Coleen Clare launch speech for Lesbian: politics, culture, existence
Welcome Everyone.
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting this evening, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to their Elders past, present and to their young leaders. This land was never ceded; it is, and always will be Aboriginal land. We have a responsibility to acknowledge past and continuing wrongs and be thankful for the generous openness to share in the kindness and wonder of thriving Indigenous culture.
It is impossible to predict Melbourne weather so a big thank you for braving the unknown and being here tonight to launch Susan Hawthorne’s inspirational book, LEZBIEN: Politics, Culture, Existence. It is a history of feminist and lesbian thinking from the 1970s to the present; an amazing celebration of 50 years of Susan’s writing.
Many of our Lesbian Community are at ‘Meet in the Middle’ tonight, a gathering of over 50 lesbians from across Victoria held in Dimboola, together with dozens of lesbians from South Australia. They send their best wishes to Susan and Spinifex for this launch. I know Susan welcomes this surprising revival of lesbian culture in a small country town that has been welcoming of this influx of women who love women for over three years. Some of the locals are now able to say the word lesbian out loud! This is a large number of Susan’s Victorian fan base who are absent – so it is grand to see you here tonight.
Some of you are clearly, like me, dyed-in-the-wool Susan fans. I know this because I saw you on the Zoom launch of LEZBIEN: Politics, Culture, Existence held earlier this month when Kaye Moseley launched this book to a group of over 50 women. Susan said, “It was an international lesbian party.” It was indeed but more than that, it was a tribute to how highly Susan is loved, respected, and read. Susan Hawthorne is a remarkable writer, she stands in the company of significant woman like Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Doris Lessing, and other great writers. Before I move on, I urge you to go to YouTube and listen to the recording of that Zoom launch, hear Kaye give a tour-de-force of lesbian history and Susan’s story, and relish memorable comments from Susan herself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en97aHknnCk
A huge shout out to Susan’s long-term partner and co-founder of Spinifex Publishing, Renate Klein, for exercising her acute foresight in seeing that Susan’s writings and this collection were vital for lesbians now, for all forward thinkers and to go into our lesbian archives. What a challenging task to choose and edit only 24 chapters out of Susan’s 60 important essays.
Some of you might wonder why I am standing here launching this book. I did try to defer to one of our many erudite lesbian scholars, but Susan insisted, and when Renate chimed in and said, “I think it should be you too,” I knew I was doomed. I long ago learned that I might be able to say no to one of this duo, but I certainly cannot argue back against both of them. So here I am. For six years I used to often base Susan in POW, the Performing Older Women’s Circus, so hopefully I can again be her base tonight as we watch her fly.
Books are about how they make you think and feel. The feeling I had reading this collection took me back to a time when I sat beside a quivering Renate in the Great Hall at the National Gallery of Victoria and watched Susan swing and swoop remarkably high up under the famous French glass ceiling. I had just learned that Susan lives with epilepsy; it was an awareness of epilepsy occasion that she was performing for that day. There was a feeling of enormous courage and inspiration in the air as the audience gasped in awe and Renate grabbed my hand.
This was not a once-off experience; I recall a hall in Sydney where we were taking part in the Performing Older Women’s Circus in the Masters’ Cultural Games, and we were checking out a new venue to set up in. The hall was old, and the ceiling was enormously high. Susan stood looking up at it, white and perplexed. “What?” I enquired. Susan replied that the ceiling was much higher than she normally performed from, and the script required her to swing alone on a trapeze. “What will you do?” I asked. “I guess I will fly higher,” Susan replied, and so she did. She took the risk, went higher and performed beautifully as she always has in her aerial performances and in her writing. We are fortunate to be the beneficiaries of that courage.
Susan looks out at our lesbian culture from a unique high and broad point, but it is not all about successes. I watched Susan in a solo tissu performance in Chapel Street where an unintended feature were the shadows her moves cast on the white walls. In this collection, Susan does not shrink from exposing the dark shades of lesbian culture, and the dark shadows that threaten our lesbian culture.
