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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, it’s finally happened. Russell Brand, comedian-turned-radical-political-podcaster, is being called out internationally about an alleged, decades-long history of sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior toward women and girls. He was called out by an investigative article in the UK’s Sunday Times and a documentary exposé on Channel 4.
 
Here’s the Wikipedia condensed version:

Now, here’s the thing. Russell Brand has been in active recovery from substance abuse disorder—including alcohol and heroin, since he went into rehab in 2002. He’s been clean and sober for more than two decades, and he has shared publicly and generously about his journey in recovery. His book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, was a best-seller. In 2005, he entered rehab in the US for sex addiction, and since then, he has been very open about the harms of pornography. In his autobiography he wrote about having drawn up an extensive ‘victims list’ of women he had “wronged” as a result of his sexual addiction.

In addition he has shared his history of sexual abuse. When he was a little boy, he was sent to a tutor who, according to Brand, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls."  He told his mother, who told his father, and the tutoring stopped, but nothing was ever done. When he was a teenager, his father took him on an Asian "sex tourism" holiday, and his father rented a prostituted woman to "teach him to be a man." The father stayed in the room to watch.  According to Brand, he was advised to leave his childhood abuse out of the book, but, he wrote, "The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in Chapter Four you see this happen, when in Chapter Twelve, I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary."

All of this is to say, I believed in Brand's recovery. My first reaction to The Times account was, "Oh, my god! He’s going to own it! He’s going to do something that none of these predators have ever done before! He’s going to model 12-Step accountability, and he’s going to do it on a public stage!  He’s going to walk his talk and set an example for the world!"

My second reaction reinforced my first:   "He's no Harvey Weinstein! He's no Bill Cosby!  The man has reinvented himself!"

Russell Brand is no longer a man-boy, mommy-shocker, BBC clown-prince, bad-boy comedian. He’s a political commentator, and an extremely competent one. He has rebranded himself as a whistleblower who is not afraid to take on the government as well as huge corporations. Some consider him the king of conspiracy theories, but, whenever I have watched his podcast, he brings the receipts, posting and citing all of his sources. Impressive. Oh, and he has attracted something like seven million followers… He is actually giving mainstream media a run for the money.

An example: There is a memorable video on Youtube of Russell Brand receiving an award at the 2013 Gentlemans’ Quarterly [GQ] Annual Man of the Year ceremony.  This ceremony is sponsored by Hugo Boss, a leading global fashion and lifestyle company. Boris Johnson, then-mayor of London, has just made a joke about the Labour Party’s lack of support for the war in Syria. So, now Brand takes the stage and says:
 
“This environment is not designed for sincerity, you realize… We will struggle if we start bringing sincerity into the situation… I’m glad to grace the stage where Boris Johnson has just made light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, meaning that GQ can now stand for “genocide quips.” I mention that only to make this next comment a bit lighter, because if any of you know a little bit about history and fashion will know that Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis, but… and the Nazis did have flaws, but, you know, they did look fucking fantastic…”

It is you who are being called to account for your past perpetration. Like the fashion giant, you are just wanting everyone to move on and celebrate who you are today. But, there were very real victims in your past collusion with a toxic, profoundly misogynist culture. And this time, Mr. Brand, it is we the people who have the receipts. There are dozens of videos of your comedy act, your hosting, your game show participation where you parade your history of misogynist predation as if it was a joke. There are videos of you grabbing, groping, kissing women. All of which are criminal acts, you realize. And then there are the women who were part of the BBC investigation. In the week following the publication of the story, there have been a half-dozen more who have come forward. And then there is the video clip from a talk show where you brag about having just exposed yourself to a woman in a bathroom minutes before going on air. In that encounter you called her by a name that was not hers and insisted you were going to continue calling her that and that you were going to "f*** her." She was terrified. It made a great joke on air.

Surely, with all that yoga, meditation, chanting, healthy lifestyle, recovery proselytizing, and especially with all of that whistleblowing, you are going to take responsibility for your actions... After all, you have made millions--millions!—by calling out the sleazy tactics of public figures who are trying to evade public accountability!

We are looking to you not to use the same-old, same-old, banal, corporate playbook of denial, lawyering up to intimidate and discourage potential witnesses, deflecting, and—of course—throwing the women and girls under the bus. We are looking to you not to take the easy way out, the rich man’s way out—which, of course, is to retraumatize your victims by discrediting them. Surely, you’re not going to play the victim, to pretend that these women are all gold-diggers or vindictive exes.  One of them was sixteen when you were thirty!  Surely you are not going to trash the child that she was!

Surely, with all of this, Mr. Brand, you are going to show up and own everything… You can’t possibly be that big of a phony and a hypocrite, can you?  Surely, now, with two daughters of your own, you can’t model this kind of misogyny? With all your pride about your working-class background, you can’t lean into the classism behind “out-lawyering” your victims? Surely, with two decades of sharing your recovery with the public, now that it’s crunch time, you’re going to “walk the talk,” aren’t you…?  Mr. Brand…?  Aren’t you…?

No, he's not.
 
And, actually, in anticipation of this kind of exposure, Brand has already been hiring high-power attorneys to threaten former alleged victims who have attempted to go public with their personal stories of rape and predatory behavior. He’s not owning a damn thing. He appears to feel completely entitled to retraumatize these women with legal threats.

Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the article went to press, Brand chose not to. Instead, he made his own video on September 16:

“Obviously, it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week, and I thank you very much for your support and for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with… But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute… These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous… Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual… What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations…”

Brand is revealing his defense strategy: The watchwords will be “promiscuity” and “consensual.” He is parsing his words to avoid libel. He says the “relationships” were consensual. He is not saying anything about the alleged acts. In fact, he has been accused of assault and rape within these relationships. These acts are criminal even if they transpire between married couples. He is leaning into the word “promiscuity,” which is defined as “characterized by many transient sexual relationships.” It’s also defined as “implying an undiscriminating or unselective approach.” “Promiscuity” would indicate that the only one harmed is himself, for dating women not in his league.  These words, “promiscuity” and “consensual” have been carefully chosen to counter the multiple charges of criminal behavior.

Predation, not promiscuity.  Nonconsensual, not consensual. According to the women coming forward, he ambushed women, he assaulted them, he propositioned them in the most intentionally vulgar and demeaning ways. He resorted repeatedly to coercive tactics, including emotional abuse, manipulation, physical intimidation, and force.

In addition to minimizing the allegations in his video, Brand  characterizes the professional investigation as some kind of conspiracy of “news media making phone calls and sending letters to people I know.” That’s actually what’s known in journalism as “research.” He goes on to say that it feels to him like a “serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of [alternative] spaces and these kinds voices.” Then, to clarify, he adds, “And I mean my voice along with your voice.”  Summing up, he again qualifies his actions as promiscuous and consensual, but absolutely not criminal.   

After this, he went silent for a week as more women came forward and more criminal allegations were made. And then the hammer dropped: Youtube demonetized his channel. What does that mean? It means he can no longer earn ad revenue off his videos on that platform. (It’s estimated that he was making a million a year off Youtube ad revenue.)  In addition, his management company dropped him, his publisher is suspending any planned publications, and the remaining dates on his current tour have been postponed.

On September 22, Brand issued his second response video. In this video he is actively deploying his defense strategy: a full-throttle call to the faithful to support him as the victim of a massive, international, corporate witch-hunt that will soon engulf us all:

"By now, you're probably aware that the British government has asked big tech platforms to censor our online content and that some online platforms have complied with that request. What you may not know is that this happens in the context of the online safety bill which is a piece of UK legislation that grants sweeping surveillance and censorship powers and it's a law that's already been passed."

Yes, every citizen in the UK has reason to be very wary of this legislation. And, yes, Russell Brand has many corporate enemies. He is absolutely posing a threat to mainstream media. He is a consummate showman, and he brings that A-game to his podcast. He makes traditional broadcasters look like sleepwalkers. And his numbers (seven million) are insane. Yes, there are many powerful people who would like to see him taken down.

And, none of that invalidates the allegations by these ten women of decades-long sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior... much of which is actually documented.

Back to this second video:  Brand directs his followers to move over to the platform Rumble, which will now be his primary platform. (Rumble has not demonetized him.) He outlines the topics of of his future broadcasts: the Trusted News Initiative he referenced earlier, the "deep state" and corporate collusion,” big pharma, media corruption and censorship. At the end, he begs his followers to stay with him as he needs them “now more than ever and more than I ever imagined I would.”

He made no mention of the allegations. It's now all completely about a global conspiracy to shut down his broadcast. 

Unquestionably, the stakes are extremely high for Brand. A public amends would be a confession of crimes, and, as of yesterday, he is already the subject of a police investigation. He stands to lose his wealth and spend the rest of his life in prison.

But the stakes are very high for his victims, and these are not just the women coming forward. The victims are also cultural. How many males modeled themselves on Brand, because they saw it worked. They saw him lifted up and richly compensated as a stud. They saw his rape jokes garnering huge laughs. How many women were silenced and disbelieved in the culture for whom he was a figurehead? 

The UK has no statute of limitations for sex crimes. Does Russell Brand want to become the test case for challenging that?  Does he want to see the UK adopt the kind of time limits for prosecution we have in the US? Because every victim in the US can tell you that these limits only protect the perpetrators. Many criminals move away from the person they used to be when they committed their crimes. Some go on to do good work. Does this mean they are no longer accountable? Brand, consistent with his perpetrations, is now marshaling his forces to set a rape culture precedent in the UK of non-accountability.

I want to say very clearly that Russell Brand is not in recovery from sex addiction. He's taken the playbook of rape culture to a new low in the last two weeks. And if his 12-Step sponsors are endorsing his decision to lawyer-up, to lie, to deny, to deflect, and to do everything he can to discredit his victims, then they are violating their own recovery just as he is violating his.

Mr. Brand, I call you out on your hypocrisy and your ongoing perpetrations. You, yes you, are part of one of the most heinous conspiracies in human history, the conspiracy to degrade, exploit, and subjugate women and girls. Your recovery is a complete sham, and however you attempt to justify your actions to yourself, all of your good works have now been utterly co-opted as part of your criminal cover-up, and they will be remembered in that light. We see you.

Originally published in off our backs women’s newsjournal, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2008, Washington, DC.

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week [October 7, 2006]—executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.
 
Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.
 
"Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died… " (Politkovskaya/ RFE)  
 
At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:

"I’d like to call attention to the fact that we talk about “individual cases” only because these people aren’t our loved ones – it’s not my son, my brother, my husband. The photographs that I’m telling you about, these were bodies that had been horribly tortured. You can’t reduce this to a small percentage—it’s an enormous percentage." (Politkovskaya/ RFE)
 
Politkovskaya was as unequivocal regarding the Chechen prime minister:
 
"Kadyrov is the Stalin of our times. This is true for the Chechen people. He’s a coward armed to the teeth and surrounded by security guards… Personally I have only one dream for Kadyrov’s birthday: I dream of him someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that meets the strictest legal standards, with all of his crimes listed and investigated."(Politkovskaya/ RFE)
 
Was Politkovskaya’s assassination a response to this broadcast? Certainly she had been aware of the danger. Kadyrov had publicly vowed to murder her. According to her, “He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman.” (Hearst) But journalism is a dangerous profession in Russia. Twenty-three journalists had been killed there between 1996 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least twelve have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power. (AP)

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly, independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently to death.
 
