issue ii: authors in queer american literature - paula gunn allen

Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen was born in 1939 to a Lebanese American father and a Laguna-Sioux-Scotch mother, “[b]ut for Paula her ethnicity was derived from exposure and experience of the Pueblo culture. This culture is a female-centered culture which is where Allen derived many of the ideas for her poems” (Paula Gunn Allen). We first met Paula Gunn Allen in a Native Women Writers class, where we read Grandmothers of the Light. This powerful book is what Allen calls a source book for women to learn the medicine woman’s path. Allen has a profoundly feminist perspective in this book, but we were surprised about the lack of lesbian acknowledgement. Beth Brant helped me to understand why this might have been; Brant explains: “when one is a Native lesbian, the desire to connect all becomes an urgent longing. Faced with homophobia from our own communities, faced with racism and homophobia from outsiders who hold semblances of power over us, we feel that desire to connect in a primal way” (Brant 945). Although one may long to break the silence of homophobia and racism, these are factors that lead to barriers for getting published. Homophobia within Native culture leads to a particular barrier when writing on traditional women’s paths that may have affected Allen’s content in Grandmothers of the Light.

Through social justice movements (Women’s, Lesbian, Gay, and Civil Rights), one can see how one movement can judge its constituency for being involved with other movements; for example: the Women’s Liberation’s exclusion of lesbians or homophobia within the Civil Rights movement. Paula Gunn Allen could be expressing this sentiment in her poem Some Like Indians Endure: dykes “like Indians / they do terrible things / to each other / out of sheer cussedness / out of forgetting / out of despair” (Allen 11). Allen begins her poem illustrating how she has “it in [her] mind that / dyes are Indians” because “they were massacred / lots of times / they always came back / like the grass / like the clouds / they got massacred again” (9). Readers can see Allen’s compassion of the universality of oppressions through this poem and other works. For example, Allen has written similarly on the people of South Africa: “When I think of the South African people, I always think of the native American people. Because we’ve lived with apartheid” (Allen 428). Adrienne Rich has depicted Allen’s poetry as “essential reading for the white poet/woman/lesbian/feminist who wants a larger and truer vision than white culture alone can offer” (Paula Gunn Allen). Being able to find similarities through oppression, Allen is able to create community that strengthens our voice to break silence through different movements.

Exploring further into Paula Gunn Allen’s work, we have been able to find work that fulfills my first expectations of her. Although many people consider themselves open-minded and aware of aspects of our privilege, this experience proves to me that sometimes we can overlook our own privilege in many aspects of our lives. We expected Allen’s work to be what we were familiar with. When it proved otherwise, we were hesitant to appreciate the work fully until we learned more about her and native women’s experiences.

issue ii: authors in queer american literatuere - andrea dworkin and allen ginsberg

Andrea Dworkin & Allen Ginsberg
The person who introduced me to Allen Ginsberg, captured me by her testimony of Ginsberg being a great poet who changed the face of American Poetry through “Howl”. This work mesmerized many in our class. When one sees an author such as this we tend to put them on a pedestal. Ginsberg was held in my high regards, until his status compromised with the writings of Andrea Dworkin within her Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.
Beyond poetry, Ginsberg composed prose about his membership to the National Association of Man Boy Love Association and its arguments. Ginsberg validates his connection to NABLA by writing, “I became a member of NAMBLA a decade ago as a matter of civil liberties,” and continued to elevate NAMBLA by associating their foundation in relation to other social movements: “In the early 1980s, the FBI had conducted a campaign of entrapment and ‘dirty tricks’ against NABLA members just as they had against black and anti-war leaders in the previous decade” (Ginsberg 170). Dworkin considers Ginsberg’s reason for membership differently. She says that “He did not belong to the North American Man-Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to fuck children and his constant pursuit of underage boys” (Dworkin 45). This is due to not only his proclamation at their godchild’s bar mitzvah that the friends of his godson “were old enough to fuck. They were twelve and thirteen. He said that all sex was good, including forced sex,” his writings include passages such as: “Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in 2 days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical NOISES that make everything sexy sound like rape” (46, Ginsberg 108). After reading Dworkin’s experience with Ginsberg, my image of him is deeply damaged. At times I question how his work can be relevant when ideals such as these must underline his literary contribution to the cannon.

