When We Were Outlaws: A memoir of love & revolution

GREAT NEWS!
My new memoir found a publisher—Spinsters Ink, an old established feminist house.
Outlaws is coming out to bookstores (and Amazon.com), on or about October 18th.
You can now pre-order your copy from Amazon, click here (or from your favorite independent bookstore) and see my author page too.

So we’ve set the date for a big, splashy, and unusual launch EVENT on Sunday, Nov. 6th. Since the book is about my life in the free-love, free-sex era of the early ‘70s—perhaps we’ll find some free pot—just lying around—on Sunday, Nov 6. Do we dare? Come, see, light up! Mark your calendars.

And yes, the backstory—Outlaws was delayed because I was among the “Alyson 24”—the authors whose new books were under contract to be published by Alyson Books last year. If you read the gay literati tabloids then you might know that Regent /Here Media, the owner of Alyson, is being sued by Bank of America/ Merrill Lynch. So, like the other Alyson authors, including Michael Musto, I had to go and find another publisher.
Gratefully, Outlaws has a new home under the watchful editing eyes of Katherine Forrest, editor in chief at Spinsters. She and I will work out the final, final, finally revised draft this summer. And the cover is right now being designed by Alice Hom, that brilliant designer of the GenderPlay in Lesbian Culture art exhibition that many of you saw.

The first 50 folks who buy Outlaws will get your book autographed with a personal message (send me your book), or a personalized, dated and signed Outlaws postcard saying muchisimas gracias for your support! (Email me cordovajj@gmail.com for details & instructions)

During most of 2010 my LEX gang of lesbian guerilla activists and I were organizing the huge Butch Voices LA Regional Conference (see story below).
I was also busy writing an essay, The New Politics of Butch,” for a new anthology about butch and femme culture that is now available. Look for Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme (edited by Ivan Coyote & Zena Sharman) at your bookstore or on Amazon. I’m told the book features great writers and the latest politics about the thorny subject of gender-identity in all its nuances.
On the more personal front I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my collar bone and some ribs, which kept me very inactive for three months! But spring has sprung in sunny California, and I’m looking forward to planning more LEX events for the lesbiqueer community this fall!

Outlaws: The Memoir!

A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s.

Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is “to the revolution” –to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground, Angela Davis; exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement. By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era—ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives—with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the ‘70s, and for those who weren’t around but still ask ‘What was it like?’ – Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today.

With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.

This month in Curve Magazine

What’s in a word?

Particulars about ‘butch’ lesbians…..



Great Gay in the park! Dyke Day LA, with nigh unto 400 queers of the lesbian variety, was laid back and cool. The atmosphere, complete with whiffs of pot, made me think of our gay-kiss-ins at Griffith Park back in the day.
Fewer lip-locks this afternoon, but now it’s chic (almost legal) to dyke-out in public.

But while handing out postcards there for the upcoming ButchVoices.LA Conference, I did stumble upon some remarks that clearly show education about butch (or femme) needs some brush-up. Like one young person said my lover wasn’t really “femme” because she’s ape-shit watching soccer and the world cup this week. And I overheard another femme say to her friend, “Naturally, the femmes did all the behind-the-scenes work.”

Since when do femmes not like sports, and since when are femmes NOT on stage! Most femmes I know had at least one guitar-carrying butch hauling their shit (oops, accessories) up and down Barnsdall’s grassy knoll. As for my femme, she often asks me, “What’s the point of games with balls in them?” She’s only mesmerized by her country (South Africa) playing against my country (Mexico)! After that she switched the TV back to extreme-architectural-do-over, or whatever.

But a few more words on the topic of butch/femme education; butches are slightly more prone to watching sports on TV, but that’s bro-bonding more than following the ball. Neither the “B” word nor “femme” has anything to do with topping—in bed or out of bed. I know lots of alpha femmes who do both as their calling card. And plenty of “soft” butches who dig it.

Oh, and when I say “soft butch,” I’m not talking not shining your belt buckle or wearing your hair long. Buckles and hair do not a butch make. The “soft” only refers to the emotional “yin” quality. (That’s like in the yin & yang of things.) “Soft butches” (unlike ‘classic’ butches) go with femmes (or other butches) who are alpha: like power femmes, barracuda femmes, some high femmes (but not all), burlesque femmes, or just plain ol’ diva femmes (who hate to be called “plain” or “ol’” anything!)

