Surface Tension: Love, Sex, and Politics Between Lesbians and Straight Women

Addressing seemingly all the permutations of lesbian/straight relationships and identity (the friendship between gay and straight women, straight women who pass as gay women, bisexual women, sexual relations with lesbians who eventually become straight), poet and essayist Daly's collection is certainly wide-ranging, but it's also rather formless. Many of the pieces are confessional, but readers (or readers likely to buy this book) will find that the guilt, the disapproval, not to mention the mechanics, sound familiar. Some writing is jargon-filled (``culturally I am woman-identified''; ``I told Becky it was a little hard for me to be nonreductive'') or just bad (``maybe she's desirous in general currently and I'm receptive to desirousness.''). There is some good writing: notably Lisa Palac's delightful, bemused description of sexual experimentation through the personals and Guinevere Turner's touching account of a chance encounter with a woman who shared her childhood in a commune. Two straight women, perhaps because they are outsiders among outsiders, give very clear readings of social and political complications: Ann Powers discusses the muddled issue of straight women committed to queer politics, while Daphne Merkin is painfully honest in her opinion that male homosexuality has a greater validity than lesbianism: ``When I think of two women together, I think of it as the default position... I have no doubt that somewhere in this assessment floats a sadder, more insidious piece of reality, having to do with the way women continue to be perceived by society at large and how we in turn assess one another.'' (Jan.)