Valerie Solanas

Valerie has been called many things: “a glitch, a mistake,” “an outcast among outcasts,” “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights,” “the Robespierre of feminism,” “Andy Warhol’s feminist nightmare,” “a female Lenny Bruce, created and destroyed by a truth most of us can’t face or joke about,” “a radical feminist Jean Genet,”“a woman who looked as though she had walked through a tear in space and time.”1 One of Valerie’s close friends, Jeremiah Newton, said simply, “She believed in something. She believed in herself. I thought that was admirable. In an era when people didn’t believe in themselves and bullshitted or wanted to believe in other people, she believed in herself and she was so sure one day the world would discover her and she would have the fame that she so richly deserved. That’s how she felt.”2

In her 1966 introduction to her play, Up Your Ass (which figured in her actions two years later, when she shot and nearly killed pop superstar Andy Warhol at his New York City “Factory”), she wrote: “I dedicate this play to ME a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion and faith this play would never have been written. additional acknowledgements: Myself-for proof-reading, editorial comment, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions and an exquisite job of typing. I—for independent research into men, married women and other degenerates.”3 Valerie insisted on her own telling, her own writing, and her self-reliance. She believed in two kinds of people: the “originators” and the “interpreters,” that is, those who created ideas and those who talked about the ideas others created.4 Such a philosophy lent itself to long stretches of isolation; her existence as an outcast defined her—from her early days as an out lesbian in Maryland’s Oxon Hill High School to panhandling and engaging in prostitution on the streets of New York, from her nearly decade-long confinement in mental hospitals on charges of insanity to her final days of living in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.

And yet for all of Valerie’s aloneness and withdrawl from the world, she managed to write the most widely produced document from late 1960s radical feminism—SCUM Manifesto. By many accounts, and despite Valerie’s frank aversion to communal social movements, she inadvertently inspired the radical feminist movement after her shooting of Andy Warhol fractured the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968. Further, she continues to provoke feminists and nonfeminists alike to react to her work, ideas, anger, rage, and symbolic persona, with piles of academic articles and chapters theorizing about her identity continuing to grow. Nearly everyone who knew her personally felt that she had an incessant intensity and markedly unique sense of humor; they also recounted stories of how she betrayed, humiliated, embarrassed, or otherwise violated them. She threatened to throw acid in the faces of her friends, called men “walking dildos,” shot a person who had some at least marginal sympathy for her, and accused many people of stealing her ideas and plagiarizing her words. Even those on the fringe found her excessive, impolite, difficult, and long winded. Jo Freeman, longtime radical feminist and women’s rights advocate, told me frankly, “Valerie should be forgotten.”5 And, for the most part, she has been forgotten. Or distorted. Or lost in the dust pile of (feminist?) history. As such, this telling of her life is a version composed only of fragments, shards, remnants, whispers, truths bubbling up, old memories, scribbles, and trash. It is necessarily partial and in pieces, a collection of SCUM, SCUM, and scum.

Early Family Life (1936–1953)

Valerie Jean Solanas was born at 5:37 a.m. on Thursday, April 9, 1936, to Louis “Lou” Solanas, twenty-one, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, eighteen, a dental assistant, both of whom lived at 104 South Frankfort Avenue in Ventnor City, New Jersey. Both of Valerie’s parents were first-generation Americans with immigrant parents. Louis’s working-class family came from the Catalonian region of Spain, while Dorothy’s mother originated from Genoa, Italy, and later married an American. Louis and Dorothy had two daughters; Valerie arrived first, followed by Judith, two years later.6

When Valerie was four years old, her parents separated, after much conflict in their marriage. Having decided that Valerie and Judith would flourish when living apart from both their parents, in 1940 Dorothy and Louis sent the girls to live with their maternal grandparents in Atlantic City. At the time, Atlantic City had a thriving four-mile boardwalk complete with diving horses on the Steel Pier, candy shops selling saltwater taffy and cotton candy, amusement park rides, and hoards of locals and tourists hitting the beach. The family lived on a street with “respectable postwar blue-collar housing, with a mix of races and nationalities” and the girls spent much of their time playing on the boardwalk with the neighborhood children.7 Valerie’s sister, Judith (Martinez, formerly Monday), later questioned the decision to send them away, particularly given Valerie’s closeness to her father: “I was just an infant. I didn’t know my father. But Valerie was very attached to her father, and I think his betrayal of her had a great deal to do with her problems later.”8

Details of Valerie’s childhood are revealed in mixed accounts, with some describing Valerie as a happy little girl, full of energy, charm, and vitality, while others painted her as aggressive and naughty. Judith described the young Valerie as a “very bright, very pretty little girl, extremely intelligent with a caustic wit,” adding that Valerie revealed a mix of precociousness and early genius.9 Valerie learned to read and write before she was six, often composing her own lyrics to pop songs around age eight. In one of these songs, Valerie changed the lyrics of “Oh, How We Danced on the Night We Were Wed” to “Judy’s head comes to a great big point, whenever she walks it comes all out of joint, her nose is so much like a banana, it reaches from here to Savannah.”10

Valerie always did things earlier and faster than her peers, playing piano at age seven, reading everything from Nancy Drew to Louisa May Alcott, and beating anyone on the block at Chinese hopscotch or double Dutch jump rope. She carried around a doll named Sally for much of her childhood but also enjoyed her dog Stinky and her turtle Myrtle. Decades later, Louis Zwiren, her then boyfriend, remembered Valerie’s affection for Stinky, saying that she sometimes affectionately called him her “puppy dog” and that “she had a dog when she was a girl, and she loved her dog. When she came home the dog would be waving its tail and . . . she had fond memories of how excited the dog was to see her.”11 To a journalist, Valerie described her childhood as idyllic; she grew up doing things most young girls do: surfing in the summer, going to dances, and getting a crush on a high school boy.12

Other accounts give a more cautious reading of Valerie’s youth. Those who knew Valerie only when she was young saw her as friendly, funny, and precocious, while those who knew Valerie later on (particularly just before or after the shooting) portrayed her childhood as more disturbed or scary. Family friends and acquaintances characterized her as rebellious and antiauthoritarian: “There is the sense, in talking to family and those close to the family, of a ‘bad seed,’ the child who was always difficult,” wrote journalist Judy Michaelson in a story published two days after the Warhol shootings.13 When Valerie was five, her maternal grandfather hit her with a belt and she just stood there laughing. A neighbor, Clara Shields, remembered her with “a mixture of affection and bemusement,” and that she had a certain volatility. Bright and lonely, Valerie hated abuses of power. She beat the shit out of a young boy who tormented a younger girl on the boardwalk in Atlantic City and stood up for girls when boys picked on them at school.

Valerie grappled with many disadvantages growing up: “bad home life, poverty, psychological instability, born in the wrong time.”14 Later reports by psychologists described Valerie’s wild adolescence, filled with shoplifting and other petty crimes, early sexual experiences, and instability with all of her caretakers; or, as reporter Liz Jobey wrote, “Valerie’s intellectual precocity had been too much for her parents and hadn’t been harnessed so she’d been naughty at school.” Judith remembered Valerie as constantly battling social norms: “She always fought off all attempts to mold her into a nice young lady. I was the one who went for the crinolines, the spike heels, and the lipstick.”15 By contrast, Valerie was a hell-raiser and brawler who chased boys who made her angry or insulted Judith; outraged, Valerie would yell at them and berate them to “fight like a man.”

As an adult, Judith lovingly portrayed Valerie as one of the funniest people she had ever met and noted that “she always wanted to be a writer.” Speaking of Valerie “with a strain of dark humor and a quiet bluntness that Valerie would have appreciated,”16 Judith said she and Valerie always maintained contact, that Valerie had always let her and her mother know where she was, at least until the last decade of her life: “Oh, I was with Valerie her whole life.”17 Valerie, Judith, and their mother, Dorothy, had a quiet closeness, though Judith protected Valerie’s story with ferocity. Judith has been described as highly intelligent, well-groomed, looking a lot like Valerie, and lacking some of Valerie’s dynamism. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a radical feminist and writer who founded Boston’s Cell 16 and sympathized with Valerie’s politics, met Judith at a play in 2001 and said, “It seemed like she really cared about Valerie. She was really sad missing her.”18

Still, Valerie’s colorful and interesting family does shed some light on the contradictions that infuse her life story. Her mother, Dorothy, was born February 3, 1918, in Philadelphia, to Rose Marie Cella, from Genoa, Italy, and Michael Biondo, an Italian American born in Philadelphia in 1891. (Dorothy’s paternal grandparents, Lorenzo Biondo and Maria Milazzoto, came from Sicily.) Rose had immigrated to the United States as an infant and lived with her father, a fruit dealer, and her mother in Philadelphia. Michael and Rose married prior to Michael’s enlisting in the army in 1914; upon his return from the war, they moved to Atlantic City (216 North Morris Avenue) before the 1929 stock market crash. Michael, who was “neat and dapper,” according to Judith, worked as a shoemaker and plumber, while Rose, a tall and beautiful woman, worked as a dressmaker in a factory. The couple struggled to raise their only daughter, Dorothy, on their small salaries.

