Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

The other set familiar with doin’ table work are the gays and the trannies, who are largely cool, but a lot of them are whiny little shits, so it’s just a goddamn good thing that they know how to dance so damned well! The gays always clamor to dance with me at parties, and who am I to deny them the pleasure? They know that fat girls are always the best dancers, and they are always very appreciative of large opinionated ladies—kudos, boys and bulls! Those gays certainly have rhythm, in their own Ellen DeGeneres way, so they make good dance partners. Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but everyone on earth loves my dancing and wants to dance with me, once they witness the full-throttle “Shirley Temple with gray hair” experience of it all—be they so blessed.

  I like most to dance at kabbalistic weddings because women only dance with the bride, and I love dancing with women. It really does set some part of my female energies right. I have danced the hula with hula girls and their grandmothers, and I have belly danced with actual Persian, Egyptian, and African women. For years, I have studied the art of sacred dance. And whenever I dance with women, my dormant goddess energy is ignited. Both sexes are left stunned, amazed, and longing for democracy and freedom!

  I know now that I was given a great gift as a child. Although I was denied the dance lessons I desperately wanted, learning firsthand what it means to be on the outside looking in, I did not let that stop me. I learned to dance with no lessons, no instructions, and no limits. I was never tamed into doing that predictable, robotic, cornball, hackneyed shit that anybody with a big ass can do. Rather, I dance like someone who has never been infected with the limited thoughts of others—raw and naked on top of the music, leading it along behind me, as I tease it into submission with an extra beat or two here and there.

  I had many a conversation with Frank Zappa about this same thing. Václav Havel had invited Frank to come to the Czech revolution to claim credit for it and be honored. I asked Frank why he thought the Slavickly inclined regarded him so highly, and he said they liked his music because it didn’t follow rules, and that they understood that freedom never does follow rules—once tasted, freedom eclipses bullshit, crumbling all the rules that confine it.

  I know that my dancing does that for women. I am not and will never be ladylike or behave myself. I know that behind the veil, when women are only around women and feeling safe, that freedom just happens. I have seen it and I have danced it, too. I have never gone to Iran or Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan to dance for those gals yet, but one day I will. By the time Granny starts jumping off tables and dancing on chairs in old Persia, all patriarchal governments will fall, so I am pacing myself. I’m saving that for my sixties. Yee-haw! The time is nigh, ladies. Hold on to your head scarves because this JILF is about to give new meaning to the words hot flash.

  Chapter 10

  Left of Center in Denver

  “It was the last of the best of times.”

  In the mid to late 1970s, my two sisters, Pearlie and Geraldine, came to live with my husband, Bill, and me and our three kids. They didn’t want to live in Salt Lake City any longer, and I sure couldn’t blame them. Now that I had help with child care and housework, I was able to get a job—first as a window dresser for a fashionable women’s clothing store and then as a cocktail waitress, which worked out well for me because I was thin by then and pocketed big tips (mostly because I never gave anyone back their change once they got drunk). Soon, one of my customers, who thought I was funny, suggested I try my hand at comedy at the club that had just opened downtown. As soon as I heard that there was a comedy club in Denver, a lightbulb went off over my head—I knew that I would go there and become a stand-up comic. Newly thin and seeking an audience, I started to write a five- minute act.

  My sister Geraldine and my husband, Bill, accompanied me to the Comedy Shoppe, where I signed up for open-mic night and did my five minutes. I killed the first time, which was good, because I might not have had the guts to come back a second time if that hadn’t gone so well. I liked that the men in the audience looked at me like a bunch of bums eyeing a bologna sandwich, as their dates and fat wives refused to laugh at my jokes. Of course, as always happens in my life, a great high (of doing well the first time onstage) was followed by dying a dog’s death the second time. The perfect bipolar experience.

  The men who ran the comedy club advised me to get more experience before I returned to perform. Apparently, my feminist jokes and too-tight pants did not go over as well as the jokes about blow jobs and masturbation told by the more experienced and successful male comics. So Geraldine suggested that I come to the Woman to Woman Book Center on lower Colfax Avenue in Denver, where she had started to hang out. She thought those women would love my act, since they were all feminists and well-read. They did love my act, as it turned out—they laughed and yelled out, “Right on!” and other supportive things like that—and they also encouraged me to go further with it. I loved it and started to volunteer in the bookstore as a receptionist two days a month. I also got to perform at the many coffeehouses, organized by members of the collective, in bookstores and open-mic nights all over the city of Denver in order to work on my act.

  I got more confident in my comedy because of them, but the trauma of not being able to substitute seeking the attention of men for my eating disorder caused me to begin slowly adding sausage, cheese, and chocolate to my diet. Then I would sneak-eat some more before taking laxatives, as well as upchuck like a mofo, and then start smoking even more cigarettes, so that I would eat less, and then smoke pot to quit smoking cigarettes, which just made me hungry. Being a housewife, mother, member of a lesbian collective, stand-up comic, big sister/surrogate mother, and cocktail waitress meant I was living too many lives at once, and something had to give. That something was my waistline, and therefore my job as a cocktail waitress. Ironically, my getting fat again made it easier for people to laugh at my jokes.

