Because I have written a lot about marginalized, even criminalized, experiences—my own—the title activist often gets applied to me. It never feels correct. Maybe because I did real activism in my youth, traveling up to Kennebunkport, Maine—summer playground for Bush the First—with ACT UP to stage a massive die-in in the quaint New England streets. A human carpet, prone beneath the August sun, queers sprawled against queers, silent, everyone thinking about those they’d lost, or their own death sentence. Not me. I hadn’t lost anyone, too young and too lucky, I guess, but I’d awakened to how evil people could be, how so many of these evil people ran the show called America. I did a lot of activism that summer. When my recent ex-boyfriend showed up for a potential job at a Sunglass Hut in Nahant, Massachusetts, and was asked by the manager if he was gay—“Because we don’t even let them shop here”—I assembled my ragtag group of new, gay (and newly gay) friends and we ransacked that shop, leaving piles of sunglasses, the entire store, really, heaped on top of the counter. We informed the manager of our queerness and his illegal discrimination and went on to get him fired. After sleep-deprived weeks defending women’s health clinics against Operation Rescue, I found out the name of the church one of the antichoice priests preached at and another field trip was underway, one where we homos stood outside the church with screams and signs and noisemakers, disrupting their Sunday morning services as they had disrupted our Sunday mornings, period, for the past weeks.
I spray-painted the name and crime of the man who’d sexually assaulted my friend outside his apartment. I blocked the streets around a church hosting a famed antigay preacher, throwing a notebook full of angry poetry at the head of a lesbian cop manhandling protesters. I took off my shirt to call attention to the unasked for sexualization of my body, its freedom controlled by government and capitalism. I did all of this and more, and perhaps because I did it all so long ago, hearing myself referred to as an activist simply for my writing feels bad, a real cop-out. Activists put their bodies on the line. They risk arrest and abuse. My writing—though it may have, hopefully, provided support and entertainment—has been largely a self-serving enterprise. I write because I am strangely compelled to, and because I generally enjoy it and understand it to be my purpose in this life, but also because I hope it will bring me things: money, security, compliments, fame, respect, and power, and the opportunity for increased money, security, compliments, fame, respect, and power. Even RADAR Productions, the queer-centric literary nonprofit I created and ran for over a decade, even as much of its work could be loosely construed as “activism” for championing and providing resources to marginalized writers, even that provided me with a paycheck and access to a material world I’d never before known. There is an argument that activism can take many forms and need not only be risking everything in the streets, but to me that is activism, and having not done that in quite a while, the label quickly peels off of me.
And so, when I was asked to speak at a university on the topic of activist writings and the personal being political, I felt uneasy. If I’d had more psychic space, if I hadn’t had a one-year-old and hadn’t just relocated to an entirely new town where I was trying to build for myself an entirely new version of my writing life, perhaps I could have read actual activist texts, writings by Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., various suffragettes and abolitionists, and taught a sort of class, but that’s not exactly what I do and, I believe, not exactly what was expected of me. Being a writer of personal narratives that do cast a light on my life’s political sources and ramifications, I figured I should be talking more or less about myself. And I was less inspired than ever.
Donald Trump hadn’t won the election yet, and, truthfully, I didn’t believe he would. In but a few weeks, I would gather beloved friends at my home to watch the results come in and celebrate our imperfect candidate, the first female president of the United States of America, Hillary Clinton. My friend Tara wore a lavender pantsuit, my friend Gigi brought balloons and little American flags. My eight-year-old niece arrived wearing a “Hillary” barrette my sister painstakingly crafted for her. I myself made a “Trumpkin”—a small, orange gourd carved in his likeness, replete with perpetually windblown comb-over, barfing bright-green guacamole onto a platter. It was only my friend Maggie who arrived with all the grimness of Cassandra and spent the night about two inches from the television screen, her thin face growing increasingly pinched as I ran from room to room, following a parade of toddlers, pausing for a scoop of guac and to reassure poor, nervous Maggie that everything, of course, was going to be all right.
