Читать книгу SCUM Manifesto - Valerie Solanas - Страница 2

Foreword

by Michelle Tea

“It’s hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM… It’s not even me… I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.”

I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto. I had retreated into the desert of Tucson, Arizona, in the midst of what I now refer to as my Radical Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown. I make light of it, but it was a dark and dangerous moment in my life. I had just learned that my stepfather had been spying on my sister and me through holes he’d stealthily carved in the walls of our home—the bathroom walls, the bedroom walls. Throughout my teenage years I’d lived with the suspicion that this was happening, a state of mind that had me tipping on a chasm of anxiety and denial I feared might end with me going totally insane. The thing was, my stepfather was cool. The dad he replaced had not been cool, he’d been a moody alcoholic who’d fight with my mom ’til she cried. When he came home from work adulterously late and fucked-up on booze or pills, we didn’t know what we’d be getting. This new dad was a cheerful alcoholic. He’d played drums in bands and had a pierced ear and a homemade tattoo on his finger. He was always nice to my mom, and to the rest of us. He took delight in cooking extravagant family dinners—3-alarm chili washed down with pint glasses of lime rickeys, gutted limes scattered across the kitchen table filling the house with the sharply optimistic smell of summer. How could he be spying on us?

For years I lived with the understanding that there was something wrong with me. Something dark and perverse. To see such a nice man, a man who finally loved me and my mom the way a father-person should, a man who went to the courts to adopt me, who bar-brawled with my birth-father at the local Moose Club over his love for us, his family—to know all this and then think that he’s watching me? Sexually, I guess? What a creep. What a creep I was.

What a fishbowl my teenage bedroom was. I loved to be inside it, reading books and magazines, listening to records, sneaking cigarettes out the window. Painting band names on the linoleum with nail polish, playing with make-up, lip-synching in the mirror. I’d be wrapping my blackened mouth around the voice of Siouxsie Sioux and would suddenly freeze: What if he was watching me right now? My room suddenly turned eerie, spooky. I was a girl in a horror movie. There was a terrible stillness, I felt like I’d been caught. To break the spell I’d do something bizarre, or lewd—grab my crotch, squeeze my breasts, squish my face into the mirror, my tongue lolling out. I’d look like a madwoman. I wouldn’t have done that, touched myself there, if I really thought my stepfather was watching. So I didn’t really believe it, and by extension it wasn’t happening.

Later, before sleep, I’d burrow under my neon-striped comforter to touch myself. I tried to make my face look really, really still in case he was watching. I didn’t want him to know what I was doing. I tried to put my face under the covers, but felt smothered. I popped my face back out into the cool air. He couldn’t be watching. He couldn’t be watching because if he was then I couldn’t masturbate and I really wanted to masturbate. What a creep. What a creep I was.

This was a long-term, low-grade crazy, a steady hum I could live with. When I found it all to be true—that there were holes in the bathroom door that fit perfectly with a hole in the jamb, creating a tunnel that aimed your eye right at the toilet, where I would sit and pee, or poop, or smoke a stolen cigarette, or masturbate. That there were holes carved into my bedroom wall, holes a person could access by walking into the back hallway, nudging over stray piece of paneling, pulling the electrical tape (dry and curled from being pulled so many times), and look through the hole in that wall right into the hole in my own. When I looked through that hole myself and saw it all—my bed, my posters on the wall, my clothes strewn onto the linoleum, the mirror I kneeled before, lip-synching. When it all came down I got a new, sharper crazy. I couldn’t hide it like I’d hidden the schizoid feelings of being watched and being creepy. I was filled with an electric hurt, a frenzied rage. I was sick, sickened.

