Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are much on my mind. Here is part of a public conversation and then a more private one I had with Adrienne Rich in the beginning of the 21st century.
Wars and Thinking
By Joan Nestle, 2003
Published in the Journal of Women's History, vol.15, no.3, Autumn 2003, A Retrospective on Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
“What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women
condensed to the point of explosion.”
Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” 1970
“The realm of human sex, gender and procreation has been
subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as
we know it—gender, identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of
childhood—is itself a social product.”
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes
on a Political Economy of Sex,” 1975
“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can
give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than
merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”
Audre
Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic,” 1978
“Thus the lesbian has to be something else—not a woman, a
not man, a product of society, not a product of nature—for there is no nature
in society.”
Monique
Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” 1980
“I mean the term lesbian
continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout
history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has
had or consciously explored genital sexual experience with another woman.”
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 1980
“What is the relationship between sexuality and gender? What
is our stake in maintaining a still relatively rigid gender dichotomy in sexual
temperament and behavior? What is the relationship between sexual fantasy and
sexual acts? What is our rational control over fantasy and do we think there
should be a sexual ethics that extends to fantasy? In other words, how set are
our individual scripts for sexual arousal?”
Ann Snitow,
Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, Introduction to Powers of Desire: the Politics of Sexuality, 1983.
“Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as
that which is outside of discourse. It’s manufactured in a particular discourse
as that which is universal. It’s constructed in a historically specific
discourse as that which is outside of time. It was constructed quite recently
as that which is old: heterosexuality is an invented tradition.”
Jonathan Ned Katz, "The Invention of Heterosexuality," 1995
"From the beginning of wars in this region from '91 on I felt that I have to invent Ten Thousand ways to let my lesbian self breathe. At some moments during the last 8 years, it
was not easy for me to put into words how do I feel when making love with a
woman and in the back there is a radio with the news of war. Killed or expelled
or other fascist acts. In my room, I would not be able to stand up and switch
off the news, because I thought respect to the killed I will show by not
switching off the radio…reading Adrienne Rich, “Litany for Survival,” by Audre
Lorde and essays of Joan Nestle kept the light of my soul in wartime alive.”
Lepa
Mladjenovic, in a private correspondence, Belgrade, 1999
American bombs are
falling on Baghdad; seven Iraqi women and children are killed by young
frightened American soldiers; Rumsfield grins his death-mask smile, “I wish I
was the author of this war plan, it is going so well.” I sit in my new home in
Melbourne, Australia driven here by breast cancer, landlord greed and my love
for a Melbourne woman. Several months ago when the Journal of Women’s History extended to me the invitation to join
this project of rereading, rethinking, I was hesitant to say yes—I have never
been a student in or taught a women’s studies class. I have been retired from
formal teaching—I am now an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the
university here, mentoring a small group of post-graduate students—for nine
years. Thus, I have no empirical data to anchor my judgments about how
important Rich’s essay has been over the ensuing years. This seems to be how I
enter public discourse, with my working class shadow of self-doubt hovering
over me, but now at sixty-two, having endured two cancers and their treatments
and the loss of a lifelong home, I am impatient with this old ghost, and so I
send it packing.
My first undertaking was, I believed, to
educate myself more, to put this 1980 essay into a deeper context. This
decision was made before the coalition invasion. And this reading, this work,
has helped preserve my sanity; thinking in a time of war is an affirmation of
the generosities of human life. For the past two weeks, I have been re-reading—Katz, Rubin, Wittig, Snitow, Thompson, Stansell—with the BBC coverage
of the war always on, muted, but throwing its images into the room. I lift my
eyes from The Invention of
Heterosexuality and see a flash of light in a night sky. I turn a page of
the introduction to Powers of Desire
and see a tank spitting out green fire. I struggle to follow lines of thinking in Gayle
Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” (1975)
exalting in her elegant thinking, her fearless adaptations of Marx, Engel,
Freud and Lacan, to pursue roots of why women are the disvalued sex/gender. I
look up and see lines of gunfire, ending in flares of destruction. Thinking,
the creation of meaning, the internal pact we make with words that they will be
moments of human sincerity, the reconstitution of near-historical texts
attesting to intellectual lineages—all of this stands in the face of the
Orwellian speech of generals, press secretaries and government leaders obsessed
with ensuring their class positions. I have just read a sentence in Melbourne’s
most progressive newspaper, The Age,
that I must add here, not as a parenthetical remark or as a distanced footnote:
“The Marine uses a chilling term picked up from the US military in Afghanistan,
to describe what might have happened to a dozen or more people thought to have
died in this missile attack—they have become ‘pink mist.’” (The Age, 8 April 2003.)
