When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  Returning to Los Angeles, I possessed no credentials as a reporter. But I was adamant that I had to write for my town’s only radical paper, The L.A. Free Press. To get a job I’d have to rely on chutzpah and wit and no small amount of my mother’s Irish luck.

  On a busy Monday morning, I slipped past the pot-smoking receptionist and scurried through the aisles bluffing as though I belonged, notebook in hand, searching for the Editorial Department. I knew I’d found it when the intense buzz of voices gave way to the quiet clicking of typewriters. Peering through the haze, I knew I’d be at home in a career where everyone smoked. Finally, I espied the well-known, electrically frayed and Afro-styled blond head of the famous publisher, Art Kunkin.

  Before anyone discovered that I was in fact nobody, I accosted him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Kunkin.” I jutted out my hand and shook his. “My name is Jeanne Córdova. I’ve read your paper carefully, and I am here to tell you that what The Free Press needs is a gay columnist—one who is also a feminist and a Chicana. Hiring me gives you three oppressed minorities for the price of one!”

  Kunkin studied me intently. Minions around him stopped their chatter.

  “You look the part, Córdova, but you talk pretty white to me,” barked the stocky, pale-faced hippie. Turning to his built-in audience, he continued, “So, we get three for the price of one, but the question is...can it write?”

  “Yes, she can!” I thrust a sheaf of articles from my paper, The Lesbian Tide, and my columns from the big gay paper, The Advocate, in front of him.

  Kunkin lit up a smoke and took my portfolio. Thumbing through it, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Finally, he bellowed, “Douglas!” A staffer came running down the aisle.

  “Douglas,” he repeated. “Clear this kid a desk. Give her two weeks. If you don’t like what you read, fire her.” He turned back to me. “And you’d better keep your community of fags and dykes happy. We like covering this new movement.” As he walked away he called back, “You don’t mind being called a dyke?”

  “That’s what I am!” I jumped up and down thrilled that The Man—the legendary Kunkin—had hired me.

  Kunkin was brilliantly ruthless with my copy and everyone else’s. I admired the man because in the name of the oppressed he broke all the rules and fought the Establishment in print. But as a publisher his weak suit was finance and the times they were a changin’. A year after I joined his staff, The Freep’s debts got the better of him and he was forced to sell his paper. He’d been one of the few people in my life under whom I was proud to serve.

  Now, under new ownership in the fall of ’75, Freep headquarters remained the same fifties-style warehouse located at 5550 Hollywood Blvd in the heart of old Hollywood. Most of the city’s wealth had moved west, toward Beverly Hills, but I didn’t care. After a stultifying butch adolescence in L.A.’s Stepford suburbs, any part of Hollywood was paradise to me. The Freep’s Production Department on the first floor housed the paper in all its myriad forms. A constant stream of super-sized production boards, carried by paste-up artists whose shoes crackled with the sound of hardened wax, clogged the aisles. The carpet was so old it looked like the cement floor had been poured over it. No formal delineations marked different departments, except a flight of stairs up to Editorial. Kunkin believed that the sum of the parts was fed by the whole. Although he was no longer around, the ever-present buzz of Kunkin mania still permeated the place. Over the last two blitzkrieg years I’d risen from once-a-week dyke columnist to a three stories per week investigative reporter with a title of Human Rights Editor. Since Kunkin had left, I’d worked for two nitwit Editors in Chief who’d come and gone quickly. Finally, the new absentee publishers had given the top slot to a talented and gracious woman named Penelope Grenoble. My own cubbyhole, an eight by ten private room on the second floor, was located across from Penny’s office and next to the City Editor, Tom Thompson.

  A week after the world and the FBI felt safe once more now that America’s sweetheart-flipped-guerrilla-action-figure had been returned to her ruling class perch, Penny sent me another urgent summons.

