by Imani Perry
I’m glad as heck that you exist. You are obviously serious people and I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained. Thus, I feel that THE LADDER is a fine, elementary step in a rewarding direction.3
She ended the letter wanting to know how things were on the West Coast, and why there seemed to be more developed homophile organizing out there. Lorraine was an organizer, after all. “Considering Mattachine, Bilitis, ONE, all seem to be cropping up on the West Coast rather than here [on the East Coast] where a vigorous and active gay set almost bump one another off the streets—what is it in the air out there? Pioneers still? Or a tougher circumstance which inspires battle?”4
Lorraine’s letter to the Ladder several months later, in August, was less about sexuality and more about feminism. It reads less like a letter to the editor and more like a letter to Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote about how the hostility toward same-gender-loving people had the same root as the domination of women. And she believed that feminism had something to offer both. This might seem like a fairly commonplace understanding today, because we associate the liberation of women generally with the liberation of desire and human connection, but in 1957 feminism and lesbianism were not necessarily, and not frequently, understood as being at all connected. That Lorraine made them so was a sign of her holistic approach to exploring her place in the world and the world itself. She believed facing profound ethical questions of her age ought to be the province of women, not just men. In this endeavor, conventions of marriage, children, and sexuality would all necessarily be challenged according to Lorraine.
In November of 1958 Lyon and Martin traveled from California to the East Coast and during that trip they furtively met with Lorraine. In advance, they’d written her, and she invited them to come to her home. They called early, at 7 a.m. (Lorraine described herself as someone who usually woke up at 11 or 12), and despite her apparent irritation at the early morning hour, she welcomed them. They described her as “Smart, pretty, and gracious.”
They recalled, “She was very nice to us but said that she ‘just couldn’t get more involved’ with the Daughters.”5 By that time Lorraine was not officially a member of the Communist Party, although she still considered herself along the socialist-communist spectrum. But her politics were increasingly of her own critical fashioning. She was a feminist, anticolonialist, and Marxist, and her sexuality became an essential part of her thinking through human relations.
And “IT” changed her life. Her calendar attests to periods of lovely socializing. One gets the sense, however, that her depression, introversion, and relentless intellectualism sometimes got in the way. This is clear in a letter she wrote to Robert upon her first visit to Provincetown, a resort community in Massachusetts that, like Ajijic, was known to be welcoming to artists and gay and lesbian people. As usual, she was taken by the beauty of the landscape: “The setting is quite beyond anything you or anyone else (including the various and assorted writers) had described. This surely is nature more lovely and more perfect and dramatic than I have seen elsewhere in the world—it is marvelous in the original sense of the word.”6
Yet she also unloaded anxieties and insecurities in her letter to Bobby. This, too, was characteristically Lorraine. On the one hand, she is passionate and unflinching; on the other, a bit tender and nervous. She wrote of attending an art opening with the foreign editor of the Daily Worker, Joseph Starborin, and his wife. It was, according to Lorraine as she expected: “smeary, sick, meaningless contemptible trash.”7 Lorraine was surprised, however, that her company didn’t share her disaffection for the show. Doris Levin, a specialist in Asian antiquities and the wife of the Bauhaus-inspired jeweler Ed Wiener, curtly shut Lorraine up. Edwin Burgum, a literary critic and Marxist who taught at NYU, also disagreed with her. And it got even worse. She wrote: “I won’t go into it all here but suffice it to say that the Starborins make a great differentiation between abstract painting and non-objective painting and can go on at great and mistaken length about ‘more than one way to look at reality’ which is the worst of all bullshit when it comes to art, yes I am angry about it because at the back of their arguments seems to lie the idea that I am a bit of a sectarian who will outgrow it all as the ‘Soviets’ are doing??? ME—sectarian!”
It was odd for anyone to imply that Lorraine was fixated upon divisions within the left; after all, she was an ecumenical believer in freedom. On this point, it seems Burgum did defend her. But by that time she was already upset with the man she called “so heavily intellectual as to be tiresome . . . as well as historically inaccurate on occasion.”
Though insecure and disgruntled while there, Lorraine also exercised her artist’s gift for keen observation. “Already the main thing Provincetown reminds me of is Ajijic (Mexico). Same people, same circumstances, scenery, art shows and cocktail parties and I have been advised about six times already by different people that ‘one either likes it—or one doesn’t.’”8 Lorraine’s choice to spend the rest of her visit writing and alone indicates that she didn’t take to Provincetown as much as she had to Ajijic. Lorraine’s playful, critical, fiercely intellectual disposition was offset by her melancholy, a simultaneous yearning for solitude and a deep loneliness. The discomfort she experienced in various places no doubt intensified those feelings.
