When We Were Outlaws Read online

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 The Last Guerrilla Left Standing

  Chapter 2 The Hat

  Chapter 3 Wisdom of the Cornfields 3

  Chapter 4 The Tide Rolls Out

  Chapter 5 The Godfather

  Chapter 6 Petition at Midnight

  Chapter 7 The Vote

  Chapter 8 The Firings

  Chapter 9 My Nazi

  Chapter 10 The Gay/Feminist 11

  Chapter 11 The Kiss

  Chapter 12 The House Where She Lived

  Chapter 13 The Women’s Saloon

  Chapter 14 A Somewhat Larger War

  Chapter 15 The Strike

  Chapter 16 A Double Bed On the Ocean

  Chapter 17 The Gospel According to Joe

  Chapter 18 The Picket Line

  Chapter 19 The Falling

  Chapter 20 The Plaintiff

  Chapter 21 The Arrangement

  Chapter 22 Crossing the Line

  Chapter 23 Front Seat Rapture

  Chapter 24 The Cuckoo’s Nest

  Chapter 25 The Body Count

  Chapter 26 A Lavender Woodstock

  Chapter 27 By Any Means Necessary

  Chapter 28 Straws and Absolution

  Chapter 29 A Fall From Grace

  Chapter 30 The Rage of All Butches

  Chapter 31 Return of the Hat

  Chapter 32 The End of the War

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Advance Praise for

  When We Were Outlaws

  “A poignant, vulnerable portrait of activism in all of its giddying complexity…There is unsettling rawness here that moves even as it educates. Weaving the national with the local and the personal with the political, Outlaws gives us a young, charismatic-but-flawed butch woman struggling heroically to reconcile her own internal contradictions, trying to find her way at the convergence of new left, feminist, and gay and lesbian politics…and hoping to live and love with courage in an activist world that has not yet reckoned with the radical political implications of ‘butch.’”

  Talia Mae Bettcher, Professor of Philosophy, CSU Los Angeles, co-editor of Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gender Realities

  “When We Were Outlaws is an important personal witness as well as an historical document, written with a truly brave heart. I have long thought of Jeanne Cordova as the James Dean of the lesbian scene. Now there is also her keen intellectual prowess which captures the history of incendiary times with equal measures of passion and cool. She adds much to our understanding of those times.”

  —Mark Thompson, former Senior Editor of The Advocate, author of Gay Spirit, and The Fire in Moonlight

  “1975, the SLA, The Lesbian Tide, and the year I came out. Jeanne makes herstory come alive!”

  —Phranc, “All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger,” visual artist

  “The honesty here is really admirable; discussing the contradictions of feminism, the then real debate about violent overthrow of the government, the huge divide and uneasy alliance between lesbians and gay men. Many activists have simply never told these kinds of stories—about the values and the sheer energy of the time that was so universally compelling. All this, and the no-holds barred, undisguised lesbian voice which is so rare to find nowadays.”

  —Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble with Harry Hay and co-author of Gay L.A.

  “A riveting, unique, first hand telling of a dangerous, fractious, creative lesbian time...the lesbian feminist ‘70s with their messy, sexy, bold social and personal visions live again on Cordova’s pages; she was thick in the middle of things, as a journalist, as an activist, as a lover. It’s all here: the first lesbian conferences, the first women’s music festivals, first gay centers, first lesbian newspapers, first gay labor disputes, lesbians in the SLA and FBI witch hunts, Susan Saxe and Margie Adams, sex before and after endless meetings, so many firsts—debates and factions galore. Like reading a stormy and passionate family diary that also speaks of a national time. One version of these times, but what a version! Dramatic, revealing, living history story-telling.”

  —Joan Nestle, Lesbian Herstory Archives co-founder; author of A Restricted Country

  “Jeanne Cordova’s memoir is a love story set between the decay of Sixties radicalism and the rocky but energetic blast-off of the Lesbian Movement. Reacting to women of the Revolutionary Left, Jeanne was both inspired by their commitments and turned off by their rhetoric. The freedom of the independent press, Lesbian and straight, will make contemporary readers swoon with envy.”

