by Jan Clausen
My insecurities prompted me to compare myself unfavorably to Les, whose political courage I intensely admired. She’d led the effort to integrate our magazine’s editorial collective on a meaningful and not merely token level, and in the process had gotten close to a circle of Black and Latina lesbian writers, among them contributors to the groundbreaking volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She joined a New York group called DARE (Dykes Against Racism Everywhere) and published an essay on racism and writing that proved intensely controversial, especially because she faulted radical feminist icon Mary Daly’s uncritical reliance on European colonial accounts of the horrors of South Asian patriarchy.
Les spoke her mind, took action, seemed the real activist, while I was a born observer (the real writer, she’d say), never much at ease with the rough-and-tumble play of People in Groups. And she was Jewish, where I was simply White, an increasingly salient fact as, partly inspired by the challenge posed by women of color to the myth of a monolithic feminist sisterhood, Jewish feminists in increasing numbers began to organize. Along with a lot of other dykes who’d never given much thought to the importance of their identities as Jews, she now joined a lively public conversation about the strengths of shared culture, the dangers of anti-Semitism, and possibilities for building coalitions with women of color.
Les’s work as an editor and critic seemed eminently useful, my poems and stories a luxury, and although I kept insisting on the dangers of judging creative work according to its perceived political uses, deep down I wondered what licensed me to speak. My own identity—what Audre’s poem had called my substance—was a thing whose value I tried mightily to believe in; intellectually, I knew that all experience is precious, that what was being asked of those with greater privilege was simply that we quit expecting to be first, not that we bow out altogether. Yet in my heart of hearts I didn’t feel so optimistic. Maybe women like me, who weren’t all that oppressed, should just shut up, thereby making more room for those involved in “breaking silences” (the controlling metaphor of identity politics, in time invoked by a spectrum of feminists from sadomasochists to incest survivors).
Despite these worries, my work was going well. My first book of fiction, a collection of stories published the year I turned thirty, had gotten enough of the right sort of review attention to make me feel really successful for the first time since I’d ceased to be a model student. The Women’s Press Limited had brought out a British edition. It wasn’t exactly the big time, but, given my subject matter and my U.S. publisher, a mom-and-pop outfit in Ithaca, New York, it was more than I’d expected. Energized, I’d been working on a novel about the fate of a lesbian family in the aftermath of the biological mother’s death: the flommy “kidnaps” her daughter from the father, a conventional sort who resents his ex-wife’s former lover and tries to end her contacts with the child. I called it Sinking, Stealing.
On the political front, too, it had been an eventful year. In the summer of 1980 I’d joined a group of women from several East Coast cities who were planning a large-scale demonstration to take place in late November in our nation’s capital. Conceived as a pageant of feminist grief and anger at the threat to life on earth posed by all militarism, with a focus on scary new wrinkles in the arms race, the protest was known as the Women’s Pentagon Action. It was intended to be quite different in form as well as message from the typical “Washington demo.”
The plan that came out of months of chaotic meetings called for a day of dramatic activities, led by enormous, colorful puppets made for the occasion by the Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater. We would begin with a solemn procession from Arlington Cemetery to the Pentagon, where we’d act out a series of relevant emotions—mourning, rage, empowerment, and defiance—in choreographed stages. Holding hands, we would ring the bleak five-sided structure, or as much of it as our numbers permitted. (As it turned out, even with more than two thousand women participating we still had to close up gaps in the circle with strips of fabric held by the demonstrators.) Affinity groups would “weave webs of life”—symbolic barriers of colored yarn—to protest the cult of Mutual Assured Destruction that had its home inside the walls. Those planning to risk arrest would block the main entrances, sitting or lying down until the cops carried them off.
The group’s makeup was as politically eclectic as its structure was amorphous. Many members were lesbians; many more were not. Some had ties to older antiwar groups like the War Resisters League, around since the 1920s and instrumental in mobilizing secular pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War. Others were aligned with the emerging environmental movement known as ecofeminism. Still others had been involved in the grassroots opposition to nuclear power that flourished in the era of the Three Mile Island disaster. The year before the Pentagon Action, I myself had joined a civil disobedience blockade of the Indian Point nuclear plant, on the Hudson River a few miles north of home. I’d been arrested and had spent two nights in jail, sleeping in a gym with a group of other Jane Does, all held for our refusal to furnish the police with real names and identification.
On that occasion, I’d found collective incarceration intriguing but irritating. Decision was by consensus instead of majority vote, requiring lengthy discussion in order to achieve unanimous agreement on any proposed course of action. The simple phrase “I block consensus” portended harrowing new dimensions in political tedium. Our Pentagon protest promised similar frustrations. For that and other reasons, I had mixed feelings about my involvement.
