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Remembering Carolyn Heilbrun
Many readers of The Women's Review of Books were saddened to learn of the death of pioneering feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun. For us on the staff, losing her means losing a part of our history: She was instrumental in founding the Women's Review and served as one of our editorial advisers from the very beginning, putting us in touch with potential writers and subscribers, and writing often herself. We will miss her intelligence, her creativity, and her insight.
In July, Heilbrun contributed an article to our special issue about Women Aging. At 77, she was the oldest contributor to the issue, which she emphasized in our editorial discussions with her. In the article, she talked (not for the first time, as readers of her book The Last Gift of Time knew) about making the choice to continue living beyond age 70. She wrote of her constant awareness that she might at any moment fall victim to "a devastating, unanticipated assault from some bodily failure," saying, "If each day is a loan from eternity, one spends it with the joy known to gamblers betting everything on a last roll of the dice. The payoff is intensity." At some point, though, the intensity must have failed her. "I have always believed that, over 70, one should be as free to choose one's death as one must, earlier, be free to choose whether or not to give birth," she stated. In October, she committed suicide.
Her decision has shaken her community of admirers, many of whom wrote to us at the Women's Review. Anne Eggebroten, of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, calls Heilbrun "the pre-eminent literary feminist of the latter 20th century, writing both fiction and feminist cultural analysis." She compares waking to Heilbrun's obituary in the newspaper to what it must have been like waking to Virginia Woolf's, and she points out that Heilbrun managed what Woolf could not "when she carved out for herself a place in the English department of Columbia University. Instead of retiring quietly in 1992, she left Columbia in a blaze of protest at the entrenched patriarchal values of the men she had worked with for 32 years, telling the New York Times in an interview, 'When I spoke up for women's issues, I was made to feel unwelcome in my own department, kept off crucial committees, ridiculed, ignored.'"
Heilbrun was born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1926 and spent her childhood in Manhattan, "roller skating for hours or devouring biographies," as she told an interviewer from Wellesley College, from which she graduated in 1947. She met her husband, James Heilbrun, while he was a student at Harvard, and they married the evening before he left for service in World War II. They had three children. She received her doctorate in literature in 1959 and began teaching at Columbia in 1960, where she became a star professor, known for her courses on modern British literature and feminist theory. Among her scholarly works are Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973), Reinventing Womanhood (1979), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), Hamlet's Mother and Other Women (1990), The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997). Only after receiving tenure from Columbia in 1972 did she reveal she was also the creator of Kate Fansler, the English professor-heroine of a series of mystery novels written under the pseudonym Amanda Cross.
"She was my literary idol," said Barbara Levy, a teacher of writing at Brandeis University and Harvard Extension. "Heilbrun began writing feminist criticism, mixing personal information with literary insights, at a time when her colleagues had been trained, as had she, in what was then called the New Criticism. The New Critics focused solely on text. Any context, even a knowledge of the author's life, was considered extraneous." Adds Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, which Heilbrun supported enthusiastically, "For me, her books challenging prevailing notions of 'women's place' were beacons of sanity. Her understanding of our commitment to research that can touch the lives of all women was a source of inspiration and energy."
Heilbrun had an extraordinary influence even on those she had never met. As Murphy Henry, a Women's Review reader told us "with a sad heart,"
I subscribed to The Women's Review of Books years ago because I saw Carolyn Heilbrun occasionally wrote for you.... Her writings were crucial to my understanding of feminism and put me on a path leading to a master's in women's studies, a small newsletter called Women in Bluegrass--that would be bluegrass music-and finally to a book in progress about women in bluegrass for the University of Illinois Press. I had hoped to send her a copy, so she could know how far her influence reached. I understand her death was all about choice, and I respect that, or at least I'm trying to, but I so wish she were still around.
Back in August, Heilbrun contacted us with an idea for a review. As it turns out, her essay about Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith is probably one of the last things she wrote. Fittingly, it combines her interest in biography, particularly in writing women's lives, and in mystery novels. We publish it with pride and grief.
--Amy Hoffman
Editor in Chief
Quintessentially noir
Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson. London:
Bloomsbury, 2003, 534 pp., $32.50 hardcover.
Reviewed by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
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CRITICS OF SUSPENSE FICTION are inclined to divide all such works, with more neatness than precision, between "noir" and "cosy." "Cosy" suggests a milieu the reader recognizes as ethically familiar, therefore one profoundly besmirched by the intrusion of murder; "noir" fiction focuses on criminal goals and the criminal consciousness. The terms also serve to distinguish between crime and detective fiction, between violence for its own sake and detection for the purposes of law and morality--at which noir literature sneers.
According to stereotype, men write "noir" and women write "cosy." The first of these allegations is, if not exact, the truer, although most women writers of detective fiction would scorn the label "cosy" as slander. What is beyond debate is that a woman who conceives of herself as profoundly masculine will probably write noir fiction. Among Patricia Highsmith's models were American male writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who placed their tough heroes on mean streets where murder is unexceptional.
The real distinction between "noir" and "cosy" is a moral one: Does the author ultimately endorse morality--not convention, but Judeo-Christian ethics and laws? By any definition, Highsmith is the ultimate noir novelist. In Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Julian Symons, who greatly admired Highsmith's novels, understood that "violence is necessary to her, because the threat or actuality of it produces her best writing." Biographer Andrew Wilson quotes from her notebooks: "I believe people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappiness," and "[p]erversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness...I love to write of cruel deeds. Murder fascinates me...Physical cruelty appeals to me mostly [ellipses Wilson's]." She also wrote that "The morbid, the cruel, the abnormal fascinate me." Wilson quotes one friend who observed that the effect of Highsmith's books is chilling, "partly because it seems to Patricia Highsmith that eating breakfast, walking the dog, and committing murder have come to occupy the same moral space." Wilson explains that "Highsmith describes murder with a certain joie de vivre, while it is clear that many of her killers... relish the act of snuffing out another life." He then asks: "What was Highsmith's own relationship to morality?" His biography answers that question with detailed and, for those even slightly inclined toward the "cosy," unnerving detail.
