Oh, go ahead. Clear the room and save the planet.

I’m talking about bringing up overpopulation every time there is a discussion about global warming, alternative energy, carbon emissions, extinction of species, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the ozone layer, acid rain, or the melting polar ice caps.

That’s right… “overpopulation.” Too many people.

And, trust me, it will clear the room. There is a reason why activists and politicians never bring it up, even though it’s the biggest “duh” on the planet.

The subject was a popular, or at least controversial one about fifty years ago. Paul Ehrlich wrote a bestseller called The Population Bomb and introduced the concept of “zero population growth.” There was a huge national conversation. The type of conversation that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had kicked off just seven years earlier. Folks were doing the math, considering the consequences, and talking about policy changes and possible solutions.

And then, the conversation was dropped. For fifty years.

What happened? Well… For starts, not all of Ehrlich’s predictions came true. Death rates did not rise. India did not starve.

On the other hand, some of his predictions did come true. When the book was written, there were between three and four billion people in the world. In 2012, that figure reached seven billion, having nearly doubled.

Several voices criticized Ehrlich’s book. Biologist and politician Barry Commoner was one of them. He had a theory that social and technological development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Needless to say he was wrong.

But the silence prevails, even as the elephant outgrows the living room, filling it with poop and gaseous emissions.  Why?

Because to talk about overpopulation is to talk about population control. And population control is an explosive subject. Where it has been mandated, there has been an astronomical rise in the aborting of female fetuses. The whole subject touches a deep nerve among ethnic and racial minorities and colonized people who have had to endure the horrors of involuntary sterilization, genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” and cultural genocide. It raises the specter of eugenics and social engineering. And then, of course, there are the religious arguments against birth control, abortion, and women’s autonomy.

Talk of population control also threatens the ruling elite… right down to their toes. To quote the words of Venezuelan  sociologist Edgardo Lander:

"Capitalism is an unlimited growth system. There can be no such thing as a steady-state capitalism, or capitalism with negative growth.”

Endless breeding and doubling populations spell more consumers, or, as the economists would put it, “expanding markets.” And that means greater Gross National Product, more jobs, more investment capital, more prosperity.  Who wants to put the kibosh on that?

But let me state the obvious: While human populations have doubled, planetary resources have not. While human waste products have doubled, places to store them have not. And, quoting Lander again, “Unlimited growth is not possible in a limited planet.” Capitalism, like any pyramid scheme, will run its course.

The reality is that burgeoning population growth is the cause of the environmental crisis. (Can’t wait to the read the comments on this blog.) Yes, poor distribution, mismanagement of resources, racism, colonialism, endless war, etc. etc. have not helped, but there are limits to what the planet can sustain. Some are saying we have already passed those limits.

So let’s get back to my original suggestion: Why not interject the issue of overpopulation into every discussion of the environmental crisis? 

Um, because most folks don’t care to be branded racist, facist, childhating, misogynist, ignorant, colonialist, and anti-spiritual.

Fair enough, but let’s look at why we should take that risk anyway…

Because nature bats last. Because reality always wins. Because nothing gets to the root of the problem except getting to the root of the problem. And because the plants and the animals dying for our sins do not have a voice. And if they did, they would say, “It’s the overpopulation of one exceptionally short-sighted, avaricious  and filthy species, stupid!”

The conversation will not be easy and the solutions are offensive. But let’s do it anyway. We can take it, but the planet can't.

Wow. A lot of confusion about rape in the news these days.

We have Congressman Todd Akin telling us that “legitimate rapes” don’t result in pregnancies. We have Senate candidate Tom Smith comparing pregnancy from rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”  Last year, Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban federal funding of abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” a term which he has refused to define, because, as he insists, it’s “stock language.” We have all kinds of liberal folks (seriously… Noam Chomsky?) insisting that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault, should not have to respond to Swedish police questioning, because—you know, he’s one of “our” guys. 

 Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) declaring that it was not a “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski drugged and vaginally, orally, and anally assaulted a thirteen-year-old who claimed, “I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!’, and then I didn't know what else to do.” This week the Guardian ran a story with this headline, “How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?”

My sisters, this is a boatload of confusion. 

