To Be Real
Sarah Schulman
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around will forget even faster.
Milan Kundera
…I want to discuss prime time shunning: the exclusion of lesbians from culture. Not being represented in a media culture puts one at a gross disadvantage. I want to share some experiences and perceptions with how the lack of mainstream, exterior authentic representation, reinforces the de-humanization of gay people within the family structure. I want to especially share with you literally how the exclusion of lesbian content replicates the structures of scapegoating, victimization, false accusations, and shunning. By examining this, you can understand the materiality of this ongoing, backstage phenomenon.
If you have no family, and you have no society, often the only thing you have is a vision of a different world. That's why so many alienated people live in the movies, books, plays, television. Because I am an artist, my relationship to these images is as a consumer and a producer. I sit in my room, and I get to have my say, to grapple with the questions that matter to me, to create new paradigms. It's my calling. It's absorbing, and a great freedom is there—the freedom to potentially exist.
But in order to actually exist, the work must leave my room. From this necessity, a new question arises, that of materiality. What good is it to make work that no one else sees? Of course, there are historical swings to these representational questions. At times, women represent twelve percent of all playwrights whose work gets produced in a given season. At other times, women represent seven percent. You know, it ebbs and ebbs.
I'm working with a wonderful actress, a great lady of the stage. She has asked me to write a play for her and we've done the work, made something really special and it's ready for the world. No takers. She calls me:
"How can this be? How can the play be any good if nobody wants it?"
"Honey," I say. "Plays don't get done because they're good."
There is still no lesbian play in the American repertoire, and I promise that that is not because all the men are better writers.
Back to the drawing board.
Some years back a young white gay man from a wealthy family, who doesn't work and who has a prestigious graduate school degree (this describes so many people that saying so implicates no one), showed me a play. I read it and I told him that the women characters were not real. But I added that I was sure that no one would care but me. He showed it to the gay male literary manager at a theater and told him he was worried about the female characters.
"You're a gay man," the literary manager told him. "Don't worry about that. It's not your area of interest. "
A year later the play got produced and there were two very different kinds of responses. A black female critic (there was only one so you know who she is) said that the writing was predictable because the Asian and female characters were condescended to. A white gay male critic (there are so many to choose from, it's dizzying) said that the play is brilliant.
I ponder this discrepancy.
What does "brilliant" mean?
Is it true that if a man creates characters out of people who have fewer rights than he does, and these characters are not fully human, in a context where real people who are just like those characters cannot get their plays produced, does that mean he is a "predictable" (predictable in his dehumanization of the less powerful) writer or a "brilliant" one? Does white gay male critic #5 care, or even consider, whether or not people unlike himself are fully drawn? And would he know if they were? Is the play "brilliant" because the people in question don't matter or brilliant because the critic doesn't know anyone like them well enough to see how distorted their representtions are?
I'm of the school of thought that says that a good writer writes complex characters. They have language and a structure that comes organically from the emotions at the core of the piece. They are grappling with something that matters. And the values of the piece are not rooted in maintaining the supremacy of the dominant. That last one is the killer.
After over three decades as a working artist in a variety of forms, it has become clear to me that there is no relationship between quality and reward. Sometimes good work gets rewarded, but not because it is good. That's just a coincidence.
Let's face it, people think that the system works if it works for them. If artwork was fairly evaluated on its merit instead of demographic or point of view, an entirely different cast of characters would be reaping rewards. The rewarded get what they get because they're, for example, white, but they think they're just better. They confound demographic (accident of birth) and quality. And whenever one person outside the box manages to be an exception, they insist it's because she's black. "They gave it to her because she's black" is something you hear all the time. "They needed a woman." But the truth is that those guys get it BECAUSE they are white. Not because of the depth and breadth of their Asian and female characters.
