Smith, Pam - interviewed by Barbara Esrig
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Interviewer | Today is December 14th, 2012. | 0:02 |
And I'm interviewing Pam Smith in Gainesville, Florida. | 0:07 | |
Hi Pam. | 0:11 | |
Pam | Hi. | 0:12 |
Interviewer | So I've known you for a long time. | 0:14 |
Pam | Years. | 0:16 |
Many years, probably 30. | 0:18 | |
Interviewer | 30 years. | 0:19 |
And I know that you've been an activist, | 0:21 | |
a lesbian feminist activist for a long time. | 0:23 | |
And I was hoping that you would tell | 0:27 | |
how you came to the lesbian Southern, | 0:31 | |
each part has its own little story, activism. | 0:39 | |
Pam | Well, I moved to Gainesville | 0:47 |
from southern California when I was in my early 20s. | 0:49 | |
I was married, and I came with my husband | 0:52 | |
for him to go to graduate school in psychology | 0:55 | |
at the University of Florida in 1968. | 0:59 | |
And we had been mostly hippies in California, | 1:04 | |
but he came to Florida because of the, | 1:12 | |
it had the only humanist psychology program | 1:17 | |
in the country in '68. | 1:20 | |
And so, people came from all over the country | 1:21 | |
to go to that program. | 1:24 | |
And we had already been kind of | 1:27 | |
borderline activists in California, | 1:32 | |
things like going to be-ins and putting flowers in the guns | 1:34 | |
of the cops that were around. | 1:41 | |
And the Watts riot had happened. | 1:43 | |
So we were involved in just being, | 1:49 | |
our consciousness was already being raised by those events, | 1:55 | |
by the racism involved with the Watts riots | 1:59 | |
and the antiwar movement. | 2:03 | |
So when we got to Gainesville, | 2:06 | |
I felt like I was going from the center of the universe, | 2:08 | |
i.e. California, to way on the periphery. | 2:12 | |
This seemed like Podunk. | 2:17 | |
I had a major culture shock in '68 coming to the South. | 2:19 | |
So the first year I was here, 1968, | 2:29 | |
well, we came in August of '68, | 2:31 | |
it took me a while to really bond with this place. | 2:39 | |
Interviewer | Tell me what Gainesville was like in 1968. | 2:44 |
Pam | It was fairly small. | 2:47 |
I think there were 50,000 people in the city, | 2:48 | |
including the university. | 2:52 | |
But of that, there was a huge population | 2:56 | |
of alternative people. | 3:00 | |
Tom Petty was here doing music. | 3:05 | |
It was very music-oriented, | 3:07 | |
very just alternative. | 3:11 | |
I went to an antiwar march in Washington DC | 3:12 | |
some time in '69, one of the big marches, | 3:21 | |
and there were a whole lot of people | 3:24 | |
from Gainesville that went. | 3:25 | |
It was beautiful, that was one of the things. | 3:29 | |
But it took me a while to care about its beauty, frankly. | 3:31 | |
I was more in culture shock with people. | 3:38 | |
I didn't immediately, well, I was 22 for one thing, | 3:44 | |
maybe I was 23 by then. | 3:49 | |
I was 23. | 3:51 | |
I was in a world where | 3:54 | |
I was peripheral to the graduate students | 3:56 | |
because I was a wife, that's pretty peripheral. | 3:59 | |
I was only 23, I had two little kids. | 4:05 | |
It took me a while to make my own world. | 4:08 | |
And so, I was living in student housing. | 4:12 | |
So I only had other student wives as cohorts. | 4:17 | |
I couldn't go to school myself | 4:23 | |
because you had to live in Florida a year | 4:25 | |
to be able to go to school, | 4:28 | |
to get in-state tuition, | 4:32 | |
so the first year, I really fumbled around. | 4:34 | |
So that was '68. | 4:44 | |
By somewhere in '69, I was able to go to a free university. | 4:45 | |
It was called The Free University, | 4:51 | |
and it was set up by all the alternative people. | 4:53 | |
And the people could give classes. | 4:57 | |
And I took a bunch of classes, | 5:00 | |
but I took one in civil rights. | 5:03 | |
I also took one in Black literature. | 5:09 | |
I remember that. | 5:13 | |
But in the civil rights class, one day, | 5:16 | |
the professor told us the next week, | 5:20 | |
there were women coming from Women's Liberation, | 5:25 | |
the Women's Liberation Movement, | 5:27 | |
and they wanted to meet with only the women | 5:30 | |
and there would be another class for the men | 5:32 | |
but this group wanted to meet with the women. | 5:35 | |
So this was 1969. | 5:41 | |
Interviewer | Where was this university? | 5:43 |
Pam | I believe we met either at the, | 5:47 |
wow, I can picture the room but I can't picture. | 5:51 | |
I think we met at the Reitz Union, | 5:54 | |
which was part of the University of Florida. | 5:55 | |
I think they gave The Free University space. | 5:57 | |
There were like 50 classes for the university, | 6:02 | |
there were lots. | 6:06 | |
And it was literally free and anybody could go, | 6:07 | |
and it was really as serious as a regular class. | 6:11 | |
We definitely were expected to keep up with our homework. | 6:15 | |
I don't think, it wasn't as serious as having | 6:18 | |
papers and tests, | 6:21 | |
but we definitely had to keep up with stuff. | 6:23 | |
So I went to this meeting, this class | 6:26 | |
that I was already going to, civil liberties or rights, | 6:29 | |
I don't remember exactly what they called it, | 6:34 | |
and Judith Brown and Carol Giardino | 6:36 | |
and I think one other person who I can picture | 6:41 | |
and I don't remember her name came | 6:43 | |
and there were probably 10 or 12 of the women from the class | 6:47 | |
meeting with them. | 6:53 | |
And they did a consciousness raising group, | 6:55 | |
and I'd never heard of that before. | 6:58 | |
And they described what they were gonna do, | 7:00 | |
which was speak only from your own experience. | 7:02 | |
That was really the ground rule. | 7:12 | |
And be as honest as you can be | 7:14 | |
with yourself and with others. | 7:16 | |
And their first topic was, they did two topics that night, | 7:19 | |
and they said we're gonna go around | 7:23 | |
and you're each gonna speak | 7:24 | |
only your personal experience with this topic. | 7:26 | |
Don't say anything about what you've read. | 7:30 | |
Don't say anything about what so and so experienced. | 7:32 | |
Just speak about your own. | 7:36 | |
And the first topic was, | 7:38 | |
have you wanted your male partner to be smarter than you. | 7:43 | |
And we all went around. | 7:50 | |
And I felt a major aha about having always been attracted | 7:52 | |
to men that were very smart and very, yeah. | 7:58 | |
So we went around and did that, | 8:06 | |
and I definitely got an aha. | 8:08 | |
The next topic was, do you want, | 8:10 | |
in your household, if you're with men in your household, | 8:14 | |
do you do more of the housework than they do. | 8:18 | |
And I had done 100% of the housework. | 8:23 | |
And so, as we went around and I heard | 8:26 | |
other people's personal experiences | 8:30 | |
and talking only from that, | 8:33 | |
I was kinda blown away. | 8:36 | |
They left us with literature to read about those two topics, | 8:39 | |
and for all I know, in general, | 8:43 | |
but I remember reading literature about those two topics. | 8:45 | |
By literature, I mean things that they had written | 8:48 | |
and other women that were starting to think like this. | 8:51 | |
And they gave us contacts for if we wanted to join a group. | 8:55 | |
I went home and shared this with my husband, | 8:59 | |
who was his own radical self, | 9:04 | |
but this was all brand new to all of us, | 9:08 | |
this Women's Liberation. | 9:12 | |
And it was pretty threatening to him. | 9:14 | |
Interviewer | What part? | 9:20 |
Pam | Well, I don't think the smartness was threatening. | 9:22 |
I don't think he understood it at all, | 9:26 | |
but I don't think it was threatening. | 9:28 | |
But the fact that these women were talking about | 9:29 | |
everybody doing equal work at the house. | 9:33 | |
There were so many parts to this. | 9:35 | |
I realized I was doing everything. | 9:40 | |
I was making all the food, I was doing everything. | 9:42 | |
And he didn't work, he was a student, | 9:47 | |
but I was also being a student. | 9:49 | |
Interviewer | And a mom. | 9:57 |
Pam | And I was a mom. | 9:58 |
So that started kind of a rift between us | 10:00 | |
because I started kind of demanding | 10:05 | |
that he do some of the work. | 10:10 | |
So that was my first opening. | 10:18 | |
So then I joined a women's consciousness group, | 10:20 | |
and that was just incredible. | 10:23 | |
The women were extremely serious about | 10:26 | |
trying to find all sorts of topics, | 10:29 | |
and this whole thing about | 10:31 | |
speak only from your own experience was gigantic. | 10:33 | |
They felt like we had to really, | 10:35 | |
the only way to find out the truth | 10:43 | |
was to go to our own experience and not | 10:45 | |
to go to anything that was written | 10:48 | |
because we really couldn't trust things that were written. | 10:49 | |
And this fit perfect with my hippie point of view too, | 10:55 | |
which was don't trust the, | 10:59 | |
to really change all the structure of the society in general | 11:02 | |
so it fit, it dovetailed perfect. | 11:05 | |
Meanwhile, there's a whole other life going on | 11:09 | |
of being extremely expansive relationship wise, | 11:12 | |
which is part of the hippie thing really, | 11:17 | |
was to be experimenting with love in general. | 11:19 | |
Interviewer | Open relationships? | 11:26 |
Pam | Open relationships. | 11:27 |
It was just all part of trying to change the way we were, | 11:29 | |
change our consciousness from how we were raised. | 11:34 | |
Interviewer | Was this group still at the university | 11:37 |
or has it relocated? | 11:40 | |
- | By this time, it went into, | |
the Women's Liberation thing was really | 11:42 | |
never university-based. | 11:45 | |
They just had come to the civil rights group | 11:46 | |
to spread their word. | 11:50 | |
But when I joined a consciousness raising group, | 11:52 | |
we met in homes. | 11:54 | |
And it wasn't university-based at all. | 11:55 | |
If anything, these women were pretty distrustful of | 11:57 | |
anything that had to do with the old structure, | 12:05 | |
whereas The Free University had been kind of half-half, | 12:08 | |
these women were way over to the edge. | 12:12 | |
There were lesbians in this group, | 12:16 | |
and they were starting to | 12:19 | |
question the women who were with men. | 12:22 | |
They were starting to, | 12:24 | |
the whole thing about sleeping with the enemy. | 12:27 | |
So by now, we're in '69, '70, starting into '70. | 12:31 | |
I don't remember. | 12:35 | |
And that was | 12:38 | |
conflictual, I think, for me. | 12:43 | |
I was married. | 12:45 | |
I was pretty hetero, I was very heterosexual. | 12:47 | |
But intellectually, I completely got | 12:54 | |
this sleeping with the enemy thing. | 12:57 | |
And men weren't changing very rapidly. | 13:00 | |
The cool ones were trying to change. | 13:03 | |
All the women that I knew | 13:06 | |
who were with men were with cool men. | 13:09 | |
