I’m still in the very early stages of writing this book–in the early stages of research, really–but I’m already wondering how to handle the specter of “interference” in lesbian projects by state entities like the FBI and sometimes by more shadowy actors. In my notes, I’ve been using terms like “FBI shenanigans” or “agents provocateurs?,” but that’s too gentle for some of the behavior I’m thinking of. Words like infiltration, deception, persecution, and intimidation are much more accurate there.
In some instances, the interference is clear. Take, for example, the type of FBI harassment that’s plainly visible in cases like that of the Lexington Six–five lesbians and a gay man who were sent to jail in 1975 for refusing to participate in a farcical grand jury investigation. It’s hard to summarize the case briefly, largely because the state’s actions were totally bogus, so even the most basic summary seems wildly biased, but I’ll try: In early 1975, FBI agents contacted scores of people–mostly women–from the Lexington, Kentucky, lesbian, gay, and feminist communities, asking for information about a lesbian couple who had spent about nine months in the city the year before. The women, known as Lena Paley and May Kelly, were in fact Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, who had participated in a 1970 bank robbery that left a Boston police officer dead. As it happened, no one in Lexington knew their “true” identities, and none of the people questioned knew where Paley and Kelly had moved on to.
As Josephine Donovan put it in her 2020 book The Lexington Six: “At first, the questions posed by the FBI agents seemed to focus on finding the whereabouts of the two fugitives, but as the interrogations continued, the questions broadened to include questions about the lesbian community in general—who was in it, who was involved with whom, who were friends with whom, the tenor of their political beliefs, and the nature of their lifestyles and ‘sexual preferences.’ ” The Lexington Six refused to cooperate because they didn’t believe the government had a right to probe into their private lives and community activities. As the book makes clear, the grand jury proceedings were intended to dig up information for its own sake, and to intimidate the queer and feminist communities–not only to discourage people from taking part in projects or doing things as basic as visiting group houses, but simply for being lesbian or gay–FBI agents outed several people to their families, despite their knowing nothing about Saxe and Power.
I also recently read David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government), which is an even starker laying bare of anti-gay behavior by agents of the U.S. government. Hundreds, almost certainly thousands, of government employees were fired between 1950 and 1975, often for mere suspicion of association with gay and lesbian people, and many more lived brutally circumscribed lives in order to avoid “detection.” (The claim that lesbians and gay men were a priori security risks didn’t only exclude people from the civil service; all fields that required government security clearances, which included a huge number of science-adjacent jobs, were affected.)
Those experiences are appalling, but they are, at least, clear. The ones I find trickiest to deal with are the cases where the evidence isn’t quite probative. Take, for instance, the vandalism of the Diana Press physical plant back in October 1977. Janis Kelly described the saboteurs’ systematic actions in an off our backs news story:
They methodically destroyed books, offset plates, and equipment, and disabled what could not be destroyed. Solvent and ink were poured over plates for books issued during the past five years, making reprinting very difficult. Five thousand copies of Rita Mae Brown’s Plain Brown Rapper (an entire press run) were destroyed. Pasted-up copy for three books meant for the Fall catalog were torn up page by page. Oil-based ink and cleanser were poured all over the gears of all four presses, so that they now must be dismantled, cleaned, and rebuilt. IBM composers, typewriters, telephones, and the adding machine were also disabled. The distribution, sales, and bookkeeping areas of the office were ransacked and strewn with chemicals from the press room.
The criminals were never found, which left the women of Diana–and feminist publications–to speculate. (Their list of potential culprits? 1. Government agents. 2. Women in the movement who “were opposed to” Diana Press. 3. “A combination of agent provocateurs and women who felt they were saving the movement for ‘feminist capitalism.’ “) Whoever was responsible, Diana Press never recovered from the break-in. The damage led to the following year’s books being canceled, which led some authors to sue for lost royalties. Diana lost the commercial printing jobs that subsidized the publishing program, the couple at the center of the operation broke up, and the company was permanently shuttered two years later.
And then there are the cases where there’s no evidence–just a sneaking suspicion that a process couldn’t possibly be so unpleasant unless someone was really trying to make it difficult. As the cliché goes, lesbians love process–but there are so many reports of so many projects getting bogged down by obstreperous participants, that you start to wonder. Most feminist and lesbian-feminist projects were the products of volunteer labor donated by women who were wiped out by the demands of life when they showed up at collective meetings or volunteer shifts. Not everything can be fun–but why would a person show up week after week to spend an evening unproductively and unpleasantly? Once women lose faith in an institution or the other women working on a project, it’s natural to want to withdraw and find something more agreeable to do with one’s time.
In case you’re wondering, there’s absolutely no doubt that the FBI did meddle in feminist and lesbian-feminist projects. In June 1977, Ms. published a multi-page story by Letty Cottin Pogrebin culling nuggets from 1,377 pages of material gathered by the FBI between 1969 and 1973 under the heading of “Women’s Liberation Movement” and released after the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the reports are pathetic in their inanity, and the errors amusing in their cluelessness, but they are proof that informants were infiltrating meetings of all kinds–consciousness-raising to organizing–and reporting back to Hoover. Pogrebin’s penultimate paragraph is a real downer, even though I’m not sure I agree with her the informants were always serving as stenographers rather than meddlers:
Sadly, what the FBI has done best is to compile a catalog of the Women’s Movement’s self-destructiveness and our lost opportunities–a requiem for once thriving coalitions killed by the death wish of ideological purists and a nostalgic reminder of extinct organizations and names long since burned out and retired from activism.”
Back in 2021, I’m trying not to give in to paranoia or to assume that anyone accused of slowing down process is a bad actor–especially since I’m not aware of any timetable that indicates how long things are supposed to take–but I won’t pretend to have figured it all out yet.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Paranoia is very much the mood of the bonkers, brilliant Freeform series MOTHERLAND: FORT SALEM–a weird mouthful of a title for a very odd show. It’s an alternative history of the United States in which … well, let Wikipedia explain: “The series takes place in a women-dominated world in which the U.S. ended persecution of witches 300 years ago during the Salem witch trials after an agreement known as the Salem Accord. The world finds itself at odds with a terrorist organization known as the Spree, a witch resistance group fighting against the conscription of witches.” There are other enemies, too, but also tons and tons of strange and often sexy mythology and crazy twists. It’s utter genius. (And yikes–I just Googled the show to find a link, and learned that apparently a ton of people ask the Goog if the show and its characters are based on real history and people! I mean it would’ve been amazing if George Washington had been kept alive by his own equivalent of “the biddies”–but no.)
LISTEN TO ME: I really enjoyed talking to Charlie Jane Anders about Never Say You Can’t Survive, her new book of writing advice, for this week’s Working. (And then Rumaan and I talked about his recent New Yorker profile, which I found surprisingly moving.)
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