BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  However, the affirming lesbian teen novel has begun to flower—not surprising, considering the progress that has been made in lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights. Fictional young lovers still get in trouble when they’re caught having sex; high-school students still scrawl ugly graffiti about suspected sexual practices. But queer YA characters are beginning to doubt themselves less and love each other more. Slowly but surely, we’re reaching a point at which het YA fiction has been for years: Lesbian teens can grab more and more reassurance, advice, and inspiration from the genre. Where and how much? Let’s see …

  Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller (Fawcett Crest Books, 1969)

  Set in 1816 Connecticut and “suggested by the life of” two actual postcolonial women, P & S is a historical novel with a twist.

  JACKET COPY: “Bold, innocent, and strange …that was their love.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS …Head over heels. Butch Sarah meets femme Patience while stocking her woodpile. Before you know it, the two are smooching.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Well, Sarah’s always been conspicuously masculine, and Patience lives in her brother’s house, so people suspect plenty. And it all comes to a head when Patience’s sister-in-law catches them in bed together.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT …Miscommunication and family disapproval at first keep them from leaving their small community together but later force them out. Does that count as punishment? Yes, in that they can’t stay where they are and be accepted; no, in that they’d already hatched plans to leave and start a life together.

  IN THE END …The two women live as wives in peace.

  AND THE SEX? Sensually allusive. “Who can count the times the waves will take her unexpected in the deep of a kiss and throw her teeth against my lip and nick it?”

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Yes, Virginia, there have always been lesbians, even in 1800s New England. But, well, the story doesn’t exactly feel immediate.

  Ruby by Rosa Guy (Laurel-Leaf Books, 1976)

  With its political dialogue and the quasi-teacher/student relationship, Ruby is almost as much about post-civil rights politics as it is about lovers Ruby and Daphne.

  JACKET COPY: “They fill the aching emptiness in each other, learn from each other, love each other, despite the shared knowledge that their happiness will end as abruptly as it began.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … Sudden and weird. Ruby admires Daphne from afar and then shows up at her house unexpectedly one weekend morning. Daphne gives Ruby a political lecture, during which she calls Ruby an Uncle Tom, and then they make out.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Daphne’s mother is fine with it as long as the girls aren’t too open about their love; Ruby’s traditional West Indian father objects strenuously, but no more than he would to a similar relationship with a boy. Ruby’s sister takes it all in stride.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Ruby’s father hits her when he realizes that she deceived him in order to spend a weekend with Daphne. Daphne’s mother forbids Ruby to take shelter in their house.

  IN THE END …Daphne breaks off the affair and says she’s “going straight.” Ruby is reconsidering plans with an old almost-boyfriend. Capitulation to compulsory heterosexuality, or acknowledgment of the fluidity of sexuality? I have to go with the former, given the melancholy tone and Ruby’s still-active feelings for Daphne.

  AND THE SEX? Rare and nonspecific. “Holding, touching, fondling, body intertwined with body, racing around the world on brilliant waves of color” is as explicit as it gets.

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Low. How could it be otherwise when they’re both gonna date men in the end?

  Happy Endings Are All Alike by Sandra Scoppettone (Laurel-Leaf Books, 1978)

  Two smart, beautiful suburban white girls find each other and fall in love.

  JACKET COPY: “Jaret Tyler has no guilt or shame about her love affair with Peggy Danziger … But then a disturbed friend of Jaret’s younger brother … sets out to teach her a lesson.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … They are brought together by a mutual pal and become close friends, then more.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Jaret’s mother is fine with it; Peggy’s sister Claire is emphatically not. The girls are determined that no one else know, because they’re scared, and rightly so, of what residents of their small suburban town would think.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Jaret is brutally raped and beaten by a guy wanting to teach her a lesson about thinking she’s too good to date men.

  IN THE END … Peggy ends the relationship after the rape because she can’t stand the thought of being outed at the trial. However, with the help of a shrink hired by her father—ironically, to help her get over the queer thing—she realizes she’s still in love with Jaret and they reconcile.

