When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  “But…” Morris’s drawl hung loudly, puncturing my wishful thinking. “We must ask for more than ten days. That picket line is disrupting our services!”

  “And my clients must have their jobs back with financial restitution,” Patton cut in.

  “The Center has no money,” Gross declared.

  “You have an annual budget of three hundred and fifty thousand a year,” Patton pressed, pointing to the spreadsheet in front of her. I’d never seen the documents she was holding.

  Morris spread both his arms at chest height. I saw his otherwise pale neck begin to color. “That was our annual budget!” he railed at Patton. “That was the money from the federal grant given to us to run the women’s alcohol prevention program. Lillene and I spent months writing that grant. That program and its money have been stolen by you people!” Morris’s neck was picking up purple. The veins in his forehead began to show. “We no longer have that money or those projected estimates you have in your hands.”

  I was speechless, shocked by Patton’s use of projection sheets I’d never seen. She and I should have talked. I was sure she was aware that the Center was running on fumes and that its financial situation had been made worse by a bold gamble that Kight and Kilhefner had made two weeks before firing us. They’d taken out a mortgage on GCSC’s new Highland property to the tune of two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars {1}. Now, in addition to that, by my calculations, the Center owed the fired employees some sixty-six thousand dollars in back pay.

  “The fate of the alcoholism grant was never part of the strikers’ issues,” I protested, remembering how the staff of the ACW had piggybacked their mutiny on top of our fight for feminist representation. I’d supported the notion that only women should direct a women’s program, but in retrospect, I’d seen that the way the separation was engineered had all but torn the financial guts out of the Center. But none of that was the business of this negotiation.

  “ACW was the beginning of all this!” Morris screamed. “Weathers and her gang are the thieves among you. That was the Center’s first grant. There is no money!” he finished with an arc of his chin.

  I sat back, silenced. While Brenda and her staff were active strike participants, it shocked me to hear that Morris blamed the strikers for ACW’s independence revolution. This raw rage was about to derail the negotiations. Had Morris forgotten our private deal? He was acting like the lord of a fiefdom of unruly serfs. It was now or never. I had to put it in his face.

  My tone dropped to charming but determined. “What if you just offered to give our jobs back?” I said deliberately, using the language of our prior understanding. “And then we strikers were willing to sign an agreement saying that you could pay us our back pay over a long period of time…say three years? That kind of monthly payment wouldn’t break you.”

  I held my breath waiting for Morris to reply.

  “That is acceptable…” Morris winked at me.

  I sat back, gratified. A smile came to my lips.

  “With some reservations,” Morris finished.

  “What reservations?” Enric growled.

  Gross took a single sheet of paper out of his briefcase, and slid it face down over to Patton. She turned it over, read it, and drew in a breath. Her spine stiffened. “These are the reservations?” she asked.

  “That is our list of dissidents, the exceptions,” Morris began.

  “We’re strikers! Say strikers!” Enric was on his feet again. He pivoted toward Patton and pounded a clenched fist on the table, “We will make no exceptions!”

  “Those names on the page are the ringleaders,” Morris continued, his tone dark and flat. “Those are the people we know are out to destroy the Center and overthrow its Board of Directors. We cannot offer their jobs back.”

  “Read the names, Sylvia,” April demanded.

  Patton read aloud. “Those dissidents who cannot be rehired are: Jeanne Córdova, June Suwara, Enric Morello, Colin McQueen, Edward Culp, Dick Nash, April Allison, and Alicia Maddox.”

  With each name my eyebrows reached further into my forehead. I’d warned Morris against singling out any individual names. Now he’d gone and listed every leader. He stared at me without flinching. Then, he turned to Gross and nodded. The lawyer took another single sheet out of his briefcase.

