Apples & Oranges by Jan Clausen

Author:Jan Clausen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: lgbtq memoir, lgbt memoir, bisexual memoir, bisexual non-fiction, lgbt non-fiction, bisexual nonfiction, lgbtq non-fiction, lgbtq nonfiction, lgbt nonfiction, memoir sexual identity, memoir sexuality, coming out memoir, coming out story, feminist canon, feminist memoir, feminist non-fiction, feminist nonfiction, bisexuality memoir, queer memoir, queer non-fiction, queer nonfiction, queer canon, lesbian memoir, lesbian non-fiction
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2017-07-07T15:53:06+00:00

In moving east I’d promised myself a chunk of summer in Portland, a symbolic dose of nature as a consolation prize for time served in the heart of artifice. I crossed Canada again and stayed for two months, backpacking near Three-Fingered Jack in the Mount Jefferson area with my friend Julie, staying in her room in a house full of strangers while she was out of town. I brooded over sad memories, got a shorter haircut, had my I.U.D. removed. I read a trashy book on Janis Joplin’s sex life, written by a woman who claimed to have been her lover. I bought a ritual copy of The Well of Loneliness in a women’s bookstore in Seattle, amused and embarrassed at the sales clerk’s caveat that its view of lesbians was pretty negative and definitely outmoded. (Did I really look like such a neophyte—or such a literal-minded reader?)

Leaving Portland again seemed even more momentous than when I’d headed out the last time. In December I’d been able to say I was giving New York a whirl; now I felt that my relation to the West had shifted permanently. I felt, as well, that I was fast approaching some sort of sexual crossroads. I’d just bought a modest-sized notebook in which I jotted the prediction that I would make love with a woman before filling all its pages.

I took a plane, my first from coast to coast, and this concession to modern travel methods also seemed to mark the finality of my relocation. My future life would be increasingly punctuated by the solemn rituals of takeoff and landing, by the revolutions of baggage carousels, by dizzying transitions from one time zone to another.

In the air I read Kate Millett’s Flying. It had been an extravagant purchase in hardcover, but I hoped that someone else’s chaos could help me. (“Time stops . . . while Teresa Juarez’s voice loud butches me from a floor mike center of the room, a bully for all the correct political reasons. Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian? . . . Yes I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a Lesbian. It was the last strength I had.”) In writing about her own gray areas, Kate reassured me that my burning longing to touch a woman again was more than just a figment of my imagination. Or rather: not an isolated figment, for if fancy is the truest substance of desire, it still requires backup. I needed to see my imaginings reflected along with my self-doubt. (“Go down dream mouth tongue singing on her center tasting knowing her essence. . . . Good it is, lovely the fullness of him in me. But need one be torn, forced to live in one place or another?” This raw report, not Radclyffe’s overcooked fable, would be my guide and mirror.)

Kate’s girlhood in St. Paul, my mother’s town, was a nice coincidence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.