Naked in the Promised Land
By Lillian Faderman
Houghton Mifflin, 356 pp., $26
March is Women’s History Month, and the theme
this year is “Women Pioneering the Future.”
Consider, then, the “pioneer” Lillian Faderman,
because the “future” is now.
In 1967, Fresno State College was “two hundred miles from the nearest
bagel or Ingmar Bergman movie or major library.” Now, it’s California State
University, Fresno, past hotbed of student political activity, past outpost of
women’s lib, and present post of Faderman, who teaches creative writing and literature.
In 1967, Faderman’s specialty was Victorian literature. Now, it’s women’s
studies, multiethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies, programs she established
at Fresno State and disciplines she based books on when the idea of such
programs and such books was unheard of.
And in 1967, Faderman was a minority faculty member: a woman. Now,
she’s past chair of that school’s English department and past dean of its School of
Humanities, positions that helped her draw top-drawer women Ph.D.s and
helped her put Fresno on the academic map.
But Faderman wasn’t always Lillian. As she describes in
Naked in the Promised Land, she was “Lilly” when she was 5 and
in the Bronx; “Lilly the Kid” when she was
12 and in East Los Angeles at the storefront Theatre Arts Studio; “Lil” when she was 15
and at L.A.’s Geller Theatre and School of Dramatic Arts; “Diamond Lil” when she was
best friends with “Simone Deardon” (née
Sonya Dubinsky); “a pachuca gang girl” when
she squeezed into a pair of capri pants in high school; “Ginger Frost” when she was a
10th-grader doing “figure” photography to pay
for a nose job; “Gigi Frost” when she was
16 and pawed over by a silent film star in a mansion once owned by Harry Houdini;
“Lil Foster” when she turned down a “hand
job” proposed by a “portly, pockmarked,
gap-toothed” but “powerful” agent named
Mel; “Arlene Knopfelmacher” (born 1934,
according to a battered birth certificate) when she entered her first Sunset Strip gay bar;
just “Gigi” when she met “the hottest butch
in town” (a nasty piece of work named Jan); “Lil” (again) when, age 17, she married a
gay, alcoholic child psychologist named Mark (age 34), who abandoned her in
Mexico; “Gigi Frost” (again) when she went back
to being a pinup (to pay for college); “The Bubble Bath Girl” at Big Al’s Hotsy
Totsy Club when she was a student at Berkeley and supporting her girlfriend “Sabina D’Or”
(née Shirley Ann Goldstein, an
obsessive-compulsive deadbeat); “Mink Frost” when
she worked with “Boston’s Blond Bombshell Miss Bathsheba,” “The Sexy Sultry
Satana,” “The Fan-tastic Miss Brandy Devine,”
“The Electrifying Electra,” and Mara
Karrara (“The Queen of South American Burlesque”) at the President Follies in San
Francisco; and “Lillian,” finally, when she got
her undergraduate degree from Berkeley in 1962 and her Ph.D. four years later, “a girl
[!],” according to her adviser, “who did the
best graduate oral exam in the history of the UCLA English Department.”
“Mommy” is what Avrom, Faderman’s son by
artificial insemination (when she was 34), calls her today. “Mama Phyllis” is what
Avrom calls Faderman’s “life partner.”
And what a life before the above mess even got started: a borderline
psychotic for a mother, who fled Latvia for the promised land (the Bronx), who lost
her family (save a sister) in the Holocaust, and who raised her “Lee-lee” on movies
and torch songs; a father, who had Lillian’s mother on a string and who refused
to acknowledge he had a daughter; an aunt, who talked mother and daughter
into moving to Los Angeles, another promised land; a widowed landlady in crummy
East L.A., who kept human eyeballs in a row of glass jars in the living room (gift
from her dead husband, “My Marty,” an
eye doctor); a string of suitors, one, a Mr. Mann (!), who had his eyes on
mother but his hands all over daughter, and another, who married Miss
Faderman. (Never mind the hole in his head, product of time spent in a mental institution.)
Lillian Faderman’s lucky to be in one piece. And who can fault her for
going mushy on us — when she’d been one tough likable cookie for a good 30-plus years
— in the final few pages of this remarkable memoir by one remarkable woman?
She’s due some TLC. One question: Her mother’s name’s what?
