Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  Well. We know the mystique of martyrdom. There were those who attacked or defended the content of the address for no political reason but for solely emotional ones. I couldn’t decide which was worse—being detested or adored. I did know that being understood was preferable to both.

  I also knew, every moment of that weekend and for the necessary “recuperation” days which followed, that without the fortuitous revelation previous to my flight to L.A., I could not have survived. For it was the morning of that flight that the Rochester, N.Y., women had taken me to visit Susan B. Anthony’s house, and it was on that plane I had written to Blake the letter which begins on page 55 of this book.

  VERY DEAR SISTERS:

  It seems important to begin by affirming who, how, and why, we are. We all know the male mass media stereotype of the Women’s Movement: “If you’ve seen one Women’s Libber, you’ve seen ’em all—they each have two heads, a pair of horns, and are fire-spouting, man-hating, neurotic, crazy, frigid, castrating-bitch, aggressive, lesbian, broom-riding witches.” So I want to start by saying that this shocking stereotype is absolutely true. The days of women politely asking for a crumb of human dignity are over. Most men say, “But you’ve become so hostile,” to which one good retort is a quote from a nineteenth-century feminist who said, “First men put us in chains, and then, when we writhe in agony, they deplore our not behaving prettily.”1 Well, enough of that. We are the women that men have warned us about.

  That settled, I want to talk about a number of difficult and dangerous themes relating to what others have variously called “The Lesbian-Straight Split,” “Lesbian Separatism from Straight Women,” and even “The Lesbian-Feminist Split.” This is the first speech, talk, what-have-you, that I have ever written down and then read—and it may be the last. I have done so because the content can so easily be misunderstood or willfully distorted, because misquoting is a common occurrence, because the risks I will take today are too vital for me to chance such misrepresentation.

  Before I go any further, I feel it is also necessary to deal with who, how, and why I am here. As far back as a month ago, I began hearing a few rumbles of criticism about my “keynoting” this conference—all from predictable people, and none, of course, expressed directly to my face. “Is she or isn’t she?” was their main thrust. “Know anyone who’s been to bed with her lately? Well, if we can’t prove she’s a lesbian, then what right has she to address a lesbian-feminist conference?” Now, I am hardly devastated by such charges, having been straight-baited before. So. It is credential time once again.

  I am a woman. I am a feminist, a radical feminist, yea, a militant feminist. I am a witch. I identify as a lesbian because I love the People of Women and certain individual women with my life’s blood. Yes, I live with a man—as does my sister Kate Millett. Yes, I am a mother-as is my sister Del Martin. The man is a faggot-effeminist,2 and we are together the biological as well as the nurturant parents of our child. This confuses a lot of people—it not infrequently confuses us. But there it is. Most of all, “I am a monster—and I am proud.”3

  Now all of the above credentials qualify me, I feel, to speak from concrete experience on: Feminism, Lesbianism, Motherhood, “Gay Male Movements” versus Faggot-Effeminist consciousness about women, Tactics for the Women’s Revolution, and a Vision of the Female Cosmos. I am an expert with the scars to prove it, having been, in my time, not only straight-baited, but also dyke-baited, red-baited, violence-baited, mother-baited, and artist-baited. As you can see, the above credentials further qualify me for being an excellent target, available not only to the male rulers but also to any women just dying to practice—even on a sister.

  But, finally, to the subject. In order to talk intelligently about the so-called “Split,” it is necessary to recap history a little. In the early days of the current Women’s Movement, many of us were a bit schizoid. The very first consciousness-raising session I ever went to, for example, gave me the warning. We were talking about sexuality, and I described myself as a bisexual (this was even before the birth of the first Gay Liberation Front, and long before bisexual became a naughty or cop-out word—besides, it did seem an accurate way of describing my situation). Every woman in the room moved, almost imperceptibly, an inch or so away from me. Wow, I thought. It was not the last time I was to have such an articulate reaction.

  Later, with the creation of GLF, a few of us Jewish-mother types spent a lot of time running back and forth between the two movements, telling the straight women that the lesbians weren’t ogres and telling the lesbians that the straight women weren’t creeps. Simultaneously, the intense misogyny coming against lesbians from gay men drove many women out of the “gay movement” and into the Women’s Movement. There was a brief and glorious sisterhood-glazed honeymoon period among all women in our Movement. Then, those contradictions began. For example, a personal one: I had announced my lesbian identification in the New York Times (which is a fairly public place, after all) in 1968, before the first GLF had been founded. Then, in 1970, one group of Radicalesbians in New York said to me, “Don’t you dare call yourself a lesbian—you live with a man and you have a child.” Now, while I might (defensively) argue the low-consciousness logic of this, since statistically most lesbians are married to men and have children, I had nonetheless learned one important thing from all my previous years in the Left: guilt. So all my knee-jerk reflexes went into action, and I obeyed. Six months later, another group of Radicalesbians confronted me. “We notice you’ve stopped calling yourself a lesbian,” they said. “What’s the matter—you gone back in the closet? You afraid?” Meanwhile, the monosexual straight women were still inching away from my presence. Wow, I thought, repeatedly.

