When We Were Outlaws

by Jeanne Cordova

  “As a Marxist, I don’t think so,” Harris shot back. “Let me explain…” She was animated and I could tell that this was nightly dinner table debate within the SLA—that is, if they had a dinner table to sit at while they were on the run.

  As we shared coffee and worldviews, there were many places Emily and I held similar opinions, but one on which we did not: murder. Ready to tackle it, I leaned down to flip over my cassette and reset record before turning back toward Emily. “A year and a half ago the SLA issued a communiqué in which the words kill, hate, fascist, insect, pig, dog, and monster appeared twenty-eight times. And your SLA motto says, ‘Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the people.’ Why so much rage?”

  “The military-industrial-complex is guilty of murder, but they call it war,” Harris replied angrily. “They rape, and they call it economic development. They are cultural cannibals…”

  As Harris ranted it became clear to me that the urban guerilla no longer even thought in personal terms. Name, rank and serial politics, nothing more. She was a walking, talking propagandist. Yet, I began to see a parallel between us. She believed that the capitalist state destroyed civilized society and kept people in bondage as alienated labor. I believed the bigotry of the heterosexual world crippled gays legally and psychologically.

  “But why did you pick up a gun?” I finally put it on the table. “Did the situation look that extreme to you?”

  “It is extreme!” Harris’ voice climbed to a higher pitch. “This armed propaganda is an essential complement to mass organizing. The guerilla front is the vanguard. The goal of armed struggle is to form the nucleus of the people’s army.”

  “But why did you pick up a gun?” I repeated.

  “Why haven’t you?” she shot back.

  “Fair enough.” I spoke slowly, giving myself time to wrestle down my shock. “I’m not a pacifist,” I said thoughtfully. “I know people have to die in revolutions. The reason I haven’t picked up a gun is because I don’t think the revolution is at hand.”

  “The working class is ready to take to the street,” Emily retorted.

  “Middle America isn’t anywhere near demanding a socialist revolution.”

  “The middle class is in a perpetual sellout!”

  “Even Cesar Chavez is organizing California’s Mexicans in the fields for better pay, not the ownership of production.”

  “Chavez is a liberal and a collaborator!”

  Tell that to the growers, I thought, wondering how Harris would play in Salinas Valley where a finely split hair was used for a child’s mattress, not political fodder.

  “The working class is desperate enough to hate,” Harris continued. “They will lead the middle class when the time comes.”

  As the sentence left her mouth it frightened me. Desperate enough to hate. I’d been desperate to end the strike against GCSC, yet never tempted to end it by violence. I felt instinctively that violence would lead only deeper into hatred. My politics were usually governed by rationality: Would this strategy work? What were the likely outcomes? Desperate and hate were beyond control, the flip side of rational. But ah, my emotional life! It seemed to be governed, if it claimed any governance at all, by feelings of need and rage. What had made me desperate enough to almost assault my lover’s other lover?

  “The middle class has been blinded into docility by capitalism,” Harris continued.

  I listened with my journalist’s ear but inside I was listening to my childhood’s desperation—my father’s autocracy, my rage to defend who I was against his constant humiliation. The every day psychological torture of being different, being gay and butch, could have crippled me for life. But somehow, I decided early on that it was society and not me who was wrong. Clutching this faith, I’d channeled my hardened humiliation, made it transform me into being a judicious combatant, fighting the straight world for my people’s freedom. Now, Emily Harris was in jail and I was not.

  My recorder clicked, signifying the end of my last tape, but I still had one final question. I asked, “Che Guevara said, ‘The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.’ In your last communiqué, you ended with the salutation, ‘I want to send my special love and rage to all sisters.’ That’s an unusual way to end a political message. What did you mean by that message?”

  A deep horn vibrated down the corridor and through the empty alcove. We both shivered. A bolt clanged and the ferric bars slid open at the far end. A voice barked, “Time!”

