Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is a brand-new biography about the lesbian who led the charge for LGBT rights beginning in the late 1950’s, when she organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), through the tumultuous 1960’s when she edited DOB’s The Ladder and walked the picket line protesting the US government’s homophobic hiring policies, into the 1970’s where she worked to bring LGBT liberation to the American Library Association and to the American Psychiatric Association. 

The biography is written by Tracy Baim, who is no slacker herself when it comes to LGBT activism . Baim is the publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, the oldest LGBT newspaper in Chicago—co-founded by Baim in 1985. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books about the LGBT press, about lesbians in the service, about Obama’s relationship to the LGBT community, and about mothers of LGBT kids. In 2014 she was inducted into the Hall of Fames for both the Chicago Headline Club and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. In other words, Baim, like the subject of her biography, is a lesbian force of nature.

Baim brings her insider’s appreciation of the world of activism to her subject, along with her editor’s ear for a good story—and Gittings’ life was full of those. She also brings her journalist’s eye for photography to the (literally) hundreds of photos that are included in the book, which had initially been conceived as a photo album. Fortunately for us, Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, documented their life, and in doing that, she ended up documenting five decades of a movement.
 
Baim has done so many important things in her writing of this book. Here are just a few:
 
She has written a major lesbian activist back into a history of the LGBT civil rights movement that was at risk of looking like a gay male movement. The erasure of lesbians has now, alas, become a “thing.” Advocate writer and blogger Victoria Brownworth has written about it. Feminist scholar Dr. Bonnie Morris has a book coming out this year titled The Disappearing L. Last year Curve Magazine published a story on “Erasing Our Lesbian Dead,” and AfterEllen posted a reminder to the culture at large that lesbians are gay people, too. So, thank you Tracy Baim, for giving Gittings such a solid, cast-in-cement,  gold-star biography in our LGBT Walk of Fame.

Next, there are the photos. These have been carefully sorted into the different eras of Gittings’ long career, and then meticulously captioned with names, dates, associations. They are truly worth a thousands words. One of the radical steps that Giddings took when she began to edit The Ladder was to feature real faces of real lesbians on the cover. Fortunately, Baim includes several pages of these archival covers, and they speak volumes about the courage of both editor and subjects.
 
This same kind of courage is also evident in the photos of those early marches at the Pentagon and the White House. There was no rainbow flag. It was all gray flannel suits and shirtwaist dresses with sensible shoes. These picketers were dressing for the jobs they were not allowed to hold.
 
In many ways, the book is like a family album. Thumbing through it, some names jump out, like "Sylvia Rivera" or "Vito Russo." So that’s what they looked like…  And other times the faces jump out.. Oh, look, there’s Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Karla Jay!

As the pages and eras scroll past, the photos become less crowded, quieter, more domestic. Another side of Gittings emerges. Here she is performing with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus… and here she is announcing the purchase of a house… and sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee. One of my favorites is a photo of her with Lahusen posing on the front steps of Gittings’ mother’s house. Both women are holding stuffed dinosaurs and laughing. Here’s the story: In the 1970’s, a new wave of LGBT activists swept into the movement, and, as new waves are wont to do, they immediately set about eliminating the “old wave." They labeled Gittings and Lahusen “establishment accommodationists”… or just “dinosaurs.” Not fazed in the least, Gittings and her partner rolled with the punches, and began to show up to meetings with stuffed dinosaurs under their arms.

And this brings me to one of the most memorable aspects of this book… the stories. Gittings was a valiant foot soldier, logging her hours at the mimeograph machine and the mailing parties, and logging her miles in the picket lines… but she was also a brilliant, creative strategist with a wicked sense of humor. She knew how to turn her enemy’s homophobia against him. One of the most unforgettable examples was an action she planned at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual convention. After years of lobbying, she and her fellow activists were finally allowed to present a panel titled, “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue.” The plan was to put two national, LGBT rights activists,  Gittings and Frank Kameny,  on the panel with two heterosexual, but sympathetic psychiatrists. It was Gittings’ partner who noted that something was missing: Where was the gay or lesbian psychiatrist? The simplest answer was “in the closet.” Being professionally out at that time could actually put one at risk of losing their license.
 
