Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  What she wanted, more than anything, was to return to teaching. Finally, a year or so after we moved to Denver, she found part-time adjunct positions at the University of Colorado at Denver, Colorado Women’s College, and Red Rocks Community College. Compensation was terrible, but the work was satisfying. For my mother, teaching was an opportunity for political advocacy. As she always had, she saw students as dupes of the system, and her job was to inspire them to challenge it by exposing capitalism and imperialism as the root cause of so many of the injustices of the world. Common as such a fate was for adjuncts, my mother was convinced that each time her contract failed to be renewed it meant that the FBI was sabotaging her because she was a threat, or at the very least that some rich corporate types on the board were trying to get her fired. She suspected that FBI informants were in her classes and that the FBI was behind her being blacklisted from the tenure-track academic jobs she applied for. The FBI had kept a file on my mother when she was an antiwar activist back in Detroit in the late sixties—a copy of which she obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—and ever since then she assumed that the FBI was monitoring her.

  My mother was unconventional all the way down to her grading system: she never gave exams and never included a grade with her written comments on papers. At the end of a semester full of discussion and oral presentations, each student wrote up a self-evaluation, discussed it with her, and gave themselves whatever grade they wanted. My mother called it an “honor system,” insisting that most students didn’t give themselves a higher grade than they deserved. I think she really believed this—she wanted her students to feel empowered, to not have to compete with one another for grades, and to not have to relate to her as their grader—but it was also a convenient way to avoid doing all that grading. Students either adored or despised my mother, depending on whether they liked her radical politics and style of teaching, but none of them ever complained about her grading system.

  My mother speaking at a Denver feminist rally in the late 1970s

  The hub of radical political activism in Denver for my mother was RIP (Radical Information Project) Bookstore on East Seventeenth Avenue where she volunteered. I doubt many books were actually sold there. The place proudly called itself “anti-profit” instead of “nonprofit,” and I joked to my mother that they should really call it “anti-money” since they never seemed to have any customers. It was mostly a hangout for local activists who wanted to show political documentaries, hold discussion groups, and organize petitions, fund-raisers, marches, and demonstrations ranging from protests at the Rocky Flats nuclear plant to monthly rallies in front of the state capitol.

  In exchange for the nights I sat through anti-imperialist documentaries at RIP, my mother would take me to see second-run Hollywood movies at the old Mayan Theatre on Broadway. Then she was the one struggling to stay awake, unless she had chosen the movie. Her favorite was Harold and Maude, perhaps because she identified so closely with Maude, the oddball old lady who has a wild affair at the end of her life with an equally oddball teenager. For my twelfth birthday, I was able to convince my mother to take me to a weekend matinee showing of Star Wars on the huge curved screen at the Cooper Theatre, but she fell asleep within a few minutes. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker bravely leading the rebellion against the Empire was apparently not anti-imperialist enough to hold her attention, or maybe it was just that it took place “in a galaxy far, far away” rather than closer to home, where she thought the real revolution needed to happen.

  Lesbians Will Lead the Revolution

  DESPITE HER CLEAR attraction to men, politically my mother desperately wished she were a lesbian. She had concluded that the lesbian movement, which she saw as the radical vanguard of the feminist movement, would lead the way to a revolution not dominated by men. Almost all of her Denver friends were feminist activists of various types, and most of them were lesbians. They liked to hang out at Woman-to-Woman Bookstore on East Colfax Avenue; my mother taught night seminars on Marxism in the basement to the dozen or so women who showed up. Many lesbian activists admired my mother: she was older, more worldly, spoke Spanish, had a PhD, had been involved in the early feminist movement in Detroit in the sixties, and seemed so self-assured in her political beliefs and commitments.

  She gained admirers in the lesbian community after writing an article for the Big Mama Rag—a locally produced radical feminist newspaper with national distribution—titled “The Case of the Crumbling Pedestal: No More Domination in Lenin’s Name,” in which she criticized revolutionaries for deifying Lenin and neglecting the “woman question.” The article opened with the line “For the past eight years, I have been doing battle with Vladimir Ilych Lenin and I am finally ready to come out of my heterosexual closet and seek support from other women in facing up to the enigma that Lenin has been in my life.” She then went on to recount her long and bitter fights with Raul over Lenin “that I imagine left an indelible political mark on my 9-year-old son, who witnessed it all.”

  Being a lesbian, my mother had decided, was politically the right thing for a good feminist to be. As she explained it to me, “Lesbians are the purest feminists—they don’t have all the hang-ups about pleasing men and attracting men.” But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “Mom, you’re definitely not a lesbian,” I said, rolling my eyes at her one night when we got home from bowling with a bunch of her lesbian friends.

  “I know, I know,” she replied with a sigh, taking her coat off.

  For my part, I wondered if some of my mother’s lesbian friends weren’t secretly in love with her. Kim tried the hardest to talk my mother into giving lesbianism a try, although Kim herself later decided that she also preferred men.

