A Word of Our Own: Ch 3 A Lexicon of Lesbian
Let us go back to the beginning, to the word echoing faintly through a childhood...
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A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—a brief meditation on my homo female life. And why it’s so hard to use that word lesbian.
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3. A Lexicon of Lesbian
Let us go back to the beginning, to the word echoing faintly through a childhood of fake wood paneled basements where my mother laid out her sewing and we played with Barbie cloaking her bizarre plastic boobs in clothes my grandmother crocheted with polyester yarn.
I hear it first in those years when I haunted the tiny dusty rooms of Bethany Baptist Church and the carpeted Fellowship Hall where I gobble down Wednesday night suppers of Salisbury steak and banana pudding. There is a playground outside with monkey bars. And a little boy in Keds sneakers with a striped blue and white shirt, and mustard shorts. He giggles as he says it, just like he giggles when anybody mentions something shameful and funny like poop. “She's a lezzie, tee-hee." “Billy has a dirty butt. Haw, haw." Lezzie. I don’t know what it means. Like I don’t know what it means when somebody flops their wrist around and says, "He's like that," I just know you’re supposed to laugh. So I do.
Lezzie echoes, too, through the air-conditioned halls of Myers Middle School where boys quit punching girls in the arm, and start to stare at their chests where little round mounds of titties will appear. The refrain returns at Seneca High, the prison-style high school of concrete blocks where the muscled, black sprinters of the track team whisper warnings to me, one of the only white girls in the group, about a girl dressing alone behind our rusting lockers. “Don’t take a shower near her. She’s like that. A lezzie.” This is said with the sibilant hiss of preachers who are beginning to inssssinuate that “lezzie” is not funny at all, but as filthy and humiliating as when a giant clot detaches itself from your uterus, gushes past your cervix, and seeps crimson through your jeans.
It is even, somehow, more dangerous than the men we were warned never to accept rides from, though I do sometimes when I don’t feel like walking from my subdivision down the long hot highway to church where boys and girls sometimes sneak off together, make out. Though not me.
I never wondered why I was different. Just prayed and prayed that my vicious mom would magically chill. Neither do I question, when I am fourteen, how a girl at the Louisville Youth Orchestra attracts me like a flame. I show her my poetry. She writes out Emerson for me, and Thoreau. We go to the park and swing on swings like children. Have adventures cruising around in her boatlike car with the windows down, and drink the wild air, admire the flowers which is the earth laughing. When she leaves town, we write long impassioned letters. I am kissed by a boy at my sister’s college way off in Indiana somewhere after a bourbon and coke. I am repulsed by his thick and awkward tongue worming its way into my mouth. He calls me a lez when I don’t let him grab my tits. Or maybe it’s the boy I went to prom with, him in his tux, me in the sea-green dress my mother wore once as someone’s bridesmaid. On a school trip to Spain just before college I take a phone message in the hotel for another girl and get it wrong. The guy tells her I did it on purpose. “He said you’re a lesbian. That you’re jealous. Are you? He said you didn’t want us to meet.”
It’s the first time I remember getting asked directly. The first time I directly deny. “No, of course not. Of course I’m not.” I’m shocked, ashamed. It’s 1984. I’m 18, and haven’t yet kissed a girl. Haven’t even imagined it.
Is that true? That it was the first occasion I was directly accused? No, I think not. When I came out, my sister Vikki told me everyone already knew because of that time in the changing room at the swimming pool when I was six and this older girl Donna who was 12 or 13 told everyone she saw me peeking under the stall. And there she was with her skinny ribs and tiny sprouting breasts, and my silly face popped under. If I remember correctly it was simple curiosity. I was the youngest in my family, and a pest. I always had to know what everyone was doing. But she screamed, “Lezzie! She’s a lezzie.” And I was so humiliated that I quit looking at anyone at all.
Then at twenty, yes twenty, there were girls outside my own dorm room at Yellowstone National Park where I had a summer job with a “friend”. Like wolves, they howled, "Lezzie, lezzie, lezzie." It was the July after my sophomore year in college. I’d met Kay hanging out in the one school lobby conceded by the Greeks—this skinny girl with an Appalachian twang and knobby knees. We’d talk until all hours, then head back to our dorm rooms for a few hours of sleep or to knock out a quick paper. During winter break, we rode the bus 24 hours to visit a friend in Texas where we walked blithely across the border to Mexico, swam in the December sea. Then on the way back to Kentucky on the Greyhound, enveloped in a twilight smelling of tobacco, and sweat, and a failing toilet, she lifted my salty finger to her mouth and sucked. Nobody has ever been as surprised as me by the result. By the awakening of desire. I was shocked, speechless. I did not know desire had been asleep, that it existed at all.
But a lezzie? That filthy thing? No. Impossible. I just liked this one girl. We both assumed… I think, that it was temporary, boys would emerge. I was outraged when a professor gave me a book of dyke poetry that he thought I’d like, by this black lesbian, Audre Lorde. I read it anyway. And re-read it again. Still have it. Dog-eared on my shelf through a move to Cincinnati, a dozen New York City apartments, several in France. She has conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. They speak of loss. They speak of fear. And sometimes joy —faded in time like that time in DC when there was a sea of dykes in front of the White House for the first time ever, and I’m there eating fire in a line of Lesbian Avengers iconic in all our rage and brief, brief glory. Lesbian, lesbian, lesbian.
That was 1993 when dykes made magazine covers, we were chic for a minute or two. Began to appear—in public. Ellen. Rosie. But as a group, as a movement, quickly disappeared again. Become a slur again. Lesbian. Fucking dyke. TERF.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 4. A Brief Meditation on Desire
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K
god this is incredible