This article was originally published in 1997 as "Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father," On the Issues, NYC.

It was revised and published as "The Case for Marlowe as the Bard,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. 5, Number 4., Cambridge, MA.

Introduction:

Debate about the authorship of the Shakespeare canon has entered the era of post-modernism and electronic media with mock trials, interactive seminars, moot court hearings, caucusing at international conferences, websites, and PBS Frontline specials.   The questioning of the authorship, however, dates back to 1728 when the issue was first raised in print by one Captain Goulding in his "Essay Against Too Much Reading."  In the intervening centuries, many theories have been put forward, and the roster of potential candidates for authorship includes Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, the 6th Earl of Derby, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, the Earl of Rutland, Sir Edward Dyer, Queen Elizabeth... and a "Learned Pig." 
 
The most recent controversy centers around Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whose name was first entered in the lists by British schoolmaster J. Thomas Looney in 1920, and whose claims have been most recently advanced by columnist Joseph Sobran in his book Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time (Free Press, 1997).    The "Oxfordians" build their case on the recent discovery of de Vere's Bible, with annotations that correspond to various passages from the plays, and on similarities between de Vere's experiences and plot lines from certain of the plays, most notably Hamlet.  As with every authorship theory, there exists a substantial body of scholarly refutations.
 
I am obviously not in sympathy with the cause of the Oxfordians, but, like many women authors before me --- including Muriel Spark, Clare Booth Luce, Helen Keller, and Daphne du Maurier --- I have come to question the traditional wisdom that attributes the canon to the actor-householder William Shakespeare.  In adding my voice to the debate, it is my hope that my disputants will heed the words of him whom we have come to praise, not to bury and "do as adversaries do in law/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends." 

It was not on the ramparts of Elsinore.  It was not in the Queen's bedroom.   It was upstairs in my studio loft, in front of my goddess altar.  That was where I encountered the ghost of Hamlet's father.  An awesome apparition, it bore no resemblance to the stern, military patriarch of the famous sixteenth-century tragedy.  No, the ghost of Hamlet's father, as he appeared this spring in my loft, was witty, articulate, and profane - but his message was the same as that of his dramatic predecessor: "Kill the King."  And to that end, I tell my story:
 
It begins with Aunt Mary, the family eccentric.  A large, athletic woman, Mary had joined the "hut boys" of the Appalachian Mountain Club in the 1920's to blaze trails and to stock cabins in the White Mountains.  A radical thinker, she had broken with her father's conservativism to take up the cause of Labor in the 1930's.  In 1964, at the age of fifty-five, she returned to Wellesley College to finish a degree program begun thirty years earlier.  After graduation, she had enrolled in a Master's program at Connecticut College, where she stubbornly devoted the next three years to writing a thesis that her advisors  warned they would never approve.   That was my Aunt Mary, quite contrary.

We all knew about Mary's thesis, of course.  It was like Cousin Bill's ships-in-a-bottle, or Aunt Laura's gardening, or my mother's  dachshunds.  To each her own.  I had a copy of Mary's paper.  We all did, because when Mary died, she had specified in her will that a collection of her writings, including the infamous thesis, be published and distributed to the members of the family.  I had placed my copy on the bookshelf as I would a cremation urn on a fireplace mantle - a memento of a loved one, but certainly not a thing of any practical use to the living.

And it was there the thesis sat, gathering dust for several years, until the evening my research on a nineteenth-century lesbian actor drove me in search of information about Shakespeare.  That's when I remembered the book.
 

Mary's thesis had been titled, "Reasonable Doubt and Shakespeare Authorship: An Appraisal of the Marlowe Theory."  That night, in my studio loft, I stayed up late and read it.  And it was on that same night that the ghost of Hamlet's father appeared to me.  The ghost was Christopher Marlowe.
 
Like the ghost in the play, Marlowe had returned in spirit to expose a crime that had been perpetrated against him.  He had come back to reveal how his kingdom - and such a kingdom! - had been usurped by one not worthy of the title.  The usurper, of course, was William Shakespeare.
 
William Shakespeare, that greatest of all dramatists in the English language, is the figure against which Western playwrights measure ourselves - and fall miserably short.  The facts of his life are the stuff of legends.  With no opportunity for education beyond the local grammar school, he had somehow achieved a university-level proficiency in Greek, Latin, and the classics.  Even in an era of public libraries, this would be an impressive feat, but for an author who had lived at a time when there weren't even any published dictionaries, it challenges credulity.  The texts for the classics were not in general circulation, and the books he would have to have read were cloistered in the private libraries of very rich men or chained to the desks at Cambridge and Oxford, where none but students and professors could access them.

And then there is the fact that Shakespeare's first play had sprung full-grown from his brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  There were no records of formative works, abortive efforts, juvenilia, embarrassingly bad plays, rejected drafts.   Just - boom - Henry VI, Part I,  a five-act drama in iambic pentameter, a work of genius.  And then thirty-six more plays written at an estimated clip of 1.38 per year over the next twenty-six years - sandwiched between spending time with his family (three children before he was twenty-one), managing a large and rambunctious theatre company, memorizing, rehearsing, and performing numerous roles, buying and renovating the largest house in Stratford, investing in real estate, engaging in several lawsuits, and commuting regularly from Stratford to London, a distance of ninety miles which required two days' travel each way.

With a track record like this, it is hardly necessary to add that, without ever attending a university or socializing at court or living on the streets, he had an intuitive understanding of the details, customs, and private scandals of all three worlds.  There is no record that William Shakespeare ever traveled outside of England, but more than half his plays are set in other countries, especially in Italy. 
 
Perhaps the most daunting aspect of the Shakespeare legend is his reputation for writing the plays "with scarce a blot," the manuscripts delivered to the printer apparently containing no editing, rewrites, or even minor corrections.  It would appear that William Shakespeare lived and breathed and had his being in perfect iambic pentameter.
 
So here had been my role model for playwriting - the solitary genius with the time and inclination to raise a family, the full-time writer with the initiative to run a busy theatre - William Shakespeare, the man who traveled by astral projection, who learned by osmosis, who existed simultaneously in parallel universes, and who channeled his plays through automatic handwriting.   

Virginia Woolf wrote of being hounded by the Victorian specter of an "angel in the house," an unwanted alter-ego who continually tried to censor her unladylike writing.  I, in my work as a feminist playwright, have also been plagued by a demon - this fiend of a bard from Avon.  Where Virginia Woolf chose to kill her tormentor, I have endeavored to compete with mine:  If Shakespeare had run his own theatre company, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had produced his own plays, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had performed in and toured with his own productions, then so would I.  If Shakespeare had been able to meet the demands of family life, then so would I.  And if Shakespeare could write one and a half plays a year while holding down a full-time job and commuting, could I, a writer of non-poetic drama, be expected to produce any less?

All of my efforts to emulate my role model only demonstrated how far short I fell of my ideal:  My domestic life was a disaster, the petty politicking within the theatre company drove me crazy, acting and directing and producing and touring and playwriting produced a disorder akin to multiple personality syndrome, and the pressure to write even two plays a year was overwhelming.  Finally, after years of this insanity, my body had enough sense to go on strike, and I collapsed. 

In addition to the daunting record of achievement, there was another angle to the long shadow cast by the Shakespeare legend.   As a very public lesbian-feminist playwright, I was forever in trouble: threats from the local homophobes, shunning by straight women and closet lesbians, eviction and boycott from gay men, slander from lesbians in coalition with all of the above, attacks from poverty-class lesbians for being middle-class, neglect from middle-class lesbians for espousing working-class causes, lawsuits with educational systems, trashings in the press, systematic exclusion from production and publication opportunities, and --- most painful of all --- sabotage from the members of my own theatre company.  Why couldn't I be more like the easy-going William Shakespeare, who was apparently respected by his peers, accepted as an equal by the members of his theatre company, loved by his family, generously supported by his audiences and patrons, and well thought of by his community?  He had even scored a coat-of-arms, the sixteenth-century symbol for "having arrived."                                                                              
 
The night Marlowe appeared to me in my loft, I discovered the secret identity of the author of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello.  The world's most famous playwright was not only rumored to have been a screaming queer, but had left England under threat of death for his heresies.  He had been arrested and incarcerated.  Even after the news of his death, his name continued to be vilified in the press and from the pulpit.  Kit Marlowe, mon frère.
 
So, what's the story?  The subject could fill a book, and, in fact, already has.  In brief, here's the synopsis:

 
Marlowe, born in 1564 (two months after the birth of the actor William Shakespeare), was the son of a cobbler.  He had been able to obtain scholarships first to a prep school and then to Cambridge, evidence that his intellectual gifts had been recognized at an early age.  During his years at Cambridge, Marlowe became involved in Her Majesty's secret service, and when the university attempted to withhold from him his Master's degree on the grounds of excessive absenteeism, the Queen herself intervened with a message from her Privy Council:  "... it was not her Majesty's pleasure that anyone employed as he [Marlowe] had been in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those ignorant in the affairs he went about."  Needless to say, Marlowe received his degree.
 
Instead of taking the religious orders which might have been expected under the terms of his scholarships, Marlowe had gone to London, where his first play Tamburlaine had been a brilliant success.  At this time, his patron was Thomas Walsingham.  Walsingham's cousin was Secretary of State, and both Thomas and his young protegee moved freely in court circles.  Marlowe joined a group of heretical intellectuals who centered around Sir Walter Raleigh, and he was hailed as the most gifted and original playwright of the age. 

And then, on May 12, 1593, fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd, was arrested.  When Kyd's room was searched, a pamphlet was discovered which argued against the divinity of Jesus.  Kyd, tortured on the rack, identified the author of the pamphlet as Christopher Marlowe. 

Heresy was a serious charge, and heretics were still being burned at the stake in England.  A week later, on May 20, Marlowe was arrested at Walsingham's estate, but his influential friends managed to arrange for his bail ---  on the condition that, until the date of the hearing, he report daily in person to the Privy Council.  This would effectively prevent Marlowe from leaving the country.
 
During this time a formal charge of heresy was entered against him by one Richard Baines, a government informer.  Baines claimed that "almost into every company he [Marlowe] cometh, he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both God and ministers."

The document includes a list of accusations, including the following statements attributed to Marlowe:

• "That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe."
  
• "That all Protestants are hypocritical asses."
• "That if he [Marlowe] were to write a new religion, he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method, and that all the new testament is filthily written."
  
• "That all they that love not Tobacco and boys were fools."
  

Baines' report to the Privy Council was received on May 29, 1593.  The next day, Marlowe was "accidentally" killed.
 
Until the nineteenth century, Marlowe's death had only been an historical rumor with no details as to the date, place, or circumstance.  Then, in 1820, the burial record was found in Deptford.  It read, "1st June, 1593, Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis (sic) Frizer."

It was to be another hundred years before the coroner's report surfaced.  In 1925, Dr. Leslie Hotson discovered the original report of the Coroner's Inquest, along with another interesting document, and if these papers had only come to light just a few centuries earlier, it is unlikely that the legend of William Shakespeare would have ever taken root.
 
According to the official report, Christopher Marlowe had been socializing all day  in a rented room of a private residence (not a tavern!) with three of his secret service buddies, men who were also in the employ of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's patron.  Allegedly, there had been an argument over the bill, Marlowe had attacked one of the men, Ingram Frizer, and the man had reacted in self-defense, fatally wounding Marlowe in the face with a dagger. 

The inquest itself was unusual, in that it had not been conducted by the local coroner, but by the Queen's Coroner who just happened to have been traveling in the neighborhood at the time of the murder.  Was this a second incidence of Her Majesty's intervention on behalf of the young hothead?   The second document discovered by Hotson was a personal pardon by the Queen for the man who had murdered Marlowe, a pardon issued in an unusually brief period of time.  Frizer, the pardoned murderer, was back in Walsingham's employ within weeks --- a seemingly odd indulgence on the part of Marlowe's dearest friend.

These are the facts of Marlowe's "murder," a murder which occurred within days of his hearing before the Privy Council on charges of such a serious nature that even his wealthy patron would not have been able to save him from torture --- and the possibility of his naming other "heretics" --- and execution.
 
If the murder had been staged (as the circumstances would suggest), with the substitution of a corpse with a mutilated face for the body of Marlowe, and if Marlowe had been allowed to escape from England to live in exile, this would certainly explain a number of things. 

It would explain why Shakespeare's first writings did not appear until the year of Marlowe's death.  It would explain why the early Shakespeare plays are so similar to the late Marlowe plays, why the Shakespeare plays deal with so many of the same themes, and why the Shakespeare plays borrow so many phrases, and even whole passages, from the Marlowe plays.
 
If Marlowe did escape, it would explain the familiarity with and interest in foreign settings for the plays.  It would also explain why the manuscripts received by the printers were letter perfect: A copyist would have been hired to transcribe all of them in order to prevent Marlowe's handwriting from being recognized.  It might also explain the unusual and generous bequest to a copyist made by Thomas Walsingham in his will.
 
If Marlowe had escaped, it would explain how the author of the plays knew so much first-hand about working-class life, about the inside of jails, about court intrigue and customs, about Cambridge, and about exile.  It would explain the author's extensive knowledge of the classics.  And if the author had been living in exile, away from his family and friends, away from the theatre, away from the country where his language was spoken, it would explain how he acquired the solitude, isolation, and leisure that every other creative author in the history of the world has required in order to turn out works of comparable genius.

Moreover, if Marlowe had escaped, it would explain the dramatist's obsession with themes of traumatic reversals of fortune, betrayal by trusted friends,  life in exile, and cases of mistaken identity.  It would explain the repeated plot device in which characters fake their own death in order to save themselves. (There are thirty-three characters in eighteen Shakespeare plays who are wrongly believed to be dead, and seven of those deaths are faked.)  Finally, it would explain the playful gender-bending which appears in so many of the plays, especially the comedies. 

It would explain the sonnets about separation and, if Marlowe was indeed gay, it would explain the sonnets about  gay love.  As a rule, the Shakespeare plays do not treat marriage kindly, and when there is a stable, loyal relationship, it is inevitably between members of the same sex, especially between two men.  (When camaraderie is depicted between a man and a woman, frequently the woman is passing as a male, or - as in Taming of the Shrew - both partners are actively engaged in mocking and subverting the heterosexual paradigm.)

And, finally, there are the portraits: The "Chandos portrait," the most famous of a number of portraits believed to depict William Shakespeare. It was painted between 1600 and 1610, and it may have been the basis for the engraved portrait used in the First Folio. It resides in London's Naitonal Portrait Gallery, which believes it to be a rendering of the playwright, who  would have been between 36 and 46.

