Another member of the Cheney family turns homosexuality into cold hard cash

Before Mary Cheney became a highly-paid gay fig leaf for the nice neanderthals at Coors (corporate motto: Not just racism - really bad beer!), mom showed the way by writing a bodice ripping book about lesbian sex.

Actually, that came out in an academic paper a few years ago, but now the novel is being rereleased so you, the american public, can share Lynne Cheney's thoughts about hot lesbian sex (and they are her thoughts, apparently - she told the Washington Times that she and Mary have a "mother-daughter agreement" not to discuss each other's "personal lives," which is presumably why she denied Mary's orientation during the last campaign. She didn't know. The whole agreement thing was just Lynne being a really crappy mom).

Special, is it not?

So, since this whole war thing is already financing her old age through Dick's pension from Halliburton, I figure she doesn't need my money. Probably can't borrow it either. Certainly even if the libraries had the funds to buy books, this sort of distasteful material would never get by guardians of the public morals like, er, Lynne Cheney.

It'd be interesting to see if Howard Stern could get away with reading from it on the radio (it is his kind of material) but I don't think he'll chance it.

As a public service, then, allow me to convince you that you do not want to read this book.

Sophie Dymond had overcome nineteenth-century prejudices to succeed as publisher of a hugely popular women's magazine. But when she left New York to revisit her native Wyoming, where her sister had died mysteriously, she left her prestige and power far behind. Waiting for Sophie was a world where women were treated either as decorative figurines or as abject sexual vassals where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husbands' hungers-where the relationship between women and men became a kind of guerilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted. In her effort to grasp the meaning of her sister's life and death, Sophie discovers the secret that tainted her life and begins to understand the experience of the vast majority of silent, trapped women.

The marriage act.

Sort of surprise you Mary grew up wanting to have sex with anyone, dunnit?

Through Sophie's eyes, we see a group of female fanatics convinced of female moral superiority to men, and conflating temperance with celibacy. They have become convinced of Woman's spiritual purity, expressed in tender friendships between women. Sophie first discovers the evidence of Helen's "affair" with Amy Travers in letters, journals, and underlined poems. "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will only be the two of us, and ... in the evenings I shall read to you while you go work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl," Miss Travers had written to Helen.

Repelled by lesbian ardor veiled as spiritual fervor, Sophie nonetheless comes to sympathize with the women's grievances -- abuse, prostitution, rape, frequent unwanted pregnancies -- and to admire their intimacy, although she cannot identify with it. Listening to one W.C.T.U. member, Lydia Swerdlow, crippled by the rigors of childbearing, insist that only reproduction can transfigure and redeem the animality of sex, Sophie understands despite herself: "For a moment, just a moment, she had a sense of the pressures which molded Lydia's feelings, and she saw that the way the other woman felt was not perverse, but a right response to her life. It had to do with wanting control; it was a different path to a goal Sophie herself was always seeking."

Watching two women embracing in a wagon after a fire, she "felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. ... She saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave."

So see, it's not the taint of sex, really. It's just that lesbianism forces one into contact with icky girls, and Lynne don't play that, which is a shame, because clearly men suck.

But that's another book.