When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  My ardent feminist chief had turned to leave my office, but she paused at the door, saying, “What I came in to tell you is the new Freep owners have demanded that I cut another ten percent of our editorial inches and give it to advertising. So I need tighter copy from you.”

  “Got it,” I’d answered, noting the worry creasing her forehead.

  After my first year with the paper, Penny had promoted me from dyke columnist to Human Rights Editor and investigative reporter. She’d also gotten our previous owners to publish my first book, Sexism: It’s a Nasty Affair, a compilation of my columns. She’d edited it herself and I had used my clout as a key reporter to champion her promotion from City Editor to the first female Editor-in-Chief. We were each other’s champions—often against The Freep’s sexist male staff and now, the new porno outfit that had just purchased us.

  And battered women were just one of a dozen on-going projects and stories. I lived in an eternal present. How to connect the dots?

  The long driveway fronting Rachel’s bungalow apartment was peppered with protesters and our supporters. It looked like she was throwing a block party. Heading for her door, I felt my thigh and groin muscles tense up. Funny how the body has a memory of its own. I was turned on just thinking about the last time I’d been on Effie Street.

  “Want a taco?” Pody approached me at Rachel’s door carrying a large bag. “I’m Robin Hood tonight.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Is that whole bag filled with food?”

  “Yep!” Pody smiled broadly. “I liberated it from All American Burger, my night gig. Sometimes I bring food to the demonstration too. I figured there would be hungry people tonight.”

  “Is money getting that tight for people?”

  “Yeah, for those who haven’t found jobs yet, which is about half of us. Between my hours at the Saloon and the burger joint, I’m just making it. Some folks are giving blood downtown. The Red Cross pays ten bucks a pint. Hope our unemployment checks start kicking in soon. You’re welcome to come to Dixie’s on Wednesday nights and to June’s on Saturdays. They’re offering free spaghetti dinners!”

  I suddenly felt very lucky even though I was just meeting my nut of seven hundred a month. To replace my GCSC pay I’d snapped up a fourth story a week at the Freep and I’d started doing collections at the new women’s abortion center, the Westside Women’s Clinic in Santa Monica. I also realized that I was somewhat out of touch. I didn’t have close social friends among the strikers. The little free time I had was spent with friends who were involved with other political projects.

  “There’s June,” Pody pointed out, as I stood in Rachel’s kitchen. “She’s got that lawyer, Sylvia Patton, with her.” The dishwater blonde attorney was clothed in jeans, Birkenstocks, and a worn leather jacket. She had the Silverlake hippie look. In her mid-forties, she was older than most of us, and probably, yes, a lesbian.

  June and others pushed in to station themselves along both sides of Rachel’s large living room. Some stood while others sat on the floor or furniture, including the green vinyl beanbag chair where I’d first undressed Rachel. Finally, I spied Rachel emerging from the bathroom. She hadn’t come to greet me and now she walked past me muttering, “Glad you found time in your busy schedule to come to our meeting.” She planted herself against a wall on the opposite side of the room from me. I tried to catch her eye, but she refused to look my way.

  “Let’s get to it,” June announced loudly, and I saw her eyes narrow with intensity. She walked into the middle of the room. The lawyer followed. “You all remember Sylvia Patton from the Echo Park People’s Law Collective,” June said. “We asked her to look into us getting unemployment benefits. Now, she has that news for us.”

  Why was June bringing the lawyer back without the group’s permission? We hadn’t voted that we wanted legal representation. This was an internal fight between lesbians and gay men. We needed to settle it ourselves. I was about to object but I held myself back. I figured I might as well hear what she had to say.

  “The news is bad from the Department of Unemployment,” Patton began in a strong low voice. “The Gay Community Services Center has denied all your claims.”

  The room hushed. No one had expected the Center to deny us.

  Patton continued, “The Board of Directors, according to my informant, sent a silver-haired, older man down to EDD and contested them.”

  I sucked in my breath. Morris had to be personally very angry to have gone down there himself. Bad move, Morris, I thought. Fear and ego had clouded his judgment.