But once Gittings had a vision for an action, she was unstoppable. She located a psychiatrist willing to appear in disguise—and what a disguise! He wore a tuxedo three sizes too large and a huge, full-head, rubber mask of Richard Nixon. His appearance was grotesque, and so was the reality to which he was responding. The panel was an overwhelming success, no small influence on the removal of homosexuality the following year from the APA clinical roster of mental diseases.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is filled with stories, often in Gittings’ own words, as Baim has incorporated excerpts from interviews as well as Gittings’ writings. The stories of her childhood, and especially of her long and rocky road to acceptance of her “difference” make for wonderful reading. It always inspires me when I discover that these super women who changed the world had to wrestle with the same demons that plague us lesser mortals.
 
Gittings is family, and her personal photo album is part of our heritage, too. Her journey, like that of a first generation immigrant, is embedded in our second-, third-, and fourth-generation lesbian DNA. Her traumas are in our bone marrow, and her victories are the legacies on which we build.

Thank you, Tracy Baim, for this meticulously researched, sparkling biography of Barbara Gittings!

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is available in both a black-and-white-photo edition and a color-photo edition! 

Anyway… with all the attention to historical accuracy about the details of women's tailoring, and with all the photo ops of processions, meetings, rallies, factory interiors, and street scenes… surely central casting could have and should have paid more attention to diversity.
 
So there is that.
 
And then, of course, the perennial absence/closeting of the lesbians. Not surprisingly, there were many lesbians in the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US. One of Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughters, Christabel, was the subject of many suffragist crushes, and had lengthy relationships with Annie Kenney and with Grace Roe. The composer Ethel Smyth dedicated two years of her life to the movement. She wrote openly about her passion for women and had a crush on Emmeline Pankhurst. (See my blog on Ethel Symth.)

But in spite of the a-historical absence of diversity in the film, there is much to admire. It features a working-class heroine. It does not flinch from the subject of rape and sexual harassment in the workplace in an era when women had no legal recourse whatsoever. It dramatizes the consequences of women having no rights of ownership over their own children. The central character is evicted from her home because of her activism, and then her husband, unable to provide care for the child, puts him up for adoption without her knowledge or permission.
 
For me, the most exciting part of the film is the coming to consciousness of the central character. We see her waking up from a deep sleep. We see her beginning to see what could be possible. We see her excitement in bonding with other women and in executing acts of civil disobediance—most notably blowing up the Prime Minister’s summer home.

And, then of course, there is the punishing routine of repeated incarceration, the police violence meted out at rallies, the horror of the force-feeding of hunger strikers. In an effort to shape a concise dramatic arc, the film begins to focus on a cat-and-mouse dynamic between the heroine and the police inspector assigned to neutralize the movement. He has been given the injunction not to allow any of the suffragists to become martyrs.
 
The dramatic climax of the film is the death of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragist who ran onto the race track at the Epsom Derby and attempted to attach a “Votes for Women” banner to the King’s horse. She was trampled to death.

The film ends with the “victory” of the Suffragists having achieved the desired martyrdom. The story went around the world and thousands turned out for the funeral procession. This is presented as the happy ending for the film, the moment that turned the tide. Just before the final credits, text appears to inform us of the historical timeline for women’s suffrage, and for other laws, including women's right to own their children.
 
But here's my biggest concern: The film absolutely implies that the women’s activism, and especially their tactical move to destruction of property, resulted in the granting of suffrage.

This is not true. At the height of the incarcerations and force-feedings, World War I broke out. In what many, including myself, considered a stunning betrayal of not just the suffrage movement, but of feminism, Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to all militant suffrage activism. Emmeline turned her brilliant organizing skills toward recruiting women for industrial production and encouraging young men to enlist. She was a prominent figure in the “white feather campaign” to shame and stigmatize able-bodied men who were not joining up. Later on, she would become a member of the conservative and classist Tory Party.
 
Finally, at the end of the war, Parliament passed an act that would enfranchise women over the age of thirty who met minimum property qualifications. This was specifically in recognition of the fact that women had been pressured into filling men’s industrial jobs during the war and, after that, it would have been ludicrous to maintain the fiction that they were too frail or feeble-minded to be entrusted with suffrage. It was their reward for doing as they were told.