I walk in
demonstrations, hear that old 1960s shuffle of thousands of feet moving on
asphalt, and think of the calls to action I have read in preparing this essay—Jonathan
Ned Katz calling on us to dismantle the oppositional categories of homosexual
and heterosexual by turning the historical eye on preconceived essentialisms,
calling for a future pleasure system that will not be based on the denigration
of the other—understand, they say and then dismantle, build anew. Thinking in a
time of war—dismantle brutal systems of power, amidst the gleeful reporting of
the technological perfection of killing machines.
I have never struggled
to write a formal piece on the eve of war—my tooth aches—I write this thinking
this is true and then when I turn to my essay, “Some Understandings,” written
to celebrate the launching of Powers of Desire in 1983, I find the sentence, “to even raise the issue of women’s
sexual freedom in the time of our government’s invasion of Grenada may seem a
bourgeois activity to some---Our government is now mobilizing this country for
further assaults on governments it deems deviant.”
I reapproach Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” not as an objective reader, not even
after twenty years. This document was a major force in the fierce debates about
women’s sexual pleasures and dangers that raged during the 1970s and 1980s. The
Sex Wars we call them. In print and in person, at conferences and book
launches, in classrooms and women’s centers, at sex parties and Take Back the
Night marches, we argued our positions. I was on the side of the lesbian
“pornographers,” writing erotic stories for Bad
Attitude and On My Back, claiming
a place in lesbian and women’s history for the butch-fem communities on my
lesbian youth. I believed that sexual fantasy, sexual autonomy, sexual pleasure
must be as deeply championed as our commitment to ending violence against
women. Some of my colleagues in this dissent from the women-against-pornography
arguments were Amber Hollibaugh, Pat Califia, Jewelle Gomez, Carole Vance, Liz
Kennedy, John Preston, Madelaine Davis, Ann Snitow, Paula Webster, Dorothy
Allison, Gayle Rubin. I list these names because they were/are my comrades—just as Rich
turned to Catherine McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Jan Raymond and Katheleen Berry
among many others for intellectual support in her essay.
In the face of a
real war, it must seem worse than ludicrous for me to use the phrase “sex wars”
with any conviction that their duration was an important time. But these were
formative years for me, years of warring judgments, years that pushed my work,
brought me into contact with writers and activists such as Adrienne and her
partner Michelle Cliff, years that launched the Lesbian Herstory Archives
(1973), years that taught me the complexity of women’s history. When I first
read “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” I hated it. I was
infuriated by its intellectual alliances, by what I perceived as its anti-sex
stance, by its transhistorism, by its sweeping generalizations about women’s
and lesbians’ lives. The sentence, “every woman is a potential lesbian” I read
as rhetorical posturing that obfuscated the material realities of all women’s
lives. Deep in the passions of the times, I thought Rich was putting her
tremendous influence in the service of the wrong camp. My heart broke as I read
the uninflected litanies of the signs of male domination—made so familiar to me
by the anti-pornography pamphlets and slide shows I had read and seen;
paragraphs that equated rape and high heels and feminine dress codes in fashion
as a means of confining women physically; warnings about false consciousness;
assertions that heterosexual intercourse or sexual penetration was a form of
legalized rape. I did not want to return to my mother’s breast, and I knew her
assumptions that lesbians did not do the "bad" things gay men did, like anonymous
sex, was simply wrong. I read the essay as a stern, severe voice from a land in
which I did not want to live.
Having been part of
a public butch-fem lesbian world since 1957, having been schooled in the ways
the state policed desire in the Greenwich Village bars of this time, having
brought myself up in the fierce way the children of sometimes desperate single
mothers do—work at thirteen and leaving my mother’s care so I could still
attend school—I found the word “compulsory” a red flag in the face of my own
determination. I distrusted Rich’s positioning in society—I read her as a formerly heterosexual woman with some influence in the world, a renowned poet
who was gracing my freak- rooted history with her presence. Ironically, her
call for a lesbian continuum, her wish to expand the theoretical and political
world of straight feminist discourse, was to me another exile for the specific
lesbian life and communities I had known. I was very suspicious of
respectability, and of feminist respectability even more so. My answer to the
anti-pornography movement and Rich’s essay was to write “My Mother Liked to
Fuck.” A once-married woman, the mother of three sons, writes the major
document calling for lesbian inclusion and a never married childless, old-time
lesbian fem writes a call for the respect of heterosexual women’s desire—both
documents coming from our deepest feminist convictions.
