As One Of My Favorite Authors, Intellectuals, Feminists, Marxists, And People In General, Her Autobiography

As one of my favorite authors, intellectuals, feminists, marxists, and people in general, her autobiography was extremely interesting for me. Some of the stances she holds now-just like her thoughts on lesbianism and how it holds a place in her life-were what she thinks, flawed as a younger woman. I think it shows the similarities she has to most people. Her thoughts and opinions are corruptible, like others, but not entirely correct without complete reflection and observation.

I’m going back to Angela Davis’s homophobic description of the dykes she met in jail that she wrote before coming out and I can’t get over how much I’ve seen the same basic framing before:

[“Since the majority of the prisoners seemed to be at least casually involved in the family structure, there had to be a great number of lesbians throughout the jail. Homosexuality is bound to occur on a relatively large scale in any place of sexually segregated confinement. I knew this before I was arrested. I was not prepared, however, for the shock of seeing it so thoroughly entrenched in jail life. There were the masculine and feminine role-playing women; the former, the butches, were called “he.” During the entire six weeks I spent on the seventh floor, I could not bring myself to refer to any woman with a masculine pronoun, although some of them, if they hadn’t been wearing the mandatory dresses, would never have been taken for women. Many of them—both the butches and the femmes—had obviously decided to take up homosexuality during their jail terms in order to make that time a little more exciting, in order to forget the squalor and degradation around them. When they returned to the streets, they would rejoin their men and quickly forget their jail husbands and wives. An important part of the family system was the marriages. Some of them were extremely elaborate—with invitations, a formal ceremony, and some third person acting as the “minister.” The “bride” would prepare for the occasion as if for a real wedding. With all the marriages, the seeking of trysting places, the scheming that went on by one woman to catch another, the conflicts and jealousies—with all this—homosexuality emerged as one of the centers around which life in the House of Detention revolved. Certainly, it was a way to counteract some of the pain of jail life; but objectively, it served to perpetuate all the bad things about the House of Detention. “The Gay Life” was all-consuming; it prevented many of the women from developing their personal dissatisfaction with the conditions around them into a political dissatisfaction, because the homosexual fantasy life provided an easy and attractive channel for escape for many.”]

so many different things to pull out. That butches and femmes are victims who lean on each other in times of crisis and forget about each other as soon as their circumstances are improved, her real horror at the mismatch of genitals and body arrangements on display around her, how frustrated she is by the people she needs to become self-sacrificing communist heroes sinking into distraction instead, her sympathy for those who use skin contact and social relations and healing sex to cope with the overwhelming violence of jail life warring with her disgust for escapism and wasted time, the posing of gay life as an all consuming false identity that takes the place of a real personality, her awareness of how much she was able to accomplish as far as challenging the administration in her short time there compared with what she thinks the other prisoners SHOULD have been able to push for if they weren’t so distracted by sex and family instead.

she recanted all of it later of course, her foreword is full of disappointment at how little she understood when she was that age, but the fact that she did think and feel that is timeless.