Skin: Talking about Sex, Class & Literature
First of all I love that Allison published this 1994 collection of essays with Firebrand Books, a feminist and lesbian press, rather than a large publisher, which surely she could have, based on the success of Bastard out of Carolina, published by Dutton in 1992. Instead of using her success, even to have a better platform for her message to advance her career, she used it to advance her community, to give back to the press that gave her a platform in the first place, with her first book, Trash. (A chapbook of poetry preceded Trash.)
I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian--femme, masochist, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed. "A Question of Class." p. 23
I'd recognized in her face the same look I'd been seeing in other women's faces for all the months since the Barnard Conference on Sexuality (which my friends and I referred to as the Barnard Sex Scandal)--a look of fascination, contempt, and extreme discomfort. "Public Silence, Private Terror." p. 101-02
What will they think twenty years from now of the oral histories of the passing women on file at the Lesbian Herstory Archives? There's no doubt in my mind that the oral histories of working-class dykes and passing women will get far less serious consideration than those of famous artists and rich eccentrics. "A Personal History of Lesbian Porn." p.191 (a blog post of mine that touches on this)