The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  amazing how seeing hate stuff and touching it can make one

  viscerally sick.

  I was called out into the living room. My mother and father

  were sitting on the formal sofa that we had and I was expected

  to stand. My father had the junk beside him on the sofa. He

  had called the FBI. They were going to come and question

  me. They came and they did. Mr. Kane disappeared from the

  street and Mrs. Kane would stand out on the lawn, her auburn

  hair crowning her beauty, alone; she was now alone. Their

  house was eventually sold.

  The crime, it turned out, was to threaten a candidate for

  president of the United States. The dirty drawings and words

  were taken to be direct threats against Kennedy, as were the vile

  insults targeted to the Catholic Church and the pope. I, too,

  was punished, but not by the government. I can’t remember

  what the punishment was, but it was tempered with mercy

  because I had helped shut down a hate enterprise. I knew that

  Mr. Kane was not a conservative in the way that Mr. Buckley

  was, even though Mr. Buckley supported segregation, to my

  shock and dismay.

  To find out what was and was not conservative as such, I

  approached a group called Young Americans for Freedom.

  Their leader was a somewhat aristocratic man named Fulton

  Lewis III. This was far outside any prior experience of mine.

  I wanted to debate him. I set up the debate for a school

  57

  Heartbreak

  assembly. I hurled liberal platitude after liberal platitude at

  him. He won the debate. This made me question not my

  beliefs in equality and fairness but how one could communicate those beliefs. I felt the humiliation of defeat, of course.

  I don’t like losing, and I was stunned that I did lose. Stil , the

  home team had lost because students thought that Mr. Lewis

  III was correct. These were the years of the John Birch Society

  and None Dare Cal It Treason, a book in which commies and

  socialists were hidden in every nook and cranny of the government and the media, and the point was that these equality-minded folks were Soviet dupes, low and venal. I didn’t see

  how my classmates could think being against poverty or for

  integration were Soviet ideas or treasonous ideas. Mr. Lewis

  was exceptionally gracious.

  This was the beginning for me of thinking about something

  the entertainer Steve Allen, a liberal, had writ en in National

  Review. Roughly paraphrased, Mr. Allen’s piece asked why a

  person was categorized as just a liberal or just a conservative.

  Wasn’t that same person also a musician or a teacher and a

  husband and a father? The patrilineal approach was the only

  approach in those days, liberal or conservative. I thought it

  was probably wrong to hate people for their politics unless

  they were doing evil, as Mr. Kane was. The argument remains

  alive; the stereotypes persist, veiled now in a postcommie

  rhetoric; I think that hate crimes are real crimes against groups

  of people, imputing to those people a lesser humanity. And

  58

  Young Americans for Freedom

  even though I’ve lost debates since the one with Mr. Lewis

  III, I still think it’s worth everything to say what you believe.

  There are always consequences, and one must be prepared to

  face them. In this context there is no free speech and there

  never will be.

  I think especially of watching William Buckley, on his Firing

  Line television program in the 1960s, debate the writer James

  Baldwin on segregation. Buckley was elegant and brilliant and

  wrong; Baldwin was passionate and bril iant and wore his

  heart on his sleeve - he was also right. But Buckley won the

  debate; Baldwin lost it. I’l never forget how much I learned

  from the confrontation: be Baldwin, not Buckley.

  59

  Cuba 2

  The bad news came first from Allen Young, a gay activist: in

  Cuba homosexuals were being locked up; homosexuality was

  a crime against the state. A generation later I read the work of

  Reinaldo Arenas, a homosexual writer who refused to be

  crushed by the state and wrote a florid, uncompromising prose.

  I read the prison memoirs of Armando Val adares and heard

  from some friends raised in Cuba and original supporters of

  Castro and Che about whole varieties of oppression and

  brutality. There was also more recently a stunning biography

  of Che by John Lee Anderson that gave Che his due - coldblooded kil er and immensely brave warrior. Of course, the river of blood and suffering makes it hard to say why so many

  of us, from David Smith to myself, saw so much hope in the

  Cuban revolution. Batista’s thuggery was indisputable; his

  thievery, too, from a population of the exceptionally poor and

  largely illiterate was ugly; but the worst part of it was U. S.

  support for his regime. That support made many of us challenge the political morality of the United States. Castro claimed he wanted an end to poverty and il iteracy, and I believed him.

