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Dorothy Allison

Every book is a lesbian book
The author of "Bastard out of Carolina" recalls how her youthful imagination found Sapphists under the most unlikely covers.

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By Dorothy Allison

June 10, 1999 | When I think of the books that shaped my lesbian imagination, it is frankly embarrassing. The truth is that my ideas of romance and erotic authority and lesbian life patterns came out of some truly awful books -- when there were any books that mentioned lesbians at all. I don't mean embarrassing and bad in the sense that they were badly written -- though, of course, that is a factor -- but embarrassing because I believed, truly and completely, in the fatalistic and brutal things that were told to me about who I could be as a grown-up lesbian. I was born to a very poor, violent family where most of my focus was purely on survival, and my sense of self as a lesbian grew along with my sense of myself as a raped child, a poor white Southerner and an embattled female. I was Violet Leduc's Le Batard much more than I was Le Amazon, that creation of upper-class Natalie Barney. People tell me that class is no longer the defining factor it was when I was a girl, but I find that impossible to fully accept. Class is always a defining factor when you are the child one step down from everyone else.

Buy books by Dorothy Allison at BARNES & NOBLE

At the age of 13 I was always calculating how to not kill myself or how not to let myself be killed. That tends to stringently shape one's imagination. I did not plan to fill up a hope chest and marry some good old boy and make babies. I did not want to be who the world wanted to make me. I was a smart, desperate teenage girl trying to figure out how to not be dismissed out of hand for who I was. I wanted to go to college, not become another waitress or factory worker or laundry person or counter-help woman like all the other women I knew. Everywhere I looked I saw a world that held people like me in contempt -- even without the added detail of me being a lesbian.

The only "lesbian" books I could find then were the porn under my stepfather's bed or those gaudy paperbacks from the drugstore that inevitably ended with one "dyke" going off to marry while the other threw herself under a car. This did not persuade me to be straight, but it did prove to me that fiction should be distrusted. No way I would kill myself for falling in love with my girlfriends. No, I had more deadly reasons to feel hopeless. To find a way out of the world as I saw it, I read science fiction. To sustain my rage and hope, I read poetry and mainstream novels with female heroines. And I read books by Southerners for ammunition to use against Yankees who would treat me mean. Always I read as a lesbian.

Next page | Flannery O'Connor was a lesbian


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