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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CG: Ah...New York...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes:

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

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

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

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

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

There are many challenges in writing lesbian-feminist plays, and today I want to talk about two of them. The first is working without antecedents in the popular consciousness, without a canon of lesbian dramatic work from which to draw. The second is the particular kind of audience response to the work which generally results from this lack of a cultural context.

Playwriting is an intensely compressed art form, taking place in a single location, over a two-hour period of time, with real human beings. Plays rely on narrative and dramaturgical conventions in order to work around these restrictions. Conventions are a form of shorthand, based on common cultural assumptions. They involve familiar paradigms and archetypes, and also stereotypes. Unfortunately, the narrative and dramaturgical conventions I inherited came from 2,000 years of theatre written by, for, about, and serving the interests of men. The lesbian character does not fit into the patriarchal paradigm except as an object of ridicule, pity, disgust, or prurient interest. The lesbian can be the superfluous spinster, or the male sexual fantasy, or the vampiric seducer of women all of whom would otherwise presumably become compliant heterosexual wives and girlfriends. And, of course, the lesbian character can be a tormented outcast who kills herself. Obviously, within this paradigm I could not tell the stories I wanted, the stories that reflected my truth.

An even more serious problem with this lack of authentic models is the fact that the lesbian-feminist paradigm, aside from being new and unfamiliar, is also inherently hostile to the patriarchal project. The lesbian experience is hugely shaped by compulsory heterosexuality, which is so pervasive in the patriarchal models that it is just taken for granted. The fish does not know it is wet. But the lesbian looking down into the pool sees the fish, sees the water, feels the hands that, since birth, have been inexorably pushing her toward the edge of the pool, and, knowing she cannot swim or does not want to learn, she must resist. To tell the story of that resistance is to draw attention to the existence of the pool and the hands that push--something that, in my experience, most men and many women are very uncomfortable hearing about. To make explicit, as I do in the play Ugly Ducklings, the negative effects of this pushing on girls who may still be rooted in a world outside the pool is to invite criticism and even censorship.
 
Similarly, the lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs some of the most venerated archetypes of patriarchal theatre, beginning with the patriarch. In this model, which does not disguise the fact that women have historically been barred from positions of power and authority--often by violence--the male hero does not come off looking quite so godlike. The lesbian-feminist playwright sees, notes, and foregrounds the masses of women whose appropriated power props him up. She states how his exercise of power perpetuates her and their oppression. He actually begins to look like an enemy, and a cowardly one at that. In the lesbian-feminist paradigm, women, typically depicted by the mainstream culture as vying with each other for his sexual attention or approval, turn to each other as more empowering, enjoyable, and appropriate companions and partners.

The lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs the patriarchal archetype of the so-called "good" woman, the compliant woman who privileges the interests of others--especially men--at her own expense. Not only does her behavior appear foolish and self-hating, but it also appears immoral in the lesbian-feminist paradigm, because female self-effacement enables the patriarchy that is systematically destroying the planet.

Writing the lesbian-feminist play requires a rejection of the models, assumptions and expectations of the traditional Western canon. This is hard work. It is the work of decolonizing oneself. The resistance to it comes from inside the playwright's own head as well as from the world around her. Necessary disciplines of isolation and attention to one's own experience can translate into anti-social behaviors and self-absorption. Both are occupational hazards, but they are seldom appreciated as suchCeven by the playwright herself, who may be wondering "what is wrong with me?" This has been by far my most serious oppression.

Fortunately for me, even though there was no visible, substantial body of lesbian-feminist dramatic work, there was a huge, vibrant, radical, radiant, life-saving, fire-breathing body of lesbian-feminist fiction, history, theory, poetry, music, and art. I began writing in 1986, and I can honestly say that had I been born ten years earlier or ten years later, I would have never been able to write a play like Ugly Ducklings--or any of my other plays. I feel incredibly blessed to have begun my career when I did, and I am incredibly grieved about the fact that women who came of age in the 1980=s and later are so often completely unaware of this amazing heritage of radical feminist literature from the Second Wave. Much of it is out of print. With the demise of the women=s bookstores and the women-in-print movement during the late 1980=s and early 90=s, there have been fewer and fewer institutions or publications for centralizing the work and facilitating access to it.

One of the books that was foundational for me as a writer was Dale Spender's Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. I recommend it to every woman who wants to write. It explained why I had no role models in theatre and it explains why I am censored today and why you cannot find many of the books that inspired my work. It explains why my work will be lost after I die. Unless, of course, I commit a high-profile suicide. More on that subject later.

In any event, I did have models for my content. I turned to the writings of Andrea Dworkin, Anita Cornwell, Audre Lorde, Christos, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Daly, Julia Penelope, Phyllis Chesler, Barbara Smith, Cherrie MoragaCas well as the tremendous collections of radical feminist writings by lesbians without big names, lesbians writing about their experiences on the land collectives, women documenting projects, publishing women's newspapers, etc. I was fortunate enough to be living contemporaneously with some of my mentors, and I have had the great privilege of meeting many and even befriending some. The majority of us were banned from the academy just by virtue of being "out," and this was a great class leveler, granting us precious permission to write without fear of ridicule or class comparisons. It also enabled radical thinking. If they're going to hang you for stealing a chicken, you may as well steal a horse. And so we did. Whole stables. Also, the economy was such that few of us had student debt, we could survive on part-time, minimum-wage jobs, and so we had the time and energy to create our own culture. I feel a lot of rage about the fact that working-class women and even some middle-class women no longer have that leisure.
 
