“Fuck gay solidarity,” Colin yelled. “They fired us!”
“I have no respect for that institution called GCSC,” June added. “This is about workers’ rights. They are management. They are the enemy!”
As June ranted, I cringed at her labeling gay men as the enemy. Male values and oppression were the enemy, not all gay people in management. And we weren’t “alienated labor” like factory workers. But my cohorts were hurt and angry. The mood of the room was not with me. “I agree they’re the opposition, but not the enemy. This particular Board doesn’t represent the concept of a true community center. This Board of closet cases made a mistake. They are five ignorant people. But GCSC is a gay center and we’re gay too—”
“We’re lesbians!” a dyke’s voice called from the back of the room.
“I say shut the place down!” Colin’s deep voice roared.
I looked to Robin for help. She held out her hands, making the “let’s talk” sign. Robin and I, and some of my peer group from the Radical Feminist Therapy Collective who were in the room, needed time to talk in private. But I couldn’t ask for a recess. Something in the room felt wrong. The group’s mood was quickly descending into a rage-driven place.
Looking for common ground, I tried to take the floor back. “Since we are agreed that we want to fight back,” I said, “we need a name for our new organization.”
As the group talked, I began to gather with my friends, but heard June propose,
“Let’s call ourselves the Gay and Red Union.”
Damn! I stopped in my tracks. June was proposing a name similar to the new gay group in town, a socialist gay organization called The Lavender & Red Union. I looked around the room wondering how many of her Commie pals June had brought with her. Among the crowd were some newbies, the effeminist men who’d been fired with us, many lesbian feminists from the Women’s Movement, and dykes like June who’d seen action in the anti-war New Left movement. These women—from the Socialist Worker’s Party, the Communist Party and other factions—were leftists first, people who had come into their lesbian identities more recently. They put what they called “the workers revolution” first. Others, like the lesbian feminists from the Westside Women’s Center, had cut their activist stripes marching for abortion rights and against rape and other anti-woman violence. From my years working with them, I knew that these lesbians put women first and believed that the patriarchy was the root of all evil. Many of them wanted to live in Amazon Nation, a fantasized utopia with no men.
Still others, like Robin and I, were feminists with a homosexual past, who believed that gay men were different from straight men and that we had to drag our gay brothers into enlightenment. There were also half a dozen faces that I didn’t know at all. I frowned as I lit another cigarette—not a great homogenous combination.
“What’s the red for?” Pody called out.
From the other side of the room Rachel spoke with a timid voice. “The word union sounds like we’re the Teamsters. Shouldn’t we go with a name the whole community feels comfortable with?”
“I like the words feminist and gay,” a member of the Radical Feminist Therapy Collective spoke up.
“I like union—it sounds united,” Dixie retorted.
“The red sounds communist,” said someone else. “I think that word confuses the issue,” she continued naively, as if she hadn’t a clue that blurring the issues was exactly what June, Dixie and Colin had in mind.
I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the “gay feminist” term that I’d proposed, but I sure didn’t support words like “red,” or “union” which would re-define our feminist fight as a labor issue.
“I like ‘Gay/Feminist 11’,” Brenda confirmed, authoritatively. “I think that says it all.”
A woman from the Westside Women’s Center spoke up. “Then, to clarify,” she said, and waved her arm across the room, “this group will be the Defense Coalition for the Gay/Feminist 11, right?”
Others grunted their approval, and I nodded in agreement. Our new organization’s title had a substantive ring to it.
“So what are we going to do about being fired?” June broke the mood of consensus.
“I say we go in at night and take the place over,” Enric called out. “And we change the locks and lock them out!”
“Yeah,” his lover agreed. “Then we’ll see who has a job and who doesn’t.”
I wondered who Enric and his lover Eddie were; where did they come from politically?
“Yeah, shut the place down!” June retorted.
“Burn, baby, burn!” Colin laughed, mouthing the chant that became popularized during the Watts Riots back in the summer of ‘65.
