Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM

by Breanne Fahs

  Valerie had tried to sell her play to alleviate her constant cash flow problem, printing an advertisement in the Village Voice on October 13, 1966, that put a relatively high price on the play:

  photo offset copies of

  “UP FROM THE SLIME”

  by Valerie Solanas

  are now available at

  $10 per copy

  222 W. 23rd St, Room 606

  Valerie wanted to find an audience, to revel in the play’s subversive, over-the-top campiness; still, the price suggests a seriousness in how Valerie circulated the play. A ten-dollar investment in 1966 from someone mail-ordering Up Your Ass signified real interest in the work.

  Valerie had eyed Andy Warhol quite early on as someone who would perhaps show interest in producing the play (though her reproducing copies of the play to raise money contradicts the popular assumption that Andy had her only copy). Valerie sent him a copy (before she personally knew him) sometime in late 1965, just after she copyrighted the play. In a letter to him dated February 9, 1966, she wrote, “Dear Andy, Would you please return my script, Up Your Ass, that I left with you some time ago? Thanks. Valerie Solanas.”95 Because Andy refused to produce Up Your Ass (and lost his copy), and because other producers found it so vulgar and pornographic that they could not or would not produce it, reviews of the work began only after the 2000 staging (the play’s first)—notably set to the music of ABBA and featuring an all-female cast—at the George Coates Theater in San Francisco. (George Coates learned of the play only after his assistant director, Eddy Falconer, saw the film I Shot Andy Warhol and suggested that they stage the play in San Francisco as a revolt against the strict “decency” clause recently implemented by the National Endowment for the Arts.)96

  Like SCUM Manifesto, the play still retained a timely and relevant feel, reaching much further than most contemporary plays in its depiction of a gender-bending dystopia. Nearly forty years after its inception, Up Your Ass provoked postmodern anxiety in its audiences and reviewers. As Alisa Solomon stated in her Voice review, “What astonishes more is the ahead-of-its-time critique of gender roles and sexual mores embedded in the jollity. Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’s dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard. Think early Charles Ludlam infused with feminism, glitter drag mixed into the Five Lesbian Brothers.”97

  As it does with many writers, the act of writing may have transported Valerie—however temporarily—away from the conditions of her life. The gender dystopia found in Up Your Ass mimicked her wildly fluid approach to her own sexual identity. Always hard to pin down, she never fully identified as a lesbian but adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual. Bongi allowed her to exist in an as-yet-undefined other space. Through Up Your Ass and “Primer,” Valerie could circulate in New York City as a bright, ambitious, clever, wisecracking woman, able to thrive while panhandling, engaging in prostitution, “shooting the shit,” and writing. This version of herself found a way to survive that did not overly compromise her: “I finally hit upon an excellent-paying occupation,” she joked in “Primer,” “challenging to the ingenuity, dealing on one’s own terms with people and affording independence, flexible hours, great stability and, most important, a large amount of leisure time.”98 This version of Valerie may have stood in stark contrast to her coping with days filled with “sordid rooms, inadequate food, and performing blow jobs to pay rent. . . . There were times when Valerie slept on rooftops and ate what was left on other peoples’ plates at the Automat.”99 Valerie lived a hard life, and it would only become harder over the next two decades.

  Her good friend Jeremiah Newton, a filmmaker and expert on countercultural New York, could not fully resolve the contradictions of her existence:

  I felt bad for Valerie. She was so intelligent and she told me she would have sex with men and she hated men. I said, “How could you do something you don’t really like?” She said, “You have to do things for money.” Well, I thought that’s a bad thing to do. She did it occasionally for money, brought people up on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. I would never do anything for money that I didn’t want to do. I thought as smart as she was, she was stupid to do that, to have men touch her. It didn’t make sense to me. It was irrational. She was still rational, but that was irrational. You don’t do something you so hate doing for money.”100

  Valerie’s family seemed hesitant to admit that Valerie prostituted herself for money; to them she talked incessantly about her writings and never about how she actually survived on next to nothing. Robert framed this as her response to her limited options: “Valerie probably worked as a prostitute. If she needed a place to stay, or if she needed money for cigarettes or food, she would prostitute herself. I don’t think she did it on a regular basis. If she had sold her play properly or sold her book properly, she wouldn’t have had to do this to make money. Back then they didn’t have a lot of homeless shelters or social workers so you did what you needed to do for the money. If she prostituted herself, it was for that night, not as a regular hobby or career.”