My mother rushed to his side, to protect him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, we had spent the past three or four years fighting weekly if not daily, about the way I looked, my white face makeup and dyed-black hair, my torn clothes. People would beat me up for looking the way I did, men and boys. I got in fist-fights or they just threw things at me from car windows, they just spit at me in the street, they just called me a freak and a slut as they sped by in their cars. That was how it went outside. Inside, it was a war with my mother, who thought I’d brought it on myself. I didn’t have to look that way. And then I went queer, and that was a problem. And then the insanity I’d been staving off, I think my dad is watching me, erupted into reality and I sort of lost my mind.

Having to leave my house, I moved in with my girlfriend, a prostitute. Needing more than the minimum wage I was making at a Greek deli, I became one too. Notice I didn’t say I “got work as a prostitute,” I “found a job as a prostitute,” or “was hired to do prostitution.” Prostitute is not a job, it’s something a woman becomes. My girlfriend and I would keep the phone numbers of the men we saw and crank call them after. We’d tell their wives. Make fun of what they’d wanted, make sure they understood we had not enjoyed it. Ask them to please stop calling prostitutes. I stole things from their homes, little things: a candle, a photograph, a toothbrush. I wanted them to feel unsafe, to become vulnerable. I felt so unsafe—before the start of every call I went on, I gathered in my mind my exit plan, what I would do if something went wrong. Would I know if a man planned to kill me? I feared my intuition was destroyed from all those years of doubting what I’d known and turning it back on myself. I scanned penises for anything that looked unhealthy, trying to keep myself safe in that way, too. None of these men would ever know anything about a life like this, a girl’s life.

It was clear to me now that men could do anything they wanted. A man could move into a family and secretly get off on the daughters for years and when the truth came out, nothing really happened. He would have to deal with the shame of being caught, but he kept the house, and the daughters had to flee. He kept the wife the daughters would never again be able to trust as a mother. He came into the family like an invasive parasite, killed it, and inhabited its dead body.

I ran away to Tucson. No reason, it was just where my girlfriend wanted to go and she was all I had now. She was my housing and she shared my rage. In Tucson I worked as a prostitute and read books, feminist books. I read The Courage to Heal, the sexual-abuse survivor’s bible. I read Mary Daly, and learned about the murdered witches, about widowed Indian women forced to fling themselves on the funereal pyre. I was learning about the global history of male violence against women and how all social systems accommodated it, from the government to my family. I started seeing so much it hurt. I started thinking that if I pushed my brain a little harder I could see into a person’s mind. It scared me too much to do it but I knew that I could.

I read Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy and the concept of killing men as a feminist action was introduced to me. A lighter read, Lesbian Land enchanted me with the reality that I could live in a world without men, that other women before me had begun to create these places, and that I could perhaps run to them. I visited one outside Tucson. The woman who gave us a tour was straight and brought her male lover in at night, which was okay with everyone. She slept on a mattress rigged up on a pallet and concrete blocks, right there in the middle of the desert. I saw a naked woman giving another naked woman a massage on a table set up in the shade of a mesquite tree. I met the land’s owner, a sixty-something-year-old woman high up in some scaffolding, building herself an octagonal house.

I thought I would move to that land someday. Meanwhile I lived in a rented abode downtown, close enough to the University to stage “Tit-Ins” on the lawn there, inciting women to take off their shirts to protest the laws that made women keep their shirts on, sexualizing their breasts, allowing them to have the freedom to be topless only in places like strip clubs, where men could profit and get off on them. My house was close enough to downtown that I could walk to the liquor store for mescal, pausing to rip the busty St. Paulie Girl posters off the wall and dump the Slushie I bought at 7-11 on the way over the porn rack. Before I left home, I’d stopped by my mom’s house and stuck Queer Nation stickers all over my step-dad’s porn mags. Especially over the women who looked like me with their punky hair and ripped fishnets.

