Discovering the relationship between lesbian artists Berthe Wegmann and Jeanna Bauck has been a revelation, and it could not have come at a better time. 
 
Berthe and Jeanna were both European painters born in the 1840’s.  Although Berthe was a Dane and Jeanna a Swede, they managed to work together, study together, travel together, and—for long stretches of time—live together. They left a trove of letters, dating from the 1880’s to the 1920’s. But, more to the point, they left us their paintings of each other. And these are packed with codes of lesbian resistance.

As lesbian poet Audre Lorde writes, “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” If this is true, and I believe that it is, then what happens when we find ourselves confronted by lesbian art that resonates with these “unexpressed or unrecognized” feelings? I believe there is an unleashing of the power of which she speaks. The paintings of these women, like metaphysical defibrillators, sent a current of lesbian electricity through my system, restoring the joyous rhythm my Sapphic heart.
 
But before I talk about these paintings and what they mean to me, let’s set the stage.  This was the first generation of European women artists who had a real shot at becoming professional painters, because, prior to the mid-19th century, women had been denied access to all the traditional pipelines for advancement in the arts. There were, of course, the lucky few whose fathers were professional artists open-minded or financially strapped enough to train and apprentice their daughters. Grateful as we are to the Rosa Bonheurs and the Artemisia Gentileschis who won the parentage lottery, this does not mitigate the cultural loss from generations of unrealized female genius.

But the world was changing. The art schools were beginning to offer instruction to women, and recognized male artists were taking on women as students. Both Bertha and Jeanna had begun their training with private lessons—Berthe in Copenhagen and Jeanna in Munich. Then, in 1867, when she was twenty-one, Bertha moved to Munich, a German city with good exhibition opportunities and low living expenses.  Four years later, she met Jeanna, who was thirty-one and already living there. In short order, Bertha moved in and the women cohabited in Munich for nearly a decade.
 
Berthe and Jeanna, like many artists in Europe, were restless…  There was this exhilarating movement coming out of France called “Impressionism.”  The Impressionists were going outside and painting “en plein air.” Instead of cursing the fickleness of the elements, they actually celebrated the transitory effects of sunlight in their art through the rapid use of “broken” brush strokes, sometimes with unmixed pigments, making no attempt to blend. The immediacy of their startlingly vibrant paintings marked a radical departure from tradition.  

There was also an interesting group of artists in Italy, the “Macchiaioli” painters. Influenced by the Impressionists, they were focused on the play of light and shadow, considering this contrast to be the major component of a painting.
 
Jeanna and Berthe began working en plein air and traveling to Italy for painting trips. In fact, Jeanna would come to be known for her landscapes.

Then, in 1880, the Académie Julian in Paris did the unthinkable: They threw open their doors to women… and Jeanna and Berthe grabbed their palettes and brushes and headed to France. They rented rooms in a guesthouse on Rue des Bruxelles, in the 9th arondissement, and they also shared a studio. Jeanna was forty and Berthe was thirty-three. Women artists from all over Europe were coming to study at the Académie Julian, forming a dynamic, international, all-women community of students.
 
But before we consider those Paris years… who were Berthe and Jeanna, really?
 
Helen Thorell, a fellow painter who lived in the same guesthouse, wrote this about meeting Jeanna:
 
"Jeanna Bauck is one of the most adorable people I have met in my life. The first impression, i.e. her appearance is not appealing—she looks like a student with her short hair, but that similarity disappears as soon as you talk to her. She seems exceptionally mild, bright, modest and always with bon courage. She is 39 years old, which I almost could not believe, but she told me today. She is awaiting an intimate friend and moreover a prominent painter from Munich, Miss Wegmann, Danish, who will also be living here… I almost dare to say that Jeanna and I have already become good friends."