Obviously, it wasn’t. When the impossible began taking shape on the horizon of our collective lives, Maggie went home, and others followed. Having been distracted by the kids, it took me a moment to catch up with where my guests had landed, a baffled acknowledgment that Donald Trump, the sexual-assaulting, racist, reality-TV narcissist, was to be our president. There’s a mistake, I thought, as Tara began to cry in her excellent lavender pantsuit. I watched comedian Jena Friedman cry on the television, advising us all to get our abortions, now. My friends Nicole and Sandwich were sunk into my couch and stayed that way until I all but kicked them out, all the life energy sucked from them, not wanting to go out and face this world that we all already knew was horrible, right? We all were like-minded, with days of in-the-streets activism in our past, writers and artists whose political opinions are clear to any reader. We were among those who complained about the giant problem that is America even throughout the Obama years. We knew the bulk of the people in our country are misogynists who don’t believe they are misogynist, racists who don’t think they are racist, homophobes who don’t think they are homophobes, we knew this already, but still, to see these attitudes manifest in this president, this president—we cried. Soon I would phone various legal organizations to see if they advised I begin a formal adoption process for the baby I literally gave birth to. I would hear shouting from my bathroom and dash out of the house in a bathrobe to watch the entirety of Eagle Rock High School defiantly storm out of class and take to the streets. I would succumb to a variety of Facebook fights that were, honestly, beneath me in every way. I would promise to stop and do it again, my rage in need of any outlet, no matter how pathetic. I would unfriend a cousin I’d thought I loved. I would ask one hundred online friends to please befriend my mother, because she is based in Florida and her internet experience was becoming increasingly apocalyptic.
But my talk at the university was weeks before this. I may not have believed, then, that the worst could happen, but I was still disgusted by the swell of support Trump was enjoying. It was exactly two days since the Access Hollywood story had been leaked. “I moved on her like a bitch. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” It was the last one, “You can do anything,” that stuck with and haunted me. Because it’s true, and we were seeing it play out writ large, as so many of us had witnessed in our personal political realm: any man can do anything, and it’s fine. The consequences are minimal, if there are even any consequences at all. A man can sexually assault a woman, brag about it, and run for president, and voters with full knowledge of this voted for him. Because what is a female life, comparatively? What is a pussy?
When I was young I had my pussy grabbed. I also lived in a city that had elected a man who was rumored to be sexually aggressive toward women, decades before I was born, in spite of his known penchant for indecent exposure. A political scion—his father had been mayor decades earlier, the VA hospital was named for him—known to visit women’s colleges, Barnard and Radcliffe, and lurk around the grounds, brandishing his dick at whatever unlucky student happened to cross his path. He was a young mayor, twenty-five years old, and he’d already been a senator before that, had hung out with JFK, went on to chair the school committee, to buy the town newspaper, the Chelsea Record, and publish his own political opinions without regard to accusations of conflict of interest. Andrew Quigley. It was through him I first learned the word flasher. A Ford dealership was advertising cars equipped with newfangled turn signals—it was the 1970s, and flashers, as they were called, were extra. WE HAVE ANDREW QUIGLEYS, the dealership advertised, making my father chuckle as we drove by. Why is that funny? “They mean flashers. Andrew Quigley is a flasher.”
“What’s a flasher?”
“Oh.”
