Our Men Against Sexism group has a healthy culture of openness and struggle, so I feel comfortable expressing what I know to be politically incorrect. “There are some traditional ‘manly virtues’ that I consider positive, like physical strength. I’m a furniture mover, and I like being in shape.” Ken, the moving spirit of the group and my best friend, replies gently but firmly, “But there’s a male bias in how you define ‘strong.’ Men may, on average, have greater ability to lift weights, but women have great physical strength in other, often more important ways, such as endurance and in the incredible feat of bearing children. It’s fine to enjoy being in good shape, but it’s sexist to see men as ‘stronger’ than women.” I hear what Ken’s saying, but it doesn’t fully sink in emotionally; I’m still enamored of my furniture-moving prowess.
Two weeks later Ken and I are honored and excited to be on an otherwise all-women day-long raft trip on the Colorado River. A local feminist stalwart is a certified guide and annually leads a trip for radical women. Ken and I have grown close to this community through the allied work of our MAS group, especially the childcare we do for women’s events, and this year we are invited to come along. The sun is a brilliant yellow, the water a jade green, and cliffs rise impressively along the banks as we raft down the Colorado. People break out a case of beer, and I join in the festivities, even though I hardly ever drink. After a couple of beers, with the motion of the raft and the hot sun beating down, I’m suddenly sick to my stomach and incapacitated. I am dropped off on a shaded islet. Ken volunteers to stay with me; the rest of the party will pick us up on their way back.
In the shade and on solid ground, I start to feel better, and before long we are laughing uproariously as I declaim, “And who was the only one who couldn’t handle the physical rigors of the trip? The big, strong furniture mover!” During this weekend of natural beauty and warm camaraderie, I can’t begin to imagine that within months I’ll become a social outcast, even a bit of a pariah, to most of the women on the raft.
On my own in Denver, I faced a range of pressing needs and desires to rebuild my life and politics: finding a way to make a living; looking for old friends; connecting with the Left; touching base—offering self-criticism and then building solidarity—with the Chicano/a, Black, and Native American struggles, and also with the local women’s movement.
To my surprise, I could find only one person that I used to run with in 1970. Mary had led a small, militant collective focused on environmental activism. She had educated me about some of the grave emerging dangers, while I discussed how those depredations related to the nature of imperialism. Back then she had been most interested in what the WUO could offer in the way of militant tactics, since she was contemplating forms of sabotage. We hadn’t been very helpful on that level. Now, seven years later, we were happy to see each other, but Mary had health problems, didn’t have a collective, and had never related much to the white Left—she didn’t think there was much of one in Denver these days.
I hoped she was wrong. I figured my best way to connect was to go to the bookstore that also served as a movement center, RIP, or Radical Information Project. But before I even got there I was jolted by what I read in the Denver Post. They ran a series on the Crusade for Justice, depicting them as bullies and thugs. This characterization was given credibility by quotes from “radicals” and “socialists” who decried the Crusade for being anti-white and violent. Those charges from the white Left sounded all too familiar, but what shocked me was that they would be repeated to the corporate press, and for a series that seemed designed to isolate the Crusade from public support and leave them vulnerable to police repression.
So even as I was setting out to reconnect with the Left in a humble way, to learn and rebuild, I had to raise this issue: that it was a problem to give the media ammunition that could be used against the main Chicano/a group in this northern corner of the land that had been ripped off from Mexico. My discussions with various individuals at RIP went nowhere, with one exception. Ken, a new friend who was himself fairly new to Denver, did allow that the white Left could often be racist in its view of Third World groups. But he also said that he had heard several accounts of Crusade intimidation that made him extremely wary of that organization.
As it turned out, it wasn’t my arguments but, inadvertently, the results of my actions that made a breakthrough with Ken. When he heard I was paying a visit to the Crusade at their headquarters, he was sure that I’d get thrown out and, most likely, beaten up because I was white. When he later saw me in one piece and happy about the meeting, he began to consider that it was the white Left’s politics, rather than the Crusade’s racial attitudes, that was the main source of the friction.
For me, the visit was the warmest and most comfortable moment since my return. They were the only activists (aside from Mary) I knew from 1970 who were still in Denver, and they were still up and running. (Ordinarily, they might have been suspicious of someone who surfaced without doing time—that he had traded information for leniency. But since Walter Gerash, a movement lawyer of great integrity, had handled the negotiations, they had no such doubts.) My self-criticism about the WUO’s backsliding on white supremacy came as no surprise to the Crusade people I talked with, but they seemed to still consider us a relatively positive element within the white Left. In any case, they accepted my self-criticism without in any way expressing contempt or disdain.
Naturally I was anxious to hear what had happened with them over the past seven years. A turning point had come during the Native American occupation of Wounded Knee in early 1973—a key moment when the WUO had been shamefully inactive. The Crusade had seen solidarity as its top priority, and had collected supplies and somehow gotten them through the FBI blockade around Wounded Knee. The Denver police had accused the Crusade of running guns to the Indians, although a police raid didn’t turn up any weapons. One police raid on the community center, during a youth dance, had resulted in a street battle—tear gas, rocks, fires, police gunfire—in which a young activist, Luis Junior Martinez, was shot dead by the police.
I didn’t know if the Crusade ever used coercive tactics within their community, but it was clear that the widespread charges against them for “violence” mainly resulted from their solidarity with Native Americans and their defense of their community center. My impression was that in this era of a receding movement, the Crusade was less active politically. But I was impressed that at a time when most radical organizations of the 1960s had dissolved, they were still here and still had a solid base in their community.
