The toaster joke.

At our monthly Lesbian HERstory Consciousness-Raising Group (yes, an unwieldly title), a fairly consistent group of 10-12 lesbians gathers to discuss a different lesbian and her life -- her ideas, her work, her influence.  The idea is to find some commonality with these lesbians who lived before us, to find our heritage in a world that still omits truths.  In my social studies class today, I answered a question about GLBT rights in 1800s America by talking about Susan B. Anthony.  "Susan B. Anthony was gay?" an 8th grade student asked, her eyes wide.  I nodded.  "I'm so glad to know that," the student murmured.  That's why we're doing the CR group.

We don't ask easy questions.  In August, our discussions about Adrienne Rich's poetry led us to explore the difficulty of coming out, the political aspects of being lesbian, the idea of compulsory heterosexuality.  In September, Audre Lorde's essays pushed us to consider race and class and the ways in which those categories of identity intersect and clash with sexual orientation.  In October, Virginia Woolf's Orlando challenged us to examine gender roles and assumptions (and even prompted us to discuss the pros and cons of purses for awhile).

Last weekend, at our November meeting, we decided to explore lighter topics by focusing our discussion on Ellen DeGeneres.  We watched the great comedian's stand-up routine from her 1986 appearance on the Johnny Carson show, and we watched the famous "Puppy Episode" from 1997, when Ellen announced she was gay.  Technically, I'm the facilitator/organizer of this group, but as we started to discuss Ellen, I realized how little I actually know about lesbian culture.  I came out in 2005 in Alaska, and I didn't move to the Lower 48 until 2011.  I'm like the German logger in Annie Dillard's novel The Living who worked for a year in a logging camp in Washington, was convinced he'd learned English from the other loggers, and sauntered into a Seattle bar to try it out. . .only to realize he'd learned Finnish in the camp, and could understand no one.

It's not that egregious, though.  I am a woman who loves women, after all, and I've read Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters, I've watched The L Word, I know Adrienne Rich's poetry.  But I didn't know the toaster joke until I watched the "Puppy Episode" preparing for the CR group.  I didn't know how many women dislike the word "lesbian" (Ellen told Time magazine in 1997 she hated the word, though she'd begun to get used to it).  I didn't know any of the stereotypes:  that lesbians can fix anything, that they mostly wear pants.  I'd never thought about purses before.  I know my 19th century history, but I'm ignorant of current culture.

And that's why we have this CR group, too.  Where were you in 1997? I asked everyone as the opening prompt on Sunday.  That was the year Ellen came out, of course.  As women took turns sharing their responses around the circle, I felt an increasing anxiety.  Where was I in 1997?  I was 19 years old that April, a college sophomore signing paperwork to study abroad in England for the next year.  I'd just broken up with a boyfriend and the world seemed vast and lonely.  In April 1997, I didn't know anyone who was gay (or I thought I didn't -- now I know I did), and the news about Ellen didn't even reach me.  It would be another eight years before I realized I was gay.

And I'm just learning the toaster joke now.  Does it matter?  I watched Ellen Degeneres talk to the Canadian actress Ellen Page about Page's recent coming-out announcement, and my eyes welled up with tears.  Even in a country that's slowly moving toward acceptance of gay marriage, it's hard to be different.  I'm proud to be who I am, and it's hard.  We need each other.  We need to know our history.  All of it, from Sappho to Susan B. to Audre to Ellen to me to beyond.

On archiving difference

Image of Boulder in 1859, from the Boulder History Museum.

In my day-job role as a middle school social studies teacher, I'm currently planning a week-long study of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864), which will include visits to the Carnegie Archives, the Boulder History Museum, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site and the Sand Creek Massacre Site way out in eastern Colorado.  I've spent all night tonight searching the online archives Carnegie holds for Boulder County, deciding which documents and maps and photographs would best help my 7th and 8th graders understand the tensions between miners/settlers and the Cheyenne and Arapaho in this area.

When I emailed the librarian at Carnegie, she replied kindly that the archives don't hold many specific resources on Sand Creek, since the event happened far from Boulder County.  I asked her for any newspapers, photographs, reports she could dig up for us from the years building up to the massacre. How could there be no records?  Boulder became an incorporated town in 1859.  According to an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were entitled to a protected tract of land that included most of Colorado east of the Rockies, the southeastern corner of Wyoming, the southwestern corner of Nebraska, and the northwestern corner of Kansas.  This included Boulder County.  Where are the photographs, documents, artifacts that record the presence of those tribes, recognized by that 1851 treaty as the people who rightfully called this area home?

The answer is complicated, I think.  Racist attitudes, differing goals for the keeping of those early records, the 1861 treaty that reduced the Cheyenne and Arapaho land to a small tract out in eastern Colorado, just north of the Arkansas River, by today's towns of Eads and Lamar.  But the silence of the archives disturbs me.  I find an 1820 account of a surveyor who was attacked by a band of Mohave.  I find the original document of a court case the Arapaho and Cheyenne brought against the U.S. government in a Boulder court.  Otherwise, the documentation is elsewhere -- in other museums, at the national historic sites, lost.  That's what the librarian told me, anyway.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the silence of archives about certain populations -- and certain people.  All summer, I read Lillian Faderman's books -- especially To Believe In Women:  Lesbians Who Changed America and Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  All summer, I felt amazed that, at 37, I knew so little about the lesbian archives.  That the archives are so hidden one has to wear the right glasses to see what's there.  That Susan B. Anthony was a great suffragette and a renowned lesbian.  That both pieces of information matter, but only the former has been well archived.

To even mention the lesbian archives alongside what happened to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Boulder County seems wrong, and yet the realities and risks of erasure and silence are not so different.  I keep thinking of what Adrienne Rich said, about how being lesbian puts us outside the norm -- into the different --  that it helps us see everything differently.  That's what I can do as a teacher, then, since I have that altered vision.  I can help my students see the gaps, the silences, the biases, the empty space where once there was something.

For what?  A student asked me today, "Why look at these old treaties, when we can't even change what happened?"  I didn't respond adequately because other students were trying to hand me permission slips, and one of them had started vacuuming, and two boys were arm wrestling in the back of the room.  But I wish I had said:  we have to be the ones who help the archives speak.  We have to create space for the silences to become loud.

That's what I'm thinking about tonight.

Longs Peak essay in the Flatirons Literary Review

The Flatirons Literary Review published my Longs Peak essay (and my dad's beautiful photo of Longs from Chasm Lake) today.  Here's a link.  Feel free to leave a comment on the site -- they're eager to gain readers!

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.