When We Were Outlaws
Page 43
Chapter 20: The Plaintiff
{1} The Tide Collective
A “collective” was a feminist group of women who made all decisions by consensus—which meant nothing passed without agreement by all. Small radical feminist groups ran as collective cells, but broader based large organizations, like the National Organization for Women, were organized hierarchically with officers, a president, and majority rule. Consensus was a laborious and time-intensive way to run a newspaper with sharp deadlines. During its long history, the Lesbian Tide was run by an Editorial Collective, who at various times included core women like Barbara “BeJo” Gehrke, Sharon MacDonald, Shirl Buss, Barbara McLean, Ann Doczi, Nancy Toder and others. We determined the paper’s voice and content. Scores of other skilled volunteer writers, paste-up artists, and distribution women were also valuable members of the staff.
Chapter 24: The Cuckoo’s Nest
{1} The Snuff Movies
These were violent misogynistic films that came to Los Angeles and other American cities from South America, that depicted the death and dismemberment of women rumored to be alive at the time. A guerilla crew I put together in 1975 drove around Hollywood in a car in the early morning dark throwing bricks through the plate glass windows of L.A. theaters showing the snuff movies. It worked. We shut them down.
{2} Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
My experience with Trotskyite ideology dates back to 1972 when I’d begun an affair with Sally Frumpkin-Anderson, who I later learned was the daughter of the Chairman of L.A.’s Socialist Worker’s Party. Trying to please her and understand her politics, I took classes with her in Marxist Leninism at the SWP headquarters in Hollywood. The novelty and brilliance of Karl Marx’s mind expanded my intellect. Yes, I was a feminist, but my twenty-three year old mind was always searching for more political knowledge.
From my studies I learned that the SWP, the American Communist Party, and most other Marxist Leninist splinter groups of the 1960s-‘70s New Left, believed that the path to revolution had to be led by “the workers,” who, they said, would at some point take to the streets in mass numbers and topple the American capitalist government. Even back then I personally doubted that American workers, from what I knew of us, were going to revolt in my lifetime. But I drank in world politics. During that summer of ’72 Sally also joined the Steering Committee of the National Lesbian Conference which we were planning for April, 1973, on UCLA’s campus.
By the winter of ’73 my love affair was on the rocks, but the SWP dealt me a surprising card. They sent their top ranking woman, Linda Jenness, to fly out from New York to meet me. Jenness had run for U.S. President in 1972 on the SWP’s national ticket. Wondering why the SWP was placing such high value on recruiting me, it dawned on me that Jenness’ outreach was because I was the publisher of The Lesbian Tide, by then growing into the most influential lesbian paper on the West Coast. By the time I met Jenness however, I’d come to my own studied conclusion that my lover’s ideology really despised homosexuality. I was ready to quit. Jenness’s attempted coup backfired. Two months before the Conference I quit my associations with the SWP and Anderson. But Anderson, and one other socialist organizer, remained on the Steering Committee.
At the April Conference, a large group of attendees alleged that there were Trotskyite goals implied in the Registration materials, and therefore the organizers were the much hated “Trots.” Anderson betrayed me and the other organizers when she and her squad of four SWP lesbians refused to identify themselves as the Trotskyites, and instead allowed us organizers to be publicly attacked as Trots. I have no knowledge as to whether any of the other 2,000 lesbians at the conference were members of the SWP, but the public political betrayal of my recent ex-lover was baffling and extremely painful at the time.
Soon after the Conference, I began to read in lesbian publications out of Boston that the SWP, and groups like it, were seeking to infiltrate the women’s and gay liberation movements in order to get feminists and gay and lesbian workers fired up and out on the streets. These “Trots”, as the feminist movement called them, didn’t really care about the rights of Lesbian mothers, the Equal Rights Amendment, or the struggle for women’s reproductive rights. They’d joined our ranks to use our huge numbers and our popular relevance to galvanize their workers’ revolution. By this time I agreed with the national mood—the opportunistic Trots were not welcomed in my movements. But, personally and politically I paid a heavy price for too-little-too-late comprehension of wider politics and my inadvertently gullible role in them. As an older activist, I try to teach young queers in the LGBTQ movement to learn more about the politics of friends or lovers before joining them on the streets or under the sheets. Politics can be deceptive.
