Author’s Note: Most people know Andrea Dworkin as the radical feminist who launched a campaign against pornography in the 1980s and ’90s, but this is only one slice of a fascinating life of activism. I’ve recently completed a full-scale biography of Andrea Dworkin that will be published by the New Press in 2020. It’s based on her remarkably rich (and previously closed) archive at Schlesinger Library at Harvard.
Andrea and I had become friendly in the early 1970s as a result of working together in the anti-Vietnam War organization redress. When first starting work on her biography, I’d expected to describe our relationship in some detail, but in the upshot did so only in bare outline. The compelling narrative of her public life became the focus of the biography. Yet since our friendship centrally involved the early years of the Gay Academic Union and throws considerable light on gay male–lesbian attempts to work together, I thought the personal story worth salvaging. Thus the article that follows. — MD
EARLY IN 1973, a group of mostly young academics began to meet informally to discuss what we might do to make the university world a more accepting environment for gay people and to foster the study of gay and lesbian lives. After months of discussion and debate we decided to focus on several goals: to pressure the American Association of University Professors and other academic organizations to protect the rights of openly gay faculty; to serve as a support network for the many isolated gay people on campus; to pinpoint needed areas of scholarly research; and to originate pilot programs for course work in lesbian and gay studies. We decided to call ourselves the Gay Academic Union (GAU), and we set about planning for a fall conference on “The Universities and the Gay Experience” as a way of announcing ourselves and beginning the work of reducing homophobia on the nation’s campuses.
From the beginning, one problem loomed large: women at that time were scarce on academic faculties, and “out” lesbians were scarcer still. At least as important was the fact that the early post-Stonewall organizations—the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance—had often been rent with bitter struggles over what the women justifiably protested as “male sexism.” In GAU the small number of gay men who helped found the organization agreed from the start—puffed up a bit with condescending pride about our superior “enlightenment”—that women should have equal representation on GAU’s steering committee. But the vote wasn’t unanimous. Some of the men took vocal exception to the introduction of what they called the “irrelevant” feminist issue. In response, some of us formed a consciousness-raising group to discuss our own acknowledged sexism.
Enter Andrea Dworkin. As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate at Bennington (where she’d had an affair with the wife of a dean), Andrea had been arrested in 1964 at a New York City anti-Vietnam war protest and had spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention, where two male medical examiners had been so brutal that she’d bled for days afterwards. Soon after that, Andrea had gone to Europe to live and write, had found “true love” for a time on the island of Crete, and had then moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutch anarchist who turned sadist and badly beat her. Finally escaping, she worked briefly as a prostitute and then returned to the States.
Living at the poverty level in an East Village tenement, she was befriended by the short-story writer Grace Paley and the well-known poet Muriel Rukeyser, who believed in her talent and took her on as a part-time assistant. Andrea also went to work for redress, the anti-Vietnam war group—and that was where she and I met and quickly became friends. At that time Andrea was putting the finishing touches on what became her celebrated first book, Woman-Hating, and she asked me to help her find a publisher. She described the book with so much clarity and force that I felt it would be (as I wrote in my journal) “a major event.” Andrea asked both me and Muriel—who was also involved with redress—to read the manuscript. Muriel—at least as Andrea reported her reaction to her parents—“called to say she thinks it’s one of the most important books of our time—wow!” I was less enthusiastic, but did believe in Andrea’s talent and sent her to Hal Scharlatt, my own editor at E. P. Dutton.
Hal encouraged her, though Andrea complained to me about his “heavy vibes” and wrote her parents—adamantly, as was her way—that she “won’t agree to certain changes they want to make.” I told her she was way off the mark about Hal, that not only was he a brilliant editor but an entirely reasonable one, and one of the gentlest, kindest of men. Andrea grumbled but took my word for it. She did have an implacable side with respect to her writing, but it was hardly the sum of her personality. Over the years her army of critics would denounce her as an inflexible virago, yet interviewers who met her personally would comment again and again on how surprised they were at her soft-spoken, gentle manner—and her uncommon ability to listen. Andrea on a public platform was often fierce and truculent; in person she was often an empathic sympathizer. I vividly remember the time I opened the door to my apartment after she and I, the night before, had had a heated political disagreement at a GAU meeting—only to find her standing there shyly with a placating bouquet of flowers.
