by Susie Bright
One day, while we were laying out our second issue, Nan was on the office phone with Barbara Grier from Naiad Press. Grier published hundreds of lesbian romances — sapphic Harlequins — and made a handsome living selling to an audience the rest of the world didn’t even know existed. Their top title was about lesbian nuns.
Barbara didn’t mince words. “I don’t have a problem with you,” she said. “We’ve known Honey Lee for years.” Translation: “We are old-gay butch/femme — we could give a shit about the feminist sex wars.”
“But,” Barbara continued, “everyone we know thinks y’all should be assassinated.”
And whom did she know? Their little sisters included all the feminist bookstore owners, the “wimmin’s” music-festival producers, the Tarot card printers, the separatist land communes, the moneymakers and key-holders of the lesbian womb-acracy. They were the economic and political capital of lesbian feminism. They’d made a dollar and set a tone.
Nan’s eyes flitted over our dildos, latex lingerie, and lube still strewn across the floor from last night’s photo shoot: “We don’t fit in anymore.”
We knew the feminist world; we created it. How could we be the enemy? How could there be a split?
Barbara’s description of “assassinators” wasn’t rhetorical; our adversaries never gave us a moment’s peace. We got hate mail every day, largely unsigned. The anonymous furies reminded me of the students in Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the ones who’d follow their charismatic guru anywhere, even if it meant over a cliff. In Spark’s story, a schoolteacher named Miss Brodie whips her little girls into going to fight for Mussolini, which is little more than an exercise in her narcissism. Tragedy and scandal result.
In our case, everything was present except for the swastikas and a railroad wreck. The anonymous anti-porn warriors put everything they had on the line to stop us. While the “grown-ups” at Dworkin-MacKinnon headquarters barely acknowledged us by name, their acolytes, armed with knives, baseball bats, legal threats, and fake buckets of blood came at us in bars, on the street, and at literary conferences. They talked to one another in code. On Our Backs supporters were considered the gender equivalent of “race traitors.”
The most eloquent among the feminist anticensorship crowd — Ellen Willis, Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, Nan Hunter, Lisa Duggan, Dorothy Allison, Carole Vance — made the case for sexual expression and women’s demand to articulate their desire. It was lofty, it was deep — it changed the social sciences and humanities in academia forever. The 1992 book Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship was so eloquent and rational it would have made Rousseau swoon. But Rousseau was not active in most Women’s Studies Departments.
For all our influence, the On Our Backs staff members weren’t creatures of academia. We were artists, sex workers, activists, publishers. We were “in the trade.”
If I had a gold coin for every one of the “anti-OOB feminists” who had a dildo or whip in her closet, I’d be Midas. I couldn’t fathom their duplicity. The people who had tried to blacklist or beat me before — during my The Red Tide years — were white supremacists. Strike breakers. Cops on the take. Mafia goons. Whoever heard of a woman your own size determined to drown you in the bathtub?
In the beginning, I thought our feminist critics needed only a sensitive explanation, a bit of sex ed — much like my old customers in the vibrator store. “The try-out room won’t bite you!”
But the bullies weren’t our customers or students — they were our competition. We were fighting over scraps, the oldest bitch game in the world.
I ended up in bed — or erotically adjacent to it — with some of my so-called political enemies.
One spring, the first year of On Our Backs, I was seeking the attentions of a Teamster bulldagger, a known stone butch who made me weak in the knees. She was a Stonewall-decade older than me. I’d look at her well-worn hands, she’d stare at my cunt, and my stomach would start to churn.
I saw her flirting with other women. When she wanted you, you could barely stand on your feet. When she worked security for a queer event, she could drive away straight men, cops, and poseurs with one flinty glance. Between her threatening disposition toward adversaries and her appetite for pretty women was a hair trigger I couldn’t wait to tease out.
I found out where she lived in the neighborhood. She had an apartment on Potrero Hill, which sported some of the most best graffiti in town: Women’s Liberation gonna get your momma, gonna get your sister, gonna get your girlfriend.
