by Susie Bright
“What do they bust you with?” I asked Corinne, the girl I ran down the railroad tracks with, my lungs ready to burst.
“Lewd and lascivious behavior,” she said. “And anything else they can cook up. Then they make you a sex offender, and you can’t get a job for the rest of your life.”
Women’s Studies was a refuge from bar life. One of my favorite classes was nicknamed Women’s Bodies 101. Our teacher, Betty Brooks, lectured that women were so unfamiliar with their own genitals that they might spend their whole life not knowing what their own vulva looked like. Quite a different life experience than a man. It reminded me of my girlfriends in The Red Tide when we tore up the sexist health class textbook.
Brooks had some inspired ideas. She told us to go home, get out crayons and a mirror, and draw our cunts. Brilliant! I went home, called over Corinne, and we couldn't wait to get out the paints and paper. “Why didn’t we think of this before?” All our vulvas were different, just like faces and thumbprints. Why didn’t we see art and anatomy like this all the time?
The next day in class, the students requested open-question time. Betty was like a one-woman hotline, and we hung on her every word. A girl with dark curls and a widow’s peak raised her hand, put it down, then raised it again even higher.
She took a huge breath. “I feel fine about … masturbation … you know, by itself,” she said. “I’m really glad … I’m lucky, I know how to give myself an orgasm.” She looked around like someone might take it back from her. Betty gestured with her hands, Yes, yes, what’s bugging you?
“I have” — the dark-eyed Madonna paused, twisting in her peasant blouse — “rape fantasies.” Her voice cracked. “They make me come, sometimes. Yeah, sometimes I can’t stop them and I feel so bad, I know it’s bad. What’s wrong with me?” With her dimples, she looked like Shirley Temple.
Betty didn’t have a chance to reply. “Shirley’s” confession made the whole room explode. Other students rushed to answer her. “It’s the patriarchy! We’ve been fucking brainwashed! It’s not your fault! You can change!”
Others pulled back like turtles in their shells. I was one of these. The first thing I thought was, Well, I have those kind of fantasies, too. I have all kinds of crazy fantasies.
I didn’t talk about them, but I realized … I would like to. If I was alone with that girl right now, I would take her by the shoulders and say, “This is normal.”
I doubted she wanted to be raped or assaulted. Duh. No one does. I had been bullied and pushed around and forced to do things I didn’t like. It was nothing like my erotic fantasy world, where everything went exactly according to my arousal and whim. In fantasy, I got only as scared as I wanted to be. I was only as subservient or sadistic as I cared to conjure. It started and ended with my trigger finger. Contrary to my real life, fantasies were … mine.
Everyone must realize that — why was everyone in class speaking so literally?
Sex education in women’s studies was an odd duck. It was fantastic as far as anatomy went:
“Where’s your clit?”
Here.
“Who has the power to determine our body’s fate?”
The individual and no other.
But when it came to the sexual life of the mind, we entered the realm of the psychological, and the women’s studies door clicked shut.
I knew a great deal of “psychology” had done nothing for women except declare them hysterical and aberrant if they didn’t behave. There was that stumbling block.
But there had always been a bohemian crossroads of art, mind, and spirit. I knew I wasn’t the first feminist to get in the fast car. Some of the most inspiring women we studied were sexually unconventional. Victoria Brownworth stood on a soapbox and demanded “free love.” Emma Goldman said if you couldn’t dance to it, it wasn’t her revolution. I had faced this same thing with the IS. … Why did some of our comrades pretend that our ancestors were straitlaced? It was as if Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.
In the eighties, when I published On Our Backs, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian,” many Women’s Studies Departments protested my work. I felt like I was running into my CSULB classroom everywhere, like the clock had been frozen.
In 1989, for example, I went to the University of Minnesota to speak on the history of lesbian eroticism in cinema. I was greeted at the podium by a phalanx of women carrying “blood”-stained banners who demanded to read a protest letter. Everyone is unfailingly polite in Minneapolis, so I moved to the side and crunched on my Baby Ruth while a young woman with a voice like Sarah Bernhardt read from her script:
First, it was the Roman Empire.
