Startled apart, I looked up to see the inquisitive round red face of Gary Franklin, a television reporter from Channel 13. I groaned. Rachel’s face turned several shades paler than her previous white-on-white. The street became a street once more. It felt like all of our comrades were staring at us.
Rachel reached out to shake his extended hand. They had, I knew, worked together on a previous story. “It’s good to see you again, Gary. Yes, as you can see, we are marching against GCSC.”
“Can you give me some background?” Gary asked, as he took her arm and started leading her away. I heard him say, “Let’s go to that coffee shop on the corner where we can talk.”
And suddenly she was gone. I stood up, furious at Gary—and myself. I knew I shouldn’t be kissing at a protest, not that kind of kiss anyway. My body still shook with desire. I took a few deep breaths, brushed the hair out of my eyes and numbly stumbled back toward the line. There was nothing to do but rejoin the oval and try to pretend our kiss—a kiss everyone had seen and was now whispering about—had never happened.
The next hour felt agonizingly long. I struggled to stay focused on my feet, forcing them to fall into step with the other protestors. Done with politics, I felt drained. The awe of my moment with Rachel still filled my chest. It had been so tender, not at all rough or awkward like most first kisses. The perfect fit of her mouth inside mine had drowned out the back-chatter conflict of my vast, anonymous city. I’d kissed dozens of women before, but there’d never been a kiss like that one. My fingers touched my lips. How was it possible?
Finally, another break. Rachel stood before me again, her blouse half opened, her breasts pert and beckoning. And all I could think of to say was a very lame, Your bed, or mine? but no, that would be too forward.
I read hesitancy in her questioning frown. “What’s going on with you?” I asked, gently.
“I’m afraid to ask you again…” she said, letting her voice trail off.
“Go ahead.” I smiled tenderly, watching the lips I’d kissed. “Ask me anything, the answer is yes!”
She burst out laughing. “Then I’ll expect you for dinner at seven at my place tonight?”
“Sure,” I shouted above the background noise. “Oh, no! What day is it?”
“Monday,” she said, the pleasure on her face fading.
“Isn’t our next protest meeting called for tonight?”
Rachel looked sad. “Yes, in fact it’s at my house.”
For a moment I hated the Gay/Feminist 11.
“Can you come early, before the meeting? I can make dinner around five.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe not just dinner,” she added. “You could stay…after the meeting.”
“Break it up you two.” Pody was suddenly beside me, slapping me on the shoulder. “This is not a kiss-in, ya know!”
The pitfalls of being a leader in the lesbian community struck me. I hated living in a fish bowl. What could I have been thinking? Would this morning’s kiss get back to BeJo before I’d had a chance to tell her myself?
I grabbed Pody’s arm, roughly. “I want to make it perfectly clear, Pody. That woman and I are not having a relationship. I hardly know her.”
“That’s never stopped you before,” Pody teased.
Chapter 12
The House Where She Lived
[Los Angeles]
May 5, 1975
Rachel opened her front door and stood, hand on her hip, greeting me. Her stance was what my mother would have called saucy—not flip, not coy, but certainly a tease. Her blouse, a gauzy lavender material, clung to her breasts, opened to the third button to reveal a strand of small blue beads. The sun, streaming through the window behind her, backlit a come-get-me smile that felt full throttle opened. It had been six hours since we’d kissed.
“Greetings, Comrade!” I bowed and held up a Spanish-yellow rose. “What are you doing after the revolution?”
Rachel laughed a deep-throated easy sound. “I’m glad you came on time for this one. Welcome to my home.”
Her mini-house was the first unit of a double set of duplexes located in Silverlake, a neighborhood alive with low rent housing, left-leaning peaceniks, and purposefully unemployed revolutionaries. Her place on Effie Street crowned one of the neighborhood’s many small hills peppered with California bungalows. She led me through a tiny kitchen and into a large living room. The place didn’t feel like an apartment, or even like she had attached neighbors, but rather like a cozy, secluded nest.
