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- Now talk to me about
the Lesbian Movement that emerges in the early part
of the 1960s,
you know and its relationship to
the Feminist Movement in general.
- Well it's really so interesting,
at John Jay we just gave the first Audre Lorde Prize
for Social Justice to the GLBTQ community,
which is very large at John Jay.
Which is very interesting because Audre and I
team taught the first,
it was called American Women in Black and White,
in the 19, maybe it was 69 or 70.
I think it was about 70,
when our students were all police officers
and mostly white,
and we were in the closet.
We posed as divorced women,
well we were divorced women.
But that's not all we were.
And to give in the year 2016
the first Audre Lorde Prize
for Social Justice
to a very
gay-friendly faculty member who supports
our gay students
and to a trans student who is a great activist
for trans rights
was really a thrill.
It was really just, Audre would've been so pleased.
Because you know,
this mother, feminist, warrior,
poet, hero, leader,
were out.
And this is the 40th anniversary
of something called the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies,
and we had our first meeting at John Jay
40 years ago,
when there was a bomb scare.
And so all of us who were at this meeting,
Marty Duberman was the chair,
were out on the street because there was a bomb scare.
And this was during the weekend,
and Monday morning, the next week,
the president of John Jay, Don Riddle,
and I happened to be in the elevator together.
And he said, I hear you had a great meeting.
And so okay I was out of the closet,
40 years ago.
But that's, it was very slow.
The closet really existed for a very long time,
and the course that we taught
which was to the students,
all of whom were police officers and fire fighters and men,
very quickly the women in the bars,
in Page Three,
and the Sea Colony heard that we were teaching.
And they invaded our class,
and then very quickly the police students
brought their wives and their mothers and their sisters
and their friends,
and it was the most crowded classroom imaginable.
And we had a lot of fun,
but we were still
you know slowly coming out of the closet.
It was very slow.
- Tell us then,
I mean I'm thinking about the coming out of the closet
as a political act.
So tell us what influence that had
or how it shaped the way people.
- It's really sort of astonishing when you think
of how far we've come,
and then you look at the backlash,
which is a little bit like Roe v. Wade,
how far we've come, but look at the backlash.
So here we've come very far,
and we can get married,
and Clare and I, we've been together for 46 years,
and we're married.
Imagine that.
Bottom line,
Audre had a great line in one of her poems,
"Your silence will not protect you."
And that notion that your silence
will not protect you
was very important.
At some point,
be bold
is a great message.
I tell my students to be bold
and to write from their hearts.
That's how you write.
Where do you, how do you write?
You write from your heart.
Okay, and you write love letters to your readers.
Be bold.
- Why does passionate politics come to mind
when you - Oh Charlotte Bunch yes.
Charlotte Bunch's Passionate Politics
has to come to mind because she was one of our
global heroes, women's rights are human rights.
And Charlotte Bunch was really one of the great organizers
of the various global meetings
for gender justice,
and you know she was one of the leaders
of an organization called The Furies,
which was based in Washington, D.C.
But The Furies had you know,
they were in this newspaper The Furies.
So there were small papers in which people
started to come out,
and JEB the great photographer started to take photographs
of and then Judy Grahn and Audre Lorde started to write
like ***.
And there we were.
We had our literature, we had magazines to read,
and we had each other to love.
It was a movement,
and it is still a movement.
- And it's a movement, and it's a movement that's
integrated, you know it has tentacles
if you like
into the broader social justice movements.
So that's part of what makes
this idea of women's work so intriguing
because here is a group of women
with a particular kind of identity
who nevertheless to achieve justice
for themselves if you like
ends up both producing
and working for justice
for the world or for - Everybody.
- Human rights everywhere.
- I mean if you're pursuing justice,
you're pursuing justice for everybody.
I mean it's no sooner that we can,
you know that we,
the notion that we can't get over our divides,
bridge our divides,
that's what the movement has to do.
That's what the Women's Movement did,
that's what the Civil Rights Movement did.
You know we just have to transcend
and bridge the divides,
and ultimately you know,
one of the heroes that
endures is Wendell Willkie,
who goes around the world in 1942,
and he has an epiphany.
Everything that happens anywhere
impacts on everybody everywhere.
We are one world.
And that, he wrote that book in 1942.
