"The Bonobo Appropriation."  There, I fixed it. 
 
What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, a new book by Diane L. Rosenfeld.

I'm not happy with it. Read on...
 
The book is a passionate plea for women to model ourselves after the bonobos, a species of great apes. They are the last of the great apes to be scientifically described, because they weren’t recognized as a separate species until 1929. The bonobos began to get a lot of press during the Second Wave, because, unlike females from other species of great apes-- including humans, the bonobo females are empowered. They are not stalked, threatened, battered, raped, or murdered by the males. Their culture and their species are peaceful.

Dr.Rosenfeld, founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, rightfully identifies the bonobos as a species from whom we have much to learn. In fact, she urges women to be “bonobos,” to hear the “bonobo call” of our sisters in distress, to subscribe to the “Declaration of Unified Independence from Patriarchal Violence” and the “Preamble to the Bonobo Sisterhood Constitution.” The entire book appears to be an homage to female bonobos and a call to us humans to reverse our evolutionary course away from the path of the patriarchally violent chimps and in the direction of the bonobos.

Rosenfeld’s credentials on the subject of violence against women are impressive: She was the  first Senior Counsel in the Office on Violence Against Women at the United States Department of Justice, and before that she was an Executive Assistant Attorney General at the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She’s got a law degree the university of Wisconsin and a secondary law degree from Harvard.  Her research areas include “Title IX and campus sexual assault prevention and response; prevention of intimate partner homicide; and addressing commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.”[from the Harvard Law website]

She has spent a long time studying what happens to us, and she has spent a long time studying the jurisprudence that enables perpetrators and betrays us into their hands over and over. I am, frankly, in awe of her focus and her activism.

What I am not in awe of is her appropriation of the bonobo. Her book is, frankly, homophobic.  What sets these female apes apart from all the other great apes is their sexuality. Take a look:

“More often than the males, female bonobos engage in mutual [that is "same-sex"] genital-rubbing behavior, possibly to bond socially with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. The bonding among females enables them to dominate most of the males. Adolescent females often leave their native community to join another community. This migration mixes the bonobo gene pools, providing genetic diversity. Sexual bonding with other females establishes these new females as members of the group.” [Wikipedia]

And how did this amazing adaptation arise, you ask? Well...

“Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo 'is maybe half' that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is 'three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.' In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, ‘which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement;’ he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice ‘about once every two hours’ on average." [Wikipedia]

Tribadism once every two hours, all day, every day.  Females across the board preferring sex with each other to sex with males. Every two hours. Yeah, that would definitely change the culture, not to mention the course of history.

Dr. Rosenfeld makes absolutely ZERO mention of bonobo sexuality, except to note that the females, as a result of their remarkable sisterhood, have empowered themselves to have sexual autonomy. In other words, she puts the cart before the horse and then eliminates the horse altogether.

Understandably, that cart is not going anywhere.

Without female-to-female sexual bonding there is no bonobo sisterhood, no powerful alliance to counter male aggression, no acceptance of females into new tribes, no intergenerational female bonds.

Her omission is no oversight. It flies in the face of primatology and common sense. This evolved, large, frontally-located clitoris is the engine that drives the female bonding. In fact, primatologist Franz de Waal notes in his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist that the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female... higher than after sex with males. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but it is probable that it significantly enhances bonding.

Dr. Rosenfeld wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants the bonobo empowerment, but  she wants it to happen in heteropatriarchy. In fact, she wants it to prop up heteronormativity. She wants to lift up the culture of bonobos as a model for human culture. She wants to write a best-selling book on the thesis that all women need to do is understand the potency of female bonding in order to emulate it. She doesn’t want to have to lose any readers by bringing up the persistent, round-the-clock, same-sex, genital activity that is the single most obvious, unique, and prominent behavioral trait of the female bonobos.

Because if she did, she might have to acknowledge that this same-sex activity among females, most notably among lesbians, does indeed lend itself to unique female bonding. Lesbian history shows us over and over how lesbian women have confronted males, established alternative all-female institutions, led the fight for feminist social reforms, and developed counter-cultural narratives to challenge the patriarchy.

Dr. Rosenfeld would have her readers believe that the bonobos were a species whose females achieved autonomy through mystically evolved feminist brains instead of enormous clitorises. She wants us to believe that heterosexual women can train themselves to think like them, and form alliances as enduring and as powerful as theirs just by using their heads.

This attitude is hugely disrespectful to the millions of women across the millennia who have not wanted to be terrorized and abused. Every woman knows that it is males who perpetrate and aggress against us and against our children, especially our daughters. If the solution was as simple as reading a book about the power of female alliances, I’m sure that book would have been written in hieroglyphs and those alliances would have been made centuries ago.

There is another omission in Rosenfeld’s book. She fails to note that even though chimp culture is patriarchal and the male chimpanzees will attack and batter female chimpanzees, there are no records of the males murdering the females. In fact, humans are the only great ape species that murders its females. After all, how anti-evolutionary can you get... murdering the mothers of the tribe? So, how is it that the chimps don’t murder the females?

Well... Chimpanzees are sexually segregated. The males prefer the company of males, and the females prefer the company of females. Females do not go off with male partners and live in isolation with them. The females stay together, raise their offspring together, and sleep together within earshot of each other. When they do mate, it is in the open and in daylight, where other chimps can witness and intervene.

But the female bonding of the chimps is not mentioned either. Advocating separatism would certainly alienate a heterosexual readership participating in a culture of monogamous pair-bonding.

