In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (16 page)

A month later Robin Morgan led a mini-assault on her former employer,
Grove Press, a small publishing house that thrived on its backlist of fancy European erotica. A dozen militants, including Ti-Grace Atkinson and Martha Shelley, barricaded themselves in publisher Barney Rosset’s office, demanding that “the millions of dollars earned from pornographic books that degrade women” be put into a prostitutes’ bail fund, a child-care center on Grove’s premises, and a salary raise for Grove’s staff.

“We hung a banner out the window,” Martha Shelley recalls. “And I broke into Rosset’s liquor cabinet and took a drink, as a sort of symbolic gesture.”

The absent Rosset, in Copenhagen on a business trip, gave the order by phone to call the cops. Nine of the invaders were arrested, trundled from one precinct station to another, strip-searched, and put in an overnight holding tank. Released the next day, they called a press conference. “The idea was that each of us was to speak for a couple of minutes,” Martha Shelley recalls, “but Ti-Grace went on for an hour until the reporters drifted off. She wouldn’t shut up.”

Meanwhile, the articles for our
Ladies’ Home Journal
supplement, produced by five independent collectives, were being read aloud in my living room and edited jointly, a horrendous process. Nora Ephron
signed on as utility fielder, weeding out clunkers as best she could. The
Journal
’s ten-thousand-dollar payment was a hot potato. Susan Spivak at Paul, Weiss, Goldberg, Rifkind, etc., incorporated us pro bono as the Women’s Liberation Writing Collective with tax-exempt status assuring the IRS we would not engage in any further shakedowns of the publishing community by means of picketing or sit-ins. Signe Hammer chaired an open meeting at the Women’s Center on West Twenty-second Street to decide how to allocate the funds.

The vibes at the Women’s Center—two rooms, a couple of desks, a bookshelf, a few broken armchairs—weren’t exactly friendly. You’d ring the bell, identify yourself, and somebody would throw down a key from a window. On the night of the big vote, the place was jammed with women sitting cross-legged on the floor, three apiece in the armchairs. Most of them hadn’t been near the
Journal
sit-in and weren’t involved in writing the supplement either. One faction tried to swing the entire ten thousand to the Joan Bird bail fund. (Bird, a Bronx Community College student and black activist, was one of the Panther-Twenty-one accused of plotting to blow up several police stations, department stores, and the Bronx Botanical Garden. Ultimately the Twenty-one were acquitted.) Another faction wanted to put all the money into a revolving bail fund for city prostitutes. Signe Hammer recalls that I rammed through a parliamentary motion against bullet-voting. That sounds like me. The checkbook shows that the money was apportioned to a day-care center, an abortion project, a women’s newspaper, a women’s film collective, and yes, a bail fund. The largest chunk paid the rent on the Women’s Center for a year. I thought I had done a great job in building the movement, but in fact I was attracting enemies and was too busy to notice.

The one-two punch of my Sunday
Times
article and the
Journal
action, an accident of timing, had given me a dose of media attention that was aggravated by an appearance on Dick Cavett. I’d been thrilled to be asked. Cavett’s late-night talk show headlined every new cultural and political trend in the nation, and of course I wanted my chance to reach an audience of millions. I roped Sally Kempton into going with me, following the Women’s Liberation model of appearing in pairs to avoid the leadership and stardom onus. Our mission was to confront
Hugh Hefner in fifteen minutes between the Jefferson Airplane and Rollo May. The band struck up the Cavett theme song, we sauntered in, and Cavett asked me to define Women’s Liberation. I quipped, “When Hugh Hefner comes here with a cotton tail attached to his rear end, that’s the day we’ll have equality.”

The audience roared, but my star turn was over too quickly. Cavett invited us back the following week for a serious conversation.

Sally, who had not enjoyed herself as much as I had, flatly refused to return for a second engagement. I pondered the wisdom of going on alone. Obviously one of my driving forces was an unquiet need for recognition. I believed I had it in me to do important work, but media celebrity as a talk show guest, “famous for being famous,” was not what I had in mind. Besides, as Sally, now the Swami Durgananda, reminds me, the two of us knew we’d catch hell from the movement. So I joined Sally in declining to do a second program.

Holly Forsman and Diane Crothers, two standout women in New York Radical Feminists, were happy to take our place. They were promptly trashed by
Rat
for seeking stardom.

Michela Griffo, the art student at Pratt who had designed our poster, had not shown up on the day of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
sit-in. She had gone ballistic over my phrase “lavender herring” in the
Times
the previous Sunday.

“
I was incensed,” she recalls. “I didn’t see ‘menace,’ I just saw ‘herring.’ It was so dismissive, Susan, and you followed that line with ‘no clear and present danger’! I’d always liked you before then, but now you were the enemy.”

Twenty-one years old at the time, Michela was a convent-educated doctor’s daughter from Rochester, New York. Engaged to a medical student, she had discovered her lesbian identity only a few months before, “when my friend Agneta, the most beautiful woman I had ever known, kissed me in my Horatio Street kitchen, and suddenly I knew what it was I’d been missing.”

