Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty

In 1975, with three other members of my lesbian-feminist collective, I went to Sagaris, a feminist theory institute, and began the process of completely changing my life. The two-week-long event took place that summer at a small college in Plainfield, Vermont and brought together about 120 feminists from all over the country, the majority of them lesbians. I signed up for workshops given by some of the “famous” lesbians, then hesitated before taking on Bertha Harris’ writing class. Even the militant lesbians among us were mostly unfamiliar with Bertha or her novels, Catching Saradove and Cherubino. I had bought a copy of Cherubino the night we arrived, though, and found it difficult and fascinating. The lush descriptive language had intimidated but intrigued me. I wanted to see what the woman who wrote that book looked like, I told myself. I did not admit until I had actually signed up that I wanted to take her class.

My hesitation derived partly from the fact that I thought of myself as a dedicated politico with an accompanying belief in the importance of feminist political theory over the self-indulgent and trivial pleasures of writing fiction. I was also afraid. In between meetings and demonstrations, between building bookcases for the women’s center and writing grants for the childcare collective, I wrote what I knew were terrible poems, and fragmentary stories that I suspected were almost as bad. But as long as I wrote only when inspired by political conviction and in stolen moments after the really important work was done, I comforted myself with the fantasy that if I had time—maybe after the revolution—and could really work at it, what I produced might not be so mediocre. I was terrified that anything I took seriously and worked to perfect would still, inevitably, be inferior. There was another fear, too. For all that I mouthed the general platitudes insisting that every woman’s story was important, I found a great many of the stories I read boring.

More than anything else I did not want to be boring.

Bertha Harris was more like a drill instructor than a workshop leader. She was adamant, caustic, and demanding. “For the next two weeks,” she told us, “you will call yourselves writers, think of yourselves as writers. You will take yourselves seriously. You will not waste my time.”

No, I swallowed and promised myself. God no.

I had gone to Sagaris along with two other women from the lesbian-feminist collective that had become both my chosen family and the way I organized my political work. That we had all been lovers was something we didn’t think much about by the time we drove up to Vermont, but it fascinated many of the women we met, including Bertha. I remember her leaning toward me in a cloud of cigarette smoke, her face expressionless but her eyes glittering. “Three of you, mmmm, you should write about that,” she told me. The tone of her voice was so husky, I involuntarily blushed. Next to the cosmopolitan and fearless Bertha Harris, I felt naive and timid. Years later I would learn that many of the women whom I met that summer thought me intimidating and overwhemingly self-confident. It was a matter of style. Unsure of myself and desperate to learn, I followed everything closely, stared at people like they were keeping secrets, and concentrated on every reference so that I could look up the names later, research all the implications. When I flirted, I did so awkwardly and abruptly, pulling on the persona of one of my aunts like a safe protective overcoat, but falling into naked confusion whenever anyone flirted back.

Mostly I flirted with no real intention of following through on the teasing banter I had learned as a teenager. Though I looked and behaved like a grownup, I knew I was not really an adult. I was an overgrown adolescent, full of sudden outrageous passions but without the emotional capacity to act on them. I had developed a protective stance to steer me through romantic confusion, separating out my emotional responses from my physical desires. I could and did sleep with anyone, never refused any proposition, and teased so much that I found myself caught in quite a few flirtations where the options were either to be very rude or to shut down emotionally and simply perform sexual acts about which I had no real conviction. I had grown up hearing my uncles and cousins curse teases. I would not be a tease. If dared, I would do anything and never admit how distant and fearful I felt inside.

Flirting and sex had nothing to do with writing, however, nothing to do with remaking the world, the revolution I fiercely believed was necessary to force this country to live up to its ideals. But everything is connected, Bertha Harris announced to us at the opening of one of her classes, and “literature is not made by good girls. If you worry too much about being good, you’re not going to write worth a damn.”

We were talking about romantic love, a subject Bertha found appalling. She wanted everyone to read Shulamith Firestone so we would know it is not drink and drugs that are the curse of the revolution, it is romantic love. She waved her cigarette in impatience at the absurdity of it all. Romantic love continues the status quo in which we both are victimized and victimize each other. I knew that by revolution, Bertha did not mean overthrowing governments or restructuring social systems. She meant writing, making art. These were, for her, the most profound and far-reaching actions we could undertake. I was still suspicious of the use of fiction, but I suspected that her comments were true nonetheless. Dividing yourself up, lying to yourself and the rest of the world, being afraid of who you might really be—none of that could possibly be of any use to the person I wanted to become. Even if I never learned to write worth a damn, I was going to have to take Bertha’s offhand comments to heart. I would have to think about this sex and intimacy stuff, and think hard.

