While I was stationed in San Francisco, they sent me to Japan for a little over a year. I got there just in time for the witch-hunt. I didn’t know what was going on – none of us did. Well, there we were in Japan, all these kids. We were twenty, twenty-one and MacArthur had said he wanted American woman in Japan so that Japanese women could see what free American woman looked like. I’m sure that what he meant was not the five hundred dykes who got off that boat. And I mean, dykes. We had an all-woman band and they were all in men’s band uniforms (p. 166).
When I finished reading the first account in this book, that of Mary who falls in love with Jane only for them both to marry other people, live next door to each other for years, and never get together, I wasn’t sure if I could continue reading. Were all the stories going to be just as heartbreaking? But I persevered and overall it was rewarding, especially for the sense of reading about my history, about the kind of women whose lives paved the way for my own.
The book was published in 1986 and has a very second wave feel. It claims to be “edited” by Adelman, but this is seriously ‘hands off’ editing. As Dorothy Allison writes in her essay ‘Believing in Literature’, second wave feminists saw editing itself as a political act: ‘we questioned what was silenced when raw and rough work by women outside the accepted literary canon was rewritten or edited in such a way that the authentic voices were erased’ (Skin 174). Adelman’s project is all about authentic voices and she got a wide range of women to participate – working class lesbians, middle-class lesbians, lesbians of colour, white lesbians, feminist lesbians, and lesbians who couldn’t give a damn about feminism. Adleman does not attempt to manipulate the material to create any kind of romanticised lesbian past that might be more amenable to the way feminists now would like to think about lesbian history. Nor does she provide any introductions to the women’s accounts to soft-peddle the content. The book is all the stronger for it.
But this also means that it’s not a happy book: a lot of the stories are angry, sad, tragic and disturbing. And these are not “nice” women. Why should they be? They have almost all of them lived very challenging lives. There are a lot of bad marriages to be escaped; others join the military. Alcoholism is a commonplace in their lives. Adelman does not edit out disturbing voices, such as the woman who admits, without any remorse, to having had sex with an 8 year-old girl when she was 13, or the woman who claims to be a bad ass radical feminist, but couldn’t manage to look after her own daughter because she was so drunk at the time, and has very ambivalent (and I would say potentially abusive) thoughts about her baby grandson. They are tough women and you get the feeling that some of them had to become very self-centred simply in order to survive because if they hadn’t put themselves first, they probably wouldn’t have survived.
At the same time, the energy and determination of these women to carve out lives for themselves against all the odds is life-affirming and inspiring. I liked the interviews best because they felt so immediate. Most of them insist on the right to be seen as sexual beings. It was interesting to see how many were engaged in inter-generational relationships (and I mean with 30 or 40 year age gaps), a pattern of lesbian life that seems to be in decline now.
The book affirms the importance of the visibility of older lesbians and of preserving their stories because without their stories we will lose the history and without the history it’s very hard to learn.
Things As They Are 