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Across the Page: Genderqueer Fiction

This month we feature three books that explore the fluidity of gender and sexuality, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, Lynn Breedlove’s Godspeed and T Cooper’s Lipshitz 6, or Two Angry Blondes. Woolf’s classic was published 80 years ago, but as our understanding of gender continues to grow, contemporary writers such as Cooper and Breedlove, among others, add new insights and perspectives to the discussion. In all three books, gender is not assumed, nor is it a burden. Rather, gender, like sexuality, is something to discover, define and, at times, redefine.

Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf (Penguin Modern Classics)

“But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its (sic) all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind?” The quote comes from a letter that Virginia Woolf wrote to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as she was beginning her famous gender-bending novel Orlando.

Orlando was published in 1928, the same year Radclyffe Hall was charged with obscenity for the lesbianism depicted in her book, The Well of Loneliness. Woolf was able to escape persecution primarily because Orlando changes from a man to a woman.

The book spans four decades – from 1588 to 1928 – though Orlando ages only 36 years. As a young man, he is brought into Queen Elizabeth’s court to work and to serve as her lover. He is a poet, however, who spends most of his time gallivanting around London and trying to amuse himself at pubs. During the Great Frost he notices and eventually falls in love with the androgynous princess Sasha (based on West’s other lover, Violet Trefusis). When Sasha betrays Orlando, he travels to Constantinople, where he becomes a duke.

It is here that Orlando falls into a trance and emerges as a woman. Everything about her other than her body, though, is the same, and Orlando is not distressed. One of the many assumptions Woolf challenges is the idea that people are either completely female or male. Orlando uses this transformation as a way to experience the world from a different perspective – “It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex.”

Orlando next finds herself in the 19th century. It’s the Victorian Age – oppressive and prudish – and she decides to follow the reigning traditions of the day and marry a man. Shortly after the marriage, she wakes up and it is the year 1928 – Woolf’s present day.

In this last section, Orlando considers her multiple lives, and as she tries to discover her true identity begins to see that she is actually composed of different selves. She has had the unique opportunity to experience the world as both a man and a woman. Additionally, by embodying these different selves, she knows what it means to love a woman and to love a man.

Throughout the novel, Orlando is neither exclusively feminine nor masculine – s/he “detested household matters” and did not have “a man’s love of power,” yet “could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned.” As a man, his soft complexion and “shapely legs” are admired. As a woman, she is equally androgynous. Still, the change in her wardrobe has a profound impact on how she experiences the world and, perhaps more significantly, how the world experiences her.

In the format of Orlando, Woolf mimics traditional biographies and their attempt to capture an entire life. But Orlando is a sprawling and witty epic, a complex and yet oddly straightforward exploration of sexuality and gender.

“The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity,” Woolf writes in the book. “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the make or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.”

Godspeed by Lynn Breedlove (St. Martin’s Griffin)

There are certain topics that are difficult to write about – for example, love, sex, family and, I imagine, the rush of speed as it charges through your veins. In Lynn Breedlove’s Godspeed, speed addict and butch bike messenger Jim reflects on all of this and more while navigating San Francisco’s hilly terrain.

Jim uses the male pronoun – “gender’s a box you turn inside out, tear up, and sew a gown out of” – and though he is in love with a stripper named Ally, he can’t kick his addiction despite her threats to leave. After an argument involving 20 dollars spent on drugs rather than Chinese takeout, Ally finally makes good on her promise, and the two split up.

The separation fuels Jim’s downward spiral and sends him to New York City as a band roadie. He settles down with a group of transfolk and begins to date other women, but he can’t stop thinking about Ally and tries to sober up – besides, he observes, “they don’t do speed here because NYC itself is speed.”

Jim is a keen observer of his interior and exterior world. An incredibly flawed but likable character, he defies convention: He identifies as a dyke rather than a lesbian. (“They’re not dykes. They’re LESBIANS! We’re freaks.”) He acknowledges the pretense of his own infidelity and jealousy; when it comes to love, he embraces the grit (“she smashes me into pieces and I make mosaics”) along with the beauty (“I see her and love every twist and turn of her driving circles around me”). And perhaps the most interesting aspect of his punk personae is that he is a mama’s boy tried and true.

Many of the characters in Godspeed, including Ally, are burdened with horrific pasts. Jim, on the other hand, comes from a decent home. His family is supportive, if not a bit eccentric, and it is not immediately clear how and why he’s ended up as a “speed freak.” Breedlove does not lean on convenient excuses or explanations, and neither does Jim: “Some people get high to escape, but I got nothing to escape, no torturous childhood. Just my own self.”

Breedlove writes with a poet’s sensitivity to sound. The language of Godspeed moves the narrative forward at full throttle, playing with rhymes and alliteration throughout: “Her tongue’s running over her lips, her eyes narrow into eyelashy slits”; “The night’s like night, with invisible wet, and I glide to the bike”; “She is deep enough to see her own depth. She loves to talk about death”; “Jesus Christ but New York chix are fine. No wonder all my exes aren’t from Texas.”

Like poetry, Godspeed is the kind of book you’ll want to read out loud.

Lipshitz 6, or Two Angry Blondes by T Cooper (Plume)

The story of Lipshitz 6, or Two Angry Blondes, T Cooper’s novel which was recently released in paperback, is as divided as its title. The book opens in the third person from the perspective of different characters in the Lipshitz family, then slips into the voice of a misanthropic, transgender Eminem impersonator who recently abandoned a successful career in writing.

In the first section, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz lose their youngest son, Reuven, when they arrive at the crowded dock on Ellis Island. It is the early 1900s, and they’ve just left the pogrom of Russia. Reuven is never found. Though the family waits for him in New York City, they eventually travel on to Texas to be with Esther’s brother, whom she admits to loving more than either her children or her husband. Several years later, Esther believes that Reuven — who as a child was “very blond” and thus did “not look like a Jew” — is the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Fast forward another 60 or so years, and we meet the last of the Lipshitz clan, a character named T Cooper who is trying to reconcile his family’s history while battling his own demons in a post-9/11 world. When his parents die in a car accident, he is forced to return to Texas to help his drug-addicted brother arrange for the funeral. In the meantime, his wife has hit a “mom-zilla” stage and wants to use one of his eggs to carry a child.

The book’s transition from past to present, third to first person, is as disorienting as the Lipshitz family’s arrival onto Ellis Island. The pace accelerates, and there is a whole new set of rules that you’re expected to learn, including a different language.

The two sections seem a world apart — and in many ways they are — but Cooper is a skilled writer who makes several unexpected connections. Esther obsesses over Charles Lindbergh, who is accused of anti-Semitism. T impersonates Eminem, who’s been accused of homophobia. Lindbergh and Eminem, with their blond hair and blue eyes, both represent the American dream of celebrity and success.

Though each generation in Lipshitz 6, or Two Angry Blondes faces its own hardship, all characters encounter some form of discrimination, violence and struggle for affection. In this struggle, the search for identity emerges as an important theme: immigrant or American; male or female; loving mother or the worst mother “in the world — Old or New”; gay or straight; Jewish by faith or ethnicity; outcast or martyr.

Cooper is not the first writer to use his family history or name in a novel, but what makes this book so compelling is how he blurs the line between fact and fiction, truth and perception.

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