The solution to male violence against women is not cherry-picking primate outcomes and mistaking them as starting points. The solution is not as simple as “sisterhood.”  If she had consulted with lesbians, studied our sexual bonding and alliances, she would have understood that our culture constitutes a resistance movement. It comes at a price.That price is precisely the stigma that Rosenfeld hopes to avoid with the unscientific omissions in her thesis.

I am reminded of the fable of the drunk person who is looking for their lost keys under the lamppost, when they dropped them somewhere in the dark. Rosenfeld’s search is a cheerful one, and positivity abounds. Lots of light. This won’t be hard at all. We just need to wake up to this new idea.  But the key to solving male violence lies outside the glow of the heteronormative, patriarchal lamppost. I would submit, considering the bonobo example, that heteronormativity is itself a patriarchal concept. Historically, it has never worked in our favor. The key to female autonomy lies in the culture and history of lesbians. The bonding is in the body, and it always will be.

Rosenfeld is extremely knowledgeable about the laws that hold women back. She advocates for changes in the laws around self-defense that acknowledge the patriarchal threats to women, that give us the right to participate in collective self-defense. She advocates for changes in conspiracy laws that acknowledge the ways that male alliances enable large-scale sexual abuse. And finally, she advocates for believing women as credible witnesses.

And yet she gaslights her readers, throwing lesbians under the bus, and arguing for the "logic of the bonobo sisterhood," when that very logic rests on a foundation of immediate gratification: seeking maximum sexual pleasure and finding it with other females.  The bonobo alliances are effect, not cause.

Rosenfeld has an whole section on the subject of compliance sex, excoriating it and expressing a longing for a social system that precludes unwanted sex.  The sad truth is that  her book is itself an artifact of compliance sex culture.

Self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians. Alliances to protect women and children? Collective self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians in any reform movement for women. Check out our history with female-only educational institutions, with the WAVES and the WAACs (female-only military branches), with the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis lines, the suffrage movement on two continents. Refusal of compliance sex? We are the champions. In fact, our resistance to unwanted sex is the source of our stigma. The very stigma that this book so rigidly and so glaringly enforces.

The Bonobo Sisterhood is a Trojan horse of a book, and I am calling the author to account for her damaging, disingenuous, homophobic, science-denial omissions and her appropriations.

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

Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007

Originally published in off our backs, vol. xxxiv, 2003 Washington, DC.

I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by the mere switching of pronouns.
 
And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…

This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern, faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.
 
Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?
 
And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of 40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes of the child in The Opoponax, bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled discoveries of the developing mind.

"I am the opoponax. You must not provoke him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the window sill. I am the opoponax."
 
Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity. She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct toward each other and toward themselves:
 
"Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/ whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest."

She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:
 
"The kaleidoscope game consists of inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects, their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter."
 
She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.
 
"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning."
 
Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of women warriors:
 
"The women say the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent."

Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the feminaries destroyed:
 
"The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations."
 
Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of ownership, and that women must resist it:
 
"The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak"
 
"The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world."

Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and memorialize a myth of her own making:
 
"For almost two milleniums lesbians had been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called 'glorious.' From which comes the 'Glorious Age.'"

Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.
 
 The obligatory and all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”– is distinctly lesbian.
 
The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids…

Listen:

Originally published in off our backs, March 1, 2006.

I met Tee Corinne at a women writers’ group in her home a few weeks after I moved to Southern Oregon, in 1988. I had just come out, and Tee was the first lesbian artist I had met whose art was for lesbians and from a lesbian perspective. I could not have found a more inspiring and revolutionary model.
 
Tee was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art. According to Tee, “I have seldom succeeded in keeping a diary, but I have almost always carried a drawing pad and, since, my eighth year, I have also had a camera.” 1
 
With a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and painting (with minors in English and history), she went on in 1968 to get an MFA in drawing and sculpture at Pratt Institute. After a few years of teaching and backpacking in Europe, she became attracted to the back-to-the-land movement and communal living. She was also, in her words, sliding into suicidal depression:

Something didn’t feel right. Nowadays they talk about over-achieving adult children of alcoholics and the problems they have with depression… Around the age of thirty I realized that art could no longer solve my problems… I found therapy, separated from my husband, became involved with women and joined the Women’s Movement. I felt better. 2
 
At forty-four, Tee recovered memories of being sexually molested at the age of six. .
I am coming to look on my suicidal years (13-29) through the lens of this information, and find, even then, strengths to be drawn upon: the strength of the survivor; the strength of talking which chips away at the killing silence; the knowledge of the value of my own life. It’s mine. I’ve paid for it.3

Tee’s photography traced the roadmap of her personal journey. In the early 1970’s, after moving to California, Tee began working on the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard, where she claims she learned an appreciation of sexual information. She began researching erotic art by classical artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. At this time, the early Second Wave feminists were arguing that heterosexuality and erotic art objectified women, but Tee’s resistance took an alternate approach: …“sensuality at its best is transformative. If I had a sense of being in touch with God, it would be at the point of orgasm.” 4  
 
She became adept at representing lesbian sexuality in ways that would elude the male gaze. In 1982, she produced a series of photographs called Yantras of Womanlove. Concerned with protecting the privacy of her models, she used techniques involving multiple prints, solarization, images printed in negative, and multiple exposures. Tee consistently and conscientiously included women of color, fat women, older women, and women with disabilities as her subjects. Sometimes printers would refuse to print her works and art galleries would refuse to show it. In 1975, she self-published the Cunt Coloring Book, which is still in print today.
 

In the early 1980’s, Tee moved to Southern Oregon, becoming part of a community of lesbians and other women who were self-consciously creating and documenting a radical, women-only culture. Many of these women were living on “women’s lands,” rural separatist collectives and communes that had been founded in the 1970’s. She became a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-83). During the next decade, much of her work would focus on her experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family and being molested as a child.
 
