The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [97]
Gay or straight, women began to name and resist male privilege and to reject a subservient role based on male definitions of femaleness. In Out for Good, Clendenin and Nagourney report on the bitter divorce of gay men and lesbians in the nascent gay liberation movement in the seventies, as lesbians became fed up with the tendency of gay men to focus exclusively on their own issues, ignoring or discounting the primary concerns of gay women. Del Martin, a longtime activist who had cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis and worked alongside gay men in the pre-Stonewall homophile movement, published a letter in The Advocate announcing her own revolution. “I will not be your ‘nigger’ any longer,” she writes. “Nor was I ever your mother. Those were stultifying roles you laid on me, and I shall no longer concern myself with your toilet training.”
In New York City, a group of lesbian women active in the Gay Liberation Front began meeting separately from the men within a year after Stonewall. Equally disgusted by the misogyny and arrogance of gay men and the homophobia of heterosexual feminists, this group wrote and distributed a passionate manifesto called “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the Second Congress to Unite Women, in May 1970. Calling themselves the Lavender Menace, a barbed response to Betty Friedan’s characterization of lesbians as a “lavender menace” that would derail the blossoming feminist movement, the authors of “The Woman-Identified Woman” described lesbians as “the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” This ten-paragraph manifesto, Clendenin and Nagourney note, “called on feminists to cut their ties with men and the male culture, to redefine their own role in society by bonding with women—ideally lesbians, since they best understood the oppression women suffered in a male-dominated society.” As Clendenin and Nagourney note, the document was “a road map to a separate political movement,” lesbian separatism.
Karla Jay, one of the instigators of the Lavender Menace action and a founder of the Radicalesbians, a group formed in its wake, says that “for lesbians, the best thing that emerged from the Lavender Menace action was the group of protesters itself—the first post-Stonewall group to focus on lesbian issues. Only weeks earlier we had been a random group of women associated primarily with gay liberation and women’s liberation. For the moment at least, we emerged a victorious organization with a sense of solidarity, common purpose and sisterhood. We knew we would no longer accept second-class status in the women’s movement or the gay movement. We would be equal partners, or we would leave the straight women and gay men behind.”
Nothing infuriated these “woman-identified women” more than biological males “masquerading” as women, particularly when these “women born men” claimed to be lesbian feminists themselves. At the West Coast Lesbian Conference held in Los Angeles in 1973 (three months before Jean O’Leary confronted Sylvia Rivera at the Pride rally in New York City), the keynote speaker, Robin Morgan, spoke for those who objected to Beth Elliott, a male-to-female transsexual folk singer performing at the meeting. Like Jean O’Leary and other lesbian feminists, Morgan characterized transvestites and transsexuals as men who flagrantly mocked and parodied women. “Man-hating,” she proclaimed, “is