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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Female Anatomy Matters. And don’t let anyone tell you different.

From theories of women’s “wandering uteri” to the insistence that womanhood is a purely social construct, and  from the witchhunts to female genital mutilation, female anatomy has been under attack. This anatomy is necessary for reproduction… and patriarchy and capitalism both have special incentives for commodifying reproduction:  It produces the soldiers that either further dreams of empire or guard against it, and it produces a labor force—the larger, the cheaper.  And, of course, our bodies are commodified for the paid and unpaid rape experiences to which a huge percentage of men feel entitled.

In patriarchy, women’s bodies are an asset, a resource, the raw material out of which humans are made. We must be owned, controlled, and—above all—kept from our power. We must be raised to be dependent on males and male approval. We must learn to distrust and fear our mothers. We must be forced into competition with other women at the expense of forming powerful alliances. We must be kept ignorant about our bodies and denied access to resources that enable our control of our anatomy. We must embrace ideologies that dissociate us from our bodies and encourage us to live dissociated identities. We must use language that erases our agency and ownership and pride in our bodies. We must use a language of dissociation that will prevent our sense of an embodied self. We must not be allowed to name our oppression, and especially the modes of attack on our anatomy. We must embrace these misogynist ideologies and become the agents for policing and schooling each other.

How do men get away with this? Well, for starts, raw power. They very blatantly legislate control over our persons. Just in the last two centuries this meant we could not vote, serve on juries, own our own children, inherit, have professional careers, get formal education, get credit in our own names, own our own wages, terminate unwanted pregnancies. We could be legally raped in marriage, sexually harassed with impunity, and a husband could have his wife locked up indefinitely on the recommendation of a doctor, who didn’t even have to examine the woman personally. Raw power.

But they also do it with ideologies: The Biblical original sin of Eve, who dragged all men for eternity down into mortal sin, getting us all evicted from the Garden. Because of Eve, men have to work for a living and women have to suffer the torment of the damned in childbirth. What was her sin? Intellectual curiosity and insistence on her own agency. This stain on our lineage became the excuse for keeping us subordinated. Denying us personhood was ordained by “the Word.”  So were other forms of enslavement. Our Biblical scapegoating does not hold the same Western universality as it did a century ago, but today there is an ideology that insists that womanhood is nothing more than a social construct and that female anatomy can be acquired through surgery. This ideology imposes heavy sanctions against formation of female alliances around shared experiences and/or oppressions associated with our anatomy and its functions. Women are prohibited from speaking the truth of women’s anatomy, and any identification with that anatomy, which is to say, any sense of an embodied self, is dismissed as ignorance and bigotry on our part.

A third prong of this attempted totalitarian control over women’s anatomy is data bias. Men in the sciences operate under the assumption that “male=human.” The result of this is the skewing of data that erases half the human race. Women must move through a world that favors males. The book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez documents the high price women are forced to pay for this willful erasure of female anatomy

Let’s take a look:

SNOW REMOVAL. Yep. Snow removal. There is an order in which municipal snow removal occurs. The priority is usually the major arteries used by drivers who commute to work. These roads get plowed first, then the bus routes, then the pedestrian routes. But guess what? Women are more likely to take public transit or to walk. Part of this is our substantially lower income, but also because we are far more likely (25%)  to “trip chain,” that is to make a number of stops on our way to a destination: drop the kids at daycare, pick up the cleaning, pick up groceries, etc. And, of course, this difference is rooted in our anatomy. How? Well, 80% of women exercise our reproductive capacity, which results in almost two decades of primary caregiving as young adults, with attendant interruptions in career-building. We make about 20% less than men. And we constitute a sizable majority of the poor and working poor. Not surprisingly, women comprise 69% of the snow injuries from falling on uncleared streets and sidewalks. Is this just theory? No. In cities where bus routes and sidewalks are cleared first, women’s injuries go down. But… the funding priority still remains commuter roads, not public transit.

TOILETS. Studies show that converting men’s and women’s bathrooms to “gender neutral,” with the men’s room retaining urinals, results in men using both bathrooms and women using only the former women’s room. Which means our lines will be even longer. The 50/50 law that mandates equal floor space for men’s and women’s facilities fails to take into account that women use cubicles exclusively, where men use urinals, greatly increasing the number of men who can use the facilities at the same time. And bathroom safety for women and children is a huge issue. WaterAid reports that women and girls around the world spend 97 billion hours a year seeking safe places to relieve themselves. Because of our anatomy and social sanctions, we cannot “go anywhere” when we need to urinate. And, of course, there is rape. Women often will avoid using public bathrooms after dark, for fear of being ambushed and assaulted. Public bathrooms around the world are notorious sites for harassment. To manage this, women often don’t drink enough water, risking dehydration and heat illness. Invisible Women has an entire chapter titled “Gender Neutral with Urinals.” It’s huge.

I really set out to summarize the book, but the examples run into the hundreds, and I am, honestly, overwhelmed. The data bias where the data is not disaggregated by sex is pervasive, and the consequences for women are disastrous. Take crash-test dummies. Yep, modeled on the average male body. But women have different muscle-mass distribution, lower bone density, differences in vertebrae spacing. And don’t even get me started on seat belts and pregnant women. We sway differently. And yes, Female Anatomy Matters. We are 17% more likely to die in car crashes.

Medicine… where to begin? That our heart attack symptoms are radically different from those of men, and for this reason thousands of women, not recognizing them in time to seek emergency services, are dead. Or the fact that colon cancer occurs higher up the colon in women, rendering the do-it-yourself, at-home screening kits less effective for women. Are we told this when considering alternatives to colonoscopies? No. Again, more female fatalities.

I actually did some crowdsourcing for examples of medical misogyny and the examples were too numerous to include. But drug testing has historically been conducted on males, resulting in the horrors of birth defects from thalidomide use by pregnant women. The horror here is that pregnant women were being specifically targeted, because thalidomide was a sedative promoted for use in third trimester sleep disorders. And ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome) is an autoimmune disorder that affects females more than males. Needless to say, it has been treated as psychosomatic: the “lazy/crazy disease.” Also Female Anatomy Matters with Lyme disease. Women tend to have more atypical rashes from the tick bites, resulting in missed or misdiagnoses. Commercial Lyme testing favors men over women, because men have more positive ELISA tests and more positive Western blots.

Mental health? Volumes have been written on this subject. Birth control and birthing practices? Ditto. Menopause and aging? Of course.  

I’m really not doing this subject justice. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, y’all. It just might save your life.

