KARLA JAY is a lesbian organizer, writer, and educator whose activism goes back to the period immediately following the Stonewall Riots. A professor of English at Pace University in New York City for many years, her political involvement dates back to her years at Barnard College in the late 1960s.
Indeed it was her involvement in the antiwar movement—and the male-supremacist attitudes that she observed—that first awakened her feminist anger and radicalism. In 1969 she joined the group Redstockings, which is where she came out as a lesbian. Later that same year, the Stonewall Riots blew up and Jay joined the newly forming Gay Liberation Front. Still active in feminist organizations, which were trying to exclude lesbians at this time, she participated in the formation of a group called the Lavender Menace as a protest, and would later publish a book titled Tales of the Lavender Menace (1999).
Other published works by Jay include 1972’s Out of the Closets, co-edited with Allen Young, an anthology of essays by writers and activists; two books about the lives and careers of writers Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien; and several anthologies giving voice to living gay and lesbian writers. In addition to her teaching career, she has continued to speak out for LGBT equality over the years. Her role in the Stonewall era was recognized by Martin Duberman in his 1993 book Stonewall, in which Jay is featured as one of four exemplars of the movement’s early organizers.
This interview was conducted via “e-mail rally” between Ms. Jay and The G&LR.
The Gay & Lesbian Review: Let me start with a question about your whereabouts in 1969 and 1970. Your piece in our collection In Search of Stonewall is titled “L.A. Spring, 1970” and concerns a whirl of events on the West Coast. However, you’re a New Yorker whose activism has mostly taken place in that city, correct? Can you locate yourself in time and space during the riots of June 1969 and in the year that followed?
Karla Jay: Like many young people of my generation, in 1969 I was caught up in the heady activism of the times: Civil Rights and anti-war demonstrations. The sexism of many of the men on the Left was disgusting. Some Leftist men at a counter-inaugural rally against President Richard M. Nixon clamored for feminist Marilyn Webb to be pulled off the stage and raped! Many women became feminists. I joined a Marxist group called Redstockings. They had coined the slogan “The Personal is Political” and developed consciousness-raising groups to analyze women’s oppression as a class. Actions and speak-outs focused most commonly on educating the public, legislators, and television audiences (through zaps—that is, takeovers of live TV shows) about abortion and the unconscionable and large-scale sterilization—usually without any consent—of African-American and Native American women. We believed in decriminalization—we did not want to be “legalized” and regulated by the state. The right of women to control our own reproduction lies at the heart of LGBT liberation as well. Who has the right to determine what we do with our bodies?
The feminist movement, however, was generally homophobic, and, as a lesbian, my sexual preference wasn’t considered political—it was just “personal.” The leaders didn’t want to discuss women’s relations with other women; they wanted to understand men better and hopefully find a more liberated one as a husband. So lesbians like myself hid in the closet and knew that queers were not welcome in Leftist groups in general. The lives of Bayard Rustin and David McReynolds [two gay postwar activists whose focus was largely on non-gay issue], for instance, make this point all too clearly.
By June 1969, I was fully engaged in Women’s Liberation and also attending NYU part-time as a graduate student as well as working full-time during the day. I heard about the Stonewall Riots on WBAI (Pacifica) radio and didn’t know what to make of them. Bar raids were not infrequent, and the threat of raids was a commonplace risk of being a lesbian.
I went down to the Village to see what was happening. It was quiet when I got there, police barricades were up, and a sign in the window of the Stonewall Inn advised people to keep calm and go home. Lots of people were milling about, but I kept my eye on the Tactical Police Force with their helmets and batons, as I knew their ferocity from when they took back the Columbia University campus from protestors in April 1968.
I returned home and thought: soon gay men will be heading off to Fire Island for the Fourth of July, and that will be the end of the protests. But something different happened. I heard about the Gay Liberation Front [GLF] forming with a goal, in part, of ending raids—indeed, mafia-controlled bars themselves. When I went to my first meeting that summer at Alternate U. (a Leftist organization near the Village), I felt I had found my family at last—women, men, and trans people, many of whom shared my ideal of a liberated world for all.
