When it came time to lead the Gay Liberation Front, Karla Jay brought a softball bat with her to that first meeting. Founded in 1969 in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall uprising, the Gay Liberation Front was a radical activist organization. Contrary to earlier groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had no interest in assimilation.
The goal was radical social change.
They didn’t want “equal rights” within the world as it existed; they wanted to revolutionize society and dismantle all oppressive structures, including the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. They reclaimed the word “gay” and also supported other movements including the Black Panthers and the women’s liberation movement.
GLF was a non-hierarchical group that rejected traditional leadership models, opting instead to rotate who led them each month by picking a name from a hat. When Karla’s name was chosen, she took control, banging her bat against the metal poles in the room (not other members, she promises) as if it were a gavel. She’d restore order to the room when debate grew heated and also used the bat to ensure that women in the group had an equal opportunity to speak.
Karla took part in many actions, including the infamous takeover by the Radicalesbians of the Second Congress to Unite Women (1970). Protesting their exclusion from the mainstream women’s movement, the group took control of the conference wearing shirts emblazoned with the words Lavender Menace.
What blows me away about this moment: they were successful. By the end of the weekend, the congress overwhelmingly voted to pass a resolution acknowledging the oppression faced by lesbians and affirming them as an integral part of the feminist struggle.
That same year, GLF threw an all-women’s dance at the Alternate U, a Marxist community space on 6th Avenue. At around 3:00 AM, several large men wearing trench coats appeared in the doorway with guns visible in their belts. Karla didn’t believe that they were police as they claimed (police carry their guns in a holster, not tucked in a belt, she knew), so she slipped out the back, ran to a payphone, and called the civil rights attorney Flo Kennedy who in turn called the press and the real police. As the men from the mafia fled, one woman shouted out the window after them, “Next time bring your sisters.”
Karla calls it the Lesbian Stonewall, a night they could easily have been killed, and one that’s been almost entirely erased from queer history. They fought back against the mafia and left feeling more emboldened in their fight for gay liberation than ever before.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
JM: You began your adult lesbian life in the 1960s. This was before Stonewall, in New York City. Where did you begin? How did you find other lesbians and community?
KJ: Oh, it wasn’t so easy to find other lesbians. I sort of went to the Village and tried to follow likely suspects without looking like a crazy stalker. I tried to see where they went, to see if they were going into some lesbian place. And 18 was the drinking age at that time in New York State.
JM: So you’re following women around that you assume are lesbians. What did they look like? What were you looking for?
KJ: Well, I was looking for women walking along who seemed to have some kind of intimacy between them, and might be dressed a little more in what we might call a masculine fashion. I was just trying to find people. I was kind of shy — I was just a teenager, so I didn’t want to walk up to people and ask them. It was mostly unproductive. I did find one bar called The Sea Colony, and I went in there, and it just seemed a little not for me. It was over on Hudson Street. It had a pool table or something, and people were not entirely friendly if you didn’t seem to fit in. I was a college girl. I looked a bit like a hippie, I had long hair, but I didn’t seem like a femme. So I didn’t seem to fit in with the other people, and this was a problem even when I found Cookie’s Bar and went there a number of times. I just felt like I really didn’t quite belong there.
And even before Stonewall, the way that women were treated by the, quote, “owner” of the bar was just despicable in terms of how we as customers were treated. For example, if you had to go to the ladies’ room, there was a line, and the restrooms were single seaters. Outside the restroom sat a kind of guard — not a real guard, it was a lesbian — and on your way in, she handed you two sheets of toilet paper. She watched people going in because we were degenerates, and we couldn’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by ourselves. Who knows what we would do.
The other thing that happened in there: there were men who came in, straight men who knew the bouncers or knew some guy to get in, and they stood around the edge of the dance floor and jerked off, openly, while we were dancing. Those were two things.
The owner, Cookie, who was the alleged owner of the bar, probably was running it for the Genovese crime family, who owned all the bars in New York City, because it was illegal to serve drinks to a homosexual. So the drinks were watered down, the glasses were none too clean, there was no running water in some of the bars, including the Stonewall. It was pretty bad.