The point I want to make, as a lesbian and as a feminist, is this: Our LGBT community, in it’s admirable intention to make the world more tolerant, inclusive, and equal has overreached with ideologies that lend themselves to this “Invisible Women” oppression. In a rush to validate trans identities, we have become guilty of contributing to the disrespect toward and diminution of the significance of female anatomy. Disappearing the reality, the historical oppression, and the lived experience of female anatomy will not pave any kind of path forward toward acceptance and equality. Female Anatomy Matters is the way. This does not mean that trans identities and anatomies don’t matter. In fact, understanding why and how Female Anatomy Matters is a touchstone for liberation for all. 

 “The story of [American] women’s suffrage has been told in the same fashion for 100 years: it is familiar, repetitive, and overwhelmingly white."--from press release.

BUT... no more! There is a new history book that has just been published, and it is GLORIOUS! 

Seriously. This book is a terrific read, a complete page-turner. I could barely put it down. The only reason I would put it down was that it was 500 pages long, and, periodically, I actually had to eat and sleep. I was really sad to see it end, even if it did mean we finally got the vote.

So how did Sally Roesch Wagner turn the history of women’s suffrage into the best beach read of the summer?  I’ll let her answer:
 
“I was inspired by nearly 50 years of learning from my students. They taught me what stories they shared with their friends; what information impacted and empowered them; what made them angry; and, most importantly, what they had never been told.”
 
She gives the reader what she wants!  And she also does not give her what she doesn’t want:
 
“I also had to avoid the impulse to replace the ‘great-men-great-wars’ narrative with a ‘great-women' one—not a task for the faint-hearted or the perfectionist.”
 
Sally Roesch Wagner has widened the lens of Suffrage history and refocused the narrative to include the women of color whose presence has always informed the struggle. She does not minimize or excuse the racism of white women, and this is one of the reasons why the book is such a page-turner: The divisions, the issues, the strategies of appeasement vs. radical action are heart-poundingly relevant to the divisions, issues and strategies of today. The major players find their counterparts in today’s Black Lives Matter and across the spectrum of Congressional leadership. In the words of Susan B. Anthony: “Every generation of converts [to feminism] threshes over the same old straw.”

The book is packed with fascinating, complicated, passionate, flawed women practicing radical and visionary politics—and also engaging in abysmal, good-old-white-boy deals-with-the-devil. Roesch shows us the backroom trades, the rhetoric, the scandals, the pernicious impact of mixing religion with politics, and the cautionary divisions that historians have attempted to hide.
 
And the men! Many women have been caught off-guard by the recent tsunami of misogyny that appears to have arisen from nowhere.  Well, it wasn’t “from nowhere” at all! The Women’s Suffrage Movement plunges us deep below the surface of this present wave to experience the historical, bottomless ocean of men’s hatred of women and compulsion to dominate every single aspect of our lives. There are no Sith or Terran Empires, no Necrons, Tyranids, Weeping Angels or other sci-fi villains who can compare with the fiendish forces of white men arrayed against women, and especially against women of color, in the struggle for women’s liberation.
 
So how does this book work?

It works because it is so user-friendly. Wagner pulls us in with her first two “I-did-not-see-that-coming” chapters: “Women Voted Before the United States Was Formed” and “Women Organized Before Seneca Falls.”
 
Just one example. There was an informal meeting of five women on Sunday, July 9, 1848 in Waterloo, New York. History books might tells us that this was where the idea for the first women’s rights convention was birthed. *yawn*
 
Wagner puts us in the room with the women. Four of them had just come from a Quaker meeting. Possibly they decided to meet in the home of the woman with the two-week-old baby, because she was still nursing. A newcomer to the meeting was a mother of five children who lived at the end of a dead-end road, two miles from her nearest neighbor, with an often-absent husband. The four Quaker women all lived in homes that were on the Underground Railroad. Even as they sat there sipping, they were breaking the law. One of these abolitionist activists had traveled all the way to London to attend an abolitionist convention, only to discover they would not seat her because she was female. WOMEN WITH ISSUES.
 
And… one of the women had just gotten home from a month-long visit with the Seneca Nation near the Pennsylvania border, as these indigenous people debated whether or not to abandon their traditional clan-based government and replace it with with a US election system. It was not lost on her that the indigenous women had more voice, dignity, and respect under their own form of government. As they sit in the room with the new-born and her mother, they most likely discussed how the Haudenosaunee people had a visionary provision that all treaties had to be approved by three fourths of all the mothers in the nation.  This provision appears to me to be an acknowledgement of the unique and very physical connection and investment that mothers have with their offspring, connection and investment that incentivizes them to priorize long-term consequences with regards to dispensation of land. And here we are today where female biology is not just considered irrelevant, but taboo to reference!  I often have wished that our government had a Cabinet position, “Secretary of Long-Term Consequences” from the Department of the Future. The Haudenosaunee were on it a thousand years ago.

ANYWAY… The old history books would simply reel off the five names. Wagner puts us in the room with all of those multicultural, multi-generational, trans-European, multi-issue cross-currents swirling around our heads. THAT’s how it’s done, women. Personal frustrations, political indignities, humble acknowledgement that indigenous people have more evolved systems of government, and white women putting their freedom on the line for the liberation of people of color. Given a context like that, almost anything could be the flashpoint for revolution.
 
So then, after these eye-opening chapters, Wagner devotes each chapter to a decade, from the 1850’s up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally passed. Bonus: At the end of each chapter, Wagner includes riveting, primary-source samples of speeches, reports, editorials and other documents from that decade. Why? As Wagner says, “Primary sources take us onto the field where we watch the action, listen to the players, and figure out for ourselves what is going on.”
 
One of my favorite examples of the value of primary resources are the editorials debating dress reform. There is an obnoxious editorial by a master mansplainer, informing Suffrage women that they are forfeiting their right to all respect and credibility in his eyes (oh, no!), because they have abandoned wearing the Bloomer costume. He, of course, never wore anything in his life that would cause threatening mobs of people to follow him down the street, to throw horse manure all over him, and to subject him to endless catcalls and threats of rape everywhere he went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton cleans his clock quite handily and I savored every word she wrote.

Well… I don’t want to give too many spoilers… but in terms of relevance, there is domestic worker Hester Vaughan who either miscarried or aborted a child borne of rape, and who was given the death penalty. What saved her?  Women who organized.
 
There is a 19th century #MeToo moment when Victoria Woodhull, slut-shamed as a "Free Love" advocate, calls out the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher on his adulterous relations with a married parishioner.
 
There is Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, rising to the podium and throwing out the most radical challenge of her career: making the same demands of religion that the movement has made of the State. She is an utter badass and her speech is a complete barn burner. And I am sure that half the women who had baked the cake and put up the party decorations where offended as hell. Because that's how it's done when you are eighty.
 