Helen found it more difficult to befriend Berthe: “Bertha is a fragile nature, […] and it would not happen, even just for an hour that Jeanna would separate from her.” This dependence and introversion are a theme throughout Berthe’s life. Berthe wrote this about living apart from Jeanna, “…as long as she is not there, too, I feel drawn back and forth and have nowhere to gain a foothold.” In 1889, during a lengthy stay with Jeanna, Jeanna wrote this to a mutual friend: “Now in Munich she has become really unsociable, cannot stand talking to anyone, locks herself up in the studio, and doesn’t want to do anything but quietly sit and paint with me, read and keep silent! I am the only lucky one who is allowed to be around.”
 
But for now, they are together, and Paris was the place for early career painters. Achieving recognition for one’s work in Paris carried significant weight in cities outside of France, and Jeanna and Berthe were keen to make their mark. The biggest flex was having a painting accepted into the annual Salon, the official, two-hundred-year-old exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The Académie itself was closed to women, but anyone could submit their work to the judges.

Jeanna had one of her plein air landscapes, Summer Evening, accepted into the 1880 Salon. The next year, she made it into the Salon again, but this time as the subject of a painting by her lover Berthe.

But before I talk about that miracle of a portrait, I want to set the scene:
 
Here are these are two brilliantly gifted painters in the early years of their career. The portrait is set in their studio... that most precious, rare, coveted, sacred, and sanctified “room of one’s own.” The artist Marie Bashkirtseff, a contemporary, had this to say about studios:
 
"In the studio, everything disappears, you don’t have a name, no family; you are no longer the daughter of your mother, you are yourself, you are an individual and you have art in front of you and nothing else. You are so happy, so free, so proud."
 
And this is a studio in Paris. And, most exciting of all, Jeanna and Berthe are middle-class women on the adventure of a lifetime, living "comme les garçons." That’s a French expression that has become an English idiom, meaning “as the boys do.” Berthe and Jeanna are living without chaperones or family, renting rooms in an arts district. They are taking their painting seriously—professionally… comme les garçons. They walk the streets alone or with other young women, they go out at night, they do as they please… comme les garçons.

No doubt, they are reading the just-published book Studying Art Abroad And How To Do It Cheaply, which offered this advice to female art students: “It only needs, however, the co-operation of a sufficient number of earnest female students to form a club, hire a studio, choose a critic, and engage models, to secure the same advantages now enjoyed only by men, at the same exceedingly low rates.” Comme les garçons. Jeanna and Berthe are doing what they love, and doing it all day long and often far into the night. They are living the dream. And painting it.
 
And their Paris studio is the setting of The Artist Jeanna Bauck.
 
To me, it’s obviously some kind of sacred grove or temple. There is a massive vine across the top of the canvas, creating a bower effect. There has been no attempt to tame this plant, and it appears to be taking over the space. The leaves are not arranged for effect; they follow their own inclination, crowding toward the light from the window. The overarching presence of this vine suggests that the outdoors is either moving indoors, or perhaps the indoors is in the process of returning to nature.

“Under her own vine,” as the Hebrew scriptures would say, Jeanna sits enthroned not on a chair, but on a table, her table… which Bertha has painted at a giddy tilt, with a counter-tilting palette suspended on the wall above one of Jeanna’s landscapes. Jeanna, she-of-the-feral-arts, perches on her table surrounded by the tools of her craft and the wildness of nature. Her hair is cut short, comme les garçons, and in its feathery, blonde anarchy, it catches and reflects the light like a halo.
 
And what is our goddess doing amid all these tilting planes, underneath the undomesticated vine and that radiant nimbus of unruly hair?  Well, clearly, she has been interrupted. We know this, because she has just closed her book, keeping a finger in it to mark the page.   
 
Now, look… I am a lesbian who owes her life to books. Helen Keller put it perfectly: “Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends.” And because I am a lesbian who loves books, I notice art that combines women and books. Don’t judge. And yes, apparently it is “a thing.” There is the 1903 marble monument to the Empress Elisabeth “Sisi” of Austria in Merano, Italy.

