The Professor and Other Writings (28 page)

At the same time, because she was a radical feminist, and thus Womanly and Empathic and Deeply In Touch With Herself, Labyris also had her sensitive side. Once I happened to ask her how she was doing, and received a soulful, if also diffident, reply:

(Confusingly, it was
de rigueur
in those days to affect a tentative, questioning tone when discussing serious personal things—an annoying tic that subsequently infected the general American female population in the 1980s and '90s.) A short time later Labyris would publish an eloquent poem about her need for private time in
Your Mama
: “My Primary Relation to Me.” I see I noted the title in my journal with a spate of horrified exclamation points.

A strange puritanism held sway everywhere. We were not a very pretty bunch. In the brave new world of radical dykery, the call for collective action and an end to male domination had resulted (only temporarily, as it turned out) in the suspension of traditional lesbian role playing: the bad old 1950s duck-ass-and-hairspray world of butch and femme. Like old-style bar culture generally, butch and femme were seen as
unfeminist
—a pathetic and reactionary imita
tion of out-of-date sex roles. By contrast, members of the “Women's Community” rejected
oppressive heterosexist models
—with the consequence that everyone sought to look as neutered and ugly as possible. No dressing up, on the one hand, like a sort of midget Elvis Presley, or on the other, like Brenda Lee in a 1950s chiffon party dress. Most gals wore the same basic uniform—turtleneck, T-shirt, or flannel shirt; jeans or possibly lumpish-looking corduroys; hiking boots or grubby running shoes. As the weather got colder the whole enticing ensemble might be supplemented with a moth-eaten man's suit coat from Goodwill or one of the drearier unisex squall jackets available from L.L. Bean. Unshaven legs and armpits?—a misogynist cliché of the time, of course, but definitely part of the Sappho-Spartan aesthetic.

I was more or less amenable to the prevailing style (or nonstyle)—anything so long as I didn't have to wear makeup. My “look” at the time? Not hugely different, I guess, from what it has always been. Apart from a brief bleached and gelled flat-top phase in the late eighties, I've always favored uncoiffured short hair, jeans or pants (never a dress), and anything tailored or vaguely military in cut. Jaeger jackets. Navy blue bell-bottom sailor pants. Men's shirts, for sure. I remember a friend once looking into my closet and saying,
You can tell a lesbian lives here. Why?
I asked.
Too Many Shirts
. Army surplus stores, I admit, have played an embarrassingly large part in my sartorial life. Only recently did it dawn on me, for example, that especially given present-day midriff-bulge issues, multipocket camouflage pants (not to mention those thick olive-green webbed belts with little tabs on them on which to hang grenades) just don't look very good on me.

Since no one was ever to be sexually
objectified
—i.e., evaluated on physical appeal—revealing outfits, overtly erotic gestures, indeed flirting of any sort, were pretty much verboten. Which isn't to say a confusing kind of subliminal tease didn't go on. Labyris, for
example, was a compulsive giver and taker of what in later and more satirical times would come to be called “lesbian hugs.” (My ex, Bev, calls them “dyke specials.”) These were those soulful, interminably held embraces—usually performed to mark somebody's arrival or departure—in which you closed your eyes, buried your head deep in the warm place between the other woman's neck and shoulder, rocked slowly back and forth on your heels, and made susurrating goo-goo sounds while also moving one or both of your hands around on her back or waist. If her shirt was not tucked in at the back and you could make roving, small-of-the-back flesh contact, so much the better. Then you might twiddle delicately with her belt loops or even investigate the waistband on her jeans.

Such ritual fondlings, oddly enough, were universally understood, not as amorous overtures, but rather more militantly, as a sign of one's advanced feminist consciousness and egalitarian commitment to sisterhood. Labyris and other embrace addicts like her were truly the foot soldiers of lesbian liberation. No one was to be excluded from the collective hugfest—except, of course, any shy newcomer who might suddenly arrive on the scene. In that case it was important to demonstrate to her that she was definitely
not
part of the existing circle of love, and would have to wait, possibly forever, before gaining admittance to it. In the presence of a New Girl, everyone's hugs took on a peculiarly self-congratulatory warmth and fervor, as if to signal the primal Hobbesian law that underlay so much of the era's either-you're-in-or-you're-out Sapphic culture:
we are very very popular and you are not!
Think about it: isn't falling into a soul-clinch with some gal even more fun when the two of you have an onlooker—a polite, possibly lonely person, anxious to be welcomed, whom you don't know and already suspect you don't want to know?
That'll show her!

