A friend–I’ll call him Alex–called to warn me before I read it. At the time I didn’t understand the call to be a warning. The year was 1985, and Alex was phoning from Wisconsin to tell me that a mutual acquaintance had just published a second short story in the New Yorker. Before Alex hung up, he said casually, “You’re in it.”
A failed writer and a repressed lesbian. I stared at the words, unable to read further. It was, I instantly perceived, a brilliant double play–one that sliced directly to the core of my identity. At 25, I wanted more than anything to become a successful writer–and, eventually, to meet that fabled perfect man. Yet I had to admit that I hadn’t produced much memorable prose during my stay in London. And that my array of male admirers had consisted mainly of an odd, reclusive American who telephoned me at strange hours of the night, an unemployed British actor recovering from a mysterious illness he declined to name, and a British engineer who lusted powerfully after American plumbing–and after me, I strongly suspected, because I represented his best hope of obtaining a good hot shower of his very own. Not an impressive list. And how easily explained by the words before me: a failed writer and a repressed lesbian.
But never have I thought of my little brush with dyke baiting as frequently as I have in the past several months, during which time secretary of health and human services Donna Shalala, attorney general Janet Reno, and now first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton have faced charges of lesbianism from both the right and the left.
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If the rumors are true, he told me solemnly, “it can have some ramifications on the economy. I think this administration is going to be mired in scandal, and they will suffer the fate that the Greeks were always afraid of: hubris. It is the blatancy with which they are conducting certain affairs. The Secret Service is going crazy! They are disgusted.” Though he will not own to having spoken with a Secret Service agent, Wheeler asserted that “even during the campaign, they complained bitterly about having to stand outside hotel rooms while Hillary was seeing one of her bimbos.”
Nor can Wheeler substantiate his charges against Hillary Clinton. He says with confidence that Hillary and Bill sleep in different White House bedrooms–but doesn’t know which bedrooms. Pressed on his sources, Wheeler allows that “for all I know, it’s completely false and completely rumors.”
The radical group Queer Nation outed Shalala solely on the basis of her having been outed by other gay groups during her tenure as president of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It’s not evidence. I grant you that, OK?” says Michael Petrelis of Queer Nation/National Capital, the group’s Washington branch.
