GINNY BERSON, COLETTA REID
- August Bernadicou
- 2 days ago
- 32 min read
FURIES, OLIVIA RECORDS, DIANA PRESS
In this oral history, we discuss the gay liberation movement that emerged in the early 1970s following the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. Ginny Berson and Coletta Reid were members of the Furies, a radical lesbian separatist group that was active in Washington, D.C. in 1971 and 1972. The group lived collectively and published a widely circulated newspaper named after the group.
They also did not stop. After the Furies, Ginny went on to be involved with Olivia Records in 1973 and Coletta with Diana Press in 1972. Olivia Records was the first all-woman record label, and Diana Press was a lesbian publishing house that featured activists, women, poets, and authors.
This interview explores the history of lesbian feminism, gay liberation, LGBTQ activism, women's music, independent publishing, and the lasting impact of Stonewall-era organizers on contemporary queer culture and social movements.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August Bernadicou: Ginny, what were you like as a child?
Ginny Berson: Just like I am today, only I didn't have gray hair. Both my parents were children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they really navigated hanging on to their Jewish identity and culture and assimilating. That, of course, affected me. They were upwardly mobile—moved back and forth from lower middle to solidly middle class. I have two sisters, and we're all lesbians. I have to say that's one of the things that my parents did right—the other thing they did right was to let us play however we wanted to play. For me, that meant playing baseball, which is really all I wanted to do. I was sure I was going to be a great baseball player until I realized that I didn't have the requisite piece of equipment that you needed to get into Little League. I didn't have a penis, and so I couldn't play Little League baseball. I think that actually had an important role in setting my course because it just seemed so unfair to me.
I grew up watching what was happening in the South with the Civil Rights Movement. I watched that on TV, and that had another profound effect on me, I think, in terms of setting my course for fixing the world, pursuing justice. Then the rest, I just kept going. I think that those two events, which were much bigger than events, were really critical for me in terms of helping me be the person I am. Growing up in Connecticut, my memory of Connecticut is that it's very green, and I don't remember much more about it.
August: You mentioned that your family was looking for assimilation. What happens when LGBTQ people assimilate?
Ginny: That's a big question. A number of things happen. I think that all of us who are not typically mainstream, whatever that means, Americans walk lines all the time of being in or being out, and of trying to hold on to our identities, and also trying to not hold on to our identities. If I can just quote a line from a wonderful poem by Pat Parker, the late, great Black lesbian poet. She said, "The first thing you do is to forget that I'm black. Second, you must never forget that I'm black.”
I think that's a really good way to think about this. When we try to assimilate, if we lose our identity, if we lose ourselves, if we forget that we are lesbians, and that we have a history of being excluded, and that we have a proud history of making change in the world, we lose something. At the same time, if all we think we are is our gay or lesbian identity, then we’re losing out. We’re more than that. I don't know how to answer your question except to say, for me, it's important to never forget that I am a lesbian, and also to remember that is not all of who I am.
August: Coletta, before finding lesbian feminism, what kind of world were you navigating personally and politically?
Coletta Reid: I grew up outside of a small town in southern Kansas in the 1950s. My father had a small garage next to our house where he worked on farm machinery. I lived in wheat country. I went to a one-room school. I did not have a way to get to high school in town, until my father was able to find someone to drive me there. You can imagine what a farm girl who always wore dresses that her mother made that were made out of feed sacks, who lived a very self-sufficient life in the sense that we ate food that we grew in our garden, that we had pigs and cows that were butchered, etc.
It's very different from the life that Ginny grew up in, in Connecticut. It was a very patriarchal life. Farm men were the bosses of their own homes, and we children had to do anything they said. The church was very patriarchal, and our lives were organized around the churches in my community. I got out of Kansas just as soon as I could by marrying a doctor's son from Oklahoma. Over the next few years, I put him through graduate school, had a couple of children, and was a well-educated housewife. That's when I became involved in women's liberation in 1969. I was a homebody.
August: How did you find the Furies, Ginny?
Ginny: I was walking down the street one day, and there they all were.
How did I find the Furies? The Furies happened in Washington, D.C., and Rita Mae Brown had moved to D.C. from New York and organized a—Coletta, correct me if I'm wrong, because you were part of this original group—she organized a consciousness-raising group, mostly straight women, with the intention of having them all come out or leading them to the holy waters of lesbianism.
I was out already, and so I was not part of that group. At a certain point, many of them came out, the group expanded, and it was decided that the group would now be a lesbian group, and I was invited to join it. There may be something else that happened. Is that what happened, Coletta?
