I Must Let Go of Brighton Now--but Look!

Before I continue saying good-bye to Brighton and all its wonders and challenges, here is a very concrete new moment in lesbian history that has come from the gathering and the amazing work of Clare D, who in the few days since we have been back, tracked down with the help of Polish friends, this 1933 copy of the Well of Loneliness in the National Museum of Poland, the one referred to by the woman whose words I have carried with me for so many years and that I put into the sea- touched Brighton air: 1979: From a conversation around the Lesbian Herstory Archives dinner and work table: The speaker, a Jewish woman in her 60s says, "I had a chance to read the Well of Loneliness" that had been translated into Polish before I was taken into the camps. I was a young girl at the time, around 12 or 13 and one of the ways I survived in the camp was by remembering that book. I wanted to live long enough to kiss a woman."

One of the themes of my text that accompanied the images--and which I will post here--is the need to seek out the counter-narrative of any given time, both in the national setting and sometimes within our own communities of certainties. This is what I tried to do with the excerpts from oral histories and media of the times--and here is one of the strongest examples. Dismissed as too depressive, or trash or irrelevant by many of the lesbian-feminist spokeswomen in the 70s and 80s, I knew from my own Bronx working-class background and my fascinations with many aspect of Hall's novel, that cultural products are complex things, that they take on new lives with almost every generation and every encountered specific moment of class and ethnicity and it would be interesting to explore their resurrections and resonances before we emptied them of value. I knew this only because so often in those so needed time of women's and gay liberation, I sat in darkened rooms with another story buzzing in my head or heart, not ones that denied the critiques of the new times, but that added layers of experiential possibilities, that warned me against new exiles coming into being right before my eyes. For this double vision and the strength to speak about it, I thank my mother, Regina, sometimes a whore, always a worker, always a little lost and always angry at the bosses.


What became clear to me as I attended the sessions at Brighton was that I needed in my 70s new lines of discussion for these times and I found them-- in Sarah Franklin's talk, "Beyond Biology: Queering the Facts of Life," her measured tones bringing into our thinking mix the desentimentalizing facts of the petry dish and how shifting biological terrains should be part of our imaginations and future politics as they will be part of our culture. Whoever this "our" will be. In Sherley Camille Olopherne's "Taken Spaces: Black Lesbians Against White Aesthetics," the old challenge of dislodging white control over almost everything was portrayed in her photographs and videos of liberated spaces for black lesbian lives--the Women of color tarp at the Michigan Women's Music Festival and the Rivers of Honey  nights at the WOW cafe in NYC. As I watched that women of color blue tarp layed on the beaten down grasses of the Michigan site, I kept seeing the tents and make shift sleeping places in Tahrir Square, I kept seeing a line of grassroots liberated spaces so simple in their materials, so huge in their dreaming of different cosmologies. As I listened and watched Sherely, I kept feeling the sounds of place, of my old New York and of all the histories I came to know there, including that of Haiti, a country that has endured all the worst ravages of French and American colonial intervention and dismissals, that is rich in its cultural heritages of literature and art, in social thinking. For many years I taught Masters of the Dew, by Jaques Romain, a novel of the 1930s built on the dream of collectivism and the works of Edwidge Danticat, the not so young now but always beautiful and brave contemporary novelist who kindly spent a day with our students, June Bobb's and mine, in the 1980s, was it?, going over with them their careful reading of her first novel of growing up as a young girl in Haiti. My Haitian students touched me in many ways, the young women and the men. Their having to choose which language will represent their public selves, their battle against economic despair, their sense of beauty. All of this I thought of as Sherely, knowing she was speaking once again in a white governed space, carefully chose her words, her images showing the possibilities of other knowledges born out of claimed spaces.


And the early morning session with Ewa Majewska, speaking of the need for a materialistic critical queer narrative, the story of the poor lesbian, and  Francesca Stella, using the example of "lesbian" identity in urban Russia and the dangers of critical assumptions when there is not enough awareness of the cultural specificities in Western interpretations--I learned a new term of thought, intersectionality, and it makes sense to me. This is how I continue my education, listening to the brave and open thinking of those struggling with ideas of equity and gender and sex and anti nationalisms in a new time. I know I have not mentioned every one whom I met in those three days, and many of the excellent sessions--I appreciated all that was offered that I could get to attend.

