My Little Runaways
The Dyke Punk Movement Has Not Even Begun to Tell It Like It Was
I’d never forget the day my ex told me to check out the trailer for The Runaways.
"What is this Little Debbie BULLSHIT?" I said. "This is a disgrace."
Director Floria Sigismondi's "pretty-in-glam" Runaways feature isn’t the underground punk scene I remember from Los Angeles in the 1970's.
Want a picture?
I was 18 in Long Beach in 1977 — that’s the southern working class lip of the LA Basin. My hippie girlfriend— who once looked like Joan Baez— cut off all her hair one day, made a minidress out of a plastic Hefty bag, and started shredding on a bass guitar she pulled out of a pawn shop. She wrote "Suck My Cock" on it with a black Sharpie. We became punk impresarios overnight.
Joan Jett, one of The Runaways' founders, was an executive producer on the Sigismondi film. I fondly remember Joan coming to see me in New York City, in 1997, to get her copy of Nothing But the Girl autographed— which, among other things, is the heaviest punk dyke erotic photography portfolio ever published. Her then-lover, Jamie Griffith’s photography was part of the book — It meant a lot.
Despite the straightie-two-shoes trailer, I decided to give the full movie a chance. Maybe the trailer was sanitized so as not to frighten the horses— or worse yet, conservative American teenagers.
I watched the film in an air-conditioned matinee with large popcorn and a Cherry Coke, to honor lead singer Cherrie. I think I was the only 52-year-old woman there who was once a wannabe-Runaway. In 1978, I would put on pistachio suede hot pants dangle razor blades from the apex of my torn t-shirt. I strut down Sunset Strip, then go into the Pussycat Theater basement which doubled as a punk club, (The Masque) and hang like a monkey from the hot dripping water pipes. What a crazy dump it was! I pulled other girls' heads out of toilets who might be throwing up all the pills they'd swallowed. Valley of the Dolls, indeed. Some other punk girl had fisted them, forgotten them, and broken their heart.
Let me make something clear that the movie only hints at: The Runaways band would not have happened, could not have even been conceived, without the Underground Dyke Punk Groupie Slut culture that stretched from the San Fernando Valley to the bowels of Orange County.
What is wrong with saying that? Do dykes never get to claim anything? Is the historical lens going to stay coated with Vaseline and excuses forever?
I'll tell you why dyke rock'n'roll legacy is important. In order to stand up to the chauvinist gatekeepers who try to keep young women out of everything, you had to not give a shit about their sexual approval.
You had to not want to get married and have babies with a nice boy. You had to be finished with "virtue."
We did not care if the guys called us "sluts" and accused us of "wishing you had a dick." We were beyond wishing; we did whatever we wanted.
A lesbian in the 1970s was characterized today as someone involved in mainstream feminist politics or the folky Back-to-the-Land milieu. Not hopped-up punks with piercings and anarchist tattoos. But we were ALL there. Most girls I knew in the punk scene couldn't relate to boomer feminism, or thought of it as their mother's trip. The emerging GenX lesbians were not into politics as usual. At the time, most of them called themselves "bi," although that was really code for: “Don't tell me what to do.”
The mainline feminists didn't know our motley crew existed, and were horrified when they found out. The old-gay bar dykes thought we were nothing but jail-bait drama queens, which was pretty close to the truth. After all, we were very young, very high, and doing everything for the first time, as fast as possible. It was LOUD. Really loud. Sexual freedom was an absolute.
Joan Jett, the guitarist/songwriter, and the Runaways' late drummer, Sandy West, were what would now be described as two butch brothers who wanted to start a band. The three other girls they recruited— Lita, Jackie, Cherie— were all tough bisexual femmes.
But "tough" has its limits when you're sixteen and exploited by the likes of a Svengali like Kim Fowley. One is unlikely to emerge in good health. The most accurate piece of The Runaways movie is the storyline that shows how they were starved and tricked like junkyard dogs. Very ugly and true.
What you don’t see is the pulse of the mosh pit and the queer liberation scene unfolding. We were an organic ecstatic teenage wasteland, true compost, but no one knew how it was supposed to come together.
Many of my punk friends were apolitical— No Future. I took to wearing a "Commie Pinko Dyke" button on my t-shirt along with the safety pins. The premium on making it versus “selling out” was a very harsh churn. Girl groups like The Runaways were totally closeted in the press, marketed as masturbation fodder for dirty old men. They sure did make it: they got a record deal. Ha! They suffered more for it. Their survival story has weathered lot of cliff-hangers.
My girlfriend I spoke of, Melody, eventually left LA, fed up. She packed up her Slits records and moved to San Francisco— "You're a bourgeois loser," were her last words to me. I was living in her apartment, but my new boyfriend accidentally burned the whole place down when he left dirty laundry on the heat register. All my clothes, books, and records turned to black bits on a charred lawn.
The same afternoon, our neighbor, Tina Chavez, took a handful of Tuinals because she said she couldn't live without the love of Runaway lead guitarist Lita Ford. Her ancient gay roommate was so toasted on poppers he couldn't dial 911.
I didn't want to go the Elks Club downtown anymore. Our old stomping ground had been taken over by boy-gangs and police riots. Our little moment of “intersectionality” was over.
I drove up from Long Beach to the Crenshaw/Slauson district to see Bitsy Gomez, who typically had a butch-girl-trucker solution to everything.
She listened to my whole sad tale, took me up on her roof, and said, "Let's light up and shoot my guns."
One year later...
I put on my studded dog collar, (exactly like the one actor Kristen Stewart wears in the movie), and went to a very serious political gay and lesbian convention convened to fight the burgeoning "Moral Majority." Anita Bryant was our nemesis, the Pre-Sarah Palin.
The Democratic Party mainline lesbians — the ones who both built a gay movement and also disenfranchised a wing or two — took one look at my lipstick and leather and flipped out. "You look like a slut! You are an operative of pimps and pornographers! The S/M white slavers are controlling you!"
As usual, whenever someone brings up a flaming cultural issue, there’s also a more prosaic power grab under way. We got pushed out.
Does anyone ever wonder what happened to ignite the feminist sex wars and the queer erotic explosion of the Eighties?
Now you know, this is why it all had to blow up. We didn’t disappear.
Let's listen to a little dyke punk anthem, shall we? Joan Jett’s testament. It gives me goose-bumps every time:
Yeah, my, my such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
What a beautiful feeling
Crimson and clover over and over
Crimson and clover
OVER and OVER
Crimson and clover
OVER and OVER
Music: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, a MUST.
Want to read more of my punk-inspired Film Reviews? Here’s my latest, in the SF Chronicle on Brooke Shields “Pretty Baby” - another case of Hollywood closets.
Great.
They all ended up in such different places. But Joan's still out there touring. I miss Sandy.