Coletta: Pretty much. I wouldn't say that we were all exactly straight in that consciousness-raising group. We were definitely all exploring and thinking about the possibility of becoming lesbians and were interested in it. I think that from that consciousness-raising group, a dozen of us started thinking about what it would mean if we worked together as a collective and lived communally.
Out of that group, maybe that started out as 20 people, a dozen of us organized ourselves into a group. We weren't named the Furies yet. We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do, where we wanted to go, and what our next step would be. I think Rita Mae was very instrumental in leading us somewhere.
August: Were there a lot of women separated from the Gay Liberation Front and the gay male liberation movement? Was there a place for lesbians in the women's movement?
Ginny: That's why we separated—because we felt like there wasn't a place for lesbians in the women's movement. In fact, the initial name that we called ourselves was “Those Women,” because every time we walked into a meeting of the basic women’s liberation movement in D.C., among the straight women, what we heard was, "Oh, here come those women."
We were not really welcomed. For the most part, they did not want to deal with lesbianism. Most of them were married to men. Betty Friedan's lavender herring speech to the National Organization of Women convention happened in New York, but that was basically—part of the issue was that they had issues they wanted to work on, including, and largely, if I remember correctly, women's reproductive health, which was not a high priority for us—abortion, birth control, etc.
They didn't want to deal with our issues, and they felt like we were distracting from their issues and also becoming a lightning rod for the media to focus on what everybody was saying anyway, which was, "Oh, women’s liberation, it's just a bunch of dykes." That's why we separated.
Coletta: I think I have a slightly different take on it, Ginny, maybe because I was one of those straight women who was in women’s liberation and really came to my lesbianism through women’s liberation, finding out by being part of the newspaper off our backs that I loved being around women. I found women much more interesting and much more emotionally available.
I credit women’s liberation a lot with my own movement, as well as with that of dozens of other women in Washington, D.C. I felt the problem was that women’s liberation needed the perspective of lesbians. They needed to know what women who lived outside of the heterosexual structures thought about women’s liberation, what our issues were, and where we should be going. That wasn't happening within women’s liberation. My experience with my friends who didn't come out was that they were fearful. They were fearful of being around lesbians, they didn't know what it meant for them and their own relationships, and they were worried about what it might mean.
off our backs was one of the first women’s liberation newspapers in the country, and I was with them for a year and a half before I came out. By a year after I came out, I would say half of the women from off our backs came out. Being at the beginning of that process, I think, was what was so painful. Women's liberation came to a point later of much more acceptance of lesbianism, but boy, at the beginning, it was hard, because our friends or my friends that I was closest to in D.C. women’s liberation were faced with having to make big decisions about their own lives.
Ginny: I want to just say one word because I don't mean to trash women’s liberation. Women's liberation in Washington was extremely important to me. It is where I first got the idea that I did not have to live my life with the goal of pleasing men. This was a revelation to me, and it was really, truly a liberation for me. I began to understand the concept of woman identification, which was so critical to our development, my development, and the development of the Furies.
I got that initial hit from going to my first women’s liberation meeting in the spring of 1970—it was not incumbent on me to look beautiful for men, to do anything for men, or to center my life on men. You cannot understand if you haven't been there, what an enormous liberation it is to understand that you can make your own choices to do what you think is right, not what some guy thinks is right. I want to just say that about women’s liberation.
August: What were the consequences of being a lesbian during this time in 1970, 1971?
Coletta: For me, it was that my marriage ended. My son went with his father and my daughter stayed with me. I lost almost all of my heterosexual friends. I had made women’s liberation the center of my life by that point, so I was thrown into a situation of needing the Furies in a very big way personally. Living with other women in the Furies was totally life-changing for me. I felt like I had gone from a fairly isolated heterosexual family where I had a level of dissatisfaction I didn't understand to having an answer to my life and where I should go, and what I should do.
Ginny: For me, it was nothing but joy. My friends at that point were either lesbians or on their way to being lesbians. I didn't talk to my family about it until later. My parents were not thrilled, but both of my sisters were fine. It was like heaven to me.
August: What happens when you internalize your oppression?
Ginny: You make yourself sick, basically, on so many levels. You make yourself physically ill. You make yourself spiritually ill. You make yourself emotionally ill. I'll tell you what happens. You repress your ability. You suppress your own creativity. When you have been internally homophobic, when you have internalized your oppression, and you finally let go of that, the personal liberation doesn't come just like, "Boom, I no longer have any internalized homophobia." It takes time because it's taken your whole life to internalize it. To rid yourself of it takes more than a minute.
