In order to kick-off our newest feature, MOUTH TO MOUTH—conversations between opinionated and mouthy people who’ve never spoken to each other before—we introduced controversial novelist Heather Lewis to outspoken sex activist Pat Califia. The result: a compelling, sparkle-filled discussion of bundles of issues including S/M, adolescent sexuality, freedom of speech and psychotherapy.—Ed.
Pat Califia: I thought your book was beautifully written. You have so much power as a writer. It was wonderful to read something about dykes that wasn’t icky Naiad hearts-and-flowers crap. I think it takes a great deal of courage to include an underage character in sexually explicit fiction. In Canada you would go to prison for doing that, if a trigger-happy prosecutor decided to lay charges against you under their very broad and vague child pornography statute. So would your publisher and anyone found possessing a copy of your book. But we all know that teenagers have gay sex, struggle with coming to some sort of peace with their sexuality, and often encounter adults who are exploitative or fucked up in their own right. I also get very bored with the sanitization of lesbian culture in “mainstream” lesbian fiction. To pretend that alcohol and drugs are not an important part of “gay life” is dishonest. So, on to my questions for you. First, why take the risk of writing about an underage character?
Heather Lewis: I think I took the risk because I didn’t know it was a risk. My whole experience with that first book was like that. I began the book in ’87, and all of it seemed rather improbable. I initially resisted the idea of setting it in the horse show world—a strange enclave people don’t know much about. I felt daunted by trying to describe that world and felt the setting would be an obstacle. I had less internal resistance to the underage thing, the drug use. Initially the drug use felt like a bigger issue in the book—before the sex theme took over. Most of all I resisted the incest theme. That one I went right down to the wire with.
PC: You’ve really broken the paradigm of “incest survivor” as victim. In this book, you speak about sexual abuse in a more complex way. How did you come to this view of or understanding of the dynamics of incest?
HL: I’d wanted to present this girl without giving her any background. I didn’t want some simplistic A + B = C equation. Oh, she’s been abused by her father, that’s why she’s like this. I wanted that to be implicit. But I had good advisors. Came to see my resistance to writing her background wasn’t artistic but psychological. I didn’t want to write anything about her parents because I didn’t want to go there. But once I did, the book made more sense, got tighter, so I knew it needed to be there.
But to get back to the question. This book and the responses to it have surprised me on a lot of different levels. One surprise was that the underage thing has been a non-issue. At least not one broached directly. The age differences between the three women were crucial to me. And while people picked up that Linda was older, they often ignored that Tory was older—that there was at least a generation between Lee and Tory and then another generation between Tory and Linda. This could well by my own fault. This thread was so obvious to me, so central, I may not have gotten it onto the page, or done it too subtly, giving people the opportunity to believe what they wanted. I was truly confused that anyone could read Tory as another teenager, but they did…
As far as Lee being underage, my biggest surprise here was that the book’s detractors kept nailing her, most often labeling her as passive. The[y] gave her no leeway, no slack. Instead of, well, she’s a teenager, this is how teenagers are, they couldn’t seem to stand it. I think that was part of the way people threatened or offended by the underage issue responded to it obliquely rather than directly.
For me, this type of response crosscuts to your question of incest survivor as victim—all that. I was somewhat stunned that the naysayers refused to give her any credit, but instead bashed her for staying with these abusive people. That their expectations for her behavior seemed predicated on Afterschool Specials or some other simplistic formula. That they couldn’t credit her for taking this leap and leaving her family. That they couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that someone with this history does not leave the original architects to find happiness in the outside world. This seemed shocking to me, the ignorance of it. Perhaps a willful ignorance?
For me the book wasn’t so much about incest as its legacy. And my perspective of it as complicated is innate. One of the reasons I wanted to avoid the whole theme was people’s simplistic ideas about it. Yes, we’re inundated with incest, or we have been, via talk shows, and just about every other medium. But, nonetheless, there’s an absence of understanding. A piece that’s always missing. A piece I’d call the turn-on factor. I can’t tell you how many people felt compelled to tell me the sex in the book didn’t turn them on. Some of these same people later admitted that it did, maybe once they saw I wouldn’t be offended. Some people definitely didn’t want to see Lee as turned on by these women, preferred to see her as a passive victim, rather than recognize that she’s fifteen, wants to have sex, is turned on by this type of sex for obvious reasons. I think maybe unless you can handle/accept this part of her you have to see her as passive.
PC: IV drug use is one of the biggest closets in the lesbian community. Almost every dyke I know who has AIDS got it from shooting up, or from fucking men for drugs. Having partied myself, I know that I am not the only lesbian who has that behavior as part of her history. How do you feel about the almost total silence on this issue in lesbian literature?
