by Camille Roy
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Copyright © 2021 by Camille Roy
Introduction and editing Copyright © 2021 by
by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
Print ISBN: 978-1-64362-074-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-109-8
Cover Art: Nicole Eisenman, “Bambi Gregor,” 1993. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Los Angeles Modern Auctions.
Interior Art: Still from ROSEBUD, a film by Cheryl Farthing 1991, photograph by Della Grace.
Design & Typesetting by Rissa Hochberger
Text set in Fortescue and Avante-Garde
Cataloging-in-publication data is available
from the Library of Congress
Nightboat Books
New York
www.nightboat.org
Contents
INTRODUCTION
AGATHA LETTERS
THE FAGGOT
ISHER HOUSE
MY X STORY
CRAQUER: An Essay on Class Struggle
LYNETTE #1
SEX TALK (WITH ABIGAIL CHILD)
TANYA
FRIENDS
SEX LIFE
FETISH
EXPERIMENTALISM
BABY (OR WHOSE BODY IS MISSING?)
PERILS
ARTIFICIAL
UNDER GRID: An Obscure Manifesto
AFTERWORD
NOTES
“She is the one who inhabits me and who familiarizes me with the universe.”
—Nicole Brossard
Dedicated to Angela Romagnoli
(1949–2017)
Hive mind, parlor trick, satchel of dirty love letters turned inside-out: Camille Roy’s Honey Mine swarms and flexes like a murmur. This is the selected fiction of Camille Roy, a book of urgencies and resistance for queer women and other gender outlaws.
Honey Mine is the most comprehensive selection of Camille Roy’s writing to date. This book gathers new and previously unpublished prose alongside hard-to-find publications that capture the intellectual excitement of the 1990’s so-called “sex wars,” the revolutionary air of ACT UP, and the play of Queer Nation and the growing BDSM scene. Despite the relative scarcity of her early publications, Camille Roy has contributed much to New Narrative’s reputation for intelligent, disorienting writing that both addresses real-world political concerns and toys delightfully with pulp techniques and pop culture.
Fans of Camille Roy’s writing might know her as a talented and daring playwright, poet, essayist, and prose writer. Her earliest publications were short fictions published in Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s periodical, Mirage, and her first published book, Cold Heaven, was a collection of plays for Poets Theater. Her genre-bending prose was published in the collections The Rosy Medallions and Swarm and has been widely anthologized.
In limited edition chapbooks and the magazine she co-edited with Nayland Blake, Dear World, Camille Roy participated in the wide-ranging rebuke of the conventional literary establishment, which has continued to overlook the defining contributions of women, queers, and writers of color to the history of literary innovation. For decades, Camille Roy has been pushing and redefining experimental writing, especially (though not exclusively) by and for queer women.
Even so, Camille Roy doesn’t offer homilies of queer representation: instead, she gives us queer world-building as a delicious and dangerous secret. Her fictions, with their sexual and gendered awakenings, model (and celebrate!) the liberatory potential of opacity. These stories are populated by characters who have not decided their lives in advance—a position that preserves, even expands, social and political possibility. “As I was folding up my jeans, Isabelle’s phone number slipped out of the pocket,” the lesbian narrator of “The Faggot” reminsces, “I stared at the tab of white paper, luscious little thing. It yanked me somewhere, but I didn’t want to go. Why go anywhere? I decided not to call. Then I decided not to decide and slipped the paper back into the pocket.” We are brought along, stepping across the threshold of normalcy and into an unexpected new life.
For all its range and wisdom, Camille has described Honey Mine as a young book, and it is full of youth’s energetic, questioning drive. There are initiations aplenty as protagonists navigate the threats of a hostile, delusional mainstream American life, often finding complicated solace in the various and rich locations of lesbian subculture. The parlor and the bar are their hidden places, promising personal and public revolution.
While this book is not a memoir, it reflects the author’s personal history growing up as a “red-diaper baby” on the South Side of Chicago. Migrating from the Midwest to the Bay Area, Honey Mine might be read in the American picaresque tradition, as Camille Roy—or an assemblage of avatars—voyages away from sanitized American ideals and into the realities of working-class lives and a vibrant queer demimonde. We anticipate that these stories will now resonate with new readers for their prescient explorations of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Since her teens, Camille had been attuned to the promise of San Francisco, which she credits to having seen Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway. She made it to San Francisco at last in 1980, and was soon attending the workshops of Gloria Anzaldúa, the first writer she met in the city. Anzaldúa was a mentor who connected the written word with political struggle, and her workshop showcased the writer’s witchy charisma, exemplifying her potent blend of poetry, theory, and performance.
Not long after, Camille “wandered off the street,” as she puts it, and into the workshops Robert Glück was teaching in the backroom of Small Press Traffic. There, Camille joined a diverse cadre of writers who were playfully experimenting with what would eventually be known as New Narrative. Flagrantly queer, anti-capitalist, and sensitive to intersectional critique, this was a community of writers who sought to record lived experience in all its intensity, complexity, hypocrisy, and glamor. To the workshop table, Camille Roy brought her love for jazz and the early pioneers of experimental lesbian fiction, especially Bertha Harris.
