Get Used to It: Ep. 73, "Voices of Our Lives: Ivy Bottini"

oh [Applause] [Music] hi i'm sheila kuhl welcome to get used to it today we have a special treat for you one in our series that we call voices of our lives in which we just have a conversation with one of our community who has been very special to us either for a short time or a long time as is the case with our guest today ivy bittini has been a decades-long activist in women's issues early women's movement stuff and certainly lesbian and gay organizing and activist work she's the currently the co-chair of the city of west hollywood's lesbian and gay advisory board but that doesn't even begin to tell you uh what she's about welcome ivy hi happy to have you here i'm glad to be here well you're right at home too since here we are in the middle of west hollywood that's right where i live where you live what we'd like to do in this series is uh talk to people really just about their lives because uh may we might end up with 20 years of oral histories without actually meaning to if we do this show often enough that's a good idea yeah and i'm really happy to uh have you tell your story uh to uh those watching in the country um let's start from the very beginning where were you born i was born in a small town on long island um this town name is malvern and actually the um i i was told growing up that the property line i don't know how this could possibly be because i'm a real estate agent and that doesn't happen but that's a story i got that the property line went through the middle of the house and so i was actually born in lindbrook because that was the bedroom and then as i had a little bigger then my bedroom was in melbourne well i i claimed malvern because that's where i went to high school that's where i went you know all through school good thing you weren't old enough to vote yet or you'd have to make a real decision about uh whether to walk from room to room yeah to get a ballot right right right so you grew up in uh in new york on island island uh-huh grew up in long island uh lived there pretty much my whole life until years later when the women's movement and now began and then within a year or two i moved into new york city so what was your childhood like tell us a little about your folks and sort of what they did and what life was like my childhood for most part was happy when i was out of the house um i was very athletic and i was from the time i was little i was always doing some sport or another and um but my my my mom and dad were kind of short people as my height i'm five foot my mom came up to here when i was fully grown to my full five foot and my dad came out to here and i was the tall one in the family and my dad was a happy-go-lucky irishman kind of irish scotch who had a beautiful town of voice and could play the piano never had a lesson um he had had diphtheria when he was a child and so he was pretty deaf but he still could just sit and play and my mom came from a english kind of you know set i know that gesture my grandmother was just like that just like that and with great ideas of the way things should be and my dad never fit into the family and i was very aware of that as a child growing up and um he was he my dad was an incredible we we were really buds you know we'd go fishing and and he he would teach me you know go outside and we'd have catch and great guy and um my mom was uh basically gentle soul until my dad drank too much and then he would come home having had too much to drink and and she would stand over him and yell at him for three or four or five hours and finally at the end of that time my dad would just lose it and then i'd kind of have to step in between them and kind of stop what what sometimes got to be a very ugly were you the only kid big one were you the only kid i was the only kid i had a brother who died five years before i was born when he was an infant well that can sometimes well always affect a family as well it's interesting being born into a family where something's already happened and you don't know as you're growing up until you're old enough to kind of you know know and understand but it sort of colors everything that we do yeah so you went did you go all through high school in long island i did i did i went through the malvern school system and uh it was great school system i i loved it um i had two majors going through you know how you pick a track uh-huh and i i i picked art and so i was on the artist track and then i was on the business track and i studied all the usual business stuff you know shorthand typing didn't like math much still don't like thank goodness thank you for calculators and um but but i like i like the art the art classes very much and did you have did you have any contact with any information or sensibility or anything about gay or lesbian stuff we're talking maybe what now the 50s how old am i now how old are you now in high school um okay in high school i graduated from high school in 1944 44. and in high school no nothing nothing um there there was a a young there was a a boy and in my one of my business classes and his name was charlie and now looking back i knew he was very effeminate but i didn't have any words but i just knew he was different very gentle like to hang out with me and my friend marilyn and as as we were growing you know from about the ninth grade on up we would practice kissing him she and i would practice kissing charlie and um and we would actually have a stopwatch okay go and we just plant our lips you know and see who could just