After that, I was busy with both Redstockings and the GLF. I was involved in more actions, such as protests against the Miss America Pageant (the protest was annual, not just once), an anti-harassment action on Wall Street that I organized, and the takeover of the Ladies Home Journal offices. In conjunction with the GLF, I did things like picket The New York Times and other publications that wouldn’t print the word “gay,” helped organize and run dances (including the first women’s dance), and started planning the first Pride march for June 1970, which would commemorate the Stonewall uprising. It is because of this march, first proposed by Ellen Broidy, Arlene Kisner, Lois Hart, and Craig Rodwell, among others, that we remember the Stonewall, and not one of the many other bar raids before or after. (Lois Hart and Craig Rodwell are deceased.)
G&LR: You actually published an article in one of our early issues (HGLR, Winter 1995) about organizing a lesbian dance in New York in 1970. But you haven’t mentioned “the Lavender Menace” by name, a group formed around this time to protest lesbian exclusion from women’s organizations. You even wrote a book titled Tales of the Lavender Menace (1999). What was it all about?
KJ: We were talking more about the time around Stonewall, but of course my activism continued and, in fact, increased in 1970. Thanks for mentioning the piece I wrote about the first lesbian dance, because magazines like HGLR were the start of my writing career.
The Lavender Menace zap against the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1st, 1970, was the most successful lesbian action of the post-Stonewall era. Betty Friedan had called us a “Lavender Menace,” by which she meant that we would destroy the women’s movement. She fired Rita Mae Brown as editor of the National Organization for Women’s newsletter along with anyone else she suspected of being a lesbian. The situation was further inflamed by Susan Brownmiller, who in March 1970 called us a “Lavender Herring” in a New York Times Magazine article. She meant that we were like a red herring, something that would lead the Women’s Liberation movement down a false road.
We lesbians who were feminists were tired of having our issues ignored or downplayed by straight feminists, some of whom were also coming on to us sexually. We formed a coalition called Radicalesbians, and we wrote what became a famous manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” It starts with the famous words: “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” Those words describe us to perfection! We made up T-shirts that said “Lavender Menace” and gathered outside the public school where the Second Congress to Unite Women was going to meet in Greenwich Village. The lights and mike were cut. When they came back on, the audience was completely surrounded by lesbians with signs like, “I am your best fantasy and your worst nightmare” and “Take a lesbian to lunch.” I was planted in the audience. I stood up and said I was tired of being in the closet in the women’s movement and pulled off my blouse to reveal my Lavender Menace t-shirt. We took over the stage and the program and forced Women’s Liberation to incorporate lesbian issues and also issues of race and class. None of these had ever been on the agenda before!
The women’s movement was irreversibly changed by that action. How many events can you say that about? So the Lavender Menace became a magical term, and most people think it was the name of our group instead of the name of the action. I have seen a couple of plays that feature it. It’s our lesbian Stonewall, one of those moments that activists are so proud and amazed to have been at and that others insert themselves into, even if they weren’t there.
G&LR: Thus did lesbians find a place in the feminist movement while also transforming it. But lesbians and gay men were pretty much in their own separate worlds at this time, no? Indeed this was the era of lesbian separatism that entailed a rejection of the patriarchy and male spaces in general. What was your position on that part of the movement?
KJ: Let me address the misunderstood notion of “separatism.” Though some lesbians embraced the word in the early 1970s, let’s be honest and admit that it is men who have been separatists in almost all countries, cultures, and religions. Men have barred women from schools, workplaces, occupations, houses of worship (or the better sections thereof), political offices, areas of the home, entertainment, and more. When the patriarchy takes control of a space or institution, they call it religion, government, the welfare of women (and children), or business as usual. When women express the desire to be by ourselves, then we are separatists, a slightly—or not even slightly—scary (to men) behavior and philosophy.
As far back as 1904, Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn) and Natalie Clifford Barney moved to Lesbos to establish a Sapphic colony, but were appalled when they discovered that the contemporary Greeks in front of them were not at all like Sappho. Plus, Barney and Vivien spoke Classical Greek and couldn’t be understood! But by 1927 Barney had established an Academy of Women in Paris, because she knew that no woman writer or artist, let alone a lesbian, would be taken seriously by men.
We, as lesbians, had always been subsumed into a male-dominated culture. But it was actually Women’s Liberation and heterosexual philosophers like Ti-Grace Atkinson who didn’t want anything to do with men or relationships with them. The people I know who really hate men are heterosexual women who have been stuck in marriages to awful people. Lesbians like me get to choose or lose male companions.
