And Will Rise?
Notes on lesbian extinction
Susanna J. Sturgis
At the end of a hard winter, when spring was at last beginning to make itself felt, my sourdough starter died. My starter didn't have a romantic history. Its ancestors weren't packed over the Rockies during the gold rush; it didn't come from San Francisco. Its history did stretch back into my own past, to a mother country I left long ago. It was given to me by a lesbian poet; it had been given to her, as I remember the story, by some lesbians living on the land in Tennessee. I'd had it for more than twenty-five years; it had moved with me a dozen times and lived in as many refrigerators. My sourdough starter was my last living link to the lesbian community of Washington, D.C., and now it was dead.
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Sourdough is yeast, wild yeast. It's alive, and like any other living thing it needs to be fed regularly. And because, unlike dried yeast, it can't be bought off the supermarket shelf, you have to double it before you use it so you always have a cup on hand. The night before my starter died, I'd poured the thick, creamy-looking batter into my big brown-striped beige bread bowl, added a cup of unbleached white flour and a cup of warm water, and whisked till the lumps were gone. Covered with a sheet of wax paper and over that a dish towel, it stayed out on the counter overnight. On that late March morning, I lifted the towel, expecting a bubbly rejuvenated starter. What I saw looked exactly as it had the night before. This wasn't good. My starter had been so resilient. It had raised uncounted loaves of bread and plenty of pancake batter. How could it be dead? Maybe it was just tired. I fed it a little more flour, some milk, even a little sugar. I gave it more time. On the second morning it was still inert.
I told myself that sourdough starter is just sourdough starter and that the death of mine was just one of those things. It wasn't momentous, portentous, or apocalyptic. But you don't have to be a poet, a writer, or an English professor to find metaphors in bread. I still remembered by heart the last lines from Judy Grahn's Common Woman poems:
the common woman is as common as the best of bread
and will rise
and will become strong -- I swear it to you
I swear it to you on my own head
I swear it to you on my common
woman's
head
Bread that won't rise is at best a misfortune. It might be a curse on the order of milk that comes curdled from the cow or wine that turns to blood at the dinner table. Letting your starter die is like letting the fire go out, back in the day when you had to trudge miles through the snow to borrow embers from a neighbor to kindle a new one.
Then my muses dropped an e-mail in my inbox. Trivia was soliciting submissions for its next issue, "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" My starter might be dead, but something was still at work here.
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By this time my kitchen counter looked like an elementary school science experiment. Starting your own sourdough starter means creating a medium that wandering wild yeast will want to drop into. Wild yeast is everywhere, but fermentation takes time and doesn't always happen. It's faster to get a cup from someone else, but who did I know who had a starter going? Besides, I'd baked enough bread in this apartment that wild yeast must surely be hovering in the air, looking for something to eat. Besides, it was spring, the moon was waxing, and I was desperately in need of some new beginnings.
I had two methods going in three different containers. In the largest of the four nested blue ceramic bowls I swiped from my paternal grandmother's house after she died, I whisked together a cup of unbleached flour and a cup of very warm water. Then I poured the mixture into a spaghetti sauce jar. The plan was to dump half of it every twenty-four hours and freshen the rest with half a cup of flour and half a cup of water. Into another of my grandmother's blue bowls, I poured a cup of 1% nonfat milk, covered it with wax paper, and left it on the counter to go sour. My dead starter still lay fallow in the big beige bread bowl. Maybe it could attract some wild yeast too? I mixed in a half cup of flour and a half cup of warm water, whisked it till smooth, and muttered a yeast-catching incantation over it before covering it with a dish towel.
