by Jan Clausen
Such scenes encouraged a kind of mental rambling, an openness to memory and stray association, that I experience as quintessentially erotic, whether or not it connects to clearly sexual fantasies. That this state is also the wellspring of art and poetry—and that I’m supposed to be a writer—hasn’t spared me lifelong doubts about how far to cultivate it, and at the time I speak of now, that chronic conflict grew acute. The idle, the useless, the flagrantly aesthetic, plainly contradicted the imperative of selfless public service that I breathed in with the political air around me. But the local mores affected me so strongly precisely because I received them as reinforcements of values taken in along with my Gerber’s baby food. Hadn’t I learned early on that pleasure is dangerous, that leisure must always be earned and justified, and that the good woman devotes herself to others?
How convenient, then, that a job I stumbled into in a sort of electronic sweatshop provided one of my more dependable modes of access to the realm of chance associations, waking dreams. The business, Enoch Rivers, was a tape transcription agency that employed a floating workforce of eccentrics—neobohemians, actors, borderline psychotics—who liked the flexible hours and informal atmosphere. I worked there off and on for seven years, starting in 1983. Sitting in front of the orange computer screen immersed in the language that poured through my Dictaphone headset—a surreal medley of TV interviews, financial industry training videos, medical jargon, even scratchy conversations recorded from phone wiretaps—I escaped from coherence and purpose for many hours each week with the excellent excuse that I had to make money.
At the transcription job and elsewhere, my restlessness also surfaced as the intensification of a tendency that had been apparent even before the Cloud: I kept falling inconveniently in love with women who hailed from worlds fascinatingly remote from my literary corner of dykedom. Questions of travel came up every time, even when the geography looked tame enough. To get to Enoch Rivers, I took the F train to mid-Manhattan, hurried through the dirty underground tunnel whose function as an impromptu homeless shelter gave it a bleak carnival aura, surfaced at the north side of Forty-second Street, grabbed a takeout coffee from the Greek coffee shop opposite the Grace Building, with its dramatic concave facade, and dodged into a far less glamorous brick structure. There, on an upper floor, I whiled away my afternoons courting eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and lusting after Luz Sosa’s tender butch bravado, her tales of life and love in East New York.
If Les and I couldn’t seem to make love very often; if in consequence I felt resentful when we did; if I felt too crowded by our public domesticity, our exhaustive sharing of texts and controversies, and yet walled off from her, from delight we’d known at one time—well, at least I could make up stories, I could masturbate, I could savor the aesthetic agony of desire admitted but not enacted. On the grounds that imagination is the molten core of sex, I erroneously reasoned that I might manage my discontent by staying home and thinking hard of elsewhere.
This surge in my ambivalent interest in travels in desire coincided with, and was reinforced by, the emergence of a new kind of feminist conversation about the erotic. Popularly known as the Feminist Sex Wars, the debate-cum-brawl had a positive side that I can better appreciate because, for once, I wasn’t smack in the middle of the hostilities. When the antiporn versus anticensorship arguments had died down, when dildos and leather and rococo undergarments were no longer causing screams of outrage, when women who passed for men had broken silences, what stood out to me as the main accomplishment of the controversy was its airing of a series of thoughtful arguments in favor of trusting sexual feelings, respecting their diversity, and stressing women as erotic protagonists, not victims.
While the common portrayal of lesbian feminism as antisex is unfair and inaccurate, it’s true that before the Sex Wars the movement had largely avoided anything that would identify it as being about sex. Between women, it was felt, the erotic would take care of itself. The parties being gender equals, power shouldn’t be a problem. Lesbian sex was frequently depicted as profoundly “natural”—for many, an echo and elaboration of the supposed paradise of mother-infant bonding. Adrienne Rich’s extremely influential essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which took an explicitly maternalist view of female sexuality, had contrasted gay male promiscuity, depicted as an obsessive quest for empty pleasure, with lesbians’ focus on loving relationships. Even Audre Lorde’s quite daring “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” was carefully vague about bodies.