The idea of a flasher—sad, desperate, bottomless beneath his trench coat—is humorous enough, I suppose, but when you are a woman, alone, walking, and are suddenly face-to-cock with a strange man unhinged enough to do such a thing, well, it’s terrifying. It’s not having to look upon a penis that is the source of terror, that is simply gross. Most penises need to be beloved in some way to not repulse, and so gazing upon one unbidden is pretty yucky, though not necessarily horrifying. It’s the implicit threat that is so frightening. A man seeking an unwanted sexual scenario with a non-consenting woman, understanding his penis to be, on some level, a weapon, hiding behind a tree and hopping out with it unsheathed. Is this man going to grab me, chase me, rape me, kill me? He wants to inspire a sexualized terror. I saw these men around Chelsea when I was growing up. Hiding in the woods behind the VA hospital. Lurking by the creek I crossed via overpass on my way to the mall. Pulling up to the curb near a different mall, asking for directions, window pulled down, and when you get close enough to see—there it is, in his hand, being jerked as the jerk asks you if you know which direction is Broadway. You see your life flash before your eyes in such moments, with every gruesome story about kidnapped girls, girls dumped in dumpsters, found dead in the woods, on the railroad tracks, etc. etc. etc., ricocheting across your (my) twelve-year-old brain.
It’s funny, having my pussy actually grabbed didn’t inspire the total terror that a random dick on an empty street did. Maybe because I was older, eighteen, just out of high school, in Boston for the day looking for a job. I’d stopped by my post office box to see if anyone had smuggled some dollars through the mail in exchange for a copy of my new zine, Bitch Queen. They had! With some money and zine trades stuffed in my black army bag I made my way into Copley Place, a Back Bay shopping emporium waaaaaaay more upscale than the cruddy Mystic or Square One malls where my formative dick-flashes had occurred. I could not even tell you what the stores at the Copley Place mall sold, they were beyond my reach to the point of nonexistence. But they did have an Au Bon Pain, and when I had the dollars, I liked to get a soup and a croissant and sit and read a book. Thanks to my new feminist zine venture, I had about five dollars and was looking forward to chilling out after pounding the pavement all day. I entered through the Westin, a hotel so fancy they employed a piano player in their lobby during the afternoon. I imagine he was playing that day as I boarded the escalator and was carried up into the luxe environment, deep carpet and crystal chandeliers. I was wearing pants. Baggy black pants I had bought on a trip to New York City. I had only recently emerged from the intense black lace of my goth identity. I didn’t really know what to wear if I wasn’t wearing black lipstick and rhinestone chokers, and I think I probably looked boring. Neutered, somewhat androgynous. The pants were silk, and something about the way they both fluttered and hid me felt cool, felt like New York or London, sort of tough. Maybe something a girl who worked in an art gallery would wear. Maybe I would work in an art gallery someday, maybe I could pop in and see if any were hiring—is that how a person got a job at an art gallery? My army bag still held a few resumes, getting crumpled against my new zines, Not Your Bitch, Chainsaw, Outpunk. Deep in thought, a hand is suddenly, insistently, painfully digging into my crotch.
Because the pants were so thin, it felt like there was nothing between the man’s knuckles and my vulva. Knuckles, the hard bumps of them, are what I remember most, and it’s why the word knuckles has long grossed me out a little. There was also a fleeting bafflement at my own physiology. My pussy—my privates, I was raised to call it—was located in the front of my body, was it not? And this man standing behind me, the ease with which he just reached out and groped it. I had imagined my pussy, my privates, tucked deep inside me, somehow protected by evolution, but now I understood it to be but a piece of ripe fruit dangling from my backside. The joke was on me—and what a joke!—to have walked around with my pussy so accessible all these years. This was bound to happen. It truly was. Before I could breathe again, because I had stopped, of course, the escalator had delivered me to the top. I fumbled off and the man continued on in long strides. Before I could even begin to come up with a plan, he was gone. Gone through the doors that led to the glass skywalk that led to the mall.
