A Word of Our Own: Ch 22 Community-Building, and the Meaning of the Universe
In which, I go to Vienna in search of lesbians.
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).
Thank you for reading! If you like it, why not heart, comment, share? Or subscribe?
Ch 21. …I walk a trifurcating path after all. On one road is the body whose existence is most heightened in the street, and most vulnerable, and still needs, despite all our advances, to eat and shit and fuck and rest on park benches where it stares at the pigeons and the other bodies going by; on another path is the Self seen through a prism of identities conjured into being by names and words and manipulated images, which are increasingly powerful as we spend more and more time online where there is a pitched battle, too, for control. The third we rarely speak of. It is where no one’s eyes are, even ours. The moment we turn the mirrors to the wall, or cover them, put away our phones. Then, our bodies merely Are. The “I” my body embodies not performing anything, defining or being defined. I exhale slowly. My molecules are light. Lighter than air. Hold everything that ever could or was or will be.
22. Community-Building, and the Meaning of the Universe, 25 years after the Lesbian Avengers
Why not? Why not put away the mirrors and phones? Why not, like Virginia Woolf, suspend the lenses highlighting the different experiences of each sex, and just allow a woman and a man to get into a minicab and flow off into the city, pretending they are not two, not three entities, but a single, seamless whole. It’s tiring, even painful, to wrench them apart, to see one sex as different from another when we share so much. But even Woolf can’t keep them suspended there in a joyful union with the universe. The woman, just trying to think, is interrupted by some man saying no, not you, not here. The man, too, can no longer be effortlessly himself. He is self-conscious and resentful, disturbed by a woman like me opening her shrill assertive mouth to protest.
I’d like to shut it. I often do. Silence is golden. But then I get screamed at in the subway. See a story about some dykes getting their faces bashed in. Somebody says I don’t have the right to say no to unwanted dicks. My friends are forced to meet in secret. Names are called. And a woman somewhere is forced to bear a child. And a woman who uncovers her glorious hair is hung by her neck until dead because autonomous women are enemies of the Patriarchal State. And I vow to persist as, knowing my importance, the fly’s irritating hum, the invisible pebble in the shoe.
Which is how I find myself in an airport in Munich with a giant tube of Avenger banners drinking beer and eating currywurst. You can’t beat wieners—not as long as they’re chopped up and covered in sauce. A spot of it lands on my black, Old Navy coat. It’s joined by a smear of glue from the duct-tape handle I rigged for the banners.
It’s 2017, not long before my unwritten speech, and I’m on my way to a lesbian conference in Vienna where I’ll display my enormous banners, show the documentary video, go through the motions of hope. At least they’re using the word. If only the dykes of the first European Lesbian* Conference hadn’t slapped an asterisk on it, abased themselves with a statement reassuring funders and participants they were inclusive. Not TERFS at all. They wouldn’t dare put themselves first, that creature formerly known as a female homosexual.
Still, I tell myself that it’s a good sign they are holding the opening party in an actual palace and not some dingy windowless room. I scuff my feet on the polished floor and gape up with pleasure at the coffered ceilings decorated with vines and fruit, nearly naked ladies and cherubs. I think there were naked ladies. Their list of speakers for that event alone included the likes of Ulrike Lunacek, the Vice-fucking-President of the European Parliament and presidential candidate for the Austrian Green Party. Another of her Green colleagues is there, too, Faika El-Nagashi, Representative of Vienna State Parliament, and a City Council Member, a dyke of Muslim background who immigrated from Hungary. One of the performers on the program a big name opera singer.
At the opening presentation the next morning, we even find little gifts on our seats in the auditorium. I’m enchanted with the pen, and steal a few others before two researchers launch their presentation which is an accounting of the Lesbian Nation, showing that between 2013-2014, out of 424 million dollars budgeted for international LGBTI issues, only two percent went toward projects for lesbian, bi, and queer women. And out of hundreds of recommendations put forward at the United Nations in recent years, only one addressed specifically lesbian issues.
They even explain that one of the problems was the word lesbian. That lesbians had quit using it. And when we don’t use the word lesbian, we are invisible in projects for women. Invisible in projects for queers. In our own societies. Which meant that their hands were tied as activists. Because to propose a project to the EU, for instance, on lesbian mental health, you had to present figures proving lesbians need it, create a model for how it might function, and also project the results you hoped to achieve. Ditto for projects addressing violence against lesbians. Or job discrimination. No word. No data. Therefore, no funding. And no action. And no community even to spark it with.
