“Yes, I remember what happened in Santa Monica,” I said.
“That wasn’t the pigs,” Tomassi said. “That was me. My army.”
I swallowed and sat down.
“And the bombing at the other building in Santa Monica,” Tomassi continued. “The one with the Social Workers Party headquarters in it?”
“I suppose you’re going to brag that your National Socialist Liberation Front was responsible for that, too?” I said.
“That’s right, chick. And I’d like a little more respect in your voice. Or else, I’m gonna call another paper.”
“Okay, Joe,” I backtracked. “A little more respect from me, and no more chicks from you. I’m a feminist, not a chick. Why did you call The Free Press?” I flipped open my tablet and grabbed a pencil.
“The L.A. Times wants too much proof, get me to reveal my ‘whereabouts’ as they say. And they ain’t gonna print what I think of those Jew pigs and Commie criminals.”
“What makes you think we will?”
“Because I’m gonna trade you.”
I waited.
“My confession, for a story about my people and what we stand for.”
“What people would that be, Joe?” His trade sounded good. Freep readers needed to know there were neo-Nazis alive and well in our midst.
“The people of the white race. We’re an occupied people in our own country. We don’t have no rights in America anymore. That’s why we’ve declared war on the Jew capitalist U.S. government.”
“Why me, Joe? How do you know I’m not Jewish?”
“Your last name tells me you’re a Spic. Besides, I saw your photo in your column. I wanted to meet a real dyke.” Joe laughed. “But that’s not the real reason,” he said. “You’re the one who writes about niggers and homosexuals and what broads want. I figure you’ll understand what it means to feel like you don’t have no rights. I want you to tell my side of the story.”
“You want an interview?” I pulled my lips tight trying to hide my excitement. A Nazi’s confession!
“That’s right,” he said.
“The cops don’t even suspect Nazi involvement. You’d be drawing fire to yourself.”
“We want the pigs and the public to credit us. I want them to wonder where and when we’ll strike again.” Joe’s voice was low and thick.
As I waited for him to go on, I heard a click followed by several more clicks. And finally, a dial tone. Someone or something had disconnected me from my Nazi.
I spent most of the day waiting for Tomassi to call back, while knocking out a story about the trial of Z Budapest, a lesbian feminist activist who’d just been arrested for giving tarot card readings. Psychics had probably been foretelling the future in California since the gold rush, but technically fortune telling was a misdemeanor violation of L.A.’s Municipal Code, Section 43.30. The LAPD was trying to shut down the goddess worshippers’ wing of the women’s movement across America. Witchcraft was allegedly a threat to national security. Budapest had really been busted because she was a radical feminist who publicly proclaimed that she was a witch, and opened a prominent Goddess storefront in Venice called The Feminist Wicca. The cops said she dabbled in the occult. That made her a criminal in our Judeo-Christian country. We feminists knew that witches were prophets of the ancient goddess religion, Wicca. We’d begun the Z Budapest Political Defense Fund, and contacted the media, as was lesbian feminist tradition when political people were arrested. It had worked! The District Attorney was now talking about probation, instead of a six-month jail term.
It was mid-evening and dark by the time I shut off my IBM Selectric. I’d had enough politics for one day. The morning’s debacle at GCSC was still smoldering in my chest like a hot spot in a temporarily contained fire. I wanted to get home before I, too, exploded with emotion. I needed to assimilate the day. I walked downstairs and out into the fresh night. Lionheart would take me home and BeJo would make a nice hot dinner and nothing bad could happen for what remained of this major bummer of a day.
I pulled Lionheart into the darkened Culver City carport and saw that BeJo’s vintage Cadillac, Ramona, was missing. Once inside I found a note. “Sweetie,” BeJo had written, “It’s Friday night. Didn’t think you’d be home. Fran invited me to join them at the Bacchanal. See you in bed tonight. I hopa, hopa, hope. Love, BeJo.”
