Coming Out Olive in the Lesbian Community:

Big Sister is Watching You

Having little or no power, as lesbians, beyond their own community, lesbians with power within their community often abuse that power. Overwhelmed by straight society’s determined misinterpretations of what they are, many lesbians have developed their own self-definitions. In many ways, however, they’ve defined themselves as straight men have defined them, that is, many lesbians define themselves in relation to others. What a lesbian is depends to a great extent on where she fits in what is known as a “hierarchy of pain.”

Whoever has suffered the most is most deserving of respect; whoever hasn’t suffered deserves no respect. Black people, because of past slavery and present racism in this country and others, are considered to have suffered more than anyone else. As the skin color of members of other races and ethnicities becomes lighter and lighter, those races and ethnicities are considered to have suffered less and less. Therefore, the lighter one’s skin, the less respect one is entitled to.

I have been censored in the lesbian press and ostracized in the lesbian community because I call myself Olive. Politically correct lesbians have agreed with the division of people into two categories: white and “of color.”

There is no distinction made between different groups within the white community—if I am white, I am assigned wasp history and culture. In one essay, in a book meant to help its three authors and all its readers to unlearn racism and anti-Semitism, there’s this question: “When women differ from us by ethnicity, by ‘blood,’ but are white-skinned, how much does our desire to have them be like us have to do with our thinking racially in either-or categories: either you are white or you are not. . . .”¹ Although her words accurately reflect the situation in the lesbian community, they seem to be only words, and I don’t think she knows what they mean. This Presbyterian woman not only fails to overcome this problem in her own self, but, while she seems to acknowledge her problem, she completely denies it by nearly always referring to both Protestants and Catholics as one people—Christians. A few times she mentions that she or another individual belongs to a particular Protestant denomination. Other than that, Christians do this, she says, and Christians do that. This is the experience of Christians in this country, she says, completely ignoring the fact that the experience of Catholics in this country has been more similar to the experience of Jews in this country than to that of Protestants. She mentions the Ku Klux Klan and their attitude toward and treatment of Jews, but never mentions that Klansmen are Protestant and feel and behave the same way toward Catholics. She says: “. . . when we [her local chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW)] scheduled a discussion on religion, the two women who spoke were a professor of religion and a Methodist minister; no representation was requested from the women of the local Jewish congregation, since ‘religion’ meant denominations of Christianity.”² My advice to this woman would be that she guess again. According to my understanding of this sentence, she and her friends at NOW consider religion to be denominations of Protestantism. As a Southern Italian/Sicilian-American Pagan Catholic, I hardly consider myself to be represented by the Pope; I certainly don’t consider myself to be represented by a Methodist minister.

Throughout her essay she drops certain phrases, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bits of bread as their stepmother leads them into the forest: “Christian-raised,” “Christian culture,” “Christian beliefs,” “Christian civilization,” “Christian believers.” Only twice in her essay does she make a real distinction between Catholics and Protestants, once when she talks about a civil rights demonstration organized by Protestants and once when she complains about her Catholic ex-husband and his priest who were trying to force on her their ideas about birth control. Apparently, this woman thinks that Protestants and Catholics are pretty much the same except that Protestants do good things and Catholics do bad things. All in all, her essay not only mentions briefly the problem of re-assignment of culture according to superficial assessments of appearance, it also does a pretty good job of demonstrating it.

This re-assignment seems to show up most obviously in the area of religion, as in the above, maybe because there are other ethnicities, besides Italian, who are overwhelmingly Catholic and who have always made more noise than Italian-Americans. But Italian-Americans are beginning to make noise. The problem now is that some are making American noise, probably because there is no Italian noise, at least not at a pitch Americans are capable of perceiving.