In reading Rich’s
essay twenty years later and after reading Rubin’s essay, where the phrases,
“obligatory,” and “compulsive heterosexuality” are first used, I can separate
out my own need for agency from [Rich's much needed] analysis of class oppression, of sex/
gender systems of power.
Besides the fact
that I was deeply involved in the discourses raging about sexuality and the
best way to provide for women’s safety, I also shared a New York
lesbian-feminist community with Adrienne; she is not just the unknowable author
of this [pivotal] essay. In the early 70s, I had a chance to meet Adrienne in
different historical circumstances, and to this day I wish I had not been so
self-protective. I had been invited to join a Marxist-feminist study group by
my mentor in feminist matters, Paula Webster, that met every two weeks in
Marta’s upper West Side apartment. We would begin talking about our assigned
chapters from Capital, but before
long, in good consciousness-raising fashion, we left the text and fell into our
lives. I was nervous about entering this world of accomplished feminist
thinkers, but I soon realized I had a ready-made place in the group because I
was the only lesbian. I often became the recipient of questions like, “Joan, is
loneliness the same thing for lesbians?” (An interesting question, really.) In
the beginning I did not mind this easily won ground of acceptance and respect,
but as the months went by, I realized that it was a cheap way of holding my own
in the group.
One night as were
breaking up, Marta asked me to stay for a cup of coffee and meet a friend of
hers, Adrienne who was a poet and also taught in the SEEK Program (in 1966, I
had started teaching in this first of the open enrollment programs of the City
University of New York). Feeling like an exhausted imposter, I just wanted to get
back to that safe space I called my world. I asked, “Is she a lesbian?” and
Marta said she didn’t think so. I can still hear my diminished voice saying,
“Oh, I think I will skip it—I am tired of being the only lesbian.” Perhaps if
Adrienne and I had met back in those earlier days, before I became the
pornographer and she the author of “Compulsive Heterosexuality,” we might have
become different kinds of friends, friends who argued their way through their
historical times.
Rich and I were to
meet many times over the lesbian-feminist 1980s—at parties, at readings, at
Womanbooks (the large and wonderful women’s bookstore that took up its home on
the corner of 92nd street, the same street as the home of the
Lesbian Herstory Archives, which a group of us had founded in 1973 as a way to
end the invisibility of lesbian lives past and present). I remember an earlier
time when the bookstore was still in its smaller quarters across Broadway and
Adrienne was the featured author. Hundreds of women looped around the block,
unable to get in. On Broadway, people were stopping each other and asking what
is happening—Adrienne Rich is giving a reading.
She was one of the
first researchers to use the archives, when it was still a small collection in
the pantry behind the kitchen. There she did some work on Of Women Born, eventually making a gift of her hand-written notes
to the archives. I just gave what must by my one thousandth sharing of the
archives slide show, and there was the image of Adrienne that always travels with
me: she is working at the small lesbian-made desk—we only wanted furniture made
by lesbians in the archives then—her dark head lowered, her whole body
concentrating on her work.
It was to Adrienne
that I turned when, after twenty-eight years of being a lecturer in the SEEK
Program, I dared to ask the formal English Department for a promotion. I needed
letters of recommendation to accompany the copies of my books and other
published materials—all with “lesbian” somewhere in the title. She graciously responded
with a letter that made me glow with pride. When my second volume of memoirs
was to be published in 1992, my editors at Cleis turned to Adrienne for a
jacket blurb and once again, her words were more than kind. On the walls of the
archives hangs a print of one of the original French woodcuts of Gertrude and
Alice, presented to the collection by Adrienne and Michelle during one of their
visits to our Manhattan home.
