CG: So, Rachel Fenton, welcome to my blog!

RF: Kia ora, hello and thank you, Carolyn Gage, thanks so much for having me! I’m a huge fan of your blog and your brilliant work, as you know.

CG: For those of you who may not be familiar with Rachel, she collaborated with me on a charming and dangerous booklet titled “Sexual Textual Tennis”  as the “Graphic Poet Rae Joyce.” I encourage everyone in the world to buy this patriarchal atom-splitting work of amazing art. BUT… today I am talking to Rachel about another aspect of her brilliant career.  Rachel and I belong to a small but mighty, extremely elite group I like to call “The Lesbian History Detective Agency.”  Rachel, perhaps you would like to share with blog readers the subject of your latest investigation…?  

RF: I just want to say, first off, “Sexual Textual Tennis” was a champion collaboration and an important one, for me personally it was a pivotal moment in my understanding of what my feminist politics are and what my art can do, so thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. And also, “The Lesbian History Detective Agency” would be a great title for a play! OK. I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with a woman named Mary Taylor. For those of your readers who don’t know about her (and five years ago, that was me), she is probably best known as the friend of Charlotte Brontë.

RF: There are several reasons I became so fascinated with Taylor… Since early 2016, following the launch of Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik) which I’d co-edited, I was looking to reconnect with my Yorkshire roots in a way that would simultaneously anchor me to Aotearoa, where I’d lived for about a decade at this point. I’d had a discussion about the Brontë sisters with my partner who said to me “Didn’t Charlotte have a friend in New Zealand?” And that’s what pushed me down the trail of Mary Taylor. I felt Mary Taylor was a figure who could hold my interest for a large, book-sized project. And I wasn’t mistaken; however, what I wasn’t seeing – wasn’t able to at that point – was why I was really drawn to her; what my psychological drivers were for pursuing her. I need to make that distinction, that my interest in her is only clear in [almost] hindsight, because I was running blind at the time of my research.

CG: I think that can often be part of the process about researching and writing about historical figures. I just finished a play about the geneticist Barbara McClintock. I had been thinking about this play for thirty years, researching it for ten, and then writing it for three years. Weeks after I finished it, I began to understand myself as autistic. After I got the diagnosis, I was doing an internet search to find out who else was autistic… and McClintock’s name turned up over and over again. Maybe on some deep subconscious level I had been searching for my own story in the history of McClintock.

It will take a biography with an entry for "lesbian" in the index before we can begin to reconcile the serious mind-body split that has been and is still being historiographically imposed on Rachel Carson, lesbian biologist.

[Originally published in On the Issues, June 28, 2012.]


As a playwright attempting to reclaim the lesbian lives of historic women athletes like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, I run into a peculiar brand of homophobia.

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 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 fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate their achievements. For homophobes, uncovering lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not be a "real woman."

But that was then and this is now. Or is it?

I call the homophobia that I encounter in telling about their lives "misguided allegiance homophobia." In this permutation folks insist that these historic 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.

Babe Didrikson 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, she made such a name for herself that 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) and set 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 22 women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals 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 and her sole concession to "media spin" may have been misrepresenting her age, claiming to be 18 instead of 21. But Babe may have been catering to the public's acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a teen as opposed to the expectations for "young ladies."

Babe's overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. Sportswriter Paul Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, wrote in "The Texas Babe" in Vanity Fair in 1932 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 and fan Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. Exploiting Gallico's machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course and Gallico idiotically accepted. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on to win the game handily.

The next year Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Ostensibly a short story, the central character was a butch Texas athlete named "Honey," a thinly-disguised mimicry of Babe. In fact, a full-page photo of Babe sat on the facing page. 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 character 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.

Suddenly, Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume and nail polish -- things she used to dismiss as "too sissy." And within five years, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe's biographer Susan Cayleff "was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment." Photographed next to George, Babe, now playing the then-elite sport of golf, did appear more feminine.

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 (LPGA) 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.

When I wrote the book and lyrics for Babe: An Olympian Musical (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), the show included 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, culminating with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from the first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this "outing" of Babe. Was this respectful? What would Babe have wanted?  And, the "smiling homophobia" of: "What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete." Some critics even felt a need to talk about George.