My grandmother Mabel died when I was forty, leaving me a suitcase full of five generations of photographs… 5  Somewhere in the process of enlarging and coloring in the old photo images, I began to bring the past and present together, visually and psychically.6
 

During this period, Tee edited several anthologies of lesbian erotic fiction. As an editor, Tee was scrupulously respectful of class difference as it is reflected in writing, again modeling an authentic, not tokenized, diversity. She looked for “stories about how sexuality could work with the bodies we have, within our disparate personal histories.”7
 
In 2004, Tee’s partner of fourteen years, writer and social activist Beverly Anne Brown, was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer and given a terminal diagnosis. Wanting to use something more immediate than darkroom techniques, Tee learned to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in order to “push the polite boundaries of portraiture.”8 The result is the series “Cancer in Our Lives.”
 
After the death of her partner, Tee was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer. On August 27, 2006, she died quietly in her home. She was surrounded by a network of loving and supportive members of her community, who thoughtfully maintained a weblog in order to keep Tee’s wider, international community informed about her health.

In the monograph about her exhibit titled “Family,” Tee wrote:
 
If I look inside me, talk to the child within who, after all, is the one who originally wanted to be an artist, I find that she almost always knows how she wants my work to look: “Beautiful, in a big and powerful way.”9
 
Those words could stand as her epitaph. Tee, you will be missed.
 

Footnotes:
 
1. Tee Corinne, “Personal Statement,” http://www.varoregistry.com/corinne/pers.html
2. Tee Corinne, Family: Growing Up In an Alcoholic Family, (North Vancouver, B.C: Gallerie Publications, 1970), p. 3.
3. Ibid, p. 9.
4. Tee Corinne, interviewed by Barbara Kyne, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html
5. Corinne, Family, p. 7.
6. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
7. Tee Corinne, Riding Desire, (Austin, Texas: Banned Books, 1990), p.viii).
8. Tee Corinne, “Colored Pictures” from “Cancer in Our Lives,” http://www.jeansirius.com/TeeACorinne/Colored_Pictures/
9. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
 

Written for Maize in 2013

When I think of Julia Penelope, I think of lesbians, linguistics, and rocks. One was her passion, one was her vocation, and one was her avocation. In my mind, the three have many things in common. Their commonness, for starts. 
 
Lesbians, and words, and rocks. Prevalent, universal, not rare, ordinary, without rank or position, of familiar type.  But to someone who has made a life study of them, lesbians, words and rocks are full of secrets, packed with history, and freighted with potential.
 
Julia knew history. She knew the stories. She knew where lesbians came from, starting with herself. And she generously shared that history… a history of sexual abuse, of being a “kept butch” and a “stone butch,” a history of patriarchal attitudes. And she shared her emergence into a world of radical lesbian-feminist values. She understood where words came from and how their uses evolved and were evolving. She understood the significance of story to the lives of women, and how words could be manipulated to control that story. She understood the structure and the politic of language… “unlearning the lies of the fathers’ tongues”—as her book Speaking Freely is so aptly subtitled.

And she studied and collected rocks. She loved to go “rockhounding.” Where others would see just an uninteresting pile of rocks, she would find her treasures. She knew the history of rocks: which ones had evolved their distinct characteristics under centuries of compression, which were the result of cooling magma, which were aggregates of minerals bonded together over time. She knew which rocks were precious and semi-precious, which would be enhanced by polishing, and which were likely to prove geodes with secret, crystalline fairy structures hidden under their crude exteriors.
 
Lesbians, words, and rocks. She leaves a solid, living, individual legacy. Thank you for your dedication and your integrity.

Originally published in in Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Issue 5, Feb., 2007.

“Andrea was always clear, and because she was always clear, she was always misunderstood. Andrea was always fierce, and because of this, she was always vulnerable.”—Words spoken at the Memorial Service for Andrea Dworkin, NYC.
 
These words were spoken in a memorial service to Andrea Dworkin, feminist philosopher, author, and uncompromising activist against pornography and prostitution. I regret that I did not take note of who delivered them, because they so brilliantly summed up the conundrum of this great woman's life.

How is it that clarity can result in misunderstanding? How is it that being fierce can result in vulnerability?
 
Andrea made no concessions to political expediency, societal prejudices, academic protocols, or social hierarchies.  She spoke the truth as she saw it, with what certainly appeared to me to be complete disregard for the consequences to herself. Few of us can do that. Few of us would want to. We like to be accepted. We like to feel that what we are saying will be acceptable. We are concerned about alienating our audiences, offending our hosts, embarrassing our friends, jeopardizing our careers, sabotaging our networks, compromising our alliances. We censor and edit ourselves in order to be effective. We are understood, at least in part, because we are willing to tailor our message to our audience's capacity to hear it. We stay away from our bottom line as long as we can in order to keep everyone at the table as long as possible.

Andrea's clarity came from the fact she spoke directly from her bottom line. It's visible in nearly everything she said or wrote. It was always crystal clear where she stood on an issue, and she stood with those whose voices were the most silenced: the women and children who were victims of sexual abuse. Andrea's bottom line made clear to most that she did not have a lot of support from powerful mainstream allies. She was not supported by academia, by corporate interests, by left-wing liberals, by governmental agencies, or even by the women's movement that she helped establish. Her clarity made it clear that she was fair game to anyone wanting to disparage, discredit, misquote, vilify, scapegoat, ridicule, malign, or libel her. Reputations could be enhanced and careers promoted by attacking Andrea. Misunderstanding Andrea Dworkin became a national pastime, an industry, and an academic discipline.
 
