From the Center
Editor’s Note: From the forthcoming 23-24 edition of the Isom Report
Dr. Minnie Bruce Pratt (L) before her SEWSA Lecture in 2019.
By Dr. Jaime Harker
The first time I ever saw Minnie Bruce Pratt in person, she was checking out at a gay bookstore in Boston with Leslie Feinberg on the day of the Pride parade. I had heard Feinberg read at Temple University, where I was selling copies of Stone Butch Blues for a friend who worked at Giovanni’s Room, so I recognized hir (Feinberg preferred ze/hir). I hadn’t seen Pratt, though—short curly hair, dazzling smile, in a dress (was it really floral? Or is that just my memory?). I was hanging out with a lovely gay man whose partner hadn’t wanted to go to the bookstore, and we recognized them just as they were leaving. We ran after to ask them to sign something, and caught them at the crosswalk. When none of us had a pen, we laughed and walked away empty-handed.
I didn’t know a lot about Minnie Bruce Pratt then. It wasn’t until I moved to Mississippi and was introduced to the lesbian feminist collective, Feminary, based in North Carolina, that I learned about her own writing. The first book I read by Pratt was a collection of her essays and speeches, Rebellion, and it absolutely rocked my world. I remember especially “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” Pratt’s essay about the assumptions and frames we carry with us and the multiple ways we need to grow, become uncomfortable, and change as we deconstruct our racism, sexism, homophobia, classism. Her descriptions of her small Southern town, the specificity of detail about its layout and the hierarchies that layout entailed, spoke to me as I tried to learn a new landscape in Oxford, Mississippi, and understand the embedded histories and ideologies that landscape hid. Pratt rejected the birds’ eye view—the grid from above, viewed as if by God—for a different, more layered understanding. Pratt explained that “as I change, I learn a way of looking at the world that is more accurate, complex, multilayered, multidimensioned, more truthful. To see the world of overlapping circles, like movement on the mill pond after a fish has jumped, instead of the courthouse square with me at the middle, even if I am on the ground.” Overlapping circles, multilayered, multidimensional—Pratt made me rethink how I saw, how I understood; she made me understand that we are never just seeing one thing. Past, present, and imagined futures, all are contained in the seemingly transparent things we observe. Pratt was exploring the intersectionality of identity, long before this became central to feminist and queer practice. The lens she provided us notice, with a poet’s eye for detail, the little details that make all the difference in our understanding.
I used that selection from “Identity” in my lesbian reading of Absalom! Absalom! at the Faulkner conference that summer, and it, more than the feminist geography I read or the outrage I provoked when I quoted Florence King to start my presentation, was the guiding star of that essay: reading landscape differently. Reading narrative differently. Noticing the things the author sees only in the corner of his eye, and making it central. Unraveling the layers until the queer and feminist identities became visible.
Not long after I started working at the University of Mississippi, I went to a panel at the American Studies Association to hear John Howard speak. On that panel was Minnie Bruce Pratt, who talked about her own aunt, whom she never realized was a butch until Leslie Feinberg saw her. I think I was too shy to really talk to her that day—introducing myself to John Howard was what I managed.
When I began working on the book that would become The Lesbian South, Pratt became one of my touchstones. Duke’s Rubenstein Library had her papers, and her letters appeared in a number of other collections as well, as did those of her friends, rivals, former lovers, subscribers, and fans. Her poetry collection, Crime Against Nature, marked the moment in 1989 when the Women in Print movement gained mainstream recognition, winning the Lamont Poetry Prize.
Crime Against Nature taught me, in a sense, the origin story of Minnie Bruce Pratt; it detailed the loss of custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian. Pratt had grown up in a middle-class family, joined a sorority, and married a man whose literary aspirations had mirrored her own. She had been protected from the harshest penalties her culture could mete out because she was considered conventionally pretty, because she conformed to the required initiations and rituals of her culture, because she married and bore two children—two boys. If she was a poet, that could be explained away, patronizingly, as a feminine hobby.
But when she stopped conforming—when she fell in love with a woman and refused to hide or deny that fact—she discovered the cost of stepping out of bounds. Her husband threatened to have her prosecuted for a “crime against nature,” a felony with guaranteed jail time; using this threat, he claimed sole custody of their two sons. Crime Against Nature, published long after that initial loss, explored the consequences of that break, in poetry so gorgeous and heartbreaking that even the mainstream judges’ panel of the Lamont Poetry Prize could not resist it.
Minnie Bruce Pratt might have crumbled under the weight of this grief. The trauma of that loss took years to process; she was, in some sense, still healing from that wound, long after her boys were grown and her grandchildren knew her as a doting grandparent. She healed through activism, refusing to accept the systems that devastated her; and through her writing, which deconstructed those oppressive systems and imagined something new.