#
My sourdough starter had come from my old lesbian community, but what spark linked that to the question "Are lesbians going extinct?" Lately I've been staring down the absence of lesbian community, and of the grassroots feminism that almost invariably grew alongside it. My first novel was published in December 2008. It took about five years to write and almost as long to get into print; in trying to promote it, I discovered that the wordscape I once called home had been ravaged by an unpublicized tornado. Of the feminist and lesbian bookstores, presses, and publications that existed when I left Washington, close to 90 percent were gone. Lammas Bookstore, where I worked for four years, died in 2000. This past winter, off our backs announced that it would cease to exist as a print publication -- oob, where I'd often helped out on layout weekends, and which had published many of my earliest reviews, essays, and interviews. I had walked away, but usually when you leave town, the town lives on behind you.
Where had all the lesbians gone who sustained those communities? As a cohort we're too young to have died off. I moved to Martha's Vineyard in 1985. Had all the others moved away too? Had they gone underground, or behind a cloud, or into another dimension? Did it even matter? If there are lesbians on TV, do we still need lesbians in real life? Isn't acceptance and assimilation the big goal? Why did I care that my sourdough starter died? I could use store-bought active dry yeast to leaven my bread, couldn't I?
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The lesbian-feminist women's community of Washington, D.C., was my starter. It drew in wild yeast from all over the country, the continent, the world, and provided a medium in which I could grow. I'd been adept with words from an early age. I wrote for my college newspapers, mostly reviews and political commentary, but the turning point, my epiphany, the moment when I really and truly knew that I was a writer, was when my review of Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (1978) appeared in off our backs. Gyn/Ecology wasn't an easy book to read, or to review. Why did the off our backs collective trust me, an untested and uncredentialed newbie, with such an important book? Damned if I know, but they did, and because I wanted to be worthy both of their trust and of Gyn/Ecology, I stretched to my limits and pushed past them.
In her essay "Beloved Image!" Nelle Morton writes of how a woman came to tell her difficult life story to a small group of women. She had never told her story before. She didn't have the words to tell it. Because the other women were listening, this woman was able to find the words and tell her story. In Morton's phrase, they "heard her into speech." Such experiences, Morton came to realize, were not unique, or even unusual, among women. She describes it as "a complete reversal of the going logic in which someone speaks precisely so that more accurate hearing may take place. This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth hearing that takes place before the speaking—a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech—a new speech—a new creation."1
In so many ways the lesbian-feminist community and the feminist women in print movement heard me to my own writing. As a reviewer I responded to what other women were writing, at once continuing the conversation and bringing it to the attention of other readers. As a feminist bookseller, I saw over and over and over again how books, and written words in general, inspired, exhilarated, and even saved lives. Other women's stories provided tools--insights, images, theories—that helped me make sense of my own life, to compost it into soil that helped me grow instead of holding me back. So often our stories didn't fit into nice, linear, neatly punctuated and paragraphed narratives. Our presses and periodicals said "Tell them anyway" and published the results. And enough readers were willing to follow where a writer led, even when the path was rocky and steep. I wasn't the only woman heard into speech by the lesbian community.
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If lesbian community was the starter, then we lesbians must have been the wild yeast -- both the wild yeast and the raw materials that go into the batter, the flour, honey, and liquid, the vegetable oil and salt. Are lesbians going extinct? Literally? No, of course not. We are, as we've always been, everywhere. Then what happened to the starter? Why is it no longer bubbling and rising and raising bread?
What happened to lesbians that we are no longer fermentatious?
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When I came out to my father, his immediate reaction was "Maybe we didn't hold you enough when you were a baby." When I came out to my maternal grandmother, who was about 86 at the time, she immediately, and for the first time, started telling me about how poorly her father had treated her mother, and how some of the other men in her genteel Virginia family weren't exactly stellar human beings either. My grandmother, born in 1892, came of age before the Freud virus infected humankind (even those of us who manage to shake it off usually carry the antibodies all our lives). I think she was on to something.
The worlds most of us grew up in couldn't imagine, couldn't even see, women who didn't come with a man attached. Even less conceivable was a woman who didn't want a man attached. If a woman didn't want a man, she must have a problem, right? The options offered by pulp fiction and the occasional eccentric's biography seemed to be commit suicide, go straight, or (if you lived between the two world wars and had enough money) move to Paris. Our only real alternative was to make some stuff up. And we did.