And what about her fierceness? Being fierce strikes me as a protective response. Something about which one cares deeply has become endangered. This is not the dictionary definition, but it's what I think of whenever the word is applied to women. Andrea's fierceness invariably drew attention to whatever or whomever was under attack, and also to how deeply, how passionately, how utterly she cared. In a world of cool political machinations and sado-masochistic academic equivocating, Andrea stood out Wildly. There was something feral about her fierceness.

Andrea has died, but her words live on - weapons and shields both. Who can be fierce and clear enough to pick these up and engage with an enemy that never sleeps, an enemy that grows stronger and more global every day, and who never seems to tire of inventing new tortures and humiliations for women?
 

Originally published by Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 2009

Portuguese translation: “A verdade inconveniente sobre Teena Brandon”

I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won’t hear this mentioned in Boys Don’t Cry, and you won’t hear it mentioned in the documentary “The Brandon Teena Story.” You won’t read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said, inconvenient.
 
“Inconvenient” means “causing trouble or difficulties.” The inconvenient truth of Brandon’s incest history causes trouble because incorporating information about child sexual abuse into the narrative of Brandon’s life pathologizes the transgendered identity adopted by Brandon and for which she has become an icon. This is perceived as disrespectful and transphobic—as an attack on Brandon’s identity and a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity.
 
But the omission of Brandon’s incest history is disrespectful and phobic to survivors of child sexual abuse. It also constitutes a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity. As a survivor, I am disturbed by the revisionist histories of Brandon that omit Brandon’s status as a victim of child sexual abuse—and all of the subsequent inconvenient truths accompanying that status.
 

Inconvenient truths have a way of remaining unarticulated, because they exist outside the frame of reference that has been established. The first difficulty one encounters in telling this inconvenient truth about Teena Brandon is the issue of pronouns. Brandon was sexually abused as a female child, born biologically female, by an adult male perpetrator who was a family member. The gender of victim and perpetrator are clinical details that are critical to the understanding of the perpetration and the impact it had on Brandon. Because of this, I will be using a female pronoun to refer to Brandon as a child, even though, in adulthood, Brandon would identify as male. This places my narrative outside the accepted protocol of respectful dialogue about trans identity.
 
In this essay, I will refer to her as “Brandon,” because, as an adult, she chose to adopt her given surname as her personal name. In titling the essay, I have used her legal, given name “Teena Brandon.” It is another inconvenient truth that Brandon never used the name “Brandon Teena.” This name was posthumously ascribed, and then picked up by the media. It was a convenient untruth, because it constituted a clever reversal of Brandon’s birth name, flipping the name to correspond with flipping gender. “Brandon Teena” is a PR-savvy metaphor… and a fiction.

In Aphrodite Jones’ biography, All She Wanted, the first narration of the sexual abuse shows up in an interview with Sara Gapp, Brandon’s best friend when Brandon was twelve. “She [Brandon] told me that one of her relatives was doing something to her that she didn’t like. She just kinda said that, you know, he would kinda whip this thing out and kinda play with it a little bit… and she said occasionally he’d have her touch him and then he would play with her and tell her, ‘oh, you like it. You know this feels good… You know you don’t want me to stop.’” (Jones, 43) According to Sara, “At that point in time, she didn’t want anyone to know about what happened. She didn’t want the guy mad at her… She was embarrassed. No matter what he did to her, she still loved him.” (Jones, 43)
 
Brandon’s therapist later confirmed the story of the abuse, adding that, according to Brandon, the sessions of abuse would last for hours and that the molestation continued for a period of years, from childhood into adolescence. In one counseling session, Brandon confronted her mother JoAnn about it, but requested that she not confront the perpetrator, who may have been one of JoAnn’s relatives. Brandon’s sister Tammy, also a victim, confirmed Brandon’s account. It is possible that this abuse was a factor in Brandon’s decision to leave home at sixteen, get a job, and move in with her then-girlfriend, Traci Beels, an older classmate.

In her book Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self, Janet Liebman Jacobs states that incest represents “the most extreme form of the sexual objectification of the female child in patriarchal culture.” (Jacobs, 11) She makes a compelling case for the fact that incest has a major impact on female personality development, including gender identity.
 
Jacobs’ book highlights significant developmental issues that influence the personality formation of sexually abused daughters, and among these is identification with the perpetrator. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child psychoanalysis, elaborates on this process:
 
'A child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-object and so assimilates an anxiety-experience which he [she] has just undergone… By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself [herself] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat." (Freud, 121)

Turning away from her mother, whom she perceives as an untrustworthy betrayer-of-her-own-kind, the victimized daughter looks toward the male perpetrator, who, because he is her abuser, is perceived as powerful, and who, because he is male, still hold the potential for objective idealization. “Female,” for the daughter, has become identified as the subjective gender for victims and betrayers. According to trauma researcher Judith Herman, “In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent… More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent.” (Herman, 106) Describing her research with survivors of father-daughter incest, Herman notes, “With the exception of those who had become conscious feminists, most of the incest victims seemed to regard all women, including themselves, with contempt.” (Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 103)
 
Rejecting the mother and her own female identity, the victimized daughter begins to imitate the aggressor. E. Sue Blume, author of Secret Survivors, describes how the daughter reinvents herself through identification with the perpetrator.
 
