The following are excerpts of the interview conducted by Irene Reti on March 6, 2002 - ed.

De Clarke

We published another book of my poetry in 1985, To Live with the Weeds, which was much more professional, and still I think a very pretty and attractive book. That was the last poetry I published. That book has actually worn pretty well. There are a couple of pieces that I sort of cringe at when I read them, but most of the book still stands up pretty well. It was, I think, the last thing I wrote in that spirit of lesbian nationalism. It was very much the last hurrah of the idea that lesbians were a unique nation, a subculture that was uniquely feminist, and that lesbianism and feminism were the same thing. It was about the last time that I was thinking that.

I think it's interesting that that book was sort of the most definitive and the terminal statement of that belief system for me. After that, many things happened to undermine, challenge, and eventually crumble that belief system. After living through the central-1980s, I was never again able to say someone is guaranteed to be feminist just because she's lesbian. We had seen all kinds of things happen. Some of them were just things like reality checks. The lesbian community started facing up to issues like battering in lesbian relationships. I mean, how could we go on saying that lesbian relationships were all idyllic and feminist and egalitarian, when women were coming out of another closet and admitting that their female lovers had been violent with them? This was very distressing. It was emotionally devastating at the time. I think it was sort of a growing-up thing to realize that the people that you thought of as us were not necessarily good people; every community has its villains, including your community.

I was thinking that in a way, as young lesbians we were almost (and this is going out on a limb here), but as young lesbians we were almost like early Zionists. We were full of idealism and this belief that we were going to prevail just by being right, and everyone who was us was right, and we were all right together. We were going to make the whole world right by being right together. The idea that our community could degenerate into violence or cruelty was very distressing. Years later I was reading some article by an American progressive leftist Jewish guy who was writing about an experience of heartbreak that he had after visiting Israel and seeing how militarized it was. He was a pacifist. I remember thinking that there was some echo in this piece that he wrote, of the kind of schism and heartbreak that I had experienced as a lesbian who was a feminist watching lesbians in my community do things that to me were very anti-feminist. It wasn't just discovering that lesbians could be mean. Everyone who went through high school knows that girls can be really mean. But I think it was watching the SM culture and the commercial sex culture, watching women start to celebrate objectifying other women. Men do this to women. Men are bad. Seeing women do these things to other women, seeing women say, "Oh, we should have strip clubs of our own; we should have strippers for lesbians; we should have prostitutes for lesbians"--that was very devastating to me. I think that's why To Live with the Weeds was the last thing I published that was in that lesbian nationalism vein.

I think [these changes] undermined my belief in separatism, generally. I stopped believing that just a commonality of attributes with some other people was enough to make them a community, or make them cohesive, or able to achieve good in the world. I think somehow that it altered my world-view a bit. For one thing, I had to face the contradiction of having at one time believed that no straight woman could be a real feminist, and now discovering that I knew some straight women who were more true to their feminist principles than some of the lesbians whom I knew. How could I incorporate that into my worldview? How could I [sigh]...

I guess it's just growing up, that you have to realize that people are much more complicated than you thought they were, and you can't sort them neatly into your tidy little pigeonhole system and expect all the people... All the people with red hair are nice people, and all the people with brown hair are nasty people, and the world is a nice, safe place, because you can always tell them apart. I think you lose that sense of safety at the point when you realize that it isn't sufficient to ask a person a few trivial questions and then you can find out whether they are okay or not. That whether they are okay or not is something a lot different from who you sleep with, and what do you wear, and what jargon can you recite.

Also, I think in organizing, in doing political activism, all of us eventually met people who were very good at talking the right jargon, but in practice were deeply manipulative, or disruptive to the movements they were part of, or pursuing some agenda of their own. I think everybody who did any kind of progressive organizing eventually ran up against this archetypical personality who joins an organization and six months later the organization falls apart. Then they join another organization and that organization falls apart. This person is often very hard-working, full of all the right rhetoric, and seems on the surface to be a political powerhouse with all the right politics, and yet they somehow have this destructive impact wherever they go. That was another of those little contradictions that sort of itches you for years, until you finally have to say, just because someone knows the password, just because they can say, "Down with Heteropatriarchy!" doesn't mean that they are actually okay. They could actually be doing something quite different, like trying to grab power, or even trying to destabilize your organization. Who knows? Maybe they are an agent provocateur?

