Bear with me... I'm going to take a few paragraphs to work up to my central theme...

As a marginalized writer of lesbian-feminist plays, I used to wonder what it would be like if one of my plays achieved first-class production (which is the industry lingo for “Broadway-level”).  My question was answered when a Brazilian film and television star ran across a collection of my plays in a bookstore near Union Square, read my play about Joan of Arc, and decided to produce and star in it. In Brazil, of course. First-class production!

A word about the play: It was a one-woman show dealing with Joan of Arc as a teenaged, lesbian, butch runaway who was returning from the grave with a searing radical feminist critique of her experiences and those responsible for them. She is returning with a mission to warn contemporary women that they are facing the same enemies and that they need to understand this and to fight.

In other words, an unlikely candidate for first-class production.

But, you know what? The show was the top-selling commercial production of the season in both São Paulo and Rio. And then it went on to tour all the other major cities in Brazil. It was a smash hit.

Is Brazil a nation of lesbian feminists? What could possibly explain this?

Well… For starts, this one-woman show featured four really beefy, macho men. They rode motorcycles onto the stage, making a lot of noise, but no “lines” per se. This enabled the producer to designate them “scenic elements,” not added characters… which would have been a violation of my contract.

These four Hell’s Angels would circle Joan, maul her, cradle her, drive her on the back of their motorcycles…  In other words, come constantly between her and the audience. And the butch thing was gone, completely. Joan wore enough eye makeup to put Theda Bara to shame, and she was dressed in tights.

And then there was the rape.

Joan was raped in her prison cell in a situation that was clearly engineered to make her prefer death to life. And it worked. She recanted her recantation and was burned at the stake.

Now, lots of playwrights have written about Joan.. Bernard Shaw, Jean Anouihl, Eva Le Gallienne... and they end at the stake. I didn’t want to do that. In my play she is returning from the dead. The stake is in the past. We are looking to the future. I wanted to respect and protect the survivors in my audience who did not need to have their trauma memories restimulated. I did not want to write a play where, once again, the boys win.

In the Brazilian production, there was no such sensitivity. The four “scenic elements” stripped down to full frontal nudity and performed the assault on the stage. They raped my character. They raped my play. The play I had crafted to empower and inspire survivors became one more traumatic encounter reinforcing the helplessness of women, always outnumbered by the machine of patriarchy.

And they screwed me financially. Of course. It took more than three years to recover my royalty, and the amount was not commensurate with the success of the work.

Why am I telling you this in an article about Saving Mr. Banks?

Because I am a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal theatre, and I was angry about that. Really, really angry. Still am, because the pain of that experience never goes away. And I believe that PL Travers was a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal Hollywood, and that she was angry about that. Really, really angry. And now the world is invited to come and mock this thoroughly unpleasant woman.

I come to celebrate her.

Was PL Travers a lesbian?  Duh.

Some insist that she was bisexual, but the evidence for that is very sketchy. Aggressively pursuing publication, Travers went to Dublin to meet the editor Æ (aka George Russell), who had sent her an encouraging letter about her poems. He was married and twice her age, with a penchant for encouraging young writers. Travers’ biographer characterizes their friendship as “filial, intellectual, and marked by romantic gestures.” In other words, he flirted. But more to the point, he insisted that she get together with Madge Burnand. She did indeed get together with Madge, moved in with her, wrote the first Mary Poppins book in a cottage with her, and continued to live with her for ten years in a relationship that her biographer characterizes as “intense.” Duh.

Æ would also introduce Travers to the teachings of Gurdjieff, a charismatic and influential spiritual teacher. Travers’ involvement with the community of Gurdjieff’s followers in the 1930’s should be of special interest to lesbian scholars. In spite of Gurdjieff’s professed advocacy of rigid gender roles, he created a women-only group in the 1920’s known as “The Rope.” The members of this group were all strong, successful women—mostly lesbian—who did not subscribe to traditional gender roles. One of these women, Jessie Orage, became lovers with Travers. Orage had scandalized the Gurdjieff community a decade earlier by wearing men’s trousers and smoking cigarettes. She documents the affair with Travers in the pages of her diary.

So what about this Mary Poppins? Was she a lesbian? Well, I will argue—as did Travers—that heterosexual romance was not for her. Travers had first introduced the character in 1926, when she wrote a series of stories about children and their dreams. This collection became the basis for the first Mary Poppins book. On November 13, 1926, the Christchurch Sun published “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” a short story about Mary Poppins’ day off with her boyfriend Bert.

Eight years later, Travers published the first Mary Poppins book, and the most significant change between the 1926 version of the famous nanny and the 1934 one, had to do with Mary Poppins’ relationships with men. Bert is no longer a boyfriend, but a buddy… or, more accurately, a groupie. Mary Poppins has become what one writer calls “untouchable and distant,” but I would use the word “exalted.” She is morphing into archetypal forms. Æ suggested the goddess of destruction and empowerment, Kali—and Travers did not disagree. By 1934, the proper nanny of her earlier stories had begun to supercede the ineffectual mother Mrs. Banks. No one except Mr. Banks, according to Travers, could understand her.

I believe what we are dealing with here is a lesbian butch. A guardian/ warrior archetype who combines military discipline with a Gurdjieffian mysticism that enables her to ascend to the stars and commune with the animals. A lesbian butch who cannot identify with a haplessly subordinate mother-figure and who identifies more solidly with the bread-winning father who must brave the rigors of a collapsing financial world.