There is Alice Paul, radicalized by the militant Suffragettes in England, who wants to have a ton of parades and protests. The by-then conservative movement says, “Fine, sweetie. Just raise your own money, because we won’t give you any.” She does, and she hosts rallies and protests that are wildly, insanely successful in terms of attendance and PR… so they kick her out of the organization. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am thinking of you so hard.
 
There is the “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” melodrama of the Tennessee vote to ratify the 19th amendment. It’s the final state vote that will make it law, and it comes right down to the wire, with a senator racing the clock to cast the vote and still make it home to attend the dying of his child. He’s escorted there by the women, who then have to race back to get him. He jumps from a moving train… Dirty tricks, last minute reversals, women staying one step ahead of their enemies. Really, someone needs to make a film.

One of the strongest through-lines of the book is white women’s betrayal of women of color in the movement. The pivotal moment happened in a midnight session of a national conference. It happened with a non-representational body of that organization. It was a dirty trick. But the groundwork for the division had been laid by complex grids of historical, social, and political matrices. 
 
There had been the “divide and conquer” tactics of the 14th amendment. Ostensibly granting citizenship to former slaves, the amendment introduces the word “male” into the Constitution... as a qualifier for voting rights. Should the Suffrage Movement oppose this amendment, so critical to spelling out citizens' rights to African Americans, if it was going to come at the expense of women's suffrage rights... including women of color?  Not surprisingly, women of color in the movement had a very different perspective from many of the white women. 

And then there was the temperance movement. Their organization had twice the membership of all the suffrage parties combined. Why? As Lucy Stone put it, “It’s so much easier to to see a drunkard than it is to see a principle.” The temperance movement has been framed today as a movement made up of Miss Grundy-type Puritanical school marms. In fact, in an era when women had almost no rights, it was a movement to stem domestic violence and especially rape. It was a movement filled with battered women and victims of sexual abuse, including incest. And it was a deeply religious movement, where women were reaching for a higher power than their human lords and masters, to legitimize their claims.

Susan B. Anthony wanted their numbers, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to join forces with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The price was an unholy alliance with organized, conservative, deeply racist religion.

And, finally, there was an appalling level of pandering to the racism of the Southern states. Women's suffrage was sold to them as a way to counter the rising political voice of African American men in the South.
 
In a conversation with Sally Roesch Wagner, she is asked, “What do you think are the most important takeaways from the women’s suffrage movement for social justice movements of today?”
 
Here is her answer:
 
“Eschew expediency. I’d like to see that on a big poster on every activist’s wall, and especially on the wall of organizations. When you abandon principle in order to win, like the later suffragists did, you may indeed win the battle, but you lose the war for justice. You create a legacy of division that continues for centuries.”
 
This is the best reason of all the many reasons to buy and read and treasure this delightful, intrepid, RELEVANT, page-turning, truth-telling book. It offers clarity and vision for our future. Eschew expediency right now and go out and get it.

I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

______________________________________________________________

Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning classic, is headed to Broadway… or, at least, it was headed for Broadway.
 
The author’s estate has just filed a lawsuit against the producer, Scott Rudin. At issue is his adaptation for stage. The estate attorney claims that it deviates too much from the novel and that this is a violation of their contract, which specifies that they shall not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters.”
 
As a playwright, I find this case fascinating. As a lesbian, I think that both sides are overlooking the obvious.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was considered radical in its day. The protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a white attorney who stands up to the prejudice in his small Alabama town, defending an African American man who has been falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

Today, however, the book is seen—rightfully—as exemplifying the racist trope of the Great White Savior.  In a silent tribute to their white champion, they rise spontaneously as Atticus leaves the courtroom. His head bowed in defeat, he neither sees nor acknowledges them.
 
This was the book that Harper Lee wrote. It is an artifact of its time. Although African American authors were writing and publishing, the white-dominated mainstream market was not ready to identify with their perspectives. Lee’s book was an immediate bestseller. It’s my opinion that the popular embrace of the book is contingent on the fact that Atticus loses his case and that the defendant is killed in attempting to escape. Like the trope of the dead lesbian, this reification of the status quo invites self-satisfied expressions of compassion from mainstream readers who are spared the more difficult work of embracing an ending that signals social change.
 
Today the Great White Savior narrative is widely acknowledged as offensive, and one not likely to repay the investment that goes into mounting a Broadway production. This is why, in this dramatic adaptation by Aaron Sorkin, Atticus is portrayed at the outset as a man in denial about the racism of his town—an apologist for prejudice, unwilling to believe that an innocent man can be found guilty.  The role of Calpurnia, the African American woman who cooks for the Finch family, has been rewritten as the agent for Atticus’ awakening. Through a series of confrontations with her employer, she manages to win over the white attorney, mentoring him into the reality of Southern rural racism in 1936. By the end of the play, he has become the Atticus with whom we are familiar, the righteous hero standing against the masses for social justice… but he owes it all to a woman of color.

Actor/musician Evadne Bryan-Perkins notes that this rewrite swaps one racist trope for another--that of the "Magical Negro." This trope relies on a supporting stock character coming to the aid of the white protagonists, helping them discern the error of their ways. (This term was popularized by African American film director Spike Lee in 2001, during his lecture tour of universities, where he was criticizing the unrealistic and stereotyped depictions of African American men in Hollywood cinema.)

But Rudin, the producer, is not just responding to the datedness of the Great White Savior narrative. He also knows his dramaturgy. In theatre, the main character needs to have what is called a “narrative arc.” The protagonist must go on a journey of transformation, starting out at Point A and, two hours later, ending up—ideally—at Point Z. (A dramatic trajectory from Point A to Point B is not likely to carry a play with the gravitas of To Kill a Mockingbird.) The Atticus of the book, tried as he is by circumstances, nevertheless begins with sterling character and social conscience and ends in the same state of  grace. He goes from Point A to Point A.
 
As a playwright, I sympathize with the producer.  He wants a play that is going to work. However, as a playwright who is zealous about her own copyright protections, I have to side with the Harper Lee estate: It is clear that, in giving Atticus a narrative arc, the producer has deviated substantially from the character in the book. In rewriting the role of Calpurnia to be a major voice in the play, the producer has essentially created a new character.

As of the writing of this, neither side is making concessions.  Rudin, from his corner, maintains, “I can't and won't present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn't be of interest…. The world has changed since then."
 
Attorney Tonja Carter, representing the Harper Lee estate fires back that the new Atticus “is more like an edgy sitcom dad in the 21st Century than the iconic Atticus of the novel.”
 