outlast anybody else i think the record was 17 minutes i mean it was and charlie eventually killed himself and when he had graduated and he got teased a lot because he he was he didn't play sports or anything and and i lost track of him but i heard that he killed himself after he was out of uh high school about three or four years wow um so did you go on to college or study i did somewhere i did i really wanted to be a gym teacher now why was that i have no idea i have no idea i think it's in the jeans um i wanted to be a gym teacher and i had um applied to pen penn state on the east coast and i was really looking forward to going and then my mom just decided that she was beside herself thinking that i was going to leave and you know not understanding back then now i understand i was like the safeguard between my mom and dad and so i said okay and my my art teacher in high school was always telling me i should go go to art school go to go study and so i said all right so i applied to pratt institute and it's a highly renowned art school in brooklyn and they have um fine art graphic art advertising architecture library science fashion i mean it's fabulous school and it's in a big old brown several brown stones and a real rickety elevator that should get in you know the open cage this is great it was five stories high it's fabulous and so um i applied there and you had to take a test it was i think one of the hardest things i ever had to do and i mean it was tough um and they accepted me and so i went i commuted back and forth and what kind of art did you what kind of art interested you at that time did you have a a way an expression already well painting or drawing or well when i was um going through school you know when you had to do your book reports i would always draw my book reports i i never i mean i'd write you know six sentences but then i'd have all sorts of illustrations you know like silver chief the lone wolf you know and i'd have all these drawings you know and three or four pages of drawings and and the teachers accepted them that was my book report i didn't really have a style at that point and when i went when i went there i was studying advertising design and um and then i was painting on on my own you know and so i graduated as a graphic designer specializing in advertising so when did you start having either a fear or a consciousness about thinking that you might be a lesbian or even any language for that well the first woman that i can actually remember wanting to be with all the time was when i was nine and my mom and dad took me away on our one and only vacation i ever remembered having with them or that they had and we went up to the catskills and we were in this old hotel that you know the big houses they had in the catskills and there was a woman there and she was an art teacher and so we we you know i saw her painting one day and and and i went out and i was talking to her and she was showing me she was painting watercolors and she was showing me how to you know hold brushes and how to mix colors and for two weeks i followed her around and it i mean she was just and there was a feeling and you know it was like it was more than just a buddy but i didn't know what it was and when and then she left i just few days before we were going i was devastated so that was my earliest recollection but no i had no words and i didn't i didn't have any words all through school um you know i had the usual you know crushes on gym teachers you know i grew up during world war ii and um my one gym teacher mrs buck she joined the coast guard and i adored mrs buck she was married to the coach and um it sounds like you know like the hoosier movie or something well you know i mean i grew up in the 40s too and it's it is like that it's sort of like you know life was simple we didn't think about this stuff we had these feelings nobody helped us out we weren't anguished about it because it simply wasn't even a possibility right and indeed did you ended up getting married didn't you i did i did don't talk about that well first i have to tell you that when i was in seventh grade i met the teacher who really saved me she took me under her wing and i adored her and really helped raise me all through the rest of school even after i got married we we kept in touch and we would have christmas together and she saw my kids when they were born and wonderful woman i mean don't ever say anything bad about teachers to me because no i wouldn't anyway it is and i mean she really saved me well um when i was 17 it sounds like that that song when i was 17. um i'm sure janice ian will be very grateful that we gave her that plug um when i was 17 and uh just starting in my first year in college at pratt my dad was a cab driver and had been a cab driver for a great number of years and drove for the local cab company on long island and um he and i were going to go fishing the next morning and he was going to come right from work because he he worked pretty much four or five o'clock in the morning and he was gonna come pick me up we were going fishing and i was asleep and suddenly i was awoken with uh i could hear a knock and then i i you could hear somebody talking and i thought oh dad must be home maybe mom's up or something and the next thing i know uh my aunt we we were with my aunt at the time because we had been evicted i mean we were evicted a lot because we didn't have a lot of money we were pretty poor and um so this was in one in between one of those being evicted now you got to find another place to live and so my