 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
PhotographedJanuary 24, 2011 Here's another piece from To Be Rather Than to Seem. I'm not sure when all this happened, but my best guess is around 1980. I hope the short piece I wrote to go with the photo turns up in my files. In those days I kept copies of everything, thanks to the carbon sets I filched from my employer. This experience was an important step on the road to "When the Truth Doesn't Fit: On Fat, Choice, and Silence" (Lesbian Contradiction, Winter 1983–84), which I just posted to the Essays & Articles section. JEB (Joan E. Biren) was a big-name photographer in the gay and lesbian communities from the mid-1970s on. She had been part of the D.C.-based Furies collective in the early 1970s, which put out one of the first lesbian-feminist newspapers and had even more cachet because Rita Mae Brown had been a member of it before Rubyfruit Jungle proved that funny novels about wiseass lesbian protagonists could sell to straight audiences. JEB's Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, published in 1979, was a runaway best-seller in feminist bookstores and everywhere lesbians congregated, and with good reason: it was a milestone in lesbian visibility. Its excellent photographs showed lesbians of all ages, doing all sorts of things, from demonstrating to hanging out at home. Many of the portraits were accompanied by excerpts from interviews with the women depicted: they talked about living on the land, parenting, recovering from alcoholism, playing pool -- giving a little insight into their lives and attitudes. Just about every lesbian household had at least one copy of Eye to Eye. The more adventurous even gave it to our parents, co-workers, and best straight friends -- some of the subjects were naked, but the nudity was discreet, which is to say there weren't any pictures of lesbians having sex. The only thing that bugged me about Eye to Eye was that nearly all the women in it were thin, and the ones who weren't were nowhere near fat. Fat liberation was just getting started in those days, and most of the ferment was on the West Coast, not in Washington, D.C., which was rarely on the cutting edge of anything. It hadn't taken root in my head either, which is why I kept my opinion to myself for a couple of years. I took it for granted that fat was a liability. Feminists and especially lesbians had long been stereotyped as ugly and unattractive, which included fat. "Can't get a man" was the familiar taunt, used by those who couldn't begin to entertain the possibility that a woman might not want a man. If she didn't have one, clearly she was deficient in some respect. This deficiency nearly always had to do with physical appearance. Intelligence was never a factor. Eye to Eye was a brave, pioneering book that challenged so many stereotypes about lesbians. I sure wasn't going to say anything out loud about the absence of fat women. Who was I to even notice? Didn't the photographer have the right to decide what pictures to use in her book? Maybe she had asked some fat women if she could photograph them. Maybe they had said no. Then Beth Karbe, another very good photographer whom I knew from my women's center days, announced at an informal gathering that she was working on an exhibit that would combine portraits of lesbians with the subject's own words. Her subjects could choose where they wanted to be photographed and what they would be wearing. She was looking for volunteers. Gulp. How could I complain about the absence of fat women from JEB's book if I wasn't willing to be photographed myself? In those days I couldn't fit into "ladies-size" pants; I did a fair amount of my clothes shopping in large-women's shops, where the selection didn't lend itself to a dyke about town and most affordable garments contained a high percentage of polyester. I volunteered. I knew where I wanted to be photographed: on the stone bridge over Rock Creek behind the National Zoo. Most days I commuted by bicycle from my group house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood to the Red Cross publications office in Alexandria, a ten-mile trek each way. I crossed that bridge every morning and late every afternoon. Beth and I set a date. It might have been a date for my execution, or at least major surgery. As it grew closer, I had fantasies of getting hit by a dump truck or coming down with a fatal disease that would conveniently kill me before the appointed hour. Sure, I could have backed out at any time, but I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the eye afterward. I was well aware that the most effective forms of oppression sink roots deep into the minds of the oppressed, and that fighting for social change includes identifying them and pulling them up -- ideally without toxic chemicals. Why was I afraid to be photographed? Did I think that being fat made me a liability to the movement? Beth didn't seem to think that including a portrait of me would ruin her exhibit. Why did I? Looking out of your own eyes is one thing. You can study your hands, your fingers, your ragged fingernails; when you take a shower you can look down between your breasts and see your belly, your pubic hair, your thighs, your calves, your feet and toes. You can look at yourself in the mirror -- but you can't see yourself the way others see you, from the outside. You can't know what they're thinking when they look at you. In those days, whatever I didn't know tended to assume monstrous proportions. It leered, it laughed, it drooled. I tried to stay on familiar terrain, and when I had to venture into dangerous territory I donned my armor and marched forward, looking neither left nor right. Here I was venturing into dangerous territory. I was going to let a photographer not only look at me but take a photograph, develop it, and hang it in a show so other people could look at it too. And the only armor allowed was my street clothes. The jeans, work shirt, and sneakers were pretty much what I wore every day. I chose my T-shirt deliberately, though. SECEDE NOW, it said, and showed a seagull flying over the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. A few years before my home state had reduced the size of its house of representatives from 240 to 160. Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard no longer had their own representatives at the State House. My shirt commemorated the movement that rose in opposition. The movement came to nothing, but I wanted its defiant sentiment on my chest. What I saw in my photograph was a woman trying to be comfortable in her own body, looking directly at the viewer as if to say, Here I am -- what's it to you? She wasn't entirely successful, but she was making a good go of it. I had to give her credit, too: she had chosen a location that offered nowhere to hide. I still have the photograph. Somewhere along the way the glass in the frame broke and the black-and-white print acquired some stains. What I lost was the short piece I wrote to hang beside my portrait. As I recall, it compared becoming a writer with becoming a lesbian -- I couldn't point to a moment when either one happened, but happened they had. I'm certain it said absolutely nothing about being fat, or about why I had volunteered to be photographed and how hard it had been to go through with it, or about how unusual it was for a photographer to ask for volunteer subjects and turn no one down. Words for all those things came later.
The photograph, by Beth Karbe
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||
