Empathy

by Sarah Schulman

  But.

  The success of After Delores allowed my editor Carole to publish more lesbian novels, and she developed a significant list of good writers willing to engage lesbian content with integrity. Lesbian subjectivity was increasingly present in the mainstream book business, primarily due to Dutton, and occasional titles from St. Martin’s and a few other houses publishing such exciting novels as Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine , Carolivia Herron’s Thereafter Johnny, plus British imports dominated by the work of Jeanette Winterson. But an unspoken, and I now believe unrecognized, discomfort with the normalization of lesbian life started to become expressed through marketing techniques that firmly, though surreptitiously, re-relegated these works to second-class status. The chain booksellers, like Barnes and Noble, began to dominate the market, and they instituted a “gay and lesbian” section in many of their branch stores. This section was never positioned at the front of the store with the bestsellers. It was usually on the fourth floor hidden behind the potted plants. What this meant in practical terms was that those of us who had the integrity to be out in our work found our books literarily yanked off of the “Fiction” shelves and hidden on the gay shelves, where only “gay” people wanting “gay” books would dare to tread. It was an instant undoing of all the progress we had made to be treated as full citizens and a natural, organic part of American intellectual life.

  While community-based gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstores had always been the backbone of our literature, devoted to books published by independent presses, I had - at this point - been a mainstream author for years. I felt very strongly, and still do, that authentic lesbian literature should be represented at all levels of publishing, including taking its rightful place as a natural organic part of mainstream American intellectual life. The corporate lockdown went into overdrive just at the moment that this integration was beginning to take place. This positioning is essential for so many reasons, least of which is the right of writers of merit to not be excluded from financial, emotional, and intellectual development simply because they have the integrity to be out in their work. Second is the right of gay people to be in dialogic relationships with straights - where they read and identify with our work as we are asked to with theirs. And finally, that even at the height of the strength of the lesbian subculture, most gay people find out about gay things through the mainstream media.

  In this crucial year, 1992, Dutton, and perhaps other publishers of gay male literature, hired gay people to market their gay books to other gay people. In other words, they created a two-tiered marketing system. When After Delores had been published, there was no gay substructure inside mainstream publishing, so the book was treated like a book. It was reviewed by a heterosexual man, Kinky Friedman, for the Times. At the time, Dutton didn’t even collect review clippings from gay newspapers. Now, with an iron-handed containment system starting to be put into place, gay books were increasingly reviewed by gay people. And reviewing publications clearly had unarticulated but lethal quota systems for how many lesbian books they would review. So that authors were competing against each other for review space, simply on the basis of being out in their work even when the books had absolutely nothing else in common. Gay authors were, in turn, often asked to review gay books with which they were not aesthetically compatible. The fact of being out in one’s work became the single most determining factor in how a woman’s career would be allowed to develop. Empathy was published in 1992. That same year, Dutton published a novel by an openly lesbian author, but the novel had no primary lesbian content. It was called Bastard Out of Carolina. And the two books were put on different marketing tiers. I was put on the newly created gay marketing track, sold only to other gay people. Bastard was treated like a regular book, one that straight people would be offered. An experienced book promoter, with four US tours and British, German, Dutch, and Japanese book tours under my belt, I was rather shocked to see the press list I received from the well-meaning gay Dutton publicist newly hired to sell gay books to gay people only. Almost all of the interviews were with gay venues. I had one straight radio interview, and the fellow asked me what it was like to be “a lesbian who doesn’t hate men.” When I called Carole, we discovered that that phrase had appeared on the Dutton press release. It was the advent of niche marketing, which basically guaranteed that the brief window of being treated like a human, when in fact I was actually just a lesbian, had come to an end.

  I have to say honestly that in that moment, I did not exactly understand what was going on. I also had my own agenda which was not immediately thwarted by the permanent shift towards containment marketing. 1992 was also the year that myself and five other women founded the direct action movement, The Lesbian Avengers, an anarchist explosion that went from a few New Yorkers imagining parachuting into Whitney Houston’s wedding, to twenty-two chapters on four continents within two years, and then crashed and burned. (See My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, Routledge, 1994 for more information.) At that time, I was a particular kind of person. I believed in the Marxist dictum, “Each according to their ability, each according to their need.” Often, I was the one with the ability, and so I gave hugely and consistently, believing that if the day should come when I was the one with the need, it would be reciprocated. I did not yet understand the consequence of oppression on people’s emotional lives. And I also did not deeply accept that in many ways I am an exceptional person, able and willing to do things that others won’t do. This has been a very difficult lesson for me to learn. I am willing to be uncomfortable for a higher purpose, and that is not a capacity shared by many other people, which is a source of great pain to me. After all, it was the willingness to write in the discomfort of unknowing for two years that allowed this novel to come to be. But in 1992, this had not all been revealed, and so I decided according to my ability to use my Empathy book tour to recruit Lesbian Avenger chapters around the country. I requested a tour of all the gay bookstores in the US South. Actually, I requested the tour budget, and constructed the tour myself. I read from Empathy and tried to start Lesbian Avenger chapters in Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Huntsville, Greensboro, Raleigh/Durham, Austin, and a number of other locations through to Los Angeles and up to San Francisco. Some of these chapters took hold, others came to be through second starts some months later, and others didn’t take at all. But in the end, it was a very successful tour for the Avenger movement.