Our days ended in Brighton with a wonderful spontaneous dinner with two women from South Africa who waved us in to their restaurant to share dinner with us. Robust, generous women who had been at the conference telling us of their journies in life. I just wanted to stretch out on the wooden table and sleep, work done, in the comfort of new friends and my darling.

Brighton Still

Dear all who have written, thank you for your responses, responses in the real sense of the word. I can feel you there, see your faces still, Janet you will always be with me. You know,. no one has to agree with what I say to be precious to me. I just wanted to write to say I am reading your words. And yes, when we are back in Melbourne, we will come to New Zealand if that is wanted. Now I am beginning to sound like a cult--no,no. I will write more tomorrow at day break--when all is fine shadows and oh so real. 

Oh Those Lesbian Lives--Brighton and Revolting Bodies, February 10-13, 2011

Just back from our four days in Brighton and what a gathering it was, this 18th year since its inception Lesbian Lives conference. However tired I was, however worried I was about my place in the new lesbian world, saying yes to this invitation from old Irish lesbian activist friends to dare the gods once again and transverse hemphispheres--always with La Professoressa by my side--proved a most wonderful venture. Now whenever doubt hits, we will look at each other as we do, and just say, "Remember Brighton."

With another history of liberation rolling all around us, in a Square in Cairo, within our Brighton moment, I found once again, the richness of lesbian imaginings, transnational, trans gender, trans borders. New lesbian histories and the old, never old in the lived courage of hard lives and robust spirits, but lined lesbian bodies suited and frocked, well worn with their ssocial struggles for more equitable times--in all the systems that take our lives, economic, gender, racial.


Before I launch into details, which may take several postings, I want to embrace the women, the butches, the fems, the boyz, the gentlemen, the no gender labelled people, whose bodies I held in my arms, whose spirits gave renewed life to mine. As a gray morning light falls into our lounge room here, I see once again, and even more feel the warmth of Marie, her beautiful fem body held close to me, letting her know she will always be my kin, one of the many "daughters" if I may so, that I found in this old town by the sea; The Irish activist circle, Marie, Izzy and Liz and their friends, my new friends and Janet--originally from Wales--and her friend, all of us sitting outside in the pale sun, warming each other with the tales of our lives written in our eyes, in the cut of Izzy's well worn suit,  in the lilt of voices created by Irish struggles, Janet always positioning her wheel chair to bring her body into the stories we were telling. They warmed me, held my body in their love and gave me for those moments, my sense of what kind of family my queer life has made possible. With the red head by my side, I could have sat at that little aluminium round table for the next twenty years, but for activists, the next moment carries movement. I carry with me now the presence of Campbell, tall and dapper and oh so kind who brushed her/his lips to mine, who carries multiple histories, multiple complexities, some created, some of the bone, in her elegance; I carry with me Camel's laughter as she offered her technical support, and I lifted my breasts to her--and always the four Catherines/Katherines and Olu and Ermi who held the workings of our days together in their hands and hearts, to old friends like Sue whom I have known since 1988, and new like Ulrika and Eva from Poland, speaking early in the morning about hard and necessary ideas, her lovely hands running through her hair as she rushed to give us her thinking, so needed. And the young woman sitting in front of me in that session who lives in my heart now--all her histories--Switzerland and Morocco and familial--fierce in her independence from all labels--I must stop now, the day light is pouring in and La Professoressa is walking through the room, waiting for her time on the computer, but to you all, know that you touched me, that my body was yours for those days, and you held it with life giving love.





On a cold, rainy Thursday we rolled our small suitcases down the cobblestone streets to St Pancras International Station, boarding the 12:55 to Brighton. Packed deep in my suitcase was a tiny memory stick with a revamped version of the Butch-Fem slide show I traveled far and wide with in the 1980s and 90s and a stack of supporting materials--my new text, the words of Jul Bruno, Sandy Kern, and other moments from "Persistent Desire." I did not read from these excerpts but carried them with me like old friends. So much I want to say about what it meant to once again fill a large auditorium with larger then life faces and bodies, of Carol, my first love who died in 1966, Mabel Hampton and Lillian Foster--an earlier draft--here I became too tired to continue but I will)

