DIVA sits down with the literary powerhouse to learn more about this incredible new release
BY ELLA GAUCI, IMAGES BY ROBIN CHRISTIAN
Four butches find themselves in the old Maryville dyke bar in 1957. Over the next 50 years, they face an upheaval of political pushback, love, friendship and community. They explore their troubles, their masculinity and their undying love for the underground counterculture they call home. These stories, interwoven and spanning generations, are the basis for Joelle Taylor’s new book Maryville.
Award-winning poet, playwright, author and editor Joelle Taylor is back with another knockout book that celebrates and commemorates dyke history and culture in all its glory. DIVA caught up with this powerhouse to find out more about this new book and her event at the Southbank Centre on 9 November.
What initially drew you to telling the stories of four butch lesbians across five decades in Maryville?
The book is based around the story of the four butch friends from CUNTO & Othered Poems, each of whom is based on a real dyke, now dead. I wanted to see what it would be like if I could haunt my ghosts. I reimagined them as 16-year-olds in 1957, conjured each a new life, and had them meet one another at the old Maryville dyke bar, where they remain for 50 years. The book is a vehicle for examining community, queer class politics, love, female masculinity, and long-term friendship – set against the background of the rise of the Gay Liberation Front, the women’s movement, black civil rights, and the squatting revolution. I wanted to conjure worlds, make new myths. It’s a ghost story and what a ghost story really is, is a love story.
Queer underground history is such a vital backbone to our culture. What do you hope readers (and audiences) take from the book?
I hope they will witness the journey with a sense of resilience and pride; what we were, what we will become. Maryville looks with a little more depth at other characters in the bar, notably Femmes, so I hope readers can find themselves in some faces. The character of the king femme Soho is an equal to the four butches, a magical, unearthly figure who remains perched at the end of the bar smoking a long cigarette for five decades. Because so much of our collective experience is about deflecting the male gaze, I’ve written the book as a television series, so that we constantly question who is holding the camera. I want the readers to be holding the camera.
Maryville explores the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke counterculture. Were there any particular themes, moments from history or cultural cornerstones that you drew inspiration from?
We have an extraordinary heritage of resistance and survival, a difficult dance that has shown us what we are capable of and what our detractors are equally capable of. As a 80s dyke I was particularly drawn to revisiting the times around protesting Section 28, and Greenham Common. That period in our mutual history that made the world seem possible to us as the marginalised, as the working class: free squats, free rehearsal space, crèches at gigs, collectives and cooperatives, all the infinite ways dykes connect and disrupt. And of course, central to it all were some incredible dykes who abseiled into the House of Lords, and invaded the BBC News.
Butch identity and history are often lost in cultural depictions of queer life. Why is it so important to preserve this history in mediums like Maryville?
Butch is a cultural office, like that of the archetypal drag queen. We are the first to fall and the first to rise again. It’s important that we count our collective memories and keep them in our inside pocket, these powerful, complex, relentless women whose fatal flaw is the word “no”, what that does to a man when he hears it. The butch is one extent of the lesbian and the femme the other, both as nonconforming as the other. The butch is the only identity that completely evades the male gaze; in CUNTO I call us “antelopes dressed as lions”.
What can audiences expect from your performance of Maryville at Southbank Centre in November?
A riot, with any luck. I’m working with legendary theatre director and novelist Neil Bartlett to suck the story out of the book and perform it as a one-hour live show, complete with live visuals from artist and filmmaker SweatMother. It will be a kaleidoscopic journey through 50 years of dyke counterculture and friendship, threaded together with music. After the show my lovely friend and queer icon Travis Alabanza will join me to chat about the book. Apart from the launch element the show is about unity and pulling together all the dykes, the sapphics, lesbians – whatever we name ourselves – to stand in solidarity, a wall you can pull bricks out of. As Derek Jarman said, “the world was ending, and it was time to dance.”
At a time when queer nightlife and underground culture are being threatened, what are your hopes for the next decade of dyke counterculture?
That we continue create these odd parentheses, these safe spaces to be dangerous. I hope that all the clubs continue to build and to diversify – a bit like Butch, Please! and their incorporation of a creative workshop element. We need spaces that hold all of us, that are experimental in their design and vision. I would very much like to see a dyke bar that is open seven days a week, a community space, a gathering ground, an altar we all pray badly at. In terms of political resistance, I think it is vital that we tell our disparate stories, that we learn to say our own names.
Joelle Taylor is the author of Maryville (Bloomsbury Poetry, 6 November). You can pre-order on Amazon, Bookshop.org or Waterstones.
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