Going Too Far (30 page)

Before we get into vanguarditis, we have to backtrack a little, take some Dramamine for our nausea, and talk about men—and male influence, and male attempts to destroy the united Women's Movement. This is such an old subject that it bores and depresses me once more to have to wade through it. I feel that “man-hating” is an honorable and viable
political
act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the
class
that is oppressing them. And although there are exceptions (as in everything), i.e., men who are trying to be traitors to their own male class, most men cheerfully affirm their deadly class privileges and power. And I
hate
that
class
. I wrote my “Goodbye to All That” to the male Left in 1970—and thought I was done with it. Del Martin wrote her now classic article “If That's All There Is” as a farewell to the male gay movement soon after—and said it all again. We were both touchingly naïve if we thought that sufficient.

Because there is now upon us yet another massive wave of male interference, and it is coming, this time, from
both
gay men
and
their straight brothers. Boys will be boys, the old saying goes—and boys
will
indulge in that little thing called male bonding—and all boys in a patriarchal culture have more options and power than do any women.

Gay men first, since they were the ones we all thought were incipient allies with women, because of their own oppression under
sexism. I won't go into the facts or the manners of the male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement, since Del did all that superbly and since most women have left the “Gay Movement” a long time ago. But I will, for the sake of those sisters still locked into indentured servitude there, run through a few more recent examples of the “new changing high consciousness about male supremacy” among gay organizations and gay male heavies. Are we to forgive and forget the Gay Activist Alliance dances only a few months ago (with, as usual, a token 10 percent attendance by women), at which New York GAA showed stag movies of nude men raping nude women? Are we to forgive and forget the remark of one male gay leader, who told Susan Silverwoman, a feminist active for years in the Women's Movement and a founder of New York GLF, that she could not represent GLF at a press conference because she saw herself too much as a woman, as a feminist? Are we to forgive the editors of the gay male issue of
Motive
magazine for deliberately setting women against women, deliberately attempting to exacerbate what they see as the “Lesbian-Straight Split,” deliberately attempting to divide and conquer? Are we to forgive the following:

Once, when I was telling one of you
Motive
editors about the estimated nine million Wicce (witches) who were burned to death during the Middle Ages—something that appeared to be news to you—you paused for a moment, and then asked me, “But how many of those nine million women were actually lesbians?” For a moment, I missed your meaning completely as a variety of sick jokes raced through my mind: How many of the six million Jews were Zionists; how many of the napalmed Indochinese babies could be said to have lived outside the nuclear family?

Then it hit me: you had actually expressed a particle of your intense hatred for
all
women by asking how many of the nine million were lesbians, so
that you would know how many of these victims to mourn, because
YOU DIDN'T OBJECT TO WHAT WAS DONE TO THE OTHER WOMEN! This is as close as I have ever heard a man come to saying in so many words that he didn't object to men torturing and incinerating millions of women (provided only that they met his standards of burnability).

—this is a quote from the second issue of
Double-F, A Magazine of Effeminism
,
⁹
in which even the faggot-effeminist
males
proclaim
their
Declaration of Independence from Gay Liberation and all other male ideologies.

Or are we, out of the compassion in which we have been
positively forced to
drown
as women, are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist, yes obscenity of male tranvestitism? How many of us will try to explain away—or permit into our organizations, even—men who deliberately
re
emphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering as “Camp”? Maybe it seems that we, in our “liberated” combat boots and jeans, aren't being mocked. No? Then is it “merely” our mothers, and
their
mothers, who had no other choice, who wore hobbling dresses and torture stiletto heels to survive, to keep jobs, or to keep husbands because
they
themselves could
get
no jobs? No, I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which
he
may enjoy), and then he dares, he
dares
to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers' names and in our own, we must not call him sister.
We know what's at work when whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag
.

Last night, at this conference's
first
session, women let a man divide us, pit woman against woman and, in the process, exploit the entire Lesbian Conference to become the center of attention and boost his opportunistic career.

The same man who four years ago tried to pressure a San Francisco lesbian into letting him rape her; the same man who single-handedly divided and almost destroyed the San Francisco Daughters of Bilitis Chapter; the same man who, when personally begged by women
not
to attend this conference, replied that if he were kept out he would bring federal suit against these women on the charges of “discrimination and criminal conspiracy to discriminate”—this is the same man some women defended last night.

Kate Millett pled for peace. What about the women who had a right to a peaceful conference for
women
, Kate, with no past
or
present male here? A true pacifist should be consistent, and preferably on the side of her own people.

The organizers of the conference pled ignorance: that they didn't realize the issue would be “divisive” of women when they
invited
him! Yet they
knew
his San Francisco history. And it is too late for such ignorance. The same fine sisters who have for months worked day and night to create and organize this event, have—in one stroke, inviting this man—
directly
insulted their San Francisco sisters he previously tried to destroy, and indirectly insulted every woman here. I'm afraid they owe us a public apology on the grounds of divisiveness alone.

My point is that if even
one
woman last night felt that he should go, that should have been sufficient. Where The Man is concerned, we must not be separate fingers but one fist.

If transvestite or transsexual males are oppressed, then let them band together and organize against that oppression, instead of leeching off women who have spent entire lives
as women
in women's bodies.

And I will not name this man who claims to be a feminist and then threatens women with federal criminal charges; I will not give him the publicity he and his straight male theatrical manager are so greedy for, at our expense. But I charge him as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist. And you women at this conference know who he is. Now. You can let him into your workshops—or you can
deal
with him.

