BeJo sat down on the bed and took my hand. “Sweetie, some things are simple. I fell in love with you because you’re good-looking. Your Elvis Presley black hair rang my bell. And now you’ve shown me a world of creativity and activism. I didn’t even know what being political meant.”
“Being political is who I am, BeJo. Besides, what does it mean to be good-looking?”
“Now don’t go all philosophical about the meaning of good-looking. It just means cute. I figured that anyone with as much passion as you showed in those meetings had to have the same passion in bed.” Her voice grew wistful as she brushed my hair with her long fingers. “Sometimes it’s hard sharing you,” she whispered softly.
“Oh BeJo,” I groaned. “Let’s not rehash this one.”
She got up and went to the makeshift vanity table. “How did feminism come up with this non-monogamy idea, or philosophy, or whatever you call it?” BeJo was a Taurus, stubborn as hell on topics she didn’t agree with. “Why does this have to be the correct liberated woman’s lifestyle? I’ve had four long-term relationships before you and they were all perfectly monogamous and perfectly happy.”
“And perfectly short,” I laughed, rolling over on the bed and watching her in the vanity’s mirror. “Living non-monogamously prevents men from trying to own women,” I explained. “Monogamy was invented by men to enslave and isolate women from one another and to protect their inheritance, their land and women as property. It’s a colonizing construct, BeJo. By rejecting heterosexual marriage and monogamy, surely you can see that we’re trying to build a new kind of society.”
Finishing her eyes, BeJo returned to the bed. “But sweetie, we are women! Why can’t lesbian feminists like you see that it’s natural for a woman to love just one woman at a time?”
Sprawled on the bed, I realized that I’d never met a woman I thought I could be with for the rest of my life. After seven years as a lesbian and dozens of lovers, I’d given up thinking I could ever be happy with one. I seemed to need and want a complexity and depth of feeling that didn’t exist in a single woman. So I’d tried to find it in several at a time. Living with BeJo was as close to being married as I ever planned to be. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “I suppose it’s natural for some women, but straights argue that heterosexuality is natural for all women and that’s false. Anyway, women have to move beyond our so-called ‘natural’ feelings. Most of them are just centuries of social conditioning, learned behavior taught by men to women to fulfill male needs.”
I thought about my friends. Almost all of them were in non-monogamous relationships. And my pre-feminist “old-gay” friends who lived monogamously were harassed for imitating heterosexual marriage.
BeJo stroked my hair. “Don’t you ever want to get married, honey?” She had pleading in her eyes.
“I’ll get married when I’m too old to be political. Or, when dykes are free to be dykes, whichever comes first.”
“What about settling down?”
I looked up at her. “Settling down into what?”
BeJo sighed. “You really have no idea do you?”
I grimaced. “What does being married mean? A white iron fence in the Valley with the RV parked in the driveway?”
“It’s a white picket fence, not iron, honey. Settling down means having a good job that pays well. And a Cadillac, not an RV, in the driveway.” She smiled, referring to the ’62 Caddie she’d named Ramona parked below us in the carport. “It means coming home every night to someone who’s happy to see you.”
I sat up and kissed her. “I always come home happy to see you.”
“Not every night, you don’t.” She turned her back to me as she slid off the bed. “Not on Monday and Friday nights.”
According to our agreement, Monday and Friday were our non-monogamous nights, our “space” nights. I took advantage of them much more frequently than BeJo did, but according to our arrangement, she could have, too.
“Oh, sweetie,’ I protested. “Mostly on Monday and Friday nights I’m at a meeting or a demo...”
“And screwing someone else after those meetings.”
I got up and stood behind her at the vanity, kissing the soft place where her neck met the back of her ear. “Don’t be angry,” I whispered.
“And you’re too tired to make love when you get home at midnight on our nights too,” she continued. “And, what’s worse, all of our friends are people we work with in the movement.”
“Who else would they be?” I asked as I started to pull off my jeans and get into my pajamas.