  Harris stood up. “That’s dinner bell.” She smiled faintly. “Amazingly, it sounds good after a few weeks.” But her bottom lip trembled, contradicting her words.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I said, standing beside her. I wanted to lift Emily Harris, my sister, bodily out of the clutches of aberrant justice and take her home to a hot bath and BeJo’s chocolate chip cookies.

  She reached out to hug me. As I felt her in my arms, I almost cried from a sense of helplessness.

  “This has been valuable, Jeanne. Just write it all down…and tell my sisters…tell our sisters…it’s about rage and it’s about love.”

  A ray from the outside sun fell through a barred window, casting a shadow over her unguarded face. For a few seconds I saw her future in her saddened eyes. Perchance we were both wondering how long it would be before she felt again the freedom to go on with a chosen life.

  The last steel door clicked twice behind me as I walked out of Sybil Brand. For her crimes of political passion, Emily Harris would have to trade the remaining years of her youth. My sentence was lighter but perhaps as long. I might never find a mate with whom to share my life, yet, walking toward my car I felt a weight begin to lift. My stride lengthened as I approached Lionheart. As long as I was free to make a political difference in the lives of my people, it was important to go on living.

  Under the afternoon sun, I unlocked the driver’s door and stretched to take off my denim war jacket. One of the multiple political buttons caught in the door handle. Bending to loosen it, I saw the crisp black and white image of Angela Davis’ face. Underneath it read, Free All Political Prisoners. Emily Harris had not come in from the cold soon enough. But I would. {3}

  Clearly, radicalism was over, I decided, sitting once more in the driver’s seat. So too was Viet Nam, President Nixon, the guerilla front, armed struggle, and the SLA. The new frontrunner for President of the United States, a humble Democrat named Jimmy Carter, had just publicly said that he opposed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This was big! Perhaps it signaled a pivotal change. Maybe our gay and lesbian movement was entering a reformist swing into mainstream politics. I needed to move forward with the National Lesbian Feminist Organization and harness dyke power to work inside the system. Maybe I’d even register as a Democrat and help infiltrate the Democratic Party with hundreds of queers. The ‘sixties, with all our half-cocked, messy revolutionary fervor about rights for minorities and women’s equality would someday be implemented. The ’seventies would be crowded with battles over restructuring American society. Yes! I felt ready to make the shift and continue the fight, even if it took a lifetime.

  Rejoining humanity, westbound on the freeway back to Hollywood, I thought about my mistakes of the last year, both the political and the personal ones. I should have seen the core contradictions in my relationship with Rachel. When we began dating I’d asked her to join The Tide, my baby—my first and greatest love—yet she had said no to co-parenting. She didn’t understand, or accept, that the movement would always come first in my life. No, passion was not enough to sustain a relationship. Another bitter, but inevitable reality. It was best that she’d left. I could never have chosen between the two.

  And I should have seen the same primal contradictions in the battle with the gay Center. I should have walked out of that war the moment my comrades voted to strike. Waging a labor battle, inside a gender war, surrounded by a movement for civil rights, portended an untenable conflict with no exit strategy tied to any
thing I could have called victory. I would absorb this lesson as a lesbian separatist battle that had to take place somewhere, somehow in Los Angeles—just as it had in multiple cities throughout the gay and lesbian national movement.

  I was now old enough to accept that sometimes in the losing is the winning; and in the struggle, is the living.

  Epilogue

  Dateline: Los Angeles, May 2011

  The end of the epic strike against L.A.’s first nationally significant gay center took place in 1978 as lesbians edged closer to achieving equal status in the national lesbian and gay movement. Lesbians began as underdogs in our own liberation struggle and battled more than a decade to convince boomer gay men that women made quality lawyers, activists, journalists, and legislators. Many would argue that gay men still don’t recognize women as equals, but having lived alongside a generation of guys raised in the sexist and racist American culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s, I know for fact that succeeding generations of men have “come a long way, baby.” Today I am amazed by and admiring of the young generation of men, both gay and straight, who walk arm-in—arm in friendship and activism with their lesbian sisters.

