In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (50 page)

Our decision to target Times Square was only one of WAP’s strategies, but it turned out that a campaign in the belly of the beast brought us unexpected allies. The legitimate Broadway theater owners, their business hurting from neighborhood crime, were crying for someone to “do something” about the blight. I suspect that
The New York Times
paid us close attention at least partly because its stone bulwark on West Forty-third Street was under siege on all sides by the sex industry’s weedy growth.

After I wrote him a testy letter, we met with Carl Weisbrod, head of the Mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project, who was charged with the thankless task of trying to close down the illegal brothels that hid behind the porn bookstores’ facades. He worked with Fred Papert, whose Forty-second Street Redevelopment Corporation was experiencing little luck in luring legitimate businesses into the swamp of Times Square. Carl Weisbrod turned out to be an imaginative and ethical young lawyer open to new ideas. When he asked what we needed, Lynn Campbell piped up, “Office space.” A few days later Weisbrod called to say there was an empty bar and restaurant on Ninth Avenue and Forty-second Street that we could use, rent-free, until Papert’s corporation found a buyer. Women Against Pornography was to occupy the funky little storefront on the edge of Times Square for more than two years, until two adjacent buildings collapsed during a renovation. The only prospective buyer to appear during our tenure was Bob Guccione of
Penthouse
, wanting to open an establishment called the Meat Rack. Alerted by WAP, neighborhood folk rallied to scotch the plan.

The neighborhood’s response was affirming from the minute we opened our doors. St. Malachy’s, an actors’ chapel on West Forty-seventh Street, sent over four desks they’d been keeping in storage. We placed them across from the massive oak bar, our literature table, and ordered some phone lines. Four desks, three paid organizers. I had not
intended this to happen—I’d warned everybody not to think it might happen—but I put aside the book I was working on (
Femininity
, already past its deadline) and took the fourth desk as an unpaid organizer. Things were moving so rapidly that I couldn’t stay away.

We put together an educational slide show of hard- and soft-core porn that was accompanied by our critical commentary, and trundled the carousel to people’s homes for consciousness-raising evenings. Then Lynn suggested that we run actual tours through Times Square. Exploratory forays into the raw netherworld of the twenty-five-cent peeps and the glitzy, multifloored sexploitation arcades like Show World, one block from our office, had convinced her and Dolores that people who were not porn consumers had no idea what went on behind the facades of Girls! Live Girls! and were afraid to find out. Women went out of their way to avoid the area, reluctant to subject themselves to its visual assaults and physical hassles.

In what became our most popular tactic, Women Against Pornography opened up the hidden life of Times Square for a suggested five-dollar donation. I plotted the itinerary and wrote a script based on information, supplied by Carl Weisbrod and Maggie Smith, about which mobster reputedly owned what X-rated theater or coin arcade, and what sort of wages the employees at Show World, the Dating Room, the Mardi Gras, or the Pussycat received of an evening. A WAP tour was never without spontaneous encounters—getting tossed out bodily by hysterical managers; watching the customers, often white men in business suits, slink away in confusion; engaging in short, frank dialogues with the amused, blasé, embarrassed, or furious Live! Nude! Topless! Bottomless! performers when they emerged from their circular cages to take their hourly breaks. The unexpected appearance of women in clothes, to observe men in clothes watching naked women writhe in mock sexual pleasure for the men’s entertainment, dramatically altered the atmosphere of the live sex shows’ self-contained world. We had not thought this out very clearly beforehand, but our intrusion was shattering to the careful construct of denial the performers relied on to get them through the night.

Georgia Dullea took one of the first tours and wrote a big feature for the Style section of the
Times
, which in turn precipitated a media
avalanche: stories in
People
,
Time
, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, several European papers; features on the city’s local TV news programs and talk shows; a coveted summons from
The Phil Donahue Show
in Chicago. Alerted by the news coverage, whole classes of high school and college students, accompanied by their teachers, signed up for the tours. We escorted, most memorably, two intrepid Benedictine nuns from Erie, Pennsylvania, a delegation from the Jewish War Veterans and the Anti-Defamation League, livid with rage when we showed them the Nazi porn genre, a study group of Chinese-American women wanting to see how they were portrayed in
Cherry Blossoms
and similar magazines. Someone in the group calculated that more than 2,500 people took the walking tours that first year, including whole groups of foreign tourists who’d heard on the grapevine that we offered the best sightseeing bargain in town. There was no time to stop and consider the emotional drain on our psyches as we kept hurling ourselves into the twice-weekly confrontations.