  One lesbian couple that befriended us soon after we arrived from Peru, Clair Kaplan and Deb Taylor, became my mother’s closest friends in Denver. They always brought over their dog, Jenny, to play with Inca. I’d never seen two dogs more ecstatic to see each other, and I thought to myself that if love existed between dogs then they must certainly be lesbian dogs in love.

  In solidarity with women’s rights issues, several of the male activists in my mother’s orbit formed a Men Against Sexism group, which often met at the house the men shared on Adams Street in Denver’s old Capitol Hill neighborhood. The Adams Street house was a popular gathering place for “consciousness raising” meetings that doubled as potluck dinners, to which my mother would often bring me along. I was startled one evening when some of the men in the house announced that they had decided to get vasectomies—which I confused with castration—to show their solidarity with women’s liberation and help free women from the chains of child care. Only one of the men actually went through with it, and some suspected that he was just trying to avoid his girlfriend’s pressures to have a baby. He had also refused to be a sperm donor to a lesbian couple who wanted a child, telling them that they were not sufficiently committed to radical politics to be worthy of his sperm.

  The person I made the deepest connection with at the Adams Street house was one of the organizers of the Men Against Sexism group, a kind and charismatic man named David Gilbert. Unlike some of my mother’s other friends, he was not constantly giving political lectures, though one time he did give me a gentle but stern warning about the evils of pornography and how it perpetuated male exploitation of women. “It objectifies women,” he explained. “Don’t succumb to it like I once did,” he warned me with an earnest look, perhaps thinking that I needed to hear that since I was nearing puberty. At that point, I’d never seen anything resembling porn other than the popular pinup calendars of bare-breasted blond women decorating the walls of many restaurants I’d been to in South America.

  As a protest against the pornography industry, he and others spray-painted the porn shops on East Colfax Avenue in the middle of the night. On weekends he organized house outings to the mountains for gun-shooting practice in the woods, setting up wooden targets that were made to look like white co
ps. His day job was moving furniture, but he was secretly a member of the Weather Underground, the armed revolutionary faction of Students for a Democratic Society. A few years later, he ended up going to prison for life for his role in a botched robbery of a Brinks truck that left a security guard dead. My mother thought it was terribly unjust that he had to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell but greatly admired that he had sacrificed so much for the cause. All I wanted was for my mother to keep herself out of jail.

  Separate from her own personal inclinations, my mother was convinced that lesbians would be essential to the revolution. This was so important to her that it kept her from joining a traditional Marxist-Leninist political party. She sent a strongly worded “Dear Comrades” letter to the Chicago headquarters of the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee, criticizing them for not accepting lesbians and gays in the organization and for not acknowledging their critical role in the political struggle and coming revolution. “I suspect that a proletarian victory of any kind will not happen until these forces are in the lead,” she wrote. “White men from present Marxist-Leninist groups who can accept the validity of their taking a secondary place in such an organizational force will be a valuable cadre.” She then offered to personally talk with the vice chairperson of the organization’s central committee about her criticisms and concerns.

  The response letter from the “Political Bureau” of the party, which of course followed the party line, bluntly informed my mother that “We do not agree with your assessment of white men in the revolutionary struggle.” Moreover, “We do not promote homosexuality among the working class,” and “homosexuals are not allowed into the organization.” Nevertheless, “We do not think that this question is one that should keep comrades outside of the party who are not practicing homosexuals.” And, finally, “We do not think that this is a matter that requires your speaking to our vice chair.” The letter ended with the words “With revolutionary greetings, Political Bureau, MLOC.” This response, predictably, made my mother furious, and she became even more disillusioned about formally affiliating with a Marxist-Leninist group.

  But my mother’s biggest fights over this issue were not with political party leaders, whom she soon gave up on as hopelessly backward and homophobic, but with Joel. He was now living in the Berkeley area again, even though he was no longer comfortable hanging out with his old hippie friends, who he didn’t think were true revolutionaries. He wrote to us: “When I first got here I got real depressed. What am I doing in this fake high-class hippie town? I still feel that way. I’m sick to death of hippyism. It’s stinking rotten decadent.” Now in his early twenties and a devout Marxist-Leninist, Joel worked the night shift on the assembly line at the Fremont GM automobile factory to pay the rent but mainly to try to get new recruits for the Marxist-Leninist organization he was involved with. As in her fights with Raul, both my mother and Joel seemed to think the success of the revolution, which they assumed was just around the corner, depended on who won their endless ideological debates.

  My mother and Joel were always trying to convince the other of their own “correct political line.” They argued on the phone, they argued by letter, and even Joel’s once- or twice-a-year visits were often consumed by their disagreements over feminism and revolutionary strategy. They each had their own distinct critiques of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and other revolutionary leaders. Joel had replaced Raul as the political debater in my mother’s life. My mother’s feelings were hurt when Joel didn’t want to read the dozens of pages of handwritten notes she took from reading the full forty-five volumes of Lenin, and Joel got offended when my mother poked fun at him for putting so much faith in Enver Hoxha’s revolutionary Albania as a model for the rest of the world. “They don’t even allow long beards in Albania,” she said, laughing dismissively. “Karl Marx had a beard!”