i heard my aunt come upstairs and i could hear my mom start to cry and i didn't know what was happening and eventually they came in and told me my dad had been killed and he was and he was driving his cab and he was on sunrise highway and a woman came out of a bar very late and came right down at him and as it turned out the woman was the mother of a girl that she and i went all through school together so it was doubly painful on all i mean there were so many levels to that tragedy sure and uh so so anyway uh we didn't have any money and i thought i was going to have to stop college and i didn't even i didn't even tell pratt i just went about my business and i figured you know i had paid for that semester at the end of that semester i would just not come back and somehow i don't know i to this day i don't know how but i got called into the dean's office thinking i had done something sure and his name was mr long year and he uh he told me that they were giving me a full scholarship for the the whole all the rest of the years and uh which i was incredibly grateful for and very very surprised so i i finished college and i used to you asked me about getting married and i so i stayed living with my aunt that was seven from 17 to about 26 i lived with my aunt and i used to commute and so i would come out of the house and i'd walk across this empty lot across the street and i'd go to the main road and then i'd walk to long island railroad and that i did that for you know a couple years and then um i was starting to be very aware that i was very attracted to girls you know although i still didn't know what that meant i figured it was just me the only one in the whole world and so don't say anything to anybody so um there was a um okay so i went to school that's right and i finished school and i get my first job in the city and it's with an advertising company that i designed bus cards that you put in buses uh-huh you know and there was a whole bunch of whole bunch of real neat women there and um one i really got oh my just so charming so she was going out with somebody and um she said well i'm sorry you know you don't have a date because we could double date and i thought i'm getting the date so i there was there was i knew there was this boy a young man across the street kind of catty cornered from where i lived now for about ten years and so i saw him one day and i asked him if he would double date with me and we could go with my friend so he said yeah and that ended up being the man i married and it turned out that he to this day has very bad asthma and he was in bed for two years and he watched me walk through the lot every morning it he told me later it was sort of the way he started his day you know he would watch me walk through and he said i really wanted to get to know you but i didn't know what to do you know so it was um so i literally married the boy across the street and how long were you married 16 years and kids i have two daughters where are they now um the old one who was 47 sheila oh my god no no we don't have children who are 47. i know that i keep it it's not possible this happened you know she lives in um in manhattan on the east side downtown and my younger daughter who's 43 lives in greenwich connecticut and she has my grandson who's 17 and she's married to her wonderful second husband uh by the name of charlie i have a lot seem to have a lot of charlie's in your life i was just thinking and how was your marriage did you um i mean i know people are interested to to understand how it is that so many women in our generation probably all of us in our generation have been serially heterosexual and and gay and lesbian if you know what i mean because we're i mean that was really the choice and and i don't know that a lot of us were really unhappy i wasn't unhappy no let me just the the week i was supposed to get married now eddie and i went out for about a year maybe a little longer and he he is a very decent loving man very gentle and so now the week i'm supposed to get married that saturday and all of a sudden i wake up on monday and i can't swallow i can chew a lot but it won't go down you know and so by midweek i called my mom's twin sister who was always i was always very close to she was like my favorite and um she said all right i'll come over so okay so she comes over but it's still not doing it but i can eat a little bit so i call my doctor my regular doctor that had from the time i was little i went to this man and i explained i said i can chew but i you know it's like my throat is locked up and he said well what's going on and i said oh i've got to stay i'm getting married so he said well i don't think it's physical so why don't you go talk there's a psychiatrist friend of mine and why don't you go talk to him now nobody back there no of course not ever said the word psychiatrist therapist i mean i don't even think the word therapist was around it was psychiatrists and i could feel myself going oh my god and so he said here's the phone number and call him out and so i so i did and made an appointment with him and and i thought well i can't let anybody know i'm going to a psychiatrist and so i didn't take my car because i was so active in sports that i had a little i had a little 36 ford 1936 ford and i was so active in sports i just assumed everybody in long island would see my car and know exactly where i was going that's how crazy you of course you know oh my god so i took the bus and i hate the bus to this i won't even ride the bus today so i take the bus and it's about a 