The 1970s opened with "The Woman-Identified Woman." "What is a lesbian?" it began. "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion." What I saw was a clown stuffed in a box and ready to pop out when you slipped the latch. The next part, though, sounded a lot like me: "She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society—perhaps then, but certainly later—cares to allow her."2
Born in 1951, I was the oldest child in an upper-middle-class family. My brothers, sister, and I weren't tracked in obvious sex-prescribed directions. I figured out pretty quickly that emulating my mother was a dead end, so of course I identified with my father. I went to a girls' school that encouraged girls' achievement, intellectual, creative, and athletic, so it wasn't until I got to college that I ran headlong into baldfaced sexism—and, at pretty much the same time, the women's liberation movement. The sexism was everywhere, in the antiwar movement I joined up with, the remnants of the New Left that hung around it, the administration of my Jesuit university, and the behavior, language, and assumptions of most of the men I was meeting. My understanding of my unhappy, alcoholic mother began to change, and my identification with my father became a lot more critical.
In 1976 Adrienne Rich caused quite a stir at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference when she described lesbian reality as something more than two women having sex with each other. She believed, she said, that "it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks a literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman. It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack."3
No one suggested abandoning the notion that lesbians were women who had sex with other women. And with excellent reason, because through the 1970s and into the 1980s, sex, erotic sparks, and sexual relationships were essential to sustaining the medium in which the wild yeast grew. Our community was so young that its roots were shallow. Nearly all of us had left our parents and parents' parents and hometowns behind; most of us didn't know each other's kin, and all we knew of each other's histories came from the stories we told about ourselves. Long-established, deep-rooted communities are bound by ties of blood and custom. With us it was sex that underlay the glowing lines between lovers and ex-lovers, forming the web that held the community together and link-ing it to other communities around the country and the world.
At first glance, it seems paradoxical that we who as feminists claimed "the right to choose" in nearly every other aspect of our lives could be quite suspicious of choice where lesbianism was concerned. "Political lesbians," those who were said to sleep with women out of political conviction rather than irresistible attraction, were not quite authentic. Women with significant heterosexual experience caused some confusion: on one hand, each one represented a victory for "our side"; on the other, what would keep them from going back to men and becoming "has-bians"?
When it came to determining who belonged and who didn't, compelling physical desire was deemed more reliable than anything involving choice. Claiming that this desire was something we had no control over edged us closer to the gay male mantra of "we can't help it" -- but with an important difference. For the men, "we can't help it" was an argument for assimilation: "We're just like you apart from whom we sleep with, and we can't help that." For lesbians, it was a way of determining who really belonged to our community of outsiders -- who could be trusted with the secret handshake and admission to the dance.
For historical women, though, the membership standards were relaxed. If a woman was dead, we would claim her as one of us on the flimsiest circumstantial or intuitive evidence. One long-term friendship with another woman, especially when underscored by passionate language in a letter or journal, trumped the evidence of a fifty-year marriage and half a dozen children. Dead women could not betray or disappoint us; we didn't need constant reassurance of their loyalty.
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Lesbian, feminist, and writer are so intertwined in me that I can hardly distinguish one from another. I'm a lesbian the way I'm a writer. No scientist can point to one gene, one allele, or a combination thereof and say, "That's the writer gene. That's the lesbian gene." Both writerhood and lesbianism developed over time, from a synergy of opportunities and challenges and the choices made in response to them. Without the lesbian-feminist community, they would have developed very differently, if they developed at all. Had I not been drawn into that fermentatious medium, I might have remained wild yeast, invisible, wafting in and out of kitchens, in search of flour and water.
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On my kitchen counter, something was stirring. Within three days, a ring of tiny bubbles had appeared around the perimeter of my big bread bowl. Was it yeast or was it air? I fed it more flour, more warm water, stirred it well and hoped for the best. The nonfat milk had never smelled sour, but it now looked like yogurt. Something must be in residence. Following the directions in my greasy, tattered, split-spined little bread book, I whisked in a cup of flour and covered the bowl again.
