On the Boomer Lesbians

Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls

Eileen Myles is a lesbian rock-n-roll poet from the rock-n-rock era. Which, you know, are baby boomers (generation born after WWII). They were a lot cool back then, compared to what we, the later generations, think of them now. Myles’ Chelsea Girls (1994), their autofiction novel reads like the biography of a boomer-era male rock star. There’s the working class upbringing, Catholic school, the alcoholic father who dies too young, the loving dysfunction. True for many people of their generation, their (Myles uses they/them pronouns) teenager years are not tightly supervised, nor is there a lot of pressure for them to perform academically well nor to marry well. They make it through college, and shortly after, begins dating women. In the first chapter, they tells the reader they writes poetry. In that chapter, they’re living with their ex-girlfriend, the ex’s new girlfriend, and the new girlfriend’s ex. It’s a few lesbian stereotypes in one, staying friends with your ex and the intensity of sex and romance. Still, your ex-girlfriend coming after you with a hammer when she catches you in bed with their new girlfriend is pretty rock-n-roll. There are a lot of drugs, showing up on LSD to an art opening, and Myles is frequently drunk. There’s kind of sex you’d expect from a rockstar: with other people’s partners, heartbreaks on both sides, and threesomes. Being a lesbian means that the fears that are more present for heterosexual women (pregnancy, lower risk of sexually transmitted diseases¹). The culture around queerness is far more accepting having multiple partners. casual sex, kink. The sex is laid out in flat detail, with the deep appreciation that other queer writers (especially Guillaume Dustan) also write of when the speak of bodies and specific sex acts, it’s writing that lacks the fuzzy soft mystery and mystique that heterosexual writers frequently use to enrobe their sex scenes. The lack of (typical) moral compass is the moral compass: not giving into the man, living by one’s own rules, audaciously marching to the beat of your own drum. That moral code seems very individualistic to me, which is why I say it’s lacking. Still, Eileen Myles does it exquisitely.

I presume mostly we from the younger generation think the boomers like Myles had it easy. Mostly because they had it financially easier, but they also had greater freedoms. Post-war 1950 America had the lowest rate of income inequality² in US history. Unlike generations before and after, it meant you could go to college or Europe by waitressing in the summer (as Myles does). Myles doesn’t have money for food, can’t pay for the t.v. they bought on credit, goes hungry for days at a time, but they can still afford an apartment to themselves in Greenwich Village³. I believe it was Roman Polanski who said that they were lucky because they had penicillin but predated AIDS (which allowed for greater sexual freedom), not to mention greater access to birth control. Unlike generations before, unmarried women and men could socialize with chaperones. Women had more options than before⁴.

Myles points out the downsides. Parents who neglected their children by today’s standards, and the standards of bygones eras before them. Myles writes of the gang rapes of teenage girls, including herself, a woman Myles was infatuated with, at least two others she’s heard of, in a world that didn’t even try to pretend women were equal to men. There’s the judgement that accompanies it, it’s a generation that divided girls into good and bad even more strongly than our own. If that happened to you, there must have been something you did to bring it on, you’re the slut (as a teenage boy calls Myles as they are still reeling immediately after it happens). Myles also writes about lesbians “lacking the privileges of men and the protection that accrued from hanging around with them”. If women of that generation were being gang-raped as teenagers, it seems illusionary at best. It’s something I grappled with also: the feeling that having a man around would keep you safe from other men, and/or safe from the world in general. That illusion might be one reason for compulsory heteronormativity⁵, another would be the greater income earning power that men have⁶. Same sex marriage wasn’t legal in any country until the twenty-first century. A young man Myles goes on a date with dies in Vietnam war. The specter of the draft, and dying and/or killing hung over them.

Myles’ politics are left of Democratic. They famously ran as an “openly female” write-in candidate in the 1992 presidential election. As I read Chelsea Girls, I thought a lot about their generation, and how that wildness and freedom turned into what the US, and the rest of the world, is today. In the aftermath of a world war that reduced the value of human life in the sheer horror of the number of death and the inhumanity that lead to those deaths, a generation of parents who often drank or otherwise numbed their psychological pain (eg, like Myles’s father), and the connections and communities were gradually weakened. The lack of morals seems wonderful and freeing in many ways, but also meant that the social contract that dictated private behaviors were gone. All of that contributed to a sort of individualism and self-focus, a lack of empathy and understanding that seems to be running amok today. Robert Caro, who’s research I cited in footnote four, mentioned the rebuilding of New York City under Robert Moses as a cause of the destruction of the communal networks, especially among Jewish and Black communities, in New York in his book, The Power Broker (1974). With those ties disappearing, without having communal ties to rely on, people seemingly became more materialistic, more motivated by greed and money out of necessity, but also because of the growing income inequality I mentioned in second paragraph of this essay. Or perhaps I’m romanticizing the past since I wasn’t there. But there does seem to be something more broken about society today, and it seemed to have started with Myles’ generation, the first generation to be born following the rupture of the WWII. Not per se that their generation is to blame, or are terrible people. One of the causes of the rupture is that throughout human history, whenever we see new technological revolution⁷, people fear progress and being left behind as much as they welcome the advancement. Thus, the problems we face today deserve a more nuanced answer than blaming Myles’ generation for them as generations that followed Myles’ sometimes do.

1. The rates of sexual and emotional abuse in lesbian relationships are both fairly high. The culture is such that women are cautious about rape/assault/harassment when dating men but not when dating women, though dating as a woman is the risk, not the gender of whom a woman is dating.

2. This is statistically true. I learned it a law school class (securities regulations, oddly enough). The text for that class also informed me that between 1970 and 2010, average CEO pay increased 400 fold.

3. An artsy neighborhood in New York City.

4. Women of many prior generations still worked beyond household chores, childbearing, and childrearing. On farms, they had many responsibilities - in Working, Robert Caro (biographer of LBJ and Robert Moses) writes that out of 275 Hill Country (Texas) women, 158 had perineal tears, and hauled on average 200 gallons of water per day. In that generation, working class women still took boarders, provide laundry service for the more wealthy, were seamstresses, etc. In later generations, they were secretaries and switchboard operators, and more. It’s inaccurate to say women didn’t work: what we think is applicable to the higher class, to which the vast majority of women never belonged.

5. Compulsory heteronormativity was a term coined by (lesbian) poet Adrienne Rich in an essay in the early 1980s. I have a copy of the essay (I have her collected essays), but have yet to read it.

6. The number I’ve heard is that women make $0.77 per dollar a man makes. However, research from the University of California suggests that that women who opt not to have children make more, so it might be motherhood that reduces income for women. Also, there are racial differences, with Latina women making around $0.60 per dollar of a white man, and Asian-American woman making $0.94 or so.

7. The invention of the printing press lead to the Reformation, the Peasants War, and the Revolution Controversy. The invention of widespread newspapers lead the Spanish-American war. The Industrial Revolution led to WWI which led to WWII. And now, we see fear and strife - the world is at a thirty-year high in numbers of active conflicts - around technology and AI.