Chapter 26: A Lavender Woodstock
{1} Women’s Music Festivals
This festival took place over the weekend of September 25–27, 1975 and not in mid-August as my narrative implies. I moved the date earlier due to the plotting needs of my story. This San Diego festival was perhaps the earliest precursor of the large national lesbian music festivals, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which became the cultural showrooms of our movement over the next two decades. Founded by Lisa Vogel and Barbara Price and their “We Want the Music Collective” in 1976, “Michigan” went on to become the mother of all women’s music festivals. Robin Tyler’s West Coast Women’s Music & Comedy Festival, the second largest festival, ran between 1981 and 1995 in Yosemite National Park. Tyler’s Southern Women’s Music & Comedy Festival (1986-1993) was the third largest of these lesbian gatherings. Along with smaller regional festivals in the South, New England, and Connecticut, they all eventually circled up and came be known as the women’s music festival circuit. A few of them, such as Michigan–despite recent political battles over trans inclusion—still sound the annual call for lesbians and feminists to come and live one week of the year in a world made by women.
Chapter 31: Return of the Hat
{1} Lesbian Nation
A popularly used metaphoric reference to a utopian world peopled only by lesbians and governed by radical feminist principles. Appearing in several books and essays, the term was mainstreamed by Jill Johnston, a columnist at New York’s Village Voice, when it was used as the title of her 1973 classic lesbian feminist treatise, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. The term continues through present day as a symbol of political solidarity among lesbians, especially lesbian separatists.
{2} The National Lesbian Feminist Organization
The founding convention of the NLFO took place in 1978. I and others began planning the NLFO in 1976. I’ve brought the future forward in this memoir in order to show where my future thoughts lay.
{3} “Minority” Lesbians
In the 1970s, people of color were referred to as “minorities.” Later, the term “third world” people came into fashion. These earlier terms hint at the extent of systemic racism present in America in those decades, even among liberals. Loretta Ross, SisterSong cofounder, recounts how at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977 a group of black women activists brought a Black Women’s Agenda to substitute for the minority plank in the main agenda. When other minority women, including Latinas, sought to join them, the phrase “Women Of Color” was created in those negotiations to find a new name for the agenda, with a commitment to work in coalition with each other on shared issues.
{4} La Raza
This Spanish phrase means “the race,” “the cause,” or “our people.” It was used in the 1960’s and ‘70s by political Latinos/as to refer generically to the goals behind our liberation movement, including the Brown Berets and Cesar Chavez’s organization of the farm workers. Today La Raza is sometimes politically interpreted by conservatives as a Chicano supremacist slogan, but most Chicanos/Latinos use it to refer to our cause –any cause that helps the progress of Hispanos or Latinos in the United States.
{5} Rachel
I’ve used a pseudonym for this courageous w
oman who allowed me to tell our story in great detail.
Chapter 32: The End of the War
{1} Venceremos
Venceremos is Spanish for “We shall overcome.” The Venceremos Brigade was a New Left activist group well known in the Bay Area during Emily Harris’s college days when she became a member. The Brigade, along with other groups that included Angela Davis and many Black and Latino activists, championed the human rights of prison inmates jailed for politically motivated crimes, or under racially discriminatory circumstances.
{2} The SLA, Monogamy & Lesbianism
Shortly after their September 1975 capture with Patty Hearst, press stories began to emerge saying that—in alignment with the non-monogamous politics of the day—most SLA members had slept together. A number of SLA women had intimate relationships with each other and were then, or have since become, lesbians.
{3} Emily Harris
Emily Harris was released from prison in 2008 for the second time, after serving a sentence for a new 2002 conviction for her role in the 1975 death of a woman during the SLA’s Crocker National Bank robbery. Harris said the shotgun she held had a hair-trigger and she hadn’t meant to pull it. In 2008, I was shocked to hear that Emily and I had been living virtually next door to one another in Altadena, California, a lesbian-friendly hamlet northeast of L.A. I was less shocked to hear that she had divorced husband Bill, is now a lesbian and had been living with her woman lover for the nineteen years between her two terms in prison.
Epilogue
{1} Lesbian Tide
Historically, The Lesbian Tide was the successor of The Ladder, and a sister in time to the famously doctrinaire Furies and the radical feminist D.C. newspaper, Off Our Backs. Thousands of lesbians read all three religiously every Sunday morning like people read The New York Times today.