Wilson did not know Highsmith in life, but she obviously overwhelmed him with material after her death. "In addition to keeping incredibly detailed diaries, she recorded her creative ideas, observations and experiences in what she called her 'cahiers' or working journals. She was also a prolific letter writer....It is these private documents... together with interviews with Highsmith's friends, colleagues and lovers, which form the core of this book." In addition to this "core," Wilson, who is English, offers up bits of American culture that he clearly culled from selective reading; too sweeping, they suffer from a lack of complexity. The biography more than makes up for these inadequate historical morsels with the abundance of Highsmith's own testimony--which is likely to astonish anyone for whom morality and ethics of any kind are essential to endurance. Wilson is not an elegant writer, but on the subject of Highsmith rather than American culture he is efficient and all-encompassing.
Highsmith's first two novels remain her most successful, the best written and the best composed: Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) set the pattern for all the subsequent work published under her own name. (The recent movie of The Talented Mr. Ripley, like the Alfred Hitchcock version of Strangers on a Train, seriously belies the motivations of the characters and the pristine plotting in the books.) Although Wilson asserts that Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley is a device with which Highsmith was attempting to dismantle the coziness of conventional crime writing, she did not, in fact, dismantle it--she had no discernible effect upon it. As Wilson himself points out, when her sales were at a low point and only Agatha Christie and Mickey Spillane were selling, along came P. D. James, who would successfully advance the cause of morality and law, though hardly in a manner that could be described as "cosy."
IN TRUTH, HIGHSMITH WROTE as she did because that was the way she thought and lived and ameliorated her suffering. In Strangers on a Train, for example, two men casually meet and agree to "trade" murders to prevent either from being identified as the murderer. Bruno goes through with his murder, but Lawrence fails; he is eventually destroyed by guilt, an emotion Highsmith despises. Discussing Ripley, Wilson claims that "[Highsmith] cleverly seduces the reader into identifying with Ripley [as with Bruno] until by the end our moral responses have been so invaginated, we are actively on the side of the killer." This, however, does not accurately depict the response of the reader who willingly follows Highsmith's murderers' thoughts yet does not convert to their motives.
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From the beginning, Highsmith wrestled with two obsessions: her admiration for men and corollary hatred of women; and the conviction that she was a male in a female body. Every writer she admired was male and, frequently, obsessed with killing. (In the whole biography, the very few famous female writers named are referred to only in passing.) Highsmith's imagination, including her use of women as muses and conquests, was entirely male. The favor was returned: Graham Greene, Arthur Koestler, and Gore Vidal all considered her superior to other crime writers (although in Vidal's case, they seem mainly to have shared a detestation of Jews and Israel). Highsmith herself believed that her hatred of women was the fault of her mother, whom she loathed in childhood and continued to loathe throughout her life. As Wilson reports, early on, she wrote the outline of a story (never published) in which a girl appears to be a kind soul and fetches her mother a nice cup of hot milk. "Then the girl takes out a pair of scissors from her pocket and, with a smile, plunges them into her mother's breast, turning and twisting them with all her might."
Highsmith's abhorrence of women is palpable, although Wilson claims, without explicit evidence, that the issue of Highsmith's misogyny divides critics: One of her friends, for example, reports that "The idea of women in a library appalled her, the thought that they could be menstruating at the same time as reading was disgusting... Women, she said, were dirty, physically dirty... She talked about women almost as if she was something other, like she wasn't one." Of Little Tales of Misogyny, one of her collections of short stories, she wrote, "my Little Tales of Misogyny consists of seventeen very short stories on the foibles of the female sex--bitter, grim, and black-humored." It should come as no surprise that she had vociferous opinions about the women's movement. Women became her lovers; men became her friends.
Wilson never makes clear his opinion of her, nor does he allow himself much interpretation: He may have been wise to avoid this. In addition to being a misogynist and an anti-Semite--"The Israelis did not ever want peace because, she believed, they were yearning for the next Holocaust and they 'love to be hated'"--Highsmith was a racist of startling proportions: "She imagined life in New York in fifty years' time when she would see 'coons hanging from 50th story windows, plugging their neighbors (other coons) before taking the lift down to fleece their pockets.'" She also wondered in almost the same breath why the foetuses of aborted babies couldn't be used to feed animals.
What is one to make of all this? Certainly she experienced the confinement of her abilities, ambitions, and male identification in the body of a woman as severely damaging. She "could not sustain a relationship [with a woman] for longer than two or three years." She wrote, "There is something perverted within me, that I don't love a girl any more, if she loves me more than I love her." If Highsmith met an attractive woman they became lovers within a few hours of meeting. She lived, in short, a stereotypically male, even macho life. Says Wilson, "She recognized her insatiable appetite for a constant supply of new conquests and the inherent destructiveness of her habit, yet she felt unable to resist its power, classifying herself as something of a 'degenerate.'" Each of Wilson's chapters, once he has covered her childhood, recounts less than two years of Highsmith's life, as she moved from lover to lover and place to place. But wherever and with whomever she was, she felt compelled to write, comparing the unsatisfactory draft of a novel to "the feelings of those suffered by a lover who has failed to pleasure his mistress." She traveled to Europe and preferred it to America--probably, Wilson surmises, because nearly all her literary models were European male writers.
He defines her quintessential themes as "homo-eroticism, the allure of the double and the erasure of identity," and certainly her writing of exchanges of identity and guiltless murder sustained her; she wrote to enable herself to live. One journalist who knew her believed her talent arouse from her genuine amorality; as he explained, some novelists like Martin Amis "do a very good job of amorality, but the bottom line is Amis is probably not an amoral person. But I think Pat really was amoral. There was this strange blankness about her.'"
The only exception to Highsmith's fiction of violence is her one lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, which is without violence, murder, or death. She published it under a pseudonym in 1952, and gave it a happy ending because in those years novels of homosexual love--and there were not many--were required to have a tragic ending. In a 1983 afterword, Highsmith wrote, "One of the main characters, if not both, had to cut his wrists, or drown himself in the swimming pool of some lovely estate, or one had to say goodbye to his partner, having decided to go straight."
In addition, gay novels of the time were "usually about men." She criticized Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, because she thought it "portrayed lesbians as 'inverts,' men trapped in women's bodies, not simply women who happened to love other women"--which was puzzling coming from the woman we come to know in Wilson's biography, who felt from an early age that she was a boy shackled in a girl's body and who claimed to have "an unmistakably masculine identity."