According to family genealogical records, Valerie’s grandfather Michael worked with his cousin James “Jimmy” Tindaro in the plumbing business but eventually decided to work in the “saloon business,” opening up a bar that served bathtub gin. When the Depression hit, Michael worked as a singing waiter in a comedy burlesque show. (Rose died in 1955, Michael in 1973.)

Traveling in similar Atlantic City working-class circles, Dorothy met Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, married him in 1936, and gave birth to Valerie. Family remembered Dorothy as a strikingly beautiful woman, a good mother, and a kind, soft-spoken, down-to-earth person who loved the girls. “She wasn’t judgmental. She accepted Valerie for who she was. That was it,” Valerie’s cousin Robert Fustero said.19 Lorraine Miller, who met Dorothy in 1968, described her as a very pretty lady, attractive, with brown curly hair and a warm, friendly disposition. After separating from Louis in 1940, four years into their marriage, Dorothy officially divorced him in 1947 when Valerie was eleven years old.

Two years later, Dorothy married her second husband, Edward “Red” Francis Moran, a piano tuner originally from Newburgh, New York.20 The family moved to Virginia, where Dorothy remained for much of her life. She and Red lived in a built-to-order home in Riverbend Estates with a view over the Potomac, then later moved to an apartment in Marlow Heights. In her later years, after Red’s death in 2000, Dorothy left for Boca Raton, Florida, and settled there, remaining in the area until her death at the Boca Raton Community Hospital on July 21, 2004.

After moving away from her family, Valerie stayed in contact with her mother and sister most of the time, often telling them where she lived and when she would next return to see them. Though Dorothy did give one interview about Valerie, to Rowan Gaither, she refused to speak further to journalists, academics, or other interviewers about her daughter. One German researcher, Peter Moritz Pickshaus, who tried to interview Dorothy, described her as “rather gruff and not willing to be of any help. . . . I found the voice and the gruffness of her mother in accord with what I was told about Valerie’s temper.”21 Following news of Valerie’s death, Dorothy apparently burned all of Valerie’s manuscripts and belongings, threw away her personal items, and largely refused to talk to reporters seeking information, telling them, “Let her rest in peace.”

Valerie’s father, Louis, was born in 1915 to Julius Solanas and Maria Prats, both of whom had recently emigrated from Spain to Canada. Julius and Maria had married in Spain when Julius was twenty-seven and Maria was nineteen. The couple had had two children—Carmen and Juanita—before leaving for Canada, in 1911, when their third daughter, Julia, was born, followed by the birth of Valerie’s father in Montreal in 1915. In 1916, now in the United States, with four children and a wife in tow, Julius secured a job as a silversmith and jeweler in Atlantic City during its heyday. Working up through the ranks of old-time Atlantic City, Julius eventually landed a job as a silversmith at the luxurious, decadent Ambassador Hotel by 1934. The hotel was considered the jewel of Atlantic City, filled with wealthy patrons who took the train down for weeks at a time to enjoy the shores, swimming, and sunlight.

The couple had one more daughter, Genevieve, at the height of Prohibition in 1925, giving Louis the challenging status of being the only boy in a family of five children. The 1930 census indicated that Julius and Maria spoke Spanish, had five children (with Louis and Julia living at home), and rented space to four boarders—“Frank,” “Mizzi,” Andrew Sanchez, and Lewis Vasquez—at their Atlantic City home at 113 North Chelsea Avenue (valued then at seventy-five dollars).

Louis’s childhood was spent in the chaotic and violent era of Prohibition and bootlegging in Atlantic City (brought vividly to life in HBO’s series Boardwalk Empire). At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, he would have been fourteen, old enough, as family members say, to understand the “old Atlantic City group” (that is, having a clear understanding of money, mobsters, and power). As a young man, Louis secured a job as a bartender in Atlantic City before gambling was legalized; he often covered for the seedy undercurrents of back room Atlantic City, learning from his father how to negotiate minding your own business. Maintaining a jovial and lively outlook on life and treating strangers with generosity, Louis often paid for drinks for the homeless and other poor people who came into the bar looking for a little relief; when dining out with family, he rarely let anyone else pick up the check. He told jokes, played the drums, and always had a sharp and witty sense of humor. In his short stint in the army, he learned how to play the accordion and eventually earned a reputation for playing that instrument and joking around with the kids in his family. His nephew Robert remembers that “he was always telling jokes, really funny, and he was always playing magic tricks with the kids. He would tell us stories. He was a lot of fun to be with, one of those ‘crazy uncles’ that all the kids seemed to love. We were a very tight family.”22

After Louis’s divorce from Dorothy in 1947, he had a short-lived marriage to Kay, a mortician and cosmetologist; the couple would often invite family to their home for dinners and parties. (Kay died of liver failure and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.) Still, he maintained a reputation for staying out of others’ business, even when others questioned him about Valerie. When the New York Post contacted him after Valerie shot Andy Warhol, he told the reporter, “I’m a bartender. I don’t answer questions. I just listen to the other person. I’m a good listener. When was the last time I saw my daughter? I don’t remember.”23

Louis had a fairly close relationship with his sisters, particularly Genevieve and Carmen (Julia died quite young). Genevieve’s son, Robert, said of his mother and her siblings, “They were really good friends. They got along really well and did really well. We all lived nearby in DC and we would walk to Louis’s house. My aunt [Carmen] lived a little further away but we saw each other all the time.”24 Carmen, described as a warm, friendly, no-nonsense woman who told dirty jokes, had a risqué side and, like her siblings, maintained an open attitude about sexuality. “The family always had a free attitude about sex,” Robert said. “They didn’t criticize anybody, didn’t care about ‘gay marriage’ or who did what with whom. They called it like it is. When I didn’t understand what fellatio was, Carmen looked at my mother [and] just said, ‘Well, did you tell him it’s a blowjob?’ That’s the way they were.”25

With a reputation for heavy drinking and pornography use (after Louis’s death, the family discovered a large stash in his apartment—though nothing “off the wall”), Louis worked as a bartender for most of his adult life, mostly at the Dennis Hotel in Atlantic City, until his death in 1971. After Kay died, Louis started seeing a new girlfriend, whose brother did not like her dating someone like Louis, a ruffian with a penchant for women and booze. One afternoon, the girlfriend’s brother went into a bar and picked a fight with Louis. Another man who had flirted with Louis’s girlfriend also got involved and the three stumbled around throwing punches in fits of drunken rage. During this fight, one of the men hit Louis so hard that his skull was fractured. “They were all drinking and they just left him lying there on the floor. He just bled to death in his head like a brain hemorrhage,” Robert related quietly.26

Valerie had an ambivalent relationship with her father. While the details of much of her childhood remain vague and slippery, she likely suffered sexual abuse from her father throughout her childhood years. Valerie apparently disclosed sexual abuse to two psychologists, who wrote in a 1968 report, “[Valerie] describes a rather pitiful childhood, including parental conflict, sexual molestation by her father, and frequent separation from her home. The patient’s mother was married three times and Miss Solanas recalls having seen only little of her because she was often being sent to various relatives. The patient added that when she was an adolescent, she was a ‘hell-raiser.’ By the age of 13 her mother re-married.”27

These stories are difficult to access or confirm with Valerie’s family, though Judith had remarked, “Valerie had experiences I didn’t have, things I didn’t know about until I read the psychological evaluations of her after she shot Warhol. Our father sexually abused her. It was after the divorce and every Sunday our mother sent us off to be with him. I was only four; Valerie was six. Something was wrong there. I never wanted to go, but I didn’t understand.”28 Her cousin, Robert, characterized both parents as kind people, saying it was hard to imagine that Louis sexually abused Valerie: “In the larger picture, he was a pretty good father. He did help her out with money and he did give her a place to stay whenever she came to DC. He did go to New York a couple of times to see her. I mean, he wasn’t a bad person. He was an alcoholic.” When I pressed Robert about the possibility of abuse, he replied somewhat tentatively, “From the point of my aunt and my mother, it’s true, yeah. He had a fondness for pornography but we never thought he would be a child abuser. If anything, he was an alcoholic.” Robert emphasized that Louis abused only Valerie and never touched anyone else. “Nobody told us about Valerie,” he said.29 Louis had a tendency toward physical violence, which, combined with the alcoholism, led to problems. Judith remembered that their mother did not protect Valerie from much of anything, adding, “It’s been reported she was a promiscuous teenager. How do you relate promiscuity to a young girl who learned about sex in the most degrading, perverted manner, from an adult who was supposed to protect her?”30

Judith directly linked Valerie’s sexual abuse to later problems, saying in her memoir, “Valerie’s sexual molestation by her own father, the one man she truly loved, catapulted her into an obscene, perverted world she could not comprehend. Who was there to protect her? Did she tell anyone, her mother, a teacher, a priest? Did they believe her or did they punish her for having the audacity to repeat such a horrid tale?”31 How this abuse affected her—and whether it influenced her ideas in SCUM Manifesto and other writings—remains an open question. As Jane Caputi, a radical feminist who met Valerie in the mid-1970s and currently chairs the women and gender studies program at Florida Atlantic University, claimed, “It’s not as simple as the abuse leads to the manifesto, that you’re filled with rage and that leads to things directly. But those experiences do take away the illusions. Those abuses don’t prescribe seeing through things, but they do affect things. That is one response to abuse, where you continue contact or are filled with rage. At the same time, you take it out on yourself.”32

As a child, Valerie coped with the abuse by initially refusing to live with her father in a permanent way following her parent’s separation. Instead, she lived with family members and friends of the family for a time. Following her parents’ separation, she first went to live with her mother. Shortly after that, when Valerie turned thirteen, Red Moran, Dorothy’s second husband, moved in with the family and lived there for a year, until Valerie turned fourteen. Red, regarded as somewhat strange, had never been married before he met the effervescent and beautiful Dorothy. He had spent most of his time working as a piano tuner, though he always fantasized about a career as a piano performer. “He would perform sometimes,” Robert said. “He wanted to be a piano player, not a piano tuner.”33 Red never took a liking to Valerie, believing when he first met her that something was peculiar about her. He later admitted that he became “anti-Valerie.” He did not like how she “streaked up the staircase and swung on the iron banister” and he disliked that she never obeyed him and never accepted authority from anyone.34

Valerie became deeply unhappy about living with Red and her mother and started to rebel against them and against the various institutions and expectations she felt constrained her. She cut short her shoulder-length hair; she did not like long hair anymore. She “ran into her sister’s bedroom, dumping her things all over the room. She went into the kitchen and turned the garbage pail upside down.”35 Spending time in the basement, she would have arguments with herself while she ironed.