To Live with the Weeds was sort of the end of an era for me, intellectually. Since then I have gone on publishing, although sporadically. It's very hard to hold down a full-time job and do serious writing. The problem is you don't have enough time to do the research. There was a period for almost ten years when I had broken up with my last lover; I had published Weeds; I had published a cassette of music. It was called Messages: Music for Lesbians and it was the last piece of that lesbian nationalism work that I did.

After that I sort of dropped out for a while. I think I was very depressed about the prospects for feminist activism. I was watching the backlash taking place. I just couldn't believe it. I was tired. I'd done a lot of organizing. I had done a lot of work of various kinds. I did what the sociologists call cocooning. I withdrew into my private life and watched a lot of movies, worked really hard at my job, and pursued my career, and said, the hell with it. This would have been the late-1980s through the mid-1990s. It wasn't like I did nothing that was progressive or political.

I decided that I needed to educate myself about globalization and economics, because I realized sometime in the last six or eight years that the way the world was organized when I was growing up, is not exactly the way it's organized now. Some of the terms have changed. The power structures have changed. The locus of the power has changed. The trends were there when I was growing up. I think what I've been coming to terms with is the degree and centralization of corporate power. This is something that was not part of my life experience when I was younger. Corporations had power when I was in my twenties. We were definitely aware that money was power. And my God, did we talk about class! The early women's movement was obsessed with assigning everyone to their correct class: I'm middle class. I'm upper middle class. I'm lower middle class. I used to be upper middle class, but now I'm middle class. We did a lot of taxonomy. We tried very hard to be conscious of the fact that most feminists were middle class, and we didn't always understand anything about the issues that were facing working-class women. And a lot of U.S. feminists were white, because that's who could get published, and that's who could get jobs in academia, so that's who got famous, so that's who influenced the movement. And we were always trying to be more inclusive of women of color, and understand the issues of women of color.

But we were not paying a whole lot of attention to the way that power was concentrating in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of wealthy men in this country. That was happening by stealth while we were having all these identity politics wars. While I was busy trying to decide whether it was a betrayal of my principles to go on teaching in the self-defense class because the city forced us to let straight women into the lesbian class (this was the kind of thing that was my big crisis of conscience at one time), while I was worrying about that (I'm not saying that that was a ridiculous thing to worry about; I think there was some relevance to that.) [but] while it was happening these media mergers were happening and anti-trust laws were being overturned. This agenda was being pursued by the business community through the 1980s into the 1990s, which has completely changed the world. The fundamentals haven't changed. The rich guys have all the power. That doesn't change. It was true in ancient Egypt.

But what political activism means, and what power we're facing, and how international commerce works, are very different now from what they were when I was in my twenties. I mean, just for casual example, forty-one percent of international trade today is not between companies. It's within companies. It's one division of a company selling stuff to another division of a company. That's a major change. Monetary policy has changed. All these things have changed. It all seems very abstract, and I'm bored as hell by economics. I find it very difficult to read economics books. But all these things have profound impacts on the ground, especially for women. Well, to take a very simple example. In general if a country's economy crashes, the women in that country end up being exported as prostitutes to other countries. It's a pattern that happens over and over again. So when the IMF and the World Bank deliberately crash a country's economy in the name of austerity measures and forcing them to pay back their debts, what really happens is this huge amount of raw prostitution material is released onto the world market. And so as the neo-liberal economists have gone around crashing various countries' economies and destroying the social sector and increasing poverty--all in the name of increasing wealth and prosperity, of course--different nationalities of women have been put up for sale on the world market, one after another. So that for a while there was a huge boom in Ukrainians because all these women were facing starvation and poverty in the former Soviet Union, and the young and pretty ones were knowingly or innocently getting involved in international prostitution, being transported to other countries, having their passports taken away. The same old story. But the population of women that it's happening to changes, from decade to decade, as these different patterns take place. So after all of these years I am still trying to understand how to stop men from buying and selling women. I'm trying to understand how the global economy doesn't work for women. It works in some ways and it doesn't work in other ways. It's a big subject. We can't really do a lot of talking about globalization in the course of this interview. But that's one thing that I'm studying.