Into my e-mail inbox came an announcement from the off our backs collective: oob was coming back to life as a print quarterly.
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Somewhere around 1980, I participated in a discussion during which the leader posed this question: Are you a lesbian first or are you a feminist first? By then I was well on the way to forgetting that "lesbianfeminist" wasn't all one word and at first the question didn't make sense. But the asker was Joan Nestle, my respect for whom bordered on reverence: Joan had co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives, one of the most remarkable institutions I've ever encountered, and she herself was an articulate link to the urban lesbian bar scene of the 1950s. I couldn't then, and still can't, imagine spending much time in any bar for any reason, but I was a lesbian and Joan's stories were part of my people's history.
Was I a lesbian first or a feminist first? Joan clearly hoped we would say we were lesbians first, but I couldn't. Chronologically I had been a feminist first, and my lesbian identity had grown out of my feminist one. My feminism had made lesbianism thinkable; being a lesbian expanded my feminism. For years, I poked at and pondered Joan's question. When the feminists pissed me off, I was a lesbian first, and when the lesbians pissed me off, I was a feminist. Eventually I rejected the question: it was too much like "Would you rather give up your legs or your arms?" Both feminist and lesbian were integral to my being.
In retrospect, that apparently innocuous question looks like an early salvo in what soon exploded into the "sex wars." By the mid-1980s, the community/network that had encouraged me as a writer and given me things to write about, tools to make sense of the world, and places to publish my work had turned into a battleground. It churned my gut like the fractured but not completely broken home I'd left with no regrets, where the alcoholic, depressed, and hopeless mommy and the know-it-all daddy were joined mostly by animosity and mutual contempt. The din was so daunting that continuing the work of "reconstituting the world"4 seemed pretty pointless. You could join in the yelling or you could shut up. Most of the essays I wrote during those years and in the years following were concerned, directly or indirectly, with identifying the factors that inhibited or stifled feminist thought and feminist speech: our notions of "politically correct" and "politically incorrect," for instance, and the notorious case of a lesbian publisher who sold reprint rights to several anthologized stories to Penthouse Forum magazine without the writers' permission.5 In 1985 I slipped away and returned to Massachusetts, my home state.
As the 1980s dragged on, the categories lesbian and feminist drifted further apart. This is not to say that many, many women weren't both at the same time; only that at the movement and community levels the seams deepened and became easier to see. The definition of "lesbian" narrowed and drew closer to the female counterpart of "gay," as if in this male-dominated society of ours women choosing women was politically and economically similar to men choosing men. More and more, feminism became identified with the mainstream feminist movement, which was preoccupied primarily with reproductive rights, job discrimination, and violence against women: crucial issues all, of course, but also defensive issues. Continuous battling through courts and legislatures, not to mention at the doors of women's health clinics, leaves little time or energy for reinventing worlds. Feminist theorizing drifted toward the academy, where time and energy were easier to come by. The categories woman and man, which seemed to have been expanding in the previous decade, were contracting again: if you couldn't shoehorn yourself into one, maybe you really belonged in the other. Dichotomies ruled: male/female, butch/femme, gay/straight, PC/PI, pro-sex/anti-sex, pro-porn/anti-porn, vanilla sex/hot sex. The movement that had once seemed so committed to pushing limits in all directions now dug in its heels: we can't help it, we don't wanna help it, girls just wanna have sex -- or fight about sex.
For years I blamed it all on the sex wars, but even at the time other factors were clearly in play, and not unrelated, among them the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan administration and Reaganomics, and corporate consolidation in bookselling and publishing. Now I think that in trying to hold our own against outside forces we lost our nerve, our heart, our center, our way. What was clear at the time was that the ground I stood on was being sucked out from both sides. I bolted.