A couple days later, in the same big room, two dykes from Kazakhstan took the podium. They were human rights monitors, back home I think, and were used to giving presentations. But they were practically shaking with emotion up there on stage. Staring at all those women. Admitting what their own lives were like in a country where it wasn’t strictly illegal to be gay. But if you got beaten up and reported it to the cops, you might end up thrashed again. Or blackmailed. It was practically an industry. If you got picked up for any reasons, the cops threatened to out you at your job, tell your families who might beat you, too, or kill you. If cops found two women alone in a car, they might drag you out and smell your fingers to see if they stank of forbidden cunt. There weren’t many out dykes in Kazakhstan. Almost none, really, except for these two who choked up as they told their story for the first time. Spoke into the silence of their great need.
The crowd was oddly still. I wasn’t the only one with teary eyes as the two speakers pled for lesbians everywhere to come out, and stay out, both online and in real life. They begged people to use the word. They said that each visible lesbian told young dykes that they weren’t alone. Every woman who said lesbian, lesbian, lesbian created room to manoeuvre for all those who couldn’t risk it. Like them. Heads went up and down nodding, yes, yes.
On the plane returning home, I considered that word, Lesbian. What a weight it was. How much it cost. But what a privilege to be able to say it. What a privilege to refuse and run away. I thought of the golfer Tiger Woods who said a few years ago that he wasn’t African American, no, not at all, but mixed race (which was true), that he was also Asian like his mother, and only half black. Poor Woods who golfed with Trump while brown kids were held in concentration camps at our borders, and black kids were shot. Poor Woods, who, when he was arrested for drunk driving, the cops nevertheless labelled, “Black.”
But…should we condemn him as self-loathing and loathsome, as if the rest of us are not? As if pain and hate weren’t an acid eating into our bones? Isn’t that at least a small part of why so many females, myself included, have tried to flee the word woman, at least for a while? Embrace any pronoun, but we, or us. Ti-Grace Atkinson theorized that because women or “females” form a class that is persecuted, the only way to improve our “condition, those individuals who are today defined as women must eradicate their own definition. Women must, in a sense, commit suicide…” Theoretically speaking, the same should hold true for lesbians. Except…
That’s what we’re supposed to do—to disappear. Give up our seats on the subway, at the grown-up table. Forget we have a community, a movement, a history of our own. Which is why even well-meaning dykes add asterisks. Fall into the trap under the cover of niceness and inclusion.
There in economy class, I scribble notes about language and of privilege, and fear, thinking about that passage in Camus’s The First Man where he writes about growing up in Algeria where his family was so poor that once when he was a kid and lied about spending a few pennies, saying they had fallen in the communal outhouse, his grandmother went into the backyard and stuck her hand down into the shit to look for them. He also talked about how the rich have more of everything, not just money, and power, but even names.
“The thing that struck him, in fact, when he discovered other homes, no matter if they were those of his school pals, or later those from a more privileged world, was the number of vases, of glasses, of figures, of paintings that stuffed the rooms. In his house, you said, "the vase that is on the mantel." Or the pot, the bowls. There were an assortment of objects that didn't even have names. In contrast, at his uncle's, one was made to admire the stoneware fired in Voges. One ate on the Quimper china. He had always grown up in the middle of a poverty as naked as death, among common nouns. At his uncles’, he discovered proper nouns.”
That’s it, I thought. Now that we can have legal sex, get married if we want, our language is expanding like our opportunities, and we can indulge what Christopher Hitchens called “the narcissism of the small difference.” See differences instead of what we share, discard old words like old clothes, believe we deserve better. Rarely consider that there might be consequences for turning away from older, larger, perhaps less precise, names. That names hold history, the key to problems and their solutions, community.
I imagine young girls, homos, some of them, sitting in their bedrooms, staring at their phones as the world around them fades and don’t even know their past has been ripped from them, like their name. They are avatars interacting with avatars, anxious about finding the right words. For everything. Being precise and inclusive and authentic. There will be no off-the-rack names for them. Everything is a sign to be read, usually drawn from a lexicon of stereotypes. In a chat room for a breast binder company, a girl talks about how she wore jeans which made her feel masc. “Did that make her boyfriend gay?” Another girl was proud of getting called dyke. It meant she didn’t look femme.
