When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  I reached into my pocket and checked my watch. A Masters degree out of UCLA and I still couldn’t afford a new watchband. At this rate it looked like my interview would start after midnight. What would my self-made millionaire father say if he found out about my life’s commitment to gay activism? In his boot-strap thinking, starting your own company and making a six-figure salary were the hallmarks of success. Luckily, he and I weren’t on speaking terms. He didn’t know what I was doing with my professional gay radical life.

  I leaned against a marble pillar. Davis was taking questions now. I slipped on my sunglasses and lowered my brown suede hat. Its Australian flat brim hid my eyes so my sisters couldn’t tell if I nodded off for a few minutes. Wearily, I closed my eyes.

  Had I been focused less intently on Angela, and more on the audience around me, I might have noticed a woman named Rachel that night, a woman with robin-egg blue eyes studying me as closely as I was watching Angela. I might have seen that fair-skinned petite woman with blonde highlights crowning a curly mass of light chocolate brown hair talking to her friend and pointing in my direction. I might have noticed how intently she watched my lips, wondering if they were pursed in anger or in concentration. I might have learned that she’d come to the Woman’s Building that night because she’d just turned twenty eight, just left her marriage, and was beginning to explore her lesbian feelings. And had I been less obsessed with work, I surely would have overheard as she asked her friend, “Who’s that lovely woman over there, the one with the brown suede hat?”

  I would have heard her friend reply, “Oh, that’s Córdova. Leave her alone.”

  “She only has a last name?” the blue-eyed woman pursued the matter.

  “Her first name is Jeanne,” the friend answered. “But Rachel, everyone calls her Córdova. She’s trouble. Forget her.”

  Awakening from my momentary catnap, I studied Angela’s oval, plain-Jane face. Her name had been romantically linked with George Jackson, but it was a vague link, I thought, and a political one. Angela probably didn’t do romance. The Communist Party line on romantic love was that it was “an irrelevant by-product of capitalism.” Devout revolutionaries were supposed to meet, court, and consummate to the trumpets of the Fourth Internationale.

  Fortunately for me, lesbians had a different take on sex, and also fortunately, I was born into well-arranged genes. My father’s jet black hair, light brown Latino skin, and my mother’s delicate placement of Irish features with well-defined dark bedroom eyes, and a ski-jump nose meant I hadn’t needed to waste political time browsing lesbian bar culture to find a lover. Feminist protestations to the contrary, good looks still seemed to be a commodity among radical lesbian feminists. Being an activist leader brought dozens of women to my bed. Power seemed to attract people, and my political life put me at the center of the action which was exactly where I wanted to be.

  My devotion to nation-building among lesbians was the reason I hadn’t followed classmates out of graduate school into the corporate business world and life in the suburban flatlands of the now cool San Fernando Valley. Many friends had gone there eager to set up their lives in Plastic Land. I could have indulged in a professional social worker’s routine, a normal life in which politics was background TV to the six o’clock cocktail hour. Normal wasn’t my style. A consumer’s life held little attraction. I wanted a more just world for my people. My role as a radical feminist lesbian was to spread the revolutionary word. When the revolution was over, maybe I’d move to the Valley and settle down. Besides, I reminded myself, I was indeed living with a lover, albeit in an open relationship where I’d had a steady flow of other affairs. The fact that none of them was satisfying had more to do with me, I was sure, than any of them.

  Angela came to a long pause and I realized her talk had ended. Music and dancing would start now. That’s what most of these newly minted lesbians had really come for—a chance to dance, to touch, to be with one another. Casting a last look back at my sisters I saw them starting to sway toward a makeshift dance floor. A small part of me envied them, but the larger part wanted to get the political scoop from Angela. I followed her toward an interview room, away from the music, away from my tribe.