"...child victims often recreate themselves, developing alter egos who offer a positive live alternative to their own. Most commonly, this is a male persona: female survivor clients may either substitute alternative male personalities, or attach to a male fantasy companion. This is simple to understand: as a victim, and a female, she associates her vulnerable state with defenselessness; males, however, are seen as physically stronger, and not easily targeted for victimization." (Blume, 85)

Brandon didn’t like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could look up them when the girls climbed the stairs. Because she attended a school that required uniforms, she wore the pants and ties that were standard for the boys, but that girls were also allowed to wear. According to her best friend Sara Gapp, “People kept saying she dressed like a guy. She didn’t… She dressed in clothes that she felt comfortable in. She didn’t go to the guys’ section to buy those clothes. Those were women’s clothes she was wearing. She just liked baggy clothes. She wore short hair. Does that make her a guy?” (Jones, 55)
 
The choice to wear baggy clothes is consistent with the choices of many survivors of sexual abuse. Brandon’s “passing” as a man began later as a practical joke on a teenaged girl who dialed Brandon’s number by accident and mistook her for a boy on the phone. According to Sarah, “Up until Liz Delano [the mistaken caller], if you had called her a boy, Teena would be offended. She didn’t want to be recognized as a guy. She didn’t feel like a guy.” (Jones, 54)
 
Brandon has also been described as indulging in male role-playing. According to her sister Tammy,
 
"The church was really significant to her. We went to Catholic school, and I think they kind of brainwash you in kindergarten on being priests and nuns. They always bring in priests and nuns to talk about how they got the calling and how you’ll know if you have the calling… Teena never wanted to be a nun; she always wanted to be a priest, and I thought it was funny because I had to participate in her masses, and I’d get really bored half the time, ‘cause she’d read from the Bible and make us sing. I thought it was just a game she played; then every once in a while she’d say, ‘Oh, I want to be a priest someday.’" (Jones, 34)

Was Brandon identifying with the power to officiate or with the gender? In light of the Church’s ban against women priests, which denies women the prestige, ceremonial office, and opportunity for leadership associated with the priesthood, it would be irresponsible to attribute Brandon’s desire to be a priest to “gender dysphoria”—a term that, when applied to females, could as well be defined as “sex-caste resistance.” Identification with gender roles in a male dominant culture cannot be separated from identification with the privileges that accompany those roles. As pioneer psychoanalyst Karen Horney notes, “We live… in a male culture, i.e. state, economy, art and science are creations of man and thus filled with his spirit.” (Horney, 152)
 
Brandon’s discomfort with her developing body has been documented. In her book, Aphrodite Jones reports that Brandon hated the pain caused by her developing breasts, and that she also complained of the pain of menstrual cramps and the inconvenience of having to deal with a monthly flow of blood. Were these the objections of a “male trapped in a female body,” or of a particularly self-assertive and articulate girlchild appalled by the inconvenience, embarrassment, and pain of the adult female body?
 
Brandon’s discomfort ran deeper than annoyance. She reported that it would “make her feel sick” (Jones, 47) to have anyone stare at her chest. Again, a girl need not be an incest survivor to register disgust at the sexual objectification of her developing body at puberty, but the female incest survivor who has internalized a masculine ideal faces a different set of obstacles:
 
"While puberty represents a painful time for many adolescent girls, for daughters in incest families this transition into female adulthood may be especially difficult and confusing as her body signals not only the passage into female adulthood but the recognition that the internalized masculine ideal is truly a fantasy of other and can never be the real self. "(Jacobs, 86)

The rejection of the female self can offer an explanation for the prevalence of eating disorders at puberty among incest survivors. Brandon, at the time of her attempted suicide, was reported as manifesting serious eating disorders.
 
"For the incest survivor, her body becomes the symbol of her victimization and thus the focus of her desire for control. Further, the obsession with a thin, boyish body, rather than an expression of femininity, may represent an unconscious rejection of the female self through which the daughter attempts to integrate the internalized male ego ideal with an external image of a masculinized child’s body." (Jacobs, 88)

Brandon reported that in October 1990, she was raped. That same fall, when she was almost eighteen, Brandon tried to join the army. According to her friends, she was eager to be a part of Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately, she did not pass the written exams. This appears to have been a turning point for her. According to her mother, “She was really upset… She started to change.” (Jones, 47)
 
One of the biggest questions about Brandon’s choices is “Why didn’t she identify herself as lesbian?” She may well have been trying to do that when she attempted to enlist. Why would a transman want to enlist in a strictly segregated, all-female environment? The military, in spite of its homophobic policies and witch hunts, has always appealed to lesbians, because it has historically provided a same-sex living and work environment for four years.
 
Although rape and sexual harassment occur in the military, a survivor who associates her violation with isolation and ongoing exposure to access by males might feel there was safety in an all-female environment, and especially if she had just been raped. Also, army regulation uniforms provide protective covering that de-emphasize sexual characteristics and discourage sexual objectification. It would be naive to assume that Brandon, who had, by high school, identified her sexual attraction to women and who had already moved in with one girlfriend, was unaware of the association of lesbians with the military. She may well have been looking for the lesbians, and this may explain in part her extreme reaction to failing the entrance exam.
 
If this is the case, then why didn’t she go looking for the communities of lesbians in her hometown? Because “don’t ask, don’t tell” was not a policy that applied to working-class gays and lesbians in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1990. The homophobia there was overt and potentially life-threatening. Harassment could take the form of anonymous, obscene phone calls, drive-by threats and insults, and physical assault. Because rape is viewed by homophobes as a “cure” for lesbianism, harassment can take the form of threats of rape, or the act itself.

For a young woman who had a horror of male sexuality and who had told friends that rape was one of her biggest fears, and who had just been raped, the prospect of this kind of harassment must have been terrifying. The October rape may, in fact, have been a homophobic assault directed against her, as a woman who didn’t date men and who had a history of cohabitation with a girlfriend.
 