And, I would submit not just confusion on the part of the perpetrators and their allies. I remember teaching an Intro to Women’s Studies class not all that long ago, and I conducted an anonymous survey. Turns out that all of the women in the class (they were all under twenty-two) self-reported as sexually active and not having orgasms. When I attempted to teach a workshop on how to communicate with partners about what one enjoys in bed, I discovered to my chagrin that none of my students had the slightest interest in this. Apparently, what they were having was not really “sex-sex.” One had to wonder whether or not it might be “rape-rape.”

Later on, teaching at an elite private college, I began asking questions about the experiences of the young women I was teaching. When asked if they knew of cases of date rape on campus, they expressed uncertainty as to whether or not their experiences with men would qualify. Since studies have shown that one in four college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape, and since studies have also shown that one in twelve male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and since studies have also shown that one third of males surveyed said that they would commit rape if they could escape detection, and since one fourth of men surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if the woman asks the man out, and the man pays for the date or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date… well, I don’t think it's going too far out on a limb to suggest that a significant number of these confused young women had, indeed, been date raped.

The problem here appears to run deeper than “No means no.” Looking for the source of the confusion, I believe that I may have found the culprit.

It’s the word “sex.” Check it out:

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sex is defined as “sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.” Not too helpful. Kind of like looking up “tennis” and reading that it is a  “tennis phenomenon or behavior.”

Looking up “sexual” is not much help either:  “having or involving sex"...  which of course leads us back to “sexual.”

Sex, like “forcible rape,” appears to be “stock language.” Nobody needs to define it, because we all know what it is.  But--see above--apparently not.

I am a writer, and like under-celebrated, African American  genius Toni Cade Bambara, I believe in “acts of language.” I’m going to commit one now. I’m going to suggest a new word for sex. And it’s going to be a gynocentric, subjective word, referencing the clitoris not the vagina.

I’m going to propose the words “cypriate” and “cypriation” for female genital activity initiated by the subject, for the primary intention of experiencing a pleasurable arousal of the clitoris. For example, “Last night, next to the waterfall,  I cypriated with my partner.” Or… “Cypriation at the full moon can be especially intense.” 

I admit, I am taking my cue from the late, great Monique Wittig, whose acts of language opened my eyes to wild possibility. In her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, she and Sande Zeig coined the word “la cyprine” to refer to the vaginal secretions that signal sexual desire.  [“Sécrétion vaginale, signe physique du désir sexuel. Une agitation trouble l'écoulement de la cyprine.”]  The derivation for her neologism is the island of Cyprus, legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Obviously cypriation does not refer to many of the acts that are considered sex or sexual in the heteropatriarchal world. In fact, it probably refers to only a tiny minority.  But adopting the use of this word will require that the subject own her agency, and it will also validate her own pleasure as something of primary, defining significance.

In other words, these young women who are unclear about whether or not they are experiencing date rape will have absolute clarity as to whether or not they are experiencing cypriation. Furthermore it will facilitate their understanding that any interaction with their vulva that is not cypriation is a potential form of violation and not acceptable... unless, perhaps, the woman's primary incentive is achieving pregnancy.

There should never have been one word that could be used to refer to pleasurable, welcome sexual activity for women and, at the same time, any and all violations or torture of her genitals. There should never have been a word for sexual activity that confused an act designed for procreation with an act designed for a woman’s pleasure. There should never be a word that can be taken to assume that actions pleasing to men and their genitals are or should be pleasing to women and our genitals. Sex and rape are only synonymous for rapists. Vagina and vulva are only synonymous where the clit and the woman’s pleasure are incidental or irrelevant.

What has happened is that women’s experience and women’s anatomy and women's pleasure have been stolen in a linguistic equivalent of three-card monte.

Sisters, take back the clit! Occupy the dictionary! And as our great foremother Sappho would sing, “We shall enjoy it/ as for him who finds/ fault, may silliness/ and sorrow take him!”

“…truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”—Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor.”

I recently revisited the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in Fayetteville, New York. It was something of a pilgrimage, as I consider her one of my spiritual foremothers. In fact, I took her last name as my own.

The visit brought to mind a quotation by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, on the subject of truth. She spoke of it as an “increasing complexity.” Historically, I have preferred my truth monochrome, monothematic—because I find comfort in certitude. It’s a near relation to rectitude, and rectitude purchases indemnity. But I digress.

