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Here is where — slowly, slowly — I’ll be posting all of my published articles and essays, along with selected talks and other assorted texts. At first, I’ll be concentrating on posting articles from print-only or defunct web publications so, if you’re looking for something that might already be online elsewhere, check here for some links or just Google me. You can subscribe to this page to be notified whenever a new text is added. Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog SuperWeed too!

Trickle-Down Environmentalism versus Ecosystemic Empathy

Trickle-Down Environmentalism versus Ecosystemic Empathy
A Meditation on the Occasion of the World Social Forum
28 & 29 January 2003
Porto Alegre, Brazil

pattrice jones

“No, the waters and the mountains do not belong to the mens. But how do we tell that to Bush and Blair?”

I’m at the Fórum Social Mundial and have no answer for the Brazilian musician who earnestly poses that question after admiring the Alice Walker quotation on my t-shirt. How indeed, I wonder, when even the people who are talking back to Bush and Blair do not understand that basic fact.

These days, most progressive environmentalists endorse what might be called the ‘trickle-down’ theory of environmental justice. Just as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have asserted that the self-interested choices of rich people ultimately help all of the other economic classes, today’s global justice advocates assert that the self-interested choices of “the people” will ultimately help all of the other species on earth. Both theories amount to little more than wishful thinking. Trickle-down economics was and remains a fantasy that justifies individual selfishness without regard for economic realities. Similarly, the ‘power-to-the-people’ theory of environmental justice is an illusion that justifies species selfishness without regard for ecological realities.

I guess most of the activists attending FSM would be disconcerted to hear themselves characterized as self-centered or out of synch with the ecosystem. But from the perspective of concern for all beings, their relentless preoccupation with people, people, people seems extremely egocentric. Water pollution? Only a concern because it hurts people. Desertification? Only a problem because people are thirsty. GMOs? Problematic only because either they or their impacts on ecosystems might hurt people. Violence? Only a problem when directed against people. The solution to each and every one of those environmental problems? Put the power in the hands of “the people.”

An advertisement for a FSM workshop exemplifies this attitude. There is a cartoon of a family in swimming suits, looking sad because their holiday plans have gone awry. The father complains that “our favorite waterfall doesn’t belong to the people anymore.” Barbed wire installed by a corporation prevents them or anyone else from approaching the river and waterfall. The thwarted swimming party — rather than, for example, the thirst of the animals who will no longer be able to reach their usual source of water — is the primary focus of concern. The solution to the terrible problem of the obstructed outing is spelled out in the headline of the poster: “WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!”

This poster hangs on the outside wall of a campus cafe in which activists are relaxing and refreshing themselves. A scrawny, mangy dog — one of the many living ghosts who haunt the venues of the World Social Forum — lies outside, panting in the midday sun, too weak to even get up and move into the shade. Environmental justice activists, many carrying water bottles in their hands, walk by without noticing or stopping to offer a drink to this obviously thirsty animal.

WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!? Who, other than people, has created dead zones in the oceans and polluted rivers and streams? What species uses more than half of all freshwater, leaving all of the remaining species to survive (or not) on the dregs? Who, other than people, is responsible for the climate change that has already irrevocably altered the natural history of the world’s waters? If not people, then who is responsible for the destruction of more than half of all wetlands on the planet? Who, other than people, has driven countless birds, fish, amphibians and plants into extinction by changing or taking the water on which their lives depended?

WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS!? People are the problem! Corporations and communities are just different types of collections of people. “WATER IN PEOPLES HANDS” means shifting the power from one group of people to another. The fundamental fallacies — the notion that water somehow ‘belongs’ to people and the conviction that homo sapiens, as just one of the billions of plant and animal species dependent on water for life, has the sole right to control this vital resource — remain unchallenged. With those dangerous ideas still operative, it’s unlikely that the new bosses of the water would be any more responsible than the old. They might ensure that people (or at least their favored subset of people) would get enough, but their ‘people own the world’ attitude virtually guarantees that they would not take into account the needs of other species, unless those species happened to be deemed useful to humans. Thus, collective ‘ownership’ of water would be only slightly less likely to result in ecosystemic disaster than private or corporate ownership.

Private and corporate control of water are just the latest logical extensions of age-old human attitudes and practices. All of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are founded on the very convenient conviction that “man” has the right and the duty to exercise dominion over the land and the other animals. While some indigenous religions do not accord such unique privileges to humans, other indigenous faiths of the past and present do share the opportune opinion that people occupy a superior position and/or exercise special rights.

The fiction of the FSM is that people, unfettered by states and corporations, will always make smart and just decisions and thus can be trusted to chart the course for all life on this planet. There’s no evidence for this fantasy and plenty of evidence against it. Looking at the thirsty dogs at the World Social Forum, I wonder: If even the most self-consciously progressive among us cannot be trusted to share water with our species’ most long-standing and loyal companions, how can we trust that “the people” in all their diversity will elect to apportion water with wisdom and compassion?

We say “Our world is not for sale,” and by this we mean that natural resources ought not be owned by private entities. “Ownership” is essentially the effective expression of exclusive control and is generally established by some act of actual or threatened private or state violence. Barb wire tears skin. Security guards carry guns and clubs.

Having challenged the idea of “ownership,” are we willing to go further and question the assumption that “the people” as a collective have the right to possess or control natural resources? If we truly believe that mountains and rivers belong to everyone, aren’t we obliged to question the bizarre system of accounting wherein “everyone” includes only humans? If we truly believe that it’s not possible to “own” a tree, then aren’t we obliged to question the idea that it’s possible to own a tree frog? Or a dog?

In short, aren’t we honor bound to find a way to liberate the water from the control of its corporate captors without selfishly claiming the control for ourselves? How could we do that? We can’t consult consult the other animals or the plants. Or, can we? Could we, perhaps, enter into such empathic relationships with them that we could be trusted to take their interests into account when planning our actions? Could we observe them with such care and precision that we could accurately conclude what they might like us to do? Could we invite people who recognize and relate to animals as fellow beings (rather than property) to represent their interests when we gather to make decisions at events like the World Social Forum?

We could and should do those things. It’s too late to undo the damage that generations of people have done, but it may not be too late to learn enough to stop the ongoing destruction. Then we — the people and the plants and the animals — can begin to build another world — together.

The Alice Walker quotation that provoked this meditation? “The animals of the world exist for their own purposes. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.” The same holds true for the water and the flowers and the land.

Annals of an Archaic Anarchist

pattrice jones

Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of Impact Press.

Review of The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader edited by A.J. Brigati (AK Press)

Quick — name two 19th century female anarchists. If you got stuck after Emma Goldman, then it’s time for you to meet Voltairine de Cleyre. Born into poverty in Michigan in 1866, converted to anarchism by the 1887 execution of the Haymarket martyrs, and active as a popular speaker and writer from the 1890s until her premature death in 1912, Voltairine de Cleyre was called by Emma Goldman “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”

Like Goldman, de Cleyre condemned the objectification and exploitation of women with the same urgency with which she challenged the legitimacy of governments. Speaking with more force and honesty than many self-proclaimed feminists manage to muster today, de Cleyre dared to denounce marriage laws that permit husbands to rape their wives as “sex slavery.” De Cleyre’s essay by that name also offers an early analysis of what we now call social construction of gender.

Unlike Emma Goldman, de Cleyre supported the concept of private property. In her 1894 essay “In Defense of Emma Goldman,” de Cleyre wrote, “Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it.” Arguing against Goldman’s belief in cooperation, de Cleyre asserted that “competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should.”