After Red moved in, Valerie persistently skipped junior high school. Her mother and Red had placed her in Holy Cross Academy but Valerie assaulted one of her teachers—a nun—and ran away from school, hitchhiking all the way to an aunt’s house in Baltimore. In response, her parents placed her in public school. There, she became the butt of pranks and jokes. She dressed and acted differently from her peers; the other kids teased and taunted her, calling her names and isolating her from friendships and other forms of social acceptance.

Having such trouble in school, in the fall of 1950 at age fourteen, Valerie was sent away to a boarding school, where she stayed for about two years. At that school she started to explore her sexuality and had her first homosexual experiences. The school provided Valerie with improved academic opportunities and her grades rose; she excelled academically, started to identify as a lesbian, and fell in love. Many years later, she told her publisher, Maurice Girodias, that she had fallen in love only once in her life, with a girl she met at that boarding school.

Some accounts of this period hold that the so-called boarding school Valerie attended was actually a school for pregnant (“wayward”) girls. We do know that Valerie became pregnant at age fourteen and gave birth, in 1951, to a daughter, Linda Moran.36 Following the birth, Valerie’s mother, Dorothy, raised Linda as Valerie’s sister in order to avoid social judgments from others about Valerie’s deviance and promiscuity. Linda learned only recently that Valerie was her biological mother and not her sister. As Robert said, “[Linda] knows now. She learned that a few years ago. She was raised with her aunt [Judith] and thinking that her aunt was her older sister and she wasn’t. She is very friendly and very family oriented.”37

Valerie likely became pregnant shortly before enrolling at the boarding school. Throughout her life she never spoke of having a daughter. In fact, only one of her friends from her time in New York—her partner for four years, Louis Zwiren—knew about her having a child at all. The family kept this secret for six decades. In later interviews with numerous psychologists, she denied having any children when disclosing her personal history.

The question of who fathered Linda Moran poses yet another series of open questions. Valerie had started to explore her sexuality at the time, so she may have become involved with someone outside the home. Alternatively, the pregnancy may have resulted from her situation at home. She had probably already experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father, and she never clarified whether her stepfather also abused her: in her later interviews with psychologists, she did not specify whether her biological father or stepfather abused her. If either Louis or Red did sexually abuse Valerie at that time, either of them may have fathered Linda, giving the family extra incentive to keep the pregnancy quiet and to raise Linda as a sister to Valerie rather than as a daughter (though in those days any out-of-wedlock pregnancy was scandalous enough to justify the family’s secrecy about it). None of these possibilities have been confirmed, but they do suggest a fuller picture of the struggles Valerie underwent as a teenager.

To make matters more complicated, Valerie maintained ongoing contact with Louis throughout her life, while she expressed near total rejection of Red. At age fifteen, after returning from boarding school, she ran away from her mother and Red to go live with her father, and documents show continued contact with him until his death in 1971. Valerie sent Louis postcards and letters detailing her whereabouts and she fell into a deep depression around the time she would have heard news of his death.38

Valerie became pregnant again in the summer of 1952, shortly after her fifteenth birthday. During that summer, she began a relationship with a sailor who was temporarily stationed near her home after returning from the Korean War. This much older man, already married and with three children, had no interest in maintaining a relationship with Valerie and did not want to help raise their child. Knowing she could not care for a baby alone, Valerie (at Dorothy and Red’s urging) agreed to give the baby to the parents of a friend of the sailor, Sherrod and Louise Blackwell. The couple lived in Southeast Washington, DC, and had money to support the child. Sherrod was as a high-ranking military officer whose income “allowed Valerie to live comfortably in their middle-class home” at 723 Atlantic Street.39

Dorothy and Red insisted on hiding Valerie’s second pregnancy also. School records from the time of this pregnancy indicate that Valerie had a “home teacher at Anacostia High School across the District of Columbia line.” Red later denied knowing anything about Valerie’s pregnancy. Judith recalled, “It was not unusual, in the ’50s and early ’60s, for a young girl to disappear and then reappear nine months later, spirit broken but youthful figure intact.”40 A family friend related that the experience broke Valerie. “Since then,” claimed the friend, “she’s been pretty much against men. Oh, just say the whole deal was taken care of by the parents.”41 Judith remembered, “I was told that Valerie had a baby, he was adopted by a ‘decent’ family, and that there was to be no more discussion about it. I doubt if anyone cared about Valerie’s feelings.”42

Valerie gave birth to her second child, David, on March 31, 1953. She lived on and off with the Blackwell family until she graduated from Oxon Hill High School the following year. According to David, Valerie’s family had made a quid pro quo deal with the Blackwells: they could keep David as their own if they agreed to pay Valerie’s tuition at the University of Maryland, College Park. “You might say I was bought with money,” David wrote in a letter in 1996.43 Valerie visited David often until he turned four. She was “emotionally torn up over him.” The visits abruptly stopped and David never saw his mother again. Emphasizing that Valerie did not pay for college through prostitution, but rather with the Blackwells’ financial assistance, David spoke about the lack of options unwed mothers faced during the early 1950s: “Valerie Solanas was an unwed mother in the 1950s. The word choice wasn’t in the vocabulary. She was a victim of society. In today’s society it was [sic] OK to have children out of wedlock.”44

David discovered his identity as Valerie’s son in 1993 at the age of forty, five years after her death; prior to that, when he was in school, he’d wondered where he got his writing talent from. The discovery startled him: “Not knowing whether to believe it or not, he went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and asked to talk to somebody who knew about Andy Warhol. A young graduate who had studied Warhol came out to see him. She showed him a book which had a picture of Valerie Solanas in it. ‘As soon as I saw her picture, I thought, That looks just like me. My whole world started whirring. And then I read about her. I thought, this woman sounds so wacked out. . . . I found out things that were unhappy to find out.’”45

When the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol was released, David contacted its producers and got in touch with Valerie’s sister and the extended family. He had spit on the movie poster, not wanting others to remember Valerie the way the movie portrayed her. He felt most degraded by depictions of her engagement in prostitution: “What hurts me is that she did it for $25, she did it for a cup of coffee. What upsets me is that she degraded herself.” Prior to 1996, Judith had not known what happened to her biological nephew named David and expressed reluctance about discovering his existence. “Judy was much more strained and reluctant to talk,” David recalled. “The whole subject of Valerie, let alone the discovery of her sister’s son, had almost been too much to cope with.” Judith’s daughter, Karen, however, expressed joy and amazement at the discovery: “I am so mad knowing there was a cousin out there in the world and none of us had ever met him.”46

Currently, David works as a photographer and public relations consultant in Washington, DC. He specializes in photos of naked or barely clothed women floating underwater, describing the subject matter as “erotic, sensual, and sexual.” During our first phone conversation, David asked if I wanted him to photograph me underwater, expressing that he found this photographic method exciting and considered this work his contribution to feminism. He also admitted, “I’m prolific just like my mother. It kind of runs in my blood, you know? I’m cynical too, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed of because I wear it like a badge. That’s where I get it.” He met his half sister, Linda Moran. “It was splendid. I got a sibling out of the deal. When all was said and done, we both know that people want to know things about us, and pretty much everybody else was making money except us.” He added, “Listen, let me tell you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Valerie, seriously. They threw away the mold when they made me.”47

David contacted the extended family in 2002 and visited Valerie’s cousins and aunts. “He looks real, real like Valerie,” Valerie’s cousin Robert remarked about David. “He’s got that square jaw and everything. He’s a photographer and does these photographs of models for these magazines. . . . He drove a semitrailer. He sold knives and carousel horses. He took pictures of beautiful girls.”48 (Robert reported that their interaction had fizzled since this first visit and that neither had initiated further contact.) David was pained by not having met Valerie before she died, lamenting, “I could have helped her out. I think that if I’d ever met Valerie, I would have been the best medicine she could have had.”49 He firmly believed that Valerie would have been proud of his erotic underwater photography business: “I get it from Valerie. Valerie would be so proud; that’s one reason I would like to meet her—I wish. Because I’m not gay, but I like when I go underwater with women, you know, my legs are shaved, and I actually wear panties.”50

We cannot know the impact of the covert adoption of David on young Valerie or later in life. She never spoke about having her children taken away from her and almost always kept secret that she had any children at all. Valerie, mother of two by age fifteen, in an era that shamed and silenced those kind of stories, maybe even denied this reality to herself. Still, by giving her son away (or more accurately, through his being taken away), Valerie was offered educational opportunities and potential for advancement that she may have otherwise been denied.