But the men, it was just that they were losing a lot. | 13:14 | |
We were gaining a lot. | 13:18 | |
So it was hard in those days with that. | 13:20 | |
And I think it stayed hard for a decade or two. | 13:24 | |
For all I know, it's still hard, I don't know. | 13:27 | |
But that was pretty hard. | 13:32 | |
I moved, well, so in the first activist thing I did, | 13:34 | |
if you call activist being | 13:38 | |
to spread the word beyond your own little self, | 13:40 | |
they asked me from my Women's Liberation group | 13:45 | |
if I would give a speech on the Plaza of the Americas | 13:48 | |
at the university against a man | 13:52 | |
who was running for the Supreme Court | 13:56 | |
and he was a racist, misogynist. | 13:59 | |
And I don't even remember his name. | 14:05 | |
I'm pretty sure it started with a T. | 14:06 | |
And he did not get into the Supreme Court. | 14:07 | |
But there was a big movement against him | 14:10 | |
being in the Supreme Court. | 14:12 | |
So that was my first speech I ever gave, was against him. | 14:14 | |
And that was pretty scary. | 14:17 | |
Interviewer | And who was there? | 14:20 |
Who was in the audience? | 14:22 | |
Pam | I think it was a pretty big audience. | 14:23 |
Probably mostly University of Florida students. | 14:26 | |
Interviewer | So they called for a demonstration? | 14:28 |
Pam | Yes, yes. | 14:32 |
At that time, there were lots of these kinds of things | 14:33 | |
on the Plaza of the Americas. | 14:36 | |
Abbie Hoffman had come that year with Burn This Book. | 14:39 | |
- | Steal. | 14:45 |
- | There was just a. | |
Steal This Book, right. | 14:46 | |
Steal This Book, right. | 14:48 | |
There was just a whole lot of that. | 14:50 | |
And we were, the Women's Liberation people, women | 14:52 | |
were just part of this program. | 14:57 | |
This wasn't a Women's Liberation program. | 15:00 | |
We were just asked to also present why he was bad for women. | 15:03 | |
So I had that role. | 15:09 | |
Meanwhile, I kept up all my antiwar activities, | 15:14 | |
but I was now more conscious of how women in that movement | 15:17 | |
were doing the secretarial work. | 15:21 | |
It was always men who were the spokespeople. | 15:23 | |
And I was just becoming more and more conscious. | 15:27 | |
My husband and I split up during that time, | 15:31 | |
but I think that did not have to do with this. | 15:33 | |
I think it was, I know it didn't have to do with this, | 15:37 | |
because actually we split up | 15:41 | |
because I went with another man. | 15:42 | |
And so, that was part, more of the whole, whatever, | 15:44 | |
the free love thing, and I fell in love with another guy | 15:49 | |
and left my marriage and eventually married that second guy | 15:53 | |
and moved to Colorado | 15:57 | |
for him to do an internship in psychology. | 16:01 | |
Out there, I was with, I immediately looked for the women | 16:05 | |
who were in consciousness raising groups, | 16:09 | |
and there, the women I met up with were more middle class | 16:13 | |
and I didn't think that the consciousness raising | 16:19 | |
was nearly as deep | 16:21 | |
and I felt pretty lonely out there | 16:22 | |
for the depth that I'd gotten in Gainesville. | 16:25 | |
I did make some friends, | 16:31 | |
but I never did any actions out there | 16:34 | |
for Women's Liberation. | 16:37 | |
They were just more, they didn't talk nearly as deeply | 16:38 | |
as the women in Gainesville had talked. | 16:44 | |
They weren't adamant about really changing everything. | 16:46 | |
They were a little more like, I don't know, | 16:51 | |
it was very half-assed. | 16:54 | |
When that man and I split up two years later, | 16:57 | |
I moved back to Gainesville. | 17:01 | |
And that was in '73. | 17:05 | |
I did my last year of college and finished that. | 17:10 | |
And then, I graduated in '74, | 17:14 | |
I was walking on Southeast Fourth Avenue | 17:17 | |
within a month of graduating, | 17:20 | |
and I saw a sign that said that there was a feminist, | 17:22 | |
I don't know if it said feminist | 17:27 | |
because feminism, that word didn't come into very much use | 17:28 | |
until at least mid-70s, I didn't like that word at first. | 17:32 | |
It seemed to take away from women's liberation actually. | 17:36 | |
It seemed more like those middle class women | 17:40 | |
I'd known in Colorado. | 17:43 | |
But anyway, there was a sign about a women's health, | 17:45 | |
a Gainesville women's health center that was opening, | 17:50 | |
and I knocked on that door and somebody came to the door | 17:54 | |
and I said, "I want to work here." | 17:58 | |
And they said, "Oh, I'm sorry, there's no jobs here." | 18:00 | |
And I said, "That's okay, I'm going to work here, | 18:02 | |
"I'll do anything, you don't have to pay me." | 18:05 | |
And so, they said okay | 18:08 | |
and they invited me to come to a, | 18:12 | |
a night of looking at your cervixes. | 18:16 | |
And so, that's the first thing I did there. | 18:19 | |
Interviewer | So how long had it been open? | 18:21 |
Pam | It hadn't been open. | 18:22 |
It wasn't open yet. | 18:23 | |
So I went to the night of looking at your cervixes, | 18:25 | |
which I'd never done anything even close like that, | 18:29 | |
but these women were back to like I wanted. | 18:32 | |
They were serious about consciousness raising. | 18:36 | |
Interviewer | And who were those women? | 18:42 |
Pam | Those women were Joan Edelson, Betsy David, | 18:42 |
Candice Harrington, Byllye Avery, and Judy Levy. | 18:48 | |
Margaret was very peripheral, she never was. | 18:56 | |
Interviewer | Margaret Parrish. | 19:01 |
Pam | Margaret Parrish. | 19:02 |
I think she did social stuff with them, | 19:03 | |
but she was never a hands-on person. | 19:05 | |
Within a month, they hired me to work in the front office, | 19:11 | |
which was mainly answering the phones and stuff. | 19:13 | |
Within another month, I was a counselor for women | 19:16 | |
that were going to have abortions. | 19:19 | |
From the very beginning, they wanted to have | 19:22 | |
a very homey atmosphere, very not like a doctor's office, | 19:27 | |
but very beautiful, they were into beauty. | 19:34 | |
They wanted it to look beautiful. | 19:38 | |
They wanted it to be homey. | 19:39 | |
And they had first trimester abortion services | 19:41 | |
and well-woman care. | 19:47 | |
Some of them had gone out to somewhere, I think California, | 19:50 | |
and met with the people, I think it was women in Los Angeles | 19:55 | |
who first were doing women's abortions themselves. | 19:58 | |
They had been doing abortions themselves actually, | 20:04 | |
but now when abortion became legal, | 20:08 | |
they had doctors doing it. | 20:12 | |
So we were part of that. | 20:14 | |
I think we were, within the first year, | 20:16 | |
I think Gainesville had women-run abortion clinics | 20:19 | |
after it became legal in maybe '73 it became legal. | 20:24 | |
So this was '74 and we were doing our own, running it. | 20:29 | |
And we were in charge. | 20:35 | |
The doctors were hired and came in to do the abortions, | 20:36 | |
but they had absolutely, they had to do it | 20:40 | |
exactly like we told them to do it. | 20:43 | |
That was a huge part of it. | 20:47 | |
We ran our own health center. | 20:50 | |
Interviewer | So in '74, which doctors were coming? | 20:52 |
Pam | They were coming from Jacksonville. | 20:56 |
Joan or Betsy had connected with. | 20:59 | |
Interviewer | Was Joan McTigue part of the group? | 21:07 |
Pam | No, not yet. | 21:08 |
This was Joan Edelson. | 21:09 | |
She was really the mover and shaker at this point. | 21:12 | |
She's a little extreme, a little kinda crazy, | 21:15 | |
extremely bright. | 21:22 | |
And Judy Levy and Byllye knew, were best friends | 21:25 | |
at the university. | 21:28 | |
And Betsy is someone they met, | 21:33 | |
she was a nursing student, | 21:36 | |
and Candice was also a nursing student. | 21:38 | |
And so, they, somehow they went to the nursing school | 21:40 | |
to find women who could help run this new school, | 21:43 | |
and Betsy and Candice jumped onboard. | 21:46 | |
I think Betsy did first and then she got Candice. | 21:49 | |
And they had been meeting, probably for at least six months | 21:53 | |
before I came because they'd gotten a building, | 21:57 | |
they'd connected with the doctors | 21:59 | |
who were gonna come in and do the abortions. | 22:01 | |
In the beginning, the doctors were, | 22:07 | |
I guess they were residents in the school. | 22:10 | |
I can't remember if the first doctors were residents | 22:13 | |
or if they were already out, they were gynecologists. | 22:16 | |
But they were men. | 22:22 | |
I don't even remember in the beginning | 22:24 | |
having a woman doctor. | 22:25 | |
We were able to get women doctors from the university here | 22:28 | |
to come to the well-woman care, | 22:31 | |
which we did three nights a week. | 22:32 | |
And we did abortions on Saturdays. | 22:34 | |
Friday night, the women would come in for counseling, | 22:37 | |
and Saturday, they would have their abortion. | 22:39 | |
And they met, an individual counselor was with them. | 22:42 | |
First, they went through a class, | 22:46 | |
in which they had to learn breast exam. | 22:48 | |
We had little kinda like consciousness raising classes | 22:51 | |
for the women. | 22:57 | |
And they met with their counselor individually | 22:59 | |
who made sure that this was their personal decision. | 23:01 | |
If anybody said that their boyfriend or their father | 23:04 | |
wanted them to have an abortion, | 23:08 | |
we were always, whoops let's stop right here. | 23:10 | |
You may do this because you may want to, | 23:13 | |
because you want to please your father, that's fine. | 23:16 | |
That, I have no trouble with. | 23:19 | |
But you've got to own this as you're doing this | 23:22 | |
because you want to, | 23:24 | |
even if it's to satisfy somebody else's needs, | 23:26 | |
but you cannot be doing this | 23:30 | |
because somebody else told you to. | 23:32 | |
There's many other options, | 23:34 | |
and we'll help you figure that out. | 23:36 | |
But you have to feel like, | 23:38 | |
well, even though this isn't everything I want, | 23:40 | |
I do want this. | 23:45 | |
And then we were with them during the abortion. | 23:48 | |
And we were major into education and empowering | 23:50 | |
and having women feel like | 23:54 | |
this was a positive experience for them | 23:56 | |
even if it had an enormous amount of sadness, | 23:59 | |
which it didn't for everybody. | 24:02 | |
Plenty of women did not have any sadness with it. | 24:05 | |
It was inexpensive. | 24:10 | |
We kept it as cheap as possible. | 24:11 | |
Interviewer | Do you remember how much it was back then? | 24:13 |
Pam | I think $150. | 24:15 |
And Medicaid paid for any woman who was poor. | 24:20 | |
So the running of the center was all done by consensus. | 24:25 | |
We did have a board of directors. | 24:30 | |
Because Judy and Byllye and Joan | 24:33 | |
and I guess Margaret was on the board, | 24:37 | |
