Fighting for balance, I braced my arms against the wall. The dawn light bathed Rachel’s lucent white skin, her face relaxed in sleep, like a small girl-child afraid of nothing and no one. And now I felt another part to this feeling, a song of loving her. The music in my head became louder than my sense of falling. It sang notes as delicate as the poppies in Tuolumne, and as fresh as the earth. Like my favorite Yosemite meadow, the song had no sides, no ceiling or floor. My mouth opened in awe. I wanted to burst out singing.
These feelings felt too huge for Rachel’s bedroom. I vaulted out of bed, ran into the living room, and threw open the west-facing curtains. I wanted to let the whole world in on my joy! What to say? What to do? Should I wake up Rachel and tell her? No! If I did I wouldn’t have any more defenses. For months Rachel had been an adventure. Now she was an imperative. What if I told her and she was more frightened than I? She’d said in her letter that love scared her. She’d told Delene that she was in love with me, but would she, could she, show up if I came to her open-hearted at high noon on a normal weekday? Maybe she only wanted me because I was rarely here. Besides, falling in love meant that one was ready to move forward, had a plan of action. I had no plan. I wasn’t ready to tell BeJo and lose my safe home with her; I wasn’t prepared to take my life apart.
This time my stomach dropped with a thud—the thud at the bottom of the well after the fall. I closed the curtains.
Chapter 20
The Plaintiff
[Los Angeles]
Mid-July, 1975
A week later, still blissed out from the shock of admitting to myself that I’d fallen in love with Rachel, I was back on the picket line. A car screeched to a stop in front of the circle of protesters. I turned to see Pody jump out of it, balancing a large stack of documents in her arms.
“Come and get ‘em!” she called out to us. “I’ve got the lawsuit!”
The line broke up as we rushed her, grabbing the documents.
“Hi, Córdova!” She greeted me with a warm smile as she pushed one into my chest.
“Thanks,” I said, flipping through the pages somewhat fearfully. I had very mixed feelings about gays suing gays in court.
“I’ve tried reading it,” Pody continued. “But I can’t make heads or tails of it. Can we grab lunch later so you can explain it to me?”
Studying Pody’s face, I felt my throat tighten inexplicably. “No!” popped out of my mouth. As her face fell, I added curtly, “I have a meeting later,” and turned my back. Picking up my placard, I fell back into the picket line, stunned at what had just happened. Seeing Pody’s grinning smile, the reality that she would soon be fucking BeJo had hit me. BeJo had told me this morning that Pody had invited her to a concert. Then she’d asked if I minded if she started going out with my buddy. I’d reacted with nonchalance and BeJo had dropped the conversation quickly, although I could see she was secretly pleased that my terse response meant I was jealous. Was I jealous?
Anger filled my body as I marched resolutely. It was time to stop putting friendship energy into Pody. Continuing to be pals with someone who would soon be my lover’s other lover felt unsafe. I kicked an abandoned placard out of the way. It hadn’t occurred to me that saying it was okay for Pody to date BeJo would end our friendship. It was one thing to accept non-monogamy intellectually. In practice, sharing the same woman didn’t feel like a path to trust-filled friendship
I slapped the lawsuit document against my thigh. Why hadn’t someone published a book on the rules of non-monogamy? I certainly couldn’t blame BeJo. She’d given me more than I’d given her, and had always acted well within our rules. Apparently, that didn’t mean I was happy with her decision. As for Pody, she’d stepped into her own damn problem. If she’d truly valued my friendship and confidence, she could have chosen someone else. I continued to stomp, annoyed with my own rigidities.
Tuning out the noisy picket line, I opened the legal document. Here was a real problem, a bunch of queers asking “the Man’s” court to arbitrate a fight amongst us. This was more fucked up than struggling over non-monogamy. Fanning the stiff pages of Patton’s brief, my eyes fell on a paragraph. Our lawyer had written, “The Board of Directors voted to nullify their own Personnel Policies and Procedures in a secret, seven-hour session held the week before they terminated eleven workers on May 1st.” Christ! There it was in black and white. The Board had nullified their own PP & P’s in order to fire us. I slammed the document shut. The PP&P’s weren’t a random bylaw that a Board of Directors could void or suspend. They were boiler plate permanent for a non-profit. GCSC had acted outside the law! With our lawyers bringing this up in the lawsuit, a judge would have to rule that the Center had fired us illegally. We would win in court. We’d get our jobs back! Breaking out in a wide smile, I let out a whoop and jumped in the air.