  “You wanted to see me?” I asked dully, as I threw myself into the chair in front of her Chieftain’s desk. The shock of seeing the Hearst capture had worn off, and I’d come back to reality thoroughly bummed. The news was rocking the country. Several of the slain SLA women were lesbians, news that would stun the readership of my own newspaper, The Lesbian Tide.{2} It was also Friday night, the night I saw the new love of my life, Rachel. But she hadn’t called or answered my messages in weeks. I’d carelessly tried to juggle our personal relationship with my political life, asking her to wait. Three weeks ago she’d walked out on me. So had Morris Kight, my political godfather and founder of the Gay Community Services Center, the scene of my recent political debacle. The bowstring of my psyche was unraveling. The weekend stretched before me with no plans to see Rachel, no calls from Morris, and no political meetings. I slouched into Penny’s chair, swung my boots onto her desk and emitted a depressed sigh.

  Penny sat up straight behind her desk. “I just heard that Patty Hearst wrote in the ‘occupation’ slot in her booking report that she was an ‘urban guerilla.’”

  “That woman is so dumb that’s probably the only job she’s ever had. I hope that’s not why you asked me to report in?”

  “Of course not,” my editor shot back. “I just had a great idea. So I made a phone call.”

  My usually demure editor was as wide-eyed as I’d ever seen her. Penny the Chief was a decade older than me and had a Ph.D. in English Literature. The most educated of all the staff, she was also the prettiest, not counting the guys, which I didn’t. Petite—just my type—with fine features and even finer doe-brown eyes, she was a hard to resist femme package for a lesbian butch like me. Thankfully, she was straight as an arrow. This kept our working relationship uncomplicated.

  “A phone call to who?” I asked dully.

  “Emily Harris’s probable new attorney that’s who. I’ve been thinking. Since Hearst has gone down, wouldn’t it be possible to get an interview with Emily?”

  “Yeah, us and every other paper in the country.”

  “Well…” Penny smiled, looking every inch the editor bursting with the next big scoop. Her nicely arranged features, capped by brown rim glasses that gave her a scholarly look, were sharply tensed. “I’ve just learned that Harris will be flown down here, to L.A. She’ll be held at Sybil Brand Institute for Women.”

  My mind slowly flew east, across downtown L.A. to the women’s prison on the hill over looking the San Bernardino Freeway. Last year, my Tide staff had led a demonstration in front of the large county prison, protesting its infamous Daddy Tank, a separate wing where they housed butch-lesbian inmates.

  “Emily could be held at S.B.I. for months!” Penny continued.

  “So?” I grunted, wondering why the hell I couldn’t get revved about the best story idea Penny had ever put on my plate. Somehow nothing seemed important since Rachel had disappeared, with no note and no good-bye. I hated bringing my personal life to work, so I hadn’t told Penny.

  She kept talking. “My old friend Leonard Weinglass just returned my call. He says…”

  I wondered briefly how Penny had a connection with the big name Lefty lawyer who was about to step forward to handle Harris’ case pro bono. But that was Penny’s job—connections.

  “Leonard says Emily might be looking to tell her story. But she’ll only consider feminist reporters. I’m guessing, as a socialist, she won’t be giving her story to the L.A. Times. She knows they won’t print her motivations as she sees them.” Penny’s pale green eyes were twinkling with excitement.

  “So who do you think she’ll choose?”

  “You!” Penny stared me down. “You’re perfect. Didn’t you tell me that the SLA had self-avowed lesbian members that were killed by the pigs in the Watts fire last year?”

  “Yeah?” I tried to shake my gloom and bend my mind to Penny’s. The accidentally
televised shoot-out between the LAPD and the SLA in Watts last year had been savage. At least the Hearst arrest had gone down without bullets. “There were two lesbians in the SLA. A woman named Mizmoon and her lover Camilla Hall. They were murdered in the Watts shootout.”

  “So don’t you see it, Córdova? As a feminist Chicana, an overt lesbian reporter, you’re perfect! I want you to write Harris a personal letter saying how much The Freep wants an interview. Tell her about your politics. Tell her you’ll write her story the way she wants it told. Wake up, Córdova. We’ve got a perfect shot at this. You and Emily have everything in common!”