Damn, I’d forgotten it was Friday night. Mondays and Fridays were non-monogamous “space nights,” according to our arrangement. We were in an open relationship, but feminist politics demanded honesty within non-monogamy. Sisterhood didn’t include lying.
I dropped my briefcase on the kitchen table and walked to the bedroom. This was a downside of non-monogamy: all that freedom meant free to be absent when your lover really needed to talk. Who was Fran anyway? Someone from the baseball team, no doubt. Over our three years together BeJo had never gotten involved with another lover. But there had been plenty of times when she’d gone out with friends. Just to show me that she could, she’d warned.
Brooding, I went to the bedroom closet and pulled out my hidden journal. I’d filled a dozen red-covered, spiral notebooks in the short six years of my adulthood. Flipping it open to a blank page I wrote the date, “May 1, 1975,” followed by, “GCSC isn’t even my fight. I put dykes first by giving my energy to projects like The Tide and the Westside Women’s Center. The Center was supposed to be a part time job, not a major war. How did I get involved with this group of macho gay male control freaks?”
I put the pen down and lay on my side, curling into a ball. Pulling the worn termination letter out of my jeans pocket, I re-read it. No mistake, Morris was the author. The tell tale sign was in the writing style: “You may have some personal properties in the Center, and we should like you to have them.” Morris always used the subjunctive when he meant to use the imperative. The sentence really meant, “Get your shit out of here now!”
I sat up and opened the journal again. “FIRED FROM GCSC TODAY,’ I printed in heavy capital letters. “Never been fired before. Feel broken inside,” I added. I closed the book, lay back down, and closed down the tears.
Hours later, I awoke, having fallen asleep in my clothes. BeJo lay next to me but she didn’t stir. There was no point in waking her. In the clarity of darkness, I realized, the ache in my stomach was bitterness—bitterness and anger about Morris. How could he have betrayed me like this? We’d been allies for years. His loft home on McCadden Place, the activist hub of the gay movement, was my second home. There were few people closer to Morris, politically speaking, than me. Yet, he’d fired me. Had I been blinded by my long loyalty to him? If he was so angry and desperate, why hadn’t he called me on the phone and talked to me about the situation at GCSC? Why had he avoided me? The firings had the ring of a near-panic political move, a hyperbolic stunt. Maybe a less savvy Board member had offered this ridiculous idea and Morris had grabbed onto it as a desperate bluff. Surely he knew that termination was using a hatchet where a precision blade had been called for.
How could I make things right? Pacing the hallway an idea came to me. I would show up at McCadden Place tomorrow morning. Reason with Morris face to face. Counsel him that LA’s first gay institution, which represented a movement that prioritized civil rights, could not terminate employees without warnings or notice. Remind him there were probably laws against this sort of thing. Make him understand that this could be one of the major blunders of his otherwise outstanding political life. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t too late. Morris and I would find a way to wiggle out of this one.
Now, with action plan in mind, I felt calmer. Yes, being fired had all been a surreal mistake. Wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers, I climbed back under the covers, feeling sorry for Morris. This was way too big a mistake for me to let my friend make. Yes. I would tell him that he’d listened to the wrong advice. That the firings would drive an unsealable crack in the always fragile unity between lesbians and gay men, a chasm that the movement could not
tolerate.
Turning over, I pulled the blankets snugly around my chest and wondered if Rachel might also be laying awake tonight. I knew she wasn’t used to this emotional roller coaster called political life. And what about money? Penny had said yes to giving me more work. Did Rachel have another job or source of income? And why did I feel so protective about her, I wondered, as I drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 10
The Gay/Feminist 11
[Los Angeles]
May 4, 1975
I’d twice driven to McCadden Place trying to find Morris. Each time no one answered. Now it was too late. News about the firings at the Gay Community Services Center had spread like a Santa Ana wildfire across lesbian land in the L.A. basin. The dyke community—many of whom were lesbian separatists who didn’t trust men to begin with—was furious. A male-dominated institution had summarily fired six women! Lesbians who had no relationship to the Center demanded to come to the workers’ meeting hastily planned for tonight.
So far, the only good thing to come out of our battle with GCSC was that the women’s alcoholism program was on the verge of a new life. Brenda Weathers had promptly moved her entire staff out of GCSC and into the large, ratty-looking two-story Craftsman with barred windows and a tattered paint job. Located in a seedy Latino area not far from downtown, the newly re-named Alcoholism Center for Women was no longer geographically under the thumb of the Board.
Walking into ACW’s spacious living room, I was greeted by friends from everywhere, from LA’s westside Venice dykes to eastside Highland Park activists. The great room was dressed with dilapidated armchairs from the fifties and broken couches with springs protruding under the seats. Posters from the civil rights, women’s, and our own gay liberation movement hung on the walls in rampant disorder as if someone racing by had flung a handful of pushpins at the open spaces. The movement had no time for aesthetics.
I tucked myself into one corner of the room, standing between Pody and my best butch buddy, Robin Tyler, whom I’d dragged to the meeting to give me some objective advice. I’d met Robin, a high energy, Peter-Pan type Canadian butch and a comic by profession, three years ago at a Gay-Straight Dialog. We’d been the only two self-identifying butches at the event who dared to raise our hands in a room full of rabid feminists who decried butches as male-identified. Our moment of mutual rebellion had ignited a deep friendship. She didn’t work at the GCSC.
Glancing around the room, I recognized a reporter from the radical feminist paper, Sister, and another from LA’s local gay newspaper Newswest. I myself would cover the story for The Lesbian Tide, although how I’d do that remained a mystery to me since my involvement had ruined my objectivity. I saw no one from The Advocate. I’d deliberately not called its publisher, Dick Michaels, or any straight press in town, since I hoped we could contain this battle quickly and keep it local.
There were close to forty lesbians in the room, yet I realized that I had only a superficial knowledge of the political background of most of them. Studying Marxist Leninism, classes I’d taken at the insistence of a Trotskyist lover two years ago, had taught me the importance of paying attention to where people were coming from politically. Knowing someone’s politics helped me predict their real agenda. And this was an unusually disparate group of political bedfellows, brought together by an act of war against lesbian feminist principles.
“All right, women! Can I have your attention?” Brenda called the confab to quiet down. Despite the presence of gay men, it was common at lesbian feminist meetings to use the catchall “women.”
In her mid-thirties, Brenda Weathers was short, compact and tough, with a hardened face that suggested she’d spent a lot of years behind a bottle. Word was she was from the streets and knew her drunks. Her staff, most of them also former alcoholics, was fiercely loyal to her as their mother lion. She and I had a mutually respectful, but impersonal acquaintance. Our paths had not crossed although she’d worked politically with Morris Kight five years ago in the Gay Liberation Front. In addition to being the head of the Alcoholism Program, she’d been one of the authors of the grant application. In recent months she’d played the role of one of the leaders of the rebellious staff. This made our telephone conversation this morning delicate.
“Can we meet and talk before the meeting,” I’d called to ask her.
“Can’t do that. I’ll be coming from another meeting.”
“Then let’s talk now,” I’d pressed. “The day we were fired you were telling me why you thought GCSC hadn’t fired you along with the rest of us.”
“Ah ...right,” Brenda hesitated. “My funding agency knows that I know how to run this program. We’ve talked a lot.”
Talked a lot, echoed in my mind. Past tense. Brenda had been talking with her grantor for some time. Luckily, she couldn’t see my mouth hanging open in shock.
“So, you’re saying GCSC wouldn’t dare fire you because your funding agency told them not to?”
“I didn’t say that,” Brenda fenced. “I’ve had to protect my program. The GCSC Board has no idea who alcoholics are. And no clue how to treat this disease. I’m tired of ignorant men who’ve never had to deal with the struggles of alcoholism, telling clean and sober women what to do. That’s what this is really about.”
“So when the staff asked me to take the workers’ petition to the Board and you promised not to write the funding agencies because you were going to give the Board one last chance to clean it up—you had already been talking to your funding agency, right?”
