TORIE OSBORN
Updated: 1 day ago
IN THESE TIMES, NATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN TASK FORCE, LOS ANGELES LGBT CENTER
I received Torie Osborn’s information from Ginny Berson, a member of the Furies and co-founder of Olivia Records. Torie started as a grassroots organizer and eventually crossed over to a more mainstream player in the nonprofit world. She was part of the founding staff of American politically progressive monthly magazine of news and opinion published in Chicago, Illinois, In These Times; served as Northern California Director of the National Organization for Women; and became the first woman executive director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center during the height of the AIDS epidemic and as the Center was also working to reach and better serve women. She later led the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C., and the Liberty Hill Foundation and went on to work on homelessness, poverty, civic engagement, and government reform.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was born in 1950. My parents were both working on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. My father worked in the State Department and was transferred to Copenhagen, Denmark, and then to Madrid, Spain, which explains my politics—the contrast between Denmark and Spain.
My father was kicked out of the State Department for being gay. He was one of the victims of the Lavender Scare under McCarthy, and he didn't let me talk about it while he was alive. He had been gay from around the age of 13 or 14. When he was 30, he met my mother, Shelly, and decided to go straight because he wanted kids and couldn't imagine having kids otherwise.
The anti-war movement was massive. I was 14 or 15 when I first got involved with the student movement. I remember taking a train to an early demonstration in Philadelphia, which was mostly attended by members of the Civil Rights Movement, by Black members of the Civil Rights Movement and white students like myself, so it was cross-generational and cross gender, but it was not small. It was like 50 people. This is 1965 or 1966. The movement spread like wildfire, and it captured my heart.
I watched Lyndon Johnson's speech on television when he said he would not run for reelection because of the war and the antipathy around it. My parents and I argued every night at the dinner table. My parents were very pro-war until the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971. Then my parents said, ‘You were right,’ and they turned against the war.
I knew that something was wrong with me, but I just assumed that I was attracted to both men and women. It was a time of heterosexual bias everywhere. There was no gay movement to speak of. There was no LGBT movement. There was no lesbian feminist liberation. That came later. We were starting very much on our own. Whether it was the anti-war movement or women's liberation or gay liberation. In 1968, lesbians—and all women—were oppressed.
They sent someone from the Women's Liberation Front to a dorm to organize at Barnard, and I heard her speak. I also attended a lecture by Kate Millett, who was teaching at Barnard then. I ran into a gay friend from Columbia who told me about the Stonewall riots in '69. I didn't go down there, but he told me about them. I had already been organizing out of my dorm. I was totally caught up in the anti-war movement.
I didn’t feel particularly oppressed because I regarded myself as straight then—even though I was bisexual. I fell in love with my best friend, which is why I left New York and transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont in mid-1970. This marked the early stirrings of women's liberation in my consciousness.
I was part of the first women's community in Burlington, Vermont, in the early 1970s. I was living in a lesbian women's household, which was very lesbian, and so going ‘full lesbian’ is a good phrase to describe my development. What made me go full lesbian? I don't know. I think it was the night that I said out loud, ‘I'm a lesbian. That's a good word for me.’ I said it out loud.
I can still remember the breath. It was January in Vermont in 1973, and I had just been driving back to the women's household that I lived in in Middlebury after I had graduated in 72—I remember that night as if it were yesterday. So I can still see the frost on the windshield and all around. I had just come from my first lesbian, feminist conference. It was very much not what I was used to, which was more political, more anti-war—it was more cultural. I realized that I was gay.
It was like a time of feminist uprising. Cultural feminism was very big, and the word ‘feminism’ was the key. We were lesbian feminists. I remember our first march in Burlington. It was a ragtag group of 10 or 15 lesbians. There were no gay men, to my knowledge. I mean, they were there, but—we probably were the first out, queer group in Vermont.
I was circulation manager at the magazine In These Times after I joined the staff in 1976. The editor's masthead was from the Socialist Party of 1900: Eugene V. Debs et al. He believed that the times were such that the new left was rising. He was wrong, and there was no network to sell the papers on street corners, as he had envisioned.
I went up to do a mailing in the office, in the one conference room, which was an all-purpose room. So I walked in, and the guys were sitting around the table, all the men, and I said, ‘What is this? A men's caucus?’ I figured it was a joke, and Jimmy Weinstein, who was the editor, said to Doyle Neiman, who was the managing editor, ‘Did you not invite the women?’ It was a staff meeting, and the women had not been invited. I walked out that day. I said, ‘No more.’ I left, never to return. I cannot believe the magazine survived, but it has.
I went back to Vermont, which was all I knew. I was living on unemployment, and I was broke. I thought I would teach karate. I had learned a bunch of karate in Chicago and thought I'd go to Vermont and get a master's in psychology. I thought I would teach women self-defense.
In 1973, Ginny Berson founded Olivia Records for her girlfriend Meg Christian. Olivia Records was one of the first of its kind: a record label run by all women. I worked for women’s music artist Holly Near, who was politically simpatico with me, which meant more lefty, more global, less defined by separatism.
We cared about changing the world. So, what issues? Issues is a very ‘now’ word, but I would say healthcare. We looked like we were part of the whole early feminist movement, which meant women's healthcare, women loving women, women's everything, feminism. We were doing it for the first time.
We sold a million records without airplay at a time when radio airplay was how you sold records. We were very grassroots, but we tapped into a network of feminist bookstores around the country and feminist distributors. There were concerts at Carnegie Hall. Most of the concerts were in church basements, but there was definitely huge demand.
There was a lot of homophobia. I remember a spray-painted sign on my garage: ‘Death to all lesbians,’ or something. It was really scary until I reported it.”
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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.
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