  Castro up against Batista is the mise-en-scene. With Castro

  60

  Cuba 2

  the poor would have food and books. Castro also promised to

  stop prostitution, which had destroyed the lives of thousands

  of poor women and children; prostitution was considered

  one of the perks of capitalism, and Havana in particular was

  known for prostitution writ large. Where there was hunger,

  there would be women and children selling sex. Now we would

  know to look for other phenomena as well: incest or child

  sexual abuse, homelessness, predatory traffickers. It would

  have been hard to think of Castro as worse than Batista

  outside the context of the cold war. When the tiny band of

  guerrilla fighters conquered Havana and extirpated the Batista

  regime, it was hard to mourn unless the prospect of equality,

  which was the promise, inevitably meant tyranny (which I

  think is the right-wing argument). Virtual y forced by the

  United States into an alliance with the Soviets, Castro’s

  system of oppression slowly supplanted Batista’s. Watching

  the United States now cuddle with the Chinese because

  Chinese despotism is rhetorical y commit ed to capitalism,

  one can only mourn the chance lost to the Cuban people

  thirty-some years ago when the United States might have

  been a strategic al y or neighbor. I’m saying that the United

  States pushed Cuba into the Soviet camp and that Castro

  became what he became because of it.

  61

  The Grand Jury

  I was eighteen; it was 1965; a grand jury had been impaneled

  to investigate the charges I had made against New York City’s

  Women’s House of Detention, the local Bastil e that sat in the

  heart of Greenwich Village, in the heart of Bohemia itself. I

  had been sexually brutalized and had turned the internal

  examinations of women in that place into a political issue

  that would eventually topple the ancien regime, the callous,

  encrustated Democrats.

  I had been subpoenaed to testify on a certain day at a certain

&nb
sp; time. My French class at Bennington was also on that day, at

  that time, and I was hopeless in the language. My French professor took my haplessness in French rather personally and refused to give me permission to miss the class. I explained

  that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her

  threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing

  mark instead.

  I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night

  before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s

  much-admired district attorney, came with another man that

  night to see me. The magnitude of his visit is probably not

  62

  The Grand Jury

  self-evident: the big pooh-bah, prosecutor of al prosecutors,

  came to see me. He seemed to want to hear from me that I

  would show up. I assured him that I would. Just be yourself

  and tell the truth, said the snake to Eve. I assured him that I

  would. He kept trying to find out if I was wary of testifying

  or of him. I wasn’t. I was too stupid to be. The rules have

  since changed, but in 1965 no one, including the target of a

  grand jury investigation, could have a lawyer with her inside

  the sacred, secret grand jury room. I was not the target, but

  one would not have been able to tell from what the assistant

  district at orney did to me. Hogan had assured me that al

  the questions would be about the jail and pret y much said

  outright that the jail had to go, something to that effect. He

  probably said sympathetically that he had heard it was a horrible place and I assumed the rest. After al , if it was hor ible, why wouldn’t one want to get rid of it? The grand jury room

  was big and shiny wood and imperial. I sat down in what

  increasingly came to seem like a sinking hole and had to each

  side and in front of me raised desks behind which were

  washed white people, most or al men. The assistant district

  attorney, who had been with Mr. Hogan the night before but

  had said nothing, began to ask me questions. Where did I

  live? Did I live alone? Was I a virgin? Did I smoke marijuana?

  I started out just being confused. I remembered clearly that

  Mr. Hogan said the inquiry was about the jail, not me, so I

  answered each question with some fact about the jail. Did I

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  Heartbreak

  live alone? They knew I was living with two men. I described

  the dirt in the jail or the excrement that passed for food. Did

  I smoke marijuana? Was I going to betray the revolution by

  saying no? On the other hand, was I going to give the grand

  jury an excuse to hold for the righteousness of the jail by

  saying yes? I answered with more details about the jail. And

  so it went for several hours. I eventually got the hang of it.

  The pig would ask me a personal question, and I would

  answer about the jail. He got angrier and angrier, and I stayed

  soft-spoken but firm. They could have jailed me for contempt,

  but they didn’t want me back in jail. I had created a maelstrom

  for them; because of the news coverage, which was, for its

  time, massive, huge numbers of people in the United States

  and eventually around the world knew my name, my face, and

  what had been done to me in the jail. Put ing me back in jail

  could only make the situation for Mayor Robert Wagner, head

  of the cor upt city Dems, more difficult. I had spoken on

  the same platform as John Lindsay, a liberal Republican who

  would eventually become mayor, and I had something to

  do with making that unlikely event happen. After I testified I

  went back to college. While probation would have been the

  normal status for someone not yet convicted of anything

  and released on her own recognizance, I was on parole, which

  allowed me to cross state lines to go back to school without

  violating the court’s rules. The system was being so good

  to me.