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? I wish that lesbian athletes -- then and now -- would have time capsules where they can safely store the truth about their lives and the women they love. We should not be left with a closeted record and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of remarkable women who were compelled to live a lie.

It was in Boulder, Colorado, and the year was 1972. I was twenty—not old enough to drink, but somehow old enough to have gotten myself married and divorced and fifteen hundred miles from home—if I could call it that. And I didn’t.

I was working on the second floor of J. C. Penneys, in the fabric department. The important thing to remember here is that the second floor of Penneys was where they sold piece goods, baby clothes, and draperies. Everything else was on the ground floor, off the mall. Nobody ever came up to the second floor except women—women who had babies, who sewed, and who decorated. And this is where I saw my first lesbians. Or, at least, it was the first time I identified the experience as such.

They were a couple, I remember—a butch and a fem. The butch was in her forties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her breasts were not apparent. She wore her black hair slicked back in a style left over from the fifties, a “duck’s ass” or “DA.” The skin on her face was leathery and tan, with hard lines around the eyes and the mouth. And her hands were in her pockets.

Her companion was everything she was not—except, of course, a lesbian. She appeared to be at least ten years younger, a blonde—although perhaps not a natural one, and she wore tight blue jeans, but not bellbottoms. These were working-class women, or what we anti-war, student-hippie types would call “greasers.”  She was shorter than her companion, and she wore makeup and earrings. Her hair was styled in a kind of bouffant look that was the shellacked, feminine counterpart of the DA.

The femme was buying fabric, and she was anxious that her purchase be pleasing to her companion. The butch appeared to be very uncomfortable with finding herself on the second floor of J.C. Penneys, and she answered her partner in a surly and self-conscious manner. She told her she didn’t know anything about this kind of “stuff.”

I remember that I shared the fem’s anxiety about pleasing this woman. I wanted her to know that I also cared, that I welcomed her presence in my department—was honored by it, even. I wanted to protect her from my co-workers who might be startled by her appearance, who might make judgments, who might even try to exchange a look with me. I wanted her to know that I would not side with them against her, that I would never be like one of them. I wanted her to smile at me, and, of course, she never did.
 
I think of this butch woman now, and I wonder what she made of the lesbians who must have just been emerging in Boulder—my generation of lesbians—young women in hiking boots with hairy legs and hairy armpits, neither butch nor fem, taking and teaching self-defense and auto repair classes, starting carpentry collectives, and organizing women’s clinics and women’s presses and women’s bookstores and women’s festivals. Lesbians fighting and loving and trashing and marching and mimeographing, smashing the state, taking back the night, giving peace a chance, making love not war. Feminists and Marxists and communists and vegetarians. Lesbians with speculums looking at each other’s cervices, lesbians with vibrators learning how to have orgasms, lesbians with kiwis, with zucchinis, with bananas, with cucumbers. Lesbians in threesomes and foursomes, in marriages, in families, in collectives, in cooperatives, in tents, in tepees, in yurts, in cabins, in dormitories. Lesbians quoting Ti-Grace Atkinson, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Valerie Solanas.

What must this butch have thought of this veritable explosion of latter-day tribadists? What could she have thought? Where in her centuries of oppression could she find any reason to trust women, even lesbians, who were not like herself? With the unerring instinct of the hunted, she would have concluded, and rightly, that the lesbians of the early seventies were dangerous to her.
Had she smiled at me on that second floor of J.C. Penney’s, or shared a look that admitted to her vulnerability or—worse yet—solicited my support, I would have betrayed her, and in a heartbeat.

It was this perpetual knowledge of an ever-present potential for betrayal that had etched the hard, hard lines around her eyes and her mouth. It was this knowledge that the fem was hoping to soften, to erase for just a moment, in the manufacture of some article of clothing for herself, for her lover, for their home, that would signify a kind of normalcy, a kind of belongingness that could never be a reality for a woman who had to run daily a gauntlet of scorn, violence, and contempt that would have killed an ordinary woman. And so her eyes never met mine, because they never missed a thing.

[Originally published in Chokecherries Anthology, Society of the Muse of the Southwest, Taos, NM, 2011]

There are many challenges in writing lesbian-feminist plays, and today I want to talk about two of them. The first is working without antecedents in the popular consciousness, without a canon of lesbian dramatic work from which to draw. The second is the particular kind of audience response to the work which generally results from this lack of a cultural context.

