I’d brought him a peace offering, hoping it would ease the way toward my need to talk to him about what stood between us. I presented the package, disguised in seasonally appropriate green and silver wrapping, and he rose immediately out of his tattered armchair. “My, what have we here?” He used the royal plural as always.
Out of the Neiman Marcus box fell a luxurious black and red Bill Blass bathrobe. “Thank you, thank you Jeanne Córdoba!” His blue eyes twinkled as he donned the robe over a ragged white tunic that looked like it was purchased before the Punic Wars.
Fittingly royal, I thought as I leaned back on his dingy sofa, and flung my stinger question at him, “So Morris. I need to know how you feel in retrospect about the Great Strike? Did you ever come to an understanding of why it happened? Do you have any regrets?”
“Oh that.” Morris’s brows rose and he smiled at me archly, as he twirled and preened in his robe.
My zinger hadn’t even made him sit down.
He looked down at me, laughed, and said almost blithely, “If I had understood at the time the essential contradictions between feminism and gay liberation, I would never have hired you people in the first place.”
“You old dog!” The disrespectful words fell out of my mouth. After all these years, Morris and I had come to the same conclusion. Thirty years ago, my definition of feminism and his definition of gay liberation were indeed contradictory.
Morris sat beside me, reached out and slapped my knee. As he rocked back and forth amid his hippie furniture, I caught a grin at the corner of his mouth as he said, “My, oh my, we didn’t have as much in common as we thought we did. But dear child, didn’t we have a wonderful time!”
The Lesbian Tide
As to BeJo, we appear to be ending life as we began it, as ex-lovers and close family, in the lesbian tradition, now thirty-six years later. BeJo left waitressing when The Tide folded in 1980 and had a long successful career in print production with FOX. “FOX Movies,” she points out, “not FOX news.” We began as radical activists, but my boomer comrades and lesbian feminists largely went on to become the first generation of women professionals in fields as diverse as astrophysics and college professors of women’s and gender studies.
Rachel had a daughter in Idaho, professionalized her commitment to feed the poor by joining the new age grocery industry, and returned to Los Angeles. She entered an alcohol rehabilitation clinic in 2005 and remains sober today. We continue a lifelong intimate friendship.
The best-butch pal of my youth, Robin Tyler, went on to create the famous West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festivals (see endnote), and became a leading activist in the fight for marriage equality. 1976 was also the dawn of a life-long friendship and decades of political camaraderie with Ivy Bottini who co-founded AIDS Network LA, the first AIDS organization in L.A., became Deputy Director of Southern California’s campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative, and is now known as the lesbian godmother of the City of West Hollywood.
As to my first-born, The Lesbian Tide {1}, forty years after her birth she is enjoying a renaissance of popularity in women’s and gender studies college courses and among young activists creating historical exhibitions, books, and events. In the Encyclopedia of LGBT History in America lesbian archivist Dr. Yolanda Retter Vargas called The Tide “arguably the newspaper of record for the lesbian feminist decade, 1970 to 1980.”
It was excruciating for me at thirty-two years old to accept the death in 1980 of my first-born as a result of the “times they were a-changing.” The lesbian feminist decade was closing down in L.A. Lipstick lesbians were coming into ascendancy and I had no interest in this apolitical phenomenon. In the decades to follow I went on to create several more publications, among them, the first LBGT telephone book in America—Community Yellow Pages, and LA’s first queer magazine, Square Peg—as well as many more campaigns on behalf of lesbian rights and issues. As a mature adult I have come to understand that social revolution is the mother of both birth and death. Even “Córdova” had to grow out of her lame sexist training—by her Latin father and her times—in order to meet and marry her spouse twenty-one years ago. In such peace, I wrote this book and plan to write many more about lesbian history. I remain in service to my people.
