There At The Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist

By BARBARA J LOVE

There At The Dawning, the memories of Barbara J. Love, (other works include Sappho Was a Right-on Woman and Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975), gives one a front-row seat to the LGBTQ+ and Women's Liberation fights for civil rights, as well as an appreciation of the character and evolution of this extraordinary and successful social visionary. As Linda Clarke notes in the introduction, "There are lessons to be learned in this autobiographical journey. It might be just the book to inform the aspiration of our youngest troublemakers and risktakers, our newest generation to try and correct its own morally intolerable social problems. They will find here many cunning stratagems and new insights on how to practice disruption nonviolently and effectively. "

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781304550200

Book preview

There At The Dawning

Memories of a Lesbian Feminist

Barbara J. Love

A picture containing person, wall, person, indoor Description automatically generated

Cover photo: 1970 Christmas Eve Gay March in Greenwich Village.

Barbara Love, the Grand Marshall, is second from the right.

Cover page photo: Barbara Love by Liza Béar

Copyright © 2021 Barbara J. Love

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent of the author.

ISBN 9 781 304550 200

Dedicated to all of those with the heart and the courage to confront norms and be their authentic selves. To those who were on the frontlines with me, shaping history, bravely sacrificing security and comforts for the cause of Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank Joan Casamo for encouraging me to write my memoir. For almost three years she showed incredible patience, encouragement, wisdom, and supreme editing skills to make this book a reality.

Next, I want to recognize Liza Béar in NY who read my stories and helped shape them and improve the narrative before I sent them on to Joanie.

Lots of wonderful people helped me with documents or helped clarify events including Carole De Saram, Ivy Bottini, Ann Wallace, Arlie Costine-Scott, Karla Jay, Donna Gottschalk, Ellen Shumsky, Margie Adam, Kate Millett, Michaela Griffo, Sandra Ramos, and my younger brother Tony Love.

Photographers captured key moments in our history, and I am fortunate to have some of their work in this memoir. Unfortunately, I do not have all the names for recognitions, but I want to give special thanks to Bettye Lane who gifted me photos of key events in my life for many birthdays and special occasions. Bettye was the most prominent photographer of the second wave, and she was wherever the action was. Her work can be found at the Schlesinger Library.

Gayle Goodman, Christina Joukadar, Myra Kovary, Marlene Springer and Deborah Ash generously read the manuscript and were helpful with corrections and ideas, feedback and suggestions.

My dear friend of over 50 years, Linda Clarke, who knows me better than anyone, has written the introduction, making me very happy.

These are my memories and recollections, and they reflect my perspective at different moments in time. Differences are to be expected, any errors are mine, and they are honest mistakes.

A very special thank you goes to my spouse, my love and the center of my universe, Donna Smith, who listened to and read these stories over and over again.

Introduction by Linda Clarke

Perhaps every generation growing up comes upon some deep social problem it must solve – some disturbing irritant or corruption or unfairness that has finally become morally intolerable.

Such was the experience of Barbara J. Love and her generation. In a moment of cultural challenge, Love, and a handful of others, fearlessly led an important social movement to liberate a shamed, frightened, outcast culture of homosexuals, lesbian women and gay men, the most despised population in America at the time.

Lesbians were an embarrassment to just about everybody. But Love and her activist sisters, many lesbians as well, saw themselves not as perverts and sinners but simply as ordinary people, and in an astonishingly short time, their efforts to expose and expunge the social bias and hatred against millions of their sisters and brothers would transform American society and prepare it for a radically more inclusive 21st century.

Many activists at the time emerged from the civil rights movement. Love came from an upper-class Republican family and community where she was a misfit. Perhaps the privilege afforded by this family eventually emboldened Barbara, but growing up she ‘kept her mouth shut’ (her words), whenever she heard about or witnessed the various forms of discrimination that eventually sickened her and awakened her determination to change the world around her.