And here's a collage from across the centuries...

There is also the delightful 1972 series, “Books and Fingers,” by Jen Mazza, of which this is merely a sampling:

Back to The Artist Jeanna Bauck... So the subject has been interrupted, but she is not disturbed. In fact, she is leaning forward eagerly, toward the source of the interruption, who must be Bertha herself. Jeanna is smiling, her lips parted. Her expression is one of ease and delight: “What is it, liebchen?”
 
And she does something else that is very comme les garçons: She crosses her legs. In 1881, ladies only crossed their ankles. Leg-crossing was the exclusive purview of males, at least in portraiture. But here’s the thing: Jeanna isn’t posing. That’s the point. Like the vine leaves over her head, Jeanna arranges herself as suits her nature. Just as they grow toward the light, so she leans forward toward the object of her affection.  And in return, the painter is capturing an image of her lover being herself, because... what could be more beautiful?

Jeanna wears a smock. It’s a nice one, but it’s a working-woman’s garment. It has a job to do: keep the pigment off the dress underneath. Also… no corset, which explains her ability to hold that leaning-over pose. And how does she accessorize? Practically. She wears a watch.
 
She does have something on a gold chain hanging from her neck, but on closer inspection, one can see that it’s a “notebook necklace.” These were very small notebooks with gold or silver covers, usually with a writing implement fastened to one of the sides. Without pockets or cellphones, a notebook necklace was handy for keeping track of appointments, addresses, and errand lists. It signifies, again, a working woman. So… a watch and a notebook… but what about jewelry?

Well… Yes. Jeanna’s jewelry in this portrait is no afterthought. It’s actually the secondary focal point of the painting, her face being primary. In fact, unlike her casual posture and demeanor, her hands appear to be deliberately posed, specifically to foreground her jewelry. The positioning of the wrists appears stiff and uncomfortable. She is having to support the hand holding the book.
 
Jeanna is, in fact, wearing a wedding ring and an engagement ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, a signifier of marital status since Roman times. She is showing us that she is a married… married, but yet not a wife--comme les garçons.
 
Berthe and Jeanna have married each other in secret and now they are telling the world without telling the world.

The Artist Jeanna Bauck is a painting bursting with lesbian joy, pride, love of self, love of studio, love of independence, love of the painter who is painting her, love of life, of spring, of art, of the world. I look at this painting, I look at the eyes of Jeanna, and I say, “Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes… Oh, yes!”

And the Salon judges accepted it in 1881, because there was no way to say no. The painting was much noted at the exhibit and very well-received, even if some assumed, because of the extraordinary intimacy, that it must have been a self-portrait!

Back in Bertha’s hometown, however, the reception was decidedly different. In 1881, she wrote this in a letter to a fellow artist back in Paris: “My studies, and Jeanna’s portrait simply have no luck here, they look at them dumbfounded, and there is no one that comprehends one whit of my painting.” A year later, she wrote, “I despise the Danes with their philistinism, which pervades all their manners and tastes. Would you believe they found Jeanna’s portrait to be “flighty and wild”, this means to say as much as in Swedish “rusket” [unruly] and for the sole reason that she is not sitting neatly combed in a chair with her hands tidily in her lap, as in all their other portraits.”

I’m not sure that Bertha’s assessment of these Danish critiques is accurate. I remember when I was first coming out, I had a crush on a lesbian actor who identified as butch. Intrigued, I asked her, “What is ‘butch’?” She answered me with bitterness: “Nobody can tell you, but everybody knows it when they see it.” I have never forgotten that, and I believe that the good people of Copenhagen, standing in front of The Artist Jeanna Bauck, knew exactly what they were seeing. And, unfortunately, their judgement fell more heavily on Jeanna than on the woman who painted her. The portrait was controversial enough outside of Paris to raise questions about Jeanna’s professionalism.