One day I passed her apartment building from my bus stop. I had such a girlish crush that I dawdled and daydreamed: What if she’s coming home from work? What if we run into each other? What if I said I was selling Girl Scout cookies?
And then, she did come home — just as I was thinking of Thin Mints.
My butch dreamboat hustled across the street holding the arm of a slim blond woman wearing a scarf, neither of them even noticing me. I watched the door slam behind them, heard their quick footsteps ascend the stairs.
I imagined them dropping to the bed, to the floor, my Teamster babe peeling off Miss Veronica Lake’s trench coat and scarf. My stomach flopped.
I ran home and phoned Margie, my friend at OOB. She was taking a break from packing boxes. I knew she used to drink at Maud’s bar with my crush, back in the sixties. Maybe she’d calm me down.
“Margie, what’s the matter with me?” I was sweating all over. “I need to get laid instead of mooning around. My dreamboat thinks I’m just a little girl.”
“Oh, she put her eye on you — little girls are just her thing. But right now she’s fucking Kitty MacKinnon, who’s a man-eater. There’s no time to fuck anyone else.”
What? Veronica Lake was Kitty MacKinnon? And Kitty wanted to get plowed by a stone butch who’d pull her hair and make her moan? How could that be true? How could someone as straitlaced as Miss MacKinnon afford to do anything in her bedroom besides keep a goldfish?
Margie had no further time for me: “That’s what I heard; I gotta go back.”
The rumors continued … but they were made up of the stereotypes that enveloped our debate. The “antiporn feminists” were all supposed to be ascetics and celibates. They weren’t — they did everything in bed, just like normal kinky people everywhere. The On Our Backs staff, by contrast, was supposedly acting out de Sade, page by page. It was all nonsense. When I thought about Kitty or Veronica making bank and getting laid while I was eating government cheese and lying alone with a ratty old pillow, I could just scream. It was easier to go back to work.
I was happiest when working on a new story for the magazine — that was the best part of On Our Backs. The stories and pictures we got from our readers “split the world open” with their honesty, as Muriel Rukeyser predicted so well.
How often do you hear women tell the truth about sex? Never! OOB was, for me, six years of truth-mongering. It had the flavor of rock and roll.
Madison Avenue took the sizzle of the lesbian feminist sex wars and put it in their own steak. How do you get from Patti Smith to Girls Gone Wild? Well, it wasn’t our plan. I don’t give a shit if anyone “buys” anything for a sexual revolution — you can’t purchase your way into it.
Straight women never got the power they wanted to come clean about sex. Instead, they got shoe-buying orgies and vibrator tittering on romantic comedies like Sex and the City. Their quest was to find romantic and financial fulfillment with the right man.
Sex for the sake of self-knowledge, ecstasy, or communal connection? Nope.
Naiad Press’s founders retired to the Gulf Coast a few years after that warning phone call. Good Vibrations was purchased by one of the traditional novelty companies that Joani Blank and I used to laugh about, the dinosaurs. Kitty MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin formed political and legal coalitions with the Christian Right. The bedsheets really stank. The people who came out on top, materially speaking, were not the pioneers or the innovators. Would you like
fries with that?
In 2009, I asked Gayle Rubin to come down to the University of California in Santa Cruz to speak about the legacy of the feminist sex wars. She said, “Oh, Susie, I don’t know if I want to go back to this subject. It’s been so many years.”
“I know what you mean. After all the lynchings, you wonder what the point was. That’s why I want you here … ’cause we need to do the forensics.”
She came down, with boxes of books and old documents that no other library possesses … there is very little microfiche on the ephemera of radical feminist history.
Rubin gave a lecture to the young undergrads and showed notable examples of women who, in defending radical sexual liberation, found themselves cast out of Eden. They were decried as Tools of the Man — instead of the founders of contemporary feminism. Gayle pointed out that the accusations (“Ellen WIllis is a sadomasochist!”) were absurd. But instead of being laughed at, the censors were taken seriously. People were drummed out for using the wrong word, for being a “sympathizer” of sexual minorities. Being an “SM practitioner” (whatever that meant) was conflated with fascism. One bright white line, over in an instant.