And what of the straight men, the rulers, the rapists, the right-on radicals? What of the men of the Socialist Workers Party, for example, who a short two years ago refused membership to all homosexual people on the grounds that homosexuality was a decadent sickness, an evil of capitalism, a perversion that must be rooted out in all “correct socialist thinking”—who now, upon opportunistically seeing a large movement out there with a lot of bodies to organize like pawns into their purposes, speedily change their official line (but not their central-committee attitude on homosexuality), and send “their” women out to teach these poor sheep some real politics? Are we to forgive, forget, ignore? Or struggle endlessly through precious energy-robbing hours with these women, because they
are
after all
women
, even if they're collaborating with a politics and a party based on straight white male rule? We must save our struggle for elsewhere. But it hurts—
because
they are women.

And this is the tragedy. That the straight men, the gay men, the transvestite men, the male
politics
, the male styles, the male attitudes toward sexuality are being arrayed once more against us, and they are, in fact, making new headway this time, using women as their standard-bearers.

Every woman here knows in her gut the vast differences between her sexuality and that of any patriarchally trained male's—gay or straight. That has, in fact, always been a source of
pride
to the lesbian community, even in its greatest suffering. That the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement, and coarse invulnerability, was the
male style
, and that we, as women, placed greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment. Then what but male style is happening when we accept the male transvestite who chooses to wear women's dresses and makeup, but sneer at the female who is still forced to wear them for survival? What is happening when “Street Fighting Woman,” a New York
all-woman
bar band, dresses in black leather and motorcycle chains, and sings and plays a lot of Rolling Stones, including a racist, sexist song like “Brown Sugar” by
that high priest of sadistic cock-rock, Mick Jagger. What is happening when, in a Midwest city with a strong lesbian-feminist community, men raped a woman in the university dormitory, and murdered her by the repeated ramming of a broom handle into her vagina until she died of massive internal hemorrhage—and the lesbian activists there can't “relate” to taking any political action pertaining to the crime because, according to one of them, there was no evidence that the victim was a lesbian? But the same community can, at a women's dance less than a week later, proudly play Jagger's recorded voice singing “Midnight Rambler”—a song which glorifies the Boston Strangler.

What has happened when women, in escaping the patriarchally enforced role of noxious femininity, adopt instead the patriarch's
own
style, to get drunk and swaggering just like one of the boys, to write of tits and ass as if a sister were no more than a collection of chicken parts, to spit at the lifetime commitment of other lesbian couples, and refer to them contemptuously as “monogs”? For the record, the anti-monogamy line originated with men, Leftist men, Weathermen in particular, in order to guilt-trip the women of their “alternative culture” into being more available victims for a dominance-based gang-rape sexuality. And from where but the male Left, male “hip” culture have we been infected with the obsession to anti-intellectualism and downward mobility? Genuinely poor people see no romanticism in their poverty; those really forced into illiteracy hardly glorify their condition. The oppressed want
out
of that condition—and it is contemptuous of real people's pain to parasitically imitate it, and hypocritical to play the more-oppressed-than-thou game instead of ordering our lives so as to try and meet our basic and just needs, so that we can get on with the more important but often forgotten business of making a Feminist Revolution.

What
about
the life-style cop-out? The one invented by two straight white young males, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, for the benefit of other unoppressed straight white young males? What about the elite isolation, the incestuous preoccupation with one's own clique or group or commune, one's own bar/dancing/tripping, which led one lesbian to announce that the revolution has already been won, that she isn't compelled, like the rest of us, to live in a man's world any more? As Jeanne Cordova has written in
The Lesbian Tide
, “An example of these politics is Jill Johnston's calling for tribes of women capable of sustaining themselves independent of the male species. How very beautiful! Truth, justice, and the womanly way! How very unreal.” And Cordova is right in pointing out that this is the “personal solution” error—the deadly trap into which so many heterosexual women have fallen. It should be obvious how painfully much everyone wants even a little happiness, peace, joy, in her life—and should have that right. But to remain convinced that your own personal mirage is a real oasis while
a sandstorm is rising in the desert is both selfish
and
suicidal. There is a war going on, sisters. Women are being killed. And the rapist doesn't wait to ask whether his victim is heterosexual or lesbian.

But the epidemic of male style among women doesn't stop there. No, it is driving its
reformist
wedge through our ranks as well: women breaking their backs working for McGovern (only to have him laugh in their faces
¹⁰
); women in the lesbian community especially breaking their backs to elect almost invariably
male
gay legislators, or lobbying to pass bills which will, in actuality, primarily profit
men
.
¹¹
Myself, I have never been able to get excited over tokenism, whether it was Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate or Bernardine Dohrn in the Weather Underground, let alone a few women to give GAA a good front (which women, by the way, are finally getting wise to, and leaving), or to serve as periodic “good niggers” for the cheap porn reportage of the
Advocate, Gay, Gay Sunshine
, and the like.

Susan Silverwoman has written a courageous paper called “Finding Allies: The Lesbian Dilemma.” In it she writes: “Men have traditionally maintained power over women by keeping us separated. Gay men capitalized on the split between feminists and lesbians by suggesting and insisting that we [lesbians] were somehow better, basically different from straight women … Gay men preferred to think of us not as women, but as female gay men.” She goes on to say that “it is imperative that we identify with the total feminist issue … if we continue to define straight women as the enemy, rather than sisters … we rob from ourselves a movement which must be part of ourselves. We are choosing false allies when we align politically with gay men who can never understand the female experience and who, as men, have a great deal of privilege to lose by a complete liberation of women. Whether or not straight feminists come out, as potential lesbians they are far more likely to understand our experience.”