In the heart of the desert
There they were, the saguaros, tall cactus sentinels of the dry
land, majestic and stubborn against the onslaught of
people and concrete mixers
B
Y
L
E
E____L__Y
N
C___ H
am awed by the western United States. To
this city kid outdoors once meant sidewalks
and handball courts, playgrounds and hanging
out on the comer. In school we studied about the
I
E
A MAZO N
T R A I L
Grand Canyon. The Mississippi River. Moun
tains. Deserts. I didn’t quite believe any of
those phenomena existed. They were fairy tales,
as unreachable as Rapunzcl's tower. When I
drove across the country for the first time in
1984, at age 39, I fell in love with the West,
especially the mythical desert. Early in March
of this year I returned to Arizona, half, I sup
pose, to reassure myself that it was really there.
I am happy to announce that it was, though in
Tucson, my base of operations, there were
times only the plentiful palm trees and land
scaped cacti convinced me of that. The city
looks as though it is owned by a concrete con
glomerate that pours night and day and then
pours some more. Around the outskirts of this
island of cement, though, are the saguaro cacti,
the palo verde trees, the ocotillos that make the
landscape magic.
And Tucson draws magical people to it . I was
able to spend time with two of them.
Valerie Taylor has been in town for some
years now. She’s been on the lesbian literary
scene a lot longer: Whisper i heir Love (1957),
The Girls in 3-B (1959), Stranger on Lesbos
(I960), Unlike Others, Return to Lesbos and
A World Without Men (1963), and Journey to
Fulfillment (1964). Naiad Press has reprinted
three of these and has published the recent Love
Imaf>e and Prism. New work is coming both
from Naiad and Banned Books. Valerie Taylor
is not only a pioneer but a mandarin of lesbian
culture.
In the early 1960s, when I was starving for
community and enlightenment, my lover and I
read Taylor’s lxx)ks. I imagine that they were
handed down, dog-eared, from some Older
Lesbian, or that we stumbled on them in a seedy
Greenwich Village shop. Did the heroines go
straight? The lesbians end badly? Whatever,
those shocking paperbacks set fires in us. We
were endlessly curious about the author. Was
she? What did she look like? Were we likely to
meet her in the bars when we were old enough?
And would we too ever write books about
lesbians?
What a thrill to get the still-unanswered ques
tions answered in an exotic — to me — desert
town in 1988. What a thrill to see Valerie Taylor
r
A
‘TAKE YOUR TASTE AWAY FROM THE EVERYDAY”
at last, under a starry Western sky, in the door
way of her tiny concrete-block home. What a
thrill to ask her to go out with me on a Saturday
night. If anyone had told me, in 1960, that I’d
ever ask Valerie Taylor out on a date'.
Valerie is in her 70s now. She’s little and
dark-eyed and warm and generous and articu
late. Back when I was reading her books she
had just left her husband and was supporting her
three boys by writing and editing. My teen lover
and I weren’t likely to run into her in the bars,
but she was actively a lesbian. She is still
actively a lesbian, for that matter. She is also
busy in the peace movement and with the local
food bank and . . . I cannot remember all the
ways she spends her boundless energies.
In other words, Valerie Taylor turned out to
be better than I’d fantasized. All I could im
agine at 15 was some swashbuckling lady killer
who had all the answers. What I found was a
peace-loving feminist who has all the same
questions about war and hunger and equality
that I do.
Valerie and I went gallery-hopping that
Saturday night, in and out of the Tucson art
throngs. I had a wonderful time. What I’ll
probably remember best, though, is losing the
car and walking this long-standing heroine of
mine up and down the streets of Tucson trying to
find it, and then our giggling hysteria as I pro
ceeded to go in the wrong direction to take her
home. She couldn't help — she only rides
buses. We were well on our way to Mexico
before I, red-faced, doubled back. Some gallant
I make.
Our companion, before the disasters, was
Hannah Blue Heron. Musician and writer, Han
nah’s work was included in Lesbian Nuns (Curb
and Manahan, Naiad Press). She is one of the
crew who run Womancraft Gallery in down
town Tucson, a large space devoted to women’s
art and craft work. I’d known Hannah in Ore
gon when she lived in a one-room cabin deep in
the woods. She moved to Tucson to help her
arthritis, and she immediately began to build an
adobe home with the help of an assortment of
women and good old-fashioned tools like
shovels and her back.
Hannah is nearing 60, long-legged, white-
haired. and actually has the aura of her graceful
avian namesake. Her home is literally dug out
of the ground, her living room a scooped-out
bowl whose contents have been shaped into the
adobe bricks that became her walls. Her cir
cular roof is a beautiful structure, almost one
with the desert. The skylight at the center of the
roof is often occupied by her dog, who simply
clambers up there from the ground to assume
his watching post.
The other dwellings at Adobeland, where
Hannah lives, range from elderly travel trailers
to two-story cabins, all women-made. I met the
creator of this women’s land, Adobe herself, an
intense former physical-education teacher from
the East Coast. With impressive staying power
and, I would assume, great tolerance for the
vagaries of our community, she has established
something permanent and valuable. I also
visited with Zanna, the poet and artist, and with
Lee Lanning, publisher of Ripening: An
Almanac o f Lesbian Lore, an early classic of the
women’s movement.
But I spent most of my time at Adobeland
with Hannah, admiring the accomplishment of
her home, looking at photographs of its
creation, listening to tales of building her life in
the desert.
My visiting was done primarily at night.
Days I devoted to the desert itself. My excuse
for the trip was research fora book that’s been in
the works for years. One of the characters
is Windy Sands, a retired motor-vehicle-
department employee who lives in her own little
shantytown of trailers and shacks where she
raises miniature cacti to sell wholesale. Two
other characters, women not unlike myself,
visit her. One finds herself in the desert, the
other gets from it what she needs to go on.
I’d expected to be enchanted; I hadn’t
expected to fall more in love. There they were,
though, the saguaros, tall cactus sentinels of the
dry land, majestic and stubborn against the
onslaught of people and concrete mixers. They
are everywhere, many-armed, looking down on
the likes of me wandering the trails of the
Saguaro National Monument. There is a feel
ing, under the naked Southwestern sun, alone
but for jackrabbits and birds, cooled by silent
breezes, lured on by the flat easy earth — there
is a feeling of lonely strength there. One is
reduced to a body and a strangely quiet mind in
the presence of the simple divinity that is sun
and earth, jackrabbit and the miraculously
adapted plant, the cactus.
Those enduring women, Valerie, Hannah
and Adobe, who may all be incorporated in
Windy Sands, remind me of the cacti. Heartier
than drought or oppression, more alive than
floods and restrictive laws, they are setting
down roots with their hand-built homes and
courageous culture. How could baby-dyke me
ever have anticipated this? A search that began
so long ago in the bars ended in a place I’d never
even believed existed: the magical, enduring
desert.
•
For more about Valerie Taylor, see the
interview by Tee Corinne and Caroline Over
man in Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, Spring
1988. Biographical data from Grier, The
Lesbian in Literature (Naiad Press).
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