One day two university psychologists in town for an academic convention sought us out. Ed Donnerstein from the University of Wisconsin and Neal Malamuth from UCLA were investigating the effects of violent pornography on attitudes toward rape, and their initial research was confirming the “hypothesis,” as Ed called it, that I’d advanced in the final chapter of
Against Our Will
. Cooperation materialized from other sources, too. The League of New York Theater Owners wrote us a check for ten thousand dollars, although Gerry Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organization, the czar behind the generous gift, threw a fit when he saw that our mission was somewhat broader than “clean up Times Square.”

“Playboy
?
”
he yelled one day, barging into the office. “You’re against
Playboy
? Where’s Gloria Steinem? Does she know what you’re doing?”

With some trepidation we paid a courtesy visit to Father Morton A. Hill, S.J., the aging director of Morality in Media, up at the interfaith office building jokingly called “the God Box” on Riverside Drive. Hill had written the minority report for the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in 1970, the report that articulated pornography’s dangers. In our terror at being lumped with religious conservatives, “abortion” and “gay rights” were the first words out of
our mouths. Father Hill was a good, kindly man, and very knowledgeable about our mutual interest. The meeting was a poignant study in contrasts. We honestly believed that radical feminists, with our deeper understanding of porn and our sophisticated knowledge of sexuality, would succeed in turning around public opinion where the old-fashioned moralists had not.

When we weren’t coping with the ringing phones, the media, the slide shows and tours, the neighborhood people bursting through the door to tell us “It’s about time!” (we decided to make “It’s about Time” our official slogan), we concentrated on putting together the intricate pieces of our September conference and October march. Tempers flared among the four full-time organizers, partly from the dizzying speed at which we were working, partly from the stress of our daily exposure to porn. Twice I turned into a screaming banshee—shooing away a photographer and model as they set up a porn shoot in front of our storefront, ejecting a drunken fellow, claiming to be a Vietnam vet, who offered to blow up any target on Forty-second Street we wanted. And I have to confess that I spoke intemperately on the
Donahue Show
when Phil asked me about Larry Flynt, recently paralyzed by a gunman’s bullet.

“Well, Phil,” I quipped, as I might have in my living room, “that may have been the best thing that ever happened to Flynt.”

Donahue’s studio wasn’t my living room. He read me the riot act and called me an Ayatollah Khomeini. Although I maintain to this day that he overreacted, the deeper truth is that I still feel ashamed that my hard-boiled wisecrack let my colleagues down.

We already had an inkling that some feminists were not happy about what we were doing, although the opposition hadn’t yet solidified into an organized campaign. The slide show was hitting raw nerves. Dolores Alexander, a whiz at raising money through the lesbian social network, had encountered a negative reaction at one of her presentations. When she projected a slide of women in bondage, a guest screamed, “You’re attacking my sexuality! I find that picture very sexy!” We began to get agitated responses from straight women as well. Sometimes they were emotional defenses of free speech, but to our bewilderment, we also saw that some women identified their sexuality
with the s/m pictures we found degrading. Porn turned them on, and they didn’t want to hear any political raps about how women were conditioned to find their sexual pleasure within the mysogynistic scenarios created by men. They claimed we were condemning their minds and behavior, and I guess we were.

Seven hundred women attended the
East Coast Feminist Conference on Pornography at Martin Luther King, Jr., High School, near Lincoln Center, on the weekend of September 15–16, 1979. The blood on the floor at the end of the weekend was all mine.

