GINNY BURSON

FURIES

Ginny Burson by unknown, 1956.

The gay liberation revolution was a radical era when LGBTQ people of all stripes fought back en masse. The revolution was an international movement, driven by courage, creativity, and a refusal to accept silence or invisibility. I first learned about Ginny Berson through her groundbreaking work with Olivia Records, the lesbian feminist collective and record label she co-founded in the 1970s. That discovery eventually led me to sit down with Ginny for this excerpted conversation. (I also interviewed Olivia’s engineer, Sandy Stone; you can read the interview here!) Before she co-founded Olivia, she was a member of the defiant lesbian activist group, the Furies.

What struck me about Ginny was how radical she really was. In our interview, she describes preparing for an armed revolution, organizing alongside the Black Panthers, and living communally in ways that challenged capitalism, patriarchy, and class privilege all at once. Her story is not only a testament to the intensity of that era but also a reminder of the visions, risks, and bold imagination that defined the early years of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946, and my parents were the children of immigrants. Their families had come from various Eastern European countries, including Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. I have two sisters, and we're all lesbians. Who could ask for anything more?

When I was a kid, I was a real tomboy, and I loved to play baseball. All I wanted to do was play baseball. I was really good. I thought I was actually going to be on the New York Yankees, until I realized that I wasn't even going to be allowed to play Little League because I was a girl. At some point, I decided that it would be much better to be a boy, because boys got to do all the cool stuff. Among the things that boys got to do was be involved in relationships with girls and women. 

I didn't know the name for this. I didn't. I started feeling attracted to girls and women when I was pretty young, but I didn't know the name for it—the only name I knew for it was ‘sick.’ It wasn't until sometime in my teens, my late teens that I first heard the word ‘lesbian.’ I knew that that was what I was. It was honestly horrifying to me. This was the early 1960s, and there was nothing positive that I found about being a lesbian. The world seemed to agree that it was a mental illness. I'm sure my story is not different from the stories of many others who grew up in the 1950s and earlier. It’s a different world now.

I thought the Vietnam War was a horrible exercise in American arrogance and greed and inhumanity. I was very involved in anti-war protests. Then I stopped being involved in it because there was no room for women in it as anything other than you can wash the dishes, you can type up the flyers, you can march with us, but you will not be a speaker, you will not be an organizer, you will not be part of the steering committee. 

I wasn't going to do that anymore. I moved my anti-war stuff into this group, Women Against Imperialism. Eventually we kind of let that drift away, and we focused much more on women's rights and then lesbian rights, understanding that there was a connection that all women were being impacted, particularly the women of Vietnam, and, eventually, Cambodia and Laos were being affected by this war. It was not an isolationist position. It was definitely an international position. Our focus in that moment was much more: we are here in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, in the belly of the beast, and it's time for us to stand up for ourselves.

The way things were in the United States was not humane. It was not humane. It was not based on any principles of kindness, love, or caring for one another. It was based on greed and competition, where the goal was to acquire more and to have the most toys. Not only was it about who got the most toys, but also about how to prevent others from getting the toys I wanted. This whole idea of scarcity—we just came at it from a different perspective, which was, we can take care of ourselves, and we will take care of ourselves, and we will begin to address some of the inequities that surround us and that harm us. It wasn't perfect, but it really worked, and I don't remember there being any issues. 

One of the members of the Furies came over to our house for meetings and was eating our cookies. We wondered, 'Why is she doing this?' It is clearly a sign of her class privilege that she's eating the cookies, and it was just a sign of the fact that she wanted the cookies that we had. We had to make it political to justify our fear. For the most part, it worked, enabling us to focus our attention and energy on what was truly important to us: preparing ourselves in as many ways as possible for the revolution.

We didn't really develop a clear vision of what the revolution would look like. We didn't think about—we didn't discuss things like, how are we going to keep people safe? How will healthcare be provided? We just didn't believe in those terms. All we knew was we were going to overthrow the patriarchy, and we were going to live in a system that was more, much more closely aligned with democratic socialism. I think we had a much clearer idea of what we didn't want than what we did want.

Meg and Ginny by unknown, 1974.

We thought it was going to be violent, and we expected that we would be taking up arms and possibly going underground and having a shootout war. I feel very differently now. I have a very clear idea of what kind of world I want to live in and how we get there. I don't believe achieving this goal through armed struggle is the right approach. It actually ensures that what comes after will be another version of what came before. In that sense, I have a very different idea of the revolution. I'm not even sure I would use the word ‘revolution.’ I think we will evolve into that—I think we do that by creating the world that we want to live in. That is a world where—I mean, I don't think we had this language then, but I would say it's a world where everybody belongs and has agency and can have a fulfilling life without stepping on anybody else's head.

We live in a world where there is a hierarchy. The lower levels of the hierarchy—we are trained to look down at the people below us in the hierarchy and believe that they are threatening us, and to focus our attention on them, instead of looking up at the people at the top of the pyramid who hold the power. More and more of us are seeing that we are really all in this together. I don't think we believed that then, and I think that makes a huge difference.”