I hear a calling that's hard to resist

A blogger named Hugo, whose blog is new to me, wrote a thoughtful if somewhat-lengthy post about something of concern to me. Hugo, it seems, is a college teacher who teaches courses on lesbian and gay American history and women's studies. I don't know whether he's straight or gay, but he's obviously not a woman--not even a short haired lesbian. He writes:

even though I believe passionately that men can and should teach women's studies courses, I also believe we must do so with a profound sense of humility. Ultimately, no matter how strongly we sympathize with our sisters, no matter how committed we are to women's liberation and equality, we can never claim to be equally affected by the issues we are discussing. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, I will have not suffered any loss to my personal autonomy. Regardless of whether or not I am pro-choice or pro-life, I am incapable of truly understanding -- on a visceral and emotional level -- what it means to live as a woman in a body that many believe ought to have its natural processes regulated by the state. That's not a personal failure on my part, and it's not something for which I feel compelled to apologize. But while men can be deeply interested in women's issues (I am) we cannot claim personal expertise in what it means to live as an embodied woman.

It must be obvious where I feel a twinge of recognition. I'm a male writer who likes writing women characters, and in the last year or two gay women characters. And so I have some expectation or fear that somebody, somewhere, sometime, is going to ask how I can be so immodest? How can I claim I can write about "The Woman's (Or Lesbian) Experience?"

Writing fiction about people different than you is different from teaching college courses about them, of course, and the artist does get some dispensation. But if someone asked me, my answer would be something along the lines that the Keitha and Annabel stories are not actually about The Lesbian Experience. They're about me. I'm writing about lesbians in order to listen to and speak through voices, or parts of myself, that are harder to deal with as "masculine."

But anyway, this Hugo makes some thought provoking and well-worth reading points.