Off to Brighton

I carried the Red Head back with me to the Gallery yesterday, to share my trove of beauty and delight. In all the times she has been in this town, she has never been to the Gallery, so busy is she where ever her desk is. Again, the lovely children, this time sitting and drawing on their little pads, Van Gogh's "idea of generosity," those almost bronzed sunflowers which I called a thistle in yesterday's telling.Together we found four large Turner's with storm reddened skies and that most prophetic one, of the early steam train coming out of the mists of gray weather, only its head making clear progress, mist giving way to mist and peering out of it, the face of modernity.  I always think of Dicken's love-hate writings about the relentless coming of the steam trains to London, the pulling down of poor neighborhoods, neighborhoods filled with life and love and struggle, the home of so many of his characters, where eccentricities flourished. Dickens who could be city planner or king of the marshes.

We stopped at five small paintings by Hogarth on the way out--his comments on the vagaries of marriage--each one a novel telling a tale of secret sex, the pox, the foolishness, the doings of the lawyer Silvermouth who is last seen fleeing through a window, the flash of his buttocks, as he leaves the mayhem he has caused behind him.

We had lunch in the gallery's cafe, in a spot of sun and spoke of how these acts of the imagination, the devotion to line and color, to composition and meaning touched our hearts in such times as these. How long did Turner struggle for just that touch of vermillion in his huge sky dreamed world, and now a century later, we gaze at skies and seas we will never see and live his moment of imagined life. The courage, the fanatic belief that such things matter, color and seeing into the heart of things, to offer that vision, without force, without destruction, to the human future. I think of the thousands gathered in Cario's Square, the colors of their mass, the lines of their gathered hope and I can see a never ending canvas filled with this portrait of possibilities.

Sun, Lions, Yellow Chairs and Red Squares

Sun greeted us yesterday. I climbed through our living room window out onto our balcony to take it full in the face. My pain is worse in the early morning hours and so I wait for the coming of the day. Today was the day I was to board one of those red lumberers, learning to flash my Oyster card. La Professoressa saw me off, bending low, with a wave, through the window of the 91. I felt like a young child being waved good-bye at her first day of school. Illness has made me unsteady and I appreciate my love's recognition of my undertaking.

Settling in, behind a mother and her lively baby girl, I thought, Joan, this is no different from the 104 careening down Broadway. It is really a short hall from Russell Square where I boarded to Trafalgar Square, my assumed destination. Up the Strand, with its titillating glimpses of the river through narrow side streets, fanciful bridge turrets catching the sun. You wait, I thought. I will come back and find you. The river in the sun is the special promise of London, I thought and then, catching sight of the dome of the National Gallery, I decided to get off at Charing Cross Station. The buses are gracious with their low and even boarding plates. I can easily get on and off. Such a prosaic sentence but now I look at cities not just for their erotic buzz of urbane life but for how kind they are to fallen bodies.

Enough. One of the dangers of writing in the darkness of a new day is that tangents seem so interesting. I am putting off the grandeur of the morning I had once I got off that bus. Opening up before me was the sun filled, leaping water-filled, people filled square. The  lions first greeted me, their huge muscular flanks shining, little people, tourists of all kinds, sitting on their massive paws, cameras clicking. The fountains shooting their waters high into the blue day, spray and fanciful water deities cavorting in the lower waters, arcs of water emanating from mouths and tails. Some visitors like me just positioned themselves against a fountain rim or the white wall that forms the base of the National Gallery and let the sun hit them full in the face, immobilized in our good fortune. This space, this offering to a city's people and its history, the shared glories of the day made me see again the wonders of these stone heavy cities, how they can dance with their own forms of joy, their persistence in time, their free offerings to those who make their way to their open places.

In the Gallery itself, I moved quickly past the Italian religious paintings of the early centuries, found Goya, and then galleries 44 and 45 where first I walked the snowy streets with Pissaro, he who knew the Caribbean light and then I found my Cezanne and Van Gogh. Van Gogh's yellow chair holding in its nest his pipe and tobacco, simple, he said, like him. The next, his yellow-gold-ochre thistle, filling the whole canvas, a gift awaiting Cezanne when he came to visit his old friend, the painting, Van Gogh, said is the idea of generosity. And across the room, enough Cezanne to see his vision, the early realism of his business success father, sitting, legs crossed, heavy in his black suit, light on his large face that is turned away from the painter, then a thickly wooded--but painted lightly--scene with a house hiding behind the verticals, next the beginning of his squares of color forming shapes of hill and vistas and finally one of his Bathers where the forms lounging in their own free form colors of blue guide us to the next moments of Western art. You know, I grew up in a book less, artless world of the working class Bronx of the 1940s. It was the public schools that I attended all my life, from kindergarten through college, that opened the doors to so many other rooms. The very schools that suffer so much neglect these days, particularly here in London where private school connections are riding high. Now I have stood in three countries gazing on the work of artists that rend my heart. I know how lucky I have been.  

