Jeanne Córdova was notably different from the usual militant lesbian-feminist of the era. For example, though she was a leader in the feminist strike against the gay male leadership at the Los Angeles Gay Center, she understood that ultimately what was at stake was the health and unity of the gay and lesbian cause, that burning the Center down, as some wanted to do, or taking it to court, as others wanted to do, would only hurt the very important cause. While many lesbian-feminists wanted to throw gay men out with the bath water, Jeanne sensibly argued that it was the duty of lesbians to “drag our gay brothers into enlightenment.” She was able to make important distinctions, too subtle for many would-be leaders, between the enemy and the misguided opposition. As any good leader must, she kept her head while all about her were losing theirs.
She would do anything for the sake of the institutions and projects in which she believed. For example, when the owner of the company that printed The Lesbian Tide dubbed a particular cover obscene and refused to print it, she struck a deal with him. She would give him an hour’s worth of tips “for getting broads into bed” in return for his printing the issue. He agreed. Of course Jeanne gave him “all the wrong information I could think of.” She was a girl-butch-knight, fighting the dragons that would destroy the movement with any weapon she could muster. Like all good knights, she owned a dashing “Lionheart” that took her from dragon to dragon. Though Lionheart was not a trusty steed in this case, but a car—a red Cougar—“he” was as loved as any knight of old loved his trusty steed.
When We Were Outlaws evokes a time that will seem like ancient history to many who live in an era when the president of the United States has called himself a “fierce advocate” for LGBT rights, major American businesses advertise in queer publications, the words gay and lesbian are used often and neutrally in the mass media, and Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow have their own national television shows. To those of us who lived that time, though, it will seem like only yesterday—those years Jeanne writes about, when we were outlaws. For anyone who lived through the 1970s, this book will be a stunning reminder of how young we once were, how earnest and revolutionary and deliciously naïve.
With humor and passion, Jeanne interweaves in this book the story of her political activism with the story of her romantic adventures. She focuses particularly on a love affair that was more than an adventure—in an era when non-monogamy was requisite for any politically-correct lesbian. She shows how lesbian-feminists tried to live their politics in their personal lives—and the complications that such youthful idealism often wrought. Those who weren’t around in the 1970s will be intrigued to learn of the rules of the social institutions around lesbian-feminism, how you were supposed to conduct yourself in a long-term non-monogamous relationship, the androgyny of style to which all lesbian-feminists were supposed to adhere. These rules may seem so amusing and antiquated to us now, but Jeanne presents them not just with the wisdom of hindsight but also with tenderness for the well-meaning but sometimes misguided enthusiasms of that era. She shows what happened when the idealistic theories of lesbian-feminism met the realities of life and human emotions. She shows how theory that makes sense in the abstract can create such pain and complications for those who try to live by it.
Jeanne brings great honesty to the portraits she paints in this book—even to her own portrait, which is often a painful task for a memoirist. She depicts herself as being sometimes wide-eyed, sometimes wild-eyed; sometimes a dreamer, sometimes a schemer; sometimes impetuous, and sometimes wise. Her insights into what made her tick—especially the difficult family dynamics that we are all destined to repeat in our most significant relationships—are stunning in their acuity and frankness.
When We Were Outlaws offers a huge slice of lesbian-feminist history as it played itself out in 1970s Los Angeles. It’s a moving evocation of the sweet innocence and incredible enthusiasm of youth, and of a time that feels like yesterday but happened—incredibly—almost two generations ago.
Acknowledgements
This is a memoir and also a history book. I wish to thank my research editor, Lynn Harris Ballen, for her hundreds of hours devoted to bringing these political events to accurate life. And my P.C. editor, Ariana Manov, who reviewed each chapter for its political nuance. Without either of them I might have surrendered well before the twelve years it has taken to bring you this story. My thanks also to Judith Branzburg for her fine editing. No one could have wished for a more supportive editor in preparing this work for its publisher by cutting, oh, say, twenty-five thousand unnecessary words.