I remember the day I crossed over that line. It was the year before On Our Backs debuted. I was at UCLA attending a founding meeting of a political coalition that was dedicated to answering the Christian-style homophobia of the Moral Majority. Gay activists from all over the state were there.
I had quite accidentally been assigned to write an amendment to the mission statement, from our San Francisco contingent, in which we said, “As gay people” — cough, cough — “we express our solidarity with all sexual minorities.” I named names: prostitutes, transsexuals, the leather community — all those who are singled out and persecuted for their sexual life.
There was a loud hiss on the floor when I read the resolution, then a stampede. Robin Tyler, a stand-up comic who’d become a major producer of women’s music festivals, headed up the warpath with her girlfriend, Torie Osborn. They were not going to tolerate perverts ruining their coalition.
I wasn’t ready for this. I knew the kind of queerish dive clubs Robin Tyler had come up through in comedy clubs. She must’ve spent more time in stripper dressing rooms than I had! Cross-dressers and hookers surely were part of her extended family. But now the “First Wives Club” was determined to drum us out. They had their eye on me because I was wearing fuchsia lipstick and a studded leather collar around my neck, along with my horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
I was asked point-blank by one of their young acolytes, a girl in a Holly Near T-shirt, if I had been paid off by the “leather men” to do this. Yeah, right, guys with black paddles just gave me thousands for a shopping spree.
I told her, “You know, my friends and I brought Holly Near to our high school in 1973, and the Boys’ Dean pulled the plug on her when she sang about Vietnam. But she kept singing and we sang with her, and we wouldn't shut up all afternoon.”
Holly Junior glared at me. She didn’t believe me.
The debate over “the San Francisco amendment” raged on in the stuffy empty classrooms we’d rented on the UCLA campus during that spring break. I knew my dad was working in his office over in the Linguistics Department, and I wanted to get away from all the bitterness. I hiked over to Campbell Hall in my “controversial” outfit, feeling more normal with each step. There were kids my age all over campus with ragged kilts, multiple ear piercings, Johnny Rotten undershirts. My lipstick did not distinguish me.
Bill laughed when he saw me. “Your short hair … the lipstick … you look so much like your mother.” I had been such a hippie girl only a year before, with my long hair and overalls.
Maybe he’d like to tell Robin Tyler about my mom’s style. Christ, if my mom saw a butch woman like Tyler, her eyes would turn into slits: “What the hell does she think she’s trying to prove?” A good matchup.
I sat on top of Bill’s desk. “Look, is there something really, ethically, morally wrong with S/M that I don’t know about? Am I naive? What are these people so worked up about? … No, don’t laugh!”
“Let me see your amendment.” He couldn’t wait to get his red pen out of his shirt pocket.
“All these people think I’m in a back room whipping someone to death! I haven’t done anything! They won’t stop making stuff up!”
Bill took his pen, glanced at my document, and moved my commas inside my quotation marks. “You know, this kind of thing has been going on forever,” he said. “Of course, you’re right to defend the persecuted. Most people know very little about sex, and you’re dealing with that all the time now.” He handed my copyedited amendment back. “This stuff you’re hearing is the same kind of thing they said about ‘homosexuals’ when I was in college.”
He gestured to a photo propped up behind one of his desks. It was of all the young men in his UC Berkeley dormitory. All queer.
“You remember Jules; I’ve shown you photos of him in drag before.” Bill got out the big white handkerchief he always kept in his pocket. “He was the only one who refused to go into psychoanalysis or try to kill himself. He used the word ‘gay’ — he said it all the time: ‘Thank god I’m gay — the straights can kiss my ass.’ We would sit around the coffeehouse on Telegraph Avenue and think he was … unbelievable. No one else talked like him.”