In her book, No Pictures in My Grave,³ Susan Caperna Lloyd, half Sicilian-American, describes her trip to Trapani during Easter Week and her efforts to re-discover her spiritual heritage. Throughout the book, she reminds us that she’s American; the Sicilians think she’s odd; people in the street recognize immediately that she doesn’t belong; she doesn’t know whether she’ll ever be able to feel a part of things. As a photographer, Lloyd is determined to get pictures of what might be a painting of a Goddess in a cave at Levanzo. The use of the flash is not allowed because it would harm the painting. She says: “I felt irritated with this Italian penchant for obeying the rules. … It never seemed to occur to them to try to get around the rules or to buy off the powers-that-be.”⁴ Maybe the Sicily Lloyd’s family is from isn’t the one on this planet. Or maybe she just forgot that Sicilians and Italians don’t tell the same story to strangers that they tell to family.

Not only does she evaluate Sicilian culture according to wasp standards, she shows the same American disinclination to even recognize Sicilian behavior if it doesn’t fit into the stereotypes. She tells us about women who participate in the Easter Week procession at Trapani: her new friend, Clara, who’s been helping to carry one of the saints in the procession for the three years prior to Lloyd’s arrival; the old women dressed in black who walk behind the Madonna; and different groups of young girls dressed as the Madonna or as Veronica. Yet she still complains that women aren’t allowed to participate. When Lloyd is invited to carry one of the saints, her participation is called “unprecedented” in the promotional material I received from the publisher with a review copy of her book. But if Clara and many other women have been participating in the procession for years before Lloyd arrived in Sicily, Lloyd’s participation is obviously not “unprecedented.” So the message is pretty clear—if you’re Sicilian or Italian (Americans are unaware of any distinction) you either conform to the appropriate stereotypes or you’re invisible.

And she tells us about the Portatori, the men who carry the heavy statues through the streets all day and all night. I know it’s important that I show respect to my people and I know it would be an honor to be asked to help carry one of the saints in this procession. But I think of the sweat and the blisters; I think of the terrible ache in the shoulders and the sharp pain shooting through the legs and I know why the job of hauling heavy loads through the village is usually reserved for donkeys. But Lloyd seems to feel that the goal of a feminist is, not to attain for women equality with men, but to be allowed to do what men do; that is, it isn’t the behavior she wants for its own satisfactions, it’s the association with men. She reminds us throughout the book that men go outside and do while women stay inside and don’t and, like an American, considers outside and doing better than inside and not.

All the same, there’s no way to deny the value of Lloyd’s book; she goes a lot further than other Italian-American women, who don’t seem to go at all, and she provides us, in a readable and friendly style, very important and very necessary information. But her American (and straight) evaluation of that information—that it’s better to be outside with men than inside with women—doesn’t help us any. Instead, it only strengthens the politically correct lesbians’ case for assigning to Italian-Americans wasp history and culture—white history and culture.

But I look white; therefore, I am white. And if I’m white, I belong to white culture. And, as a member of white culture, I’ve been told I have suffered the least and caused the most suffering to others. If there is little I can do, as an individual, to stop the suffering, I am expected to do the next best thing—feel guilty.

I have been told that by calling myself Olive I am evading my “responsibility of guilt.” Because I am a light-skinned woman living in the United States, it is accepted that my grandparents, whether or not they owned slaves themselves, belonged to the group who did own slaves and were entitled to all the benefits. If they chose not to take advantage of those benefits, it’s their own fault. When I tell lesbians that Southern Italians and Sicilians didn’t even begin to arrive in this country until twenty years after the slave days were over I am told that this is a “wrong use of facts” and that today I am a member of an oppressor group and that I can choose to take advantage of my “white-skin privilege.”

“White-skin privilege” means I don’t suffer from racism. It means that whatever problems I have that might be caused by anti-Italian bigotry are of less significance than the problems of dark-skinned people because I can scrub the shine of olive oil from my forehead, pluck the hairs from my chin, change my name, and go right out and get myself a well-paying job and a luxury apartment anytime I like.

One lesbian, in a women’s newspaper, writes in opposition to racism, yet uses several racist techniques to defend her position. At one point, she says “... the more lesbians who look like the dominant culture claim that they are examples of oppressed cultures, the more invisible the members of truly oppressed cultures become.”⁵ To ignore the problems of truly oppressed people is racist but to ignore the problems of merely oppressed people is not racist. Any lesbian can suggest that we fight the racist act of ignoring the problems of oppressed people with the progressive act of ignoring the problems of oppressed people and other lesbians will not notice what she’s doing. If I write about the problems faced by Italian-Americans, I am taking attention away from other, more deserving, people. Therefore, if I write about the problems faced by Italian-Americans, I am a racist.

