Riding Fury Home (27 page)

In February, two months after I had left New York, my mother wrote that she'd broken up with Stella. Stella had plummeted into her chronic depression, something I hadn't witnessed during our jubilant days together in Manhattan. I felt sad for all of us, but in a dull, distanced way. I couldn't let myself feel how shattering it was, to lose this new family in which, for the first time, my mother had found love. It was an odd twist to have my mother be the one to leave a depressed person, but I thought I understood: Gloria had lost so many years to her own grief that she didn't want to be with someone trapped in despair. I wrote, “I'm so sorry it's worked out
this way, but your sanity and strength are most important. If Stella's depression and need for you are sapping your energy, it's no good.” I didn't see the irony in my advice: how my childhood had been sapped by my mother's depression, but I'd had no option to leave.

 

 

ONE EVENING IN EARLY summer, I went to a Gay Liberation Front meeting in San Francisco. Someone announced that KPFA, the local listener-supported Pacifica radio station, wanted to start two gay programs: one created by gay men, one by lesbians. Who wanted to work on it? I leapt to sign up. Two groups emerged from that meeting and began producing shows: the gay men started
Fruit Punch,
and we women initiated
Lesbian Air.

Only one of our group of eight had any radio experience. I was excited but nervous that we had a weekly hour-long show to fill. But to my relief, when we arrived at KPFA, we were welcomed by straight feminists who, at this station, had fought for and pioneered a feminist radio program called
Unlearning to Not Speak,
named after the Marge Piercy poem taped to the door of their office.

The
Unlearning
programmers tutored us. We broke into two groups, with four of us per group clustered around one of the professional
reel-to-reel tape recorders as our mentor demonstrated how to locate the exact spot on the tape to cut, how to lay it on the metal editing block, cut it on the diagonal with a razor blade, and splice two cuts together. The skill of these foremothers, and their
we can do this
stance, helped me overcome technology phobia. To discover I could do this was thrilling, better by far than learning to tune up my VW Bug.

One afternoon, I went into one of the tiny editing booths with an unedited tape of a coming-out story—one of several we were using for our first program—a notebook, and a fresh razor blade. The claustrophobic booth was lined with white soundproofing particleboard, and only just big enough for one Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine, a rickety rolling desk chair, and a tall garbage can. I began listening on headphones, pausing the tape to take notes on a pad, starring the parts of the story that seemed most vital. As I rewound the tape and went over the interview again, I became completely immersed in the woman's story and the creative process of paring it down—making an edit, listening to it, adding a tiny splice of a breath if the timing was too tight. I was so swept up, the closed-in space dropped away. Finally, a grumbling stomach roused me to glance at my watch—my God, hours had gone by!

During our early shows, I discovered something about myself: Live on the air, I was terribly shy, but during prerecorded off-air interviews, to be edited and broadcast later, I relaxed into a curiosity about the women I interviewed, engrossed in the details of their stories, and able to ask questions. I didn't know yet what I had stumbled on—something so fitting that I would spend the next ten years as a radio producer and recording engineer.

 

 

IN THE WINTER, Gloria visited me at the lesbian collective I'd moved into. She slept on our frigid, unheated back porch, chipper and uncomplaining. My housemates loved her: the hip lesbian mom, happily eating our vegetarian meals and sharing our feminist vision.

My mother had agreed to be interviewed for the radio show, so I took her to the recording studio. At the radio station, we faced each other across a long metal folding table, mikes on stands pointed at each of us. In the three years since we'd both come out, I'd heard bits and pieces of my mother's story, but had never really asked for details of what she'd experienced and what it had meant. Now, I asked my first question: “I'd like to know how you felt when you married my father.”

Gloria leaned toward me, bringing herself closer to the microphone. “One of the reasons I married your father was that I wanted to get away from home. I wanted to have a home of my own, and I wanted to have children. I certainly don't think I was in love with your father; I liked him as a person—he was a nice man—but . . . ”

“Did you ever tell yourself in your head that you loved him? Did you feel like you loved him?” I asked into my own mic.

“No. I thought I liked him, that he was a good man and we could be friends. But I never really was excited about him. I never felt that I really loved him.”

This was no big surprise, given what I now understood as my mother's suppressed sexual identity. Yet her stating this lack of love was oddly comforting—it made sense of the deadness and silent tension between my parents. I went on without much pause, “Did it ever occur to you
not
to get married—that you had that option?”

“No, I was brought up to feel that that was what a woman did: get married. Work wasn't important; school wasn't important. You
went to school to meet a man, and you went to college to meet an educated man.”

“You went to college, but you didn't take it seriously?”

“No, I guess I didn't.”

Once I began asking my mother questions, I stopped noticing the studio's microphone stands piled up in one corner, the white soundboard walls, or the tan wall-to-wall rug mottled with stains from years of recording sessions. My focus was on my mother's expressive face as she spoke. Finally, we could share this.

“So, when did you start having a relationship with a woman?”

“Marian. It was when you were a baby. She was my best friend. I really loved her as a person. We spent a lot of time together, just as friends, talking, going fishing, sharing our ideas and our thoughts. And then one day she told me how beautiful love could be between women. She meant love on every level—including the emotional, sexual, intellectual. She didn't have to convince me, because right away it felt natural. Because I really loved her as a person. When I say ‘I loved her,' I know I didn't have those feelings for your father. I may have liked him a lot and thought he was a good person, but I wasn't thrilled by him, or excited by him. I was bored.”

“Did you go through guilt feelings, or did you feel perverted or anything, when you started being lovers with her?” I wanted to know this, mostly to understand my mother, but also because my generation had no sense of lesbian history, no images of women before us loving each other without shame.

