by Barbara Deming

bradford lyttle and i were comrades during the 1960's in a number of actions against war and against racism which the committee for nonviolent action organized. and as member of the c.n.v.a. executive committee we also sat through innumerable meetings together. he was the coordinator of many of the actions in which i took some part (and he was often the one who had dreamed them up) . . .

in the summer of 1974 brad visited me one afternoon and we fell into a discussion of homosexuality. i had come out publicly as a lesbian the year before. he said he thought it was wrong to deny homosexuals their civil rights, but felt that homosexual relationships were "substitute relationships" formed by people who could not seem to form "satisfactory" heterosexual relationships and, soon after, we exchanged several letters. the one included here was printed in win magazine, october 10, 1974.

dated: 8-12-74

dear brad-

yes, i really do want to discuss "these matters" with you - sexuality.

you write: "if human animals possess a genital differentiation, obviously for purposes of sexual reproduction, it seems reasonable to expect them to have a corresponding and appropriate emotional differentiation. heterosexuality would seem the appropriate biological attitude." i don't follow you here. would you try to put into words for me what you feel to be the appropriate emotional differentiation? how should a man feel toward a woman, a woman toward a man? my own strong conviction is that this very belief that we should feel differently toward one another lies at the root of all our difficulties. yes, the genital differentiation is for purposes of reproduction, obviously. but what purposes would you say that the emotional differentiation serves? i would say that down through history the claim that there must be such differentiation has served the purposes of male domination.

actually, later in your letter you yourself write in a way that plays down those so-called differences between us. writing of reich, you say, "[his] notion about a generalized sexual energy leads to a corollary that reich didn't seem to see the significance of, that is that the energy doesn't necessarily have a male or female character. " and you write: "what this means in regard to the question of gayness is that the male or female psychological aspects of a person's personality are superficial in comparison to the person's deeper sexuality." i very much agree. and here is a question for you: does this energy not have a biological source? i ask this because you write earlier in your letter, "gayness seem to have no reasonable biological origin. why should nature frustrate the mechanisms of procreation?" i'll answer your question with another question: shouldn't these mechanisms be frustrated rather more often than they are? isn't over procreation a problem? and i'll answer it with a deeper question: is the only reason for sexuality procreation? this is not reich's view, is it? (you say that you find yourself "in almost complete agreement" with him.) i've not yet read reich, so let me speak simply for myself. i would say myself that our sexuality is given us so that we can commune with one another - and with our universe. it "cracks our single selves", i say in a poem i'll enclose. and for me this reason for its being given us is quite as primary as that of procreation. without sexuality we would be impossibly isolated within our individualities. we could not experience community, could not experience in our flesh the truth that we are, all of us, "members one of another", and of all that is. the sense of this is very lacking in the modern world - because sexuality is, yes, very damaged. damaged, i would say, by the attempt to split it into the so-called male and the so-called female - the one sex supposedly by nature dominant, the other supposedly happy in surrender - all possibilities of communion weakened by this lie. for dominance and submission can produce only distortions of communion.

if we can free ourselves of the will to dominate (or the willingness to submit), our sexuality allows us, i very much believe, to commune not only with other people but with the whole world of nature. you write that "reich's discoveries about sexual dynamics led him to believe in a generalized sexual energy, which, if fully released in orgasms led to mental health, but if dammed up led to neurosis." i would express the same belief - except that i would leave out the words "in orgasms." the language of genital sexuality is a wonderful language for communion, but not the only language. there have been periods in my life when i have been, literally speaking, celibate and yet in such communion with others that i felt no sexual frustration at all. (this was very much so for the months i was on the walk to cuba, for example.) i know that others have had comparable experiences. i have just been looking through some of rilke's letters and here is a sentence from one of them: "and i really believe i sometimes get so far as to express the whole impulse of my hear, without loss of fatality, in gently laying my hand on a shoulder."

let me quote a passage, too, from a kind of journal in which he describes a communion with the natural world which i would call sexual in a profound sense. (he is writing of himself in the third person):

it could have been little more than a year ago, when, in the castle garden which sloped down fairly steeply towards the sea, something strange encountered him. walking up and down with a book, as was his custom, he had happened to recline into the more ore less shoulder-high fork of a shrublike tree, and in this position immediately felt himself so agreeably supported and so amply reposed, that he remained as he was, without reading, completely received into nature, in an almost unconscious contemplation. little by little his attention awoke to a feeling he had never known: it was a though almost imperceptible vibrations were passing into him from the interior of the tree. . . . it seemed to him that he had never been filled with more gentle motions, his body was being somehow treated like a soul, and put in a state to receive a degree of influence which, given the normal apparentness of one's physical conditions, really could not have been felt at all . . . . nevertheless, concerned as he always was to account to himself for precisely the most delicate impressions, he insistently asked himself what was happening to him then, and almost at once found an expression that satisfied him, saying to himself, that he had got to the other side of nature . . . . later, he thought he could recall certain moments in which the power of this one was already contained, as in a see. he remember the hour in that other southern garden (capri), when, both outside and within him the cry of a bird was correspondingly present, did not, so to speak, break upon the barriers of his body, but gathered inner and outer together into one uninterrupted space, in which, mysteriously protected, only one single spot of purest, deepest consciousness remained. that time he had shut his eyes, so as not to be confused in so generous an experience by the contour of his body, and the infinite passed into him so intimately from every side, that he could believe he felt the light reposing of the already appearing stars within his breast.

our sexuality, i would say, makes possible experiences like this - which i have known, too, and assume that you have known. would you not agree that we lack fullest mental health if we are not capable of this?

sexuality can dissolve the boundaries of our individual selves; it makes possible a deep relation with the rest of the world. reason enough for being placed within us. that the act which can result in the birth of a new life results itself from this urge to touch other live than our own is as it should be. but the creation of children is not the only reason for our sexuality.

you write that "the biological inclination" is to be heterosexual. i would say that the biological inclination is simply to be sexual. you write: "a social origin for gayness seems . . . likely." i would say that a social attempt to force us to be heterosexuals - and if patriarchy were dispelled and, with it, the power inequities that make most heterosexual relationships so distorting - my guess is that we would find ourselves quite naturally attracted to either sex. it would be a matter simply of which individual person awakened love in us.

love -
Barbara