by Jan Clausen
Later, when the term came into vogue in dykedom, we would joke about “lesbian bed death,” the notion that long-term lesbian partners are more prone than other couples to a loss of sexual interest in each other. I never put much credence in the concept, never felt that our dry spells were something to be accepted as part of a larger pattern. For me they remained a quiet emergency, lack of sex an intimation of chronic hunger.
I only hinted at these thoughts in my notebooks, which no longer seemed as private as they had when I was single. Occasionally there’s the glimpse of an underlife: “I thought about the need for a journal that would contain things I can’t say—I mean things forbidden or entirely anomalous w/in the feminist context. . . . Many things L. would understand. But not for instance that I fantasize about men’s bodies. (Not that I understand it precisely either. But I admit it to myself.)”
Today I can’t recall those fantasies; what seems significant is less the fact of their existence than my need to refer to them in writing. My notion of a journal in which I might record things I hesitated to speak aloud hints at my growing willingness to explore those “unacceptable” impulses that adhere to the underside of all social life—impulses that, in a densely ideological setting, often register as politically transgressive. The fact that I could do men was a sign of deviance in dykedom (at least insofar as I maybe hadn’t outgrown it); so, too, was my conviction that the flaws of really existing women belied utopian hopes of our perfectibility. Not just the erotic fact alone but its convergence with other factors would ultimately lead me to rethink my lesbian loyalties.
Les was crabby like me, so my loathing of sentimental theories only reinforced our bond. It was the sexual stuff—not just retrograde fantasies but the depth of my disappointment in the waning of our passion—that I sensed was dangerous to our hope of permanence.
I spent October in the Berkshires, at the Millay Colony for the Arts. It was my first stint at an artists’ colony, and the boost it gave to my writerly self-esteem was hugely amplified when I got word that I’d been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship. I seemed poised to finish my novel in record time.
On a Sunday night in December, I received a long-distance call from a couple named Stephanie and Joyce. Les had worked with them in several capacities, and was currently advising Stephanie on putting together a volume of Jewish lesbian writing. They’d captivated Emma, inviting her to stay in their roomy old house and entertaining her in the style of hectic fun often favored by childless people who like to play at parenting. They were prominent in “lit biz” and well known to several of Les’s and my friends, who regarded them as flaky and politically naive, but amusing to watch and usefully energetic. Drama and rumor were their attendant atmosphere.
The two of them professed to admire my writing. Naturally, I was flattered. In hopes that they would help me get my novel published, I’d been sending them installments as I progressed. Now it seemed they’d changed their minds. They were both on the line, though Joyce was doing the talking, in a tone that implied I knew exactly why she should be so angry at me. My novel, she said, was anti-Semitic to the core. How could I have written this Jew-hating book?
Incredulous, yet with a sense of déjà vu, struggling to breathe normally, I tried to find out what she was getting at. The main point, it appeared, was that I’d made my character Daniel, a Jewish father, my “villain.” The extralegal custody fight that formed the basis of the plot pitted him against a gentile heroine. Daniel was “rich,” a “devil,” a man without a conscience, all attributes of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes.
I knew, of course, that I shouldn’t be defensive—the rule of thumb for responding to political criticism. But this wasn’t dialogue; there was no benefit of the doubt, no sense that I (or Les, for that matter, for of course, as they well knew, she too had read the manuscript) was also a person who might care about this issue. I got off the phone and, sobbing, went in to explain to her the bizarre predicament we’d just landed in.
While the telephone call had felt like an ambush, we now saw there’d been warning signs. Stephanie and Joyce had been picking fights lately, doing peculiar things. Shirley had told us how Stephanie had lectured a group of women of color on anti-Semitism. “Would you hide me in your attic?” she’d demanded, as though, Shirley said, it hadn’t occurred to her that if Reagan’s America took a fascist swerve, dark-skinned people would be in camps as fast as Jews. Joyce, who wasn’t Jewish, was clearly “taking leadership,” to use a phrase Les and I borrowed from some left sectarians who wanted whites to hitch our wagons to the star of the more oppressed Third World.
