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Activist-Author Karla Jay Chronicles Her Liberation as a 'Lavender Menace'
by John Zeh
Capital Coverage News Service
CINCINNATI (March 21) - Veteran lesbian-feminist activist-author Karla Jay defended the need for hate-crimes legislation and offered advice to activists seeking to repeal Issue 3 here as she signed copies of her latest book March 20.
She visited the Queen City's Crazy Ladies and Joseph-Beth bookstores after appearing on WAIF FM's "Alternating Currents" to discuss Tales of the Lavender Menace, her new "memoir of liberation" published by Basic Books this month.
Her tenth book chronicles how she liberated herself, beginning in 1968 at Columbia University where male activists "trashed" the campus while expecting women to "succor" them by cooking, cleaning up, and sleeping with them while taking all the credit.
"I realized in a breath-taking way that there couldn't
be justice for anyone in America, so I joined the women's movement,"
she told a dozen people at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Norwood's
historic Rookwood Pavilion. She was inspired by women in the
Red Stockings groups, where things "personal were political."
Jay's book offers a hilarious and poignant tale about how she
helped start Lavender Menace, disrupted a feminist congress to
get lesbianism and homophobia on its agenda, and played a major
role in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970's.
It's a fast-paced, funny look back at the paths taken by countless
individuals in the 1960's and 1970's who worked to forge a new
society with a vision of social justice and sexual liberation.
"I wanted to debunk the myths that exist about our movements, such as that men had all the fun, without writing a dry history book," she said. "Women had an amazing amount of fun," she insisted. "I organized the first national Ogle-in, where we whistled at men on Wall Street, and they ran away!"
Jay, with a doctorate in philosophy, Jay is director of the Women's and Gender studies and an English professor at Pace University in Manhattan, where she has taught for 25 years. Among her books is the pioneering Out of the Closets, written with Allen Young. She was raised "not as a radical," but by a conservative family in Brooklyn.
She read from "Tales" to commemorate the 29th anniversary this week of her "zap" at Ladies' Home Journal, feminists took over the office of it's male editor, demanding, for example, that one column must be re-named "Should (not Can) This Marriage Be Saved?"
Jay was among the first activists to place race and class issues on the women's movement's agenda. "They had no women of color, no one to speak about issues of class," she said. "I liked being a radical rather than a lobbyist because you can change people's consciousness."
She decried that Mafia-owned bars were the only social outlet for gays in New York before the Stonewall uprising, and told about police informing employers, family, landlord, and school officials that people caught in raids were queer. Raids did not stop until a man arrested at a bar jumped out a window at police headquarters, got impaled on a fence that had to be blow-torched apart to get him to hospital, and made the news, she said.
Jay strove to avoid creating a glowing look back at the gay movement's past that would cover up nasty occurrences. "Some activists were actually armed and dangerous, and we realized that the patriarch labeled us all as deviant and mentally ill," she said. "Many were on too many drugs and drank too much. I learned about the toll that drinking took on the movement. We've seen many lasting changes in society, but it also took a toll on the people who fostered them."
Asked about the debate over whether hate-crime laws with enhanced penalties for anti-gay attacks are in fact "thought-crimes," Jay defended their use. "It would help if such laws were on the book," she said. "Gays, lesbians, and Asian-Americans are very near the top of envy and hatred for their industriousness, as the Jews of the 1930's were. It helps to have anti-hate crime laws."
A bill has been re-introduced in Congress to expand current hate-crimes law to include crimes based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender, or disabilty.
Jay cautioned, however, that such laws can create "a false illusion if we think we're safe, because in a dark alley, it won't matter to perpetrators if there is a law or not." She noted that there are "a lot of quiet murders going on that don't have the profile of Mathew Shepard's." Told about the unsolved murder here of a bisexual Union Township man by a male prostitute, she said. "I worry that the lives (of such victims) seem not to matter."
Jay said people should look to the positive side of Shepard's murder. "He's a good poster boy that a lot of people will look at and see their son, and will help get these crimes turned around. These murders are so repulsive that it will finally turn the tide."
She said she fears that anti-gay initiatives like Cincinnati's Issue 3, which prohibits passage of protections for people based on their being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, are on the rise. "They are really terrible, and clear violations of (the Constitution) that must be struck down," she said.
To activists in Stonewall Cincinnati, the new Pink Paradigm social club, and others working to overturn Issue 3 or on behalf of other gay social change, she had this advice: "It's time to recapture the spirit of fun. You have to have imagination, to do something that captures the imagination of the public."
"The right wing has taken over that strategy and co-opted our tactics. Anti-gay propositions take too much of our time and money," she concluded. "We must set the agenda, call the shots, and set the agenda so (opponents) will have to react.
A Cincinnati native and University of Kentucky graduate, veteran journalist John Zeh writes for the weekly Ohio Gay People's Chronicle, Rainbow Cincinnati website, and The (Louisville) Letter. He contributes to Lambda list service in Kentucky and Rainbow News/Talk in southern Ohio. E-mail JohnZeh@aol.com
