City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2014 For Love and for Justice: Narratives of Lesbian Activism Kelly Anderson Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/8 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] For Love and For Justice: Narratives of Lesbian Activism By Kelly Anderson A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The Graduate Center, City University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History 2014 © 2014 KELLY ANDERSON All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Blanche Wiesen Cook Chair of Examining Committee Helena Rosenblatt Executive Officer Bonnie Anderson Bettina Aptheker Gerald Markowitz Barbara Welter Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract For Love and for Justice: Narratives of Lesbian Activism By Kelly Anderson Adviser: Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook This dissertation explores the role of lesbians in the U.S. second wave feminist movement, arguing that the history of women’s liberation is more diverse, more intersectional, and more radical than previously documented. The body of this work is five oral histories conducted with lifelong activists and public intellectuals for the Voices of Feminism project at the Sophia Smith Collection: Katherine Acey, former Executive Director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; Dorothy Allison, author and sex radical; Suzanne Pharr, southern anti‐ racist organizer and author; Achebe Powell, activist and diversity trainer; and Carmen Vázquez, LGBT activist and founding director of the San Francisco Women’s Building. Taken together, their stories dovetail into a new narrative about the relationship between lesbians, feminism, and queer liberation. In addition to the edited transcripts, this dissertation includes a new chronology of gender and sexual liberation, demonstrating the interconnectedness of late 20th century social change movements, and a chapter on oral history methodology. This work adds to our collective knowledge about lesbian lives by sharing five important life narratives, contributes to a re‐imagination of the vast and intersectional scope of second wave feminism and sexual liberation, and attempts to disrupt conventional methods of documenting and sharing history by privileging oral narratives. iv Acknowledgements This project has been in my life for a very long time. So my gratitude is deep and wide. Thank you to my mentors—Bonnie Anderson, Bettina Aptheker, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Martin Duberman, Gerald Markowitz, Priscilla Murolo, and Elizabeth Wood— for years of encouragement and for giving me the tools to share these stories. I’m deeply grateful for the sustenance of my family and friends, particularly graduate school comrades Hilary Hallett and Marcia Gallo, who have been with me for the long haul. Working with the Voices of Feminism project at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College has been the opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you to colleagues Joyce Follet and Sherrill Redmon for that open door. And, most importantly, I’m profoundly grateful to the women whose stories I share here: Katherine Acey, Dorothy Allison, Suzanne Pharr, Achebe Powell, and Carmen Vázquez. Thank you for your trust, your grit, and your vision of liberation. The world is a better place because of you. v “We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.” ‐ Dorothy Allison vi Table of Contents Introductions 1 Gender and Sexual Liberation Chronology 22 Narrator Biographies 30 Gender, Desire, and Feminism: Oral History Methodology 33 Katherine Acey 52 Dorothy Allison 108 Suzanne Pharr 175 Achebe Betty Powell 236 Carmen Vázquez 302 Conclusions 362 Bibliography 366 vii Introductions This project lies at the intersections—of disciplines, of methods, and of literatures. Of activism and the academy. Of oral testimony and written. Of preserving the past and creating a usable history, or as historian Maylei Blackwell calls a “retrofitted memory.” I’ve done this work for them, my narrators, the women who came before me who showed me a way to be in this world and who I wish to honor by sharing their lives with you, with my students, your students. This project lives at the intersection of heart and mind. It’s about knowledge but also about relationships. My approach is lies at the intersection of the teachings from my best mentors. Bettina Aptheker taught me to “pivot the center;” Amy Swerdlow taught me to keep pushing the timeline back, to look earlier; Priscilla Murolo taught me to always look at the crossroads; Liz Wood illuminated the lesbian spaces; and Blanche Cook taught me how to document lesbian history with integrity and that all biographies are really group portraits. My dissertation is a “portrait” of five women who have been life-long activists, change makers, and cultural workers. Self-identified feminists, radicals, lesbians, and visionaries. All baby-boomers. All friends and comrades in various capacities. Katherine Acey, an Arab- American who got her start in civil rights, is a tour-de-force in progressive, feminist philanthropy. Dorothy Allison is a truth-teller and story-teller who has been an organizer in the trenches and a writer who has forever changed the ways that we talk about class, sexuality, and violence. Achebe Betty Powell is a born leader, a powerful orator and teacher who has been organizing on an international stage far longer than we’ve been using the term “global feminism.” Suzanne Pharr is a proud Southerner, an organizer who has always been at the fore of social justice by insisting that, for example, the battered women’s movement be a movement about racism and homophobia as much as it is about gender. And Carmen Vázquez, a Nuyorican butch, has led the women’s movement and the LGBT movement away from reform and towards radical change, always asking us to look for justice rather than rights. My intention is that a group portrait of radical lesbian leaders and visionaries will challenge our existing chronologies and paradigms about U.S. second wave feminism, that the lives of Acey, Allison, Pharr, Powell and Vázquez remind us that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Second wave feminism is and can be a multi-racial, intersectional, social justice movement with vibrant and courageous lesbian and queer leadership. Our history tells us so. I’ve always been a good listener. I think it’s the yearning for wisdom, for someone to point me in the right direction. This lesbian and feminist had the good fortune to be born on 1 Stonewall in 1969 but landed in the American South, a region reluctant to give up “tradition” for Yankee ways. So despite the revolutions, the burning undergarments and cities, I was sequestered in a triumphalist Confederate storyline with no leading roles for strong women or queers of any kind. And when I started to unlearn and relearn a different story of the American past, particularly one with women and LGBT people as major players, it is not an overstatement to say that my world turned upside down. My passion for knowledge, for knowing about the resilience and beauty of my (queer and feminist) ancestors has only grown more insistent. Because now I get to pass it on. For the past 15 years, I have been an educator, teaching mostly women’s and LGBT histories to (mostly) women and queer people. It changes them. It changes our communities and our movements. It’s a kind of truth-telling and a prayer that operates on both a deeply spiritual and rigorous intellectual plane for me, all at the same time. In 2004, I was fortunate enough to land in a position at Smith College that would allow me to be a historian and activist and teacher all at the same. This dissertation is a result of the work I’ve done as an oral historian at the Sophia Smith Collection. I began the position an amateur, but with a great passion for and a fair amount of experience in doing the work. My past ten years as an oral historian have fundamentally altered the way I do history. This dissertation is very different because of it. In effect, this work is really an amalgam of both fields—of traditional history and of oral history. I don’t just use oral history as a method; rather this is a dissertation about oral history. About what it means to craft new narratives using oral testimony. It’s about inhabiting the subjective and exploring what that means about the past rather than bending one person’s truth to fit the mold of objectivity. This is not what I was taught, but it is the historian I’ve become. The (Queer) Journey and the Art of Listening The documentation of LGBT histories has largely been a grassroots, community based effort that has been part of queer resistance as much as it has been about “History.” Queer histories have used oral testimony extensively because we have lacked other kinds of evidence, especially in our own voices. So the oral history becomes our most valuable and widely used archive of LGBT experience. Despite historians’ extensive reliance on oral testimony, the practice of oral history has been vastly under-theorized until recently. 2 Historian Nan Alamilla Boyd, is one of the first to try to map what it means to do “queer oral history.” In her essay “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History,”1 Boyd asks how researchers have grappled with queer theory and what impact that work has had on LGBT history.