In both the women’s and older women’s circuses, Susan was known for her generosity, inclusivity, and accessibility, clearly one of our top performers. Her hand was always out to welcome and include each newcomer of any ability and to urge us in our performances to look at the whole of lesbian experience. This openness was not always reciprocated. It is still distressing to Susan, me, and others, that much of her foresight and wisdom around transgender issues and knowledge of lesbians and torture was not openly received; it was seen as too hard and too confronting to deal with. This collection is hard-won out of painful life experiences from which Susan has garnered insight and wisdom; it draws on excruciating conversations and research that many of us would shy away from. She shares with us her high flights and also the hesitations, slithers, tangles, falls and crashes of her life. Susan lives a vibrant life, seeking out and standing beside all lesbians whatever their history, colour or ability; the vitality and essential need for local and international lesbian connection flows through her work.
At first sight this book may appear daunting, but Susan writes kindly; is never didactic, never patronising; with generosity she invites you into her thoughts with an openness to walk her pathway with her, to find out what information she has garnered, what knowledge she offers. She takes you deep inside her analysis which is straightforward and clear, easy to follow. She leads you on a pathway to form your own opinions. It is a rare gift for a passionate writer not to tell you what is right and what you should think.
The chapters draw on experience from over 50 years, with insights reaching back to Sappho. You can read the whole book, or you can find a topic that is of interest to you and explore it. I believe that once you delve into this book you will return to read each chapter in a way that suits you, increasing your knowledge and encouraging you to think about your own analysis of lesbian politics, culture, and existence. Some chapters will intrigue and inform you to the point where you will want to seek out Susan’s other writing to take you deeper into her arguments. Susan’s writing on ecology, globalisation, refugees, torture, economics, and transgender challenges are searingly current and essential reading for all lesbians making their way in our current world. Joyfully, the book closes with a loving embrace of her great friend the activist, scholar and artist, Suzanne Bellamy, whose sculptures of lesbians reading Lesbian Linear B, grace the cover.
I share a love of Sappho and poetry with Susan and with many of you. Some of my favourite poems written by Susan are alluded to throughout the book which reminds me to say that Susan has authored many books, poems, essays, and anthologies, which are listed in this book. LEZBIEN: Politics, Culture, Existence could be the beginning of a wonderful lifelong writing treat for each of you. I often return to Queenie the Cow; she still puzzles me and makes me laugh; and The Butterfly Effect is still a favourite book.
‘Together,’ is such a lovely young poem, it is a great launch pad for the essays that follow and track Susan’s thinking through the years; let us share it now.
“we sink into the silent grey softness
She whispers
may St Joan be in your dreams
I think
of Robin Morgan’s Lesbian Poem,’
Slowly
our energies become one
Tender
caresses and hesitant fondlings
Car headlights
flashing round the bedroom walls
Break into
our solitude.”
One of the listeners at the Zoom launch questioned how we could get this quintessential book out to younger lesbians, and I have thought about this a lot. I think I would buy and gift the book freely, telling young women that Susan is a heroine of ours. That this great lesbian writer is a poet, the author and co-editor of 30 books, part of the Women’s Liberation Movement, behind early feminist conferences, worked in a rape crisis centre, was unemployed, did taekwondo, writes poetry, dabbled in pottery, taught English to Arabic-speaking women, ran book fairs, is a grassroots traveller, an aerialist flying in two circuses, lived in Wagga Wagga, Melbourne, London, Greece, India, Türkiye and now Mission Beach, has wild dogs, speaks in pubs, cafés, on radio, in theatre, plays the flute and performed in a bush band.
