LAURA J. MERRELL’S response to my review of Beyond Shame, by Patrick Moore, in the January-February 2005 issue of this journal was in several ways so strangely unmeasured a rejoinder—half the length of my entire review—that I felt that it deserved attention and response.
In her letter Merrell wrote: “Picano is not the first man who I have heard expressing the opinion that the problems of lesbians are nothing compared to those of gay men.” I defy anyone to find that in my review. She also wrote: “He is however the first to complain that women can only rise in the playing field when men forfeit the game.” I wrote no such complaint, and “forfeiting” is a strangely voluntary way to explain dying of the AIDS plague, although I did repeat what two women in Moore’s book reportedly said on that particular subject. The only people I did go after, a point that Merrell ignored totally, were younger gay men, whom I felt have let Gay Liberation die.
On the other hand I did write something that I believe brought on Merrell’s strong overreaction. Here’s the sentence:
A pretty bland remark for such a lengthy and passionate rejoinder, you would think. Except that inside my bland little statement is a piece of not exactly hidden GLBT history that Ms. Merrell was canny enough to recognize. In truth, it’s one of those pieces of our history that we seldom speak about today, so if you were not present at the time, you would have never even known it happened. In short, it’s another of what I call the conveniently accepted lies of gay history—along with the enormously touted, rainbow-wide origins of early gay liberation (a total myth) and the supposed effeminacy of early gay male life before the big bad “clones” came along (another, sadder myth)—that I addressed in these pages a while back.
Like those convenient yet until now accepted lies, this lie has not so much been advanced by any particular group or faction as it has been allowed to happen, allowed to insinuate itself into our shared past—all for the sake of GLBT unity, which is the reason most often evoked when our history is distorted in this way. The lie is that gays and lesbians have been fully united since the onset of the gay liberation movement right through today; that, despite many minor disagreements, in general we’ve always played nicely together.
That’s certainly the way it seems to be now. But then, what do we do with the reality of the six- or seven-year period beginning in the mid-1970’s, when a large portion of out lesbians—many of the intellectuals and the most important leaders—actively abandoned the GLBT movement, some never to return, others coming back, as Merrell said she did, to help friends dying of AIDS, with others keeping their distance for decades, sometimes returning again briefly later to receive an award or honor?
Because that’s exactly what did happen at the time, and attempting to cover up or whitewash this truth isn’t going to make it go away. However, looking at it realistically may actually teach us something crucial about the built-in gender tensions of our movement, not only in the past but as it is at present and where it seems to be headed.
To this day, there are gay men and gay women of my generation who will have nothing to do with each other socially, who work together only when forced to, who then fight each other vigorously, who actively undermine each other in work and in organizations large and small, and who, when asked about each other, will say things like “Never trust a dyke” or “No fags: I don’t care how much money or connections they have.” (Luckily, for me, this deep gender enmity that seems to be part of our movement’s history runs counter to most of my own experiences. I’ve always had close women friends, straight and gay, and at least one lesbian thinks of me as a “brother” and I think of her as a “sister.”)
What has to be admitted first is that most, if not all, of these lesbians felt they had a damned good reason to leave their gay brothers behind in the mid and late 1970’s. And if the same choice came along again today, they’d have as valid a reason to do it again.
Patriarchal culture seems to have taken an even firmer and more authoritarian hand today. Despite some advances in some limited areas in this country, women continue to face glass ceilings in work, health care, health research, sports, finances, and even the arts. Men’s clubs have as tight a grasp on what counts as power in the U.S. as ever before. And the number of American breast cancer victims should be a national outrage. In the rest of the world, the situation is far worse. As Sembrene Oumene’s film Moolade shows, compulsory cliterodectomy is practiced by millions. In recent television interviews in allegedly U.S./U.N.-liberated Afghanistan, women insisted they must wear the full covering of burquas to “feel safe”—from what or whom they didn’t say, presumably from all men. In northern Mexico, young women are being murdered at an alarming rate year after year with no apparent police intervention.
Back in the 1970’s lesbians joined the National Organization of Women at a time when that growing coalition seemed to be gathering considerable power and exercising real strength. NOW was for many women the clear Tide of History. Under the leadership of women like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and with the intellectual support of popular and respected writers like Marilyn French, Kate Millet, June Jordan, Francine du Plessix Gray, and Erica Jong, the women’s liberation movement of the mid-70’s became one of the crucial political causes of the second half of the century.
Popular films and books of the time seemed to support women’s liberation, and soon many discriminatory laws at the local, state, and even federal levels began to be repealed or counteracted by new legislation. The jewel in the crown, of course, was Roe v. Wade, which gave women back the right to their own bodies in the matter of childbirth. The end of the decade was an especially heady time for women in their fight for equality. NOW’s decision to seek a constitutional amendment to make these changes federally mandated and thus eternal seemed to be only natural. What American could dispute something called the Equal Rights Amendment?
