by Camille Roy
Sometimes I feel that the truest respect one can show towards the past is to allow it to be something other than a predecessor of the present. Perhaps its alien and most forbidden nature did not reproduce. Exploring the deep lostness of what has died out is a freedom I didn’t have when I was young.
1977. Fast stride. Headed down the street. Rollicking, with cowlick and leather motorcycle jacket. In my new Doc Martens, I was going someplace, for sure.
The day changed with the shadow. I am tall but he had to lean down to get in my face. It was a strange feeling, that face of contorted rage plunging towards me, blocking out the sky. His shrieks hummed with malice and hysteria. “You fucking dyke!!” he yelled, over and over. I suspect what set him off was that I existed, and I clearly felt good. There was a long moment when I thought he’d pound me into the pavement.
But suddenly he was gone, mysteriously redirected.
Almost immediately I ran into my friend Meredith. She led me into the nearest bar where she listened without saying a word and bought me a couple of whiskies. Meredith had an encompassing presence and big ’70s rock star blond hair. She was a singer in a successful local band. But even when she wasn’t singing, she had an internal vibration like a barely audible tuning fork. I think her eyes quivered a tiny bit, deep within that large nest of hair. Whatever it was, it really relaxed me.
Being a lesbian meant living at the edge of a disastrous and threatening form of visibility. Recognition could turn to violence in an instant, although mostly there was erasure and absolute zero cultural capital.
Yet social life constructs itself even when there is intense desire that it not exist. The way we were erased made us hyper visible—to each other. This felt like a form of molecular liveliness: tiny, insouciant, and sharp enough to cut. It gave me a zone of freedom that was intoxicating.
The terms that would describe us were lurid… so distance fell away. We were inside, touching, without perspective…
…even as we were outside of society, ghostly, hidden.
(Under Grid: An Obscure Manifesto)
Living under such conditions changes a person’s relation to time. The present is magnified; intensified. Night after night we displayed ourselves at the bar. We could mimic and disrupt the social codes of eroticism and gender. We played with butch and femme with more expressive freedom because we got to be meaningless: a freedom which can’t be bought. We were at the intersection of nothing and gender.
Ink smudges on a wet cocktail napkin—someone’s private message disappears between the hem of her stocking and her thigh.
(Artificial)
Meaninglessness can be infused with relation and feeling. Invisibility is a risk but also a shelter; it can proffer freedom if it becomes a location of community. All revolutions (in values as well as governments) begin in these underground and secret spaces. Such places, even when contingent and fragile, are where the stifling rigidities of the historical moment can mutate into something new.
As a young lesbian, the obscurity of my person became a comfortable condition. I didn’t think it would ever be disturbed.
(Under Grid: An Obscure Manifesto)
It was lovely to be ignored by the dominant culture—a major symptom of the chronic infection that is misogyny is pervasive and remorseless judginess of women. The ridiculous messages that aimed to control and infest women with insecurities and self-hate were too far away to be heard distinctly. This was particularly useful for me because, in my adolescence, I experienced what might now be called gender dysphoria. I simply could not relate to femaleness, at least my own. Being a lesbian at that time was a fantastic shield from the sexism of the dominant culture. Our oppression and the feminism we invented made the barrier so effective it eased our relationship to our bodies. This was a sweet accident of my youth.
Camille & Angie, 1985
I remember when the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs got its first big-brand ad: Absolut Vodka. It was stunning and even a little uncanny that they were so enlightened they saw us as a market. It became a regular thing, an Absolut Vodka ad on the back cover. Capitalism?
What do you do, when you give yourself the freedom to play with gender and not be suffocated by its images? For us, spoof was an integral element. We were gender shoplifters. Using gender this way put us in the wrong, and that suited me. This was the context the femme in me needed to strut. The moment has passed and so has my interest.
But Angie used to say I wasn’t a femme, I just liked power, whereas she was really a butch from childhood.
She was good at fistfights, for example. Headlocks. Add in baseball, tennis, football, basketball. Tennis lessons were available in her working-class neighborhood for twenty-five cents and these led to newspaper stories about a budding prodigy. It didn’t happen because her family didn’t have the money.
Angie had straight male friends who loved her as much as it is possible to love a friend. She moved among people with disarming frankness and warmth.
My father described her as a realist, a deep compliment and a true one.
A gay male friend recently joked that no matter who was in the room, Angie was the butchest one there. This was partly about social class and then also what we thought of as butch skills, honed with years of dedication: auto mechanics, home repair. She could throw a baseball like nobody’s business.
I had a video made of Angie’s memorial. It was expensive but worth every penny. There is a haze around violations of the gender contract. People who live that rebellion successfully, with grace and courage, must be seen to be believed. Their disappearance is more profound because the rules they broke in life reformulate in their absence, as if they never lived. But the memorial disrupted that. Angie blazed. The stories about her and her life, the witnessing performed by dear and longtime friends, made a kind of historical document.