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AS WITH MANY SUBJECTS OF BIOGRAPHY, Highsmith aging and ill becomes more lovable and more attractive, as though suffering rendered her more human. Or, perhaps those who knew her in old age speak of her more kindly. Yet there remains an anomaly: Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.
Originally published in 1966, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction was written for The Writer magazine. Two decades later Highsmith added a foreword explaining her purpose in careful, reasonable words: "I talk about my beginnings...[and] also about my failures and mistakes; I learned from them, and perhaps others can learn from them." Throughout, the book is rational, pleasant, and readable, although Highsmith explains that she finds "the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not." Despite similar remarks, honest but not disturbing, her book supplies a valuable guide to the writing, publishing, and marketing of books. She knows that beginning writers wish to sell their books, and her tone is forthright and, apart from a reference to killing a terrapin for a stew that even she finds horrifying, quite mild. She even remarks, surprisingly to a reader of this biography, that she does not think her books should be in prison libraries. It is not easy to reconcile this reasonable endeavor with the portrait that emerges from the Wilson biography, raising the question of whether a writer's private jottings and personal letters ought to be presented with such completeness; perhaps they give an unjust slant to the subject's character. The function of private notebooks and personal letters is precisely to allow for comments not intended for public scrutiny. They contain passing thoughts; they reflect particular moods of anger or despair and thus may be unrepresentative of the whole person.
I wished, after reading this biography, that the words of Julian Symons had been allowed to define her: "She has a professional ability to order a plot and create a significant environment, but what takes her books beyond the run of intelligent crime stories is the intensity of feeling brought to the central figures." Symons admits that Highsmith is an acquired taste, and a taste that some never acquire, but concludes that "There are no more genuine agonies in modern literature than those endured by the couples in her books who are locked together in a dislike and even hatred that often strangely contains love."
With a subject like Highsmith, tortured by the sense of being bodily misplaced, compelled to thrash out at the world in her anger and misery, a biographer needs to choose his materials with tact and discretion. Above all, he needs to grant her the indulgence of sophisticated interpretation. The reader of this biography can hardly fail to recoil from much that is revealed. For those, like Symons, with the critical adroitness to focus upon Highsmith's qualities as a writer, a biography such as this must be found lacking. Excessive detail and only moderate narrative skill here combine to leave Highsmith besmirched and the reader repelled.
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Highsmith: Another view
Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker. Cleis Press, San
Francisco, 2003, 207 pp., $14.95 paper.
Reviewed by Marie J. Kuda
IN 1959, WHEN PATRICIA HIGHSMITH and Marijane Meaker met at a dyke bar in Greenwich Village, they were already household names to lesbian readers under their respective noms de plume, Claire Morgan and Ann Aldrich. It would have shocked their contemporaries to find these two women, whose reputations were polar opposites, in bed together.
Much of Meaker's memoir of her relationship with novelist Patricia Highsmith reads like the lesbian pulp fiction she wrote during the post-World War II heyday of paperback originals. As Ann Aldrich, Meaker raised the ire of early lesbian feminists with a series of nonfiction titles that perpetuated negative stereotypes and took pot-shots at The Ladder, the nascent publication of the nation's first lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis. Her work was referred to as "poisonous but entertaining," presenting lesbians as "disgusting or unnatural creatures." She was described as a "prolific and negative author...her books hardly worth the time or price"; and accused of "running down her relatives." Meaker wrote genre pulps in the 1950s and 60s under another pseudonym, Vin Packer. As Packer, Meaker published Spring Fire, which Jeannette Howard Foster, in her pioneering opus Sex-Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey (1954), characterized as "a sympathetic treatment which bows to orthodox standards by ending tragically." (Foster understandably erred in identifying Packer as "an established male author.") It would be 1972 before lesbian reviewers would approve of Meaker's literary treatment of lesbians by acclaiming her humorous novel, Shockproof Sydney Skate. Meaker has gone on to receive dozens of awards as a writer of juvenile and young adult fiction under the names of M. E. Kerr and Mary James.
As Claire Morgan, Highsmith published her lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, in 1952 to good reviews. It had moderate success in hardcover, then skyrocketed in paperback sales. Valerie Taylor, whose first lesbian novel Whisper Their Love sold two million copies, described the impact of the book to the 1974 Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago: Claire Morgan, she said, broke the mold of lesbian formula fiction, which until then had been aimed at heterosexual males. Morgan's positive heroines, real women who overcame obstacles to their love, attracted a huge lesbian readership. Jeannette Foster further suggested that the arguments Morgan proposed for the validity of "variant love" presaged the swing of the literary pendulum toward "favorable treatments of variance" in fiction.
On re-reading, The Price of Salt holds up well. Nineteen-year-old salesclerk Therese is smitten by an elegant customer and contrives to meet her. Carol is in the process of seeking a divorce. Mutually impassioned, the women take off on a cross-country jaunt, followed closely by a detective hired by Carol's husband, who threatens to take sole custody of their daughter. When Carol returns to deal with her husband and his lawyers, Therese loses faith. She considers returning to her old boyfriend and finds a career in New York. But, as she is about to embark on an affair with a stage actress, she realizes "it was Carol she loved and would always love...It would be Carol in a thousand cities." Carol sacrifices custody of her child. The lovers see each other across a crowded restaurant, and the book ends in a Hollywood fade as they move towards each other. A few things date the novel. The amount of copy devoted to smoking and drinking is about equal to that in a Hemingway novel or a Bette Davis movie. And as Taylor told the her audience in 1974, "Today, the wife would find a good feminist lawyer and win custody."
DESPITE THIS BOOK'S TITLE, I learned more from it about Meaker than about Highsmith. When Meaker and Highsmith met, Meaker, already in a relationship, was smitten. They immediately began a two-year horizontal tango that would last longer than their romantic feelings for each other: When they finally split, each woman found closure by brutally murdering the fictional counterpart of the other in respective novels. Meaker was closeted, jealous, possessive, and unfaithful. Dissembling to her then lover of eight years, she spirited Highsmith away to a farmhouse in Pennsylvania to isolate her from potential competition and social or business contacts who might claim her time. However, Meaker retained contact with her old lover and friends with whom she would confide and complain. In public she reacted furtively when Highsmith put her arm around her, wanted to walk down the street holding hands, or reached out to touch her across a restaurant table. Both left a posh restaurant without protest when they were refused service because they were wearing pants.