  The lines began to be drawn, thick, heavy. Friedan trained her cannon on “the Lesbian Menace.” (In a show of consistent terror and hatred of lesbians, and indeed of women, one might say, she only recently announced last March [1973] in the New York Times that the lesbians and radical feminists in the Movement were CIA infiltrators. We met her attack with a firm political counter-attack in the press, never descending to a level of personal vilification or giving the media the cat-fight which they were trying to foment.) In 1970, backlash began, starting in NOW4 and infecting radical feminist groups as well. The bigotry was intense and wore many faces: outright hatred of and revulsion at lesbian women; “experimentation”—using a lesbian for an interesting experiment and then dumping her afterward; curiosity about the freaks; dismissal of another woman’s particular pain if it did not fall within the “common” experience, and many other examples.

  Meanwhile, lesbians, reeling from the hatred expressed by the gay male movement and the fear expressed by the Women’s Liberation Movement, began to organize separately. Of course, a great many lesbians had been in the Women’s Movement since its beginning—a great many had, in fact, begun it. These included some women who were active in Daughters of Bilitis5 under other names, not only to keep jobs and homes and custody of their children, but also so as not to “embarrass” NOW, which they had built. In addition, a great many formerly heterosexual or asexual women were declaring themselves lesbians, as they found the support to “come out” of their kitchens and communes as well as their closets. Some women were pressured, not necessarily, although certainly sometimes, by lesbians. The pressure came mostly from confusion, contradictions, pulls in different directions, paths which each might have led to a united feminism but which the Man exploited into warring stands; he was aided, of course, by the internecine hostility of any oppressed people—tearing at each other is painful, but it is after all safer than tearing at the real enemy. Oh, people did struggle sincerely, hour upon hour of struggle to understand and relate—but the flaw still widened to a crack and then to a split, created by our collective false consciousness. We are now teetering on the brink of an abyss, but one very different from what we have been led to expect.

  At present, there are supposedly two factions. On one side, those labeled hetero
sexual, bisexual, asexual, and celibate women. On the other, those labeled lesbians. Not that the latter group is monolithic-far from it, although monosexual straight women can, in their fear, try to hide their bigotry behind such a belief. No, there are some lesbians who work politically with gay men; some work politically with straight men; some work politically with other lesbians; some work politically only with certain other lesbians (age, race, class distinctions); some work politically with all feminists (lesbians, heterosexuals, etc.); and some, of course, don’t work politically at all. As Laurel has pointed out in an incisive and witty article in Amazon Quarterly, there are sub-sub-sub-divisions, between gay women, lesbians, lesbian-feminists, dykes, dyke-feminists, dyke-separatists, “old” dykes, butch dykes, bar dykes, and killer dykes. In New York, there were divisions between Political Lesbians and Real Lesbians and Nouveau Lesbians. Hera help a woman who is unaware of these fine political distinctions and who wanders into a meeting for the first time, thinking she maybe has a right to be there because she likes women.6

  Still, the same energy which created The Ladder7 almost twenty years ago is now evident in the dynamism of The Lesbian Tide, the dedication to the fine points of struggle and contradiction in Ain’t I A Woman?, in the analytical attempts of The Furies, and in the aesthetic excellence and serious political probings of the new Amazon Quarterly, to name only a few such publications.8 That energy, contorted into hiding and working under false pretenses for so long, has exploded in the beautiful and organized anger of groups like Lesbian Mothers Union (begun in San Francisco and now spreading across the country), to defend and protect the rights of the lesbian and her children, and, by extension, to stand as guardian for all women who, the moment we embrace our own rage, strength, and politics, face the danger of having our children seized from us physically by the patriarchy which daily attempts to kidnap their minds and souls. The energetic development of this consciousness, so tied in with ancient mother-right, is, I think, of profound importance to lesbian mothers, all mothers, indeed, all women—it is one of the basic building blocks in our creation of a Feminist Revolution. And again, that energy, in the radical lesbian-feminist presses. That woman-loving-woman energy, freed into open expression and in fact into totally new forms of relationship by the existence of the Feminist Movement, has exploded in marches and demonstrations and dances and films and theater groups and crisis centers and so on and on—a whole affirmative new world within the world of women.

  And yet.

  A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Feminist Revolution: both Betty Friedan and Rita Mae Brown condemned me for being a “man-hater.” Both Ms. magazine and The Furies began to call for political alliances with men, The Furies at one point implying that lesbians should band together with gay and straight males (preferably working-class) in a coalition against the enemy: straight women. Indeed, in one by now infamous statement, Rita Mae declared that lesbians were the only women capable of really loving men. Now of course this did come as a shock to many a lesbian who was obviously under the misguided impression that one had become a lesbian because she in fact loved women, and was indifferent-to-enraged on the subject of men. But now that the “correct line” had fallen from heaven, one was supposed penitently to dismiss such counter-revolutionary attitudes, learning to look at them and other women who still clung to them with contempt. One was also supposed to place issues such as the Vietnam War, political coalition with men, warmed-over Marxian class analyses, life-style differences, and other such un-lavender herrings in the path, in order to divide and polarize women. While doing all this, one was further supposed to hoist the new banner of the vanguard. (You know, the vanguard—Lenin leading the schlemiels.)

