Lesbian Discrimination During WWII The Untold Story of the Manhattan Eight
Women born in the early Twentieth Century were conditioned to play it safe. How can a woman take risks when she can’t open a bank account, have a credit card, or own property without a male cosigner?
Born in 1936 in New York City, Margaret Randall came of age in such a time, but she was always a risk taker—taking big risks that yielded a big life—sometimes big dangers. The story of the extraordinary danger she faced in coming out at age fifty cap a lifetime of risks she took from an early age.
Margaret at a party heard Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and became, in her words, “turned on to poetry.”
Margaret’s family moved to Albuquerque when she was ten, so Albuquerque is stronger in her memories than her first days in New York. In her early twenties; however, she followed her mentor, artist and professor Elaine de Kooning, back to New York. Her three years there with beat poets and abstract expressionists are recounted in her memoir I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary (Duke University Press, 2020).
Margaret knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of six. But she hated having to memorize the poetry they taught in school. It wasn’t until she was nineteen and went to a party in the East Mountains (east of Albuquerque) that she heard Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and became, in her words, “turned on to poetry.” She learned the discipline and craft of poetry from the New York City poets, but believes “if I had stayed in the U.S., my poetry would have evolved very differently.” She escaped before McCarthyism ruined many artists’ lives and effectively frightened writers into producing very male, heterosexual, “safe” work.
Again taking a big risk, Margaret moved to Mexico City as a single mother with a ten-month-old son. There she took Mexican citizenship and met and married poet Sergio Mondragón with whom she had three daughters. The two young poets started an international bilingual poetry magazine, El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, which from 1962-1969 published hundreds of poets who wrote freely about everything. In the late sixties, she started reading works by feminist writers in the U.S. which shifted her gender consciousness while living in a sexist, male-dominated society.
The Mexican government became increasingly corrupt and repressive, and in 1969, she was forced to stop publishing and her passport was confiscated. She fled to Cuba, where she lived until 1980, during which time she catalogued oral histories of the women of the Cuban revolution, including Haydée Santamaría, a highly-placed revolutionary and politician who expressed to Margaret in 1970 that the Spanish use of male pronouns for both male and female was clearly unfair—an early feminist, whether she was so named or not.
Courage Amidst Conflict: Exploring Lesbian Discrimination During WWII
After Cuba, Margaret lived in Nicaragua for three years where she also catalogued oral histories of Nicaraguan women, until she wanted to come back to the U.S. to care for her aging parents. But the Reagan Administration ordered her deported soon after her return in 1984. The government claimed that her writings in several books were “against the good order and happiness of the United States.”
During the first year of her trial, Margaret’s defense team used a First Amendment defense, and the women’s community across the nation—both straight women and lesbians—rallied around her cause. Twenty-five defense committees sprang up around the country. Adrienne Rich attended the first week of her trial. Musicians performed and poets read in support of her case, including musician Holly Near, plus poets Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Pat Parker, Allen Ginsberg, and Joy Harjo.
In 1985, a lesbian supporter with whom Margaret was having dinner started a sentence with “When you come out…” After more than two decades in Latin America, it was the first time Margaret, then age fifty, considered being with a woman. “In a world of social revolution, every moment was devoted to fighting imperialism,” Margaret explains. “Within one week, I was with a woman.”
That woman was artist Barbara Byers, and they are still together nearly forty years later. “With men, being a wife was an unfortunate condition. With Barbara, finally ‘wife’ is a good thing. We are so supportive of each other in our art.” She doesn’t regret coming out in middle age because she loves her children and grandchildren dearly. “I feel like I was privileged in coming out because my life was established and my family was okay with it, both my parents and my children.”
However, while embroiled in the immigration case, her lawyers cautioned her that the Ideological Exclusion Clause of the McCarran Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 barred “sexual deviants” from entering the country. Margaret wrote poems about her new-found love, but didn’t make the gender of her subject visible. She won her case on appeal in 1989. After that, “I wrote about it as I wanted.”
The support from her family as well as the high-profile support throughout the country—including Berkeley declaring February 2, 1986 Margaret Randall Day—made her feel a sense of responsibility to use that privilege to help defeat the McCarran Walter law—passed over Truman’s veto. Most of its provisions were repealed in 1990. “If I’m privileged—white, educated, and so on—it is my responsibility to work for those who don’t have it.” And that is Margaret Randall’s watchword. Whether as poet, essayist, photographer, translator, or lecturer, she is always a social activist, transforming the world through art. With over 200 books and a list of awards that in 2019 alone includes an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico, the Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize from Quito, Ecuador, and the Haydée Santamaría Medal from Casa de las Americas in Cuba, Margaret Randall is no doubt the most internationally-acclaimed contemporary lesbian poet.
LesBe Poetic Profile: Margaret Randall
From This Honest Land (Wings Press 2023), Margaret shares a poem capturing the moments of the “shared razor edge of fear” when she had a stroke with her beloved Barbara present.
Poet without Words
I still hear those garbled sounds,
feel my tongue like thick mud
trying to make words.
Translation didn’t step in
when I opened my mouth to speak
and the words fell apart.
My ears were working and my mind
but my tongue wouldn’t obey
what the brain commanded
and all I heard was thickness,
like glue, or steel wool
scouring the inside of my skull.
I cannot remember what I was trying to say
as my own words fought me and won.
Two or three minutes,
Iand all I heard was thickness,
like glue, or steel wool
scouring the inside of my skull.
I cannot remember what I was trying to say
as my own words fought me and won.
Two or three minutes,
I still hold the mirror of your eyes, love,
searching for meaning in mine,
shared razor edge of fear.