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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971
1971-07-02 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 4
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dialogue All the time i've been gay - identified--or identifying myself as gay--it's been less than a year--and i've been glad i was gay. But i keep thinking, you know, you don't just turn gay--like there's all these signals, things i remember that i see now in the context of gayness. But all the time i was falling in love with women--especially in high school--i didn't think i was a lesbian--i don't think i even saw it as wrong or sick, just painful. I had this liberal idea of bisexuality or idealistic love, something like that. That it was painful sort of made it fit the stereotypes, like romantic love is supposed to hurt. I guess i expected pain. People didn't shelter me from pain things. I felt unjustly treated--like, my love wasn't acknowledged, i was put down, people didn't take my suffering seriously. But i came to expect injustice. This last thing about injustice & pain makes me think of it as a class feeling--but maybe middle-class gay experience is closer to it than lower-class straight--but this is really a connection i think. [hand drawn head] What you wrote made me start to think about the differences between being middle-class and gay like me, and working-class and gay like you. I realize there are important differences between us, but just this one seems to be very interesting. I never stopped to think before about how being middle-class affected my also being gay. But when I do, my mind seems to center on expectations--expectations that middle-class parents have for their children. It seems to the point also that when I think about expectations the picture that immediately comes to my mind is my mother being upset with me on two occasions. First, when I was arrested and put in jail and second when she discovered by reading some of our letters that I was having a relationship with a woman. Those two times of trauma stick out in my mind when I consider my relationship with my mother because those were the times she was most angry with me. She was angry because I was jeopardizing my future--my future that was wide open. In the first instance I was ruining my chances of getting into medical school and, of course, in the second instance I was ruining everything. When Mom found out I was gay, she used her strong influence on me to convince me that I should go to a psychiatrist. She said I might think it was wonderful now, but in a few years I would be unhappy. I think happiness and expectations are a key to the connections between gay and class because before I was gay but, as you say, saw the signals even then, I was worried because I knew the values of my class, and knew what girls were supposed to be like and grow up to be. I also knew the values of my society and said that people who were different than that wouldn't be happy. And of course I wanted to be happy because that was a value, too. Well, all this made me uncomfortable and pensive and I can remember that throughout all of high school I was obsessed with happiness. Everytime I would see someone I would wonder if they were happy and feel bad if I thought they weren't. I bet I wondered this around three times every waking hour for more than 5 years. I used to dream of what it would be like not to be concerned with happiness. I imagined subsistence tribes in Africa and peasants in Europe who, from the pictures I'd seen, were both hard-working peoples that didn't have time to wonder about things not essential to making a living. Do you understand what I'm saying? That people for whom staying alive is hard would be happy just to get a period of rest, a holiday, a week-end. That would be happiness and not all this qualitative bullshit about directing your life in the best possible way for you, an individual who is unique. One difference that makes it hard for me to understand your experience is our relationships with our parents--a difference in intensity, for one thing. I feel i didn't know what my parents' expectations were 'cause we just didn't know each other. My mother didn't have the kind of influence & control over me that would make her expectations so important to me. I didn't identify with her then. The people i wanted love& approval from were mostly friends my age. By the time I was in high school i was pretty distant (emotionally) from my family but i really identified with my friends' images of me, and with my own fantasy world, 'cause i didn't have a lot of friends. Some girls i knew had a lot of influence on me. And their support was what i valued. So i got into intense emotional, always unequal, relationships. Like, i should have seen i was really gay when i was 15 and really wound up with Elaine. We were into a lot of the same trips but it seemed she was easily better at most things. I idolized her; we were close to each other but i knew i was not as important to her as she was to me. And i was physically attracted to her and we couldn't handle that. Sometimes i wished i was a boy so i could touch her and know she'd like it. She had everything going for her in a real straight-success way but when i first knew her she didn't have all the proper ambitions. She was all the right categories--smart, beautiful looking, creative--for a woman to make it, except she was working class so she didn't have far out clothes and things. So people didn't notice her a lot until we were almost in 11th grade. Then i guess she realized where she was at and what she could do. She got into this class climbing thing. She had become friends with these two men who taught at our school; they noticed her, and not in the way most males she knew did. They weren't out to fuck her; they were gay. They mind-fucked her to reject the working class identification which they despised themselves. They had grown up in an even poorer city than ours and they had adopted the cultural bullshit of the upper middle class. They hadn't climbed much, though--but they thought Elaine could. She got right into it. Very quickly, she wanted what they wanted her to have. She decided to change her "style" as much as possible. First she dropped almost all her friends Page 4 Vol. I No. 17 Ain't I
