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COMMUNISTS IN CLOSETS

Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s explores the history

of gay, lesbian, and non-heterosexual people in the Communist Party in the
United States.
The Communist Party banned lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off
as “degenerates.” It persisted in this policy until 1991. During this 60-year
ban, gays and lesbians who did join the Communist Party were deeply clos-
eted within it, as well as in their public lives as both queer and Communist.
By the late 1930s, the Communist Party had a membership approaching
100,000 and tens of thousands more people moved in its orbit through the
Popular Front against fascism, anti-racist organizing, especially in the south,
and its widely read cultural magazine, The New Masses. Based on a dec-
ade of archival research, correspondence, and interviews, Bettina Aptheker
explores this history, also pulling from her own experience as a closeted les-
bian in the Communist Party in the 1960s and ‘70s. Ironically, and in spite
of this homophobia, individual Communists laid some of the political and
theoretical foundations for lesbian and gay liberation and women’s liberation,
and contributed significantly to peace, social justice, civil rights, and Black
and Latinx liberation movements.
This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and general readers in
political history, gender studies, and the history of sexuality.

Bettina Aptheker is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Feminist Studies

Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is the author of
Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became A Feminist
Rebel (2006); and The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1976; second
edition 1999).
“Bettina Aptheker’s personal history of gay and lesbian people and the
Communist Party is essential and transformative in enlightening our
understanding of gay, Black, and women’s liberation visions in America.
She shows how queer desires for freedom were so expansive, that they
were propelled by both the party’s political visions of justice and the
cruelties of its organizational prejudices to create entirely new liber-
ation formations. Aptheker traces the invention of Gay Liberation in
America, the first Women’s Studies class, the founding of Parents of
gays solidarity organizations, lesbian music, and the first play by a Black
woman on Broadway – all sprouting from queer Communist origins.
This is a book that makes connections and fills gaps, defies stigma and
defies historical silence.”
Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show:
A History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (2021)

“This book is at once a deeply personal portrait of Bettina Aptheker

and her struggles as a gay woman in the Communist movement, but
also a generous, appreciative and carefully historicized portrait of the
many others who were gay, feminist, and Communist. The chapter on
Lorraine Hansberry is especially enriched by Aptheker’s triple vision.”
Mary Helen Washington, Distinguished University Professor,
English, University of Maryland, College Park, author of
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and
Cultural Left of the 1950s.

“Through vivid personal reminiscences and extensive archival research,

Aptheker draws out the hidden histories of gay and lesbian participation
in American communist movements, even as the Party remained hostile
to that possibility. From pre-Stonewall labor and social welfare causes to
the origins of gay liberation and beyond, she reveals, queer communists
played key roles on the Left. Her biographical approach provides rich
texture for understanding how both famous and previously unknown
activists navigated the tensions between their political and sexual identi-
ties, and how they influenced American history and culture.”
Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States
History, Emeriti, Stanford University, coauthor of
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.

“In this revelatory study, Bettina Aptheker gives us a superb model of

lesbian-feminist scholarship, distinguished by rigorous use of archival
materials and written from the heart. Succeeding generations will find
here the historical foundations upon which to build new, more inclu-
sive, movements for social justice.”
Julia M. Allen, Professor emerita of English, Sonoma State
University, author of Passionate Commitments:
The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins.

“With Communists in Closets Bettina Aptheker has given us a work that

is bound to be a classic in the history of the American Left. Combining
intricate historical detective work with analytical rigor and a biogra-
pher’s skill in individual storytelling, Aptheker reveals the hidden his-
tory of gay and lesbian radicals who had remained closeted as members
of America’s homophobic Communist Party and Communist Left.
Aptheker’s deep knowledge of the CP, her sensitivity to and under-
standing of the LGBT experience, combine with her brilliant archival
work to make this history not merely comprehensible but profoundly
moving and memorable.”
Robert Cohen, Professor of Social Studies,
Steinhardt Affiliated Professor, History Department,
New York University, and coauthor of Rethinking America’s Past:
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, 2021.

“With this important book, Bettina Aptheker takes us on an amaz-

ing journey of heart and history. Closeted and secreted for genera-
tions, advocates of socialism, anarchism communism – and LGBTQ
folks were hidden from history. Filled with stunning new informa-
tion, countless surprises, bold connections, Bettina’s life and research
enhances our understanding of some of the most creative and interest-
ing lives of our long-denied culture. This is a delightful book needed
now and for the future.”
Blanche Wiesen Cook, John Jay College & Graduate Center,
CUNY, author of ELEANOR ROOSEVELT,
vols I, II, and III among other works.

“Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets is an insightful history of the

lived experiences of queer Communists in the United States. While her
archival digs into the lives of Harry Hay, Lorraine Hansberry, Betty
Millard, and many more would be reason enough to devour this book,
readers will be delighted to find Aptheker’s own story woven throughout
the narrative, lending an important first-person perspective to her rich
biographical archaeology. Written with good humor and a keen sense
of what might have been, Aptheker reminds readers of the complicated
pressures that shaped the lives and politics of queer Communists in the
twentieth century – and how they responded with grace, courage, and
perseverance.”
Aaron Lecklider, Professor, American Studies, College of
Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, author
of Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality
and the Left in American Culture.

“Deeply personal and thoroughly researched, Bettina Aptheker’s

ground-breaking book opens the closet door to the rich queer history
of the U.S. Communist Party. Through portraits of dynamic leftists—
Black and white—such as early gay rights activist Henry ‘Harry’ Hay,
Communist Party activists Elizabeth (Betty) Millard and Eleanor Flexner,
and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Communists in Closets provides a new
model for historical writing on the U.S. Left and LGBTQ movements.”
Erik S. McDuffie, Associate Professor, African American Studies,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of Sojourning
for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism,
and the Making of Black Left Feminism.

“Combining personal recollections with impressive archival research,

Aptheker has reconstructed the lives of inspiring social justice activ-
ists whose true selves remained hidden due to pervasive homophobia.
Communists in Closets deeply enriches our understanding of the history
of the Communist left and of LGBTQ life in the United States.”
John D’Emilio, Professor Emeritus, History;
Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois,
Chicago, author of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood:
Coming of Age in the Sixties.
COMMUNISTS IN
CLOSETS
Queering the History 1930s–1990s

Bettina Aptheker
Cover image: Jenny Q. Sandrof, Blue Heron Design Group.
Photo courtesy of Giselle Tsering (photographer).
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Bettina Aptheker
The right of Bettina Aptheker to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aptheker, Bettina, author.
Title: Communists in closets : queering the history 1930s-1990s /
Bettina Aptheker.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022013326 (print) | LCCN 2022013327 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032043098 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032035840
(paperback) | ISBN 9781003191391 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Communist Party of the United States of
America–History. | Communist Party of the United States
of America–Membership. | Sexual minorities–United
States–History.
Classification: LCC HX89 .A78 2023 (print) | LCC HX89 (ebook) |
DDC 335.00973–dc23/eng/20220505 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013326LC ebook record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2022013327

ISBN: 978-1-032-04309-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-03584-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19139-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003191391

Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
For Kate
I lift up my heart and rejoice
Shantideva
CONTENTS

List of Figures x
Acknowledgmentsxii

1 Introduction: What Is Found There: In the Archives

and in Life 1

2 Stonewalled: Gay Liberation and Communist Silence 47

3 Harry Hay (1912–2002): “Welcome, My Dears”:

A Communist, Radical Faerie in a Revolutionary Quest 81

4 Elizabeth (Betty) Boynton Millard (1911–2010):

A Passion for Women and a Global Sisterhood 104

5 Eleanor Flexner (1908–1995): Living the Unnamed:

Scholarship, Activism, and a Boston Marriage 141

6 Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965): Freedom in Mind 171

7 The Communist Party Ban Ends: Stories of the

1990s and 2000s 220

Afterword: A Labor of Love 247

Index251
FIGURES

1.1 Bertha C. Reynolds circa 1937, NYU Tamiment Library

Archives, Daily World photo collection (Courtesy of
Longview Publishing, New York)25
1.2 Shirley Graham Du Bois and David Graham Du Bois,
Cairo, Egypt, 1968 (Courtesy of Bernard Jaffe Collection,
Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University
Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst Libraries)33
1.3 Victoria Mercado hugging Angela Davis, San Jose, CA,
outside the courthouse after acquittal, June 4, 1972, lower
left seated, Bettina Aptheker (Courtesy of Associated Press)36
2.1 “Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats,” by Thomas
Lanigan-Schmidt (Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Fine Arts,
NY and the artist)52
2.2 Dale Mitchell, 2019 (Courtesy of Dale Mitchell)63
3.1 Harry Hay 1950 Los Angeles. (GLC0090) Harry Hay
Papers (GLC 44) (Courtesy of Hormel LGBTQIA
Center, San Francisco Public Library)82
3.2 John Burnside & Harry Hay, 1994, Gay Pride, New York,
Stonewall 25th Anniversary. Photo by Daniel Nicoletta
(Courtesy of Daniel Nicoletta and Harry Hay Papers
(GLC 44) Hormel LGBTQIA Center, San Francisco
Public Library)97
4.1 Betty Millard with Rosita Perea, at Charles Street home,
NY circa 1960 (Courtesy of Sophia Smith Women’s
History Collection. Permission from Olivia Millard)106
 Figures xi

4.2 Betty Millard with her niece Olivia Millard at Betty’s

Dutchess County farm. Circa 2001 (Courtesy of
Olivia Millard)132
5.1 Eleanor Flexner, circa 1948 (Courtesy of Schlesinger
Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA)145
6.1 Lorraine Hansberry, 1955, Artist: Friedman-Abeles
Photograph Collection (Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture)173
6.2 “Glory” by Elizabeth Catlett, Medium: Cast bronze
with black patina on a wooden base (Courtesy of Davis
Museum at Wellesley College, MA. © 2022 Mora-Catlett
Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NY) 211
7.1 Sadie Barnette and Rodney Barnette, Beside Flatbed Truck
with the New Eagle Creek Saloon, Gay Pride Parade,
San Francisco, 2019 (Photo by Cabure Bonugi, Courtesy
of Sadie Barnette and the Lab, Jessica Silverman Gallery) 229
7.2 Rodney Barnette, Angela Davis, Victoria Mercado, June 2,
1972, San Jose, CA. awaiting verdict (Photographer Stephen
Shames, Courtesy of Stephen Shames) 230
7.3 Lowell B. Denny III (with Hunter) 2020 (Courtesy of
Lowell B. Denny III) 234
7.4 Angela Davis, 2012 (Photograph by Sandi Sissel from
Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, a documentary directed
by Shola Lynch, Courtesy of Shola Lynch) 239
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to so many people who offered me invaluable assistance over

the ten years that I worked on this book. Michael Nash, who was the director
of NYU’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives made extraor-
dinary efforts to allow me full access to the Communist Party’s archive, even
before it had been fully assembled, and directed me in the initial stages of
my research. His untimely death in 2012 was a profound loss for all those
who knew him. Sam Webb, the General Secretary of the US Communist
Party in 2010, believed in this project, and authorized my access to the sealed
files in the Communist Party’s archive. Kelly Anderson, at the Sophia Smith
Collection of Women’s History alerted me when the papers of Betty Millard
first arrived in 2012, and helped me multiple times in my research with both
Millard and later with Marge Frantz. Olivia Millard, niece of Betty Millard,
and her executor, shared Betty’s journals with me at her home, told me won-
derful stories about Betty, and introduced me to Lisa Springer who was so
important to Betty in her last years. Lisa Springer, then, shared some of her
memories with me. Ellen Fitzpatrick responded generously when I asked for
her help with my research on Eleanor Flexner. And Daniel Horowitz shared
with me all of his archival materials on Eleanor Flexner along with vital infor-
mation about her and others pioneers in the field of women’s history. Vera
Kallenberg, a colleague in Berlin, and an authority on Gerda Lerner, likewise,
shared archival material including letters between Eleanor Flexner and Lerner.
Ellen Dubois was immensely helpful in our conversations on Zoom about
Eleanor Flexner. And Julia Allen corresponded with me, and met with me on
Zoom providing invaluable insights and then archival material for my work
on Betty Millard. MaryLouise Patterson was a source of constant counsel and
inspiration to me especially for my research on Lorraine Hansberry, and the
 Acknowledgments xiii

Black Communist intelligentsia in the 1950s and ‘60s of which her parents,
Louise and William L. Patterson were a vital part. Philip Sinitiere gener-
ously shared his research on David Du Bois and Lorraine Hansberry, including
wonderful archival material. Cheryl Higashida provided me with important
guidance early on in my work especially about Alice Childress, and Lorraine
Hansberry. Joey Cain guided me with patience and care through the archive
of Harry Hay at the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Historical Center at
the San Francisco Public Library. Likewise, Eleanor and Bernard Hilberman,
neighbors here in Santa Cruz, shared wonderful childhood memories they had
of Harry Hay and Anita Platky. Their memories, especially of Anita, allowed
me to make her more visible. Hugh Ryan shared his research on queer history
as it was allied with my own, and took me on a personal tour of the archival
exhibit he curated at NYU in 2019 commemorating the 50th anniversary of
the Stonewall uprising. Beth Lilach’s knowledge of the Holocaust and archives
relating to the post-War efforts to assist displaced persons and refugees pro-
vided me with essential details on the life of Rachel A. (Rae) Levine. Samuel
(Chip) Delany provided me with a delightful connection to New York gay
history during his visit to Santa Cruz in 2016, in particular, alerting me to the
life of Mary Davis, who was widely known as Stormé DeLarverie. Elisabeth
Armstrong met with me at length and then provided me with archival material
on Betty Millard, and on the Women’s International Democratic Federation.
Michael Helquist provided me with wonderful details about his research on
Dr. Mari Equi, for which I am indebted.
I received generous funding over the years I worked on the research for this
book from the Committee on Research of the Academic Senate, University of
California, Santa Cruz. Likewise, I received financial support from the Peggy
& Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair for Feminist Studies during my
tenure as Chair, 2017–2021.
I am very grateful to the people who generously gave of their time by meet-
ing with me and sharing ideas and materials including Robby Cohen, Rosa
Pietanza, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Clare Coss, Aaron Lecklider, and Gayatri
Gopinath.
I am greatly indebted to the people I interviewed, some of whose stories
appear in the book including Angela Davis, Sadie Barnette, Eric A. Gordon,
Lowell B. Denny III, Dale Mitchell, and Jim Fouratt. I appreciate the loving
support I received from dear ones who provided me with meals, homes in
which to stay while traveling, and/or their knowledge of Communist and/or
gay and lesbian history including my once-husband, Jack Kurzweil, friends,
Arlene Avakian and Martha Ayres (1940–2016), my beloved cousin Terri
Sasanow (1952–2020), friends and colleagues, Anne Cammett and Marcia
Gallo, and Berenice Malke Fisher and Linda Marks.
Sarah Schulman provided me with indispensable guidance in our meetings
together in New York, and later on email as she read chapters of the book.
xiv Acknowledgments