But there was another reason why Brandon wasn’t identifying herself as lesbian: Lesbianism had become a power issue between Brandon and her mother.
 
In March of 1991, shortly after Brandon’s rejection by the army, a teenaged girl named Liz Delano dialed a wrong number and reached Brandon by mistake. Liz mistook Brandon for a teenaged boy, and Brandon played along, calling herself “Billy.” For a joke, she put a sock in her underwear and met Liz at a skating rink as Billy. Liz continued to call the Brandon home and ask for “Billy,” and JoAnn began to understand that her daughter was posing as a boy. She was not happy.
 
A few weeks later, Brandon began a relationship with Heather, a fourteen-year-old friend of Liz. She moved in with Heather, posing as a male and calling herself “Ten-a.” JoAnn Brandon understood that this relationship was a sexual one, and she began telephoning both Heather and Heather’s mother, insisting that the young man they had taken into their home was her daughter. Heather, like Brandon, was an incest survivor. According to the account in Jones’ biography, the focus of Brandon’s relationship was intense, romantic role-playing, not genital sex, and Heather responded initially with gratitude for the thoughtful behaviors and absence of sexual pressure. Brandon deeply resented JoAnn’s attempt to sabotage the relationship, and she especially resented her mother’s attempt to cast her in the role of a sexual (lesbian) predator.
 
To explain away her mother’s persistent calls, Brandon told Heather that she had been born a hermaphrodite, but that JoAnn had chosen to raise her as a female in order to “keep her for herself.” (Jones, 89) According to Heather, “He [Brandon] had a legitimate answer for everything. He’d tell me his mother couldn’t accept the fact that he was male, that she wanted two little girls, that she was just playing a joke.” (Jones, 67) Brandon’s knowledge of hermaphroditism had come from an episode of the Phil Donahue show.

JoAnn herself tells a different story: “I knew that all of a sudden there were beer parties going on and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter over there that’s not supposed to be drinking or doing anything.”(Jones, 67) She understood that any sexual activity between Brandon and the fourteen-year-old Heather was statutory rape. JoAnn was outraged by Brandon’s claim of hermaphroditism. “I gave birth to her; I know what sex she is. There were no attachments anywhere that had to be removed.” (Jones, 68)
 
JoAnn stepped up her campaign to “out” her daughter. She sent two lesbian co-workers to visit Heather’s mother. They had photographs of Brandon as a little girl and a copy of her birth certificate. In response, Brandon tore up every picture of herself she could find. Perceiving lesbianism as her mother’s attempt to break up her relationship, Brandon began binding her breasts, lowering her voice, and using men’s rooms in public.
 
In June 1991, Brandon filed a complaint against her mother for harassment. She and Heather took the tape from their answering machine to the police. On it was a message from JoAnn calling them lesbians and threatening to expose them. Her mother’s insistence on Brandon’s lesbianism had become a serious enough power issue to involve the police.
 
Lesbianism was a family issue in another sense. The winter following Brandon’s attempt to enlist, her sister Tammy had given up a baby for adoption—to a lesbian couple from San Francisco. Brandon had urged her sister to keep the baby. She had wanted desperately to be an aunt. Later, one of Brandon’s gay male friends would report how “He [Brandon] hated lesbians; he was totally against lesbians,” (Jones, 93) citing the adoption as the reason for this hatred.

That same summer, Brandon began forging checks in order to buy groceries and gifts for Heather. She had obtained a fake identification card and was getting jobs as a man. She began telling friends that she had gotten a sex-change operation in Omaha. By October, she had been cited on two counts of second-degree forgery. Brandon’s illegal activities began to accelerate, as did her drinking, compulsive behaviors, and eating disorders. Finally, Sarah, her best friend, decided to take matters into her own hands. She met with Heather and explained to her that Brandon was a female. Heather terminated the relationship and Brandon attempted to kill herself by taking a bottle of antibiotics. This landed her in a crisis center, and here, finally, she was able to receive professional counseling.

Brandon spent seven days at the crisis center. Dr. Klaus Hartman wrote up the initial report. Brandon’s history would have included twelve pending charges of forgery, a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, an untreated rape in October 1990, eating disorders, binge drinking, and an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl. The diagnosis? A mild case of identity disorder. After just a few days of counseling, Brandon told her mother that a sex change operation had been suggested by her therapist.
 
Was transsexualism Brandon’s idea or the therapists’? Mental health clinician Deb Brodtke took over Brandon’s case at the crisis center and continued to treat her for almost a year on an outpatient basis. Brandon is reported telling Brodtke she wanted to be a male, “to not have to deal with the negative connotations of being a lesbian and because she felt less intimidated by men when she presented herself as male.” (Jones, 83) If this is true, what Brandon told her therapist was not that she felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body, but a woman trapped in a world where it was dangerous to be female, and especially dangerous to be lesbian.
 
Jones’ book does not record any attempt on Brodtke’s part to challenge Brandon’s internalized lesbophobia. There is no record in her narrative of efforts to supply Brandon with information about lesbian culture or lesbian history, information about lesbian coming-out groups or groups for young lesbians. There is no record of her attempting to connect Brandon with an adult lesbian who could counsel or mentor her. The “gender identity disorder” (GID) diagnosis reflects the historical heterosexism of the mental health field, which has traditionally understood gay and lesbian desire as evidence of the desire  to become a member of the other sex.
                                   
Brandon’s diagnosis appears not to have included alcoholism. It’s interesting to note how prevalent the use and abuse of alcohol is in the documentary, the biography, and the feature film—and yet how absent it appears to have been from the treatment plan. If alcohol abuse had been identified as even a contributing factor to the chaos and torment of Brandon’s young life, it seems logical that there would have been some attempt to incorporate a recovery program into the treatment plan.
 