We stood awkwardly, three feet apart, in the large living room.
She broke the silence. “You look nice in red. It makes your skin tone darker.”
I blushed at her compliment and hoped my brown skin would conceal it. I’d never picked a specific shirt for a date, but for this occasion I had ironed a red button-down. On the way, I’d even taken a comb to my unruly hair, since Rachel seemed the “proper” sort who would want some courtly behavior before jumping into the sack.
“You look smashing,” I replied, wishing instantly that I could take the word back. “Smashing” was too archaic. I tried to take my eyes off her smile, find a topic to recover my balance. “Your living room is nice and big, all the protesters should fit in here,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Brenda said we couldn’t meet at ACW anymore. My place is central to most parts of LA. Would you mind making yourself comfortable for a few moments?” She began to shuffle towards another room. “I forgot something.”
“Of course,” I said, wondering what she could possibly be missing. Just one more thing I’d have to take off when I undressed her.
Trying to focus on the present, I began to case the living room. With polished oak floors and off-white stucco walls and filled by a stereo, a desk, TV, and bookcases, the room felt lived in. Most of the windows were open and it smelled like a garden. A small pine table that looked like it came from some farmer’s kitchen served as her desk, and a shiny black Smith Corona sat on it. Circling a large avocado-colored bean bag chair, I ran my fingers over the unusually small screen of a television that huddled in a far corner. Clearly, Rachel didn’t watch much TV.
Bookcases stretched along the entire south wall and looked like she’d made them herself, like a proper self-empowered dyke, from old planks and milk crates. The top shelf held cookbooks interspersed with file boxes. I lifted one lid—recipes. Ah, she cooked. This butch could not have too many lovers who cooked. Next to the recipes was a sprinkling of books about Oriental religions.
I made a mental note to ask Rachel what religion she was raised in. No one I knew in gay or women’s movements was a practicing anything anymore, but I’d learned that a woman’s childhood religion was relevant to her sexuality. I’d found that formerly Catholic lesbians had more sexual hang-ups, while Protestants sometimes did, and Jewish dykes were generally less contorted (and therefore more fun in bed.) My medieval Catholic parents had rarely mentioned sexuality. Identifying as a boy while growing up, I’d unknowingly but blessedly escaped the usual shame-filled Catholic sexual message aimed at indoctrinating girls. Rachel wasn’t Jewish or Catholic; I would have picked up those clues, so she had to be some kind of wishy-washy Protestant. That was good news!
Squatting to investigate the bottom shelves, I saw that they were filled with feminist books, pamphlets and small volumes of poetry. The works of Marge Piercy, and Susan Griffin did not surprise me, but wow—Rachel seemed to have everything Sylvia Plath had ever written. The Bell Jar, Plath’s fictional account of her descent into madness, was very popular with new feminists who were just leaving their marriages. She also had books by Robin Morgan, my favorite political poet. Aha, this woman and I might have something in common besides carnal attraction.
Portrait of a Marriage caught my attention. I pulled the memoir off the shelf. How interesting that Rachel had placed this book in her theory section rather than with the other biographies. A story of the non-monogamous marriage between the author’s parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold N
icolson, the memoir detailed the author’s affairs with men and, more prominently, his mother’s long and tempestuous love affair with British lesbian author and socialite Violet Trefusis. It was popular now and quite inspirational in the women’s movement’s ongoing redefinition of every aspect of our lives, right down to sexual politics and marriage.
I didn’t believe in marriage—the complexity of who I was wouldn’t fit the traditional confines of monogamy. What’s more, the idea that marriage and sexual exclusivity were good, or even natural, for women had been disputed by radical feminists as early as 1967. Then too, the notion of loving, or making love, with only one woman for the rest of my life felt bizarre. I agreed with our foremothers, like Simone de Beauvoir, that lifelong sexual exclusivity was an unnatural state. That suited me just fine since I was convinced that I’d never find one woman with whom I could be all of my many selves.
Rachel appeared rather suddenly at my elbow. “Have you read that book?”
