“Two women went behind the stage and, when the audience was [seated], they turned the lights off,” Karla Jay, a writer and LGBTQIA+ feminist activist, vividly recalls. “When the lights came back on, the audience was completely surrounded by lesbians!” Over the phone, Jay is recounting the rebellious stunt pulled off on 1 May 1970. This was the Lavender Menace: an action staged by a group of lesbians in New York, who had come together after being excluded from the mainstream women’s movement. It would prove a pivotal moment for lesbian feminism.
On that notable day, a group of twenty-or-so strong tie-die clad lesbians, Jay among them, infiltrated a congress run by the National Organization for Women (NOW), a leading organisation in the American women’s movement. NOW – under the direction of its president Betty Friedan
