I cannot remember any part of my adult life without Minnie Bruce Pratt. My first encounter with her was on the pages of her poetry collection When We Say We Love Each Other. No, that isn’t quite right; I read her essay “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” for an undergraduate women’s studies class in the late 1980s at the University of Michigan. That essay was very popular in women’s studies circles, and it led me to the perfect book, Yours In Struggle. A collection of three essays, Pratt’s joined by two other essays, one by Barbara Smith and one by Elly Bulkin, Yours In Struggle is an early example of how lesbian-feminists theorized and explored intersectionality. In her essay, Pratt wrote, “I’m trying to talk about struggling against racism and anti-Semitism as issues of how to live, the right-and-wrong of it, about how to respect others and myself.” Reading this early essay of Pratt’s, I find many of the hallmarks of Pratt’s work: a profound commitment to feminism as an intersectional practice committed to addressing structural inequality through attention to people’s material lives. That perfect book, Yours In Struggle, defined my thinking about writing and about making books. Books were conversations among friends and political comrades. I set out in the world with Yours In Struggle as a guide to find a community of writers, a community of comrades.
Pratt’s second poetry collection, Crime Against Nature, won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1989. With Crime Against Nature, Pratt received accolades from the Academy of American Poets even as she provoked discomfort among the attendees at the award ceremony with her talk of lesbian bars, queer sexuality, and feminist politics. Firebrand Books, publisher of Crime Against Nature, published her collection of essays Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 in 1991 as well as her book of creative non-fiction, S/HE, an extraordinary collection that documents the beginning of her relationship with Leslie Feinberg as a meditation on gender and sexuality with beauty and grace. S/HE is the lyrical memoir of a poet offering vital linkages between lesbianism, feminism, and trans identities and positing a powerful queer, feminist, and trans analysis of gender. In 1995, when Firebrand Books published S/HE and Stone Butch Blues, Minnie Bruce and Leslie were rock stars in queer literary and political movements. When I listened to the audio recording of their reading at OutWrite, I was riveted by the alchemical charge between Minnie Bruce and Leslie. They passion for one another and for the ideas that they explored individually and together through their work emanated from the recording gripping me years later.
Minnie Bruce consistently published poems and collections of poetry through both university presses and independent feminist presses. Walking Back Up Depot Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999) documents and continues to grapple with the legacies of the US South. She writes in the title poem, “Words would not remake the past. She could not make it /vanish like an old photograph thrown onto live coals. / / If she meant to live in the present, she would have to work, do / without, send money, call home long distance about the heat.” In two collections, The Money Machine, published by Belladonna* in 2003 and Inside the Money Machine published by Carolina Wren Press in 2011, Minnie Bruce gave voice to the experiences of working people in the world. The poems in these collections demonstrate her commitment to making class visible in her extraordinary poems, in her political work, and in her daily life. Her new and selected collection, The Dirt She Ate published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2003 won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry.
Although Minnie Bruce was highly educated—she earned a PhD in English literature from the University of North Carolina—she lived a precarious economic life. Despite a prestigious PhD, award-winning poetry collections, and teaching commendations, she never secured a stable, tenured job. The inability of academic institutions to offer homes and supportive environments for lesbians and queer women like Minnie Bruce Pratt with capacious intellectual engagements is a terrible shame. Minnie Bruce was not alone in this institutional exile and economic precarity. Leslie Feinberg, Irena Klepfisz, Judith Katz, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other lesbian-feminist writers, theorists, poets, and intellectuals were shunned by academic institutions even though their work shaped powerfully lesbian-feminist and queer lives, giving us a sense of what is possible, what might be, if we imagine, if we leap.
Minnie Bruce’s most recent collection Magnified (Wesleyan University Press, 2021) extends the long conversation of love notes between Minnie Bruce and Leslie. Their relationship began in 1993 and offered public grist through multiple poems and books by each as well as through their public commitments to activism in queer communities, through Worker’s World, and other Marxist formations. Magnified contains poems that Minnie Bruce wrote during Leslie’s extended illness and death. The poems are powerful, spare, and luminous exploring the liminal spaces of life and death.
