The Lesbian Edition
of Books to Watch Out For

BTWOF is very pleased to be able to bring you this excerpt from Lucy Jane Bledsoe's keynote address at the Lambda Literary Festival, October 10, in Provincetown. It was refreshing, inspiring, and one of the best parts of the Festival.

By Lucy Jane Bledsoe

.…The best coming out stories, the profound ones, are about much more than girl learns she likes girls, or boy learns he likes boys. They’re about blowing open the dominant story….

….When I got to the top of those stairs [in her first lesbian bar], I was met by a room full of women looking nothing like the girls at school. It was 1975, and yes, they were wearing flannel shirts, levis, and Fry boots, and let me tell you, they looked hot to this young girl….

I also learned about an ongoing feud between the prostitutes, who hung in the bar in between jobs, and the political dykes. As it happened, a political dyke had slept with one of the working girl dyke’s girlfriend, and a fistfight broke out that night while I was there. Chairs and beer bottles flew. I had never seen women so fierce – about love, sex, and each other. And I was filled with wonder.

No, the picture wasn’t pretty, but it was lustful, honest, and a completely different story from the ones I’d been told about what women did.

And that was just the beginning. What coming out was about for me was learning that there are multiple stories, that everything I’d been taught to believe was actually just one layer of life in and among many other layers. I became hungry for more stories….

[W]hen I met those fierce, flannel-shirted political lesbians, and the equally fierce spike-heeled hooker lesbians, in the Other Side of Midnight, choosing to love whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, however they wanted, I knew that that was what I wanted. I wanted to be part of the vanguard that redefined what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to love, I wanted to be with the people who stretched open society’s view of what was possible in human connection.

I am talking about this now because this is also what I want for our writing community. I want us to remain in the vanguard, for us to challenge the dominant society’s view of love and relationship, as well as their views of art, community, and spirituality….

[F]or me, being a lesbian, and being a lesbian writer, is about envisioning a new way for everyone. I don’t want us to lose sight of our vision to love who, when, where, and how we want, with or without straight approval, with or without a state-sanctioned piece of paper. I want them to be like us, and not the other way around….

[B]esides sneaking into dyke bars, something else extraordinary was happening to me in the 1970’s.  What was happening to me was Adrienne Rich. Audre Lorde. Pat Parker. Edmund White. James Baldwin. And many others. Talk about having my mind blown. Here were a group of kickass queer writers who were challenging the status quo every step of the way. Not only that, but feminist bookstores were opening up all over the country to carry the words and work of women.  I’d been a reader my whole life, of course, but here was a community of women who were deciding to open their own bookstores so that we could determine the stories that would be told about our lives….

I don’t see our writing community as having an outsider status; rather, I see us having a visionary status. We, as artists who not only love differently, but have different stories to tell, are positioned to see most clearly the dominant story, and it is our work to show readers some of the other stories….

© Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Look for the complete text of the speech in an upcoming issue of The Lambda Book Report. Find out more about Lucy's other writing at www.lucyjanebledsoe.com.