Karla Jay: The Lesbian Stonewall That History Forgot

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.

Jeffrey Masters: You began your adult lesbian life in the 1960s. This was before Stonewall, in New York City. Where did you go to find other lesbians and community?

Karla Jay: Oh, it wasn’t so easy to find other lesbians. I went to the Village, and I tried to follow likely suspects without looking like a crazy stalker. And I tried to see where they went in to see if they were going into some lesbian place. And 18 was the drinking age at that time in New York state.

JM: You’re following women around that you’re assuming 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 or one of them might be dressed a little bit more in what we might call a masculine, in quotes, fashion. And 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, I think, 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 mean, I was a college girl. I looked a bit like a hippie, and I had long hair, but I didn’t seem like a femme. And so I didn’t seem really 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,” in quotes, 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. And 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. And she watched people going in because we were degenerates, and we couldn’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by ourselves, because who knows what we would do.

The other thing that happened in there, where there were men who came in, straight men, who knew the bouncers, or they knew some guy to get in, and they stood around the edge of the dance floor, and they 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 own all the bars in New York City, because it was illegal to serve drinks to a homosexual. As it was, the drinks were watered down. The glasses were none too clean. There was no running water in some of the bars, including the Stonewall. So 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 and say, 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,” she’d say. And then she’d order you a drink, and you’d pay for it. So it was not a great place. However, 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?

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 live 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, and the turning point in stopping the bar raids was the raid at the Snake Pit, which was 1970, ’71.

Police went in there and rounded up people who they could round up, people who were underage, not wearing gender-correct clothing, and they took them to the precinct in the Village. And the precinct had around it at that time, it’s no longer there, they had a wrought iron fence with decorative spikes on the top. And they rounded these people up, and they took them into the precinct, and there was one man named Diego Vinalles who was a migrant from South America. And he was so freaked out that he had been arrested, and that his family would find out in South America and he would be deported, that he jumped out of the second story window in the police station and landed on that ornamental fence.

The fire department had to come with a blowtorch, and they torched the fence in half, turned him over on his back, put him on a stretcher with spikes sticking out of him, because he would’ve bled to death if they had tried to remove them, and they took him to the hospital. Now, that’s what ended the bar raids, sadly, not the Stonewall uprising. That was in the ’70s, and that was on the news. We, in the Gay Liberation Front at that time, we were picketing when we saw the stories of this young man who had wound up like that. And so in some ways that ended the bar raids. Stonewall is monumental because of the demonstrations that happened before Stonewall, at the most ever, the most ever in terms of people who came out were 200 people. And in 1970, during these first Pride marches, there were probably around the country about 10,000 people who marched. There were marches not just in New York, but in LA and San Francisco and Chicago, and there were maybe 10,000 people, and 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, and what you meant by that?

KJ: Yes, that’s a really good question. People don’t realize how radical we were. And the more mainstream groups like Mattachine, and the Daughters of Bilitis, wanted this sense of equality, which meant that they were going to redivide the pie, and we would have a more equal share of this pie in society. We thought the pie was rotten, and we wanted to get rid of that pie and bake a new pie, because why should we go straight, and why shouldn’t you go gay? We were very radical. We were much more radical than many of the 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 we said, “What would you like to come out of gay liberation?” And 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, it seemed like such a preposterous idea. You want to get married? It was just, it was so distant, and pie in the sky. And we didn’t want to get married. We wanted to form alternatives to marriage. And I still feel this way. I feel that 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 is praised by the patriarchy?

JM: Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine Society, these early gay groups…it was separate groups for men and women. Gay Liberation Front was gay men and women working together.

KJ: And trans people. There were quite a few trans people. And some bi, people who identify as bi.

JM: I mean, you came from the women’s movement where it was just women in these rooms. What was it like for you to suddenly be working with men and all these other people?

KJ: Well, it was like a great big dysfunctional family. And I’ve always been very open-minded about meeting people. I’m a pacifist, and certainly, in the GLF, I met men, they were all different. There were men who had been on the left, there were men in there who hated women, and 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. There were lots of trans people, not just Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, but there was kind of a contingent of people we would call trans today. They called themselves street transvestites back then. There’s Marsha and Sylvia and Bubbles and 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 and were just poking in, hoping they would find something interesting. There were people who came to cruise, let’s be honest.