Cookie could come up to you and take a lit cigarette out of her mouth and put it under your chin. She had a very thick Greenpoint accent, and she’d say, “Girls, this ain’t no church. If you wanna talk, go talk in a pew.” Then she’d order you a drink, and you’d pay for it. So it was not a great place. But where else could we go? People today don’t understand that there were no coffee houses, there were no college clubs, particularly.
JM: You mentioned Stonewall. Was it immediately apparent, after the uprising, how big that moment was and the meaning of it?
KJ: No. In the rearview mirror, we can say, “Oh, Stonewall was really this monumental event.” But we have to admit — as someone who has written a real history — that there were many bar raids before Stonewall, and if Stonewall had been so monumental, there wouldn’t have been bar raids after Stonewall. And there were. The turning point in stopping the bar raids was the raid at the Snake Pit, which was in 1970 or ’71.
Police went in there and rounded up people they could round up — people who were underage, not wearing gender-correct clothing — and took them to the precinct in the Village. The precinct had a wrought-iron fence around it at that time, with decorative spikes on top. There was one man named Diego Vinalles, a migrant from South America. He was so freaked out that he’d been arrested, and that his family would find out and he’d be deported, that he jumped out of the second-story window of the police station and landed on that ornamental fence.
The fire department had to come with a blowtorch and torch the fence in half, turn him over on his back, and put him on a stretcher with spikes sticking out of him — because he would’ve bled to death if they’d tried to remove them — and they took him to the hospital. That’s what ended the bar raids — sadly, not the Stonewall uprising. That was in the ’70s, and it was on the news. We, in the Gay Liberation Front at the time, were picketing when we saw the stories of this young man. So in some ways, that ended the bar raids.
Stonewall is monumental because of the demonstrations that happened afterward. Before Stonewall, the most people who ever came out to a demonstration was 200. In 1970, during the first Pride marches, there were probably around 10,000 people across the country who marched, not just in New York, but in LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. That’s what changed things.
JM: In the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front was formed. In your book you write that their goal was to revolutionize society, fight sexism, and abolish traditional gender roles rather than just seeking equal rights. Can you explain that distinction, about not seeking equal rights?
KJ: Yes, that’s a really good question. People don’t realize how radical we were. The more mainstream groups, like Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis, wanted this sense of equality — meaning they were going to redivide the pie, and we would have a more equal share of it in society. We thought the pie was rotten. We wanted to get rid of it and bake a new one — because why should we go straight, and why shouldn’t you go gay? We were very radical, much more radical than many people today. We used to chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We weren’t going to change so that the heteropatriarchy would feel comfortable with us. Our goal was not to get married and have a white picket fence and children in the suburbs.
In fact, at one of the early meetings of the Gay Liberation Front, we went around the room and said, “What would you like to come out of gay liberation?” One person said, “I would like to be able to walk in the Village and hold my lover’s hand without being afraid.” And a woman said, “I would like to get married.” And we all laughed. In 1969, that seemed like such a preposterous idea. You want to get married? It was so distant, so pie in the sky. We didn’t want to get married. We wanted to form alternatives to marriage. I still feel this way. I understand the battle for marriage equality, but why shouldn’t people be allowed to live however they want together? Why is that less of a valuable structure than this dyad that’s praised by the patriarchy?
JM: Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine, these early gay groups…one was a gay men’s group, one was a lesbian group. The Gay Liberation Front had gay men and women working together, and trans people. What was it like for you, coming from the women’s movement where it was just women in the room, to suddenly be working with men and all these other people?
KJ: Well, it was like a great big dysfunctional family. I’ve always been very open-minded about meeting people. I’m a pacifist, and certainly in the GLF I met men who were all different. There were men who had been on the left, there were men who hated women — I’m sure they saw us as a real buzzkill just for being in the room. I met people who belonged to Eulenspiegel, which is a bondage society, B&D. There were lots of trans people, not just Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, but a whole contingent of people we’d call trans today. They called themselves street transvestites back then: Marsha, Sylvia, Bubbles, Zazu Nova, and others who came and went.
There were guys who had sex in the back of empty trucks in the meatpacking district. There were people who were scholars, just poking in, hoping they’d find something interesting. And there were people who came to cruise, let’s be honest.
JM: With all these differences, was it hard to find agreement on what the priorities should be in the group?
