Intimate Wars (19 page)

We slowly became friends. We both wanted and craved action, and being romantics with vivid imaginations, we began to make plans for creating a feminist world. Once we placed an ad in the
Village Voice
recruiting feminist warriors: THE FEMINIST GOVERNMENT NEEDS YOU! We envisioned a kind of feminist guardian angel brigade that would patrol the streets of New York City insuring the safety of women, stopping domestic violence and sexual harassment, and defending patients at abortion clinics. We received only two responses, so that dream had to be put on hold.

Phyllis was also unusual in the world of the radical feminist leadership in that she was a single mother choosing to bring her son Ariel up to be an active part of her political life. I remember her defining rape for him at my kitchen table
when he was just nine years old. She took him with us to some pro-choice rallies, and he later worked at Choices for a couple of summers. We all occasionally spent time at Kate Millett's farm during her famous celebrations of the Japanese festival Obon, sharing her wonderful feminist arcadia.

Andrea Dworkin was another dedicated feminist with whom I became friends through my work as a pro-choice leader and publisher of the magazine. She, too, cast a very large shadow. Andrea was always soft-spoken, smiling through her small talk until she came to her reality—then she became a fiery herald of truth.

I was always impressed by her work against rape and pornography, especially her ability to put theory into practice, as in 1983 when she and Catharine MacKinnon were hired by the Minneapolis city government to draft an antipornog-raphy civil rights ordinance (which would define pornography as a civil rights violation and allow those harmed by the industry to sue for damages) as an amendment to the City of Minneapolis civil rights ordinance.

In a sense she was the Robespierre of the movement. This analogy came to life when Andrea reacted to
A Book of Women's Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486
, which Carol Downer had written with Rebecca Chalker detailing ways that women could sabotage potential anti-abortion laws, one of which was to claim that they had been raped. Andrea felt very strongly that if women were to fake rapes as a tactic in the struggle to access legal abortion, it would denude and diminish her work fighting rape and violence against women. She called Downer a traitor to the movement and told me over the phone that if she had the power, she would have her executed. I asked whether she would like a guillotine to be put up in the town square for this purpose and she found the idea quite pleasing.

AS MY CIRCLE OF FRIENDS broadened and my professional reputation grew, I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with some of the most brilliant and unique political and literary women of the time: Petra Kelly, Florynce Kennedy, Kate Millett, Erica Jong, and so many others. I wanted our life-altering conversations and ideas to reach past our meetings, our speeches, and even our publications.
On the Issues
was a success as far as radical non-mainstream feminist publications can be called successful—at its height we had twenty thousand subscribers nationally and internationally—but I wanted to reach more people, to be on the cutting edge. With the right medium we could spark public dialogue on subjects that were too often passed over in the mainstream media. And the way to reach mass audiences was not through print magazines; it was on television.

In 1986, I decided to create, coproduce, and host a feminist talk show I called
MH: On the Issues
. It was a series of ten thirty-minute cable shows syndicated to eleven million homes: the first feminist show on television.

I interviewed Bella Abzug, Bill Baird, Carol Bellamy, Susie Orbach, Elizabeth Holtzman, and NOW NY chapter president Jennifer Brown. I celebrated my fortieth birthday on the air with Deborah Perry—a self-described feminist witch—who blew bubbles for me and gave me two presents: a small candle from Gloria Steinem's fiftieth birthday cake, and a large multicolored candle in the shape of a vagina.

Betty Friedan, on the other hand, was known as a kind of sacred monster—some called her the “mother of the women's movement”—and she had a reputation for being difficult at best. On the date of her guest appearance the cab that we sent for her was late, prompting her to call from her apartment screaming that we were all a bunch of idiots and she had no time for this. She finally capitulated and we
all waited with baited breath for her to arrive at the studio. One young assistant, so very excited to meet her, held a dogeared copy of
The Feminine Mystique
on her lap ready to be autographed.

In walked Betty muttering and bellowing, “Let's get this fucking thing started—I can only stay for twenty minutes.” She rushed past that young girl without even noticing her.

Throughout the interview Betty was in a state of high anxiety, glancing at her watch and fidgeting, until finally she interrupted a question I was posing to say, “I'm very sorry, but I must leave now.” She got up from her chair, dragging her microphone behind her, and stormed out of the studio while the cameras kept rolling. I continued with the show, having another ten minutes to fill.

 

FOR SOME WOMEN feminism is a way of seeing the world more clearly, of taking off the glasses that society, culture, and geography have placed upon you. The best of them had an “aristocracy of the soul” because of their work and their vision for women's freedom, and even though this did not always translate into altered behavior, I made allowances for them most of the time, as I am sure they felt they made allowances for me. I was attracted to thinkers who were able to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to leap the distance from radical writings to the soapbox to the streets. We were feminists engaged in a just war sharing the privilege of a critical consciousness, and we knew we had to support each other's missions and lend one another our strengths.

This truth bolstered my political and professional life, but the knowledge that I could lose my business for Medicaid fraud, which I hid from almost all of my friends, never ceased to haunt me during those years. My possible indictment still felt like an impending death sentence, a terrible secret I had
to keep. I remember sitting in my office and looking at my political posters, saying a kind of private goodbye.

Unlike Marty, who could find release and forgetting in sleep, I was tortured with anxiety at night. I realized that just as he had his defense mechanisms, I would have to develop mine.

In the midst of my crisis I was fortunate to meet Mahin Hassibi, a well-known child psychiatrist. I was immediately attracted to this small black-haired Iranian woman. I soon found she was the most well read of any person I had ever known and the only one who had ever completed Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
, Gibbon's
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and all of Proust, both in French and English.