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On Martha's Vineyard, I eventually found another fermentatious medium to grow in. To my urban eye, most of the women looked like lesbians in their jeans and sensible shoes, but hardly any of them were. To be sure, there were lesbians, and gay men, in the year-round population. They recognized me pretty much as soon as I got off the boat. To my surprise, I didn't feel especially drawn to most of the lesbians I met. The sparking energy that I had identified with lesbians just wasn't there. To my even greater surprise, I found it in the women's group I was invited to join a year or so after I arrived: all of these women were feminists, none were lesbians, and most—including me—were single. Men, in other words, were not a big part of our picture. That group became part of the starter that kept me growing, as did the local theater scene (the director who pulled me into it was a lesbian), the weekly newspaper where I worked, a volunteer-run coffeehouse that was a nexus of the island's grassroots music scene, and, especially, an anonymous fellowship that bore a strange and strong resemblance to the lesbian-feminist community I had left.
What made the similarity strange was that at the time a common view among feminists was that this worldwide fellowship was patriarchal, Christian, and not feminist-friendly. In practice, though, it was non-hierarchical, self-sustaining, and based on the telling of stories. In recovery I rebuilt myself from the ground up—same ingredients, new structure—and began to knead together my disparate experiences growing up in an alcoholic family, finding my voice in the lesbian-feminist community, and living in the place where I now found myself.
It is quite possible to be a lesbian, even an out lesbian, in a community where lesbians are a very small percentage of the population, but it takes a lot more work to remain visible. Audre Lorde and Cris Williamson don't come up in casual conversation, and if anyone notices your double-women-symbol earrings, they're too polite to mention it. In small towns and tight-knit communities, what is most visible in public are the things people have in common; but though to an outsider's first glance Martha's Vineyard presents one homogeneous façade, its surface is crawling with hairline fractures, some of which conceal deep fault lines and rifts. You don't find this out from reading the newspaper. You find this out through talking on back porches, eavesdropping at the post office, and working alongside a variety of people—and, of course, through second-, third-, and fourth-hand information, which is to say "gossip." There's so much stuff that everybody knows but hardly anyone mentions in public. Being a lesbian slipped easily into that category.
I've lived here far longer than I've lived anywhere else. The island has become my starter, my medium; my first novel is set on Martha's Vineyard and not for nothing is it titled The Mud of the Place. But the theories and images and insights that have shaped my understanding of this place come primarily from the lesbian-feminist writer-artist-activists who inspired me in another one: Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Judy Grahn, Joanna Russ, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Gloria Anzaldúa. (The non-lesbian in my pantheon is Jane Jacobs.) The novel's main characters are a lesbian and a gay man, and nearly everybody is trying to strike a balance between individuality and community.
Surely many, many of us who were the wild yeast of the 1970s and 1980s have taken our experience into the wider world and are putting it to creative use. Just as surely, the starter in which we grew has either died or gone into long-term hiding. The crucial question behind the question of whether lesbians are going extinct is not "Where are the lesbians of yesteryear?" but "Where will the lesbians of tomorrow come from?"
My answer is that the lesbians of today—all of us, no matter what decade we came out in—need to tend to our starter. Revive it if it's faltering, restart it if necessary, and keep it going.
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Founded in 1976 by Harriet Desmoines (Ellenberger) and Catherine Nicholson, the journal Sinister Wisdom carried the dedication "A journal of words and pictures for the lesbian imagination in all women." After editorship transferred to Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff in 1981, those words disappeared. I missed them then, and now, looking back, I see their disappearance as another harbinger of the retrenchment/reaction that, unbeknownst to any of us, was beginning to set in. For the lesbian imagination in all women. The words issue an invitation and a challenge: to unlimited expansion, courageous action, and an inclusion based on choice. They allow that physical attraction might be less important than the choices we make based on, or in spite of, our sexual proclivities.