Meaker tantalizingly name-drops the subjects of Highsmith's conversations with her: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Ned Rorem, Janet Flanner, Jean Cocteau; but then she tells nothing of what was said except, "It was a two bottle night." In fact, drinking probably accounts for a lot of lapses. Meaker says she gave up trying to keep up with Highsmith, and while not calling her an alcoholic, recounts her drinking in detail, including the time Meaker mistakenly took a hefty swallow of Highsmith's 80-proof morning orange juice.
Meaker's sources for several of her Vin Packer plots were contemporary murders, a New Zealand parricide, a notorious US matricide, even the Emmet Till case. Her method of writing differed from that of Highsmith, who drew her plots mostly from whole cloth, wrote on a rigid schedule, and did not discuss her work in progress. Meaker, although a commercial success, was envious of Highsmith's respectability as a well-reviewed mainstream hardcover author. In turn, Highsmith seemed envious of Meaker's mass-market sales and easy income: Hardcover authors were paid percentage royalties doled out annually on the sales of each copy; paperback writers received two cents a copy for each book printed regardless of sales. While they were together, Meaker received an $8,000 check from a reprint run. She notes, "I got twice what Pat did for one book."
Meaker describes Highsmith as "gentlemanly" in her manners and appearance: blazer, soft shirt, ascot, and slacks. Highsmith opened doors for Meaker, rose to meet a woman, and picked up her pants by their crease before sitting down. Highsmith preferred Europe to America and felt she was more highly regarded there. There are hints that Highsmith's Southern upbringing left her tinged with racism. When Lorraine Hansberry, whom Meaker had met at a party, invited Meaker to the opening of the film version of A Raisin in the Sun, Highsmith demurred saying: "I know the plot. Colored person thwarted, then colored person triumphant. It's not my concern."
Still, it is disconcerting, if Meaker is to be believed, to see the 70-year-old Highsmith portrayed as racist and anti-Semitic. In a bitter epilogue Meaker makes her case, summarizing some letters and a final visit Highsmith paid her a few years before her death. Meaker notes that the novel Ripley Under Water (1991) was dedicated to the Intifadeh and the Kurds and suggests that Highsmith's anti-Israeli stance was "a displacement, that her real anger might have been at American publishers who she felt were largely Jewish, and unappreciative of her work."
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Tales of the city
Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 by
Nan Alamilla Boyd. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 319 pp.,
$27.50 hardcover.
Reviewed by Julie Abraham
IN WIDE OPEN TOWN, Nan Alamilla Boyd presents queer San Francisco as the product of a town "wide open" to all forms of pleasure, all forms of money-making, and the conjunction of the two. Boyd's work is the latest addition to a series of place-based studies by historians and anthropologists as well as geographers and urbanists--including George Chauncey's Gay New York, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis' Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (about Buffalo, New York), Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island, Marc Stein's City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves (about Philadelphia), and Moira Rachel Kenney's Mapping Gay L.A.--that take their particular locations as the frame for detailed explorations of social relations, politics, and culture. Such studies, each in their own way carrying forward the impulse to recovery that was the origin of so much lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender scholarship, have served as key points of reference in US queer studies over the past two decades.
To embark on any such project is a bold move. But to take up San Francisco
was particularly brave, given the many already available accounts of queer San
Francisco. San Francisco was the setting for one of the earliest studies of
lesbian feminist community, by Deborah Wolf, in the late 1970s. The city appeared
as the model of gay urban life in geographer and social critic Manuel Castells'
1983 landmark study The City and the Grassroots (to which so many studies
of queer urban life still refer), and in journalist and cultural critic Frances
Fitzgerald's attempt to characterize the 1980s, in part through a portrait of
the Castro district, in Cities on a Hill. And then there is the abundant
literature of San Francisco queer life, of which the best known example, Armistead
Maupin's Tales of the City series, has even made it on to television.
All of these and many other materials have contributed to San Francisco's status
as the imagined homeland of various
"Why San Francisco?" is the first question such a history produces, and her
best answer is, inevitably, history--a history that incorporates and finally
fosters the development of queer cultures. San Francisco was a port city that
only flourished after the gold rush of 1848 brought floods of people from many
nations, many more men than women. Sexual permissiveness and money combined
with a very rapid rate of growth to make the city a place where a politician
could campaign for office "on the platform that anti-vice interests were bad
for business," as did P. H. McCarthy, a successful labor candidate for mayor
in 1909 who "vowed to make San Francisco 'the Paris of America.'"
Police records are the key to this study, as sources of evidence of Sexual permissiveness and money combined to produce public settings for the
performance of deviance, from vaudeville stages in the 1920s, to nightclubs
of the 1930s and 1940s, and gay bars in the post-World War II decades. The literal
performance of queerness, on stage, by men and also women in drag, often in
conjunction with performances of racial difference, were the draw at all of
these venues. Especially after Prohibition, the clubs and bars where tuxedo-clad
pianist and singer Gladys Bentley, in the decades after her Harlem career, and
torch singer Beverly Shaw, who always "sang directly" to the women in her audience,
were headliners and drag revues flourished were supported in large part by tourists
drawn by San Francisco's reputation for vice. In fact, the "periods of anti-vice
activism [in the city]--the 1850s, 1870s, 1910s, and 1950s--produced a wealth
of print material that advertised and drew international attention to San Francisco's
vice districts.... San Francisco's reputation for vice thus became its calling
card."