What is my point? My point is that history does not support the theory that women’s escalating activism for the vote brought men in power to their knees. It did not. Women’s abandonment of their own agenda and participation the most patriarchal of patriarchal horrors was what turned the tide.
 
My point is that women’s movements do not follow the same trajectories as men’s movements. If there were no gay men, and the entire queer movement had been composed solely of lesbian and bisexual women, I do not believe that we would have ANY of the legal gains that we have today. In fact, I believe that the movement, as with the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US, would have resulted in increased marginalization and suffering.  Today we are seeing our hard-won abortion rights being eroded by cat-and-mouse games. Today, poor women in some areas have great difficulty in arranging for abortions, because of laws about waiting periods, restrictions on where abortion clinics can operate, and the expenses that these new laws entail.

My point is that lobbying men should be a last resort. We should organize ourselves around efforts to provide for our needs without needing to petition men in power. By all means, get women elected into as many positions as possible, but the rush for equal participation in patriarchal institutions is what led to Pankhurst’s abandonment of the movement.
 
And, much as the movement recognized the significance of having a martyr, Emily Wilding Davison died with a ticket in her pocket to a women’s dance that night. She did not plan to martyr herself, but to celebrate her victory in the company of women. That is the movement I want to commemorate.

What does it take to confront a rich and powerful rapist?

It would be easy to think of Andrea Constand as a kind of Wonder Woman who brought Bill Cosby to justice with her Lariat of Truth.

That’s just it. It would be easy. Easy to believe that heroines are born that way, that they have an extra chromosome for courage or fearlessness.

I think of a quotation by Albert Einstein: “It's not that I'm so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

What if Andrea Constand was not Wonder Woman? What if she just stayed with the problem longer?  

Let’s look at the temptations she faced, temptations that face any victim who attempts to confront her perpetrator. Constand didn’t always meet them successfully. Sometimes she wavered, hesitated, fumbled, backed away… but she  always--eventually--came back, and when she did, she came back stronger, with more support, and with greater clarity.

So here are the Seven Temptations of Andrea Constand:

1. The temptation to believe it never happened, to doubt one’s perceptions, to blame oneself.

Cosby was not a new acquaintance, nor was he a date. Constand had known him for two years, since 2002 when she came to work at Temple University as the director of operations for the women’s basketball program. Cosby, a member of the Temple Athletics Hall of Fame was a frequent fundraiser and honored guest. In his sixties, he had positioned himself as a mentor to her, inviting her to dinner parties, and then to private dinners, at his home outside of Philadelphia. He would talk to her about basketball, her career, and spiritual beliefs. He met her family and cultivated a relationship with them. He had groomed her patiently for victimization.

The night of the rape, Cosby  invited her over, to “offer her assistance in her pursuit of a different career.”  She testified that he gave her three pills, claiming they were herbal supplements for stress. He insisted that she take all three.

Constand was drugged. Her memory of the incident was impaired, filled with blackouts, vague impressions, and she experienced enormous disorientation when she recovered consciousness. She remembered  waking up on a couch at four in the morning, her clothing in disarray and Cosby standing over her in a bathrobe. Confused and mortified, her initial response was a kneejerk, socially conditioned one:  She expressed embarrassment over her disheveled state. He gave her a muffin and took her home.

2. The temptation to get on with one’s life, to distance oneself from the episode, to attempt to normalize the situation and/or relations with the rapist.

Four months later, she left her job and career, moved back home to Canada, and began studying to become a massage therapist. She stayed in contact with Cosby, and, several months after returning home, she took her parents to see his show at a casino in Ontario.

3) The temptation not to tell anyone.

Constand did not tell anyone for a year. This is not uncommon. She was in survival mode, in flight. What eventually brought her back to the rape was the emphasis in her massage classes on a code of ethics around touch.

In January 2005, Constand finally broke her silence and told her mother. Immediately after that, she reported the rape to the authorities where she lived. They passed the case on to the police in Pennsylvania. 

4)  The temptation to accept an apology as sufficient.

Three days after the report to the police, Cosby and his people began to call her. Constand and her mother stated repeatedly that all they wanted was an apology. Even Cosby admitted this. According to the filing, he told the police that she had not asked for money, “but had only asked him to apologize to Plaintiff and her mother, which he did.”

