knows it can't be true, tha t Adeline would notkill herself because they have a pact. An agreement that if eitherof them ever feels like doing it they will call the other. Then she
starts in on me about where was Nora? Why wasn't she there withher? I know she needs to blame someone. I'm glad she's saying it
to me and not to Nora. Even so, I don't want to hear this shit. I stay
calm, try to comfort her, and refuse to give credence to herblaming. If she had any sense that any of us were grieving, or inneed of anything, she gave no indication of it. I understood her
pain, but I couldn't take in her hostility. I am painfully aware thatmuch of what I feel is anger and that it feels inappropriate toexpress it.

52

Josie, especially, is being able to be with Nora. I'm relieved thatshe knows how to do this. Since I seem to be having so much selfcontrol, I go back to the phone calling. Tacked up by the phone isa list of calls which Adeline made over the weekend. From theirhouse just about everyone was a long distance charge, even us.
The practice of writing them down eliminated hassles at bill time.
There was Vivian near the bottom of the list. Adeline had madea date to get together for brunch and skiing today. Vivian had
been trying to call all day. Yes, she was sure Adeline was sober
when she called. I stay on the phone with her till she's ready tohang up. She says she has friends she can call and be with.
I wonder if Adeline drank the eight bottles of beer then, or did
she drink them? Nora is sure there was no beer when she left, midmorning yesterday. My mind still doesn't want to accept suicide.
I don't want to have to be so angry at her. Maybe her ex-roomie
buddy, Will Dance, was there drinking with her. Maybe even in
her room. Maybe she said something honest to him about thinking he was screwing her in their most recent business venture.
Since the officials are still upstairs with her body and the hetneighbors have left, I go back to the phoning. No luck at Silver's.
I breathe a sigh of relief for not having to tell her yet. I know it's
going to be the hardest call of all. It was pretty typical of Adelineto hang on and hang on to a relationship, even when it was nolonger good. There was still lots of unresolved stuff between
them. Partly she needed to not be a failure at love. She wasn't any
different than the rest of us in her desire to avoid rejection. Anda failed relationship, no matter what anyone said, felt like rejection to her. If a relationship doesn't work then what you've got
left is yourself. That's who she couldn't bear to focus on. She was,more than likely, coming to the realization that Nora was not tobe her life-long mate either.
Every few minutes I'd find myself going back and forth fromthe one option to the other. She did or one of those men did it toher. Didn't really matter a whole lot, the truth was that men had
killed her, no matter who pulled the trigger.
The only sensible thing I could think to do with my anger atwhat they'd done to her and are doing to the earth and all of us
is to firm my resolve to resist them and to create even more dyke
identified time and space. I know my anger at the injustice of it all

53

fuels me as much as my love of us. My sadness begins to come out
as it sinks in that Adeline won't be coming forward with us.
Somehow we all managed to get through the next few days.
Nora, with her dog and kitten, come to stay with us for as long as
they need. We host a giant potluck and memorial which lesbians
from college town and the two nearest cities attend. On the table
amidst the many white candles, stones and magic memorabilia,
are the handful of photos she'd picked out to bring to the party.
This was a much bigger group but in a way I was reminded ofthe last time a bunch of us had gotten together for a meal. The
occasion was to celebrate the harvest. It was the end of October.
We were an unfamiliar group, so it wasn't always comfortable.
Adeline and Nora hosted at their house. I was impressed with all
the fancy family heirloom table dressings that Adeline brought
out for the occasion. Mostly she kept them packed away, unable
to look at them because it was still too painful to remember her
mother, and accept the fact of her death. Seemed she was taking
a pretty big step forward in coming to terms with it by beginning
to use her belongings. She even loaned me a favorite green enamel coffee pot of her mom's, admonishing me to be very carefulwith it.
At the informal memorial many of us tell stories of her. Horses,
cats and dogs were central characters in many of those stories. We
also share our thoughts and feelings about suicide. Nearly half of
the women in the room had seriously considered it as an option.
Several tell of unsuccessful attempts. We talk of making pacts
with a trusted friend, to call her if any of us get to thinking about
it seriously. This didn't do anything to prevent Adeline, butmaybe it would save one of us. This ritual served as a closure ofsorts for some of the women. To those of us intimately involved
with the ongoing drama, closure seemed far away.
The day before this, Ruth, Josie and Nora had gone back to thehouse to get enough of Nora's things to tide her over for a weekor two. Nora wasn't ready to be packing and going through her
stuff but she did put some of it in an out building so she wouldn't
have to go back in the house to get it.
Slowly, gradually we begin to put our lives back in order. Less
than a week later Lois calls to say she's had the locks changed on54

the house, in effect evicting Nora, without notice, before she's
even had a chance to pack. With each passing conversation she
becomes more hostile toward us. Six different lesbians try to talksense to her, but she persists with her accusations and insults.
Meanwhile the authorities are dragging their feet. As it turns
out their primary interest is in filling in the blanks in the FBI files
on our households. The sheriff strongly urged both Nora and me
to come in and talk to him separately. All of us, together, had told
all we knew. We figured he had created his own scenario. It went:
Adeline was the jilted lover; Nora and I were the other pieces ofthe puzzle. Either she killed herself because she was jilted or Nora
did it to get rid of her, to be with me. We kept refusing to go in andhe kept threatening us with stronger measures. We were pretty
unnerved by this to say the least, and three weeks had gone bywith still no official determination. Suicide or homicide? Everyfew days there would be some little story on the local TV or radio,
saying they were still following leads in the possible homicide.
It seemed this would never end and spring would never come.
Then one day smack in the middle of February the sun moved a
lot closer to the ground. It gave Nora and me the push we needed
to get out for something besides going to work. We took the truck
and went to retrieve her belongings from the shed. By noon thetemperature was reaching 60. We were anxious to get home, outof our long johns and heavy insulated boots, but there at the endof our road were two sheriffs cars.
They make a big show of flashing their lights and sirens as weturn in front of them. It's so ridiculous I consider not stopping, but
figure they'd love an excuse to shoot us. We are under arrest fortheft and are to proceed to jail with the truckload of evidence.
They book us, do all the mug shot and finger print routine, allow
us our calls and split us up. For several hours we both refuse toanswer any questions. We have no lawyers. Then they make a big
production out of taking another set of prints and mugs of me andletting me know it's for the FBI. They bring this slick dude who
I assume is a fed to take a look at me. I'm being relatively calm 'til
now 'cause I know both of us have a half dozen witnesses tovouch for our whereabouts and the theft charges will obviously
go nowhere. The whole truckload of stuff probably wouldn't bevalued at $100, and it's clearly Nora's personal belongings. What55

was their game?
I decide I'd rather know what they are looking for than spend
the whole weekend in jail in silence. I agree to talk with Chief
Deputy Fearsome. Most of the questions are things I know healready knows the answers to. Then he wants to know did I everhandle her gun. I remember her showing it to me. Searching mymemory I can't remember if I picked it up or not. I thank my luckystars it was her gun and not the one she'd borrowed. I decide he's
just trying to intimidate me and confidently answer, ''No, I've
never touched it." He wants to know did I remove a note after wefound her and before the deputy arrived. I say, "Give me a break.
You already know the neighbors and three other people were in
her room ahead of me."His next question is the last one. ''What are the names of theindividuals who arrived there first?" This is certainly no secret,so I tell him. Then miraculously we are free to go if we can comeup with $200 cash bond each. He seems surprised that we do but
Jean has spent the afternoon getting ahold of as much cash as she
could. We think surely the whole trumped up thing will be
dropped the following Monday in court, if not before. But no,
we're told to get lawyers and reappear the following week.
The public defender assigned to me is the same person who'dhandled the purchase of our collective's land seven years earlier.
I wonder if he knows anything about criminal law. I wasn't
inclined to tell him anything except the bare essentials about theso-called theft. It didn't seem he would be sympathetic to issuesof queer harassment. It wouldn't be a popular position in our
town of 5,000.
A few days later Nora remembers this lawyer she'd heard
champion some unpopular person in another court. We meetwith him, tell him the whole story about Adeline and he agrees totake both our cases for no charge. A year or so later, incidentally,
we read in the paper that he has been sentenced to five years inprison for income tax evasion. He had better luck with our cases
though, and after three appearances in court and three weeks ofdealing with the slime balls, the charges are finally dismissed.
All this time, a total of six weeks since her death, there was still
no ruling about the case, and supposedly still no reports from the
autopsy.

56

At night I'd lay in bed and close my eyes, see her mutilated face,and I'd feel an overwhelming sorrow. I believed she was destined
to learn whatever it was she was trying to avoid in this life andthat she'd just have to do it in her next one. Letting myself feelsome of how lonely and despicable she must have felt, I could
remember it with my whole body. The horrible consuming depressions, walking around feeling powerless over everything,especially myself. And always the drinking to try and make it go
away. Then, when I wouldn't be in that deep depression I'd drink
just a bit more moderately, enough to ward it off - and just outof habit. It never helped, of course, that I surrounded myself withothers who dealt with life in a similar fashion and who didn't
know any more how to love themselves than I did. It made me sadthat there was so little we seemed to be able to do to take care of
our own. And even when we tried as lots of us do, there is just no
way to insure that one who needs help will take advantage of theoffered hand.
Finally a week later we get the report that her blood alcohol
content was conSiderably higher than legally drunk and that theofficial ruling is death by suicide. The position of her gun hand is
explained by the fact that she apparently lived for a short timeafter the bullet entered her head.
Several months later we get ahold of a copy of the official
investigation, and confirm everything we already know in ourguts. Confirm there was virtually no investigation, except of us.
It states that the FBI was investigating "this group" and they andthe sheriff decided to "share information and names to see if we
could get a solution to this problem." We learn that Howie andMaude had accused us of stealing her stuff, but would not comeforward because "they were afraid of us." We learn that violent
suicide is not unusual in "these kinds of people." We learn thatthe abusive neighbor's mother is his alibi. We confirm that thesister wanted us prosecuted. We learn that Will Dance had
volunteered the information that Nora was leaving Adeline tolive with me and that is why Adeline was depressed.
Well, Nora did come to live with us, and we all did get to begreat friends and eventually go on with our lives. Life wasn't thesame without Adeline and our lives were never the same becauseof her. In those first few weeks many lesbians would write or call57and say, "Is there anything I can do?" Once we had some resolve
we wrote a letter to everyone updating the situation and ended
with our answer to that question. It's still timely today, almost
five years later.
"These are actions that would feel supportive and that can help
us all:• For dykes to make wills, durable powers of attorney and takecare of personal business so that we exercise power over our own
lives and our own deaths.
• For lesbians to stop using drugs and alcohol.
• For lesbians to stop putting their trust and energies into men.
• For lesbians to set up support systems so we can get our stuff
out in the open and help each other live.
• For dykes to do everything we can to eliminate suicide as an
attractive alternative to living in this world."

,..l
~
~~

esbian.~ E t hie s

A forumforethicalissuesamong
lesbians.

Envisioning theWorld We Were All
Meant to Live In.
• ESSAYS• READERS FORUMS• REVIEWS/COMMENTARY

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58

Chiah Heller-Zbloki

for michiyo fukayo;
april 25, 1953-ju1y 9, 1987

Somewhere
along the furthest coast of june'bout twelve noon
you decide that you've had it.
too many yearsof queer, crazy and poor
daughter old enough now,
taken care of.
so you walk to the university mallthrough iron waves of heat
been circling vermont three days now
open the door to that american cathedral
just shot up like a mushroom
on the edge of town
complete with everything
ever worshipped or wanted
just cause you don't have it.
but you've had it.
you've had it so badthat you buy the one thing
you've been wanting for years
a black trigger floating between
the fine fingers of angels
in your dreams
angels with pearl white oriental faces
gowns soft like mother's breasts
calling you home into their dark creases.
two p.m.
a woman drying her blond hair59

in the next roomheard the backfire of a carthen a gurgle.
opens your door
sees a bed, big stain
swell across the porcelain sheets
in one great cloud
red as the world
after hiroshima.
sees your black haircircle round your sleepy face
like water whirlinground japan, frantically licking
the poison from the milky sandsof the shore
sees a round door
along your temple
small opening to a world
could only enter by force
or by the sharpest desire
to let your blood tell the story of everything
you ever cried or loved for
only nobody hears the story at first.
that week in the hospitalmen in green clothforce air through lungs
weary for the stillness
they'd worked so hard for- shaved a clean square of sanity
round that red temple door,
sealed it up
till no stories came anymore.
some came to see youa lovera caseworker
a few old friends
60knew you when you were younger,
saner, angrier,writing poems 'bout beinga dyke daughter of a jap girlimported by a soldier
to this white racist land
- poems about your love for your half-brownalmond-eyed daughter
growing like everythingin your weakening arms
and the stories did come.
ten days later they ran up in our throatswith salt and laughter.
we made a circle for you
your growing daughter found her place in the center
and we told about your crazy, your poor
your years of taking care of everybody
but your own woman self
we read your angry poems
told about the shape of your smileand sang in long tones
like women from some other land
we do not know across the sea- a land where the water
still comes home to the shore
every eve after wandering
to wash away everything crimson,
broken and burned.

61

Chiah Heller-Zbloki

to the women who weep

they say we are crazy
we women
who weep
we women who weep
who keepthe last grains of soil
moist with our griefthey say we are crazyfor we do not string coins
upon a cord
and then eat theminsteadwe set clay bowls
beneath the moon's face
we sit and dreamover her reflection
they say we are crazythat we long for a past
we've invented
that we long for a time
when women stroked the earth
with magic feet
and when women ruled gently
like grandmothers
but we are not crazy
our madness makes us bold and sane
our sadness and our rage
are the last precious stonesof our fortune62

we need these stones
to throw, destroy
rebuild
what we know
we have lost
we are not as they say
our tears and our memories
fertilize our fields
and taste in our mouths
like manna

untitled Linda Marie Nolte

63

Elana Dykewomon

The Story I Never Write
So you, what are you crying about? Everything comes aroundagain. And is hard. Here you are, you got everything a dyke could
want. But your mind goes up in flames in an instant.
I've been listening to "Thorazine.'" "I was chained to the floor
with a needle carrying thorazine / I had something to say ... "I sat in the red chair and stared out the window and counted tomyself - four of the womyn whose bodies I touched, four ofthem were locked up and me myself, that's five. There is something to tell about that. But what?
Zeena said she was reading a book about a holocaust survivor
who just last year had gotten herself to write what had happened
to her when she was a child.
What happened to you when you were a child?
- it doesn't matter
it was a long time ago
I'm a different womon now
I don't carethat childwho stands there the best I can do for her is the best we can do for
our daughters still hope she makes it out of the corridor alive
I don't remember
I don't write this story
I don't even like to allude to it
The student nurses were nice, one of them beat me at cards all thetime, she wanted me to know I was too much of a smart aleck
It was a long time ago in baltimore
and baltimore is a dead city
no one remembers it
I work in a small town by the ocean on the oregon coast. Next
to the museum where I print, there's a cafe with a little style,""Thorazine" by Susann Shanbaum, on Trying to Survive, by the Berkeley
Women's Music Collecti ve, queer toones Publishing, ASCAP, 1978.

64

Andrea's. Maggie's the main day waitress, a womon in her forties
with a strong british accent. I've watched her for awhile because
she has a bright and bitter energy around her. She has a daughter
but no obvious man. She plays a musical instrument. She works
hard as a waitress.
Andrea's has an art show on the wall, which changes. It justchanged. I went in for coffee, to hang out, look across the street
and worry about whether my oakland lover was going to comesee me or not, how to pay the bills, and about politics. There wereseveral woven sculptures on the wall. Two boys were discussing
them with Maggie who had made them. I was impressed by her
work. Thought again, what is this womon doing here? As anyone
thinks about anyone in this town they are tempted to think about.
I admired her work to her. Then went back to pretending tocorrect the typesetting in front of me.
Maggie had Ella Fitzgerald playing. Andrea's in-laws or parents came in. They asked Maggie if she'd been to art school; they
thought her work was so fine. She said no, she was an occupational therapist, you have to learn about twenty crafts to do that.
They asked her where she had worked.
Meanwhile, I thought to myself - occupational therapist and began to remember something. A cage at the top of abuilding. The older people questioning Maggie were on the otherside of the room and I didn't catch everything they said. But I didhear her say johns hopkins, said she left there in 1968.
I scribbled on the folder. 1949 - that's the year I was bornplus 13 = 1962. I thought about it for a little while. I watched
Maggie move around the room. Not many customers, 11 a.m. I
motioned to her. I said, "Did you work at johns hopkins in 1962?"
She said she had just gotten there in May of that year. I said, "1 wasthere then."She said, ''Where did you work?""1 was a patient. I was thirteen. You worked with me in theceramics room."
She asked, "What's your last name?" I told her. ''Yes, I remember that name." She looked at me again. "That's one of the things
you do when you leave, you forget. Do you remember Jackie?" I
remembered someone, but it was a long time ago; it was eighteen
years ago. She said, ''Well, you're doing very well."65