The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

"She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her."(Hearst)
 
Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?
 
Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about  the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book,  A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to  The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm.”
 
But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have been something more, something deeper.
 
There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003, when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective:
 

Ultimately, the only thing that she was able to negotiate was permission to bring some water and juice to the hostages who had neither eaten nor drunk in two days. Early the next morning, Russian special forces stormed and gassed the theatre, killing forty-two of the hostage-takers and 129 hostages.
 
But what her account demonstrates is that, shaking and barely able to stand, she was human and terrified. At the same time, she could not ignore the verbal harassment of her companion on this dangerous and humanitarian mission. In what might seem to others a minor point under the circumstances, she is scrupulous about setting the record straight, and in doing so, recovers her spiritual poise. Her focus is on the suffering of those caught in the middle of the conflict, the hostages—and especially the children. But her sympathy for the hostages does not keep her from quoting with empathy her captors’ words, “You never give our children any food during mopping operations, so let yours suffer, too.” (Politkovskaya)
 
That was the power and the genius of Potlitkovskaya—her ability to hold onto the larger context of governments, political parties, military campaigns, while at the same time focusing on the often-contradictory details of individual experience and accountability. It was this focus on the immediate suffering, the outrage of the moment, that was the hallmark of her journalism—and possibly the secret behind her tremendous courage.

References:  

Associated Press. “Russian Reporter Killed in Moscow.”  7 October 2006
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061007.wrussian- journo1007/BNStory/International/home
 
Hearst, David. “Anna Politkovskaya: Crusading Russian Journalist Famed for her Exposés of Corruption and the Chechen War.” The Guardian 9 October 2006  http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1890838,00.html
 
Maineville, Michael. “The Silencing of Anna Politkovskaya.” Spiegel Online 13 October 2006 http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442392,00.html
 
Politkovskaya, Anna. “Inside a Moscow Theater with the Chechen Rebels.” International Women’s Media Foundation, http://www.iwmf.org/features/anna
 
Politkovakay, Anna, interviewed by RFE/RL. “Russia: Anna Politkovskaya’s Last Interview.” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty 9 October 2006 http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/fc088b08-0cbd-4800-b2ff-f00f5494fa5e.html
 
Smith, Becky. “Independent Journalism Has Been Killed in Russia.” The Guardian 11 October 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1896806,00.html
 
Writers in Prison Committee, International PEN. “International PEN Statement on the Murder of Russian Writer and Journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.” International Freedom of Expression Exchange 7 October 2006 http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/78140

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder.  Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction.  And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? 
 
The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage.  Eleven foster homes.  One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse.  Her mother?  Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday,  her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her.  In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager.  Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead.  Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.”  Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.

But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality.  What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal,  incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders —  a woman who was  raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history —  that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?

What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value.  Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified  they feel. 

Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men.  The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child. 
 
At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold  for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.

 Originally published in Trivia: A Journal of Women’s Voices , Issue 7/8, September 2008.

A few years ago, I wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s traumatic childhood—which included being raised by a single mother who was repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness, placement in multiple foster homes, multiple incidents of child sexual abuse, and being legally prostituted at fifteen in a brokered marriage. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. I made the argument that a woman who could have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress syndrome was being celebrated, instead, as an icon for adult female sexuality:
 
"What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe ‘s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel. Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?  The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child."
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Few people who remember the heyday of the Happy Hooker know that she spent the first two years of her life interned in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Here is her story:
 
Hollander’s mother, an Aryan, was living in Germany with her family in the 1930’s, when Hitler came to power. She became engaged to a Jewish friend of the family, but, panicking at the wedding, she ran away. A gang of Nazi teenagers cornered her on the street, beat her and stoned her, shaved her head and forced her to wear a sign with the words “Jew whore.” Her family, shocked and terrified, smuggled her into the Netherlands. Here she met and married a Jewish doctor, who was the head of a hospital in Indonesia. Their courtship had been brief, and even before they left for Surabaya, Hollander’s mother discovered that her new husband was a notorious womanizer.
 
In June 1943, Hollander was born, and two months later, she and her mother were taken to a Japanese concentration camp. Her father had already been taken prisoner. Hollander’s mother had the option of going to a camp for Aryan women, where conditions were not so brutal, but she refused to be separated from her daughter, and chose to join the Jewish women with their children.
 

Hollander was able, as an adult, to reunite with a fellow child-survivor from the camp, a woman who had been six years old at the time of her imprisonment. It seems that some of Hollander’s information about her experiences may have been augmented by what her friend could also remember.
 