And lesbian literature? Oy vey. Now here's a long story. The battle for lesbian representation in American publishing is more complex than the Battle of Bulge. And more bloody. Occasionally, books pop up on the radar every few decades, even big sellers like the 1950s hit The Price of Salt by "Claire Morgan" (the pseudonymously frightened Patricia Highsmith). Skip a few years to Rubyfruit Jungle, published in 1973. After that, the only overtly lesbian protagonists by lesbian authors to be allowed on mainstream America's bookshelves were from Britain. Since the British mainstream publishers published Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters in the first place, marketed them like regular people, reviewed them in regular places as though they were full human beings, rewarded their labors, made films out of their books, the U. S. presses decided that they were worthy of republication. But since no lesbian writer with lesbian content could be treated the same way here, none were able to achieve the same level of currency that Winterson and Waters have been able to achieve. So they get re-published here, occupying the American shelf space for quality lesbian fiction because they have already achieved an acclaim that we are not allowed to have. Basically, as Urvashi Vaid has said, in America "lesbian content is the kiss of death."
My first lesbian characters were Harriet the Spy and Anne Frank. In high school in New York City in 1974, I went to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and bought and read Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sydney Abbott and Barbara Love. In college in 1977, I read Rubyfruit Jungle, the edition from Daughters Incorporated. The first lesbian reading I ever went to was in 1979 by Joan Larkin, Susan Sherman, and Honor Moore. I was very inspired by the pioneer generation in New York City—the people already on the scene when I came into it—Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz. I admired their intellectual prowess and personalized their message, feeling that they wanted me to be a moral person. I still feel this way about them. Many of the decisions I've made in my writing and in how I've handled my career have been determined by this feeling of having to live up to them. Audre was my teacher at Hunter College; she's been dead for years. I met Adrienne Rich once for five minutes. Irena and I occasionally meet at demonstrations. Yet, I made them into a lineage or an ancestry and imagined that they had expectations of me. I imagined that they were raising me to practice democratic principles of community-building and to apply them to the literary community, which to me means returning phone calls, responding honestly to people's work, being available, helping people who have less access, maintaining integrity about lesbian content, always knowing that there are some things that are more important than money. Keeping my promises. With these kinds of ideas, I made them into my ancestors.
Grace Paley, another one of these people I pretend is watching me, says that writers choose their themes when we are very young and stick with them our whole lives. One of my main themes is creating the lesbian life as an organic part of American literature. This has forced me since my first novel was published when I was twenty-five—twenty-six years ago—to constantly look at the reality of what we are living and translate it into an artful representation or, in some of my books, a representational art object.
What are the stakes in this? Why is having authentic lesbian content excluded from mainstream representation reinforcing shunning and oppression in gay people's daily lives? The key answer is POWER. Truthful lesbian representations teach straight people, through some trickle down theory, to be kinder to gay people. But it's not just that. With lesbian representations, lesbians can see truthful depictions of themselves and thereby realize that they are human. But it's not just that either. Far more important is the daily material behavior of the people who create popular culture, people constructing global ideas about kindness and beauty behind the scenes. These influential people determine whose work will be seen, what paradigms will dominate and become normalized, who will be able to earn a living, what kinds of opportunities artists will have to develop. They determine who will feel right and who will feel wrong. Remember, what gets seen has almost no relationship to what is created. What is created is what is expressed; what is seen is what is selected.
…
Let me say clearly that trying to publish lesbian novels and get lesbian plays produced in this era means encountering…distorted assaultive shunning and cruelty on a regular basis. At least once a week some kind of devaluative experience takes place. Someone acts disrespectfully, disregards my level of merit and achievement, diminishes something of value, because the lesbian content of the work removes any currency that my accomplishments might otherwise create. And lest you feel compelled to try to excuse or justify this, there is no other lesbian writer working in these forms (novels with lesbian protagonists, multi-character stage plays with lesbian point of view) who is faring any better. There is no one else who because of more talent, a more user-friendly personality, better connections, a trust fund, or an Ivy League degree has been able to get lesbian content novels and plays at the appropriate levels of presentation and recognition. Even great, openly lesbian writers like Paula Vogel, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned To Drive, have not been able to have success with a work with serious multi-character dramatic universes with overt primary lesbian content. Where we are allowed to function in theatre is with closeted or coded work and performative or solo theater pieces. None of this is because of the quality of the artistic achievement, nor is it because of the marketplace and people in Iowa. I have learned from repeated experience that it is entirely because of the individuals with the power of selection, their practice of devaluing who we are, our consequential lack of power and social currency, and the ease with which people feel free to extend the shunning they have observed us experience in every other institution of life.