Valerie excelled in high school from ages fifteen to eighteen, though she had few friends. In her senior year, she received all As with one exception: her physics class. She learned at this age to think more and more for herself. She refused to conform to the gender norms of the day, changing her dress, style, and mannerisms to fit her temperament. At one point, her high school records indicated that she lived alone and held a job, though whether she had her own apartment or how she supported herself is unclear. A classmate remembered her as the brunt of jokes: “Out of the 87 of us, she was the odd one, definitely. . . . She was always decent, though she kept her distance. Except when provoked. Then she would flare up.”51 One of the boys in her class put a tack on her chair. In response, Valerie turned around and hit the boy sitting behind her with her fists. She accidentally hit the wrong boy, but her classmates never told her. Generally, the boys picked on Valerie, while the girls ignored her. Still, Valerie gave her classmates the impression that she was independent and could take care of herself. Beneath her high school yearbook picture ran the caption “Val. Brainpower and a lot of spirit.”52

As a teenager, Valerie had a steadfast determination about her educational future, setting her sights on college despite the many hurdles she faced. In her senior year at Oxon Hill High School, she asked the principal, Michael Hernick, for a letter of recommendation, which he happily agreed to write and in which he declared, “I understand that Valerie Solanas needs a letter of recommendation. She is an exceptionally bright girl with lots of courage and determination. She lacks financial support at home, and is determined to get an education, and is proving that determination.” Valerie’s graduation record noted that she overcame her obstacles by “setting new goals.”53

College and Graduate School (1954–1959)

Regarded by nearly everyone she met as fiercely intelligent and witty, Valerie left the Blackwell home in 1954 and enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park. To contextualize the climate of the university at the time, consider that Valerie’s entrance into the university occurred only three years after African Americans were first admitted there.54 Men far outnumbered women at the time, with so-called traditional values still guiding much of university life (with such values influencing clothing, attitudes about dating and sexuality, women’s compulsory “quest” for marriage, and the near total silence surrounding homosexuality).

Valerie blazed into university life, maintaining a B average throughout her undergraduate years. As in her high school days, she lacked friends and needed financial help; “money was to become an important element in her life.”55 Majoring in psychology (though beside her yearbook photo it says she received a BS in chemistry), she supported herself by working in the psychology department’s experimental animal laboratory and, perhaps, by accepting financial assistance from the Blackwell family. Her college fees totaled less than a hundred dollars a year, and she made ends meet in a variety of ways to get herself through college.

Her professor and laboratory supervisor, Robert Brush, worked with her on experiments that examined active and passive learning behavior in rats and dogs. Brush specialized in animal learning, hormone-behavior interactions, endocrine physiology, and behavioral genetics. During his years at the University of Maryland (1956–59), he worked primarily on “traumatic avoidance learning” and avoidance responses in dogs and rats.56 In the lab, he and Valerie investigated how animals avoided aversive stimuli (such as electric shocks) to generate new learning; Valerie’s role would likely have included observing and testing animal behavior, applying electric shocks, and recording responses. During these years, she started to formulate her theories of men’s genetic inferiority, ideas that would appear later in SCUM Manifesto. “The male,” she wrote, “is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.”57

Brush, who died in 2010, had much sympathy and affection for the iconoclastic Valerie, calling her “a very interesting, unusual student. I would use the words diffident and brash at the same time.” He found her bright and dedicated, if difficult. “She was rebellious as hell. . . . She had a chip on her shoulder a mile high. But she liked me, and I liked her. I had a warm spot for her—I felt she’d come up the hard way.”58

Despite her rebelliousness, or perhaps because of it, Brush remembered Valerie as quite competent and diligent, as someone who “did a very proper job of handling all the research activities. She struck me at the time as being tangled up in personal problems, but I always thought she could work her way out of them. She never talked about it, but I got the impression that she [got] kicked around a little bit. She was older, more mature, and had seen the seamier side of life. Even then she knew all the four-letter words. . . . She did not have that fresh-from-the-tub, neatly-combed-hair appearance, but she was reasonably well put together.”59

Unlike other women of the late 1950s, Valerie did not wear the standard skirts and sweaters, preferring jeans and casual shoes. Brush noted this and said that he liked Valerie in part because he felt that “she had the cards stacked against her.”60 In a phone call decades later, he expressed his belief that she had been sexually abused and commented that she lived at the bottom of the social scale. When he heard about the 1968 shooting of Warhol over a decade after he had worked with Valerie, he remembered saying, “Oh my God, poor Valerie,” and felt deep sympathy for the conditions that had brought her to that act.61

Valerie injected something new into the college environment. Unlike the women of her time, she had a mix of rebelliousness, anger, irreverence, and volatility. Classmates found her funny, bright, and interesting, qualities that helped to neutralize her more intense and aggressive character. Her classmate Bob Gallagher, who later became a philosophy teacher, described her as profoundly smart, driven, studious, serious, and not interested in partying like other students. Jean Holroyd, a psychology major who admired Valerie, said, “We were bright, not rebellious. . . . She was rebellious. . . . She’d been on her own a long time.”62 A male classmate commented that she was “straightforward, outspoken, didn’t strike me phony in any way. We shared a beer once.”63

Valerie earned a reputation of bouncing from place to place and being fanatically frugal. She often expected friends to pay for her when they went out and rarely had any money of her own to contribute. She also had difficulty gauging the limits of others’ generosity and kindness and would expect more of the same if someone helped her out. This quality extended well into her later life; she frequently returned to the same people for favors long after they had first welcomed her advances. This, combined with Valerie’s keen sense of personal revenge when slighted, caused problems for her during her college years and beyond. For example, she raised hell in the girls’ dorm and once tipped a crate of bottles down a flight of stairs after a fight with another woman. “Ultimately, she was either asked to leave the dorm, or requested permission to leave and took her own apartment. It was more or less of a girls’ fight.”64 After she left the dorm and moved in with some classmates, problems continued. While she was living with three women classmates in a basement apartment, one roommate offended her; in retaliation, Valerie “peed in the girl’s orange juice and put it back in the fridge.”65

University officials frequently required that Valerie attend psychological counseling following these various incidents; at this, Valerie balked and rebelled. She responded with anger and on one occasion overturned a table during a counseling session. She frequently received disciplinary action and was once nearly expelled. Classmates considered her somehow older, hardened, cynical, and different from most women her age. In stark contrast to her peers, Valerie cared little for disguising her sexual interest in women yet occasionally slept with men. She was an out lesbian with an occasional boyfriend, an identity that might be confusing even by today’s standards, let alone in the conservative mid-1950s collegiate culture. An anomaly and a misfit, Valerie preferred to cultivate her own intelligence and free-spiritedness over the conventional aspirations of women her age: “She was an open lesbian at a time when most students were still agonizing over sex before marriage.”66

Despite the turmoil Valerie ignited in her peers, she excelled in school during her college years. She made Psi Chi, the university honor society in psychology, and became a frequent contributor to her school newspaper, the Diamondback. Cultivating a personality that emphasized humor, audacity, and an acute awareness of sexism, she wrote letters in response to what she perceived as the various injustices committed against women at the time. Though she worked as a feature reporter in 1956, writing tame pieces (such as brief snippets on donating blood and on the costs of a graduate diploma), she began to develop more direct attacks against patriarchy and sexism in her senior year, often using sarcasm and alliteration to make her points.

Valerie declared in one of her letters, somewhat eerily, that she wrote with a pen “dipped in blood.”67 In a 1957 letter to the editor responding to a classmate’s claim that women seek college degrees only to find a suitable husband, Valerie wittily retorted:

Do I detect a touch of male arrogance and egotism in the astute report which Mr. Parr so thoughtfully prepared for us? The insipid innuendoes advanced by him are representative of the type of rationalizations indulged in by the typical, conceited, immature male. It is characteristic of males of this calibre [sic] to blithely believe that women are wasting away without them. Such a belief enhances their blatantly bloated egos.

Mr. Parr would have us believe by his childish chatter that coeds, although lusting for lads, are incapable of hauling in a husband, due to the blasé indifference of their virile associates. He tries to convey an illusion of famished females being rejected on all sides by the dashing, debonair men-about-campus. This is pure nausea! One only has to attend one of the many informal dances, and he will be impressed by the drove-like array of stags mincing mournfully about in quest of a winsome woman . . .

Mr. Parr’s cogent comment that “many coeds are not here to concentrate on the BA degree, but rather on the MRS degree,” suggests, to me, a wisp of wishful thinking. Can our sadistic statistician cite any “cruel evidence” to substantiate this stabling statement? Apparently he conducted his informal survey solely among the “deadwood” of the female, collegiate populace. If Mr. Parr would broaden his associations to include the more serious-minded element of coedhood, I have no doubt that his conclusions would be of an entirely different nature. But perhaps I’m asking too much, since it’s characteristic of everyone to choose as associates those who are on a comparable intellectual level.

