Well, this got my attention:
 
“In 1665, actors put on the first play in colonial America and were immediately arrested for public wickedness.” 
 
If we are seeking relevant antecedents for modern times, we turn to this era at our peril. It was the era of, well, colonization.  Colonization, enslavement, and genocide.
 
Still, I was intrigued.  Was this because theatre was prohibited?  In the Massachusetts colonies, we know that theatre, dancing, cockfighting, boxing, and other entertainments were banned as “forms of levity and mirth [that lead] easily to sin.”  But this incident occurred in Pungoteague, Virginia—in a tavern, no less. Unlike Massachusetts, which was colonized by Pilgrims and Puritans, the Virginia colony had been established by a joint-stock company chartered by King James I. Whether or not capitalist imperialism constitutes a form of cult is the subject for another blog, but, in any event, Pungoteague was not Puritan.
 
Yes, theatres across the Pond had been officially closed and mostly silent during two civil wars and the period of rule by Oliver Cromwell, but, by 1660, the Restoration was on and English theatres were opening up again. In fact, they were an integral part of the process of re-establishing the hereditary monarchy.

Well, then, was it an issue of petty grievances?  Were the actors locked up at the behest of a powerful neighbor who had some kind of beef with them—a boundary dispute or a wandering spouse? Certainly, up north, the courts were not above arresting local scapegoats—mostly female—accusing them of witchcraft, and then hanging them.
 
But here’s the thing…  The itinerant judge for Accomack County requested a re-enactment of the play at the hearing, which—there being no official courthouse yet—was held at Fowkes Tavern, conveniently the site of the alleged crime.  The judge, obviously a connoisseur, even specified that the defendants were to show up in “those habilments that they then acted in.”  This would indicate that the actual content of the play was at issue. In other words, the trial was to determine whether or not the performance contained material that constituted “public wickedness.”
 
Well, did it?

The records of the case are scanty, but we do know the title of the work: Ye Beare and Ye Cubb, aka The Bear and the Cub. Remember this is during the colonial era, about a century before the Revolution. What came to be known as the British Commonwealth, upon which “the sun never sets,” was just getting started. “Mother England” had colonies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, the Carolinas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and—the original one—Virginia. 
 
Scholars have speculated that this bear-and-cub thing was a metaphor for the Virginia colony’s relationship to England. One such scholar, Joel Eis, relates the play to the tensions between an upper class still loyal to England and a rising middle-class of merchants who were angry about restrictions that the king had placed on international tobacco trade—tobacco being Virginia’s cash crop.  Further, Eis has located a number of pamphlets and speeches from the 1660’s that employ similar “parent-progeny” analogies to criticize England’s patronizing relationship to its colonies.
 
The specific charge “public wickedness” adds credence to this theory. What exactly is “public wickedness?”  Apparently, it was a colorful term for blasphemy, which, according to my dictionary app, is “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.”  And there is rub:  Sacred things.  Like Mother England…? Like King Charles II…? 

Public wickedness is a concept that is very much still with us today. It has undergone a number of permutations across the centuries. By 1735, for example, it had become “seditious libel.”  Under English law, it was a criminal offense to publish or otherwise make statements intended to criticize or provoke dissatisfaction with the government. Ironically, truth was not a defense and, in fact, made the offense worse. English libel law spelled it out: “The greater the truth, the greater the libel.” Who knew?
 
This law was tested in the colonies in the 1735 trial of a printer named John Peter Zenger. He put out a weekly journal that routinely roasted the governor of New York… and, remember, in the colonial era, this governor would have been appointed, not elected. Not surprisingly, the governor hand-picked the two judges to evaluate the allegedly libelous material, and, also not surprisingly, they found in his favor. The jury, however, was of a different mind. At the urging of none other than Alexander Hamilton, they defied the judges and acquitted Zenger.
 
Then there were two brief decades following the Revolution when the young United States apparently let public wickedness run rampant, but by 1798, Congress passed four laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government or its officials.
 
It was, needless to say, not a popular law, and it expired when John Adams left office in 1801. After this, public wickedness had an astounding century-plus-long run before another sedition law was instituted. This happened in 1918, to amend an espionage act that was passed the previous year.

These laws were responses to concerns raised by the Great War. The Sedition Act came hard for public wickedness, imposing “a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both” on anyone who dared “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” It was repealed three years later, but not before legendary trade-union activist Eugene Debs had been sentenced to ten years in prison.
 
The Sedition Act of 1918 was repealed in 1920, although many parts of the original Espionage Act still remain in force. In fact, the charge leveled against controversial whistleblower Edward Snowden was a violation of two counts of the 1917 Espionage Act.
 