KJ: Oh, we almost never agreed. It was just a big chaotic thing. We tried to reach consensus, but in truth, most of the work was done in subgroups. There was a Red Butterfly cell, which studied Marxist theology. There were consciousness-raising groups — I had been in Redstockings, which developed consciousness-raising in this country, and I tried to introduce that to the Gay Liberation Front, along with others who favored it, because consciousness-raising was popular. There were people who wanted to dance. There were people who thought we should only do political actions, and those people put together “zaps,” as we called them, actions that were fun, a little entertaining, and also made a political point.
JM: The group had a non-hierarchical leadership structure. What I didn’t know until reading your book is that to pick the month’s leader, you picked a name out of a hat.
KJ: Yes.
JM: And so when your name was called, you decided to address sexism in the group. So was that anyone’s purview, whoever was in charge that month could pick that priority, and everyone would listen? Were there wild swings in what the priorities were each month?
KJ: Well, everybody had an axe to grind. One of the problems of addressing equality is that there was a big study by an Australian researcher, Dale Spender, about discourse. She went to faculty councils at universities and recorded the speech that took place, what percentage of the discourse was by women and what percentage was by men. She discovered that when women spoke more than 17%, the men complained the women talked too much.
JM: More than 17%.
KJ: 17%. And that was the problem women had, and I think still have, with this discourse: “Okay, well, you said your thing, now I’m going on for 20 more minutes.” I became the chair, and I brought my softball bat to the meeting, because I didn’t have a gavel. We were in the basement of the Church of the Holy Apostle, and there were poles holding the ceiling up, and I banged the softball bat on the poles.
JM: You banged the poles, not people, to get order?
KJ: Not people. I have heard that I hit people, but I’m a pacifist, I’ve never hit anyone. The bat is at the New York Public Library, and anybody can go see it. It’s in absolutely perfect condition, because I was such a poor softball player that I never hit anything.
JM: So you banged the bat on the metal poles to get everyone’s attention?
KJ: Yes, you couldn’t hear me over the din otherwise. We tried to get it so that women got 50% of the floor space. Women were only about 20% of the people who were there, so it was difficult. One of the things we wanted was our own dance. We wanted these political changes, but we also wanted social change, and the dances were important.
JM: Going back to what you started the conversation with, Cookie’s bar has dirty glasses, two sheets of toilet paper in the bathroom, and you’re being treated poorly. You’re humiliated.
KJ: Humiliated every night you went there. You felt humiliated by the goons at the front who were taking your money, and you’re paying what I called the lesbian tax — much more than for a comparable filthy bar down the street.
JM: So you propose, “Let’s do a dance.”
KJ: Let’s do a dance. There were dances every month at the Alternate U. They were great fun, but the women felt they couldn’t meet other women because there were so many male bodies on the dance floor, many taller than the women — you couldn’t even see where the women were. So we were given a back room with a torn couch full of roaches from pot — the stub of a blunt. The women didn’t think that was enough, and we wanted our own dance. Some of the men were against that because they were afraid we would leave — if we started these separatist activities, we might leave. So we demanded to have this dance. The treasury only had between $2 and $300 in it, but that was enough to rent the Alternate U, and we asked for donations at the door.
JM: What was the Alternate U?
KJ: I should explain that. There was a university called the Alternate University, at the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street. It was a Marxist university with a bunch of little classrooms, and it was one of the places where you could go print leaflets on a ditto machine.You ran it by hand, and you cranked it.
JM: And they had no problem with this gay organization having a dance?
KJ: No. Susan Silverman worked over there, and she was a member of the Gay Liberation Front — one of our younger members. The other cute thing about Alternate U was they had a rat named Chairman Mao who was the paper shredder. We were pre-mechanical, if you wanted a document to disappear, you put it in the rat cage.
JM: So the dance happens, and you’re collecting money at the door. How much—
KJ: We asked for a donation. I don’t remember what it was and we also sold alcohol, beer, with a donation, because it was illegal to sell alcohol without a license. Things were very cheap back then, probably a dollar or so. My job was to handle it if there was trouble, because we’d sent a scout out to Cookie’s Bar and heard the bar wasn’t as crowded as usual for a Saturday night. This was in February, so we were worried and our worries were not misplaced, because at about 3:00 in the morning, when we were cleaning up, these large men in trench coats with guns in their belts appeared in the doorway. They were so large they filled up this big doorway. They said they were the police, and that we were selling liquor without a license, and they started to push the women around.
