The Coming Out Stories
Susan J. Wolfe ; Julia Penelope Stanley ; Julia Penelope
For many lesbians, the process of coming out remains an intensely emotional and often painful experience, even in the 1980’s. The stories of the first edition recorded the struggle of contributors to name their lesbian identity, a process that often preceded by years their decision to act on their love for women. This second edition shows that the processes we call “coming out” are only a little less difficult now.
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When I remember some of the many hours I have spent with friends sharing coming out stories, I’m astonished by the realization that straight women don’t have them. What? There are women who don’t have tales about ‘the day I told my mother/father/best friend/ husband’? There are women who have never hooted, screamed, or cried at recognizing themselves in someone else’s coming out story?
I read The Coming Out Stories once for what was familiar and again for what was different, sometimes exotically different, from my experience. I began with all the women whose names I knew and moved on to the stories whose titles intrigued me and detoured through the ones that caught my fancy as I flipped the pages. ‘There’s no such thing as a linear Lesbian,’ writes Susan Leigh Star. There is probably no such thing as a linear reading of this book. You may be determined to start at the beginning, but how are you going to resist anything called ‘This Is About How Lesbians Capture Straight Women and Have Their Way With Them’?
In her foreward (sic) Adrienne Rich reminds us that ours is an oral tradition ‘here set down on paper.’ It is not surprising that this collection has the rhythms of late night bull sessions and women’s center rap groups. Sometimes it drags and sometimes sharing sparks insight, makes connections, spawns the kind of laughter that makes your sides ache. A lot of the laughter comes from your profound belief that you have survived some excruciatingly awkward experiences, like trying ‘quietly to sneak a Majority Report out of the big clip they were hanging in but the whole batch had slipped out and there they were swimming all over the fucking floor’ and Sometimes there is the kind of eloquence that helps you to ask the questions and piece together the answers that were once too threatening: ‘…our failure to seriously address ourselves to some very frightening questions: How have I internalized my own oppression? How have I oppressed?
Instead, we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry. Even the word oppression has lost its power. We need new language, better words that can more closely describe women’s fear of and resistance to one another; words that will not always come out sounding like dogma.’ (Cherrie Moraga Lawrence, ‘La Guera’) Taken together, the stories in this book are a reminder of the power of words. Over and over the writers recall the thoughts and feelings they had and dismissed because they did not know the words to describe them; if loving women is not validated by what one sees in the street or reads in a book, then it is unthinkable, it cannot exist.
As the editors write of the contributors to The Coming Out Stories, ‘In writing their stories for all of us, they have created the world they (and all of us) have needed to survive.’ ‘Coming out?’ Susan Leigh Star asks. ‘I said it was a miracle. Each of us a miracle.’ What the lesbians here have survived is astonishing, and there are grimmer horror stories that remain to be told. Incredibly, these women can laugh at the fumbling they had to do to create selves that no one had (or so it seemed) ever been before. Star again: ‘I want the silent spaces that we have to be of our choosing, not the prison boundaries of our imaginations, of our lives.’ When the words are not there, it is hard even to imagine. We have to ‘dream of a common language’ before that language becomes a possibility, and The Coming Out Stories is a beginning of that dream. ‘These stories both repeat and contradict each other,’ Rich writes, ‘like other tribal tellings. They are in complete; some of the truths we need are not here. The telling must go on.’ ~ Susanna J. Sturgis, Off Our Backs, Vol. 10, No. 10 (November 1980)
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Details
| ISBN | 930436032 |
| Genre | Coming Out; Grier Rated |
| Publication Date | Jun-80 |
| Publisher | Persephone Press |
| Editor | Julia Penelope; Susan J. Wolfe |
| Format | Trade Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 251 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Great |
| Editor | Julia Penelope; Susan J. Wolfe |
| BookID | 2279 |
