Geneva Williams: Can you share a little about your educational background and what made you decide to become a professor of women’s and gender studies and English?

Karla Jay: There was no women’s studies or gender studies when I was in college. I was a French major and I thought I would like to become a college professor. And I did pursue a graduate education in Comparative Literature. But, it is interesting that you should say something about Women’s Studies because I was working on a dissertation and there was a new chair of the department who called me in, as I was working on American and British writers who had moved to France, because I was in comparative literature. She called me in and said to me, “Wouldn’t you be better off working in the Women’s Studies department and leaving us?” And I said “there is no Women’s Studies department!” There was a hint to get out, you know. And it was very difficult. I went to New York University for graduate school. And it’s funny because everyone thinks of NYU as a bastion of liberalism, but it wasn’t back then in some ways. They were in Greenwich Village and they didn’t want to attract too many queers, so they were quite homophobic. And Barnard College was quite homophobic because it was a women’s college and women’s colleges had a reputation of being lesbians, so they were homophobic. And NYU was anti-woman. And if you are thinking “well, the chair was a woman,” well, women enforce these things! They enforce the patriarchy and if you think that the woman in charge makes it the matriarchy then you have to think about Golda Meir and the fact that she was the head of Israel didn’t make that a feminist country. So, I had a very difficult time with that because there was no Women’s Studies, but I did want to teach. I started out teaching English as a second language. I got a start with tutoring international students in English and I moved on to teach English as a second language. Back then, it wasn’t the kind of teaching job where you needed a degree in that. I did that for a number of years and it wasn’t until I was a professor at Pace University, which was after being there for about 8-9 years as an adjunct, that I had finally gotten to do some Women’s Studies courses. 

We were really pushing for a Women’s Studies program, then a minor, then a major. I remember my first lesbian studies class at Pace, it consisted of 12 students. Most of them were nurses who wanted to find out about HIV and there were few lesbians and gay men in the class. And they wanted the door closed in case anyone walked by in the hallway. So that was what it was like when we did these first classes. I thought that Womens’  and Gender studies was a really good idea. In the 1970s we were kind of developing it by the seat of our pants because there really weren’t Women’s Studies textbooks yet. So we were collecting articles and ideas and meeting to decide what kind of things we should cover in an introduction to Women’s Studies. And having been in the Women’s Studies movement from 1968-69 on, I knew what the primary issues for young women were. And so, I could cover those in my class. Things about marriage, equality, equality in the workplace, sharing tasks, homosexuality, racism and how that ties into the women’s movement, alongside a number of other issues that were important. It wasn’t really that hard to reach out and develop a Women’s Studies curriculum that students were interested in. 

Williams: Do you feel like you have seen a change in inclusion of lesbians within feminist spaces?

Jay: I guess the answer is yes and no. It depends who is defining herself as a lesbian. To some degree yes. In 1977 at the Houston Conference of Women, the movement decided that lesbians should have a full and equal participation in the Women’s Movement. Although Betty Friedan, who up to that point had thrown lesbians out of NOW, really did not apologize for what she had done. Because she had a purge! She went through NOW and threw out lesbians from local and national offices. She threw out Rita Mae Brown, who was the editor of the newsletter. To a certain degree I wouldn’t say that we have had a larger role, we’ve had a more open role. Because really, if all the lesbians had been thrown out of the Women’s Movement, Betty Friedan’s fear that the heterosexual world would think of the Women’s Movement was a bunch of dykes. Well the Women’s Movement was a bunch of dykes! So, if we have really and truly been thrown out, then the Women’s Movement would have been severely crippled in that sense. I have known women who were in the closet. They were afraid to tell friends that were in their group that they were lesbian. Now, today there is a larger acceptance, except for there are trans women who define themselves as lesbians. The attack on trans women as self-defined women has been quite vocal both here and abroad. So, I really don’t know because I hear different accounts. I really don’t know the actual size of the anti-trans movement within the feminist movement. Certainly groups like WoLF (Women’s Liberation Front) today and festivals and meetings and so forth that bar trans women who call themselves lesbians. I don’t know how open the Women’s Movement is to all lesbians, for instance, to being welcoming of very butch lesbians. Very butch lesbians and non-binary lesbians is something they are very uncomfortable with. Because today people really define themselves very widely on a spectrum, so I really can’t speak for all women’s experiences in the Women’s Movement. 

