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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 103
Jane De Lynn’s 1990 novel Don Juan in the Village also unfold in the “timeless
and tasteless world of dyke noir.” But, for the purposes of this discussion, I will
focus on Sarah Schulman’s 1988 novel, After Delores.
In keeping with her earlier work, Schulman sets her third novel (and first
publication by a mainstream press) in the lesbian subcultural milieu of New
York’s Lower East Side. Its narrative chronicles four months in the life of an
unnamed narrator, a nihilistic, working class, coffee shop waitress whose life has
been unbearable since the title character abandoned her for another woman.
Haunted by her unresolved feelings, and fearful of the consequences which
might result from a direct confrontation with Delores, the narrator attempts to
escape depression over her situation by conducting an investigation into the
murder of a recent acquaintance—a teenage runaway go-go dancer whom she
calls Punkette. Within the larger narrative context of a crime story, After Delores
examines the narrator’s unsuccessful attempts to assert “justice” for herself by
seeking revenge against Delores for the betrayal of their relationship.
Like the antiheroes of men’s hard-boiled fiction, the narrator’s interest in
solving Punkette’s murder has little to do with a desire to preserve the State’s law
and order. Instead, she begins her pursuit of vigilante street justice because “No
one [else] was going to take the time to find out what really happened” (30). The
narrator’s investigation of the murder is aided by an “old-time femme,” a woman
who prefers to live her life as a 1950s lesbian version of Priscilla Presley. After
assisting Priscilla in achieving her “perfect moment” of revenge (Priscilla “tells
off” a former lover at a public dance), the narrator realizes that “If you waited for
the right moment you could eventually get revenge” (4). More importantly, the
narrator is also left with Priscilla’s gun, “it was tiny, with a pearl handle, deadly,
sleek and feminine” (10). Noting that possession of the gun frees her from
worry, “because the next time somebody went too far, [she] had the power to go
farther” (27), the narrator begins her pursuit of Punkette’s killer while she
simultaneously imagines new ways to “even the score” with her ex-lover, chiefly
by murdering Delores’s new girl friend, Mary Sunshine:
I could blow Sunshine’s brains right out of her head. I’d splatter them all
over Franklin Street. I’d have to kill myself too, of course, since the world
doesn’t understand moments when there are no alternatives but murder.
People don’t see your pain when you are the killer. So I’d blow away my
insides and Delores would have to live with that for the rest of her life.
There was something so attractive in that picture that I decided it would be
better to give Priscilla back her gun as soon as possible.
(12)
Despite her second thoughts, the narrator decides to keep the gun while she tries
to bear in mind that Priscilla’s gun is “a trump [she] could only play once” (27).
Through a series of chance encounters and accidental discoveries of evidence,
the narrator unravels the mystery of Punkette’s death and kills her murderer, a