Many baby boomers consider themselves a “child of the sixties” – the “flower children” of the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War protest era.
I myself was a child in the ‘60s, born at the tail end of the baby boom, but influenced greatly by the social movements unfolding around me.
Destined to be a Feminist
In some ways, I was destined to be a feminist. My mother was fired for being pregnant with me, despite being the sole wage-earner for our family at that time. Twelve years later when she divorced my cheating father, the judge said he expected to see me and my sister in juvenile court before too long if our mother insisted on taking back her maiden name as she’d requested.
My school years were in New Haven, CT at a time when National Guard tanks were rolling through the streets to suppress racial justice and anti-war protests, immortalized in the Doors’ lyric, “Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven.” This was where Black Panther Bobby Seale was put on trial and Yale President Kingman Brewster famously said he didn’t think a Black man could get a fair trial in America.
I protested against sex discrimination in my grade school when I wasn’t allowed to help reset the lunchroom tables and chairs, a job just for boys. I voted for George McGovern in our 5th grade’s mock election and put an Impeach Nixon bumpersticker in my bedroom window a year later.
My mantra as a child was “That’s not fair!” My mother would always reply, “Sorry, life’s not fair.”
I imagined I would join the counterculture when I grew up. But the fall I left home for college in Oregon, Ronald Reagan was elected, and there was very little student activism on my campus. The closest counterculture I could find was the Grateful Dead.
The Home I’d Been Searching For
It wasn’t until my senior year, when I was scanning the want ads for a job, that I found the home I’d been searching for.
It was volunteering at the Portland Women’s Crisis Line.
In their 40-hour training, all of a sudden – my life made sense. I understood what had happened to me as child sexual abuse and date rape; what happened to my mother as emotional abuse; and how these experiences were not our fault, not isolated incidents, but part of how male dominance is maintained over all spheres of life. I learned how sexism, racism, class oppression and all other structural inequities are inextricably bound together.
And I noticed that the women I was meeting who ran the crisis line and other feminist groups I was joining – the women I most admired – were lesbians. I wanted to be just like them.
My very first crisis line shift was on International Women’s Day, 1985. These were 12 hour shifts, 6pm to 6am, from two twin beds flanked by two red rotary phones. The experienced volunteer guiding me through that first night promised it would be fun – just like a slumber party! She would make us lesbian popcorn – with tamari and brewers yeast.
I was sure a woman would die that night because of mistakes I would make.
The crisis line quickly became my life. I was lucky I graduated college. We organized Take Back the Night marches, escorted outside abortion clinics, ran anti-racism trainings. Soon my volunteer shifts turned into a paid job.
The next year I was hired as the Outreach Program Coordinator at a battered women’s shelter. There I ran peer support groups for women who’d been in abusive situations, and also coordinated our community education program. This was still years before Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act.
Most professionals providing housing, healthcare, welfare, counseling, legal aid, and law enforcement had little-to-no training in the realities of sexual and domestic violence, in what was needed to move from victim to survivor.
Our mission to change that included doing the first-ever training of Portland police officers – we spent 30 weeks giving one-hour presentations to 20 officers at a time. Every week’s session was a public hazing, after which one or two officers would come up to say, privately, that everything we had said was right… their mother or sister, or wife in her first marriage, had been through it. But they never broke rank in front of their peers.
“Amazingly – and terrifyingly – I got the job.”
A few years later, I was once again reading the help wanted ads and saw that a coalition of women’s rights groups was recruiting a lobbyist for the upcoming state legislative session. I had never even been inside the state capitol, but a woman I was dating at the time was a legislative committee staffer. The night before my interview we played a game they gave out at the Capitol visitors center called “How a Bill Becomes a Law.”
During my interview, when asked about my experience as a lobbyist, I said: “I have none, but my understanding of how a bill becomes as law is…”
Amazingly – and terrifyingly – I got the job. Their hiring pool was extremely shallow, given this was a temporary six-month position for very little pay. Even so, several of the women who held the position before me had gone on to become judges and elected officials; the woman who followed me, Kate Brown, later became Oregon’s governor, the first openly bisexual governor in the nation.
For that 1989 legislative session, my job was simple: Analyze every single bill introduced for its impact on women, and mobilize support or opposition accordingly.
The bill our coalition led with aimed to address sex discrimination in insurance. Trying to fight the insurance industry, a colleague said, is like trying to jump over the tallest buildings in the country – because they own them. We got incredibly close, even winning a supportive editorial in the state’s leading (and conservative) newspaper. Then the opposition brought in the big guns. They secured a retraction of the editorial and managed to attach an anti-abortion rider to the bill.
Oregon was then and remains one of the few states to fully protect – and fund – a woman’s right to choose, with no legal restrictions for those aged 15 and older. Provoking a vote on this was the last thing we wanted. We managed to kill the anti-choice amendment, but that meant killing our insurance equity bill too.
When the session ended it was time for another long-shot job interview. The woman who had founded the statewide coalition of battered women’s shelters and rape hotlines was retiring. Their lead candidate dropped out. I was offered the job. I was 26. The staff I joined as their new Executive Director were 10, 20, and 30 years older than me.
In later years, when I saw the barriers to entry that developed as advocacy work became better funded and more professionalized, I realized how fortunate I was to have come along at the end of the founders’ era.
I got to learn from the women who had seen a problem with no solution, who decided to create something out of nothing. Women who were willing to take a chance on a younger woman who didn’t have much experience, but was committed to pushing the boulder up the hill.
Pushing the Boulder up the Hill
During the five years I led the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, our issues started to move onto the main stage. The first real federal funding came through in 1994. And we had what could be seen now as the first “Me Too” moment.