Her suggestions for editing and revision made for a more accurate and robust
history. Her enthusiasm for the project both inspired me and gave me confi-
dence in my work.
I am exceptionally grateful to others who read the manuscript in part or in
whole and for their comments, including Julia Allen and Robby Cohen. Ann
Jealous read several chapters and provided extensive editorial comment and
notes. My daughter Jenny Kurzweil read the manuscript chapter by chapter as
it came off the printer. Her brilliance as a creative writer added greatly to the
fluency and clarity of the final manuscript.
My agent of many years, Charlotte Raymond, provided me with warm,
steady support, and wise counsel. Kimberley Smith, senior editor at Taylor &
Francis, believed in this book before it was born, and offered me a contract
which gave me the incentive to write with swift intensity. I have benefited
from her steady encouragement. Emily Irving, assistant editor at Taylor &
Francis, provided me with all the publisher’s specifications and a welcome
extension on the date of completion. Sarah Schuchard gave her encouraging
and timely expertise in the final formatting of the manuscript. Graphic artist
Jenny Sandrof came on board to design the cover that resonated with me in
wonderful ways. I am very grateful for her beautiful work.
My wife, Kate Miller, taught women’s history for decades, is a cultural
anthropologist, and profoundly learned. She lived with this book for a very
long time! We talked about it over the years in detail and she shared many
invaluable ideas with me. In late March 2020, as the pandemic started, she
asked me if I was ever going to actually write it. She pointed out that I was
76 and if I was going to do it, maybe I best get at it. With that loving nudge
I did. She has read every chapter, sometimes more than once, and given me
indispensable advice, and editorial comment. I have benefited immeasurably
from her loving kindness over these many years.

My abiding love and gratitude to all.

1
INTRODUCTION
What Is Found There: In the
Archives and in Life

I “came out” of the closet with confidence in 1965 as a Communist. I had

been a prominent leader in the Free Speech Movement on the University
of California, Berkeley campus, the previous year. Now I was running in a
student-wide election for a position on the “Rules Committee” that would
govern free speech on campus. I thought the students should know my polit-
ical affiliation, which, at the time, was still only semilegal. I wrote an open
letter to the students on the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
It was published on the front page of the Daily Cal. I was 21 then. The next
day a headline on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner reads, “Bettina
Admits It. She’s a Red!” I won the election in a landslide.
I don’t remember feeling particularly fearful about my Communist coming
out. This was because it was emotionally congruent with my family and friends.
I did get a lot of mail, some of it viciously misogynist and anti-Semitic. There
were also death threats, some more serious than others. I lost my auto insurance
because the company now considered me a “target person.” I also got hundreds
and hundreds of letters of support, some of which were deeply moving to me.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) uprising at Stonewall
Inn in New York began four years later on June 28, 1969. It continued for
several days as mostly young, gay, lesbian, transgender, and transvestite peo-
ple protested against police harassment, police violence, and the longstanding
and continual homophobic persecutions. People were regularly faced with
police entrapments. Newspapers published the names of those arrested in gay
bars, often ruining lives. There were beatings and killings of gays and lesbi-
ans, at times by the police themselves. These deaths routinely went uninves-
tigated and unpunished. There was almost no press coverage of the uprising.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191391-1
2 Introduction

The New York Times finally wrote a small piece about it buried inside the
paper three days after it began.
I heard about Stonewall months later, registering it in the recesses of my
mind and crouched lower and further back into my queer closet. I had no
words to articulate who I was, and I was paralyzed by fear. I needed to be
“acceptable” as a Party member. Likewise, had been brutalized by police and
the FBI, which was occasioned by my first lesbian affair when I was 22 then,
however, presumably safe I was supposed to be, hidden in marriage.
From the point of view of my emotional life, all those in my immediate
circle including my parents and friends and student comrades revolved around
the Communist Party, where I had been rooted since childhood. My father,
Herbert Aptheker, was frequently cited in the press as the Party’s theoretician.
My mother, Fay P. Aptheker, had been in the Party since 1929, well before my
father. However, the Party provided no sanctuary for a closeted lesbian. On
the contrary, it had long condemned us as “degenerates.” Everyone understood
that “degenerate” was a code for homosexual. In 1938, for example, Article X,
Section 5 of its constitution declared:

Party members found to be strikebreakers, degenerates, habitual drunk-

ards, betrayers of Party confidence, provocateurs, advocates of terrorism
and violence as a method of Party procedure, or members whose actions
are detrimental to the Party and the working class, shall be summarily
dismissed from positions of responsibility, expelled from the Party and
exposed before the general public.1

So, the Party Constitution put us queers in with strikebreakers, drunkards,

betrayers, and terrorists! Of course, I was buried in the closet as were a lot of
others. I didn’t know this until I began this project. In fact, for virtually all of my
19 years as a Party member, I was a closeted lesbian, even while being married
for 13 of those years, a not unusual “solution” for gay and lesbian people.
In the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy anti-communist and homo-
phobic attacks, the Communist Party hierarchy ordered members of the Party
in different states to conduct interviews with Party members concerning their
sexuality. One such person, an older comrade who was a close friend, told me
about this in the late 1970s. I was struggling with my sexuality. She explained
that she was instructed by the Party leadership to talk with several women
comrades about their sexuality. If these comrades were lesbians, or had had a
lesbian liaison, she was told to ask them to leave the Party. My friend explained
this was because the Party feared that if the FBI threatened them with expo-
sure, they could become informants. Although no one has done a complete
study of this, none of the informants I know of, or who surfaced in vari-
ous anti-Communist trials, were blackmailed homosexuals. My friend said
that other comrades were asked to make similar inquiries inside the Party,
 Introduction 3

and women and men were thus forced to leave the Party voluntarily or were
expelled. She said that she deeply regretted her role in this purge. What an
impact this must have had on gay women and men forced to abandon their
comrades, at a time when everyone was under such intense attack. It was also
clear that the Party’s rationale for purging gays and lesbians from its ranks
was precisely the same as the government’s rationale for purging homosexuals
from the State Department: they could be blackmailed by the Soviets and
other foreign powers and forced to become spies.
The Communist Party banned gays and lesbians from membership for
60 years.
I came out as a lesbian ten years after Stonewall. It was November 7, 1979.
I had fallen in love with a woman, and I was soaring with happiness. I was
also, sometimes, stricken with absolute terror. My sweetheart had no such
terrors. Kate was thrilled to claim a lesbian identity and called up all manner
of friends from her adolescence and young adulthood to proclaim it. They
may have been more than a little startled, but most of them were supportive,
swept up by her affirming enthusiasm. Born and raised in North Dakota, in a
working-class family whose parents were Republicans and devout members of
a Lutheran church, she had somehow escaped all of the intense and damning
homophobia that I had absorbed in and around the Communist Left. This
might say something about what the word “radical” means! It is also striking
that Kate did not internalize homophobia while I was saturated with it. The
process of unlearning the deep layering of it in my consciousness remains
ongoing, even after all of these years.
I kept my lesbian identity a secret from my parents for years and drove Kate
crazy with my endless speculations about whether or not my mother knew.
Really, in retrospect it was ridiculous. But at the time I was on an emotional
cliff, alternating between ecstasy and paranoia. Finally, I talked to my mother,
and she told me that she had known I was a lesbian since I was 16. And when
I shrieked, “Why didn’t you tell me?” She said, “Because I hoped for the best
for you.” The best, from her point of view, was marriage and children. And
then she said, “You know, Lillian Wald was a lesbian.”
Lillian Wald was a social worker, and founder of the Henry Street
Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York. This Settlement House with
its English language classes, dance classes, and many cultural programs had
been a haven for my mother and thousands of other impoverished immigrant
children and their families. “How did you know about Lillian Wald?” I asked
in astonishment. I had only recently read an essay about her by the feminist
historian Blanche Wiesen Cook confirming Wald’s lesbian identity. “Oh,” my
mother said casually, waving her hand as if to brush away a fly, “Everyone in
the neighborhood knew.” So much for historians and our archives!
My mother also said that she would “take care of your father,” which I
presumed to mean she would tell him.
4 Introduction

I never had a direct conversation with my father about being a lesbian,

but after a while he started sharing information with me about people he had
known without ever using the words lesbian, gay, or homosexual. This was
how our conversations worked.
Then, when I was about 40 or so, I learned that two women he had known
very well were a couple and in the Party: Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins.
Anna was a historian, and Grace was an economist. I had even met Grace and
had my own memories of her. He told me, “Everyone knew.” To which I
responded in astonishment, “Well, I didn’t!” This constant secrecy and invis-
ibility was crazy-making. Anna and Grace were allowed to remain in the
Party because they didn’t publicly acknowledge their relationship. And each
of them was very prominent in Party work. Although they were never “out,”
I discovered that there was an underground network of gays and lesbians who
were around them, including for example, Betty Millard, whose story is told
in detail in Chapter 4.
In 2013, Julia M. Allen published her dual biography: Passionate Commitments:
The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins. It is a wonderfully engag-
ing, queerly emblematic biography of Grace Hutchins (1885–1969) and
Anna Rochester (1880–1966), life partners who devoted themselves to the
Communist Party and an infinite number of allied causes, including espe-
cially a feminist agenda to advance the equality of women in all ways. Fearless
through the McCarthy repression, under relentless FBI surveillance until their
deaths, stubborn, energetic, upright, ever reserved in the habit of their upper
class, WASPY origins, they created a way for themselves to be “whole persons”
at a time when there was no way sharing commitments. They had such passion
for each other, for women, for peace, and for social justice. It is an inspired
story told in meticulous detail. Starting their lives together as Christian paci-
fists, affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, they left that movement
and joined the Communist Party in 1937. They remained members for the rest
of their lives. But they never publicly articulated anything about their relation-
ship, and never in any way advocated for equality or civil rights for gay and
lesbian people.
Working with Robert Dunn and Alexander Trachtenberg, two leading
Party members from the late 1920s onward, Rochester and Hutchins founded
Labor Research Associates, providing statistical data and analysis vital to the
trade union movement. In addition, Rochester published several historically
based works including Rulers of America (1936), Why Farmers Are Poor (1940),
The Populist Movement in the United States (1943), and Capitalism and Progress
(1945), among many other pamphlets and dozens of articles. Hutchins focused
her research on women workers, publishing Women Who Work in 1932.
No such analysis had ever been done before. Famed labor organizer Lucy
Gonzalez Parsons, the widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket mar-
tyrs, wrote to Hutchins. “The women whose lives you so graphically depict
 Introduction 5

are the mothers of future generations. It is terrible to contemplate, but such is

life under capitalism.”2
On Rochester’s death in 1966, obituaries appeared in The Worker and
The New York Times, both noting that she had “no survivors.” Likewise, when
Hutchins died in 1969, there was no mention of her long and intimate partner-
ship with Rochester. The Communist Party held no memorials.
At another time my father told me to pay attention to a woman named
Bertha C. Reynolds, who, he said, was a remarkable scholar and had taught at
Smith College. Another time he said that I should look up Maud Russell. “She
worked in China,” he told me. I do not know how he knew about the lesbian
identities of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, Maud Russell, or Bertha
Reynolds for all their apparent closeting.
These were all separate, random conversations over several years.
I also soon realized that coming out as a lesbian was never-ending and
depended on the many different contexts in which I found myself. I was out
in the Party, more or less by default. Then I came out publicly to my students
during a class at University of California (UC) Santa Cruz in 1984. In succes-
sive years, I came out to students earlier and earlier in the course because if I
didn’t come out, they assumed that I was straight.
We can ask, “Why does it matter?” It mattered so much because all of us
know we were “different,” in ways that were deemed by society to be not only
abnormal, but perverse. In my case, growing up in the 1950s when homophobic
attacks came from all sides, I also internalized a sense of shame about my sexual
desires and a deep-seated belief that I was fundamentally “evil” because of it.
It still matters because being closeted creates a dual consciousness, a sense of
always being an outsider, a sense of feeling crazy. As I healed from the worst
of this internalized oppression, I developed a lesbian sensibility that shaped my
way of seeing, reading, thinking, and being in the world. Sexuality is, after
all, a core identity, like gender, or race, or ethnicity, or religious tradition, or
disability. A lesbian sensibility affects how I read, how I see people I meet, and
what I notice in my everyday life. For example, I notice heterosexuality. A les-
bian sensibility affects how I see the interlocking of oppressions like racism and
misogyny and class exploitation.
For example, I reviewed a book by Anne Balay called Steel Closets.
Published in 2014, it is about LGBT folks who work in the US steel indus-
try. I was keenly interested in her work precisely because I was a lesbian and
because I knew the Party had been deeply involved in organizing the steel
workers union in the 1930s. In fact, Gus Hall, who was the General Secretary
at the time I was in the Party, had been a key to union organizing. Based
on extended interviews with steel workers, Balay described the steel work-
ers’ culture, as one of “hypermasculinity,” in which pornography, objecti-
fication of women, and sexual violence were embedded. The isolation, shift
work, forced personal conversations hour after hour and day after day, the
6 Introduction