Andrea had been reluctant to join GAU all along. First of all, she wasn’t an academic and her sympathies were focused not on the plight of gay people but on the mistreatment of women. Besides, she had decided early on that many of the gay men in GAU were blatant sexists, most of them unwilling to acknowledge it. The original organizers, almost all of whom self-described as political radicals, were (in my view) far more aware, as creatures of the culture, that they’d internalized a patronizing view of the inherent abilities of women. Within two years, though, GAU came under the control of a small group of far more conservative gay men—at which point I, and most of the other pro-feminist men, resigned. The organization itself collapsed a year later.
All that lay in the future. Back in 1973, by way of thanks for having put her in touch with Hal Scharlatt at Dutton, Andrea invited me to dinner at Max’s Kansas City, then all the rage. We ended up talking nonstop for five hours that night—talking “with a kind of electricity” (as I wrote in my journal). It turned out that despite all those redress meetings, I knew almost nothing of Andrea’s personal history, nor she of mine, and after filling in the blanks we settled into a searching political exchange that was formative for my activism in the years ahead. Throughout the evening (as I feverishly put it in my journal), “rockets kept going off in my head, butterflies in my stomach. We kept completing each other’s sentences, shaken at the similarity of experience and perception, overjoyed at the confirmation that we were not singular freaks but parts of an emerging community (nervously) willing at last to talk about what we all had long wanted to hear, to demystify the desperate secrets, to end the separation in ourselves (and the society) between the private and public voices,” to embrace the manifold, fearful sexual fantasies and the deviations from traditional gender norms “as enrichments to be openly encouraged, not shameful deviations to be carefully concealed.” At the time of our dinner, Andrea described herself as bisexual, leaning more toward the heterosexual side, at least experientially. Within a few years she would come out as lesbian, though after a “wild” youth, she settled into a far more subdued pattern. (Details are being cunningly saved for the biography!)
Andrea helped me to important clarifications in my own understanding, especially in regard to bisexuality. It was not, she insisted, the equivalent of—and could even serve as a fortification against—androgyny. That is, to have sex with both genders (as the binary then had it) in the same way—for example, to be always dominant or always passive—could keep us from the realization that each of us has a spectrum of sexual impulses and gender fantasies. As I told Andrea that night in Max’s, in the past I’d often berated myself for what I labeled my “inconsistent” desires in bed, and saw my varying moods and acts as a function of an “incomplete” or “muddled” sexual identity. Andrea assured me that what (back then) was often called “role confusion” or “gender fucking” was what we now regard as the rejection of rigid definitions of permissible needs.
Andrea also reinforced my already pronounced conviction that in essential ways women and gay people shared a common struggle against a shared oppressor: the dominance of the heterosexual male and our own deep-seated wish to become like him, to play his macho role, to incorporate his macho body, to offer ourselves—even gratefully—to his macho mistreatment. I had also already come to believe (as I wrote in my journal) that “the primary obstacle that had been preventing that alliance from being recognized and from maturing was the gay male denial of their own marginality and gender non-conformity”—and that this was especially true of the white, middle-class gay men who dominated the organized political movement.
At the time I had somewhat smugly assumed that I was already more conscious of sexism as the enemy than were most gay men. What I now began to see more clearly was that the “enemy” wasn’t “out there” but within ourselves. And in that regard I was hardly exempt from scrutiny. As I put it in my journal: “my enjoyment of the company of women is sometimes based on the stereotypic qualities I invest them with—‘understanding,’ ‘sensitivity,’ ‘intuition’—the same gender expectations that were deep-seated in the culture and whose consequences made women afraid of success, and men disdainful of emotion.”
Discussion of the advantages and pitfalls of a feminist–gay alliance became general within GAU, and during one argument over the issue, one of the women members, a historian of science—a warm, intelligent person who’d immediately impressed me—broke through the tangled debate to say, with just a trace of irritation, “You need to get it through your heads that in the eyes of the straight world, you’re all considered feminine.”
Andrea herself made another point: she urged us to distinguish strongly between the need for gay men to become better informed about feminist concerns and the views of a group called the “Revolutionary Effeminists,” which in those years enjoyed considerable notoriety and whose ideology was exemplified in the writings of Kenneth Pitchford (married at the time to the prominent feminist Robin Morgan). In Andrea’s view, which complemented and strengthened my own, Pitchford tended to see “female” traits as inherent and fixed, and she deplored his call for homosexual men to “copy” those traits and to subordinate their own needs in the name of bringing Womanhood to power.