So that is the current standoff.
 
But I think both sides are missing something. It’s not about Atticus. It’s never been about Atticus. The voice of the narrator in the book is a gender-non-conforming girl named Scout. Atticus is her father. Harper Lee, a lesbian, has created a character that is her alter-ego, telling a story that was inspired by an actual event that occurred near her hometown in Alabama when she was ten years old. The plot and observations in the book are loosely based on her own experience. The model for Atticus was her own father.

Scout has a huge dramatic arc. In fact, Scout’s coming-to-consciousness about the socials evils of the adult world is the point of the book. She goes from being a naive child who has absorbed the prejudices of her peers, to someone who can break away, incorporating perspectives of the under-represented and standing with the outsiders of the world. Scout watches the trial, literally, from the colored section of the segregated courtroom. At the end of the book, she has traveled from fear of a developmentally disabled neighbor, to recognizing him as an ally and friend.
 
Why not make Scout the central figure in the Broadway show?  In the book, she is six, but she was older in the film. If the play is refracted through the adoring eyes of a child, wouldn't that explain her idealized experience of her father? In the book, Scout accompanies Calpurnia to a Black church, where she has a massive awakening as she sees Calpurnia's transformation of status among members of her own community. No need to violate the contract. Just allow the woman the full and radical context of that scene.

Can a Broadway audience identify with a gender-non-conforming little girl. Why not?  It wouldn’t be the first time. Member of the Wedding, another best-seller by a Southern lesbian author, was adapted for Broadway. It opened in 1950 and ran for more than five hundred performances. A historic production, the cast included Ethel Waters and a young Julie Harris. What is significant here is that the author adapted the book herself, and the character of the tomboy, Frankie, remains as central and unaltered on the stage as she was in the book. 
 
Yes, there will be a problem if Aaron Sorkin stays on to attempt a Scout-centric adaptation. Sorkin’s writing credits include the television series The West Wing, and a roster of tough-talking, political films including A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. He has already been questioned about his ability to write dialogue for Harper Lee’s juvenile characters. Asked if they will be expected to “speak Sorkin,” he responded, "Well, they're gonna have to, because I didn't write their language like they were children."
 
As a solution to this author-producer deadlock, I would like to put my name forward as an alternative writer. My credentials include thirty years of creating and performing lesbian roles for the stage, including more than a dozen gender-non-conforming roles for little girls. I invite Mr. Rudin to the webpage for my Butch Visibility Project. I really believe this might work.

Mia Merrill, a human resources manager, happened to see a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it upset her so badly that she started a petition to have it taken down. Her petition garnered more than 10,000 signatures in less than a week. (see below) She did not ask that it be destroyed... just taken down. In fact, she was even okay if it stayed up:  “I would consider this petition a success if the Met included a message as brief as, ‘Some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus’s artistic infatuation with young girls'.”

And here is the Met's response:  “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present, and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.”

And here is my response: "Oh, for f*** sake." Literally.

The painting is titled Thérese Dreaming by Balthus.

Here's the thing...

There was a real Thérese. Her name was Thérese Blanchard, and she was eleven years old in 1936, when she had the misfortune to catch the eye of her Parisian neighbor, Balthus.  She was the daughter of a restaurant worker, and her family may have welcomed, or even needed, the extra income to be had from modeling. In any event, Therese posed for Balthus for the next three years. He made ten paintings of her. The art world considers them his finest work.

Let’s get back to Thérèse. She was a child. She posed for Balthus on numerous occasions for three years. We cannot know if she wanted to pose for him or if she was ordered by her family to do it. In the case of Thérese Dreaming, the child had to hold an awkward and physically uncomfortable position (both arms held over her head) for long stretches of time. She also had to hold an emotionally excruciating position… exposing her elevated crotch and underwear with her legs wide apart. I would submit that the physical and emotional discomfort of the subject were components in of the painter’s choice of pose.  I would also submit that, if Thérèse is dreaming at all, it is of something to make it stop. In fact, the subject’s eyes appear to be squeezed tightly shut, her eyebrows contracting from the effort.
 
Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy.

The Met appears to be unclear on this point.
 
Seven years ago, the art world was very unclear about a film by Larry Rivers titled “Growing.” The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, but in 1910, it was just sold, with the archive, to New York University.
 
“Growing” was a film in which Rivers filmed his daughters every six months over a period of at least five years. According to one of his daughters, when she objected at the time, he called her “uptight” and  “a bad daughter.”  When she confronted him as a teenagers, he gave the justification that his “intellectual development had been arrested.”

Rivers edited the footage of his naked daughters into a 45-minute film that he was intending to include in a 1981 exhibition of his work. The mother of the girls stopped him.
 
Initially, New York University refused the now-adult daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. They did agree to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, insisting that “Growing” was the work of a great artists and not child pornography.  The public did not agree, and the story went viral. In the end,  NYU did not want the controversy, and they returned the film to the Larry Rivers Foundation. The Foundation has said they will never allow the film to be shown publicly.
 
The simple fact is, “Growing” is child pornography, and it is illegal to buy it or to own it. This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began, like Balthus’ paintings of Thérèse,  when one of the subjects was eleven.

I blogged about the Larry Rivers situation at the time, and in my blog I made a radical proposition intended to break the deadlock over, “When an important artist makes child pornography is it still art?”  I will repeat that proposition here:
 
I propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.
 
Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how the socialization of the child is really about her colonization. It’s easy for us not to think about children this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity… and nearly endless opportunities for exploitation.  

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.
 
“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.
 
This obscene film by Larry Rivers was an artifact of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhoods. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University had no right to acquire it. It belonged to the daughters.

Thérèse Blanchard is not alive today. She, unlike Rivers’ daughters, cannot stake a claim to the documentation of her abuse. But in continuing to display works like this (and much of Balthus’ canon), we perpetuate the prurience of the perpetrators.
 
Children have a right to their lives, to their experience, to their privacy. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting and monetizing their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization. And if the child victims are no longer here to stake that claim, then we should make sure that these crime-scene artifacts, no matter how "tasteful" or "masterful" the execution, will never be revered as works of art.

​Dark Matters is Susan Hawthorne’s latest novel. Susan is one of the most prolific lesbian authors and poets I know, as well as one of my favorite “synapsers.” She makes connections between art and history, between the personal and the political, between the mundane and earth-shaking… and when I read her, I feel my own brain building those bridges, expanding and deepening my understanding and appreciation of my own experiences.

