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You asked me to tell you the story of the day the Radical Lesbians stole the press from the youth service agency where I worked. That was 1971 - MayDay Year - the big spring demonstration that followed all those years of Vietnam Moratoriums in Washington, the once and for all demo that aimed to stop the government in its tracks. The Capitol was bombed that year and they thought Leslie Bacon, a young woman in the MayDay Collective, knew something about it.
One day the FBI came looking for her. She was in the shower and when she heard them coming she climbed up naked, out the trap door in the roof. They chased her across the rooftops til they caught her. At the same time, someone came around warning all the communal houses, "Flush your dope ... clean up ... there's FBI knocking on everyone's doors!"
After all that died down, in November, I was asleep one morning in my basement furnace room on Lamont Street, where 12 of us adults and 3 kids lived. A little way down the hall was Sharon, sleeping too, when the phone started ringing through our dreams.
Sharon answers it. She comes into my room and says, "We've got to get down to the office! The Lesbians are stealing the press!" So we throw on some clothes, jump on my Kawasaki 90 and ride down to the bottom of the 19th Street hill.
When we got there, the press was gone, the women were gone, the truck was gone, and Bill Treanor -- the director and founder of Special Approaches in Juvenile Assistance -- had just arrived. He stood there with his hands on his hips, squinting down the street at nothing, furious!
We went inside. He and I had never met. My job interview with him was scheduled for that morning. Sharon, who was becoming my lover, had been running a job counseling project for this group and was training me to replace her, trying to get permission from this guy.
Here I am, this woman discovering her own Lesbianism, in the presence of this man, who's FURIOUS at these Lesbians called The Furies, who, in his reality, have stolen a piece of property from the Free Community, as we called it in those days. He stroked his beard, put his feet up on the desk, tried to lean back and behave reasonably, act like he really wanted to understand.
In the midst of my job interview, he asked ME why these women did it. I didn't know 'em. But I knew they called themselves The Furies and didn't want to work with men, and that seemed sensible, but SO hard to explain ... to men.
The Furies confused me, too, actually. I'd seen them in public, at poetry readings and movement events, being separatist and provocative, putting each other and all us women on the line, pointing their fingers in a crowd of women they knew, who were still straight. "You must LEAVE your man!" ABANDON your boy child!" I thought they were obnoxious, but certainly the most sexy and interesting stuff around.
So I got one of their numbers and called them up. "Listen," I said, "I want to hear your side of the story. I feel caught in the middle, and I wanna know what you did and why. What's going on?"
That's when they explained to me that the press was really theirs. It had been voted to them democratically at a meeting of The Free Community. It's just that Bill wasn't there, he was vacationing in Mexico. He never would have approved it anyway, he would have filibustered. But they'd presented their case to ALL the assembled groups and individuals that came to that meeting called to decide what to do about the press.
Everyone voted that they had the best plan and that men could get print training lots of other places and that it should go to them. But Bill never answered their phone calls when he came back from Mexico, and they had a year's worth of publishing planned, ready to go.
They explained to me that Bill and the Institute for Policy Studies - our local hip/radical think tank - had gotten the press cheap, second-hand, and announced that they were making it available to the whole community. But when the women tried to use it, Bill put them through all these numbers. He was good at that.
So they debated about what to do over the whole summer while they planned their publications - the monthly Furies newspaper, and different poetry books on women loving women, and little essay collections on class, Lesbianism, ageism and racism. And they realized, "Hey, talking with him isn't gonna do any good, action's what he understands." So they'd come early that morning with a crew of moving men and took the big press down the two flights of stairs and out the front door before anyone could stop them.
The woman I talked to said, "You're crazy to be working for that man. He will screw you over. You shouldn't give your energy to men, they will screw you over in the end." And I said, "Thank you for the advice. I think it is ... uh ... probably true, but I feel my role is as a mediator, between forces, and I'm gonna try to do this." And I did. For years and years.
So anyway, The Furies eventually contacted IPS themselves and negotiated directly with them. And maybe because two of the Furies -- Charlotte Bunch and Rita Mae Brown -- had been close to the IPS men before in the movement, they got it all worked out. They kept the press ... and published everything they said they were gonna publish too.