The Importance of Literature by Queer Women for A Queer Woman

aka, a short biography through the works of Constance Debré

This summer, a woman asked me on a date to my favorite bookstore. I obliged. While wandering around that bookstore, she gave me a funny look after I excitedly pointed out the fourth or fifth explicitly queer book. I made an offhand joke, and my very queer taste in literature and art became a running joke during our brief courtship. I hadn’t realized how queer my tastes ran prior, and then I ran with it. This Substack was born.

I’ve put hours upon hours into finding queer lady literature, and one of my hopes for this Substack is that others use my site as a resource. On a more self-focused note, there’s the connectedness and sense of community I get through reading these books, all of which are written by women older than myself, as if I’m guided and mentored by them…and all of which I can relate to some aspect of myself. In reading their words, I find a different type of depth. In my one-sided conversation with a book, I’m free. The book itself takes me on a journey through the author’s and my thoughts on it, through subjects like sexual assault, tawdry hookups, feeling and/or being an outcast, broken states and war, strange, wild philosophical meanderings. In real life, I check my conversation to downplay the intensity of the subjects. Books do not force such restrictions upon me.

I just finished Jane DeLynn’s republished In Thrall (1982), will review it soon, and will seek out her other works. It’s more or less about family and coming to terms with being a lesbian as a mid-century Jewish-American. I can draw similarities to growing up as another model minority, with somewhat similar pressures to conform, get an education, respectability, and upward mobility. That similarity is deepened through the shared experience of queerness as queerness affects one’s ability to conform and be respectable. I finished In Thrall, and also read Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag (1905), which touches upon my South Asian roots. Reading literature written by South Asian authors or authors of South Asian descent feels as if I’m speaking to grandmother, or to my ancestors generations before them. Even then, the heterosexual experience in most South Asian novels can be jarring as it isn’t my experience. If you mostly exist within heteronormative culture, you may not notice how heavily our roles, behaviors, appearance, interests, and our jobs are influenced in by the expectation and norms of gender and heteronormativity. To chose or because of nature, an alternate gender presence and sexuality removes you and makes you an outcase. When I read a book that’s focused on heterosexual relationships, it feels like I’m looking into a house that I’ve been banished from forever. I’m looking into the house from a great distance, I’m not welcome there nor am I seen by the residents.

Constance Debré’s Love Me Tender (2021) and Playboy (2018) are the two books-by-a-lesbian that made me think more than any others, and are the best examples of why literature written by lesbians is so important. Perhaps it’s because I share some baseline biographical points with Debré: I shoved away earlier signs of queerness to conform and had a long term relationship with a man before coming out, and both of us had early signs of lesbianism that we ignored. Debré writes that a tomboy around the age of four, then she “forgot”, I was a tomboy from the age of five through eight, then I forgot. Then I had horrible fights with my parents as they tried to force me to wear heels, makeup, and once, something that wasn’t a baggy flannel shirt when visiting relatives. The very first dream I’d had about sex involved an older woman. At the time I only knew it felt disturbing and somehow altogether too exciting. I had no exposure to queerness, and the shame of dreaming of someone older compounded with a lack of knowledge about lesbianism. After that, I was assaulted by the first person with whom I had a sexual experience, a friend’s boyfriend’s friend. I wanted safety, and so when a young man offered the semblance of it to me, I stayed with him. Though, I also came out to him within the first few months of dating. I told him I was interested in women. He said that was fine. I dated women for a while when we were together. Unlike Debré, who was bored, I was depressed and miserable which compelled me to split my life apart at a much, much younger age. Unlike Debré, it wasn’t because I came out as a lesbian, I didn’t have a rough custody battle, nor do I have a living child that I grieved: it was because I was sexually assaulted by a man I’d refused shortly after graduation. For a long time, a male partner represented safety for me because I’d been assaulted before getting into a relationship with one, and then again after our relationship ended. After both, like Debré’s heightened anxiety, hopelessness, and feeling like “lonesome cowboy”, I felt entirely alone, while at the same time having a roster of friends that gave me rooms, couches, and startup contract jobs I could easily do from a laptop. Neither Debré nor I went physically far in our rebellious reimagining of image: she’s lived in Paris her whole life, I’ve lived in or near San Francisco. That significant, because the proximity allows for a network of help to exist. Let’s also not forget the privilege of living in two of the world’s most expensive cities. I went through a battle of leaving behind - or being left by - friends, family, and jobs as they were impacted by the aftermath of the assault. Debré takes on lovers and leaves them as soon as she senses any sign of attachment. You cannot commit in the face of such instability. Even your identity is unstable: Debré changes her appearance, getting tattoos and taking on a masculine look. The signs of it were there: her friends thought she’d outgrow being a tomboy when she became a mother, then when her relationship to her son becomes contentious, a part of her womanhood denied by her ex and the powers that be, she leans harder into masculine behavior and looks. My alteration was different: I began to wear loose-fitting black from head to toe, no other type of footwear other than boots (still don’t) immediately after finishing law school, and my hair grew shorter and shorter each year. I had more than one friend tell me they believe I was covering up my femininity, and both men and women tell me that I don’t think or act like a woman. I look androgynous, still wear boots, still avoid light or bright colors, I look obviously gay. My rebellion is still there: in a city of people wearing tech t-shirts and athletic shoes, I prefer looking polished and put-together. Someone once called me a “gentleman”. Some friends say my demeanor and personality has changed dramatically: I take up space, I laugh frequently, and every time (yes, every) I see my boy’s haircut in a mirror, it makes me feel gleefully happy months after. I’m sure more than one person thinks that both my appearance and my lesbianism is due to the assault and that I’m still “traumatized”. Debré’s genesis was different, but there’s an analogy I’m making about how both genesis events made both of us want to rebel, to check out of heteronormative, misogynistic, homophobic, racist (etc, etc, etc) society and live by a different code. And the dismissal of both by certain folks has similar roots: if you don’t conform, then you’re acting like a teenager, whatever you’re doing is not valid, and especially for women, it’s because you have “trauma”. It’s suspect, and especially suspicious if it involves rejecting men.