Admitting she was in the right place at the right time with the right rage, she tells her story with a cheerful honesty and transparency. Her book is a spontaneous, accessible, non-sequential conversation, irresistibly open, unselfconscious, friendly, and profoundly honest, much like Barbara herself.

I met Barbara close to the beginning of her political awakening when she lived at 43 5th Avenue next to Washington Square Park. She was writing Sappho Was A Right-on Woman with Sidney Abbott, her partner at the time. I had run into her at a Quaker meeting on nonviolence at Gramercy Park and was immediately struck by her sense of humor and amiable intelligence. We were soon sharing what books we were reading, standing on the curb oblivious to traffic, departing Quakers, and the usual bustle of NYC streets. I was quickly caught up in Barbara’s social circle which consisted of intensely political women, radical, unrepentant, totally one-pointed in their desire to upend society and make it a more comfortable place to live in and thrive, not only as lesbians but as women.

In this way and with these people I soon joined a Consciousness Raising (CR) group. If feminism was already becoming an important social movement, this particular CR group of lesbian feminists represented something else. We were all swept up by the still incoherent ideas of feminism, but as lesbian feminists we were mindful of our rightful place on the frontlines of change. These important insights made a huge contribution to the second wave of feminism of the 20th century.

It was an extraordinary moment for all of us. Nobody was more insightful in this effort, more determined, than Barbara herself, and this book describes in detail the brave actions that went into such a life. Describing herself as a troublemaker and risktaker, she has successfully thrown off society’s view of her.

There are lessons to be learned in this autobiographical journey. It might be just the book to inform the aspiration of our youngest troublemakers and risktakers, our newest generation to try and correct its own morally intolerable social problems. They will find here many cunning stratagems and new insights on how to practice disruption nonviolently and effectively.

I cherish my long-lasting friendship with this extraordinary warrior woman I first met in 1969 and with whom I still enjoy a deep connection more than 50 years later. During these years we have snorkeled in Curacao, seen Denali at sunrise, climbed blueberry covered hillsides hiding black bears. We’ve been snowed upon in our tents in Yellowstone Park, and we’ve watched the hills of Tuscany ablaze with the fires of August, Ferragosto. We welcomed a new year walking through the plumeria scented streets of Maui and cheered in Paris on Bastille Day. We have solved the problems of the world together with our family of friends innumerable times over brunches and dinners at Kate Millett’s Farm and around our own huge dining room table in New Paltz and now in Florida. Many of our closest friends and family members have died and we have mourned and celebrated their lives together. Always a stalwart reliable interested loving friend, she brings good cheer and intelligent conversation and a keen sense of probity with her everywhere, much like invisible luggage.

Barbara Love’s own father once said to her that of all his children she was the one he would bet on to get herself out of a rathole. Well, she got a lot of us out of one. Hers is a remarkable story.

Contents

There at the Dawning

Not My Mother’s Daughter

My First Love

My Swim Coach

Deadlines and Bylines

1958 Paterson, New Jersey

How Much?