Then there is the "Corpus Christi portrait," dated 1585, and discovered during renovations at Corpus Christi College of Cambridge in 1952 or 1953. One account says that it was discovered in the walls of the room above the one occupied by Marlowe 370 years earlier. Is it a painting of Marlowe?  It could be. Marlowe would have been a young man of twenty. Certainly, the subject is opulently dressed for a scholarship student, but there is evidence that in 1584 Marlowe began receiving "significant additional income from an unknown source" [Wikipedia].  In any event, since 1950's the painting has become firmly associated with Marlowe.

They appear to me to be portraits of the same man, twenty years apart. The configuration of the lips, the fly-away hair, the eyebrows, the thinning hair over the forehead that's already apparent in the younger portrait. One final word: The Corpus Christi painting carries the inscription: "Quod me nutrit me destruit," which translates to "That which nourishes me destroys me."

The thesis that Marlowe lived to continue his playwriting solves more problems than it raises, and one is left to marvel at the far-fetched and incredible hypotheses of those who would still argue in favor of William Shakespeare's authorship of the plays.  The only plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that these academics are - as Shakespeare was - middle-class, bourgeois, christian, heterosexual, politically conservative, status-seeking organization men who, in their zeal to have it all, have elevated the legend of William Shakespeare to a religious doctrine - one which holds for them a promise of salvation and redemption.  The legend of Shakespeare would prove that  any one of these men, at any moment, is capable of producing world-class literature, demonstrating not only an innate capacity for spontaneous, unrehearsed genius, but also depths of the spirit which have historically only been associated with those individuals who have undergone tremendous loss and suffering through an ordeal by which they have had to carve out an identity separate from and at odds with the norms of their society.
                                      ______________________________

In 1930, during the Depression, my Aunt Mary had won a scholarship to study sculpting at Yale.  She chose instead to go to New York, where she worked as a bookkeeper and as a secretary for twelve years - up until the time of her marriage. 
 
As a child, I remember discovering one of Mary's sculptures up in my grandmother's attic.  It was a stunning female nude, and I had asked my mother why her sister had never told me she was an artist.  My mother explained that with Mary's passion for great art, she had decided it was better to quit than to run the risk of turning out inferior work.
 
Aunt Mary had aborted her career without even giving herself the chance to develop. I can't help wondering how much the censorship of information about women artists and the inflated myths of male artists, like the legends surrounding the actor William Shakespeare, had contributed to her unrealistic expectations and subsequent demoralization.  And I also can't help wondering if her return so late in life to academia, with her hopeless quest for the acceptance of her heretical thesis, was not the final act of a tragic patriarchal drama in which her own monarchy had been usurped by a pretender. 
 
 

[This piece was originally published in off our backs, Washington, DC.]

This is my personal list of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for my friends who might find some guidance helpful in relating to my ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis):

DON’T expose me to your company if you believe CFS is psychosomatic, “yuppie flu,” or anything less than one of the most frightening, tragic, and debilitating diseases of the century. Because it is.

DON’T think you’re being supportive by telling me how you get tired too sometimes after a hard day at work or a long bike ride. The fatigue (read “debilitation”) experienced by people with CFS is unlike any kind of physical or emotional state experienced by able-bodied people, even after they’ve run a marathon. This kind of comparison is as offensive as discussing your experiences with dieting to someone with a wasting disease. Just don’t. If you are able-bodied, you have no physical context for understanding my experience, so don’t think you do.

DON’T suggest that my symptoms might not be so severe if I didn’t dwell on them, cater to them, give them so much attention, let them run my life. In fact, that is the very philosophy that led to he collapse of my health in the first place. I maintain what vitality I do have by careful attention to even small changes in my body.

DON’T try to be helpful by suggesting other “normal” factors which might be causing my symptoms. Yes, no doubt there are other factors - there always are - but I am an expert on my disease and I am on intimate terms with my symptoms. It is arrogant for you to try to interpret them for me.

DON’T spend time with me unless you are grown-up enough to understand that the desires of an able-bodied person should not be weighed in the same balance with the needs of a disabled person. Forget your assertiveness training, your skills at compromise, or your “getting to yes” negotiating expertise. If I need to leave an environment because it is toxic to me and you want to stay, it is not a solution for us to stay fifteen more minutes. Those fifteen minutes may result in my spending the next two days in bed. I get my way, because the stakes are infinitely higher for me. If you think this is about my control issues or power tripping, get some help with your ableism.

DON’T say things to me like, “God, I don't know how you can stand to live without [your career, your home, swimming, running, eating favorite foods, being able to travel, being financially independent, etc.] ever again!” Don't say, “Boy, I could never give up [my career, my home, swimming, running, eating my favorite foods, being able to travel, being financially independent, etc.]” Our losses are our losses. They don't signal fortitude, sacrifice, or strength of character. We deal with them in healthy or unhealthy ways, and sometimes that changes every hour. They are our losses, and the only appropriate response is heartfelt sympathy and sincere offers of assistance. A little political activism would not be out of place either.

DON’T punish me with your frustrations at the inconveniences I cause you with my illness. Yes, in the short term, you may get me to “pass” as able-bodied or even take care of your bad mood, but in the long run, I will decide you are an ableist asshole. I have no choice but to live with these inconveniences and disruptions 24-hours a day. If you choose to be in my company, you can assume responsibility for temporarily accommodating my disability.

DON’T date me if you want to think of my illness as some footnote to my personhood. It is a central part of my identity now, just as being lesbian is. We all know how icky it is to be around straight people who tolerate our lesbianism, but who flinch every time we bring up the subject of our lover. It feels just as bad to be with friends who know I have CFS, but who become stiff and uncomfortable whenever I incorporate my experiences or needs into our interactions. If you can't take the heat, get out of my kitchen.

DON’T ever use the word “crazy” in relation to the confusion, seizures, extreme irritability, panic attacks, or periods of being emotionally overwhelmed which are part of the cognitive losses and neurological disturbances of this illness. I can identify and name these states and take responsibility for them. I have a whole battery of information and arsenal of strategies for coping with them. In fact, I see able-bodied folks acting out all the time from food allergies, blood sugar reactions, the effects of alcohol and caffeine in their systems -- and in my experience, those of us with CFS are far more aware, more accountable, and more forthcoming about mood swings and emotional states than so-called able-bodied people who have the dubious privilege of still abusing their bodies.

DON’T persist in pressuring me about an activity once I have identified it as something I have reservations about because of my illness. We folks with CFS often question our reality because of the elusive, “moving target” nature of our symptoms. Because most of us are experiencing some degree of social isolation, we are especially vulnerable to pressure which is accompanied by even a subtle threat of further marginalization. And it's always tempting to see if we can pull off a “normal” activity. But the price of being mistaken can be months of relapse. It's not worth it. “No” means “no.” Don't presume to know my limits. They change every day, anyway.

DON’T attribute your lack of sympathy to my attitude. This is a standard defense of bigots. Racists are always sure that there are right ways to be African American and wrong ways. Sexists believe that harassment and discrimination only happen to women with bad attitudes. Ableists are always convinced that there is something in the attitude or the behavior of the disabled person which is causing their own irritation or aversion towards us. Nothing unmasks your ableism more than this point of view toward me. I have to fight my way through a toxic, apathetic, and even sadistic world every day. I am assertive-to-militant about my needs, and I haven't got the energy to coddle ableist people. You will not see me looking helpless, tearful, or pathetic. Someone suffering for a few weeks with a flu virus may be able to indulge or even luxuriate in their temporary helplessness, but those of us who are sentenced to chronic illness for the rest of our lives must make other adjustments -- ones which should be valorized not excoriated. I need an ally, not a rescuer. If you can't feel empathy for an embattled warrior, it's your ableism and not my attitude. Period.

DON’T think I'm being manipulative when I have to excuse myself from a stressful dynamic. Most people will check out of an argument when it reaches the level of screaming and throwing objects. Because of this disease, I experience much lower grades of conflict as being that stressful and life-threatening, and I have to check out. I am accountable in my relationships to people, but sometimes it takes me longer, with more periods of time-out, in order to work through a difficult issue. Don't make me hang up on you.

DON’T suggest new supplements or treatments unless I have asked. Like most single women with the disease, I have experienced a drastic and terrifying reduction of resources. And like most women living on very low fixed income, I have had to evolve a highly refined and customized process for cost-benefit analysis. It has taken me years to fine-tune my regimen of supplements and foods. Yes, I am sure I would benefit from massage, blood tests, medical care, organic food, acupuncture, and Chinese herbs, but I can't afford them. Unless, of course, you want to buy them for me. Classism and ableism go hand-in-hand, and in case you don't know, health care in this country is a privilege, not a right.

DON’T mistake my periods between relapses for recovery. I have plenty to deal with regarding my own ups and downs. Don't make me have to cope with your hopes and expectations for me. What I most need from you is the reassurance that I am a perfectly wonderful friend even at the lowest point in my health, and even if I never get any better.

DON’T accuse me of being jealous of your health when I confront your ableism. I wish that my able-bodied friends were more aware of how their able-bodied privilege translates into ignorance, arrogance, and bland sadism. The issue is not my envy of your privilege, but your abuse of it.

DON’T make me take care of you around cancelled plans. Yes, I'm sorry whenever that happens. I do try to know what my limitations are, and frequently I err on the side of conservatism just so that I won't have to change them or cancel later. But every now and then I will say I can do something that I can't. Too bad. But the whole life I had planned for myself - my career, my home, my family, my social life, my sports, my hobbies, my standard of living, my quality of life -- have been permanently cancelled. I just can't get too into your pain about a picnic or a camping trip. And you know what? I'm not even going to try.

DON’T think I'm kidding when I talk about suicide. The depression that accompanies CFS has been likened to the depression that AIDS patients experience in the last two weeks of their lives. With CFS, it goes on for years. Ask me. I may have actually scavenged a piece of garden hose for the exhaust pipe. I may have stockpiled barbiturates. I will probably tell you, because I am hoping someone will help me. If you care about me and I am talking about suicide, consider stepping up your support. I'm not kidding. CFS patients do take our own lives, and we do it a lot. And part of it is because nobody seems to give a damn that we are losing or have already lost what we used to consider our lives. Give a damn.

DO make an effort to learn something about the disease on your own. There is a ton of information about CFS in the libraries and bookstores - first-person narratives, medical and alternative healing manuals, cookbooks. There are all kinds of websites on the Internet. Check out Solve ME/CFS.

DO acknowledge frequently that I am disabled. I have to run as fast as I can to stay in place, or even just to fall back at a manageable rate. I like to have that acknowledged. Whenever I do participate at a “normal” level in an able-bodied event, it has probably taken a lot of advance planning. Acknowledge that. Appreciate it. I pay higher dues, and I like to be credited for it. Even though I may look like a slacker to the able-bodied world, remember this: I am operating at the absolute top of my physical bent all the time. I am probably working harder than any able-bodied person you know. Just because I don't mention it, doesn't mean I'm not struggling.

DO ask me how I am when we get together for an activity. That lets me know that you are willing to be my ally in confronting the challenges I am meeting during the time we are together. I have come to learn that when you don't ask, it means you don't want to know. It means that your plan is to grant me the “privilege” of being considered your able-bodied peer for the duration of our activity. In other words, my illness will only be real for you if I bring it up. Experience has taught me that this attitude results in your equating my mentioning of symptoms with my causing those symptoms. And you will oppress me accordingly.

DO adopt a CFS awareness when you are in my company. No, it's not codependent. It's supportive. And courteous. Why should the member of an ethnic minority be the one to confront the racism all the time? Well, it's her survival issue, but frankly, that's no excuse for her white friends to let her do all the work. A racist world hurts us all. And so does an ableist one. And a toxic one. I love it when my companions allow me to shift some of the burden of my chemical sensitivity vigilance onto their shoulders, even for just an hour or two. The analogy I use is that of traveling with a disabled child. If you want to make it clear that the child is my child and therefore my problem, because you're only interested in my company... well, it makes me choose between my allegiance to my child (myself) or you. Guess who's going to win.

DO confront your superstitions about denial and immunity. If you are afraid to imagine yourself in my shoes, to really hear my experience, or to adopt a CFS consciousness about toxins and stress levels when you are in my company - look at the reason why. Are you afraid that you might become vulnerable to the illness if you let too much of its reality into your consciousness? That is a very human response, but also a very ableist one. If this is your truth, then stick to the company of other able-bodied people. Don't make me deal with it.

DO make it easy for me to say, “I need to leave” or “I need to lie down” or “I need to pull off the road/ trail and take a nap.” When the plan changes abruptly like that, see how fast you can get behind it, instead of seeing how guilty or ashamed you can make me feel or how difficult you can make it for me. These disruptions are normal for me, and I love it when my companions work together to minimize the social stigmatization that results from my meeting my needs.

DO offer support. Offer whatever you can. The gesture is often the most therapeutic part. I don't have a bathtub, but I experience chronic muscle pain and I love it when friends invite me to come over and take a bath. Can you cook a meal on a really bad night? Can you be there for 20-minute support phone calls? Ask me what kind of support I would like. I understand that doesn't mean you can give it. I'll just be stunned that you asked. In seven years, no one ever has, but I do keep hoping.

DO clean up your car/ apartment/ clothing. Remember what I have told you about my allergies: fabric softener, essential oils, perfumes, bleach, any and all pesticides. When you keep “forgetting,” I get one of two messages: Either you don't believe I'm really sick or you don't care. I never get the message you just forgot. That's your fantasy... and a function of your able-bodied privilege.

DO tell me how amazing I am. Tell me a lot. Praise my coping skills, my achievements, whatever I am proud of. Praise my ingenuity, my resourcefulness, my optimism (I'm still alive, aren't I?), my courage. Believe me, people with CFS hear “slacker,” “whiner,” “nutcase,” “drama queen,” “control freak” a dozen times a day in a dozen subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No matter how much you praise me, it can never be too much.

DO stand up for me when I’m not around. You will probably have more credibility than I do. Spread the word about CFS. Confront others on their ableism. Talk about the crying need for support services similar to those offered by the AIDS networks in our communities. Stop others from blaming the victims. When you hear charges that I am exaggerating my symptoms, set the record straight. The symptoms that show, the ones that I talk about, are just the tip of an iceberg.

DO share this link and pass it around your workplace.

And if all of this seems too overwhelming to remember, then try this simple formula:

Pretend it’s happened to you.

