Tag Archives: Lucy Jane Bledsoe

The Aftermath of Gay Conversion Camp: Tell the Rest by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

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the cover of Tell the Rest

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In 2014, I read The Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe based solely on the fact that it was included on a book list called “Lesbians In Cold Places.” And you know what? That was a great decision, because I really enjoyed it. It was a slow-building character study set in Antarctica, with a queer main character, of course. So when I saw that she had a new sapphic book out today, I had to pick it up.

I have to start this with some heavy content warnings, because this is a book about conversion therapy and its aftermath. This review will discuss conversion camp and homophobia, and the book includes homophobia, abuse, rape, religious trauma, and suicide.

The book starts with two kids, a thirteen-year-old white girl and a sixteen-year-old Black teenage boy, running through the woods, trying to escape conversion camp. Then we flash forward to 25 years later.

Delia is fresh from a divorce and has just gotten fired as a college basketball coach. She’s also struggling with uncontrollable attacks of anger. She’s never felt so lost or out of control. So reluctantly, unbelievably, she drives across the country to her hometown in rural Oregon to move in with her brother and coach her old high school’s girls’ basketball team.

Her coach in high school was her hero. She gave Delia a path to follow, skills to develop, and a passion to nurture. Since then, basketball and the discipline she has around it has been her guiding light in her life. Maybe she’s hoping that by confronting her past, she can address the anger issues she’s having. Maybe she wants to step into her old coach’s shoes and inspire a new generation of kids. Maybe she just has nowhere else to go. Whatever the reason, she’s determined to take this team to victory, and she demands the best.

While I think this is Delia’s story, we do also get some point of view chapters from Earnest—the boy she escaped with. They never saw each other again after that night, but they both are still grappling with it and their experience at Celebration Camp. While Delia is at a difficult time in her life, though, grappling with her past, her personality, her anger, her family, her career, and more, Earnest seems more settled.
He has a job teaching poetry and a boyfriend he loves. The central tension in his story is struggling to write a poem about his experience at camp and their escape—something he’s been trying and failing to do for years.

As both of them find themselves needing to confront the past, it seems inevitable they will meet again. As we follow along with Delia and Earnest now, we also get chapters of their time at Celebration Camp, revealing more about the experience that had such an impact on them. Still, this is more about the ongoing effects of that experience than the camp itself.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a light read. It feels like an open wound: Delia especially is still hurting so much and hasn’t gotten closure on it. Eventually, though, we do see her begin to work through it, accompanied by the glimpses of the lives of the teenage girls she’s coaching.

If you like to read character studies and quiet stories about working through trauma—and trying to lead a high school girls’ basketball team to glory, because that really is a big focus—I highly recommend this one. It’s a thoughtful, sometimes painful, but effective narrative, and it’s one that’s interesting to read after books like The Miseducation of Cameron Post, because this looks at not just the immediate horror, but the aftermath of being taught to hate yourself as a young person.

Julie Thompson reviews A Thin Bright Line by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

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thin-bright-line-bledsoe

“There is so much we don’t know, can’t know, in doing historical research. Emma Donoghue writes, in the afterword of her collection Astray, ‘when you work in the hybrid form of historical fiction, there will be Seven-League-Boot moments: crucial facts joyfully uncovered in dusty archives and online databases, as well as great leaps of insight and imagination. But you will also be haunted by a looming absence: the shadowy mass of all that’s been lost, that can never be recovered.’” (Postscript)

A Thin Bright Line, by Lucy Jane Bledsoe, tells the story of a life lived fully, yet not quite openly. Bledsoe starts from the end of her namesake, Lucybelle Bledsoe’s, life and proceeds to build on the available fragments. The two women’s lives follow amazingly similar career paths and sexual orientation, despite decades and miles apart. Bledsoe was nine years old when her aunt died in an apartment fire in 1966. As a result, she has few clear memories of her aunt, a vague, albeit benevolent, figure who made periodic visits and sent gifts. The woman was a benign mystery to her family. In an era without social media and portable devices tracking every move, it was much easier to leave without a trace, or else leave behind few clues about who you were.

