Gender and Sexualities: An Inquiry

Audio file for Chapter 1: The Personal Is…? I can still clearly remember the conditions under which I wrote “Home Movies.” I was living in a cheap winter beach rental on an island off the coast of New Jersey, writing and revising a book of poems and regularly reading Poets and Writers magazine for both its articles on craft and its information on publishing opportunities. It was in the magazine’s classified section that I saw the call for submissions to an anthology focusing on lesbian writers’ takes on the theme of “home.” The anthology, to be published by Cleis Press, was entitled Chasing the American Dyke’s Dream: Homestretch , and its editor, Susan Fox Rogers, was looking for creative nonfiction essays to include in the book. Thinking back on it now, I believe that I was gripped right away by a desire to submit some work to this project—although I didn’t resonate then, and don’t now, to either the “american” or the “dyke” parts of the anthology’s title. But I did happen to be a female-bodied person who had loved other female-bodied persons—making me a dyke for all intents and purposes, I suppose— and I was in the midst of grappling with what “home” could and did mean to me. As much as I loved living there, Long Beach Island wasn’t really my home…unless I decided to define that term anew, in ways that might make sense for the shape and the stuff of my life. “Home Movies” had not yet been written when I first saw the notice in Poets and Writers , which meant that, if I was going to submit something to the anthology, I’d have to write it first. The piece got itself born in a variety of places and ways: in my daily walks on the beach, when I would think about the piece until not-thinking took over and ultimately delivered some number of words that I would hurriedly write down when I got back to my rental. In stolen moments in my childhood bedroom when I visited my father as he recovered from cancer surgery and treatment. In longer break-away stints at the public library in the dying city in which I was born. At some point, freewriting allowed me to discover the structure for the piece, with its short sections headed with the titles of imaginary “home movies” from my lived experiences. That was big—the inventing of a form to inform the content of the essay, and vice versa. That’s much like identity and identification, I think now: the always-changing interplay of our selves in bodies interacting in the social and political world, perceiving and thinking about and seeking to understand ourselves in certain ways and being perceived and thought about and understood—or not—by others. If anything, I hope that the piece says something about the shifting sands of this individual and collectivized understanding of “self,” and the way that so- called “personal” writing can allow us a moment of invention so that we may release that self into the world and get busy with the task of inventing new ones. By the way, Long Beach Island was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. I find it poignant and powerful, miraculous and sad, that this place where I once birthed a form of myself can no longer be visited, in the way it once was, by me. And absolutely fitting, too.