Like her mentors, Camille has also hosted a series of intimate workshops in her own living room, inspiring new generations of writers. Over the months that we met with Camille to discuss her work, we sat with her in the parlor of her Potrero Hill home and were offered delectable foodstuffs, anecdotes of butch-femme revels, and conversation imaginative and analytical. As in the book, there were a lot of good zingers. Camille is a rare combination—a brilliant writer of great confidence and modesty. She was always inquisitive, a fierce truth teller, and deeply kind without any hint of the saccharine.
Thinking of conversations with Camille, we imagine her laughing or making a sharp-edged point; equally, we imagine her listening, poised on the edge of a smile. One feels as though she’s eternally eager for the pleasures, interest, or combat to come. That is the atmosphere of this book: wideeyed without being naive, elegant, and ready for anything. In its specificity, Honey Mine is historical in the best sense. It gives us a new vantage on our past and the future on the hor
izon, and is bound to be a predecessor to so many great queer books as yet unwritten.
And now, we have reached the gateway to Camille Roy’s marvelous and perilous world. To everyone reading along with us: Come on in, honey, the water’s fine.
—LL + ES
Dear Agatha,
Is it all point of view? Pleasure, I mean—the surprise in the dark. I suppose it’s different for everyone. To Camille it felt empty and fresh, because she was.
She left words out. It wasn’t only that she was new at it. Sex. It was the business of settling into the body, the one which had arrived with its equipment of muscles and tits and hair about six years earlier. It felt helpless and vivid, but also sensational, a big place accented with childish gestures. A stadium. Was it possible that her body felt like a stadium?
It took getting used to. Which was what she was doing, at her own pace, with minimal use of unfamiliar vocabulary. After dinner on the living room couch, as the roommates swirled in & out, Dusty would say it. For a tease. Sex? That word again, slyly reaching into Camille’s ear. Camille couldn’t stand it. Her fingers butterflied onto Dusty’s mouth and pinned those offensive lips together.
Dusty protested with a firm shove, flopping Camille off the couch. Then she fell on top, so the dumb thumbprint of her hipbone prodded Camille in the abdomen. A surge transfixed them both: mutant permission. Girlishly, Camille threw open her legs, clasping Dusty around the shoulders.
Camille felt like a slab of wedded marble, so fucking lavish. The roommates stepped over them, as though ignoring evidence of a slaughter.
Dusty was the whiplash who connected Camille’s pieces. Camille was Dusty’s little hole through which events streamed. Wordless, in other words. Kisses leapt out of her throat, scribbles leaked from the fingertips. Her hand floated away from her body and covered Dusty’s mouth, to prevent any of those words from leaking out.
1. What Dusty said was consistent with what Dusty thought.
2. Camille was uptight about just words.
3. Dusty was a woman of action, without regrets.
4. Irreconcilable differences.
To get anywhere close to their state of mind I need to empty out the story, so that just the clean gestures of the young are left, brittle and delicious. Their nourishing secrets…Then I could claim that nothing mattered to Camille and Dusty except their alert twists through the warm folds of an old pair of sheets, soft as lambskin.
But of course that’s not true. Dusty had legal problems. After the bust her name had been on the front page of their small town newspaper. Dusty’s brother had seen the headlines and called Dusty’s mother, who then locked herself in the bathroom and called Dusty.
“I can’t believe you’ve been a… you’ve been a… prostitute…” she wailed, and broke down into bitter sobs.
As a character, I want Camille to be just a little hole through which events stream. But she’s never little enough. It’s so awkward. Some words flare up from the page. That word whore, case in point. Push it a bit and it opens out into fields of degradation and crime. Which can’t be the whole truth. How can a story be true, when it’s situated inside distortion?
Camille was an escape artist inside language. The trick is not getting caught. This actually works well. The only problem is that you erase your past as you go. I reflected on this the other night as I was driving home, past a long line of dark warehouse doors and tiny, pitted alleys. By the middle of the street I’d drifted into one of those states where this was the only street. The beginning and ending of all streets hung motionless around me as each instant peeled off and fluttered soundlessly into the past. Then I noticed two women standing at the curb. They were sheathed in gleaming body suits, and crimson and yellow boas were piled in snaky coils around their necks. They looked like Vegas showgirls poised to step into a limo, bigger than life, confident in their glittering details. They surprised the darkness. That complexity has always been captivating for me. It’s not all the ostrich feathers at once but each separately that charms me, and then my brain starts to fizz. But I was driving. I had to look back at the road.
The feeling had a metallic aftertaste. Otherwise it was just synapses firing according to some schema I’d stored. It didn’t add up to either pleasure or pain. Is this melancholy? Or something more inaccessible.
I think of chunks of my past as pieces of brain chemistry. It accounts for how alien they feel, while still being tender. They have moved entirely out of language, into something else—the folds and fissures of this thing I carry around. Luggage between the ears. This story is coming from brain tissue, and that makes it alien and intimate, even to me.
