Apples & Oranges Read online

  BOOKS BY JAN CLAUSEN

  After Touch (poems)

  Waking at the Bottom of the Dark (poems)

  Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover (stories)

  Duration (poems and prose)

  Sinking, Stealing (novel)

  The Prosperine Papers (novel)

  Books and Life (essays)

  Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding

  Sexual Orientation (nonfiction)

  Apples & Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity

  (memoir)

  From a Glass House (poems)

  If You Like Difficulty (poems)

  Veiled Spill: A Sequence (hybrid)

  APPLES & ORANGES

  MY JOURNEY THROUGH SEXUAL IDENTITY

  JAN CLAUSEN

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  New York • Oakland • London

  Copyright © 1999, 2017 by Jan Clausen.

  Originally published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reissued in 2017 by

  Seven Stories Press with a new preface by the author.

  All rights reserved.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following sources:

  “You Say I Am Mysterious” by Elsa Gidlow. Permission for Elsa Gidlow’s work

  courtesy of Celeste West and Booklegger Publishing, Box 460654, San Francisco,

  CA 94146.

  Izumi Shikibu poem: from The Ink Dark Moon by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko

  Aratani. Copyright © 1990 by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. Reprinted by

  permission of Random House Inc.

  “Lilith of the Wildwood, of the Fair Places,” from With Anger/With Love by Susan

  Sherman, Mulch Press copyright © 1974. Reprinted by permission of Susan Sherman.

  “Trash” entry: Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

  Company. Reproduced by permission from The American Heritage Dictionary of the

  English Language, Third Edition.

  “Letter for Jan,” “Between Ourselves,” from The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.

  Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Clausen, Jan, 1950- author.

  Title: Apples & oranges : my journey through sexual identity / Jan Clausen.

  Other titles: Apples and oranges

  Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2017] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017004240 (print) | LCCN 2017015776 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781609807504 (E-book) | ISBN 9781609807498 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Clausen, Jan, 1950- | Lesbians--United States--Biography. |

  Gender identity. | Heterosexuality.

  Classification: LCC HQ75.4.C55 (ebook) | LCC HQ75.4.C55 A3 2017 (print) |

  DDC

  306.76/63092 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004240

  Book design by Jon Gilbert

  Printed in the United States of America

  987654321

  To Andrea

  To Soc

  You say I am mysterious.

  Let me explain myself:

  In a land of oranges

  I am faithful to apples.

  —elsa gidlow

  from Makings For Meditation

  Seeing someone holding my fan, the courtier Michinaga

  asked whose it was; when he heard it was mine, he took

  it and wrote on it the words “Fan of a Floating Woman.”

  My response:

  Some cross the Pass of Love,

  some don’t.

  Unless you are the watchman there

  it is not your right

  to cast blame.

  —izumi shikibu, heian court, japan

  from The Ink Dark Moon,

  translated by Jane Hirshfield

  with Mariko Aratani

  Contents

  Preface to the 2017 Edition

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  one Apples and Oranges

  two The Clausen Way

  three The Education of Desire

  four Proverbs of Hell

  five Ménage à N

  six Any Woman Can

  seven Fish without Bicycles

  eight A Cloud and Its Consequences

  nine Questions of Travel

  ten I Cross the Pass of Love

  eleven Floating Woman

  Postscript to the First Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Preface to the 2017 Edition

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT desire and its consequences: personal and social. It’s about the perplexities of identities and the politics they support. It’s about the fervent pursuit of justice for all, complicated by the pull of private happiness. It’s about a bunch of stubborn people who keep harping on the question, “How should we live?” and rejecting easy answers. It’s about the rewards and pitfalls of building the trail while hiking it. It’s about proudly claiming the revolutionary high ground, then learning that the boldest, bravest strategies for fixing the world have a downside. I propose that the joys of living out of sync with the lazy common sense of the culture at large are worth the risks of inevitable disappointments, not to mention battle scars. I track a particular kind of gender rebellion, one cast in terms defined by a late 20th century feminism crucial to the forging of our modern understanding that freedom and equality are inextricably bound both with matters of state and public policy and with the most intimate coordinates of human experience: our bodies, erotic leanings, communities, families.

