by Jan Clausen
Nadine of course didn’t see it that way. She was furious, said I’d implied she was garbage. How could I echo her own most hateful feelings about herself? It wasn’t a matter of logic anymore, of talking myself out of feelings. Even I could see that I had to get out of there.
I was now at the traditional age for college graduation. In a sense, it might be said that I too had graduated, had finished my preparations for adult life by completing a process of divestiture that I’d begun at fifteen, when I rhetorically elevated the destiny of a junkie over that of a professor. My mother, who earned a master’s degree in English during my late adolescence, says that when Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” was assigned, she found herself intrigued by the sentence “I would prefer not to,” which reminded her of me. It reminds me of me then, too. To paraphrase my old friend William Blake, I hadn’t been able to know what was enough until I knew what was less than enough.
Of course I didn’t jettison everything. I was still a middle-class child; I never faced starvation. But somehow, during the winter with Nadine and Laurann, I managed to strip down as far as necessary. Walking the midnight streets to get away from their ardor, I finally had my fill of solitude. Penniless, friendless, detached from human structures, I tried my survival skills and found them serviceable. Afterward, “preferring not to” took a back seat to preferring; I was able to claim as my own the work I undertook, the poems I wrote, the great city I adopted, the lovers I bedded down with.
That’s not, of course, to say that my path was smooth thereafter. Repeatedly, I’ve come to junctures in my life where it has seemed that the only way I could move forward was to move dramatically. It’s apparently my fate to be drawn to extremes, to a standard of purity that I’ve luckily never been able to live up to. The Learning Community and its attempted “ménages à n” would have their echoes in my later relationships with People in Groups.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, the Community had tried valiantly to push the limits of alleged human nature. A bit less grandiosely, one might say that we joined a sincere and vigorous but naive current—“the counterculture”—that attempted nothing less than the radical revision of a supremely individualist social order. Although I don’t recall being aware of it then, the sexual ambiguity and borderlessness we cultivated—our refusal to notice anything unusual in the attractions of men and women to either gender, our suspicion of sexual exclusivity and consequent enthusiasm for risky emotional experiments, as well as our failure to be shocked by sexual liaisons between mature adults and postadolescents who might have been their students—were consonant with the mood of early gay liberation.
Even in gay and lesbian circles, few people today remember that in the period following the Stonewall rebellion a radical gay movement proposed to abolish both “the heterosexual” and “the homosexual” as mutually exclusive categories of human beings. Some of its adherents espoused “gender-fuck” (a variant transvestite practice that eschewed the superfeminine ideal of traditional drag in favor of startling mixtures such as beards with evening gowns); “radical effeminacy” (a feminist-inspired critique of conventional masculinity); and unorthodox unions like the marriage of the radical feminist poet Robin Morgan to the radical “faggot” poet Kenneth Pitchford. In a polemic representative of this radical position, originally published in the underground newspaper Rat, the lesbian writer Martha Shelley accused the straight world of having repressed its own homosexual feelings, in the process creating a class of sexual pariahs: “We want you to understand what it is to be our kind of outcast—but also to understand our kind of love, to hunger for your own sex. . . . We will never go straight until you go gay. . . . And because we will not wait, your awakening may be a . . . bloody one.”
This nervy assault on the basic categories by means of which the modern West has organized its understanding of the sexual self quickly gave way to what has been called the “ethnic model” of gay identity. In this model, homosexuals are a coherent, bounded social group, entitled to claim rights and press for improvements in status on the same grounds as racial and ethnic minorities. While the model has made pragmatic political sense, it has the distinct disadvantage of hardening sexual boundaries, giving queers a reason to require declarations of sexual allegiance. In turn, the perceived need for a solid identity has fed enthusiasm on the part of some gay activists for biological explanations of sexual orientation.
Although the post-Stonewall period may seem terribly remote, its legacy is very much with us in the form of our enhanced awareness of the potential for flexibility in sexual as well as political formations. Indeed, I think that the popular appeal of theories that promise to anchor something as confusing as desire in the solidity of observable physical traits owes much to a widespread longing to escape pervasive intimations of fluidity.