Playwriting is an intensely compressed art form, taking place in a single location, over a two-hour period of time, with real human beings. Plays rely on narrative and dramaturgical conventions in order to work around these restrictions. Conventions are a form of shorthand, based on common cultural assumptions. They involve familiar paradigms and archetypes, and also stereotypes. Unfortunately, the narrative and dramaturgical conventions I inherited came from 2,000 years of theatre written by, for, about, and serving the interests of men. The lesbian character does not fit into the patriarchal paradigm except as an object of ridicule, pity, disgust, or prurient interest. The lesbian can be the superfluous spinster, or the male sexual fantasy, or the vampiric seducer of women all of whom would otherwise presumably become compliant heterosexual wives and girlfriends. And, of course, the lesbian character can be a tormented outcast who kills herself. Obviously, within this paradigm I could not tell the stories I wanted, the stories that reflected my truth.

An even more serious problem with this lack of authentic models is the fact that the lesbian-feminist paradigm, aside from being new and unfamiliar, is also inherently hostile to the patriarchal project. The lesbian experience is hugely shaped by compulsory heterosexuality, which is so pervasive in the patriarchal models that it is just taken for granted. The fish does not know it is wet. But the lesbian looking down into the pool sees the fish, sees the water, feels the hands that, since birth, have been inexorably pushing her toward the edge of the pool, and, knowing she cannot swim or does not want to learn, she must resist. To tell the story of that resistance is to draw attention to the existence of the pool and the hands that push--something that, in my experience, most men and many women are very uncomfortable hearing about. To make explicit, as I do in the play Ugly Ducklings, the negative effects of this pushing on girls who may still be rooted in a world outside the pool is to invite criticism and even censorship.
 
Similarly, the lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs some of the most venerated archetypes of patriarchal theatre, beginning with the patriarch. In this model, which does not disguise the fact that women have historically been barred from positions of power and authority--often by violence--the male hero does not come off looking quite so godlike. The lesbian-feminist playwright sees, notes, and foregrounds the masses of women whose appropriated power props him up. She states how his exercise of power perpetuates her and their oppression. He actually begins to look like an enemy, and a cowardly one at that. In the lesbian-feminist paradigm, women, typically depicted by the mainstream culture as vying with each other for his sexual attention or approval, turn to each other as more empowering, enjoyable, and appropriate companions and partners.

The lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs the patriarchal archetype of the so-called "good" woman, the compliant woman who privileges the interests of others--especially men--at her own expense. Not only does her behavior appear foolish and self-hating, but it also appears immoral in the lesbian-feminist paradigm, because female self-effacement enables the patriarchy that is systematically destroying the planet.

Writing the lesbian-feminist play requires a rejection of the models, assumptions and expectations of the traditional Western canon. This is hard work. It is the work of decolonizing oneself. The resistance to it comes from inside the playwright's own head as well as from the world around her. Necessary disciplines of isolation and attention to one's own experience can translate into anti-social behaviors and self-absorption. Both are occupational hazards, but they are seldom appreciated as suchCeven by the playwright herself, who may be wondering "what is wrong with me?" This has been by far my most serious oppression.

Fortunately for me, even though there was no visible, substantial body of lesbian-feminist dramatic work, there was a huge, vibrant, radical, radiant, life-saving, fire-breathing body of lesbian-feminist fiction, history, theory, poetry, music, and art. I began writing in 1986, and I can honestly say that had I been born ten years earlier or ten years later, I would have never been able to write a play like Ugly Ducklings--or any of my other plays. I feel incredibly blessed to have begun my career when I did, and I am incredibly grieved about the fact that women who came of age in the 1980=s and later are so often completely unaware of this amazing heritage of radical feminist literature from the Second Wave. Much of it is out of print. With the demise of the women=s bookstores and the women-in-print movement during the late 1980=s and early 90=s, there have been fewer and fewer institutions or publications for centralizing the work and facilitating access to it.

One of the books that was foundational for me as a writer was Dale Spender's Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. I recommend it to every woman who wants to write. It explained why I had no role models in theatre and it explains why I am censored today and why you cannot find many of the books that inspired my work. It explains why my work will be lost after I die. Unless, of course, I commit a high-profile suicide. More on that subject later.

