The best books that helped me claim my identity as a lesbian and feminist

When I was struggling with my sexual identity as a lesbian, and also beginning to understand how that was connected to feminist ideas, I discovered the writings of Adrienne Rich. Primarily a poet, this book revolutionized my thinking.

As Rich wrote about her own experience as a writer “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” and re-visited the poetry of Emily Dickinson showing her as a deeply closeted woman-loving woman, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” and re-visioned what honor meant for a women as contrasted to what it meant for men “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,”  and another titled “The Meaning of Our Love for Women is What We Must Constantly Expand,” among many other essays in this book, my whole world was turned upside down and inside out.

It was published many years ago, is still available in print, and still resonates.

Audre Lorde described herself as a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior.

She was primarily a poet, but she also wrote powerful prose including Zami that she called a “biomythography,” describing Black lesbian life in the 1940s and 1950s primarily in New York. This book, Sister Outsider is comprised of a series of short essays that profoundly changed and influenced my thinking from a Black, feminist, queer perspective.

Titles suggest new ways of thinking. For example: ”Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” 

So much of her writing was about breaking silence, about writing as a way of helping to sort our ideas, and feelings, about sexuality as a source of empowerment rather than shame.

There was an uncompromising clarity about the pain and politics of racism. And even before we had more fully developed the language for it, the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexuality all are intertwined systems of domination, how we are all part of one another, how difference can be made into a way of knowing and a source of empowerment, rather than division and fear.

I have worked in anti-racist movements throughout my life, and Lorde’s work was deeply personally meaningful and clarifying to me. 

Gloria Anzaldúa was born and raised in South Texas, growing up along the U.S.-Mexican border. For many years she lived in San Francisco, and then in Santa Cruz, California.

The first 113 pages of the book are stories and essays drawn from her life experiences as a woman of Mexican and Indian heritage, daily experiencing life at the physical border between the United States and Mexico.

She was raised in a strongly Catholic tradition, while also drawn to and inventing her own spirituality rooted in indigenous practices of harmony, balance, and reverence for the earth. She was a lesbian in a straight world that condemned her woman-loving sensibility.

Each of these is a “borderland” to be navigated and negotiated, and each of these borders is rich with insight, life, laughter, tears, violence, and love. The last 100 pages of the book is titled “Un Agitado Viento/ Ehécatl, The Wind.” It is the wind of poetry.

The Spanish language filters throughout the book but you are provided enough context and/or translation to understand even if you don’t speak the language.

This book revolutionized my thinking because it taught me (again) how to use personal experience to illuminate political life. And it taught me about the specific dislocations of colonialism and thefts of land, and exploitation of labor in deeply personal ways, opening my heart to love and kindness, and understanding. “This land was Mexican once

Was Indian always

And is.

And will be again”

Alison Bechdel is a graphic artist, and for many years her weekly comic strip was syndicated in queer newspapers across the United States, and then published in a marvelous and hilarious series of books called Dykes to Watch Out For.

It was so wonderful to have a comic strip that reflected back to me so much of my own interior life and also the queer people and communities I knew. Then in 2006 Allison Bechdel took the queer world by storm when she published this memoir based on her childhood in a small New England town in which her father ran the funeral home (the fun home of the title) and taught English in the local high school.

He was gay, a secret he kept from everyone in his family and in the town, until an incident leaked it out into the family and beyond. Bechdel recreates her childhood, her family’s dynamics, her feelings, in graphic sequences that are visually compelling with an accompanying text that reproduces dialogue with extraordinary immediacy.

All of this influenced the way Allison Bechdel explored and acknowledged her own lesbian identity. Alternately gripping, funny, literary, and psychologically complicated Fun Home was ultimately made into a Broadway musical.

It received rave reviews. In this way, it ‘crossed over’ from a solely queer to a mainstream audience. The story resonated with me personally in many ways; and, I also appreciated it as a brilliant work of art and literature.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1940s and 1950s. As one of New York City’s 5 boroughs it has character and even a mystique about it, and we Brooklynites are often very proud of our heritage.

Until I was about 13 the Brooklyn Dodgers were the zany, irreverent, baseball upstarts who sometimes even won the World Series. And they hired Jackie Robinson, desegregating professional baseball. All of this is to say that when High Ryan published his book, I devoured it as it fused my Brooklyn heritage and my queer identity.

Starting with poet Walt Whitman, he takes us through the writers, the dock workers, the socialists, the communists, the college professors and artists, who were lesbian or gay and both shaped and were shaped by the city, Ryan’s archival research is amazing, and his writing style breezy, and accessible.  Even if you’re not from Brooklyn (!) you will enjoy the book.