A FINAL WORD: For decades, the medical community has pretended that ME/CFS is a psychological disorder, even in the face of decades of discovery of biomarkers. There has been intense, ongoing pressure and lobbying from insurance companies to refuse to accept it as a disease, because treatment is expensive and lifelong.  Instead, patients have been  and still are "prescribed" CBT ("Cognitive Behavioral Therapy") and GET ("Graded Exercise Therapy"). Both of these degrading, so-called treatments have resulted in death. In fact, until very recently, these were the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Today, with rising numbers of Long Covid patients, whose symptoms are nearly identical to those of ME/CFS patients, our illness and disability are finally being taken seriously. We are finally getting apologies from the medical community, including the CDC, which refers to their history with ME/CFS as "shameful." Ironic how we were not allowed to donate blood, but it was "all in our heads."  How does that work? #theyknewtheyalwaysknew

In 1988, I flew to Buffalo to attend the first conference of International Women Playwrights, the organization that would later morph into the International Center for Women Playwrights (ICWP.)  I was thirty-six years old and had just come out publicly as a lesbian and as a playwright in 1986. At that time, I had officially given myself the name “Carolyn Gage,” naming myself after Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose unwillingness to make compromises had resulted in her being written out of history. At this historic conference and so newly emerged from my chrysalis, I experienced one life-changing encounter after another with playwrights who seemed like goddesses to me.

This is a record of my impressions and my experiences of that conference, looking back from a distance of thirty-four years. I am autistic, the conference was overwhelming for me, and these memories are highly subjective. Whatever interpretations, inaccuracies, or projections this paper contains, they are my own.

At the first meeting of all the attendees, we were asked to stand up, one by one, and state our name and the location of our home. My heart pounding, I stood up and said, “Carolyn Gage, Lesbian Nation.” Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution was the title of a book written in 1973 by the radical-lesbian, feminist author and cultural critic Jill Johnston. Most Western lesbians in my age cohort would have been familiar with the phrase, if not the book. In announcing my sexual orientation as a homeland, I was not only making a statement about bonds of lesbianism transcending and transgressing boundaries of citizenship, but I was also putting out a challenge to the lesbians at the conference to identify ourselves so that we could find each other. If I am remembering rightly, there was some programming at the conference for lesbians, but it was not until the last day—which would be too late for us to socialize or organize. Other women began to claim lesbian status in their naming, but more to the point, when I sat down to eat lunch, my table began to fill up with the lesbians.

And what lesbians! Phyllis Jane Rose, Sandra Shotlander, and Eva Johnson were just a few who made a tremendous impression on me.
 

I remember a Russian woman who had a male interpreter, and what a stir that caused… a man sharing the podium and daring to translate the words of a woman! Separatism was in the air.  Eva Johnson, an out-and-proud, Aboriginal Australian playwright, performer, poet, theatre director and producer spoke about her work as a director in Australia. I remember her talking about producing a play about the colonization of her people. In her production, all the white male roles were performed by Aboriginal women. She told us that she had been challenged for this casting choice. I have never forgotten her explanation: She asked who better understood the mind of the white male colonizer than the Aboriginal woman. Within a year I had founded a lesbian theatre company named No To Men, where women would play all the male parts.

Eva changed my life in another way. She was a featured speaker, and I remember how, before she began her talk, she requested that all the men leave the auditorium. Many of the men at this historic women’s conference were from the press—international and national, and they could not believe that Eva was ordering them out! One of the men in the audience was the interpreter for the Russian playwright, and passionate pleas were made to allow him to stay. But Eva would not budge. I had never in my life seen a woman exercise so much authority. It took my breath away.

Eva belongs to the Malak Malak people of the Northern Territory, and she is a member of what is known as the “Stolen Generations” in Australia. Between 1910-1970, the Australian government forcibly removed indigenous children from their families as part of a policy of “assimilation.”  Some of the children were adopted by white families, and many remained in institutions. They were taught to reject their heritage and forced to adopt white culture. Eva was taken from her mother at the age of two and placed in a Methodist mission where she was kept for eight years. At the age of ten, she was transferred to an orphanage in Adelaide, and would not be reunited with her mother for three decades. As I remember, her mother was in a nursing home, and she saw her daughter on television and recognized her. This was the story she was going to tell. (She wrote a poem about her mother. You can read it here.)

That day, standing on the stage in front of hundreds of playwrights, academics, and members of the press, she stared down the protesters, declaring simply “This is women’s business.” I have never forgotten that. I can still hear her voice in my head. It had never occurred to me that women had a right to our own spaces, or that we had “business” that entitled us to that space. I was electrified.
 
Eva Johnson’s work reflects her identity as part of the “Stolen Generation,” and it also addresses cultural identity, Aboriginal Australian women’s rights, land rights, slavery, sexism and homophobia. She lit up the conference with her joy and her exuberance, which were inextricably connected to her awareness of her history. She is a living embodiment of Alice Walker’s affirmation, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”

I remember eating breakfast with Nigerian playwright, Onuekwuke Nwazulu Sofola (aka Zulu Sofola), who was teaching for a year at the State University at Buffalo. She wanted to talk with me about lesbianism, and I remember that she asked an unusual question. At this point in my life, I was very focused on the ways in which lesbianism was, in the words of Jill Johnston, the “feminist solution” to patriarchy and its abuses. Onuekwuke’s work was deeply engaged with issues of women’s subordination and violence against women, and I remember thinking that her questions reflected her engagement with this issue of “feminist solutions.” She told me she had been thinking all night about what she had heard about lesbianism at the conference. Suddenly she leaned toward me and asked me, “But when the women break up, it must be terrible…?” I affirmed that it was, and in my (vastly limited) experience, this was because the potential for intimacy between women was so much greater than that between a man and a woman. I remember she nodded and sat back. Something had been resolved in her mind. I remember thinking “This woman must love women so much, that she would see this pain of separation as the central issue associated with lesbianism.” I felt profoundly chastened and also deeply moved, and I never forgot that exchange.  

And then there was Toni Cade Bambara. Wearing a bright red, leather kufi hat and African print pants, she burst into the room, swung up to the podium, and delivered a dramatic and refreshingly non-academic presentation. I remember she opened her talk with a vivid and affectionate tribute to the women who had been influential in her life, the “ladies in the black slips,” as she described them—the African American women in her family who would hold forth in the kitchen on Sunday mornings. At that time, I was not familiar with her work. I went home from the conference and read everything she had written that I could get my hands on. Twenty years before “diversity” and “inclusion” became buzzwords, she was writing “One’s got to see what the factory worker sees, what the prisoner sees, what the welfare children see, what the scholar sees, got to see what the ruling-class mythmakers see as well, in order to tell the truth and not get trapped.”

Toni had edited one of the first collections of essays, poetry, and short stories by African American women, The Black Woman: An Anthology.  It was a response to the male “experts,” both black and white, whose sweeping generalizations about Black women made no allowances for the voices of those women themselves. In her second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks, Toni included selections written by freshman composition students along with works by Alice Walker and Langston Hughes. The point I want to make is that the opening of her talk was just a glimpse into her radical approach to art and to activism—an activism that perpetually widened the circle of community as she defined it.

On the second day of the conference, the lesbians had organized a gathering, and Toni showed up for it. One of the orders of business was to collect signatures for a conference resolution condemning Section 28, which was the legislative designation for a series of laws across Britain that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. It had been introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government and had gone into effect earlier in the year. The vague and hateful language of the bill translated to widespread censorship and paranoia across the UK, especially among educators. I remember that Toni took on a leadership role, educating us about the most effective way to go about achieving our goals, and she did this with mind-blowing humility and respect for egalitarian process, never once pulling rank, even though she was clearly the most experienced activist in the room, and possibly one of the most experienced in the world.

Toni left an indelible impression on me. She personified a level of authenticity and integrity that I had never experienced personally. She was present… I mean, 100% in mind, body, and spirit. She had a power that was palpable. When she stepped up to that podium, I felt as if the room had gone from grey to technicolor, that we had all been half-asleep and now were fully awake. In her essay “What It Is I Think I Am Doing,” she had written:
 
…when I look back on the body of book reviews I’ve produced in the past fifteen years, for all their socioideolitero brilliant somethingorother, the underlying standard always seemed to be—Does this author here genuinely love his/her community?
 
She walked her talk, and I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity to meet her and hear her in person. And I appreciate the opportunity to revisit my memories from this conference now as an old woman, and to be able to see so clearly how the influence from these remarkable women was taken up in my bones and how my desire to emulate them laid the foundation for my lifework.

International Women Playwrights: Voices of Identity and Transformation- Proceedings of The First International Women Playwrights Conference, October 18-23, 1988
by Anna Kay France (Editor), P.J. Corso (Editor)

Records held by former University Professor at Buffalo, Anna Kay France, as related to her involvement in the 1st International Women Playwrights Conference(IWPC) held at the University at Buffalo, October 14-23, 1988. Includes correspondence with national and international playwrights, session transcripts, and papers from the International Center for Women Playwrights.
https://findingaids.lib.buffalo.edu/repositories/2/resources/737
https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/handle/2328/7978

Here’s the problem.  Amber Heard presented two photos as evidence that she was a victim of battering. They were actually the same image, but one of them had been edited. When cross-examined about this, she insisted that they were two separate photos. She said that she took the first photo, and then turned on a light and took the second photo. Hmm… Then the photos were displayed to the court with their time stamps. They were both taken at exactly the same second. Exactly.

So Ms. Heard explained how she took the first photo, then broke the pose to turn on a light, and then got back in exactly the same pose to take the second photo… all of this in less time than one second. The same identical angle, the same identical expression, the same identical placement of every single hair. What she was asking us to believe was impossible. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie. We all had eyes. We were all looking at the photos, at the time stamps. We all knew how brief one second is. Did she take us for idiots?  And if she had no difficulty presenting us with such a blatant, demonstrable lie, how could we believe anything else she said, especially if it was a lie that might help her case?

At this point some of us were remembering her inadvertently disclosing to the court that she owned a “bruise kit.” What is a “bruise kit” you may ask…. Well, it’s a “cosmetic item that comprises a disc with many color palettes, including red, burgundy, violet, purple, yellow, and sallow green compacts. As per the Ben Nye Makeup Company, the wheel is made up of hues that closely resemble the color seen in bruises and skin abrasions.” Actors use bruise kits to make themselves look bruised. Heard told us she owned one. And then she quickly disavowed it.
 
Ms. Heard could have made a different choice when she was caught submitting an edited photo as evidence. She could have said, “Yes, it is the same image, but since this is such an important piece of evidence, I edited it to better delineate the bruise on my cheek.” Some of us might have still been skeptical. Some of us might have thought, “Well, that makes sense. She’s entitled.” Some of us might have wondered, “Is that even allowed?”  But there would have at least been some wiggle room.

What Ms. Heard told us was such a blatant lie, it insulted our intelligence. And this happened over and over again during the course of the trial. She would be challenged about something she said or something she presented as evidence, and in order to defend it, she would generate a whole new string of lies, usually more implausible than the original. She did this with her lie that she had donated all the money from her divorce settlement to charity. Though not included in the trial, she did it when confronted about her arrest and her night in jail for domestic violence. She did it when caught with falsified papers, attempting to smuggle her dogs into Australia. She did it with her version of how part of Mr. Depp’s finger was severed.
 
And then, after all these documented inconsistencies and contradictions, there is the issue of how much she asks us to take her at her word...The complete absence of medical records of injuries from alleged years of horrific battery and rape that would go on for hours and days. The lack of witnesses, apart from a sister who, according to a court declaration, was herself a victim of Heard’s violence. The lack of photographic evidence—apart from the bruise photo— when there are dozens of photographs of spilled wine, broken glass, defaced mirrors, lines of cocaine, Mr. Depp passed out/sleeping. And there is the videotaping of his behavior without permission. It’s not like Ms. Heard was shy about documenting. Why didn’t she just step in front of the mirror when she photographed it? The photographs she submitted as proof of injury in no way matched the narratives of extreme violence that she described. Not even close.

The UK trial admitted therapy records into evidence as “medical records.” In the US, therapy  records are considered hearsay--which they are--and, as such, they are rightfully disallowed. The judge in the UK trial, a man who had personal and professional connections with the publication being sued and who would have been disqualified as a juror in the US, relied on Ms. Heard’s word to reach a verdict. The US jury did not. I feel it's worth noting that the judge believed at the time, as did the rest of the world, that she had already donated her seven-million-dollar divorce settlement to charity. Because she had said so, repeatedly.
 
Look, many of us who followed this trial are survivors.  And many of us were abused by people who lie. Our responses to lies and liars can be skewed by this experience. I remember my mother explaining to my father that I had broken the back window of our station wagon. I was probably ten, or younger. The window had somehow been rolled up not in the track, and forced so badly that it would not roll up or down anymore. I hadn’t done it. I was confused. How could I have forgotten doing that? Did she mistake someone else for me? And why was she being all giggly about it?  Today I understand that my mother broke the window and lied about it, because she was terrified of my father, and she was probably high. Maybe she thought my father would be less angry at a child. Whatever she was thinking, she counted on my loyalty in that moment, and I did not disappoint.

I knew I had not broken the window. I knew my mother was saying something that she knew was not true. I did what many survivors learned to do. I refused to connect the dots. Connecting the dots would leave me with one of two conclusions: “I must be crazy” or “My mother is a dangerous liar.”  So I just turned on the internal fog machine that so many abused children have learned to deploy. I let the testimony of my own experience and the lie of my mother coexist, unconnected, in my brain. I needed to believe my mother, because my father was terrifying. That was my overriding ideology: Trust my mother.
 
But I’m not a child anymore. I have disabled the fog machine, in spite of the fact that this complicates my life. I have had to ditch the ideology that kept me from connecting the dots. In recovery, there are no ideologies that justify sacrificing my experience of what is true.

Amber Heard has just lied to a courtroom, to a jury, and to me about a piece of critical evidence. And it’s obvious to everyone watching.  Yes, I want to believe survivors. I have written the largest canon of plays dealing with violence against women of any playwright in the English-speaking world. I am a survivor. I have skin in this game.  And among many feminists, especially feminist activists, there is an ideology about always believing women who claim to be abuse victims.

But Amber Heard has just lied and I saw her do it.  I no longer have a way to let that coexist in my brain with believing her. The dots connect themselves these days: She lied; therefore she is a liar; therefore she is not to be trusted.

And these dots also simultaneously connect up: This is a really, really inconvenient truth in a world where there is finally a global movement of women coming forward to name powerful men as perpetrators. The vast majority of perpetrators of violence against women are, of course, men. And it’s  a really, really inconvenient truth that otherwise powerful men can occasionally be victims of domestic violence at the hands of women.