FDR said why don't we run together
and have a new Progressive Party, you and me,
and Wendell Willkie considered it.
But Wendell Willkie was a man who ate too much,
drank too much, loved too much,
and he dropped dead very suddenly
of too much.
And so it didn't happen.
But his book,
One World is still the message
for the future.
- I want, that's a great note to end on,
but I don't wanna end there. (laughing)
I wanna back up for one minute
and talk about this combination
of civil rights, women's rights,
and I especially wanted to talk about it
through the eyes of Florence Kennedy, Flo Kennedy.
Tell us about her
and how she brings these movements together.
- Well Flo Kennedy was one of the most amazing
attorneys, a black attorney,
who was also a broadcaster.
She had her own television show,
her own radio show.
She was a very radical attorney.
And she traveled a lot with Gloria Steinem,
so that when they were building the Feminist Movement,
she and Gloria would go all over the country
for feminism.
She also traveled with me for the Peace Movement.
And she was really really very funny.
She, her quips were amazing, for instance.
- Before we get to the funny part,
get to the serious part.
- Well the serious part was - What was she saying
when she wandered around?
- Well she was saying we're all in this together,
organize, you know get out of your kitchen,
get out of your living room,
get out beyond the television,
get out and march.
We need to be marching.
We need to be shoulder to shoulder.
- [Alice] Should be marching for what?
- [Blanche] Justice.
- Justice - For civil rights,
for women's rights,
for human rights.
And that was,
and you know,
empty the prisons,
we need education for everybody.
She was really one of the people
who just said what is this prison stuff?
We need help,
people in prison need help.
They need counseling,
they need,
they need jobs.
They need to be
educated to be able
to be self-supporting
and contributing.
And so she had this really big vision,
everybody needs to contribute,
everybody needs to be safe.
And that was Flo Kennedy.
- And now tell us the quips. (laughing)
- Well the one quip was,
if men got pregnant,
abortion would be
a sacrament.
That was one of her funny quips.
- Wonderful.
So civil rights and the Women's Movement
moving hand in hand
into the 1970s,
but then along comes
Black Power, along comes
a kind of split on the part of both extremes.
Some elements of the Women's Movement
separate and argue for
what we now call liberal feminism
or you know
participation in the goodies
that the earth has to give,
and some elements of the Black Movement
argue that women
really are and should be
within the African American Movement subordinate
to black leadership.
- Well some of us didn't play
those divisive games,
so I think of Angela Davis
and the Black Power Movement,
when the Black Power Movement
comes the Black Panthers.
And then there are friends of the Black Panthers.
And then there's Angela Davis
who is really one of our abiding heroes.
And the bridge there.
As a matter of fact,
it was Angela Davis who got
an Audre Lorde chair at the University of Kentucky
in Louisville,
organized it for you know Audre Lorde.
So Angela Davis,
I mean there were always people
who wanted to keep the big bridge
and fought for the big bridge.
And I have to say I think Amy,
I think those of us - Amy Swerdlow.
- Amy Swerdlow I think those of us
in our study group,
I mean we had,
you know we have to think about socialism.
Can't we think about socialism?
How do we think about socialism?
Not male dominated Soviet dominating socialism,
but you know Emma Goldman anarchism,
power from the bottom up.
At some point we have to think very big and very radical
and keep our movements clear.
So and I think that continued
with Audre.
There's a new book The Wind is Spirit,
that Gloria Joseph just did,
in which you know Audre
who built bridges globally.
So there's an Afro-German feminist movement
of radical women that when Audre was in Berlin
getting alternative health care,
she was part of that
creating this Afro-German movement,
and there's a wonderful film that Dagmar Schultz has done,
Audre the Berlin Years
which anybody can get on YouTube.
Thrilling really.
And this
continues so that
Clare Coss my partner who did a book on poetry,
is a playwright,
her play on Emmett Till is going,
has been translated into German
and is going to be in Berlin
next year,
The Civil Rights Movement, White Responsibility,
White Silence, We Have to Stop the Violence.
These are the big issues.
They're not going away unfortunately.
One can argue
they're getting worse.
We have a fascist
bigmouth running for President.
That's very scary.
This is new in America.
But it's not new in the world.
And the battles are old.
We have to keep the struggle on
as Annette Rubinstein,
my personal hero, always said,
"Life is about the struggle."
(laughing)