Voltairine de Cleyre classed herself “as ‘Anarchist’ simply,” declining to embrace a more specific descriptor. Today, we would class many of her views as libertarian. Well aware of the evils perpetrated by capitalists in search of profits, de Cleyre defined the “essence of Commerce and Manufacture” as serving to “multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material possession and enjoyment.” At the same time, she approvingly cited the Jeffersonian idea that “the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves.” De Cleyre described the ways that the United States government, since its inception, had been “a merchant’s machine.” Yet she accepted the naive notion that competition, unfettered by government, will ultimately result in in a more equitable economic world. These days, that notion goes by the name of “free trade.”

Voltairine de Cleyre’s views on “human nature” may strike modern readers as archaic. While some of the ideas and controversies that preoccupied Voltairine de Cleyre a century ago are outmoded, many of her observations remain fresh today. Her description of the aftermath of the McKinley assassination, during which “wild rage… stormed through the brains of the people… turning them into temporary madmen, incapable of seeing, hearing, or thinking correctly” but which eventually “spent itself” reminds the reader of the ongoing collective reaction to the events of 11 September, 2001.

Voltairine de Cleyre’s defense of direct action rightly continues to be cited to this day. In this essay, de Cleyre pointed to examples such as the Boston Tea Party, noting that “direct action has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people now reprobating it.” Her reference to the 1774 incident in which a tea ship was burned in the Annapolis harbor summons up thoughts of the the recent sentencing of William Cottrell for burning sport utility vehicles.

Before embracing anarchism, Voltairine de Cleyre was a lecturer for the Freethought movement, which strongly challenged religious dogma. Unfettered by today’s fad for ‘tolerating’ even the most dangerous and hateful political ideologies so long as they call themselves faiths, de Cleyre did not hesitate to argue against theism. In these days of Christian crusade, one can only hope that leftist activists one day will recover de Cleyre’s courage concerning religion, joining her in naming and explaining the necessarily negative impact of belief in a singular supreme deity.

One wonders what Voltairine de Cleyre would have thought of today’s tax-paying members of the peace movement, with their chants of “support the troops — bring them home.” De Cleyre declared the standing army to be “a standing menace to liberty,” recognizing that its existence made wars more likely. In a 1909 essay, she argued that in order to achieve peace, “all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who wish to make war do so at their own cost and risk… neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade.” Here, and in her reminder that “against a real General Strike, the military can do nothing,” de Cleyre offers ideas and insights that ought not be forgotten.

Every public library should have this book. While not the anarcha-feminist foremother that many of us would wish for, Voltairine de Cleyre was an important figure in both anarchist and feminist history whose ideas deserve to continue to be heard.

An Army of Fools?

by pattrice jones

Originally published in Fall 2005 issue of Impact Press.

Review of War Made Easy by Norman Solomon

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

So goes the old saying. But when it comes to war, we’ve been fooled over and over again, with the same tricks serving the same purposes every time.

When does credulity become complicity? That’s the question that arises for me after reading Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy.

People in the United States like to think of themselves as peaceful and friendly lovers of liberty. Despite that innocent and pacific national self-image, the USA always seems seems to be fighting somebody, often by means of torture and treachery. In my lifetime, the United States has invaded Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq, and Panama; bombed civilians in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Vietnam; and sponsored reactionary paramilitary violence in Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and heaven-only-knows where else.

How is it that peace-loving people are so frequently inspired to march to war? How do people who see themselves as guardians of liberty come to confuse occupation with liberation? Why do people who claim to deplore political violence so often use violence to solve real or perceived political problems?

There are two possibilities: (1) US citizens repeatedly have been tricked into supporting violence by war-mongering politicians and their sycophants in the media; or (2) US citizens aren’t really all that committed to peace and freedom after all.

In War Made Easy, Norman Solomon elaborates the first of these hypotheses, examining 17 ways that “presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death.”

As stated by Solomon, the 17 ideas that lead citizens to support military adventures are:

• America is a fair and noble superpower
• Our leaders will do everything they can to avoid war
• Our leaders would never tell us outright lies
• This guy is a modern-day Hitler
• This is about human rights
• This is not about oil or corporate profits
• They are the aggressors, not us
• If this war is wrong, Congress will stop it
• If this war is wrong, the media will tell us
• Media coverage brings war into our living rooms
• Opposing the war means siding with the enemy
• This is a necessary battle in the war on terrorism
• What the U.S. government needs most is better PR
• The Pentagon fights wars as humanely as possible
• Our soldiers are heroes, theirs are inhuman
• America needs the resolve to kick the “Vietnam Syndrome”
• Withdrawal would cripple U.S. credibility

Solomon devotes a rambling chapter to each idea. Some chapters survey the ways that the idea in question has been used to promote different military endeavors while others serve as antidotes by refuting the idea under scrutiny.

Solomon has something interesting to say about each of the 17 problematic propositions but I found myself wishing for a more focused and comprehensive treatment. In which recent wars have each of the ideas been operative? How have they been deployed and to what effect? How do we know what impact they actually have had on the thinking and behavior of United States voters and soldiers?

In contrast to his well-justified cynicism concerning the motivations of politicians, Solomon’s attitude toward the credulous public seems almost naive. Concerning covert operations in Central America in the 1980s, Solomon approvingly quotes journalist Robert Parry’s opinion that “If the American people knew that their tax dollars were being used to arm brutal armies which were butchering political dissidents, killing children and raping young girls, then support for the Reagan-Bush policies would have evaporated.”

That was a reasonable supposition at the time but the truth has come out since and in no way diminished American adoration of Ronald Reagan. More recently, support for Bush’s Iraqi adventure has declined only due to US costs and casualties. Photographs of mutilated Iraqi children and pornographic torture at Abu Ghairb did not reduce public support for “our troops” or their Commander in Chief.

How, then, is Solomon so sure that the public has been tricked? Isn’t it possible that United States citizens know very well what their government is doing and whole-heartedly approve of the use of violence to secure cheap gas for their Hummers? Since the foundation of the United States, haven’t white Christians always approved of the violent appropriation of the lands and lives of darker non-Christians?

A related set of questions concerns the media. A journalist himself, Solomon describes but does not explain the complicity of journalists in pro-war propaganda and disinformation campaigns. He shows how, again and again, journalists fall for and then belatedly discover the deceptions of politicians. But aside from a few tantalizing glimpses into the psyches of sycophants like Dan Rather, Solomon does not help us to understand how men and women who see themselves as seekers and speakers of truth are so easily and repeatedly led to participate in deception.

Reflecting on Solomon’s 17 pro-war propositions, it seems to me that we — journalists and citizens alike — are so easily tricked into criminal violence specifically because we have such a strong belief in our own innocence. Solomon’s portrayal of citizens and, to a lesser extent, journalists as the hapless dupes of duplicitous politicians suggests that he also embraces the myth of American innocence. While the hope that this gives him is heartening, I wonder if his faith might be misplaced.

Nonetheless, this is an important book that should be read by anyone unfamiliar with the rhetoric and reality of recent military engagements. However, the readers who need this book the most might have the hardest time with it.

This book might be difficult for readers without a good grasp of recent US history. While Solomon fully explains the deceptive dynamics of some military interventions (such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic) his discussions of some episodes (such as incidences of media bias in its coverage of US-sponsored violence in El Salvador in the 1980s) may not make sense to readers who do not already know what really happened. For such readers, I’d suggest reading Solomon’s book in tandem with the relevant chapters in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States or Alexander Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire.