Another phone rang in the background. “Sorry, Córdova, gotta get this one, it’s the emergency line.”
My heart sank, as I hung up swallowing an angry retort. So Weathers had stoked the fires of rebellion because it suited her program’s interest, but she hadn’t been fired. I felt used.
I ordered my mind back to ACW. The room quieted down following Brenda’s call to order.
“We’re all here,” she addressed us. “To decide what the lesbian feminist community’s response should be to the termination letters.”
There was a collective moment of silence, as if we were all gathered at a graveside. The recently deceased were eleven bodies, five men and six women.
June broke the hushed mood, her green eyes blazing. “It seems to me that we were terminated illegally. Even factory workers are given warnings or reprimands. Did anyone get a warning?”
“A warning about what?” said Pody.
“A warning that your job was in jeopardy,” June snapped, her thin upper lip tight.
I stepped forward. “June is referring to a set of standard rules that non-profit organizations are supposed to follow when hiring or firing people. The rules are called the personnel policies and procedures.” I addressed Rachel, who sat across the room with some of her friends. “Did the topic of personnel policies ever come up at management team meetings?”
Rachel looked blank as she mouthed a simple, “No.”
Everyone looked around, whispering.
No one knew anything, nor had there been any reference to PP&P’s, as they were called. As a professional social worker, I knew non-profits had to have a legitimate set of PP&P’s, but I wasn’t thinking about the law when I got hired by the Center last fall. It had been a relatively simple process, no procedures or job descriptions. GCSC was the first gay non-profit in the country. No one in our young radical movement worried about following the rules.
“A lawyer I talked to said this is very important,” June continued. “If GCSC has these procedures they certainly didn’t follow them. An employee is supposed to get an official warning that their job is in jeopardy due to some specified reason.”
“Does this mean we can apply for unemployment?” said Colin, the big guy with the Afro.
“Right on!” another voice yelled out. The room broke into excited chatter as it occurred to the group that there might be some immediate financial relief.
“We should all go down to EDD and apply for unemployment,�
� I said.
June interrupted. “Even if we do qualify, I think the Center will reject our claims.”
“Then they need to give us our jobs back,” one of the effeminists interrupted. “It’s one or the other!”
“I’ll bring the lawyer next time we meet,” June said.
I felt a bolt of panic shoot through me from groin to brain. A lawyer meant a lawsuit, a lawsuit meant court, and court meant the matter would be taken out of our hands as a community.
“That’s premature, June.” I spoke loudly to the entire room. “It’s too early to turn this thing into a legal issue. Officially inviting a lawyer to our meeting will make the lawyer think we’re asking her to represent us. That takes us a step further than we want to go.”
Enric joined in, “Can’t we have a lawyer come here unofficially and just give us some information?”
“Yeah, we need info,” several voices chimed in.
“We should decide how to get our jobs back before we call in someone else,” I argued. “Let’s make a demand and give GCSC a chance to respond.”
A new voice spoke up “They had their chance and they already responded.” I recognized the dishwater blonde ponytail of June’s best friend. Dixie Youts, dressed in the de rigueur Lefty dyke attire of work boots and flannel shirt, visited June at work often. She was a Maoist, a believer in Mao Tse Tung’s Chinese revolution. “I see this issue as workers versus their bosses,” she said, stepping forward. “When you’re on the assembly line and they’re trying to squeeze your contract and lay you off, you don’t go running to them and say, ‘We’re giving you one more chance to give us our jobs back, pretty please.’”
“Right on! We’re not gonna beg anymore,” someone bellowed.
I upstaged Dixie, purposely walking into the middle of the room. “‘They’ are not just the ‘bosses’! The ‘they’ that we’re talking about is a homosexual services center.” I projected my voice. “‘They’ are gay men, and the last I heard this movement is about gay solidarity.” I desperately wanted everyone to treat this issue as a gay problem, not a labor issue.
When We Were Outlaws Page 12