In any event, I did have models for my content. I turned to the writings of Andrea Dworkin, Anita Cornwell, Audre Lorde, Christos, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Daly, Julia Penelope, Phyllis Chesler, Barbara Smith, Cherrie MoragaCas well as the tremendous collections of radical feminist writings by lesbians without big names, lesbians writing about their experiences on the land collectives, women documenting projects, publishing women's newspapers, etc. I was fortunate enough to be living contemporaneously with some of my mentors, and I have had the great privilege of meeting many and even befriending some. The majority of us were banned from the academy just by virtue of being "out," and this was a great class leveler, granting us precious permission to write without fear of ridicule or class comparisons. It also enabled radical thinking. If they're going to hang you for stealing a chicken, you may as well steal a horse. And so we did. Whole stables. Also, the economy was such that few of us had student debt, we could survive on part-time, minimum-wage jobs, and so we had the time and energy to create our own culture. I feel a lot of rage about the fact that working-class women and even some middle-class women no longer have that leisure.
 
The point I am making here is that art is not created in a vacuum. Not even the most brilliant woman can write without precedents. She will either use--and use at her peril--the ones that are hers by default--the mainstream, patriarchal ones that bombard us 24/7, or else she must actively seek out the feminist ones that will enable her to tell the story that empowers her.

But content was not enough. I also needed plays to use for models. Combing through the mainstream canon, I could find no radical feminist models, with the exception of a few highly encoded scenes from Gertrude Stein operas, a handful of one-act Suffrage plays, and a little one-act treasure called Trifles, by Susan Glaspell--and I did direct and produce all of these. But I needed successful, full-length, large-cast plays for models. I was going to have to locate the mainstream plays that most closely resembled the one I was intending to write. I was going to have to close my eyes to the content, and tease out the elements of structure that I could apply to my work. This is a dance familiar to many a native artist whose own tradition has been banned, stolen, corrupted or destroyed. I do experience my lesbian identity as a colonized one.

I found three plays, and I want to take some time to talk about them, because they illustrate so beautifully the problem of assimilation, or attempting to tell a partial lesbian truth without making it radical--"radical" as "down to the roots." All three of these plays were attempting to change attitudes about gender. All three of them, in my opinion, did more to further entrench the stereotypes than they did to challenge them. I have no doubt the hearts of the playwrights were in the right place. But it is the structural mechanics, often relying on those dramaturgical conventions, that undermined the message.

Patriarchal Culture is a shopping cart with a bad wheel. It steers to the right, unless there is an intentional and constant effort to wrench it back to the leftCin order to get it centered. I want to say that again, because it's such a critical point in my survival. I live and work under career house arrest. I can write whatever I like, but I cannot make a living at it. I cannot find venues for it. My work is not allowed to leave the house. Why? Because I am always wrenching to the left. I would not have to do that in a culture that was authentically gender-neutral. I must wrench because the cart is rigged in the direction of male dominance/female subordination.

So I dug out three former Broadway hits that dealt with issues of gender and sexual orientation in same-sex environments for children.

The first play, Tea and Sympathy, was written by Robert Anderson in 1953. It was an attempt to advocate for the so-called effeminate boy at a boarding school--the boy who prefers the company of women to his rowdy male peers, the boy who's artistically inclined, is not an athlete, and has no interest in sex for its own sake. This advocacy backfired, however, because the play never left the sexually colonized paradigm of heteropatriarchy. It never challenged the essentialist notion of manhood. At the very end of the play, the effeminate, scapegoated student is seduced by his macho housemaster's wife, and this act supposedly rescues him from the questions in his own mind--and in the mind of his audience--about his sexual orientation. His so-called manhood is doubly redeemed in this incestuous scenario, because, by his initiation, he not only "becomes a man" but also succeeds in stealing his enemy's wife.
 
In fairness to Anderson, his play went as far as it dared. Within the paradigm of heteropatriarchy, he did manage to make the point that effeminate men might be more courageous, more appealing to women, more heterosexual than the macho, athletic men who prefer the company of males socially. But in winning that battle, the playwright lost the war. Tea and Sympathy increased the marginalization of gay males--affirming through Tom's example, that they just hadn't found the right woman to rescue them yet.

