More than a dozen years ago, The Star published my “Guestwords” article “Lichtenstein Across the Net.”
This 2013 article described how, in growing to womanhood during what many have called the conformist decade, I hid my athletic ability from men, including when I played tennis with Roy Lichtenstein, accepting without question the societal demand that I had to protect a man’s sense of manhood. In every competitive match with a male, I would purposely hit the tennis or Ping-Pong ball into the net, allowing him to win, thereby reinforcing his sense of masculinity.
Society taught me that my popularity with the “opposite sex,” and my hope of finding a husband, rested on this socially demanded responsibility as a female. Accepting this as required, I duly did all I could to make each man in my presence feel stronger, smarter, more capable and better than me.
In reflecting on these coming-of-age years (in the 1960s and ’70s), I see how much hiding I did. For instance, my boyfriend at the time, who introduced me to the Lichtensteins, was my companion only during the week. On weekends I dated my girlfriend, who occupied my sexual thoughts and my heart. But there was little joy in my love affair with her because I knew that the psychiatric association in midcentury America considered same-sex attraction a “disease.” Everything that I read and heard increased my feelings of immense shame for not being straight.
When I first thought that I might actually be that word, Homo, I was stunned. Totally naive, I wondered how it could be possible that my kissing and bedding this older woman whom I met in college could be called that? After all, I was seriously dating an eligible bachelor at the same time who wanted to marry me. He had everything a girl could possibly want, including a private plane! I went into therapy, thinking it would take some six weeks to figure out why I didn’t want to marry this great catch. I was wrong by many years.
Simultaneously, I read everything I could find at the Queens College and 42nd Street libraries on what was then referred to as “inverted sexuality,” defined as a clinical term in 1950s America used by medical and psychological professionals to categorize and pathologize individuals, primarily homosexuals and those who were gender-nonconforming. It was considered a mental illness and a form of social deviance, leading to widespread legal, social, and professional persecution.
Every writer I found on the subject (except Judd Marmor) presented my propensity as hideous. Authenticity was out of the question for me now, and hiding became a necessity. I had to be careful even with language that I used in informal conversation. When talking to acquaintances, it became automatic for me to change genders, so that “the movie I saw last week with my girlfriend,” switched to my “boyfriend.” As I struggled with my sexuality, I could give no hint, certainly not to my parents or friends, of the inner turmoil I was feeling, the self-loathing and shame that now shadowed me continuously. Other than in therapy, I told no one. Fortunately, as an artist, I had another outlet: I could blurt everything out in my sketchbook diaries. Here the words and drawings poured out nonstop, and in these 28 books I could vent my anger and admit my confusion. My chosen artistic obsession at the time was the human face, but because of my shame, I found that the eyes of my own drawings gazed back at me in contempt –– until I turned the face to be a profile, and began my artwork “Below the Eyes.” Thousands of drawings, collages, and constructions followed with no eyes to torment me.
In these books I felt no qualms in detailing the ups and downs of my sexual life and evolving womanhood. I revealed that I was a budding feminist and activist with a longing to write and record my journey, to let it all hang out on the page in order to relieve my stress. And it did relieve my stress. It always had the effect of calming my nerves, easing my depression, and helping me feel less lonely and hopeless.
Why do I have such a need now to revisit and write about this unhappy period in my life? Why do I want to reopen this decades-old wound? Why do I want to discuss shame in my lectures, and even in the draft for a picture book I created? I titled it “If Pictures Could Talk of Shame — Below the Eyes: Sexuality and Averting the Gaze.”
I could, instead, focus on how I gradually triumphed over my shame, and currently exhibit art in museums that many consider symbolic of protection/ strength/power (including in my series of “Knights of Protection” and “Warriors Waging Peace”), and happily married a fabulous woman. I remember how proud I was when The Star published our wedding in its 2008 Wedding Book supplement.
But my need now is to share the long, intense, confusing time in my life when my thoughts were filled with how bad I was, and days were spent in disguise and camouflage. In my mind, focusing instead on my successful transition beyond shame would distract from my desire to provide help and support to as many people as possible who now experience their own kind of shame.
Future opportunities will arise for me to follow up with my emerging success over this issue, but for now, I’d like to look within to the time when my artwork and diaries began to ease the pain of my shame.
Linda Stein is a feminist artist, activist, writer, and lecturer who lives part time in East Hampton. She is founding president of the nonprofit Have Art: Will Travel! for encouraging anti-bullying and diversity. Her traveling exhibitions address gender and sexuality and include workshops and webinars, and her show “Facing the Gaze” is at Methodist University’s David McCune International Art Gallery in Fayetteville, N.C., through Dec. 5.