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Lesbian Book Review: Jan Clausen

Jan Clausen's experience is summarized in a review of her book,
Apples and Oranges: My Journey to Sexual Identity, in the nation's
largest gay newspaper, The Washington Blade (The book—Apples and
Oranges, by Jan Clausen; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998):

"Most Gay people have pondered the following notion,
however fleeting or subconscious: What if, after coming out to
family, friends, and co-workers, I fall in love with a member of the
opposite sex.
………………………………………………………………………
Clausen, a poet, novelist, and famous radical Lesbian activist,
lived for 12 years with her female lover, raising a daughter with
her. Clausen's world shifted in 1986, though, when she fell in
love with a man she met on a political trip to Nicaragua.
Naturally, the affair had a tempestuous affect on her personal life,
but Clausen hadn't imagined that she would be ostracized by the
lesbian community." (The Washington Blade, 8-20-99, pg. 43)

Curve, a lesbian magazine, adds its analysis:

"Jan Clausen was a well-known lesbian author and
activist when she shocked many in the gay community by
forming a long-term relationship with a man. Her article about
it in the now-defunct journal Out/Look, elicited a storm of mail
condemning her for betraying her lesbianism. Apples and
Oranges tells the fuller story of Clausen's shifting sexuality and
raises many questions about how our personal lives and identities
overlap and intersect—often in surprising ways…Clausen is also
the author of eight previous books that may be familiar to lesbian
readers, including The Prosperine Papers. (Curve, May 1999, pg. 34)

Out, a best-selling gay magazine also comments:

"After 10 years of partnership with a woman, Clausen
fell in love with a man. Her lesbian community rejected her, and
their dismissal was more harrowing than her coming out had been.
Now she offers her interracial, het relationship as a radical form of
sexuality that is yes, straight, but no, not a patriarchal evil.
Gender, she claims, should be the focus of sexual politics rather
than categories like `straight' and `gay.' Point well taken…"
(Out, March 1999, pgs. 86-87)

Clausen's story has been widely discussed in the gay
community. Notice how the gay community has reacted to her story.
No one doubts that this change has taken place; that fact is not
even challenged by gay activists. Nor do gay activists claim that a
discussion of the phenomenon will cause hated and violence against
gays; nor that gays, particularly teens, will now engage in a rash
of suicides. Because they know that such public propaganda claims
are false.

Clausen's own description of this earth-shaking heterosexual
event in her lesbian life is most enlightening:

"In July 1987, in a war zone in northern Nicaragua, after a
dozen years of intense coupledom with my lover Leslie Kaplow
and slightly more than that of intensive lesbian feminist activism
on literary and political fronts, I got involved with a man. `I got
involved.' How pale and nervous the words ring,like a gauzy cloak
obscuring facts that ought to be more frankly stated. `Got
involved,' `fell in love,' `became attracted to'—- euphemisms all.
But what are the facts? Some would say (have said) she left a woman
for a man. Some would say betrayed her people.

At the time, I was thirty-seven years old. Since age
twenty-five I had been firmly attached to Leslie, and to her
daughter, Emma, who was now a high school senior. Both my
extensive political commitments and my growing reputation
as a poet and novelist were completely bound up with my
lesbian identity. Any sex outside my `marriage' would have meant
trouble, but lying naked with a male stranger in our family's
Brooklyn apartment while Les was at a New Jewish Agenda
conference in L.A. was like deliberately embarking on a sea
cruise off the edge of a flat earth." (Apples and Oranges,
pg. xv; emphasis by the author)

She tells of the emotional impact this affair provoked:

"But now the pain I was experiencing as what had
seemed a solid identity unraveled, leaving a vertiginous
absence of plausible narrative structure…Surely it couldn't put me
through any more mental anguish than what I'd felt weeping in a
shabby hotel room where my new male lover and I had spent an ardent
weekend, as I bitterly confessed, `I hate the institution of hetero-
sexuality—and I'm in love with you.'" (Ibid., pgs. xvii—xviii;
emphasis Clausen's)

Two other lesbians have given Clausen insight on the problem
of fluid sexual identity:

"In The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian
America (1996), the lesbian journalists Pamela Brandt and
Lindsy Van Gelder address some of the perplexities…In a chapter
entitled `Everybody Out of the Gene Pool,' they forthrightly
acknowledge that many lesbians have experienced some degree of
satisfaction in sexual and romantic relationships with men…' `if
there's a single word that describes much of female sexuality, gay
or straight, it's `"fluidity."' And they admit `The trickiest part
is that no one in our community knows precisely what anyone else
means when she describes herself as a lesbian, a bisexual, or a
heterosexual!'"(Ibid., pgs. xxiv—xxv)

Jan Clausen concludes:

"…I think it's fine to be straight or gay by
choice. What's not okay is to lie about the complex attractions
that often culminate in simple labels. What's unacceptable is to
bully the border-crossers. What's got to stop is the rigging of
history to make the either/or look permanent and universal. I
understand why this argument may seem dangerous to erotic
outsiders for whom the public assertion of a coherent, unchanging
lesbian or gay identity has proved an indispensable tactic in the
battle against homophobic persecution." (Ibid., pgs. xxviii—xxix)

Even Clausen admits that the "born gay" claim is a "lie."
In the last paragraph, Clausen seems to be saying, "We know we're
lying, but isn't our lie working well!" ("Erotic outsiders" are
gays and lesbians).

Lesbian poet Audre Lorde's words in her poem, Between
Ourselves, are cited by Clausen:

"I do not believe
our wants
have made all our lies
holy.(Ibid., pg. xxix)

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