In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (51 page)

Lynn optimistically projected a turnout of twenty thousand. I redid the numbers and came up with five thousand, tops. Anything under that magic figure, the man in charge of police permits had warned, and we’d be trotting along the sidewalk, not coursing through the streets. Dolores Alexander juggled the list of speakers for the postmarch rally in Bryant Park. No problem there. We had Abzug, Steinem, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, and Charlotte Bunch, the former lesbian separatist, who had agreed to come up from Washington to add her voice. While Dolores lined up the speakers, I negotiated endlessly with the NYPD commanders of Midtown North and South, who were not thrilled about diverting a twenty-block stretch of traffic along Broadway from Columbus Circle to Forty-second Street on a busy Saturday afternoon. Neither, I think, were they convinced of our peaceful intentions.

Two gum-chewing babes in leather jackets sashayed into the storefront one evening, looking impossibly conspiratorial and tough. “Where’s the
heavy stuff
gonna happen?” they whispered.

“Say what?”

“You know, the
heavy stuff.
”

I giggled. They had to be undercover cops.

The storefront became a nightly beehive of Day-Glo paint and thick brushes, staple guns thwacking on plywood poles. Off in one corner, Yolanda Mancilla presided over the cutting and stitching of the largest banner I’d ever seen. A high school student recently accepted to Harvard, Yolanda had walked into the office after the conference with a tearful pledge to translate anything we had into Spanish. It turned out she had a talent for artwork as well.

Harold Prince had given me some useful pointers when I’d solicited his advice after seeing
Evita
, marveling at how he had staged a rousing street demonstration with a handful of actors and picket signs that somehow conveyed the impression of great multitudes.

“How many folks you expecting?” the director inquired.

“Five thousand.”

“How many posters?”

“We’re making five hundred.”

“Verticals and horizontals? Mix of colors and slogans?”

“Of course!”

“Okay, here’s what you do. You place your five hundred posters among your first thousand marchers.”

“But, Mr. Prince, the other four thousand marchers will want to carry some posters.”

“You did your organizing, now you’re going for the picture,” said the genius of spectacles. “A sea of waving posters from the front of the line.”

The Women Against Pornography March on Times Square got between five and seven thousand demonstrators, and nearly every second marcher seemed to have brought her own homemade sign. The sea of waving posters at the front of the line looked glorious that night on the CBS network news and in the morning papers. Most certainly we would not have gotten such extensive coverage without our great visuals.
The guy from 1010 WINS News Radio hugged me. The
Times
actually used the phrase
“sea of waving placards.” Harold Prince phoned in his congratulations.

Lynn Campbell resigned as a paid organizer for Women Against Pornography the week after the march. She needed less stressful work to preserve her dwindling health. (This wonderful person hung on to her life for another five years.) With Lynn gone, I resigned from WAP as an unpaid organizer, to return to the task of earning a living by completing my book on femininity. We had fulfilled the promise we’d made to each other in San Francisco the year before, when I’d said “Organize in New York and we’ll make pornography a national feminist issue.” Others were ready to carry it forward. I hadn’t intended to be a full-time antipornography worker, nor did I want pornography to overshadow rape, a tail wagging the dog, but the campaign had been too exciting to walk away from—until the strain wore me down. Nothing in our women’s movement was ever accomplished without severe emotional depletion and fractured personal relations. Dolores Alexander and I were barely speaking between the conference and the march. My long-standing friendship with Barbara Mehrhof was in tatters. Much of the bad feelings had to do with “elitism” and “personal publicity,” the movement’s names for recognition and credit. Four organizers had worked side by side at the WAP storefront for six frantic months, yet it was my name, usually bracketed by Steinem’s and Abzug’s, that most often appeared in the papers, and it didn’t help that I’d begun to bark orders like a martinet. The people I needed to distance myself from were the women I’d brought together, and I believe that the feelings were mutual, at least for a while.