We who were young and sexually rebellious in the early 1970s were mistaken not in questioning the supposed immutability of erotic types and the naturalness of existing gender categories, but rather in embracing a too impatient faith in deliberate, short-term changes. We reckoned insufficiently on the tenacity with which a social order inheres in the tiniest cells of psychic life. Our tragedy (or maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, maybe the problem has been our tidy notion of revolution) is that, while “human nature” can and does evolve with altered social circumstances, no group has ever exerted very much control over the direction and timing of those shifts.
The ménage à n crashed, and great was its fall. I crawled out of the bunker and surveyed the carnage. The Community was a shambles. Josh, whose parents had spirited him away to a psychiatric hospital in Sonoma County, had been discharged to their care and was working for his father, dwelling in sunny poolside opulence, a prisoner of the very environment I imagined had predisposed him to suicidal anomie in the first place. I had long since ceased to cultivate my few other friends. My last gainful employment, many months before, had been selling popcorn and candy at the Blue Mouse Theater, a barely respectable downtown cinema showing mostly budget westerns.
Though devastated, I was on my mettle. I had to find a place to live, figure out what to live on. A few months before, seeking alternatives to real work, I’d cobbled together a couple of sleazy confession stories, which I’d dropped in the mail and forgotten about. Now, miraculously, I heard from Dauntless Books, Inc. the news that they were buying “Sex Was My Diet Pill” and “My Disease Dampened His Desire.” I received, just in time, several hundred dollars (and of course began cranking out trash at top speed, but never again managed to sell a line of the stuff). I rented a furnished studio apartment in a building full of the sad old aimless white guys Portland used to specialize in, and took a job next door at a Winchell’s Donut House. My title was counter girl. I punched a clock, provided my own uniform, and made minimum wage and all the doughnuts I could eat. By the time I left to train as a nurse’s aide at the V.A. Hospital (more sad old aimless white guys), I’d worked up to the skilled, lonely glory of night baker.
SIX
Any Woman Can
JOURNAL ENTRIES
The thing about lesbianism is that I love women—in multiples, sort of—their bodies, their relationships. I don’t feel as though I would want a close romantic relationship with one woman—or [I feel] that, if I did, it would be little different than that with a man. . . . I don’t love men as a group or find them interesting as I do women. (June 1973)
On one hand I like the word lesbian because it implies a world of women—and that is the phenomenon that continues to delight and astonish me. On the other hand I find it very misleading because it tends to reinforce people’s conceptions of a world with exactly two sides, two sexual orientations and no more. . . . Homosexual love is the great rejoicing of finding something that seemed lost, of touching something that seemed forbidden, removed forever. (December 1973)
I really don’t think I’m obsessed w/ Nadine, the individual Nadine, anymore . . . but rather with the Nadine “a woman/no woman/such as co
mes in dreams”—the Nadine that is also the Naomi Marks and the impossible Alexa I once flirted with and all the others. . . . She is everything I desire. She is myself—or rather, I am herself. (April 1974)
Paul appears in my life, creates a local disturbance, disappears again. . . . It’s horrible when I feel indifference, worse when I feel passion. Which, as we all know, tends to be intensified by absence, by withholding. He withholds his body from me. Not in theory, in practice. And then I’m tormented by the old contradiction: my lust for a woman. If I want one so much I can’t want the other so much, it’s a contradiction. But I do. (September 1974)
I am simply not the bar dyke type. Yet my whole effort (or series of efforts) at making myself a woman in relation to men seems to be about at an end. (October 1974)
When does coming out begin? How long does it take? Exactly five years and the breadth of a continent separate the autumn of my first conscious bisexual plotting, Ned against Alexa, from the autumn when I exited the sterile Queens apartment I shared with Paul Nardis for a threadbare floor-through near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where I planned to pursue a lesbian existence.
