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    Terri Lynn Jewell: In Memoriam

    Civil Rights In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews
    Originally published in  Womanist Theory and Research, Spring/ Summer 1996, Athens, GA and and off our backs, May 1996.
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    Terri Lynn Jewell 1954-1995

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    Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

    Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."
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    The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

    "There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
    and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril."     - Bessie Head

    "From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

    "... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
    What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
    comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
    unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
    the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible."     - Paula Giddings
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    "The woman who takes a woman lover lives dangerously in patriarchy."
    - Cheryl Clarke

    "If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written." - Mary Helen Washington

    "Being a black woman means frequent spells of impotent, self-consuming
    rage."     - Michele Wallace

    "... I know that we must reclaim those bones in the Atlantic Ocean... All those people who said "no" and jumped ship... We don't have a marker, an
    expression, a song that we all use to acknowledge them... we have all that
    power that we don't tap; we don't tap into the ancestral presence in those
    waters."    - Toni Cade Bambara

    "A Home where we are unable to voice our criticisms is not a genuine Home.
    Nor is a genuine Home one where you assimilate, integrate and disappear.
    For being invisible is the same as not being at Home. Not being at Home
    enough to be precisely who you are without any denials of language or
    culture."    - From the Introduction to Charting the Journey
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    "I am both Black and a woman... And yet I am continually asked to prioritize my consciousness; is race more important; is gender more important? Which is more severe, etc.? The fallacy lies not in struggling with the answer, in trying to figure out which is the correct answer for the group at hand, but the fallacy lies with the question itself."- Patricia Hill Collins

    "We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle - because, on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world."- Michele Wallace

    "... right to life is not inherent, but is by grace of... an enemy. I think that
    those who so loudly proclaim perfect freedom call out triumphantly before
    being out of the difficulty."    - Mary Shadd Cary
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    "Homophobia divides black people as political allies, it cuts off political growth, stifles revolution, and perpetuates patriarchal domination."- Cheryl Clarke

    "Manasa lambda manify: atao mafy, rovitra; atao malemy, tsy afa-tseroka." (Like washing thin fabric: wash it hard and it will tear; wash it gently and you will not get the dirt out.) - Malagasy proverb

    "One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female. A Black feminist analysis has enabled us to understand that we are not hated and abused because there is something wrong with us, but our status and treatment is absolutely prescribed by the racist, misogynistic system under which we live."- Barbara Smith

    "After distress, solace." - Swahili proverb
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    A Poem for Rachel Crites

    Child Abuse In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History
    Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
    Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007
    The Virginia Medical Examiner ruled on Monday, [February 5, 2007] the two missing Montgomery County girls died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was an act of suicide.
     
    ... there were no empty bottles of pills or alcohol, but investigators did find the keys turned in the “on” position and the car had run out of gas.
     
    He said authorities later found the bodies of two females in the car's front seats.
     
    Loudoun County investigators confirmed early Saturday that the victims were Rachel Samantha Smith, 16, of the 14000 block of Platinum Drive in Potomac, and Rachel Lacy Crites, 18, of the 600 block of Gate Stone Drive in Gaithersburg.
     
    The two went missing Jan. 19. ---MyDeathSpace.com
     
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    And she said,
    “Wherever I end up laying . . .
    I want to stay with my true love . . .
    With my true love . . .
    Next to her.”

    She said:

    “This is my choice.”
    She said.
    “This is my choice.”
    “I’m sorry.”

    And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry.

    I’m sorry for every sorry time you had to hear “gay” like it was something
             bad.
    I’m sorry for every sorry time they called you dyke and didn’t mean that you
             were fierce, and strong, and true to loving women.
    I'm sorry for the sorry Catholic church that called you a sinner.
    I’m sorry for all the sorry teachers who never taught you how natural, how
              normal it is for women to love women and for girls to love girls, and
              that many of the most brilliant, most daring, most courageous women
              in history were lesbians.

    I’m sorry.

    And if it was up to me,
    I would bury you,
    Bury you with your true love,
    And her with you.

    And I’m sorry for the suffocation
    That had nothing to do with CO2.
    And I’m sorry for the long, slow freezing
    That had nothing to do with temperature.
    And I’m sorry they took so long,
    Took too long,
    To locate you.

    Because they’ll never find you now.

    And if it was up to me,
    I would bury you,
    Bury you with your true love,
    And her with you.

    And on the stone, I’d carve
    Your last words
    In deep granite gashes,
    Too deep to wear away,

    Those sorry words
    You left
    To a sorry world
    Rachel, I would carve,

    “I’m sorry.”
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    Caitlin Allen: In Memoriam

    In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism
    Originally published in Lesbian Connection, 2013
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    Caitlin Allen died Thursday, March 14, 2013 at the age of thirty-nine on her farm up in Starks, Maine.
     