“Butch” is about your style, presentation, way of thinking, and innate body language. “Butch” should not be confused with your emotionality (there are dominant butches, and plenty of pillow-king butches). And “butch” should not be confused with what kind of job/career path you’ve chosen. I know electrician femmes and Ph.d femmes, and a whole lot of femmes who are not in the “giving” professions. Some femmes I know last “gave” in the Ice Age.

So butches - and ‘studs’ and tombois and genderqueer leaning to the masculine dykes -you gotta be clear about who you are. If you’re not, your femme may just fill in your blanks. Butch dress and presentation is one variable of butch identity, but presentation does not necessarily define a butch’s sexual performance or her emotional comfort zone around dominance (or lack thereof) in a relationship.

All of which is to plug the upcoming ButchVoices.LA Conference in October. Ya gotta come so you can get your shit together around being a butch. If you are not ‘studly’ enough to come on your own, bring your butch-boi buddy, your femme, or any of your genderqueer friends who want to check out the scene and make up their own minds.
You can’t beat the price--$50 (sliding scale) for a whole weekend of best lesbiqueer performers and very smart lesbian speakers from all over the fucking country. Can’t get this at the Dinah!

Check out the who’s who of the butch-world at the conference’s website: http://bvla2010.com/
Kudos to the organizers of Dyke Day in the Park, and both Dyke March nights. Nice job!

Butches and Their Clothes – Still Walking the Gauntlet

Drag Kings, fashion shows, butches and ties are everywhere, but what’s all the commotion about? Seems like only yesterday it was femmes and lipstick lesbians stressing out about ‘what to wear’ to the next hot event. Now we’ve got the Top 100 Hot Butches List, and the heat is now on us—butches—to toss the t-shirts and rag-ass jeans. Don’t leave the house lookin’ like a washed-up granola dyke with bad hair.
Are there politics behind butches and their clothes, or is this just another reason for lesbians to trend-out meaninglessly? Yes, we got politics. Clothes are an important dimension of the new butch renaissance. Because many of us have been deeply traumatized about clothing.

As a teenager, I hated being dragged to Macy's by my mother. Every trip meant a new oppression by girl things called bras, stockings, slips, shoes that pinch, and other ‘harnesses’ for parts of my body that used to be free. I could not figure out how to get into the bra-thing and was sure my mother had it wrong—it had to be a new sort of football jockstrap. But my teenage voice didn’t count. I was forced to endure five years of daily gender oppression.
In my first year of college and freedom, I was sure I still hated clothes shopping but I had to wear something, so back to Macy's I went. Parking my Chevy in the only free parking spot I could find, I accidentally entered the store by another entrance. What a shock! I found myself in paradise in Macy's—the Boy’s Department. The colors, the styles, real jackets, normal shoes and trousers! I couldn’t believe it! There was nothing wrong with ‘shopping’, I’d just been lost in the women’s sections all these years. Thrilled, I moved on…and had an identity crisis in the Men’s Department! And no, it never occurred to me that I was crossing the evil waters of the gender binary. I hadn’t a clue. My body was just responding instinctively to all the right clothes.

But my lifetime trauma wasn’t over. As my body grew into a woman’s with several butch features—like being so short-waisted that women’s pants crawled up to my breasts, and men’s shirt sleeves hung below my elbows—I spent the next couple of decades running back and forth between the various departments, including petite, looking desperately for an article of clothing that fit without causing havoc within my cross-gendered psyche. The low-waisted fad was terrific, but I went years not buying new socks until the young men’s department—and young men themselves—finally stopped wearing children’s socks. I always buy three of everything that fits because years might pass before I’d find another shirt that worked with my butch wardrobe.
Becoming a feminist helped me understand the politics of clothes—that clothes were made to reinforce heterosexual stereotypes. And to marginalize those of us who didn’t fit the fashion paradigm of “male” and “female.”
That’s when I got angry and started dressing with a political vengeance. I wanted to prove to the world that a masculine-inclined woman could look dapper. I even trained my siblings and parents. When my mother bought me hooped gold earrings on my 40th birthday, my father - seeing my sad face - offered to take them away and bought me a cool black belt instead.

