The tools I could give my child. . .

Exactly six years ago, on August 22, 2008, I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, set my duffle bag on a bed and then waited for the moment the shuttle bus would arrive to take us to the Care Center.  My daughter Mitike was there.  My daughter.  The seven other families in the guest house, all white, milled restlessly around the courtyard, the living room with its black leather couches.  Our children were waiting for us.  We'd received the emails, filed the proper paperwork, paid the required legal fees, allowed social workers to interview us and inspect our homes, and we'd waited and waited and waited.  Now, we'd arrived.  Ready.

I've written much elsewhere (see the blog I kept in those first few years) about what it was like to bring Mitike home and to learn to be a mama.  I've also written about skin color and being a white mother raising a little girl with different hair and a different awareness than I might ever understand.

But now that I have a seven-year-old -- a wise seven-year-old who asks poignant questions and notices everything -- the world is getting more complicated.  Mama, why was a teenage boy shot in Ferguson?  Mama, why did Dr. King have to tell people it was wrong to segregate everything?  Wasn't it obvious?  Mommy, why did the American doctor get medicine for ebola but they're not giving it to all the Africans?

I could turn off NPR while we're cooking dinner together.  But we have these important conversations over our soup or our hamburgers.  We talk about the world, and I say I'm not always sure why it is the way it is, but I know people can make it better.  I say this even when I'm not sure.  Even when I'm planning a social studies lesson on the decimation of the Native Americans in the 1800s and thinking about race riots in current-day Missouri.

What do I tell a seven-year-old?  My white privilege makes me blind sometimes.  I feel guilty when I think, thank goodness, she's a girl.  Gender connects us, I say, and we're so similar (we are).  But I forget to celebrate her difference.  I forget she needs that, because I don't always see it.

Two weeks ago, I sat on a couch in a beauty salon on East Colfax in Denver while a Nigerian woman braided Mitike's hair into tiny rows.  Mitike sat on a high black swivel chair beside a woman getting her twisties taken out and a woman getting extensions put in.  The other two hair stylists were from Mali, and they were all switching between English, French, and something else while they worked, commenting on a dramatic Nigerian soap opera on the TV screen beside my couch.  Mitike sat in the swivel chair for four whole hours, and the women doted on her, bringing her into a world I could only peer into.  They mostly ignored me and my New Yorker on the couch, and I was uncomfortable.  Except for the pain of tight braids, Mitike was completely at ease.

Six years.  I've been a single mother for half that time.  Next year, the majority of Mitike's life, she will have had a single lesbian mother, a family of only two.  It's time for me to start pushing us both out into the world a bit more.  It's time to make myself more uncomfortable more often.  More trips to Aurora and the Ethiopian community there, commitment to a heritage camp this summer, maybe a trip to D.C.  I know:  I could relax into her regular little girl concerns:  who her friends are, what she'll wear tomorrow, what she can put into her lunch now that she's making it herself.  I think she'd let me.  But the news on the radio each day challenges us both to do more.  We are not the same, she and I.  In a world still spewing judgment on skin color, my job as a mother is to help her find pride in all that she is.

I've been thinking about how Adrienne Rich said in "Compulsory Heterosexuality" that lesbians, because they live outside of the expected social structure of heterosexual marriage, begin to gain a new perspective on other aspects of life, too.  I do not know how it feels to be the only person of color in my neighborhood and my school every single day.  I do know how it feels to be different, to feel different.  I know I need to find my history.  I know to question those who judge me.  I know to share my pride in who I am with those around me.  These are gifts I can give my child in this seventh year of getting to be her mama.  Maybe, to allude to Audre Lorde, these could become tools she could use to dismantle the master's house. . .

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!

From "A Woman on Longs Peak"

An excerpt from a much longer essay I submitted to the Flatirons Literary Review today.  I'll post a link to the whole essay if they publish it.  

. . .The sky begins to lighten for an hour before we see the sun.  Now I can see the path switch-backing up through the tundra, the hump of Storm Peak to the right, the craggy triangle of Mount Lady Washington to the left.  Behind us, layers of purple peaks give way to the endless plains, a hazy horizon and clouds just beginning to pink.  The trail rises past the tranquil Peacock Pool and then:  Longs Peak.  I’ve been worrying about whether or not to write the name with its apostrophe, but now I see the mountain and know names matter not at all.  This mountain -- the cut granite of the diamond face, the rock formation we call the Beaver, the deceptively tranquil snowfield we call the Dove – has been uplifted, eroded, scoured by wind and weather for millions of years.  Any name a human gives it is a passing whisper.  I stand still in the trail and gaze up at the mountain.  Words are dust here.