Debré also grew up in a sort of fallen family riddled with addiction and dysfunction and saw (I suspect) law school as a means out, and into what Debré calls the bourgeois and what I called a “white picket fence life”; French versus American but same concept. Debré rejects this while proclaiming herself eternally, perpetually “rich”, by which she means upper class, and looking down on the petit bourgeois. She often seems out of touch, stealing for the thrill of it while holding onto her Rolex, living on ten euros a day or so she tells the reader while writing about her alter ego “CD”. Like Debré now, I’d argue that I don’t use my law degree. Just as it informs her writing, it’s the strongest influence in my writing, and in my day job too. It informs the way I construct a thought, a sentence, and make an argument. Of course, Debré is truly more upper class than me. I have no illusions that being the high caste descendent of a wealthy great grandfather, of priests and book publishers gave me any advantages in life because I grew up poor and a racial minority in the US. I’m first generation, and I read a lot because my parents told me so I’d learn to speak, read, and write English. I have test scores to prove it worked. I’m puckish, I’m called strong and brave, I’m the recipient of admiration at parties and in crowds because of the accomplishment of my education. I hate how it colors the way others see me; I think I did it all by myself because I worked two jobs at times and saved up for college. My father admitted that the family held me back rather than helping me on the last Thanksgiving I spent with them. It doesn’t matter much to me, because my background gives me something I seek out above almost all else: it gives me so much freedom as compared to someone whose family was more supportive. Yet, I also feel uncomfortable thinking that, wondering if I’m as underprivileged as I make myself out to be. For many Americans, I’m an example of a model minority that’s living the American Dream. Certainly my family holds itself out as being of a higher, more educated class than others. I’m evidence of that: I am the first person on either side of that family to get a college education, and then I went to law school. That I’m the first signals less privilege to me. Did some of the snobbishness passed down give me the confidence, the manner of speaking and holding myself, the way of thinking and worldview, to persevere when school counselors, teachers, cousins, my parents, the world at large, expressed doubt that I’d be able to do it? My wealthy great-grandfather became wealthy because he rebelled, choosing to reject his caste-worthy role and leaving the country to start a (very) successful business. Like him, I went to law school in a flame of rebellion, and also to also get away from a legacy of alcoholism, depression, and dysfunction. If I didn’t inherit those genes, that legacy of the caste system and its system of intermarriage, would I have the qualities I have today? If you have those genes and that sort of legacy, are you more primed to climb out one or two generations of poverty rather than being entrenched in multigenerational poverty? Debré’s answer is seemingly yes.

When I started this piece, I thought I’d related parts of my life to many works. Perhaps my arguments are stronger in choosing a current personal favorite. Debré doesn’t appeal simply because she is also a lesbian, she writes like a lawyer and she appeals to me because of the elegant simplicity that belies the philosophical complexity of her writing, with her thought-provoking takes on class, identity, feminism/misogyny, power, and meaning. The commonality of lesbianism factors into that, because shared experience and shared identity affect our thoughts, worldview, and personal philosophy. When I read Qiu Miaojin, Eva Baltasar, Jane DeLynn, Patricia Highsmith, Carson McCullers, Virginia Woolf, or Djuna Barnes - queer women writing over the last century - I sense the commonalities. There’s a wildness, a checking out of normal society, of being strangers looking in, the self-inflicted loneliness and isolation, a similarity in the contradictory desire for connection and rejection of it that I see in myself and in the work and life of Constance Debré, the struggle with privilege and sometimes with the perceived lack or surplus thereof. Could I live without this type of literature, read the more heteronormative? Yes, but I’m so glad I don’t have to.