HL: Here again I feel dense about the silence. Though I do remember being in college, watching some film for some class that had a lot of nasty stuff in it, but there was one graphic IV drug-use scene (wish I could remember what film it was and what class it was for). Anyway, the entire audience flinched at this shooting-up scene. I’d recently been outed as a former IV drug user by a fellow student, and so watching that film, that scene, and the response to it, I knew why I’d kept this part of my past under wraps. I think this accounts for the silence. Even though we’re all supposed to be so cool, so hip, it’s bullshit. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, IV drug use, I’m not fazed by that, I can dig it.” It’s a whole other ballgame to say, “I’ve done that.” You’re instantly separated and voyeured. Same, but more so, with prostitution. Yeah, yeah everyone’s hip. Wants to slum, but only so far. Only if they can keep from getting dirty themselves.
PC: What gives you the strength to be such a strong and dissident voice in a genre that is mostly written for an eighth-grade reading level, and bound by sickly greeting-card sentiment, i.e. lesbian literature as defined by the fiction published by Naiad Press?
HL: If I have strength, it[‘]s come essentially from the kind of denseness I’ve talked about. I simply didn’t know what I was in for. How it would feel to expose myself at this level. The book’s fiction, of course. But we all know that a first novel is viewed as autobiography, whether the publisher positions it that way or not. My publisher played that card. It puts you in a peculiar trap. There’s some way, right now at least, that memoir is given more respect. First novels, you get the bash, without the payoff. You endure the speculation. Learn that people—whether it’s your friends or people at the publishing house—are having conversations; wondering is it live or Memorex. Your true color…well, only my therapist knows for sure. That’s my quip, but here again the same voyeur/separation thing.
This was the greatest lesson for me. I’d assumed my experience was not so out there, not so extreme. It was painful to learn differently. To slowly accept I was a little further off the beaten path than I’d imagined. And that I couldn’t get by or get off on some badass trip anymore—that particular pose or defense felt pretty empty and lonely.
PC: Why is literary criticism in the gay and lesbian press conducted at such an infantile level? Do you feel that your work gets the critical attention it deserves? What sort of response from critics would be helpful to you in your own work?
HL: I don’t feel I had a bad time with the gay press. This was a pleasant surprise. I thought I might run into trouble. I expected to get the ooh, bad role model thing. But it never really happened. John Weir in The Advocate wrote one of the most meaningful reviews, meaningful to me on a personal level. Linda Yablonsky in Out didn’t shy away from anything. These stand out. As do pieces by gay writers for more mainstream publications—Gary Indiana in Details, Carol Anshaw in The Village Voice. The New Yorker came through, too, with a great review in a gay theme issue. By and large I found the response of the gay press and community heartening. I felt we’d turned a corner.
The dissenters were largely writing in places like the New York Times Book Review. I was offended here more by disrespect than what was actually said—that they would assign the book to someone so inappropriate, especially inappropriate given that my editor had turned down the person’s first novel. But I gather that’s business as usual there, though I think the Times has a propensity to hit lesbian first timers in a way they don’t hit gay male first timers anymore. Progress? I don’t know, probably. At least they’re reviewing us.
The Women’s Review of Books delivered one of the most insulting and insipid reviews (I got better, more insightful clips from North Carolina). Katie Roiphe did a late bash in last November’s Harpers—an “incest round-up” article. She took specific aim at Sapphire and me, projecting her own opportunism on us and suggesting we’d come up with our novels after studying Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison respectively. The implicit racism of this was disgusting, as was Harpers’ decision not to print letters I knew were written calling them on the racism. They had no problem printing letters that bashed the article on every other front.
I also felt frustrated by the comparisons that turned up here and there between Allison’s book and mine. This, too, felt unbearably simplistic. To me, the books have virtually nothing in common other than both being authored by lesbians and published by mainstream publishers—and yes, of course, incest. But our approaches are so profoundly different that this felt, well, annoying at best. And as you suggested, part and parcel to this idea that we can only move so far. I hadn’t even read Allison’s book until mine was already in production. The idea that she simply had to be an influence or had set the standard by which all other dykes are judged I found offensive and limiting.
Yes, I did get the right-of-passing bash by the Naiad gals at OutWrite ’95. But this came so late in the game and I’d been waiting for something like this for so long, it passed like a blip. And again, the sentiment in the audience was so supportive. Essentially—“Sit down Barbara, we’ve heard this before.” I wouldn’t mind their views if I thought they really believed them, really had convictions. But they always seem to be advancing their business agenda by blowing political smoke. My only regret was not remembering that incident when they sold the lesbian nun stories to Penthouse without the women’s consent, and then were like, “Tough shit, we own the rights, we need the money.” Wish I’d called them on that as they were accusing me of selling out and/or being manipulated by some corporate publishing conspiracy.
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Thanks ladies! :)
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