Betty Kaplowitz, Gay Women’s Liberation, and Out & About
Betty Kaplowitz (born 1946), originally from New York City and a creative writing student at SF State, served as the founding co-chair of SF State’s GLF, alongside Charles Thorpe, in 1970. They also worked together to create the Gay Rap group discussed in the previous section. During the same period, Kaplowitz served as the “woman’s advisor” for and a poetry contributor to San Francisco Gay Free Press, which Thorpe edited.[1] As noted previously, Kaplowitz told a Phoenix reporter that GLF men were “often condescending and chauvinistic,” but she argued strongly, at least in 1970, for lesbians to work with gay men rather than form their own separate organizations. She clearly collaborated with Thorpe, notwithstanding their differences. Over time, however, Kaplowitz’s gender and sexual politics began to change.
In November 1970, Kaplowitz authored an essay titled “Gay Women’s Liberation: The Problem of Priorities” for the San Francisco Free Press. “Gay women’s liberation” was a phrase used across the country for a relatively short period of time, before “lesbian feminism” and “radical lesbian feminism” became more common. Kaplowitz’s essay began by discussing a meeting of eight gay liberationists, including herself, that she had attended in preparation for a program on KQED. She was the only woman and her dissatisfaction with the meeting led her to not go to the program taping. “Why was it so hard at the meeting for me to get any ideas across?” she asked. “Or even, for that matter, to get anyone’s attention, to get those seven men quiet enough to listen to me? Why, when I wanted to talk about my idea for a gay rap center, was I constantly asked to talk about Women’s Liberation?” Although she kept saying “I’m gay and here to talk about GAY Liberation,” she was ignored, which led her to ask, “Can gay men and women work together when the men are always trying to keep the women in their place?”[2]
Kaplowitz was aware that in New York “women split from GLF to form Radical Lesbians,” and in San Francisco, “there’s a Gay Women’s Liberation, which has little or nothing to do with the men of GLF.” (Kaplowitz seems to have been referring at this point to San Francisco’s GLF, not San Francisco State’s.) In both cases, the women involved were trying to decide whether to work with the women’s liberation movement. “I, for one, cannot,” Kaplowitz declared. “When possible, I work with them,” she clarified, “but they are not always ready to back up their gay sisters—not yet.” “Being gay” was more important to her, she explained, and that had led her to the conclusion that gay women should remain within GLF, but she also thought that they should form a “separate caucus” for women. They “ought to be willing to back up their gay brothers when necessary” and recognize that “the chauvinism of gay men is not of the same roots as the chauvinism of straight men.” When gay women “get ourselves together as gay women,” she emphasized, they would be able to “relate at a deeper level with Women’s Lib and with gay men.” “Lesbian implies revolution,” she concluded, but “Gay implies revolutionary even more so. And that includes men.”[3]
In March 1971, in an article headlined “Women’s Lib Has Arrived,” which focused on a recent Women’s Day Rally at SF State, the Phoenix identified Kaplowitz as a leader of Gay Women’s Lib. The article and her affiliation, if accurate, suggest that Kaplowitz’s positions had changed on some of the issues discussed a few months earlier, moving away from her primary identification with gay liberation and toward a stronger one with women’s liberation. Kaplowitz was quoted as saying, “Women have got to get it together by themselves. We should get our support from women without having to depend on men for approval.” She continued, “Most men are hostile towards Women’s Lib—which is good—it’s a big threat. Lesbians are the biggest threat. Men don’t consider them women because they are not feminine, which is a paradox. Feminine is a male-defined term meaning attractive to men. Women have to start relating to women on all kinds of levels. We need to get our models from women and identify with them.”[4]
An oral history that I conducted with Kaplowitz in 2023 casts further light on some of the topics covered in the media stories discussed above and below. Kaplowitz, who describes her family background as Jewish, recalls moving to San Francisco in 1964, after studying for a year at Brooklyn College. She says she was involved in the antiwar movement before joining the gay movement and the women’s movement. In 1968, she returned to New York City, staying there for a little more than a year; as a result, she missed most of the Third World Liberation Front strike, but recalls going to a faculty protest shortly thereafter. According to Kaplowitz, she met Charles Thorpe on campus when he was handing out fliers to advertise the formation of GLF. She was interested and the two of them organized the group’s first meeting, which she thinks was attended by only a few people. GLF remained quite small, she recalls, until it began organizing gay dances. Kaplowitz also remembers meeting with SF State President S. I. Hayakawa to discuss institutional recognition for GLF; she recalls that he did not like the group’s name and that he waved around a pair of scissors while he was talking to them, which she found strange and disturbing. She also remembers visiting Bernie Goldstein’s popular Human Sexuality class, which included one lecture on homosexuality. According to Kaplowitz, Goldstein commented at one point that if one was gay, one would not stand up and say so because of the risks of losing one’s job and one’s friends. Kaplowitz responded by standing up. She shares more positive impressions of faculty members Sally Gearhart, Lois Flynn, and Lucille Birnbaum.