The second play that dealt with sexual orientation issues in a same-sex environment for children was The Children's Hour, written in 1932 by Lillian Hellman. This play was inspired by an actual trial that took place in Scotland in 1810. Two women who ran a school for girls were accused by one of the students, who claimed to have witnessed them engaging in sexual behavior with each other. Hellman was careful to make the point in interviews that the play was not about lesbianism, but about "the power of a lie." She was defending the right of women to be self-sufficient and to live without men, without being accused of lesbianism. This is a far from dated theme. Most current plays and films about single women go to extraordinary lengths to reassure audiences about not only the heterosexual orientation of the characters, but also their silliness and subordination in relation to men.

For Hellman to make her point, lesbianism must be represented as heinous. If she equivocates on this point at all, it is only in the final moments of the play, when one of the women realizes that her feelings may actually be lesbian. Within minutes of this confession, she kills herself--leaving it up to the audience to decide whether or not this is a tragedy or a necessary consequence.

The Children's Hour was less useful to me than Tea and Sympathy, because it did not work that well dramaturgically. It plays like a melodrama. But, again, it reflected mainstream attitudes toward lesbianism that are still rampant, and it provided a kind of foil for my own play.

The third play was the German classic Children in Uniform, adapted from the film Mädchen in Uniform adapted from a book by Christa Winsloe. This took place in a Prussian girls' boarding school, and actually depicted a butch student and her crush on the female teacher who showed her some tenderness in the otherwise harsh and regimented environment of the school. The film was released in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and critics are quick to point out that it represents an allegory about retaining humanity in a totalitarian environment. Interestingly, critics still fail to identify Winsloe=s intentional depiction of lesbianism as a locus of resistance.

This play was the closest to what I wanted to do in Ugly Ducklings, in that it was sympathetic to the lesbian characters. But the play is not without problems. Winsloe intends us to view the teacher as a martyr, but today's audiences find her relationship with the students inappropriate. Also, in the book Manuela kills herself at the end, leaping from the roof of the school. When the film was made, two alternate endings were shot--one where the suicide was completed and one where it was intercepted. By the time the play was written, box office had obviously weighed in in favor of the intercepted suicide, but it is an obviously pasted-on, fake happy ending. Dramaturgically, all the action is pointed to the necessity, even the inevitability, of Manuela's suicide.

And I want to take a minute with lesbian suicide, because it is such a central theme in my play and in our culture. Lesbian suicide is a nifty ending for lesbian plays, because it offers the audience an opportunity to feel they can empathize with the character's suffering without feeling that they are enabling an identity that troubles their notions about gender or morality. Most of us can afford to feel charitable toward the dead.
 
Consider the 1991 film Thelma and Louise. They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws. They have killed a would-be rapist. They are on the run. And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point, the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare: They kiss, they look at each other, they yell "yee-haw"--and then they get down to the business of survival. They ditch the car. They dye their hair. They go underground on any one of the dozens of women=s lands all over the U.S. They're in Arizona, right? They could go to Adobeland. Or Apache Junction, which is an entire village of lesbians. They get healthy. They heal. They make love. They change their diets. They do yoga. They dance under the full moon. They build a hay bale house. They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any. They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute. They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment. They have a zillion delicious options. But in the movie, they go off a cliff. In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss. Lesbianism is a fate worse than death. The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators. The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kissCcoming after the decision to commit double suicide. (Twenty years later, Million-Dollar Baby has not traveled far. The empowered woman with fighting skills must ultimately desire her own suicide.)

There are two plots in Ugly Ducklings. One is the coming-out story of a closeted, middle-class counselor who has fallen in love with an out, working-class counselor. The second plot concerns a deeply disturbed adolescent butch and a ten-year-old camper who has a crush on her. The adolescent lesbian acts out intense, internalized homophobia to deflect attention from herself, and the target she chooses is the ten-year-old. The ten-year-old, terrified by the scapegoating, attempts to hang herself on the stage. This attempt is intercepted by the two counselors, and in the course of the intervention, the closeted counselor outs herself. The child is saved, the lesbian lovers, on their way out of patriarchy, are reconciled.