I wish I had done absolutely anything at all. I did nothing, which is always the worst. And I know that it is enough to withstand an assault; that in itself is enough, to have to then act in any sort of clever, brainy, heroic, witty way, with the sensation of the man’s hand still clamped on your pussy—it’s too much. It verges on a sort of victim blaming. It is enough that I stood there, shaking with rage, with the sudden onslaught of injustice. Enough to have spun around in hopes that someone, anyone, had seen it, was making themselves known to me, was stepping up to right this horrid wrong. I was eighteen years old and still lived at home and probably wanted someone to take care of me. There was no one. A security guard standing idly by the exit where the pussy grabber had just passed through. A man. I didn’t like security guards. My friends and I had been ejected from the Copley Mall more times than I could count, for loitering or stealing coins from the wishing fountain or using the smooth metal descent between the escalators as a slide. They handled us roughly and with disgust and I was not about to tell one that a man had grabbed my privates. A man I’d only seen the back of, who could be practically any man at all. And so, my story ends. I did not grab him back, dig my own knuckles into the blob of his scrotum. I did not let a warrior yell loose from my throat and attempt to tackle him. I did not simply scream and point, I did not give chase. I stood there, stunned, until I realized I was in the way of the people coming up the escalator, and I moved out of the way and walked through the glass tunnel to the Au Bon Pain. And I had soup and a croissant and I read about a young, punk rock feminism I had not at all known was happening. And I went home. All the time, the man’s hand stayed there, lodged roughly between my legs.
This was the story I was going to tell at the university, about how a man who brags about grabbing women’s pussies is a serious contender for the presidency of the United States and there was nothing my writing or anyone’s writing could do to stop it, to change the consciousness of the millions of people voting for him, because we have been writing, and before us, so too were all the others who lived and died writing and their writing didn’t change anything either, did it? A big part of my personality, I know, is optimism, hope, and inspiration. If I may be so crass, I might even say it is part of my brand. I was not brought to this university to suggest that the writings of, say, James Baldwin, even as they remain perhaps the very best writings in the history of the English language, actually have done nothing to bring about change because here we are, decades after his death, contemplating the eminent rule of a famous bigot. While on a normal day I am a bit ambivalent, suspicious, about writing’s ability to change the world, on this day I was most cynical. I decided to accept the fact that I might be a ginormous bummer to the students I was preparing to present to. It didn’t feel good. Students are children, right, and children are the future, and the future is bright. But I felt so tremendously defeated, and I wanted to make space for that. It didn’t feel good, but it felt honest. And why should these children be the future, anyway? They are inheriting all of this shit and somehow they’re supposed to save us all? Ugh. We’re all fucked, is how I felt. I sat at a café, trying to work it into a coherent essay. I did a lot of internet research, trying to find more information about Andrew Quigley’s indecent exposure. Whatever happened happened before the internet, and his family probably had his record expunged anyway. I posted a call for rumors, knowing how tacky that sounded, on a Chelsea Facebook page, and was met with outrage from the townspeople, for speaking ill of the dead and bringing shame upon his ancestors and also for being a lazy writer likely suffering from writer’s block. I deleted it. An acquaintance from Quigley’s generation confirmed the anecdote about the Ford dealership and recounted a school board meeting assembled to discuss Chelsea High being the lowest-scoring high school in Massachusetts. A fireman at the back of the room, unimpressed with Quigley’s proposal, shouted, “Hey, Andrew! This is what I think of your input,” and whipped his raincoat open and closed, open and closed. I kept searching, playing with different keywords. And then I found this:
The City to a Young Girl
The city is
one million horny lip-smacking men
screaming for my body.
The streets are long conveyor belts
loaded with these suckling pigs.
All begging for
a lay
a little pussy
a bit of tit
a leg to rub against
a handful of ass
the connoisseurs of cunt
Every day, every night
pressing in on me closer and closer.
I swat them off like flies
but they keep coming back.
I’m a good piece of meat.