  Everything in common. Penny’s words finally broke through. Much more in common than you know, Penny, my inner voice said. I’d never told Penny that my own paper, The Lesbian Tide, was close to underground women fugitives. I’d never told anyone that I knew these women were reading The Tide because we dropped issues at a safe place for them to pick up. And most of all, I’d never told Penny that armed struggle was a question I’d been dealing with personally. That I had friends who were close to these women and that I too wondered what I’d say if a fugitive sister asked me to pick up a gun for the revolution. Sometimes my heart ached to watch the pigs hunting down my sisters. These radical years I too proceeded on a need to know basis and my editor didn’t need to know how close I was to the line between advocacy journalist and participant. A line which at times felt almost porous to me.

  “All right, Penny. I’m in. I’ll do it.” I got to my feet and saluted my editor with a snap of my wrist. “It’s a brilliant idea.”

  I turned to leave her office, embarrassed that my brain was too overloaded to have come up with the idea myself.

  “Córdova,” she called out to me, “I want your letter to Emily on my desk before you leave work today!”

  “Whatever you say,” I called back over my shoulder, as I ambled back to my cubbyhole. Closing the glass door behind me, I sat down at my desk. Penny’s face pressed against my glass wall. “Today!” she mouthed.

  I took paper out of my top drawer and ran a sheet through my typewriter, and waved Penny off with a silent, See me writing!

  Dear Ms. Harris, I began. But no words followed. My mind talked to Rachel. Where are you? When will you come back to me?

  I no longer had the capacity or desire to talk politics with anyone—not with Emily Harris, not with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Harris would be in jail for months before her trial, and possibly too blown away by her own defeat and capture to respond to any reporter. For once in my life, my heart was dictating that politics could wait until I found a way to repair my personal life. Emily the freedom-fighter had to wait long enough for me to go back, retrace my steps, find out where I’d gone wrong with Rachel, Morris, and the whole damn gay strike. I had to win them both back. I couldn’t face myself, much less Emily Harris, until I’d faced my own demons. Was it only last November that my life had felt so promising and full of hope?

  Chapter 2

  The Hat

  [Los Angeles]

  Dateline: Grand View Street, Midtown,

  November 11, 1974

  The stars pierced a crisp winter’s eve the night I first met Rachel. I was covering a story at the Woman’s Building, an L.A. art institute that was both a feminist venue and a lesbian hangout. Entering the courtyard’s sanctuary, I strode between the pillars of the stately two-story relic on Grand View. It was packed with some four hundred lesbians mostly clad in the counterculture uniform of androgynous dress—low-slung bell-bottoms, anti-war bandanas, shirts from the Salvation Army, Birkenstock sandals, and frizzed out hair. The vibrations of “woman-power” injected the air with edgy exhilaration.

  Happy to be walking on women-loving-women ground, I buried myself deep in the crowd. I could feel the electricity—the rustle of women rubbing shoulder to shoulder, the muted, sweet smother of tightly packed sisterhood. After years of activism, I was still thrilled to be part of the family of women.

  We—the family—had come together that night to hear Angela Davis, the controversial former UCLA professor, read from her newly released autobiography about political prisoners, Panthers, and other purist propaganda. The woman, the philosopher, the disciple of Marx, sat on a small stool in front of us smoking a pipe. Seeing her in the flesh—the aggressive jut of her jaw, the angle of her wrist as she held her pipe, her don’t-fuck-with-me attitude—begged me to recognize something familiar about her. The woman reeked of lesbian butch body language! Aha, I smiled to myself. The scuttlebutt on the gay grapevine was right—Davis had to be gay. Her forbidding black spectacles, however, seemed to ward off any invitation to a personal life, implying she was of the mind only, above the debris of human emotion.