Anyway…  there was another world war and another sedition law. This one was called the Smith Act, and it was passed in 1940, making it a criminal offense to advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to organize or be a member of any group or society devoted to such advocacy. 

During the notorious witch-hunts of the 1950’s, the Smith Act was applied broadly to members of the Communist Party, to labor union activists, and folks rumored to be gay or lesbian. In 1957, we the people said, "Enough is enough," and the act was amended to limit its application. Now, under the Smith Act, the prosecutor bears a considerably greater burden of proof, because they must prove “beyond reasonable doubt” active participation in or verbal encouragement of specific insurrectionary acts.  In other words, no more prosecutions based on sexual orientation, membership in trade unions or civil rights organizations, and so on.

The Smith Act, even in its worst iteration, did establish an important precedent. Because it was federal law, it has been used to nullify various sedition acts passed by individual states. Some of these have been profoundly arbitrary, vague, and even draconian. Good riddance.
 
Well, we have certainly wandered far afield of Fowke’s Tavern and Pungoteague…
 
The playwrights and actors had their day on December 18, 1665. The judges failed to see the public wickedness alleged by the plaintiff, and, in fact, the plaintiff didn’t even bother to show up.  All charges were dismissed and the plaintiff was ordered to pay everyone’s court costs. And thus ends the historic record of the first English-language play performed on these shores.

But I worry about public wickedness. I do. I’m a playwright--an American playwright--and my cultural lineage absolutely traces back to Ye Beare and Ye Cubb.
 
I am not afraid of violating the Smith Act. I am afraid of violating something far hazier, far more pervasive, more pernicious, and, ironically, something that appears increasingly to be itself approaching violation of the Smith Act. 
 
I am talking about the stream of executive orders of the current regime. I’m talking about executive orders that:

No, none of these tell me what I can and can’t write. But they certainly tell me what I can expect if I promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. I can expect to be banned from production contracts, from performing, from teaching, from lecturing, and from a very broad range of funding sources.
 
So, what exactly constitutes “promoting DEI?” Writing a play that features a disabled character? A character of color? That centers women’s rights, or lack thereof?  At what point does race-specific casting fall under promoting inclusion? Or, open-casting, for that matter? I tend to write about historical themes. What if history itself promotes DEI—and what history doesn’t?  
 
I have to second-guess what this means, or else go with “better-safe-than-sorry” themes, which, by process of elimination, appear to be narratives focused solely on white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class, male heroes and their struggles.

Well... I do have another choice. I can opt for public wickedness. My heritage. My birthright. And when I ask myself what "public wickedness" means in today’s theatre, I hear the admonition of longtime civil rights activist and Georgia Representative John R. Lewis:
 
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
 
Public wickedness is good trouble, necessary trouble. And it’s also something else. It’s a duty.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it… Here are the  words of Dr. Toni Morrison, and, make no mistake, she is talking about healing:

“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

Amen.

“Bernice Reagon is a living treasure in an institution used to dealing with static treasures. When you meet her, you know there’s something there – a vision, a focus, a drive, an intensity – and that’s never changed.”—Ralph Rinzler, Smithsonian Asst Secretary for Public Service

“For more than a half-century Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching—speaking out against reacism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment—including the planet that sustains life as we know it.”—from www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com

Dr. Bernice Johnson was a musician, producer, scholar, activist, composer, commentator… and an invaluable role model.
 
I know her work through reading histories of the Civil Rights Movement, through seeing her perform at a number of Sweet Honey in the Rock concerts, and through her writings. Her example, her art, and her counsel about struggle have given me strength, courage, and clarity. It’s the clarity I want to talk about in this blog. I’m going to focus on three memes that are on my screensaver. These are quotations by Dr. Johnson. Here’s the first:

I am lost a lot. I’m autistic, an incest survivor, a woman living with hidden disability, and a lesbian feminist in a neurodivergent, misogynist, heterosexist, ableist, rape culture. I am frequently overwhelmed, scapegoated, confused, and frustrated. Frequently. This advice by Dr. Johnson reminds me that this is to be expected. No shame. Pick yourself up and go back. And for me, that going-back means going back to my first encounter with Second Wave women’s writing, my first encounters with the writing from the women from the Civil Rights movement… Fanny Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara,  Dr. Johnson.

These words helped me understand that I was not crazy, and that I was not alone. They helped me understand the significance of “context,” and that without my own context I would understand myself the way the enemy wanted me to understand myself. Creating my own context, I could see my enemy exactly for who he is. This meme reminds me it’s not enough to go back to a memory. I need to start "doing" again. I need to start doing whatever I was doing when I was not lost. And for me, that is generating work that makes myself visible to myself, that gives voice to the women like me whose voices have been stolen or silenced. This meme reminds me of a piece of recovery wisdom: You can start over at any time.