Matilda Gage was a Suffrage worker. She was part of a triumvirate, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the leaders and the strategists of the movement. They hung out together. They were comrades-in-arms and best friends... until they weren’t. And that moment came in 1890, when Gage discovered that Anthony had gone behind her back  to recruit Stanton in brokering a deal to merge the National Women's Suffrage Association with a rival Suffrage organization made up of conservative, Christian women. Gage woke up to find herself ousted from the organization she had helped lead for twenty years... and well on her way to being written out of history.

This was why I had chosen to be her namesake, actually: Because Gage had refused to compromise her principles in the name of expediency. She would not compromise in her opposition to a “white-women-only” Suffrage campaign, nor would she compromise on her opposition to the Church. In fact, she had written an entire book, Woman, Church and State, unmasking the misogyny of Christian history, supporting her thesis that the exploitation of women was not some oversight or side effect of Christianity, but was it’s entire raison d’être. In other words, Christianity could not be redeemed.

I loved Gage’s radical vision. I loved her refusal to compromise, even when it cost her so dearly.

But, standing in the Gage House nearly three decades after taking her name, I found myself revisiting my own history as well as hers. And her history was that of a married, middle- class woman with four children and a husband who supported her. Gage did not have to earn her living, nor did she have to worry about how she would survive in old age.

My history, since coming out, had been that of a low-income, single lesbian who supported herself largely through touring around the country and giving lectures and performances. Standing in the Gage House, I realized with a jolt that my life experience had more in common with that of Susan B. Anthony—a single, working-class lesbian who supported herself with public speaking—than with Matilda Gage.

And this realization caused me to revisit that historic betrayal of 1890.

Susan B. Anthony had co-founded the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President. That movement has been mocked as a bunch of tee-totaling Miss Grundies attempting, with hysterical fervor, to police the harmless dissipation of others. In fact, it was a movement of battered women, of activists against domestic violence. It was a movement of survivors of sexual abuse and especially of incest. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman could not own property, could not inherit, could not own her own wages, could not own her own children. Wife-beating and marital rape were legal, and any woman attempting to seek relief through the courts would face an all-male jury. The woman who married an alcoholic was in for a lifetime of terror and abuse, and so were her children. Outlawing liquor appeared to be the quickest way to seek relief legislatively from this nightmare, and the Church was more inclined to support temperance than women’s enfranchisement.

Anthony’s roots were in this movement of survivors. The personal stories of suffering that she encountered would be familiar to any rape crisis or shelter worker. The needs were immediate: shelter, food, protection, medical attention, social services for the children.

Anthony had moved away from the temperance movement to the movement for Suffrage, but those roots and those experiences continued to inform her activism. Standing in the Gage House, which is in a lovely middle-class neighbhood of large houses with landscaped yards, I began to experience the increasing complexity of that so-called betrayal.

Gage’s uncompromising stance, pristine in its radicalism, could have  delayed Suffrage by decades--or even centuries, depending on how deeply the Church was alienated. How would that position read to a woman like Anthony? Might it not look like a function of class privilege? Gage, with her feminist and middle-class husband, might be willing to die before seeing her goals realized, but for women in desperate circumstances, delay could be fatal.  Even limited power, limited Suffrage, would be a foot in the door, a toehold… a something for so many women who had nothing. And these conservative Christian women had resources, lots of them. Was it easier for a woman who was not needing to support herself to turn down that money on principle than for a woman  scraping out a living on the lecture circuit? A woman for whom marriage could never be an option?

I remembered the words of Florynce Kennedy: “'Nothing but the best for the oppressed' translates to ‘nothing for the oppressed.’” And I remembered the words of another legendary activist, Bernice Reagon Johnson: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”

And Anthony was lesbian. Let us never forget that. She did not love men, did not want men. She desired women. She understood that her tribe could never experience security or domesticity in our relationships until women had equal access to education and to jobs. In 1890, she was seventy, in an era before Medicare and Social Security. She was also often desperately lonely in her touring work. One of her lovers had been Anna Dickinson, who  also supported herself as a public speaker. How much could Stanton with her seven children and Gage with her four understand about their lives? And, it is important to remember that the temperance movement leader was Frances Willard, also a lesbian.