  While the Avengers resonated with people’s needs and interests, the doors that I thought that Empathy would open about gender turned out to be entirely out of step with the historic moment. Instead, the zeitgeist was pointing in other directions. Judith Butler, someone who I like and respect, published Gender Trouble, which argued persuasively for gender as something presentational. My book tour of Germany coincided with hers, and every place I arrived, she had just departed. People kept asking in German accents, “But isn’t gender performative?” I found her followers to be sort of annoying. Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg also published significant books which extended the discussion of gender in the direction of body modification, dress, pronouns, and science, i.e. exteriority. The transsexual/transgender revolution was happening in a big way. Usually, when I would go on a book tour, I would ask audiences what lesbian books they loved. The previous year it had been Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan. Suddenly, every other dyke was reading Stone Butch Blues. The tide had turned in exactly the opposite direction from my own private revelations about the lesbian self. And the shift seemed permanent. Some years later, I heard Judith Halberstam speak at the Whitney Museum on her theory of “Female Masculinity.” I was very confused by her thesis, and raised my hand to ask, “Why do you say that butch is masculine?” I’d always experienced it as a highly feminine state. Everyone seemed to understand but me. The group conscience was going the other way. As Sun Ra said, “You’re on the right road but you’re going in the wrong direction.” In the subsequent decade, more women have decided to t
ransition and become men through body modification. As Empathy expresses, I have never personally experienced any similarity between lesbians and men. To me, lesbians and men were on opposite ends of “the continuum.”

  Even years later when I fell in love and experienced mutual sexual ecstasy and joy with a woman who had a transgendered identity, her maleness did not express itself in public presentation or body-modification. It was only in her soul. I gave her Empathy, but she never read it. Neither, apparently, did many other people. Empathy was my worst-selling book, the least reviewed (the Times ignored it), and the least translated (three foreign editions: Sheba, UK; Argument Verlag, Germany; Alfaguara, Spain). It has provoked the fewest Masters theses, doctoral dissertations, and chapters in academic books of any of my work. It is rarely taught. In short, it flopped.

  But I love it. Empathy is my free, wild child, the book I wrote from my deepest most optimistic place with my greatest skill. And I am so grateful to Arsenal Pulp Press for rescuing it from the recycling bin. Maybe this time around, it will make more sense to someone other than me.

  From Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Lillian Faderman (Viking Penguin, 1994)

  “The Penis Story” by Sarah Schulman, 1979

  The night before they sat in their usual spots. Jesse’s hair was like torrents of black oil plunging into the sea. Ann watched her, remembering standing in the butcher shop looking at smoked meat, smelling the grease, imagining Jesse’s tongue on her labia. She was starving.

  “I’m just waiting for a man to rescue me,” Jesse said.

  “Look, Jess,” Ann answered. “Why don’t we put a timeline on this thing. Let’s say forty. If no man rescues you by the time you’re forty, we’ll take it from a different angle. What do you say?”

  “I say I’ll be in a mental hospital by the time I’m forty.”

  Jesse was thirty-two. This was a realistic possibility.

  “Jesse, if instead of being two women, you and I were a woman and a man, would we be lovers by now?”

  “Yes.” Jess had to answer yes because it was so obviously true.

  “So what’s not there for you in us being two women? Is it something concrete about a man, or is it the idea of a man?”

  “I don’t think it’s anything physical. I think it is the idea of a man. I want to know that my lover is a man. I need to be able to say that.”

  Ann started to shake and covered her legs with a blanket so it wouldn’t be so obvious. She felt like a child. She put her head on Jesse’s shoulder feeling weak and ridiculous. Then they kissed. It felt so familiar. They’d been doing that for months. Each knew how the other kissed. Ann felt Jesse’s hand on her waist and back and chest. Jesse reached her hand to Ann’s bra. She’d done this before too. First tentatively, then more directly, she brushed her hands and face against Ann’s breasts. Ann kissed her skin and licked it. She sucked her fingers, knowing those nails would have to be cut if Jesse were to ever put her fingers into Ann’s body. She looked at Jesse’s skin, at her acne scars and blackheads. She wanted to kiss her a hundred times. Then, as always, Jesse became disturbed, agitated. “I’m nervous again,” she said. “Like, oh no - now I’m going to have to fuck.”

