SCUM Manifesto. Valerie Solanas
stopped by my mom’s house and stuck Queer Nation stickers all over my step-dad’s porn mags. Especially over the women who looked like me with their punky hair and ripped fishnets.
My house was close enough to frat row, that line of adobes housing frat boys, that I’d been hollered at by them passing by and learned not to turn down that street. I thought about blowing one up. I was very serious. I thought it would be fairly easy and we could probably get away with it, and if we didn’t I was actually prepared to go to prison for my part in this war. Because that’s what it was: a war. Men got to do anything to women and women got to walk around scared and traumatized and angry. Men got to do anything, period. Men got to do everything. Something had to take them down. The only reason I didn’t blow up the frat house was that my girlfriend refused to do it with me. I didn’t want to do it alone. That would mean I was crazy. If I did it with others, I was part of a movement. Sisterhood is Powerful. I truly could have done this, could be sitting in jail right now. With an act of violence that one moment in my life—traumatized and desperate, unable to cope with what I’d experienced—could have become the rest of my life.
There’s no way for me to talk about Valerie Solanas without talking about this, the trauma I experienced as a female sensitive to misogyny in this world. Valerie suffered sexual abuse from her birth father, then didn’t get along with her step-father, was sent her to live with a grandfather, and then her grandfather beat her up. She ran away at 15 and was impregnated by a married man—I’ve no understanding the nature of that relationship, but it’s safe to presume it was at least statutory rape. Valerie’s kid was taken away and she lived on the streets from then on.
“The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit,” Valerie writes in the Manifesto. From where I sat, on my porch in Tucson, Arizona, drinking a glass of mescal and paging through, she got everything right on.
From the start, I understood the Manifesto to be totally for real and totally not. It was an ideal, a utopic vision too out-there to ever be realized, and its dense dark humor struck me as exactly correct. It was outlandish. I’d done die-ins with ACT-UP and Kiss-Ins with Queer Nation; I’d waved coat hangers at Christians trying to block clinic doors and I had a deep appreciation for the way humor was used as a device to hit the truth like a pinata, again and again, throughout the tome. To see the SCUM Manifesto’s humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It’s not. Valerie’s use of humor is not unlike any novelist’s use of fiction to hit at the truth. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie’s eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. The hilarity in the Manifesto strikes me as fighting fire with fire. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon. It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it’s painful.
Valerie did her work in the ’60s, when it was legal for men to rape their wives, when girls who bled to death from back-alley abortions “deserved it.” In 1969, a year after Valerie’s famed shooting of the artist Andy Warhol, feminists who rose to speak at the New Left’s Counter-Inaugural to the Nixon inauguration in Washington were greeted by audience cheers of “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down a dark alley!” And these were the liberal-thinking men.
I’ve realized that going totally fucking insane is a completely rational outcome for an intelligent woman in this society, and I think this idea becomes only more solid the farther back in history you go. Says the writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a supporter of Valerie during her dark days, “I look at someone like Dorothy Allison, who was a teenager when we started rabble-rousing, and how she testifies that it was woman’s liberation that saved her life. Here’s a person that was routinely raped by her stepfather for her entire childhood, and from the time she was about eight years old, lived in the most horrible conditions. She was the very kind of person who could have ended up like Valerie Solanas had women’s liberation not been there.”
I live in a large community of would-be Valeries—queer people, formerly or presently female, many of whom have survived the violence of the heterosexual families. Writers with sharp intellects and incredible talent whose stories are routinely rejected from the still male-dominated literary worlds, both mainstream and underground, independent and corporate. Author Red Jordan Arobateau, in a review of the eventual San Francisco production of Valerie’s contested play, “Up Your Ass,” writes, “The reason I’d like to get on my knees to give Valerie a blowjob is because I identify with her and know she needed more joy. So much of my own life was hell, being a butch dike (now Transman) typing manuscripts in a hotel room, lonely, unpublished, not a dime to my name, not a friend in sight, and finding johns a lot easier to get then the love of a woman.”
To be living so low yet so close to the largest artist of your time. To have caught his interest and been put in his films. All around you ideas are flying, becoming real. To be so near to power, to hand him your work, to know how he could help you, to hope that he would.
“Did you type this yourself? I’m so impressed. You should come type for us, Valerie.” This what Andy reportedly said as he received a copy of that play. That he never returned the work, the sole copy during a time before computers and Kinkos (forget about producing it), is history. The existence of “Up Your Ass” in Warhol’s archives at his namesake museum in Pittsburgh suggests the artist did indeed have the work the whole time. Why didn’t he just give it back to her? She probably wasn’t worth his time.
Genderqueer Valerie, a big dyke. On top of everything, she walked around in her newsie hat, her scruffy hair, baggy men’s clothes, cursing and smoking. It’s irresistible to think of Valerie today, in 2013, when templates for so many gender identities exist. Would she be a butch dyke? A genderqueer inbetweener, bashing the gender binary? Would she transition, after all that, to male? She certainly wouldn’t be the first trans man with some rabid man-hating in her past. Brilliantly minded, bold enough to present herself honestly (she took the Village Voice to task in 1977 for writing that she wasn’t a lesbian: “I consider the part where you said, “she’s not a lesbian” to be serious libel,” she said, during a time when writing about someone actually being a lesbian would be the grounds for a very profitable libel case. “The way it was worded gave the impression that I’m a heterosexual, you know?”), Valerie’s understanding of gender was limited by her place and time. The Manifesto’s fatal flaw is also the very thing it requires to exist—strict adherence to a binary gender system and its attendant biological determinism, all in spite of being routinely in the company of trans women such as Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling, who lived in the same SRO hotel as Valerie. Perhaps it is the influence of these women that inspired Valerie to allow for the survival of “faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive.” I read “faggots,” in this entry, to include queens and transgendered women, as there was scant consciousness about trans lives at the time, and “faggot” existed as a catch-all slur for anyone presenting as queer or genderqueer.
Again and again, as one reads the Manifesto, one asks herself, “What the hell is this?” It is so, so funny that it’s hard for me not to condemn anyone bothered by it as painfully lacking a sense of humor. Check this out: “SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence “I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd” then proceed to list all the ways in which he is. His reward for doing so will be the opportunity to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with the SCUM who will be present.” Hilarious and begging for a performance-art enactment, but SCUM is also a very un-funny critique of American culture, then and now, delivered it with the fearlessness of someone who has already been so thoroughly rejected by the system that she has nothing left to lose. Many of Valerie’s notions are excellent and plausible, such as “SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public” (clearly the vision of a broke New Yorker). The Manifesto is as much of a call for a class war as a gender apocalypse, with “eliminate the money system” coming in behind overthrowing the government and before destroying the male sex in its opening mission statement. Indeed, the hysteria at a woman threatening to kill men within a culture where men kill women regularly has been so great