JUST WANNA BE SEEN AS SANE

A few weeks ago, in the ONYX (BLN), there appeared an article by Joyce Pen- alver. She told about her "coming out" along with it's difficulties and joys. I enjoyed her writing very much and I re- spect her also.

All Gay people have experienced some form of oppression related to being gay. Homophobia and other social oppression makes coming out a very difficult thing to do and it makes being proud to be a lesbian just as hard. Many of us choose to be quiet in our own oppression.

I personally have not come that far in being vocal when some derogatory statement is made about gays. But at least I will say something. For instance, during the holidays a friend of my fath- er's told me, "You better watch out for those gays in San Francisco, they'll get you. "I told him simply, "I don't have to, I'm not the least bit afraid." For me to have said just that little bit a year ago might have been impossible. But time passes and I feel more sure of my-

self; I love me and I'm proud of who I am, I cannot be ashamed. I know I face discrimination from those I love, but I want friends and family to truly love me for who I am. (To thine ownself be true.)

Persecution will always show its ug- ly face. If I'm not persecuted for being a lesbian, I will be persecuted for being black, a woman, for eating chocolate, for wearing glasses, for wearing white socks, for liking Japanese-made calculators (the list goes on).

It's hard to stand up and be recog- nized. But we can do simple things to support ourselves. We can write letters in support of gay lifestyles to newspa- pers, television networks, congressmen and other legislators. You don't even have to sign your real name.

Writing letters in protest of our oppression is the easiest way to support our liberation.

1983 Camille Barber

In Celebration of Black History Month

Whenever black women took pen in hand they did so with a sense of allegiance to and involvement in a great moral quest. Black women's earliest writings were impelled by social, political, and moral causes that were life and death issues for black people.

One of the results of this identification with great moral and social issues is a sense of personal autonomy that many of these women laid claim to.

My second hunch about the black woman's struggle for a literary voice is that it is often achieved under the influence of a nurturing female community or because of a female precursor who conveys to the writer the power and authority to speak.

If there is any single distinguishing character- istic of the literature of black women writers, it is this powerful identification with a female kinship network which transmits its own authority.

Mary Helen Washington, in Radical Teacher, No. 17

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Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me- so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.

Their names, selves, faces feed me like corn before labor. I live each of them as a piece of me, and I choose these words with the same grave concern with which I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward visions of all our lives.

Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother's mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home.

There it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother's blood.

Audre Lord, in Zami, A New Spelling of My Name

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