You’re Bound to Piss Somebody Off #Appropriation #PoliticalCorrectness #Humanity

By Lisabet Sarai

Our Grip title for the next two weeks is “Appropriation”.

If you’re an author, appropriation isn’t something you do. It’s something other people accuse you of doing. And frankly, most of the time those accusations ring hollow, at least to me.

I’m sorry, but I don’t intend to apologize for writing stories that feature black characters, even though I’m white. Nor do I feel any sort of reticence in imagining and capturing the experiences of men, either gay or straight, despite the fact that I don’t have a penis. Or creating a character who’s a Catholic nun, when I was brought up Jewish.

Sure, it’s quite possible that I will not get everything “right” (although I’d argue that human beings are so diverse and multifaceted that the concept of accuracy might not make a lot of sense). If someone objects to the way I’ve portrayed a gay man, an Asian woman, a Native American, a Catholic, a transgender woman, or whatever, because I’ve made some factual errors, I welcome the correction. However, I categorically reject the suggestion that I’m not qualified to write about groups to which I don’t belong, or that my doing so somehow inflicts damage on the members of that group.

Remember Black Lace, the groundbreaking erotica imprint that would not accept submissions from male writers? Of course they were free to make their own rules, and I suppose that in some sense “erotica for women by women” was their marketing gimmick. Still, I found it annoying, and I know many male colleagues who felt the same way. I would be willing to bet there are quite a few male authors out there who could convince an editor they were female.

Part of the magic of writing is spinning truth out of the imagination. Experience may be important, but our stories transcend experience.

The concept of appropriation is closely tied, for me, to the notion of political correctness. Please believe me when I say that I try to respect every human being on the planet. Compassion, civility, human rights for all —these are among my most cherished values. Paradoxically, political correctness often erodes these values. Wars about the appropriate terminology for a marginalized group don’t help build trust and cooperation, they tear it down.

I’m an author. I’d never claim that words are not important. However, actions still speak much louder, for me at least.

Immediately after the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., I wrote a story (Divided We Fall) about a possible dystopia I saw arising from the outcomes. The two young protagonists, one black, one Vietnamese, live in adjoining ghettos in Los Angeles. They’ve been taught to hate and distrust one another, because the powers that be understand that a divided resistance will never be effective.

The story includes some harsh language, including racial slurs. When I asked my fellow authors to help share my blurb and excerpt, some of them objected because of the language. I found this deeply frustrating. The language was the whole point, after all. It’s a deliberate attempt on my part to show how they have dehumanized one another. If I were to remove the references to “nigger” and “gook”, the story would lose some of its impact.

Finally, I just have to shrug. You’ve got to have a thick skin and a philosophical attitude, because you’re always going to piss someone off.

Meanwhile, here’s a politically incorrect excerpt from Divided We Fall. If you want more—well, all sales benefit Planned Parenthood.

“Freeze, bitch.”

I’m expecting the challenge, but still, my stomach does a queasy flip. I remain motionless, as instructed, keeping both hands visible. A tall, lean figure steps out from behind some pollution-rusted shrubbery in front of a ruined apartment building. He carries his Kalashnikov like it’s another limb, one which he points directly at me. Funny how there’s never enough food, but no problem getting guns.

“What you doin’ here? This ain’t your territory. You get your gook ass back ‘cross the street before I kick it back!”

Though the guard talks tough, I can see he’s young, maybe younger than I am. He fixes me with a belligerent glare and brandishes his weapon like he’d just as soon shoot me as not, but there’s a softness to his mouth that lets me imagine him smiling. Using his left hand to draw an ugly blade from his belt, he strides in my direction.

He wears threadbare jeans and a faded camouflage shirt, open to the waist. The inky skin on his bare chest gleams with sweat, despite the brisk wind. The paler flesh of a scar slashes across his chest, just above his left nipple. That must have been a dire wound, close to fatal. He might be young, but he’s no stranger to battle. None of us is, these days.

“You hear me, bitch?” he growls and jabs at me with his knife.

Instinct taking over, I shrink backward, then recover. He mustn’t think I’m afraid. Straightening my spine, I raise my flag a bit higher.

“I claim the right of truce.” I make my voice low, even, and respectful. But not subservient. “I’m looking for my three-year old brother. He wandered out of our territory earlier today. Someone said he might be in Niggertown.”

“You better hope he’s not.” The guard gives me an evil grin. “Me and my boys just love a bit of barbecue.”

I ignore his jibe. He’s just trying to pull my chain. I hope. “Can I have a look around? Please?”

“Any gooks enterin’ Niggertown got to pay the toll.” His leer widens, his white teeth a shocking contrast to his soot-dark complexion.

“Of course.” I’d expected something like this. I jerk my thumb toward my backpack. “May I...? I’ve got veggies, from my mother’s garden. Cucumbers, green beans and kale. Chilies, too.” 
 

Money wasn’t much use in the barrios. Fresh vegetables, though—they were hard to come by, and I’d heard the soil in Niggertown was even more contaminated than ours.

He steps closer, until he’s looming over me. The point of his knife grazes my throat. Unflinching, I meet his eyes, brown as the muddy water of the Mekong in Mother’s old photos. His blade travels down my chest, pausing between my breasts. “I want something hot,” he murmurs. “But it ain’t chilies.”

“You think you’ll rape me?” Amazed at my own daring, I grasp his wrist and drag it to one side, until the blade’s a safe distance from my flesh. He doesn’t resist. Dropping his hand, I give the little kick I’ve practiced so many times and flip the switchblade into my hand, already open. “I’ll kill you first, boy.”