but they didn't work at the health center. | 24:38 | |
So there was always a bit of a separation | 24:43 | |
between the board and the women who ran it. | 24:45 | |
All of these women were still straight. | 24:50 | |
I don't think, I mean, we had lesbians working there, | 24:54 | |
but we were all straight. | 24:57 | |
Everybody I said there was straight. | 24:58 | |
Interviewer | And were there nurses and counselors? | 25:00 |
Pam | Candice was a nurse. | 25:02 |
And yes, there were nurses and there were counselors. | 25:04 | |
We tried to, we had meetings constantly | 25:08 | |
trying to make our decisions about how to run things, | 25:10 | |
although the board had separate meetings | 25:13 | |
doing a bigger overview of things. | 25:17 | |
I don't remember what the big issue was the first. | 25:22 | |
Can I remember? | 25:27 | |
Oh god, yes. | 25:28 | |
We had a woman who hired on | 25:29 | |
either in the front office or as a counselor or both, | 25:33 | |
Deborah David, I believe her name was, | 25:37 | |
who was a radical black women's empowerment person. | 25:40 | |
And she was a power, she herself was extremely powerful. | 25:49 | |
And she wanted the health center to go | 25:54 | |
much more in the direction of helping black women. | 25:57 | |
And she wasn't really a women's liberationist. | 26:03 | |
She didn't think white women needed that. | 26:07 | |
She was very strong in that. | 26:12 | |
Well, the board, Deborah started having quite a lot of power | 26:16 | |
at the health center. | 26:20 | |
And the board really felt threatened by this, | 26:24 | |
and they laid down the law basically. | 26:27 | |
They had all the real power. | 26:34 | |
And was I on the board at this point? | 26:37 | |
I don't think I was on the board at this point. | 26:42 | |
But I have to say I was on their side in this. | 26:45 | |
So they shut down the health center for a day, | 26:51 | |
called each person in individually, | 26:53 | |
and went over the mission. | 26:56 | |
And either you agreed with the mission, | 26:59 | |
which was a women's liberation mission, | 27:01 | |
really nothing to do with black liberation, | 27:04 | |
and you either agreed with that or you left. | 27:10 | |
And I believe they fired Deborah when she didn't agree | 27:15 | |
to agree to that. | 27:20 | |
Interviewer | And what was it that she wanted them to do? | 27:21 |
Pam | You know, I can't remember exactly. | 27:24 |
She was, oh boy. | 27:30 | |
In those days, we had just long meetings over everything, | 27:32 | |
and Deborah was always kinda | 27:35 | |
undermining the women's liberation point of view. | 27:37 | |
And it really was more subtle than specific. | 27:43 | |
I don't remember if she wanted to have | 27:49 | |
a men's clinic, for instance. | 27:51 | |
I don't remember what her specific demands were | 27:53 | |
or even if there were demands. | 27:56 | |
It had to do with a subtle thing about power, | 27:59 | |
and her way was definitely different | 28:03 | |
than a specific women's liberation way. | 28:07 | |
And she was undermining that. | 28:12 | |
Interviewer | And that was like the beginning of | 28:14 |
sort of a split between the African-American women | 28:15 | |
and then white women. | 28:19 | |
The women wanted, they wanted their men to, | 28:20 | |
they didn't want to be the sole working person. | 28:29 | |
They wanted their men to be more involved in the family, | 28:36 | |
and white women wanted them to be less involved. | 28:40 | |
Pam | Yeah, we were coming from different. | 28:44 |
And we couldn't yet talk very well. | 28:46 | |
And I have to say in this case, we're at 19 probably 75 | 28:50 | |
or maybe 76, I doubt it was '76 yet though. | 28:56 | |
We really didn't have a way to communicate well, | 29:03 | |
and I think it was because we had real different goals. | 29:07 | |
So there was a lockout. | 29:11 | |
Those women were locked out, | 29:14 | |
and then the center was only locked for a couple of days | 29:19 | |
but then the board had control again | 29:23 | |
and we went forward with this. | 29:27 | |
And then I got on the board of directors | 29:33 | |
somewhere along in there because | 29:35 | |
they decided to have more workers on the board. | 29:36 | |
Then we did a big, big conference. | 29:40 | |
Interviewer | Was there any repercussion from it? | 29:44 |
Pam | No, well. | 29:45 |
I only know the side that stayed with the health center, | 29:49 | |
and in that, there was no repercussion. | 29:52 | |
There was more peace, actually. | 29:54 | |
I think a couple of other women left, | 29:58 | |
but not very many women left and went with Deborah. | 30:01 | |
And I don't know what she ended up doing. | 30:04 | |
I think she went to law school actually. | 30:06 | |
Then we had a big national, we hosted a big national | 30:10 | |
women's health conference, and this is significant | 30:15 | |
because of the lesbian component. | 30:18 | |
So to plan that, there was a planning committee of which | 30:20 | |
the health center was kind of the center | 30:25 | |
but there were other women from other parts. | 30:29 | |
Gerry Greene, Rosalie Miller were both strong lesbians, | 30:31 | |
and they were in a lesbian women's | 30:37 | |
consciousness raising group. | 30:39 | |
Meanwhile, all the straight women at the, | 30:45 | |
by this point and this is '76, | 30:48 | |
in April of '76, we had the conference, | 30:52 | |
so we were probably planning it by summer of '75. | 30:55 | |
And all the straight women that were planning it | 31:00 | |
with the lesbians who were planning it, | 31:04 | |
all were getting more and more drawn to lesbians. | 31:06 | |
We were listening to Lavender Jane by Alix Dobkin. | 31:10 | |
We were all just opening to this possibility. | 31:15 | |
And now, sexuality seemed a little more fluid to us. | 31:20 | |
We were like, oh, maybe we aren't just straight. | 31:23 | |
Maybe we could be, we would never have said homosexual, | 31:29 | |
but maybe we could be lesbians. | 31:35 | |
It just was starting to dawn on us | 31:39 | |
that this was a possibility. | 31:41 | |
And we were all then planning this huge health conference | 31:44 | |
where thousands of women were going to come | 31:48 | |
from all over the country. | 31:50 | |
And I personally was in charge of the speakers. | 31:53 | |
And we got Rita Mae Brown, we got Phyllis Chesler | 31:56 | |
who was Women and Madness, we got Pauline, | 32:01 | |
what was Pauline's last name, it started with a K. | 32:05 | |
Can't remember. | 32:08 | |
We got Barbara Ehrenreich. | 32:09 | |
And I got to be the one communicating with all those women | 32:12 | |
and getting them to be our big speakers. | 32:18 | |
Meanwhile, we were also planning | 32:22 | |
workshops for all through the conference. | 32:26 | |
We got workshops on lesbians | 32:30 | |
and straight women working together. | 32:34 | |
We had one of those done every single session. | 32:36 | |
We got somebody who was an activist | 32:39 | |
for prostitutes in San Francisco to come | 32:42 | |
and talk about feminists and Women's Liberation, women | 32:44 | |
who were involved in that. | 32:48 | |
- | It was COYOTE, wasn't it? | |
- | I think, I don't know. | 32:51 |
It was the beginning. | 32:53 | |
I'm not even sure that had formed yet at that point, | 32:55 | |
but maybe it had. | 32:58 | |
So we were gonna go to the edge with women's issues. | 32:59 | |
So all through this process, we were working with, | 33:07 | |
we meaning the women I was with, | 33:10 | |
with the women's health center, | 33:12 | |
were working with the lesbians on this | 33:13 | |
and that radicalized us in that direction. | 33:17 | |
- | How are you advertising? | 33:20 |
- | Every one of us | |
became a lesbian. | 33:21 | |
Every one of us, I think. | 33:23 | |
Well, Judy Levy didn't become a lesbian. | 33:25 | |
But I don't think she was ever with a man again. | 33:29 | |
Byllye Avery became a lesbian. | 33:33 | |
Betsy David became a lesbian. | 33:34 | |
I became a lesbian. | 33:37 | |
Candice became a lesbian. | 33:38 | |
I can't even, I can't think of any of us | 33:42 | |
who didn't become lesbians. | 33:44 | |
Vicky, I think she was, I don't remember if she, | 33:46 | |
I think she was straight, she was the photographer | 33:51 | |
and she got with Betsy, what was her name, another Betsy. | 33:54 | |
Anyway, we just all crossed over at that point in '76. | 34:01 | |
Interviewer | It was sort of an aha kind of thing. | 34:07 |
Is that what happened or? | 34:09 | |
Pam | Yeah, I would say that. | 34:10 |
I think most of us were really tired of the men in our lives | 34:11 | |
who were not really being able to raise their consciousness | 34:17 | |
as far as we were. | 34:21 | |
We were loving being with women. | 34:22 | |
Our whole lives were starting to circle around women. | 34:25 | |
And the lesbians were the, they were pretty attractive, | 34:29 | |
and their lifestyle was pretty attractive. | 34:32 | |
Interviewer | What was that? | 34:36 |
Pam | God, they were much freer. | 34:37 |
They seemed to have a lot more fun. | 34:46 | |
And they also seemed like they had higher consciousness. | 34:48 | |
And all that was our thing, was | 34:52 | |
still transforming consciousness as far as we could. | 34:56 | |
Now, for me personally, | 35:01 | |
I was pretty strongly heterosexual. | 35:04 | |
Another factor at this women's health conference | 35:10 | |
was that this was the first time that a group, | 35:13 | |
I think this was the first time, I'm sure it is actually, | 35:16 | |
the first time in the United States | 35:19 | |
where a group of women got together and talked about incest | 35:21 | |
and their childhood sexual experiences. | 35:26 | |
This was the first time ever. | 35:31 | |
And Gerry Greene and I led that workshop. | 35:32 | |
We were both child sexual abuse | 35:35 | |
victims, survivors, whatever. | 35:39 | |
So for me personally, and there's such a range | 35:42 | |
of what pulled people to lesbianism, who were straight. | 35:46 | |
You got this whole continuum of women who were lesbians, | 35:51 | |
knew it forever, women who were lesbians, didn't know it, | 35:54 | |
but recognized it as soon as there was a possibility | 35:59 | |
and support to recognize it. | 36:03 | |
But there is also a whole lot of women | 36:05 | |
who were truly straight who chose to be lesbians | 36:08 | |
because for whatever reason. | 36:14 | |
Some, it was for social and cultural reasons | 36:18 | |
and just had enough bisexuality in them | 36:23 | |
that they could make that switch. | 36:26 | |
For me personally, it was because I couldn't get completely, | 36:30 | |
because of my childhood sexual abuse, I couldn't get, | 36:39 | |
I never could be completely comfortable with men sexually | 36:47 | |
even though I was hot. | 36:51 | |
It's kind of a whatever, catch-22 there. | 36:53 | |
I was highly drawn, I was heterosexual, | 36:55 | |
I was very drawn to men | 36:59 | |
and was perfectly happy for whatever six months, | 37:01 | |
but I could never be completely intimate. | 37:05 | |