Far more important than literary merit to a lesbian editor is the extent to which a lesbian writer has suffered from oppression. While in straight literary journals contributor notes usually list a writer’s publications, readings, awards, jobs, etc., in women’s literary journals contributor notes often list race, sexuality, physical handicaps, chemical dependencies, experiences of child abuse, etc. The purpose of lesbian literary journals is not so much to present worthwhile literature as it is to preserve otherwise neglected stories.

If I am Olive, if Italian-Americans have suffered oppression, my story deserves space in a lesbian literary journal. There are very few lesbian journals. The space in any one of them is limited, the money is tight, and the staff is an unpaid, over-worked collective that’s constantly changing. It’s impossible for any little magazine to print everything considered worthwhile. It’s impossible for lesbian literary journals to print work representative of every different group of women. It’s racist to deny dark-skinned women the opportunity to be heard, as white men have always done in mainstream publishing. It’s racist for lesbian literary journals to give space to light-skinned women when they might have given space to dark-skinned women. Space given to one woman is space taken away from another; it’s impractical to live up to one’s ideals.

If I am white, if Italian-Americans have not suffered oppression, my story is wasp and has already been told. There is no way, and no need, to justify giving space to an unimportant variation of a too-often repeated theme that so few people can relate to, whether considered in terms of ideals or money. If I am white, lesbians can abuse, ridicule and, by doing so, neglect my culture without being charged with racism. Mentions of Italian-Americans in women’s literary journals are very rare, very brief, and always negative.

In one issue of Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, one story uses the name of Al Capone to remind the reader that criminals were as dangerous in the thirties as they are today.⁶ In another issue, a character in a story claims that a firefighter’s job is no more dangerous than the job of a bartender in a lesbian bar because the bartender has to put up with the Mafia.⁷ In both cases, there is the acceptance of the bigot’s association of Italian-Americans with crime and a willingness to reinforce that association. A further reinforcement is accomplished by the fact that Italian names are never used to bring up positive images—or even to identify real and active characters.⁸

In A Gathering of Spirit,⁹ an anthology of writings by American Indian women, one of the contributors is half Italian. All the writers identify their ethnicity in their contributor notes. Although they are over-whelmingly full Native American, several mention other races. One woman describes herself as Laguna/Sioux/Lebanese, another as Blood/Chicana. One woman says her mother is French-Canadian and Native American. One contributor’s name is Kateri Sardella; she identifies as Micmac.

Sardella’s narrative, apparently true, includes a brief conversation between two insensitive bigots who refer to her father as a “paizan.”¹⁰ Only Italians would use that word and only in reference to an Italian. Although she thus admits in a begrudging and negative way to being just as much Italian as she is Micmac, she never actually names herself Italian and doesn’t claim that part of her heritage.

Like many Italian-Americans, Italian-American lesbians don’t know which side of their pizza the sauce is on. When I told an Italian-American lesbian about this story, her immediate response was typical of those confronted by claims of oppression of Italian-Americans—she said, “So what? Everybody’s got problems.” She said that Sardella isn’t necessarily an Italian name and that “paizan” doesn’t mean Italian, it just means friend.

If Italian-American lesbians don’t even know how to read about themselves, it’s not surprising that they don’t know how to write about themselves. One cliche in lesbian literature is the use of a massage as seduction in a lesbian love scene. Lesbians like to use different kinds of oils, choosing oils with medicinal properties or magical powers, scented or non-scented. According to work I’ve read as editor of la bella figura,¹¹ an Italian-American lesbian chooses olive oil every time.

In an effort to bring a better awareness of Italian-American issues to non-Italian lesbians, and to Italian-American lesbians as well, I proposed, to the editor of a lesbian literary journal, a special issue of Italian-American women’s writing. This is fairly common in the lesbian literary community, in which there have been, besides the Native American issue mentioned above, special issues of various literary journals devoted to work by and about Black women, Asian-American women, and Hispanic women.