One morning later in
the 1980s, I received a call from Adrienne. She had been asked to speak at a
Times Square Rally for a “Take- Back- the- Night” march through the 42nd
Street sex district. A group of us opposed to the targeting of women sex
workers had authored a flyer opposing this tactic. In an honest quandary,
Adrienne asked me to explain my stance. Her search for a clearly thought-out
position during this divided time deeply impressed me. The image of Adrienne
that will always stay with me, however, is the summer afternoon the three of us
met to talk about this growing schism in the movement. She invited Deborah
Edel, my partner at the time and co-founder of the archives, and me to her
Montague, Massachusetts home. Since we were coming from New Hampshire, we first
stopped in Peterborough to lay a rose on the grave of Willa Cather—who lay in
the shadow of the same mountain range that sheltered Adrienne’s home. We sat in
the backyard and tried to talk. Adrienne had recently been to Nicaragua and she
told us her arthritis had been so bad she had to be carried on and off the
lurching buses that took the group around the country. In my memory, I felt
awkward and inarticulate. My final view of Adrienne was of her standing in her
shorts on the front porch, waving good-bye. I had never seen her body before,
and bodies for me are the starting places of all our stories. A small woman,
with scarred legs and twisted bones, a poet in the shadow of mountains, a
tireless traveler for human rights. I need to chronicle these encounters that
shifted between generosity and alienation because I am writing about the living
time in which this text was produced. “Compulsory Heterosexuality” will never
be just words on a page, but a breathing emanation from a rugged struggle. We
were all living our ideas in passionate ways, creating homes for new histories whether
in our poems, bookstores or living rooms.
What we did in our
bedrooms, however, and the significance of those acts, was where the break
came. In the early 1980s, particularly after the Barnard Sex conference, Rich
and I were often pitted against each other. We moved in different circles, both
in terms of friendships and in our heads.
The social and
political background of 1980 and now are eerily similar. In the beginning years
of this 21st century, the American right wing, with a deadly disdain
for dissidence and the disenfranchised, is firmly positioned to wipe away most
of the progress accomplished in the last decade on issues of sexuality,
reproductive rights and gender nonconformity. Concerns about protecting the
family, the demand on (Anglo-European) women to have more babies (a particular
campaign here in Australia), the attempt
to pull women out of the workforce makes Bush’s government a direct descendant
of Reagan’s America; now this son of the right with far too many fathers has pulled
half the world into the abyss of war.
Computer images of helicopters rotating from
side to side, missiles hanging from their bellies, inhuman looking humans
vaguely seen in simulated cockpits. Bush in blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, a
small American flag pinned to his lapel reads his lines; events in Iraq have
reached their final destination—we have done nothing to deserve this—we will
not drift—we have the sovereign authority—we will rise to our responsibility.
At sixty-two, with my own body scarred by two cancer
operations, with a new generation of students, some queer, some not, but all of
them refusing unquestioned categories like “mother,” or “man” or “woman,” I
return to “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” I still find it
claustrophobic and relentless, a work too sure of all its assumptions, too
eager in its marshaling of unquestioned supporting voices, too narrow in its
understanding of women’s sexual possibilities and too essentializing of almost
everything. (Of course, this description can be applied to my own work as
well.) In short, a work of its time. I do, however, have a better understanding
now of the discourses required to start the dismantling of the sex/gender
systems of power that rob us all of life. Rich, a post-1970s lesbian feminist,
refused to accept her exclusion from feminist academic thinking lying down and
in her refusal, has given generations of women students a vision of
nonheterosexual possibilities. My check of the internet showed that her essay
is a staple of almost every women’s studies program. A week before I was told
about this project, a lesbian-feminist friend of mine who teaches sociology
sent me an essay for publication that she had written about the representation
of Italian women in three American films. Dawn, a once married woman with a
grown lesbian daughter, was going to use this article as a coming out vehicle.
In the first paragraph of her essay, she employs Rich’s concept of the lesbian
continuum as the conceptual framework that gives her permission to gaze upon
these seemingly heterosexual cultural constructions with a lesbian eye. Thus,
Rich’s essay gave room both for an intellectual approach that did not exist
before “Compulsory Heterosexuality” and a personal announcement of the author’s
own sexuality.
