When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  “It’s your client, the publisher of The Lesbian Tide,” I announced myself. I stuck out my hand, “Jeanne Córdova.”

  “Oh,” he said. Standing, he shook my hand. His palm was sweaty but his grip was hard.

  I took a seat in the armchair in front of his desk, sprawling one leg casually across the other and took out a cigarette. Looking at him, I waited for him to light it. He did.

  I positioned my pack of Benson & Hedges next to his cigar in the ashtray and said, “I hear you’ve got a problem with our cover this month.”

  The man rocked back in his chair. “That’s not my problem. That’s your problem.”

  I brought my fist down on his desk. Hardening my voice, I looked him in the eye. “We have a contract with you to print this issue. The whole issue.”

  “That contract doesn’t mean shit to me.” Charlie yawned, resting his elbows on his desk. “You guys are paying just above cost. I only print you to keep my staff busy.”

  Confrontational power play wasn’t going to get me my cover, I realized. Leaning back in my chair, I asked conversationally, “You gotta a problem with sexy women, Charlie?”

  “Hell no.” Charlie leaned forward. “I like the woman you sent here. What’s her name...?”

  “BeJo…Barbara.”

  “Yeah, Barbara. She’s got great legs.”

  I swung a boot leg onto the corner of Charlie’s desk, looked into his deep mud—brown eyes and said, “Yeah, and that’s not all she’s got that’s great.”

  Startled, Charlie studied me as though he were trying to decide whether or not we were complete strangers. Finally he smiled, showing his crooked teeth. “So, how do you bulldykes get all the pretty ones?”

  “Well, my man,” I teased, mentally trying to deduce how far this conversation would have to go before I got what I wanted, “that’s for me to know and you to guess at.”

  He grunted. “How about you give me your best secrets about women for the next hour and maybe I’ll give you what you want?”

  “You’ll turn on our press run before we begin?”

  Charlie threw back his head and broke into a laugh. “Fuck! You don’t know anything more than I know, you bargaining little dyke!”

  “I must know more than you know, Charlie, ‘cause I’m going home with Barbara tonight and you’re going home to no one.”

  No straight woman would let a man walk out of the house looking as unkempt as he did with his slovenly plaid shirt two sizes too small for him.

  Charlie stared, speechless.

  “So how about making that deal with your new best butch pal?” I continued.

  “I don’t want my friends in the biz knowing I printed that photo…”

  He seemed to be waffling. I offered, “I’d be happy to delete your company’s name from the masthead. Believe me, none of the people I know, know any of the people you know.”

  Charlie’s ragged eyebrows knitted. He had no idea what I’d meant.

  “An hour’s worth of tips on getting broads into bed?”

  My eyes closed for a moment of reflection on my about-to-be-sullied butch honor. “Okay. One hour. And the press runs till my job is done.”

  Charlie picked up his phone. “Roger?” he barked, “Tell Tom to run that dyke cover. Let’s get it out of here.” He dropped the receiver into its cradle. Reaching for his cigar, he leaned far back into his chair, locked his fingers behind his head and threw his own legs on his desk. “So start talking,” he said.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, I stumbled out of Charlie’s dark glass tower into the frying sun. BeJo was waiting for me. She pressed a cold soda into my hands. “My hero!” she joked, toasting her soda can against mine. “You saved our cover. Look, here’s a copy!”

  My eyes fell on the lovely sight of Gudrun and Jan kissing, one woman’s hand resting against the other’s neck {3}. Noticing the light and shadow contrast, I smiled, “Wow, it came off great! Copies of this all over the country make it all worth while!”

  “Makes what worth while?” BeJo knew my voice too well; she’d caught the inflection, a tiny space of regret in my voice. Her forehead knitted.

  “Worth spending an hour with a sexist pig,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. I grabbed BeJo’s hand and walked her to her car. “Men are all the same. But at least I screwed him too. I told him all the wrong information I could think of!”

  “Wrong information about what?”

  I ignored her question. “We need a new printer, BeJo. But right now, I just want to get the fuck off his property.”

