Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown

"'Are all homosexuals as perceptive as you?'" (179)

I come from a small town of mostly white people with a strong divide of class. Middle suburbia and rural farmers are the opposing set identities, and rule out strict notions of what is expected or allowed to those from those categories. Few of us are on some confusing space, such as I find myself - sloppy middle class white with my father running us into debt he could still go to prison for in order to fake it has transformed into the lying notoriety today where he has become a manager in his dead end department at EB and mom has turned from nurse working night shifts at the ER (bodies still haunt her today) to a self-employed alternative energy therapy practitioner. I have fucking weird normal ass parents.

I used to be confused about what to call myself beyond a class traitor or trend traitor at best but I don't think that's easy or fair or worthwhile; or is actually seeing my history right. I can only do what I do now and acknowledge my place and self as I do it. I'll read more into it the more it affects me as I try to climb a totem pole to financial stability without destitution. Insert joke: transforming a punk house into a punk home. For any point, as a kid I fit in with the poor and underachieving kids, but one of my last two friends I still love from there is not. Another middler, but one with stronger and safer means. The other is trying to escape too and is a fuckin' doctor now. We all are, escaping that is. Not a doctor yet. Ex-friends I no longer talk to are stuck there forever and they will die there forever. You have nothing to say to me about that but penultimate last chapter of this book is mostly about that feeling.

In my hometown there are divides beyond class of course, but when my childhood home next to a gun club and Randy's was foreclosed on we moved to the outskirts of the suburbs - renting from a hairdresser who used to gel my hair. Up the street from us a single house had scorch marks on the door. It had burned years before but never been torn down to an empty lot.

Alot of Molly's feelings and interactions kind of mirror things I've thought about or experienced. I flew the coop like her, with less necessity to survive. Weirdly too, most of Rita Mae Brown's books appear to be thrift mystery novels about cats (and other pets, such as...dogs). It's uh, an oddity that I can't exactly understand why among those books which amass most of what she's written, she has Rubyfruit Jungle. The main takeaways are the book's quick wit and complicated coming of age sexual romps. Class and race are also constant themes but handled with a mismatched veneer at times. Often, and importantly, this story is extremely sexual and uncomfortably so. Maybe I'll get into all that, that's kinda what I am trying to do here, right?

Molly - dyke supreme - fucks a lot of people through the book. The author like Molly has this resistance to labeling her identity or repeatedly talks in termlessness. That's great and all sometimes and something I too advocate for and not even a problem I have in the book. The book is blatant - Molly is a lesbian but hates being stuck to expectation. I think the end is supposed to comment on that but feels like it less does much of anything beyond her accepting her self won't be done soon. The writer I wouldn't trust with this. Some shit about label-less individuals always makes me annoyed - particularly the history and importance around some. And others who dedicate to an identity that they found on the internet do the same. On both ends, it feels like a lapse in understanding oppression or intersectionality. Who is human and who is monster, or who isn't even worth being enough to be a monster. It feels like these people don't care about more than American selfishness but who am I, faggot-supreme, to say.

Molly's sex life is where a lot of the uncomfortable sexual discussions happen in the book - she fucks her non-biological cousin (as she's adopted), she fucks straight girl after straight girl, she fucks men begrudingly, and often these escapades are unfulfilling and awkward. It's hard to feel the discomfort at points though, mostly for how more often than not, these are extremely funny scenarios. For instance - she fucks the lover of the woman she's having an affair with and both the woman and her lover mention role playing in two opposing queer cruising fantasies. The woman desires to be a gay man, the man she fucks a lesbian. It's a satire that I almost spit my coffee out on and then dribbled when on the next page a chapter starts about the woman being a "golden shower queen." I don't think this outweighs moments where the author writes about younger people, sometimes underage having sexual experiences. Those are and will continue to be a problem that the book which jokes too much, may not be able to comprehend a responsibility to. A harsh judgement but I'm not bothering to judge it. I didn't mention a scene in Wolf in White Van that I think was cruder and more useless than the kissing between Leota and Molly at the beginning of the book. It's possibly on level with Leroy's sexual abusing situation with an older gay man. That part I think was underwritten to a point of harmfulness and therefore, I'm mentioning it for that reason.

Molly is, as she jokingly states, a southern belle. This is only important for her interactions with black characters in the book and how Molly, who does not understand the "active" racism of her adoptive family, doesn't undo a legacy of it either (she's more like Tim Wise than a member of the Weather Underground). She gets critiqued by Holly who has her own issues but the author doesn't settle it (a great quote comes from this: "Fuck you. You have to throw in my face that you don't have that option, don't you. People like you make me sick, wearing your poverty like a badge of purity." - 158, which kind of contextualizes a need towards that colorblindness junk in terms of what white anarchists and commies do for class politics).

Maybe things don't get settled so easy. I also think the ending might be trying to critique this too but maybe I'm searching for more meaning than I'm going to get. It ends...somewhat disappointingly. Molly grew from a complicated upbringing, escaped her class and its setting (a poor class) and fucked her way through New York without turning tricks. She wants you to know that part to give herself some moral highground, whether she wants to admit it or not. Calvin is another important character amidst these notions of class, race and responsibility to ones home, but gets a lighter and more kind treatment to his complications (all the while I think fulfilling Brown's own issues that she doesn't undertake as much in the book - he is a black absentee father).

The end of the book spends more time with Molly evaluating her upbringing and her loves (she has an Elektra-comparative thing going on with her adopted father and mother and Carl dies way early in the book and Carrie is the one to outcast her).  She makes a documentary of Carrie and sees Leroy and Leota again. No one has been made better, and they spout racist things at her, judge her for her lesbianness, and try to live in the past as they all struggle to survive the changing economics of the time. She shows the film among a bunch of pornogrind films and no one bothers to give her any credit for her work. She graduates and the book makes a reference to how she may still not make a film until she's 50 (I didn't mention she wants to be a director because the book hardly makes use of this info) which she jokes about a few times in the last part/after Holly. It leaves nothing really settled beyond this notion that for some reason, she's gone and that divide is more in the past. It feels Unitarian in a kind way and in a kind of bland way.

Anyway, it's complicated. On one hand, this book is actively funny and touching and sweet. On another, I feel compelled to not live like Molly or anyone else in it. It's fiction, ya big shit. Can't follow the life of something not real. Anyway.

Anyway, it connected. Some of my favorite scenes include:

• The opening of the book is unforgettable and wildly inappropriate. You gotta read it for yourself.
• Part I, Chapter 5 when Molly is forced to be Mary in a Christmas pageant, the popular girl forced to do drag as Joseph, the two of them fight over improvising lines and Mary's role as a subordinate woman, a wiseman pisses himself onstage, the teacher tries to save it with caroling, and Molly shoves the girl off the front of the stage (but told within 3 pages of text). There's also a great part where Molly and Leroy plan to run away together so they can wear makeup.
• Part II, Chapter 9 when Carolyn the Protestant not-lesbian lesbian gives me a headache on the page but has a moment on sexuality that I think was well done versus other parts (re - explaining her issue with having sex with her high school boyfriend and how he treats her to Molly who is too young and brash to respond well).
• "You know what I think? I think you're as much a lesbian as I am. You're a Goddamn fucking closet fairy, that's what you are." (114)
• Part III, Chapter 11 because it's Calvin's chapter. Like I said, he reads as a character that is intensely interesting but underwritten/mismanaged. In this chapter Molly also pelts grapefruits at a rich kid to get 100 bucks and it's the chapter where she's officially thrown out of her family.
• I already talked about cruising/golden shower girl.
• "Maybe all kids love their mothers, and she's the only mother I've ever known." (217)