Lynne Cheney
Second Lady/Culture Warrior
Back in 1981, I read probably the hottest book of my middle-aged life. Up until that point, I was a devout Calvinist, shunning much the was unfamiliar to much of the omnipresent secular world, constantly berating the female employees at my office for wearing pants and shoes outside of the kitchen. Nothing screams “not of the elect” as a woman who shuns the conventions of my world view, then it happened.
I was participating in a joint book fire with my church and the John Birch people when I gave in. I reached down into my assigned burlap sack, brimming with such titles as My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume when I saw a book with two sultry women pioneers were staring out at me. My thought process was that this tome entitled Sisters by a woman I greatly admired, Lynne Cheney. Cheney was the wife of Rep. Dick Cheney (R-WY), who is currently the Vice-President of the United States of America. The year before, my wife and I had both written checks toward the Congressman’s re-election fund (full disclosure, my wife was not aware that I had opened a checking account in her name that I frequently used to launder money, seeing as I had forbidden her to pick up a pen or pencil for any task not germaine to child rearing). I had presumed that the book must be an appropriate work that had mistakenly been included by pranksters from the local Communist Party.
…She took off her dress, her petticoat, her corset, her stockings. Even her lacy undershif and drawers were wet, clinging to her body before she stripped them off. Standing naked, she opened the volume on the bedside table and took out the letter she had put there earlier. Clutching it with one hand, she pulled back the bedclothes with the other and got into bed, burying her face in the pillow.
Reading this words that seemed to leap off of the page and attack my senses was an awakening. Could words unlock such verboten desires, lying in a permanent state of dormancy since the womb, unleashed with such a fury that had no equal? To think that these words were nearly lost forever, rescued from the bonfire of profanity that sought to save the world from its own longings for freedom and sexual liberation. My life soon took on a series of changes.
I stopped beating my wife. I started reading the newspaper. I stopped littering. I grew a moustache. I went on the first of several sex tours in Thailand. I went to church only once per week. I had an affair with that girl from the clinic. I reconciled with my son. I loosened the spiked cilice around my thigh two notches. I wrote a song. I became a vegetarian. I had an affair with the guy at the library. I let my children celebrate Halloween. I began wearing eye liner. I bought a television. I allowed my wife to leave the house. I got divorced. I had erotic blood rituals.
What upsets me is that twenty-five years later; Lynne Cheney is denying much of the beautiful poetry that lies between the covers of Sisters. Recently on CNN, Cheney told Wolf Blitzer “I have never written anything sexually explicit.” This cut to the core of me. Not the sexy type of cutting that I and my third ex-wife used to partake in, but in a deeper, emotional sense. Cheney opened my eyes to the power of words and sex and combining the two in book form. My understanding of women grew after reading this book. Consider this passage:
…Soon, she moved to the floor, where she began making a pattern with objects from the mantelpiece. She was sitting with her legs bent in inverted V’s, and when she leaned back on her arms to consider her arrangement, Sophie saw that the front of her dress strained slightly. Her breasts were growing, and Sophie wondered if she had begun to menstruate yet. And if she had, would she tell her about it? Would her odd matter-of-factness carry over to her own coming of age?
Sophie remembered when her own flow had begun. She felt obliged to tell her grandmother, had gone looking for her, not because she wanted to tell her, but because she thought she should. Deer Woman had been sewing a pair of moccasins when Sophie found her. “The bleeding—it’s begun for me,” she blurted out.
I know for a fact that this passage is sexually explicit, because I read it to the congregation one day at Church and was informed by the ministry that it was clearly sexually explicit and that leather chaps were inappropriate for the Sabbath. Unfortunately I was branded on my thumbs with two “P’s” (for perversion) and shunned for eternity. It mattered not that I was considered part of the Elect, for as far as I was concerned, God made the rules, John Calvin wrote them down, and I was in the heaven club no matter what I did on this earthly paradise of sinful delights.
I was delighted in 1986 when Mrs. Cheney was appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Here is the golden opportunity where the government can now fund more works like Sisters and perhaps more of my hidden passions my manifest themselves. What appalled me was how Mrs. Cheney did not follow the lead established by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) and fund work by Renaissance men such as Robert Mapplethorpe, a man who had photographed me several times while we vacationed together. Why had she abandoned her sensibilities? I was left heartbroken, sad and blue-balled.
Mrs. Cheney has more recently avoided her true past. She lied to Cokie Roberts in 2000, who inquired about her lesbian daughter Mary. "Mary has never declared such a thing," despite that she in fact had ten years prior and had been working for Coors Brewing Company as their official "liaison to the gay community."
Mrs. Cheney does not believe in a static history, rather one that evolves where events change to resemble completely different realities. She pressured the Department of Education to destroy 300,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled “Helping Your Children Learn History” (costing taxpayers $110,360). The objection centered on the National History Standards that she helped fund under the NEH with the Department of Education. She criticized the final product for giving insufficient attention to heroes like the Wright Brothers and Robert E. Lee and too much attention to lawbreakers like Harriet Tubman.
Personally, I really don’t care what Mrs. Cheney does to American History, but her past connects deeply to my past. Reading Sisters, I felt alive for the first time. To deny the sexiness of this work is to deny my sexiness, which I can’t let happen. I’ve had far too much sex, so there is no going back. In full disclosure, I am fully protected in my activities, as was made clear in this passage from Sisters:
…There were several small sponges, each in a silken net with a string attached. There were packets marked “Preventive Powders,” and lined up in neat rows were several dozen condoms.
“But the sheaths are really the best. Sometimes men don’t like them.” She stared into space for a moment, seeming to remember something; then she gave a small shrug. “But since it is they who get us with child, don’t you think they should cooperate?”
Safety first, I couldn’t agree more.
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