Still Sane

"I had always had crushes on my girlfriends and women teachers and I couldn't seem to get interested in men, no matter how hard I tried. So I sort of knew I was different, even to the point of looking up homosexuality in the library. I read about butches and femmes and women wanting to be men, and how they were sick and drank and ended up committing suicide. That didn't sound like me, so I figured I was some other kind of weird.

But finally this woman Diane seduced me, and all my questions were answered. I know what I'd been wanting. My whole being had the jitters but it felt like coming home. Diane was older and supposedly wiser and she said being a lesbian wasn't that easy. She said I was bound to have lots of subconscious guilt which I would have to resolve in order to have a happy life. She'd been seeing a shrink for years. So I went to see a shrink too, a woman shrink, which I thought would be easier.

I was quite on edge but happy and spinning. The shrink was very grave and said it was serious and bad. I got a bit upset and even shed six or seven tears, so the shrink gave me my first Valium. After I left, she phoned the Royal Hospital. She said she had this sicko lesbian who should be hospitalized for awhile. She said she could certify me against my will since maybe I was self-destructive. After all, I had cried in her office and I was a lesbian to boot. I spent the next three years in and out of mental hospitals."

While Sheila was hospitalized she was drugged many times, often by force. She often tried to escape. She was given shock therapy many times. Even then she knew she was a lesbian. She slashed herself with a razor while drugged. She tried to kill herself. When she "behaved" they would let her sign herself out but there was no life on the outside. The shock treatments ruined her memory until she couldn't remember enough to do a simple warehouse job. She would live in a room in a rooming house because all her friends thought she was "sick." She was drugged all the time, even on the outside. Sometimes she would sign herself back in. Finally they moved her to Strackville, the place for the worst cases. This scared her a lot.]

"I decided I had to get out of Strackville. I decided it didn't matter if I was some kind of crazy person who needed their protection to keep from flipping into a total blackout. I was scared of flipping out but I was more scared of Strackville. Some people spent their lives there. Some people died there. Me, I was going to pass for normal and get out.

So there I was, trying to pass for normal, all drugged up in this place that stinks of shit and Lysol and every day is endlessly boring except for the occasional flashes of violence and I'm powerless to protect myself and I'm normal. Normal women don't talk about being a lesbian and they're always cheerful. I was always good and smiling, never complaining or bothering the staff, keeping my mouth shut and smiling, always obedient and quiet and nice and smiling, in the middle of this hellhole, smiling and smiling. And I did it. After three months I got out.

After I got out of Strackville, I was very calm and normal and a bit unreal. I had to stay with my family and see a shrink at first but I stayed real quiet and boring and eventually was allowed my own life. I moved in with this woman Judy. We were lovers, but she thought of herself as a straight-like falling in love with me was just this accident. She didn't want any of her friends to know and she was always after me to dress more femme-like in public.

I got a job as a law clerk. I had to lie to them about the three year gap in my life. I was getting lots of practice in lying. I went to work every day, and tried to pass for normal and not feel too much. I was off tranquilizers by then, but I drank a lot, just like the lesbians I used to read about.

So that was my life for the next three years, and then I met this women at a sociology of deviance class. She called herself a lesbian just like that, in public even, and she also called herself a feminist. She had a lot of friends who were also lesbians and they all walked around like they had this Special Wonderful Thing. Like they were proud. I had never before in my entire life met anyone who said it was even OK to be a lesbian, and then all of a sudden there were all these women who said it was even great. And my life began to change."

Years later, Sheila and Persimmon made this book. It took three years to make. When the time comes to show the sculptures, they are worried about what people will think. Would they be sympathetic but really think Sheila was sick? Would they think she was weird?

"At the opening of the show lots of women told me they'd been there too, or their mothers or sisters had. Some of them I didn't know and some I did - women I'd known for years without knowing that. There we all were swapping stories and sometimes we were angry and sometimes sad but we all knew we had something to flaunt. When you flaunt something nobody can use it against you."

Each personal story made me feel safer and each strong survivor made me prouder. They also reassured me that what I remembered had really happened even though the chronology is still garbled at times and some parts are blank. Being drugged or shocked blurs much of the order, but I heard my experiences told back to me and then I felt sure.

For years I have had a political appreciation that I am a survivor for getting out of there, not a failure for getting locked up in the first place."

From Still Sane by Persimmon Blackbridge and Sheila Gilhooly. Press Gang. Used by permission.