Skin by Dorothy Allison

Author:Dorothy Allison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

This essay appeared in Forum in Spring 1985.

Conceptual Lesbianism

I’m not yet a lesbian, the letter began. Not yet? I passed the page over to my friend Jan. “What the hell do you think this is supposed to mean? You think maybe it’s something she hasn’t gotten around to, like putting henna in her hair or trimming her toenails? Or maybe she thinks of lesbianism as a trip she’s always planned to take—like a day trip out to Coney Island or a really complicated expedition to the Himalayas, or maybe Montana?”

Jan gave me one of those looks that clearly expressed she knew I knew what the woman meant, all the different things she had implied. The letter, after all, had been written to accompany a review copy of the woman’s book of poetry. And Jan was right. I could easily imagine the woman sitting down with a stack of magazines and newspapers, or a list out of one of the directories of writers and reviewers, wondering how she was going to get anybody interested in excerpting or reviewing her work. Maybe she had come to my name after hours of work and had been feeling both tired and silly. There had probably been different letters for different categories of reviewers, but I doubted she had sent one off to the Guardian that said, I’m not yet a socialist. Nor could I imagine such a letter from a male writer wherein he would define himself as not yet a faggot. Even the radical faeries and men’s movement theorists don’t talk about conceptual homosexuality as the goal of a heightened sensitivity. But lesbians have had to confront a world of misconceptions, from our teenage years when they tell us it’s just a phase, to the last few years when magazines have prominently featured pretty young white female pairs, and suggested that we’re all some variation on k.d. lang, Martina Navratilova, or Melissa Etheridge—somehow establishing a notion in the public mind that lesbians are young, healthy, middle-class jocks who can sing.

Ever since I heard the Ti-Grace Atkinson quote about feminism being the theory and lesbianism the practice, I’ve been uncomfortable with the odd glamour applied to the term lesbian. I use the word glamour deliberately, since I believe that what has grown up around the concept of lesbianism is not only an illusion of excitement, romance, and power, but an obscuring mystery. Or, as a nasty lady I used to adore would always joke, “When is a lesbian not a lesbian? When she’s a feminist!”

In the early days of the women’s movement, many women found themselves struck dumb by the accusation of lesbianism: “Ah, you’re all a bunch of dykes!” Some of these women made a practical and moral decision to confront the basis of the prejudice. After the first roll of, “Oh no, we’re not,” they started saying, “So, what if we are?” Or at least some of them did. While parts of the women’s movement did everything they could to disassociate themselves

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