Hollander recounts how she saw soldiers repeatedly caressing and fondling her six-year-old companion, who was being prostituted by her mother for food. She remembers how all the women had to crouch down “like frogs” in front of the soldiers:
 
"The women were obliged to accept all kinds of humiliation; the slightest sign of disobedience was punished with mindless severity. A favorite practice was for the man to thrust his fingers into the sides of a woman’s mouth and then tear it open from cheek to cheek, leaving a bleeding gash where there had been a mouth. As more and more savage soldiers took over guard duties, there were many who took delight in inflicting torture for its own sake. They would rip open mouths without even the justification of an act of disobedience or a glance of defiance, just as they would inflict beatings as the whim took them." (Hollander, p. 54)

Food was scarce at the camp, and the women and children were all suffering the effects of malnutrition. Some of them were starving, and women attempted to barter with smugglers for any extra provisions they could get. One woman, caught with contraband for her starving child, was burned alive. Hollander’s mother, who had smuggled diamonds into the camp by hiding them in her vagina, was also caught. She was beaten and left for dead among piles of corpses. Managing to survive, it was weeks before she was able to return to her daughter.
 
Hollander describes what may be her most intact memory:
 
"One image survives of me, a lonely, frightened child sitting on a tiny suitcase containing everything I owned, sobbing in terror as a squad of soldiers marched past, each sporting three or four watches stolen from the women, shouting strange words at the top of their voices. Kirei, kirei: bow down, bow down!  There was the uncanny sight of a group of women, bowing and frog-squatting, while on the other side of a barbed wire fence, rifles at the ready, these frightening men strode by. I burst into an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Where was my mother? No one came to dry my tears. An orphan has to look after herself. "(Hollander, p. 59)
 

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue 2, Spring 1999, Northampton, MA.

In the last issue of Rain and Thunder, Barbara Louise's plea for donations to provide permanent housing for “The Dinner Party” was published. “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, a symbolic commemoration of women in history, is probably the most famous work of Second Wave feminist art in the world. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago researched the biographies of women that were just coming to light in the newly-created departments of Women's Studies. She designed a triangular table for the thirty-nine “guests,” each represented by a place setting complete with an individually designed place mat and plate.  Inside the table, was the “Heritage Floor,” where tiles bearing the names of nine hundred and ninety-nine more women honored those not chosen for seating at the table.
 
“The Dinner Party” was a massive work, engaging the minds, hearts, and hands of dozens of women. It marked a reclaiming not only of aspects of women's history, but also of women's traditional arts, which had been considered “crafts” by a male dominant art world.
 
“The Dinner Party,” as with all works of art, represents the vision of its maker—a vision specific to an individual, to a place, and to a time. That time was the beginning of the Second Wave, when the movement was dominated by the interests of white and predominantly middle-class women. That place was the US, a country still struggling to catch up to the upheavals caused by the social revolutions of the 1960's. And that woman was Judy Chicago, a white woman eagerly embracing the discoveries, values, and comeraderie of that early Second Wave and courageously using her feminism to challenge the male hegemony of the commercial and academic art world. It was a time when sisterhood was powerful, but multi-culturalism was not.

Since 1979, the women's movement has undergone changes, including a radical critique of the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of its earlier agenda and constituency. As African American studies became more feminist-friendly and women's studies became more multi-cultural, consciousness about the marginalization of women of color in so-called “women's history” was raised. Curricula that may have appeared to be racially inclusive in the 1970's is now, in light of two decades of scholarship and publication by and about women of color, seen as painfully tokenizing.
 
“The Dinner Party” is an accurate reflection of the racial imbalance that characterized women's studies two decades ago, and critiques of the work that charge it with racism are valid. In a photograph commemorating the dozens of artists who contributed their work to the project, there is not one face that appears to be African American. Ironically, the book in which this photograph is published is titled The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage.
 
The only African American woman invited to sit at the table is Sojourner Truth. Not just a token at “The Dinner Party,” Truth was also used as a token by the predominantly-white Suffrage Movement. The cause for which she labored stood to benefit white women more immediately than women of color, and perhaps it is for this reason that she was the first woman of color to come to mind when Chicago was drawing up her seating arrangements. Perhaps the work of women like Fannie Lou Hamer or Harriet Tubman was seen as too specific to African Americans to warrant the one place at the table with so many white women.

In addition to calling attention to her token presence, African American critics of “The Dinner Party” have raised objections to the plate design for Sojourner Truth. The other dinner guests have plates whose designs represent fanciful abstractions on the theme of the vulva, but Truth's plate is distinctly “other” and “exotic,” in that it has stylized human faces, not vulvas, on it. Critics have noted a “mammy-esque” treatment of the African American woman's face on this plate, which was overtly designed to represent an African mask and the agony of enslavement.  This refusal to ascribe a vulva design to Sojourner Truth has been read as a racist denial of, or discomfort with, the African American woman's sexuality, a flip-side—or perhaps overreaction—to the traditional stereotype of Black women as oversexed.
 
Chicago does include the names of other Black women among the 999 names on the floor tiles, but this roster is still dominated by white women of European background.
 
The only First Nations woman at the table is Sacajawea, again a collaborator with white—and, this time, colonial—interests. Although the goddesses represented at the table are multi-cultural, the actual historical guests do not include any Latinas or Asian women.  
 
Where do we go from here? Should we abandon “The Dinner Party” to the warehouse where it has been ignominiously stowed all these years—a response not to its lack of racial inclusiveness, but to its aggressive feminist content. Do we, for the good of some supposedly overriding cause, gloss the racism inherent in the token presence of women of color at the table?

Is it possible for a work of art to be considered great, when, at the same time, it reflects and perpetuates racist values?
 
To answer this question, it might be instructive to turn to the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose work as an English professor at an Ivy League university has compelled her to grapple with a canon of “great works” by almost exclusively white authors. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, she shares with us her discoveries about what she calls “African Americanism,” or “the ways in which a nonwhite or Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US:”
 
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury… For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasions for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.