But... any movement that purports to be for survivors, and at the same time demands that its followers disbelieve the testimony of our own eyes, demands that we give liars a pass on their documented deceptions, and that demands of male survivors impossibly high standards for evidence--even in just one instance--is a movement that lacks credibility. Because that's how lying works.

I was born in 1952, and my father was a pornography and sex addict. It was rare among my peer group to have been exposed to pornography on a regular basis in the home. Today, it's possibly more rare to reach puberty without exposure, and I am writing this blog in part to "hear  myself into being," but also to share my experience and thoughts with younger women who have grown up with online pornography.

My father's collection of pornography was all in print, obviously, and there were three categories…  There were the men’s magazines of the 1950’s, with titles like Real Men, Man’s Epic, Man’s Life, Man’s Conquest, and True Man. The covers featured odd combinations of Nazis or Castro, semi-naked women in bondage, and exotic, deadly animals. The women were always being tortured

The second genre was the true crime or detective magazines and tabloid papers. Some of these contained pulp fiction, but others contained actual stories from police files, usually accompanied by graphic photographs. I was profoundly traumatized by two stories that I still remember. One was about a father who forced his young son into a shower of scalding water and would not let him out. The other had to do with an ex-boyfriend and battery acid. My mother tried to comfort me by explaining that these were stories about people who lived very far away from us, in neighborhoods very unlike our safe, little suburbs, and that these were a kind of people we would never know. That point was lost on me. What I needed her to tell me was that these stories were made up and that only an incredibly insane and brain-damaged person would find them appealing. But the stories were real and so were the photographs. The person who found them appealing was my own father and her husband, and this monster was inside the house with us in our safe, little suburb.

The third genre was Playboy, which began publishing one year after I was born and ten years after my parents had married. By this time my mother was apparently desensitized to my father’s reading habits and deeply complicit in covering up his addiction, taking pains to hide his torture pornography. Compared to the battery acid images, Playboy was like Better Homes and Gardens. My mother eagerly bought a subscription and would proudly display the magazine on her living-room coffee table. After all, Playboy wasn’t just a girlie magazine. They were publishing the likes of Saul Bellow, Seán Ó Faoláin, John Updike, James Dickey, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Crichton, John le Carré, Irwin Shaw, Jean Shepherd, Arthur Koestler, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, John Irving, Anne Sexton, Nadine Gordimer, Kurt Vonnegut and J. P. Donleavy. It was literature. Her relief must have been enormous.

But… great writers notwithstanding, none of my other friends’ parents had copies of Playboy on their coffee tables.

What was the impact of these magazines on my developing brain?  Well, they taught me that women were subhuman. That was clear. They all looked the same, were all the same age, had no careers, no brains, no personalities, and existed as obstacles or rewards for men. They were, above all, available.   Both the rescuers and the perpetrators had a crack at them. What did I learn about men?  I learned that men in general and my father in particular were terrifying. This did not leave me, a young female, in a very good place. The naked women in these heavily airbrushed images had neither pubic hair or labia, which led me to believe that there was something grotesque and monstrous about my developing body. It occurred to me that I might not be female after all. Frightening as that was to me, it also meant I might not have to be a woman… in other words, subhuman.

Was my sexuality affected by this early exposure to pornography? Hell, yeah, it was!  Confronted with thousands of narratives and images of rescuing/perpetrating males and helplessly tortured females, I was compelled to pick a team. I chose Team Rescuer/Perpetrator. In trauma studies terminology, I experienced “fusion with the perpetrator.” I was aroused at the same time that I was traumatized by the materials in my home. In my early sexual and romantic fantasies, I was the rescuer or perpetrator. Sadism permeated my fantasies. On the other hand, on the rare occasions when I would identify with the victim, then my arousal become conflated with loathing and helpless rage.

When I was nineteen, I read Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex. It was a revelation, and it brought clarity, purpose, and identity to my tragically dissociated life.  Shulamith brought the counter-narrative and  the alternative identities that had been absent from my childhood. I began to read feminist writers, women’s history, and especially feminist biography. Eventually I passed through the looking glass all the way into lesbian separatist culture and community. I was home.

Did my sexuality change? Yes and no. I was now present in my own life. No longer dissociated. No longer passing. I was consciously and conscientiously choosing my orientation. This was empowering, but also disorienting. I had moved beyond survival/passing mode, but I began to experience the long-delayed post-traumatic syndromes and retrieval of trauma memories from my childhood. Showing up for myself in bed meant showing up with an array of alarming emotions and syndromes that had never been part of my repertoire in my performative heterosexuality. Sexual liberation for me meant recovery work, confusion, misunderstandings, wildly mixed metaphors, and a confrontation of the deeply internalized images and narratives that had informed my sexuality from childhood. The covers of True Man, the terror of the battery acid, the horror of my own family.

Across the decades, I have read about women who were able to wrest back their sexuality from patriarchal conditioning… and I envied them. In comparison, I felt that my circuits for sexual arousal fantasies were hard-wired in. They barely budged. In bed with a companion, I took comfort in the fact my partner could not see what I was thinking. Actually, for all I knew, they might have been experiencing similarly programmed imagery. In lesbian communities of the 1980’s there was a significant movement to embrace lesbian pornography and sado-masochism.  I felt that I could understand it, but also that it was not for me. I had not chosen my programming, and to embrace it as an adult felt like capitulation.

To make a long story short…  I am now almost seventy. My life with intimate partners is in the rear view mirror now. These days I am taking stock. I have close to thirty years in Alanon recovery for the damage of being raised by addicts. I have worked hard as an incest survivor, as an autistic woman diagnosed late in life, and as a lesbian feminist to own my own life and my own thinking. My political views are constantly evolving, as is my spirituality. My recovery continues to progress. But my sexuality never evolved. What has changed is my relationship to it. By the time I ended my last relationship about a decade ago, I found myself so spiritually and emotionally alienated by what turned me on that “being intimate” with my partner was actually the opposite. My experience of sex with her did not bring me closer. I had needed to distance myself from her in order to enter the world of sexual tropes left over from true crime and male fantasies.

As I said, what I am doing these days is taking stock. And when I take stock of my relationship history, I think, “I did the best I could with a sexuality that was imposed on me before I was old enough to speak.” I also did the best I could to decolonize my thinking and my choices from all the toxic values of my childhood. I dedicated my lifework to generating narratives, paradigms, and archetypes that would provide women and girls with a different way of seeing themselves.

When I think of my issues with intimacy, how many of my failures were a function of undiagnosed autism, or unremembered child sexual abuse, or the pornography?  That question does not feel productive any more. What does interest me is the question, “Were there things I might have done differently?”  

Yes, I believe there were. There were things I could have done that would have kept me connected—and deeply connected—to my partner. Things that involved entering an altered state and producing endorphins, without having anything to do with biological urges intended to perpetuate the gene pool. Things that were intensely specific to my own needs and the needs of my partner for healing. Things that would reflect and support an evolving spirituality and a deepening intimacy.

Well… What are these things?  

Before I explain, I want to credit the woman who discovered them: Rebecca  Jackson. She was an African American “eldress” or leader of a Shaker community in Philadelphia that housed twelve to twenty African American Shakers. She had a life partner, Rebecca Perot. For thirty-five years these women lived together , worked together, and slept together in a celibate relationship.

The things that they did to deepen their intimacy and integrate it with their spiritual commitment were what they called “visions.”  Rebecca Jackson recorded some of these in her memoir Gifts of Power. It is obvious that the two of them cultivated their capacity to experience these visions, possibly with a specific practice like a guided meditation, and that they shared these visions with each other. Here are some examples of Rebecca Jackson’s visions:  

This one is an affirmation of a kind of baptismal purification, one which also washes away fear. It’s also an affirmation of the beauty and autonomy of her partner in an era when slavery was still a practice and when even free Black women had few protections from sexual predation, especially if they worked in the homes of white people.
 
“I saw Rebecca Perot coming in the river, her face to the east, and she aplunging in the water every few steps, head foremost, abathing herself. She only had on her undergarment. She was pure and clean, even as the water in which she was abathing. She came facing me out of the water. I wondered she was not afraid. Sometimes she would be hid, for a moment, and then she would rise again. She looked like an Angel, oh, how bright!”

And this is a vision that could be read as a lesbian appropriation of the so-called Fall of Eve:
 
“After I laid down to rest, I was in sweet meditation. And a beautiful vision passed before my spirit eye. I saw a garden of excellent fruit. And it appeared to come near, even onto my bed, and around me! Yea, it covered me. And I was permitted to eat, and to give a portion to Rebecca Perot, and she ate, and was strengthened.”
 
And what of Rebecca Perot’s visions? Well, here’s one of them that affirms not only their relationship as partners, but also their entitlement to royal status as daughters of African descent.
 
“I dreamt that Ann Potter and Rebecca Jackson and myself were in England. And Ann Potter took us to the Queen, and she crowned Rebecca King and me Queen of Africa. I then saw Africa with all her treasures of gold, together with all her inhabitants, and these was all given into our charge.”

These women were not using pornographic tropes to gin up a sexuality that was driven by predatory conditioning and biological imperatives. They were starting with the false narratives from patriarchal religions, a history of captivity and colonization, and personal trauma that would disempower them and then,  either consciously or subconsciously, they were constructing explicit, vivid, and sensual visions that went right to the heart of their wounds and applied an empowering counter-narrative.They were affirming their own authority and exercising fantastic powers of imagination.

What if I had created time to meditate or practice guided meditation like these Rebeccas? What if I had gone on these imaginative journeys with my partner, or shared my visions later… visions that generated a healing context for both of us? In retrospect, I feel that often my attempts at intimacy would inadvertently result in restimulating my and my partner's traumas. What if we had set aside time and dedicated energies to envisioning the conditions that would make us feel safe with each other, empowered, blessed and held by beings or powers greater than us?

Reading about the visions of these women, I feel they were describing altered states and ecstatic experiences… but ones that did not take them away from their spiritual practices and systems of values, as my practice of sexuality took me away from mine. They chose what would delight them, what would strengthen them as partners. They did not rely on an inundation of endorphins from imported tropes. They were undoing body shame and personal violation, histories of abduction and enslavement, and the false teaching of the depravity and degradation of women. They were fixing the Bible and each other.

Looking back, I wish I had been more creative, and I wish I had had the courage to really interrogate the place that my sexuality, damaged as it was by pornography, should occupy in the kind of life I wanted to lead and the kind of woman I wanted to be.
-------------------------------------------------------
If you are interested in reading more about the two Rebeccas, see my blog "When Sex Is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy."

If you are interested in what pornography addiction does to the brain, see my blog "Pornography on the Brain."

One of the gifts—one of the many gifts—of women’s spirituality has been the spiral. [Take out my slinky] This is a visual aide. One of the gifts of women’s spirituality has been the spiral.  Other spiritual traditions had given us the star, and the triangle, and the cross, and the circle.  And now we have the spiral.
 
I like the spiral, because it explains my experience. It’s the difference between looking at life in two dimensions or three dimensions.
 
Now, for instance, [hold the collapsed slinky pointing at them] if you look at the spiral in two dimensions this way, it looks like a circle. And any point on the spiral will look like it’s on the circle. In other words, like you keep ending up exactly where you started. Which is how some people, self included, have felt about our relationships. But it’s not really back where you started. It may be the same location on the circle, but it’s much farther along on the spiral. [extend] Like this.
 
Okay, now hold it like this [stretch it out sideways], and look at it like this, in two dimensions, and it looks like a zig-zag line that goes up and then down and then up and then down. Kind of a bipolar thing—up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong.  If this is your career, these are promotions and firings. Or if it’s your money, these are the Dow Jones averages. If it’s relationships, these are the honeymoons and these are the breakups. “How’s your relationship?” “Oh, it’s going great.” “Oh, we’re back in counseling.”
 
Well, I couldn’t get too excited about the circle [demonstrate] or the number line [demonstrate]. But then, like I said, women’s spirituality gave me the spiral. Now, I have a whole new three-dimensional model for understanding my life and my relationships. [elongate and rotate]

Now I can see that I am moving forward like a line, but the ups and downs are gone. They don’t have this linear up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong bi-polarism anymore. I can see that the ups and downs both move me forward, and moving forward, not up or down or in circles is what it’s about. You see, the spiral is actually a series of revolutions, so when we use this model, our lives are seen as a series of progressive revolutions. Progressive revolutions. I like the way that sounds better than “ups and downs.” “How’s your relationship?” “Oh, progressive and revolutionary… and yours?”
 
Progressive revolutions. [do the slinky] And this brings me to the topic of this afternoon’s lecture: Slinkies. Kidding. “When Sex Is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy.” I’m going to be talking about lesbians who have chosen and who are choosing not to practice genital sex in their primary relationships. And I will be talking about the spiritual dimension of that choice, which may even be in the fourth dimension.
 
So what does this have to do with a slinky?
 
Well, depending on where you are in your own spiritual journey, you may feel that the whole idea of lesbian relationships without sex is a throwback to repression and denial, a reactionary return to oppressive stereotypes about women in general and lesbians in particular. This topic might feel like something you’ve struggled against, or outgrown, or worked through, or put behind you. [collapse the slinky] It might look like back to square one, reinventing the wheel, “here we go again.”  But I am asking you to remember that we’re on the spiral today, not the circle. The subject may be a familiar one, but today we’re coming at it from a revolutionary perspective. [expand the slinky] We are not going to be spinning or reinventing wheels.
 
This is a subject that may feel very threatening, too. [stretch the slinky] If not being sexual is good, then being sexual must be bad—or, if sex is a good thing, then not having it must be bad. But I’m asking you to remember that we’re not on the number line, either: no up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong. We’re on the spiral—and that means nothing but progressive revolutions. [rotate] You may have passed through this position, you may pass through it again. You may have had a negative experience with it, or a positive one, or a confusing one. You may not return to it in this lifetime. You may return to it once or several times. You may choose to stay in it.  And you may spiral through it today during this lecture and find some new ways to evaluate the last time you or your partner were there, or pick up a few things from this loop to spin you forward to a new position on your journey.
 
 So let’s take a look at some of America’s recent progressive revolutions. We had a huge one in the 1960’s. Several actually. The ‘60’s saw the flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, and the birth of the anti-war movement, the United Farmworkers Union, the Black Panthers, La Raza Unida, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Liberation Front. It saw the beginnings of the environmental movement, and the Second Wave of feminism. And it was also the decade of what the media called the Sexual Revolution, a radical overturning of sexual mores, made possible by the widespread availability of birth control pills.

