The Audacity of a Kiss: Love, Art, and Liberation

By Leslie Cohen

Shortlisted for Lesbian Memoir/Biography Lammy Award

Rendered in bronze, covered in white lacquer, two women sit together on a park bench in Greenwich Village. One of the women touches the thigh of her partner as they gaze into each other’s eyes. The two women are part of George Segal’s iconic sculpture “Gay Liberation,” but these powerful symbols were modeled on real people: Leslie Cohen and her partner (now wife) Beth Suskin. 
 
In this evocative memoir, Cohen tells the story of a love that has lasted for over fifty years. Transporting the reader to the pivotal time when brave gay women and men carved out spaces where they could live and love freely, she recounts both her personal struggles and the accomplishments she achieved as part of New York’s gay and feminist communities. Foremost among these was her 1976 cofounding of the groundbreaking women’s nightclub Sahara, which played host to such luminaries as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Pat Benatar, Ntozake Shange, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Patti Smith, Bella Abzug, and Jane Fonda. The Audacity of a Kiss is a moving and inspiring tale of how love, art, and solidarity can overcome oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978825130

Leslie Cohen

Leslie Cohen was born and raised in New York. She studied fiction at Columbia University. She is the author of This Love Story Will Self-Destruct. 

Book preview

Prologue

In 1979, George Segal, the famous Pop artist, was commissioned to create a sculpture commemorating the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. The uprising was the seminal, although not the only, event to kick-start the gay liberation movement. Segal’s bronze sculpture, covered with a white lacquer finish, was eventually unveiled in Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, formerly known as Sheridan Square Park, in 1992, after almost thirteen years of controversy. The sculpture is called Gay Liberation. It depicts a life-size male couple standing a few feet away from a life-size female couple sitting together on a park bench. One of the men holds the shoulder of his friend. One of the women touches the thigh of her partner as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Over the years, Gay Liberation, the sculpture, has become more and more recognizable around the world and an icon that is visited by thousands of people every year.

Beth Suskin, my partner (and now wife) of more than forty-five years, and I were the models for this sculpture. Since the sculpture’s unveiling in 1992, we have stood before it many times, staring at our doppelganger selves. We have witnessed drunken men slouched on the park bench with their heads resting on our laps, children climbing on us like monkey bars and sitting on our knees, and grown men and women crying openly before it, overcome with emotion, because they remember the many years of humiliation they experienced when they were taunted, arrested, and forced to hide because they were gay or lesbian. Gay men and lesbians from around the world have come to see the sculpture as a symbol of gay pride and as a confirmation of the great progress that has been made towards their visibility and acceptance.

It is astounding to us that our love for one another is publicly signified and immortalized in this way. However, our love story cannot be told in full without also including the tale of Sahara, the first New York City nightclub owned by women and designed for women. I opened it with three other women in Manhattan in 1976. The club was an elegant oasis in a desert of oppression against women, both gay and straight, where women discovered a safe space to express who they were. Luminaries of the time came to witness and bask in the welcoming scene, which in turn nurtured a generation of women who would become luminaries of the future. Beth and I discovered our love for each other and nurtured it against the backdrop of Sahara, and in my mind, they are inextricably woven together. This is our story.

The Audacity of a Kiss

PART I

Youth

The only constant is confusion.

—Leslie Cohen

1

Secrets and Dreams

I was born in 1947, two years after the Hiroshima bomb and the end of World War II, the year that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed. Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play baseball for a major league team, and the gender-bending artist, David Bowie, was born. Whatever memories I have of my earliest years are few but sweet. I played, I laughed, I skinned my knees. When I was four or five years old, I stared up at the sky one afternoon trying to see God. What appeared overhead was the enormous image of the Knickerbocker man (an image from an old beer ad of the time) in his colonial dress and three-cornered hat looming over me amongst the clouds. This appearance of what I thought was God was so real that it frightened me, and I ran into the house to find my mother.

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In 1955, for my eighth birthday, my mother, Marcia, gave me a pink bassinet stroller. Curious, I peeked under the hood of this alien girl’s toy to find a plastic doll wrapped in a blanket. I smiled and thanked my mother, not knowing what I would ever do with this oversized plaything in which I had absolutely no interest. I decided that the carriage could be useful to store my catcher’s mitt, baseball, and bat when I wasn’t using them. They would be safe there next to the doll that I never touched.

In the large apartment complex in Whitestone, Queens, where we lived, my play area was a paved quad, partially inhabited by a one-story parking garage and a concrete playground made up of seesaws and swings. Adjacent to the playground were rows of do-it-yourself clotheslines that sagged in the background from the weight of boxer shorts, undershirts, and bleached white bedsheets that swayed in the wind like flags of surrender. The smell of fresh detergent permeated the air around us. Corralling the quad on all sides were the indistinguishable and unadorned two-story, connected, redbrick apartment buildings. Sparse trees and grass were scattered around, but pavement underlined almost everything.