Disney, by the way, turned Mrs. Banks into a "Suffragette," because in his mind, this was synonymous with bad mothering. PL Travers, no doubt aware of the heavy lesbian butch presence among the ranks of women militating for equal rights, was baffled and unhappy with his choice. Truly, her flighty and uber-feminine Mrs. Banks would have been terrified by the Suffragists.

But back to Mary Poppins. I know this archetype. I have been working with lesbian archetypes in my writing for thirty years. I find them in the writings of other lesbians, in their biographies, in our spiritual traditions and rituals, and in the lives of the women I love. And they are completely invisible—censored—in mainstream culture. Where they do surface, they are wildly misinterpreted, ridiculed, or demonized. As is the character of PL Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. Which is more like "Saving Mr. Disney."

Disney comes off like “Father Knows Best” in the film, but, in fact, he was a heavy-handed union-buster who, according to documents that surfaced under the Freedom of Information Act, served from 1940 until his death in 1966 as a secret informer (read “spy”) for the FBI.

And he was a misogynist, a fact reflected in his hiring practices...  as well as his need to ridicule the movement for women's suffrage.The letter below spells out the Disney Studio's  policy:  "Women do not do any of the creative work..."

And then there was the animation. When Travers signed her agreement, she never dreamed that Disney would be sneaking animation into a film with live actors. Technically, it was not an animated film. He was sticking to the letter of the agreement, but not the spirit. The animated dance sequence took up a remarkable fifteen minutes of screen time. Was he just rubbing it in?

Not surprisingly Travers raised hell.

No, Disney did not invite her to the opening. This was a professional insult. Resourceful dyke that she was, she shamed another Disney executive into sending her an invitation. Yes, she wept at the premiere, but they were tears of frustration and disappointment. The animation! At the after-party she confronted Disney. According to Richard Sherman, who co-wrote the music, she declared in a loud voice, “Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney looked at her coolly and replied, “Pamela, the ship has sailed.” (She had asked him to call her Mrs. Travers.)

Most of the world would now equate Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews’ characterization. Travers' radical revisioning of parenting outside the box of traditional gender roles had been domesticated. And even the Suffragists had been trashed. Mr. Banks was saved. Mrs. Banks was saved. Bert and Mary were saved. And the lesbians were safely back in the closet, banished to a shadow world apart from the nuclear family and disallowed contact with the children.

I feel for Travers. I feel for her pain in fighting so hard for the real Mary Poppins, but lacking a language and a literature of archetypes to which she could point and say, “No, this is not that! Here is the frame of reference!” But that literature was as censored as her identity. She insisted on being called Mrs. Travers, but there was no husband. There never had been. "Travers" was her father’s first name. How could “Mrs. Travers” possibly, in 1960,  advocate for all of the attributes, affinities, mythological referents that belong to our culture?

Short answer: She couldn’t. But she did not pretend to be happy. She did not go gently into the heterotopia of Disneyland. She raised as much hell as she could, but she was outflanked, outmaneuvered, and outnumbered by the strike-breaking, Red-baiting, rabid McCarthy-ite spy who was dictating the so-called family values that would enshrine the patriarch and ensure the compliance of women.

Italian feminst Carla Lonzi has said, "Men use myth; women don’t have sufficient personal resources to create it. Women who have tried to do so by themselves have endured such stress that their lives have been shortened by it." But Travers beat the odds, living to be nearly a hundred. I submit that her fighting spirit, the very spirit so vilified in the movie, had a great deal to do with her longevity. Well-behaved women rarely make centenarians.

Saving Mr. Banks is a witch-burning. Make no mistake about that. Give me a film company and I will show you a film about a powerful, visionary, immanently reasonable lesbian fighting off an evil army of propagandists who are hell-bent on breaking the spirit of one of the greatest lesbian archetypes ever set on paper… a liberator of children, a goddess to the natural world, a harbinger of a new order in the wake of the collapse of capitalism. I invite you to imagine and inhabit that scenario, because, sisters, I promise you that it is the real story.


Like this blog? You'll probably enjoy my blog  "Stealing the Herd" and the Butch Visibility Project.

Thinking about my craft…

I just finished a wonderful book, The Lost Carving by David Esterly. The author is a woodcarver who specializes in ornamental fruits and flowers. He was commissioned to replace some remarkable work by eighteenth-century carver Grinling Gibbons that was destroyed in a fire at Hampton Court. The author takes us on a saunter into another era, without losing sight of the contemporary political skirmishes surrounding British heritage restoration work (being done by an American!)… along with meditations on the art of woodcarving, as well as bucolic commentary on the seasons in his rural workshop.

But the reason why I am writing about David Esterly’s book is that it set me to thinking about my own craft. The subtitle is “A Journey to the Heart of Making,” and I found myself applying many of his observations to my own work as a playwright.

“I’ve discovered the principle of dramatic tension that’s at the heart of the act of woodcarving.” He is talking about the way he holds the tools. The rear hand provides the propulsion, while the front hand resists the momentum. This results in precision and power.

In my playwriting, that propulsion is always the personal compulsion to tell a story that in some way answers a need of my own: the reclamation of the history of my lesbian foremothers that I so desperately need, the validation of other incest survivors who bear witness, the heroines who have dared to challenge the patriarchy. What is it that checks this evangelical or propagandistic momentum?  The rigid format required for telling a good story on the stage. The scenes that open and close the acts, the building of suspense and momentum, the deft handling of exposition (a major challenge with historical material), the subplots, the comic relief, and so on. And out of that tension, enhanced focus, economy of dialogue…  precision.