  AND THE SEX? Nothing explicit, but it’s clear that they’re having plenty.

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Mixed. Jaret is sure of herself and supported by her family; Peggy, even when the two reconcile at the end, is reluctant to claim a lesbian identity. “I only know that I love you and I want to be with you now,” she says. Unlike in Ruby, however, this does seem to be an acknowledgment of sexuality’s fluidity—perhaps because the young lovers are still together.

  Crush by Jane Futcher (AlyCat Books, 1981)

  In the mid-’60s, at an exclusive boarding school filled with cruel, manipulative upper-class girls, crushes are more than common, but actual lesbian relationships are forbidden.

  JACKET COPY: “Jinx knew she had a serious crush on Lexie, and knew she had to do something to make it go away. But Lexie, who always got her way, had other plans.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … Lexie, the fastest, most glamorous golden girl at Huntington Hill, takes Jinx on as a project, which starts their intense friendship.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Jinx believes she must keep the depth of her feelings for Lexie secret not only from everyone at school but also from Lexie herself. She knows she could be kicked out of school for being queer, and she also senses Lexie’s underlying unreliability.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Both girls end up expelled.

  IN THE END … Jinx is disillusioned about the relationship, while Lexie seems unchanged.

  ‘AND THE SEX? Not quite happenin’. The two kiss and rub up against each other once or twice, but no more.

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Nil. Jinx may survive okay, and even goes to the college of her choice, but there’s really nothing but misery connected to lesbianism here.

  Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982)

  Even though some plot elements are similar to those in Crush, Annie is a fundamentally optimistic story of friendship and romance.

  JACKET COPY: “Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful … and so confusing.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … The two girls meet in a museum and strike up a friendship, which takes them both by surprise with its intensity and slowly becomes romantic.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Nope.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Annie and Liza get caught having sex in the house of two teachers for whom they’ve been house-sitting, and at the same time the lesbianism of the two teachers is uncovered. Liza is suspended from school and almost expelled, and the teachers get fired.

  IN THE END … The two lovers, after one estranged semester away at college, redeclare their love and plan to spend a holiday together.

  AND THE SEX? Cutaway: “A light in the hall … made a wonderful faraway glow and touched Annie’s soft smooth skin with gold. After the first few minutes, I think the rest of our shyness with each other vanished.”

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: An explicit lesson: “Don’t punish yourselves for people’s ignorant reactions to what we all are,” says one of the teachers. “Don’t let ignorance win. Let love.”

  EXTRA-SPECIAL INTERTEXTUAL NOTE: Annie buys a copy of Patience and Sarah for her and Liza to read.

  A Stone Gone Mad by Jacquelyn Holt Park (Alyson Publications, 1991)

  This story spans from 1948 to 1977, which might explain why,
in the first chapter, Emily is exiled from her family after her sister discovers her making out with another girl; it might also explain why Emily subsequently tries to be “normal” through relationships with men. What it doesn’t explain is why, in 1991, someone would choose to write a novel (for an independent queer publisher, no less) that’s so filled with self-hatred and the rhetoric of illness.

  JACKET COPY: “When sixteen-year-old Emily Stolle is discovered in the arms of a female schoolmate, she is as appalled as her family.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … Which one? Mattie is Emily’s older sister’s best friend, Lu is a sorority sister, and then there are all those anonymous women from the bars.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Absolutely not; the reaction is invariably disgust and shame.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Emily is first sent away and shunned by her family, then later cut off by a close friend who briefly became a love, then made to move out by a bigoted roommate. And, of course, she’s plagued with constant shame and the belief that she’s sick.

  IN THE END … After years of denial—and of trying to “cure” herself through relationships with both men and women—Emily sustains a long-term relationship with a woman. She even comes out to some strangers on the subway. But it seems a hollow gesture, since the people who really mattered in her life either never knew about her lesbianism or were unable to accept it.

  AND THE SEX? Pretty explicit, in a deadpan kind of way: “Emily’s hands dropped to Reena’s breasts; the nipples hardened.”