The title of the book indicates just how deep Hawthorne is going with her story. “Dark matter” refers to the matter that composes about 84% of our universe. It is not made up of atoms. We know it is there, because we can observe its gravitational pull, but so far, nobody has been able to figure out what it is

​Appropriately, Dark Matter is the story of the disappearance of a lesbian. In a secret dawn raid, Kate is abducted by anonymous government forces in Australia. She is imprisoned and tortured. We hear her story through her own voice in the pages of her prison diary. We hear other parts of her story through the voice of Desi, her niece, who is attempting to make sense of Kate’s life through her papers and by tracking down the history of her lover Mercedes, who was shot in bed with her the morning of the raid.
 
The prison diaries are fascinating and horrifying. Kate narrates the details of her torture, which includes rape, while carefully documenting her strategies for keeping herself sane during the ordeal. Her secret weapon is language. Desi notes how pain destroys language and describes Kate’s ideas of invention of language as a form of revenge against the torturers: “Her way of winning.”

​If language is a way of winning, genealogy may be a way of prevailing. Dark Matters returns again and again to the theme of lesbian genealogy.
 
“That’s the thing about lesbians, it’s a kind of detective story that unwinds in scraps but half of the pages are shredded and the rest are so destroyed as to be unreadable. What we have left are fragments.”
 
Desi calls her discipline “Diagonal Genealogies.” Because, of course, lesbians don’t usually descend from lesbians. I think of my own diagonal lesbian genealogy, my own lesbian aunt. The “spinster schoolteacher” who actually lived with another woman for most of her adult life, raised that woman’s children, and put them through school. And then there are the diagonal lesbian literary genealogies I share with Hawthorne… Sappho, Woolf, Wittig, H.D…  And also her pantheon of goddesses.

I am intrigued by Hawthorne’s exploration of genealogy. She references an emotional genealogy, as well as genealogies of memory.
 
“…those lists are helping me figure out the relationships, order of birth and all the pieces that go missing in family trees where there are only women to pass on the stories. On the most difficult to reach branch of the tree sits the lesbian.”
 
Dark Matters moves from a dystopian fictional “disappearing” of lesbians in Australia to the historical Chilean desparecidos under the regime of Pinochet. Desi, searching for her dead aunt’s lover, travels to Chile and visits the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights). It is estimated that, under Pinochet, tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured and an estimated 200,00 Chileans were driven into exile. Two thousand were executed. Many of these victims were secretly abducted and imprisoned. To the outside world, they simple “disappeared.”

These references to the “disappeared” were especially resonant, because the “disappearance of lesbians” is currently the subject of blogs and magazine articles in popular culture. My friend Bonnie Morris wrote a book about the phenomenon: The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. Is it appropriate to compare this cultural erasure with the murder of the desparecidos of Chile and Argentina?
 
Desi makes connections between what happened to lesbians in Nazi Germany and what is happening currently to lesbians in countries where our freedoms are not protected. She notes how lesbians are called “disposables” in Columbia, and I think of the term “corrective rape,” and how liberally it has been executed against South African lesbians. Desi quotes from poem by Gill Hanscombe: “No one is proud of dykes… Only other dykes are proud of dykes.” 

​I experienced Dark Matters as a kind of deep and swift current that swept me up and carried me along. I am back in calmer waters now, but it has left me in a different place, and with a subtle momentum that was not there before. 

Dr. Bonnie Morris’ eagerly awaited book The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture is out now, and available in paperback. Buy it. It’s (borrowing a riff from Dr. Bon) “pure protein” for the soul… in an age of postmodern and sound-bite carbs. And we need protein, because, sisters, it’s time to build some muscles.
 
Okay. The book. It’s amazing, Amazonian. It does things that are supposedly not possible. Like lesbians. It’s often warm, personal, and personable… and at the same time impeccably researched and documented. She brings “scholarly standards to radical history.”  It’s engaging and accessible, stimulating and inspiring. It’s actually kind of everything.
 
Dr. Morris lays it right out from Page One, stating in her first sentence that she writes “as a woman, lesbian, and feminist; a dinosaur facing extinction in this new queer jungle. I’m writing now to describe what it looks like and feels like to be written out of history.”
 
Bam.

And what a history it was! Lesbian feminists in the late 20th century created a powerful movement, and we did it before the Internet. But as Dr. Bon notes, “By 2000, anything woman-identified had become proof of unthinkable allegiance to a retro gender binary.”
 
This, of course, did not happen to gay men. Why and how did it happen to lesbians? Dr. Bon, influenced early in life by Nancy Drew and Harriet the Spy, invites us to join her in solving this mystery… and she describes her treasure map:

“As cultural capital, the threatened art and music of this recent lesbian past is precious to me.”
 
It should be precious to all of us… not just lesbians, but anyone concerned with the rapidly eroding rights of women. Because, as we are seeing, when they came for the lesbians, it was the prelude for the abasement of all women.
 
Dr. Bon is a professor of women’s studies, and from this vantage point, she has been able to watch the process of erasure. She notes how the terms for identity most popular with her students include “queer, gay, bi, trans, or ally.” What did these have in common? “…they were all either gender-neutral or male-inclusive. These terms embraced masculine possibilities, or relationships with men, in ways that lesbian of course did not.”  In this lineup, “lesbian” is read as separatist, and the ignoring of men is nearly always conflated in patriarchy with hatred of men. This image, of course, is anathema to female activists or progressives.

In the world of Gender Studies and queer theory, lesbian history finds itself homeless. Even studies of girlhood are read as transphobic. In the colorful words of Dr. Bon, “For better or worse, the stereotype of the angry radical lesbian marching with fist raised against the patriarchy has been replaced by the embossed wedding invitation for Megan and Carmen.” As the New York Times trumpeted after the Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex marriage, “Separatism is for losers.”
 
So… that’s where we are. That’s just chapter one. The pundits have drawn an official curtain over three decades of radical, lesbian-feminist social change and a flowering of lesbian and feminist culture unprecedented in the history of the world. But…  Nothing to see here, folks. Let’s move along. Dr. Bon cannily uncovers one of the key mechanisms for our erasure: The lesbian stereotype so aggressively propagated erases our activism.

White-girl music?  The “women’s music” movement had its roots in African American blues, in the protest songs of the 60’s—and earlier, and in appropriation of the male-dominated genre of rock-and-roll. Dr. Bon reminds us of the “Varied Voices of the Black Woman” tour. Diversity? Lesbian feminist festivals and concerts almost without exception offered sliding scale tickets as well as sign language interpretation. Accessibility was a priority right out of the gate.
 