Then the Holocaust.
And now, the University of Minnesota has invited Susie Bright to speak on pornography.
She was serious.
I gave my lecture, which was well received. People laughed with good humor. I didn’t seem like the monster whom “Sarah” had described. I was pregnant with Aretha, and when I went to the bathroom, I asked the event producer to escort me. As if on cue, I was rushed by a student hiding in the toilets, her eyes burning like she’s been awake for nights.
“You are responsible for women’s genocide!” she said. She was carrying something sharp in her hand. She stopped mid-speech and took in my big belly, like it hadn’t been on her screen before. In my protestors’ minds, I was killing women with my wicked fantasies, not creating new life.
I remembered that girl in Betty Brooks’s class. Was there a knife behind her helpless plea? I knew she wanted attention. But what kind?
Even in Betty’s class, I sensed that if I had comforted the girl — “There’s nothing wrong with you. Call off the witch hunt; let’s think about this” — it would not have been welcome. Everyone was talking in rhetoric.
I could have told The-Girl-in-the-Peasant-Blouse, “Someday your fantasies will change, but it will be because you have more sexual experience, not less.”
She might learn to be tender to herself. She might blink and see that not everything was so black and white.
How I Got Introduced to On Our Backs
A love poem brought me to On Our Backs. A great swirling erotic gust that picked me up and dropped me down in rich dirt like Dorothy Gaynor.
I was twenty-two. I had one credit left to graduate from college, my “hard science” requirement. I’d transferred from Long Beach to UC Santa Cruz, where activism and adventure were an easy fit. But UCSC still expected me, a high school dropout, to learn my molecules and formulas.
I procrastinated. I thought I might get rich for a summer, in 1981, by joining my friends who were planning a season of work in Alaskan fisheries. Salmon, salmon, and more salmon. The scheme was, we’d eat doughnuts and fish and fly to Hawaii when the season came to a halt or our fingers went numb.
Young people like my Santa Cruz girlfriends and I poured into the fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, every year with such dreams. But the summer of 1981, there was a catch. The full-time fishery workers went on strike.
Ah, catnip. I got involved with the Longshoremen’s Union like flypaper and sap. Getting rich wasn’t on the agenda; I was eating doughnuts exclusively. I lived with six other people in a three-person tent located on a pallet at the top of a mud cliff. Dumpster diving, pallet scavenging, beautiful midnight suns — Alaskan days and nights blurred together, and it was August before I knew it.
I began to hitchhike home, starting with a small plane back to the Yukon. I looked like a boy with a bowl haircut out of The Grapes of Wrath, and all my muddy possessions were in my embroidered (“Alaska or Bust”) Kelty backpack. I had achieved both.
It was a beautiful road trip; for a time I was happily escorted by other adventurers, and no fewer than three Deadhead school-bus conversions. I felt close to home when I stuck my thumb out on Interstate 5 out of Eugene in southern Oregon, with a sign that said: South: Humboldt.
A solitary Datsun driver, bald, with three days�
�� beard, picked me up and started speed-rapping. Guess what? Everybody was against him. Another Earl Van Nuys. I nodded sympathetically and wondered how long before the next gas station stop, where I could make an excuse to get out.
The driver — “Call me C.B.” — kept one arm on the wheel at all times. But when we crossed the state line, he reached under the seat with his free hand, pulled out a handgun, and set it in his lap. “I gotta protect myself, shit, the people I pick up, these fucking faggots, I have to protect myself!” he said. I didn’t take my eyes off that gun.
Then I tuned in.
“You know, you could suck me off,” C.B. was saying. “Suck me right here; I’m doing you a big favor, and I don’t even know who you are. You could be anybody, and I couldn't trust you, but if you sucked me off, it would be like we could trust each other.”
I answered as if he’d asked me whether I could spare a moment to make him tea and toast. Nice and slow and really quiet: the eggshell walk.
