‘Feminist troublemaker’ Barbara Love dies at 85
Barbara Love, a seminal lesbian feminist activist and author who was determined to normalize the lesbian experience and integrate it into the early days of the women’s movement, died on November 13 in the Bronx. She was 85.
Love died of complications from leukemia and Parkinson’s disease, said her wife, Donna Smith.
“She was fearless in fighting for civil rights and acceptance of lesbian and gay people,” her obituary reads. “Her many achievements continue to influence and inspire.”
From ‘upper-middle-class comfort’ to haunting the city ‘like cockroaches’
Barbara Joan Love was born to a wealthy family on February 27, 1937, in Ridgewood, N.J.
Although raised in privilege in New Jersey, she came of age in the late 1950s and early ’60s as a closeted young woman in New York’s Greenwich Village. She haunted the city’s Mafia-run lesbian bars, which were often raided by the police. “We’re like cockroaches,” she said of her fellow lesbians of the era. “We only come out at night.”
In those pre-Stonewall days, you could be fired if your employer discovered you were gay. Your parents might no longer welcome you home.
In her memoir, Barbara Love wrote of coming out to her father and brothers in 1970, when she was 33. Her father had shunned her when she came out, but her mother- by then divorced from her father- had declared: “First to thine own self be true!”
Love and ‘the Lavender Menace’
Barbara Love was true to herself and had no problem making her truth known to others.
For example, she was among a group of lesbians who fought to be recognized by the National Organization for Women (NOW) when then-president Betty Friedan had derided lesbian feminists as “the Lavender Menace,” seemingly internalizing the bias of the mainstream press and popular culture by seeing the concerns of lesbians as a threat to the political aims of the movement.
So Love, along with others who had formed a consciousness-raising group of lesbian feminists, took action. They made T-shirts with the phrase “The Lavender Menace” and wore them to NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women in the spring of 1970 in New York City.
They tore through the audience, holding placards declaring: “We are your worst nightmare, your best fantasy.”
A legacy of Love
Barbara Love put her troublemaking ways to good use and left a lasting legacy as a lesbian feminist activist, author, and editor. Perhaps that legacy is best represented by Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, a book she co-wrote with Sidney Abbott, her partner at the time.
“Our goal,” they wrote about the book, “is to go about our lives- as human beings, as women, as Lesbians- un-self-consciously, and to be able to spend all of our energy and time on work or fun, and none on the arts of concealment or on self-hatred.”
Sources:
- The New York Times
- Patch
- Legacy
- Featured Photo Credit: Diana Jo Davies, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library