A detailed entry for Lucybelle, found by chance in The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century, as well as an obituary in the Journal of Glaciology, sparked years of research leading to this novel. Bledsoe scavenged her father’s memories of his sister. Among them, her aunt’s aspirations to write a novel; her penchant for organizing school-wide jokes and flash mob-type performances; and reciting humorous poetry. As for the adult Lucybelle became, there is far less information available. A handful of primary documents, such as the reports left behind following the fatal apartment fire, and interviews with the remaining people who knew her aunt in some capacity, were all that remained of a seemingly rich and vibrant life.

Lucybelle Bledsoe was born in 1923 to a devout Christian household in Pocahontas, Arkansas. Her mother was a housewife and her father had a dual career as a farmer and county judge. As a child, Lucybelle displayed a keen intellect, as evidenced by her voracious reading habits and ability to pass the Arkansas bar without having had attended law school. The novel spans a decade and opens on New York City, 1956, about ten years after she left her hometown. The former country girl had by this time built a successful career for herself at the Geological Society of America as an Assistant Editor. She shares an apartment with her longtime girlfriend, Phyllis, and their dachshund, L’Forte. She also enjoys the city’s nightlife with a core group of friends. Everything seems good enough, even if it involves a bit of compromise. However, her life is upended when her relationship shatters and a sudden job offer is pushed at her by Henri Bader, a European ice scientist working for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The novel flows from New York to Chicago to Vermont. Along the way, Lucybelle experiences overt and vague threats from her employer and sources unknown. She learns how to compartmentalize her life, balancing her employer’s demands that she refrain from dating women with a challenging career. The novel is full of coded terrain: her workplaces at Snow Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) and Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), and her private and family lives. Through her relationships and career, Lucybelle makes sense of the path she wants her life to take. Despite having her life extinguished just as she seems to fully realize it, the novel is an incredible tribute.

Bledsoe paints a sensitive, nuanced portrait of her aunt, displaying an understanding of the period’s public, private, and personal politics, and social mores. Some of the characters are works of fiction, such as Lucybelle’s Chicago girlfriend Stella, her cluster of friends in New York City, and coworkers at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in New Hampshire. However, the many lives that factor into this story all reflect some aspect of life during the Cold War, in the period covering 1956-1966. Each of the women featured react differently to societal pressures and offer a sort of option for how Lucybelle might conduct her own life. A Thin Bright Line is an engaging and immersive story, featuring strong, intelligent women.

Mid-century queer history is fascinating and complex. Most of the literature and sources mentioned in the novel can be borrowed via public libraries in the United States or purchased online. I acquired the first two volumes of collected issues of The Ladder via my local public library’s interlibrary loan system. I recommend supplementing your reading with the titles listed below.

  1. Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Bérubé

  2. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

  3. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

You can read more of Julie’s reviews on her blog, Omnivore Bibliosaur.

Danika reviews The Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

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This was the third book I read in December that Queer Books Please categorized as part of the “Lesbians In Cold Places” genre, and it definitely fits there! The Big Bang Symphony is set in Antarctica, and the incredibly cold climate can be felt on every page. Only one of the three protagonists is a lesbian, though. All three women have travelled to work in Antarctica to push themselves to solve problems in their lives, to answer questions about themselves. Mikala (the queer character) is still grieving her partner, who died a year ago, and whom she was with since childhood. Rosie, who seems like the central character, maybe because we start the story with her, is adrift. She left home as a teenager and has been searching for it ever since, leading her to this furthest corner of the globe yet again. And finally, Alice, meanwhile, has come to Antarctica to finally leave home, to escape an overbearing mother and to perhaps find a new relationship.

