by Chana Wilson
Something was shifting in me. As I pumped along, I could feel some new kind of determination rising up from my belly, but I couldn’t yet name it. My mouth frowned in a bitter grimace. I slowed the bike, leaned over, and spat onto the pavement. Then, as I sped on along the road bordered by telephone poles and fields, a simple certainty came to me: I was done with Mike.
Chapter 26. Freedom School
NOT A WORD FROM MIKE when I got back to campus, and I didn’t contact him. A few days into the spring term, I saw him walking and holding hands with Lorrie, a girl who looked a lot like me: long wavy brown hair parted in the middle, no makeup, same bell-bottom jeans. There was one noticeable difference: She was thinner. I couldn’t believe he’d replaced me that fast. Even though I was done with him, it irked me.
In early May, school life was jolted by the news that four students at Kent State University had been shot and killed by the National Guard while demonstrating against the bombing of Cambodia. In response, there were nationwide student strikes. At Grinnell, we took over the ROTC building. Male students burned their draft cards in the school’s Herrick Chapel. All classes ended, and the school was closed down before commencement. No finals, no final papers. My procrastination of school assignments had me on the verge of flunking several classes, so I heaved a sigh of relief. Kent State had saved my academic ass.
Instead of leaving town, my group of radicals, still energized from the ROTC takeover, decided to stay on over the summer to study theories of revolution. We called ourselves Freedom School. The dorms were closed, but we found places to stay off campus. Kate stayed, too, and we postponed moving to San Francisco until the fall. We’d somehow made up by avoiding all mention of our spring trip.
Our group read Karl Marx, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon and studied the history of the Cuban Revolution and the story of Che Guevara. I did some of the reading, but my bad study habits now seemed to bleed over to even these chosen subjects, and I just couldn’t stay focused. My mind would wander off halfway through a paragraph or I would grow sleepy and doze. I came to our daily group discussions ill prepared, which didn’t help my confidence. My shoulders tensed up, my breath grew shallow and fast, and I was made shy by my fear of saying the wrong thing. Here was the sharing of political ideas I so longed for, but I couldn’t bear to appear unthinking or politically naive among these admired peers. My silence hardly seemed noticed, since the men dominated the discourse anyway. Two guys in particular pontificated constantly about political theory, hurling quotations and rhetoric at each other. I hated conflict, and these diatribes made me cringe.
The women of our group lived together in the house of a sympathetic professor and his family who were away for the summer. On the coffee table, feminist newspapers began to pile up. One day, I was slumped on our living room couch, struggling through Das Kapital, Volume 1, my feet up on the coffee table, when I just couldn’t bear slogging through any more and so I picked up a women’s paper. I idly scanned a column. Suddenly, I found myself immersed, gobbling the feminist analysis of the cultural myths we’d all been raised with. And then—bang!—I was thunderstruck. Here was my life, my experiences given name: women’s oppression, patriarchy, male chauvinism. Given a cultural context that was so much wider than my own individual life. This feminist analysis, laced with my own remembrances—how in sixth grade my newly emerged breasts made swinging a bat awkward and shameful; how in eighth grade I started to hold back my enthusiasm for having all the answers, in favor of letting the boys shine; how I had acted so eagerly as Mike’s art assistant—gave me my first glimmer of recognition of how the culture had conditioned us women to capitulate in our relationships with men, and to abandon so much of ourselves.
We, the women of Freedom School, started having separate consciousness-raising meetings to discuss feminist ideas. Our stories poured forth: experiences with men, sexuality, abortions, what it meant to be oppressed as women. The room buzzed with our excitement and anger. Then we read and discussed Anne Koedt’s essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” My God, this was why fucking had been so uninspiring—I had a clitoris! My poor clitoris had been neglected on the myth that vaginal penetration automatically brings waves of bliss, and I had felt like a failure. It was a stunning example of a cultural lie that benefited a male-oriented sexuality. Our anger shone in us, a light that overcame depression and shame.
