Girls in the men's room
You free your mind in your androgyny
Boys in the parlor
They're getting harder
I'll free your mind and your androgyny
No sweeter a taste that you could find
Than fruit hanging ripe upon the vine
There's never been an oyster so divine
A river deep that never runs dry
The birds and bees they hum along
Like treasures they twinkle in the sun
Get on board and have some fun
Take what you need to turn you on
Behind closed doors and under stars
It doesn't matter where you are
Collecting jewels that catch your eye
Don't let a soul mate pass you by
Garbage - "Androgyny"
The 1980s was an androgynous renaissance: Annie Lennox rocked a crew cut better than most men on daytime MTV, enormous shoulder pads were in, the pageboy dominated, and a defiant Grace Jones blended gender mores to a distorted paste in mainstream films like Conan the Destroyer and A View To A Kill. Although published in 1996, Push is set during the 1980s, and infused with a strong relevance to the time period it lives through. Push is as a much a product of the era it swims in as it is a testament to the intolerance which overwhelmed 1980s popular culture.
Precious is unquestioningly the novel's main character, but what about her classmates at the alternative school? While one of my biggest gripes over Sapphire's novel is the stifling lack of detail given to characters other than Precious, Mama, and Miss Rain, this could have been done on purpose. Rita, Consuelo, Jermaine - these characters are all carbon outlines for the audience to fill in however they wish. However, with all of the classmates and their unique (if underdeveloped) personalities taken into consideration, it is Jermaine who I find the most interesting and substantial. Jermaine is first described by Precious as a "a girl my color in boy suit, look like some kinda butch." It's a minimal but evocative description. Perhaps intentionally, Sapphire's self-portrait on the back of the book's jacket was the first image that popped into my head here. Between the angular, squared-off haircut and jagged expression Sapphire even looks like a dead ringer for the aforementioned Grace Jones. I would not be surprised if Sapphire inserted herself the novel as a composite of both Miss Rain and Jermaine, using distinct parts of her personality to embody these two characters. It would certainly complement the duality-heavy characters found in all of the readings we have analyzed in our class so far. Each character represents two sides of the lesbian stereotype: the butch, male-aversive Jermaine - she responds with a blunt "good" when Consuelo makes the observation that there "ain' no guys in our class" - versus the "straight-acting" lipstick lesbian embodied by Blue Rain. However, Blue Rain is by no means a 'weak' character. For example, she has no problem reasoning against Precious' homophobia when the latter expresses her Louis Farrakhan-informed prejudice: "Miz Rain say Farrakhan is jive anti-Semitic, homophobic fool." Finally, Blue Rain attempts to even change Precious' attitudes through calm reasoning, a move that is somewhat successful thanks to Precious' respect for her teacher. "Ms Rain say homos not who rape, not homos who let me sit up not learn for sixteen years, not homos who sell crack fuck Harlem. It's true. Ms Rain the one who put the chalk in my hand, make me queen of the ABCs." Unlike the relatively foppish gay and lesbian characters portrayed throughout mainstream media, Sapphire's Blue Rain is confident, strong, and intensely passionate. She doesn't resort to meekly backing into a corner nor violence when her personality comes into question. Considering the rampant ignorance and prejudice surrounding the LBGT community during the early 1990s, when "Precious" was written, Miss Rain is a rare mainstream example of a positive lesbian role model.
Though the audience learns enough about Jermaine from the character herself, it is through Precious' observations on her classmate which sheds the most light on androgyny, sexuality, and mainstream attitudes towards the two controversial ideas, especially in relation to the novel's time period. In fact, Precious has a strong aversion to Jermaine from the beginning, when she moves away from the woman when her lesbianism is thrown out into the open because Precious "don't want no one getting the wrong idea about /me/. To Precious, lesbianism is "freaky deaky," and even though her and Jermaine are the same color, they are not (and might never be) on the same plane of existence: "We about the same color but I think thas all we got the same. I is /all/ girl. Don't know here." There is a sense of learned elitism Precious extols towards Jermaine solely due to the latter's sexuality and aesthetic; it's ironic considering Precious has an extreme inferiority complex as far as almost anything else is concerned, owing to her abusive upbringing. Sapphire, who is bisexual herself, uses Precious' ignorance allegorically to represent the prejudice deviant sexualities faced in the 80s . Likewise, this same ignorance is used by Sapphire to point out and criticize the discrimination African-Americans exhibit towards people of their own ethnicity. Sapphire even wishes she had a "light-skinned" boyfriend throughout the novel, indicating there are certain shades of all-inclusive prejudice directed /towards/ blacks, /from/ blacks. On an wider scale, Precious' attitudes are essentially a microcosm for the rest of the world's behavior towards the LBGT community.
An early insight into Jermaine's character comes through in Precious' observation over the androgynous character's name. "Jermaine, which I don't have to tell you is a /boy's/ name, say, "It's who you know and I know too many people in the Bronx baby." Names are an exceedingly important component to one's self-identity. Is Jermaine even her real name? Sapphire keeps this ambiguous. Ultimately the audience has no idea, because even Jermaine's story at the end of the book mentions nothing about how she was named. Furthermore, her full name is Jermaine Hicks. It's an ironic last name; I don't really need to point out why (Jermaine's distaste for "honkies", an integral part to her character, as she so often reminds the audience, plays a big part in the blackly humorous but subtle wordplay over her name), but let me just say that with a surname like that, I could certainly understand why she might have changed her first name.
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