collective and dangerous labor, group showers, and pervasive misogynistic and
homophobic cracks created a hellish environment for queer steel workers, for
women workers, straight or gay, and for Black workers, straight or gay. “My
interviews reveal that an incredible level of violence toward and harassment of
queers is part of the basic steel work environment,” she concluded. I knew Gus
Hall was demonstrably homophobic and misogynist, and in the Party he had a
reputation as a womanizer. Balay’s book explained a lot to me!3
Claiming my sexuality and making myself visible were both part of my own
process of healing from internalized homophobia, and also a larger struggle to
allow us to publicly claim an identity that was despised in the dominant cul-
ture, and within the Communist Left. Lesbian mothers lost custody of their
children and gay and lesbian partners were routinely denied even visitation
rights. Gay and lesbian partners were denied access to each other in medical
emergencies and hospital visitations. We were fired from jobs. Gay men espe-
cially were entrapped and arrested by police, often beaten. Lesbians too faced
awful violence, including execution-style murder. We dealt with multiple lev-
els of discrimination in our everyday lives, for example, when our children
(if we had custody) filled out simple, routine parental consent forms at school,
or when we filed tax returns, or when one of us died and families, friends,
coworkers, and colleagues could ignore/deny our grief or our ability to attend a
funeral. In reflecting on the costs of closeting, lesbian-feminist writer and poet
Judy Grahn observed that the fear of discovery “causes many Gay people to feel
that no matter how much you love your family and friends, you can never feel
they completely love you, for being in the closet means that they do not even
know you, they know a projected false image of you.” The Communist Left
shared the views that upheld all of this violence, even as the police, the state,
and the courts enforced it.4
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, secrecy about one’s sexuality has
a terribly corrosive effect. It creates a kind of daily, gnawing anxiety, and a
constant worry about a slippage that might cost a job, or custody of children or
family relationships, or political alliances. One also internalizes an awful sense
of personal shame, both because the closeting reveals such an ambivalence
about being gay or lesbian, and then because one feels as though one is betray-
ing our struggle for visibility and human rights. These were the realities for
tens of thousands of LGBT people in the United States for decades, and it was
only after the formation of gay rights organizations and gay liberation move-
ments in the mid-twentieth century that the laws slowly began to change. Even
with this progress, a prevailing stigma is still evident in many communities.
In the late 1970s, the Party’s publishing house had contracted with me to
write a book on women’s history, and then they refused to publish it. Woman’s
Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class was too feministm. Kate said they said
they will never publish a Lesbian.
I left the Communist Party in October 1981.
 Introduction 7

How I Came to Write This Book

I was invited to be on a panel at a conference of the American Studies
Association held in Oakland, California, in October 2006. The panel was
called “Queering the Left in U.S. History” and was organized by Aaron
Lecklider, a colleague from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who is a
cultural historian. When I agreed to do it, I realized I would have no oppor-
tunity to do any kind of research. Kate said, “Use yourself as the archive.”
My presentation was eventually published as “Keeping the Communist Party
Straight; 1940s–1970s.”5
I began thinking about doing more research and writing a more compre-
hensive journal article. Invited to teach at NYU in Spring 2010 by their depart-
ment of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and having pursued this research on queer
communists a bit more, I gave another talk about it. A lot of folks showed up,
many of whom had been or still were in the Party. We had a terrific discussion
following the formal talk, and I basically stood at the podium taking notes as
one person after another recounted his/her experiences in the Party and on
the Left, and then started arguing among themselves as Communists, and even
ex-Communists and socialists tend to do. It was quite wonderful, really, and
very funny. By the end I realized I had a book project in hand.
The Communist Party had been a foundational part of my life. Being a
lesbian is foundational to who I am, and have always been. I thought put-
ting these two parts of my life experiences together could be of benefit to
others sorting their own, and to those seeking a broader understanding of
Communist and queer history. Ultimately, this is a book of stories to make
sure that queer Communists are visible, valued, and recognized. It is to coun-
ter erasure. It is to help us heal from decades of abuse, and to build a movement
on the bedrock they set into place.

A Short Overview of History and Literature

The Communist Party, and more generally, the communist and socialist left,
may be thought of as tiny sects with a few thousand members at most and
largely without influence. This is somewhat misleading. For example, the US
Communist Party, founded in 1919, had 60,000 members by the early 1920s.
It was smashed in the Red Scare during the 1920s and its membership reduced
to about 7,000 by the end of the decade. However, membership soared again
in the 1930s to more than 100,000 as the Communist Party immersed itself
in civil rights organizing in the South and union organizing in the Midwest.
Communists and thousands of antifascist progressives organized in the Popular
Front against fascism in the United States (and Europe). Party members were
deeply involved in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. This was the name for the
fighting force of thousands of young men from the United States who went to
8 Introduction

Spain to fight in defense of the Spanish Republic against the fascist forces led
by General Francisco Franco. Scores of young women also joined the Brigade
as nurses risking their lives treating the wounded, both military and civilian,
in rudimentary hospitals, some of them set into caves.
Beginning in 1926, the Party initiated publication of The New Masses, a cul-
tural and literary magazine whose predecessors had been first The Masses and
then The Liberator. Writers who published in The New Masses included Langston
Hughes, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine
Herbst, Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Meridel LeSeuer,
and Dorothy Day. Its founding editor was Mike Gold, whose fictionalized auto-
biography Jews Without Money was to become a literary classic, translated into
14 languages. The New Masses was one of the most widely read Left literary and
artistic journals of that era and was largely under the aegis of the Communist
Party. Between the Popular Front and New Masses and CIO industrial organ-
izing in the Midwest and the anti-racist organizing in the South, even as many
members as the Party had, thousands more passed through it. Many more people
were around it and read its publications. From this point of view, an examina-
tion of the queer history of the Communist Party opens up a new historical
venue for consideration of both the Left and the LGBT liberation movements.
I have benefited from many scholars whose works helped me to better
understand ways of thinking about queer and communist connections. For
example, Cheryl Higishida’s Black Internationalist Feminism: Writers of the Left
(1945–1995) explores the writings of Black internationalists, among them
Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Rosa Guy. Higishida is explicit
about the Communist circles in which they traveled, and, when appropriate,
their own queer sexuality and/or their writings in which lesbian or sexually
non-conforming characters are portrayed.
Similarly, a book by Miriam Frank, Out in the Union: A Labor History of
Queer America was instructive. Frank organizes her study thematically, using
her interview material as commentary about struggles as they unfolded. She
divides her study into three sections: “Coming Out,” “Coalition Politics,”
and “Conflict and Transformation.” In “Coming Out,” Frank focuses on the
struggles of queer workers in unionized construction jobs; the highly segre-
gated craft industries such as carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work that
have, until recent years, excluded both women and people of color; and the
auto industry. She did not identify Communists within her published work.
Miriam was extremely generous with me and made her oral history tapes and
transcripts available. She put an asterisk next to the names of those individuals
she thought were Party members. There were just a few, and all were quite
circumspect. The oral histories suggested a continued Communist closeting
even as queer identities were revealed.
Works by gay historians, John D’Emilio and Martin Duberman, have
documented the contributions of queer folks in defining radical social justice
 Introduction 9

movements of the late twentieth century, such as Bayard Rustin, Barbara

Deming, and David McReynolds. In addition, Alan Bèrubè wrote a definitive
work on gays and lesbians in the military during World War II. He was in the
middle of writing a history of gays in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union,
a union with significant Left and Communist influence, when he died unex-
pectedly in 2007. His collection of essays, My Desire for History: Essays on Gay,
Community and Labor History, edited posthumously by Estelle Freedman and
John D’Emilio, assisted me in thinking about historiography, queer spaces,
erasures, and methods of research.6
Aaron Lecklider’s book, Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of
Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, was published in June 2021. His
approach, based on meticulous archival research, is more dispersed than mine,
giving broader range to the Left, inclusive of some who were communists,
and others who were socialists, bohemians, and non-conforming, sometimes
itinerant folks, many on the margins of society, who embraced a radical pol-
itics. He sought out their stories through literature, letters, autobiographies,
radical newspapers, and artistic productions. He demonstrated, in innovative
and often delightful ways, how pervasive and influential queer sensibilities and
stories were, including those by some who were not themselves gay or lesbian.
Focused between the 1920s and 1960s, Lecklider’s work reenvisions the cul-
tural history of those years from a queer perspective that is often exhilarating.
He also shows that “Many of the most important documents articulating leftist
feminism in the 1940s were written by queer women. They were outsiders
who developed a revolutionary vocabulary from which to challenge that struc-
ture of a society that could not contain them.” 7 Among the early couples he
described, for example, were Ruth Erickson and Eleanor “Steve” Stevenson.
Stevenson came from Minnesota and arrived in Greenwich Village in 1925,
reveling in the spirit of the place. It’s where she met Ruth, and they were
soon living together. Lecklider delights in their romp through the Village,
and their growing radicalism which led them to embrace many of the writers
of the Harlem Renaissance, anarchism, and then finally moving more toward
socialism and the Communist Left, whether or not they were ever actually
members of the Party. They most certainly moved in those circles and were
friends with Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester. Lecklider reports that by
1930 they had moved to Milford, Connecticut, where they lived for the rest
of their lives. Lecklider’s stories of Erickson and Stevenson, told in a breezy,
sort of cheerful way, are typical of the scores he recounts. Most importantly,
Lecklider’s work shows the full participation of queer perspectives in the cul-
tural history of the Left.
A decade before Aaron Lecklider’s ground-shaking cultural history, gay
historian Martin Duberman astutely observed that, “Many [white male]
left-wingers … position themselves as radical on economic and class issues but
are utterly traditional in regard to feminist and gay concerns.” It is significant
10 Introduction

here that Duberman saw the connection between sexism and homophobia.
This in itself was an important insight. He then went onto challenge Left his-
torians like Eric Hobsbawm who “seal themselves off from the realities of gay
experience,” and public intellectuals and former New Left leaders like Todd
Gitlin for scorning the insights and contributions of gay and lesbian scholars
and activists. Duberman wrote, “None of these left-wing traditionalists could
conceivably express such [pejorative and dismissive] views if they’d read a
word of Eve Sedgwick or Judith Butler. If they had they would have to take
seriously some of the basic insights of queer history and theory: the perform-
ative aspects of gender, the viable parameters of friendship, the shifting shape
across time and culture of such purported universals as the nuclear family,
monogamy …”8
My efforts here are allied to these and other similar works. My purpose
is to show that LGBT history and the history of the Communist Left and
Communist Party are deeply connected through the individuals that embod-
ied both, however, unwilling either side sometimes is to acknowledge it. I
personally embody this, but I am by no means alone. Moreover, if we take
seriously intersectional politics, we might begin to think about an intrasec-
tional way of thinking. The use of “intra” emphasizes that race, class, gender,
and sexuality not only intersect. It means that their formations and existence
are simultaneously embedded in each other.

Segregated Archives
I have been doing extensive archival work for a decade. The organization
of archives exemplifies the ways in which the Communist and the Left are
segregated from queer history, and vice versa. In spring 2010, I began work
in the archives of the CPUSA housed in the Tamiment Library at NYU, an
archive that at the time was not yet fully processed but is now well organized
and readily available. When I began, I met with Michael Nash, who was head
of the library. He informed me that the Party had placed no restrictions on
access to its archive with one exception. The exception was the files of the
so-called Review Commission, also known as the Control Commission, post-
1953. These are the case files of individuals brought before the Commission
for disciplinary action as a result of some perceived or actual violation of Party
policy. It was the body that had the authority to suspend or expel members of
the Party. These files, Michael informed me, were sealed. I could access them,
he said, if I got permission from the Party.
These were the files I most needed to see because the Communist Party
did not permit homosexuals to join or to remain members if they were known
to be homosexuals. To progress in any serious way, I knew I needed to see these
files. I sent an email to the then General Secretary of the Communist Party,
Sam Webb. I told him what I was doing and asked if he would meet with
 Introduction 11

me. He was very open and generous with his time. We talked for nearly two
hours, and by the end, I had complete access to anything I wished to see in
the Party files, including those of the Control/Review Commission, with the
proviso that post-1953 I would not use any names. I had no problem with this.
I was not trying to embarrass or “out” anybody.
If you were gay or lesbian there were only two options. Either you were
closeted and did not otherwise announce your gay or lesbian identity, or you
identified as gay/lesbian, in which case continued membership was untenable.
As some folks I had known have passed away in the years since the Party lifted
its ban on gay and lesbian membership, I have read obituaries in the Party press
and learned of their queer lives. One woman, for example, Mary Davis in
Northern California, was a lesbian, whom I had known for years. I never had
any idea she was gay! I reflected on how damaging this was to all of us. Had
we but known! And yet, of course, that was impossible. So, there was only
very limited possibility of creating any kind of queer community for solidarity
and friendship within the Party. When it happened, it had to be underground
within the Party. It did happen, and Betty Millard reflected on it, which I write
about in her story in Chapter 4.
A major issue in archival research, in general, is that archives tend to pre-
serve materials from white, wealthy or middle-class political, literary, artistic,
or otherwise mainstream public figures and professionals. The Schomburg
Center, with its focus on Black culture and history, and the archival collec-
tions in historically Black colleges and universities, also tend to focus on the
achievements of conventional literary, artistic, or political figures. Invoking
Toni Morrison’s idea that “we cannot remember those we do not miss,” mind-
ful searches and awareness of omission is part of the journey in LGBT histor-
ical studies. This makes all the more critical the establishment of lesbian and
gay historical societies and archives, even as their practices tend to make it
hard to find connections to the Left.9
The focus on traditional archives also makes it challenging to find stories
and histories of working-class people and people of color. This is partially
overcome by archives of social justice and civil rights movements, such as the
privately-run Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research. In
recent years, this has also been mitigated by collections of oral histories. All of
this compounds the search for the doubly marginalized queer and Communist.
For example, Mexican-Americans, especially women, were prominent in the
Communist Party throughout the Southwest in the 1930s and 1940s and well
into the 1960s. However, it is very difficult to find reliable information on their
personal lives. For example, an extraordinary book by Justin Akers Chacón
provides an encyclopedic history of Mexican-American radicals, including
socialists, wobblies, and communists. But in its more than 700 pages, there is
no hint of gays or lesbians in the struggle among the hundreds of people whose
lives he documents.10
12 Introduction