Esterly discovered something else. That there is third dynamic in play: The heel of the restraining hand must rest on a stable surface. Ah ha. The audience. The audience grounds the passion of the artist and the cleverness of the craftswoman. Always the audience. What do they see? How long can they sit? Can they tolerate a shock or will it alienate them? What are the limits of their “suspension of disbelief.”  In the words of Esterly, “It’s a beginner’s error that you can operate while floating above the world, in some ether of strength and desire and inspiration.” In fact, I may be mistaken about the audience being the grounding. Perhaps, for the playwright, the heel of our metaphorical hand rests, for better or worse, on box office revenue.

“These days I tell anyone who’ll listen that if you carve a leaf with holographic accuracy it looks like a wooden leaf. You need to introduce a series of selective exaggerations, which acknowledge the wood medium and render the leaf in that new language.”  Exactly. Yes, in real life, people do mumble, and they do stumble, and they certainly do not face in one direction for the whole of their time on earth. “Selective exaggerations.” Like projecting one’s voice to the back wall of a 500-seat house, even when whispering. Yes, this is a play. This is not real life. What is the point of a real whisper if the audience can’t hear it? “Selective exaggerations.” The high points. That was what Aristotle was after with his twenty-four-hour rule. Compression. Or as Samuel Goldwyn Mayer said, “Start with an earthquake and build from there.” Back to Esterly again: “Hyperbole in the service of naturalism.” His conclusion: Don’t copy nature; copy art. Indeed.

And along similar lines:  “If the viewer is truly deceived, then the effect of the art object is no different from that of the actual object.” He was talking about painting wood carvings to simulate the real thing. And then he goes on to describe something called the “valley effect.” A Japanese scientist found that the closer he designed robots to resemble humans, the more repellent people found them. (The “valley” is the dip in acceptance levels.) Esterly notes, “Simulacra are disturbing. We want to know where we stand with a thing. We want the terms to be clear.”

I  have always felt that it is important to visibly pull one’s punches in staged violence. I want the audience to stay in the world of the play. If the violence appears too real, they come out of the play to wonder if the actor is hurt or, if not, then they want to know why not. Worse, some audience members are triggered into a post-traumatic stress response. At that point, they aren’t even in the theatre in real time and space, much less the world of the play!

And I feel the same way about sex in the theatre. If the actors are going at it, the audience becomes curious about how they deal with it every night. If the actress is taking all her clothing off, the audience again leaves the world of the play to speculate about the performer and her boundaries. Is she dissociating? Has the production resulted in her being stalked? Is she cold? Simulacra are disturbing. And, as Esterly notes, “We want reassuring differences.” In film, these are not necessary, because we are looking at dots on a screen, projections of a thing that happened often a long time ago and in another location. Not so for live theatre. We need those reassuring differences.

“Structural weakness thereby produces formal opulence.” Esterly is talking about the stems of flowers… too delicate in woodcarving to support the head of a flower. The solution? Doubling or tripling the stems, or else anchoring the flower to half-hidden leaves or flowers below them. In the work of Grinling Gibbons, this translates to an abundance of cascading flowers, fruit, braids and sheaves.

The structural weakness of theatre as a medium? The platform, the one-hundred-and-twenty minutes. The need for a break after sixty minutes. These are the fragile stems upon which the playwright hopes to hang her weighty themes and life-changing drama. And she does it by exquisite compression, in both time and space. She has a captive audience, as opposed to a novelist or even, these days, a viewer of film, who can rent the DVD at home. Those audiences can set the book down or hit pause if they need a bathroom break. The playwright has to respect the captive nature of her audience. She has to work to hold interest and be responsive to the needs. The break must either be comic relief, or an intermission. The structural weakness of theatre produces the formal opulence of compelling dramatic content and masterful storytelling.

“Somewhere I read of a study that identified not optimism or happiness or serenity or  sociability as the psychological trait most predictive of longevity, but a more homespun one: conscientiousness.”  Esterly is talking about the zealotry of Gibbons in carving out forms where they would never been seen. He referenced pious cathedral sculptors who would finish the backs of their statues, because God can see everything.

Esterly made the discovery that fifty percent of the effort will achieve ninety percent of the effect. I immediately thought of all the amateur actors I had known who would learn their lines a few days before the performance, of the tech weeks where the sets, costumes, and lights come together for the first time on opening night. But Esterly goes on to observe, “If you allow yourself to stop at that ninety percent, then the carving can never succeed, never really succeed.” And there it is. Why I love Chekhov. Why I always choose Chekhov when coaching an audition piece. Chekhovian dialogue is always the tip of the iceberg, and if the actor has not studied the nonverbal submerged aspects of the character, the words are unactable. In other words, there is no ninety percent with Chekhov. The silences, the shadows, the thoughts—self-censored by the character—should scream across the footlights.

But here’s the rub: It takes another fifty percent to achieve that final ten percent. It may not be missed by the masses. Certainly, not by folks who are paying for your time. I have worked with many an actor who balked at doubling their effort for such a diminished return, failing to recognize that, in the words of Esterly, that last ten percent is “everything.”

