When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  Inhaling this life, I followed the trail of bare-breasted dykes, zigzagging from circle to circle searching for Rachel. My organizer’s eye counted as many as a thousand lesbians! I slowed down to watch a ten-woman jam session of guitars, kazoos, and a washboard encircled by an audience cathartically singing, “I’m Tired of Fuckers Fuckin’ Over Me,” a movement favorite. Dozens of semi-clothed dykes wore colorful ethnic beads that contrasted with their tanned skin. This half-naked Lesbian Body was vibrating like a jungle tribe! My beleaguered spirit began to unwind. The sweet odor of cut hay and women’s sweat was soothing. I breathed in our lavender Woodstock. To feel complete, I just needed to find Rachel.

  Arriving at the crest of a small bluff, I looked down on the stage surrounded by long flying hair, bronzed nipples, swinging breasts, twirling tie-dyed skirts, and girl children dancing in circles. A young mother, bare-breasted and suckling her infant, sat in the dust, cross-legged. The baby wore a white kerchief tied hippie style in a knot at the back of the head, as did her mother. The baby’s scarf bore the word anarchist lettered in red, and her mother’s hands were busy tending her so a woman next to Mom pressed a joint to her lips. Studying the red-faced infant I wondered if Rachel and I could ever have a child together. Maybe someday in such a daughter’s lifetime, gays would be allowed to marry. Then our daughter’s daughter, a grandchild of dyke militants, would grow up and attend her own lesbian festival in the 21st century!

  At this thought I wiped tears of joy out of my eyes as I made my way down to the stage. Lots of L.A. dykes had come, as well as women from as far away as Wyoming and Colorado. Friends and colleagues called out my name every few minutes. Suddenly, a naked body appeared in front of me. I jumped back, startled. There stood The Tide’s ace music reporter, Rogi Rubyfruit.

  “Have you seen Rachel?” I asked, fixing my gaze on Rogi’s toes, embarrassed to see someone I knew well, yet not in the Biblical sense, parading nudely before me. I might take off my shirt this weekend on the last day, but I was still Catholic by culture, so that would be my limit.

  “No, no have seen,” Rogi quipped in her quick, high tones. “But then I haven’t been merely socializing. I’m covering this story! What angle are we looking for, chief?”

  I squirmed, hoping no one had heard the elitist, distinctly not feminist “chief.” “Write about how the music lives inside the Lesbian Body,” I instructed Rogi’s toes. “Do the metaphor.”

  “Wheeee! That’s great!” She scampered off.

  As an organizer, I’d realized two years ago that the new sound of women making music together was shaping a formidable cultural dimension of Lesbian Nation. Women couldn’t live on theory alone it seemed—we had to have voice and song. And this woman-sung music was building political cohesion in our community. I was born in a Sound of Music family of twelve–minus the music. But I got the political importance of it and was making sure The Tide was documenting and interpreting this cultural wave. We were printing interviews with the singers, like Meg Christian and Cris Williamson, and lengthy reviews of concert dynamics in every issue.

  Visually, I combed the crowd: no sign of Rachel. The dinner hour was approaching; she could be at a campsite where she and her friends had nested. Or, she could be at any one of the performances, workshops, or dancing areas that were popping up impromptu everywhere. Assuring myself that Rachel wasn’t in the sprawled crowd around me, I decided to seek out some friends and beg dinner. In my haste, I hadn’t brought any food. But I knew I would find my performer friends, like Robin or Margie Adam, hanging around the food table that a passer-by told me was behind the stage.

  I followed the curve of the crest and descended toward the stage, a roughly engineered affair: a twenty by fifteen foot raised platform of nailed-together plywood supported by cubed pilings of cement. I shook my head. For all our protestations, a male-owned forklift company had to have dropped the pilings into place. Rounding the stage, I saw the sun falling into a low sky of red and purple. Finding Rachel after dark would be difficult. I hated the thought of waiting until morning.