Certainly many girls expect to eventually commit matrimony (though not all, by far), but can we logically conclude from this that marriage is their primary purpose in coming to college? . . .

I’m afraid Mr. Parr’s puerile arguments are doomed to fizzlehood. Therefore, I suggest that the infantile Mr. Parr abandon letter writing and adopt a hobby more suitable to his status, such as throwing snow balls in front of the girls’ dorms or instigating panty raids.—Valerie Solanas

Through such letters, Valerie gained a reputation at her campus as “Maryland’s own little suffragette” (a nickname one of her classmates gave her), who used humor, satire, and anger to fight back against (what she termed) the “pure bigoted drivel” in the newspaper.

While she gained quite a following among unmarried women students at the university, many men rallied against her both in the newspaper and in one-on-one exchanges. One writer, Hank Walsh, whom Valerie had attacked, called her mode of thinking “Solanian interpreted psychology” and stated sarcastically, “Keep up the good work, Valerie, America needs you.” In a more astute observation of Valerie’s techniques of using sarcasm and advocating for women’s domination of men, one reader, J. L. Partello, responded in a letter to the editor, “It would appear that Miss Solanas establishes a point only so she can stab something or someone with it. Since Miss Solanas has, in the fashion of a female Don Quixote, chosen her own field of battle and her weapons to her own advantage, it would be difficult, if desirable, to dislodge her from her present obnoxious station. . . . My only suggestion for others on campus who might for some reason be interested, is for them to accept Valerie as a campus institution as they would the fountain in front of the math building, and otherwise, go their busy ways.”

Indeed, Valerie honed in on the power of sarcasm in many of these columns, even sharing her rhetorical strategies in a few of her letters. Foreshadowing later debates about the seriousness of SCUM Manifesto, Valerie declared in a 1957 letter to the editor of the Diamondback, “The primary purpose of satire is to sarcastically scorn human voices and follies.” Her classmates were puzzled about whether her comments about smashing patriarchy and advocating matriarchy represented her beliefs or sarcasm, something Valerie never directly confirmed one way or another. In one Diamondback column, she wrote of women taking power: “The he-man has had his heyday and the femmes are forging ahead. So stouthearts (if you are, indeed, stouthearts), recapture your kingdom! Charge onward in your covered wagons! Don’t be pulled to the pillars of Valerie’s temple! Take heed! Take arms! Take Geritol!”

Early debates about the seriousness of Valerie’s ideas mimic almost precisely those that followed SCUM Manifesto nearly a decade later. Valerie always walked a thin line between humor and sarcasm, on the one hand, and seriousness and viciousness, on the other. Known by many as incredibly funny (even as a child), Valerie argued in the Diamondback for the merits of humor as a tool to repudiate sexism: “Humor is not a body of logical statements which can be refuted or proved, but is rather a quality which appeals to a sense of ludicrous. Nor can humor, if it is truly good humor, be triumphed over by mere ‘massive education.’”68

Valerie honed in on the fundamental inequalities around her during her college years, furious that women shouldered an undue burden of both housework and emotional labor in their relationships. In one letter to the Diamondback, she sniped: “A case in point is his statement that ‘men come home at night too tired to make decisions, so the wife willy-nilly has to.’ Of course his wife isn’t tired. All she did all day was chase after the kids, cook, wash clothes, shop, free-scrub floors, etc., while harassed hubby warmed a seat in an air-conditioned office (in between coffee breaks). But he’s too tired to make decisions.” Valerie also used her psychology training to deconstruct the “naturalness” of gender roles, telling readers, “It’s quite sure that were he to take a basic course in psychology, he would realize that no one is naturally anything (where personality variables are concerned).”

With a penchant for recruiting others to her cause, Valerie submitted several letters that included a list of names, following her own, of women who “ardently upheld” her views in her letters to the Diamondback. In one of her final letters to the editor, titled “Final Thrust,” she concluded with a poem: “Therefore, it seems quite fitting/To dispense with the verbal hitting:/To lay our pens aside for another fray/However, one point must emerge; From my quasi-sadistic purse—/The thrust of my pen was a must! Touche!”

Having cultivated a reputation for being an outspoken and sardonic advocate for women’s rights, Valerie was given a fifteen-minute slot on a local radio chat show during which callers would seek her characteristically sarcastic and irreverent advice for their “mainstream” problems about dating, marriage, money, friendship, social etiquette, and school. Valerie offered her trademark mix of ferocity and humor to address women’s issues of the day, making up her answers on the fly. Her sister, Judith, laughed as she recalled, “People would actually take her answers seriously.”69

Despite Valerie’s general tendencies toward being alone, she did develop a few friendships during college, primarily among the more avant-garde crowd. She had a few friends who hung out at Prince George’s restaurant to talk about philosophy and the meaning of life. These friends were artistic, poetic, and interested in jazz. A number of them were psychology majors. The group liked to read Herman Hesse and talk about politics and culture. One, Jean Holroyd, said Valerie had a very, very hard life and did not develop necessary trust, always preferring to live on the fringe: “She had trenchant things to say. It came up that she was a lesbian. Even in our crowd Valerie was on the edge.”70

In her later years at college, Valerie rented a room in College Park nearby and, according to Dick Spottiswood, a student she knew, worked her way through the rest of college as a prostitute and cocktail waitress. Dick felt intimidated by Valerie, describing her as having a brutal honesty about her. She told him stories about the sexual abuse she had experienced and the many difficult events that she had confronted. In an interview he showed mixed emotions, recalling that one summer Valerie had suggested that he come up to Atlantic City with her to find work as a waiter while she worked as a cocktail waitress and turned tricks: “Whenever possible, she would get her tricks drunk and roll them [steal from them].”71 (Valerie later told psychiatrists that she made money in college through prostitution while living a “homosexual life for enjoyment.”72) One night when she suggested that she and Dick have sex, he was somewhat alarmed, as “she was someone I feared.”73 He was at her place; she was cooking on a little hot plate and suddenly asked, “How would you like to spend the night with me?” Somewhat nervously, he replied, “Valerie, I thought you liked girls,” to which she responded, “Everyone likes a change once in a while.” It was, he said, a clinical experience.74

In her push-pull relationships with her male friends, Valerie expressed a deep-seated ambivalence toward the men in her life. Valerie once asked Dick to make an X-rated movie (“something strictly pornographic”) and would occasionally wear makeup around him. “She looked feminine and vulnerable. She looked beautiful,” he recalled and recounted that Valerie led two separate lives—one as a “working girl” and the other as a scholar. On campus, she would “plunge into her academic work.” His relationship with Valerie was marked by both her intense neediness and her generosity. “If she could do you a favor she would,” he remarked. Still, if you helped her once, she often came back for more. When Dick tried to cut back on helping her, she perceived this as a slight and retreated completely, never asking him for anything again.75

Valerie’s sexual escapades threatened and confused people and often got her into trouble. Family members wondered whether Valerie should be placed in a mental hospital for “oversexed women,” because she used sex for personal advancement and money-making. “She just enjoyed sex and using sex as a means to an end,” her cousin Robert said.76 Her romantic entanglements, however, were even more difficult to decipher.

Her relationships with men during this time may have led to a brief, opportunistic marriage. While living in College Park, she met and took classes with a Greek classmate, Paul Apostolides, who wanted to stay in the country and become a US citizen. “He discovered that if you married an American citizen, back then you became an American citizen automatically, so she said, ‘Okay, we’ll get married,’” Robert reported. The marriage lasted six months, after which time Apostolides went on his way and she went on hers and they divorced. “She may have gotten paid for it,” her cousin said. “Knowing her she probably got something out of it. That was a very short marriage for the time.”77

Valerie eventually graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1958 with a major in psychology. Interested in pursuing a career in evolutionary and biological psychology, she applied and gained admission to the master’s program in psychology at the University of Minnesota that same year. Entering the program in the fall of 1958, she expected to find opportunities for continued educational advancement and exploration. Instead, she faced quite the opposite: the glass ceiling and other forms of gender bias; she was one of only a few women to enter her graduate program. She concluded that all the grants and scholarships went to women, while all the jobs, research money, and resources went to men. Women faced the continual barrier of not being able to advance within the field, something Valerie resented. She wanted and expected more from her graduate education. No longer sheltered by her mutually affectionate relationship with Robert Brush, she faced the harsh reality that she could not advance professionally as a female psychologist. “Valerie Solanas understood how the deck was stacked against any female who wanted something other than marriage and motherhood,” the reporter Judith Coburn later wrote.78

In the spring 1959 semester, Valerie racked up four As and two Bs, and, adding to her primary interest in psychology, declared a graduate minor in philosophy. She hung on for two semesters as a graduate student, earnestly trying to find her way in a system that favored men and their experiences. Then, after nearly a year in graduate school, she claimed she “got bored,” abruptly dropped out of school, and disappeared.

