What had she done after that first Gay Pride event? Too bashful to linger and flirt, she had ducked into the local women’s bookstore, Amazons and Pages, and promptly fallen in love with women’s history. Those shelves of radical first editions, some of them signed! Women who were gay in the seventeenth century! She ended up getting a part-time summer job in the bookshop. Soon she was making out in the stacks with the co-manager, their bandannas and Birkenstocks cast off and co-mingling on the cocoa-brown carpet of the Women’s History aisle.
But the more Hannah read and researched, the more her lesbian pride came with a side dish of shame, and it sure wasn’t about the sex act itself. How was she supposed to deal with these newly discovered lesbian foremothers who, apparently, were racist and classist Jew-phobic jerks?
It had shocked her. Earlier, in high school, she’d naively assumed that any woman in the oppressive Olden Days who gained access to power would surely help empower other women. Then she learned how Queen Isabella expelled both Jews and Muslims from Spain, how white Southern women whose husbands secretly raped their slaves then had those slave women punished further still. Elizabeth Cady Stanton mocked Irish and Catholic immigrants, thus alienating many Irish women immigrants who might have joined the suffrage movement. The great filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made propaganda films for Adolf Hitler; Oveta Culp Hobby, who directed the first Women’s Army Corps, wouldn’t integrate the troops; nor were talented black women welcome in the All-American Girls Baseball League. Japanese-American women desperately hoping to get out of World War II internment camps in the Western states were rejected by Seven Sisters colleges. Margaret Sanger’s early birth control movement was full of bold feminists—including women who supported sterilizing the “unfit.”
Now, at 19, she was discovering that lesbians, too, came with as many prejudices as straight folks. The writer Patricia Highsmith obsessively disliked Jews. Natalie Barney, who held so many visionary lesbian salons in Paris, had a pro-Fascist, anti-Semitic streak too; her very beautiful lover, artist Romaine Brooks, jeered Gertrude Stein as “an uneducated Jew.” Even Gertrude Stein herself, a Jew in love with a Jew—Alice B. Toklas—ignored the Holocaust. And what about P.L. Travers, the probably lesbian author of all those Mary Poppins books? Her tales were riddled with black stereotypes. And Radclyffe Hall? Judging herself tasteful in never depicting all-out sex scenes, living in the rarefied air of the upper class, she identified with “the worthy among the inverted . . . those fine men and women whom Nature has seen fit to set apart as variants.” And then there was that lesbian who infiltrated other lesbians’ meetings as an anti-Communist informer for the FBI, and . . .
No one was perfect. No one loved everyone. One could still take pride in what lesbians, as a group, had accomplished in the face of unrelenting hostility across every culture. But how could she rationalize being attracted to so many of the individual women in history who were so flawed? Even scarier, what were her own biases?
Immersed in women’s history, she found plenty of lesbian pride. But like others, Hannah had hoped to find a unifying, divine love in the community she was claiming.
This year Hannah began her Pride Day at Sappho’s, spending the morning on a volunteer crew decorating for the big after-party. Isabel had provided the work team with a delicious brunch: little quiches, salmon and cream cheese and bagels, platters of hummus and sliced tomatoes, very dark and rich coffee. Hannah remained quiet and thoughtful as she looped lavender daisies around ceiling beams and barstools. Finally she burst out: “When we came out, Pride was a big deal, right? It was a statement to be seen there. How do I deal with some of my students who just don’t care about Pride, or the women who came before them? They’re not political at all. You know, when I first came out, I identified as a lesbian even before I had actually had sex. Now I have female students who are having sex with one another without ever identifying as lesbians. It’s like they skipped a step.”
“Aw, straight girls who experiment always fell into that category,” Carol shrugged.
“It’s false consciousness,” growled Yvette.
“My first Pride? It was Pride for guys, not us dykes. I was 86’d from the men’s bar because I was a woman,” Letty huffed.
Isabel, who seldom entered debates such as these, spoke up unexpectedly. “Hannah, you always expect your students to care as much as you do about ‘famous’ lesbians from the twentieth century and earlier. Their role models may be ordinary women, lesbians and gay men they know personally. Besides,” she added with a grin, “remember that joke that everyone thinks they were someone ‘famous’ in a past life? Why don’t we honor ordinary women, at Pride?”
