JUDY GRAHN
- August Bernadicou
- 9 hours ago
- 12 min read
GAY WOMEN'S LIBERATION GROUP, WOMEN'S PRESS COLLECTIVE, AUTHOR
There were so many different gay liberation groups in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was truly the first time that LGBTQ people fought back against their oppressors en masse. This was part of a broader social movement. You had the Black Panthers, women’s liberation, anti-war movements, hippies, and countless other groups that all sought to advance civil rights. Enter Judy Grahn, who was a member of the Gay Women's Liberation Group, “the first lesbian-feminist collective on the West Coast,” founded in 1969, shortly after the Stonewall Rebellion. This group morphed into the Women's Press Collective, which strove to commit itself “exclusively to work by lesbians disenfranchised by race or class.”
Judy is a trailblazing poet, cultural theorist, and activist who laid the groundwork for the lesbian feminist movement by integrating poetry with political urgency through literature about working-class life, sexuality, and resistance. She was among the first to write about the experiences of women excluded from mainstream society in her time. She was involved in many of the earliest lesbian organizing efforts in California. She created literature based on the lived experiences of those involved, challenging existing social norms for women and breaking down boundaries around what was considered acceptable speech.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“My father’s family emigrated from Sweden around 1904. My mother’s people had been here since the beginning of European colonization. My parents moved from Southern Illinois to the factory world of Chicago, which is where they were living when I was born in 1940, right before World War II. When I was eight, my dad moved us down to southern New Mexico, which was a great boon. It was a softer environment. It was much easier for my parents.
It’s stunningly beautiful, just every day, all of this glorious, glorious natural beauty and all kinds of wild creatures that might come up through the drain and scare you, or they might just delight you because they're a little horned toad or a bass lizard, or a big jackrabbit, or a great big bird or whatever. It was just marvelous compared to Chicago, where factory workers were very restricted. It was easier all around. My dad worked as a cook. He was unable to get a white-collar job, so he worked as a cook in the restaurant business. My mother worked for a photographer, and I went to school. I learned to love poetry, especially from my dad, because he loved it.
I seem to remember bringing some psych books home from the library that my mother and I went to when I was probably 13 or 14, and the word ‘homosexual’ was in there. Of course, it was horrifying because it was categorized as a mental illness. So, we didn't want that. It was not to be talked about. I never heard any adult person say the word ‘lesbian’ out loud, so it was a secret.
I didn't want to grow up to be a girl. I didn't want to be—as I went into puberty, I really resisted my development. I did not want to grow up to be a woman. Because of the way women were treated in that culture, I just rejected it. I was looking for something else. When I was 16, I knew the word lesbian, and I looked it up in the dictionary to see what it meant. I read the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. There was a character named Puck, who was gender-ambiguous, and I realized that there were people somewhat like me in the world. It made me hopeful.
Women and lesbians were particularly prominent during World War II because society needed them. That is the thing about us: sometimes we're on top of the world, and sometimes we're on the bottom of the world. But during the 50s, it was the McCarthy era, and he was not just going after communists. It was anything at all that was out of the spectrum of basic fundamentalist Christian ways of being, and so LGBT people were, as a whole, really suppressed. The suppression was that you just didn't exist. There was no talking about you at all.
When my mother found out that I was in love with a woman, she was really horrified, but she talked to some of the neighbors, who were single teachers, who were oppressed lesbians. They could not have lovers—they could have jobs as teachers, and I think they calmed her down somehow. I don't know what they said, but they said something. So she relented about that.
Then she met my lover, and she said, ‘Oh, she's just like you. How could I hate her?’ In other words, she expected to hate her, but she couldn't, because she was just too in touch with her own sensibilities. So that was happening, but there was no way my lover and I could live together. She was going to college, and I was a rebel, living in the town where she was going to school, and I had a hard time earning a living. It was a poor town to begin with. I worked as a waitress and could afford rent, but I could not afford heat, light, or food, and I was losing weight. At the restaurant where I worked, I was eating the leftover crackers and drinking the leftover creamers on these plates I was carrying back and forth from the kitchen. I was just way too skinny. I was stealing food. I was stealing lunch meat from the local grocery store. So I joined the service, and then I was kicked out of the service for being a lesbian, and that radicalized me.