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dialogue All the time i've been gay - identified--or identifying myself as gay--it's been less than a year--and i've been glad i was gay. But i keep thinking, you know, you don't just turn gay--like there's all these signals, things i remember that i see now in the context of gayness. But all the time i was falling in love with women--especially in high school--i didn't think i was a lesbian--i don't think i even saw it as wrong or sick, just painful. I had this liberal idea of bisexuality or idealistic love, something like that. That it was painful sort of made it fit the stereotypes, like romantic love is supposed to hurt. I guess i expected pain. People didn't shelter me from pain things. I felt unjustly treated--like, my love wasn't acknowledged, i was put down, people didn't take my suffering seriously. But i came to expect injustice. This last thing about injustice & pain makes me think of it as a class feeling--but maybe middle-class gay experience is closer to it than lower-class straight--but this is really a connection i think. [hand drawn head] What you wrote made me start to think about the differences between being middle-class and gay like me, and working-class and gay like you. I realize there are important differences between us, but just this one seems to be very interesting. I never stopped to think before about how being middle-class affected my also being gay. But when I do, my mind seems to center on expectations--expectations that middle-class parents have for their children. It seems to the point also that when I think about expectations the picture that immediately comes to my mind is my mother being upset with me on two occasions. First, when I was arrested and put in jail and second when she discovered by reading some of our letters that I was having a relationship with a woman. Those two times of trauma stick out in my mind when I consider my relationship with my mother because those were the times she was most angry with me. She was angry because I was jeopardizing my future--my future that was wide open. In the first instance I was ruining my chances of getting into medical school and, of course, in the second instance I was ruining everything. When Mom found out I was gay, she used her strong influence on me to convince me that I should go to a psychiatrist. She said I might think it was wonderful now, but in a few years I would be unhappy. I think happiness and expectations are a key to the connections between gay and class because before I was gay but, as you say, saw the signals even then, I was worried because I knew the values of my class, and knew what girls were supposed to be like and grow up to be. I also knew the values of my society and said that people who were different than that wouldn't be happy. And of course I wanted to be happy because that was a value, too. Well, all this made me uncomfortable and pensive and I can remember that throughout all of high school I was obsessed with happiness. Everytime I would see someone I would wonder if they were happy and feel bad if I thought they weren't. I bet I wondered this around three times every waking hour for more than 5 years. I used to dream of what it would be like not to be concerned with happiness. I imagined subsistence tribes in Africa and peasants in Europe who, from the pictures I'd seen, were both hard-working peoples that didn't have time to wonder about things not essential to making a living. Do you understand what I'm saying? That people for whom staying alive is hard would be happy just to get a period of rest, a holiday, a week-end. That would be happiness and not all this qualitative bullshit about directing your life in the best possible way for you, an individual who is unique. One difference that makes it hard for me to understand your experience is our relationships with our parents--a difference in intensity, for one thing. I feel i didn't know what my parents' expectations were 'cause we just didn't know each other. My mother didn't have the kind of influence & control over me that would make her expectations so important to me. I didn't identify with her then. The people i wanted love& approval from were mostly friends my age. By the time I was in high school i was pretty distant (emotionally) from my family but i really identified with my friends' images of me, and with my own fantasy world, 'cause i didn't have a lot of friends. Some girls i knew had a lot of influence on me. And their support was what i valued. So i got into intense emotional, always unequal, relationships. Like, i should have seen i was really gay when i was 15 and really wound up with Elaine. We were into a lot of the same trips but it seemed she was easily better at most things. I idolized her; we were close to each other but i knew i was not as important to her as she was to me. And i was physically attracted to her and we couldn't handle that. Sometimes i wished i was a boy so i could touch her and know she'd like it. She had everything going for her in a real straight-success way but when i first knew her she didn't have all the proper ambitions. She was all the right categories--smart, beautiful looking, creative--for a woman to make it, except she was working class so she didn't have far out clothes and things. So people didn't notice her a lot until we were almost in 11th grade. Then i guess she realized where she was at and what she could do. She got into this class climbing thing. She had become friends with these two men who taught at our school; they noticed her, and not in the way most males she knew did. They weren't out to fuck her; they were gay. They mind-fucked her to reject the working class identification which they despised themselves. They had grown up in an even poorer city than ours and they had adopted the cultural bullshit of the upper middle class. They hadn't climbed much, though--but they thought Elaine could. She got right into it. Very quickly, she wanted what they wanted her to have. She decided to change her "style" as much as possible. First she dropped almost all her friends Page 4 Vol. I No. 17 Ain't I
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