What is so sinister is that just as this structure keeps complex lesbian content out of mainstream culture, its absence is then experienced, I think subconsciously, by perpetrators in the private sphere as justification for their actions. When a person scapegoats a gay family member, there is no big movie, book, or play creating a cultural status quo telling them not to. The reason for this is that the people with power behind the scenes in art and entertainment behave exactly the same way that people with power do in the private sphere. The shunning is dynamic and mutually reinforcing.
The history of lesbian literature is a bit more complex than the stage because in book publishing we did break through during the 1990s and have now lost those advances. In theater, the breakthrough still has not occurred. Because it takes so much personal strength to have primary lesbian content in this era, the writers who persevere need some sense of historical context to be able to understand what is happening to us right now and why. Oppression is both informative about the powerful other and infantilizing about the self. We have a very sophisticated understanding of the structures that keep oppression in place. We understand the dominant cultural mind and how it is constructed while they still don't even know that their power is constructed. We are experts on them. But no one is expert on us.
Lesbian publishing became established in the 1970s by pioneers like Wendy Cadden, June Arnold, Joan Larkin, and Barbara Grier, with presses like Out and Out Press, Daughters Inc., and Diana Press and later Persephone and Crossing Press, Naiad and firebrand, Cleis and Seal. Collectively, the feminist publishing movement produced excellent work by superior writers. Work that was as technically advanced as any competitive writer in the marketplace and work that was extremely meaningful to its readers, far beyond the impact of most mainstream writers on their readers. The challenge then moved from the already difficult act of getting these works into print to the next, far more difficult step. Namely, to have our most talented and achieved writers and works of art recognized on the basis of their merit without having to compromise the primacy of the lesbian characters. This is the challenge that we still face.
The one thing that has substantially changed in the publishing world is that a writer can be openly lesbian personally and still be accepted as an American writer as long as she produces some work with no primary lesbian content. So, the current state of affairs is that books where the lesbian content is coded, sub-textual, involved with secondary characters or sub-plots, written in what is called "lesbian sensibility" or featuring strong women characters with ambiguous sexualities are considered "well written." Books in which the protagonist is a lesbian in the first and last chapter? These books are not "well written." They are considered to not deserve to be part of American fiction because the lives that they depict are not acceptable lives. Books with primary lesbian characters are diminished and demeaned because the prejudice and stigma against the characters results in a series of institutionalized lies. Namely that the books are "about homosexuality," are "political, not literary," and are all alike. This results in an institutionalized quota system in which books with primary lesbian characters are only compared to each other, only compete against each other, and are never ever placed in the spectrum of American fiction. Even magazines practice this censorship. If the New Yorker or the Atlantic or their ilk have published fiction by openly lesbian American authors with primary lesbian content, it's escaped me.
As the obvious merit and ability of lesbian writers became clearer, one of the goals of the lesbian publishing movement became to have our best work accepted by the widest range of American readers. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Before the advent of niche marketing in 1992, people wrote books with primary lesbian and gay characters because they had to. They were artistically and ethically compelled to this decision despite the almost certain knowledge that it would prohibit them from ever being able to earn a living. They were speaking to the world from a place of truth. Once people began to perceive of a gay market, they wrote book proposals to develop books purposefully for that market, books that were as superficial as meaningless books that straight people were sold, but with a gay lilt. So rather than our best work and our best talents being recognized and integrated into American literature, the publishing industry bombarded our own community with junk books such as The Gay Hair Book which then dominated the shelves of gay book stores, when there were still many gay book stores. Simultaneously, we were making no progress in getting our quality lesbian literature out to the general public.