“We won’t get our jobs back if we burn the place down,” I warned.
“So let’s demonstrate!” said June.
Knowing that the group wanted action, I tried to seize the energy, “Yeah, let’s call a community wide demonstration for tomorrow.”
Dixie spoke again. “I like the demonstration idea. But a one day demo ain’t gonna cut it. We have to boycott the place. Everyday, all day!”
“Boycott! Boycott!” The room took up the call.
I looked to my left where my wise friends, the therapy collective, were gathered. Even they were nodding. The room wanted to do something big. The word “boycott” was harsher than “demonstration,” strong enough to embarrass the Center. Maybe the word “boycott” would make them buckle more quickly, I thought.
“I’m good with boycott,” I chimed in. “We demonstrate until we get our jobs back. As long as it takes!”
“Right on!” a chorus went up.
The dense air seemed to exhale like someone had popped the cork on a bottle of champagne. Boycott had resonated. Goddess forbid, I thought as I let the moment go by, that any of us linger long enough to define what we meant by boycott. I hoped we intended some loose form of ad hoc, ongoing demonstration. But were June and Dixie thinking we meant a traditional labor boycott where no one crossed a picket line? That could get far nastier than what I wanted. But no way I could get the room quieted enough to discuss the fine print. This meeting was done.
Robin nudged me. “I have to split. I’m glad this is your fight and not mine,” she said and slapped me on the shoulder. “Some of these people are very far out. If I were in your place I’d get out of this fight, and soon!”
Startled by her summation, I hugged her as she left, and then sat down on a sofa, emotionally wrung out.
“You were brave,” Rachel said, handing me two chocolate cookies and a napkin.
I looked up to see her smiling at me, and sighed, touched by her gentleness. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Almost got my head shot off.”
“I agree with what you said. GCSC is not my enemy. They hired me. But you must be tired of talking politics. I was wondering…since we’re unemployed and don’t have to work tomorrow, would you like to come over to my house now for a relaxing beer and talk?”
I smiled to myself. A relaxing beer at ten thirty at night? I was flattered. The woman might be shy politically, but there was nothing timid about her personal overtures. I’d arrived late in the decade of free love and had been making up for lost time by sleeping with every other woman that turned me on. Could Rachel be an every-other, I wondered. She seemed to be inviting herself to the party. Still, I was hesitant. Maybe I wanted to be the one to make the approach. Maybe I just hadn’t decided it was her I wanted to approach. Or maybe I was just too worn out for any more “talk.” The meeting had gone much worse than I’d expected, a narrowly missed disaster. A wave of exhaustion rolled through me.
“I’m rather talked out after this meeting,” I said, studying her small, gold-hooped earrings. “And…someone is expecting me.” It had just dawned on me that tonight was Sunday, not a “space” night from BeJo.
“You’re a busy woman,” she whispered as a friend came toward us. She turned to walk away.
“Another time?” I called after her.
Gathering my things, I walked out of the building, pausing on the front porch to light up a cig. An attractive slim woman sat on the step, as if she was waiting for her ride. I couldn’t tell if she was butch or femme. Sifting visual clues was much more complicated now that everyone was wearing the same damn androgynous jeans and flannel shirts. It was far simpler in the good ‘ole pre-feminist days, when lesbians sorted themselves out and advertised by distinguishable dress signals. Standing in the cool night air, I suddenly felt very alive in my body, like there had to be more to life than politics. I watched Rachel walking down the block and across Alvarado Street. Suddenly overcome with regret, I ran down the porch stairs to call after her, but it was too late. Her car door slammed in the night.