I believe it's why there was such an enormous burst of creativity at that time with women—I'm talking now about women and the lesbian movement, but this was happening all throughout the culture. African Americans were doing the same thing, and gay men were doing this. Everybody was saying, we were all saying, "No, the rules that you have given us, we reject. The ways that we are supposed to think about ourselves, we reject." In doing that, just enormous creativity was released, and it is why there was so much ferment, fervor, and creativity in those early days.
Coletta: I think that's really true, Ginny, and you've said it very well. I feel really lucky in a certain way that I came out through the women’s liberation movement. I felt very positively about becoming a lesbian. I didn't feel the oppression that women who came out before that movement did. I was so naive and so sheltered as a young child in Kansas that I didn't even know lesbians existed until I was living in New York City in the mid-1960s.
I knew gay men existed, but I don't know—when I was at off our backs, I read Kate Millett—that you can think about your erotic impulses and integrate them across a whole spectrum. That was a revelation to me. Becoming a lesbian was wonderful. It released sexual energy that I had never had before. It made me feel emotionally close to women in a way that I really wanted. It was truly a liberation.
August: What are your thoughts on conversion therapy?
Ginny: Really bad idea. Terrible. I don't know the answer to the question of, "Is all of our desire programmed? Are we socialized into our desires?" I suspect that there may be some of that, but for the most part, I don't think it's true. You can't convert someone. It's a torture, it's a form of torture, I think, actually, to try to turn somebody into something that they're not, to try to make them renounce their own inner spirit, their own sexuality, their own passion, and their own desire—to somehow accept that that's all wrong and to be something that you're not. Oh, it's a terrible thing.
There's an underlying implication, which is that it's bad to be a lesbian or gay. It's not bad. Also, there's this binary that you're either gay or straight. There's all this stuff in between that we're learning more and more about. Conversion therapy, from beginning to end, is a terrible lie.
Coletta: I think that it really violates the ethics of therapy. The part that's upsetting to me is that you go to a therapist, whose job is to help and support you to find your true self. That's their job. Their job is not to tell you anything about who you are. Their job is to be there as a supportive person to let you find out who you are. It's a major ethical violation. I find it really difficult.
August: What did daily life in the Furies collective look like?
Ginny: We started out in four different houses. There were 12 of us, and there were two people in one house in Northwest, and then the other three houses in Capitol Hill, which was very gay at that point, held the other ten of us. Daily life—we had a lot of meetings. It seems like we had a lot of meetings. That's what we did, was have meetings.
We wrote for the paper once we decided to do a paper. We had study groups. We met with our study groups and read history and whatever feminist books were out at that point. There was such a lively underground, as it was called, newspaper life at that time. There were lots of feminist papers, and there were a few other lesbian papers. We read them. We talked about them. I don't remember us doing much other than going to meetings, studying, and writing.
Coletta: A number of us had jobs that brought money in. It was a collective. We did have to have money to live. We did childcare because we had three female children. We took care of our homes, supported our homes, made meals, everything that women do in life to make sure that life goes on. Ginny is quite right about the meetings. I don't think I've ever been to that many meetings.
My daughter, Keira, was two at that time. Once she saw some ravens or crows sitting on a high line, and she said, "Oh, look, they're having a meeting." Her life was spent listening to me say, "Oh, now I have this meeting, and now I have that meeting." What I think was so great about the collective was that all those meetings, listening to each other's ideas, and trying to hammer out our own ideas for ourselves as a group, really brought us to a theory of lesbian feminism.
Really was crucial for us: looking at history, reading historical books, reading books about other oppressed groups and their theoreticians, reading about psychology, about sexuality, reading about lesbians in the past, and how they lived. All of those meetings crystallized into articles in our newspaper and formed the basis of our theory, which was what the newspaper was for: to create a lesbian feminist theory.
August: What issues did you care about in 1971?
Coletta: One thing I have to say that's really important is that we cared about all the issues that the left was caring about at the time, that oppressed people were breaking out from their oppression in every area of life. We cared about racism. We cared about imperialism. We cared about capitalism. We had articles about all of those in the newspaper. We were trying to place lesbian feminism within a revolutionary theory. We weren't just concerned about our own liberation. We really felt that all people had to be liberated for any one particular group to be liberated.
We were trying to look through a lesbian lens at capitalism, at all the different forms of oppression that were happening within the country at the time. I think that it was really important that we came, as lesbians, from so many different and other movements. I came from the women’s liberation movement. Other people came from the gay movement. Some people, like Charlotte, had worked primarily in anti-racism and the anti-war movement. Almost all of us had been involved in the anti-war movement in some way.