This is the next meme that continues to alter the course of my life. We humans are social creatures and when we are uncomfortable in social settings, that can mean that we need to adjust our behaviors or attitudes… or that we may be somewhere we do not belong. That discomfort can be interpreted as a warning sign of danger.

Remembering this bit of wisdom from Dr. Johnson enables me to do a self-intervention. I can recalibrate: “I’m in coalition and I’m insanely uncomfortable; therefore I must be nailing it.” I don’t change my position. I don’t apologize. I don’t get up and leave. I stay, I fight, I work. I’m in the right place and doing the right things. The discomfort is normal. It’s healthy. It’s productive. This IS the work. How you do something is what you get. This is bigger than myself and bigger than my ego. As an autistic person, I can have difficulty interpreting my own discomfort as well as the discomfort of other people. Dr. Johnson reminds me that their discomfort can also be healthy and productive. Allow others the lessons of their own struggles.

My final screensaver is not a meme. It was a posting on Toshi Reagon’s Facebook page. It’s the story of a conversation between her and her mother, and it made a deep impression on me. I am frequently up in arms over some fresh outrage… politically, culturally, socially.  I am often calling for my sword and my best horse. Today I grab onto these words by the “Queen Mother”  instead:   “You will not kill people today. They are already dead. Let us move forward.” 
 
I work with “they are already dead.” What did she mean when she said that? Clearly they are not! Look how angry I am!  But I defer to the Queen Mother who has fought way more battles and way more successfully than I could ever imagine. So what does this mean?  I think it means that they have already left the field… or, rather, the field has left them. The field that I am fighting on is somewhere else, something else. The fact that their values are so utterly foreign to mine should make them dead to me in terms of the teeming array of brilliant beings that inform my world… real and imaginary. Which leads right into the next question:

“Have I done my work?”  Isn't this my work... the constant charging out the door? Dr. Johnson reminds me that it probably is not. It’s one more way the patriarchy and rape culture absorb my energies and eat my spirit. Fighting them or subordinating myself to them, they still win: I am not able to pursue my own vision.
 
Yeah, vision. Dr. Johnson again: “Had my anger wiped away or cleared my vision?” Nearly always wiped it away or distorted it.

And here is a sentence that lights up the night sky: “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”  Okay, truth here:  99% of the time when I am riding out to do battle, I could care less about reviving the institution or the individual with whom I intend to engage. I am fighting to win, to defeat, to overcome, to wipe out an enemy. I am fighting to make it absolutely clear that me, and my views, and my values shall prevail and dominate. I could care less about the spiritual life of the entities opposing me. Isn't that the model for warriors?  No. Not when I remember that Dr. Johnson is one of the greatest warriors who lived in my time. This is the model:  “She reminded me not to hover over dead places I had no intention of reviving.”
 
Again, the word "dead." Already dead. Done. Move on.

And then she ends with this “She told me my only failure in life would be if I could not access my heart to create.” And if I have been struggling with her words prior to this, reluctant to give up my oh-so-righteous fight, this sentence wipes the board clean in one sweep, and I surrender. This is so completely correct. I’ve lived it. I’ve proved it. I know failure and I know success, and she  is absolutely right.
 
My disability includes extreme fatigue, and I suspect the incessant, autistic drive for confronting injustice is a big piece of this. I thought I was being intrepid, noble, self-sacrificing, and sometimes even awesome in these confrontations. That they had disabled me and in all likelihood would end by killing me just seemed like some kind of inescapable collateral damage. This little anecdote as recounted by Dr. Johnson’s daughter has turned my approach to life on its head when nothing else could. Not even death.
 
I’m not someone who gets physical tattoos, but I do collect psychic ones, and the words of Dr. Johnson are tattooed on my soul.  They are the metaphysical letterhead  for my agendas.  Cultural commentator David Brooks writes about "deterioration of motive," which occurs when fear and a sense of threat enter the chat. This is the point when engagement becomes nonproductive and destructive. Dr. Johnson's advice provides me with a standard against which I can check my intentions and I am so grateful to her.

And one final meme...  It's been a privilege to live on the planet at the same time as Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:
 
“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]
 
I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza. What does it mean for me to see to it that I “feel right” about what’s going on? And what qualifies as “feeling right?” Who can be the judge of what “right” means?

When I consider this directive to “see to it” that I feel right, the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.
 
It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

It means watching my own process closely, scanning for signs of my own compassion fatigue, frustration, temptation to embrace a simplistic narrative, or  temptation to succumb to the apathy of overwhelm.
 
