Flirting in Literature

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

On Flirting: a Facilitated Discussion in Chicago, July, 1989 

While cleaning up recently, I opened a boxful of mementos from the '80s and early-'90s, which I hadn't seen since boxing them up for our move to New Jersey from Illinois in 1996, including:

When I was 22-23 and volunteering as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth group advisor in Chicago, I curated a series of literature-snippets. I accompanied each of them with a question or two, and made handouts that read, "On Flirting. Consider the following excerpts and questions and bring your thoughts to this Saturday's discussion."

My first real girlfriend and I broke up the prior spring and I had no idea how to flirt with women. I created the discussion guide to help myself. Growing up, I didn't feel free to flirt, especially not with girls. Perhaps some of the youth also felt unfree, I thought, and what a gift, via this discussion guide, to plant the seed that same-sex flirting with one another was OK:

The first excerpt was from "You're Ugly, Too" by Lorrie Moore, "The New Yorker," July 3, 1989:

Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the kids and hoping for a reconciliation, so that despite all his betrayals she might no longer despise him, and, in the few minutes remaining, learn, perhaps, what his last name was and what he did for a living, though probably there was already too much history between them. She would nod, blush, turn away.

And then...

Q: Have you ever planned too much, too quickly with someone you've just met?

The second snippet was from *Miss Manners' Complete Guide to Excurciatingly Correct Behavior* by Judith Martin, specifically the chapter, "Courtship (for Participants, Their Friends and Relations)." She wrote of how flirtation done properly was "an end, not a means."

And then...

Q: Have you ever had fun, flirting just for its own sake without it leading to a deeper involvement?

The third bit was from *Jitterbug Perfume* by Tom Robbins, a section, where Ricki hits on Priscilla and is rebuffed.

And then...

Q: Have you ever flirted with someone who was straight or equivalently unavailable?
Q: Ever tried to turn a flirtation into something more? What were the results?

The fourth excerpt was from *Lesbian Passion: Loving Ourselves and Each Other* by JoAnn Loulan, including, "Sometimes just setting rules takes the pressure off."

And then...

Q: Can you cut off a flirtation if it causes you more pain than pleasure? 

The fifth quote was from *The Lost Language of Cranes* by David Leavitt, where two friends consider becoming a couple.


And then...

Q: Have you ever flirted with a friend?
Q: How did you resolve this flirtation?

The sixth bit was from "The Village Voice" by Vince Aletti on June 27, 1989, where he reviewed a book of Bruce Weber's photography, including, "What makes beefcake so compelling now is its nostalgia for innocence."


And then...

Q: Do you prefer seeing explicit or suggestive images? [How about language?] 

The seventh excerpt was from *Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit* by Jeanette Winterson, including:

Poor Melanie, she didn't understand any of them, she just knew she needed Jesus....I went round to Mealnie's and we read the Bible together...and I was delighted. She was my friend, and I wasn't used to that....I talked about her all the time at home, and my mother never responded.

And then...

Q: Have you and another ever shared a passionate pursuit as a substitute for a romance between you two?

The eighth snippet was from *Hey, Dollface* by Deborah Hautzig. It was a Young Adult novel, where two high school girls fall in love, but in the particular scene, they're talking on the phone about a date one of them had with a boy.

And then...

Q: Have you ever tested a romantic prospect by detailing an exciting experience you had with someone else to that person? 

The ninth quote was from "The Rug of Identity" by Jill W. Fleming in *Lesbian Plays,* selected & introduced by Jill Davis. A lesbian couple is trying to rekindle their spark.



And then...

Q: If you've ever been or are now part of a couple, how do you sustain the fliration between you? 

The tenth excerpt was from "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" in *The Company She Keeps* by Mary McCarthy. It included an exchange between a man and a woman, where the woman is unimpressed initially until the man is familiar with the author of the book she's reading.

And then...

Q: What makes you not want to flirt back?
Q: Initially turned off, what can persuade you to become engaged in a flirtation?

The eleventh snippet was from *The Mind-Body Problem* by Rebecca Goldstein, where a woman and a man begin flirting with each other's intellect, agreeing that mathemeticians are aestheticians.

The twelfth and final bit was from *Self-Help* by Lorrie Moore, with a funny exchange between a man and woman who just met, where the woman is reading *Madame Bovary* in a Doris Day book jacket.

And then...

Q: Which style(s) of flirting do you most enjoy, e.g., eye-contact, intellectual, humorous... 

I wonder what became of those LGBTQ youth in Chicago. Today, they would be ages 44-51. Hope that those who wanted to learn to flirt did and found the loves of their lives eventually, like I did. 

Lesbian Life BCE (Before the Cat Era) and Beyond

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.