The point I am making here is that art is not created in a vacuum. Not even the most brilliant woman can write without precedents. She will either use--and use at her peril--the ones that are hers by default--the mainstream, patriarchal ones that bombard us 24/7, or else she must actively seek out the feminist ones that will enable her to tell the story that empowers her.

But content was not enough. I also needed plays to use for models. Combing through the mainstream canon, I could find no radical feminist models, with the exception of a few highly encoded scenes from Gertrude Stein operas, a handful of one-act Suffrage plays, and a little one-act treasure called Trifles, by Susan Glaspell--and I did direct and produce all of these. But I needed successful, full-length, large-cast plays for models. I was going to have to locate the mainstream plays that most closely resembled the one I was intending to write. I was going to have to close my eyes to the content, and tease out the elements of structure that I could apply to my work. This is a dance familiar to many a native artist whose own tradition has been banned, stolen, corrupted or destroyed. I do experience my lesbian identity as a colonized one.

I found three plays, and I want to take some time to talk about them, because they illustrate so beautifully the problem of assimilation, or attempting to tell a partial lesbian truth without making it radical--"radical" as "down to the roots." All three of these plays were attempting to change attitudes about gender. All three of them, in my opinion, did more to further entrench the stereotypes than they did to challenge them. I have no doubt the hearts of the playwrights were in the right place. But it is the structural mechanics, often relying on those dramaturgical conventions, that undermined the message.

Patriarchal Culture is a shopping cart with a bad wheel. It steers to the right, unless there is an intentional and constant effort to wrench it back to the leftCin order to get it centered. I want to say that again, because it's such a critical point in my survival. I live and work under career house arrest. I can write whatever I like, but I cannot make a living at it. I cannot find venues for it. My work is not allowed to leave the house. Why? Because I am always wrenching to the left. I would not have to do that in a culture that was authentically gender-neutral. I must wrench because the cart is rigged in the direction of male dominance/female subordination.

So I dug out three former Broadway hits that dealt with issues of gender and sexual orientation in same-sex environments for children.

The first play, Tea and Sympathy, was written by Robert Anderson in 1953. It was an attempt to advocate for the so-called effeminate boy at a boarding school--the boy who prefers the company of women to his rowdy male peers, the boy who's artistically inclined, is not an athlete, and has no interest in sex for its own sake. This advocacy backfired, however, because the play never left the sexually colonized paradigm of heteropatriarchy. It never challenged the essentialist notion of manhood. At the very end of the play, the effeminate, scapegoated student is seduced by his macho housemaster's wife, and this act supposedly rescues him from the questions in his own mind--and in the mind of his audience--about his sexual orientation. His so-called manhood is doubly redeemed in this incestuous scenario, because, by his initiation, he not only "becomes a man" but also succeeds in stealing his enemy's wife.
 
In fairness to Anderson, his play went as far as it dared. Within the paradigm of heteropatriarchy, he did manage to make the point that effeminate men might be more courageous, more appealing to women, more heterosexual than the macho, athletic men who prefer the company of males socially. But in winning that battle, the playwright lost the war. Tea and Sympathy increased the marginalization of gay males--affirming through Tom's example, that they just hadn't found the right woman to rescue them yet.

The second play that dealt with sexual orientation issues in a same-sex environment for children was The Children's Hour, written in 1932 by Lillian Hellman. This play was inspired by an actual trial that took place in Scotland in 1810. Two women who ran a school for girls were accused by one of the students, who claimed to have witnessed them engaging in sexual behavior with each other. Hellman was careful to make the point in interviews that the play was not about lesbianism, but about "the power of a lie." She was defending the right of women to be self-sufficient and to live without men, without being accused of lesbianism. This is a far from dated theme. Most current plays and films about single women go to extraordinary lengths to reassure audiences about not only the heterosexual orientation of the characters, but also their silliness and subordination in relation to men.

For Hellman to make her point, lesbianism must be represented as heinous. If she equivocates on this point at all, it is only in the final moments of the play, when one of the women realizes that her feelings may actually be lesbian. Within minutes of this confession, she kills herself--leaving it up to the audience to decide whether or not this is a tragedy or a necessary consequence.

The Children's Hour was less useful to me than Tea and Sympathy, because it did not work that well dramaturgically. It plays like a melodrama. But, again, it reflected mainstream attitudes toward lesbianism that are still rampant, and it provided a kind of foil for my own play.

The third play was the German classic Children in Uniform, adapted from the film Mädchen in Uniform adapted from a book by Christa Winsloe. This took place in a Prussian girls' boarding school, and actually depicted a butch student and her crush on the female teacher who showed her some tenderness in the otherwise harsh and regimented environment of the school. The film was released in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and critics are quick to point out that it represents an allegory about retaining humanity in a totalitarian environment. Interestingly, critics still fail to identify Winsloe=s intentional depiction of lesbianism as a locus of resistance.

This play was the closest to what I wanted to do in Ugly Ducklings, in that it was sympathetic to the lesbian characters. But the play is not without problems. Winsloe intends us to view the teacher as a martyr, but today's audiences find her relationship with the students inappropriate. Also, in the book Manuela kills herself at the end, leaping from the roof of the school. When the film was made, two alternate endings were shot--one where the suicide was completed and one where it was intercepted. By the time the play was written, box office had obviously weighed in in favor of the intercepted suicide, but it is an obviously pasted-on, fake happy ending. Dramaturgically, all the action is pointed to the necessity, even the inevitability, of Manuela's suicide.

And I want to take a minute with lesbian suicide, because it is such a central theme in my play and in our culture. Lesbian suicide is a nifty ending for lesbian plays, because it offers the audience an opportunity to feel they can empathize with the character's suffering without feeling that they are enabling an identity that troubles their notions about gender or morality. Most of us can afford to feel charitable toward the dead.
 