issue ii: authors in queer american literature - Beth Brant

Having begun to write at the age of 4o in 1981, Beth Brant says that she “had no models for being an Indian lesbian, much less one who wrote. I fumbled and wrote in aloneness” (Brant 945). Brant continues that even though literature at the time lacked inclusion, she “knew there was a community out there and that we were looking for each other. I think the courage of naming ourselves as lesbian is a significant act of love and community” (945). Today, Brant challenges readers when the lack of Native Lesbian literature comes to light: “[I]f you ask why you have not read or heard of these women, ask it to yourself. The answer lies in the twin realms of racism and homophobia. Some of us cannot get published. And this has nothing to do with the excellence of our work. It has to do with who will be courageous enough to see us in all our facets of being. And of course, this has to do with power and who has it and who exercises it over us. We are rarely reviewed in so-called feminist newspapers or journals. So-called progressive papers do not know our names” (946). Seeing silence since she began writing, Brant will never be silenced again and will challenge people in power including social movements.
Brant’s radical and bold voice continues to ring within her literature. Similar to Stein and Cather, Brant changes what dominant language means for the purpose of her writing. Although her writing uses the dominant cultures language, Brant employs language differently. Brant explains, “when I use the enemy’s language to hold onto my strength as a Mohawk lesbian writer, I use it as my own instrument of power in this long, long battle against racism” (U of M). Brant’s writing as well as other Native women’s is what Brant calls “grief filled art” for common themes within are the loss of land, language, religion, people, and children (Brant 946). Brant explains that though these subjects are predominant, “the work is not bitter or mournful. It is testimony. I suggest that Native lesbian writing brings an added dimension to grief and celebration” (Brant 946).
One can see these themes in Brant’s grief filled short story, “A Long Story.” Brant captures a parallel grief between two different families in separate time frames. Beginning with 1890, readers see the pain of a Native, heterosexual woman whose child has been taken from their community; Brant writes, “It has been two days since they came and took the children away....It is good for them, the agent said. It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know civilized” (Brant 167). Readers then see a lesbian family’s child, Patricia, taken from them in 1978; Brant writes, “He took her hand and pulled her to the care. The look in his eyes of triumph. It was a contest to him, Patricia the prize. He will teach her to hate us. He will!” (170). Brant’s powerful story and revolutionary voice demonstrates the oppression and cruelty towards families by dominant culture through time.

issue ii: themes in queer american literature

The main themes within Queer American Literature are also reflected within America’s Queer culture. Silence and Breaking the Silence are the predominant themes. The act of writing about queer life, especially by a queer author, is stepping out of the subordinate class that the GLBTQ population is subjected to. It goes without saying that the art of a queer author parallels their experiences. Because queer experiences are expressed through our art, the autobiographical nature of queer literature is thus exposed. Adrienne Rich says that “invisibility is not just a matter of being told to keep your private life private; it’s the attempt to fragment you, to prevent you from integrating love and work and feelings and ideas, with the empowerment that that can bring” (Rich199-200). Berth Harris has a similar assessment: “Cultural (and therefore ‘literary’) silence is first brought about through suppression of the group’s sense of ‘realness’ – especially through invalidation of experience” (Harris 257). According to Harris and Rich, if we do not see our literature in the canon and the classroom is our identity valid? No. We are invisible.
The use of authors’ language is crucial to many readers and reviewers seeing our writing as reflecting the mentality and sentiment of all queers. Use of obscure language and codes was necessary for some authors such as Gertrude Stein to include nonheteronormativity. Two examples: 1.) Stein’s Tender Buttons literally translates to ‘tend her buttons’ as in sexual pleasure, 2.) Stein’s famous line about women “having a cow” is code for orgasm. Willa Cather is another author who encoded, because she “may have adopted her characteristic male persona in order to express safely her emotional and erotic feelings for other women” (Zimmerman). The use of explicitness is also common due to the lack of queer identity in other forms of media. The references may be shocking to some and also illustrate the human nature of sexuality.
Often in Queer Literature, one can see the dual oppression (such as the oppression of women and homophobia) and multiple oppressions (such as the oppression of women, homophobia, racism, etc.). On women of color and lesbians, Adrienne Rich articulates that they are “even more profoundly erased in academic feminist scholarship by the double bias of racism and homophobia” (25). Randy Burns, co-founder of Gay American Indians explains that “[a]t the same time, gay American Indians face double oppression – both racism and homophobia.... Even now, leadership roles in the gay community continue to be filled by white males, and minority tokenism is the rule. Organizations are always coming to GAI [Gay American Indians], eager for Indian representation – but they fail to address the economic and social obstacles to equal and full participation and they ignore our input when we do participate.” (2-3). Rich and Burns expose the intersections of race, class, and homophobia. Dominant society attempts to silence us all. Break the silence.