In other words, Morrison contends that racist depictions are not just oversights or unfortunate lapses on the part of the white artist to be circumvented like potholes in a road, but rather that these distorted characterizations inform the entire canon of values embodied in the work, being the very key to understanding the construction of the white artist's identity!
 
What does this mean for 1990's feminists approaching “The Dinner Table” today? It means that we should not flinch from confronting the treatment of women of color in the work. Far from shying away from these embarrassing seating arrangements, we should make them the centerpieces of our critical understanding of the work and of the movement it represented. The absence of women of color at the table is more than an unintentional oversight. It is a necessity for a feminist identity that informed and defined the entire guest list. Sojourner Truth's position at that table, according to Morrison's theory, provides the key to understanding the myths, the terrors, the denials, the strengths, the failures of that early feminist movement. The artist's unwillingness to grant, or inability to conceive, a symbolic vulva for a Black woman may be central to an entire definition of Western sexuality, of white women's sexual identity.  Adopting Morrison's perspective and approach, one could argue that the Black and the First Nation's women's place at the table, and the exclusion of the Latina and Asian woman, could be the most historically significant aspects of “The Dinner Party.”
 
White radical feminists have vacillated between stonewalling and scapegoating when confronted with racist artifacts of the early Second Wave. Neither is a constructive strategy, and I suggest that we take Morrison's teaching to heart and begin to find ways to talk about our history that neither glosses over or trashes this very mixed heritage. A step in this direction would be to incorporate an acknowledgment and historical contextualizing of the racist treatment of women of color in any description of “The Dinner Party,” and especially in any press release designed to raise money for housing the project. As Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist."

[Originally published in Hard Jobbin’: Women’s Experiences of the Workplace, Ride the Wind Press, Beausejour, Manitoba, 2003]


I led a double life when I worked on the second floor of J.C. Penney's. By day
I was a simple store clerk, a sensitive young woman far from home and going
through a painful divorce. By night and on weekends, I was a dangerous politico, a rabid anti-war protester, a hippie, a radical feminist, an enemy of the
people.

If my co-workers suspected me of leading a secret life, it was probably one
more in line with their experience. On the second floor of Penney's, women
did not leave their husbands for trivial reasons, and certainly never within the
first eighteen months of the marriage! I am sure they assumed I was covering
some shameful and traumatic episode when I gave my pitifully naive and inadequate explanation that I had simply grown tired of being married. It would
have gone without saying on the second floor that I was protecting my shame
at having discovered some adulterous affair—either that or I could not bring
myself to name the horrors my brute of a spouse had inflicted during one of
his periodic bouts of drunken debauchery.

In fact, my husband had been a thoroughly nice man. It was I who had been
difficult. I left, because I could no longer bear who I had become in comparison with this consistent, earnest, successful, conscientious, and nice man.

Nor would my co-workers have understood my desire to escape the confines
of home and family. Far from wanting a house of my own, I was actively engaged in eliminating every possession of mine that I could not fit into a backpack— with the exception of my sewing machine, bought on that second floor of J.C. Penneys and resting, even as I type this memoir, not ten feet from the computer.

It was the summer of 1973. I was twenty-one, Nixon was still President, The War was still going on in Southeast Asia. I was living in Boulder, Colorado, where I had been living since the fall of 1971, when I had followed my recently-graduated husband west to his new fellowship in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. A good wife, I had dropped out of school in order to work at J.C. Penney's selling piece goods.

It would be at J.C. Penney's that I became initiated into the mysteries of my tribe. Working on the second floor, I was surrounded by housewares, sewing machines, clothing for infants and toddlers, fabric and notions—and women.

There was not a man who worked on the entire floor.

Irene Manther ran the piece-goods department. She had moved with her husband from Wyoming to Colorado in a horse-drawn wagon, which gives you some idea of her age, and our age, and the speed at which global technological colonization was advancing. And yet, for all her pioneer crossing in the shadow of the Great Divide, in nearly fifty years of service, Irene had been unable to traverse that gulf that lay between management and staff, between men and women in the corporate world. Her lack of promotion was considered a scandal, a source of whispered rage in the no-man's-land of the second floor.

I did not share her rage. I was unable then to understand women's desire to have any part of a position defined by and necessitating congress with men. I considered the second floor of J.C. Penney's to be some kind of heaven. If the price of being overlooked by men was low wages, so be it. Irene Manther was like a goddess to me, presiding over a vast and colorful matriarchate. Through her capable hands flowed miles and miles of fabric, rivers of textiles containing the iridescent visions of women crossing into, and then crossing out of our department, crocheting us briefly into the web of their conversations, snagging our opinions on their projects, and then hooking away as they knitted, knotted, braided, tatted, embroidered, pieced, patched, and wove themselves into the world beyond the second floor.

We sold these women the soft cotton flannel for their babies' rompers, the denim and broadcloth for their children's playclothes, the silks and satins for their daughters' prom dresses, the lace and nylon net for these daughters' bridal gowns, the linen for the tablecloths, the gingham check for the kitchen curtains, the fake fur for the stuffed animals, the discounted cotton floral prints for their housedresses, the polyester doubleknit for their new-fangled pantsuits, the cotton batting and fiberfill for their quilts, the nylon tricot for their lingerie.

The women seldom sewed for their menfolk. It went without saying that men's clothing required too much fuss, what with tailoring, french seams, buttonholing, fly-fronts, cuffs, padding, lining. Most of their husbands and sons wore blue jeans, uniforms, or business suits anyway. Cheaper to buy, and, besides, the men were always so self-conscious, worrying all the time about what other men might think of them. No, it was better all around just to buy them the ready-mades downstairs. They preferred it that way.

