by Jan Clausen
While I find Pillard’s observations useful, I think it’s important to note that a history of sexual flexibility by no means automatically ensures, though it may sometimes encourage, women’s resistance to identifying as either gay or straight. Given the social and political utility of these powerful identities, not to mention the difficulty of bypassing them in a society where everyone is widely assumed to be one or the other, it is hardly surprising that many attempt to square complex erotic histories with simple, dichotomous labels.
In The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian America (1996), the lesbian journalists Pamela Brandt and Lindsy Van Gelder address some of the perplexities attendant on such efforts. In a chapter entitled “Everybody Out of the Gene Pool,” they forthrightly acknowledge that many lesbians have experienced some degree of satisfaction in sexual and romantic relationships with men. They cast a skeptical eye on efforts to apply biologically deterministic theories—or, indeed, any rigid either/or grid—to lesbian sexuality: “Our own interviews, a look at what’s talked about in lesbian publications and on online bulletin boards, and what academic research exists on the subject all indicate that a great many women in the gay community appear to be Kinsey middles and Kinsey rovers who, for various reasons, label themselves lesbians . . . if there’s a single word that describes much of female sexuality, gay or straight, it’s ‘fluidity.’” And they admit, “The trickiest part is that no one in our community knows precisely what anyone else means when she describes herself as a lesbian, a bisexual, or a heterosexual.”
Brandt and Van Gelder speculate on two sets of factors—neither one primarily sexual—that might distinguish those women who are attracted to both men and women but end up identifying as lesbians from those with similarly complex attractions who never come out. Possibly “[i]t’s about guts, not pussy.” In other words, some women who have a choice are reluctant to give up the privileges associated with the heterosexual label. Or perhaps “Kinsey middles and Kinsey rovers” (that is, women who would rate about a three on the scale and women whose balance of attractions shifts over time) come out because whatever erotic satisfactions they may experience with men fail to compensate for the sorts of flaws (lack of sensitivity to others’ feelings, avoidance of housework and child care) that women commonly complain of in male domestic partners.
Given the premise that many women have some degree of choice about whether they gravitate to male or female lovers (which is not, of course, to say that all do), one might reasonably conclude that if mainstream notions of sexuality were based on women’s experiences, the dominant model would look more like a Kinsey spectrum than like a pair of rigidly imposed “orientations.” Or perhaps—à la ancient Greece or modern Suriname—the gender(s) of a person’s sexual partners would seem no more relevant a gauge of his or her basic nature than would a host of other habits, preferences, and tastes.
The fact is, however, that modern Western sexual categories have evolved from scientific theories and sexual folklore that focus overwhelmingly on male behavior and feelings. Women’s experiences are typically explained as lesser or even defective versions of men’s—an approach that fits in only too well with traditional views of men’s sexuality as strong and assertive, that of women (especially “ladies,” that is, upper- and middle-class females) as weak and reactive. The commonplace depiction of male desire as an urgent, even uncontrollable event marked by clearly observable physical signs and progress to a swift, decisive climax sets the standard for desire in general; a more lingering, not so genitally localized arousal, an eroticism described as deeply rooted in emotions, may appear less sexual rather than differently so. It is hardly surprising, then, that women are asked to lie quietly in the Procrustean bed of either/or identities.
There is a further important sense in which those identities have quite different implications for women than for men. The fact that gender relations are power relations, that even the most privileged female finds herself disadvantaged in relation to certain groups of males, gives women a major incentive to flout the rules of gender.
And homosexuality is popularly imagined to be a violation of gender norms as much as of sexual ones. Thus, lesbianism, with its associations of “mannishness,” may seem like revolt against gender subordination—as it certainly did to me. By the same token, heterosexuality may connote conformity and submission.
For men, however, the stakes are different. Like women, gay men have reason to rebel. Many of them have been taunted and ostracized for a perceived failure of masculinity; in particular, transvestites and “effeminate” gays have often courageously defied gender stereotyping. Yet during the past several decades, white, affluent gay men whose attraction to other men appears to be the only thing standing between them and traditional male privilege have shown little interest in mounting an assault on gender inequality. Instead, they’ve invested most of their efforts in a necessary but far too narrow campaign to legitimize homosexual desire.
I believe it is in part because prevailing gender arrangements work to their benefit that both straight and gay male sex researchers, men whose theories have received a great deal of media attention and currently exert major influence over popular understandings of sexuality, have frequently neglected to think very deeply about what exactly gender is, how it figures in desire, and how gendered relationships (sexual or not) reflect patterns of power in the society at large. Rather than considering that women’s complex attractions might pose a radical challenge to assumptions about the fixity of both gender and sexual categories, many of these men have preferred to regard masculinity and femininity as distinctions etched in the Darwinian stone of an evolutionary outcome. If nearly everyone wants either apples or oranges (if in fact, as “gay gene” theories suggest, some of these desires are encoded in our DNA), then oranges and apples must be different to the core; the distinction lies in what they really are, not merely in meanings we attribute to their surface variations. By closing off the question of how culturally malleable understandings of gender actually relate to biological sex differences, this reductive approach to eroticism unwittingly reinforces sexist assumptions about the natures of men and women.