Was it Gage who betrayed Anthony in her refusal to compromise, holding their Suffrage organization hostage to a radical vision that was so far ahead of its time? It was easy for Gage to explore spiritualism and other metaphysical systems, when she was not dependent upon the Church as a support system that could provide community, emergency health care, and financial relief, as well as ideological support for the purity and sanctity of womanhood--a lifeline to women struggling with the contempt and violence of their spouses. How relevant would the historical violations of the Church be to these women who had nowhere to turn but the Church?  Was it realistic to expect them to catch up to doctrines of radical feminism in their lifetimes?

I left the Gage House overwhelmed. It was difficult to resist the temptation to think I had been wrong. Right and wrong have no place in “increasing complexity.” The world has need of radical and visionary thinkers, as well as for the pragmatic, on-the-ground, coalition-building, compromise-making activists. There will always be a tension between the two positions, and that tension can provide a healthy check against the excesses to which each is liable. 

The Gage House stood as a bulwark of rectitude for me in my younger days, when I was in the process of reinventing myself. Today my appreciation of it has increased in complexity. Today it is an invitation to go deeper, to challenge everything--even to examine  my beloved foremother through the lens of  working-class, lesbian activism.

Take a tour of the Matilda Gage House website. This essay, narrowly focused on a specific facet from my own experience, does not in any way do justice to this remarkable woman, who did "walk her talk" in so many radical ways. Her home was on the Underground Railroad, and, because of her coalition work with Native women in her area,  she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation. Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, would author the beloved Oz books, with their gender-bending heroines. Her crusade for separation of Church and State is especially relevant today. Sally Roesch Wagner is the visionary and pragmatic Executive Director of the Gage Foundation, and, I am privileged to say, a friend and colleague.

The Internet is abuzz with the posthumous outing of astronaut Sally Ride. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and these appear to be divided into two camps. Some folks wish that Dr. Ride, as an iconic astronaut, had been out publicly as a powerful role model in the LGBT community. Indeed, there is a posthumous campaign on Facebook to point out the fact that, because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy will not be able to receive federal death and pension benefits.

Others, taking their cue from Dr. Ride’s sister, support her decision to remain publicly closeted, citing her right to privacy and attributing her reticence to her Norwegian background. Others point out the excessive and unwelcome attention to her gender and personal life (“Do you wear a bra in space?”) to which the media subjected her as the first woman in space. The Washington Post wrapped up their defense of her closet with this summation: “… Ride lived in a world where we should all live, a place where we celebrate someone for her accomplishments and not her sexual orientation.”

Actually, Washington Post, a lesbian orientation is an accomplishment. Historically, and certainly in Dr. Ride’s lifetime, living a lesbian life has meant overcoming substantial obstacles and negotiating myriad oppressive situations. Living a lesbian life has meant excommunication and expulsion from religious organizations; discharge from the military; disinheritance and estrangement from families of birth; incarceration in mental asylums; harassment, discrimination and firing in the workplace; loss of housing; loss of educational opportunities; being banned from teaching jobs; loss of custody of one’s children; loss of partnership benefits including pensions and health insurance; and loss of one’s career.

These are specific oppressions, and living with them results in adoption of strategies, formation of alliances, invention and creation of alternative systems of support. There is the weightlessness of an invisible identity that defies the gravitational pull of what many experience as compulsory heterosexuality, and this weightlessness comes with both freedoms and challenges. There is a certain traction and grounding that come from rooting oneself in societal norms.  The oxygen of societal acceptance and approval is taken for granted by those for whom it constitutes the air they breathe. In the closed space of the closet, there is a suffocating lack of circulation. Dr. Ride lived her life in a secret orbital, and the special conditions of that orbital informed her choices, her character, and her legacy.

Dr. Ride’s sister stated that Sally did not believe in labels, the inference being that lesbianism is a label.

Newsflash: Being lesbian is an identity, and nothing could be further from a label. When you label me, you spraypaint an offensive epithet on my front door. That’s not pleasant for me, but I can paint over it. It does not affect who I am or how I live. When you insist that “lesbian” is nothing more than a label, what you are doing is very aggressive. You are attempting to evict me from my home, deny me access to my community, cut me off from my heritage and history, appropriate a tremendous body of literature, and disappear my culture. Insisting that my identity is nothing more than a label supports heterosexist hegemony and isolates and marginalizes me. It’s also more than a little pornographic, because attempting to reduce the richness of lesbian history and culture to a personal sexual practice is the hallmark of a fetish.