35 minute ride to freeport from where i live so i go over there and i go into the building go up and i go into this waiting room and the door opens and a voice has come in and so i walk into this room now sheila this is all i remember of i'm assuming a session i have no idea i walk in and here is this man sitting behind this big psychiatrist mahogany desk you know as when you think of it's like you know a huge desk and it felt like he was like 18 miles away from me and i walked in i stood in front of his desk he didn't he didn't even say sit down i stood there and he said why are you here and i didn't expect that question and so out of my mouth fell i think i love women it was like i think i love women and then i went where did that come from because i had never even formulated those words in my mind i just went boom and so he as he said to me and i and this is all i remember the session he said to me have you ever kissed a woman and i and i and i was shocked i said no i had never even thought of it i said no and he said you are not homosexual just like that and he said he said go get married and cleave he actually used the word cleave even then i knew that was a word that was weird and he said and cleave unto your married friends because i had all these sports friends all these basketball buddies right the occasional one the occasion of sin yes yes uh-huh oh and he even said and give up your basketball team which i was coaching you know give up all of that and cleave until you're married friends that's all i remember from the session and so you know i think i genuflected and kissed his ring i'm not sure but i left and and i got married that saturday and i did exactly what he told me gave up all my sports and i cleaved cleveland's clothed to all my married friends and fell in love with them so nothing changed you know i just shifted locations where the women i fell in love with my friend esther siegel you know and a woman at my job when i was working for newsday so you know i had a woman i was in love with it at my job and in my social circle so it was very nice but they never knew it you know but that was my experience of trying to deal with what i was feeling that was the limited experience i had never to be spoken of again until many many years later so you're working at newsday did you go to work at news day have two little girls yep um takes us into the 60s i think sort of a dangerous time for all of us time of incredible change in transition and was that true in your life as well it was amazing up until 1966 um i got married in 53 my my first child was born i got married in 52 my first child was born in 53 my second child was born in 56 and then i had a third pregnancy that i lost in 59 and so i was i worked here and i worked there but mainly i was working at newsday and then in 1966 the the reporter that i had this mad bad crush on she uh we were going to have lunch and i normally didn't you know i went in kind of late and then i'd work into the evening and so she called me we were going to have lunch about 12 30 or something and she called me when i got into the art department and she said can't have lunch i have to go interview some i don't know some i don't know they're doing some new women's group i have to go to new york and she was disgusted because she didn't want to drive into new york because this was on in garden city long island oh it was like 35 40 miles sure you know so i said all right so she leaves and about 6 30 the phone rings and i'm in the art department and and she goes hi i'm back i said oh good she said uh we can have dinner if you want but get in here right now so i said okay so i hung up and go running into the city room and and i go over and she's typing madly and she thrushed this paper at me you know kind of like here sign this you know and i said what is it she said don't even ask me now just sign it and i and i did i mean i would have given him my born you want me my mom yeah you can have that house too i just adored her so i signed this paper and i went back back to work and later she called and said okay let's have dennis so i said to what did i sign she said you joined the national organization for women it it was a membership form she said that's what i went in to interview it's a woman by the name of betty friedan she wrote this book feminine feminine mystique and they announced its formation of of this new organization and you just joined it i said fabulous and i thought what you know because i hadn't read the book and as you know as it turned out that moment that i signed that paper was about to change my my life in just about the most the most ev every facet of my life changed so what was now at that point now was a national organization didn't have any chapters um it now was this um organization based on feminism who knew you know i went home looked it up he didn't even find it anywhere and it betty fedan and 11 other i think women formed the organization as a result of president kenny's kennedy's uh commission on the status of women where for dan and these other women served along with the guys and at the end i think they met for about three years and at the end the guys basically said to them okay thanks a lot girls you were great now we'll we'll we'll get the report done and we'll let you see a copy of it and that so infuriated them that the story goes they went out to some club some cafe or something in washington dc that day all sat around the table and decided after martinis and whatever else betty fedan incidentally loves to drink vodka on the