  —Sarah Schulman, author of After Delores and Rat Bohemia

  When We Were

  Outlaws

  a memoir of love & revolution

  Jeanne Córdova

  Copyright © 2011 by Jeanne Córdova

  Spinsters Ink

  P.O. Box 242

  Midway, FL 32343

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  First Spinsters Ink Edition 2011

  ISBN-13: 978-1-935226-51-2

  ‘Jesse’ written by Janis Ian

  Taosongs Two (BMI)

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  This book is dedicated to

  the queer youth of today whose activism

  now gives their elders so much pride

  And to my Family of Choice

  who kept me alive during the rough and early years:

  Ariana Manov, BeJo Gehrke, Robin Tyler,

  Ivy Bottini, Sally Stewart, and Dina B.Evan

  And especially to LHB who does so now

  Author’s Note

  A Persistent Noise

  (the story behind Outlaws)

  I was not born knowing how to love. It came to me late in life and continues to be difficult. Politics on the other hand came naturally, my mind attuned from birth to the ways of power and survival. Over the twelve years it took me to complete this memoir I discovered that a writer has to understand love and hate, and other primal contradictions, in order to have something to say that will interest others.

  When writers sit down to write we attempt to sort the good guys from the bad and to find what cracks in the foundation of our own character may be moral or immoral. If we write authentically, we find both in ourselves as well as others. My spiritual teacher, Michael Ventura, once told me, “Writers are not nice people.” Luckily, I experienced no surprise or deflation at hearing his words. I knew at an early age that I was too butch, too different, and too dangerous to be nice.

  To be nice is to bore, because by definition “nice” has no shadow or shade. The father of my South African spouse was a freedom fighter - “an outlaw.” The fact of her paternity drove me to investigate her further, and in the process I married her. This memoir visits many outlaws, some freedom fighters, and a few who would be called terrorists today. I am one such outlaw. I have been willing to “go too far.” I needed to know and sort out these outlaws in my mind in order to discover the perimeters of my moral compass. I am not a nice person. I have too many shades. Outlaws takes place at the intersection of shadow and shade that differentiate between persona and principle.

  I have always been fascinated by how a noisy swelling called a social movement arrives on the doorstep of an individual’s life and how she responds to it. Most ignore the calling of the unfathomable energies of our times. For the rest of us—how does one recognize a social movement when it comes calling
at your door? And what greatness or despair might follow should you open the door and invite it into your life? The first step must be to recognize that a stranger of importance has showed up. And I think this recognition must come from listening to the pain in your body, mind, or psyche. Where does it hurt?

  The pain in my life began at the age of four with the simple act of receiving the wrong Christmas present—a toy doll. The dissonance in your life might begin more obviously: the day you were raped, the night you went to bed hungry, the day your father left home. My pain was subtle and psychic, and I could have ignored it except that I continued to receive the wrong Christmas present for eighteen years. That was step one in recognizing my social movement when it came knocking—the persistent noise in your head that tells you that the world’s reality and your own don’t match. The pain nags relentlessly. One might argue that never getting a Christmas present that matches your sense of self beats going to bed starving. But I did go to bed starving for two decades, haunted by the famine of misidentification.

  Identity and answering the call to activism are two themes I deal with in this book. Besides the major themes and plot noted on the cover, you will also find yourself by making this journey, traveling back with me to the embattled relationship of a butch daughter/son to her Latino father; to the perils of an unrequited love affair; and to the unshakable audacity of a twenty-six year old advocacy journalist coping with a life lived at the intersections of multiple American civil rights struggles.