And in case the apologists of the closet are relying on the “born that way” argument to trivialize lesbian identity, they should understand that lesbians are not gay men. Lesbianism has always represented an empowering choice in patriarchal cultures.

Time out for a brief history lesson: Here in the US, until the invention of reliable birth control, women could not practice heterosexuality outside of marriage without risking extremely severe consequences. I am talking about the stigma of the notorious “fallen” or tragically “ruined” woman, with the searing rejection of out-of-wedlock children—often relinquished for adoption under economic, or religious, or social—or all-three—pressures.

On the other hand, the socially sanctioned expression of heterosexuality—marriage—was a dangerous and degrading institution for women. In an era before birth control, women could not deny their husbands sex, and this could mean serial pregnancies for two decades or more, with the attendant toll on both psychological and physical health. It often meant too many children to protect or provide for. The rates for infant mortality were nearly as high as the rates for death in childbirth. Wives could be raped and beaten with impunity, could not inherit money, could not own their own wages, vote, serve on juries (critical factor in rape trials), could not own their children.  Husbands could have their wives incarcerated indefinitely in mental asylums. This was still true through the middle of the twentieth century.

The woman with enough self-esteem to insist on control of her body; the woman with dreams of creative, entrepreneurial, or intellectual work; and the woman whose childhood experiences of male sexuality were traumatic enough to preclude her fulfilling the obligations of the marriage bed had two choices: celibacy or lesbianism. Many women chose lesbianism. And many of these, not surprisingly, were women of achievement. Scratch around under the surface of these thousands of exceptional, historical “single women,” (as Ride was presumed to be) and you will usually find the lesbianism.

Dr. Ride made her choices during her lifetime, as we all do, weighing her priorities and considering consequences. For many women whose lifework is with children, and especially in the field of education, the closet has been compulsory.

But Dr. Ride is dead now, and, in exiting the planet, has exited her closet. There is no reason to attempt to stuff her legacy back into that prison, except of course the usual heterosexist impulse to erase lesbian achievement, impoverish our history, appropriate our lives. What is the motivation behind that impulse? Could it have something to do with the fact that a disproportionately high number of women of pioneering achievement are lesbians… and especially in arenas traditionally dominated by men? Why is this still true today? Clearly the label theory will not provide us with an answer. We can only begin to understand this high percentage of lesbian achievers when we begin to explore and celebrate the resistance, the iconoclasm, the strategic brilliance, the hard-won integrity, and the deep gynophilic passion that are indigenous to lesbian identity. Dr. Sally Ride embodied all of these qualities, as a lesbian, and they cannot be separated from her accomplishments.

This essay was originally published in On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking, July 27, 2012.

Writing about women athletes is a joy. Women athletes defy expectations and societal norms. They run their own races. They inspire and they revolutionize. This is why slamming into their closets is such a jolt and a disappointment.

Yes, it’s true that lesbians in the spotlight have historically needed to disguise their orientation. The penalties for deviance from the heterosexual template have been swift and severe. This was especially true for women athletes, who, by the very nature of their achievements, posed a challenge to the tenets of femininity. (They had muscles and they were competing!) The media, and sometimes even the fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate the achievements of a threateningly ambitious and aggressive female athlete. For homophobes, uncovering a lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not have been a “real woman.”

But that was then and this is now. Or is it? In attempting to uncover and reclaim the lesbian lives of historical women athletes, I am running into a peculiar brand of homophobia. It’s not virulent, but it’s also not the “smiling homophobia” that insists a woman’s sexual orientation is irrelevant to an understanding of her life and her lifework. I would call this new permutation more of a “misguided allegiance homophobia.” I am referring to the folks who insist that these historical figures would not be pleased by being outed posthumously; that honoring their lives requires honoring their closets and perpetuating the fictions they so carefully constructed during their lifetimes.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias is a case in point. She was a tomgirl from the get-go, racking up trophies for a variety of sports in high school and even trying out for the football team. Recruited for an amateur basketball team in Dallas while still in her teens, she made such a name for herself, she was invited to try out for the 1932 Olympic track team. In order to get around the three-event limit for individual athletes, Babe’s handlers were allowed to register her as a team, all by herself!  In two and a half hours, she won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles)—setting a world record in the hurdles and javelin. In addition, she tied in the high jump, setting another world record, and finished fourth in discus. She scored eight points higher than her nearest competition—a team of twenty-two women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals—breaking her own world records in both, and took the silver in the high jump. During this period, Babe was too focused on winning to give much attention to her image. She appears to have been perfectly comfortable with herself, her only concession to “media spin” having been a misrepresentation of her age. Claiming to be eighteen instead of twenty-one, Babe may have been catering to the public’s acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a girl who is still in her teens, as opposed to their expectations for “young ladies.”

