In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (29 page)

While
Ms
. was undertaking its mission to reach the broad multitudes, some evangelistic lesbian feminists were steering a course in the opposite
direction, toward separatism and exclusion. The Lavender Menace action at the Second Congress and their “Woman-Identified Woman” position paper had inspired a coming-out fervor akin to a tidal wave. At the time, I was bewildered by the overnight conversions and sudden switches in overt orientation by many of the activists I knew. Now I think I understand the phenomenon better.

There is a saying that armies run on their stomachs and political movements run on sex. Romance and sexual attachments flourish in the heated cauldron of common cause; flirtation, intrigue, and attraction are compelling reasons to get out of the house and go to a meeting. As a movement seeps into one’s veins and takes over one’s life, who else exercises any hold on one’s imagination but other movement people?

Women’s Liberation was a one-sex movement. The dissatisfactions with men that propelled women into the cause found expression and support in the vital community of activists, but activism cannot quell emotional loneliness or bury the need for sexual connection. Many women who came out as lesbians in the seventies were driven by a deep yearning for emotional and sexual connection. Caught in the powerful wave, some others merely wished to experiment, try a lesbian experience, have an adventure, explore their bisexual dimensions. Several were persuaded, at least temporarily, by the lesbian-feminist argument, emphatically presented, that radical feminism led logically to lesbianism and a woman was wimpy if she wanted to sleep with the enemy. (“Political lesbians” were viewed with suspicion by hard-core dykes who insisted that
they
did not have a choice.) But the overarching truth is that a large number of women had simply found their true sexual identity at last, not knowing or believing before the seventies that the option existed.

One popular manifestation of the lesbian input into radical feminism was the All-Women’s Dance. Illegal back-room dancing was the ostensible reason behind the notorious police raids of the old-style gay bars, so defiant open dances in nonbar spaces became a prime organizing tool of Gay Liberation. In a cross-fertilization, open dances were adopted by the women’s movement much as the technique of small-group consciousness-raising was adopted by the Gay Liberation Front.
Flyers announcing the dances became nearly as prevalent as flyers announcing political actions, and it soon became the custom to hold a women’s dance nearly every weekend and at the conclusion of every important conference. A tremendous release of sexual energy was apparent in the spirited circle dances and conga lines, and there was a sweet, innocent bacchanalian aspect to tearing off one’s shirt and dancing bare-breasted in a room full of women, but I was one of those who demurred. Despite that apocryphal saying attributed to Emma Goldman—“It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it”—I felt the dances were irrelevant to the pursuit of feminism’s serious political goals. For those who were interested in exploring the possibilities of a women’s community independent of men, the dances were extremely relevant. They became a bone of contention in what came to be called the gay-straight split.

The gay-straight split went down differently in every group in every city. In New York Radical Feminists it went something like this: There came a time at the general meetings when anyone who stood up to address a heterosexual issue was met by a fusillade of stamping feet and a chorus of “Come out, come out!” Lesbian life was put forward as the new political utopia, free of hampering sex roles and unequal status. The idea was very exciting to women in the process of discovering their lesbian identity, but those of us who loved women as friends, not as sexual partners, were upset by the logic and the clamor. We desired to change men, not our sexual orientation. I watched in frustration as heterosexual women left the movement in droves, not primarily out of homophobia, as some of the lesbian theorists insisted, but more from a sense that the movement had exhausted its usefulness for them. They were replaced by newly uncloseted lesbians from all walks of life, from the gay bars to elite, quiet cliques in academia, who previously had not felt welcome in the movement’s ranks.

I stayed, and developed a lasting reputation in certain lesbian circles as an unregenerate homophobe, an assessment that genuinely distressed me. My refusal to accept the lesbian nirvana was a political as well as personal position, deeply felt. I thought it was ridiculous to gauge feminist commitment by sexual preference. So did many lesbian feminists, but
their voices got lost in the furor of the times.

Lesbian separatism was a further step. It took hold most dramatically in Washington D.C., where
The Furies
, a newspaper put out by a collective of the same name, took aim against heterosexual feminism for a year and a half. Once again the catalyst was Rita Mae Brown, this time in conjunction with Charlotte Bunch, the dedicated antiwar activist and popular leader of the dominant left wing in D.C. Women’s Liberation. The extreme lifestyle changes that Bunch came to embrace were emblematic of the times.

Open-faced and bespectacled, the daughter of Methodist missionaries who ran medical clinics in the mountains of North Carolina and New Mexico, Charlotte Bunch had been a liberal Christian student leader at Duke University during the mid-sixties. “My moral fervor went directly into the civil rights movement,” she remembers. “My first protest was to hold a pray-in at the segregated Methodist church in Durham.” In 1966, Charlotte moved into a black neighborhood in Washington to organize a project against poverty and racism. She married her coworker Jim Weeks, a Presybyterian student organizer from Berkeley, the following year.

“Like many of those early marriages in the sixties, we were political comrades who also had a sexual life,” Bunch reflects. “I was heterosexual just like anybody who never thought about being anything else.”

In quick succession Charlotte received a fellowship at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, joined a Women’s Liberation study group started by Marilyn Webb, and took part in the 1968 Miss America Protest. Moving to Cleveland with Jim, she started a women’s group there and helped Marilyn organize the Thanksgiving conference at Lake Villa, Illinois, where she was sickened by the angry clashes between the radical feminists and her ideological allies, the anti-imperialist women. The Cleveland sojourn was an unhappy time for her, and she and Jim returned to Washington. In May 1970 she flew to Hanoi with an antiwar delegation. Webb had started
off our backs
earlier that year, but Charlotte kept her distance from the newspaper collective, viewing it as “Marilyn’s thing.” It was so typical of Marilyn, she thought, to dash headlong into a new project without consensus-building. Charlotte’s new group was Women and Imperialism. With others she made plans for a “solidarity conference”
with North Vietnamese women, to be held in Toronto in the spring of 1971.