In my continual rummaging through archival sources, including those dig-

italized and online, I was thrilled to learn that one of the first films ever made
featuring a lesbian romance was produced in Mexico in 1951. Among its cos-
tars was Rosaura Revueltas, who was a member of the Mexican Communist
Party. The film was a remake of a German one from 1931 that had been
banned by the Nazis. The Mexican film was called Muchachas en Uniformes
(Girls in Uniform). The Mexican version of the story was set in a Catholic high
school and centered on a romance between a 14-year-old student and a nun.
It was based on the German novel by Christa Winsloe, which had originally
been set in a boarding school to which many of the wealthiest Germans sent
their children. Thus, the German version had a class-conscious edge absent
from the Mexican.
Muchachas en Uniformes was directed by Alfredo Crevana, who already had
a well-established career. Rosaura Revueltas played the role of the Mother
Superior whose strict adherence to doctrine and discipline doomed the lovers.
Revueltas was one of the country’s leading actresses with many film credits
to her name. The film created an uproar, and although it was not banned,
condemnation of it by the Catholic hierarchy was fierce, as were their denun-
ciations of those who made it.11 In its stormy wake, Rosaura Revueltas left
Mexico and immigrated to the United States.
Rosaura Revueltas came to Los Angeles, joining with Communists in the
Mexican-American community. A year or so later, Revueltas was engaged by
filmmakers Michael Wilson, Herbert Biberman, and Paul Jarrico to star in
Salt of the Earth. Released in 1954 despite the efforts by the US government
to suppress it, it told the story of a strike by Mexican-American zinc min-
ers in Hanover, New Mexico, led by the Mine, Mill, and Smelters Workers
Union, with significant Communist influence. Rosaura Revueltas’ character
was strongly feminist, as was the film. Although she was legally in the United
States, government agents detained her and then deported her to Mexico
without so much as a hearing in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the film
from being completed.
After being deported from the United States, Rosaura was blacklisted in
Mexico, as that government caved to anti-Communist pressure from the United
States. She moved to Berlin (then East Germany), where she worked with Bertolt
Brecht in his Ensemble Theater from 1957 to 1960. For a time, she was also in
Cuba working in their postrevolutionary theater. By the late 1960s, she was
able to return to Mexico, where she pursued a career in acting and dance, both
performing and teaching. She had one son, Arturo Bodenstedt, who was born
in Berlin. She died at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, May 1996, at the age of
86. This was all that I was able to learn about her personal life, although I suspect
more is available in archival sources in Mexico. It is profoundly ironic how much
her life and career were interrupted, as she was caught first in a homophobic, and
then in an anti-Communist, vise. Still, she persevered.
 Introduction 13

Emerging Stories: “Red Diaper Babies”

Shape Radical Visions
It is astonishing how many on the Communist Left have been part of the gay
and lesbian experience, and some became engaged in the late twentieth cen-
tury LGBT Liberation movements. Some were what we laughingly call “Red
Diaper Babies” because we were born into Communist families. As I stud-
ied the archives at various sites and contexts, in conversation with folks and
my own memories, I began to see that the two experiences and movements
were very much intertwined, especially through individuals who were in and
around the Communist Left and were experienced organizers. They became
a part of the emerging gay rights and lesbian and gay liberation movements.
It was like holding a kaleidoscope to the mind’s eye. What had been hidden
from me started to emerge.
For example, it was in 2010 while teaching at NYU that I first met Jonathan
Ned Katz. I had long admired him and the work he had done in 1976 in editing
Gay American History, Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. This was the first real
documentary history I had ever seen of our lives, its timing for me just at the
juncture of my struggle to come out even to myself. Jonathan has since pub-
lished extensively in gay and lesbian history, and he initiated and curates the
online resource “OUThistory – It’s about time!” with scores of stories by many
contributors.12 He is also an accomplished artist, especially of what he calls gay
erotica. He has had exhibitions at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York.
Over lunch one day, Jonathan told me something about his childhood. He
was raised by a father who was Communist and a mother who was a psychoan-
alyst! He laughed, recalling the feeling during a typical family dinner of watch-
ing a ping-pong match through competing discourses. One day in 1951 when
Jonathan was about 15, his dad, Bernard, came home with a new book. It was
the first volume of my father’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United
States. Jonathan also said that his dad took classes at the Party-run Jefferson
School and often talked to him and his brother, William Loren Katz, about
Black-American history. It was from this that Jonathan first got the idea of doing
a documentary history. He told me he thought that it must have been tough to
find the voices of Black people, but if it could be done, he thought he should be
able to find and document the voices of gays and lesbians. From one “red diaper
baby” to another! I loved the story. And how influential his book has been!13
Another story about a “red diaper baby” who was a central figure in shap-
ing some of the most joyous times in the lesbian movement from its earliest
days comes from the composer and charismatic folk singer Alix Dobkin.
Her memoir, My Red Blood, described her childhood in the early 1940s in a
Jewish Communist family in New York that had echoes of my experience,
including avidly cheering for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field with
her “Pop.” Later the family moved to Philadelphia and then to Kansas City,
14 Introduction

following employment opportunities for her dad. Both of her parents were
in the Communist Party. They had left it by 1956, which was about the same
time Alix decided to join it. She reported that her primary motivation was to
be able to hang out with the kids in Kansas City she knew and liked who had
radical politics. She was attending the academically challenging Shawnee-
Mission High School, feeling ever the outsider, even after she met a handful
of Jewish kids. She didn’t fit in with them given her New York experiences
and her radical politics. She felt more comfortable with the radical Kansas
City kids.
As she approached adolescence, homosexuality entered her awareness,
mostly through the rantings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. It wasn’t his rant-
ings, of course, but the idea of loving women. It hit a resonant chord. “My
chief political passions, justice and equality had always landed me outside
conventional circles, but the older I got, the clearer it became that some of
my private inclinations were even more abnormal.” Remembering an ear-
lier time in her New York childhood at the Communist-run summer camp,
Kinderland, she reported that she and her bunkmates had “concluded that ‘ab’
meant ‘above’ and bragged to each other about how ‘Abnormal’ we were. At
camp it meant special and smart, but in Kansas it meant isolated and lonely.”14
Her early experiences in the Communist Party, including her participation
in the World Youth Festival in Vienna in 1959, provided her with a sense of
community and camaraderie even as she masked her sexuality. She was soon
conventionally married, and then a mother. From her Brooklyn Dodgers fan-
dom to her marriage and motherhood, I felt as though my life had been along
a parallel line, although Alix was four years older.
Alix Dobkin loved music, and it was perhaps the pivotal force that got her
to the Village in the very early 1960s. She was good, very good, and got to
play with folks like Bob Dylan. The Village scene and the music propelled
her in new directions. By the early 1970s, she was part of a lesbian feminist
community and in 1973, she produced Lavender Jane Loves Women with Kay
Gardner and Marilyn Ries. On her website she described it as “the very first
album by, for and about Lesbians in the history of the world. From then until
now, I have focused on the lives, concerns and perspectives of women who
love women.”15 Dobkin became a kind of troubadour for the lesbian-feminist
movement, traveling, as she wrote, “to hundreds of women’s communities in
this country and many others. It has been my privilege and pleasure to gather
elements of our common culture and to create a body of stories, songs, obser-
vations, and opinions.”16 She always worked in a collective way, so that “sister-
hood” was manifest in how songs were written, and performed. As she wrote
near the end of her memoir about the lesbian-feminist world she inhabited for
many years, Dobkin wrote, “I found myself working with a host of remarka-
ble women to build a community based on our self-determined best interests
to further our well-being. No wonderland could have held more promise for
 Introduction 15

someone whose lifelong essence rested upon being original, unconventional,

and radical.”
Although she was long gone from the Communist Party, she never aban-
doned her “red blood.” Her music reflected that fusion of anti-racist, anti-
imperialist, feminist, and woman-loving perspectives. I can remember the
first time I heard “The Woman in Your Life,” from Dobkin’s album Lavender
Jane Loves Women. I was teaching at San Jose State, recently separated from my
husband, struggling with my fears and identity. Some dear lesbian-feminists
among my students entertained my kids so I could go to a Cris Williamson
concert, and she sang it. I was laughing and crying at the same time.
Gerald Meyer, who worked with my father as a student intern at his American
Institute for Marxist Studies in the mid-1970s, was gay and a Communist. A
colleague at NYU told me about him, and urged me to get in touch with
him. I had a long telephone conversation with him in December 2017, and we
corresponded via email. Jerry taught history for more than 30 years at Hostos
Community College in the South Bronx, and was cherished by students and
colleagues for his warmth and compassion. He was an authority on the life
and times of Vito Marcantonio, who was a member of Congress representing
a poor working-class district in East Harlem from the late 1930s through the
1940s. For most of that time, Marcantonio was in the American Labor Party;
it was one of those rare instances of the partial success of a radical left third
party in American politics.
Jerry was born in 1940 and raised in a rough and tumble working class,
mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey. One of three
brothers, Jerry grew up in an impoverished family living in a cold-water flat,
with a coal stove in the kitchen. His father was often violent; his mother strug-
gled with her own problems and provided what limited care she could. Jerry
told me that it was their paternal grandmother, who was Jewish, who really
raised the boys and took care of them. Jerry said, “She saved us.” Jerry told me
that through his grandmother he felt himself to be “culturally very Jewish.” It
was with his grandmother that he discovered a love of learning, because, he
explained to me, in his impoverished home, there was “no encouragement for
intellectual work” and a kind of “privileging of poverty,” as though it were a
“badge of honor.” However, both his parents and his grandmother applauded
and advocated for good actions and “giving comfort to the disconsolate.” He
said he appreciated learning this at a young age. Jerry knew he was different
early on and told me he “wasn’t part of boys’ culture.” which, talking to me in
retrospect, he thought to be a “bonus.” He said he could ride a bike, but never
played competitive sports; he was, he said, “sissified.” When he was 15, he had a
nervous breakdown driven in part by this feeling of difference, even if he didn’t
yet fully know himself to be gay. He was so alienated from the Catholic school
he was attending and from the Catholic Church in which he had been firmly
placed by his parents. He said it was “all learning by rote. . . memorizing the
16 Introduction

names of the saints.” One of the teachers at the school had chastised him for
reading a book critical of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch
hunts and instructed the other students to avoid him. So, publicly humiliated,
he threw his books onto the floor and stomped out of the room, never to return
to the school. At the same time, he left the Catholic Church. It was then that
things began to fall apart for him. Although he no longer believed in Church
doctrine, it and the school had structured his life and provided some sanctuary
away from the craziness in his immediate family. With the structure gone, he
fell apart. During his breakdown, however, he was greatly helped by an aunt
who took a strong interest in him, and brought him books, which “I devoured,”
he said. Encouraged by his keen interest, she took him to the public library
and its Teen/Youth section. Jerry told me that “transformed my life.” Among
the books he read was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He explained to me that there were
no Black people in his neighborhood; he knew nothing about Black history,
enslavement, or Black life. The book had a huge impact on him.
Jerry recovered and completed his high school education in a public school,
the only one among his brothers to do so. By the time he was in college
in New York, he said, his best friends were girls and women; they studied
together in the library. That was where he felt most comfortable.
As was true of so many of us who had grown up in the 1950s, Jerry got
married, and was raising his two children with his wife, when, by the early
1970s, his inner world propelled him into gay life. Although he didn’t say
so explicitly to me, I thought Stonewall and the emergence of a gay libera-
tion and activist movement must have further encouraged him to come into
his own. He joined the Communist Party in 1974 even though he knew it
“denied that gay people existed,” as he put it to me. By 1978, he had left his
marriage and had begun living with the man who was to be the love of his
life, Luis Romero. His divorce was messy, especially regarding his visitation
rights with his children. The court, however, enforced the divorce settlement,
which allowed him to see his children unsupervised. Of course, none of this
was easy on his kids, who were both by then in their early teen years. Jerry
told me “I took care of them,” and “both of them today are alive and well.”
And he further emphasized how much they both loved and respected Luis. He
also spoke with me about his struggle with alcoholism in the 1980s and how
he overcame it. He is a great supporter of AA, and sponsored others in their
efforts to heal. One Italian woman, he told me, felt that he had saved her life
and had also given her back her pride in her Italian heritage because of his love
for Vito Marcantonio.
Jerry was one of the founding faculty of Hostos Community College,
which is part of the City University of New York. It was opened in 1968, and
he was on the faculty first as an adjunct lecturer and later as a full-time profes-
sor. Hostos Community College, named after Eugenia Mario de Hostos, an
educator, essayist, novelist, and Puerto Rican patriot, is located in the South
 Introduction 17

Bronx. Most of its students are working-class Black and Puerto Rican people
from the surrounding community.
Jerry joined my father at the American Institute for Marxist Studies, doing
research for him and helping to administer it in 1973, a year before he joined
the Party. He also got Herbert a part-time position at Hostos teaching two
classes in American History at night. They shared an office at the college. I
remember how much my father loved it and how moved he was to be teaching
people who had been working all day and still came to his classes at night.
Jerry told me that Herbert was “warm and supportive” of him as a gay man
and that he was equally welcoming to Luis when he met him. For Jerry, work-
ing with Herbert at AIMS was intellectually stimulating and personally very,
very helpful.
Jerry taught at Hostos for 30 years and was the first chapter president of the
Professional Staff Congress there, which was the name of CUNY’s faculty
union. When the city tried to close Hostos in the mid-1970s during one of its
many fiscal crises, Jerry led a movement of faculty and students in protests that
included occupying buildings, marching, and lobbying in Albany. It was typi-
cal of so many city and state governments to try to cut the youngest and most
vulnerable institutions of higher education serving primarily working-class
people of color. Jerry, who had inspired this successful movement, became a
kind of campus legend.
In addition to teaching classes in American history, he was also ever the
activist. One biographer noted that “Jerry was a slightly older contemporary of
the New Left activists of the 1960s and was deeply engaged in the struggles of
that era. But his heart was always with the Old Left of the 1930s and ‘40s that
helped birth the great industrial unions …”17
Jerry and Luis lived in Brooklyn in the neighborhood of Park Slope, where
they had bought their home in the 1970s, before the area was gentrified. Jerry
had also bought a couple of other properties in the same neighborhood around
the same time, for little more than the cost of the taxes due on them. With
the gentrification of the area, he became quite wealthy from the sale of those
homes. He donated thousands of dollars back to Hostos, setting up scholar-
ship and emergency funds for students. In 2012, he donated money to build a
conference room named in honor of Marcantonio in which an annual forum
could explore his political legacy and its meaning for contemporary times.
Jerry loved giving money away to folks, including to a band, for example, to
cut their own label. He felt it to be a great joy.
Jerry told me that he was a member of a Party club in Park Slope that was
“tolerant of gays,” and otherwise he stayed pretty much under the wire of any
kind of notice from the national Party leadership. However, he said that after
a Party convention in about 1983 that refused to acknowledge and affirm the
gay movement, he left the Party. (The Convention was actually held in 1985.)
He just felt it was too much of a contradiction for himself.
18 Introduction

In early November 2021, Jerry took a fall outside his Park Slope home and
sustained a head injury from which he did not recover. He was 81. I learned of
his death through a mutual friend. She also said that he had told her how much
he had enjoyed our conversation about his life; I was so grateful to know this.
I know that for his life-partner, Luis Romero, his death was a devastating loss,
as it was for his now-adult children. When I corresponded with a colleague
at Hostos Community College, she told me how beloved Jerry had been.
“Everyone loved him,” she said.