The section "Men and Boys" in the pattern books was modest, statutory even, and always toward the back. It was the elegant gowns, the riotously bright sundresses, the voluptuous loungewear sashaying and strutting across the pages that courted our attention when we stood before the long counters with the pattern books as large as Manhattan phone directories.

The women who sewed back then were good homemakers. They practiced thrift and industry. It was never admitted, never even hinted at, that this might have been a form of art, a creative act, a mode of self-expression. No, these were women sewing for their families, saving money, making do. And as we ran the rainbow fabrics through their hands, and held the bolts up next to them, suggesting braids, and rick-rack, buttons, appliqués, bead-work, we never for a moment acknowledged, even to ourselves, that the women we helped were pleasuring themselves.

And over it all presided Irene Manther. There was not a question about clothing construction for which she did not know the answer. She had sewn it all. There was no quilt pattern she couldn't sketch by heart, no fabric stain for which she didn't know a recipe, no body deformity for which she couldn't make adjustments. Irene was even practiced in the lost art of "turning a suit," that Depression-era economy that involved taking apart the seams of a man's suit and reassembling it again with the worn side of the fabric facing in.

Irene had seen the skirts ascend from the instep to the ankle, then shimmy up the knee. She had seen them plummet to mid-calf, only to scramble up again, this time boldly cresting the knee to establish various base camps along the thigh, in anticipation of a final bid for the summit. Irene had seen shoulders go bare, then shoulders go square; bustlines puffed out like powder pigeons, then flattened down like pancakes, then nosed out like torpedoes, and now assuming the anatomically correct, if sartorially nondescript, contours of human breasts at long last out of harness. Irene had witnessed waistlines cinched in with corsets, then dropped loose to the hips, then smoothed over with girdles, then gathered in with waistbands, then raised up to the breasts, and now riding back down on the hips with bell-bottom jeans.

Irene had lived through two wars to-end-all-wars, and the Bomb, and the Depression, and Korea, and the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Liberation Movement, and Vietnam. Through it all she had raised children and grandchildren and seen them married and buried. Irene had milked cows and churned butter and split wood and broken horses and barn-raised and she had come through all of these changes to sell piece goods on the second floor of J.C. Penney's where there weren't any men, and where she would never be a manager.

I felt safe in Irene's matriarchate, and safety had been rare in my experience. Raised in terror, I have spent most of my life trying to prevent what had already happened. Now, at twenty-one, I was in the process of going through a divorce, and on the verge of having to take responsibility for my life—a staggering proposition for someone whose whole prior focus had been resistance. J.C. Penney's provided a refuge for me, an oasis of pure sensory experience in a post-traumatic world where every experience seemed freighted with the moral weight of a life-or-death decision, and yet which was, at the same time, eerily unreal.

For eight precious hours a day, I could be present for these bolts of sensuous fabric. It was safe to define myself in relation to them. The demands were not complex. I would move between these parti-colored islands, allowing my hands to trail over the satiny bolt ends that hung like bright flags into the aisles. When a careless customer had disturbed the arrangements of these pennants, it was my job to restore symmetry. I would reach my hand up under the loose fabric, as if running my hand up the smooth thigh of a woman, then in a deft and impersonal gesture, flip the fabric up over the bolt end and wedge it back into the soft and yielding space between the other fabrics.

It had also been my job to restore order to the spool rack. The spools of thread were displayed on a tall metal frame with sloping dividers, where they beckoned to the children like a giant busy-box while their mothers selected patterns and passed the time of day with the clerks. The threads were arranged by color in the dividers, and it was a great game to the children to see how many they could put in the wrong dividers before their mothers noticed what they were doing.

I had my own game that I played as a keeper of the spools. I would try to see how many I could sort by color without checking the dye number stamped on the end. As many of the hues were similar, especially the blues, this posed something of a challenge to my powers of discrimination.

Sorting spools was an aesthetic, a kinesthetic job, and one of my co-workers was as fond of it as I. Her name was Bobbi, and she would try to beat me to it, especially if there were other tasks, like marking remnants, less to her liking. I enjoyed Bobbi. She was not quick like Irene, but soothing and rhythmic in her movements. My own biorhythms would slow whenever I found myself transiting her orbital.

On the nights when I closed the register with Bobbi, she would insist on examining all the nickels and all the pennies. She was a coin collector, and in those days buffalo nickels were still fairly common. She would always buy them from the till. I was never clear exactly what markings Bobbi was looking for on the pennies, but in her methodical way, she would turn and look at them all. In what appeared to me to be the constricted stream of Bobbi's life, she was clearly panning for gold. Still expecting to stumble across the mother lode, I could not appreciate the ritualistic value of Bobbi's actions, which lay entirely apart from the capture of precious metals.

Women were making quilts in Boulder. Sometimes they would bring as many as a dozen bolts of fabric to the counter, from which they would ask us to measure only a quarter of a yard apiece. Of course, this must have seemed unspeakable dilettantism to a woman like Irene, whose quilts I imagined to have been meticulously pieced together from the scraps and rags carefully hoarded during an era when nothing could be taken for granted.

Women who considered themselves not clever enough to work outside the home, would stand at our counter and perform split-second mathematical calculations in their head as they figured for selvedge, for nap, for shrinkage; making allowance for alterations, customizing patterns by combining features from other patterns. And some of them, the old-timers like Irene, worked without patterns at all, using old newspapers or no paper at all.

