A Word of Our Own: Ch 15 Defining Home
In which I begin to question the limits of identity and of politics. But not love.
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).
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15. The Gully: Defining Home
What makes home, home anyway? Or a community, a community? Is it a name? A shared language? Shared origin? The square blocks it sits in? The geography of love?
After we burned our bridges with the Avengers, I grieved, I raged. I retreated into pre-tetrapodial jelly from which life emerged. But then time passed as it always does. I moved in with Ana for good. The sun streamed through her windows. I listened to thwacks and laughter from the handball court across the street. I wrote poems again. Tried my hand at a mystery. Looked for temp work. When it snowed, there was an intense crystalline silence. Sometimes we would put music on, and swirl elegantly around to Beny Moré until I collapsed on the floor, giggling too hard to stand. One spring, we marked flower beds in the back yard, then dug up broken pottery, plastic toys to plant roses, clematis, holly bushes, snow drops.
We travelled when we could. Upstate to her tiny cabin in the Catskills where in autumn the leaves fell and the underbrush died away, laying bare the bones of the hills. The summers there were luscious, hot, and excessively green. One winter we were offered a free place in San Juan and went south to Puerto Rico where I learned the sharp rocks lurking under the waves were called dogs’ teeth, dientes de perro, and one day we went to a dyke bar, settled familiarly on some stools. There, I don’t know how, but I managed to get into an argument with a curly-headed, blue-eyed blonde lesbian who said Americans didn’t speak Spanish, so was I a self-hating Puerto Rican or what? I had brown hair, brown eyes, a tan, a reasonable grasp of the language. I’d even picked up a Caribbean accent. Meanwhile, a taxi driver sneered at Ana when she said she was Cuban, a neighbor practically. “Really?” He stared dubiously at the short, dyed hair no self-respecting Latina would wear.
Meanwhile, back in New York, we avoided old friends, old enemies. Except for the Dyke March in June. It was almost sacred for Ana to go and see the hordes of dykes claiming Fifth Avenue for themselves. She’d persuade me to put on some sunblock and take the train uptown to the leafy, pigeony Bryant Park where everyone would gather under all the sycamores, and the tourists would gawk, and the hawkers would turn up with bottled water, and badges and flags. She’d find the drummers and march along with them, half dancing in joy while I trudged beside her, still mourning the word Lesbian which felt lonely divorced from Avenger.
Bit by bit, I learned more about Ana. We’d sprawl out on the naked floor and she’d tell me about the small Cuban town she grew up in. The fights with her mother to behave as young women should. How she moved with her grandmother to the big city of Havana to go to a musical conservatory. The revolution which interrupted everything and freed her, until it tossed her in jail for hanging out with undesirables, being an unruly woman, grilling her about all the homosexuals in the literary project El Puente. Sending her to a shrink who gave her electric shocks when she claimed to be a political prisoner. How the first thing she did when she got out was find a girl to sleep with. How her mother was the catalyst of it all. How she immigrated to France in time for ’68 and les Gouines Rouges, then to New York where started Medusa’s Revenge, a dyke theater with her girlfriend at the time Magaly Alabau, which was her first attempt at creating a room of one’s own that had started to obsess her since leaving Cuba and landing in France where everybody was reading American feminists, which was great, because Americans were reading de Beauvoir. And everybody on both sides of the pond were re-reading Wolfe. And it wouldn’t be some shitty place. It would be nice. For years, she kept the receipts from all the materials they bought to renovate the basement of that place on Bleecker Street. She had a good job then, and dumped a whole bunch of her own money in.
It was practically a community center. They offered space to the Spiderwoman Theater, a troop these three Native American sisters had, and the Salsa Soul Sisters which were kin in name only but still breaking ground. They paid the bills by throwing huge parties that dykes from all over the city came to, with Ana the self-appointed bouncer at the door. Five foot nil, she was the knight protecting all the girls inside from Bleecker Street’s drunken men. Once, when a naked man with a samurai sword dropped into the space from the coal chute in the ceiling she persuaded him to disarm. Once, while women filed inside to watch a performance, she blocked a gay man who was wasted and aggressive, and vowed revenge. Because what could be worse for some white guy, even a fag, than some marginal event taking place in which his dick was not center stage? Soon, the theater got a letter from the Human Rights Division of New York City accusing them of sexual discrimination, and threatening to drag them to court as if they were a cesspool of power like the Knickerbocker Club. Poor little boy excluded from one whole space. What an outrage! What an abuse of human rights!
