On the Down Low

[RedRosa]

I know that there are a lot of reasons to be on the down low, especially for married women with children still at home. There are objective reasons such as social ostracism, job loss, or if a housewife, divorce and the ugliness that follows.

I've been fortunate inasmuch as my social life has been lived out in the music/art/punk counterculture where all kinds of sexualities are accepted, and I worked in the entertainment industry where being bi, gay, trans or lesbian (if you're below the line -- it's different for celebrities) is no obstacle.

My parents disowned me for a variety of reasons, but my brother always stuck by me as did his wife; when he died at the early age of 35 leaving behind my sister-in-law and a 7 year old daughter I was in a position to help. Today my niece is a history professor in the UC system and did pretty well, something I'm proud of.

All this is by way of prefacing some thoughts on Susan Sontag, a favorite writer who was a closeted lesbian for her entire life. Her son published her diaries after her death and apparently with her permission, granted while she was still alive. She wrote about her fears and about sex in her journals, and their publication enlarged my sense of her. When she was alive she never fessed up to being a lesbian, so reading her diaries where she tells all was fascinating.

The volume titled Reborn, Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 chronicles her freshman year at Berkeley when, at 16, she entered into her first sexual relationship with a woman. Sex is the theme of the book, showing the way it illuminates life for a bright young thinker who is uncomfortable in her body and how, ever after, sex becomes a measure for Sontag of personal and artistic freedom. Because that's what sex is.

The art critic David Schreiber wrote a biography of Sontag, reviewed here (it's well worth reading): https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/ ... schreiber/

[delevigne-fan]

Reads like she was a bi woman with a preference for women.
It says as much - *mostly* women in relationships, sexuality with “women and men”.
That’s not a lesbian despite what the article says.
Bisexual activists would call that erasure. (I’m not a bisexual activist but I’ve read those arguments).

It reads like calling Freddie Mercury gay. His longterm relationship with Mary Austin etc.

[delevigne-fan]

I shall cite two North American sources:
The first is from 2019 and is Canadian.
It uses the term bisexual and describes relationships with men and women in great length.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as ... -1.5320441

The second is American and is from 2005 and reduces Sontag calling herself bisexual in 1995 to a code word for lesbian.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html

I believe the 2019 really is more nuanced due to its later date. The 2005 article is bisexual erasure, nothing less.

Was David Bowie an exclusive homosexual? The answer is of course, no. I bet if he’d been married to a man instead of Iman at the end of his life, some articles would have branded him a gay man.

[RedRosa]

Here's an excerpt from Reborn: “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality,” she wrote in 1959. “I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me --I feel -- a license. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. With H. [Harriet Sohmers, an American expatriate with whom she fell in love in Paris], I thought it didn’t bother me, but I was lying to myself. I let other people (e.g. Annette [Michelson, film scholar]) believe that it was H. who was my vice, and that apart from her I wouldn’t be queer or at least not mainly so. . . . Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.”

[delevigne-fan]

But wait, here’s an interview with her in the year 2000 from the guardian where she talks about loving her husband and her male and female lovers and acknowledges them.
She is quoted, in her own words.

The article used the word bisexuality.
So maybe she did say she was a homosexual in 1959 but by the year 2000 she talks about a range of people.

Maybe she was both a bisexual and a lesbian.

It probably doesn’t matter as she’s been gone 18 years, and this interview is from the year 2000 and the other quote is much older.

I’d like to think bisexual women can claim Susan Sontag as one of us. Legitimately - the evidence is there.
But really it doesn’t matter.

[delevigne-fan]

Apologies to the lesbian community and maybe this show is something of interest for lesbian or bi women partnered with women:

All female and non-binary season of the Ultimatum:Queer Love. There’s a trailer too. Looks interesting.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/ ... -cast-news