A Word of Our Own: Ch 14 Learning to Say Lesbian
In which I learn what dragons and lesbians have in common.
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
Episodes may get further apart as I hit sections that are tough to rewrite—like this one.
Thank you for reading!
14. Learning to Say Lesbian
By 1992 I wasn’t looking anymore. Not searching. Or pretending. I had a home and a name, at least for a while. Bush was in the White House. Dinkins was still mayor of New York. ACT-UP was in the street fighting AIDS. I went around with a notebook I scrawled poems in, admired the trees in Tompkins Square Park, lived in a shared loft on Avenue B in the East Village and tried not to get mugged. Every Tuesday night I went across town to meetings of the Lesbian Avengers.
I don’t know how to write about them. I’ve done it too many times with too much hindsight. One attempt sounds like a script for a David Lean film. There’s the inarticulate longings, strange joys, fear as I walk upstairs in the Lesbian and Gay Center, and enter a room as bustling as Piazza San Marco trying not to meet anybody’s eyes. And when somebody flirts with me, as shy and as brash as Katherine Hepburn, I make an awkward joke and run away, return, hand outstretched only to retreat again. All you need is lots of B-roll of pigeons and distant roofs. It’s beautifully universal, how we all yearn. Most young people, young dykes especially, feel like a ship or a bird from outer space trailing fire as we plummet downward, burning up the dust on our waxy wings.
Except, instead of setting off fireworks, I learn to eat fire. That’s what’s different. The stakes. I trade poems for propaganda, make posters. Instead of romantic misunderstandings, I suffer through the big meetings which manage to be both really contentious and terribly boring. The working groups are okay, though. Sometime we meet in our loft sitting on broken-down couches and cheap futon chairs, drinking Rolling Rock. I wave my pencil at the group, and tell them to focus. They can’t. One woman is broke and heard about a job at this bar.
“Does anybody knows the manager?”
“Theresa used to date her. I think they’re still friends.”
Another partied at the Clit Club last weekend and saw X making out with Y.
“I didn’t even know they were dating.”
“Maybe they aren’t.”
“But isn’t X still seeing Z?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Another explains that she had sex in the toilet with a girl she met on the dance floor while girls in a long line outside pounded on the door. “It was so scuzzy, there were bloody smears on the wall.”
Somebody complains about her roommate who always eats her food.
Then they try to figure out who I should date next. “Why not that one, she’s a writer, too.” I turn red, try to get them back on track. But they don’t leave me alone, shamelessly talk about who is hot. I say, “Come on. That’s not why we’re here.” Though of course it was. Homo sex and the consequences of it in the world. Our homo lives.
I realize now, that among ourselves, we never used the word lesbian, never defined it, didn’t need to. You could say of us like dragons, they “do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.”
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