Ties That Bind

by Sarah Schulman

  There was a brief window between approximately 1986 and 1992 when publishing started to open up to lesbian literature. Due to pioneering editors like Carole DeSanti, (who, I believe, has since abandoned lesbian fiction), writers like Carole Maso, Jacqueline Woodson, Jane DeLynn, Patricia Powell, Jennifer Levin, Carol Anshaw and many others were able to publish adult novels with primary lesbian content in mainstream houses at the same time. Some years there would be five to eight lesbian novels published in a given season. However, once niche marketing was put into play, these expansive, gifted writers had their books literally moved from the “Literature” sections of chain stores to the newly created “Gay and Lesbian” sections, usually in the back of a top floor of Barnes and Noble somewhere behind the potted plants. In this way, our best literature was guaranteed marginalization, while work by lesbians with no lesbian content came to occupy the public “gay” space and got treated as American literature.

  Interestingly, the families of gays and lesbians behave the same way in the marketplace as they do in the halls of justice. Absent. Just as they do not fight for full inclusion into the society of their gay family members, they do not purchase or consume artworks that come from the cultural point of view of their gay family members. Lesbian novels are just as overlooked or ignored or demeaned as every other part of our lives.

  Now, this being America, it is really shocking to find out that the one thing more powerful than money is homophobia. Because, of course, all these publishers could make more money if they presented this literature in a more general way. And many of these lesbian books sold more copies than books by straights. But, fascinating and devastating as it may be, the publishing industry has shown no interest in breaking open the niche market. The shunning of artworks and artists who have enough integrity to be consistently out in our work is almost complete. It absolutely reflects the lived reality we experience in relation to other social institutions. I want to explore why and how these obstacles are kept in place and then look at what we can do to change them.

  First of all, agents, editors, publishers, magazine editors, publicists, and marketers are in the social role of cultural administrators. They don’t create ideas; they select and package them. That is just a fact. But when you are in an era of immense social repression, as we are in, cultural administrators take on a crucial role. They can either resist and mitigate the new order or they can pander to and implement it. What I have seen in the last years is that the general mood of agents and editors is that, yes, indeed, books with primary lesbian content are not good books, not well written books and are in and of themselves deficient by nature. A world view that is very consistent with what we’re seeing on the evening news and in the realm of the family.

  “Throw in a murder,” is a suggestion that more than one publishing professional has suggested to more than one superb, but newly unpublishable writer. “Just throw in a murder. Make it an erotic thriller.” I would point out that my colleagues with coded, euphemistic, subtextual, or secondary lesbian content were not being told to throw in a murder. “If only you had written After Delores ten years later,” one of them said to me. “You would be rich.” In other words, in the view of almost every lesbian agent or editor that I have spoken to, the reason that no novel with primary lesbian characters since Rubyfruit Jungle has been accepted as fully American is because something is wrong with the books. All of them. They are all deficient. And they all need to be changed. They all need to have a murder. Because lesbianism is not literary. Our lives are not poetry; they are not dramatic; they are not interesting; they have no merit. The projection of shame is overwhelming. It is sad and pathetic. But we see it everywhere.

  Queer editors of national gay magazines put straight people on the covers all the time. Can you imagine Al Jolson on the cover of Ebony saying what it’s like to work in blackface? Lesbian editors and agents are no more advanced in their self-esteem than anyone else, and they work in isolating, grueling straight corporate environments. If you’re in an office sixty hours a week, you can’t have any idea of what is really going on out there, can you? Celebrities who came out after they got famous or made it with work that was closeted are better than ones who have always been out. That’s what the gay and straight press hammer at us everyday. A famous cover story in Entertainment Weekly of gay people in the business featured sixteen photographs of key players in the gay entertainment boom. The only one who had started his career out of the closet was RuPaul. It is the Jody Foster syndrome. We are dependent on gay people in cultural administration positions to have the kind of self-esteem and vision and self-love and personal integration to see through these lies, that many of them cannot, do not, and will not have. And so the vision has to come from us.

  So now, what is to be done?

  As in all areas, the answer lies in third-party intervention.

  The first step is that agents and authors with clout need to put the issues on the table with the publishers and producers. I have had a lot of experience with agents (both theatrical and literary) who will acknowledge privately that work is being diminished for its lesbian content but who will not sit down with the selectors and say so. They keep the information as the author’s private burden. In publishing, most editors have never acquired a novel by an openly lesbian writer with primary lesbian content. Most have NEVER, in their entire careers, bid on such a novel. Yet, if you ask them directly, they would claim that they themselves are not prejudiced and would, theoretically, be open to publishing such a novel. It’s just that no novel that they like has ever come along. If anyone with access would ask the right questions, the next obvious place to go in the conversation is to ask these liberal, progressive, powerful editors the following question:

  Why is it that nothing that lesbian writers express corresponds with what you think should be heard?

