May 2nd, 2008
Jamie Lee Evans, “Internalizing the Lesbian of Color Body”
Two lesbians of color, Black and Asian, had seemingly forgotten lesbians are everywhere, and come from everywhere. We did gut checks on who we were thinking of when we thought of lesbians in East Oakland. We were thinking of dykes like the ones on 20/20: white, middle-class and definitely out of place in the inner city. We did find the Mexican restaurant, barely before 8, but they let us in and we ate while they closed up. While eating my taco, I watched the owners turn away customers who arrived after the hour.
Closing early, too dangerous to stay open past dusk.
I kept thinking about what I had said, what I had thought. I
felt ashamed. Who wanted me to think that the likes of me couldn’t be found in a neighborhood much like the Los Angeles city I had grown up in? It was that brutalizing and very alive force that declares only one race, class, only one type of person is okay, the rest of us are superfluous. Lesbians are everywhere I repeated again and again on our way back home. I felt close to tears. What does it mean that I call the “lesbian community” home, but do not see myself or other sisters like me living in that home? How many east Oakland dykes did I make invisible by my earlier statement? Was I thinking about the theft and violence that comes out of communities of poverty and imagining that lesbians are never thieves or never involved in violence? Was I remembering my own tough youth and how I knew that to be lesbian (or more accurately be caught lesbian) meant certain cruelty and attacks, even possibly murder? Maybe … maybe, but probably it was more like I was thinking that “lesbians” wouldn’t be in east Oakland, because they are safer, smarter, richer and whiter than residents of this area. Honestly and painfully I acknowledged to myself that I internally read lesbian as white lesbian.
Read the whole thing here.
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From “Internalizing the Lesbian of Color Body” by Jamie Lee Evans, from Sinister Wisdom 49, The Lesbian Body, Spring/Summer 1993, pp. 10-13.