Endnotes
Chapter 1: Last Guerilla
{1} National Lesbian Conference
April 13-15, 1973 on campus of UCLA (also known as West Coast Lesbian Conference.) This conference began as a west coast event but in planning stages evolved to include thousands of lesbians from Maine to Seattle, and remains today the largest political gathering of lesbians in history. One of the first major gay events held on a state university campus thanks to the Southwest Regional Lesbian Working Committee, and the behind the scenes approval of the paperwork by UCLA’s Associate Dean of Students, Sheila Kuehl. The charismatic Kuehl, child star as “Zelda” on the popular 1960s TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, later became California’s first open LGBT State legislator and authored the Dignity for Students Act, which protects students against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, as well as other crucial LBGT legislation.
Chapter 2: The Hat
{1} Angela Davis
The message of sisterhood and personal politics came late to this superstar of the Left. Davis finally came out as a lesbian in the 1990s. The National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum invited her to speak at their convention in 1993. In her speech Davis used the phrase “my community” several times when speaking about gays and lesbians. In the winter of 1998, in New York’s gay magazine OUT, Davis finally answered long-standing rumors about her lesbianism, saying, “It is something I’m fine with as a political statement. But I still want a private space for carrying out my relationships.” Davis said that when she began researching for her book about African-American women who sang the blues, Blues Legacies & Black Feminism (1999), she came to understand the role sexual desire played in women’s liberation.
Chapter 4: The Tide Rolls Out
{1} Daughters of Bilitis
The Daughters, named after Bilitis, a lover of the legendary Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, was founded in San Francisco in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. It was the first organized group of gay women in America. I’d heard its whispered name from dykes on my bar-league softball team, but it took me three years after coming out in 1967 to stumble upon its unpublicized L.A. meeting place. When I joined D.O.B. in 1970 it was a thriving national lesbian non-profit with thirteen chapters spreading from San Francisco to Boston, and a national Board of Directors. For more than two decades, it had been home to five to seven hundred gay women who were committed to one day living openly in a society that recognized homosexuals as positive, productive, and free. For a detailed history of D.O.B. see Marci Gallo’s award-winning book, Different Daughters (Seal Press: 2007). The demise of The Daughters came about in the early seventies as feminism and its own daughter—lesbian feminism—supplanted D.O.B.’s ideological and organizational centrality.
{2} “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” was the definition of a lesbian offered by the birthmother cell of Lesbian Feminism in 1970. The group—which included later famous activist authors Rita Mae Brown, Charlotte Bunch, Karla Jay and Barbara Love—was based in New York City and called Radicalesbians. This profound, yet singularly politicized, definition of lesbians ignited the Lesbian Feminist Movement.
{3} Lesbian Tide’s Kissing Cover
The issue with Gudrun Fonfa and Jan Aura kissing was the August 1974 cover of The Lesbian Tide. The Tide editors created this cover shot to protest a Ms. Magazine cover photo showing a heterosexual couple kissing. I moved the Tide’s cover fight with it’s printer into the 1975 timeframe of my memoir in order to illustrate the hardships The Tide went through with printers. During our nine year history (1971-1980) many issues of The Tide were contested by sexist printers over “pornography.”
Chapter 6: Petition at Midnight
{1} In early 1971 GCSC’s co-founders, Kight and Kilhefner, borrowed heavily from the incorporation papers of Del Whan’s Gay Women’s Community Service Center. Unfortunately that lesbian center would fold in 1973 due to lack of funds.
Chapter 7: The Vote
{1} Sheldon Andelson, recruited by Kight as new member of the Board of Directors in 1975, became the first multi-millionaire major donor in Los Angeles to gay causes, bringing others like him into the mainstream of national gay politics. My old pal, Shelly, was named in 1980 by then, and current, California Governor Jerry Brown, to be the first openly gay person to serve as a University of California Regent.