  It wasn’t always so.

  Two cataclysmic events had to occur in order for early lesbians to come back to working with gay men. The first originated in Dade County, Florida in 1977 when a newly burgeoning American religious right movement put country and western singer Anita Bryant on its national stage as its anti-gay spokesperson. The conservative backlash grew quickly into a national movement in reaction to the so-called moral decline generated by ‘60s liberal activists. Bryant sparked America’s first anti-gay crusade by convincing Dade County to rescind its recently enacted civil rights laws protecting gays against employment and housing discrimination. As News Editor of Lesbian Tide, I watched with horror as press releases arrived almost monthly from activists in Dade, St. Paul, Minnesota, Eugene, Oregon, and Wichita, Kansas. Bryant was winning. Gay rights were going down everywhere!

  By ‘78, the queen of Florida’s orange juice industry had moved west to California, prompting Orange County senator, John Briggs, to put an initiative on the state ballot which called for the firing from the California public school system of any teacher believed to be homosexual. From Sacramento to San Diego, gay and lesbian leaders panicked. We realized we’d have to raise millions to fight a statewide ballot. Television ads were the only way to reach the heterosexual middle class who would vote for or against us.

  But since the strike of ’75 lesbians in Southern California were boycotting the gay male Center. What to do? Quickly we realized that to stand a chance of defeating the Briggs Initiative women would have to return to working with the men in order to unite the movement. I called Bob Sirica, the little newbie from ’75 who was now Executive Director of GCSC. Bob jumped at the overture saying, “Yes of course. We must meet and bury this strike division.” Hastily, Patton and the strikers met with GCSC’s Board. Within a week, both sides had settled. The dykes agreed to end the boycott and stop all negative media. The Center agreed to issue a public apology admitting illegally firing the workers, and to pay everyone for back wages and compensation. Each striker was given a $90 token check. The strikers no longer cared about the amount. We were facing a multi-million dollar battle. We had no time to quibble. Ah, timing—the linchpin of politics!

  The second historic event which brought gay men and women back into realignment came more horrifically than anyone could have imagined. The catastrophe was the AIDS-HIV epidemic, which arrived, cloaked in mystery, in Los Angeles in 1983. Thousands of lesbians rushed into the streets, and to the bedsides of our gay brothers. Women, both gay and straight, became significant partners in creating ACT UP and dozens of other AIDS organizations.

  By 1988 the leadership ranks of gay male activists were decimated by “the gay plague.” GCSC couldn’t find enough gay men alive from the boomer generation to fill its higher staff positions. But sexist attitudes among gay men had changed, had become more open, and grateful, towards women. Finally, this culminated in 1988 when the Board of Directors of GCSC named lesbian feminist activist Torie Osborn to their top spot, Executive Director.

  The “L” Word

  After Briggs was defeated, dozens of women continued to lay a more polite siege to the Gay Community Services Center—lobbying from within, petitioning from without, begging, and demonstrating—to add the word Lesbian to its name. By the mid 1980s progressive gay organizations, such as the National Gay Task Force, incorporated the word Lesbian in their titles.

  The newly renamed NGLTF decision “marked both the specificity of lesbian life and politics and the coalition between lesbians and gay men,” according to NGLTF’s archival records. But L.A. could never lay claim to early self-imposed political correctness.

  On a hot and humid summer midnight in 1982, three Los Angeles dykes, led by Christi Kissell—a remarkable nineteen year old then on-staff as GCSC’s Director of Women’s Programming—realized the time had come to take matters into their own hands.

  Kissell, who had also been my lover the summer before her heroic reclamation, told me:

  “By 1980, the LA Gay Community Services Center was run on a social services model by muscular mustached men with MBAs. This was before the AIDS movement proper. Although each month, the lines at the Health Clinic grew noticeably longer. The Center was swimming with guppies (gay urban professionals) and formerly radical dykes were selling ads in yellow pages. Signs of the times. The gay community and the lesbian community shared the Center’s space and occasionally overlapped. There were women’s programs and men’s programs and a well-maintained room reservation schedule that assured peaceful coexistence. The Center had long added to the illustrious board of directors Lesbian psychotherapists and Lesbian lawyers and Lesbian assistant producers.

