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    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
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    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
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        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
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        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
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        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
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        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
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        • Lack of Cover
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        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
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        • Listen
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        • Duel
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        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
        • Landlady Emily Carr
        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
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      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
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        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
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        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
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        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
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      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
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        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
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Letter from Cynthia Rich

Picture
Dear Lise,
Eons ago, you suggested I develop some thoughts I'd just expressed about how those of us who were fortunate enough to live passionate committed lives from the early women's movement on sometimes respond to younger lesbians. I said I couldn't write a piece for Trivia, but that I'd try to jot down some of those thoughts in a letter to you. I just came across a few notes I made back then, so I'll do my best to convey what it was that I promised to pass along. Since my "insight" isn't all brand new, it may lack the passion with which I expressed it then, and that is probably what caught your attention. Still, here goes:

I had come across a new glossy free magazine (the kind that show up in coffee houses) for lesbians in San Diego, called FlawLes, with a photograph on the cover of young, slim white women staring at each other with what seemed to be passionate intensity. I picked it up with a familiar kind of aversion already rising, and a real resistance to looking at it. I thought I "should" read it, just to know what is out there by and for San Diego lesbians—who are they? what are they thinking? how are they viewing the world?—so I stashed it away to take to the desert for, let's face it, bathroom reading. I was surprised by just how much resistance I had to opening it.

Inside were more photos of young, slim white women, in tuxedos, in bustiers. There were stories of young, slim white women in real estate, chefs in restaurants, karate teachers, singers, info on the hottest local boutiques to freshen up your wardrobe. My anger as it began to rise was an anger at a whole generation of younger lesbians. How could they wipe us out in this way, how could they turn their backs on everything that lesbian feminists of the '60s, '70s, '80s accomplished and revealed, render us--and more important, all we built-- invisible in both the past and present?

I've been absorbing Buddhist practice, and as you know, the desert is for me a place of greater clarity, but still I was surprised to feel suddenly a kind of seismic shift in my reaction. I am still shifted. Here is the understanding that may take a long time to explain but took only the space of a handful of minutes to shift me:

It can be painful for us, as lesbian feminists active in the '60s and '70s and beyond, when younger lesbians speak condescendingly of who we were—seeing us as joyless, blindly man-hating, a-sexual, afraid to be feminine, making ourselves ugly, whatever—meanwhile ignoring entirely what we did, wrote, said, or if they are academics or progressives, deciding that we must have ignored race and class. Feeling our lives—which we know were extraordinary—made invisible, we may assume, reflexively, that such attitudes towards the generation of women who preceded the current generation mean they are acting out of ageism (whatever momma did, I'm going to do differently), or out of a real disrespect for what we did, who we were, how we saw the world.

Somehow on the desert, I saw clearly: They aren't dismissing us. They don't know us. How could they? This isn't ageism, as we usually define it. It's not separation from momma. They don't know anything about momma.

They have no history at all, or they have the incredibly pared down, distorted history that lingers in mainstream and progressive media—the man-hating, sexless women who burned bras and made a fuss until the powers that be changed some attitudes and opened up some mainstream jobs, but who never recognized that the world has changed and so still hold these sour grudges towards men and society.

(I had a similar sketchy and unpleasant notion of the women of the Temperance Movement, until Barbara1 explained that these were women-identified women, who saw the horrors for women of husbands and fathers who took their paychecks to the bar and then came home, without money to feed the family, and raped their wives and abused their children--women who also gave marvelous lessons in public speaking to young girls across the country, so that the girls could gain the confidence to speak out on women's issues—lessons that served Barbara so well, and that she always gave them credit for. In fact, who knows? The Temperance women may have influenced the development of her feminist understanding of the world. To me, if I thought of those women at all, they were joyless enforcers of an outdated morality. That wasn't ageism, it was ignorance, seeing other women through the only eyes I was given, the eyes of men.)

