Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  Leslie and I were staying with a friend of hers in Amherst. Mara and Marge had made their own arrangements, Marge with a friend who was not a lesbian. Les and I arrived early at the coffeehouse, wanting to check out the space and set up our book display. Two young women in crew cuts, wearing karate gis, were sparring over by the windows; the place was otherwise empty except for the woman we’d corresponded with about the reading. “They’re practicing karate for the Dyke Patrol,” she said.

  “Really? In Northampton?” I asked, a touch too matronizingly. It was spring, Massachusetts was blooming, and to hardened Brooklynites looked irreproachably bucolic.

  “There’s been some street harassment,” she explained. “We’ve got to defend ourselves.”

  Our audience trickled in and Mara showed up. Les and I bantered about where to find the groupies, or “guppies,” as we called them. (It had become a standing joke that these appearances were more about crowd pleasing than poetic subtleties, and ought to command the amenities enjoyed by rock bands.) Hearing a commotion at the door, we discovered that Marge had arrived, accompanied by the friend in whose house she was staying. The doorkeeper said that the friend, who was known to the community as a heterosexual, couldn’t enter. The friend then unhelpfully offered to kiss a woman.

  Though less than charmed by her provocative stance, Mara, Leslie, and I felt we needed to intervene, especially because Marge was threatening not to read. The reading organizer said that the coffeehouse’s status as a lesbian-only space had been spelled out clearly on the flyer. Our reply, that we hadn’t taken the policy literally because “lesbian space” in New York simply meant an environment open to women who were comfortable being around a lot of dykes, didn’t get us very far. The Dyke Patrol chased us down the stairs. We’d driven all that way for nothing.

  At least it made a good story. We quickly realized that this was one of those times when the best means of preserving one’s sanity is to sit back and try to be entertained by the dance of human folly. What we didn’t know was that we were soon to be denounced in other terms that we would find it a lot harder to laugh off. That famous precept “the personal is political,” once interpreted as encouragement to analyze women’s emotional and sexual experiences for clues to gendered power dynamics, was now increasingly seen as an admonition to mend the world by reforming not only one’s personal choices, but the very fabric of one’s subjectivity. To use the telling phrase with which Adrienne Rich concludes “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” the good feminist’s primary task was to “clean up her act.”

  In a taste of factional bloodletting to come, Leslie and I tangled with our coeditors before we’d even put out the first issue of our new magazine. The two of us had imagined our publication as a forum in which to connect fine poetry and fiction to the sort of left dyke politics that drew both of us. Mara and Leba accused us of proposing to sacrifice form to content, art to politics. Stung, we retorted that their approach would deny the possibility of exploring the relation between the two.

  Positions on both sides were rather too reductive (and more than a shade ironic, as Mara’s later writing career would be completely enmeshed with her plunge into Jewish feminist organizing). We’d established, early on, a contentious atmosphere that worsened at a beach house in Amagansett. It was Mara’s place, rented with precious money from a small writing grant, and Les and I had driven out there with Emma, who’d brought a friend along, for a weekend of editorial meetings and beach walks. My vision of a stunning full moon above the breakers, transforming the beach into a playland of delicate shadows, fuses with the memory of hours of arguments over whether a hypothetical piece on Susan Saxe, a lesbian antiwar organizer who’d been a fugitive and was now serving a prison sentence, would be appropriate for a literary magazine. Every hour or so either Les or I would have to stop the shouting to check on Emma and her playmate, who cavorted nervously around the edges of our hostilities. We four editors were like prospective parents who have a major falling-out before their kid is even born. But, amazingly, we managed to keep going, sustaining our increasingly successful publication through the misery of Mara and Leba’s eventual breakup.