  However difficult her financial and psychological condition, Valerie kept in contact with her family during those years and would visit her father, mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever she could scrape together enough money to travel. She went home for Christmas most years, eager to revel in home cooking and to tell stories about New York and her life as a writer. The family was divided generationally about whether to dismiss Valerie as a kook or see her as fascinating: “We found her to be like one of those characters that we could tell stories about,” Robert said. “The kids all liked to sit around and listen. The older generation thought she should be locked up and didn’t understand it.” Talkative, hyper, and hungry, she told stories about New York over heaping plates of spaghetti. “All she ever wanted to eat when she came down here was spaghetti. My mother would make her roast beef and gravy or anything and she’d say, ‘Don’t you have any spaghetti?’ and my mother would say, ‘All right, we’ll make you some spaghetti.’ As long as she had spaghetti, she didn’t care.”101 (Valerie is said to have had a voracious appetite: “I was not halfway through my plate of Chinese vegetables, but she had already finished her steak, French fries, and salad.”)102

  Given the numerous accounts of her wolfing down food when it was available and her nearly constant requests to move in with almost anyone who would listen, it is evident that Valerie lived on the edge: she was often hungry (as are most people who panhandle for a living) and rarely had any stability in where she slept or lived. She was known for asking people if she could live with them even if she loathed them. The Chelsea Hotel evicted her several times, in summer 1967, in fall 1967, and in early 1968. Certainly, Valerie saw men as having unfair access to money, resources, and power. She keenly sensed the inequities building around her in late 1966 and early 1967. Bouncing from place to place, meal to meal, she had little shame about asking for a place to live, a hot meal, or a “piece of the action.” She had work to do, things to say, pieces to write. She needed a place to land. During an interview with the journalist Robert Marmorstein, she asked if he would let her stay with him:

  “I’ll keep out of your way. I wouldn’t make a bad looking roommate either, would I?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, but why me? I’m flattered. You hardly know me.”

  “You’ve got an apartment. That’s all I need to know about you. I’ve got lots of work to get out and no place to stay. It’d just be for a couple of months.”

  “I thought you had an apartment.”

  “I’m staying with some old dame. But she gets on my nerves. She’s square. Doesn’t know which end is up. Can’t get used to my hours. I’ve got to get out of there.”

  “Your manifesto says that a good SCUM girl would just as soon stick a shiv into a man’s back as look at him. How could I feel safe with you in my apartment?”

  “Look, I’m a revolutionary, not a nut. That kind of thing takes organization. I’m practica
l, not stupid. We’re years away from that sort of thing. I’m not ending up in some fink jail.”

  “I’m sorry. But I really have no room. How about the girls you have in SCUM? Couldn’t you stay with any of them?”

  “They’re all as bad off as I am. All the ones I know are barely scrounging out places themselves. Christ, the shit you have to go through in this world just to survive.”103

  SHOOTING

  SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars

  1967–1968

  Let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

  RARELY HAS HISTORY SEEN A MORE CURIOUS COUPLING than Andy Warhol and Valerie Solanas. Both misfits and outcasts, genderqueers and nonconformists, they operated in their own orbit and, in doing so, left an indelible mark on the world. Despite their connection, to frame the significance of Valerie’s life around her shooting of Andy would minimize her merits as an author and her broader intentions as a revolutionary. Too often when SCUM Manifesto is cited as her major achievement, the Warhol shooting is never far behind. When the shooting of 1968 is given as Valerie’s fifteen minutes of fame, SCUM Manifesto serves as its footnote. This pairing resolves any form of contradiction that may arise when comparing her life and work, as the contradictions between the manifesto and Valerie’s life, between theory/satire and practice, are masked by the overly reductive formulation of Andy Warhol shooting equals SCUM Manifesto in practice.1

  In many ways, her relationship with Andy merely formed a center point for many forces moving through Valerie’s life at the time: her growing anger toward men, particularly men with power, prestige, and wealth; her interest in self-promotion and fame, particularly as a writer; her emerging connection with the avant-garde, queer, and drag scene in New York; her wobbly mental health and the intensifying deterioration in her rational thinking; and the classic contradiction between her desire for acceptance and her outright rejection of all organized groups or movements. Andy tapped into all these, particularly by showing a spark of interest in Up Your Ass and Valerie’s tour de force, SCUM Manifesto.

  SCUM MANIFESTO (1967)

  The SCUM Manifesto is an extraordinary document, an authentic love-hate child of its time, written in the unholy accents of inspired madness. . . . Written at white heat, and containing within itself the secret knowledge of the victim, the economical insight of the obsessed, the multiplied courage of the utterly disinherited, SCUM is the work of the ultimate loser, of one beyond redemption, and as such its quality is visionary.