I was asked recently whether Angie’s gender identity was he. It’s odd for me to field such a question for Angie. Hers was a working-class butch feminism which took pleasure in violating gender norms, in concert with other butches—emphatically and rebelliously as women. The question has the side effect of obscuring an important part of her life’s work. As I explained to my friend, Angie was a badass super athlete butch dyke who spent at least a decade hauling the word butch out of the trash, so that she and younger lesbians could feel comfortable with it. Part of this work was being a role model of survival skills: social, physical, political. Survival is a collective accomplishment.
I don’t believe my answer to the question about my lover’s gender identity can be understood as it stands. It’s referencing community experience which is largely unrepresented and invisible. A story that our friend Sally shared at Angie’s memorial gives it some context. I’ve included it below with her permission.
I’m going to share a brief story about something I learned from my friend Angie, something that I use often in my work and when I’m out in the world. First a bit of background: Angie and I became friends in about 1982—I was in my early ’20s—and before long we were going off on camping trips together mostly to Big Sur and then later up to the Eel River in Humboldt County. Angie was a great breath of fresh air. She was comfortable with sexuality and really savvy about sexual politics. She was butch and completely unapologetic. She was wild, she loved to laugh, she had a million friends, and she was as in love with the magic of the natural world as much as I was. We could easily spend a day meandering along a stream or a trail looking at everything—plants, rocks, frogs, newts, lizards, snakes, birds. She was eight years my elder and, at that time, I thought of her as a kind of guide to the ways of the world.
…On one of our camping trips, Angie and I decided we’d spend the entire day swimming down the Eel River. And so, one morning, we got in the water near our camp at Standish-Hickey and had an unforgettable day, just floating along, watching ospreys overhead, lying around on warm sand banks, examining rocks, and talking. At the end of a long, wonderful day, we climbed out for the last tim
e, dried off in the sun, and hiked up to the highway to hitchhike back to camp. We were hungry and sunburned, and so first we decided to get something to eat at a scruffy looking little bar nearby. I was a little reluctant, but Angie wanted to go in, so we did.
We were shoulder-to-shoulder as we opened the door. It took a couple of seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and for me to realize that we were in what I considered dangerous and hostile territory. There were about a dozen men inside sitting at the bar and they all turned their heads and stared at us. I hesitated and took a step backward. Angie grabbed my elbow and whispered in my ear, ‘COME ON. DON‘T YOU THINK THEY‘VE EVER SEEN A COUPLE OF BUTCHES BEFORE?’ And so, we walked in.
Angie immediately started working the room, pointing to the little tv up in the corner above the bar and asking who was winning the baseball game—the Giants or the Dodgers? She asked what they thought about the new shortstop and whether he’d make it in the majors or be sent back down to Triple A. She wanted to know what was on the menu, whether it was homemade, what everyone did for a living, who owned farms, who had herding dogs, what kind of dog was the best herder, whether llamas were better guards than dogs, whether the winter would be rainy, had anyone seen any river otters nearby, offered to show them around San Francisco next time they visited, and promised that she knew all the best restaurants. I was mostly quiet that evening, watching her in action. I’m sure you can all picture this in your minds—Angie loosening everyone up, turning the focus of attention from us to them, changing the equation with her enthusiasm, her laugh, her curiosity and her good will. Late that evening, one of the guys gave us a ride all the way to our camp in the back of his flatbed—I remember sitting with Angie, a blueeyed dog and a couple of bales of sweet alfalfa. The cooling summer air smelled so good.
Later I became an engineer—thanks in part to the encouragement I received from Angie—and I use what I think of as Angie techniques when I’m at construction sites dealing with the same kind of flinty, skeptical dudes we encountered at the bar. It’s a friendly but firm and unapologetic judo. I picked it up from Angie and I use it all the time.
Is this little story surprising in an afterword? I discovered my need to include it only in the process of composing the text. The discovery accompanied the realization that the more difficult comments I’ve encountered since Angie’s death can be interpreted as acts of lesbian erasure.
The afterword, I came to understand, could be used to create safety for myself. Via the afterword, I can set boundaries on what people feel free to say to me. Because I am a widow—a lesbian widow, with thirty-six years of history in that relationship and embedded in that community—the erasure is intolerable—too deeply painful to be endured. I am unwilling.
My intent is to create silence around myself on these matters, not discourse. I think this creates a nourishing emptiness which is a part of how I want to live now.
Meanwhile, there is the language of the book, which is the meeting place of the living and the dead. It is open for business. I hope that it can be entered by anyone, and feasted upon, like the washed-up carcass of a whale. It reminds me of the last lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At The Fishhouses.”