There was a brief window between approximately 1986 and 1992 when publishing started to open up to lesbian literature. Due to pioneering editors like Carole DeSanti, (who, I believe, has since abandoned lesbian fiction), writers like Carole Maso, Jacqueline Woodson, Jane DeLynn, Patricia Powell, Jennifer Levin, Carol Anshaw and many others were able to publish adult novels with primary lesbian content in mainstream houses at the same time. Some years there would be five to eight lesbian novels published in a given season. However, once niche marketing was put into play, these expansive, gifted writers had their books literally moved from the "Literature" sections of chain stores to the newly created "Gay and Lesbian" sections, usually in the back of a top floor of Barnes and Noble somewhere behind the potted plants. In this way, our best literature was guaranteed marginalization, while work by lesbians with no lesbian content came to occupy the public "gay" space and got treated as American literature.
Interestingly, the families of gays and lesbians behave the same way in the marketplace as they do in the halls of justice. Absent. Just as they do not fight for full inclusion into the society of their gay family members, they do not purchase or consume artworks that come from the cultural point of view of their gay family members. Lesbian novels are just as overlooked or ignored or demeaned as every other part of our lives.
Now, this being America, it is really shocking to find out that the one thing more powerful than money is homophobia. Because, of course, all these publishers could make more money if they presented this literature in a more general way. And many of these lesbian books sold more copies than books by straights. But, fascinating and devastating as it may be, the publishing industry has shown no interest in breaking open the niche market. The shunning of artworks and artists who have enough integrity to be consistently out in our work is almost complete. It absolutely reflects the lived reality we experience in relation to other social institutions. I want to explore why and how these obstacles are kept in place and then look at what we can do to change them.
first of all, agents, editors, publishers, magazine editors, publicists, and marketers are in the social role of cultural administrators. They don't create ideas; they select and package them. That is just a fact. But when you are in an era of immense social repression, as we are in, cultural administrators take on a crucial role. They can either resist and mitigate the new order or they can pander to and implement it. What I have seen in the last years is that the general mood of agents and editors is that, yes, indeed, books with primary lesbian content are not good books, not well written books and are in and of themselves deficient by nature. A world view that is very consistent with what we're seeing on the evening news and in the realm of the family.
"Throw in a murder," is a suggestion that more than one publishing professional has suggested to more than one superb, but newly unpublishable writer. "Just throw in a murder. Make it an erotic thriller." I would point out that my colleagues with coded, euphemistic, subtextual, or secondary lesbian content were not being told to throw in a murder. "If only you had written After Delores ten years later," one of them said to me. "You would be rich." In other words, in the view of almost every lesbian agent or editor that I have spoken to, the reason that no novel with primary lesbian characters since Rubyfruit Jungle has been accepted as fully American is because something is wrong with the books. All of them. They are all deficient. And they all need to be changed. They all need to have a murder. Because lesbianism is not literary. Our lives are not poetry; they are not dramatic; they are not interesting; they have no merit. The projection of shame is overwhelming. It is sad and pathetic. But we see it everywhere.
Queer editors of national gay magazines put straight people on the covers all the time. Can you imagine Al Jolson on the cover of Ebony saying what it's like to work in blackface? Lesbian editors and agents are no more advanced in their self-esteem than anyone else, and they work in isolating, grueling straight corporate environments. If you're in an office sixty hours a week, you can't have any idea of what is really going on out there, can you? Celebrities who came out after they got famous or made it with work that was closeted are better than ones who have always been out. That's what the gay and straight press hammer at us everyday. A famous cover story in Entertainment Weekly of gay people in the business featured sixteen photographs of key players in the gay entertainment boom. The only one who had started his career out of the closet was Ru Paul. It is the Jody Foster syndrome. We are dependent on gay people in cultural administration positions to have the kind of self-esteem and vision and self-love and personal integration to see through these lies, that many of them cannot, do not, and will not have. And so the vision has to come from us.
Milan Kundera
…I want to discuss prime time shunning: the exclusion of lesbians from culture. Not being represented in a media culture puts one at a gross disadvantage. I want to share some experiences and perceptions with how the lack of mainstream, exterior authentic representation, reinforces the de-humanization of gay people within the family structure. I want to especially share with you literally how the exclusion of lesbian content replicates the structures of scapegoating, victimization, false accusations, and shunning. By examining this, you can understand the materiality of this ongoing, backstage phenomenon.