  Best of all, volunteering at Woman to Woman allowed me to read great books that changed me in so many ways. The books of Professor Mary Daly affected me more than any others, with the exception of Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church and State, which I, almost single-handedly kept in print. The greatest thing I learned working in a bookstore was that you can help keep great words and great ideas alive and in print simply by ordering two hundred copies of a particular book from the publishers. I over-ordered all of Mary Daly’s books, and Matilda Joslyn Gage’s, too.

  Dr. Daly wrote about God as a female intelligence, and that was the great capper to a lifetime of reading about God from a male point of view for me. Dr. Daly became one of the first women to receive a doctorate in Latin, and went on to teach about theology and the “Reversal of Gender” by the Vatican, by simply declassifying the Vatican’s own records!

  Mary and I ultimately became the closest of friends until her death on January 3, 2010. I was out on my Kawasaki Mule in the fields on my Hawaiian nut farm when I saw her apparition standing between the trees and waving good-bye to me. Not until the next day did I receive the email that told me that she had died at the exact moment I had a vision of her the day before. Spooky, spooky things are always happening if you know where to look and how to look for them.

  In 1980, ours was a multiracial, multiclass, multi-sexual- preference conglomeration of activists and intellectuals. We operated a women’s referral hotline that had been in existence since the year of our Lord Bobby Kennedy, 1962. We called ourselves “feminists,” and everyone else called us “women’s libbers.” It was all so quaint!

  At the Woman to Woman Book Center, we carried books written by women authors, telling of their real lives under the various world governments, none of which wished to understand or consider the ideas of women. Women were, of course, a threat to all of those governments and religions and theories, and I think I know why. It’s because women seek solutions to problems that actually work and are in the best interest of the most people in their circles. Solutions are the enemy of patriarchy, which is in a total state of unending war. The stock ma
rket itself is based on the sale of weapons and WMD! If that patriarchal threat were to be removed, many people would not have jobs. No more than that needs to be said, really.

  Our collective valued solutions; we had discussion groups, consciousness-raising groups, our own production company, called Black Orchid Productions, our own feminist news paper, called Big Mama Rag (yes, we did have those back then!), as well as grievance groups, who would approach the collective and seek spiritual and social redress. We were geographically and psychically at the center of the Western American women’s movement for the Equal Rights Amendment, called the ERA. We were also a nonprofit organization that could provide funding for programs that benefited women.

  The movement toward democracy for all citizens was getting too close to being real for a lot of rich people. The effective opposition to that ideal was embodied in a man named Ronald Reagan, working for those who paid him to act the part of “President of the United States,” and pass laws to help them “privatize” (steal) Social Security money, and pocket it themselves, instead of using it for the people it was created to serve. They were called Republicans.

  Reagan Republicans were different from what Republicans had ever been before. They wanted to undo the social safety net that allowed the American way of life because they felt people who work for a living are paid too much, whereas people who do not work for a living (like the idle rich and what Bush called the “investing classes”) are not paid enough.

  In the early 1980s came the Reagan landslide, the cornerstone of which was the threatened patriarchal family, one that was headed by a proper (white), Christ-loving, strong male provider, a proper (white) Christian wife under his loving dominance, and two or three properly behaved offspring, who were not homosexual. That sanctified unit was free to overconsume to their hearts’ delight, oblivious to the destruction of the planet, subsequently buried under the garbage they created.

  For them, the times were just right for man-hating women’s libbers (feminazis) to ruin God’s plan, so that proper social order could be overturned and women could be tricked into thinking that being equal with their male counterparts under the law was a good idea! Saving the family from its own women was no small task for Republicans. Restoring proper family values was then and is now crucial to white Republicans, who oppose everything that does not go out of its way to favor those who are at the very top of the Ponzi scheme that’s turning out to be our economy.

  When the women’s libbers were not off gallivanting braless, or having needless abortions just for fun, they were coming up with ways to blur the gender lines, such as dreaming up the ERA. Getting rid of gender altogether is what the libbers wanted to do most of all, because in addition to being man-haters, they all had penis envy and wanted to be allowed to violate the sanctity of men’s private clubs (the Congress and the Senate). As if that were not misguided enough, the sluts also purposely failed to honestly inform American women that equality really meant that men could not be prevented from entering ladies’ bathrooms, where ladies would no longer be safe to do the things that ladies do privately in bathrooms.

  The Big Lie sure did work, like it always does. Sarah Palin is the modern-day version of Phyllis Schlaffly, who authored all of the anti-ERA rhetoric. Palin’s commentary on death panels and health care uses that same dumbass doublespeak that works so well on the drugged illiterates who are her followers. “Are you going to let some big, bloated socialist government tell you that you should be able to afford health care? Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

  It’s that old knee-jerk “Women better get other women in line before there is trouble for every woman” threat. Like hens who peck a “defective” chick to death, right-wing women react out of fear to anything that seems different from the sanctioned model of perfection and are very good at herding other women back under the big umbrella of shame. “What about the children?” they always moan, bleat, and cry, when in fact, the last thing on earth they care about is “the children.” If we cared so much for children there would be seat belts in school buses, and we’d cut the military budget before we cut school budgets. Many women lost custody of their children in the ‘70s because they took jobs, and right-wing judges (activist judges) thought that was terrible. Republicans did not consider it ladylike to accept money for work. It was downright rude!