The sun rises.  At this elevation, it is a sudden event, the world progressively lighter until There! the sun appears fuscia between two eastern peaks, and then rises with surprising speed, turning golden, warming the world.  Normally, I’d watch, but I only have eyes for Longs Peak.  The diamond face catches fire, turns golden.  Hardy columbine and yellow arnica nod in the wind, and wisps of gilded cloud move across the rounded top of the peak.  We hike onward, our eyes on the great rounded summit.  It is not holy, because holy is what people make things.  It just is, and we are here, and I am grateful.  Grateful even though I cannot feel my fingers in my thick gloves, even though my four layers of fleece and my windbreaker do not keep out the chill wind, even though we have hiked only half of our journey to the summit.

*

Many sources, including the popular book Longs Peak:  a Rocky Mountain Chronicle, by Stephen Trimble, claim that a woman named Anna Dickinson was the first to summit Longs when she stepped onto the summit in mid-September of 1873.  However, although Dickinson was only the third woman to successfully climb the peak (the Boulder County News reported a Miss Bartlett summited a few weeks after Addie Alexander), she was the most famous.  In 1873, the 31-year-old Dickinson was a well-known orator who had been an instrumental abolitionist and now was actively involved in the women’s movement.  She was also what we would call today a lesbian.  Through her study of their correspondence, historian Lillian Faderman documents Dickinson’s close, intimate relationship with Susan B. Anthony, as well as with other women.  This isn’t relevant to Dickinson’s ascent up Longs except that it is nearly always omitted from biographical accounts of her.  One thinks about many things in the long ascent of Longs.  It’s possible Dickinson was thinking about Anthony’s latest letter, her expressed wish to “snuggle. . .closer than ever,” her cheeky assertion that her bed was “big enough and good enough to take” Anna in (Faderman 26). 

Dickinson had already summited Pikes Peak, Mount Lincoln, Grays Peak, and Mount Elbert.  She’d ridden up these other 14ers on horseback or burro, and she’d rolled boulders from the top of Elbert just to delight in watching them fall.  She was a passionate mountain climber who had climbed New Hampshire’s Mount Washington over twenty-eight times.  Longs Peak would be another peak to add to her list, and, since she was with the famous Hayden survey party, she hoped the climb would help her career, which was floundering.

In The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Janet Robertson describes the morning of Dickinson’s ascent:  the party had a large breakfast at 4 a.m. on September 13 at their campsite in what is now known as Jim’s Grove, then rode up toward the Boulderfield.  To cries of scandal later when it was reported in the Boulder County News, Dickinson wore trousers.  Even more scandalous, she split the trousers on her descent.

*

I’ve climbed this mountain before.  When I was 14, my dad took me to the summit on a cloudless July day.  I remember my lungs ached, and that I didn’t want him to know I was tired.  I wore cut-off jean shorts, a red cotton sweatshirt, pink and turquoise hiking boots.  It was 1991.  We tried again four years later, when I was 18, but sleet that coated the rocks in the Boulderfield with ice turned us back.  Today, I’m thirty-seven, hiking the mountain with two of my cousins, both of whom first summited as teenagers, too.  It was the required rite of passage in our family.

Just below the Keyhole, the eponymous gap in the rock ridge at the top of the Boulderfield, the wind increases, the temperature drops.  Ominous grey clouds speed through the Keyhole and swirl across the Diamond face, then obscure it, then obscure everything.  My fingers ache because I’ve ripped open a package of hand-warmers and inserted them into my gloves, and my face is numb.  My cousin Anthony is wearing shorts, and my cousin Johanna has wrapped herself in all the clothes she’s brought.  The three of us look at each other.  We’ve all summited before, but we’ve also all turned back before.  This mountain creates its own weather, and it’s serious.  Dangerous.  When Anthony, who is 6’5”, climbs to the Keyhole to peer over the other side, the wind unbalances him.