  “Does this mean we won’t be getting any money?” Pody asked, fear in her voice.

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what it means,” Patton said. “But don’t worry; I’ve filed a counter to the denial. They are in the wrong. The way they fired you all without letters of reprimand in your personnel files, or any warnings. The fact that they operated without PP&Ps. We have a strong case. We will win this one. But it will take four, maybe five or six weeks.”

  Everyone was speechless. I looked at Rachel. She stood perfectly still, dumbstruck. The Saloon, she’d told me, paid minimum wage.

  “Fuck GCSC!” Enric cried out.

  “We want our money now!” Colin bellowed behind me.

  “Yeah, make ‘em pay!” June yelled. She seemed to tolerate authority even less well than I did.

  “Hold on,” Patton interrupted, “There’s more.” She bent down to her briefcase, snapped the latches and brought up a powder blue covered staple-bound booklet, some thirty or forty pages long. “GCSC has just published this piece of propaganda. It’s called, ‘A Report from the Board of Directors of GCSC.’ It’s been sent to community groups all over town.” Patton flipped through the pages. “The Board claims that all the firings were justified because you have been ‘fomenting dissidence.’ They say they were investigating you trouble-makers for weeks before they fired you and they had to get rid of you to save the Center.”

  The word “dissidence” shocked me. Morris was the only Board member who knew how to use the word in proper political context. And it was becoming clear to me that the bonehead decision to fire us had not been a spur of the moment impulse. No wonder the Board had dumped me—I’d have blown the whistle on their planning. I felt my face get hot as hope drained through my torso, down my legs, and congealed into a block of concrete holding my feet to the floor. I’d foolishly hoped Morris would realize the mass firings were a mistake. That he’d be ready to negotiate by now. But, no—they were launching new missiles. Damn, Morris! This meant I’d have to continue to do battle with my political godfather. I couldn’t walk away from this fight.

  Someone grabbed the blue book from Patton. It circulated through the room. The rumble grew. Out of Colin’s huge, bulky frame, came the yell, “Burn, baby, burn!” echoing the Watt’s Riots slogan.

  The room took up the chant, “Burn, baby, burn!”

  June called for attention. “What are we going to do about this?”

  For a fraction of a second my ears had picked up a rehearsed tone to June’s question. Had she and the lawyer already talked out a plan?

  “What can we do?” asked April.

  “We can call a strike!” June shot back. “Then they’ll know we’re serious.”

  The word “strike” sounded ominous to me. “What does a strike look like?” I asked Patton, my voice calling for attention.

  The room fell into stone quiet.

  Patton remained in the middle of the floor. “The demonstration line will look the same as it does now. But calling a strike means something more serious. It means we sue the Center for wrongful termination. It means we initiate a formal lawsuit. The protest line becomes a picket line. And it won’t stop until they come to the bargaining table to negotiate with us.”

  “And everyone who crosses the picket line will be scabs!” Dixie Youts proclaimed. “We treat GCSC like a supermarket that exploits its workers. The picket line stops anyone from going in to do business. GCSC is no dif
ferent from Boeing or IBM. The Board of Directors are capitalist pigs that exploit their workers. It’s about the bosses versus the workers.”

  June followed. “If we keep the picket line strong into the fall, the Center’s funding agencies might drop their grants for next year. I say, close the bosses down!” Her cropped head jerked rapidly as she spoke.

  Hysteria mounted. I grasped where June, Dixie, and the lawyer, were headed. They’d already made up their minds. Tonight was a setup to get their agenda passed. They’d admitted defeat—we were not getting our jobs back. All that was left, in their minds, was to turn the demo line into a picket line and spread labor consciousness throughout the gay community. They wanted to change the language of our fight with the Center. I had to suppose that Patton, like me, knew that language defines and controls a movement, so they were trying to use language to redefine the nature of our battle, using words like “strike” and “scab” and trying to have us see our selves as “workers” rather than feminists. My suspicious hackles were up because I feared that, like other Leftists I’d worked with, they sought to use various gay or feminist issues as a punctuation mark on the road to a socialist revolution. This made me furious. Nobody uses my movement! I vowed. Gays are more oppressed in Communist Russia and Cuba than we are in America. Capitalism wasn’t the enemy of gay civil rights. Their enemy was not our enemy, and neither was GCSC.