But I’m writing it, and that means I’m taking experience through the fake death which follows artificial life. To me, writing doesn’t feel like an act of the imagination. It’s more like the sedimentary traces of that act, a kind of cleaning up after the fact. That’s all right, at least I can accept it. But then I’m stuck with the question of what gets made when words are piled together… This paragraph, for instance. I think it’s a dwelling place for a sort of ghost, one who whines, craves visitors, is erotically frustrated. Into this eternal present (which is eternal because it never arrived in the first place), the hapless reader stumbles, turns around in confusion, then crashes through the rear exit. Reading is a kind of crashing through meaning—as the ghost is my witness.
The past sags into ghostliness.
I prefer syllables, on account of what they do to you, Agatha, my dear reader—how they rub your eardrums like tiny rags. All your drums are so clean now. That’s how we stay in touch, and I love it, at least in theory.
But I’m getting away from my story. To be honest I’m uneasy with it, especially the hunk of girl love in the middle, steaming and sweet. Camille and Dusty embarrass me. Does the world need more lesbian corn? A writer friend of mine told me, Definitely not. I think he was being cruel.
It wasn’t a romance. It was this: Camille had risen out of teenage social death like a swamp thing, long hair in knots, her clothes still smelly. As she was still re-learning how to wash, to eat, to talk, she found this girl Dusty. Who had a body like a silky blade. Who was paramilitary when it came to shooting off her mouth. Dusty seemed like a sheriff in an old western, who for obscure personal reasons, had taken up a life of crime. Dusty brought honor to the wrong side of the law. For Camille it was like stumbling into paradise. She had found her flowering shrub.
Yours always,
Camille
Dear Agatha,
Mostly, it’s boring to be a girl. You are a prisoner of your girlish appearance. You can’t get outside. You are either with all the other girls studying themselves in mirrors as they dream of devouring meat, their own excess flesh, anything to get rid of it permanently, or someone is trying to stuff something weird between your legs. It’s one or the other.
I was clear on this. Being a mess gave me a kind of immunity, but it didn’t make me stupid. Far from it. In truth, understanding roared inside me as regards to the whole situation of girls, although it didn’t quite trouble me, because I ignored trouble even when I was in it. In my characteristically vague but stubborn way, I disregarded the situation of girls. After all, I had never been inside anything, including appearances. I was too skittish.
I never said no, or yes. I trembled constantly, a hungry ghost.
So when I pushed open the pink door of the massage parlor, and found its yellow sateen couch coated with girls and they were wearing bright ’70s loungewear and waving cheerfully at me, I leapt over the threshold. I threw myself through the door. As though to the accompaniment of timpani, a drum roll, the cacophony of hormonal triggers… It was the summer I turned twenty one.
Some moments are perfectly lurid, but also fresh. That moment rose like a welt from its historical bed and I fell in it.
I was in love with my times, and that meant hate was interesting. Vietnam was over, but it had left residue—the mob in the street, which included everyone I kn
ew. Anyone could join, so we did. Political life was filled with spite, and much of it came from us, or our kind. Each day took place within the margin between the passing hour and imminent collapse, for that was all that many of us believed in. Even the corruptions of the state seemed exhausted. Any small act of rebellion might be the final straw.
It turned private desperation into a kind of festival. I’m digressing now from the specifics of the parlor, but I want to decorate this part of my story with another one, the story of Sara and Sand. Sara was political, in the paranoid style of the times, and Sand was younger, impressionable. Sara became involved in a particularly fierce ideological argument, and when she lost that argument, she claimed the entire revolution for herself. She turned herself into a cause. Sand remained faithful, really she clung to Sara. She became Sara’s party of one. For a few months, no meeting or demonstration could occur without Sara and Sand, bitterly silent, striking a pose that conveyed Sara’s heroic martyrdom and Sand’s abject loyalty. This was widely understood as Sara trying to haunt us with the ghost of her leadership, and it was annoying to everyone. Then, for a few months, they were rarely seen. When Sara surfaced, she announced that she and Sand were going to leave town in a van and travel as gypsy-witch-communists. This was a bit of Sara’s trickery, an example of her inclination towards subterfuge, for instead of leaving town, they wrapped themselves in toilet paper and lit it on fire.
Sara went up like a torch and died. Sand lost her nerve at the last instant, and rolled frantically around on the wall-to-wall shag. Still, her ear burned off, as well as the skin on one arm. She lay in a burn bath for a month, then she was shipped home to be cared for by her alcoholic parents.
The war at home. It was luxurious, all that anger. It sprang forth everywhere like the weeds of a wet hot summer in Mississippi dirt. I still miss it. I believed in that anger, in its promises. I got through everything, any grueling adventure, because I was waiting for that anger to finally and completely arrive—a moment when the daily world would shimmer and crack into pieces, a broken mirror, and we would all run into the street, barking like dogs. Free at last.
