Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (30 page)

Debi liked to say, “What would Steve Jobs do?” Steve Jobs was her number one favorite man in the whole world. She had me fooled for a year that she knew him personally; she quoted him so extensively that I thought they had met in the Copenhagen Room at the O’Farrell Theater for a lap dance.

“We’re not going to pay for typesetting anymore,” Deb announced one day. “It’s too expensive, and it’s irrelevant. Steve Jobs has a computer for us that’s going to change all that; we’ll do it right here in the front room.” She said this as she pointed at their living room, which had been transformed into our paste-up and layout den.

A computer? I imagined Hal in Space Odyssey. Impossible! I couldn’t man a rocket; I knew only how to write, edit, wax down copy, use a proportion wheel.

Debi came home with an enormous beautiful white box that looked like it belonged on a Milan runway. In it was the 1984 Macintosh desktop computer and a keyboard.

I started sniveling. “I can’t do it. You don’t understand … I barely passed ninth-grade algebra.”

She took a cassette tape out of the package and put it in her boom box. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Flute music started up on the tape as if we were about to attend a New Age seminar. I felt as though someone had placed either an egg or a bomb over my head, but I couldn't tell which.

A woman’s voice came over the speaker. She sounded beatific. “Take the monitor out of the box,” she said. She patiently explained how to insert the plug on both ends. Debi rolled her eyes.

The disembodied Apple Goddess said, “Press the Power button on.” It was like a priest declaring, “Body of Christ.” A heavenly tone came out of the computer, as if something was being born. The screen flickered, and a smiling little “box face” appeared on screen. It twinkled at me. It said, “I don’t care if you didn’t understand ninth-grade algebra.”

I blew my nose in my wet Kleenex one last time, and Debi said, “So how fast can you type?”

Debi wanted everything Steve Jobs had — like investors. Giant loans. People clamoring at our innovation. I felt she was ignoring political reality. “People don’t think Steve Jobs is a pervert,” I said. “No one’s trying to take him away in leg irons for frightening the horses.”

“He is frightening the horses,” Debi said, cupping her face in her palm like she and Steve had just spent all last night in pillow talk. She was going to be Doris Day to his Rock Hudson.

On Our Backs
was embraced, at first, by San Francisco’s commie and anarchist bookstores. They loved us. That had to be good for about a hundred copies in sales. We were a big hit on the emerging Internet, too, circa “800-baud” modems. There was no World Wide Web. We picked up devoted Star Trek fans on Usenet.

Finally, the gay men’s bookstores opened their arms to us — they loved us, too. That meant a few thousand dollars — a glimmer of hope.

In every major city there were large women’s bookstores — the heart of feminist publishing — but each one took a different position on us. Mostly “against.” Some, like the Toronto Women’s Bookstore or A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin, issued press releases in which they accused us of being virulent racists and anti-Semites, of practicing female genocide, of endorsing white slavery, of being pimps masquerading as women. When I spoke on the topic of female orgasm in western Massachusetts, I got bomb threats at two different campuses.

There was one rumor that “Susie Bright” and sex theorist “Pat Califia” were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas. Yeah, we got Letters to the Editor like that.

This swell of protest against “lesbian pornographers” had two main charismatic leaders, both of whom were loath to mention our names in public. But we said theirs all the time: Catherine MacKinnon, a legal scholar, and Andrea Dworkin, a poet and writer.

I was fascinated by Dworkin because she was truly radical, a poet who took her manifesto into philosophical deep water. She wasn’t content just to whine about porn or “traitors” like
On Our Backs
. No, she questioned the very nature of penis-vagina intercourse itself. It didn’t make much physiological or psychological sense — her impression of intercourse was biblical rather than scientific. But she had … flair. Like arguing with Freud but being happy he took you for a ride. When I read her novel
Fire and Ice
I thought, “Look at this: She’s re-created de Sade’s
Juliette
.” She was de S
ade’s most brilliant student. She could write sadistic sex scenes and vicious critiques of the bourgeoisie like few of her peers. If I could have gotten Dworkin to sheath her sword, I would’ve loved to sit down for a conversation. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for most women’s minds — not mine, not anyone’s. She was a patriarchal opponent who preferred the company of the most cerebral male scholars.

