Women's History: The Lavender Menace

I remember being very surprised when I first learned about the role of the lesbian activist group Lavender Menace in shaping 1970s feminism. In the early 1970s, the mainstream feminist movement was not accepting of lesbians. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and president of the National Organization for Women, famously referred to lesbians as “lavender menace” to the women’s movement, because she felt that stereotypes of lesbians as masculine and widespread bias against lesbians would make it more difficult for the primarily white heterosexual middle-class women in the women’s movement to create political change if they were associated too closely with lesbian activism. Thus, NOW worked to distance itself from lesbian issues, not allowing an early lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, to be a sponsor for NOW’s First Congress to Unite Women in 1969.

When NOW prepared to hold a Second Congress to Unite Women, little had changed in terms of lesbian representation within the women’s movement—there was not a single woman who was openly lesbian on the conference program. A group of lesbians decided to come together to raise awareness of lesbian issues and protest the exclusion of lesbians from the movement. They decided to reclaim Friedan’s words and call themselves the Lesbian Menace.

The action they planned for the conference was known as a “zap.” They planned to interrupt the conference and nonviolently raise awareness of lesbian issues. To prepare, they checked out the building beforehand, printed up lavender “Lavender Menace” t-shirts, and wrote a manifesto for distribution, titled “The Woman-Identified Woman.” (Well worth a read.) As far as the events of the day, I’ll refer to Karla Jay’s account, published in her book Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (also worth a read):

"The Second Congress to Unite Women got under way on May 1 at 7:00 PM at Intermediate School 70 on West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. About three hundred women filed into the school auditorium. Just as the first speaker came to the microphone, Jesse Falstein, a GLF member, and Michaela [Griffo] switched off the lights and pulled the plug on the mike. (They had cased the place the previous day, and knew exactly where the switches were and how to work them.) I was planted in the middle of the audience, and I could hear my coconspirators running down both aisles. Some were laughing, while others were emitting rebel yells. When Michaela and Jesse flipped the lights back on, both aisles were lined with seventeen lesbians wearing their Lavender Menace T-shirts and holding the placards we had made. Some invited the audience to join them. I stood up and yelled, "Yes, yes, sisters! I'm tired of being in the closet because of the women's movement." Much to the horror of the audience, I unbuttoned the long-sleeved red blouse I was wearing and ripped it off. Underneath, I was wearing a Lavender Menace T-shirt. There were hoots of laughter as I joined the others in the aisles. Then Rita [Mae Brown] yelled to members of the audience, "Who wants to join us?"

"I do, I do," several replied.

Then Rita also pulled off her Lavender Menace T-shirt. Again, there were gasps, but underneath she had on another one. More laughter. The audience was on our side."

After this grand entrance, the Lavender Menaces took the stage, and there was a speak-out on lesbians and the feminist movement. Though some members of the planning committee tried to return to the original program, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Several of the Lavender Menaces were invited to run workshops the following day on lesbian issues, and some women who had attended the conference, of all sexual orientations, attended an all-women’s dance hosted by a lesbian group that evening.

Feminists both in the Lavender Menace and in NOW have later called this event absolutely pivotal in changing the relationship between lesbians and the feminist movement. The action strongly demonstrated that lesbians were an important part of the women’s movement, and would no longer consent to having their issues ignored or pushed to the side in order to accommodate biases of some of the women in the movement or to make the feminist movement appear less threatening to people in the mainstream, and the message of those who spoke that day were heard.

The following year, at its 1971 national conference, the NOW delegates adopted a resolution recognizing lesbianism and lesbian rights as “a legitimate concern for feminism.” For me, today, it is hard to imagine what the feminist movement might look like had the Lavender Menaces not stepped up and insisted that lesbians be able to participate fully and openly in women’s liberation. Where would feminism be without the participation of so many strong and talented lesbians and queer women? What would feminism and feminist theory be like without support for women of all sexual orientations? The fact that the idea of feminism without lesbians’ and queer women’s participation appears so foreign to me is, I think, a good sign, in that it shows how far we as a movement have come in overcoming this misunderstanding and discrimination in the early days of the women’s movement.

For Women’s History Month, I think it is not only important to celebrate the victories that women have made in overcoming sexism, but to talk about the ways in which we have been able to overcome discrimination within our own movement. I think that stories like that of the Lesbian Menace need to continue to be told in order to remind ourselves that, while we may not ever be perfect as a movement, we can continue to work, often with great success, toward even greater solidarity and understanding within the feminist movement.