I laughed. I said, "I guess so." I don't know what I said.
"Oh, they called you an 'adolescent adjustment,' they neverlabel anyone that young with anything more."o yes they do, I wanted to say but didn't. She got up. She went
back to work. I started to shake. I paid the bill and left her tip andfelt strange about tipping. I went back to work, told the story as
best as I could to WillaMae, the museum's dyke CETA artist, andlater when we went to lunch there, Maggie was more open to us;
she put on old jazz and shimmied around the room while she wasserving, but other than that she let it go and I let it go
it was eighteen years ago
in baltimore
which is gone now.
The afternoon wore on me and the museum seemed small. At
lunch I talked with WillaMae about emotions and control. I said,"I feel like I'm very emotional."
She said, "You sure don't show it."And I said, "Funny how the skull encompasses you." I thought
about feeling and tried to feel my way through the thoughts andcouldn't. Started to have a hard time with it. Way back in memory
I could vaguely see Maggie's face eighteen years ago, unlined, notbitter, clipped in the way it is now, and sweet, helping me to makea blue ceramic vase from a mold which she disdained (making
ceramics from molds). The vase was on my grandmother's TV in
new york until my grandmother died and I kept thinking about
that, the vase and my grandmother and Maggie.
The upstairs of phipps clinic starts to come into focus for me:
the attendants bring your ward up in the elevator, the ones who
are able to go. The different rooms for different crafts, and at theend of the room where a bearded man teaches painting, a sun
porch. Caged in. You can stand out there, five stories up, andpretend you're climbing on monkey bars if an attendant doesn'tcatch you. People on the streets below can watch if they want to.
I turn my head away, because I don't want to watch her. But
here she is again, on my bulletin board, a snapshot someone in myfamily must have taken: myself at thirteen, sitting on the edge ofa metal frame bed on east one, in a sparse room with peelingplaster. And I feel like -66

The womon can not say how she feels. It was a long time ago.
The city is dead. She remembered Rita, though. Riding horne
tonight she remembered once, in high school, her favorite
teacher, Rita, overheard her tell the story of her life to some
womon briefly, just the sketch, "and then I was in a mental
hospital for a year when I was thirteen, and then I was in a half
way house in baltimore in the slums for another year, and then I
was kicked out of a friends' boarding school, and then I carnehere." Later Rita laughed at me. She said, ''You'll have to get overtelling people that, Elana, it's such an emotional, manipulative
thing to do, dear. You're just playing for sympathy or shock. It
keeps you from having normal relationships. It keeps you in yourrole, you know, your play-act of mental patient. You're not socrazy."
I started watching more carefully. I didn't want anyone's sympathy. I didn't want to manipulate anyone. So I learned never tosay to anyone: and then I was in a mental hospital for a year until I knew them really well, and could say: but see, that was along time ago, I'm not crazy, it doesn't mean anything, don't let
it even scratch the surface of how you feel about me.
I turned off the typewriter and wept. I leaned against it andsobbed. At first I just wanted my grandmother back. Then I
started to cry: You fucking bitch, you fucking bitch. I sobbed andsaid: I'm so angry. I will tell you the student nurses were nice, notthat they tied me into a chair to set my hair, saying, ''You'll thankus for this, it will make you feel like a woman." They too, after all,were victims, passing on being a victim. Personal anger is such an
indulgence. Is taught as indulgence.
I am so angry about keeping this in. About being afraid to tellyou. The disapproval, the closing down of a womon you love andwhom you want to love you ties you up, ties you to the ground,keeps you down as much as thorazine. And I've walked aroundnew york so pumped full of thorazine my joints froze my bodyrashed my vagina turned red. I couldn't remember anything
except, in the back of my brain, if I ever got horne, I would killmyself right, so that wouldn't happened to me again - and I
know that that careless gynocidal chemical brutality can sometimes be little compared to what we have done to each other forthem mother to daughter womon to womon lover to lover67

friend to friendo you yer getting personal again
it's not likeit's not like the men didn't rape you with freud every way
they knew how. I remember one of the rounds doctors, a giant
prick, coming by and seeing a painting I had done in occupational
therapy in which there were two mountain peaks. "Hmmm," hesaid without looking at me, "clearly you have a regressive fixation on your mother's breasts here." I was very upset. I went to my
psychiatrist. I said, 'What did he mean?" My psychiatrist
knocked the ashes out of his pipe and said damn dr. whatsisname, I wasn't ready to talk about that with you yet. He laughed
like it was joke. What's the joke, I didn't say. You want to tell me:a. if I paint mountains you'll say they're breasts, b. that it's wrong
for me to paint mountains or breasts, you'd say I was healthy if I
painted trees (I started painting trees), c. that it's regressive andthere's hardly anything worse you can be than a fat thirteen-yearold regressive throwing her emotions around wanting breasts
somewhere in her fantasy. I lay awake thrashing in my bed. My
thoughts were teeth, grinding each other: why do they think it's
not regressive if a woman wants a penis, why isn't it regressive towant your father, who says it's the right way, why, why did they
do this to me.
Years later my mother went to visit the psychiatrist, to talkabout old times. He said, "I was just a young resident then, we
didn't know a lot, I would have done things differently, but I
couldn't have done so bad, she never went back in again, did
she?"
There are too many stories. I wanted to write something good - about having been a mental patient in a mental hospitalin a big city the whole year I was thirteen. Good - that is,linking
it up with the experiences of my lovers:
Lois, who stayed straight, had shock therapy and used to say,"- all the plots of the movies are gone but why I stay with
Richard is because he came to the hospital every day I was there
and read me from the newspapers. Even though I didn't hear aword of what he said, he came every day ... " I bought that forawhile because I knew what it meant, hoping she would realize
68she had already paid back more than she ever owed. Last night I
read in the Lesbian Insider, "straight women who are locked up getlots of visitors. Lesbians don't."
And Mary, who couldn't bear it after her lover of five years left
her, got drunk and went to a motel on the jersey shore, started tocarve her lover's name on her arm. Her friends came and locked
her up. She was lucky and only stayed in the hospital a couple
weeks. Survived the hospital, and the fact that that's all her
friends knew what to do with her. She rolled up her sleeve andshowed me the scar.
And Sharon, who was not lucky, who did not escape drugs orshock therapy or psychosurgery or the judgement of lesbians
who thought that if her karma had been in shape that wouldn't
have happened to her. Before whose pain I felt like some who had
survived a camp relatively intact in front of someone who had
come out terribly changed, tortured, left furious but broken. I
thought it was up to me to fix it because I understood what had
happened there. Because I had seen the place on the CAT scan
where they burned the holes in her brain. Because we werelesbians who could do anything, change the actual molecular
structure of the wound. I couldn't fix it, and I began to use what
had happened to her to hide what had happened to me.
And Zeena, whose crazy time haunts her still, a womon who
folded in upon herself in deep depression, scared to death of her
fear and of the incomprehensible demands of the world. She says,"that time when no one knew what I was going through" - andwants me to speak, wants me to talk about it. And I say:it was a long time ago
I have nothing much to say. I was a lesbian child born into astraight family and I did what I could to get out of there, that's all.
I don't want to talk about it. The worst I thought could happen to
you was to die; they taught me different.
There are many things worse than that. One is to fall into theirhands. Another is to come out of a mental hospital submissive,
unable to fight back. A third is fighting back in silence. The fourthis breaking the silence and finding the womyn around you
saying, "There must have been something wrong with you in thefirst place if you fell into their hands." Is having the womyn say,
"There's nothing we can do about it. When a lesbian is crazy,69

difficult and in pain, we have no way to help her here or provide
refuge, it may be she has to go back in again."Once I heard a story about a lesbian community that took careof a womon who was - in trouble in herself - who had been in
hospitals before. They decided she did not have to go back.
Womyn who were her friends and womyn who hardly knew her
took turns staying with her. Being there with her in the place
where she wanted to be. Over months and months of time. I don't
know how they worked it out. The rent money, the food money,
the time, the commitment to persistence. I heard that they did andthat they did it simply, without condescending, without extracting a debt larger than: I hope you will do it for me if I need it andyou can.
It's hard to believe of us. But I want to believe it. Taking it backto you, the story I can't write about myself anymore tonight
because it hurts too much, it brings back too many hallways withthe fear on every side and me that child shielding against it,against the dead womyn and the dead self in that fear, against thesuicide, the remembrance of feeling: there is nothing worth
waiting for - brought back to me today by accident in a cafe on
the coast. The circles my life makes sometimes shatter me, time
falls apart, what I want is never what I think I want and what I get
is not satisfying me. In an instant I can be caged again.
After all that started to stir I suddenly couldn't believe anymore, didn't care what happened to me. Too much comes back,too much has happened to too many lesbians that will never betold. I am too angry and I have no purpose or direction for thatanger. I feel very tired and very alone.
And it happened a long time ago.

70

Bettianne Shoney Sien

My Mother Played the AccordionItis the smell, the open gray metal accordion case, it floats out
like a ghost. My mother stands in the Good Room laughing again
like a girl, the music strapped to her chest, part of her broad
shoulders. She plays; I dance a child's polka. I press my cheekagainst the crimson velvet lining, run the backs of my arms along
the smooth buttons, the colored inlays.
A luxury, this memory; our private life.
Only once he walked in, the last time.
"Oh for Christ's sake Vera, not that again. You don't haveenough to do without making a commotion too."i arrived a fool with my seventeen years and hope my grandmothers
accordion wedding gift three sticks vine charcoal one pad paper fromnuns five year diary four lines per day expecting by eighteen
Is this how it was for her: he is in the kitchen where I am
washing the dishes. He never takes his eyes from my back, stays
in his chair and doesn't move to help but doesn't shut up for
telling me how each plate should be rinsed thoroughly as I am
doing just that, how the baby bottles must be scrubbed with thebottle brush which I am already holding in my hand. Why do I goaround so dumpy all the time he wants to know, put on such anact, and don't I know how lucky I am.
I despise my own face when tears are stronger than my pride
to hold them. I turn to him fully, "Get out of here. Get!"
He charges, grabs me ...
"It will happen to me, I am becoming her. You are making me
into her. Leave me alone!"
He is purple, ripping my shirt, screaming into my face, ''You
little bitch, don't you dare say I had anything to do with her, she
was nuts, crazy, a mental case from the word go - you got that,you got that?!"
I smash his head with the soapy plate still dripping in my hand,it breaks against his crown. I hit him again, he bleeds, stares,
stunned a moment out of his attack.
''You,'' I say, with absolute certainty, "you, are an assassin."71And then I run, I run out of the house, down the highway. I run
and run wondering where can I go, finally dropping into a ditch
where I wipe the sweat from my eyes with the dishcloth, andmake a plan.
beautiful babies yes i want to crawl into a hole in the ground awake
every night his rage make the infant stop nothing consoles what is wrong
what power do i haveno he says i dont have good christian love im not nice anymore im not
im chipped at chipped away
i am starving to death there is a cavern in my chest my life seepingout
For five years I lived in an apartment down the street from aplace called Misty Manor. Twice a day the patients were paradeddown the street, past my bedroom window; arms hanging stiffly,
heads loose atop curled-in shoulders, sluggish robotic steps.
Prisoners of war, daily I was reminded what it was my motherescaped.

i dreamed i was walking many other people were walking yet i am
alone thinking how the bomb could drop wouldnt that be justice after alli have waited so long to die that doesnt mean that i want the whole world
to disappear that doesnt mean somewhere for me for the future for notjust my children i have hope it is not enoughin the dream i came upon a friend she was like me locked in sitting
unclothed as they make us times they think we will try anything she was
weeping i said come on it is time to continue
the path was narrow water on one side but deep the other razor rocks
no choice but i did attempt the rocks regardless pulled down by attendanti knocked him away but did not escapea woman with an infant whispered to me you will come to a place tellthem you want to sleep not shower
i see already the barns i hear the showers
i want to sleep the man does not understand he takes me into a room
where all the men sit around a table they speak to one another but mylanguage no one can comprehend
Once in the attic I found four yellowed charcoal drawings of an
infant sleeping in a wooden cradle. It was dated the year of mybirth, there was no signature. I have searched and never comeacross them again.
72

Once I was walking down the basement steps and came uponthese words scrawled in a child's hand with charcoal: why is
mom playing with death. Perhaps it was a dream.

depressed is the word he said shame on you a pretty girl get over that
nonsense
i write here even when it betrays me
the thought of any more need of even words i am so afraid of losing
more than i have what do i have ever will have a woman only has her
secrets
She is standing in the kitchen much taller than me. I am theinvisible witness to her howling deathwish, terrified to leave heralone. I don't know where to hide or how I can save her. I am Alice
getting smaller by the moment.
they say this will pass truth is it will return again too
Once not so long ago she cradled me, told me I was a jewel,
made her ring sparkle in the light shining through the ice on thewindow; "See."
If they say she was a monster they don't know.
Under my feather quilt I am safe, angry, I want to know why
her, who I love, and not him, who deserves it. I want to know.
things i want to be true i dont write down when have i ever not hada face reading over my shoulder cut it out rip it out that is what they cantbear that a woman should have her secrets
My father is driving the car too fast down a steep hill.
My mother is coming back to us, they have let her out after
three years. She sits pale, in a mint-green pantsuit, fragile, her hairsprayed stiff with Final Net.
am i so terrible
i dont want to see gawking up at me from the page dont i know enoughto not say more if i got drunk i would tell stories until they set me on fire
so who cares so i dont so who wants to read it anyway
They think her love for me is stronger than her will to escape.
I do my part by never once taking my eyes off her. I don't knowwhat they see; I see my mother.
She has the knife in her hand, she is fast, suddenly strong, she
breaks for the bathroom, with a quick hand she locks me out. Let
me in, let me.
73how exposed one feels suddenly when the blood really does come out
runs on the sink wounds really running from my arm see i am real iam a painter, carver
if i act quickly no one will know no one will know no one
I run for rescue in slow motion crying, I betray her; I am nodifferent. Backing away from the grip of two strong men, sheturns, pushes me onto the floor in her rage.
Her rage, her life; I want her life so much. I want her life because
I am a child and do not think I can survive without it.
From then on we shared no secrets. From then I would listen to
her tortured sounds vomiting the overdoses, his fingers down
her throat. I could be no comfort, found none for myself.
there is one thing they can not make me do that is live not even if theyoutsmart my bodythis prison is a prison is my home where i wait cant move unless hesprings the trap
dont they know i am not for waiting
My father was beating me with his fists, I felt I would die. I
looked up and saw her sitting, alive again; silent, pale, observing.
I realized it was a dream, she spoke to him through me, "1 will
destroy you, don't doubt it."i walk down the street stare go ahead a curiosity i look into a store
window that reflection is not me
what is it they want i fix my eyes straight ahead look only direct
or meet their eyes with nothing in mine a skill i have pull my mind toa safe world
there is no safe place to go crazy what i didnt know there is no cure it
only gets worse the drugs take away they cut it doesnt end doesnt heal
it doesnt there is only one end to this path
once i was blue it was mine now i have nothing not my own body notpride dont push away they say i trust no one
spare me your pity
Out of superstition and mother loyalty, I avoided the doctors
who gave pills, did surgery. A therapist instead: eighty dollars afix. As I came down each time the voice haunted me, "No ofcourse you are not queer. You hate your father. Not all men arelike him."74

''You say you are weeping about the woman found strangled
at the edge of campus, but really that's an excuse for deeper grief.
Don't put your problems on the world./1
Out of rage, common sense, I dismissed the dealers, learned todismantle my own bombs and return them carefully to their
origin: reset.

there is no pill to make him stop
no operation to cut away time for me no hospital to give me peace ofmind time to hold the baby all night there is no curethe gold stars mean nothing to me i wont work for them im sick to notwant gold gummy stars alright im sickhe said not the time for questions not the time to think
I think of my mother's act of rebellion: she wouldn't live forthem.
I think of my own and know: I won't die for them.

it is not because i dont love my life it is because i love it very much
I don't know what they see; I see my mother. No one tuckedaway hankies that day and said, ''But what an accurate portrait
Vera could draw, a born artist she was./1
Noone recalled, Vera played a fine tune, that you could counton. That you could remember./1
Maybe I was too young to know. After all no one really is a born
artist. More than inclination it takes hours, money, and for awoman a voice in her own time that reminds, "It is right to want
to do this above all else./1/I

it is not because i dont love my life it is because i love it very much
I hear the hushed gossip of cowards behind me in the grocery
store, asking of my mother; what did she do, what did she do,what did she do. They don't hear. It is only a whisper.

My mother played the accordion.That is what she did.

75

Dee dee NiHera

Money Changes Everything*It

took many months away from misery entrepreneurs before I
began to realize their effect on my life and on society as a whole.
While paying a shrink, I drifted away from unpaid friends. I
learned that not only did I frighten them, but that they lacked
experience to help me understand my pain. I learned friends were
"too close" to the situation, that I couldn't trust them with mydeepest secrets. I learned that only thoughtless self-centeredpeople expect support for free from untrained folks they callfriends . Friends learn from subtle behavior modification programming that turning to books, dogs, trees, streams or deep
breathing will only delay "necessary treatment" and worsen thepotential customer's condition.
To believers, therapy means goodness, helpfulness and expert
care. No matter what goes wrong in the chatting-for-hire relationship, the opinions of the faithful do not budge. When one professional damages us, we often seek out another in hopes they'll fix
us up and heal our pain from the previous damage. Torture,murder, brain washing, incarceration, rape, battering and fascism all happen in the name of therapy. These are not merely side
effects or the errors of misguided professionals. They are part ofthe package. All therapy is political and hierarchical. Some professionals lie about the relationship more than others.
Psychotherapy is a medicalized term used to distinguish itfrom common activities. If we play in our homes it's called play.
If it occurs in a professional building the identical activity becomes play therapy. If we weave baskets or make belts we're
doing art! craft labor. If under psychiatric guidance, we're engaging in occupational therapy. If we wash our kitchen floor, we're
cleaning house. If we're inmates in a psychiatric institution, we're• This paper is excerpted from a much longer article, which will appear as achapter in The MisenJ Business, a book in progress. The full text, as well as otherchapters, is available for postage and copying costs from Dee dee NiHera, P.O.
Box 20904, Juneau, AK 99802.