Forty years later, we are in the middle of another revolution of the spiral, in which the movement for lesbian and gay rights has come of age. For the first time in American history, we are visible in mainstream politics and culture. This revolution is one that has spiraled back to some of the territory covered by the 1960’s sexual revolution, with lesbians now reclaiming our sexuality with a vengeance. Denying that any aspect of sexuality is off-limits or the exclusive prerogative of males, lesbians have been very noisy about sado-masochism, dildos, harnesses, vibrators, pornography, role-playing—you name it, lesbians do it.
 
But in our insistence that we will not be silenced or censored sexually ever again, are we silencing and censoring a voice that may well be on the cutting edge of our next revolution? I think we are, and I am here to make a case for that voice being heard.  It is the voice of the lesbian for whom sex is not the primary metaphor for intimacy.
 
I am a dramatist, which is to say a storyteller, and so, not surprisingly, when I sat down to write this lecture, I began to look for the stories.  And I found three of them, three stories about women who customized their relationships to accommodate their spiritual missions—whether that mission was about personal commitment, spiritual activism, or realizing a dream. Each of these women lived or is living a spiritually radical life in which the choice to practice non-genital intimacy is or was the key element responsible for her success.
 
The first woman I want to talk about will be one familiar to many of us today. Her name is Karen Thompson, and she is the sheroic woman who fought for eight and a half long years for the right to bring her partner Sharon Kowalski home, after Sharon suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of car accident in 1983.  Karen had to battle her partner’s homophobic and deeply ableist parents for guardianship in a legal system that repeatedly refused to recognize the legitimacy of a lesbian partnership ― all the while her partner was suffering from inadequate treatment and care, and during a nightmarish period of three years in which she was not allowed to visit Sharon at all.

Prior to the accident, Karen and Sharon had only been partners for four years—hardly a long-term relationship. If the celebrity relationship expert was encouraging breakups over differences regarding sexual practices, what must she have thought of a woman who had tabled her entire career, revised all of her life goals, spent all of her savings, and given up her privacy to dedicate her life to fighting for the right to be solely financially, physically, and emotionally responsible for a woman with overwhelming needs, who could no longer perform most of the functions of an able-bodied person, and whose brain no longer functioned like an able-bodied brain?

It occurred to me that we, as a culture of lesbians, should have made Karen Thompson our expert on lesbian relationships.  Her comprehension of the power of love, the spiritual dimension of it, and the awesomeness of its responsibility utterly eclipsed the sound-byte clichés of the so-called relationship expert.
 
Today Karen Thompson lives in what she calls a “family of affinity.” She describes her process in forming it: “I was on the road, speaking and fund-raising, and between that and my teaching job, I literally lost who I was. I was wishing my life away from one court hearing to the next. I finally realized that, to survive, something had to change. I had to give myself permission to move on with my life. I didn’t know if I was ever going to see Sharon again, and if I didn’t, was this the way I was going to live the rest of my life? I made the decision that I would start dating and be open to another relationship, but that I would never walk away from Sharon. Whoever came into my life would have to understand that my commitment to Sharon was a lifetime commitment. Sharon and I would always be a package deal. If anyone could learn to love me, they would have to love us both.”
 
Patty Bresser had known Sharon and Karen before the accident. This is an important point, because it meant that Sharon would be able to remember her. Because of her short-term memory loss, she would never be able to recognize or become familiar with anyone she met after the accident. Patty and Karen began to live together, and Patty worked to build a relationship with Sharon before Sharon came home. When Karen asks Sharon if they should send Patty back to Connecticut, Sharon always says, “No.”
 
Karen’s relationship with Sharon is a model for customizing the definition of intimacy. Karen is careful to include her relationship with Sharon in any definition of her relationship to Patty. She uses the expression “family of affinity” because it includes Sharon. She refuses to privilege the sexual relationship over the non-sexual one, but she also refuses to infantilize Sharon by referring to the caretaking relationship as a guardianship. Patriarchy has no simple term for these relationships. “Partners” and “couples” imply twosomes. “Family” means birth or adoption. “Lover” connotes sexual activity. None of these define the very intimate dynamic between Patty and Karen and Sharon. They are a family of affinity. That is a family of choice based on their love and commitment toward each other. It is simply beyond the closed circles and binaries of the patriarchal model.
 
So that is what Karen Thompson is doing today. And what about the celebrity expert on lesbian relationships?  I understand that she has left the community and married a man.
 
This first relationship deals with disability as a sexual issue. The disability movement has worked long and hard—and rightfully so—to dispel the notion that people with disabilities have no sexuality. Lesbian culture has been supportive of this effort to re-educate. I am thinking of Tee Corinne’s erotic photographs two decades ago of nude lesbians who use wheelchairs, and the many anthologies of lesbian erotica that always include stories by women with disabilities.
 
But, again, in the rush to join the sexual revolution, are we silencing or muting an important voice?  Disability can be one of the reasons why lesbians choose asexual partnerships. There are many medical conditions that render sexual activity painful or onerous, or just plain low-priority.  Sex drive can be lowered or eliminated by certain medications, by depression, or by treatments or syndromes associated with fatigue. Sometimes sexual activity can result in a neurological backlash or a fatigue hangover. There can be many reasons why sex as a metaphor for intimacy might need to be re-examined in light of disability.

When sex is accepted as the universal metaphor for intimacy, which is certainly the message we get from every aspect of the mainstream and even lesbian popular culture, it becomes the criteria for a relationship as well as the index for how well the couple is doing. The disabled woman may feel a need to either fake an interest in sex or resign herself to a life without primary intimacy, which may well mean without family. These are poor choices for an able-souled woman who longs for partnership. And what does it mean when our primary cultural metaphor for intimacy requires disabled women to lie or be excluded? I would like to suggest that the relationship model of the sexual couple on perpetual honeymoon is an unrealistic and oppressive model, and one that does not take into account the ever-present possibility that either partner—or both—can become disabled in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any time.
 
Karen threw out that model in order to hold onto her love. Refusing to see her situation as an either-or, martyrdom-or-abandonment binary, she created a third option, the “family of affinity,” honoring an ongoing commitment to intimacy in light of the fact that sexual expression was no longer the appropriate metaphor for this intimacy.  Where a “family of affinity” may not meet the needs of women with less severe disabilities than Sharon, it certainly suggests a flexibility about the metaphor for intimacy.
 
Well, if sex is not the index for intimacy, then what is? In one of her poems, Marianne Moore has written that the greatest indicator of deep emotions is restraint.  Restraint… What about that? What about substituting restraint instead of passion as the measure of love in a relationship? Sounds good to me.  Passion may be little more than an index of hormonal activity, emotional neediness, or conditioned response. Restraint, on the other hand, shows up when the needs of one partner conflict with the needs of the other on the proving ground of a relationship.
 
Restraint means sitting with uncertainty, confusion, and anger to the very boundaries of your comfort zone, and even beyond, in the faith that there will be a way, that there will be a light, that there will be grace at the end of the day. I am sure the world will never know the most courageous part of Karen Thompson’s eight-year struggle. We can all read about the court cases and the fights with social service agencies, but we will never know the hours and days and months of Karen’s most significant work—the questioning of her actions, of her motives, of her sanity—an inquiry into the very foundations of what it means to love and what it means to have a commitment—and also into the deep metaphysics of what it means to be human, of who we are and what our life means when we lose our achievements, our intellect, our mobility, our hobbies, our habits, our ability to communicate—when our appearance is altered, our perceptions, our personality, our sexuality—what is the essence that remains? Most of us will have to wait until we die to answer that question. Karen Thompson lives in the grace and challenge of answering that question every day.
 
[Slinky] Let’s get back on our spiral, and this time we’re going to travel back into the past. This time we’re going to visit a lesbian whose decision to practice non-sexual intimacy had its roots in a political and historical reality.

We’re traveling back almost a hundred years to 1862, to Philadelphia. We’re visiting a house on Erie Street, a house where twelve to twenty African Americans, mostly women, are living communally. It is a Shaker house, and the leader, or “eldress” is Rebecca Jackson. Her partner, another African American woman, is named Rebecca Perot and she lives with her. When Rebecca Jackson dies at the age of seventy-one, Perot will change her name to Rebecca Jackson, Junior and take over the spiritual leadership of the community.
 
The two Rebecca’s lived together, worked together, and slept together in a celibate relationship for thirty-five years, and Rebecca Jackson’s commitment to Rebecca Perot was integral to her commitment to liberation and to spirituality.
 
Rebecca Jackson’s life spanned a period of tremendous social upheaval for African Americans.  Born in 1795, she lived in a world of contradictions.  She was a free Black woman in a country where enslavement was legitimized by a white government. She was a woman preacher at a time when most of the churches banned women from the pulpit. She was a married woman who would not put her husband above her spiritual calling at a time when obedience was one of the marriage vows for women. And she preached the sinfulness of marital sex when the prevailing theology taught sexual submissiveness as a sacred duty of women in “holy matrimony.”
 
Like Karen Thompson, Rebecca Jackson did not start out her life as a radical activist. She, too, underwent a series of progressive revolutions.
 
Her mother having died when she was thirteen, Rebecca was sent to the home of her older brother Joseph Cox, a widower with six children and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, Church. She lived with her brother until she was forty-one, managing his household, raising his children, and working on the side as a seamstress. During these years, she married Samuel Jackson, who had been a tenant in her brother’s house, and after the marriage, they continued to live with the brother. Jackson’s writings indicate that, prior to her spiritual awakening, she had been a traditional housewife and care giver.
 
Her awakening was catalyzed by a betrayal. In 1831, she discovered that her brother, who had reneged on his agreement to teach her to read, was altering the wording in letters she dictated to him.  When she confronted him, he rebuked her with a vehemence that reduced her to tears. But, in the very moment of her shame and humiliation, she heard the voice of a radical new consciousness. She described how this voice came to her and told her “the time shall come when you can write.” In obedience to this inner voice, she picked up her Bible and began to pray. To her amazement, she discovered that she could read. This was one of Rebecca’s first “gifts of power,” as she called her spiritual experiences and visions. She was to receive many over the next four decades.

Rebecca Jackson pledged absolute obedience to this inner voice, and as she continued to listen and obey, she found herself, like Karen Thompson, being led further and further away from the traditional values with which she had been raised.
 
Rebecca Jackson was being called to preach, a calling that scandalized her minister brother. Because women were not allowed to preach in AME churches, she became an itinerant preacher, holding renegade “Covenant Meetings,” typically comprised of women. Eventually the power of her preaching began to attract whites as well as blacks, and men as well as women. She began to receive invitations to preach in other towns, and was even, on occasion, invited to speak in a church.
 
African American spirituality has always been deeply engaged with questions of liberation, and Rebecca Jackson’s engagement with these questions included the added dimension of gender.
 
One of Rebecca’s most astounding revelations—the one that became the cornerstone of her philosophy of liberation and the principal text of her preaching was that sexual intercourse was—and I quote here from her autobiography—“of all things the most filthy in the sight of God, both in the married and unmarried, it all seemed alike.”
 
Now, before we jump to conclusions about Rebecca’s Puritan values or sexual repression, let’s remember that we are on a spiral here, and we have to look at her revelation in the context of her being an African American woman in the early decades of the 19th century.
 
The history of the African American woman is a history of ongoing, horrifying, universal, nearly inconceivable sexual torture and violation. The case can be made that rape, not lynching, should be the metaphor for race oppression in this country. Because she was enslaved, and because the law deemed the “fruit of her womb” to be the property of her owner, regardless of paternity, the African American woman was sexually abused not only to gratify her white enslavers’ sexual appetites and domination impulses, but also to increase his so-called property. She was paired off with African American males on the basis of genetic traits, and she was also prey to every white male with whom she came into contact. Being considered chattel, she had no recourse to law, and an enslaver could hardly take issue with a sexual assailant of any color whose actions might increase his so-called property. Captive African American women suffered from serial pregnancies, sometimes as many as fifteen and twenty. In the words of one planter, “An owner’s labor force doubled through natural [his words] increase every fifteen years.” The violation done to a woman by forcing her to bear and nurture unwanted children is neither recorded as “work,” nor as “punishment” or “torture,” but it was all three.
 
Pregnancy was a risky business in the 18th and 19th centuries, and these serial pregnancies took their toll in terms of child mortality, insanity, suicide, and exhaustion. The enslaved woman had absolutely no recourse when faced with sexual violation. Any displays of resistance to white rapists were met with violent reprisals, to herself and to her family. If she protested assault by an enslaved man, she risked loss of support within the community of captives. She had access neither to medicine, doctors, or hospitals. To add to the inconceivable horror of this situation, the captive woman had no control over her children at all. She could not protect them from torture, rape, slave labor, murder, sale at auction, or transport.
 
But it is important to remember that, in terms of sexual vulnerability, the so-called “free” African American woman in the early 19th century was almost as vulnerable as her enslaved sister. The majority of jobs for Black women were domestic service jobs, and because of this, most African American women were compelled to work in the homes of white families, where they were usually isolated from other workers, and where opportunities for rape were plentiful. When domestic servants were raped or sexually harassed, they had no recourse except to quit the job. Publicizing their violation would only redound in charges of slander or loose morals.

And, finally, all married women—white or Black—in the early 19th century were legally slaves to their husbands. Historically, they could not own property, collect their own wages, or own their own children. They could not vote, hold elected office, or serve on juries—a key point in the prosecution of rapists. They were banned from educational and career opportunities. Jobs open to them were menial and low-paying. And they could not deny their husbands sexually.
 
A wife was compelled by law to submit to her husband’s sexual demands, regardless of how untimely, unwelcome, repellant, or brutal. Husbands had the legal right to batter their wives, wife-beating being considered humorous and a form of “discipline.” What we today would call marital rape was considered a wifely duty in the 19th century. Refusal to comply with a husband’s sexual demands was grounds for divorce, with the attendant loss of children, property (her husband was entitled to everything that was hers when she married him), shelter, and financial support.
 
As with the more overt enslavement of women, marriage was likely to result in serial pregnancies when the number one cause of death for women was from complications in childbirth. Perpetual motherhood for the duration of her childbearing years—for women of all races—resulted in poverty and overwork for married women—again increasing mortality rates for both mother and children. The only form of birth control available to these women was the extended visits to friends and relatives.
 
Rebecca’s own experiences and observations had taught her that so-called free women were enslaved by their relations with men, and that heterosexuality was not only the ideology, but also the mechanism of their oppression. Her discovery would be elucidated more than a century later by poet and author Adrienne Rich in her classic feminist essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
 
But Rebecca Jackson lived in an age before women’s studies and feminist theory. Seeking support for her revelation, she turned to the one text available to her: the Bible. And here she found the passages that supported her preaching:

• I Timothy: “She shall be saved in childbearing, if she continues in faith and charity and holiness, with sobriety.”
  