But wait. My brain skipped to Step 2, and my exuberance faded; it would take years for our lawsuit to be heard in court. The way things were going, GCSC might not exist in two or three years. I had heard that wealthy gay male donors on the Westside, confused by the strike, had begun to stop giving. Other donors were calling upon both sides to “get your shit together” before they’d resume giving. Word about the lawsuit had also made the rounds among public funding sources. The Feds and the State would not give more public grants until the “gays vs. gays” strike was resolved. Yeah, so we’d ultimately win in court, but what would we win—a financial settlement from a gay organization that couldn’t pay its rent? And if the Center were by some miracle still alive in two years, we strikers would have moved on with our lives. None of this spelled victory.
Lost in my downer mood, I reopened the document at page one. If I read the lawsuit from cover to cover perhaps I could find some crack in the door, some tiny piece of information that hinted at something I could do to effect an out of court settlement. The bold-faced words at the top of the page made me freeze in step. It read:
Plaintiff; Córdova Et. Al vs. Defendant; Gay Community Services Center
My chest deflated. There it was, my name, “Córdova,” suing a gay organization. I stumbled out of the picket line choking with humiliation. Why had Patton used my name to lead?
Bending over, I felt sick to my stomach. I clenched my jaw against the rage. I couldn’t stay out here in public. Breaking into a sprint, I ran down the street, away from the strikers, away from the line. Running toward the privacy of Lionheart, I threw myself into the driver’s seat, rolled up the windows, and snapped the locks. My fists pounded the wheel. “Why my name?” I screamed out loud. The words whiplashed against the window and blew back in my face.
Christ! I’d worked so long to build trust and a solid political reputation with my people. They trusted my name based on my track record. A half decade spent creating a united gay and lesbian front to challenge heterosexual normalcy. Thousands of hours building new organizations, brokering inter-group conferences, writing and publishing, to build and shape an L.A. community that could move our civil rights forward. And now it was all ruined, decimated by a single line of type in public print for all posterity: “Córdova” had sued her town’s gay community center.
I jabbed the rigid leather in the middle of the steering wheel. When and how had people come to perceive me as the strike’s leader? I never would have led in this direction. My chest heaved as my breath broke into sobs and I stared at the blank instruments on the dash. Where had I gone wrong?
A knock on the passenger window startled me. I unlocked the door, and Rachel slipped into the car.
“Jeanne,” she said, as she reached for me, her hand turning my chin toward her and cradling it. “Why so sad, what’s happening?”
“I’m glad you came.” I hugged her. “Have you seen this terrible thing?” I grabbed the lawsuit off the console between us.
“Yes,” she said. “I was pleased. Finally, GCSC will know we’re serious.”
I flipped it open to page one and pointed. “Why do you think my name is on the top, like
I’m the fucking leader of this strike?”
“Don’t tell me that’s what’s upset you,” she said, reading the page. “Look down, here, further on the page,” her finger pointed, “the rest of us are all listed.”
“But why is my name first and up there?”
“Probably because you’re the highest ranking. You were a member of the Board of Directors.”
“Oh!” I muttered, realizing Rachel’s answer was probably a good one. “But our damn lawyer should have made an alphabetical call. She could have put April Allison’s name first.”
Rachel shrugged and reached for my hand. “Yes, she most likely was using you because your name is the most widely known.”
“I’ve called Patton’s office six times in the last two weeks. If I’m such a ringleader, why can’t I even get our own lawyer to call me back?” I retorted. “The woman doesn’t like me. I don’t support her labor versus the bosses way of framing this. She’s sure found a way to lock me into her box,” I screamed. “Morris has beaten me again.”
Rachel looked at me. “What is this really about?” she asked calmly.