Renters Strike Back: The All-City Rent Strike of 1969-71

by pattrice jones

Originally published in the February 1999 issue of Ann Arbor’s alternative newspaper, Agenda.

“Landlords have money and power… tenants have each other.”

With those words, a group of University of Michigan students launched an event that reverberates to this day. The Ann Arbor Tenants Union’s “all-city rent strike” of 1969-71 began 30 years ago this month and may be said to have never ended. Every day, some Michigan tenants exercise their right to withhold rent in response to poor housing conditions or other problems with their landlords. Most are unaware of the valiant efforts of the activists who secured that right 30 years ago or of the steadfast struggles of those who have sought to maintain tenants’ rights in the decades since. That’s too bad, because the story is instructive as well as dramatic.

Before beginning the tale, however, I should disclose that I was the coordinator of the AATU from 1993 through 1996 so this will not be an entirely dispassionate history. That said…

Once upon a time, rental housing conditions in Ann Arbor were among the worst in the nation. Students fought with one another for the chance to crowd into over-priced, dilapidated apartment houses near campus. Low-income tenants faced similar conditions on the outskirts of town.

This was in the late 1960’s, a time of great national and local upheaval. Frightened by the rising tide of urban uprisings, lawmakers across the nation turned to studies and commission reports, most of which listed housing problems and powerlessness as sources of potentially violent discontent. In Lansing, lawmakers responded with the Warranty of Habitability (MCLA 554.139), which requires all elements of a rental unit to be fit for the use intended and compels landlords to abide by applicable city and state housing codes.

Meanwhile, in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan campus had become a hotbed of student activism. Frustrated by their own housing problems and angered by the conditions faced by tenants living in poverty, a group of graduate students decided to test the new law. Since the Warranty of Habitability appeared to imply that tenants had a contractual right to withhold rent when landlords did not fulfill their responsibilities, a rent strike seemed to be the most promising tactic.

The young organizers of Ann Arbor’s tenants union knew that tenants living in poverty had organized successful rent strikes elsewhere — most notably in Harlem in 1963-64 — but they also knew that Michigan’s law was yet untested and that low-income renters would be most vulnerable were they to strike and fail. In contrast, students could fall back upon parents or dorm housing. A student rent strike could win benefits for all tenants without exposing the most vulnerable tenants to the threat of eviction.

The organizers targeted ten local landlords believed to be among the worst offenders. They publicized the impending strike and collected signatures of students who pledged to strike. Along the way, they obtained the endorsement of a number of diverse campus groups, including the Engineering Council, the Black Law Student Association, and the student government.

The proposed strike was big news in Ann Arbor through the fall of 1968 and into the winter of 1969. The Ann Arbor News and the Michigan Daily were filled with news articles, editorials, and letters about tenant rights, landlord abuses, housing prices and conditions, and other related issues. While the newspapers may not have intended to do so, they furthered the cause of the strike by helping to spread the word and by teaching renters about their rights. Thus the new tenants union won its first victory before the first dollar of rent was withheld.

On the evening of February 13, 1969 the tenants union announced that the goal of 2,000 signatures had been reached. The strike began the next day and lasted into 1971. Along the way, what had been a local controversy turned into a spectacle closely attended by the national media.

Landlords retaliated almost immediately. The most civil among them simply sued for eviction, an eventuality for which the tenants union was very well prepared. Of the hundreds of court cases stemming from the strike, more than 90% resulted in victory — in the form of rent abatements, orders of repair, or both — for the tenants. And, most significantly, one case — Rome v. Walker — resulted in a State Supreme Court ruling upholding the right of Michigan tenants to withhold rent.

While educating tenants, coordinating the strike, and helping to strikers to defend themselves in court, the tenants union scrambled to defend itself and striking students from other forms of landlord retaliation. Some landlords locked-out striking tenants, throwing their belongings on the street, while others achieved the same end by cutting off utilities. A few landlords threatened and physically intimidated striking tenants, leading to the creation of a tenants union 24-hour mobile defense team.

Local attorney Jonathan Rose, who joined the tenants union in 1969 and served as its attorney in 1970, recalls the exciting tenor of the times. “The tenants union was a high energy, optimistic undertaking. The tenants union shared the lobby of the Student Activities building with the student government. The Black Action Movement (BAM) was organizing outside the window while the tenants union was working inside…. There was a high spirit of grassroots organizing.” When the BAM strike against the University began, the tenants union organizers encouraged rent strikers to participate in the BAM-led general strike. An AATU flyer printed at the time noted that the high cost of housing in Ann Arbor contributed to low Black enrollment and concluded that “the general strike [is] the only tactic left to force the University to grant the BAM demands.”

The student organizers of the tenants union also had to grapple with the University. Then, as now, the University played a significant role in the Ann Arbor’s housing woes. Then, as now, the University provided a captive market of unsophisticated consumers for landlords, was slow to respond to student demands for additional on-campus housing, and drove up property tax rates by removing land from the city tax rolls. But, rather than supporting its students’ attempts to obtain more habitable housing, the University chose to respond to the rent strike by threatening striking students with academic sanctions.

While the University never followed through on its threat to sanction striking students, its preparations to do so set the stage for one of the most dramatic incidents of the strike. A local bank agreed to provide the University with the names of students who were holding rent in escrow. In response, the tenants union called for all students to withdraw all of their funds from that bank on a single day. The students responded, withdrawing more than $100,000 and closing 400 accounts. Students stood on the street corner burning their bank books. The bank closed early that day, and went out of business soon thereafter.

Other local tenants were encouraged by the success of the student rent strike. Public housing tenants launched a 1971 rent strike complaining, among other problems, of ankle-deep mud in ground-floor apartments.

Positive outcomes of the rent strike of 1969-1971 were not limited to court victories and local tenant empowerment. Because of the national attention directed at the strike, which included articles in such venues as Business Week and the New York Times, student tenant associations modeled on the Ann Arbor Tenants Union sprang up across the country. Some, like the AATU, have survived and thrived into the present. Ann Arbor’s successful rent strike also helped to spark the national consumer rights movement, which would become so important later in the 1970s.

While AATU has turned out to be one of the most stable organizations coming out of the late 1960s, its founders did not intend to found a permanent organization. Their original goal was simply to organize an effective strike, bringing the tactics of democratic unionism to landlord-tenant relations. However, as the strike progressed, tenants’ desires for a permanent and more extensive tenant association prevailed. The new AATU opened itself to non-striking tenants and began to take action on a number of issues. One of the most pressing concerns of local renters was the University’s failure to adequately house its students. In an interesting precursor to the tactic used by homelessness activists in the 1990s, the AATU constructed a ‘tent city’ on the U-M diag in the fall of 1970. For three weeks, student protesters lived on the diag in tents in order to protest dorm over-crowding and publicize the University’s role in the local housing crisis. That protest ended only when a hepatitis scare caused health officials to order the tent city destroyed.

Another dramatic series of early AATU actions involved State Crime Commissioner Louis Rome. The AATU staged a number of demonstrations intended to show that while Rome was enforcing the law in Lansing, he was breaking the law as a landlord in Ann Arbor. A 1970 demonstration in Lansing paved the way for Rome’s resignation as State Crime Commissioner — which he tendered only hours before pleading guilty to criminal charges stemming from excessive Ann Arbor Housing Code violations in his buildings.