Also, I have this conviction that feminism, as an idea, only has a fighting chance in a civil society, where there is still civilization. Because women don't have the physical force or the militarism to impose feminism by force; it can only be argued as a civil position in a society that has some commitment to human rights. When an economy crashes and burns, and a society is reduced to dog-eat-dog, women and children are the first to suffer, and feminism is not going to fly there at all until people have enough to eat. I see the preservation of civilization and the ideal of democracy as preconditions for feminism. Unless you have this basic idea about human rights and democracy, and might does not make right, and the strongest bully should not rule the neighborhood, then you don't have feminism. Because women are never the strongest bullies. Women are the underdog, in terms of physical strength and social power. And so, unless you have the fabric of a social culture that still has its structure, and its interrelationships between human beings, and some kind of code of conduct, and maybe even a code of law to protect the weaker from the stronger, then it isn't even really possible to start talking about feminism--not until you have a culture where ism means something. When people are selling their seven-year-old daughters to whorehouses so that the families will not starve, there's not much point in saying, "That's very oppressive, what you're doing to your daughters." I think this is what some Leftists mean, and I object to their skewing it in this direction, when they say that feminism is a secondary concern. I don't think it's secondary. But I do think that you can't extricate the agenda of feminism from these other agendas of alleviating poverty, and reducing Third World debt, and producing a more equitable kind of world trade. That's a very tangled subject, but basically when the rule of law collapses and a country reverts into barbarism or constant crisis, it's very bad news for women.

And so, I've begun to broaden my perspective a bit, and think about the prospects for various kinds of crisis, and how it's very important to revert to those because... Well, take what happened to the former Soviet Union. You had this very totalitarian state. It was bad. Nobody can really defend the kind of repression that took place in the Soviet Union. But when it collapsed there was a power vacuum, and the people who took over were the Mafia. Now, Soviet women who had had a guarantee of equal employment with men don't have jobs any more, and Soviet women have to prostitute themselves. Old women are having to sell their household effects and jewelry to get food on the streets of Moscow. This is what happens when the social order collapses. Even if it was a totalitarian social order, which is essentially a bad thing, for individual women, it may have been more survivable to squeak by under a totalitarian state than to live under the chaotic rule of Mafia drug lords. This raises all kinds of questions for these traditional ideas about what does freedom mean? What does liberation mean? What does democracy mean? To me, it's coming increasingly down to--how does it work for women? A society that is gentle and sustaining and supportive of women and children is very likely to be a civilized society, and a place that is decent for everybody to live. A society that is brutal and exploitative and violent to women and children is likely to be a pretty lousy society for everybody else to live in. Women and children are like the canaries in the coal mine for social orders.

So this long detour takes me to the signs that I see in the wind that worry me. I think a lot about sustainability; the fact that the way we do business and the technologies that we use today are fundamentally unsustainable, is very frightening to me. If the biotech people do something really stupid and screw up agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere, and there's the potential for them to do that, (Never believe that the human race isn't capable of doing something spectacularly stupid. I mean, we invented plutonium.) if they do that, if they derange all of agriculture and we have food shortages, that means implicitly either a real totalitarian clamp-down, or a state of chaos and civil unrest and food riots, and wars over food, and that kind of stuff. And again, that's a scenario where feminism vanishes from our horizons, and this whole cause that I've worked for, as much as I can, becomes irrelevant. I don't want that to happen. And so I've become very concerned about trying to maintain a sustainable, civil society in which there is a chance for feminism to continue working. I don't like any of the scenarios that lead to civil breakdown and barbarism. Because under civil breakdown and barbarism women get reduced to childbearers and prostitutes and slaves. And as soon as you have rule by strongmen, you can forget any idea about equal pay for equal work and stuff like that.

In the last few years I've been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about the unsustainability of the way we do things. I've become increasingly concerned about the flagrant, spendthrift squandering of petroleum resources when our entire technology and our entire economy are based on this one resource. We are a monocrop economy when it comes to petroleum. And what will the effect be if the world goes to war over the last petroleum resources, which in a way we already are doing. That's already beginning. The American incursions into Central Asia. Everybody who is halfway awake knows that these wars are about oil, that the Gulf War is about oil, that the Afghan invasion is about oil. So these are things that worry me. I worry about the development of an underclass, a permanent large underclass in America. I worry about the stratification of wealth, because again, women in poverty are vulnerable to all of the exploitations that feminists don't want women to be vulnerable to.