Few of the radical feminists were interested in the prospect of meeting with the Vietnamese women even though as individuals we were strongly opposed to the war. The struggle to wrench free of the male left’s priorities had succeeded in focusing us on a strictly feminist agenda: abortion was our issue and rape was on the horizon. From our point of view the Toronto conference was just another of the left’s unceasing efforts to assert antiwar work as the chief priority in Women’s Liberation. Feelings ran especially high in Detroit, where six movement feminists signed the “Fourth World Manifesto,” a sophisticated analysis of the anti-imperialist women’s tactics. It offered instead: “The demand for an end to sex roles and male imperialist domination is a real attack on the masculine citadel of war.”

Charlotte Bunch was not perturbed by the Fourth World Manifesto, but her careful construct of political certainties began to implode when Sharon Deevey, her best friend and sturdy partner in antiwar work, made a stunning revelation. Deevey, in a movement marriage similar to Charlotte’s, confided that she had become a lesbian after falling in love with Joan Biren, another antiwar activist they knew, who had taken up photography in Washington and started calling herself by her initials, JEB.

The intense romance between the two women kicked off what Bunch calls in retrospect “the summer of madness.” Charlotte and her husband joined a commune built around JEB, Sharon, and Sharon’s husband, but JEB and Sharon abandoned it for an all-lesbian house, leaving Charlotte behind with the men. Coletta Reid, a founder of
off our backs
, left her husband to start a new lesbian life. Three more women at
oob
began to wonder if they might be lesbians, too. What impressed Charlotte was the energy, “a political, sexual, emotional energy that was just popping all around, everywhere, an intense personal experience of women figuring out their sexuality overlaid with this political, intellectual discussion about the meaning of lesbianism and heterosexuality.” She wanted to be part of it. Intellectually she felt she was part of it already.

That fall Rita Mae Brown and her current lover, tiring of New York,
piled their belongings into a van and moved to D.C. to join one of the communal lesbian houses. After six weeks of sustained courtship, she seduced Charlotte Bunch. In an agonizing decision, Charlotte left her husband four months later. “Rita Mae was a good introduction to the potential of lesbianism for me,” she reflects, “although I knew enough about her to realize that she was being opportunistic. She made an assessment of the D.C. Women’s Liberation scene and figured out how to get her alliances.”

Swallowing her mortification when Rita Mae jilted her for another lover, Charlotte took her newfound lesbian-feminist evangelism back to her Women and Imperialism group. “I pushed my view that lesbianism had to be on the agenda for the Toronto meeting with the Vietnamese,” she remembers. “I felt the Vietnamese women needed to know about it.” The anti-imperialists went berserk. The issue, they reminded her in a set of screaming matches, was how to get more American women to work against the war.

Charlotte did not go to Toronto. Instead she broke with the anti-imperialists and formed a lesbian-separatist collective with Rita Mae Brown, Ginny Berson, Coletta Reid, Sharon Deevey, and JEB that became The Furies. She relates, “There were people in it like Nancy Myron and Dolores Bargowski, lesbians forever who were feeling this incredible release—instead of the old shame they were suddenly the vanguard. Others weren’t sure they were lesbians at all and eventually decided they weren’t. And I, with my whole history of political work, had to believe that lesbianism was a political cause. I had to make it a political cause.”

The first issue of
The Furies
, dated January 1972, carried bold separatist statements by Ginny Berson and Charlotte Bunch. “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference,” Berson wrote, “but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.” Bunch proposed that “organized lesbianism is central to destroying our sexist, racist, capitalist, imperialist system.” Then she threw down her challenge to the movement’s confused and bewildered straight ranks: “As long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters.” In one
ter sense Charlotte was speaking personally. Both she and Sharon Deevey had been ostracized by many of their straight friends on the left when they’d abandoned their husbands for women.

Lesbian separatism becomes more understandable in the context of other holier-than-thou separatist organizations of the era, from the Black Panthers to Weatherman, in which there was a narrowing of the core goup and an intensification of the rhetoric.
The Furies
was not the sole advocate of separatism to emerge in the women’s movement.
Ain’t I a Woman
, begun by “a conspiracy of Radical Lesbians” in Iowa City, was committed at first to printing a range of Women’s Liberation voices in the Midwest; as the paper changed gears it announced it would print only those articles its shrinking collective of eight, then six, agreed with.
Spectre
, a voice of “white revolutionary lesbians” in Ann Arbor, doused its pages with expletives, dropped final consonants to affect a tough working-class style, and declared war on everyone, including
The Furies
. During the same period in New York,
Rat
was taken over by a lesbian collective, then by a third-world lesbian collective, and finally ceased to publish.

When she raised her head from her
Furies
evangelism, the sober fact slowly dawned on Charlotte Bunch, the former consensus-builder, that separatism was not only frightening vast numbers of heterosexuals in the feminist movement, it wasn’t making any friends in Washington’s lesbian population either. Rita Mae Brown’s favorite outreach program was to invite bar lesbians to screen one of the old Hollywood films she loved, and then hit them with a political analysis, but the tactic usually resulted in a mass exodus once the movie was over. As the spring of 1972 rolled around, Bunch and the others felt a need to confront their catalytic rogue on her individualistic tendencies vis-à-vis the collective. This wasn’t the first time
The Furies
women had turned on each other; Sharon Deevey and JEB had already been expelled on an assortment of charges.