And finally, Brandon’s GID diagnosis, so replete with homophobia and gender bias, also appears to have ignored the “elephant in the living room”—the incest. The account of Brandon’s treatment and diagnosis does not appear to include Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome commonly associated with survivors of child abuse, and especially survivors of incest. This is remarkable given the fact that, at the clinic, Brandon presented with a record of years of untreated child sexual abuse, a report of a recent rape, an escalation of criminal activity, a history of multiple identities, sexual predation toward under-aged girls, extreme risk-taking behaviors, avoidance of medical care from fear of routine examinations, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, terror of being in a female body, expressed fear of men, preference for protective clothing, and compulsive bathing—six or seven showers a day with changes of clothing. (Brandon’s obsession with cleanliness would continue throughout her life, and, according to friends, even in her last years, she was still taking three or four showers a day.)
 
Instead of a diagnosis related to trauma, the therapist apparently sent Brandon home with information about “gender reassignment” surgeries, which would include such procedures as suturing the vagina, removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus, transplanting the nipples, constructing an appendage using skin grafts from the thighs, and administering steroids. Brandon’s friends reported that Brandon expressed a marked ambivalence about these recommendations.
 
Her sister Tammy remembers the family’s reaction:
 
"Basically, we were getting worried about Teena. And we couldn’t get any help for her… you know, not help to deal with her being gay or anything like that, but help to deal with her trying to figure out herself. Maybe she needed some counseling. And she had mentioned to us about committing suicide, so we kind of used that as a reason of getting her to there [Lincoln General Hospital], and the psychologist there said that Teena needed long-term help… which I don’t know if that was really the case, but they did send her out to the Crisis Center, and… I wish I really knew what Teena had told them or what those doctors had told Teena, but basically, she came out of there saying, ‘I want a sex change,’ and… ‘They told me I need to do this and that.’ And they might have told her that, but I don’t know if that’s really what she wanted to do.” "(Muska)

In advocating for the surgery that would facilitate Brandon’s transition, the therapist advised her of the professionally-mandated, year-long probationary period, a period in which the patient would be required to live as a man. Had Brandon described her current strategies for passing as a man in relationships—strategies involving the deception and statutory rape of naive and inexperienced minors who were unlikely to be assertive or educated enough to confront Brandon’s sexual subterfuges? If the therapist did address the legal, ethical, or safety issues of these strategies, Brandon never saw any reason to revise them. In fact, armed with the official diagnosis of “Axis I: transsexualism,” Brandon escalated her deceptions and seductions.
 
After this counseling, her repertory of lies expanded to include tales of her grandmother’s plans to send her to Europe to have the surgery done, and of scheduled dates in June 1993 for a bilateral mastectomy. She told her various girlfriends at various times that her vagina had been sewn up, that “something” had been implanted that would eventually grow into a penis, and that she had begun hormone therapy. Like the stories of hermaphroditism that preceded the transsexual diagnosis, all were untrue.

According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter’s repudiation of a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to childhood sexual abuse.
 
If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as “performative.” Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.
 
The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not “fucking with gender.” Gender has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her perception of herself.
 
"What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What’s different is that you just ‘do’ it differently: it is ‘allowed’ to be attached to different bodies. The aim of transgender politics is to allow you to be ‘be’ the gender that you ‘are.’ However, being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men and women… And it’s no surprise that what is female and what is male in this view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. "(Corson, 3)

Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender hierarchy, but what it does do is “render women’s choices to oppose this hierarchy as women and on behalf of women incomprehensible.”(Corson, 3)
 
In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized daughter’s “gender dysphoria” is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.
                       
"A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and incommensurability."(Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193)

Dissociation is a survival strategy.
 
"It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation (double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it allows escape from experiencing the event and from responsibility/guilt, and it may serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self. The child may begin by using the dissociative mechanism spontaneously and sporadically. With repeated victimization and double-bind injunctions, it becomes chronic. It may further become an autonomous process as the individual ages." (Courtois, 155)
 
Dissociation is a way of altering consciousness. As millions of survivors can testify, these dissociated memories have not really gone away. Whether or not they ever surface to the conscious mind, they continue to exert their influence through somatic disorders, flashbacks, sleep disturbances, intrusive dreams, and dissociative disorders. Repressed memories do not go away because one wishes them away. The survivor takes control of her life by understanding and assimilating repressed trauma, not reinforcing the split. And this is precisely why the GID diagnosis is so potentially pernicious when applied to the victimized daughter.
 
When the GID diagnosis is substituted for identification and treatment of PTSD, it reinforces the splitting that was a result of childhood trauma. However “queer” the diagnosis, it does not deviate from a model of normativity based on traditional sex-caste roles. The GID diagnosis that recommends transsexualism as a “cure” seriously compromises the victimized daughter’s potential for recovery from the effects of her trauma. Instead of offering techniques to aid her retrieval of memory and reintegration of dissociated material, the GID diagnosis enables and encourages an even deeper investment in the disorder, by offering a false promise of legitimizing this ahistorical dissociative identity through “reassignment” of gender. It exploits, rather than deconstructs, the syndrome.

Finally, when the transgender identity is an extension and amplification of the victimized daughter’s identification with the perpetrator, a divided consciousness continues to inform the survivor’s psyche, playing itself out in scenarios of revictimization.
 