I submitted this play to a well-known, mainstream theater in D.C. several years ago. They considered producing it. The script was circulated among the staff. They had a meeting about it. In the end, they rejected it on the grounds that it was too pedagogical. I was puzzled by this. Pedagogical... meaning preachy? I went back through the script. There's only one preaching or teaching speech in the entire play, and that's the speech at the end of the play delivered to the child with a rope around her neck. It is definitely pedagogical, because the child has internalized some very bad pedagogy that's going to kill her. In the speech, the counselor explains how being lesbian is something like being born left-handed. Absolutely pedagogical, no question about it, and also dramaturgically justified. In fact, there was nothing else I could have put in that spot--unless, of course, I wanted the child to die. What this theatre was telling me was that the difference between art and propaganda was the death of the child. Kill her, it's art, and they'll produce it. Let her live, it's propaganda, and no production.
 
I kept my thoughts to myself for several years, but when the show was mounted last spring by Venus Productions, also in D.C., I had reason to reconsider my silence. The reviews were strong. We had an endorsement from the NPR affiliate station. The show was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play of the year. And yet there were reviewers who took issue with the end of the play. Metro Weekly complained that the ending was "too neat, never takes advantage of ... lucrative opportunities to wrap up her dawdling script."
"Lucrative?" Interesting choice of words. "Dawdling?" The child with the noose around her neck ... as in "let's get on with it?" Potomac Stages praised my restraint (whatever what that means), at least until "the final scene when it turns preachy and, as a result, becomes artificial and off-putting." Why is letting the lesbian live perceived as "artificial?"  I have no comment whatsoever as to the application of the word "off-putting" to the rescue a child from hanging.

At risk of sounding like a touchy artiste, I submit that the intensity of the criticisms that have been so single-mindedly focused on pressuring me to change the ending of this play are in direct proportion to the success of that scene. If you are doing radical feminist work, and you are doing it well, and particularly if you are doing lesbian-feminist work, you will know the power of your work in exact proportion to the resistance you encounter. Never mistake it for a sign you are on the wrong path. We all must wrench, and wrench again, and keep wrenching as long as we are in the toxic, misogynist current of a male dominant culture. Do not ever apologize for that. And don't even think about changing your ending!


[The following was first delivered as a paper for the New England Women's Studies Conference in March, 2005. Originally published as "In Search of a Lesbian Stage Tradition," in The International Gay and Lesbian Review, Issue 14.2, March/April, 2007, Cambridge.]

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she just has to leave her husband at home with his mistress, toss her suitcase in a roadster, and head Downeast for a little timeout with her new, butch girlfriend. In July 1933, that’s exactly what First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did. The roadster was a light blue Buick with a white convertible top, and the girlfriend was hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, aka “Hick.” Their itinerary took them north to Québec, and then over to the Gaspé Peninsula, and then down the Maine coast. Traveling without benefit of the Secret Service, the two women enjoyed a madcap junket down endless dirt roads, sleeping in a cottage without plumbing, and indulging in nighttime tickle-fests.

Eleanor’s road trip remains emblematic of much of Maine’s lesbian history: hidden in plain view. Now that Maine has adopted a law legalizing same-sex marriage, perhaps it’s time to unpack the closet and take a little road trip through Maine’s lesbian history.

Reversing the direction taken by Hick and the First Lady, our first stop will be in the south… South Berwick, to be exact, where we find the home of Sarah Orne Jewett, one of Maine’s most celebrated authors. Jewett’s 1896 collection of short stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about a fictional fishing village called Dunnet Landing (said to be modeled on Tenants Harbor) is considered an American classic, a distinctly female contribution to a catalog of testosterone-charged war epics and whaling sagas. Critics have noted that Jewett’s villages appear to be peopled almost exclusively by women, the men all being dead, away at sea, or senile.

But then Sarah always did prefer the girls. Her early poetry testifies to heartbreaking attempts to secure the affections of young women, but few of these girlfriends could support themselves as Jewett did, and perhaps even fewer were willing to forego the joys of motherhood for a same-sex relationship. It was not until she met wealthy widow Annie Fields (pet name “Fuffatee”) that she was able to consummate her longing for a life partner, living in what was known as a “Boston Marriage” from 1881 until her death in 1909.