“Friends are people you have something in common with, who like the same kind of fun that you do. And fun! Oh, there’s a concept...”
“I have everything in common with my political buddies. Fun is for bored people who are seduced by capitalism’s excess.”
“Don’t start with that socialist stuff,” BeJo cut me off. “I thought you weren’t a Commie anymore. It’s a good thing I’m not out to my mother so I don’t have to write home and say, ‘Hey Mom guess what? I’m living with a Communist!”
“I’m not even a socialist anymore. But Marx has some good ideas—”
“You’re too deep, baby,” she snapped, slipping into a pair of low, flat heels. “Why do you think about things that only make life more complicated?”
“How can a person be alive and not think about these things?”
“I’m perfectly alive and I don’t.” BeJo headed for the front door. She called back to me, laughing, “Try to be happy and don’t think too much. You need more control over your mind!”
“And you’re too German!” I shot back, realizing that BeJo could build a clock and take it apart in the time it took me to define the feminist meaning of time. And yet, I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t think she and I were a long term match. There were matters of the mind, as well as matters of the soul—my mind and my soul—that I couldn’t share with her.
Chapter 4
The Tide Rolls Out
[Los Angeles]
With BeJo gone for the night I had a few private hours to write a story for The Tide about the conflict that was tearing apart the L.A. Gay Community Services Center and, though not for public print, sabotaging my relationship with my gay political mentor—the Center’s founder, Morris Kight.
Clad in pajamas, I hoisted myself from the bed and walked down the hall to the second bedroom, where my child—The Lesbian Tide—lived. I sniffed the smell. Fresh ribbon ink and carbon paper mixed with cigarette smoke. I loved it. This room was command central, the hub of my life. The Tide and I had lived together since its birth in August of ’71. The photos, art boards, file cabinets, and Rolodex filled with names and contacts of every gay organization and lesbian leader from around the country—not to mention our expensive, new IBM Selectric typewriter—all lived here together in a 10x10 room a straight couple would have turned into a nursery. Not me. This was the ink-and-thought-filled back room where Lesbian “herstory” was discussed, chewed over, and written for our now two thousand paid subscribers.
I opened my briefcase, the thick black cardboard kind with an orange and black bumper sticker that read DYKE, in 72 point type, all caps. It sat on a wall-to-wall table made out of an eight by four-foot, black painted piece of plywood, held up by two sawhorses. BeJo had flipped out when I’d said I’d only move in with her if I could bring The Tide with me. To me, since growing up the definition of home had always included work; I had watched my parents pore over architectural blueprints on the kitchen table every night. Leaving work at the office might be normal to BeJo, but it was never my style. Besides, my life was about rearranging the very definition of normal. Normal said that queers were born sick or criminal. Normal said that women were born to serve men in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Normal, like my father, said that success was battling one’s way to the top of the economic ladder and letting the chips—with people as collateral damage—fall where they may. Not to me. Normal was not a good reason to do
anything. If my beliefs were dedicated to normal I would have committed suicide as an alienated butch teenager and certainly never founded a newsmagazine called The Lesbian Tide.
Like most of the good things in my life, stumbling upon The Tide had been an accident which occurred on the path I’d taken to avoid an unwanted destiny. After a successful year of being President of the L.A. Chapter of the national gay women’s organization, Daughters of Bilitis, it had become clear to me that I was going to lose a bid for re-election—if I made one. As D.O.B. president, 1970 and ’71 had seen me lead the charge to open L.A.’s first center with the word “lesbian” painted boldly on the glass door at 1910 S.Vermont Avenue. {1} But this was also the year that feminism arrived in Los Angeles, and I as D.O.B.’s leader had recently begun to spend too much time, according to the old-school membership, consorting with a new group in town called The Lesbian Feminists. Yes, I was becoming a “feminist.” My sisters at D.O.B. felt threatened by this new theology that defined lesbians as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”{2} Old-school gay women, who peopled D.O.B., thought that a lesbian was a girl who slept with other girls, not a bunch of hippie “womyn” who didn’t shave their legs or armpits.