rocks with pepper black pepper it's quite good so they sat there and doodled acronyms and when they got to now they thought and they made national organization for women and it's not of women a lot of people make that mistake but it's right for women so you joined this chapter which didn't exist yet so you were one of the refounding members of the first chapter of now so that was in new york that happened to be in new york city uh-huh right i don't know whether there would be any connection to sort of sexual orientation stuff but i i think there was probably as i understand your story kind of over the evolution of your feminism also an evolution of your own kind of understanding that you were a lesbian well there i mean even as i was getting involved i i suddenly was starting to have an awareness that there were going to be a lot of women there you know and on some level i understood that that was going to be very important for me and i wish i could say i joined now out of some deep seated political conviction but it was really at lust for this woman when she said sign the paper i signed it um except that can't be the reason why you became the chapter president come on ivy i quickly understood exactly what what it was about as we were all i mean it was one of those great adventures because there were no there were no no maps you know it had never been done before um we didn't know where we were going every day was like creating new footprints in the sand where there had never been any and i became the i think the second to third president official president um and i was kind of brought in to to there was a split in the chapter it was a group of people who wanted to run it by consensus and then there was group people who wanted to run it you know like a cooperation type thing and um i was brought in to bring them all together and and that's kind of been my role role in the community too you know it's sort of well i was interested when you were talking about consciousness raising because i remember that i mean i hardly knew anybody in the 70s that wasn't in a consciousness-raising group um but there was no such thing when you first started in no in 1968 uh when when i became president i had observed and had gone to one to two times not a lot um there were a group of lesbians in the village and they were doing what they called lesbian consciousness raising and so i went a couple of times and i i was in the first the second group can't remember but there's since there's been i think they're up to number 289 or something you know they just kept spinning off groups and i was so impressed on how they were looking at the lesbian issue or or lesbianism that i i thought what a great um organizing tool this would be and now so i went back to my chapter and and created this whole series of eight topics um about feminism with the underpinning being feminism and introduced at first i had my board go through it and we had a great time and um you know warren farrell warren farrell started the men's movement but he was in my chapter and he was coming when when finally the board loved it and we realized that we'd be fine with going to work and we started to you know have other other membership would be going through it warren farrell was one of the ones and i just saw him on television yesterday morning he's written several books about the men's movement and um and and it because now always had men it's you know four women so there were always men members and but consciousness raising when with the topics i mean there were topics like um rape the tool of the oppressor um do women like other women really like other women i know what's the conditioning can i really like you as a person or what's the competition you know you know all the feminist stuff and you know things like um is feminism a lesbian issue now that's an interesting question because there was a flip side of that that really got to be kind of a hot topic for now as i remember in terms of the question of whether lesbianism is a feminist issue right and it got to be pretty um divided on that were you part of that oh god yes oh big part yeah a very very painful part of my life the initial impetus of now um and feminism was really on equality as far as work uh compensation you know all the kind of um economic issues but it was not organized to go below that that was not where they began um and and consciousness raising took you below took you underneath it took you down you know below the belly of this beast of sexism and patriarchy and and and so suddenly uh consciousness little cr we were looking at at issues underneath all the the the icing kind of stuff that you had as women we had to deal with and um that became the argument uh is this a civil rights organization or is it an equal rights organization began as an equal rights organization it's a civil rights organization you can't have equal rights unless you get to the civil rights so that was the split and um and when my last year as president i did a uh panel i would i we would have like panels like once a month or once every couple months and and and i did the panel on is lesbianism a feminist issue um and there were 15 14 people on 14 women on the panel i was the moderator the only women that were out lesbians and that i knew were lesbians except for myself and i hadn't really come out out out was barbara love and sydney abbott who wrote sappho is a right on woman everybody else was was was heterosexual for all intents and purposes a whole bunch of them now orange but at that time they were and um