I looked at her. She’d put on some dangly green and purple earrings. “Yes,” I said. “In fact, it’s one of my favorites.”
She touched my sleeve. “The two women were not monogamous, you know. But they loved each other over a lifetime.” Her voice was low, almost reverent. “I think marriage is dated. But not commitment.” She shook her head and laughed. “I sure as hell didn’t like being a wife! Being the other woman sounds like a lot more fun to me!”
We both fell silent, realizing what she’d said. Rachel had to know that I lived with another woman.
“When were you a wife?” I asked.
“Two years ago in Kansas,” she replied. I kept his last name, but not him.”
It was my turn to laugh, and feel more relaxed. Rachel’s background was familiar territory. In the last few years most of my lovers had recently come out of heterosexual marriages. With the birth of women’s liberation thousands of straight women were turning to feminism as an alternative to unhappy marriages. As a butch, I had no complaints. As a feminist, I agreed with Jill Johnston’s new book, Lesbian Nation, which shocked both the gay and het worlds by saying, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the solution.”
“Why did you divorce this John?”
“I didn’t know a lot of things about him before I married him.” Rachel’s face lost its smile as her mood shifted. She started to walk away. “Come into the kitchen. We’d better eat before the meeting starts.”
I followed her into the tiny room and sat down at a Chevy-yellow Formica table with two matching yellow vinyl chairs. It reminded me of my childhood kitchen in West Covina.
“Would you like a beer?” she asked, opening the fridge.
“No thanks, but I’ll have a Coke if you’ve got one. I never drink before meetings.”
“I always do,” she said. “Meetings make me nervous.”
“Do your parents know you’re a lesbian?” I asked.
“I hardly know it myself.” Rachel came toward me, leaned across the table and lit two small candles. “I just came out to myself last year. My mother may suspect, but my father wouldn’t know it if I kissed you in front of him. He doesn’t notice much.”
“So they aren’t together anymore?” Something in her story made me guess they’d split up.
Rachel turned back to the stove. “No. My father left us…when I was twelve.”
In the hunch of her shoulders I saw her withdraw. A silence came between us and I hesitated, reluctant to pursue the parent subject.
“Do you like your rice plain or with garlic and butter?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“With,” I said, sniffing again. It didn’t smell like there was hamburger or other meat with the rice. But perhaps now was not the moment to admit that I wasn’t part of the peace, love and brown rice crowd.
The rice smelled heavenly. A light sweat had broken out over her delicate and very sexy upper lip; she had to smell even better than her rice.
I reached across the table and took her hand.
“Hey Rachel, anybody home?” a voice yelled from outside the front door. The herald was followed by the laughter of other voices.
“Our comrades have arrived early,” Rachel said, withdrawing her hand. She stood to clear our plates.
“Damn politics!” I blew out the candles, choking on the smoke.
It was almost midnight when the meeting broke up. The last of our band had just walked out the front door. Empty beer bottles and soda cans were scattered everywhere.
“Some of our fellow protesters are wacko,” I shouted to Rachel across her living room. I was jacked up and stomping the perimeter of the room like a disoriented boxer. We had ended up having the same argument we had had at the earlier meeting. Worse, this time June and her labor cronies had taken the unauthorized liberty of bringing a labor lawyer, Sylvia Patton, to the meeting. I wanted to keep our issues within the community. Any hint of gays suing gays in the courts was going too far in my opinion. Tonight’s vote—to let this lawyer check into our unemployment, to see if we qualified—scared me. The vote had carried by twenty to ten; I’d voted with the minority. Rachel had voted with the majority. Now that everyone was gone, I had to explain to this innocent how politics really worked.
“There were too many unexpected people here tonight,” I said. “I wish we hadn’t allowed supporters to vote.”
“Isn’t that the egalitarian thing to do?” she asked.
“Yes, normally. But these others don’t have the same stake in the situation as we do. Letting just anyone who comes to the meetings vote diminishes our right to decide the outcome of this thing. It was a bad decision.”