Nearly every feminist star—Abzug, Steinem, Robin Morgan, Shere Hite, Phyllis Chesler, etc.—and a host of distinguished feminist artists and writers came out for Women Against Pornography’s intensive conference. Among the weekend’s highlights were Daphne Ayallah’s slide show on breasts and breast fetishes and the redoubtable Fran Hosken’s research on clitoridectomy, billed for our conference as “the
reality
of sexual mutilation.” Hosken made genital excision a feminist issue twenty years before it became an international concern. We had panel discussions on erotic art, pornography and incest, pornography and sexuality, pornography and the older woman, sadomasochistic images in fashion photography, the use of animals in pornography and sex. Wendy Kaminer from the Mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project, and the author of WAP’s First Amendment position paper, conducted a workshop on antiporn activism, the legal concept of prior restraint, and free speech. In the spirit of open dialogue, we handed over two panels to feminist critics of the antiporn movement whose views we respected. Ellen
Willis and Alix Kates Shulman led a discussion titled “Prudery, an Infantile Disorder,” and Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel of the Lesbian Herstory Archives presented the case for lesbian erotic art.

I chaired the concluding open-mike session, “Strategies for the Future,” on Sunday afternoon. There is no way to explain what happened, except to note that the concentrated exposure to graphic images combined with intimate consciousness-raising on rape, battery, and incest in close quarters for two full days had brought many raw emotions roiling to the surface. The session had barely begun when a heckler started badgering me from the front row.

“Why isn’t your literature in Spanish?” she razzed.

I tried to ignore the disruption.

“You’re a bunch of fucking middle-class white elitists.
Why isn’t your literature in Spanish?
”

If there is a cool, effective way to handle hecklers, I never found it. Neither did I ever learn how not to rise to the bait.

“We’d love to have our literature in Spanish,” I shot back. “We want it in Braille and in every language. At this point we’re still struggling to put it in English.”

The heckler made her way to the stage. She had on a cheap man’s suit, a stiff-collared white shirt, and a dark tie. Later I learned she called herself Frog, and identified herself as an incest victim. Frog grabbed the open microphone and jerked her thumb in my direction.

“I’m sick of this elitist bullshit.
We
do all the work in this movement, and
you
go home and suck cock.”

Wrong, Frog, wrong. I was going home every night to an empty apartment. I had been living alone for five years.

Her charge delivered, Frog sauntered back to her seat. I waited, hoping that one of my colleagues would rise to my rescue. Nada. Did they not think I required rescue? An air of expectancy hung over the auditorium. Blood boiling, I stood up and walked the few steps to the open mike.

“I’d like to ask you something. If you hate men so much, why are you wearing men’s clothes?”

The gasp was audible. So much for “Strategies for the Future.” The next two hours went by in a blur of tearful statements and harsh accusations, mostly (I think) about the invested power of men’s suits in a patriarchal society, and the pros and cons of my right, as a heterosexual woman in pants, to challenge the attire of a lesbian in drag.

On Monday morning a very positive report by
Leslie Bennetts, “Conference Examines Pornography as a Feminist Issue,” was splashed across our familiar venue, the Style section of the
Times
. Bennetts had not hung around for the Sunday afternoon disruptions, but some people who had, or who had not been there but had received sketchy accounts, could not let it go. Adrienne Rich had begged off from the weekend, pleading an overload of work and public commitments. Days later she resigned from WAP by letter, citing my “homophobic attack
on a lesbian wearing pants” (I’m paraphrasing from memory but I believe that’s close). When I called her at her home in western Massachusetts, she would not hear me out. Adrienne and I had been political allies for nearly a decade; I treasured the company of this brilliant, internationally recognized poet who bore up so stoically under physical disability and personal trauma, whose twin worlds of intellectual achievement and radical activism were an unending search for perfection. We never spoke again. I think Adrienne was already in tremendous conflict over the implications of an antiporn movement, although her break from it did not come for another five years.

With slightly more than a month left to go, WAP put its painful emotions on hold and hunkered down for the October 20 March on Times Square. Lynn Campbell, Marilyn Hayes, Renee Mittler, and Dana Lobell firmed up the out-of-town contingents, who were arriving on chartered buses from U. Mass., Amherst, Hampshire, and Brown. We had solid commitments from many of the actors of Forty-second Street’s Theater Row, who had to make their way day and night past the sex-shop grunge, as well as from the residents of Manhattan Plaza, a high-rise apartment building in the neighborhood populated mainly by senior citizens and theater people. The Coalition of Labor Union Women and a women’s caucus of post office workers were eager to join the march.