We realized that Joyce and Stephanie’s ties to a number of our community’s most influential writers and editors meant that they could damage my reputation (and by implication Les’s) among a lot of people who hadn’t had a chance to judge my manuscript for themselves. After all, this was a moment in which many Jewish lesbians were seeing the world through the powerful lens of a newly revalued identity. As feminists had done in early consciousness-raising groups, they were questioning much in their own settled way of viewing things. They would surely question the perceptions of a non-Jew, and they might well mistrust my motives. While few would believe I could be an out-and-out bigot, many would suspect I must be guilty of something. And in an atmosphere in which the Reagan revolution prompted fears that North America could become the site of widespread, European-style anti-Semitism, the question of fairness to me and my book might pale beside the sense of urgency about alerting lesbians to the dangers of stereotyping Jews.
Thus began the phenomenon that Leslie and I dubbed “the Cloud.” We were thinking of a character in the comic strip Li’l Abner, who walks around beneath his own personal thunderhead. The accusations hovered at ceiling height. Stigma had adopted us.
When I didn’t recant, Joyce and Stephanie dispatched to a list of prominent lesbian literati a lengthy memorandum entitled “An Analysis of the Anti-Semitic Content in Sinking, Stealing.” The document explained, “It is a difficult task for gentiles to comprehend the depth of violence in [the novel]. . . . The characterization is based on anti-Semitism, based on a false notion of Jews: Jews as evil, Jews without integrity, Jews as inhuman. . . . We hope that these comments will not only assist Jan Clausen in her necessary consciousness-raising, but will also help both writers and readers in developing a sensitivity to anti-Semitism in lesbian literature.”
It takes a village to trash an activist. The village took its cue. Some of the participants were Jews; many were non-Jews anxious to do the right thing. As Les and I had expected, most who joined the critical chorus discounted Stephanie and Joyce’s extreme rhetoric, yet urged me to contemplate radical surgery on my book after expunging lurking prejudice from my soul. Some concurred with the memorandum’s premise that unflattering portrayals of “oppressed” characters were to be avoided at all costs. Les and I got strong support from women who believed that lesbians had to be able to write fiction as complex as the social worlds we inhabited. But in a way it didn’t matter. We felt branded, exposed, accused of an awful crime against identity, in a situation in which the charge was itself both proof and punishment.
I have often tried to dissect this incident, to understand how trashing happens, how the idealistic will to change can become a medium in which ugly suspicions flare and spread, much as an overgrowth of fungus provokes a yeast infection. Trashing turns real problems into allegories in which the trashee figures as The Problem personified. Once the process is set in motion, it draws in bystanders, playing on their fear of being the next to be denounced, appealing to their wish for reassurance that they’re among the elect, they’re part of the solution. I know because I’ve had all those feelings myself. And I know, having been the target, how trashing hollows out the trashee, replacing healthy self-critique with a debilitating cycle of self-doubt and defensiveness.
Maybe the worst thing was the way the charges seeped into the groundwater of my life with Les a
nd Emma. You love two Jews, and you’re a Jew hater: no one directly said as much, but it couldn’t fail to be implied. And the implication was in a sense irrefutable because it concerned not actions but subtle states of consciousness. It produced in me sensations that foreshadowed the hopeless feeling of being on trial for my identity—of having to clear my subjectivity’s good name—that awaited me when I slept with Benjamin.
At a level beyond the issue of anti-Semitism, my novel had fallen afoul of an intracommunity dispute about what to do with this powerful thing called identity now that we’d discovered it. Was membership in an “oppressed” group to be seen as conferring an automatic badge of politico-moral authority? Was feminism basically a quest for purity, a mighty effort at self-reform? Were evils like racism, Jew hating, and class bias to be understood as patriarchal toxins polluting our pristine female natures? Could power be innocent?