“I thought it was okay. I voted for it.”
“I know you did.” I didn’t want to get into lecturing Rachel, since mentoring wasn’t the role I wanted with her.
Rachel folded herself into a miniature chair near the living room bookcase. “Some employees who were not fired were here tonight talking about forming a union,” she said earnestly. “If we’d have been unionized we could not have been fired the way we were.”
“Unionizing may be a fine idea,” I countered. “But a lawsuit coming at a time when we are fighting for feminist reforms all over the country will just cloud the issue. A lawsuit might make people think we’re protesting for higher wages or benefits from a new gay center that has no money and just moved out of a condemned building. I don’t know if this lawyer cares if gays tear their community apart.”
“Of course she does!”
“Don’t you understand? This lawyer’s from the Echo Park People’s Law Collective. That’s a Marxist organization, Rachel. Marxists just try to bend gay and feminist issues into mass demonstrations, or ‘workers’ issues.’ I’m afraid they just want to have their own little workers revolution right there on Highland Avenue. She never even said she’s a lesbian.”
“I think the lawyer is a lesbian, Jeanne.”
“Who she fucks is not the point.” I said vehemently. “The point is who she wants to fuck over. Anyway, who wants those stupid jobs back? It’s not like they paid anything. Any one of us can make a better living somewhere else.”
“We can’t just walk away and pretend it never happened,” Rachel said. “You only worked a few hours a week at the Center, Jeanne. Some of us worked there full time and really need our jobs back.”
I stopped and tossed the trash bag into a corner. What Rachel said was true. I hadn’t lost my dream job. Yet, many of the others were hurting. I was being myopic.
“The Board will realize they made a bad choice,” Rachel said. “They will come to their senses and realize that we’re all family. They’re directors of a gay center for God’s sake.”
I studied Rachel in her naiveté and wondered why she personally needed such hope.
“I damn well hope you’re right,” I yelled.
“All this anger scares me,” Rachel whispered from the other side of the room. Her voice sounded distant. “I wish you’d calm down.”
The volatility of the
meeting, and my own emotions, seemed to upset her. In the pint-sized chair she looked like a small child. I went to her and knelt on one knee beside her. Taking her hand, I said, “Don’t be afraid of me, I’m just blowing off steam.”
She stared at our hands locked together on her lap. “My father used to scream at my mother, and throw things. Sometimes he threw my sister and brother into walls.”
Images of my own father chasing us with his belt floated up from somewhere inside. “I don’t throw things when I’m angry,” I tried to comfort her. “Well, maybe a lamp or a can of Campbell’s clam chowder if I’m really angry. But it has to be clam chowder or else I won’t throw it.”
Rachel raised her eyes. “Why does it have to be clam chowder?”
We both burst out laughing. I relaxed and sat down on the floor beside her, still holding her hand. “Did your father ever throw you against the walls?” I asked.
“No, not me. I was the peacemaker. I would get in between him and my mother…and my siblings.”
“My mother was the peacemaker in our family,” I said. “Dad would lose it and come tearing after one of us with his belt or a broomstick. It was often me he caught. But my mother would try to stop him.”
Rachel studied my face. She brought her hand up to my cheek and cupped it like she was holding a precious flower.
Tears began to well, but I looked away. In exile I was missing the grow-up years of my younger sibs. They still lived under my father’s roof. Brother Bill, my first best friend in life, got his own apartment a few years ago. Happily, I’d come out to him and he’d often drop by to talk about girl problems and our latest romantic exploits. I desperately hoped there’d come a day that I’d get to know the little ones as grown adults with their own vision of what was right and wrong. The last thing I’d overheard before my exile was Zoey and Kathy, age eight and nine, discussing whether or not they could “catch what was wrong with Jeanne.”
I swallowed a sob and turned back to look at Rachel. The last thing I’d expected on this first date was to share stories about disturbed family and violent fathers. I pictured her as a tiny girl-child standing between two over-sized parents, her arms held out to keep them from clobbering each other.
When We Were Outlaws Page 14
