Re-Vision

By Donovan Cleckley

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light--
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
- Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times Are These” (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995)

Throughout history, oppressed classes of people have been robbed of their resources—particularly, their bodies as themselves. Being true for women, as a colonized people, this state of things has also been true for homosexual people. Lesbians and gay men have been subjected to varying sorts of dehumanization in the straight world. Persecution has shifted from religion to psychiatry—with medicine acting, in effect, as a theology. Sickness and sin have become one and the same. But the naming of homosexuality as a pathology, presenting our bodies as our prisons, nevertheless remains there.

Lesbians and gay men, being homosexual people, have found it to be in our social and political interests to work together. These collective efforts, despite the divisions between the sexes, formed the basis for the modern gay rights movement. Men and women engaging in work together has been so for the proletariat as for Black people. However, a persisting difficulty, in the question of where the people are, is how a movement will regard women as a people with their own “cross-cultural culture,” as Robin Morgan writes. Across communities, there are separate and shared interests between men and women. Such has been the case with the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Front, a new form, now, for what had been, previously, the New Gay Liberation Front. There must be real thought: re-new in re-vision.
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Adrienne Rich writes of “re-vision” being “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” For woman, naming has been the domain of man in male-dominated society, as, for the homosexual individual, it has been comparable: the imprisoned self appears in what Monique Wittig calls “the straight mind.” For the lesbian or the gay man, as seen in the subjection of women, it seems of importance to understand one’s social conditions: how one is where and why that is. Only then do we get to the what of oppression as a historical and material social phenomenon, not merely in misunderstanding it as psychological. “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched,” Rich tells us, “we cannot know ourselves.” With lesbians and gay men, as for any colonized people, our collective work begins not with a denial of difference, as men and women, but rather our recognition of each other.