it was fascinating um the place was packed there were nearly 400 people that came to that panel normally it had 50 or 60 in the audience because we advertised in the times every month we would advertise in the times and that that room was was packed and at the end the feedback that came back over the next week or two everybody in the audience thought everybody on the panel was a lesbian because it was like they said well well they must be because why would they be talking about it sure of course you know i mean you gotta but it cost a larger brouhaha than that didn't it because i think it cost you your presidency yeah it did um betty fedan um we were fairly close we lived in the same brownstone complex as did the reporter from newsday the three of us and um so i i saw her a fair amount of time and we would travel together certain places you know that we would go and i could see her getting more and more agitated as i was pulling the lesbian issue out of the closet and which which i found out was making some of the closeted gay women they didn't identify as lesbians because that was too political they were a gay woman they became really terrified i remember there was two women especially that i hung out with you know and we'd go dancing together and we you know we'd have dinners and they were the ones that really started the first purge because now it's had several purges of involving lesbians right and so the first purge they really agitated you know look what she's doing you know she was going to have all these lesbians because they didn't want to be pulled out of the closet which i never would have done i mean i could have at any time for like a year and a half never would have done that so um she got for dan was a member of the chapter and a whole bunch of the national people who were living in new york were members of my chapter and they started this whole rumor campaign about a month and a half or two before the elections where i was running again and about a month before the election i got a phone call from barbara love and sydney abbott and barbara was on the phone and she said ivy they're out to get you and they're stacking the meeting um there's a rumor mill going saying awful things about you you know like i was seducing this one and that i should have only been so lucky it wasn't true and but they had all these rooms going and and some of the women who were um to this day i'm not sure of their sexuality they're still in there and i'm still not sure of their sexuality and they were panicking and so one one especially i mean she was just oh so hateful with the rumors she got going and she said and barbara love said we've got about 30 40 lesbians and we want to come down next meeting we're going to join and so we'll be able to vote and and i said no you can't do that that's not fair you're not interested in now and i have faith in the membership you know famous last words famous there were two two things in my life i said you know that was one of them where i thought oh my god anyway uh i was totally wrong the night of the election there were almost 400 women in the room brand new members had never seen 98 of them and many of them were paper members you know never came to a meeting you know and and uh and i was they they put this because nobody was running against me except they put this one woman up to run against me who had been in the chapter three months had never even seen her and she ended up winning and i never saw her again i mean i think she came to two meetings you know i went home sat in the chair for a month after work every day going what happened you know you were really depressed huh oh i was i was so wounded well i mean i can i understand but it's you know it's happened to so many people charlotte bunch tells this story and uh a number of women who really had put their hearts into the early feminist movement because it appealed to so many of us it was like it was like hearing women's music for the first time or you know just thinking oh my gosh there's something here that finally speaks to me and makes sense and then to put so much sweat blood and tears into it and have it turn on you on the basis of this issue which is one of the most central issues really about feminism which really goes to issues of gender and you know well i think it's the bottom line of feminism um i mean when when the world cannot control you any other way they'll say what are you a lesbian and that sends most women scurrying right back where they came from back into the house taking care of the kids so don't try for the promotion or and i honestly believe it's the bottom line well it is interesting because your work ended up then being primarily in the lesbian gay bisexual transgender movement right um not i think because it was the only thing left to you but because i think it it appealed to you but um because i know you came to california um and you were involved early on came out here in seven years in the gay and lesbian center here in l.a i think yeah and and it was interesting to me because we sort of had no home at all at that point in the women's movement they were you know lifting their skirts away from the lesbians certainly didn't want to be identified with lesbians the gay movement was a gay movement pretty much right it was the guys so what was it like at the center pretty much the same i got a job as the women's director of the women's department and we had two rooms and that was it i mean we were invisible any you know in that building on on highland um that that was our turf but