  It’s a profound question. And a difficult one. All of these editors have published numerous books by straight and closeted people that have tanked. They have published numerous books that don’t matter and sold no copies. Why would they choose those over lesbian books with dynamic content and loyal readers? Obviously, something is at play that is more pressing than sales.

  Now rethink this question in the context of the issues raised by this book. The editors grew up in families where, to greater or lesser degree, the message of heterosexual supremacy was made clear. A message that is not true, but is enforced. Whether they are straight or gay, they left their families for an educational system that emphasized heterosexual supremacy. They live in a country whose laws emphasize heterosexual supremacy. They watch movies, plays, and television that pathologize gay people and elevate straight people, even though in truth straight people are not superior. In every arena of life, they have seen gay people be FALSELY diminished and shunned. They work in an industry where lesbian women have achieved some power and influence, in part, by excluding lesbian content from American letters. Socially, politically, representationally, and personally they have seen gay women who are out in their work be excluded and demeaned. Now they receive a novel that reflects this experience of being shunned. What do they do with it?

  Shun it!

  They are looking for a novel that will not reflect the lived experience of its author. They simply repeat and replicate the systems of exclusion and scapegoating that they have been raised with because the fact is that NOTHING a lesbian has to say authentically about her life would be acceptable for normative positioning within publishing. For her to speak from a place of authority would not be normal. Only for her to be shunned would be normal. And since book publishing is about being normal, it is restricted to people who are normal.

  Straight authors with big guns in house could make a big difference with all of this. For example, Stephen King, Terry McMillan, and Amy Tan could transform the situation. Imagine them on subway ads, smiling, and the caption saying, “We read gay and lesbian books. Lesbian books are part of American literature.” Come on Oprah. Pick a novel with an
openly lesbian writer and a lesbian protagonist. YOU CAN DO IT. PEN AMERICAN CENTER supports repressed writers in other countries. What about here? And STOP NICHE MARKETING. Gay books need to be mixed advertised with straight writers of the same level of merit, even if they have more stature due to the privileging of heterosexual content. These ads should run in mainstream publications. Gay authors and straight authors should be toured together. The publishers need to encourage comparisons to writers with similar aesthetic concerns, not just other gay work. I know that my playwriting is closest aesthetically to the work of Donald Margulies and Jon Robin Baitz, but because of my content, no one would ever make that comparison. My novels are closest to Paul Auster and Philip Roth, but I’ve spent my life being compared to other dykes. If magazines are clearly operating with quota systems for work with lesbian content, the publishers need to directly address this issue with the book review assignment editors. Two or ten books by lesbian authors can appear on the same list at any given house if they are treated like books. I recently was told by an openly lesbian editor at a progressive house that she couldn’t even look at this manuscript because she had “too many LGBT books in the pipeline.” Does anyone ever refuse to consider a manuscript because they have too many heterosexual books in the pipeline? To make us compete against each other is ridiculous.

  It is niche marketing that keeps straight people from fully accessing gay and lesbian material. Stop pre-ordaining limited audiences for our literature. White people read books by black authors; Christians read books by Jews. Straight people can read books and see plays about lesbians. They’ll get used to it. Publishers need to openly address with magazines, newspapers, funding organizations, awards boards, curatorial spaces like PEN, writers workshops, publishing institutes, etc., that they know that author X is as talented as any straight person publishing today and that this publisher expects her books to be treated in that manner. And when the institutions do exclude and marginalize, the publishers have to be ready to call and address that marginalization. You may think that this sounds like a lot. But it is not. It is a very easy process once you get used to it. And in the long run, it will pay off in expanding market possibilities so that our most talented writers are not forced, psychologically and financially, into the world of acceptable sub-text. If this does not happen, we will end up with generations of writers with no place to go, client lists that cannot make money, and an increasingly narrow range of voices presented in an increasingly censorious cultural field.

  This exclusion is dynamic with the way lesbians are treated in the public and private spheres and becomes a propaganda message of silent endorsement to homophobic family members as they go about their day.

  CONCLUSION

  Facing Challenging Ideas

  When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he allowed the formerly fringe Christian Right to move their agenda, which was called “The Family Protection Act,” center stage. This coalition began to push through a wide array of anti-abortion restrictions on local and national levels. One of these efforts was a federal bill called The Human Life Statute, which would have outlawed all abortion and some forms of birth control. Congressional hearings on the bill were chaired by John East, North Carolina’s co-Senator with Jesse Helms. Senator East’s hearing prohibited anyone who supported abortion rights from testifying.