There was no one left from what had been a small Black Panther chapter in Denver. The militants I’d known in 1970 were in prison, or underground, or regrouped in Oakland. One brother had been killed. I was, however, able to find a representative of the revolutionary nationalist All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), which had been started by Stokely Carmichael, who had taken on the African name Kwame Ture. They didn’t have a chapter in Denver, just a couple of members. When I met Rick, I explained who I was and again started with a self-criticism. Rick was gracious about it and, overall, seemed to have a very favorable view of Weather. As we went on to a broader range of discussions, we connected well personally. Over time, Rick and Nadine’s house became the place were I felt most at home; it was to become my refuge when I was isolated and under attack by the white Left.
Nadine was Jewish, and while she seemed to me to be too dismissive of white feminists, she had a down-to-earth sense of the real-life conditions of poor and oppressed people. With three beautiful kids and little income, Nadine and Rick lived those survival struggles. She also cautioned me that even for the oppressed, nationalism had its limits. Israel and, to a lesser degree Liberia (where ex-slaves, who migrated from the U.S. in the 1800s, became the ruling class) were painful examples of how the oppressed could become the oppressor. Rick turned me on to the delights of Peter Tosh’s music; Nadine treated me like her biological brother.
The third stop on my amends and solidarity track was the women’s movement. Since there was a big overlap between the RIP Left and the feminist community, making contact was easy. Compared with the Crusade and the AAPRP, the connection felt less organic because the political history and framework were more divergent. Sabrina seemed surprised that I wanted to meet with her at all. When I started out with a self-criticism for the WUO’s dearth of feminist program and macho style, she let out a big “and how!” on the latter point. Sabrina felt that armed struggle was inherently male supremacist, and she didn’t see any positive aspects in what we had done. That made me a little uncomfortable, but the point of my visit was not to impose my politics but rather to work on and change my sexism. Given her dislike for the WUO, Sabrina was extremely generous, open-minded, and willing to talk. Some of her suggestions on how to support women’s struggles were later put into practice in our Men Against Sexism group.
Long before this first round of solidarity visits was completed, I had found a way to make a living. Here I fell back on my experience as a furniture mover. I also found a cheap but pleasant apartment in a racially mixed neighborhood. Several of my neighbors were very friendly. The one sticking point was that they couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t get a TV, why I wouldn’t even accept their old one for free.
The moving company I ended up with, once again, drew on students and ex-students. The guy who owned it, Jake, had shown a lot of initiative in building it up from scratch—although his lack of capital left me with safety concerns about a few of the rigs. Despite my politics and fugitive past—I was quite open about it—Jake felt comfortable with me as the lead man on a truck. I got along well with my fellow workers, almost all white guys. The one woman at the company, the dispatcher, Bonnie, turned out to be a real gem and became one of my best friends in Denver. Originally from Mississippi, she had left to escape the bigotry she’d encountered after dating a Black man. While never in the organized Left, Bonnie had a deeper sense than many radicals of society’s racism, sexism, and class divides—and a willingness to stand up to them in her own, unpretentious way.
The evening couldn’t have been nicer, a chance to talk, after a long absence, for hours on end. Lydia and I’d been lovers years ago, but comrades for the duration, even when out of touch. While I was still underground, she’d been part of a team defending Black homes from assaults by white mobs, as Boston became the center of open racist violence in the 1970s. We’ve been catching up on our lives and the state of the world over bagels and coffee in Coolidge Corner, a section of my hometown, Brookline, that borders on Boston.
As we walk to the trolley stop at about ten o’clock to return to our respective homes, we see a ruckus developing. Two white teenage boys are accosting two younger and smaller Black teens—they have book bags and what looks like art supplies—simply for being Black and in the neighborhood. We step in, face the white kids and tell them to cut the BS. But there’s already too much static and motion for us to contain. The whites dart around us and the Blacks run. Lydia turns to cool out a group of white girls on the corner who are screaming, “Kill the niggers!” Meanwhile, I see that fifty yards down the road the two white teens have one Black kid (who’d turned to face them to enable his younger brother to get away) down on the ground. I race down there, but as I pull one teen off, the other bolts around me to get in a kick to the head. It alternates like that—seemingly forever but actually for another two or three kicks—as several adult white male bystanders watch the assault without lifting a finger to help me stop it.
The cops drive up, let the white teens flee, and take the Black kid away with them—we hope for the medical attention we demand and not to be booked, but the cops’ hostile attitude doesn’t bode well. (When we later call the police station, they won’t provide any information on the condition of the youth or what happened to him.)
As Lydia and I sort out what happened, I keep reliving those kicks to the head and obsessively going over every aspect of how the events unfolded to see if we could have stopped the attack sooner. It hadn’t occurred to me to start throwing punches; now I feel I’d been too passive, that I should have been more aggressive to protect that kid. The moment is doubly upsetting for Lydia. My berating myself, and implicitly her too, for not doing enough reminds her of how Weather trashed activists for not fighting hard enough. The situation is especially infuriating for Lydia because I represented Weather sexism and arrogance in our personal relationship. Despite her anger she’s making the effort to explain this to me. I’m still in denial on these issues, and vivid replays of those damaging kicks to the head are looping though my brain. I can’t process what she’s saying…
Soon after I got settled in Denver, I headed East for a visit with my mom and dad. Needless to say, my parents were thrilled and this reunion was joyous. They even hosted a small gathering for me with old family friends. I enjoyed seeing people after all this time, but there was also a bit of awkwardness, as I perhaps hadn’t yet fully decompressed from living underground within a revolutionary organization. While I knew enough not to get into heavy political debates, and certainly not on Palestine/Israel, I nonetheless was thrown off balance and not adequately gracious about the divergences in world views. For example family members were certain that the Vietnamese routinely tortured U.S. POWs, while the U.S. forces of course were humane with theirs.