• I Corinthians: “He that is married careth for the things of this world, how he may please his wife.” 
• Luke: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But they that are accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage.”
  
• I Corinthians: “She that is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how she may be holy, both in body and in spirit.”

 
When Jackson preached the gospel of celibacy in marriage, she did so with considerable scriptural authority. She argued that man’s sexuality was more unnatural than that of animals, otherwise why was it not practiced, as the animals practiced theirs, in the light of day? Describing the sexuality of animals as taking place in an orderly fashion in “times and seasons,” she decried the sexuality of men which took place in “confusion, in fear, in shame, in darkness, through lust, and to gratify themselves, by the influence of the Devil and not to multiply the earth and glorify their Maker.” According to Jackson, “In this respect they have fallen below the beasts, for these know times and seasons, and after that they remain still, until the time of nature’s season returns. And in that, they answer the end of their creation more than man.”
 
It is important to understand that Rebecca Jackson was a powerful and persuasive speaker, and that what she was advocating was nothing less than an uprising of enslaved women. And married women were eager to embrace a doctrine that gave divine sanction to their natural aversion to compulsory sex and childbearing. Far from being dismissed, the threat posed by Jackson’s preaching was taken very seriously by the men in the communities where she was fomenting revolution. Her autobiography Gifts of Power makes frequent mention of the “persecutions” with which she was met. Although she does not elaborate, the narrative suggests that, on more than one occasion, these so-called persecutions took the form of conspiracies against her life.
 
Preaching overt liberation from gender roles in marriage was only a first step in the evolution of Jackson’s radical spirituality. Over the years, her vision and her imagery became increasingly matriarchal.

This is from her “Letter to a Friend in Christ:”
 
"My very dear and well beloved Sister, whom I love in the Gospel of Christ and Mother... by which we are made able to see eye to eye in the Gospel through the spiritual womb of our Spiritual Mother... Now we thirst for the living waters of eternal life. And this is the Milk of the Word, which we draw from the breast of the Bride, the Lamb’s wife. He is the Word, She is the Milk. He is the Bridegroom, She is the Bride. We who draw Her breast, have the deep things of God, which will compass the men of worldly wisdom about to their confusion, through a virgin life."
 
Rebecca left her husband in 1836, when she was forty-one. Sources indicate this was the same year in which she made the acquaintance of Rebecca Perot, although they did not begin to develop their relationship until about seven years later. What little we know about their relationship is found in the recorded visions of both women published in Gifts of Power.
 
Here is Rebecca Jackson’s description of a vision of Rebecca Perot:
 
“I saw Rebecca Perot coming in the river, her face to the east, and she aplunging in the water every few steps, head foremost, abathing herself. She only had on her undergarment. She was pure and clean, even as the water in which she was abathing. She came facing me out of the water. I wondered she was not afraid. Sometimes she would be hid, for a moment, and then she would rise again. She looked like an Angel, oh, how bright!”
 
And here is an interesting vision that could be read as a lesbian subversion of the so-called Fall of Eve:
 
“After I laid down to rest, I was in sweet meditation. And a beautiful vision passed before my spirit eye. I saw a garden of excellent fruit. And it appeared to come near, even onto my bed, and around me! Yea, it covered me. And I was permitted to eat, and to give a portion to Rebecca Perot, and she ate, and was strengthened.”
 
And what of Rebecca Perot’s visions? Well, here’s one of them:
 
“I dreamt that Ann Potter and Rebecca Jackson and myself were in England. And Ann Potter took us to the Queen, and she crowned Rebecca King and me Queen of Africa. I then saw Africa with all her treasures of gold, together with all her inhabitants, and these was all given into our charge.”
 
These two women encouraged each other to indulge in ecstatic and empowering visions that celebrated their love in sensuous and Afro-centric metaphors, and that challenged each other to experience themselves as favored daughters of a beneficent female deity.
 
Later the two Rebecca’s embraced Shakerism, a utopian, communal religion based on principles of celibacy. After several years of struggle against the racism of the white Shakers, and her own personal struggles with the leader of that community, the Rebecca’s received authorization to found their own community for African Americans in Philadelphia.
 
Obviously, Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot reflected the values and experiences of Black women living in a country where enslavement was still practiced. But I think that their visions and their choices have much to say to any woman who has experienced loss of sexual autonomy—through child sexual abuse, rape, harassment, or sexual pressures within a chosen relationship.
 
I am including this story of Rebecca Jackson, because it is one that gives a historical context to an individual’s perception of sex. Since the birth control pill freed sexuality from an automatic association with pregnancy risk, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the popular media to represent sexuality as apolitical and ahistorical. It is, in fact, neither.
 
Our sexual experiences do not occur in a cultural, social or political vacuum. My generation remembers when marital rape was still legal, when date rape was simply a “bad date,” when sexual harassment was called teasing and the problem defined as women’s poor sense of humor. We remember the time before rape crisis lines, rape victim advocates, before battered women’s shelters. We remember when abortion was illegal, when incest was considered extremely rare, a subject for offensive jokes about Appalachia.
 
Times have changed, but where my generation remembers the brothels of Vietnam, and the mass suicides of raped women in Bangladesh, the rising generation has memories of Bosnia and the ongoing and rising sexual slavery throughout Asia—a slave traffic supported by both heterosexual and gay male Western businessmen and entrepreneurs.
 
Our experiences of sex also occur within a context of our sexual histories. The Women’s Action Coalition estimates that approximately 33% of girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen by someone within the family. 25% of girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen by someone outside the family. Building on studies of post-traumatic stress disorder of Vietnam War veterans, psychologists have begun to develop a whole new field of research and theory based on the effects of trauma. This has led to specific research into the effects of child sexual abuse on the development of the child. Symptoms and syndromes that used to be lumped together under “hysteria” or “borderline personality,” are now classified as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The abused child is now understood to have symptoms similar to those of war captives and torture survivors, only with more severe consequences, because the trauma occurred when they were children, without adult understanding of their situation or skills for coping with it. The understanding of Complex PTSD is just now beginning to enter the public discourse. And high time, too. I believe that this will be part of the next revolution, and that trauma studies will inevitably lead to a new area inquiry, “intimacy studies.”

I want to spend just a minute on some of the ways in which children process sexual abuse, because this has a lot to do with how survivors experience sex as an adult. The child is dependent upon parental figures and, to a certain extent, on all adult authority figures, for her survival. Knowledge that parents or adults are dangerous or dishonest can be life-threatening to the child, and the child’s mind develops elaborate strategies for protecting her against this taboo information. Some children repress the memories entirely, and sometimes permanently. Some women recover these memories, often in their late twenties or early thirties. Retrieval of these memories radically alters the sexual patterns and behaviors of the survivor, and some therapists mistakenly insist that the behaviors of the survivor prior to their recovery of the trauma memories—behaviors that may well have been hypersexual and dissociative—constituted the “authentic” sexuality of the client. The therapist may mistakenly direct her energy toward getting the survivor to return to these behaviors, when, in fact, they may have been syndromes of the trauma from which she is attempting to recover!
 
Some children undergo a process called “fusion with the perpetrator” during sexual abuse. Because they don’t understand what is being done to them—often not even having words for it, and because it is too dangerous to experience their violation at the hands of their care giver, they will identify with the perpetrator and his arousal during the abuse. This can result in tremendous confusion for the survivor later in life. She may find herself aroused by scenarios involving her own pain, trauma, or humiliation, or she may find that she can become aroused only in the role, play-acted or real, of a perpetrator. Her fantasies and/or her sexual practices may run completely counter to her spirituality and her core politic—and yet, she may find it is difficult or even impossible to achieve the same kind of arousal with roles or fantasies more consistent with her values.
 
Fusion with the perpetrator is similar to the downloading of pornographic files into a computer, only the computer is the psyche of the child victim. Just as a computer virus can contaminate files and programs in the host computer, this involuntary importation of overwhelming sexual and emotional adult material can pre-empt and corrupt the child’s natural development of her own sexuality. This projected affect from the perpetrator can become hard-wired into the child’s psyche, where it may reside, more or less intact, as she begins to mature sexually. This kind of hard-wiring can be very difficult to take apart or rebuild later on. Imagine the pain and frustration of the woman with an evolved politic and spirituality, who, in her most intimate relationship, finds the program of some invasive pornographic perpetrator running—a program that she never intentionally imported, and one that is counter to everything she stands for and has fought against in the other areas of her life.
 
This woman will not find help with her dilemma in a popular culture that is insisting sex is apolitical and ahistorical, that tells her, “if it feels good, do it.” What if what feels good, feels bad? Then the culture says, learn to disconnect the politic and the spirituality that make it feel bad. Orgasm at any cost! For some women, this advice sounds suspiciously like the perpetrator’s agenda, and it is to be achieved through the same technique: the woman’s spontaneous dissociation.
 
Dissociation is another survival strategy for abused children. In repression, the child splits off the taboo memory. In dissociation, she splits off the taboo parts of herself—the parts that she was not allowed to express as a child. She may have split off all of her rage, so that most of the time she appears to be incredibly easy-going and non-confrontational, but when something triggers her, she can go into shockingly abusive behaviors. She may not have been allowed to set boundaries, and so most of the time she might appear to be a generous and devoted care giver—and then, one day, she is gone with no looking back.
 
I’m not talking about Multiple Personality Disorder, where the survivor has developed a number of discrete personalities, with their own histories, names, and behaviors, and where the survivor is amnesiac about the actions she performs in one persona when she is in another. Women with dissociative identity disorders remember their behaviors, but they are often unable to understand them or be accountable for them. They feel shame and confusion about their inconsistencies, and many women with dissociative identity disorders have histories of serial failures in their intimate relationships.
 
Dissociative sexual behaviors are extremely common among survivors of child sexual abuse. These can include hypersexuality, emotional absence, dependence on drugs or alcohol, or childlike passivity during sexual encounters. They can include rage or abusive behaviors. Sometimes sexual activity will trigger somatic memories, and a survivor can experience the physical sensations with or without the emotional states that occurred at the time of her abuse. Many survivors cannot become aroused without alcohol, drugs, or intense role-playing.
 
Much of what the media portrays as women’s sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder. Marilyn Monroe’s behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a molested child trying to appease a male authority figure than an adult woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction. And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? Our pop cultural icon for female sexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage. Eleven foster homes. One orphanage.  By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse. Shortly after her fifteenth birthday, her legal guardian brokered a so-called marriage for her. In other words, Marilyn Monroe she was legally prostituted as a teenager. She made three attempts at suicide before she was twenty-five, and several more throughout the rest of her life. Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband Joe Dimaggio “Pa,” and she called third husband Arthur Miller “Pops.” Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.
 
But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality. What does it say about male dominant culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal incest survivor who had dissociative identity disorders and who eventually killed herself?  Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality was a transcendent phenomenon, somehow existing apart from her history of trauma, developed in a cultural vacuum? It was not. Her sexuality was no different from that of millions of survivors of child sexual abuse all over the world.  At a recent auction of her personal affects, a pair of Marilyn’s stiletto-heel pumps was sold for $48,000.  A high price to pay for shoes, but the price is much higher for the woman who attempts to walk in them. And maybe that’s the point.

“Hypersexuality” is a term you will never see in the popular media, although it’s all over the literature about post-rape and post-incest syndromes.  It has been suggested that sexual dissociation is so rampant in female populations that dissociative disorders have come to define what is considered normative sexual behavior for women.
 
Healing from dissociative states requires awareness and conscious integration. It means learning to identify when one is dissociated, learning which situations and dynamics trigger the flight into dissociation, and learning how it feels to stay present.  It means going back and experiencing the frozen grief and displaced rage. Healing from sexual abuse, contrary to the books on lesbian sexuality, does not necessarily result in a renewed interest in sex. The survivor who no longer relies on dissociation to enable her sexual activity, may have become unwilling to indulge in the fantasies and scenarios that so clearly are not of her choosing, but that are necessary for her to achieve orgasm. She may have stopped repressing or censoring the disruptive somatic memories, so that sex is physically painful. She may become aware that this metaphor is so contaminated with traumatic associations, she is not able or maybe even not willing to redeem it as a metaphor for intimacy. She may have come to feel so trusting of her partner that, for the first time in her life, she is free to bring all of who she is into her most intimate moments, and this supreme gift of showing up with all of herself may be the very thing that precludes sexual activity. How painful for this woman to discover that her partner preferred her dissociative behavior!
 
Sexuality is learned. It is imperative that we begin to ask where we learned it and what were the motives of our teachers, before we accept these lessons as part of our identity and allow them to determine the shape of our lives and of our intimacy. Sexuality is not apolitical or ahistorical. In fact, sex may be the most political lesson of our lives, a primer for understanding the meaning of invasion, occupation, colonization. What more powerful tool for a colonizer to possess than the ability to cross the wires for pain and pleasure in a subject people at the very command headquarters of the central nervous system? What percentage of a population would one need to torture and brainwash in order to colonize the whole? What does it mean that 33% of girls are survivors of sexual torture, and many—or even most—have to some degree formed an identity around identification with and protection of the perpetrator?
 
We do not know whether or not Rebecca Jackson was a survivor of sexual abuse, but we do know from her writings that her overwhelming quest for liberation for Black women and her courageous confrontation of the facts of the historic sexual violation of Black women were too great for her to see any value in reclaiming sexuality as a metaphor for intimacy. In fact, it was part of her spiritual quest for liberation to keep the abuse of sexuality always in the front of her preaching and her mission. Instead of rehearsing scenarios of domination and enslavement with her partner, she chose to construct visions of goddesses, of healing, of abundance. For followers of Rebecca Jackson, the primary metaphor for intimacy was the consummate respect for the chastity of the women they loved, a chastity that was a metaphor for the physical autonomy and integrity that had been so historically, so perpetually, so painfully, and so violently wrenched from her people. The greatest gift Rebecca Jackson could bring to her beloved Rebecca Perot was the conceptual restoration and celebration of her virginity, most rare and most treasured—an almost inconceivable symbol of liberation for an African American woman in the 19th century. And still a rare, treasured, and almost inconceivable symbol for freedom for any women of any color in the 21st century.
 
Hard subject.  We are talking about millennia of denial. Time for a slinky break. [slinky] Breathe. [breathe]
 
This is going to be our last trip together. This time we’re going to enter the Twilight Zone.  [sound effects and slinky]  We are. Only it’s a true story. We are traveling back about thirty years, to a parking lot in California. It is the parking lot of the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles. There are two white women getting ready to take a five-day vacation trip up to Napa Valley. One of the women is a blonde and the other is a redhead. The car is packed with food, clothing, and cameras. The gas tank is filled for a five-day adventure.  Remember that. It’s an important point. The two women get into the car.
 