Queer Stories from the Archives

I continue now with some additional biographies and personal vignettes to give
a few samples of the queer communists I learned about or knew. In the remain-
der of the book there are successive chapters on those whose lives I studied in
greater depth. I chose this biographical method to honor the political and cul-
tural contributions of these closeted Party members. I also wanted to convey
how homophobia is internalized, and the personal, political, and psychological
effects of closeting, which could best be done through telling life stories.

Maud Russell (1893–1989): China, Women, and Revolution

Among the more colorful, adventuresome, and selfless queer Communists I
learned about was Maud Russell. In 1917, at the age of 23, she went to China
as a “social worker” under the auspices of the Young Women’s Christian
Association to educate girls and young women in the Y’s missions, with a
special emphasis on overcoming illiteracy. She was to remain in this work for
26 years; China transformed her from a more or less apolitical person who
wanted to be of service into a Communist.
Maud Russell was born and raised in Hayward, California, part of a white,
solidly middle-class family. The photographs I have seen of Maud in ado-
lescence and young adulthood suggest the extent to which she was not per-
forming traditional femininity of her era. In one, for example, when she was
probably in her very early twenties, she is wearing what look like khaki pants,
and a casual white shirt, her hair is cropped short; she’s standing, slouching
slightly, hands in the front pockets of her trousers, her face turned toward
the camera with a faint smile, suggesting her tomboyishness. Enrolled as an
undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Maud met Mary
Ingle Bentley (1876–1940). In 1913, Maud was 20 and Mary was 37. They fell
in love. Mary was Secretary for the Berkeley chapter of the Young Women’s
Christian Association. Maud was a member. Often feeling herself an outsider
in conventional circles, delighted to be in the company of women and having
an impulse toward generous service, Maud felt comfortable in the “Y” cir-
cle and appreciated the social betterment programs that they initiated. Mary
 Introduction 19

Bentley was from a more upper class, prominent Berkeley family whose father
was a leading theologian.
In the YWCA, Maud and Mary found themselves in a loving circle of
women devoted to each other as well as to the pursuit of worthy projects,
especially to relieve the suffering of women and children. This circle of loving
women and their commitment to social justice made them especially attractive
to Maud. When she graduated from Berkeley in 1915, she went to work for
the Y in San Francisco.
In spring 1917, Maud learned about a missionary program run by the
YWCA in China. Enthralled, full of life and adventure, she applied for and
was accepted into the program, on the condition that she eventually completes
a master’s degree in social work when she was on furlough; this was to be
arranged after every seven years of service. Critical to Maud’s decision to pur-
sue work in China was that the “Y” women were designated social workers
and not “missionaries”; the distinction mattered. The YWCA did not prose-
lytize; its programmatic purpose in China was education. Literacy programs
also included some medical and hygienic training in disease prevention, and
courses in sewing, cooking, and Bible study. Once a mission was successfully
established, the American women were expected to give over leadership to
their Chinese counterparts.
I speculated about the decision that Maud and Mary made to be apart
while still considering each other in loving partnership. I have no archival
evidence, and could come to no conclusion about this. However, in her public
life, both in China and in the United States, Maud remained deeply closeted.
I first suspected the lesbian connection because my father had suggested it. My
suspicion was confirmed, however, when a colleague and friend at NYU, who
was herself a lesbian, had met Maud on a trip to Nicaragua in the 1970s and
they had become friends.
Maud set sail for Shanghai across the Pacific in August 1917 as World War
I raged in Europe, only months before the Bolshevik Revolution. China itself
was also in the throes of major upheaval. The 1911 Revolution led by Sun
Yat-Sen had successfully overthrown the Manchu Dynasty, but its dream of
creating a democratic unified nation was thwarted by the imperial intrigues
of the British and the French, each allying itself with one or another war-
lord, to procure the vast mineral resources needed for industrial production
in the War. Shanghai, in particular, with its ports and nascent industrial base,
became an industrial and shipping center. I don’t think Maud was aware of
all or most of this political context or history when she first went to China.
I think she knew little about the country; she was primarily motivated by a
feminist agenda centered on education for girls and women.
Upon her arrival in Shanghai, Maud was sent to Nanking to study the lan-
guage. After two years she achieved sufficient mastery to be sent on her first
mission, which was to a new YWCA school being established in Changsha,
20 Introduction

Hunan Province, in central China. She worked there until her furlough in
1924, returning to New York to begin a master’s program in social work at
Columbia University. Maud would return to Changsha two more times, in
the late 1920s for two years and then early in the 1930s again for two years.
Maud loved Changsha and the women with whom she worked. For example,
there is a letter from Maud to the YWCA Asilomar Division, from Hankow,
Hupeh (now Hubei), China, dated February 11, 1928. Maud was thrilled
because she was back in Central China:

“You see where I am back in Central China! But this time I’m going fur-
ther on, to Changsha, in Hunan Province. You remember I have written
you about our YWCA there – how brave and resourceful our secretaries
were last Spring when the communists took over the YWCA; and how
Miss Hsu returned this Fall and reopened the Association; and how the
staff and the Board have carried on there. They have asked that someone
be sent up to work with them, and since I have lived in Changsha for
four years (1920–1924) I am the lucky one. It is like coming home, to be
getting back to my beloved Changsha; my tongue can hardly wait to get
into Hunanese again!”18

Maud’s immersion in the country, close personal friendships, and the enor-
mity of the political upheavals surrounding her transformed her political con-
sciousness and her cultural affinities. In 1927, she joined a Marxist study group
in Shanghai. Others in their group included Rewi Alley, a New Zealander
who had come to China many years before, adopted two boys, and made
the country his home. He was a communist, and he was gay.19 Also in the
study group were Lily Haass and Talitha Gerlach, both Americans employed as
social workers with the YWCA in Shanghai. Another member of their group
was a well-known Chinese revolutionary, Cora Deng (Deng Yuzhi). As a
student in Shanghai, she had participated in the May 4th Revolution of 1919 in
which thousands protested the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.
This was because the Western powers had ceded China’s Shandong Peninsula
to Japan. As another imperial power, Japan and its incursions into China were
becoming a constant worry. The students prevailed when they were joined
by workers in Shanghai and other cities. Deng was fluent in English, having
studied at the London School of Economics. All the members of the Marxist
study group were seasoned social workers and organizers, all were committed
to easing the suffering of the Chinese people, and women in particular.
During Maud’s years in China, she and Mary maintained their relation-
ship through extended correspondence, occasional telephone calls, and living
together when Maud returned to the United States. They maintained their
relationship in this unconventional way for 27 years, and until Mary Bentley’s
unexpected death due to a gall bladder infection in 1940. It was in the flood
 Introduction 21

of condolences that Maud received while still in China that I appreciated

the fullness of their love, and the way in which their sisters in the Asilomar
Division of the YWCA completely accepted and acknowledged their relation-
ship. Upon Mary’s sudden death on November 1st, a Y sister cabled Maud with
the news. In the weeks following, she received many beautiful letters, some
of which also included descriptions of how well Mary had been looking at
her birthday party only days before her death. One particularly heartfelt letter
from Sophia, a friend in Berkeley, was hand-written on onion paper:

This evening in my small bedroom here, that faces on a garden and

entwined stately pine trees the candle has burned, stately and still,
bringing together us three, Mary, you, and myself – as often in fact,
in my memory, we have been – and as always, in recollection, we shall
be … so many memories of Mary and you flocked to me: the time at
Asilomar when you roughed each other so vigorously in who could say
one or the other more? The birthday party, Mary in her blue and the
buckle slippers – you all in my tiny cabin. Close by … and Mary says
with glee, having captured you for your own party!
Mary had such a special lot of fun in life, didn’t she? That is the chiefist
thing I think about in thinking of her life and its daily satisfaction. Life she
{word?} told to “free-about” and it gave her satisfaction, plenteous …. A
wonderful life you’ve had together, Maud, here and there, physical, letters,
messages – like your telephone call across the thousand miles …20

Maud Russell left China for the last time in 1943. With the World War
and a full-scale Japanese invasion, all YWCA personnel were ordered out
of the country. When she returned to the United States, she joined the US
Communist Party, fusing her Christian ethic of social justice service, feminist
convictions, and Communist self in a way that she felt was ethically congru-
ent. However, she remained deeply closeted as a lesbian.
Upon Maud’s permanent return to the United States, she went to work
for a time with the Passaic, New Jersey YWCA. After three years, however,
Maud left her position at the Y and moved to New York City. She found an
apartment on West 93rd Street and shared it with the remarkable writer, trans-
lator, and social worker Ida Pruitt. She and Maud lived together for 15 years.
Whether or not they were lovers I cannot say with certainty, but their friend-
ship was politically and culturally congruent. They each worked on their
respective projects, complementing each other’s initiatives.
Ida Pruitt (1888–1965) had been born on the Shandong Peninsula in China
to Western missionary parents; she was educated in the United States, eventu-
ally attending Columbia University Teachers College and graduating in 1910.
She traveled back and forth between China and the United States, with much
of her mid-life spent in China, where, from 1912 to 1919, she was principal
22 Introduction

of Wai Long Girls School in Chefoo and later, after studying social work
back in the United States, was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in New
York to head the Department of Social Services at the Peking Union Medical
College, where she remained until 1938. She left her position shortly after the
Japanese Occupation began and joined with Rewi Alley in organizing Chinese
Industrial Cooperative Factories in the countryside to support China’s indus-
try. This was part of China’s organized resistance to the Japanese Occupation.
Many of the young workers in the cooperatives had been orphaned, some
were crippled. A US group called Indusco was formed to raise funds to support
the cooperatives, and, in 1939, Pruitt returned to the United States to become
its Executive Secretary.
Pruitt never married, but, while living in Peking, she adopted two girls, one
Chinese and one a Russian refugee. She arranged for their education in English
schools in China and later sent both to the United States as they reached adult-
hood for college education, and to be out of harm’s way in the war.
Meanwhile, in the late 1940s, as revolutionary events were unfolding in
China and the Cold War increasingly defined US foreign policy, Maud Russell
initiated and was the executive director of the Committee for a Democratic
Far Eastern Policy (1946–1952). Its primary purpose was to prevent US mil-
itary intervention in China. With the success of the Chinese Communist
Revolution in 1949, and the increasing anti-communist hysteria in the United
States, it became impossible to sustain the organization, and it folded. Maud
then began almost single-handedly publishing The Far East Reporter with a
small staff working in New York in an effort to convey less-biased news from
revolutionary China and the democratic or pro-socialist struggles in other Far
East countries. It was published on very thin onion paper for overseas mailing.
I remember seeing it in my childhood home on a shelf above the radiator in the
kitchen where my father kept it. When he read it, you could hear the crinkle of
the paper as he turned the pages. It was there along with his regular subscrip-
tions to The Nation, The Christian Century, The New Republic, and I.F. Stone’s
Weekly, everyone trying to counter the anti-communist hearings, purges,
arrests, and deportations. While government persecutions of gays and lesbians
were happening at the same time, in the same ways, by the same government
agencies, and were at times completely intertwined, the Left, including the
Communists, remained silent about it. For Maud the double persecutions must
have been excruciating as she too remained silent and closeted.
At the same time that Maud worked on her Far East Reporter, Ida Pruitt
continued to work for Indusco, fundraising for the Cooperatives in China
until 1951. She also wrote and published several books, including Daughter of
Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman. In addition, she translated
several novels by Chinese women into English.
In July 1961, Maud and Ida were forced to move when their apartment
building was scheduled for demolition. Maud remained in New York, finding
 Introduction 23

an apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River. Ida moved

to Philadelphia to be near one of her daughters. Ida died four years later.
Maud, ever persistent continued her work in support of China, publish-
ing the Far East Reporter sporadically until 1989. In the 1970s and 1980s, she
supported the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and she returned to China for
what would be the last time in 1978. In retrospect, from my point of view,
her support of the Cultural Revolution is profoundly disturbing, especially
considering how much of her life in China had been devoted to loving and
compassionate service. But then I also know how many Communists, includ-
ing myself, denied the atrocities in the Soviet Union, for example, because of
a blinding emotional commitment to a political ideal that was not the reality.
In my case, and perhaps in Maud’s, this emotional need was connected to a
secret lesbian sexuality. In my case, I persisted in an unreasoning loyalty to
compensate for my unacceptable deviance.
Even as Maud’s health declined and she became partially blind and lost some
of her hearing, she travelled to Nicaragua as part of a US delegation to support
the Sandinista Revolution in 1980 that had finally overthrown the US-backed
Somoza dictatorship. She carried on a voluminous correspondence with friends
and comrades throughout the world and worked closely with the Communist-
affiliated New York attorney Ira Gollobin to manage her papers and her estate.
Maud died in New York in November 1989. She was 96 years old.

Elizabeth Olds (1896–1991): Communist?