We knew they weren’t police because, first of all, police officers keep their guns in a holster, not a belt. And these men were gigantic — far too large to fit in a police uniform by anyone’s estimation. So I ran out the back door — there was a fire escape — and ran to a phone booth. Unfortunately, the nearest phone booth was a block away, in front of Cookie’s Bar. I called our lawyer, Flo Kennedy, a Black lesbian feminist who had said, “If there’s a problem, call me.” I told her what was happening, and she said, “I’m going to call the press and the police.” So the real police came, and these guys just evaporated. As they were leaving, one of the women stuck her head out the door into the stairwell and said, “Next time, bring your sisters” — to the mafia. I couldn’t believe it. That kind of sums it up, we had more moxie than we had brains, because we could’ve been killed.
I kind of talk about that dance as the lesbian Stonewall. We could’ve been killed there. A couple of the women were beaten up, women were pushed around. And somehow this dance has just sort of been erased. The only event we did that wasn’t erased was the Lavender Menace action…
JM: At the Second Congress to Unite Women.
KJ: Yes, that one’s still widely regarded today.
JM: Before we get to that, the Lavender Menace itself, I know it was predominantly Gay Liberation Front members, but was it a part of the Gay Liberation Front, or its own separate group?
KJ: The group was actually called Radicalesbians, after a great deal of struggle. We didn’t know what to call ourselves. We wanted at first to have consciousness-raising groups that were all women. By March of 1970, we were infuriated by an article in The New York Times Magazine by the late Susan Brownmiller, who called us a “lavender herring.” Betty Friedan had called us a “lavender menace” — she said lesbians would destroy the women’s liberation movement, because if the movement was thought to be a bunch of dykes, nobody would support it. But in truth, the women’s liberation movement was a bunch of dykes. Betty fired women who were lesbians — anyone she thought was a lesbian, and most of them were, though some weren’t.
So we wanted to do something. Some of the women were from the Gay Liberation Front, many had never been there. Some were from NOW and other feminist organizations, so it was a mixed group. There were about 40 of us.
JM: And for the Second Congress to Unite Women, in May 1970, what was the intention?
KJ: We were tired of being ignored by the women’s liberation movement. To give you an example, Redstockings, the group I was in, their starting point for seeing women as a social class was to say that all women were oppressed by all men. And they found it really inconvenient and disturbing to their Marxist analysis to see the ways that heterosexual women oppressed lesbians, and the way all of us oppressed women of color and working-class women because of their economic status. They didn’t want to deal with that at all.
JM: And Redstockings developed the slogan “the personal is political.”
KJ: But when you were a lesbian, the personal was just personal — they didn’t want to hear it. They were really strict about it. So we wanted to bring that to their attention, and the issues of race and class…that’s been left out of the narrative. So we wrote a manifesto called “The Woman-Identified Woman.”
JM: Right — a founding document of lesbian feminism.
KJ: It’s an amazing document, considering that 40 women chipped in and we got it together. That’s hard.
JM: “The Woman-Identified Woman” also redefined the word “lesbian” into a political and sexual identity. Can I have you read a little bit from it?
KJ: I can’t read — I’m print-impaired.
JM: Can I read a part of it?
KJ: Yeah. I know it starts, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” — that’s how it starts.
JM: [reading] “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her innermost compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society — perhaps then, but certainly later — cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted way of thinking, feeling, and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually herself.” What did you think when you read that for the first time?
KJ: It seemed like an incredibly bold statement. It was certainly meant to be something that people could swallow. That’s why we used the term “woman-identified woman.” It was something that a feminist who was a lesbian could identify with. And, as I said, as a pacifist, you want people to come over to your side.
JM: So the audience was all women there?
KJ: Alix Dobkin later had a wonderful song, “Any Woman Can Be a Lesbian” — and we held that out to them. Over the years, many of the women I knew back then became lesbians later on. I think they realized that their chance of finding a man who was going to treat them with full equality — considering how we were brought up in such separate spheres of behavior and expected outcome — was probably never going to happen. A lot of feminists didn’t think of themselves as lesbians at the time.
JM: And so this “Woman-Identified Woman” manifesto — you handed this out at the congress. Paint the picture for us of what happened.
