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I remember when I first read Barbara Smith's essay on
why Toni Morrison's Sula was a lesbian novel, how this great grinding
noise went through my brain. Of course, I thought, and so was Carson
McCuller's Member of the Wedding and My Ántonia by Willa Cather.
I always knew that. In that moment my whole imagination shifted, and I
admitted what had always been so: I had spent my adolescence re-interpreting
the reality of every book, movie, and television show I had ever
experiencedmoving everything into lesbian land. Of course, that was how I
had kept myself semi-sane and developed an idea of how to love someone, how to
be part of a community, and maybe even find happiness.
I read Mary Renault as lesbianeven her novels that
featured only men. There was her novel about two women on a houseboat, with
the one of them writing westerns to support them both, The Friendly Young
Ladies, which was definitely about lesbians, but all Renault's work seemed
to me to carry forward the same themes. (I discovered that every woman I have
ever dated had read not only The Persian Boy but Fire from Heaven,
and recognized them as lesbian textsas if Alexander the Great was really,
truly just another wounded butch underneath it all.) I read books for the
queer subtext and because they advocated a world I understood. Books about
outsiders, books about inappropriate desire, books where the heroes escaped or
fought social expectations, books where boys were girlish or girls were strong
and mouthyall were deeply dykey to me, sources of inspiration or social
criticism or life-sustaining poetry.
Flannery O'Connorthat astonishing, brave, visionary
who told hard truths in a human voicewas an outsider holding a whole
society up to a polished mirror. She was as ruthless as one of her own
characters, and I loved her with my whole heart. Surely, she was a lesbian, I
told myself and took comfort from her stubborn misfit's life, the fact that
she lived with her mama and never married. I did not need her to sleep with a
woman to prove her importance to me, though I would have been grateful to
think of her with a great love comforting her as lupus robbed her of all she
might have done.
If I set aside Flannery O'Connor, I would have to say
that science fiction made me who I am today. I spent my childhood buried in
those books. Every science fiction novel I fell into as a child, regardless of
the gender or sexual persuasion of the author, widened my imagination about
what was possible for me in the world. There were those perfectly
horrible/wonderful stories about barbarian swordswomen who were always falling
in love with demons, and there were the Telzey stories and the Witch World
books and countless brave and wonderful novels told from inside the
imaginations of "special" young girls. Mindreading seemed to me to
code queer. Alien suggested dyke. On another world, in a strange time and
place, all categories were reshuffled and made over.
These days with everyone so matter-of-fact about sexual
identity it is hard to explain how embattled I was as a girl, how embattled
the whole subject seemed to be. It was entirely different for women ten years
younger than me if they grew up in an urban center, and different again a
decade later for everyone regardless of where they grew up. I wonder what it
must be like for those lesbians younger than me who have never had to make
that translation. How do they read books, watch movies and television, and
shape their own sense of being queer in the world today? Sometimes I wonder if
books are as lifesaving for teenagers today as they were for me when I was a
girl. But then I go to speak to some group and there are those young people
clutching books to their hearts, asking me what I am reading with the same
kind of desperate passion I felt whenever I went to a library or bookstore. No
doubt it is different these days, but that passion still seems to be there.
Books are still where some of us get our notions of how the world is, and how
it might be.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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