Despite widespread popular appeal and an enthusiastic acceptance among a large subset of gay men, biologically determinist theories have not, by and large, appealed greatly to women who feel under pressure to explain their own erotic inclinations. While some who felt their queerness early do invoke hard wiring or genetic influence, large numbers of lesbian-identified women prefer to speak in terms of emotional makeup, political or moral commitment, or long-range practice versus mere experimentation. In other words, they are likely to interpret a woman’s desire for certain sorts of partners as stemming from who she is. Gay men tend to see it the other way around: a man is who he is because his desire is directed to one or the other gender—desire is destiny. It is precisely because few women share this attitude that lesbians’ discussions about “dykes who fall for men” often reach such a bitter pitch.
By highlighting the way in which a societal debate over the relationship between desires and identities has played out in certain groups of lesbians, my own memoir illustrates most directly how our current system of rigid sexual categories shortchanges women. That focus is in keeping with my conviction that criticisms of the either/or model always need to keep gender in mind. It will not do to assume that various kinds of sexual behavior have symmetrical implications for women and for men. This is not to say, however, that I think my story lacks all relevance for efforts to get beyond conventional thinking about men’s desires. Women have always been schooled to pay attention to men’s stories and men’s theories; we have measured ourselves, as my own life attests, by all sorts of masculine yardsticks. Reciprocation is centuries overdue.
In considering my topic’s gender implications, I need to acknowledge the extent to which my perceptions of what “women” do and feel reflect the contours of my own journey. My experience “as a woman” is not timeless or bord
erless, but very much a function of my particular circumstances. As lesbian and gay historians have established, the very notion of the lesbian as a special type of woman defined by her desire is relatively recent; even more recent and local is the vision of women-loving women as a community or people (a “lesbian nation,” in Jill Johnston’s phrase), a notion that has appealed more to white, middle-class women than to others for whom experiences of race and class exclusion have made vivid the things (especially power) that divide us. My nearly lifelong tendency to regard sexual identity as an appropriate, even inevitable, medium through which to negotiate my gender grievances is a telltale mark of my social origins.
I want to make it clear at the outset that I am not claiming that everyone, or even a majority of people, would become “bisexual” with a little encouragement, or that if they did the world would be a better place. And I think it’s fine to be straight or gay by choice. What’s not okay is to lie about the complex attractions that often culminate in simple labels. What’s unacceptable is to bully the border-crossers. What’s got to stop is the rigging of history to make the either/or look permanent and universal.
I understand why this argument may seem dangerous to erotic outsiders for whom the public assertion of a coherent, unchanging lesbian or gay identity has proved an indispensable tactic in the battle against homophobic persecution. The issue bears comparison with distinct but related questions surrounding racial identity: for instance, will a focus on nuances inadequately represented by “black and white” labeling, including a trend toward recognizing biraciality, undermine the solidarity of people of color in the face of ongoing racism? Despite the danger that a blurring of sexual categories could feed into heterosexist and antifeminist backlash, I believe it is high time that lesbians and gays, as well as the straight world, retire their border police. As Audre Lorde put it in the poem “Between Ourselves,” “I do not believe / our wants / have made all our lies / holy.”
Besides, I want to argue for the value (not merely the existence) of those liminal conditions that shadow all would-be solid identities. The improvisers, the borderland people, know secrets that sex-radical movements keep alternately uncovering and suppressing. A genius for subversion—not the urge for certainty—has allowed modern gay and lesbian movements to fashion a space of freedom within a culture of control.
That space has been my school. That’s why I can’t help looking back.
ONE
Apples and Oranges
WHEN I OFFICIALLY declared myself a lesbian at the age of twenty-four, I did not exactly forget about my history of vigorous if problematic involvements with men. Rather, after the fashion of all sorts of people who, in various circumstances, religious and secular, claim symbolic rebirth, I bracketed that old life. I would not deny, but neither would I dwell on, my mostly heterosexual past, which I now defined as a species of error, and a far less significant portion of my biography than my present and future. My transfiguration was far from unique; indeed, I would likely never have had the nerve or need so radically to redefine myself if not for the encouragement of droves of smart, plucky women who were simultaneously embracing the heady task of reinventing our gender in defiance of patriarchal expectations.
At the time, I belonged to a circle of feminist poets who ended up functioning as a coming-out support group. Of seven members, only one was that admirable thing, an old-fashioned, lifelong lesbian. The other six, in our twenties and thirties, were in various stages of emergence into woman-loving. Two had been married, were mothers of young children. To us, the products of an era deeply attentive to the social dimensions of personal arrangements, this turn toward women was politically charged, yet in no way abstract or dryly theoretical. Unlike the infamous “political lesbians,” feminists who would eventually be accused of having committed themselves only “from the neck up,” we were as eager as adolescents who’ve just discovered sex to make love to one another and to the other young dykes who showed up for poetry readings at the new Women’s Coffeehouse or crowded onto the postage-stamp dance floor in the Duchess, an overpriced lesbian bar off Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.