“What makes handwork inimitable is what will allow it to survive.” Esterly is talking about the invention of computed numerical controlled (CNC) machine tools that can be controlled by computer-aided design or computer-aided manufacture (CAD or CAM) programs. Obviously, these programs are far cheaper and more efficient than hiring a woodcarver, and Esterly advises against competing with them. But there are things they cannot do: “Carving’s redoubt is the mountain fastness where it thrives best, the overhanging peaks, sharp arêtes, and shaded hollows that defy the geometrics of machine tools.” He quotes Herodotus, “Better to live in a rugged land and rule, than to farm a soft plain and be slaves.”

I think of film. On location. Jump cuts, narration, voice-over, multiple camera angles, the opportunity to edit, close-ups, green screens, computer-generated imagery (CGI). Live theatre cannot hope to compete with the special effects or the realism of film… or the control over final product that an editor wields. Why does theatre spend so much money on a lighting system that can accommodate thousands of light cues, or sets that are sumptuously fanciful or meticulously realistic? These were trends that reached their apotheosis at the turn of the century, just before film began to poach our audiences. As film advances, why didn’t theatre head for our “redoubt of mountain fastness”… the thing that film can never replicate. The immediacy, the contemporaneity of real flesh-and-blood enactment before one’s very eyes. The stage performer’s skillset should be very different from that of a film actor. The stage performer must establish a rapport with an audience, a real relationship in real time and space.

Theatrical speeches, those verbal arias building in argument and intensity, used to carry audiences into such raptures they would halt the play for multiple rounds of ovations. Today, producers consider this kind of writing an embarrassment, a mark of amateurism. The playscript is expected to ape the screenplay, with dialogue consisting of one or two lines. This is like hiring a woodcarver to imitate work done by CAD/CAM. I have never understood why, except that film costs more and usually makes more money than live theatre, and on this basis alone, the presumption is made that it should be the touchstone for all the performing arts. Film is a visual medium, where stage is aural. Film is cool; live theatre smokin’ hot. If theatre is becoming obsolete in the age of electronic media, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

“A carver begins as a god and ends as a slave.” Or, as Esterly explicates, the balance of power progressively shifts from the maker to the made. “You start as a godlike creator, imposing ideas on a passive medium, and you end up grounded in the life of this world, taking instructions from the thing in front of you.”

A good play is about something, and a great play is about something significant… and the great playwrights choose to write about significant issues that are on their own edge. In other words, the higher the stakes for the playwright, the more she is incentivized to go for that extra ten percent. Starting out with a lofty thesis, the playwright is quickly brought down to earth by the constraints of the physical stage and performing within a two-hour span. As the play develops, the characters themselves begin to dictate their own dialogue. Then there is the need for scene sequences that will allow audiences the time to assimilate the emotions from the previous scene. The further along into the process, the fewer the options. Eventually, for me, the process of invention has turned into one of discovery… petition even. Will this work? Will the characters accept this? Can an audience go along with that? Can this be staged… and within a budget?

Esterly, who expected that his replication work would be haunted by the ghost of Grinling Gibbon, found that he was merely a fellow traveler: “The objects were telling me what they’d told him. They were defining the possibilities of their modeling.”  Esterly began to question who was in charge, and his answer emerged as he worked: “an embryonic carving intent on being born.” In other words, what he was making had begun to participate in its making.

This is as apt a description of playwriting as I have ever read. A play may appear to be the brainchild of the writer that is then painstakingly brought to life through the collaborative effort of dozens of artists. But my experience is more aligned with that of the sculptor Rodin who said, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” There is an idea… story, or theme, or character—or a combination of the three. I begin to chip away the obviously extraneous elements, and as I do this the work begins to define possibilities for me. The godlike imposing of my vision on the medium begins to morph slowly into a listening-and-response. There is an embryonic drama intent on being born.

“There’s no waiting, then, for the muse to descend.” The creativity is not something separate from the making. Esterly quotes the aphorism, “Inspiration is for amateurs.” Of all the times when I approach drafts and edits, I would say only one or two of those approaches were motivated by a burning desire to create or express. Either habit or discipline account for the majority. And behind that habit and that discipline lies a sense of devotion to the craft: servitude.

Because Esterly was attempting to recreate the work of another sculptor, he felt a kinship with the carvers in Gibbons’ workshop. Were they fabricators for a conceptualist? Looking at the finished work, he concluded, “They seem to have carved as if it were their own composition. Sincerity shines out from the work, sincerity that seems inseparable from skill.” Sincerity inseparable from skill. In this commodified world, who would make that connection? “The daunting technical demands of the work appear only to have deepened their engagement. Its difficulty was their honor.”

Working for three decades as a lesbian playwright in a culture where lesbians neither own theatres nor have a historical affinity for them, I recognize the truth of Esterly’s insight into the craftspeople who worked for Gibbons. The demands of telling a lesbian and feminist story in such a labor-intensive and transitory medium, which has historically been profoundly hostile to women of non-traditional appearance and resistance to female gender roles, have been daunting. And those daunting demands did deepen my engagement. The difficulty drove me to write a book on how to produce and direct lesbian theatre, as well as publish a collection of scenes and monologues with lesbian content. And then there are the sixty-five plays in seven collections... all self-published. The difficulty of the work is my challenge, and when I take it up, it does become my honor.  