KJ: Okay. There were about 40 of us, and we had T-shirts we made up that said “Lavender Menace.” They were hand-dyed in the bathtub and then stenciled — that’s how T-shirts were made back then. We cased out the place — it was at a public school in Greenwich Village — and we met before the congress. When it was about to start, a couple of the women went backstage and cut off the lights in the auditorium. When the lights came back on, lesbians were lining the aisles, and the audience was completely surrounded. We had signs, oak tag posters that said things like, “We are your worst nightmare and your best fantasy,” and “Take a lesbian to lunch.”
JM: So the lights come up, and they’re surrounded by women in shirts that say Lavender Menace, holding signs.
KJ: Yes. Some of us were planted in the audience. I was one of them. I was dressed for the conference, wearing a nice red satiny blouse. When the women were in the aisles, I stood up and said, “I’m tired of being in the closet in this movement.” I pulled off my blouse, and there was a Lavender Menace T-shirt underneath. I joined them. Rita Mae Brown said, “Sisters, sisters, join us in this movement. Who wants to join us?” Some women said, “I do, I do.” Rita pulled off her T-shirt, and there were gasps because people thought she was going to be naked — but she had another Lavender Menace T-shirt on underneath, and she threw that into the audience. That’s what a zap was like — people were laughing and cheering. Some of us went up on the stage and said, “This conference is not going on as planned. There’s nothing on this agenda about lesbians, nothing about race, nothing about class — and here’s your new agenda.”
JM: And what blows my mind is that they said okay, and let you set the agenda.
KJ: Yes, they listened. They liked it.
JM: That’s incredible. Today you’d be thrown out.
KJ: Today, yes. The thing is, people didn’t arrest people back then. Knock wood, I’ve never been arrested, and I did so many illegal activities. It looked so bad for you if you were arrested. I certainly went to many bail hearings where other women were arrested. We were really lucky. Today you would be arrested — people are just intolerant of you intruding on their space.
JM: And so they were more or less receptive at that congress, and let you talk. Did that change the movement going forward?
KJ: It really changed the women’s movement. Issues of race, class, and sexuality were on the agenda going forward — except that Betty Friedan, who was incredibly homophobic, did not officially accept lesbians until 1977, at the women’s conference in Houston. I understand that they practically broke her arm to get her to say that lesbians could be a full part of the movement. And that was seven years later.
JM: A lot of books written by men during this time — activists — talk about the protests and the zaps, and they also talk about all the sex they were having. Your book does the exact same thing, I have to say.
KJ: Yes, I look back, and people think we didn’t have sex. It’s like your grandmother never had sex, right?
JM: Right. So that was important for you to set the record straight. You’re very critical about monogamy in the book as well.
KJ: I’m trying to express how I felt at the time, that monogamy was seen as property ownership.
JM: Were you in the minority thinking that? Or was it widely accepted?
KJ: I think that many of us did not believe in monogamy, in exclusivity. The men certainly didn’t believe in monogamy; I don’t think I knew any men who were monogamous then. But among women, it was a real debate. It was very difficult, I think, for women to be open to the idea of non-monogamy. You know the joke about lesbians back then, and probably now: what does a lesbian bring on her second date? A U-Haul. But there’s truth to it: lesbians tend to couple up quickly and become exclusive. That’s why it’s such a popular joke.
JM: Because it’s true.
KJ: Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to it. It is a stereotype, but we didn’t want that.
JM: I want to talk about Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, which you co-wrote with Allen Young. This was an anthology that documented the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Movement, a first-of-its-kind book, printed as a mass-market paperback, so it was available everywhere. Was it hard to convince a publisher to print this book, let alone make it so widely available? This was 1972.
KJ: It was horrible to get this book out. Allen and I were each collecting material, and we joined forces and put together this book. The first editor we went to — Allen got this guy’s name, he was at a major publisher, and he wanted the book. He made an offer, and he went to the editorial board of this major publishing house — and the next thing he knew, he was driving a taxi. [laughs] I shouldn’t laugh. No. He was fired for proposing this book to a mainstream house. We really felt bad that he was fired. So we found a left-wing publisher called Links, and they put it out as a hardcover and trade paperback. Then it came out in a mass-market paperback from Pyramid Books, which became Jove Press, part of Harcourt Brace. We were kind of astonished. But the thing that was hilarious about the first edition of the mass-market paperback was that the title wasn’t on the cover — instead, they cut a keyhole. It was a red cover with a keyhole, and you were supposed to be able to read Out of the Closets through it, but they cut the keyhole the wrong size, so you couldn’t see the title. It was very ridiculous.