    She was an artist, a farmer, a farrier, a landscaper, and a carpenter. She moved to Maine from Pittsburgh in 1995 with her then-partner and lifelong friend Darlene Clute. They both worked with Woodfords and Community Partners, assisting developmentally disabled adults.
     
    In 2000, she and her partner Jen Gilmore bought a small home in Starks, Maine. They remodeled this home and a few years later traded up to a farm with 30 acres and a barn. In addition to an assortment of cats and dogs, Barking Dog Farm would have horses, chickens, goats, turkeys, ducks… and a cow. Caitlin and Jen began a craft business, making homemade wooden lamps, and Caitlin also started an internet business of painting portraits of people’s animals. Together they launched their carpentry business, named “Women Do It Better.”
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    Caitlin participated in her local Big Sister program, and she would take her “little sister” on camping trips and trail rides. Her two nieces, Ariel and Mackenzie, adored her, and Mackenzie wrote in her journal: “Aunt Katy I have gotten all of my inspiration from you to be an artist now. I am following in your foot steps.”  Caitlin loved animals, especially horses, and was a skilled farrier. She could trim the hooves of the horses others were afraid to approach. Caitlin also wrote children’s books and played guitar, writing and singing her own songs.
     
    She was actively engaged with lesbian culture, and she and Jen made the journey one year to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. She would contribute articles and artwork to Maize: A Country Lesbian Magazine. For several years she was a member of the Feminist Spiritual Community in Portland, Maine, participating in weekly rituals.
     
    She attended the University of Maine at Farmington and was working toward completing prerequisites for veterinary school when she became overwhelmed by conditions later diagnosed as Complex PTSD.
     
    Caitlin was endlessly curious about the world she lived in, tremendously loyal and generous to her friends and neighbors, community-minded, and creative. She will be deeply missed by all who knew her.
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    Monique Wittig: In Memoriam

    In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History
    Originally published in off our backs, vol. xxxiv, 2003 Washington, DC.
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    I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by the mere switching of pronouns.
     
    And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…
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    This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern, faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.
     
    Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?
     
    And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of 40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes of the child in The Opoponax, bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled discoveries of the developing mind.
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    "I am the opoponax. You must not provoke him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the window sill. I am the opoponax."
     
    Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity. She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct toward each other and toward themselves:
     
    "Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/ whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest."
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    She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:
     
    "The kaleidoscope game consists of inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects, their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter."
     
    She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.
     
    "The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning."
     
    Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of women warriors:
     
    "The women say the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent."
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    Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the feminaries destroyed:
     
    "The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations."
     
    Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of ownership, and that women must resist it:
     
    "The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak"
     
    "The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world."
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    Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and memorialize a myth of her own making:
     
    "For almost two milleniums lesbians had been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called 'glorious.' From which comes the 'Glorious Age.'"
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    Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.
     
     The obligatory and all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”– is distinctly lesbian.
     
    The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids…

    Listen:
    "There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember… You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."

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    Tee Corinne: Lesbian Artist and Revolutionary 1943-2006

    In Memoriam Incest Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History
    Originally published in off our backs, March 1, 2006.
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    Tee Corrine, Self-portrait, Gelatin silver print, 1980.

    I met Tee Corinne at a women writers’ group in her home a few weeks after I moved to Southern Oregon, in 1988. I had just come out, and Tee was the first lesbian artist I had met whose art was for lesbians and from a lesbian perspective. I could not have found a more inspiring and revolutionary model.
     
    Tee was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art. According to Tee, “I have seldom succeeded in keeping a diary, but I have almost always carried a drawing pad and, since, my eighth year, I have also had a camera.” 1
     
    With a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and painting (with minors in English and history), she went on in 1968 to get an MFA in drawing and sculpture at Pratt Institute. After a few years of teaching and backpacking in Europe, she became attracted to the back-to-the-land movement and communal living. She was also, in her words, sliding into suicidal depression:
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    Something didn’t feel right. Nowadays they talk about over-achieving adult children of alcoholics and the problems they have with depression… Around the age of thirty I realized that art could no longer solve my problems… I found therapy, separated from my husband, became involved with women and joined the Women’s Movement. I felt better. 2
     
    At forty-four, Tee recovered memories of being sexually molested at the age of six. .
    I am coming to look on my suicidal years (13-29) through the lens of this information, and find, even then, strengths to be drawn upon: the strength of the survivor; the strength of talking which chips away at the killing silence; the knowledge of the value of my own life. It’s mine. I’ve paid for it.3
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    Tee’s photography traced the roadmap of her personal journey. In the early 1970’s, after moving to California, Tee began working on the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard, where she claims she learned an appreciation of sexual information. She began researching erotic art by classical artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. At this time, the early Second Wave feminists were arguing that heterosexuality and erotic art objectified women, but Tee’s resistance took an alternate approach: …“sensuality at its best is transformative. If I had a sense of being in touch with God, it would be at the point of orgasm.” 4  
     