  Suddenly Ann remembered that their sexual life together was a piece of glass. She put on her shirt and went home. This was the middle of the night in New York City.

  When Ann awoke the next morning from unsettling dreams, she saw that a new attitude had dawned with the new day. She felt accepting, not proud. She felt ready to face adjustment and compromise. She was ready for change. Even though she was fully awake her eyes had not adjusted to the morning. She reached for glasses but found them inadequate. Then she looked down and saw that she had a penis.

  Surprisingly, she didn’t panic. Ann’s mind, even under normal circumstances, worked differently than the minds of many of those around her. She was able to think three thoughts at the same time, and as a result often suffered from headaches, disconnected conversation, and too many ideas. However, at this moment she only had two thoughts: “What is it going to be like to have a penis?” and “I will never be the same again.”

  It didn’t behave the way most penises do. It rather seemed to be trying to find its own way. It swayed a bit as she walked to the bathroom mirror, careful not to let her legs interfere, feeling off balance, as if she had an itch and couldn’t scratch it. She tried to sit back on her hips, for she still had hips, and walk pelvis first, for she still had her pelvis. In fact, everything appeared to be the same except that she had no vagina. Except that she had a prick.

  “I am a prick,” she said to herself.

  The first thing she needed to do was piss and that was fun, standing up seeing it hit the water, but it got all over the toilet seat and she had to clean up the yellow drops.

  “I am a woman with a penis and I am still cleaning up piss.”

  This gave her a sense of historical consistency. Now it was time to get dressed.

  She knew immediately that she didn’t want to hide her penis from the world. Ann had never hidden anything else, no matter how controversial. There was nothing wrong with having a penis. Men had them and now she did too. She wasn’t going to let her penis keep her from the rest of humanity. She chose a pair of button-up Levi’s and stuffed her penis into her pants where it bulged pretty obviously. Then she put on a t-shirt that showed off her breasts and her muscles and headed toward the F train to Shelley’s house to meet her friends for lunch.

  By the time Ann finished riding on the F train she had developed a fairly integrated view of her new self. She was a lesbian with a penis. She was not a man with breasts. She was a woman. This was not androgyny, she’d never liked that word. Women had always been whole to Ann, not half of something waiting to be completed.

  They sat in Shelley’s living room eating lunch. These were her most attentive friends, the ones who knew best how she lived. They sat around joking until Shelley finally asked, “What’s that between your legs?”

  “That’s my penis,” Ann said.

  “Oh, so now you have a penis.”

  “I got it this morning. I woke up and it was there.”

  They didn’t think much of Ann’s humor usually, so the conversation moved on to other topics. Judith lit a joint. They got high and said funny things, but they did keep coming back to Ann’s penis.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Shelley asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you really have a penis, why don’t you show it to us?” Roberta said. She was always provocative.

  Ann remained sitting in her chair but unbuttoned her jeans and pulled her penis out of her panties. She had balls too.

  “Is that real?”

  Roberta came over and put her face in Ann’s crotch. She held Ann’s penis in her hands. It just lay there.

  “Yup, Ann’s got a penis all right.”

  “Did you eat anything strange yesterday?” Judith asked.

  “Maybe it’s from masturbating,” Roberta suggested, but they all knew that couldn’t be true.

  “Well, Ann, let me know if you need anything, but I have to say I’m glad we’re not lovers anymore because I don’t think I could handle this.” Judith bit her lip.

  “I’m sure you’d do fine,” Ann replied in her usual charming way.

  Ann put on her flaming electronic lipstick. It smudged accidentally, but she liked the effect. This was preparation for the big event. Ann was ready to have sex. Thanks to her lifelong habit of masturbating before she went to sleep, Ann had sufficiently experimented with erections and come. She’d seen enough men do it and knew how to do it for them, so she had no trouble doing it for herself. Sooner or later she would connect with another person. Now was that time. She wore her t-shirt that said, “Just visiting from another planet.” Judith had given it to her and giggled, nervously.

  The Central Park Ramble used to be a bird and wildlife sanc
tuary. Because it’s hidden, and therefore foreboding, gay men use it to have sex, and that’s where Ann wanted to be. Before she had a penis, Ann used to imagine sometimes while making love that she and her girlfriend were two gay men. Now that she had this penis, she felt open to different kinds of people and new ideas, too.