Tasha was Dave Dellinger's daughter. She and Susan Hathaway had been a part of the Chicago 8 trial. All of those different perspectives were really important to creating our group. We weren't a single-issue group.
Ginny: Right. The overarching issue for us was understanding how patriarchy and male supremacy worked, what male privilege meant, and what it meant to be a radical lesbian feminist, and to see all of these issues through that lens.
Coletta: Yes. Other theoreticians are coming to the point of saying that women's oppression is probably an initial oppression that all other hierarchies are built upon, because it starts out in the family.
August: What did the revolution look like during this time?
Ginny: It's interesting. I don't think we had a very detailed vision of the future. We had a great analysis of what was going on, but I think we didn't spend a lot of time talking about what it was going to be like, except that we knew that it was going to be very different. It may be true that the most we could say is that there would be no hierarchies. There would be no hierarchies based on race, based on class, based on ability, based on gender, based on sexuality, no hierarchies.
Beyond that, I don't know that we really developed much of a vision, because we were spending our time trying to really understand how all of the oppressive systems that we were living in worked and how best to undermine them and destroy them.
Coletta: I think that we were looking at the intersection of those different oppressions, and we were so deep into trying to understand and change them that having a vision of what that would be like was easier than knowing a way to get there. When we left the Furies and went on, for most of us, to create other feminist institutions that were within the economic system, I think that was what we saw as our next step, and the next step in the revolution. The left was so dominated by violence and the idea of seizing power through violence, and I don't think we saw that as a solution.
Ginny: Oh, I disagree with you. I think we did see it as a solution.
Coletta: Some of us did.
Ginny: I think we did. We saw ourselves as possibly, eventually, having to go underground, taking up arms, and allying ourselves with—we saw ourselves as a vanguard party that would ally with other vanguard parties like, in particular, the Black Panthers. Speaking just for myself, I mouthed those words. I don't know deep inside that I really would have done it. I'm glad I didn't do it, but I think that I thought that was the path. I don't think I thought that there was another path to revolution, and I definitely believed in revolution.
Coletta: Maybe it's in my own temperament or even my own personal physical cowardice, but when there were demonstrations, and people were doing things like kicking in windows of the First National Bank, I couldn't take myself there. I wasn't able, I wasn't strong and courageous enough to say, "No, I disagree with this," the possibility of going underground, et cetera, and accepting what was happening in the group. Personally, it was very hard for me to get myself there.
August: Did the Furies collaborate with any of the other liberation groups of the time?
Ginny: The Furies were a separatist group. I have to say this about that time, which is still true, to a certain degree, today. There was a tendency to see people who did not agree with you 100% as not your enemy, but not your friend. It was very difficult to make alliances. We certainly didn't know how to call people in, I would say. We argued strenuously and in not friendly ways with other lesbian feminists around the country who were not following our line, really.
It's hard to talk about alliances at that point because we were pretty doctrinaire about our philosophy, our theory, and our belief that our way was the right way. If you weren't with us, you were against us. The left, in general, has a tendency to do criticism by standing in a circular firing squad. I think that's gotten a little bit better, but that's how we did it then. I think we had ideas that we would, for example, eventually hook up with all the other vanguard parties, but I don't think in the Furies itself that we had those relationships.
We were just a tiny bit arrogant in thinking that everybody was going to have to see things our way, and that's how it was going to be. There was a huge amount of activity going on. My understanding, my memory of it, is that it was pretty separate. There were a lot of groups that were operating very separately from each other. The idea of the No Kings rallies that are happening now that are so broad-based and so welcoming to so many different points of view, and basically, the only ideology, if you will, the only underlying cause is to stop the move towards authoritarianism and fascism in this country, that didn't happen then. There wasn't that kind of intersectional connection, cooperation, or alliances.
Coletta: Yes, I totally agree with Ginny. We were very intolerant. We were most intolerant of the people who were closest to us.
Ginny: Right.
Coletta: If you were an inch away in belief, then you could have been a mile away. When I look back at that period, I feel like one of our greatest shortcomings was that we did not make allies of the other people who were in a process of moving towards where we were. You were either there already or too bad. My being cut off from my women’s liberation friends and the people I had worked with at off our backs was a necessity to remain in the Furies. You pretty much had relationships with other women in the Furies, or you didn't have relationships. That was my experience anyway.
I am very happy about what is happening in the world today because it seems like we've moved away somewhat from being so intolerant of what seemed to me to be small differences. We thought there was a right and a wrong way to go about things and to think about things. As I see that changing, I begin to understand that there can be honest differences that people have from their experiences, and that doesn't mean they're bad people. We weren't able to get there at that time.