  Before we get into vanguarditis, we have to backtrack a little, take some Dramamine for our nausea, and talk about men—and male influence, and male attempts to destroy the united Women’s Movement. This is such an old subject that it bores and depresses me once more to have to wade through it. I feel that “man-hating” is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. And although there are exceptions (as in everything), i.e., men who are trying to be traitors to their own male class, most men cheerfully affirm their deadly class privileges and power. And I hate that class. I wrote my “Goodbye to All That” to the male Left in 1970—and thought I was done with it. Del Martin wrote her now classic article “If That’s All There Is” as a farewell to the male gay movement soon after—and said it all again. We were both touchingly naïve if we thought that sufficient.

  Because there is now upon us yet another massive wave of male interference, and it is coming, this time, from both gay men and their straight brothers. Boys will be boys, the old saying goes—and boys will indulge in that little thing called male bonding—and all boys in a patriarchal culture have more options and power than do any women.

  Gay men first, since they were the ones we all thought were incipient allies with women, because of their own oppression under sexism. I won’t go into the facts or the manners of the male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement, since Del did all that superbly and since most women have left the “Gay Movement” a long time ago. But I will, for the sake of those sisters still locked into indentured servitude there, run through a few more recent examples of the “new changing high consciousness about male supremacy” among gay organizations and gay male heavies. Are we to forgive and forget the Gay Activist Alliance dances only a few months ago (with, as usual, a token 10 percent attendance by women), at which New York GAA showed stag movies of nude men raping nude women? Are we to forgive and forget the remark of one male gay leader, who told Susan Silverwoman, a feminist active for years in the Women’s Movement and a founder of New York GLF, that she could not represent GLF at a press conference because she saw herself too much as a woman, as a feminist? Are we to forgive the editors of the gay male issue of Motive magazine for deliberately setting women against women, deliberately attempting to exacerbate what they see as the “Lesbian-Straight Split,” deliberately attempting to divide and conquer? Are we to forgive the following:

  Once, when I was telling one of you Motive editors about the estimated nine million Wicce (witches) who were burned to death during the Middle Ages—something that appeared to be news to you—you paused for a moment, and then asked me, “But how many of those nine million women were actually lesbians?” For a moment, I missed your meaning completely as a variety of sick jokes raced through my mind: How many of the six million Jews were Zionists; how many of the napalmed Indochinese babies could be said to have lived outside the nuclear family?

  Then it hit me: you had actually expressed a particle of your intense hatred for all women by asking how many of the nine million were lesbians, so that you would know how many of these victims to mourn, because YOU DIDN’T OBJECT TO WHAT WAS DONE TO THE OTHER WOMEN! This is as close as I have ever heard a man come to saying in so many words that he didn’t object to men torturing and incinerating millions of women (provided only that they met his standards of burnability).

  —this is a quote from the second issue of Double-F, A Magazine of Effeminism,9 in which even the faggot-effeminist males proclaim their Declaration of Independence from Gay Liberation and all other male ideologies.

  Or are we, out of the compassion in which we have been positively forced to drown as women, are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist, yes obscenity of male tranvestitism? How many of us will try to explain away—or permit into our organizations, even—men who deliberately reemphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering as “Camp”? Maybe it seems that we, in our “liberated” combat boots and jeans, aren’t being mocked. No? Then is it “merely” our mothers, and their mothers, who had no other choice, who wore hobbling dresses and torture stiletto heels to survive, to keep jobs, or to keep husbands because they themselves could get no jobs? No, I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this
androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag.

  Last night, at this conference’s first session, women let a man divide us, pit woman against woman and, in the process, exploit the entire Lesbian Conference to become the center of attention and boost his opportunistic career.

  The same man who four years ago tried to pressure a San Francisco lesbian into letting him rape her; the same man who single-handedly divided and almost destroyed the San Francisco Daughters of Bilitis Chapter; the same man who, when personally begged by women not to attend this conference, replied that if he were kept out he would bring federal suit against these women on the charges of “discrimination and criminal conspiracy to discriminate”—this is the same man some women defended last night.

  Kate Millett pled for peace. What about the women who had a right to a peaceful conference for women, Kate, with no past or present male here? A true pacifist should be consistent, and preferably on the side of her own people.

  The organizers of the conference pled ignorance: that they didn’t realize the issue would be “divisive” of women when they invited him! Yet they knew his San Francisco history. And it is too late for such ignorance. The same fine sisters who have for months worked day and night to create and organize this event, have—in one stroke, inviting this man—directly insulted their San Francisco sisters he previously tried to destroy, and indirectly insulted every woman here. I’m afraid they owe us a public apology on the grounds of divisiveness alone.