To the Women I Watched Kiss
Were you already walking around Paris together that Saturday afternoon as my train pulled into the Gare du Nord? Or were you locked away from the rain somewhere, lost in the vastness of loving each other? My own room in a hotel near the train station had two narrow beds and a Juliet balcony overlooking a bar whose red neon sign flashed “Le Cheval.” In the dark gray evening, I put my damp suitcase in the corner and swung open the windows. I looked out on the rainy street and thought, as I did every day that year, about hell.
I wasn’t much younger than either of you and certain I was damned for eternity. It was the autumn after I graduated from high school and I was an ocean away from home because my parents had gently suggested I might want to take a year off before college and “work out” my “preoccupation with homosexuality in a Christian setting.” I, more alarmed than even they knew by this preoccupation, enthusiastically agreed.
I deferred college enrollment and headed for an Evangelical Christian study community in the Swiss Alps, a place where privileged “doubters” like me have gone or been sent since the 1950s for a rigorous education in conservative Protestant theology and Continental Philosophy. The week my path crossed yours in Paris was my mid-semester break, a brief flight from the previous two months in which I’d spent my days studying, attending lectures, mopping floors, weeding the garden, or baking bread for the community, writing secret letters to my secret girlfriend, and sobbing frantically somewhere alone on the mountainside or in the village church. I was determined to find Biblical literalism so intellectually and emotionally satisfying that I’d stop being what I’d long suspected and now knew myself to be: gay. By the time October break rolled around, progress toward this goal was going as well as you might expect. As had generations of queers before me, I fled to Paris.
Despite having just escaped the bookish hush of my studies in Switzerland, I began my first morning in Paris by walking, Right Bank to Left, across the river to the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company. As I had been for most of the past year, I was too nauseated with self-loathing and terror to eat: even the innumerable croissants gleaming in patisserie windows on the walk to the bookshop, even in Paris in soft light after soft rain.
I got to Shakespeare and Company before it opened and paced the little square in front of the shop until the shutters rolled up and the book carts rolled out. I knew little about queer culture or history or literature, but I knew about Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, and in the dim light between shelves, I found it immediately.
Nearly eighty years earlier, Virginia Woolf, while publicly defending Hall’s right to free speech had, in private, called The Well “a pale tepid vapid book.” To me, it felt anything but tepid, like anything but history, to look around furtively, to reach up and pull The Well of Loneliness down from the shelf, to slide it across the checkout counter, to ask the bookseller working the till to stamp the title page with the seal marking it Kilometer Zero Paris, to stuff it into my backpack and gasp out onto the fresh air of the Petit Pont, wondering if I’d been seen. It felt like crossing a fire into the future.
“It felt like crossing a fire into the future.”
For the next three days in Paris, all of them brilliant with cold sunshine, I spent most of my daylight hours rigid on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, The Well of Loneliness open on my lap, gulping down all 450 pages of Stephen Gordon’s doom. In the evenings, in the room over Le Cheval, I buried The Well, with its damning and ludicrous cover blurb—“The bible of lesbianism”—deep in my backpack. I’d pull out my (other) Bible and read the first chapter of Romans again and again, the way I'd been doing every day for months: God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. Surely, I fooled myself, viewed at just the right angle, this dreaded page of my childhood Bible wasn't about me and my beloved, not about Stephen and her Mary, not about you, as yet unknown to me somewhere out in the neon-smeared dark.
I got what I came for that first morning, and yet, nearly every morning after, I would return to Shakespeare and Company. Sometimes, pushing through the fear that I’d be recognized as The Girl Who Bought The Lesbian Book, I’d step over the threshold to wander between the shelves. Other times, I’d be unable to make it inside but would loiter outside the door or circle the block for hours.
Why did I return day after day? Maybe because the part of me that knew the closet could be a tomb wanted to be recognized and resurrected. There’s also the fact that, as boundary-breaking as it felt to buy and read The Well of Loneliness in public, I realized what I’d already suspected, cloistered with my Bible for hours at a time for the past few months: books alone are not enough. And despite its deserved reputation as a maudlin tragedy and despite the way it ends with Stephen abandoned and alone, the last scene of The Well of Loneliness is one of the most powerful invocations of queer community I know, so powerful that it drove me into the streets in search of others like me.
“I wondered if, rather than being my destiny, hell might be what I’d already lived through, might one day even be history.”
In these last pages, Stephen, like you and I were then, is in Paris. Stephen, like I was then, is alone and raging at God. Her beloved, Mary, has left her for a man. While grieving the personal loss of her beloved, Stephen realizes that her love story is as political as it is personal, and is about so much more than her individual romance with Mary, or with any one woman. Her identity is about being one of many, about all the “quick, the dead, and the yet unborn” queers to whom she and you and I belong. In heightened, melodramatic prose that I loved, and still love, Hall writes: “They possessed her.” Stephen feels the vastness of queer community. She hears them—she hears us—crying: “Our name is legion—you dare not disown us.”
One afternoon, after leaving Shakespeare and Company for at least the fifth time, I ducked to my right down a narrow lane, away from Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. There, without ever even knowing I existed, you possessed me. You were laughing in each other's arms against a medieval wall, stopping each other's laughter with your mouths. Two women just about my age, blocking the late sun from me in one bright moment when you with the light hair twisted up for air to laugh and you with the dark hair dove to kiss her neck. You took no notice of me in your shameless, public joy, even though I stopped in the middle of the street no more than six feet away and stared, my heart in my throat.
I remember the weight of The Well of Loneliness in my bag like a stone. I remember being dazzled by the light of the sun—or was it the light of your joy; they felt the same. I felt I might die of shame. I wondered if, rather than being my destiny, hell might be what I’d already lived through, might one day even be history. I wondered if a queer future I’d never heard of or even read about, but was seeing with my own eyes, might be possible. I felt our name was legion.
About the Author
Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson is a bookseller, editor, and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Terrain.org, Oh Reader magazine, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife in Cleveland, Ohio. She’s on Instagram @eplumleewatson.
Read Elisabeth’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Jeevan Jose.
Edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha.