Consider the 1991 film Thelma and Louise. They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws. They have killed a would-be rapist. They are on the run. And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point, the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare: They kiss, they look at each other, they yell "yee-haw"--and then they get down to the business of survival. They ditch the car. They dye their hair. They go underground on any one of the dozens of women=s lands all over the U.S. They're in Arizona, right? They could go to Adobeland. Or Apache Junction, which is an entire village of lesbians. They get healthy. They heal. They make love. They change their diets. They do yoga. They dance under the full moon. They build a hay bale house. They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any. They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute. They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment. They have a zillion delicious options. But in the movie, they go off a cliff. In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss. Lesbianism is a fate worse than death. The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators. The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kissCcoming after the decision to commit double suicide. (Twenty years later, Million-Dollar Baby has not traveled far. The empowered woman with fighting skills must ultimately desire her own suicide.)

There are two plots in Ugly Ducklings. One is the coming-out story of a closeted, middle-class counselor who has fallen in love with an out, working-class counselor. The second plot concerns a deeply disturbed adolescent butch and a ten-year-old camper who has a crush on her. The adolescent lesbian acts out intense, internalized homophobia to deflect attention from herself, and the target she chooses is the ten-year-old. The ten-year-old, terrified by the scapegoating, attempts to hang herself on the stage. This attempt is intercepted by the two counselors, and in the course of the intervention, the closeted counselor outs herself. The child is saved, the lesbian lovers, on their way out of patriarchy, are reconciled.

I submitted this play to a well-known, mainstream theater in D.C. several years ago. They considered producing it. The script was circulated among the staff. They had a meeting about it. In the end, they rejected it on the grounds that it was too pedagogical. I was puzzled by this. Pedagogical... meaning preachy? I went back through the script. There's only one preaching or teaching speech in the entire play, and that's the speech at the end of the play delivered to the child with a rope around her neck. It is definitely pedagogical, because the child has internalized some very bad pedagogy that's going to kill her. In the speech, the counselor explains how being lesbian is something like being born left-handed. Absolutely pedagogical, no question about it, and also dramaturgically justified. In fact, there was nothing else I could have put in that spot--unless, of course, I wanted the child to die. What this theatre was telling me was that the difference between art and propaganda was the death of the child. Kill her, it's art, and they'll produce it. Let her live, it's propaganda, and no production.
 
I kept my thoughts to myself for several years, but when the show was mounted last spring by Venus Productions, also in D.C., I had reason to reconsider my silence. The reviews were strong. We had an endorsement from the NPR affiliate station. The show was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play of the year. And yet there were reviewers who took issue with the end of the play. Metro Weekly complained that the ending was "too neat, never takes advantage of ... lucrative opportunities to wrap up her dawdling script."
"Lucrative?" Interesting choice of words. "Dawdling?" The child with the noose around her neck ... as in "let's get on with it?" Potomac Stages praised my restraint (whatever what that means), at least until "the final scene when it turns preachy and, as a result, becomes artificial and off-putting." Why is letting the lesbian live perceived as "artificial?"  I have no comment whatsoever as to the application of the word "off-putting" to the rescue a child from hanging.

At risk of sounding like a touchy artiste, I submit that the intensity of the criticisms that have been so single-mindedly focused on pressuring me to change the ending of this play are in direct proportion to the success of that scene. If you are doing radical feminist work, and you are doing it well, and particularly if you are doing lesbian-feminist work, you will know the power of your work in exact proportion to the resistance you encounter. Never mistake it for a sign you are on the wrong path. We all must wrench, and wrench again, and keep wrenching as long as we are in the toxic, misogynist current of a male dominant culture. Do not ever apologize for that. And don't even think about changing your ending!


[The following was first delivered as a paper for the New England Women's Studies Conference in March, 2005. Originally published as "In Search of a Lesbian Stage Tradition," in The International Gay and Lesbian Review, Issue 14.2, March/April, 2007, Cambridge.]

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she just has to leave her husband at home with his mistress, toss her suitcase in a roadster, and head Downeast for a little timeout with her new, butch girlfriend. In July 1933, that’s exactly what First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did. The roadster was a light blue Buick with a white convertible top, and the girlfriend was hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, aka “Hick.” Their itinerary took them north to Québec, and then over to the Gaspé Peninsula, and then down the Maine coast. Traveling without benefit of the Secret Service, the two women enjoyed a madcap junket down endless dirt roads, sleeping in a cottage without plumbing, and indulging in nighttime tickle-fests.

Eleanor’s road trip remains emblematic of much of Maine’s lesbian history: hidden in plain view. Now that Maine has adopted a law legalizing same-sex marriage, perhaps it’s time to unpack the closet and take a little road trip through Maine’s lesbian history.

Reversing the direction taken by Hick and the First Lady, our first stop will be in the south… South Berwick, to be exact, where we find the home of Sarah Orne Jewett, one of Maine’s most celebrated authors. Jewett’s 1896 collection of short stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about a fictional fishing village called Dunnet Landing (said to be modeled on Tenants Harbor) is considered an American classic, a distinctly female contribution to a catalog of testosterone-charged war epics and whaling sagas. Critics have noted that Jewett’s villages appear to be peopled almost exclusively by women, the men all being dead, away at sea, or senile.

But then Sarah always did prefer the girls. Her early poetry testifies to heartbreaking attempts to secure the affections of young women, but few of these girlfriends could support themselves as Jewett did, and perhaps even fewer were willing to forego the joys of motherhood for a same-sex relationship. It was not until she met wealthy widow Annie Fields (pet name “Fuffatee”) that she was able to consummate her longing for a life partner, living in what was known as a “Boston Marriage” from 1881 until her death in 1909.