  Davis began her speech by laying a basis for what she called “an increasingly fascist pattern” in America’s government. She brought up examples of racism in our judicial system, like how Nixon was acquitted before coming to trial, while her black cellmate was held in prison for eighteen months before coming to trial.

  The audience was half drifting, not listening too closely when, in the middle of her speech, she blithely said, “Alternative sexual orientations are a bourgeois affectation.”

  My pen stopped scribbling. An audible rumble, like a rolling 6.1 earthquake, vibrated through the mostly white, but mostly lesbian audience. I looked up and thought—this could be a real short night.

  Angela also looked up. Her lips tightened as her eyebrows registered the crowd’s response. She stopped speaking. Everyone waited.

  The wave of the quake subsided. In a rare burst of collective dyke forgiveness, the audience settled back down. Whew! It was my turn to be surprised. They were not going to walk out. No white woman could have said what Davis said and still have an audience. These were volatile years, when dykes brooked no disrespect. But we also knew Davis had earned her veteran activist stripes by being jailed by the FBI for allegedly helping her political prisoner friend, George Jackson, escape. I also felt a certain sadness coming from my sisters. Somehow we accepted that this Communist intellectual was probably too cerebral to practice any sexual orientation.

  As I pressed the stop button on my tape recorder and flipped the tape over I decided I wouldn’t let Davis off so easily. I was covering her talk and book signing for The Freep, so it hadn’t been too hard to arrange an interview with her after her talk. But I was also double hitting tonight, covering the event for my own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide. I checked my pockets and found three more cassettes. Tonight I’d strike a blow for my lesbian readership, which was rapidly growing as we picked up subscribers from college towns as far away as Duke in North Carolina. I’d make it my job to convince the Afro-haired political activist to come out of the closet.

  Chewing the plastic cap of my ballpoint, I turned to study the people in Angela’s entourage. I tried to spot a woman lover’s body language. No one. Nada.

  For now, I listened carefully to the rest of her speech, hoping the well-connected Leftist might say something about the fugitive freedom fighters she had to know. Perhaps she’d drop a comment about a change in direction of the New Left’s stratagem on urban guerilla warfare. The subject interested me, as well as both of my newspapers. Many of us radical activists were groping with the question of how far to go in confronting the military-industrial complex. With the kind of people I knew, any day now I might be asked to commit more than civil disobedience. More likely, the choice would drop in front of me with no notice, and I’d have to rely on instinct. I’d be called upon to print something in The Lesbian Tide, or approached as a known Tide staffer and asked to hide a sister who was a fugitive. It was a question I had to come to terms with way down inside me where it mattered. The times were combustible, boundaries between right and wrong morphed faster than I could wake up some mornings. Last May, millions of Americans had watched those televised, but oh-so-real deaths of six members of the S.L.A. Searching desperately for Patricia Hearst, and following a three-hour gun battle, police SWAT teams
moved in and fire-bombed the safe-house in South Central Los Angeles, killing six SLA comrades as thousands looked on in the streets surrounded by many dozens of cop cars. I’d felt a chill up my Leftist spine watching that day. I’d worked in Watts as a social worker, mere blocks from the torched house. After the SLA deaths, I’d spent several days holed up in my apartment, grieving because I knew that some of the dead were radical lesbians like me.

  Scribbling notes as fast as I could, I lost Angela’s train of thought somewhere around her saying, “It is true that women were the first group to be oppressed but…there is a different quality in the oppression that prevails under, say, feudalism, than that which prevails under capitalism.” The woman could out-talk and out-think me any day of the week. At twenty-six I was well versed in the ideological principles of most social movements of my day; but as Davis waxed on dialectically, I chided myself for not being properly prepared. I hadn’t read all of her writings. I’d only skimmed her recent essays. Her resume alone made me feel, in my military father’s words, like “an indolent speck on the map of life.” No, I’d have to work much harder to be, like Angela, the perfect political machine—able to spout Marxist paragraphs, or better yet, quote lesbian feminist theory at the click of a microphone switch.