Going Too Far (29 page)

Slowly, oh how slowly everyone moved, as if through stroboscopic light. He danced toward me so slowly, although his skirt flew backwards with the speed of his rush down the steps.
The Angel of Death
, I thought, my own gaze locked onto his demented eyes filled with woman-hatred and woman-fear.

What have I done to you, my son, that you should hate me so?

You have given me life. You made me live and I cannot bear it
.

Is life so terrible then, my son, my son?

It is terrible because somewhere I have lost you and lost the way. You
gave me
life. Your fault, your fault
.

I stood motionless for an eternity while he moved toward
me, his disgust of me and of the women on the lawn spilling tears down that gaunt face.

He was only three steps away, they said, when they stopped him. Women. Women moving up the steps from all sides, convening on that tall frame like the Bacchae on Pentheus. I heard later that Kate Millett probably saved his life, throwing the cloak of her pacifism over the scene long enough for him to escape with only two or three Erinnyes in pursuit. Somehow, I remember asking people not to panic but to return to their places. Somehow, everyone did. Somehow, the keynote speech was continued, and finished.

The rest of the day piled jolt upon jolt into what I could only term an emotional overload. There were women, that day and the next, who refused to leave my side. There were women I'd never met or spoken with or seen before who came up out of nowhere and thrust armloads of flowers at me; one gave me a little silver ring, one a sketch she had done. There were other women who threatened to beat me up—for not having championed their transvestite “sister,” I gathered, or for having refused to urge lesbian feminists to seek salvation in the Young Socialists Alliance. There were tidal waves of intense love and equally intense hatred, neither of which was really meant for me but which was aimed, instead, at the woman who had ventured certain political thoughts against a current tide—and (most of all) who had almost died before their eyes.

Well. We know the mystique of martyrdom. There were those who attacked or defended the content of the address for no political reason but for solely emotional ones. I couldn't decide which was worse—being detested or adored. I did know that being understood was preferable to both.

I also knew, every moment of that weekend and for the necessary “recuperation” days which followed, that without the fortuitous revelation previous to my flight to L.A., I could not have survived. For it was the morning of that flight that the Rochester, N.Y., women had taken me to visit Susan B. Anthony's house, and it was on that plane I had written to Blake the letter which begins on page 55 of this book.

V
ERY
D
EAR
S
ISTERS
:

It seems important to begin by affirming who, how, and why, we are. We all know the male mass media stereotype of the Women's Movement: “If you've seen one Women's Libber, you've seen 'em all—they each have two heads, a pair of horns, and are fire-spouting, man-hating, neurotic, crazy, frigid, castrating-bitch, aggressive, lesbian, broom-riding witches.” So I want to start by saying that this shocking
stereotype is absolutely
true
. The days of women politely asking for a crumb of human dignity are over. Most men say, “But you've become so
hostile,
” to which one good retort is a quote from a nineteenth-century feminist who said, “First men put us in chains, and then, when we writhe in agony, they deplore our not behaving prettily.”
¹
Well, enough of that. We
are
the women that men have warned us about.

That settled, I want to talk about a number of difficult and dangerous themes relating to what others have variously called “The Lesbian-Straight Split,” “Lesbian Separatism from Straight Women,” and even “The Lesbian-Feminist Split.” This is the first speech, talk, what-have-you, that I have ever written down and then
read
—and it may be the last. I have done so because the content can so easily be misunderstood or willfully distorted, because misquoting is a common occurrence, because the risks I will take today are too vital for me to chance such misrepresentation.

Before I go any further, I feel it is also necessary to deal with who, how, and why
I
am here. As far back as a month ago, I began hearing a few rumbles of criticism about my “keynoting” this conference—all from predictable people, and none, of course, expressed directly to my face. “Is she or isn't she?” was their main thrust. “Know anyone who's been to bed with her lately? Well, if we can't
prove
she's a lesbian, then what right has she to address a lesbian-feminist conference?” Now, I am hardly devastated by such charges, having been straight-baited before. So. It is credential time once again.