Next stop is Portland, where we drop in on the Maine Women Writers Collection, housed in a wing of the library at the University of New England. And here we have struck the mother lode: The collection houses not only writings by Jewett, but it also has inherited the library of lesbian author May Sarton, who moved to York in 1973, the same year her most famous book, Journal of a Solitude, was published. The roster of her library reads like a Who’s Who of Second Wave lesbian-feminist writers. In 1965, when Sarton published her lesbian novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, an entire generation of young women responded to her courageous call by discovering and celebrating their own Sapphic voices.

The Maine Women Writers Collection houses another treasure: the first lesbian novel ever published in America. Who knew that the woman who would donate her mansion for what would become the Portland Art Museum was also responsible for Ethel’s Love Life? Published in 1859, the book describes how a naïve, young fiancée finds herself passionately involved with another woman, making the remarkable discovery that, “Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men.” Author Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat may have been writing autobiographically, because later she published a book of lesbian love poems, taking care to closet her dedications.

It’s time to head north, this time to Southport Island, summer home of Rachel Carson. Wait a minute—Rachel Carson? Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the book that warned of the dangers of pesticides and saved the planet? The founder of the environmental movement? That Rachel Carson? What’s she doing on a lesbian road trip?

It appears that Ms. Carson had a lifelong history of passionate attachments to women. At the age of forty-five, she began spending her summers on Southport Island, where she developed what biographers coyly call “an intimate friendship” with her neighbor Dorothy Freeman, who was fifty-five, a grandmother, and in a long-term marriage she had no intention of disrupting. Rachel, with a history of financially supporting her mother, a disabled niece, and the niece’s out-of-wedlock child, appears to have been very comfortable with the arrangement.

But was it lesbian? The “intimate friendship” spanned the last ten years of Rachel’s life, and during the winters when the women lived hundreds of miles apart, they wrote letters to each other several times a week. These letters, published in 1995, make mention of the need to destroy certain letters immediately upon reading and discuss the need for Dorothy to enclose an extra letter that might be suitable for Rachel to share with her mother, in case she were to ask. There is a breathless series of letters leading up to a rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, where Rachel jokes about how she will feign a chilly greeting for the benefit of the desk clerk.

Intimate friends or lesbians? You say “potato” and I say “potahto.”

On to Camden, home of tomboy “Vincent” Millay, known to the rest of the world as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. One evening, at a party at Camden’s Heritage Inn, where her sister was working, young Vincent regaled the summer people with a rendition of her poetry. She apparently made an impression on one of the guests, a woman named Caroline Dow, who took the working-class Vincent under her wing and began introducing her to a network of other powerful and—significantly—unmarried women. Dow took her protégée to New York, bought her a wardrobe, coached her in social graces, and pulled strings to get her into Vassar. At Vassar, Millay’s lesbian affairs were so flagrant, Dow, possibly fearing for her own reputation, sent Vincent a letter threatening her with complete withdrawal of her patronage if she did not break them off. It is after this point, Millay began to show an interest in  men.

And now, the last stop on the tour… Mount Desert Island. In the town of Northeast Harbor is a charming white house with a sign on the lawn that reads, “Petit Plaisance.” Appointments can be made to tour this home of author Marguerite Youcenar, the first woman ever to be inducted into that bastion of literary male chauvinism, the Académie française. Yourcenar, a French citizen, was on a visit to the States to be with her lover Grace Frick when war broke out in Europe. Stranded here for the duration, she acquired a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence and settled into a domestic routine with Grace. The two would travel up to Mount Desert Island in the summers, eventually establishing a year-round residence. Yourcenar and Frick were partners from 1937 until Frick’s death in 1979.  Bar Harbor was also summer home to the family of celebrated lesbian author and Parisian salonist Natalie Barney, who brought her lover, poet Renée Vivien, for a visit in 1900.

And this concludes our road trip, which is by no means comprehensive. How many other celebrated Maine so-called spinsters, like Rangeley’s famous hunting guide “Fly Rod” Crosby, or Brunswick’s noted botanist Kate Furbish, might have led closeted lesbian lives? It’s cause for celebration to be able to reclaim this history, with hopes for the day when all of Maine’s brilliant lesbians can live openly and with pride.

[Originally published in The Portland Phoenix, June 24, 2009.]

It was in Boulder, Colorado, and the year was 1972. I was twenty—not old enough to drink, but somehow old enough to have gotten myself married and divorced and fifteen hundred miles from home—if I could call it that. And I didn’t.

I was working on the second floor of J. C. Penneys, in the fabric department. The important thing to remember here is that the second floor of Penneys was where they sold piece goods, baby clothes, and draperies. Everything else was on the ground floor, off the mall. Nobody ever came up to the second floor except women—women who had babies, who sewed, and who decorated. And this is where I saw my first lesbians. Or, at least, it was the first time I identified the experience as such.

They were a couple, I remember—a butch and a fem. The butch was in her forties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her breasts were not apparent. She wore her black hair slicked back in a style left over from the fifties, a “duck’s ass” or “DA.” The skin on her face was leathery and tan, with hard lines around the eyes and the mouth. And her hands were in her pockets.

Her companion was everything she was not—except, of course, a lesbian. She appeared to be at least ten years younger, a blonde—although perhaps not a natural one, and she wore tight blue jeans, but not bellbottoms. These were working-class women, or what we anti-war, student-hippie types would call “greasers.”  She was shorter than her companion, and she wore makeup and earrings. Her hair was styled in a kind of bouffant look that was the shellacked, feminine counterpart of the DA.

