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CHAPTER 3

Cancer Butch

Trip Up the Fast Lane

I didn’t set out to test-drive a sports car. Commuting one morning in my work-a-day Honda Civic, I noticed rows of BMWs and a huge banner inviting me to Come and drive one! Raise money for breast cancer! I screeched into a U-turn: I had always wanted to try out a BMW roadster. The showroom, decked out with pink roses, ribbons, helium balloons, and a huge array of finger foods donated by Whole Foods, reminded me of a movie star’s funeral, only the centerpiece was a BMW 3 Series instead of a coffin. That car would spend the summer purring through air-conditioned dealerships across the the southern swath of the United States being signed—yes, written on—by test drivers. The gleaming hostess, a cancer version of Vanna White, exclaimed, “You can drive as many times as you want to,” with the confided aside, “but you can only sign once.” That I was in North Carolina only added to the novelty of the experience.

Near the door, another exhibit—“The BMW Pink Ribbon Collection”—featured the usual array of logo’ed stuff—towels, coffee mugs, sport bags, caps—all embossed with the words The Ultimate Drive. A fellow test driver said, with real feeling, “It’s really beautiful, they did such a good job this year.” I took a pamphlet inviting me to “Show you care with style.”

Beckoned more by style than care, I turbo-charged down the highway minutes later, encapsulated within exquisite walnut and leather. (This was no CT scanner tube.) Five minutes after that, I accidentally diverged from the specified route, thus driving uninsured the same stretch of freeway on which my own car had been totaled by a semi the previous month. (For a minute, cancer seemed less dangerous than the current risk.) At least I was Earning-a-Dollar-a-Mile-for-Breast-Cancer. I turned pink at the thought.

It can be hard to untangle the motives of the breast cancer–corporate care nexus. I bought a Hansen’s grapefruit soda the other day, which bade me to “Save lives, Send tabs”: If I disengaged the pink opener from the can (“use extreme care!”), washed it, put it in an envelope, and sent it, they’d donate a dime to the cause. The right postage stamp would earn another two cents. Although it is difficult enough to find out how much money these campaigns collect, it is nearly impossible to figure out where that money goes. Nevertheless, BMW raised $9 million through its campaign, and I was able to drive the car I’ve long fetishized.¹

Despite the thrill, something about the campaign struck me the wrong way. The advertising for the event made it seem as if a cure were just down the road, although survival rates have barely accelerated in the last century. Nor did the atmosphere of self-congratulation and celebration leave space to mention several known carcinogens that the auto industry has lobbied hard to allow in gasoline and in car manufacture (a paradox perhaps made easier to swallow after the collective loss of brain cells from decades of inhaling leaded gas fumes). And the whole event, with the pink, the products, the dealer’s marketing strategy, doubled down on the same traditional femininity that seeps through the entire complex of women’s cancer, such as the pamphlets that let women know how soon after mastectomy they can return to “washing walls.”²

It reveals my own messed-up romanticism to admit my reaction at diagnosis: Why can’t I have a cool disease, like HIV/AIDS? I wanted a queer disease, a young-guy disease. Susan Sontag wrote in the 1970s of the varying licenses bestowed by different diseases: “The tubercular could be an outlaw or a misfit; the cancer personality is regarded more simply, and with condescension, as one of life’s losers.”³ Not only does a cancer diagnosis tend to relegate one to the world of loserdom, but breast cancer in particular drags one by the hair into the territory of gender. When diagnosed with breast cancer, the literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick thought, “Shit, now I guess I really must be a woman.”⁴

Moving between self-elegy and elegy of her friend Michael Lynch, a gay man living with HIV/AIDS, Sedgwick examines diagnosis and gender in her article “White Glasses.” She details her cross-country search for a pair of spectacles. She wanted those very glasses that Michael wore as a flaming signifier, to augment her own self-identification as a gay man. But on finally finding them, she realized with dismay that on a woman “the pastel sinks . . . invisibly into the camouflage of femininity.”⁵ In the end, the glasses merely reinforced the very codes of femininity that Sedgwick aimed to shuck. In a similar way, breast cancer—not the breast itself—sinks her further into the obscurity of white womanhood.

You can spend your whole life creating an identity different from the one people smear onto you (girl, husband-seeker, spinster, mother, whatever), and then one charming little diagnosis threatens to suck you under, into the archetypal death doled out by the feminine body. Like a huge “we told you so,” diagnosis provides the capstone to the argument that biology defines you. “They” (whoever they are), with hurtling finality, shamed me into accepting the truth of my sex.

Then again, gender signifiers provide an easier conversation topic than does mortality. “Shit, I am woman (fine, have it your way)” is more palatable than “I’m also person—animal, mortal, finite.” What would it mean to acknowledge—really acknowledge—the sheer number of people who literally rot from the inside out each year, with no way to stop it, while so many known causes of cancer continue to be pumped into the environment? Just like Sedgwick’s white glasses, which sank “banally and invisibly into the camouflage of femininity on a woman,” cancer everywhereness drops into a sludge of nowhereness. The focus on pink and breasts and comfort conveniently displaces sheer terror, as do the ubiquitous warning signs. While the gay activist slogan silence = death decreed public outcry, for cancer, ubiquity = death. Now, that’s terrifying.

BOMBSHELL

In The Cancer Journals, feminist Audre Lorde compiled journal entries, poetry, and analysis to explore her experience of breast cancer in the 1970s. The book brought cancer out of two closets: the personal closet of disguise and the political closet of cancer production. Lorde believed that the pressure toward prostheses and reconstructions tended, on the one hand, to prevent women from coming to terms with the multiple losses that accompany the disease and, on the other, to make women feel the lack of a breast as a stigma: a sign of shame, a token of lost sexuality, and therefore an indicator of cultural worthlessness.

In considering mastectomy as a gendered stigma, Lorde poses the counterexample of the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, who wore an eye patch to cover an injury sustained in World War II. To Lorde, the patch was an insignia of Dayan’s suffering and thus his strength and courage: “The world sees him as a warrior with an honorable wound, and a loss of a piece of himself which he has marked, and mourned, and moved beyond. And if you have trouble dealing with Moshe Dayan’s empty eye socket, everyone recognizes that it is your problem to solve, not his. Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also.”⁶

For Lorde, the signifier of the scar presented opportunities for communicative and collective action. The Cancer Journals—a critical part of both the history of cancer and the history of feminism—offers an exhilarating read. Lorde called it as she saw it, unapologetically. When offered a prosthesis to stuff into her bra, she responds, “For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim.”⁷