Valerie’s sister, Judith, believes that Valerie’s withdrawal from graduate school signaled that “something had gone terribly wrong.”79 After dropping out of the University of Minnesota, Valerie drifted through various parts of the country and lived with several men, none of whom she liked. With hitchhiking as her means of transport, she made a jagged trip from Minnesota to California. From fall 1959 to spring 1960, she roamed around, lost and trying to find her way.

She eventually arrived in Berkeley in the summer of 1960 and spent time at the university, hanging out with people and taking a few classes there. While visiting California, still spinning from her departure from graduate school, her recent excursions throughout the country, and the anger she felt bubbling up toward men and their privilege, she started to ruminate on what would become her most famous work: SCUM Manifesto. Honing in on her love of writing, she also laid plans for a play.

Valerie had not yet found a place where she belonged. Traveling back again across the country, she hitchhiked her way to New Jersey, where she attended another graduate program (the exact school is still unknown) for a period of at least a year (1961–62). Many years later, she told a good friend that during that period in New Jersey, on weekends and school breaks she would periodically leave school and take the bus to Manhattan and go to Greenwich Village. On discovering the Village, she had fallen in love with its atmosphere and vowed to live there one day. In stark contrast to the relatively mellow cities of her childhood and adolescence, New York offered something far more compelling: freedom to express herself, openness to differences in sexual identities, and the chaotic tangle of modern urban life. Greenwich Village symbolized for Valerie the center of a new universe: “Women were holding hands and men were holding hands and she liked that. She wanted to live in New York City one day. It’s where she’s lived, more or less.”80

Valerie’s spirits brightened in these years, and she would take trips home to tell family about her experiences venturing into New York City. Robert said, “When you would sit down and talk with her, she seemed to know a lot about everything. When it came to politics and social behavior and the way people acted, she knew a lot about that and it was absolutely accurate and everything. I found it fascinating.”81 Judith’s husband, Ramon, similarly recalled, “I loved listening to Valerie! I’d stay up half the night. You didn’t talk, you listened to her theories. She read everything. Her thinking was far in advance of everyone. She talked about what she called the Mob (GE, RCA, all the giant corporations that were taking over the media—later in the ’60s we called it the System) and how soon they’d control all the information. Nobody was talking about that then. And about men. She had our number!”82

Early Days in New York (1962–1966)

While living in New Jersey and commuting into New York for day trips, Valerie made a decision that would forever change her life: she was determined to become a writer. Sometime around 1960–61, she started writing her play, Up Your Ass, a gender-bending romp about a character named Bongi and the “degenerates” she encounters along her way. Valerie’s energy, wit, sarcasm, and humor now met with her increasing exposure to alternative ways of living and thinking—bohemia, the budding counterculture of Greenwich Village, and early traces of a queer community. New York had transformed her professional interests—while only a few years earlier she had wanted to pursue a degree working in evolutionary and biological psychology, she now saw herself as a playwright and provocateur.

Valerie longed to move to New York City permanently but could not yet afford it. Visiting there, the outcast of outcasts finally felt at least a marginal sense of belonging. In the summer of 1962, she moved to Manhattan, finding lodging at a women’s residence hotel in a brownstone near the river on the Upper West Side. She listed on a postcard to her father a return address of 350 West Eighty-Eighth Street. Though she did not yet live in Greenwich Village, she was exuberant about her move. On June 28, 1962, she sent a postcard to her father, Louis, and his wife, Kay, to 2503 Fourteenth Street Northeast in Washington, DC, that read:

Dear Pop + Kay,

I have a really nice room in a girls’ residence hotel. Only 12/wk + all the hotel services—24hr switchboard service, etc. I was going to live in the Village, but it’s too expensive.

There’s a lot of action here in N.Y.; the town really swings. I should’ve moved here long ago.

I have a part-time job in a coffee house in the Village. I’m making just enough to live.

I showed my uncompleted play to the director of Sheridan Square Theater (off-Broadway) to get an opinion. He said it has a lot of potential + he encouraged me to finish. I hope to finish in a month or two.

Give my regards to everybody. I’ll write again when I have something interesting to say. Love, Val

In the early 1960s, Sheridan Square Theater was known as the “wrong place for the right people” and attracted some of the more brilliant and edgy characters of the day—jazz musicians, actors, and those seeking underground gay nightclubs. That Valerie sought it out as her first choice suggests that she had a good sense of a potential audience from quite early on in the writing process. She worked tirelessly on Up Your Ass, spending time waitressing, writing, and working toward her goal of saving enough money to live in the Village. Whether she engaged in prostitution during these years remains a question, as waitressing jobs in New York then would probably have allowed her to eke out just enough to live on, as she mentioned to her father. No other documents exist to confirm her residence, activities, or movements from this period.

Valerie spent the next three years—from 1962 to 1965—working, writing, and living in and around Greenwich Village. Carrying around her heavy, old manual typewriter, she fired off her missives as she moved from place to place: “From one temporary crash pad to the next, from the Hotel Earle to the Chelsea Hotel, she always carted it along, and when she had no home, she kept it in a storage locker.”83 Though she may have finished Up Your Ass earlier, she did not register it with the Library of Congress copyright office until 1965.

By then, Valerie had moved to the Hotel Earle, just off Washington Square Park, which offered a separate wing for drag queens and lesbians. Still traveling alone most of the time, she ate most of her meals at the Twenty-Third Street Automat, which was cheap and allowed her to pass the time and spark up random conversations with fellow patrons. More confident, struggling for money, and connected more intensely with the countercultural mecca of the Village, Valerie in 1965 had finished Up Your Ass and was roaming the streets as a tragicomic street figure. Mary Harron, who wrote and directed the film I Shot Andy Warhol, based on Valerie’s life, wrote in the introduction to the script, “Her days were spent drifting, panhandling on street corners, passing the afternoon over a cup of coffee in a cheap restaurant. . . . When she couldn’t collect enough money panhandling, she would turn tricks.” Harron continued on this theme in personal notes from around 1992, painting a vivid portrait of Valerie’s life in those days. “A picture of her life in cheap hotels, days spent drifting. . . . I see her lying on the bed in a room filled with old newspapers and piles of manuscripts, panhandling on street corners, cheap restaurants, automats. She liked to hang out, to ‘shoot the shit.’ In those days there was such a thing as bohemia—a true division between hip and straight, between downtown and uptown—but Valerie’s world was on the far margins, isolated even from bohemia.”

In a near-constant struggle to make ends meet and to feed herself, Valerie became a pro at bumming cigarettes, talking others into buying her a quick meal, and selling conversation. She often missed rent. And in late 1965 she was kicked out of the Hotel Earle for lack of payment and decided to move for a brief time to a scummy welfare hotel, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place.84 Next she lived in room 606 at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West Twenty-Third Street, known as a residence for people on the fringe. The Chelsea has one of the most colorful histories of any hotel in the world. The owner, who city officials forced out in 2007, had what he called a “seventh sense” for fame, and would allow those he believed would become famous to default on their rent for long periods. The hotel would later house other budding writers and artists, among them Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, and Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia there on November 9, 1953, and Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious, was found stabbed to death in the Chelsea on October 12, 1978.

Early Writings

Those who knew Valerie well all agreed that her primary identity was that of a writer. In a 1991 interview with Rowan Gaither, Valerie’s mother remarked that Valerie “fancied herself a writer”; never was this more true than during Valerie’s early years in Greenwich Village. She wrote her three primary works—Up Your Ass, SCUM Manifesto, and her piece for Cavalier magazine—between 1962 and 1967. Valerie’s productivity, interest in writing, and spot-on social commentaries flourished during these years.

“A Young Girl’s Primer”

In July 1966, Valerie published an article in Cavalier magazine titled, “A Young Girl’s Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class.” At that time, Cavalier published articles and photos similar to those in the more mainstream Playboy magazine, combining tastefully nude photos of celebrities and models with articles geared toward middle-aged men. (When I bought a stack of them in 2011, the seller on eBay was advertising them by emphasizing that one had “pictures of Julie Christy’s nipples.”) Valerie’s piece appeared in Cavalier with an alternative title: “For 2c: Pain, The Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly.”85 In one of many sexist trivializations and mockeries of Valerie’s writing, the table of contents listed her article with a line by the Cavalier editors that said, glibly, “How a nice young lady can survive in the city: The easiest way to be comfortable is flat on your back.”

Confident, funny, and brash, the piece details the sexual pursuits of a no-nonsense city girl who casually makes money selling conversation and sex in order to free up time to write and pursue her own interests. She may indeed be “flat on her back” in this story, but not without a heavy dose of wit, snarkiness, and vengeance. As Harron wrote, “The persona Valerie adopts here—confident, cool, swinging, in charge—is an idealized self, the version of herself she most wanted to be.”86

The article showcases Valerie’s fast-paced movements through Manhattan, following the writer through a hectic day of miniature rejections and small triumphs, idle time and outright hustling, with biting humor thrown in for good measure. In one such humorous reversal, Valerie wrote of a fellow panhandler, “Here comes that old derelict: ‘Say, Miss, could you help me out? All I need’s another seven cents and I can get me a drink.’ ‘You lying mother, you don’t want a drink; you’re collecting money for mutual funds.’”87

“Primer” takes pleasure in small deceptions, wordplays, and power trips; Valerie confidently tricks men into giving her money, only to eventually tell them they are worthless. For example, she writes of one man who is soliciting information about prostitutes: “Tell me where there’s some girls and I’ll give you a dollar.” “Okay, give me the dollar.” “Here.” “There’s girls all over the street. See ya.”