Following the close of the all-city rent strike, the AATU found itself with little money and a lot of responsibilities. While financial support for the strike itself had come from a number of sources, including a large donation from the UAW and a benefit concert by Joan Baez, the AATU had a harder time finding support for more mundane tasks like following up on court cases in the appeals phase, providing day-to-day tenant counseling services, and working to expand the legal rights of tenants in Michigan. Tenants who could not afford to pay AATU dues wanted and needed AATU services, but the costs of providing those services had to be covered somehow.

The AATU sought and gained funding from the U-M student government and agreed in exchange to provide the benefits of AATU membership to all students without charge. That agreement has persisted, in various permutations, to this day. Then, as now, services to low-income non-student renters were funded by donations and grants while non-student renters who could afford to do so were asked to pay AATU dues in exchange for AATU services.

In addition to providing educational services to individual tenants and helping groups of tenants to organize rent strikes, the AATU in the 1970s worked to enhance the rights of all Michigan tenants. In Lansing, the AATU helped to pass the’lock-out law’ (which prohibits landlords from using extra-legal tactics like changing locks or shutting off utilities to evict tenants), the law prohibiting retaliatory eviction (which protects tenants who join tenant associations or otherwise exercise their legal rights), the Truth in Renting Act (which regulates leases), and the Security Deposit Act (which controls the collection and return of deposits). Each of these laws is strongly pro-tenant, and every Michigan renter now enjoys their protection. The AATU also worked in coalition with other organizations to support passage of the state’s consumer protection and anti-discrimination laws.

This list of legislative victories might seem to suggest that the AATU had become a tamer and less controversial organization. Nothing could be further from the truth. During this period, the AATU continued to organize hotly contested rent strikes and to use the tactics of dramatic demonstration in order to publicize pressing problems. Such efforts concerning the plight of low-income mobile home residents led to the extension of tenants rights to those who rent space in mobile home parks.

AATU rent strikes in the 1970s were not always so successful at achieving wider ends. While most strikes concerning poor conditions or landlord abuses continued to result in court victories or out-of-court settlements favoring tenants, strikes for lower housing prices or collective bargaining agreements were less effective. One exception to that general rule was the Trony strike of 1976, which resulted in a unique collective bargaining agreement between the landlord and the AATU. As always, AATU rent strikes were emotional affairs. Recalling her participation in the 1976 strike against Edith Epstein’s Reliable Realty, bookstore owner Lynden Kelly says that she and other tenants felt “very scared… but also empowered.” In lawsuits arising from that strike, tenants represented themselves with the assistance of the AATU and won significant victories. Kelly reports that the process was “easy, once you got over your nervousness” and that negotiating “as a bloc” rather than as individuals was a useful strategy.

In the 1980s, the AATU turned its attention to local housing legislation, helping to revise the Ann Arbor Housing Code and working with environmentalists to pass the Weatherization as Responsible Management (WARM) ordinance. As the 80s progressed, the AATU, like other housing organizations across the country, focused increasing attention on the critical lack of affordable housing.

Since the chief complaint of Ann Arbor renters has always been high prices, the AATU had always worked for fair rents. As homelessness increased, the problem became more urgent. Local efforts to institute rent control had been repeatedly thwarted and were now moot due to a provision in state law forbidding localities from imposing rent control. This left local housing activists with only a few options for dealing with the problem. AATU efforts to encourage public funding of new affordable housing,preserve the existing stock of low-income housing by forcing landlords to make necessary repairs, and pressure the University to build more student housing have played an important role in the ongoing local struggle against homelessness. Since eviction is the most common immediate cause of homelessness, AATU anti-eviction efforts on behalf of low-income tenants prevent homelessness on a case-by-case basis.

The AATU’s emphasis on service to individual tenants combined with activism on behalf of all tenants has continued into the 1990s. In this decade, the AATU has worked in coalition with a diverse set of organizations in order to achieve common goals. For example, the AATU has worked with feminist organizations in order to pass a privacy ordinance, with gay and lesbian organizations to open University housing to same-sex couples, with disability rights organizations to enforce fair housing laws, and with anti-racist organizations to contest police harassment at public housing sites. This coalition work has proceeded on top of the day-to-day work of the AATU and despite a significant backlash against tenant rights in general and the AATU in particular.

The effects of that backlash cannot be overstated. During the years that I coordinated the AATU, we spent a lot of our time simply blocking landlord efforts to overturn or dilute existing tenants rights. Every year, the state House of Representatives considered outlawing — yes, outlawing — the mandatory housing inspections required many Michigan localities. The integrity of our local Housing Code is constantly threatened by landlord demands for exceptions and revisions. Perhaps the most serious local threat to tenant rights in this decade was posed by the Ann Arbor ‘Y’ which claimed — with the strong support of Mayor Sheldon and several City Council members — that its tenants were not entitled to the rights provided by state and federal law.

The AATU became heavily enmeshed in the local controversy concerning the ‘Y’ when a ‘Y’ tenant who was also a University of Michigan student came to us with documentation of an egregious violation of her rights. She had experienced what she felt to be sexual harassment by a ‘Y’ staff member so she wrote a letter of complaint to the ‘Y’ Board of Directors. In response, she received a letter ordering her to vacate her room within 72 hours and notifying her that the ‘Y’ would give a bad reference to any landlord who inquired about her. Looking into our records, we found a number of tenant complaints of similar evictions without due process. The AATU ended up suing the ‘Y’ on behalf of its tenants and did win a ruling requiring the ‘Y’ to abide by landlord-tenant law. Attempts to force the ‘Y’ to live up to the agreements it made when obtaining public funding for its building have been unsuccessful so far.

The ‘Y’ case provided me with one of the most chilling moments in my association with the AATU. I cannot describe how it felt to hear the attorney for the ‘Y’ say — in open court — that its tenants did not deserve due process in evictions because many of them are people with mental disabilities.

Another highly-publicized AATU action of the 1990s, the Baker Commons rent strike of 1994-95, inspired all of the AATU staff and associates who worked on it. Baker Commons is a public housing site serving seniors and people with disabilities. Responding to requests from tenants, the AATU organized a rent strike to compel the Housing Commission to make urgently needed repairs. While about a third of the building’s tenants began the strike, threats and misleading information from the Housing Commission soon reduced the number of strikers to a handful. The Housing Commission then sued to evict the remaining strikers but dropped the suit as soon as they realized that the tenants had a lawyer — the same Jonathan Rose who had represented the AATU back in 1970. Negotiations dragged on and then failed. The tenants sued the Housing Commission, asking the judge to order the repairs made. In the strike’s 16th month, the case was settled out of court since most of the repairs had been made or were in progress; the settlement allowed the tenants to permanently retain almost all of the rent that they had withheld.

Speaking at an AATU educational seminar in 1993, founding member Steve Burkhart said that the students who organized the rent strike of 1969 succeeded in part because they wholeheartedly believed that they could. The same could be said of the Baker Commons tenants. Commenting on the staying power of the AATU, Burkhart stressed the importance of relationships in community organizing.

In a sense, unionism is nothing other than the creation and maintenance of relationships. The AATU has survived against the odds precisely because of the relationships — both among people and between people and the organization — that it has engendered. In the fall of 1997, the AATU faced a funding crisis so severe that the continued existence of the organization was in question. There was no money to pay staff members and no guaranteed source of funding for the coming year. A team of community volunteers — including four former AATU coordinators, several former AATU volunteers, and members of various organizations with which the AATU had worked in the past — came together to rescue the AATU. In short order, they staffed the tenant counseling line, held fund raising events, secured grants for the coming year, and hired a new coordinator. Today the AATU is as strong as it ever was, serving 200 tenants per month on its counseling line, organizing tenants, putting out The Tenants’ Voice newspaper, and producing its weekly radio show, Tenant Talk.