It means distrusting what I hear and still listening. It means maintaining integrity and emotional sobriety when I become the target of outrage by people who are traumatized. It means responding to, but not reacting to baiting and catcalls. It means holding a number of contradictory emotions and scenarios simultaneously.
 
It means understanding that “feeling right” is an elusive and subjective state, an ever-receding horizon, and that the striving towards it is the closest I can ever come to achieving it.

This “see to it” business is very hard work, and I’m not good at it. I don’t enjoy it. I realize that I enjoy being righteous far more than I do this striving to feel right. But the longer I pursue this injunction of Harriet’s, the more clearly I see that it’s absolutely necessary. It is the price of wholeness.
 
And of course, in terms of action to take, she has been clear: “Of that every individual can judge.”                                

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Summer 2010, Northampton, MA.

“Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”--Wilma Mankiller
 
Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nations died on April 6, 2010. She served as their Principal Chief from and 1985 to 1995.
 
Her story contains and reflects the history of her people, retracing archetypal paths of displacement and homecoming. And her story is the story of a powerful woman—negotiating motherhood and intimate partnerships in a patriarchal landscape, meeting and overcoming resistance to serving in a leadership position. It is also a story of a person living with disabilities, both congenital and accident-related. Mankiller’s lifework was a steady demonstration of what could be possible, for an individual, for a community, for a nation. As her best-selling autobiography emphasizes, political and personal resistance require an understanding of place, knowledge of one’s history, spiritual roots, and a love of one’s people.

Mankiller’s father was Charley Mankiller, a Cherokee, and her mother, Irene, was of Dutch-Irish descent, but acculturated to Cherokee life. She had ten siblings and grew up on her father’s allotment, near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. She remembers her first ten years at “Mankiller Flats” with affection. She and her siblings would walk three miles each way to school, but, in Mankiller’s words, “I didn’t know the difference between being poor and having money until one day at school. A little girl… saw my flour-sack underwear while we were in the outhouse. She ran and told some other girls, and they all teased me about it. That was really the first time I had any inkling we were different.”
 
In 1950, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came up with a plan for dealing with what they termed “the Indian Problem.” This new policy, ominously called “termination,” had been hatched by Dillon S. Myer, the then-commissioner of the BIA. His credentials for the job? He had been the director of the Japanese War Relocation Authority that, during World War II, had implemented the internment of Japanese-American citizens in camps in California. As Mankiller notes in her autobiography, “The Cherokees and other native tribes should have recognized that the assorted Trails of Tears of our ancestors served in large part as models for the removal of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americas in the 1940’s.”

On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted a resolution making Indians “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States…”
 
This policy became the excuse for breaking up Native communities and putting tribal lands, no longer non-taxable, on the market. Mankiller’s family was offered the option of “relocation” to a large, urban city. Her father, having been taken from his home as a boy and forced to attend an Indian boarding school, was reluctant to leave his land, but eventually became persuaded that moving to San Francisco would offer a better future for his children.
 
Mankiller remembers this government facilitated relocation as her own personal “Trail of Tears”—referring to the infamous forced relocations from 1831 to 1838 of five autonomous tribes living in the Deep South. Four thousand of the 15,000 “relocated” Cherokee died from exposure, starvation, and disease during this forced march to Oklahoma.
 
“No one pointed a gun at me or at members of my family. No show of force was used. It was not necessary… I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you give up your home, your community, and everything you have ever known to move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. I wept tears … tears from my history, from my tribe's past. They were Cherokee tears.”

The better life that the Mankillers had been promised turned out to be low-paying factory jobs and housing in an urban ghetto. Feeling neglected by her parents, who had their hands full supporting the large family, Mankiller became a rebellious teenager, running away to her grandmother’s ranch near Modesto. She had to run away five times, before her family finally allowed her to stay. She credits her year on the ranch as a turning point in her life, where she took an active role in the farm, shadowing her tough and outspoken grandmother.
 
At the end of this year, she moved back in with her family, who were now living in Hunter’s Point, an area near the shipyards that had been settled by African American families fleeing the Dust Bowl. By 1960, Hunter’s Point was a neighborhood filled with racial tension and gang violence. Mankiller writes how her years on these “mean streets” began to shape her perception of the world: “The women are especially strong. Each day they face daunting problem as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their children, but of the whole community.”

After high school, Mankiller moved in with her sister, taking a job as a clerical worker. She met an Ecuadoran student from an aristocratic family, and after a dizzying summer courtship, they flew to Reno to get married. Mankiller was seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, and then two years later, she had a second daughter. She began to take classes at a community college and then, through a minorities educational opportunity program, she entered San Francisco State University. By the mid-1960’s the Bay Area was exploding politically and culturally. Mankiller describes taking her daughters to Haight-Ashbury: “…I think the people of the Haight had to be as curious about us as we were about them. My daughters wore shiny patent-leather shoes and little-girl dresses, and I looked like what I was at the time, a young housewife who liked to observe… but was unwilling to get fully involved.”
 
