The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s StudiesMargaret Vandenburg knew I was becoming her. Not her, of course, but like her — what she is. A lesbian, professor, writer, mentor. You’re incurable, she told me smiling, you could never make it in civilian life. She didn’t mean that I was gay but that I cared too much about ideas. Sitting in her office on that wooden schoolroom chair three feet away from her with blazing cheeks, a college senior, I became, incurably, a lesbian professor. Margaret rejects essentialisms, including “born that way” conceptions of homosexuality. I suppose that I was born a lesbian, though I became one too. Desire is a learned behavior. I read novels, I watched films, I went to bars, I cut my hair. I sat in lecture halls and blushed continuously, magnetized. I looked at Margaret Vandenburg and wrote down everything she said. In time, the words like empty bowls filled up: androgyny, queer, butch, dyke. Could it have been otherwise? We don’t like to say that knowledge is the requisite to intimacy; we don’t like to leave desire in the hands of reason. Yet the parts of me that are incurable are those that Margaret helped to shape. She taught me my desire. At Barnard College, Margaret’s teaching and belief reorganized my own — this orienting and reorganizing was my college education, and some days I still wake up there. I’d be a stranger to myself without it and without her. How could anything be otherwise?
