LEAVING STONEWALL

of course, everything i wrote before was from a male's point of view, both experientially & theoretically. i think my grade school was filled w/the old school lesbians who were referred to delicately in the community as "spinsters." i don't think the bar in the san carlos hotel was for them(it was a famously early "gay" bar for men in p'cola). it's not like i didn't have contact w/women who, at least, dabbled in same-sex sex play.

i remember the old national lampoon joke about there being nothing more joyless than lesbianism in the 50s, 60s, & early 70s, which explained why the political
lesbian community was so joyless in the 80s. you just never saw them partying. at least the men had the thrill of being arrested(of course, this was written by hetero comedy writers who had no clue that a lesbian had, in fact, been the initial provocateur in the stonewall riot).

in p'cola, my first mff 3some(w/holly & a friend of hers)ended disastrously. after several hours of manual, oral, & mechanical(vibrators)play w/the two ladies & countless orgasms for them, the passion of the moment came to a screeching halt when it came time for the ladies to reciprocate. holly tearfully balked at having to share me(or at least my cock)w/her friend. she hadn't had any problem w/sharing my tongue or fingers or attention to their needs. i ended up on the couch w/a painful erection. they went happily(at least in terms of sexual satisfaction)to sleep. months later, holly's friend & i consummated a more successful mff 3some w/s. there was a slight hesitation on the ladies part of taking the big leap & doing the oral sex thing but they got over it pretty fast. all of these women are or have been married & have children. it was just a curious phase, i think, spurred on by my encouragement.

at new college, it just happened w/o anyone's encouragement. like i wrote about earlier, it was 3 to 1 women to men at new college. for the most part, this was all bi-sexual behavior. lots of mff 3somes, rarely did two women connect & couple up. in fact, the one "out" lesbian was, despite her attractiveness, pretty much shunned by the other women because of her pugnacious attitude. when the story got around that she'd actually never had ANY sex, she became a kind of joke.


back in p'cola during the outrigger years, there was rampant bi-sexuality among most of the women. my post-new college new college gf, carrie, was open to anything in a way that i'd never experienced. i'd get the nerve up to mention some sex act that i was interested in pursuing & she'd not only enthusiastically embrace it but begin adding things into the mix. i was deeply impressed. there was beth & her friend kristin & j & e & terra & dona. mainly, again, this was experimentation under the eagerly watchful eyes of men. there was so much of this back then that it lost a lot of its frisson for me. i remember terra talking about her & a gf & her saying something like, "i know this kind of thing turns you on" & when she reached to find out, she was surprised that i wasn't. dona would entertain cara for hours behind closed doors & i simply cooked them dinner or went out for coffee.

none of this has given me the tiniest bit of insight into the lesbian community or lesbian sexuality. i understand that much of the behavior described above ISN'T lesbian(though some of it was). still, i have a better sense of inuit natives than lesbians & i've lived w/& worked w/& known hundreds of lesbians over the years. it's one thing to acknowledge the idea of "the other" & work on the ethics of that recognition. it's quite another thing to recognize a huge blind spot after the recognition. in other words, after acknowledging the other, some kind of knowledge should coming flooding in: the sense of difference & sameness, an awareness of sensibility, etc. talk about feeling pretty damned dense.

i've always felt that there was a significant difference in the sexual economy of lesbian libido as opposed to gay or straight male sexuality. i think it's bound up w/the institutionalized repression of ALL women &, particularly, their sexuality. don't want no maenads here, no siree. this would account for a lot of the anger since they're hit w/a double whammy: "shaped" into the patriarchal idea of "woman" & then blocked from any access to specifically feminine sexuality. it's a crippling & insidious example of bateson's double bind but on a larger societal level. the problems the gay rights movement has had to address are making sense of how social institutions can so dramatically impact the specific psychology of an so many diverse(gender, race, class) individuals & clarifying that convoluted process &, more importantly, articulating sensible solutions.

things have changed somewhat. i think there's more joy involved in the lesbian community(i'm talking lacanian jouissance here & all you have to do is see the dykes on bikes in the sf gay pride parade to know what i mean), though there's still the institutional insistence on co-opting every second of its expression(vide pics). to work outside the patriarchy is to work w/o a net which is no small feat & dangerous too. since stonewall, that's where gays have been operating, especially lesbians. when equal rights have been at least put on the books (remember jim crow & know that laws can easily be undermined) my wish is that a jolt of jouissance will course through the social structures & some walls will come tumbling down. stonewall seems almost like ancient history(1969)but america is still just leaving there...for the afterparty, i hope, w/the gay boys & lesbians.