Once it got beyond the pheromones and got to true intimacy, | 37:09 | |
I couldn't be honest about myself really. | 37:14 | |
I was always ashamed, and I just couldn't do it. | 37:18 | |
And I couldn't be, this is another huge thing, | 37:22 | |
I couldn't be, my particular sexual abuse | 37:25 | |
was being forced from the age seven | 37:30 | |
to masturbate my stepfather. | 37:33 | |
So I couldn't be very giving sexually. | 37:36 | |
I could receive okay, but I couldn't be giving. | 37:40 | |
That was a pretty major obstacle. | 37:48 | |
So that was really my motivation to become a lesbian. | 37:51 | |
Then I thought that, well, maybe I'd be okay with women. | 37:57 | |
And then during that planning of the conference, | 38:06 | |
I fell in love with a woman. | 38:09 | |
I fell in love with Rosalie from a distance. | 38:11 | |
I mean, fall in love is probably too big of a word for it | 38:13 | |
because it wasn't reciprocated. | 38:16 | |
But I, man, I really really really fell for her | 38:19 | |
and wrote her a letter stating that, | 38:23 | |
and she very kindly wrote me a letter back | 38:29 | |
saying how sweet that was but I wasn't her type | 38:33 | |
and asked me if, was this how I was with men, | 38:41 | |
did I write letters to describe. | 38:44 | |
And then she had a talk with me during the conference | 38:49 | |
about that kind of thing. | 38:53 | |
And so, the next time which was just a few months later, | 38:54 | |
I became sort of attracted by a woman, | 38:58 | |
I took Rosalie's advice and just walked up and said, | 39:02 | |
or acted whatever, I don't remember, | 39:07 | |
but I did some kind of come on to that woman, | 39:09 | |
and sure enough, that worked. | 39:12 | |
So then I had my first sexual experience | 39:14 | |
with a woman. | 39:17 | |
- | And who was that with? | |
Pam | Mary, oh god, Mary Boynton, Mary Boynton, | 39:18 |
who's pretty much sort of a jock and not very | 39:23 | |
conscious actually as it turned out. | 39:26 | |
But I was with her for a year. | 39:29 | |
And we lived in a big communal setting with men and women. | 39:32 | |
I was still raising my kids and all. | 39:36 | |
But then I realized that my problem, | 39:39 | |
my sexual stuff really went beyond men, | 39:42 | |
and so then I decided to try to be with men again | 39:47 | |
because really I was heterosexual. | 39:50 | |
And so then I went back to being with men. | 39:54 | |
But meanwhile, I was still working at the health center. | 39:56 | |
Interviewer | Can you say again about the conference? | 40:00 |
Because I'm interested in the conference. | 40:03 | |
How you got people came. | 40:05 | |
- | It was fabulous. | |
Interviewer | Where you met, how you advertised. | 40:08 |
Pam | We advertised all over the country, | 40:13 |
and people came from all over the country. | 40:16 | |
Interviewer | How? | 40:17 |
Because they didn't have computers. | 40:18 | |
Pam | No, we had no computers. | 40:20 |
Oh, I didn't even think of that. | 40:21 | |
We sent out brochures. | 40:23 | |
We got money from somebody. | 40:26 | |
I'm trying to think, how did we have money for all of this. | 40:29 | |
Because we must have had to put out a fair amount of. | 40:32 | |
I think we must have gotten grants to do this conference, | 40:35 | |
but I can't picture where. | 40:41 | |
I wasn't in that end of it, the fundraising end of it. | 40:43 | |
But we must have had money | 40:46 | |
because we rented the Reitz Union, | 40:47 | |
we had the ballroom, we had. | 40:51 | |
Interviewer | It was at the university. | 40:54 |
Pam | It was at the university. | 40:55 |
And we had 20 conference rooms. | 40:56 | |
It was big, and we paid all these national speakers | 41:01 | |
to come and speak and we put them up, | 41:06 | |
well, we did put them up in our houses actually. | 41:08 | |
But we paid them. | 41:11 | |
These were very well-known speakers. | 41:12 | |
They were huge. | 41:18 | |
And Rita Mae opened it on Friday night | 41:23 | |
or whatever night, Thursday night, with her, | 41:25 | |
and she is hysterically funny | 41:28 | |
and she is such an out lesbian. | 41:31 | |
And that really set this tone. | 41:34 | |
And she was kinda radical at the time. | 41:36 | |
So she set the tone. | 41:39 | |
Interviewer | And hadn't she been kicked out of | 41:40 |
the University of Florida? | 41:41 | |
- | And she had gone to | |
the University of Florida, yeah, | 41:43 | |
and yeah, she'd been kicked out. | 41:46 | |
And Rubyfruit Jungle was becoming one of the books. | 41:49 | |
I don't know how we got the word out. | 41:51 | |
We must have done it through the mail. | 41:54 | |
Interviewer | Was Lesbian Connection around yet? | 41:58 |
Pam | Probably? | 42:01 |
I would think, oh by '76, I'm sure it was. | 42:04 | |
That, but there were also feminist, | 42:07 | |
now they were called feminist women's health centers | 42:10 | |
all over the country. | 42:13 | |
The Boston Women's Collective was going. | 42:15 | |
We'd gone up, oh, that's how we got the idea | 42:18 | |
to do the women's health conference. | 42:20 | |
Betsy and Candice and I and Byllye, | 42:22 | |
the four of us went up to Boston | 42:25 | |
because the Boston Women's Collective | 42:28 | |
had had a weekend something, | 42:30 | |
a conference about women's health, radical women's health, | 42:34 | |
and we had gone to that. | 42:39 | |
The women who, oh gosh, Chisholm. | 42:43 | |
Interviewer | Shirley? | 42:47 |
Pam | Shirley Chisholm was at that. | 42:48 |
So we had gotten, we got the idea while we were in Boston. | 42:50 | |
Let's do a southern women's health conference. | 42:54 | |
But we had women from all over the country come to that, | 42:57 | |
thousands of women came to this. | 43:01 | |
Interviewer | And what was it called? | 43:04 |
Pam | What was it called? | 43:07 |
You'd have to ask Randi. | 43:11 | |
What was it called? | 43:12 | |
This is when Randi came into the picture, during this time. | 43:16 | |
She wasn't one of the planners, | 43:19 | |
but she came to this. | 43:21 | |
Lots of my, people who became my, | 43:23 | |
Randi Camion, lots of the women I became | 43:26 | |
very close friends with over the long run, | 43:28 | |
Marilyn Mesh, Lynda Lou Simmons, | 43:32 | |
they all came to this conference and got radicalized. | 43:34 | |
We just sent out written things all over the country, | 43:43 | |
talking about. | 43:48 | |
Southeastern Women's Health Conference, | 43:49 | |
I think is what it was called. | 43:52 | |
The Southeastern Women's Health Conference. | 43:54 | |
And it was three or four days long. | 43:58 | |
It had hundreds of workshops. | 44:01 | |
We had tracks you could follow. | 44:03 | |
We had seven or eight tracks | 44:04 | |
like the lesbians and straight women working together track | 44:07 | |
and we did bunches of different workshops on that. | 44:11 | |
We had a track on prostitution. | 44:14 | |
We had a track, I can't remember all our tracks, | 44:18 | |
but I got all that literature. | 44:21 | |
I think a bunch of us have saved it. | 44:23 | |
I hope so. | 44:26 | |
That was a very important conference actually. | 44:28 | |
And gosh, we just kept on going. | 44:37 | |
There was another lockout at the health center when, | 44:42 | |
the second thing, and this time I was on the opposite side | 44:45 | |
from the board of directors. | 44:49 | |
By maybe it was '79, Judy and Byllye and Randi | 44:52 | |
decided that to be fully encompassing of women's health, | 45:02 | |
we had to start a birth center. | 45:07 | |
And so, they were the movers and shakers behind that | 45:09 | |
and that's when Joan McTigue came into the picture. | 45:13 | |
They hired her as their midwife, | 45:17 | |
and she moved up here from Port St. Lucie I think | 45:19 | |
or Sebastian, one of those mid-eastern coast towns. | 45:22 | |
But Randi and Barbara, what was Barbara's last name. | 45:34 | |
I can picture her totally. | 45:38 | |
They had been in the women's underground midwife network. | 45:42 | |
Interviewer | Lay midwifery. | 45:48 |
Pam | Lay midwifery, so they were very involved in this. | 45:49 |
This was really, they considered this their baby. | 45:53 | |
Byllye and Judy considered it their baby. | 45:57 | |
And a rift started between those two people, | 46:00 | |
between those two sides. | 46:06 | |
And I'm not sure exactly why the board | 46:10 | |
didn't want Randi and Barbara | 46:14 | |
to be, whatever, in charge but they didn't. | 46:18 | |
They wanted Byllye to be in charge. | 46:23 | |
Interviewer | Byllye wasn't a midwife? | 46:28 |
Pam | Byllye wasn't a midwife. | 46:30 |
Although she was a very radical woman. | 46:33 | |
But anyway, the midwives wanted it to be midwifery run | 46:37 | |
and the board didn't. | 46:42 | |
Well, that time, they closed down the health center, | 46:43 | |
the board did, and locked out | 46:50 | |
Randi, Barbara, and any of the women who went | 46:53 | |
in that direction and almost all of us supported. | 46:57 | |
Interviewer | And Joan? | 47:02 |
Pam | And Joan was on the midwife side. | 47:03 |
Almost all of us supported the midwives. | 47:06 | |
And we like had a sit-in kind of thing in the health center. | 47:16 | |
We wouldn't allow ourselves to be locked out, | 47:19 | |
and we just started running it. | 47:23 | |
And the board, we had many, many meetings to | 47:26 | |
try to sort this through. | 47:31 | |
And the upshot of it was the solution | 47:35 | |
was for Judy and Byllye and Joan, | 47:39 | |
not Joan, she was, well maybe Joan, but Margaret, | 47:43 | |
that they would get the birth center | 47:48 | |
and we would get the health center. | 47:50 | |
And Randi and Barbara and Joan | 47:53 | |
were pretty brokenhearted about that, | 47:57 | |
that we gave up the birth center. | 47:59 | |
Interviewer | So there was gonna be a birth center | 48:04 |
in the same place | 48:07 | |
as the abortion center? | 48:08 | |
- | Not the same. | |
No, we always had two buildings. | 48:09 | |
We always were gonna have, | 48:11 | |
the birth center was gonna be on, | 48:13 | |
it was on Northeast First Street | 48:14 | |
in the Duckpond neighborhood | 48:17 | |
and the health center was on Southeast Fourth Avenue | 48:18 | |
across from Alachua General. | 48:24 | |
Though there were always going to be two separate buildings, | 48:28 | |
because the birth center needed a lot of space | 48:30 | |
and our health center was not that big, | 48:34 | |
we couldn't have accommodated that. | 48:37 | |
(phone rings) | 48:40 | |
Do you want to stop this so I can turn that down | 48:42 | |
or will that bother us? | 48:44 | |
Interviewer | That's okay. | 48:46 |
Pam | So I said I was on the side of the midwives | 48:51 |
during that time, which is totally true, | 48:56 | |
but I also understood Judy and Byllye's point of view. | 48:58 | |
They really had put the money and the effort, | 49:03 | |
they were powerhouses and they were, | 49:07 | |
I trusted their women's liberation kind of point of view | 49:13 | |
more than I trusted the midwives' point of view. | 49:17 | |