  By late 1981, the various services and programs to which we had referred the widows, the orphans, and the needy through our work at the collective had been “unfunded” by the Reaganites, whose sole purpose was to begin the dismantling of the middle class, and to divide and conquer the American Woman’s Movement for Equality and Parity. The first step in this class warfare, waged to dismantle the New Deal (specifically Social Security, so that it could be put into private hands), was to flood the streets with mental patients who should never have been released from hospitals. Their benefits were cut, and as they began to roam the streets, they gravitated toward the mom-and-pop stores that flanked the Woman to Woman Book Center—sitting outside, begging, peeing, and putting undue burden on those small business owners, who began to close their shops and vacate Colfax Avenue in disturbing numbers almost immediately. I guess this was what Reagan Republicans had in mind when they called themselves the “party of small business.” In Reagan Republispeak that meant destroy small businesses so that the moneyed classes could later move in and pick up some choice real estate bargains. I never understood how they got away with calling themselves “the party of small business.” What sheer balls!

  I saw my first glimpse of the frightening future when an older woman, well-known to all on middle Colfax Avenue, was taken down by two uniformed police officers, one of whom held her head to the pavement with his black boot. I ran outside, yelling, “Officer, what are you doing?” I had never seen the likes of it. What did she do, pull her fork on him? I wondered.

  “Get back in your shop!” he yelled. But I, indignant and suburban, crossed the street anyway and said, “I want your badge number! I am reporting you to your sergeant!”

  Two large, black lesbian collective members, who were there long before my sister Geraldine and I had joined in on the fight against “patriarchy,” grabbed me by the arms and told me to get back in the shop and to shut up. I was immediately thereafter schooled by Latina, Indian, and African-American women about what America had always been like underneath the thinly lacquered veneer of equality.

  The bookstore’s collective began to faction in opinion as to what should be done to counter all the disappearing resources. It got pretty heavy, and one of us wrote an article in Big Mama Rag that called for full-on revolution against the government. This upset a lot of our constituents and collective members and readers, who said we would probably get audited and lose our nonprofit status now that we had opened that huge can of worms inside of Pandora’s box.

  The Left’s MO invariably seems to devolve into dogma wars about terminology and theory. This gives birth to more factions and petty politics while everyone does less and less to solve the real problems. That is why it was possible for the Republicans to prevail; they have shown us what they really meant by “free markets”: slave wages and substandard conditions. Even their talent for doublespeak can’t completely hide their two-fisted greed for more: more money, land, power, military supremacy, and compliant women.

  By early 1983, I was the last of the straight women at the bookstore. Most of them said that they felt they had been run out of there by the lesbian separatists, who thought that if you shaved your legs you were a gross, disgusting pig and a traitor, and they wanted no hairless-legged women in the collective. They continually voiced the idea that straight women were the actual oppressors of lesbians. That really pissed me off. I used to say, “You are driving out the middle! No revolutions happen without the middle! Let’s organize welfare mothers and waitresses!” Everyone snickered at me.

  I got to stay because everyone loved my sister, and I loved her lover, as one loves one’s in-laws. The lesbians used to call me
all kinds of names, from “dikey-likey” to “closet case,” and I would good-naturedly tell them to go fuck a man just once before they swore off it. They would giggle like schoolgirls, gagging and screaming, “Yuck!”

  We kidded one another, and sometimes things got unmercifully tense as a result. Mostly, we saw one another as compatriots for correctly choosing to stay in the collective at Woman to Woman and insisting on taking a multicultural, multiracial position in the movement toward international feminism. Women Workers of the World United (WWWU) was what we decided our name should be, and then that was changed to Women Workers of the World United with Men Workers of the World, or WWWUWMWW. We wanted to show that we were feminist but inclusive. Later we called it Multi-Cultural Women for Pay Equity, or MCWPE, to show that we were diverse, feminist, and working class.

  We couldn’t get too many people interested in joining up with us, though, printed flyers or not. Later we changed our name to WAP, Women Against Pornography, which used a traveling slide show to raise funds to help smash patriarchy. We desperately needed to raise some funds to replace the funding that had been cut. We were seeing dozens of homeless women outside our shop now, and we figured that we could hold benefits to raise funds in order to help them.

  We were hired to go to Wyoming to present the slide show, but when we got there, we found out there were a bunch of men in the audience. Chi, who had the most seniority of anyone in the collective, said, “This slide show is not for men; it titillates them, and that is not what we want to do with it. We want to radicalize women by letting them look at the way women’s bodies are exploited so that they will join our struggle.” Sadly, Wyoming’s women weren’t that interested in getting radicalized by the porn slide show, and even if they were, they never had any real funds to give us in our struggle to make all that sex and porn profitable. That’s f**king patriarchy for ya! We knew we needed some profit if we were to operate a nonprofit organization and get anything done at all in this lousy world.