Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

There are no lower orders. There are no lesbians or transgender people or fill in the blank. There are only people, a wild mix of energy, different abilities, colors ranging from ebony to bleached white. We’re everything and everybody. I don’t even believe in male and female, it’s a sliding scale and we are hag-ridden by a binary culture: male-female, black-white, straight-gay, rich-poor, and so it goes. The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by material possessions. It’s even worse if people define themselves by money.

When I wrote Rubyfruit Jungle in 1971 (the year I wrote it, not the year it was published), the only way to begin to understand your situation was to take the label given to you by others, a label devised centuries, if not millennia, ago for some labels, and to understand how this became hardened oppression. That work is done. Think about it. Once you buy into a definition of yourself that has been made by others, you’re a victim. Victims draw great strength from banding together and declaring a common oppression and a common (always glorious, of course) culture. Perhaps, but you’re still a victim.

The most revolutionary thing you can do is be yourself, to speak your truth, to open your arms to life, including the pain. Find your passions.

never seen men hold each other. I thought the only things they were allowed to do was shake hands or fight. But if Carl was holding Ep maybe it wasn’t against the rules. Since I wasn’t sure, I thought I’d keep it to myself and never tell. I was glad they could touch each other. Maybe all men did that after everyone went to bed so no one would know the toughness was for show. Or maybe they only did it when someone died. I wasn’t sure at all and it bothered me.

Leroy cocked his slicked head and looked at me. “You know, I think you’re a queer.” “So what if I am, except I’m not real sure what you mean by that.” “I mean you ain’t natural, that’s what I mean. It’s time you started worrying about your hair and doing those things that girls are supposed to do.”

“How come you’re all of a sudden so interested in my being a lady?” “I dunno. I like you the way you are, but then I get confused. If you’re doing what you please, out there riding around on motorcycles, then what am I supposed to do? I mean how do I know how to act if you act the same way?” “What Goddamn difference does it make to you what I do? You do what you want and I do what I want.”

I didn’t even want a husband or any man for that matter. I wanted to go my own way. That’s all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there. Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain. I’d rather be alone.

“Oh great, you too. So now I wear this label ‘Queer’ emblazoned across my chest. Or I could always carve a scarlet ‘L’ on my forehead. Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it? I don’t know what I am—polymorphous and perverse. Shit. I don’t even know if I’m white. I’m me. That’s all I am and all I want to be. Do I have to be something?”

“No, you don’t have to be anything. I’m sorry I asked you if you were a queer. But this is a big jolt. Things your mother didn’t tell you and all that. I guess I’m square, or maybe I’m scared. I don’t think you or anyone else should wear a label and I don’t understand why who you sleep with is so Goddamned important and I don’t understand why I’m all strung out over this. All this time I thought I was this progressive thinker, this budding intellectual among the sandspurs, now I find out I’m as shot through with prejudice as the next asshole. I cover them up with layers of polysyllables.”

Carrie, Carrie whose politics are to the right of Genghis Khan. Who believes that if the good Lord wanted us to live together he’d have made us all one color. Who believes a woman is only as good as the man she’s with. And I love her. Even when I hated her, I loved her. Maybe all kids love their mothers, and she’s the only mother I’ve ever known. Or maybe underneath her crabshell of prejudice and fear there’s a human being that’s loving. I don’t know but either way I love her.