So even though, | 49:22 | |
I just didn't think it was fair | 49:25 | |
to take the birth center from them. | 49:26 | |
I thought they should be able to work together | 49:29 | |
with the midwives, but I just could not see | 49:32 | |
taking the birth center from Judy and Byllye. | 49:36 | |
It just didn't seem right to me. | 49:38 | |
So I supported the split and that they got the birth center. | 49:41 | |
I also wasn't, I also hadn't, | 49:48 | |
I was running the abortion clinic at that point, | 49:51 | |
so it wasn't a personal loss for me. | 49:55 | |
Whereas with Randi, Joan, and Barbara, | 49:58 | |
it was a personal loss. | 50:02 | |
It was huge for them. | 50:04 | |
And I'm not sure that | 50:06 | |
Barbara ever got over it. | 50:08 | |
And Randi, who had been very close with Byllye, | 50:11 | |
that friendship never recovered. | 50:18 | |
And Randi wouldn't go, when Judy Levy was dying, | 50:20 | |
she died of liver cancer, | 50:24 | |
but she's the first person I ever knew who did this, | 50:27 | |
she had a big gathering of people to say goodbye, | 50:31 | |
to tell her what she had meant to them | 50:37 | |
and that kind of thing. | 50:41 | |
- | What year was that? | 50:43 |
- | And Randi wouldn't go it. | |
Probably that was in the early 80s. | 50:45 | |
Interviewer | So it was still pretty raw. | 50:48 |
Pam | Yeah, I mean it was four, five, six years later, | 50:50 |
but Randi had not spoken to Judy since. | 50:54 | |
She'd made up with Byllye by then, | 50:57 | |
but she could never forgive Judy for what she did to them. | 50:59 | |
And I never, I don't think I ever spoke in depth | 51:07 | |
with Judy or Byllye after that, | 51:11 | |
and consequently I don't fully know their | 51:14 | |
side of the story. | 51:19 | |
And as I say all of these things, | 51:21 | |
it's probably, when you do a history, | 51:24 | |
you know you're only getting one person's point of view | 51:27 | |
because there are a lot of points of view | 51:30 | |
in all of these stories. | 51:32 | |
If you talk to Deborah David, | 51:34 | |
you'd get a whole different story | 51:35 | |
about what happened at the health center. | 51:37 | |
Interviewer | This is your story. | 51:40 |
Pam | But this is my story. | 51:41 |
I stayed conflictual about the lesbian part of myself. | 51:44 | |
I just stayed conflicted. | 51:52 | |
I fell in love with a woman, Kate Gallagher, a crazy woman, | 51:57 | |
but very charismatic and very sexual in I think 1980. | 52:02 | |
And from then on, I have only been a lesbian. | 52:10 | |
But it's not without its problems. | 52:16 | |
I really actually still consider myself, | 52:20 | |
this is more internal, this isn't | 52:24 | |
something I go out and advertise, | 52:27 | |
but I still consider myself more heterosexual somewhat. | 52:30 | |
But I've been married to a woman for 20 years. | 52:36 | |
I'm completely ensconced in that life, | 52:42 | |
and I will be 'til I die. | 52:48 | |
I love her, and I love the life actually. | 52:52 | |
I can't quite see living a heterosexual life | 53:01 | |
even though I am personally more heterosexual. | 53:05 | |
I don't like the life of it. | 53:11 | |
I just can't quite visualize it anymore. | 53:17 | |
So it's been 30 years, the '80s, the '90s | 53:19 | |
that I've lived fully in a lesbian world. | 53:22 | |
But I've always been a lesbian who, | 53:28 | |
if anybody asks me, I'd say that I was bisexual | 53:36 | |
or I might even say I was heterosexual | 53:39 | |
but choosing to live a lesbian life. | 53:42 | |
Interviewer | What does that mean, | 53:47 |
to be heterosexual but living? | 53:48 | |
Pam | With attraction, I would say that I'm just more | 53:50 |
sexually attracted to men, | 53:54 | |
but I'm not attracted to them in most any other way. | 53:57 | |
So I'm not gonna let that rule my life. | 54:00 | |
And by now, I'm 68, I'm almost 69, I'll be 69 in two weeks. | 54:04 | |
Or no, I'll be 68 in two weeks. | 54:16 | |
Yeah, I'll be 68. | 54:20 | |
I'm just not that sexual in general. | 54:24 | |
I don't think I would be in any circumstance. | 54:28 | |
So that's not my consideration, | 54:31 | |
and I can fully embrace the lesbian lifestyle. | 54:34 | |
I don't think it has that much to do | 54:39 | |
at the core of it with sexuality actually. | 54:44 | |
I just don't quite see that as the core. | 54:51 | |
I know lots and lots of lesbians who are single | 54:55 | |
and lots of lesbians who are in long-term relationships | 54:59 | |
that aren't sexual, I mean women who would identify fully | 55:03 | |
as a lesbian but by either this age | 55:06 | |
or this point in their relationship | 55:09 | |
or just in their own, probably this has to do with age, | 55:13 | |
in their own selves hormonally maybe, | 55:18 | |
it just isn't a core part of our lives anymore. | 55:21 | |
So it doesn't separate me from the lesbian world. | 55:25 | |
And I feel like I can be myself. | 55:32 | |
I don't feel like, this, me saying this view, | 55:34 | |
I think I can say it anywhere and people would nod. | 55:37 | |
It just would be a non-issue now. | 55:40 | |
That wasn't quite as true in the '70s. | 55:42 | |
And by the '80s, | 55:47 | |
I wasn't any longer as involved | 55:53 | |
with the women's health center | 55:55 | |
and then my next stage of radical women's work | 55:58 | |
was with the anti-nuclear movement | 56:05 | |
and we formed a, I think, what did we call ourselves. | 56:09 | |
I don't know. | 56:16 | |
I don't remember what we called ourselves. | 56:18 | |
We had a name. | 56:20 | |
And we then became major activists | 56:23 | |
in the anti-nuclear power movement and organized | 56:27 | |
marches to Washington. | 56:32 | |
- | With lesbian feminists. | |
Pam | With lesbian feminists. | 56:34 |
Woody Blue came down to meet with us. | 56:35 | |
That's how she came to Gainesville, | 56:38 | |
she was passing through and we had a big meeting | 56:40 | |
of whatever we were called. | 56:42 | |
We were making banners then to take to an anti-nuclear | 56:45 | |
march against Savannah River | 56:50 | |
where the streams were literally boiling | 56:53 | |
with the heat that the nuclear plant discharged. | 56:57 | |
And at that thing, we did civil disobedience | 57:04 | |
and got arrested and spent. | 57:08 | |
Well, there were some straight women in that group, | 57:12 | |
but it was led by lesbians. | 57:17 | |
Interviewer | And who was in that group? | 57:20 |
Pam | Oh gosh, that's Corky Culver, Lynda Lou Simmons, me. | 57:23 |
There were 12 of us that got arrested together. | 57:31 | |
Kate Gallagher, Weed, Jane, what's Jane, | 57:35 | |
she was Jane, became Weed in jail, | 57:41 | |
Jane, what was Jane's last name, | 57:46 | |
I know it as good as I know anything. | 57:50 | |
Interviewer | It'll come. | 57:54 |
Pam | Yeah, it'll come. | 57:55 |
Jean, what was Jean's last name? | 57:56 | |
She and Kate became lovers in jail. | 57:59 | |
Judy Keathley. | 58:06 | |
And that's where we met, in jail, | 58:11 | |
we met the women from Sugarloaf down in the Keys. | 58:13 | |
We all went to jail. | 58:19 | |
- | Was Barbara Deming there? | |
Pam | Barbara Deming wasn't | 58:21 |
because she was not healthy enough to be there | 58:22 | |
but she sent Blue and. | 58:25 | |
What was her, oh my god, now I don't know if | 58:31 | |
I should say this on the things, oh man. | 58:33 | |
This is a story, oh god. | 58:39 | |
So they were radical lesbians for sure, | 58:43 | |
and they were majorly into the peace movement | 58:46 | |
and anti-nuclear power movement | 58:48 | |
which we thought just, nuclear power | 58:51 | |
just seemed like a huge extension of patriarchy | 58:54 | |
and the worst use of energy and the worst | 58:56 | |
disrespect for the Earth, | 59:00 | |
which we considered woman-like, the Earth. | 59:02 | |
This other woman whose, oh wow, her name is escaping me, | 59:08 | |
but she lived in, we met her in jail. | 59:11 | |
I have to tell you how our jail was | 59:15 | |
because this was highly significant. | 59:19 | |
We were arrested for blocking a road, | 59:21 | |
and we admit to be arrested | 59:25 | |
and that was because our whole purpose was to get | 59:27 | |
national attention. | 59:32 | |
- | And where was this? | |
Pam | This is in Savannah River, South Carolina | 59:33 |
at the nuclear power plant, when we blocked | 59:37 | |
trucks from coming in or out. | 59:40 | |
And a whole bunch of people got arrested, maybe 100 people. | 59:44 | |
And somehow they let the 12 of us stay together, | 59:50 | |
and we were sent to a jail in Aiken. | 59:54 | |
We got arrested near Barnwell, that's where the plant is, | 59:58 | |
the Savannah River plant, | 1:00:03 | |
and we were sent to Aiken, South Carolina | 1:00:05 | |
because there were too many of us for one jail. | 1:00:08 | |
The 12 of us, only the 12 of us were sent to this little | 1:00:10 | |
country jail in Aiken, South Carolina. | 1:00:14 | |
And that jail, they had two floors to their jail. | 1:00:19 | |
They turned to the top floor into our jail, | 1:00:26 | |
and they let the men be on the bottom. | 1:00:31 | |
And they just gave us the top floor, | 1:00:33 | |
which was designed in a way that you walked up the stairs | 1:00:36 | |
and then it had a three-sided walkway, | 1:00:39 | |
more than a walkway, it was probably 12 feet wide. | 1:00:45 | |
And then jail cells on the interior of that walkway | 1:00:49 | |
in a U shape, so you got a U-shaped hall | 1:00:53 | |
and then a bunch of, I don't know how many jail cells, | 1:00:57 | |
maybe eight jail cells, four on one side of that U | 1:01:00 | |
and four on the other side backing up to each other. | 1:01:06 | |
So on the bottom of the U, there weren't any openings. | 1:01:08 | |
They locked us into our little cells the first night, | 1:01:13 | |
and they put us in jail because we wouldn't give our names. | 1:01:17 | |
We were known as the Jane Doe's | 1:01:21 | |
because we refused to give our names | 1:01:23 | |
because we knew that was a tactic | 1:01:25 | |
that we'd get more attention. | 1:01:28 | |
It would bring the media to us | 1:01:30 | |
so we could get our message out. | 1:01:33 | |
So we stayed the Jane Doe's. | 1:01:34 | |
Well, the jail people liked us | 1:01:36 | |
and recognized right away we weren't criminals. | 1:01:40 | |
They opened, they never locked us, | 1:01:44 | |
past that first night, they didn't lock any of the cells. | 1:01:47 | |
So we were given the run of the upstairs alone, | 1:01:51 | |
no jail people, no nothing, just us 12 | 1:01:57 | |
got to be, have the upstairs of the jail, | 1:02:01 | |
which was not much of a jail anymore. | 1:02:05 | |
So we had a giant CR group and we'd dec, | 1:02:09 | |
people brought us yarn, we put webs all over the place. | 1:02:11 | |
NPR came and interviewed us. | 1:02:19 | |
All the local newspapers came and interviewed us. | 1:02:24 | |
The Gainesville Sun got people to come and interview us. | 1:02:27 | |
We majorly got our word out. | 1:02:31 | |
Meanwhile, we had consciousness raising groups | 1:02:36 | |
three times a day. | 1:02:39 | |