In this sense, the development of San Francisco's queer culture was based on
the commodification--indeed the self-commodification--of queer persons. Sexual
permissiveness and money had combined to produce settings in which
What might be called the "public investment" in San Francisco's vice scene
meant that club and then bar life were not controlled by organized crime. In
the 1940s, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown could observe, "There is no organized crime
in San Francisco; the crime is all organized by the police department." In the
absence of the Mafia, queer people owned clubs and bars, so waitresses from
one establishment were able to start others of their own. Audiences contained
local queers as well as straight tourists. Consequently the performances of
queers as queers provided both a tourist draw and a base for the growth of a
sense of community among the locals. Boyd describes the development of transgender,
gay male, and lesbian cultures through these processes in San Francisco, as
sometimes interwoven and sometimes distinct entities, but as often as not sharing
the same spaces and identifications. As Esther Newton would document of the
1960s in Mother Camp, the drag performer was the emblematic homosexual
in the queer and straight worlds during these decades.
Wide Open Town is meticulously researched. Drawing on the many oral
histories Boyd conducted to complement her work in the archives, she begins
each chapter with an extended autobiographical statement, allowing her subjects
to appear full-force and even to speak in ways that challenge her own analysis
in subsequent pages. Key figures in San Francisco's
BOYD CHALLENGES A NUMBER OF TRUISMS. There is the common assumption that women
were only peripherally involved in the history of drag performance, which her
account of, and pictures from, Mona's 440 quite effectively belies: "[I]n the
post-Prohibition years, when Finocchio's advertised itself as the place 'Where
Boys Will Be Girls,' Mona's marketed itself as the place 'Where Girls Will Be
Boys.'" Manuel Castells' frequently invoked assertion that lesbians are not
territorial and therefore do not form or inform urban neighborhoods or make
political claims in the ways that gay men do is contradicted by Boyd's description
of the North Beach district in the 1930s and 1940s, where she argues that lesbians
"did take up public space. They did acquire a geographic basis for the development
of new social identities. Moreover, the visible presence of lesbians in the
public sphere altered the relationship between the state--the policing agencies
that regulated public life--and lesbian society."
Finally, her demonstration of the degree to which economic interests produced
queer San Francisco suggests that At the same time, Boyd's work insistently calls to mind that of her predecessors.
Again we are presented with an opposition between the political values, engagements,
and effects of the world of the bars and the world of political activists, especially
the early homophile movement. Again there is an emphasis on the 1960s as a cultural
breaking point, although Boyd argues that in San Francisco, the shifts that
are identified nationally with Stonewall in 1969 had already begun by the mid-1960s.
She takes up the familiar opposition of "covert" vs. "overt" homosexuals,
those committed to assimilation and those affirming difference, which she maps
over her account of the split between politicos and bar goers. But in 1961,
as Boyd explains, the city's most popular drag queen, José Sarria, "staged a
run for city supervisor from his pulpit at the Black Cat," one of the city's
most popular gay bars, with the message that "Gay is Good!" The city's most
successful homophile organization, SIR (Society for Individual Rights), embraced
social life, organizing dances, drag shows, "bowling nights, tennis matches,
hiking expeditions, a softball league, card games, discussion groups, and camping
trips," as well as candidates' nights at which local political aspirants appeared,
and campaigns offering legal advice to those caught by police entrapment. Bar
life and political engagement both offered platforms for a few individuals to
publicly identify themselves as gay or lesbian--José Sarria, Phyllis Lyon and
Del Martin of the Daughters of Bilitis. Yet it was not necessary to be "out"
to participate in bar life or join a political organization--most regulars at
either the bars or DOB, Mattachine, or SIR meetings did not use their real names.
Despite the various romances of bar life or of political activism through which
we read our histories, the achievement of queer San Francisco seems to have
been that there was little need to choose between assimilation or outlaw status.
Instead, the schoolteachers hung out at the bars, convinced they were nevertheless
keeping their secrets, and however visible the activists' efforts, it was still
much easier to get people to come out to a dance than to a meeting. Should we
be surprised? To pose the bar goers against the politicos is to presuppose a
scarce economy of political virtue, in which either the bar world or the homophile
groups must come out ahead. But is political virtue so scarce? Is assigning
virtue our task? What are we really worried about--class differences, or the
connections between pleasure and politics? Wide Open Town suggests that
it's time for a new paradigm.
Philosophy of the heart
WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE that cannot stand alone, but depends on modifiers
and conjunctions to complete it, to give it heft and meaning? There is "brotherly"
love, "platonic" love, "puppy" love, "courtly" love, and of course, that most
vexing, confounding, ever-elusive "romantic" love. Love often shows up in common
parlance with a partner, as in love and death, love and lust, love and hate,
love and war, and that reverent, consecrated pairing, love and marriage, which
"go together like a horse and carriage," in the words of the popular ditty ending
with the rhyming couplet, "This I tell you brother, you can't have one without
the other." We know, of course, that we can and more often do have one without
the other: marriage without love and, conversely, love without marriage. A loveless
marriage, sullied from the start, is the mainspring of Toni Morrison's latest
novel, Love; a marriage between the 52-year-old Bill Cosey (his second)
and his 11-year-old child bride, Heed the Night, whom Cosey purchases from her
father for $200 and a pocketbook.
You can guess you're in a Toni Morrison novel when you encounter such a situation,
not to mention a character named Heed the Night, whose relatives are named Solitude,
Righteous Morning, Winsome, and Joy. Reading on, you find that Heed has hired
a young sex-pot and reform school parolee named Junior, whose toes have merged
together to form a hoof (Pan perhaps?); by then you know for certain that you
have landed on Morrison's narrative planet, populated by the outcast and dismembered,
the uncanny and grotesque. When Junior appears, wearing no underwear, answering
Heed's ad for a secretary and companion, Cosey has been long dead, leaving behind
his next of kin: Heed, his widow, and Christine, his granddaughter, who were
once intimate childhood friends. Eight months older than her former playmate
cum bride cum grandmother, Christine is sent away following the marriage, exiled
from the house "throbbing with girl flesh made sexy." After Cosey's death, she
returns to Silk, the coastal town where Cosey had established "the best and
best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast." Like a character
in a Greek tragedy, she is determined to exact her revenge on Heed, the woman
who displaced her in her grandfather's favor and affection; but more, to assert
her "claim of blood" on Cosey's estate, "equal to Heed's claim as widow."