In case you think anti-butch remarks are a thing of the past—I overheard my femme partner having a conversation at the last party we went to. She was talking with two 50-something year old lesbian feminists:

“Butch doesn’t happen anymore,” one of them sneered, as if they smelled rotten veggies.

“Labels don’t need to be prescriptive,” said my femme. “Masculinity doesn’t belong to men anymore. Haven’t you heard?”

“The word ‘masculine’ is still a dirty word to us,” they countered.

“Butch and femme exist in every generation of lesbians,” my woman said."Why don’t we stop trying to tell each other who to be?”

“Well! We don’t need to be men.”

So I see my Sweetheart point to me and my butch bud Pat Aldarete, both in tie & jacket that night. She says, “Jeanne and Pat have no choice but to claim their masculinity. When they walk into restaurants people still stare at them. Like they have a right to ask, “Are you a guy or a chick?”

“Oh, that never happens anymore!” I hear my two same-aged ‘sisters’ tell my lover.
A few hours later, my girl and I go out to a Valley eatery, and I walk the het gauntlet of stares from middle-aged straight men and their wives. But…oh wait! This time it is different. The only ones who didn’t stare was the straight couple under thirty.

So yes, butches are still trying to express our real selves in a world that still has a het gauntlet and doesn’t make clothes for us. Nowadays there are a few butch fashion lines struggling to break even, and even Nordstrom makes that occasional shirt “for the tailored woman.” So, butch—or some call it “androgynous” –clothing trauma lives on (made only slightly easier by a more unisexed society.) But that’s what all the fuss is about, we butches are still trying to change the world.

*L.A’s next Butch fashion show takes place Friday, October 9, at the BUTCHVoices.LA Conference. Email for more info: BVLA2010@gmail.com

What the Maine Vote Tells Us

Last night, early in the night, I saw the stats trending down in Maine and called my close buddy, Ivy Bottini to tell her, “We’re losing Maine.”
I added, “The majority never votes positively on the rights of a minority. They will always protect their turf.” (That’s why we invented democracy – so that the majority couldn’t trample on the rights of the minority. )
What Ivy told me in return was an old maxim that we veteran activists know well, “We have to take power. No one is going to give it to us.”

So I called Mark Sullivan, spokesman for Protect Maine Equality, and asked him, “Do you have a back-up plan for tomorrow? Our troops should be staging protests, or a statewide sit-in tomorrow.”
But I could tell, he didn’t want to hear about defeat that early in the evening.

So I get up this morning and see that Maine lost by one full percentage point more than we did last fall in California, 53-47%.

There was nothing wrong with Maine’s campaign and nothing critical wrong with California’s either. Both struggled valiantly and brought our side up from the mid 30% ten years ago to the highs of 47-48%.
Simply put, straight people want to keep their “M” word. If gay people can get married, how can they understand their world? It’s changing too much, too fast, too soon for them. I know these are the comments of older people like my Roman Catholic parents. They don’t understand the subtlety of our argument that civil unions and domestic partnerships are not separate-but-equal categories. They are telling us, “Why can’t you just take your civil rights, since you say your fight is about civil rights, and leave us the M word?”
This sentiment showed clearly in Washington state last night where our winning ballot measure (Yes, we won in Washington!) simply elevate the status of civil unions to grant us all the rights of married couples—without using the “M” word.

What does this tell us? What is the message of Maine and Washington for our gay strategic leaders?

I think the LBGT movement should stop wasting our precious funds and energy on a strategy that leaves 90% of gays and lesbians out of the picture. We have lost in 31 states now, and the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over regardless of feedback. I think our leaders should be more concerned with winning our rights, instead of fighting paper-tiger battles around the “M” word. We should re-focus our efforts on doing what Washington did—winning. Our movement needs to be about winning civil rights for domestic partners in all 50 states. Dozens of states don’t even have domestic partnership (civil union) statues. They have nothing. Where are our big organizations and their purse strings when it comes to fighting for simple recognition of gays as couples in Kansas, Florida, or Colorado?