I grew up a tomboy in the 1950s. A daredevil, I spent restless summers on my bike, doing boy things. We played stickball and catcher’s fly up in the quad’s open area. Pretending to be Roman gladiators, we fought with flying rocks and sticks. Our shields were large metal ash can covers that we absconded with from the street. As the most competitive and adventurous of my friends, I often led the charge. I was always the victor at scissor locks, a wrestling game that allowed me to take down my opponents and lock them between my legs while lying on my back until they screamed for mercy. I won because of the impressive strength of my limbs.

Another of our favorite games was climbing man-made dirt mounds at construction sites, surrounded by the scent of dank concrete and upturned earth from newly poured foundations, a smell I loved. Fighting off the others while covered in dirt from head to foot, the rule was that whoever reached the top of the hill first was named King of the Mountain. Other times we would clamber onto the roof of the parking garage, rip off the rubber shingles, and hurl them at each other like missiles. The goal was to mortally wound our make-believe opponents. It was not easy to achieve, but we loved the battle.

The most fatal wound for me, however, was the onset of puberty. Before puberty, running, fighting, and proving my strength felt natural. I was equal or superior in my prowess and abilities to anyone my age, regardless of gender. With all my might I ran, biked, and flexed my budding muscles without an inkling that soon I would no longer conquer or belong.

Starting at age eleven, as my small breasts began to bud on my strong, flat frame, my bravado and self-confidence began to wane. While I was still detached from the changing contours of my unruly body, I didn’t really notice that my male peers were growing stronger than me—until the day I lay wounded and sprawled on the ground, looking up at them. A fourteen-year-old boy had received a new set of boxing gloves and challenged me to a fight. What had been a typical boxing match between friends turned into the day that would forever shift my perspective.

My eleven-year-old face just wasn’t prepared for the wallop it received from my opponent. The shocking pain of his punch folded me like an accordion, dropping me to the ground. Then two other boys joined in and pinned me down to further illustrate their superior strength. I struggled to rise but, with their laughter filling my ears, they held me down while their hands cupped my undeveloped breasts. Mortified, I lay there, too weak to defend myself.

Like lightning, I had been struck, not only by the force of a boy’s punch but also by the cruel reality that I was a girl and that being a girl now presented me with physical limitations. I could not defend myself. I never faced restraints before then, at least ones that I was aware of. It would be my last competitive battle with the boys in the neighborhood and my first realization that, at least when it came to physical prowess, I was inferior. At that moment, a paradigm shifted dramatically for me, a change that would soon be accentuated by my own family dynamic and alter my life forever.

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The 1950s and early 1960s were not the time or place to be vocal. Secrets are often the only things we can hold on to when silence is the fashion. No one ever spoke about what was right, or, for that matter, what was wrong. There were just expectations. I moved through my younger years with a smile on my face, totally enthralled with childhood, innocent, until adolescence blasted me.

Deciphering what I could and could not do with my changing female body disturbed me a great deal. The boundaries of possibility were already shrinking. More and more resigned, I often asked myself—did my desire to have the options and choices in life that boys had really matter? I was a girl, destined to be a housewife and a mother anyway. Perhaps that is why my mother gave me that baby stroller. It was a type of litmus test to prepare me for who I would become. I could sense that I was not expected to go out into the world and battle like the boys to make a living and have adventures. My stomach churned with a nagging discomfort at the notion of a life confined by a single limiting scenario, being a wife and mother, but any other thought was bewildering.

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I was eleven when my father moved us from Queens to a house in Jericho, Long Island. The split-level house backed up to potato farms and was part of a subdivision called Birchwood Park Homes. I loved having a house and being close to nature. There were lots of trees to climb, so leaving Queens wasn’t so bad for me. My fifteen-year-old brother, Michael, hated it.

My friends at this time, the eleven- and twelve-year-old boys and girls in Long Island, were starting to blossom into preteens, which meant they saw each other with new curiosity. To demonstrate their maturing sexuality, the boys started to engage in the pulling and plucking of girls’ bra straps. In a desperate attempt to fit in, I begged my mother for a bra, which my undeveloped breasts could not fill.

However, I felt little sexual attraction to boys and couldn’t relate to the suffocating hormones that flew through the air between the young girls and boys who were my friends. I was already becoming aware of the vast chasm of expectations that existed between boys and girls. My beloved bat and glove were now relegated to a shelf in my closet. Life became even more baffling as I tried to transition from perceiving boys as friends and teammates to objects of desire, and my differentness from other girls became even more pronounced, at least to me. My world had changed and I so wanted to fit in, to follow the prescribed path—to desire boys and have boyfriends, to be like all the other girls.

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My mother, Marcia Cohen, and her sisters, Simi and Blanche, were the first women I loved. Of course, I loved my uncles (their husbands), but they weren’t nearly as dynamic to me as my aunts. My mother and her sisters never said it outright, but they seemed to feel the same way. The men either lacked their intelligence, joie di vivre, or integrity. My mother and aunts were all beautiful, honest, and filled with life and mischief. When we got together, they often spoke Yiddish so that I and my cousins, Bobby and Alan (Blanche’s sons), and Ellen (Simi’s daughter), wouldn’t understand what gossip or marriage problems they