In my late twenties, when I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan just twenty city blocks from my parents, I joined Womanrite, an avant-garde feminist theater group. For several years, the five original members of the troupe had been performing their send-up of Cinderella; I was one of a dozen women invited to join for the purpose of developing a new play.
My kids were living with their father. Despite doing battle daily with a corrosive, nagging guilt, this was one of the most exciting periods of my life. In between part-time jobs ranging from secretarial to, ironically, babysitting, I was writing my first novel, taking classes at the New School, and performing street theater on the back of pickup trucks. I was also in a romantic relationship, for the first time in my life, with a woman. I felt so thrillingly alive that I barely slept; when I lay down at night,the words and scenes from that day’s workshop swirled through my head, propelling me out of bed to work on my novel or write new material for the group.
Looking back, I am struck by my age at the time—twenty-eight. I am now in my sixties and have had many opportunities to observe twenty-eight through the lives of younger friends. I’ve watched young women do the same things I was doing in my years with Womanrite—exploring sexual identity, creating art, turning that art into political activism, all within a community of like-minded women. During the 90s I edited a lesbian magazine, and saw my young co-workers scraping together money for the rent, moving from one apartment or city to another at the drop of a hat, trading and borrowing each others’ broken down cars, taking the band on the road, the cameras to a shoot, the truck for a week at Burning Man. The difference between these women and myself at their age was, of course, that I had children. But my hunger for freedom had been just as great, so overwhelming that it led me to do the unthinkable as a mother. These young women have given me a great gift: perspective. Leaving my kids, I’ve finally come to see, was not the act of a callous monster, but an act of survival. I knew I was living on borrowed time, and I crammed as much into those four years as I possibly could.
I was as crazy about The Cinderella Project as I was for the woman who’d written the bare-bones script, and I became understudy for one of the stepsister roles. I got to do the part three times; otherwise I operated the rudimentary lighting. When we scheduled a series of performances in the Manhattan loft where we held our workshops, I jumped at the chance for my mother to see the play. Although the prospect of integrating her into this part of my life was scary, I suspected that, as a closet feminist, she would love the play as much as I did. I wanted her to see what was really going on in the women’s movement, instead of the superficial distortions she read in Time magazine.
As we rode the downtown bus to the loft that evening, I became increasingly anxious. Would Rhoda like my friends? Would she disapprove? Worse, would she embarrass me with her unpredictable behavior? If she disapproved of the play, or went into hateful mode and expressed it, I stood a good chance of being humiliated.
My mother was oblivious to my concerns: from her point of view we were going to see a play, something we’d done many times. All at once I realized that my mother had no way of knowing what this was like for me: She had never been an adult daughter. This revelation struck me with such force, it was as if my mother suddenly stepped out of shadows and into light. I had never thought about the affect of her loss in quite this way: for the first time I really got why this otherwise intelligent woman was clueless about her daughters. I was glad I’d decided to let her glimpse a sliver of my life—or at least what I thought would be a sliver. What she actually saw was the last thing I’d expected or intended.
The Cinderella Project was what we called woman-identified. In Womanrite’s version of the fairy tale, The Man arrogantly reigns over a metaphorical space in which women compete for dubious prizes. While most of our audiences discerned a lesbian subtext, I knew my mother’s mind didn’t operate that way, that while she might think our brand of feminism a bit radical, The L Word wouldn’t once cross her mind. And that is exactly what happened.
The minute the house lights dimmed, Rhoda was riveted. The performance captivated her just as it did the younger women around her. She was even smitten by one of the actors, S, a voluptuous woman and charismatic performer whose dry delivery garnered much audience laughter. In real life, like a lot of lesbians back then, S had left her husband for a woman. She was now the central figure in a lesbian triad. I could see that S’s monologues affected Rhoda more than the others, and afterwards she whispered that S was by far the most talented of the actors.
It was Womanrite’s practice to invite the audience to stay for a post-performance discussion. I loved these feedback sessions, where women almost always praised the play and talked about how it affected them, often sharing intimate stories and deep feelings. With naïve enthusiasm I pulled my mothers’ chair into the circle next to mine.
I hadn’t noticed before, but in attendance that night was the well-known feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. In addition to promoting lesbian separatism, Dworkin was almost single-handedly responsible for rousing a virulent anti-pornography movement among feminists. Large and imposing in her trademark denim overalls, she sat cross-legged on the floor, looking as if she couldn’t wait for a chance to speak. R. usually began these sessions with a short introduction, but before she could say a word, Dworkin pounced.
“I saw the play the first time around, some four years ago,” she began. Slowly she rose to her feet so she towered above us. Hooking her thumbs through her overall
straps like some Midwestern farmer, she continued, “At that time I was critical of some aspects of the play, but I have to hand it to you—I think you made some excellent changes to the narrative. It really moves now.” Womanrite members basked in the famous writer’s approval—and then Dworkin dropped her bomb. “It has a distinct lesbian sensibility now–so I can’t help wondering, now that all of you have actually become lesbians, did the changes evolve parallel to your sexual identity? Or vice versa?”