Hers was a political experience of a very different kind: she had participated in the Iranian Revolution, as an activist in the streets and as a doctor treating other activists who had their heads broken open by the Shah's goons. A close friend of hers had set herself on fire in Tehran to protest women's status in that country.
¹⁹
The power struggle between the Americans and the Iranians over the years meant that she, too, was a pariah of sorts in American society. She was harassed in Metropolitan Hospital, where she was the assistant director of child psychiatry, by being called “Khomeini's daughter.” Over time she became a true soul mate, a woman who was always there to talk and help center me. We would have hours of philosophical conversations that gave me a kind of pleasure that nothing else could and distracted me from my troubles at the clinic.

After seven years, many thousands of dollars, and much psychological trauma, a legal way out was found to finally satisfy the prosecutors without having Choices ruined or myself indicted. Because the infraction had happened while Choices was still operating as Flushing Women's Medical Center, Dr.
Leo Orris (who had been part owner then) agreed to help us plead guilty in this case under our old name. And since Flushing Women's Medical Center no longer technically existed as such, Choices as it now existed was saved from destruction.

The end of my nightmare was reported in an article published on the front page of the
New York Law Journal
on December 28, 1988: “A Queens abortion clinic pleaded guilty yesterday in state court to illegally overcharging 400 Medicaid patients and paid $50,000 in restitution.” A relatively small price to pay in the end; the hardest part was to accept this verdict as the last word. Clearly, it wasn't.

I was sued again soon afterward by a pro-life doctor, Cordelia Beverly, in what turned out to be a major commercial free speech case. Choices had been publishing and freely distributing calendars celebrating reproductive rights since 1980. In 1988 we illustrated the month of June with a picture taken at the Third Regional Conference of Women in Medicine that depicted Dr. Cordelia Beverly posing with Dr. Lena Edwards, an award-winning physician, both in attendance there. The inclusion of Dr. Beverly's picture was meant to be an honor, but she felt we had put her life at risk by publicly associating her with an abortion clinic. She held that Choices had illegally used her image as an advertisement.

By vote of 3–1 the court affirmed partial summary judgment on Dr. Beverly's claim under Civil Rights Law 51. The case, which centered on whether my giving out free calendars nationally was advertising or education, made the front page of the
Law Journal
. After that I was very careful to get appropriate consent before I printed anyone's photos, especially if it pertained to Choices.

 

DEALING WITH THESE ANXIETIES and obstacles made me more sensitive than ever to the discrimination and pain that
marked so many of my patient's lives. The little girls and adolescents with wide eyes expressing what could not be spoken still got to me the most. I wanted to protect them, to give them their own defense mechanisms that would enable them to move through these difficult years without becoming casualties of the sexual culture. Parental consent was a hot topic at the time, thanks to Reagan's attempt to pass a law that would require federally funded programs to notify parents when their children requested services. When I first opened my clinic I supported parental consent, thinking it best to have the support of a committed adult when making such a hard decision. But the 1988 case of Becky Bell, an Indiana teenager who died as a result of an illegal abortion she had sought rather than tell her parents she was pregnant, showed what could go wrong if minors were prohibited from making their own choices.

When I was asked to give the first family planning and birth control talk (called “What Will Mama Say?”) to the Girl Scouts of the USA chapter in New York City, I was excited to have the opportunity to reach girls before they were faced with such a life-altering choice. I was amazed at how ignorant the girls were about their bodies and sex. They were so open and trusting, sharing with us their questions and fears. One girl revealed that she'd been sexually abused by a relative. Another asked the question, “Can you get pregnant from kissing?” Later the PCC sponsored a well-advertised Teen Speakout on Choice, at which I hosted a panel of experts who could answer the teenagers' questions about their reproductive rights: whether they wanted to have an abortion, keep the baby, or give it up for adoption.

The Creedmoor Mental Health Players, a group of talented staff from Creedmoor State Hospital, heard about my program with the Girl Scouts and asked if I'd be interested in
collaborating with them to hold a workshop series at Rikers Island Prison. As we talked with the male and female inmates on subjects like battered women, rape, alcoholism, depression, and sexual issues, I found that I had a connection to the prisoners. I was interested in women who were in prison for crossing boundaries, women who killed their abusers, or women behind bars for political reasons.

Meanwhile I noticed another underserved, shamed group that was being overlooked and discriminated against when it came to health care. Lesbians tended to visit their gynecologists much less frequently then heterosexual women, unwilling because of the medical assumption of heterosexuality. They were given medical forms questioning their use of birth control, their “marital status,” and so on; there was absolutely no conception of the need for sex education and health care directed toward women without men.

I made sure that my staff knew how to be sensitive to the needs of lesbians so that Choices would be a safe space for them to seek care. But the obstacles homosexuals faced extended far beyond the boundaries of the clinic, so when I heard about the story of Karen Thompson, a lesbian whose lover, Sharon Kowalski, was in a car accident that left her a quadriplegic and unable to speak, I knew I had to help publicize it. Because Sharon's parents refused to recognize the fact that their daughter was a lesbian, they barred Karen from visiting Sharon's treatment facility. Karen was traveling the country, trying to set up interviews and give speeches to enlist support for what had become her crusade. She was fighting for the rights of all LGBT individuals. When I broke her story in
On the Issues
in 1987, Karen hadn't seen her partner in two years.

Gay men were dealing with a new health crisis around this time. I had covered AIDS in the first issue of my magazine in
1982 when it was an inchoate threat; by 1986, it was exploding like the abortion issue had ten years before. And like abortion, it was controversial, dangerous, and profound. AIDS had become the gay man's unwanted pregnancy. For the first time since penicillin eliminated the fear of venereal disease, men were facing potentially life-threatening results from sex, an issue with which women had always had to grapple.