Fresno Famous

Longtime Fresno resident and author Lillian Faderman is, in her own right, a celebrity in the literary world.

She invited me to her home recently for an interview, in advance of her speech at the upcoming Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States conference, scheduled for March 22-25 in Fresno. The conference is being hosted by the English Department at Fresno State, and Faderman is one of four featured speakers.

As Faderman invites me in, I think of the pioneering contributions she has made in gay and lesbian history, as well as multi-ethnic literature. She is the author of 11 books, most recently the social history book Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians.

In formulating my questions, I consider the importance of literary voices, how those of us within the academic and literary community crave stories of writers we admire who continue to inspire and encourage us. The writers I love are those who challenge me to connect to the world and the attempt to become part of a larger discussion, and Faderman is definitely one of those writers.

I have to admit, I've always been a little intimidated by Faderman's body of work, which ranges from lesbian history -- where I was first introduced to her about six years ago -- to Chicano literature, to Hmong oral history, and finally, to her own history as a Jewish American.

I feel like I'm in the presence of someone who has a vision and love for humanity that I want to nurture within myself. Faderman's life and work seem inseparable. She has an intuition that these "marginal" voices were -- and will continue to be -- important.

In the 1960s, Faderman was a graduate student trying to complete her dissertation on Victorian literature. She describes her first year as an undergraduate at UCLA:

"I had a professor that everyone loved in the English Department. His name was Robert Bone and he did a book called The Negro Novel in America, which I thought was just so exciting -- everybody was going to pay attention to that."

Faderman transferred to UC Berkeley, and when she returned to UCLA in 1962 as a graduate student, she learned that Professor Bone did not get tenure because "his research wasn't considered important."

In 1965, Faderman had a professor who already had tenure. His name was Philip Durham, and he published a book called The Negro Cowboys. The publication of Durham's book was after the Watts Riots.

"Suddenly, people who were not Black became interested in the idea and what's going on with other ethnicities," she said. "Not in the academy, but there was obviously an interest somewhere out there."

Faderman's interest in multi-ethnic studies thus began with her interest in the reality of the American landscape. She is gifted with an intuitive vision of the importance of "marginal voices," or, as Faderman chooses to refer to multi-ethnic voices, "borderlands" voices, borrowing from Gloria Anzaldua's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

Though she decided to complete her Victorian dissertation, Faderman said: "I realized that I was never part of who those guys around me were. I was just really cognizant of my own borderlands both in terms of gender . . . in terms of ethnicity . . . in terms of class . . . and of course in terms of sexual orientation."

Faderman had her personal experience to draw from. However, she noted, "because it was the mid-'60s, it still wasn't the time I could write about women or gay stuff, but I could at least write about ethnic stuff." She realized that what Durham was doing was what she wanted, "not necessarily on Negro cowboys, but on ethnic literature."

Faderman decided to address and explore the issues and lives of multi-ethnic voices. Living on the margins herself, raised by her immigrant mother and aunt who emigrated from Latvia in 1923, Faderman knows the struggle of those on the periphery. More importantly, she reveals how these marginal voices filter into the mainstream, exposing their importance, their reality, and their influence on the dominant culture.

With her dissertation complete, Faderman began researching ethnic voices published in various prints for a potential anthology. She and her partner, Barbara, shared the idea of a multi-ethnic anthology, and the more they talked about it, they became more involved in putting something together.

Faderman mentioned the project, Speaking for Ourselves: American Ethnic Writing, to Durham. In 1967, a textbook acquisition editor approached Durham for an anthology but he turned down the offer, suggesting Faderman, a graduate student working on her anthology, instead.

"They flew someone out from Illinois to take me and Barbara out to dinner, to convince us to go with Scott-Forsman. Convince us, yeah?" Faderman jokes.

The research, though, on writers of color was grueling. Faderman said she ran into difficulty from various sources.

For example, "in the bowels of the UCLA library" they discovered a magazine, Common Ground that published "White ethnic writers," writers who were not Protestant Anglo-Saxon, but Jewish American, Italian-American, Polish-American, etc. The Christmas issue, for example, published short stories and poetry. Common Ground discovered writers like Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan and Japanese short-story writer Hisaye Yamamato, authors now widely anthologized.

"All the stuff [was] essentially forgotten by the 1960s," Faderman said, "totally forgotten."

In 1967, Faderman moved to Fresno for a teaching job at California State University, Fresno. Though Speaking for Ourselves would be published in 1969, Faderman was excited to continue her research.