This is the blonde woman’s description of their trip:
 
"We discovered some wonderful places. We explored the old missions around Santa Barbara. We were mostly alone as we traveled up the coast, with just the quiet trees looking down over the misty sea. Eventually, I remember tall, tall mountains looking down into magical valleys. To me, it was like stepping right in to the Old Testament. We were swept up in the spirit of the place… We were both just marveling at the overwhelming feeling of the place. And then, suddenly, we came back to our senses and found we were still in the parking lot at the Bel Air Hotel. I don’t understand it. It was five days later, and it appeared we hadn’t moved. Our luggage was still intact. The same gas was still in the tank. And our food was still warm. I don’t expect you to understand, because even Judy and I have never been able to explain this experience. Maybe it was just something we both needed desperately. I do know that this was shortly before I went into a very dark depression. And maybe God was preparing me for this. I felt so close to him during this sort of spiritual trip that we took. Then in my darkest days soon afterward, he seemed so far away that I couldn’t find him. But, maybe, through this journey, he had instilled in me an extra bit of strength, so that I could hold on. I’ll never be sure. I do know that both Judy and I can still recall certain moments from that trip. And they seem to come back at the times when we need it the most."
 
The two women who took this spiritual trip together have been in a primary relationship for more than forty years. They met in third grade, and they remained best friends throughout their school years, years in which the blonde girl was scapegoated as a slut because of her large breasts and flashy clothes. The redhead, the daughter of an abusive and alcoholic widower, was hired out as child to do field work side-by-side with adult males. After high school, the redhead enlisted in the military, and the blonde began a career as a performer. When the redhead got out of the service, she came to live with the blonde, and has been living with her ever since—except for a brief period of time when a crisis in their relationship drove the redhead to re-enlist.  It was quickly apparent to both that they had made a terrible mistake, and the blonde, by then rich and famous, used her political connections to get the redhead honorably discharged.

The two women travel together, they create art together, they work together, they play together, they share a bed, and—as the Bel Air story makes obvious—they share a very deep and very personal spirituality. They do not have sex with each other, but the blonde has made a point of telling the press that she sleeps naked.  These days, when asked if they are lesbian, the blonde woman will reply, “You can call me that if you want to.”
 
Some lesbians would not call them that. The blonde has a husband, a man she married as a teenager, who lives with both women in a separate part of the house. The blonde also has had a history of heterosexual affairs from time to time, but always with the understanding that these would not jeopardize either her marriage or her primary relationship with the redhead.
 
The blonde is Dolly Parton and the redhead is Judy Ogle. Now, I realize “Dolly Parton” is the last name that might come to mind when one thinks of lesbians or celibacy. Dolly Parton has become a cultural icon for heterosex, and she has, through cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting, turned her body into a pornographic caricature.
 
So why am I talking about her in the same breath with the likes of Karen Thompson and Rebecca Jackson? Because she so beautifully exemplifies the problem of definitions that come up whenever we try to talk about lesbian relationships.
 
The language and models that we have for our relationships reflect a male dominant culture and its interests—or obsessions. These do not serve us lesbians well. This is a quotation from the book Boston Marriages: Romantic But Asexual Marriages among Contemporary Lesbians, edited by Esther Rothblum:
 
"Because women’s sexuality is socially constructed by men, contemporary sexologists are inclined to demand genital proof of sexual orientation. Before labeling her as bisexual or lesbian, most researchers expect a woman to have had genital relationships with other women. Feminists have pointed out some serious shortcomings with this assumption. Female bisexuality and lesbianism may be more a matter of loving other women than of achieving orgasm through genital contact… The absence of genital juxtaposition hardly drains a relationship of passion or importance."
 
I am talking about Dolly Parton today, because she is an example of a woman who has had to customize her intimacy in extreme ways to negotiate a superstar career in a patriarchal culture that makes it extremely difficult for any woman to realize even small dreams.
 
Dolly Parton was a hillbilly woman, and where my generation of lesbians associated freedom with flannel shirts and work boots, for Dolly, those constituted the uniform and symbol of her oppression. Poor and poorly educated, she was a smart and ambitious woman. And she knew that her only way out of the constriction of poverty and compulsory heterosexuality/motherhood was through exploiting her sex appeal, a patriarchal common denominator that crossed all class lines. Short, tight skirts and sparkly, spangly tops to her were symbols of mobility, of ambition, of glamour, of big cities, of travel and adventure. Dressing with what were to her power symbols, she gained the unearned reputation of being a slut in her community. But outside her community, the manipulation of these symbols proved to be very effective.
 
Her marriage to Carl Dean, a working-class man, when she was still a teenager was another career move, in that he was able to support her while she was building her career. More importantly, her marital status enabled her to market her sexuality as a commodity while retaining the respectability and protection of marriage. It also enabled her to share her home openly with Judy.  Dolly Parton is very open about her affairs, and about the fact that she does not see Carl Dean very frequently, never travels with him, and does not share her professional life with him. Asked if she believes in living together before marriage, she quips that she does not believe in living together after marriage. Carl Dean accepts Judy as part of the family, rotating the tires on her car and changing the oil.
 
Had Dolly looked to Carl Dean for undying passion or companionship, she would have divorced him long ago. Had she attempted to live as a single woman, her affairs would have been regular features on the covers of the tabloids, and she would never have been able to walk the fine line between sex symbol and the wholesome purveyor of family entertainment and proprietor of “Dollywood.” Had she lived in an exclusive partnership with Judy, the only albums she would have been allowed to record would have been with Olivia Records, a company not even founded until Dolly was over forty.

It’s interesting to read the words that Dolly uses to describe her relationship to Judy: “pure,” “sweet,” “innocent,” “fun.” In her world, sex is a metaphor for power, glamour, performance, an altered and manipulated state of arousal, commercialism, artificiality—something not so pure, not sweet, not so innocent, and, possibly, not so fun. It might be worth considering that the kind of spiritual odyssey that Dolly and Judy experienced was a result of the fact that they had never invested their intimacy in sexual practices, which, although they may become more refined in terms of technique, remain relatively static in terms of transformative growth. Maybe it was specifically this investment in other forms of intimacy that allowed them to channel their love into what appears to have been another dimension altogether.

Dolly’s choices reflect the kind of splitting required of women in patriarchy. She maintains separate relationships for all the functions of her life as a woman whose ambition has always been to be a superstar. That she did not end up like Marilyn Monroe may have something to do with the protection and stability she has experienced in her personal life, through her marriage to Carl Dean and her ongoing intimate, sleep-in, companionship with Judy. Both Judy and Carl Dean met her and loved her before she became famous. Dolly Parton chose not to privilege her sexual relationships as the place where she would entrust her primary intimacy, and possibly this is one of the biggest secrets to her success. Where Marilyn made the fatal mistake of identifying with her image, Dolly is open and articulate about how her body is a costume and her public persona an act. Maybe she is able to do that, because Judy, who knew her as a child, holds her identity, and Dolly always comes home to Judy.  
 
So there is no language to describe Dolly Parton’s relationships. Who benefits from that? Quoting again from Boston Marriages, “The language available to describe reality, particularly such a fundamental aspect of reality as relationships, serves as a method of social control.” That is such a powerful statement in considering this topic, it bears repeating:  “The language available to describe reality, particularly such a fundamental aspect of reality as relationships, serves as a method of social control.”  Rothblum goes on to say, “If we can’t say it, it’s hard to think it, and even harder to enact it. That standard question of all political analysis, Who benefits? serves us well here.”  Who benefits? “Who benefits from our not making commitments outside of a sexual context? Who benefits from our limited ability to value nonsexual intimacy? From the poverty of our language of intimacy? What kinds of intimacy would we describe and value, what kind of commitments would we make and honor, if we based our definitions of relationships in the reality of experience?”
                                                                             
Mary Daly, radical lesbian philosopher and all-round rabble-rouser, has given us a new lexicon for bespeaking ourselves into being, and one of the expressions she coined was “pure lust,” which she describes as “the desire to share pleasure.”  Surely that is the emotion that defines Karen Thompson’s ongoing care of Sharon Kowalski, that describes the sharing of visions between the Rebeccas Perot and Jackson, and that would characterize the fourth dimensional spiritual journey that Dolly Parton and Judy Ogle took from the parking lot of the Bel Air hotel.  This “desire to share pleasure” allows us the freedom to define for ourselves what those symbols of pleasure will be, and in doing that, we honor the possibility that our politic, our intellect, our creativity, and our spirituality may have greater gifts of intimacy than a sexuality so influenced by conditions out of our control and inimical to our interests.
 
[slinky]  Time for us all to get back to our own highly individual, highly unique progressive revolutions. It is my hope that the journey we took today will enhance our appreciation for our current location on the spiral—wherever that may be—and En-courage all of us to feel more freedom and more confidence in respecting the great wisdom of our bodies and customizing our metaphors for intimacy.

CG: So, Rachel Fenton, welcome to my blog!

RF: Kia ora, hello and thank you, Carolyn Gage, thanks so much for having me! I’m a huge fan of your blog and your brilliant work, as you know.

CG: For those of you who may not be familiar with Rachel, she collaborated with me on a charming and dangerous booklet titled “Sexual Textual Tennis”  as the “Graphic Poet Rae Joyce.” I encourage everyone in the world to buy this patriarchal atom-splitting work of amazing art. BUT… today I am talking to Rachel about another aspect of her brilliant career.  Rachel and I belong to a small but mighty, extremely elite group I like to call “The Lesbian History Detective Agency.”  Rachel, perhaps you would like to share with blog readers the subject of your latest investigation…?  

RF: I just want to say, first off, “Sexual Textual Tennis” was a champion collaboration and an important one, for me personally it was a pivotal moment in my understanding of what my feminist politics are and what my art can do, so thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. And also, “The Lesbian History Detective Agency” would be a great title for a play! OK. I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with a woman named Mary Taylor. For those of your readers who don’t know about her (and five years ago, that was me), she is probably best known as the friend of Charlotte Brontë.

RF: There are several reasons I became so fascinated with Taylor… Since early 2016, following the launch of Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik) which I’d co-edited, I was looking to reconnect with my Yorkshire roots in a way that would simultaneously anchor me to Aotearoa, where I’d lived for about a decade at this point. I’d had a discussion about the Brontë sisters with my partner who said to me “Didn’t Charlotte have a friend in New Zealand?” And that’s what pushed me down the trail of Mary Taylor. I felt Mary Taylor was a figure who could hold my interest for a large, book-sized project. And I wasn’t mistaken; however, what I wasn’t seeing – wasn’t able to at that point – was why I was really drawn to her; what my psychological drivers were for pursuing her. I need to make that distinction, that my interest in her is only clear in [almost] hindsight, because I was running blind at the time of my research.

CG: I think that can often be part of the process about researching and writing about historical figures. I just finished a play about the geneticist Barbara McClintock. I had been thinking about this play for thirty years, researching it for ten, and then writing it for three years. Weeks after I finished it, I began to understand myself as autistic. After I got the diagnosis, I was doing an internet search to find out who else was autistic… and McClintock’s name turned up over and over again. Maybe on some deep subconscious level I had been searching for my own story in the history of McClintock.

RF:  Taylor had found herself adrift of her family and in need of financial security and she wanted better for herself but also, crucially, for all women. Unlike Taylor, I’m working-class – a group she admired because she saw working-class women as having achieved something like equality with their men through the division of labour and their ability to earn, whereas middle-class women eschewed work because it was considered degrading for women to work in Victorian society. Of course, it wasn’t so much degrading as a means for women to escape patriarchal control at that time… If women could not be controlled by the church or by the financial hold of husbands, they were a threat to the patriarchy. Mary wasn’t just a trailblazer, she was a danger to society. I had been labelled a “rabble-rouser” by one of my co-editors on the anthology in the first interview we gave. It irked. It’s a form of class discrimination in the UK. Working-class people are frequently given such labels as angry, aggressive, intimidating, because middle-class people are afraid of poverty, afraid of people who have touched poverty. I wrote in the story that won the University of Plymouth Short Fiction Prize that perhaps middle-class people think they can catch poverty by association with working-class people. Certainly, that’s been my experience. The label stuck.

CG: Ah...New York...

RF: I spent two days researching without breaks in New York Public Library’s Berg collection, and another in The Morgan Library and Museum’s Sherman Fairchild Room. Reading Bronte’s rough slant in contrast to Taylor’s immaculately controlled handwriting was an experience I will never forget. Taylor’s hand was like fine ironwork in a continental city until her beloved sister Martha’s death, when the line tremors and the first sign of emotional weakness shows like the ink on a Richter scale.  I thought I felt her pain because I was in pain. I carried this knowledge to my illustrations. When Taylor tells Brontë she is leaving England for New Zealand, I allowed my emotions to bleed into my pen, distorting the line with real as opposed to imagined feeling.  On the fourth day, I met up with my online friend Lori. Throughout the previous decade, she had been a constant support to me. Never judgemental, though always truthful. Blunt, even, at times. Loyal. She accepted me for myself. Her letters to me are written in the finest wrought iron cursive, back-leaning, whereas mine to her are a roughshod gallop. Just like the poems I wrote in New York.  My friendship with Lori gave me some insight into the importance of Taylor’s friendship, a friendship that was predominantly epistolary

In 1999 I reviewed Linda Lear's biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature for publication in  The Lesbian Review of Books. Twenty-one  years later, this review was cited in a new anthology titled Literature, Writing, and the Natural World, edited by James Guignard and T.P. Murphy and published by Cambridge Scholars.

My review had been centered on the biography's failure to apply the word lesbian to any of the intimate and well-documented relationships that Carson had with women throughout her life.  Because I thought these relationships would be of interest to my readers, I am republishing this review:

 The word "lesbian" is not in the index to Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.  This is because the word "lesbian" is not in the text of what has been hailed by The New York Times as "the most exhaustive account so far of Carson's private, professional, and public lives."
 
This omission is peculiar in light of the fact that the author, Linda Lear, had access to the correspondence between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman --- a correspondence that documents the two women's lesbian passion and commitment during the last ten years of Carson's life.  In fact, three years ago, a collection of the letters was published in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952--1964.

To Lear's credit, she does not withhold the details of Carson's relationships with women, even when these details indicate lesbian attachments.  In fact, she has done a considerable amount of detective work in uncovering them.  What she fails to do is establish a context for understanding the significance of these lesbian relationships and how Carson's orientation as a lesbian shaped her career and her ideas. 
 
