I am Audre Lorde
...struggled all her life to find the love and emotional warmth that was missing while growing up. Recounting her life to me, she was brutally honest in her descriptions of most aspects of her life including many love affairs and her own difficult battles with drinking. She admitted to having intimate relationships with women as well as men, but was surprisingly evasive about one significant relationship. For nearly fifteen years, Nuala O’Faolain lived with openly gay Irish journalist Nell McCafferty. I was thrilled to learn this, having come of age at the same time as Nuala, and also suffered from the loss of warmth and love while growing up. I felt we connected in a way that wasn’t possible with the other women I had met. Our lives paralleled each other in so many ways and her honesty put me at ease. I wanted to learn more. Like me in the United States, O’Faolain was ahead of the women’s movement in Ireland and struggled to establish herself in the male-dominated world. She also tried the “female” calling as a wife and mother, but is now alone without a partner or children. I was fortunate enough to have two children and be with Frances when I died. O’Faolain said that the fifteen years she lived with Nell were “the most life-giving relationship of my life.” However she was very reticent to discuss the exact nature of her relationship with Nell. I couldn’t help but show my disappointment. I had lived my life open, honest and joyful in my love of women and Nuala was hiding and avoiding her truth. She keeps pursuing disastrous love affairs and continues to drink. She has not surrounded herself with the love and support of women as I have in my life. At 64, and after all she has accomplished, she still feels that a woman alone is no one if others do not define her. How sad, how very sad. I had even more in common with Edna St. Vincent Millay than I did with Nuala. Edna was born in 1892 in Maine and grew to become one of the greatest lyric poets of the twentieth century. She was also an accomplished playwright and speaker who often toured giving readings of her poetry. While not a playwright, I was a poet and spoke extensively in academic and political venues. Millay wrote many poems in traditional sonnet form on topics such as love, fidelity, erotic desire and feminist issues. She was an acknowledged bisexual who carried on many affairs with women, an affection for which is sometimes evident in her poems and plays. She did marry, to Eugen Jan Bossevain in 1923, but the marriage was quite open, and extramarital affairs were accepted. At the age of seven, Edna’s mother asked her husband to leave the family home. Edna, her mother and two sisters moved to Massachusetts and at the same time Edna insisted upon being called Vincent. She began entering writing contests with that name. Millay’s childhood was free spirited which was reflected in her creativity. Her poem, “Renascence” won fourth place in a poetry contest. It was that poem which started her on her literary career, beginning with a scholarship to the then all female college of Vassar. Millay kept up her writing of poetry and drama while at Vassar. I did the same while at Hunter College. Also during her college career Millay broadened her sexual horizons to include relationships with women. Most notable of these affairs was with the English actress Wynne Matthison. Matthison was one of many women Millay was involved with, and she kept in contact with some of them throughout her life. In 1922, A Few Figs from Thistles was published, which sparked controversy with its feminist leanings. Some poems depicted that sexual freedom formerly only for men was now equally valid for women. How radical – 1922! In 1971, I publicly read a lesbian love poem for the first time, which was later published in Ms. Magazine, but it was rejected for inclusion in my third volume of poetry, From a Land Where Other People Live, which was published in 1973. Millay moved to Greenwich Village after graduation, a particularly freethinking and artistic neighborhood in Manhattan at that time. Greenwich Village was always a carefree, progressive and artistic area. That freethinking attitude flowed well into the 50’s when I lived there and began spending large amounts of time at the girl bars. She continued writing and continued her involvement with women. Millay also began intimate relationships with men, but said none of them were able to sway her from her natural lesbian leanings. I was fascinated by her candor and the ease in which she spoke of her sexuality. Coming of age in the 20’s and 30’s as a lesbian was very radical. She recounted a conversation she had at a cocktail party with a psychologist about her recurrent headaches. She said he asked her if it ever occurred to her that she might, although not conscious of it, have “an occasional impulse toward a person of your own sex?” Laughing she responded, “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual, too, but what’s that got ...