That busy schedule is another of the secrets of the AATU’s success. Unlike many other organizations, the AATU has never chosen between service and activism. In the absence of activism, social services provide short-term solutions for long-term problems. On the other hand, activism aimed at long-term solutions often leaves people without solutions for the problems they face right now. While it has often taken heat from every direction for doing so, the AATU has steadfastly insisted on pursuing both paths. Tenants who contact the AATU receive the tools and information they need to solve their immediate housing problems; they are also given the opportunity to learn about, and work to change, the underlying causes of those problems.

The AATU’s preference for the tactics of direct action is another reason for its continued existence. I define ‘direct action’ as any tactic that actually does something about the problem it seeks to address. Demonstrations just… demonstrate. While the common tactics of marches and rallies do have expressive value and do provide some education to the public, they no longer have the power to bring about change by themselves. New activists fed on a diet of only demonstrations and marches soon become depleted and demoralized. In contrast, direct action offers something to do with all of the energy stirred up by demonstrations and provides visible results at every turn. Rent strikes are direct action: the target (the landlord) is actually affected by the action from the moment that it commences. Other forms of direct action used by various movements include needle exchange programs, reclamation of abandoned buildings, and physically blocking the destruction of environmental resources. Each of these examples of non-violent direct action actually does something about the problem while at the same time, through media coverage, educating the public about the problem and its potential solutions. By consistently including non-violent direct action in its spectrum of activities, the AATU has ensured that activists new to the AATU will be offered the chance to actually affect the problems which concern them.

As Jonathan Rose often says, “tenants have more rights than they know and less rights than they need.” The housing problems that face us today are different, but no less compelling, than those of 1969. The AATU is doing something about them every day, and stands ready to do more. The AATU’s present coordinator, Melissa Danforth, has a clear vision of several energetic actions that could and should be undertaken by the AATU in the coming years. However, she reports that the AATU’s resources are currently stretched to the limit by the costs of routine operations. Volunteers and donations are urgently needed to help the AATU bring its legacy of activism into a fourth decade and a new century.

Race-ism at the Games

This essay was originally published in March of 1994 as an OUT in Left Field column in the LGBTQ newspaper Between the Lines. OUT in Left Field ran from March of 1993 through January of 1995; Between the Lines was distributed throughout the state of Michigan, USA.

If the editors of Between the Lines ever want to get my column on time, they’ll have to come over to my house and destroy the television. Here I am as usual, way past deadline and outraged about something on the TV.

This time it’s the Olympics. I was all set to write about Tanya and Nancy when The Games themselves appeared on the screen. I couldn’t look away — it was like watching an accident in progress. From the opening ceremony, when South Africa was welcomed to the winter games without any mention of the international boycott which had barred it from previous games, to the patriarchal — OOPS, patriotic medal ceremonies…

Here’s what I was going to say to Nancy Kerrigan:

Every once in a while, the chance to transcend your usual limitations and do something that makes a difference arrives at your door. I hear such an opportunity knocking for you, and I don’t mean the chance to go for the gold. Now, now when the Olympic spotlight is upon you, you have the chance to call a press conference and deliver the following message.

“Right after I was attacked in October, I wondered, ‘why me?’ Then, I learned more about the scope and scale of male violence against women and I started thinking, ‘me too.’ The violence that I suffered at the hands of a stranger was scary and painful. I’m still shook up and I know I won’t ever feel as safe as I once did. That experience has helped me to empathize with the emotional and physical pain suffered by women like Tanya Harding at the hands of abusive partners. I refuse to be a part of Tanya’s abusive ex-husband’s plot to get back at her for leaving him. I’m tired of women fighting among themselves when the real issue is male violence against us. I believe Tanya, not the perpetrator of her abuse. I reach out my hand to her in sisterhood and solidarity in the hopes that she will join me in starting a new organization of women athletes against domestic violence. And, I’ll be donating any money I receive from endorsements gained as a result of my victimization to that new organization.”

Of course, by the time you read this, the Olympics will have passed and Nancy Kerrigan will have delivered no such message. It may be too much to hope for such a statement but its not too much to demand from someone who is allowing herself to be portrayed as a heroine. True heroism, of course, requires courage and sacrifice, neither of which is required in order to seek fortune and fame by participating in a sport you love. True heroism requires turning one’s own personal pain into a chance to end the pain of others. Nancy Kerrigan now has that chance, but I doubt that she will even notice it in her rush to race for glory.

…That was supposed to be the theme of this month’s column. But then I had what CBS might call “An Olympic Moment.” I had been alternatively brooding and raging about various aspects of the spectacle, like the special Olympics Hanes commercial, which pretends to disdain racism/nationalism by saying that people come only in “small, medium, and large” — as though by ignoring very real differences in history, culture, and access to power, those differences will just go away. Even worse, in the course of the commercial everyone is allowed a unique cultural identity (French, Norwegian, Pakistani, etc.) except the man from Africa, who is called, simply, “African.” Get a clue, Hanes — they have countries there, too.

And, while we’re at it, will somebody please tell downhill skier “Picabo” Street that it might have been cute for a small child to appropriate the name of a Native American tribe for her very own because she liked the way it sounded, but she’s all grown up now and her continued misuse of that name is arrogant and disrespectful. Europeans took Native American land whenever they felt like it — taking a Native American name with the same disregard for the people to whom that name rightly belongs adds insult to injury.

And then there are the games themselves, which reinforce the notions that there is such a thing as being “number one,” that only one person can reach that pinnacle at a time, that it’s an admirable thing to be that person, and that “gold” is the appropriate reward for such a lofty achievement. As my canine companion Zami — who steadfastly refuses to participate in dominance rituals — often says, “isn’t it all of these hierarchies that got us into trouble in the first place?”

“Racing for the gold” — wasn’t that what Columbus was doing when he invaded the Americas and proceeded to cut off the hands of any Taino Indian who didn’t collect enough of the stuff for him to take back to Spain? And wasn’t proving who’s number one what Hitler was all about?

And that’s when I had my Olympic Moment…  sitting there noticing that ice dancers appeared to be getting extra points for being blonde and wondering why Asian athletes were never featured in those warm-hearted looks at the person behind the glory…  I realized that it all boiled down to what might best be called “race-ism.”

There you have it, one little phrase that sums up the unspoken ideology behind the games. First, the idea that people can and should be divided into groups and that those groups can and should be ranked. Second, the idea that competition between and among those groups is both natural and good. Now, undoubtedly some of you reading this are now thinking, “wait a minute — competition is good.” To that I can only say, please, look at the research in any field — education, workplace productivity, whatever — and you’ll find that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that cooperation is the way to go.

What does any of this mean for gay men and lesbians? Well, it’s something to think about as we approach the Gay Games in New York this summer. I’ve been struggling to find a way to write about those Games which respects the positive role they can play in queer communities but which also recognizes the danger of imitating the very worst aspects of the dominant culture. I don’t want to ignore the very important contributions of queer sports teams in terms of providing social outlets, forging support networks, building a sense of community, and providing positive role models for queer youth. On the other hand, given all of the above, is “going for the gold” really a behavior we want our queer youth to emulate? Do we really need more “race-ism” in queer communities? Isn’t there some way to construct an alternative sporting structure that doesn’t depend on competition? What if we held an event and nobody “won”?

