Quickly I decided that I should try to fly under Morris’s radar, be an absentee worker, ignore the politics of the place, and stick to writing about the health needs of dykes. What could be controversial about lesbian health? Morris wouldn’t even know I was there. We could continue our close working relationship on wider gay issues.
Perhaps I was naïve. Within a few months I had joined the forces of lesbian resistance.
During the fall of ’74 the lesbian staff had presented the Board of Directors with several workers’ petitions stating our belief that as feminist workers we had a right to self-governance. We’d repeatedly asked the Board to let us have a staff-elected management collective to replace Ken Bartley, the lone male Administrator. Bartley was one of those gay men from the 1950s who felt emasculated if a woman asked him to be a decent human being. Morris Kight’s Board had rejected our notion of a management collective—the word “collective” sounded too radical and too feminist to them. But they’d agreed that a five person management team was a good idea. However, they appointed Bartley to head the team, and three other men to be co-managers with him. Tonight the Board would vote to seat the fifth and last staff representative on the management team. Tonight we’d submitted our last petition, a list of three lesbian feminist employees. We’d demanded that they pick one of the three to fill the last seat.
“The Board has to give us something,” I told my co-worker.
Pody’s normally fun-loving face was creased with worry lines. I shared her angst. Here we were, lesbian employees of a gay center protesting against it. Pody had recently moved to town from North Carolina and this was her first movement action. Like her Cuban-born father, Pody was blonde and fair-skinned, which made her less Latina looking than I. Both of us had been raised white, culturally speaking.
My Mexico-born father had met my Irish New Yorker mother at West Point in 1946, the year after the good war, World War II, ended. Graduating the Academy, he’d been assigned to Paris to help the reconstruction of postwar Europe and never looked back to his childhood in Texas. Raising us, he’d told us that we were Americans and he taught us Italian, the language of opera and artists, rather than Spanish.
Pody nudged my shoulder. “So how does pressure cause social change?” She motioned toward the board members sitting behind the closed doors, all of whom were in their fifties or older. “Especially with this bunch?”
I reached into my jeans and pulled out my silver Zippo lighter. “Listen,” I said, as I flicked it open and spun the wheel with my thumb. “Did you hear the grate of the wheel against the flint? Metal on metal, immutable force against un-giving force equals a spark, a flame, a fire. That’s the principle of dialectic materialism.”
“Run that by me again?”
“It’s a political theory, Pody. A process of social change spelled out by the German philosopher, Karl Marx.” I took a long drag off my cigarette. “Marx says that at some point in the evolution of a thing called A, that A will be so impacted by its opposite, let’s call that B, that both A and B will lose their A-ness and B-ness and evolve into an entirely different new thing called C. The Gay community Services Center is A. And we, the lesbian staff, are B—the forces of change.”
“Combustible,” Pody laughed. She jabbed my chest, playfully hitting the political buttons affixed to my faded blue denim political war jacket. To me each button represented a battle decoration from a campaign hard fought or a new organization founded. Marimacha y Feliz! proclaimed one that took the derogatory Spanish words for “lesbian and happy” and screamed it out on red letters against black. “Alpine County or Bust” said another, referring to Morris’s wildly popular idea that gays should move to the small, nondescript Northern California county and take it over.
Huddled on the floor with Pody, I realized that tonight’s petition might be a last ditch effort. We were desperate to get one of our own, a lesbian feminist representative, as the fifth and final member of the management team. Our patience was running thin. We didn’t trust that the Board of Directors, all men except for one lone female who was barely out of the closet and called herself “a gay woman” rather than a “lesbian,” would make the right decision about seating one of our choices. More than that, the petition had become symbolic. All over the country, and in other Los Angeles organizations like the Woman’s Building and the Westside Women’s Center, women were rising up and rejecting male, top-down, hierarchical power structures. Our petition was the latest step in lesbians trying to persuade GCSC to adopt a few basic feminist principles like collective leadership and equality between lesbians and gay men. Out of GCSC’s fifteen programs, twelve were for gay men.
The irony was that although GCSC was a male-dominated agency, a new grant last fall had come from the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism to rehabilitate women alcoholics. A national study had been done which showed that twenty-five to thirty percent of lesbians had problems with drinking, so the government had given the money to a gay agency for outreach to lesbians. The grant was a national blockbuster in both amount and target population; a three-year renewable funding for the staggering amount of a million dollars, a third of a million per year, a groundbreaking statement as the first federal money exclusively given to rehabilitate women alcoholics. It was also a national first because a million had never been given to a homosexual organization. A second, smaller grant had recently come to GCSC from the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for the purpose of setting up a women’s health clinic, my department, the Herself Health Clinic.
Of course this kind of government funding was great news for the national gay and lesbian movement. No one could have predicted we activists would get help for our people from the very source of our oppression. But these two grants were destabilizing Morris’s fledging GCSC. Before the grants, the Center had largely subsisted on those private donations from wealthy gay men. Now this federal money forced the Center to hire almost two dozen lesbian employees. Another half dozen had to be hired for the women’s clinic. So much money and so many women! Now there were twenty-nine female salaried positions at GCSC; female employees outnumbered males by three to one. The inadvertent upheaval in gender balance had come as a major shock to its Board of Directors.