  Begun in 1996 and published in 1999, Apples & Oranges looks back on events leading up to a pivotal moment in my life: the decision to leave not only my long-term relationship with a woman, but my identification as a lesbian—and, in consequence, the social networks I’d relied on for my writing and activism. That watershed had occurred in the late 1980s, but despite the changes wrought by the time lag, I started the book at a point when the world around me was still recognizably that of my early adulthood. This was a world in which lesbians and gay men lived outside the law, both in literal terms and in how we were broadly imagined. Despite significant progress since the 1960s in reducing social stigma and breaking down the tyranny of the closet, our intimate relationships were routinely attacked by legal and religious authorities. Same-sex family ties lacked protection under the law. Bowers v. Hardwick, the notoriously homophobic Supreme Court decision that upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy, was years away from being overturned. Marriage equality seemed like a pipe dream, one that many proud supporters of gay and queer liberation deemed far less important than other pressing issues. The policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” made hiding their identities an official requirement for homosexuals serving in the military. Same-sex couples were mostly unable to adopt kids or become foster parents; those who raised one partner’s biological offspring had to resign themselves to the co-parent’s lack of officially recognized parental rights. In the mid-1990s, the development of effective drugs to fight HIV infection was still a recent, seemingly miraculous event for communities devastated by the siege of AIDS—and enraged at the widespread stigma and government inaction that fueled the epidemic. While the Internet was emerging as a mass communication tool and information source, it had yet to register its mighty twenty-first century impact on everything from our images of marginalized identities to the strategies for survival and mutual support available to LGBTQ youth to the organizing methods used by radical social movements. Print culture still reigned.

  This was a world in which gender seemed considerably more stable, less subject to scrutiny, than it seems to us now—not for everyone, of c
ourse, but for the large majority, including plenty of lesbians, gays, and self-described queers whose ways of moving through the world defied straight society’s rigid gender norms.

  Today, the mainstream presumption of a heterosexual planet is fading, if far from vanquished, with lesbian, gay, and bisexual lives and identities accorded far more respect and legal protection than they had when I wrote this book. At the same time, a growing movement for transgender rights is rapidly raising consciousness and hammering at entrenched legal barriers. In this climate, people who reject the crude either/or of traditional gender classification, bravely asserting the integrity and dignity of their internal sense of differently gendered being, stand out as the trailblazers of new ways of imagining the sex/gender system. Which is not to say, of course, that many transgender people aren’t comfortable with some version of a binary gender landscape, where “male” and “female” function as ideal types, largely defined in contrast to each other. Yet today, it’s the gender resisters and gender revisers, the gender uprooters and gender refusers, who vividly stake their claim to the radical ramparts—poised to disrupt a schema of polar opposites that has passed its sell-by date.

  Depending on how you read it, this book has nothing or everything to do with current struggles over re-imagining how we understand gender. Nothing, in the sense that the approach to gender embraced by my generation of feminists, who proudly waved the banner of Woman in the effort to radically expand our own and the public’s sense of what that gender label could signify, can be viewed as reinforcing this rigidly binary system. Everything, in that our brand of gender insurrection helped pave the way for the current rebellion against not only the coercion of society’s gender labeling process (with people broadly expected to live out their destinies based on the sex assigned them at birth), but against the tyranny of the whole binary setup. It’s like yanking on the thread that unravels the tapestry: once you start asking questions about the sex/gender system, the frailty of the entire apparatus quickly becomes apparent.

  In the main, my generation of feminists subscribed to what can be seen as a kind of gender nationalism, convinced that the solution to the despised and exploited status of females the world over lay in championing our kind, shoring up our affinity group— even as many of us also acknowledged and tried to work with the truth that our many differences, especially those of race and class, often made for gaping disparities in our daily lives, in our access to even the tiniest bits of political leverage, and in our visions for how to achieve positive transformation. Our efforts had an enormous impact, improving the status of women generally, and doing much to diminish lesbians’ marginalization. We rallied around the path-breaking courage of women who dared to flaunt a female masculinity that we called butch and the straight world mocked as unfeminine or mannish. On occasion, though, some of us lapsed into a loopy essentialism (as in claims that women are inherently nurturing, peaceable, and life-oriented while “men love death”). Members of our movement sometimes excluded trans women and male children, falsely reasoning that since “womyn-born wimmin” had long been trampled by patriarchy, we needed to circle the wagons around our biological birthright. Even those who didn’t go there—I certainly among them—mostly ignored the possibility that the experiences of trans people, and even the wide variations in gender expression observable all around us, might necessitate rethinking the notion of Woman as a stable identity, firmly distinguished from Man, rooted in biology as supplemented by a universal socialization process.

  When I shared the news that this book would be reissued, and mentioned how strange it felt to revisit the text after so many years, several acquaintances casually asked me if I planned to revise it. My answer was an immediate, horrified no, given my awareness that the thing about looking back is that the view keeps changing. Revising (unless the revision is so extensive that the text becomes, in effect, a different work), risks mere cosmetic “updating.” On the other hand, a commitment to thoughtful scrutiny of the products of times past not only helps us refine our grasp of what went on “back in the day,” but encourages that lively, multi-layered process whereby history can seem to return our gaze, affording fresh insights into contemporary struggles. My text is a unified expression of the person I was at the moment of composition and the ways I reflected the times in which I was living. Its errors may be as instructive as its insights. Its testament to my feminist generation’s framing of gender equality questions exclusively around the notion of “women’s liberation” illustrates the truth that important social movements, notwithstanding their great achievements, are time-bound and imperfect.