Everything in the women's world is ritual, and the fabric department was no different from the beauty parlor or the baby shower in this respect. We spoke about sewing, but this was only the most superficial aspect of our communication rituals. Like bees inspecting new arrivals at the hive, we stroked each other gently with a thousand psychic feelers; taking readings, checking orientation. As Irene explained the intricacies of pattern-alteration, she would be teaching, approving, exchanging. We were the keepers of the flame, we women. We were the ones who were responsible for the well-being of the children, for seeing that we and that they survived. Our communications, no matter how trivial, were all informed by this shared understanding, and here on the second floor of Penney's we were not compelled to restrict the dimensionality of our language, as women always must in the presence of men.

The island I live on has a “barter-and-swap” Facebook page, which many of us bargain-hunters read on the the regular. One day, an intriguing request popped up, and it gave me pause. It was from a school librarian in one of the towns on the island. She was producing a “Human Library” day at her middle school, and she was looking for volunteers to be the "resources," if you will, in this one-day library. Specifically, she was looking for folks with identities and experiences outside of the ordinary… folks who could enhance the kids’ understanding of diversity from a first-person-narrative perspective.

Like many lesbians of my generation, public schools have not been especially welcoming or safe spaces for us. I have had my share of negative experiences, including one in which my lesbian theatre company was involved in a “national priority” ACLU lawsuit, because the composer for a musical I produced had been fired from a public school teaching job because of her affiliation with my theatre. This was the late 1980's, and in that state it was still legal to fire gay and lesbian teachers, but here's the catch:  This teacher had been fired for merely being associated with a lesbian theatre company... hence the ACLU's interest. They saw it as a legal foot in the door, because it broke Constitutional law.  (For a quick refresher on the relevant Bill of Rights clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”) The case, which was against a school district, a local arts council, and the state arts organization, did eventually  settle after an aggressive, state-wide PR campaign. It was a victory of sorts, but my valiant little theatre company had dragged so viciously through the homophobic mud, it was necessary for me to close it and move to another state. (Thank the Goddess, it was before the Internet and viral hate campaigns!)

But, dear reader, the universe is generous in its offers for do-overs, and this was mine. I volunteered. I actually had two identities that would qualify me for the project: I was a lesbian and I was autistic. For reasons that were part boredom from forty years of coming-out and part trauma from the ACLU thing, I chose to apply as autistic and undiagnosed. The other three human library books were a woman with an eating disorder, an immigrant who had spent time in a refugee camp, and a Jewish woman who had grown up in a small town where she had been the only Jew among her peers.  We were assigned to a classroom, where would talk about our lives and answer questions for thirty minutes, and then a new group of students would rotate in. Each of us would give our presentation three times. So this is what I said:

“I’m Carolyn Gage, and I am autistic. I was not diagnosed until very late in my life, and I’m going to talk about what was going on for me when I was a child. 
 
I was given a doll when I was a very little girl--I believe six, or maybe even younger. Her name was Ginny, and I immediately recognized that she was a queen. She looked something like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz. Ginny was wise, and she was good, and she was very powerful. I was intensely engaged with Ginny  and her story, which I was making up as I went along, but which I experienced more as getting to know her. 

Word got out that I liked dolls, and family and friends began to give me all kinds of dolls on my birthday and for Christmas. I would inherit the neighbors’ outgrown dolls. My collection would eventually include over fifty dolls, and my cousins built me a dollhouse that was four feet high and six feet wide, with four floors, an attic and a dungeon.  It was basically a stack of boxes with doors cut between them.  For me, it was a palace. It had a  a chest of jewels in the dungeon; it had a garden terrace with a fountain; it had an attic garret for the servants. Yes, there was a full contingent of servants right out of the fairy tales: scullery maids, and grooms, and footmen in livery... It made no difference that I didn’t know what they did or even what livery was.
 
I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance... There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother--who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT... in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit... which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.

And now a word on “hyperfocus.”  That is a word applied to us autistic folks when we are passionate about some subject or activity, when we are able to devote our entire attention to said subject or activity for long periods of time with a high degree of concentration. It might be snakes, or magic tricks, or collecting coins… but it is something from which we derive immense satisfaction, which is why we focus our attention on it. Our special interest will trump every other activity or interest in our lives. Quite simply, nothing can compare.  Neurotypical people, who are not autistic, feel like there is something wrong with that... something a little too much about our special interests. Hence the word "hyperfocus." (In the bad old days, our special interests were even more insultingly characterized as "obsessions!") From my perspective, I think there is something sad about people who are not blessed with their very own, highly personal wellspring of profound satisfaction. They seem to suffer from a condition of  "hypo-joie-de-vivre," for which they compensate with excessive and superficial socializing. Neurotypicals don't hold the monopoly on pseudo-scientific name-calling.
 
So, anyway… my so-called hyperfocus. My mother had noticed my intense relationship with the dollhouse and with the dolls. Worried that it was going to crowd out everything in my life, she made me pack up the dolls every summer, in the hopes I would go outside and play with the neighborhood kids... you know, "be normal."  Yes, I would go outside, but I had an emergency kit of miniature dolls. I would go into the woods with a copy of Peter Pan and enact the entire book down by the creek.

When I turned thirteen and was entering high school, she came down to my bedroom, which was in the basement, and she told me that I was now too old to play with dolls,  and that it was time to pack them up for good. For me, this was like having your mother tell you that it’s time to murder your fifty best friends. I was profoundly upset and I began to cry hysterically. She was shocked by this and told me that I could go upstairs and that she would pack up the dolls without me.
 