  “Sounds good to me.” BeJo plopped into her car. She couldn’t resist spreading the cover proof out on the steering wheel. Stared at our baby. Her cover’s print resolution was clear and sharp. “She’s beautiful,” I whispered.

  BeJo sighed, looking at me through the driver’s open window, and said, “This is why I love you. You make things happen in the world and I’m part of that.”

  As her words sank into my body, so did the exhaustion of the confrontation with Charlie. The post-partum downer which always followed the excitement of getting each issue to bed was settling into me. As I leaned on her car, my legs felt weak, my will depleted.

  “It’s Saturday,” BeJo said. “You haven’t been home during daylight hours for weeks. Come home with me now and I’ll make you a nice lunch and put you to bed.

  As I drove home following BeJo, I felt somehow defeated. Yes, the next issue was liberated, yet a vague unrest gnawed at me. I’d told Charlie lies; things I hoped would make his dates dump him like a bag of hammers. So, I’d won. Then why did my stomach hurt? Because it was a narrowly held power, with me forced to play the only card a butch had with a man like that—other women.

  My father had taught me how bullies handled the world and each other, that power was their fulcrum. When I was a child, my father’s power was terrifying. There was no winning. I’d had no cards. All the power belonged to him and the man meant to be obeyed. Obedience was everything. Straight out of West Point, he treated his children like plebes, blowing reveille and making us stand inspection every morning. When he was in his early thirties he had moved his wife and five children from Germany to the orange groves of 1950s Southern California, where he set up a marble import company and was pressured with seven more offspring.

  I tried to be especially careful of his power at night when he came home for dinner. Mom always said, “The dinner table is the heart of the family.” Our dinner table—an extra long “hot-dog” dispensing table that we’d borrowed from the Church and normally used to feed the masses—sat on steel folding legs in my childhood’s kitchen. Sometimes at dinner, because I was only seven, or ten, or twelve, I forgot to be careful, forgot to obey. When I did get in trouble, one of Dad’s authoritarian not-to-be-messed-with-or-ever-changed rules was: “You will do what I tell you to do, as long as you live under my roof.” I whispered to myself that the next time he chased me with a bat, or his leather belt, I’d find a better place to hide; next time I’d be smarter, run faster, and run away. And the day I was eighteen would be the last next time. I’d run away and live under my own roof. No sir, when I got older, no matter the cost, I swore to myself, not even the Pope would tell me what to do.

  Lionheart’s wheels bumped, startling me. I was drifting over the lane markers. Christ! I hated allowing my father to leak back into my life, even for a daydream. I looked at my watch. A bummer of a day—and it wasn’t yet noon.

  Chapter 5

  The Godfather

  Dateline: The streets of Hollywood,

  June 1971

  The tyranny and humiliation of my life under my father was the reason I became a warrior. My life as a freedom fighter in the movement for gay civil rights took a dramatic turn towards being a career path on a hot June day in 1971, the day I met Morris Kight, L.A.’s most prominent gay community organizer, and the man who would become my political godfather.

  At fifty-two, Morris was an experienced anti-war, peace, and black civ
il rights activist. He knew how to plan large-scale demonstrations and keep them peaceful. In a fledgling movement filled with twenty and thirty-year olds, he was unquestionably our leader although he did not necessarily look the part. Of medium height with an ordinary, middle-aged potbelly, he had a shoulder length white mane so wispy that the wind blew it in all directions at once. Usually, he wore the simplest of thrift store khaki pants and shirt, one grade up from vagrant.

  On that day, at Morris’s invitation, I had answered the call from leaders of the infant gay and lesbian movement in New York to help plan simultaneous gay liberation marches across the nation. The marches would commemorate the last Sunday in June, the second anniversary of our 1969 Stonewall Revolt in Greenwich Village, the most famous rebellion of queer people against police harassment in modern times.