What changed all that was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the fall of 1969. The island had been occupied briefly five years earlier by a group of Sioux, as a symbolic act of reclamation. In a hundred-year-old Sioux treaty, the US government had agreed that any male Native American older than eighteen, whose tribe had been party to the treaty, could file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. As the island had been declared surplus federal property since the closing of the penitentiary in 1963, Native American activists were claiming their right to take possession.

In October 1969, a fire of suspicious origin gutted the American Indian Center in San Francisco. In an act of protest, fourteen Native Americans landed on Alcatraz and claimed it in the name of “Indians of All Tribes.” Within a day, the Coast Guard arrived to escort the protesters off the island, but ten days later, nearly a hundred activists returned—this time with provisions, and the occupation lasted for nineteen months. During this time, Mankiller would visit the island with her daughters, running support for four of her siblings and their children who had joined the protest. In her words, “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.”
 
Mankiller was also feeling the effects of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and against her husband’s wishes, she bought herself a car and began driving to tribal events up and down the coast. She took a job directing the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland and began volunteering with the Pit River people in Northern California, helping them with their fierce battle to regain tribal land from a utility company. Meanwhile, her brother Richard had gone to Pine Ridge and participated in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee.
 
Mankiller separated from her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. Her husband, after picking up nine-year-old Gina for a trip to the circus, informed Mankiller that he would not be returning her. After an agonizing year of separation, he finally brought Gina back, and Mankiller, afraid that he would try to abduct her daughter again, decided it was time to go home to Oklahoma.

“I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay.”
 
She finished her degree in social work and was hired to work for the Cherokee Nation as an economic stimulus coordinator. Her daughters were adapting to their new school, Mankiller was building her home on ancestral lands, and everything seemed on track—and then tragedy struck. She was in a car accident that crushed her face, her legs, and broke her ribs. Worst of all, her best friend had been the driver of the car that hit her, and she had not survived her injuries. The accident required two months’ hospitalization and seventeen surgeries, and it became another turning point.
 
Having come so close to dying—“walking into the spirit world,” as she put it—Mankiller began to turn toward the Cherokee spiritual path, seeing herself as “the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.”
 
Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis and underwent surgery for removal of her thymus. Drawing on the strength of her ancestors and of present-day Cherokee medicine people, she regained her health, returning to her work “with a fury.” She founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department and managed the self-help construction project of a sixteen-mile water pipe that revitalized an impoverished Native community.

The project affirmed her belief that the Cherokee people had the capacity to solve their own problems, and it also brought her together with the man who would become her life partner and best friend—Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who worked with the tribal Housing Authority.
 
In 1983 she was asked to run for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Stunned by the sexism she encountered, Mankiller was accused of being an affront to God, and of making the Cherokees a national laughingstock. She even had foes within her own campaign, but she managed to win the election. In 1985, when the Principal Chief was called to Washington, she inherited his office for the remainder of his term, and then ran on her own for Principal Chief and was elected for two more terms. The Cherokee Nation membership is currently 290,000, making it the second largest tribe in the country, after the Navaho. Mankiller was not only the principal guardian of Cherokee tradition and customs, but she managed a budget of seventy-five million dollars. She saw that much of this income went into health care, education, and job training.

Mankiller had been diagnosed in her twenties with polycystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that ran in her family, and in 1990, she underwent an operation to replace one of her affected kidneys. Her brother Don was the donor.
 
In 1995, she made the decision to retire from public office, but she remained a force in tribal affairs, offering counsel and mediation. Later she taught as a guest professor Dartmouth College. In 1998, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Mankiller’s health problems continued to escalate, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and lymphoma. In 2010, the cancer metastasized to her pancreas, and she died on April 6, at the age of sixty-four.
 
Mankiller wrote, “Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we’re either visionaries, ‘noble savages,’ squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We’re very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.” Her courageous life of leadership and activism has given the world a visible alternative to the racist stereotypes.

Originally published in  Womanist Theory and Research, Spring/ Summer 1996, Athens, GA and and off our backs, May 1996.

Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."

The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

"There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril." - Bessie Head

"From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

"... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible." - Paula Giddings

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

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.

“Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles - either online on social media, in the real world, or both.” –Wikipedia
 
Cancel culture is nothing new. In the 1950’s, it was called blacklisting, or Communist witchhunting. It was a political tool for consolidating support and silencing dissent, and it was especially effective in stifling writers… at least until it got to Broadway. And what happened when "cancel culture" attempted to invade Broadway is an example today for a world that is rapidly becoming more and more polarized and censorious.