This poem was written in 1970, by a fifteen-year-old New York City girl named Jody Caravaglia. It had been published in the Hunter College High School literary magazine, and from there was picked up for inclusion in an Avon anthology with the scintillating title Male and Female Under 18. Forty thousand copies of this collection of youth writing were published, and the book was selected by educational publishers Prentice Hall for inclusion in a reading program which bundled together a variety of books and sold them to school libraries at a discount. Chelsea High School’s library participated in this program, and in winter 1976, Male and Female Under 18 was added to the shelves. That spring, an upset parent made a phone call to Andrew Quigley, then chair of the school committee. Her teenage daughter had borrowed Male and Female, and maybe she was freaked out by “The City to a Young Girl,” the shock of finding the word cunt in a school library book. Or maybe the mom was paging through it and it was she who flipped out. Regardless, Quigley made a home visit, was shown the poem, and decided the book would be removed from the library. He didn’t consult the rest of the committee—three men and three women—but did arrange a meeting to discuss “objectionable, salacious, and obscene material being made available in books in the High School Library.” He then penned an op-ed and published it in his newspaper, the Chelsea Record. Male and Female Under 18 “made me sick to my stomach to think that such a book could be obtained in any school—let alone one here in Chelsea.”
Quigley shared copies of the poem with the three male members of the school committee in time for the meeting. He did not distribute copies to the women, believing the poem too “crude” and “offensive” for female eyes. At the meeting, Quigley deemed the poem “outright obscene” and “filth.” Fellow committee member Anthony “Chubby” Tiro cosigned, stating, “The book is lewd and leaves nothing to the imagination. It’s outright obnoxious.” The committee moved to petition Chelsea’s superintendent of schools, Vincent McGee, to remove the book from the school library; it had already been temporarily removed, Caravaglia’s poem torn out. McGee found it concerning that the complaint was being handled in an open school meeting, and suggested Quigley was “setting in motion a chain of events that might lead to censorship.”
And he was. Quigley penned another editorial, scolding McGee’s thoughtful prudence and calling “The City to a Young Girl” “vile and offensive garbage.” He threatened the librarian, Sonja Coleman, with the loss of her job, and she responded by defending Caravaglia’s poem as not being obscene, insisting that both students and faculty should have access to it, and suggesting that the book was improperly removed from the school library—there are clear American Library Association guidelines on how to handle a challenged book, and the Chelsea school committee seemed ignorant of them. Quigley wrote another editorial, calling the poem “lewd, lascivious, filthy, suggestive, licentious, pornographic” and, again, “obscene.” And he continued to call meetings. At one, a committee member called Caravaglia “a sick child.” At the next, the school committee voted unanimously to remove Male and Female Under 18. At the next, Quigley moved that the committee consider removing Coleman from the library.
One week later, Coleman, having assembled a group of allies under the banner Right to Read Defense Committee, filed suit against the Chelsea school committee in federal court. The plaintiffs asked for an injunction against the book’s removal, protection for Coleman against reprisals, and a judgment that the removal of Male and Female Under 18 violated the rights of students, teachers, and librarians. Federal judge Joseph Tauro soon issued a temporary injunction, returning the book to the library for students whose parents issued a note allowing them to read it, and ordered that there be no reprisals against Coleman.
Here’s me, in a café in Portland, Oregon, a few hours from this talk I was dreading, suddenly electrified with excitement, with rage and pride and a sense of poetic, feminist history. First of all, the poem itself: “The streets are long conveyor belts / loaded with these suckling pigs.” The pure disgust of a fifteen-year-old girl, one empowered enough to call out such shit when she sees it, to not mince words, to turn the assaulters’ grotesque language against them by reclaiming it—one of my favorite methods of defense: “a little pussy / a bit of tit / … / the connoisseurs of cunt.” This was slam poetry decades before slam poetry existed. It was the sort of feminist confessional rage I myself had begun my writing with, and I was swooning backward through the ages at this fifteen-year-old girl who had so deeply pissed off Andrew Quigley. Oh, the irony, if that’s what it is, of a serious street harasser trying to shut up this brave, truth-speaking young girl. The perennial bravery of librarians! The confirmation, yet again, of how lousy my hometown was! I continued to scan the trial transcripts because the trial, though I had never, ever heard of it, was actually quite important and is still taught in law schools today.
