None of this seemed to faze my parents. They embraced me and they embraced my friends and lovers. At the remove of many decades, I’ve realized that I’d probably have been better off had my parents’ response to my younger radicalism separated me from them a bit. A close friend at Wesleyan, who has two grown children, once told me that when her son was in college and studying abroad, he called home with news intended to shock. He reported that he’d just shaved his head (at a time when punk rock was ascendant). Both Ann-Lou and Michael let the remark pass unnoticed. Shortly after he got off the phone, Ann-Lou suddenly burst out, “We’ve got to call him back! You’ve got to yell at him for that—that’s what he expected you to do and he’s right.” So Michael called him back, and told him he’d just done something stupid, immature, and disrespectful. Then all was well.
In my case, Huntingdon remained the referent for “home” until long, long after I graduated from college, and I made my own life while being pliant to parental expectations when I visited, faithfully attending church every Sunday and singing a grace before meals. I believed then and believe now that I could have caused them no more exquisite pain than by declaring my lack of faith and unwillingness to practice a religion I no longer believed. Whether in the end it would have been better if I had spoken out, I truly don’t know. But I do fear I was not true to myself for much of my adult life as I became (for all intents and purposes) “Brethren” only in the company of my family. The fact remains that I kept my counsel, and found myself mentally assuming the posture of the Heisman Trophy when I was in Huntingdon or Lititz, doing an emotional stiff-arm to ward off family life, though I loved them all.
I was in graduate school, mid-twenties, when Mother called. “Tina, there’s going to be a convening of Brethren women down at Bridgewater College—you know, the Brethren college in Virginia. It’s going to happen this summer, in July, and we want to have a discussion of homosexuality. I thought you’d be the perfect person to lead the conversation. Could you come?” While the Church of the Brethren is a dissenter from the militaristic state and discounts the blandishments of the world, it is by no means radical when it comes to gender and sexuality. The importance of family life is assumed, as is the quietly patriarchal structure of that social unit, as David Watt demonstrates in his luminous, understated book Bible-Carrying Christians.2 One of the congregations he studies is an Anabaptist church. The Mennonites who worship there are drawn to witnessing against war and living very simply, in the spirit of the witnessing that Mother found so attractive in the Sojourners. No member of that church, however, thought unremarkable, unexamined father-headed family life could be anything but good. There is no Brethren publication similar to the book published in 1963 by British Quakers, Towards a Quaker View of Sex, which argues that neither gender nor sexual orientation matters when considering loving relationships, but rather tenderness, responsibility, and commitment. Not all Quakers affirm that view even now, I’m sure, but there it was, a slim book among others on homosexuality that Swarthmore Gay Liberation demanded the college library buy, and one of the only ones—other than publications hot off the presses of Firebrand or just released by Shameless Hussy press—to represent homosexuality positively. In the last fifty years, much has been said about sexuality at the annual meetings of the Church of the Brethren, but the church has not been able to declare that sexual orientation doesn’t matter to God—or to the Brethren, for that matter—let alone to welcome homosexuality as part of God’s plan. In fact, the issue has repeatedly roiled Annual Conferences, and bitter words have been exchanged amid pleas for more temperate language.
I knew that the convening of Brethren women was of real importance to Mother—I even appreciated that she wanted that discussion of homosexuality. She believed with all her heart in tenderness, responsibility, and commitment, and loved her lesbian daughter without reserve. “Yes,” I said, bowing before filial piety, even as I thought oh no, no, no. When the time came, I drove from Rhode Island as far as Washington, D.C., where I stayed with my lover from Swarthmore days and got really drunk girding my loins for the morrow. The next morning was blazing hot. I stopped for coffee at a neighborhood McDonald’s, and drove down to southern Virginia, in July, in my car with no air conditioning, with a breakfast sandwich and an aching hangover. When I reached Bridgewater College, the air was oppressive with heat and humidity. Conference participants were housed in a college dorm, also with no air conditioning—and no fans. We ate dinner in the stifling college cafeteria, and later I lay awake for a long, long time in my narrow bed. The next day the hangover was gone and I led the workshop, and the day after that a final prayer ended the proceedings. Mother embraced me with tears in her eyes, saying, “Oh, I so wish Ken were here! I’m so proud of you.” She thought he would be proud, too. I was happy in the moment—It’s Over!—and pleased that people I cared about had witnessed my skills as a teacher, but mostly I wanted out. Out and away. It seemed absurd—me, a Brethren lesbian! But of course, I am.
Wesleyan’s affiliation with Methodists seems to have left only an architectural trace, a lovely brownstone chapel, and I’ve never set foot there or anywhere else to attend a worship service. I don’t go around calling myself Brethren, because I’m not. Yet as is patently obvious, we can’t choose our families of origin, and we can’t choose our childhoods, so I have no choice but to “be” Brethren. I am a professor, as my parents both were before me, and I’ve lived close to the campus, as my parents chose to do. I thought that the familial Anabaptism of my childhood had inclined me toward the professoriate, but no further. I now know otherwise. For better and for worse, I am my parents’ daughter.