Many, though not all, gay women joined this Wave of the Future. It scooped up most particularly the activists, intellectuals, artists, northerners, easterners, professionals, and academicians. Lesbians of the western, central, and southern U.S. were a bit less likely to be swept away by NOW. In her 1999 autobiography, Tales of the Lavender Menace, Karla Jay, a member of the Gay Libation Front from the beginning, documents the enthusiasm for NOW and the ERA that animated many women at the time.
Some gay men also supported women’s liberation, especially the ERA, and showed up at marches and protests on behalf of women’s issues. Gay men already familiar with strategies from the 1960’s Civil Rights, antiwar, and gay liberation movements marched and picketed alongside their sisters. Contemporary photos show many mustached and bearded guys in tight jeans and bomber jackets (the “clone” look) present at these actions. For me and my male friends, these events were high-spirited fun for a good cause. And women’s protests seldom brought out the truly dangerous loonies we were familiar with from other marches. It was a wonderful and hopeful time.
However, certain changes began to creep into relations between lesbians and gay males as a result of the growth of NOW. My own first sign of how this could manifest itself occurred at the 1979 New York City Gay Pride Parade, at that time the largest and most politically influential in the country. As I was supposed to be onstage, my partner and I marched near the front of the parade and arrived early for the Central Park rally. Like most of the speakers, I was onstage when our rally leaders, Vito Russo and Bette Midler, got there, the latter without her tape or amplifying equipment, which was still on its way uptown. People from the parade were pouring into the area when the last speaker, Sylvia Rivera, came onstage dressed in her usual Puerto Rican hooker’s summer outfit. Even back then, Sylvia loudly—with no proof I ever received—proclaimed her status as one of the customers at the Stonewall Bar on the night of its historic riot. As Sylvia, with her bad complexion and execrable make-up, reached the stage, two women who were already there leapt up and began pushing Sylvia off. “This is a travesty to all women,” they loudly declared in microphone range. Sylvia, a tough street hustler, pushed back. Minutes later everyone was asked to leave the stage. While we stood backstage and the women yelled and Sylvia yelled and Vito tried to shout them down and sort out the problem, Better Midler saved the day by taking the mike and loudly singing, a cappella, a large part of her repertoire, drowning out much of the nearby noise to a perplexed if delighted crowd of marchers as they entered.
The result was that the two lesbians refused to be part of the rally, and left. They also demanded that the other women who were to be part of the on-stage event also leave, which they did. They quickly found a hillside mike set up for audience members, which they briefly commandeered and from which they loudly exhorted all the lesbians in the crowd to leave. Since most had just arrived after a five-mile hike, this did not happen. Sylvia also left the rally, and after a short while, disgusted, so did my partner and I.
Some friends of mine later discussed what had happened. Some concluded that it was an oddity and that the two irate lesbians were exercising newfound female power, even as they were trouncing Sylvia’s rights, while others concluded it was a single incident, an aberration. Within weeks of that incident, through Vito Russo I heard that unofficially the leadership of NOW completely supported the women who’d left the stage, saying that women everywhere had been subjected to the indignity of being mocked by Rivera and transgendered people. They also suggested that women had no role in what was essentially a gay male movement. Not cheering words.
Not long after that, Manhattanites were treated to a new arm of NOW’s growing power—Women Against Pornography (WAP). Most of us who heard about the group were okay with it and with NOW’s official line that pornography objectified and degraded women. Which it did. But then we were exposed to WAP’s displays in New York’s midtown street corners on workday lunch hours. Pairs of women would hand out leaflets advocating that all pornography be censored—even depictions in which no women were involved. I watched as several gay men questioned the women. All porn? they asked. Yes, all porn. Even when it involves underweight forty-year-old men, who could never be mistaken for women? Yes, they were told: pornography itself was the target.
Then there were the three-by-five-foot photographic blow-ups that the pairs of protesters would display on street corners for all to see. Extracted from subscription-only or under-the-counter magazines, they featured women horribly bound and gagged, their bodies contorted beyond belief, and they were sickening. They were beyond any possibility of erotica except for a very tiny minority of sick heterosexuals. I heard one teenage girl telling the women, “You’re exposing me to that for the first time. Aren’t you as bad as the original pornographers?” No, the team of women declared, since they were showing it for educational and political reasons. This tactic was short-lived, lasting only (I later heard) until NOW found itself being sued for lewd public exhibits, and WAP quietly ceased such public displays.
Within a month I found myself on a panel in Boston, allegedly to discuss “Meaning in GLB Literature,” but it turned into a confrontation between gay men and women. I was pretty bored by the proceedings and not paying that much attention, until—in response to a typical boast of the extent of his recent sexual activities by writer/activist Scott O’Hara—a woman panelist declared: “Well, we all know that gay males are women’s worst enemies. Worse than even straight men.” Over the next year virtually every public meeting of gays and lesbians that I attended took this theme and developed it. At a literary panel at a college in central Massachusetts, I learned from a lesbian panelist that “gay men want all women dead—except, of course, the tiny percentage they wish to retain enslaved as baby making machines, so they’ll have another generation to molest.”