My house was close enough to frat row, that line of adobes housing frat boys, that I’d been hollered at by them passing by and learned not to turn down that street. I thought about blowing one up. I was very serious. I thought it would be fairly easy and we could probably get away with it, and if we didn’t I was actually prepared to go to prison for my part in this war. Because that’s what it was: a war. Men got to do anything to women and women got to walk around scared and traumatized and angry. Men got to do anything, period. Men got to do everything. Something had to take them down. The only reason I didn’t blow up the frat house was that my girlfriend refused to do it with me. I didn’t want to do it alone. That would mean I was crazy. If I did it with others, I was part of a movement. Sisterhood is Powerful. I truly could have done this, could be sitting in jail right now. With an act of violence that one moment in my life—traumatized and desperate, unable to cope with what I’d experienced—could have become the rest of my life.

There’s no way for me to talk about Valerie Solanas without talking about this, the trauma I experienced as a female sensitive to misogyny in this world. Valerie suffered sexual abuse from her birth father, then didn’t get along with her step-father, was sent her to live with a grandfather, and then her grandfather beat her up. She ran away at 15 and was impregnated by a married man—I’ve no understanding the nature of that relationship, but it’s safe to presume it was at least statutory rape. Valerie’s kid was taken away and she lived on the streets from then on.

“The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit,” Valerie writes in the Manifesto. From where I sat, on my porch in Tucson, Arizona, drinking a glass of mescal and paging through, she got everything right on.

From the start, I understood the Manifesto to be totally for real and totally not. It was an ideal, a utopic vision too out-there to ever be realized, and its dense dark humor struck me as exactly correct. It was outlandish. I’d done die-ins with ACT-UP and Kiss-Ins with Queer Nation; I’d waved coat hangers at Christians trying to block clinic doors and I had a deep appreciation for the way humor was used as a device to hit the truth like a pinata, again and again, throughout the tome. To see the SCUM Manifesto’s humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It’s not. Valerie’s use of humor is not unlike any novelist’s use of fiction to hit at the truth. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie’s eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. The hilarity in the Manifesto strikes me as fighting fire with fire. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon. It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it’s painful.

Valerie did her work in the ’60s, when it was legal for men to rape their wives, when girls who bled to death from back-alley abortions “deserved it.” In 1969, a year after Valerie’s famed shooting of the artist Andy Warhol, feminists who rose to speak at the New Left’s Counter-Inaugural to the Nixon inauguration in Washington were greeted by audience cheers of “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down a dark alley!” And these were the liberal-thinking men.

I’ve realized that going totally fucking insane is a completely rational outcome for an intelligent woman in this society, and I think this idea becomes only more solid the farther back in history you go. Says the writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a supporter of Valerie during her dark days, “I look at someone like Dorothy Allison, who was a teenager when we started rabble-rousing, and how she testifies that it was woman’s liberation that saved her life. Here’s a person that was routinely raped by her stepfather for her entire childhood, and from the time she was about eight years old, lived in the most horrible conditions. She was the very kind of person who could have ended up like Valerie Solanas had women’s liberation not been there.”

I live in a large community of would-be Valeries—queer people, formerly or presently female, many of whom have survived the violence of the heterosexual families. Writers with sharp intellects and incredible talent whose stories are routinely rejected from the still male-dominated literary worlds, both mainstream and underground, independent and corporate. Author Red Jordan Arobateau, in a review of the eventual San Francisco production of Valerie’s contested play, “Up Your Ass,” writes, “The reason I’d like to get on my knees to give Valerie a blowjob is because I identify with her and know she needed more joy. So much of my own life was hell, being a butch dike (now Transman) typing manuscripts in a hotel room, lonely, unpublished, not a dime to my name, not a friend in sight, and finding johns a lot easier to get then the love of a woman.”

To be living so low yet so close to the largest artist of your time. To have caught his interest and been put in his films. All around you ideas are flying, becoming real. To be so near to power, to hand him your work, to know how he could help you, to hope that he would.