Chapter 9: Cordova’s Nazi
{1} Captain Joe Tomassi
Joe Tomassi was admired by Thomas Metzger, the founder of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), who wrote the following in Tomassi’s eulogy:
“Captain Joe was a natural leader of men who did not believe in going completely by the book. Joe recruited a lot of people in the L.A. area and performed many marches. An ordered style loose cell type, his group wore street clothes and surplus military jackets much like the left wing. They grew long hair and many had beards. They could move through the streets of L.A. without notice. No armbands, badges or any other identifying trinkets. They trained in the mountains and the deserts…It is my opinion that if the ideas of organization of Joe’s National Socialist Liberation Front would have spread across the nation we would be in a much better situation than we are now in.”
{2} LAPD Spy Networks
Since the union building 1920s, and again throughout the black and brown liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Los Angeles Police Department sought to undermine civil rights activism through its branch called the Red Squad.
There was no outside oversight of any intelligence gathering, since LAPD Chief William H. Parker had declared in 1950 that all intelligence files were “the property of the chief of police,” and therefore shielded from subpoena and outside perusal.
In 1965, Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis formed the Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) which became California’s secretive political intelligence-gathering operation. In 1970 the CCS evolved into the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), which was later found to have put together a scandalous record of illegal spying on targeted politicians and political activists. CCS shared information with right-wing extremist groups. By 1975, the PDID was the custodian of almost 2 million dossiers on 55,000 individuals and organizations.
In the course of an ACLU lawsuit filed in 1983, it was discovered that the PDID had illegally spied on both individuals and organizations, including myself. Then District Attorney Ira Reiner called these renegade police units “a band of zealot officers (who) believe it is completely appropriate…to abuse every single moral or ethical precept that is involved in society.”
Among those targeted by the PDID were two California governors, a state attorney general, a mayor of Los Angeles, a future LAPD chief, City Council members, the National Organization for Women, the PTA and the World Council of Churches. Others discovered to have been spied upon, included: Coalition Against Police Abuse; Alliance for Survival; U.S. Communist Party; Black Panther Party; Teamsters for Democratic Union; Peace and Freedom Party; Progressive Labor Party; Greater Watts Justice Center; Church of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard); La Raza Unida; People’s College of Law; Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee; Venceremos Brigade; anti-nuclear groups (all of them); American Friends Service Committee; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; United Farm Workers Local 80; American Civil Liberties Union; Community Relations Conference; Juvenile Justice Center; Socialist Workers Party; New Mount Pleasant Baptist Church; and Women For.
Chapter 13: The Women’s Saloon
{1} Lexington Six & FBI
The intrusion of the FBI in Lexington, Kentucky took place between January and May of 1975, a few months earlier than this memoir implies. In pursuit of leftist radicals Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, the FBI harassed lesbian compounds in San Francisco, Connecticut and Colorado. Some of the Lexington Six women were convicted of “obstruction of justice” on March 8, 1975. The names of these brave women are: Gail Cohee, Debbie Hands, Carey Junkin, Linda Link, Jill Raymond and Maria Seymour. Some were jailed for 18 months. The May/June 1975 issue of The Lesbian Tide printed “Power or Paralysis” which detailed the harassment of these lesbians. According to an essay in the anthology, No Middle Ground: Women & Radical Protest, NYU Press (1997), “Many of the Lexington Six and their supporters defined their radicalism in terms of their homosexuality, co-mingling personal, political, and sexual politics.” Susan Saxe was captured shortly after the Lexington women were imprisoned. Katherine Ann Power eluded the FBI for twenty-three years, but suffered a lifelong depression that finally made her turn herself into authorities in 1993.
{2} Camilla Hall
SLA member Camilla Hall’s poems were printed in the June 1974 issue of The Lesbian Tide. Between the winter of 1974 and the end of 1975, debate over whether to interpret fugitive feminists and lesbians as political sisters, or as common criminals, raged throughout the national lesbian feminist press.
{3} Judy Grahn
“The Common Woman Poems,” published by Grahn’s Woman’s Press Collective in 1973, were popularly quoted and printed on walls in lesbian and feminist spaces. The Saloon quote was from the closing lines of the final poem in the series, “Vera from My Childhood.”