It is telling that she wrote to Robert about her time in Provincetown. Later, some of Lorraine’s friends saw Robert as “getting in the way” of her life as a lesbian. This was particularly a problem, according to a girlfriend-turned–friend, Renee Kaplan, once Lorraine became involved with Dorothy Secules, her longest relationship.9 Lorraine sometimes brought Robert, Dorothy, Renee, and others together socially, although I am not sure how successful that was. It certainly could have been awkward to have one’s husband always present in the middle of living a life as a young lesbian. And though Robert was deeply committed to ensuring Lorraine’s place in the canon of great American artists—even until his dying day—their attachment couldn’t have always been easy for him either after the romance had ended. Regardless, the ongoing connection was not one way. Robert was not merely holding on to Lorraine—Lorraine also held on to him—and he was, to all appearances, her best friend even when he angered and frustrated her. Theirs may not have been a romantic union, but it was a union.
From the perspective of someone who has spent years mining pages to see who Lorraine was as an artist, that Robert, his second wife, and her daughter left neatly maintained folders with her writings on lesbian themes is a gift to Lorraine and to those of us who love her that cannot be denied. Yes, the writings remained shrouded for many years. But they were maintained. His dedication to her craft extended decades beyond her life.
Among the pieces in those folders are the short stories Lorraine published in the Ladder, and also ONE, a homophile publication that featured more work about men than women. She did so under the pseudonym Emily Jones. It was her second pseudonym. According to the FBI, she also wrote articles for the socialist publication the Daily Worker under the nom de plume John Henry, after the steel-driving Black folk hero. That reference is clear. Emily Jones is more curious. The Jones perhaps was taken from Claudia Jones. Emily is intriguing. It could be that she was thinking of the poet Emily Dickinson, especially in her loneliest of days. Or maybe it was just that, together, Emily and Jones sounded like a nondescript and unidentifiable person.
The stories she wrote as Emily Jones, published and unpublished, were about love and desire. They are part of the early Lorraine, the writer before Raisin made it to Broadway. Her voice in them is tender.
“The Anticipation of Eve”
was published in the December 1958 issue of ONE. The protagonist is a young newspaperwoman named Rita, short for Marguerite. She, like Lorraine, is a Midwesterner with a French name who has moved out East. The action of the story takes place on a visit to her cousin Sel, who is also a transplant from the Midwest and recently married. Sel and Dave have an infant son. Rita feels warmly toward them, and comes to their home with the hope of revealing a secret, thinking: “It is horrible to make a beautiful thing a dreadful secret, horrible for anyone.”10 Rita believes she can divulge her secret, because Sel and Dave are unconventional, they support Negro rights, and even (here Lorraine displays her cutting wit) men having beards. “It was because of all these things and others that I had decided to tell them about my secret—whose name was Eve.”11
But then Sel interrupts Rita’s internal conversation with her plan to set Rita up with a man named Kevin. Dave attempts to dissuade her, but Sel persists: “Let’s face it honey, you’re twenty-six. You’re beautiful and all that but you are twenty-six.”12 Sel’s insistence that she be married soon sticks in Rita’s throat as she realizes that, to Sel, marriage “was the beginning and end of life.” Sel says further, “You can’t go on living with roommates for the rest of your life Marguerite.” There is a small implication that perhaps Sel’s insistence is rooted in her suspicion. But Rita reflects, “I had been so careful about all the obvious things” and, moreover, “they had seen Eve only a few times and I rarely mentioned her at all. . . . I knew they had to consider my relationship with my roommate as cordial but perhaps a little unpleasant. . . . In three years Eve had remained an unimportant enigma to them.”13 Sel provokes further, implying Eve must be “loose” or in some other way shameful.
Rita loses the impulse to tell them about Eve: “Suddenly it all seemed very remote and alien; something that might after all in spite of beards and Negro equality, turn the simple good face into something hostile and painful and yes, frightened. It might be a terrible mistake.”14
Rita removes herself from the moment with her thoughts. She recalls meeting Eve while on an interview assignment and being both disturbed and compelled by her eyes. It is a sly inversion of the biblical story of Eve in which she is the temptation rather than the tempted.
Rita then thinks about how she, not Sel, was the pretty and desired one in their hometown. But now Sel believes she has something over Rita because she has adhered to conventions of womanhood. Rita has her own union, however. She thinks of Eve’s hands, one bearing the ring Rita gave her. She wears it even in public. And the gift that Eve offered Rita in return, “the little flat, gold heart, on the fragile almost invisible chain which she said could hide from the world, yet lie quite near my heart.”15
Perhaps she should tell them, she thinks, but is interrupted by the baby, “little Davie,” crying.
Rita is left alone with Dave. At first she suspects he knows: “Didn’t know how or how long, but I could see he knew.” But then it seems she is incorrect. Dave says, “‘This guy, this Kevin,’ he waved his hand in something that could have been an unfulfilled ballet gesture, ‘he’s gay as a Mardi Gras parade, you know what I mean?’”16
Rita likens the moment to being on the battlefield, when a man can feel only relief when he sees his buddy fall instead of him. She responds in the expected way, saying that his sexuality is horrible. “And then it was clear to me why I could hate myself. I realized at first that there had been a sadness in Dave, a trouble, a disturbance, but now a voice had concurred, had spoken from everyday and in front of my very eyes I saw his lips turn town.”17 Dave’s words are hateful, and Rita observes, “It was 1956 and the ‘clean’ were still casting out the lepers.”18
But something else is behind Dave’s words. He says he knows the guy well, he spent time with him, and that “he doesn’t want to be helped.”19 The sadness and disturbance in Dave’s face suggests there might be some intimacy and identification between Dave and Kevin . . . and Rita. This suggestion deepens as Dave cautions Rita not to tell Sel about Kevin.
