Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  I was unprepared for identity loss. Unlike my gradual, almost leisurely transition to loving women, my exit from dykedom was a rout, disorderly and graceless. In the midst of two divorces, I had precious little chance to distinguish between my feelings about separating from the women’s community and my guilt and sadness about leaving Leslie. My own bewildered reactions to being involved with a man tended to get confused with others’ negative judgments. As a lesbian writer, I had publicized my sex life, purposely questioning boundaries between personal choices and group objectives. Now I was stuck with having those choices treated as community property.

  Not that reactions were uniformly hostile; my closest lesbian friends behaved like friends, prioritizing me above political symbolism, while many in the larger lesbian community reacted with generous reassurance, or simply didn’t care. But I could never count on kindness, much less approval, nor predict when I’d be ambushed by accusations of betrayal. I found myself on perpetual red alert, braced for attacks from my erstwhile home base. The syndrome was all too familiar from the Cloud, and though I liked to think of myself as strong at the broken places, my new notoriety inevitably evoked acrid memories of a previous rush to judgment.

  It did not occur to me to hold on to lesbianism via the obvious route of insisting on the label. I thought, in fact, that I was who I used to be—I certainly felt like the same person—but I did not deign to beg, to make myself ridiculous. Besides, I needed time to get my bearings. “I don’t want to take a position on my body before I’m sure what position my body’s in,” I quipped. But it was hard to keep quiet and simply watch my own behavior when I was always under pressure to explain, to put words to interactions and feelings for which there is no ready-made language.

  I was struck by how often lesbians inquired what I planned to call myself, almost as though the absence of a name for my condition were more upsetting than my actual behavior. Evidently stigma inhered in my floating status. Perhaps, I thought, I was something like the kiki, the neither butch nor femme lesbian looked down on within the rigidly role-identified bar culture of the fifties. I myself retained many vestiges of my old, dualistic frame of reference; I remember, for instance, discussing with my good friend and former magazine coeditor Leba the possible implications of sleeping with a man over various lengths of time. While it seemed unlikely that sex with Benjamin had instantly turned me into someone radically different from who I’d been when I was Les’s lover, what would happen if he and I stayed together? How many months or years would it take to change me into that alien life form, a heterosexual woman?

  I kept being embarrassed by people who hadn’t heard of my disgrace and expected me to function as a normal lesbian. Was I then obliged to come out in reverse? Though it seemed an unfair burden, I usually opted for full disclosure. Just as I’d once feared that real dykes would accuse me of exploitative behavior if I acted on my attractions to women without first renouncing men, so I now dreaded being charged with hypocrisy if I didn’t wear dishonor on my sleeve.

  Yet it wasn’t so easy to represent myself in a way that felt accurate. When my old flame Marge Bannerman solicited work from me for a new anthology (reflective of a new atmosphere of cross-gender cooperation, this one would include both gay male and lesbian poetry), I carefully explained my delicate situation to her. Not only was she not at all shocked, but she said that she still regarded the poem she had in mind as a lesbian poem. I agreed that it was and said I’d be honored to have her reprint it—and soon was harshly reproved by a self-appointed member of the identity police who thought I’d forfeited my rights to any further association with dyke culture.

  I knew full well how the binary schematism of the sexual and gender politics I myself had long pursued supported that conclusion. In that view of things, I was now a de facto het, drenched in privilege galore, happily ensconced in a world made for me, where every aspect of the culture from opera to advertising ceaselessly endorsed—nay, promoted—my “lifestyle.” I didn’t need lesbians; I had everybody else.

  How else could I fathom the logic involved when Shirley and Mariah both cut me off without a word of explanation? While they’d been closer to Les than to me, I’d always considered that I had an independent relationship with each of them and couldn’t imagine that they’d decided to ostracize me simply because I’d broken up with her. They were treating me like an enemy, an other, someone who had ceased to merit the same consideration as would a lesbian, a comrade.