It was what they called a mass-market paperback, and the book was on racks at train stations, bus stations, and supermarkets, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. People were thrilled.
JM: I would have assumed that if a book like that got published, they would have buried it and done a thousand copies, if that.
KJ: I don’t know what the first printing was, but it just took off. There are many editions of it, and Out of the Closets is still in print today, it’s almost 55 years later.
JM: Wow. But you say that activists at the time thought it was dangerous to publish a book like this. How so?
KJ: It was, in a way. It made you public in a way that not many people were, out in public — for you and your coauthor. For Allen and me, it turned out it really wasn’t dangerous, but it seemed like it could be, to have our names out there when there weren’t many public names at the time.
JM: Speaking of names, you actually changed yours. What was the purpose of that? What did it do for you?
KJ: I did that much earlier, in the ’60s. I was born with my father’s last name, and many women in the women’s movement — including people who weren’t in the movement, like Martha Shelley and Susan Brownmiller — changed their names. It was something we did. Why shouldn’t I have a name that’s mine rather than my father’s? Why shouldn’t women have a name that’s not their husband’s? So in the women’s movement, we thought, “I’m going to have a name I like.”
JM: Did that give you an anonymity that made you able to be bolder, in a way?
KJ: No, I legally changed my name, and it’s been my name since the 1970s. I went to court and changed it. It was not a difficult process.
JM: I guess I’m wondering, people said that if you publish this book, the name Karla Jay is going to be associated with being a lesbian. Did that not matter as much, maybe because you had already changed your name?
KJ: It worried me a bit, because when I went for a job at Pace University as an adjunct, I decided I wasn’t going to be in the closet, because I already had a book out. And even though there wasn’t an internet, someone was very likely to come across my name somewhere, to see an interview with me, or to see me. In fact, I was the co-emcee of the Pride rally in Central Park, I believe in 1976, and my boss saw me on the TV news. He didn’t say anything to me directly — he called in other workers he knew might be gay and said, “I know Karla’s a lesbian. Is she a transvestite?” He went around asking people if I was a transvestite, and they just laughed right in his face.
I thought that I might suffer discrimination, and indeed I did. I had a lawsuit against a potential employer. This was around the time of Ronald Reagan, about 1990. The employer took my résumé around and showed it to people in the office, and asked her coworkers how they’d feel working with a lesbian. I sued them. She said to me, “I’m not going to hire you because the big boss complains there are too many women at the editorial meetings.” And that was illegal. If she had said, “I’m not going to hire you because you’re an open lesbian,” I would have had no legal protection. But she said that to me, and to someone else I knew who applied, so we took them to the Human Rights Commission, and we won. But that was 1990, so being an open lesbian probably did cause problems.
JM: A lot of what you’re doing in the book is explicitly correcting and clarifying history. Are there any big myths or misconceptions you’re still worried about?
KJ: I think the biggest misconception is that people don’t understand what a wonderful time we had being activists. People think that we older lesbians, we elders, were a serious group — that we had no sense of humor, which is one of the stereotypes about feminists, and that we didn’t have a good time. But we really had a fabulous time. We made lifelong friends — many of the people I met back then I’m still friends with. I’m still friends with Allen Young, whom I co-edited and wrote four books with. If you can find someone with whom you share a common core of belief — political and social belief, how to treat other people, how the world should be — you’re more likely to remain friends. To meet someone at a club, or online, it’s hard to find that common core of connection. The only thing we generally have in common as queers is that we tend to like people of the same sex — and I say “generally” because I don’t want to exclude bisexuals, and some trans people like the same gender, and some like the opposite gender, and some are non-binary and identify in different ways. So it’s still difficult to find people just based on your identity. Having this political background has enabled me to find lots of people I care about.
And the other stereotype is that we were political, we didn’t have sex. Oh my goodness, we did everything. The reason lesbians didn’t talk so much about sex back then is that we were too busy doing it, we didn’t have time to sit down and explain it to you.
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