Pretty who owned Bluestocking Books, a feminist bookstore in Columbia in 1994, not only loved books but also loved movies. She had co-sponsored Dorothy Allison to do a reading with Women’s Studies at the University of South Carolina on the evening of March 21st. which meant she would miss Tom Hanks’s beautiful acceptance speech for Best Actor in Philadelphia. I didn’t realize that night how important the Oscars were to her because I was enamored by Dorothy Allison’s stories from her award winning book Bastard Out of Carolina that had been published two years earlier.
At the time I was a financial advisor working with numbers with no thought of writing, but I was mesmerized by this woman who was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1949 to a fifteen-year-old mother. Lesbian literary journal Sinister Wisdom recalls Allison’s childhood was marked by poverty, sexual, physical and emotional abuse – themes which became cornerstones of her work. Needless to say following Allison’s talk, I bought her book from Pretty who invited me to go to dinner with a few friends along with Allison.
My memories of the dinner are unremarkable except that Allison was polite, even cordial but, as Pretty remembered, seemed underwhelmed by our table of local lesbians who were thrilled to be in her presence. Our lives would intersect with hers again twenty-three years later, however.
In 2017 the University of South Carolina published a collection of oral histories I edited: Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement, Committed to Home. The back cover included a comment from Dorothy Allison whose storytelling has always been an inspiration to me as a lesbian writer.
“Thirty years of history retold from the inside is in this anthology. The people who stood up and risked their homes, their families, and their very lives to make the world safer and more just for all of us tell us how they did it, day by day, year by year.”
Through her books Dorothy Allison told us day by day, year by year of her personal struggles to make the world safer and more just for all. During the Thanksgiving season this year I will be especially thankful for this lesbian activist whose life lifted us to higher ground.
Dorothy Allison died Wednesday, November 6th., at the age of 75 – her words live on.
Rest in peace, Dorothy.
I'll Call It Like I See It 