Oscar Wilde was not a stupid man. He was highly educated, and, as a playwright, was considered brilliant. So here was something that always bothered me about that notorious trial for gross indecency:

His friends and attorney advised him to flee the country. If he stayed in England he was unquestionably going to be found guilty and sentenced to prison... most likely to hard labor.  His own flippant testimony in the earlier libel case, as well as the testimony of several of the "rent boys" whose sexual services he had purchased, were going to seal the deal. The magistrate, somewhat sympathetic to his situation, made a point of delaying issuing the warrant for his arrest until 5PM, specifically to allow Wilde to catch what they called the "train boat" to France. His wife urged him to go. His friends, seeing which way the wind was blowing, all departed for the Continent.

But Wilde didn't go. He waited for them to come and arrest him.

Why? Later he would say that he could not face the status of being haunted and hunted... and that he actually believed that he could be acquitted.

Insane denial? Magical thinking? Or was there something in his past that encouraged him in his belief about immunity?

Reading about Wilde's father, I thought I might have a found a key to solving the mystery. His father, William R. Wilde, was a celebrated Irish eye and ear surgeon, who was eventually knighted. The scandals surrounding his life appeared not to have disturbed his reputation. He had three children out-of-wedlock before marrying Oscar's mother.

Then, in 1864, Mary Travers, daughter of a Trinity professor, accused him of having drugged her with chloroform and raping her. Sir William did not appear in court, and the jury took this as an admission of guilt, but the sentence they handed down was an insult to plaintiff. They awarded her one farthing in damages... apparently the valuation in their eyes of her physical integrity. His refusal to testify was considered shameful, and it is interesting to note that the sole voice urging Oscar not to take the train boat was that of his mother. (In fairness, she did ask him if he was innocent, and he insisted that he was. Her response was that he must stay. Oscar had also been unequivocal about disavowing his homosexuality when he retained the services of his attorney... severely compromising the reputation of a man who had been a friend as well as a colleague.)

But getting back to Sir William Wilde... He had been involved in medical controversies around the interpretation of child rape, especially the rape of little girls. He maintained that the real danger was that of innocent persons being falsely charged with perpetration. His position was that the epidemic of "infantile leucorrhoea" (inflammation and infection of the genitals, somtimes leading to death) was no more than an issue of poor hygiene on the part of the little girls.

Most infamously, he offered an appeal in the case of Amos Greenwood, who had been found guilty of manslaughter in the case of a nine-year-old girl that he had raped and who had died from syphilis. Neither the defendant nor the defendant's friends argued for his innocence, but Sir Wilde attempted, unsuccessfully,  to recruit twelve of his colleagues in maintaining that the girl had died of poor hygiene.

Later, when his coachman was accused of raping and infecting two girls, Wilde came to his defense, and, late in the proceedings,  his wife, Lady Wilde came up with an alibi for the coachman. The coachman admitted to his habit of inviting little girls up into the hay loft of his barn to look at kittens...  Later, Sir Wilde also came to the defense of a businessman and a railway clerk accused of raping girls.

This was the father of Oscar Wilde. These were the causes and scandals that informed his childhood. What would be the lessons? That a man can be promiscuous and a sexual predator, and still become a knight of the realm. That, even found guilty of drugging and raping a colleague's daughter, the penalty will be a farthing. That children are not sexually abused, but that their genital infections are their own fault and the true victims are the innocent folks scapegoated by them and by their parents.

In "De Profundis," a lengthy and self-serving letter that Wilde wrote from prison, he described the prostituted children he and his lover would acquire:

"People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers ; the danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as a snake- charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and makes it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air as a plant sways restfully in a stream. They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes, their poison was part of their perfection."

"Evil things of life?" Not even human. Panthers or cobras. And, he, Wilde, is their victim.

In light of Sir William's denial about sexually transmitted diseases, it is interesting to note that his son had not had sexual relations with his wife for several years. The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent. There is no evidence that Oscar ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.

We can never know why Wilde did not take the train boat to France when he had the chance, but it does not seem unreasonable that his choices may have been influenced by the values of Sir William Wilde.

In a personal footnote, as an activist against child sexual abuse and as an advocate of victims of pedophilia and incest, I am always disturbed when Wilde is put forward as an LGBT icon. He was no "out and proud" activist. He repudiated his homosexuality in the courtroom, as well as in "De Profundis," where he referred to it as a form of "erotomania," and one of the "most disgusting passions."  He was not sentenced to prison for an egalitarian, intimate partnership with Lord Alfred. It was his sexual predation toward underaged boys that indicted him. He never took responsibility for his actions, and upon his release from prison he resumed his sexual predation, traveling with Lord Alfred to Algiers for the express purpose of buying boys on the cheap... boys who could never be called upon in British court to testify against him.

Looking for the lesbians on patriarchal historical narratives is a subversive activity, requiring researching the lives of so-called spinsters and other women whose eschewing of heterosexuality has been construed as something (anything!) other than attraction to other women. Nuns, for instance… or the Chinese marriage resisters.

Marriage resistance was a “thing” in three districts of the Pearl River Delta from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930’s. In fact, anthropologists have had the temerity to call it a movement. At its height there were an estimated one hundred thousand women refusing to allow men access to their domestic and sexual services through the institution of marriage. They were referred to as the sworn sisters of the Golden Orchid.