My proposal was not only accepted, I was asked to edit the issue. In preparation, I attended a meeting of this journal’s collective to learn how they work together and to understand what was expected of me. When I got to the meeting, I was given, by the editor, a previous special issue of their publication on Jewish women so that I could “get some ideas about what could be written about such a small group,” as though her ignorance of my culture and heritage is proof I have none and, therefore, I needed to copy another culture and heritage to make it look as though I do have my own. The impression I had from this woman, who was Jewish and who had contributed to this issue, was that she felt, as a Jew, Jews are real and Italian-Americans are not and that if I, as an Italian-American, want to be real, too, I’d have to learn from non-Italians.

Another member of the collective said she understood my right, as an Italian-American, to have such an issue, and she was very strongly in favor of the right of all women to define themselves, although she really couldn’t see how I could fill a whole magazine—this would be fewer than 150 pages—with nothing but writings by and about Italian-Americans. It reminded me of the time, when I was about ten years old, I announced to my father that I was going to write a book of short biographies of women who had accomplished great things in the arts and sciences. My father was pleased and said my ambition was commendable, but I’d never be able to find enough women to fill a whole book.

And I thought about The Dream Book, an anthology of about 400 pages of writings by Italian-American women. An editor of a fairly important women’s literary journal, and a feminist interested in all the concerns of all women, might be expected to have heard of such a book which, at that time, had been out for more than two years. But, when I told this editor about the book the first time, she said she’d never heard of it. Maybe it’s not entirely fair to expect someone to know everything in any given area, even if it is considered her area of expertise, although one book is not everything. But when I mentioned it to her again, not too long afterward on another occasion, she said again that she have never heard of it. And when I mentioned it to her a third time, not too long afterward on another occasion, she said again that she had never heard of it. How many times does a politically correct radical lesbian feminist separatist, who’s in a position in which one might expect her to know something about women’s literature, have to hear about a book of writings by Italian-American women before she’s heard of it … before she acknowledges that it exists … that we exist? But if it doesn’t fit the stereotypes they don’t see it. Italian-American women don’t write; we cook.

It wasn’t long before I understood what was expected of me. When I asked the editor what she thought an Italian-American women’s issue would be, she said, after some hesitation, that she thought it would be an examination of the difficulties of being a lesbian in an Italian-American family and a celebration of our culture. Considered from a non-Italian point of view, these topics can be seen as descriptive of negative stereotypes—the homophobic patriarch and the harmless buffoon. Even worse, if these topics are the only ones examined, the journal would ignore more important issues (more important because they’re ignored everywhere else)--the difficulties of being Italian-American in the lesbian community and how Americans and Northern Italians, including lesbians in both groups, have tried to rewrite the history of Southern Italian/Sicilian-American lesbians and straight women. What this editor wanted from me was a journal about Italian-Americans that wouldn’t disturb the popular notions of ignorant people, most of whom were bigots as well. And she hoped, by asking me to do the typesetting, something not asked of other guest editors, she would be able to free herself of a good deal of the work of putting this issue together, so that she could devote that time to writing her own novel.

When I told the editor that I was no longer interested in doing the issue, she gave the job to two of her friends—women who had been friends of mine until I dropped the issue.* One of them told me that the editor had required them to sign a contract giving the editor full and final editorial control of the issue—something else which isn’t asked of guest editors of other special women’s issues since it so obviously makes impossible the whole purpose of self-definition. As a result, the official Southern Italian/Sicilian-American lesbian self-definition, as given in a fairly important women’s literary journal, is a definition censored by a non-Italian who is ignorant of our culture and heritage and unwilling to learn. And there is censorship, along with a determined inability to recognize reality, working to limit the writing of Italian-American lesbians, in quantity as well as quality, in other segments of publishing as well.