“Or year round?” agreed Yvette.
“I know. It’s like every year at Pride we hear about what was done TO homos or done FOR us by well-meaning straight people who passed civil rights ordinances.” Tina waved her roll of crepe paper as if it were a cutlass. “What about what we did ourselves, just in terms of—you know—daily survival?”
“Well, what’s ordinary pride, then? I mean, what do we admire in ordinary lesbians?” Hannah asked. “You tell me.” She sat back on her heels, glad for a break from hanging streamers, and took a bite of quiche, which melted in her mouth.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Isabel, hiding a small smile behind a coffee mug, turned back to tidying the bar. Then Letty said, “We always had the highest regard here for dykes who had skills we could use. Didn’t matter if they were rich, educated, famous, published, or glamour-puss beautiful. It was, Hi, can you get these newsletters mimeographed for free in your office at work without being caught? Can you get the best deal for the softball uniforms? Can you hammer, do lights for dances, rewire a stereo?”
“And butch skills, basic butch pride,” Yvette suggested. “Taking pride in knowing how to tie a tie right, change your own oil, build a ramp.”
“What about femme skills?” Carol shot back. “I was the first one here to choose to be a lesbian mom. Had my daughter through artificial insemination, so I kept my gold star lez card. I became a mother, but I never had sex with a man.”
“You could afford to buy frozen sperm,” Letty argued. “My ma never married. You all know I’m the daughter of a rape. My sheroes are everyday women survivors.”
“My lesbian P.E. teacher risked her job by coaching me after school.”
“My lesbian aunt took me to the movies every Sunday because we didn’t have a TV. She saved her money to treat me when she never went out herself.”
“Pride is getting sober.” “Pride is taking your abuser to court.” “Pride is getting undressed in the locker room at the gym after you’ve lost a breast to cancer.” Hannah, on her heels, marveling at their endless lists, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Finally, Carol, who worked at the bureau of social services, gave Hannah a friendly swat. “Your kids will get political as soon as they start looking for jobs and find out it’s still a man’s world. Come on, let’s go check out the parade. Didn’t some of your students make a float? Let’s go support them.”
At the parade, nursing a Creamsicle, Hannah stood on the curb, incognito and uncomfortable as hot men in black leather thongs danced on floating fantasy themes pulled by dog-collared “slave” youths. She tried to remain nonjudgmental for two minutes. Yes, her students had a float; here it came. And yes, she was proud of them. Their signs celebrated the LGBT minor she’d help establish at the university. These were future historians and scholars. They waved at her, looking joyful, alive, young.
She watched as her students’ float rolled away, followed by a tough-looking lesbian crew. “Whoa! Look at that brigade,” marveled Hannah, poking Carol to get her attention. If Pride Day had become unalterably commercialized in recent years, brands and bank logos and rainbow vodka ads flapping from every awning and banner, at least this flotilla of dykes declared old school. Led by one battered motorcycle, the women walked four abreast, an army of amazons. She stood on the curb transfixed.
“Whe
re?” Carol frowned. “I don’t see anything.”
“What do you mean? They’re right in front of us,” Hannah insisted, and then both her own blood temperature and that of the mild June air seemed to plunge twenty or thirty degrees as she realized what she was seeing.
It was a ghost crew. Where a woman’s bicep tightened, where a foot picked up to march a step ahead, there were wavy parentheses like the shedding of dust, and Hannah could see right through the boots and leather jacket sleeves for an instant before the formation of women solidified again. Together, they shimmered, then solidified, shimmered, growing transparent and fading, then colorful again. Hannah now saw that the marching feet did not disturb the litter in the street, that the brightly packaged condoms and tossed candies left by each preceding Pride contingent did not stick to the soles of the shoes walking along now. The flag they held did not move in the wind. It had, she now saw, only forty-eight stars. These were dykes of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s.