Through Sinister Wisdom I published a new edition of Crime Against Nature in 2013 as the inaugural book in our Sapphic Classic series. While working with Minnie Bruce on the new edition, I marveled at the seriousness with which she approached publishing and her work. She greeted each element of the publishing process with determination and resolve. From the respect that Minnie Bruce showed me, I learned to value my own labor as a publisher and as an editor—and to treat the publishing process as sacrosanct. Together, Minnie Bruce and Leslie modeled the importance of attention to ownership and control of writing as forms of labor. Their political analysis and how they implemented it into the practical elements of their lives inspire me. One of the final projects that Minnie Bruce and Leslie did together was create a freely distributed copy of Stone Butch Blues. That copy of Stone Butch Blues remains in circulation today. Minnie Bruce and I did something similar with her first chapbook, The Sound of One Fork.
The Sinister Wisdom edition of Crime Against Nature reminds readers of the price that Minnie Bruce Pratt paid for living her life as an open lesbian: she lost custody of her children and faced severe restrictions seeing them. It also documents her life after “the system of ownership and bigotry had almost killed me with grief.” Pratt wrote in the afterword of her “continuing life with my two grown children—and my five grandchildren—about my life with my lover of twenty years, my comrade, my transgender lesbian spouse.” She continued, “because the oppressions still persist. And so the struggle to answer and end the oppressions must also persist.”
There are so many ways Minnie Bruce’s life and work persist beyond her death. She leaves us a rich legacy from which we can challenge oppression and bigotry. Through her life we can model our own profound commitment to anti-racist work; we can imagine our own strategies of facing and reckoning with the systems in which we were raised and challenging them for systemic change. We can participate in activism like her work with LIPS and Camp Trans. We can read and learn and speak and act. Perhaps most profoundly we can engage in the family and community building work that Pratt did throughout her life. During her sickness and as the news of her death reached out into various communities, the ways that she knit kinship have been visible and profoundly moving. She was in her life surrounded by family in the most expansive sense of the word. Her sons and their partners, her grandchildren, chosen family, women and men that she mentored, offering support and advice as they found and did their work in the world, comrades, confidants, and more. Minnie Bruce created a world with vibrant social, political, and emotional connections.
While I love all the books that Minnie Bruce wrote, I love most of all the first collection, When We Say We Love Each Other. These poems are gorgeous, lyrical portrayals of lesbian love, lesbian bodies, lesbian fucking. Consider, for example, “Plums”:
I love the way you
give me cold plums. I love the
way you give me tongues.
These lines, written in 1983 were daring and audacious. When I read them first in the late 1980s, they still were. I think perhaps they are even today.
For nearly twenty years, I have carried handwritten notes from Minnie Bruce Pratt with me. She wrote to me after I reviewed S/HE for the Michigan LGBT newspaper in 1995. She wrote to me after I wrote about Leslie’s life and legacy at The Toast. Those letters buoyed my spirits; they inspired me; they grounded me. Recently, after visiting Eudora Welty’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, I wrote a letter to Minnie Bruce about the visit thinking about generations of white women in the South grappling with race with the best tools that they had. In response, Minnie Bruce sent a huge package to my house: a mounted poster of the Welty house that she had carried with her through all her travels and moves from her first visit to the Welty house. It, too, had a handwritten note. Now there will be no more letters in the mail from Minnie Bruce. No more surprise packages. My copy of When We Say We Love Each Other is dog-eared and well-loved. In the poem, “When I Call Your Name,” Minnie Bruce begins, “July is over” and concludes, “Tell me, love, how to speed time now, / How to slow it then, when I call your name.” Reading those lines there is the great sorrow that Minnie Bruce will not see the end of this July; she has no more time to speed or slow; she will not hear us when we call her name.
One of the last times we were together was in Oxford, Mississippi. We talked about my grandmother, who was then 98 or 99. She said she thought she would be like my grandmother and her mother—live well into her 90s, moving between the apartment in Syracuse and the home on the red dirt of Alabama. I wish that were so. I want to visit Minnie Bruce in my retirement. I want to approach my life with the same thought and care as she did; I want to think about things with her politically; I want to enact with her the commitments to feminism, lesbianism, anti-racism, countering anti-Semitism, Marxism, and imagining and creating a better world. Now I will have to show my fealty, my appreciation of her work, not in conversation, not with letters, but in my own quiet dedication. Fortunately, she taught me what that looks like.