  Yet incomplete as our vision of gender justice was, the majority of its tenets retain their relevance. The more things change, the deeper cruel old power digs in, morphing but ever-hardy. Even as new generations have been busy re-imagining the connections among gender, desire, justice, and freedom, an oppressive system mobilizes and polices gender and desire as these intersect with other key vectors of power and difference (think race, class, disability, nationality, religion . . . ). Crucially, we face not only noxious ideas, hateful acts, and malign policies, but entrenched structural conditions that relentlessly reproduce the devaluation of cis women, trans women, trans men, gender queer people, and even cis men who can’t or won’t fall in line with the patriarchal program. In case anyone needs proof that what I refer to in this book as “the problem of being a woman” still hangs heavy over the land, there’s this: I write at a moment when a U.S. presidential election has just provided the stage for an atavistic gender theater, a spectacular object lesson in how far we haven’t come. In the aftermath, we have a Republican president-elect who throughout his campaign gleefully flaunted what amounted to a caricature of white heterosexual masculinity imagined as the embodiment of national “greatness.” Meanwhile, supporters of his Democratic opponent routinely advanced the essentialist notion that there would be something inherently positive and forward-looking in the gesture of “breaking the glass ceiling” to install a female “Commander-in-Chief” (aka celebrating a “vagina . . . sitting on the chair in the Oval Office,” as a prominent lesbian writer from my own generation archly phrased her endorsement). Evidently the most basic questions of 20th-century-style, woman-championing feminism are still very much in play, questions like: is it okay for powerful people with penises to treat people without them as their sex toys? And: is the possession of a vagina by someone who wields vast power inherently humanizing—quite apart from the structures and interests she serves?

  So it’s partly on account of the ugly tenacity of age-old gender hierarchies—their insidious resilience, even as they morph under the seismic pressures of new social forms—that my tale of 20th-century life as a lesbian feminist still resonates. But in truth, today I’m less interested in the parts of this book that tackle gender theory or spell out a message. Maybe that’s because the older I get, the less impressed I am by exposition and exhortation, which ring particularly hollow when the questions really matter. I value most those passages that strike me as successful in suggesting the pungent flavor of an era whose causes and controversies—so urgent back then, so peculiar to that time—are, beyond their specific contours, emblematic of a powerful, rarely described experience: the strenuous, glorious, tedious, sometimes heartbreaking push and pull of being-with-others in the struggle to repair what is broken by the violence of injustice.

  Today, other modes, other imagined communities. New lines of alliance, new bones of contention. The gender revisers, the gender improvisers, the gender interrogators have amped up the pressure on the sex/gender system. Their canniest and bravest interventions so often take on the ways gender is braided with and used to prop up the other interlocking forces of oppression—economic, racial, colonial, and more—that undermine our one indispensable hope: the hope that our faltering species can manage to stick around long enough to make a few basic improvements in our treatment of each other and the planet.

  In the documentary “What Ha
ppened, Miss Simone?,” a soaring, sobering portrait of a brilliant artist accompanied by her demons, there’s a clip in which an interviewer asks, “What’s ‘free’ to you, Nina?” The peerless singer answers, “I’ve had a couple of times onstage when I really felt free, and that’s something else. That’s really something else! . . . I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear. I mean, really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life, no fear.”

  If we could have that.

  No fear.

  If we could all have that.

  No fear.

  —January 2017

  Author’s Note

  PHILOSOPHERS HAVE DEBATED whether—and if so, in what sense—reality exists apart from our perception of it. The author makes no guarantee of the verisimilitude with which she has rendered “actual persons,” whatever those may be. Her purpose in composing this work has been to imagine her own past, the improvisations of a “self that is not one,” with all possible fidelity and rigor. Of necessity, other figures come into her story. She has tried to respect their separateness, their ultimate opacity, and the fact that when they entered her life as relatives, friends, enemies, or lovers, they had no warning that she would one day write about them.

  A theme of this book is the need to honor surprise and discontinuity—“resistance to identity”—more than is customary. Even if you suppose that the dramatis personae have been more or less faithfully transplanted from some moments of real life, please bear in mind that all of them (the author included) are different people now. They have slipped the traces, like the ghostly boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses:

  For, long ago, the truth to say,

  He has grown up and gone away,

  And it is but a child of air

  That lingers in the garden there.

  Realizing that these cautions will be almost universally disregarded, the author has provided the principal players with fig leaves in the form of invented names. Biographical details have also been altered as necessary to protect privacy.