One obvious problem was that the group was far too white. Its racial problems closely paralleled those I’d already encountered in CARASA. Although that organization was inclusively named the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, in practice it mostly focused on abortion, the issue that most white feminists cared about far more than they did the problem of forced sterilization, which was rampant in many communities of color. The Women’s Pentagon Action similarly engaged a mostly white, middle-class constituency. Like the anti-nuclear movement overall, it mistakenly assumed that just because a nuclear war would end the world for everyone, people of all races and classes would come together to prevent it. Aspects of militarism that were of more immediate concern to certain Third World communities—U.S. military aid to repressive governments, for instance, or the use of sites in Puerto Rico for air force target practice—often got no more than passing mention in a leaflet.
On the plus side, it was action, and I needed to act, for I was flooded, much as I’d been in childhood, by images of the earthly hell in preparation as the U.S.-Soviet arms race sharply escalated in the second half of the Carter presidency. A women’s action made perfect sense to me, not because I believed, as some of our members did, that women were inherently nonviolent (if that were so, why thousands of years of wars?), but because I was still committed to a world within the world, a space for my gender to explore its powers free of masculine interference. I liked the notion of a group of women taking on an issue so often left up to men, going global, as it were, rather than sticking to our gendered turf of predictable concerns like reproductive rights and day care. I approved of the creative imagery, the effort to reinvent protest. But I felt that the emphasis on symbol and ritual needed to be balanced with attention to practical means of reforming violent structures. And I regretted the dearth of thought to go along with the feeling. I wanted to delve into the economics of the arms race and to name the global reach of U.S. military might as an effect of something called imperialism as much as patriarchy. “Take the toys away from the boys,” which we chanted in the street, was a clever line, but it wasn’t analysis.
Above all, I chafed at the sentimental notion of women’s special virtues that seemed to have proliferated in recent years and now pervaded much of the white women’s movement like a sickly sweet air freshener. The Pentagon Action borrowed its ideas of women as natural nurturers from sources including the feminist nonviolence movement, the nascent ecofeminist
movement, and the less militant strains of lesbian separatism. Its understanding of war as “male violence” drew on books by radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, whose outrageous rhetoric (“men love death” Les and I parodied—or was it an actual quotation?) I regarded as a classic instance of feminists’ all too frequent preference for feel-good sloganeering over strenuous thinking. Awareness that People in Groups everywhere exhibit similar tastes did little to console me for local backwardness.
In 1981 I wrote a poem called “Apostate,” poking fun at the vogue for images of spinsters and quilts and weaving as symbols of a gender-given mission to stitch up a world ripped to shreds by destructive men. Hadn’t I become a feminist precisely to avoid a life of brainless, blameless servitude? I was thinking in part of the Pentagon Action’s “webs of life” when I wrote the opening lines: “Furthermore, I abjure / these textile metaphors.” Paraphrasing a famously violent epigram (“when I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver”), I ended by preferring writing well to being good: “when / I hear the word nurture / I reach for my / pen.”
In the event, the first Pentagon Action (there were two, in consecutive years) took place in the weird interregnum that followed the 1980 presidential election, when everyone I knew was frantically wondering how we’d ever get through just one Reagan administration. Les and I were moving into a new apartment on the top floor of a squarish, three-story brick building on Eleventh Street across from Prospect Park. We’d answered a classified ad for a “working couple,” knowing it was a long shot. When we saw all the space and light, we kept insisting, “But we do work!” and managed to bamboozle the aging, timid landlord into taking our security deposit even though a pair of dykes clearly wasn’t what he’d envisioned.
Half my things were still in boxes when I left for D.C. and discomforts familiar from so many other demos: the borrowed apartment, bed with slept-in sheets, the importunate cat and souring milk in a strange refrigerator, the paucity of toilets, the hordes of sectarians, the irritation of coming well prepared and having to replicate the miracle of the loaves and fishes for the multitude who neglect to bring water and food on a daylong outing. Yet underneath it all was the tang of genuine adventure.
Emma joined me for the initial phase, the somber, silent trek through almost-winter Arlington, which was more to my taste than the mourning and raging on cue. But mourn and rage we did, all around the bureaucratic fortress. Les arrived to take over parenting duties before I got arrested.
Late that night, a bunch of us who’d pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges were herded, wearing handcuffs and leg irons, onto a bus that drove over endless twisting roads, toward daybreak disgorging us at Alderson Federal Penitentiary, where we served our sentences, ten days in most cases, amid the rolling hills of West Virginia.
When a new anthology that Les had coedited appeared in the spring of 1981, the publishers organized a splashy promotional event, a marathon poetry reading to be held in Boston’s venerable Arlington Street Church. The program featured literary heavies, so many of them, Les and I decided that we’d all be lucky if the floor held up under the collective weight. Cynically-boastfully, we took to calling it “the Circus.”
