BARBARA J LOVE - There At The Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist

Cover photo: 1970 Christmas Eve Gay March in Greenwich Village.

Barbara Love, the Grand Marshall, is second from the right.

Cover page photo: Barbara Love by Liza Bar

Copyright 2021 Barbara J. Love

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent of the author.

ISBN 9 781 304550 200

Dedicated to all of those with the heart and the courage to confront norms and be their authentic selves. To those who were on the frontlines with me, shaping history, bravely sacrificing security and comforts for the cause of Gay Liberation and Womens Liberation.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank Joan Casamo for encouraging me to write my memoir. For almost three years she showed incredible patience, encouragement, wisdom, and supreme editing skills to make this book a reality.

Next, I want to recognize Liza Bar in NY who read my stories and helped shape them and improve the narrative before I sent them on to Joanie.

Lots of wonderful people helped me with documents or helped clarify events including Carole De Saram, Ivy Bottini, Ann Wallace, Arlie Costine-Scott, Karla Jay, Donna Gottschalk, Ellen Shumsky, Margie Adam, Kate Millett, Michaela Griffo, Sandra Ramos, and my younger brother Tony Love.

Photographers captured key moments in our history, and I am fortunate to have some of their work in this memoir. Unfortunately, I do not have all the names for recognitions, but I want to give special thanks to Bettye Lane who gifted me photos of key events in my life for many birthdays and special occasions. Bettye was the most prominent photographer of the second wave, and she was wherever the action was. Her work can be found at the Schlesinger Library.

Gayle Goodman, Christina Joukadar, Myra Kovary, Marlene Springer and Deborah Ash generously read the manuscript and were helpful with corrections and ideas, feedback and suggestions.

My dear friend of over 50 years, Linda Clarke, who knows me better than anyone, has written the introduction, making me very happy.

These are my memories and recollections, and they reflect my perspective at different moments in time. Differences are to be expected, any errors are mine, and they are honest mistakes.

A very special thank you goes to my spouse, my love and the center of my universe, Donna Smith, who listened to and read these stories over and over again.

Introduction by Linda Clarke

Perhaps every generation growing up comes upon some deep social problem it must solve some disturbing irritant or corruption or unfairness that has finally become morally intolerable.

Such was the experience of Barbara J. Love and her generation. In a moment of cultural challenge, Love, and a handful of others, fearlessly led an important social movement to liberate a shamed, frightened, outcast culture of homosexuals, lesbian women and gay men, the most despised population in America at the time.

Lesbians were an embarrassment to just about everybody. But Love and her activist sisters, many lesbians as well, saw themselves not as perverts and sinners but simply as ordinary people, and in an astonishingly short time, their efforts to expose and expunge the social bias and hatred against millions of their sisters and brothers would transform American society and prepare it for a radically more inclusive 21st century.

Many activists at the time emerged from the civil rights movement. Love came from an upper-class Republican family and community where she was a misfit. Perhaps the privilege afforded by this family eventually emboldened Barbara, but growing up she kept her mouth shut (her words), whenever she heard about or witnessed the various forms of discrimination that eventually sickened her and awakened her determination to change the world around her.

Admitting she was in the right place at the right time with the right rage, she tells her story with a cheerful honesty and transparency. Her book is a spontaneous, accessible, non-sequential conversation, irresistibly open, unselfconscious, friendly, and profoundly honest, much like Barbara herself.

I met Barbara close to the beginning of her political awakening when she lived at 43 5th Avenue next to Washington Square Park. She was writing Sappho Was A Right-on Woman with Sidney Abbott, her partner at the time. I had run into her at a Quaker meeting on nonviolence at Gramercy Park and was immediately struck by her sense of humor and amiable intelligence. We were soon sharing what books we were reading, standing on the curb oblivious to traffic, departing Quakers, and the usual bustle of NYC streets. I was quickly caught up in Barbaras social circle which consisted of intensely political women, radical, unrepentant, totally one-pointed in their desire to upend society and make it a more comfortable place to live in and thrive, not only as lesbians but as women.

In this way and with these people I soon joined a Consciousness Raising (CR) group. If feminism was already becoming an important social movement, this particular CR group of lesbian feminists represented something else. We were all swept up by the still incoherent ideas of feminism, but as lesbian feminists we were mindful of our rightful place on the frontlines of change. These important insights made a huge contribution to the second wave of feminism of the 20th century.

It was an extraordinary moment for all of us. Nobody was more insightful in this effort, more determined, than Barbara herself, and this book describes in detail the brave actions that went into such a life. Describing herself as a troublemaker and risktaker, she has successfully thrown off societys view of her.

There are lessons to be learned in this autobiographical journey. It might be just the book to inform the aspiration of our youngest troublemakers and risktakers, our newest generation to try and correct its own morally intolerable social problems. They will find here many cunning stratagems and new insights on how to practice disruption nonviolently and effectively.

I cherish my long-lasting friendship with this extraordinary warrior woman I first met in 1969 and with whom I still enjoy a deep connection more than 50 years later. During these years we have snorkeled in Curacao, seen Denali at sunrise, climbed blueberry covered hillsides hiding black bears. Weve been snowed upon in our tents in Yellowstone Park, and weve watched the hills of Tuscany ablaze with the fires of August, Ferragosto. We welcomed a new year walking through the plumeria scented streets of Maui and cheered in Paris on Bastille Day. We have solved the problems of the world together with our family of friends innumerable times over brunches and dinners at Kate Milletts Farm and around our own huge dining room table in New Paltz and now in Florida. Many of our closest friends and family members have died and we have mourned and celebrated their lives together. Always a stalwart reliable interested loving friend, she brings good cheer and intelligent conversation and a keen sense of probity with her everywhere, much like invisible luggage.

Barbara Loves own father once said to her that of all his children she was the one he would bet on to get herself out of a rathole. Well, she got a lot of us out of one. Hers is a remarkable story.

Yesterday I finally got up enough guts to buy your book. Today I read it in the morning and reread it in the evening. Tomorrow I stop telling lies - forever. I would start tonight, but I live alone, so I have no one to be honest with except myself. But now that I have been truthful with me, the rest doesnt look quite so bleak. Thank you! Thank you! I am still scared shitless, but I know that when the smoke clears I will have a much higher opinion of myself - something I must have. From an anonymous letter to Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott in 1975