In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (12 page)

In April 1970,
THE FEMINISTS
passed a
resolution directed at Ti-Grace: all future media interviews would be determined by lot. Atkinson resigned two days later. During the next decade she would pursue a stormy course in feminism without being part of a group.

Rosalyn Baxandall remembers 1969 in New York as the year of the
truth squads. Nine or ten women would burst in unannounced on somebody’s husband and confront him with a list of grievances. Baxandall says the name was borrowed from the State Department’s “truth squads” that descended on a college campus after an antiwar teach-in. Irene Peslikis believes the tactic came straight out of
Fanshen
, William Hinton’s account of a liberated Chinese village, circa 1949, where timid peasants learned to “speak bitterness” and “struggle against” their landlord oppressors.

Ros’s husband and Marilyn Lowen’s husband were confronted by the truth squads for their womanizing. Lee Baxandall sat through his struggle session so penitently that Rosalyn began to feel sorry for him. Marilyn Lowen’s husband went into a rage at the group’s intrusion. “It was scary,” remembers Peslikis.

Robin Morgan joined the truth squad that confronted Judy Gabree’s husband at
Penthouse
to demand that he quit his job at the porn magazine. Porn boss Bob Guccione took the women on, defending his empire in the name of sexual liberation. Robin, sitting on the floor, began nursing her six-month-old son, Blake.

She relates, “I said to Guccione, ‘Do you see? This is a breast and this is a baby. This breast has a real functioning purpose. It feeds a child. This is what a breast is made for, not for your ogling.’ And then,
quite
unintentionally, a stream of milk hit him in the eye. It was one of my best moments.”

Robin, whose small group had remained intact after WITCH fell apart, was the best known “politico” in the city. After the episode with Guccione she came up with a new idea: “We were becoming bursitis-ridden, literally, from carrying around these goddamned mimeographed papers in shopping bags when we’d go to some college for a weekend of organizing. So I said, “This is ridiculous. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could publish all of the papers in a book, a publicly available source, so the word can really get out.’ And some people said, ‘Yeah, that would be amazing.’ ”

Those were expansive days in publishing, when sympathetic editors were racing to offer contracts to New Left activists like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the Soledad Brother George Jackson. Pressing her connections, Robin approached John Simon at Random House. “He said,” she remembers, “that I had to get the material in fast because six months down the line there might not be any interest. So, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I went back to the group, thinking we’d do the anthology as a collective. And all hell broke loose.”

Robin ran into the kind of opposition that would become all too familiar inside the movement. How would they divide the money? Maybe they weren’t ready to go public! Would the publisher or their collective have final editorial control? Finally the women accused her of being on a personal star trip.

“After two or three meetings in which we continued to struggle with these things, something in me snapped,” Robin says. “To my shock, I heard myself saying, ‘Well, sisters, if the group won’t do it,
I will
.’ ”

Nineteen sixty-nine had dawned hellishly for Betty Friedan.
Her stormy marriage was coming apart. The insiders in NOW compared notes on her drinking and the knock-down-drag-out fights she had with Carl that left her with shiners on several occasions. NOW’s sitin/press conference at the male-only Oak Room of the Plaza in February was a great success, but Dolores Alexander, who’d left a job in journalism to be NOW’s executive director, had to stall the press until Betty arrived. That morning Friedan had telephoned Dolores to say she couldn’t show up—Carl had hit her the night before and she had a black eye. In a panic, Dolores phoned Jean Faust, a former president of the New York chapter, who rushed to Betty’s Dakota apartment to see if she could do something with makeup. When Friedan finally swept in to the Plaza to face the press, she had on a mink coat and dark glasses. “I asked her to take off the dark glasses so I could have a look,” Dolores recalls. “Jean had done a fabulous job. She looked fine.”

Friedan got a Mexican divorce in May, but the dissolution of her twenty-two-year troth did not improve her famous temper. She yelled at the volunteers, reducing them to tears. In the thick of their battles Carl used to taunt that her beloved NOW was a a bunch of man-hating dykes. Betty began to pick up on the theme, muttering darkly about infiltratration. One day she turned on Dolores, warning some board members that their executive director was involved in a lesbian conspiracy to take over NOW. Dolores was dumbstruck. She was still involved with men, and the possibility of being a lesbian had not yet occurred to her. Of course there were lesbians in NOW, solid, hardworking activists like Toni Carabillo, who didn’t bother to hide it, and Ivy Bottini, a mother of two who was just beginning to discover her lesbian identity. But NOW’s lesbians had considered their sexual orientation to be a private matter until
Rita Mae Brown had walked in the door.

By her own account, Rita Mae Brown was born in rural Pennsylvania, her father unknown, and adopted by relatives who ran a butcher shop in York. After spending her teen years in Fort Lauderdale, she attended the University of Florida before coming to New York to take her degree at NYU. Writing and filmmaking were her ambitions; stirring
the pot was her pleasure. If Ti-Grace Atkinson, the sleekly coiffed blonde-turned-Amazon-warrior, had given Friedan some sleepless nights, Rita Mae Brown, a lesbian Huck Finn with curly short hair and intense dark eyes, was Friedan’s nightmare come true.