Unlike most of the early lesbian feminist publications which carried either politics or poetry, The Tide was built on the model of a mainstream weekly newsmagazine, including its 8 ½ x 11 traditional size, and three column format. Each issue carried a broad range of national news stories, investigative reporting, interviews with iconic lesbian musicians and songwriters, concert reviews, short news clips from around the world, photos of the famous and the ordinary, book reviews, one or two poems, and local lists of lesbian bars, restaurants, and shops. At its height The Tide printed only 3,000 issues monthly but its “pass along rate” was clocked at 9 per issue. With its strong radical voice and coverage of the primary and most controversial issues, people, and events of its era, the paper played an impactful role in knitting together a sense of national identity among lesbians. Its popular writers included Barbara Love, Karla Jay, Achy Obejas, Jeanne Córdova, Charlotte Bunch, Margie Adam, Sharon MacDonald, Right on Rita Goldberger, Nancy Toder, Shirl Buss, Rogi Rubyfruit, and Ann Doczi—many of whom went on to become successful authors of gay and lesbian books.
In 2004, The Tide’s rights to digital reproduction were bought by the national college and library service EBSCO which has scanned and makes available all but the first few issues. Sets of The Tide’s nine year run (1971-1980) are carried at most gay or lesbian archives, among them New York City’s Lesbian Herstory Archive, San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, and L.A.’s ONE International Gay & Lesbian Archive and June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. Many original internal documents and photos can also be accessed online via the Jeanne Córdova Collection posted on the Online Archive of California site. Lesbian Tide’s papers, and Córdova’s are housed at the ONE Archive in Los Angeles.
Jeanne Córdova is a pioneer of the modern American Gay & Lesbian Civil Rights Movement. Born in Germany to Irish and Mexican parents, she is one of twelve siblings and has always enjoyed a large crowd.
Her activism began as L.A. chapter president of the Daughters of Bilitis in 1970, and she went on to found and publish The Lesbian Tide, the largest national newsmagazine of the lesbian feminist decade.
After taking her masters degree in Social Work at UCLA, she returned to her alma mater as a key organizer of the National Lesbian Conference (UCLA, 1973). Córdova worked on the campaign to defeat the anti-gay Briggs initiative, (Prop. 6, in 1978), which would have purged LGBT teachers from California schools. One of the first openly gay delegates to the National Democratic Convention, she served as president of the Stonewall Democratic Club in the early 1980s.
In 1986 she became Media Director for STOP 64, the campaign that defeated the California AIDS quarantine ballot measure. Between 1980 and 1999, Córdova continued publishing by founding the Community Yellow Pages, which became the nation’s first and largest LGBT telephone directory. During an eight year adventure living in Mexico, Córdova and her partner created a non-profit organization for economic justice, La Palapa Society of Todos Santos, AC. Returning from Mexico living in 2007, Córdova co-founded LEX—The Lesbian Exploratorium, a cultural guerilla group—which created the now famous “GenderPlay in Lesbian Culture” trilogy. She recently organized and chaired the 2010 Butch Voices Regional conference in Los Angeles.
Previous books include a memoir, Kicking the Habit: A Lesbian Nun Story (Multiple Dimensions, 1990), and a collection of her L.A. Free Press columns, Sexism: It’s a Nasty Affair (New Way Books, 1974). Her essays appear in numerous award winning anthologies, among them, Persistent Desire; A Femme Butch Reader (Alyson Publications, 1992) Love, West Hollywood (Alyson Books, 2008) and Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011).
She lives in the Hollywood Hills among other outlaws, artists, and authors. And invites you to drop in at:
jeannecordova.com!
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 The Last Guerrilla Left Standing
Chapter 2 The Hat
Chapter 3 Wisdom of the Cornfields 3
Chapter 4 The Tide Rolls Out
Chapter 5 The Godfather
Chapter 6 Petition at Midnight
Chapter 7 The Vote
Chapter 8 The Firings
Chapter 9 My Nazi
Chapter 10 The Gay/Feminist 11
Chapter 11 The Kiss
Chapter 12 The House Where She Lived
Chapter 13 The Women’s Saloon
Chapter 14 A Somewhat Larger War
Chapter 15 The Strike
Chapter 16 A Double Bed On the Ocean
Chapter 17 The Gospel According to Joe
Chapter 18 The Picket Line
Chapter 19 The Falling
Chapter 20 The Plaintiff
Chapter 21 The Arrangement
Chapter 22 Crossing the Line
Chapter 23 Front Seat Rapture
Chapter 24 The Cuckoo’s Nest
Chapter 25 The Body Count
Chapter 26 A Lavender Woodstock
Chapter 27 By Any Means Necessary
Chapter 28 Straws and Absolution
Chapter 29 A Fall From Grace
Chapter 30 The Rage of All Butches
Chapter 31 Return of the Hat
Chapter 32 The End of the War
Epilogue
Endnotes