Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM

by Breanne Fahs

  “Valerie Solanas finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valerie’s life, including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUM lectures, Up Your Ass casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections to Majority Report, a continual emphasis from various sources on Valerie’s intelligence, radicalism, humor, comedic improv timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of her work dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system, and the patriarchal status quo.”

  —NATH ANN CARRERA, singer/musician

  “This compelling biography shows the complexity of Valerie Solanas, placing her in the context of so many later-twentieth-century cultural realities—the commodity explosion of the art world, nuclear family damage and dysfunction, emergent baby-boomer generation narcissism, and the complicated internal struggles of the feminist movement.”

  —CATHERINE MORRIS, Sackler Family Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

  “Valerie Solanas was an enigma, an outsider even among misfits, and one of the most shocking radicals in a decade teeming with them. Breanne Fahs’ book is a long overdue excavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanas’s visionary manifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol.”

  —CYNTHIA CARR, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

  Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  Text copyright © 2014 by Breanne Fahs

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First ebook edition April 2014

  First printing April 2014

  Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

  Text design by Drew Stevens

  Ebook design by Ellen Maddy

  Inside front/back cover:

  “Lies! Lies! Valerie Solanas.” This is a reproduction of Valerie Solanas’s handwriting on the 1971 copy of SCUM Manifesto housed in the collection at the New York Public Library. To sabotage the Olympia Press edition of SCUM and to protest unauthorized changes to her manifesto, she marked up her book with her own graffiti. For the full story, see Chapter 5.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  eISBN 978-155861-849-7 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-155861-848-0 (paperback)

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  SOUNDING OFF

  Atlantic City to New York City, 1936–1967

  SHOOTING

  SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars, 1967–1968

  PROVOCATION

  The Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism, 1968–1973

  MADNESS

  Of Mental Hospitals and Men, 1968–1974

  FORGETTING

  The Lost Years and Final Days, 1975–1988

  PHOTO INSERT

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  References

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  About the Press

  Also Available From the Feminist Press

  For G. Elmer Griffin,

  who cracked open the universe

  and

  for Eric Swank,

  for more than our share

  of la dolce vita

  Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

  —REBECCA WEST

  PREFACE

  We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. . . . I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

  TRACKING THE LIFE OF VALERIE SOLANAS, MUCH LIKE pursuing the movements of an invisible wolf, has led to many dead ends. Standing in the dusty, empty lots of downtown Phoenix, a place where Valerie once roamed the streets eating out of Dumpsters, digging a fork into her scab-filled arms, and howling at the moon, I stare at the silent mountains with a familiar mix of amusement, mourning, and awe. She’s dangerous, they still say, I won’t even talk to you until I see a death certificate.1

  In one of Valerie’s more paranoid phases near the end of her life, she insisted she would write a book called Valerie Solanas. It would provide the definitive account of her life, told by herself, and, she imagined, it would sell at least twenty million copies (with a one-hundred-million-dollar advance from the Mob). Valerie hated the idea of imperfection, of others representing her life and work, of errors to the official record of how things went down. At the same time that she believed a uterine transmitter had been implanted in her against her will, sending details of her movements and words to what she called the Mob, she also took the time to correct spelling and grammar errors in the feminist periodical Majority Report. Her misfire at Andy Warhol felt like a blow to her reputation. She went by an absolute standard, even as she slipped into deeper and deeper psychosis. The irony of now writing a book called Valerie Solanas that gives an “unauthorized” account of her life, offering up a text filled with the potential for error (and, of course, Valerie’s posthumous cosmic revenge) is not lost on me.

  Taking aim from the literal and metaphorical gutter, closing in on the power and audacity of those who prowled for thrills and never pandered for “Daddy’s” approval, Valerie wrote in her renowned, funny, and vitriolic SCUM Manifesto of women who had a SCUM state of mind: “Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around . . . and around and around . . . they’ve been the whole show—every bit of it . . . SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in the gutter of our ‘society,’ which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.”2 In Valerie’s world, the lowly, downtrodden, abject, forgotten, nasty women living in the shitpile would inevitably take over the world. SCUM has power. SCUM knows truth.