JM: And so all these differences…was it hard to find agreement on what the priority 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, and I had been in Redstockings, which developed consciousness-raising in this country. And so I tried to introduce that, to some degree, to the Gay Liberation Front, along with other people who were in favor of this, 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, which were actions which were fun, a little entertaining, and they also made the political point, a lot of them.

JM: I know that the group had a non-hierarchical leadership structure. What I didn’t know until reading your book was that to pick the month’s leader, you picked a name out of a hat.

KJ: Correct.

JM: And so when your name was called, you decided to address sexism in the group?

KJ: Yes.

JM: And so was that anyone’s purview? Whoever was in charge that month could pick that priority, and everyone would listen? I guess I’m trying to figure out, were there wild swings in what the priorities were each month?

KJ: Well, people had their—people were there because they had an axe to grind. Everybody had an axe to grind.

JM: An axe to grind with who?

KJ: You know, they had something they wanted to accomplish.

JM: Okay, okay.

KJ: That’s what I mean. They had something they wanted. And one of the problems of addressing equality is that there was a big study by an Australian, I think she was Australian, Dale Spender, about discourse. And one of the things she did was she went to faculty councils at universities, and she recorded the speech that took place, and what percentage of the discourse was by women and what percentage was by men. And 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 that women had, and I think still have, is this discourse that, “Okay, well you said your thing and now I’m going on for 20 more minutes.” But I became the chair, and I brought my softball bat to the meeting, and I used the bat because I didn’t have a gavel, and if I had a gavel, I had no lantern. We were in the basement of the Church of the Holy Apostle, and there were poles that were holding the ceiling up, and I just banged the softball bat, the poles.

JM: You banged the poles to get order, not people.

KJ: No. And 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. That’s because I was such a poor softball player that I never hit anything.

JM: And so you banged the bat to get everyone’s attention.

KJ: Yes, on the metal poles, and then I could, you couldn’t hear me over the din. So I, we tried to get it so that women got 50% of the floor space. Women were only about, probably as a guess, about 20% of the people who were there. So it was difficult. But one of the things we wanted was we wanted our own dance. And when you said that we wanted these political changes, we also wanted social change.

JM: And the dances were important, going back to what you started the conversation. Cookie’s bar has dirty glasses, and there are two sheets of toilet paper in the bathroom, and you’re being treated poorly.

KJ: You’re totally 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. You were paying much more than for a comparable filthy bar down the street.

JM: And so you propose, “Let’s do a dance.”

KJ: “Let’s do a dance.” Now, there were dances every month, at The Alternate U, we had a dance. They were great fun. But the women felt that they couldn’t meet other women because there were so many male bodies on the dance floor, many of whom were taller than the women. You couldn’t even see where the women were. So we were given a back room at the Alternate U with a kind of torn couch full of roaches from pot, that kind of roach, the stub of the blunt. And the women didn’t think that was enough, and we wanted our own dance. And some of the men were against that because they were afraid we would leave, if we started to be out with these separatist kind of 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: Oh, okay, I should explain that. There was a university called the Alternate University, and it was at the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street. And it was a Marxist university, and it had a bunch of little classrooms, and it was one of the places where you could go to print up leaflets on a ditto machine, where 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. She was one of our younger members. And 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, you wanted it to disappear, you put it in the rat cage.

JM: That’s amazing.

KJ: Paper shredding, 1969.

JM: So, the dance happens, and you’re collecting money at the door. How much—

KJ: At the door, well, yes. We asked for a donation because 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. So if you wanted beer or soda, you gave a donation. Things were very cheap back then compared to today. It was probably a dollar or so to buy something. And we set up the work, and my job was, if there was trouble, because we had heard, we sent a scout out to Cookie’s Bar, and we heard that the bar wasn’t so crowded as it usually would be on a Saturday night. This was in February, so we were worried.

