AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS as an activist for the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, Marcia Gallo started graduate school at the City University of New York, working with Martin Duberman and other luminaries at the center for lesbian and gay studies. Ten years later, at the age of 55, Marcia has published the results of her research, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Carroll & Graf).
The DOB was the first lesbian organization in the U.S., founded by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San Francisco in 1955. Taking its name from the lesbian-themed “Songs of Bilitis” by French poet Pierre Louÿs, the DOB would soon start publishing a monthly magazine, The Ladder, which helped organize a national lesbian readership and eventually a political movement. Gallo’s book, which is the first full-length history of the DOB, is based on the author’s intensive archival research and interviews with surviving members of the group.
I conducted this interview with Marcia in my apartment in Manhattan in November 2006.
— Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman: It was fascinating to discover in your book that the first lesbian organization was interracial from the first day.
Marcia Gallo: There were interracial couples in DOB so white women were dealing with women of color on an intimate level. It was always a struggle. Some of them tried really hard to ensure interracial involvement and some of them didn’t, but the consciousness was there. Which was one of the reasons I fell in love with these folks. I think that the idea of racial discrimination was very well understood on a gut level; it wasn’t theoretical. They were influenced by people like Eleanor Roosevelt and A. Philip Randolph. They paid attention to racial struggles. They borrowed from the Civil Rights Movement over and over again.
But, if you actually read The Ladder, it’s not there. They took on race only as an example of a way for lesbians and gay men to assert their claims for equal rights. So, you don’t see stories about the March on Washington per se, you see references to learning from the Civil Rights Movement. They were the first to put women of color on the cover, but only three or four times in fourteen years. And the one African-American president of DOB—in 1963 she was the first person of color to lead a gay or lesbian civil rights group, so far as I know—remained pretty low-key. So, fifty years of trying to deal with racism on a personal as well as organizational level. But that they struggled is what was so fascinating to me. Not that they were righteous—they would engage in these critical conversations about practice as well as politics, about racism, about separatism versus working with men, about trans issues.
SS: As you point out, DOB chapters were often thirty to forty women at best. What is the role of vanguardism in lesbian history?
MG: It’s hard for us to figure out our leadership issues, how we feel about leaders and who gets to be a leader. When Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first gay couple in San Francisco to get married, it was because they had created DOB. They founded the first lesbian organization, and they are renowned for that. When I was interviewing for the book, it was hard to find people who would criticize them publicly. Privately, of course, they are just human, but publicly they’re celebrities. Not only did they help start DOB but they stayed with it for many, many years, and they are the ones who are most associated with it. Every movement has people like that.
SS: And how do straight people view them?
MG: They got international, instantaneous press coverage. Their wedding was covered by USA Today.
SS: What type of person becomes a lesbian vanguardist?
MG: Butch. Except for Phyllis! Clearly someone really strong. Very intelligent, actually. Early on, in 1959, DOB did a survey and found that most of its members had been to college. This is the 50’s! They were really off the charts in comparison to the number of average women who had gone to college. They had also moved away from home. Strong, intelligent, independent at a young age. Used to being on one’s own. Very political, interested in the world of politics. Most of my sources were ACLU members their whole lives. Interested in civil liberties, issues of equity, sort of “American ideals.” They were not Harry Hay; they were not about a different system. They wanted this system to live up to its promises.
SS: So, they believed that they could reform the system.
MG: Which is why they pushed for integration, even while they were a separatist entity. They all really loved to have a good time. They loved to be social, they loved to drink and dance. But even the women around the country liked ideas and debates. They weren’t careerists. They worked at a variety of jobs, from secretary to teacher to engineering.
SS: So they could excel in lesbian politics in a way they were not allowed to excel in other realms.
MG: Yes, it was their arena for power.
SS: I disagree with Lillian Faderman’s comments in Lambda Book Report, in her review of your book, that The Ladder was not a strong influence on lesbian–feminist culture. What about Barbara Grier, “the granny queer” as she used to call herself. After editing The Ladder for DOB, she went on to create Naiad Books, which provided the primary income for women’s bookstores for years and inspired a lot of women’s publishing. And she inspired many lesbians to write. She published my first book.
MG: Barbara Grier is very charming, really funny. She has a great sense of humor. I had heard so much about “that Grier woman” that it became really important to get her side of the story. I don’t agree with her action of taking The Ladder from the Daughters, but I have come to understand, from her point of view, why she severed The Ladder from DOB and stole their mailing list. In fact, Jeanne Cordova also “divorced” The Lesbian Tide a few years later, taking it from DOB, but handling it completely differently. But Barbara Grier was involved from 1957 on. As literary editor of The Ladder, there are some issues where she is half the issue at least, in terms of letters to the editor, editorials, and book reviews under all these different names. She’s an interesting character. She said she wasn’t an organizational person, more of a lone wolf.