Carson, author of the ground-breaking exposé of the risks of pesticides, Silent Spring,  is remembered now as the founder of the ecology movement, but she might also be considered the first ecofeminist.  Through the network of connections she made with women during her lifetime, she evolved her philosophy of the interconnectedness of all forms of life.   Because of the censorship she imposed on herself, a censorship that her biographers have perpetuated, the significance of Carson's world of female relationships has not been explored for its impact on her career and on her writing.

This censorship, ironically, may be read by some as a mark of Lear's scholarly detachment, an index of her professionalism --- that she refuses to speculate or overlay interpretation on incidents and documents for which there may be alternative explanations.
 
Lear's predicament is not unique.  In fact, it parallels the situation of Lorena Hickok's biographer, Doris Faber, who insisted that the romantic language in the Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence "does not mean what it appears to mean."  Fortunately, her homophobic treatment of Hickok has been countered in recent years by Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and by the publication of Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.  Similarly, the publication in 1998 of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, poses a serious challenge to the assumptions of previous biographers about Dickinson's heterosexuality.  One irate male academic has characterized the publication of these letters as "an utter distraction from her outstanding intellect and her talent."

But is it?  There are some of us who would argue that it is the presumption of heterosexuality that is the "utter distraction."   Just what, exactly, are the academic criteria for determining the sexual orientation of a historical figure?  At the present time, a homophobic academy prefers the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" approach, in which the biographer must make her case for queerness beyond a reasonable doubt.  But gay and lesbian scholars do not consider homosexuality to be a crime, and our concerns lie more with understanding a politic, an aesthetic, a social orientation that potentially informs the body of work produced by men or women whose sexual orientation, however individual the form of expression, may nevertheless provide a perspective that is unique and distinct from that of heterosexuals. 
 
In addition, what appears to be "reasonable doubt" in the minds of biographers like Lear and Faber reads like homophobic panic and denial to scholars who find it unreasonable to explain away an obvious constellation of lesbian or gay relationships on a case-by-case, or even  word-by-word, basis.

Hear the words of Rachel Carson, 47,  written to her lover Dorothy Freeman, 56, in 1954:
 
"... I have been remembering that my very first message to you was a Christmas greeting.  Christmas, 1952.  I knew then that the letter to which it replied was something special, that stood out from the flood of other mail, but I don't pretend I had any idea of its tremendous importance in my life.  I didn't know then that you would claim my heart --- that I would freely give you a lifetime's love and devotion.  I had at least some idea of that when Christmas came again, in 1953.  Now I know, and you know.  And as I have given, I have received --- the most precious of all gifts.  Thank you darling, with all my heart."  (pp. 66-67, Always, Rachel)
 
Or the words of Dorothy Freeman:
 
"How sweet to find your clothes mixed in with mine, dear --- that brought you near.  I've wanted you so when I looked at the moon, when the tide was high; when the water made wild sounds in the night; when we went tide-pooling; when the anemones were exposed for a few seconds as the water rushed away from the cave; but most of all, darling, when I went back to the veeries ---" (p. 117, Always, Rachel)

On the eve of a long-awaited rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, Dorothy wrote this note to Rachel:
 
"New York --- darling --- a week from this moment I shall be with you if all goes well -- and it must!  Yes, I think we can be casual if we meet at the desk --- just a chilly glance I'll give you and say, 'Glad you made it...'" (p. 69, Always, Rachel)
 
What is to made of the humor in this note, if the subtext is not lesbian? 
 
In the early years, the correspondence itself was carried on in a clandestine fashion, with each woman writing a letter to the other woman's family, "for publication," with the private love letter hidden surreptitiously inside.
 
In the case of Carson and Freeman, it is not even necessary to resort to Lilian Faderman's argument for the inclusion of non-genital love relationships in the category "lesbian."  In light of the women's own writings, it is unreasonable to conclude that the relationship was platonic.  One does not need to disguise a platonic same-sex relationship from the desk clerk at a hotel!

Lear's conscientious research into Carson's early years reveals another significant lesbian attachment, one which was to determine the direction of Carson's professional life.
 
Mary Scott Skinker, 36, was a professor of biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women, where Carson was studying to become a writer.  Under Skinker's mentorship, Carson began to focus her creative energies on biology.  Carson's correspondence to friends at this time indicate that she was deeply infatuated with her teacher.  When Skinker took a leave-of-absence to attend Johns Hopkins University, Carson attempted to follow her, but was unable to raise tuition money.  Instead, she founded a science club she named Mu Sigma Sigma --- Miss Skinker's initials in Greek.  After graduation, Carson rendezvoused with her former professor in Skinker's family cabin in the Shenandoah Valley.  As Lear coyly notes, "There were no longer any boundaries between mentor and protégée." (pp.56-57)  (Shades of Radclyffe Hall's "... and that night they were not divided"!)  Skinker and Carson maintained contact with each other for two decades, and when Skinker, 57, became hospitalized with cancer, she gave Carson's name as the person to be contacted.  It was Carson who stayed with her until she lost alertness, and only then was her care taken over by members of her family.

Carson found companionship and mentoring with another powerful woman, Marie Rodell, who became her agent.  Although Rodell had been married briefly, Lear notes "she kept the details of her marriage locked in a closet." (p.153)  The relationship between the two women advanced quickly beyond a professional one, and when Carson was denied passage on a research ship, because of the impropriety of a lone woman joining an all-male crew, Rodell agreed to accompany her as a "chaperone."  According to Lear, "Ten days on the Albatross III voyage had deepened their friendship, and they now closed their letters to each other with love." (p. 172)
 
Because of her failure to provide a lesbian context for Carson's experiences, the reader must read between the homophobically elided lines to understand her relationship to Marjorie Spock and Mary Richards.  These two socially-prominent, single women had bought a house and were living together.  We are told that they became members of Carson's inner circle of friends.

Mary Richards, described as a "digestive invalid," required organic food, and Spock, who had studied organic farming, obliged her partner with a two-acre vegetable garden.  In 1957, state and federal planes sprayed the property repeatedly with DDT mixed in fuel oil --- spraying as much as fourteen times in one day.  Spock and Richards sued the government in a trial that lasted twenty-two days.  They lost on a technicality, but not before Spock had sent out her daily account of the ordeal to her friends and supporters, including Carson.
 
This was a lawsuit sparked by one woman's desire to protect her disabled life-partner.  Carson, whose first love had been mercilessly harassed out of her career as a college professor and later out of a career in the government, was again faced with a situation where the survival of a lesbian she loved was being threatened.  This time Carson was in a position to do something.
 
What did the Spock-Richards relationship mean to Carson, who was still living with her mother --- who had never been able to live openly with the women she loved?  How did the passionate crusade of a woman devoted to protecting her partner affect Carson's own interest in the issue of pesticides?   Did the security and nurturing she received from the maternal Dorothy Freeman influence her decision to write a book that she knew would raise a fire-storm of controversy?  How did the persecution of Skinker influence Carson's own career decisions, as well as her decisions to live a deeply closeted life?  Did her oppression as a woman in a male-dominated field and as a lesbian in a heterosexual world influence her advocacy for respect for the diversity of life on the planet?

It will take a biography with an entry for "lesbian" in the index before we can begin to reconcile the serious mind-body split that has been and is still being historiographically imposed on Rachel Carson, lesbian biologist.

About 35 years ago, I got the idea of building a museum to commemorate and honor women who are victims of rape. I was inspired at the time by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I eventually published "The Women's Rape Museum" as a blog on this site.

Because of this blog, two architecture students from the University of San Carlos in the Phillippines reached out to me, asking me to be a consultant on their thesis project, which was to design a museum for survivors of sexual violence. The two students were Allen Celestino and Fairyssa Biana Canama... and they did an incredible job with their project, titled "Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum." It was designed for a site in Cebu City, but it could and should serve as a model for similar museums in any city.

Celestino and Canama studied a range of Holocaust and war memorial museums, and came up with a design that would take visitors on a healing journey through the different stage of assimilating the trauma of rape. To aid in the presentation of their thesis, they made a beautiful short video that takes the viewer on a graphic tourof the various passages and chambers of this architectural journey.

Their video journey is only 3.5 minutes long... and well worth the viewing! They have broken down the chaotic and inchoate process of healing from post-rape trauma, helping the victim access an experience that too often is an internal and unassimilated secret.

The genius of their project is that this is also a healing and integrating experience for the friends and families of survivors, who often have no idea what their loved one is going through. In this museum experience, they can literally accompany them through these externalized stages, offering enormous opportunity for dialogue and empathy. 

For those who are interested in the process behind their choices, their half-hour thesis presentation is fascinating and also available online.  (It includes the shorter video of the museum tour.) Both Celestino and Canama come out as survivors in their video, and their design process reflects their constant engagement with their own experiences.

I encourage survivors and those who love us to take the short tour of Walls of Silence, and then the longer tour of the thesis presentation. I encourage all of us begin to think more deeply about the needs of survivors in our culture and ways to bring this tangible, visible proof of caring to our communities.

I have been thinking a lot about autism, and what it means to be defined as “neurodivergent” in a “neurotypical” world.  Even those "politically correct" labels reflect the biases of those for whom autism is "other." Anyway, this week I was watching a video about octopuses, and it opened up a new lens on autism... and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

First, some facts about the octopus:  It's everywhere... all over the world--in the deep sea, in the kelp forests, in the coral reefs, along the rocky shorelines. It's massive, and it's tiny. It's been around for millions of years. And it's wicked smart, especially when you consider the other members of  the mollusk family: clams, oysters and snails.

The octopus can perform all kinds of learning tasks… including ones that involve object perception and short-term and long-term memory. It can make plans, which means it remembers past events, imagines future needs, and analyzes the ways that current actions can relate to both. It uses composite tools. It takes things apart. It invents games. It problem-solves. It explores the environment like a curious child.

What does this have to do with autism? Trust me, I'll get there. (I'm autistic.)

So, all the other species (dogs, cats, humans, dolphins) that are considered forms of "intelligent life" are vertebrates. In fact, most of them are mammals, and primates at that. These “intelligent life” vertebrates trace their common ancestors back 320 million years, probably to some kind of lizard. But when we go looking for the common ancestor that we share with the octopus, we have to go back more than twice as far... 600 million years, in fact. And the common ancestor was... wait for it... a flatworm.

What's my point?

My point is that, in the history of this planet, intelligent life actually evolved twice, in widely separated (vertebrate and invertebrate ) trunks of the family tree. And the point of this observation is to explain why the intelligence of the octopus is so insanely different from the intelligence of the vertebrates.

And HERE is where it relates to autism:  Our theories of intelligence have historically been derived from our studies of vertebrates, especially mammals, and especially primates. All these vertebrate forms of “intelligent life”  have been very social creatures that travel in pods, packs, herds, or tribes. Not surprisingly, our theories about intelligence have been shaped by this fact.  These theories have assumed that intelligence evolved in certain species in response to social needs for communication, for bonding, for collective action, for establishing and maintaining social hierarchies, and so on.
 
But… then there is the octopus, a form of intelligent life that is notoriously anti-social. The octopus does not bond with other octopuses, does not live or travel with them, and  does not observe any kind of social hierarchy. It is a real loner. According to our theories of intelligence, it should actually be quite stupid... dumb as a snail, in fact. But the octopus has 500,000 neurons and the snail has only 20,000.  The octopus is right up there with the pig, the dog, and the dolphin. Clearly there is a problem with our theories about the evolution of intelligence. Being social has no bearing on the development of intelligence.
 
And here we are.  Autism is "characterized by difficulty in social interaction and communication." We are wired for resistance to social pressure. We are said to lack empathy, to have difficulty reading social cues, are oblivious to social hierarchies. We don't travel in packs. Are we missing out on evolutionary forces that generate intelligence?  Or are we developing intelligence along a completely different axis, like the octopus?

How did the octopus come to be so much smarter than the snails and clams? If it wasn't social pressure, what was it? Apparently, it's all about the shell... or lack thereof.

One hundred and forty million years ago the lineage that produced the octopus lost its shell. This shell-less proto-octopus was way more nimble, way more mobile, and way more vulnerable than the other shell-encased members of the mollusk family. With all the predators in the ocean, one might have expected this new branch of the family tree to become extinct in a generation or two. But that’s not what happened.

The octopus got very smart very fast. It became a master/mistress of disguise. It developed the ability to  change not only color, but also texture in 200 milliseconds. That’s faster than the blink of an eye. It’s way faster than a lizard that takes 20 seconds to change color. And the octopus can change camouflage up to 177 times per hour. How can it do this? Because most of its 500,000 neurons are not in its brain, but in its eight arms. The stimulus/response thing bypasses the brain completely. It takes a shortcut that enables the arm to "read" the environment and send appropriate signals directly to the special camouflage cells i the arm. These camouflage cells are incredibly complex, with highly specific functions. Some control for red, black and yellow coloration. Some reflect blue and green light, others reflect white light. Another layer of specialized cells can change the texture from smooth to rough, and back again.
 
What does this have to do with autism? Well, so… let’s go back to losing that shell, that protection.  Kind of like losing one’s armor. Yes, it makes one vulnerable, but it also drives the evolution of a different kind of intelligence, an intelligence that is rooted in highly complex and subtle interactions with one's physical environment. If the octopus lacks the social intelligence that comes from belonging to a pack, it has evolved an exquisitely fine-tuned relationship to the natural world around it.

If an autistic person is lacking in social intelligence, have we evolved compensatory sensitivity to our surroundings? Without the kind of protective armor that non-autistic people develop in their social interactions, have we developed a different form of perceptual/conceptual mobility, a nimbleness of spirit? Could it be that our "special interests" are part of this protective disguise? Without the rigid shape associated with a social role, are we not able to slip ourselves into the secret nooks and crannies of a rich inner life that appear irrelevant or inconsequential to those who have never had to develop alternative resources?

I can't claim to have anything like the brilliant adaptations of the octopus. But I do feel that centering the intelligence of the octopus calls into question many of our human assumptions and theories. I have the intelligence to know that we humans have very limited understanding of intelligence, and that we may well have reached a period in our evolution as a social species, where the concomitants of our bonding, i.e. our love of  conformity, our lack of authenticity, our prioritizing of congeniality,  our staggering disregard for our natural environment, and our ongoing massacres of our fellow creatures are going to destroy  life on the planet in less than two generations. Is it possible that autism marks an acceleration in human evolution--that our intelligence is moving in the direction of the octopus--and not a moment too soon?