Those who took this tack increasingly mistrusted the complexities indispensable to art; ambiguity, for them, was in the enemy camp. It seemed to me that they attributed extraordinary powers to language while all but ignoring social structures and economics. They prioritized crafting the perfect consciousness (would it were possible!) over doing anything. But there were others who, while also mindful of the dangers of unexamined stereotypes, declined to trade the risks of the imagination for the sterile safety of “positive images.”
I cast my lot with these last, yet the irony was that for all of my mistrust of the politics of virtue, I still of course aspired to be good; that was what made the trashing so devastating. I’d not by any means jettisoned my feminine tendency to measure my self-worth in terms of usefulness to others. That imperative of service and the resulting reassurance furnished much of the motivation for my activism. The fact that I’d tried so hard and been rewarded with a Cloud enraged me enough to sour me permanently on the notion of sacrifices for the greater good of dykedom.
When I think about the Cloud and its sequelae, I think of Les’s narrow lair, which boasted absurdly many doors—one to the dining room, facing Emma’s bedroom; one to the outside hall (this door was bolted and never used); plus unevenly hung French doors opening onto a large space that served us as a book and magazine warehouse. I think about lying on her double bed—our beds were our only truly comfortable furniture and we often used them in preference to chairs—debriefing from the latest confrontation. I think of our practice of screening each other’s mail (“tasting,” we called it, like paranoid emperors); somehow it was easier to read a hostile missive when its noxious contents had first been summarized. I think of watching “Dallas,” eating tons of air-popped popcorn. I think of feeling completely debilitated.
I think of Les’s desk, which sat in front of her only window, a window that faced the wall of a neighboring building, and of how that desk was surrounded and overshadowed with stacks of books that loomed in precarious, shifting arrangements. They were books on the Holocaust, books on the Middle East, books of interviews with Palestinian women, books on all the wrenching what-ifs of history that had to be addressed in the major essay she’d begun on anti-Semitism and racism. Its purpose was to consider the issues from a comparative perspective that would get beyond the vortex of competitive agony too often suggested by the phrase “Black-Jewish relations.” Pre-Cloud she’d planned to write something on the topic, but the accusations had deeply wounded her, and the project now took on the dimensions of an obsession, as though its difficulty made it more valuable.
I think of her labor over every sentence, debating nuances, weighing tone and balance: she would be an anti-Stephanie, beyond reproach in her handling of sources, scrupulously balanced, fair to those she disagreed with. I think of the cats keeping her company, loyally indolent, and how every surface was covered with dust and cat hair and pages of typescript cross-hatched with insertions and corrections.
I remember (but this memory is colored by later ones) how helpless I felt in the face of Les’s moods, how I tried to build a mood of my own, insulated from that in her which I had no power over.
I know I wasn’t the only lesbian feminist from whom the acrid factionalism of those years, and the merciless intrusions of ideology into every crevice of fantasy and affect, exacted too great a price. The quest for innocent power and moral purity was in the end as problematic when pursued by lesbians as in any nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood.
By the time a year had passed since the Boston “Circus” reading, it already seemed like a dyke equivalent to King Edward VII’s funeral, that pageant of concord among the world powers just before the Great War. After 1981, all we did was fuss and fight. Desire itself became a bone of feminist contention, with women at odds over pornography and sex work and the ethical implications of various sexual practices. My writer friend Maud got trashed around this time, after allowing herself to be videotaped going down on Betty Dodson, the author of Liberating Masturbation. The tape was shown at a Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex organized by dissidents at the 1982 Barnard conference on feminist scholarship. Shortly afterward, antiporn feminists phoned her employer and denounced her as a pervert.
Jewish feminist support groups went at each other tooth and nail, Di Vilde Chayes against Di Yiddishe Shvestern, everyone under sudden enormous pressure to identify herself as a Zionist, non-Zionist, or anti-Zionist, everyone up in arms over proper terms and timing of condemnation for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. (Ten years later, a friend of mine looked back: “We were at each other’s throats over the Middle East, and then it was like everybody realized, ‘Central America—there’s something we can all agree about!’”)