Almost in unison, everyone’s eyes slid towards my mother. I myself could not look in her direction. The next day S. showed me, in word and gesture, the way Rhoda seemed to recede further and further back in her chair. I, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction, as if ready to keel over. My anguished lover sat on the floor tying her shoelaces with great concentration. This all took a matter of seconds—until R. recovered enough to lurch into action.
“First of all,” she said, her voice unnaturally tranquil, in contrast to her beet-red face, “you’re making an assumption that may or may not be true of all the members of this group.”
Anyone with an ounce of sense could see the situation plain. My mother was the only older woman in the room, and it was obvious from the way we were sitting, not to mention our reactions, that she was my mother (though everyone in the theater group later said they felt she was standing in for all their mothers). Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity would have noticed the Womanrite women’s faces, imploring her to shut up. But Andrea Dworkin (who died in 2005) never shut up for anyone. She was either oblivious to the situation or being purposely confrontational—knowing now what I didn’t know then about Dworkin, I’d bet on the latter.
I don’t know what else she or the others said—I was too freaked out to listen. My brain was busy clicking away: should I tell my mother I was a lesbian? That I wasn’t? That I was having a fling? My first instinct is always honesty—but at this point I really wasn’t sure what to call myself. I hadn’t yet put my relationship with a woman into context. Some days I thought I was a lesbian…but I was still attracted to men. Should I tell my mother I was bisexual? And then it dawned on me: I could lie. Everyone lies about sex; it’s almost expected in polite society. Who could blame me, after all, if three months into my first lesbian affair I wasn’t ready to come out to my mother? Not only would I lie, I decided, I’d cut to the chase as soon as possible, confront the issue head on. Silently I rehearsed my little speech, and as soon as it seemed politic to leave, I directed my mother to follow me out the door. The minute we were alone in the elevator I blurted, “I know you’re probably wondering if I’m a lesbian–well, I’m not.”
Her face visibly relaxed. “Oh, I know that,” she said off-handedly. Without pausing she launched into a stream of enthusiastic chatter about the play. She was still chattering madly after we got on the bus, praising the actors, especially S., who
she thought was wickedly funny. Suddenly she grew quiet and seemed to be thinking; then, with uncharacteristic timidity she asked, “Was S. ever married?” Halleluliah! I could truthfully, triumphantly, tell my mother that S. had indeed been married! Never mind she’d been divorced for some ten years—the fact of marriage was heterosexual credential enough for my mother. It was the reason she believed that I was straight. The wording of her question, I knew, had been in code. I thanked the gods she hadn’t asked about R., a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, or, goddess forbid, Stephanie. But then, she’d hardly noticed them, so taken had she been by S. I had to wonder: was Rhoda a closet lesbian?
In fact, Rhoda was no stranger to homosexuality. Her uncle Yernie, Lily’s brother, had been gay, and until his death he was her closest friend on the planet. He was the only person other than Janice that I ever saw my mother confide in, or who she seemed truly happy to be around. They discussed books, theater, The New Yorker; Yernie was a kind of mentor to his niece. Their age difference wasn’t that great: when she was a teenager he was in his early twenties, and he used to take her out with his friends on weekends. Yernie traveled in upscale, sophisticated, mixed gender circles. In later years my mother told me about lavish parties in luxurious Fifth Avenue apartments, where butch lesbians wore tuxedoes and femmes dressed to kill.
As a child I adored Yernie. I didn’t know he was gay until after he died, at 57, of emphysema. I knew he was different, though—he was the only unmarried adult in the family, he went out all the time with male friends, and he spoke fluent Italian. He worked an ordinary civil servant job, but off hours was always creating something. He made lamps and vases adorned with delicate pictures of animals, each paw and tail cut with precision; sometimes he let me cut out one or two, but mine looked nothing like his, and I’m sure he threw them away. In my childish Nancy Drew mentality I sensed something suspicious about Uncle Yernie, but I wasn’t yet savvy enough to figure it out. A year or two after he died I asked Janice about his sexual proclivities. “It was never talked about,” she said, “but it was understood.”
I still remember my mother at Yernie’s funeral, turning back to the grave while everyone else was leaving, standing there alone for a moment. For the rest of her life she kept her affinity for gay men and culture. She loved The Boys in The Band
and The Killing of Sister George, read James Baldwin and Edward Albee, and she always knew when an iconic new diva like Barbra or Bette came along. Given all this, it now seems odd that she didn’t detect the lesbian subtext in Cinderella; that she believed a married woman couldn’t be gay; that she accepted the lies I told to assuage her fears. I suppose we see and believe only what we want to see and believe. Then too, she was more in sync with gay men than lesbians. In any case, it wasn’t hard for me to keep my love for Stephanie from Rhoda’s judging eyes. I simply told her I wasn’t a lesbian, and that was the end of that.
Or so I thought–until, nearly ten years later, drunk in a Parisian café, Rhoda turned to my sister and began telling her the story of Our Evening With Womanrite. Had she been mulling it over all these years? Did she harbor suspicions about me? By then I was involved with a man, and she knew it. I was also further along in my sexual identity process; I thought of myself, without doubt or conflict, as bisexual. Thus, when Rhoda got to the part of the story in which Andrea Dworkin outed a roomful of women, I said , “Ma, there’s something I have to tell you.”