And yes, no matter how humpy, bumpy, and involved these embraces became, it was nonetheless borne in upon one that they were never to be interpreted—Isis forbid—as
sexual
in implication:

 

DID YOU GET THAT? UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES!

NOT SEXUAL AT ALL! NEVER EVER! NO WAY!

IF YOU THINK IT'S MEANT TO BE SEXUAL

THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU.

 

The successful gal-radical was thus as adept at sending out mixed messages as any Mozartean coquette. Labyris, for example, knew precisely how to play it: the exact moment when drawing back, breaking contact, might leave an emotionally susceptible hugmate sick with erotic confusion. I found the ritual (and all its unspoken rules) both good and bad. Good, in that being sisterly and nonsexual felt safe to me; I had zero rakish charm and little concept indeed how one went about flirting with someone. Bad, if not excruciating, because I longed to be touched in some unconditional way. I had suffered—forever, it seemed—from an appalling case of skin hunger. Like most English people of their class and generation, my parents had been cold and physically skittish—my mother all the more so after the divorce. I was the proverbial
ours mal léché
. And as for my two abortive love affairs up to that point:
never, never, never enough
. The result: crippling ambivalence toward hugs in general and lesbian hugs in particular. It didn't matter, paradoxically, whether the hug was given or withheld—both situations were hard. And the larger problem would be around for a long time: I consciously avoided ever having a professional massage until my forties, precisely because the thought of such purposeful and pleasurable contact released in me such a chaos of painful and conflicting emotions.

My private difficulties apart, a pervasive fear of sensuality in the world of
wimmin-lovin' wimmin
made for a peculiarly convent-like atmosphere. No one dared critique it thus at the time, of course, but as weird little enclaves like the
Your Mama Wears Army Boots
collective demonstrated, the lesbian-separatist movement of the 1970s was no less neurasthenic, sexually warped, or passive-aggressive than
any other utopian venture one might name. Indeed, it may have been worse. The fact that we were all young women—overgrown girls, really—merely intensified the atmosphere of underlying hysteria. Things, to be sure, would change drastically enough a decade or two later—witness dildos, drag kings, and
The L-Word
. Even as early as 1981 or '82 attitudes had begun to budge a bit: I remember attending a raucous feminist conference at Barnard in one of those years at which a rebellious horde of self-described “sex-positive” lesbians of all stripes—hardcore S&Mers, unrepentant butches and femmes, Sapphic maenads favoring fetish wear, bondage, and the like—descended on the event and proclaimed the coming era of strap-ons, nipple clamps, and black silk negligees.
No more prudish granola dykes
!
Girl-on-girl porn for all!
But in 1975 such things remained undreamt of.
Off Our Backs
had yet to be supplanted by
On Our Backs.
The typical “women's community” of the seventies was in consequence as kooky, prim, and repressive as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Maypoles, lewd dancing, flagrant obscene mirth: all unthinkable.

True: I worked as a member of the
Your Mama
collective for a little while that fall—mostly stapling copies of the mag together on weekends. I also contributed poems to one or two issues, though in a style rather more Ogden Nash or Hilaire Belloc, perhaps, than Adrienne Rich. (Rich, to the shock of the American poetry establishment, had recently come out in the press and was regarded as saintly—if not semidivine—by the
Your Mama
gang.) While the collective tolerated my comings and goings, it was becoming clearer and clearer that my sensibility did not exactly harmonize with prevailing rad-lez attitudes. Yes,
Your Mama
published “Mucous Jungle,” a jaunty little piece of doggerel I'd written about having a dreadful head cold—full of droll references to snot, jungle foliage, the brackish Amazon, oral sex, etc.—but I was obviously an oddball. And after a while, I in turn felt myself becoming frustrated with the frumpy-ideological house style. Labyris, Pokey, Artemis, and the rest began to seem a
bit tiresome. I was even starting to suspect that my interest in Lesbian Nation—at least its official political and aesthetic manifestations—might be on the wane.