Paul and I got together late in the summer of 1972. About six months had elapsed since my break with Nadine. My life consisted of my Winchell’s doughnut job and twice-a-week visits to Nadine’s analyst, Dr. Eugen Beck. Fatherly, decent, liberal-though-German (he’d grown up under the Nazis as a matter of fact, and spoke a disconcertingly accented English), Beck was also treating Paul, and had other patients who’d belonged to the Learning Community. He ran his own ménage à n.
I was writing poems and beginning to submit them to little magazines and feminist newspapers, some published in distant cities. (I was ambitious but skittish; when Hanging Loose in Brooklyn accepted “i am not a field-goal kicker,” I agonized over whether to furnish the requested bio note. I feared contamination by a status-conscious poetry establishment: Better a junkie than a professor be.) I was also scribbling longhand drafts of stories I tended to leave unfinished, mostly erotic serials with characters loosely based on women I’d fancied, among them two Winchell’s coworkers. What if Carol, who’d trained me as night baker (her blowsy bully of a mother ran the shop), were to be seduced, not altogether gently, by slatternly Roberta?
I was intrigued by the bizarre and soul-destroying “world of work,” notwithstanding the fact that the job was classic feminine drudgery, quite lacking the virile glamour of the Beats’ sporadic ventures into the labor force. (Not that I looked to the likes of Kerouac and Snyder for guidance anymore, but they’d impressed on me their masculine notions of writing and rebelling, an influence that persisted.) I still believed that all experience is sacred, bright motes of being dancing in the eye of nothingness. Now my nights at Winchell’s contrasted with my scholastic past like some weird dramatization of the mind/body problem, as if I’d given up cavorting in a realm of pure thought to be these sturdy, weary legs that propped me up behind the counter; this flour-smudged face that smiled at sexist men; these arms that hoisted giant bowls of yeast dough, punched out my “raise” with mechanical precision, and cranked the hopper over the vat of reeking grease; this trigger finger on the jelly pump. I’d elected an untutored, all-American desperation. It hadn’t read a word of Heidegger.
It was desperation lite, fueled on simple carbohydrates. I did enjoy a maple bar at times, a newbaked yeasty pillow, frosting not yet hardened to brittle varnish. I liked the catty gossip, the sexual innuendo (Roberta’s name was linked with those of several taxi drivers), the chemical rush of top-forty radio flogging me through the dead zone after midnight.
I couldn’t shake the grandiose, shameful sense of having volunteered for incarnation. I knew that this attitude, plus my absorption in books, my family history in Bellevue, meant I wasn’t a full-fledged “worker,” though I worked hard enough. (Too hard maybe: real workers cut more corners.) I was and wasn’t in the same boat as the weary-feisty “girls,” some already mothers, cornered by sex and difficulty, with whom I punched the clock and shot the breeze. I’d meet more wasted lovelies up at the V.A. Hospital, where I’d work on a cardiac ward the following year. Did I want to be them, bed them, or just get them into language? As usual, the categories blurred.
I’d initially been attracted to Paul when his gaunt, sardonic figure, romantic with damage, had loomed through the Learning Community’s polysexual miasma. Becoming lovers with him now bespoke some continuity, and in my depleted state I definitely welcomed the prospect of a connection I wouldn’t need to build from scratch. We shared desolation you had to have been there for: we’d both been snared by Nadine’s addictive love, both cared for Josh and failed him.
So we began in a tentative mood, with a middle-aged sense that our gestures postdated everything of real importance. Then we continued, still young after all, more resilient than we figured we had any right to be.
I was proud of my dropout status, had no plans to return to school. Paul, however, was finishing his B.A. at Lewis and Clark College and beginning to investigate graduate programs. He contemplated training as a lay analyst.