“Let me tell you, mister, it’s like this,” I said to him. “My sister Tracey is expecting a baby — a home birth — any hour now, and that I have to make it to Arcata, that’s fifty more miles, on the double.”
A man frightens you with a handgun, you counter with childbirth. Something equally terrifying.
C.B. let me off in Trinidad. “This is fine,” I said, opening the door before he came to a full stop.
I walked the rest of the way to Spinster Hollow, my “sister Tracey’s” lesbian commune. Eight women sharing all their income and expenses to live on the land. Tracey was in fine condition and not pregnant in the least — but some of her roommates wanted to be.
I walked into a Spinster Hollow biology lesson being held in the main cabin, where everyone shared common space. One of the other collective members, Marilyn, wanted to get pregnant as soon as possible. She’d “borrowed” a microscope from Humboldt State University to take a closer look at whether her insemination tactics were working.
A nice gay man in town was jacking off for her. I volunteered to go pick up his sperm. I drove a 1967 VW bug into town, collected Mr. Good Sport’s semen in a Gerber baby food jar, and tucked it into my down jacket to keep it warm.
When I got back to Marilyn, the turkey baster was ready. Everyone wanted to squeeze the bulb. There was a burst of comic recognition at our desire each to be “the one” who ejaculated, the thrust that would make it happen. “Let it be me!”
We took turns. Marilyn was supine. She did a shoulder stand. After a few minutes, she wanted to test the sperm’s motility. We swabbed her, put the mucus specimen on a glass slide, and looked through the microscope. I had never used a microscope before. Wow. More science in one morning than I’d had in a lifetime.
The sperm were madly wriggling about. Exhilarating!
It was too soon to see whether Marilyn’s fertility rite had been successful. I had only a few days to get back to Santa Cruz. I made a forlorn but final decision, with Tracey hugging me for luck: I would waste no more time passing my science class. My turn behind the microscope had given me hope that my attempt at completing college might not be a complete fiasco.
I enrolled in San Francisco City College and chose: astronomy. Who doesn’t love a dark sky and beautiful stars? I had a glorious memory of the night in 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder onto the Big Green Cheese — my first time seeing color television.
Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Lesley, made Jiffy Pop popcorn and crackers and onion dip. Even Mrs. Lesley’s miserable teenage son crept into the room for the moon walk. All the miserable vapors from America’s culture wars disappeared for one evening, as weightless as space junk.
With that history, I was sure I could master the City College astronomy class. When I arrived the first day of school, I was like a constellation, so white, so fair, so filled with literary references. The only way I could remember anything the professor handed out was to recall the Greek myths my mother taught me. It was as good a route as any into my professor’s heart.
My last course in college became a treat instead of a burden. I would get a respectable B. My real problem became housing, money. I was crashing in my sleeping bag in a gay commune at 986 Valencia Street. All the bedrooms were full, but there was a generous sill below the window in the storefront. The sun poured down on my Therm-a-Rest. Upstairs, a Rajneesh commune performed their self-titled “chaotic mediations” and fucked their brains out while we, the pinko queers downstairs, tried to have meetings. They called it their “spiritual practice.” We called the police.
I did janitorial gigs, waitressed a few banquets out of Local 2, cleaned sinsemilla from the Spinsters in Humboldt and sold it for $40 an ounce. I just wanted a normal wage job. Tracey had moved to San Francisco, and she pointed out a notice in the newspaper: The Golden Gate Bridge District had been ordered by the courts to hire women, after years of discrimination. They needed lane changers, the people who move the traffic cones during rush hour. I could do that! I had the perfect interview gambit: “Yes, I know the bridge weather is cruel. It would scare any normal person, but you have to understand: I’ve been living on a mud pallet in Alaska and skinning my own squirrels. This is nothing.”
Those bridge veterans probably met vigorous and physically able women all day long. I was the one who was impressed with my heretofore undiscovered physical prowess. I didn’t know I had it in me.