"In both the play and imagination of the survivors, a tenuous relationship exists between the internalized male abuser and the violated female child… While the introjection of the perpetrator may at times mask the daughter’s identity as victim and thus contribute to the construction of a false persona, patterns of revictimization reveal the extent to which the unprotected and violated female self also inform the personality of the victimized daughter." (Jacobs, 99)
 
Revictimization was the story of Brandon’s short adult life, as she played out serial fraudulent identities that resulted in arrest and incarceration, seduction of under-aged girls who rejected her when they discovered her secret, and increasingly dangerous alliances with violent and homophobic males. Brandon’s sexual deceptions, deceptions that escalated after her official diagnosis as transsexual, put her girlfriends at risk in very real ways. Her girlfriends in Lincoln had been teased and harassed by their friends, but when Brandon moved to the more provincial Richardson County, the stakes became even higher. Both of Brandon’s Humboldt friends, Lisa Lambert and Lana Tisdel, were being harassed at their workplaces and at social events. One of Lisa’s friends described Lisa’s dilemma: “Everyone in Humboldt knew about Brandon. Lisa didn’t try to hide it. Lisa couldn’t believe something like this happened to her. She made it clear that she was too caring to shut Brandon out. She was mad and hurt about it, but she didn’t want to hurt him [Brandon], didn’t want to turn him out on the streets.” (Jones, 205) Her compassion would cost her her life.
 
Lana’s situation was complicated by her friendship with ex-convicts Tom Nissen and John Lotter. When Brandon was arrested for forging checks on December 15, 1993, she had phoned Lana to bail her out, but Lana was horrified to discover that her “boyfriend” was being held in the women’s section of the jail. Instead of going herself, Lana sent Tom, her former boyfriend, to bail Brandon out. The arrest was reported that week in the Falls City Journal, making public Brandon’s biological identity as female, and, consequently, Lana’s participation in what would be perceived as a lesbian relationship. Friends of Brandon believe that the bailing-out was the beginning of a set-up for the subsequent rape. Nissen and Lotter appear to have felt deceived and humiliated by Brandon’s gender presentation. In the words of one friend, “He [Brandon] played a player and [the player] got even for it.” (private email, December 20, 2004)

According to Jones, however, Lana had attempted to protect Brandon, even after she realized she had been deceived. She told her family and Tom Nissen and John Lotter that she had seen Brandon’s penis. But Tom and John were not convinced, and they performed their own investigation—strip-searching her. These were both men with histories of violence, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. It may have been that Lana’s safety was seriously compromised once it was known by these men that she had participated in a sexual relationship with a biological female and had lied to protect the fact.
 
Three days after Brandon had, at Lana’s urging, gone to the police to report the rape, the police questioned John and Tom, but did not arrest them. John denied the rape, but said that Lana had asked him to find a way to determine Brandon’s sex. On December 30, the two men went to Lana’s house looking for Brandon, but Brandon, who was no longer welcome there, had taken shelter at Lisa’s farmhouse. Lana reported that John said he “felt like killing someone” and told her she, Lana, was next. This may have been why Lana’s mother told them where Brandon was hiding. After they left, no phone calls were made to warn Brandon or Lisa that the men were on their way. Conflicting testimony suggests that Lana may have actually been in the car, or even at the house, on the night of the murders.

Many aspects of Brandon’s life would have been easier in a culture that was not transphobic, but recovery from incest trauma would not have been one of them.
 
"Recovery from traumatic sexualization… begins with the process of reintegration whereby the original trauma is brought to consciousness. Only then can the idealization of the perpetrator give way to the reality of his sexual violence. With the deconstruction of the idealized father, the daughter can begin to reclaim and redefine the female self, diminishing the impact of the internalized aggressor." (Jacobs, 165)
 
When the internalization of this ideal has become incorporated into the gender identity of the victimized daughter, specifically as a response to the trauma, this kind of deconstruction is impeded. These may have been so damaged by the incest that it might appear more expedient and more therapeutic to adopt a differently-gendered identity that is not so apparently freighted with traumatic associations. This identity, however, cannot—by definition—offer the integration that characterizes recovery.
 
So, how does the victimized daughter heal? In Victimized Daughters, Janet Liebman Jacobs elaborates some of the stages associated with recovery, noting that not every survivor will experience these changes: (Jacobs, 136)

As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest, and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case can be made that Brandon’s transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation, impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors based on a dissociated identity.
 
As a final footnote, one of Brandon’s friends has shared this story about the week between the rape and the murder:
 
"On Christmas day of 1993, when Lisa brought Brandon back… from Falls City, [a friend] met him[Brandon] at the door and said “Hi Brandon” In reply [the friend] was told by Brandon that there was no Brandon, Brandon was gone. Her name is Teena. That didn’t change at any point in that last week." (private email, December 20, 2004).

 References

 
Blume, E. Sue. Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990.                                                                              
 
Chodorow, Nancy and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Barrie Thorne, ed., with Marilyn Yalom, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. New York: Longman, 1980.
 
Corson, Charlotte. “Sex, Lies, and Feminism,” in off our backs, June 2001.
 
Courtois, Christine. Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.    
 
Epstein, Julia and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, Ed. Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
 
Ferenczi, Sandor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Pscyho-analysis. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.
 
Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanism of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1981.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
 
Horney, Karen. “The Masculinity Complex in Women,” Archive fur Frauenjunde 13 (1927): 141-54.
 
Jacobs, Janet Liebman Jacobs. Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self. New York: Routledge, 1994.
 
 Jeffreys, Sheila. “FTM Transsexualism and Grief,” in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue #15.
 
Jones, Aphrodite. What She Wanted. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
 
Muska, Susan and Gréta Olafsdóttir. The Brandon Teena Story. New York: New Video, 1999.
 
Peirce, Kimberly. Boys Don’t Cry. Hollywood: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1998.
 
Shengold, Leonard. Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
 

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.