Naked in the Promised Land by Lillian Faderman (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003); ISBN: 0-618-12875-1; 368 pp.; $26 (cloth).
My partner is fond of saying, 'If you scratch the surface, almost everyone has a pretty amazing story to tell about their lives.' And, boy,
does Lillian Faderman have a story to tell!
For many of us who were out in the 1980s, Faderman quickly became an icon, with her books Surpassing the Love of Men (1981)
and The Scotch Verdict (1983) the first, or at least among the first, to turn a scholarly eye on lesbian history. We were enthralled with
getting a peak at where we'd come from. With Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1991) and To Believe in Women (1999), her reputation
as an important and respected scholar of lesbian history and literature was cemented beyond doubt. It is for this reason, in part, that
Naked in the Promised Land, Faderman's memoir of her younger years, is so shocking, although at least some of it would likely be
amazing in any case.
Born to an unwed immigrant mother in 1940, Faderman spent the first six years of her life in rented rooms in a less than elegant
section of the Bronx with her mother and her mother's sister, Rae. The plan had been, when the two sisters moved to this country in
1923, to marry wealthy husbands and bring the rest of the family over from Latvia, but neither woman had managed to find a
husband, though they did send money home from their meager wages earned in sweatshops. In 1945, at the end of World War II,
when the belated news came that every Jew in their small town had been killed, the sisters had a falling out, causing Rae to leave,
and Faderman's mother began a downward spiral into mental illness that took her years from which to recover.
This left Faderman, as a very young child, alone to cope with her mother's bouts of depression and crying and, to a degree, left
her neglected. She was dirty ('I don't remember ever being in the bathtub'), with a tangled mass of unwashed hair: 'My mother
sometimes passed a comb over my head, but she combed deep enough to hit the knots, the pains was awful. 'Stop, stop,' I screamed
at her, and she did, leaving my head to announce to the world the story of her hopeless parenting' (p. 13). Desperate to make her
mother happy, Faderman, as a young child, decides she must get into the movies, the one thing her mother loves, but her journey
only takes her as far as becoming a pin-up girl, and then later, after a therapist convinces her to stay in school, she pays her way
through college by stripping.
Her road to becoming a lesbian is equally fraught with perils and missteps. Although she never seemed particularly tormented by
the realization of her sexuality, she did find herself in some rather unhealthy relationships, including a marriage of convenience with a
gay male friend, whom she loved dearly but turned out to be an alcoholic who ended up deserting her, and an obsessive-compulsive
woman who was incapable of holding down a job. Also, Faderman made the decision to keep her sexuality from her family—not an
unusual decision, given the time—though she continued to remain in close contact with her mother and aunt (who, for instance, come
to visit her and her partner when Faderman has a child in the '70s).
Even when Faderman's life rests firmly in academia, there are stories of romance, infidelity, and the exciting first days of feminism,
making this book, from beginning to end, a page-turner: not a 'whodunit' but a 'howdshedoit.'
This can't have been an easy story for Faderman to tell, but she does it with candor, not shying away from any detail, no matter how
personally embarrassing, or from accepting responsibility for her actions: like all of us, she is not always proud of how she had treated
the important people in her life, but neither does she apologize for doing what she needed to for self-preservation.
Naked in the Promised Land is eminently readable, and many of the photos in the book are remarkable. This book should, I think,
serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to make a better life for him- or herself, with predominating themes of love, hope, and
triumph.
And Faderman is still an icon.