Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  The visionary historian Jonathan Ned Katz (author of Gay American History and The Invention of Heterosexuality) has recently argued that “a radical leveling of the old homo/hetero distinction” is under way as a logical consequence of the legitimation of same-gender sexual relations. I couldn’t agree with him more on the need for what he calls “a new pleasure system,” but it’s my view that, while sexual identity borders are indeed growing somewhat more porous, they’re unlikely to dissolve any time soon. Instead, they show signs of being reconstituted on a basis that may grudgingly allow for a marginalized “both/and” option even as straight and gay identities are increasingly viewed as mutually exclusive (and mutually reinforcing) versions of the “normal.” Given relentless gay baiting from the right, it is understandable why such a modification appeals to large numbers of same-gender lovers despite its conservative, constricting implications.

  When depressed by this prospect, however, I have only to frame the issues in a somewhat different way to feel a burst of optimism. North America is on the verge of being rocked by a groundswell of interest in experiences that transcend, subvert, or defy either/or expectations embedded in received categories of race, nation, and culture, as well as gender and sexuality. Just one index of the phenomenon is literary: a flood of memoirs about biraciality and multiracial families; works about transborder experiences of exile and immigration; fiction and theory from postcolonial perspectives; critical reflections on whiteness; and books by writers like Eva Hoffman and Ariel Dorfman who explore bilingualism as a window on the self’s multiplicity.

  The questions raised by such work intersect with the contestations of queers, bisexuals, transgendered people, and others who, like Katz, favor a new pleasure system, or who claim a link to traditional sex/gender systems that simply don’t translate into either/or terms (for instance, those Native Americans who call themselves Two Spirit People). Often the intersection is explicit, as in the writings of the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work explores what the title of one of her books designates Borderlands/La Frontera, an image encompassing same-gender eroticism, bilingualism, and the U.S.-Mexican border as connected sites of cultural and political resistance. Writing like this catalyzes, while it also reflects, significant shifts in the way large numbers of us are living and imagining our lives. I believe it signals a powerful if nameless cultural movement: an identity politics for a really new millennium.

  Beyond identity categories, we all face the puzzle of how best to foster justice in a complicated world in which “shared oppression” is less than ever a simple mechanical binding force. The unity required for effective social action always exists as an achievement in time, tenuous and precious—a leap-stagger-crawl-wobble-cartwheel-pirouette across the Gulf of Loneliness, the indelible uniqueness that divides each “I” from others.

  I at first experienced my own namelessness, my floating-woman status, primarily as absence, in the form I’ve referred to here as identity loss. For not only had my leftish version of lesbian feminism supplied a seemingly unbeatable solution to my problem being a woman, not only had it provided a powerful, supple language in which to articulate my criticisms of a world that imposed unacceptable conditions for belonging, but it had supplied a name for my lifelong inner difference, a sense of being a stranger in the land that couldn’t readily be accounted for in the familiar terms of race or class, ethnicity or religion. Now I was up against the obvious: my story wasn’t really that of the homosexual-as-outcast. My same-gender attractions weren’t the cause of my outsiderhood; indeed, it seemed quite likely that I’d come by the courage to insist on my feelings for women even though I could do men precisely because I already felt so marginal. Now I feared being banished from the company of misfits and consigned to the pastel hell of normalcy deemed appropriate for class- and skin-privileged women who lapsed from deviance.

  Instead, no longer sustained by a tightly woven community, I’ve tapped into a network of serendipitous connection. My companions are the conscious border dwellers, conscientious objectors to an order of things that would divide us from each other, ourselves from our selves. We share a honed awareness of those daily negotiations necessary to inventing less segregated lives, unmaking the architecture of constructed misery.

  So there’s Elise, my dear friend from prelapsarian days, lesbian fiction writer and teacher of English in a mostly Black college. Jewish (she grew up middle-class in Boston with European family roots), she lives now with her English lover (working-class background, Ph.D.) and a biracial daughter they’ve adopted. We sit in her back yard and gossip about old loves and the ins and outs of our quotidian border crossings: our perplexity at the West Indian fondness, shared by her students and Benjamin’s relatives, for telephone guessing games (“hello, good evening, who do you think this is calling?”); how she’ll deal with the two vocal Christian fundamentalists when it’s time to come out to her English honors class; how strangers inflict their racial curiosity on a two-and-a-half-year-old (the bus driver kept badgering her daughter, “Where did you get that curly, curly hair?” until the child replied, “From my head!”).

  There’s Ollie, my pal from the Sister City delegation, whose suggestion that I apply for a job as a writing teacher in the innovative liberal arts college where he works led me fortuitously back into the world of organized learning. That foray has allowed me to revisit, this time as a teacher with a modicum of power, some of the questions about education’s relevance that so vexed me at Reed. Ollie and I and our writing program colleagues constantly discuss the political dynamics that surface in our classrooms and the multiple ways in which student writing bears on issues of identity and power.