The feeling was intensified by encounters that fall with a celebrated professor at the university—not
the
Professor, but a woman who might be characterized, retrospectively, as the Professor's mirror opposite: the
Anti-Professor
, so to speak. Jo was from the Deep South: a short, surly, crop-headed professor in the history department. She was in her mid-forties, built like an old-fashioned fireplug, and butch and mercurial beyond measure. Academically speaking, she had come up in the bad old days and had been in the closet for many years before undergoing a Damascene conversion to radical feminism. As the university's then-sole self-professed “dyke” professor, she was bluff, pugnacious, and histrionic, a charismatic teacher and speaker, but also intellectually plodding and hopelessly sentimental about women and the feminist cause. Humor-wise, she made Olive Chancellor, the dour spinster-suffragette in Henry James's
The Bostonians
, seem like Milton Berle. I never did take a course from Jo: she was a scholar of the American labor movement and I confess I found factory reform and shirtwaist makers somewhat dull in comparison with various dotty Brontës and the flagellation poems of A. C. Swinburne. But I saw Jo often enough at women's events: she migrated back and forth (as I did on a much smaller scale) between the world of the University and the “community.” And after I began attending a weekly feminist reading group that she facilitated, we were regularly in one another's sights.

I can't say we hit it off. Jo would have detested the metaphor, but she was unquestionably the Queen Bee of the local lesbian hive.
What does Jo think?
—such was the question whenever some new call to action or political scheme was hatched. She had her own little loyal entourage: a set of doting female worker-drones (many of them graduate students in English like me), as well as an apparently inex
haustible supply of temporary love mates: brawny lady-carpenters, vegan poets, Tarot card readers, food co-op workers. (She wasn't particularly successful, it seemed, at maintaining actual relationships.) She did not appear to use deodorant. She was also—as I see so much more clearly now—generous, brave, truthful, and decent.

While I admired her warmth and even, sometimes, her strength of character, I also found her slightly ridiculous. Jo was especially revered by the “community” on account of several well-known personal struggles. Besides having Heroically Endured a Hellish Existence as a Lesbian in the Dark Ages (the 1950s), she was also, very volubly, a recovered alcoholic and (in her own doleful phrase) a Chronic Overeater. Within five minutes of meeting her you were likely to hear about these life-trials in some detail. The second affliction was one on which she particularly liked to expatiate—usually when everyone around her (as at the feminist reading group, say, after a lively discussion) was grabbing paper plates and about to launch, innocently enough, into a cheerful potluck meal at someone's house. Given Jo's deep, baritonal Southern drawl and melodramatic tendencies, these sorrowful admissions of frailty and struggle, like Dickens's account of the death of Little Nell, were almost impossible to listen to with a straight face. Indeed the phrase “
Ah-m uh crawnic ovuh-eaduh”
—piteously enunciated, diphthongs lengthened into absurdity—remains a running joke for me and Blakey thirty years later. It was considered the purest sadism, obviously, to drink a glass of wine or appear to enjoy your food in front of Jo: her strong unstable features would screw up in an anguished rictus and her expression become that of a Sad Clown, a sort of lesbian Red Skelton, on the verge (terribly enough) of starting to cry.

Jo realized, I think, that her power over me was limited and thought me cold and priggish. (I was.) She was ambivalent about the academic world and often fantasized about leaving it. Perhaps because I was a new Ph.D. student and had already begun to cultivate
a minor reputation as “smart”—or at least ruthlessly competitive—she seemed to associate me with the very life she wished to abandon. I remember having a chat with her once in her office that fall, in which she revealed with some pride (and more than a little hostility) a dramatic plan, indeed, to leave the cosseted life of the scholar behind and join the proletariat. She was going to get a uniformed job, she announced—maybe even “
drahv buus
.” Now “
drahvin' buus”
was clearly another Jo-ism for the ages. She made the activity in question—tootling gently down the avenue, halting every block or so to take on elderly passengers—sound like some primitive yet cathartic physical function: something one might perform in private, with deep shame, but also with an enormous, juddering sense of relief. I admit it, I probably simpered. I deserved whatever dirty look she gave me. An effete little twit like I was could not be expected to understand such urgency, such ecstasy, such authenticity.