  “We agreed to meet with you because we have a formal offer.” The attorney mouthed each word slowly. “I have been empowered by the Board of Directors of the Gay Community Services Center to offer to drop our lawsuit against you and withdraw our appeal against unemployment benefits, in exchange for the dissidents dropping the picket line, the boycott and your lawsuit.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Enric screamed, jumping to his feet. This time I joined him, my face red with rage.

  My godfather stared at me as if he’d forgotten who I was.

  “That’s not your only offer, I hope?” I demanded, still incredulous.

  Morris cleared his throat. “GCSC is about gay liberation. I can see in retrospect that we shouldn’t have hired you feminists in the first place. That was my mistake.”

  April gasped. I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. Morris had finally been honest. He was saying said GCSC was a gay institution and would go feminist over his dead bodyI gripped the metal edge of the table with both hands. Finally, Morris lifted his eyes to mine. A small smile twisted his lips. His normally perceptive blue eyes were the color of slate rock.

  Mine were filled with rage. Morris had played me! I’d failed to realize how exclusively Morris loved the body politic of gay maledom and power. Between these two loves of his life, dykes were but a necessary show of political correctness. We were expendable. Feminism would never be part of what motivated Morris Kight.

  Patton looked toward Sirica and Corneilson for some glimmer of compromise. “I don’t suppose there is a second paragraph to your offer?” she asked. They said nothing. They were window dressing.

  “There is nothing further,” Gross replied. “This is what I have been empowered to present to you.” He closed the manila folder in front of him.

  I was still shaking with anger. My thoughts tumbled quickly—my mentor had betrayed me! He’d never intended to offer our jobs back. I saw myself leaning across the table and punching Morris to wipe the near-grin off his placid face. April reached over and put a restraining hand on my forearm. Gross looked at me nervously. He opened his mouth, speaking haltingly to Patton, “Will we see you at the next scheduled session on September nineteenth?”

  Patton replied, “I will take your everything-for-nothing offer to my clients’ meeting of the whole. I’m sure you realize it will not be acceptable. I’ll call you about the September nineteenth session.”

  April was the first of our team to stand and walk out. Morris rose up and bowed, like a Japanese emperor giving his subjects permission to self-immolate. He turned and left the room, his retinue scurrying behind him.

  My fury dissipated into a deep quiet. I sat glumly, stunned beyond words. Why had the Center agreed to meet with us when it had no intention of offering real compromise? Why this elaborate charade?

  The pattern to Morris’s plot points piled up in my brain. It was suddenly all too clear. The Center’s first hope, to deny our unemployment benefits so we’d eventually quit the picket line to find new jobs, hadn’t worked. Now, with the EDD hearing a few days away, they’d come to the negotiating table hoping to mitigate this monetary defeat. They hoped to sucker us, to use this as a bargaining chip, something they would “give” us so the Center could appear magnanimous in the gay press saying they’d “granted” us unemployment benefits. They’d also strategically agreed to talk to us and grant a second token concession to withdrawal of their own frivolous countersuit. If we’d postpone the picket line.

  This was vintage Morris, a brilliant subterfuge. I put my elbows on the table and covered my face. I could read the headlines in the next issues of The Advocate: “GCSC Grants Benefits; Strikers Reject Offer to Settle!�
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  Chapter 28

  Straws and Absolution

  [Los Angeles]

  September 3, 1975

  I walked out of the negotiation building and onto the beaten-down end of Sunset Boulevard. With the September glare hitting me, my shirt was soon drenched and clinging to my back. Cars flew past me, and I stood on the sidewalk not sure which way to turn.

  Rubbing my eyes, I noticed I was on the verge of tears. The Great Strike had lost its greatness. Negotiations were over. There was no more joy, or even righteousness, on the picket line. The strikers would say no to Morris’s list. The lawsuit, when it finally had its day in court, would award compensatory damages that would be more than the gay Center could pay. By that time we’d be a pack of wolves circling a crippled prey. Even if GCSC did settle and survive, it would take a decade to heal the antipathy that lesbian feminists felt toward the institution that represented no liberation for women. So much effort—and now defeat.