MacKinnon, on the other hand was a square, a non-original. She had sterling judicial provenance from her family; her father was a judge and former congressman.

The same year I was editing my first issue of
OOB
, MacKinnon and Dworkin went to work for the Minneapolis city government to draft an antipornography civil rights ordinance that deemed “pornography” to be a civil rights violation against women. It allowed women who claimed “harm from pornography” to sue the producers and distributors for damages. It specified that “pornography” and “harm” was whatever you said it was. After all, we all know it when we see it, don’t we? They pursued the same strategy in Indianapolis. Most influential of all, Andrea and Catherine’s activism completely revamped the Canadian Customs code for what kind of
literature could enter the country.

Let me give you an example of how that worked out in practice: I would submit a story for a feminist erotic publication … about two lovers who have a conflict but then make up and live happily ever after.

Snore? Not to the Canadian Customs Department! Our publication would be stopped and seized at the border because no woman can have an argument in an erotic publication — that is “violence against women.” No one could have anal sex because that is “violence against women.” No woman could masturbate with a sex toy because that is “violence against women.”

Of course, this was enforced against only small presses. If I wrote or edited a story with the same elements for a major New York publisher, it sailed across the border.

Catherine and Andrea were not naive about the consequences imposed on lesbian, queer, and feminist presses. Their slippery slope was greasier than a leather-boy bathhouse. Both women’s efforts in Minnesota and Indiana attracted the support of Christian conservatives, who joined them in their efforts to drive the legislation through. They didn’t always win in the courts — but the link between Bible thumpers and porn bashers was made perfect.

As traditional puritans like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly adopted “feminist” rhetoric about “the degradation of women,” any thought of eviscerating the patriarchy blew away like so much dust. Whatever MacKinnon’s plans were for women’s liberation, she ended up erecting a chastity belt around the First Amendment.

Of course, I took it personally. How could these leaders and their shock troops think they had more in common with crooked televangelists than they did with me, someone who drew pictures of clits on walls? I started to feel like the “crooked” part was what they had in common. Either that, or grudges so old we couldn’t fathom their origin.

In 1997, I got an invitation to speak in Madison, Wisconsin, with a slide show of lesbian photography from
On Our Backs
. It was work featured in Nothing But the Girl, a book on which Jill Posener and I had collaborated.

Curiously, our picture show was sponsored by A Room of One’s Own, one of the bookshops that had declared a jihad against
OOB
when we debuted in 1
984. When I got to meet the bookstore staff, I was curious about them — and they were so happy to see me. Hugs and kisses all around.

“I don’t get it,” I said to them. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you never carried
On Our Backs
before; you led the protest against us. It was like Andrea Dworkin’s marching orders. Who died?” I was trying to keep it light.

The five women who’d greeted me looked down at the floor, guilty. My host adjusted her paper-clip necklace and tried to keep her voice steady. “Um, one of our founders died, actually. She’d been fighting cancer for a long time, and …”

That’s what it was like.

Our dreamed-of investors — the feminist foremothers, with whom we thought we’d be best friends — had made up their minds they were going to die before they let us in the door.

And Main Street America? Well, we were just whores to them; they didn’t talk to us during business hours. It didn’t matter what the Constitution said, how the Miller test determined non-obscene speech, what Henry Miller or D. H. Lawrence had accomplished in the courts. We didn’t have lawyers and civil rights leaders pressing our case. Most of our audience, no matter how sympathetic, was made up of men and women who didn’t admit their sexual preferences in public. They only dreamed of being out of the closet. They weren’t going to make a phone call.

One day, while we were laying out our second issue, Nan was on the office phone with Barbara Grier from Naiad Press. Grier published hundreds of lesbian romances — sapphic Harlequins — and made a handsome living selling to an audience the rest of the world didn’t even know existed. Their top title was about lesbian nuns.