The Weight of Empire

Gray, gray days. The Flaming Redhead has started her tenure at SOAS, the School for Oriental and African Studies, not far from Russell Square. This is how our life goes. I follow in her academic footpaths and then take my own detours, fill my days with my own curiosities or negotiations. I walk with her to the student teeming inner courtyard of the University, students from all over the world, buzzing with their ideas, their languages, their sense of what must be talked about--I watch her disappear into the old building, myself an old teacher, but one who never reached such heights, myself always and still loving the swirling courage of young people to think in questions, refusals while their body styles announce their love of new territories. I leave my love in young hands and cane in hand and my constant companion Mousey--another story--tucked away in my Australian student bag, face my first day alone on London streets. I tick tick my way past the Square, having decided to pay a visit to the British Museum, a place I have never visited before. Being able to walk there is a great plus for me. I am building up to mounting the other Red ones.

I just follow the old iron rails and around a corner, there she sits, set far back from the footpath, a huge monument to imperial culture or plunder, which is another way to see it. Across from the Scottish shop where pink tartans wink from the windows, and a little street filled with places selling bottled water and postcards, the massive classical edifice announces its hold on other's histories with traditional stone certainty. Again, many people speaking many languages join me as I walk under the banners announcing the Afghanistan Exhibit: Crossroads of the World and right behind it, the more adventuresome of us can take in the "The Egyptian Book of the Dead" exhibit but at an extra cost. I wonder at how prophetic these displays of captured or seduced goods are--one country we--America and Britain for now--are raining bombs down on whatever treasures may be left--as simple as children in a village and the other, where we may extol their imaginative journeys in the after world, while in this real one, we cannot decide which freedoms of life we should allow the Egyptians since we have for so many years, been very clear on which freedoms we will not. I wonder--what kind of exhibits would the old worlds put on of the artifacts of the new ones--here a banner, "The Treasures of War Machines" with carefully preserved tear gas canisters made quaintly in that Quaker territory called Pennsylvania. Enough, when one walks through the lovingly collected cultural bones of so often despised until death peoples, rant comes too easily to the lips.

I leave the fray day behind me, the simple measurements of the footpaths and cafes, and enter a monumental space much more like the great railroad terminals of the past. Modern structures within the old call for our attention but I make my way to one of the original reading and display halls, filled with the collecting imagination of the good Doctor who in 1753 turned over to the Crown his thousands of personally amassed artifacts, divided up into natural and artificial--oh how easy it was all back then--rich wooden cases display a child's slipper from China. Tell me Doctor, natural or artificial. Object after object, huge vases from the Greeks with intertwining swan necks making living garlands for the rim, Roman statues with their crumpled noses and gentle phallusses gaze down on the rest, book cases with treasured works on the history of old India and on and on. I join a tour group for a while until my legs ache too much and then I just sit and think. I too gathered, all my work for the Lesbian Herstory Archives when it was in my apartment, I understand the need to save artifacts but in our own name, in our own time, without armies or national philosophies of the right to cultural and political enslavement of the others. We came close, I have to say, with that regrettable slogan of the 70s, an army of lovers cannot fail.

Along the side of the reading room, there was a replica of the Rosetta Stone with the sign, please touch. And I did. The original is on level four--another day--but I felt wonder as my fingers moved over the inscribed shapes of language. How to see these collected moments of natural and unnatural culture without armies and banners, without ownership and robbery, with out invasion and death to the child who wore those slippers? Here in the vast library of the greed and heartless power of Empire, I listen for the sounds of those who lived in these objects, of those who fell in love with the young man with the crumpled nose, of those who gathered in squares for new freedoms and wrote their dreams on stone.