  Looking down at the cactus rock garden next to the sidewalk, I bent over and grasped two white, sun-broiled rocks, one in each fist. The pain stung. I saw myself running madly down the tattered street, hurling the rocks, shattering delicate store windows, laughing crazily at the tinkling sounds of destruction. I felt my inner Great Wall, the heavily fortified mental barrier erected between my politics and my emotions, cracking from fatigue and contradiction. The strike had sapped me. As had Rachel. I was dangerously close to empty. Why had I spent so much time fighting on male turf trying to make the Center co-gender, I wondered bitterly, pacing as I clutched my rocks.

  Staring angrily across the street, I realized I was looking at the steeple of a church tucked on a side street. Aha, a church, a place apart, just like the convent. Approaching the front door I read the sign, St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church. Sebastian—I remembered my holy card of him. A martyr tied to a post with arrows sticking out of his chest. How appropriate. I entered, genuflected, and made my way to a pew. Placing the rocks on the wooden seat beside me, I knelt in the pew, breathing slowly and consciously, allowing the energy of my defeat to dissipate.

  I closed my eyes and Morris’s face appeared. He sat on the couch at McCadden Place where I’d crossed the line and met him last month. It was the moment just before we’d shaken hands in agreement—yes, I could see his eyes now, the same cold, emotionless glass they’d been today. The sly smile behind his words had said to me, “This is the house that I built, and it will always be mine!” I should have known then that his Center would never, at least not in this decade, elect avowed feminists to its Board, put the word “lesbian” in its name, or foster a collective management structure.

  Grasping for straws and absolution, I considered that perhaps the strike foretold a separation that was destined to happen. At a primal level, feminism and gay liberation were contradictory for many of us. I’d cringed years ago when I’d heard Morris and his Center co-founder, Don Kilhefner, first define gay liberation as “a movement for sexual freedom.” To women that sounded like gay men only wanted the freedom to fuck whenever, and whomever, and as much as possible. Permission to fuck was not the movement or the goal to which I’d pledged my life. Radical feminism was about replacing the male order of hierarchical relationships and creating egalitarian structures of shared power. Why couldn’t gay male leaders of my generation realize that sexism and misogyny were the basis of their oppression too? That the straight world feared gay men because they’d crossed the line between male power and female submission and they were discriminated against because they “acted like women.” Would we women have to wait for a whole new generation of men to realize women’s liberation was their liberation too? Today, the uneasy coalition of gay men and lesbians was a double-load freight train waiting to derail.

  Even now the memory of Morris’s rage during the negotiations took me aback. I hadn’t seen rage like that since my father threw Judy and me out of his house, hating me for being different and for daring to bring that difference into his house and trying to change his values so that I could live under his roof with the rest of my family. That attempt had failed, just like this one. But never in the last six years had I regretted leaving my father’s domain. Fighting against his constant railing and belittlement of my being gay, I’d found pride in who I was, and I was doing my part to change straight society and show him he was wrong.

  Suddenly my mouth fell open. Like Lazarus, a scale fell from my eyes and in this moment the issue was clear! My father was wrong, and so was Morris. I’d been trying to get back into my political godfather’s house and take it over, or at least make him change his rules for living there. Not leaving with Judy the day Dad threw her out would have meant dying. I didn’t choose death then, and I wasn’t going to choose it now.

  I got up off my knees and picked up my rocks. My tribe of women didn’t need to beg entrance to the supposed Holy of Holy place. In order to survive, maybe all of lesbian-kind had to leave the house of the father, the house of men. Maybe we were at a turning point in history when men and women could do more good by working separately. Perhaps the ideology of dyke separatism—the idea that lesbians could only achieve equality by not working with men, gay or straight—was correct, at least for this point in history!