He apologized several times. On the phone, not in writing.

5) The temptation to accept money in lieu of accountability.

Offers of money are standard ploys for predators with resources, especially when the victim is not wealthy.  Cosby called Constand’s mother and offered to set up an “educational trust” for Constand to attend graduate school, provided she could prove to him that she was maintaining a grade point average of 3.0. He later admitted he had done this for another accuser.

Constand turned it down.

6)  The temptation to give up when the police refuse to file charges.

The District Attorney, declining to file charges, stated, “I think that factors such as failure to disclose in a timely manner and contacts with the alleged perpetrator after the event are factors that weigh toward Mr. Cosby… Much exists in this investigation that could be used to portray persons on both sides of the issue in a less-than-flattering light.”

Constand’s actions were consistent with choices made by trauma survivors in the immediate aftermath, but juries and judges are rarely trauma literate, and it is easy for victims to feel ashamed for not being better plaintiffs. At this point, many victims give up, and Constand might have done that, except that Cosby began a campaign to discredit her as an extortioner.

After offering Constand an apology and money, Cosby and his reps went to the tabloids with a story about how Constand’s mother had demanded money from him even before Constand had contacted the police. Cosby insisted that the relationship had been consensual. As a second and then third woman came forward with similar stories of being drugged and raped by Cosby, he gave a personal interview to The National Enquirer, in exchange for them killing the story of the third woman.  In the interview, he described Constand in such specific detail there could be no question about her identity.

Six days after the Enquirer story, Constand filed a civil suit in federal court--
under her own name, her anonymity already having been compromised by Cosby’s interview. She accused Cosby of “battery, assault, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation/defamation per se, and false light/invasion of privacy.” Because of all the publicity—much of it propagated by Cosby himself—ten other victims contacted Constand’s legal team to offer corroborating testimony.

Constand’s team requested a protective order to shield the identity of these women from the press. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that the Cosby team also moved for a protective order that would seal not only his testimony, but that of his accusers. This move caught the attention of the Associated Press. What was Cosby attempting to hide? The AP made two separate attempts to force open the court records, and Constand sided with them.

7)  The temptation to say “enough,” to tell yourself that you’ve gotten everything that you’re going to get, to let it go short of full accountability.

Cosby settled with the usual terms: neither party is ever allowed to discuss the case or to disclose the amount of the settlement.

But Cosby continued to defame Constand. When even more women began to come forward, Cosby’s website posted  a statement in clear violation of the settlement agreement, that “decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced. The fact they are being repeated does not make them true.”

Immediately Constand forced him to publish a retraction, which he did: “The statement released by Mr. Cosby’s attorney over the weekend was not intended to refer in any way to Andrea Constand.”

And, finally, as the AP continued to push for disclosure of the court records of her civil suit, a federal judge ordered the deposition unsealed. He stated that Cosby, in posturing for years as a “public moralist,” had forfeited his right to privacy. The world could read for itself Cosby’s admission that he had obtained nine prescriptions for Quaaludes to be given to women with whom he wanted to have sex.

And here allow me a little ironic digression. It is likely that Amy first saw Ada in the role she created of Mrs. Wiggs from the play Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Believe it or not, the play was an adaptation of a book that was the second best-selling novel of 1902... an inane melodrama about how wonderful it is to be poor, with the widow Wiggs elevating optimism to the level of lunacy. ("My but it's nice an' cold this mornin'! The thermometer's done fell up to zero.") I wonder if the irony was lost on Amy Lowell...? (A digression from the digression, there is a hilarious Youtube clip from a filmed version of the play with Zazu Pitts and W.C. Fields... )

ANYWAY... history gives us no answers, just clues. We know Ada turned Amy down more than once. We know that Amy was persistent to the point of bullying, and that when Ada did eventually agree to move in with Amy on her Boston estate, Sevenels, she insisted that it be for a trial period of six months, and that she would work and be paid as Amy's assistant, receiving the same amount of money she would have earned had she continued to tour as an actor.

Bear with me... I'm going to take a few paragraphs to work up to my central theme...