We resent that the younger lesbians sometimes seem to think they are inventing their lives, as though nothing came before. But that is their reality. They have no idea who they are, and they are making it up as they go along in a world of very confusing messages. In urban areas, and with cable TV more often in rural areas, they are told that they can be out lesbians and that is at least acceptable if not downright cool; they can have marvelous sex by watching lesbian porn and a great job (at least until this Depression); if they want, they can have children, and soon they can get married—nothing is holding them back. So if their lives as women, much less as lesbians, aren't working, the problem must be them. How can it possibly be political? How can it possibly relate to a woman-hating society? Come on now.

So when I looked at FlawLes through these eyes, what I suddenly saw was a generation of lesbians who, in their own way, are as blindly and innocently inventing who they are, with as little to go on, as the lesbians of the '40s and '50s. The self-hate that came from feeling like you were the only one has been replaced by the self-hate that comes from feeling all wrong in what is so obviously a world nurturant to women and lesbians. For us to feel contempt or anger as they struggle to define themselves, including by imitating mainstream heterosexuality, is as pointless, and frankly as arrogant, as feeling contempt for the generation that preceded us, who also sometimes tried to replicate mainstream heterosexuality in their search for a way to be.

It's just too easy to resent younger lesbians for failing to see and challenge the nature of patriarchy as we did, and to decide they've simply been bought off by the mainstream, or are not learning from us because they are motivated by ageist contempt.

We were, and are, wonderful to do what we did, name what we saw, but there were many causes and conditions that allowed us to see and challenge reality as we did.

We were very, very brave and determined to deconstruct as much reality, imagine alternative ways of being and seeing, and above all uncover and face as much cruelty, suffering, injustice as we did, and I often think that it was our willingness to live daily with the pain of staring that much negativity in the face that we deserve most respect for. Still, we need to remember that when we did that work of seeing and naming, we were part of a widespread movement that was active everywhere. It was a time when even mainstream heterosexual women were daring to think new thoughts and to actively challenge received ideas and realities. (I think of Sally Gearhardt, "Women are leaving men in droves!" and of the hundreds of acts of defiance—activisms—in cities and towns around the country.) There was an entire movement beside us to help us turn painful reality into alternative visions of possibility, so that we were not always drowning in the ugliness.

This is not where women in this country are today. It is immensely painful and difficult to do the work that we did—uncovering all those forms of women-hating—without that window of opportunity. It is also much more difficult to envision other ways of being. Which is probably why there are "waves" of feminism. It is amazing to me that the young women of Rain and Thunder have, by finding each other, been able to do both—facing the ugliness and seeing the possibilities—but there will always be a handful in every period who can endure that much reality without a larger movement to support them, and it can't be expected of most.

Right now, there is a different window of opportunity—the spiritual window we've talked about with Obama—for learning to bridge all kinds of difference without either abandoning one's values or expressing hostility and indulging personal attack. That's such a relief that I don't mind riding on the wave I can see out there.

None of this, rather pedantically expressed, tells what I felt and saw that day on the desert. I felt a real kind of loving curiosity. Instead of judging them, I felt waves of tenderness for the young lesbians who are trying to figure out who they are with nothing to go on. What would it really be like to be them today? Just as I felt, listening to Barbara, a loving curiosity about what it was like to be a lesbian in the '40s and '50s. Because, however much she is told she is just like her mainstream heterosexual counterpart, I believe that mainstreaming will never work for her. I believe that it doesn't work for the heterosexual woman either. But by her nature, by her choice, I believe the lesbian is a subversive being who will always have a spirit freer than the false and confusing freedom that's being extended to her now. Even on the pages of FlawLes, this glossy magazine, I could see her struggling to know herself. I felt her courage.

Of course these young lesbians are ageist, just as they are often racist, looksist, disability unaware, etc. etc. But when Barbara confronted ageism in the '70s and '80s, there was a context, a framework, so that we had reason to expect that younger women would learn more quickly than they did. They didn't have to go into the stacks of Widener Library to find books whose titles lesbians of today don't even know.

So that's about it—the insight of minutes taking so long to spin out. I'm not sure the medium fits the message. The message is that I see each generation of lesbians needing to discover for themselves what being a woman who loves women means, and that I have a lot of faith in who lesbians are, even when they are flailing around trying to discover who they are. And in the end that is who lesbians are, aren't we—women who are free and brave enough to keep discovering who we are?