The femme was buying fabric, and she was anxious that her purchase be pleasing to her companion. The butch appeared to be very uncomfortable with finding herself on the second floor of J.C. Penneys, and she answered her partner in a surly and self-conscious manner. She told her she didn’t know anything about this kind of “stuff.”

I remember that I shared the fem’s anxiety about pleasing this woman. I wanted her to know that I also cared, that I welcomed her presence in my department—was honored by it, even. I wanted to protect her from my co-workers who might be startled by her appearance, who might make judgments, who might even try to exchange a look with me. I wanted her to know that I would not side with them against her, that I would never be like one of them. I wanted her to smile at me, and, of course, she never did.
 
I think of this butch woman now, and I wonder what she made of the lesbians who must have just been emerging in Boulder—my generation of lesbians—young women in hiking boots with hairy legs and hairy armpits, neither butch nor fem, taking and teaching self-defense and auto repair classes, starting carpentry collectives, and organizing women’s clinics and women’s presses and women’s bookstores and women’s festivals. Lesbians fighting and loving and trashing and marching and mimeographing, smashing the state, taking back the night, giving peace a chance, making love not war. Feminists and Marxists and communists and vegetarians. Lesbians with speculums looking at each other’s cervices, lesbians with vibrators learning how to have orgasms, lesbians with kiwis, with zucchinis, with bananas, with cucumbers. Lesbians in threesomes and foursomes, in marriages, in families, in collectives, in cooperatives, in tents, in tepees, in yurts, in cabins, in dormitories. Lesbians quoting Ti-Grace Atkinson, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Valerie Solanas.

What must this butch have thought of this veritable explosion of latter-day tribadists? What could she have thought? Where in her centuries of oppression could she find any reason to trust women, even lesbians, who were not like herself? With the unerring instinct of the hunted, she would have concluded, and rightly, that the lesbians of the early seventies were dangerous to her.
Had she smiled at me on that second floor of J.C. Penney’s, or shared a look that admitted to her vulnerability or—worse yet—solicited my support, I would have betrayed her, and in a heartbeat.

It was this perpetual knowledge of an ever-present potential for betrayal that had etched the hard, hard lines around her eyes and her mouth. It was this knowledge that the fem was hoping to soften, to erase for just a moment, in the manufacture of some article of clothing for herself, for her lover, for their home, that would signify a kind of normalcy, a kind of belongingness that could never be a reality for a woman who had to run daily a gauntlet of scorn, violence, and contempt that would have killed an ordinary woman. And so her eyes never met mine, because they never missed a thing.

[Originally published in Chokecherries Anthology, Society of the Muse of the Southwest, Taos, NM, 2011]

[Originally published in On the Issues, June 28, 2012.]


As a playwright attempting to reclaim the lesbian lives of historic women athletes like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, I run into a peculiar brand of homophobia.

Writing about women athletes is a joy. Women athletes defy expectations and societal norms. They run their own races. They inspire and they revolutionize. This is why slamming into their closets is such a jolt and disappointment.

Yes, it's true that lesbians in the spotlight have historically needed to disguise their orientation. The penalties for deviance from the heterosexual template have been swift and severe. This was especially true for women athletes, who, by the very nature of their achievements, posed a challenge to the tenets of femininity. (They had muscles and they were competing!) The media, and sometimes even fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate their achievements. For homophobes, uncovering lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not be a "real woman."

But that was then and this is now. Or is it?

I call the homophobia that I encounter in telling about their lives "misguided allegiance homophobia." In this permutation folks insist that these historic figures would not be pleased by being outed posthumously; that honoring their lives requires honoring their closets and perpetuating the fictions they so carefully constructed.

Babe Didrikson was a tomgirl from the get-go, racking up trophies for a variety of sports in high school and even trying out for the football team. Recruited for an amateur basketball team in Dallas, she made such a name for herself that she was invited to try out for the 1932 Olympic track team. In order to get around the three-event limit for individual athletes, Babe's handlers were allowed to register her as a team, all by herself. In two and a half hours, she won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles) and set a world record in the hurdles and javelin. In addition, she tied in the high jump, setting another world record, and finished fourth in discus. She scored eight points higher than her nearest competition -- a team of 22 women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals and took the silver in the high jump. During this period, Babe was too focused on winning to give much attention to her image. She appears to have been perfectly comfortable with herself and her sole concession to "media spin" may have been misrepresenting her age, claiming to be 18 instead of 21. But Babe may have been catering to the public's acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a teen as opposed to the expectations for "young ladies."

Babe's overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. Sportswriter Paul Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, wrote in "The Texas Babe" in Vanity Fair in 1932 that this "strange girl-boy child" would have been right at home in a men's locker room. He used the word "boy" more than a dozen times to refer to Babe, attributing her athleticism to an over-compensation for her inability to attract men.

What Gallico did not mention was that Babe had made a fool out of him. After the Olympics, fellow sportswriter and fan Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. Exploiting Gallico's machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course and Gallico idiotically accepted. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on to win the game handily.

The next year Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Ostensibly a short story, the central character was a butch Texas athlete named "Honey," a thinly-disguised mimicry of Babe. In fact, a full-page photo of Babe sat on the facing page. Gallico imagines the other women athletes trash-talking Honey. They ridicule her Texas accent, comment on her frequent use of obscenities and speculate about her lesbianism. Gallico depicts his character as a genetic freak, filled with self-loathing in spite of her gold medal, sobbing while she smacks her own face and claws at herself -- because she cannot get a man.

