Starting a HERstory CR group in Boulder. . .

I've started a MeetUp.com group:  "Lesbian HERstory C.R. Group".  We meet in Boulder at the Meadows Branch Library on Sunday, August 3, for the first time.  Thirty lesbians have joined the MeetUp and fifteen have RSVPed for the August 3 meeting.  What are we planning to do?  In the 1960s and 70s, women held "consciousness-raising" groups, or "CR" groups, in which they gathered in a circle to discuss various issues in a safe space and to build community together.  I've only recently learned about CR groups from the most recent issue of Sinister Wisdom.  In the 1970s, I was a zygote and then I was a baby.  However, the more I've researched and read, the more I've realized that lesbians (and possibly all women) need to revive the CR group model.  We talk about GLBT marriage and Pride parades, but we don't hold consistent space for ourselves to discuss other topics, like our history (or our "HERstory"), our relationships, our art, our identity and power as lesbians.  Thus, my MeetUp group.

I'm nervous.  I'm a little surprised that fifteen lesbians have signed up for the group, and I'm excited.  In my imagination, we create a group that meets monthly and that becomes a source of power for each other and for other lesbians.  I think it's possible.  To begin, I plan to talk about Adrienne Rich and to read "Song" and "Diving into the Wreck".  Then we'll talk.  What can happen in a circle of women who meet to share stories and investigate what history has erased or forgotten?  Maybe quite a bit. . .

Song
by Adrienne Rich

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn's first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Reaching for the Moon

I just watched the film "Reaching for the Moon" (2013), an important and beautifully constructed story about the poet Elizabeth Bishop and her fifteen-year relationship with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares.  I'm still overcome by the tragedy (and complex sweetness) of the story.  Maybe Ms. Bishop's words are the only appropriate ones:

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Lesbian HERstories

This summer, I've gotten interested in lesbian history.  More than that:  I've gotten interested in how much I haven't been told, in how so much of the "official" history has erased or edited out lesbian lives.  In Naropa's Allen Ginsberg Library, I found Joan Nestle's book, A Restricted Country, which is part memoir of becoming and being a lesbian in the 1940s and on, part fiction about lesbian lives, and part essay.  In one of Nestle's essays, I discovered she was instrumental in opening the Lesbian HERstory Archives in Brooklyn.  What?  There's a Lesbian HERstory Archives?

I kept reading.  On the same shelf with Nestle's book, I found Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  This history tome examines primary source documents like diaries and letters to demonstrate that women have desired and achieved relationships with other women for centuries.  In the chapters about the American suffragette movement, I realized how much had been left out of my education.  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Blackwell, Carrie Catt, Jane Addams -- their correspondence and others' confirm committed relationships between these powerful women and other women.  For many of these women, these partnerships lasted for decades, into their old age.

Currently, I'm reading Faderman's To Believe in Women:  What Lesbians Have Done for America.  In well-researched chapters, the historian seeks to demonstrate the ways in which lesbian life -- and the freedom from what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality" -- empowered women in various eras to work toward social change.  Women in the late 19th century even lived openly in their relationships with other women (not termed "lesbian" yet, but more often "romantic friendship" or "Boston marriage").  It wasn't until psychoanalysis and the cultural phenomenon of the "feminine mystique" gripped America in the 1940s and 50s that lesbianism became labeled as "sexual inversion".  Our foremothers simply knew their love for other women as a different way to be in the world -- for many of them, it was a way that comforted and supported them as they pursued difficult social reform and otherwise lonely lives.

I'm 37, and I'm learning nearly all of this lesbian HERstory for the first time.  When I came out in 2005, I searched wildly for stories similar to mine.  I found whispers in Emily Dickinson's letters to her sister-in-law, in Eleanor Roosevelt's correspondence with Lorena Hicks, in the relationship between Annie Liebowitz and Susan Sontag.  I found books like Living Two Lives:  Married to a Man but in Love with a Woman.  I wish I'd found Faderman's books.  Nestle's book would have frightened me -- I wasn't ready to hear about the difficulties yet, the legal battles, the discrimination.  But I desperately needed to know that I was not the only woman in the world who had fallen in love with another woman.

Once, when I was in 7th grade, my social studies teacher put us in small groups and asked us to write, design and perform a skit that would make one of the 19th century reform movements come alive.  My small group -- all girls -- chose the suffragette movement.  One girl was Carrie Nation (the hatchet-wielding temperance fighter), one girl was Sojourner Truth, and I was Susan B. Anthony.

No encyclopedia entry I read to prepare for the skit told me Susan B. was a lesbian.  But she was.

