Lesbian Fashion Struggles
Caroline Earleywine
Reviewed by Ali Hintz
Lesbian Fashion Struggles is a humorous, heartbreaking, deeply personal collection of poems about growing up and living in the rural South as a conventionally-attractive blonde lesbian. Earleywine uses fashion as a lense through which to view her struggles with self-expression. The first poem of the book, “Where I Come From,” investigates Earleywine’s ancestral queer history of “women / from the Old South who never married / who lived in their aprons and their closets.” In a way, this poem reads as a dedication: “I talk and I talk and I open / my mouth because they couldn’t, / because they can’t / anymore.”
She goes on to write about a subject well-traversed yet still important, the (non)acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks among their own families. The speaker’s experience, like many others, is mixed: her 93-year-old grandfather “assured me he thought no differently / of me, he asked if I wanted any of his old clothes” yet her father “at the family reunion… / introduces [her and her lover] as roommates, friends.”
Some of her strongest poems use fashion to question the impossible tradeoff between being oneself and being safe. In “Lipstick,” the speaker confronts her internalized misogyny that makes her reject markers of femininity in order to feel strong. However, instead of feeling strong with short hair and lipstick the shade of “camouflage,” she feels “washed out and smudged, / worn down to a nub.” She dreams of a shade “bright as a dare, not a blushing / apology, a shade so loud it / breaks teeth.” In the end, it’s not fashion that lends the speaker strength; it’s the freedom to choose how to live and look without the burden of others’ judgement. I never thought a book with the word “fashion” in the title could bring me to tears, but that is because of my own miscalculated rebellion from society’s expectations about what a woman should be. I wish I had this book when I was fourteen and trying to come to terms with my own queerness, but I’m sure glad I have it now.