How did such an astounding phenomenon arise? Some speculate that it might have evolved from a custom known as “delayed transfer marriage…” which something of a layaway plan for claiming brides. The woman was allowed to live with her family for a period of time after the wedding ceremony.  Here’s a quaint entry from the 1853 Shunde County Gazetteer:

Girls in the county form very close sisterhood with other in the same village. They do not want to marry, and if forced to marry, they stay in their own families, where they enjoy few restrictions. They do not want to return to the husband’s family, and some, if forced to return, commit suicide by drowning or hanging.

This “delayed transfer marriage” was unique to the Pearl River Delta… maybe because this was the center of the silk industry in China—one of the very few industries which employed women. And economic independence, as we all know, is the key to the survival of women-loving women under patriarchy. In China, this was doubly true, because of the heritage of footbinding and infanticide in the regions where marriage was a girl’s only prospect for financial security and her family’s only hope for getting her off their hands.

Obviously, the woman working outside the home could not afford to be hobbled, no matter how erotic her “little Golden Lotus Hook” (putrescent, maimed, and infected bound foot) might be to men. Also, where girls represented earning power, families would be foolish to kill off their potential breadwinners.

And so the girls of Canton were allowed to survive and to develop their bodies. They were also educated.

But there was one more factor in their favor: lack of men. In the nineteenth century large numbers of Chinese men were emigrating to America. Now, some might insist that the “marriage resisters” were not so much militant lesbians, as frustrated spinsters turning to each other, because there weren’t enough good men to go around. But the case can be made that the removal of the men allowed women freer range in expressing their affection for each other.

In addition, there were religious ideologies that supported these women of the Golden Orchid. Many of them worshiped Guan Yin, a goddess of women who herself had rejected heterosexual marriage. One anthropologist recorded this creative explanation for same-sex bonding: If a woman believed she was predestined to marry a certain man, and he happened to reincarnate as a woman, she would still be attracted to him as her predestined mate!

By 1933, the “girls” had begun to form alternative institutions to marriage. Here’s the Gazetteer of Chinese Customs:

Although the two women living together cannot be said to have the form/equipment of a man and a woman, they nonetheless enjoy the pleasure of male-female [intercourse.] Some say that they use friction or rubbing force, others say they use “mechanical devices.” … They adopt a daughter to inherit their property. When the adopted daughter also forms Golden Orchid sworn sisterhood with another woman, the woman is treated like a daughter-in-law.

Apparently, the women of the Golden Orchid understood the need to incentivize same-sex unions along the same lines at patriarchal marriage!

Another way they protected their sisterhood was by organizing “girls’ houses” where the female children of a village lived together until they either married or took spinsters’ vows. It was in these houses that the tradition of sworn sisterhood developed. Here is what Janice Raymond, a former nun, has to say about sworn sisters in her book A Passion for Friends: a Philosophy of Female Friendship:

There were various ways in which sworn sisters were pledged to each other.... a pair of girls or women would take mutual vows never to marry and never to part company. The Chinese term for sworn sisters was “shuang chieh-pai, “ “mutually tied by oath.” Very often, these girls or women had spent a large part of their childhood together... Sworn sisterhood, however was not limited to twosomes. It often comprised a larger association of many women who were committed to each other in friendship and who formed an organized antimarriage grouping.

The sworn sisters lived in “vegetarian halls “ or “spinsters’ houses.” The former were residential halls for a somewhat subversive Buddhist sect which had been outlawed for political militancy. Girls living in these halls were expected to practice “self-cultivation “ by eating vegetarian diets and abstaining from sex with men. The “spinsters’ houses” were more secular, and vegetarianism was not required. Both institutions provided for women in their old age. There were retirement and death benefits, and there were also funds for celebrations and for emergencies.

Some of the vegetarian halls had libraries, and in these were found “good books,” treatises written by Buddhist nuns, urging girls to resist marriage and representing such resistance as an act of moral courage. These teachings even went so far as to depict suicide as an honorable alternative to arranged marriages. Sworn sisters, sometimes as many as six, had been known to drown themselves together rather than see one of their number married against her will.

Some resisters went through with the marriage, but refused to consummate it, returning to their families of birth. Other women, “tzu-shu nu,” were “never to marry. “ The tzu-shu nu would have ceremonies to mark their unions with other women, and these were recognized by the whole community. In fact, Chinese newspapers carried accounts of the ceremonies.

Marjorie Topley, the anthropologist who did the original work on marriage resisters in the 1950’s, claims that lesbianism was common among the tzu-shu nu. She notes that lesbian practices were called “grinding the bean curd “—a reference to a dildo made from silk and packed with bean curd.      

The collapse of the silk industry and the threat of Japanese invasion in the 1930’s, forced “sworn sisters” to retire early to their spinsters’ houses, or to migrate to Hong Kong or Singapore as domestic workers, where they lived in “kongsi,” dwellings of women from the same region in China.  The women of the kongsi would not take jobs in establishments which had fired another member of the kongsi. Many of these houses carried on the tradition of marriage resistance, and some even established banks for the purpose of making loans to the members. Single women would sometimes adopt daughters, but it was more common for sworn sisters to adopt jointly.

Although the Communists, who considered the resisters “counter-revolutionary,” wiped out the movement in China, some of the tzu-shu nu were still surviving in the 1990’s survive in Singapore and Hong Kong, keeping alive the tradition of their vows: “that there might be nothing but truth us.”