other than that it was very male we happened to have at the time susan cuna was acting as interim director which was good because it was another woman that had some some authority that i could go to if we had a problem but it was very it was very male very male very male valued so how did you get more women interested in the center i didn't i really didn't i mean i took my department out and we would put on programs you know for women's organizations but in the center um it felt initially like like swimming upstream against a real strong current and that was 76 70 late 75-76 and on the heels of that anita bryant was agitating in florida around gay men and trying to do initiatives against the gay gay male community um nothing about lesbians and i'm not even sure she knew there was a lesbian but i read a little like this much in the l.a times one column an inch deep something about anita bryant in florida is working trying to get an initiative level and i thought oh god it's coming here and um you know it's like some of those things you know there are things in life suddenly you know and and i thought now what can i do so i yeah i heard there was a meeting for something else over the house and the man's name was morris kite and so i showed up at that meeting and within a couple of weeks we started to talk about anita bryant and we formed the campaign um campaign for human rights no i'm sorry human rights coalition there is campaign for human rights human rights coalition and so for the next two years we organized the community and after one year john briggs senator john briggs look at your glorious capital it's a little more glorious now i have to say okay good good well he was just awful and he started to talk about an initiative called the briggs initiative and it would have gotten rid of all teachers all homosexual teachers or any teacher who supported homosexual rights or spoke out in defense of someone who was gay they would have been gone they on the spot they could be fired and so we started organizing grassroots and and then gail wilson um loved gail uh lesbian realtor and her her office is still there gail wilson realtors on san vicente and she she started to organize and suddenly there was a man by the name of david mixner and then peter scott and suddenly or there were all these names floating around me and finally gail said to me um why don't you come work for the campaign go talk to david mixner so i did and i was hired on as deputy director of the no one six campaign and i took a sabbatical leave from the center and when we won the briggs initiative you know by a handy margin um gail said to me don't go back to the center get your real estate license and come with me which i did so i never went back to the center huh i never went back to the male bastion at the time but it certainly didn't take you away from activism and i was i was interested in um you know it's it's interesting when you've had such a long experience especially with two fledgling movements and the kind of theoretical work and we it's only in hindsight that we really think as activists about the theories that engaged us or the theories of the movements that made us do what we did but it was interesting when you said there was this split in terms of sort of the philosophy in the early women's movement in now about whether it would be about civil rights or equal rights and a lot of people don't really know if there's a difference right i think it's one of the same yeah but you also have talked to me about this notion that you think there's a difference between the work you do in a movement and i can't remember quite how you put it between assimilation and affirmation and affirmation will you explain that um well right now there's there are um a lot of people who believe in assimilation that our movement it will be wonderful when there is no difference when we are all one society and and how nice it will be and it'll be nice for the culture that dominates now because that's exactly what will be there when we assimilate into it um that's not going to change that's dominant by huge percentage points that's the dominant culture i believe in affirmation of being who we are protecting and maintaining our communities our cultures we do we do have cultures we're incredibly creative people we are we get through the most horrendous things with such humor and grace and caring and style that will not be there it will be that over there and so i have i just go crazy when i hear people talk about how wonderful assimilation is going to be because we will be invisible again we assimilated into that society for years and years and hundreds of years that was us you know and it's taken so long for us to say that's not us this is us that we will be giving that up again but the people who are talking about assimilation do not have the experience or the history before they just see us standing up and saying here we are and they see that world out there railing against us and wouldn't it be nice if everybody made nice they don't understand the dangers and the loss the tremendous loss that we will suffer psychologically in a soul if we do that well i found with the women's movement or with women wanting to be equal but not wanting to be part of the women's movement which was sort of the second it wasn't even a second wave of feminism it was like the second thing that came after the second wave right um it was interesting to me that they couldn't hold on to this assimilation thing though for long one woman would want to get a job so we started