  Although I’d just spent months organizing the first Gay Women’s West Coast Conference—scheduled to take place on the same weekend as the march so lesbians could have their own celebration on what was becoming known as gay male liberation day —I jumped at my first chance to work one-on-one with this brilliant strategist. That he had invited me came as something of a surprise since, together with the Rev. Troy Perry of the gay Metropolitan Community Church and other gay male leaders, Morris had already set the demands for the L.A. march: to decriminalize gay sex by demanding the eradication of California’s anti-sodomy laws. Maybe he and the other gay men were beginning to take their lesbian sisters seriously.

  “The March route will start here,” Morris said, as he spread a map of Los Angeles over the hood of a parked car. He pointed to the corner of McCadden and Hawthorn, two small streets a block east of the major avenue called Highland. “Our people can be hidden as we assemble here, yet have quick access to a main street,” he explained.

  Morris and the others had spent frustrating months in front of the L.A. Police Commission, begging for a permit to use the streets. But our much despised Police Chief, the calcified Ed Davis, had denied us. He’d written a letter to Councilman Art Snyder, which said, “It’s one thing to be a leper; it’s another thing to be spreading the disease.” We hadn’t made much progress in raising his consciousness. Last year he’d said, “Giving a permit to homosexuals would be like giving one to robbers and rapists.” Finally we had gotten qualified permission. The march could start at 6:00 pm at night and we were to stay on the sidewalks. One misstep, he’d warned, and the cops would be all over us.

  I bent over the map. “It’s a good kickoff site,” I agreed. “It’s quiet and tucked away, the cops won’t see us gathering.”

  Morris nodded, his eyes still glued to the map. “We’ll then emerge out onto Highland and march north to Hollywood Boulevard. Then east ... all the way to Vine.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” I said, a note of admiration in my voice. “The movie star names embedded in the sidewalks on Hollywood make the Boulevard wider; the marchers can go five or six abreast down the Boulevard.”

  With a wrist flourish that would rival a fag half his age, Morris drew an imaginary line east. “We shall simply tiptoe the ten blocks over to Vine Street, which is long enough to make a proper political statement,” he told me. Although he was born in a no-name town in south Texas, Morris’s formal speech sounded more like that of a Southern gentleman.

  He pointed to the map again. “Toward the end of the route, right about here, why don’t we surreptitiously lead everyone off the sidewalk and into the middle of the street?”

  “Why can’t we just ignore the cops and take to the streets for the whole march?”

  “Because, my dear, one builds the momentum of a demonstration slowly.” Morris waved his hands in a complex of spirals. “One allows it to become a ballet, a dance that builds in intensity.”

  I watched him, fascinated by his silver-strapped hands, each finger encased by custom-soldered turquoise Navajo rings. Much of his energy seemed to be channeled through these flamboyant jewels, and in their movement I saw the subtle orchestration of the entire march.

  “I get it!” I said. “We start off gradually so that people can get into a braver mood. We build the commitment and the excitement. Then, we burst onto the street for the last few blocks.”

  Exactly!” Morris exclaimed, resting his arm on my shoulder.

  I flushed with a pride I hadn’t felt since my father once watched me pitch my softball team to a no-hit shutout. That was more than a decade ago. By now, Frederick Benito Córdova had no idea that I had dedicated my life to a passion he would call a perverse and utterly ridiculous waste of time. I was beginning to feel that this man, Morris Kight, and I shared a political passion that was more familial than anything I’d felt with my father since early childhood.

  “And who do you think can solve our traffic light problem?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But we’ve got to stop those lights from cutting up the march like a segmented snake.”

  “Ah, dahling!” He smiled. “That’s where your lesbians shall save the day.”

  “My lesbians?” I blinked. Christ, I thought. Here comes the pitch.

  “Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Morris added. “You are the premier lesbian organizer in Los Angeles, are you not?”

  I had no answer for his rhetorical flattery but that’s when I realized he’d asked me to join his planning committee because he’d spotted me as a “comer.” Morris Kight’s invitations were about results. He knew about my Gay Women’s Conference and he knew that I could put boots on the streets.

