Hidden History: Lynne Cheney is My Sister!

Hidden History is my Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in gay and lesbian history.

Sisterhood is powerful. Need proof? Just ask our current Second Lady, Lynne Cheney, author of our topic for today’s discussion, the pulp novel Sisters.

You have to hurry, though, since dear old Lynne and her husband aren’t long for Washington. They’ll shortly be packing their belongings, bidding George and Laura a fond adieu, and shuffling back to Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming. That is, after all, the territory Ms. Cheney knows best, the very same territory for which she sets out in the pages of her 1981 western classic.

Ah, 1981! Now, if we use author Katherine V. Forrest’s definition of the golden age of lesbian pulp novels as 1950-1965, it seems that 1981 is a bit late for Sisters to qualify. But that’s okay, because despite the presence of lesbian characters, Sisters is not a lesbian pulp novel, dammit! So says Lynne Cheney, and so it must be.

Let’s back up a bit, though. What is Sisters all about? Why has Lynne Cheney tried to hide the book from public view? Is it really a lesbian pulp novel at all? And what does any of this matter anyway?

Set in 1880s Wyoming, Sisters follows New Yorker Sophie Dymond west as she attempts to clean up affairs following the untimely death of her sister Helen. When we learn that Helen died in a fall, there’s little doubt that Sophie’s eventually going to uncover a deeper story full of foul play. Interestingly, though, Cheney decides to throw in a lesbian subplot, as it becomes clear to Sophie that Helen had an extremely close relationship with Amy Travers, a schoolmarm who had taught both of the sisters when they were younger.

As discussed by lesbian blogger Plaid Adder in a scathing and insightful critique of Sisters, there are no sex scenes in the novel, so readers are left to follow the clues Sophie finds in deciding about the nature of Amy and Helen’s relationship. There of plenty of clues. Amy calls Helen “my dearest lover” in the inscription on a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She becomes “my joy and my beloved” in a letter from Amy. And Amy specifically states in that same letter to Helen that she wants them to

Go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

What a cozy domestic scene! Since Sophie finds nothing written by Helen to Amy, the lesbian passion may be one-sided. (This would fit with the hetero-promulgated motif, discussed in detail by gay film critic Vito Russo in his brilliant book The Celluloid Closet, of there only being one “real” lesbian in any woman-woman affair.) In case there’s any further doubt in readers’ minds about Amy, though, Cheney makes sure that Sophie sees Amy arm in arm with the ungainly-named Lydia Swerdlow, causing her to think that, “The women who embraced in the wagon were…Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” In other words, once two lesbians actually, you know, do it, they’re going to be pretty disgusted with themselves. So the novel is definitely homophobic, but it’s also definitely dyke-y.

Vanishing without a ripple upon its release—either because very few read it, it is poorly written, or both—Sisters was barely commented on for over twenty years. Cultural critic Elaine Showalter wrote about it for a scholarly journal, but who reads most scholarly journals? All in all, there was no reason to think that Sisters would ever become a highlight in Lynne Cheney’s career. It was on its way to becoming…all together now!...”Hidden History”!

Then, in 2004, the shit hit the fan. The New American Library decided to capitalize on the Second Lady’s fame by reissuing Sisters. Lynne Cheney decided to have her lawyers get in touch with New American Library and tell them that they wouldn’t be. The announced reason? Sisters was simply not among Cheney’s “best work.” (This would lead me to ask what, exactly, we are supposed to think of as Cheney’s best work, but that would be uncharitable of me, wouldn’t it?) A seeming attempt to cover up the authorship of her “scandalous” book led every news outlet in the country to the story, discovering in the process that Sisters also contains incest, rape, and—scandalous to evangelicals, I’m sure—contraception. Horrors!