First of all, when I left off our backs—and I was one of the primary and earliest people, even though it was started by Marlene Wicks and Marilyn Salzman-Webb—we were able to negotiate with off our backs to get their individual subscription list, all of the bookstores, women's centers, and other places that ordered off our backs in bulk. That was really important to give us a base to advertise ourselves, too, by sending out our first issue free to all of those people. It was hard to find people who had presses that could print off our backs and later to print the Furies’ newspaper, but there were presses that printed alternative newspapers that were willing to do that. Sometimes we had to go far away to Long Island or to Atlanta. We taught ourselves everything you have to do to make a newspaper work. We learned everything. We learned how to mail them, how to put things in zip code order, how to bundle, how to keep subscription lists, and there were no computers. We were doing it all by hand on typewriters.
We learned how to paste up every page in the newspaper. We learned how to do layout, how to survive financially, and how to keep books. I think that it was a fantastic example of women teaching themselves entrepreneurial skills. We really did a good job.
Ginny: I really have nothing to add. There's a picture in the announcement that you sent out about this. That is a picture of us sitting—in the bottom left corner of that picture, I think—of us sitting in a circle. What we are doing there is actually putting the labels on the individual newspapers. We're having a mailing party, basically, which we did whenever we had a paper to put out.
August: What kind of feedback did you get and from where?
Ginny: We got two kinds of feedback. Most of the feedback we got was extremely positive. Women were so excited to have this. The writing was actually good. For the most part, it was not hit-you-over-the-head writing. It was well-constructed, thoughtful writing that tried to engage people. The core of the paper was the theory of lesbian feminism, examined from many angles, but it also included short stories. There were poems. There were drawings. There were photos.
One of the women, Lee Schwing, was teaching us all taekwondo, and there were little exercises that we did—it was not just a black-and-white, "Kill your eyes reading this," paper. Movie reviews, everything. Anything in the world, we had something to say about it. We wrote it well. Most of the feedback was fabulous—was really positive. There was also feedback, particularly from other lesbian feminist groups that were critical, that didn't like that we said—I don't even remember what, but it was this thing that Coletta was talking about, where we were this close, but we weren't this close.
They were very critical of us. It was something somebody said was classist, or it did not have enough of this analysis or that analysis. It came from everywhere. It turns out, I will say that my partner of 30 years, who lived in Berkeley at the time, her women's group, straight women's group, used to wait for their copy of the Furies’ newspaper to come, I want to say every month, except we never got it out every month, but whenever we got it out. Feedback came from all over the country. I don't know if it came from beyond the country. People loved it. Women loved it.
Coletta: One thing that I think was so important in the writing was that each of us had an individual kind of writing that we were very interested in. Helaine Harris liked to write about history, about lesbians in the past, how they lived, how they survived. Lee Schwing liked to write about staying physically strong and the importance of being able to fight back. Susan Hathaway liked to write about capitalism and imperialism.
Each of us had individual interests, but every article, we discussed as a group. Even though we had our individual names on articles, there was a way in which the group had come to an understanding or a position that that individual person was transmitting. That, I think, made the newspaper—which was not a typical newspaper. It should have been called a journal or a magazine or something, except we couldn't afford to print that, because we had a coherence to what was in it that you rarely see. I think that was so important to lesbians when they read it, that there was one voice.
Ginny: Some of the women in the group were good editors. People edited each other, and it was welcomed.
August: Was there a danger of sending this all over the country and using your real names?
Ginny: Probably, but we didn't really care.
Coletta: I didn't notice anything.
Ginny: The focus of the government, at any rate, at that time was on Weatherman and really on the Black Panthers.
Coletta: We were women.
Ginny: That's right. We were women. We didn't even exist for them. There was no social media, so there was no way to find out—we had a PO box. Maybe we had our address there. I don't know. No. The answer is no.
Coletta: I think that the greatest criticism I ever received was from other lesbian groups who had a different point of view about what we ought to be doing.
Ginny: Right.
August: How did the views differ?
Coletta: There were women who were very strongly socialist. We were, I would say, quasi-socialist and definitely not Marxist. We didn't think that the government needed to run the economy. We didn't fit into that socialism place. We weren't totally cultural feminists either. We believed that culture was really important and we wanted to change culture, but we also were looking at governmental systems and economic systems. There were a lot of shadings within lesbian feminism of where you stood on various topics, and we had our own take.