  “Hello Jai! What’s happening?” Margie Adam called to me by her nickname for me. Predisposed as she was to wearing natty blazers, Margie’s body language was decidedly foppish. Tall and lean of frame, neither butch nor femme, she called herself androgynous, “a perfect 5” on the butch-femme role-differentiation scale. She threw her arms around my shoulders, hugging me tightly. Her kinky blonde Afro formed a halo around her vibrant smile, accentuating her charismatic warmth. Releasing me, she studied me at arm’s length. “What’s wrong, Jai? I can hardly feel your energy.”

  Margie always spoke in that amorphous, touchy feely talk. Half the time I didn’t understand what she was saying, but she’d taken her aura-energy lingo onstage. Her intra-song audience raps were littered with odes to all the human forms on the planet and magical animals, so I assumed the rank and file of Lesbian Nation derived meaning from her words.

  I kissed her cheek and tried to muster better energy. “It’s good to see you, Marg.”

  “Come and have a Tofu burger.” Margie led me under a backstage tent to a card table that afforded some privacy. “Spill

  it to me, Jai, what’s depressing your vibe? Are you in love?”

  Few people would have dared to ask me such a personal question, but Margie and I had forged a concrete intimacy since we’d met at the first California women’s music conference at a college in Sacramento, in May of ‘73. I had been aimlessly walking the campus grounds, engulfed by the consuming emotional dysfunction that had gripped me since my troubled National Lesbian Conference the month before. I’d crept purposefully away from the outdoor pack of gyrating Sacramento lesbians and had made my way into one of the empty buildings to be alone. Crouched in a hallway against a classroom wall, my knees drawn to my chest, my head in my hands, I was trying to understand why I felt so exposed and vulnerable simply by being out in public.

  That’s when I heard a voice calling out to me from an adjoining classroom. The piano-accompanied voice was questioning and wistful, and I was captured by lyrics that seemed to put words to my internal anguish.

  “Do you hate yourself, lovable lady?

  Can I be of help, beautiful woman?

  Your silence is a wall between the two of us,

  And your beautiful heart is breaking.”

  Listening, I dissolved into a small heap on the linoleum floor and started sobbing loudly. The piano went silent. The stranger who was playing came out. Without a word, she sank down on the floor next to me and took me in her arms. I cried myself into an exhausted peace. My new friend’s name was Margie Adam.

  A week later I moved into her house in Lompoc and Marg and I began a love affair of the pen, the piano, and the soul. A brief stab at being sexual passed as a stumbling moment between two women who were fascinated by the creative core in one another. Marg taught me how writing deeper than a news story could bring about healing. “Look inside, Jai,” she told me over and over. “That’s where you’ll find your poetry.” Under her care I’d begun scribbling feverishly. I wrote about how the Pacific beach sand breathed, about the narcissistic nuances of emotional collapse, and about the birth of an emotional child called Lesbian Nation. Marg had been at the UCLA Conference too. She championed my feeble hope that the way out of my feelings of primal personal betrayal and political primal dissonance lay in my writing. In turn, I contributed a line about donuts to a new song she was writing about a magical unicorn.

  Six months later, healed and back at The Tide in Los Angeles, I produced Margie Adam’s first solo concert. I had her double-billed with the Village Voice’s columnist Jill Johnston, author of a blistering new tome called Lesbian Nation. But Johnston had come on stage with an almost empty pint of Southern Comfort and told the audience, “I don’t believe in lesbian nation anymore.” After that bombshell, Margie stole the show that night, and had gone on to become a national women’s music superstar.

  Now, down and heartbroken again two year
s later I told Marg about the state of my love affair with Rachel. My long ago caretaker took my hand. “You’re so devoted to politics, Jai. It sounds like your lover’s main complaint is that you don’t take the time to make her feel special.”

  I leaned forward over the card table, gripping Margie’s hand. “How do you manage to make time for your political singing work and a lover?”

  Margie threw back her head, her Afro bobbing. “I don’t! My personal life is like a revolving supermarket door. I’m on the road so much, the only time I have to meet someone is on my way up to the stage or down from it. That’s why a lot of us are lovers with each other,” she finished, referring to the tendency lesbian singers had of sleeping with one another.

  “There is no personal peace in revolutionary times, Jai,” she said. “I decided I can’t give up writing and singing to our lesbian tribe in order to settle down with any one woman.”

  “I can’t give up my political work either, Marg.”