It was June 22, 1950.  The names of prominent Broadway playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman had just been published in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The brainchild of three FBI agents, this official blacklist named 130 organizations and 151 individuals—actors, musicians, writers, and broadcast journalists, and it was intended to flush out subversives in the media and, in contemporary parlance, to “no-platform” them. The question on everyone’s minds, “Would Miller and Hellman now face the same fate as the ‘Hollywood Ten?’ Would their careers be destroyed? Would they also go to prison?”

Broadway was another story.  Stage actors formed families, rehearsing with each other for weeks and then facing their audiences together night after night, and maybe even for years if the show was a hit. Holding hands at the final curtain, the actors shared an awareness of the work as a whole and an appreciation for everyone’s part in it. Sometimes these shows would be sent out on tour, but for the most part, after a show closed, the Broadway family would scatter and then regroup at the next round of auditions for plays.  There was a centuries-old history and a tradition among Broadway actors that simply did not and could not exist in Hollywood.

The prison-bound Hollywood Ten all saw their careers terminated for a decade, but the Broadway artists had an entirely different experience.  The production of Death of a Salesman continued its Broadway run into the fall of 1950, five months after the publication of Red Channels. That same year producers Kermit Bloomgarten and Walter Fried sent the play out on national tour. In spite of the fact that one of the authors of Red Channels attempted to organize local boycotts of the play at every stop, the tour was a success. One month after Salesman closed on Broadway, Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People opened. And in 1953, one of the most enduring artifacts of the McCarthy era premiered at the Martin Beck Theatre. The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials, is often interpreted as a commentary on the McCarthy witchhunts. Called to testify before HUAC in 1956, Miller was asked about this, and his response was sardonic: “The comparison is inevitable, sir.” In 1955, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays both opened on Broadway.

And what about Hellman? In 1951, her play The Autumn Garden opened at the Coronet Theatre, and in 1956, the musical Candide, featuring Hellman’s libretto, won a Tony Award for Best Musical.

In other words, Broadway continued to support Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman. Let's look at how and why this happened:

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) would take a similar  position to SAG. Even as they fought on progressive fronts to become the first industry union to win employer-funded health and retirement plans, AFTRA voted to suspend any member who failed to cooperate with HUAC. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing the screenwriters, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) also supported HUAC and turned against their blacklisted members.

Workers in the film and television industries were frightened into silence, or worse, frightened into naming names in order to protect themselves. But three thousand miles away, on another coast and in an alternative universe, Actors Equity Association, the actors' union,  took a very different course of action. They rejected the blacklist and supported their members who had been named.

To understand their decision, it’s important to look at how Actors Equity worked. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, it was a union centered in New York, but with branches in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco… but—and this is important—regional decisions had to approved by the New York council. In other words, Broadway actors ran the show.  Actors Equity already had taken a progressive stand against segregation of audiences in 1947, effectively causing the closure of the National Theatre in Washington.

In September 1951, at a quarterly meeting of Equity in New York, the members passed a strongly worded resolution against the practice of blacklisting. Because it was passed by members, it had to go before the Equity Council, where it was hotly debated for two weeks before being rejected. A committee was formed to redraft the resolution. This time, the resolution passed, but with more diplomatic wording and unfortunately omitting a clause that drew attention the fact that Black actors faced a kind of double jeopardy “as they have always been discriminated against in terms of employment.”

 The final resolution was, however, unequivocal in its repudiation of the Communist witch hunts:  

“Whereas the aforementioned practice of “blacklisting” is by its very nature, based on secrecy and prejudiced judgement and results in conviction by accusation without an opportunity given to the accused person to be heard and to defend himself… now therefore be it resolved: That this Association again condemns the practice of “blacklisting” in all its forms, and that this Association will act to aid its members in their rights to obtain a fair and impartial hearing of any charges that may be brought against them.”