Suddenly, Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume and nail polish -- things she used to dismiss as "too sissy." And within five years, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe's biographer Susan Cayleff "was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment." Photographed next to George, Babe, now playing the then-elite sport of golf, did appear more feminine.

So successful was Babe in presenting herself as a traditional housewife that, several years later when Babe entered a long-term relationship with a woman, the press was willing to characterize the woman as Babe's "protégée." According to biographer Cayleff, Betty was Babe's "primary partner." A fellow pro golfer, Betty roomed with Babe on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) circuit and lived in her home for the last six years of Babe's life. Whatever George may have thought of this arrangement, he accepted the situation. When Babe was in the hospital dying from colon cancer, Betty moved in with her, pushing the beds together.

When I wrote the book and lyrics for Babe: An Olympian Musical (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), the show included a love scene and duet between Babe and Betty. The scene marks a turning point in the narrative, as Babe moves from a position of alienation and competition with women to one of intimacy and professional alliance, culminating with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from the first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this "outing" of Babe. Was this respectful? What would Babe have wanted?  And, the "smiling homophobia" of: "What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete." Some critics even felt a need to talk about George.

At what point can we recognize that Babe was bisexual -- or a lesbian whose marriage may well have been a concession to career-busting homophobia? I wish that lesbian athletes -- then and now -- would have time capsules where they can safely store the truth about their lives and the women they love. We should not be left with a closeted record and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of remarkable women who were compelled to live a lie.

In January, African American lesbian writer, poet, essayist, and dancer Donna Allegra died at her home Brooklyn at the age of 67. This blog attempts to commemorate her life and her writing through an exploration of one of her short stories,  “The Dance of Cranes,” which pulls together so many threads of Allegra’s own biography as well as the issues she faced as a black, lesbian, butch, feminist, working-class writer in the twentieth century.

Allegra’s papers are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and this is her biography from their website:

“Born and raised in Brooklyn, Allegra studied theater at Bennington College and Hunter College, graduating from New York University in 1977 with a Bachelor's degree in dramatic literature, theater history and cinema. She worked as a construction electrician to support her writing and dancing, reviewed dance, theatre and film productions as a freelance cultural journalist, and produced lesbian and feminist-oriented radio programming for WBAI from 1975-1981.

Allegra was an early member of the Jemima Writers Collective, the first black lesbian writing group in New York City. The collective grew out of the Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States, and was founded to encourage black women writers to share their creative work with each other in a supportive environment. Fellow members of Jemima included Candace Boyce, Georgia Brooks, Linda Brown, Robin Christian, Yvonne Flowers (Maua), Chirlane McCray, Irare Sabasu, and Sapphire. Allegra later joined the Gap-Toothed Girlfriends Writers Workshop.

A prolific writer of poetry, short stories and biographical essays, Allegra has been published in over thirty lesbian and feminist anthologies and numerous black and lesbian journals and magazines. In 2001, she published her first book, Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers, a collection of twelve short stories and a novella about black lesbian dancers. In addition to her writing career, Allegra is an accomplished African folklore and jazz dancer.”

In this blog, I wanted to share excerpts from her short story “Dance of the Cranes.” This was originally published in the anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction. It’s also included in Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers. “Dance of the Cranes” is about a fourteen-year-old, black, lesbian butch who is struggling with issues of sexuality and gender, and also wrestling with the homophobia she is encountering in her community of dancers. In the story, this girl, Lenjen, finally sees someone who looks like her in her African dance class—an older butch dancer named Lamban, and the two are paired together by the instructor to perform the Dance of the Crane. As the pair demonstrate their dancing, the rest of the class bears witness and celebrates the tribal/familial bond of these two outsiders, and in doing that, Lenjen’s trauma and Lamban’s estrangement are healed.

This intersecting pain of butch-phobia and homophobia, coupled with racism, misogyny, and classism were familiar themes in Allegra’s life.

Writing in the late 1990’s when the Internet was still in its infancy, Allegra was ahead of her time in naming the specific intersecting oppressions that she faced as an emergent lesbian writer of color. Her exposés are exceptional in their candor about how these oppressions shaped her experience. In 1997, her essay, “Inconspicuous Assumptions,” was published in Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write About Class. In it, she ticks off these assumptions:

• One particular cultural base should define universal standards in literature.
• The white male experience is central.
• All lesbians are white and upper-class.
• Writers have money, hence plentiful free time.
• The playing field for publishing is level for LGBT writers.
• Only white males take their craft seriously.

Fast-forwarding twenty-five years, it’s interesting to look at her list of “inconspicuous assumptions” and note how much more conspicuous they are today—thanks to the arduous efforts of writers like Allegra. It’s also interesting to note how many of the changes in the field of publishing have been superficial, especially with regards to working-class writing and lesbian-of-color representation. The lesbian butch voice remains underrepresented in all genres.

Here is Allegra, heartbreakingly candid about how the absence of kindred literary role models impacted her self-image:

"A telling marker of ruling-class viewpoint has to do with whose lives make it to the page and just whose story is told. The upper classes had their dramas enacted as the experience we were supposed to take as “universal.” Shakespeare’s leading characters were court royalty. Well, I’m not exactly the queen of England, but I first recognized myself as a lesbian by name in the story of a British noblewoman. Before I finished Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, I knew my common bond with Stephen Gordon made us sisters. I had all the symptoms of her situation. As a tomboy long past the age when I should have outgrown the “phase,” I waxed romantic over pretty girls; boys were fit companions, but of no interest beyond that. Clearly, I was destined to ride horses across the British countryside and become a champion fencer!