There is only one Italian-American lesbian publishing novels about Italian-American lesbians. There is also Dodici Azpadu, who identifies as Sicilian-American. In her novel, Saturday Night in the Prime of Life,¹² Azpadu presents a Sicilian-American lesbian whose problems, according to the lesbian press that printed the book, seem to be caused mostly by her family’s Sicilian heritage. Their blurb on the book’s back cover says: “Though primarily Neddie and Lindy’s story, the context—the trap—is the male-dominated Sicilian culture that affects the women who exist inside and outside it.” This is acceptable in lesbian literature. Lesbians consider Italian-American culture to be patriarchal; Catholicism to be a woman-hating religion; Italian-American men to be wife-beating male chauvinist pigs; and straight Italian-American women to be glued to their stoves by the starch in their pasta. These are the forms of oppression suffered by Italian-American women because of their culture; these are not the negative stereotypes of bigots. Obviously, a Sicilian-American or Italian-American lesbian has a lot to complain about.

Yet, reading this book reveals very quickly and plainly that the story revolves around Concetta, the family matriarch, to the point that “the context—the trap” that oppresses all the other characters, female and male, lesbian and straight, Sicilian and American, far from being a “male-dominated” culture, is most definitely a “Concetta-dominated” culture.

The novel is mostly concerned with Neddie and Lindy’s working through their decision about what to do with Concetta, who, in her old age, is making conciliation noises at her estranged daughter, Neddie. The scenes describing how Concetta makes life difficult for everyone around her on the “straight side” of the family serve to indicate the special difficulties not found in a traditional, and legal, heterosexual relationship. As Lindy points out many times, Neddie’s brothers, in spite of the real problems they have in their own situations, aren’t considering leaving their wives to take care of their mother, as Neddie is considering leaving Lindy. But what’s also clear in the book is that, whether any particular character is actually afraid of Concetta or, at the other extreme, almost openly resentful of her, they are all willing to rearrange at least half their lives, if not all, to give the appearance of showing respect. Concetta’s power may not be the kind that’s honored, or even acknowledged, in mainstream or lesbian culture, but it’s power nonetheless—and it’s a power even her sons don’t want to mess with.

Goat Song,¹³ another novel by Azpadu, revolves around Brandy, a woman who was abandoned to an orphanage at birth. No one knows her ethnicity, including Brandy herself. Although Azpadu seems to make a special point of stating the ethnicity of every other character in the book, even we, the readers, are never told Brandy’s ethnicity, although Catherine, one of Brandy’s lovers, offers a few guesses: “Middle Eastern, Eurasian, Latin or Creole.” Azpadu describes Brandy as having “swarthy skin, a large hooked nose, thick coarse black hair and brows, a trace of hair above her lip.”¹⁴ Because of her appearance, she’s subjected to racism as a woman of color. And this is why it’s never stated in the novel that she’s Sicilian. From conversations and correspondence with Azpadu, I know that Azpadu identifies as a woman of color and that she knows her history well enough to produce such a brilliant metaphor—the Sicilian-American lesbian as an unclaimed orphan. While Brandy’s every thought, feeling, and behavior screams Sicilian, Azpadu understands her own culture well enough to realize that Brandy is made more thoroughly Sicilian by not being named Sicilian. Thus Azpadu succeeds in using omertà to break omertà—Azpadu would also understand that this novel would not have been published by a lesbian press if it openly named Sicilians as people of color who suffer from racism. It simply wouldn’t fit in with the politically correct lesbian’s “hierarchy of pain.” If lesbians make no distinction between different European groups, they certainly can’t be expected to distinguish between Northern Italians, Southern Italians, and Sicilians. In fact, they seem to have no notion of how young Italy actually is or of how the peninsula and the islands became one political entity. Instead, they seem to have accepted the kinds of historical accounts generally found in the most shallow of travel guide books and believe that the name Italy is really descriptive of a single ancient civilization created by a single ancient people. If they happen to know a blue-eyed blonde who has a grandparent from Milan, there’s no reason for them to upset their tidy categories by thinking that Brandy is subjected to racism because she’s Sicilian.

