Rubyfruit Jungle

Women kissing women is beautiful. And women making love together is dynamite. So why don’t you just let yourself go and get into it.

No, I wasn’t surprised, but it still brought me down. I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her.

“Oh, I see, they won’t take orders from a woman, eh?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t noticed they were too good at taking orders from one another.”

Besides being biologically superior, that ole frog is more together than I am. That frog doesn’t want to make movies. That frog hasn’t even seen movies and furthermore that frog doesn’t give a big damn. It just swims, eats, makes love, and sings as it pleases. Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they’re the pinnacle of evolution?

Of all careers I thought film would be somewhat open, but their pathetic egos had bloated to outrageous proportions behind a small Arriflex and they resented a woman who could compete on “their” territory and worse, win.

She laughed. “That’s funny, that’s truly funny. Why the entire world must look different to you.”

“I think the lady doth protest too much. You wouldn’t promote such blatant lesbian propaganda if you were sure of yourself and your sexual identity.”

“I mean men bore me. If one of them behaves like an adult it’s cause for celebration, and even when they do act human, they still aren’t as good in bed as women.”

What the hell am I going to do with my life? Tell me what to do?”

“I can’t. It wouldn’t mean anything if I told you. You got to tell you.”

“It’s so hard.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s always hard no matter who you are, where you came from, what color your skin happens to be or what sex you got stuck with. It’s the hardest decision every individual has to make in their life, probably.”

Goddammit! No matter what happens to me I’ll still have the knowledge inside my head and nobody can take that away from me. And someday, even if you can’t see it coming, I’m going to make use of that knowledge and make my movies. My movies, you hear me, Holly—not soppy romances about hapless heterosexuals, not family dramas about sparkling white America, not Westerns that run red from first reel to last or science fiction thrillers where renegade white corpuscles fill the screen—my movies, real movies about real people and about the way the shit comes down. Now if I don’t get the money to do that until I’m fifty, then that’s the way it is. I’m doing this so help me God and it’s not for nothing.