Stonewall (29 page)

KARLA

K
arla had gone to a few NOW meetings, but had quickly decided they weren't for her; she found the organization too oriented toward winning legislative changes, and overall too tame, too focused on asking to be “let in.” Working to achieve equality in an unjust society was pointless to Karla. She also disliked the then common notion that feminism should take a backseat to the “main” struggles against capitalism, racism, and imperialism. She saw that argument as a convenient one for men, as a long-standing rationale for deferring women's liberation by insisting that its time had not
yet
come, while arguing that it would
automatically
come once the “larger” struggle had been won.

Karla had less trouble pulling away from the male left than some women did, for the simple reason that she had never been closely identified with it. For her, the upheaval at Columbia University had been the starting point, not the culmination, of struggle. And during the Columbia fracas, she had been appalled at the macho behavior of the left-wing male students. Unlike some radical feminists, Karla became convinced early on that male-supremacist behavior was not simply the result of men being the agents of an oppressive capitalist system, and would not automatically disappear with the destruction of that system. She was in favor of changing the country's economic structure, but was skeptical that such change alone would liberate women—or, for that matter, free blacks either.

These views drew Karla to Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone in February 1969. Her membership in the group, in turn, further clarified her views. Without being rigidly Marxist, the Redstockings selectively employed Marxist analysis, and particularly in insisting that women's behavior resulted from the material circumstances in which they found themselves; they married, for example, not because they had been conditioned to believe they should (as many feminists argued) but because they consciously realized that women's low-paying, alienating work made the single life too difficult.
⁵

Karla was not among the original organizers of Redstockings, but did join the group within a few months of its founding. By then, the
dominant faction (and one had to be part of a faction to feel fully alive in the late sixties) had decided to downplay activism in favor of establishing and participating in consciousness-raising groups. In Marxist style, Redstockings created those groups along the lines of semi-independent cells. Each group was assigned a single letter of the alphabet as a name, and each sent a single delegate to the meetings of a central committee. Karla was often chosen as her group's representative, and she also went out often on speaking engagements to explain to other women how they could form their own consciousness-raising groups.

Unlike some other feminist groups—for example, the celibacy-advocating Boston-based Cell 16—the dominant faction in Red-stockings did not denounce heterosexuality as an institution that perpetuated male dominance; women, they argued, should confront, not abandon men. The charismatic Rita Mae Brown was among those who felt that Redstockings was not merely pro-heterosexual, but downright heterosexist. When she decided to come out as a lesbian to her consciousness-raising group (not the one Karla was in), she found maximum discomfort and minimal support—and left Redstockings soon after.

Rita Mae Brown was at first alone in her daring. Karla had picked up early, in her own group, the same hesitant, uncomfortable reaction to any hint of lesbianism, but for a while she chose to be silent about it. She had finally found women with whom she felt comfortable personally and politically—more comfortable, certainly, than she had felt with the butch/femme women she met in the lesbian bars. They had insisted, because of her flowered dresses and long hair, that she was a femme, but she had resented the attempt to lock her into a role that constricted the actual range of her impulses. Knowing her own aggressive strength, she hated being stereotyped on the basis of outer appearances alone.

She felt differently typecast, but typecast nonetheless, on the few occasions when she went to a Daughters of Bilitis meeting. She looked much younger than her actual age—hitchhiking at the age of twenty-three, she was mistaken for a fifteen-year-old runaway and arrested—and the conservative women in DOB reacted to her in terror. She tried to convince them that she was not jailbait, but they kept nervously insisting that DOB was not in the business of bringing out teenage girls. Angry and disgruntled, Karla would afterwards refer to them as “the Daughters of Bursitis.”

By comparison with being pigeonholed as a femme and fled from
as a juvenile, Karla felt herself well treated—respected as a many-faceted adult—in Redstockings. And the group's reluctance to discuss lesbianism did not especially faze her because she was not, in 1969, at all eager to label herself a lesbian. While an undergraduate at Barnard, both she and her steady girlfriend from CUNY thought of themselves as bisexuals. Though that particular relationship ended at about the time Karla graduated, and though it was followed by a series of casual affairs with women, she had several prolonged affairs with men during the same period.

Her boyfriends ranged from an upstairs neighbor, to a Swiss body builder (who also self-identified as bisexual), to a countercultural printer. What she liked about these men was not their conversation—“I didn't like men's patriarchal heads,” she later said—but their ability to give her physical pleasure. The men she chose seemed turned on by her aggressiveness, and she got them to do what
she
wanted to do sexually. Which didn't mean that she always controlled the relationships and got to end them whenever they stopped working for her. Her most satisfying lover, the printer, walked out abruptly on her after finding her in bed one day with a woman.

Karla was juggling several kinds of lives simultaneously—much like Jim and Yvonne. Along with her bisexual affairs and her political involvement with Redstockings, she was taking graduate courses in comparative literature at night and holding down a full-time job during the day. Her first choice for graduate school had been U.C. Berkeley, where her high board scores, offsetting her B average, had won her a scholarship. But she felt unable to accept it. She had so little money that it seemed less risky to stay in familiar New York, get a daytime job, and work on her doctorate at night. She decided on New York University, though the school didn't make it easy for her: two of her male friends, with lower grades and board scores, got scholarships there, but she was turned down.

The first summer following graduation from Barnard, Karla found a temporary job—thanks to her excellent French—with the prestigious literary agent Georges Borchardt. Impressed with her work, Borchardt, at the end of the summer, got her a full-time, ninety-five-dollar-a-week position as an assistant editor with the David McKay Corporation. Kennett and Eleanor Rawson, the owners of the McKay publishing house, were in the process of editing David Reuben's
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask
—a book that would become a runaway best-seller.