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Goodbye, beloveds.
Notes
Lynette #1
Bernstein, Charles. “Socialist Realism or Real Socialism?” Soup. No. 4. 1985.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, IL: Black & Red, 1977.
Dyer, Richard. “Male Gay Porn.” Jumpcut. No. 30. March 1985.
Goldstein, Richard. “Kramer’s Complaint.” Village Voice. 2 July 1985.
Weene, Seph. “Venus.” Heresies #12. Vol. 3, No. 4. 1981.
Under Grid
Brossard, Nicole. Picture Theory. Barbara Godard, trans. Toronto, ON: Guernica Editions Inc., 2009.
Glück, Robert. “Long Note on New Narrative.” Biting the Error. Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Gail Scott, eds. Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2004.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “The Principles of Philosophy, or The Monadology.” Philosophical Essays by G.W. Leibniz. Roger Ariew and David Garber, eds. and trans. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989.
Tiffany, Daniel. Infidel Poetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Acknowledgements
My influences include the New Narrative group (Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Steve Abbott, Sam D’Allesandro, Mike Amnasan, among others) and fellow travelers such as Eileen Myles, Gail Scott, Carla Harryman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Rachel Levitsky, Kathy Acker, kari edwards, Renee Gladman, Lawrence Braithwaite, and Abigail Child. If I allow myself to follow the ripples as they expand outwards there are more: Samuel Ace. Michelle Tea. Mary Burger. Dia Felix. Amanda Davidson. Leslie Scalapino. Tisa Bryant. Pam Lu. And still more: early on, I was electrified by feminist poetics, especially as exemplified in Kathleen Fraser’s work. And earlier still, Gloria Anzaldúa was a formative writing exemplar and teacher, my first in San Francisco. (This was through the workshop “El Mundo Surdo.”)
As a list reduces its contents to items, so this list is a reduction of extraordinary experiences. The cumulative effect was a deep and generous permission that has fueled decades of work. Thank you, everyone! We’ve been companions of the imagination, spurring one another on. Because of you, my writing has taken risks—erotic, personal, intellectual—in a process which has wavered between delighted confusion and flashes of debasement.
Thanks to the editors, publishers, and friends who have supported this work over the years in the following magazines and anthologies: Amerarcana, Biting the Error, Dear World, From Our Hearts to Yours, Mirage/Period(ical), and Writers Who Love Too Much. Thanks to Abigail Child for permission to reprint “Sex Talk,” which also appeared in her collection This Is Called Moving. “The Faggot” and “Perils” were originally published as Swarm by Bruce Boone and Robert Glück’s Black Star Editions. Craquer was published as a chapbook by Mary Burger’s 2nd Story Books. Thanks to Kelsey Street Press for their permission to reprint several pieces from The Rosy Medallions: “BABY,” “Fetish,” “My X Story,” and “Sex Life.”
This book would not exist without the dedication of the editors Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen. Honey Mine was originally their idea. At every step they were inspiring co-conspirators with invaluable advice. They have made the book better. I am more grateful than I can say.
My deepest thanks to Nightboat. The press has done amazing work, especially with New Narrative writers. Honey Mine being included on their list truly feels like home. I appreciate Lindsey Boldt’s support and understanding throughout.
My mother always had a fierce identification with my writing, and I am deeply grateful for the permission this gave me. Her lifelong rule-breaking example has been a great legacy and another source of freedom.
Lastly, I would like to dedicate the book to my dearly beloved partner and wife, Angela Margaret Romagnoli. You are with me always.
Camille Roy’s most recent book is Sherwood Forest. Other books include Cheap Speech, a play, Craquer, a fictional autobiography, Swarm, The Rosy Medallions, and Cold Heaven. She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and Open Space, the SFMoma blog. She lives in San Francisco, California.
Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of the poetry collections The Braid, Justice Piece // Transmission, and Nightwork. They live in Richmond, California.
Eric Sneathen is the author of Snail Poems and Minor Work. With Daniel Benjamin, he edited The Bigness
of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture. His next poetry collection, Don’t Leave Me This Way, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries. We publish books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. Please visit nightboat.org to learn about our titles and how you can support our future publications.
The following individuals have supported the publication of this book. We thank them for their generosity and commitment to the mission of Nightboat Books:
Kazim Ali
Anonymous (4)
Abraham Avnisan
Jean C. Ballantyne
The Robert C. Brooks Revocable Trust
Amanda Greenberger
Rachel Lithgow
Anne Marie Macari
Elizabeth Madans
Elizabeth Motika
Thomas Shardlow
Benjamin Taylor
Jerrie Whitfield & Richard Motika
This book is made possible by support from the Topanga Fund, which is dedicated to promoting the arts and literature of California.