“Did you type this yourself? I’m so impressed. You should come type for us, Valerie.” This what Andy reportedly said as he received a copy of that play. That he never returned the work, the sole copy during a time before computers and Kinkos (forget about producing it), is history. The existence of “Up Your Ass” in Warhol’s archives at his namesake museum in Pittsburgh suggests the artist did indeed have the work the whole time. Why didn’t he just give it back to her? She probably wasn’t worth his time.

Genderqueer Valerie, a big dyke. On top of everything, she walked around in her newsie hat, her scruffy hair, baggy men’s clothes, cursing and smoking. It’s irresistible to think of Valerie today, in 2013, when templates for so many gender identities exist. Would she be a butch dyke? A genderqueer inbetweener, bashing the gender binary? Would she transition, after all that, to male? She certainly wouldn’t be the first trans man with some rabid man-hating in her past. Brilliantly minded, bold enough to present herself honestly (she took the Village Voice to task in 1977 for writing that she wasn’t a lesbian: “I consider the part where you said, “she’s not a lesbian” to be serious libel,” she said, during a time when writing about someone actually being a lesbian would be the grounds for a very profitable libel case. “The way it was worded gave the impression that I’m a heterosexual, you know?”), Valerie’s understanding of gender was limited by her place and time. The Manifesto’s fatal flaw is also the very thing it requires to exist—strict adherence to a binary gender system and its attendant biological determinism, all in spite of being routinely in the company of trans women such as Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling, who lived in the same SRO hotel as Valerie. Perhaps it is the influence of these women that inspired Valerie to allow for the survival of “faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive.” I read “faggots,” in this entry, to include queens and transgendered women, as there was scant consciousness about trans lives at the time, and “faggot” existed as a catch-all slur for anyone presenting as queer or genderqueer.

Again and again, as one reads the Manifesto, one asks herself, “What the hell is this?” It is so, so funny that it’s hard for me not to condemn anyone bothered by it as painfully lacking a sense of humor. Check this out: “SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence “I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd” then proceed to list all the ways in which he is. His reward for doing so will be the opportunity to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with the SCUM who will be present.” Hilarious and begging for a performance-art enactment, but SCUM is also a very un-funny critique of American culture, then and now, delivered it with the fearlessness of someone who has already been so thoroughly rejected by the system that she has nothing left to lose. Many of Valerie’s notions are excellent and plausible, such as “SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public” (clearly the vision of a broke New Yorker). The Manifesto is as much of a call for a class war as a gender apocalypse, with “eliminate the money system” coming in behind overthrowing the government and before destroying the male sex in its opening mission statement. Indeed, the hysteria at a woman threatening to kill men within a culture where men kill women regularly has been so great as to even now distract from the class rage inherent to the book. Is that why Valerie never found a home among her feminist peers? Although she worked and wrote alongside the tremendous second wave feminist revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, writes Alice Echols in her history Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, “Radical feminists in New York Radical Women knew next to nothing about Solanas until she shot and nearly killed pop artist Andy Warhol in June 1968.” Valerie had been to college, but every academic line she writes is followed by something completely potty-mouthed or shocking. It has less stylistically in common with feminist writings of the time and more in common with the absurdist manifestos of art movements, or with punk rock, which hadn’t even happened yet. According to filmmaker Mary Harron, who went on to memorialize Valerie with the wonderful film I Shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto is “deadpan, icily logical, elegantly comical: a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist.” Declares the Special Collections Library of Duke University, “Solanas is not generally considered to be a part of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Who will claim her?

Though she does employ the adjective “groovy” in reference to the ideal SCUM women, Valerie was certainly not a member of the moment’s male-dominated anti-establishment proto-hippie counter-culture. “Dropping out is not the answer, fucking-up is,” she wrote, calling bullshit on what looked like a culture of narcissistic male navel-gazing, but also she’s really not a joiner: “SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to achieve its end… SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil-disobedience basis.” SCUM is a Manifesto written by a criminal—a queer when queer was illegal, a prostitute, a woman who looked like a man, living by her wits, an artist.