She constructs shoplifting as patriotic, pokes fun at socialists, and views time in terms of financial value: “I’ll grab a listen. A Socialist. I listen a while, then leave, continuing to do my bit toward bringing about socialism by remaining off the labor market. But first a few little acquisitions from the 5&10, since it’s right here. I enter, considering what more I, as a woman, can do for my country—shoplift.” She jokes and heckles, talking about time as valuable for a writer trying to make it in New York City. She tells a man who wants to chat, “Look, my time’s valuable. Standing here talking to you’ll cost me four-fifty an hour,” or later, “That’s conversation. I charge six bucks an hour for that” (76).

In this piece, Valerie floats above any negative ramifications of the hard life, choosing instead a persona filled with self-confidence, amusement, and smarts. After convincing one man to pay her six dollars for an hour’s worth of conversation over dinner, she adds, “For an additional four bucks I do the illustrations on the napkin.” Always keenly ready for antagonistic jokes at the expense of the “nice, middle-class lady, one of Betty Friedan’s ‘privileged, educated girls’” she so despised, she writes of panhandling, “This job offers broad opportunity for travel—around and around and around the block. And to think—some girls settle for Europe.” When she encounters a woman handing intellectual fliers to men only, Valerie fires back, “She’s been programmed beautifully” (76).

A foretaste of Valerie’s later writings in SCUM Manifesto appear, too, as she ponders her lot in life: “A few days off, then back to work. I pan around, wondering how I can help rid the world of war, money and girls who hand pamphlets to men only. Salvation won’t stem from nice, middle-class ladies pushing for Mr. Cole” (77). The article foreshadows Valerie’s more forceful arguments in her manifesto, where “nice girls” must be discarded, men (including those who want her to walk on them with golf shoes, stilettos, and cowboy boots) know they are worthless, and women take matters into their own hands.

Up Your Ass (1965)

Valerie’s notorious play, Up Your Ass, has received far more attention for its alleged role in the Andy Warhol shootings than it has for its artistic merits. That said, the play represents one of only a few finished works (albeit unpublished) created by Valerie during this time and one that would fatefully bring her into Andy Warhol’s orbit a few years later. The play provides another window into a version of Valerie she wanted to be: forceful, sarcastic, in charge, playful, eccentric, grandiose, and funny. Technically titled Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime, the play showcases Valerie’s interest in theorizing and writing from the social gutter. About the play’s title, she joked, “Just in case the play should ever become a Broadway smash hit, at least there would be something acceptable to put on the theater marquee.”88 Filled with cursing, playful linguistic romps (much like her work in the Diamondback years earlier), and hair-raisingly irreverent characters, Up Your Ass was the fictional companion to the later SCUM Manifesto.

In the full title of the play, Valerie was referencing the notion that if women rock the cradle (that is, care for children), they won’t be rocking the boat, changing the world, causing trouble, wreaking havoc. The play features a hustler-panhandler heroine, Bongi Perez, and a variety of other hyper-stereotyped yet funky characters: the unconscious woman, the john, the Christian fanatic, and the drag queen. Reporter Judith Coburn wrote of Up Your Ass:

Putting forward a veritable clusterfuck of oddball characters, Up Your Ass features: Alvin, the dopey Hugh Hefnerite with his revolving bed; Ginger, the Cosmo career gal getting ahead and getting even by “lapping up shit”; Spade Cat, the black smoothie who gets all the girls; White Cat, the loser who never gets any; Mrs. Arthur, the sex-obsessed wife and homicidal mother; her penis-crazed kid known only as “The Boy”; Russell, the classic misogynist bore; and then, the ever-present Solanas character, the sanctimonious but wacko family counselor. . . . There’s also Miss Collins and Scheherazade, two over-the-top drag queens, sendups both of Warhol’s Candy Darlings and the tiresome claque of “superstars” like Ultra Violet. . . . At the play’s center is Valerie’s alter ego, Bongi Perez, a street-smart lesbian hustler and know-it-all who is as sex obsessed as everyone else and who puts out for her tricks but not for lovers.89

With vaudeville-like sequences of events, often flopping wildly between Bongi’s internal narratives and her interactions with those she meets on the street, Up Your Ass harnesses the full power of Valerie’s forcefulness and wit. The play includes Bongi’s selling her body for cash, fifty bucks for “five minutes with a three-quarter minute intermission,” ten bucks more for her to “sneer, curse, and talk dirty.” She goes on: “Then there’s my hundred-dollar special, in which, clothed only in a diving helmet and storm troop boots, I come charging in, shrieking filthy songs at the top of my lungs.” She eventually convinces her john to follow her into an alley for a quick twenty-five-dollar hand job. Prostituting and hustling, Bongi spouts rhetoric that would later appear in SCUM Manifesto: “All roads lead to Rome, and all a man’s nerve endings lead to his dick. . . . You might as well resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ will be a redundancy.”90

Reviewing the play from its February 2001 run at PS 122 Theater in New York, New York in the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon wrote: “The play centers on a wisecracking, trick-turning, thoroughly misanthropic dyke called Bongi . . . [who] banters with drag queens (one yearns to be a lesbian: ‘Then I could be the cake and eat it too’). She entreats—and ill treats—clientele (letting a john buy her dinner, she tells him, ‘I’m gonna help you fulfill yourself as a man’).”91 Up Your Ass lets no one off the hook, taking jabs at masculinity and femininity and reserving as much humorous hostility for Daddy’s girls as it does for exploitative hetero men. Taking aim, Valerie portrays a well-heeled socialite gobbling up a turd because, Bongi says, “everyone knows that men have much more respect for women who are good at lapping up shit.”

As a sample of the dialogue in Up Your Ass, Bongi says, “Oh, my, but aren’t we the high class ass. You got a twat by Dior?” Later, a character named Spade Cat says, “That’s a mighty fine ass. And yours ain’t at all bad. You may consider that a high compliment, being I’m a connoisseur of asses. There’s nothing dearer to my heart than a big, soft, fat ass.” Bongi replies, “Because it matches your big, soft, fat head?” Bongi proceeds to have dinner with a man she despises and recounts her “engaging memories” of stomping up and down on a man’s chest and breaking the glasses he wore in his shirt pocket. “I’ll take it you’ll do just about anything,” the man says. “Well, nothing too repulsive—I never kiss men.” (He later admits, “I have quite a light, playful streak in me that I keep sharpened up by a faithful reading of the more zestful men’s magazines—Tee-Hee, Giggle, Titter, Lust, Drool, Slobber, and, just for thoroughness, Lech.”)92

In a later scene, she talks to a woman named Ginger, who enjoys “lapping up turd,” and who says, “We both agreed that a woman with any kind of spunk and character at all doesn’t have to choose between marriage and a career; she can combine them. It’s tricky, but it can be done.” Bongi retorts, “What’s even trickier yet is to combine no marriage with no career.” Ginger goes on to pridefully tell Bongi she has always been a rebel; on her refusal to pick up her toys as a child, she says, “I’d stamp my foot and say ‘No!’ twice before picking them up. Oh, I was a mean one. My latest rebellion is my childhood religion; I’ve just rebelled against that. I used to be a High Episcopalian.” “What’re you now?” “Low Episcopalian. Do you know they’re even days when I doubt the Trinity?” “You mean Men, Money, and Fucking?” “No, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What religion do you belong to?” “I used to belong to the Catholic, but I wrote it off when they started talking about demoting Mary” (11).

Bongi has dinner with Ginger and her “boyfriend,” Russell, which leads to some banter between them. When Russell blows out a match Bongi has lit for her cigarette, she yells, “You dumb ass! What’d you blow my match out for?” “I was only trying to be a gentleman. I wanted to light it for you.” “Russell’s a perfect gentleman at all times,” Ginger says. “You mean he fucks with his necktie on?” Bongi quips. After Bongi rants at them for the unnecessary gesture, Ginger snidely says, “She has penis envy. You should see an analyst. I’d recommend mine, Dr. Aba Gazavez, a truly remarkable man. You’ve probably heard of him; he’s the famed authority on women and the leading exponent of the doctrine that labor pains feel good.”

The end of the play features a teacher from a Creative Homemaking class discussing the joys of becoming a homemaker: “Integrate your sex life with baby bottle washing: wait until hubby’s getting ready to take his bath; then, quick, soap up the baby bottle brush, working it up into a nice foamy lather; then when hubby’s all nicely naked and is leaning over to test his bath water, you come te-e-a-a-r-r-ing in . . . (demonstrating.) . . . r-a-a-m-m-ing the brush right up his asshole. So, you see, Girls, marriage really can be fun” (14–15, 23–24).

Ginger later asks, “Tell me, what must a woman do to seduce a man?” “Exist in his presence,” Bongi replies. “Come on, now; there’s far more to it than that.” “Well, if you’re in a really big hurry, you can try walking around with your fly open.” “Why don’t you run for president?” asks the Alley Cat. Bongi replies, “Nah, I like to think big.” Lecturing Russell on the inevitable demise of men, Bongi says, “You may as well resign yourself: eventually the expression ‘female of the species’ll be a redundancy.” Russell responds, “You don’t know what a female is, you desexed monstrosity.” Bongi snipes back, “Quite the contrary, I’m so female I’m subversive.” “Well I for one wouldn’t make love to you for a million dollars.” “Maybe not, but you’d do it for nothing” (16–18).