  Sitting in front of Davis, in the small room with two other reporters, I was surprised to see that she was only a few years older than me, no more than thirty. Her lean, taut body held itself like a trampoline that refused to be broken in. It flashed through my mind to ask her how she felt about white hippies wearing Afro hair in support of their black sisters and brothers. Quickly I decided against it; Angela looked too serious for pop-culture triviality. One of the reporters asked her if she thought prison conditions had improved in the last three years since she’d been released and started her new organization, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression.

  As she answered my mind drifted in another direction. What could be so difficult for Davis about coming out gay? She had been the first political female on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, had been arrested for helping Black Panther George Jackson escape, and had been widely persecuted for the lawfully protected act of preaching Communist beliefs in the land of the free. So why didn’t she see that gays were part of the revolution?

  She paused, and I saw my opportunity. “Ms. Davis,” I said, “Black Panther leader Huey Newton said recently that the new Gay Liberation Movement was ‘a friend and potential ally’ in the civil rights struggle. Do you share his point of view?”

  From the way she looked at me I could tell she had pegged me for a gay activist before I’d asked the question. Such was an occupational hazard for being an out and proud baby butch-looking dykelet with short black hair combed James Dean style.

  “I believe that all people have a right to privacy in their personal lives,” Davis said. “But there is a difference between the oppression of racism and economic exploitation…and the quality of discrimination against gay people.”

  My mind silently screamed, “Yeah, the difference is that economic exploitation is better than being raped for being a dyke or a faggot.” But before I could rearrange my thoughts and press on, the third reporter was taking Davis back to her more comfortable subject, the Communist Party.

  I wondered how to proceed. Davis would avoid calling on me now that she knew The Free Press had sent a gay militant. The woman didn’t want to answer personal questions. But feminism taught that the personal is political. Linking the two was a cornerstone of the feminist revolution, said Redstockings, the foremother cell of Radical Feminism. We daughters had begun to see everything in political terms. These days, smoking pot was a political statement.

  I believed it was critical that Davis come out gay. It was not her personal choice; it was her obligation. How could my people walk the streets openly if our leaders remained afraid? Her coming out would make her a great role model for otherwise frightened black lesbians. In our battle to change the straight world, the cowardice of passing was the weak link in our lines. Condoning Angela’s passing was no way to run a movement.

  “Ms. Davis!” I shouted, jumping to my feet, “Would you be willing to say that you are gay, if you were gay?”

  Davis’ large eyes narrowed as if she were trying to block out an errant laser beam. With an air of detachment she studied me for a long moment that found us both sweating out an inconvenient truth.

  “I’m not denying or affirming anything about my private life,” she said. “Personal issues are not a relevant part of political life.” {1}

  She re-lit her pipe, which had long gone out.

  “Next?” she said, dismissing me.

  Chapter 3

  Wisdom of the Cornfields 3

  [Los Angeles]

  Dateline: Culver City, April 1975

  “Welcome home, honey!” my lover greeted me as I walked through her front door. She waved a sheaf of papers in the air like a lasso, kissed me on the cheek and announced, “I’ve got loads of messages for you!”

  Barbara Jo “BeJo”
Gehrke and I had met three years ago when she’d walked into a planning meeting of the National Lesbian Conference. At thirty-two she was six years older than me, a fact I liked. I relied on the wisdom of older women because I was almost always in over my head with some new action I’d planned and therefore looking for a soothing place to land.

  “I’ve had a shit of a day.” I hugged BeJo and dropped my cardboard briefcase on the kitchen table.

  My life at BeJo’s apartment was a respite from the normal stress and chaos of my political life, the place I went to retreat and gather my strength. We had the standard lesbian feminist relationship—non-monogamous—but she was my primary lover. In the jargon of the day primary lover meant the one you spent the most nights with, and the one whose schedule other secondary lovers were supposed to wrap around.

  Ours was a plain, but functional, two-bedroom apartment that sat on thin legs over a carport in Culver City. It was a decidedly working-class building, but BeJo had made gingham curtains to wall out the world, and I’d spliced together an assortment of once grand wood furniture from garage sales in Beverly Hills.