What is this really about? A lifetime of warring with Dad was reverberating in Lionheart along with my fists on the dash pummeling again. I saw him in my mind in the bleachers at the last championship game in high school. He’d sat directly behind the catcher so I’d see him with every ball I pitched. It was the bottom of the tenth, overtime, game tied, no hits, no runs, no walks. My perfect shutout game. But then…I heard the loud crack…the batter connecting to my curve. It was supposed to drop sooner than it did. I turned at the mound watching the ball fly out of the park dropping so far I could barely see it. Still, I kept watching. I couldn’t bear to turn back knowing I’d see Dad get up and leave.
“Jeanne,” Rachel shook me. “This isn’t about Morris. This is about something the Center did wrong. You’re not to blame.”
I fell back against Lionheart’s worn leather, my body spent. “Let’s not talk about the lawsuit anymore,” I said, as I gathered her into my arms and kissed her roughly. Rachel found my tongue, responding with her body reaching across the console. A tightness in my groin spread throughout my body.
“Come home with me,” she said her eyes glazed, matching mine. She knew that lovemaking would make the pain go away.
I looked back toward the picket line, desperately wanting to go to Effie Street to jettison the rage. But my mind was obsessed. I couldn’t let go of the lawsuit. I couldn’t make love or sleep—until I found some hope, some answer, about what I could do to solve the goddamn strike.
That’s when I remembered. I had a meeting scheduled this afternoon. There was hope. Rachel saw my shift in mood.
“Please don’t tell me you have a meeting,” she’d groaned, her body pressed against mine.
“I do,” I said. “And I’m late and it’s way out in Venice.”
“Take me with you? I don’t want to leave you now.”
“I don’t want you to either. But I can’t take you. It’s a closed session at the Women’s Center, called by others.”
Rachel re-gathered herself, opened the passenger door and walked back to the line. I knew she wasn’t happy.
I steered west absentmindedly—heading for the Westside Women’s Center. Hope drove me. My best peer friends had called the meeting. They’d know how to advise me.
The WWC, as we called it, was located in a 1920’s Craftsman style house in Venice with a sloped roofed and wide front porch. It was the third incarnation of L.A.’s principle Women’s Center. The first had opened early in 1970, at the dawn of feminism, at 1027 South Crenshaw Boulevard in mid-town L.A. Then a new site called the Venice Women’s Center opened as an off-shoot of the Crenshaw Center and the two coexisted for six months until Crenshaw closed. In 1974 the Venice Women’s Center relocated to Hill Street which was on the northern border of Venice, a ragtag community of radicals, hippies, and the homeless, which stretched along the Pacific. Its pack of rebels now included us radical feminist dykes. WWC was headquarters to dozens of lesbian and feminist groups that met seven nights a week and all weekend. It brought together women working in anti-racist and anti-war efforts; academics and grassroots community organizers. Rumor had it that more than a few fugitives—from the FBI and the civil wars in Latin America—used the WWC as a center for drop-offs and pickups of people and information not condoned by the US government. It was also a halfway house along the Underground Railroad that tracked between suburban heterosexuality and lesbian liberation. These years it felt as though dozens of young housewives were hearing the clarion call of feminism and were rushing to take their place in a wildly growing Lesbian Nation.
Entering Santa Monica on the Westbound 10 Freeway, I knew that my only chance to find a solution to the strike and my angst lay in talking with my circle of political peers at this unique meeting. The group was composed of four other lesbian political leaders who’d come of age with me in the culture of lesbian feminism, veteran dykes who’d survived their own similar battles. My close friend, Ariana Manov, had called the meeting. Judy Freespirit and Jane Herman, members of the powerful L.A. Radical Feminist Therapy Collective, and Kate McDonough, Director of the new Westside Women’s Clinic, would all be there. Goddess bless!