The hypocrisy was appalling to me because the gay middle managers were sergeants, and my captain, who was really mean to me, was gay. They were gay, but they were hiding it, because otherwise they'd be kicked out of the military unceremoniously—just shamed and so on. My parents were notified, and I was interrogated. It was really quite something, and I came out of it, you know, really anguished and angry and knowing, I just knew that we weren't these people that we were being said to be. My poor father didn't have a way to understand, and he was really upset, so he didn't talk to me for quite a while, about five years, and that was hard, as I had been very close to him.
I landed in Washington, D.C., and I started trying to go to school, learn something, and figure out what was happening. My lover, who had nearly been kicked out of school over this because the military had notified her superiors as well, had to stay away from me for a while, but after a couple of years, she came back. She came to live with me in Washington, D.C. We were very interested in developing the Black nationalism that was on the radio, and Malcolm X and other Muslims who were saying, ‘Fight back against white supremacy.’
We knew some people were fighting back, and we also knew there was such a thing as white supremacy. We knew other groups of people were also oppressed. We didn't even have the word oppressed. I don't know how we talked about it. We talked about it in terms of martyrdom and crucifixion because that was the language we were given. We picketed the White House for the first time, which was organized by East Coast homophile organizations.
We joined the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and they were planning a second march around the Liberty Bell. We dropped out of that, and I came down with Cat Scratch Fever and was in the hospital in a coma, but I had already written two things. One of them was an article called m, and I sent it off to an underground magazine. It was literally sold at a newsstand in a brown wrapper, as if it were pornography, when it was actually a legit journal about sexuality. They took my article and paid me a phenomenal $50, and I had also written a first draft of what became a sort of iconic thing that's still around. It was actually being taught for a while. It was called The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke. It's a satire about a psychiatrist and Edward, and the changes the psychiatrist wants Edward to undergo. Edward's naive responses to that—suddenly, I was in the hospital, in a coma for three days, and not expected to recover. Still, I did recover, and my lover and I headed back to New Mexico for my recovery, but I had started down this path. I woke up from the coma happy, absolutely fearless, and determined. I was going to be a poet.
My lover wanted a revolution, and I realized I did too. So we went off to do our best to foment such a thing, whatever that might mean. And of course, it meant several things. It meant feminism, and it meant everything LGBTQ, and by that time, it also meant anything ecological, because Silent Spring had been written by a lesbian. The early stirrings of an ecology movement were rooted in an awareness of what industrialization was doing to the planet. So I was off and running, although in every direction.
Frank Kameny, who led the Washington, D.C., Mattachine Society, was certainly radical. There's no doubt that Barbara Gittings from the Daughters of Bilitis and Frank were radical, and they were leaders of this in this part of my world, but Mattachine’s idea was to assimilate, and so they didn't want anybody looking trashy. They didn’t want anybody looking too gay. They wanted us all to look straight. So for my first picket with them, I had to buy an outfit of women's clothing—we were all called ‘girls.’ Then no one was called ‘women.’ No one used the word ‘woman.’ We were girls. We were young girls or old girls. Take your pick.
Our clothes were Levi's, like a working-class cowboy. They gave us a chore: the two of us, my lover and I, were to make a donation box decorated like a Valentine's birthday cake or something. A man could have done it in 12 minutes, but we labored at it for hours, and it looked like a pile of rubbish when we took it in there; their faces were astonished because nobody knew the difference between dykes and gay men, really. Women had not been talking to each other. There wasn't a movement yet. I think the gay men probably had more solidarity at that point than the women did, except for Daughters of Bilitis, and they were assimilationist as well, and we weren't. We wanted to be ourselves. We wanted to come as ourselves.
I moved to San Francisco, and we were part of the New Left. We were going to all kinds of demonstrations and actions. There was a movement among African Americans to establish Black studies at San Francisco State. We were part of that. There was a free speech movement at Berkeley. We were part of that. We went to Oakland to hear speakers from the Black Panther Party. So we were collaborating with them.
I was working for a leftist newspaper, doing typesetting. So this all happened in the spring of 1969. I'm not sure when Stonewall happened, but we heard that there had been some riots in New York around gay liberation, which was very good, but it was gay men. It didn't really have anything to do with us and what we were trying to do. So I didn't think much about it at all. Just a few months later, in November of 1969, we founded our own movement, which was Gay Women's Liberation. We did a conference for West Coast homophile organizations. It was mostly gay men.