  My loyal lesbian friends clued me in on some pretty unpleasant gossip, evidence that a lot of women loving women expected me to know my place, go back to hethood quietly. Yet I felt profoundly placeless, my outlook and concerns far less comprehensible to most of the heterosexuals with whom I interacted than to even those lesbians who were most critical of me. When I answered questions about the nature of my writing, challenged heterosexist thinking, or spoke of Emma as my daughter and then needed to clarify the nature of the nonbiological connection—in short, when I revealed almost anything of myself—straights immediately saw me as a dyke. Then I’d have to decide whether to explain I had a male lover, in which case I’d feel doubly exposed. (For if masculinist thinking has positioned lesbianism as a sort of running sexual-moron joke—what a hoot that any woman should remain indifferent to the obvious attractions of the phallus!—then how much more hilarious is her eventual recognition that she can’t, after all, live without the blasted thing.)

  With straight and queer alike, I now discovered, I was going to be repeatedly misperceived unless I divulged intimate details of my sexual history, details of a sort that members of the former group are almost never required to furnish to mere acquaintances and that even the latter can generally reduce to a dignified formula (I’m gay). I found myself recalling a patriotic tale I’d been forced to read in school. In Edward Everett Hale’s The Man Without a Country, Philip Nolan is punished for expressing a laudable if impolitic sentiment (“Damn the United States—I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”) with exile to the high seas where he is forever deprived of news of his native land. I felt like Philip, always between ports. If in some sense I’d chosen the life of a floating woman—if I’d proven, in the end, not much more loyal a citizen of Lesbian Nation than of my local nation-state—still I did not think my choice merited my expulsion from all familiar territory.

  Early in 1989, now thoroughly familiar with the peculiar symptoms of identity loss, I decided to write an essay using my own recent history as a point of departure for raising certain questions about the politics of desire. In a way, it was just another chapter of the project I’d been engaged in for many years: exploring how the personal is political. But “My Interesting Condition,” as I called the piece, would also conveniently announce my new status to the lesbian reading public, thereby cutting down on the frequency with which I’d have to break the news in person, a chore that seemed to recur with irksome regularity although it was now well over a year since I’d ended things with Leslie. I liked the idea of making a resolute gesture, of insisting, in writing, not only on being who I was, but on trying to understand it.

  I knew I was breaking precedent by talking publicly, and in a queer context, about experiences that challenged the fixed boundaries (more accurately, the rule of one-way-only border crossing) at the heart of lesbian feminist ideology. But I did not foresee the bitter indignation that would greet my rejection of what amounted to a woman-identified closet: the pervasive, embarrassed silence about lesbians’ “straight” attractions, attractions that were, I was discovering, far more common than I’d supposed. As soon as word about my relationship with Benjamin began to get around, I started hearing from women in parallel situations, including some who’d recently slept with men but still identified as dykes. Apparently ours had become the latest edition of the love that dare not speak its name.

  “My Interesting Condition” was published in 1990 in OUT/LOOK magazine with the provocative tag “When Lesbians Fall for Men.” The editors
highlighted its shock value by running as cover art a cheeky graphic depicting a woman’s upper body. She’s wearing denim with a plunging neckline; a glimpse of cleavage forms the backdrop to a hovering winged Cupid who aims his fatal dart—a male circle-and-arrow symbol—at the DYKE button pinned to her left breast. Because OUT/LOOK, now defunct, was then the premier U.S. lesbian and gay quarterly, the publication effectively made my announcement to a national audience. The negative reaction was swift and powerful, like the recoil from an automatic rifle.

  But what blew me away wasn’t just the negativity but the mix of reactions, including highly positive ones. More than any piece of writing I’ve sent out into the world, “My Interesting Condition” functioned like a Rorschach test. I sometimes had trouble believing that the selfsame sentences and paragraphs could arouse such wildly disparate reactions.

  I reaped the whirlwind of indignation in slow motion, at first primarily through letters to the editor that OUT/LOOK forwarded to me before publishing a sample. Many were of the “cancel my subscription” genre. One woman maintained that I might rationalize until I was “blue in the cunt” without producing anything more than a “vaginal veil” for my “failures as a woman-identified woman.” Another protested that she did not want to open a gay and lesbian publication only to “read about how wonderful heterosexual fucking is.”