At the end of one class, Bertha did the unthinkable: she divided the class into two sections and gave us a writing exercise we would be required to read aloud at our next meeting. “Lesbians over here, straight women over there,” she told us. We hesitated, horrified and delighted—horrified because we were all survivors of just such divisions in our community, and delighted because it was such a relief to have the issue be treated so matter-of-factly. A few women looked as if they might argue with the division, but Bertha bowled over their objections by announcing that anyone who wasn’t sure what they were could just pretend for the moment. Women blushed, sputtered, giggled, and made a choice. We sat on the floor and determinedly did not look at each other. A few women changed groups.

Bertha stood between the two groups, waiting for everyone to settle down, then she addressed the heterosexuals. “Sex,” she said, and along with many of the other women I flinched. “You’re going to write about sex. How many of you have daughters?” She nodded in acknowledgment of the few hands raised. “Remember what I said about fear and the forbidden? I want you to write about sex, about sex between a mother and a daughter, you with your daughter.” A gasp erupted, followed by uncomfortable laughter. Everyone stared straight ahead.

Bertha moved over to our group with a swagger, her thumbs hooked in the front pockets of her jeans. She cocked her head to the side and smiled charmingly. “You get it easy,” she smiled. “I want to see what you can do with language. No euphemisms. No clichés. Write for me about going down.”

There was a pause. We stared at the floor. From the back of our group came a tentative voice. “About what?”

“Cunnilingus,” someone growled.

“What’s that?” This voice was high and uncertain.

The reply came, confident and deep-voiced. “Come up to my room and I’ll show you.”

We all laughed together. A small frown line appeared between Bertha’s dark eyebrows. “Oral sex,” she said in a very clear nononsense voice. “Write about it as if no one before you had ever written about it before.”

Sitting on the floor looking up at Bertha, I ran my tongue over my teeth thoughtfully and then, realizing what I was doing, blushed furiously. Write about that, I was thinking, how can I write about that? Cunnilingus. Sixty-nine. Muff-diving. Pussy-licking. All the words I knew for the act echoed in my brain. I remembered an impassioned argument from more than a year ago when I had slid down my lover’s sweaty belly to push my face between her thighs.

“Worship you,” I had whispered to her, and then yelped when she had pulled me up by my hair.

“I hate that,” she had hissed at me. “That’s what they think we do.” Her they was piercing and contemptuous, evoking every man who had jerked off to the image of dykes licking hungrily at rigid clits. Hurt and frustrated, I had argued that I was no man and I wanted to do it. It had become an issue, subject for discussion in our CR group. Tribadism, oral sex, finger fucking. No one admitted using dildos, wanting to be tied up, wanting to be penetrated, or talking dirty—all that male stuff. Sex was important, serious, a battleground. My lover wanted us to perform tribadism, stare into each other’s eyes, and orgasm simultaneously. Egalitarian, female, feminist, revolutionary. Were those euphemisms? Euphemisms for I can’t come like that.

I thought of all the pornography I had ever read. Male language. Fucking. I liked oral sex as an act of worship, after fucking strenuously, after coming and making her come. Afterward, teasing a clit so swollen my touch is almost agonizing, listening to her moan and weep above me, or performing that act of worship while her fist is twined in my hair, holding me painfully, demanding that I work at this thing, strain with every muscle in my body until my neck and back are burning with pain and I can barely go on, following her every movement, every gasping demand, coming myself as she comes, released from the torment, orgasming on the agony and the accomplishment.

I couldn’t write that! I looked at the women leaving the room, laughing and joking, running to tell friends what Bertha Harris had dared to assign us. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Pornography, pornographic, I am, it is. Where had all that come from? Reading my stepfather’s porn collection as a teenager, jerking off as motionlessly, quietly as possible. No one must know. Sex is dangerous. What can I say that is a little dangerous, not too dangerous?

Bertha Harris, my lover and her rigid convictions. My fear. I sat down to write about how my sexual imagination had been shaped by my stepfather’s porn books, quoting the titles and making jokes about the language. Half a dozen times I began the piece and tore it up. What I wanted to admit was how conflicted I felt, how the language of those dreadful sexist dirty books both offended and heated me. I wanted to talk about how confused I was about desire itself, what acts seemed sexual, what seemed dangerous, what funny or humiliating or deeply, deeply erotic. Every attempt stalled on my fear. Easier to be funny than honest. Simpler to be confusing than blunt. I wrote and rewrote in a terror of betrayal, wanting desperately the love of beautiful women, all right, the beautiful women who would read me. But each effort was marked by my terror of their contempt. With a tremendous effort, I finally finished a piece that was playful and funny, lyrical and sensuous. I wrote about tender, soft, biscuit sex, how sometimes loving her my mouth would taste of apples and yeast. I couched it all in oceanic metaphors and even admitted my great need to charm the reader/lover. Most of all, I spoke a language of lesbian conviction, differentiating my desire from the rude awful acts of men in porn books. I was not male, absolutely not male. “This is no dance with leader and lead,” I wrote, “but coupling after the manner of dolphins who never make love where men can see.” Definitely not male.