So, looking forward to the arrival of summer, I ask, “Can’t we all just go swimming without making it into a race?”

Personality Complex: Eli Clare Dives Deep Into the Muddy Waters of Identity Politics

by pattrice jones

This interview and book review was originally published in the December, 1999 edition of LesbiaNation.

In her recently released book Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press), lesbian feminist and disability rights activist Eli Clare explores the political and emotional terrain of disability, class and sexual orientation by means of personal narratives. In sometimes surprising ways, Clare brings together issues that on the surface seem separate but which she sees as parts of a devastating unified field: environmental destruction and the sexual exploitation of children, homophobic violence and the economic exploitation of workers, cultural bigotry and the exploitation of natural resources.

Some of us, Clare maintains, are more scarred by these things than others, but none of us are unscathed. As she points out, our bodies can be and are “stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us…. Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets.” But Clare is not content to simply catalog the damage; she insists that “the stolen body can be reclaimed.” That grand hope amid grave circumstances is Clare’s gift to her audience. In return, readers are asked to join her in grappling with complex and often uncomfortable issues. It can make for grim reading at times, but Clare eases the way by writing in an engaging style and by mixing anecdotes and recollections with more abstract political reflections.

This slim volume is already having a big impact: Lesbian activists such as Suzanne Pharr and Mab Segrest have lauded Exile & Pride with much acclaim, while others, like sexpert Pat Califia have dismissed the book as “leftist dogma.” We spoke with Clare about her work and the mixed reactions it’s generating within the community.

In her review for Girlfriends magazine, Pat Califia wrote that in Exile & Pride “Clare bludgeons the reader with leftist dogma.” How did you feel when you read that?

Steamed. Not hurt, but stung. I’m really good at resisting messages from the dominant culture, but to have someone like Pat Califia using the words dogma and bludgeon tapped into some self-doubt. Now I can laugh and say that if I’m writing leftist dogma, it’s because the world needs leftist dogma. When did leftist dogma become a bad thing?

I guess I’m not surprised that Califia wrote a negative review of this book.

Right, right. I don’t know Pat, but her work, about 90 percent of it, makes me ask, What are you doing? She’s made her career by being very outrageous in terms of sex and sexuality. She’s basically said time and again, “Let’s erase all the lines; let’s stop judging behavior connected to sex in any way, shape or form.” And that equates things like child pornography with consensual sex between adults.

What do you think about the fact that some of Califia’s writing has been really influential, especially among younger lesbians? Specifically, in light of what you’ve written about being raped by your father, her book Doing It for Daddy.

She has been one of the people who really perpetuated this great divide about sexual politics that I write about in my book. There are two polarized positions: You’re either anti-pornography and called anti-sex and accused of being pro-censorship, or you’re pro-pornography and called pro-sex and anti-censorship. To carve a thoughtful political place between those two poles is really difficult. How do we talk about the roles of pornography and erotica? How do we talk about censorship and free speech? How do we talk about sexual damage and sexual pleasure at the same time and really create a complex analysis?

I think Pat has really furthered the polarization. She says, “Do it for Daddy!” without thinking about the implications of who fathers are and can be and have been in people’s lives; what sexual damage is connected to fathers. How can role-playing be part of a healthy, full, pleasurable sexual experience? She’s not doing that complex thinking about what sex means, what damage means, what pleasure means, and how pleasure and damage coexist all the time. And because she’s so wildly popular, her not doing that complex thinking means that people who think she’s great aren’t either. I think that damages us as a movement. So…I wasn’t hugely surprised by the bad review.

On the other hand, you’ve had some very positive responses.

Yes, yes. In general, I’m hearing nothing but good things.

In the book, you write a lot about how your queerness and class background interact.

When people ask me what the book is about, what I say is that it’s about identity and home. And, in the book, home is the body, home is community, home is place, home is politics. So I wanted to write about home, and writing home meant writing about rural Oregon to some extent and this little fishing/logging town I came from. And to write about that, I had to write about poor and working-class people and clear-cut logging. But I now live as this somewhat urban queer person. I have a lot of working-class friends, but the community at large is a middle-class community. I had to follow that chain to get to a point where I knew what the connection was between the urban queer person now and my sense of home in the backwoods of Oregon.

The book is so wide-ranging. I can see how queer readers might ask, since the subtitle of the book is “Disability, Queerness, and Liberation,” why the hell I spend a third of the book writing about clear-cut logging? The book explores a bunch of topics from clear-cut logging to gender identity with tangents to the freak show and pornography. But the theme through all of that is identity.

What do you hope readers carry away from Exile & Pride?

The ability to slow down and listen. That’s part of what I’m telling urban environmentalists about clear-cut logging: Slow down and listen to the folks who have lived logging for a century and a half. I’m telling queer urban activists to slow down and listen to rural people. I’m asking both queer people and disabled people to think about naming. What does it mean to name ourselves “crips?” What does it mean to name ourselves “queer?” What does it mean for some of us to name ourselves “freaks” and “perverts?” To think really complexly about naming and how naming is connected to our sexual history and to our personal histories. And I’m asking people to think as complexly as I’m thinking. And, yes…complexly with a very lefty center.

Interview with Jill Johnston

by pattrice jones

This is the transcript of a 1999 interview with lesbian feminist author and activist Jill Johnston. An edited version of the interview ran in the webzine LesbiaNation accompanying this profile of Jill Johnston.

pj: I’ve heard more than one lesbian of a certain age say, “there wouldn’t be a lesbian nation if it weren’t for Lesbian Nation.”

JJ: I saw myself as spearheading something back then, but there was also a group of us. I mean, there was a consensus. It’s just that I happened to have a voice, I had already established a space in a newspaper which was a radical newspaper so therefore I just happened to have that vehicle. A lot what I wrote depended on the people I knew who kept informing me of things I might not have known about. So it wasn’t me alone. And, of course, it was entirely dependent on the consensus that was developing. Any regrets that I might have are purely professional in that I did go way out on a limb and then created problems for myself.

pj:In Lesbian Nation you say that you want to see gay and lesbian books and movies and plays, etcetera. Now we have all those things–

JJ: We do?

pj: To a degree. I guess that’s what I wanted to find out from you: what do you think about what we have right now?

JJ: I haven’t seen anything that interests me.

pj: No?

JJ: I have yet to see something that makes sense to me… but, I haven’t seen that much, perhaps. Perhaps I really haven’t seen enough. I think there’s an emphasis on sex and I think that’s counterproductive for lesbians and for the future of the lesbian feminist movement. It feeds into the stereotypes.

[2007 commentary by pattrice: This cracked me up in light of the sex-heavy content of Johnston's published chronicles of her young lesbian life.]

pj: Do you keep track of any of the magazines that are produced by younger lesbians these days, that sort of thing?

JJ: No. No I don’t.

pj: So, I can’t get your commentary on them.

JJ: Well, I am interested in…The marriage question primarily interests me. I do believe it’s very important for marriage to be legalized in the United States, very very important and that it’s … I just can’t believe the resistance. And I wonder how long it’s going to take. I was married in Denmark, with my Danish partner in 1993, that was a very big event for me. And we tried to, I tried to publicize it as much as possible. I did manage to get some publicity. And then we had a big party here.

pj: And there’s a text that you wrote about it…

JJ: There’s a text, yeah, I wrote it in the old style.

pj: It’s actually on the internet.