  Around the time I moved in with Leslie and Emma, I drastically curtailed my writing about sex. No more private porn, no poems of raunchy longing; in my journal, a suspension of the once habitual dissections of my fantasy life, though occasionally there are clues. After a housewarming party for an ex-lover of Les’s: “I like being in dark rooms packed with sweaty women who dance crotch to crotch. . . . I wonder if Leslie ever thinks about that kind of sex—the kind that is based on temptation, appearances. Probably not.” My reticence wasn’t driven by ideology, although I did concur in the lesbian feminist objection to the popular stereotype of dykes as hypersexual beings. (Les always used to say that her first task in talking to college classes about lesbianism was to disabuse them of the notion that her day revolved around putting on her boots and heading for the bar.) But just because we didn’t flaunt it certainly didn’t mean that Leslie and I and the women we hung out with weren’t into exuberant lovemaking. (I remember sitting around with friends and having a good laugh about some purists who’d decided penetration was verboten.) Rather, I think I somehow assumed that now that I was in love with a woman, one with whom the sex had started out spectacularly, eros would take care of itself. I also think I didn’t know how to square my new idea of myself as responsible lesbian citizen and parent with my history of sexual rebellion.

  A poem from 1978 or 1979, entitled “impermanence,” offers a sharp assessment of the compromise involved. The speaker describes how she and her lover “go about our busyness / stolid, unconscious, bourgeois as the cats, / more self-important with our politics.” The couple are, she says, “too-civilized sisters scared of what we glimpsed / while flying eyeless by the instruments / into the nature-crazed interior / where pleasure equals anarchy and death.” These lines seem to me a fair summary of the way in which both Leslie and I withdrew from the intensity and vulnerability we’d experienced in our first months as lovers. It states my awareness of the power of old forms to mold a supposedly radical lifestyle and suggests that the domestic life I’d chosen shared certain traits with the domesticity of my own childhood—foremost, a desire to mask the chaos that desire alludes to and invites: “dear apparition, semi-solid sweet,” the speaker at last directly addresses her lover, “the rooms are rented, and the faces changed / decade to decade. nothing makes up for that.”

  Leslie and I had never formally promised either monogamy or permanence, but the logic of how we’d set up our life together, the idea of family we enacted with Emma, seemed predicated on some lesbian version of the traditional rights and obligations of a marriage. Certainly Les appeared to me to perceive our sex as something serious, highly moral, definitely not the kind “based on temptation.” She wanted to know what I thought about in bed, she wanted to be sure I didn’t have fantasies that didn’t include her.

  As my poem indicates, I sensed I was losing something but had made up my mind to live with the loss. My compromise was perhaps made palatable by the fact that my identity as an open lesbian seemed to make me subversive almost by definition. I could settle down, quit thrashing about so much, transferring to the collective some of the burden of smashing convention that hitherto had rested too heavily on my individual shoulders.

  My major satisfactions in this period were not the ecstatic and irregular ones that I had defiantly claimed as a teenager and recently pursued as a quasi-bohemian artist. Indeed, they looked a lot like the middle-class satisfactions of rational production and measurable achievement in which my family of origin had specialized. But along with the work, there were always homely pleasures, not the least of them the literary and political gossip that traversed the city, the region, and sometimes the continent with amazing speed. What was the legend-in-her-time white working-class dyke poet, supposedly settled with a lover in Oakland, doing in Boston making googly eyes at the academ
ically empowered Native American poet? Who’d gotten into a major fight with whom at which panel at NWSA (pronounced “Nawsuh,” for National Women’s Studies Association), its annual meeting our equivalent of a women’s movement county fair on a continental scale? Would Prairie Fire Organizing Committee have its predicted showdown with Fort Dyke (seps with attitude) at the Christopher Street Liberation Day march?

  In the warm months and less frequently in the cold ones we escaped from city routines, taking Emma camping in New Jersey, visiting friends upstate or down south, where she could cavort with shaggy animals and swim in local lakes while we sipped iced tea on shady porches or sank into deep hammocks to read magazine submissions. With the car radio tuned to the country-and-western station, we sang along to “You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille” and my favorite, “Drop-kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life.” We drove to North Carolina in the springtime, a bored child and a frantic cat egging each other on to mayhem in the back of Les’s clunky VW wagon, which broke down just outside the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. Once we recovered from the trip we enjoyed a peaceable interlude in a sagging farmhouse inhabited by a Women’s Center pal of Les’s who was now in nursing school. Dot boasted of her newly acquired country skills, which ranged from keeping bugs off a cabbage and climbing a barbed-wire fence to cooking placenta in wine sauce, a trendy dish at local birthings.

