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Judy Rae Grahn
(1940 - living) U.S.A.

Judy Grahn

Poet and activist

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udy Rae Grahn is a lesbian poet and activist born in Chicago. Her father was a cook, and her mother a photographer's assistant. She spent much of her childhood in what she describes as:

"... a sparsely populated, rural portion of the world, in an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas. There, it seemed to me, virtually everything was prohibited except low-level wage slavery and mandatory, joyless marriage."

Her working-class background would have permitted no space for a young lesbian in the early 1960's, and she recalls her

"utter isolation at sixteen, when I looked up Lesbian in the dictionary, having no one to ask about such things, terrified, elated, painfully self-aware, grateful it was there at all. Feeling the full weight of the social silence surrounding it, me, my unfolding life."
At 18 she "eloped" to be with Yvonne, a student at a small nearby college who first introduced her to the secret Gay culture whose history she would later trace.
Her college years as one of a group of lesbians included looking out for herself and her friends in a "wasteland of human relationships and social rigidity." Typically, Grahn relates this mutual protection system to women as an underclass:
"We stood watch for each other as lovers do in jail. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) courage. We knew about cunnilingus, though only the boldest among us practiced it. We knew about the Mound of Venus. We knew about tribadism and about butch and femme. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) sexual appetites. We knew that Gay was our generic name, that people who were not Gay were 'straight' and that many of them called us 'queer' with unfathomable hatred and fear..."
She joined the Air Force, but at the age of 21 was given what she calls "a less-than-honorable" discharge for being a lesbian. Her letters and notes were seized and used against her friends in the service, and her parents notified of her "crime." Moreover, she experienced denials of jobs and housing, and was even "beaten in public for looking like a dike." As a woman writer and a lesbian, she had become doubly Other, a recognition which, instead of silencing her, radicalized and motivated her.

The following passage from Another Mother Tongue (1984), her history of gay culture, describes her despair after her "less-than-honorable discharge" from the Air Force for lesbianism:

"Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization, I worked as a bar maid serving hard liquor to dying winos. I did not believe there was any farther to go on the bottom of society than where I was. But as I found the company of other Gay ex-service people who also had the state fall on their heads, living in an area mixed with people at the bottom of Washington's perpetual ghetto of Blacks and whites and a scattering of Asians, I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself indefinitely, inside the mind and outside."
When she went to a Washington D.C. library to read about homosexuals and lesbians in an effort to investigate who she might be, the librarians told her such books were locked away, available only to professors, doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers for the criminally insane. As she would later write, there
"constituted some of the serious jolts I experienced in my early twenties concerning the position of Gay people in American society." Such jolts made her "angry and determined enough to use my life to reverse a perilous situation."
In 1963 she was one of fifteen members of the Mattachine Society to picket the White House for gay rights. In 1964 she published, under a pseudonym, an article in Sexology Magazine in which she argued that lesbians were normal, ordinary people. Also under a pseudonym, she published some poems in The Ladder, the magazine put out by the Daughters of Bilitis and edited by Barbara Gittings.

Most of her poetry, she realized, was unpublishable by a mainstream press: so in 1969 she founded, with Wendy Cadden (her lover at the time), the Women's Press Collective. They began by printing on a mimeograph machine in the basement, but in time grew into a complete, productive press. That same year Judy Grahn was a founding member of the West Coast New Lesbian Feminist Movement.

Her volumes of poetry include Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1971), She Who (1972), an experiment in feminist scripture, and A Woman Is Talking to Death (1974). These three volumes were collected together as The Words of A Common Woman (1978).

In 1982 Grahn published The Queen of Wands, the first of a projected quartet of long poems. The Queen of Swords appeared in 1987, with Cups and Diamonds to follow. In 1984 Grahn published her most influential work, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. In this richly researched and speculative study of gay and lesbian cultural history, she explores the history of words (like "gay," "faggot," "dyke," "fairy," "butch" and "drag") associated with gayness - and finding their tribal or cultic origins, thus resuscitating from a despised language a new language of opposition and authority. As she puts it:

"Another Mother Tongue proposes that Gay people have a culture, that it cuts across class, race, gender and even national and tribal categories. It proposes further that Gay people have functions in society that involve, and in fact require, Gay attributes. In short, it says that Gay culture is central to Gay people and that Gay people are central to their societies, even when they occupy a despised or underground position."

( ...... )

"Of course sometimes high humor is involved in maintaining ... secrecy. Gay people of all social strata develop intricate codes and language inflections that operate within ordinary-sounding language patterns to convey information that members of the Gay culture can understand. The idea is that hidden things may be least noticed when contained in what is most obvious."

