Testimony
Page 28
Without warning, Gen’s bungalow in Springboro flashed into memory, with its spacious rooms and sprawling backyard, the homey study lined with bookshelves, the stocked liquor cabinet. A fierce shake of her head dispelled the image, bringing the kitchen window into view. This apartment might be cramped, but the life she’d left behind had smothered her.
Juliet must have misread Gen’s momentary hesitation as disappointment because she added quickly, “We’ll hang some of your pretty photographs and it will be better, I promise.”
Gen drew her in for a kiss. “It couldn’t be any better, Juliet. Thank you so much.”
In truth, she might not even need a study. Muriel had helped her secure a private space at the New York Public Library. “Office sounds too grand. It’s more of a carrel,” her former mentor had hastened to explain. There she could complete her book on Mary White Ovington, the white woman who had cofounded the NAACP.
“This is a good neighborhood for people like us, too,” Juliet said, still on the defense. “There’s actually a bar over on Eighth Avenue for gay gals called the Sea Colony. I’ve been nervous to go alone, but we’ll try it together.”
“Do they have food?”
Juliet thought they only served drinks, so instead they headed a short two blocks away to the White Horse Tavern, which she said was a favorite hangout for writers and other bohemians. The scruffy façade needed a coat of paint, but the dark wooden interior welcomed Gen like a hug.
“That was Dylan Thomas’s booth,” Juliet said, expressing amazement when Gen admitted her ignorance about the Welsh poet. “Jeez. Even I know who Dylan Thomas is and I’m not a writer,” she teased.
“I’m not a writer yet,” Gen hastened to point out.
It was an identity she was just going to try on for size, she had told herself. Muriel’s publisher had contracted with Gen for her book on Ovington. The tide was turning in the United States, the editor said, and he envisioned a series of biographies of white and Negro champions for civil rights. He tossed out the word bestseller like a promise.
Gen didn’t trust that she could actually make a living from such work, but maybe she could write articles, too, or even teach a class. When she presented Frank Johnson with a hefty check for the NAACP chapter, he had offered her a contact at The New School, a college that apparently welcomed progressive thinkers and political outcasts as teachers.
“I busied myself on the train trying to come up with my pseudonym,” Gen said when their wine and burgers arrived. “I’ve settled on L.V. Ryder, with a y. What do you think?”
“Where’d the L come from?”
“I can’t say.”
Juliet put down her burger. “You’re blushing! You have a first name you’re ashamed of? Were you named for Aunt Loretta or Lavinia?”
“Worse. Great Aunt Lula.”
“I love it! I’m about to live in sin with Dr. Lula Virginia Rider.” Juliet fiddled with one of her French fries. “Well, L.V. does suggest a scholar. But Gen, I love the name Virginia.”
Gen struggled for the words to explain. It was more than a desire for a new beginning, and she wasn’t afraid of being haunted by her past at Baines. Ursula had more than earned her fee by making sure the college scrubbed Gen’s record squeaky clean.
“I feel protective of her,” Gen said after a considered pause. When Juliet scrunched her forehead in confusion, Gen added, “Of Gen Rider. She deserves a chance to be herself.”
A smile lit Juliet’s face, and they tapped wineglasses. “To Gen.”
“To Gen,” she echoed.
Acknowledgments
In 1952, Martha Deane, a respected full professor at UCLA, was suspended without pay after a neighbor reported to the dean that he had seen her kissing another woman through the window of her home. Female faculty banded together to help support her financially during a lengthy hearing process. Eventually, Deane settled with the university and left teaching. The administration buried her case deep in its records, but a historian unearthed it by accident fifty years later while writing about the Cold War loyalty oath on the UCLA campus.
Testimony took its inspiration from Deane’s story, although I transported my novel to another location and year. Deane’s experience resonated with me for two reasons. On the negative side, it underscored how the insidious nature of homophobia has repeatedly ruined people’s lives. On the positive side, Deane’s story spoke to the power of the support networks that queer people and women create.
Cases similar to Deane’s are plentiful. During the 1950s and early 1960s, many queer teachers lost their jobs in a wave of right-wing fanaticism. From 1955 to 1965, for example, legislators in Florida systematically purged gay faculty, students, and staff from that state’s colleges and universities. In the 1960s, esteemed literature professor and scholar Newton Arvin lost his position at Smith College.
I wrote and revised this novel during a new flood of anti-LGBTQ sentiment, wanting to give a human face to the individuals who experienced the chilling effects of antigay activism. Happily, as I was revising in June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its historic ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, stating that anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I’m indebted to numerous research sources. The article that sparked this novel was “The Case of Martha Deane: Sexuality and Power at Cold War UCLA,” by Kathleen Weiler, but also invaluable was The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal, by Barry Werth. Other helpful books and articles included: Communists and Perverts Under the Palms, by Stacy Braukman; The Deviant’s War, by Eric Cervini; Cures: A Gay Man’s Odyssey, by Martin Duberman; “Doing the Public’s Business: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, 1959–1964,” by Karen Graves; The Lavender Scare, by David K. Johnson; “Homophobia in Mississippi, 1958” by Jonathan Ned Katz on OutHistory.org; and My Butch Career, by Esther Newton.
This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Time is a gift to a writer, and the fellowship allowed me time away from teaching to make this novel what I wanted it to be.
For reading partial or complete drafts of Testimony at various stages, I thank writer-friends Selene dePackh, Debra Efird, Paul Reali, Rachel Stein, and Lucy Turner; and especially my wife, Katie Hogan—my alpha reader and most cherished writing buddy.
As always, big thanks and hugs to the women of Bywater Books, who have dedicated themselves to publishing lesbian literature. The community and I owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing these stories to light.
About the Author
Paula Martinac is the author of a book of short stories and six novels. Her debut novel, Out of Time, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (Seal Press, 1990; e-book Bywater, 2012). Her novel-in-stories, The Ada Decades (Bywater, 2017), was short-listed for the 2017 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, the Foreword Indie Award for LGBT Fiction, and the Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie Award for Historical Fiction, and her novel Clio Rising (Bywater, 2019) received the Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction (Northeast) from the 2020 Independent Book Publishers Awards. She has also published three nonfiction books on LGBT themes, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites. In 2019, she received both a Creative Writing Fellowship from the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte/Mecklenburg County and a Literature Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. She is a lecturer in the creative writing program at UNC Charlotte.
Read more at paulamartinac.com.
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Copyright © 2021 Paula Martinac
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61294-180-6
Bywater Books First Edition: January 2021
Cover designer: Ann McMan, TreeHouse Studio
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