Encamped in separate quarters in the three-story house that Cosey built at
One Monarch Street, Heed and Christine engage in pitched battles, "bruising
fights with hands, feet, teeth and soaring objects," before settling into an
"unnegotiated cease-fire." Nearly as famous a residence as Beloved's
124 Bluestone Road, Cosey's imposing house, resembling a church, harbors several
ghosts of its own, perhaps none more haunting than the ghost of Cosey.
Just who was this Bill Cosey? What motivated him to marry a girl almost 50
years his junior? What manner of man was he, who had "women fighting so hard
for his attention you'd think he was a preacher"? While the entire cast of female
characters seems obsessed with Cosey--May, his daughter-in-law; Vida, the former
receptionist at his resort; L, its former cook and the narrator; and Junior,
the randy secretary--the novel revolves around Heed and Christine, these two
friends turned mortal enemies, who have squandered their lives (and their friendship)
nursing and rehearsing grudges and resentments decades old. As with all of Morrison's
narratives, the reader will have to wrestle with this book, which is not brought
easily to heel. Like her previous novels, this one is elliptical and slow to
give away its secrets and then, at that, in jagged pieces. We come to know Cosey
and his women shard by shard.
A "handsome giant," a "heavy drinker," and a committed womanizer, whose "pleasure
was in pleasing," Cosey is descended from a "long line of quiet prosperous slaves
and thrifty freedmen." Rumored like his father to be a police informant, he
is deemed nonetheless the "county's role model," whose blood-soaked money financed
Cosey's Hotel and Resort, now boarded up and much of its surrounding acreage
sold in parcels to developers who throw up slapdash houses that blight the town
of Oceanside. The awe and envy of the townspeople eking out a hardscrabble existence
at a fish cannery, Cosey's resort "lived on even after the hotel was dependent
for its life on the [local blacks] it once excluded" from its doors.
But even when we learn these surface details, Cosey remains much the mystery
man, who takes shape and texture from what each person needs and finds in his
portrait, which once hung behind the hotel's reception desk, and now above Heed's
bed. "Painted from a snapshot," the portrait is gilded by each viewer, spun
from the filaments of fantasy. For Heed, the image is "exactly like" the man.
"What you see there is a wonderful man," she tells Junior, who has already found
in Cosey's portrait the man she needs to see: both the father and the "Good
Man" she never had. His "kind eyes... promised to hold [her] steady on his shoulders,"
through "an orchard of green Granny apples heavy and thick on the boughs."
This vision of paradise and plenitude embodied in a person is bound to be shattered,
especially since, in this book, Cosey, the love object, the beau ideal,
is himself so shattered--"an ordinary man" with "cracked-glass eyes" who has
been "ripped... by wrath and love."
Cosey isn't the only character "ripped" by love in this novel, in which acts
of violence, present and remembered, are much the norm. A girl named Pretty
Fay is gang raped; Junior's uncles chase her in a truck, seemingly for sport,
running her over and crushing her toes. Heed sets Christine's bed on fire, and
Christine shows up at Cosey's funeral with a switchblade in her hand. But perhaps
the quintessential act of violence is Cosey's marriage to Heed, which "laid
the brickwork for [his] ruination" and hers, as well--all because he wanted
to replace the son he'd lost, and for that "only an unused girl would do." No
child issues from the marriage and Cosey--"the dirty one who introduced [Heed]
to nasty," to the reek of "liquor and an old man's business"--sees the error
of his ways and returns to his long-time lover, the mysterious Celestial, a
"sporting woman," whose "face [is] cut from cheek to ear."
ONE MIGHT REASONABLY WONDER why there is so much violence in a book called
Love, why violence repeatedly usurps the space that love might hold.
Commonly the fantasied antidote to psychic wounds and losses, real and imagined,
love is an expected unguent, a form of medication, pain's "natural" anodyne.
But Morrison takes a harsher, tougher, less romantic view of love, one fashioned
from the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a wisdom infused throughout her novels.
While this novel must be seen on its own terms, of course, it is also useful
to place it in the context of Morrison's earlier work.
In Love she reprises her most familiar scenes and situations of love
gone badly wrong, twisted and distorted into surrealistic shapes, often bizarre
beyond belief. One thinks of the possessive/protective love that compels Sethe
to kill her baby girl, Beloved, in an effort to spare her the certain social
death of slavery; the obsessive love that leads Joe Trace, the older man, to
fatally shoot Dorcas, his younger lover (Jazz); the God-like love that
compels Eva to burn her drug-addicted son alive, or the self-sacrificing love
that drives her to hurl her crippled body from a top-floor window in a futile
effort to save her daughter engulfed in flames (Sula). But Morrison's
exploration, from book to book, of love in all its guises began, significantly,
with the love of whiteness as physical ideal. Pecola's tragic, ultimately maddening,
yearning for blond hair and blue eyes in The Bluest Eye set the template
in many ways for the work that followed. Indeed, Morrison's poignant, finely
wrought dramatization of Pecola's ardent desire for the "look of love" (at least
in the Western world) is underneath it all, a desire to be loved, noticed, recognized.
It is in The Bluest Eye that Morrison condemns the idealization of "physical
beauty," along with its counterpart, "romantic love," the two "most destructive
ideas in the history of human thought," she writes. Her first novel's penultimate
paragraph could serve as an epigraph to the latest:
Love is ultimately abstract in its treatment, more philosophy of love
than its expression. But if this seems the least emotionally felt, the least
passionately surcharged of Morrison's novels, it is perhaps because her aim
is not to write a love story, at least as that genre is conventionally understood,
with expectations of sweaty palms and lustful scenes of romance requited or
renewed. Love's terms here are far from "cozy." There are no bedroom scenes
of couples like Violet/Violent and Joe Trace lying underneath the covers in
the dark, whispering to each other what is in their hearts, tenderly exploring
each other's bodies; no Sula mounting her lover, looking into his "golden eyes
and the velvet helmet of [his] hair, rocking, swaying" to the "creeping disorder
that was flooding her hips"; no First Corinthians "tilt[ing] [her lover's] chin
up with her fingers and plant[ing] a feathery kiss on his throat." Despite all
of Cosey's rumored lovers, his "pleasure in pleasing," there are few descriptions
of pleasure in this text, except perhaps for Junior's trysts with Romen, the
16-year-old male Heed hires as yardman and errand boy.