“Don’t you call me that, bitch!” I’m ready for him to hit me—I expect the toll to include some blood—but he holds back. “Anyway, I wouldn’t rape your skinny yellow ass. Nah, I’m gonna wait till you beg for it!”

I burst into laughter. I just can’t help it. “Right. That’ll happen the same day the pigs lay off the barrios and the Tower collapses.”

He tries to look fierce, but he can’t quite pull it off. “Just you wait,” he warns. “You gonna be on your knees. Beggin’ for me to put my big thing between your legs. An’ me, I’m just gonna leave you there!”

Glimpses of Truth

by Jean Roberta

I have all sorts of qualms about following the traditional advice to “write what I know” in the most literal sense. To start with, when Sacchi’s call-for-submissions came out for Wild Girls, Wild Nights, I had already written three lesbian stories that I thought of as unvarnished truth, in which only the names were changed.

One of these stories, “Family Gathering,” was about my first ever woman-to-woman sex, and it was published in Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and Stacy Bias (Alyson Books, 2004). The second, “Gabrielle’s Fountain,” was about a first event (“squirting” or female ejaculation) in a doomed, long-distance affair I had with a woman who wanted me to move in with her in another town (with my grade-school-aged child), but her life alarmed me, and I didn’t really want to share it. This story was also published in an anthology from Alyson, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel: First-timers: True Stories of Lesbian Awakening (2006). For awhile, it seemed as if Cleis and Alyson were competing for the biggest share of the “true queer sex stories” market.

My third (or first, really) autobiographical lesbian story was/is not sexually explicit because we didn’t have sex. It is about my flirtation or one-sided crush with a charismatic local singer-songwriter who was an avid reader, and therein lay the problem. Unlike the women in my published stories, this person was likely to find and read any publicly-available material I might write about her. I only sent this story to one place: the Storytime list of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association, in 1999.

This story felt dangerous for various reasons: the character was recognizable, and if I spiced it up by making it an actual sex story, and it got published, what kind of fallout could I expect? The risks didn’t seem worth it, especially since I had no problem making up stories which didn’t seem libellous.

When Sacchi’s call came out, I asked if she would accept reprints. She said no, the publisher wanted original stories. I had promised my spouse when she was still only my new girlfriend (in 1989) that I would never embarrass her by describing her naked body on a page for all to see. That seemed fair to me.

Of course, most of what I write (including fantasy stories) is rooted somewhere in my life, but I prefer to avoid gossip and accusations, if possible. So when a call for “true,” original lesbian stories comes out, I just have to pass.

Even when I’m writing about a general scene or situation (e.g. the sex trade) which is real, there is the question of how to present it, as Annabeth brought up. Even though the fierce feuds over “political correctness” which characterized the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s seem to be over, I think they left me with traces of post-traumatic stress.

When I read Michelle Tea’s latest more-or-less autobiographical, meta-fictional, surrealistic novel, Black Wave (so I could review it for The Gay and Lesbian Review), I was amazed, once again, that Ms. Tea is currently described as the voice of young, working-class queer women who dare to tell it like it is. Considering that her narrator, named Michelle, is constantly high and usually drunk, and that she breaks promises and hearts, including her own (as people in altered states of consciousness tend to do), I suspect that the same book, written in, say, 1982 (when Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami came out), would not have found a publisher. Or if it did, the author would have been barred from every conference and publication with “feminist” in its title.

In 2007, I dared to write a story for an anthology about (and largely by) “women of colour,” edited by Jolie du Pre for Alyson: Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica. This was not a “true stories” anthology, thank the Goddess. My narrator looks white but has a dash of native blood, which actually describes me, so I hoped I would not be trashed for writing it. (I wasn’t.)

The story, “For All My Relations,” is about two sex-workers (based loosely on my experience in the early 1980s), and it starts with an anti-erotic scene. (Things heat up later.) I argued with myself about this opening, but I decided to leave it in. The fate of “Lynette” in the following passage shook me up at the time, and still does:

“Lynette had been missing for a week when she was found behind the Royal Arts Centre, naked and tied up. She had been left in the bushes in the surrounding park, on a January day when the temperature hovered at forty below zero in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius. She was found too late.

‘Jesus,’ I said to Amanda. We were watching the image of a covered shape on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance by paramedics on the TV news. Police were looking for the last man who was known to have seen her.

‘Did you know her?’ I asked.

‘A bit, yeah. She worked for Crystal and Sapphire when I was there. She took on too many guys on the side, though, just to collect the agency fee. That’s not safe.’

Crystal and Sapphire were legendary, and their fame went a long way toward convincing most of our johns that all whores were dykes and vice versa. The two madams (Mesdames? I had taken some French in high school), one black and one white, had arrived in our simple town from a more worldly city five years before, and opened the first escort agency here.

A woman who could cheat on Crystal and Sapphire would have to be shortsighted, to say the least. It didn’t follow that she deserved a slow, painful death.”

“Crystal and Sapphire” were a lesbian couple from Winnipeg (capital city of the province of Manitoba, said to be in the exact centre of Canada) who started the first escort agency in the town where I live, which was formerly known mostly as the national headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Making a profit by renting out call girls here in the late 1970s took a certain vision, or business savvy, or cynical, woman-hating gall, depending on your perspective. If they saw a niche that needed to be filled, however, they were on the right track. They were so successful that their multiple agencies produced spinoffs. As far as I know, all the surviving local agencies can be traced back to the founding mothers.

I realized that this whole story could be read as a cautionary tale about the wages of sin, which is certainly not how I intended it. As other writers have said, however, once a story goes public, in some sense it no longer belongs to the writer. Readers interpret it through the lens of their own experience, their own biases, and whatever is generally deemed to be “true” in the cultural climate of the time. “Truth” is never a stable thing.
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