At the other extreme is Rachel Guido deVries’ novel, Tender Warriors.¹⁵ This book makes a point of labeling Italian-Americans as white and minimizing prejudice faced by Italian-Americans. One character, a Black man, obviously a token, serves no purpose in the plot other than to conclude that Sonny DeMarco isn’t so bad for a white guy. DeVries says: “Till Sonny, he never liked to talk to white people after that.”¹⁶ Lorraine DeMarco marries a Black man: “Once [her in-laws] got past an initial disappointment that Curtis was with a white girl … .”¹⁷

Although the novel represents Italian-Americans in a positive enough way, it never goes beyond what an anti-Italian bigot could tolerate; positive enough is not positive enough. There’s no really deep sense of Italian culture and heritage as there is a deep sense of Sicilian culture and heritage in Azpadu’s Goat Song. The several small evidences of Italian ethnicity given throughout deVries’ novel could have been acquired by a non-Italian in a movie theater. Most references are to food: lasagna, stuffed braciole, artichokes, meatballs, simple cue words. Other references are to “that macho Italian stuff;” to Dominic’s being a patriarch and to Dominic’s Cadillac.

DeVries uses three Italian words in the book. Two of them are spelled incorrectly. All three are translated on the bottom of the page on which they first appear. This is in contrast to Azpadu’s use of Sicilian* in Saturday Night in the Prime of Life. Azpadu offers no translations, just as many Hispanic feminist writers offer no translations of Spanish words, phrases, and whole paragraphs in otherwise English texts in English language publications. On the one hand, you could say it’s polite to translate. On the other hand, you could say a reader might have enough respect to look up a word in a dictionary, enough awareness of an “other” people, who have contributed a great deal to this country’s culture, to be familiar with a couple of simple words. It’s apparently because of this other hand that deVries doesn’t translate the Spanish word “machismo,” a popular word among speakers of English. But “capice,” (“capisce” or better, as it’s used by the grandmother to address the grandson, “capisci”) which she does translate, is also a popular word among speakers of English.

The novel describes an Italian-American family that tries to escape itself. The three children, Rose, Lorraine and Sonny, become, as Lorraine thinks of it, “a dyke, a junkie, and a weirdo.” Rose has a “need to carve out her life, separate from the family, as different from the way she grew up as she could imagine.”¹⁸ After distorting Italian-American family life to fit the stereotypes, deVries has her characters running away from that distortion as though anything’s better than being Italian. Rose, Lorraine and Sonny choose non-Italians, mostly Blacks, as friends, lovers, and spouses. Even the language of the book is more similar to Black English than to Italian English. With all the non-Italian motivations of the characters and the distortion of Italian ways, deVries could have written a very different novel exploring how an “other” culture, in an ungracious country, can become so distorted and unhealthy that its own children run from it, something that’s a very real and common problem among Italian-Americans. But this is never openly pointed out in the novel; that’s not what the novel is about. Instead, the author seems to have accepted this distorted and superficial view of Italian ways as simple Italian-American reality and thus seems, herself, to be running from the family.

These three are the only novels written by and about Sicilian-American and Italian-American lesbians published by the lesbian press.* Each falls into one of the only three categories allowed by lesbian censorship. Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, according to the lesbian press that printed it, blames all problems on “the male-dominated Sicilian culture.” Goat Song acknowledges problems of racism within the lesbian community but does not name Sicilian one of those who suffers from this racism. Tender Warriors names its characters Italian-American, but calls them white and middle class, and minimizes their problems.

None of these novels tells the whole story. Maybe it’s not fair to think three novels should tell the whole story of a culture. Or maybe it’s not fair that lesbian censorship has only allowed us these three novels.

And while lesbian censorship has made our prose difficult to write, the denial of our culture has made Italian-American lesbian poetry impossible. I’ve been told that poems that honor my family according to Italian-American values are “feeding into negative stereotypes;” that poems protesting against anti-Italian bigotry are racist; that offensive images, that is, Italian-American images, should be modified to be made acceptable to the “majority culture;” that benign poems are wonderful evocations of my culture but not universal or serious enough to publish.

