Rita Mae Brown: Lavender Menace

Day 4 of the Pride 30 Project for Pride Month, 2018.

As an ardent lesbian feminist, Rita Mae Brown had difficulty finding her place within the social movements of 1960s and 1970s America. Born in 1944 and raised in Pennsylvania and Florida, Brown made her way to New York City where she attended New York University and, in 1967, joined Columbia University’s Student Homophile League. She left the group shortly after she realized gay men, like straight men, did not care about women’s issues. She then joined a New York City chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), who cared about women’s rights, but were concerned with appearing “respectable” and therefore suspicious of the presence of lesbians within the organization.

Betty Friedan, one of NOW’s founders and the organization’s first president, infamously referred to lesbians as “the Lavender Menace.” By the early 1970s, the mid-to-late twentieth-century Women’s Movement (also referred to as the second wave of the U.S. feminist movement) and the Gay Liberation Movement were gathering steam, giving gay women the consciousness to articulate how their experiences differed from both heterosexual women and gay men. At this time, the articulation of a distinct lesbian identity was often necessitated by exclusions gay women faced in both feminist and gay organizations. Feminists such as Friedan thought that the presence of lesbians within the Women’s Movement, and within NOW specifically, would hinder their goals by furthering the assumption that all feminists were man-hating lesbians who wanted to destroy “respectable” notions of womanhood, sexuality, and the traditional American family.

Brown, filing away Friedan’s comments about “the Lavender Menace,” next tried the radical feminist organization Redstockings. Founded in January of 1969 — the same year as the Stonewall Inn Riots — Redstockings, unlike NOW, were less concerned with the politics of feminine respectability. Though the group focused on more controversial issues like reproductive rights, abortion, and the rights of sex workers, they were not particularly concerned with issues faced by lesbians. The group, whose analyses were often grounded in Marxist theory, regarded lesbianism as a political choice as opposed to a personal identity that constituted an oppressed class in need of liberation. They likewise regarded gay men as choosing other men as romantic and sexual partners due to misogyny.

Brown was, however, impressed by Redstockings focus on “consciousness raising” as a feminist strategy. “Consciousness raising,” in the context of second wave feminism, typically involved small groups of (typically white, middle-class) women sharing their experiences about a particular issue. This act resulted in women’s consciousness being raised as they realized their struggles were not individual, but widespread, and therefore a product of gender-based oppression. The act of “consciousness raising” within the Women’s Movement can be summarized by the phrase “the personal is political.”

Though Brown left Redstockings, she would take the idea of “consciousness raising” with her in her quest for an organization, and perhaps even a movement, that did not sideline the concerns of gay women. So, in January of 1970, she showed up at a meeting of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) — a radical gay rights organization formed in the aftermath of the Stonewall Inn Riots — to tell the women of GLF they needed their own organization. In a nod to her time with Redstockings, she boldly announced she was starting a lesbian-only consciousness-raising group.

Propelled by Betty Friedan’s cries about “the Lavender Menace” within NOW, Brown told the women she recruited from GLF they needed to write a statement articulating the necessity of a unique lesbian feminist position. They would present this manifesto at an upcoming NOW event, the Second Congress to Unite Women, being held in New York City on May 1st of 1970. The group was also angered by a March 25th New York Times article penned by straight feminist Susan Brownmiller, who dismissed Friedan’s stance toward lesbians in the Women’s Movement as “a lavender herring, perhaps, but no clear and present danger.” They saw Brownmiller, in her attempt to take a humorous jab at Friedan, as dismissing the significance of lesbian exclusion within the movement. The women — including Lois Hart, Cynthia Funk, Ellen Bedoz, Artemis March, and Barbara XX — wrote down their thoughts, which March then organized into a unified whole. Their manifesto, which opened with the line “a lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion,” was titled “The Woman-Identified Woman.” Because the piece was written collectively, they listed the author as “Radicalesbians.”

Brown knew they needed a bold way to get their point across, so she proposed a zap. Zaps, popularized by the post-Stonewall organization the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), are a theatrical form of direct action protest that typically involve the public shaming of an individual or organization to force them to change their ways or take a stance on a particular issue. One of GAA’s most notable zaps involved targeting New York City Mayor John Lindsay in order to make him take a public stance on gay rights. On April 13th of 1970, GAA members infiltrated the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera and shouted gay slogans at the mayor as he and his wife made their entrance.