I may have held myself aloof from the Anabaptists, but the Anabaptists are nevertheless a part of me, and my desires are, in some queerly feminist way, Anabaptist desires. I want a complexly relational life and wish to help others, and over the years I created a far-flung network of elective affinities. This network distributed the overwhelming weight of caring for me, and made it possible for me to return home rather than go to a nursing home when discharged from rehab. Close friends helped with the overwhelming needs of my utter dependency, yet the filaments of the network also reached deep into Wesleyan as an institution. I had the accident the day before trustees were coming to Wesleyan, so they arrived twenty-four hours into the crisis. Three months later, they donated $8,000 toward the wheelchair that I still use—it’s the right model for me, but wasn’t covered by insurance. A vice president met Janet at the hospital very early the second day after the accident, to learn what information about my condition he could release in an e-mail message to all faculty and administrators. Only a few weeks earlier I had presided over the first faculty meeting of the year, where newly hired members of the faculty are introduced, so practically everybody knew who I was. The publicity of the accident—amplified by its timing—mattered, I’m sure, especially in the first days and weeks, but the sustained attention and care given to me over months and years responded to my own deep conscious and unconscious desires for connection to others.
In the horrific ordeal that followed my accident, Janet and I were saved first by the active love and generosity of our closest friends, but we needed more, and more was forthcoming. I was still quite ill from the shock of the damage to my central nervous system when I was discharged. I couldn’t shift my weight at all when I was sitting in my wheelchair, which I did from noon to around 8:00 in the evening. So friends came over to cover the time when Janet was out of the house and tipped me from side to side every half hour to change the pressure points on my sit bones. I joked with Lori, who helped me generously hour after hour, saying I had become “a clown with sand in my head,” the opposite of those inflatable punching clowns weighted at the bottom so that they pop right back up after being hit—because I found it difficult to stay upright at all. Yet, owing to her loving friendship and the help of so many others, I never had a pressure sore. Janet and I were fed for a full two years with lasagnas, quiches, curries, beans an
d rice, soups, brownies, and more lasagnas, all dropped off on the back porch, where half of the table was given over to washed casserole dishes, pie plates, and Tupperware we were returning. Janet would have wasted away without that food when I was in the hospital, I think, because she truly was then at a loss in the kitchen, and when I came home we were both overwhelmed. I did outpatient physical therapy at the Hospital for Special Care for a year and a half, five days a week, driven there and back by friends, an hour and a half commitment. I never missed a single therapy session. My friends were driving a second-hand van with a ramp and wheelchair tie-downs, which we paid for by drawing on the Christina Crosby Fund that friends had set up at a local bank. Our household has stabilized, and our finances are no longer in the red every month, so we are no longer living on charity, but I’m honored that my friends gave freely to me in my time of great need. Caritas is, after all, “the highest love or fellowship,” according to George Eliot.3
The Wesleyan community that supported me was heterogeneous and by no means of one mind on institutional questions. In the years before I got hurt, queer students would spend the night before National Coming Out Day “chalking,” which entailed writing ribald messages in colored chalk on sidewalks all over the campus. One year a friend gleefully reported to me that someone had written “Christina Crosby’s leather pants make me wet” on the sidewalk in front of the English Department, a message he saw when he came to his office early in the morning. Building and grounds workers soon scrubbed away that message and others less pointedly directed but no less enthusiastically expressed on the sidewalks all over campus. The students who covered the sidewalks with sexual vulgarities had high hopes their messages would épater la bourgeoisie, and they did. Many professors and members of the staff disliked the overnight flowering of unabashed, hyperbolically sex-positive assertions, but I was flattered by being so singled out. I knew that these sexually explicit messages were a way for the queer and “questioning” students to come together and act out, act up, and make Wesleyan theirs for a moment. I was all for it, and enjoyed the chalked-up, sexed-up Wesleyan they modified with their youthful, dissonant dissent, and the hopefulness of queer possibility. President Bennet was not of my opinion. He was offended by the annual ritual, and made an executive decision to ban the practice, asserting that the messages were offensive and explicit violations of community norms governing public discourse. I miss the chalking. It was ludic and unsubtle, unsuitable and excessive, and meant to be so. It let in air and light.
At the huge party we finally threw to thank all who helped us, after Janet’s words of gratitude, Doug spoke up to testify that when any of the more conservative trustees would in conversation raise the topic of gay marriage, he was quick to say that he’d never seen a married couple more devoted to each other than Janet and I, proving that gay people could enter into matrimony as seriously as anyone else. Janet did not jump up to refute him, nor did I, because we were each deeply grateful for all that he and Midge had done for us, and recognize that it’s impossible to square the circle of queer desire and sexually normative, corporate life. The community that kept us going was heterogeneous, created in response to my desire for connection with others, and included some who explicitly disagreed with each other, as Janet and I disagreed with Doug. It was a network connected to University life but distinct from Wesleyan as an institution. I felt no need to respond with thanks to God when I learned that the minister of the Congregational church and his parishioners prayed for me, but I felt sustained by their attention, nonetheless. When Dick asked whether Marxist prayers would help or hinder recovery, I said they’d help.