  We hunted up bargain underpants and blue jeans on Sundays in the musty, crowded shops around Grand Street, sniffing the pickles in open barrels on the sidewalk, ogling the cakes in Gertel’s Bakery, then stopping in for real sustenance at one of the dairy restaurants. Our favorite was the Garden Cafeteria, a place on East Broadway next to the Daily Forward building, beloved by us for both prices and atmosphere. At the door you received a ticket, and as you moved down the line of steam tables, each server punched it to show how much you’d spent—so many cents for soup, for boiled vegetables, so much for a steaming plate of kasha varnishkes with gravy. The total, paid as you left, was unbelievably low, but a sign on the wall warned of the stiff penalty for lost tickets. Customers, many of them ancient, were inclined to linger over bright yellow cake and boiled coffee, so another sign, stamped on metal, admonished: after you finish your meal please give your seat for the next. Years later, when the Garden had closed and the space was being gutted for a Chinese restaurant, I snagged that sign off a trash heap as a souvenir for Leslie.

  We indulged the hobby of our secret language, as private as sex, with its elaborate cast of fantasy characters, among them that swinging sister, Nun Other (as in “I love you and Nun Other”), animal familiars for ourselves and our friends (one couple were known collectively as “the Monkphants” because we’d guessed they had a monkey-and-elephant fetish) and deliciously mean designations for enemies (obnoxious men were “basters,” short for “turkey basters,” the implement then becoming widely known as standard technology for do-it-yourself donor insemination).

  Our unwieldy threesome became a working unit, as Emma and I learned to get along without Les’s intervention. I grew to be proud of the family we were building. Increasingly, my writing was finding an audience. Life was hard, but we were pioneers; we figured it was supposed to be that way. We had going for us our young energy, the optimism that flowers in the youth of social movements. I’d always been a skeptic, and a fan of complexity (a favorite word of both Les’s and mine), a utopian and yet an unbeliever. I was always waiting for effective leadership. In its absence, I kept schlepping.

  It was a dappled time, struggle flecked with happiness. “Hard to be us,” our friend Shirley Wilkes used to say, with rueful pride and gentle irony. We knew that she, a Black dyke feminist, caught it coming and going, and we were pleased to be included because in some ways we did, too. We had no careers (as the world understands such things), no property, no men nor stake in making nice to them. The way we saw it, fish sans bicycles were up a creek and sitting pretty, the freest women on the planet. Except for each other, what had we to lose?

  EIGHT

  A Cloud and Its Consequences

  trash (trăsh) n. 1.a. Worthless or discarded material or objects; refuse or rubbish. . . . 2.a. Empty words or ideas. b. Worthless or offensive literary or artistic material. 3. A person or group of people regarded as worthless or contemptible.—trash tr.v. trashed, trash • ing, trash • es. 1. Slang. a. To throw away; discard: “Ideas and works of art . . . get bought and trashed as quickly as razor blades” (New York). b. To wreck or destroy by or as if by vandalism; reduce to trash or ruins. c. To beat up; assault. d. To subject to scathing criticism or abuse; attack verbally . . .

  —The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

  IN 1981, I GOT TRASHED. (Note the niceties of usage: children of the New Left and its spin-offs don’t say “my work got trashed,” but “I got trashed.”) The charge was anti-Semitism, evidence of which supposedly appeared in an early draft of my first novel.

  This was a semiprivate trashing that never registered on the letters pages of periodicals like off our backs and Sinister Wisdom, which served our community as informal ideological seismographs. But in Leslie’s and my world, it was off the Richter scale. Though I understood even before the earth stopped undulating that I should try not to take what had happened personally (it was just one of those things, those social cataclysms that People in Groups periodically generate), it marked an end to my romance of lesbian belonging. While it might have been somewhat random, it wasn’t accidental, but grew out of a climate in which the politics of a range of identities—sexual, racial, ethnic—were being pursued in ways that increasingly made my corner of dykedom feel like a demolition derby.