  “I have to work graveyard tonight, but I have an hour before I leave,” BeJo said. “Come and eat. You must be tired walking in here at ten at night. I kept dinner warm.”

  With lush brown hair and a tall slender body, BeJo had a slight olive hue to her skin, which spoke to her German-French ancestors from Alsace Lorraine. After a stint in the Navy, BeJo had decided not to return to the farm. She wanted to be part of life in a big city where, as she said, she could “consort with intellectuals.” But at five foot seven and lanky, she was every inch the farm girl she’d sought to leave behind in Iowa.

  As she set the table, I looked around the living room, trying to shake off the world of politics. That was a difficult task, since feminist, gay and leftist newspapers from around the country lay on every horizontal surface. BeJo’s yellow and orange plaid breakfast chairs clashed with the table’s red oilcloth, but the table was extra long and sat ten bodies scrunched together. That was the important thing. The Tide Collective and other movement groups met here weekly.

  “Karla called from New York,” BeJo called out. “She said the gay rights ordinance went down again this year. Do you want the story? Your pal Robin Tyler left a message saying the press conference for Z Budapest’s trial is Monday, ten a.m. sharp. Someone called from a new gay group in Texas, wants you to speak at a lesbian writers something or another. Lesbians organizing in Texas, who’d a thought it! And Penny called from The Free Press. She wants to see your body at the office tomorrow morning, early.”

  I sat at the table and watched BeJo’s perfect hand-eye coordination placing silverware faster than a speeding bullet. When I’d seen how talented she was on The Tide’s wax and paste-up boards, I’d bumped her up to Production Director.

  “Ariana from the Westside Women’s Center says we must do something about telling lesbians to watch out for the F.B.I. She says they’re infiltrating the dyke community looking for Patty Hearst.” BeJo stopped reading and looked me in the eye. “What’s Patty Hearst got to do with lesbians, honey?”

  “Uhh,” I stalled, trying to think of a simple explanation for how and why the country’s top fugitive had wound up in dykesville.

  “You’d better give out someone else’s address if you’re going to drag The Tide into that one!” BeJo finished my thought.

  I smiled to myself as I looked at her. Years in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco had not corrupted BeJo’s uncanny ability to see things pragmatically. Common sense was one of her contributions to my life.

  “And, oh,” she continued, “I handled this one myself. Hope you don’t mind. “Karla Jay called from New York wanting to know if The Tide can pay her enough to make a living if she relocates out here. I laughed and laughed. Told her I’m already supporting you, the publisher, and that the paper can’t support anyone.”

  BeJo dropped the pink message notes on my plate and went to the stove still chattering. “I love being your secretary, talking to people from all over the country fighting the military-industrial-complex. My honey...”

  I cringed; it was sexist to use the term “secretary” these days. “You’re not my secretary,” I called after her. “You’re the best production artist The Tide has ever had!”

  By becoming a core member of the Tide Collective, BeJo had woven herself into the fabric of my life more tightly than the locked together roof beams overhead. And, she was one efficient woman. Whether she was balancing plates at her waitress job or making love, her body moved with the keen self-confidence of a ball player. I supervised the grueling, forty-eight hour layout of The Lesbian Tide every month, but I couldn’t lay a straight line to save my life. When it became obvious to me that BeJo was faster and more creative than any of the professional paste-up women who volunteered each month, I’d ragged on her, telling her that her talents were going to waste being a waitress; she should think about becoming a professional in the graphics world. I told her the white-collar work world was peppered with the resumes of men who over-valued themselves and women who sold themselves short. I guess my words were finally beginning to change her obstinate mind, since she’d recently told me she’d been reading the job ads for graphics work.

  She sat down next to me with a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes. “Oh, here’s one more message. I saved the best for last,” she said with a twinkle in her dark brown eyes. “That cute blonde butch co-worker of yours from the GCSC Center, Pody, called.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t tell people that The Tide is insolvent, sweetie. They’ll think we aren’t a professional paper. Besides, I pay rent, I support myself.”