Our women’s group decided to confront the men about their domination of our mixed group meetings. As a result, a new policy was instituted: Before each discussion of reading material, each person got dealt two playing cards. When that person spoke, he or she would throw a card into the center. Each person had to use both cards, and no one could speak more than twice or for more than five minutes. In theory, I applauded us women having equal speech, but I took to speaking once briefly, and then slipping the second card underneath my buttock.
One night, we women went to the drive-in movie together. We had no cars among us, but we had discovered a low fence at the back of the local drive-in lot. After the movie started, it was easy to climb the hillock behind the movie field and clamber over the wood fence and sit on the strip of grass uphill from the parked cars. We couldn’t really hear, so one of us would make up zany dialogue and we’d all roar.
I leaned back on my elbows, my belly loose from laughing, smelling the sweet summer grass mixed with the acrid odor of cooling blacktop, the Iowa sky showering us with stars. I scanned the row of us silhouetted by the light cast back from the movie screen. We had all made identical shawls, crocheted loops of tan acrylic shaped into a V, and we were all wearing them: seven shawl-clad women looking like septuplets. My connection to these women amazed me. We had told each other everything, shared open-hearted revelations that intoxicated us with our newfound commonality. I had never before felt such a sense of belonging. Sisters, I whispered to myself. My sisters.
WHEN FREEDOM SCHOOL ended, I cried as I packed, knowing I would never see most of my Iowa friends again.
I went home to New Jersey to see my parents and gather some of my things before Kate and I headed for San Francisco. Mom was still pretty phobic about driving, so Dad met me at the Newark Airport and drove me to Mom’s. On the way, I spouted my newly acquired feminist rhetoric about male chauvinism and the unequal power dynamics between men and women. “I’m only going to have secondary relationships with men,” I ranted. “I will have my primary relationships with my sisters, with women!”
I glanced over at Dad; saw his hands gripping the wheel, his face clenched tight. Finally, he managed to sputter, “I hope this . . . this . . . phase . . . won’t last too long.”
WHILE I WAS AWAY, my mother had gotten her first job in several years. It was a tough, heartbreaking job, and I was amazed she could handle it: teaching remedial English composition to African American boys on the verge of dropping out of high school. My mother was still doing individual and group therapy, but I wanted her to go to women’s liberation meetings, where she could get support without the premise that there was something wrong with her. I’d tacked up the Manhattan number for Older Women’s Liberation on a bulletin board in the kitchen. So far, she’d ignored it.
I called her Gloria now. “No more dehumanizing, oppressive title of ‘Mom’!” I told her. Besides, we were Sisters, and I wanted to recognize her personhood. I started calling my dad by his name as well. “Hi, Abe, how ya doin’?” I’d say into the phone, as if he’d become someone else, and not quite my father.
For all my talk of sisterhood, when my mother was around, I didn’t pay much attention to her. I walked around humming “California Dreamin’.” I wrote in a journal that I had begun at Grinnell and mailed letters to the Freedom School women. More than anything, I needed not to focus too much on my mother, not to resume a role so familiar and deadly. My love for her was too fierce, too consuming, and I couldn’t afford it. My vision was turned from her, moving toward a life of my own.
Chapter 27. By the Bay
KATE AND I FLEW IN
TO the arms of sisterhood. Before leaving New Jersey, we’d called a women’s switchboard in San Francisco, so we boarded our flight with the name of a married woman who had volunteered to put up new women arrivals to the City of Love. In the Women’s Liberation Movement of 1970, it was as if a huge group of orphans had discovered their lost kin and were gleefully screaming, “Sister! Welcome!”
During the taxi ride to our hostess’s house in Diamond Heights, San Francisco Bay gleamed blue and wide like the new life spread before me. I vibrated with an excitement I couldn’t admit had fear laced through it. After thirteen years of school, there was no set structure to life. What would I make of it?
