Myths and Images

The world of lesbian fiction has undergone a transformation in the last few years, giving me a wealth of new writers and protagonists I can wholeheartedly recommend—Jeannette Winterson’s gondolier in The Passion, Carol Anshaw’s athlete in Aquamarine, April Sinclair’s furious, charming adolescent in Coffee Will Make You Black, Blanche Boyd’s witty and dangerously nervous Ellen in Revolution of Little Girls, and, of course, Fannie Flagg’s thoroughly engaging butch/femme lovers in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Unfortunately, I am never satisfied.

When I read my friend Cris South’s novel, Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses,* I was surprised by a character named Moon, a pragmatic lesbian with a history in the civil rights movement, who at a moment of violent confrontation shows up with a baseball bat and the desire to use it. Only a minor character, Moon stopped the book for me—she was so familiar. I have known a lot of women who could have been Moon. One I knew very well indeed, a woman whose right elbow no longer bends easily since it was broken outside a lunch counter in Little Rock. The last I heard of her, she had married another woman in a hand-fasting ceremony, after her bride’s ex-husband had sworn to kill them both. They moved to Arkansas, changed their names, and started an aluminum siding business. I know telling anyone she sells aluminum siding puts my friend in the realm of the not very exciting. But I think about her a lot, and how much I’d like to write her into a novel: that big white woman who drawled stories like somebody’s grandma, every one of them true, every one of them terrifying and enthralling, though for her they were just the matter-of-fact accounts of things she’d seen and done.

I’ve got a handful of candidates for novels in the back of my head, at least a half dozen lesbians whose lives are totally remarkable and apparently unimaginable to most of us. For years I kept looking in our fictions for the women I have loved in the world, and mostly failing to find them there. Only recently have a few begun to appear—that amazingly butch working-class-never-been-to-college-and-proud-of-it woman I’ve found in every city I have ever visited.

I kept thinking about an old girlfriend of mine when I was reading Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,* about the story she told me, the time her daddy went out and bought her a tailored suit, tie, and fedora. Said to her, “Girl, if you’ve got to dress that way, at least let me show you how to do it right.” He put a perfect knot in that tie, gripped her arms so tightly he left bruises, then walked out to get stunningly drunk. She stood there staring at her image in the bathroom mirror, trying to decide whether she should leave before he came back.

“Did you?” I asked her.

“Kind of,” she shrugged. “I went over to my girlfriend’s place to show her the suit, then came home in the morning to change my clothes for work. He was already gone, but the mattress from my bed was smoldering out in the alley below my window where he’d thrown it with all my stuff. I packed up what he hadn’t burned and didn’t go home again till two years later, just before he died.” She looked me right in the eye and added, “For every good intention that man ever had, he had a dozen more that were purely evil.”

I nodded, knowing just what she meant.

I once had a very strained conversation with a forceful and much-respected lesbian editor. She wanted to know why I wouldn’t review any of the novels she was publishing. Didn’t I understand how important reviews were, how hard they were to get, and, moreover, how important it was for lesbian books to be taken seriously and discussed by lesbians writers? I kept going Uh-huh and Hhhmmm and trying to change the subject. I couldn’t bring myself to say that for the most part I didn’t even remember the titles of her books, no less the characters’ names, and it just wasn’t possible for me to write about fiction in which I have no interest.

Still, many of those books that I wouldn’t read if I were trapped in a mine sell thousands of copies, so there obviously are lots of women who do find them interesting. A matter of taste, I’ve told myself, and tastes change. After all, when I was an adolescent I spent six months totally enthralled by western novels, easily rethinking the gender of all the characters. At the time it didn’t matter to me who kissed whom. I just wanted to be the gunslinger on the black horse. When kissing did become important, I hunted down every “lesbian” character, writer, and implication I could find without regard to whether the work was any good or not. In truth, for most of my life if a book was about a “lesbian,” I would read it regardless of quality or interest. That is how I have gone through an enormous collection of extremely tedious fiction and several shelves of frankly grotesque medical studies, indulging an undiscriminating and omnivorous appetite for many years. Faggots and dykes, rubber freaks and transvestites—everything queer fascinated me, and nothing so much as the everyday life and romantic adventures of people in whom I could dimly see myself. I was constantly juxtaposing one set of myths against another: the imagined life of my own possibilities against the unimagined inarticulate world literature denied me.