Despite this view of the flesh as epiphenomenal, we wanted sex to do a lot of work. We’d hitched our eros to our ideology, a move equivalent to asking a dragonfly to pull a plow.
Now a bunch of women were talking heat—and dirt. Among the first exchanges in the Sex Wars were volleys fired by women in Les’s and my friendship circle. Several of them were involved in S/M, and now became more vocal about it. (I quickly learned to stop saying “S and M,” phrasing that branded the speaker as hopelessly “vanilla.”) Aimee began writing some pretty brave stuff about the implications of being a butch identified Chicana. Because this discussion was, among other things, the outgrowth of a working-class lesbians’ revolt against the gentility of middle-class “wimmin’s culture,” it often usefully emphasized how desire is shaped by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
Butch/femme, which had been seen as embarrassingly old-fashioned when it wasn’t portrayed as an echo of straight misogyny, now made a comeback as lesbians openly acknowledged the relevance of erotic role-playing to modern feminists. “Incorrect” fantasies, sex work, arousal by pain and violence, sex for sex’s sake, anonymous encounters, sleeping around, the attractions of lesbian pornography (and the attraction of some lesbians to nonlesbian porn)—all of these hitherto taboo topics now came up for debate. We were facing the implications of desires that couldn’t be cut to fit our politics. Being dykes didn’t mean that we floated above gender, or that masculinity as both ideal and terror had been effectively excised from our psyches and our bedrooms. Our communities of origin, with their peculiar and specific erotic associations to images of seduction, ravishment, purity, ecstasy, excrement, and sin, were part of us, inevitably reflected in our purportedly pristine feminist sexuality.
The point was not that sex should be exempt from all political critique (though some “sexperts” did eventually engage in a line of argument that boiled down to “whatever’s hot is right”). But we had to start from desire and its unsettling revelations, to affirm “the erotic as power” and resist the fearful counsel that would crack down on emotions whenever they exceeded the bounds our logic proposed as suitable.
Les and I were, of course, vanilla—not exciting like our friends who kept whips on their bedside tables. I felt very much on the sidelines of the sex talk, yet was paying close attention to the message that even though our desires had been forged in the crucible of capitalist, imperialist patriarchy, and were therefore saturated in social nastiness, it was okay to have them. In fact, it was partly because we took so seriously the task of transforming social relations that we needed to be open to all reality, psychic reality included.
Here the decadent tendencies of identity politics—its metamorphosis into a quest for innocent power—received a timely corrective. The “sexperts” were saying that we are mixed, contingent beings. Human betterment is not a science of subtraction. What we want is freedom and justice, not ritual purity.
If they were right, perhaps my wanderlust might not be indefensible after all.
I tended to fall in love in novel, dramatic situations; incarceration, revolution, and violence appeared, to my chagrin—well, if not to turn me on exactly, at least to put me in the mood. It happened in 1979 with my antinuke arrest and in the following year during my stint at Alderson. In 1984, on my first trip to Nicaragua, I developed a painful crush on a North American academic. I was embarrassed by what I came to recognize as a pattern of “desire under pressure” both because it seemed
so distant from my everyday existence (a.k.a. reality) and because I thought it reflected badly on my political seriousness. I was supposed to be a principled leftist, after all, not a pleasure-seeking tourist or teenybopper. I thought it had to be a problem that otherness and elsewhere (so often “more oppressed”) appealed to the writer in me. When I fell in love with a person, a place, an atmosphere, I also fell in love with stories, I fell in love with language. But the politics of identity in which I’d been saturated admonished the writer to “tell her own story”; telling anyone else’s risked exoticizing, objectifying.
My visits to prison and war plunged me into scenes of stark, riveting drama; they ripped away the veils from social forces and engaged my imagination, both poetic and sensual. But the plunge was brief and included all sorts of safeguards. Wasn’t there something unclean in my excitement?