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Negative. The fairly happy ending for Emily and her girlfriend Anna can’t make up for a story in which, for more than three hundred pages, desire for women is referred to as “that hated curse that was following her,” and lesbianism is a “disease [that], surely as any malignancy, ravaged her and ruined those it touched as well.”

  Dive by Stacey Donovan (Puffin Books, 1994)

  A sparely and beautifully written novel that is more about V’s father’s terminal illness than about her romance with a classmate.

  JACKET COPY: “As V falls for Jane, she begins to discover that in love, as in life, there are more questions than answers.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … V is drawn to Jane from the very first time she spots her in the hallway, and the two start walking home together every day.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? The unreal, almost hallucinatory tone of the book renders the question of to tell or not to tell irrelevant.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … Doesn’t happen.

  IN THE END … V and Jane are in love.

  AND THE SEX? In the same fluid, not-quite-stream-of-consciousness prose as the rest of the book: “Every time I touch her somewhere, and I have to touch her everywhere, she murmurs, the urgency of desire, the surrender to the hands that take us.”

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Not clearly articulated but fairly high nonetheless. “I recognize the fact, according to the world, I mean, that two girls having sex together … is pretty unusual. What I don’t understand is how it got to be that people still think there’s something wrong with it. Even I think there’s something wrong with it … Or I think I thought I did. But I don’t.”

  Good Moon Rising by Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)

  High-school seniors Jan and Kerry embark on a typical teen first love: movie dates, kissing in cars, surreptitiously spending the night.

  JACKET COPY: “A love story, a portrait of aspiring young actors, and a powerful reminder of cruelty met through intolerance.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP STARTS … New girl Kerry beats Jan out for the lead in the school play. When Jan coaches Kerry on her lines, romance blossoms.

  CAN THEY FESS UP? Well, they’re worried about it, but they decide fairly early on not to hide the relationship.

  WHEN SOMEONE FINDS OUT … There’s some harassment by schoolmates, which the lovers put a stop to by coming out.

  IN THE END … The girls are planning how to tell their families.

  AND THE SEX? Plenty of making out (with quite sexy descriptions), and Garden doesn’t shy away from even more: “Jan traced the sunspots on Kerry’s body. ‘My golden love,’ she whispered … ‘I never knew hands and mouths could make anyone feel what I’ve felt today.’”

  PRIDE QUOTIENT: Off the scale. “[Jan] faced Kent and, loud enough so everyone would be able to hear, said, ‘You were right. The signs were right. I am gay.’ With the words came a sense of relief and liberation so great that she felt she never wanted to hide again.”

  Stormin’ Norma

  Why I Love the Queen of Teen

  Andi Zeisler / WINTER 1998

  TWO YOUNG BOYS AND TWO YOUNG GIRLS ARE WATCHING TV. It’s cable, it’s rated R, a hot tub is involved. Everyone is watching the screen in silence when suddenly one of the boys nudges the other, points to his crotch, and announces, with no small amount of pride, “Look, I’ve got a boner.”

  Stock Beavis-and-Butt-Head fare, sure, but it was also the moment when it dawned on me that, when it comes to verbalizing physical feelings about sex, the societal benevolence handed to boys is rarely, if ever, extended to girls. Those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s entered puberty in the glow of a celluloid world that seemed to have a single raison d’être—to visualize the sexual blossoming of the American boy. Female characters in carbon-copy movies with names like Losin’ It and Screwballs were exhibited as either the facilitators of or hindrances to that all-important loss of male virginity. These movies were supposedly all about girls, but actual girls weren’t important enough to figure prominently, except in those moments where attractive body parts were doled out for male satisfaction. We were sluts. We were prudes. If there was any kind of middle ground, we weren’t gonna discover it at the multiplex.