We huddle in the stone hut just below the Keyhole.  The hut is a memorial to the climber Agnes Vaille, who died after a successful winter ascent of the East Face went awry in January 1925.  Ten hikers are already crammed into the tiny hut.  One of them is a shivering little boy of nine.  I close my eyes and think of the black and white photo I’ve seen of Agnes Vaille.  She wears a long, dark, loose dress, and she’s tied up her hair.  She’s leaning back with one hand on a boulder, the other on her lap.  She wears wire spectacles, but she looks young, and her neck is slender and lovely.  I love the way she looks not at the camera but into the distance, a half-smile on her lips.  She was in the Red Cross in France in WWI. 

When the rescue party found Vaille after her climbing partner, Walter Kiener, stumbled down the mountain for help, the extreme conditions – temperatures they recorded at 50 degrees below zero, 100 mile-per-hour winds – she had already died of fatigue and hypothermia.  One of the rescue party members also died.  Kiener lost fingers and toes to frostbite. 

Today, it is August 6.  The temperature outside is probably forty degrees, but inside the hut, we are all waiting for the mountain, knowing enough to respect its warnings.  It could clear, a man in bright orange yells from his perch at the Keyhole.  He waves a cellphone.  I got a signal for a moment, and the radar showed the front is moving through!  But cloud has obscured the Boulderfield below us, and we’re cold.  The nine-year-old’s teeth are chattering.  With every gust of wind, the windows in the tiny hut built for Agnes Vaille rattle.

*

Janet Robertson writes of Anna Dickinson in her later life:  “Although she had many suitors, she spurned them all and chose to remain single.”  Lillian Faderman documents the kind of single life Dickinson lived, in letters like this one she wrote to Susan B. Anthony:  “[I long] to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you – I can’t have you?  Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you” (26).

Whether her successful ascent of Longs on September 13, 1873, mattered to Dickinson is difficult to know.  In the autobiography she wrote several years later, she barely mentioned the ascent, since she had more to say about the part she’d played in American politics and in the social movements of her time.  Longs Peak was one more mountain she had climbed.  Her companions on Longs probably named Mount Lady Washington in her honor, giving her that nickname because of her love for the New Hampshire peak, but it’s difficult to discern whether Longs meant something special to Dickinson in the way it did to others.

Nine years later, in 1882, Dickinson performed as Hamlet on Broadway.  This is unrelated to her ascent of Longs Peak, except for the courage it took to do both.  And except that she was ridiculed for wearing trousers in both.   In 1891, her sister Susan had her incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane.  Some sources say she was paranoid, some say she was alcoholic, some say she was wrongly accused.  When she emerged, she sued for her reputation and won, but then lived the last forty years of her life in quiet obscurity, unknown. 

*

I re-name the triangular Mt. Lady Washington Anna Peak.  In the Agnes Vaille Hut, Johanna shivers and says we need to make a decision, now.  Up or down.  I run up to the Keyhole edge and find clearing clouds.  The wind has lessened.  I suggest we go on, and so we do.

The route from the Keyhole to the summit of Longs is marked by bright yellow painted circles enclosed with red, the bullseyes hikers call the Fried Egg Trail.  It’s more perilous than I remember from twenty-three years ago, but the wind has calmed to a breeze and the sun emerges sometimes from the clouds to warm us.  The steep, slick granite western side of the great mountain drops 2,000 feet to turquoise alpine lakes.  On the other side of the deep canyon, jagged peaks snag the clouds as far west as I can see.  Two years ago, I hiked to the top of the gentle green Mount Audubon, just across the canyon, and I shuddered to see the vertiginous sides of Longs Peak.  I swore I never needed to climb it again, but here I am.

The fried eggs lead us along narrow ledges.  If we slipped, we’d die.  In June this summer, a Fort Collins man fell to his death from the Trough.  Last August, a Missouri man died falling from the Narrows.  The risk is real. The climbers with their ropes and helmets might be safer. . .

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.

Writers every lesbian should read (a list).

I don't know why I've listed lesbian movies on this blog and not lesbian poetry, lesbian essays, lesbian novels.  I'll remedy that here with a list. . . please comment to add the ones I've forgotten!

Writers every lesbian should read (an incomplete list):

HERstory

Lillian Faderman (especially Surpassing the Love of Men, To Believe in Women, and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers)

The journal Sinister Wisdom (every lesbian should subscribe!)