It does indeed take a village to birth a book. My village people are:
Don Weise, former editor at Alyson Books, who first accepted my work and lent his prodigious mind to showing me how to make it better.
Author and friend Mark Thompson, who became my coach when I was down to the twenty yard line, and helped push me through the fear of hurtling over the end zone. For his great generosity of spirit and humble wit, I thank friend and champion Stuart Timmons, who encouraged me to write “important political stories” even when he was exhausted from his own great work, GAY L.A. Deepest thanks also to “Rachel” for her uncommon courage and willingness to share our story.
My teachers and fellows at Lambda Literary Foundation’s first Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices—particularly Terry De Crescenzo, Fenton Johnson, and Katherine Forrest —for her stalwart belief in me. Writers@Work founder Terry Wolverton, my classmates Cara Chow and “Amgen Matt”—who first validated my love scenes as “hot” from his gay boy perspective.
My lesbian writers group mates Lisa Freeman, Komal Bhojwani and Rachel Harper. Close friends, Professor Talia Mae Bettcher and Susan Forrest, who lent me their smart minds and feedback skills. Dear old friends—historian Lillian Faderman and publisher Art Kunkin.
My dyke gang LEX, the Lesbian Exploratorium Project, for hosting the launch events for this book and standing together with me through so many lesbian cultural projects.
And gracious thanks to LBGTQ archives that exist to give authors like me the primary materials from which to produce new work. Particular thanks to Loni Shibuyama, chief research dyke at the ONE Archives of Los Angeles, and to the Southern California Library.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my mother and father who first acknowledged me as “an interesting character.” The sense of discipline they instilled in me—never leave something unfinished, above all, never quit—was often the only internal sensibility which kept me going. Their strength of will and purpose has been core to my life. My father died the year I finished writing this memoir. I did not tell him about this book because as a Catholic he had eternity much on his mind—lots of sins and a preoccupation with how many years in purgatory he’d have to spend before seeing my mother once more in heaven. I’d like to think he would have simply said of this book, “I never said I was perfect. You have to do what you have to do, pal. Just be excellent at it.”
As a longtime journalist, activist, publisher, and author, no project has been more difficult for me than writing this book. I heartily thank my spouse, Lynn, who has endured this other lover in our lives for so long. Her acumen, multiplicity of talents, and devotion to me and Lesbian Nation continue to amaze me.
Chapter 1
The Last Guerrilla
Left Standing
[San Francisco]
Dateline: San Francisco Mission District-September 18, 1975
They stand separated, handcuffed yet defiant. Each boxed in, tightly surrounded by FBI agents in the underground parking lot of an ordinary apartment building.
“General Teko” by his fugitive SLA name, Bill Harris slouches—solitary, hunched like a big cat ready to pounce if the handcuffs don’t hold or a captor looks away long enough for him to snatch his wife, Emily, and split.
Emily Harris, thin, mousey-haired with strung out bangs, gaunt-cheeked from fourteen months of living on the run, looks at the camera, her face caught between defiance and despair. An
d “Tanya,” Patty Hearst by her white, bourgeois name, stands several car spaces apart from her comrades, fragile, an out-of-place urban guerrilla, teary and vulnerable, repentant revolutionary or terrified prisoner—only her hairdresser knows for sure. She is at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list for her leadership in the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Her chestnut locks fall smartly in waves around her face. It’s a good hair day. But a bad day, perhaps the last day, for the revolution.
The camera refocuses on a bearded Bill, about to be tossed into a waiting black van lettered Federal Bureau of Investigation. His dark eyes glassy with rage, he raises steel-cuffed fists above his head, clasps them together in a power-to-the people salute. He mouths our chant: The revolution lives on!
The Feds are careful, uptight, crew-cut, muscled men in suits who do not move. The camera is watching them too. They need to play it by the book. No mistrial for these three, the last of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the last of the Underground Left, the last who matter to America anyway.