As an interesting footnote, Chinese revolutionary, feminist and writer Qiu Jin exchanged vows of eternal friendship with poet, calligrapher and reformer Wu Zhiying in 1904... the same year she began wearing men's clothing. She marked the occasion with a poem called "Orchid Verse"... perhaps a reference to her earlier sisters of the Golden Orchid?

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And I appreciate the reminder from an anonymous reader to footnote my sources... I did read the entry in  Lesbian Herstories and Cultures... and the other two sources were internally referenced in their article:

Sankar, Andrea. "Sisters and Brothers, Lovers and Enemies:
Marriage Resistance in Southern Kwangtung." Journal of Homosexuality 11:3-4 (1986): 62-82.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

Wolf, Margery, Roxane Witke, Emily Martin, ed. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.

I have been reading the memoirs of Ethel Smyth, a British lesbian composer and part-time militant Suffragist.  In Ethel's methodical way, she decided to commit exactly two years of her life to the Suffrage Movement, and during this time she became a comrade-in-arms, literally, to Emmeline Pankhurst--undertaking to instruct her in the fine art of rock-throwing, so that she could make the desired impact on 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

During this smashing campaign, both Ethel and Emmeline were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison, where they were assigned adjoining cells and where a sympathetic matron would allow them to take tea together and occasionally "forget" to fetch Ethel back to her cell.

Emmeline and Ethel became very close friends, and they continued to stay in touch after 1913, when Ethel's self-appointed term of service expired and she returned to the world of music.  In 1914, Ethel rendezvoused with Emmeline in France during one of Mrs. Pankhurst's periodic flights from arrest in order to recover from the debilitating effects of another hunger strike--this time her tenth!   Under the infamous "Cat-and-Mouse Act," she would have been subject to immediate re-arrest, even though bed-ridden, had she remained in England.

And then war was declared.  Ethel joined the French army as a radiographer, and Emmeline returned to England, where she placed her considerable charismatic powers at the service of the British government, becoming a spokesperson for the government she had devoted so many years of her life to tearing down.

It was during this period that Ethel published a volume of her early memoirs, a large portion of which was devoted to her first lesbian passion, a relationship with one Lisl Herzogenberg.  Lisl, a married woman, had come to Ethel's rescue during her student days in Germany, when she was experiencing a nervous breakdown.  Lisl moved into Ethel's rooms and cared for her during the crisis, bathing her and feeding her.  Later, she "adopted" Ethel into her home. 

The two women maintained a passionate friendship for seven years.  The friendship came to an abrupt and traumatic end over Ethel's first romantic involvement with a man--who happened to be married to a mutual friend.  Both the husband and wife had told Ethel that theirs was an entirely open marriage, and Ethel, young and naive, had taken them at their word.  Even though their dalliance had been entirely platonic, Ethel was cast in the unsavory role of the "other woman" and socially shunned.  Under pressure from others (most notably Lisl's mother, who despised Ethel), Lisl cut off all contact with her.  A few years later, Ethel found out that she had died.  It was the great tragedy of Ethel's life, and she gave it that weight in her memoirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, however, had no patience with what she considered self-indulgent sentiment.  On reading Ethel's memoirs, she remarked that readers might feel that the whole affair was just a "tempest in a teapot."  Ethel, in her later remembrances about her relationship to Mrs. Pankhurst, noted that, although she laughed at the time, still "between reader and writer a gulf was fixed."  Sure enough, their friendship ended shortly after.

Reading this narrative reminded me of my own experience with heterosexual radical activists.  There was always this "gulf fixed."  For these women, there was a sharp dividing line between their personal lives--usually petrified into social routines associated with long-standing marriages, and their political lives, teeming with activity.  They looked down on us lesbians, whose personal lives were very much in the forefront of our experience-- and inextricable from our commitment to women's causes.

That this priority might play itself out in unstable relationships, heady crushes, profound inquiries into the nature of desire, and bitter factionalizing came with the territory.  Women loving women in the most intimate sense were breaking far newer ground than those who marched with signs or circulated petitions.  While others asked for liberation, we were attempting to determine what that might look like.  And not afraid to look foolish in the process.

Ethel Smyth was working out the most basic algebra of her liberation with Lisl.  Wildly unmothered, she had needed to detach from her mother, a woman whose brilliant youth had been cut short by seven more-or-less consecutive pregnancies, and whose subsequent behaviors towards her children--not surprisingly--were indicative of serious emotional disturbances.  Ethel, through her own form of "hunger strike," had finally obtained permission to study music in Germany, and here she was confronted with the suffocating social strictures for "unattached" females, as well as the brutal misogyny of the music world. 

That Ethel was able to find the nurturing and the shelter so critical to her survival was a miracle.  That she found it in the bosom of a heterosexual marriage was profoundly subversive.  That she and Lisl were able to sustain the intensity of their love for seven years in the face of both their dependency upon male privilege is astonishing.  And it was the devastation of the final break which released Ethel forever from any and all concessions  to conventional morality. 

When I think of Mrs. Pankhurst's hunger strikes, her violence against her own body, and her total capitulation to the worst extremes of patriarchy--namely war, I am called to reconsider the definition of militancy, of radicalism.  It was Ethel's fearless quest to feed herself, to feast on the love of another woman, even in the heart of their respective heterosexual prisons, which inspires me with hope for a revolution.

Note to the reader:

Most of the dashes were edited out of Emily Dickinson’s poems when they were first published in 1890. The editors, Mabel Todd Loomis and Thomas Higginson, also “regularized” her spellings and word usages. The poems were not “un-edited” until the 1950's.