Ginny: There were also groups that were not as separatist as we were, that were lesbian feminists. That was another difference.
Coletta: True.
August: Back in the liberation era, it seemed like the objective of the oppressors was to persecute people, like electroshock therapy, bar raids, getting your name in the paper. Now it seems like the broader effort is to make LGBTQ people invisible. Do you agree with that, or disagree with that? What are your thoughts?
Ginny: They're certainly not trying to make trans people invisible. They're certainly putting a lot of spotlight on trans people, maybe wishing they were invisible or would just go away. In a certain way, that focus on trans people is really about all of us. It's really about lesbians, all LGBTQ people. It's just easier and safer for them to focus on trans people than on lesbians, gays, and bisexuals—first of all, because there are so few of them, and second of all, because most people don't understand what that is. I don't even want to go there. That's a whole other story.
I guess I would say this. If you look at the government, and the Trump administration in particular, you can see that their attitudes, their policies, their statements about women and about people of color are so denigrating, and so really despicable, and filled with so much of that old patriarchal, racist language and intent. I think that the fact that lesbians and gays at this point are not being focused on is because the oppressors don't even think it's important enough. We are subsumed in the category of “others," the category of “not the right people.”
When you focus your policies, your racist, destructive, hateful, and really cruel policies on women and people of color and immigrants—and I'll put trans people in there too, because they are so specifically named—that's us. That's all of us. They don't have to say lesbians and gays, because we're part of that. We are subsumed in that wave of vile hatred. I don't think it means anything positive that we have not been singled out because we are in the groups that are being pushed down as far as they can push us down. They don't have to tell us for us to understand that we are part of those groups.
Coletta: I think that there is a way that they are trying to make us indivisible. I'm thinking about the banning of books and libraries. If you look at the books that are on that list, there are books about women, there are books about people of color, and there are books about LGBT people. I think that we are not seen as being as much of a threat as people of color are, but they were put in the same category of otherness, as you said, Ginny, but also of wokeness or whatever. It is disturbing to see people like Tim Cook, who was head of Apple, retiring now, but for him to be a gay person and to be accepted within the establishment of capitalism and Trumpism and whatever. I find that disturbing.
August: What would you say to gay Republicans or gay people who just say, "Oh, I'm Republican because it's fiscally responsible," or something like that? What would you say to those people?
Coletta: It's only fiscally responsible if you have a lot of money. If you're upper-middle class or maybe even upper-middle class on up, I think that Trump's version of fiscal responsibility is, in fact, not fiscal responsibility at all. It's a privilege. What were you going to say, Ginny?
Ginny: No, I agree with you. I think that your class privilege, that your wealth is going to save you from what's happening in this country, what is behind this move to authoritarianism—it doesn't make fine distinctions. It's not going to stop if rich gay people are okay. It's all-encompassing. It's important. If people are being persecuted, if people are being oppressed because they are gay, then it is such a betrayal to say, "Not me, because I have money and I'm accepted." It's such a betrayal of other people like you, but also of yourself, because what in God's name makes you believe that it will not touch you eventually? If they can do it to them, why can't they do it to you?
The inability to feel solidarity with people like you and to see that you have more in common with people like you than you have with other wealthy people is truly heartbreaking. That's what I would say. It's true. When I worked for Pacifica Radio, we used to cover the political conventions. The convention in—I think it was Houston—was horribly homophobic and misogynistic. There were gay delegates.
I remember bringing those delegates on the air and asking them, "How can you be a Republican in this situation?" It was exactly what Coletta said. "They will lower my taxes." If that's the thing that's most important to you, go have a good life, because you are hurting yourself and you're hurting the people that you should be in solidarity with, people you will need. They would never let me say all of that.
August: What was the average age of the women in the Furies?
Coletta: Oh, I was the oldest. I was the oldest from 27 to 30. I think Helaine was the youngest, 16 to 18 or 17 to 19.
Ginny: I think she was 18. Mostly, except for the babies, Helaine and Lee, we were in our 20s.
August: Why did you all choose to be separatists?
Ginny: I think, as we said at the beginning of this, because we felt like there was no room for us in the women's liberation movement, and then we began to feel like it was a good thing. We needed to be separate from heterosexual women in order to really develop ourselves and our political thought, and understand our political and our emotional connections with each other.
Coletta: I think that's right. We were both forced into it. In any early social movement, I think, you turn into yourselves, you create a circle, and you're looking at each other to understand who you are before you have the ability to turn out.
August: What do you think people misunderstand about this time?
Ginny: One of the things that I've heard, and I've heard this from younger women, is that we never talked about sex.
