I'll Never Not Think of Dorothy Allison

A tribute to a femme dyke writer who personified pride.

I’ve long harbored a fantasy of going up to Guerneville just to track down Dorothy Allison. I’d said it in half-jest as recently as in the last few weeks before I knew she was sick. When I found out she passed last week, I said goodbye to that dream but did not say goodbye to her.

Instead, I picked up The Women Who Hate Me, her glorious work of poetry, and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, a short memoir published after her 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina brought her fame. I watched the short film made about her in that same era of the late ‘90s when she’d already been writing for 20 years, having worked all that time to get really good at it. And she was — even in her early articles published in feminist magazines like Qwest and Conditions, she had a talent for telling hard truths. Her smutty stories in On Our Backs in the ‘80s were not just titillating but ripe and rich with lifesize senses built into her sentences. She was a storyteller who told our stories through the rarified lens of her own lesbian life.

When I say I’m a lesbian, I will never not think of Dorothy Allison.

Photos by Lynda Koolish, gifted to me in 2023