Apples and Oranges : My Journey To Sexual Identity [Hardcover]

Jan Clausen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 1999

After more than a decade of "marriage" to a woman with whom she was raising a daughter, Jan Clausen fell in love with a man, stunning herself and the lesbian community to which she had been intimately connected. The experience was, she writes, "like deliberately embarking on a sea cruise off the edge of a flat Earth." In her luminous and affecting memoir, Clausen charts the trajectory of her sexual life -- from her first kiss to her later loves -- and offers a stunning critique of society's insistence on yoking identity to desire. In the 1950s Pacific Northwest, Clausen grew up in a family in which extramarital sex, swearing, and spicy foods were verboten. In the sixties, she embraced the (hetero)sexual revolution, consorting with various adolescent Lotharios and failing miserably in her effort to become a topless dancer during her summer break from Reed College. After leaving school, she joined an experimental community, where she met her first woman lover. But it was amid New York's dynamic feminist milieu in the 1970s that she "crossed the pass of love" and fell for Leslie Kaplow, also a writer and activist. As a couple, they immersed themselves in the city's vibrant literary sisterhood and eventually launched their own literary magazine. In time, however, Clausen grew restless in her personal relationship and uneasy with what she calls People in Groups, those enforcers of ideological purity. Through her travels, she discovered sweet escape from her familiar world, especially through her activism in Nicaragua, whose war-ravaged streets would provide the backdrop for her unpardonable act: falling in love with a West Indian male lawyer. Deeply felt, gorgeously written, Apples and Oranges is a testament to the powers and perils of desire. It is also the story of one woman's mourning for the community that cast her out and a dazzling examination of the ways in which we all search for identity. Rejecting all efforts at sexual sorting, including the label "bisexual," for her own journey, Clausen arrives at an understanding of sexual attraction in which both likeness and difference emerge as deeply erotic. Whatever our passions, this groundbreaking work will never again let us consider the received categories of sexuality in the same light.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Jan Clausen, long-time lesbian activist and poet, left her lover of 12 years for a man, she was exiled, as she puts it, "from the Garden of Dykedom." Her social circle, her reputation, her writing career--all hinged on her public identity as a lesbian. "Public" rather than "sexual": Clausen casts her dilemma not in personal but in social terms, remarking at one point that people want to know "which version of me is real." In this elegant, sharply focused memoir, she recalls her early sexual life with men, her absorption in radical politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her gradual cultivation of "protolesbian sentiments." As her feminist poetry gained notice, Clausen found "the promise of inclusion in a tiny, woman-only avant-garde more enticing than membership in an undifferentiated throng." Although she presents this book as an argument against the either/or model of sexuality, it is more an elegy for that lost sense of inclusion in a beleaguered minority. A thought-provoking and seductive work. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Formidable intelligence mixed with personal confusion is often a recipe for interesting reading. Clausen begins her story by stating that, after "a dozen years of intense coupledom" with a woman, she "got involved with a man." This book is both a personal "effort at mending a broken identity" and a more general attempt to describe human sexuality as fluid rather than fixed. Clausen recalls her essentially untroubled 1950s Pacific Northwest childhood. Her first sexual experience with a woman came freighted with her "political commitments" as a feminist and "growing reputation as a poet and novelist," and she freely admits that, as part of the feminist generation that came of age in the 1970s, she "hitched eros to ideology." She seems, however, unaware that, when she broke with the lesbian community after falling in love with a black male attorney on a trip to Nicaragua, she continued to link her sexuality to her politics. For example, she sees the search for bisexual and for biracial identities as similar in kind and refers to herself as "a tragic mulatto of sex." Her prose, while often stunning, carries a defensive tone as she jumps through logical hoops to retain her leftist and feminist bona fides. But her depictions of life in America in the '50s, the activism of college students in the '60s and the development of lesbian feminism in the '70s is fully engaging. And she comes by her confusion honestly, through an earnest, literate wrestling with the intersection of the personal and the political. QPB selection; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1St Edition edition (January 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395827523
• ISBN-13: 978-0395827529
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,103,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning and thought-provoking, January 23, 2001

By 

Marcy L. Thompson (Sammamish, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Apples and Oranges : My Journey To Sexual Identity (Hardcover)

Jan Clausen has been walking on the wild side of sexual preference all her life. First she came out as a lesbian, in a world that is not particularly friendly to the sexually deviant. Then she left her 12-year partnership to be with a man, a decision which alienated her from the lesbian community she had been so instrumental in building. In this book, she tries to make sense of it all, for herself and for the reader, exploring what it means to be a lesbian or not.

The central idea of the book is that either/or sexuality is too confining, that women's eroticism flows in a way that makes all labels into prisons. This summing-up misses a great deal, however, as she covers the ground of her own intense life experience, the ways in which the lesian community deals with sexual outlaws, and the ways in which our principles sometimes get in the way of living authentic lives.

This is a great book, just because of the ideas discussed. However, the author is also a poet, and so the prose is dense and lovely, with a rhythm that supports the philosophical discussion in a profound way.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Apples & Oranges - Dawn Till Dusk ..., July 28, 2000

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A. Melinda (IN, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Apples and Oranges : My Journey To Sexual Identity (Hardcover)

Jan Clausen wrote a very intellectual and profound moving book especially for this very book, Apples & Oranges. I am very moved by the depth of feelings in which Jan Clausen described herself and her experiences. The character development is a real suspense and this book gave me thrill and also could have helped people who are in search of their sexuality. Moreover, I really could not get my hands of the book, and if I could, I would read it from dawn till dusk. A real life experience full of colours of life which brought an aspect in my real life. Very Good !

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, thoughtful, and ultimately moving, September 11, 2011

By 

Patrick Reilly (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Apples and Oranges : My Journey To Sexual Identity (Hardcover)

Jan Clausen's memoir of her sexual and personal journey is both affecting and thought-provoking. She writes extremely well, and with no-holds-barred honesty. What fascinated me the most is her exploration of what might be called socially constructed sexual identities. In some critical ways, it matters little who is doing the constructing. Whether queer, straight, or bi (or none of the above), conventional communities all seem to want to define people according to unchangeable, constricting labels. Those who fit that community's expectations are accepted, but woe betide the person who chooses her own path. Human sexual identity may simply be much more potentially fluid than communities with rigid standards (however radical they may think they are) are willing to accept. And in the process of expelling those who have disappointed them, those communities, whether straight, lesbian, or Amish Christian, show clearly that ideology matters more to them than friendship or even love. That was one of the lessons I learned from this book: those who love us only when we behave as they wish love their belief system best of all. And those who truly love us, will do so unconditionally.