By the time I’d gone underground, my parents had grown to strongly oppose the Vietnam War; and later, I think, they came to take a certain pride in how early and clearly I had opposed it, and even in the WUO’s ability to elude the government without harming any person physically. More broadly, when my father tried to explain why nothing had turned out as he’d hoped and expected with any of his three kids, he would say that the war drove our generation crazy.
As good as it was to be with them again, I felt an edge of uneasiness. My parents obviously hoped that everything would now return to normal: The war is over; our son is back home! But in my heart, I was still fighting imperialism. There was no way I could abide the still massive assault on human life, potential, and dignity involved in “business as usual.” The very next night what had promised to be a delightful reunion with Lydia proved to be a graphic and painful reminder of just how pervasive the problems were.
About two months after I got to Denver, Rick and Uhuru asked me to run for the community board of directors for the local poverty program. That was quite a surprise, because their analysis was the same as mine: the “War on Poverty” had been designed to co-opt the struggles of the 1960s, to deflect the communities’ demands for self-determination with a pittance of government hand-outs that provided a few articulate individuals with jobs and fostered dependency. But the program did fund the community center where Uhuru had a job, which was the base for his community organizing. They were now under government pressure to “integrate” their all-Black board of directors, and Uhuru wanted me to be the white person on the board.
The experience did give me an opportunity to work with some good people and to learn more about community issues, but it also confirmed my already jaundiced view of the “War on Poverty.” One of the worst aspects was how the two main centers in the city—ours and the one in the Chicano/Mexicana community—were regularly pitted against each other, competing to win the same funding grants. Uhuru and I worked hard to develop fraternal links, and managed to get an excellent Mexicano organizer hired for a job at our center, but we barely dented the built-in structural problem.
My work on the board put me in touch with police brutality issues. After a couple of especially heinous incidents, a citywide coalition was formed to demand a community review board, better-defined police procedures, and methods to monitor and restrain the police. The coalition provided a good opportunity for activists from the Black and from the Chicana/Mexicano communities to work together (the white Left in Denver wasn’t a presence in this work).
What I had never imagined beforehand was that male-to-female transgender activists would be a major component of the coalition. Still fairly ignorant and backward about these realities, I saw them as exotic, if not strange. To me, it seemed that folks should just accept the gender they were “born with” and work from there against stereotypes and for equality. It was only through the discussions that came from working together that I got a sense of how some individuals felt deeply, and as central to their identify, that they belonged to a gender different from the one society had assigned them.
Transgender people of color experienced incessant and cruel abuse from the police. They were regularly stopped, and at times arrested, on any pretext—usually accompanied by taunts, threats, and all too often by gropings or beatings. In the red light districts of the city, the police did their best to make everyday life for the transgendered a constant torment. In spite of this, their representatives, who suffered the worst retaliation for our work, impressed me with their serious, focused, and courageous approach. Overall, our coalition raised consciousness and promoted dialogue among communities, but we did not achieve any structural change to rein in police brutality.
A few months after my arrival, the Native American Longest Walk of 1978 came through Denver. The campaign had started out from San Francisco on February 11, with seventeen marchers, and they were headed all the way to Washington, D.C. Their purpose was to call attention to and defeat eleven bills in Congress that would have annulled treaties protecting Native American sovereignty. By the time they got to Colorado, with spring breaking, they were hundreds strong, and hundreds more of us joined them for the eighty-mile leg from Denver to Pueblo. The bright blue skies, the soaring spirits, and the uproarious welcome we got from the Chicano/a community of Pueblo made for an exhilarating event. By the time the Longest Walk reached D.C. they were three thousand strong; and they won their key demands.
Before a year was out, Ken asked me to go in with him and two other radicals to rent a house on Adams Street. In addition to wanting to live more collectively, Ken felt that the house had the potential to serve as a movement mini-center. It was in a somewhat higher rent district than where I lived, but still cheaper than our four separate apartments. Plus, I’d still be within my district for the poverty program board.
I didn’t know the other two people, only that Ken thought highly of them. Flip was the most outspoken gay activist in the Denver Left—radical, energetic, and anti-imperialist. Ginger, from a working-class background, was a feminist and was also open to allying with the Chicano/a movement. She said she’d be comfortable in the otherwise all-male household.
I cherished the privacy of my little apartment as well as my rapport with my neighbors. But my growing friendship with Ken, my favorable impressions of Ginger and Flip, and my desire to become more engaged with the white Left/feminist community tipped the balance. As it turned out, the move led to qualitative changes in my personal and political life.
As busy as each of us was, we tried to have dinner together a few times each week, and we soon got to know one another. Flip amazed me with his openness in describing his early childhood, the depth of his sexual identity, his family’s reaction, the problems for and within the gay community, and the obtuseness of most of the Left on these issues—the education he gave me was a real eye-opener. Ginger expressed a healthy frustration with the Left’s tendency for lots of meetings and talk that didn’t lead to any organizing, and she pushed for projects that put us in closer touch with everyday people. As Ken had envisioned, different activists often stopped by and our dining/living room (which combined could sit close to forty people) became the site of some valuable forums and discussion.