It must have been 1998 or so that Ana bought a laptop with a modem and began a new adventure. She’d sit down at the trestle table she used for a desk, plug in the whining cord. Then for hours, for days the only thing that would move would be her eyes, the screen they were focused on, and her hand on the mouse going click, click, click. No more picking up a daily paper when she went out to the gym, and sitting at the table with it, smearing her fingers with its ink, breathing it in. Connected to the internet, she had access to newspapers from all over the world, their websites at first updated daily, then hourly, then as news broke, linking to other sources. It was like going from a rivulet, a creek, to a vast ocean of information that she’d dive into and only leave when she was sunburnt or hungry, overwhelmed by the surf. Or emotion.
At the turn of the millennium, the national TV news started covering the crisis provoked by this boy Elián González, who left Cuba on a raft with his mother and a bunch of other people, but was the only survivor fished out of the sea. Photographs showed a skinny little kid with big wounded eyes. His father wanted him to return to Cuba. The Miami relatives who had taken charge of him wanted him to stay in the U.S. But though Ana wasn’t a fan of the island she’d run from, she’d leave her computer and stalk into the kitchen where I was chopping onions or stirring something, and rant about the Miami relatives and how their arguments to keep the kid from his father in contradiction to international law, sounded a lot like the ones used to take kids away from dykes, or from Native Americans. And she’d stand there vibrating with urgency, all wormy with unsaid words, until I got myself a bright pink iMac, and we started The Gully online magazine offering “digested news, raw opinion, queer edge,” where suddenly she had a voice, too. As loud as anybody. Which didn’t stop at Elián and Cuba.
This part would make a terrible movie. Imagine it. Two nearly motionless figures at opposite ends of the room. Only the clack of a keyboard as our brains range wide, covering the non-guilty verdict of a bunch of New York cops who killed Amadou Diallo for trying to hold up his wallet, interviewing a gay man in Ghana who’d get beaten up by homophobes then the cops, examining how the press shaped the story of Puffy and J-Lo, sneering at the photo ops in the 2000 U.S. election that had Gore and Bush competing to appear in front of the most vibrant stained glass windows, their eyes uplifted to God. In 2003, we celebrated the Supreme Court case, Lawrence v. Texas, that finally made it legal for two consenting adults to fuck even if they were homos, overturning sodomy laws in fourteen states.
One bright blue September day, I went up on the roof with our neighbors and wrote about that, too, what it was like to watch the Twin Towers fall, then months later what it felt like to be an American when news broke of torture in Abu Ghraib.
We recruited a few other writers, but mostly it was just us churning out articles as fast as we could like two early influencers. They weren’t random. They circled the idea of social change, how it worked, what elements it required, like free speech, like the right to assemble. We had this idea we could build a global agora where people could share skills, share opinions, create community, where a democracy activist in Namibia could hookup with Venezuelan protesters, a transactivist in Argentina with a dyke blogger in Iran. Style was an important part of it. Publishing in English and Spanish, we treated Bush and his minions the same way as lesbians holding a kiss-in in a park in Guatemala—like they were just around the corner—and I thought they were. I still do. All humans equally real and near as the neighbor upstairs stalking across the floor, shaking our ceiling with his heavy steps.
I used every tool I had to create it, this community of our dreams. Besides the content, there was the code that presented it. Each article online echoed the visuals of a newspaper but was really a movie set, a stage, with lots of stuff going on behind the scenes with hidden text talking to search engines, putting endless thumbs on endless scales. At a brief gig as a taxonomist for the Mining Company (which became About.com then Dotdash), I’d learned to go through their main pages and figure out the words people would use to find them, add them to invisible headers to boost their standing in the search engines. I did the same thing when we started The Gully.
We also listed related articles on every page, herding readers this way, not that, “You liked this angry article about Bush? Here’s ten more.” Offering an endless loop, an iron airless bubble so different from a physical newspaper which, even if they have a political slant, still remind you of the vastness of the world. And even if you bought the paper to read about an election fight, a headline will scream that a building collapsed on the corner, the Yankees lost or won, Dan Brown published another best-seller, scientists discovered or disproved something, stocks went go up or down. There is weather and movies and art. You can turn past it all if you want, but like a memento mori, a memento vivere it’s there.
