Sappho's Overhead Projector Page 2
“And what kind of position are you looking for now?” asked the Overhead, reviewing Hannah’s curriculum vitae. Hannah reflected, If She really is the great women’s studies department head in the sky, this is the moment to ask for anything I want. Tenure at Yale, program director at Binghamton, guest lecture year at Oxford, research assistant to Alison Bechdel. But I think there’s something more important to do. I think this isn’t about me. What she wanted, Hannah realized, was to get a bunch of books into the hands of that little girl once denied entry to the white library. Likewise, she wanted to put gay-positive books into the hands of kids living where homosexuality was still a crime. There was a mission for her— Sappho had said so— and it had something to do with circulating books, rescuing books. “Might I become some sort of radical librarian?” she ventured.
“You have chosen wisely,” said She, “and named a sisterhood long devoted to my service, protecting women’s knowledge from destruction and amnesia. This is the hour for all librarians and archivists to rise up in their place of work, and guard what has been so misunderstood: that women had a herstory, and like so many sea mammals that barely break the surface to be seen, the mere visibility is alarming and a target, though so much more is underneath. And, my dear, you understand this isn’t an intervention of just one for one. This is a complete projection, a sliding of the right over the wrong, an overhead projection over time. It won’t be easy. Think clearly of a place where you might work.”
Where the books are. Where the history is. There’s an office for me somewhere that sits exactly on the boundary between a trove of women’s learning and all the lawmakers who ever denied access to learning based on race and sex. I want to occupy that office and defend the archived books. Where is that front office where those who would ban books by lesbians come face to face with those, like me, who dare to teach such books? Where are uptight Congressmen forced to take orders from gay librarians? In just one place, in America. One institution. And I know its name.
“I’ll take one year at the Library of Congress,” said Hannah, “to liberate women’s history from the inside out. I’ve had this feeling, just a feeling, that something’s being held there— a book that rightfully belongs to a girl, or girls. Maybe I can find and free that book. Project it somewhere, as I’m starting to understand. And— you can help me get that job?”
“Oh, yes; consider it done,” said She.
And Sappho spread her wings.
Chapter One
Very Long Distance
Later that summer, in the sticky heat of August, Dr. Hannah Stern found herself at home in a place that wasn’t home. She’d always felt focused and cozy in a library, any library, though she understood anew the privilege behind that sense of comfort and belonging. And this was the Library, the Library of Congress, which had granted her a one-year archival position. She now lived a good three states away from her lover Isabel— far away, too, from their beloved community institution, Sappho’s Bar and Grill. But even if she had to spend this year alone, using her nights to apply for other jobs in academia, Hannah loved Washington.
The city bristled with diplomats, embassies, international cuisine, intrigue, bookstores. On her daily subway ride up to the Capitol South stop, she overheard arguments in French, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and Vietnamese. These were the languages, she realized, of America’s wars; she was deep in the belly of policy and invasion, Pentagon and peace action. Someone had told her that the recorded announcement “Step back, please: doors closing!” was a lesbian’s voice, chosen out of all others during a Metro audition. Ordered by a lesbian to stay safe on her morning commute, and then at work handed armloads of rare manuscripts to catalogue, Hannah felt contentment lodge beneath her breastbone, the anger at having been pushed out of academia gradually being replaced by a better range of emotions.
The gay writer Alan Gurganus had once said, “Anger is a kind of B-emotion. Rage is as clear as gin.” When even sorting out her feelings reminded her of grading former students, Hannah remembered that she was here to be useful, having enlisted in the alternative Secret Service of the Overhead Herself.
She’d packed only what she needed for a year of work, clothes and kitchenwares and some of her treasured books. The going-away party at Sappho’s Bar and Grill had been an emotional feast, rather than a lamentation: Isabel, her partner, bar owner/host and practitioner of so many mysterious arts, had invited all their friends to a literary-themed dance with aphrodisiac drinks. Everyone Hannah cared about showed up with a book and a bouquet, and they dined on egg creams (the favorite treat in Harriet the Spy) and tarts shaped like Egyptian papyrus, each inscribed with a good-luck wish in lavender icing. “Now go read,” shouted Letty, the bar’s longest-but-not-oldest member, and quieter elder Trale added, “Be as selfish as you want. That means keep doing the work to get us on those shelves.”
Get us on those shelves. When Hannah finally kissed Isabel goodbye at the airport, long, good kissing in that remote women’s bathroom no one ever used, their noses and lips bruised from passion, Trale’s words suddenly pressed on their atmosphere like a waffle iron. Hannah touched Isabel’s soft brows. “Do you think books about us— about lesbian lives— are going to be lost again, or banned again, and rediscovered again decades later, in some sort of endless cycle?”
Isabel tucked in her blouse. “Endless cycles being my specialty, you know my answer. Yes. But I also think we took for granted that our history began to matter, and we really believed that women’s bookstores would carry our stories forward longer than our own time.”