If you have no family, and you have no society, often the only thing you have is a vision of a different world. That's why so many alienated people live in the movies, books, plays, television. Because I am an artist, my relationship to these images is as a consumer and a producer. I sit in my room, and I get to have my say, to grapple with the questions that matter to me, to create new paradigms. It's my calling. It's absorbing, and a great freedom is there—the freedom to potentially exist.
But in order to actually exist, the work must leave my room. From this necessity, a new question arises, that of materiality. What good is it to make work that no one else sees? Of course, there are historical swings to these representational questions. At times, women represent twelve percent of all playwrights whose work gets produced in a given season. At other times, women represent seven percent. You know, it ebbs and ebbs.
I'm working with a wonderful actress, a great lady of the stage. She has asked me to write a play for her and we've done the work, made something really special and it's ready for the world. No takers. She calls me:
"How can this be? How can the play be any good if nobody wants it?"
"Honey," I say. "Plays don't get done because they're good."
There is still no lesbian play in the American repertoire, and I promise that that is not because all the men are better writers.
Back to the drawing board.
Some years back a young white gay man from a wealthy family, who doesn't work and who has a prestigious graduate school degree (this describes so many people that saying so implicates no one), showed me a play. I read it and I told him that the women characters were not real. But I added that I was sure that no one would care but me. He showed it to the gay male literary manager at a theater and told him he was worried about the female characters.
"You're a gay man," the literary manager told him. "Don't worry about that. It's not your area of interest. "
A year later the play got produced and there were two very different kinds of responses. A black female critic (there was only one so you know who she is) said that the writing was predictable because the Asian and female characters were condescended to. A white gay male critic (there are so many to choose from, it's dizzying) said that the play is brilliant.
I ponder this discrepancy.
What does "brilliant" mean?
Is it true that if a man creates characters out of people who have fewer rights than he does, and these characters are not fully human, in a context where real people who are just like those characters cannot get their plays produced, does that mean he is a "predictable" (predictable in his dehumanization of the less powerful) writer or a "brilliant" one? Does white gay male critic #5 care, or even consider, whether or not people unlike himself are fully drawn? And would he know if they were? Is the play "brilliant" because the people in question don't matter or brilliant because the critic doesn't know anyone like them well enough to see how distorted their representtions are?
I'm of the school of thought that says that a good writer writes complex characters. They have language and a structure that comes organically from the emotions at the core of the piece. They are grappling with something that matters. And the values of the piece are not rooted in maintaining the supremacy of the dominant. That last one is the killer.
After over three decades as a working artist in a variety of forms, it has become clear to me that there is no relationship between quality and reward. Sometimes good work gets rewarded, but not because it is good. That's just a coincidence.
Let's face it, people think that the system works if it works for them. If artwork was fairly evaluated on its merit instead of demographic or point of view, an entirely different cast of characters would be reaping rewards. The rewarded get what they get because they're, for example, white, but they think they're just better. They confound demographic (accident of birth) and quality. And whenever one person outside the box manages to be an exception, they insist it's because she's black. "They gave it to her because she's black" is something you hear all the time. "They needed a woman." But the truth is that those guys get it BECAUSE they are white. Not because of the depth and breadth of their Asian and female characters.
And lesbian literature? Oy vey. Now here's a long story. The battle for lesbian representation in American publishing is more complex than the Battle of Bulge. And more bloody. Occasionally, books pop up on the radar every few decades, even big sellers like the 1950s hit The Price of Salt by "Claire Morgan" (the pseudonymously frightened Patricia Highsmith). Skip a few years to Rubyfruit Jungle, published in 1973. After that, the only overtly lesbian protagonists by lesbian authors to be allowed on mainstream America's bookshelves were from Britain. Since the British mainstream publishers published Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters in the first place, marketed them like regular people, reviewed them in regular places as though they were full human beings, rewarded their labors, made films out of their books, the U. S. presses decided that they were worthy of republication. But since no lesbian writer with lesbian content could be treated the same way here, none were able to achieve the same level of currency that Winterson and Waters have been able to achieve. So they get re-published here, occupying the American shelf space for quality lesbian fiction because they have already achieved an acclaim that we are not allowed to have. Basically, as Urvashi Vaid has said, in America "lesbian content is the kiss of death."