Lesbians began abandoning the gay movement both privately and publicly. Some, like Adrienne Rich (in her essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality”), said it was about time, it had to happen; lesbians had little in common with gay men anyway, as the latter had been subverted by the larger male capitalist culture, had no interest in women’s rights—or anything other than having as much sex with each other as possible. It reached a bizarre kind of a climax when Andrea Dworkin declared on a stage in New York (and later on TV, when being interviewed by Mike Wallace) that all women were victimized every time any male on the planet had an orgasm. Some men, including her husband John Stoltenberg, supported Dworkin in her radical feminist views. Wherever she, Rich, and a handful of other prominent women appeared, they enjoined their sisters to flee from the “danger of gay male culture” as fast and as completely as possible.
Many women heeded this call and steered clear of gay men for decades. What changed this situation was that the Equal Rights Amendment, having come within a hair’s breadth of being ratified by the requisite 38 states, began to lose steam and to be voted down in the remaining states. Anti-NOW women like Phyllis Schlafly, mere gadflies up to this point, emerged and were found to represent the thinking of many women in the U.S. who did not support NOW or the ERA.
In a panic to counteract this backlash, the leaders of NOW began to distance themselves from the group’s lesbian elements, with Betty Friedan publicly calling lesbian members a “lavender menace” (a phrase that forms the title of Karla Jay’s memoir about this era). The lesbian wing of NOW was denounced as having its own agenda and was “asked” to leave the organization. The real reason for this was to deprive NOW’s enemies of ammunition against the ERA, and the departing lesbians were assured privately that their sacrifice would now guarantee the passage of the Amendment. But it never made it through another state legislature before its time limit expired, so the ERA withered on the vine.
Of course, even before this historic betrayal, many women refused to support the rift with gay men, even though they were constantly being pressured by their peers to do so. Among them were the lesbian owners of the Manhattan bookstore Three Lives & Company, who were more interested in good writing than in politics. But in general it became increasingly difficult to gather a mixed-gender gay and lesbian group together for any cultural event. Aware of this, my partners at the Gay Presses of New York—Terry Helbing and Larry Mitchell—and I did a special outreach to women, and within a few years we published several important books by lesbians, including a first translation of Renée Vivien’s stories, Woman of the Wolf, and all the plays, poetry, and fiction of Jane Chambers. We also rescued the path-breaking anthologies, Lesbian Fiction and Lesbian Poetry, edited by Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin, whose would-be publisher, a feminist press, had gone bankrupt (though we distributed the books under the defunct press’s logo without taking any credit ourselves). We also lost several important lesbian authors and projects, even some under contract, when those authors felt coerced by their peers to publish only at a feminist press.
To be sure, some of this earlier generation of lesbians were on hand when the AIDS epidemic broke out and were wonderfully active in helping. Most of the women of act-up, however, were lesbians born a decade or more later. Most had never joined NOW and felt actively excluded from the organization. It was women like these—Ann Northrop, Sarah Schulman, Jenifer Levin, Lesléa Newman, Amber Hollibaugh, among others—who forged a new connection between lesbians and gay men. Be it noted that from 1982 to 1988, gay men in positions of power and influence were dying in such great numbers that, if lesbians hadn’t stepped in, most of the organizations and institutions that continue to operate today would have collapsed.
WHERE DOES THAT leave us now? Many analysts, with the usual 20/20 hindsight, have said that the first generation of mostly gay male activists failed the GLBT movement, if only by failing to stay alive. On the other hand, the agendas furthered by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), and their immediate successors do seem to be moving forward today, three decades later, if somewhat haphazardly. The decriminalization of homosexual activities by state, local, and federal governments is steaming ahead on a variety of fronts. Last year’s Supreme Court ruling was a truly significant victory in this area.
But the issues that have emerged as the most urgent ones for our movement in recent years are same-sex marriage and gay participation in the military. Rightly or wrongly, these are often perceived as “lesbian issues”; at any rate, they are not ones that were deemed important by the early male leaders of the GAA and GLF. Other matters like adoption and child rearing are also thought by many gay males to be women’s issues. On the other hand, the liberationist positions of the early gay male leaders are deeply buried today, because talk of free sex is apparently embarrassing or discomfiting to many lesbians. Laura Merrell’s reference to gays “getting torn to pieces at the Mineshaft” is typical. The few times I visited the Mineshaft, I saw a great deal of S/M “theatre” and very little real action—and I was looking for torture to write about. For the real thing, I had to go around the corner to the heterosexual Hell Fire Club.
Do gay men and lesbians really have the same needs and problems, and are there solutions that are good for both? After forty years of being openly gay I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know it’s time for us to start asking this question all over again.
Felice Picano, whose novel Dryland’s End has recently been republished, is the co-author of a new edition of The Joy of Gay Sex.