This queer and layered moment is interrupted by Sel reentering the room with the baby. She tells Rita, “This is what being a woman is,”20 referring to the child in her arms. It is as though Lorraine has created in her the very embodiment of what she saw Simone de Beauvoir writing against. Lorraine wrote, regarding The Second Sex, “The problem then is not that woman has strayed too far from ‘her place’ but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even. She has gained the teasing expectation of self-fulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself yet chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment,”21 meaning the conventions of marriage, domesticity, and children.
Rita not only yearns for but also has found something else far more fulfilling. When she leaves her cousin’s apartment, it is as though she at once retreats and escapes. It is night, and Rita is enchanted by the sweetness of spring air and her anticipation of her Eve is not a damnation but a resurrection. At first, she rues the noble things she did not say to Sel, then doesn’t care, because
I could think only of flowers growing lovely and wild somewhere by the highways, of every lovely melody I had ever heard. I could think only of beauty, isolated and misunderstood but beauty still, and only beauty. Someone had spoken to me of something they thought was unclean and sick and I could think only of beauty and spring nights and flowers and lovely music. [. . .] Someday perhaps I might hold out my secret in my hand and sing about it to the scornful but if not I would more than survive. By the time I reached our block I was running.22
It is tempting to think of Lorraine’s cousin Shauneille whose name sounded close to Sel; whose husband was named Donald while Sel’s was named Dave. Shauneille and Lorraine were close, had grown up together in Chicago, and both moved to New York and became playwrights. But I cannot say this story is autobiographical, in whole or part. What I can say is that the tension she captured, between family and gender expectations and the way homophobia could crush intimacies in the most heartbreaking of ways even as romantic love made space for them, was absolutely real.
Two things stand out for me in Lorraine’s Emily Jones work. One is the importance of the out-of-doors. In her most famous published work, interior domestic spaces are always important, so much so that the apartments become characters. They are sites of intimate reckoning with large social forces and also the closest of relations. But in the Emily Jones work the moments of deepest reckoning happen in the public, whether outside or in restaurants or clubs. If anything, The Anticipation of Eve shows that this public space motif is not a simple metaphor for the difficulty of the closet and the desire for public recognition. Rather it seems as though a freedom from a certain form of domestic constraint gives breathing room, and possibility. Her characters yearn for fresh encounters and fresh air.
The second distinctive feature of the Emily Jones fiction, for me, is found in its aesthetics. Lorraine reveled in female beauty. She poked fun at Simone de Beauvoir’s hypocrisy in harshly judging women’s adornment: “The writer brilliantly destroys all myths of woman’s choice in becoming an ornament; and the charm of it is the photograph then on the dust jacket which presents a quite lovely brunette woman, in necklace and nail polish—Simone de Beauvoir.”23 Lorraine teasingly suggested that perhaps it was pleasure and not just constraint that shaped the Parisian philosopher’s style. Likewise Lorraine was unapologetic about her own appreciation of beauty, whether natural or artifice, writing, “Nor, need we despair for the promotion of beauty anywhere. Scent, jewelry, rouges have undoubtedly assumed some cultural identification with womanhood that hopefully will henceforth be independent of an association of the centuries of slavery which has been the lot of woman.”24
Apart from her pseudonymous fiction, Lorraine didn’t spend much time writing about women’s beauty. Maybe she
worried that it would sound frivolous (or even too feminine) in comparison to the way many of her literary heroes wrote character descriptions. Perhaps she worried that her attentiveness to female beauty might be too revelatory. But in truth, these lush descriptions were in line with a tradition of Black women’s writing with which Lorraine was familiar, from Harlem Renaissance novelists Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset to the Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks.
And yet, most of the Emily Jones fiction doesn’t feature Black characters or focus upon race at all. It seems odd. Because it is not as though Lorraine thought race was superfluous when it came to her sexuality. She mentioned it in her letters to the Ladder. Maybe she avoided it for the same reason James Baldwin gave for not dealing with race in his 1956 queer novel Giovanni’s Room. He said of it in an interview,
I thought I would seal Giovanni off into a short story, but it turned into Giovanni’s Room. I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the “Negro problem.” The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it. I might do it differently today, but then, to have a black presence in the book at that moment, and in Paris, would have been quite beyond my powers.25
Maybe a discussion of race would have complicated matters for Lorraine too. Or it might have been the case that she was simply trying to provide what her largely white audience was seeking. Or she was depicting a world that seemed to have not yet made space for a woman like her, not really. There was already a long history of Black lesbian artists, writers, and musicians. But the downtown scene she traveled in was overwhelmingly white.