  Where were we going to find it, then? Most likely at the library, where it was assumed girls outnumbered boys—just as it was assumed we were the moviegoing minority—and could, by default, strut our stuff. But even with whole shelves devoted to telling the stories of girls—historical girls, sporty girls, adventurous girls—there was still one story that too often wasn’t getting told: the story of girls and sexuality. And that’s where Norma Klein, queenpin of the young-adult boy-girl sex novel, came in to help.

  Now, Judy Blume is widely considered the patron saint of teen-girl literature, and not without ample reason. Her oeuvre, which includes Tiger Eyes, Deenie, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, buoyed enough of us through puberty that it should be considered required reading for anyone with ovaries. Tons of us have some variation on the story of sneaking a friend’s older sister’s copy of Forever into our sleeping bag and avidly searching out the much-whispered-about “good parts.” But if Judy was the wise older sister nimbly guiding us through the confusing realm of maxipads and training bras, Norma Klein was the wacky, worldly aunt ready to blow our minds with a feminist, intellectual outlook on sex and relationships that would make us look twice at what the movies proclaimed as the Way Things Are. Klein’s formidable contribution to the YA canon—forty-plus books—served as proof that even if Hollywood and network TV have boys on the brain and in the billfold, someone was interested in making the sexual coming-of-age of girls equally important. Herewith, nine reasons why Norma K. rocked the young-adult genre.

  Her books lived up to the label “young adult.”

  The paradox of young-adult media—magazines, television, movies—is how, even in the process of trying to make girls feel comfortable with their lives, the messages imparted most often encourage extreme discomfort. Being “yourself,” girls are told, is fine, as long as that self concentrates on being thin, pretty, unintimidatingly smart, and boy-friendly. Along this same line, countless authors of novels for girls translated the term “young adult” to mean “shopping-obsessed, boy-crazy bubblehead,” and the result was a vast assortment of stories that centered on a female character just dying to be asked to the prom by Joe Hunky Football Fondler. Consider the insanely popular Sweet Valley High series, which focused on a gro
up of walking, talking clichés—the nice girl, the crafty girl, the rich girl, the studious girl—whose apparent sole purpose in life was to gossip and scheme against each other in hopes of scoring a fella.

  Unike these books, NK’s narratives refused to equate a dance with sublime happiness, or to measure social success with physical looks. Instead, her characters were unspectacular and self-conscious girls and boys, usually in their last year of high school. They’ve never had a “real” relationship but have developed a substantial battery of expectations and opinions. They meet someone and hit it off, and the story traces the development of the relationship and the myriad changes sex brings to their lives. Where other YA novels would close on the happily-ever-after image of the main character wrapped in her date’s beefy arms at the prom, NK’s novels asked: What happens after that?

  Klein treated her characters as the burgeoning adults they were, addressing the problems that arise when things like sexual jealousy, impotence, and parental envy are introduced into teen relationships. By the end of many of her books, the affair has ended and the characters are ensconced at college, ruminating on what has been learned from this first, complicated relationship, and ready to start another.

  She wrote funny, faceted, smart characters.

  There’s the anxious cellist Robin in Queen of the What Ifs, the reluctant starlet Rusty in Domestic Arrangements, the misfit lovers Peter and Leslie in Family Secrets, the repressed artist Augie in My Life as a Body, and the opinionated science whiz Maggie in Love Is One of the Choices. They were awkward, lumpy, beautiful, smart, flaky, Jewish, Zen Buddhist, neurotic, outgoing—and most important, they were all of these simultaneously. NK’s characters broke the dream-teen mold of most young-adult novels—instead of sucking down Orange Julius at the mall, these kids were more likely to be practicing the bassoon or training their pet chimpanzees. The plotlines themselves were layered and unconventional, focusing on everything from discovering a parent is gay to what happens when twin fourteen-year-olds decide to open a gourmet restaurant to distract themselves from their parents’ separation. Klein’s young characters, in fact, were almost too cerebral—I mean, how hard would you laugh if you were seventeen and your best friend busted out with a statement like “I believe celibacy sharpens my perceptions of reality”?—but for all their precocity, they displayed enough cluelessness and self-absorption to be believable as actual teens.