issue ii: introduction to queer american literature

There is a lack of queer literature in English classrooms and the cannon of American Literature. Queer authors that are taught to literature students are veiled under the mask of heteronormativity. LGBTQ writers are homogenized into the dominant culture’s sexuality. Of course we know the staples or cult classics of a crucial part of our identity: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Radcliff Hall’s Well of Loneliness, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman.
Last fall we asked ourselves, who else is there? Our actions came out of the frustration with the lack of visibility in the classroom; our analysis of inclusive texts led us to see the corrupt state of the literature field. This invisibility and coding of American Literature reminds us of the Hays code of production in film. People in positions of power dictate who is included in anthologies including the contents of their biography and work, they also which authors to teach, publish, and analyze.
This unbalanced power has led to a great bias as to what is considered and revered as American Literature (capital A, capital L, if we need to remind you). For example, many people critiquing Jane Rule’s The Desert of the Heart used their influence and moral codes to silence and devalue queer content and authorship. One critic wrote, “But all the time you keep turning to the photograph of the author on the jacket and wondering how such a nice looking woman could ever have chosen so distasteful a subject” (Rule 1). Even two decades later in the 1990’s Bertha Harris sees silencing taking place. Harris writes, “It is not the work per se we have lacked, but memory of the work that has gone before us: our literary past, and access to our literary present – which, by and large, is still being ignored or trivialized by the press. The most serious effects of this deliberately induced amnesia have been prevention of that measure of truth that only fiction and poetry can express and prevention of that sense of community all writers need in order to learn and grow” (Harris 258). Censoring part of the population’s self-image that demands all of us explore Literature as it is written for all of us and to leave with a greater understanding of humanity, not just within the context of our own lives.
After seeing the faults in American Literature, we decided to explore our invisible literature. Our first steps were deciding how we recognize queer literature. Should we classify authors identifying as straight who have queer content in this genre, and how about queer authors that have in their work only hetero relationships? Bonnie Zimmerman, a lesbian and literature theorist, suggests that we follow this outline: 1. queer author, 2. queer perspective, 3. expresses a queer perspective. After following this outline, we compiled a hefty reader of Queer Literature and theory. In this zine, you explore our views on the themes of Queer American Literature, an assessment of core queer authors, and suggested readings.

issue ii: queer american literature - break the silence

Looking at a compilation of queer literature and analysis of over 1,000 pages that we were about to read for our independent study on Queer American Literature was a sense of gratification and a frustration. After four years within the English department, our endeavor left resentment that Queer Literature is expunged from what most consider the cannon of American Literature and anticipation for an inclusive and non-homogenized viewing of art.
- becca sorgert

Having the desire to know more about queer artists, we wanted to delve deeper into queer perspective within literature to see if queer literature should be regarded in a different manner than its current status. Finding that within the canon and classroom, queer authors are canonized, but their lives are not taken in account, though some students decipher what particular content means. Through the course of our independent study, we came to understand that Queer Literature deserves its own place and representation within the study of Literature. Through this we conclude that many English departments, including our own, needs radical change.

- julia oxenreider

issue i: julia oxenreider's poetry

Mutilated sex organs part one:
(out of millions and millions and billions.)

they cut off her clit with a dull piece of glass
and when she collapsed
all the men slapped her ass
and laughed.
she bled for a week
maybe more
with out her clit
she was safe...
from being called a whore.
when they raped
when they fucked..
when they assaulted her with their big, man sausage dicks
they would rip open the stitches
call her a dirty bitch.
she never did heal and it became too hard to piss
so when she became septic
they threw her in a marshy ditch.


Anonymous

when she had an abortion to save her own life
everyone called her a selfish fucked up cunt
who deserved to die.
\
the catholics said they owned her ovaries
the corporate politicians said her eggs were public property
the evangelicals said she would go to hell
/and all the groups, everday,
worked real hard to:
-Cut the aid to mothers and children
-furrow their brows at women's right to a decision
-raised the price of childcare
put and end to welfare
-create ignorance around contraception
-lie to create mass deception.\
instead of feel bad and sad about her decision..
she became raging mad
/ she raised her fists
and gave the gift
of Revolution.