Speechless

1956

Study Hall

1960  Florence, Italy

Russian Police

A Slip of the Hand

It Is My Thing

1961 Florence, Italy and Marseille, France

Keith Appears

Celia’s Pride

Before Her Time

Not Butch, Not Femme

1961-1968  New York City

I Am the Ship

1970 New York City and Ridgewood, New Jersey

Marsha’s Request

1969  New York City

A Different Radicalesbian

1969-1971 New York City

The Lavender Menace Action

Different Directions

1971-1977

AIDS Work

Close Allies

Saving Identity House

1971  New York City

The Drawing Test

1975  New York City

Black Death or The Lesbian Censor

1967-1970 New York City

When the World Changed

1968

A Very Personal Clock

Purple People

1971-1989 New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut

Sigmund’s Revenge

1975  New York City

The Purge

1968-1971 New York City and Los Angeles

Betty’s Bite

I Call the Question

1977

Sailing Lesson

Danish Christmas Pudding

Mom’s Choice For Heaven

Obsessed Feminist

Two Freedom-Fighters

A Women’s House

1977-1978

Orange Juice

1977  New York City

My Matriarchy Period

The Vigil

1996 Poughkeepsie, New York

The Red House Caper

2000-2001 Hyde Park, New York

Creating A Record

Kate the Rascal

Troublemakers Together

New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York

The Farm

Pride

There at the Dawning

Yesterday I finally got up enough guts to buy your book. Today I read it in the morning and reread it in the evening. Tomorrow I stop telling lies - forever. I would start tonight, but I live alone, so I have no one to be honest with except myself. But now that I have been truthful with me, the rest doesn’t look quite so bleak. Thank you! Thank you! I am still scared shitless, but I know that when the smoke clears I will have a much higher opinion of myself  - something I  must have.      From an anonymous letter to Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott in 1975

It was a change from darkness to light for lesbians - the dawning of a new age. My partner, Sidney Abbott and I tried to document that change in ourselves and in our friends in the book Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism.

We kept our writing secret because our group, the Radicalesbians, rejected contributing to the ‘pig’ media. We did not agree and wanted to reach a much wider population. We worked out of a tiny room on the 11th floor of 43 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where we lived in a studio apartment on the second floor.

This was our first big collaborative project, so the process of writing was a rocky one. We took turns producing book chapters. Then we would swap manuscripts, letting each other amend the text as we saw fit. It’s not hard to imagine that neither of us liked having our very important words tampered with. This unfettered, free-for-all approach to editing led to quite a few emotional outbursts, enough that we sought a therapist, Jean Milar, to clear the air. Therapy did not always help.

One day, in a fit of pique, I was so upset by Sidney’s critique that I tossed the manuscript out of the window. I watched the pages separate and float down the airshaft. Fortunately, it was a closed-off area. After chilling out, I managed to retrieve the papers and get back to work. That was not the only setback. Another time, Sasha, our Alaskan husky, ripped up several chapters we had left on the worktable while we went out for lunch. What a mess! Because this was still a work-in-progress, we weren’t keeping carbons. I like to think that when we rewrote those chapters, we improved on them.

I know my writing was influenced not only by the women’s movement and the gay movement, but also by the psychology courses I was taking at the New School of Social Research and by readings on Gandhi given to me by my friend Linda Clarke, in particular his focus on the power of the individual.

One day, when I was working alone, I heard a big bang, like a bomb going off. Though I couldn’t see anything from our office window at the back of the building, I didn’t immediately rush downstairs to check it out. Not even an explosion should interrupt my thinking! I waited for lunchtime to go outside and discovered that 11th Street was sealed off from Fifth Avenue to Sixth Avenue.

A policeman explained that a boiler had burst. (That was not the whole story, as I later found out.) I could see the big hole between two buildings halfway down the street. Oddly enough, these buildings—one owned by Dustin Hoffman—were not damaged. I ate lunch and returned to work, not knowing that a historic event had occurred within a half-block of my apartment. Two members of the left-wing militant group, Weather Underground, had blown themselves up by mistake while assembling bombs in the basement of a townhouse.

We got help finding a publisher, Stein & Day, from Nath Rockhill, a member of Gay Activists Alliance and a mutual friend. This was in 1970-71 and without Nath’s help it probably would have been much harder to find a publisher. But Stein & Day was on the cutting edge, having just published a book by a gay writer, Jim Fisher.

We had a serious disagreement with the publishers over the cover design, but for the first edition we got our way with an image of a woman in a Levi jacket holding a lyre and a strong bold typeface for the title. That was a temporary victory. The Sappho re-print cover features two delicate manicured hands wearing nail varnish and gay rings, the fingers reaching for, but barely touching each other. Combined with a light, ornate typeface, this exaggerated femme design made us very unhappy but there was nothing we could do about it.

