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4 " I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain. "

Adrienne Rich , Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

5 " That's what we've been taught, this is the underpinning of all European culture-this firm belief that there are no secrets that won't sooner or later come to light. Who was it that said it? Jesus? No, Pascal, I think it was… so naïve. But this faith has been nurtured for centuries; it has sprouted its own mythology: the cranes of Ibycus, manuscripts don't burn. An ontological faith in the fundamental knowability of every human deed. The certainty that, as they now teach journalism majors, you can find everything on the Internet. As if the Library of Alexandria never existed. Or the Pogruzhalsky arson, when the whole historical section of the Academy of Sciences' Public Library, more than six-hundred thousand volumes, including the Central Council archives from 1918, went up in flames. That was in the summer of 1964; Mom was pregnant with me already, and almost for an entire month afterward, as she made her way to work at the Lavra, she would get off the trolleybus when it got close to the university and take the subway the rest of the way: above ground, the stench from the site of the fire made her nauseous. Artem said there were early printed volumes and even chronicles in that section-our entire Middle Ages went up in smoke, almost all of the pre-Muscovite era. The arsonist was convicted after a widely publicized trial, and then was sent to work in Moldova's State Archives: the war went on. And we comforted ourselves with " manuscripts don't burn." Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored. "