Kaplowitz recalls that after GLF was established and she began working with Thorpe on the San Francisco Gay Free Press, the two had arguments about the paper’s depictions of naked men, which she thought would not appeal to lesbians. Not long thereafter, she began orienting herself more to Gay Women’s Liberation. Asked why it was important to establish GLF at SF State, Kaplowitz comments that coming out as gay was necessary for creating spaces for LGBTQ people, gaining recognition, promoting equality, reducing intolerance, and making social change. At one point in our interview, Kaplowitz shared a memory that she later wished to correct. In the interview, she stated that a few days after she stood up in Goldstein’s class, she was physically attacked by a male student outside the campus cafeteria, with the man saying something like “we don’t need any queers here.” She then stated that another male student came to her rescue, putting a stop to the attack and helping her in its aftermath. Shortly after the recorded interview, Kaplowitz emailed me to say that she subsequently remembered that she was attacked while putting up fliers for a GLF meeting, not because of a reaction to what she had said in Goldstein’s class.
After graduating from SF State in 1970, Kaplowitz remained in San Francisco and became well-known as a regional folk-rock singer. In 1974, several Bay Area feminist, lesbian, and lesbian-feminist periodicals, including Sisters, Plexus, and the SF Women’s Centers and SF Women’s Switchboard Newsletter, announced performances by Kaplowitz at Full Moon, a women’s bookstore and coffeehouse in the Castro, and the Wild Side West, a lesbian bar in Bernal Heights. Some of these performances were fundraisers for the Women’s Skill Center, the Women’s Prison Collective, and the Lesbian Mother’s Union.[5] Sisters (with the subtitle “by and for Gay Women”) also published a cover photograph of Kaplowitz playing guitar in its April 1974 issue. The issue focused on a Women’s Music Festival that had been sponsored by the San Francisco Women’s Centers in January. According to the accompanying article, 750 women (“no men”) attended the festival and the proceeds would be used to help establish a San Francisco Women’s Information and Resource Center.[6] Three years later, Kaplowitz’s record album Out & About was released by Boof Bray Records.[7] She left San Francisco for a few years in the mid-1980s and more permanently in 1998. She later owned a newspaper in Nevada and a bookstore in Massachusetts, where she now lives with her long-time partner.
Notes
[1] Betty Kaplowitz, “Poem for Dorothy,” San Francisco Gay Free Press, Nov. 1970, 2; Betty Kaplowitz, “Silent Words: A Song,” San Francisco Gay Free Press, Dec. 1970.
[2] Betty Kaplowitz, “Gay Women’s Liberation: The Problem of Priorities,” San Francisco Gay Free Press, Nov. 1970, 3.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Curran Jensen, “Women’s Lib Has Arrived,” Phoenix, 11 Mar. 1971, 1, 6. For additional items in the Phoenix that linked feminism and lesbianism in this period, see Loretta Manill, “Women’s Liberation: Human Image Wanted,” Phoenix, 8 Oct. 1970, 3, 8; Jack Tipple cartoon, Phoenix, 17 Mar. 1971, 2.
[5] “Local Lesbian News by a Local Lesbian,” Sisters, Mar. 1974, 29; calendar listing, “First Anniversary Party,” Plexus, 15 Apr. 1974, 10; calendar listing, Plexus, June 1974, 9; calendar listing, Plexus, Aug. 1974, 9; calendar listing, Plexus, Oct. 1974, 9; calendar listing, SF Women’s Centers and SF Women’s Switchboard Newsletter, Dec. 1974, 4; calendar listing, Plexus, Dec. 1974, 10.
[6] “The Women’s Music Festival,” Sisters, Apr. 1974, cover, 23-26.
[7] Betty Kaplowitz, Out & About (Boof Bray Records, 1977); see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb3vzaA3THE.