I was only 16 when my high school girlfriend’s mother took me to the principal of an all-girls high school and told him I had seduced her daughter. Within a few days, I was sitting in the principal’s office with my father, and she told me that I was a “bad moral influence” on the approximately 3,000 female students at Philadelphia High School for Girls and that I was inciting her. He explained to his father that he had been distributing graphic literature and radicalizing society in other ways. The school’s student council becomes lesbian.
I actually wanted to have that kind of power too, but it wasn’t. All I had was a stack of stolen lesbian paperbacks I had found on the bookshelf of someone I was babysitting, and a clipping of Jill Johnston, the lesbian columnist for the Village Voice. In the 1970s, just a few years after Stonewall, my mere presence was enough to get me kicked out.
When I look back on those days, and when I was at the school that my mother, grandmother, and sister attended, I realize that the reason I was expelled was because I stood out. I had several girlfriends, all of them upper-class women. My French teacher was a closeted lesbian, but she was my mentor. From when my mother was in school, there were still lesbian non-public teachers there. I was a political and social extremist, but the previous nine years I had attended a small private girls’ Catholic school had both solidified my lesbian sensibilities, radicalized me, and turned me into a troublemaker. It was becoming. I was a threat to the status quo of closet and lesbian invisibility. Without realizing it, I was demanding visibility, the right to hold my girlfriend’s hand when she showed up at my locker between classes, the right to kiss her. I was demanding a world that would allow me to be openly gay, and they feared it, feared me, that naive, unconscious messenger.
I recently reflected on this period of my life and the concept of queer and lesbian visibility while writing an article about my late wife, artist Maddy Gold, who recently passed away after a courageous battle with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. I’ve thought about it a lot. Maddie and I met at an all-girls high school, where a lifelong love affair began. Somehow we found our way back to each other after 23 years of marriage, albeit interrupted by the ups and downs of homophobia.
She also taught college freshmen at the College of the Arts and Drexel University, so visibility was something we always discussed. Students came to her all the time, and she had to help them navigate the new, often daunting, newness of visualization.
The irony of these writings I’ve written this past year without her, and the memoir I’m writing about the life we spent together, is that I haven’t been this invisible since she passed away. I have never felt that way. Being a widow is all about absence, and when my editor suggested I write about this being Lesbian Visibility Week, I wondered what I would say. But telling our story is an essential part of raising awareness.
For years, I have been a highly visible “spokeslesbian” on television, radio, and on countless panels at conferences. Throughout the 1980s and his 90s, I referred to myself as a “lesbian in a dress.” That’s because my high-femme presentation was perfect for television, and producers liked to pit me against homophobes on a daily basis. I was quick-witted, articulate, angry, and cute. We won the ratings, and I was invited to appear on the show many times, talking about everything from the ex-gay movement to the Sharon Kouraski scandal to lesbian mothers to ACT UP.
Being able to speak out on issues that directly affect lesbians was extremely important to me both personally and politically. Lesbians have always been overshadowed by the queer liberation movement led by gay men and the feminist movement led by straight women. Erasing lesbians as a class of their own is an issue I have written about extensively. Erasing lesbianism means erasing women’s history.
Erasing lesbians is erasing lesbian sexuality from the historical record, as is erasing all autonomous female sexuality. Women’s sexuality has always been viewed, discussed, and depicted within the structures and scope of the male gaze.
Lesbian visibility is fundamentally about being seen and what that means. In so many parts of the world, that means the threat of death through honor killings or corrective rape, but it also means a voice, a face, a body, a voice, a face, a body, a voice and a presence in our being as women who love, desire, and are committed to other women. It can also mean giving.
So what do we mean when we talk about lesbian visibility? In this era of encroaching fascism and authoritarianism, visibility is or must be synonymous with sustainability? yeah. That is, to reassert and reestablish lesbians as central figures who cannot be erased, downplayed, or ignored. My mentor, Audre Lorde, said: “What we must do is commit to a future that includes each other and work towards that future by drawing on the special strengths of our individual identities. And to do this, We must recognize our sameness and at the same time tolerate each other’s differences.”
It’s visibility.
A lesbian friend of several decades emailed me a story about Deborah Edel, one of the co-founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Just as Lesbian Herstory Archives turns 50, he turns 80, too. Edel told NBC News. It’s a revolutionary act. ”
A year ago, when I interviewed Joanne Nestle, another co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, she told me that her books had been banned and that “lesbian thought, lesbian imagination” had been banned. He said this at the time. Culture, we are the owners of these books. The Lesbian Herstory Archives has thousands of books that I would burn if I could. ”
Being a lesbian and showing respect for lesbians is a revolutionary act. The act of being an octogenarian lesbian, like Nestlé and Edel, who are still fighting for the freedom of lesbians to be lesbians, is a revolutionary act and a statement of recognition.
Julie R. Enzer, the longtime editor of Sinister Wisdom, a quarterly magazine about lesbian literature and art, published an article titled “Provocation” during Lesbian Visibility Week.
In it, she talks about her dedication to maintaining Sinister Wisdom. As an editor, she has published 50 books so far, and she says she has the passion to publish 50 more. “Lesbian and queer women need institutions that can survive because we need to end the cycle of inventing and reinventing things generation after generation,” Enzer said.
yes. sustainability. “We can do better at creating a future for lesbians,” Enzer says.
When I was expelled from school years ago, it was because they wanted me to be invisible. They claimed that I had that moral power because my visibility was so threatening. This is my message about visibility. “Be a threat.” Reject otherness. Refuse erasure.