Much love,

Cynthia


Notes

  1. Barbara Macdonald, writer and feminist activist, and Cynthia's partner for 28 years. Together they wrote the book Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism

About the Author

Cynthia Rich is co-author with Barbara Macdonald of Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism and author of Desert Years: Undreaming the American Dream. She is co-founder of The Old Women's Project (www.oldwomensproject.org) and most recently is the author of dharma gleanings: company for a meditation practice (www.dharmagleanings.org).

For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.    
"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change.
There are new mountains." (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986)
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    • An Interview with Sharon Doubiago
    • Confrontation with the Rapist
    • Defense Attorney's Lament
    • Entertainment for Men
    • Greve Series / White Works
    • A Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow White
    • Laws of Kissing If Newton Were a Woman
    • Two Poems by Judith Terzi
    • One of the Cronettes
    • Inspiration
  • Previous Issues
    • Voices of Feminism >
      • Issue 16: "Feminisms" >
        • Toward a Theory and Praxis of Sustainable Feminism
        • Feminisms: Inclusion as a Radical Act
        • Grace
        • Three Ekphrastic Poems
        • Braids
        • Medusa
        • Who's Coming Along: Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and Collaboration Today
        • We had rituals we didn't know what for
        • A Brief History of a Feminist Mind
        • Marge Piercy: On Feminism, Politics, and Writing
        • Lack of Cover
        • Refresh
        • Crabby Apples
        • A Place of Storytelling and Sustenance: Molly Sutton Kiefer's Nestuary
        • When She Was Two
        • Margaret Sanger Speaks
        • A Song for Maman Dantor
        • Listen
        • Abiquiu
        • Changing
        • Barbie at Rest
        • When We Crack, Let's Do It Together
        • Duel
        • Domestic Constellation
        • America the Beautiful
        • Death of a Valkyrie
        • Old Woman Who Grieves War
        • I Read My Death in the Winter Stars
        • Femenina Sube: My Aquarian Age
        • The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory
        • Journal: In the Bois de Vincennes
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        • Scenario For a New Agenda
        • I Could Do That
      • Issue 15: "Animal Instincts" >
        • Women. Horse. Mountain.
        • My Pre-Feminist Animal Instincts
        • Our Animal Selves
        • Presage
        • Animal Self
        • Comings and Goings
        • And the Hawk Flies
        • Birds of a Feather
        • Proper Adornment
        • Reverie
        • Algonquin Anthology
        • Sea Stars
        • Immortal
        • Spirit Horse
        • First Cousins: A Suite of Poems
        • Bird of Prey
        • Crows
        • Harpy
        • Snake I Come
        • Approaching the Gate
        • Horses in Winter
        • "Domestic Terrorist"
        • Homeless
        • Displacement
        • The Mornings After
        • Gust of Win
        • Squirrel Dick
        • Cats
        • Frankie
        • Worms
        • Animal Cracker
        • I Don't Believe in Marriage
        • Drawing on the Dream
        • The Cow with a Human Face
        • Orangutans at the Jardin des Plantes
        • Abattoir
        • In for Life
        • I Am Shark
        • Giving Voice to Bear
        • Threshold Crossing
        • The Mark of the Bear
        • Discernment Is All
        • Bears at Midnight
        • The Musky Scent of Bear
        • Baggage
        • The End of Our Friendship
        • Four Mile River Road: 1 Mile
        • The White Dog
        • White Dog/Blue Pearls
        • Baby Dream #15
        • Baby Dream #39
        • Fish Songs
        • Today I Fished
        • The Surgeon's Territory
        • Boudoir Portrait
        • The First Six Months of Survival
        • P for Patience
        • French Pout
        • My Next Girlfriend
        • Winter Solstice
      • Issue 14: "Preoccupation" >
        • Wheatpastes
        • An Editorial: "It's not time to worry yet."
        • Courage
        • Dispirited
        • Voices
        • Falling
        • Sunset #2
        • Cut You Out