And so it was, four years later, Berthe would set out to make a second portrait of her beloved—one that would silence the critics. By then, the women had left their student days behind. Jeanna was back in Munich, supporting a mother and sister, where she had founded a school for women artists, and Berthe had returned to Copenhagen. In 1885, seeking medical treatment for rheumatism and anemia, Berthe was temporarily in Dresden, and Jeanna came to take care of her. It was during this time that Berthe painted the Portrait of Jeanna Bauck.

In the first portrait, Berthe had painted Jeanna as an artist. This time she would paint her as a lady. Veil, check. Gloves, check. Corset, check. Absence of all color, check. Conspicuous consumption, check-check-check-check. Bourgeois to the hilt and “come il faut,” which is another French expression that has become an English idiom. It means “as it should be.”

Art historian Frances Borzello talks about how the female artist has traditionally had to use self-portraiture to reconcile “the conflict between what society expected of women and what it expected of artists.” ("Comme il faut" versus "comme les garçons?") According to Borzello:

“The problem for women – and the challenge – was that these two sets of expectations were diametrically opposed. The answer was a creative defensiveness. It is only through understanding the women’s desire to out-maneuver the critics by anticipating their responses that one can begin to make sense of why their self-portraits look as they do.”

So here sits Jeanna, upright and in a chair. If her legs are crossed, we can’t tell. She’s not going to show us her wedding rings. They’re under a glove. The hair has been captured by the netting of the veil and lies squashed under it.

Now, there is one small signifier: the pince-nez glasses. In 1885 ladies preferred the lorgnette, a pair of glasses with a long handle that could be held in front of one’s eyes. The lorgnette was impractical for reading anything more taxing than the hallmark on the bottom of a china cup. That Jeanette has pince-nez indicates that she does close work (writing, reading, or painting) for extended periods of time. It’s a mark of professionalism, and, of course, comme les garçons.

It has only been four years since their student days and the smiling, eager portrait painted in their Paris studio.

This is the mature look of a woman who has had to make and to accept painful concessions in her art and in her life. In fact, this entire portrait represents a concession. Jeanna is struggling financially, while Berthe’s career in Copenhagen is so successful, she is turning down portrait commissions almost every week. If this portrait is good enough, it will hang in the Paris Salon, as a testimony to Jeanna’s professionalism.

But there is something else. Jeanna is sitting for this portrait, because Berthe has been sick, too sick to paint, and this is a project that has revived her interest in painting. And so, Jeanna is wearing tight, expensive, and uncomfortable clothing, as a concession to her long-distance lover who believes that a bourgeois portrait is all it will take to bring acceptance and recognition to an obvious lesbian. Jeanna’s face, full of tenderness, fatigue, and resignation, says it all.  She is indulging her lover.

This portrait fills me with something more profound than joy. It fills me a lesbian truth about loving women in a patriarchal world.

And there is one more thing in this painting that I want to talk about. The chair. It is the ugliest chair I’ve ever seen, and I have seen and owned my share. It’s a chair that Goodwill might turn down.  The color is ghastly, and the leather or the cloth is so shabby that the wooden struts of the chair back are beginning to wear through. The twisted braid has some kind of frayed, metallic thread that highlights the ugliness.

Why would an artist, intending to focus her attention for days or even weeks on a project, choose such an unattractive prop? Her subject is certainly dressed to impress. Why this monstrosity?

I have to conclude the chair is intentional. As intentional as the display of the wedding rings in the earlier portrait. The chair was at hand, that’s all. It was there, so they used it. The chair is an artifact from the non-art, non-lesbian world... the one that would dissipate our spiritual forces with the acquisition manipulation of trivial things.  The entire painting is a masquerade, except for Jeanna's face, which is magnificent.

And here is Audre Lorde again… “It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understandably, that cart is not going anywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written for Maize in 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 2009

Portuguese translation: “A verdade inconveniente sobre Teena Brandon”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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