Two seeds that had already started to sprout soon blossomed into my main areas of political work: solidarity with El Comité (in English, “The Committee”) and a Men Against Sexism (MAS) group. Audre was the person who provided the keys for both these doors. She was unique, at least for Denver—being both a Maoist and a stalwart feminist, committed to building an independent women’s movement. She and I had a lot in common as rare birds who devoted a lot of attention to theory. Our mutual respect and interest in each other’s ideas generated a mild flirtation, but with our frequent political friction, no romance developed. I learned a lot from her emphasis on the issue of violence against women, and I appreciated her Maoist reminders that class struggle continues even after the revolution. She seemed interested in my position that the fundamental relations of production could not be reduced to wage-labor and capital; that the economy was also based on subsuming the labor and resources of Third World countries and on the unwaged and underwaged work of women, which meant that those struggles also were fundamental. But I don’t think she ever broke from more traditional, labor-centered Marxism. She believed my support for national liberation movements that took Soviet aid was revisionist; I felt the Maoists were sectarian. Surprisingly, given our differences, it was Audre who introduced me to the Chicano/a group, El Comité. She also was the one who a year earlier had urged Ken to form MAS.
When Ken had asked me, not long after we met, to join the MAS, I agonized over my decision. Clearly, I needed collective ways to work on my sexism—but I was wary of joining an all-white group that wasn’t anti-imperialist. But here in Denver I had no way to combine the two, so I opted to join MAS while continuing my still isolated efforts to build solidarity with people of color groups.
Other men’s groups I had known either self-censored by preimposing a correct line before talking or, racing in the opposite direction, reinforced their sexism, passionately justified as men “expressing our feelings.” In MAS, under Ken’s leadership, we were encouraged to speak openly about sexist attitudes—no one was jumped on or condemned—but then to struggle with them, to work to get to a better place. While our discussions remained confidential, we regularly consulted with feminist mentors about general issues and the broad direction of our efforts. So when, for example, Carl confessed that he liked Playboy magazine, we discussed why that appealed to him and tried to work through the power dynamics of objectifying women. Later we’d check-in with our mentors about the issue, without naming the individual involved. The process felt healthy and helpful to me, including my working through my masculinist distortion of “strong.” In retrospect one problem with our politics was that we hewed too closely to the prominent line of the day, as put forth by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, that pornography was the leading edge of male supremacy. We weren’t yet familiar with the critiques that developed among feminists on the dangers of puritanism and of promoting censorship—which could later be used against affirmations of lesbian and gay sexuality.
The main point wasn’t some unattainable self-perfection; fighting sexism mandated concrete solidarity with women’s struggles. When we asked various women how we could help, the response was a ringing, unanimous chorus: do childcare for our meetings and events! With lots of events, and some of our eight-man group living in Boulder, I got to do lots of childcare, to the point where I developed a relationship to some of these sparkling children, including some personal times out together too.
Solidarity also entailed efforts to educate and organize other males. Our most successful project was a series of skits we did for high school classes. Ken knew some progressive teachers who invited us in—and who must have prepared their students well, because even the boys seemed attentive. The funniest skit had me as guy who thought his wife did nothing all day, on a rare time alone with the kids—while our other members had a ball playing the rambunctious children. Our skits were crafted to cover a range of themes, but I was amazed at the passion one issue evoked: one Black or Latina girl after another spoke out with anger about sexual harassment at their jobs.
How strange…me, of all people, passing out leaflets for a Progressive Labor front-group, CAR (Committee Against Racism)! After the 1969 split of SDS, PL made “fighting racism” a top public priority. Naturally they still deny there’s a system of white supremacy—to them racism among workers is a matter of bad ideas, not based in white privilege. Similarly, they still oppose independent organizations for people of color. “Fighting racism” is PL’s way to unite and lead the (predominantly white) U.S. working class.
What will the comrades in El Comité think when they learn I was here? They can’t stand PL because of its rejection of Mexicano/a self-determination. But I’d had no time to consult: I’d only found out about the Ku Klux Klan rally and protest against it through a flier at the bus stop on my way to work. I feel like I’m doing the right thing on this corner in downtown Denver, handing out the (way too rhetorical) CAR leaflet and talking with those who’ll stop about opposing the Klan—which in the event doesn’t publicly show its face.
Ironically, the only workers at PL’s “all for the proletariat” event are myself and three friends from the moving company. We came straight from a job that ran late, so we’re still in our work clothes. At the end of the demonstration, I’m surprised to see that the CAR core group scatters, leaving the two most visible speakers, with posters and a megaphone, to walk several blocks back to their car alone. This strikes me as careless, given the Klan’s history of violence, so we four movers escort them back to their car. At first taken aback, the CARs seem thrilled to get such staunch support from these anonymous workers.
I met El Comité because of a car accident—Audre’s. She broke her leg, which required two weeks in the hospital—leaving her fourteen-year-old son Paul home alone. He was a mature and together kid but still found that prospect unsettling. I moved into their place until his mom came back home.
