THE PROBLEM

In early 1974 Alli was still successfully passing as James Tiptree. Her biographer Julie Phillips writes "Alli was struggling with her story for Aurora [an anthology of stories showing life after gender equality's been achieved.] All of the the eventual contributors, including Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, had a difficult time with the assignment." In October, Tiptree wrote to the editor Vonda McIntyre

I find in my heart I am so damn pessimistic I cannot imagine a better world.

I can't imagine people--men and women and children--just living. With everything OK [...] This isn't age--I guess I've always been this way. Living in an essentially doomed world [...] I care strongly that other, younger people should have a better life--but as for myself I can't imagine it [...]

Moreover I suspect that most of the organised world activities are male structured (as well as male-dominated) so I can't believe that simply filling in the personnel-slots with women means anything real. And I don't think things would get much different unless women had a chance to build their own world ... which ends up like Russ's "When It Changed" and not Beyond Equality at all. Everything else I try just ends up with Golda Meier running a space-station, the Heinlein jocks-in-skirts thing. I REFUSE to fancy some stereotype like Women-Have-ESP or Only-Women-can-understand-aliens etc. etc.[...]

I would not feel threatened by an all-female power-structure any more than I do by an all-male one."

[It began] in some kind of fancy hospital... my mother arrived there (driving a car!) car key was stained (bloody?)... I took doctor (Larson? Parsons) aside to tell him she hurt all over (like me)--as we walked he scooped a small patient from a chair in the hall and thrust it into a wooden drawer. "It's time, in you go!" It was a very old woman, like a toucan bird, all head and beak--I said, but it's dark in there, no light, nothing! [...] "Can't you be kinder?" He shrugged [...] I tried to talk about Mother, about being kinder, I said I'd seen cruel untreated diseases--he seemed OK but then made the first peculiar or "ominous" remark--"Are you sure all that hasn't changed you?"--or "made you sentimental" [...] I protested, thought him convinced. [...]

Then we came to an eating room, the doctor went to sit with several young nurses; I knew I was invited but I turned away [...] instead went to the dessert "line" to cozen some food--I was "irregular," lying, "I'm with--" Some men at one end like off-duty conspiratorial waiters or sailors offered me a dish [...] and drink, the drink was pinky-creamy, I felt awkward and left after drinking it--the men were joking evilly--

And now the terrible chase-action part begins-

First, drink in hand, I somehow yielded to some kind of temporary idle seduction or woman's room Saks sort of atmosphere--I went around and "down" with the women--till somehow I understood I was in a trap, running to some kind of slavery, and tried to resist--fought to turn around and go back [...]. Always the magic talisman was, "Let me pass, I must leave and go to my mother, she is dying up on the top floor, her doctor is Dr. Parsons?... They want me." [...] At first it was various "temptations" and threats, all by women--dressed as vampires, insects, whores, etc.--silks and weird spaces and hangings--always trying to get to the "up" ramp, get up it--"I can't be a woman, I must go to my mother!"

Finally she made a run for it, pursued by the pack of women, then turned: "One of the pack came at me, I grabbed her or she me, wrestling arms, everything in terrible slow-motion glue (I was lying on my face, on my arm I think) [...] couldn't talk or breathe--I bent only her finger, it withered--I awoke--"

She didn't note what the dream also suggests: she doesn't belong at the table with the women, but the girly pink drink the men offer her is worse. It seems to be the men's feminine drink--not the women themselves--that sends her down into the world of "vampires, insects, whores" (like Greenwich Village in a lesbian novel). As always, there is no alternative but asexual virtue, kindness, and remaining her mother's daughter.

--Julie Phillips--

James Tiptree, who had nightmares of being a woman

EDITOR'S NOTES

• In a footnote Phillips adds "Alli thought the ramps came from reading Cordwainer Smith: "unlike 'Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,' back was up." In six hundred pages on Tiptree, this footnote is about the only mention of Smith's influence on Tiptree. Yet they were kindred spirits in many ways--their military and intelligence backgrounds, their pseudonyms and privacy, their xenophilia verging on furriness, their hunger for fairness and simple kindness--and their despair of ever seeing it. The dream-women penned underground echo other Smith tales of his Underpeople. In "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" Elaine meets a group of underpeople who nearly kill her to keep their basement shelter secret:

  In the hidden and forbidden
  Downtown of Clown Town
  there were horrid ones and horrider
  in the brown and yellow corridor.

• Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" haunted me because I was living its plot. I grew up in a clan of gifted girls (our immediate gang had one other boy and six girls). Female meant smart, competent, normal. I went into shock when I left that nest and found a world ruled by aliens: men. I still feel part of a group only if it's predominantly women, and uneasy in packs of males. The effects on my sexuality were subtler: instead of dating and trying to couple and build a nuclear family, I've unconsciously sought existing communities where women are a majority and hierarchy is weak--where I could be the token man, the shared husband... the sex toy?
  Houston's narrator, Oren Lorimer, worked in male-dominated fields, but gets shipwrecked in an all-female future; he must convince skeptical women that men are people at all, can have any place in their world. Tiptree creates something like the world of my childhood as her own feminist utopia, then locks the door on Oren, on me--and on herself as Tiptree, too: her Utopia has no place for many of her interests. As in the dream, women are as much a barrier as a community. (Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, published the next year, has parallels: she openly calls it "an ambiguous Utopia"--her cooperative anarchists, including the women, can be petty, blind, greedy, cold.)
• Neither Alli/Tip nor Julie Phillips comment on the dream's mantra, "Let me pass!" In this one line I hear the seed of two classic Sheldon stories:
  1. Houston, Houston, Do You Read: here "Let me pass!" is a wonderful dream-pun. Alli longed to pass as a man physically and sexually, and did pass for a man in the science fiction community--but as she wrote this, her male persona was starting to fray. She needed to be accepted as a man, so she creates Oren Lorimer, who needs to pass as a woman... the only definition of human the future has.
  2. Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!, in which a runner believes she's a messenger in a feminist future, passing through the ruins of Chicago, threatened by wild dogs; but Chicagoans see her as a crazy girl jogging through slums, about to get herself killed. "Let me pass!"--through patriarchy into Utopia. The dream is less violent, but says as plainly that women are as big a part of the problem for Alli/Tip as men.

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