It would be a massive book on a specially carved wooden stand. The page ends would be gilded and it would fasten with an elaborate metal clasp in the shape of a labrys. The binding would be purple vellum … no. Vellum was calf skin. No animal products. The binding would be fine purple cloth with the title embroidered in green and white. The Book of Everything We Know: Lesbian lore from the beginning of time.
The book would tell all the lesbian stories, outline all that lesbians had discovered, all that they knew, caring for each other, for animals, for the Earth. All the old herbal and healing lore, the secrets that the witches were burnt for. The stories would be tales of courage. Courage not in fighting and warfare, but in refusing to do things that are wrong, refusing to tell lies and toe lines. Courage to be true.
It would be both funny and profound.
The book would be a great treasure, sought out by women and men everywhere, consulted by scholars and ordinary folk alike. It would be known by repute in the four corners of the Earth, revered by all. The reputation of the book would be in direct proportion to the high standing of lesbians in the community, the respect accorded to their wisdom and experience.
But at this point Ro, wiping her eyes and gulping chocolate, had to admit to a paradox. Lesbian wisdom arose from the experience of outlawry. So if lesbians were to be held in high esteem, and were no longer outlaws, what would happen to their wisdom?
What was it she wanted? To be loved and accepted? Or to be care-for-nobody, law-unto-ourselves? In the fold, or out of the fold?
She dug out the diatribe she had written for Lesbian News after the Pine Gap protest years before.
I’m not anything respectable, she had written. I’m a LESBIAN.
That was it. What they had been was not-respectable. And now they were respectable. Almost.
She observed with horror the hijacking of the GLB liberation project by the campaign for gay marriage. Marriage? They want to be MARRIED?
Gay marriage, changing gender, getting a new body. Lesbian, plain and simple, was old hat. Sadly she fastened the clasp of The Book of Everything We Know. In any case, who needed a book? Google had arrived, and with it the days of everyone knows everything.