And what do you think happened? Yes, I was lost. It’s like when you pull the centerboard out of sailboat…  You can’t set a course anymore. The boat just blows around and very likely will capsize. It’s also like losing your compass. There’s no more “north” anymore. All directions are the same and equally meaningless. No centerboard and no compass, I wandered and I also went whichever way the wind blew. I copied my friends. I tried to please other people.  My mother wanted me to get married, so when I was eighteen I got engaged, and three months after I turned nineteen, I walked down the aisle. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. But, never mind. It didn't matter. There had been this massacre of the imagination. My entire tribe had been wiped out.

I didn’t find my way again until I was thirty years old, and I went to college to get a degree in theatre. It had taken me seventeen years to find my way back to the dollhouse, and some of those years were very hard and very dangerous, because of autism but also because I had lost my centerboard and my compass.  And some of those years were fun and easy, because I was pretending to be someone fun, and I found myself in circumstances that were easy. But the main thing was that I wasn’t being myself. And for the folks who knew me and loved me during that era, this does not in any way mean I am not so grateful to have had you in my life, or that I don't love you. I believe that several of you actually saved my life. But, in spite of that love...  I was still far, far from home.
 
So, at thirty, I was back in the dollhouse. Back making up stories and bringing characters to life. I was an actor and a director, and for a little while I taught theatre classes, but eventually, I found that my true calling was being a playwright.... which was what I had been doing in the dollhouse. And I have now been a professional playwright for more than forty years. I have written over a hundred plays that are published in nine collections of my work. I have toured all over the US, and some in Canada, and in Europe, and I have met a whole lot of really wonderful and interesting people. I have had a great life. Full of challenges, but always rich in meaning.

The moral of the story is my mother didn’t need to worry about me. My special interest was going to give me a life... the life I was meant to have. It wasn’t the life she had planned for me, but it was the one I wanted.

So I want to tell you another story. Yes, it is connected to the dollhouse, so put a pin in that. We'll get back to it. This is a story about Beatrix Farrand, who was a landscape gardener here on Mount Desert Island. (She didn't like to use the word "architect" for what she did.) I don’t know if she was autistic or not… Back in her day very, very few autistic women were ever diagnosed, but she did have a thing about which she was passionate and to which she devoted her life, full-time, and even over-time... as in, “hyperfocus.” It was designing and executing gardens. She designed a lot of them here on Mount Desert Island. She designed Abbey Rockefeller’s garden, which  you can still visit. And she designed her own garden down on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor.  She had inherited a cottage and some acres there. It was named Reef Point, and Beatrix wanted to create an internationally famous garden where people could come from all over the world to  appreciate the beauty of the plants and of the Maine coast. She also collected a huge library of books about landscape gardening that she intended to make available to folks who were serious about gardening.

So, this is the important part of the story:  Her land went right down to the ocean, with rocky cliffs and huge boulders, and huge firs and spruce trees. When you looked out at the ocean, you would be looking through these trees, and she loved that view. And so do I. It's very specific to Maine. And Beatrix thought the natural landscape around the house was spectacular.  Now, some of her clients wanted their homes to look like the European homes of rich people with huge flat lawns all planted in grass, that would extend right to the edge of the water. And they wanted gardens that would have these geometrically laid out garden beds, in squares and diamonds with short little hedges around them and a fountain in the middle. And the way you built a garden like that was by cutting down most of the trees and pulling out all those big rocks, and then bulldozing the whole thing completely flat and planting it with grass. And the plants in those gardens would come from all over the place, and only a few of  them would be native. And everyone’s garden kind of looked the same.

But Beatrix had a little saying, and it went something like this:  She said “Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”  What did that mean? It meant take a good look at those gorgeous trees and those huge rocks that are so unique to this island, and all those dips and bumps in the ground… and then make a design that works around them. Maybe put in some native plants around some of the rocks, to draw the eye. Maybe even add some trees to make the skyline a little more balanced… but you start with what's already there, the ground. You don’t start with your plan, and then bring in the chainsaws and bulldozers.
 
So my mother had a plan for me, but she didn't take into account what my ground was.  Or maybe she did, and she thought if she packed up all the dolls and ripped apart the plywood of the dollhouse—if she bulldozed who I was—then her plan would work. And I guess it did... for a while.  I was married for a year. And then I just went drifting. But eventually, after seventeen years,  I began to evolve a plan, or a series of plans, that would fit the ground of who I was, an autistic person with a definite special interest. 

Why am I telling you this? Because lots of people throughout your life will have plans for you. Your parents... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. They love you, and it's natural for them to have some idea of how they think your life should be. Your teachers, your friends, your partners... they may all have vague or definite plans for you.  But sometimes--most times--they don't really see the ground of who you are. Or they see it, but they don't "get it." They think the trees block the view, and the rocks are hard to mow around. Your ground won't work with the plan they have in mind.  But your job is to understand your ground: what is you and what isn't you, what probably  isn't going to change, what you love, what makes you the happiest in the world. And no matter how weird that is, if it's your special interest, you can probably make a great life out of it.

Why? Because you will do that thing long after everyone else has clocked out and gone home. You will do it on weekends. You will do it on holidays. You will do it for low pay or no pay. And in time,  you will probably stand out, because you will be working harder, smarter, better than everyone else, because of that so-called "hyperfocus."  You may not see the plan now, but trust the passion. It's a gift. These are the years you should be learning your ground, appreciating it, standing up for the beauty of it and your right to inhabit it.

So, if you take away anything from what I've said today, I hope it's this:  t

“Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”