What can we really ever know of love, the novel seems implicitly to ask, especially
since so many other things come masquerading in its name: greed, obsession,
betrayal, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and above all love's impostor, sex,
"the clown of love." According to this novel's mysterious narrator, who prizes
secrecy, sex stands, much the same as violence, in the place where love might
be. Women especially "open their legs rather than their hearts," which hide
the wounded "sugar child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside,"
playing in their minds their own versions of a somebody-done-somebody-wrong
song that another's wished-for body will set all to right. Because both Christine
and Heed each cast the other as the wronging partner in her life's drama, "Big
Daddy" Cosey, the leading man, gets off scot-free. As the novel moves, perhaps
too hastily, to its conclusion, Heed and Christine arrive at the mutual realization
that Cosey was indeed an illusion, "everywhere and nowhere," that each had "made
him up." But they reach the greater realization that they "could have been living
[their] lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere." In
seeking to "possess" Cosey and then his material legacy, these former friends
forget they once "belonged" to the other, "shar[ing] stomachache laughter, a
secret language, and knew, as they slept together that one's dreaming was the
same as the other one's."
This language is reminiscent of Sula's deathbed memory of the days when she
and Nel were "girls together," so close that they merged to form "two throats...
one eye and ... had no price." Morrison here reprises that earlier novel's exploration
of how women turn into rivals and competitors for men (more boys than men),
whose affections are always splintered, divided, far-flung. According to the
narrator in Love, "Having men meant sharing them," although every lover
typically wants "the largest slice," unwilling if not ill-prepared to "know
the real" love, "the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits.
It takes a certain intelligence to love like that." Few of Morrison's characters
seem endowed with such intelligence, their lives and choices attesting to the
far more common reality that love and intelligence are mutually exclusive. We
tend to love first and think later, if at all.
If Morrison ultimately offers a more sobering, cold-eyed view of love than
one might hope to find in a novel titled Love, she has blown a kiss,
as it were, to her most ardent readers, has tendered a kind of valentine-a retrospective
or compendium of her earlier takes on love. The distance between the first words
proper of The Bluest Eye (1970)--"Quiet as its kept"--and those of this
new novel--"the women's legs are spread wide open"--represents not merely a
chronological sweep but a philosophical journey into the heart of love, at times
a darkened continent blazed by Morrison's luminescent prose, her dazzling lyricism,
her labor of love.
Dykes to watch out for
IN 1982, RECENT COLLEGE GRADUATE Alison Bechdel sent a letter to a friend;
in the corner she drew a cartoon character, and in a short notation off to the
side, penned the phrase "Dykes to Watch Out For." For Bechdel, it was a declaration:
"We are, you and I, dykes to watch out for." Thousands of cartoon panels later,
Bechdel and the characters in her comic strip are celebrating their 20th anniversary.
Bechdel's comic strip has become a cultural institution, especially if one uses
the customary definition of the word institution: "an established organization
or foundation, especially one dedicated to education, public service, or culture."
Education? Public service? How can a comic strip be declared a cultural institution?
In fact, there is a long-standing tradition of bias against the comic strip
as a valid medium for conveying cultural information and meaning. Yet, in Understanding
Comics, Scott McCloud argues that, "Comics offers tremendous resources to
all writers and artists…it offers range and versatility with all the potential
imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word."
In many ways, the argument against comics as a valid art form is the same as
that used to discredit other popular forms of culture: mass-produced films,
television, advertising, and games--all of which convey many intricate layers
of cultural meaning and information, while engaging audiences through the interaction
of words and images. McCloud continues: "Traditional thinking has long held
that truly GREAT works of art and literature are only possible with the two
[words and pictures] kept at arm's length. Words and pictures together are considered,
at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst, a product of crass commercialism."
However, the rise in the prominence and prestige of the graphic novel over
the last 20 years has brought with it a willingness to look at the comic strip
as a valid form of cultural exchange. Bechdel agrees that comics can play this
role: "The comic strip observes culture, but it also is culture. I see my role
really as a kind of cultural anthropologist."
If we are to consider Bechdel a cultural anthropologist, hers would certainly
be a radical discipline for study--pushing boundaries both in and out of her
academy. From the beginning and much to the dismay of many an editor, Bechdel
insisted on including sex and sexuality in the visual language of the strip,
making it too controversial to run in certain newspapers: "Right now, my strip
runs in about 50-60 newspapers across the US and in Canada. Although the number
of gay papers is starting to plateau," Bechdel tells me,
One of the only strips in the history of publicly distributed comics to feature
women together in bed, Dykes to Watch Out For has for years cultivated
a familiar, everyday visual language. The spaces her characters inhabit are
for the most part interiors: living rooms, beds, kitchens.
It is precisely the exploration of these intimate spaces that allows so many
readers to identify with her characters and the way they navigate their lives.
In fact, many would argue that Bechdel's strip acts as both a cultural marker
and a prism through which American lesbian subculture has refocused itself.
Bechdel and her characters have meant different things to different generations
of lesbians and non-lesbians. In a November 2001 article in Ms. magazine,
Judith Levine, herself a prolific author, coined the phrase "dykegeist" to describe
the way Bechdel has reflected back the daily essence of contemporary, second-wave,
lesbian and feminist life. Bechdel's characters reflect a reality not otherwise
present in the media. In fact, it is in this role that Bechdel has felt the
most pressure. She explains,
While Bechdel's contemporaries see the comic strip as a mirror for their lives,
the generation that grew up with Bechdel's strip see it somewhat differently.
For those of us in the third wave, the characters in the strip were our future
public face and concrete evidence of a vital lesbian subculture--one that was
well-established, political at its core, media (and humor) savvy, and female-focused
but flexible.
Bechdel is particularly attuned to documenting generational differences among
her readers and in the characters in the strip. There is no lack of evidence
of a real cultural and political divide among different generations of feminists--and
as our cultural anthropologist, Bechdel is on the case. In her introduction
to this new collection, she confronts this divide straight on: "Lately, the
young activists I meet seem to have cut their teeth organizing gay-straight
alliances in their day-care centers. And many have moved beyond the need for
even the categories 'gay' and 'straight.'"