They had small signs around their necks. I am Lorraine Hansberry. I am Louise Fitzhugh. I am Lisa Ben. I am Natalie Barney. They were writers! On a small float they pulled along, two women sat cross-legged at a makeshift desk, reaching by turns into apple crates piled high with books. They flung the books at Hannah: bad pulp novels about doomed lesbian affairs, classic paperbacks with actual lesbian authors—she knew them all. These were the signed first editions she had discovered at her first women’s bookstore after her first Pride parade in 1979, the difficult, flawed authors she had nonetheless chosen to love. As the books landed at her feet, each flopped open to the signed frontispiece page ever so briefly, and then vanished in a spray of lavender smoke.
“God damn it! Are you sure you’re not seeing this?” Hannah pulled frantically at Carol’s arm. But Carol was pointing to the next float, already approaching: “Look, Hannah, there’s our mayor. She finally came to Pride.”
She needed a drink. Sappho’s would be packed by now, of course: It was Pride Day. There were six or more men’s bars in the community, but only one exclusively for women, and after hours of being jostled by semi-clad males intent on cruising, quite a few lesbian activists would be ready to dive into a cool martini at the bar—before, perhaps, diving into one another. A celebration in womanspace. Pride in what all of them had created, there in that valley: community.
Hannah dropped Carol at her house, saying nothing more about the ghost crew she was certain she’d seen at the parade, and then headed over to Sappho’s parking lot. Motorycles filled more than half the spaces. She could hear bellowed laughter, the ring of the cash register, and oldies music: an inviting vibe. Making sure she had her wallet and camera for the occasion, Hannah pushed open the door to the bar.
The first thing she noticed was the coat rack. In summer Isabel kept the coat rack in the back storeroom, or the Nook, since no one came in with the bulky outer layers of winter months. Hannah herself was clad just in shorts and an old Olivia Records T-shirt. But the coat rack was now fully assembled in the entry hall, and on its pegs she saw an expansion of thick black jackets. Leather jackets of the old-school variety: the jackets of the parade crew.
And at the bar, belting down shots, were Louise Fitzhugh, Barbara Gittings, Lorraine Hansberry, Barbara Grier, Lisa Ben, Patricia Highsmith, more figures she could not yet identify, a line of lesbian authors and playwrights and editors who had risen out of the McCarthy era and published the paper trail of literary pride, identity, creative life, the honor of the daring written word.
Isabel was pouring them drinks from two tumblers marked BUTCH and FEMME.
Every woman at the bar turned and looked at Hannah, who stood slack-jawed in the doorway; but there was no screech of barstool as these bodies turned; for ghosts don’t make old metal grind. And yet they called to her. “What’ll it be, missy?” shouted one.
“I told you, no talking, Highsmith! Just because I read you doesn’t mean that I won’t toss you out,” Isabel warned, acting as both barmaid and bouncer as if everything were terribly routine. And Barbara Grier, the irascible founder of Naiad Books, leaned past Isabel and told Patricia Highsmith, “That last manuscript of yours? If Jesus Christ crawled on his knees, he couldn’t get that thing published.”
Then Hannah realized that while she could see the ghost brigade of lesbian pioneers, and so, it seemed, could Isabel, there were in fact two other living women from their own era at the bar. The two oldest regulars, who had patronized the bar before it became Sappho’s, were drinking too. Could they see the “visitors” amongst them? Isabel busily served one and all with the same ebullient professionalism she brought to any occasion, as if this were not a Pride party for the dead. Amid the shimmering ghost writers, the stoic elder tomboy they all called Trale (and sometimes more affectionately Trale Blazer) was sipping cognac at the bar. And Letty was now sprawled in the armchair by the chessboard, tipping up a beer and reading People, clearly not interested in the classic lesbian fiction written by the literary figures now floating around her.
“Hello, Doc,” said Trale, nodding to Hannah and patting the barstool beside her. “Think this one’s empty. Getting rather crowded in here, huh?” Her long eyes twinkled.
“So you see them too,” Hannah ventured, in complete wonderment. It must be in the drinks! But I haven’t even had one yet. She watched as Trale nodded and sipped.
“What do you think’s really going on?” Hannah dared ask her. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. If you see what I see.”