Like all my lovers, Paul became my teacher. Having learned from Sasha about steam railroads and from Josh about the art of wilderness survival, I now boned up on psychoanalysis. Ferenczi, Horney, Bowlby, Winnicott, cathexis and primary process, the Basic Fault and the Good Enough Mother, were old friends of Paul’s, to whom he eagerly introduced me. He played the piano with less technical expertise than commitment to what he called “musicality,” an elusive but crucial aspect of performance that he connected to the subtleties of feeling he talked about with Beck. His musical opinions had the force of moral ones. He revered Bruno Walter, abominated Toscanini. I wasn’t sure I heard the difference, any more than I was sure (from my horizontal position on Beck’s Naugahyde couch) that the talking cure could really rearrange me for the better.
Paul was nothing like a woman, but he wasn’t manly either. Despite his arrogance, it was tough to picture him in the lordly role that some of my boyfriends had affected. For one thing, he hailed from Cambridge, Massachusetts, which made him the quintessential effete easterner, one of those people for whom culture precedes nature. A hike to an alpine meadow would remind him of a poem, the Oregon coast of an oceanic feeling. Before me, he’d had two lovers, both women in their thirties; besides Nadine, there was Florence, Norman Migdoff’s ex. I myself was a year his senior, and still envisioned him as the white-limbed bitter youth lounging in a dressing gown, the sleepyhead to whom pregnant Nadine used to bring a precoital wake-up present of milk and chocolate chip cookies after her husband left for work. Our histories with her seemed to position us as sweetly perverted siblings.
Our sex, Paul’s and mine, was energetic but spotty. More than other men I’d been with he was subject to fits and starts, to gusts of ambivalence I tried not to take too personally. Long before we were lovers I’d heard him proclaim that sixty-nine was his favorite recreation. I too liked oral sex (preferring giving to receiving), but hadn’t gotten past my old-fashioned conviction that penis-in-vagina was the ultimate intimacy available to persons with disparate genitals.
I worried that my body seemed like too much work to him. When he came, it seemed an assertion of will as much as pleasure. When I couldn’t come myself, I felt abandoned, almost jilted, mired in a swamp of sticky, unattractive needs. I masturbated often, sometimes while he slept beside me; if he ever noticed, he didn’t mention it. I worried about this penchant for accessible satisfactions, which I deemed inferior to the partnered ones that (not always, but too often) proved elusive. Yet I liked the way our relationship minimized the disgrace of conventional boy-girl goings-on, precisely because Paul shared (for different reasons, to be sure) my reservations about that combination. He was heterosexual in an interrogative mode, freely admitting, for instance, an erotic dimension to his friendship with Josh.
Paul thought he wanted “something” from a man. I was happy to talk about it, and not just because I welcomed th
e chance to discuss yet again my feelings for women, but because it brought me closer to the world of male desire that had attracted me at least since junior high and my obsession with T.E. Lawrence. The two of us cultivated a garden of perversion, fantasizing a threesome with Paul’s friend Jonathan, a husky ex-Reedie from White Plains now employed as a machinist. Jonathan cooked fantastic Szechuan food, was a guilty hedonist, nursed leftist sympathies, and kept falling in love with straight guys. He claimed the Marlboro Man as his erotic ideal, a daring statement in that longhaired era, when “androgynous” was a term of approbation and the Castro Street clone had not as yet arrived to popularize gay macho.
Jonathan asked me to be his date for his company’s Christmas party. He wasn’t out at work, and thought it would make life easier if he put on a small charade of normalcy. I went, in a flowered shawl that Nadine had given me, the two of us high on Bacardi he’d supplied. We danced to the trite pop music, ate the vulgar American dinner, and chortled up our sleeves at the success of our imposture. Even if I couldn’t make the leap to lesbianism (which I persistently imagined on an all-or-nothing basis), it felt fine to spit in the soup of heterosexual presumption.
The increasingly urgent question of whether my feelings for one man could outweigh the attractions of women as a people was a new version of my familiar difficulty in squaring flickering desires with an ideal of constancy. I couldn’t seem to stop looking for certainty in eros, couldn’t get it through my head that gray areas might be part of the very landscape of my longing.