Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human
A Heartfelt Thanks To All the Pioneers
I almost missed it. As I do many things. When newspapers enter our house, they sit, get older, are scanned hurriedly and then recycled. We’re out of touch, sure, but that’s life right now, a marathon race of picking up and dropping off and deadlines and homework and the usual. And so it was an exception that I actually gave our local gay paper Just Out a more thorough read and discovered to my delight that one of my favorite authors is coming to town next week, Lillian Faderman.
I always make the assumption that every lesbian in America knows Lillian Faderman’s work, and pays similar homage. I figure any woman who writes “a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America” (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) deserves the occasional genuflection by the grateful masses. But maybe it’s just me.
Needless to say I poured over the short article about her latest book, To Believe In Women, and her gratitude for all the women who paved the way for her acceptance and happiness as a lesbian.
And I thought, way to go Lillian. I’ll second that motion.
And I’ll start by thanking her. It was Faderman’s book, Surpassing the Love of Men (a history of love between women from the Renaissance to the present), that I checked out of the library again and again and again in college, keeping it until the fines on it were enough to buy three books. She is a woman who became a lesbian mom before there were scads of us filling the Lamaze classes and preschools (surely an act of the utmost bravery), and she’s devoted her career to bringing to light the women who went before us.
Because where would we be without all of them? And though I’m grateful for Oscar Wilde refusing to apologize, and for David Hockney and Robert Mapplethorpe making magic with a Polaroid, and for the drag queens refusing to “go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go” at Stonewall, it is the women to whom I relate. As a mother of a son I am ever so pro-male, but I am not a male, certainly not a gay male, and I don’t want to be.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
But who I did want to be as a young lesbian was Natalie Barney. With or without the dough. Or Romaine Brooks with her marvelous portraits. Or Hilda Doolittle, or Sylvia Beach (though not Gertrude Stein because she’s way too butch for me).
I wanted to know the minds of Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Cherrie Moraga and Audre Lorde, who despite my seeming retreat from the world of feminism (I am a housewife after all), inform my everyday life by their words. You can take the woman out of the Women’s Studies program, but you can’t take the Women’s Studies program out of the woman.
I wish I could go back and thank all the butches and femmes meeting in nightclubs, risking arrest, because they needed each other so much. I wish it was required that all the pierced and tattooed babes shouting about queer this and queer that, and defiantly questioning gender must stop and give a moment of silence for all the women, who lived before community centers, Bennetton ads or Julie and Melissa (bless their motherly hearts). Perhaps they do it anyway.
Even the small can mean so much. Though their rejection of my make-up wearing ways hurt me to the quick, just meeting a roomful of hairy-legged, actual lesbians at my sister’s college twenty years ago opened up a new vista. Though he died before I had a chance to meet him, my mother’s cousin Kevin was, throughout my childhood, a symbol for gayness. The evidence that it was a possibility. He was an influence by just existing.
As were the two women who visited our tiny trailer park each year in Canada. They had lived together over four decades before one of them finally passed away. Short, squat, their gray hair cut close to their heads, they were the stereotype embodied, with their fishing, their little dogs, their blunt, plainspoken humor that I found threatening yet strangely appealing. I saw them over seven years of my childhood, seven summers, and got to know them. My mother says they weren’t lesbians, or that they didn’t know they were. But I knew they were a couple, and the happiest one I ever witnessed as a kid. They made love between women look good.
Without a tattoo between them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the women out there now as well. When I walked into the video store with my son recently after talking in the car about what “gay” meant, it was nice to look up and see the Indigo Girls performing and be able to say, “they’re gay too.” Our kids sing along to Melissa Etheridge, and know she has kids with her partner. I’m grateful for kd lang shaving Cindy Crawford, for Chastity Bono coming out, for Ellen having a really cute girlfriend and everyone knowing it, and for not being the only lesbian mom on the block.
And thank you Lillian Faderman, for reminding me.