Lesbian? What the Questions Teach Us
Elizabeth Olds (1896–1991) was a Minneapolis born artist who was raised in
a comfortable middle-class family and studied architecture at the University
of Minnesota. A major artist of the 1930s and 1940s, she was widely exhib-
ited in the United States. Today her works can be found in the Smithsonian
American Art Museum and in several university art museums, most notably
at the University of Texas, Austin. She was introduced to the Communist
Left in the late 1920s and 1930s in both Paris and the United States. She
worked with the federally funded Public Works Art Project, and in mid-
1934 produced an extraordinary series of lithographs depicting the workers
at the Swift and Company Meat Packing plant in Omaha, Nebraska. As art
historian Helen Langa wrote, “This was an unprecedented subject for fine
art in the early 1930s. Indeed, few American artists had ever depicted peo-
ple at work, and Olds’ choice of stockyard scenes was especially bold for a
woman.”21 Sheep Skinners, as her series was called, was the first of many she did
of workers in mining, coal, and steel, as well as others depicting movements
for social justice. Particularly significant also was the drawing she did entitled
The New Women of Spain, which was reproduced in the New Masses in 1936. It
showed Spanish women as militia fighters in the anti-fascist Republican units,
24 Introduction

a departure from the usual portrayals of women and children as refugees suf-
fering and passive. Another strongly feminist work was Burlesque, completed
in 1938. This lithograph is “startling different (from those usually done). By
molding the dancers’ bodies into a wall of angular energy and repeating their
stiff-armed poses, exaggerating the artifice of their smiles, and turning their
linked bodies into a visual metaphor for ‘labor solidarity,’ she celebrated these
women’s strengths.”22 For the purposes of this study, the question is whether
Elizabeth Olds was a lesbian. There are reasons to think she was, and Helen
Langa explores these in her essay; however, there is not a definitive answer.
The question shows us the ways in which the stigma of queer identity skews
both the historical record, and, in this case, our critical understanding of her
art with its portrayal of women’s strengths and solidarity. Art critic and biog-
rapher Langa astutley observes: “We now understand that automatically char-
acterizing single career women as heterosexual is historically problematic.”23
Langa’s well-founded point caused me to think about the revolutionary
and/or literary or professional women and men I encountered in my research
who seemed to live their lives outside of traditional heterosexual norms. To
truly reenvision, to “re-remember,” is to remain interpretively open while
being sensitive to the enormity of the social stigma and political pressures
exerted by the dominant culture.

Bertha Capen Reynolds (1887–1978)

One such example of a woman who lived outside heterosexual norms and
was most definitely a member of the Communist Party was Bertha Capen
Reynolds. My father had first mentioned Reynolds to me in the context of
those not-acknowledged lesbian conversations. I found her archive in the
Sophia Smith Collection in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was a Marxist
scholar, and one of the founders of social work in the United States.
Bertha Reynolds pioneered in the field of psychiatric social work; she also
is credited with developing the idea of “case work,” which ultimately revolu-
tionized social work practices. Between 1925 and 1934, she was the Assistant
Director of the School of Social Work at Smith College in Northampton,
Massachusetts. In 1937, the same year in which she joined the Communist
Party, she was fired from her teaching position at Smith by a nervous dean as
a wave of anti-Communist persecutions began in New York and Washington,
D.C. Reynolds was always open about her Marxist approaches to social work,
but she hid her Communist Party membership from all except her most inti-
mate friend. Her ideas about social work were radical, especially for those
times; she believed that people were poor as a result of capitalism’s systemic
inequalities. She believed that social workers should be unionized and needed
to be engaged in social justice movements, even as they worked to give direct
assistance to and relieve the suffering of those in need.
 Introduction 25

FIGURE 1.1  ertha C. Reynolds circa 1937, NYU Tamiment Library Archives,
B
Daily World photo collection (Courtesy of Longview Publishing,
New York)

Reynolds also became deeply engaged in psychoanalysis as a patient and

as praxis. Her mentor was Dr. Frankwood E. Williams (1883–1936), who was
among the foremost psychiatrists of his time. He emphasized lowering rates of
mental illness through prevention, which was congruent with Reynolds’ ideas
about social work. He was especially concerned about mental illness among
those who were incarcerated. Reynolds had suffered a nervous breakdown as
a young woman and recovered; her interest in and advocacy of psychoanal-
ysis was rooted in that experience. In her many published writings and pri-
vate letters, Reynolds emphasized the importance of psychology fused with
a Marxist analysis of social conditions, especially for the working classes, as a
way to think about the practice and teaching of social work. These ideas were
controversial in the more orthodox dogma of the Communist Party, which
rejected psychoanalysis altogether. Reynolds nonetheless stood her ground. I
have little doubt that her breakdown and her lifelong struggle with sexual-
ity were at the root of her intense commitment to psychoanalysis. Reynolds
had voluminous correspondence with scores of Communists, Marxist schol-
ars, and social workers. Among them was Eleanor Flexner, and when Bertha
wrote to Eleanor, she always sent her best wishes to “Helen.” This small
observation is what led me to first consider that Eleanor Flexner was a lesbian!
26 Introduction

Reynolds was hired as a social worker by the National Maritime Union

(NMU) and the United Seamen’s Service (USS) in 1943 as a social worker.
The seamen were often under tremendous stress, she explained, coming into
port on ships that had been torpedoed, and/or having been at sea for months
on end, under war conditions, in large convoys, and with little sleep. Writing
in her autobiography, An Unchartered Journey, Bertha said, “It meant a great
deal to me … to find an opportunity to express my whole self in my chosen
field.”24 This was because the NMU, as Bertha explained, “had fought its way
into being (under the CIO in 1936–37) from racket-ridden craft unions which
had offered small protection to men who earned as little as twenty-five dollars a
month while living at sea.”25 The NMU wanted a social worker, like Reynolds,
who was herself a union member, and believed in unions for the protection of
workers. While in New York, she lived in the Sunnyside apartments in Queens,
a housing cooperative in which Communist families predominated.
Reynolds had a more than 50-year intimate friendship with Rachel (Rae)
Levine (1909–1990), beginning in 1929 and lasting through Reynolds’ death.
Levine was 22 years younger, and they met when she attended the Smith College
program in Social Work. Levine had a truly extraordinary social work career spe-
cializing in disability. She spent the post-World War II years in Shanghai, China,
Germany, and Israel, in succession, between 1945 and 1955, providing services to
refugees and those in the Displaced Persons Camps in Europe. She and Reynolds
had an almost daily correspondence. Rae Levine’s letters from Israel often gave
a detailed picture of life there in the country’s first years, describing for example,
the continual shortages of food and the hardships faced by so many traumatized
refugees. Although she was based in Israel until 1955, Rae periodically returned
to the United States. In Israel, Levine was the founder of the Malben Institution
for the Care of Handicapped Immigrants in Tel Aviv. Malben was launched with
the initiative and funding of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)
established at the end of the War. Levine left Israel for good in 1955 despite des-
perate appeals to stay from the Ministry of Health. Although I did not find refer-
ence to the Palestinian people in the letters that I read, she did express increasing
discomfort with the country’s political direction. After she returned to New
York, Levine had a long social work career at Bellevue Hospital.26
In several letters between Rae and Bertha, their profound love for each
other was clear. For example, Rae had returned to the United States late
in 1951, and she and Bertha spent some time together at Rae’s New York
apartment on West 104th Street. After Bertha had returned to her home (at
that time she was living with her brother on the family’s farm in Stoughton,
Massachusetts), Rae wrote to her on September 6, 1952:

My dear Bertha … Thoughts of our precious few days together keep

recurring in my mind, and I feel I shall always carry with me the glow
of your warmth and affection. As though all of this is not infinitely
 Introduction 27

more than I deserve, the few simple words you spoke on the eve of your
departure, filling my cup to over brimming, moved me so I couldn’t
utter a word. How often have I pondered over this thing of Man’s ina-
bility to give expression to the most worthwhile capacity he possesses, to
love another human being without fear. We keep locked and buried in
the innermost recesses of our souls the one thing that could truly set us
free, while we nurse and nurture the petty hurts, actual and imagined,
and thus finally become our own worst jailers.

Then, near the end of her letter, Rae wrote, “You don’t know it but ever since
Smith days, without alteration I’ve carried your image with me, everywhere.
Your words (when we were together) were a response at last, and I am grateful
for I shall lean and draw on this, and it will give me strength and comfort in
the hard pull ahead.”27
While working in the Reynolds’ archive, a mutual friend put me in touch
with the then 90-year-old Ann Hartman, who had known Reynolds for
many, many years and had been the dean of the School of Social Work at
Smith College. She lived in Hadley, Massachusetts, with her life partner,
Joan Laird. Ann told me in no uncertain terms that Reynolds “was not a
communist and she was not a lesbian.” When she said this, I was still in the
archive, and I was holding Reynolds’ Party membership card in my hand! My
strongest response to Ann Hartman’s denials was an overwhelming sadness
that all of the loneliness that Bertha experienced and wrote about was largely
as a result of this terrible fear of discovery, so that presumably someone as
honorable a friend as Ann Hartman was ultimately not trusted. What an
awful isolation!28
While reading an oral history that Rachel Levine did with a graduate
student at Columbia whose dissertation was on Reynolds, I got confirmation
from Rae on what I thought: that Bertha Reynolds was, in fact, a lesbian. For
example, she told the oral historian about a woman with whom Bertha had
gotten involved in a relationship that lasted for two years. She pronounced
it “horrible, just horrible and would not talk about it further.” In her oral
history, Rae revealed more about her relationship with Bertha when she
explained:

I’d been going after her on this [writing her autobiography] for a year or
more, you see. I read it and I wept. It was her autobiography. Pouring
out from when she was a child, right straight through. All right. So I
read it. Nobody ever saw it. And I returned it to her. {It was titled} “The
Unchartered Journey,” and its raw material, had a lot of her personal
things in it. And I said “No Bertha, it doesn’t belong in here. It was too
personal, too private, too personal. You see, this is how she revealed
herself, but the public wouldn’t appreciate it. Not really.29
28 Introduction

Rae said that after she had read that first personal draft of her book, she
was even more drawn to Bertha. She had clearly set out to protect her. In
the months following that first read, Bertha lived with Rae at her apartment
on West 104th Street, and as she wrote, Rae read, chapter by chapter. The
Unchartered Journey was published in 1963 and was strictly limited to Reynolds’
professional social work career. It described how she innovated and developed
the idea of social work based on her field experience, teaching, and lectures.
There is a not whisper about her personal life.
Rae Levine’s protection however much she loved Bertha, and Ann
Hartman’s vigorous denials or Bertha’s sexuality and Communist affiliation
helped me to understand just how deep was the double closet in which Bertha
Reynolds had lived. With this double closeting Bertha paid an enormous
emotional and psychological price. There was so much loneliness and isola-
tion. She was forever the outsider.

Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964): Rocking the Musical World

Marc Blitzstein was a prolific composer and a contemporary of and collab-
orator with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Hans Eisler, Leonard Bernstein, and
Lillian Hellman, among many other luminaries on the Communist Left. He
became an overnight celebrity in 1937 when his opera, The Cradle Will Rock,
opened in New York amid controversy and chaos. Originally commissioned
by the Works Project Administration (WPA) under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
“New Deal” and set for an opening at a Broadway theater, it was canceled
by the theater at the last minute, the WPA hierarchy fearing that it was “too
radical.” It finally opened at a venue further uptown in a larger theater, to
a packed house. It was dubbed by the press as “the steel workers” opera,
because the libretto called for steelworkers to unionize and strike. The direc-
tor was Orson Welles, the producer was John Houseman, and its opening was
characterized by one reviewer as “the most exciting evening of theatre this
New York generation has seen.”
Marc Blizstein was born in Philadelphia of Jewish-Russian heritage. His
parents separated when he was very young, and for a brief time, his mother,
now a single parent with three children, moved to Los Angeles to live with
her sister. However, by the time Marc was old enough for junior high school,
the family had returned to Philadelphia, and Marc lived with his father and
stepmother. His musical genius was evident from early childhood; indeed, at
the age of 15, he was a piano soloist with the Philadelphia orchestra. After
graduating from college, he studied at the Curtis Institute and later with
leading composers in both New York and Europe.
Within his natal family, Marc was closest to his sister Josephine ( Jo), to
whom he confided his homosexuality in a remarkably candid letter in 1929.
“Shame,” he wrote, “is the single largest enemy; the sense of being sick, of
 Introduction 29

living a diseased life, is another- - the social obstacle, the individual one …
Now I accept what I am; really knowing all it involves …”30 In another letter
to Jo a little later that same year, Blitzstein also acknowledged that he had had
sexual relations with women “and liked it.” He thinks of himself, he wrote,
as what is “medically classed bisexual.”31 Indeed, for a brief time, Blizstein
was married to Eva Goldbeck (1901–1936), a Berlin-born immigrant who
had moved to the United States with her family at a young age. Eva studied at
Northwestern University and the University of Indiana and became a writer
and translator. She and Marc fell in love and were married in 1933. However,
Eva was in very poor health and died in 1936, probably from anorexia. Marc
was bereft. It was following her death that he worked at a frenetic pace, pro-
ducing, for example, a Piano Concerto and a piano solo piece, a Scherzo called
“Bourgeois at Play.” And it was also the period in which he wrote both the
libretto and music, and prepared the orchestration for, Cradle, which rocketed
him into celebrity.
Blitzstein was a member of the Composers Collective of New York and
the New York Composers Forum Laboratory, both organizations were part of
the Communist Left. Likewise, his operatic achievement with The Cradle Will
Rock was profoundly influenced by a Brechtian style, so that its characters were
all archetypes like “Mister Capitalist,” “Mrs. Capitalist,” “The Gent,” “The
Dick,” “The Moll,” “The Mr. Mister,” and so on. Indeed, in a conversation
with Brecht when he was first thinking about the work, Brecht suggested to
him that prostitution came in many forms, including the Capitalist system of
exploitation itself.32 In addition, Blitzstein stylized the music to fit a depiction
of social class, so that, for example, the Moll is in the blues style, The Gent is
jazz, The Dick is the waltz, Mister Family is popular song, and so on.33
The opera’s plot revolved around an imminent steel-workers strike. The
workers were in the throes of organizing an industrial union. The opera con-
veyed the resistance of the steel mill owners to unionization, by any means
necessary. The work was very much within the genre of popular Communist
and Left theater of those times, including Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty,
John Howard Lawson’s Marching Song, and the collective work of Peter
Martin, George Scudder, and Charles Friedman’s The Young Go First. It was
very much at the cultural center of the Party-led Popular Front. In spite of it
being part of the milieu, it was more radical than its counterparts, and per-
haps more immediate in its subject, so that at the very last minute with the
audience already coming to the Broadway theater for opening night, they
were forced to move the production after a frightened theater-owner locked
them out! In addition, unlike its counterparts, it was a musical, requiring
actors who could sing, and in later productions, trained opera singers per-
formed it. Biographer Pollard concluded that “the work arguably remained
very much an opera, [and] one so inventive and vernacular as to help redefine
and popularize the genre.”34
30 Introduction

