Hello from Paris!
Yesterday, I hopped on a city bike and zipped around in search of that unicorn—an open news kiosk. Newsstands are not only increasingly rare here, but often closed on Sundays, and entirely shuttered in August when the city empties itself of Parisians, leaving mostly foreign tourists who can’t be expected to linger over their weekend coffee with a newspaper in French.
Still, google maps assured me there were a few. So I headed towards Place de la Nation from St. Blaise, and finally found a place open in front of a shabby McDonald’s to buy the weekend edition of Le Monde. The transaction was weird, a kind of time travel. Giving some guy money in exchange for a handful of paper with squiggles on it, which stay unremittingly the same. I can’t even remember the last time I bought one, though I occasionally read the periodicals at the library.
Back home, spreading the newspaper out on the table, I remembered how much I like them. Opening up their broad, awkward pages, the feel of cheap newsprint, the ink smearing on my fingers, its particular perfume, the way newspapers order the world. Unlike websites, they don’t funnel you to articles that you’ll like because the algorithms say you’ve already read similar ones. Instead, they allow you to discover that a bigger world exists in which inflation in Britain and slaughters in Ukraine co-exist with soccer matches and art exhibits. It’s a reminder that the world is troubled, but also immense, fascinating, complicated, and I am very small in it. Which is a relief.
That wasn’t actually the point of searching out the paper, just a bonus. What I wanted to read was a surprisingly lengthy article about the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney who lived the great bulk of her life in Paris at 20, rue Jacob in Saint-Germain. I knew about her because she was a lesbian, and contemporary of Gertrude Stein. But also because I did some research when the Girl and I lived on rue Visconti in a tiny apartment that had one window where, if you stared up, you’d see the branches of the sycamores growing in her former back garden.
Sometimes at night I’d lay there wondering if she’d listened to that same tree with the dry rustling leaves. And I’d try to imagine the parties she held in the Temple of Friendship, or the people who went to the salon she held on Friday afternoons that everybody who was anybody attended from her close friend Colette to Jean Cocteau.
She was a brilliant writer herself, but as importantly, was a radically unapologetic lesbian, who used the word, accepted the label, wrote about it, celebrated it, even declared that the problem wasn’t her but the world which was like a “funhouse mirror deforming us into unrecognizable shapes…I look at myself without shame. Why would anybody blame me for being a lesbian?”
So of course her salons were total lesbopaloozas where several generations of dyke writers like Djuna Barnes and Radclyffe Hall got their first glimpse of a world without shame, which allowed them to begin the work of constructing it. Without lesbians like Barney—yes, a few others existed too—there would have been no Medusa’s Revenge or WOW Café, no Clit Club, Crazy Nanny’s, no Lesbian Avengers like me who took to the streets not just with anger but with humor, joy, and an unapologetic sexiness which was really the point, right? Pushing for a world in which we could live our best homo lives without getting beaten up, ostracized and deprived of basic civil rights.
That got lost somewhere along the way. Maybe in the fight for same-sex marriage when lesbian and gay strategists de-sexed us, making it all about chaste legal equality, in which “love is love.”
And in exchange for a range of tax breaks and inheritance rights, homos seemed to promise to efface ourselves, do nothing more offensive than hold hands and share a tepid kiss. We so thoroughly succeeded that I’m not actually surprised that our new generation of queer activists has largely sidelined homosexuality, sometimes even denied it, and focused the movement on the post-modern performance of gender.
When I think of the past, sex is one of the few things I’m nostalgic for. That brief period of time when dykes could compare notes about hot girls and our hopes of getting off without seeing everything through a political filter, looking for ulterior motives, acceptability. It’s why I like the new Netflix series Uncoupled which is ostensibly about a break-up, but above all about gay guys and dicks.
They talk about them, celebrate them, joke about them. It reminds me of sitting outside the First Avenue laundry talking to my black fag photographer friend Al who’d go on and on about his latest trick, “A white boy and total Nazi. Literally. He had swastika tattoos. But man, the sex was hot!”
“You’re gonna get killed,” I tell him.
He didn’t care. “Better that than my cancer, honey.”
Nathalie Clifford Barney, like her hero Sappho, made a virtue of her desire. And I was pleasantly surprised that the author, Zineb Dryef, embraced it, too, actually ending her article by explaining that the reason the painter Romaine Brooks finally broke up their open relationship after decades was that Barney had “the bad taste at 87, to take up with a young woman of 60.” Ha! What a great story.
And what a great reminder that naked, unapologetic desire is something every lesbian should strive for. At any age.
In Other News
Because I’m struggling with questions of time myself, and how to incorporate it into writing, and am also a big fan of Robert Wilson, here’s a kind of video essay, How Robert Wilson Bends Time.
Women and Health
Caroline Criado Perez presents a hugely important study about how even a tiny funding increase in the study of women’s health would have a huge impact, reminding us from her book, Invisible Women, that knowledge gaps matter…
because contrary to what we’ve assumed for millennia, sex differences can be substantial. Researchers have found sex differences in every tissue and organ system in the human body, as well as in the ‘prevalence, course and severity’ of the majority of common human diseases. There are sex differences in the fundamental mechanical workings of the heart. There are sex differences in lung capacity, even when these values are normalised to height (perhaps related is the fact that among men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20–70% more likely to develop lung cancer).
Worth reading the entire newsletter, especially how heart disease and Alzheimers affects women.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,