Two months before our elections I’d had the audacity to invite Women Against the War to come speak at D.O.B.’s monthly meeting. I’d come to believe that the Vietnam War was politically relevant to the gay cause. The evening was a disaster—Wilma Flintstone meets Jane Fonda—a socialist plot by their own leadership, said the D.O.B.’ers. I and my small pack of “radical” members had to go.
“It’s clear we aren’t going to get re-elected to catch frogs,” said my best butch pal, vice president Barbara McLean, who’d come west after her own stint as president of D.O.B.’s Chicago Chapter. We, the radical leadership, were meeting to decide how to greet our fate.
“No,” I laughed looking around at my small pack which included Barb’s lover, the D.O.B. secretary, Caren Presley. “So how do we prevent a coup and get out of here with some dignity?”
“I’m not ready to leave D.O.B.,” said Caren. “We want to become feminists but I feel more at home here than I do with those strange lesbian feminists.”
I thought about our dilemma. As an organized and smart pack of friends we’d come a long way. We wanted to stick together. We were also convinced that this new feminist philosophy had much to offer and that this new thing called the Women’s Liberation Movement was something we wanted to be part of. It felt good and right and spoke to society’s secondary discrimination against us, the fact that we were women.
That’s when the future occurred to me. “Why don’t Barb and I step aside as president and vice president and run for newsletter editor and assistant editor,” I said. “The membership never looks at newsletter editor as anything important; it’s the fifth and last officer on the executive board.”
“Great idea,” Barb agreed catching my drift of a new future for us. “Then we can all be the newsletter staff and create something dynamic and all stick together!”
Months later we’d put the plan into action and I became newsletter editor, demoted in the eyes of the membership. That was the beginning. Much to my surprise, I’d fallen in love with the freedom to express my thoughts and politics in print.
Six months later, my gang and I slapped a new title on the L.A. D.O.B. Newsletter, calling it The Lesbian Tide. The membership grew even more afraid of their now radical feminist newsletter. They voted affirmatively, and with gusto, when its staff asked permission to take The Lesbian Tide solo—that is, out of D.O.B. From its small beginning, I’d modeled our tiny publication’s format to be that of a newsmagazine—like my favorite national weekly, Newsweek.
Now, four years later, Barb and Caren had been sucked into Orange County to work in a new field called computers, but Bejo and I and a new crew ran a forty-page monthly with photos and a glossy cover that was eagerly read by thousands of lesbians—both the exploding feminist kind as well as the old-school butch-femme couples of D.O.B. We were fast becoming the best lesbian paper in the country with lesbian feminist writers from San Francisco to New York wanting to be published in “The Lesbian Tide: A feminist publication, written by and for the rising tide of women today.” My newest goal was to take the paper in a truly national direction. The road to such distribution, sent wrapped in an anonymous plain manila envelope, would not be smooth.
Dateline: Downtown L.A., Mid-April 1975
The ringing phone woke me and I turned over and read the clock, eight a.m. Startled, I sat up trying to remember whose bed I was in. The room was decorated with flower child scarves; the bedroom’s doorway was composed of strings of colored beads. Of course, I thought, it was Annie’s bedroom. I’d come over last night with the purpose of breaking up with my latest “short-but-meaningful-affair” as we feminists called our secondary relationships.
I jumped toward her phone hoping to catch it before the second ring woke her. We had indeed broken up last night—apparently sealed with some heavy duty closure.
“Hello,” I whispered into the receiver, realizing I should have just pulled the plug out and saved myself—or Annie—an unsavory explanation of who I was to someone who could be her next lover.
“Hello is this you, honey?” the voice asked.
Oh Christ! Maybe it was Annie’s other lover?
But suddenly I recognized the voice. “BeJo? What are you doing calling me here?”
“I’m calling you there because you are there,” my lover replied, her tone quick and panicked. “They’ve stopped the presses!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the damn printers. You were supposed to meet me here this morning.”