I say its time to re-direct the gay movement into fighting the real battle for civil rights in all 50 states. Put the “M” word on the back burner for a decade and watch—it will fall into our laps as soon as the older generation stops voting. But during this next decade, our people need REAL rights, not words, in order to conduct their lives as fuller couples, parents and human beings with practical needs.

As a movement we’ve made real progress over the last four decades. But progress means winning battles, not losing expensive wars. We cannot allow the right to define the direction of our movement as we pour millions into their coffers. If we re-direct our efforts towards writing an effective series of laws that gives gay & lesbian couples their civil rights, in much the same way as California legislators like Sheila Kuehl did over the last twenty years, gay couples in dozens of states will profit from this re-direction.

Lesbians Leading the Marriage Fight …I don’t think so!

A rebel dyke’s thoughts on marriage

I was shocked to read in Don Kilhefner’s last column in Frontiers IN LA, that he believes lesbians are leading the same-sex marriage fight. Part of me wants to say, “And what’s wrong with that? White-gay-men have led almost every fight in our movement for the past 40 years. And the other part of me wants to ask, “Where did you get this crazy notion?”
In his article, “The Same-Sex Marriage Steamroller” Kilhefner says, “Let me respectfully suggest that the same-sex marriage issue is largely a lesbian-led one.” As evidence for this odd conclusion, he cites an article printed in the New York Times that “indicates that nearly 70% of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts are between women.”
I don’t doubt that lesbians are getting married far more than gay men. This is nothing new. Dykes have been more into commitment, home-building together, and nesting than gay men’s more freewheeling lifestyle -- decades before the ‘marriage’ issue wound up on the front burner of our political agenda.
But to cite the fact that lesbians are more inclined toward marriage than gay men as evidence that the marriage issue is “largely a lesbian-led one” is a sloppy and sexist conclusion. It is true that there are lesbians in the leadership of the marriage fight, but for every gay woman in leadership, I cite gay male names and organizations like Geoff Kors of Equality California, Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, Cleve Jones, blah, blah….
And yes, for the first time in our history, some organizations also have lesbian leadership like Torie Osborn, Kate Kendall, and Jenny Pfizer, and our home-grown maverick, Robin Tyler. So, for the first time in the 40 year history of the LBGT struggle, perhaps the marriage fight is truly co-gender in its leadership. And I realize that to some men, equal leadership might feel like lesbian domination but this is not fact.
Kilhefner goes on to say that “if something was so far out of balance in favor of gay men’s issues, our sisters, right so, would and have in the past, fervently pointed it out to gay men.” To that adjudication I say – the LGBTQ movement has almost always been out of balance in its pursuit of issues that affect gay men. In the radical 70s the movement was led by gay men who sought to eradicate laws inhibiting gay men’s sexuality. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the male leadership’s single-issue was fighting AIDS. And in this century the energy-field has been all about the T, as in transition and transgender. So there has never been a decade in which an L word issue has dominated. Until, perhaps now. So please guys, don’t get all hen-pecked over the fact that dykes are co-leading the marriage fight. We lesbians have been with you and supporting your issues for a very long time.

And as to marriage itself, I do heartily agree with Kilhefner and Ivy Bottini’s recent essays that our LGBT movement is in danger, not from lesbians, but from our co-gender leaders who think that marriage is the only issue on the gay agenda. I am a lesbian who does not believe in state-sanctified relationships. And I know thousands of lesbian feminists, like myself, who are not getting married because we believe that the vow we make to each other in front of family and friends IS the most sacred and important.
I do believe that we LGBT folk might be over-narrowing our movement into a single-issued struggle that will not serve us in the future. I saw the Women’s Movement almost die because it focused all of women’s liberation on the ERA Amendment (which never did pass). The Suffragette Movement (for women to get the vote), did disappear from the map with the passage of the 20th Amendment. The Black Civil Rights movement became narrowly focused on the Civil Rights Act (1964) and after it passed, that movement lost much of its steam. So history does tell us, a single-issued movement can be quickly cut off at the knees. Social movements are strongest when they put forth a broad range of goals.
I worry, along with Bottini and Kilhefner, that the over-focus on marriage weakens the broad health of our struggle for full equal rights for every lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer person not just in California, but in the whole world. We should be sending money and troops (organizers) to small towns in America and countries in the world where gender-variant people like us are in jail. We should be in the streets protesting the discharge of women and men from the armed services. We should be right there, with legal defense and money, when people are murdered on the small streets of the Midwest. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be caught up in the luxury of quibbling over which year to return to the California ballot. As long as we are divided, that’s a signal that the time is not now. But now is the time to build and strengthen our political, social service and cultural institutions. Yes, we will win the right to marry one day soon. The real question is -- will we endure as a community long after the last vote has been cast on marriage?