So, our worries were not amiss because, at about 3:00 in the morning when we were cleaning up The Alternate U, these large men in trench coats with guns in their belts appeared in the doorway. And they were so large, they just filled up this big doorway. And they said they were the police, and they said we were selling liquor without a license. And they started to push the women around. And we knew they weren’t police because, first of all, the police officers don’t keep their guns in a belt. They’re in a holster. And these men were gigantic, and they were far too large to fit in a police uniform in anyone’s estimation. So I ran out the back door. There was a back exit, and a fire escape, and I ran to a phone booth. And unfortunately, the nearest phone booth was a block away in front of Cookie’s Bar. And I called our lawyer, who was Flo Kennedy, who was a Black lesbian feminist who said, “If there’s a problem, call me.” She was an amazing, an amazing person and attorney. And I told her what was happening, and she said, “Well, I’m gonna call the press and the police.” So the real police came, and these guys just evaporated. And as they were leaving, one of the women stuck her head out the door into the stairwell and said, “Next time, bring your sisters.” She said to the mafia. I couldn’t believe it. And that kind of sums it up. We had more moxie and, intention than we had brains, because we just could’ve been killed.

And 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, things that happened to lesbians, somehow this dance has just sort of been erased. The only event we did that was not erased was the Lavender Menace action, and of course, is still widely regarded today.

JM: The action at the Second Congress to Unite Women. Before we get to that…the Lavender Menace itself, I know it was predominantly Gay Liberation Front members, but was it a part of Gay Liberation Front or was it 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. So we called ourselves Radicalesbians. We wanted at first to have consciousness raising groups that were all women. And, by March of 1970, we were infuriated by an article in The New York Times Magazine by the late Susan Brownmiller, she 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 women’s liberation movement was thought to be a bunch of dykes, nobody would support them. But in truth, the women’s liberation movement was a bunch of dykes, it was kind of. But Betty fired women who were lesbians, anyone she thought was a lesbian, and most of them were lesbians, and some were not.

So we wanted to do something. And some of the women were from the Gay Liberation Front. Many of the women had never been there. Some were from NOW and other feminist organizations, so it was a kind of mixed group. There were about 40 of us.

JM: And for the Second Congress to Unite Women, it was May 1970. What was the intention to do?

KJ: Well, we were tired of being ignored by the women’s liberation movement. To give you an example, Redstockings, which was the group I was in, they were a group, and their starting point of 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, that they oppressed lesbians as heterosexual women, and to see the way that all of us oppressed women of color and working class women because of their economic status. And they didn’t want to deal with that at all.

And Redstockings developed the slogan, the personal is political. But when you were a lesbian, the personal was just personal. They just didn’t want to hear it. They were really strict about it. And so we wanted to bring that to their attention, and the issues of race and class, and that’s been left out of the narrative. So we wrote a manifesto called The Woman Identified Woman.

JM: It’s a founding document of lesbian feminism.

KJ: It’s an amazing document, considering that 40 women chipped in, and that we got this together. That’s hard.

JM: The “Woman Identified Woman,” it also redefined the word lesbian into a political and sexual identity. Can I have you read a little bit from it, actually?

KJ: I can’t read, because I’m print impaired.

JM: Can I read a part of it?

KJ: Yeah. I mean, I know it starts, it says, “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion,” is how it starts.

JM: “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

KJ: Yes.

JM: “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’s in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually herself.”

KJ: Yes.

JM: What did you think when you read that for the first time?

KJ: It would seem like an incredibly bold statement. It was certainly meant to be something that they could swallow, and that’s why we used the term woman identified woman. It was something that a feminist who was a lesbian could identify with. And we wanted, as I said, as a pacifist, you want people to come over to your side.

JM: So the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion, they could identify with that. That is something all wo—oh, that’s interesting. And so the audience was all women there?

KJ: The audience is, you know, Alix Dobkin later had a wonderful song, “Every Woman Can Be A Lesbian.” It went, “Every woman can be a lesbian,” and we held that out to them. And over the years, of course, many of the women I knew back then became lesbians later on. They did. They realized that, I think that their chance of finding the 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, they realized that that was probably never gonna happen. And, for them, a lot of feminists who didn’t think of themselves as lesbians.

JM: This “Woman Identified Woman,” the manifesto, you handed this out at the congress.

KJ: Yes, after we seized it.

