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Immersed in Lesbian Punk
Lorrie Sprecher's debut novel Sister Safety Pin is a coming-out novel with a refreshing twist: the protagonist is into punk. The novel, told from Melany's point of view, takes place in the days before Tribe 8 and other queer punk bands hit the scene. It unfolds in punk nightclubs, lesbian bars, college classrooms, and the funky sort of apartments one lives in during their college years. Hallmarks of punk are sprayed across every page: safety pins and brightly colored hair, The Pretenders and slam dancing, leather jackets, black jeans, and bondage bracelets. Attitude is everywhere -- that desire to shock and offend people, to wake them up and make them see -- and underlying it all is an integrity, an earnest desire to change the bad in the world to better. It's perfect environment for a young radical feminist coming of age.
From the beginning, the focus is on identity: individual identity, lesbian identity, feminist identity, punk identity. "From my course in American literature, I knew it was perfectly natural for young men to engage in angst-ridden searches for their true identities," Melany says at the beginning of the novel as she begins a parallel and equally angst-ridden journey of her own (10). But she doesn't find much in the way of help in any of the texts she is studying. In fact, her final paper on Paradise Lost, "Eve: LesbianFeminist Extraordinaire," is failed by her Milton professor. And even D.H....