According to Grahn, the unique place gay people occupy in any society is in opposition to any stable, one-sided, monochrome perception of the universe:
"I believe that Gay culture at its heart is continually, however unconsciously, trying to reveal the other side, sometimes just to reveal the fact that there are sides. I believe we do this with regard to the sexes, to work roles, to the world of judgment and value, of aesthetics, of philosophies, of other realms of consciousness. We act out irony, essential humor, and paradox."
Like the work of Gloria Anzaldòa and Cherrie Moraga, Another Mother Tongue mixes the genres of poetry, essay and autobiography to produce a fluent, mutable new form.

In her subsequent work The Highest Apple (1985) Grahn builds on her notion of gay culture to trace a lesbian poetic tradition from Sappho through such figures as H.D., Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein to contemporaries including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Olga Broumas and Paula Gunn Allen.

In her latest and most controversial book, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993), Grahn undertakes nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of human history and identity. Blood, she thinks, is at the center of culture: as she told The Advocate,"It doesn't have to be traumatic blood. It can be natural blood and the rituals that women have always performed that have given us all the things we treasure." Those things include chairs, drinking straws, Greyhound buses, lipstick and red wedding dresses.

Speaking of her youthful butch orientation Grahn says what many lesbians and lesbian theorists have continually reiterated:

"Our point was not to be men; our point was to be butch and get away with it. We always kept something back: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures, something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was 'Here is another way of being a woman,' not 'Here is a woman trying to be taken for a man'."

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Judy Grahn is a love poet, although her poetry is not particularly erotic. She is a love poet in the traditions of Whitman, Ginsberg, Cummings, with more than a little bit of Gertrude Stein. Grahn borrows many of their repetitive, incantatory techniques, but transmutes them to celebrate the energy common to women in their diverse work.

Her sensualness occurs in the dance-like, ritualistic patterns of much of her poetry. She seems able to find songs or enchantments in virtually every aspect of the language of women. These poems are social activities, designed to replicate in readers, especially through reading aloud, the ideal of Lesbian civility.

Grahn idealizes but does not sentimentalize the Lesbian bond, because she makes us aware of the facts of aloneness, the penalties of her choice, and the tenuousness of her dream. She is also tough in rejecting the false securities and illusory paradises that romantic idealism produces.

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"she who"

the woman whose head is on fire
the woman with a noisy voice
the woman with too many fingers
the woman who never smiled once in her life
the woman with a boney body
the woman with moles all over her
In her early work, Grahn created a series of portraits of women, both lesbian and straight, which embody the diversity of the "common woman." The result is a long series, The Common Woman Poems, which has become a major document in the feminist movement. The series mixes realistic depictions of oppressed women with a revolutionary call to action:
the common woman is as common as the best of bread
and will rise
and will become strong - I swear to you
I swear it to you on my common
Woman's
Head
The origin of this series, as Grahn says, "was completely practical: I wanted, in 1969, to read something which described regular, everyday women. Without making us look either superhuman or pathetic". The women portrayed are tough and resilient, hardened by years of work in low-paying, demeaning jobs and in equally demeaning sex roles. Ella, for example, is
... a copperheaded waitress,
tired and sharp-worded, she hides
her bad brown tooth behind a wicked
smile, and flicks her ass
out of habit, to fend off the pass
that passes for affection.
She keeps her mind the way men
keep a knife ...
But the more the women are described, the less "common" they appear, each one possessing some volatile side of herself hidden beneath the surface:
she has taken a woman lover
whatever can we say
She walks around all day
quietly, but underneath it
she's electric;
angry energy inside a passive form.
The common woman is as common
as a thunderstorm.
The titles of these portraits indicate precisely where the portrait takes place: "Helen, at 9 AM, at noon, at 5:15" or "Carol, in the park, chewing on straws," as though they are photos in an album. The portraits are not idealized, and the lives the women lead are hardly heroic. Madness, abortion, failed marriages, sexual frustration, shrill invective become the unhappy legacy of the "common woman." To Grahn these features signal a potential power that must be discovered in everyday language:
I'm not a girl
I'm a hatchet
I'm not a hole
I'm a whole mountain
I'm not a fool
I'm a survivor
I'm not a pearl
I'm the Atlantic Ocean
I'm not a good lay
I'm a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness

In 1990, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction for Really Reading Gertrude Stein.

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Source The San Fransisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. © 1989 by Cambridge University Press

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