And Hannah knew what she meant. They’d met in graduate school, Hannah completing her doctorate in women’s history and Isabel dropping out to buy and remodel the local dyke bar. Isabel had furnished that beloved community space with rare books from women’s bookstores around the world, at a time when those spaces and sites proliferated in every city and so many countries: from Amazon Books in Minneapolis to the Streelekha in Bangalore, India.
That collecting and shelving of the lesbian novels and herstories helped make Sappho’s as much a space to curl up with a book as an active nightclub. The best local minds and quite a few aspiring writers had drifted into membership at the bar, finding in the unusual cocktails a quality of time travel no one could explain. On open mic nights, or during the events when the bar hosted readings by visiting authors, the vibe at the bar surged wavelike toward group recognition of the past.
And in all their herstories, differences were sharp and painful, yet there was, in that space, an overriding sameness in their lives as women who partnered with women, so that books or stories referencing lesbian survival drew cheers of recognition. When the poet at the mic or the song on the stereo referenced Paris in the interwar years, suddenly everyone was able to speak French; and if the lights changed or the food steamed with an aspect particular to another decade, well, weren’t they all there to celebrate collective survival in its timelessness?
In silent agreement they all suspended doubt, embraced Isabel’s magic as hostess and brewmistress. What is she putting in those drinks? I’ll have another. Did everyone see what just happened, or was it only meant for me? Watching her lover serve women’s history in each crafted martini, understanding that the past could be consumed and thus reenergize women of the present day— all of that had helped stir Hannah to preserve their literary trail. She manifested the scholarly inspiration that was just one intended result of Isabel’s mixology.
Isabel, for her part, wasn’t talking. Over the past year she had lifted the veil of ordinary time and shown Hannah glimpses of the women’s history past, a year of frequent ghostly encounters Hannah would never forget. Now they were lovers, and in the future would be sharing a home— a cohabitation Hannah had to set aside for now. But, as she had stepped toward the security line and mouthed I love you to Isabel, she reflected that if academia had pushed her out, the Overhead had pulled her to this gig. She had a job to do, rescuing lesbian books— from what
? For whom? Trale’s words, again, tugged at her, “Get us on those shelves.” Could she? Would she?
Isabel, watching Hannah walk away, mouthed silently the words, So mote it be.
• • •
Now Hannah had taken a one-year lease on a rented apartment near Dupont Circle, once the hub of D.C. gay and lesbian life, now coolly gentrifying to brand-name shops and chain eateries. It was the old neighborhood of Lambda Rising Bookstore and Lammas Women’s Books, both institutions now gone yet well-remembered by the locals, who were happy to grant interviews about the heyday of LGBT bookshop readings and salons. Women’s history might be poorly represented in the U.S. capital city’s monuments and official guidebooks, but her own new neighborhood was alive with upstart commemoration: a Joan of Arc statue, an Underground Railroad marker, and was that Olivia Records’ cofounder Judy Dlugacz she glimpsed, dining in the window of the French bistro? An avowed feminist congresswoman she recognized on sight coming out of a hipster eyeglass frame store, the top female sportswriter in the country coming into the bakery, and editors of local and national LGBT newspapers drank noisily together at the Malaysian restaurant that doubled as a gay bar.
She would always wrestle with this, her deep affection for radical celebrity, for the movers and shakers who made their mark in advancing women’s progress. These were the figures in her own time who later would be, should be recalled as historically significant. But the famous were not the only ones who made history, Hannah reminded herself as she collected her book bag, ID badge and Washington Post and headed for the exit at Capitol South. This had always been her folly, to lecture on the public figures of the political past, without granting equal time to everyday women (and men) who had lived through the conditions of an oppressive past with dignity and with inventive means of survival.
The Madison Building connected to the Jefferson Building through a series of underground tunnels. It might be summer heat or winter ice outside, but at the LOC the climate was old paper, rare books bulging, federal librarians rushing from appointment to appointment. School parties lined up at one door while smug scholars, ID cards flashing, used the “researchers” entrance. Amish visitors stood in reverent awe before one of the world’s oldest Bibles while feminist detectives combed through the early papers of cross-dressing rebels. In one of the secretly located doughnut cafes, three young women fresh out of library school were plotting an exhibit on eighteenth-century cookbooks, blissfully unaware of the ironic contrast between their fast food snacks and their subject matter; men moving fragile boxes of materials between loading docks hailed each other with news and gossip about the latest Senate scandal.
Her job involved cataloguing recently donated women’s collections by theme. More and more women who had participated in the whirlwind of second-wave feminism were now aging into their seventies and eighties, mindful of the need to downsize possessions and perhaps leave the good stuff to an archive or two. Those who had saved everything— treasured and tattered copies of Sisterhood Is Powerful, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Wanderground, Loving Her, even Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book— were surely an annoyance to lovers and landlords as they moved boxes of yellowing literary ephemera from closet to closet over the years. But it was precisely because they had lived their lives out of the closet that made their holdings dear to them and dear to historians like Hannah, and her new coworkers at the LOC.