I believed with all my heart in the project. Like I believed in the converse. Even as I spent six years trying to create a community, an identity, a brand, I was beginning to ask questions that threw it all into doubt. I was still haunted by the end of the Avengers when I’d look around the room and think, “Who the hell are these people with their smug, angry faces?” All I could see were differences, of age and class, race, and rage, not to mention dispositions. Why had I ever come to sit in that room buzzing with heat and with hope? I began to wonder what words like lesbian really meant. What did I mean when I said it, after years of the Avengers, then years of seeing the cardboard figures of identities that our institutions propped up on wedding cakes to represent us? Was lesbian a descriptor, or a handy artifice? Just what was our connection? Weren’t all identities maybe a little fake? A little exterior? Didn’t they require constant reinforcement? If not from inside, then out. If not potlucks and softball games, then the bottle thrown from the window? A punch?
Alone, I’d pad around the house in my bare feet, and try to feel them—but couldn’t. The wooden floor was real, that brick wall, but not my identities inherited like mismatched plates. I even wrote an article describing how blank I felt sitting on the toilet in the morning half-asleep when no one was watching. Not white, not homo, or female, not even human. I’d be surprised every single month when I bled. Every day when I got hungry. And not just because I spent hours and hours lost inside a screen. Even when I stepped outside, and the world was waiting for me, with its eyes, or words, I could just ignore it. I was motion in the street, wind passing, a shadow cast on that pigeon, I was weightless and free. Until I tried to use the women’s locker room at the Y with my short hair and trim body and somebody screamed, “This is the ladies.” And suddenly my body had volume and mass. And meaning.
I began to wonder if the fakeness of identity, as opposed to being, was why activists found it so easy to change the rules. Didn’t that explain how, when the Republican George W. Bush broke ground giving people of color important cabinet positions, activists suddenly changed the meaning of Black, and Condoleeza Rice didn’t qualify, a traitor to her race. Colin Powell, too, was an Oreo. Black only on the outside. Inside—white. Gay Republicans were also excommunicated from the category of “queer” no matter that they were still homos, still suffered discrimination for being attracted to the same sex, that thing on which our identity was supposed to be based. Sure, Andrew Sullivan, for instance, was a homo, but not like us. Not really. After 9/11, newly focused on Islamophobia, progressives of the left allowed inconvenient gay Muslims to drop completely off the queer radar, like all the young fags being tortured in jail in Egypt, not to mention what happened to women there, because it might complicate the Muslim narrative, Muslim identity so much their feeble brains would explode.
Given all that, Ana and I used to deliberate about whether sexual identity or sexual orientation was a better way to talk about dykes. At the time she said identity was the way to go. It implied there was more to being a lesbian than just who we slept with. Something shared, a community, a culture. Drop a dyke into a lesbian bar, a lesbian party, practically anywhere in the universe and there is something familiar. Like a variation on a theme. And she had a point, the same human music I found at a dyke bar in New York was there in San Juan and Cincinnati and even a clandestine dyke gathering in Havana the one time Ana went back with me in tow. There’s that little buzz of sexual interest, competition even, but also the melody of shared desire shared experience shared humor shared fear shared beds. Where there was a place even for weirdos like me who were some times brashly chatty, sometimes sullen and silent and awkward in the corner clutching a beer bottle like a life-saver won’t somebody rescue me? But please don’t talk to me or I’ll scream.
Sexual orientation, on the other hand, was a monumental natural force like the magnetic pull of true north. It pares away differences like leaves stripped from winter trees. You don’t have to actively recognize what you have in common with anybody. It’s just there. Ineluctable. Like naked branches against the sky. Or the definition of a species. You can’t opt in or opt out, ex-communicate anybody. Unlike the cesspool of identity politics which increasingly focused more on the politics than the qualities that allowed us to identify as and with a class. But what choice did we have, really, when it came to organizing? Finding strength in numbers? Amplifying voices that were never meant to speak?
Stay tuned for…
Ch 16…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K