My first lesbian characters were Harriet the Spy and Anne Frank. In high school in New York City in 1974, I went to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and bought and read Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sydney Abbott and Barbara Love. In college in 1977, I read Rubyfruit Jungle, the edition from Daughters Incorporated. The first lesbian reading I ever went to was in 1979 by Joan Larkin, Susan Sherman, and Honor Moore. I was very inspired by the pioneer generation in New York City—the people already on the scene when I came into it—Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz. I admired their intellectual prowess and personalized their message, feeling that they wanted me to be a moral person. I still feel this way about them. Many of the decisions I've made in my writing and in how I've handled my career have been determined by this feeling of having to live up to them. Audre was my teacher at Hunter College; she's been dead for years. I met Adrienne Rich once for five minutes. Irena and I occasionally meet at demonstrations. Yet, I made them into a lineage or an ancestry and imagined that they had expectations of me. I imagined that they were raising me to practice democratic principles of community-building and to apply them to the literary community, which to me means returning phone calls, responding honestly to people's work, being available, helping people who have less access, maintaining integrity about lesbian content, always knowing that there are some things that are more important than money. Keeping my promises. With these kinds of ideas, I made them into my ancestors.
Grace Paley, another one of these people I pretend is watching me, says that writers choose their themes when we are very young and stick with them our whole lives. One of my main themes is creating the lesbian life as an organic part of American literature. This has forced me since my first novel was published when I was twenty-five—twenty-six years ago—to constantly look at the reality of what we are living and translate it into an artful representation or, in some of my books, a representational art object.
What are the stakes in this? Why is having authentic lesbian content excluded from mainstream representation reinforcing shunning and oppression in gay people's daily lives? The key answer is POWER. Truthful lesbian representations teach straight people, through some trickle down theory, to be kinder to gay people. But it's not just that. With lesbian representations, lesbians can see truthful depictions of themselves and thereby realize that they are human. But it's not just that either. Far more important is the daily material behavior of the people who create popular culture, people constructing global ideas about kindness and beauty behind the scenes. These influential people determine whose work will be seen, what paradigms will dominate and become normalized, who will be able to earn a living, what kinds of opportunities artists will have to develop. They determine who will feel right and who will feel wrong. Remember, what gets seen has almost no relationship to what is created. What is created is what is expressed; what is seen is what is selected.
…
Let me say clearly that trying to publish lesbian novels and get lesbian plays produced in this era means encountering…distorted assaultive shunning and cruelty on a regular basis. At least once a week some kind of devaluative experience takes place. Someone acts disrespectfully, disregards my level of merit and achievement, diminishes something of value, because the lesbian content of the work removes any currency that my accomplishments might otherwise create. And lest you feel compelled to try to excuse or justify this, there is no other lesbian writer working in these forms (novels with lesbian protagonists, multi-character stage plays with lesbian point of view) who is faring any better. There is no one else who because of more talent, a more user-friendly personality, better connections, a trust fund, or an Ivy League degree has been able to get lesbian content novels and plays at the appropriate levels of presentation and recognition. Even great, openly lesbian writers like Paula Vogel, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned To Drive, have not been able to have success with a work with serious multi-character dramatic universes with overt primary lesbian content. Where we are allowed to function in theatre is with closeted or coded work and performative or solo theater pieces. None of this is because of the quality of the artistic achievement, nor is it because of the marketplace and people in Iowa. I have learned from repeated experience that it is entirely because of the individuals with the power of selection, their practice of devaluing who we are, our consequential lack of power and social currency, and the ease with which people feel free to extend the shunning they have observed us experience in every other institution of life.