The Women’s Peace Encampment in Seneca, New York—a lineal descendant of the Women’s Pentagon Action—became the site of epic struggles over principles and tactics. Every time I heard the latest from up there, or read about the annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where they were brawling over whether male children could attend or whether to admit postop transsexuals, I felt mightily relieved to have missed the action. “Thank God,” I liked to say, “feminists don’t have state power. We’d be putting sisters up against the wall.”
Lesbian couples whose long companionship had helped glue Les’s and my world together now ripped asunder. Mariah and Bonnie, whose farm near Albany we’d often visited, the elders talking lit biz around the woodstove while Emma played with the dogs and clean snow buried the world, broke up and sold their land. Aimee and Shirley parted bitterly. Aimee moved to the Bay Area and didn’t answer letters. Maud would follow her in a year or two, saying before she left, “I’m cutting off pieces of myself just to see what I’m like without them.”
It did not occur to me to withdraw from lesbian politics, which of course I could have done without ceasing to love women. It wasn’t simply that I had too much invested. It was also that I couldn’t turn my back on the dream engendered by those moments in which the feminist politics of a range of identities got practiced in an open-ended way, one that encouraged deeper probing rather than instant answers, that welcomed differences within beleaguered groups instead of pressuring members into a clenched conformity, that supported “breaking silences” without romanticizing pain, without conditioning the right to be heard on demonstrated suffering.
As bitterly disillusioned as I was with so much in lesbian feminist practice, I was more committed than ever to the worldview that my life as a lesbian had made possible. At home in dykedom, I was merely alienated. Anywhere else I’d be a real alien.
I couldn’t write; the Cloud had seen to that. So as not to fritter away my NEA grant, I went to work half-time for an outfit that Les and I dubbed “the Maxes,” two sexist but fairly harmless guys named Max who ran an executive search firm from a tiny office suite near Columbus Circle. Their focus was the medical industry, and boring afternoons full of monoclonal antibodies afforded me a soothing if surreal escape from the thrills and spills of feminism.
Eventually, I finished Sinking, Stealing, which saw the light of print in 1985. My p
ublishers, in both the U.S. and England, were the ones who’d done my story collection. Reviews and sales were both very good. I gave some readings in London and Edinburgh. A lesbian filmmaker optioned the book.
I’d been rehabilitated, only I wasn’t mollified.
Nurture, schmurture, I thought. Hold the textile metaphors. I went through the motions, harboring the seed of future apostasy in the form of an unspoken and unspeakable conviction: I don’t owe women shit.
NINE
Questions of Travel
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
—Elizabeth Bishop
THE FIRST YEARS of the Reagan era left me both drained and restless. I moved through the treacherous spaces of my women’s community clad in cynicism like a bulletproof vest. I loved too soberly, wrapped up in duty. Although you couldn’t say the Cloud had driven Les and me apart—in a way, it had even intensified our closeness—the bond had lost its elastic optimism and now felt more like the stunned accord of castaways. Though we could take comfort in our similar responses to the world of feminist politics, our joint immersion meant that we never got a break from a life drenched in issues. Our sexual problems interfered with another possible source of comfort and pleasure. What energy we had that wasn’t focused on sheer survival—earning a living, parenting a child, coping with depression—went into eminently useful undertakings like Les’s monumental essay. Matthew Arnold himself couldn’t have faulted our high seriousness.
I reacted to the claustrophobia by casting cautiously about me, seeking new spheres of action. In effect, I was trying to travel without going anywhere. On the political front, I slowly got involved with the Central America solidarity movement—basically the “straight left,” though more and more dykes were joining up. At the same time, I increasingly savored the cracks and crevices of everyday life. Anything peripheral, unanalyzed, enticed me: gorgeous language and stolid faces in the subway, a saunter through an unfamiliar neighborhood where little girls in first communion dresses skittered along the sidewalk like manic peonies, a solitary trip to Shakespeare in the park, the Cuban-Chinese luncheonette on Eighth Avenue where Maud and I met to confess the unfeminist extent of our literary ambitions. I craved a bit of cover from the searchlight of politics.