Now such women gladly signed over artwork, songsheets, broadsides and paperbacks that bellowed of feminist change and culture, proof of the network of independent women’s presses that had flourished through the 1970s: Daughters, Diana, New Victoria, Shameless Hussy. And the names of the radical feminist newspapers, the likes of which had once flowed from every American state and nearly every large city, too! Big Mama Rag. off our backs. The Lesbian Tide. No More Fun and Games. Hera. Then there were the tiny pamphlets, and their larger single-sheet cousins, the broadsides, the poster art, the whole range of calls to action and calls to thought that had signaled awakening, awakening of the soul— in that time before social media and Facebook.
Putting such donor treasure troves in order was a daunting task. The regular staff was overwhelmed with special projects in addition to the usual exhibits, the presidential exhibits, the exhibits rushed onto the crowded fall calendar to accommodate unique papers on tour or on loan from abroad. There was always something on printmaking or publishing itself. Everything stopped when a fundraiser turned entire wings into private reception areas, or when a high-profile guest with a security detachment, often a Middle East dignitary, decided to stop by. Hannah was basically pinch-hitting for the real staff, who had of late been distracted in a hundred directions while the donations piled up. Every day, she arrived eager to see what The Pile would yield— she had quickly nicknamed the stack of file folders on her corner desk The Pile. Indeed, her immediate supervisor, a tough but tender-faced curator named Aurora, often greeted her with the interrogation, “So, Stern— how’s The Pile coming along?”
Separate the latest donations from the earliest. Keep the dates of the contents on a different list from the dates of the donations. Divide into themes: politics, consciousness-raising, anti-racism, child-care and day-care activism, lesbian rights, wages for housework, The Equal Rights Amendment, the Equal Pay Act. There were membership lists and papers from organizations: National Women’s Studies Association, National Women’s Political Caucus, the Feminist Writers’ Guild, Daughters of Bilitis. Hannah had, at one point or another over her life, belonged to each of these. Then there were the women’s music festivals, fifty or more, that had bloomed where planted in almost every state, including Alaska and Hawaii. Those programs and flyers, and the women’s music concerts and artists touring year-round, formed another archive that could be an exhibit of its own— or directed into the Performing Arts Reading Room— or did it go to the LGBT collection? Who was she to decide? But this was her job. This was what she had asked to do, to be useful in the ways she had been trained . . . the ways her university no longer cared to pay her to do . . .
Don’t think about that. Don’t think about that. Think about the lesbian kid whose life will be changed if we get any of this material out there on exhibit. This is about visibility. The pipeline. The great torch-passing of culture from one tired generation to the next and youthful one. See what we did. See how we lived. Never forget. And she’d carefully turn to the next donation file, scanning the listed items for something really unique and thrilling, though all of it excited her: a signed copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, or that feminist carpentry memoir Against the Grain.
Gradually, Hannah came to learn the names of departments and elevator levels, the most interesting underground shortcuts, the best deals in the mouth-watering souvenir bookshop, which section heads should be avoided or sweet-talked as necessary, and when to sneak over to the Performing Arts Reading Room and listen to the rare and classic women’s music albums donated by collectors and benefactors across time. It was a digital age, here in Hannah’s late forties, yet vinyl and paper still dominated this snug world of preservation. After all, the focus here was history.
She’d noticed other funny anachronisms, too. The public telephone jutting out from the wall in the women’s bathroom was a chrome inelegance she couldn’t understand. Each time Hannah entered the stylish lounge, designed in some far earlier, leisured time, she was struck by the contrast between the smoothly tiled sinks, the spacious mirrors and private stalls, and the rusting pay phone that greeted visitors just before they entered the bathroom facility itself. Why, wondered Hannah, would someone stick a pay phone here? Never mind that they were now properly in the age of cell phones, debit cards, laptops, and email, with almost no one carrying change for a public phone or the necessity to use one at all for business calls. And who would conduct “business” in the middle of taking care of other urgent business? It always made her laugh and shake her head, as each day she nodded familiarly at the silent phone when entering the lounge.
> But this was Washington, D.C. The Watergate scandal, Deep Throat in a parking garage, spies from other nations leaving clues and documents under park benches, under mailboxes, in shuffled papers, so perhaps some touring spy once used this “safe phone” to indicate a safe house, or call in an untraceable code-breaking message. One day Hannah noted the number on the bathroom phone: 202-554-4876. It didn’t cue a memory of any famous spy film she had seen. Probably just a courtesy installation in the last era before cell phones, so that women could call anxious partners, bosses, school heads while on mini-break from touring Capitol Hill: “We’re almost through here, then we go see the Supreme Court tour— meet you at five.” Or: “One of the schoolkids threw up at lunch time, so I’m taking her home and Laverne will stay on as chaperone.” Or: “Honey, I lost my keys somewhere in the last museum, so can you pick me up?” And even, perhaps, an excited lesbian tourist, once: “Marianne, I just had to call and tell you— the name of Sappho appears on the ceiling in the Great North Hall! Yeah, I took a picture of it! Okay, bye.”