76engaging in indus trial therapy. The market is rapidly expanding
to include every activity imaginable. People in this field can only
make a living from what they perceive as therapy.
All universities teach beliefs. Beliefs become facts whenthe majority of those in power agree with the beliefs. The general
population is often in awe of what it takes in time and resourcesto acquire a degree. People are taught to assume that a degreed
person is better qualified, more skilled and dependable than heror his non-degreed counterpart. Less expensive and time-consuming ways exist to exchange ideas and teach each other different ways of doing things. But without social validation fromdegree granting institutions, ordinary wisdom remains outside
the realm of possibilities.
Universities do more than sell information. They create a professional privileged class and institutionalize racist, sexist andclassist ideologies. The concept of professionalism serves todivide the haves from the have nots. To insist on the preface"doctor" for one's name is to desire the status of master overothers. The ideologies of therapy and profeSSionalism overlap in
purpose and meaning. Both convey a sense of goodness anddesirability. Hidden beneath this cloak of misinformation wefind that both therapy and professionalism encourage inequality,
authoritarianism (under the guise of expertise), cut-throat competition, and ethical irresponsibility. Simply by virtue of theirtitles alone professionals are considered respectable, trust-worthy specialists. They teach lay people that oppression wears asmile and should be embraced and respected. They repeat the
mantra to themselves and each other, 'We are superior to nondegreed helpers and friends because of our expensive formal
education. Everyone needs our services because all people havedifficulties surviving in the modern world."

Why We Buy
New graduates enter one of the fastest growing markets inadvanced capitalism thanks to government sponsored advertising. We don't choose therapy simply because we're angry, hurt,
frustrated, isolated and confused. A manipulative and clearlyplanned advertising campaign financed by tax dollars continuously shapes our thinking on the subject. We learn almost hyp77

notically and unconsciously to associate the terms therapy, helpfulness and alleviation of pain.
The media is the most powerful ally of the misery industry.
Reporters present the beliefs and opinions of psychiatrists asscientific facts. Successes and breakthroughs are big news. Deathand relapse make poor copy but are quite common.
Misery entrepreneurs use the media to their individual andcollective advantage. Because they perceive that most problems
have a personal solution which can be marketed as therapy, there
is no end to supply and demand. Part of any advertising campaign is to make a product desirable and then to confuse apotential buyer about the difference between desire and need.
The final step is to create a dependency on the product and limit
its delivery to the marketplace.
Therapists require dependency from customers, they survive
on it. Part of the professional's marketing strategy in collaboration with government agencies is to convince potential customers
that first, professional conversation is a service commodity andsecond, that the populace desperately needs to buy what theyalone are licensed to sell.
Language is another important aspect of the sell. Atrocities
hidden in language are a method used by both the military andthe mental illness industry to keep their image acceptable andsaleable. Take for example psychiatric and psychological treatment. Many think that when a person is placed in a locked facility
with no trial they incarcerate the inmate illegally. If a medical staff
runs the locked building, people believe, due to advertiSing, thatthe "patient requires hospitalization." Drugs change to "medication" when prescribed. Medications somehow avoid the current
medical blitz on drug abuse. Supposedly only self-medica tors
abuse chemicals. Electrical shocks change to electroconvulsive
therapy. When a person takes a razor and carves little lines into
her arms, doctors call this activity self-mutilation. When a physician saws into a person's skull and slices out portions of the brain,
doctors call this psychosurgery.
How many folks would bring their friends, their kin or themselves to the prison gate for punishment? By medicalizing thelanguage to "hospital," "treatment" and "help," authorities
know that many will turn in themselves and their loved ones.
78

In the office of the therapist, a more subtle form of oppression
occurs. Equally dangerous, it too goes unrecognized and unchallenged. The expert promotes herself as different from and superior to the ordinary peer. Some therapists claim equality with
their customers while promoting themselves as superior to thecustomer's peers. The medicalized title of the paid conversationalist or treater is central to the entire misery enterprise. Also
important is the language professionals use to describe theircustomers. Some therapists call those who pay them consumers
or clients. These experts attempt to de-medicalize the buyers'
position in the hierarchy. Removing the stigma of mental patientis also good for the business of those who fear the "real wierdos."
They can treat everybody else. For some reason, these therapists
see no reason to change their title or position. They were top dog
with patient! customers and still are with client/customers. Achange in title might have threatened their authority and thus
their income.
Psychotherapists today needs the patronage of their customers
and the State to survive economically in their career. Even though
customers and the state keep them in the money, they pretend itis their product (therapy) which is needed. How many workers
do you know who can charge for services their customers didn't
order and don't even want, who can drag out the sell for a life
time, who control both the time and the manner in which theirservices are delivered to the market?
If a house cleaner who earns ten dollars an hour questions her
psychotherapist who charges seventy dollars for fifty minutes,
the therapist may equate money with personal worth. "1 charge
seventy dollars because I'm worth it. You would too if you could
get it. .. and I can help you get what you want and deserve." Morefrequently, the discussion will shift to the customer's supposed
problems. "Why do you resist my attempts to help you feelbetter? Why can't you make and keep commitments in your life?"
Once somebody lays their money on the table, the therapy
hook goes deeper. Sellers congratulate their voluntary customers
for "doing something good for yourself," or starting to "take careof yourself" and advise that "you owe this to yourself." The feecollector reminds customers that "this is a safe place, a nonjudgmental place, you need not censor a single verbal response."
79

"You're not weird or alone." "It took great strength and couragefor you to make the decision to come here today. I applaud yourstrength." ''You're special, I'm here and I care." It's seductive tohave an audience who you believe is there only for your wellbeing.
Therapists tell their customers to share their fears in thissociety, but in an attempt to mask their own terror, they drug
visionary customers. Because most customers have learned tofear these non-ordinary sensory perceptions, they willingly
swallow damaging chemicals and hope the payoff is worth therisks. Drugs are well-marketed and highly profitable. Drugs
prove how much users need them like therapists prove howmuch we all need therapy.
Government Dispensaries
Money is one of the most taboo topics in this commercial caring
enterprise. Folks without money have "the right to treatment"
but if professionals judge them or their middle class counterparts
as being possessed with a serious mind sickness, they have noright to refuse treatment.
Without choice, the legal system sends offenders to miseryentrepreneurs as a court sentence, a requirement of parole or as
an alternative to jail. Others go as a requirement for receiving
public assistance, an insurance settlement, or so the court won't
take away their children. As professionals have moved into thelucrative market of child psychiatry, more and more children areforced to participate in treatment. Over the past five years childdiagnoses have increased 1000% while child hospital admits(incarceration) have increased 400% over the same period.
Social turmoil greatly benefits misery business entrepreneurs
both in private practice and in clinics. The more who come to theclinics, the more clinics will be reimbursed by third party payments. While the customer in private therapy for two years will
pay ten times the amount of the annual income of half of humanity, the public customer also contributes to the gross national
product. McKnight writes in "A Nation of Clients" that thosereceiving public assistance are more valuable in their dependency because so much income is derived from this dependency.
They probably will never produce the amount made off them, so
80can not contribute as much working as they can dependent onservices and therapy.
The government and the misery business need each other tosurvive. Misery entrepreneurs adjust people to their oppression(including sellers who call themselves feminist and radical). In
return the government grants these professionals certain privileges, licenses and free advertising. It is in their interest toconceptualize social injustice as individual psychopathology(mind sickness). It is in their interest to have the "masses" adjust
to oppression. It is in their interests to train the "masses" to seekout authority for every problem and to make authority appear
concerned with our well-being.
If we're all isolated and preoccupied with blaming ourselves
for our poverty, homeless ness, sickness, battering and unhappiness, we will never unite and confront the unequal distribution of
wealth, stealing disguised as taxation, biological warfare, racism,sexism or anything else. We won't even recognize their existence.
Social unrest and demands for equality will be put to rest in favorof a trip to the therapist. We all pay for such a philosophy. Some
more than others.
Who's Sorry Now?
Sellers of therapy have a few formulas to deal with dissatisfied,violated or dead customers. One is called "the bad apple" theory.
They pull it out frequently as so much seems to go wrong in themisery business. The bad apple theory concedes that cruel orignorant practitioners exist among professional ranks, but that a
few misguided and ill individuals in no way reflect upon theentire operation, only happy endings and customer satisfaction.
Co-optation is an important aspect of diffusing anger andrestraining social action against all institutions, including psychiatry and psychotherapy. Faithful customers defuse criticism
of the profession by accusing violated critics of poor shopping
habits. "You just didn't find the right shrink." The assumption
here is that there is choice at all times.
Entrepreneurs and customers also charge survivors of therapy
violence with frightening the needy with horror stories, and label
critics as "mentally ill."81

Feminists Strengthen the BusinessCriticizing feminist conversation-for-hire in a meeting or awomen's news journal in the United States is like criticizing
Catholicism in the Vatican. Women jump to defend their shrink(feminist therapist) and shrinks jump to defend their products.
The critic rapidly becomes the anti-feminist, the outsider, theignorant. Critics are too negative, unsupportive of women's
needs, can't listen and are "addicted" to an anti-therapy stance.
If a feminist seller violates a customer, the feminist was only
masquerading as a feminist or the incident never really happened. Unlike other sellers, feminists seem to believe that theircolleagues never harm, disable or destroy their customers.
The term "feminist" is not a liberating one to me. Further, I do
not support the U.S. feminist (therapy) movement. I think that agroup so embedded in psychiatric jargon and which takes nostand against incarceration is not a women's liberation movement. (Maybe that's why women took "liberation" out of theirname and decided to call themselves a feminist rather than awomen's liberation movement. A friend of mine suggested thata change in class perspective put women's liberation out andfeminist in as labels.) I think the feminist (therapy) movement in
the United States is different from women's liberation in otherparts of the world.
Neither political criticism of psychiatry nor counter institutions were new ideas in the 1960s. Women's liberation theorists
naively decided that the problem with psychiatric and psychological services was an over abundance of male practitioners
treating fema~e patients and a sexist theoretical foundation forsuch treatment.
With a limited analysis of the problem, no critique of a medicalized language and little understanding of classism within theprofeSSions, women set up grass roots projects such as women's
centers, battered women's shelters and mutual support networks. They took power rather than waiting for the experts to"empower them" with the right to change.
Meanwhile, highly educated feminist entrepreneurs decided
that the way to change the system and "empower" women was
to work from within the system. This at least gave them a good82

salary compared to grassroots organizers who had to scramble
for phone money. The reform philosophy is different from aphilosophy of revolution. Their strategy was to reorganize existing institutions without altering their basic foundations. They
called their reorganized institutions "alternatives." An alternative's progressive appearance helped appease certain elements ofthis social change movement. Feminist therapy, for example, wasconceptualized and marketed as an alternative to oppressive
psychotherapy.
All licensed sellers pay tuition in the same classist, racist andsexist universities, but supposedly those calling themselves
feminist put their indoctrination aside to bring their sisters a
product packaged with more appeal.
Feminist therapy sellers, in an effort to corner the market in thepolitical women's community and convince prospective buyersof this therapy's uniqueness, proclaim equality between buyers
and sellers (later some acknowledged that it wasn't an equal
relationship, but that's life).
Is it equal when buyers teach sellers about human interactions
and give them marketable experience yet have to pay to teach? Is
it equal when buyers are expected to share their inner mostsecrets while sellers sit safely watching and interpreting theircustomer's behavior? If the seller decides to share pain and thebuyer listens as part of her paid treatment? When one has thepower to imprison another?
Another early selling technique was to convince women with
political problems that therapy could help. As a recruitment
method, supporters of feminist therapy decided that apolitical
women could get politicized and active through feminist therapy, not through peer consciousness raising groups or any otherobviously political channel.
Non-degreed women offering women feminist therapy forfree needed to be dealt with. The pros taught trainees thatworking without economic remuneration was anti-feminist andshowed they suffered from a mother/martyr complex. Nondegreed women began charging women to come to groups intheir homes, groups that in the past were peer-organized without
fees. Now professionals pointed out that they were selling support without a license, and advised women to purchase proper
83university training. Professionals were invited into many rapecrisis centers and battered women's shelters to observe and help
out as equals. Slowly they moved out the "lay persons" whoorganized the shelters in the beginning.
Now women wrote articles and sold workshops on how tochoose a therapist. Professionals invented syndromes for survivors of rape, battering and incest and wrote up grants to provide"treatments" for these diagnoses. They said what women in pain,
women battered and raped, women brutalized in prisons andpsychiatric institutions need is not mutual support, grass-roots
organizing and political revolution. We need a marketable resource, an expert to chat with, a professional "sister" to sell us
hope.
While inactively waiting for a revolution, frustrated feminists
need to purchase professional talking. How else can one keep her
spirits up in these unsettling times. Sellers make buying easy. A
woman can even buy on a sliding scale from the majority of sellers
except they generally slide up easier than they slide down.
Sliding scales are a great marketing strategy for a glutted market.
Women who would pay nothing now pay something and feelgratitude for the favor.
In a relationship determined by money and inequality, womenlearn how to relate, to love, to befriend one another. Noncommercial relationships weaken as the therapeutic model ofrelating teaches women how to be (or not be) with each other.
Feminist therapy sellers know that "the personal" makes betterbusiness sense than "the political." Classified sections in women's papers don't include "political growth" sections. The
sellers market therapy as a social change activity. The government is pleased with the state of affairs. It supports the philosophy of capitalist individualism. This philosophy is based on theidea that personal change is really the only change possible andsocial change as part of personal change is inconceivable. How
can a hurting confused woman even think about changing thesocial structure with others before she purchases and completes
a life-long personal care program?

84

Where Do We Go?
Those making war would definitely prefer to psychologize every
aspect of our lives for obvious reasons. If we're bombed it's because we have negative thoughts rather than greedy governments.
When we psychologize an inmate's anger or a critic's displeasure, we quit paying attention to these people. They become
invisible. Psychotherapy has harmed many people and altered
even our most intimate relationships. It helps alright. It helps us
become more invisible to each other and to the government.
Disenchanted therapy customers often have difficulty finding
each other and psychiatrically violated people generally experience isolation, silence and self-blame for atrocities not of our own
making. This must and can stop. The solution is not to hire nondegreed therapists or hire peers to hear our pain. We can all starttalking to each other outside the marketplace. Though it takes a
lot of courage and attention, we can start changing the world
today by asking a woman "how are you?" and meaning it.

Selected Bibliography
Bergin, Allen E. "The Deterioration Effect: a Reply to Braucht," Journalof Abnormal PsychologJJ, 75(3):300-302.1970.
_. "The Effects of Psychotherapy: Negative
Results Revisited," Journal of Counseling Psychology, 10(3):244-250. 1963.
Cardea, Caryatis. "The Lesbian Revolution and the 50 Minute Hour: aWorking Class Look at Therapy and the Movement," Lesbian Ethics,
1(3):46-58. 1986.
Duxbury, Micky. "Feminist Therapy?" Madness Network News, 3(8):1617.1975.
Evgenia, Tracie. "How Feminist Is Feminist Therapy?" Off Our Backs,
6(6):2-3+. 1976.
Feyerabend, Paul. "Experts in a Free Society," The Critic, Nov IDec, 1970,
pp.58-69.
Hadley, Suzanne W. and Strupp, Hans H. "Contemporary Views ofNegative Effects in Psychotherapy," Archives of General Psychiatry,
33:1291-1302.1976.

85

Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. "Lesbian Ethics: Some Thoughts on Power in
Our Interactions," Lesbian Ethics, 2(1):4-32. 1986.
Hurvitz, Nathan. "Manifest and Latent Functions in Psychotherapy,"
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2):301-302. 1974.
_. "Peer Self-Help Psychotherapy Groups andTheir Implications for Psychotherapy," Psychotherapy: Theory Researchand Practice, 7(1):41-49. 1970.
_ . "Psychotherapy as a Means of Social
Control," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 40(2):332-339.
1974.
Kelly, Betsy. "Selling Yourself," RT: a Journal of Radical Therapy, 4(7):10.
1975.
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. ''When Talk Is Not Cheap: Psychotherapy as
Conversation," The State of Language, L. Michaels and C. Ricks (eds.),
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. pp. 440-448.
Lee, Anna. "Therapy: the Evil Within," Trivia: a Journal of Ideas, 9:34-45.
1986.
Loewenstein, Andrea Freud. "Kate Millett's Loony Bin Trip," Sojourner,
June, 1987, pp. 12-15.
Mancuso, J.c., et aL "Psychology in the Morals Marketplace: Role
Dilemma for Community Psychologists," A Consumer Approach to Community Psychology, J.K. Morrison (ed.), Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979,
pp.261-294.
Matarazzo, Joseph D. "Some Psychotherapists Make Patients Worse!"
International Journal of Psychiatry, 3:156-157. 1967.
McKnight, John. "A Nation of Clients," Public Welfare, Fall, 1980, pp. 1519.
Oden, Thomas. "A Populist'S View of Psychotherapeutic Deprofessionalization," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 14(2):3-18. 1974.
Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Perenyi, Constance. "Enough Is Enough: Feminist Therapy and OtherBad Habits," Big Mama Rag: a Feminist News Journal, 7(1):11,20+. 1980.
Sullivan, GaiL ''Women's Shelters House Contradictions," Sojourner,
7(8):5. 1982.