Because Les and I had naively agreed not to have emotional secrets from each other, I felt obliged to tell her about my crushes, giving rise to melodramatic interludes, periods of tension, explosions and silences, followed at length by a cynical convalescence. She tended to treat my confessions as evidence of some alarming but hopefully transient derangement. She, it appeared, never had a serious thought of having sex with anyone but me. I wanted an erotic separation; only thus could I feel truly met when we came together. I wanted to know she was with me because of something lively between us, something supple and risky, that might have been otherwise. That something might have thrived on elbow room, but we always seemed to be, as the saying goes, “all up in each other’s faces.”
She had her own ways of making me feel shut out (for one, we now routinely slept apart on account of her insomnia), but they had nothing to do with wandering libido. She’d say, “I’m monotonous,” the complacent-rueful phrase we used. It was true, and it didn’t make me feel especially cherished. Of course I wanted to think she wouldn’t throw me over, but not because she simply hadn’t noticed other options. The truth was that a lover’s plural inclinations, however upsetting, had always energized me. Hurt, she’d rib me: “Of course some floozy is more exciting than your monotonous, faithful one.” She made me out to be a mere sensation-seeker, avid for the spice of novelty.
Increasingly she shut down, for weeks or even months. What happened to her gorgeous openness, her gift for a sensual intensity that used to make me feel both virtuosic—to be the instigator of this storm of pleasure—and boringly average in my orgasmic moderation? Where did that lushness go when she grew preoccupied; morose; obsessed, in the wake of the Cloud, with textual treachery? (We joked that her perfectionist approach to argumentation would have done a Talmudic scholar proud.) To her, our sex was settled—not perfect, obviously, but she didn’t seem to think there was any cause for panic. I felt deprived but ashamed to make a fuss. I was panicking in slow motion, trying to hold a tricky balance, to cultivate an eros of my own without upsetting the applecart. My parenting of Emma, my literary life, my lesbian identity itself, all meshed so intricately with our coupledness that it seemed any move that destabilized my marriage might topple my entire world.
Despite the brave new feminist affirmations of desire, I felt that “two-timing” Les, as we called it, would be a terribly serious, possibly fatal, step. Not that I ever imagined she’d break up with me simply because I slept with another woman. That wasn’t the way it worked in our world. (How it worked was usually that partners agreed in theory that expectations of strict monogamy were unrealistic, though when it came to practice, things could get much dicier.) But I couldn’t shake the awareness of how upset she’d be, couldn’t picture actually conducting an affair—which would have to take place with her angry, hurt knowledge—as anything but a calamity for us both.
Perhaps this was the reason why the women I fancied weren’t very likely lover candidates. Yet I eventually came to feel that my attractions were as destructive as if I’d gotten further with them. I gave Les a lot to put up with, and my guilt made it worse. There seemed something corrupt in my use of these virtual affairs to dramatize disaffection, erotic and otherwise, that I couldn’t make up my mind either to relinquish or insist on.
Betty, my fave rave from the nuclear power plant protest, was a veteran of fifties bar dyke culture. Although an anarchist, she was patient and sensible, a welcome brake on the urge to martyrdom that sometimes sweeps like a flu virus through civil disobedience actions. She and I were arrested together warbling her favorite protest song, “Give Me That Old Lesbianism” (sung to the tune of “Old Time Religion”). She was boyishly motherly, with short gray hair and a rabbity grin. What I felt for her was simply a pleasurable glow, a thrill at the sight of her clenched fists in handcuffs, a subtle inclination of my cells toward the taut stretch of her body in the sun as we strolled around downtown Buchanan, a sleepy Hudson River town where we spent days in court disposing of misdemeanor charges and supporting our fellow demonstrators.
