Pratt, Minnie Bruce

Coming Out

In the 1970s, Pratt joined the National Organization of Women and worked in educational programming on subjects such as women's health, rape, and women and the media. She also helped organize a rape crisis hot-line and a domestic violence shelter, and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). In 1975, Pratt came out as a lesbian. In response, her husband took custody of their children, Ben and Ransom, when they were 6 and 7, and separated Pratt from her sons. Pratt decided not to fight for custody because on the advice of a lawyer, as she notes in Rebellion, she was afraid that her “lesbian identity would mean that I would never see my children again.” Unable to visit with her sons in her own home, Pratt often traveled hundreds of miles to see them.

In Crime Against Nature, her poems such as “Declared Not Fit, Sounds from My Previous Life” and “Seven Times Going, Seven Coming Back” portray [Page 1016]Pratt's grief and sense of intense loss during her forced separation from her sons. She also writes of the shame she felt in her identity as a lesbian mother, as in the poem titled “Shame”: “If I had been/more ashamed, if I had not wanted the world./If I had hid my lust, I might not have lost/them. This is where the shame starts.” In the poem “The Child Taken From the Mother,” Pratt defends her decision to come out in spite of the consequences, comparing the implications of questions she receives to those asked of “women who've been raped” which ignore the dynamics of “terror and power.” In the essay “Identity: Skin Blood Heart in Rebellion,” Pratt explores the connections between her experience as a lesbian mother who lost custody of her children with the experiences of other women of minority status.

Pratt's other poetry collections include The Sound of One Fork (1981), We Say We Love Each Other (1985), Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999), The Money Machine, and The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems (2003). For five years, Pratt served on the collective editorial board of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions. In S/HE (1995), a finalist in nonfiction for the American Library Association Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award and for the Firecracker Award, Pratt uses prose vignettes to question the boundaries of gender as conventionally understood in social and biological terms.

...