Like me they’re easily led by their desire to be good, be precise, find the key that opens all the doors. They are offered the pre-digested language of gender of sex of race, politics, but instead of salvation end up sorting themselves into niche markets where an endless, immaterial virtual loop of affirmation keeps them—keeps us—compliant, and so hooked on the pleasure of being liked and hearted and applauded that Right, Left, Center we consume what our bubble tells us to from ideologies to elastic bands, obey more rules than ever before in the name of liberation.
Ursula Le Guin knew this first. In her Earthsea books, learning an animal’s, a thing’s, a human’s true name was to control them. You had a different one for the use of everyone, but the most intimate of friends. And how with so many names, but our own stolen from us, lesbians are powerless, can't see what we do have in common, and often can't recognize the systemic, the systematic discrimination and cultural erasure we face as a class. And it's there. It's still there. Like the attacks on our physical autonomy. No matter what we call ourselves.
That’s the point I ended up making in my speech, declaring in ten different ways that you couldn’t have a movement without the word, and our denial of it was a sign of incredible privilege when there was still so much to do. To get to the room, I’m led out of a book-crammed office and past the chapel which is peaceful and white. When we navigate a hallway groaning with oil paintings or photos of stern, bearded figures in stiff white collars, the college’s deans, I feel their eyes on me. An evangelical lesbian preaching the power of the Word among all these men. Not just the Word made flesh. But the flesh made word.
I nod at the silent men and continue on. I feel hollow as I stand in front of the students and say it. Over and over. Lesbian. Yes, I stand in front of the students with my red reeboks and severely coiffed hair, and am it. That is the most I can give those students. My body in front of them saying, lesbian. Others, I invoke until the room is full. The dykes in Vienna. The Avengers. I show bits of the documentary which reveals how even real live activists sometimes wince when they say their own name, lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. Though on film at least they talk openly about their fear. The difficulty of doing it. Here’s Anne talking about internalized homophobia. Here’s Gail talking about rage. Maxine speaking of activism as love. A different Ann invoking that thing which is the most dangerous of all, hope. But there, inhabiting this word lesbian together, in public, many for the first time, they look happy. They look free.
At dinner, the glasses flush yellow and flush red. I chat with all the students. Smile. Smile a lot. And drink less than I want. Am suddenly furious. Heading there on that train I realized I was only halfway there, had opened a Pandora’s box, a book. Am disgusted at how this fifty year-old smiling public woman that the children's eyes in momentary wonder stare upon cites Lorde instead of the furious Valerie Solanas who once called the women's movement "a civil disobedience luncheon club." And shot Andy Warhol—who deserved it. When she asked him to produce a play, he offered her a job as a typist at the Factory instead. Fucking asshole. He’s lucky she didn’t slice him up, as the founder of the Society for the Cutting Up of Men.
Something was missing. Was that it? Anger? The gift the students needed—even now in this world full of rage and outrage? But that is men’s rage. Rarely women’s. “Gee, isn’t it awful for women to hate men?” as Joanna Russ sneered in the Village Voice, one of Solanas’ only defenders. Even Lorde’s women warriors hardly ever lifted a sword against them, standing there on the threshold, Refusing to budge this way or that. Always in a doorway coming and going. Is it a strength or a weakness how “Assata my sister warrior / Joan of Arc and Yaa Asantewa / embrace / at the back of your cell.” They’re not off fighting together, but with any luck, they’ll at least get laid.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I went to the bathroom, kicked the stall. I’d showed how the word lesbian created community, revealed a political class that was discriminated against. But so much of the time I’d used the passive syntax. Mary Daly would have something to say about that. And Almania Barbour, a black activist in Philadelphia who said decades ago in frustration, “The woman’s movement is the first in history with a war on and no enemy.”
If you want justice, it’s not enough to reveal the crime, even name the victim, you have to go after the perp. Identify them. Ask like any flatfoot, who profits? That is, if you want to stop it from happening again.
Stay tuned for…
The last and final chapter 23…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home. And why not think about hearting or sharing or subscribing or saying hello or something?
xoxo K