Well, I spend my winters in Florida and I belong to the Democratic Women’s Club of Palm Beach county. And we work for candidates across the board from local offices to national candidates. I was very involved down there years ago for Hillary Clinton’s run for office. My partner and I have experienced some homophobia from the women while being at a table and the women weren’t talking to us and weren’t including us in the conversation. Additionally, there is much hostility at the bathroom. I’ve heard “oh, you’re in the wrong place.” Okay, I have short hair and I am a bit non-binary, but they are usually speaking in a policing kind of way. Like, “what are you doing here?” I am doing the same thing there as they are! Or at least I hope so! That is the kind of homophobia that I do get, more often in Florida than New York, by the people I call the bathroom gender police. Having lived in Europe where there is one bathroom for men and women, there was never an issue and I find it baffling. I mean they all got along in France, in particular, and there was always just one restroom. You walk past the urinal into the stall and if it was empty then you went in there. It was never an issue! In New York City, in Broadway theaters it is becoming more common for women to just go over to the men’s room without much complaint. But, the Broadway theater crowd is much more progressive. You know, it’s hard to say. There is still homophobia. And they feel, I don’t know, that we are holding them back. And how much time are they spending on our issues when we, the LGBTQ+ community, are under serious attack. As are feminists in a way. I mean, the right to control our bodies.

Williams: Thank you. The next question I have for you is, can you speak about the importance of the Lavender Menace?

Jay: The Lavender Menace was this wonderfully successful action. One of the things I always try to encourage young people to think about is that you really don’t need thousands of people to create political change. When forty of us took over the Second Congress to Unite Women in May of 1970, we had the entire audience surrounded by lesbians and we announced that we were changing the agenda of the second congress to include lesbians who have never been discussed at a conference. Also, to include class and race, which had never been discussed, these ideas were accepted. And that made a real change in the lives of the women who were there. I think there was some effort in the women’s movement, not in NOW which I would call the women’s liberation movement, but in the feminist movement there were efforts to particularly embrace the lives of working class women. For example, we tried to work with women who worked at AT&T, the telephone company. Telephone operators were 100% women and it was one of the jobs that African American women could get. We worked with these women to improve their lives, and we, the more radical women, were also more involved in things like trying to get childcare in workplaces. You know, we started this journey in the 1970s and after the takeover of the Women’s Home Journal, which paid us 100,000 dollars to leave, all of which went to charity and part of that money went to the development of childcare centers in the workplace. That’s a big barrier for women who need and or want to go to work. And back in the early 1970s, the only company that was having childcare for women was Stride Rite. I don’t know if you know Stride Rite, but it’s a terrific shoe company. It might not be in business anymore. And in their factories they had a childcare center! Some universities then developed them. But mostly it was a kind of selfish act because they wanted the education majors to have experience right there in the precise and be supervised. Well, that was a kind of not entirely altruistic endeavor if you think about it. And yes, the Lavender Menace and their live inspirations. You know, there are bars called the Lavender Menace and there is a drink that has to do with Lavender. I don’t drink, so I’ve never had this. There is a bookstore in Scotland where they created a play that has the name Lavender Menace in it even though it is made up of gay guys. It’s strange, it’s gay men. The idea of the Lavender Menace has lived on and has inspired young people to take action. And I think that people like the idea of menace, that we took ourselves so seriously that we would threaten the patriarchy in a sense. Not in a violent sense.

Williams: Thank you, that brings us to the next question that I have for you. I have been fascinated with your book, Tales Of The Lavender Menace: A Memoir Of Liberation. Can you share a story or two about what you learned while writing this book?

Jay: Well you know, the book has a lot of research in it. The research was done in the 1990s over quite a few years. And in those days there was really no internet and the internet was starting at the very end, so it was really quite primitive. I did a lot of research and I found out a lot of things about people and I looked into a lot of archives and I talked to a lot of people. You know, I have to say that it just confirmed what I had already been teaching in courses at Pace University in courses in memoir writing. One of the things I often said to the students was that memory is not the same thing as reality and fact, that we remembered things differently. One of the things I see that is included in the book, that was not learned particularly while writing the book, but if you look today at the Stonewall uprising. Today it is often called a riot. It was not a riot, it was not blood and gore. The recreation of this event to include people who were not there. By their own accounts they were not there! That has really changed my entire concept of history! If the story of that night and the following week at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village is now primarily a mythical creation, how can we ever expect to truly know the details of history that is further back? You know, the American Revolution, the Civil War. We really have to question the truth of these stories that we have read. In the book, I do that myself. At the end of Chapters I put these little stories in to show the person who writes the memoirs is not the same person who lived them. So many years later and now in the late 90s I was no longer a young radical, but a middle aged middle class academic. I am glad that I wrote it when I did because my memory today of what happened in the late 60s and early 70s is actually less clear than it was 25 years ago. It just fades a little bit more over time.

Williams: Who would be your top three lesser known yet influential women in history that we should include in our curriculum?

