I’ve been screwed over by
most of the people involved in the Italian-American literary mafia.
And because I never sucked up and worshipped the people in power,
they called me arrogant and said I don’t know how to get along with
people. After all these years, they still gossip about me. I’ve
even been attacked twice on Facebook by people who have never met me
and, since they get their “information” about me from their
gossip, let other people do their thinking for them. But the opinions
of people who let others do their thinking for them are worthless and
there are many people who feel that gossiping is a serious character
flaw.
I first met Janet Capone
when I was living in San Francisco. I had put an ad in the local gay
newspaper saying that I wanted to start a group for Italian-American
lesbians. She was one of the first people who answered the ad and we
started the group more or less together.
After knowing her personally
for a while, I realized that she was capable of changing her
personality according to the person she was relating to and according
to what she wanted from them. I remember one day when she had
recently broken up with her girlfriend. She was almost in tears and
she kept repeating, “After I changed my whole personality for her.”
Evidently, this woman didn’t like Janet but Janet was attracted to
her. So Janet just changed her personality to one that this woman
would like in order to have a relationship with her.
There are two obvious points
Janet wasn’t smart enough to see for herself. 1: If you get someone
to like you by changing your personality, she still doesn’t like
you. She just likes what you changed your personality to. 2: Sooner
or later, your personality is just going to pop back to what it
really is, and that’s when you break up.
The last I heard, Janet was
a separatist. For a lesbian, that means you have nothing to do with
men, whether in business or in your personal life. Of course, it’s
impossible to do that. No matter how many women you surround yourself
with, there are still men around, men who need to be dealt with.
I personally think
separatism is a load of crap. It’s immature and represents a
refusal to face reality. If men and women find it difficult to get
along, if there is sexism, pretending the problem doesn’t exist
doesn’t help anyone. Problems don’t go away when you ignore them.
I was the first lesbian to
present a paper to the American Italian Historical Association
talking about being an Italian-American lesbian. I told Janet about
it and encouraged her to do the same. She was afraid to do it. She
was terrified. According to her, Italian-Americans are all
homophobic. It took a lot of talking, but she finally did it. Now
I’ve heard that she’s telling people she was the first lesbian to
present a paper to the AIHA as a lesbian.
And she’s taking advantage
of men. She finally figured out that she can get further in her
career with the help and support of Italian-American men than she can
get from lesbians. So much for separatism.
I’d had a few poems,
harmless and nothing that challenged the terrible censorship in the
lesbian community, published by Sinister Wisdom. I wrote to
the editor suggesting that they do an issue devoted to
Italian-American women, as they’ve done for other groups.
I was surprised when the
editor agreed and even asked me to edit it. I said yes.
Later on, I found out that
this editor only agreed because she wanted to use that time to write
her own novel. She also asked me to do the typesetting—other
editors of special issues don’t have to do the typesetting.
When I realized that this
editor and the other women on the board didn’t know anything about
my culture and even assumed that, because they knew nothing, there
was nothing to know, and that the editor herself was an ignorant
anti-Italian bigot, I dropped the issue.
Janet, who never mentioned
to me that she was a personal friend of this editor, then took over
the issue. I remember her showing up for a meeting of our
Italian-American group, saying, in an uncertain voice, “If I can
just find ten women to write something, and they each write about ten
pages, that should fill an issue.” She didn’t have a clue about
what you could possibly write about being Italian-American. She knew
no more about our culture than this editor did.
The editor made Janet sign
an agreement saying that the editor would have full and final control
over what it said in the Italian-American issue.
In other words,
Italian-American women are represented in the lesbian community by a
magazine that was censored by an ignorant anti-Italian bigot and
edited by a woman who is suffering from a severe case of internalized
bigotry.
She thinks that any evidence
of an Italian heritage is an ethnic slur, from having a crucifix over
your bed to wearing black for years after your husband dies. And yet,
half the things she said and did as an Italian-American was a
stereotype, and very superficial.
We eventually put together a
mailing list for the Italian-American group. Janet called the group
BASIL, Bay Area Sicilian and Italian Lesbians. Janet sent out
information about the next meeting. She ended by saying: BASIL—Dat’s
a niza spiza. I told her off when I saw it. I found it very
offensive. She cried. Her excuse was that she hadn’t known it was
offensive.
When I dropped the
Italian-American issue, Janet dropped me and she kicked me out of the
group. She refused to let me have a copy of the mailing list. This is
censorship.
Censorship of me was also
attempted by the Istituto culturale italiano at that time in San
Francisco. I had been invited to give a talk, along with Janet. With
everything that was going on, the woman who was putting it together
tried very hard to talk me out of doing it. She told me she could say
I was “indisposed” and couldn’t participate. I had to swear on
a million bibles that I wouldn’t plant friends in the audience to
ask “embarrassing” questions in order to participate.
If I hadn’t introduced
Janet to the AIHA, if I hadn’t given up that issue of Sinister
Wisdom, Janet would never have known she could take advantage of her
ethnicity to get ahead in her career. And she wouldn’t have a
career.
Janet didn’t even know
that she was Italian-American or what it means. Her ethnicity, for a
long time, was something she wanted to escape.
One thing lesbians do, if
you say anything politically incorrect in a poem or a story or a
speech, is sit in the back of the room and hiss at you. This is
supposed to scare you into behaving properly. Once, Janet, again in
tears, said that she had said something and they hissed at her.
When I read some poems at an
AIHA conference, and got to the lines of one poem, “The Drop of a
Hat,” that said, “In this time of lesbian feminist
multiculturalism/some of us are more multi than others,” there was
Janet sitting in the back of the room with a friend, hissing at me.
Her writing, or what I read
of it, was good enough, but it was nothing special, nothing that
anyone else couldn't have written, and it was very wasp-like. She would
never have gotten as far as she has without sucking up to
Italian-Americans. No one else would care about what she wrote and no
amount of ass-kissing in the lesbian community would have convinced
them to publish her ordinary and “ethnicity-less” work,
especially since she was in no position to do favors for them.
When I first published
You’ll never have me like you want me, I sent the
information to everyone I could find e-mail addresses for. Janet
Capone was one of those people. I wasn’t interested in renewing her
kind of friendship. I just thought that the more people who know
about the book, the more it would be talked about and the more copies
would sell. I thought if she mentions it to someone who mentions it
to someone, maybe it might get to someone who would buy the book and
appreciate it.
To my surprise, she wrote
back saying “Congratulations. Let me know where I can get a copy.”
(I had mentioned where she could get a copy in my message.)
I was astounded by the
stupidity of her apparent idea that I was open to a personal
relationship with her, after what she did. But I guess she’s not
too picky about who she sucks up to.
