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The Elections of Pride: A Personal Journey

Katherine V. Forrest

For the Gay folks of my century in the middle of the 20th centuries, books and movies made us look disgusting or compassion, and www.chickslovechicks.com irregular mindset scriptures placed us among the most frightened deviants. A poet came out of this situation and throughout my personal living. Apparently, out of this framework, we found a way to live, to consider contacts, and create a living for ourselves.

My personal experience is not that dissimilar from many of our reports. By the time childhood had significantly altered my outlook, I had made it clear to my parents, peers, and cathedral that any arrangement besides camaraderie with my own sex was intolerable. From as early as time five, I had been falling in love with my female playmates except for those inevitable dozen boy years when I preferred the inquisitive community boys to the unmemorable girls.

So I had behave similarly to everyone else. whatever it required. Match off. Acceptable to been. I could properly compete against my fellow citizens and community.

It was a purpose consequently uncompromisingly tough that I spent my late teen years committing every different evil in the book somewhat than respond to the one I yearned to undertake. I muddied my personal existence and that of anyone who was interested in me, like so many self-denying lesbian persons of my technology. Self-loathing caused the most perverse harm to every connection, and I marched on to the next one and the next one, blatantly wrecking everything. I was only there to convince myself that I was fine; I only needed some time; and with a little more sophistication, I may emerge from this abyss and older into what was expected of me. That sin might be technically forgivable, but I knew in my depths it would be an irrevocable act, a one-way passage to another place.

Even though I later found women who loved me, and even though I had loving relationships, I remained largely suffocated by all the early shame and my own powerful homophobia even after I committed the Big Sin and made that irrevocable passage. up until I surpassed my 40th birthday.

I had always wanted to write, and did write– in the same way as I had tried to live my life, the way the world expected me to write. In the years that have passed, I have perhaps written better books, but none will ever win me over more than this one, where I forged my identity, lived my truth, lived my integrity, prided myself, and voiced my opinions. But at the age of forty, a book, unbidden, pouring out of me like a song, the book that was mine to write– Curious Wine.

From the perspective of today’s open and sexually free lesbian community, it seems astonishing that in 1983– a mere two decades ago– Curious Wine was a breakthrough book for erotic candor. I wrote the book that other lesbians wanted to read because I felt the passion and beauty of lesbian love and how incredibly beautiful women are together. And keep reading because Curious Wine is one of the most well-known lesbian books ever, selling as well as it did in 1983.

Few readers see everything an author puts into a novel, and there are some elements that only the author will probably ever know and understand. They are not influenced by any symptom of emotional immaturity. No woman fits into any stereotype of psychological dysfunction, nor does she fit into the heterosexual mythology that one lesbian was always” the man” or the idea that women become lesbians because they are unattractive to men. Diana is very attractive, Lane is classically beautiful, and they have had positive heterosexual experiences. Out of all these options they choose the most difficult: a life with each other. Diana and Lane, the two main characters, are thirty-two and thirty-four years old and have a lot of sophistication. They are not adolescents drawn by the mystique of the forbidden. They have a college degree and are successful professionally, and their economic independence gives them many choices. Curious Wine is universally considered a romantic story without political issues. Curious Wine also depicts a heterosexual parent who doesn’t reflexively reject his lesbian child, which is unusual for its time. Her father, deeply disturbed by Diana’s admission, requests time to reevaluate his theories rather than issuing rote condemnations. But my artistic choices were indeed political and challenged many stereotypes of that day.

In every line of this” simple” romance, politics is implied in Curious Wine, to celebrate not only the beauty of our love but also its rightness.

Daughters of a Coral Dawn, my second novel, is a futuristic, frequently humorous utopian novel with all the sensuality of Curious Wine and portraits of strong, resourceful women that lesbians have long desired to find and later have desired to become. My aim for this novel was perfectly expressed by Ann Bannon in her review in the Gay Community News:” Daughters of a Coral Dawn is a love song to the strength, beauty, and ingenuity of women”.

At the time ( 1984 ), I was looking for the ingredients to fit a idea that I had vaguely imagined as” a lesbian life in process.” I was already working on a mystery book about power abuse, which I knew would have a lot of resonance with a lesbian audience, and which, it turned out, would be the heart of my writing. At that time women were finally moving into the higher echelons of police work, and, realizing that I would need police investigators on the scene, I decided that my investigating detective would be a woman. The suspects his emotionally and spiritually battered employees because the murder victim is a tyrannical executive. Given that the majority of us spend a third of our adult lives in offices and cubicles, I set the novel in the business world, which is a remarkably underused background in fiction.

And so onto the pages of Amateur City stepped homicide detective Kate Delafield of the Los Angeles Police Department: my lesbian life in process. Here was a woman working in a high-pressure, high-pressure, and high-pressure occupation. I could swirl the political winds of her increasingly volatile and visible community around a perfect woman with integrity and decency. A serendipitous meeting of author and character– because who better to explore this woman and this issue than a writer who had spent forty years locked in her own closet? And most importantly, she was a closet lesbian who presented the best case scenario for anyone who challenged the practical requirements of presence.

As the series progresses, Kate Delafield’s personal circumstances reflect the experiences of many lesbians in early 1980s America and perhaps the world. Unable to take part in the visible bar scene, Kate has little awareness of the clamorous politics engulfing her community in 1984, nor of its suddenly burgeoning literature. However, as Amateur City begins, her small, intimate circle has collapsed: her partner died in a car accident. Kate struggles to maintain her image of competence and control despite being caught up in her grief in the closet she believes she must occupy at all costs to succeed in her homophobia-ridden career. She has been living quietly with an adored partner in a 12-year relationship, their circle of acquaintances only a few lesbian and gay friends.