Here in London

I write you now from our rented flat on Tavistock Place, from a London whose graces I had forgotten and from an England that is under its own kind of seige. Yesterday the Prime Minister announced the end of multiculturalism here, the "experiment" of respect for and welcoming of difference. In his passionate cultured voice with his hand movements under lining his sincerity, he launched an attack on the Muslim citizens of this country. Just as the Arabic diaspora was rejoicing in its rediscovered political dignities, its courage in the face of tanks and American behind- the- scenes might, Cameron hurls the old hatreds, not British enough, he says, revelling in the public use of old fears. He calls for a purer form of Britishiness, while in the streets of Lufton, 2000 extreme British right wingers and their international supporters march in support of organized hatred and uber nationalism. Silence from the private school loving wealthy leader who looks to his own class more and more while seizing on fiscal troubles to narrow the public human heart here.

I want to tell you of our first full day here, when the sun shone and the streets were full of London's people. We walked from our Bloomsbury site across London to the Thames with a stop at Madam Rushka's shop for larger ladies, we walked through Convent Gardens, with its theaters peeping out of narrow streets, past Nelson on his tower, squares of city life with the red buses like ancient mammoths pulling in and out and around, hauling always and still the people of this city to their destinations. I was determined to walk to the river, I told my Professoressa and she went ahead in her own pace, waiting for me every ten minutes to catch up. I always had the flame of her hair ahead of me. To Jubilee Bridge and the lift that allowed me to walk across the Thames, to look back at its city scape, the old still prevailing while the new rises in any free space. I looked up river, saw the Tower Bridge, the waters of old London flowing below me, my Dickens London, where dead bodies surfaced back into the story below the hovels standing with their feet in the swampy tidal flats of the destitute--Dickens who found a way to entice the human heart into kindness, laughter, self reflection, while depicting social cruelties. On across the bridge and walking, walking with stops for me to catch my breath, to rest my legs, until we reached the Tate Modern, a new London site for me. A cavernous space put to the use of the human imagination. School children of all colors standing closely together, not because their teacher barked them into it, but because the space itself spoke of the need for human warmth in the face of the vastness of an old factory space turned to house vast artistic dreams, huge intimacies, the children's faces turned upward to find the building's sky, somewhere the up must end, you could see them thinking.

I gratefully sit in one of the wheelchairs just waiting for those who need them and we proceed into lifts and find the Surrealism exhibit. Not the usual, not a Dali insight but an artist from the Ivory coast working on small squares of cardboard with colored pencils and pen, his own version of national and intimate dreamings. The installation that opens the exhibit is spare--a white wall with black line suggesting an urban landscape and falling into it are the bodies of two large birds, free flyers of the English countryside, pinned to the sky wall with arrows through their hearts. Their bodies seem still lush with life, their wings beating out of the wall but the arrows eternally pinning them to a fallen grace. The artist we are told sees in their prevented flight, the death of the imagination. I will never forget their loss.

Being in a wheel chair proves a virtue when we pause in front of cubistic line drawings of Picasso, drawings done when he is near to death and wants to honor the life force of desire. Women, often with the face of his last lover, spread their legs across the multi- peopled-parts canvas, their vaginal slits centering the drawings, their breasts with dearly loved large dark nipples, in profile, have flung across them the wanting arms of Van Gogh and Picasso himself, drawn several time, his balls swelling the Renaissance pouches of his imagined self. I find it all beautiful and moving, I have always loved the old bull. And now I sit on eye level with those wonderful closed promises of warmth and wetness that I too have known in my life, the promised openings to lush life.

You see, I am writing early in the morning here. Pain awakes me at three or four and I cannot sleep, and so finally after all these years, I write as I should have done all these years without pain as my stimulus but the joy of the life with words on the page, lines of possibilities, of voyages, of hymns to beauty and touch and angers at social failures shaped into meaning. I am having cancer dreams, of Carol in the hospital. dying so many years ago, of surgical procedures that pull back the flesh to reveal the killing things. I work to keep my pain at bay here--each day a negotiation because I have these four months to follow my Professoressa through the streets of London, Paris, New York, Belgrade, to find the rivers of people rich with their differences in all the cities, to refuse the narrowings of political nationalistic leaders who fail the wonders of life at almost every opportunity.