Two or Three Things (dedicated to Dorothy Allison)

In 1988, a self-identified cross-eyed queer femme author named Dorothy Allison published Trash, a collection of stories that went on to win two Lambda Literary Awards. Dorothy had already published a collection of poems, The Women Who Hate Me, in 1983, and would go on to publish Bastard Out Of Carolina in 1992. That book, nominated for the National Book Award, would later become a film directed by Angelica Houston, and be listed as one of 136 great American novels by The Atlantic. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature hit the shelves in 1994, and in 1995, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure came out, ninety four pages of performance storytelling developed into a memoir. Her less celebrated, but just as powerful novel, Cavedweller, was published in 1999.

On November 6th, 2024, a day that was already unimaginably difficult for many of us, Dorothy died.

Those are the facts you can look up on the internet. What I want to write about for this inaugural Substack post is much more personal. What is remembered lives, I am told, and for this transqueer writer, the idea of Dorothy being anything but vibrantly alive in our queer literature and literary discussions is unacceptable. Dorothy’s writing challenged and changed how we think about writing about queerness, about rural poverty, about childhood trauma and abuse. Her writing gave us permission—no, it double dog dared us—to write our own queer stories. Many of us are the writers we are today, with the communities and opportunities we have, very much because of her work, and her love.

So, let me tell you a story about Dorothy.

I was twenty years old, recently discharged from the Army under Chapter 15 of the UCMJ (back in the days before DADT) and new to San Francisco, where I had arrived with only my stenciled duffle bag full of clothes, books, and journals, and $50 in my pocket. I met Dorothy at my first San Francisco Pride, where she sat behind a rickety card table, handing out literature for the local women’s BDSM club. I had read and re-read Trash so many times by then that the pages were almost as unglued as I felt, standing there, watching San Francisco summer sunlight flash off Dorothy’s over-sized glasses and the wicked grin of her teeth.

I thought I wanted to be a writer. I had one year of college under my belt, but had been unable to continue to attend because there was no money. When the Financial Aid department at the small college I’d attended asked if my mother could mortgage her house, I laughed. We lived in a thirty-year-old trailer that was valued at $300 for taxes. The Army had been my last-ditch attempt to pay for college. How that went is a whole other story. But I thought I wanted to be a writer. I thought I was a butch dyke, and, in the words of the Femme partner in the couple who would become my Leather family, “I think he thinks he’s a top.”

I learned a lot that year…

About my sexuality, about my gender, about writing. Especially about writing.

Why is an essay ostensibly about Dorothy swerving into such personal details? Because Dorothy wrote about us, about rural queers, about kinky queers, about our rage and our passions, and about our fierce hearts. And, and this is the thing, she taught many, many of us how to write our own dangerous stories. “I want hard stories,” she wrote, “I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.”

That summer, I stood several yards away from where she sat, and stared at her, gobsmacked, flushed, terrified, and turned on. Because someone had just told me that Dorothy was offering a writing workshop through the A Different Light bookstore, in the Castro. A writing workshop! Me and my tattered spiral bound notebooks, in a class with Dorothy Allison! It took me half a pack of Lucky Strikes to get up the nerve to walk toward her.

I managed to stammer out that I wanted to take her class, and she cocked that now famous eyebrow at me and said, “Well, Darlin’, I need to see something you’ve written, first. You got something to show me?” Oh, that sly, wicked grin…

I lied. I said I did. The class started in three days, and Dorothy said I could hand in something the next day. I stayed up all night, using a housemate’s electric typewriter to crank out a fifteen page story. It was probably abysmal. It certainly reeked of cigarette smoke. It was probably derivative of her style. It was probably desperate, and it was no doubt one of the best things I have ever written, if passion and risk have anything to do with it. That summer my real education as a writer began in a cramped and book-filled room above A Different Light’s main floor, as Dorothy Allison leaned forward in her folding chair, cocked an eyebrow at each of us, and asked us what we could write for her. “Talk to me,” she would say, “Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.”