I am so sad and angry. The hate mongers have struck again and drive a child to their grave. They, the GOPer politicians, the ill-religious fanatics, homophobes and the repressed self-hating closet cases who have been shamed and bullied into hiding who they are. I wrote my book specifically to confront the horrors of conversion therapy to raise awareness
Painter Romaine Brooks, La Primavera, Spring (c.1910), featuring the dancer Ida Rubenstein #WomensArt https://t.co/vyFK9ziW8F—
#WOMENSART (@womensart1) April 12, 2023
Since Elon took over Twitter and turned it into a part of fascist central. I have been searching around for a new platform to talk about current issues art, politics, and things that interest me. Prior to Twitter’s demise as a free wheeling space to communicate with others with like the interest I have been looking at Substack. Several of my friends had recommended it And signed on, hoping to make a little money from the writing.
Having resigned myself to no longer using Twitter as a means of regular communication, I have tried several of the alternatives, Mastodon, Tribel, and post. That’s far I have found post the easiest to use. I post on tribel fairly regularly, and I have never fully mastered Mastodon. My success rate with Substack has been on and off. They have been changing the platform, and now have made a change the perhaps will work for me.
I have satisfied myself with chatting among my friends about issues that interest me in art and politics mean light, but I am going to try sub stack if I can master it’s platform. Eventually, like all of my friends, I will probably charge five dollars a month for you to hear me vent feelings that we all share in my peculiar thing on them. For the time being everything will be free and I will start trying to comment regularly now that my anti-conversion memoir, Erase Her: A Survivors Story is finally coming to fruition.
So follow me if you like my speaking truth to power running commentaries
And feel free to chime in.
Romane Brooks love sunny Italy and the champagne golden light of Florence
Yet ironically she appears to have painted only a few landscapes. Spring being the most successful.
https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/romaine-brooks/spring-la-primavera/
https://www.amazon.com/author/cassandralanger
My book is now available in preorder from Book Baby and on Amazon. It launches on the 30th. I probably would never have written my story if not for the encouragement of my friends. First Itene Javors who was teaching graduate classes at Yeshiva in clinical therapy. Following a discussion over the recent suicides of several queer teens during which, I finally reveal my own experiences with conversion torture and attempted suicide at the age of 14. I had put my these in a lock box and pretty much thrown away the key.
When I did agree to speak to her class, imagine my shock at the fact that what I had to share with this group of future therapists was new to them. They were shocked to learn the history of emerging treatments for gay people in the 1950s, that gay people were treated as mental cases, outlaws, and criminally persecuted. Moreover, they had no idea of the horrible things that could happen to gays under the law or in mental hospitals and conversion treatments, Chemical castration, and shock treatments. Water cures, systematic brainwashing, hypnosis, and when all else failed the miracle cure-lobotomy!
My own experiences as a vulnerable girl in a patriarchal society and system included being unequal as a female in a man made system from birth. The oppression starts from day one of being color coded by a pink blanket. It continues with little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. What that means is growing up in a gender-assigned society that you’re expected to conform to no matter if that just isn’t who you are.
My story is about the whole construct of heteronormity and binary categorization of the sexes. Of course as a new born peaches and cream baby girl I knew nothing of the society or culture I now existed in. Not did I know anything of it’s religions, social classes not power structures that would become the borderline of my life growing up.
I never conformed to my mother’s gender expectations. When my mother fell prey to a cult leader representing himself as a child behavior expert, I was incarcerated for two years as a teenager and barely escaped a lobotomy. My hopes are that those who feel helpless might find some skills to survive and thrive in this book. My story of surviving 20th-century conversion therapy is set in 1950s Miami and upstate New York. My aim is to put secular conversion torture in a historical context to understand the development of homophobic policies and systems active now in red states such as Florida with its “Don’t Say Gay” laws.
Erase Her is the first volume of my survive and thrive memoir. As I embark on the second volume I am available for zoom talks, in person appearances, podcasts, and any and all opportunities to talk about what it’s really like to live like in a society that systematically damages and tries to destroy you as a human being and how you survive and thrive despite it all because of your creativity. Free free to contac@@
How does the choice of subject affect the writer especially in a marginalized community? In posing the question to myself since finishing my Brooks biography and beginning my own memoir of anti-conversion therapy, Erase Her: A Survivors Story.
Romaine Brooks was a survivor and thriver. She developed her own ways and means using her natural artistic talents. When I walked into the Whitney Museum and got off at the wrong floor as a young graduate student in the 1970s what drew me to her 1923 self portrait. It began my desire to know more about the woman behind the image she projected; the strength, confidence and sense of knowing herself. I wanted that for myself. I wanted to be my own woman; in fact all, for lack of a better word, the men and women embodied in me.
Erase Her is all about my journey to reach my authentic realization with a lot of help from Romaine Brooks and her circle.
Well, the big day is almost upon me. I am so excited to be finally be telling my story of betrayal, surviving, and thriving.
From Romanian avant-garde Elvis to all the Swedish anarchist Sufi Post-Impressionsists you can imagine
Secret Satan, 2021 part 1
Rediscovering Romaine Brooks 