  Controlling my anger so I could speak calmly, I walked to the middle of the room. “Our fight is about lesbian feminism versus male-dominated hierarchy. Our struggle with GCSC is not about salary or better working conditions. It’s about women’s struggle to be treated equally,” I pleaded with my comrades. “Besides, our jobs are not the only important thing. GCSC is the only out-front gay address in the city of Los Angeles. It’s a symbol of safety that calls to homosexuals all over the country. Its existence makes life safer for each one of us in this room. GCSC isn’t a supermarket. It’s the place my gay baby brother might go to ask for a bed when my Catholic parents throw him out. It’s a place for kids who are beaten in high school by their peers for being faggots.”

  “I’ve got something to say here,” Rachel’s tentative voice broke in.

  “Go ahead,” said Patton.

  “When I left my husband two years ago,” Rachel began, “I heard about GCSC. It was the first place I went to when I thought I might be a lesbian. And I was no teenager. I was twenty-seven years old.”

  “I went there too!” Pody called out. “If GCSC closes because we call a strike, won’t that be a big defeat in the eyes of the straight world?”

  June ignored Pody and turned directly to me, her freckles aflame. “If you still believe in GCSC, Córdova, why don’t you just cross the picket line and declare yourself a scab?”

  I fought to keep my cool. I had to stay clearheaded. “This isn’t about me or any individual, June. Sure the Board was wrong to fire us. Was that illegal? Of course it was. So let’s change the place and replace the Board. Let’s just argue to get unemployment but not sue demanding punitive damages and back pay. Ruining the Center fiscally means there won’t be any jobs. Not for us or anyone else.” Surely everyone in the room knew that GCSC didn’t have money. Was it only me who knew that the wealthy gay attorney, Thomas Hunter Russell, had loaned GCSC the down payment to move into the new Highland location? “Let’s keep our focus on changing, not destroying! Our goal is to get feminists into management and on the Board.”

  “GCSC will never offer our jobs back,” June retorted. “We have no choice but to strike!” She slung her arm around Patton’s shoulder, raised a clenched fist, and yelled to the restless crowd, “I say we vote now. To strike or not to strike!”

  I racked my mind—what alternative would appease the escalating anger? I held my space in the center of the room. “I say we demand they come to the negotiating table. Now! We use the threat of a strike as leverage to get them to bargain with us.”

  “Oh right, Córdova,” Dixie retorted. “They won’t even grant us unemployment checks.”

  “But I’m sure if you grovel,” June said, her hands on her hips mocking me, “Because Morris Kight likes you, he’ll resign. And we’ll all fly to heaven in a capitalist Lear jet!”

  “What planet were you born on?” I screamed at my nemesis.

  June took a long step toward me and shouted in my face. “We don’t need scabs on the Steering Committee, why don’t you—”

  Patton wedged herself in between us. “Break it up you two!”

  Dixie grabbed June’s arm. Pody pulled me away.

  Enric called out, “It’s time to vote!”

  “Yes, vote!” June flung her words at me.

  “Wait a minute! You can’t vote on something without us!” a woman’s voice yelled.

  Everyone turned toward the kitchen to see the tanned face of Elizabeth Elder, the co-coordinator of volunteers at the Center, enter Rachel’s apartment. Elizabeth’s normally restrained composure had been replaced by a tear-filled, sad expression. She was followed by three more of the Center’s employees, Charlie Jones, Eddie Culp, and Terry Pearsy

  “Why are you all so late?” someone asked. The four of them were among a group of current GCSC employees who regularly attended our meetings, even though it could be dangerous for them to do so.