And what about the “women-only” events? What about them…?  Wasn’t anybody noting the men-only offerings of the entire rest of the culture. In the words of lesbian photographer  JEB (Joan E. Biren), “There was nothing in the culture that nourished us.”
 
“… so many women were desperate for positive reflections of lesbian life that just to be at a lesbian-majority event was thrilling; actually enlightening. Joining together to create this temporary  majority at women-only concerts allowed audiences to experience (for the first time) an environment where lesbians were in charge of what was said about lesbian lives.”

The women’s music festivals were all about diversity, community, and family… and, in the pre-Internet days, the political grapevine.  The entire first chapter, “The Soundtrack of Our Awakening” is breath-taking. I felt as if I was leaning over the shoulder of a master archeologist, unearthing cultural treasure after cultural treasure, proving the existence of a time and a place that had become as mythical as Atlantis. Just this chapter alone is worth the price of the book!
 
But wait… there’s more. That’s only the beginning. The second chapter, “By the Time I Got to Wombstock.” This is the chapter about the festivals—the women’s music festivals. As Dr. Bon notes, “Thousands and thousands of lesbians experienced at least one such festival as part of their personal and political awakening in the quarter-century between 1974 and 1999.”
 
I remember so clearly my first festival. It was the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, produced by Robin Tyler. It completely rocked my world. It changed me forever. Later I would attend the West Coast Lesbian Festival, the East Coast Lesbian Festival, Campfest, the Gulf Coast Womyn’s Festival, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I went to “Michfest” for fourteen years, contributing programming to it for nine.

My experience of these festivals is so outside the context of everything to do with the patriarchy that I am at a loss for words in describing it. What I would say for the last quarter century was just “see for yourself.”
 
But Dr. Bon finds the words:

“Were festivals designed to be lesbian erotic vacation spaces? Or were they reflective, goddess-centered spirituality breaks from rampant sexism and homophobia in society? Or training camps for lesbian political nationhood? …Against this backdrop of recovery meetings and nude partying, hopeful diversity and angry processing, the nation’s best all-female stages evolved over time, a music and comedy performance history  that should be central to any reconstructed narrative.”
 
She cites Robert McRuer in his research on gay and lesbian utopian communities:

“The emphasis for many lesbian feminists had shifted from engagement with, or transformation of, the outside world, to removal from that world and the structures of patriarchy and capitalism that sustained it… despite the fact that it was an outdoor event, the spatial orientation at women’s music festivals was inward.”
 
This subject is so charged for me, I am overwhelmed just attempting to review the writing of another author! All I can say is thank the goddess for Dr. Morris. Seriously. She has chronicled assiduously forty years of the jewel in the crown of lesbian feminist culture, and in this chapter, she presents us with a comprehensive history of the roots of the festivals, the lineups of performers, profiles of the largest one, and an in-depth analysis of the controversies surrounding the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

In the second half of this chapter, Dr. Bon opens up to share her own personal journey with the festivals and how she came to transform her passion for this culture into the archiving of it. As a nineteen-year-old college sophomore, she bought her first ticket to the Michigan festival. The year was 1981, and the festival was five years old.
 
She shares with us the tender pages of her journal of the experience, beginning with the eighteen-hour road trip on a privately chartered Greyhound bus. In spite of the all-night party on the bus and being rained out of her tent, her relationship with festival culture was consummated on that trip: “This is my life choice. I have been silent because so much of what I feel has already been expressed so eloquently by others before me in this movement. But I want to capture it all, for it has captured me.” 
 
O, sweet bird of youth… I wish that starry-eyed nineteen-year-old could have known what awaited her… a hundred festivals, thousands of women, hundreds of thousands of words. By 1986, her graduate school training had put her well on her way to being a professional historian. Her note-taking expanded into tape recordings. Eventually, she began to invite women at the festivals to journal along with her.
 
These journals were so much more than “dear diaries.” In Dr. Bon’s own words:
 
“In creating a longitudinal festival journal before women had computers, blogs, Twitter, or Facebook, I ended up with an archive of how self-worth developed in a marginalized community.” 

What she was documenting was a miracle.

Lesbians, she reminds us, were still outlaws in the Eighties. Lesbian moms lost their kids. Lesbian kids lost their homes. Unlike other marginalized populations, we rarely had families who had or backs, much less shared our identities and could transmit the culture.

And we were not gays. We were lesbians, specifically females. On top of the homophobia, we were combating the ubiquitous misogyny that too often considered  rape, battery and harassment to be our fault. But we found each other, we began to share our stories, and then we celebrated ourselves. These celebrations were not just part of a movement toward liberation. They were an embodiment of the liberation itself. Radical beyond description… except that Dr. Bon was doing just that.
 
Why no coverage?  Aside from the obvious biases against women and homosexuals, Dr. Bon offers and additional explanation: AIDS. She notes how the Radical Faerie movement of the 1980’s, a movement among gay men, embraced separatist retreats in nature as part of identity-building. This generation, however, was ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. The heyday of lesbian culture coincided with the plague years for gay men, and, as a result, many of the men who were in sympathy with this culture and who might have been able to provide a supportive context for it for future historians did not survive.
 
Then, there is the rise and fall of the lesbian-owned businesses, especially the women’s bookstores, which were sanctuaries and clearing houses for entire communities of lesbians.

And… the  Internet… The difficulty of archiving pre-Internet and the great ease of hijacking narratives in the post-Internet era. Googling these festivals, one is most likely to land on websites dismissing them at transphobic, benighted, and historically  insignificant. In Dr. Bon’s words:

“In the realm of social media and political rhetoric, [women born female] lesbians and trans women were cruelly set against one another in the ongoing battle over the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. This has successfully rewritten recent history to portray lesbian cultural  activists as both privileged and oppressive, burying other realities.” 

Unlike most of those who write on this subject, Dr. Bon was actually there. She was there for nearly forty years.
 
The Disappearing L has a fascinating chapter “Imagining an Eruv,” where Dr. Bon documents the history of Jewish lesbian-feminists in the lesbian culture. She talks about the struggle for a separate “Jewish Tent” at the Michigan Festival, the eventual realization of that dream, and then the permutations of that institution. Drawing parallels between the identities of Jews and lesbians, she compares strategies for preservation of culture.
 
The Disappearing L is so rich in detail and anecdote, so enlightening in analyses, I am at loss to do it justice. This book, and Dr. Bon’s archive, which is at the Schlesinger Library, are treasures.  I feel blessed to have been a part of this time, this culture, and to have walked with so many of these women… and I feel blessed that someone has preserved the record and the artifacts of this “Golden Age.”

From Dr. Bon's website:

A lifetime of teaching women's history.