  There’s my friend who writes about being the white mother of Black sons. My friend who writes prose in English, poems in Spanish, splicing together gay Manhattan and his native Colombia. My friend who makes intricate, poetic videos about growing up African-Italian-American. My friend who grew up Black and queer in Arkansas, cut his teeth on texts by lesbians of color, and is using Foucault in an analysis of interactions in a gay bar in Bed-Stuy.

  There are my students, full of staccato energy, tenderness and anger and despair and itchy hope. The earnest young poet, an immigrant from Haiti, whose spoken English betrays no trace of a Creole accent, yet who struggles for an elusive fluency in written prose: “When I first came to college, you know, I wanted those big words—I wanted them so bad! But now I realize you’ve got to start from where you are.” The student from New Hampshire who uses my writing assignments to invoke the peer torture so often inflicted on gay boys, and to remember the power of ACT UP’s Ashes Project, a protest in which the cremated remains of people with AIDS were dumped on the White House lawn. The Latina in an otherwise all-white class who reads a beautifully written short story about a Mexican-American waitress and is challenged on the use of two untranslated words of Spanish by a student who insists that they hinder reader comprehension. The white woman whose unsentimental memoir of rural poverty includes her rueful acknowledgment of longing to be one of the “more Advanced Lesbians,” instead of a wishy-washy “bisexual.”

  And then there’s Benjamin, sturdy voyager through the stations of the Caribbean diaspora. His Carriacou childhood of agricultural labor meant that in Patio Grande he distinguished himself as the sole member of our Brooklyn group who could handle a machete; his British colonial education, Virgil and all, now makes him the Latin expert in his Manhattan law office.

  With time, I’ve come to see that being a floating woman suits me. Certainly it seems to me far preferable to making a career of serial identity. My boycott of descriptive language for my sexuality is, I freely acknowledge, a quixotic strategy, one I certainly wouldn’t recommend to those who feel they really are gay or straight or bi, or who don’t mind making do with simple terms even as they acknowledge underlying complexities. (Here’s how one male reader of “My Interesting Condition” explained to me why a gay identity felt perfectly consistent with his history of s
ome acknowledged desire for women: “If the world makes an issue of my cocksucking, so will I and besides, men are the true north on my sexual compass.”) It’s less a utopian gesture, for I don’t pretend to know what erototopia would look like, than a personal protest against an either/or so entrenched that it’s hard to envision what will supersede it.

  The perplexities of living label-less underscore the fact that large areas of social life depend on an expectation that everyone can reliably be slotted into an appropriate sexual category. I’ve had to reevaluate what it means to be “out.” At first I mostly ignored the problem, accepting the common wisdom that sexual self-description is a pressing issue only for those whose current involvements or official identities would otherwise be misinterpreted. (I now think of this as the snapshot approach to erotic biography, the implication being that a glimpse of any moment tells us all we need to know about a person’s past and future.) I’d taken in my critics’ angry message that I was now as good as straight and should behave accordingly.

  Then I began to feel uneasy about the assumptions straight people made about me because my partner was a man. I began to resent the de facto closeting that resulted from my minimalist approach to discussing my personal life with coworkers, students, and others I met who knew little of my background; in my horror of those assumptions, I avoided mentioning Benjamin, preferring to leave my private life blank, as gay people often feel constrained to do. This issue of how to present myself, what to emphasize or occlude, remains a persistent problem for me, as indeed it is for so many whose life circumstances challenge stereotypical expectations (the members of a multiracial family, the very light-skinned person of African descent, the transsexual). It’s as though I’m accompanied by a shadowy double, the person (dyke or straight) I think I’m being imagined as. I’m calculating how to deal with misperceptions, whether to debunk, ignore, or encourage them. Very often I feel I’m passing. I don’t always know for what.

  In the company of lesbians and gay men, I try to come off as “socially gay”—comfortable in gay surroundings, attuned to gay issues, fluent in gay lingo. And it’s not that I’m pretending—I am all these things—but without the backup of a solid identity, I’m extra aware of the need to give a credible performance. I do a fair amount of socializing on my own in lesbian and gay circles, in part because Benjamin tends to be ill at ease with groups of people, but also because it just feels easier to keep the worlds separate.

  When my worlds collide, a thing like this can happen: in the spring of 1995, I accepted an invitation from a student friend to join a group of people mobilized by ACT UP in protesting cuts to New York City’s health care budget. The plan was for a civil disobedience action that would block the Queens Midtown Tunnel at rush hour. At my suggestion, Benjamin volunteered legal help. Arriving late to the planning meeting, he caused a little flap, as several activists scurried around the room with news that a cop might have just walked in the door. It was true enough that his was a stranger’s face, and that, plotting illegal doings, they had reason to be cautious, but I wondered later if he would have been singled out had he been an unfamiliar white kid in ragged jeans and body piercing, instead of his dark-skinned, neatly dressed, fiftyish self. There might have been sixty or seventy people in that room, and only four were visibly Black; I feared the incident reflected racist “othering,” as well as clashing styles of sexual self-presentation.