“The first time I saw Rita Mae,” recalls Jacqui Ceballos, “she looked like a little doll, a real southern belle. I was so proud to have her in the group. I thought,
Oh, we are finally getting the college women
.”

“Rita Mae was a true original,” laughs Dolores Alexander. “Funny, witty, a wonderful speaker, and very evangelistic. She had this crusade to seduce every straight woman she knew.”

Ivy Bottini was smitten. “I’ll never forget the first meeting she came to,” Bottini reminisces. “She was wearing a short skirt and a ruffled white blouse and she said, ‘As your token lesbian in this room …’
Lesbian!
She’d uttered the word. You could have heard a pin drop, it was that quiet. I loved her for it. Dolores and I made her head of the newsletter committee.”

Friedan was apoplectic. A survivor of the fifties, when union people and progressives were red-baited and hounded, she had a premonition that the same thing would happen to the women’s movement, with dyke-baiting as the inquisitors’ tactic. Friedan took stock of the new loose cannon and started muttering about the Lavender Menace.

For all Rita Mae’s hands-on success in gaining converts, she felt the straights in NOW didn’t want her, and after a few tumultuous months she quit. Believing the downtown radicals might be closer to her style, she exchanged her blouses and skirts for a secondhand military coat with epaulets and gold buttons and started coming around to the Redstockings meetings.

“
The Redstockings didn’t think of lesbians as a Lavender Menace or run for the door when I raised the issue,” she remembered years later. “They simply weren’t interested.”

“
Yes, Rita Mae was with us for a while,” muses Kathie Amatniek Sarachild. “But it’s funny, I always tend to forget that.”

“
There was such an assumption of heterosexuality at the beginning of the women’s movement,” says Ellen Willis, shaking her head.

Martha Shelley, a lesbian poet in Daughters of Bilitis, was showing Greenwich Village to some visitors from the Philadelphia chapter on a hot summer evening in June 1969 when they walked past Christopher Street and witnessed—she learned the next day—the first night of the
Stonewall riots. “Oh, that’s nothing, we have riots in New York every night of the week,” she remembers telling her guests.

The truculent City College graduate, from a working-class Orthodox Jewish home, had read
The Feminine Mystique
“very early.” At twenty-five she was writing poetry and working as a secretary at Barnard—“a nest of dykes, but what did I know?”—and going to Daughters of Bilitis meetings, “because I was a dyke but I wasn’t a cute, WASPy, blond dyke, and I didn’t do well in the Mafia-controlled bars.”

D.O.B., the nation’s first lesbian organization, had been founded in San Francisco in 1955, with a deliberately obscure name, by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. The New York chapter, which rented space in a dingy warehouse, could count on ten members for its monthly meetings, and maybe thirty for a dance, but it suited Martha better than NOW, where, after some tentative forays, she had sensed that “a lot of the straight women felt uncomfortable around me.” Still, it annoyed her that the D.O.B women were as conservative and square, in their own way, as the NOW women.

“In those days I was dropping acid, smoking dope, and also going to antiwar marches,” she recounts. “I thought D.O.B. was nuts to try to prove to straight America that we were just like them only gay.”

Stonewall changed everything. A month after the police bust of the drag queen bar and the unexpected street-kid resistance, the gay men of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis placed an ad in
The Village Voice
calling for a protest rally in Washington Square Park and a march to Sheridan Square. Several hundred people turned out for the unprecedented action. For the first time in history there were shouts of “Gay Power!”

“I jumped up and made a speech,” Martha remembers. “I said, “We’ll be back.’ ”

Gay militance was rising and Martha was in the thick of it. That summer she helped form a new group with Jim Fouratt, the instigator of the Central Park Be-In and other whimsical Yippie happenings, and
shop owner Bob Kohler, a befriender of street queens. Meeting at Alternate U., a radical lecture center on West Fourteenth Street, the militants attracted many previously closeted gays from the New and Old Left. “Our politics were left, feminist, gay, radical,” Martha joyfully sums up. “We were proud commie pinko queers.”

When someone uttered the name
Gay Liberation Front, Martha pounded her fist on the table and shouted, “That’s it!” She volunteered to edit
Come Out!
, GLF’s monthly paper.

The lesbians who joined the Gay Liberation Front in its formative months were practiced swimmers in the era’s swift currents. Lois Hart, nicknamed Lovingheart for her gentle, passionate nature, was Martha’s polar opposite, a former nun who had passed through Millbrook, Timothy Leary’s spiritual center for attaining higher consciousness through LSD. Artemis March, a Vassar graduate who had contemplated a career in sociology, had dropped out of the system to make and sell leather sandals and belts. Karla Jay, an editorial assistant at Collier’s Encyclopedia, thought it prudent to keep her newfound lesbian activism a secret from her Redstockings consciousness-raising group. Ellen Shumsky, a school librarian, had been deeply involved in the battle for community control of the schools in Ocean Hill–Brownsville.