86

Mary Moran

Breeze Inn
Entering the first vacancy of the day, Marla slides open thewindow for a breath of fresh air against the smell of stale cigarettesmoke in the room. Rose grabs a set of clean sheets off the cart in
the hallway and drapes them over the arm of the chair next to thetable. Working as a team hasn't changed the amount of time ittakes to finish cleaning the total of twenty units between the twoof them but it does give the women a chance to talk.
As they strip the spread, blanket and sheets from the bed Marlaasks, "Did you hear about Joyce?"''No. What's happening?" In her mind Rose pictures Joyce whoworks as a breakfast cook in the coffee shop at the motel. With herveteran spatula in hand Joyce scrapes up spattering bacon, hashbrowns and fried eggs then slaps them over on the grill. Steamrises to frizz her graying hair tucked daily under her hairnet.
Grease and sweat revive teenage acne at the age of forty-five. The
smell of fried food clothes her like a second skin that she's grownused to wearing from six in the morning until two in the afternoon
Monday through Friday.
"She shot and killed Eddy last night."
Stunned in disbelief for a moment, Rose jars herself back into
her job and yanks the pillowcase off the pillow then tosses it on
the heap of dirty sheets.
"I was at the eight o'clock meeting at the eastside AA clubhouse," admits Marla. ''Just two houses down from Joyce's upper
flat. We heard the shotgun blast just as we were saying the
Serenity Prayer."
Rose takes her end of the clean folded sheet. With a flip of theirwrists the women snap open the sheet in the air over the double
bed then smooth it into place and tuck the ends under themattress. The corners are neatly squared off with military precision and ready for inspection.
"Joyce must have called the ambulance herself cause theycome rushing right to the house in five minutes flat with their87

lights flashing and the sirens screaming bloody murder," continues Marla as she pulls her side of the fuzzy gold blanket over the
top sheet.
"I can just hear Joyce calling and saying: I shot myoId man andhe's bleeding all over my rug. You coming or do I need to call on
the sanitation department?" After stopping to pose an imitationof Joyce matter-of-factly reporting the shooting, Rose smooths
out the wrinkles in the blanket.
Rose fumes, "All those years of Joyce calling on the cops forprotection against Eddy. And they didn't do a damn thing."
Marla heaves the heavy spread back onto the bed. ''Well, theysure did something last night. Locked up Joyce in the county jail.
Stuck her kid in juvenile hall. And they got Eddy iced on a slab in
the morgue."
Rose shivers before speaking. "That poor girl's tried everything from moving back South with no forwarding address tochecking herself into the state mental hospital. You know things
are real bad when a girl has to hide out in the nuthouse cause she
feels safer there than at home."
They pull the bedspread up and over the pillows and slide theirhands under to form a neat fold.
''You know, a couple of the old-timers at the AA clubhouseknew Eddy personally from years ago. Last night they were
saying he was probably drunk as a skunk and meaner than a pit
bull when he come busting down Joyce's door," comments
Marla.
"Eddy sure got what he deserved," says Rose.
''You better believe it. Joyce blasted that S.O.B. out of her life forgood. 'Cept now they'll be slapping a murder one charge on her."
In a glimmer of hope Rose says, ''Maybe she'll get off with selfdefense.""Pat chance!" says Marla with a huff.
Rose grabs her bucket of cleaning solutions and a stack of clean
towels off the cart and disappears into the bathroom.
When she pushes up the sleeves of her olive green cardigan
Rose's thumbs slide over the ridges of scar tissue on her forearms
that remind her of the winter she spent in the state mental
hospital. Joyce was an inmate with her at the time. Rose never saw
herself or Joyce or any of the other women on the fifty bed ward88

as crazy. Granted, they all had problems - mostly with the men in
their lives. Many had been raped as children or as adults. Somelike Joyce were being battered by their husbands or boyfriends.
All of them were being drugged or shocked into submissive
silence. To Rose's horror, five of the women had been lobotomized into vegetative states. And that winter, Karin and Pele died
under suspicious circumstances behind the locked doors of theirward.
Sprinkling the white cleanser in the tub, toilet, and sink basin,
Rose scours her memory for clues as to how she and Joyce ever got
out alive. In her heart she knows that there is no mystery to it.
After seeing that any attempt to get help for their problems orrelief from the pain in their lives resulted in an array of punishments, they realized that compliance with those holding the keys
was the only way out.
And then what?
After being honest about her incarceration to one employer
Rose quickly learned to lie about her past to avoid the everwatchful eyes of her boss just waiting to catch her "acting crazy"
so he could fire her.
She wrings out the cleaning rag until her knuckles turn white.
When Rose started working at the motel and found out Joyce
was the breakfast cook in the coffee shop, they nodded andgrinned at one another. Like long lost friends they joked andtalked but never said a word about the old days.
Rose spritzes the fingerprints left on the bathroom mirror andbuffs the surface clean of any evidence of last night's guest. She
looks directly at herself in the mirror and sees Joyce, then decides
to call in sick on the day of Joyce's preliminary hearing.
Marla drives the vacuum cleaner across the carpeting as if it
was a lawn mower shearing every blade of grass down to theirvery roots. Her left hand strangles the handle of the upright
Hoover while she steers the machine around the bed, then bashes
it against the metal frame repeatedly.
"Bastard!" She flips the switch off and weaves the cord into
figure eights around the hooks on the handle.
Marla is all too familiar with-the likes of Eddy. Her daddy wasa drunk. As she bends over to empty the ashtray into the wastebasket her right temple throbs over the scar above her eye. A89reminder of the time her daddy threw the lamp at her mama,
missed his target and split open Marla's head. She was twelve
then and screamed through the tears and blood running down
her face, "I hate you! You're not my father! I wish you were dead!"Wiping away the beads of sweat on her forehead, Marlapolishes the dresser, table and nightstand with Pledge andswears she'll be at the hearing for Joyce.
While Rose fumigates the room with a mist of Lysol Marlaslides the window shut and draws the drapes against the morning sunlight.
"Only nineteen rooms to go," sighs Rose.

City Life Myra Fourwinds
90

flyin thunda cloud rdoc

iz it 2 hard 2 admit thatwomyn hurt womyn?

.

1 have noticed that many womyn are so squeamish about discussing the mental health system & how many womyn have been
hurt by it, that they'll do anything just about 2 get someone 2 stoptalking about the way they feel, because they are so busy trying
to get womyn to buy in2 the system of mental health, because they
say that it "helps."
what i often wonder iz how these very same lesbians can be theones who are the most vociferous when it comes down 2 what
they call the "patriarchy," when the system they proclaim as the''best 4 certain lesbians" iz just as malest &. just az oppressive az
the other systems that they have fits about? the imbalance &stupidity of womyn having literary heart attacks about what theycall patriarchy & then crying about "how good the system ofmental health can be" makes me feel like going off 2 an island allby myself.
we exist/live in a lesbian society which iz supposedly a womon
loving society, but espouses sameness & assimilation 4 anyone
who iz different. why a system such az mental health which haz
been systematically proven 2 be oppressive & destructive 2 thepsychic & emotional abilities of womyn is still supported bywomyn, some by becoming mental health nurses and doctors
themselves, is a mystery 2 me (& 2 most womyn i have spoken 2).
& 2 think, 4 years many of us have been called "crazy," "looneytunes," "psychotic" by these self-same womyn who wouldn't
think something iz the matter wif them because they would haveus go 2 torturers (many of us know just what they will do 4 us!).
i do not apologize 4 my anger because it is righteous anger & i
am expressing anger that not only i, but many of my sisters, feel
& if somone iz upset because of my raw anger then something iz
tapping on her conscience.

91

Batya Weinbaum

Oasis
Oasis, an alternative emotional healing space at the Michigan
Womyn's Music Festival, was originally created in response toprotests when a Spanish flamenco dancer was hauled away by
security for jumping on stage to dance to the drumming. She hadjust landed in the U.S., was not wearing clothes or her contactlenses and was hauled away for being "schizophrenic" and"speaking word salad." Her interpretation was that she wasexperiencing spontaneous rebirthing after she had attended aworkshop. Eventually she wore out even the other "crazies" whocoalesced in protest (consciousness was already high because of
a post-festival disability conference the previous summer). Manyof us went from Michigan to NEWMR (New England Women'sMusic Retreat) to the West Coast Festival, protesting and consciousness-raising en route.
At the third festival, being able to speak Spanish, I helped her
by explaining how to get a paper she had written posted andpassed out and how to set up a workshop. Because she was seen
as "a crazy," it was assumed by some that I had written the paperfor her. We parted ways at a boarding house in S.F.
Dealing with this through three festivals, a group drew together and presented a proposal for a new area. Even though wewere the radicals, on the scene doing the work, women were
hired the next year (with salary) who had degrees as therapists,
in humanistic psychology and such. We had to fight to get our feetin the door, but we did, for barter and trade. But eventuallytension and resentment blew up, as a result of the long-standing
problems.
For example, some people think they know what is "healing"
and don't like loudness, anarchy, spontaneous energy and cigarettes. But that's often what being "a crazy" is about. And somepeople think that what ya gotta do is organize structure, designate time and workshifts. Whereas others, who might have been
locked up from time to time, feel just hanging out and being92

around to pick up on whatever needs to be done can pass forwork. Some identified this as professional versus lounge workstyle, and others (guess which ones) resented this.
Other problems emerged: the patronizing attitude towards"us" by the ones who had taken over. The white middle-classworkstyle. The need for some of "us" to please the therapists incharge by trying to "heal" them, instead of seeing some of thesedivisions as political. The ripping off of carefully fought formaterials. The in-fighting over class background and culturaldifferences. The dropping off of the consciousness-raising aboutcraziness and turning the area into a mental health facility withidentified "grief" therapists and this kind of therapist and thatkind of therapist and workshops. Festival security turning to thisin-house community mental health center for an inner police
force to placate anarchist consciousness (i.e., calling Oasis reps to"rope in" belligerent rule breakers, instead of questioning therules themselves). The martyrdom-consciousness of those who
took over. Women hiring their girlfriends or friends or girlfriendsof other "important" festival women instead of ex-patients. The
high ex-patient turn-over because nobody could stomach theshit. The disintegration of collectivity into hierarchical structure
partly due to the whole "take charge" shift in the inner workingof the festival.
But there are positives - no one will ever be taken off the land
to a hospital, even though divisions on this arose within the Oasis
structure itself. And there is cross-networking among exs, andsharing of information on alternatives. It's a good place to hangout if you can stand all the condescension if you happen to be "acrazy" or "ex-" yourself. And some spin-offs occurred like thecreation of Trinity - grounding space at NEWMR by women
who met doing this networking.

93

Diane Hugs

Thera pissed

This paper examines some of the problems in the lesbian community when it comes to therapy's standards and ethics. My encounters include therapists who gossip to others, incest therapists who cross emotional and physical boundaries, and therapists who believe that AI-anon is a completely safe program
within the lesbian community. Since I am a lesbian, my experience is with Lesbian/ Feminist therapy.and lesbian community
attitudes.
Growing up working class, I had been taught that therapy wasfor the upper class people who couldn't handle their own lives.
Six working class people I knew wound up in the state mental
institution, never to be seen again. So when I decided to seek help
with my emotional problems, relating to the incest I'd experienced as a child, it was with a lot of fear. My search for a therapist
was hard. I had to find one who was willing to deal with mydisability, work with me on wheelchair access and accept the factof my limited finances.
I found a therapist, Joyce, who specialized in healing fromincest and had an excellent reputation in the field. She was a goodtherapist and pulled me through some of the hardest times I've
experienced as an adult. Even so, it was difficult to accept that I
was paying for therapy time to educate her about my physicaldisability.
I joined a group for lesbian incest survivors. Once I told thegroup what I knew of my own story, I felt empowered. I left
feeling good about myself and the group. A few hours later
something very strange began to happen. My lover, Chris, told
me that I'd been talking as if I was six years old. This kept
happening. My lover and other friends would tell me they had
been talking with me at all different ages. These younger personalities started to tell stories of abuse I not only didn't remember,but that were also beyond my imagination.
94

A few days later I went into a mental crisis. I would thinkseconds were passing, when it really was minutes to hours. I
thought I must be going crazy. Joyce came over and helped me
calm down through some relaxation exercises. Then she gently
introduced me to the concept of multiple personality disorder(MPD) .
The first time I split (went into another personality), in front ofJoyce she was stunned. She had not worked with anyone with
MPD before, "It was if a whole new person was sitting there
instead of you. Not just facial expressions and gestures, but also
your voice and presence." That's basically what everyone aroundme was saying, it really was like I was three, six, thirteen, sixteen,
etc .. Joyce decided to get help with my "case." She found a senior
therapist (Shirley) who had a background in MPD. Shirley had
also worked with other disabled people, so I didn't have to reexplain my disability.
It was about two or three months later that a distant friend
asked me if I was still splitting as much. I asked her how did she
know about it anyway? She told me that a friend of hers heard it
from Chris's therapist. The feeling of being exposed was overwhelming and I really questioned if all of this was worth it. I
decided to continue therapy anyway, feeling secure in the factthat Joyce did not gossip. I now know that I have over thirty
separate personalities.
'
Chris was in AI-anon. It soon became apparent to me that, toChris, being disabled was the same as being an alcoholic. She was
responding to my physical crises as if I were an alcoholic on adrinking binge. Chris said part of her healing process was both of
us working on our relationship, so that she didn't feel responsible
for me (feel"co-dependent"). She moved out, we spent limited
time together, and she took little or no responsibility when I hada crisis. It seemed as if any form of caring was considered co-ing,
and as a disabled woman I especially resented that.
Arguments between us continued to increase, and I really
didn't know why. We desperately tried to hold on to some formof this relationship. Finally, on the day before our third anniversary, Chris and I decided to have Shirley mediate. (We choose
Shirley over Joyce because Chris was an old friend of Joyce's.)
While Chris was still outlining the basic problems, Shirley broke95

in saying she fully supported Chris's moving away to take care ofherself, and that she herself believed in the teachings of AI-anon.
I sat and watched as Chris explained how alone she felt when
I had a seizure and how it angered her. She felt left behind. Shirleysaid this was a normal reaction to seizures and turned to me
saying, "Don't you understand this? How do you feel whensomeone is too sick to give you the support you need?" "Such as
an emergency?" I asked. ''Why, I take care of the emergency,
especially if you mean a medical one, then I take care of myself,
but no, I have never felt angry with anyone who had a seizure justbecause they had one." "But what if it inconvenienced you, likemade you late getting somewhere?" Shirley probed my feelings.
''Well, I suppose if there was already a question as to whether thisperson was using the seizures to get something," I responded.
''But what if it just made your life harder?" Shirley just wouldn't
let go. "No, I wouldn't be angry, but I am getting angry now." Ipushed these words out. "Maybe you're just not in touch withyour emotions then, because it's very normal to be angry at
someone who has just had a seizure," Shirley informed me.
I couldn't believe my ears. People have a variety of reactions
to emergencies such as' seizures. Initial reactions may be harsh,
but once they become familiar with seizures, most people learn tohandle them matter-of-factly without dumping on the epileptic.
A non-disabled example of a similar situation is when a woman
has severe menstrual troubles to the point of throwing up andfainting. I wondered, was it only in disability issues that Shirley
would validate this type of angry response?
I sat silently as Shirley asked Chris what it was she truly
wanted from this situation, not to hold back. Chris remained
quiet for a few minutes so Shirley asked her, "Do you want out of
this relationship, is it just too much for you at this time?" "Yes,"
Chris replied after her silence. "There's no way for me to remainin this relationship and not be co." Shirley commended her on her
courage to say this. At that time I fully realized that Shirley wasin no way being an objective mediator. I was numb, and thoughts
moved slowly through my mind. The first thing I needed forsurvival was to feel safer, so I brought up issues around AI-anon
meetings which Chris attended twice a week within the lesbiancommunity. "If you're leaving me then it's fine if you talk to96

people, but please not in front of large groups like AI-anon. It
makes me feel exposed. How many women in wheelchairs havemultiple personalities?" I asked. "Yeah, that's fine with me,"Chris responded. But Shirley was inflamed. Shirley told me thatmy fears were totally unfounded, that no one in AI-anon madejudgements from what they heard at meetings and most certainly
would not tell others in any situation. As a disabled woman, I
know I am not the only one to run into problems concerning AIanon versus disability issues. Is AI-anon sometimes used as an
excuse for not caring for other people?
By this time I was so broken inside that I don't remember a lotof the rest of the session, but I do have it on tape. When I later
confronted Shirley about how she'd handled the mediation, she
told me that she was so supportive of Chris because she felt that
I was the stronger of the two. Shirley refused to listen to the tapeherself to see if on second thought she might have been biased
during the mediation. I never saw her after that, though Joyce
continued to use her as a senior therapist on my case.
In the weeks that followed, new issues arose. As I began integrating one of my personalities, the memories were becoming
mine. I didn't expect that the memories would have anything to
do with Chris. There were scenes between Chris and part of me
who is an eighteen year old prostitute. I remembered Chris
yelling at me: "You whore, going out to get some ass?" andshoving me. Then physical confrontations would take place. Thiswas very disturbing to me. Later when I asked Chris if thesememories were accurate, she said ''Yes, in fact that's a big part of
the reason I left you so suddenly. I found myself being abusive,and didn't know how to stop except to get totally away. It felt a
lot like when my father was so drunk he-w~n' t remember, andI could actually haul off and slap him with nol'epe1'CITSSic:ms." A
couple of days later I became furious that the lover I trusted somuch would hurt me because she knew that I wouldn't remember. And why hadn't any hint of this come out in our mediation?
Why had Shirley been so eager to focus on Chris's"co-ing" as themain problem?
Chana, a sweet, non-threatening woman had recently entered
my life, and some personalities trusted her enough to communicate with her. Once they were sure Chris wasn't corning back,97they came out with some horrendous stories about how Chris
had treated them. Chana believed the personalities she spoke to,but I was hearing it through her, and my heart just wouldn't
accept it.
Next therapy session I told Joyce about the stories and asked
her if she would please try to talk to some of these personalities
to find out what had happened. Joyce said no. She told me, ''Don'tbelieve everything you remember, some of it may be out of any
recognizable focus." Which parts was I to believe and which todisregard? Was I only supposed to believe what my various
personalities said about the past? Obviously, I was not supposed
to believe what any of my personalities said about the present,
especially when they involved my lover.
Joyce insisted on a mediation with her, Chris, and me before
talking with me alone about it. Her refusal to speak with thepersonalities who were angry and afraid of Chris scared the hellout of me. She seemed, like much of the lesbian community,
willing to accept that women don't abuse women. I began towonder if this was how Joyce would handle other situations
where possible abuse had occurred. Would she, an incest therapist, call in both the victim and the possible abuser before everreally dealing with the victim's feelings in the first place? Thiswas more like the court system - face the accuser instead of help
the victim cope with the trauma.
We spent many therapy sessions discussing my fears. Joyce
still wanted me to face Chris before working on my feelings. She
never did get my point, and I still do not understand hers, but it
cost me financially and emotionally just the same.
Joyce and I had established a ritual hug at the end of eachsession. It was a way of saying good-bye and it let me feel that she
cared for me as a person. At the end of one of our sessions I was
feeling withdrawn but conceded to the closing hug anyway. This
time Joyce would not let go. At first I slightly pulled back, since
I couldn't get up and walk away, but she hung on. Then I reached
up and grabbed both of her shoulders and pushed her away. Still
she did not let go. Finally I pushed with all my strength and she
let go. All of my panic buttons around physical boundaries were
pushed sky high, and I was unable to speak at all.
The next session I brought up what had happened. She said "I98thought that your pulling back was really your way of saying you
wanted more." That's exactly what my father or anyone else who
ever sexually abused me have said. I told her the trust between us
felt violated. Joyce's only reply was that either she was reading
me wrong or that I was scared of further intimacy and that's why
I reacted as I had. This discussion lasted through two therapy
sessions. But neither session brought any resolution, I didn't even
get an apology for misreading my moves or a promise not to doit again.
At the end of the second session Joyce said, "I guess a hug is outof the question for now," and I said "Yes, it is." Then she asked
if we could at least shake hands, to which I agreed. While her
hand was still in mine, Joyce said, "This makes that Certs jingle
run through my head, how does it go, a handshake instead of akiss." That was it. I exploded in her face, "Haven't you heard one
damn word I've been saying? Let go of my hand and please leave
now, I can't handle this anymore."That was the end of my therapy with Joyce. There was no way
for me to continue working so intimately with someone I could nolonger trust. Although I had planned on going right back into
therapy with some other therapist, I didn't find anyone who had
the time or who understood MPD enough to want to take me on.
It left me stuck with a million questions and no known way ofgetting to the answers. To this day, that's where I'm at. I work
hard on pulling myself back together, but it sure would be easierwith some help.
©1988 Diane Hugs

