One of the reasons Naomi Wolf decided to call her book Vagina -
A New Biography was a result of seeing the lesbians in her native
San Francisco rise up in the 1970s. Her mother Deborah was one of
the first women in America to write an academic tome about the then
emergent lesbian community and consequently, the controversial
feminist author says, she spent much of her adolescence in gay
bars.
"Because I grew up witnessing what it did for a whole group of
people who had been hounded about their sexuality, who said, "Fuck
you, we're queer, we're going to take back that name, we're dykes
and we're not going to run away from you any more and we're not
going to let you define us on this intimate level as negative," I
witnessed the empowerment of a whole population. It was my
formative experience. [Empowerment came] through language and
through culture" - and this is why using the word vagina positively
is, she believes, so important. "But it was also through asserting
a positive value around their sexuality [that was] so derided and
ostracised," to achieve the relative rights we enjoy today.
It's still not perfect for lesbians and bisexuals but it's a lot
better, she notes, than it was in the 1950s and 60s when we were
losing our jobs and being murdered and abused on a grand scale. "We
have to follow that template, [we] have to stop running away from a
culture that is trying demonise [our] sexuality."
Read the rest of this interview in the October issue of
DIVA on sale from September 27 2012.
Buy it online here
divadirect.co.uk
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PHOTO Lezli + Rose