Andrea encouraged me to see the Pitchford model as static—and tyrannical, a confinement of women to a limited set of biologically induced traits, and of homosexual males to a no less traditional “effeminacy” historically linked to a genetic deficiency. At that stage in my own rapidly evolving views on sexuality and gender, Andrea’s words were heady stuff. Here was a perspective, a radical set of views, that not only rejected traditional straight male dominance but also some of the “far-out” strategies then being deployed to undermine it.
Andrea lasted only a few months in GAU. She felt worn down by the resistance of most of the gay men to acknowledge their own entrenched sexism. It was a point I could hardly deny, but I did take issue with her blanket assumption—and told her so—that this particular group of gay men was no more open to a “salvage operation” than men in general. Although our consciousness about sexism wasn’t at the optimal level we might like, we weren’t quite as uneducable as she insisted. Thus there was some hope that we—gay men and women—could manage to work together, which would increase our clout and our potential ability to create social change.
Andrea didn’t buy it. She believed that the “primary emergency” for women was feminism, not homosexuality. My counterargument was that we were capable of more than one commitment at a time; few of us—and certainly not Andrea—lived so single-mindedly or had such a limited a supply of energy that we had to confine ourselves to single-issue politics. The conversation ebbed and flowed, though neither Andrea nor I gave much ground. Our relationship, in fact, wouldn’t last beyond the mid-’70s. No personal anger was involved; our political paths simply diverged.
Late in 1974, she wrote a blistering letter of resignation from GAU, denouncing the organization for its “insufferable arrogance and male supremacy.” By then I didn’t disagree: the conservative, anti-feminist cohort among the gay men in GAU had pretty much taken over the organization. I also agreed with the way Andrea subsequently broadened her indictment to include “leftwing” men for their “abysmal ignorance of feminist writings” and for failing to assimilate “the social analysis that radical feminists have done in these last years … they are reading [Stanley] Aronowitz, [Murray] Bookchin, etc. with serious regard, and [Kate] Millett, [Robin] Morgan, [Ti-Grace] Atkinson, and [Angela] Davis not at all, or with the most obvious condescension.”
Part of the lasting legacy of my friendship with Andrea was an audacious insight of hers that has stayed with me. What Andrea saw in her clear-eyed way—and would greatly suffer for—was (as she put it) the need “to break down the dichotomy between how we talk to ourselves and (perhaps) our closest friends, and how we present ourselves in our formal, social roles.” What was needed was an effort to present ourselves publicly with the same complexities and contradictions of which we’re privately aware in our fantastical heads. That impulse could, and surely would, be belittled as mere exhibitionism, but the risk would have to be run. To decide to talk openly and in detail about our private lives represented—when not done merely to secure notoriety—an impulse to understand our feelings honestly and to share them openly.
It would mean, too, making an effort to use words as genuine instruments of communication rather than, as currently, a means of self-deception and disguise, or as a tool for social control—that is, a device for preventing communications that might threaten to upend accepted definitions of human-ness and relationships of power. Andrea pointed out that the attempt at honesty, especially at first, would often fail; the words would come out as a grab bag of postures, indulgent distortions, unfelt laments, arch formulations—in other words, what we were already used to. But the impulse behind those missteps, if it remained authentic, could represent the buried wish to break away from the exchange of false messages, to bridge the gulf of separation.
It didn’t matter, she argued, that our initial attempts might fall lamentably short. That would only mean that the performance was deficient, the communication incomplete. How could it initially be otherwise, coming from people schooled—through defective integrity and truncated testimony—to maintain the traditional taboos. We needed to at least make a start toward what many of us were beginning urgently to feel: that people have to talk to each other in different ways about different things. A start is a start—not a completion. The need is there: to universalize—but not homogenize—freakiness, to allow people to see that what they’ve been taught to hide as individual shame could be converted into bonds of commonality.
Yes, Andrea (and I) had a utopian streak a mile wide, and one that would, with heightened experience of the world, be doomed to diminution. More’s the pity.
Martin Duberman’s recent books includeHas the Gay Movement Failed? andJews Queers Germans: A Novel History.
