orgasm. It was that simple.
Every other thing that the women’s liberation movement was about during the sixties and seventies in New York followed from that, including the fact that I looked out my window one morning and saw lesbians everywhere. It’s easy to recognize lesbians; they look like you, only better.
The early days of the women’s liberation movement in New York was as intimate as the boudoir scene which opens Der Rosenkavalier. The more intimate the women, the higher their consciousness, the greater their liberated displeasure in men, the greater their pleasure in one another. That’s how liberation initially worked. But pleasure frightened many women; so did the displeasure of men. Betty Friedan, a social reformer from Peoria and the author of The Feminine Mystique —a primitive analysis of sexism which immortalizes Ms. Friedan as the liberated housewife’s liberated housewife—put the fear of pleasure into words; she accused lesbians of trying to subvert the women’s liberation movement with orgasms. A sexual panic broke out.
When the dust cleared, the movement was roughly divided between the sexual subversives and the rest of the women’s movement—women who feared both the displeasure of men and the pleasure they felt with one another.
Lover is the pleasure dome—which includes fêtes champêtres and excursions to bars, the movies, and Niagara Falls—I imagined for those sexual subversives. The twins, Rose and Rose-lima, tell their sister Flynn that at the end of the movie everyone ascends into Heaven. Lover “ends with Justice being done … true lovers united.” It’s a Renaissance heaven I had in mind, where there’s sex.
Just as my father had invented an “alternate” existence for vaudeville dancing, with me, so I assumed the women’s movement’s sexual subversives (as if they were, en masse, a duplicate of the Blessed Virgin Mary) into the “heaven” of Lover. I wanted them to have a good time, unmolested by women who were afraid of pleasure.
Although Lover is presumed to be a “lesbian” novel, and it is, the sexual subversives I put in it are not always, nor necessarily, lesbian. I am no longer as certain as I used to be about the constituents of attraction and desire; the less certain I become, the more interesting, the more like art-making, the practice of love and lust seems to me: it becomes more like something I first grasped as a child.
Shortly after I was born, my mother moved in across the street with a beauty parlor operator. Their ordinary routines centered on hard work and the double bed they bought on layaway. Their “hobby” (but it was an obsession) was attending beauty pageants. They made notes— hair styles, approximate bust and hip sizes, legs, posture, gait. They thought that the talent category in the pageants was a waste of time, stuck in, they said, to distract people from the real issue at hand, which was the girls’ bodies; to make it seem, they said (when it certainly wasn’t!), that baton twirling or a ham-fisted performance of the first movement of “The Moonlight Sonata” was more important than an eighteen-inch waist. They almost always disagreed with the decision of the judges. My mother told me why she’d moved in with the beauty parlor operator: “Because I worship beauty.”
Rather than love or hate me, my mother elected to become a confirmed aesthete; I became acquainted at Mother’s knee, so to speak, with a way to overwhelm reality that has come to be called the gay sensibility.
Lover’s central characters, my sexually subversive elite —Maryann, Grandview, Honor, Metro, Daisy, Flynn, Mary Theresa, and “the beloved” (who appears under other aliases too) are highly aestheticized, like contestants in a beauty pageant; they are not intended to remind readers of actual flesh and blood. As well, my characters are from time to time distorted or magnified or reduced, like the stars (Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Loretta Young) in the Hollywood movies of the forties and fifties. Or they are painstakingly romanticized into melodrama, like the artists (highly temperamental composers, ballet dancers, et al.) in the camp classic of my generation, the British film The Red Shoes.
Or they are very often like those saints of my Roman Catholic girlhood, every one of them a femme fatale like Salome, who single-mindedly pursued any extreme, the more implausible the better, to escape the destiny of their gender. At St. Patrick’s Academy, holy cards were distributed as rewards for excellence in English grammar and composition, Latin and penmanship, and for keeping a straight spine up your back, especially during the elevation of the Holy Sacrament at Mass: girl-saint holy cards for the girls, boy saints for the boys. The saints I earned appeared to me against a robin’s egg blue background in a state of ecstacy: a rapturous transport often accompanied by physical phenomena (swoons, trances, stigmata, speaking in tongues, agitation of the limbs), in which the soul is liberated from the body so that it may contemplate the nature of the divine more readily. The exempla of some saints preface Lover’s episodes to honor their acumen at ecstacy.
I deliberately mistook holy cards, which were intended as aids in meditation and prayer, as objects of art. Depicted in glowing colors, with blazing eyes and parted lips, the saints were all raving beauties. I mistook, I mean, raving beauties for objects of art: I was young and unworldly. I am no longer young.
Life affects Lover’s characters as if it were, instead, Traviata or Norma —just as it did the queen of art, Maria Callas. In my mid-thirties I threw a yard sale in front of my Greenwich Village building which I advertised as “The Maria Callas Memorial Yard Sale.” Swarms of strangers approached, dropped some small change into my cigar box, and reverently bore away my mismatched kneesocks. No one charged me with falsifying my old clothes; everyone already knew that Maria Callas had never set foot in my socks. Together, the patrons of my “Maria Callas Memorial Yard Sale” and I were collaborating in a sort of workshop production of the gay sensibility, whose practice hinges, like the arts, very much on decisively choosing as if over is. I recall saying this to one devotee: “She was wearing those argyles the morning of the day she so tragically died in Paris. That’s twenty cents, please.” And he replied, “Too true. I’m going to keep them in a silver box on my coffee table.”
But real flesh and blood does hover at a safe distance behind Lover’s unreal characters. As I wrote, I had in mind some of the most intellectually gifted, visionary, creative, and sexually subversive women of our time. I got to know nearly all of them within the women’s liberation movement, and I was drawn to them in the first place because they were hot. Some appear in Lover as sexual subversives. Others are in place to sabotage how the vulgar think about love, lust, sex, intellectual activity and art. Ask them this: Are you a practicing homosexual? They will answer, I don’t have to practice. I got perfect at that years ago.
The real women join with the fictional characters to commit Lover’s “style.” All of them, like all good performers, are protean in their capacity to exchange one identity for another; they are so intrepid and ingenious they are able, when circumstances call for it, to shape-change to male. Other women I came across in the movement are responsible for the personal anecdotes and jokes in Lover, which are as much a part of its texture as anything I invented myself.
In no particular order, the real life lurking behind Lover was: Jill Johnston, Eve Leoff, Jenny Snider, Esther Newton, Jane O’Wyatt, Phillis Birkby, Carol Calhoun, Joanna Russ, Yvonne Rainer, Valerie Solanas, Smokey Eule, Mary Korechoff, Kate Millett, Louise Fishman, and myself. Books by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Valerie Solanas show up on a bookshelf in Lover as my own objets de virtu.
It does not flatter them to say so, but the work of Jill Johnston, Yvonne Rainer and Louise Fishman made the ultimate difference in how I imagined Lover, and determined, however obliquely, Lover’s expression.
Lover Enjoys Postmodernism: 3
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