  Infuriated readers like these didn’t bother to address a range of issues I’d raised, among them my conjecture that controversies over dykes who sleep with men mask a deeply threatening, seldom discussed divide “between women who can ‘pass’ and those who can’t, between women who love women but appear less threatening to the straight world and women who . . . fit the stereotype of the butch lesbian and are brutally punished for it.” But the circle of my critics extended considerably beyond those women who went ballistic at the “sex with a man” issue. A few months after the essay came out, I was stunned by an encounter with a writer I’d been friendly with for years, someone I’d always seen as being on the side of erotic diversity. She berated me for my frankness about the problems I’d experienced with lesbian community life, implying that by being less than totally positive, I’d unilaterally wrecked the chances for dykes to engage in a needed discussion about their attractions to men.

  I heard secondhand of the negative rumblings from around the country. “People were yanking your books off syllabi right and left,” said a feminist I met recently, recalling ancient outrage in San Diego. It’s a most peculiar feeling, when you’re not even famous, to know that perfect strangers will have heard you called a traitor. Scandal, I’ve noticed, tends to decay in half-lives, and this one, which at the moment of detonation seemed appreciably less toxic than the Cloud, certainly has more staying power.

  While the angriest critics of “My Interesting Condition” apparently saw it as a frontal assault on dykedom, the many women who called or wrote to thank me, most of whom had lived the conflicts it described, seemed to read it as a tribute. They responded viscerally to my descriptions of fear, guilt, and self-blame; they, too, mourned an identity and community they deemed irreplaceable. “I’m going through, almost verbatim, a lot of what you’re going through. . . . [Your article] has put me more in touch with my sadness, isolation, loss, and pride.” “I have never felt so alone. This is so much more difficult than ‘coming out’ as a lesbian was for me. There isn’t even a name for this process.” “I realize that I still believe being a lesbian is superior to being straight. Until I let go of that one, I’m rather doomed . . . I long for and ache for the (lesbian) community.”

  Today I’m struck by the way in which such disparate reactions suggest, underneath their surface opposition, a similar loneliness and fear of abandonment. One of the angriest letter writers suspends her raging long enough to observe poignantly: “Lesbianism is not taken seriously in this world. It is invisible, it’s treated as a joke, a titillation, an act in 3-ring circus talk shows or a way to taint a woman who gets out of line.” She and my supporters both fear that their sexual choices will leave them fatally isolated. While conflict raged, however, I was hardly above the fray. It stung me to see my arguments caricatured, to be portrayed as a stock character in a crude drama of heroines and sellouts.

  Now I can see that divorce is, indeed, the continuation of family by other means. The quarrel located me deep in lesbian space even as it focused on the effort to expel me. Even in 1990 I could dimly perceive that the Sturm und Drang had to do not so much with the actual contours of my story as with the way in which its broad outlines evoked the familiar tale of uneven competition between a “real” lesbian and a heterosexual man for the allegiance of an indecisive, erotically impressionable female (read: a “real” woman). The classic version of this drama, perhaps the central trope whereby the modern West has imagined lesbianism, unfolds as an exercise in phallic vindication: the person with the penis gets the girl. (And not always for the reason one might think: in Colette’s Le Pur et l’impur, a dizzy femme named Loulou returns to her husband not for the sex but out of humiliation that her woman lover “can’t do pipi against a wall.”) Over and above the real-world pressures of “compulsory heterosexuality,” it is largely thanks to the power of this plot that the figure of the bisexual traitor has acquired, within lesbian culture itself, such a strong symbolic valence. That single, simple image stands for a myriad of ways in which the social world is stacked against women who love women.

  It wasn’t merely that I’d transgressed the party line; in sleeping with a man and then writing about it, I’d morphed into the tender villain of the classic lesbian nightmare. I was Verena Tarrant bailing out of her Boston marriage with the feminist Olive Chancellor to marry Basil Ransom in Henry James’s The Bostonians, deemed by the lesbian critic Terry Castle “the first and perhaps the most haunting ‘lesbian tragedy’ in modern English and American literature.” I was Nellie March in D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox, marrying the man who’d felled a tree on top of her lover Jill Banford. In Radclyffe Hall’s much scorned yet eternally influential The Well of Loneliness, I was shallow Angela Crossby, the blue-eyed vamp who taunts mannish lesbian Stephen Gordon with the infinitely cruel, “Could you marry me, Stephen?” then betrays her to sate a coarse physical passion for a real man, Roger Antrim.