  “Yes, you pay some rent,” BeJo said, handing me a full plate. “Of course, you couldn’t put a steak on the table or a spare tire on the car with what’s left over. Not that you ever go shopping for the house or food, so how would you know what a light bulb costs these days? “But, then...” she teased, picking up her fork, “life with you is the most exciting thing I’ve done for myself since joining the Navy! Stop obsessing on what people think of The Tide. Come into the bedroom and talk to me while I get dressed for work.”

  Following her, I lay down on our bed while she started in the bathroom. I breathed a sigh of relief staring at the ceiling, realizing that I wasn’t on speaking terms with my parents. They would never expect a dinner invite so I’d never have to explain that I had a woman lover or that she was a waitress who’d grown up on a farm and had brothers named Butch and Spike. My family’s classism was as overt as their homophobia. Since Dad had thrown me and my girlfriend out of his house when I was nineteen, I’d never had to explain my gay life, or anything else, to them. All for the best, I assured myself, as images of my ten younger siblings ran through my mind like a montage. They lived only twenty minutes away, in South Pasadena, but I hadn’t been home in seven years. I wondered why it never got any easier, and if the longing for my siblings and my mother would ever disappear.

  Now it was always BeJo—not Mom—to the rescue, BeJo who provided stability and a semblance of home life. Before I’d met BeJo, I’d lived in a ninety-five dollar a month one-room studio on the beach. Dinner used to mean opening one of seven cans of Campbell’s soup, which I’d arranged single-file in the cupboards above labels naming the days of the week.

  The bathroom door opened and BeJo sat down beside me. Watching her put each shapely leg into her stockings I remembered how I’d fallen in lust with her the night at the Bacchanal when I saw her dance. The cavern-size lesbian dance club had played Carole King’s “Tapestry” all that summer of ‘72 and BeJo had boogied sharp and easy like she knew she was good. Being Latino, Dad had taught his kids that dancing was a primary outlet, and I’d adopted it as a primary way to woo a woman. I’d gone to BeJo’s apartment that night. I was surprised to discover that she was the most accomplished femme lover I’d ever met. Old-school bar femmes were far better lovers than newly coined lesbian feminists, I was disco
vering. The latter, most freshly out of straight marriages, had too much political noise and correctness going on in their heads. Two months later, I’d moved in with BeJo.

  “Somehow I’ve got to get a handle on the deeper meaning of what’s going on at GCSC,” I reflected aloud to her. Being news editor on The Lesbian Tide I’d heard rumblings about lesbians across the country walking away from working with gay men, our brothers. Were shades of this unusual political occurrence about to happen here in Los Angeles?

  “Sometimes life doesn’t have a deeper meaning,” BeJo said. “Sometimes, shit just happens.”

  “Political shit never just happens, BeJo,” I countered. “There’s always a way to analyze the bigger political picture so that one can grasp the particulars more clearly.”

  BeJo stopped and studied me. “Honey, sometimes I don’t understand what drives you. Most people have a life and then do activism at night or on the weekends. With you it’s the other way around. It’s not like they’re electing women to be President of the United States these days.”

  “How does ‘Senator Córdova’ sound?” I said.

  “Are you joking me, baby?” she said, slipping into a dark blue straight skirt.

  “Yes and no,” I answered slowly. “I’ve been thinking about it. But a person has to be able and willing to lie easily to be an elected politician. I dunno. Maybe it feels more authentic to stay grounded in issue-based politics. Look what Cesar Chavez did for the farm workers. And he’s not an elected anything.”

  “You wouldn’t last a day in them thar cornfields,” BeJo drawled.

  I chuckled. “I think they’re them thar grape fields.”

  “Them neither,” BeJo replied from the bathroom, where she was drawing on her lipstick. She consciously backslid on her feminism and put on make-up to fit in at work.

  “Every Chavez needs a campaign organizer or press secretary,” I continued.