Romaine Freed Me to Write My Own Story
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@@
D’Annunzio’s Folly
Readers of these pages may find a new book The Fiume Crisis by Dominique Kirchner, Reill that details d’Annunzio’s short lived capture of the city of Fiume after the World War II of interest as the holidays approach. The coke-inspired fantasies led to orgies, a progressive constitution and inspiration for future writers.
Romaine painted d’Annunzio as Il Commandante and a hero which was how he was regarded by the loyal legions that helped him take over Fiume following the peace.
During this period I’ve lockdown and sheltered at home because of the Covid pandemic. I have found myself looking around for desirable distractions. I have also been wracking my brain to come up with ways of gifting my loved ones and friends with gifts that they will enjoy as we get through both the pandemic and fears here in the US regarding our troubled presidential transition.
So wishing you all safe and healthy as we kick 2020 to the curb.
My own collaborations with other creatives in my circle have produced led me to direct my attentions to their creative endeavors these include Irene Javors and Matthew Snows beautiful children’s book based on my Manx cat, Kelpie, Kelpie’s Bells available on Amazon and Book Baby
Romaine Brooks Lives
Romaine and her circle are alive and doing their thing in this lively and entertaining yet serious farce by Francesco Rapazzini.
Award winning screen writer and creative Suzanne Stroh gives a dazzling interpretation of more than sixteen voices;male and female who make Natalie’s birthday party so entertaining, full of delicious gossip, and fraught with tension.
Lovers of Romaine will find her voiced by Suzanne based on the only known recording of her voice. This is an incredibly easy and enjoyable way to get more familiar with the Paris of the 1920s through this remarkable group of free thinking and living people. Naturally, I loved it!
The Enduring Allure of Ida Rubinstein
Romaine’s Villa Sant Agnese
Romaine Brooks’s Villa in the hills of Florence is being restored. This is the place that she and her lover Natalie Barney suffered privations and constant threats of being sent off to an internment camp in Parma before deportation to a concentration camp because of being foreigners, and in Natalie’s case having Jewish blood during WWII.
It’s in the stars
Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, and Lily de Gramont shared an interest in Astrology and Tarot throughout their lives, as was Natalie’s other lover Dolly Wilde. This does not strike one strange because during the 19th and currently, people are curious about what the future holds and how it will affect their lives and loves.
In 2014, author and translator, Suzanne Gerber-Stroh consulted an astrologer to construct birth charts for Romaine Brooks and her intimates. Here are the results.
Satisfy your insatiable curiosity and make what you will of how closely Mr. Mann’s findings correspond to the personalities of these highly creative and productive gay women.
For more go to Suzanne Stroh’s link and look for the 2014 entry.
Did she stop painting?
According to Romaine Brooks she never laid aside her brushes. In her audio interview from 1968 she was dismayed that McAvoy had painted her in a background that show her with dried up brushes and a pallet. She said emphatically that he had not shown her glass table that she used as a pallet which implied that she was not painting any more. By implication this suggest that she was still actively making act at the time he painted her.
So for those of you reading Wiki I am in the process of updating the errors in it. It is a work in progress. It was her intention to paint him but he never was available long enough to sit for her. So she painted Duke Umberto Strozzi at the age of 87 in 1961.
MS. Blog Interview
A terrific and timely interview with me in Ms. Magazine by Mary Meriam.
Sexual politics are alive and flourishing in the GOP presidential race and in the current debates regarding Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for the office. So having independent women like Romaine Brooks and her circle, having their say about real women’s lives and creativity is a blessing.
Romaine’s circle of women and lesbians forged their own notions of a room of one’s own, in their case several houses and shared households, as well as space to spread their creative wings wide. Their notions of how to live authentic lives are much more contemporary than they have previously been given credit for.
Not everyone will want to emulate their lifestyle, but we have to give them full credit for demanding one given the limitations placed on women during the interwar period and beyond.
Sapphic Modernism and Meaning
A new book, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 by Susan Lanser simply underscores the importance of Romaine Brooks’s and Natalie Barney’s vision of modernity and exposes as theorist Martha Vicinus has remarked “the centrally of Women’s subordination in the construction of social and cultural systems.”
I hope that my book, Romaine Brooks: A Life (University of Wisconsin Press) which is now at the compositors will help to clarify how Romaine and Natalie envisioned true female independence They both faced overwhelming odds against any woman, much less a lesbian feminist being truly her own woman. They both struggled to find themselves and enable other women to be thoroughly modern in their sense of it. I sometimes wonder what people will take away with them from my book. I look forward to finding out.
Rediscovering Romaine Brooks 