99

Rikki Westerschulte

Cutting
One Tuesday morning I sat in my regular spot on the couch andmy therapist announced that she was moving to another city. I
was overwhelmed. Shocked, terrified, enraged, abandoned. I
didn't know I was, though, because I shoved all those feelings outof me and just said something like, "Oh, well I'm glad you're
getting something you want." Then I left, went home and decided
to slash my arm with a razor blade. I was very calm about it, andfelt relieved that there was something I could do to control
myself. So I did. I put about 40 cuts in my arm, a few of which left
a scar. Most healed in a week.
It's hard to say what happens or why I did this painful thing to
my body and me. I started cutting when I was 32 and did it every
few months or more for four years. When I cut I don't feel
panicky; I just feel calm. Just deciding to do it enables me to geta grip on my life. Most of the literature says it starts inadolescence, so I don't know if I'm weird or they just haven't
gotten to us grown-ups yet. When the thought comes over methat I can hurt myself, it is always a great relief for those momentsof extreme anxiety that I can only describe with words like "hurt"or "shame." But part of the problem is not knowing what I'm
feeling, just feeling out of control and needing to get control. I
think it's related to feeling abandoned and unlovable, andashamed of those feelings; wanting to hide them. When I can talkabout them and don't feel the shame, I don't cut. Shame only
leaves me blaming myself for someone else's abuse and mistreatment of me. It's not my fault that I learned to abuse my body andto hate myself, but it is my job to change that learning now.
My therapist, I think, really wanted to help me come to lovemyself and get free of this abuse. But she didn't understandit. .. how could she? Sometimes her main focus was to confront meon the compulsive and addictive aspect, so I would muster theconviction to change my addictive behavior. I'd say to myself,"Since no one knows but me and it doesn't hurt anyone, why
100not?" I think confrontation only made me feel more separate,frightened and abandoned by her. I wasn't good enough to be
loved. I was "sick." I wouldn't be OK until I could stop this, andmy feelings of being totally un-OK and unloved by her made me
want to do it. What a mess.
I'm not a professional, but I think it would help a lot iftherapists didn't get frightened and focus on trying to stop the
cutting. I think it's important to accept cutting on a certain level,
so that telling about it doesn't make us feel more ashamed, more
sick and more isolated. It would help if they acknowledge the partof us that is trying to take care of ourselves by cutting. It would
be good for people dealing with cutters to accept the cutting as thebest thing the cutter can find to do for the time being, and to focus
on emotional recovery, maturing, finding new channels andoutlets and so on. For me, awareness is the path to freedom andresponsibility and a fuller life, but no wonder most of us forget thepast, resisting remembering and feeling. It's not fun or easy.
Today I can learn to accept life the way it is, to accept the things
that I didn't get, accept my needs and fears, name my feelings,
find persons worthy of my trust with whom I can talk. I've
learned this from my lesbian friends, who care for me in ways myfamily never could. When I'm hurt I can say so to someone. When
I'm angry I can express it toward the right person, and I can learn
to forgive. I can learn that people are not perfect or totally horrid;
they are a mix of things, and none of them has the life-long job oftaking care of me. That is my job. Progress is slow but I have agroup of friends who believe in me and support me, and I thinkthat keeps me from falling into despair.
I live in a culture that has always secretly or openly participated in hurting and exploiting women and girls. I can learn tosay no to that culture and that learning from my childhood. I
don't deserve to be chopped up like a piece of liver or a carrot!
Whew. Thanks for listening. I feel better when I talk about this.
1£ you're a "cutter" or a burner or you chew your fingers or bang
your head or pull your hair or anything like that to hurt yourself,
I hope you start telling people who can listen to you and love you.
People like yourself. It won't be easy but it will help.

101

head & heart line connection
Judy Springer
102

Testimony--=======
These pieces are excerpts from longer narratives and poems.
We created this section to provide room for a multiplicity ofvoices and experiences. This testimony bears witness
not only to the horrors visited upon womyn, but toour ability to survive and envision new possibilities .

•••••Sharon Sumpterfrom Nature (part of In Pieces, a book in progress)
In the hospital there is no such thing as nature. Just long cold
walls, an anonymous grayish-green. Windows leading outside
are barred. We are so high up. The ground appears far away, thepeople merely ants. Nothing in here is alive - not the impersonal
staff nor the patients who pace the hall, guinea pigs for thepsychotropic drugs of the sixties. All connections with the outside world, the world of nature, have been removed.
One time I actually managed to escape as we came down theelevator and the doors opened. I ran as fast as I could and actually
made it to the outside! I laugh remembering myself running
down Soto Street with the men in the white coats coming after me.
I am proud of this escape, even though I am captured anddragged back to my prison. In my desperation I have not evenseen any of the nature that must been along the way.
One day Dr. David took me on an outing. I was allowed to leave
the building with him. The doors were unlocked. We came down
the elevator and walked through the lobby where the outsidersare. They are ftee to move at will and have no idea what happens
once you step into the elevator. We walked past the information
desk and out the double glass doors. We were in the back between
the hospital and the nurses' dormitories.
It is a different world once we step out the doors. I am overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. There is a blue sky that goes on
forever. The vastness, the freedom of it is exhilarating! There aresome trees which in the years ahead I will come to love as family.
But for now, we go to sit on the grass. It is so green and shimmering. Full of energy and movement. I look at a blade of grass. I
103realize I have never seen it before. The rest of the world disappears and I move into this blade of grass. I understand now. I cry
at the beauty. I love the grass. I feel I am seeing the world for the
first time. I want to hold it in my arms. I feel immensely happy.
I realize I am no different than the blade of grass. I have seen the
Goddess.

•••••
Kathy Moorhousefrom Turning Point
Fear arises. It's OK I tell myself. I'll be able to move in themorning when it's light. Nightmare after nightmare. Dark figures, men, approach my bed as I sleep. I rise up screaming, eyes
wide, and I see them. I know they are there. But no, maybe not.
Sometimes I open my eyes and everything is red. 'What do you
think about that, Kathy?" the therapist asks. ''You're seeing red?"
Give me a break. And I feel myself sliding more and more, down
and down.
The ambulance arrives and they pick me up, put me on astretcher and carry me away. But can they take me far enoughaway? I hope so.
I lay on the table for hours, my friend speaking to me as I lay
in silence. Lots of coming and going, doctor consulting with myfriend. At last the doctor approaches me again. ''You must do this
one thing," he says, "for your own good. Will you sign thispaper?" It's a voluntary commitment to Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute. "If you don't, you'll be sent to Napa involuntarily."
Now they wheel me to the ward and another examinationtable, another doctor. This time there are more questions. And assignments: count backwards by threes starting at one hundred;
what does a rolling stone gathers no moss mean to you? Recite thepresidents backwards starting from the present.
For months prior to my hospitalization I'd felt myself slipping
into craziness. At first I was terrified by what was happening, butthen insanity became very alluring. The more overwhelmed I felt
by the confusion of emotions, nightmares, hallucinations andinability to concentrate, the more I began to view insanity as my104

only hope of escape. I came to believe that insanity would relieveme from the suffering, so I stopped trying to slow my descent andI threw myself into a free-fall over the edge.
Maybe I thought that someone else would have to deal with itthen. Not me. I wouldn't be there. But I was there. What adisappointing surprise. I was still there and I still had to deal withmyself.
I realized that first day in the hospital that nobody but me, theme I was at the moment, could live my life. It seems obvious now,
but it hadn't been before then. I always had been convinced thatsomehow I could escape myself, whether it be by moving, by
over-medication or by going crazy. Even now I sometimes slip
and think I can spiritualize my way out of myself. But I know
better.

Karla K.

•••••

from On Surviving Psychiatric Assault
At this writing, I am coerced by the psychiatric professions
under a 6 month order of probationary commitment. I am toldthat I am mentally ill. No psychiatrist approached me with anopen mind after the police felt that I was a danger to myself.
Wearing muddy clothes on Palm Sunday after walking in afield was the suspicious event that alerted the police. Theirmisrepresentation of events caused an emergency detention in a
hospital. I don't actuallly know how I can go on not feeling thefear I feel from five-point restraint and solitary confinement; andfrom spending 30 days locked inside a hospital.
Knowing the conditions of the psychiatric professions, in itself,
is an awareness I think that enlarges the view of democratic
America that I previously had. If looked at as a prejudiced system,
people different from the norm are weeded out.
I can go on by virtue of the fact that I must. That is all I feel now.
Other women make my life worthwhile. It is separatism within
the system.

•••••
105

Maria LaVara
from Suspicions of a Manic-Depressive
When I got ahold of my medical records (which was no easytask) I was alarmed by the numerous diagnoses I was tagged with(go get Hitchcock!), so I decided the psychiatrists must need morepractice, and hoped they could practice on someone else in the
future.
Every time I was compelled to leave the house it became a"choose your own adventure." Magic was absolutely everywhere. Neighborhood dogs were angry wolves and possessed
elevated intelligence. Food was inedible, I learned this the hard
way when I bit into a screaming peach.
My brother reasoned with me, ''You need to be put into a'controlled environment,'" he said. I was highly suspicious ofhim and his every move. I knew what that "controlled environment" was. What he failed to see was - who's controlling that"environment"!
Off I went to the nice controlled environment. An incredulouslooking doctor appeared, obviously a Powerful Being with adiabolical sense of humor had guided him to the path of psychiatry. He sat down and began writing furiously in his note-bookwithout bothering to look at me. He slid a typed form on the tablein front of me and offered his gold pen, "I am going to admit you
for a period of seventy-two hours, sign this. If you won't sign, I
will put you in against your will. In that case you will be kept for
two weeks for observation. "•••••Yvonne M. Moonstorm
from The Adventures of Yvette

When it carne time to lock the ward door her first night there,
she panicked and tried to get out the door. A couple of the young
staff members then grabbed her, and forced her down to the floor.
They then lifted her in the air, and carried her to the locked
isolation room. All that was in that damned terrible room was amattress and a pillow. They took all of her jewelry, rings, watch
and earrings, away. She doesn't remember exactly how manydays and nights she spent in that awful ' and terrible isolation
106

room. She had no watch. There was no clock. There was only one
small window and it was barred and she couldn't really tell thetime - except if it was day or night. She was a mess. She couldn'tchange clothes. She couldn't wash, or take a bath. It was a terrible
and horrible experience. One which she has tried so hard to forget
over the years. She could tell time somewhat because her meals
were brought in on trays by the different shifts. She rebelled. She
pounded on the door (steel), and wore herself to exhaustion .

•••••Bethany
from An Excerpt from a Non-Existent Diary
August, 1982
I am to be put in the seclusion room for a reason I cannot
remember. Several women enter my room. I must take off myclothes and put on the hospital gown they bring. I begin to
undress there, before them all. I know enough to know that I will
be given no privacy in which to undress. They tell me I must takeoff my underpants. I can wear only the hospital gown. I say No,
I need my pants.
It is hospital policy, I am told. It is a rule. I must take off myunderpants.
I say No and sit down on the bed, the plastic mattress-covercrinkling as I sit upon it. No, I say. I need my underpants. The
standing women form a semi-circle around me as I sit. I am given
the explanation one more time. It is hospital policy. There isnothing they can do. I remain as I am. One of the standing womensits down next to me. She asks me to be reasonable, to please takeoff my underpants. It must be done. I say No. Probably tears start
down my face.
Won't you be reasonable? they ask. I cannot answer them. I
think I am being reasonable.
They begin to push me, on my shoulders, to force me down
upon the bed. They are planning to undress me. I struggle withthem. They stop. They look at me sternly.
Do you want us to have to call the men? !fyou don't cooperate
we will have to call the men. Is that what you want? I cannot
answer them. That is not what I want.
107

I do not cooperate. I continue to struggle. They call the men andthen stand aside while the men remove the underpants from mystruggling body. They are offended that I have created thissituation where the men must see me naked. They are offended
that they must see the men overpower me and remove my pants.
The men complete their work and step back to watch while thewomen lead me to the seclusion room. I am locked in the room,in a gown with no underwear .

•••••Lynne Yamaguchi Fletcher
from To Dr. Loren D. Acord, clinical psychologist, retired naval officer,
an open letter:
I was sixteen and terrified, a drunk, a drug abuser, a chain
smoker, reckless, accident prone, self-mutilating, suicidal, struggling to come to terms with my sexuality - of these we talked
only about my sexuality. We were enlightened, sophisticated,
we talked about angst, the pain of being different, of living in ashallow world. We were kindred souls, fellow geniuses in a
mediocre world.
I had gone to say goodbye to you. I was to leave shortly forcollege and would miss you, I knew; what we had shared wastrue feeling, true communication. This was so, and then you
kissed me.
After you kissed me, you said you had never done anything
like this before, and you stood and locked your office door. You
undressed me, then yourself. I don't remember saying a word.
You were gentle. I lay rigid and dumb, passive, numb. You kissed
my breasts and genitals. You tried to please me. I tried to pleaseyou. I willed myself to feel none of it, not the kissing, not the
gentleness, not the penis I held to my mouth, not my fear, not loss,
not your soft push into me.
Afterward, and later, I played cool, savvy. I even bragged of"sleeping with my therapist" to friends, oh yeah, more experience for the streetwise wiseacre.
It took me fifteen years to apply the word "rape" to what
happened between us. It took me fifteen years to apply the word"rape" to what you did to me.
108•••••
Ruta (Mazelis) Winds tar
from Cracking
My abuser choked me with penis, with body taking my breathand being away; then I was choked with values, control, power
greater than rapist - the rapist was more honest, clear, direct,
and never professed to care, to help, to heal. My present stillcontains the weight of bodies holding mine while keys crashedtogether endlessly in the process of unlocking doors, thresholds
waiting for my captivated crossing. Today I carry my keys
bunched together. Noiseless. My hand empowered. My being determining what is to be locked out, or in. Never up.
I, womon of newly born voice of power, recall the days of myspeechlessness, stutter ... the trembling courage to state myknowing to my father, naming him my perpetrator. After his
scream of "NO!" which rings its lie in my ears today, the helpful
therapist educated him regarding my withdrawal behavior and"processed his feelings" while approving a weekend pass for us .
.. .Today, rocking with fear and need for expression of nightmarish memory, I first planned my escape route. How to run, justin case helpers with keys should come for me. They know where
I am. I receive a monthly bill to refresh my memory. I am still
paying. I am beginning to demand payment in return. And I am
winning. I am truly healing. I am angry. I am whole. The civil
battle transforms into a battle of personal wholeness naming thereality of abuse, of psychiatric gynocide. I am beginning to crack
my silence.
Cheryl Marie Wadefrom Finding Words•••••

Falll986
Counselor: Let's see if we can discover what you're reallyangry about.
Joanne: I'm very clear. I'm angry at you.
Counselor: Stay with your feelings.
Joanne: This is the fourth time you've promised to do something and the fourth time you have some feeble excuse for not
109

following through.
Counselor: Let's look more closely at your anger. Let's look at
its root.
Joanne: I'm angry at you for not following through on yourcommitments.
Counselor: It's good you're expressing anger, but let's focus onwhat it's really about. Doesn't this sound a lot like feelings you
have about your mother?
Joanne: Yes. My mother betrays commitments and doesn't
accept responsibility for her behavior either. The difference is, shedoes it for free.
Counselor: That's good. Let's keep with this. I'm your mother.
What do you want to say to me?
Joanne: I don't want to talk to my mother. I'm talking to you.
Counselor: I'm your mother. Talk to me.
Joanne thinks about all the words she knows. She thinks about
the art of conversation, the nuances of the counselor-client relationship.
Joanne: Mother, would you please tell my counselor that I
won't be corning back to see her .