This book is a slow build. The plot does not race along. Instead, the novel concentrates more on character development, and the way these three women’s lives intersect. The setting is fascinating, because it is extreme. It really creates this great parallel to these characters trying to “find themselves”, because in this climate you can literally die from standing still too long. And the characters and their arcs are all compelling. I loved Rosie’s brash, bold personality, though I found her romantic life in the book to be frustrating (but that was the point). Mikala and Alice take a little while to find their voices, because they are more subtle than Rosie. Mikala is juggling a lot of different things in her life, but one of them is her failure to find creative release. She is a composer, and she spends most of the book trying to break through the barriers to her creativity. Alice is a scientist, and she examined everything with exacting, unbiased logic, until she doesn’t. I feel like I should have found her romantic arc annoying, because it follows some tropes that I have hated in other stories, but I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it worked well for her.

Mostly, it’s the ending that really made this book for me. As I’ve said, it’s a slow build. I found most of the book a little difficult to get through, because it wasn’t a pageturner, it wasn’t making me desperate to know what happens next. But that unfolding of character development, the detailing of the different relationships all the characters end up having with each other, the subtle weaving in of their backstories, it all paid off. By the end of the book, I really felt for these characters. I was rooting for them. I actually was grinning to myself and laughed out loud near the end, because I was happy to see these characters get the resolutions they so desperately needed in their lives. If you’re up for a atmospheric, character-based story, I would definitely recommend The Big Bang Symphony. The writing is skillful and the characters are so believable. Curl up in a chair with a warm drink and settle in for a subtle, but satisfying, read.

Guest Lesbrarian: Stefanie

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This guest lesbrarian post is brought to you by Stefanie and was originally posted at Elevate Difference. Thank you so much, Stefanie!

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Big Bang Symphony begins with one big bang and ends with another. A plane crashes on its way to McMurdo Station on Antarctica while carrying several of the continent’s summer residents, including Rosie Moore and Mikala Wilbo, two of the three female protagonists of the story. Everyone survives except for one unnamed woman; we find that her death and the crash subsequently inform the lives of the main characters, as we follow Rosie, Mikala, and Alice Neilson as they attempt to carry out their respective work on “the Ice.”

Each woman has come to Antarctica in search of something: for Rosie, a constant traveler with strained family relations, it is money toward the purchase of her first stable home; for Mikala, a renowned up-and-coming composer, it is a father she never really knew and an escape from the grief still following her after her partner’s death three years prior; for Alice, a geologist and the youngest among them, it is evidence that the earth has survived previous global warmings and will continue to do so. Each search revolves around at least one man in the characters’ lives, though the women’s burgeoning relationships with each other come to dominate and fortify one another in achieving their separate quests.

Rosie makes a strong impression on Mikala in the aftermath of the plane crash and ignites her romantic, sexual, and musical interests. Mikala cannot get Rosie out of her mind, even as she struggles each day to write the first music she has composed since her partner’s death. Rosie, in the meantime, becomes obsessed with one man, all too married, and distracts herself with another. Alice, committed on several levels to her advisor, finds herself pushed beyond her comfort zone and begins to emotionally react in ways she has never let herself do before. When an emergency strikes, the women are tested and find themselves opening up to experiences that had previously challenged them, causing them to change in a setting hostile to most growth.

The reader will quickly find that Bledsoe’s choice of setting—the gorgeous, yet deadly landscape of Antarctica—figures as a main character in and of itself rather than simply as a background against which the action of the novel plays out. Indeed, it is the ways in which the characters live on and with such an inhumane environment that propels each to reach out to one another to attempt to accomplish their goals and survive the short, harsh summer at the South Pole. Bledsoe consistently, if occasionally awkwardly, imbues each chapter of the novel with the themes of life and death, music, travel, and the relationship between an individual and the cosmos.

The Big Bang Symphony was a compelling read from the start, save perhaps the initial chapters written from Alice’s perspective, which can be frustrating in terms of her double devotion to both her mother and to the fastidious nature of science. Rosie’s and Mikala’s stories easily make up for this, however, and as Alice comes into her own on Antarctica, I soon found her narrative equally complex and interesting. In Rosie, Mikala, and Alice, Bledsoe clearly created characters who never would have met had it not been for the coincidence of living on the Ice together; their obvious differences make their incipient and meaningful friendship all the more captivating over the course of the story.

If you’d like to submit a guest lesbrarian post, email me at danikaellis@gmail.com