Lines of affiliation linked us to lesbians, gay men, and others thoroughly gender queer, and spun out to some who are married and apparently quite normal. The network included big city New Yorkers and small-town Pennsylvanians, multiple racial and national identifications, dear friends and people I didn’t know face to face. All buoyed me up when “the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing: I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me.”4
16
Pretty, Witty,
and Gay
When Janet got to the hospital, she was asked several times whether I had been drinking before the accident. No, she said, I had not. She was asked again. “No, I already told you—she was riding her bicycle!” Then she was told that the question of alcohol had to be seriously addressed because of how it interacts with other drugs. A patient coming into the emergency room can be dangerously overdosed on anesthesia and heavy-duty painkillers if she arrives with a lot of alcohol in her bloodstream. They also wanted to know if I was a heavy drinker addicted to alcohol, because, if so, they would keep the alcohol level in my blood high, so that I wouldn’t experience withdrawal on top of the trauma of the accident. Janet assured them that this was not necessary, and after my first round of surgical anesthesia, they reported to her that I must not do any drugs, because it didn’t take much to keep me under.
A couple months before, coming up on my fiftieth birthday, I had gone to my general practitioner for a physical. Handed a questionnaire about my alcohol consumption, I indicated that I drank one or two drinks every day, as I had done for decades, beginning in graduate school, and usually consumed more during the weekend. After my physician had completed the physical exam, she left me to get dressed and then returned with a sheaf of papers in her hand, including the questionnaire. That’s when I learned that I was a “problem drinker.” So I told Janet when I got home, “Guess what? I’m a problem drinker,” and we puzzled over the apparent irrationality of rationalized medicine. The appellation seemed to both of us oddly misplaced. I hadn’t experienced the sorts of problems either of us associated with “problem drinking”—missed work, car accidents, embarrassing outbursts. Still, the conversation with my doctor also made me wonder whether alcohol was in fact a problem in a way that I didn’t clearly see. And if there was a problem, what was it?
Janet did not object to my drinking. In fact, even though she herself was an exceedingly moderate drinker—one glass of wine often lasted her the evening and she did not drink every night—she liked alcohol. Janet thinks that drinking helped to save her life when she was an adolescent and young adult. She started drinking in ninth grade, and discovered early on that she felt better—a lot better—when under the influence. She drank hard and pretty recklessly, and kept it up her four years at Dartmouth, where college traditions support heavy drinking, especially in the fraternities that continue to dominate student social life at the college. Then she graduated, and moved to Washington, D.C., to work in a consulting firm where about a third of the partners were Dartmouth alums—the other two thirds had graduated from Wesleyan or Duke. Both Dartmouth and Wesleyan had been coed for less than a decade, so most of the men who were partners of the firm had attended exclusively male institutions, with male bonding rituals. They did plenty of drinking, which set the tone for everybody else—work really hard, and then drink to relax and have fun. Yet in a life-affirming perversity, when Janet turned twenty-one and could drink legally anywhere, she stopped drinking altogether. Alcohol was no longer making her feel good, especially in the mornings after she’d been at the bar the night before. So she stopped. Without the alcohol, she felt bad enough to seek out a therapist with whom to talk. Missing the lift that alcohol had provided, she was struggling. “Stop drinking,” the therapist said, “you really need to stop drinking, it’s a depressant.” “I don’t drink anymore.” No, you really have to give it up, the therapist kept repeating—she seemed incapable of understanding that after years of steady, serious drinking, Janet had stopped because alcohol no longer made her feel good. She didn’t quit going to bars with her friends, she just drank club soda when she got there. Alcohol wasn’t the problem for her. The problem was feeling flat and increasingly disconnected from life.
I find Janet deeply attractive because she attends to the truth of emotions, and is clear about her commitment to feeling good. She also
has the will to do the hard work of changing her life, if that’s what’s necessary. For many complex reasons, she’s given a lot of years to talk therapy and “bodywork”—massage, craniosacral therapy, yoga, swimming, and now Pilates. We have a running joke about her commitment to “process,” the direct discussion of affective truths. Working out, and working through relational life. We call this talking “making sausage,” because all kinds of stuff goes into it. Process is also stereotypically a lesbian way of life. When someone is making a mess of his life, as happens all too often in this screwed-up world of ours, we observe that he’s got to get more lesbian—he’s not made enough sausage. We are both pretty thoroughly processed, and quite committedly lesbian.
A Body, Undone Page 16