In 2000, Vermont established "civil unions" meant for same-sex couples. This form of marriage relies on the existence of a local gay and lesbian community, while contributing to the development of "gay and lesbian tourism" and pushing certain churches to revisit their treatment of same-sex couples. Gay and lesbian rights and rural communities are not mutually exclusive.
Born in Ohio in 1876 to wealthy parents, Natalie Clifford Barney is today better known for the freedom of her lesbian life-style than for her writing. Nevertheless, she was a serious writer, and consciously engaged in writing from a specifically lesbian point of view. With her lover Renée Vivien, she attempted to revive the cult of Sappho, and thus to revitalize a lost lesbian literary tradition. Through her weekly salon, Barney encouraged women writers, serving as a mentor and muse, and often as a lover. She enjoyed enduring friendships with many well-known women and men of letters, such as Gertrude Stein, Remy de Gourmont, Colette, and Dolly Wilde. Fictional characters based on Barney appear in novels by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Liane de Pougy, Djuna Barnes, and Radclyffe Hall. Barney's own writing consists of one novel (The One Who Is Legion, an eccentric meditation on gender and personality); a few collections of plays, poetry, and ''portraits'' of women; several volumes of memoirs; and two major volumes of ''pensées,'' or aphorisms, in which she comments on society, politics, and sexuality using a variety of urbane personae. Natalie Barney's work deserves more recognition than it has received, and her life still can serve as a model of self-creation uninhibitied by social strictures. aiming for ''eternity.'' Compared to her friend Djuna Barnes's, for example, even Barney's best work often seems rushed and unpolished, and does not resemble the sustained effort of a driven artist honing her particular style. Barney does, nevertheless, deserve a larger place in literary history than she has usually been granted. 1 She certainly understood the power behind literary tradition, as she understood the importance not only of promoting women's literature, but also of rediscovering or reimagining, if necessary, a feminist, and a lesbian, tradition.From her earliest memories, Natalie loved women. She turned to women for playmates, then for first crushes, and later for lovers. She danced and flirted with men, enjoying their conversation, but she had no desire for them. Natalie resisted her family's desire that she conform to American social expectations for her sex and class, finally creating herself anew as an expatriate American in Paris.When her life ended quietly in 1972, she had outlived most of her friends and admirers, and had been forgotten by nearly everyone. (She has never been completely forgotten, however: Judy Chicago made Natalie a guest at her Dinner Party, and the novels in which she appears are still read today.) As historians know, a life that is lived from day to day is nearly impossible to reconstruct. Barney didn't keep a diary, but, luckily, she wrote memoirs and had writers for friends, several of whom have obligingly left us portraits of her. Recent publications of Barney's work have revitalized interest in her; an internet search yielded 70 mentions of her name--most attached to brief quotations from her work--and several pages dedicated to her.
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