“Dance of the Crane” is set in a community of black women taking West African dance classes in New York. It opens with a teen-aged, gender-non-conforming, lesbian Lenjen accompanying her mother to a class.

“Lenjen wanted her mother to understand how she drank from the current of energy that flowed from the dancing women, that they were the ones who enriched her blood. She wasn’t putting her passion on the floor for some mating game. But [her mother’s] mind was set, and Lenjen didn’t want to whine after her to explain.”

The girl has noticed an older woman at the dance classes, who has been away for a while but is just returning. She finds herself pulled toward this woman who “wore African pants and didn’t hold back from trying the men’s steps."

The older woman, Lamban, is an older version of Lenjen. I suspect that she represents the missing role model in Allegra’s own youth. In Lamban, we see the development of themes just emerging in the teenager and discover the secret behind her long absence from dance classes:

“She’d been through the fire, sorted through the ashes and determined she wouldn’t hurt herself again by denying her lesbian self. She’d tried hiding this truth from anyone who got friendly with her. When she couldn’t pretend anymore, instead of going to class, she stayed home and cried night after night for a week…

Lamban still grieved that being a lesbian could make her an outlaw to a group of people who did the most spiritually sustaining thing she knew in life. She’d needed all those months away to love herself again. The time in seclusion let her grow perspective, like new skin. That’s how lobsters did it—when the old shell became too small for the mature body, they’d go to a protected place where they could shed the old covering safely. In that haven, they could curl naked and vulnerable until a new covering grew in.”

The final dance of the evening is the lenjen, the dance after which the teenager had been named—the Dance of the Cranes. The teacher pairs Lamban and Lenjen. In the description of the solos, Allegra describes a deeply healing ritual between two members of a people who have survived a diaspora, but who are also survivors of a different kind of dispersement—lesbian butches unable to find their people and despairing of a home they have never known:

“If your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed… Make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.”--Rebecca Solnit
 
German-Swedish, lesbian painter Lotter Laserstein not only made herself that “small republic of unconquered spirit,” but she created a body of work that documents that Amazonian domain. Most remarkable, she did this in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.
 
Laserstein painted “In My Studio” at the age of thirty. The year was 1928. She had just graduated from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. It was a time of uncertainty and also exhilaration. For the first time, women were allowed to attend public art academies. For the first time, women were allowed to attend nude figure drawing classes. For the first time, women were allowed to sport traditionally male haircuts, the “Eton crop” or the “bubikopf.” They were allowed to wear straight-waist dresses and tuxedo jackets. The “Great War” had opened up employment in traditionally male trades and professions. Women had their own money and began to exercise their autonomy in ways that would have been inconceivable to their mothers.

Laserstein wanted the world to see that she had her own studio, a mark of her professionalism and her success—and that it was an impressive one in an upscale residential area of Berlin, with a panoramic, rooftop view.  She was a brilliant painter, had begun to rack up impressive credentials, and she was not afraid to flaunt it. To be absolutely clear, Laserstein titled the work “In My Studio.” She had, at thirty, achieved not only a room of her own, but a studio no less.
 
And what was happening in this studio of hers? No less than a miracle. Laserstein is painting a female nude, the traditional subject of centuries of male artists. An internet image search for “odalisque” will turn up hundreds of images of reclining female nudes. According to art historian Joan DelPlato, “By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.”

Laserstein was taking one of the most popular tropes in Western art history and subverting it and appropriating it to a lesbian and feminist context. A meticulous and classically trained painter, she executed numerous studies for this painting before settling on this precise position for the model. Fifty years later, Traute Rose could still recall her discomfort: “… the pose was very difficult to hold. Nevertheless, I held on because I saw it develop into a true masterpiece.” Where male painters would lasciviously or puritanically cache the pudendum in folds of fabric or behind a lifted thigh, Laserstein features her lover’s mons in full frontal nudity as the focal point of the painting, locating it at the intersection of two diagonals: one established by Rose’s body and the other by Laserstein’s oblong palette.
 
And what about this model? Her name is "Traute Rose," and was a model noted for an athletic and androgenous physique. Laserstein not only told people that Traute was her favorite model, but their intimacy is the subject of a number of her paintings... paintings that the artist would refer to as collaborations between her and Rose. In a letter to Rose in 1956, Laserstein was describing a painting of a nude that she was then working on, noting that it was “far from being as good as ours.” The relationship between male painters and the female nude models has historically been hierarchical, with the dominance of the painter made explicit in the paintings where they appear together.  Lasertein’s portraits of Rose bear witness to their mutuality and the trust between them. They appear to share an artistic investment in the painting. It is not a commercial relationship.

A year after "In My Studio," Laserstein would paint  “I and My Model,”  where Rose stands in a slip behind the painter, her hand resting with unconscious familiarity on the shoulder of Lasertain as she watches her process of painting. Laserstein is facing outward toward the viewer, presumably looking in a mirror that is reflecting this image of both the women.  The intimacy of their relationship as co-creaters is explicitly the theme in this painting. A year after this, Laserstein paints “At the Mirror” where Rose, naked, is positioning the mirror while Laserstein prepares her palette, again emphasizing their collaboration. Rose is looking into the mirror but not at her reflection.

The term “male gaze” was coined from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1971.  Since then, it has become a well-known and widely discussed theory. In the essay, Mulvaney argues that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in a masculine and heterosexual subject position, where the figure of the woman on screen was depicted as an object of desire. In this era of cinema, the protagonists were overwhelmingly male and audience members, regardless of sex, were encouraged to identify with them... that is, to adopt the "male gaze."  The female charactes in these films  were coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness," objects of male voyeurs and fetishists. This "male gaze" informs most portraits in the traditional canon where naked women are the subject. Laserstein was challenging this head-on, with a "take no prisoner" attitude in these paintings of Rose.