Babe’s overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. She made several enemies, and one of them was sportswriter Paul Gallico, probably best remembered for having written The Poseidon Adventure. Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, believed women should only be allowed to compete in six sports: archery, shooting, fishing, ice skating, swimming and equitation—the “beautiful” sports.

Gallico launched his first attack with an article in Vanity Fair titled “The Texas Babe.” In it he made the comment that this “strange… girl-boy child” would have been right at home in a men’s locker room. He used the word “boy” more than a dozen times to refer to Babe, attributing her athleticism to an over-compensation for her inability to attract men.

What Gallico did not mention was that Babe had made a fool out of him. After the Olympics, fellow sportswriter Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. (In the days before television, syndicated sportswriters wielded considerable power in making or breaking athletes, and Rice was one of the most influential. He is arguably responsible for the celebrity of a roster of athletes including Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and Knute Rockne. His support for Babe was a key factor in her success.) Exploiting Gallico’s machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course, and Gallico idiotically accepted the dare. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on handily to win the game. It was after this humiliation, Gallico began to obsess over the prominence of Babe’s Adam’s apple.

A year after publishing “The Texas Babe,” Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Although this was ostensibly a short story, it would have been immediately clear to readers that the central character, a butch Texas athlete named “Honey,” was a thinly-disguised caricature of Babe. In fact, there was a full-page photo of Babe on the facing page. In this story, Gallico imagines the other women athletes trash-talking Honey. They ridicule her Texas accent, comment on her frequent use of obscenities, and speculate about her lesbianism. Gallico depicts his heroine as a genetic freak, filled with self-loathing in spite of her gold medal, sobbing while she smacks her own face and claws at herself—because she cannot get a man.

This was 1933. Suddenly Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume, and nail polish—all the things she used to dismiss as “too sissy.” And within five years, she was married to George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe’s biographer Susan Cayleff, was “was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment.” His weight would eventually balloon to 400 pounds. Photographed next to George, Babe did appear more feminine. Also, she was now playing golf, refusing to discuss either her previous career in basketball or her Olympic achievements in track, insisting that her sports career began with golf. Amateur golf—and there was no such thing as professional golf for women at that time—was an elite sport, requiring membership in a country club. These were the “ladies who lunch, ” wives of wealthy men or daughters of privilege, and Babe, an immigrant truck driver’s daughter, had to step up her gender game.

Marriage to George Zaharias worked, and the press eased off. So successful was Babe in presenting herself as a traditional housewife, that, several years later when Babe entered a long-term relationship with a woman, the press was willing to characterize the woman as Babe’s “protégée.” According to biographer Cayleff, Betty was Babe’s “primary partner.” A fellow pro golfer, Betty roomed with Babe on the Ladies Professional Golf Association circuit and lived in her home for the last six years of Babe’s life. Whatever George may have thought of this arrangement, he accepted the situation. When Babe was in the hospital dying from colon cancer, Betty moved in with her, pushing the beds together. Babe trusted her to change her colostomy bag, and it was Betty who, at Babe’s request, shaved her legs for the last time.

I wrote the book and lyrics for a musical about Babe Didrikson (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), and the show includes a love scene and duet between Babe and Betty. The scene marks a turning point in the narrative, as Babe moves from a position of alienation and competition with women to one of intimacy and professional alliance. The play culminates with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from our first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this “outing” of Babe. Was this respectful to her memory? Would Babe have wanted it? And, of course, the smiling homophobia: “What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete.”  Some of the critics who reviewed the play felt a need to talk about George. After all, wasn’t he the great love of her life?

At what point can we recognize that Babe was bisexual—or a lesbian whose marriage may well have been a concession to career-busting homophobia? The larger question is when will the mainstream become so literate about lesbian history and culture that they can recognize and embrace the archetypes and paradigms of the lesbian butch: the aversion to dresses, the achievement in traditionally male arenas, the advocacy for women?

