It’s 1970. Lesbians are just beginning to distinguish themselves as lesbians within the women’s rights movement. Judy Grahn writes about standing up to authority:
[A] group of us attended a lecture by a well-known, thoroughly published psychiatrist, an ‘expert’ in female homosexuality. From the audience, we questioned him, what was his authority based in? What real reasons did he have for pathologizing our lives? For emphasis, we stood up, scattered throughout the audience. There were at least a dozen of us, perhaps more. We didn’t yell or threaten, just stood. At our standing up, declaring our sanity to him, he gathered his papers and fled the room. We felt like Dorothy discovering the Wizard as a tiny man behind a curtain of false authority.
The emperor has no curtain.
source:
A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet
by Judy Grahn
2012. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco CA
2012. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco CA
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