  Though one might expect old tropes to wither away in an era in which it has become commonplace for women to leave men for other women, my experience reveals that “leaving a woman for a man” is still the lesbian equivalent of mortal sin. Like the anger some Black women feel about sex between white women and African-American men, the rage this archetypal trespass against dykedom provokes is first and foremost a protest against social inequality rather than a response to individual behavior, the particulars of which may seem irrelevant in light of symbolic injury.

  I know, of course, that the heterosexist order is the big enemy. If women’s passions for other women were taken seriously and made to feel at home everywhere, then presumably nobody would have much interest in outing or ostracizing dykes who sleep with men. Yet that is no justification for policing identity, a tactic that ultimately recoils on the very groups in whose name it is implemented. If I have to falsify my experience in order to fight beside you—if, in effect, I have to pretend that I’m queer in precisely the same way as you or be viewed as some sort of half-caste hanger-on; if I can’t feel that it’s my battle, too—then how can I wholeheartedly fight the good fight? Sexual minorities unwilling to acknowledge the fact that many people are neither gay nor straight encourage the liminal to falsify their lives for the sake of fitting in. Queer nations that deport “disloyal” citizens cut off their noses to spite their faces.

  Recently, a bisexual activist suggested to me that if “My Interesting Condition” were published today, the reception might be quite different. She’s certainly right that over the past few years many women and men have publicly and privately contested the rule of either/or identities. The bisexual movement itself, and the acknowledgment it has won for “b
oth/and” behavior within lesbian and gay groups; the spread of the tendency to identify as “queer,” a term invested with connotations of erotic fluidity; the fact that many unstraight young people seem disinclined to swear erotic fealty to a single gender—all are hopeful signs of old rigidities on the wane.

  Yet I’m not so sure that all’s changed utterly. Repeatedly in the years since my own fall from grace, lesbian communities nationwide have been rocked by dramatic reverse outings. The musician Holly Near roiled the waters by acknowledging her involvement with a man around the time of my OUT/LOOK article. In 1995, the filmmaker Maria Maggenti (The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love) published an essay on “Falling for a Guy” in the Village Voice. More recently, a reverse outing scandal involving JoAnn Loulan, a popular speaker and author of widely read handbooks on lesbian sexuality, was reported in national gay media. Apparently rites of outrage still serve a collective purpose, helping to affirm group membership and delineating the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

  Implicit in the bisexual activist’s comment is the more important question of the status of either/or eroticism in the world at large. For it is this larger context that provides the implicit setting for local practice within specific communities of sexual dissenters, even as those communities strive to innovate. And so long as the dominant assumption remains that there are two and only two basic ways to be sexual, even the lives of those who know better will have to be lived largely in relation to the structures that that assumption has put in place.

  Throughout the nineties, even as bisexual movements and queer politics have contested rigid sexual boundaries, countervailing forces have exerted enormous influence on public perceptions of sexual identity. Fueled by the prestige of contemporary genetic science, the craze for biological explanations of all sorts of human behavior has given a boost to “born that way” theories of erotic attraction. Meanwhile, high-profile campaigns for basic rights for gay men and lesbians have been conducted along lines that reinforce the idea that the human norm is orientation to one gender or the other. This has occurred in part because many gay rights advocates believe in the universality of fixed orientations, but also because they tend to model their efforts on those of U.S. racial and ethnic minorities—groups that have traditionally grounded successful antidiscrimination arguments in their perceived (if fictive) status as stable, biologically distinct populations. Obsessive media coverage of scientists’ efforts to identify possible biological influences on sexuality (commonly reported in oversimplified terms that foster notions of genetic determination not claimed by the researchers themselves); debates on gays in the military; campaigns for the legalization of lesbian and gay marriage; controversies over the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy; and some conservative gay male pundits’ insistence that gays renounce the delights of erotic experimentation have all generated large doses of propaganda for an either/or vision of human sexuality.