My mother's round face widened with her smile, as she shook her head a couple times in remembrance. “When I started being lovers with Marian, I never felt better in my life. I was excited and thrilled and all the things you read in the books. I felt so good that
I wanted to take you, leave your father, and just go off with her and live forever and ever together.”

“Did you ever ask her if she'd do that?”

“No, because I knew that wasn't what she wanted. When I look back on it, it was very ‘closet-y.' We were both married. We really cared for one another, but she wanted the security of her home. Anyway, I saw her every day, and you saw her every day, when you were very little.”

I interviewed my mother for close to two hours. Knowing I would later edit it gave us the freedom to wander through her story. She elaborated on the despair of losing Marian, how electroshock therapy wiped out her memory, her experiences in the mental hospitals, going through withdrawal from psychiatric drugs when I went off to college, and having sex with many women during her first, wild year after coming out. We both spoke of the deep connection between us. There had been so much secrecy, shame, and unexplained grief, and now, we were giving voice publicly to the unspoken and taboo, to what it was like to reclaim a joyous, woman-loving life.

 

 

THE NIGHT THE INTERVIEW was broadcast, I sat in an alcove outside the on-air control booth, hunkered into a tweed wool love seat with frayed arms. It had sunk low over the years it had served as a way station for guests or programmers waiting to go on the air. Tonight, I couldn't bear the bright lights of the on-air booth, with all its electronic paraphernalia: the bank of shiny silver tape machines—one of which would have my tape whirling—the microphones, turntables, and control board fanned in a U surrounding the board operator. I needed a place that was dark and soft.

From the couch facing the closed control-room door, I watched the red light attached to the doorframe light up, the signal that someone was live on the air. Her voice came over the alcove speakers: “This is KPFA and KPFB in Berkeley. Up next:
Lesbian Air.”
The light went off as she started the tape. And a buzzing began in my chest.

A friend of mine sat next to me on the couch, but I barely felt her presence. I was conscious of being excited and proud of the final product, the first full hour-length show I had ever produced, edited, and mixed with music. But a state of agitation had taken over my body. I gripped the couch's arm as if it were the mane of a bucking bronco, in order to ride out the broadcast.

First there was the oddity of hearing my own voice as my introduction went out across Northern California, from the Pacific ocean to the Sierra mountains: “
My mother and I are both lesbians; she's fifty two and I'm twenty three. A lot of my friends have asked me what it's like to have a mother who's a dyke, and I tell them it's made an incredible bond between us . . . ”

Then, there was my mother's voice, telling her story,
“ . . . I can't quite remember when I started getting so depressed that I wanted to kill myself, but it was sometime after the affair with Marian broke up . . . and I've been in so many hospitals, I can hardly remember how many. So many different kinds of places, some of them so expensive, and some of them very nice—you know, comfortable. But they were really just to keep you off the streets!”

I had thought I was over the shame, now that I had a political analysis to explain what had happened in my childhood. When I read Phyllis Chesler's
Women and Madness
, with its in-depth critique of the psychiatric treatment of American women, I felt enraged and affirmed. I knew others would relate to my mother's story, that it had relevance beyond one woman's experience.

But as I listened to the broadcast, shaking came over me, rising in waves from my belly. The silence in my childhood was embedded deeply in my body, and each act of asking a forbidden question and voicing what had been taboo beat against my sinews. It left me raw, breathless, and pulsing with fear and exhilaration.

 

 

“YOU KAREN, THE RADIO PRODUCER?” A woman driving a VW van had pulled up to the airport curb and leaned across the passenger seat, yelling out the open window.

It was May 1975, a year after the broadcast of my interview with my mother had aired on KPFA. I'd emerged from Los Angeles International Airport into a hot, smoggy Friday afternoon. The organizers of the weekend conference, called Lesbian History Exploration, had told me to look for a blue van.

I grinned and nodded, and the driver leapt out, slamming her door and coming around to the sidewalk. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a handmade silk-screened T-shirt with AMAZON in purple letters. She slid open the van door and heaved my bag inside.

The van proceeded to the next terminal to pick up another passenger, a slender woman in her late seventies, whose head was wrapped with silver braids, giving her a kind of halo. She looked like someone from another time and place. When I saw her waiting on the curb, I thought of a French countrywoman stirring a big black pot over an open hearth, not a presenter at a lesbian conference. She turned out to be Elsa Gidlow, a lesbian poet. I'd never heard of her, but during the conference, I learned a surprising fact: This woman, born in 1898, had, in 1923, been the first in America to publish an openly lesbian book of poetry.

Elsa was given the deference of the front passenger seat, and as we roared off, I was left to my own thoughts, since it was impossible to hear much over the rev of the VW engine. I was nervously anticipating my own presentation. The conference organizers had discovered my interview in the catalog of the Feminist Radio Network and tracked me down.

The VW made its way north along the coast, heading for the Jewish summer camp that had been rented for the occasion. We pulled up in front of the main building, a large, rustic wood meeting hall. We were among the last of the 150 or so women to arrive. Most were milling around the hall, hugging old friends, gathering in clusters. Shyly, I stood there, uncertain what to do. It was a great relief when one of the organizers took me aside to look over the sound equipment they had arranged for my presentation.

The next morning, I found myself picking at my breakfast, my stomach queasy. I decided to go directly to the meeting hall to double-check the equipment. The large, vacant room echoed my footsteps as I walked over to the portable tape machine resting on a wood table. I threaded the tape and played a brief snippet, checking the volume.

I sat in the chair next to the table laden with equipment, and stared at the room, with its rough-hewn camp decor of unpainted wood walls and hardwood flooring, tension gripping my stomach. About ten minutes before the program time, women began wandering in. I smiled in their direction, and then bolted for the bathroom. When I got back, the room was nearly full. The chatter of one hundred or so women hummed through the meeting hall.