Lillian Faderman
is a lesbian expert. The academic historian's books Odd
Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men
and Chloe Plus Olivia constitute essential elements
of any lesbian history 101. Her books are dense with research
yet remain superbly readable. Her new work, To Believe
in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for AmericaA History,
studies relationships between women in the period between
the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I.
Hold on to your Susan B. Anthony dollars, all you fans o'
lesbos--Faderman uses the suffragette queen's letters to prove
she liked the ladies.
Willamette Week: Do you ever get tired of talking
about lesbians?
Lillian Faderman: No, but I did do a book in between
Chloe Plus Olivia on a subject very dear to my heart--immigrants
in America--called I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong
and the American Immigrant Experience. There is a very
large Hmong community in Fresno, about 35,000, and a lot
of them are my students.
Do you have any groupies?
I get nice letters from people. I have some students who
are devoted, but I don't have Madonna- or Ani DiFranco-type
groupies.
There's a common perception that you can tell a lesbian
by her shoes. Do you wear sensible shoes?
No, not unless I'm at the gym, which isn't often enough.
What's your next book going to be about?
My mother. The working title is A Paternity Suit and
a War. I was born in 1940, and just at that time two
huge things happened in her life. She was an immigrant from
Eastern Europe, and the idea was that she would try to strike
it rich, marry a rich man and bring the rest of her family
to the United States. That never happened, and shortly after
I was born, Hitler marched through my mother's shtetl
and the whole family was wiped out. So she was dealing with
that. But also, my father is a man with whom she had an
eight-year affair. He had asked her to have two abortions,
and he wanted me to be the third. She sued him for paternity
and lost the suit. So she was dealing with both a small
war--a war between the sexes--and this huge war and its
effects.
What's your favorite lesbian movie?
I absolutely love High Art. There are a lot of lesbian
movies that I really don't like. I wasn't delighted with
Go Fish.
What kind of music do you listen to?
Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, Dinah Washington.
Did you come across things in your research that actually
shocked you?
A lot of things blew my mind with excitement. For instance,
I suspected I'd find things about Susan B. Anthony. There
have been other biographies that have hinted at her letters
with Anna Dickinson. I didn't know I would find things about
Susan B. Anthony and a woman whom she called in several
letters her "lover." And when she used the word lover, she
did not use that word synonymously with "fan"--she had a
lot of fans, younger women whom she called her "nieces."
Do you have dreams about the women you write about?
No, not dreams exactly, but I feel they are very much with
me. I don't mean to sound mystical, but I know a lot of
them would bless this book. They would be perfectly happy
to be outed in this day and age.
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Willamette Week | originally
published August 11,
1999
|
