On surviving the unbearable in "layers of quivering gauze"

Learning from our trancestors

Friends, I’m so sorry that I’ve been m.i.a. I’m coming back, this time with a chunk from my latest newsletter for the farm that’s devoted to what I’ve been listening to whilst gently tending to winter-sheveled gardens and the sowing of this season’s seeds. Take good care and let me know if you’ve been listening to anything that’s lighting fires inside of you, too.

Once all the manual tasks of the Spring hit, both my husband and I spend a lot of time with our headphones, treating our ears to a wide variety of stories, songs, voyages, and conversations. Of the many hours I've lately spent listening, Making Gay History's 14th season, The Nazi Era, is the media that’s been taking up the most space in my mind. Eric Marcus, the podcast's founder, executive director, and host, is a brilliant journalist who has assembled an equally magnificent team devoted to telling queer histories with care, authenticity, and a great expansiveness. So many of the stories shared this season are excerpted from hours-long interviews conducted by organizations such as the USC Shoah Foundation and are linked in the episode descriptions so you can go and spend even more time with these survivors—a powerful way of honoring and caring for the memories and experiences of these ancestors, especially since all of the survivors profiled in this season, like the vast majority of those who made it out alive, are now gone.

Author photo of Ovida Delect from the cover of her 1989 memoir, Sucres de feu, soupes d’agonie.

One of the stories that keeps coming back to me is that of Ovida Delect, a Trans woman who fought with the French resistance. During the Holocaust she was imprisoned at the Neuengamme as a political prisoner; it wasn't until the 1980's that she began living openly as a woman. Marcus tell us that, throughout her incarceration, "it was her innate understanding of herself as a woman that served as a beacon” as she retreated “into a dream world to reanimate that ‘pearl’ of femininity inside of her." Here's how she put it in her book:

As for me, I’m convinced that what saved me is my feminine essence.

After working for 14 or 15 hours; walking or running back and forth between the camp and the worksite; roll calls upon roll calls; endlessly waiting in fog or rain squall or snowstorm, or under a scorching sun; after lining up for soup; and a thousand other hellish things, I’d come back to my block with my head done in from the yelling, my eyes full of sneering images, my body often black and blue.

I was in a state of shock or severe agitation.

I’d bury my head in my coarse, filthy sleeves and try to “recover.”

It wasn’t always easy, but I’d manage to “seal my shell” from breaths and drafts, noisy coughs and shouts, my neighbors’ bony limbs and sharp elbows, murky smells, and above all, the whole hellish atmosphere of our day-to-day life. This way I would give this “pearl” a new lease on life, a frail rebirth in which its little flame could sputter brighter, then brighter.

I would pull on skirts, in wide expanses of freedom and fleetingness, in protective forests, meadows dotted with daisies and primroses, houses that were so very warm.

I would be a hostess, an assistant, a fiancée, a little bride, a ballerina, a fashion model for stunning long dresses, a nurse, a mother, a schoolteacher, a poetess, a musician, a healer. I would dance in velvety muslin, elusive taffeta, layers of quivering gauze. I would swish against eddies of satin and caresses of tulle. I would be a caryatid of silk in motion. Nothing was too beautiful.

And my reality wasn’t snuffed out. It was kindled, in fact, by contradiction.

I made a woman
With my pain
With my soul
And I dreamed…

… I did more than dream. My pain and my soul, they were my real life.

So I prevailed over the pervasive death. Not only life being ended but also being reduced to base instinct, stagnation, hopeless apathy.

Femininity was not only an oasis, a wellspring, a rediscovery for me of depths; it was also my way up and out—beyond the watchtowers, into the blue and its stars.

And it was a sheltered space that made the company of others feel possible again.

I truly can't recommend listening to this series enough. The podcast itself has 13 other seasons, each of which is fantastic and features interviews, most conducted by Marcus, with folks such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Morty Manford.

Every day it becomes more important to learn more of our histories, and to get those histories from those who do their work with astute and humane diligence. This podcast reminds me, over and over again, that our species perseveres in the face of goodness and terror alike.

Whatever it looks like, however it feels, and wherever you may hold it, I hope that you have a blessed and sustaining Pearl inside of you, too.