“Well, I don’t have much to say,” said Trale. “I was in here tuning the piano when they all came in. I have opinions. But I keep them to myself. You’re the history teacher. Isn’t your business past lives?” She pushed a small glass toward Hannah. “Why don’t you try this? It’s called a Wooden Floor. A favorite of us carpenters from the 1970s, but careful. It’ll make you want to lie down.”
Hoping to impress Trale, Hannah threw back the shot, noticing telltale signs of Isabel’s herbal mixture in the foam left on the glass. What would happen next? “I can see these women all around you. I know who they are. You know, for Pride Week I just set up a display at the library honoring these earlier lesbians who made the culture happen. But I never expected to encounter their ghosts at the parade, or at the bar!” She could feel leather jackets stirring on their pegs, as if demanding a place in the conversation. She could feel the drink heating up her legs and arms.
“You encounter me at the bar pretty often,” said Trale. “And I’m an earlier lesbian. By the way, I’m not a ghost. Not saying you should honor me, just that you can ask me questions about the past if you’re inclined. Can’t always ask the dead, though on some nights they just won’t shut up, huh?”
Hannah digested this. “I’m sorry, Trale. I guess I’ve never really taken the time to sit down and talk to you, have I?”
“Well, you know, it’s like the Wizard of Oz. I watch you go chasing all over for lesbian history, and there’s plenty of it right here in your own backyard,” Trale pointed out, with a sideways look. “I was in this bar before Isabel bought it. Here’s the thing: I could tell you stories. I’m older than I look.” She took out a cracked leather wallet from her hip pocket and pushed out her driver’s license with a calloused thumb.
Hannah gasped at the date. “You’re not THAT old!”
“Maintenance,” said Trale, patting her slim hips. “Athlete, vegetarian. Just some cognac at the weekend—or during Pride,” and she gestured to Isabel with her glass.
Hannah felt the courage to ask questions unfurling in her muscles like a banner. “Trale, do you sometimes meet up with past lives, here?”
“Just on special occasions,” said eighty-six-year-old Trale, who looked no more than sixty, and she reached out to grab the floating waist of Natalie Barney, who paused and smooched a kiss on Trale’s cheekbone. “She was a good kisser, in her day. You think she didn’t try to make me, too? Jesus . . . she had every woman. Paris salons, full of artists. Too rich for my blood! I was just a studio mus
ician for the military band.”
“You were in Europe? You actually knew these lesbians?”
“I was there briefly with the army. I stayed and helped rebuild some of their houses as they aged; sort of a chore-boy to the ritzy, you might say. It’s kind of a blur now. I saved some of their writings from being pitched out or stolen when they died,” and Trale raised her glass in tribute to the ghost-dyke lives around them. Ghosts raised their drinks in turn. “Remember that the hired hands always know what’s going on in the lives of the famous. I varnished their window sills, put in fencing; I heard their conversations. Just outlived ’em, that’s all. I’m open to seeing past lives; it’s not the drink. Although the booze here has its special charms,” and she leaned over the bar and squeezed Isabel, who turned and chided, “Trale.”
“How did you deal with the downside of these women—their racism, their Jew-baiting, their dysfunctional love affairs?”
“You act like you’re naïve,” said Trale. “You know all that is still part of the culture now. Maybe better hidden.”
“Well, what was the old bar like?” Hannah asked. “I mean, before Isabel bought it.”
“Ah.” Trale looked up at the ceiling affectionately. “Well, as you know, it was called the Overhead, partly because it cost so much to keep it going and none of us had any money, and then we were all in over our heads volunteering here at a time when you could get queerbashed going to a known dyke bar. It was a good time and a not-good time. Don’t idealize the old days. There were bar fights and, yeah, there was racism, and of course a lot of smoking, a lot of alcoholism. Some women came in pretty damaged. We had anger that we used as best we could. We were always trying to harness people’s energy. One night I was really angry and wanted to hit something. Right away Letty said, Come over here; we need this wall down. It was down in ten minutes.” She smiled, reminiscing. “We had a period of time when the actual wood bar wasn’t finished. Sue broke her wrist, then never got around to putting a hinge on the unfinished section, so when you leaned on it just right, drinks went flying. Anyway, one night Letty emphasized her point with her fist. Her beer flew straight up, she caught it with her left hand, and never missed a beat.”
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