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Is She or Isn't She?March 14, 2006 After I submitted my Octavia Butler tribute a week ago, the editor asked what I could say about Butler's lesbian identity. What I could say was that it was news to me that she had one. Maybe I'd missed something? I haven't been anywhere close to the science fiction scene in years, and even when I kept in touch the furthest west I generally got was Madison, Wisconsin. Butler lived and circulated mostly on the West Coast. What "everyone knows" on one side of the country doesn't necessarily percolate through to the other side. So I did a quick Google to see just how out of it I really was. Not very, it seems. Where "lesbian"+"Octavia"+"Butler" appeared on the same Web page, it was usually coincidental or it had to do with Butler's characters. A couple of sites carried plaintive queries along the lines of "I've heard that Octavia Butler was a lesbian -- does anybody know?" A few of the obits referred to her as a lesbian, but most of these appeared in gay or lesbian publications. Gay and lesbian publications, not to mention individual gay men and lesbians, like to claim as many people as they can for "our side." If there's a shadow of a doubt that someone was exclusively heterosexual, they're in. By the accounts of nearly everybody -- friends, acquaintances, students, and the lady herself -- Octavia Butler preferred solitude to company. Her name isn't linked with any lovers or live-in partners or even long-term roommates. For many players of the lesbo-gay numbers game, this raises a big lavender flag. The absence of male lovers, partners, and roommates from the public record is deemed highly significant. The absence of female lovers, partners, and roommates, however, is presumed to be of little consequence: same-sex relationships are so often hidden from history, and from the next-door neighbors, that the absence of tangible evidence proves nothing. Hah. If it proves anything, it's that an awful lot of people have a hard time believing that a woman can exist without being in some kind of one-on-one relationship. Me, I have no trouble believing it: I'm doing it. I seem to be more gregarious than Octavia Butler was, but like her I cherish my solitude. So I took the tangible evidence of Octavia Butler's life at face value, because there was no reason not to. As a feminist and a writer, I deeply believe in the importance of stories -- not only telling my own but listening to those of others. Listening to what they say, not to what I think they're really saying, or not saying, or would be saying if they weren't in the closet. For the record: If you hear that I'm having a one-on-one with a man, you can safely assume that my body has been snatched by the pod people, but at this point in my life the prospect of an "intimate relationship" is about as attractive as the prospect of an asteroid smashing into New England.
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