Toni Stone is another case in point. She was the first woman to play Negro league baseball. By age fifteen, she was playing semi-pro baseball, and in 1949 she went professional with the San Francisco Sea Lions. When they failed to pay what they had promised, she went with a team in New Orleans, and then in 1953 signed with the Indianapolis Clowns. Historically, she has been referred to as a “drawing card” for the Clowns, but in her fifty games with the team, she maintained a solid .243 batting average, playing second base—the position Hank Aaron had vacated two years earlier when he was recruited by a recently-integrated Major League team. Toni was sold to the Kansas City Monarchs in 1954. The Monarchs were an unhappy experience for her, and, citing lack of playing time, she retired after only one season.

Toni Stone was a tomboy, but was she a lesbian?  She didn’t like girls’ clothes. In her own words, she was “big and sassy.” She dumped her birth name “Marcenia” in favor of one that “sounded more like ‘tomboy.’”  Like Babe, she excelled in many sports as a child: ice skating, golf, track, high jump. She was especially passionate about baseball. Her parents, a beautician and a barber, were distressed enough about Toni’s gender deviance that they arranged for her to have pastoral counseling at the age of ten. Fortunately, Toni’s priest was sympathetic and signed her up for his Catholic Midget League… And she never looked back.

Toni had it rough traveling with nothing but men. Not only was she having to deal with Jim Crow laws regarding segregated accommodations, but, as the only female player, she was shut out of the locker room. And she was left to her own devices in terms of dealing with sexual harassment. One of her former teammates narrates a story about Toni sliding into base. The second baseman tagged her by running the ball up her crotch and over her breasts. Toni immediately leaped to her feet and began punching him. Another time, she would take after a harasser with a baseball bat. According to Toni, that man never bothered her again.

Because she travelled with men, some people assumed Toni was a prostitute. According to Toni’s biographer, Martha Ackmann, Stone did little to correct them and she began to stay in brothels when touring in the South. At the brothels, she was given a hot meal, a safe place to sleep, and a chance to launder her clothes. “The prostitutes started following the sports pages so they would know how she was doing,” Ackmann says. “It was remarkable.”

In her biography, there is no record at all of any boyfriends. There is, however, a husband. His name was Aurelius Alberga and he was forty years older than Toni. She married him shortly after she moved to San Francisco, when she was struggling with various jobs—including operating a forklift on the docks—while trying to play professional baseball. Alberga, who is credited as being the first black officer in the US army, began his working life as a bootblack, later becoming a successful realtor and insurance salesman. By the time Toni met him, he owned a Victorian house in Oakland and was well-enough off to support a wife. Aurelius was what was known as a “race man,” having helped organize San Francisco’s NAACP as well as a black Masonic lodge in Berkeley. He was an avid supporter of Marcus Garvey.

It was, to the say the least, an unusual marriage. Toni was twenty-nine and her husband was in his seventies. After the wedding, she moved directly into a bedroom on the first floor, while Aurelius’ bedroom remained on the second floor. Was this a love affair, or was it a companionate arrangement between a progressive, older man, who would be in need of nursing care, and an unusually independent and ambitious young woman struggling to survive in a new city? Did Aurelius recognize her enterprise and her self-determination, seeing something of his own character and struggle in her stories? Was he gay?

Toni stayed married to Aurelius, and she did take care of him in his old age. He lived to be 103. Unlike Babe, no female “protégées” or “housemates” turn up in the historical record. History would have us believe that Toni Stone’s only passion in life was for baseball… and a man old enough to be her grandfather. I remain a skeptic.

In an interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Stoni said, “I loved my trousers, my jeans. I love cars. Most of all I loved to ride horses with no saddles. I wasn’t classified. People weren’t ready for me.”

And perhaps we still aren’t. I am wishing that lesbian athletes, then and now, could all have time capsules, where they could safely store the truth about their lives, including the truth about the ones they loved—the women who stood by them through so much oppression, and whose loyalty has been rewarded with obscurity, so that we historians and cultural workers would not be faced with the closeted record of their lives and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of women who were compelled to live a lie.

Recommended biographies:

Ackmann, Martha. Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.