A cop knocks Bill’s hands down and waves the camera away…toward Hearst, mislaid daughter of America’s ruling class. Her tall, thin frame accompanies a white-on-white complexion that manages wordless surprise: Why is everyone looking for little ol’ me?
That Patty Hearst is the center of the Western World’s attention confirms the vacuity of the culture that that spawned her. But Patty Hearst, newspaper heiress gone rogue radical, granddaughter of press baron William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner, doesn’t interest me.
I move closer, sit on the floor to get a better look at the small screen’s grainy, black and white video. My colleagues, fellow staff of the Los Angeles Free Press, huddle together in the Production Department listening to the televised news. The story that captures my reporter’s instinct is that of Emily Harris, wife to Bill, college student, middle class emblem of the sixties. Emily is the last feminist left alive in the SLA. I didn’t want her caught, her life cut short before she was old enough to make a thoughtful contribution to our cause. She is my last guerrilla left standing.
Her face is walled off, jaw clenched, stoic; I see she is blue-eyed. I know we are the same age, same height, same frame size, same Irish nose. Emily Montague Schwartz—”Yolanda” by her revolutionary name. Both of us recent students of political sociology, me at UCLA, her at the U. of Indiana. Her ever-so-great immigrant grandparents came to America to give their progeny a chance at a better life. Better than what? Emily and I want to know. What if Emily Montague Schwartz is me and I am her, just another freedom fighter trying to supplant capitalism? Why is it Emily—and not me—who is today a captured revolutionary? Why does she face the end of her life while I look to a future free to be an activist in the lesbian and feminist movements?
And why does the footage show Emily, small and frozen in her early morning jogging shorts? CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite speaks fast and furiously. The Feds spotted Bill and Emily this morning on a sidewalk as they stepped out of their heavily surveilled apartment to go jogging. I gasp! A careless California moment—jogging. Hadn’t they had enough exercise running from the FBI this long and tortuous final year?
My editor-in-chief speaks loudly, declaring, “It’s the end of an era!”
“Yes,” I reply. “The sixties are finally over—just five years late.”
“So much for the revolution,” she adds. “I guess we’d better get on with the Reformation.”
“Sadly true,” I agree, wondering whether the Symbionese Liberation Army is to the Left what the strike at our LA Gay Community Services Center is to the lesbian and gay movement: the last gasp of a falsely united political front. The chaotic battle in my current life at the Gay Community Services Center has also just failed. The Establishment has won. Nineteen seventy-five is lopping off radicals on the right and the left. Only those in the middle are left standing.
Police helicopters, the pigs’ newest addition to preying on American civil liberties, begin to leave the screen. A phalanx of wide-bodied undercover-cop cars carrying Emily, Bill and Patty spill out of the underground parking structure like tanks in a Russian parade. I bow my head, my hands covering my face.
The country has been divided for months; anti-war Leftists hoping that Hearst and her SLA anti-capitalist comrades would evade the FBI forever; the Establishment and their ilk seeing Leftist freedom fighters as simple criminals disturbing the status quo. The SLA’s brain spasm of kidnapping a high-profile member of the elite class had completely buried the group’s initial noble political action—demanding two million dollars from Hearst’s father to feed the poor in Oakland. Randolph Hearst had coughed up the money, supply trucks with food had scurried into the mostly black township a year ago. But in the interim, the SLA had robbed several banks and left one innocent bystander dead. By now the radical group’s message about the politics of poverty had been lost. Today mainstream media’s sole preoccupation was—is—Patty Hearst a kidnap victim or a willing rifle-toting, bank-robbing urban guerilla? And the question my Free Press radical readership wanted answered was—what does today’s news mean for the survival of the Left?