I think that somehow the feminism that I started out with, that I was exposed to and learned, as you might say, when I came to college, has broadened my world rather than narrowing it. That if you care about what happens to women, you end up having to care about everything. I have to resort to specifics, because the generality is so all-inclusive that I can't say anything meaningful about it. It's just vague generalizations. But take a discussion we were having online awhile ago about the United States and NATO's use of depleted uranium in munitions, and the very probable connection of depleted uranium dust on battlefields with increased cancer rates and birth defects and leukemia and things like that. One of the things that I said, in the course of this debate, was that we have to remember that these burdens are going to fall on women, because it's women who are going to have to do the long-term care for family members who are dying of cancer. It's women who are going to be blamed by their husbands when they give birth to deformed babies, and are going to be divorced by their husbands and cast into poverty because they will be blamed for birth defects. It's women who will have to care, lifelong, for defective children who are born as a result of this kind of toxic contamination. And it's women's reproductive system in general that seems to be the most fragile when it comes to responding to environmental toxicity, so that you can bet that breast cancer and uterine cancer and ovarian cancer are going to crank up when the environment is polluted. And so, for all of these destructive things that happen in the world, in 98 cases out of 100, you can bet that women are going to bear more than their share of the burden of these things. In the end you end up reaching this rather exhausting intellectual point, where every issue is a woman's issue.

AIDS in Africa. It you look at what's happening in Africa, with twenty million people dead in the last decade from AIDS. All these young parents are dead, leaving their children orphans. Who's picking up the slack? Grandmothers. It's the women who are adopting their grandchildren and becoming mothers all over again at the age of fifty and sixty and raising small children because their own children have died. And so, all over the world where you see these impacts of, for example, American military adventuring, or corporate profiteering, or local warlordism, or local religious fundamental extremism--no matter where you go, the irresponsibility of men is casting the burden on women. Whether you are fighting the environmental battle or the landmine battle... Any place you go where there's a human rights battle going on, the odds are that there's a dreadful impact on women. As a feminist, unless you want to restrict yourself to being (and I'm going to be kind of controversial here), the kind of white bread, middle-class American feminist who thinks that the biggest thing on her personal agenda is remedying the inequity in car insurance premiums for women versus men... I mean, discrimination should be fought, but if you want to narrow your feminism to the point where it's just what affects women of your own class and race in your own country and income group, to me that's pointless because women won't have a good life until there is a general kind of justice and equity. Because women will always be the last in line when justice and equity are handed out. So you are going to have a lot of justice and equity before the men are willing to share it with the women. It's just common sense.

I would say that being a feminist has led me inexorably to having to educate myself about all kinds of global issues that had never crossed my horizon when I was a young feminist, to forge alliances with all kinds of people that I might not have forged alliances with when I was younger, and to question all kinds of things that seemed very self-evident to me. I mean, even take the issue of prison rape, which is considered a man's issue, for the most part. There are some researchers who say that more men are raped every year in the United States than women because of the extreme amount of rape that happens in men's prisons. I don't know if that's literally true. I mean, the prison population is very large now. We incarcerate a greater proportion of our population than any nation on earth, except, I think, Iran. Way more than many other nations that we like to shake our fingers at and say how lousy their human rights record is. But forget the numbers. I mean, does it really matter whether more rape happens in prison than outside? The real point, to me, is that when men are raped in prison, a lot of them, when they are released, the first thing they need to do is go rape a woman to recover their lost masculinity from being raped by other men. So in the end sexual violence always dumps on women. In the end, men who were beaten by their fathers beat their children and wives. The violence that men do to each other still has this trickle-down effect, where women end up absorbing it. They are at the bottom of the food chain. I don't see prison rape as somebody else's issue. I have to see it as my issue because women are going to suffer for this. If this violence isn't curbed, women are going to end up paying for it. Women end up paying for a lot of... Well, it's almost a Victorian cliché, isn't it? Men commit the offenses and women pay for them. But in general women end up paying for a lot of the things that men do that are wrong, even when men do these things to other men.

So I guess that's how one becomes more radical rather than less over a lifetime. It's rather exhausting, I'll tell you. I think it was a lot easier and lot more cheerful to be a naive young lesbian-feminist in my twenties. I think it was also less productive, in a sense. I think perhaps the most productive thing we can do is to make these connections. To go and sit in our own little area of expertise is satisfying, to an extent. But really, this is just my bias, but making the connections between apparently different manifestations that are really all part of the same thing is the kind of work that I want to do.