Center & Bottom:“I have come to claim …” The Marilyn Monroe poem and its preceding illustration, from Edward the Dyke, by Judy Grahn (1971).
“Over and over Grahn calls up the living woman against the manufactured one, the manmade creation of centuries of male art and literature. Look at me as if you had never seen a woman before … Our lovers teeth are white geese flying above us / Our lovers muscles are rope-ladders under our hands. Marilyn Monroe’s body, in death, becomes a weapon, her bone a bludgeon to beat the voyeurs, the fetishists, the poets and journalists vampirizing off the ‘dumb-blonde’ of the centerfolds.”
— From “Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman” by Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 1979).
“Before I left [Dr.] Caprio’s care, he told me a professional secret: he had a friend who practiced in New York City and L.A., whose patient was Marilyn Monroe. It was against the rules of psychiatry to tell me about her, he said, and then immediately told me she had been extremely depressed for months, had been casting about for some other way to be, to find her place in the world, or who she really was … and so, he said, in her desperation (that was his term), she had gone to Fire Island. My ears perked up. I had heard of Fire Island, though only in hushed tones. Fire Island was some kind of Gay Mecca, and not just anyone could go there. I certainly couldn’t imagine going. It was like Avalon, or any fairy underworld, you had to know who to ask, you had to know the code … That Marilyn Monroe had imagined for a moment that she might be a lesbian, this was an amazing thought for the twenty-two-year-old social outcast who worked nights making sandwiches and slicked her hair back to go to the gay bar on weekends. Who was now on a Fire Island of her own, in Frank Caprio’s office, asking whether she might be ‘curable’ of a life that seemed only an affliction. And here was the doctor’s revelation that she, Marilyn, the greatest beauty of the US of A, the great Monroe wanted to see this life, my scummy little life, this outlaw lesbian life, as if it might be a better choice … Not long after this visit to Fire Island, on August 5, 1962, Monroe died … I was devastated by her death, that an artist, a talented, ambitious working-class woman could climb so high and not make it very far into her thirties without crashing.”