Essayists

Rebecca Brown (especially Gifts of the Body and American Romances)

Audre Lorde (especially The Uses of the Erotic)

Adrienne Rich (especially On Lies, Secrets and Silence)

Minnie Bruce Pratt (Rebellion:  Essays 1980-1991)

Mab Segrest (My Mama's Dead Squirrel:  Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture)

Barrie Jean Borich (My Lesbian Husband:  Essays)

Dorothy Allison (Skin:  Talking about Sex, Class and Literature)

Joan Nestle (A Restricted Country)

Sarah Schulman (My American History:  Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years)

Novelists

Jeanette Winterson (especially Written on the Body, The Passion, The Powerbook, Stone Gods, Gut Symmetries)

Aimee and Jaguar, by Erica Fisher

Sarah Waters (especially Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith)

Virginia Woolf (especially Orlando)

Shamim Sarif (especially The World Unseen and all the movies she makes)

Rebecca Brown (especially Terrible Girls and Annie Oakley's Girl)

Classics you should probably read

Patience and Sarah, by Isabel Miller

The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith

The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall (had to list it)

Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown

Annie on my Mind, by Nancy Garden

lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s (it's so entertaining)

correspondence between lesbians from history

YA books

If You Could Be Mine, by Sara Farizan

Tea, by Stacey D'Erasmo

Kissing Kate, by Lauren Myracle

The Beginning of Us, by Sarah Brooks

Memoirs

Why Be Happy When You Can't Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Zami, by Audre Lorde

Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg

Poets

Adrienne Rich

Audre Lorde

Mary Oliver

Eileen Myles

June Jordan

Margaret Randall

Marilyn Hacker

Akeilah Oliver

Robin Becker

Olga Broumas

Judy Grahn

Emily Dickinson (?)

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. . .

Review of "Cloudburst"

In "Cloudburst" (2011), Stella (Olympia Dukakis) and Dottie (Brenda Fricker) are lesbians in their 80s who live in a little house by the sea in Maine -- more or less peacefully, though their 31-year relationship contains some playful spark. All is well until Dottie's granddaughter, Molly, tricks her blind grandmother into signing away her power of attorney, which allows Molly to have her put in a nursing home.  Enraged, the fiesty and potty-mouthed Stella sneaks into the home, rescues Dottie, and then heads north to Canada in her rickety red pick-up truck, determined that if the two of them are legally married, they can be protected.  On the way, they pick up a sad and lost New York dancer/hitchhiker named Prentiss.  The majority of the movie is filmed in the cab of the truck or in the little Canadian towns just north of the Maine border.

This film is wonderful.  Stella and Dottie are realistic characters, and their relationship contains the solidity and rough patches a 31-year relationship is bound to contain.  The love between the two is palpable: it's sweet to have the third-person observations from Prentis (Ryan Doucette), but the audience doesn't need that perspective to see Stella and Dottie obviously love each other.  Like the camp comedy of the 1950s, the quest upon which the two women embark to gain legal protection for their relationship is hilarious and over-the-top, as Stella's ridiculously foul language and inappropriate comments get them into trouble and Dottie's blindness causes her to stumble into one very embarrassing situation.  However, like that camp comedy, the film is actually saying something serious.  Look at these two lesbians who have been together 31 years.  Really?  They live in a country where their commitment to each other isn't legal?  Where they have to roadtrip to Canada for legal protection?  At many points in the campy roadtrip scenes, such as the moment when Dottie and Stella get caught in the fast-rising tides, a sense of doom creeps into the comedy.  The two women are together, but barely.  Stella's right to be paranoid.

Olivia Dukakis is incredible as Stella, to the end of the film.  The trick for the viewer is to see her, finally, as Dottie did in her love:  as a woman who has endured too much, who loves big, who knows to recognize her "best day" when it comes.

Every lesbian should see this film, to honor our oldest generation of lesbians, to hear about 1950s lesbian culture and rules, and to find comfort in the camp and truth in the serious.  Other people should see this film, too, but they won't understand it the way we will. . .

A letter to the Boulder Bookstore

I visited Portland's Powell Bookstore a couple of weeks ago, where I saw the largest collection of lesbian fiction (and lesbian mystery, lesbian non-fiction, lesbian memoir -- all shelved separately, as the photograph shows) I've ever seen in my life.  I returned home to Boulder determined to create change, even if it was in a relatively small way.  For now.

Yesterday, I emailed the following letter to the Boulder Bookstore.  I have not yet received a response.  Updates to follow.

Emailed on June 26, 2014.