Sinister Wisdom took its name from Joanna Russ's then-new novel The Female Man, now an acknowledged classic of feminist fiction, lesbian fiction, and science fiction. The Female Man draws together four women, Joanna, Jael, Jeannine, and Janet, who share the same genotype but live in different universes. Janet is from Whileaway, an all-women world where men are unknown. Janet is more different from the other three than any of them is from each other; the others have all been strongly shaped, though in different ways, by the struggle to hold their own in a world they don't control. At the end of the novel the authorial I bids farewell to the characters one by one. To Janet she says:
Goodbye to Janet, whom we don't believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman.6
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Since the Europeans arrived, Martha's Vineyard has been a place from which islanders regularly went to the mainland or to sea to earn their livings. For centuries they could return and find a home that hadn't changed much in their absence. In recent decades the changes have accelerated. Islanders, especially younger islanders, are leaving and not coming back. The fermentatious medium that made the place home is endangered. Still, those of the diaspora can return to a place they recognize, and where they are recognized.
Can we, the wild yeast of the lesbian diaspora, do that? For sure there are remnants of the old world out here, offshoots and volunteers and probably spontaneous new growth—new efforts to reconstitute the world. What lesbians and feminists have to offer the world is deeply rooted in women-only space. That's where we get patriarchy out of our heads, and form the support systems—the mediums—in which we can grow and thrive and reinvent the world. Without those support systems we are orphans, women without a country. Isolated from each other, sooner or later most of us will pull back, blend in, and let others forget that we are women who put other women first. The great improvements in women's lives have not been brought about by women working in isolation from each other.
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Now two sourdough starters are thriving in my refrigerator. Lest either one die of neglect, I've been baking more bread than even a bread-loving single woman can eat. Fortunately my friends and neighbors never turn down a free loaf.
Each new starter includes some of the other's substance, and one is the collateral descendant of the one I brought from Washington all those years ago. The old yeast died, but the wild yeast came back; give wild yeast a suitable medium and fermentation will happen. Bread, like the common woman, will rise.
Notes
- Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 127-128. [return to article]
- "The Woman Identified Woman," by the Radicalesbians, was first published in Notes from the Third Year (1970). Since then it has circulated in many forms, formal and informal. One current online source is Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement, part of the Special Collections Library at Duke University: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/womid/ (accessed June 15, 2009). [return to article]
- Adrienne Rich, "'It Is the Lesbian in Us . . . ,'" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 200-201. [return to article]
- The phrase is based on the last line of Adrienne Rich's poem "Natural Resources," in her collection The Dream of a Common Language (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 67. [return to article]
- These two essays are available on my website at http://www.susannajsturgis.com/essays-articles.php. See "Is This the New Thing We're Going to Have to Be P.C. About?," first published in Sinister Wisdom, and "Breaking Silence, Breaking Faith: The Promotion of Lesbian Nuns," which first appeared in Lesbian Ethics. Another journal that published several of my essays between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s was Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism. Its name says it all. It heard me into a lot of pretty good writing. [return to article]
- Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975; Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 212-213. [return to article]
About the Author
Susanna and Rhodry (1994-2008)
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Susanna J. Sturgis is the author of The Mud of the Place (Speed-of-C Productions, December 2008), a novel about small-town people getting unstuck with a little help from their friends. In 1999, when she got back into horses after 30 years away, she finally understood her life as a ongoing search for places where it was OK to dress in barn clothes and hang out with girls. Such places tend to be fermentatious, but she didn't realize that till she wrote this essay. She thanks the Feminist Women's Writing Workshops (defunct), Wintertide Coffeehouse (also defunct), and WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention (still thriving!), for giving her plenty of reasons to believe. For comments and encouragement on this particular essay, she is deeply grateful to Susan Robinson and Bonna Whitten-Stovall. Susanna is a year-round resident of the seasonally occupied territory of Martha's Vineyard, where she lives with a young Alaskan malamute, makes her living as a freelance editor, and dresses in barn clothes even when she's not at the barn. You can find her online at www.susannajsturgis.com or www.themudoftheplace.com.
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