  Valerie saw things, knew things, sensed things far earlier than her contemporaries of the 1960s, giving her work a quality that is both beyond the pale and startlingly prescient. At a time before computers and Twitter, before sophisticated infertility treatments and 24/7 headline news, before no-fault divorce and marital rape laws, before punishable sexual harassment and antidiscrimination policies, she understood, somehow, the core of what would come to dominate modern American life. She sensed that constant surveillance would allow
unlimited access to the powerless from the powerful. She believed that men would continue to justify wars based on increasingly asinine reasons. She predicted test-tube babies and the ability to reproduce without the bodies of men. She forecasted the invention of Viagra (calling it her “perpetual hardness technique,” which would “render men manageable and easy to deal with”). The gender-bending romp she created in her 1965 play, Up Your Ass, featured characters that even the best of queer theorists cannot categorize or understand. She loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.

  Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of the founders of radical feminism, once reflected that for the visionaries and revolutionaries, they must ask, Just how far out can I get from the time and context in which I live?3 Just how far away could Valerie get from a context in which women wore strings of pearls, married in their early twenties, renounced sex before marriage, and lived out scenes from Mad Men in real time? Just how much distance could she create between herself and a cultural context that trivialized, insulted, and ignored women, particularly successful, ambitious, intelligent women? Certainly, this distance, embodied most brilliantly in the SCUM Manifesto, made Valerie far more dangerous than the .22 Colt revolver or .32 Beretta automatic she wielded when she strode into the Factory and shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968.

  There is something about the SCUM Manifesto. Its brashness, its vivid, startling anger, its outrageous humor and wit, its uncanny insights and truth. It has a one-of-a-kind tone, never replicated by anyone. In an undergraduate college course I teach on manifestos, I ask students to write their own manifesto and they often stare up at me in panic, not knowing how to find that voice, a voice like Valerie’s. That she could carry such force, hurl such obscenities, take us right to the edge and then shove, serves as a testament to the power of Valerie Solanas. That she wrote SCUM Manifesto on rooftops, banged it out on an old typewriter she carried around in lieu of more reasonable items like clothes and toiletries, makes it all the more poetic. Valerie loved her words, her works. The story of Valerie’s life, more than anything, is a story of her relationship to the manifesto. From its start in the mid-1960s, when she bragged to her father about writing it, until her final documented conversation in November 1987, when she pleaded with Warhol “stupidstar” Ultra Violet to get a copy of it from the Washington, DC copyright office, SCUM Manifesto played a central role in how Valerie understood, and spoke to, the world. As librarian Donny Smith wrote in The History of Zines, her manifesto, like Valerie herself, “has never found a comfortable place. . . . Sometimes it’s a feminist classic, sometimes a marginal tract, a cult classic, a rant, man-hating, anti-feminist, surrealist, anarcho-socialist, utopian, apocalyptic.”4

  In the growing accounts of 1960s counterculture, amid the piles of theory and mythology amassing about Valerie’s life, where does she belong? How does one tell a story about someone like Valerie, someone whose life is entrenched in myth and imbued with seemingly bottomless emotional energy? I set out over a decade ago—long after Valerie’s death—to write the story of Valerie Solanas. I got my first copy of SCUM Manifesto in 1999 from a friend who had returned from studying abroad in Paris, where she had heard a lecture by the prominent French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In this lecture, Derrida had pulled out a copy of the manifesto from his briefcase, praising it as necessary, somehow, to the intellectual history of women. My first reading of SCUM Manifesto transformed something in me, too, for in the midst of studying critical theory, I had found someone with no regard for the academic canon, no apologies for her reckless humor and wild destruction. Later, as a graduate student in clinical psychology and women’s studies, I searched for more of her story but could find only small pieces of it.

  Hers, I believe, is the best kind of story, told through a pile of fragments and trash: dusty, lefty zines like Holy Titclamps and DWAN, transcripts of conversations now twenty years old, news clippings, DIY art mags, Hollywood scripts, material from a coroner’s office, half-recorded answering-machine messages, discussions in cat-filled apartments, blurred photos, YouTube videos, narratives from shaky memories, phone calls, missing files, consciousness-raising rants of radical feminists, browning letters and postcards, Library of Congress copyright registries, run-ins with the Warhol elite, notes from meetings in now-demolished diners, posters featuring the middle finger, long-forgotten pamphlets and newsletters. After all, Valerie, of all people, truly appreciated and yearned for knowledge from scum, seeing truth only in the gutters and landfills, in the sludge and the muck, in the abject, forgotten, broken pieces left behind by the more reasonable, affluent world. SCUM, she said, “is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs.”5