        • Brooding
        • Planetary
        • Sleeping. Dreaming.
        • Drama with the Neighbor
        • Woman to Woman
        • The Conspiracy of Chores
        • Murder
        • White Sunset Through a Mesquite Tree
        • Patricia Cornflake's Lesbian Lifestyle
        • Doldrums, Horse Latitudes, and Tropics
        • A Woman Poet's Critique of Words Too Commonly Spoken
        • Memory's Witness
        • Finding Edges
        • Oh, That Bed! That Bed!
        • Mother, Daughter
        • Here We Are
        • Crazy Jane Addams Occupies Hull's House
        • Virtue
        • The Canary
        • White Sunset #3
        • Flow
        • Citrus
        • The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
        • Occupy Wall Street Poster
        • The Tent
        • Occupy Me!
        • (post)Occupation
        • The Poison Our Grandmothers and Mothers Drank
        • Hellish Clout
        • Tangle
        • The Bathing Scene from Marguerite Duras's "The Lover"
        • As I Lie
        • The Therapist
      • Issue 13: "Death" >
        • A Feminist Editorial on Death
        • Plucked
        • Chromosomal Geography
        • The Clinic
        • Offal
        • I Have Come to Show You Death
        • The Making of a Peaceful Death
        • Sayonara
        • Sitting in the Lap of God
        • Cycle
        • My Assailant
        • New Jersey Spring
        • Something Missing
        • Triptych: Art Essay on Death
        • The Heroes of Ecbatana
        • Jane is Dead
        • The Miscarriage
        • A Spiritual Death? The One-Eyed Doe...
        • Black Bears
        • Circus
        • The Road to Nowhere
        • American Jisei
        • Nothing to Lose
        • For Linda
        • For Ryan
        • Mindfall
        • Rest in Peace
        • Love Is Stronger Than Death
        • Twins and M/Others: A Survival Story
        • Due Diligence (A.K.A. Cracking Open Her Case)
        • Empirical Evidence
        • Dissociation
        • 27.2727273 Readers
        • The Nomad
        • Manifesto
        • Baby Island
        • Chinatown, Death, and Women
        • Surrounded by Death
        • Where Sanity Returned
        • Whitney
        • In the Shadow of Mumtaz
        • Of Woods
        • The Egg Broke
        • Playing with Dolls
        • Threadbare
        • Because We Must Lose You
        • Clock Time
        • Gynosis One: Samhain
        • The Last Trimester
        • Crossing
        • Tiny Eve
      • Issue 12: "Southwestern Voices" >
        • Issue 12 Editorial: "Southwestern Voices"
        • Trojan Horses in the Desert
        • You Can See the Silence
        • Fleeing Oklahoma
        • North Rim, Grand Canyon, AZ
        • Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills, CA
        • Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, CA
        • Our Lady
        • Mothers of Beauty
        • Talking Incest
        • Desire
        • Tales from the Health Club
        • Three Years Old Watching the Open Sky
        • The Missing Girls
        • It Has Become Our Will: Onward with Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
        • A Conversation with bell hooks
        • Gertrude Stein, Hitler, and Vichy-France
        • Tinker Tailor Soldier Stein
        • Organic Evolution
        • Eclipse of Hope
        • I Lied
        • First Apartment
        • Translations of Poems by Shez
        • In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
      • Issue 11: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct," #2 >
        • Editorial_11
        • Invisible Outline
        • We Live as Two Lesbians
        • PrognostiKate
        • Dinosaurs & Haircuts: A Performance Monologue
        • To Be Real
        • Matrices
        • Coming Into Word
        • Prince of Paris
        • Ending Patriarchy
        • The Revolutionary Is the One who Begins Again
        • Always a Lesbian
        • Anti- Rape
        • Walking the Moon
        • Entanglement
        • Women Alone
        • No One Lives Her Life
        • Coming Out of the Straightjacket
        • Oscar of Between
        • Michele Causse
        • Jill Johnston
      • Issue 10: "Are Lesbians Going Extinct?" #1 >
        • Editorials
        • Before and after Sappho: Logos
        • On Living with a Poem for 20 Years: Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking to Death"
        • And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian ExtinctionNew Page