I am a woman. I am a feminist, a radical feminist, yea, a militant feminist. I am a witch. I identify as a lesbian because I love the People of Women and certain individual women with my life's blood. Yes, I live with a man—as does my sister Kate Millett. Yes, I am a mother-as is my sister Del Martin. The man is a faggot-effeminist,
²
and we are together the biological as well as the nurturant parents of our child. This confuses a lot of people—it not infrequently confuses us. But there it is. Most of all, “I am a monster—and I am proud.”
³

Now all of the above credentials qualify me, I feel, to speak from
concrete experience on: Feminism, Lesbianism, Motherhood, “Gay Male Movements”
versus
Faggot-Effeminist consciousness about women, Tactics for the Women's Revolution, and a Vision of the Female Cosmos. I am an expert with the scars to prove it, having been, in my time, not only straight-baited, but also dyke-baited, red-baited, violence-baited, mother-baited, and artist-baited. As you can see, the above credentials further qualify me for being an excellent target, available not only to the male rulers but also to any women just dying to practice—even on a sister.

But, finally, to the subject. In order to talk intelligently about the so-called “Split,” it is necessary to recap history a little. In the early days of the current Women's Movement, many of us were a bit schizoid. The very first consciousness-raising session I ever went to, for example, gave me the warning. We were talking about sexuality, and I described myself as a bisexual (this was even before the birth of the first Gay Liberation Front, and long before bisexual became a naughty or cop-out word—besides, it did seem an accurate way of describing my situation). Every woman in the room moved, almost imperceptibly, an inch or so away from me. Wow, I thought. It was not the last time I was to have such an articulate reaction.

Later, with the creation of GLF, a few of us Jewish-mother types spent a lot of time running back and forth between the two movements, telling the straight women that the lesbians weren't ogres and telling the lesbians that the straight women weren't creeps. Simultaneously, the intense misogyny coming against lesbians from gay men drove many women out of the “gay movement” and into the Women's Movement. There was a brief and glorious sisterhood-glazed honeymoon period among all women in our Movement. Then, those contradictions began. For example, a personal one: I had announced my lesbian identification in the
New York Times
(which is a fairly public place, after all) in 1968, before the first GLF had been founded. Then, in 1970, one group of Radicalesbians in New York said to me, “Don't you dare call yourself a lesbian—you live with a man and you have a child.” Now, while I might (defensively) argue the low-consciousness logic of this, since statistically most lesbians are married to men and have children, I had nonetheless learned one important thing from all my previous years in the Left:
guilt
. So all my knee-jerk reflexes went into action, and I obeyed. Six months later, another group of Radicalesbians confronted me. “We notice you've stopped calling yourself a lesbian,” they said. “What's the matter—you gone back in the closet? You afraid?” Meanwhile, the monosexual straight women were still inching away from my presence. Wow, I thought, repeatedly.

The lines began to be drawn, thick, heavy. Friedan trained her cannon on “the Lesbian Menace.” (In a show of consistent terror and
hatred of lesbians, and indeed of women, one might say, she only recently announced last March [1973] in the
New York Times
that the lesbians and radical feminists in the Movement were CIA infiltrators. We met her attack with a firm
political
counter-attack in the press, never descending to a level of personal vilification or giving the media the cat-fight which they were trying to foment.) In 1970, backlash began, starting in NOW
⁴
and infecting radical feminist groups as well. The bigotry was intense and wore many faces: outright hatred of and revulsion at lesbian women; “experimentation”—using a lesbian for an interesting experiment and then dumping her afterward; curiosity about the freaks; dismissal of another woman's particular pain if it did not fall within the “common” experience, and many other examples.