  Speaking of difficult topics, I leave bread crumbs that mark the trail of a life story condensed here in two years that will show you the fullness of how I and other outlaw activists lived. I also talk to you about depression, pill popping, alcoholism, and unresolved parental issues so that young activists today will know they are not alone, and not think themselves rendered incapable by the false seduction of this kind of background music. Such notes are no excuse for inaction.

  Each generation of social justice activists and artists comes of age convinced that the battles they face are unique to history. History is a spiral of relapse and overlaps which push the envelope of identity and liberation a new step forward, then back, then further forward. The “isms” of my youth—black nationalism, Chicanismo, American imperialism, feminism, gay liberationism, sexism, lesbian separatism—arose in the ‘60s and ‘70s because world consciousness was at the dawn of change over these issues. We need to realize that global “noises” like the massive contagion of democratic revolt called the Arab Spring could not possibly have taken place in the 1970s because that generation of Middle Eastern activists was overwhelmed and preoccupied with adjusting to their imposed post-colonial boundaries. The first wave of feminism, the suffrage movement of the early 1900’s, could not have raised the issue of a woman’s right to choose because the technology of birth control, just like the technology called Facebook, was buried in the future. Karl Marx writes that technology underpins and directs the possibilities of social change. I agree with this construct.

  Today, the United States has new issues and names for new “isms.” Our post constructionist vs. essentialist youngest generation, the Millennials, conduct their activism at the intersections of globalism vs. globalization, states rights vs. federalism, female circumcision vs. transnational feminism, gender disorder vs. gender performativity, assimilationism vs. cultural multiplicity, and nationalism vs. migration, to name just a few. Queer social change advocates and artists also have new “isms” and speak of transgenderism, queer theory, gender fluidity and variance, essentialism, Butchdom, and trans-malehood. The very name of the movement in which I came of age—the gay and lesbian movement—is now called the queer or LGBTQ movement. Gays and lesbians are but a majority tribe in this expanded version of people committed to the exploration and liberation of gender identity. Queer theory and transgender politics have revolutionized the way young people today relate to their bodies and society. “Queer” now includes a host of self-identities beyond gender or sexual orientation. Queer words are the forbidden words now used by those who choose to become a power that speaks to truth. And the word “gender”—used in my youth to refer to men and women—is now popularly used to define the specifics of one’s performativity. Queers of color now form the vanguard of challenge to the ‘heteronormative’ (formerly, ‘straight’) world. How far we’ve come!

  My point is that hidden in the “ism” of each generation is the seed of the next revolt. The “isms” of today have unfolded from the “isms” of yesterday as each generation begins where their foremothers left off. So activists beware—understanding what happened yesterday will show you what you can make happen tomorrow.

  To tell you what happened in my yesterday, I’ve had to make a few authorial compromises. Real life, unlike a book, does not include the orderly playing out of disasters, victories, or morals-of-the-story. For most of us life doesn’t unfold so neatly. Memoirists are forced to hunt and peck through the messy events of our lives—the loss of love, a death, betrayal by comrades—as if they occurred in a sane sequential cause and effect manner. A few events in this memoir took place one or two months before or after the dates I imply. I brought forward or moved back such dates hoping to create an articulate narrative arc for readers. Because I take historical accuracy very seriously, you will find date corrections noted in the “Endnotes” section at the back of the book. Endnotes also offer additional historical detail and relevant chismes (gossip) regarding some events. This section also fills in the end-of-the-story for some persons or political events that were not resolved until after the book’s timeframe. Lastly, Endnotes includes comments from some of the characters in my memoir. I thought it only fair to give pivotal public players the chance to remark about their actions before mine are consigned to the ever evolving sequence called history.

  I’ve used the real names of everyone in this book who played a public or historic role. Pseudonyms have been given to two personal characters with small roles, and notably to “Rachel” due to the extraordinarily intimate nature of our story. All representations of the people in this memoir and my relationship with them are true. Truth is necessary, it keeps us sane. Secrets bend the mind into more hurtful “realities” that never existed. Yet, in rendering this story, I have given my truth; others may have their own “truth of the matter.”