  —Vivian Gornick, introduction to S.C.U.M. Manifesto

  To understand Valerie’s relationship to Andy—indeed to understand Valerie at all—one must consider Valerie’s unusual relationship to her writing. Shortly after shooting Andy, she hurriedly told a reporter, “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.”2 Several scholars have honed in on this quote as both peculiar and notable—she chooses “what I am” rather than “who I am”; she writes herself into the text after just having committed violence against three men; and she maintains, at a moment of intense stress, that her manifesto is of central importance.3

  SCUM Manifesto was written between 1965 and 1967. Valerie published an outline in the Voice in February 1967, likely finished an original draft of the book in May, and completed a revised version of it in late June 1967; in a postcard to her father dated June 14, 1967, she wrote that she was nearly finished writing it. The work is as sweeping as it is radical. Copyrighted originally on May 19, 1967, by Valerie, the self-published edition of the manifesto represented the culmination of years of contemplation, effort, and revisions. SCUM Manifesto marinated in Valerie’s life for many years, but as Mary Harron aptly put it, “In style it feels as if it were written in one great rush. It isn’t quite like anything else but it does resemble Artaud’s surrealist manifesto—visionary, hallucinatory rhetoric. Also de Sade in its black vision of human nature, its complete inversion of accepted values. And, more disturbingly, it resembles the better bits of writing by the Unibomber. It is a product of a gifted mind working in isolation, with no contact with but also no allegiance to academic structures—isolated and therefore owing nothing to anyone.”4

  When reading the manifesto, we sense almost immediately that Valerie has broken things: rules, norms, barriers, the rhetoric of politeness, academic modalities, reverence for those who came before. It takes on all the characteristics of manifestos distilled to their purest form: urgency, anger, a sweeping sense of the we, impatience, irrationality, high polemics, drive, and forward thinking. It has a strange mix of humor, aggression, playfulness, wit, sarcasm, and truth. People often say, after reading SCUM Manifesto, that they have never encountered anyone who wrote or thought like Valerie; this, to a certain extent, gives the manifesto its force, its sense of oddly contemporary flair despite its now being written nearly a half century ago.

  Valerie theorized from the gutter, from the sidelines, from scum, from the foulness of humanity. She dove into the swamp of patriarchy and slogged through the muck. She understood that this mentality—theorizing from the “garbage pail that men have made of the world”—was all women had left to use. In her writing, she became a verbal sniper, picking off the key tenets of sexism, taking aim at nearly every major institution men promote and celebrate:

  war, money, marriage and prostitution, work, prevention of automation, nice-ness, politeness, clean language, “dignity,” censorship, trivial “entertainment,” secrecy, suppression of knowledge and ideas, ignorance, fatherhood and mental illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity), authority, government, boredom, monotony, “Great Art,” “Culture,” philosophy, religion, morality based on sex, competition, prestige, status, formal education, prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.), social and economic classes, domesticity motherhood, materialism, sexuality, ugliness, destruction of cities, poisoning of air, hate, contempt, distrust, prevention of conversation and friendship and love, isolation, suburbs, violence, disease and death.5

  SCUM Manifesto had such a profoundly unique style and tone that it evades categorization. Drawing on men’s biological inferiority, Valerie began the manifesto with all the dynamism and radicalism she could muster: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”6

  The text then bends and swerves through nearly every major institution that oppresses women, spliced with humor, irreverence, seriousness, swipes at Daddy’s girls (“The effect of fatherhood on females is to make them male—dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, nice, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, ‘respectful’ of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened out and thoroughly contemptible”), hippies, suburban moms, and corporate businessmen. Men, in other words, feel so insecure about their masculinity that they intrude on, and generally obliterate, the autonomy of their wives and daughters and even female strangers. Their sweeping women off to the suburbs, for example, reveals men’s deep-seated insecurity and need for women’s comfort and company. Men prevent women’s friendships, define Great Art as a reflection of themselves, go to war for meaningless reasons, demand “respect” from women and children, develop educational institutions based only on exclusivity, and cannot love anyone or anything. “The male cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gang-banging” (10, 16).

  Key to SCUM Manifesto are Valerie’s rants against sexuality itself; she paints sexual desire as a complete waste of time, something women should forget altogether and eliminate:

  Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless t
he woman, the more deeply embedded in the male “culture,” in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. . . . On the other hand, those females least embedded in the male “Culture,” the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking; who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs, mortgages, mops and baby shit; too selfish to raise kids and husbands; too uncivilized to give a shit for anyone’s opinion of them; too arrogant to respect Daddy, the “Greats” or the deep wisdom of the Ancients; who trust only their animal, gutter instincts; who equate Culture with chicks; whose sole diversion is prowling for emotional thrills and excitement; who are given to disgusting, nasty, upsetting “scenes;” hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth; who’d sink a shiv into a man’s chest or ram an icepick up his asshole as soon as look at him, if they knew they could get away with it, in short, those who, by the standards of our “culture” are SCUM. . . . These females are cool and relatively cerebral and skirting asexuality. (27–28)