I felt Lionheart speeding, tapped the brakes, and settled down for the drive out to the ocean. The women I was meeting with were all femmes, I reflected, except Kate. In the gay male movement and back in my old bar dyke days, butches had the power. But femmes were the leadership running the lesbian feminist movement. This made sense to me. It was always the most oppressed that held the rawest anger in a social change struggle. Therefore they made the best leaders. Drag queens and a stone butch, arguably the most oppressed of gay men and dykes, had thrown the first punches at the Stonewall Uprising. Housewives had started the feminist movement because they had the most to gain from it. In my lesbian feminist movement it made sense that lesbian femmes had the power. As women and lesbians they had experienced the most personal discrimination from their ex-husbands and male lovers. As one of only a handful of national lesbian butch leaders, I was an exception. It was a privilege to belong to this group of powerful women who had both intellect and political savvy. Some of them had become my “family of choice” since I’d been exiled by my biological family as a teenager. After my father threw Judy and me out, I knew I had to find a new family. A group of friends with whom I could have Christmas dinner, celebrate a birthday, and call in the middle of the night when a lover left. Every gay person I knew had a similar story about being emotionally, or literally, exiled. To gays, family of choice was not a substitute. It was a necessity.
Ariana had called today’s meeting to take action around the FBI’s arrest of the “Lexington Six” and other dykes who they thought were withholding information about lesbian Leftist fugitives Susan Saxe and Katherine Powers. Defending our community against the FBI and its notorious Grand Jury was the topic of the meeting. And, I hoped that after today’s political agenda, my buddies might be willing to stay and listen to my personal problems about the GCSC strike.
The strike had become much more than my personal problem. Contention over it was spreading throughout the community and becoming problematic for everyone, including the Westside Women’s Center. Ninety percent of the lesbian feminist community had terminated relations with the sexist gay Center. Scabs—who included any woman or gay male who publicly sympathized with GCSC—were no longer welcomed at the WWC, the Women’s Saloon, the Woman’s Building, the Women’s Switchboard, or other lesbian group or gathering place.
Last month there had been a bitter showdown here at the Westside Women’s Center initiated by a small group of women who called themselves the Lesbian Activists. The group’s leadership came out of Chatsworth, a tiny, no name dot on the map in the San Fernando Valley. Lesbian Activists had applied to use the Westside Women’s Center as their regular meeting place. That was no problem, since most lesbian and many feminist groups in
the city met at the Center. But the group’s newsletter, The Lesbian News, had declared itself neutral in the GCSC strike. This was a very big problem. Last month, they were denied the right to hold their meetings at the WWC. They’d been deemed “not feminist enough.”
Feeling ostracized, the Lesbian Activists had retaliated by calling for an end to the GCSC boycott in their next edition of Lesbian News. Oddly, and despite their newsletter’s name, the group identified themselves as “gay women” rather than lesbian, and said that both sides in the strike were equally guilty.
There was also a small but vocal minority of strike-phobic dissenters within my own collective at The Lesbian Tide. A member of this minority, a good writer named Jan Sappell, had quit last week over The Tide’s openly pro-strike coverage of the almost three month old, divisive strike. Two more of The Tide’s staff members were wobbling. Even BeJo had demanded we publish a graphic in our last issue that called upon both sides to “Shut Up and Compromise!” {1}
I hadn’t told anyone, including BeJo, that I too had been thinking about modifying The Tide’s boycott of printing only one side of the GCSC story. We’d received, but hadn’t yet printed articles written by GCSC people, scabs, or sympathizers. A week ago, Chief Scab Lillene Fifield had submitted a written essay—an emotional appeal calling for “an end to this insanity that forces sisters into silence and withdrawal.” I was sitting on her submission. How much longer could I, as a journalist, justify dismissing the other half of the story? The Tide had solidly called for feminist reform at GCSC, but had also denounced random violence, and not called for more radical demands like “closing the boss-controlled gay center.” We were a monthly publication, and events had moved too fast between the boycott and the strike and we’d had no time to print my careful distinctions between the two strategies. The paper was editorially run by BeJo, Annie Doczi and me—with a large number of newbie skilled volunteers who came and went every six months. Yet we prided ourselves on being a reliable publication. The Tide’s pride was my pride. To me that implied a pact, an oath to my readership to render the news, all the news, about lesbian feminism. It was also getting harder for me to stand up under the pressure of the gay male community. Many gay men in town, including leaders I’d worked with closely on mixed gay and lesbian issues, were accusing me, because they knew my name, of trying to destroy the Center.
When We Were Outlaws Page 25