When Butchdom Was in Flower

I’ve just had one of the most unusual experiences of my life – being in unknown city surrounded by 400 Butch identified - women, dykes, bois, trans folk, youthful studlets, aged bulldykes, feminist she/he’s, rapper-aggressives, classic and soft butches, and every other kind of lesbian Butch I’ve never seen nor heard about.

Yeah – I was there at the start of a new movement being born within the great family of LGBT people, but here the “B” stands for Butch. Yes, I’m talking about the first ever Butch Voices Conference in Oakland, August 20-24, 2009.

Walking into the grand ballroom of the Marriott up to the stage to give my keynote address, I saw and felt a great wave of power and awe sweep toward me. The power in the surge felt all-woman, yet also mass-culine, a rough-and-tumble, yet strangely elegant surge of love. What is this power? I asked myself as my shoulders coiled in fight or flight mode, the first instinct of growing up butch in a hostile world.

But then I saw Jewelle Gomez in the second row stand up and start clapping. And then the whole room rose up like an old-bull rising to her feet one last time, and I realized that they were clapping for me like I was Achilles returned from a lifetime of war.

And suddenly I realized that this surge was the force of butch-love. And it wasn’t just for me it was for each other. None of us had ever in our lifetime been with a great crowd of our own kind and this was awe, amazement, and wait… I remember the feeling from the 70s, great bands of lesbian feminists gathering and shouting and reveling in ‘sisterhood’, but only this time… it was lesbian brotherhood.

And later I found myself in a workshop led by Sasha T. Goldberg - a room packed with 60 butches who’d come to hear what the hell the workshop title “Bulldagger: For Women-Identified, Female Pronoun using Butches” – meant. And what it turned out to mean was some fear that our kind of butch might be an endangered species. We worried that so many of the young Butches were choosing unusual combinations of mixing ‘butch’ with masculinity. Did that mean that our definition of butch was being cut off at the knees? So we put our fear out on the table and looked at it. We talked about the loneliness of growing up as the original gender-warriors of lesbianism. And out of that shared pain came the realization that we need to re-define ‘butch’ in a post-trans world. And out of this realization we decided that we would not surrender to fear, not even to the fear of extinction. No, that’s not the butch way. We don’t surrender to fear. So we decided, we are not going to cut off our junior brothers who are taking ‘butch’ beyond the binary of male & female. How could we reject them when our own lives are about demanding that the straight world move over and accept the existence of masculine woman? How could we divorce them off when they are only creating a new platform out of the freedom we fought to give to them?

And so it was decided, almost from the very first day, not just in this workshop, but the Butch Voice Conference as a whole declared that we didn’t want to draw a line between female and male identified butches. We didn’t want to cut off the new shadows of what it might mean to be butch. We just said “no” to dividing ourselves along the patriarchally created lines of binary genders that we’ve fought so long and hard to bury.

And in case some dykes are out there saying, so what’s the big news, a bunch of ‘guys’ got together and decided they are guys? That wasn’t the case. When I gave the Conference organizers the title of my keynote, “Keeping our Feminism, While Exploring our Masculinities,” I thought I might be a lone voice of feminism at the weekend. But I was determined to insist that the new generation of butches know the strength of Feminism and don’t grow up without it. So I was shocked and over-joyed when butch after butch, particularly the African American, working-class butches, whose voice was strong this weekend, claimed feminism as a cornerstone of their own ideology of ‘butch.’

And yes, Butch Voices also taught me a lot about class. Things that this other class, privileged, Chicana, feminist, classic-butch never knew. And I had one of the best nights of my lesbian life rocking to the performance night talent called “Butch Nation” which blew the roof off Humanity Hall in Oakland. But these are others stories…more stories about butch voices…that I hope to write about later.