And in that context, back to the women from Sugarloaf, | 1:02:41 | |
Blue was so radical, she was fabulous to us. | 1:02:47 | |
And this other woman was too. | 1:02:50 | |
I wish I could, Quin, Quin was her first name. | 1:02:52 | |
I hate to even tell you this story, | 1:02:57 | |
but it does seem like a part of everything. | 1:03:00 | |
Quin, oh I can't, I'm not going to. | 1:03:04 | |
I actually can't, I've decided. | 1:03:09 | |
It's not ethical to say what I. | 1:03:11 | |
I would love to, and this story should go somewhere, | 1:03:13 | |
but who do you think will hear this or see? | 1:03:19 | |
Interviewer | It's gonna be in the archives. | 1:03:21 |
Pam | And it probably wouldn't be looked at for years? | 1:03:24 |
If Quin is dead, it would be okay to say this story, | 1:03:26 | |
and I don't know if she is. | 1:03:30 | |
I just beg people not to go after her if she is still alive. | 1:03:32 | |
She grew up a. | 1:03:39 | |
Interviewer | Should I turn it off? | 1:03:41 |
Pam | Let me tell it to you first and you decide. | 1:03:42 |
I'm not going to tell that story | 1:03:45 | |
partly because it's not really my story | 1:03:47 | |
but the part that is my story about it was that it was, | 1:03:49 | |
what we were told was, to me it went along a violent line | 1:03:53 | |
and it kinda cemented for us, | 1:03:59 | |
for the us meaning my friends and I, | 1:04:04 | |
that no we were gonna be steadfastly nonviolent, | 1:04:08 | |
that we believed that that was the true path, | 1:04:11 | |
that that was what feminism, which we now call the feminism, | 1:04:15 | |
what that was leading to | 1:04:20 | |
and that was an essential core for us. | 1:04:22 | |
I think it was in those consciousness raising groups | 1:04:26 | |
that we first started talking about our dreams, | 1:04:29 | |
sharing our dreams, literally night dreams. | 1:04:31 | |
We would have a dream group every morning | 1:04:34 | |
to share what was going on in our unconscious. | 1:04:36 | |
And out of that group, | 1:04:40 | |
we decided to do a women's peace march | 1:04:42 | |
and we started planning it while we were in jail. | 1:04:45 | |
We stayed in jail for two weeks | 1:04:49 | |
and then in order to start | 1:04:51 | |
really doing the women's peace march work, | 1:04:54 | |
we gave our names and got out. | 1:04:58 | |
We'd figured we'd done our, | 1:04:59 | |
we'd gotten the attention we were gonna get. | 1:05:01 | |
Interviewer | Was there anything to do about sobriety? | 1:05:03 |
Pam | Oh my god, there was, | 1:05:06 |
well, not all of us. | 1:05:07 | |
I smoked a joint while I was in jail. | 1:05:09 | |
But there were two alcoholics among us | 1:05:12 | |
who were trying to cope with that | 1:05:17 | |
and they became sober in jail. | 1:05:20 | |
You do become sober in jail. | 1:05:22 | |
Although I did have that joint passed to me in a book | 1:05:24 | |
and I did smoke a couple of toasts | 1:05:27 | |
and everybody else freaked out about that. | 1:05:30 | |
But at any rate, sobriety did become, | 1:05:33 | |
for some people, it became | 1:05:40 | |
wonderful, really wonderful. | 1:05:44 | |
I think Corky'd feel free for me to say | 1:05:47 | |
that was the beginning of her long-term sobriety. | 1:05:49 | |
And Blue also, Blue I think was, | 1:05:54 | |
Blue was part of leading her to sobriety | 1:05:56 | |
because Blue had been sober for many years by then. | 1:05:59 | |
Blue was probably 10 years older than us | 1:06:02 | |
and had come out of a radical lesbian, the 50s thing. | 1:06:07 | |
She was somebody born a lesbian, true to her lesbianism | 1:06:12 | |
from a young age. | 1:06:17 | |
And she told us stories about that. | 1:06:19 | |
That was incredible in jail, | 1:06:22 | |
to hear stories from different women | 1:06:23 | |
about what their lives had brought them to | 1:06:28 | |
or what their lives had been like. | 1:06:32 | |
So then we did the Women's Peace March in December of '83. | 1:06:35 | |
Interviewer | When did you get out of jail? | 1:06:44 |
Pam | In the fall. | 1:06:48 |
We went to jail and we were there for two weeks, | 1:06:50 | |
that October. | 1:06:52 | |
We had Halloween in jail, so I know it was October. | 1:06:53 | |
So we went to jail somewhere in the 20s of October | 1:06:56 | |
and got out somewhere the first of November | 1:07:01 | |
and by December we were starting the peace walk. | 1:07:03 | |
And we went from Gainesville to Key West | 1:07:05 | |
and we walked the whole way. | 1:07:08 | |
And that started out with its purpose to be | 1:07:11 | |
to spread the word outward | 1:07:15 | |
to communities that we walked through | 1:07:17 | |
against the nuclear power industry. | 1:07:20 | |
But as we went along, that slowly changed | 1:07:24 | |
and became more and more about | 1:07:30 | |
women's inner development. | 1:07:34 | |
And I would say by halfway through Florida, | 1:07:37 | |
nobody was reaching out anymore except to | 1:07:39 | |
women's groups. | 1:07:45 | |
At first, we were all about the whole world | 1:07:47 | |
and getting the message and having press conferences | 1:07:50 | |
and da-da-da. | 1:07:53 | |
By halfway, we were now much, much more into radical, | 1:07:54 | |
internal feminism. | 1:08:04 | |
And it was at that time | 1:08:08 | |
that I personally had a split with some of my best friends | 1:08:11 | |
because they became lesbian separatists on that walk. | 1:08:16 | |
In fact, I would say the majority of women that walked, | 1:08:22 | |
that did that walk, who stuck with it, became separatists. | 1:08:26 | |
And I had a boy child and I never could embrace separatism | 1:08:32 | |
for a variety of reasons, mostly | 1:08:43 | |
I think I had a core spiritual belief | 1:08:46 | |
that even though I wanted to be, | 1:08:49 | |
live my life mostly separate from men, | 1:08:55 | |
I didn't think that was my long-term goal, | 1:08:59 | |
to have my whole life be separate from men. | 1:09:03 | |
I can have my private life, but I didn't, | 1:09:06 | |
and I saw a purpose in doing that for women | 1:09:09 | |
but I didn't see it as a goal. | 1:09:12 | |
And all of my best friends, well not all, | 1:09:15 | |
but some of my most significant best friends | 1:09:20 | |
followed the separatist path and then lived it for the next | 1:09:23 | |
10 years, and so I lost two at least, | 1:09:30 | |
two of my very best friends I lost during that time | 1:09:39 | |
and didn't get back with them until the early '90s. | 1:09:44 | |
Our lives just went in really different directions. | 1:09:52 | |
Randi and I stayed with our whatever, our not separatist | 1:09:55 | |
but still radical women perspective, | 1:10:01 | |
and Judy and Lynda Lou went into a very separatist stage. | 1:10:08 | |
Interviewer | And Becki was on that? | 1:10:16 |
Pam | We met Becki on the peace walk. | 1:10:17 |
We stayed at her house. | 1:10:20 | |
She offered, she heard about the peace walk, | 1:10:21 | |
and she and her girlfriend at the time | 1:10:24 | |
offered us their house to stay in outside Orlando. | 1:10:26 | |
And so, that's where we stayed, | 1:10:30 | |
and Becki came to our circle because we always had circles | 1:10:32 | |
and she came to our circle that night in her living room, | 1:10:36 | |
I think it was on her porch, | 1:10:40 | |
and that's how she. | 1:10:43 | |
- | And she just found out | |
about it. | 1:10:45 | |
- | And she just said, | |
I'm going with these women, and she left her life. | 1:10:46 | |
And that happened to a lot of women on that walk. | 1:10:50 | |
They came to that walk and they left what they were doing | 1:10:53 | |
and joined up. | 1:10:59 | |
It took us months to get to Key West. | 1:11:01 | |
It was a long way to walk. | 1:11:04 | |
Interviewer | Tell me how you worked that. | 1:11:06 |
I think Sandra Lambert was in that group? | 1:11:11 | |
Pam | Sandra Lambert heard about it. | 1:11:13 |
Sandra Lambert, she didn't go to jail, | 1:11:17 | |
but I think she was at Savannah River. | 1:11:20 | |
A bunch of the women, she was from Atlanta, | 1:11:26 | |
and a bunch of the women from Atlanta came to Savannah River | 1:11:29 | |
for the protest and they were also arrested. | 1:11:33 | |
But I don't think Sandra was arrested because she was, | 1:11:36 | |
it would have been a dangerous situation for her. | 1:11:39 | |
She was on crutches at the time. | 1:11:41 | |
- | And she was running Charis. | 1:11:43 |
- | And she walked on the walk, | |
she went on crutches on the walk. | 1:11:47 | |
She wasn't in a wheelchair. | 1:11:49 | |
Interviewer | Wasn't she running Charis then? | 1:11:51 |
Pam | She was running Charis. | 1:11:52 |
She was one of the two or three owners. | 1:11:53 | |
She and Sherry and one other, maybe just she and Sherry | 1:11:57 | |
owned it. | 1:12:01 | |
She came to the walk and that moved her to Gainesville. | 1:12:05 | |
We were, are, whatever, a really dynamic group of women | 1:12:10 | |
who were fun-loving. | 1:12:18 | |
That's something about the South. | 1:12:21 | |
When you ask about how's the South different, | 1:12:22 | |
we are fun-loving. | 1:12:25 | |
Corky and that whole group of women, oh my god, | 1:12:28 | |
they were even separatists before there was such a word | 1:12:32 | |
as separatists, but they, they just had fun. | 1:12:36 | |
They did not think consciousness | 1:12:40 | |
excluded being wild and fun. | 1:12:43 | |
And that was always something | 1:12:49 | |
that was extremely attractive about us, I think. | 1:12:51 | |
And we were emotional and deep. | 1:12:56 | |
I would say those were core values of the southern women, | 1:13:00 | |
to take our feelings into account, to trust them, | 1:13:10 | |
and to be deep, | 1:13:18 | |
to not be superficial | 1:13:21 | |
and then to have a heck of a lot of fun. | 1:13:23 | |
We always believed that. | 1:13:26 | |
Music was always a big part of us. | 1:13:28 | |
Now that kinda leads you to fun. | 1:13:30 | |
We were always playing music together, | 1:13:33 | |
and we were always listening to music. | 1:13:35 | |
Interviewer | There was a whole women's music | 1:13:45 |
movement. | 1:13:47 | |
- | Huge women's music. | |
Interviewer | Holly Near, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian. | 1:13:48 |
Pam | How did I get, how did this happen? | 1:13:57 |
What were we writing? | 1:14:02 | |
I met Corky, when I came back from Colorado, | 1:14:04 | |
this was '73 so it was before the women's health center. | 1:14:11 | |
I was a waitress at a Pizza Hut, | 1:14:13 | |
and Corky came in | 1:14:18 | |
with somebody else, I don't know who it was, | 1:14:23 | |
and sat in a booth and ordered coffee or something or Cokes. | 1:14:25 | |
And they just sat there and they were writing. | 1:14:29 | |
And I kept overhearing. | 1:14:31 | |
And I walked up to them and I said, | 1:14:32 | |
"Are you women's liberationists?" | 1:14:35 | |
They looked at me and said, well yeah. | 1:14:38 | |
I said, "What are you planning?" | 1:14:41 | |
And they were planning | 1:14:43 | |
an art and health | 1:14:49 | |
festival at the Thomas Center. | 1:14:54 | |