Dear Boulder Bookstore:

I moved to Boulder a year ago, and am so glad to live in a town with a large independent bookstore like the Boulder Bookstore.  The online component is excellent, and the employees in the store are always helpful.  As a local middle school teacher, I send my students your way to find their books, knowing you'll be able to help them find what they need.

All of that said, I'm curious about something:  why does the Boulder Bookstore not have a separate LGBT fiction section (or a lesbian fiction, gay fiction, and trans fiction section)?  I've noticed those books are shelved with the general or YA fiction, which makes them very difficult to find, particularly for people who are just coming to terms with their sexuality and find it embarrassing or shaming to ask a store employee for assistance.  When I first came out as a lesbian in 2005, Seattle's Elliot Bay Books and Left Bank Books, both of which shelve lesbian fiction as a separate genre, became havens for me -- places I could browse for stories that were like mine, without stuttering through an explanation to an employee.

I'm wondering if you would consider shelving LGBT fiction books in their own section in your bookstore.  I know Boulder used to have Word Is Out and Lefthand Books, which provided those safe places for LGBT or questioning people to find the stories they needed, but those places have closed.  I also know your website -- and websites like Amazon -- provide the incredible service of allowing anyone to use any search terms. My search for "lesbian fiction" on the Boulder Bookstore website yielded an impressive list.  However, I think the physical bookstore needs to make a statement that you recognize the LGBT community and understand those stories need to be readily accessible.  The LGBT non-fiction shelves in the Boulder Bookstore are sparse, but at least the category tells your customers you carry that kind of writing.

Truthfully, even though I have been out as a lesbian for ten years, I feel acknowledged and affirmed when I walk into a bookstore that has a lesbian fiction section.  A couple of weeks ago, I had that lovely experience at Powell's in Portland.  I'd love to feel the same way at home.

Thank you for considering my request (and my hope) that you create an LGBT fiction section in the Boulder Bookstore.  I would love to be able to tell my students -- and my friends -- that such a crucial section exists.  

Sincerely,

Sarah Brooks

reader and lesbian

Letter to Virginia

Dear Virginia,

Once, I wrote a fictional essay in which I burst into your room, where you sat surrounded by papers, your pen poised in ink-stained fingers.  I crossed the room to kiss you.  I suppose I did not imagine you as much as I imagined Nicole Kidman's you in "The Hours," but my point is that I wrote about kissing you.  I made love to you, and the pen dropped from your fingers, splattering ink across the pages on the brocade carpet.  You were surprised.  Vita didn't know half of what I knew.

How arrogant, that I believed I could move you to passion with my 21st century lesbian love.  I'm sorry.

I've been thinking about you.  About what's important.  I've been re-reading you, and wishing I could read you.  You said:  "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".  I haven't thought about that as much as I should have.  I interpreted it to mean independence.  Financial stability.  But you were talking about space, too, weren't you?  About the mental and spiritual and physical space from all other people.  If I really want to become a real writer, I must hold myself somewhat apart.

Is it possible to hold myself apart and also love?

I want to know more about you and Vita.  I read Orlando and it told me only that you loved her, and that you imagined her as man and woman and also something more than either of those.  You wrote asking her to "throw over" her man and come walk with you in the moonlit darkness, and she wrote to you that she missed you, loved you, longed for you.  And?  When Vita was with you, finally, Virginia, did you merely wish to return to that solitary room of your own?

I read that you struggled to see yourself as a sexual being, and that Vita struggled because she wanted you to recognize her as a real writer.  Your affair ended in 1929.  "All extremes of feeling are allied with madness," you wrote in Orlando in 1928.

Is it possible to engage in madness and also to create art, or is the madness the art?  I recognize myself in you, and so I offer us Georgia O'Keefe as a reminder that it is possible to create art and not be mad.  It is possible to paint passion and be balanced.  Tempered.

When I wrote that fictional essay, Virginia, I wrote that you'd be saved by my passionate kiss, by my bold 21st century life.  I wrote that you'd never have entered the river with stones in your pockets if you'd had other options for your life.  What did I know?  You'd tasted that life with Vita.  You weren't oppressed by homophobia, but by the heaviness of your own mind.  The room of your own was not large enough.  It couldn't quiet the voices in your head, the persistent sadness.

I want to know why writing didn't save you.  What would have?  In Orlando, you wrote, ". . .We write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person.  The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." But?

I want to know more about the room of your own.  About the room of my own.  I want to know if it could be enough.

Sarah

And. . .?