She co-founded the Feminary collective in 1979 and wrote, in prose and poetry, incisive investigations of the power systems that informed the South. She kept learning about the intersections of inequality, and kept publicly agitating—against systemic racism, against bigotry, against Antisemitism. She refused essentialism and transphobia, helping to create Club T as an alternative to the transexclusionary Michigan Womyn’s Music festival. She wrote for the Daily Worker through 2023, critiquing the “money machine” of American capitalism explicitly. In ways large and small, in public protests and keynotes and classrooms, she kept teaching and organizing.
Pratt, more than most, understood the cost of gender—the cost of refusing to conform to one ‘acceptable’ version of femininity. She knew, when she came out in the 1970s, that she would never be hired in a tenure track job, and she was right. She spent her career adjuncting and speaking, and not until the end of her teaching career did she even have a full-time position with benefits. I recognize the irony that I was promoted writing about her work, but she was never given the most basic of job security for actually writing the work.
The thing about Minnie Bruce Pratt is that she understood this too, without bitterness. “Why,” she asked, “would the capitalist system reward me for critiquing that same system?” She wasn’t surprised, because she knew, in a way that most academics do not, that meritocracy does not rule, in academia or anywhere else. She knew that wages and benefits have nothing to do with worth and everything to do with the desires of the powers that be.
She understood the cost of gender but she did not accept that such a system had the right to bestow value or worth. And she also understood that conformity came with its own deadly cost—and of the two, the cost of freedom was preferable to the cost of subjectior.
That hers was the better way was clear in my every interaction with her. I didn’t really talk with Minnie Bruce Pratt until after The Lesbian South came out, when we invited her to deliver a keynotes at
SEWSA, an organization she helped to found. I soon learned that Minnie Bruce Pratt didn’t approach any of these accolades the way other scholars did. She made an appointment to call me on the phone, talked to me about our goals and the larger focus of the conference (“Envisioning a Feminist and Queer South”), and then delivered the best keynote we have ever had, focused on the specifics of our cultural location. She went to every session and asked questions and met with everyone; she brought first editions of her books and sold them, signed, at rock bottom prices; she went out of her way to make time to do an interview with a Southern Studies master’s student who worshiped her, and who told me, after she came up to him to make an appointment for his interview, “this is the best day of my life.” She met with students from Students Against Social Injustice (SASI) and wrote about them for the Daily Worker.
She went to dinner with a group of Sapphic women and told stories that had us laughing uproariously. The next time we invited her to come speak at UM, I arranged for several students to come with us, including one who had written her Ph.D. written comp on Crime Against Nature. Minnie Bruce Pratt also came and talked with me and my wife, a chef, for a long time; when she spoke with you, you were the most important person in the world to her.
Knowing Minnie Bruce Pratt has been one of the great privileges of my life. I, too, have learned something about the cost of gender, the cost of not fitting in and refusing to fake it. I lost the religious community that raised me when I came out, and that trauma—discovering that a community you loved would no longer love you when they knew who were really were—is something I always carry with me. But for all the things I lost, the things I have gained have been far greater. I have met people of extraordinary kindness and fierce bravery and active compassion, who fight for a better life for everyone, in spite of a system that seems designed to spit us out and break our hearts. People like Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Leslie Feinberg. I still remember that first talk I heard from Feinberg, back when I was a new graduate student. My friend at Harvard Divinity School had told me about Stone Butch Blues, and when I listened to Feinberg, so open and proud and brave in hir fitted suit, facing ignorant and often hostile crowds who didn’t want to know what ‘transgender’ meant, I knew my own limited upbringing was being cracked wide open. “We all go in together,” Feinberg said, “or we don’t go in at all.” When Feinberg was talking, in the early 1990s, even those in the queer community refused to embrace the trans folks who had always been central to gay liberation. Minnie Bruce Pratt embraced that cause, and so many others, disavowing the privilege a pretty femme might have claimed to proclaim the solidarity of all of us.
Minnie Bruce Pratt was, for me, a kind of queer saint, a model of everything I want to be as a teacher and a scholar: warm, engaged, insightful, generous, brilliant, noble. In the moment we find ourselves, when so many gains that her generation of activists won are being watered down or overturned or ignored, we need her inspiration more than ever. Pratt and her generation refused to allow conventional wisdom to make them doubt themselves, and committed to the hard work of deconstructing their bigotry and privilege and building coalitions that make the world better for all of us. Pratt refused to be divided from her allies and insisted that we all can grow and change and resist, in the face of the most hostile opposition. I will miss her more than I ever can express, and I will try to live up to the example she set for all of us.
The cost of gender is high, but the cost of conformity is higher still. Together, we can lift each other up and make a better, freer world for those who come after. Writers and activists like Minnie Bruce Pratt taught me that. May her memory forever be a blessing.