Over the last decade, we on the Left—with the Los Angeles Free Press as one of our voices—had toppled a crooked President, ended a no-win imperialist war, re-fought the Civil War and won voting and housing rights for black Americans, introduced the counterculture lifestyle in which a young person could “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” and brought forth the still radical notion of “free love.” These movements of the sixties were ebbing but new concepts of potential radical change had recently swept into my life, and the lives of thousands like me. From Boston to Los Angeles small cells of women had begun to gather to protest the second class citizenship of womanhood in the Western World. Homosexuals were marching in the streets to redefine gay as a way of being rather than a crime. From our successful victories in other peoples’ movements, we as women and queers knew we could continue to change the world. And here I was, lucky enough to be born on the cusp of two eras. Good timing had always been a blessing in my life. There was much to be done. My people—gays—could hold a job or rent an apartment, but only if we pretended to be straight and stay deeply in the closet. For me, that was nowhere close to good enough.
A staff member turns off the TV. My editor’s hand is suddenly on my shoulder. “Córdova, I need you up in Editorial. We need to cover this story. We’ve got ten hours before deadline.”
I lift my head and shake it back to present time. “Cover what, Penny? Everything looks over to me.”
“Every newspaper in the country will be all over this story.” My editor’s tone sounds sharp as she motions me upstairs. “That means we have to dig deeper, uncover an angle that no one else has. I want you to find Emily Harris and get her story.”
Born in 1962, the Los Angeles Free Press was America’s first underground newspaper. The Freep and I had been lovers—me as her Human Rights Editor and investigative reporter—for two years now. Our story was one of love at first sight.
The Freep had tracked the first anti-Vietnam street protests, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers, the drug-experimental lifestyle of Timothy Leary, the FBI and LAPD spying on activists, and every musical, theatrical, or civil rights-oriented band of brothers and sisters trying to build a counterculture based on peace, love, and brown rice. It was not unusual to step over the lounging forms of Bobby Dylan, Allen Ginsberg or Abbe Hoffman hanging out in our bead-strung hippie coffee room. And The Freep was not uptight about covering the newest of the radical movements, the gay and lesbian one that most papers wouldn’t even credit with being an organized wave of social change. This was my movement, and at twenty-six, I’d logged five years as a pioneer gay activist. Coming out of Social Work grad school, I’d studied my Saul Alinsky thoroughly, but the father of modern urban rabble-rousing had not told me that being a front line organizer could be so emotionally exhausting. Burnout was the factor that drove me to The Free Press.
&nb
sp; In the fall of ‘73, I felt as if I’d just been released from an emotional halfway house. Disappointments and betrayals triggered by my role as a key organizer of the National Lesbian Conference at UCLA had left me feeling battered by the very tribe of women that I’d made a lifetime vow to serve. The Conference, the largest gathering of lesbians in history, had been a moment of divination and a specific kind of hell. My own lesbian feminist newspaper, The Lesbian Tide, had called it, “the cloning of a nation.”{1} Two thousand lesbians from forty-five American states had come to L.A. to speak their piece. Every big-name lesbian speaker, strategist and leader in the country had attended. Warring ideological groups of women from different parts of the country had fractured over the stage presence of a transsexual woman, the encroachment of the Socialist Worker’s Party, the public drunkenness of superstar Kate Millet during her keynote speech, and a divisive rant by the other keynoter, Robin Morgan, author of the new bible of feminism, Sisterhood Is Powerful. The “shoutalong” had split our community into rabidly disparate political ideologies. The birth of Lesbian Nation at UCLA had been so psychologically labored for me, its primary midwife, that I’d run away from Los Angeles. I’d hitchhiked north to a small Sacramento music festival trying to travel anonymously while every lesbian feminist publication in the country was slicing and dicing me and the other organizers. At the music gathering I’d met a song-writer named Margie Adam, who led me to discover that I could write my way out of a nervous breakdown. I’d written hundreds of pages about depression and breaking through it. And in this healing, it dawned on me that writing about Lesbian Nation might take me out of the over-exposed trench of trying to organize it. Writing for a living might also feed the hunger for words and journalism that I’d left behind in adolescence. Perhaps, I hoped, I was even good enough to earn a living at it.
When We Were Outlaws Page 2