“Córdova, can they do anything like fire us for protesting?” Pody asked, a hint of fear in her otherwise cheerful voice. She was the coordinator of volunteers in the clinic program.
“No way, Pody. We can’t let fear sidetrack us. We have to handle ourselves calmly and firmly,” I said, trying to borrow the sage tone I’d read about in the writings of community organizer Saul Alinsky. “I don’t think the Board can do anything to us, directly.”
A flicker of compassion passed through me. Poor newbies, I thought, studying Pody and her friend, Rachel, who had just joined us in the wait. Looking at this new woman, I saw she was petite, barely clearing five feet, and had startling blue eyes. She was definitely femme and new to the movement, I realized, because she wore earrings. This at a time when jewelry was seen as a sign of seeking male approval and “collaborating with the enemy.” I vaguely remembered that she was on staff, and that I’d seen her walking around the halls at GCSC and at other events, but we’d never been introduced. I pitied newcomers. These were their first gay jobs. Surely neither of them had signed up for a pitched battle against a gay Board of Directors.
I stole another look at the petite woman, who still smelled of the suburbs. She had a lovely Irish face, and I had a weakness for ladies of my mother’s ancestry. She was dressed in a gauzy green blouse open low enough to more than suggest small, well-formed breasts. Ardent feminists exposed nothing, I knew, so this also told me she was probably a lesbian-come-lately, one of thousands of heterosexual women who’d recently left a marriage and now flooded the fast growing Women’s Movement.
I was a “lifer” –a lifelong lesbian, a dyke who’d never been heterosexual, married, or slept behind enemy lines. At fifteen my mother had accidentally tipped me off to my as yet u
nknown sex drive by pointing out to me that the birthday card I received from a girlfriend was indeed a love letter. Filing this reference away deeply in my subconscious, I managed to be pleasantly shocked and gleefully proud when my first morning after arrived four years later.
We lifers didn’t need a political movement to give us permission to come out of the closet. As a lifelong lesbian, I’d trained in the culture of pre-feminist lesbian bars. I treated newbie lesbians like tourists—with a good deal of skeptical distance. Fifties bar culture held that such a woman needed, at best, a year to sort out her identity issues, and at worst, she’d dump you—as a trend or experiment—before going back to men.
I turned away from Pody and her friend and toward the ashtray next to the stairwell. I needed to sit, smoke, and think things out politically. It was now ten o’clock. The Board couldn’t hide in there all night.
Damn. What were we going to do if the Board came out and announced they were rejecting our petition? Ken Bartley, I was sure, had purposely given us only a one-day notice about tonight’s meeting. That meant something unexpected was up. Always have a back-up plan, I chided myself. June and I needed to strategize, and we needed to do it now!
June Suwara, the tall, quick-mouthed Director of the Peer Counseling Program, cut an imposing figure dwarfed only by her ideologically battering personality. Orange-haired with freckles, June was in her usual androgynous drag—today’s version a green and black flannel thrift store shirt and a camouflage vest, replete with political buttons that bespoke her solidarity with Mao’s Chinese revolution.
In my lifelong lesbian vernacular, June was butch. I thought it was odd how most lefty lesbians from the anti-war movement rarely admitted to being butch or femme. They identified with the politically neutral label “androgynous.” This was only one of the many political duplicities espoused by lesbians who followed Marx or Mao, I thought. June and I were far from friends, since I knew almost nothing about her personally other than she’d been working at GCSC for two years. That meant she understood the intricacies of the politics here better than I did. And she was extremely vocal about them. All the more reason that she and I needed to be on the same page when the Board came out.
The redhead was in intense conversation with Brenda Weathers, the Director of GCSC’s Alcoholism Program for Women (APW). She glanced at me, but didn’t break off her conversation, deliberately keeping me waiting. I noticed that the buttons on June’s khaki vest read differently from mine. The most dominant one screamed, OVERTHROW CAPITALISM, red letters on white. From what June had said to me, and from the scuttlebutt on the Center’s grapevine, I knew that June was a self-described, card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Unlike me, a convert to radical lesbian feminism from a homosexual background, June was a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty with worker-based class politics. Her father was probably a union leader, while my father, a poor boy from Texas, was the president of the marble import company he’d built from the ground up. Dad used to come home at night complaining that the unions were breaking him. I made a mental note to find out more about June’s background. It could be relevant to the fight ahead of us with the Center.
Studying the crowd around June, I realized that the Center’s rapid hiring had brought lesbians of wildly different political backgrounds into forced proximity. Among us, there were lesbians from the hinterlands of suburbia who called themselves gay women and had grown up thinking of themselves as homosexual. This group felt that gay men were our brothers. They clashed with those among us who were feminists and felt that the cause of our second-class lives was the male-constructed world of patriarchy. These newly converted lesbian feminists were sure there was little difference between straight and gay men. Also among us were activists from the New Left who, like June, had grown up on an anti-war, down-with-the-Establishment diet. To them, being a lesbian was only the latest issue in their litany of oppressions.
