'The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle Book Talk, "Part Two: 1969", Lillian Faderman, 2015/10/18

[caption: Lillian Faderman Historian and Author of, The Gay Revolution 1969]

Faderman: So now I’m going to skip to 1969 when “gay people”–which of course included lesbians in the language of the day–when they became militant in their demands for rights. The first militant organization was the Gay Liberation Front in NYC, and then quickly Gay Liberation Front organizations cropped up all over the country. In that first organization in New York City, there were women but they were far outnumbered by the men and they soon became disenchanted with the men.

Faderman: I want to read the section from that: “The lesbians of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969 were just as leftist, militant and committed as the gay men but they were a small minority of the group, 10% to 15%. From that major gripes rose. At the GLF dances, lesbians were “like an afterthought in a roomful of men”, GLFer Arlene Kistner complained. She’d been in the radical feminist Red Stockings when a longhaired hippie gay friend brought her to her first GLF meeting soon after the group got started. She kept coming back because it seemed, at first anyway, like she was being drawn irresistibly into a communal consciousness. She was awed by the collective energy, but at GLF dances she felt squeezed out by disturbingly rampant male sexuality. Kistner wasn’t alone among GLF women who resented that for the men at the dances, “human contact was limited to groping and dry fucking”. The guys sucked up all the air in the room. The women felt they couldn’t breathe. The dance problem was barely the tip of the gripes. Ellen Chumsky, who had gone to Cuba to help with harvests the whole year before the Students for a Democratic Society thought of forming the Vince Seremos Brigade, believed she knew as much or more than the GLF men. She couldn’t bear their political diatribes which were delivered as only they had a pipeline to the truths of anarchism, Trotskyism, Leninism, Marxism and everything else. And when women such as Martha Shelley and Lois Hart matched them in pontifications, the men resented it. It was the dawn of the radical feminist movement and the radical feminist anger of GLF lesbians was growing apace. Lesbians were tired of fighting for “everyone else’s cause while ignoring our own”, Martha Shelley wrote in an essay she called “Step and Fetch It Woman” which appeared in the first issue of the GLF magazine, Come Out. “The feminism of lesbians is built into their beings”, she said, “I have many feminists who are not lesbian, but I have never met a lesbian who is not a feminist.” She’d been a founder of GLF but she concluded that the behavior of GLF men was intolerable to lesbian feminist sensibility. GLF lesbians were especially peeved when the group donated $500 to the Black Panthers. “I don’t remember agreeing to give the money to the Black Panthers, Flabby O Rando complained, at the next GLF meeting. She’d been brought into the GLF by Martha Shelley. “Want to come?” Shelley had asked. “Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for this all my life,” Rando had answered. Now she wanted to know why GLF wasn’t donating money to abortion rights. She wanted to know why the lesbians had to support the Panthers if the Panthers weren’t supporting the lesbians. By the time GLF was 6 months old, they concluded that they’d all been radicals long before they had hooked up with radical gay men and they needed to put their radicalism into lesbian issues, women’s issues. They’d meet on their own without the men. And then I’d tell the story of the catalyst for those meetings. In January 1970, Rita Mae Brown showed up at a Gay Liberation Front meeting. She had the seductive dark good looks of a beautiful Italian boy and she came to tell the GLF lesbians they belonged somewhere else. Brown had been part of the student homophile league at Columbia University in 1967 but she dropped out when she discovered that gay men were just like straight men and “don’t give a damn about the needs of women.” Though the 1969 rebellion at the Stonewall Inn was becoming iconic, Brown, already a feminist, proclaimed at a gay men’s revolution, “For the great bulk of the lesbian community, it’s just not all that significant,” she insisted. As soon as she learned of the National Organization for Women, she found out where the New York group was meeting and she joined. Her smarts and good looks led to hints by the leadership that she could have a place among them if she played her cards right. But she quit NOW too because it was full of what she called “golden girls”, stockbrokers, lawyers, art directors and such. They did give a damn about women’s needs, but mostly with regards to job discrimination and the Pill. They also gave a damn about what the white rich male heterosexual media found acceptable, which meant they sweated to keep NOW’s image lesbian free. Next Brown found a radical socialist women’s group, Red Stockings, but what they gave a damn about were prostitutes and childcare for single working mothers. Lesbians were off the radar. She didn’t last long at Red Stockings either. By now she decided she was too tired and too wise to invest more energy in the “straight ladies”. That’s what brought her to the Gay Liberation Front meeting that night. With her bold rhetorical skills of which she had no doubt, and her considerable lesbian sex appeal, of which she was even surer, she played the Pied Piper. I interviewed one woman who was there who told me “there was energy around her that crackled and sparkled that night”. She was very seductive. She dragged the GLF lesbians into an all-lesbian group that was feminist. It would heal the sense of alienation she suffered from the male homophiles, and the heterosexual feminists of both the right and the left wings, and it would be good for the lesbians too. Rita Mae Brown’s alluring performance at the first GLF meeting of the new year became GLF lesbians’ call to action. The most useful tool to promote radical awareness and constructive anger, Brown had learned in Red Stockings, was consciousness-raising and now she announced to GLF she’d be starting all-lesbian consciousness-raising groups. “Lesbian oppression and homosexual male oppression have less in common than you think,” she’d go to the women. In consciousness-raising groups, they’d learn why she promised.

[END OF VIDEO]


Interviewee: Lillian Faderman
Interviewer: Audience member
Transcriber: Lantien C.
Formatter: Serena R.
Recording Date: October 18, 2015
Release Date: October 25, 2015
Location: City Council Chambers in West Hollywood, California
Interview Length: 00:07:50