“Oh shit! Is it Saturday?”
“You bet it is. I can’t believe you forgot. You’ve never missed a press check!”
I stood naked on Annie’s linoleum floor, horrified at my negligence. “I’m sorry…”
“This isn’t part of our non-marital, non-monogamous agreement,” BeJo cut off my protest. “But we’ve got worse problems now. The printer is refusing to run The Tide’s cover. You’ve got to get down here.”
“No shit!” BeJo had my full attention. The Lesbian Tide had not had printer problems for months. It would take weeks to find another. There were no women-owned printers running the big web presses. “What’s his problem?”
“He says the cover photo is obscene! Honey, we are really screwed. You’ve got to talk him out of this.”
Anxiety was plain in BeJo’s voice. No cover meant a late issue. Years ago I’d laid down a cardinal rule to the staff: “The Tide rolls out on time each month! That’s why it’s called ‘the tide.’ Nobody is allowed to get sick or break-up with a lover until after an issue hit the streets.” In a movement peopled by lesbian feminists who were prone to process rather than product, The Lesbian Tide was famous for its stability. Our readers relied on us. And here I was breaking my own rules, ditching a lover on movement time!
“I can’t talk to this guy,” BeJo whined. “He’s a bully. I don’t do confrontation remember? That’s your job.”
Everything’s my job, I cursed, bending to collect my boots. “Give me fifteen minutes. Meet me and brief me outside the back door of the building.”
I tiptoed back into the bedroom, poking around for my shirt. The goddamn movement. What was the point of being purposefully unemployed and dirt poor if I got pulled out of bed to go to work? My boots felt raw against my bare feet. No time to find socks. I ran for the door.
“Thank the goddess you’re here!” BeJo said, hugging me as we met in the printer’s back alley.
“What the hell is going on?” I snapped.
“It’s because of the photo of the two women kissing on the front cover.”
I grabbed her hand and strode toward the pressroom. “I have a plan.”
Once in the great room the pounding of the forty-foot web press, its drums thundering, drowned all conversation. I paused
long enough to smell the ink, the rhythmic clatter, and the sounds of men barking staccato orders to one another. How I loved the rush and the smell of words churning through metal.
Our sales rep, Roger, waved me into his small office. The man was wimpy, slightly built, and was nervously smoothing his thinning grey curls. He looked more tired than I was after being up all night. But anger was fueling me.
“I’m sorry about this,” he offered lamely.
“So am I,” I boomed. “Why is there a problem with our cover? It’s a headshot. They’re both fully clothed. You print this kind of photo with a man and a woman all the time.”
“It’s not a problem with me.” Roger held his hands up. “I think the two women are...it’s a fine...kiss.”
I looked at BeJo and then back to Roger. “So who’s got the problem?”
The man turned around and pointed to a large upstairs window. “It’s his problem. That’s my boss’s office.”
The glass cage sitting above the pressroom looked like a traffic controller’s private domain. I turned to BeJo, who was wide-eyed with fright. Roger, shuffling proofs on his table, avoided my eyes. I watched his wrists move, then leaned over and spoke softly in his ear, “Roger, are you gay?”
His lower lip trembled and he stopped shuffling. He closed his eyes for a moment. His wrinkled face broke into an unexpectedly sweet smile. “Yes, I am,” he said softly. “I’m not your problem.”
I reached over and gave his hand a brief, soft squeeze. Then I pointed to the upper office. “So what’s his name?”
“Mr. Karinsky,” Roger said fearfully.
“No, Roger, what’s his first name?”
“Charlie.”
By that time I was half way up the stairs. The tough approach was the only kind that men respected.
“Who is it?” a thick voice boomed from behind the closed, dark glass.
I yanked open the door. My eyes focused immediately on the burly, cigar smoking, oily-faced man behind the desk. But I didn’t flinch. Working class tough guys had never scared me. It was the tight-lipped, white-collar power men whose potential for violence was carefully shrouded that unnerved me.
When We Were Outlaws Page 5