Next stop is Portland, where we drop in on the Maine Women Writers Collection, housed in a wing of the library at the University of New England. And here we have struck the mother lode: The collection houses not only writings by Jewett, but it also has inherited the library of lesbian author May Sarton, who moved to York in 1973, the same year her most famous book, Journal of a Solitude, was published. The roster of her library reads like a Who’s Who of Second Wave lesbian-feminist writers. In 1965, when Sarton published her lesbian novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, an entire generation of young women responded to her courageous call by discovering and celebrating their own Sapphic voices.

The Maine Women Writers Collection houses another treasure: the first lesbian novel ever published in America. Who knew that the woman who would donate her mansion for what would become the Portland Art Museum was also responsible for Ethel’s Love Life? Published in 1859, the book describes how a naïve, young fiancée finds herself passionately involved with another woman, making the remarkable discovery that, “Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men.” Author Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat may have been writing autobiographically, because later she published a book of lesbian love poems, taking care to closet her dedications.

It’s time to head north, this time to Southport Island, summer home of Rachel Carson. Wait a minute—Rachel Carson? Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the book that warned of the dangers of pesticides and saved the planet? The founder of the environmental movement? That Rachel Carson? What’s she doing on a lesbian road trip?

It appears that Ms. Carson had a lifelong history of passionate attachments to women. At the age of forty-five, she began spending her summers on Southport Island, where she developed what biographers coyly call “an intimate friendship” with her neighbor Dorothy Freeman, who was fifty-five, a grandmother, and in a long-term marriage she had no intention of disrupting. Rachel, with a history of financially supporting her mother, a disabled niece, and the niece’s out-of-wedlock child, appears to have been very comfortable with the arrangement.

But was it lesbian? The “intimate friendship” spanned the last ten years of Rachel’s life, and during the winters when the women lived hundreds of miles apart, they wrote letters to each other several times a week. These letters, published in 1995, make mention of the need to destroy certain letters immediately upon reading and discuss the need for Dorothy to enclose an extra letter that might be suitable for Rachel to share with her mother, in case she were to ask. There is a breathless series of letters leading up to a rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, where Rachel jokes about how she will feign a chilly greeting for the benefit of the desk clerk.

Intimate friends or lesbians? You say “potato” and I say “potahto.”

On to Camden, home of tomboy “Vincent” Millay, known to the rest of the world as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. One evening, at a party at Camden’s Heritage Inn, where her sister was working, young Vincent regaled the summer people with a rendition of her poetry. She apparently made an impression on one of the guests, a woman named Caroline Dow, who took the working-class Vincent under her wing and began introducing her to a network of other powerful and—significantly—unmarried women. Dow took her protégée to New York, bought her a wardrobe, coached her in social graces, and pulled strings to get her into Vassar. At Vassar, Millay’s lesbian affairs were so flagrant, Dow, possibly fearing for her own reputation, sent Vincent a letter threatening her with complete withdrawal of her patronage if she did not break them off. It is after this point, Millay began to show an interest in  men.

And now, the last stop on the tour… Mount Desert Island. In the town of Northeast Harbor is a charming white house with a sign on the lawn that reads, “Petit Plaisance.” Appointments can be made to tour this home of author Marguerite Youcenar, the first woman ever to be inducted into that bastion of literary male chauvinism, the Académie française. Yourcenar, a French citizen, was on a visit to the States to be with her lover Grace Frick when war broke out in Europe. Stranded here for the duration, she acquired a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence and settled into a domestic routine with Grace. The two would travel up to Mount Desert Island in the summers, eventually establishing a year-round residence. Yourcenar and Frick were partners from 1937 until Frick’s death in 1979.  Bar Harbor was also summer home to the family of celebrated lesbian author and Parisian salonist Natalie Barney, who brought her lover, poet Renée Vivien, for a visit in 1900.

And this concludes our road trip, which is by no means comprehensive. How many other celebrated Maine so-called spinsters, like Rangeley’s famous hunting guide “Fly Rod” Crosby, or Brunswick’s noted botanist Kate Furbish, might have led closeted lesbian lives? It’s cause for celebration to be able to reclaim this history, with hopes for the day when all of Maine’s brilliant lesbians can live openly and with pride.

[Originally published in The Portland Phoenix, June 24, 2009.]