Coletta: We just did it.
Ginny: We just did it. We were busy.
Someone said to somebody, "Oh, you wrote all this theory and blah, blah, blah, but you never told us about sex." I said, "Yes, but we found the clitoris."
Oh, I think there's one other thing I would say. They thought we were man-haters. That was the thing. "Oh, you're all man-haters." The truth of the matter is, we certainly were angry at men, but the enemy for us was male supremacy and the patriarchy. It was not men in general. We were not going to go around shooting men, even those of us who thought we were going to go around shooting something. In fact, I think there was a piece that Rita wrote about how heterosexual women were actually angrier at men than lesbians because they lived with them. We had so little contact with men. We didn't hate men. We hated male supremacy.
Coletta: Yes, I agree. Then I think one of the things people don't understand is how spontaneous social movements were at the time. Somehow, when people talk to me, they act like the Furies were this organized group that I joined, instead of the Furies just being a group of lesbians that got together and ended up calling themselves the Furies. Women's liberation was a spontaneous uprising that happened all over the United States, and so was gay liberation. It felt like we were all coming to an understanding simultaneously and creating our own forms of resisting what was going on.
There were women's liberation and gay liberation groups in every small town in Kansas. Women's centers were in every university. There was a huge spontaneous desire to become our own leaders. When people talk about, "Oh, I think that Ms. magazine was a wonderful place and Gloria Steinem is a great person," but we didn't see them as our leaders. We saw them as other women doing their form of whatever. I think people now feel like they have to be led more, instead of just grasping the power and doing what they can where they are.
August: I know you were separatist, but did you identify more with the gay liberation movement or the women's liberation movement?
Coletta: I did not identify very much with the gay liberation movement. I didn't know very many men in the gay liberation movement. It seemed to me that there were pockets of the gay liberation movement that were more leftist and really strongly looking at all forms of oppression, but that wasn't the majority.
August: What are your views on current divisions among lesbians about trans women, for example, whether trans women can be lesbians?
Coletta: It seemed to me that we fought a lot to be able to identify ourselves the way we want to. I would say that it goes against my personal ethics to tell people that they can't determine their own identity.
Ginny: I agree with Coletta. I think it's a mistake to see people as either this or that. I think we need to move beyond that. I think the world I want to live in is a world that includes everybody. Well, not exactly everybody. There are a few people I don't want in my world, but it basically includes anybody who shares common values. I don't want to exclude. I don't care what a trans person, a trans woman calls herself. I care: do we share values? Are we fighting male supremacy? Are we fighting racism? Are we trying to build a world that reflects our values of love, and equity, and peace, and justice? If that's what you're doing, I don't care what you call yourself.
August: What do you say to LGBTQ people who don't understand transgender people, or think it's hurting the movement, or just don't relate to their oppression?
Ginny: I think it's hurting the movement because it's a very easy target in the same way that it was said that lesbians, in the early days of women's liberation, should stay in the closet because it's hurting the movement. Because everybody will think it's just a bunch of lesbians, and they won't take us seriously. That is the same tactic that is being used now. “Trans people will hurt the movement.” But look at all the focus that is on trans people that is actually hurting trans people much more than it's hurting the movement.
A movement is not a group. A movement is many groups, many people moving in the same direction, sharing a vision, sharing values. The idea that because the Trumpites are going after trans people we need to separate from them, no, that is a reason for us to bring them in because that's how it works. Separate out one group, get rid of them. Then you separate out another group, and you get rid of them. Then it goes on and on and on. That's not how you build a movement. You build a movement by opening your arms, not by closing your hands like that. That's what I think.
August: What do you think about what happened in Virginia with the voter-approved redistricting being shut down by the courts two days ago?
Ginny: Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible. It's a terrible, another assault on our so-called democracy, which isn't much of a democracy anyway.
Coletta: Or how about Tennessee?
Ginny: Yes, how about Tennessee?
Coletta: The importance of our support, especially young Black leaders, young leaders of color who are coming up and have the ability to inspire people. The government is deliberately keeping them from being heard. It's just amazing. So unconscionable.
August: What do you think it's going to take for the Democrats to wake up and beat the Republicans and play the game? All the Democrats did these independent commissions, like in New York, where I live, to make redistricting fair, but the Republicans aren't playing by those rules.
Ginny: Yes. I don't know. I'm not really a political strategist in that sense. I don't know what it's going to take. If they're not awake at this point, given everything that's going on, it's hard to know what it will take. I really don't know.
