He stuffs the brassiere he is wearing
in cotton wool rags socks, and I
help him dress him in a skirt
tie a bow around his neck, and he
takes a seashell and puts it as a vulva […]
I rape him with no lust […]1
These lines written by Yona Wallach are part of her trilogy of plays that unfolds her turbulent relationship with a man referred to in her biography as Tadeush. Wallach was considered radical, both in her life and in her poetry. She met Tadeush after being treated with LSD in a mental hospital to which she admitted herself to "experience madness." Tadeush was a thief, a cross-dresser and a philosopher influenced by Genet and Nietzsche, as well as a supporter of Hitler. Their chalet was a petite room in an abbey turned hostel in Jerusalem, where artists and lowlifes cohabited. The couple's versatile sex life in the abbey included gender role-playing, sharing their bed with other(s), abusing and enjoying one another.
This relationship came to an end, after Wallach almost stopped writing while she was with him and "suspected him to be an intellectual thief, a medium who steals ideas from her head adopts her speech and becomes her."
Wallach's sex life and fantasies are registered in many of her poems. In 1970, Wallach published PreSleep Poem: Tribute to Godard, today known as Another Sex:
It's been insinuated there's another sex
good that someone knows about it
If there is another sex
bring it here and we shall know it
we shall speak candidly, there is or there isn't
As we are already very tired
of our virgin wives
and always in pictures
it's something other […]2
In 1997, the poem was performed by a trans singer as part of an album that composed Wallach's poetry related to sex. It was embraced by the LGBTQ community, as well as by academia, as denoting that there is another sex. Ironically, Wallach's irony was ignored by a large part of her audience. This méconnaissance is mentioned by poetry critics every now and then, but forty years after her death, Wallach is today widely considered a pioneer of queer poetics.
Wallach wanted "fame." With her poems, she created a unique veil, a successful trompe-l'oeil for the abyss of the sexual non-relation she knew something about. Her poems allowed her to create this other sex she didn't manage to create with Tadeush in their chalet. This veil perhaps worked too well, revealing a sexual non-relation between a poet and her readers.
[1] Sarna Y., Yona Wallach: Biography, New Edition: Keter, 2009, p. 209, author's translation. All quotes by Wallach are taken from her texts curated in the biography.
[2] Wallach Y., "Sex Aher." Achshav, 1970, author's translation.