        • My Mid-term Exam in Lesbian Theory
        • Letter for Cynthia Rich
        • Dispatches from an Australian Radicalesbianfeminist
        • No Longer Burning
        • Reinvention and the Everyday
        • The Personal is Political
        • Notes on Reinvention and Extinction
        • Dyke on a Haybale: A Lesbian Teen in Kansas Speaks Out
        • Gay Trans and the Queering in Between
        • Lesbian Lament
        • The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon
        • Who Says We're Extinct?
        • She Who
        • Lesbians Going All The Way
        • Trivia Saves Lives
        • Notes on Contributors
      • Issue 9: Thinking of Goddesses >
        • Vulture Medicine Augury
        • When hens were flying and god was not yet born
        • Canoeing our Way back to the Divine Feminine in Taino Spirituality
        • Testify
        • Young Pagan Goddess
        • Goddess is Metaformmic
        • For Want of a Goddess
        • Amaterasu- The Great Eastern Sun Goddess of Peace
        • What is Goddess? Toward an ontology of women giving birth. . .
        • Inanna Comes to Me in a Dream
        • First Blood Well The History of Bleeding
        • The Song of Lilith
        • Freedom Speaks Through Us
        • Dulce's Hands
        • Notes on contributors (9)
      • Issue 7/8: Unabashed Knowing >
        • Bad Manners All That Jazz
        • Hypatia
        • Amerika in 5 Parts
        • Screens: The War at Home
        • Invisible Nature
        • Woman-Woman Bonds in Prehistory
        • I Saw a Woman Dance
        • The Edible Parts
        • The Happy Hooker Revisisted
        • Re-membering an Interrupted Conversation:the Mother/Virgin Split
        • Notes on contributors (7/8)
      • Issue 6: The Art of the Possible >
        • The Aerial Lesbian Body: The Politics of Physical Expression
        • Wanting a Gun
        • Red Poppies Among the Ruings
        • Returning Home with Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia
        • Noah's Wife
        • Reclaiming the Spooky: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly as Radical Pioneers of the Esoteric
        • Grand Right and Left
        • Notes on Contributors (6)
      • Issue 5: The Resurrection Issue (2/2007) >
        • Waiting for Sappho
        • A Song of Captain Joan
        • Blue Mojo
        • Why Do Something If it Can be Done
        • In Memoriam: Monique Wittig
        • The Loudest Self
        • Clear and Fierce
        • (B) Orderlands' Lullaby
        • Borderlands
        • akaDARKNESS: on Kathy Acker
        • Remembering Barbara Macdonald
        • The Making of Power
        • Octavia Butler: A note on Xenogenesis as a love story
        • The Essential Angel: Tillie Olsen
        • Carol's Hands
        • Notes on Contributors (5)
      • Issue 4: The Wonderful & The Terrible (9/2006) >
        • Cunctipotence
        • Global Lovers
        • Our Lot
        • Doe a Deer
        • Degendering Sex: Undoing Erotic Alienation
        • Seven Stages of Lesbian Desire (What's Truth Got to Do With It?)
        • That Easter
        • Amazon Grace: Read it Aloud
        • Athene, 2002-2005
        • Notes on Contributors (4)
      • Issue 3: Love & Lust (2/2006) >
        • Conversation with Michele Causse
        • Chloto 1978
        • The Woman with the Secret Name
        • She is Still Burning
        • In the Beginning
        • Sanctuary
        • When Sex is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy
        • Arielle
        • Quotidian Love
        • Leverett
        • After Sappho's Fragments Tips for Natural Disasters Said Before
        • A Lesbian is a Memoir
        • Notes on Contributors (3)
      • Issue 2: Memory (12/2005) >
        • The Lost Days of Columbus
        • Agenesias of the Orld World
        • The Power of the Earth Shake/Rousing
        • Return to Earth
        • Forces of Nature
        • The Beauty Shop
        • The Other Shore
        • Notes on Contributors (2)
      • Issue 1: The Body (10/2004) >
        • Lovesick
        • Guerilla Girl Ponders the Situation
        • The Secret Pornographies of Republicans. What's left? Preferably Knot
        • Communing with Bears
        • TRIVIA LIVES: Division Street
        • After Reading: Les Gueilleres
        • Notes on Contributors (1)
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