For myself, I am
excited by the layering of thought, by discourses pushing against each other,
by the cracks in certitude—even in a time of war. This time, as I read Rich, I
carried Foucault and Butler with me, I understood that we were all trapped in a
reversed discourse, but the questioning, the assertion of inclusion had to
start somewhere. I realized how much of my own life’s work has been, in
Jonathan Ked Katz’s words, “compensatory affirmative action.” (178) I see
Rich’s essay as a moment in a different continuum, one of public thinking about
sex/gender constructions and resulting inequalities, with De Beauvoir,
Radicalesbians, Wittig, Rubin, Katz, Foucault and Butler all preparing the
ground for the next generation of ideas that will challenge what we think we
know and give us new tools to dismantle the systems of power that constrict our
humanity. Thinking in a time of war is the preparation to end all war.
“There are more
ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active,
stronger, more resistant, more passionate than ‘politicians’ think. We have to
be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in
books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles
carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But
it because the world has ideas (and mostly because it produces them) that it is
not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to
teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”
Michel Foucault, “Les Reportages d’idees,” 1978
Before I end, I want to say one more thing. Over the years, I
have read savage reviews of Rich’s poetry, reviews attacking her for being too polemical.
Adrienne Rich has put her whole literary reputation in danger because she has ideas
about injustices of all kinds and these ideas inform her creative world. For the
risks she has taken in this country of so-called free speech, where the disdain
of the establishment can crush a writer’s spirit, I will always honor her.
I want to thank the English and Creative Writing Departments
of the University of Melbourne for giving me a home for the next 18 months. I want
to particularly acknowledge Daniel Marshall, Renee Barnes, Cathy Gomes, Angela Keem
and Katie Hogan, post-graduate students all, for their gifts of ideas and their
warm welcome.
In memory of Lynda Myoun Hart (1953-2000), who with brilliance
and grace took the conversation even further.
By Joan Nestle, 2012,
Melbourne
Note to Shawn: Remember I am writing as a 72 year old
living far from the events I record here. I am sure Deb will bring some things
into better focus, and I know you wanted a short piece, but all the early years
of LHA were embedded in the political and cultural undertakings of the 70s and
80s where queer, gay, lesbian-feminist and identity politics marked our
friendships and work. The archives was only one of the firsts of that time.
Please add these memories to my collection there.
First I want to thank Shawn and all who have worked so hard
to make this so important LHA event possible and for giving me the chance to
provide some context.
Years: 1974-1984. Deb and I had committed ourselves to
spending the first ten years of LHA to spreading the word, to building
confidence in the possibility of such a project, to enlisting the involvement
of all we met, to welcoming every one we could through 13A’s doors, and to
covering every lesbian cultural event we could while still working full time. I
from the butch-fem bars of the late 50s, Deb from the lesbian feminist world of
the early 70s were both active in the newly forming communities around us. How
these two collections came into LHA is a story of comradeship, archival
servicing and the generosity of these two women. First connections: Adrienne,
Audre and I were all teachers in the SEEK Program, (1966--),a radical alternative
educational program, born of the street rebellions of the mid 60s and created
by the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus of the New York State Assembly under the
powerful leadership of Shirley Chisholm, that was housed on the different
campuses of CUNY. Both Adrienne and Audre lived close by on the upper West Side
in the large cheap rent stabilized apartments that were available in those
years. Often I would run into Adrienne hauling her groceries up Broadway. Both
writers were frequent readers and visitors to Womenbooks, that grand lesbian
and feminist gathering place that was on the corner of 92nd street,
and LHA was just down the street.
Later another connection: demonstrations in Washington, on
the streets of New York, whether against America’s interventions in Nicauraca or
for reproductive rights and often Adrienne would stand with us and our little
LHA sign. We were all involved with the Feminist Writers Guild, the
child of Sonny Wainwright, who was our first friend to die of breast cancer amidst
communal support. (See “Stage V: A Journal Through Illness,” 1984 with Audre's words on the back cover.) Still another site of connection was the monthly
meetings at GWA, the Gay Women’s Alternative in the old Universalist Church on CPW
and 79th street where both writers often read and socialized with
friends and there we were, taping what we could. With Audre, there was the
additional connection of our shared experience in the lesbian bar
communities of the late 50s and early 60s.