Blitzstein joined the Communist Party in 1938, the same year in which it
banned homosexuals from membership. How aware he was of this I do not know,
but having been recently widowed and otherwise closeted, he did not allow his
true identity to be visible. Overriding everything for him, I think, was the huge
struggle against fascism as Hitler consolidated his power in Germany, gave sup-
port to the fascists in Spain, and prepared for the annexation of Czechoslovakia
and the invasion of Poland. The Party was at the center of the Popular Front, and
in his heart, Blitzstein was at the very center of that, pouring everything into
composing and performing. Although he had been raised in a secular Jewish
family, he reeled from the realities of Hitler’s “final solution.” He affirmed in a
post-war journal entry that “It is possible that anti-Semitism is the biggest reason
for feeling a Jew.”35
In 1936, the year before the Cradle premier, the Spanish Civil War com-
menced, and Blitzstein gave several benefit concerts, sometimes performing
on the piano himself. He also composed works in honor of the anti-fascist
forces. For example, he wrote the score for a documentary film, The Spanish
Earth, which a reviewer in The New York Herald called “the most powerful and
moving documentary film ever screened,” with what he called “a brilliant
musical accompaniment.”36
By 1942, Blitzstein volunteered for the war effort, joining the Army. He
was stationed in England. Of course, his musical talents and fame followed
him, and he was assigned the position of “Entertainment Specialist.” Among
his many achievements was his work with the Army’s Negro Chorus, assem-
bled from among the hundreds of Black troops stationed in London. He
conducted the chorus in a performance of his own work, Freedom Morning,
with the London Symphony Orchestra at Albert Hall in September 1943.
Press notices pronounced it a sensation. While in England he became well
acquainted with leading British composers, including, for example, Vaughn
Williams. During the war he began composing one of his most celebrated
works, The Airborne Symphony, completed in 1945–46 after his return to the
United States. It was intended as a tribute to the fighter pilots who did their
best to protect Britain during the Blitzkrieg, while also flying night missions
bombing German military installations. The symphony included a large cho-
rus, and Blitzstein referred to it at various times as a “lyric symphony,” a “bal-
lad symphony,” a “dramatic cantata,” and a “tone poem.”37 Leonard Bernstein
conducted Airborne’s premier on April 1 and 2, 1946, with the New York
City Symphony. Blitzstein, Bernstein’s senior by more than a decade, was a
kind of mentor to Bernstein, and they maintained a deep personal bond until
Blitzstein’s untimely death.
Blitzstein left the Communist Party in 1949, even as he continued his com-
mitments to Left politics and radical social justice movements. For example,
in that same year, he worked with Lillian Hellman and wrote another major
operatic work, Regina, based on her play, Little Foxes. Set in the South at the
Another random document with
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"No better! Oh dear!" said Michael. Then, as the cold air
blew in upon him, he began to cough.

"Now do go in out of the cold," said the girl. "You'll be

worse, if you don't take more care of yourself, Mr. Betts."

"But I want to hear what the doctor said. I want to know all
about it," Michael protested. "If you won't come inside, I
must stand here and catch cold."

"Oh, well, then," said the girl, yielding, "I don't want you to
catch your death." And she stepped inside.

Michael led her into the inner room, and tried feebly to stir
the dull fire into a blaze.

"Let me do that," said the girl eagerly. "I'm a rare hand at

making a fire. But you did ought to keep a better fire than
this, Mr. Betts. You don't know how to take care of
yourself."

"Don't I?" said Michael. "Ah, and I've no daughter to take

care of me, as your father has."

"Ah, poor father!" said the girl, her face clouding over.

"Is he worse?" asked Michael.

She nodded. "This cold wind is so bad for him," she said.

Observing the girl more closely, Michael saw that her face
was wan and thin, with dark circles beneath the eyes.

"Set the kettle on the fire," he said, "and make yourself a

cup of cocoa."

"No, thank you," she said. "I'll make a cup for you with
pleasure; but none for me—thank you all the same."
"Well, put the kettle on," he said, thinking she might change
her mind, "and then tell me all the doctor said."

"That's more than I can tell you," said the girl, with a smile;
"but they say he is not without hope of pulling her through.
He says the next twenty-four hours will decide it."

"Ah," said Michael, with a shiver.

"We must just hope for the best," said the girl, striving after
cheerfulness; "hope and pray, that's what we've got to do.
Did I tell you that Mrs. Lavers sent a message to us girls at
the club, asking us all to pray for her?"

"No," said Michael, "you did not tell me that."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Presently the water

began to boil, and his new friend busied herself in making
him a cup of cocoa. She did it deftly, and waited upon him
in a kind and gentle way; but she was not to be persuaded
to take any herself. Michael was hurt by the determined
manner in which she refused his hospitality. He could not
understand why she did so, for she really looked as if she
needed nourishment.

"What work do you do?" he asked presently.

"I make matches when I can get taken on," she replied;
"but just now is a slack time in the trade."

"Then you're badly off, I fear," he said.

"I haven't complained, have I?" she asked, turning upon

him with an air of defiance. Then, with an evident desire to
turn the conversation, she remarked, as she looked about
her, "What a sight of books you have, Mr. Betts!"
"Do you like books?" he asked.

She nodded her head. "I'm awful fond of reading."

"Well," he said, with the kindest intention, "if there are any
of my books that you would like to read, I'm willing to lend
them to you."

"Oh no, thank you," she said hastily, colouring as she

spoke, and giving a quick little movement of the head, as if
the suggestion annoyed her. "I don't want to borrow your
books, Mr. Betts."

He looked at her curiously. She was certainly a very strange

girl. But he liked her. He was beginning to feel considerable
confidence in her.

"I must go now," she said. "I don't like to leave father for
long."

"Stay a moment," said Michael in a timid, hesitating way. "I

wish you'd do something for me before you go."

"What is it?" she asked.

"Just kneel down and say a prayer for that poor little child. I
want to pray, but I can't. My heart is so hard—and—and—
it's years since I tried—but I'd like to hear you."

She looked startled and alarmed.

"Oh, I can't," she said; "I can't pray out loud like that."

"Say it in a whisper," he suggested.

She hesitated, her colour coming and going under the strain
of excited emotion.
"I'll try," she said at last. "She says it don't matter what
words we use, as long as they come from the heart. God
can read our heart, and He will understand."

So she knelt down, and Michael bent beside her, whilst in

broken, childish utterance, the very quaintness of which
seemed to prove its sincerity, she asked the loving Father to
spare the life of little Margery. And Michael prayed too,
breathing forth what was perhaps the first true prayer of his
life. The prayer seemed to bring the assurance of its
answer. There were tears in the eyes of each as they rose;
but God's comfort was in their hearts. The girl said not a
word as Michael shook hands with her; but when she
quitted the house and walked quickly homeward her heart
was filled with a strange wonder not unmixed with joy.

CHAPTER XI
MUTUAL CONFESSION

WHEN Michael rose the next day, he found to his

satisfaction that the wind had changed. It no longer blew
from the north-east. There was a soft, spring-like feeling in
the air. It was time for Spring to herald her approach. The
winter had been long and hard. No one felt more pleasure
at the thought of its departure than did Michael Betts.

He opened his shop betimes on this fair morning, and then

set to work to put things in order there. He felt very weak
as he did so. More than once he dropped the heavy volumes
he tried to lift. It was clear he was not the man he had
been. No, he was beginning to fail. And then he thought
with a smile and a sigh of the little fair-haired maiden who
had thought him "so very old." He was very anxious to
know how this morning found her. He kept hoping that the
girl whose acquaintance he had made in so strange a
manner would come in to tell him how the little sufferer
was; but she did not come, and at last, unable to wait
longer, he sent Mrs. Wiggins round to the house to make
inquiries.

The news she brought cheered him greatly. She had been
told that the little girl had taken a turn for the better, and
there now seemed hope of her recovery.

"Thank God!" ejaculated old Michael.

He could not trust himself to say more. He felt so glad that

he could have cried like a child for very gladness. As it was
he had to take off his spectacles and wipe them very
carefully more than once before he could go on with his
work.

"Thank God," he said to himself over and over again. God

had heard his prayer—their prayer. How he wished his new
friend would come in, that they might rejoice together! He
had known her but for a day; he did not even know her
name; but the sorrow and anxiety they had shared, the
prayer they had joined in breathing forth as from one heart,
had united them by a close bond of sympathy which years
of ordinary acquaintance could not have wrought.

But the girl did not appear all that day, nor the second day,
nor the third. Michael began to feel a vague uneasiness
concerning her.
"Surely she might have come round just to say how pleased
she was," he thought. "Can it be that she wants to drop my
acquaintance, or is her father worse? If only I knew where
she lived, I'd go and see."

Meanwhile each day Margery was reported to be a little

better. Her throat grew clearer, her voice more distinct, and
signs of returning strength gladdened the heart of her
anxious mother, till at length the little one's recovery no
longer seemed doubtful.

How thankful Michael was, no words can tell. He felt that if

the little one had died, he could never have forgiven himself
for what he had done. As it was, the burden of his past
weighed heavily on his mind. He fell into the habit of
walking round to Mrs. Lavers' house every evening when his
shop was closed. He would carry with him some little gift of
flowers or fruit for the child. And Mrs. Lavers never refused
these, never showed by word or look the least
consciousness of the wrong he had done her.

Once when he spoke of it, she said: "Dear friend, let us

forget all about that. Our Lord taught us that if we did not
forgive the brother who wronged us, we could have no
blessed sense of God's forgiving love. I forgive you from my
heart, and God will forgive you too if you ask Him."

But old Michael went home with a heavy heart. He

remembered how he had treated his own brother, and it
seemed to him that he had no right to expect that God
would forgive him his sins.

One evening Michael was in his shop, setting things in order

at the close of the day. He had not yet put up his shutters;
but he scarcely expected to have any more customers that
day, when suddenly the door opened, the bell tinkled, and
he looked up to see the worn, weary-looking preacher
entering the shop. It was some time since this gentleman
had been there, and Michael was pleased to see him again.

"Just in time, sir," he said; "in another ten minutes my

shutters would have been up."

"Ah, well, I am very glad to find you here," replied the

gentleman; "though I do not come as a purchaser. But what
is the matter with you, Betts? You are not looking at all
well."

"I have not been well, sir; but I'm better now. I've had a
sharp attack of rheumatic fever, and it has left me as you
see. I shall never be again the man I was."

"Dear me! I am sorry to hear that. Rheumatism is a terrible

thing. You do look as if it had pulled you down. And
unhappily I bring you news that will distress you. Do you
know I am visiting a poor man in the district where my
mission-hall is who tells me he is your brother."

Michael started and changed colour.

"It's true, sir," he said, after a moment's pause; "he is my

brother."

"I thought so. I could not doubt his story as he told it. It is
a sad story, Mr. Betts. He is now on his death-bed. I have
come to entreat you to go with me to him."

Michael sank on to the nearest chair. He was trembling so

that he could not stand. He said nothing, and the gentleman
went on speaking.

"He feels that he has wronged you grievously, and he wants

to make what amends he can, and to hear you say you
forgive him, ere he passes away. I don't think you will find it
hard to forgive him when you see him as he is."

"There's no need to talk so, sir. You don't understand. I've

most need to ask his forgiveness. The wrong wasn't all on
one side. I can see that now, though I couldn't before.
Where is he, if you please, sir?"

"At no great distance. I will take you there at once, if you

can come."

"Ay, I can come, sir; I have only to put up the shutters, and
I shall be ready."

So in a few minutes they were on their way. In Oxford

Street, the gentleman hailed an omnibus going westward,
into which he helped old Michael, and then seated himself
beside him. From this they alighted when it had carried
them about a couple of miles.

"Now, do you feel able to walk a few steps?" the minister

asked Michael.

"Yes, yes, I can walk," he replied; but in truth, he felt faint

and tremulous, and could not have walked far. Happily it
took them but a few minutes to reach their destination. A
dreary, miserable street it was, though it lay very near to
the large and handsome dwellings of the rich.

Michael looked with dismay on the dirty, squalid houses, the

ill-kempt, slatternly women who sat on the doorsteps, or
hung about the public-houses—there were three in the
street, though it was not long—and the ragged urchins who
disported themselves in the road. The minister paused
before one of the houses. The wretched-looking women
crouched together on the doorstep slowly rose and made
room for them to pass into the house. The minister led the
way up a foul and rickety staircase. Not till he reached the
top did he pause and tap at a door. A voice within bade him
enter, and he opened the door and advanced into the room.

Michael was slowly following him. The steep stairs tried his
breathing, the close, ill-smelling atmosphere made him feel
faint. He had to pause at the top of the stairs, clinging for a
moment to the unsteady bannister, ere he could find
strength to advance. As he waited, he heard a weak voice
within asking painfully:

"Will he not come, Mr. Mason? Oh, don't tell me that he

refuses to come!"

Michael went forward quickly into the room. It was a poor

place. A table, a couple of chairs, a box or two, and the bed
on which the sick man lay, were all the furniture; but it was
fairly clean, and there were tokens of womanly efforts to
make things as comfortable as they might be. By the bed
stood the girl whose acquaintance Michael had made at Mrs.
Lavers' door.

He started, and an exclamation of surprise escaped him as

he recognised her; but she made a quick movement
enjoining him to silence, and he said nothing.

"I've come, Frank," he said, turning his eyes upon the bed;
"I've come, and with all my heart, I wish I had come
sooner."