Chapter 11
The Kiss
[Los Angeles]
May 5, 1975
The marine layer was burning off, leaving a rose-tinged Hollywood sky over 1213 N. Highland Avenue, GCSC’s new, brick-faced office building. With its businesslike louvered windows, the edifice looked like a government-run social services agency. It was hard to believe that last week we were a radical hippie flophouse, and that over the weekend, L.A.’s best known gay organization had morphed into a “gay institution.” The very words sounded so impossible together. Not a happy coincidence, I thought, for either side that today was the Center’s first day open for business at its new location and it was the first day of our demonstrating.
Striding up Highland to join my comrades, I saw that our demonstration numbered about fifty strong, mostly women, but a few men, all marching in a long oval in front of GCSC’s main entrance. My heart raced with excitement. I waved to some friends who’d just opened the city’s first feminist bookstore, Sisterhood. One of them carried a placard which read, Fired Workers Demand Jobs Back. Further back, the editor of LA’s radical feminist newspaper, Sister, held a poster saying, GCSC Board of Directors Rejects Feminism.
The demonstrators’ mood felt raucous, but not heavy. Good, I thought, we needed to display serious but orderly intent. Perhaps the strong words and this drastic public measure would force the Center to admit they’d made a mistake. GCSC could not afford to polarize L.A.’s lesbian and gay community. It was also terrible PR for the Center. Surely Morris could not allow this to go on. He had to give in, and soon. And yet, I was veteran enough to know that drastic measures sometimes had greater than intended drastic consequences.
Two years ago, I’d been shocked by a press release The Tide received from New York, announcing that all the lesbians had walked out of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), the city’s primary gay organization. The split had happened because lesbians felt assaulted at GAA’s mammoth dances where they felt forced to be with hundreds of half naked men who were all but doing it on the dance floor. The dykes had first asked the leadership men to tone down this behavior, but when nothing changed, they stopped going to their own organization’s main social activity. After months of battling male domination on the dance floor and, more importantly, sexism in GAA’s leadership, the dykes had staged a mass walkout. They’d gone off to form a new organization, Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL). The woman who had led the split was my counterpart in New York City, Jean O’Leary, a lesbian primacist who was my same age, also an Irish Catholic, and the city’s top-gun lesbian organizer. She’d become president of the new LFL. And ever since, the powerful all-lesbian organization had been accomplishing great things. A similar split had rocked the San Francisco community five years earlier when Del Martin, the Bay Area’s top lesbian leader, issued a riveting, now famous, letter called, “Good-bye, My Alienated Brothers.” Martin’s separatist manifesto said “Good-bye to the wasteful, meaningless verbiage of empty resolutions made by hollow men of self-proclaimed privilege. ‘Gay is good,’ but not good enough—so long as it is limited to white males only. I will not be your nigger any longer. Nor was I ever your mother.” Her damning words led SF dykes out of the gay movement and into the feminist movement.
As I joined the demo and made the turn in the large oval of marchers, I chewed on the inside of my mouth. Was national gay history about to repeat itself here in L.A.? Walking out of a gay organization was not the same thing as demonstrating against one, but which was worse? Protesting in front of a gay building made the hairs on the back of my neck break into a sweat. Christ, lesbians demonstrating against a gay center! My nerves were working themselves. I started to doubt myself, realizing we should have taken more time at the meeting to talk about the politics and strategy of “demonstrating” versus “boycotting.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Rachel walking opposite me in the oval. She seemed to be flirting with me; her eyes lit up each time we passed each other. It was certainly easier to focus on lighter things so I looked her right in the eye and smiled back flirtatiously. As she circled she called out, her voice high and flushed, “This beats sitting in meetings, doesn’t it?”
She passed before I could reply, but not before I noticed that she wore a shade of pale peach lipstick. Lipstick, I chuckled to myself, a symbol of women’s “collaboration with the patriarchy.” How long it had been since this woman had actually slept with the enemy—a man? Still, I had to admit, my past was littered with evidence that I liked almost straight-looking lesbian femmes.
