KNOCKING ON LESBIAN HEAVEN`S DOOR
The pagan christmas party

February 2012

 

I must confess I love the purple laptop that the dead lesbians gave me the first time I visited Lesbian Heaven. It has lots of cool applications, but the one I am crazy about is the Gossip Pop-Up, a small window that opens unannounced to let me know all the juicy news that are going on up there. For example, when the elections for Head of Lesbian Heaven took place, an update told me that Virginia Woolf was now in charge of things. Today, the Gossip Pop-Up said: Pagan Christmas Party at midnight. Please wear your best gown.

I had already been told by some of the dead girls that the Lesbian Heaven’s Christmas Party was wild, so I got ready to interview several very drunk Sapphic ghosts. However, when I arrived there was no music, no dancing, no heavenly cocktails being poured. Instead, long floating tables had been elegantly set and women where quietly moving around them, looking for their assigned seats with strained expressions on their faces.

The Ladies of Llangollen, whom I had interviewed last month, spotted me and came to say hello. “Virginia Woolf’s orders,” Eleanor explained to me, clearly in a very bad mood. “That stuck-up writer is getting on our nerves.”

“There, there, honey,” said Sarah, trying to soothe her lover. She looked at me. “Woolf decided to make some changes in our annual Pagan Party, and many of us are outraged. This has always been the day to go crazy, to forget that we are just spirits and to try to remember our flesh by submitting to all earthly sins. However, our new Head would rather we had a more refined dinner.”

“Refined?” Eleanor snorted. “Please, she’s a snob, to say the least!” I didn’t know what to say. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers –I have yet to meet a lesbian who doesn’t say that, even if she hasn’t read a word written by her, although I swear that’s not my case- but I could understand their disappointment. Anyway, my job was to interview the inhabitants of Lesbian Heaven, not to judge them, so I decided to start searching for a new interviewee.

I didn’t have to look for a long time. Some of the women sitting at a table presided by a lady dressed in a bright green robe were calling my name and telling me to sit with them. “Grab a chair and sit at the poets’ table, young lady, we have so many stories to tell you,” said the woman in a robe with a sweet voice. I looked at her closely, wondering if my guess was right. Could she really be Sappho?

Next month on KOHLD: Meet the amazing poets Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, Gloria Fuertes and Audre Lorde.