Apples and Oranges: My Journey Through Sexual Identity
—Jan Clausen, Apples and Oranges.
In the foreword, Jan Clausen presents the timeline of her memoir: “Begun in 1996 and published in 1999, Apples & Oranges looks back on events leading up to a pivotal moment in my life: the decision to leave not only my long-term relationship with a woman, but my identification as a lesbian—and, in consequence, the social networks I’d relied on for my writing and activism. That watershed had occurred in the late 1980s” (12).
In her memoir, Clausen takes issue with the rigidity of identity categories: “A theme of this book is the need to honor surprise and discontinuity—’resistance to identity’—more than is customary” (20). Clausen’s experience in the queer community is one that defies neatly labeled identity categories.
Jan Clausen was born in 1950 and became a major advocate in lesbian feminist circles during her adulthood: “The writing I published in my twenties and thirties was part of a lesbian feminist effort to invest with decisive political importance the great divide between women who love women and women who love men” (24). Her lesbian identity, in this case, played a major role in the kinds of people she surrounded herself with, the queer magazines to which she submitted her work, and the groups to which she was able to access (209). Her writing during this time, therefore, became more than just her writing—it became part of a political effort with the interests of lesbian women at the forefront. So when Clausen found herself years later in a relationship with a man, she watched this entire identity crumble. She explains how the aftermath of leaving her lesbian relationship and entering a straight-appearing one caused intense distress and total disarray in every aspect of her life: “The upheaval that voyage occasioned has been incalculably more traumatic than my original coming out” (23).
In this event, Clausen came face-to-face with the backlash of exiting her lesbian relationship for a heterosexual-appearing one. She explains how most lesbians exiled her from their circles afterward: “A lot of women loving women expected me to know my place, to go back to hethood quietly” (355). Yet Jan does not feel that she is straight, as her history of relationships with and attraction to women places her in a strange liminal space: “I felt profoundly placeless…when I revealed almost anything of myself—straights immediately saw me as a dyke. Then I’d have to decide whether to explain I had a male lover, in which case I’d feel doubly exposed” (355).
The process of writing this memoir proved an invaluable means for Jan to make sense of this placelessness. After witnessing the disintegration of her lesbian identity, this memoir has been instrumental in rediscovering herself along the way: “It is, then, precisely because my own experience has been so dramatic and difficult that I’ve composed this memoir as a way to understand the fragments in relation to one another. In some sense it’s an effort at mending a broken identity. At the same time, I believe my seeming inconsistencies have something crucial to reveal about the limits of our current sexual categories” (26).
Clausen also complicates gender in this text:“If nearly everyone wants either apples or oranges (if in fact, as “gay gene” theories suggest, some of these desires are encoded in our DNA), then oranges and apples must be different to the core; the distinction lies in what they really are, not merely in meanings we attribute to their surface variations. By closing off the question of how culturally malleable understandings of gender actually relate to biological sex differences, this reductive approach to eroticism unwittingly reinforces sexist assumptions about the natures of men and women” (39). Clausen provides the insight that when one chooses to believe in the nature of rigidly defined sexual categories, one must believe in an essential-ness of gender. This reinforces the implied assumption of biological sex as directly corresponding to gender and implies that people must choose/be one or the other. Jan follows up on this point: “On one hand I like the word lesbian because it implies a world of women—and that is the phenomenon that continues to delight and astonish me. On the other hand, I find it very misleading because it tends to reinforce people’s conceptions of a world with exactly two sides, two sexual orientations and no more” (185).
Clausen also complicates queerness in her memoir. She confronts readers with the question: what does it truly mean to be queer? Jan brings up the possibility that if queerness means simply going against sexual normativity, then technically she would qualify as being queer in relation to the normativity that was born out of feminist lesbian circles: “Coming out as a lesbian, then, was not about isolation; even though one did become a pariah in much of straight society, it mostly felt like belonging. In contrast, getting involved with a man entailed a furtiveness, a sense of being the only one, reminiscent of the closet” (45). Here, being with a man felt more transgressive for Clausen. This is almost a reverse kind of coming out. Most stereotypical queer narratives depict a person who feels isolated in their queerness and then triumphantly leaves heterosexual society behind forever by finding belonging in a queer community. Yet Jan experiences the events in the inverse: she finds ease in the gay world and then transgresses the queer world by existing within the straight one. Whose is the queer experience now?
By the end of the memoir, Clausen becomes more comfortable in the liminal space she occupies: “With time, I’ve come to see that being a floating woman suits me. Certainly it seems to me far preferable to making a career of serial identity” (370). Jan takes readers along with her on her life journey in order to reveal the limitations of sexual identity categories and to warn of the issues that normativity can create.
