There. I said the word “gay”. Good thing I’m not in Florida. But back in 1970, it wasn’t a very safe word. Stonewall made a big dent in that. And in 1970 I joined what was then a really really small Gay Liberation student group. We had meetings. A few people came. We put on dances. More people came. Then we started a newspaper. I loved it. It was my introduction to journalism which I discovered was my favorite thing to do after music.
One day, while selling copies of the paper on Castro Street, something happened which was not that unusual, but pushed all my buttons anyway. A middle aged man came up to me and wanted to chat. I really wasn’t in the mood but listened for a couple of minutes. He was clearly straight and had an agenda. He noticed that I had some facial hair and said, “So you have too much testosterone and that must be why you’re a lesbian. I bet all you need is a good fuck.”
Seriously? I thought, while trying not to whack him in the head with the newspapers. I mean, what is the proper response to that? I believe I said something like, “Go fuck yourself!” and walked away. Ok, not the best response, but it felt good.
The newspaper became somewhat successful. But when I confronted my co-chair of Gay Liberation about the fact that there were too many pictures of naked men to get very many women to read the paper, he didn’t really care. He said that gay men loved it and that we’d leave those pictures in the paper – they sold copies.
Ah. An introduction into the business that takes over quality news. You really can’t keep publishing a paper without advertising which pays for the printing mostly and the distribution as well. I wasn’t convinced that the Gay community had nothing more to offer than pictures of naked men. Surely there were actual issues that the community could relate to. But what did I know?
So I left the newspaper. I decided to take my music more seriously. Instead of going from one meeting to another to another, I went on tour. I played music for lumberjacks in Quincy, CA, for lesbians in Salt Lake City, for students at Yale, in Charlotte, NC, in New York City and so many places in between. It started to become clear that while meetings and talking about issues were incredibly important, music could get to people’s hearts. And that’s a whole different ball game. If you can reach people on a heart to heart level, then it becomes possible to talk about different things, things that none of you talk about every day, things like sexuality, where you stand on that particular spectrum and what you think of people at the other end.
If everybody who is constantly yelling, threatening and basically being bullies would just chill and attempt to find the place that nurtures us all when we communicate with one another, then maybe things would improve. Even in Nixon’s time when the nation’s politics were also in upheaval, people still talked to each other. So did people in Congress! (Nixon’s racism and antisemitism only came out later when tapes were discovered.)There has to be a way for conversation to happen. We are in a place right now where that seems to be impossible especially when people refuse to see what’s real and true.
More music?