  I gasped, feigning horror. “You’re not thinking of using my lesbians as cannon fodder at the intersections, are you?”

  “Well,” Morris said, dropping his voice coyly. “At the anti-war demonstrations I observed that lesbians were often the security monitors. They seemed to like that role. Ergo, I thought perhaps your people would like to stop the cars. Lesbians always protect gay men, thusly...”

  “Enough, Morris!” I cut him off. “Of course we dykes will protect you.”

  Smiling, Morris drew a set of index cards from his shirt pocket and handed them to me. “I made you a proper card file of the intersecting streets between Highland and Vine,” he said.

  I took the cards with a sardonic smile; he’d come came prepared, knowing I would agree to his plan. I was about to get angry at his manipulation when I realized that two could play his game.

  “One last thing, Morris,” I said, and stopped my teacher as he started to fold up the map. “Since we dykes are willing to take this risk, it’s only fair—for your protection, of course—that the lesbian contingent marches at the front of the march.”

  “Oh really?” Morris stopped folding.

  “And furthermore, when the march moves into the middle of the street and unfurls the lead banner, I want some dykes holding that banner along with your gay men.”

  “But those men have already been chosen!” Morris’s voice rose to a flabbergasted pitch. “They’re all activists, they deserve the privilege.”

  “Morris.” I lowered my voice, forcing myself to stay calm. “The TV cameras are going to be there. We need to show that we’re united—gay men and lesbians together. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Morris loved the Body Politic of gay men with his whole being, he understood his people like a father, but when it came to comprehending us—his sisters from Lesbian Nation—I wondered if he meant what he said politically, or was he going to turn out to be a slippery old eel?

  He inhaled deeply before speaking. “Of course, dahling,” he said, his voice now back to normal. “That’s what this march is about—equality. The women shall be up front. Gender parity it shall be!”

  On June 27, the night of the march, despite the wide-spread rumor that the LAPD was going to shut the whole damn thing down and arrest everyone, two thousand queers showed up!

  The assemblage at the corner of Hawthorn and McCadden Place was mass confusion. I passed Freda Smith, a Sacramento organizer from the Gay Women’s West Coast Conference,
and yelled to her, “Grab every dyke you see and tell them to look for the Lesbian Mothers banner!” I pointed toward it at the head of the march. We lesbians didn’t have much in the way of signs, but at the conference Del Martin had raised the issue of lesbian mothers losing custody cases in court—an issue that scared many of us. Myself and other organizers had only convinced about half of the attendees that marching in a gay parade was also a lesbian issue. To many of these women Stonewall and the Christopher Street West annual march was a gay male birthday.

  Because of my telltale organizer armband, marchers were besieging me. They were arriving by car, foot, bus, and bicycle. “Will there be trouble with the pigs?” “Who should I march with?” Most gay men looked blankly at me saying they didn’t belong to any group. They’d only heard that this was gay Sunday in Hollywood. They’d hitchhiked from Phoenix, or bussed in from Colorado looking for someplace on earth to be openly gay. Even a group called the Gay Community Alliance had flown in from Hawaii.

  Finally, with the sun setting to our backs, we were chanting and marching abreast down Hollywood Boulevard, every newly conscripted gay draftee shouting at the top of his and her voice. Dashing up and down as a monitor, I paused and almost came to tears. A banner carried by an elderly, straight-looking woman walking alone read, Heterosexuals for Homosexual Freedom. I wanted to salute this woman. Someday, perhaps even in my own lifetime, gays will be free, I told myself.

  That day was not tonight. Uniformed cops were everywhere. Several cars had male drivers dressed in full suit and tie, plainclothes LAPD vice or Feds. The rumors of LAPD files were true—they were taking photos of every monitor and anyone who looked like they were organizers including myself.

  When I was social working in South Central three years after the Watts Rebellion of ‘65, I’d seen many armed young men and learned that the FBI’s counter-intelligence program was all over the black activist community. The Feds wanted nothing more than to hunt down every member of the so-called insurrectionist Black Panthers who they believed sought the violent overthrow of white America.