Leave It All Behind

by Giselle Renarde

For more than 50 years, my grandmother was married to a man with unchecked mental health issues.

My grandfather didn't believe in doctors. I want to say he hadn't seen one since WWII, when shrapnel was embedded in his lungs (where it remained until he was cremated), but I think I'm romanticizing the past a bit. Because in the late 1950s my grandfather was incarcerated for committing a violent crime against his family. Since he was institutionalized in psychiatric correctional facility, I suppose he would have seen doctors then.

I can't imagine that helped matters any.

Point being: my grandfather didn't see doctors if he wasn't being forced to. But he did self-medicated. With alcohol.

I spent a great deal of time with my grandfather, in my youth. I remember him very fondly. After his death, my grandmother revealed to me that he'd been abusive toward her in every way possible.  I was shocked to hear this. It didn't sound at all like the grandfather I'd known and loved. In fact, it sounded more like my father... who was also institutionalized after committing criminal acts, in what's now known as a forensic psychiatric hospital.

When I started working in the domestic violence sector, I learned more about the cycle of violence that plays out through the generations. That's when the pieces started coming together. My mother was "daddy's little girl"--her words. So she married a man just like her father. She saw no reason not to.

When my grandmother began speaking more openly about the family violence that had taken place throughout the years, my aunts started talking too. Not my mom. My mother doesn't like to talk about unpleasant things. She says the past is in the past. It isn't, and perhaps one day she'll come to that realization, but she hasn't yet and it's not an issue that's easy to push.

Throughout my childhood, my mom's two younger sisters were an endless source of funny family stories. I remember taking the subway with them when I was six or seven years old and saying, "Tell me another story about when you were kids!" I couldn't get enough.  I loved their hilarious stories about my aunt's pet rooster and the family of ducks that lived under their house.

So when the darker stories started coming out, I was really amazed. All those sunny family stories were still true. They'd just left out the unpleasantness until now.

My younger aunts told me about coming home for lunch on school days. My grandfather did shift work and he was home during the day. My older aunts were in high school, and their lunch period started a little earlier than the lunch hour at the elementary school. So my younger aunts would walk home together, and on certain days they'd find my older aunts leaving the house. No words would be exchanged. Only a frown and a shake of the head. That was enough to inform the younger kids that it wasn't safe to go inside. On those days, my aunts didn't get to eat lunch.  They went into the field across the road, and they played or gleaned grains for their pets.

The new stories, the dark stories, don't go into detail the way the sunny ones had.  But they don't have to.  I know now that my mother grew up in much the same family environemnt I did. There are so many nuances to the type of fear a child experiences growing up in a household that could spiral into violence at any moment. You can feel it all around you. The air is too still.

My grandmother once told me about a book she read some time in the 1950s. It was a novel about a woman she identified with, a housewife with a whole bunch of kids. Not a bad mother, but not a happy housewife. A woman who'd had enough of the pressures at home.

The character in this book packed a suitcase and left it all behind. Left her husband, left her kids. Took off and had adventures of her own.

I remember my grandmother telling me how much that book meant to her.  That character was her hero, because every day of her life she wanted to do the same thing: pack a suitcase, leave it all behind.

But my grandmother... she never did leave.


Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. She was nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, and her book The Red Satin Collection won Best Transgender Romance in the 2012 Rainbow Awards. Giselle has contributed erotica and queer fiction to nearly 200 short story anthologies and written dozens of juicy books, including Anonymous, Seven Kisses, Bali Nights, In Shadow, and Nanny State.

Visit http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com for free erotica and exciting new releases.

Back in the Day

by Jean Roberta



What are the chances? In March 2016, the prolific Sarah Schulman got a big novel published. In October 2016, the slightly-less prolific but also well-known novelist and science writer Lucy Jane Bledsoe will have a work of historical fiction published, based on the life of her aunt, after whom she was named. Both books are set in the 1950s, and both are at least partly set in Greenwich Village when it was really “bohemian.” Both authors are major lesbian writers who were born in the postwar America they describe, and both writers discuss their personal connections to their subject-matter. I was lucky enough to get review copies of both books from The Gay & Lesbian Review.

