Blast from the past

Off Our Backs, May/Jun 2003 by Sheklow, Sally

Getting daily email invitations to enlarge my penis isn't the only benefit of having my own web site. The other great thing is that people from my past can find me. That might not be appealing if you are evading stalkers, creditors or that gross guy who had a crush on you in high school. But there are old friends I'd love to hear from.

I just now got an email from the woman I came out with! We've been out of touch since Holly Near was a lesbian. We were college roommates back in 1975 when, after the first five minutes of Women's Studies 101, we ran out and shaved our heads, had our IUDs removed and changed our names to Hayfield and Glacier (TRUE!).

Glacier and I swore off men because we wanted to undermine the patriarchy. Our strategy was to cut men off from sex and to convince all women to stop putting out, too. If straight men couldn't get any, our theory went, we could bring down the entire military-industrial complex. Creating a woman-empowered, egalitarian society was our goal. Victory seemed easy and inevitable. We became those "political lesbians" that born-dykes love to ridicule. And I can see why.

We weren't attracted to each other. And we weren't attracted to other women, either. We sure as hell didn't want anyone to be attracted to us. That shouldn't have been too much of a problem given our preoccupation with smashing through the sexist belching taboo and our boycott of deodorant, which we considered a patriarchal plot. It wasn't about attraction at all. In fact we thought attraction itself was patriarchal. The idea was to raise our consciousness and love ourselves until eventually sisterhood would be powerful enough to make us an army of lovers who could not fail.

We immersed ourselves in feminism. We refused to participate in any activity dominated by men. We wouldn't touch a book by a male author. We read TiGrace Atkinson, Jill Johnston and Pat Parker. We listened to Meg Christian, Baba Yaga and Alix Dobkin. We even got female dogs and named them Golda and Virago (TRUE!).

Being students, it was our job to educate academia through the emerging social protest modality of graffiti (now known as vandalism). One day we liberated the men's bathroom and painted on the wall behind the toilet in big red letters: "You hold the tool of patriarchy in your hands!" We signed it with a fist inside a women's symbol and went home smug about our accomplishment. Were we ever surprised the next day when men were still running everything!

Glacier had a work-study job hosting a radio show on the campus classical music station. Rebels that we were, one night we armed ourselves with women's recordings and took over the airwaves. We had the studio to ourselves which we declared "under lesbian control." In the name of all the women who cooked and cleaned and bore and tended children for the composers who created classical music, we declared the station women-only space and locked ourselves in. We played women's music all night. Back then the selection of music by, for, and about women was fairly limited. We must have played Malvina Reynold's "We Don't Need the Men" a hundred times. We even had a children's hour. We played non-sexist kids' music and read books with girl heroes, whom we called she-roes. While every wee-hour classical music listener tuned in, we read a feminist version of Sleeping Beauty published by Sojourner Truth Press in 1972. The story ended:

And so it happened that Sleeping Beauty slept for one hundred years and was awakened by a woman's kiss and that kiss ignited a passion and a tenderness, which were felt somehow by women all over. And so it happened that many lesbians came to The Land and found strength in each other and were beautiful (TRUE ACTUAL QUOTE!).

We even gave regular news bulletins, rewriting one A/P wire story to read "President Carter, a white heterosexual male, gave his state of the male-dominated misogynist union today." Ha, ha! Take that, patriarchy! What a thrill to pose such a threat to the status quo. We were on the air for twelve hours and nobody even called campus security.

During a heat wave we became righteously indignant that men could go around with their shirts off and women couldn't. We checked the local ordinance and learned that breasts were not considered genitals and therefore baring them did not qualify as indecent exposure in our town. Our tits had as much right to the open air as men's and we set out to prove our point, so to speak. We tore off our "Women Are Not Chicks" T-shirts and rode our bikes across town letting our generous endowments enjoy the cool breeze. In a stunning show of support, the city council turned right around and added breasts to the indecent exposure ordinance.

The whole time we were in college, students were required to take Physical Education. We enrolled in classes that would make us stronger warriors in the feminist movement, such as yoga and trampoline. If only Physical Education had educated us about being physical with each other, we could have spared ourselves a lot of unnecessary fumbling. We knew there was more to being lesbians than playing "Free to Be You and Me" at three a.m. and spray painting bathroom walls, but we didn't know what to do. Our heterosexual indoctrination and anti-sexist determination bollixed everything up. Neither of us wanted to be the boy. Neither of us wanted to be the girl, either. Nobody wanted to make any advances-we respected each other too much to impose ourselves on another person's space. And nobody wanted to surrender-we respected ourselves too much to give up our power. So all that happened was we squirmed around in the back seat for a while. We never got past first base, by which I refer to women's softball and not the totally male-dominated American pastime.