And it was a precursor to the spring arts festival. | 1:14:58 | |
And they were planning it. | 1:15:03 | |
And I said, well I want to help. | 1:15:04 | |
And so they, she was just like, a waitress. | 1:15:05 | |
So that's how I met Corky. | 1:15:10 | |
Interviewer | What year was that? | 1:15:12 |
Pam | That was before the women's health, | 1:15:13 |
that must have been '73. | 1:15:14 | |
So that's how I met that group. | 1:15:16 | |
That was very fun, that was a fantastic, | 1:15:25 | |
that was all fun. | 1:15:28 | |
That was puppets and art and probably Lorelai was involved. | 1:15:29 | |
I really don't know exactly who all was involved. | 1:15:33 | |
Interviewer | Had they bought the North 40 yet? | 1:15:39 |
Pam | No, oh maybe, maybe they had, | 1:15:40 |
but not very many of them. | 1:15:43 | |
Yeah, probably right around that time, they had. | 1:15:44 | |
They lived in the red house though. | 1:15:47 | |
And Pat was the only one who lived at the North 40 | 1:15:52 | |
at that point. | 1:15:57 | |
She lived in a little teeny teeny travel trailer. | 1:15:59 | |
But other women had built structures there. | 1:16:02 | |
At that time, to build structures, | 1:16:08 | |
they insisted on using only hand tools | 1:16:11 | |
because power tools were considered too male | 1:16:14 | |
and too much a part of the patriarchy | 1:16:18 | |
so we only would use hand tools to build things. | 1:16:21 | |
So you can imagine how long it took to build a house. | 1:16:24 | |
So yeah, there's a whole group of those women | 1:16:32 | |
that I was just pretty peripheral to, | 1:16:33 | |
although they were the partiers and so we started partying. | 1:16:36 | |
So that was a huge thing in Gainesville, | 1:16:43 | |
was having music concerts and having parties, | 1:16:44 | |
probably a fair amount of drinking | 1:16:49 | |
but nobody seemed like they were getting drunk. | 1:16:51 | |
Everybody smoked marijuana at the time, | 1:16:55 | |
so that was kind of a non-issue. | 1:16:57 | |
I wouldn't have trusted anybody who didn't smoke marijuana. | 1:16:59 | |
I wouldn't have given them two cents | 1:17:02 | |
because I felt like, well it was a cultural thing. | 1:17:05 | |
That was what helped raise your consciousness, | 1:17:08 | |
and if anybody was against that, | 1:17:10 | |
well you just wouldn't have had anything to do with them. | 1:17:14 | |
They didn't seem worth the time of day. | 1:17:18 | |
Now, if somebody didn't smoke because they, | 1:17:21 | |
I'm not sure I even knew anybody back then | 1:17:26 | |
that was like this, | 1:17:28 | |
but if they had some kind of. | 1:17:29 | |
Interviewer | Respiratory thing. | 1:17:33 |
Pam | Yeah, then it would seem okay, | 1:17:34 |
but if it made them weird, well then you're like, | 1:17:35 | |
oh okay, that tells you something. | 1:17:38 | |
I don't want to be around anybody | 1:17:41 | |
that that makes them weird. | 1:17:42 | |
But anyway, that's just the vibe of, | 1:17:46 | |
that group is just, they are partiers, | 1:17:50 | |
and they're having fun | 1:17:54 | |
and everybody is trying to work out | 1:17:58 | |
their personal relationships. | 1:18:00 | |
That was a giant basis of the women's movement, here anyway. | 1:18:03 | |
Who's the poet? | 1:18:11 | |
Oh wow, who wrote the book on honesty. | 1:18:14 | |
Interviewer | Adrienne Rich? | 1:18:20 |
Pam | Adrienne Rich, okay, that was like our Bible. | 1:18:21 |
She had some statement about | 1:18:26 | |
you aren't telling me something or other | 1:18:29 | |
because you're not doing it. | 1:18:31 | |
You say you're doing it to protect me, | 1:18:33 | |
but in fact, you're doing it to protect yourself | 1:18:36 | |
to not have to deal with me. | 1:18:39 | |
So we were really into poets that were writing about honesty | 1:18:42 | |
and about core experiences and yeah. | 1:18:49 | |
It was a whole cultural movement. | 1:18:54 | |
And for me and my people, fun was a part of it. | 1:18:59 | |
He has notes, yes, yes. | 1:19:04 | |
It's a little teeny, it's a Bible, it's a Bible. | 1:19:07 | |
- | A manifesto. | 1:19:12 |
- | It is, it's our manifesto. | |
Interviewer | About being honest. | 1:19:15 |
Pam | About honesty, about radical honesty. | 1:19:16 |
We believed in that. | 1:19:19 | |
It got us into some trouble in ourselves some of the time | 1:19:21 | |
because. | 1:19:27 | |
Interviewer | Notes on Lying. | 1:19:29 |
Pam | Notes on Lying, that was the name of it, yeah. | 1:19:30 |
During some of this time, | 1:19:40 | |
I was with Lynda Lou and Marilyn Mesh. | 1:19:41 | |
Marilyn Mesh and Lynda Lou Simmons had invited me | 1:19:46 | |
to join with the men they were involved with at the time | 1:19:49 | |
to do an organic farm, | 1:19:55 | |
so that was in 1979. | 1:19:57 | |
I was still at the health center, | 1:20:02 | |
and I did both for a long time. | 1:20:03 | |
And we did sweat lodges and it was with them | 1:20:07 | |
that I was doing a lot of the anti-nuclear work. | 1:20:13 | |
And we were pretty spread into lots of parts | 1:20:17 | |
of the cultural stuff that was happening then. | 1:20:21 | |
Organic food was all part of it. | 1:20:26 | |
We also believed that the world might end anytime soon. | 1:20:29 | |
So we were, for a little tiny period, | 1:20:33 | |
we were the types that wanted to always have | 1:20:35 | |
a knife with us | 1:20:38 | |
and some water and wool blanket because | 1:20:43 | |
what if the world has a big explosion. | 1:20:49 | |
Interviewer | What were you gonna do with the knife? | 1:20:54 |
Pam | Oh, we'd have to cut a lot of things. | 1:20:56 |
If you're on your own and the world is mostly blown up | 1:20:58 | |
and you're the last people left, | 1:21:01 | |
you're gonna have to survive. | 1:21:03 | |
So you need a knife to survive, | 1:21:05 | |
you need a good wool blanket, you need water. | 1:21:07 | |
You might have to make a bow and arrow. | 1:21:10 | |
I don't know what we thought we were gonna do really, | 1:21:15 | |
but that seemed essential to us. | 1:21:17 | |
It's huge. | 1:21:26 | |
We never fit in one little story, | 1:21:27 | |
all of what we were touching into. | 1:21:29 | |
It still informs me to this day. | 1:21:33 | |
I don't think I've changed my conscious. | 1:21:35 | |
Well, maybe I've changed my consciousness, | 1:21:39 | |
but the basic parts that grew during that time | 1:21:41 | |
are there right now. | 1:21:46 | |
Interviewer | So after the peace walk, | 1:21:48 |
I remember I was part of that at the end, | 1:21:53 | |
but that whole experience was very, what? | 1:21:55 | |
It's a lot of processing. | 1:22:07 | |
- | It was complex. | |
It was a lot of processing. | 1:22:10 | |
That was the circles. | 1:22:11 | |
That's how it became more inner than outer, | 1:22:12 | |
is the circles became more and more personal. | 1:22:15 | |
They were huge circles. | 1:22:18 | |
We're talking plenty of times 60, 70 women. | 1:22:19 | |
I don't know exactly what came of that | 1:22:30 | |
because it was all so personal. | 1:22:32 | |
For me, it was losing my best friends, | 1:22:33 | |
that I could not go along the path | 1:22:38 | |
they were gonna go along, that they did go along. | 1:22:40 | |
They didn't exclude me. | 1:22:44 | |
It's just that I, we each had to follow our core belief | 1:22:45 | |
and theirs was becoming different than mine. | 1:22:51 | |
They went on to plan LEAP out of that, out of the peace walk | 1:22:57 | |
which was, what did that stand for. | 1:23:02 | |
Lesbians for Empowerment | 1:23:04 | |
and Process, I'm sure that wasn't it. | 1:23:08 | |
What was it? | 1:23:12 | |
I don't know what it stands for. | 1:23:17 | |
I don't know, but LEAP was its name. | 1:23:20 | |
And that was at the North 40. | 1:23:22 | |
And they're the ones that planned that. | 1:23:24 | |
I went to it, but I wasn't part of the planning | 1:23:26 | |
because by then it was lesbian separatists | 1:23:29 | |
who were planning that. | 1:23:32 | |
- | Were you still working | |
at the Gainesville women's health center? | 1:23:33 | |
Pam | No, by then I was just, let's see. | 1:23:34 |
No, I wasn't. | 1:23:36 | |
I was still farming. | 1:23:38 | |
And I was, I quit my. | 1:23:43 | |
My kids grew up at that point, well not fully grew up, | 1:23:44 | |
but my daughter, in '83, she was 19, | 1:23:49 | |
so she was pretty much, she was born in '64. | 1:23:52 | |
And Ian was born in '67 and he was by that time | 1:23:56 | |
living at his father's. | 1:24:00 | |
So I was free. | 1:24:02 | |
So what did I do? | 1:24:04 | |
I just started to, I'd been working so hard. | 1:24:05 | |
I started taking part-time jobs | 1:24:08 | |
and just mostly doing my activist work. | 1:24:13 | |
Interviewer | When did people sort of, | 1:24:16 |
did a lot of people leave the Gainesville | 1:24:18 | |
women's health center at that point? | 1:24:19 | |
Pam | Yes. | 1:24:21 |
Candice, I don't remember, she left before I did. | 1:24:23 | |
Betsy went to graduate school. | 1:24:26 | |
It was really a natural, there wasn't a big leaving. | 1:24:29 | |
We'd all been there long enough. | 1:24:32 | |
It was sort of stagnating. | 1:24:37 | |
And each of us was doing more our own thing. | 1:24:41 | |
I was now farming | 1:24:44 | |
and I was majorly on a spiritual path by then. | 1:24:46 | |
I'd been going to Eloise Page Natural Law classes | 1:24:49 | |
for probably four years by then, | 1:24:54 | |
so my path had turned a little more spiritual. | 1:24:59 | |
Betsy had gone to graduate school, she was getting her PhD. | 1:25:03 | |
Candice went off on her own spiritual thing. | 1:25:07 | |
Judy was dying. | 1:25:14 | |
Judy Levy. | 1:25:18 | |
Byllye moved up to DC or to somewhere like that. | 1:25:23 | |
Interviewer | To start the black women's. | 1:25:27 |
Pam | She started the black women's health, | 1:25:29 |
and she became just huge. | 1:25:31 | |
She got a MacArthur's genius grant. | 1:25:34 | |
Interviewer | She moved up to Atlanta first. | 1:25:40 |
Pam | Maybe Atlanta, yeah. | 1:25:41 |
But she left Gainesville and became very involved | 1:25:43 | |
in the thing she created. | 1:25:48 | |
Betsy created the rural women's health initiative | 1:25:50 | |
which to this day is going on | 1:25:55 | |
and she went on to, after her PhD, | 1:25:57 | |
she teaches at Chapel Hill, | 1:26:00 | |
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | 1:26:04 | |
She's a major mover and shaker. | 1:26:07 | |
At the women's health center, | 1:26:13 | |
we started teaching the doctors | 1:26:14 | |
how to examine women by us being the models, | 1:26:16 | |
where they put their hands inside us | 1:26:21 | |
and we told them don't do it this way, do it this way. | 1:26:24 | |
And Betsy is still teaching that model to doctors | 1:26:28 | |
up in North Carolina. | 1:26:33 | |
Randi went to PA school and started working at the children. | 1:26:36 | |
It was just a very individual thing. | 1:26:42 | |
She went on to work with children | 1:26:44 | |
who were victims of abuse. | 1:26:47 | |
And I think each of us just went on and did our own thing. | 1:26:50 | |
I went on and worked at the birth center actually. | 1:26:56 | |