When Audre returned she told me that the accident had happened on the way home from a talk by Juan Antonio Corretjer, a leader of the Puerto Rican Socialist League. Audre had been interested because she’d heard that, unlike the Crusade, the sponsoring Mexicano/a group was explicitly Marxist. Don Juan Antonio’s talk had stressed the anti-colonial nature of Puerto Rico’s struggle and supported the armed groups there. Audre saw the affinity with my politics and graciously gave me the contact information of the group that had invited him.
El Comité, with a core of about ten local activists, was affiliated with the statewide Mexicano/a Movement for National Liberation (M-MLN), which in turn was closely allied with the MLN, a Puerto Rican group within the U.S. Most of those in El Comité had a background with the Crusade for Justice and still upheld much of that tradition. But they saw an additional need for a group with more focused politics that explicitly advocated socialism. Also, while still studying the question, they didn’t see the spiritual concept of Aztlan as providing a concrete resolution for Mexicano/as within the U.S. and instead leaned toward a reunification of the “Southwest” (which the Mexicans called “El Norte”) with the rest of Mexico, striving to build one, socialist country. As a result, they favored the term “Mexicano” over “Chicano.” And importantly for me, they stressed solidarity with other national liberation struggles.
The first El Comité representatives I met were Marco and Patricia. Marco, who seemed young for his leadership role, was the brother of Luis Martinez Jr., who had been killed by police in a 1973 raid on a Crusade youth dance. Patricia had a deep history in the Colorado Left, as well as in the Chicano/a movement. As I met others, they all impressed me with their warmth and seriousness. Most of them balanced raising kids and having working-class jobs with organizing. One member, Rafael, delighted in telling coworkers who called Mexicans “wetbacks” that they, as Euro-Americans, were “oceanic wetbacks.”
A new and tiny group, El Comité had opted to invite their closest white allies to their weekly meetings. When I arrived, a white couple from Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) had already been attending. I remembered STO’s valid critique of Weather’s “Hard Times” line and, in any case, was excited to make contact with white leftists who prioritized anti-racism.
Early on Larry and Penny of STO did me an immense favor by introducing me to the work of Samir Amin, whose Unequal Development (Monthly Review Press, 1976) is the magisterial work on the post-World War II structure of imperialism. But as happy as I was to meet potential allies, I became disenchanted at my first El Comité meeting. Larry made himself the center of most of the discussions, raising and insisting on points that others didn’t consider relevant. He clearly saw himself as much more knowledgeable than the neophytes in El Comité. But, however much Marx and Amin he may have read, his sense of what issues were crucial for the Mexicano/a community was not nearly as good as that of the El Comité organizers. In any case, I found his insistent effort to provide political leadership inappropriate—classic white intervention into a struggle by people of color. I was surprised and uncomfortable, but as a newcomer didn’t say anything.
After two more such meetings, El Comité leadership told the three of us that they were changing the structure of the relationship. The weekly meetings would be for members only, to clarify their politics and strategy; they would also hold periodic meetings with us on allied work. The change was a godsend for me.
The new structure also helped me improve my relationship with Sojourner Truth Organization, but my efforts to bring about positive interchange between them and the feminist-centered Left around Adams Street only created friction. The feminists saw Larry and Penny as the prototypical Left heterosexual couple, with the male dominant and heavy into abstract theory. The STOers saw the Adams Street crowd as backward on race and considered my efforts there to be doomed. I felt we were reliving the terribly destructive 1969 split between a male-dominated “anti-imperialist” Left and a white-centered “feminism.” But I didn’t know of any women-of-color groups (the women in El Comité advanced women’s rights but placed primary emphasis on unity for the overriding national liberation struggle) or anti-imperialist/feminist stalwarts such as Naomi or Lydia in Denver.
While STO may have been right about the limits of the Adams Street community, my work there was the only place that provided some solidarity—a small number of whites who would come to EC events and a little bit of fundraising. The tidbits of support I brought to EC were scraps compared to the nutritious banquet they provided me. I learned a tremendous amount from them. They were great examples of being both politically radical and rooted in their community; of being able to study theory and still talk in everyday language; of being committed to their nation and still strong on solidarity with other national liberation struggles. One event in particular made an indelible impression on me, an El Comité-sponsored talk by Ricardo Romero and Priscilla Falcon, two leaders of the M-MLN. I had never been so close up to such a stirring synthesis of humanism and militancy, a lyrical sense of the potential of the children combined with the recognition that we were fighting a ruthless power structure.
A key lesson many of us had drawn from the demise of the WUO was that a white group with little interaction with or accountability to people of color organizations would inevitably drift back to white-centered politics. The prescribed antidote was for whites to operate “under Third World leadership.” But what exactly did that mean? There were myriad different interpretations and applications of that concept. Many different errors could be committed in that name: on one pole was the danger of (in effect) picking the leadership—throwing white resources to the particular organization we liked best. Another pole was to act as a free floater among a range of organizations, picking and choosing with no responsibility or accountability to anyone. There were lots of ways to screw up but no formula to guarantee getting it right.
In my view, the terms set by El Comité provided a healthy and fruitful approach. First, our work together was based on extensive political discussions and a high level of unity. Second, I wasn’t barred from supporting other progressive groups, such as the Crusade, as long as there wasn’t a direct conflict with El Comité’s program. Third, while my specific work around El Comité projects was under their direct leadership, I was also encouraged to do a broader range of work, and to use my own political judgment in anti-racist organizing among whites.