  “They fired us today!” Elizabeth screamed. “All four of us. Ken Bartley picked us off one by one,” she said, sobbing full-flow now. “Late this afternoon he brought us in separately…but told us all the same thing. That GCSC wouldn’t be needing our services anymore. Pack your things and get out! He was almost that blunt. So we came here.”

  Once more the room fell into a shocked silence.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, wanting to slam my fist into a wall. The Center was unrelenting in its crackdown. The Gay/Feminist 11 were now the Gay/Feminist 16.

  June asked, “Why were you fired?”

  “Bartley said we were inciting the staff. Trying to persuade the other employees to join the Service Workers Union.”

  “But Patton says employees have the right to form a union,” Rachel said, confused.

  We all turned to face Patton. “Yes, you have that right,” she said.

  “These firings sound illegal, too,” I said. “Did they give any of you a written warning to cease and desist?”

  “Nothing,” Elizabeth said, folding herself into a heap on the wood floor. She looked like she’d just had a close friend die. “It came out of the blue. Just like the day they fired all of you.”

  The room exploded with rage. “Vote! Vote!”

  “Is everyone ready?” Patton called out. Between the denial of the benefits and now these additional firings, the Board’s timing had played right into June’s hands.

  I watched the room shift, bodies moving from one place in the room to another as the ideological factions among us “dissidents” began to coalesce, each behind their spokesperson. Pody, Rachel and some of the others came to stand with me, forming the feminist camp. Across the room, June had most of the guys, and all of the socialists. Their camp also had the hotheads, more numerous than thoughtful. Over by the Plath-congested bookcase stood a third group, a smaller and silent minority. I didn’t think they’d grasped the difference between what I was proposing and the strike June wanted. They just wanted their jobs or unemployment checks and were content to let others determine how to wage that war.

  “This has to be done by secret ballot,” I demanded, seeing the writing on the wall, but hoping privacy might top peer pressure. Some shrugged, others nodded. Rachel went to her desk and took out paper. She and Pody began to tear it into little strips. The strips made their way around the room. Pens and pencils appeared. People sat on the floor, or bent over to scribble on a friend’s back. No one talked or consulted a neighbor. Rudy took off his faded fedora and passed it around the room. The votes were collected. Patton called out. “Does anyone object to Enric and Alicia counting the votes?”

  No one replied. Alicia would be fair, I
knew. The two of them made their way into Rachel’s bedroom and closed the door. I listened intently for the rustle of unfolding paper or conversation, but heard nothing.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” a hushed voice asked.

  I turned to face Rachel. In the intensity of political maneuvering, I’d forgotten she was in the room. Now she was standing close enough to touch.

  “I’m nervous,” she laughed. Apparently, she’d forgotten her anger at me.

  “Me too.” I smiled for the first time that night.

  “Can you stay a little afterwards? I’m somewhat shocked.”

  “Sure,” I said, surprised, but delighted. “I can stay as long as you want me to.”

  Colin and Alicia reentered the room.

  “We’re finished,” said Alicia, her voice registering no emotion. “The ballots are 18 to 10 in favor—of calling a strike.”

  Chapter 16

  A Double Bed On the Ocean

  [Los Angeles]

  Mid-May, 1975

  “Don’t you have some place to go?” I asked Pody, who was thumbing through a book in Rachel’s living room.

  My new lover was at the kitchen door saying good-bye to the last of the protesters. Now we have to call ourselves “strikers,” I thought glumly, wishing Pody would disappear so I could fall into bed with Rachel and forget the vote I’d lost.

  Pody looked up from her book and around at the empty room. “Oh! You want me to leave. You’re staying here with Rachel!”

  I stared back at her. “The meeting is over. Why don’t you go call BeJo or someone else who wants you to clog up their space?”

  Pody snapped her book shut and slipped into her coat, trying to hide her shock. “You mean you don’t mind if I called your…ah…BeJo?”

  I also couldn’t believe the words had fallen out of my mouth. I blamed my anger on the bad vote. But it didn’t matter—it was too late. “If that’s what it takes to get you out of here…” I forced a smile. “You were going to call her anyway, weren’t you?”