What is so sinister is that just as this structure keeps complex lesbian content out of mainstream culture, its absence is then experienced, I think subconsciously, by perpetrators in the private sphere as justification for their actions. When a person scapegoats a gay family member, there is no big movie, book, or play creating a cultural status quo telling them not to. The reason for this is that the people with power behind the scenes in art and entertainment behave exactly the same way that people with power do in the private sphere. The shunning is dynamic and mutually reinforcing.
The history of lesbian literature is a bit more complex than the stage because in book publishing we did break through during the 1990s and have now lost those advances. In theater, the breakthrough still has not occurred. Because it takes so much personal strength to have primary lesbian content in this era, the writers who persevere need some sense of historical context to be able to understand what is happening to us right now and why. Oppression is both informative about the powerful other and infantilizing about the self. We have a very sophisticated understanding of the structures that keep oppression in place. We understand the dominant cultural mind and how it is constructed while they still don't even know that their power is constructed. We are experts on them. But no one is expert on us.
Lesbian publishing became established in the 1970s by pioneers like Wendy Cadden, June Arnold, Joan Larkin, and Barbara Grier, with presses like Out and Out Press, Daughters Inc., and Diana Press and later Persephone and Crossing Press, Naiad and firebrand, Cleis and Seal. Collectively, the feminist publishing movement produced excellent work by superior writers. Work that was as technically advanced as any competitive writer in the marketplace and work that was extremely meaningful to its readers, far beyond the impact of most mainstream writers on their readers. The challenge then moved from the already difficult act of getting these works into print to the next, far more difficult step. Namely, to have our most talented and achieved writers and works of art recognized on the basis of their merit without having to compromise the primacy of the lesbian characters. This is the challenge that we still face.
The one thing that has substantially changed in the publishing world is that a writer can be openly lesbian personally and still be accepted as an American writer as long as she produces some work with no primary lesbian content. So, the current state of affairs is that books where the lesbian content is coded, sub-textual, involved with secondary characters or sub-plots, written in what is called "lesbian sensibility" or featuring strong women characters with ambiguous sexualities are considered "well written." Books in which the protagonist is a lesbian in the first and last chapter? These books are not "well written." They are considered to not deserve to be part of American fiction because the lives that they depict are not acceptable lives. Books with primary lesbian characters are diminished and demeaned because the prejudice and stigma against the characters results in a series of institutionalized lies. Namely that the books are "about homosexuality," are "political, not literary," and are all alike. This results in an institutionalized quota system in which books with primary lesbian characters are only compared to each other, only compete against each other, and are never ever placed in the spectrum of American fiction. Even magazines practice this censorship. If the New Yorker or the Atlantic or their ilk have published fiction by openly lesbian American authors with primary lesbian content, it's escaped me.
As the obvious merit and ability of lesbian writers became clearer, one of the goals of the lesbian publishing movement became to have our best work accepted by the widest range of American readers. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Before the advent of niche marketing in 1992, people wrote books with primary lesbian and gay characters because they had to. They were artistically and ethically compelled to this decision despite the almost certain knowledge that it would prohibit them from ever being able to earn a living. They were speaking to the world from a place of truth. Once people began to perceive of a gay market, they wrote book proposals to develop books purposefully for that market, books that were as superficial as meaningless books that straight people were sold, but with a gay lilt. So rather than our best work and our best talents being recognized and integrated into American literature, the publishing industry bombarded our own community with junk books such as The Gay Hair Book which then dominated the shelves of gay book stores, when there were still many gay book stores. Simultaneously, we were making no progress in getting our quality lesbian literature out to the general public.
There was a brief window between approximately 1986 and 1992 when publishing started to open up to lesbian literature. Due to pioneering editors like Carole DeSanti, (who, I believe, has since abandoned lesbian fiction), writers like Carole Maso, Jacqueline Woodson, Jane DeLynn, Patricia Powell, Jennifer Levin, Carol Anshaw and many others were able to publish adult novels with primary lesbian content in mainstream houses at the same time. Some years there would be five to eight lesbian novels published in a given season. However, once niche marketing was put into play, these expansive, gifted writers had their books literally moved from the "Literature" sections of chain stores to the newly created "Gay and Lesbian" sections, usually in the back of a top floor of Barnes and Noble somewhere behind the potted plants. In this way, our best literature was guaranteed marginalization, while work by lesbians with no lesbian content came to occupy the public "gay" space and got treated as American literature.