Through the outreach we’d done—the conference, the march, the slide shows, the tours—Women Against Pornography had attracted many new volunteers, most of them young enough to be my daughters. The newcomers had been in high school during the early seventies, yearning to be part of the feminist revolution. Dorchen Leidholdt, an editor of college textbooks at Random House, and a WAP founder, took on a leadership position, duly noted by
Hustler
in its usual scatological manner. The group continued to make news on a regular basis by initiating the WAP zaps, a series of awards and brickbats bestowed
on the advertising industry, and by demonstrating sisterly support for Linda Marchiano, the former Linda Lovelace, when she exposed the brutal truth behind her life as the can’t-get-enough star of
Deep Throat
. At this time, WAP’s approach was still strictly educational, in line with the founders’ vision. It kept up the Times Square tours, organized panel discussions, sent out speakers and slide shows, conducted the occasional protest demonstration, and did not advocate any new legal measures to curb the growing pornography menace.

I think the new conservatism of the Reagan era caught most feminists by surprise—I know the overwhelming sweep of the 1980 elections caught
me
by surprise—but it soon became transparently clear that the political and cultural climate of the nation was undergoing a change of tremendous proportions. We had entered the greedy Me Decade, with “Lighten up!” and “Family Values” as its conflicting mottoes. It was against this inauspicious backdrop that the internecine feminist pornography wars became a pitched battle.

In the summer of 1981 two significant books articulating the feminist opposition to porn, Susan Griffin’s
Pornography and Silence
and Andrea Dworkin’s
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
, were negatively assessed in
The New York Times Book Review
by Ellen Willis, whose weekly columns in
The Village Voice
had made her the de facto leader of the increasingly vocal feminist anti-anti-pornography forces. Granting the misognyny rife in porn, Willis argued that the larger demon was the sexually repressive family structure. She pondered whether the “peculiar confluence” of feminist antiporn activism and the antipornography stance of the fundamentalist New Right indicated a subconscious feminist shift toward the conservative cultural tide, and concluded that it did.

Later that year I received an urgent long-distance telephone call from Alice Schwarzer, the formidable editor of
Emma
, the German feminist magazine. Schwarzer’s halting command of the English language made her speech come out in short bursts, but she seemed to be saying that someone named Pat Califia, a pornography writer in California, was launching an important new feminist movement.
Emma
was going to run one of her essays, and the magazine hoped I would write a response.

“What’s the new movement?” I inquired with interest.

“Lesbian sadomasochism,” Schwarzer replied. I thought I misheard her.
“Lesbian sadomasochism!”
she shouted into the receiver. “It is sweeping your movement. You do not
know?
”

I didn’t know, and furthermore, I didn’t believe her. I told her to send the essay to Dorchen Leidholdt, the new leader of WAP.

“
I was horrified by the Califia article,” Leidholdt remembers, “horrified that a German feminist magazine was going to publish statements like ‘An s/m scene can be played out using the personae of guard and prisoner, cop and suspect, Nazi and Jew.’ My name is German, my father is of German descent. I felt almost a sense of personal responsibility.” Leidholdt wrote an agitated response for
Emma
and set out to learn more about Pat Califia’s organization.

A rare “top” in a field of “bottoms,” the San Francisco pornographer led an s/m group named Samois, for the house of torture in
The Story of O
, and was editing an anthology of lesbian s/m writings called
Coming to Power
. Califia’s evangelistic promotion of lesbian sadomasochism as a new oppressed minority had first seen the light of day in
Heresies
, a New York–based feminist magazine of the arts, in a steamy “Sex Issue” extolling the pleasures of pornography, s/m, and butch-femme erotics. “
I enjoy leathersex, bondage, various forms of erotic torture, flagellation (whipping), verbal humiliation, fistfucking, and water sports (playing with enemas and piss),” the author explained to her “vanilla friends.” Joan Nestle, who’d given a presentation at our conference, contributed a personal narrative of her life as a femme drawn to working-class butches in the 1950s. There was also a racy younger-generation dialogue, “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With,” between Amber Hollibaugh and the Chicana poet Cherrie Moraga, which, like Nestle’s piece, was an open challenge to lesbian feminism’s proud assertion in the seventies that butch-femme roles were an outworn mimicry of the dominance/submission mode of heterosexual relations.