  At the opposite extreme, the life of a floating woman takes in staid hetero gatherings such as the potluck dinners organized by the residents of Benjamin’s and my famously integrated, slightly stuffy, heart-of-Caribbean-Brooklyn community, a tiny island of middle-class property owners in a poorer, heavily immigrant neighborhood. So important, evidently, is the illusion of uniform mores (already somewhat disturbed by our interracial presence on a block where most families are neatly Black or White) that some of our neighbors speak of me as “Mrs.” or casually refer to Benjamin as my husband. I do not correct them, not wanting to rock the boat (what would I say? how on earth could I convey the importance to me of not being legally married?), but I always wince, thinking, What if dykes could see me now?

  That thought returned in force at my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, an extravaganza they planned years ahead of time, wanting to ensure that not only their three daughters but each of our partners would be present. There we sat, pouring champagne: my mother and father, my two sisters and their husbands, Benjamin and I, plus my youngest sister’s son. Though not quite keen enough on reproducing ourselves, we formed in other respects a picture of spotless family values (liberal ones, of course, given the token integration). And while sure that a woman partner of mine would have been accepted there, I also believed that the Noah’s Ark symmetry was gratefully, if unconsciously, noted by most of those present as an enhancement of the occasion. Had I shown up with a woman, I’d have reminded everyone that heterosexual pairing is not a universal desideratum, and that would have been a discomfiting reminder.

  For just as my parents’ wedding album once conveyed to me not merely a notion of something private they’d done but an impression of a clearly all-important institution, so now we were in effect celebrating not only their marriage, but hetero coupling generally (and lifelong monogamy to boot!). This is part of the point of major social rituals: they are not simply individual acts but partake of and reinforce some very large assumptions about how the world is put together. I wished there had been a chance to honor my parents’ love and its contribution to their children’s lives without symbolically exalting their way over all others, but that didn’t seem to be an option. No longer quite the Bartleby I was in days of yore, I played my part in the heteronormative pageant.

  Tugging against my unease at the world’s eagerness to assimilate my mode of loving to its model of matrimony is the temptation to accept almost any acknowledgment that Benjamin and I belong together. Though some of my insecurity has faded with time, I’m still sensitive to the many negative assumptions that might be made about us as an interracial couple. Many years ago in Grenada, he tells me, people used to say that a man who moved to England and married a white woman must have plucked her from the gutter. His own relatives have welcomed me, allaying many of my fears, but I’m not sure I was wrong to have been careful. My being white seemed difference enough. Could I blame anyone who might have had the thought: She wasn’t supposed to be looking at men in the first place. Did she have to pick a Black one?

  Of course I puzzle over the luck of this selection, the impulsive rightness of it, on both my part and Benjamin’s, when by external measures we ought not to fit. Being happy, I’ve sometimes wished we could have met when we were younger, only to realize that we probably got together at the earliest moment when the relationship could have worked.

  Not until middle age did the factors that connect us work their way, as it were, to the surface of our lives. Young, we were occupied in sorting out the implications of precisely those circumstances that make us seem an unlikely pair, and we would have been no help to each other in that process. I can’t imagine that I would have been favorably impressed by Benjamin’s youthful, exuberant heteromasculinity, nor would my North American naiveté have been an asset as he pondered his relationship to a postcolonial homeland.

  Given my deep suspicion of traditional straight roles, it was crucial that I bring to this relationship a fully adult sense of my vocation as a writer and my identity as a political progressive. I believe, in fact, that my shakiness in these areas undermined my relationship with Les; with a male partner, things could only have been worse. Now I feel I’m on my own in a way I never was before. I like the fact that Benjamin and I have completely separate professions. I experience no temptation to look up to him, insecure and self-critical. We meet on the level.

  By the time we got together, I’d long ago ceased to think of dealing with race as the optional pursuit so many whites consider it to be. Largely thanks to my immersion in antiracist lesbian circles, I�
��d learned that, much in the way I’d done with gender, I could modify not the fact but the meaning of my whiteness. I’d gotten past lamenting the sorry history attached to my skin color and developed a personal stake in transforming the racial order of things. Thus the issues facing an interracial couple came as no big surprise to me. Further, my years in a lesbian family had accustomed me to societal disapproval of my chosen forms of intimacy, so it felt familiar to anticipate occasional hostility and pervasive incomprehension. (In fact, when it comes to negotiating everyday life, I’ve found it easier to be he-she but interracial, though I realize that impression is a function of context. I’m especially chary of travel to rural areas that are either mostly white or historically segregated.)