During her first year on the faculty, she taught a first-year course on multi-ethnic literature. As the class developed, fellow faculty member and Fresno poet Philip Levine introduced student and Sanger native Luis Omar Salinas and many others to her. She then decided to begin research on a Chicano literature anthology. Her emphasis on Chicano literature was because of the group's cultural presence in the central San Joaquin Valley.

The resulting anthology, From the Barrio: A Chicano Anthology, would be published in 1973.

In the early 1970s, there was nobody doing "serious academic research" in gay and lesbian studies, Faderman said. Then, in 1975, she discovered Jonathan Katz's Gay American History. Having the intuition for what is important, and, more precisely, for what research was imperative, she began researching gay and lesbian history.

Faderman mentioned the anthology Sex Variant Women and Literature, published in 1956. "I didn't even check it out," she said, "I read it in the stacks."

In 1978, she had published six articles in gay and lesbian studies. "I was on fire with that stuff. It was all I wanted to do," she said.

That fire did not exhaust itself. In 1981, Faderman published her first widely read book, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.

Yet, Faderman said, "I could not have come to the point to do lesbian research if not first done multi-ethnic research. The reason for that was I realized that I could do borderlands research and that it was important."

Furthermore, "in an area that was extremely personal," Faderman emphasized, "the importance, that it could be done and needed to be done."

In the last 20 years, readers have seen the profound effect that borderland voices have had on American literature. However, readers have also sometimes witnessed how these diverse voices attempt to create specific divisions. I asked Faderman if she finds these divisions problematic.

Faderman's early lesbian research revealed certain movements by people of color. She explained that there were "these very broad organizations that tried to encompass the entire ethnicity. But now for instance there's not an Asian Pacific organization. The point is there's such a huge proliferation. . . . I think that's an important intermediate period."

This intermediate period closes in on how these broad organizations eventually split off into very specific, defined groups. "The boundaries become finer and finer, and now there's even a group of Gay Columbian artists," she said. "That's how fine it is, defined in terms of identity -- that fine -- that precise. But how long can that keep up?"

With the American myth to strive for an individual sense of being, I wondered about the possibility for these groups to cling to their identity. I speculated on the potential possibility of the breakdown of these groups and see their future resistance, a natural reaction to the fear of loss.

Faderman responded, "When I was working in ethnic studies, we really challenged the notion of the melting pot. That's ridiculous. The point that we made is that it doesn't happen for people of color. [With] the salad bowl metaphor, they maintain their particular identities. The mosaic metaphor became popular. . . . But now there does seem a possibility for a melting pot."

At first, I, too, bristled at the idea, fearing a homogenized nation. However, as these boundaries become finer and finer, Faderman said, as people mix and mingle, perhaps there is potential for a melting pot, but not one that concludes my fear. Instead, I can now imagine our backgrounds, ethnicities so enmeshed that we will all share something of another's past.

In 1998, Faderman came to her research on the Hmong experience, an important body of work for the Fresno area. She had great interest in researching I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience.

"I was teaching in the early 1990s, and I saw the population was changing yet again," she said. "When I first came [to Fresno] the population was largely blonde. I found Asian students and didn't even know what their backgrounds were and found out they were Hmong. I became interested in who my students were."

Each chapter opens with Faderman's personal narrative, and I asked her if she found her story as a European immigrant similar to the experience of the Hmong.

"I did, of course, and the whole concept of universality has been so problematic, so vexing in recent years, and yet I did find things that are universal," she said.

The very structure of I Begin My Life All Over, which weaves Faderman's story with that of her subjects, reveals how people's voices can intersect and often integrate. More and more, literature seems to be reflecting the reality of American voices, voices on the borderlands that are becoming mainstream. One day we may come to agree on what it is to be an American.

Looking back, for example, at American literature anthologies, there is a void of multi-ethnic writers. Faderman notes that the Heath anthologies of American literature have been including multi-ethnic voices since the '90s. Paul Lauter, editor of the 1990 Heath anthology, wanted to "show the ways in which American literature reflects America."

This was only 17 years ago, and the integration was controversial. Today, no anthology would consider the absence of multi-ethnic, gay/lesbian, and women's voices.

"Some of the most important writers," Faderman said, "are from various ethnic backgrounds."

Faderman speaks Friday, March 23, at a MELUS conference luncheon event, at the Piccadilly Inn University at Cedar and Shaw avenues. For details on the conference, see the MFA blog or Melus.org.