JJ: Is it? But I’ve also written about it in a regular style. I did quite a bit of work for the New York Times, for the Book Review and when I tried to get an account of the wedding into the magazine — even a short account — they wouldn’t do it.

pj: What do you say to the feminists who say that the institution is so essentially corrupt because of its history that, rather than reforming marriage to include gay men and lesbians, the opposite direction should be taken, that we should get the state out of marriage?

JJ: They’re crazy.

pj: Yeah? How come?

JJ: Well, first of all, I think they’re prejudiced against marriage because that again is a stereotype: lesbians and gay men don’t get married. That’s a kind of stereotype. I think they’re operating on that. But, secondly, as for the corruption of the institution… I don’t know, I don’t think it’s any more corrupt than it ever was. It was a corruption from the very start, which was probably 4000 BC. Around then, there was a corruption of women’s rights from the very start.

pj: Right, I think that’s what the point would be, why stick with it then?

JJ: Because it does help to really corrupt the system. When they ended the ban on black-white marriages in the 1960s, it helped corrupt the institution. That’s one way of looking at it anyway. I don’t think of it like that. I think of it like: we pay our taxes, we should have the same rights.

pj: Clearly, the right shares your feelings about how important marriage is, given how strongly they’re resisting reform.

JJ: I suppose you could look at it that way, sure. But I don’t think about that so much. I mean just that it seems to be the thing that the national task force or whatever should be concentrating on in the way that women concentrated on getting the vote. This is very important. This is an umbrella thing that could happen that would change a lot of things… there would be more respect, not to mention the civil rights that are involved.

[2007 aside by pattrice: And now we see that the marriage issue has, for the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement, served the umbrella function that Johnston envisioned. So, again, she has proved to be ahead of the curve as she was in the 70s, albeit in an entirely different direction.]

pj: Looking at the lesbian nation such as it is today, what other big issues do you see?

JJ: Well, I see another issue. I’m assuming there will be another lesbian feminist episode and one can only hope that it’s stronger and more powerful and that some of the problems that infested the original movement might be understood and improved upon. Of course, ideally I would see it overtaking feminism. Why should we… I never understood why we should have a secondary or marginal position at all. I thought it was crazy. I thought we were the natural leaders.

pj: In many ways, what has happened is that there has been an assumption of leadership but it hasn’t been overtly lesbian. Frequently, especially at local levels, it is lesbians who are the leaders of feminist organizations.

JJ: Oh, yes, yes. But they’re closeted, basically closeted again.

pj: Or not making a big deal out of their lesbianism.

JJ: Yes. The necessity of coming out is a tremendous problem. and once again, sex comes to the forefront and that’s why marriage is so important. So that the playing field is leveled. I mean, lesbians are still freaks. If you say it. At least, that’s the way it appears to me…. Another thing that I hope that lesbians would deal with would be the mother-daughter issues that are endemic to the lesbian relationship.

pj: Can you say more about that?

JJ: Well…. well, that’s the psychological component. Just as straight people are always dealing with the father-daughter things in their relationships, in our time, it certainly seemed to me from all the stories that I heard from my friends or from the literature was that most lesbians were had grown up virtually as outcasts to their mothers because they were growing up differently. This created, of course, tremendous tension if not outright conflict between the mother and the growing lesbian daughter. That was never addressed in the movement. It was completely obscured. One hopes that all of that would also tumble out of the closet.

pj: Even with the relative glut of gay and lesbian studies books, that’s not an issue that I’ve seen addressed.

JJ: I’ve seen it in old literature anyway, where they will strongly speculate on the origins of lesbianism in this conflict.

pj: And maybe that’s why people don’t want to go there.

JJ: Yeah, Yeah, I understand that.

pj: But there is such a lot of literature within feminism on the mother-daughter relationship.

JJ: Well it’s generally understood that the straight woman imitates her mother’s role, right? But of course now we have lots of women in other roles, so now what? Now what have we got? But when we were growing up, we had mothers — I did have a different kind of mother, she was always independent — but that was not the general model.

pj: And it’s always fallen to mothers to inculcate femininity in their daughters.

JJ: Exactly, and if they have a daughter who’s not imitating them correctly, then they get upset and angry and whatever and then this creates a lot of conflict.

pj: And if they have a daughter who isn’t subordinating herself in the same way that mother has…

JJ: Right.

pj: …then, the mother gets angry when the daughter won’t do to herself what the mother has done to herself.

JJ: Exactly. So, if you transfer all of that into something called the lesbian feminist movement which we had from, say 1970 to 1975, then what you’ve got is a huge amount of betrayal. And that will make a movement implosive, very implosive, totally implosive. Because you can’t have a strong political movement with individual members in so much disarray… or so much emotional disarray or so much fear. And, what I saw was that it was hard for women to keep themselves together personally much less going out to fight for whatever it was we were fighting for. We were fighting for dominance with the straight feminists, I don’t really know.

pj: It seems like the same dynamic that you’ve described between a mother and a growing lesbian daughter could easily be recapitulated with straight women.

JJ: Right. Of course. And a lot of it was. A lot of straight women were brought out by lesbian women or straight women wanted to be brought out or whatever. But I do think that the main accomplishment of that time was the consensus that developed for an identity that had never existed before… that’s what I think the big accomplishment was. And that would of course be on the agenda for any future consensus. To draw in young women will who, by that means, achieve this identity.

Jill Johnston: (Con) Founding Mother of the Lesbian Nation

by pattrice jones

This profile originally appeared in 1999 as a featured article in the short-lived webzine LesbiaNation.

To say that Jill Johnston is a writer who was one of the earliest and most influential lesbian feminists is a little like saying RuPaul is a singer who had a hit record and big hair…true enough, as far as it goes, but by no means the whole story. Johnston’s 1973 Lesbian Nation inspired a generation of lesbian activists (not to mention the name of a certain website), but the book is both more and less than the political treatise one might expect. Similarly, Johnston herself is a paradoxical figure who contradicts all stereotypes about lesbian feminism.

Johnston was a popular columnist for New York’s Village Voice when she gained notoriety by becoming the first mass media journalist to come out as a lesbian in print. She immediately became a center of controversy not only in the “straight” world but also among feminists and early gay and lesbian activists, such as the members of Manhattan’s Gay Liberation Front.

Many factors fueled the fires. As Johnston notes in Lesbian Nation, her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution” was not yet backed by a sound political understanding. At the same time, she stepped right into ongoing struggles between homosexual and heterosexual feminists over the role of lesbians in the feminist movement. To top it off, Johnston’s own flamboyant personality sparked her to make bold statements and dramatic gestures, some of which (such as jumping into a swimming pool and floating around topless during an expensive feminist fundraiser) were neither understood nor appreciated by her feminist comrades.

All of this is recorded in Lesbian Nation, which, along with Trudy Darty and Sandee Potter’s Woman Identified Women and Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love’s Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, soon became one of the founding documents of lesbian feminism. Nation was quickly followed by Gullibles Travels in 1974, in which Johnston’s rebellious adventure continues. Her books do not contain the well-reasoned essays one might expect of a founding feminist, however. Part Gertrude Stein, part e.e. cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure, Johnston uses a poetic stream of consciousness to recount her evolving opinions and the contexts in which they arose.

Beyond their value as documents of lesbian feminism, Johnston’s early works also serve as delightful records of a bygone era: the late ’60s and early ’70s. In them, Johnston and her cohorts confront themselves and others with difficult feminist issues, but also indulge in madcap adventures and all manner of Yippie-style political activism. And sex. Lots of sex.