When Anita Hill was subjected to such horrific treatment during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hearing, a Washington Post reporter, Florence Graves, decided to investigate why the U.S. Senate thought it was okay to behave as they did. She found ample evidence of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, with many stories pointing, ironically, to Oregon Senator Bob Packwood. I say ironically because Packwood was known as the strongest Republican champion for a woman’s right to choose at the time – one of the only Republicans. He was good on women’s legal rights – but wrong in how he behaved when no one was watching.
After the Packwood story broke in the Washington Post, we knew there were more victims back in Oregon who might want to come forward, in solidarity with the initial women who’d told their story. We offered our phone number for these disclosures – and got quite a few. Our humble little office was suddenly inundated by international news crews wanting access to these women, and an intense pressure campaign from the local newspaper that was caught flatfooted by the Washington Post scoop.
I somehow drew the short straw and had to be the one to call Gloria Steinem to persuade her to stop defending Senator Packwood. Thankfully, she answered her own phone, listened to what I had to say, and came out in support of the women. Soon after, Packwood resigned.
A Precursor to the Time We’re in Now
During this same time, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Oregon was becoming a testing ground for movements to assert white and Christian nationalism, to push back against the gains of the civil rights, women’s, and gay rights movements. A precursor to the time we’re in now.
In 1988, a group of right-wing radicals calling themselves the Oregon Citizens Alliance – or OCA – put their first anti-gay measure on the Oregon ballot. It would become the first statewide loss in a total of 35 state and local ballot measures in which Oregonians voted on the rights of their gay and lesbian neighbors.
The highest profile of the OCA’s statewide ballot measures was Ballot Measure 9 in 1992. Ballot Measure 9 would have amended the Oregon Constitution to declare homosexuality abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse, equating it with pedophilia, sadism, and masochism. An earlier version included bestiality and necrophilia – sex with animals and corpses.
After nearly two years of courageous mobilization by thousands of Oregonians from all walks of life, voters rejected Measure 9. But along the way, hate crimes soared, including the desecration of a Catholic church and the firebomb murders of a Black lesbian and her white gay roommate.
At the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, we were in a unique position to contribute to this two-year opposition campaign. First, we had expertise in child sexual abuse, so we took the lead in debunking the pedophilia propaganda until the mainstream medical and psychological organizations stepped into the fray. Second, we were one of the very few advocacy organizations that had a presence in each of Oregon’s 36, mostly extremely rural, counties.
Along with the anti-racism commitment that was part of the Coalition’s work, we had done extensive internal education on Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, the title of a book by Arkansas activist Suzanne Pharr, who traveled often to Oregon.
My board chair Marcy Westerling set off around the state with Suzanne and two activists of color with expertise in far-right movements, Pat McGuire and Scot Nakagawa, to help rural communities understand the risks to democracy and our state, if rights were once again to be denied to a category of people. This was the founding of the Rural Organizing Project, a courageous network of rural activists in Oregon, now in its 4th decade.
Countering the “Sin of Despair”
A few years ago, as we were approaching the 30th anniversary of the historic No on 9 campaign, I was invited to head up a year-long project to bring the organizing lessons from that time into our present day, given our rights, and the fundamentals of inclusive democracy, are again on the line.
The result was a website, No on 9 Remembered, that tells 30 stories of resistance.
My collaborator in that project was Eric Ward, a Black pro-democracy leader. We centered the project on this belief of his:
“We have to become a movement that understands the long arc of history. Learning from earlier struggles teaches us discipline and helps prevent the sin of despair. In a time where some seek to erase or deny our nation’s history, remembering the stories that are part of the movement for inclusive democracy is a powerful act of resistance and redemption.” ~ Eric K. Ward
Back to election night, 1992 – we did defeat Ballot Measure 9, but that very night the Oregon Citizens Alliance vowed to come back with a sanitized version of the measure in rural towns and counties all over the state, and at the state level in 1994. We were distraught that we’d spent nearly 2 years, millions of dollars, and untold blood, sweat and tears – just stopping a bad outcome from happening in just one election, without building up something of our own.
Strengthening the Movement for Inclusive Democracy
A few of us committed to using the next round of campaigns to strengthen our movement for inclusive democracy. I left my job at the domestic and sexual violence coalition and threw myself full-time into the effort.
It was a tough go – everyone was worn out from the Measure 9 campaign, and 1994 was a lower turn-out, non-presidential election year in which Newt Gingrich and the Christian Right took control of Congress. But we defeated the anti-gay measure in Oregon and established what’s come to be known as one of the strongest LGBTQ+ rights organizations in the country, Basic Rights Oregon.
In 2015 Oregon was named the second-most LGBT-friendly state in the nation.
After that campaign the owner of a small public relations firm asked me to come join their team. I wasn’t even sure what public relations was! They worked only with non-profits and public interest causes, and he told me, “It’s about building a broader base of support for your mission.” I realized that’s what I’d been doing all along, only without professional training or any real budget.
Working there taught me how to be a consultant in strategic planning, program development, fundraising, and communications. But after a few years I realized I didn’t want to work in what was rapidly becoming a big firm.
I went out on my own, and have been self-employed ever since, partnering with organizations working on reproductive rights, environmental protection, criminal justice reform, improved funding for schools and human services, countering anti-semitism and white nationalism, and other issues dear to my heart.
But there was another motivator for the freedom of self-employment. By that time I’d met Amber. We shared a dream of life on the road….
Read Part 2: Fighting for our Rights & Rites
Photo: Holly (center) at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian & Gay Rights with her mother (right) and grandmother (left), an anti-fascist WWII émigré from Italy
Caveat: As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.” Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory, from No on 9 Remembered.