Jay:  I think that some women have sadly just fallen into obscurity. One of my personal She-ros is Barbara Deming, who was a pacifist, a civil rights activist, a lesbian, and a very prolific writer. I think that her call for peaceful ways to create social change – I mean, we need to look up to that! We need to stand up to the ultra right. Many of the second wave feminists have been somewhat forgotten. Some of them, now that they are long dead or quite elderly, have biographies or autobiographies made of them that I hope will revive them. For instance, someone like Susan Brownmiller, she wrote Against Our Will, and it was the classic book about rape. She really formulated and explored the way that rape was enacted and encoded into the law and how all these things didn’t favor the survivor of rape. Now, Susan is still alive and Claire Potter is writing a biography of her. I hope it will be revived, once in a while her name pops up. Her book was one of the top 100 books of the 20th century, but I can’t imagine who has read that in recent times. I even see someone like Kate Millet kind of disappearing. And her Sexual Politics was kind of an ovular work about understanding the way the world works. She was a brilliant explorer of the literary past. There are all these people from the second wave who have kind of not drifted into oblivion, but are not at the tip of anyone’s tongue. 

The other thing to remember is that we did things because we wanted to create social change. We did not think we would be famous or that that social change would happen. But we had to fight that fight anyway! Whether we won or lost or whether people remembered us or not! It wasn’t about us, it was about changing the way we live so that young girls would not have to grow up the way we did. And to a large degree, social change has been expansive. We see the trials, such as the one about Diddy. You would have never seen a trial like this in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s. So this new willingness of the victims of rape and abuse to speak up and speak out about and not be shamed by this by the defense or public. I mean, this is real social change! The kind that means women feel emboldened to act upon their own behalf.

Williams: What emerging feminist scholarship do you admire or whose work you currently enjoy reading? Are there any lesser known lesbians who you look up to that we should include in our course curriculum?

Jay: I think I answered that first one, but I can give you a few more. I am currently on Sarah Schulman’s new book that has just come out about people working together. I think that Sarah is an extremely important thinker who has created the extremely large compendium on HIV and this book is going to be really important for people to discuss. It is not that I agree with it completely. After all, the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, was intersectional. We worked with the Black Panthers, we worked with the Young Lords, we worked with the women’s movement. So this idea of trying to unify across very difficult differences – I mean, the Black Panthers were not exactly pro-gay, you know! We needed to unify with them. I think this is a lesson for today, but I am glad that Sarah’s taking that up. Of the lesser known women that people might look into, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who were around back then. And Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott, who wrote Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. A lot of these women are kind of now not well known. They are important activists and thinkers as well. Also Jean Córdova, who I imagine that somebody will write a biography of her. Well, if someone who is not now then maybe someone [reading] this will be! There she was in LA putting out the Gay Yellow Pages, which was the first way that you could find people. And she created the Lesbian Tide, a national newspaper and magazine for women. She was really just a mover and shaker. A lot of these people were movers and shakers, Barbara Jordan, Flo Kennedy. That’s another one who may have been forgotten. Kennedy was a Black feminist, lawyer, lesbian in New York who was just out there and in everyone’s face. She is in that TV documentary series that is about Mrs. America. Flo Kennedy kind of makes an appearance there. I was listening to a documentary about Bella Abzug. Her daughter Liz Abzug was on the show and a young woman called and told her that she was so glad that Liz was on the show because that young woman had never heard of her! I was kind of quietly screaming at home. I thought to myself, if people don’t know who Bella Abzug is then other people don’t have a chance. We can’t let history be Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and no one else. There was a lot going on. Although Gloria is an amazing person, it’s nothing against her!

Williams: Well put. Do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so, can you share why you think this course would be beneficial for high school students?

Jay: I think that the more history the merrier for high school students! One of the things that I discovered as a college professor was that students know almost no history. They know very little about government and how it works. And this is not only ignorance, but it is becoming a real danger as the right learns about history and government and tries to manipulate it to its advantage. The government actively erases women and other groups from history. They pulled a story about Harriet Tubman off a site and the blatant erasure of women means that women’s history is needed all the more! Whether it counts for AP, whether it is a non-AP course, or whether it’s a history club! We need to know our history. It gives us great insight into what women did that moves along the kind of terrible mistakes that we made historically. After all, there was incredible racism and classism within suffragist movements. They were entitled women. You know, they did not include these other people and we need to learn from these experiences to know what they did that was interesting. We need to know who did things at all! Women were among the first fliers at air shows and that women were explorers around the world. We need courses that will empower women to go forward in their lives and hopefully each woman will find herself a She-ro that she can hold onto as she goes forward and faces opposition in the patriarchy.

Williams: Yes, well thank you for your answer and thank you so much for your time!