I Am A Woman. Ann Bannon
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We hosted Lil Hardin Armstrong (Louis’s first wife and a great jazz pianist herself), Johnny and Baby Dodds (clarinet and drum players par excellence), and others. Jack just gobbled it up. He would settle into an old easy chair in the living room, legs propped up on a hassock and cigarette in mouth, and drum with his fingers on the chair arms. I can’t count the beers that disappeared on such an evening, but there are ancient tapes of the music, and it was nothing to apologize for.
The original Jack was always a treat to have in our company. My little brothers adored him, but they didn’t learn his name on the first visit. There were so many young musicians around on weekends that we had a standing joke that they were all uncles: Uncle Bob, Uncle Bill, Uncle Harry. So Jack, on his first visit, was greeted with, “Here comes Uncle Somebody.” It stuck, even after they mastered his name. He had a funny take on life—ironic, droll, and rather unsparing—and he would sit in that chair and shoot zingers at us between musical numbers. We all loved him. I noticed, however, that unlike the other young men who dropped by so often, he never brought a date with him. Whether or not he was gay is another of those mysteries I never cracked.
I began to lose track of Jack only after I went away to college, when I was able to get news about him only occasionally from the hometown boy I was dating. Finally, shortly after my college graduation, I thought to ask the now-former beau, “Where is Jack these days?” The answer was not reassuring. He had gone to work for the CIA and had been sent to Ho Chi Minh City, then known as Saigon. He had, in fact, made several trips there, and finally, he did not come back from one of those trips. By now, it was the early 1960s, an increasingly dangerous time to be in Southeast Asia. No one from those heedless, happy times in my hometown seems to know how his story ended. It is a source of sorrow to me that he drifted out of my life without leaving a trace—except, I venture to hope, in his incarnation in these stories as Jack Mann, the good-hearted, perpetually frustrated gay man who could never resist taking in lost kids and helping them find jobs and make their way in the Big City. Alas, they always made their way to some other lover and left Jack in the lurch. But he never lost hope, nor do I, that someday, somehow, “Uncle Somebody” will come strolling up the front walk, cracking wise and charming us all.
And oh, the drinking! And oh, the smoking! You follow it all in the narrative, and you really wonder how any of us survived those days. And the truth is, there were casualties. But consider the reason. Where else were we to go? What women’s bookstores, what culture clubs, what social safety nets were there for women then? How did they even find one another? They resorted to the one social institution that represented a haven, a place to meet old friends and find new ones, a place to relax and be oneself—a place, in other words, that served an indispensable function in a perilous era. That some of the women from the ‘50s and ‘60s were sacrificed to the flow of liquor and smoke, lamentable though it is, is hardly to be wondered at. The options were so few and the need was so great that the bars were always crowded. Still, those women must be remembered with affection and gratitude; they were pioneers, too, and helped to build the foundation of sisterhood we all stand on today.
Last, the title. I had wanted to call the novel Strangers in This World. But Dick Carroll wouldn’t go for it. I suspect he knew much better than I that my title would not work as a code phrase to alert potential readers to its lesbian content. He was a canny marketer and used every available strategy to promote the books. Indeed, he had come up with the rather clever Odd Girl Out as the title for my first book. So what did he invent for this one? I Am a Woman. I always thought it was a vacuous sort of name for a book. It has no real referent: Who, for example, is the “I”? The book is not a first-person narrative. The title makes sense only as part of a longer sentence followed by a question, which had to be reproduced in its entirety on the cover of the original edition: I Am a Woman in Love with a Woman. Must Society Reject Me? What a mouthful of angst. I thought it was unwieldy and irrelevant to the story line; it could have been slapped on virtually any lesbian pulp paperback. It had no special connection to this one. But I Am a Woman the book became and remains. And in that incarnation, it sold like the proverbial hotcakes in 1959. So Dick Carroll was right and I was wrong. It still seems unappealing to me, an almost nameless name. On the other hand, this book, vague title and all, is one of my favorites in the series.
And so the saga of Laura and Beebo begins here, with its somewhat old-fashioned language and a few dated attitudes, but with a fresh and youthful joy in love and lust and all hopeful possibilities that defies the passage of time. It’s no great secret that the white-hot romance between them didn’t last a lifetime. But that’s only the first lifetime. They are still young at heart, still handsome women, still kicking. Who knows what the future holds? My own life is proof positive that none of us knows or perhaps would want to. All the good things seem to come upon us unawares. I leave all doors open.
Ann Bannon
Sacramento, California
December 2001
Tell your father to go to hell. Try it. It’s a rotten hard thing to do, even if he deserves it. Merrill Landon did. He was an out-and-out bastard, but like most of the breed, he didn’t know it. He said he was a good father: sensible, firm, and just. He said everything he did was for Laura’s own good. He took her opposition for a sign that he was right, and the more she opposed him, the righter he swore he was.
But he was a bastard. Laura could have told you that. But she couldn’t tell him, because he was her father. That was why she ran out on him. Left him high, dry, and sputtering in his plush Chicago apartment with only his job to console him. And never told him where she went. Never told him why.
Never told him of the angry agony of her nights, spent torching for a love gone wrong. Never mentioned his straight-laced bitter version of fatherly affection that hurt her more than his fits of temper. He never kissed her. He never touched her. He only told her, “No, Laura,” and “You’re wrong, as usual,” and “Can’t you do it right for once?”
She had taken it all her life, but it was the worst the year after she left school. It was a year of confinement in luxury, of tightly controlled resentment, of soul-searching. And one rainy night when he was out at a press dinner, she packed a small bag and went to Union Station. She bought a ticket to New York City. She could never be free from herself, but she could be free from her father, and at the moment that mattered the most.
So she rode out of the big city, wet and cold with its January gloss, and left behind Merrill Landon, her father. The man in her life. The only man in her life. The only man she ever seriously tried to love.
All she wanted from New York was a job, a place to live, a friend or two. As long as she won them herself, without her father’s help, she would be happy. Much happier than when she had been surrounded with comfortable leather chairs, sheathed in sleek fine clothes, smelling like an expensive rose.
In school Laura had studied journalism. She did it to avoid a showdown with Merrill Landon. He had always taken it for granted that she would follow his profession, just as if she were a doting son anxious to imitate a successful father. She accepted his tyranny quietly, but with a corrosive resentment that he was unaware of. There were times when she hated him so actively for making a slave of her that he saw it and said, “Laura, for Chrissake, don’t pout at me! Snap out of it. Act your age.”
Laura was more afraid of loving Landon than leaving him. She was afraid the yearning in her would flare someday when he gave her one of his rare smiles. When he said, “Klein says you’re learning fast. Good girl.” And her knees went weak. But he saved her by quickly adding with embarrassed sarcasm, “But you messed up the water tower assignment. Jesus, I can never count on you, can I?”
When things became intolerable she left him at last with no showdown at all. She had considered going in to tell him about it. Walking into the library where he was working, where she was expressly forbidden to go in the evenings, and saying, “Father, I’m leaving you. I’m going to New York. I can’t stand it here anymore.”
He