Audre Lorde was there, sucking smoke from a fragrant joint that was passed around on the way to the party afterward. She danced far into the night, looking like a younger self, the Audre of gay-girl bars, not the stately mother-oracle who’d just revealed her visions from a pulpit. Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff were there, Adrienne with her strange patrician accent (“pulpit” pronounced “poolpit”), joking that she and Audre were turning into “the Mutt and Jeff of the antiracism circuit.” Pat Parker had flown in from the Bay Area, and so had Judy Grahn, that self-taught genius, who claimed (entirely implausibly, I thought) that she’d written her great long poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death” in a day or two on a peach brandy high. She and Paula Gunn Allen appeared to be an item.
Despite my reluctance to engage in feminist hero worship, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Most of these women were famous (for lesbians). I greatly admired their poems, their politics. Of course I felt like a bit of an interloper. Not only was I younger, less well known, but I was the only one on the program who was white, middle-class, and what Adrienne liked to refer to as “social Christian.”
Through the magazine, Les had made us some brilliant new friends, Shirley Wilkes and Aimee Huerta, both writer-editors and leaders of an emerging cultural-political coalition among feminists of color. They’d recently moved to Brooklyn, to an apartment blocks from us. We’d helped them paint while the place was still empty. I remember perching on a ladder, paint roller in hand, discussing poetry with Aimee. Like me, she owed her first allegiance to that genre, but increasingly turned to prose to work out complex trains of thought. I was enormously attracted by her penchant for what I’d soon describe, in an essay called “A Movement of Poets” that argued against narrow agendas for feminist poetry, as “courageous scrutiny of what is most frightening and destructive in ourselves as well as in the world outside us.”
We all got along well, but Les and Shirley were especially tight. Both were born organizers with lengthy academic training whose own vocations as writers often took a back seat to their mission of introducing the work of women of color and anti-racist whites to feminist audiences. Soon Shirley’s battered car, the Brown Bomber, was a regular in front of our stoop. Emma and I grew used to the energetic sound of Les’s half of their phone conversations, gossip seamlessly joined to strategizing.
The Brown Bomber brought Aimee and Shirley to Croton-on-Hudson, where Les and I spent an August house-sitting while Emma visited grandparents in Israel. They shared our relish of simple homemade food and complicated movement scandals, dissection of which Shirley interspersed with dramatic readings from supermarket tabloids. All four of us badly needed a break from the demands of pressured, increasingly public lives, from the scary adulation of being perceived as a walking symbol of one’s espoused political values, from cutthroat competition in the name of nurturing. But Les and I didn’t doubt that Aimee and Shirley, as a Black and Latina couple, had it rougher than we did. They were caught up in a peculiarly racialized variant of the love-hate dynamic that so frequently enmeshed successful feminists. Too many white women saw them as leaders and sought their token presence on this or that panel, too many sister dykes of color resented their prominence. Identity politics placed them on permanent exhibit, their domestic fortunes seeming to offer clues to the future of interethnic coalition building.
While some of these difficulties were apparent at the time, it’s only in hindsight that I emphasize the pressures we all faced. Back then I was focused on the possibilities. I hoped for personal success for my writing—not measured in mainstream terms, for I knew the mainstream wouldn’t have me, but with a lesbian audience—yet never envisioned it as a purely individual achievement. I was learning so much from women like Shirley and Aimee. Though the politics of our diverse identities often meant working in separate arenas, we never doubted that we were building something large and good together. We seemed poised to unite complex analysis (so much more satisfying than women-are-better platitudes) and the lushest, starkest truths of poetry. I imagined that we were just getting started. The unease I sometimes experienced about my “identity credentials” was, I hoped, just a mild neurotic symptom. I ignored it, kept on trucking.
I worked well in Croton, getting further into Sinking, Stealing and completing “A Movement of Poets.” I enjoyed the cool and quiet, woodsy runs and walks and swimming, and cooking in the sinfully spacious suburban kitchen. There was just one major problem, Les’s reluctance to make love. There was no particular reason, she insisted, it was just how she felt right now. In fact, it wasn’t the first time I’d remarked that the rhythms of her sexual interest seemed less determined by anything that was going on between us than by mysterious inner forces I had no access to. So much for my hopes that unpressured time together might help us recover the prim
ary physical connection we’d had in our early days. I felt both angry and disappointed (this was our vacation), even though I remembered other times when I’d been the one to turn her down.
So gradually that I hardly noticed what was happening, I’d begun to think of sensual happiness as a lovely foreign country we’d visited once for too brief a time. I didn’t know why I sometimes withdrew from her, any more than I knew why she turned off to me. I guessed it had to do with what I called “feeling crowded,” the lack of solitude and separation endemic to family life. I craved suspense, the rituals of seduction. She seemed almost alarmed by any spontaneity, as though lovemaking were official business and had to be conducted by the book.
When we were new, our sex had felt like freedom, made from volitions distinct yet coinciding. Now we were so close and yet our timing was off; we competed strangely to give each other pleasure. When I lay in her arms and let her work her will on me, a will that only wanted my satisfaction, I felt immobilized, helpless, stripped of adult sexual powers. I felt she was directing me how to feel. And when her sex was locked away from me (she didn’t feel safe), I was desolate as a child denied the breast.