Finally, June finished talking with Brenda and turned to me. “What’s up, Córdova?” she asked in her usual clipped tone.
I stood up straight. “We need to talk about what to do when the Board comes out.”
“That’s true,” June said. “Bartley let it slip this morning that the Board won’t be seating me on the management team.”
In composing its slate of three acceptable names to seat on the management team, we’d deliberately put June’s name down as one of the three, along with myself and a quiet, non-controversial lesbian named Denise Crippen. The Board didn’t know it, but Denise was one of us, a lesbian feminist. We’d strategized that the Board would reject June and me as too hard to control, so they’d have to accept Denise.
“Did Bartley say why not?”
June’s freckled complexion turned dark. “He told another staffer he thinks I have hidden agendas.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Who knows what those idiots are thinking?” June retorted. “I think he found out that I went to some of those Westside meetings to start a new lesbian center.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I go to those meetings too. I have close friends in that Lesbian Center Collective group.” It crossed my mind that Bartley was lucky June hadn’t popped him one in the jaw. The man had a small, lean build, and a pushed in face that looked like it had been last been kissed during the Ice Age.
“Why should GCSC care anyway?” June said. “A lesbian center on the Westside would take the pressure off them to create more lesbian programming.”
I moved closer to June and lowered my voice. “I think the real reason the Board refused you is because you’re a commie-pinko dyke,” I whispered wryly.
“Yeah, probably,” she agreed. “They know I’m pro-union.”
“Exactly. Fomenting unionism among staff isn’t a brew they want employees drinking.” I blew the hair out of my eyes. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Board was going to refuse June. “What will happen if they don’t choose Denise?”
June looked around the room. “That will fry everyone,” she said.
I nodded. “The first thing we need to do now is spread the word. No matter what happens, keep a lid on it. No insults, no name-calling, no confrontation. The Board members are from a generation that thinks talking loud is angry.”
“Anger is exactly what we should show them,” June said. “Why not scare them? Fear is the only reasoning they’ll listen to.”
I lowered my eyes so that June couldn’t read my face. Was she indirectly asking me how Morris would respond to an intimidation strategy? Most activists who knew the lay of the land politically knew that Morris Kight and Jeanne Córdova were close and had always been on the same side. June might know I was one of Morris’s protégées.
“We can’t take no for an answer.” The belligerence in her voice amplified my fears. “Something’s gotta give or some of us will be forced to quit.”
“That might be exactly what they want,” I cautioned.
“Last week Bartley called one of my people an anarchist hippie.”
“Evolution will never reach Bartley,” I agreed. “He’s a mutant strain.”
“He’s got to go.” June smacked the wall with the palm of her hand.
“I agree. That’s why it’s so important that we get the fifth vote on management. We’ve got to curb his power.”
June’s eyes narrowed. “And if they say, ‘We haven’t had enough time to consider…’?”
“Then, you or I step forward and demand they regroup for another emergency session tomorrow night.”
June nodded. “Acceptable,” she said. “OK. I’ll tell my group not to yell fuck you at Kight. But they’d better do it tonight, Córdova.” She spun on her heel and left me with her demand.
I wiped the sweat off my brow. It was hard to believe June and I were on the same side. Goddess forbid this fight with GCSC should drag on.
By the time I returned to Pody, I was strung out. I let myself slide down the wall. I’d been awake most of last night, lobbying on the
phone. Sometimes my life went by too fast like I was chasing it from behind.
“I’ll go down to the liquor store and get us some beers,” Pody instructed. “Do you want a downer to calm your nerves?”
I looked at her gratefully. “A cold Coke would be great.”
As Pody left, I reached into my back pocket and found my back-up Darvon, which I popped with a sip of water. I’d first discovered painkillers in college. They quelled the pain of exhaustion and let my tired body keep up with my overactive brain. I closed my eyes and lit a cigarette, trying to relax. When I’d signed up for this job it was supposed to be a small, part time gig. Now it had devolved into a political mess. Why couldn’t Morris and his boys toss their lesbian feminist staff a few egalitarian bones? We hadn’t even been able to convince them that a man using the women’s bathroom was a legitimate issue. The men’s room smelled of urine. Now ours did too.
Pody returned with the beer, squatting beside me on the floor. “I’ve never been part of anything like this. I just came to the big city to date girls…I mean women.”
“That sucks, I’m sorry. I guess we dykes found our voice with feminism and now the guys can’t shut us up.”
“I heard the boys brought a thirty-foot “cock-a-pillar” float to the gay march a few years ago. The lesbians must have gone nuts.”
“Of course we did! The men were demeaning gay ‘liberation’ as sexual license,” I recalled, picturing the giant, brightly colored papier mache penis with men’s feet sticking out from beneath as it walked down Hollywood Boulevard. “Lesbians believe gay liberation is about coming out without being fired at work.”
Pody nodded. “Yeah, or not allowing your ex-husband to take you to court and claim you’re an unfit mother because you’re living with another woman.”
Pody looked glum. “No wonder we’re still fighting with them.”
She gestured toward my pocket and I took out two cigarettes. “That doesn’t speak well for our odds on winning tonight, does it, Córdova?”
When We Were Outlaws Page 8