Interestingly, the families of gays and lesbians behave the same way in the marketplace as they do in the halls of justice. Absent. Just as they do not fight for full inclusion into the society of their gay family members, they do not purchase or consume artworks that come from the cultural point of view of their gay family members. Lesbian novels are just as overlooked or ignored or demeaned as every other part of our lives.
Now, this being America, it is really shocking to find out that the one thing more powerful than money is homophobia. Because, of course, all these publishers could make more money if they presented this literature in a more general way. And many of these lesbian books sold more copies than books by straights. But, fascinating and devastating as it may be, the publishing industry has shown no interest in breaking open the niche market. The shunning of artworks and artists who have enough integrity to be consistently out in our work is almost complete. It absolutely reflects the lived reality we experience in relation to other social institutions. I want to explore why and how these obstacles are kept in place and then look at what we can do to change them.
first of all, agents, editors, publishers, magazine editors, publicists, and marketers are in the social role of cultural administrators. They don't create ideas; they select and package them. That is just a fact. But when you are in an era of immense social repression, as we are in, cultural administrators take on a crucial role. They can either resist and mitigate the new order or they can pander to and implement it. What I have seen in the last years is that the general mood of agents and editors is that, yes, indeed, books with primary lesbian content are not good books, not well written books and are in and of themselves deficient by nature. A world view that is very consistent with what we're seeing on the evening news and in the realm of the family.
"Throw in a murder," is a suggestion that more than one publishing professional has suggested to more than one superb, but newly unpublishable writer. "Just throw in a murder. Make it an erotic thriller." I would point out that my colleagues with coded, euphemistic, subtextual, or secondary lesbian content were not being told to throw in a murder. "If only you had written After Delores ten years later," one of them said to me. "You would be rich." In other words, in the view of almost every lesbian agent or editor that I have spoken to, the reason that no novel with primary lesbian characters since Rubyfruit Jungle has been accepted as fully American is because something is wrong with the books. All of them. They are all deficient. And they all need to be changed. They all need to have a murder. Because lesbianism is not literary. Our lives are not poetry; they are not dramatic; they are not interesting; they have no merit. The projection of shame is overwhelming. It is sad and pathetic. But we see it everywhere.
Queer editors of national gay magazines put straight people on the covers all the time. Can you imagine Al Jolson on the cover of Ebony saying what it's like to work in blackface? Lesbian editors and agents are no more advanced in their self-esteem than anyone else, and they work in isolating, grueling straight corporate environments. If you're in an office sixty hours a week, you can't have any idea of what is really going on out there, can you? Celebrities who came out after they got famous or made it with work that was closeted are better than ones who have always been out. That's what the gay and straight press hammer at us everyday. A famous cover story in Entertainment Weekly of gay people in the business featured sixteen photographs of key players in the gay entertainment boom. The only one who had started his career out of the closet was Ru Paul. It is the Jody Foster syndrome. We are dependent on gay people in cultural administration positions to have the kind of self-esteem and vision and self-love and personal integration to see through these lies, that many of them cannot, do not, and will not have. And so the vision has to come from us.
About the author
Sarah Schulman is a native New Yorker. Her novels, nonfiction books, journalism, films and plays reflect people whose points of view and experiences are rarely represented in the mainstream arts. She is currently involved in a number of projects. Her new book, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, is forthcoming. She's currently working on two books: Solidarity Visit: Israel/Palestine and The Queer International and The Healing, a novel inspired by Balzac's Cousin Bette. Newly working in film, she has co-written three with director Cheryl Dunye: The Owls (premiere, Berlin film Festival 2010), Mommy is Coming (released in 2011) and Adventure in the 419 (in pre-production.) She is working with director Deborah Kampmeier on the film Lonely Hunter, about Carson McCullers. With Jim Hubbard, Sarah co-directs the ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org). She is currently organizing a US tour of Palestinian LGBT leaders.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.