Surely, you would have the interest of young lesbians now, and for good measure add in that with Renate Klein she began a feminist publishing house which is still blooming after 30 odd years. You could throw in that Susan is a critic and political commentator, and that is only the half of it. You could also mention that she writes about exotica, erotica, heterosexuality, separatism, lesbian refugees, the torture of lesbians, lesbian economics, violation of lesbian rights, war and ecology, the impact of the transgender industrial complex on the existence of lesbians as a political force, globalisation and cyberfeminism. Who could not be inspired? And I have not touched on Susan’s myriad conference presentations, academic degrees, accolades, awards; her knowledge of Sanskrit and other languages, the fact that her books have been translated into nine languages.
If you cannot remember all of Susan’s vivid life story, grab yourself a handful of the media release page and distribute them widely. This book contains information and analysis that young lesbians need to know, and you will also enjoy and benefit from the writings.
It is clear that I am a fan of Susan’s, and a tad biased, so let us listen for a moment to what the great lesbian writers who have endorsed LEZBIEN: Politics, Culture, Existence have to say about her writings.
Janice Raymond: “… Her essays maintain a balance between the tensions of lesbian history and the building blocks of a lesbian future.”
Monalisa Gomyde, from Brazil: “… It is due to writers such as Susan Hawthorne that our culture is preserved and able to flourish.”
Lynne Harne, co-editor of All The Rage: “… A must-read for every person who cares about justice.” Lynne is particularly referring to the essays on torture and the challenges of the takeover of transgenderism.
Sally Wainwright, editor, Women’s Rights, Gender Wrongs: “… I was struck by how many of the arguments Susan Hawthorne was making ten, 20, 40 years ago are being evoked today – a stark reminder, if any were needed, that many of the battles we face now are battles that lesbians have been fighting for many years.”
Prue Hyman, New Zealand economist, lesbian and political activist: “… Give it to every young lesbian you know – and to those who do not realise yet that they are lesbian (the straight world would benefit from reading it too).”
Sheila Jeffreys, feminist lesbian writer: “… There is such richness here, and this book is a treat for old lesbians like me and for a new generation.”
Susan writes:
Lesbians are as varied as the plants in a garden. Some are like trees, tough, tall and you want to lean on them, sit in their arms; some are like the fruiting trees, always creating things, dropping their blossoms, nuts, fruits and doing the rounds again; others are like perennials, hard at work, at the daily grind and keeping on keeping on; some are like weeds who won’t go away; others are like surprise plants and wild flowers that pop up, flower and are never seen again. What they all have in common is that they all need water. Some need more tender loving care than others. But without water none will thrive. They also need soil. Culture is soil; love is water.
When you belong to a group that is denied water and soil, the members of the group have to invent their own ways of survival.
These words speak intimately to the need for lesbian culture to have pride in itself, to have public exposure, to have safe spaces in which to grow, blossom and thrive.
As Susan writes,
The lesbian world extends all the way through the body – from every muscle, cell, and sinew – through to a spiral of time/space – from every nanosecond/nanodistance to the vast sweeps of curved space/time through and between galaxies. The lesbian world is a multiverse of possibilities.
I would love you to conclude this evening by reading Susan’s poem at the end of the book, ‘Things a Lesbian Should Know,’ but to do this you will have to buy the book, or get your library to buy it in. I have taken Susan’s words from the Chapter ‘Footnoted and Sidelined’ to summarise her wisdom:
Use the word lesbian often.
Do not silence lesbians even if you disagree. Argue rather than boycotting.
Accord lesbians the same rights as others.
Do not put lesbians in the too-hard-basket to wait until after the revolution.
Be proud of the lesbians in your life.
It is appropriate at this point to remember, as Susan does, the lesbians who have been tortured and died simply for being lesbians as she dedicates her book: “For the unrecorded, unremembered, unnoticed lesbians and for the lesbians who shouted and made waves.”
In closing, I acknowledge Renate Klein’s contribution to all of Susan’s life and work; and the talented input of the whole of Spinifex Press – it takes a team to achieve greatness.
It is a great honour to declare LEZBIEN: Politics, Culture, Existence by Susan Hawthorne, launched.
Coleen Clare 17 September 2024
