For the majority of the twentieth century, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was an enclave of affordable housing (e.g. tenements) that housed lively immigrant cultures as well as many queer folk feeling the crunch of capitalism’s unceasing demands. Today, I’m discussing three books written by or recollecting the memories of queer Jewish women who lived and loved in the Lower East Side, whose approach to gender and romance and life in general remain relevant. It’s interesting to see how the women’s approaches to queer love are a reflection of the conditions they lived under, and how both evolved over time.
After Delores by Sarah Schulman (1988)
With her pulpy-poetic prose and characters that are as unremittingly unlikeable as only men are ever prized for penning, Sarah Schulman carved a niche out of making literature from lesbian Manhattan’s most seedy glories. After Delores is my favorite of her fictions.
It starts on Halloween night, where our unnamed narrator picks up a Priscilla Presley impersonator and steals her gun. Unnamed and unmoored, this disgruntled masc then spends over a hundred pages in tortured fantasy about all the ways she could use her new sidepiece to create closure for her earlier, off-page unrequited breakup with the titular Delores.
Girl’s got a Chekhovian device and it’s only a matter of time before everything is blown to hell.
Oozing every bit the wounded machismo that made Marlon Brando a household name, Schulman’s narrator slinks and strides her way between Brooklyn and Newark, with the Lower East Side and all its cheap housing and cheaper eateries at the center of the action. She’s joined by a cast of ruthless high femmes, twisted found families and women hardened by their choices yet clinging desperately to what little security and softness they can find amidst the psychic carnage of their inner conflicts.
The narrator becomes fixated on solving the murder of a stripper—between plaintive ruminating about Delores and spiraling into self-destructiveness.
Pulpy, creepingly noirish, and charging both genres’ conceits with deep metaphorical weight, Schulman’s novel complicates its tropes. The narrators at-times borderline hallucinatory thoughts of homicide (and hot girls whose absence makes them grow all the more symbolic) are frequently interrupted by the frustratingly grounding realities of working as a waitress. Femme fatales are fallible, multifaceted and tired women who code-switch and adjust to shifting contexts with the ease of applying lipstick. And there is no dearth of the indignities aggrieved people are capable of when confronted with someone just a bit more vulnerable than them—petty as they are.
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is the only other author I’ve read who comes close to Schulman’s distinctive sense of humor and style. There’s something so vivid about their visual language, and you can see the story unfold like a movie in your mind’s eye. I went with friends to see a piece of pulpy off-Broadway reckoning this year, and left the theater thinking someone should adapt After Delores to the stage. It could be in the vein of Tennessee Williams or Lorraine Hansberry or David Henry Hwang’s messy dissections of masculinity and symbolic, complicated desires, but for the first time centered on a spiraling butch. Seriously, can someone make this happen?
Lower East Suicide by Anna Margolin, translated by Mildred Faintly (2024)
Speaking of women doing toxic masculinity, let’s go even further back to the years after the first World War. Lower East Suicide is a collection of Anna Margolin’s poetry recently translated by Mildred Faintly.
Born Rosa Harning Lebensboym in Belarus, the woman who would be known as Anna Margolin was shipped off to New York as a teenager whose dalliances with the local boys had become cause for concern. She ended up finding ample fodder for both her intellectual and other appetites in the Lower East Side and its Yiddish literary scene. Most of her life was spent in the Lower East Side (with a brief stint in Israel before leaving her husband at the time and the children she had with him), where she wrote most of her poetry—and was usually married to men. But despite her adhering to the social expectations of her era, she had women loves and six poems at the very end of this collection express a distinctly sapphic sensibility. My Venus in particular features this musing:
“her lap is glorious
as the purple confection of an Iris’s petals;
her hips broad, athletuc,
her hair pours, bronze, to her shoulders;
a line of pearls, like a series of whispers
matches the curve of her bosom
they tremble ever so slightly to her heart-beat”
The earlier pieces in the collection are characterized by that terribly Romantic mingling of pessimistic pleasures and decadent despair—like an ill-fated, inbred ruler indulging in roses and wine while listening to the first stirrings of his empire’s weakening. Or the inextricability of life from death, as when the narrator of City by the Sea compares dancing couples to ghosts. Margolin’s writing is at other times shot through with a sense of impotent frustration, forcefully despairing against the discord between her will and reality refusing to bend to it. These poems echo Byron and Shelley’s fierce melancholy, Baudelaire’s soulful self-martyrdom. Words to engrave in particular is evocative of Blake and Byron’s most strident reckonings with mortality and the creative drive.