Q: IS SHE STILL CARRYING THAT NOTEBOOK AROUND?

A: Yes--and still writing in it with a fountain pen.

Q: How many journals has Bon filled by now?

A: One hundred and seventy-nine; they jam the bookshelf my father built for me when I was three. On my table, catching sunlight and moonlight, is a bowl of fountain pens. Come choose your weapon: Sheaffer, Lamy, Watermark.

"My research interests and available guest speeches include women's sports, the women's music movement since the mid-1970s, Jewish women's history, and other female-identified communities across time....

I've traveled the world as a professor and guest speaker. Appearances include both University of Waikato and Victoria University in New Zealand; Reykjavik University in Iceland; the Women's Education, Reserach and Resource Center of University College in Dublin, Ireland; Tel Aviv University in Israel; Queens College in Ontario, Canada; and Anna Daresh Women's College in Madras, India. Bring me in to speak at YOUR next women's history event!"

The Disappearing L can be ordered from the publisher for $22.

And here's an interview I did with Dr. Bon, sponsored by Green Woman Store for their telesummit on the environment in 2015.

Two things are going on for me this week: PTSD and Martha Graham. The PTSD is from the constant headlines about the sexual predation of one of the leading candidates for the office of President. Martha Graham is from my work on a play about Jean Rosenthal, the lesbian who lit her performances for thirty-five years.
 
In the course of researching Martha, I ran across a Youtube video of one of her most famous dances, “Errand into the Maze.” It’s a recreation of the dance that premiered in 1947. You can see it here.

Twelve years ago, I had watched the video of this dance, but I didn’t’ really see it. At that time, I was mostly interested in it from a biographical perspective. Was this about Graham’s ambivalence about marrying Erick Hawkins, one of her dancers? I had accepted the analysis of the dance pundits that “Errand” is about a woman’s fear of sexual intimacy.

Watching it this time, with active PTSD, I arrived at a very different understanding of the dance. I felt I was watching a woman wrestle with retrieval and integration of a traumatic rape memory. “Errand” was suddenly personal and relevant to me.
 
The dance is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the story, the warrior Theseus must slay the Minotaur that lives in a labyrinth. Adriadne, the king’s daughter, helps Theseus by giving him a ball of thread that he uses to find his way out. In Graham’s version, there is no male warrior. It is Ariadne herself who enters the maze and slays the monster.
 
What Martha Graham has done is take us into the internal landscape of the survivor and her memories. Every single beat of this dance was suddenly intelligible and relatable to me. As an archetype, it reinforces the map of a survivor’s terrain: You are here. You may find yourself here later on. And if you can manage to get here, you’re out of the woods.

The dance begins before the dance. Martha would lay out the labyrinth before she danced it. It was made from lightweight, flexible boning that dressmakers used. One could buy it by the yard. Boning, unlike rope or ribbon, has something of a mind of its own. It resists, and the dancer must dialogue with that. I believe this is important. I believe it is why Martha chose it, instead of rope. It has a will… as do traumatic memories. And I like that she would lay out the labyrinth as a personal ritual, before each performance. Dancers still do that today. The path back into our memories is profoundly personal, if subconscious.

So… the stage is set with a stylized moon, a path of boning, and a V-shaped sculpture at the center of the maze that resembles an inverted pelvis with both legs up in the air.  The dance begins with pelvic contractions… labor pains? (Martha suffered from agonizing menstrual cramps.) The dancer begins to move as if she is being compelled against her will… Some have said that the world is forcing her, but her spirit resists. I see the opposite. I see her spirit calling her, her memories coming to get her:  It’s time.  The resistance is her habitual self, the armor of denial or routine that has been her protection.

Traumatic memories arrive. Their arrival feels unbidden, intrusive, pathological. In fact, often they arrive to be healed. The psyche that has been hiding them may be suddenly ready. Sometimes there is a trigger, an event that replicates the trauma, and we are set on that path again, greatly against our conscious will. But in Martha’s dance, this struggle is set in motion by an action that archetypically marks the beginning of labor, of birth. Unbidden, intrusive, seemingly pathological… but necessary for creation.

So, bent double with the violence of the contractions, the woman begins her journey dancing down the path of the boning, dancing into the maze toward the memory. She arrives at the crotch of the torso, or the trees, where she appears to ground herself temporarily, and then pull away, and then return. “I can’t but I must; I can’t but I must.” And then suddenly the Minotaur appears, a male dancer, mostly nude, with horns on his head and his arms yoked over a bone/staff.

Here it is: The Memory. She shields her eyes from the sight. She turns her back. It menaces her. She finally, turns toward him, throwing up one arm in a futile gesture of resistance. He literally bends her to his will and the horror is accomplished. She pushes the memory away, refusing to look. In denial mode, she retraces her steps back into the maze, this time, pulling up the boning behind her and weaving it between the legs of the torso as a kind of shield, just as the Minotaur returns, looking for her.

She does not want to come out from her defenses. The memory is exerting a pull over her. This time, she collapses on the floor, not even attempting a defense. She rolls as he steps over her, appearing to kick her along. He pulls her onto his back and carries her curled up in a fetal roll. He drags her back when she attempts to crawl away. He swings her around by the wrists. The Minotaur/memory literally kicks her ass.
 
But all this time, she has been growing stronger. This time, when he leaves, she discovers a joy, a lyricism in her body. She discovers pleasure. The contractions return, but she is integrating them, owning them as part of her body—part of her process. They are no longer an alien force violating her. She participates. She experiences them as part of her strength. And when the Minotaur returns, she still doesn’t want to look, she still experiences the dread.  He gloats, he menaces, he taunts. She is avoidant, she tries to move away… He still frightens her, but there is a new determination. Her hands are over her uterus.

Suddenly, she spins around to face her tormentor. She grabs his hands and leaps onto his thighs, towering over him, wrestling him, staring him down. She holds her ground. He collapses on the ground, the stiff bone that held up his arms rolls away, and he dies.

She returns to the torso/altar and unwinds the boning, stroking the legs/bones/trunks. She is free. Her body is her own. The "errand" is accomplished.

Warning: Some graphic descriptions of violence against women.

Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade, edited by Caroline Norma and Melinda Tankard Reist, contains nineteen testimonies by women from around the world who have survived the sex trade, with three commentaries, a prologue by Rachel Moran, and an introduction by the editors. These are the voices of women who have been trafficked, used in pornography, worked in legal brothels, worked on the street. Some of them were addicted, some were sexually abused as children. All of them survived.  