  Myself and five other women: Stephanie Roth, Libby Smith, Tacie Dejanikus, Maureen Angelos, and Karen Zimmerman signed up independently at a forum sponsored by CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) to do an action inside the hearing. We had never met as a group before; some of us did not know each other; and some had never been politically active before. We planned our action in the car on the way down to D.C.

  We called ourselves The Women’s Liberation Zap Action Brigade. We made hand drawn signs and folded them up in newspapers, waited on line, and got into the hearings. This was in the days of live TV and before CNN. We sat in the audience and listened to speaker after speaker endorse The Human Life Statute. Then, when a male doctor testified that “a fetus is an astronaut in a uterine space ship,” we couldn’t take it any more. We stood up on our chairs and yelled, “Stop these hearings!”

  We were so nervous that Tacie’s sign was upside down. We said, “A woman’s life is a human life,” and we were arrested by the D.C. police and charged with “disruption of Congress” and later brought to trial. We were the lead story on all three network news shows and raised, I believe, $25,000 in contributions from people who had seen our action on television. This was before ACT UP and direct action was a contested tactic, one that eventually led to some of us being ejected from CARASA. More to the point of this story, the police officer who arrested me was named Billy Joe Picket. And in my trial he testified, under oath, that I had stood up on my chair and said, “Ladies should be able to choose.”

  This is fascinating. I said, “A woman’s life is a human life,” and he heard, “Ladies should be able to choose.” I assume that the idea that a woman’s life is a human life was so inconceivable to him that he couldn’t even hear those words in that order.

  Don’t be like Billy Joe Picket. Please don’t change the words or meanings of this book in order to be able to contain them. Please do not claim that I said or believe any of the following things:

  I am not saying that all families are terrible to their gay members.

  I am not saying that straight people don’t have family problems.

  I am not saying that all gay people replicate and extend the arm of familial, social, and cultural oppression to each other.

  I am not saying that no novel by an openly lesbian writer with primary lesbian content has ever been published by a mainstream press.

  I am not saying that no therapist ever helped anyone.

  I am not saying that every gay parent is appropriate for custody.

  Basically, I am not making any unnuanced arguments that are without exception. So, please don’t feel compelled to be like Billy Joe Picket and pretend that I have in order to disqualify my work.

  Here is what I am saying:

  Familial homophobia is unjustified.

  Societal homophobia is unjustified.

  Cultural homophobia is unjustified.

  All of these are manifested in a kind of shunning or exclusion in which the gay person is diminished and humiliated.

  People are scapegoated because they have no power. The perpetrator realizes, or subconsciously understands, that scapegoating this person will have no negative consequence because no one cares enough about what happens to them to make the perpetrator accountable. That gay people, themselves, can extend this active abandonment to each other through a re-victimization that follows the same patterns. Therapy does not currently provide a solution to this. The visibility of gay people has not significantly changed this situation.

  Change lies with third party interventions to create a critical mass of consequences for the perpetrators of shunning, scapegoating, and bullying. Third parties have the responsibility to tell families, governments, cultural arbiters, and ex-lovers that they can no longer scapegoat the gay person and must instead practice negotiation and due process. For example, the way AIDS activists who did not have AIDS disrupted government agencies who were shunning and neglecting people who did have AIDS, until they were forced to negotiate.

  I do want to say that despite the current ideology that victims cause their own oppression, some people are really victimized. And some people are really perpetrators.

  •A victim is a person who is being punished but hasn’t done anything wrong, and no one will intervene to end the punishment.

  •A perpetrator is someone whose behavior creates negative consequences for a person who does not deserve to be treated that way by them.

  •Injustice is when the consequences of actions on another are not how that person deserves to be treated.

  •Success is opportunity at one’s level of merit. More than that is privile
ge, less is deprivation.

  Some perpetrators know what they are doing, and others lack enough awareness to see what they are doing. Some defend their right to violate others; some use the awareness to change their behavior. But victims do not seek violators. They simply are more vulnerable to violation because it is known that no one cares how they are treated. It is the power of suggestion. As we learned in the anti-rape movement, the rape victim is never at fault for having been raped. The rape is always the fault of the rapist. People of color never justify racism. Simply by being born, human beings have an essential right to have their experiences acknowledged accurately; they have the right to due process in all realms; they have the right to negotiation, to express the consequences of other people’s actions on them. They have the right to be included in their own family/society. They have the essential right for others to show cause before inflicting punishment.

  Human beings have the profound duty to intervene when someone else is being victimized, especially if that person asks them to. Just because a perpetrator says you should not intervene doesn’t mean that you have to do what they say.

  Telling victims that their abuser is wrong does not help anything. You have to tell the abuser herself. A moral person creates consequences for other people’s cruelty so that scapegoating can no longer continue.

  When I was in fourth grade, we had a poster on the wall with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln: