When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  “My father wasn’t always like that,” Rachel said. “He was very loving, before he went to the war.”

  “What war?”

  “The Korean war. He was a marine.”

  “But he came home in one piece?”

  “On the outside maybe. But he was a different human being inside. Then they got divorced.”

  I closed my eyes, remembering my childhood prayers to the Blessed Virgin asking why Mom couldn’t send my father away so that he wouldn’t beat us anymore. Later, as an adult, I realized my parents were Catholics, so divorce was never an option. But he was an angry man inside.

  Rachel stood up suddenly. “Let’s have some music,” she said, moving toward the kitchen. “Come, dance with me.” She held out her hand. “I just bought this new Joan Baez album called Diamonds & Rust.

  My mind stopped buzzing. Fathers and politics weren’t the reasons I was at Rachel’s house in the middle of the night. I set my Coke can aside and took her in my arms. Her perfume smelled like vanilla almonds.

  “Maybe there is a better way to resolve the fighting at GCSC,” she said, as she pressed the lip of her beer bottle against my breastbone. “Maybe you and I can find it together.”

  I brought her closer to my body. The electric feeling spread from our hands to my groin. I wondered if she felt the same. Talking became more tense. Somehow it became harder to find the right words.

  The room began to sway. I’d had a beer and Rachel three or four. I relaxed into the music and caressed her back with my hand. “You know how to dance,” I said, responding to the lilt in her step. One of the many non-romantic byproducts of feminism, I’d learned, was that few lesbian feminists knew how to dance well. Only old gay femmes like BeJo who’d grown up in bar culture did. Dancing was foreplay in bar culture. If a lesbian didn’t dance, she didn’t get a lover.

  The evening fog sashayed through Rachel’s open windows. “Do you have somewhere else you have to be tonight?” Rachel asked in a whisper.

  “No, I don’t have to be anywhere else tonight.” I lowered my lips to meet hers.

  “I heard that you live with a woman named BeJo. Are you and she lovers?”

  I drew my head away from her lips. “Sort of…”

  She threw her head back and laughed. “That’s a pretty simple yes or no question!”

  I wrinkled my forehead and tried to step delicately. “Yes, then. BeJo and I began as lovers but we haven’t slept together in…months,” I fudged. “We are very non-monogamous.”

  “Just asking.”

  She let her forehead rest against my cheek; her face nestled into the cavity of my shoulder. She must be four inches shorter than me, I marveled. She was everything in miniature.

  She lifted her head and smiled. “We’re a perfect fit.”

  Her body relaxed against mine again and she ran her fingertips over the hair on the back of my neck. Again the rush began as my hands began to explore her back. Touching her made the muscles around my groin tighten. I sought her lips as my fingers brushed her nipple. She trembled and gripped my neck more tightly. Sensitive breasts, I made a mental note. My fingers widened to take her small breast in my hand. Her lips opened to let me in as her knees began to disappear from under her. I gripped her waist to hold her up. I was alive on Effie Street, on a dance floor on top of the world, everything else dropped away.

  My legs got weak and I knew I couldn’t hold her up much longer. I steered us close to the avocado chair and whispered, “Beanbag chairs can be beds, too,” and I let us fall.

  Hours later, on the edge of sleep Rachel gave me a smile that lit up my insides and murmured, “Pretty butch.”

  “Butches aren’t pretty,” I growled.

  “This one is,” she said, tapping me on the nose.

  Joan Baez’s lyrics replayed all night and laid down a track in my heart.

  A morning ray crept across my forehead. I lay perfectly still, feeling the tangible heat from the window’s sun on my skin. Sex with Rachel had been rather supernatural, something at the core of it extraordinary and disturbing. For a few minutes, it had taken me to another world. I watched her face as the light edged across her profile and slowly traveled down the delicate bridge of her nose. Her face in sleep had the surrendered look of a small child napping.

  The radiator on the far side of the room chugged for breath. I tried to sit up and look at my watch. I had to get to The Freep, but my arm was pinned beneath her. We were sprawled almost naked on the living room floor, half in the avocado bag chair, and half on the blond wood. The wood was warm beneath my legs. She must have gotten up during the night, after we’d fallen asleep, and covered us with a pink blanket. Shifting my weight, I tried to disengage. My boot heel scraped against the oak. Shit, we’d been in such a hurry I’d made love with my boots on. I closed my eyes against the approaching day, trying to hold onto the night. In the afterwards of her I’d felt an exquisite sense of physical and emotional peace. But today was a new day.

  Damn! What would the protesters have to say about this affair? Rachel was not going to be another one-night stand. The Gay/Feminist 11 would not take kindly to me conflating the bedroom with politics. In-bed romances meant new out-of-bed power alliances. June’s camp might think I was sleeping with a newbie to win more votes. The balance of power among the protesters was tense enough already. Rachel and I would have few champions in this crowd.

  And what about BeJo? Christ! It was a space night but I should have called to say I wasn’t coming home. I told myself BeJo wouldn’t be jealous of a simple new affair. She didn’t seem to mind as long as I stuck to our rules—Mondays and Fridays as non-monogamy nights. Rachel hadn’t asked if there were any rules. This could get complicated.

  Find your damn clothes, Córdova. Get the hell out of here! a disturbing voice inside me demanded.

  Crawling around, I discovered my belted jeans on top of a set of Dylan album covers. Bell-bottoms had the advantage of being able to slide on and off quickly over boots. Where was my shirt? Nowhere! It must be on the floor, under the beanbag chair, under Rachel. No problem. I kept extras in the trunk of the car. Slipping into my denim jacket, I felt a pinprick scrape the top of my naked breast. An errant political button was poking through the denim. There was Rita Mae telling me in green lettered, ten-point Times New Roman, “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail.” Was my present situation what she had in mind? I snapped the jacket closed. This would have to do until I got to work and put on a new shirt in the bathroom at The Freep. None of my colleagues would be uncool enough to ask where I’d lost my clothes. It was still the decade of free love.

  Searching for my briefcase, I crept toward the kitchen table. A cartoon postcard picturing a blonde woman dressed in a flower child headband sat on the table propped against my briefcase. I turned it over. “I want to make love with you—again and again!” Rachel’s flowery script had written.

  I should leave a note too. Something sweet about the night. Opening my DYKE-bannered case, I ripped a page out of a notebook. Scribbling in red ink, I wrote, “Have to go to work. See you Friday, at the meeting. It was great last night.”

  I looked at my note…crossed out the impersonal “it,” and replaced it with “you.” Now it read, “You was great.” Illiterate. Cold. I crossed out “You was” and lettered, “We were.” Hmm? I murmured to myself. “We” was too…two. I crumpled the now illegible note and shoved it into my pocket.

  Chapter 13

  The Women’s Saloon

  [Los Angeles]

  May 9, 1975

  Late Friday afternoon found me holed up in my Free Press office, poring over story notes about The Lexington Six, a group of lesbian college students and feminist organizers in Kentucky who had just been arrested by the FBI. The Feds were searching for anti-war activists Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, who had been roommates and lovers at Brandeis University. In 1970, as a political action to fight the war, Saxe and Power along with three men, had robbed a bank in Brighton, Massachusetts. One of the men
had shot a police officer during the robbery. The FBI now thought the Lexington dykes had information about the whereabouts of the two lesbians who were still on the Feds’ Most Wanted list. {1} I’d been tipped about the story through the lesbian grapevine and had convinced Penny that the arrests had national implications and The Freep should cover it.

  A light on my outside line began to blink. It had to be BeJo or Rachel. “What’s up with you?” I said, hopefully covering both.

  “I wondered the same thing. You haven’t called in four days.”

  I broke into a smile. Rachel was a welcome break.

  “Have you forgotten we have a ‘relationship’?”

  “Does a terrific one night stand qualify as a relationship?” I returned my voice light and flip.

  “At least a short and meaningful one,” she shot back.

  Remembering the sweet weight of Rachel falling against me as I’d brushed her nipples, I felt a rush of adrenaline. My body wanted her again. I had made a casual statement to BeJo over morning coffee about meeting someone new, but my primary lover hadn’t asked for a name. BeJo knew that secondary lovers were supposed to fit in around one’s primary schedule. Those were the rules, and I was grateful that in this new lesbian feminist

  lifestyle of rapid turnover of words, concepts and practices, I had a framework of rules to cling to. Feminism had torn up my bar culture ways.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called,” I said, looking for a good excuse. “The Tide Collective has been in an uproar all week, arguing over whether or not to print Camilla Hall’s poetry.”

  “Is the poetry that bad?”

  “It’s not a quality issue,” I explained, “Camilla was a member of the SLA killed by the cops in Watts last year. I went to her memorial service.” I blinked trying to hold my composure as images of the two young lesbians suffocating in the house filled with teargas flashed through my mind. {2}

  “I remember watching that on TV. Was she a lesbian?”

  “Yes, a radical lesbian feminist. So was her lover, Mizmoon who died with her.”

  Rachel gasped. “I had no idea there were lesbians in the SLA. Does the FBI know?”

  “As usual, they were the last to know. But since Watts, yes.” I fiddled with my pencil, trapping it inside the phone cord. “It took the pigs almost a year to put the SLA’s sleeping arrangements together. Everybody was sleeping with everybody. Just like us.”

  “I guess they were practicing non-monogamy too,” Rachel joked.

  “Once they figured out the lesbian angle, the FBI has been raiding dyke communities all over the country. They think we dykes are hiding Patty Hearst.”

  “Do they think that every lesbian in the country knows every other lesbian?”

  “Yeah.” I grinned to myself, pleased at how quickly Rachel’s mind pulled things together politically. “All the activists anyway. They’re acting like there’s a national lesbian network that’s hiding fugitives of radical groups.”

  “Is there?” Rachel asked.

  My lips froze. Shit! It dawned on me: I shouldn’t be having this kind of conversation over a Free Press line! From tidbits I heard, but purposely never written about, I knew that lesbians across the country had both knowingly and unknowingly helped hide radical feminist fugitives. But, this was certainly not something to talk about with a new lover on a line that could be tapped. The Freep had printed stories alleging that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a secret Counter Intelligence Program (nicknamed COINTELPRO) whose purpose was to spy on American activists and anti-war groups. So I knew the Feds had wiretaps on thousands of phone lines belonging to the alternative press. I might not be the only one on this line with Rachel!

  Instinctively, I swept the Lexington Six notes off my desk and into a drawer. Some of my info had been smuggled to The Tide by friends of the Kentucky dykes.

  Rachel broke into my silence. “The Feds must think all lesbian feminists oppose the establishment.”

  “Millions of anti-war Americans do.” I laughed dismissively. “That’s no big news.”

  “What a ridiculous stretch of logic,” Rachel said. “Where did you get Camilla’s poetry? Do they use the U.S. Post Office?”

  My hint to break off this line of talk had been too subtle for Rachel.

  “We shouldn’t talk about these things,” I mumbled.

  In the silence I could tell her feelings were hurt. Yet, I wasn’t about to tell her—on or off the phone—that The Tide’s information from underground sisters was left hidden under the rubbish in a broken milk carton by the weedy overgrown side of the Westside Women’s Center. Not even Tide staffers knew this, although I personally distributed copies of The Tide each month to a dumpster behind a Venice grocery story for our underground comrades.

  I told Rachel, “Would you believe that Camilla’s poetry was delivered by little underground boll weevils who burrow up in various parts of the city and bring me news?”

  She laughed. “Why don’t you ask those same little boll weevils to burrow you over to my house?”

  “Ah…” I laughed, caught off guard. “I need one more hour to finish the story I’m working on.”

  “So, I’ll wait here for you to pick me up. We can go to the Women’s Saloon.”

  The new, self-avowed women’s restaurant was the talk of the town; it even had “good food politics.” I didn’t know that food had politics, but I had heard that Rachel had gotten the job as chief cook and that Pody was working there too as a waitperson.

  “That certainly sounds like a date.” I stalled, a bit rattled by her proposal. I usually appeared with BeJo in public, and appeared only in the bedroom with other lovers.

  “Are you afraid BeJo might be there?” Rachel’s voice was edgy.

  “Of course not,” I hedged truthfully. I knew BeJo had a softball game in Venice on the other side of town.

  “But you don’t want to walk into a public place together?” she pushed.