  I turned away from the altar, ran down the aisle and out the front door. I had to let go of the GCSC before its contradictions snuffed me out as a lesbian activist. Many of my lesbian activist friends had already given up the movement, left L.A. to live on the land in Santa Cruz and grow carrots for the revolution. I didn’t want this burn out to happen to me. I’d be damned if I would spend the rest of my life fighting Morris Kight, or my father. Someday, forces more compelling than the values of lesbian feminism would force Morris to concede, but until that day, the Gay Community Services Center was no longer my problem.

  Spying a phone booth, I sprinted toward it, rocks still in hand. I needed to talk out a solution with someone. I wanted to call Rachel. I wanted her to be that someone. I picked up the receiver and dialed her phone number, but something kept me from leaving a message when the answering machine picked up. It was wishful thinking, believing that Rachel would be there for me now when she hadn’t returned my phone calls in weeks. Our relationship had been born into a political setting, but Rachel and I didn’t have a political relationship.

  I dropped in another dime and dialed Robin’s number.

  The Crest Coffee Shop was a fifties-style joint with fake wood paneling, corners filled with ferns and macramé hangers, and vinyl booths. It was the preferred hangout for Silverlake’s non-moneyed activists and intellectuals because the booths offered conversational privacy and the broad bank of windows facing Sunset afforded enough light for writers to read their manuscripts to one another. Also, the price of a full breakfast was two bucks.

  “You look bummed out,” Robin said, sliding into my booth. She watched me sipping my coffee through a straw I’d twisted into a stick person. Since leaving St. Sebastian’s I’d lost some of my revelatory steam.

  I smiled. “Glad you came,”

  “Why you so convinced the negotiations are over?” she asked, as she pointed to my coffee and nodded to a waitress. “Why can’t the strikers compromise more?”

  “We can’t compromise on an offer of everyone-gets-their-jobs-back-except-the-leadership. That’s unprincipled.”

  “What about continuing the picket line and building pressure to make them come up with a second offer?”

  “Short of breaking windows and allowing more violence, I can’t see us mounting any more leverage on the line. How many more months can we ask picketers to walk around in a circle without seeing any results? Fewer and fewer are showing up each week. Morris is banking on this attrition and that men’s money and donations will win the day in the long run.”

  Robin mused, “Do you ever think maybe dykes and gay men need to be separate and do their own thing for a while?”

  “That’s the conclusion I’ve come to,” I said, relieved that Rob
in was already on the same page. I leaned forward. “And I’ve also thought about the strike from a dialectic perspective. Gay men versus lesbians are certainly the struggle of opposites. Right now this generation of gay men, having grown up with society’s ingrained sexism, constitutes the upper class. As men, they have both the money and the power. But that might not always be so. If men control the means to production, women control the means to reproduction—that means power, too. Someday, women will come into their power. Then today’s gender power imbalance will start to level out.”

  Robin reached across the table and gently pried the stick person out of my hand. “So when are you going to leave the boys to the boys?”

  I looked at her soberly and then smiled. “Today?” My eyes danced with excitement, and fear.

  Robin studied me. “So, what’s stopping you?” She leaned forward and tapped my head. “Get out of your head and into your gut! Your instincts have carried you this far. Look at your track record—The Tide, two national conferences, The Freep. You’ve made the right calls for five years. Trust yourself!”

  “If I go public with quitting and put it in The Tide, and say negotiations are over, it will signal an end to a working relationship between lesbians and gay men in L.A. And if lesbians don’t go back to GCSC, we won’t get government money for our priorities. Who inside GCSC will agitate for a program to support lesbian mothers’ court battles for custody?”

  “Government money never made anyone strong.” Robin tossed my stick person back to me.

  “Christ, Robin, you’re such a Libertarian!” I laughed.

  “At least I’ve got you smiling.”

  “And no closer to doing what needs to be done,” I retorted, as the waitress returned with coffee for Robin. She ordered me a Coke float with two scoops.

  I began to unravel my stick lady.