On Sunday, March 23, The New York Times celebrated Gloria Steinem, who has just turned 80. The Sunday Review section featured an icon of Steinem that took up the whole page, with her familiar cheekbones and center-parted hair framing her knowing eyes.
Steinem has become for many Americans the face of feminism. For me, she's an icon of the longevity of feminism, even as we still debate what it means. Steinem has influenced many in her activism and writing, her humor and her humanity over these past four decades.
But Steinem's survival also reminds me of those mentors who have not survived the costly work of speaking truth to power, those who might not be celebrities, but who put their bodies and names on the line for women's rights, for LBGTQ rights and for the rights and visibility of people of color.
Recently, I watched along with my students Litany for Survival—a documentary of the life of another important feminist icon, Audre Lorde. Together we watched on film her slow deterioration from liver cancer, as she loses her voice, her fine brown plumpness leaving her. But still her gaze is both sharp and kind behind her glasses, as she reads her poem "Today is not the day":
I am not afraid to say
Unembellished
I am dying
But I do not want to do it
Looking the other way.
I think of the fact that all three of my best graduate school mentors—Janet, Barbara and Alfred—have died. Jewish, African American and Chicano, I used to call them my "Rainbow Coalition," my "Superfriends"—so needed at my mostly white university. All three of them in their own ways made a home for me from which to do the work that I wanted to do and that wasn't there before.
Alfred laughed freely and raucously over coffee and sandwiches at the outdoor café on Bancroft Avenue, a big brother. He told me about writing poetry, sometimes on the sly, and the importance of decolonizing your mind; about racing cars and about fooling around and sometimes making mistakes; about how proud he was of his teenage daughter that he'd had when he was just a teenager, about his frustrations with the colleagues who seemed to pull rank with him—the only tenure-track junior faculty of color at that time. Alfred had a long mustache, beautiful and white against his brown, still-young skin and eyes that burned with fierce warmth.
Janet brought me and her other students into her home once a month, fed us from the huge pasta bowl that she got as a wedding gift decades ago and then listened closely to our work, teaching us by example how to be loving, tough critics for each other. Sometimes she pried, stepped a little out of bounds with her advice. "Is that boy really the one for you?" "What are you eating, sweetheart? You look thin. Is this being a vegan really the answer?" or maybe just "Tell me about your father." But we knew she went there because she loved us.
Barbara read my half-baked dissertation drafts with such seriousness, glasses at the tip of her nose, or stuck back into her salt-and-pepper afro when she was ready to make an important point. Even though she was completely overworked as chair of African American Studies, she took me on as a student after meeting me once, debating me gently, pushing me to take a more radical line of argument, advocating for me without me even knowing.
I think often about how lucky I was to stumble on this committee, and their willingness to see me, to work with me from where I was, to imagine with me the possibilities for a life of the mind that I was terrified of, and to push me. And I think about how difficult that level of engagement is, and how unrewarded in the academy. How they spent their time against the grain of status and power, and that had a cost.
I think of the writers, activists and artists whose words I've loved and taken to heart, but never met, and the toll of their work of seeing and knowing, and naming, the risks of their openness: Audre, taken from us by liver cancer; Gloria Anzaldua ( diabetes ); Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs ( complications from AIDS ); and too many others.
Though they never matched the celebrity of Steinem, these figures are my Superfriends, models for me of generosity of the mind and heart. Their lives have taught me what it means to question authority, including your own, to give up the pose of all-knowingness. When I think of their work, I am reminded of the ethical obligation to be responsible to each other, which is also sacred. To keep—to both watch and to hold in one's heart.
Francesca Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Popular Culture, gender, race, sexuality and performance. Her books include Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era ( University of Michigan Press, 2013 ) and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon ( Palgrave, 2003 ).
