A Word of Our Own: Ch 1 On the Train
In which I set off on a journey.
It’s 2017. On the way to give a speech about lesbians and activism, I pull out a copy of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay about women’s literature, and begin to read. She asks why women are poor. I want to know why lesbians are hated, and why so many of us find it hard to even use the word. The echoes are deafening. Pretty soon I’m doing the unthinkable—defacing the book with comments, scrawling notes on the back of my speech in a conversation with a dead woman, who sends me on a quest.
This is the journey. Welcome.
A WORD OF OUR OWN: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home
1. On the Train
The air is oniony and cold. The guy behind me chews a burger. He's holding it by the white waxed paper, and trying not to drip on his coat. I want to ask if I'm on the right train, but his face is so concentrated, and his mouth so full, that I ask the lady who gets on and sits in the row across from me. She has long dark hair and chic black leggings filled with long elegant legs. "Is this the train to New Haven?” "I certainly hope so," she replies in an indifferent Katherine Hepburn drawl, before withdrawing into the cocoon of her gleaming, black phone.
I nod and settle in, spreading out my stuff over the empty seat next to me and pull up the hood on my coat to send out my own wave of antisocial vibes. Mine are the thuggish dyke kind that work best if you're in a leather jacket, but with practice can emerge even from this black flannel-lined coat I found on sale several years ago at Old Navy and now has only one small stain on the sleeve from that incident with the duct tape handle I rigged for the giant tube of vinyl banners I lugged to Vienna and back. I extract a book from my bag instead of the speech I'm supposed to give, and start to read.
I barely notice when the train inches out, creeping through the grey broken outskirts of the city. I brought it because it was small and fit in my bag. I’d forgotten how elegant the writing was. How the writer contained her anger in a tone you could only call amused, and a skill so surgical she could trace long cuts in her victim that you wouldn't feel until you see your guts tumbling out on the floor, among the old newspapers, and coffee drips. Then I think, for a minute, about how she filled her pockets full of stones and walked into a stream. In a permanent expression of… what? Rage? Or fear? Or misery? It could have been hope— that death would solve the problem of life.
I shouldn't bring that up now, her suicide. It sounds like I'm dismissing her. But I admire how long she survived. As powerful as they are, words only get you so far, weave a kind of spell that elevates you, that may even transform, but if the world doesn't, too, or not quickly enough, they start to weigh on you. Something’s got to give. The flesh usually. The mind. But we persist anyway, like Graham Greene's whiskey priest. For what? Why? A moment of beauty? Pleasure? Or habit even, which has much the same effect as hope. That this time we’ll get the words in the right order, and speak with the right inflection at the proper cycle of the moon, into ears properly primed and cued, and something—maybe even something good—will happen.
It's why I’m on the train. To give a speech fancifully called, Last Lesbian Standing: Language, Community-Building, and the Meaning of the Universe, 25 years after the Lesbian Avengers. In my defense, that title promised what I wanted to read. Not what I could write. And I agonized for months over a handful of pages when the only useful thing I had, I have, to say is that lesbians still need a movement. And for that, we still need above all, the word. This is not at all self-evident. Either the need for a movement or that linguistic stain of a word. I'm told twice a week that lesbian is too old-fashioned to even pronounce. Young dykes are all gender neutral and queer and fluid as heck, or so post-gay they don't want any words at all. Writing, I faltered at every obstacle. I didn’t know where to start. I never do anymore, with the word lesbian. Especially now when words change meaning hour to hour. More battle lines than ever are drawn.
What's a lesbian compared to that? What's a lesbian at all?
Stay tuned for Chapter 2, Lesbians Online: Porn Stars and Poetesses.