Barbara didn’t mince words. “I don’t have a problem with you,” she said. “We’ve known Honey Lee for years.” Translation: “We are old-gay butch/femme — we could give a shit about the feminist sex wars.”

“But,” Barbara continued, “everyone we know thinks y’all should be assassinated.”

And whom did she know? Their little sisters included all the feminist bookstore owners, the “wimmin’s” music-festival producers, the Tarot card printers, the separatist land communes, the moneymakers and key-holders of the lesbian womb-acracy. They were the economic and political capital of lesbian feminism. They’d made a dollar and set a tone.

Nan’s eyes flitted over our dildos, latex lingerie, and lube still strewn across the floor from last night’s photo shoot: “We don’t fit in anymore.”

We knew the feminist world; we created it. How could we be the enemy? How could there be a split?

Barbara’s description of “assassinators” wasn’t rhetorical; our adversaries never gave us a moment’s peace. We got hate mail every day, large
ly unsigned. The anonymous furies reminded me of the students in Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the ones who’d follow their charismatic guru anywhere, even if it meant over a cliff. In Spark’s story, a schoolteacher named Miss Brodie whips her little girls into going to fight for Mussolini, which is little more than an exercise in her narcissism. Tragedy and scandal result.

In our case, everything was present except for the swastikas and a railroad wreck. The anonymous anti-porn warriors put everything they had on the line to stop us. While the “grown-ups” at Dworkin-MacKinnon headquarters barely acknowledged us by name, their acolytes, armed with knives, baseball bats, legal threats, and fake buckets of blood came at us in bars, on the street, and at literary conferences. They talked to one another in code.
On Our Backs
supporters were considered the gender equivalent of “race traitors.”

The most eloquent among the feminist anticensorship crowd — Ellen Willis, Pat Califia, Gayle Rubin, Nan Hunter, Lisa Duggan, Dorothy Allison, Carole Vance — made the case for sexual expression and women’s demand to articulate their desire. It was lofty, it was deep — it changed the social sciences and humanities in academia forever. The 1992 book Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship was so eloquent and rational it would have made Rousseau swoon. But Rousseau was not active in most Women’s Studies Departments.

For all our influence, the
On Our Backs
staff members weren’t creatures of academia. We were artists, sex workers, activists, publishers. We were “in the trade.”

If I had a gold coin for every one of the “anti-
OOB
feminists” who had a dildo or whip in her closet, I’d be Midas. I couldn’t fathom their duplicity. The people who had tried to blacklist or beat me before — during my
The Red Tide
years — were white supremacists. Strike breakers. Cops on the take. Mafia goons. Whoever heard of a woman your own size determined to drown you in the bathtub?

In the beginning, I thought our feminist critics needed only a sensitive explanation, a bit of sex ed — much like my old customers in the vibrator store. “The try-out room won’t bite you!”

But the bullies weren’t our customers or students — they were our competition. We were fighting over scraps, the oldest bitch game in the world.

I ended up in bed — or erotically adjacent to it — with some of my so-called political enemies.

One spring, the first year of
On Our Backs
, I was seeking the attentions of a Teamster bulldagger, a known stone butch who made me weak in the knees. She was a Stonewall-decade older than me. I’d look at her well-worn hands, she’d stare at my cunt, and my stomach would start to churn.

I saw her flirting with other women. When she wanted you, you could barely stand on your feet. When she worked security for a queer event, she could drive away straight men, cops, and poseurs with one flinty gl
ance. Between her threatening disposition toward adversaries and her appetite for pretty women was a hair trigger I couldn’t wait to tease out.

I found out where she lived in the neighborhood. She had an apartment on Potrero Hill, which sported some of the most best graffiti in town: Women’s Liberation gonna get your momma, gonna get your sister, gonna get your girlfriend.

One day I passed her apartment building from my bus stop. I had such a girlish crush that I dawdled and daydreamed:
What if she’s coming home from work? What if we run into each other? What if I said I was selling Girl Scout cookies?