The bench trial spanned six days in the fall. Over a hundred Chelsea High School students crammed into the courtroom, missing school to watch history being made for them. They were scolded by the judge for snapping their gum and for throwing toilet paper out of the courtroom windows (!!!) but otherwise kept it together. It took months for Judge Tauro to deliver his verdict, and in the meantime Quigley and the school committee voted to fire Sonja Coleman, but backed off when the librarian asked the court to hold them in contempt for disregarding the order that her job be protected.
In the end, what prevailed? Justice. In his opinion, Judge Tauro speaks lovingly of libraries, calling them “magic.” “The most effective antidote to the poison of mindless orthodoxy is ready access to a broad sweep of ideas and philosophies,” he wrote. “The danger is mind control.”
I Google-Image-searched Jody Caravaglia, fantasizing that a tough-ass teenage girl would pop up and say, “What’s up,” to me between cracks of her gum. What I got was a bunch of pictures of pregnant women wrapped around yoga balls, in between black-and-white photos of Patti Smith Group live onstage, Mink DeVille on his knees, all big hair and intense cheekbones, Elvis Costello with his guitar slung around his neck. Photo credit: Jody Caravaglia. My heart raced, because I love girls and their stories, I love outsider culture, and it is truly these things that have helped me make sense of my own place in this hostile world, that somewhere there was a corner, there were people, and I belonged to them. Jody Caravaglia, who was fucking sick of men ogling her on the streets of New York City, who boldly wrote a poem about it, who pissed off a bunch of conservative men and prevailed. After the trial, Sonja Coleman said that thirty or so Chelsea High students formed their own group for students’ rights as a result of their right to read being so messed with. When Quigley and Co. tried to ban their student newsletter they involved the ACLU, and the goons backed off. Meanwhile, Jody Caravaglia, now in her twenties, was pursuing photography, capturing these underground antihero rockers, getting bylines in Rolling Stone. Feeling like a detective, I clicked around my computer, checking out the photos of rows of pregnant women on yoga balls. A prenatal massage place in Brooklyn, begun by a Jody Caravaglia. When the creative people of my generation’s need for stability grew too strong to ignore, they became life coaches. The generation before mine had become massage therapists. The trajectory from angry slam-poet teenager to cool rock photographer to prenatal massage therapist made sense. I called the number on my screen and left a message for Jody Caravaglia. And five minutes later, as I returned to my table with a refill of coffee, she called me back.
Here’s why I love “The City to a Young Girl.” First of all, it’s true. For any young female, any city is strewn with landmines of unwanted male attention. So, it’s got universal appeal. Something it probably has not been credited with because universal experiences are male. But all women know this. And the boldness of her language makes her strong, a sort of warrior on all of our behalf. That language does everything I didn’t do when the man on the escalator grabbed my cunt. By simply grabbing the reins of the predatory language meant to intimidate and objectify she becomes a sort of fearless linguistic goddess. You feel the power of the words twofold—with a flinch you feel them being hurled at you, yet simultaneously she catches the bullets in her hands and whips them back at our assailants. She’s also lampooning them, mightily. “Suckling pigs.” “Connoisseurs of cunt.” How hilarious! To reduce the threat of men to a bunch of needy babies, grotesque and snarfling. To mock their interest in women—they’re connoisseurs—sure they are, the poet winks. I am giddy with the daring vision of this fifteen-year-old girl when my cell phone rings.
Jody Caravaglia is as open and forthcoming as maybe you could expect from such a poem, as, I don’t know, earthy as someone comfy with both obscene language and handling the bodies of pregnant women. I like her immediately. She still doesn’t think her poem, her writing it, is that big of a deal. She went to a cool high school, it was the sixties, she was encouraged to think and write boldly, it’s what everyone was doing. She thought the trial was absurd, but she wishes she had thought of a way to monetize the moment. Her poem had captured national attention, but she struggled the way artists struggle. She had a turbulent love life. She was terrified of Trump winning the election, horrified and disgusted by the recent Access Hollywood tapes. She’s intense but warm, a New Yorker, I guess, though I suspect she’s also a Scorpio. Through my phone her energy enters the sedate Portland café, seeming to invigorate everything. I told her I’d like to be her friend. “I don’t do friends,” she says in a not unfriendly way. “But we can know each other.”