  In a time when denunciatory rhetoric conflating a wide range of strategies for progressive social change with various forms of reactionary nationalism has largely obscured the real achievements of identity politics—with the result that the phrase itself now typically functions more as an epithet than as a neutral description—it’s important to be clear that the destruction I refer to can’t be blamed on our efforts to bring identities into the political picture. Such efforts were (and remain) vitally necessary in addressing power imbalances ignored not only by the Old Left but by the straight, male-dominated white New Left and the patriarchal leadership of Black Power and other racial justice movements.

  Our infighting recalled unhappy traditions of internecine warfare within other radical insurgencies. The connection emerged vividly when Les and I attempted to explain to her stepmother why I’d decided to suspend work on my novel, a tale so weird and convoluted that we always stumbled in the telling, aware how bizarre it must seem to the uninitiated. A tart-gentle Manhattan grandma from an immigrant background who’d made a career as an epidemiologist, she surprised us with the quick empathy facilitated by her history on the left. My story, she said, recalled the days when Communist party members used to be “brought up on charges” for offenses like white chauvinism. “What you’re experiencing,” she pronounced with the authority of a pro, “is about maintaining ideological purity.”

  While lesbian feminism was itself of course a species of identity politics, the first context in which I recall encountering the term was a statement issued in 1977 by a pathbreaking Black feminist group, the Combahee River Collective. “Above all else,” that document stirringly declares, “our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. . . . We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” Ever mindful of social structures and economics, the statement emphasizes grassroots organizing, rejects biological reductionism, advocates coalition work, and eschews the “fractionalization” promoted by white lesbian separatists. Far from summoning Black feminists to withdraw into the defensive insularity of the Most Oppressed,
it envisions alliances sturdily rooted in the historical and contemporary particularities of various groups’ experiences.

  Les and I were soon up to our eyeballs in this brand of identity politics, a corrective to the antileft bias that marked too much of white lesbian and radical feminist politics and in our experience often presaged a romanticized view of women, encouraging neglect of real world organizing in favor of emphasis on “wimmin’s culture.” We welcomed the attention to race, class, and gender in the work of a new generation of lesbians of color, perceiving it as crucial both on its own terms and for the example it provided of alternatives to the quest for one true locus of oppression that preoccupied too many feminists. To illustrate how narrow such politics could be, Les often told the story of an experience she’d had at a women’s bookstore event set up to promote her lesbian poetry anthology: a white audience member approached her to complain that a stunning poem about a young Black boy gunned down by a white policeman revealed its author to be “too much into her racism and not enough into her sexism.”

  Even as I embraced the new identity politics, they sometimes left me feeling nervous. While I’d been dealing consciously with race for a number of years now, I’d been doing so in the context of predominantly white groups where the issues were always “outreach,” greater “sensitivity.” Now the oppressed were setting their own agenda, and responding felt a lot less optional. I was afraid of falling short, of not evolving fast enough, of revealing ugly flaws that might not easily be pardoned, foremost among these a liberal nervousness I deemed as bad as prejudice.

  Years before, at a mid-seventies poetry benefit, Audre Lorde had trained her X-ray vision on me and diagnosed my problem. We had met on other occasions, but I was still a bit starstruck. At the start of the evening I apologized for not having let her know sooner how much I admired her work. Hours later, on her way out the door, she handed me a poem scrawled on a paper napkin. Titled “Letter for Jan,” it begins: “No I don’t think you were chicken not to speak / I think you / afraid I was mama as laser / seeking to eat out or change your substance / Mawulisa bent on destruction by threat / who might cover you / in a thick dark cloud of guilty symbols.” At the time, I’m afraid I was too unnerved at having my cover blown to appreciate the wry reassurance of the ending: “When all the time / I would have loved you / speaking / being a woman full of loving / turned on / and a little bit raunchy / and heavy / with my own black song.”