“Then,” Dorchen recalls with a shudder, “came the Barnard conference.”

The ninth annual “The Scholar and the Feminist” conference at Barnard College on Saturday, April 24, 1982, proclaimed “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” as its groundbreaking theme.
Months of planning
by Carole Vance, a Columbia anthropologist, and a team of advisers of her choosing had gone into the day’s proceedings, intended to produce a joyful exploration of “politically incorrect” sexual behavior, to counter the “fascist” and “moralistic” tendencies of WAP. The bizarre result was a somewhat nervous, somewhat giddy, occasionally tearful exposition of the pleasures of s/m starring the
Heresies
contributors and augmented by Dorothy Allison, Esther Newton, and Gayle Rubin, the last a feminist scholar who had emerged as a leading member of Samois.

A dozen WAP women, their T-shirts emblazoned with “Against Sadomasochism” and “Feminists for a Feminist Sexuality,” picketed outside with their protest leaflets. “From the response, you’d have thought we dropped an atomic bomb on Barnard,” Dorchen Leidholdt remembers. Adding to the furor, alarmed college authorities had confiscated a “Conference Diary” intended for registrants,
a pastiche of the planners’ notes and scribbles interspersed with arty graphics of lipstick kisses, razor blades, safety pins, and chain collars, and an empty page reserved for phone numbers. Ellen Willis’s scribble had hailed the planning sessions as “a radical act” embodying a political urgency she had not witnessed since the early days of Women’s Liberation.

Not every speaker at Barnard that day addressed s/m or butch-femme roles. A few invitees read academic papers tracing the “social purity” ethic, cast as a strain of repressed sexuality, in nineteenth-century feminist movements, while the young historian Alice Echols brought matters up to date by
accusing Adrienne Rich of taking the sex out of lesbianism by championing women’s sexuality as more diffuse and spiritual than the sexuality of men.

On Sunday, the
Lesbian Sex Mafia, Dorothy Allison’s s/m support group and dangerous-games society, held an off-campus speak-out featuring dildos, nipple clamps, and a bondage slide show by Betty Dodson, a movement entrepreneur who made her living by conducting workshops on masturbation. “I love rough sex and I have many fetishes,” Allison announced, “and if something’s possible to do, I’ll try it three times.” (The novelist
Bertha Harris, one of her early mentors, recalls that during this experimental period in Allison’s life some of her friends were deeply concerned for the young writer’s health and safety.)

Four reporters from Washington’s feminist newspaper
off our backs
labored to make sense of the Barnard conference for their readers. “A travesty,” concluded Fran Moira. “I was deeply disturbed,” editorialized Carol Anne Douglas, who resisted the s/m speakers’ claim that they were sexual radicals. “I think their positions were those of sexual conservatives,” she countered, “to assume that attraction must be based on differences, polarities, or dominance.” Guest columnist Claudette Charbonneau, incensed that the antiviolence movement had been excluded from the program, wrote that she felt she had entered “an Orwellian world.” Tacie Dejanicus, upset by the name-calling, charges, and countercharges by the hardening factions, admitted that she did not know how the intense ideological split would shape feminism in the future, but concluded “it is certain to do so.” The sexuality debate was to rage in
oob
and other feminist journals for several more years.

“
I think most lesbian feminists were dismayed, and continued to be dismayed,” Carol Anne Douglas reflects. “The s/m evangelists, or sexual libertarians, as I began to call them, emerged at a time when the American left wasn’t going anywhere, and when lesbianism per se was no longer transgressive, to use one of their favorite words. But there was still a tendency to want to be the most militant and the most revolutionary. They were obviously suggesting that what
they
liked was the coolest, and that sex without those things was vanilla, or boring, which was pretty insulting to the rest of us.” Douglas had further reason to feel insulted, when Susie Bright, an erotic writer in San Francisco, named her magazine (“for adventurous lesbians”)
On Our Backs
, pointedly thumbing her nose at the earnest politics of America’s oldest, continuously published feminist paper.