  Their single-minded obsession with debating each other began to frustrate me more and more, but my mother took it all in stride. In a P.S. to Joel at the end of one of her letters, she wrote, “I’m so inattentive to Peter these days that he holds me down on the bed to get me to listen to his small talk, says he is going to cut the cord on the phone. He’s in good humor about it, though.”

  The debates between my mother and Joel were perhaps extra intense because they had once been such close political allies; after all, not only had my brother taken my mother’s side in the divorce and the custody battle, but in 1977, not long after returning from Peru, they’d collaborated in putting together a booklet denouncing China’s new political leadership following Mao’s death, and made hundreds of copies to distribute. They called it “a study for the use of Marxist-Leninist comrades,” titled The Capitalist Roaders Are Still on the Capitalist Road: The Two-Line Struggle and the Revisionist Seizure of Power in China. My mother and Joel had already been leery of Mao’s rapprochement with the United States, and after his death they were sure that China was veering dangerously off course—toward global capitalism and away from the more radical self-sufficient communist path originally blazed by Mao—and they wanted to sound the alarm. Rather than putting their names on their booklet, they listed the more authoritative sounding “China Study Group” as the author. They were actually the only members of the group, with our Denver apartment listed as the official address. My mother managed to distribute hundreds of copies at home and abroad, but hundreds more ended up in our closets, gathering dust for years.

  One day, after another one of my mother’s long arguments on the phone with Joel, I sat on the floor at her feet and asked her the question that I thought would most likely keep her attention. “Who is most radical,” I asked, “you or Joel?”

  “Well,” she paused, trying to figure out the simplest way to answer. “Each of us thinks we are more ‘pure Marxist’—Joel because he sees that revolutions were made in Russia and China by a party under centralized control and that’s what he wants here, and me because I see that where revolutions were made under centralized control, women and minorities, who were the most exploited, didn’t come into power.”

  Seeing the puzzled look on my face, my mother went on. “Your brother has organized political forces behind him. I’m more radical because I’m the one swimming against the tide—but not against the tide of history!”

  “Oh, okay, you’re each more radical in your own way,” I said, regretting my choice of subject.

  “Here, I’ll let your brother speak for himself.” My mother opened her desk drawer and handed me a letter from Joel in which he laid out their differences, emphasizing how wrong my mother was to focus on the “bourgeois lesbian movement.”

  Dear Andrea,

  It is deeply disturbing but undeniable that our differences are major. I consciously identify with the Marxist-Leninist movement and ideology that has been developed by Marx, Engels, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, the Chinese and Albanian revolutions, Mao Tse-tung, and Enver Hoxha, as a movement and ideology which is and will lead the world proletariat and the whole world to communism.

  I believe you have an incorrect outlook that you have carried from bourgeois aspects of the women’s movement that has been strengthened by your sinking roots in the lesbian community in Denver. You have conciliated, more and more, to friends in the lesbian movement who take a cultural separatist and fundamentally bourgeois outlook, look at all Marxist-Leninist groups in this country and around the world as consolidated male chauvinist groups, oppose looking at capitalism as the primary enemy and put the woman question above the class question and aim the main blow at patriarchy, and now apparently are looking towards a woman’s communist party or a woman-initiated communist party.

  “Your brother’s problem,” my mother said with a sigh, “is he always thinks he’s figured it all out.” She laughed. “I succeeded in turning my oldest son into a communist, but I totally failed to turn him into a feminist.” And then she added with a smile, “It will sure be interesting to see how you’ll turn out, Peter. Who knows, maybe not a co
mmunist or a feminist! I just hope you won’t become a total conformist like your father.” That was my mother’s real fear. She said this to me without even a hint of bitterness or resentment toward my father. At this point, with the divorce long behind her, it was more like she felt sorry for him somehow, as if he, too, had been duped by the system. One of my mother’s life missions was to make sure I avoided a similar fate.

  Don’t Vote!

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1976, was Election Day, including at Denver’s Lincoln Elementary School. The excitement had been building for weeks as students prepared their campaign speeches, buttons, banners, signs, and posters. Teachers, administrators, and students of all grades would gather for a special assembly in the school auditorium that afternoon. It was Jimmy Carter vs. Gerald Ford.

  My mother had enrolled me in fifth grade at Lincoln as soon as we arrived from Peru, in time for the fall term. I was so eager to be accepted as an American, to fit in, that I swore off speaking Spanish and didn’t tell anyone we had just moved from Peru. But I had other strikes against me: I was too old for fifth grade—at eleven, I should have been in sixth—and worse, during the first week of school, my classmates noticed all the white specks in my hair, the lice eggs that I had brought with me from Peru.

  It turned out that lice treatments actually work if none of the other students have lice. Once I used the special shampoo, I was finally lice-free. But the sound of the students snickering as they pointed fingers at me those first few days in school rang in my ears for months afterward.

  When I told my mother that everyone at school was busily preparing for Election Day and that there would be a special event to celebrate it, she squinted at me across the dinner table. “The elections are a sham,” she said, picking up her fork.