In the end, it may be the criminals, the prostitutes, and the artists who claim her. In the 1990s when I was prostituting and writing my own Manifesto in a café, I was approached by a queer woman who looked like a man who wanted to bum a piece of paper off me. I vaguely knew this person—her name was Fiver and she was part of a San Francisco dyke street gang called The HAGS. She was sitting at a table with a few other Hags, all butch dykes and all, for the record, hot. Valerie would not have looked out of place among them.

“We’re making stencils,” she explained. “About Valerie Solanas. You know, she wrote the SCUM Manifesto? We’re going to tag them around the Tenderloin, she died in a hotel there.” That’s how I found out that Valerie had lived and died in my own city, from drug addiction and the poor health that comes with such an affliction, that comes with street prostitution, shitty housing, mental illness, and lack of community. I wanted to join The Hags in their Valerie crafting, but I was scared of them. They were a real gang and pulled crime and did harder drugs than I did then. They loved Valerie, and they lived and died like her. In a few years Fiver and another dyke would be killed by a batch of heroin tainted with flesh-eating bacteria. Another, Johanna, would see her mental illness flare up severely enough to keep her homeless until she died of cancer, struggling with her addiction right until the end. Another member of the gang got sober, transitioned to male, and saved his life.

This is who Valerie stood for, and these are the people who will not just remember her but cultivate a remembrance of her. This past April marked the 25th anniversary of her death, and a performance I had curated to explore her complicated legacy was canceled when an unexpected controversy grew large enough to give me concern about the safety of having such an event (plus sucked the fun out of it). Gay men accused me of giving voice to a person they likened to Hitler, Jim Jones, and Harvey Milk’s assassin, the cop Dan White (all men who I believe would have fallen first to Valerie’s sword). Trans women, understandably traumatized by the trans hatred in so much second-wave feminist rhetoric offered intense criticism on the internet. As time wore on, response to the event grew to a stressful clamor. The woman working the door feared for her safety, as did many of the performers—the ones who hadn’t already canceled. Possibly Valerie, loyal to no demographic but her constructed, imaginary SCUM Woman, would have appreciated the hoopla, but I was frankly too exhausted and bummed out to carry on, and pulled the plug on the event, which was meant to benefit the St. James Infirmary, a free clinic in Valerie’s old neighborhood that serves sex workers and trans people and could have, had it existed earlier, prevented Valerie’s death at age 52.

Instead of hosting the event, I spent the evening of the 25th anniversary of Valerie’s death at an artist’s talk by the photographer Catherine Opie, a butch dyke whose early work documented the sexual and gender outlaws of San Francisco. In another time she could have been Valerie, a disadvantaged genderqueer artist panhandling at the edges of the art world. Today she’s an art star, giving lectures at the Museum of Modern Art. It seemed the perfect start to a night that ended outside the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin, on the street where Valerie made her money. We drew a chalk circle on the sidewalk and stood around it with candles, each reading a piece from the Manifesto. All around us the drug-addled swayed, curious, then darted away, perhaps mistaking us for Christians or something. A woman exited the bar behind us and fell onto the ground, too drunk to walk. We posted Valerie’s picture on the hotel door, and someone handed out tiny women’s symbol earrings. We all put them on, all of us SCUM members whatever our gender, because as she said to the Village Voice in 1977, back in New York after her stint in jail and follow-up incarcerations in mental hospitals, SCUM is a state of mind. And to those of us who “think a certain way,” the SCUM Manifesto will always be a fascinating, confusing document: a product of a place and time that remains sadly relevant; a piece of political literature, pre-riot grrrl riot grrrl, pre-punk punk, prescient and perturbing and revelatory. For all of its enduring controversy, or perhaps because of it, this work will be with us for the ages, to be wrestled with and fought over and never quite figured out. Congratulations Valerie, you made a work that sticks. May you rest in peace.