•••••Linda Stalker
from Northampton State Hospital

October 30, 1981
Five months in a state hospital living behind locked doors,
noticing the set of keys and who has keys - keys are what separate them from us. At any given time what you own and value
can be taken away. Feelings of anger and insecurity blend together. Pain surfaces and I begin to scream. Losses become vivid
and the sense of being alone surfaces. I grow into a frightened
little child, yet I am 28, aren't I? Sometimes I am able to accept
medication and it dulls the pain. Anger that a chunk of my life has
been spent here. Such a high price to stay here and accept the help.
Yet what are my alternatives? Why is it so difficult to make somesense out of my life and why does my life seem so tattered? The
anger is constant. Some days I control it other days I don't. I strikeout against myself and others. They take action against me andmy anger intensifies.
110

November 4, 1981
A quiet evening walking on grounds. Tenderly trying to workout a friendship, feeling low but having the satisfaction of "keeping it all together." Almost losing it a couple of times but happily
able to control the anger.
One greeted me at the door, smiling - trusting I walked down
the ramp with her. "We are going to have to do a search." I said
fine and emptied out my pockets. But what I had in mind andwha t they wanted were not the same. I became an object they had
to search. We were each engaged in a struggle for power. Morethan that I was fighting for my own self respect, but that was
stripped. Suddenly there was mass confusion, male and female
staff were there, the men held me down and the women searched.
They said, "Why are you acting like this?" Screaming, "I didn't doanything! Why are you doing this?" Flash backs of times my bodywas invaded. This was routine, but I was facing another time ofviolence.

•••••

Linda Marie
from Sue: On Healing Ourselves

Sue Rose is a friend I went to school with. She has been inmental wards in Australia and the USA. I did not want to believe
Sue was ill because she was my friend so that meant she was likeme. Most of us would like to be taken seriously but that is difficult
if we are thought of as mentally ill. I have always feared being
considered crazy because of what "They" might do - like lockyou up.
She recorded her experience for me. The following is what I
have copied from the tape:" ... There are some things I find now that I can do such as thenatural act of stretching and yawning. I couldn't do this before
when I was on medication. You loose some of your natural urges.
"I'm becoming the person I was before all this happened a longtime ago. A sort of Rip Van Winkle effect. I sat out the 70s and partof the 80s. It's easy to blame someone else - 'if this person hadn't
done this or that I wouldn't have gotten like this' - actually everything rests inside. I know I can choose not to let people or111

situations affect me. I can realize situations that are negative andnot let them destroy me. I would rather put my energies toward
constructing.
"I know I am lucky to be alive. I met people who were diagnosed as manic depressive who were given heavy drugs like
prolixin. Two of them died from the drugs.
"I would like to teach a class in how to make the most out of theleast. This is something I had to teach myself. I have learned fromthe inside what it is like to unrealistically view the world. Also,
I've been in touch with my deeper self. And there have been goodthings that come out of it.
"I have learned to trust a lot of what is in myself. I feel that a lotof what I experienced in the past was unreal. The worst time waswhen I was on drug therapy. Those years were terrible. The heavy
drugs put a lid on me. Everything was forced back on itself. My
energies were forced inward in a chaotic way.
"The last thing I would like to say is that you are the most wellwhen you heal yourself."•••••
Bethany
from About Shock (dedicated to Jean)I had already spent the last two years unable to function and inalmost constant pain, despair and depression. Now I was spending much of my time locked in a barren room and strapped to abed. He said shock treatment would end all this, that it would
relieve my depression, that it would end my pain, that I would
feel better.
In truth, if he had said he wanted to amputate my feet becausethat would make me feel better, I would have agreed to amputation too.
Burning my brain did not seem like such an outrageous way torelieve my pain. I spent lots of time trying similar things anyway- cutting, tearing, mutilating my body. I might as well let theshock-doctor try.
I knew other women who had been shocked. Some had lost
huges pieces of their past, their future. Others seemed fine. Either
way was okay by me. I thought I had nothing to lose.
112

Why did I participate in this destruction? Why does anyone?
Why didn't the shock-doctors see that they were simply supporting my own ever-spiralling self-destructiveness? This time
however, they bought the weapons, and I was relieved of theburden. They were paid handsomely for that service.
Should I ever be tied down in that locked room again, willingto cut off my feet and destroy my brain - I long for one clear voice
to speak to me-to remind me that my life is precious, is sacred,and is worth loving. That I must seek ways to protect it andnurture it~ and NEVER, no matter how unbearable the pain
seems, try to destroy it. Neither through suicide or electro-shock
therapy.
Perhaps this clear voice will be a friend's voice. Perhaps thisclear voice will become my voice. I long to hear it.

•••••
Janelle Lavellefrom Learning to be Obnoxious Again
My unconscious mind rebelled. I started seeing things that
weren't there. Gabby (my lover) took me to a shrink, who decided
I was schizophrenic and put me on large doses of Thorazine. It
worked. The visual hallucinations stopped, and I became steadily
more docile toward Gabby and everyone else. I quit writing; I lost
all ability to execute the graphic design that was so important tome as a career; but - for the first time in my life - I wasn't pis singanybody off. Gabby, my shrink, Gabby's shrink, and others
convinced me that I was on the road toward healing, and that I
was ''better.''
I have become sensitized to the world again. I get mad; I get
happy; I write pOinted analyses and emotional editorials; I fightback against oppression. The people who knew me in the preThorazine days are glad that I'm a strong and forceful ally again.
The people who only knew me "drugged out" - those who
controlled my life by "taking care" of me - are quite unhappy.
I have split away from many of them in the last 1 1/2 years, as I
have reclaimed my ceded power. I have exchanged people who
control for people who love.
113

I have thought about what we can all do, as a lesbian community, to create emotional well-being for ourselves. I think it isimportant that we maintain a healthy balance between suspicionof established psychiatric medicine, and acceptance of its occasional power to heal.
We all know the danger of accepting being drugged because
we are too different. But we also need to be sensitive to the women
for whom drug-connected therapy is real, effective and helpful.
Medication is allowing me to understand what I think, feel andfear for the first time in my life. The change has been earthshattering for me, and for those who love me .... I wish my lesbianfriends were a little less disapproving. They're glad enough thatI'm fully functional; but I am dead certain that the anti-druggies
among them are still critical of the way I accomplished it. We
don't need that kind of second-guessing from our own community. Our job is to 'validate and recognize every woman's search.
I also think the usual lesbian tendency to hide from the world
greatly inhibits our ability to help each other. At least in mySouthern corner of the universe, women tend to form iconoclastic
couples or little groups and let the rest of the lesbian world walkright on by, instead of reaching out to help. We desperately needto improve our communication, physical contact and willingness
to support lesbian and gay/lesbian institutions that help bring
women to wholeness. Too many lesbians are crying out for help,
and too few are willing to provide it. Part of the problem is getting
the word out to women that we need their help; any suggestions
will be gratefully accepted. Some lesbians' attitudes toward thementally-struggling remind me of many women's approach totheir professional life: they have fought every step of the way up
the career ladder, and they'll be damned if they'll make it one bit
easier for the women coming up behind them. If we don't teachothers our hard-won lessons - if we don't answer the hotlines,
provide the lesbian-positive counseling and support our sisters'
struggles for mental health, whatever that struggle might be we are leaving no trail marks of our own passing.
And too many of us will get lost as they search for their mind's
way home.

•••••
114

Mary Lou Daugherty
from Depression
1955, 14 years old.
It's July, and I am locked into a series of rooms with white walls
and bars everywhere. Why? Because I ran away from a "happy"
home for no reason. I was diagnosed as schizophrenic, then as
manic-depressive. Cookie, my best friend, needed to get away, so
I joined her. I think I was in love with her. Everyone agreed that
this was absolutely no SANE reason for running away. Cookie
ended up in the state reformatory for girls for two years. My
mother knew the judge, and pointed out that I was lucky to be in
the state mental institution, rather than with Cookie and all those
BAD girls! They gave me pills and shots. I was tied to the bed atnight, for my own protection, they said. I was in a large room withrows of beds. People were always screaming, crying, moaning
and talking. We all wore hospital gowns and bathed every
morning. We waited in a long line while two men with smirking
smiles and glaring eyes watched us shower, and then gave us
clean gowns for the day. They took some of the people, one byone, into the adjoining room at the end of the hall. I could hearscreaming and moaning and harsh commands by the attendants.
Sometime later the inmates would be brought back, secured on
stretchers, unable to talk, their faces distorted and their eyesblank. Some people had surgery. Their heads were bandanged .
... I finally got out after only three months. The others stayedbehind .
...Depression, for me, is the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness; I see a future of only doom and dread. A terrible weightis holding me down, when nothing is okay and no one canunderstand or be with me in the terrible, frightening, lonelinessand nothingness. No help is possible. I forget what it feels like tolaugh and can't remember feeling good. I don't care about anything or anybody and often can't focus or think logically. Timeseems to stand still. I especially don't want to live because it's too
hard. What if I were "rescued"? I would be locked up again.
Being depressed is easy; it feels more comfortable, more natural. I can predict what will happen. If I listen to the positive115

thoughts, do something to make the depression leave, I'll be lesscomfortable, unfeeling, less alive.
What would I like to do to help others like myself? (1) Provide
for support. I need to feel that my depressions are acceptable by
my friends, that we have unlimited respect for differences. (2)Make known those lesbians psychiatrists and/ or therapists who
can deal with depression. (3) Recognize and provide support for
lesbians who are not "out" at work. (4) Recognize and provide
support for spouses and children of depressed lesbians. (5)Provide crisis centers or groups where lesbians can go for helpthat is confidential, professional, reliable and supportive. (6) Set
up special "care" units for lesbians with problems.
May our lesbian daughters never have to face depression
without the love and support of those of us who have lived with
it before. May we conquer the isolation and let it surpass us no
more.

•••••
Louise Wisechildfrom Patience Becomes a Dragon (for an imaginary client of Freud's)
She turns, to face the monster, the father, the brother
She turns into a dragon She is big and they are small
She roars, making a new silence filled with the explosion of her
voice
In the morning, her body, burning with fire
At breakfast she writes,"My name is Patienceand I am a dragon.
Dragons do not lie on couches
with mortals towering over them."

116Barbara Ruth

Song of the W omon with Rope in Her Hair

I tried tying rope around my headTo keep my brains from flying out
But still my mind
Kept slipping through the knots. The hemp
Was soAbrasive to my ganglia;
I foundMyselfWith rope burns on the nerves.
All right.
It didn't work.
But I was desperate
I'd have tried anything.
I did
Try anything
I knew to stop the pain
To keep on
Holding on.
Sometimes I still
Wear braids of rope
Against my frontal lobes
The weight
Upon my head
Makes me know I'm still alive.
Sometimes I think
My mind,
My precious, prisoned mind,
Is all that keeps
That rope
Off of my neck.

117

Marie Cartier

The Naturopath
for lady Shevins, N.D .

She

paints magic - peacock blue, eggshell white, violet.
An art, this healing.
She can part the mist, call the barge.
Morgan Le Fay has shown her Avalon.
I pour my litany on torn canvas:
alcoholic, anxiety attack, night terror,
chill, sweat, insomnia.
She nods, knows the underground, the Fairy Queen.
Hands me a cartography of flowers, herbs.
Trust this, she says.
Leopard's-bane, Mountain Tobacco
Chamomile, Ground Apple, Oystershell
Our hands hold the brush,
this solid magic.
Monkshood, Honeybee, Metallic Gold
Deadly Nightshade, Blister Beetle, Brazil Root
I gather thread,slip needle through canvas.
Sew with earth medicine,a chant of light.
St. Ignatius' Bean, Wolf's Foot, Staghorn,
Quicksilver, Quaker Buttons, Meadow Anemone
I mix colors.
Tender. Eggshell white.
Stroke the palette.
Rock Crystal, Inky Juice of the Cuttlefish
White Cedar, Brimstone, Tree of Life
Trust this, she says.
I begin to paint.

118

jodi

GretelPart I

When Gretel grew up, she felt guilty. She thought about all thewitches who'd been burned before, and then she thought about
shoving her own witch into the oven, and she had nightmares.
She rationalized that she'd been young at the time, and scared,
and didn't know what was going on. I mean, Hansel'd been the
one with the idea, and what could she do? They'd been warned
not to eat sugar or take candy from strangers, and how was she
to know, a t the age of nine, the old womon was an archetype? Shealso felt bad about the rumors that her parents had been trying to
get rid of them. Another cultural misunderstanding. Plenty ofchildren'd been sent on vision quests before, but they didn't
usually try to kill the objects of their visions. This time the papers
got word of it, and it turned into a child abuse legend.
Oh god, how could she face herself? And Hansel! She stillwanted to punch him for the way he puffed himself up and tookcharge of everything when the police came. How he wrote all
those stories and got rich from it, distorting all the facts and noteven having the courtesy to use an assumed name so his sister, atleast, could avoid achieving notoriety on the tails of her brother's
pretext. Christ, she'd had to change her name to "Gretchen," andstill people would recognize her sometimes. She had nowhere to
turn. She developed headaches. She wanted to scream.
One day, she did. She screamed long and hard. She screamed
at the sky and she screamed at the earth. She shook her fist at the
ground and she pointed a finger in the air. Waved some pots
around, threw a few things. Made a big ruckus and then sobbed
herself to sleep on the lawn. Ah, catharsis. She didn't care anymore what anybody thought. Let them come and take her away
if they wanted to.
They did. A neighbor called the police and said that strange
woman Gretchen had flipped, and was raving and shouting
incoherently on her lawn, posing a danger to the community.
119Another neighbor backed the story. She had waved a saucepan
menacingly, you know. And she'd even thrown a butterknifeyou could see it there, sticking straight up out of the ground by the
petunias. Now, who would throw a butterknife? She had to be
crazy. Anyway she'd been talking to herself. Anyone could see
she was a nut, and they just didn't want to take any chances. She
could hurt somebody. Or she could hurt herself. She needed help.
Such a serious woman. It figures she'd do something like this.
She didn't cooperate with the arrest. She just said, "Leave mealone, I didn't hurt anybody. I just had to let off a little stearn.
C'mon, let me go back into my house. I'm sorry if I bothered theneighbors, but hell, it could've been worse. At least I wasn't
playing rock music loud with my windows open, like somepeople do all the time on this block. The butterknife, it was aimed
at the ground, and no one was near when I threw it. It's not as
dangerous as a baseball hit out of the park. I didn't menaceanyone; when I shook that saucepan I was just trying to make apoint with the Goddess ..."
These were mistakes. Don't say "Goddess" when you're trying
to plead with the police. Don't be rational when you're resistingarrest. In fact, don't resist arrest. It's hopeless and it only convinces them that you're scared and therefore that you havesomething to hide.
They booked her, dosed her with downers, and waited for her
to improve. She didn't. The meds only made her disoriented. She
was so angry about the situation that they had to keep increasing
the pills just to keep her from getting "worse" (louder, more
uppity). Her brother wrote another story, and got even richer off
of it. Everyone was very sympathetic and moved by Gretel's
predicament, but still they felt she was a danger to herself andsociety, and they were glad she was receiving expert treatment.
Part IIWhy didn't she just talk to somebody about it, instead of letting
it build up inside her like that?
Okay, let's try it. Gretel was tired of keeping her brother'ssecret. She was tired of pretending she wasn't tired. She didn't
really want to make a big public stink about it, but she wanted totell someone, just to clear it off her own chest. So she called the120Community Mental Health Center and made an appointment.
Just for her own sake, to learn how to deal with this trauma. You
know, there's no shame in finding a professional to talk to about
your problems. And Gretel wanted to work it out instead of
keeping it bottled up inside her. So she went, on a Wednesday at
two. She talked to a nice, well-trained psychologist, who was very
sym pa thetic.
--First of all, it was good that she'd sought treatment-- Second of all, why hadn't she done it sooner?
-- It just proved that all child abuse accusations were based onlies.
-- Or: It was just another case of famous-person stress andnervous breakdown (so they medicated her, see part I).
--Or: Whatever had happened to her to make her so delusional as to want to recant her original story?
-- Or: Did she really mean to say that she was the Gretel offairy tale fame?
-- Or: It is my duty, as a responsible citizen, to notify the
media/the law because people should know/because it's such a
sensational story/because you should sue for justice (spend a lotof money, destroy your anonymity and private life, make me afamous therapist).
Part III
Gretel was sick of living a lie and protecting her brother'ssecret. So she went to a wimmin's group and told her story. She
knew they would believe her.
They did! But they couldn't believe she'd kept silent so long:
Why'd you let your brother get away with that? (Goddess, what
a patriarchal womon.) Also, I mean, what did she expect after
burning the archetype?! YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T LOVE THE
WITCH? (Obviously, this womon got what she deserved.)
Part IV

Okay, this is cynical. I made the whole thing up just to advance
my own point of view. Gretel had options. She had friends and a
support group, and she didn't care what her brother did, orwhether anybody believed her. She was on good terms with herparents, though they didn't see each other often. She told her
story to people, and either they believed her or they didn't, but
121she was secure enough in her own self tha t it didn't bother her
what other people thought.
She prayed a lot and did rituals, and made peace with thewitch, who told her, "Honey, it was your dream - I've no intention of disappearing just because you might have wanted me to.
Old womon archetypes, we don't get much appreciation thesedays but we're alive and well outside your imagination. You can't
get rid of us, no matter what you do. I'm not saying I was happy
about you and Hansel setting fire in the woods like that; it was a
nasty story Hansel told, and you could've done a lot better if you
hadn't tried to burn me in the first place. But I'm glad you got off,
because now that you've changed your attitude, we have achance to work together. So get up off your knees, and let's get on
with it. Here, have some granola. The oats are organic, and I
didn't use any sugar - "Now, there's a happy ending. But how many wimmin are as
creative and lucky as Gretel?

Witch II Judy Springer
122

Janet Aalfs

Branded
1.

