Bohemia's Swinging Lovers

by Ellen Lansky

Lavender Magazine, July 2, 1999

A Conversation with Barrie and Linnea

Barrie Jean Borich's new book, My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage, is a document of and a monument to her long-term relationship with Linnea Stenson.

My Lesbian Husband is a stunning display of talent and craftsmanship; its publication in September will prompt discussions about long-term relationships in and beyond the GLBT community. My Lesbian Husband will cause readers all over the map to reconsider their locations, to question their coordinates.

Lansky: You two are fabulous retro-lesbians. How does your retro style express your lives together?

Borich: It's not very mysterious. I married my father. Linnea has the same tastes in music and the arts as my father. And we like '50s kitsch.

Stenson: We've never really swung with the pack.

Lansky: How have the discussions and debates about "gay marriage" affected the writing of your book?

Borich: It entered the book midway. It gave me a lot of fodder. But attending our siblings' weddings was more significant. We've been together longer than any of our siblings.

Stenson: We also had friends that were performing ceremonies to celebrate their relationships, although at one point I think we did swear we'd never get married.

Lansky: Creative nonfiction tends to blur the differences between the "true" and the "real." How does putting your relationship at the center of a work of creative nonfiction blur the boundaries between the true and the real? For example, to what degree was getting married affected by the writing of the book? How did getting married affect the work-in-progress?

Borich: For me, this kind of writing is a journey. I have a question. I want to figure out the answer through writing. It's a kind of immersion journalism, where I'm reporting on my own life. So, yes, the writing impacts the life. The life impacts the writing. But the wedding itself was its own thing. One of my students said, "Now you're going too far." But the questions of the work brought me to the questions of life. It's one of the reasons why a book like this is so exhausting to write. The real keeps changing. How do you feel about getting written about, Linnea? Does it feel any different this time?

Stenson: I have a certain distance from the creative process. I make decisions based on what's the right thing to do. I'm not thinking about how art and life intersect. The person in the book is a version of me. It's something that's true about me, but not real about me.

Borich: How is it not real?

Stenson: Emotionally, it's true. But you, as a writer, are always an imperfect filter.

Borich: I wonder how you would write the same book. You'd probably begin, "The day we got married. was it a Tuesday or a Wednesday?"

Stenson: That's exactly right. Something can be emotionally true, but it's not actually real.

Borich: Now we're talking about modernism. Which brings us back to "retro-lesbians." We remain in our modernist bebop, with occasional steps into postmodern confusion.