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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 1, 1987)
++- r ^ X wiT Tn» '**ir/ Southern route In Durham I declined to read erotica because a gentleman in business attire, clean-shaven, bellied, stood nearby staring blank-faced into a single book throughout most of my reading. B Y L E E L Y N C H y main impressions from a quick Southern tour are vociferous songbirds and consistently lovely women. One friend reminded me that Southern women have a reputation for physical beauty, but I’d never thought that conventional gtxxJ looks might transfer to our own. Secondary impression: Stately buildings surrounded by blazing azaleas, long quiet blocks of porch-fronted homes in both black and white neighborhoods. M and rooms full of laughing, applauding, culture-hungry women. Norfolk, Virginia, is a Navy town; flat and unpretty except for the waterfront. There, a festive shopping mall is backed by older shops and fronted by a view of the most enormous ships I have ever seen. Pretty scary. But Dr. Ellen Lewin, Director of Wo men’s Studies at a local school, wasn’t scary at all. We went to high school to gether twenty-six years go. 1 admired her enormously. She was a fifteen year-old radical before the age of radicals. Today (after reconnecting through my books last year) she thinks she’s mellowed, but obvi ously forgets that the field of women’s studies is a tenuous cutting edge through society’s misconceptions, preconceptions and preoccupation with conception — and that the teachers are the vulnerable blades. Ellen brought me together with a small and brave group of women who have formed the Tidewater Bookshelf, a book store without a home which travels to its customers with lesbian and feminist titles. They dared not advertise too blatantly — many of the women involved are Naval personnel. Others are simply Southerners T H E Personalized Naturopathic Health Care Steven Bailey* N.D. Naturopathic Physician General Practice Nutrition Classical Homeopathy Women s and Children’s Health Care Immune Supptrrt Programs Diagnostic and Laboratory Workups AMAZON T Vis Medicamx Naturae NORTHWEST. NATUROPATHIC CLINIC 2606 N. W. Vaughn / Portland, OR ( 503 ) 224-8083 CASCADE NATUROPATHIC CLINIC 819 N. Killingsworth / Portland, OR ( 503 ) 289-9914 HAL JONES AUTOMOTIVE JOY ENTERPRISES Bill Joy Ron Joy Our thanks go to those Just Out readers who number among our customers. We enjoy seeing each of you, appreciate being of service to all of you — and welcome your references — thank you very much. This month, we join our Just Out clients in celebrating Lesbian and Gay Pride and remind them to celebrate safely. 5111 NE Fremont Portland, OR 97213 • CRYSTALS 8c GEMS • RITUAL ACCESSORIES • METAPHYSICAL PRACTITIONERS CRONE MAGIC 249*0444 PORTLAND 12-6 TUE.-SAT. 1405 N E BROADWAY Just Out, 24 . June. 1987 288-1130 R A I L with a healthy respect for one tradition of their homeland: eradication of queers. Not that the South is any different from any place else. It just seems to be more so. But then, my audience was more so, too— one of the most appreciative I’ve ever had. The attorney who’d just started practice, the Naval officers who’d enlisted for training they never got, the writer who’d heard that publishing with a lesbian press was the kiss of death. I reminded her of Isabel Miller, Judy Grahn and Rita Mae Brown. On the way to Richmond, Ellen took me strolling through Williamsburg, a recon struction of a colonial town. Though real people live in the real houses, tourist groups ran amok and there were few signs of real history: pigs slopping in the mud, slaves struggling to survive, fragrant out door plumbing. And we complain that the Soviet Union rewrites history! Lesbians, however, are similar every where. Representatives from the local softball team — “ Soft Touch” — were on hand to cheer my softball story. They had a story of their own: of their one-armed teammate who can catch a ball and have it back in the air again in the blink of an eye. Helen Whiting squired me around. She was one of several military daughters I met who opted to settle in the South. I stayed with Kristen, retail manager of Lady slip per, a national woman’s music distributor and mail order company. Her large breezy home is in an impressively integrated neighborhood. Readings at The Regulator are very Southern. I felt as if I was presiding over an at-home tea as I sat on a wrap-around cushioned bench with my visitors. One woman had driven a great distance with her three young sons and their just-weaned kittens. While the boys stayed outside looking for kitten homes, mom listened to old-dyke-takes-by-request. I was gratified by Durham’s yen for my characters. More than Western or Northeastern readers, the woman of the South seem to fall in love with fictional characters and have an end- I' less curiosity about their ongoing lives. A New Yorker drove me down to Greensboro, North Carolina. Her non drawl was like a breath of home. But in Greensboro I was plunged once more into musical voices: Kim, assistant manager of White Rabbit Books, which is owned by John Neil, greeted me, along with Cathy, a filmmaker who, with backing and time, may well rival Donna Deitch’s achieve ment with Desert Hearts. Jody was there, too, a jewelry-maker who wends her way down from the mountains of North Caro lina to spend her weekends in the gay com munity. Greensboro, like the other cities I visited, may not boast of its gay people, but there are four bars in the small city. Two of them have drag shows — a well- entrenched Southern tradition enjoyed by lesbians right along with gay men. I stayed with Kathy and Karen, who are members of Lesbians Up For New Adven tures (LUNA), which co-sponsored, with White Rabbit, my trip. Both women are Virgos like myself. It has been my obser vation that Virgos have difficulty, to say the least, in making decisions together, in out-courtesying one another, and in penetrating one another’s stubomness. Our threesome proved me right. Once the initial, and riotous, negotiations were over, I rested until it was time to travel to a Unitarian church in the woods where wo men overflowed the seats to hear excerpts from Dusty’s Queen o f Hearts Diner (to be released in August). Besides the Virgos, songbirds and les bian beauty, the other commonality I found was a scarcity of gay writers visiting the South. The women were so glad to see me in person, and seemed so stimulated by what I read, that I wonder if alliances can be made between booksellers and grassroots groups in the various cities to establish a Southern Route on the Amazon Trail. Once formed, such a network could also supplement any in place to fight censor ship and obscenity laws. In Durham I de clined to read erotica because a gentleman in business attire, clean-shaven, bellied, stood nearby staring blank-faced into a single book throughout most of my read ing. In Greensboro, after the reading, Karen mentiond that I could have been arrested for reading a story called “ Dusty Eats Out” though she assured me there’d been no police in the audience. As I write this at Chicago’s O ’Hare International, I’m aware of breathing a little bit easier. From those big destroyers (literally) in Norfolk, to those little words in state sta tutes that restrict the freedom of speech and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness embodied in Williamsburg, I was more aware than usual of the risks a lesbian takes to write about her life. When it was over, when my last words hung naked and vulnerable in the balmy North Carolina air, Kathy and Karen whisked me off to a ‘ ‘pasture party" given by a couple who own a local stable. It was a comforting sight. At least two hundred lesbians, along with a handful of gay men, talked and danced around a huge bonfire which glowed orange and bright. I watched older femmes, baby butches, dancing boys; smelled horses, burning wood; heard rock music by the pond, and the shouts and laughter of a people set free, for a few hours, to love one another in the open, before the flickering bonfire light, under the dark and — unfortunately for the revelers — not always gracious South ern sky.