At the age of twenty, before I’d become a feminist, I’d fallen head over heels for Gayle, an acutely feminine eighteen-year-old with butt-length chestnut hair that looked like she brushed it several times a day. There was something about rank femininity, the way these femmes flick-flicked their tresses with a snap of the neck, the way they made their earrings dance like bobby pins prancing in the air, that captured a rough element in me and made me want to lay down with them and growl with contentment. Later, as a feminist, I realized my body’s tastes were not erotically correct. I’d responded by trying to go back into the butch closet, but with not without strong pangs. I’d never forgotten the day I’d taken a shoebox full of ties and carefully hid it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. Then, I’d taken off my ankle-length black leather boots and, with a bolt cutter, snapped off the gold chain that circled each heel. Wearing boots with chains, I’d been accused of being “male identified,” a feminist cardinal sin. Other than this I had few dress complaints. The unisex radical feminist uniform of denim over denim, no jewelry, no makeup, felt natural to me and even rather butch—though my feminist friends called it androgynous. Femmes committing to feminism had a much tougher time. They became embroiled in an entire wardrobe change. More than a few lovers had secretly told me about their sadness over having to scuttle their makeup and every piece of feminine clothing. Androgynous, it seemed to me, was code for ill-fitting and sexless dress. Feminism too often took the romance out of lesbianism.
Did Rachel realize how badly she was breaking rank, or did she just not care? She’d certainly not gone all the way with feminist deflowering; her style was jeans but with gauzy flowered hippie blouses half-opened down to her breasts, with earrings and naturally curly blonde-brown hair. I liked her rebellion. And there was obviously something about me—not my femininity—that Rachel liked.
Suddenly, she darted out of the line, skipped over to me and whispered in my ear, “Can we talk at the break?” Her breath was cool in my ear, giving me the chills.
“Sure.” I smiled. I twirled my placard, and kept walking.
A ten-minute break finally arrived and I found her sitting in the center’s parking lot on a little block of cement, marked Reserved for Staff. Fellow demonstrators were milling around sipping sodas and talking with one another, but she sat demurely, legs together, looking down as if lost in a world of her own. I squatted next to her on the cement block, straddling it and facing her, stretching one leg in front of her and the other behind.
“What’s happening, Jeanne?”
I greeted her with my best smile. Up close and more personal, I saw that she wore small
pewter earrings with blue stones. The scent of some kind of perfume begged me to lean closer and something about the way she pronounced my first name, drawing out the end of it like the last bead in a rosary, felt incredibly sexy. Most friends called me Córdova. The sound of it on her lips made me remember that she’d no longer be around in my life everyday. We wouldn’t be crossing paths accidentally at GCSC anymore. The thought troubled me. No more flirtatious notes, no more…options. I paused. The reflection of the white sky brought a translucent quality to her pale, light pink complexion.
“Well, hello there!” She seemed taken aback by my proximity. She tilted her head to the side to expose the flawless skin of her neck. I leaned closer to block the glare from my eyes.
“What?” I answered absently.
Her eyes were a dazzling powder blue, the color of a smog-free winter L.A. sky. Her lips crinkled into a come-hither smile as she laid a surprising finger on my lips as if to soothe further conversation. She studied me, a half-smile suppressing a glimmer of satisfaction.
Huddled on the cold cement, amidst the Sturm und Drang of clashing ideologies, kissing this woman suddenly seemed like a very necessary idea. I needed to kiss her to pass the adrenaline from my body into hers. My body moved forward and I pressed my shoulder against hers to let her know I was coming in.
Our lips touched briefly, brushed each other’s contours. Mine parted, my tongue opening her mouth ever so slowly. Going inside, I felt as if I’d passed down this tunnel before, as if I’d known her in a past life. Time stopped. Contentious comrades became background music. The Big Bang could not have diverted my attention. I wanted to devour this woman now. Flip her over the cement block onto an asphalt bed, strip us both and take her right there in front of God and the Communists.
Out of nowhere a male voice interrupted, “How’s politics, girls?”
When We Were Outlaws Page 13