There could be little doubt that the hand of death was on

the man who lay there. His wasted face was deadly pale,
the breath came with difficulty through his parted lips;
there was a look of anguish in his eyes, and when he spoke
it was by a painful effort.
"Thank God you've come in time, Michael. Will you come
and sit here close beside me, so you may hear what I have
to say, though I can't speak loud?"

Michael took the seat indicated without a word. Such

emotions swept over him at the sight of his brother that it
was impossible to speak.

"Kate," said the sick man, making a sign which she

understood in a moment.

She knelt down beside the bed, and began fumbling for
something beneath the mattress. Presently she drew forth a
tiny bag made of faded scarlet flannel, which she placed
beside her father.

"Michael," said the sick man feebly, "I was a sore trial to
you before we parted. You might well feel ashamed of me,
as I know you did. I was a bad, ungrateful brother."

"Don't speak of it," said Michael huskily; "never mind that

now."

"But I must speak of it. I sent for you that I might speak of
it, as Mr. Mason knows. Michael, the last time you gave me
shelter in your home I was so ungrateful, so shameless,
that I stole one of your books and carried it off with me."

"I know that you did," replied Michael, "but never mind that
now, Frank."

"It was a Greek book," continued the other, without heeding

his words. "I'd heard you say that it was worth seven
pounds. I could not get that for it; but I found a dealer who
was willing to give me half, and for that I sold it. The money
soon went in drink, and I thought no more about it for a
long time. Then I married. At first I let my wife think that I
had no one in the world belonging to me; but one day when
I'd taken a drop too much, I let out that I had a brother
who was a well-to-do tradesman, and then she set her
heart on seeing me reconciled to my brother. I had to tell
her the whole story at last, just to make her see it was
impossible. But even then she would not see it. No; she just
said that I must save the money I'd had for the book, and
pay it back to you. It was she who began the saving, you
see. We did not get on very fast with the saving; but we
made a beginning. Then she fell ill. Mr. Mason began to visit
us then. He's been a good friend to us. He tried to make me
a sober man for a long, long while before he succeeded."

"Don't say that I succeeded," said Mr. Mason. "It was the
grace of Christ that delivered you from sin and enabled you
to begin a new life."

"It is more than a year ago," said the sick man slowly,
"since I took the pledge, and Kate and I have been trying
ever since to add to the money in the bag. My wife left it in
Kate's hands; she knew she could not trust it to me. It has
not been easy to save. Kate put most into it, not I. She's a
good girl is Kate, though I say it."

"Ah, she's a good girl," said Michael, so fervently that his

brother looked at him in surprise.

"What, you say so too? But you do not know her."

"I can tell by the looks of her," said Michael evasively.

"Ah, well—it's true anyway. But now about this money,

Michael. I have so longed to make your loss good. I thought
you'd believe I was a changed man if I gave you back your
money. But it's been hard work. We've had to draw out
some of the money since I've been ill. There's only five
pounds in the bag now, and I wanted to make it seven, for
you said the book was worth that to you. Here's the money;
take it and count it."

But Michael pushed the bag from it.

"No, no, Frank; keep the money. I don't want it, indeed. I
would rather not have it."

"But you must take it," cried the other excitedly. "I can't
rest unless you do. Ah, Michael, you don't know, an honest,
respectable man as you've always been, what it is to have
the burden of such a deed resting on your conscience."

"Don't say that, Frank—don't for goodness sake talk that

way, for it's not true!"

"But it is true," protested the other; "don't I know the good,

honest, steady man you've always been? Haven't I
sometimes felt proud that I had such a brother, and wished
enough that I'd been more like you? Why, I've told Kate
here about you often enough. Once I sent her round to the
shop, to have a look at the place and to see the kind of man
you were."

"But all the while you were under a mistake concerning

me," groaned Michael, feeling himself compelled to
confession. "What if I were to tell you that I am a man who
has robbed the fatherless and the widow?"

"I'd not believe it," returned his brother. "No, not if you said
it with your own lips, Michael."

"But it is true," he cried. And then brokenly, confusedly, he

told the story of how he had kept the bank-notes he had
found in the professor's book.
There was silence for some moments when he had ceased.
Then the sick man leaned forward and laid his wasted hand
on his brother's.

"Oh, I am so sorry for you, Michael," he whispered. "I know

what you must have suffered with that burden on your
heart. We are fellow-sinners."

"But I am the worse," said Michael. "'The first shall be last,'

the Bible says. In the pride of my heart I thought myself far
above you; but you would never have done a thing like
that. No, you have been a better man than I all along. It's
bad to be profligate; but I do believe it is worse to have a
hard, unloving, pharisaical heart."

"'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us

our sins,'" said the minister; and, as they all kept silence,
he began to pray aloud, expressing as he believed the
desire of each heart as he besought the Divine Father to
forgive and blot out the sins of the past.

And as he prayed, its burden fell from the spirit of Michael

Betts; his proud, hard heart was broken, and became as the
heart of a little child in its sorrow and contrition. It was the
birth-hour of a new life to him.

CHAPTER XII
MICHAEL'S HOUSE BECOMES A HOME
THE reconciliation so late effected between the brothers was
complete. Michael's one thought now was how he might, in
the brief time that remained to him, atone in some degree
for the coldness and indifference of years. He would fain
have removed his brother to a more comfortable dwelling;
but the medical man whom he brought to give his opinion
refused to sanction the attempt. The risk was too great. The
excitement and fatigue involved in the removal would
probably hasten the end. All that could be done was to give
as homelike an appearance as possible to the dreary room
in which the sufferer lay, and to provide him with every
comfort his condition demanded.

These efforts were not without result. His heart relieved of

the load which had pressed on it, and gladdened by his
brother's kindness, the sick man now enjoyed an ease of
mind which could not fail to influence beneficially his bodily
condition. He rallied wonderfully, and Kate even began to
hope that her father's life would yet be spared. But Michael
knew better. He was too old to be deceived by such hope.
He could see that death, though it had relaxed, had not
relinquished its grasp.

Every hour that Michael could spare, he spent by his

brother's bedside. He even engaged a young man to help
him with his business, that he might have more time at his
disposal. But the new interest he had found did not make
him forgetful of little Margery. Every day he sent to the
house to enquire how she was doing. He knew that Kate,
when she saw him, would be sure to question him eagerly
as to the report he had received. She was not so absorbed
by anxiety for her father as to be forgetful of the dear little
maiden who was ill, or of her mother, the kind friend to
whom she owed so much. She and Michael, whom she was
learning to call "uncle" now, a name which sounded
strangely in the ears of each, rejoiced together over the
good news of the little invalid which each day brought.
Margery was out of danger now and advancing steadily
towards health.

One pleasant April afternoon, Michael determined to walk

round to Mrs. Lavers' house ere he went to see his brother.
He had bought that morning of a dealer at his door a pot of
pretty pink cyclamen which he thought would please little
Margery, and he wished to carry it to her ere the flowers
began to fade.

As he was handing it to the servant at the door, Mrs. Lavers

came down stairs, and, seeing him, advanced to speak to
him.

"How very kind of you!" she said, as she admired the pink
blossoms. "Margery will be so pleased. I never knew such a
child as she is for flowers. Won't you come upstairs and see
her for a minute? I know she would like to see you, and all
fear of infection is past now."

Michael could not resist this invitation. He followed Mrs.

Lavers upstairs, treading as gently as he could.

Margery had been carried into the little sitting-room, and

lay on a sofa near the window. The room seemed full of
flowers; there were so many friends who loved to send
flowers to little Margery. She looked very fair and fragile as
she lay there clad in a little blue dressing-gown, with her
golden curls tossed in wild disorder on the pillow. Michael
was dismayed to see how white she was, save for the rosy
spot which glowed in each cheek, and how plainly the blue
veins showed on her wasted temples. Her favourite doll
reposed by her side, and open on her knee lay a book with
coloured pictures, which Michael recognised at a glance as
the "Pilgrim's Progress," with the purchase of which their
acquaintance had begun.

The smile with which Margery greeted him as soon as she

caught sight of him was reassuring to Michael. Surely no
child who was not getting well could look so radiant.

"Mr. Betts has just come up to say, 'How do you do?' to you,
dear," said her mother, "and see what lovely flowers he has
brought you."

"Oh, what beauties!" cried the child delightedly, "I haven't

had any like them, have I, mother? Thank you very, very
much, Mr. Betts. Please put them here, where I can see
them, mother."

"And are you feeling a little better, missy?" asked Michael.

"Oh yes, much better, thank you. Mother says I shall soon
be able to run about again, but I don't feel as if I should be
able to run fast for some time to come. I can't even play
with Noel yet. He seems so rough and noisy."

"I see you are able to amuse yourself with your book,"
Michael said.

"I like looking at the pictures," she replied, "but it tires me

to read much. It is funny you should come just now, Mr.
Betts, for I was only thinking of you a moment ago. I often
think of you when I look at my 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"

"That's because you bought it of me, I suppose, missy."

She shook her head, and her little face grew thoughtful.

"No, that's not the reason. It's because I never can tell to
what part of the book you belong. You can't be Christian or
Faithful, don't you see, because you say you never did
anything wrong in your life."

A deep, dull red suddenly suffused Michael's face.

"Don't say that, miss," he exclaimed in a tone of pain; "I

never ought to have said it. When I spoke so I did not know
myself."

"Then it wasn't true," said Margery.

"No, indeed, miss. If I'd spoken the truth, I should have

said that I'd been doing wrong all my life, and cherishing a
hard, proud, unloving spirit. I did not love God, nor even
my own brother, and you can't love one without loving the
other, you know, miss."

"I could never help loving Noel," said little Margery, "but
what did you do that was so wicked, Mr. Betts?"

"Don't ask me, miss. I would not like to tell you the bad
things I have done. Why, you've been one of the sufferers
by my wrong-doings. You ask your mother, and she'll tell
you how shamefully I wronged both her and you."

"No, no," said Mrs. Lavers, laying her hand gently on the old
man's arm, "Margery will never hear of that from me, Mr.
Betts. That's all over and done with. Don't speak of that
again, please."

Margery looked curiously from one to the other.

"Then you had a burden all the time, Mr. Betts?" she said.

"Ay, that I had, missy, and a burden which grew heavier

and heavier, when once I began to feel it."
"Why that was just like Christian," said little Margery,
looking much interested; "and have you lost your burden
now, Mr. Betts?"

"Yes, thank God, I have lost it, miss. I lost it as Christian

lost his, at the foot of the cross. In other words, missy, I
believe that God has forgiven me my sins for the sake of
Jesus Christ, who died for me and such sinners as me."

"Then you are very happy now," said little Margery.

"I'm happier, miss; yes, truly, I'm happier than ever I was
before, but I can't forget the past. I'd give anything to be
able to live the years of my life over again."

"What a number you would have to live!" said little Margery

thoughtfully. "For you're very old, aren't you, Mr. Betts?"

"Ay, missy, I'm old," he answered.

He felt old indeed when a little later, he found himself by his

brother's bedside. To think that that big, sturdy girl was the
daughter of his brother Frank! It did not seem so very long
ago that he had been "little Frank," his mother's spoiled
darling. He had always seemed so very much younger than
he, Michael, was; but now he lay there a haggard, wasted,
aged-looking man, drawing near to death. His feet were on
the brink of the dark river now. A change had set in during
the night. Michael needed not to be told that his brother
had but a few hours to live.

"I would not mind if it were not for Kate," the dying man
murmured, turning towards his daughter with love and
yearning in his glance. "I don't like to leave her alone in the
world."
"She shall not be alone," said Michael, "there shall always
be a home for her with me."

"Do you hear that, Kate?" the sick man asked with
brightening eyes. "Your uncle says you shall have a home
with him."

But the girl's look did not brighten.

"I don't care what becomes of me if you leave me, father,"

she said almost sullenly; then added, with passionate
emotion as she bent over him, "If only you would get better,
we might be so happy yet."

A lump rose in Michael's throat as he watched the girl's

look, and heard her words. No one had ever loved him like
that.

"Frank," he said slowly, "folks reckon me a well-to-do man;

but you're richer than I am. I've no one to love me, or to
care whether I live or die."

His brother turned his eyes on him and understood.

"She'll love you, Michael; she'll love you too, if you're good
to her. She is a good girl, is Kate, though she has had a
rough bringing up. I called her Katharine, you know, after
our mother. I've tried to tell her what our mother was, that
she might be like her. But I've been a poor father to her.
Mine has been a wasted, ill-spent life, and now I can but
give it back into the hands of God, trusting in His mercy
through Jesus Christ."

He lay back exhausted by the effort he had made in saying

so much. His life was ebbing fast. He said little more save in
feeble, broken utterances. The end came peacefully about
midnight, and the life which, with its errors and failures,
God alone could truly judge, was sealed by the hand of
death.

Michael took the weeping girl to his own home, and did his
best to comfort her. Mrs. Wiggins predicted that Kate would
not long live with her uncle. It seemed to her impossible
that so ill-assorted a pair could get on together, or a girl
accustomed to a free, independent life, put up with an old
man's fidgets. But the result proved her prediction false.
Kate was of a warm, affectionate nature, and pity
constrained her to be patient with the poor, lonely old man,
whilst he was disposed to cling at any cost to the only being
who belonged to him.

Their common interest in Mrs. Lavers and sweet little

Margery was a lasting bond of sympathy. Mrs. Lavers still
showed herself a true friend to Kate. She encouraged the
girl to come often to her house, and sometimes of an
evening, she and her children would "drop in" to pay a visit
to old Michael and his niece. The little ones loved to explore
the marvels of Mr. Betts' shop, and never ceased to wonder
at "the heaps and heaps of books." Mrs. Lavers was able to
give Kate many a useful hint which helped her to adapt
herself to her new position.

By-and-by, Kate came to take an intelligent interest in the

book trade, and developed quite a talent for mending and
covering dilapidated volumes. Customers were surprised to
find now in the shop a bright, quick, dark-eyed damsel, who
passed lightly to and fro, fetching and carrying books as her
uncle directed her. She learned his ways more quickly than
any youth would have done, and was careful to observe
them. She found her new work infinitely preferable to
making matches, and had a sense of responsibility in
connection with it, which heightened her self-respect, and
made life seem well worth living.