Map of Ireland, Stephanie Grant

I think that white northerners, people in America living north of the Mason-Dixon line, like to convince ourselves that historically there was no real racism here, at least not like in the south.  Sure, there were a few hot spots like Detroit where race riots happened, but some of our best friends were black.  We supported abolition.  We didn't have Jim Crow laws (at least, not the kind written down).  We're the racial good guys.

The fact is, racism, while less overt, was and is just as insidious in the northern part of the US as it was in the south.  While it's true that more northerners than southerners expressed a positive opinion of desegregation and equal rights, when I came right down to it the same fear and prejudice reared it's ugly head during the 1960s and 1970s in places like Chicago and Boston.  Especially at issue was school desegregation, which resulted in the forced busing of both white and black students out of their neighborhoods and into other areas of the city to achieve racial integration.

It is Boston's struggle over school desegregation that is the focus of Stephanie Grant's novel, Map of Ireland.  The main character, Ann Ahern, is a troubled Irish girl from Southie, the neighborhood in South Boston where the Irish settled during the 1800s and early 1900s.  It is now the 1970s-the 60s are over, leaving behind some aging hippies and a country struggling to catch up with the furious pace of cultural change that it just experienced.  The year that the busing started in Boston's public schools is the same year that Mademoiselle Eugenie, a Senegalese exchange teacher, comes to teach French at Ann's school.  Ann quickly develops a crush on Mademoiselle Eugenie, but it's not her gender that concerns Ann-it's the color of her skin.  While Ann has known for a while that she is attracted only to women, her desire for Mademoiselle Eugenie brings her into contact with more Blacks than she has ever known, and forces her to confront her own prejudice, as well as the oppression and violence that poor Blacks in Boston experienced at the hands of their white neighbors during that difficult year.

Grant does with this novel what I hope other authors will do as time goes on-she has a gay main character, but the book is not about gay issues, at least not mostly.  There are many societal issues raised in the book-sexuality, class, ethnic heritage, race-but the racial issue takes centers stage, and is the driving force behind the other parts of the story.  While no one is defined by a single part of their identity, often books with gay protagonists are specifically about being gay-struggling for self-acceptance, coming out, finding love, fighting for equality.  In this novel Ann has already mostly come to terms with her sexuality, but her feelings for Mademoiselle Eugenie throw her into crisis.  While Grant never uses this term, much of what Ann struggles with is feeling like a race traitor, feeling as though she is trapped by her own ethnicity and geography, unable to see any way forward that does not mean cutting herself off from the only community she has ever known.

The other thing that Grant does quite well with this book is the authenticity of the characters.  Despite her obvious support of racial equity and understanding, her black characters are not sentimentalized.  They are portrayed neither as noble heroes or victims, but as complicated, flawed people.  While some of the whites in the book are obvious villains, for the most part they are written as people struggling to maintain control over their own lives in the face of fear of the unknown.  While it is clear where Grant's sympathies lie, the story does not ever devolve into preachiness or stereotypes, and while you might not agree with the position of any one character, you begin to see how nuanced the situation really was.  Black and white issues rarely exists in the real world, and they don't exist in this book either.  Like most of us, this book resides squarely in a shade of gray.

Curious Wine, Katherine V Forrest

I imagine that getting a lesbian love story published in 1983 must have been quite a chore.  After all, you couldn't really even talk about being a lesbian in 1983.  Writing a book about a lesbian affair, especially one with as much graphic sexuality as Curious Wine, seems pretty courageous.  So let's take a moment to honor that courage...ok, moment over...let's begin...

Curious Wine is the story of Diana and Lane, two women discovering they love women over a long weekend at a cabin in Lake Tahoe.  Drawn together by fate and irresistible desire, and unbeknownst to anyone else, they create a small lesbian oasis in the room they share.  Surrounding these two are a group of women, mostly in their 40s, in varying states of relationship with men.

The fact that this book was published in 1983 shows in the way that the characters relate to each other.  I had to think of the book the same way I think about an exhibit in a museum.  Dated, an object from another time to examine and study.  For a third wave feminist such as myself, it was hard to feel a kinship with any of the women, defined as they are by their relationships (or lack of relationships) with men.  There was Liz, the bitter divorcee; Madge, the "progressive" woman in an open marriage, though only her husband ever dabbled;  Chris, the spinster; and Viviane, who decided to forgo staying at the cabin with the rest of the women so she could stay in town with her boyfriend.  The main characters were equally stereotypical.  Diana had just come out of a bad break-up, a relationship which followed a bad marriage.  In trying to deny her lesbian feelings, she picks up a man in a bar who ends up assaulting her, thereby driving her into the arms of a woman.  Lane had briefly had a wonderful relationship with a man, only to be devastated when he died in Viet Nam.  She then spent the next several years being rather promiscuous, which I think the author wanted us to perceive as forward thinking and strong on her part, but which came off as desperate.  At one point in the book the women play some encounter games, the kind popular in the 1970s, and all of the negative female stereotypes of competition, jealousy, and apologizing for having ideas and opinions comes out clearly.  Maybe the author herself was struggling with how to be a woman in the age of the ERA-if so, her struggle is evident in her portrayal of these women.

As a lesbian myself, I hoped to feel some kinship with the two woman-loving women in the book.  I did feel a connection with Lane's character, a take-charge lawyer who refuses to be drawn into the other women's drama during the encounter games.  Lane was the character most like me.  As a teen and young adult she had intense feelings towards other girls, but didn't recognize them for what they were, or suppressed them out of guilt and fear about being a lesbian.  I didn't recognize my own first crushes for what they were, either, though I was saddled with WAY less guilt and shame coming out in 2000.  Sadly, that is where any identification I felt with the characters ended.  Do I think that trying to run away from your same-sex feelings and hiding from the world is historically accurate?  Of course.  I just don't think that this novel does a great job of making the reader feel like they are part of the story, and therefore experiencing the past in a way that speaks to the now.  Anyone who has read Stone Butch Blues or Ruby Fruit Jungle has had that experience.  This novel just didn't rise to that level.

I looked up this author before writing this post, and she has written many books and won numerous awards from gay literary organizations.  I suppose there is something to be said for reading Curious Wine as a primary source for the development of feminism and gay identified literature.  In that sense, it is very much like a museum exhibit-you'll learn something about the past, but in such a way that you can't really touch it.