It makes perfect sense to me that the most popular lesbian novels are romances, love stories in which the major action is when and how (not if) true love will triumph. Love stories seem to also be the most popular heterosexual fiction, and why should lesbians be different in that? Romances cross gender lines as well as categories of sexual preference. Gay men eat this mind candy with only slightly less enthusiasm than dykes, possibly because they have had more of it available to them for a longer period of time.

Unlike any number of literary lesbians I know, I am in favor of mind candy. I think romances, like science fiction, Gothics, and pornography, serve several distinct and vital purposes, not the least of which is to challenge or augment our own mythology. More than simply a mental vacation, genre fiction and romances provide a grounding in a queer version of the contemporary world. We get to see ourselves and our community on the printed page, and that is vitally important. Growing up an obsessive and self-consciously queer reader, I was ravenous for anything that remotely suggested perversity. I needed to know both that I was not the only one, and what all the people who were not queer thought it meant. After all, knowing the cultural mythology about your identity is vital to organizing your own survival. It also plays a part in developing an affirmative self-image—sometimes just by showing how wrong-headed the straight world can be about us.

“Imagine,” I announced to a girlfriend after reading Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye, “how many people think lesbians cut off their nipples with garden sheers.” If they think that, they must be wrong about a few other things too, I reasoned. Scrupulously I researched lesbian and gay characters as presented in mainstream fiction by supposedly straight authors. Silliness, I told myself, though every now and again I’d reconsider. What, I wondered, did Carson McCullers intend with that woman who cut off her nipples—a calculated way to talk about denial and the death of the soul?

I still remember the shock with which I discovered Carol in a Thousand Cities, the Beebo Brinker books by Ann Bannon, and later, the weepy but entirely believable Olivia. Suddenly I was no longer dependent on straight people’s ideas about who we were. I entered the realm of willful self-mythology. As a woman who wanted to write, nothing could have been more important than learning I didn’t have to spend my life rewriting my imagination to suit a straight world.

I picked up Rubyfruit Jungle from a friend in 1973 and felt the world shift around me. Rita Mae Brown wasn’t just a lesbian novelist, and her book wasn’t just a reassuring romance. Molly Bolt was a completely new way to imagine myself. Goddamn and Hello, I shouted, and went home to reinvent my imagination again. Nor was I the only one who took up Rita Mae as a role model. Overnight, lots of lesbians started writing the politically aware novel of their own lives, which, in fact, is something we’ve gotten with monotonous regularity since. After a few years I started feeling like Molly Bolt was a lot to live up to, but still easier on all of us than her clones, particularly since most Molly Aspirants were dismally forgettable.

For years I have made a practice of asking people about their favorite lesbian novel, and it is amazing how many people couldn’t remember one, or fell back on The Well of Loneliness. I never raise the question of how good the work is as literature, only how memorable—and memorable is about mythos. The characters in fiction we remember are the ones around whom we build our ideas of the world. No amount of political analysis will force people to believe in an idea they cannot imagine, or a character in which they cannot see themselves or someone they love. Unfortunately, I am never sure if it is the power of good writing that makes a character real (and thus an idea of how life can be lived), or how close the character comes to ideas people already accept or are ready to accept. Would Molly Bolt have been the same twenty years earlier? Not a chance.

Given all this, I still find myself irritated with a lot of the lesbian and gay novels being published today. I mostly don’t believe in the characters, or else I’m not interested in what happens to them. Why do so many of them talk alike and appear to have gone to the same college, seen the same movies, read the same books, and apparently lived nearly the same lives? Are we so stuck inside the boundaries of what has thus far been presented as the gay and lesbian mythos?

Well, what should we be writing? my students ask me.

Write about people who fascinate you, I tell them. Write about people who move you passionately, ideas and arguments that get you excited. Don’t write uninvolved books. Write engaged books, angry, sexy, outrageous, scary, and dangerous books. Don’t prop your story up with slogans, or walk your cardboard characters through the last argument you read in a news magazine. Don’t write what you think you should be writing. Write what you love. Write about people you can’t forget. It’s time for books written by people who are in love with their characters and can make us feel that.

As a start, may I suggest someone like my friend down in Arkansas?

This essay appeared in an earlier version in March 1985 in the New York Native.

*Crossing Press (Freedom: California, 1985)

*Firebrand Books (Ithaca: New York, 1993)