My story-poem was a great success and a small revenge. When we had the reading, everyone blushed and yelped with appreciation. I read in a sweat of terror, self-consciousness, and pride. My ex-lover smiled at me, and I knew that the next time someone wanted to push their tongue against her clit she would find it harder to refuse them. A small glow of pleasure heated my belly. It was not till the following afternoon, when I was lying alone on the hillside in the sleepy afternoon sunlight, that I thought about what everyone else had read, how many stories had flirted with the fear of telling the truth about sex, how few actually described sex itself. Love stories, grief and memory stories, sensual memory stories, one that played on the words eating her, featuring the body of the beloved, newly dead, cooked up as stew and savored—nonexplicit to the point of obscurity. In the brave new world of lesbian-feminist fiction, much of it seemed not so brave after all.

In the context of what everyone else had written my cowardice was not so apparent. But I knew it had guided what I had written and not written. I had been almost explicit about the act, the body, and the desire. I had said the word labia, talked about sweat, and referred to the pulsing shout of release that punctuates orgasm. But I had only flirted with the truth, the way I love it when my lover’s hands pull my hair, when her teeth rake my skin. I had articulated a gentle seductive language, but I am not gentle in bed, not seductive. In heat, I am abrupt and desperate. What I had not said was so much greater than all the soft words I had used with such care.

What was taboo? In what context? Sex had always been so risky. It had seemed enough just to pronouce myself a lesbian. Did I have to say what it was I truly desired, what I did and did not do, and why? The prospect was terrifying. I left Sagaris full of confusion. I packed up my notebooks and shut my mouth on what I could not admit shamed me. I had believed everything Bertha Harris had said about the process and importance of writing. But if everything was connected, and writing well required the kind of self-knowledge and naked revelation she implied, then writing was too dangerous for me. I could not go that naked in the world. I stopped writing for six months. When I started again, I did it knowing what was necessary. Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page. If writing was dangerous, lying was deadly, and only through writing things out would I discover where my real fears were, my layered network of careful lies and secrets. Whether I published or not was unimportant. What mattered was the act of self-discovery, self-revelation. Who was I and what had happened to me? In the most curious way, I have only learned what I know through writing fiction. What I have been able to imagine has shaped what I know and revealed to me what I truly fear and desire.

It is hard to connect one year to the next, one action to the one before it, cause and effect and every act with its necessary and unique reaction. For most of my life I have been too busy to analyze, to understand how this experience produced that piece of work, or that woman precluded those others. But rereading Bertha Harris’ Lover* one night, I understood that when I wrote “Thighs” I was writing in response and tribute to the lover herself, “the sequence of events she executes to just get her own body next to another’s,” and that when I named the Boatwright family in Bastard Out of Carolina—carefully avoiding any reference to Gibson and “Yearwood, names that would have had all my South Carolina relatives sitting up to take notice of how I talked about them—I was reaching back to Lover’s twins, Bogart and Boatwright. Since I know I would never have written either book without the revelations that followed from those classes with Bertha Harris, it strikes me as completely appropriate that I made such indirect and unconscious references to my first teacher. I had not planned it or even known I was doing it at the time, but all those years I had owed Bertha Harris a debt. She was the one who stood up and dared to say what she really thought, who told me to name myself a writer and live up to the responsibility, who reaffirmed my conviction that writing was important.

Some of us have no choice, I am always telling my students. Some of us have to write in order to make sense of the world. Write out your obsessions, your fears, your curiosities and needs. You can decide later whether you will publish or not, I tell them, how much and why. Even as I say this to them, I know I am setting a trap—the same one in which I have been caught. Writing is still revolutionary, writing is still about changing the world. Each of my students who tells the truth about their life becomes part of that process, and every piece they share with me that challenges my own self-exploration pushes me to deeper work. Sex and lies, I believe, are the core of it. You may not be happy as writers, I tell them, echoing Bertha Harris, but you will know who you are and you will change the world.

Exactly.

* Reissued by New York University Press (New York, 1993)