    She became adept at representing lesbian sexuality in ways that would elude the male gaze. In 1982, she produced a series of photographs called Yantras of Womanlove. Concerned with protecting the privacy of her models, she used techniques involving multiple prints, solarization, images printed in negative, and multiple exposures. Tee consistently and conscientiously included women of color, fat women, older women, and women with disabilities as her subjects. Sometimes printers would refuse to print her works and art galleries would refuse to show it. In 1975, she self-published the Cunt Coloring Book, which is still in print today.
     
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    In the early 1980’s, Tee moved to Southern Oregon, becoming part of a community of lesbians and other women who were self-consciously creating and documenting a radical, women-only culture. Many of these women were living on “women’s lands,” rural separatist collectives and communes that had been founded in the 1970’s. She became a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-83). During the next decade, much of her work would focus on her experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family and being molested as a child.
     
    My grandmother Mabel died when I was forty, leaving me a suitcase full of five generations of photographs… 5  Somewhere in the process of enlarging and coloring in the old photo images, I began to bring the past and present together, visually and psychically.6
     
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    During this period, Tee edited several anthologies of lesbian erotic fiction. As an editor, Tee was scrupulously respectful of class difference as it is reflected in writing, again modeling an authentic, not tokenized, diversity. She looked for “stories about how sexuality could work with the bodies we have, within our disparate personal histories.”7
     
    In 2004, Tee’s partner of fourteen years, writer and social activist Beverly Anne Brown, was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer and given a terminal diagnosis. Wanting to use something more immediate than darkroom techniques, Tee learned to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in order to “push the polite boundaries of portraiture.”8 The result is the series “Cancer in Our Lives.”
     
    After the death of her partner, Tee was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer. On August 27, 2006, she died quietly in her home. She was surrounded by a network of loving and supportive members of her community, who thoughtfully maintained a weblog in order to keep Tee’s wider, international community informed about her health.
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    In the monograph about her exhibit titled “Family,” Tee wrote:
     
    If I look inside me, talk to the child within who, after all, is the one who originally wanted to be an artist, I find that she almost always knows how she wants my work to look: “Beautiful, in a big and powerful way.”9
     
    Those words could stand as her epitaph. Tee, you will be missed.
     
    Footnotes:
     
    1. Tee Corinne, “Personal Statement,” http://www.varoregistry.com/corinne/pers.html
    2. Tee Corinne, Family: Growing Up In an Alcoholic Family, (North Vancouver, B.C: Gallerie Publications, 1970), p. 3.
    3. Ibid, p. 9.
    4. Tee Corinne, interviewed by Barbara Kyne, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html
    5. Corinne, Family, p. 7.
    6. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
    7. Tee Corinne, Riding Desire, (Austin, Texas: Banned Books, 1990), p.viii).
    8. Tee Corinne, “Colored Pictures” from “Cancer in Our Lives,” http://www.jeansirius.com/TeeACorinne/Colored_Pictures/
    9. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
     
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    Thinking About Julia Penelope

    In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History
    Written for Maize in 2013
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    When I think of Julia Penelope, I think of lesbians, linguistics, and rocks. One was her passion, one was her vocation, and one was her avocation. In my mind, the three have many things in common. Their commonness, for starts. 
     
    Lesbians, and words, and rocks. Prevalent, universal, not rare, ordinary, without rank or position, of familiar type.  But to someone who has made a life study of them, lesbians, words and rocks are full of secrets, packed with history, and freighted with potential.
     
    Julia knew history. She knew the stories. She knew where lesbians came from, starting with herself. And she generously shared that history… a history of sexual abuse, of being a “kept butch” and a “stone butch,” a history of patriarchal attitudes. And she shared her emergence into a world of radical lesbian-feminist values. She understood where words came from and how their uses evolved and were evolving. She understood the significance of story to the lives of women, and how words could be manipulated to control that story. She understood the structure and the politic of language… “unlearning the lies of the fathers’ tongues”—as her book Speaking Freely is so aptly subtitled.
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    And she studied and collected rocks. She loved to go “rockhounding.” Where others would see just an uninteresting pile of rocks, she would find her treasures. She knew the history of rocks: which ones had evolved their distinct characteristics under centuries of compression, which were the result of cooling magma, which were aggregates of minerals bonded together over time. She knew which rocks were precious and semi-precious, which would be enhanced by polishing, and which were likely to prove geodes with secret, crystalline fairy structures hidden under their crude exteriors.
     
    Lesbians, words, and rocks. She leaves a solid, living, individual legacy. Thank you for your dedication and your integrity.