Crystalizing My Lesbian Identity

The other morning, I was finishing up stretching after my indoor-rowing session in our house in Montclair, New Jersey, in the sunny room downstairs with the triple-glass doors. Just then, Randy Crawford's "Wrap U Up" began playing, according to the algorithmic personalization of the free music that boomed from the black Bose box on the floor.

I sat down in one of the four Carolish-era Herman Miller Eames shell chairs I had inherited when my mom (z"l) died 20 months ago, cracked open a Costco bottle of water and swigged as I looked out into our half-snow-covered garden. Listening to Randy Crawford's molten voice, I remembered a winter-night date more than a quarter of a century ago, back when I was renting an efficiency apartment near Ashland and Addison in Chicago. The apartment wouldn't have had room for a rowing machine, even if I could have afforded one then.

At a friend's party the prior weekend, I had met a tall, Midwest-born-and-bred classical musician with classically beautiful features. Our first date included dancing to late-'80s music in all its glory at a then-popular-and-now-extinct Chicago North-Side lesbian bar. After a marathon of songs, we paused only to go to the multi-stall Ladies Room. I was ready to return to the dance-floor when she kissed me for the first time. Against the sinks, in the bathroom.

"I don't want this in here. It makes it seem dirty." With her graceful hands and tender mouth, she tried to change my mind, but I was repulsed. We were too beautiful to be doing something so gorgeous in such an unappealing place.

"Let's go for a walk," she suggested and I was relieved. We left the club and walked out into sub-zero wind. We walked against the wind all the way to the Lake. No one else appeared to be there in such forbidding weather. I could hear my teeth, tapping together. She smiled at me and took the mitten off of one of my hands, and warmed each one of my fingers, in her mouth.

CE - Cat Era

Thrilling as it had been with the musician, and a number of other remarkable Chicago-area women in my twenties, Pat emerged as the kindest, funniest, most appealing, brilliant and magnetic among them.

Yesterday afternoon, on our way home from an afternoon ride in our station wagon to Chester, New Jersey -- which my wife Pat and I had read was quaint, according to Yelp -- we stopped at a grocery store and I whispered out of the side of my mouth, "Pat, look, sisters." For the first time, she didn't turn to look. We kept walking and I said, "I guess it's no longer such a big deal, huh?" Throughout our nearly 24 years together so far, the term, "sisters", had been code for whenever we thought we saw an apparent couple of two women. It was always exhilarating to be reminded that we weren't alone.

Pat always said I could blog about whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't invade her privacy with my postings, so I'll step gingerly around this point: For our first decade and a half together, I could enjoy intimacy in our relationship practically whenever I wished, and then we adopted two sister-cats, one of whom sleeps with us routinely. (Just ran this paragraph by Pat and she acquiesced to my including it.)

The post-rowing Randy Crawford tune and the book *Carol*, and the movie -- which I felt improved upon the book -- awoke my BCE memories. And then Pat gave me an article by Frank Rich, where he wrote: "Even today, Todd Haynes’s mesmerizing adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel comes as a shock—mostly for how much lesbian culture remains invisible to America at large." 

This post is my humble contribution to increased lesbian visibility.

"Parting Glances" Circa 2009

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

A Chat with Survivors of the Era

The owners of the B&B, where we're staying in Ogunquit, have a large DVD collection and yet we had seen most of the mainstream and gay titles already. "Parting Glances" was supposed to be a gay classic, and they owned it, and it was one that we had not yet seen, and so we watched it last night.

It was like getting into a time-machine. Ah, so that's how the movies depicted what it was like for the guys when I was trying to find myself as a 20-something lesbian! The B&B owners referred to it as a "sweet movie" in a tender tone and so I was hoping for a highly-poignant film experience.

Really, it was no better than most of the lesbian films we've ever seen, which didn't make me happy, but which was validating, at least, that we weren't the only ones who were so desperate for images of ourselves, being ourselves, that we accepted sub-optimal plots/acting/cinematography just to glimpse people who looked like some of us, living their lives.

This morning over breakfast, one of the owners asked, "What did you think of the movie?"

I didn't want to hurt him or insult his taste, which in every other way, e.g., the landscaping of the B&B and its interior, was lovely -- even stylish -- but I told him that it reminded me of the quality of so many of the lesbian films I'd seen over the years, i.e., not great, but that I could understand how wonderful it felt simply to see two guys simply being affectionate on the big screen.

Yes, he agreed; that was its chief appeal.

Then I said, "And I loved the soundtrack! Whatever happened to the Bronski Beat and Jimmy Somerville?"

"I don't know," he said and broke the spell. We were no longer back in Chicago in the '80s -- or for him, I imagine Pittsburgh; we were dolloping Greek yogurt that I never could have afforded back then into generous bowls for breakfast.