My impromptu decision to participate in PL’s anti-Klan rally left me anxious as to what El Comité would think. When I saw them next, they spoke first, before I could offer any explanations. “Some of our people saw you at the PL demonstration downtown. As you know, El Comité cannot ally with PL in any way because they deny our most fundamental right: self-determination. If you had gone to that demonstration representing yourself as our ally, that would have been wrong. But from the accounts we got it was clear that you went solely as a white individual opposed to racism. That was your responsibility. We like what you did.”
Outside of El Comité work, I ended up allying with STO and opposing PL in a new and sudden controversy whose seismic waves rippled through the Left—in Denver and around the world. 1974 through 1979 saw a high tide for revolution unprecedented in world history. National liberation struggles waging people’s war seized state power in seven different countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while in five other countries regimes that came to power through coups or elections promulgated similar programs. But even amid those upheavals, one revolution burst on the world stage as a total surprise to almost everyone in the West: Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Iran had been a prime example in my 1967 pamphlet U.S. Imperialism, so I was aware of the history. When the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil, the CIA orchestrated an August 1953 coup and installed the Shah (Persian for “king”) as the autocratic ruler. Iranian fellow graduate students at the New School had described to me in angry, painful detail the wholesale jailing, torture, and killing of the opposition by SAVAAK’s, Iran’s ClA-trained secret police.
But I hadn’t been in touch with Iranians students since 1969 and had no idea what was happening in the only places people could still congregate and air their grievances in Iran—the mosques. So I was totally surprised (as was the CIA) when massive street demonstrations erupted in late 1978. By February 1979, the Shah had fled and the religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, took power as the head of the Islamic Revolution. While I didn’t know anything about the new regime, my immediate concern was our responsibility to block U.S. military intervention.
In Denver the Iranian Student Association and some U.S. Left groups called a public and, as it turned out, well-attended meeting. The Iranians students had a formal unity around nonintervention, but it was clear that beneath the surface there was tremendous tension between the Islamic and the Left students. PL was the most vociferous U.S. Left group, and their speaker made a fiery criticism of the “reactionary, petite-bourgeois Khomeini regime.” Someone from STO answered, articulating my position better than I could: “It’s not the job of the U.S. Left to tell the Iranian people which government to choose. Rather, our responsibility is to uphold self-determination and staunchly oppose our own country’s imperialism. Today the Iranian nation needs our support for their independence. If tomorrow the people have to rise up against a tyrannical regime, we’ll support them in that tomorrow.”
We had a parallel struggle within MAS. Almost everyone in the group was delighted when U.S. feminist Kate Millett flew into Iran to speak out for women’s rights. But Ken and I argued that given the history of destructive Western interventions, and the almost universal Iranian resentment of them, Millett, who in any case wasn’t staying to organize or to face the repression, was not doing Iranian women any favors by presenting feminism as a Western initiative.
In retrospect, the rights and wrongs of the debate with PL were not quite as simple as they seemed to me at the time. Yes, we were right to place the primary emphasis on opposing our own country’s imperialism and in upholding Iranians’ right to choose their own government, and strong emphasis on criticism of the new regime served to undercut that main point. But I was slow in recognizing how serious the dangers were with the emerging new phenomenon of right-wing anti-imperialism. (In 1953, Khomeini had been one of the right-wingers allying with the CIA in building opposition to Mossadegh.) The Khomeini regime did not share essential features of progressive national liberation movements: 1) restructuring the economy in the interests of workers and peasants; 2) promoting greater roles and rights for women; and 3) practicing solidarity with other anti-imperialist struggles. While it would have been wrong to place those problems in the forefront, I should have at least acknowledged those concerns, especially given U.S. imperialism’s role in destroying the once-popular secular Left alternative to the Shah.
Being a childcare regular meant I almost never attended the events (those to which men were invited) of the women’s community, but I usually heard about them later in discussions with friends. A dynamic new form of protest in the late 1970s was “Take Back the Night” marches, where women’s collective strength became a counterforce to the sexual harassment and violence that individual women faced daily. Allison and Bev recounted to me how their march down East Colfax Street, the main drag for strip clubs and porno shops, had been greeted with catcalls by a number of Black men out on the street. Many were probably touts who helped hustle prospective customers into the clubs and a few may have been pimps. The women had answered the catcalls with taunts, and Allison and Bev felt a rush of empowerment from the experience.
Their sense of strength after enduring a lifetime of harassment resonated with me. Still, I had mixed feelings about the encounter. Yes, those men and the industry some of them worked for were sexist, but was this very public spat between white women and Black men the best way to empower women and build alliances? Instead of the street people of East Colfax, could the march have targeted the more powerful corporate forces that benefited from exploiting women? (Near the end of my stay in Denver, a small group of us—men and women—did a clandestine spray-painting against some pornography profiteers.)
The next major feminist march, six months later, started with a rally in a park in a Mexicano/a neighborhood. Again, I only heard about the event afterward, but this time from El Comité: “Why didn’t the organizers let us know beforehand? Why didn’t they coordinate this with any Mexicano groups? The community took the rally as an outside invasion and was very hostile. We believe in women’s rights and want to organize our people to work for equality, but this event put us in an awkward position, because it presented feminism as an outside imposition.” I gingerly raised this concern with one of the “Take Back the Night” organizers and offered to put her in touch with El Comité, but she felt that women had an independent right to organize other women and that even if the response wasn’t good in this first instance, Chicanas would join them over time.
