Description:
When Jan Clausen, long-time lesbian activist and poet, left her lover of 12 years for a man, she was exiled, as she puts it, "from the Garden of Dykedom." Her social circle, her reputation, her writing career--all hinged on her public identity as a lesbian. "Public" rather than "sexual": Clausen casts her dilemma not in personal but in social terms, remarking at one point that people want to know "which version of me is real." In this elegant, sharply focused memoir, she recalls her early sexual life with men, her absorption in radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her gradual cultivation of "protolesbian sentiments." As her feminist poetry gained notice, Clausen found "the promise of inclusion in a tiny, woman-only avant-garde more enticing than membership in an undifferentiated throng." Although she presents this book as an argument against the either/or model of sexuality, it is more an elegy for that lost sense of inclusion in a beleaguered minority. A thought-provoking and seductive work. --Regina Marler
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