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At the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women held at Mount Holyoke College in August 1978 I heard Audre Lorde read her essay, "Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power." The experience transformed my life. It wasn't the essay alone. It was Audre Lorde's presence, the quality of her voice, the clarity of sound, her thoughts propelled with such precision and confidence. It was also the story of how the panel got to happen and the audience response to it.
There were three participants. They had titled their session "Lesbians and Power." The program committee at the Berks unilaterally changed the title to something innocuous, deleting the word "lesbian," and scheduled it in a small room. Audre Lorde and her co-panelists were outraged. They printed a flyer (this is in the day before cell phones, computers, and email), reclaimed the word "lesbian" in their title, and secured the largest auditorium on the campus.
Two thousand women came. We listened with rapt attention. At the end of each paper there was robust applause. Then the floor was opened for discussion. A woman rose and told the story of the panel's titled obscurity and near demise. She asked if all the lesbians in the room would please stand. Almost the entire audience rose.
In August 1978 I had only recently separated from my husband, and while we had joint custody of our two young children, they lived with me. I had been struggling to come out for years, trying to overcome the terror induced by near-constant FBI and police surveillance because I was a member of the U.S. Communist Party and because I was a prominent activist in movements for civil rights, peace, and social justice. I also had been physically brutalized. I remained seated in that moment, too frightened to stand. It occurred to me that the few other women still sitting may well have also been closeted lesbians!
However, I understood the politics of solidarity. I knew that those two thousand women were not all lesbians; and I knew that Audre Lorde and her sister organizers had presented me with a miraculous moment. One year and two months later I met the love of my life, and gradually over the next several...