In her final conversation in the play, Bongi speaks to a woman named Arthur who hates her husband and endures bad sex with him. Arthur muses, “Sure, I’d like to do something radical and daring—like think, but you have to make a few concessions, if you want to live in society, so I have sex and collect antiques; I kinda like musty things from out of the past.” “You mean like men,” Bongi replies. “You might say that; men do have a naturey aura about them; when they’re around Fuck is in the air; it’s overpowering; it carries you away with it, sucks you right up.” Bongi says, “Very fucky world we live in. My only consolation’s that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and queer. . . . You know what really flips me? Real low-down, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshits, the kind that when she enters a room it’s like a blinding flash, announcing her presence to the world, real brazen and public. If you ever run across any broads look like neon lights, send ’em my way” (27–28).

Valerie took immense pride in Up Your Ass. This document held much of her identity as a writer, artist, and provocateur. She spent many years drafting and editing the play (recall that she first showed it to a director in 1962), refining words and story lines, making sure the dialogue flowed smoothly. In the 1967 copy of Up Your Ass, retained in the late 1990s by the Andy Warhol Museum, recovered from a silver-painted trunk belonging to Billy Name, Valerie’s handwritten corrections appeared throughout the manuscript.93 Small instructions of where a character should hold her glasses (“he had his glasses in his shirt pocket”) and careful spelling error corrections (“Hungers” to “Hunters”) appear throughout this copy. Valerie’s original 1965 copyrighted version—a carbon copy of the hand-typed, sixty-page version placed with the Library of Congress collections—included numerous typographical errors carefully corrected in her hand using white tape and blue ink. Valerie had seen Up Your Ass through years of corrections and refinements and had even produced mimeographed copies of the play in 1967 to sell at several bookstores: Eighth Street Bookshop, Sheridan Square Paperback Corner, Underground Uplift Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, and East Side Book Store.94

Valerie had tried to sell her play to alleviate her constant cash flow problem, printing an advertisement in the Village Voice on October 13, 1966, that put a relatively high price on the play:

photo offset copies of

“UP FROM THE SLIME”

by Valerie Solanas

are now available at

$10 per copy

222 W. 23rd St, Room 606

Valerie wanted to find an audience, to revel in the play’s subversive, over-the-top campiness; still, the price suggests a seriousness in how Valerie circulated the play. A ten-dollar investment in 1966 from someone mail-ordering Up Your Ass signified real interest in the work.

Valerie had eyed Andy Warhol quite early on as someone who would perhaps show interest in producing the play (though her reproducing copies of the play to raise money contradicts the popular assumption that Andy had her only copy). Valerie sent him a copy (before she personally knew him) sometime in late 1965, just after she copyrighted the play. In a letter to him dated February 9, 1966, she wrote, “Dear Andy, Would you please return my script, Up Your Ass, that I left with you some time ago? Thanks. Valerie Solanas.”95 Because Andy refused to produce Up Your Ass (and lost his copy), and because other producers found it so vulgar and pornographic that they could not or would not produce it, reviews of the work began only after the 2000 staging (the play’s first)—notably set to the music of ABBA and featuring an all-female cast—at the George Coates Theater in San Francisco. (George Coates learned of the play only after his assistant director, Eddy Falconer, saw the film I Shot Andy Warhol and suggested that they stage the play in San Francisco as a revolt against the strict “decency” clause recently implemented by the National Endowment for the Arts.)96

Like SCUM Manifesto, the play still retained a timely and relevant feel, reaching much further than most contemporary plays in its depiction of a gender-bending dystopia. Nearly forty years after its inception, Up Your Ass provoked postmodern anxiety in its audiences and reviewers. As Alisa Solomon stated in her Voice review, “What astonishes more is the ahead-of-its-time critique of gender roles and sexual mores embedded in the jollity. Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’s dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard. Think early Charles Ludlam infused with feminism, glitter drag mixed into the Five Lesbian Brothers.”97

As it does with many writers, the act of writing may have transported Valerie—however temporarily—away from the conditions of her life. The gender dystopia found in Up Your Ass mimicked her wildly fluid approach to her own sexual identity. Always hard to pin down, she never fully identified as a lesbian but adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual. Bongi allowed her to exist in an as-yet-undefined other space. Through Up Your Ass and “Primer,” Valerie could circulate in New York City as a bright, ambitious, clever, wisecracking woman, able to thrive while panhandling, engaging in prostitution, “shooting the shit,” and writing. This version of herself found a way to survive that did not overly compromise her: “I finally hit upon an excellent-paying occupation,” she joked in “Primer,” “challenging to the ingenuity, dealing on one’s own terms with people and affording independence, flexible hours, great stability and, most important, a large amount of leisure time.”98 This version of Valerie may have stood in stark contrast to her coping with days filled with “sordid rooms, inadequate food, and performing blow jobs to pay rent. . . . There were times when Valerie slept on rooftops and ate what was left on other peoples’ plates at the Automat.”99 Valerie lived a hard life, and it would only become harder over the next two decades.

Her good friend Jeremiah Newton, a filmmaker and expert on countercultural New York, could not fully resolve the contradictions of her existence:

I felt bad for Valerie. She was so intelligent and she told me she would have sex with men and she hated men. I said, “How could you do something you don’t really like?” She said, “You have to do things for money.” Well, I thought that’s a bad thing to do. She did it occasionally for money, brought people up on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. I would never do anything for money that I didn’t want to do. I thought as smart as she was, she was stupid to do that, to have men touch her. It didn’t make sense to me. It was irrational. She was still rational, but that was irrational. You don’t do something you so hate doing for money.”100

Valerie’s family seemed hesitant to admit that Valerie prostituted herself for money; to them she talked incessantly about her writings and never about how she actually survived on next to nothing. Robert framed this as her response to her limited options: “Valerie probably worked as a prostitute. If she needed a place to stay, or if she needed money for cigarettes or food, she would prostitute herself. I don’t think she did it on a regular basis. If she had sold her play properly or sold her book properly, she wouldn’t have had to do this to make money. Back then they didn’t have a lot of homeless shelters or social workers so you did what you needed to do for the money. If she prostituted herself, it was for that night, not as a regular hobby or career.”

However difficult her financial and psychological condition, Valerie kept in contact with her family during those years and would visit her father, mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever she could scrape together enough money to travel. She went home for Christmas most years, eager to revel in home cooking and to tell stories about New York and her life as a writer. The family was divided generationally about whether to dismiss Valerie as a kook or see her as fascinating: “We found her to be like one of those characters that we could tell stories about,” Robert said. “The kids all liked to sit around and listen. The older generation thought she should be locked up and didn’t understand it.” Talkative, hyper, and hungry, she told stories about New York over heaping plates of spaghetti. “All she ever wanted to eat when she came down here was spaghetti. My mother would make her roast beef and gravy or anything and she’d say, ‘Don’t you have any spaghetti?’ and my mother would say, ‘All right, we’ll make you some spaghetti.’ As long as she had spaghetti, she didn’t care.”101 (Valerie is said to have had a voracious appetite: “I was not halfway through my plate of Chinese vegetables, but she had already finished her steak, French fries, and salad.”)102

Given the numerous accounts of her wolfing down food when it was available and her nearly constant requests to move in with almost anyone who would listen, it is evident that Valerie lived on the edge: she was often hungry (as are most people who panhandle for a living) and rarely had any stability in where she slept or lived. She was known for asking people if she could live with them even if she loathed them. The Chelsea Hotel evicted her several times, in summer 1967, in fall 1967, and in early 1968. Certainly, Valerie saw men as having unfair access to money, resources, and power. She keenly sensed the inequities building around her in late 1966 and early 1967. Bouncing from place to place, meal to meal, she had little shame about asking for a place to live, a hot meal, or a “piece of the action.” She had work to do, things to say, pieces to write. She needed a place to land. During an interview with the journalist Robert Marmorstein, she asked if he would let her stay with him:

“I’ll keep out of your way. I wouldn’t make a bad looking roommate either, would I?”

“No, you wouldn’t, but why me? I’m flattered. You hardly know me.”

“You’ve got an apartment. That’s all I need to know about you. I’ve got lots of work to get out and no place to stay. It’d just be for a couple of months.”

“I thought you had an apartment.”

“I’m staying with some old dame. But she gets on my nerves. She’s square. Doesn’t know which end is up. Can’t get used to my hours. I’ve got to get out of there.”

“Your manifesto says that a good SCUM girl would just as soon stick a shiv into a man’s back as look at him. How could I feel safe with you in my apartment?”

“Look, I’m a revolutionary, not a nut. That kind of thing takes organization. I’m practical, not stupid. We’re years away from that sort of thing. I’m not ending up in some fink jail.”

“I’m sorry. But I really have no room. How about the girls you have in SCUM? Couldn’t you stay with any of them?”

“They’re all as bad off as I am. All the ones I know are barely scrounging out places themselves. Christ, the shit you have to go through in this world just to survive.”103