Inspired by the GAA, Brown decided her group would take over the Second Congress to Unite Women. The group, now referring to themselves as “the Lavender Menace” in a reclaimatory fashion, had forty T-shirts printed. Ellen Broidy and Louise Rhodes offered up their apartment where they dyed the freshly printed shirts a pale shade of purple in the bathtub. They also printed copies of their manifesto and made signs bearing slogans such as “You’re Going to Love the Lavender Menace” and “Women’s Liberation IS a Lesbian Plot.” The Lavender Menace was ready.

On May 1st, the Second Congress to Unite Women kicked off at 7:00 PM in the auditorium of Intermediate School 70 on West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. As the first speaker prepared to take the stage, two Radicalesbians, who had cased the school, cut the lights and the microphone. In the ensuing darkness, lesbians, wearing Lavender Menace T-shirts and holding placards, filled the aisles of the auditorium. When the lights turned back on the zappers began yelling, raucously inviting members of the audience to join them.

Lesbian Karla Jay, a plant in the audience, stood up and yelled “Yes, yes, sisters! I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement,” as she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Lavender Menace T-shirt. “Who wants to join us?,” Brown hollered to the audience, and when some answered in the affirmative, she pulled off her Lavender Menace T-shirt to reveal another underneath, eliciting peals of laughter. Borrowing an expression from her southern upbringing, Brown later remarked that the NOW women were so surprised they didn’t know if they should “shit, run, or go blind.”

After the main action of the zap, the “Lavender Menaces” distributed copies of “The Woman-Identified Woman” and took to the stage to discuss lesbian exclusion within the Women’s Movement. Brown and her group certainly made an impact. At the next national NOW conference, held in September of 1971, a resolution recognizing lesbian rights as “a legitimate concern for feminism” was adopted. No longer would lesbians remain silent within the Women’s Movement.

But zaps were not enough to satisfy Rita Mae Brown. She dreamed of creating a women’s political party that could overthrow the patriarchy. To better understand how power worked on a grand scale, she moved to Washington, D.C., but was unsure what to do next. It was at this time she met Charlotte Bunch, an articulate young lesbian who was a graduate of Duke University. Bunch was in Washington serving as the first woman fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. The pair, who connected both intellectually and physically, had the idea of forming a group to explore the revolutionary potential of lesbian separatism. They would call themselves The Furies, after the three goddesses of vengeance from Greek mythology.

Brown, Bunch, and ten other lesbians (all of whom were white and educated) secured a house located at 219 11th St. SE in Washington, D.C. There they shared, clothes, chores, child care, money, and slept on a common floor. The group also published a collective newsletter to disseminate their theories of lesbian feminism. The Furies, along with other 1970s lesbian feminist separatists, saw lesbianism as a politically revolutionary identity — not because sexuality was strictly a choice — but because lesbian identity had the potential to radically transform society by dismantling both heterosexuality and patriarchy. Though the collective was short lived, disbanding in the spring of 1972, their theories on the confluence of gender and sexual orientation continued to impact the Women’s Movement.

Shortly after leaving The Furies, Brown wrote and published her first novel: Rubyfruit Jungle. Released in 1973, Brown’s semi-autobiographical novel follows the character Molly Bolt, a lesbian raised in poverty who makes her way to New York City to pursue a career in filmmaking. A bestseller upon publication, Rubyfruit Jungle is, arguably, the most popular lesbian work of fiction, surpassing even Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. Unlike Hall’s tormented protagonist, Stephen Gordon, Molly Bolt is self-possessed, seductive, funny, and a clear heroine. In her introduction to the 2015 edition of Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown, however, stated she does not view the book as a “lesbian novel.” Any work labeled with a qualifier, she argued, is relegated to second-class literary status. Nevertheless, for her contributions to lesbian literature, she was awarded the Lee Lynch Classic Book Award and the Pioneer Award at the 27th Lambda Literary Awards in 2016.

Say what you will about Rita Mae Brown and her characteristic bravado, but she has always been, uncompromisingly, herself.

“The reward for conformity,” she once said, “is that everyone likes you except yourself.”