Asked if she wanted to have a look at the manuscript, Karla was
horrified to find it filled with racist and homophobic remarks—like the question-and-answer colloquy in which the query “How could the Mayor's daughter get VD?” was answered by “Sleeping with a guy who slept with a black prostitute.” Karla brought the material to the Rawsons' attention, and found them sympathetic to her complaints. But in the end they were unable to persuade Reuben to remove most of the offending remarks.

Soon after starting work with McKay, Karla was riding her bike one day when several teenagers appeared out of nowhere. She tried to speed away but they grabbed her, threw her down a nearby flight of cellar stairs, and ran off with her bike. When she got up, she was unable to straighten out her leg and the pain was excruciating. X-rays revealed that her back was broken in three places. When the doctor saw the plates, he was incredulous and asked Karla how she had managed to get to his office. Who had carried her in? When she said she had walked in by herself, the doctor gasped, “Impossible!” He wanted to put her in a hospital, but she refused to go, so she was given a steel brace and put in traction in her own apartment.

Her roommate and friends took care of her. The doctor had told her that she would
probably
be able to walk again but would never be able to straighten her leg. With typical spunk, Karla set out to prove him wrong. Among the friends ministering to her were the novelist Joel Lieber (later a suicide) and his wife, Sylvia, who lived around the corner. The couple was involved with Zen Buddhism and gradually got Karla interested too.

She started doing meditation in which she visualized herself whole and well, and every day she would try to straighten out her leg a little more, painful though the exercise was. She also became a vegetarian. She had already been leaning in that direction because of the war in Vietnam: “I considered myself a pacifist,” she said later. “I was really into Gandhi. I didn't approve of killing and I didn't want other people killing in my place. And that included killing a cow for me. I haven't eaten red meat since 1968.”

She had to wear a corsetlike brace for about a year, and limped badly for several more years after that. But her leg did gradually straighten, and later X-rays revealed that her back had regenerated. She had to give up bowling, because the jerking motion was inadvisable, but apart from that had no residual problems of any kind. Did meditation and vegetarianism do the trick? Karla doesn't pretend to know, saying simply, “I have no explanation.” But once well, she vowed never again to feel so defenseless, and took up judo. That, in
turn, helped her quickly lose the fifty pounds she had gained from lying around in bed.

And, limp and all, she also returned to politics. In September 1969, she took part in the second feminist protest at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. (The first protest, a year earlier, had involved day-long picketing and guerrilla-theater skits but not—as the massive coverage claimed—bra-burning.
⁶
) At the second demonstration, Karla and the other feminists passed out roses on the boardwalk and told each woman they gave one to that
she
was the real Miss America.

Karla was beginning to notice strange things about her telephone. If she hung up and then quickly lifted the receiver again to make a second call, there was a little space before she could get a dial tone. And then came the time when she picked the phone back up and heard one man asking another, “What do you think she meant by that?” Karla had previously assumed that her phone was being tapped, but the actual discovery still proved a shock.

It later turned out that the New York City “Red Squad” was not only listening in on the conversations of various women in Redstockings, but had planted someone at meetings—in much the way the FBI had long had socialists and Communists under surveillance and was currently doing its best to subvert the black civil rights struggle. Karla later became one of the plaintiffs in the famed
Handschu
case against the Red Squad, which dragged on for years; in the process she saw full reports of the Redstockings' central committee meetings, complete down to descriptions of objects in the room. Though Karla was one of only seven or eight women who sat on that committee, they were never able to find out who the plant was.

The day finally came in Karla's consciousness-raising group when Micela Griffo—who had been brought out sexually by Rita Mae Brown, and who would be active in the Gay Liberation Front just a short while later—finally spoke openly of her lesbianism. Some of the straight women in the group, especially Alix Kates Shulman, were supportive, and Karla felt encouraged to speak out herself. She still disliked labels, but since she
was
sleeping with women she felt the responsibility of sharing the burden of whatever negative consequences might follow.

But what she discovered was that “there were quite a number of lesbians in quite a number of closets in Redstockings,” and instead of opprobrium she got “a whole new supply of lovers”—though, in many cases, not very good ones. As a “gesture of solidarity” with their
lesbian sisters, some straight women had started to take on the lesbian label and to do some experimenting in bed. These “political lesbians,” as they were known, tended to be lousy sex partners. Despite themselves, they brought their homophobic leftist baggage with them to bed, and were likely to find their sexual experiences with women disappointing. “They were really boring in bed,” Karla said later. “It was like eating matzoh.” It didn't take her long to decide that if any more straight women wanted to experiment sexually, they could do it with somebody else. Then, if they decided they liked lesbianism, Karla would be there.

JIM

J
im Fouratt regarded Abbie Hoffman as his brother. They had been through a lot together—from the action on the floor of the stock exchange to the confrontation at the Democratic convention in Chicago. And in 1969 they managed to bring the David Susskind television show to a dead stop by unveiling a live duck that promptly shat all over the stage. (Jim had already stunned Susskind by appearing dressed all in white; an apparition, complete with flowing blond hair, that seemed a miraculous reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself.)

Through all the high jinks and the serious politicking, Jim had swallowed his doubts about Abbie—about his self-celebration, his drug-taking, his (in Jim's view) “irresponsible” tendency to lead people into more trouble than they had bargained for. But an incident finally occurred that crystallized Jim's doubts and led to a definitive break between the two men. In order to do his political work—to notify and mobilize people for actions through his fly sheet,
The Communications Company
—Jim had long relied on his trusty Gestetner duplicating machine. One night he returned to his apartment to find the machine gone, apparently stolen. His suspicion immediately focused on Abbie, because of the disagreements the two had recently had over the 1968 Chicago confrontations and Abbie's dismissive comment that Jim “didn't really understand politics.”