  “Nor should you!” Margie seemed surprised. “What you do for our movement is too critical, Jai. The Tide is our voice!”

  I leaned forward and whispered, “You seem to be saying that we activists can’t have both. That in fact, you and I have already chosen the political rather than the personal.”

  “Did I say that?” Margie swallowed hard. “Oh, what a dismal thought!”

  I ran my fingers through my dusty windblown hair, and looked around, checking that no one was sitting too close. “I’m coming to the conclusion that this non-monogamy really doesn’t work, Marg.”

  “Oh, Jai, you are in love!” Margie laughed. “Come on, let’s go outside and listen to the music. The woman who is coming on now is Clytia. She’s climactic!”

  I threw back my head and laughed too. Lesbian feminists were forever changing their names to suit their inner muse.

  As Marg and I squatted on the grass together, Climactic Woman seemed to be singing a song about my new reality, “I’m Feeling Kind of Monogamous over You.”

  As she finished, a panicked woman ran up to Margie and fell to her knees. “Margie, Holly’s piano player has got the runs. Ya gotta play backup for her!”

  “I’d be happy to,” Margie replied. “Tell her I’m coming.” She turned to me with a grin splashed across her freckled face. She placed a mimeographed sheet of paper in my hands. “Take a look at these workshops, Jai. If I don’t see you later tonight, I’ll meet you at the Role Playing session tomorrow!”

  Again she made me laugh. Margie would meet me at the Role Playing gathering only to give me a hard time because I championed the delightful choreography of roles and difference and she did not. The workshop would not talk about butch-femme in any direct or real way. Lesbian feminists felt that the whole subject amounted to nothing more than a heterosexist leftover that should be altogether abolished.

  I studied the weekend’s roster. There were sessions on Raising Male Children, definitely one I could skip; Anarchy, not in my lifetime; and Racism, Looksism, Ageism, and Fat Oppression. No workshops on how to do relationships successfully, nothing on Romantic Obsession. I tucked the list in my pocket and tried to enjoy the performances.

  Holly Near was about to sing. To command a better view, I walked away from the stage and wound my way up through the crowd gathered on the hillside. Holly’s vibrant a capellaand counterculture politics were as pure as the Left ever got. When she broke into the song, “Sister-Woman-Sister,” the hillside chorused back to her. Her voice echoed off the hills and the crowd seemed to multiply and push forward. Awed by the landscape of sound, I turned to drink in the faces of the vocal hundreds behind me.

  That’s when I saw Rachel.

  The blonde-gold in her hair, silhouetted against a dark granite boulder on the hill, jumped into my line of vision. Without thinking I called out her name, but the music was too loud. She kept singing with Holly.

  I waited and watched. She seemed lighthearted and happy. But something was wrong with this picture. A storm of interference, white noise shooting through adrenaline, was gathering in my head. Her lips and eyes were the same, pale peach underneath the robin-egg blue, but wait—another woman’s arm was wrapped around her! The stranger’s hand rested on Rachel’s neck. Foreign fingers toyed with my lover’s curls! I gasped. The alien arm belonged to a butch standing beside her. The dyke had a white Irish-looking face with a mop of dark hair that rested on lumberjack shoulders. She towered over Rachel’s small frame. The butch woman’s energy seemed to want to wrap Rachel into her bulky body. Now she was leaning down. She kissed my woman on the temple! Rachel didn’t seem to notice the kiss. But now she lifted an arm to wave to someone, the very arm that had clung to my neck as we made love in the car less than a week ago!

  The pain began in my groin and hammered past my vocal chords. My mouth opened. I couldn’t stop my shout, “Raaachel!”

  People turned to look at me. So did Rachel. Her eyes found mine, As I came into focus her face turned the color of acid-washed stone. The robin’s eggs filled with tears.

  I wanted to run to her, but my feet were paralyzed. There was no more festival and no more song. There was only Rachel and I, a past and a future that yet to shape.

  I blinked. And she was gone.

  And then I was on top of the hill, leaning against the granite boulder, gasping for air. My eyes were wide and glassy; my fists rose to find the sky. But Rachel and her butch were nowhere. Instead, Susan stood in front of me.