  This work is written as a novelized memoir because I wanted it to be accessible to everyone, not just academics or historians. I also wanted to present history as a living thing, not just a documentary type sequence of impersonal truths. By structuring and styling my work as a novel, I have re-created dialog that reflects the emotional truth of those long ago conversations and people, rendering dialog as correctly as memory, old tapes, papers, diaries and research allow. Paying more attention to content, I cannot claim to have rendered the style of conversation—especially among personal rather than political characters—accurate to each person’s personality. It is not my wish to hurt or cause problems for persons alive or dead with whom I interacted during the years portrayed in this memoir. If I have done so please accept my sincere apologies. A memoirist has only her own truth with which to define and express her historical view, so please forgive any pain I may have caused as I have sought to find my truth.

  In 1999, I sat down to write a butch’s simple love story, but out popped a political drama of wider scope. I sat down to write an autobiography and out popped two sole years of my life. I sat down to write a book about what it means to grow up deleted and dangerous in American culture. A constant beacon in my life has been the reimagining of myself, or an entire generation of teens, growing up in a queer-affirming loving world. If you are one of these youth, this book is about you. And if you are one of the hundreds who lived through these times and changed history, “the kids” and I salute you.

  Fondly, JC

  Foreword

  by Lillian Faderman

  I first saw Jeanne Córdova in 1971 in Los Angeles. She was on a panel of feminists and l
esbian feminists, and though I can’t remember much of what was said that day—by her or by any of the panelists—she was indeed memorable. A soft-spoken panelist had just begun her comments when a couple of people in the large audience yelled “Louder!” The speaker stopped and looked puzzled. Jeanne rose from her seat: to this day I can vividly see her lift the microphone from where it sat at the long table and place it in just the right spot so that the woman might be heard. It was such a simple gesture, but it spoke volumes. It was full of grace and graciousness, and an extraordinary confidence, too. It said, “I take the responsibility for making this panel a success and the audience happy.” It said, “I know I have the power to do this.” It also drew all eyes to Jeanne, and it was clear that though she was only in her early twenties, she was used to having all eyes drawn to her. She was, very simply, remarkable in her style and appearance—wearing an Elvis Presley shirt with flowing sleeves, her hair combed a la James Dean, her boy-girl form lithe and graceful—a “pretty butch,” as her lover Rachel accurately dubs her in this memoir; but with so much more smarts, force, charisma, and natural leadership ability than “pretty butch” would suggest. I knew that day that here was a young leader such as the lesbian movement in Los Angeles sorely needed.

  Jeanne captures so well in these pages the early—and mid-1970s, when the movement that she skillfully led in Los Angeles was at its height. Lesbians of that day, particularly lesbian-feminists, were impassioned activists—angry, committed, and bold—who took a page from the Black Power and Anti-War movements. Lesbian-feminists knew with certainty that the powers-that-be were wrong and corrupt, and they were happy to tell them so, and send them to hell. As a leader, Jeanne Córdova had to figure out how to take their wonderful but unruly energy and channel it into constructive action. Her task, as she shows here, was often like that of herding cats.

  Jeanne was on the scene and in front of the pack for virtually every major event or piece of business that involved the Los Angeles lesbian movement in the 1970s. She not only helped organize the 1971 gay pride parade in L.A., but she also brought gender parity to the parade—lesbians up front in equal numbers with gay men. She was a wily strategist, who used good sense as well as a wicked sense of humor for the sake of the cause—figuring out, for example, a wonderfully novel way of getting rid of homophobes who came to jeer at the parade. She organized the first—and extremely important—national lesbian conference in 1973. She was the leading lesbian columnist and reporter for what was, arguably, the most important alternative newspaper in the country, the Los Angeles Free Press. She was the founder and editor of one of the most vital lesbian-feminist journals of the era—The Lesbian Tide.