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.

The question of woman (and lesbian).

I want to keep the discussion we ten lesbians held this afternoon at Boulder's new Lesbian HERstory C.R. group private, so I'll just share this general observation:  a lesbian-only space contains a different energy, its own power, its own cocoon of safety.  Except for Indigo Girls concerts and bars like Seattle's Wild Rose, I've never actually been in a lesbian-only space until today, and I still feel emotional about the experience.  In the past three years, I've been lonely so much of the time, and today I felt entirely connected.  Heard.  Understood.

My brother-in-law, who, other than my former husband, is the kindest man I know, asked me a couple of weeks ago why I wanted to organize a lesbian-only event.  I stuttered through an inadequate answer.  Tonight, I can explain clearly:  because even in a world that increases its acceptance of lesbians every day, we need space to be with just each other.  We breathe differently there.

Insisting on lesbian-only or women-only space hasn't always been a popular approach, as I've just read in Michelle Goldberg's essay "What is a Woman?" in this week's New Yorker (August 4, 2014).  Goldberg's summary and analysis of the battle that has raged since the 1970s between radical feminists and transgendered male-to-female people includes decades of challenge to women-only space.  Goldberg focuses on the Michigan Womyn's Fest, which has been severely criticized by the transgendered community because it admits only "womyn-born womyn".  Musical groups like the Indigo Girls have announced boycotts of the event until it becomes trans-inclusive.  Women (womyn) on the other side of the debate have argued they simply need a women-only space for awhile, to feel safe and unencumbered by societal oppression.  The trans community has reacted with anger to that, saying it implies trans male-to-female people are unsafe.  Consider, too:  in the summer of 2010, some of the people at the protest camp Camp Trans committed acts of vandalism that included the spray-painting of a six-foot penis and the words "Real Women Have Dicks" on the side of a kitchen tent (Goldberg 28).  That kind of violence is of a specific kind, and it is counter to what the majority of male-to-female people argue they want:  inclusion into the safety of women-only places.

In the weeks before today's C.R. group (and before I read Goldberg's article), two trans male-to-female people emailed me to ask if they could sign up for the lesbian HERstory group.  My answer:  yes!  If they identity as lesbians, they're welcome in the group.  To say otherwise -- to say, as some radical feminists do (Goldberg mentions Sheila Jeffrey), that a person who is biologically male still benefits from our society's male privilege and so cannot participate in meaningful feminist dialogue -- is to imitate what has so often been done to us as lesbians.  I think trans people in lesbian spaces deepen the kinds of conversation we can have.  Return to what Monique Wittig said in the early 1980s:  "I am not a woman, I am a lesbian."  If someone genuinely identifies as lesbian, we must open our arms and pull them in.  If we do not, we'll repeat the 1950s rejection of the butch lesbian, the 1960s separation from working women and women of color.

But what if a man emailed me to ask if he could join our lesbian-only group?  Our space today would have felt entirely different.  We wouldn't have talked the way we did.  In an era in which we are encouraged to include everyone so we offend no one, we lesbians still desperately need spaces where we can just be with other lesbians -- not with the bar scene pressure to date, but with a C.R. group ability to comfort, inspire and empower.

In "21 Love Poems," Adrienne Rich wrote, "No one has imagined us."  No one, that is, but each other.  I can think of no better reason to gather, just for awhile, in the same room with each other.

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

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. . .