My love life and my political interests filled every spare minute I wasn’t job scrounging. I was part of a queer artists’ collective called Mainstream Exiles that went a lot further than anything I’d experienced quoting Rita Mae Brown. Wasn’t she dating tennis players now and raising racehorses? Her revolution had taken a detour to plusher pleasures.
I had a lot of crushes in our group — there were so many charismatic people: Rhiannon, Max Valerio, Marga Gomez, Tom Ammiano, Tede Matthews, Reno, Lea DeLaria — it was the birth of the San Francisco gay comedy and performance art scene.
I wanted to do a show, too, my own show. I knew what the title would be: Girls Gone Bad. I had a treasure trove of old pulp novels from the golden years of early paperbacks, the ones that presented titillating case histories of twilight women — insatiable, fiendish, and horny. These kinds of books didn’t get discussed in school, but you’d find them in drawers, tackle boxes, under car seats. I was fascinated with literature that everyone knew about but no one spoke of. I wanted to mash up some of that genre with the catechisms of Catholic virtue I’d been brought up with.
One of my old lovers from Alaska — Terry — came up to crash with me on a holiday weekend. It was Carnival, the holiday that turned the Latin Mission District into a tsunami of samba. Tede, my roommate, found a magenta-pink taffeta ball gown in the streets outside my window, and said, “It’s you, Cinderella.” It felt so good. If he could wear beautiful skirts and corsets, surely I could be just as quixotically femme.
When I made love to Terry that night, I put my whole hand inside of her. It just happened. My fist curled like a rose hip, inside a place that was so soft. She coiled around me, like she was lost, like a kitten who hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
The day after our rendezvous, my ball gown came off, and I was back in Astronomy 101 in my cutoffs and Queers Support the Sandinistas T-shirt. I didn’t pay much attention to anything our dear professor was saying, because I was busy writing a love poem:
1. Rocky outer crust
Icy mantle
liquid nitrogen, a kernel
Hissing at the core.
2. Compare planets with lovers:
As with cosmic evolution,
There are many mysteries
Does life exist on other planets?
Where did we come from?
Your orbit
Was like a magnetic field
baby
That hurts
I was so attracted too
And now
I cannot touch
Your outer rim
Without remembering a dream
I fucked you round a dance floor
Like a wheelbarrow, your hair mopping the ground
And legs about my waist
The sweat ran down my neck
And trickled on the underside
Of your breasts
They curved like a sulphur plume
The next night, Tede invited me to read at Modern Times Bookstore Collective, just two doors down. A gay Marxist bookshop: yummy.
I read my poems. I felt like Elizabeth Taylor in Maggie the Cat’s nylons. My words gave me a presence that my spectacles and hunched shoulders wouldn’t otherwise suggest.
Someone during the show’s break told me that Good Vibrations needed a “feminist vibrator clerk;” I thought maybe I’d apply for that along with the bridge job. Good Vibes had one employee who’d left town suddenly with broken heart. I wondered who that was.
Vibrators, huh? That could be more fun than changing traffic cones. My heart was the opposite of broken — it was bursting with leaps of faith.
Two days after the Modern Times poetry reading, I found in my mailbox a handwritten letter from a stranger.
The message was curlicued, in fountain pen, a beautiful hand, from a young woman named Myrna Elana. She said she was the cofounder of a new magazine in the works called On Our Backs (OOB). I burst out laughing before she even got to the title’s explanation: they were dedicated to tweaking the prudery of puritanical feminist publications like off our backs. The conservative feminists believed sexual liberation was playing into the hands of the bestial impulses of male dominance. Ah, science!
The premise of OOB was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distant planets. We were alive to sex and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be. I couldn’t wait.
Myrna wrote that my writing was “beautiful,” that she had been sitting on one of the metal folding chairs at Modern Times. She asked me if they could include my poems in the first issue — or anything else I might have in my desk drawer. She said she’d loved to meet me. It was my very first fan letter.