Those who think that lesbian feminists of the ’70s were prudish or anti-sex will be very surprised by the number–and variety–of sexual encounters Johnston details. For example, in the space of just a few pages into the “Slouching Towards Consciousness” section in Lesbian Nation, Johnston experiences a remarkable orgasm with one woman, sleeps with, but is disappointed by, another, has a threesome with a heterosexual couple (just because she wants to sleep with the woman) and “half seduces” feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson. If, as they said at the time, feminism is the theory, and lesbianism is the practice, Johnston got a lot of practice.

“Slouching Towards Consciousness” itself is a remarkable document. Half diary, half commentary, the essay records Johnston’s unsteady steps toward feminist consciousness and lesbian activism. And she doesn’t flinch from exposing her own shortcomings, sharing actual diary entries from 1969 and 1970 as well as her thoughts at the time, even though they sometimes paint her to have been occasionally racist, often misogynist and almost always extremely arrogant in her ignorance. But it is precisely by personal example that she demonstrates that growth and change are truly possible.

Change is a running theme in Johnston’s early work, and it must be said that the author herself has evolved since the early days of the lesbian movement. The avowed enemy of monogamy married her partner, Ingrid Nyeboe, in a Danish legal ceremony in 1993, and is now an avid advocate of gay and lesbian marriage.

Johnston’s 45-year professional writing career has also been variegated. She had established a following for her dance criticism and weekly column in the Village Voice prior to coming out but found her career hampered by the controversies that attended the publication of Lesbian Nation in 1973. Johnston remained a staff writer for the Voice until 1981, and in her subsequent freelance career, she has written regularly for the New York Times Book Review and Art in America. Her books include two autobiographical volumes, Mother Bound and Paper Daughter, as well as a recent critical biography of artist Jasper Johns. She is currently at work on a new autobiographical volume, which will deal with an issue she has never before addressed in print: her relationship with her father. And many of Johnston’s early writings were recently republished by Serpents Tail in Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970-75. Her dance and other critical writings for the Voice are collected in Marmalade Me, which was recently reissued by Wesleyan University Press.

Johnson remains a mercurial and often frustrating figure. As well she should. In all of her confounding complexity, Johnson is part of the true history of the Lesbian Nation and continues to remind us at every turn of the confounding complexity of our own lesbian lives.

it is all a change.
writing is changing.
the writing is changing.
changing is such good writing.
– Jill Johnston, Gullibles Travels

Warlords & Condom Queens

This essay was originally published in September of 1993 as an OUT in Left Field column in the LGBTQ newspaper Between the Lines. OUT in Left Field ran from March of 1993 through January of 1995; Between the Lines was distributed throughout the state of Michigan, USA.

I was hard at work on the promised column on tactics for the queer rebellion when I heard something on the TV that pushed me over the edge. So, that column will have to wait while I ventilate.

What set me off was hearing yet another newscaster refer to an indigenous Somalian leader as a “warlord.” (If you’re thinking, “oh no, now she’s off on foreign policy . . . no wonder they call this column ‘out in left field,’” please bear with me and read on. The relevance to the domestic concerns of U. S. queers will become clearer as we go.)

Leaving aside the question of whether or not this particular so-called “warlord” is evil incarnate, let’s think about words and pictures. At the start of U. S. military involvement in Somalia, we were shown pictures of a country beset by chaos and starvation. We were told that the reason for these problems was that “warlords” were rampaging through the countryside, wreaking havoc and preventing the “charitable” distribution of food by more civilized nations. Of course, no one actually said that Western nations were more civilized. The word “warlord” took care of that. Imagine them calling George Bush “warlord” instead of “Commander in Chief,” and you’ll see what I mean.

The dramatic imagery of the “warlord” also served to obscure the real reasons for the tragic conditions in Somalia. For centuries, African cultures were depopulated by the slave trade and destabilized by colonization . African natural resources were plundered to profit the invading Europeans. African nations have struggled mightily since decolonization, but the damage done by centuries of such abuses cannot be undone in a couple of decades. The natural resources, of course, are gone forever, and the countries which profited from their theft now consider themselves charitable when they give back a pittance of what they stole in the form of loans and “donations.” Could any of this have anything to do with starvation in Somalia? No, it’s all the fault of those rampaging warlords.

This tactic - the use of dramatic and degrading phases to devalue the enemy and hide the true source of the problem - is often used against people of color at home and abroad. It has also been deployed against queers and others whose image is already debased in the popular imagination of the dominant culture. The use of such dismissive phrases tends to set the terms of the debate and block legitimate discussion of complex issues. When that happens, everybody loses.

Back in the U. S., the female equivalent of the warlord is the “queen.” If I were a gay man, I’d be outraged by the frequent use of this term to degrade and ridicule African American women. It all started with Ronald Reagan and his sneering references to “welfare queens” who reportedly drove around in Caddilacs while their children starved. While race was not explicitly mentioned, the references to Caddilacs assured that most whites would see Black. According to Reagan, these “queens” were responsible not only for their own poverty but also for the economic woes of the whole country. Never mind deindustrialization, profiteering by big business, or tax subsidies for the rich. It’s all the fault of those rampaging welfare queens. Sound familiar?

More recently, Lani Guinier learned what it’s like to be queen for a day. One minute, she was a respected law professor and Justice Department nominee; the next minute, she was the “quota Queen.” Never mind that she had never advocated quotas; it was a catchy phrase, so the name stuck. In short order, Guinier was history. The truth was no defense against the orchestrated perception of her as a quota-slinging “reverse racist” hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of democracy. Clinton withdrew Guinier’s nomination without allowing her to explain her true views to congress and to the voting public. In the process, we lost not only an exemplary nominee but also the opportunity to conduct a national dialogue on the ideas that Guinier actually does support.

The next African American woman to be dubbed was Joycelyn Elders, who was ridiculed as “the condom queen” upon her nomination to the post of Surgeon General. Only Bill Clinton’s fear of his own humiliation, should yet another nomination go down in flames, led Elders to get the support necessary to withstand the attack.

The frequency, fervor and effectiveness of this queen-calling should tell us something about the powerful intersection of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The popular imagination is pervaded by perverse and/or threatening images of people of color. The word “queen,” originally reserved for powerful (therefore masculine therefore perverse) women, is further tainted by its association with homosexual (therefore perverse) men. Put it all together and you can bring down a Presidential nominee with a single word.

Well, I say, if the word “queen” is so powerful, let’s turn it against our common enemies. It’s no accident that the queen-callers have all been opponents not only of decent subsidies to people living in poverty, affirmative action, abortion rights, and public AIDS education but also of gay and lesbian rights. They are scared, straight, white men, clinging to their power and privilege by any means necessary. We need to take that power away from them.

As Lani Guinier learned, reason and integrity are no match for ridicule and exaggeration in the media circus that passes for a free press these days. The only way to fight back is to wrest control of the image and, in so doing, to rearrange the terms of the debate.

I’ll leave it up to some enterprising Radical Faerie to figure out a creative way for gay men to stand in solidarity with African American women, turn the tables on the queen-callers, and reclaim “queen” as the proud queer emblem that it is. Remember, the trick is to find a dramatic image, combine it with a catchy phrase, and deploy both in a way that will ridicule and intimidate the opposition. The only difference is that the goal is to expose, rather than hide, the true face of the oppressor. I’ll be watching to see what you come up with.