  64

  The Grand Jury

  A couple of months later there was an article in the New

  York Times saying that the grand jury had found nothing

  wrong with the jail. Everything had hinged on my testimony,

  so they were also saying that I was a liar. I left the country

  soon after, but seven years later, when the place was final y

  closed, a lot of people thanked me. Years later Judith Malina

  would say I had done it. When I challenged that rendering of

  the politics, she said that political generation after political

  generation had tried but I had succeeded - not that I had done

  it alone, of course not, but that without what I had done, for

  al anyone knew the jail would still be there, thirteen floors of

  brutalized women. Most of the women in the Women’s House

  of Detention when I was there and in the immediate years

  before and after were prostituted women; I had the unearned

  dignity of having been ar ested for a political offense. Frank

  Hogan had a street named after him after he died.

  Probably the best moment for me happened one day when

  I was approached by a black woman on a Village street corner

  while I was waiting for a light. She worked in the jail, she said,

  and couldn’t be seen talking with me, but she wanted me to

  know that everything I had said was true and she was one of

  many guards who was glad I had managed to speak out. You

  tell the truth and people can shit al over it, the way that grand

  jury did, but somehow once it’s said it can’t be unsaid; it stays

  living, somewhere, in someone’s heart.

  65

  The Orient Express

  I was going to Greece. There were two countries in Europe

  where one could live cheaply - Greece and Spain. The fascist

  Franco was stil in power in Spain, so I decided on Greece. I

  took a boat, the appropriately named SS Castel Felice, from

  New York to a port in the south of England, then a train to

  London. I had two relatives there, old women, hard-core

  Stalinists, who talked energetically and endlessly about the

  brilliant and gorgeous subway stations in Leningrad. It’s a

  disorienting experience - listening to the worship of a subway

  system. They saw me off on that legendary train the Orient

  Express. It has since been rehabilitated, but in 1965 it was a

  wretched thing. I had under $100 and the clothes I wore

  along with some extra underwear and T-shirts. We changed

  trains in Paris in some dark, damp, underground station, and

  we kept going south. Somewhere outside of Paris people began

  exiting and cattle began coming on. There was no food, no

  potable water; as the train covered the terrain downhill we’d

  get more cows accompanied by a peasant or a peasant family.

  I hadn’t anticipated this at al - I, too, had read about the

  elegant and mysterious Orient Express. A sweet boy offered

  6 6

  The Orient Express

  to share his canned Spam with me, but I foolishly declined. It

  was a four-day trip from London to Athens, each hour after

  Paris more sordid than the one before. I did love the train ride

  through Yugoslavia because the country was so very beautiful,

  and I
promised myself I would go back there someday, a bad

  promise nullified by war. I had never been in a communist

  country; there were more police than I had ever seen in my

  life, and each one wanted to see everyone’s passport and go

  through everyone’s luggage. I was easy on that score. I had

  one small piece of luggage and nothing more.

  While still in Yugoslavia, I began talking with an American

  named Mildred. She was wrinkled as if her skin had been

  white bread, squooshed and rolled and then left to dry. She

  had smudges of lipstick here and there and was very kind to

  me. I needed water desperately by the time we reached

  Yugoslavia, but I was afraid to run out to the station when the

  train stopped because I didn’t know when it would start up

  again. I’ve always found traveling by train exhausting and anx-

  iety-making. Mildred gave me water or pop or something I

  could drink. The cows were in touching distance now, and so

  were the peasants, though there were many more cows than

  peasants.

  Mildred was going to Athens. Someone had stolen al of her

  money. She wondered if she could borrow some from me -

  what I had would be exactly enough for her to liberate her

  things, being held by an irate landlord, and then later that

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  Heartbreak

  same day she would have the money wired to her by her son

  so she would be able to pay me back. We made a date to meet

  in a town square in Athens for the day following our ar ival.

  I gave Mildred pretty much al of my money. I had enough for

  the YWCA that first night. The next day at the appointed

  hour I waited in the square. She never came. The direct consequence was that as it started turning dark I had to find a man to take me to dinner and get me a room. And I would

  have to do the same the next day and the day after that. I

  kept hoping I'd find Mildred here or there. I never held it

  against her.

  6 8

  Easter

  I went to Crete to live and write. I didn’t know much about

  it except that my roommate at the Y was from there. What I