I Am Not A Lesbian
She said she wasn't a lesbian, she wasn't straight, and she was not bisexual. 
She thought it was 'interesting' to define her sexuality by negation.
	 	from Bye Bye Brunhilde (a play by Camille Roy)



What was it he said last time? ...that everyone in the theatre has an obligation 
to bring the work to a wider audience, and my literary style obscures the action 
and characters. This, he added with a huff, is why he doesn't believe in what I'm trying to do. 

But I'm not a playwright! That play just came, whole cloth, from rooms swollen 
with...  jail dolls & inebriates... 

Wobbly strippers. Harsh life of some, uncanny illness of all the rest. 

Tempo, dynamics being ground into the dirt... 
of the strip! 

His comment probably was a reaction to the walk-out, the night that big dyke 
princess of the Norwegian shipping industry led half the audience out of my 
play...

In my dream there was a strong conviction that something was wrong. It stank up 
my sleep. I woke up & lay there thinking I should call L. The last Quaalude was 
so big I could hardly swallow it. Where does she get this shit? Such wierd stuff 
ends up in that room under the stairs... which she's decorated with fluttering 
paper skull cut-outs, their easter egg colors dressing up the illicit file 
cabinet. 

 I want otherwise feeders for my distractions. I want them hot and bitter. 

So I called E., for conversation. She said she meant to write in her journal, 
'I'm here,' and instead wrote 'I'm weird.' 

It reminded me of a cocktail party last week, where I was told I'd been harmed 
by someone, but the injury was in the past. I left feeling like a mortician of 
myself. As I crossed Market at Webster 3 Latino drag queens with sequines 
falling off their eyelashes staggered towards me and one made the motions of 
pinching off a flower at my pussy. I screamed Drunks, drunks, drunks...

Such injuries collapse myself, then I feel stupid.

I should strip self out of my social relations & see what's left: An organism 
that mounts itself (reflexes). A Chewy with a flat tire. Tender & vicious 
impulses. Hopeless obscurity. 

Quiet milky light.
Waxy solid legs. 
Feeling... suspended at the edge of a grief that is the rest of my life, 
I am not a lesbian, I say. What does that 
make me? she says.
You're a groupie, I explain.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For a long time I didn't mind being in the closet. I liked the voluntary refusal 
to disclose what I 'meant'. 
...useful for poems that I can't find 
...in the eroding frontier of my body, anyway.

In those days dyke life felt like an injection of outside. 
Before queer theory, before face time with famous lesbians, 
women were carpeted with meanings so thick there was no boniness 
to experience --- while lesbians had the opposite problem: being deserted by 
meaning. They spoke from the gorge in their throat. 

Suffering, when it's bigger than you are --- just a balloon with a grin.
 
So I don't aspire, although I am an angel. In the clouds I sit around and make 
dogs up
...possibly by divine right...
   ...yet infected by nostalgia, 
             that morbid inwardness...
      ...nostalgia for repression...
...No extremity has brought this mystery to me...
    ...Forthwith to bend down and cover my knife with a      
                                          napkin...
                                                       ...An assassin, as surely 
as I'm closing my hands...
  ...The writer's task of delivering a point of view --- gone! 
			This is soulful freedom.

camille roy