With Gay Women’s Liberation, we also did poetry readings, and there was a great deal of really literary activism in the Bay Area—lots of it, lots of African American poets and so on. And there was a mix-and-match happening. Sometimes our readings were only for women, and sometimes they were for the movement in general. But we had a movement, and we were part of other movements, and that was the exciting part.
We established lesbian-only households. Each of these households had a project they were working on out in the world. All of a sudden, I felt urgency in my early writings: lesbians connected with the women's movement and identified as women. One of my early articles is on lesbians as women.
Women fell out of the Adam and Eve sex categories of Christianity, which had been put in place. These women were likely to end up in a mental hospital or have lobotomies or electroshock therapy, that kind of thing. It was tough, tough times. It was tough times, and it was very violent times, also, because all this stirring around led people to activism that included bringing the war home, and let's be violent. Our movement wasn't violent, with a couple of exceptions, but it was very, very active. Two things that our household did that were extremely important—Wendy Cadden and I established a press and started publishing women's work, including mine. We also published an anthology called Lesbians Speak Out, with a lot of working-class voices, and the work of Pat Parker and Willyce Kim, who had radical voices.
We were organizing with our poetry. We would do the readings, and women would gather and stomp and yell and scream and holler at us and to cheer us on, and then there would be a dance, or there would be meetings. We were right in the middle of all of this activity. The other thing that happened outside our household was a bookstore. Suddenly, women had public presence; they could go to the bookstore and find books about women, which, you know, had been buried up until then, and that became an important organizing space. We moved it from San Francisco to Oakland—we moved our press with all this machinery that we had to use—no one in the world would publish the stuff that we were writing. So we did it, and it was immediately snatched up, taken to Australia, and spread all over the country.
A different household had a health clinic that was doing abortions, and they were also doing other kinds of gynecological health work. There was a group that—they were told they could live in this house if they would use it as a women's center. So they lived upstairs, but the downstairs was a women's center and sometimes a battered women's shelter. This would have been one of the first of our generation.
Some other groups were socialists, so their organizing focused on fitting into socialist dogma. They were developing ideas about what it meant to be a feminist, what it meant to be a lesbian, and what was a dyke? What was a radical dyke? You know, all these discussions that were going on. Other households put out their own newsletters. Every household had something it was doing—there were about seven. Pat Parker had a household that was the beginning of organizing women of color. That term wasn't even used at that time, but that's what she was doing. Within our group, she was doing something for a subgroup of women who often felt oppressed by the white supremacy within Gay Women's Liberation or in any group of mostly white women or white people. Still, in this case, it was white lesbians.
There was a school teacher, a woman whose boyfriend was beating her up, breaking her ribs. She would go to school with a broken nose and bruises, and tell people she'd fallen into the door—her ribs were taped up or whatever. So we just decided to occupy her apartment. She lived upstairs from him; her ex-boyfriend lived downstairs, and he had a pistol. He worked as a guard, so she was terrified of him. We moved in, and there were 60 of us who moved in, and there would always be two or three of us who would be with her. We would take our projects with us, sit there, and do them for six hours, and then somebody else would come and take the shift. But 24 hours a day, she had us there. We were trying everything, every peaceful thing that we knew of, to help her gain confidence and learn self-defense and get some new ideas about herself and to help her break free, if possible. We did that for six weeks, and the day we stopped, he moved away. She had won. She had won the right to stay in her apartment. She hadn't wanted to move, and so it was a victory.
Some other members of our group picketed a wedding because the husband had, before he was the husband, had a party, a bachelor party, and the woman who was hired to come out of a cake, half naked for the party, had been raped with a Coke bottle or something like that. So she came to us. She knew that we were doing actions, and so a group of people went to the wedding with flyers that said what he had done. We handed them out to everybody. I was told the Berkeley police approached him and said, ‘You've got to stop beating up these women. You've just got to stop. It's just getting too violent.’
We were in a revolution. We were actually doing a revolution. It was a peaceful revolution for the most part, I mean, gay men rioted at Stonewall and rioted over Harvey Milk's killer getting a soft sentence. But for the most part, it was very peaceful. We made ourselves useful to society as quickly as we possibly could, coming out to say, ‘Yeah, your brother-in-law is actually gay—the one you like so much.’ We called ourselves Amazons and identified with warriors. But it's not that we went around blowing things up. It's that we just persisted in being who we were and being out about who we were and talking about justice and human rights.”
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