When I didn’t receive a timely response to a poem I submitted to a women’s newspaper in New York, where I lived at the time, I attended an open meeting of the paper’s collective to see what was happening. The collective consisted of Blond, Hispanic, Black, and Jewish women who informed me, with politely controlled rage, that my poem was racist; therefore, it had been tossed in the trash and ignored. The poem openly discusses the lynching of Sicilian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, even making the murder of these few Sicilians seem as horrible as the murder of so many more Blacks in other lynchings.* I was told that Blacks, because they’re Black, have been subjected to institutionalized racism, while Italian-Americans, because they’re “white,” have not. The implication was that, because Blacks cannot escape being Black, as Italian-Americans can escape being Italian-American, Blacks don’t have the luxury of escaping racism as Italian-Americans have. Therefore, Blacks have a serious problem that needs to be corrected while Italian-Americans have no problems. Although it would be considered racist to suggest that a light-skinned Black woman try to pass in order to get ahead in a racist society, it’s considered an advantage for an Italian-American to be able to abandon her culture and heritage and become something better: in this land of opportunity we can rise from lowly w0ps to real white middle-class Americans. Isn’t that why we came here in the first place? In fact, it’s not only racist, it’s pointless to talk about the lynching of Sicilians and Southern Italians when I can so easily pretend it never happened, get white, and it’ll never happen again.

I’ll always wonder what would have happened in that room if I had mentioned that some of the people who participated in that lynching of Sicilians were Blacks and that the NAACP considers this to be the worst single incident of lynching ever to have occurred in the United States. And I wonder how many Sicilians it takes to equal one human being.

I’ve also been told that the internment of the Japanese during World War II was motivated purely by racism, as is the resistance to reparation today. The proof I’m given is that Italians and Germans were not interned. But Italians and Germans were interned during World War II. Imagine trying to write a poem about the internment of Italians during World War II, about the real suffering of real people. Imagine trying to make that poem sound as proud and bold and full of human dignity and energizing rage as some poems about the oppression of Black people. If history books and newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, continue to pretend that Italians were never interned, and lesbians, both Italian-Americans and non-Italians, believe the lies they read about Italian-Americans and accept the omissions, as they claim not to believe or accept about anyone else, a poem about the internment of Italians during World War II is not only impossible to publish, it’s impossible to write.

There’s a motto printed on the bookmarks given out at many women’s bookstores across the country--“Freedom of the press belongs to she who owns the press.” I used to think that meant that in order for us to define ourselves by our own standards and to preserve our stories, we would not only have to do our own writing, but our own printing and distribution as well. Apparently, I was wrong. After several years of trying to publish poetry that defines Italian-Americans by our own standards and preserves our stories and values, I’ve concluded that this motto means no more than it says—that the small percentage of lesbians who have access to printing, control what is printed, and by doing so, determine what every lesbian should be.

The Italian-American lesbian, if she is neither white nor “of color,” does not have a place in the lesbian’s “hierarchy of pain.” If every human being must be either white or “of color,” and I claim to be neither, either the lesbian’s view of the world is false or I don’t exist. Therefore, although there are a few individuals who are white and middle-class Americans whose families just happen to have come from Italy, there is no Italian-American, as a people with a heritage and a culture, in lesbian literature.

notes

1 Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminists Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1988, page 49.

2 Ibid, page 31.

3 Susan Caperna Lloyd, No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily, San Francisco, California: Mercury House, 1992.

4 Ibid, page 38.

5 Bay Area Women’s News, January/February 1988, “Of Color: What’s in a Name” by Vivienne Louise, pages 5 and 7.

6 Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, no. 24, fall 1987, “Nancy Drew and the Serial Rapist” by zana, pages 4-19.

7 Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, no. 25, winter 1988, “Hanukah at a Bar” by Lee Lynch, pages 15-27.

8 A Gathering of Spirit, Sinister Wisdom Books, originally issue no. 22-23 of Sinister Wisdom.

9 Dodici Azpadu, Saturday Night in the Prime of Life, Iowa City, Iowa: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1983.

10 Dodici Azpadu, Goat Song, Iowa City, Iowa: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1984.

11 Ibid, page 33.

12 Rachel Guido deVries, Tender Warriors, Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1986.

13 Ibid, page 26.

14 Ibid, page 72.

15 Ibid, page 131.