JM: Yes. 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.” And they were hand-dyed in the bathtub and then stenciled. That’s how T-shirts were made back then. And we cased out the place. It was at a public school in Greenwich Village, and we met before the congress. And when the congress was about to start, a couple of the women went backstage and cut off the lights in the auditorium. When the lights came back in the auditorium, lesbians were lining the aisles, and the audience was completely surrounded by lesbians. And we had signs. We had these oak tag posters that said things like, “We are your worst nightmare and your best fantasy.” And it would say, “Take a lesbian to lunch,” and things like that.

JM: The lights come up, and they’re seeing, surrounded by women in these shirts that say—

KJ: Right, Lavender Menace, holding signs.

And some of us were planted in the audience. I was one of the women in the audience, and I was wearing, I was dressed for the conference. I had a nice red satiny kind of blouse on. And when they were in the aisle, I stood up in the audience and I said, “I’m tired of being in the closet in this movement.” And I stood up, and I pulled off my blouse, and there was a Lavender Menace T-shirt on underneath. And I joined them. And Rita Mae Brown said, “Sisters, sisters, join us in this movement. Who wants to join us?” And some women said, “I do, I do.” So Rita pulled off her T-shirt, and there were gasps because people thought she was gonna be naked, but she had another Lavender Menace T-shirt on underneath, and she threw that into the audience. And that’s what a zap was like. People were laughing and cheering. And we went up on the stage, some of us, and we said, “This conference is not going on as planned. There is nothing on this agenda about lesbians. There’s nothing on the agenda about race. There’s nothing on the agenda about class, and here’s your new agenda.”

JM: And what blows my mind is that they said okay, and let you then set the agenda.

KJ: Yes. They listened to it.

JM: They liked it. That’s incredible. Today you’d be thrown out.

KJ: The thing is people didn’t arrest people. Knock wood, I’ve never been arrested. I did so many of these illegal activities. It looked so bad for you if you were arrested. I certainly went to many bail hearings where other women were arrested.

JM: Wow.

KJ: We were really lucky. Today you would be arrested. People are just intolerant of you intruding on their space.

JM: And so they more or less were receptive at that congress, and let you guys talk. And did that change the movement going forward?

KJ: Very receptive. And did that change the movement going forward? It really changed the women’s movement. Issues of race, class, and sexuality were on the agenda going forward, except that Betty Friedan, who really was incredibly homophobic, she did not, at least officially, accept lesbians until 1977 at the women’s conference in Houston. And I understand that they practically broke her arm to get her to say that lesbians could be a full part of the movement.

JM: Wow.

KJ: And that was seven years later. Yeah. Betty was a terror.

JM: You know, a lot of books written by men during this time, activists, they talk about the protests and the zaps, and they talk about all the sex they were having. Your book does the exact same thing, I have to say.

KJ: Yes, we were, you know, I look back and people think we didn’t have sex. So I guess it’s like your grandmother never had sex, right?

JM: Right. So that was important for you to set straight the record. You also have a lot of choice words. You’re very critical about monogamy in the book as well.

KJ: I’m trying to express how I felt at the time. And that monogamy was seen as property ownership.

JM: Was that your view at the time, or were you in the minority in thinking that, or was that kind of widely accepted?

KJ: I think that many of us did not believe in monogamy, that it’s 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 an idea of non-monogamy. The joke about lesbians back then and probably now was, what does a lesbian bring on her second date? And the answer is a U-Haul. But there’s truth to it, that lesbians tend to couple up quite quickly and to become exclusive. And that’s why it’s such a popular joke.

JM: Because it’s true.

KJ: Because it’s true, there’s a lot of truth to it.

JM: I want to obviously 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. It was a first-of-its-kind book that was printed as a mass market paperback, so it was available everywhere. Was it hard to convince a publisher, to print this book, let alone to 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 we put together this book. And the first editor we went to, Allen got this guy’s name. He was at a major publisher, and he wanted the book, and 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. I shouldn’t laugh, but no, he was fired for proposing this book to a mainstream house. And we felt bad that he, we really felt bad that he was fired.

JM: Of course.

KJ: So we found a kind of left-wing, called Links, and they put it out as a hardcover and trade paperback. And then it came out in a mass market paperback from Pyramid Books, which became Jove Press, which was part of Harcourt Brace. And 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, and there was a keyhole, and you were supposed to be able to read Out of the Closets through the keyhole, but they cut the keyhole the wrong size, and you couldn’t see the title.