Take thisthe doctorman says.
Silent on couches,eyes lowered, womenplace pills on tongues
and swallow,
blowing up inside.
2.
I have been called crazyin fun, by friends who want to laugh.
I have laughed too,never having been locked up.
I am not laughing now,
sitting in a circle with womenwhose faces have been razed,
senses erased,
who are the battlefield.
Our voices
travel, one to the other,hoping to be heard.
3.
This is war
and I have been brandeddyke, bitch, manhater,
diseased. For some
this means I'm crazy.
For others I don't exist.

123

The facts of my life
have saved me thus far
from destruction
but I am not outside
the range of fire.
The real damage already done
is that when we talkwoman to woman
words we use shatter
inside each other's heads.
I could sit here
still, mouth closed,eyes on the groundin the middle of a minefieldpraying I'll survive,or I could move forward,
asking questions,telling my version,
knowing that when I am taken
I will not go face down.

124

_________________ Review
Still Sane, by Persimmon Blackbridge and Sheila Gilhooley,photography by Kiku Hawkes. (Press Gang, 603 Powell St.,
Vancouver BC V6A IH2 Canada, 101 pages, $12.95 Canadian.)
Sheila Gilhooley's first woman lover told her that Lesbians
have "subconscious feelings of guilt to resolve" and need psychiatric "help." Sheila's woman the-rapist had her locked up forbeing a Lesbian. Thus began a three-year nightmare of forced
drugging, forbidden friendships, unsuccessful escapes, suicide
attempts, desertion by friends outside, electroshock, rape, anddestroyed self-confidence. It ended only when Sheila decided
anything was better than dying inside. She lied her way out by
smiling continually, no matter what happened. After three morefrightened, drunken years in the closet, she met "a woman who
called herself a lesbian .. . in public ... And my life began tochange."The sculpture series Still Sane, which opened at the Women in
Focus Gallery, Vancouver BC, in 1984, told the story of Sheila's
three years inside, through Persimmon Blackbridge's sculptures
and Sheila's words. All the clay sculptures were made from threeplaster body casts of Sheila. Sheila wrote the text, often remembering as she wrote. In the book Still Sane, Kiku Hawke's photography preserves the show's power in two dimensions, and several essays and interviews develop its themes.
Still Sane tells "one person's story .. . ina way that would let theaudience see the wider situation." (Persimmon, "Coming Out
Crazy") The life-sized sculptures, uncamouflaged by hair or
clothes, scars showing, are sometimes whole, sometimes
chopped-down or fragmented. The flight or droop of the shoulders is as eloquent as the eyes or mouth. Sheila's story appears
handwritten on the walls, or sometimes on the sculptures, so thatneither is reduced to commentary or illustration. Both are thestory. (The book also contains each sculpture's text next to thephotograph.)Two-page spreads of quotes from government reports, commercially-produced books and mad movement sources put particular incidents in context. The sculpture "19 shocks" illustrates
125the electroshock "treatments" Sheila's shrink ordered her toundergo because she "didn't want to be cured of being a lesbian."
It shows a row of shattered, armless female bodies, stacked floor
to ceiling. It is followed by a listing of shock's "side effects,"
statistics on how many people undergo it, and testimony about
how institutions get around "informed consent" requirements.
Still Sane doesn't pretend its story is unique, or one that happens only to dykes. It is a story of systematic terrorization, likeprison or military basic training, in which the state tries to break
down an individual personality and rebuild it for the state's
purposes. In the closing essay, Dee dee NiHera concludes, "We
must stop rationalizing that torture is necessary for anyone."
Means of resistance vary in different institutions, as "unladylike behavior" shows. On a ''behavior mod" unit, where everything, even a bath, was a reward for "good" behavior, a nurse told
Sheila to shave her legs. She took the razor, changed her mind,
and slashed her arms instead. The sculpture shows her whole,hands on hips, legs planted, face confident and even humorous,
taking up space - the picture of a successful resistor.
Although many critics thought of Sheila as the "diSintegrating" subject matter and Persimmon as the artist, they plannedand executed each phase of the work jointly. Still Sane is about
better alternatives to expert-subject relationships. It is one longreminder that women as a group are the raw material for themental illness industry, which needs "patients," "consumers," or"clients" - people who don't take care of themselves but create
jobs for others "taking care" of them. Minimum-wage attendants
and $lOO-an-hour talk sellers both stay off welfare thanks topeople, largely women, who feel "crazy" or "need help."
Still Sane stresses that help, however hard-won, comes notfrom "experts" but from a community of equals resisting whatmade us feel "crazy" in the first place. One of the two color photos
is a group sculpture of Sheila and four dyke friends. Each one's
short autobiography tells how she (and her parents or shrink orhusband) thought she was "crazy" for not losing weight or liking
boys, for "talking to other women," for being overcome by"screaming, kicking, hysterical" rages -which stopped when "I
kicked out (my husband), stopped seeing my shrink and had amiraculous recovery."
126

The title Still Sane doesn't intentionally reflect contempt formadness. It was inspired by Carolyn Mas's song about selfrespect under pressure: "They may say you're crossing theline .. .You may think you're losing your mind. Stare in their faces:
Still Sane." Sheila writes: "I began to see my strength in surviving
and feel proud that I hadn't ever given up on myself and been
'cured' even by such a formidable institution."
Quotes from visitors to the exhibit and Nym Hughes' essay
show how the mental illness system still endangers and traps
Lesbians. Nora D. Randall illustrates this through the story of one
dyke who attended the Still Sane show "on a one-day pass fromthe loony bin," where her lover had been thrown out and barredfrom visiting her, and where she had been thrown in isolation for
stopping and reporting an attempted rape. The dyke got a diagnosis other than "homosexual," but still no respect as a dyke, awoman, or a human being. After all, 11 years after the AP A took"homosexuality" off the "disease" list, at least one medical school
still had lectures on "sodomites and perverts." Tragically, Lesbians and feminists keep sending "troublesome" women, by force
or persuasion, to psychiatric lock-ups, as if the mental illness
system were a resource to be used.
Dee dee NiHera's "Still Mad" analyzes why it can never beother than a threat: "(T)hose in power define 'reality' and 'sanity'
to suit themselves. Psychiatry ... enforce(s) these narrow definitions . .. Organizing (emotional realities) into some diseasecategory alienates us from so-called normals ... (and makes)
those not yet labelled censor their words and actions for fear offitting into one of the hundreds of diagnostic categories ...
Medicalizing behaviour does more than threaten self-esteem andcreate false fears. It obscures the political nature of
psychiatry .. .Those interested in (ending) forced psychiatrictreatment must cease giving credence to diagnoses" and develop
our own values and frame of reference. Like Persimmon concludes: "Maybe we have something good and valuable to offer
just as we are. Maybe we shouldn't be normalized. Maybe we've
got something we should be proud of." Or as Sheila writes: "If I
had it do over ... 1'd call the show Still Mad and be proud of that."
127

Rebecca Ripley

Books Received ____________
Not Vanishing, the long overdue, wonderful, first poetry collection bylesbian and Native American activist Chrystos, 1988, $9.50, Press Gang
Publishers, 603 Powell St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A IH2.
Lesbian Psychologies - Explorations and Challenges, an anthology of 26
feminist writers, therapists and academics in sections addressing identity, relationships, family, therapies and community, edited by the
Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective, 1987, $12.95, Univ. of illinois
Press, 54 East Gregory Drive, Champaign, IL 61820.
Bird-Eyes, a 16-year old lesbian befriends a deaf woman in a mental
institution, by Madelyn Arnold, 1988, $8.95, The Seal Press, PO Box 13,
Seattle, WA 98111.
Angel, generations of women and the coming of age of a West Indian
heroine in Grenada by Merle Collins, 1988, $8.95, The Seal Press.
The Obsidian Mirror - an adult healing from incest, a personal journey by
Louise M. Wisechild, 1988, $10.95, The Seal Press.
We Stand Our Ground - Three Women, Their Vision, Their Poems, adialogue and individual poetry sections by Kimiko Hahn, Gale Jacksonand Susan Sherman with artwork by Josely Carvalho, 1988, $9.95, IKON
press, PO Box 1355, Stuyvesant Station, NY, NY 10009.
The Crystal Curtain, a lesbian psychic murder mystery by Sandy Bayer,
1988, $7.95, Alyson Publications, 40 Plympton St., Boston, MA 02118.
Incidents Involving Warmth, lesbian feminist love stories by Anna Livia,
1986, $7.95, Onlywomen Press, 38 Mount Pleasant, London WCIX OAP.
Love Death and the Changing of the Seasons, a lesbian novel in verse by
Marilyn Hacker, 1987, £4.95, Onlywomen Press.
One Foot on the Mountain, an anthology of British feminist poetry 19691979, edited by Lilian Mohin, 1979, £2.95, Onlywomen Press.
Beautiful Barbarians, lesbian feminist poetry, edited by Lilian Mohin,
1986, $8.95, Onlywomen Press.
Unholy Alliances, a collection of new women's fiction edited by Louise
Rafkin,1988, $9.95, Cleis Press, PO Box 8933, Pittsburgh, PA 15221.
My Father was a Toltec, Chicana feminist poetry by Ana Castillo, 1988,$6.95, West End Press, Box 27334, Albuquerque, NM 87125.
It's A Family Affair: The Real Lives of Black Single Mothers, by Barbara
Omolade, #4 in The Freedom Organizing Pamphlet Series, 1987, $3.50,
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, PO Box 908, Latham, NY 12110.

128

Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism by Angela Y.
Davis, #5 in The Freedom Organizing Pamphlet Series, 1987, $3.50,
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Osten's Bay, lesbian adventure and romance set in the Dutch Antilles by
Zenobia N. Vole, 1988, $8.95, The Naiad Press, PO Box 10543, Tallahassee, FL 32302.
We Walk the Back of the Tiger, lesbian romance set in the early 70s women's
movement, 1988, $8.95, Naiad Press.
Sunday's Child, lesbian sports thriller by Joyce Bright, 1988, $8.95, Naiad
Press.
The Secret in the Bird, a psychological mystery by Camarin Grae, 1988,$8.95, Naiad Press.
Before Stonewall: The Making ofa Gay and Lesbian Community, an illustrated
guide to the film by Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller, 1988, $7.95, Naiad
Press.
Lesbian Crossroads, interviews on lesbian identity with 15 lesbians (andsome of their families) by Ruth Baetz, 1988 (orig. 1980), $9.95, Naiad
Press.
October Obsession, a mythological mystery in which a woman seeks her
missing aunt and her own lesbian truth, by Meredith More, 1988, $8.95,
Naiad.
All Out, a lesbian sports and politics novel by Judith Alguire, 1988, $8.95,
New Victoria Press, Box 27, Norwich, VT 05055.
Lesbian Stages, five plays by Sarah Dreher, author of the S toner McTavish
novels, 1988, $9.95, New Victoria Press.

!WOMA~-E-WS---------~~-~-:'N'IC ~ NEWSI'MII AHO CAUP4:lAR Of MNTS

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129_______ _Letter ________________
Letter from E1 Cenote Writers' Workshop
June 15, 1988
Elana,
There is something inherently racist in white women editing
the works of women of color. What makes this so? We live in asociety where racism is the construct for how the society functions. Everything women of color do is filtered through whiteness - the white norm. White women have to be aware that they
are a part of that norm and garner power and privilege from it,solely based on their color, be they lesbian, heterosexual, ablebodied, disabled, poor, rich, fat, thin, old, young ....
It is common for groups of white people, women and progressives included, to develop exclusive new languages that set themoutside the status quo - the white norm. The new languages, justlike the language of the white norm, are used to define theexperiences of other people. When those other people are of color,white people ignore that the new language gives them as muchprivilege as the old. And they use the new language as a pretensethat they are no longer racist. People of color have not been
allowed their languages and have not been included in thedevelopment of the "new" language; therefore, it is an illusionthat this new language, progressive or not, can be anti-racist.

The "women's community" has taken the lead in identifying a
number of oppressions. It has been notorious in creating a "politically correct" language which equates the "isms." This has theeffect of leveling oppressions; the leveling distorts, negates andtrivializes the experiences of women of color. No matter what
oppressions a white woman faces, she still benefits from white
privilege. As a white editor you must recognize and acknowledge the power and privilege of your position. In changing thewording of the works of women of color, regardless of yourintent, you attempt to fit the experience of the woman of color into
the white model; this enforces the invisibility of women of color.

130

For women who've done their anti-racism "workshops," racist
acts often become more and more subtle. It is imperative thatwhite women who espouse an anti-racist line stop and listen towhat women of color are telling them, rather than telling womenof color how to make their experiences "politically correct."
We encourage you to publish this letter for the benefit of all
white women who edit the work of women of color.
From that piece of each of us that refuses to be silenced,
Uzuri Amini
Pam Maes
Virginia R. Harris
A. Loba Nemajea

Roz Leiser
Carolina Delgado
Peggy Sullivan

what's so great about

SOJOURNER?
Try~

RITA MAE BROWN:"It'S full of responsible news
coverage. provocative articles,
and a solid sense of community."
ADRIENNE RICH:" It's an unu5ually handsome
and intelligently written
journal : serious, responsible,
and stimu l lting. "the eleven·year·old
national feminist forum
that comes out every month!

o Sample Issue (52)0 1 year / 12 Issues ($15)
0 2 years/24 Issues ($26)
Name._ _ _ _ _ __Address_ _ _ _ __TILLIE OLSl:N:" It'S brave marvelous,
informatil e, challenging,invaluable essential.
I'm deeply indebted for
all it's brought me. "Please mall with payment to:
SOJOURNER
143 Albany Street
cambridge, MA 02139

131

Contributors' Notes __________
Katharyn Machan Aal was born in Woodbury, CT, in 1952. Since
1975 she has lived in Ithaca, NY, where she teaches on the facultyof Ithaca College, coordinates the Ithaca Community Poets, anddirects the Feminist Women's Writing Workshops, a national
summer program. She is the author of twelve published collections of poems, the most recent of which is When She Was the GoodTime Girl, 1986 winner of The Signpost Press annual competition.
Janet Aalfs: I write and practice/teach martial arts in the Pioneer
Valley of Western Massachusetts with other pioneers. I am afounding member of two lesbian writing groups and head instructor of Valley Women's Martial Arts. One of my guardian
spirits is a seal.
Diane Averill: I currently teach at Portland Community Collegeand Lewis and Clark College. I have published in Calyx, Calapooya
College 10, Colorado Review, Hubbub, Kalliope, Mississippi Mud,

Northwest Review, Plainswoman, Poet & Critic, Portland Review,
Room of One's Own and Seattle Review. My book of poems,
Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, is looking for a home.
Bethany supports her dog OBOE and herself by working as a
bookkeeper. After 13 years in and out of mental institutions,halfway houses and day treatment centers she considers this arevolutionary action.
Rosario Caicedo was born in Colombia, South America, and has
lived in the U.S. for the past 16 years. Rosario's work has appearedin Sojourner, El Taller Literario, Embers and other publications. She
won First Prize for Poetry in the THIRD WOMAN LiteraryAwards contest, 1986. She has read her poetry at Yale Univeristy,
Trinity College and at several literary events. She is a member ofthe Board of Directors of El Taller Literario, a new journal which is
being published by a group of Hispanic writers from Conn.
Rosario lives with her two children in New Haven.
Marie Cartier has published in Pudding, New Kent Quarterly,

Focus, Eidos, Black Maria, Kalliope, Eve's Legacy, Central Park, Colorado Review, among others. Currently, she is at UCLA. Her play,
When the First Two Hundred Letters Came, about political prisoners,
will open in Los Angeles this October.
132

Mary Lou Daugherty is a training manager and professional
educator working in Chicago. She and her lover have raised fourchildren while residing in Bartlett, a suburb.
Winifred Eads: I am forty-two, a writer-artist full of petroglyphs
I have not had said through me yet; live in Seattle, work in spirit
world among elders in a nursing home where I assist them in theiractivities.
Lynne Yamaguchi Fletcher is a Japanese-American free-lance
writer and editor living alternately in Mass. and Arizona.
Myra Fourwinds is a writer, photographer, videographer livingin the Bay Area. She believe that images using mythic archetypical symbols speak to us on an unconscious level across time andacross cultural boundaries. By finding these archetypes within
ourselves and others around us, we become aligned with thecollective imagination and find access to the essence of life force.
As Meridel LeSuer says: "The most revolutionary act is to celebrate life." Myra exposes aspects of this celebration on film.
Chiah Heller-Zbloki is an eco-feminist theorist who teaches
feminism and ecology at The Institute for Social Ecology in
Plainfield, VT. She is also a feminist psychotherapist, artist andpoet who writes and writes and writes because she has to.
Tryna Hope: I am a Jewish lesbian living in Northampton, MA.
My clients are people who have been in and out of the State
Hospital. My job is to make sure the community does all it can,and more, so that my clients need never be institutionalized.
Diane Hugs is a 33-year old disabled lesbian. She's been published in With The Power of Each Breath, My Storys On, The Courage
to Heal and a local printing of Disabled Calligraphy. Diane iscurrently working on a novel, and is an active member of Wry
Crips (a disabled women's theatre group). Still in transition fromlosing her sight, this is the second published piece she has done
without being able to see her writing.
jodi: I'm a disabled Jewish lesbian, currently working on startinga newsletter for disabled wimmin/lesbians/women. The address for the newsletter is 2 Sun Lane, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601.
I love farming.
Karla K. is a writer-editor who is unemployed in the midwest,
after living and working in the east. She has published articles on
health and a poem.
133