Readers looking for aching love poems will find a surfeit here, where “A ship going down / wouldn’t give so vivid / a sensation of sinking” as the heavy, unsettling silences that can spring between two people. And so many poems of being apart, either physically or emotionally, from a deep love. Many of these love poems eschew gendered pronouns or specific allusions to form and sex, instead focusing on depicting the emotional moments and undercurrents in a relationship.
Margolin also centers a feminine subjectivity that chafes against the expectations of society, her metaphors alluding to concepts John Berger would popularize in Ways of Seeing over half a century later. In the poems “Portrait” (excerpted below), “I Walk in the Shadows,” and “In the Streets,” she articulates the inchoate rage and spiritual chafing caused by being watched, and eventually internalizing those gazes to the point where your expression of emotions becomes stifled.
“When the kindly evening hours
bent down to shelter her, to shelter everything,
with the gentle sorrow of darkness,
all she felt
was the dull banked fire of madness
inside her, repressed,
though it choked her.”
It’s a powerful, at times darkly humorous (she excoriates a married lover for returning home to his wife, and dedicates an entire other poem to the feeling of falling out of love and into disgust with her husband) collection of poetry that will appeal to readers interested in Romanticism or Expressionism. Or anyone who wants to immerse themselves in a series of emotional states and evocative imagery through poetry.
It Was Her New Work by C.S. Moed (2024)
This is a must-read memoir for fans of archival practices and the quiet side of queer history that pairs photographs with pages of poetic, context-deepening prose. C.S. Moed’s love letter to both her queer mother and the Lower East Side that raised both of them ties the changing cityscape to the changes in Florence‘s aging body. The history of the Lower East side from the perspective of a child and young woman is entwined with the mundane landmarks of one woman’s lifetime there.
It was “a lifetime spent hiding from love”, as Moed puts it. She recounts Florence’s stories of going to girls’ dances and flirting with women. But when the woman she loved most decided to get married to a man, Florence chose to do the same—and found herself deeply unhappy with the arrangement. Nonetheless, she had daughters and was dutiful in maintaining them to the standards of the time and place. Moed reflects on the places that raised her as much as her mother: “Water was not a foreign entity on the Lower East Side. Not everybody swam, but everybody got wet—Coney or Pitt Street Pool or, in my aunts’ and uncle’s days, the East River” she writes. We see photographs of Florence in bathing suits throughout, as well as black and white photographs of her younger self, beaming at the camera. Florence lived through the progress made by queer New Yorkers firsthand—eventually finding the courage and community needed to come out on her own terms.
I was moved by a photograph from 1982, showing a 58 year-old Florence standing by the senior convertible at a Pride event. After waiting “her entire life to walk down a street as who she really was. And she wasn’t going to give up that walk for anybody or anything.” So she walked. At 58 years old, she was finally able to be out and proud, finding community with other older queers.
Many of the other photos looking back at a younger Florence, or an older Manhattan, are fuzzy where the body blurs and memory errs. Moed also writes of her experiences caring for Florence through the older woman’s progressing dementia, including photographs of the older woman in bed and on oxygen. The materials in this book were pieced together from Moed’s desire to better understand and remember the woman and city that raised her, even as both lost parts of themselves to time. Even after the physical fades, at least captured memories can remain to connect generations, to make better sense of the present through the lens of the past. Moed writes about how this work is her attempt at preserving a singular history. She writes of her grief, in trying to convince Florence’s ex-lover, herself now a great-grandmother, to at least donate Florence’s letters to her to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. At least let the love they once had live on in the record, since it couldn’t in life.
One of the last pictures shows Florence at a Pride parade or march, waving a flag for SAGE. The largest American organization specifically for LBTQ+ elders, its mission is to give dignity and support to the people who are our living history. The photo, and the very last one of Florence looking bright-eyed and pleased with the moment, are a fitting end to a story about how much is lost with time, yet lives on through the people we support and care for.
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