But it was what they called mass market paperback, and the book was on these racks at train stations and bus stations and supermarkets, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So, people did buy it. It, people were thrilled.

JM: I just would have assumed that if a book like that got published, they would have buried it and done a thousand copies, if that.

KJ: Oh, I don’t know what the first printing was, but it just took off. There are many, many editions of it, and Out of the Closets is still in print today. It’s almost, what is it, it’s almost 55 years later.

JM: Wow. Wow.

KJ: It’s really astonishing.

JM: But you say that activists at the time thought it was dangerous to publish a book like this.

KJ: It was, in a way.

JM: How so?

KJ: It made you public in a way that not many people were out there and not many people were in public.

JM: For you and your coauthor.

KJ: Yeah. For Allen and I, but it turned out it really wasn’t dangerous. It seemed like it could be to have our names out there when there weren’t many public names that were public at the time.

JM: Speaking of names, you actually changed yours.

KJ: Oh, yes. I did that much earlier. I did that in the ’60s.

JM: Right. What was the purpose of that? What did it do for you?

KJ: Well, I was born with, my father’s last name, and many women in the women’s movement, including people who weren’t in the women’s movement, like Martha Shelley, many people changed their names. Martha Shelley changed her name. Susan Brownmiller changed her name. It was something that we did. Why shouldn’t I have a name that’s my name rather than my father’s name? Why shouldn’t women have a name that’s not their husband’s name? So we in the women’s movement thought, “I’m gonna have a name I like.”

JM: Did that give you an anonymity that made you able to be bolder, per se?

KJ: No, because then I legally changed my name, and it’s been my name since the 1970s.

JM: Okay.

KJ: It’s my name. I went to court, and I changed it. It was not a difficult process.

JM: Or, I guess I’m wondering, people said, if you publish this book, the name Karla Jay is gonna be associated with being a lesbian. Did that not matter as much, maybe ’cause you had changed your name?

KJ: It worried me a bit, because when I went for a job at Pace University as an adjunct, I decided that I wasn’t going to be in the closet because I had a book out already. 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 it was 1976, and my boss saw me in Central Park on the TV news show. And my boss didn’t say this to me. He called in other workers he knew might be gay, and he said, “Well, I know Karla’s a lesbian. Is she a transvestite?” He went around asking people if I was a transvestite. And they just laughed. They laughed right in his face.

I thought that I might suffer discrimination, and indeed I did. I had a lawsuit against a potential employer. It was at the time of Ronald Reagan. I guess it was, what was that, about 1990, where the employer took my resume around and showed it to the people in the office and asked her coworkers how would they feel working with a lesbian. And I sued them because she said to me, I couldn’t have sued them because I was a lesbian, but 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 to me, “I’m not going to hire you because you’re an open lesbian,” I had no legal protection.

JM: Wow.

KJ: But she said that to me, and she said that to someone else I knew who applied, and so we took them to the Human Rights Commission, and we won. But that was 1990, so the fact I was an open lesbian, probably did cause problems.

JM: A lot of what you’re doing in the book, explicitly, is correcting and clarifying history. Are there just big myths or misconceptions you still are worried about?

KJ: I think that, 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 of, I don’t know, just people who worked all the time. We had no sense of humor, which is one of the stereotypes about feminists, and we didn’t have a good time. Well, we really had a fabulous time. We made lifelong friends. Many of the people I met back then I am still friends with. I’m still friends with Allen Young, whom I co-edited and wrote four books with. If you can find someone that you have a core of belief, and you believe in this common core of political and social belief and how to treat other people and how the world should be, you’re more likely to remain friends.

To go into, let’s say, a club or to meet someone online, it’s hard to find this common core of connection. The only thing that we have in common, which makes it very difficult for us as queers, is that we generally like people of the same sex. And I say generally because I don’t want to exclude bisexuals, and some trans people, as you know, like the same gender, and some people like the opposite gender, and some people are non-binary, and they identify in different ways. So, but it’s still difficult to find people just based on your identity. And 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, we were too busy doing it. We didn’t have time to just sit down and explain it to you.

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LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@jeffmasters1⁠⁠⁠

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