Clausen - Apples & oranges: my journey through sexual identity

After Touch (poems)

Waking at the Bottom of the Dark (poems)

Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover (stories)

Duration (poems and prose)

Sinking, Stealing (novel)

The Prosperine Papers (novel)

Books and Life (essays)

Beyond Gay or Straight: Understanding

Sexual Orientation (nonfiction)

Apples & Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity

(memoir)

From a Glass House (poems)

If You Like Difficulty (poems)

Veiled Spill: A Sequence (hybrid)

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

New York Oakland London

Copyright 1999, 2017 by Jan Clausen.

Originally published in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reissued in 2017 by
Seven Stories Press with a new preface by the author.

All rights reserved.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following sources:

You Say I Am Mysterious by Elsa Gidlow. Permission for Elsa Gidlows work
courtesy of Celeste West and Booklegger Publishing, Box 460654, San Francisco,
CA 94146.

Izumi Shikibu poem: from The Ink Dark Moon by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko
Aratani. Copyright 1990 by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. Reprinted by
permission of Random House Inc.

Lilith of the Wildwood, of the Fair Places, from With Anger/With Love by Susan
Sherman, Mulch Press copyright 1974. Reprinted by permission of Susan Sherman.

Trash entry: Copyright 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company. Reproduced by permission from The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, Third Edition.

Letter for Jan, Between Ourselves, from The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.
Copyright 1978 by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Clausen, Jan, 1950- author.
Title: Apples & oranges : my journey through sexual identity / Jan Clausen.
Other titles: Apples and oranges
Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2017] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004240 (print) | LCCN 2017015776 (ebook) | ISBN
9781609807504 (E-book) | ISBN 9781609807498 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Clausen, Jan, 1950- | Lesbians--United States--Biography. |
Gender identity. | Heterosexuality.
Classification: LCC HQ75.4.C55 (ebook) | LCC HQ75.4.C55 A3 2017 (print) |
DDC
306.76/63092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004240

Book design by Jon Gilbert

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

To Andrea

To Soc

You say I am mysterious.

Let me explain myself:

In a land of oranges

I am faithful to apples.

elsa gidlow

from Makings For Meditation

Seeing someone holding my fan, the courtier Michinaga

asked whose it was; when he heard it was mine, he took

it and wrote on it the words Fan of a Floating Woman.

My response:

Some cross the Pass of Love,

some dont.

Unless you are the watchman there

it is not your right

to cast blame.

izumi shikibu, heian court, japan

from The Ink Dark Moon,

translated by Jane Hirshfield

with Mariko Aratani

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT desire and its consequences: personal and social. Its about the perplexities of identities and the politics they support. Its about the fervent pursuit of justice for all, complicated by the pull of private happiness. Its about a bunch of stubborn people who keep harping on the question, How should we live? and rejecting easy answers. Its about the rewards and pitfalls of building the trail while hiking it. Its about proudly claiming the revolutionary high ground, then learning that the boldest, bravest strategies for fixing the world have a downside. I propose that the joys of living out of sync with the lazy common sense of the culture at large are worth the risks of inevitable disappointments, not to mention battle scars. I track a particular kind of gender rebellion, one cast in terms defined by a late 20th century feminism crucial to the forging of our modern understanding that freedom and equality are inextricably bound both with matters of state and public policy and with the most intimate coordinates of human experience: our bodies, erotic leanings, communities, families.

Begun in 1996 and published in 1999, Apples & Oranges looks back on events leading up to a pivotal moment in my life: the decision to leave not only my long-term relationship with a woman, but my identification as a lesbianand, in consequence, the social networks Id relied on for my writing and activism. That watershed had occurred in the late 1980s, but despite the changes wrought by the time lag, I started the book at a point when the world around me was still recognizably that of my early adulthood. This was a world in which lesbians and gay men lived outside the law, both in literal terms and in how we were broadly imagined. Despite significant progress since the 1960s in reducing social stigma and breaking down the tyranny of the closet, our intimate relationships were routinely attacked by legal and religious authorities. Same-sex family ties lacked protection under the law. Bowers v. Hardwick, the notoriously homophobic Supreme Court decision that upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy, was years away from being overturned. Marriage equality seemed like a pipe dream, one that many proud supporters of gay and queer liberation deemed far less important than other pressing issues. The policy known as dont ask, dont tell made hiding their identities an official requirement for homosexuals serving in the military. Same-sex couples were mostly unable to adopt kids or become foster parents; those who raised one partners biological offspring had to resign themselves to the co-parents lack of officially recognized parental rights. In the mid-1990s, the development of effective drugs to fight HIV infection was still a recent, seemingly miraculous event for communities devastated by the siege of AIDSand enraged at the widespread stigma and government inaction that fueled the epidemic. While the Internet was emerging as a mass communication tool and information source, it had yet to register its mighty twenty-first century impact on everything from our images of marginalized identities to the strategies for survival and mutual support available to LGBTQ youth to the organizing methods used by radical social movements. Print culture still reigned.

This was a world in which gender seemed considerably more stable, less subject to scrutiny, than it seems to us nownot for everyone, of course, but for the large majority, including plenty of lesbians, gays, and self-described queers whose ways of moving through the world defied straight societys rigid gender norms.

Today, the mainstream presumption of a heterosexual planet is fading, if far from vanquished, with lesbian, gay, and bisexual lives and identities accorded far more respect and legal protection than they had when I wrote this book. At the same time, a growing movement for transgender rights is rapidly raising consciousness and hammering at entrenched legal barriers. In this climate, people who reject the crude either/or of traditional gender classification, bravely asserting the integrity and dignity of their internal sense of differently gendered being, stand out as the trailblazers of new ways of imagining the sex/gender system. Which is not to say, of course, that many transgender people arent comfortable with some version of a binary gender landscape, where male and female function as ideal types, largely defined in contrast to each other. Yet today, its the gender resisters and gender revisers, the gender uprooters and gender refusers, who vividly stake their claim to the radical rampartspoised to disrupt a schema of polar opposites that has passed its sell-by date.