Mabel Todd Loomis also suppressed all references to Emily’s lesbian relationship with Susan Huntington Dickinson, Emily’s sister-in-law and next-door neighbor. There is no mention of Susan in the Letters of Emily Dickinson, published by Loomis in 1895—even though Emily’s correspondence with Susan is voluminous, spanning four decades and including drafts and notes about the poems as works-in-progress. (Loomis was the mistress of Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother and Susan’s husband.)

The letters were not published until 1998.
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DASHING
By Emily Dickinson's Dash


I am Emily Dickinson’s dash—the hand-off in a relay race. I am “Heads-up!”—“Your turn!”—“Last tag!” I indicate a synapse. I spark the gap, up the ante, pass the baton. I am the very first thing that had to go, when they decided to publish Ms. Dickinson’s work—but, no!— I am the second. The first, of course, were the poems that made reference to Emily’s passion for Sue Gilbert.

The dash is an elevated blank, if you think about it.  It is an appropriation of silence. It indicates an intentional—defiant?—ambiguity. It is the author’s evasion of the literary house detectives. What cannot be named can be synapsed around, and after a while, there is—there will be—a connection.

If you teach yourself to follow the multiplicity of readings in Ms. Dickinson’s poems, you will find the synaptic pathways of your brain altered. They will have become reprogrammed. You will, in short, have a brain that makes connections—dangerous ones—exactly the way Ms. Dickinson’s did. I do not exaggerate. I leave that to the italics, to the exclamation point, to the upper cases.  How do you illuminate, clarify, elucidate—how do you organize— brilliance?  I am her invitations, instead. I am license to jump the track. This is all about speed, about mental reflex. Where there aren’t words, there are always connections.

Virginia and Gertrude were dashing women, also. But Emily was the only one who could dash her brains out. I am the fragments of that broken plank in reason. I didn’t come cheap.

I am horizontal—not hierarchical, but lateral—like hostility. The dash is an outstretched hand.  I can pull you across or ask for a handout. Emily did both at the same time, because she knew too much. She wanted to recruit and be rescued at the same time. If you could follow her thought, she was not alone. That was something. And, then, of course, there was Sue.

Ah, Sue—How to measure the distance between Sue Gilbert’s kitchen and Emily’s bedroom window? No dash in the world could bridge that gap, but I was the gesture. And—yes, let it be said—I was also the taunt: “See what I can do.” Because everyone could see what Sue could do. She could procreate. She could delegate. She could regulate.

But Emily, Emily—one-trick-pony!—Emily could synapse. Sly Emily. Shy Emily. Gay and dashing Emily. Emily was quantum, where Sue was algebraic. Emily was possibility; Sue was probability. Where you locate Emily in time—the “onset of Eternity”—you cannot graph her coordinates in space. When you pinpoint her in “Amherst,” it’s “Good Morning—Midnight—.” I did that for her. I am the quark of punctuation.

What started as morse code for Sue ended up a cryptogram. Clumsy dyke, Emily only wanted to bridge the gap between houses. Naive Emily! Little did she know those houses were galaxies apart, and the little dash—the wistful open palm—(my house or yours?)—was the password through language to the boundaries of thought. And she went there. And every time she did, a part of her never came back. And between what jumped the fence to Sue’s house, what fell through the floor of reason, and what bled out between synaptic gaps—what lived upstairs in her father’s house became more and more translucent—a doppelganger. Emily’s body became the punctuation they craved so much for her. Her body was the period that anchored a life sentence. It was the comma of the essential—for women, anyway—subordinate clause. It was the quotation mark of other people’s ideas, the semi-colon caution light before we can proceed through the intersection. She was all punctuation when she died. Her spirit had fled long ago in great mad dashes. And Sue Gilbert was left holding the memories, which, finally, were containable after the dashes had been deleted.

When love is gone, there is the dash.  The plank in reason breaks when there is no love, no possibility of love left—when every woman’s heart is connected to her body and that body is indentured out forever. No love… no love. The mind has been constructed for denial. It was never designed for truth. Poor Emily. She didn’t know that—until it was too late. Eventually she would have exhausted even the possibilities. That would be enough to stop most people. But not Emily. Lay down Emily’s dashes side-by-side, and they’re like a cattle crossing. Living next door to impossibility, where else could she go but up through the roof—or, as she put it, down through the floor?

Virginia reserved her dashes for letters. They could be mistaken for haste. Her readers had an out. Gertrude alternated with ellipses. She invited sighs—handrails. There are absolutely no sighs associated with the dash. No trailings-off, no “ah, well . . . another day, perhaps . . .” No “if only . . .” where Sue Gilbert was concerned. “If only’s” are for novelists, not poets. Poets are about precision— or nothing at all. When Emily failed to finish a sentence, it was an act of courage, not cowardice. I was her springboard into eternity.

Emily took no prisoners except herself. Her sentences were all meant to be executed. That’s the beauty of the dash. You have to throw the switch yourself. She gave her readers lessons in electrocution.

“Think like me and see where it gets you.” All dressed in white, talking through closed doors. No need to open them when one can trans-port—literally—with the dash. And the white? Absence of color, that “Element of Blank”—traveling clothes for the synapser? What is the opposite of mourning? Surely not life—That only leads back to death.

The opposite of death is the dash. But it will kill you.