The Cosmopolitans (New York: the Feminist Press)



This thick paperback by Sarah Schulman is loosely based on a nineteenth-century French novel, Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac, and it occupies the same social space as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), which broke new ground by showing black and white, gay and straight characters interacting as approximate equals. Schulman’s two major characters, Bette and Earl, are social outsiders who live in exile from their original families and who have little in common aside from being tenants in the same building. Bette was disowned by her family in the 1920s after being jilted by a dishonest lover, and Earl, as a man-loving actor and a “Negro” from the South, can’t find a safe space anywhere. Their friendship (“for life,” as Bette points out to an interloper) is a type of relationship rarely seen in current fiction, now that “community” no longer refers to physical space. The purity of this bond shines against the grit of working-class urban life.

Despite the grit, the late-fifties arrival of television advertising, in the form of an ad-woman who dresses like Jayne Mansfield and speaks in snappy one-liners, introduces a note of social satire. Bette is dazzled but not fooled by this character, who inspires her to manipulate new circumstances to secure what she wants, which is simply the return of her friendship with Earl. To get him back in her life, Bette must arrange the breakup of his disastrous affair with a naïve young wannabe actress from Bette’s well-heeled family who can’t understand why Earl “loses” sexual interest in her, or why he would be desperate enough to regard her as a social life-raft.

As the author explains in an afterword on style, this novel was influenced by the “kitchen-sink” realism of the 1950s, yet the dialogue sometimes suggests vintage Hollywood and grand opera. (Schulman has explained that this novel was originally conceived as a play, and it has an “intermission.”) Characters express their emotional truth with startling eloquence, much as the author does in her non-fiction on moral issues. The reader is reminded that art, “realistic” or otherwise, is usually better-organized than life, which is why both fiction and advertising can hold our attention.

A Thin Bright Line (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press)



This novel takes place in some of the same territory, but its realist style has a harder edge. This is a fictional reconstruction of the last decade in the life of the author’s lesbian aunt, for whom she was named: Lucybelle Bledsoe from small-town Arkansas. In a lengthy postscript, the author outlines her methods of discovering as much evidence as she could about a remarkable science editor and possible novelist (although her novel was never found) who died in a house fire at age forty-three, in 1966.

The possibility that the original Lucy Bledsoe was murdered is troubling and not completely beyond reason, considering contemporary government policy regarding “homosexuals” (not to mention women with access to classified information) as security risks in the “Cold War” of the United States vs. the Soviet Union. However, the author Lucy Bledsoe has chosen to accept the official verdict, that the fire was an accident, and that the only smokescreen might have come from a smoldering cigarette. This approach allows her to focus on her aunt’s life rather than her death. It seems likely that the original Lucy Bledsoe would prefer to be remembered that way.

The result is a tightly-plotted, suspenseful novel which would be absorbing even if all the characters were completely fictional. This is the stuff of the lesbian paperbacks of yesteryear, complete with coded conversations, blackmail, and love that is all the sweeter because it comes with such a high price. There are convincing cameo appearances by actual writers of the time, including Valerie Taylor and Lorraine Hansberry, and references to Lucy’s idols: fiction-writer Willa Cather and science-writer Rachel Carson.

The story is told in a no-nonsense third-person voice, but Lucy’s personality comes through in her words and her actions. She appears thin and pale, straightforward and logical, with diverse skills: she earned a Masters Degree in Literature from Columbia University, dropped out of a Ph.D. program, and spent much of her working life editing reports by geologists and other scientists.

As an independent person and a closeted member of an outlawed community, the original Lucy Bledsoe has no qualms about spending time in Chicago with an appealing black ("colored," "negro") woman who runs her own taxi company (thanks to her training as a mechanic during the War) and who loves to take photos. However, when Lucy shows up at a bar in Stella’s neighborhood, looking for her, the presence of a white woman attracts a degree of attention that makes Stella uncomfortable. Police harassment is a fact of life that makes it necessary for Stella to pay regular bribes just to stay in business.

Aside from de facto segregation, does Stella have any other reason for running hot-and-cold with Lucy? Well, yes, and to make things more complicated, there is a spy in Lucy’s workplace who gets paid to report on her. Fun times.

The thin bright line of the title is a glow on the horizon which promises future discoveries about the nature of the earth, as well as a future in which lesbians like her niece could live openly, without fear. The semi-transparent brilliance of ice is a kind of motif in this novel, in which Lucy’s work on a project in the Arctic foreshadows the author’s repeated trips to Antarctica, and her use of that continent as a setting for fiction.

In both novels, a dazzlingly clear light is shone into dark corners. Queer life in the pre-Stonewall era has rarely been presented this movingly or well.