Chapter 14: A Somewhat Larger War
{1} Weather Underground Organization
Only one member of the WUO, David Gilbert, remains in jail as of March 2011. Most, like leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, had charges against them dropped or received probation and minor jail time. Much of the FBI’s evidence against them was thrown out of court because the Feds broke so many laws in collecting this evidence. The Weather Underground was back in the news during the 2008 presidential campaign when Republicans tried to smear Barack Obama or his ties to Bill Ayers via their mutual interest in a Chicago educational foundation. Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin was referring to Ayers when she said Obama was ‘palling around with terrorists.’
Coincidently, it was the FBI who palled around with terrorists in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. In 1978 two covert FBI agent provocateurs were forced to surface. Agent Richard (Ralph) J. Gianotti and Agent William (Dick) Reagan were outed when they were subpoenaed to testify for the government’s case against an L.A. split-off faction of the WUO, The Revolutionary Committee. The agents had infiltrated the RC for six years! The RC was a feminist faction led by Judith “Josie” Bissell and Leslie “Ester” Mullin. The women, based in the Silverlake/Echo Park area, had left the WUO because of its male supremacist behavior toward its women comrades. In 1977 the RC planned to bomb the offices of Orange County California Senator John Briggs, the radically conservative Senator who sponsored the drive to expel gay teachers from California schools. The bombing never came off. Bissell and Mullin were convicted and did time in Federal prison.
{2} My FBI Jacket
My paranoia back in those days turned out to be justified. In 1985 the ACLU gave me a court-discovered document from their 1983 lawsuit, a four-page except from my own FBI file (known as a ‘jacket’), which detailed the evening I spent with “John” from the WUO and others. The document confirmed that there was an FBI informant in the room with us that night. All the names in the document, except my own, were blacked out, but in the pages I recognized the location and the Hollywood building I was in that evening.
FBI documents (housed at ONE International Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles) also reveal that the FEDS had sent undercover informants to both my 1971 Gay Women’s West Coast Conference and the 1973 National Lesbian Conference at UCLA. They also attended a number of DOB gay women’s meetings in the 1960s thru 1972, including my opening of the first lesbian center at 1910 S. Vermont in 1971. Hoover’s FBI believed that radical lesbians were part of a national Leftist conspiracy to overth
row the Establishment. I hope to obtain more details for my next book on lesbian feminist history.
Chapter 15: The Strike
{1} Joan Little(pronounced Jo Ann)
I first wrote about Little —the twenty-year old black woman who had been charged with murder for stabbing her jailer when he tried to rape her a second time—in the Free Press in mid April, and in The Lesbian Tide’s May/June 1975 issue.
Chapter 16: Double Bed on the Ocean
{1} Janis Ian’s “Jesse” appears on her 1974 album Stars. Jesse was also sung in 1973 by Roberta Flack on her Killing Me Softly album, and then in ’75 by Joan Baez on Diamonds & Rust. Ian came out as a lesbian in 1993 to much rejoicing by the LGBT movement.
Chapter 17: The Gospel According to Joe
{1} Armed Struggle
In his memoir, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow: 2009), WUO co-founder and one time fugitive Mark Rudd said, “I would not trumpet the disastrous strategy of armed revolutionary struggle, which had led me to founding the Weather Underground. How could I? By 1977 I saw the underground as a total failure as well as a tragic mistake…Nor did I still believe in an imminent socialist revolution in the United States, as I once had.”
Chapter 18: The Picket Line
{1} McCadden Place Garden
In later decades, Morris Kight would plant dozens of new trees in his historic garden, labeled with names like Schrader, for California State Judge Rand Schrader, and other gay men who died from AIDS. Morris planted a flowering eucalyptus in memory of Truman Capote. A magnolia marked the passing of Tennessee Williams. Years later, a flowering Chinese Magnolia tree was planted in West Hollywood’s Triangle Square to honor Morris himself, who died just weeks after his tree’s planting in 2002.
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