My crush on Dee was more serious, and shameful: she wasn’t one of our group of amateur outlaws that blew through Alderson Penitentiary in the weeks around Thanksgiving 1980, but a real prisoner. She was in her late thirties, had been locked up for many years. She had first been convicted for attempted robbery, but had later escaped and assaulted a guard in the process. She had more state time to do when the Feds got done with her.
She was tall and blond, neat in jeans and tailored shirts. She looked like a returning college student, a status to which she aspired. She had a job drawing blood in the prison clinic. She was openly gay but not political. She hung with the white, quasi-middle-class convicts—a leftist radical whose husband was doing life in Marion, some Charles Manson acolytes. I was fascinated by the hints she dropped on the comparative sociology of correctional institutions. She’d liked the cons who went by the old code: you had to toe their line, but at least you knew where you stood with them. She’d been at some coed facilities. The advantage there was knowing that when you had a girlfriend, she wasn’t with you just for lack of men.
I could see that the penal system wasn’t glamorous, that its purpose and effect were to kill the mind and spirit. But looking into it thrilled me, like watching surgery, seeing the layers of muscle pulled away, the inner workings and connections. Dee would say, “She dropped a dime,” or “Somebody caught them homosecting.” I wrote it down, but what could I do with it?
The strength of my longing for her caught me by surprise. I was getting out, she wasn’t, I couldn’t say a word to her. Back home, I told Les, who took it pretty well, I thought. Dee and I corresponded for many years after that, though my romantic feeling faded early on, killed off by the religious homilies and self-help jargon that flowed freely when she set pen to paper.
My participation in the international movement to support popular efforts for sweeping social change in Central America built on and expanded old political involvements. Like the Women’s Pentagon Action, it was a forum for opposition to my country’s penchant for mass murder in the name of democracy. The militaristic system that had shadowed my childhood with nuclear terror and had jolted my generation’s political conscience during the war in Southeast Asia now fomented so-called low-intensity conflict in tiny countries whose populations rejected authoritarian rule and chronic hunger. The urgent situation called on activists to address precisely the social-structural roots of injustice that had gotten short shrift from those radical and lesbian feminists who’d discarded the baby of political economy with the bathwater of the sexist and heterosexist male left.
This was the heyday of Salvadoran death squads, largely composed of moonlighting members of the regular government security forces who kidnapped, tortured, and “disappeared” civilians, then dumped their mutilated bodies in residential neighborhoods. It was also the heyday of U.S. aid to the Salvadoran military. As Salvadoran soldiers trained at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, Ronald Reagan solemnly certified to Congress that El Salvador was improving its human rights record, thereby triggering a Pavlovian response: the release of more millions t
o defeat guerrilla forces portrayed as Soviet surrogates. It was the heyday of hidden airstrips and illicit arms deals, of a U.S. administration’s sweeping disregard for law in its zeal to fund a Nicaraguan counterrevolution.
I took note of the fact that U.S.-based radical women of color related their local struggles to self-determination in the Third World. Aimee and some of her New York Latina friends immersed themselves in Latin American culture and politics. Audre Lorde, whose mother was from Grenada, wrote an essay denouncing the 1983 U.S. invasion that capped the tragic implosion of the only leftist revolutionary government in the English-speaking Caribbean. And the Central American conflicts themselves emphasized gender politics in ways that increasing numbers of North American feminists were beginning to pick up on. I hoped that Central America work would allow me to bring together the best of identity politics, opposition to bullying U.S. military might, and hands-on involvement in progressive social restructuring.
Real as these high-minded motives were, I was also again responding to the restless longing for a change of scene that brought questions of travel to the fore of my erotic life. It’s hard to explain, in an age of careless tourism, how defensive I felt about wanting to see the world. Some of it had to do with the landlocked mentality of my rearing, in which foreign travel, or even speaking a second language, seemed like a pursuit for fancy people from back east. (I finally applied for my first passport at age thirty-four.) This provincialism was reinforced by my puritan political surroundings. Most dykes I knew rated traveling for pleasure as at best a frivolous habit, at worst an exploitative one.