Reading this book, the question that kept coming up for me was, “How can anyone believe that prostitution is a legitimate job?” I believe the answer lies in the fact that most people will believe what they are incentivized to believe. Long-time abolitionist Melissa Farley is cited in the introduction:
 
“There is an economic motive to hiding the violence in prostitution and trafficking… prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators… Many governments protect commercial sex business because of monstrous profits.”
 
But what about the average person on the street… the average liberal, perhaps? I am reminded of what Hitler wrote about the “Big Lie:”

“… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily… they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
 
It is this belief in the Big Lie that enables governments and organizations like Amnesty International to overlook the truth about prostitution, and it is actions like the writing in Prostitution Narratives that will render that Big Lie unsustainable.
 
Rachel Moran, who wrote the Prologue, speaks about the lying at Ground Zero… in the victim’s own consciousness. (A footnote on Moran: She is the author of the astounding memoir Paid For: My Journey Through Prositution. Her memoir performs the near-miraculous feat of describing in detail the emotional state and psychological syndromes and strategies associated with the violations of prostitution. Her courage in writing that memoir reminds me of Harriet Tubman, who didn’t just get herself out of captivity, but who retraced her steps back to hell, over and over again, in order to bring out others.) So here is Moran:

“… I lied to others about what prostitution was; I did not lie to myself…  My deepest compassion is with the women who must mine deeply within themselves to uncover the subterfuge, go through the pain of examining its shapes and edges, and find a way to squarely look at the thing it was designed to conceal. In this process they must acknowledge the carnage of their own complicity.”
 
“The carnage of their own complicity.” And, the carnage of all our complicity.
 
The only way I know how to do this book justice in a blog is to give the space over to some of the voices in these pages, starting with the writing of Jacqueline Gwynne, a woman who was a receptionist at an upscale brothel in Melbourne. (In Australia, prostitution is legal.)
 
“My job title was ‘receptionist.’ I had a brothel manager’s license. But in reality I was actually a pimp. I had to sell women…
 
When I started, I was pro-porn and pro-sex work. At first I thought it was cool and exciting. I had read many books and watched films about the sex industry. It is glamourised in the media. But, in reality, the men are mostly fat, ugly, mad, old, creepy, have poor social skills, very few sexual skills and appalling personal hygiene. They generally can’t have normal relationships with women because of these reasons and they also have no respect for women. Any man that walks in to a brothel has no respect for women…"

I was only allowed to call the police if a client got angry about the service he received. I could have called the police numerous times, but abuse, intimidation and sexual harassment were all just part of the territory. The owner didn’t want us calling the police. We were expected to handle it all on our own…
 
The men would request exactly what they had seen in porn and wanted the girls very young and blonde. They would request extra for no condom: that would happen every night. I have no idea if any girls did, there were rumours of it happening. When you haven’t had a job all night, can’t pay your rent, it’s 4am and some guy offers you $500, what do you do?...
 
Being paid for sex is not what I think of as consensual sex. If you met these guys elsewhere you would not want to have sex with them. Prostitution is virtually paid rape…”
 
Rhiannon in “Didn’t Come to Hear Bitches Recite Poetry,” elaborates on that theme:

“When a person is paid for sex they are being paid precisely because of the fact the sex is unwanted. Sexual autonomy cannot exist when a person is sexual for any reason outside their own desire, for their own pleasure. The sacrifice of my bodily autonomy was precisely what I was paid for.”( p. 72.)
 
“He told me he had $200 and I followed him to his apartment. In the world I lived in, the sum of all I was worth was $200. That fact filled me with more pain than I could contain. In his bathroom I took the rest of the pills left in my bag, found his razor and used it to cut my wrists, then removed my clothes and went and lay down on his bed with blood sticking to the toilet paper I had stuck on the cuts. He only had a hundred dollars, he said. It was all he could find. I insisted on clutching the cash while he used me. This man felt it was worth paying a hundred dollars to have sex with a woman who had a tear-stained face and bleeding wrists."
 
Was that kind of callous or sadistic indifference an exception?
 
Caitlin Roper cites from a study done by Melissa Farley and colleagues, “Comparing Sex Buyers with Men Who Don’t Buy Sex:”
 
“Two thirds of both the sex buyers and the non-sex buyers observed that a majority of women are lured, tricked, or trafficked into prostitution” and that “41%... of the sex buyers used women who they knew were controlled by pimps at the time they used her…  The knowledge that women have been exploited, coerced, pimped or trafficked failed to deter sex buyers from buying sex.”

Linda explains what that looks like:
 
“A lot of them [johns] seem hypnotized, like they don’t know that the whole thing isn’t real. A lot of them say, ‘I love you’; a lot seem normal, but not many realize that you are there because you were initially desperate and then you just got lost in the money or drugs or whatever. It’s inconvenient for them to think about our circumstances.”
 
So why aren’t more survivors speaking out? 
 
Here’s Tanja Rahm:
 
“A lot of women around the world have been trying to tell the truth about prostitution and what is going on in prostitution. But when you speak out, you take a high risk. You run the risk of being threatened, hated, being told that you are weak, weren’t strong enough, that prostitution isn’t for everyone, that you chose it for yourself, that you got a lot of money from prostitution and are therefore a whore. What the pro-prostitution lobby tries to do is frighten women into not telling the truth about their experiences, so that you won’t be able to hear the truth. The fact you don’t hear from [survivors of prostitution] very often is not because they are not there. It is because they are not ready to confront society’s neglect of their experiences.”
 
But some of these women do speak out… and here is Simone Watson’s experience:

“Yes, those memories linger whether I am meeting with politicians, or trying to be heard among the cries of ‘sex worker rights’ in the media. Or intellectuals who calmly look at me as an interesting subject—who view it all as a sociological phenomenon of interest. Rather than violation. Rather than agony. Rather than urgency. And when traveling all the way, with the resultant PTSD, to meet politicians in my own or another state in fear and desperation that another generation of human beings will endure what I went through, and telling them I am a survivor. Then going back to the hotel room to sleep and being woken several times sweating and suffocating. Feeling weights on me. Crying, then feeling stupid. Checking the internet for news from home and finding another person telling me they hope I die and that I am feminist scum and a man hater and too ugly to fuck. That I needed to get raped and that would sort me out.”
 
Finally, I want to end with the writing of Christine Stark, a friend and fellow author. I reviewed her book Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation a few years ago. In her essay, “When You Become Pornography,” she tells of her experience:

I'm so grateful these women survived and I am in awe of their courage in telling their stories in Prostitution Narratives. I'm grateful to the editors, to Rachel Moran, and to Spinifex Press. I encourage women to take this book and not just read it, but deploy it. 

Order here.