Jovette Marchessault, the first Québécoise novelist unequivocally to declare her lesbianism, was born on February 9, 1938, in Montreal but spent her earliest years in the nearby countryside where her father was employed as a munitions worker during World War II. In her autobiographical novel, La Mère des herbes (1980; translated as Mother of the Grass, 1989), she recounts the devastation she felt when the family was forced to move to one of the poorest districts in the center of Montreal after the munitions plant closed.
The sense of a lost paradise is one that appears frequently in her prose fiction where she often laments the disappearance of paradises of all sorts--sexual, spiritual, natural--crushed by the heavy weight of religious and social sanction.
The strongest influence on Marchessault's early life was her grandmother, a half-Indian herbalist, gifted pianist, and inspired painter of hen portraits. This formidable creativity served, she said, as a kind of "alibi" that relieved her of the necessity to create in her own right.
Instead, she spent the years between thirteen (when she left school) and thirty-one in a series of jobs that ranged from washing diapers to operating a machine in a garment factory, to clerking in a bookstore and, finally, to a four-year stint pursuing delinquent accounts for the Grolier encyclopedia firm.
These jobs were punctuated by long Greyhound bus trips to Mexico and the West Coast and visits to the bars and cafes frequented by gays and intellectuals in the heavily repressive atmosphere of Duplessis's Quebec. Through this whole period, she read voraciously, becoming almost wholly self-educated.
( Read more... )Citation Information
Author: Klein, Yvonne M.
Entry Title: Marchessault, Jovette
General Editor: Claude J. Summers
Publication Name: glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture
Publication Date: 2002
Date Last Updated July 28, 2003
Web Address
www.glbtq.com/literature/marchessault_j.html Publisher glbtq, Inc.
1130 West Adams
Chicago, IL 60607
Today's Date February 9, 2013
Encyclopedia Copyright: © 2002-2006, glbtq, Inc.
Entry Copyright © 1995, 2002 New England Publishing Associates
( Further Readings )More LGBT History at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Gay Classics
Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro III (born December 31, 1948), better known as Joe Dallesandro, is an American actor and Warhol superstar. Although he never became a mainstream film star, Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century, as well as a sex symbol of gay subculture.
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A Note in the Margin by Isabelle Rowan
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