The union stood by the blacklisted actors and offered them support, and they were the first and the only performing arts organization to do so.  Following their lead, the Broadway producers joined with Equity in their condemnation of the practice. A paragraph regarding blacklisting became standard in Equity’s basic agreement:

“The Manager and Actor admit notice of the anti-blacklisting provision contained in the basic agreement between Equity and the League of New York Theatres…”

There is an old nursery rhyme that goes: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost/ For want of a shoe, the horse was lost…” and so on, through losses of rider, battle, and eventually the kingdom itself. Something like that happened in Hawaii, for want of a goddess…and here is the story:

It is February,1893. The US Marines have already landed their forces and are occupying Iolani Palace, Queen Liliuokalani’s cabinet ministers have betrayed her attempt to promulgate a new constitution, and she is being scapegoated by the colonial plantation owners as a traitor to her country. They have forced her to draft a document abdicating from the throne, but instead she has written this:

. . .to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps the loss of life, I do under protest and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States, upon the facts having been presented to it, undo the actions of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constituted sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.1

In spite of the care Liliuokalani has taken to define the situation as one that is temporary and coerced by threat of violence, the Queen’s action is interpreted as abdication, and it will continue to be interpreted that way for another hundred years… but that comes later. This is still February 1883, one month after the drafting of this document…

There has just been a great gathering of kahunas, or Native shamans, in Honolulu. They have met to consider ways to restore the Queen to the throne and to recover the sovereignty of their nation. It has become clear to the spiritual leaders that the christian god of the missionaries is not on their side in this crisis. In fact, the christian god seems very much in the pocket of the sons of the missionaries, who have grown up to become greedy plantation owners.

On February 13, 1883, three women from this gathering pay a visit to the Queen. These are three of the most powerful kahuna women of Hawaii. They are coming to tell her the good news: The goddess Hiiaka, sister of the great volcano goddess Pele, has given them instructions, and if the Queen will only follow them, she will be restored to the throne.

The word for goddess or god in Hawaiian is akua, which is somewhat indeterminate. Akua can refer to forces, persons, or things—as long as they have a lot of mana, which is another indeterminate word referencing spiritual power. According to the Wikipedia, mana is “an impersonal force or quality that resides in people, animals, and inanimate objects.” Actually, this lack of specificity is part of the secret power of the Hawaiian language

Prior to colonization, the Hawaiians did not have a written language. They didn’t have currency, either, and there is a connection. Anyway, words were meant to be spoken aloud and understood in the immediate context of what was being said. The multiplicity of meanings was intended to enhance spiritual and artistic associations, not constrict them legalistically, as in written-word cultures. According to Serge Kahili King, a present-day shaman who lives on an active volcano, “What this means is that, when we hear or read stories of an entity such as Pele, the volcano goddess, we can never be certain whether the story is about the spirit of a natural phenomenon, the human ancestor of a particular family line, or both, or neither.”2

It is important to keep this in mind when considering the kahuna women’s visit to the Queen.

Hiiaka is the goddess of Hawaiian culture. She had a human girlfriend, a woman named Hopoe, who taught her the hula dance. Hopoe’s name means “one encircled as with a lei or loving arms,” and she became Hiiaka’s companion-lover. Now, the hula dance is a very sacred practice, a ritual so powerful that even a tiny misstep can result in serious consequences for both the dancer and the community. Because of this, apprentice dancers were ritually secluded and placed under the protection of Laka, one of Hiiaka’s sister goddesses.

But for Hiiaka and Hopoe, the hula was a joyous celebration of their love, to be danced in the sacred groves of their beautiful island … at least, until Hiiaka’s older sister Pele fell in love with a human chief named Lohiau and sent her younger sister on an errand to fetch him. Pele made Hiiaka promise not to seduce the chief during the journey, and, in turn, Hiiaka made Pele promise to protect the sacred groves and Hopoe in her absence. Although Hiiaka performed her errand faithfully, she was delayed on the return trip, and Pele’s jealous temper erupted, pouring lava over her sister’s sacred groves and entombing Hopoe in the molten rock. Hiiaka, with a temper of her own, tricked Pele into killing her warrior chief. Later, much later, the sisters would reconcile.
 
So this is the goddess who has proposed a plan for putting the Queen back on her throne and who has sent kahuna women to deliver the proposal. What was it? Here is an account, taken from Helena Allen’s excellent biography, The Betrayal of Liliuokalani:

They proposed that the three with the queen form a procession and enter Iolani Palace from the King Street gate…The three would chant their way in through the gate, up past the walk, past the guards and soldiers into the throne room… ‘we in front… the queen behind’ and ‘we will stop the mouth of the gun.’ Once inside the throne room the three would lead the queen to the throne, seat her on it and then die. ‘Perhaps!’ they said, ‘death will not come at once but it will come within a few days’ and the queen will know that the gods have accepted their sacrifice.3

And what is the Queen’s response to this bold plan? She turns them down. In fact, she writes in her diary, “I wish they hadn’t come.”

Why? Because Queen Liliuokalani is an Episcopalian. She understands that any association with the kahuna women will be construed by the foreign press as a reversion to heathenism on her part. Her enemies are eager for any “proof” to support their contention that she is a superstitious savage whose irrational leadership had necessitated their intervention on behalf of her countrymen.