  “I wasn’t alone the night we scrawled ‘& Lesbian’ in pink and purple paint with a caret (^) underneath to signify the squeezing in between ‘Gay’ and ‘Community.’ We painted it on a piece of scrap wood and affixed a flat piece, like from a picket fence, with the notion that we would climb to the roof of the building and wedge the sign with professional block letters above the main sign outside the two story building at 1213 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood. I liked the wedge-it-in idea because: (1) no one had to spray paint upside down, (2) once we got up there it would be fast to install and was a good get away plan, and (3) that’s what Lesbians were at the center ‘wedged in,’ awkwardly and late.”

  To this day no one else knows who drove the dyke getaway car. When the greater L.A. gay community woke up the next morning and saw “& Lesbian” added to the GCSC sign, the news spread a California wildfire through the L.A. basin. By the time the Board of Directors saw the new sign on their building they knew they had a tough choice: publicly erase “Lesbian,” or change the name of the place to the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center. They chose the latter.

  After a four decade career in activism, I’ve learned that identity is a prickly and ever-evolving matter. In 2011, having long ago moved from quaint Highland Avenue into a four-story glass and brick structure the Feds built in the 60s to house the IRS—GCSC is now called the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. In this age of irony, some now call the movement itself, Gay Inc.

  Before her death in 2006, former Board member Betty Berzon had emerged as an award-winning author of several best-selling therapy books about gays and lesbians in long term relationships. Twenty years after the Great Strike, she parted from Morris as her political mentor, and came to the conclusion that during the strike, “Morris was using me for his own agenda.” Berzon then publicly repudiated her role, saying that the mass termination of the Gay/Feminist 16 was “an overreaction and morally wrong.” Her apology is a testament to a good activist’s valor. We should all admit our mistakes as publicly as we claim our achievements.

  My Political Godfather

  Morris Kight died peacefully in his sleep in 2003 at the satisfactory age of eighty four. Thi
s was the only accomplishment Morris ever managed to pull off peacefully. In the ancient days of the Roman Republic the citizenry occasionally bestowed the title “a great man” upon an individual, usually a conquering political figure, who wrought fundamental change within the Empire. Morris Kight, still credited as one of the pioneer founders of the LBGT movement, was such a great man. He founded, or caused to be built, most of the major gay organizations in Southern California. His strategic concepts and ideas dominated the formation of the radical gay liberation movement. He was a grassroots organizer who was left behind in the early 1990s when the power center of the gay movement went establishment and moved from its city-state structure to Washington D.C.

  Morris and I were forced to reconcile, at least politically, to face the Briggs Initiative in ‘78. We continued working together for another two decades, ending in 1996 when Kight retired and I, as President of the ONE Archive, urged him to give his mammoth collection of papers to a gay archive rather than a University. He managed to thwart me once more, splitting his papers between ONE and UCLA. Although we frequented each other’s kitchen table for advice throughout our remaining campaigns, we never spoke about the only battle in which we were on opposite sides.

  Our last conversation took place on Christmas Day of 2002 when I woke up that morning realizing that my godfather was old and sick and eighty-two. And we had never said good-bye. Haunted by our lack of personal reconciliation, I dropped in on him unannounced at his Beachwood Canyon apartment.

  Morris smiled as he opened his door. “Ah, it’s Córdoba!” he bowed and waved me in with a now limp flourish.

  I followed him, shocked as he led me through a tiny living room and kitchen crammed with what seemed like one or two million pieces of paper, books and documents. The place was unkempt and sad. It horrified me to see our once great leader living in such disregard. Among the questions I had for him that morning was—how did he feel watching fashionable gay fundraiser attire change from khaki to Prada? But sitting on his tie-dyed sofa, I dropped this idea.