By this time there had already been several incidents when I’d held my tongue. One particularly upsetting moment came during the Longest Walk. A few whites had volunteered to work in the kitchen set up to feed hundreds of marchers. Audrey went to the Native American woman in charge with some criticisms and demands on how to organize the work. The woman, Leah Deer, explained why she didn’t agree. Audrey did an about-face and led the three women who had come with her in an angry walkout. I just sat there, the one white person left in the kitchen, quietly chopping onions. Leah Deer, clearly upset, said to her coworkers, “Why is she so sure she knows how to do this better than me? I organized and led the kitchen for the entire Wounded Knee occupation, and we did it well.”
While my refusal to join the walkout spoke for itself, I never discussed the incident with Audrey. It was still early in my relationship to this feminist community, and I wasn’t sure I had the standing to do so. But this latest incident, in the Mexicano/a neighborhood, raised a conflict I couldn’t avoid.
Personally, I felt like the political track I’d been on, with a leg on each rail, was pulling me apart, way beyond any stretch I could manage. Solidarity with El Comité and MAS were my two most fulfilling areas of political work. There shouldn’t have been any contradiction, but in practice, in Denver in 1978, it felt like an unbridgeable gap.
The community I lived in was of the white Left/feminist overlap. My politics saw fighting all oppression as central, but identified racism as historically the prime stumbling block to developing successful revolutionary movements in the U.S. My responsibility, as I saw it, was to work on racism within my community. Understandably it was awkward for a man to initiate these, or any sensitive, issues in the feminist community. Nonetheless, we had held a few mixed forums and discussions at Adams Street. Once Audre had even invited the leader of a Maoist communist party, who had touted Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Communist Party as having the correct, revolutionary line in global affairs. Certainly, then, I could initiate a discussion on our relationship to the Black and Mexicano/a communities here in Denver.
Even so, I proceeded with caution. I sought copresenters and asked some of those I was closest too, like Bev and Allison, for advice on the best approach. The response was, “Just go ahead and do what you feel is right.” Given the understandable distaste for lectures from male politicos, I decided to limit my remarks to ten minutes before opening up to group discussion. Instead of general political principles, I raised three specific examples of what I considered missteps on race. The first two, from my own history, were met with nods or, at worst, bemused silence. It wasn’t until the third, the feminist rally in the Mexicano/a park, that all hell broke loose.
“We’re sick and tired of leftist men giving us abstract lectures on politics.”
“Oh, shit,” I’m thinking, “it’s not even two years since the demise of the WUO and I’m about to be all alone again.”
The effect of my carefully considered little talk was almost magical. In an instant I was transformed from anti-sexist Male of the Year, who even got invited on the annual feminist raft trip, to Sexist Dog of the Century. My opening didn’t lead to the kind of around-the-circle discussion I’d hoped for, and there was almost no engagement with the three examples I raised. Instead there was an outpouring of anger and criticism of a male leftist lecturing women. No one spoke in my defense.
Even with this abject failure, I hadn’t yet hit bottom. That came in the following weeks. Those who had disagreed with me didn’t keep arguing, instead they stopped talking to me altogether. I went from feeling very much part of a community to feeling like a pariah. Most painfully my closest relationship to kids, to Jeremy and Melinda, withered in the heat of their mom’s hostility, as she no longer wanted me to take them out.
One irony of my situation struck me: the proudly democratic-centralist WUO and the explicitly nonhierarchical feminist community could not have been more different in terms of organization and political line. Yet both could be similarly effective in evading political struggle and in using social ostracism as a powerful weapon for suppressing dissent. But of course I wasn’t underground anymore. I still had other personal/political friendships that served as a refuge: Rick and Nadine’s apartment, alive with their three children and with Peter Tosh’s music; my friend Bonnie at the moving company, not in the organized Left but trying to live as an independent woman and an anti-racist; my work with El Comité; and a handful of women who had a strong commitment to forging a whole politics of feminism, anti-racism, and socialism.
Paradoxically, my defeat at the meeting provided the impetus for a consciously anti-racist core in Denver. With those still talking to me, my most telling argument was to contrast the reaction to me with the reception for the guy promoting his pro-Albania party. He had never been in or related to our community. His topic was the political line of a deified male leader on another continent. He had lectured at the front of the room for an hour before taking questions—and in the Q&A had shamelessly claimed that Albanian communism was very supportive of lesbian/gay liberation, without anyone calling him on that blatant lie. In contrast, I lived and worked in our community, focused on specific examples from our practice, and talked for under ten minutes to kick off an open discussion. Yet America’s Enver Hoxha was well received while I was blasted for “abstract lectures.” The blatant inconsistency exposed a powerful, deep-seated resistance to grappling with our internal racism, and led a few people to see the need for more direct and consistent work in that arena.
Ginger began to do solidarity work with El Comité, which she found to be much more down-to-earth than the white Left. MAS increasingly worked on racism as well as sexism and made more effort to relate to El Comité programs. A few women with strong anti-racist politics, especially Catha (who hadn’t been in Denver for most of these conflicts) and Sara, worked on joint study and projects with Ken and me. So, even though my sense of being part of a community—one that had taught me a lot—had shattered, now there was a small set of folks much more consciously working against racism and in solidarity with Third World and people of color struggles.
