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"You drink like a girl," a poet told me once at a poetry confab at a pub.
"Anne Sexton's girls have too much women's stuff in them," a guy told me once in grad school.
"Is it okay to give flowers to a lesbian feminist?" a buddy asked me, before presenting me with beautiful roses on my birthday some years ago.
In art as in life, gender is one of the first, and often the most important, things, that we notice about someone or in a poem, movie or other work of art. Sometimes gender is the subject of art. "Orlando," the wonderful novel by Virginia Woolf (which Woolf modeled on her lover Vita Sackville West) takes the reader along as the main character transforms from a man into a woman throughout English history. At other times, gender is the subtext of art. Reading "Middlemarch," we're aware that George Eliot wrote under a pseudonym so that readers wouldn't know she was a woman.
As a lesbian, legally blind feminist coming of age in the 1970s, there was no escaping issues of gender. One of my earliest memories is of being told by Frankie, a grade-school playground bully and heartthrob, that "blind girls have cooties." When I shot back, "You have them, too!" Frankie calmly picked up his baseball bat and replied, "No way. Only girls have cooties!" Back in the day, when your fourth grade boy classmate said only your gender had cooties, you just cried, blew your nose, internalized the sexism, and jumped rope with the other girls.
Often, issues of power and sexism in life and art are connected to gender. It's no accident that some gay men identify with women (because of shared oppression) or that some queer women may be or love drag kings (because of wanting to have some of the power of straight men). Part of the fun and power of art is the ability of the creative artist to transcend and transgress gender in his or her art. One of my fave examples of this is the 1949 movie (starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) "Adam's Rib." With a superb, witty, script by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by the inimitable George Cukor, this classic rom-com, turns traditional gender roles on their heads. With a progressive feminism, far ahead of its time, Tracy and Hepburn portray a husband and wife, both lawyers, who are on the opposite side of a case. The case is centered on a woman, played brilliantly by Judy Holliday (then beginning her movie career), who, enraged and frightened, goes after her cheating husband. While a comedy, the movie raises issues of feminism and gender equality that still resonate today.
Trying to write about gender and art is like trying to write about air. How do you define air? Do you think about air? The air is just always there. We're constantly breathing in it. I invite you into my airspace by leaving you, humbly, with three of my poems that touch on gender and art. "I Dream of Katharine Hepburn" is informed by the movie "Adam's Rib." "The Split-Screen of Desire" was inspired by "The Street Car of Desire," the renown Tennessee Williams play. "If I Were a Boy" is from the series of poems that I'm writing about my Uppity Blind Girl character. Its engine was figuratively started by the Al Pacino film "Scent of a Woman."
I Dream of Katharine Hepburn
I dream that I'm you, Kate, stealing
the 1940s scene, ruling in black and white,
a handsome king of the silver screen, holding
the reigns, taking my charmed subjects
on a ride to Celluloid Land. I'm in Adam's Rib –
where Spencer cries crocodile tears;
I, a mid-Century Manhattan gladiator,
rampage in court; and, turning the cinematic
tables, the wronged wife makes the cheating
husband fear for his life, and goes on to star
in even better lit movies. If, Kate, I awake,
in a dark movie where men never tear up,
let alone cry; drag kings are cast
away; and cuckolded dames are left
to die, will you be my screen-saver?
The Split-Screen of Desire
The kindness of strangers
is sexier than Lauren Bacall
bending down over Bogie
to ask if he can whistle,
the woman at the bus stop, thinks,
if only a mysterious stranger
would fix the loose ends
of my bad hair, my last love affair
and my splintered soul.
We are all Blanche, I know,
but if a film of my life is made,
I'll cast myself as Stanley.
from the Uppity Blind Girl poems
If I Were a Boy
I'd drive, Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman,
into the Macho Blind Guy sunset, spinning
my wheels over the heavens and earth,
stopping only to pick up girls. The chicks,
sneaking a peak, would die to know
how I kiss with my manly eyes closed.
Screeching past dead-man curbs,
racing the devil's own, the secret
of my blind lip-lock will remain
tethered to my man-boy bones.
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