Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM

“
Valerie Solanas
finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valerie’s life, including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUM lectures,
Up Your Ass
casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections to
Majority Report
, a continual emphasis from various sources on Valerie’s intelligence, radicalism, humor, comedic improv timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of her work dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system, and the patriarchal status quo.”

—
Nath Ann Carrera
, singer/musician

“This compelling biography shows the complexity of Valerie Solanas, placing her in the context of so many later-twentieth-century cultural realities—the commodity explosion of the art world, nuclear family damage and dysfunction, emergent baby-boomer generation narcissism, and the complicated internal struggles of the feminist movement.”

—
Catherine Morris
, Sackler Family Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

“Valerie Solanas was an enigma, an outsider even among misfits, and one of the most shocking radicals in a decade teeming with them. Breanne Fahs’ book is a long overdue excavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanas’s visionary manifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol.”

—
Cynthia Carr
, author of
Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Text copyright © 2014 by Breanne Fahs

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First ebook edition April 2014

First printing April 2014

Cover design by Herb Thornby,
herbthornby.com

Text design by Drew Stevens

Ebook design by Ellen Maddy

Inside front/back cover:

“Lies! Lies! Valerie Solanas.” This is a reproduction of Valerie Solanas’s handwriting on the 1971 copy of
SCUM Manifesto
housed in the collection at the New York Public Library. To sabotage the Olympia Press edition of
SCUM
and to protest unauthorized changes to her manifesto, she marked up her book with her own graffiti. For the full story, see
Chapter 5
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

eISBN 978-155861-849-7 (ebook)

ISBN 978-155861-848-0 (paperback)

Contents

Front Cover

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

SOUNDING OFF

Atlantic City to New York City, 1936–1967

SHOOTING

SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars, 1967–1968

PROVOCATION

The Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism, 1968–1973

MADNESS

Of Mental Hospitals and Men, 1968–1974

FORGETTING

The Lost Years and Final Days, 1975–1988

PHOTO INSERT

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Press

Also Available From the Feminist Press

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

—REBECCA WEST

preface

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. . . . I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth

Tracking the life of Valerie Solanas, much like
pursuing the movements of an invisible wolf, has led to many dead ends. Standing in the dusty, empty lots of downtown Phoenix, a place where Valerie once roamed the streets eating out of Dumpsters, digging a fork into her scab-filled arms, and howling at the moon, I stare at the silent mountains with a familiar mix of amusement, mourning, and awe.
She’s dangerous,
they still say,
I won’t even talk to you until I see a death certificate.
1

In one of Valerie’s more paranoid phases near the end of her life, she insisted she would write a book called
Valerie Solanas.
It would provide the definitive account of her life, told by herself, and, she imagined, it would sell at least twenty million copies (with a one-hundred-million-dollar advance from the Mob). Valerie hated the idea of imperfection, of others representing her life and work, of errors to the official record of how things went down. At the same time that she believed a uterine transmitter had been implanted in her against her will, sending details of her movements and words to what she called the Mob, she also took the time to correct spelling and grammar errors in the feminist periodical
Majority Report
. Her misfire at Andy Warhol felt like a blow to her reputation. She went by an absolute standard, even as she slipped into deeper and deeper psychosis. The irony of now writing a book called
Valerie Solanas
that gives an “unauthorized” account of her life, offering up a text filled with the potential for error (and, of course, Valerie’s posthumous cosmic revenge) is not lost on me.

Taking aim from the literal and metaphorical gutter, closing in on the power and audacity of those who prowled for thrills and never pandered for “Daddy’s” approval, Valerie wrote in her renowned, funny, and vitriolic
SCUM Manifesto
of women who had a SCUM state of mind: “Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around . . . and around and around . . . they’ve been the whole show—every bit of it . . . SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesn’t yet prevail; SCUM’s still in the gutter of our ‘society,’ which, if it’s not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesn’t drop on it, will hump itself to death.”
2
In Valerie’s world, the lowly, downtrodden, abject, forgotten, nasty women living in the shitpile would inevitably take over the world. SCUM has power. SCUM knows truth.

Valerie saw things, knew things, sensed things far earlier than her contemporaries of the 1960s, giving her work a quality that is both beyond the pale and startlingly prescient. At a time before computers and Twitter, before sophisticated infertility treatments and 24/7 headline news, before no-fault divorce and marital rape laws, before punishable sexual harassment and antidiscrimination policies, she understood, somehow, the core of what would come to dominate modern American life. She sensed that constant surveillance would allow unlimited access to the powerless from the powerful. She believed that men would continue to justify wars based on increasingly asinine reasons. She predicted test-tube babies and the ability to reproduce without the bodies of men. She forecasted the invention of Viagra (calling it her “perpetual hardness technique,” which would “render men manageable and easy to deal with”). The gender-bending romp she created in her 1965 play,
Up Your Ass
, featured characters that even the best of queer theorists cannot categorize or understand. She loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, one of the founders of radical feminism, once reflected that for the visionaries and revolutionaries, they must ask,
Just how far out can I get from the time and context in which I live
?
3
Just how far away could Valerie get from a context in which women wore strings of pearls, married in their early twenties, renounced sex before marriage, and lived out scenes from
Mad Men
in real time? Just how much distance could she create between herself and a cultural context that trivialized, insulted, and ignored women, particularly successful, ambitious, intelligent women? Certainly, this distance, embodied most brilliantly in the
SCUM Manifesto
,
made Valerie far more dangerous than the .22 Colt revolver or .32 Beretta automatic she wielded when she strode into the Factory and shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968.