  This biography of her life—a life that many have labeled a sheer impossibility (Valerie was homeless! She had twenty different names! Her mother burned all her belongings! She was dangerous!)—contextualizes the bigger societal stories surrounding Valerie and her writings. It is a story that stands at the crossroads of many things. As a story of violence, it accounts for the traumas of an individual girl and a woman who detected a spirit of collective anguish. As a story of madness, it weaves in and out of the horrors of psychosis, the difficulty of diagnosis, the impossibility of reason, and the institutions that trap and release so many of our heroes. As a story of art, it returns, again, to the question of how one’s life speaks to one’s work and how the deftly cool and calculating Andy collided with the hot-tempered and fiery Valerie. Finally, as a story of truth, it demands a consideration of the “shit we have to go through in this world just to survive,” calling forth, across the time and space of the last four decades, a reckoning.6

  —Breanne Fahs

  SOUNDING OFF

  Atlantic City to New York City

  1936–1967

  “Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?” (I don’t say it’s for carfare, unless they ask; the preciousness of my time demands brevity.)

  “What do I get for fifteen cents?”

  “How ’bout a dirty word?”

  “That’s not a bad buy. Ok, here. Now give me the word.”

  “Men.”

  —Valerie Solanas, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class”

  VALERIE HAS BEEN CALLED MANY THINGS: “A GLITCH, a mistake,” “an outcast among outcasts,” “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights,” “the Robespierre of feminism,” “Andy Warhol’s feminist nightmare,” “a female Lenny Bruce, created and destroyed by a truth most of us can’t face or joke about,” “a radical feminist Jean Genet,”“a woman who looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time.”1 One of Valerie’s close friends, Jeremiah Newton, said simply, “She believed in something. She believed in herself. I thought that was admirable. In an era when people didn’t believe in themselves and bullshitted or wanted to believe in other people, she believed in herself and she was so sure one day the world would discover her and she would have the fame that she so richly deserved. That’s how she felt.”2

  In her 1966 introduction to her play, Up Your Ass (which figured in her actions two years later, when she shot and nearly killed pop superstar Andy Warhol at his New York City “Factory”), she wrote: “I dedicate this play to ME a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion and faith this play would never have been written. additional acknowledgements: Myself-for proof-reading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions and an exquisite job of typing. I—for independent research into men, married women and other degenerates.”3 Valerie insisted on her own telling, her own writing, and her self-reliance. She believed in two kinds of people: the “originators” and the “interpreters,” that is, those who created ideas and those who talked about the ideas others created.4 Such a philosophy lent itself to long stretches of isolation; her existence as an outcast defined her—from her early days as an out lesbian in Maryland’s Oxon Hill Hi
gh School to panhandling and engaging in prostitution on the streets of New York, from her nearly decade-long confinement in mental hospitals on charges of insanity to her final days of living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.

  And yet for all of Valerie’s aloneness and withdrawl from the world, she managed to write the most widely produced document from late 1960s radical feminism—SCUM Manifesto. By many accounts, and despite Valerie’s frank aversion to communal social movements, she inadvertently inspired the radical feminist movement after her shooting of Andy Warhol fractured the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968. Further, she continues to provoke feminists and nonfeminists alike to react to her work, ideas, anger, rage, and symbolic persona, with piles of academic articles and chapters theorizing about her identity continuing to grow. Nearly everyone who knew her personally felt that she had an incessant intensity and markedly unique sense of humor; they also recounted stories of how she betrayed, humiliated, embarrassed, or otherwise violated them. She threatened to throw acid in the faces of her friends, called men “walking dildos,” shot a person who had some at least marginal sympathy for her, and accused many people of stealing her ideas and plagiarizing her words. Even those on the fringe found her excessive, impolite, difficult, and long winded. Jo Freeman, longtime radical feminist and women’s rights advocate, told me frankly, “Valerie should be forgotten.”5 And, for the most part, she has been forgotten. Or distorted. Or lost in the dust pile of (feminist?) history. As such, this telling of her life is a version composed only of fragments, shards, remnants, whispers, truths bubbling up, old memories, scribbles, and trash. It is necessarily partial and in pieces, a collection of SCUM, SCUM, and scum.

  EARLY FAMILY LIFE (1936–1953)