Breanne Fahs - Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)

Valerie Solanas finally provides an in-depth, decade-spanning history of Valeries life, including mid-teen pregnancies, anti-essentialist college newspaper rebuttals, SCUM lectures, Up Your Ass casting calls, transience, letters of grammatical corrections to Majority Report , a continual emphasis from various sources on Valeries intelligence, radicalism, humor, comedic improv timing, and intensity, and thorough discussions of her work dismantling and repudiating sexuality, gender, morality, marriage, the money system, and the patriarchal status quo. NATH ANN CARRERA , singer/musicianThis compelling biography shows the complexity of Valerie Solanas, placing her in the context of so many later-twentieth-century cultural realitiesthe commodity explosion of the art world, nuclear family damage and dysfunction, emergent baby-boomer generation narcissism, and the complicated internal struggles of the feminist movement. CATHERINE MORRIS , Sackler Family Curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist ArtValerie Solanas was an enigma, an outsider even among misfits, and one of the most shocking radicals in a decade teeming with them. Breanne Fahs book is a long overdue excavation of the obsessions, paranoia, and rage that fueled both Solanass visionary manifesto and her appalling attempt to murder Warhol. CYNTHIA CARR , author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Text copyright 2014 by Breanne Fahs

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First ebook edition April 2014

First printing April 2014

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

Text design by Drew Stevens

Ebook design by Ellen Maddy

Inside front/back cover:

Lies! Lies! Valerie Solanas. This is a reproduction of Valerie Solanass handwriting on the 1971 copy of SCUM Manifesto housed in the collection at the New York Public Library. To sabotage the Olympia Press edition of SCUM and to protest unauthorized changes to her manifesto, she marked up her book with her own graffiti. For the full story, see .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

eISBN 978-155861-849-7 (ebook)

ISBN 978-155861-848-0 (paperback)

CONTENTS

Atlantic City to New York City, 19361967

SCUM, Shots, and Stupidstars, 19671968

The Contentious Birth of Radical Feminism, 19681973

Of Mental Hospitals and Men, 19681974

The Lost Years and Final Days, 19751988

For G. Elmer Griffin,
who cracked open the universe

and

for Eric Swank,
for more than our share
of la dolce vita

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. REBECCA WEST

PREFACE

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.... I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten itthat no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

TRACKING THE LIFE OF VALERIE SOLANAS, MUCH LIKE pursuing the movements of an invisible wolf, has led to many dead ends. Standing in the dusty, empty lots of downtown Phoenix, a place where Valerie once roamed the streets eating out of Dumpsters, digging a fork into her scab-filled arms, and howling at the moon, I stare at the silent mountains with a familiar mix of amusement, mourning, and awe. Shes dangerous, they still say, I wont even talk to you until I see a death certificate.

In one of Valeries more paranoid phases near the end of her life, she insisted she would write a book called Valerie Solanas. It would provide the definitive account of her life, told by herself, and, she imagined, it would sell at least twenty million copies (with a one-hundred-million-dollar advance from the Mob). Valerie hated the idea of imperfection, of others representing her life and work, of errors to the official record of how things went down. At the same time that she believed a uterine transmitter had been implanted in her against her will, sending details of her movements and words to what she called the Mob, she also took the time to correct spelling and grammar errors in the feminist periodical Majority Report . Her misfire at Andy Warhol felt like a blow to her reputation. She went by an absolute standard, even as she slipped into deeper and deeper psychosis. The irony of now writing a book called Valerie Solanas that gives an unauthorized account of her life, offering up a text filled with the potential for error (and, of course, Valeries posthumous cosmic revenge) is not lost on me.

Taking aim from the literal and metaphorical gutter, closing in on the power and audacity of those who prowled for thrills and never pandered for Daddys approval, Valerie wrote in her renowned, funny, and vitriolic SCUM Manifesto of women who had a SCUM state of mind: Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, morals, the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... and around and around... theyve been the whole showevery bit of it... SCUMs been through it all, and theyre now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out. But SCUM doesnt yet prevail; SCUMs still in the gutter of our society, which, if its not deflected from its present course and if the Bomb doesnt drop on it, will hump itself to death. In Valeries world, the lowly, downtrodden, abject, forgotten, nasty women living in the shitpile would inevitably take over the world. SCUM has power. SCUM knows truth.

Valerie saw things, knew things, sensed things far earlier than her contemporaries of the 1960s, giving her work a quality that is both beyond the pale and startlingly prescient. At a time before computers and Twitter, before sophisticated infertility treatments and 24/7 headline news, before no-fault divorce and marital rape laws, before punishable sexual harassment and antidiscrimination policies, she understood, somehow, the core of what would come to dominate modern American life. She sensed that constant surveillance would allow unlimited access to the powerless from the powerful. She believed that men would continue to justify wars based on increasingly asinine reasons. She predicted test-tube babies and the ability to reproduce without the bodies of men. She forecasted the invention of Viagra (calling it her perpetual hardness technique, which would render men manageable and easy to deal with). The gender-bending romp she created in her 1965 play, Up Your Ass , featured characters that even the best of queer theorists cannot categorize or understand. She loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.

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