I have to ask, “What sign are you?”
“Scorpio.”
I read the end of “The City to a Young Girl” differently than the author intended it. It closes with “I’m a good piece of meat”—a dark acceptance, I thought, a depressing moment of biology actually equaling destiny. After indulging this larger-than-life hellion vibe, a sort of linguistic revenge fantasy, I appreciated the entrance of some despair, some exhaustion. It’s real. But that’s not quite how Caravaglia meant it. It was more like, she’s complicit. Some part of her liked the attention. Some part of her was participating. I wanted to struggle against this with her—no, this fifteen-year-old girl, all of us girls and women, are put into the rotten position of being sexualized and harassed by strangers and having that be somewhat normal—whatever we do to cope with it, we’re not complicit. But I didn’t write “The City to a Young Girl.” It’s not my poem, it’s Jody Caravaglia’s, and at the end of it all I do like that she complicates the story. “I’m a good piece of meat.” It’s grim, but smart. There’s a poet behind the poet, a set of eyes watching the way that this put-upon female body gathers some sort of pleasure, or power, from the sexual attention, and that observer blows our narrator’s cover. It’s meta. I love Jody Caravaglia.
But I have to go. I have a lecture to deliver. I try to get all of this down in a document in the scarce time I have left. I’m feeling it, the purpose and point of our political writings, our personal struggles. It’s not to change the world that can’t or won’t be changed. It’s to leave traces of ourselves for others to hold on to, a lifeline of solidarity that spans time, that passes on strength like a baton from person to person, generation to generation. I felt enlivened by Jody’s poem, which did, in fact, change the actual world if by changing the world I mean changing laws. I guess that’s my issue with writing as activism: how hard it is for it to change the actual systems that oppress and limit and kill. But Jody Caravaglia did it. Her poem created increased legal freedom for what we can and cannot read, what young people have access to. This poem, with the help of Sonja Coleman and her allies, demanded that the complicated and often violent experience of being female not be considered obscene.
At my lecture, calamity happened. My document was nowhere to be found. I found myself in the most dreaded position of being at a podium in a room full of occupied seats, department heads lingering in the back of the room, all eyes on me, all words erased from my screen. So I talked. I read “The City to a Young Girl.” It was a pleasure to read it. I told everyone about Jody Caravaglia. That two hours ago I was in despair about this topic, activist writing, writing that makes a difference. I had made my peace with being uninspiring and depressed, and within this short span of time a piece of writing spoke to me across generations and filled me with hope. The discovery of this poem, this triumphant court case, and my new brio-filled not-friend Jody Caravaglia—that I had found them all through my investigations of that scoundrel Andrew Quigley—it felt like magic, a miracle. Our words and stories are so often buried, forgotten, never known, and the excavation of them may not change the world but it may make the world worth living in. I cried a little as I spoke, wondering if this current political climate wasn’t effectively driving me mad, but so what if it was, I figured. Madness is always an appropriate response. Everyone in the audience wanted to know the poem, to know Jody Caravaglia. They wrote her name in their notebooks. Later, when I returned home, I typed her name and her poem into various social media sites, using the somewhat pathetic tools of our time to launch her story into the world. Somewhat pathetic, but without them how else would I have shared her work, how else would I have found it, found her, at all? I felt a rare sensation that all was as it should be, the whole awful beautiful mess of it. The feeling filled me up, sparking tears, a gorgeous flicker, and then receded. Because all is not as it should be. And we all must get to our work.
From a talk given in 2016 at Portland State University.