EllenO’Neil is there in her relationship with another woman, whose power inequality is not well known. The late love scene between Kate and Ellen recognizes Kate’s feelings of isolation and grief, and it also highlights one of lesbian relationships ‘ greatest assets: the healing power that women can bring to one another.

In the second book of the series, Kate collides head-on with her community in her investigation of 19-year-old Dory Quillin’s death at a lesbian bar. The emerging politics of our reincarnation of family and the ever-strengthening community that gay men and lesbians are creating with families we have chosen are central to this mid-eighties novel. Murder at the Nightwood Bar is the story of a woman’s journey to community, going beyond a typical mystery novel. Multi-racial faces they are, these women of the Nightwood Bar, confrontational faces, and closeted Kate stirs uneasily under the hostility from these” sisters” who view her as the enemy.

The Beverly Malibu, the sequel to the book, also features tracks from the murder of an old-time Hollywood director, which still resonate with the residents of the apartment complex where a murder took place. Kate meets Aimee Grant, the much younger and more independent woman who will eventually become her partner, and Kate discovers a sexual metamorphosis from her outdated butcher ideas in Amateur City due to the unsettling behavior of Aimee, who has her own ideas about sexual dynamics. A parallel view is inescapable: The McCarthy period has never ended for our community. We won’t be fully accepted into our families, our jobs, our government, and our churches until we are.

Kate investigates a gaybashing murder in Murder by Tradition, one of our most vile crimes against humanity. By revealing herself for the first time to this straight woman, Kate edges out of the closet, and on the stand in court she must make a crucial decision when she is at the mercy of a lawyer who knows she is a lesbian. This pre-“Law and Order” novel, which is based on a real case, covers both the investigation and the court proceedings. This book, which I write for my gay brothers, is a portrait of a heterosexual woman ( the prosecuting attorney ) who functions as an ally as well as a lesbian and gay men as brothers and sisters.

One of the collection’ most important democratic moments is when Kate confronts her individual bigotry in another image. After making the decision to avoid her racist policeman lover, she suddenly confronts him with her severe homosexuality by asking:” Why is calling another man homosexual the greatest insult?” Why do other people find queer males but repulsive?

He explains his theory:” Queers, they want to remain shot, thus they turn themselves into girls.” You are not a person if you are a genuine gentleman.

And Kate responds, “Ed, what you just said… do you realize how disrespectful it is to people?”

His answer is condescending. The very essence of bigotry is hatred for the women, and Taylor serves as the compelling case for why the feminist movements for fairness is just as important to gay people as it is to ladies of every tradition. However, Taylor’s disdain for women is traditional because it was previously rooted in adult assimilation in all races and religions.

The wardrobe concept is present in all three of Delafield’s subsequent books. Sleeping Bones, the eighth book in the collection, is set in the late 1990s, and despite Kate being more isolated in her private lifestyle than she has previously been, she nevertheless finds explanation for being isolated on the job. Angel Alley also has the ramifications of the drawer at its center. In dealing with Kate’s day as an agent in the Marine Corps, the aristocracy military force known for its brutal witch-hunt for homosexuals, Liberty Square exemplifies the damaging reputation of the wardrobe.

Viewers who have followed Kate from the beginning may today realize that her story is deeply flawed while also being substantially imperfect, and that this is the reason she is staying in the drawer despite the length of these seven publications. She will never understand how it has stifled her career and her choices, isolated her on the job, cut her off from her society, and distanced her from Aimee, who is becoming exceedingly impatient with a partner whose options and politicians are consequently fundamentally different from her own. Kate Delafield finally crosses paths and experiences an inevitable collision in the upcoming eighth book.

Between Curious Wine and Sleeping Bones, my writing has shaped the development of both a literary community and a writer. It has taken the form of thirteen works of fiction. I’m grateful for having a character like Kate Delafield to explore and portray these changes in my lifetime, for having documented them in my work, and for having witnessed them. Many of the issues that are important to my community have been presented in my work in an entertaining manner ( I trust ). All of us have developed political awareness and identity as this new century approaches in America, aside from lesbians who are completely isolated.

The main focus of my work has been coming out about the wonderful-unfinished business of our community and the wonderful lesson I’ve learned from my own lesbian life. The LGBT community continues to demonstrate each and every day in each and every one of our lives that the personal is indeed the political. The most crucial, most empowering step any of us can take to achieve personal dignity and that any community can take to achieve political standing is speaking the truth of ourselves.

Katherine V. Forrest has won the Lambda Literary Award twice for Best Lesbian Mystery and recently received the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation. She has been profiled in numerous magazines and newspapers abroad as well as in virtually every major lesbian and gay publication in America. Katherine Forrest has become a leading author of mystery books featuring lesbian LAPD homicide detective and ex-Marine, Kate Delafield, and a leading voice in gay and lesbian fiction since the release of her bestseller, Curious Wine. Daughters of an Amber Noon, the eagerly awaited sequel to Daughters of a Coral Dawn, is her next book due out in September 2002 from Alyson Publications. She served as Naiad Press ‘ senior fiction editor from 1984 to 1994, and she is now a speaker on writing’s craft. Filmmaker Tim Hunter, who also directed River’s Edge, is considering finishing her novel Murder at the Nightwood Bar.