Лавандин қаупі: Лесбияндық феминистер қозғалысының тарихы

Lesbian radical feminist advocacy group

Lavender Menace was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970. Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo, and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). They later became the Radicalesbians. The phrase "Lavender Menace" was reportedly first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan, president of The National Organization for Women (NOW), to describe the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other heterosexual feminists, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. Friedan's remarks and the decision to drop DOB from the sponsor list led lesbian feminist Rita Mae Brown to angrily resign her administrative job at NOW in February 1970. In a New York Times Magazine article on March 15, 1970, straight radical feminist Susan Brownmiller quoted Friedan's remarks about the "lavender menace," which Brownmiller took as an allusion to Cold War era "Red Menace" rhetoric, and dismissed Friedan's worries as "A lavender herring, perhaps, but no clear and present danger."

Describing lesbian activist Rita Mae Brown, Karla Jay has said: "one thing that you were not going to tell Rita was to shut up." A few members of the planning committee tried to take back the stage and return to the original program, but gave up in the face of the resolute group and the audience, who used applause and boos to show their support. The group and the audience then used the microphone for a spontaneous speak out on lesbianism in the feminist movement, and several of the participants in the "zap" were invited to run workshops the next day on lesbian rights and homophobia. Straight and gay women from the congress joined an all women's dance, a frequent organizing and social tool used by Gay Liberation Front men and women. After the Congress, the women who had organized the protest began to hold consciousness raising groups for women of all sexualities. They also changed their name, first to Lesbian Liberation, then to Radicalesbians.

The "Lavender Menace" zap, and the publication of "The Woman Identified Woman," are widely remembered by many lesbian feminists as a turning point in the second wave feminist movement, and as a founding moment for lesbian feminism. After the zap, many of the organizers continued to meet, and decided to create a lasting organization to continue their activism, which they eventually decided to call the "Radicalesbians". At the next national conference of NOW, in September 1971, the delegates adopted a resolution recognizing lesbianism and lesbian rights as "a legitimate concern for feminism". The Lavender Menace Bookshop, an independent gay bookshop in Edinburgh that existed from 1982 to 1986, began as a bookstall called Lavender Books in the cloakroom of Fire Island gay disco on Princes Street, Edinburgh; the name of the stall was taken from the Lavender Menace group. In 1999, Susan Brownmiller described the impact of the protest and subsequent lesbian feminist organizing, writing that "Lesbians would be silent no longer in the women's movement." Karla Jay described it in her memoirs as "the single most important action organized by lesbians who wanted the women's movement to acknowledge our presence and needs," and said that it "completely reshaped the relationship of lesbians to feminism for years to come." "We felt as well," Jay wrote, "that the zap was only the first of many actions to come and that lesbian liberation was suddenly and unstoppably on the rise."