So for the thousands of dykes who missed this extra-ordinary event, tune into http://www.butchvoices.com/ - because the awesome organizers promise ButchVoices2 two years from this summer.

For more from me see my website under construction at subterior.com/cordovajj, moving shortly to www.JeanneCordova.com

PS Title of my blog gives a nod to 1922 book/play/movie 'When Knighthood Was in Flower', about chivalry in the Tudor Period!

PHOTO: Lisa Everly. (seen here, Lynn H. Ballen & Jeanne Cordova, co-producers of the LEX-Lesbian Exploratorium exhibit, GenderPlay, part of the BV art showcase 'Visually Speaking' )

What do Sotomayor and Palin have in common?

Watching the sexism, 10 white men ‘bullying’ a lone woman reminds me of the worst of Chris Matthews trying to grok Hillary Clinton. And just when I feel my stomach start to settle down one of these guys from The Family of Old White Guys brings up the “wise Latina” quote for the 45th time and makes me feel I was wrong to come back from living in Mexico. As a Latina American, it doesn’t take much to out-wise these good old boys who haven’t swept a floor since they left Mommy, I am appalled by the overt racism of the supposedly wisest men in America – Senators.

I want to paint my protest sign and get out there on the streets for Sotomayor, a feeling I haven’t had since the paint-Anita Hill-as-a-tramp in the Thomas for Justice hearings decades ago. So I can feel the heat from my Latino hermanas across the country. I ask myself -- Why are Republican Senators being so obviously racist? Don’t they know they are loosing thousands of Latino votes by the hour?”

And then it dawns on me! These hearings are not about Sonia Sotomayor, she’s a shoo-in, everyone has admitted that. So what’s this show about? It’s about Sarah Palin’s constituency and who’s gonna be its champion come 2012. Her constituency, the Last White People Standing Party, that’s the LWPS party, not to be confused with the NSWP party – the National Socialist White People’s Party, yep, the NAZIs.

The Last White People Standing party is the last gasp of rural, used-to-be, the ‘real’ America, why are all these people of so many colors taking us over constituency that Palin now represents. And the Last White People are very, very pissed off. And something, I believe, the rest of us have to take seriously, if only to watch them try to take back their disappearing country. That will affect the rest of us.

Obama’s election as our first African American president, and come on, Michael Jackson was blacker than Obama, has tipped the balance of power in this country so much that LWPS might well be that missing third party on the national stage. Remember Ross Perot who at least hid his racism behind his ‘pro-business’ rhetoric? So let’s watch out for the rise of this third party. Oh it won’t be called the Last White People Standing party …no, it’ll be called something very democratic sounding and close to God. Let’s see, the Patriot’s Party, or maybe the National American Party. Yeah, that’s a good catch-all word – American. What does that stand for?

Pop Quiz Question: What will that new Party be called? Best answer gets front seats at the next sold-out LEX event! And, kudos to Angela Brinskele who got the last pop quiz lesbian history question first and right. Still owe Angela that GenderPlay T-shirt! Congrats to Angela!

Rules for Radicals....

Righto, haven’t blogged much lately, but now I’m on a run. We’re working on the Top 20 Required Reading for Young Activists list. We’re breaking it up into philosophy, basic classics, gay, lesbian and trans categories.
For now, start with a basic -- Saul Alinsky’s classic, “Rules for Radicals.” It’s small, in paperback, cheapo. Alinsky was The Man in early 70s community organizing and Obama and I both carried the Rules in our back pockets. In 1972 I did my Masters in Social Work at UCLA and wrote my thesis on, “The Organized Lesbian Community of L.A.” The professor gave me a “C” saying, “I don’t believe this exists, but I’ll pass you because I know you’re going to create it. Nice try.”
Alinsky was our guideposts at UCLA School of Social Work for both Chicano and Black Student Alliances, whites too!
So here's a question: Anyone know who Del Martinez is (besides the President of the UCLA Chicano Alliance back in my day)?
That’s the pop-history question of the day. (no googling!)
A GenderPlay t-shirt will be awarded to whoever knows!