From the moment of that kiss, Michela also understood that “I had stepped into a world where I was going to be judged by who I slept
with, and I didn’t have a choice whether or not to be political about it.” In January 1970 she resigned from NOW with Rita Mae Brown. Teaming up like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, in Michela’s description, Brown and Griffo scoped out Redstockings, where they tried a c.r. group, and lent a hand at the liberated
Rat
, where Rita Mae published poetry and essays and Michela did pasteups and graphics. They surveyed the scene at the Gay Liberation Front, where the GLF women, outnumbered and outvocalized, were having their problems with the GLF men.

“Rita and I came into GLF to start trouble,” Griffo relates. “Our sole purpose was to politicize the lesbians, to get them out of this male-dominated organization and start our own lesbian political base. And that was exactly what we did.”

“
We didn’t really distinguish ourselves as lesbians during the first few months of the GLF,” says Ellen Shumsky, “but I guess some feminist stuff was filtering through. We were becoming aware at the meetings that the men were always the primary speakers. The weekend dances, our big social forum, became the scene where the power struggles got enacted. We felt the dances were being conducted in a male style, which at the time meant a dark, packed room, loud music, and lots of raunchy, hot bumping and grinding. There was no place to talk, no place where the lights were on and you could really see other people and be more contemplative, social, and playful. All this predated the GLF Women’s Caucus, and the split.”

In a gut response to my words in the
Times
, Griffo made an “I Am a Lavender Herring” T-shirt with iron-on letters and wore it to the next Gay Liberation Front dance. “Everybody thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen,” she remembers.

“Michela had on a jacket over her shirt,” says Artemis March. “She was going around the floor sort of flashing ‘Lavender Herring.’ ”

“Rita was so impressed that she wanted to plan an action around it,” says Griffo. “Something that would embarrass the women’s movement for denying our existence.”

“Well, some people might have seen it that way,” says Artemis March, who’d taken a seminar run by Cell 16 in Boston and had briefly hooked up with
THE FEMINISTS
in New York. “
We had this gay thing
over here, and there’s that feminist thing over there, but there’s no lesbian-feminist thing. Rita Mae proposed that we start such a process.”

The GLF women coalesced around their new, unifying purpose. In April 1970 they sponsored the first of their own All-Women’s Dances at Alternate U. The dances were joyful occasions. Beer sold for fifty cents and as many as three hundred women, drawn by leaflet actions in the Mafia-controlled bars, linked arms and kicked up their heels in large circles, stripping off their tops as the evening progressed. At the same time or even earlier, a small group of GLF women started meeting at Brown’s fifth-floor walkup, where they made plans to disrupt the Second Congress to Unite Women, which NOW and the radical groups were convening in May with no mention of lesbians on the proposed agenda.

Early on, Griffo recalls, Brown decided that “Lavender Menace,” not “Lavender Herring,” would be the best slogan for their T-shirts “because that’s who we were, or were going to be—a menace.”

“We wanted to do something that would get their attention,” says Artemis March. “Something funny and positive that would engage people and open up a space for us to make a statement. The notion was that we would collectively develop a position paper. Rita thought it was very important that we sign it with real names.”

Around this time, the GLF women became the Radicalesbians, independent of the Gay Liberation Front. They made up a “Radicalesbian” button, chic with good lettering, in black and white.

“Radicalesbians? Why not Radical Radishes?” somebody quipped. And sure enough, somebody else made a “Radical Radish” button and wore it to the next meeting.

It fell to Artemis March to organize and synthesize the position paper that Rita Mae wanted, the paper that would define lesbian feminism for the first time in history. Artemis started composing her drafts, reading them aloud to the others, getting their input.

“Sidney Abbott came over to the little hole in the wall in Brooklyn Heights where I was living,” she remembers. “I’m pacing around saying, ‘Oh, this action at the Congress is going to happen in ten days and I’m stuck. It’s not flowing.’ ‘March,’ she says, ‘you need a hook. How
are you going to get my attention?’ Sidney used to work in public relations. Then she comes out with, ‘A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.’ It was a beautiful statement. I knew it was hyperbolic, but it was a beautiful opener and it broke the logjam.”

The Sunday before the Congress, a weary Artemis March read her eleventh draft at a Radicalesbian brunch at Ellen Shumsky’s. Linda Rhodes came up with a title: “
The Woman-Identified Woman.” Artemis typed the final version on an IBM Selectric after business hours in Barbara Love’s father’s office. She appended six names to the paper in order of the importance of their contributions: hers (as March Hoffman, the name she then used), Ellen Shumsky (signed Ellen Bedoz), Cynthia Funk, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, and Barbara Gladstone (as Barbara XX). Then she added, because it was true, “with other Radicalesbians,” and put a price on it of twenty-five cents. She ran off enough xeroxed copies to fill two cartons.

The ironically named Second Congress to Unite Women took place at an intermediate school in Chelsea during the weekend of May 1–3, 1970. I will never forget the intensity of the emotions that were released at the Congress—some of them directed specifically toward me.