reality for the sake of expediency; not to gas-
light each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to
the truth of our experience. Our future depends
on the sanity of each of us, and we have a
profound stake, beyond the personal, in the
project of describing our reality as candidly and
fully as we can to each other.

LN NN NGOG RPN

There are phrases which help us not to admit we
are lying: “my privacy,” “nobody’s business but
my own.” The choices that underlie these
phrases may indeed be justified; but we ought
to think about the full meaning and consequen-
ces of such language.

Women’s love for women has been represented
almost entirely through silence and lies. The
institution of heterosexuality has forced the les-
bian to dissemble, or be labelled a pervert, a
criminal, a sick or dangerous woman, etc., etc.
The lesbian, then, has often been forced to lie,
like the prostitute or the married woman.

Does a life “in the closet” —lying, perhaps of
necessity, about ourselves to bosses, landlords,
clients, colleagues, family, because the law and
public opinion are founded on a lie—does this,
can it, spread into public life, so that lying
(described as discretion) becomes an easy way
to avoid conflict or complication? Can it be-
come a strategy so ingrained that it is used even
with close friends and lovers?

Heterosexuality as an institution has also
drowned in silence the erotic feelings between
women. | myself lived half a lifetime in the lie
of that denial. That silence makes us all, to
some degree, into liars.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the
possibility for more truth around her.

DN NN RPN LRGN

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneli-
ness.

The liar is afraid.
But we are all afraid: without fear we become
manic, hubristic, self-destructive. What is this

particular fear that possesses the liar?

She is afraid that her own truths are not good
enough.

She is afraid, not so much of prison guards or
bosses, but of something unnamed within her.

The liar fears the void.

The void is not something created by patriar-
chy, or racism, or capitalism. It will not fade
away with any of them. It is part of every
woman.

“The dark core,” Virginia Woolf named it, writ-
ing of her mother. The dark core. It is beyond
personality; beyond who loves us or hates us.

We begin out of the void, out of darkness and
emptiness. It is part of the cycle understood by
the old pagan religions, that materialism de-
nies. Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing,
something.

The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not
mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it
has been identified with lovelessness, barren-
ness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our
“emptiness” with children. We are not sup-
posed to go down into the darkness of the core.

Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that
nothing is the beginning of our truth.

The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void,
with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a
way of maintaining control.

ORI AR WD GNP

Why do we feel slightly crazy when we realize
we have been lied to in a relationship?

We take so much of the universe on trust. You
tell me: “In 1950 | lived on the north side of
Beacon Street in Somerville.” You tell me: “She
and | were lovers, but for months now we have
only been good friends.” You tell me: “It is
seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.”
Because | love you, because there is not even a
question of lying between us, | take these ac-
counts of the universe on trust: your address
twenty-five years ago, your relationship with
someone | know only by sight, this morning’s
weather. | fling unconscious tendrils of belief,
like slender green threads, across statements
such as these, statements made so unequivocal-
ly, which have no tone or shadow of tentative-
ness. | build them into the mosaic of my world.
| allow my universe to change in minute, signifi-
cant ways, on the basis of things you have said
to me, of my trust in you.

| also have faith that you are telling me things it
is important | should know; that you do not
conceal facts from me in an effort to spare me,
or yourself, pain.

Or, at the very least, that you will say, “There
are things | am not telling you.”

When we discover that someone we trusted can

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