Meanwhile, lesbians, reeling from the hatred expressed by the gay male movement and the fear expressed by the Women's Liberation Movement, began to organize separately. Of course, a great many lesbians had been in the Women's Movement since its beginning—a great many had, in fact, begun it. These included some women who were active in Daughters of Bilitis
⁵
under other names, not only to keep jobs and homes and custody of their children, but also so as not to “embarrass” NOW, which they had built. In addition, a great many formerly heterosexual or asexual women were declaring themselves lesbians, as they found the support to “come out” of their kitchens and communes as well as their closets. Some women
were
pressured, not necessarily, although certainly sometimes, by lesbians. The pressure came mostly from confusion, contradictions, pulls in different directions, paths which each might have led to a united feminism but which the Man exploited into warring stands; he was aided, of course, by the internecine hostility of any oppressed people—tearing at each other is painful, but it is after all safer than tearing at the real enemy. Oh, people
did
struggle sincerely, hour upon hour of struggle to understand and relate—but the flaw still widened to a crack and then to a split, created by our collective false consciousness. We are now teetering on the brink of an abyss, but one very different from what we have been led to expect.

At present, there are supposedly two factions. On one side, those labeled heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, and celibate women. On the other, those labeled lesbians. Not that the latter group is monolithic-far from it, although monosexual straight women can, in their fear, try to hide their bigotry behind such a belief. No, there are some lesbians who work politically with gay men; some work politically with straight
men; some work politically with other lesbians; some work politically only with
certain
other lesbians (age, race, class distinctions); some work politically with
all
feminists (lesbians, heterosexuals, etc.); and some, of course, don't work politically at all. As Laurel has pointed out in an incisive and witty article in
Amazon Quarterly
, there are sub-sub-sub-divisions, between gay women, lesbians, lesbian-feminists, dykes, dyke-feminists, dyke-separatists, “old” dykes, butch dykes, bar dykes, and killer dykes. In New York, there were divisions between Political Lesbians and Real Lesbians and Nouveau Lesbians. Hera help a woman who is unaware of these fine political distinctions and who wanders into a meeting for the first time, thinking she maybe has a right to be there because she likes women.
⁶

Still, the same energy which created
The Ladder
⁷
almost twenty years ago is now evident in the dynamism of
The Lesbian Tide
, the dedication to the fine points of struggle and contradiction in Ain't I A
Woman?
, in the analytical attempts of
The Furies
, and in the aesthetic excellence and serious political probings of the new
Amazon Quarterly
, to name only a few such publications.
⁸
That energy, contorted into hiding and working under false pretenses for so long, has exploded in the beautiful and organized anger of groups like Lesbian Mothers Union (begun in San Francisco and now spreading across the country), to defend and protect the rights of the lesbian and her children, and, by extension, to stand as guardian for all women who, the moment we embrace our own rage, strength, and politics, face the danger of having our children seized from us physically by the patriarchy which daily attempts to kidnap their minds and souls. The energetic development of this consciousness, so tied in with ancient mother-right, is, I think, of profound importance to lesbian mothers, all mothers, indeed, all women—it is one of the basic building blocks in our creation of a Feminist Revolution. And again, that energy, in the radical lesbian-feminist presses. That woman-loving-woman energy, freed into open expression and in fact into totally new forms of relationship
by the existence of the Feminist Movement
, has exploded in marches and demonstrations
and dances and films and theater groups and crisis centers and so on and on—a whole affirmative new world within the world of women.

And yet.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Feminist Revolution: both Betty Friedan and Rita Mae Brown condemned me for being a “man-hater.” Both
Ms
. magazine and
The Furies
began to call for political alliances with men,
The Furies
at one point implying that lesbians should band together with gay
and
straight males (preferably working-class) in a coalition against the enemy: straight women. Indeed, in one by now infamous statement, Rita Mae declared that lesbians were the only women capable of really loving men. Now of course this did come as a shock to many a lesbian who was obviously under the misguided impression that one had become a lesbian because she in fact loved
women
, and was indifferent-to-enraged on the subject of men. But now that the “correct line” had fallen from heaven, one was supposed penitently to dismiss such counter-revolutionary attitudes, learning to look at them
and
other women who still clung to them with contempt. One was also supposed to place issues such as the Vietnam War, political coalition with men, warmed-over Marxian class analyses, life-style differences, and other such un-lavender herrings in the path, in order to divide and polarize women. While doing all this, one was further supposed to hoist the new banner of the vanguard. (You know, the vanguard—Lenin leading the schlemiels.)