Ann, our benefactress and hostess on that first night, escorted us on the following morning to a three-story Victorian mansion in the ultra-rich neighborhood of Pacific Heights, poised on a hill looking down to the bay. Her friend Frances, in her forties, was renting out rooms in a home she shared with her husband, Paul, and two young daughters. Paul, an architect, had lost his job in a firm two years before and was still unemployed, so they had begun taking in boarders. Frances was totally involved in the Women’s Movement, and was filling the house with Women’s Liberation activists.
The room that was available had once been the master bedroom. It had the formality of an old-style upper-class world I’d seen only in movies: stained-glass windows bracketing the marble fireplace, a crystal chandelier, plush white carpeting, and heavy maroon velvet drapes. Nonetheless, the rent was cheap, and Kate and I decided to join the expanding household.
The first thing we did was to pull apart the double bed. We dragged the mattress onto the floor of the far corner and left the box spring sitting on its metal frame on the other side of the room. We flipped for who got to sleep on the mattress and who was stuck with the box spring. I was the loser.
WHAT HAD BEEN AN upscale nuclear-family home was now a countercultural collective household. The group pooled food money, $10 per week each, and we took turns shopping for our produce at the farmers’ market. Refrigerator magnets held two sets of chore wheels, one for household tasks, the other for dinner-cooking duty.
At night, twelve of us ate in the spacious living room, sitting on the floor around a low-slung marble coffee table or perched on the couches and stuffed chairs. Frances was an artist, and her large abstract oil paintings hung throughout the rooms above the oak wainscoting. On the sideboards were Chinese vases, and in a corner, a life-size wooden Buddha. Welcomed into this family, I felt as if I’d entered some avant-garde new age where the rich shared their lives with political activists.
The two daughters didn’t seem fazed by the change in their home. They burst in and out of the house, babbling with us all about their day. Paul disappeared for hours into his study, coming out for brief forays where he wandered around the house looking rather lost, but he gamely took his turn at cooking dinner, although it was always the same: hard-boiled egg and tuna salad sandwiches on whole wheat bread with carrot sticks on the side. Paul’s lost, sad way reminded me of my dad, and I felt a bit sorry for him.
On Friday nights, Gay Women’s Liberation met in the house. The one out lesbian in the household, Donna, a Texan in her late thirties, had invited them. The first Friday after moving in, I could hear murmurs and laughs from below. I knew I was going down there. Since I’d left Grinnell, I couldn’t imagine being lovers with men again—that seemed way too oppressive. Logic told me that left only two options: celibacy or lesbianism. It was an intellectual concept, because I wasn’t aware of any erotic feelings for women, but I was curious to sit in on the meeting. I waited until Kate went down first. I wanted to go separately, worried that people might assume we were lovers or, for that matter, assume I was a lesbian.
Fear made my legs heavy and weak, and I held on to the oak banister as I descended the staircase. I had never been in a room filled with lesbians before. As far as I knew, I had never met a lesbian. I couldn’t remember anyone ever saying anything about lesbians, but there must have been something half-heard and half-forgotten, because somehow I’d soaked up the culture’s disgust and repulsion. I thought I was too enlightened and progressive to be affected by such stereotypes, but lurking in the recesses of my mind were noxious images of bulldaggers—rough, swaggering women with slicked-back hair—rousing fear.
And then I was in the room. Sixty-some women were gathered: lively, laughing, all absorbed and facing the speaker in the front of the room. It was easy to unobtrusively slip in and sit on the floor at the back of the room. I looked around. The place was packed. Women were seated on the couches, chairs, and floor, spilling between the living and dining rooms; most were in their twenties, many with long straight hair, wearing bell-bottom jeans or green army surplus pants. Some were in hippie regalia of tie-dyed T-shirts or colorful Indian embroidered tunics laced with little mirrors; there was a smattering of girls in their late teens and older women in their thirties, forties, and fifties. An ex-nun in blue jeans and a flannel shirt was standing in the front of the room, telling her story of leaving the convent. Her tale was greeted with a wave of friendly laughter, as if the group were saying, Yes, yes, we hear you, sister!