Coletta: We're so wedded to the two-party system, and we're so wedded to a form of government that is based on competition and checks and balances, that I think that we have a hard time seeing a society that would be cooperative and collaborative. I'm not sure how to get to that society, but it feels to me like the current forms of government, and democracy, and two-party system are not adequate to getting us there.
August: Expanding on that, what does the revolution in 2026 look like or need to look like?
Ginny: I don't believe in violent revolution anymore, in case anybody was worried.
What does it look like? Here's what I think it looks like. It looks like being able to understand what your values are, and to operate from a place of love and kindness, and not indiscriminately—to go to people. The revolution to me is when we can all sit together and talk about what's important and acknowledge our differences, and nobody's trying to be on top of anybody else. It's just what Coletta said. It's based on collaboration, cooperation, and developing shared visions. Maybe that's not possible in this country ever, but maybe it's possible in small areas, it's possible in regions, it's possible in towns. It can happen. I think that's how it's going to happen, actually, that people are going to get together and say, "Enough. We're not doing it that way, we're doing it this way."
Coletta: I think we really need to work locally, and that's at this point where we have the most power. My hope is that there will be change in terms of international capitalism in terms of nation states, in terms of ability to move across borders, etc. I don't know how to get there, but what I can do is work on supporting immigrants in Santa Fe. I think we need to stand where we are, and look at where we are, and see what needs to happen in our local communities, as Ginny did. That's where change is going to begin.
August: Does anything else inspire you all to keep going? Are there any other things that come to mind?
Coletta: In Santa Fe, the immigrant movement is largely led by young people. I find it extremely inspiring that people who are young are taking up their situation and trying to make it more equitable. Ginny, didn't you see that when you went to Mount Holyoke?
Ginny: Yes, I saw—I went to Mount Holyoke as an undergraduate, and I was just back there last weekend to speak at the Lavender graduation ceremony. The change that has come over that college in the 60 years since I was there is phenomenal. It didn't happen in one day, and it didn't happen because one person said, "Hey, let's change everything." It happened because a lot of people said, "This isn't working. Let's try this. Too many people are being hurt by this. Let's change it." It's just a completely different place now from when I was there. It's full of these young, vibrant—I think 77% of the student body considers themselves queer. When I was there, I thought I was the only one.
I think what inspires me is seeing in Oakland how many small organizations are doing really important work. There's a woman who is organized in Deep East Oakland, which is a very Black part of Oakland, an African American part of Oakland, which is a food desert. She has organized a service where she goes to supermarkets and brings in fresh produce for the corner liquor stores, which are what there is there. That fresh produce is now available easily to people in Deep East Oakland. That's a revolution. That's one person having an idea and making it happen.
Coletta: I read this article about the difficulty of doing any action in a highly authoritarian system, and Russia was the example. I read about people in St. Petersburg who decided that they needed to do something to support their community that would not bring down the wrath of Putin and the secret police. They decided they would go to buildings that were built in the last century that had beautiful lobbies, were historically important, but were neglected by the government, and clean them up. They would just go every weekend, and they would take all their little things, and clean up, and make the lobby beautiful for the people who lived in that apartment building.
I just thought, "Oh, that's so brilliant to be able to figure out a way that you can do something that will create a sense of community, and will bring people and make them proud, at the same time undermining the government." I just think that we have to think outside of the box, as they say, that we have to have that creative ability to start looking at how we can subvert without going immediately towards violence or immediately towards resistance.
Many times, I see what happens when you resist, you increase resistance. How is it that you can be creative? I saw the Guerrilla Girls exhibit in Washington, D.C., when I was there. The brilliance of the Guerrilla Girls and how they were able to subvert the patriarchal art system in New York City and begin to bring awareness to it was so amazing. They did it in such a way that people laughed, that people became more aware, and that they could continue doing it without being suppressed.
August: Can you each name someone from this time period, from the early '70s, that you want to give visibility to, who people don't necessarily know or maybe don't remember?
Coletta: I think that sometimes people don't give Judy Grahn and her poetry the importance that it had in the early gay movement. When I first read Edward the Dyke, it was eye-opening, her ability to both make fun of our dyke tendencies and be proud of them and to bring awareness to them, etc. Sometimes I feel that we haven't given the visibility to Judy that we should have.
Ginny: Oh, boy, that's a good one. The only person that I can think of who has certainly had a lot of visibility but has been so out of the picture for so long that I'm just going to name her is Meg Christian, who was one of the original members of Olivia Records and was willing as a musician to stand with all the politics behind Olivia when very few other musicians were willing to do that. It made a huge difference.
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives and the QueerCore Podcast.