If my coming out was a community event, so, in a sense, was my relationship with Leslie. She and I met at the New York Women’s School, a new Brooklyn feminist center that occupied the drafty parlor and second floors of a brownstone on seedy Ninth Street in not yet fashionable Park Slope. I enrolled in her women’s literature course; we connected through our crabby reluctance to admire each and every piece of writing with even vaguely feminist content. (Most audaciously, I remember, we argued that Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was not a very good novel.) We attended women’s cultural events like a reading given by Adrienne Rich and Robin Morgan in the studios of radio station WBAI. (Les got into trouble for crabbiness again, writing a review that acknowledged her preference for Rich’s subtle language over Morgan’s rhetoric. She was right, I thought, but Rich herself objected: our criticism mustn’t reproduce the competitive atmosphere of the male poetry scene.) We courted in her cluttered apartment, our discussions of poetry punctuated by four-year-old Emma’s bedtime routines. As we settled into existence as a couple, our social life increasingly revolved around the bicoastal village of feminist publishing.
Coming out as a lesbian, then, was not about isolation; even though one did become a pariah in much of straight society, it mostly felt like belonging. In contrast, getting involved with a man entailed a furtiveness, a sense of being the only one, reminiscent of the closet.
I first encountered Benjamin manning the Reagan Tank, an attention-getting prop belonging to the Brooklyn Nicaragua Sister City Project, a grassroots group formed in 1986 by supporters of the Sandinista revolution. (I’d plunged into Central America solidarity work out of conviction, but also in response to the claustrophobia attendant on my sojourn in women-only spaces; by the early 1980s, I was itching to have an impact on the big bad two-sexed world.) The tank was a large papier-mâché shell in the shape of Ronald Reagan’s head, set atop a mock-up of an armored vehicle sprouting a swiveling gun barrel. The whole contraption was mounted on wheels and designed to be maneuvered by someone stationed within. There were eyeholes, but the tank’s rigidity didn’t allow much breadth of vision, so the helmsman required a helper who could steer clear of obstacles, hand out informational flyers, answer bystanders’ questions, and deflect belligerent patriots. At a certain Park Slope street fair, Benjamin took the role of Ron, and I landed the job of leading him around—a strangely intimate pairing, though inimical to small talk.
We had no contact for months afterward, but then we were thrown together on the project’s first Nicaragua delegation, a group of about a dozen Brooklynites who traveled south to meet residents of our tiny sister “city,” a coffee-growing village called San Juan del Río Coco. The delegation was gone for ten days—a couple of nights each in Managua and Estelí, another in Matagalpa, and a hectic sojourn in the dangerous, war-lush hills above the Coco River, where campesinos lugging AK-47s inquired in their soft, elided Spanish if Brooklyn chickens were bigger than their chickens. Back in the Big Apple, in hallucinatory heat, Benjamin and I “did the do,” as he would say.
He was in his mid-forties at the time. Born on the tiny, dry Caribbean island of Carriacou, he’d grown up in a family of subsistence farmers, working the fields, tending cattle and sheep, eating fry bakes and kuku and crab soup, watching year after year the same American westerns—High Noon and Shane—that would return to the movie house in St. George’s, Grenada, where he attended high school. Eventually he aced the Cambridge exam and won a scholarship to university in England. Now, having traveled worlds, he was a lawyer in Brooklyn, a naturalized U.S. citizen who viewed with quiet rage the global machinations of his adopted empire.
We found in each other an unexpected likeness.
In falling in love with him, I was rushing headlong, and yet it was deliberate. I was a walking oxymoron. I was compulsively attracted, I willed myself to be. I was hastening t
o be out of control before I changed my mind. “I couldn’t help myself” feels almost accurate—except for its evasion of responsibility, which won’t do at all. What I was up to took me by surprise, yet in retrospect has a fated air about it.
The first hint of what was in store came when the delegation arrived in San Juan. We were weary, grubby, giddy with relief at having reached our destination in one piece. (The army had supervised our trip over the unpaved road from Estelí, as it wouldn’t do to have foreign visitors wiped out in a contra ambush.) It happened to be the “Day of the Teacher,” and that night we were asked to attend a celebratory dance held in the town’s only school. The music was canned, people showed up in work clothes, and I was oddly reminded of a junior high school sock hop. I grumbled, not too loudly, about the heterosexist scene, certain callow youths being too visibly delighted by the novelty of dancing with a gringa. What if I’d rather dance with girls? I said.
“So I am warned,” Benjamin humbly remarked. “I know better than to ask you.” We’d hung out some already, back in Managua. On a trip like that you get to know people pretty fast. I said, No, no, of course I didn’t mean him. The next dance turned out to be a slow one. We’re precisely the same height; our bodies fitted perfectly. Something gently ironic in his way of holding me, a rueful delicacy of touch, moved me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. Later I thought of that embrace for comfort, as I lay awake in the bedroom I shared with another Brooklyn woman, the Sandinista grandmother who was putting us up, and two or three of her small granddaughters. I laughed at the sheer incongruity of life, but thought I might as well enjoy it.