Minnie Bruce Pratt

The long-awaited reprint of this classic work of lesbian literature. Pratt's brave memoir recounts her struggle to overcome the repressive traditions of the American South and live her life honestly. It chronicles her youth, marriage, her eventual decision to come out and her life with author and transgendered activist Leslie Feinberg.

S/He

Lindsay

That night I looked back at my first friend, a girl scalded by her mother’s shame. The threats of walk- like- a- lady, of don’t- be- so- loud- and- angry. (And hate yourself enough to almost go crazy.) I looked back at myself, the child flirting in photographs with angled head, sidelong glance. The child given an impossible choice by her teachers: Be smart or be a girl, be a girl or be strong. (And hate yourself enough to almost leave your body.) The two of us had sat at playtime in the dirt, barefoot, battling furiously hand- to- hand in the desire to defeat the other. How had we survived to meet again? Survived to grow up to be women for whom the word woman did not adequately describe the twists and turns our bodies, our lives, took through sex and gender?

We could have answered that woman was not the opposite of man, and that liberation meant crossing all arbitrary gender boundaries, to place ourselves anywhere we chose on the continuum of maleness to femaleness, in any aspect of our lives.

Some of these reformists accepted limits on what constituted womanhood because of uncritical allegiances to their own class and race positions. For others, this was a strategic decision; they believed a political definition of woman that deemphasized difference would secure more territory for women in a hostile world. They hoped to establish a bulwark, and then a place that could be built on for greater liberation. In fact, the exclusion of women who blurred the edges of what was considered legitimate as woman— because of race or class or sexuality or gender presentation— made women’s space smaller and more dangerous, made this aspect of the women’s movement weaker and more limited in foundation.

As women and as lesbians we wanted to step outside traps set for us as people sexed as women, to evade negative values gendered to us. We didn’t want to be women as defined by the larger culture, so we had to get rid of femininity. We didn’t want to be oppressed by men, so we had to get rid of masculinity. And we wanted to end enforced desires, so we had to get rid of heterosexuality.

And both inside and outside lesbian space, there is another assumption held by some. No “real” lesbian would be attracted to as much masculinity as I prefer in my lesbian lover.

I wish I were running away in a car with another woman, driving farther south into the heat, sweating inside the translucent blue voile dress I wore the summer before I married, the one that no longer fits me after two children. I might argue with her all the way, but I’m arguing with myself: How to be a woman? I don’t want to be. They do not see my mind, they only see my body. I don’t want to leave my body. I want to feel full and humid, thunderhead about to crack with lightning. I want to walk in danger by myself and survive, the way she holds her head up, clenches her teeth under blood- red lips, and dares anyone to stop her. I don’t want anyone to think I am like her. When we meet in the hallway at work, I can barely look at her, and she also looks askance.

Do I desire her because she spoke the secret out loud, because she broke through the barrier between us? Do I desire her because she made herself vulnerable, showed me her wounds, a beckon to me to hold and heal her? Do I care for her only as a guide to follow down a path to myself? I wander between word, dream, fantasy, desire, action, man, woman, woman, woman.

When I am with her, I have no idea what sex I am or what gender, whose body I have, or the meanings of my gestures. One afternoon I spread her legs with my hands and her labia with my fingers and dart my tongue deep into her. Satiated, I coil around her and fall asleep. In my dream I feel something swell between my legs, heavy and hot. Waking with a start in the dim twilight, in the rank sheets, first I am lying on my husband, his penis engorged against my stomach. Then it is her penis that burrows and bumps against me. Then I shift and know: perhaps it is my own, writhing and dreadful between my legs.

Standing in a dusty field, she’d gotten her first hit in twenty- five years— a single over third base. The energy flew up from the earth through her cunt, belly, shoulders, into the bat. The power of the hit, her arms lifting and winging her toward all the other women running in response to her.

On summer mornings, lying very still in bed, I closed my eyes and waited for someone to touch me. Hours dreaming of someone stern, determined, almost rough, who could break down the door into the intolerable white sunlight of my lonely room. Then I would be seen. Then I would be made translucent with desire.

Maybe I can drive into a third space that is lesbian, and not woman or man. I’m ready to live outside of femaleness, the hedge of roses, thorny and beautiful, that has encircled me wherever I’ve sat waiting.

The tips of her fingers leave small burning circles on my right breast, like the imprint of a lit cigarette ground out in beach sand.

I argued with her about marks. I said that we make them—alphabets or tattoos—as a human act to place the self in time, in location. If my beloved agrees to my teeth on her neck, then the tiny bruise is like a poem written to join the self passionately to another. The mark only becomes a trap when we begin to use it to save ourselves, when the wedding ring becomes a gold coin to buy security, eternity. Then we fix the other with an X: mark the spot, stay the same, be mine forever. We become unable to possess and then relinquish.

the arc of your hips turning inside out my ideas of sex and love.

your clit with its tongue out waiting for my breath.

This is not a man passing on the street who sees you as a man, arm in arm with me, a woman. This is not a lesbian who watches us dancing at a party, and sees you as either a butch lesbian or a woman trying to be a man, and me as femme or deluded. This is someone who lives in a world where gender and sex are fluid. Not an academic exercise, but what she tells the kids about who she was as their father. The shock to me of you sitting here as him, at this ordinary Formica table, though of course that is the pronoun that suits your masculine spirit, short hair, Oxford shirt, men’s slacks. The word spoken about you, not in hostility or misperception, but because, for you both, that is how flexible gender is.

Meeting you for the first time over curried chicken and masala dosa, she is socially appropriate to refer to you as him. Meanwhile, you are saying that you are a woman and transgendered, that your masculinity is a range of gender expression that should be available to all women, as femininity should be to men. You insist that you are him and also her. When I enter the conversation, I call you both by your given names to be respectful. The either/ or pronouns suddenly are the jaws of a steel trap snapping shut on infinities that exist where body, self, sex, gender, the world, and lunch intersect.

Over the clatter of the lunchtime rush, she says that she did “the femme thing” for a while to prove she was a woman, but now she believes in not denying her past. In the past I have denied I was a woman. The pronoun she was a trap set by others to catch me. I watch her talk, cheeks flushed pink, eyes gleaming silver and green. I imagine wrapping womanhood around me like a length of shimmering metallic cloth. She looks at me frequently as she talks, careful to divide her attention between you and me. How my aunts talked to me as a little girl, curly- headed and new in my mother’s arms. No words from them to me without sex or gender.

“You are not only a lesbian, but very, very queer. You love a woman who is manly, and yet do not want her to be completely man. In fact, you desire her because she is both. And how often has she found someone who really wants to touch, hold, lie down with both at once?”

Itold her about my classroom discussion of the word cunt, how I speak of the goddess Cunti, the source of law and life, order and death, creatrix of the world. The one whose name is origin of country, kin and kind, of cunning, ken, and cunnilingus. How her powers and ours were divided and defamed. The power of the universe reduced to one part of woman’s body, cursed on the street and at home as cunt. For thousands of years, the word caught and caged like our beautiful, furry, bony part. But if we don’t use this elegant word, what are we to use? Do we go on saying down there, as if our bodies hold hell, the underworld, a place forbidden to venture?