And always Deb and I were speaking of LHA’s decolonizing
mission. Adrienne and her lover, Michelle Cliff, came to dinner in the early
70s, and brought with them their first donations to the collection, the signed
woodcut print of Alice and Gertrude, that hung on the dining room wall for all of
the 92nd street years. Adrienne asked if she could work on “Of Woman
Born,” in the archives while we were both at work, and so there she sat, at the
lesbian built wooden desk, turning out index card by index card of notes,
welcoming me home in the late afternoon. (image) When the Modern Language
Association held its historic meeting in New York, (check date) the one where Monique
Wittig made that famous speech, “I am not a woman,” the archives staffed a
table with copies of our holdings of the lesbian writers present there,
including Audre and Adrienne. In the evening all the members of the first ever MLA’s
lesbian caucus came for to LHA to see the collection and party. Later in the
1980s, Deb and I visited Adrienne in her summer home in Montague just after her
return from Nicauraga, continuing our ongoing political conversations. I think
the most important thing I can say here is that Adrienne and Audre understood
from the beginning what we were envisioning, all of us with our different but
connected histories, joined at this time. Others would say, it can’t be done,
you can’t have an archives in an apartment, you don’t have the money or the
time or the knowledge, you are not professional enough, but we were part of a
movement that created what was needed, with all the resources we had that could
be shared. We had communities we valued too much to let willed cultural amnesia
determine what was history. Almost before anyone else, these two women, so sort
after, donated parts of their work to the collection around you tonight. They
had come to know LHA’s dedication to its undertaking of inclusive history.
Throughout the years, Adrienne always made sure her publishers sent a copy of
her new books to LHA.
The last correspondence I had with Adrienne came as the
result of another kind of archival project, a 2003 issue of the Journal of
Women’s History dedicated to a retrospective of Rich’s 1980 essay, “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
April 9, 2003
From the editor for the journal:
Dear Adrienne,
At Joan’s request I
am forwarding you her contribution to the retrospective on “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She felt some apprehension about not
being engaged in the formal scholarship surrounding your article, but I believe
she has provided exactly the sort of piece we expected from her. She asked me
to forward it to you because it is a bit intimate and wants you to see it
first. She also wants to make sure she has the “facts” straight—Willa Cather’s
grave, and the like. If you have any questions or thoughts you’d like me to
pass along to her, please let me know. I am so happy to be working on this
retrospective.
All my best,
Stephanie
Gilmore, Managing Editor
April 11, 2003:
Dear Stephanie,
I’m about to leave for a three weeks’ trip to Chicago and
points east, will not be on e-mail, so I’m glad your letter with Joan’s essay
reached me today. Please let Joan know that her integrity and honest and
passion for history and language have been an inspiration to me for years and
this essay is no exception. There are two points of fact which need correcting:
I have three sons, not one; and its Emily Dickinson’s grave that is in Amherst,
near Montague; Willa Cather is buried in Peterborough, New Hampshire, not too
far away. Please tell Joan also that I taught her essays, including “My Mother
Liked to Fuck” (and also “This Huge Light of Yours”) to my women’s studies
classes at San Jose State and Stanford in the mid-eighties.
As you know, I have been refusing permission to reprint
“Compulsory Heterosexuality” in anthologies and college readers in recent years
because I felt it so flawed and out of date. I have often pointed to Joan’s
work as the kind of complex, experientially-based lesbian thinking that should
be taught in courses on women everywhere.
And yes, “thinking in a time of war is affirmative of the
generosities of human life.”
I have two questions. I was shocked to hear, by chance
recently, of Monique Wittig’s death. I wonder if you—or Joan know when she died
and where.
With my thanks to you and Joan—
Adrienne
How Audrey’s collection came to the archives also grew out
of personal and communal shared moments. One of the earliest memories I have of
Audrey is when we attended the first ever conference on Lesbians and Illness in
the early 1980s. Audrey was the keynote speaker and it was as a result of talks
with her, that a group of us began the Lesbian Illness Support Group which met
for several years. When Sonny was dying, surrounded by the women’s community
including LHA, Audre took respite in LHA. (I don’t have my papers on this for the exact
date, but we should have records of this in both the conference file and in the
illness subject file; I think there was a poster that we have of the conference
that could be used.) I have two special memories of Audre, however. We had come
to know that Audre loved fresh water fishing, and one summer afternoon, as Deb
and I headed off to New Hampshire, we arranged to meet Audre and Francis on
their way to their favorite mid West fishing grounds at a truck stop off the
upstate throughway so we could give her my no- longer- used tackle box, and
there, somewhere off the highway in New Jersey, she and I spoke about the
butch-fem days, not always agreeing but having fun.
