When I wrote I Am a Woman, my second book, I had learned a lot, almost all of it exciting and confirming, about lesbian and gay life. I had been to the mountain—Greenwich Village—and I had seen and touched and watched and absorbed and treasured so much about that life and that place. I could not live in it—there were children now—but I could feel it and possess it and give it back to my readers.
Ah, but time went by and now I came to the task of writing book number three in the series, Women in the Shadows, having learned a great deal about what it means to soldier on through a tough relationship and, as important, what a range of problems existed in the lesbian and gay community. I did not imagine, when I first visited New York, that the law was so particular nor so cruel as to criminalize private sexual activities between same-sex partners. It was frightening to learn that police raids targeted the gay bars on a regular schedule, and that one could be arrested and publicly humiliated simply for being found in one having a glass of beer with friends. I was appalled to discover that there were gangs of adolescents roaming Greenwich Village at night terrorizing gay people, beating them up, threatening them, doing bad things to good people just to score points in their tribal hierarchies.
From the point of view of the miscreants, gay men and lesbians were both easy and socially sanctioned targets. Why? Because the legal system was intractably biased. For those who wished gay people ill, the Establishment had almost—not quite—provided a license for mayhem. Young boys, some uncertain of their own sexual drive, took advantage of the prevailing prejudice to do a lot of irreparable harm to people who could protest—at their peril—but almost never prevail. Such was the atmosphere of the time. It pushed some gay people over the edge. For a brief moment in her life, Beebo was one of them. I guess the fact that I let something calamitous happen to her in a sense deflected calamity from my own door. Better to dump misery on Beebo’s stubborn back than risk a crack-up that would bring my own family down around my ears.
Most pointedly, I was saddened when I found bias within the community itself: confusion and shame over one’s own sexuality, alcoholism, partner abuse, broken relationships. This was the community I had taken to my heart, that I had romanticized and loved, that I had clung to in imagination when my daily life threatened to overwhelm me. It was shattering to let go of my ideals; unfair though it was, I felt betrayed. Why couldn’t the gays and lesbians in the Village realize how lucky they were? How much they had that the rest of us, outside looking in, could only yearn for?
And yet, as I was learning these disturbing things, I was trying to find my balance. My life and my discoveries about the gay community seemed to be developing in parallel. This book is dark—despite my dislike for the negative connotations, the title is probably apt—and there are things in it difficult to read, as you will know when you’ve finished it. Still, I feel affection for it, for the girl I was when I wrote it, for the gropings toward elusive happiness, even for Beebo and Laura painfully pulling their love asunder. This is a part of what lovers do; remember, they were young, too.
It would not be accurate to say that I became embittered. But I did feel the need to explore some of these newly discovered imperfections in a place and a population I had always admired without reservation. Perhaps it was analogous to reaching that point in a love affair where reality begins to overtake romance. You don’t fall out of love, but you have to restructure the relationship and lift it to a new plane. And so, while acknowledging the problems, I looked for other things to keep hope alive, to ease the heart even while coping with the pain.
There were themes I wanted to develop. In this age before the Civil Rights Movement burst upon us and changed the world forever, it seemed to one naïve young writer that two lovely women, one black, one white, ought to be exploring the possibility of interracial romance with one another. It seemed logical that a lesbian and a gay man, both of whom wanted children, should get together and, based on respect and deep affection, possibly even marry. After all, they were “nice” people, and one didn’t drag a baby into a world of illegitimacy in those days. These motifs may have been a bit clumsy in the handling, but they were rare in lesbian storytelling of the day. And they were constructive as well as unusual. It pleases me now to realize that I cared as much then as I do today about harmony between the races; that I saw and encouraged the affection, the cooperation, the whole sense of being family together, that can spring up between gay men and lesbians. It was out of this matrix of caring that the marriage of Jack and Laura came to my mind; that the cautious romantic minuet between Laura and Tris developed. But the obverse of that hopeful coin was the coin of disillusion. And there is plenty of it here.
The tentative romance between Laura and Tris, the ultimate decision of Jack and Laura