My critics in turn could point to inconsistency in my practice: I was more willing to criticize white women for racism than people of color for sexism. In fact I did on occasion raise, in a low-key fashion, political issues with El Comité, who proved to be more open to political dialogue than the gathering at Adams Street. But it was still true that my approach in each venue was different. I had felt like I was a part of the white Left/ feminist overlap community, yet I was, in contrast, a solidarity worker with El Comité. Also, my political analysis didn’t see the two situations as exactly the same. While I believed it essential to confront all forms of oppression, both in program and in internal work, and I supported autonomous women’s organizations, I still saw racism as the prime barrier to revolutionary advance in the U.S.
In dealing with El Comité, I always checked in with and responded to the woman in the leadership, who had great politics and judgment, and at times I talked about the central role of women’s liberation in various Third World struggles. But I did not do any systematic critique of El Comité on these or any other issues. As for the old pattern of the ivory tower male politico, I honestly felt I was learning a tremendous amount from both sets of relationships. Despite my current and difficult differences with many in the community, they had, over the past year, provided helpful challenges to my sexism. And, naturally, I found the work with El Comité to be invaluable. But one’s character is never permanently set in stone as a “good guy” or “bad guy.” There was a real danger of my growing to fit the stereotype if I didn’t develop a more collective work situation. Being so isolated politically, I was doing precious little to organize in any community or to confront state power.
Long before the turning point of that meeting, I had been exploring going back underground. I had considered “inversion,” the surfacing of the WUO, a major mistake and setback, and I was especially critical that we hadn’t done more to support the armed clandestine organizations that had fought harder and taken much heavier casualties. At the same time, ego played a major role in my restlessness; I was eager to find post-WUO redemption by “fighting on the highest level.” This journey also had a very compelling personal aspect, which eventually had the spectacular result of the birth of my son.
I couldn’t tell those I worked with that I was going back under, but to be responsible I gave a month or two’s notice that I’d be leaving, to move to another city. As that date approached, there were already some modest advances in political work—but that improved qualitatively after I left. Ken, based in MAS and with some allied women, led in building a solidarity group with El Comité, called the “San Patricio Corps.” The name came from a group of Irish-American soldiers who went over to the Mexican side during the U.S. war of conquest of 1846–48.
My last political debate in Denver happened in the same spot as my first—the RIP Bookstore. Then, it was with someone I’d just met, about the white Left’s public attacks on the Crusade for Justice. This time it was a chance encounter with my former good friend/adversary Audrey, and was about Vietnam’s recent invasion of Cambodia. This time I lost decisively; in fact I was left speechless.
From Audrey’s Maoist point of view, the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge (KR) of Cambodia was revolutionary, while the Soviet-aligned Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) was revisionist. From my national liberation perspective, I had supported both against the U.S. invasion. I had seen some charges of KR brutality in the corporate press, but it was so standard for the West to discredit revolutionary forces with disinformation about atrocities that, like pretty much everyone else on the Left, I paid those accounts no mind.
While I supported the new government in each country, I had a lot more knowledge of and respect for the VCP, with its decades of effective struggle against Japanese, then French, and then the U.S. invaders, successes clearly based on deep and strong roots among their people. I knew little about the KR, which had been a relatively small and untested organization until 1970, when the U.S. had engineered a coup to overthrow the popular Prince Sihanouk, because he wouldn’t give the green light for U.S. military incursions. The coup brought Gen. Lon Nol to power, and resulted in a quick and total collapse of legitimate authority in Cambodia. In the relative blink of an eye, by April 1975 the KR captured the capital, Phnom Penh. Now in early 1979, to the shock of everyone on the Left, Vietnam had invaded Cambodia.
Audre challenged me to condemn the invasion, but I balked. She pointed to the history of Vietnam acting as a dominant and at times oppressive nation among the three of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam). While I couldn’t formulate, even for myself, any clear political rationale, I just had more affinity for and trust in the VCP than the KR. Audre fired back, “The whole time you’ve been here you’ve vociferously argued that the highest, most inviolate political principle is self-determination of nations. How, then, can you possibly condone Vietnam’s invading and taking over Cambodia?” Although still unwilling to concede, I had no answer.
It wasn’t until a year or two later—I was back underground and no longer in touch with Denver—that the grisly reality became apparent: KR responsibility for the deaths of over a million (later estimates put it at 1.7 million) of their own people. Genocide is the one situation—both in international law and in humane morality—that overrides the principle of self-determination. The Khmer Rouge horror must serve as a lesson—if Stalin wasn’t enough—to the Left that we can’t automatically endorse every group that employs Left rhetoric and fights against imperialism.
The Vietnamese invasion was undoubtedly motivated in part by their national interests—but it stopped the genocide in progress. It was amazing, if not amusing, to see how the corporate media, which had expressed such concern about Cambodian lives when that served to discredit a “Left” regime, now did not deem it worthy of their attention when those lives were being saved by the Vietnamese. Imperialism performed dizzying political somersaults in order to remain consistently inhumane. The U.S., which had first brought about the collapse of legitimate authority in Cambodia and then condemned the triumphant KR as radicals in power, now supported them in order to undermine the main revolutionary force in the region, the Vietnamese. The U.S. insisted that the UN recognize the ousted genocidal regime as the legitimate representatives of the Cambodian people and gave material aid to KR guerrilla resistance.
But the revelations of the scope of the horrors in Cambodia, and then the U.S. diplomatic gymnastics to support the genocidal KR, were yet to come. At that moment in early 1979, I was standing tongue-tied in the RIP Bookstore…and on the verge of leaving the community, battles, and organizing in Denver to fight imperialism on another level—but whether to be more or less effective remained to be seen.