I sat among the group and heaved a sigh of relief and joy. These were just women, wonderful women. Women who seemed vibrant and self-assured, laughing deep belly laughs. Many looked just like my feminist sisters from Freedom School. Many looked just like me.
ALTHOUGH MY FIRST meeting of Gay Women’s Liberation brought a startling recognition, I didn’t feel any sexual arousal for women, so it seemed impossible to really call myself a lesbian. I signed up for a one-afternoon course given by Breakaway, a grassroots feminist school, titled The Woman-Identified Woman.
We met in an actual classroom because the teacher, Bev, was a full-time professor at a community college. She wasn’t supposed to use her room for an outside meeting, but there we were. Bev, in her thirties, was, in my eyes, an older woman. Her dark hair was cut short around her ears, wire-rimmed glasses resting on her pale, angular face. She wore a white tailored shirt tucked into brown corduroy pants with a thick leather belt and heavy black work boots. Before she started her talk, Bev sat at her desk, tamping pipe tobacco into a pipe bowl, lit up, puffed deeply, and then stood to begin her talk, pipe in hand. The sweet scent of pipe tobacco filled the room.
The lecture began. “Because what uniquely identifies a woman as a lesbian is sexuality,” Bev explained, “society has defined lesbians solely as women who have sex with women. But this is too narrow,” she continued, waving her pipe as she spoke, “and misses the richness of lesbian experience. Let’s think about what are the aspects of being a lesbian.”
Bev moved to the blackboard and began writing a list in her neat script, each item given its own line. She’d write a line, then turn and repeat it while facing the class, scanning our faces with her brown eyes that seemed to me deeply intelligent. Along with each of Bev’s statements, a gong began ringing in my head.
“A lesbian is,” she intoned, “a woman who loves women.” Yep, that’s me.
“A woman who gets her primary emotional support from other women.” Another yep.
“A woman who shares intellectual ideas with other women.” Check.
“A woman whose life centers around women, whose daily passions are with women.” Check.
She kept going, my head nodding enthusiastically, until she got to the final point:
“A woman who has sex with another woman.” Well, nine out of ten. Close enough.
I left the class joyous. Permission given—I was a lesbian! Phooey on straight society’s narrow definition. Now I felt fortified, more sure that my woman-identified love would carry me along until I opened sexually.
During that afternoon, something else shifted in me: The disdain for manly women that I’d absorbed began to lift. Although Bev looked the stereotype of the old-style butch, I found her terribly handsome, beautiful in her confidence, compelling in the assured way she lit her pipe. She was so bright, so alive.
I could watch her forever.
A MONTH OR SO AFTER MY first Gay Women’s Liberation meeting, Kate and I both proclaimed ourselves lesbians. Neither of us had had any kind of sex with a woman, but that didn’t stop us, now that our nineteen-year-old bravado was filled with women-identified lingo.
The meetings began breaking into small discussion groups halfway through each session so that women could develop a stronger connection and share more. Kate and I joined a group of eight who were to become an ongoing unit. Both of us were vocal in our opinions. On the topic of coming out, we declared that women should deal very directly with parents and straight friends, something neither of us had yet done. When, after a few weeks, relationships and sexual experiences became the topic, we both had to admit we’d never had any. “What!” several members burst out. Group discussion grew heated: Was a woman a lesbian just because she said so, even if she’d never slept with another woman? Did we get to stay? Two women said they felt unsafe. I burned with embarrassment and I longed to slip out of the room. But by meeting’s end, votes for inclusiveness prevailed.
IT WAS A RELIEF WHEN AN attic suite became available and Kate and I could move out of the ornate master bedroom. The plainer room felt more fitting, with its sloped ceiling and bare wood walls and floor. Kate slept in the large main room, and I had my own turret alcove jutting out from one corner. With curved windows all around, the turret was like a bird’s aerie perched above San Francisco Bay. I loved that tiny space. Sleeping on my twin mattress on the floor, I felt wrapped in my own magical nest.