Maggie Kazel is a former nurse's aide, psychiatric technician andmusician's manager. She currently resides in Minneapolis, writes
screenplays and poems and teaches drama and music. If she
could live part of the year in the southwest, San Francisco and thesoutheast while maintaining residence in the prairie lands, shewould. Travelling is the only balm for her condition.
Kendall is a displaced New Orleans actress and writer now
teaching theater in the North. Her collection of other women's
plays, Love and Thunder (Methuen), came out this year.
Maria LaV ara: I'm from Los Angeles and I sing with the band The
Trash. This is the first story I've ever written, and I got high on it
for three months after I wrote it.
Janelle Lavelle: I am a 36-year old North Carolina transplant who
works in emergency services for pay, and gay and lesbian groups
for sanity. I am a staff writer and survivor of The Front Page, aNorth Carolina gay and lesbian paper. My spouse Pat and I
maintain a two dog, one cat home.
Bea Loud is a pseudonym, chosen for this piece because thenames of the other characters have all been changed in thisotherwise true story. I've been a lesbian activist for 19 years, only
recently turning to writing as a primary vehicle for expressing it.
Linda Marie is a lesbian writer living in the S.F. Bay Area.
Yvonne Mattingly Moonstorm, M.A., 41, is a graduate of St.
Louis University and the University of Denver. She is the motherof two sons, 18 and 19. She writes poetry and short stories, and has
had poems published nationally. In 1984, she also wrote a book
- a biography of her mother. She has traveled extensively.
Kathy Moorhouse is a 41-year old Berkeley lesbian, working
class, PhD, blue collar worker who has a way with animals.
Mary Moran is a madwoman with a sense of humor who loves to
eat and gossip with her girl friends at neighborhood restaurants.
Dee dee NiH era: I have survived psychiatric cages and manyother forms of violence against women in my 40 years. I am activein the battered women and mad movements. Loving women,teaching healing practices of the world, and living in Alaska help
keep me hopeful.
Linda Marie Nolte: I am a 29-year old short, fat lesbian withnorthern European Fairy ancestry who loves living in Minneapolis. My drawings provide an emotional anchor, a safe channel for134expressing my subconscious self.
Ellen Oppenheimer makes contemporary quilts in Oakland, CA.
"I am pleased to be able to contribute something to Sinister
Wisdom."Laura Post: I am an angry, obsessive Jewish lesbian raised in a
dysfunctional family, a recovering alcoholic training to be a
psychiatrist in San Francisco, and a niece and ex-lover of people
that my profession has labeled schizophrenic.
Rebecca Ripley is disabled, middle-aged, Jewish, and a former
psychiatric inmate. She is also a former long-term user of the-rapy
and phenothiazines, having quit both in the early 1970's. After 17
shrink-free years, she's still mad and now proud of it.
Margaret Robison is a tired old southern bitch now painting andwriting in Massachusetts yet again. She is the author of two booksof poetry, The Naked Bear (Lynx House Press/Panache Books) and
Here (Camelback Press).
Barbara Ruth: "Song Of The Womon With Rope In Her Hair" isfrom my book, Past, Present & Future Passions (available from
HerBooks, PO Box 7467, Santa Cruz, CA 95601). I continue
looking for ways to make that rope a lifeline, rather than a noose.
Braiding helps.
'Bettianne Shoney Sien: I write short pieces of fiction that explore
my experiences growing up in a large family (13 children) in rural
Midwest poverty, and the joys and struggles of my life now as aradical lesbian feminist. ''My Mother Played the Accordion" isincluded in a collection of my short stories entitled Lizards/Los
Padres to be released by HerBooks in December 1988.
Judy Springer: I am a 42-year old, white, Pisces,lesbian motherof-two, artist/ ceramist and a small town dyke (Brandon, Manitoba, Canada).
Linda Stalker: I'm still struggling within the mental healthsystem. Since '81 I have been involved in human rights andcitizen advocacy. It's one way to deal with my anger. Sharing myexperience with other women and writing is a vital part of my life.
Sharon Sumpter is a bisexual lesbian activist and psychotherapist who works with women survivors of abuse, institutionalization and sexual oppression. Her book-in~progress, In Pieces, isdedicated to opening the closet doors for former "mental patients." "I went into my work to undo the criminal things that135

were done to me and that I saw done to other women." She thanks
Deena Metzger and Asherah for this, her first published work.
flyin thunda cloud rdoc iz a non-feminist/non-separatist lesbian
who iz of mixed native amerikan, jamaican west indyan & afroamerican heritages who loves to talk & iz learning to be a good
listener & friend. one of the ways i support womyn in their search
4 a way out of the mental health system iz to produce a newsletter
SUPPORT. no newsletters will be sent 2 any mental healthprofessionals. sample copies are $1, subscriptions are $10 per
year, from SUPPORT 3423 Coles Rd., Columbia, SC 29203. Include SASE.
Cheryl Marie Wade is 40, a crip, a writer, straight, an incest
survivor, a performer - today, in that order. Her work has
appeared in Calyx, Ikon and Sinister Wisdom.
Joan M. Ward: You might just say that I'm one of those Dyke
Separatists from Madison, Wisconsin - quiet, grim and humorless.
Batya Weinbaum is a wandering Jew with a post office box in
Vermont.
Rikki Westerschulte is a 37-year old lesbian, a part-time mother,a tech-writing manager in a computer firm, and a graduate of UC
Berkeley and San Francisco State. And a feminist who finds
healing through self-love. She is currently earning a marriage &family counseling degree from the University of San Francisco.
Feral Willcox is a radical lesbian outlaw Southern poet.
Ruta (Mazelis) Winds tar: I'm a 29-year-old lesbian feminist
celebrating life with my lover, our 3 cats and other healing
womyn. The name Mazelis belongs to my abuser and that's why
it's included; the name Windstar is my chosen name and represents new breath and freedom.
Louise Wisechild: I'm a writer and massage therapist in Seattle
and I have a new book from Seal Press, The Obsidian Mirror: An
Adult Healing from Incest.
Jo-Ellen Yale: I am a renegade lesbian-feminist therapist who has
spent her entire professional life observing and repudiating theabuses and hypocrisy of the traditional psychiatric/psychological community.

136

______ Announcements and Classified Ads
CALLS FOR SUBMISSION
Psychiatry & Womyn: A call by womyn - for womyn - to create
alternatives to psychiatry: "What is your perfect healing place?"
We're asking for input from womyn (especially from mental systemsurvivors) on a project we're planning - a safe place for womyn inemotional distress. If YOU were in emotional distress . .. (say your life isfalling apart around you, you lost your friends/ family, you have no job,
you have no money, and/ or PAST hurts/violence against you build up
inside - you're in a painful, confusing situation) ... and you are indanger of being committed or committing yourself to a "mental" institution, what would you want INSTEAD? If you could stay in any kindof safe, healing place, what would that be? What can you envision for
yourself as a wonderful place to be in times of emotional crisis?
You can use these questions as a guideline for writing, or make up
your own. We don't need a well-organized grammatical essay whatever form it takes will be just fine and much appreciated.
Location? - city, country, suburbs, near ocean, river, open space,near neighbors, quiet neighborhood, near city bustle, etc.?
Building? - house(s), dorm(s), cabin(s), tent(s), yurt(s), etc.? How
many? What would they be like? Size, arrangement, materials, colors,amount of daylight, heat source, furnishings, etc.?
How long would you stay?
Would you be alone? Group of others in similar situation? If so, how
many? Someone(s) whose job it is to provide emotional or physicalsupport? If so, what would they do? What would they be like?
Would you want your friends, family, children, animal friends to visit
or stay with you? Would men be allowed?
Would food be provided for you? Would you cook? Clean? If not,who would?
What would you do there? Would you have goals for your time there?
What would your healing process be like?
Who else would be there for healing? Who would decide who gets in?
Who would run the place?
Would there be any rules? If so, what would they be? What about
drugs, alcohol, suicidal or homicidal womyn?
How would all this be paid for?
Your response need not be realistic! Use your imagination! Your
name will be kept confidential unless you say it's OK not to, but please
include address or phone so we can contact you. All responses will beappreciated! Judith Sara, 27 Daniel Square, Belchertown, MA 01007
137

DISABLED WIMMIN'S NEWSLETTER wants stories, drawings, articles, poetry, ideas by disabled wimrnin. For information or to send
your work, SASE to: 2 Sun Lane, Poughkeepsie, NY 1260l.
IN OUR OWN VOICES - FAT DYKES .. . BREAK THE SILENCE, ananthology, is seeking contributions in all forms by January 1, 1989, toToni L. Cassista, PO Box 2968, Santa Cruz, CA 95063. She is also seeking
documented experiences of discrimination based solely on weight toamend current state civil rights laws.
RADICAL DYKE HUMOR is the theme for the next issue of Lesbian
Ethics. Send contributions by December 31 (flexible - write them) to
Lesbian Ethics, PO Box 4623, Albuquerque, NM 87196.
THE NEW MOON is a new quarterly non-profit, national multi-focus
publication for lesbians. Send contributions, or for more info, to: 2 Kings
Terrace, Ames, Iowa 50010.
WOMEN WHO DIDN'T KNOW THEY WERE JEWISH UNTIL THEYWERE ADULTS - an anthology HerBooks will publish, is seeking

submissions in all forms by February 1, 1989. Send work with SASE to:Jewish Women's Anthology, PO Box 1174, Felton, CA 95018.
BUBBE MEISERS BY SHAYNA MAIDELEHS - an anthology of writings by Jewish women about their Jewish grandmothers, is seek submissions in all forms including recipes. Send with SASE to Leslea Newman,
50 Hawley St., Northampton, MA 01060. Deadline, May 15, 1989.
LA BELLA FIGURA - a literary journal for Italian-American women,with a special welcome for lesbians. Send SASE for guidelines andsubscription info to: Rose Romano, PO Box 411223, SF, CA 94141-1123.
LESBIAN BEDTIME STORIES sought for anthology. Deadline: Dec. 3l.
To: Bluejay, Tough Dove Books, PO Box 528, Little River, CA 95456.
OUR RIGHT TO LOVE: A LESBIAN RESOURCE BOOK is seeking
photographs for the revised edition. Send B&W photos (with releases)
to Ginny Vida, 45 Plaza St., #1-G, Brooklyn, NY 11217.
EIGHTH MOUNTAIN PRESS ANNUAL POETRY PRIZE - for excellence in feminist poetry. $1000 + publication. Booklength ms. acceptedin Jan. & Feb. beginning 1989. No reading fee. Send SASE for details. 624
SE 29th, Portland, OR 97214.
BERKELEY WOMEN'S LA WJOURNAL is soliciting ms. for its 4th issue.
Multidisciplinary treatments of legal arguments welcome. For info andguidelines: Boalt Hall, Room 2, Univ. of Ca., Berkeley, CA 94720.
WOMEN'S FANT ASY AND SCIENCE FICTION sought by Susanna J.
Sturgis, who is editing a new women's speculative fiction series for
Crossing Press. Deadline: January 31,1989 for the first anthology. Full138

length novels also sought, send queries and anthology submissions to:
S.J. Sturgis, PO Box 39, West Tisbury, MA 02575.
WOMEN AND CANCER anthology, being edited by Judith Brady for
Cleis Press, is seeking submissions in all forms. Send submissions (2copies) or inquiries to Judith Brady, 62 Sussex St., SF, CA 94131. Deadline: August, 1989.

UPCOMING CONFERENCES
PARALLELS & INTERSECTIONS: A conference on Racism and Other
Forms of Oppression, April 6-9. For info, write: Women Against Racism
Committee, c/o Women's Resource and Action Center, Dniv. of Iowa,
130 N. Madison St., Iowa City, IA 52242.
6th Annual Graduate Women's Studies Conf., FEMINISM AS CATALYST: Bridging the Discourses of the Sciences, Social Sciences, Arts andHumanities. March 4,1989. For info write: Women's Studies Program,Mill Building, Dniv. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.
GENERAL
LOVE ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT, Jewish Lesbian Feminist Poetry byLeslea Newman now available. Send $6.00 plus $1.00 shipping to
HerBooks, PO Box 7467, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.
TO LIVE WITH THE WEEDS, strong radical lesbian poetry by D.A.
Clarke now available. Send $7.00 + $1 postage to Her Books, PO Box 7467,
Santa Cruz, CA 95601. Special gift edition with rice paper endsheets $8.
CUNTCOLORINGBOOK/LABIAFLOWERSisbeingreissuedinamultilanguage, expanded edition. $5 + $2 shipping from Last Gasp, 2180
Bryant St., SF, CA 94110.
PRISONERS: The Prison Book Program provides FREE books - fiction,
women's, gay/lesbian, third world, prison law and other politicalissues, as well as a resource list with support organizations, newspapers
and penpals. Write: Redbook, 92 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130.
May take up to 2 months to fill orders.
THE LESBIAN HERSTORY ARCHIVES has to match a $10,000 grantfrom the Chicago Resource Center for a video project on the Daughtersof Bilitis. DOB was founded in 1955, they're asking you to send $19.55 to
PO Box 1258, NY, NY 10116. Make checks payable to LHEF, Inc.
MAILING LIST SERVICES. Let me computerize you! Address changes,
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THE TRIBE OF DINA:A JEWISH WOMEN'S ANTHOLOGYEDITED BY: MELANIE KAYEIKANTROWITZ& IRENA KLEPFISZ"T~ richnds <lnd diversity 01 the lives 01 Jewish womenare stunningly documented in this new collection."-Women's Review of Books" AjoyOus celebr<ltion ... Seph<lrdic <IIld Ashken<lzi. ISf"elileminists. lesbi"ns <lnd heterosexu<lls. cultural <IIld religious
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ISBN 0-931103-{)2-9 • 1986 336 pp • S9.95

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sinister wisdom
Current & Back Issues(partial list of contents)#35/Spedal Focus on Passing. Includes work on/by Black, Jewish, Native
American, Latina, Italian, White, disabled, working class, butch, fern lesbians• Jewell, Frye, Pratt, Rosales, Bogus, Ruth, Gage, Barrington, Davis, JEB, Romano •#34/Spedal Focus on Lesbian Visions, Fantasy, SdFi. Includes work on
Separatism, Disability, Building and Transformation• Katz, Ortiz Taylor, Hoagland, Allegra, Livia, Louise, Rios, Danaan, Marah •#33 I Special Focus on Wisdom, Lesbians of Color, Non-violence, War Stories,
Incest, Leaving a Will, Assimilation, Fat Poems, Coming to Terms• Anzaldua, Ruth, Rich, Chrystos, Kaye/Kantrowitz, Hardy, Gilmore, Brody, Rakusin •#32/Spedal Focus on Illness, Death, Mourning, Healing, the Disappeared,
Hunting Season, Dealing with Suicide, Cancer, New Ritual Observances• Maia, Allegra, Sears, McDonald, Waters, Hansell, Rosenblum, Butler, Stinson •#3l/Spedal Focus on Sex and Fiction, Coming out in the South, Found Goddesses, Waiting, Bobe Mayse, Sex and Socialist Feminism• Smukler, Blackwomon, Romano, Davenport, Dykewomon, McNaron •#28/Spedal Focus on Women & Work; Body Image, Size & Eating, Aging,
Comedy about Outlaw Lesbian Communities, Courage, PC/PI, Letter on #26• Clarke, Heather, Kiepfisz" Sturgis, Gould, Boucher, Gomez, Sardella, Moran •#27/Special Focus on Girlhood, Sexuality and Violence, Office Work, Navy
Dykes, Feminism & Snobbery, White Trash, Passion, Poetry I Performance,
Women of Color IWomen in Israel/Women in Lebanon, Ed. Statement on #26• Adnan, Felman, Grahn, Schalet, Bogus, HaMa'avak Touch, Quintanales, Anzaldua •#26 I Special Issue: To Go To Berbir by Jill Drew, a book-length journal written by an American nurse working in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion#25/Butch/Fem in the 50's, Women's Peace Encampments, Erotic Satire,
Native American Roots of White Feminism, Palestinian, Haitian, Puerto
Rican Struggles, Jewish Radical Identity, Welfare Motherhood Sexuality, SciFi• Allen, Cotrell, Root, Stecenko, Love, Paz, Smukler, Hall, Lipstadt, Brant •#24 I Violence Against Women & Resistance, Alcohol, Fighting Racism, Dyke
Culture, Black Lesbians, White Working Class Identity, Censorship• Harjo, Derricotte, Nestle, Lynch, Sylvester, Pratt Moirai, Parkerson •#2l/Separatism Revisited, Jewish Survival & Defiance, Black Lesbian
Writing, Photos of Dykes in Drag, Suicide, Bars, Letters about Anti-Semitism• Kiepfisz, Arobateau, Segrest, Simpson, Tomes, Addison, justice, Foley, Crawford •Sinister Wisdom 111-20 are out of print. Photocopies of specific articles
can be provided-there is a $S charge for the first article, and $1 for each
additional article in the same order. Allow two months for deliveryof special orders; one month for delivery of back issues.

flnifTER
WlfDOmSince 1976...

"One of the most popular and widely read
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essaysgraphics
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MANUSCRIPTS
Send all manuscripts to Sinister Wisdom, POB 3252, Berkeley, CA 94703.
Submission Guidelines
All written work should be SUBMITTED IN DUPLICATE. Submissions
may be in any style or form, or combination of forms. Five poems or twostories maximum submission per issue. We prefer you type (or send
your work on Macintosh discs). Legible handwritten work accepted,
tapes accepted from print-impaired womyn. All submissions must beon
white paper, with the author's name on each page. SASE MUST BE ENCLOSED. Selection may take up to nine months. If you want acknowledgement of receipt, enclose a separate, stamped postcard. Graphic artists
should send B&W photos, stats, or other duplicates of their work. Letusknow if we can keep artwork on file for future use.
We are particularly interested in work that reflects the diversity of ourexperiences: as women of color, ethnic women, Third World, Jewish,
old, young, working class, poor, disabled, fat. We will not print anythingthat is oppressi ve or demeaning to lesbians or women, or which perpetuates negative stereotypes. We do intend to keep an open and critical
dialogue on all the issues that effect our work, joy and survival. See p. 8
for details on upcoming issues. The themes are intended as guidelines,
not as rigid catagories. If you have work that doesn't fit an upcoming
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BOOK ORDERS: SW Magazine and SW Books are no longer housed or
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