“Daddy, can I blow my nose?” I asked. I loved using his handkerchiefs. I hated to say goodbye. I went back to the conference, and our amendment was trounced in a final vote.
I went back to the conference, and our amendment was trounced in a final vote.
My dominatrix friend Tina once told me: “I’m not spanking Republicans anymore. I’ve had it.”
That’s what I wish I’d done. I wouldn’t have tried to argue with the Carrie Nation blacklisters — I only titillated them, after all. I provided the red meat.
Have I been guilty of femme-on-femme destruction myself? Why did it blindside me?
The answer to my self-interrogation is … hard to spit out. The one young woman to whom I’ve ever been unconscionably bitchy, whom I have stuffed in a corner when her voice didn’t suit my tune, is my daughter. My baby. My maternal ills in action!
I’d look like a frickin’ feminist saint if I hadn’t become a mother.
And yet, loving my daughter right, delighting in her surpassing me, has been a healing kiss, if ever there was one. All the good women I knew, who did love me and mother me, they made a big difference. A huge difference. I have been loved well by most women in my life.
We don’t know Snow White’s stepmother’s name, do we? She, Miss Queenie, was a nobody. She hired the henchmen, spread the ill words. But she had no real power. Just a mad vestless consort, gazing in a mirror, her pitiful kingdom of shattered glass. Poor you. I know her now, la belle dame sans merci. She has cost us so dearly.
The Daddies
The feminist puritans did succeed in driving On Our Backs into the arms of charming pornographers — the very infidelity of which they accused us.
All we did was answer the phone. I picked up the office receiver one day — expecting a weary creditor — and instead heard a fellow who sounded like he had just arranged for a pumpkin coach to come pick us up with a glass slipper.
“My name is John Preston. I'm from Drummer magazine, and I think you are absolutely brilliant.”
Drummer was a gay men’s leather magazine. They were the first to publish photographs by Mapplethorpe, stories by Steven Saylor. They were hardcore as hell, and yet they had aesthetic standards like the Algonquin Room.
I waved my hands frantically at Nan and Debi. It was our first message from a peer, or someone we’d like to be a peer, who could see we weren’t just taking off our underwear for the hell of it.
Preston was pointed. “No one else is taking on the status quo like you. I thought the gay liberation movement was fucking dead. You make my secret leather feminist heart go pitter-patter. You are just the Molotov cocktail we’ve all needed.”
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In the sex trade, I met many businessmen, peddlers, and film rats who moved product up and down the street. The guys with the gold chains, and the cigars, and the New Age carny versions of Hollywood also-rans. They weren’t looking for revolution or sexual transformation. They were looking for you to turn around and show them that fat ass.
Like anyone you’d meet in the non-A-list side of the movie business, porn’s entrepreneurs often arrived on the set from “below the line.” These were people who’d made industrial films, spaghetti Westerns, or B-loops, or had worked in the Army Signal Corps, like Russ Meyer.
Russ was one of the exceptions who loved us. Instead of a hooker with a heart of gold, he was like the dirty old auteur with the same. He’d talk about his own work in great running monologues, then interrupt one of his sagas to look me straight in the eye and say, “You’re really doing something; you know that?”
In his dotage, he’d take me out for steak dinners in Pasadena, during which he’d insist I drink whiskey and eat rare steaks — something I wouldn’t have ordered anywhere else, with anyone else. He wanted to talk about the war, the beaches of Normandy — from him it sounded like the bloody mud of Normandy. He’d slam his drink down and say over and over: “I’d get down on my knees with this son of a bitch — he’s bleeding out on the ground — I’m the last person he sees alive; he’s dying, and I take his picture, and he tells me to call his mother.”
“How could you take their pictures at a time like that?”
“How could I not?” Russ waved his arms. “How do you expect them to die, no one seeing them, no one knowing their name? I was their only connection to the living!” And so it was a mitzvah for him. He cried. I’ve never cried so much over a meal with anyone — besides a lover — as I did with Russ Meyer.