Also, Queen Liliuokalani has placed all her political eggs in the diplomatic basket. Naively, she believes that the invasion of her country by the US Marines has been the result of some error in communication, or some unauthorized activity on the part of a rogue commander. She believes that President McKinley, hearing the facts of the case, will set the situation to rights. She is desperate to present a demeanor as Victorian as… well, as QueenVictoria.

Queen Liliuokalani also understands that this plan is likely to result in martyrdom, and that martyrdom of kahunas, and especially of kahuna women, will result in an armed uprising throughout the islands. As a christian and as a woman and as a ruler with a profound sense of responsibility toward her people during a time of overwhelming social and political change, she does not want her actions to be the cause of a massacre by the superior forces of the Marines.
 
And so the Queen sends the kahuna women home. Unfortunately, President McKinley does not do the same with the Marines, and the rest is history.

Would the goddess’s strategy have worked? I believe that it would.

A queen who is arrested or shot as she crosses the hall of her own palace and attempts to mount the steps to her own throne is clearly not a ruler who has abdicated. Had the plan been carried out, the century-long wrangling over the legal interpretation of the Queen’s statement would never have taken place. The focus would have been entirely on the atrocity, not on a document. After shooting the Queen’s escorts, the Marines would have found it difficult to claim they were only there to protect the Queen. Sensational drawings of the murders would have circled the globe, and the international community would have risen in protest over this bloody takeover of a peaceful, island nation.

Yes, it is possible that the United States would have seized the islands anyway, as it had already done with so many indigenous lands on the continent, but Hawaii was different in that it had a constitutional monarchy recognized by the heads of Europe. It had cordial diplomatic and trade relations with the US, and it was also a geographic entity surrounded by water, whose boundaries were indisputable. The lack of armed resistance was confusing to a world that had to rely on written missives, often received months after an event.

There was also a level on which this strategy could not fail: the spiritual plane. A key element of the plan had been the proposed chanting by the kahuna women as they escorted the Queen. This chanting was as sacred as the hula dance, and just as powerful. To make a mistake in wording or pronunciation was as offensive to the goddesses as a misstep in the hula, and these kahuna women were well aware of the danger of performing such a sacred ritual in the occupied palace.

The focus and concentration necessary to perform these chants would actually enable them to create sacred, Native space around the Queen as they formed their processional. No display of imperialist domination would supplant the women’s allegiance to their Native deities, and no threat of violence to their persons would distract them from carrying out their sacred trust. Their statements to the Queen made it clear that, if they died, it would be because Hiiaka had accepted their sacrifice. The Marines had no place and no power in the paradigm they were intending to generate. The outcome was guaranteed: Either the Queen would be allowed to keep her place on the throne, or the sacrifice would be accepted, in which case Hiiaka would keep her promise.

Unfortunately, the Queen did not share the kahuna women’s perspective. She had been spiritually colonized by a turn-the-other-cheek religion—one conveniently tailored to the needs of a colonial invader. She failed to understand that no amount of Western education, European etiquette, or christian churchgoing could erase the stigma of her skin color and her biological sex in the eyes of her enemies. Arguing for the legitimacy of her constitutional monarchy could not protect her resource-rich nation from the greed of the plantation owners.

Throughout her life, she continued to hope, addressing her people in her 1898 biography: “The people to whom your fathers told of the living God, and taught to call ‘Father,’ and whom the sons now seek to despoil and destroy, are crying aloud to Him in their time of trouble; and He will keep His promise, and will listen to the voices of His Hawaiian children lamenting for their homes.”4

And so Queen Liliuokalani waited for a restoration that never came. A century later, President Clinton would sign into law the Apology Resolution “to acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and to offer an apology to the Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.”5 It is an apology deemed to have no binding legal effect.

The story of Hiiaka and Pele reads like a cautionary tale that the Queen might have done well to heed. Pele’s mesmeric attraction to the male chief temporarily blinded her to her sister’s loyalty, even as the Queen’s obsession with colonial perceptions blinded her to the powerful truths being presented to her by the kahuna women of her own nation. Tragically, for a second time, Hiiaka’s sacred groves were desecrated.

[Originally published in n Trivia: Voices of Feminism,, issue 9, March 2009.]

Footnotes:

1 “Liliuokalani,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliuokalani

2 “Hawaiian Goddesses” by Sergi Kahili King, Aloha International http://www.huna.org/html/hawaiian_goddesses.html  

3 Allen, Helena. The Betrayal of Liliuokalani:Last Queen of Hawaii. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1982, p. 199.

4 Liliuokalani, Lydia. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/liliuokalani/hawaii/hawaii.html

5 “Hawaiian Independence” http://www.hawaii-nation.org/publawsum.html

 The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]