It's midnight and I should be in bed.  Or I should be a spectacularly productive writer, writing away into the wee hours, creating realistic fiction and heart-rending essays.  Instead, I've spent two hours searching Amtrak schedules and debating with myself whether I should take my child to Disneyland this summer -- something that would make her extraordinarily happy, but that would make a serious dent in our finances and would probably make me grumpy for a long list of reasons.

Next Friday, TK and I are going to get in the Honda CRV and travel south to New Mexico and Arizona, where we'll drive in an enormous circle for a week of visits to friends.  That plan alone should cure my wanderlust, but it makes me crane my neck even more.  In June, after a family reunion in Spokane, couldn't we take Amtrak down the entire coast of California?  What if we traveled in July to the Yucatan peninsula, just to swim in the Caribbean for several days?  I could save money for retirement, or I could introduce my daughter to the amazing world.

I sound so adventurous.  In reality, the prospect of doing all this traveling alone with a seven-year-old sweeps loneliness into this silent living room.  I try to avoid the spiral of "Ali and I used to have all these plans. . ." because it doesn't help me in this moment.  It's true, and now I need to make plans alone, with my little daughter, whose deep brown eyes absorb everything she sees, who will delight in the train trip, who will be astonished by the warm water in the Caribbean.  She's my focus now.

And for now.  Maybe someday I'll be able to think what it could mean to include another adult in my plans, but I'd rather research bus times to Crater National Park.

A new world

Have I mentioned that by day I'm a middle school teacher?

This afternoon, I sat in the back of the classroom while a guest speaker talked to my students about gender identity awareness -- part of the health curriculum we're teaching at our school for the next two weeks.  The speaker, Heather, was a young (28 -- when did I get so old?) lesbian woman with an open manner and an easy laugh, a relaxed self-confidence.  The kids listened to her intently, far better than they had for the previous speaker, who had tried to get them to think about healthy relationships.

Heather listed all the ways people identify -- gay, lesbian, bi, pan-sexual, transgender, asexual, bi-curious, heterosexual, queer, inter-sex.  She talked freely about the history of the word "homosexual" and about the ways laws have recently changed.  The kids listened.  No tittering.  No whispering.  When the relationship guy had asked them to think about dating, they rolled their eyes at each other and blushed bright red, but Heather's talk didn't seem to faze them at all.

I seemed to be the only person amazed by this.  In the middle school where I taught for seven years in Alaska, we weren't even allowed to talk about "alternative families" in our health curriculum - - much less the definition of "bi-curious".  In Iowa, where I grew up, I never heard the word "lesbian" until someone whispered it to me in the locker room when I was 16 or 17 -- told me that Carrie on the newspaper staff was lesbian and wasn't that gross?  I couldn't even understand what it meant.  Nobody talked about sexual orientation in any official way when I was growing up.  I never knew it was a real option, a real life.  In college, I knew two women who were together, but it was novel:  they were the token lesbians on our small campus at the time.

I'm not that old.  Thirty-six.  I was a middle schooler only 22 years ago, but the world has changed dramatically -- wonderfully.  When I looked around at all those adolescent faces listening to Heather this afternoon, I wanted to burst into tears that I never got this opportunity to learn about all the options and I wanted to shout something triumphant.  Yes, yes:  I teach middle school in Boulder, which is famously tolerant of sexual preferences.  But change has come.  I currently have three students who are out and proud, and everyone accepts them for who they are.  I wish Carrie the newspaper staff girl and I had grown up in this world, too.

Release of The Beginning of Us!

If you type in "Sarah Brooks The Beginning of Us" into Amazon.com, you find the little book I've written, starting NOW!  Thank you to everyone who wants to read it.  You can buy it at Amazon or at my publisher's site, Riptide.

Also, I'm going on a virtual tour all this week.  Follow me by going to these links:

January 27, 2014 - Planet of the Book Blog

January 27, 2014 - That's What I'm Talking About

January 28, 2014 - Prism Book Alliance Reviews

January 28, 2014 - MamaKitty Reviews - Spotlight Stop

January 29, 2014 - Book Reviews & More by Kathy

January 30, 2014 - Live Your Life, Buy the Book - Spotlight Stop

January 30, 2014 - Queendsheenda

January 31, 2014 - Sid Love

January 31, 2014 - Lipstick Lesbian Reviews

Amazing.  Maybe -- just maybe -- this will be the start of that full-time writer path about which I've always dreamed. . .