But by then, Judy and Byllye were no longer involved. | 1:27:00 | |
It got bought out by midwives. | 1:27:03 | |
And I went and worked for those midwives | 1:27:05 | |
and became their kind of manager. | 1:27:07 | |
And yeah, we all. | 1:27:11 | |
Lately, what activist things? | 1:27:17 | |
Really activist, I'm not sure | 1:27:21 | |
that I did much activism beyond the '80s. | 1:27:27 | |
So I was in my 40s. | 1:27:30 | |
Interviewer | But you did go to, | 1:27:32 |
you went to acupuncturist school. | 1:27:33 | |
Pam | I went to acupuncture school, | 1:27:34 |
and then I became, it's a different kind of activism, | 1:27:36 | |
I became an alternative medical person | 1:27:40 | |
and started affecting people's lives on an individual basis. | 1:27:46 | |
Interviewer | So you always believed | 1:27:51 |
in alternative medicine. | 1:27:52 | |
Pam | Totally, totally. | 1:27:53 |
Everything feels like it all fits together. | 1:27:54 | |
I went on and from the '70s on, | 1:27:57 | |
I was interested in dream work | 1:28:01 | |
and just in the last few years, about three years ago, | 1:28:02 | |
went and got professional, I went to a two-year program | 1:28:08 | |
in dream work, in Jungian dream work. | 1:28:12 | |
And I've been doing that ever since. | 1:28:16 | |
I lead a dream group now. | 1:28:18 | |
I don't think consciousness, once you get consciousness, | 1:28:23 | |
I think you keep consciousness. | 1:28:27 | |
And so, hopefully you keep on changing with the times | 1:28:29 | |
and do what's necessary to help consciousness | 1:28:33 | |
in the time that we're in now. | 1:28:37 | |
For instance, we're in 2012 | 1:28:41 | |
and there's this whole thing about the Earth might end | 1:28:44 | |
on December 21st, I don't believe that at all. | 1:28:46 | |
I do think we're in a changed time | 1:28:50 | |
and that maybe that the Mayans could foresee | 1:28:54 | |
that we are in a changed time | 1:28:58 | |
and that seems pretty obvious to me. | 1:29:00 | |
I'm still totally interested in the environment. | 1:29:03 | |
We are right now having water issues with our aquifer, | 1:29:06 | |
and I'm in a group that is fighting the people | 1:29:11 | |
that are trying to put in cow farms | 1:29:16 | |
that will pull up major amount of water from our aquifer, | 1:29:19 | |
plus put a bunch of shit into the ground | 1:29:23 | |
and affect our aquifer. | 1:29:26 | |
So the environment has stayed critical to me | 1:29:28 | |
and I'm still doing activism work with that. | 1:29:32 | |
Relationships between men and women | 1:29:38 | |
are still critical to me. | 1:29:40 | |
I have many men friends now. | 1:29:43 | |
I'm much more relaxed about it. | 1:29:45 | |
I think their consciousness has finally changed some, | 1:29:47 | |
but that's always still work. | 1:29:51 | |
- | And has your daughter | |
become an activist? | 1:29:53 | |
Pam | My daughter and son, both are major activists | 1:29:54 |
with the Occupy movement. | 1:29:57 | |
My daughter started a group in San Diego called | 1:30:01 | |
Middle-Aged Ladies in Support of Occupy. | 1:30:04 | |
And that's become just a huge thing there, | 1:30:11 | |
and in fact, it's gone national. | 1:30:15 | |
And she's still real involved with that, | 1:30:17 | |
of women who aren't spending the nights | 1:30:19 | |
but they're down there helping the Occupiers. | 1:30:22 | |
And my son was one of the founders of Occupy | 1:30:26 | |
here in Gainesville, and he's very involved in that | 1:30:30 | |
and went down to the Republican National Convention in Tampa | 1:30:33 | |
and fed people, he went to Food Not Bombs, those people, | 1:30:39 | |
and helped feed the other people | 1:30:44 | |
who are more on the frontlines. | 1:30:46 | |
Because they're now in their late 40s, my kids. | 1:30:48 | |
Yeah, both of them are involved in that. | 1:30:52 | |
My son works with children with autism in his work life, | 1:30:55 | |
and my daughter works with elders in San Diego. | 1:31:01 | |
She's in charge of, for the county of San Diego, | 1:31:07 | |
she does all their, I don't know what it's called, | 1:31:12 | |
healthy living, something like that. | 1:31:15 | |
So she does health stuff. | 1:31:18 | |
But she doesn't like hands-on. | 1:31:19 | |
Well, that's not true, totally. | 1:31:21 | |
She does laughter yoga too. | 1:31:23 | |
She runs a whole laughter yoga program for the elders, | 1:31:25 | |
and that's the one hands-on thing she likes. | 1:31:30 | |
She more likes planning things on that level. | 1:31:33 | |
She likes planning, organizing whole big things. | 1:31:37 | |
Interviewer | Didn't she get a degree in anthropology? | 1:31:40 |
Pam | Yeah, she got a degree in anthropology, | 1:31:44 |
and she went to North Carolina | 1:31:46 | |
and got a degree in public health, | 1:31:48 | |
a master's of public health. | 1:31:50 | |
Ian, my son, has a learning disability. | 1:31:51 | |
This is like one of the tragedies of my life, | 1:31:54 | |
is that I didn't know anything about that | 1:31:59 | |
when he was growing up in the '70s. | 1:32:02 | |
I'd never heard of attention deficit disorder, | 1:32:04 | |
and I'm sure that that's what he has. | 1:32:09 | |
I just did not parent him very well | 1:32:14 | |
or at least half-assed. | 1:32:22 | |
I did some things good. | 1:32:24 | |
I loved him good. | 1:32:26 | |
I put him in an alternative school. | 1:32:28 | |
I think that was good for his spirit. | 1:32:31 | |
I think he would have been crushed in public school. | 1:32:33 | |
But I did not pay enough attention to learning. | 1:32:35 | |
And he never graduated from high school, he got a GED. | 1:32:41 | |
He got into major substance abuse, | 1:32:47 | |
and he just was pretty unhappy most of his adulthood | 1:32:51 | |
until he got sober maybe five years ago, | 1:32:56 | |
four years ago, five I think. | 1:32:59 | |
And that's changed his life. | 1:33:01 | |
And he was a carpenter all those bad years, | 1:33:03 | |
which didn't fit him at all. | 1:33:06 | |
I had a patient actually | 1:33:12 | |
who was a caregiver for autistic people. | 1:33:13 | |
And they needed somebody and I went and said to Ian, | 1:33:17 | |
you know, I think you oughta consider applying | 1:33:20 | |
for this and I know it's not much money | 1:33:22 | |
but I think it'd be steady money, | 1:33:24 | |
which in my book steady money is better than. | 1:33:27 | |
People get real sidetracked by making $20 an hour, | 1:33:31 | |
but then if they really can only work 10 hours a week, | 1:33:37 | |
what does it matter, $20 an hour? | 1:33:40 | |
Anyway, he turned out to love autistic people | 1:33:44 | |
and love being their careperson. | 1:33:49 | |
So now, he's running their daycare, day center. | 1:33:53 | |
And he loves it. | 1:34:00 | |
He feels like he shouldn't even be being paid | 1:34:02 | |
because it's so much easier than being a carpenter | 1:34:05 | |
which he wasn't at all suited to. | 1:34:08 | |
So now he just gets to be with people | 1:34:11 | |
and just be kind to them. | 1:34:13 | |
And that fits ADD people. | 1:34:15 | |
So he's finally okay, | 1:34:19 | |
but I still worry about him | 1:34:22 | |
and it's still a pretty big tragedy in my life | 1:34:25 | |
about myself basically, what I wasn't able to. | 1:34:28 | |
Of course, I had these kids when I was 19 and 22, | 1:34:33 | |
so I had a hell of a lot of growing up to do | 1:34:37 | |
as they were growing up. | 1:34:40 | |
Interviewer | Well, it's all a process, right? | 1:34:42 |
That's something I think about with feminism and about | 1:34:45 | |
the zeitgeist of our generation is that | 1:34:53 | |
it was more the journey to getting where we're going. | 1:34:59 | |
Pam | The journey itself counts. | 1:35:05 |
Interviewer | Which was a lot. | 1:35:08 |
Your life as a southern lesbian feminist activist | 1:35:12 | |
permeates in so many different directions | 1:35:22 | |
and you've gone in so many different ways. | 1:35:24 | |
In hindsight, we can be seeing some ways | 1:35:29 | |
that we would have done that differently but we did it | 1:35:34 | |
the best way that we knew how to do it. | 1:35:37 | |
Pam | With my son, during that time, | 1:35:41 |
he was a teenager in '83, he was born in '67, | 1:35:45 | |
so whatever he was, he was 16. | 1:35:50 | |
And Judy, one of my best friends | 1:35:52 | |
who went the separatist route, | 1:35:55 | |
had almost helped raise Ian. | 1:35:58 | |
She was very significant in his life. | 1:36:01 | |
And one day in the kitchen, at my house, Ian was there. | 1:36:03 | |
He was living with his father, | 1:36:08 | |
but he was over at our house. | 1:36:09 | |
And Judy was there and he went up | 1:36:11 | |
and put his arm around her. | 1:36:13 | |
But now he's a big 16-year-old punk actually, | 1:36:14 | |
he was into punk rock. | 1:36:19 | |
And Judy recoiled and said something like, don't touch me. | 1:36:20 | |
And it was heartbreaking to him | 1:36:26 | |
and that became like a heartbreaking experience for me. | 1:36:31 | |
If there was a choice, it's my kids, | 1:36:36 | |
or I say that they're gonna take precedence, | 1:36:39 | |
I didn't always act like that as I was raising them for sure | 1:36:41 | |
but in a core level, when I saw my son hurt emotionally, | 1:36:45 | |
it just crushed me, just totally crushed me. | 1:36:53 | |
And that was one of the big divisions then | 1:36:56 | |
for my friendship with somebody who had been | 1:36:59 | |
a very close friend for a decade. | 1:37:02 | |
So it's been intense. | 1:37:06 | |
Those people are now back to being my best friends. | 1:37:10 | |
I suppose we just moved in. | 1:37:14 | |
I think Judy, I don't know if she. | 1:37:16 | |
I know one of her best friends now | 1:37:17 | |
is a young man that she works with at Lightning Salvage, | 1:37:19 | |
a young gay guy is now, I would say John's her, | 1:37:24 | |
maybe not her best friend but right up there. | 1:37:28 | |
And Lynda Lou mostly has a world with women for sure. | 1:37:33 | |
But I don't think she'd call herself a separatist anymore. | 1:37:38 | |
I think we all mellowed. | 1:37:45 | |
We all mellowed. | 1:37:46 | |
And I was in a bad car accident | 1:37:49 | |
that they, in '93, '94, the beginning of '94, | 1:37:52 | |
and that brought us all back together actually, | 1:37:57 | |
when I was almost dying, then it was like, | 1:38:00 | |
they just came, they just came to the hospital. | 1:38:02 | |
It didn't matter, nothing mattered anymore. | 1:38:06 | |
And they were there. | 1:38:09 | |
And then as I recuperated, they were there. | 1:38:11 | |
And then we've been together ever since. | 1:38:15 | |
It took that, it took almost dying | 1:38:18 | |
to bring us back together, but it did. | 1:38:21 | |
Interviewer | Well, I want to thank you so much. | 1:38:26 |
This has just been a wonderful, wonderful, | 1:38:28 | |
all has been a life and a testimony to | 1:38:31 | |
what a Gainesville woman is about | 1:38:34 | |
and your part in that, so thanks. | 1:38:38 | |
Pam | Thank you. | 1:38:42 |
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