Cayleff, Susan E. Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. University of Illinois Press, 1996.


This article was orginally published in On The Issues, Spring 2012.

CG: I'm very happy that you have translated and are producing my play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, in Beijing. I was just reading about your play The Rabbit Hole... a lesbian revisioning of Alice in Wonderland. Was that your first attempt to produce a lesbian play in Beijing? How was it received?
 
San: Yes, The Rabbit Hole was my debut as a playwright of drama. I wrote some fictions and fairy tales before, but I always want to write something about lesbians in China, their lives, their love, their living conditions and so on. In 2010, LES+ had publicly staged the first lesbian drama in China, which called The Tower of Joy and Sorrow. This play attracted many attentions of audiences and media in China, from then we found the stage performances is a really good way to show ourselves besides publishing magazine. So I wrote this play and took it onto stage in Beijing earlier this year. Different with our first try on stage, I put some magical realism elements in this play, many audiences said this play is more than lesbians life only. And this time, we attracted many male audiences to watch. I was really surprised about this at first, but afterwards I was really happy about this, because this is what we want, let more people to see us.

CG: How did you find my play and what made you want to produce it?
 
San: It was a really wonderful experience for me to find your play! As I just mentioned, to show lesbians’ life in the form of drama is started very late in China. We lack of experience, lack of funds, and lack of actors…So when I committed to devote into this, I constantly collect a variety of advanced foreign experiences and the classic lesbian scripts to learn more. Then, I found you! Thanks to the internet. You and your plays really inspired me, especially The Second Coming of Joan of Arc. The first time I saw this play, (I brought it form LuLu.com), and I told myself that you should introduce this play to China. Lucy for me, your generous authorization makes all this happened.
 
CG: There are many Western references in the play (for instance, to The Wizard of Oz). How did you handle those?
 
San: Actually, the story of Joan of Arc was good known in China. I think this is mainly because the spread of several classic movies of Joan of Arc. When I do the translation, I studied a lot of information, minimize the difficulties of understanding due to cultural differences. However, the core of this play is not about the differences from Eastern and Western cultures, it’s about the circumstances that we face together.

CG: I understand you have been editing LES+, a lesbian magazine in Mandarin, since 2008. Is this the only lesbian magazine?  Do you have any problems with censorship?
 
San: LES+ is the only paper published lesbian magazine in Mainland China until now. There are few other electronic lesbian magazines, but they only transmitted through the internet. Paper publishing has brought us some financial pressure, but we insist on it, in order to retain this position. Due to the publication censorship in China, We have no publicly released qualifications so far, which means our magazine is underground publish. We sold our magazines in coffee shop, activity center, regional agency point and the online store. We still hold on, we believe that one day it will change.
 
C: What is the legal status of lesbians in China?
 
San: It’s really a complicated issue…Well, we still have no right to get married, and the law does not recognize same-sex relationship. This leads to many same-sex relationship problems, due to the lack of legal protection. In fact, there are also some problems within the LGBT community. When Chinese people mentioned homosexuality, they can only think of gay, but not the lesbian. This is mainly due to the lack of sound of lesbians. We are working hard to change this situation. And we can also see the situation is truly into a better direction.

CG: Have you had experiences personally with censorship or discrimination as a lesbian?
 
San: Lesbians in China of my generation are very different from our previous generation. China is richer, more confident, and more open. So generally, we do not receive a violent discrimination, (except some outlying poor areas, where violence and discrimination are still serious), but discrimination we receive is more intimate, such as discrimination in employment, discrimination at work etc. I had experienced the discrimination in employment before myself. The employer eventually hired a sweet girl who is always wearing a skirt but not me, and the boss told me directly they need a real girl with nice dress to obtain customers favor. I think this itself is discrimination and oppression against women.
 
CG: And.... finally... anything else you want to share with a lesbian-feminist readership here in the US and Canada??
 
San: The voice of lesbians in China is still very weak. Many people turn a blind eye to us; ignore our needs and callings, even including our own parents. Now, more and more of us have recognized this, and we working hard to try to change all this. We are doing everything you have done, and we believe our future will be what you have now been or even better. And we will be so glad if you can pay attention to us, encourage us, and support us. Because as you may already know, we are a family.

San's Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc,  贞德再临_中文 is available online as a PDF download, or paperback.