The Italian-American Literary Mafia

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.