The figure of Rose in "In My Studio" has been referred to by art critics as monumental. She sprawls across the foreground, and there is absolutely no attempt to titillate the spectator with partial concealment with drapery. The model is lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps asleep. There is no "come hither" expression. Her face is turned toward Laserstein, not us. Traute Rose, with her small breasts, her “Eton bob,” her lack of makeup, and her large and muscular hands, defies the expectations of "the male gaze."

Laserstein foregrounds these hands and the gender non-conformity of Rose in her painting "The Tennis Player."

Rose is not the model in "In the Tavern," but the subject is another Weimar "New Woman," sitting alone in a cafe and sporting the "bubikopf" haircut. Laserstein has highlighted the hands of her model, placing them in the foreground, as she unselfconsciously slides one of her suede gloves off her hand. Again the hands are large and muscular. The painting foregrounds the new freedom of women to sit in a tavern unaccompanied by a man. In the background there is another single woman, reading a menu or a magazine. Laserstein painted "In the Tavern" in 1927, and it was purchased by the City of Berlin a year later, presumably to hang in an administrative space. The painting was confiscated by Nazis in 1937 or 1938 as an example of "degenerate art." Long believed to have been destroyed, the work surfaced in 2012 at an art auction, but it is now once again in a private collection. The number 14607 is still visible on the back of the painting, from when it was part of the inventory of outlawed works.

Laserstein also painted "The Motorcycle Driver" in 1929. This painting is assumed to be a portrait of a young man. I challenge that assumption. World War I had created opportunities for young women to learn and practice auto mechanics, and the historical record of that era has noted garages and ambulance corps that were staffed entirely by lesbians. There are enough similarities in facial features to raise the question for me as to whether or not this is a self-portrait by a woman who was clearly pushing all the boundaries of gender presentation.

But let's return to "In My Studio..."  I am struck by the contrast between the sterile, flat rooftops of the boxy buildings in the background and the warm, sensuous curves of the figure in the forground. Clearly, it is a winter day. The trees are bare, the skies are grey and overcast, and snow covers the roofs. The studio walls are comprised of a series of large glass windows… and yet the model is unclothed, relaxed, and luminous. Clearly, the interior of Laserstein's studio generates its own climate and features it's own landscape and architecture--the anatomy of the female. “In My Studio” documents the features of  lesbian-controlled and lesbian-defined space, and in doing so, it establishes a beachhead in Western art for this space. This is a world that has historically been hidden in plain sight. Laserstein brings it out from the shadows and presents it to a world where women, for the first time, have achieved the possibility of financial autonomy that makes this dream attainable. Laserstein is saying, "Look, I am doing it. So can you." The revolution had arrived.

But the freedoms that "In My Studio" celebrated were being increasingly threatened as the Nazis rode to power. Traute Rose is featured in a painting by Laserstein that captures the period of the "calm before the storm," the uneasy uncertainty of the late Weimar period. The painting is "Abend Uber Potsdam," or "Evening Over Potsdam," painted in 1930 and featuring a group of friends having a meal on a rooftop overlooking Berlin. The painting has become an iconic "Last Supper" on the eve of the Holocaust. Rose is the figure on the far left, whose back is to the artist. There is a sense of foreboding, anxiety, and resignation in the work... as if these friends are waiting for the nightmare.

By 1935, Laserstein had been registered as one-quarter Jewish and forced to close her painting school. She was denied membership in the professional art organizations who sponsored exhibitions, meaning she could not longer show her work publicly. She was still able to show her work in London and in Paris, and in 1937, when she was invited to exhibit work in Sweden, she packed up her canvases, including "Evening Over Potsdam" and left Germany forever. The painting was eight feet in length, and her friends had to help her with packing and transporting it.

Laserstein's career, which had taken off so quickly and which was gaining so much recognition, was cut short and she was forced to start over in a foreign country where she did not speak the language. To survive, she painted portraits for members of the upper class. Word of mouth spread rapidly, and she became a successful painter who would eventually be able to afford a second summer home. But it came at a price: She had to paint what her clients wanted. The days of spending hundreds of hours painting rooftop Bohemian friends and nude portraits of her beloved Rose were over. Painting was a business now.

Laserstein had a sister, also a lesbian. She was unable to get her out of Germany, and the sister and her partner spent the last three years of the war hiding in a dark and unheated potting shed, where there was no water in the winter. She emerged from the war profoundly traumatized by this experience. Laserstein's mother was murdered in one of the camps.  As for Laserstein, she was embraced by the Jewish community in Sweden and they immediately arranged a marriage for her with an older Jewish man, which meant she could become a Swedish citizen and not be forced to return to Germany.  The marriage was a political expediency and existed only in name.

The war took a tremendous toll on Laserstein, as she struggled to learn a new language, to rebuild a career, and to help family members trapped in Germany. The boldness, ambition, and vision, so evident in her early works are absent from the Swedish years. Her life and her work had become about survival.

Laserstein lived to be ninety-five, dying in Sweden in 1993. Paintings by her continue to surface from private collections, appearing at auctions. Because her work was so original, not belonging to any particular school or tradition, and because she was censored and exiled from Germany, her genius has gone largely unrecognized until very recently. As a lesbian artist, it is important for me to embrace her as one of my greatest foremothers, and to celebrate the record of her lesbian life that she has left to us...  with her butch non-conformity, her radically non-hierarchical relationship to Traute Rose, her artistic resilience, and her resistance to the imperatives of "the male gaze."