In the early 1980s Audre knew that I was working on a slide
show documenting lesbian life pre 1960s, and agreed to tape an excerpt from her
essay, “Tar Beach,” for the presentation. Sometime later found Deb and I
sitting with Audre in her St Paul’s Avenue Staten Island home, around the
family wooden dining table, covered in books and photographs, talking about the
archives, the old days and present struggles. After reading the passage she had
chosen, she asked if I would want to use any of her photographs from the 60s and
before in the show; this is the collection now found in the archives including
her confirmation picture and the original cover photograph for Zami, with Audre
in Bermuda shorts, holding her then lover’s hand, back to the camera, looking
in a shop window. She asked if the archives would be interested in a box of
book reviews she had upstairs under her bed. We climbed up and Audre gave us a
tour of her study alive with her passions. Before we left, she made sure LHA
had copies of her early poetry collections.
It was a day of utter generosity which ended with her son Jonathan, his
shirt tails hanging out, climbing up the steep steps as we made our way down,
our hearts fill.
I can see Audre still, standing between the hallway and the
dining room at an at-home, her arms draped around a friend. Powerful,
unrelenting, and supportive in every way she could be to young writers and to
LHA. And I remember in 1992 the celebratory taking leave at Riverside
Cathedral, the church filled with pounding drums, her friends from all the
world filling the cathedral to honor the poet warrior, Audre Lorde. I am sure you will feel the spirit of both
these women welcoming you, calling to you, during these hours at LHA.
I know this is more then you want, Shawn, but once the
memories pour out, I need to get them down. I sit here in 4 Fitzgibbon
surrounded by the books of my two friends as well as Sonny’s cancer journal—so
many more stories to tell. Also I know I refer to Deb and I mostly but as we
did the things I write about other women were pouring their energies into the
archives as happens on these floors.
Please feel free to use any part of this remembering or
none—and I will send a copy of Deb so she can correct or add. What an important
time this will be.
Here is a list of things I remember at LHA that could be of
use if you have not already found them:
1. The images referred to—Adrienne working in the first
little archives room, Audre’s attendance at our at homes, the image of
Adrienne, me and Marge Barton at a 1980s Washington demo with the LHA sign,
taken by Deb I am sure and of course the Audre Lorde special photograph
collection
2. Audre’s reading from “Tar Beach,” that I refer to—should
be in audio cassette’s collection plus the tapings of both their readings that
we did over the years—if usable
3. The material from the Lesbian and Illness conference—held
I think at Brooklyn or John Jay College—we have a poster from it, I think and
Sonny’s book with Audre’s words
4. The program of the church service for Audre which has a
piece in it from LHA—should be in subject files
I am sure you have found many wonderful things.
One final note, Both Audre and Adrienne were particularly
important to me—because of the generosity of their support of me as a writer
even though from time to time our views differed. I do not mean in any way to
compare my work to theirs in talent or importance, but we were comrades of and
in our times. These are the stories the archives keep alive.
An Afterthought: Silences Not Broken
I have long thought that while both these writers spoke about the need to "break silences," they were themselves constrained by the demands of identity politics. They were almost forced to be purer role models for the communities that claimed them then the complexity of their own lives testified to. I do not think this is a good thing for artists of any kind, nor for the communities that hunger for their words. The silence surrounding Rich's marriage, the suicide of her husband, her relationship with her three sons, the impact of her lesbian identity on her past and her past's impact on her political identities are our losses, I think, but in the hey day of lesbian-feminist cultural supremacy, the 1980s, there really was no space to discuss such contradictions and perhaps no desire on the part of the writers. I think of Frances, Lorde's white lover of many years, that in the later years of Audre's life, seems to have fallen off the map. Struggling for her life, Lorde changed her life,but always in some kind of communal spotlight so much went unspoken. When we demand lives that reflect prevailing cultural certitudes, so much is sheered off. Perhaps some day, we will know more of their complex sadnesses and exiles, of the histories of their chosen joys, of the reasons for their loss of words. In her last collection of poetry, Lorde began the discussion of her need to be free of demanded personas. We as adoring communities must allow for questions, for unexpected desires, for broken scripts, for the full force of complicated lives; it is in the seeming impurities of experience that so much wonder lives.
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