Cheney grew increasingly frustrated as the story refused to die. Interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio, Cheney stonewalled, refusing to admit there even was a lesbian relationship in Sisters. In the midst of politely bridling at being asked tough questions about some attempted sexuality-related censorship by the Bush administration’s secretary of education (Buster the Rabbit, we hardly knew ye!), in the midst of desperately trying to end Gross’s line of questioning about gay marriage (“I’ve made my position clear,” she snaps), Cheney:

• admits that Sisters “is not a very good novel.”
• attempts to move the conversation along to a different topic by setting up the straw argument that she doubts many people have actually read the novel.
• tries to deflect discussion of lesbian content by claiming that she was only trying to rewrite Daphne DuMaurier’s mystery Rebecca in a Western setting. This is wonderfully funny, seeing as how DuMaurier herself was bisexual and that the character Mrs. Danvers’ obsession with Rebecca has been interpreted as coded lesbian passion. Cheney either assumes, probably correctly, that listeners will be ignorant of this, or, more likely, she herself is ignorant of it.
• will only go so far as to say “there’s a question about the relationship between two women.”

In trying to explain, Cheney says, “There’s a question about what these…what relationships that occurred in long-ago historical times meant emotionally to the people living then. I think we’re guilty of a lot of ‘present-ism.’ We take the behavior of the people in the 19th century and try to translate it into 21st century terms.”

Let us pause. In a sense, Cheney is making a sophisticated historical argument that is also debated by gay and lesbian historians: when did gays and lesbians come to see themselves as gays and lesbians instead of just as people who sometimes had sex with members of their own sex?

Of course, this argument is completely disingenuous when considering the book Cheney actually wrote. Cheney isn’t trying to act out a complex historical situation with these characters. When she does discuss the characters’ sexuality, her actual game becomes clear: to deny the very idea of two women having sex, a cornerstone of homophobic doctrine for generations, if not centuries. When Lydia talks to Sophie about her sister’s relationship with good ol’ lesbian Amy, she characterizes it as a “passionate friendship…The flame they nurture has no heat or smoke.” In other words, no sex. Sophie, not being experienced with this kind of thing, happily accepts the explanation, concluding, “Such convictions dictated limits one could not go beyond without destroying the myth. There could be no tearing off one’s clothes and lustily hopping into bed, not if one would preserve the love-religion.” Sophie becomes a stand-in and mouthpiece for all the heterosexuals who are so terrified by lesbian sex that they need to discount its existence. Sisters winds up an incredibly appropriate title for the novel, since that is the only type of relationship between women that Lynne is willing to countenance. We need to laugh this kind of silly, phobic claptrap out of existence.

The book has continued to dog Cheney, despite her obvious desire for any discussion of it to disappear. When Jim Webb was running for senator in Virginia in 2006, the George Allen campaign attempted to smear his character by quoting sexual passages from Webb's novels. Not only did this publicity net Webb’s books new readers, it caused Webb to bash back. The world was treated to the sight of a potential Democratic senator—you know, the party that’s supposed to support the GLBT community?—using lesbian sex as a bludgeon. Webb suggested that reporters could “go and read Lynne Cheney’s lesbian love scenes if you want to, you know, get graphic on stuff.”

Would that there were any, Jim! When Wolf Blitzer tried to ask Cheney during an interview about Webb’s comments, Cheney went apoplectic, spitting, “Jim Webb is full of baloney.” In this case, Lynne’s right; if he had read the book, he’d know that lesbians aren’t allowed to have sex in Lynne’s World.

I’ll leave you with this brief but interesting exchange from the same interview:

Wolf Blitzer: “It [Sisters] did have lesbian characters.”

Lynne Cheney: “This—no, not necessarily.”

Whatever gets you through the night, Lynne.

Author’s Note: There are currently 28 copies of Sisters being sold over the Internet, ranging in price from $77.95 up to $301.90. If you don’t mind not having a physical copy of this literary masterpiece, it is also available online in PDF format. And last (and definitely least), one of the 28 copies being sold seems to be inscribed with the following anonymous limerick:

There once was a Sapphist from Casper
Whose Dick was quite a disaster.
He was always cocksure,
But he shot premature
While she dreamed of how women would grasper [sic].

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net or philipclark@hotmail.com.

Next week: Hidden History goes on a two-week hiatus. There will be a new book club roundup in this space next week.