SS: Your book is engrossing and fun to read, and strangely one of the very few histories of the movement to come from the academy. Gay and lesbian studies have not emphasized the community in the way that African-American studies have. Why is that?
MG: First, there are very few gay and lesbian historians. Many do theory, literature, art, and performance. There are more lesbian histories if you go back to the 18th and 19th centuries.
SS: In recent years, so many important people have died. Gloria Anzaldúa. Tee Corrine just passed away. Arlene Raven. People who are not known, but they changed the world. They never got stamped in history, and now they’re gone. What are some of the subjects in contemporary lesbian history that need attention?
MG: I’ve been steeped in the 1950’s. Okay, you know, for all her complexity, Mary Jane Meeker is a very interesting character. She had at least four pseudonyms, was an award winning youth, adult, and mystery writer.
SS: And she has the Patricia Highsmith angle.
MG: Yes, she’s very savvy, she used a pseudonym to become her own agent. I’m fascinated by pre-60’s feminism. Valerie Taylor is another fascinating woman. She was disabled, she has that middle-American heartland background. She’s Jewish. She has one heroine who survives a concentration camp, moves to Illinois and lives with this family in a community where all the women are sleeping together. It’s called Return to Lesbos. She was active in peace stuff and died pretty much penniless. Another is a woman named Pearl Hart, an activist lawyer and founder of the National Lawyers Guild. Loved showgirls. But also got involved with Valerie Taylor. She was an advisor to all the early gay groups and helped people deal with police abuse.
SS: Well, I’ve always been interested in Kitty Genovese [whose 1964 attack and murder in Queens was witnessed by many people but not reported to the police].
MG: That’s my next project!
SS: You’re kidding?
MG: That’s my next project.
SS: When I was a gay kid, there was an older woman named Sonny Wainwright who died of cancer. She had written an autobiography. And when I was about twenty, Sonny said “Kitty Genovese was a lesbian. That’s why they let her die!”
MG: When I grew up in Delaware, Kitty Genovese was very important to me. She represented the limits of what a woman could do. You could not be out at 3 am. You could not drive a sports car—she had a red sports car—because if you did and someone attacked you, no one was going to help you. Later, in 2004, the fortieth anniversary of the murder, there was a story in Newsday where the reporter revealed that her partner is still alive and was waiting for Kitty to come home. There is one little reference in the Times story, about a “roommate,” but then it was dropped. Kitty Genovese was the perfect victim; she was like an outline on the sidewalk. Everyone knows her name, but no one knows anything about her. She’s known for her death.
SS: To what extent is the queer academy interested in serving the community?
MG: The historians and scholars I have learned from—Marty Duberman, John d’Emilio, Blanche Cook, Lillian Faderman, Estelle Freedman, and others—do talk about serving the community. Often where the academy does connect with the community is in the classroom. Especially places like CUNY, community colleges. I couldn’t over-theorize if I wanted to in my classroom. So, you have to be kind of real with folks. And it’s not dumbing down, it’s about connecting with people where they are prepared to connect. I showed The Celluloid Closet, which still works, last week in my class at Lehman (CUNY), and I showed Fire. There was a little undercurrent of uncomfortableness for the women and for the men, but at the end the class erupted in applause. So, I see change happening. My students all favor gay marriage. They all favor the ability of gays to be together, but the question that still causes trouble is adoption.
Before I went to graduate school, I was an organizer, which is how I met Del and Phyllis. I worked for the ACLU. I remember how much I hated it when people who worked in the academy talked about teaching as activism. I mean, they had a captive audience who needed a grade, they had summers off. That’s not activism. Now, I still think that it’s over-stated, but I do understand it a little bit more when you watch people’s attitudes change and their minds open up. Although it’s not automatically constructing a group effort to make big changes.
SS: I love your perspective: you’re writing about regular people who changed the world, and asking about their various relationships to power. This is how a few generations of lesbians and feminists were trained to think. Yet, in the contemporary moment, this point of view is most often mocked. If you think of dominant cultural characterizations of a lesbian perspective, asking who has the power is considered to be a drag, humorless, ideological, special interest, instead of as an organic, enlightened point of view.
MG: Feminism is still subversive. It’s still scary. Feminism means humanity is moving forward and addressing inequalities. And that women lead. Independent women who do not need men for their emotional, physical, and economic well being are scary still—even those of us who love men. I think that the fact that we strive to be independent is frightening because we challenge all the paradigms. When we’re at our best, we challenge the way power gets constructed. We challenge how knowledge is transmitted. We are just too powerful, too uncontrollable, too queer.
Sarah Schulman’s tenth book, The Child, a novel, will be published in June by Carroll & Graf.
