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Friday
June 15, 2007
Vol 35 Issue 24

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Friday, Sep 05, 2008

Not Thinking Straight by Madelyn Arnold

Up The Ladder to freedom. Well, partly
Up The Ladder to freedom. Well, partly by Madelyn Arnold - SGN Contributing Writer AS THE NEW REVERE THE OLD It can be so moving -- seeing the new meeting their elders with awe and pride; watching youngsters finding their tongues to ask about when some aspect of society - now quiet - seemed dangerous. Back when former abolitionists shouted "votes for women!" And how did all those old queens and daggers ever find the stones to say, Pleased to meet you! We're the Mattachines and the Daughters of Bilitis [DOB]! Well, they didn't, exactly. And if there are parallel universes where the young revere the old for establishing ways that will benefit succeeding generations, they must be very different from this one. Certainly my "generation" was anything but generous to those previous... but I wonder. Are the reasons always the same? READING THE [LADY WITH THE] LADDER The other day a therapist in his 50s admitted that, when he had started out, in his 20s, he had been astonished to discover that, up to the time he was in college, homosexuality had been considered a 'mental illness'. Likewise, I often have to explain to contemporary Gay folks that we used to be dumped into institutions - particularly males - to jails/prisons and females to looney bins. When I was 17, I was committed and I was almost as lonely there as I was afraid. But, in time, I looked around to see who else was there. While younger, I had read prodigiously about us all... there was only a little that had told me anything good about how we saw ourselves and most of that was written prior to 1905 (and if I didn't agree with it, at least it didn't outright slander us all). I had looked and looked for work about my century, stuff that would tell me what was actually happening. Nothing from the 30s to the early 60s was worth spitting at (other than from a few Germans) except learning there was a Lesbian group, the Daughters of Bilitis, which had a magazine called The Ladder. Imagine that! I thought: we've got a newspaper! I suppose this reaction had something to do with Superman, Lois Lane, and all those sexy newspaper making and folding and stacking machines I saw at the movies and, later, on television. We had a newspaper, so we had some kind of reliable mailing list. We had writes, surely, if we had readers? Literati with my proclivities. Of lady literati if you will; to that point the only Dykes I had met imposed Butch and Bitch and I didn't need to buck the law to get what I knew I hated. As for literate.... Suddenly, I could imagine women like me: readers, writers and mathematicians like my lover reading The Ladder. So watching several butch girls on the wards, I suddenly made my choice and, when we had a chance to be alone, managed to ask... "Ever read The Ladder?" The woman, a nurse, rolled her eyes up languidly to meet my own: I have a subscription. Did she know how to make a moment fire up. Over the following months, I learned a great deal from her; not all of which was especially good to know. And, I got my hands on a copy of The Ladder, which slapped me sober. It was a little thing with blue ink and three staples. Not exactly the New York Times, but I had already got her measure from her chat and "library" of self-help books. Self-hell books was more like it. She was ahead of her time; that stuff is much more popular today, wherever she is.... BRIDGING THE GAP One time I mentioned seeing that paper and a graduate student made the rudest noise: "From a stencil -- a mimeograph for your grammar class!" Yes, the truth hurts. But dammit, it took courage to make that stencil and run it off. By the time I was back in school, times had changed: the process was, free yourself, instead of looking out for others. Many of us had watched the various movements come alive, and now they wanted all of us outsiders - out. New "movements" took the form of X-Liberation Front, where X was whatever group needed freeing: Women's Liberation Front, Gay Liberation Front (GLF), etc.. Many of us had never heard of any Gay groups and, the ones who had, had heard of the Mattachines. Young guys had heard of them and "The Bilitis", and tended to despise either one, no matter what. They tended to consider GLF the first [or the only one worthy]. I got a taste of why at an anti-war rally where the Mattachines had a literature table. I had only seen more "appropriate dress" on an undertaker: herringbone Hickey-Freeman suit with fedora and silk tie. People didn't wear any hats anymore, and we dressed like bums. Each group sized the other up and scorned. And their "literature"? Jeezus whiz. That was it for me: exeunt Mattachines. Maybe I'll take upcontent another time. AND THERE WAS THE WAY Our "elders" talked over our heads about names and cases we didn't know. The criticized everything we did and were. More to the point was a supper I threw for my lover, who was studying Graduate French. I invited the only friend that she had made and I hadn't wanted her friend to feel odd (among only women), so I invited my best male friend. Gay males both, each of them was the closest (non-sexual) friend to one of us. And, I couldn't not see the interaction between them. Afterward, her friend followed me into the kitchen for washing-up. I want to thank you, he burbled along, pleased with himself. He almost rubbed his hands.... As he was leaving, he fixed an icy look on my friend, then, his expression changed like I'd given him a present: "He'll do what I want, all right. And maybe I can stretch it out a little...." And off he went into the blackest night -- with my friend. It wasn't prudery, that was infuriating. He thought I had given my friend to him -- thought I had valued him over and above my closest friend. The arrogance of this frowsy old queen. Like, really. And there was the throwback idea: when I know what you are, you have to put out for me. It's your fate. When I got up the courage to ask my friend if he was "seeing" this guy, he shrugged. And, then, he said the one thing I never expected... which says much more about me than about either man... [no, I won't tell]. AS MUCH AS TO SAY I've come to think that each new group feels its way to permanence by failing to notice any predecessors. If it can't do that, it denigrates whatever came before. [Predecessors] were cowardly; [the ones before] were useless; and dressed like pimps/queens/jerks. They never analyzed things right.... They never got it. And the ones that came before fail to see the new. How else can we all ignore that we are ignorant?

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