Was Alice Paul, the suffragette who helped push through the 19th Amendment, a lesbian, too?  The film Iron-Jawed Angels, which I love, seems to seek to deny any rumor that Paul had lesbian relationships, giving Hillary Swank fantasies about a certain young man.  Does it matter whether Alice Paul was a lesbian, or does it only matter what she did for women?  Film-maker Paul Barnes defended his omission of Susan B. Anthony's lesbian relationships in his film "Not for Ourselves Alone" by explaining, "we did not have the time to explore this part of her life."

But I know this:  we do ourselves and our children and their children no favors if we cover truth, mask truth, twist truth.  How do we dig deeply enough?  How do we ask the right questions?  More and more, I understand that my sole job as a middle school social studies teacher is to push my students to uncover what has not been told, what is missing.

As a lesbian, my job may be to be a carrier of the lesbian HERstory torch, to keep unearthing stories, to tell and tell their names so that no one forgets.

We must make the time to keep learning -- and telling -- these stories.

A love letter to New Mexico. . .

Sometimes, I decide to write about non-lesbian topics. . .so I write essays like this love letter to New Mexico (published by the New Mexico Mercury on Monday).  It's funny, though:  when I re-read the letter, I realize I'm addressing the state as a woman, all those curves in the road, all those secret places in the desert.

Orange is the New. . . Lesbian?

After I write my 1500 words tonight, I plan to turn on episode 6 of the second season of "Orange is the New Black," that show everyone's watching from Netflix.  I can't imagine you don't know the story (especially if you found my blog because you searched for something "lesbian"), but the short summary is this:  Piper Chapman, a white, prudish, WASPy woman engaged to be married to a man is convicted of drug smuggling nine years earlier -- a crime she committed with and for her lesbian girlfriend, Alex Vause.  Each episode of "Orange" follows Piper through the corrupt and complex system of a maximum-security women's prison.  The show also investigates the stories of other women prisoners, and it holds court on many issues within the culture of a women's prison.

"Orange" also investigates many seldom discussed issues within lesbian culture.  When Piper discovers Alex is in the same prison, the passion she feels for her rekindles (after her anger and hurt fade).  Does this mean Piper was always lesbian, and that her feelings for her fiance, Larry, are false?  Or is it only Alex the person that Piper loves, not all women?  In its list of the show's characters, Wikipedia calls Piper "a bisexual woman," but is she?  Or has society forced her into compulsory heterosexuality?

Sophia Burset, a transgendered woman in prison for credit card fraud, raises questions about what defines a woman.  Formerly a male firefighter, Sophia is easily the most stylish and well-mannered woman in the prison.

Carrie "Big Boo" Black is the "diesel dyke," the butch lesbian who takes pride in her identity as a tough woman with aggressive needs.  Feminism has often wanted to dismiss the butch/femme dichotomy as mimicking patriarchy, but butch women like Big Boo argue that it's a valid identity on its own.

Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren is a lesbian who struggles with mental illness, another issue that is often kept hush-hush in the lesbian community.  She developed an obsession with Piper in Season 1, which introduced some interesting discussion about race and lesbian relationships, too.

Nicky Nichols is a lesbian and a former drug addict, who has been in a relationship with other women in the prison (and competes with Big Boo at one point to see who can get the most women to orgasm).  Her high sex drive and flirtiness challenge the stereotype of the asexual aging lesbian.

Poussey Washington is a comfortably out lesbian who has struggled with acceptance in the greater world (her father, a major in the U.S. Army, was transferred out of Germany because Poussey had a relationship with the base commander's daughter).  She's in love with Tastee, her best friend in prison, though Tastee is adamant about her heterosexuality.

What else?  Mr. Healy, the prison supervisor, is homophobic.  His opinion (and protection of) Piper changes entirely when he suspects her of being lesbian.  Some of the inmates are homophobic for some reason or another, like Pensatuckey's religion, or Miss Claudette's cultural upbringing.  Piper's fiance Larry (and Piper's mother) seem to hold Piper's lesbianism at nearly the same level of criminality as her involvement in a drug ring.  The point:  "Orange" is bringing lesbian culture into the spotlight for the greater world.

Then. . . why do I feel vaguely uncomfortable about my love of the show?  Because one day, in a conversation with another lesbian, I realized that almost everyone -- lesbians included -- has seen "Orange," but few people have read Jeanette Winterson or watched great lesbian films like "Tipping the Velvet" or "Aimee and Jaguar".  "Orange" and Ellen are becoming all people know of lesbians.  We're forgetting Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, Virginia Woolf, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde.  Culturally, we spend more time thinking about how lesbians interact in prison than how lesbians interact in the greater world.  Yikes.

At the top of my flier for the lesbian CR group I'm trying to start in Boulder, I wrote "'Orange is the New Black' isn't all of who we are."

Even though I love "Orange," it's crucial to remember the rest of what being a lesbian means. . .