That said, a heterosexual woman named Roxanne Dunbar, who founded a group called Cell 16 in 1968, created the theoretical underpinnings of heterosexual separatism. As early as 1970, Daughters of Bilitis co-founder Del Martin was decrying the sexism of gay men. The Furies Collective and other lesbian groups of the early 1970s developed lesbian separatism. There is no way to know how many lesbians became separatists for a short period or longer, and there are still all-women communities around the country that strive for communal living and a testosterone-free environment. You might say that the recently defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was an annual two-week respite from the patriarchy for many women.
Most lesbians never were separatists, but many more have worked on lesbian-centered projects. I think it’s a myth that these women came back together with men at a later point. Sure, some did, and I know a few who even married men later on. But the women who worked with men are most likely a different group from those who focused on lesbian communities and lesbian-only issues. We love the rom-com version in which the broken queer family comes together at the deathbed of the AIDS patient, but it ain’t true.
That said, I admire separatists. Most of them are doing wonderful and positive work by giving their time and energy to women. It’s not my choice, I have never been a separatist, but I can respect their lives and contributions to how we think about issues like gender.
G&LR: Wow, I never thought of it that way before. Men are the true separatists in so many respects historically and across cultures. But I wanted to ask you, finally, about your take on the arc of the LGBT movement and the legacy of Stonewall after fifty years. How have things turned out—or how are things going—relative to your hopes and expectations as a young activist in the 1970s?
KJ: There are enough takeaways from Stonewall to write a book—and many are coming out soon! There have always been many different strands of activism within the lgbtq+ movement. While the majority are—and have always been—more comfortable with quiet lobbying and writing checks for others to do the heavy lifting for them—in-your-face radicals have likewise been out there for fifty years, including the Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, Lesbian Avengers, ACT UP, Gays Against Guns, and now Reclaim Pride. It is both a natural development and a personal heartbreak for me that on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, there will be two marches at the same time in New York City and elsewhere: traditional, sponsored marches like Heritage of Pride and more radical queer marches organized by Reclaim Pride. These two marches very much represent these two different strands of queer politics. However, we need both radicals and lobbyists to stop the rising tide of anti-queer legislation and sentiment.
That said, so much more has come to pass than I ever would have expected. Though I chose early on to live as an out lesbian, I didn’t think that I would end up as a Distinguished Professor. Indeed, I wondered whether anyone would ever give me a full-time job. While there is still much discrimination in the workplace and in communities, there are also lots of support groups in both places that didn’t exist when I graduated from college. Much positive legislation has passed in various places, but let’s not forget that homosexuality is still illegal in over seventy countries.
The fact that lesbians and gay men can marry here is our biggest achievement, and these legal unions bring with them over 1,300 rights and protections that should not be ignored. Though I do not believe in the institution, I am married myself and have urged some older lesbian couples I know to get married, because I don’t want to see the survivor evicted from a rent-controlled apartment if the leaseholder dies first. Above everything else, I want to be able to take care of the person I love if I am no longer there for her, and leaving a huge legal mess will not make a political point. As much as we could, we created an anti-marriage ceremony, with only four people in attendance plus the city clerk at a spot in a park where the dog had relieved himself, followed by a blueberry pie with two plastic brides.
I have been to a lot of weddings since we got married in 2004. Queer events are a lot more fun, I admit, but deep down, they resonate with every other wedding. In the end, you can’t substitute the Prince and the Princess with two people of the same birth assignment and claim that you’ve created a new way of life. We don’t need more of this particular story but a new story altogether. I still like to think that we radicals of the Stonewall generation could have upended the patriarchy in favor of a freer, more just, and more equal world, not just greater legal recognition for some.
Today, there are many segments of the community that we can look to for guidance. The queer youth of Parkland High School hark back to the pacifist goals of the ’60s, and their social media skills are amazing, as are young people standing up with elders around the world to demand a clean, livable planet. The Women’s March, Gays Against Guns, and Reclaim Pride highlight the possibilities of resistance today. Members of the trans community nobly insist that they are becoming who they are, no matter what. Conferences I have attended like “Black Women Rise” demonstrate that the Civil Rights struggle is very much alive, as is the connection to LGBTQ rights. In other words, we are connecting to one another and committing ourselves to fighting more than our own battle, because more people are beginning to see again that these issues are ours, too, not just someone else’s problem.
