hierarchy of fame always favored those in the movies; intellectuals per se were low on the list. As an of ice worker, I was not expected to have ideas, but I had them anyway. In the larger
meetings when we had a whole roomful of the famous or
somewhat famous, I would be cut in two for put ing an idea
forward. I remember being torn to pieces by some famous
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My Last Leftist Meeting
divinity professor. Whoever he is, I hate him now as much as
I did then. Another noneminent and I apparently called his
moral purity into question. I have no idea how or why; I
didn’t then and I don’t now.
In this smaller meeting in a tiny room around a nondescript
table there was more congeniality. Cora Weiss was there, I
remember - her family owns or owned Revlon. A man named
Carl from Vietnam Veterans Against the War headed the
meeting in the official sense; he was famous in the antiwar
movement, prominent, in no way a servant, instead a rather
cunning leader. The women’s movement was going full tilt but
never seemed to penetrate the antiwar movement (and hasn’t,
in my opinion, to this day). No one appeared wil ing to
rethink the status quo. In fact, no one was prepared to understand that the women’s movement had outclassed the peace movement with both its originality and its vision of equality.
I had once been at a meeting at Carl’s apartment, shared with
a woman. He proudly showed me the self-hating graffiti her
consciousness-raising group had etched and drawn and painted
onto a canvas on the wall. He enjoyed it a lot and especial y,
as he made clear to me, that the women had done it themselves.
See, he seemed to be saying, this is what they think of themselves so I don’t have to think more of them. I remember being very troubled - why was this woman-hating graffiti what
they thought of themselves? I remember noting in my mind
that this was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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Heartbreak
We took a break in the middle of our little meeting - someone had to make a phone cal - but returned to the table wel before the break was over. None of the women, including
myself, talked. Our col eagues of the male persuasion did talk:
about Marilyn Chambers, the pornography star who had
sold Ivory soap in television commercials until she was booted
out by a morals clause in her Ivory contract. The conversation
came from out of nowhere; nothing logically led to it and
nothing explained the fact that the men al liked the conversation and participated happily. They talked in particular about how much they would like to fuck her in the as . This seemed
to derive from her most famous movie, Behind the Green Door,
which they al seemed to have seen.
I sat there in dismay and confusion. Weren’t we trying to
stop exploitation? Weren’t we the love children, not the hate
children? Didn’t we believe in the dignity of al persons?
Wasn’t it clear - surely it didn’t have to be pointed out - that
pornography defamed women? Even if Carl’s woman friend
and her friends debased themselves, commercial pornography
required male consumption and brought the defamation to
a new level. What the men said was so vile that I was real y
wounded by it. I seemed unable to learn the lesson that pornography trumped political principle and honor. (I may have learned it by now)
I found myself nauseated and in my mind debated whether
or not I would give a little exit speech or simply get up and
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My Last Leftist Meeting
leave. The exit speech would have the advantage of let ing
them know how they had let down me and mine, others
like me, women. Were these men worth it - were they worth
fighting for the right words, which was always so hard? Were
they worth overcoming the nausea, or should I just puke on
the table (and I was damned close to it)? I noted that the men
were having a good time and that the women not only did not
raise their eyes but had their heads lowered as if trying to
pretend they didn’t hear or weren’t there. I noticed that the
men did not notice that the women had suddenly become
absent, at the table yes but not present, not verbal - there was
a quiet resembling social or political death; in ef ect, the women
were erased. I got up and walked out. I never went back to the
group and stopped get ing my $75-a-week paycheck, which
was the mainstay of my existence. Everything else I earned
was chump change.
103
Petra Kel y
Some twenty years after my last leftist meeting, I went to a
memorial service at the United Nations Chapel for Petra Kel y
Petra Kel y was the daughter of an Amerikan father and a
German mother; she was a pacifist and a feminist. Living in
Germany she founded the Green Party, which was devoted to
ecofeminism, nonviolence, and anti pornography politics. She
brought one of the first lawsuits against a pornographer for
slander, libel, and hate. She put up a hell of a fight but lost
the case. The lefties within the Green Party didn’t support her.
Before her death she was doing antiwar work in the Balkans.
The memorial service was organized and at ended by my
old pacifist friends from the anti-Vietnam War days. Petra had
been shot to death by her male companion-lover who then
shot and killed himself. The companion-lover had been a
general with NATO in Germany; Petra had been responsible
for his transformation into a pacifist.
Cora Weiss was the emcee of the event. There were seven
or eight invited speakers, most of them male or maybe al of
them but Bel a Abzug. Many of the speakers, touched by the
conversion of the NATO general to nonviolence, spoke at
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Petra Kelly
length about his courage and honor; his stunning contributions
to pacifism and world peace (through renouncing NATO).
Some of them mentioned Petra in passing. One or two did
not mention her at al but called him “brother” and nearly
dissolved in tears. (And we thought that boys couldn’t cry. )
The sentimentality on behalf of the male convert to pacifism
was astonishing. Many of the speakers appeared to accept that
Petra and her companion-lover were the victims of a plot,
probably CIA, because the CIA saw him as a turncoat and
wanted to kil him - she was, as monsters say, collateral damage.
Others thought that there had been a mutual suicide pact,
that Petra had agreed - ladies first - to be killed by the former
NATO general. I waited for Bella Abzug, one of my heroes,
to speak. She spoke last, I think, but nothing she said challenged the notion of Petra as a helpmate who wanted to be kil ed. She even managed to say something nice about the boy,