EVIDENCE OF OTHER DIVIDES--cultural, political and social--also abound in
Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon Based Life Forms to Watch Out For. The
title itself is a playful comment on inclusiveness--and it is indeed Bechdel's
self-deprecating humor that has kept the strip feeling fresh for so many years
and has helped to bridge the divides. One of the more divisive dialogues in
this collection comes from the "trannie-baiting" that Lois and Mo engage in.
In this interchange, Lois lies to the transphobic Mo, telling her that she has
decided to transition into a man. There is a distinct tension in the exchange:
Bechdel comments:
There has been much debate, both in the strip and outside of it, of the demise
of the "sub" in "lesbian subculture." As Madonna kisses Britney, and Rosie O'Donnell
cuts her hair, where is the evidence of "a social group within a national culture
that has distinctive patterns of behavior and beliefs?" Bechdel says,
In the strip we see this loss of community in the closing of the women's bookstore,
Madwimmin, a plotline that directly reflects reality. In the last ten years,
over 170 women's bookstores have closed their doors as mega-stores have moved
in. Where, then, will lesbian community happen? Where will the gathering places
be? On this point Bechdel is uncharacteristically optimistic:
Panel by panel, person by person, in chronicling the lives and loves of a group
of friends, Bechdel has charted, and in some cases, propelled cultural and political
shifts. Growing up, Dykes to Watch Out For was a vital cultural thread
of lesbian subculture woven into my life, and helped to shape my identity as
a third-wave feminist. You see, I first encountered Mo and the girls in my junior
year of high school. It was 1986 and all was Reagan and ruffles in the world.
Buried in the back of some alternative newspaper, near the sex ads, were four
little panels that would come to represent more to me than I could guess at
the time. As a straight little girl from tiny-town America wearing Laura Ashley
and prepping out on Duran Duran (why are guys in make-up so attractive?)--my
world was less than small, and entirely heterosexual. Then in sauntered Mo,
striped shirt and glasses, and suddenly there was a much larger world outside
Montville, Connecticut (pop 14,000)--and it contained some very cute girls.
Suddenly, I had something to aspire to: I wanted to become a "dyke to watch
out for."
And while my life choices have led me down a bewildering variety of roads--straight,
not straight, sometimes bent backwards while trying to go forwards--Bechdel,
Mo and the girls (and guys!) have always been one step ahead of me, standing
at the fork in the road, with a little sign: "Try this way; it's interesting
and, by the way, really funny." So, Alison, thanks for the road signs (Danger
Ahead!), kudos, and happy anniversary.
Lesbian wedding, c. 1968.
From Wide Open Town.
Male impersonators and performers pose at Mona's 440, c.
1945. Clockwise from top left: Butch Minton, Jan Jansen,
Kay Scott, Jimmy Renard, Mickey, unknown,
Beverly Shaw, Mike. From Wide Open Town.
Fem-butch couple at Mona's 440,
c. 1945. From Wide Open Town.
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Love by Toni Morrison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 208 pp., $23.95
hardcover.
Reviewed by Deborah E. McDowell
Toni Morrison (Photo by Timothy
Greenfield-Sanders)
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly,
violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly...
The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized,
frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.
As the heart's desire of Love, Bill Cosey is literally frozen in the glare
of his lovers' inward eyes--Heed's, Christine's, Junior's, Vida's, L's, and May's--becoming
whatever each needs him to be: "Friend," "Stranger," "Benefactor," "Lover," "Husband,"
"Guardian," "Father," the roles that double as the chapter titles, the last of
which is, tellingly, "Phantom."
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Lisa London talks to Alison Bechdel about 20 years of cartooning and her new book,
Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Los Angeles:
Alyson Publications, 2003, 128 pp., $13.95 paper).
Self portrait by
Alison Bechdel
My strip reads slightly differently depending on whether you see
it in the paper, or in one of my books. The newspaper format gives it a very
quotidian aspect, it becomes a part of everyday life. You read it at breakfast
or in the bathroom. And that reinforces the content of the strip--these small
domestic moments in the characters' lives.
When I first started out, I knew exactly who my audience was--other
young, college-educated lesbian feminists like me. And I followed a fairly strict
party line--I'm pathologically nice, so political correctness came very naturally
to me. But over the years I introduced Stuart, the token white male. And Sydney,
the evil women's studies professor, who takes some irritatingly conservative
positions--she's hawkish on Iraq, for example. But I think these non-party-line
perspectives just add more dimensionality to the strip.
Mo (leaving a message on Lois' answering machine): "Lois,
Hi. I guess you're out. Listen, call me. I, uh….want to apologize for saying
I couldn't be your friend if you turned into a man, okay? So, uh…Happy New Year."
[Cut to Lois and her friend listening to the answering machine]
Lois's friend: "But you're not transitioning."
Lois: "I know. I just felt like yanking her chain. She was really being
transphobic and it pissed me off." [Cuts back to Mo and Sydney]
Mo: "God, she pisses me off! Acting like I'm being oppressive when she's
the one betraying every tenet of feminism for a chance to grab some male privilege!"
Sydney (Mo's girlfriend): "Isn't it a tenet of feminism that gender is
culturally constructed?" There's a lot of hostility against transexuality among lesbians--this
idea that if you transition from female to male [or reverse] you're "leaving
the club." I think I've been pretty up front about the ways Mo is intolerant..
I think a lot of lesbians aren't willing to go on record and say that they feel
this betrayal. I'm trying to be honest without being hurtful, which is sometimes
a hard balance.
I feel like as a cultural reporter, I've violated the prime directive.
In making this subculture more visible through my comics, I've had a hand in
contributing to its demise.
I've been anxious and worried about this development for so long
that I really feel like I've moved through it, I'm done. I mean, of course I
was very sad to let Madwimmin Books go, but now in the strip I have Bounders
(the rival chain bookstore) and get to make all sorts of jokes about Mo having
to shelve Ann Coulter. It's all grist for the mill. Plus I see a lot of parallels
between the loss of queer community and the loss of community in general, as
corporations are busy paving over the real world with WalMarts. Fortunately,
lesbianism seems ultimately uncommodifiable to me. What can it sell, and to
whom? I'm hoping we'll start to see a reverse politicization--community happening
more locally, person to person.
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