  “Where did she go?” I demanded.

  She seemed as shocked to see me as I was to see her. “Rachel said you had to work this weekend.”

  “I didn’t have to work!” I screamed. “I saw Rachel standing right here a few seconds ago, Susan!” My voice was dark. “I saw her standing here with another butch!” I slammed my fist into the boulder, and barked at Susan, “Who was she with?”

  “With?” Susan stammered, her eyes trying to avoid mine.

  “I saw that butch kiss her for fuck’s sake, Susan! Who is she seeing?”

  “I’m sorry, Córdova!” Susan’s gasped. “I thought she’d told you.”

  As I sped home, northbound on the San Diego Freeway, the thought of Rachel being touched by someone else made me want to smash everything around me, throw glass cups at the metal garage door at Effie Street, crack heads of unknown passers-by with multiple large black typewriters thrown from a freeway overpass.

  It occurred to me that I knew Rachel’s other lover. That is, if she was her lover. Her name was Jacki and she was the lover of my flirting-buddy, Gahan Kelly, co-founder of L.A.’s famous Sisterhood Bookstore. At the Westside Women’s Center meeting, I’d bumped into Gahan, who I remembered, had told me that she’d just broken off her long-term relationship with Jacki. Despite having the same taste in women, or maybe because of it, Jacki and I had a competitive acquaintanceship. Now Jacki had what was mine and I wanted it back!

  Home in L.A., I left raging messages on Rachel’s answering machine. “Is being with another woman what you meant by spending more time together?” I screamed. “God damn it, Rachel, pick up the damn phone. I can’t believe you lied to me!”

  At midnight on Sunday I drove to her Effie Street house, deciding to confront her in person and make her tell me what the hell was going on. She had to be home from the festival by now. I parked on the downward slope, watching the front door of her bungalow as I waited alone in Lionheart. Had she in fact broken up with me and simply slipped out the back door without telling me? Or was this some kind of non-monogamous trick, a passive-aggressive payback? Her apartment remained dark and shrouded; not a light burned. It was as though she didn’t live there anymore.

  I dozed and drifted, searching for answers. Did this other woman mean anything to her? As the hours fell away I decided that Jacki was just a revenge date that Rachel had made out of anger after I’d left her in the parking lot on BeJo’s birthday. She’d send Jacki packing after this weekend. There was too much passion between us. She loved me too much.


  Dawn assaulted Rachel’s front porch before I admitted she wasn’t coming home. I drove away alternating between rage and bewilderment. Monday I began calling the Saloon, and by Tuesday her boss, Colleen, admitted that Rachel had called in over the weekend saying she’d had a family emergency and had to go out of town for a week. She wasn’t scheduled for another shift until the following Sunday. My heart sank. Where and when would I find Rachel?

  Chapter 27

  By Any Means Necessary

  [Los Angeles]

  September 3, 1975

  The alarm broke through my sleep and I vaulted out of bed—the big day was here. This morning the strikers were scheduled to meet with GCSC for official negotiations.

  Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I looked at myself and managed a proud smile. I had accomplished the almost impossible. Last week, at my insistence, the Strike Steering Committee had met and agreed to go to the table! Still, the universe was continuing to punish me. The meeting had taken place at Rachel’s house—even though she wasn’t there—due to a scheduling conflict at our lawyer’s office. I’d flinched walking in, but at least Joan Baez wasn’t playing on the damn stereo.

  Pody whispered to me, “Rachel gave me the key to let everyone in. What’s more, she gave me her written proxy to vote!”

  “Which way?” I asked.

  “Whichever way you vote.” Pody’s eyes twinkled.

  I was momentarily disarmed by Rachel’s display of political trust. Looking over Pody’s shoulder, I found myself facing my lover’s bedroom. The door was open. I couldn’t staunch the memories, the private nights lying on the queen-sized futon under her multi-colored Nepalese bedspread. I turned away. This had been our world. It seemed only moments ago.

  “That’s great,” I said to Pody, as a mixture of relief and anxiety passed through me. It would be so much easier to concentrate on politics without Rachel’s presence. And yet…I hadn’t seen her since the festival and longed to be with her.