wearing shoulder pads in our jackets like they did in the 40s when the women were had to go in and you know work like we've got shoulders and we want choice which is a very very important part of feminism but i always thought some part of it was that the non-pregnant worker was the only kind of worker who was valued that women were in danger of not being hired because everyone knew they could get pregnant and so we would say no no no we're not going to get pregnant look we've got this pill right and so don't worry about it i'm a non-pregnant worker with shoulders you won't even notice if i have kids because god forbid i'll ask for anything special i'll be just like them right and so they said okay we'll give you a chance and they hired one and then they hired two and it was their mistake when they hired three because when three of us got together we said that's a consciousness i'm lying you know i want child care i want maternity leave and we began to understand we cannot be the same because we're not the same no we're not and i think it's very much the same with gay and lesbian people whether it's even something so small as putting a picture of your lover on your desk because assimilation in a way is also dealing with difference whether you know it or not because it's a question as to whether assimilation into a straight culture would allow you to put a picture of your lover on your desk or not because so many people don't that's right and you know people probably are watching this and saying oh well it's great for me at work because people ask me about my partner and they asked me about my kids and i'm very happy but that's not assimilation that's affirmation that's what you're talking about exactly i have my picture on my desk i talk about a lover i talk about you know our family as a family that's right so but do you see uh any which way do you see us going in this i mean we've got a strong movement now we've made some progress well we've we've made some legislative progress um a little bit i i really worry about where we are going because i spent so many years organizing the grassroots and you can't have a movement without the grassroots sooner or later the people who have the power are talking to nobody there's nothing to back them up and the people with the real power they get that they get that this is a paper tiger we're dealing because there's nobody behind them and i'm very worried about the way i see our community moving because we're being um a sort corporatized we're being incorporated we're being institutionalized we have very large community organizations and we have corporates corporations that we are beholding to on so many levels that i get stuff in the mail and it says send me a check it doesn't say meet me on the picket line you know it doesn't say you know let's get together and have a rally in the park you know it doesn't say um we're going to have a town hall meeting all they ask for is come to a dinner put on you know a tux you know and then and the dikes you can put on a tux you know you know and go and do this which leaves a whole bunch of people out because they can't afford it and which does not get you involved in the issue it just gets you involved for the evening and so i worry about that because if anything really came down on us really bad we're going to be in in a state of shock because we don't have the troops i look upon grassroots people as troops well you know it's interesting young people who don't have money to write a check who are very radical in their own ways um seem to be a growing part of the movement and there's been organizing done there youthful youth organizers that's great organizing themselves and i see a real kind of ca kinship i guess between the young organizers and those of us who've been through a lot of this i don't know the people sort of in the middle i i think of myself as middle-aged so i don't know what they are but you know the people in the middle so much um i have a hunch though having now done political campaign i'm you know just my own and a few others the people will show up if you ask them and what you're saying i think is that we're not really building that we're not building it at all as a matter of fact it's frowned on it's not encouraged by the large uh because you might write a check out to a small organization right a small group of people although there are thousands of these now unfortunately of course the time goes by way too fast and there's only a couple of minutes left so let me ask you what i don't know i'm having such a good i know me too but i'm glad when it goes by too fast because that's the way it should be right do you have any advice for this community that you're worried about i guess you know be true to yourself you know don't don't have somebody say to you you know you shouldn't do that you shouldn't you shouldn't look like that you shouldn't dress that way you shouldn't go to that boy you should go to that bar you know just be true to yourself and i mean that's that's the best for the world if you would be true to yourself not just for us but for all people we we fall into all these traps about trying to be somebody we're not ivy thanks so much i really really loved having you on the show i loved it loved having you here too and uh listening in on our conversation with ivy bittini ivy spent her life as an activist and i think that it's probably a really good thing when you look back and say i actually made a difference and i could actually get used to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you