  My throat tightened. “What’s the big deal if we drive over in two cars? Anyway, I might have to go do an emergency interview later tonight. In case that happens you’ll have your car.”

  “I’ll see you in an hour,” Rachel gave in. “In case you’ve forgotten I’ll be the one with the purple carnation.”

  Damn. I hung up. An argument over a first non-date. Not a great start. No time to think on that.

  I reached for the Lexington papers, spreading them out again on my desk. I actually had to write two stories, one for The Freep, and one for The Tide. The Freep would, of course, run an unabashedly pro story calling the Lexington Six “freedom fighters.” These women had stood their ground and taken the 5th Amendment, refusing to talk to the FBI. They would not rat out their friends, friends who might, or might not know where Saxe or Power was hiding. The prosecutor had cited them for contempt and tossed them in jail, where they would stay until the Grand Jury adjourned—which could be months or years.

  Thank the goddess Penny had taught me reporting skills because The Tide’s story had to be different. It still often bent my mind having to write re-angled versions of the same story in two different ways within hours. But The Tide had large subscription bases in university towns and it was urgent to spread the word that the FBI had gone from Lexington to poking into the Colorado, Connecticut, and Oakland lesbian compounds. The Feds could be in L.A. next week The Tide’s story would focus more on the lesbian background of the women and point out that the FBI’s investigations amounted to an urgent call for lesbians to unite nationally against the coming grand juries, which would use sisters to snitch on other sisters. I intended to push The Tide Collective to print an editorial, my words saying: “We support the Lexington Six in their refusal to testify before the Kentucky grand jury. We urge women and gays to politically and financially support those sisters who defend our freedom at the price of their own.”

  I knew my point of view would be controversial. Not all of the Tide staffers, much less our readers, were radical. Many of them were middle-of
-the-roaders. Persuading them to vote agreement about printing Camilla Hall’s poetry had come at a large cost. To convince the group, I’d read them a note from Mizmoon, whose real name was Patricia Soltysik and who had grown up in Los Angeles. Mizmoon, Hall’s lover, wrote that she’d attended the National Lesbian Conference that I’d helped organize at UCLA in ‘73. “I’m grateful for the Lesbian Tide,” her note said. “I read it whenever I can get it. Thanks for continuing such great work.” She’d signed off, “In sisterhood, Mizmoon.”

  I’d showed my sister staffers a photo of Camilla, a blue-eyed blonde with that whole-grain-wheat-from-the-Midwest face. Both lovers were younger than me. The majority of the staff had agreed to print Camilla’s words as her good-bye, arguing that everyone deserved a eulogy. Yet, two important staff members, our best copy editor and BeJo’s assistant layout woman, had left The Tide over the issue. They walked out saying that by supporting the SLA women we were getting “too radical.” They disagreed that Camilla and Mizmoon were “the good guys.” They were also afraid that the cops would be at our door. I was disappointed because I knew that tough times called for tough courage.

  Camilla Hall must have sensed her future. She’d sent her poems to The Tide asking us to print them upon her death. We ran her poems, one of which ended with the lines:

  It’s my turn soon, I feel it coming

  Rumbling and stumbling but on its way at last!

  Others have gone (especially you)

  And I won’t be left again.

  I will cradle you in my woman hips,

  Kiss you with my woman lips,

  Fold you to my heart and sing:

  Sister woman, you are joy to me.

  I sat back in my chair staring at the poster of Che Guevara on my office wall. Che’s inspiring words had successfully resulted in the Cuban revolution and had made him a hero to my generation. His radical ideas had helped spawn the Marxist urban guerilla movement in the United States. Yet, to my knowledge, only a few handfuls of lesbians had made a commitment to take up arms. Typing the last page of my story, I wondered what complex combination of factors—personal and political—made a woman pick up a gun and become willing to lay down her life for her beliefs. I’d learned from my father that violence was part of life. I saw politically motivated violence—cop killings, Nazi bombings, student protests—all around me these days. There was little talk about armed struggle in the gay male movement, but there certainly was some in the intimacy of radical feminist circles. It was the kind of topic one discussed only with close and committed friends. Where I would draw the line if asked to commit? Were Camilla and Mizmoon the saints or the fools among us?