After publication, I was surprised by the content of letters from readers. Scared to buy the book, one woman wrote that she had read it in the bookstore aisle. She couldn’t take the book home, where she was still living with her parents, because the word lesbianism on the cover was too intimidating.

But perhaps the most moving was the story of Mary Jo Risher, a 38- year-old nurse who was fighting for custody of her younger son. She took Sappho to court every day. Mary Jo was a nurse in Dallas with two sons. I’d helped her raise funds for her lawyers when she came to New York. One son was 17 and his brother was 9 years old. Against the boy’s wishes, the husband wanted to get the younger son away from his mother. This boy, desperate to be with his mother, was not allowed to testify. The older boy, who had been bought off by his father with a car, testified against his mother, saying he was embarrassed by his mother’s lifestyle. Mary Jo sobbed in court and read passages from Sappho to calm herself down. Her partner borrowed money from her father, a gas station owner, to help pay the lawyers’ bills.

Mary Jo lost her case. The strain was so great on the couple that they eventually broke up. It was one of many sad episodes in our history.

We received many letters, including a beautiful one from Janis Ian, writer of Society’s Child, a song she wrote after being told she couldn’t date the black boy she was in love with. I was thrilled that Janis, who was a hero of our time, had found the book important. Another letter was from Margie Adam, the feminist songwriter, whose songs moved and inspired women all over the country. Margie still has passages from Sappho on her wall to remind her of our ability to create our own future.

Sidney and I wanted to have a special event for the book that included the whole community. We settled on a shipboard party on the Wavertree Tall Ship docked at the South Street Seaport. The Wavertree was built in 1885 in Great Britain and made four trips around the globe. We advertised by flyer and word of mouth making sure that everyone knew they were invited. About 150 lesbians came, some from as far away as Delaware and Boston. We had lots of cold keg beer, a beautiful June evening, and joyous music from the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Best of all we had each other.

Not My Mother’s Daughter

I am 12 years old, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and going downstairs for supper at our summer cottage in Bay Head, NJ. My brother Douglas, handsome at 14 with his blue eyes and glowing blond hair, emerges at the top of the steps in crisp white pants, navy blue jacket and red tie. He’s going to the yacht club dance. I am not. In the morning I have swim practice. Besides, no boys have invited me, and Douglas wouldn’t want me tagging along. Downstairs my mother greets Douglas excitedly. She looks at me askance, If I were your age, you can bet I would be going to the dance.

I grew up privileged but troubled. Privileged because I was brought up in a six-bedroom Tudor home radiating upper-middle-class comfort with a maid and a chauffeur. Troubled because I was uneasy in my own skin, with my family, and with their social milieu. What my parents wanted for me was not what I wanted.

For schooling, my mom wanted me to experience what she had - boarding school. She drove me to check out the Emma Willard private school for girls in Troy, NY. On the plus side, the school had horseback riding and I was always asking my mother for riding lessons. But the swim team was pathetic compared to the level of competition I was used to. I did not want to leave my high school and swim team.

If I’d known then that Emma Willard, a pioneer in girls’ education, focused on academics rather than manners and style, and that Jane Fonda would have been in my class, would I have felt differently? No. Nothing could match my passion for swimming and my commitment to my swim coach.

Of course, Mom took me to Broadway. We saw South Pacific. She loved it, but it made me very uncomfortable. I did not have words for why at the time, but now I can say it was heterosexual propaganda. I could not identify with Mary Martin’s romantic feelings for the middle-aged French plantation owner.

My mother was beautiful, an amateur actress and model. She was also president of the Women’s Club, and very proud of being president of the past presidents’ club. She shopped at the fashionable Jenny Banta store in Ridgewood and other women would follow her lead. Once, I clearly remember being in the vestibule and watching my mother sashay down the stairs to go to the Women’s Club. She was all in blue, wearing a stunning dress matched by blue shoes, gloves and pocketbook. My mother is flat-out gorgeous, I said to myself.

In contrast, I did not care about clothes and sometimes wore the same outfit to school three days in