As a marginalized writer of lesbian-feminist plays, I used to wonder what it would be like if one of my plays achieved first-class production (which is the industry lingo for “Broadway-level”).  My question was answered when a Brazilian film and television star ran across a collection of my plays in a bookstore near Union Square, read my play about Joan of Arc, and decided to produce and star in it. In Brazil, of course. First-class production!

A word about the play: It was a one-woman show dealing with Joan of Arc as a teenaged, lesbian, butch runaway who was returning from the grave with a searing radical feminist critique of her experiences and those responsible for them. She is returning with a mission to warn contemporary women that they are facing the same enemies and that they need to understand this and to fight.

In other words, an unlikely candidate for first-class production.

But, you know what? The show was the top-selling commercial production of the season in both São Paulo and Rio. And then it went on to tour all the other major cities in Brazil. It was a smash hit.

Is Brazil a nation of lesbian feminists? What could possibly explain this?

Well… For starts, this one-woman show featured four really beefy, macho men. They rode motorcycles onto the stage, making a lot of noise, but no “lines” per se. This enabled the producer to designate them “scenic elements,” not added characters… which would have been a violation of my contract.

These four Hell’s Angels would circle Joan, maul her, cradle her, drive her on the back of their motorcycles…  In other words, come constantly between her and the audience. And the butch thing was gone, completely. Joan wore enough eye makeup to put Theda Bara to shame, and she was dressed in tights.

And then there was the rape.

Joan was raped in her prison cell in a situation that was clearly engineered to make her prefer death to life. And it worked. She recanted her recantation and was burned at the stake.

Now, lots of playwrights have written about Joan.. Bernard Shaw, Jean Anouihl, Eva Le Gallienne... and they end at the stake. I didn’t want to do that. In my play she is returning from the dead. The stake is in the past. We are looking to the future. I wanted to respect and protect the survivors in my audience who did not need to have their trauma memories restimulated. I did not want to write a play where, once again, the boys win.

In the Brazilian production, there was no such sensitivity. The four “scenic elements” stripped down to full frontal nudity and performed the assault on the stage. They raped my character. They raped my play. The play I had crafted to empower and inspire survivors became one more traumatic encounter reinforcing the helplessness of women, always outnumbered by the machine of patriarchy.

And they screwed me financially. Of course. It took more than three years to recover my royalty, and the amount was not commensurate with the success of the work.

Why am I telling you this in an article about Saving Mr. Banks?

Because I am a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal theatre, and I was angry about that. Really, really angry. Still am, because the pain of that experience never goes away. And I believe that PL Travers was a lesbian writer whose beloved lesbian protagonist was hideously mangled by the machinery of patriarchal Hollywood, and that she was angry about that. Really, really angry. And now the world is invited to come and mock this thoroughly unpleasant woman.

I come to celebrate her.

Was PL Travers a lesbian?  Duh.

Some insist that she was bisexual, but the evidence for that is very sketchy. Aggressively pursuing publication, Travers went to Dublin to meet the editor Æ (aka George Russell), who had sent her an encouraging letter about her poems. He was married and twice her age, with a penchant for encouraging young writers. Travers’ biographer characterizes their friendship as “filial, intellectual, and marked by romantic gestures.” In other words, he flirted. But more to the point, he insisted that she get together with Madge Burnand. She did indeed get together with Madge, moved in with her, wrote the first Mary Poppins book in a cottage with her, and continued to live with her for ten years in a relationship that her biographer characterizes as “intense.” Duh.

Æ would also introduce Travers to the teachings of Gurdjieff, a charismatic and influential spiritual teacher. Travers’ involvement with the community of Gurdjieff’s followers in the 1930’s should be of special interest to lesbian scholars. In spite of Gurdjieff’s professed advocacy of rigid gender roles, he created a women-only group in the 1920’s known as “The Rope.” The members of this group were all strong, successful women—mostly lesbian—who did not subscribe to traditional gender roles. One of these women, Jessie Orage, became lovers with Travers. Orage had scandalized the Gurdjieff community a decade earlier by wearing men’s trousers and smoking cigarettes. She documents the affair with Travers in the pages of her diary.

So what about this Mary Poppins? Was she a lesbian? Well, I will argue—as did Travers—that heterosexual romance was not for her. Travers had first introduced the character in 1926, when she wrote a series of stories about children and their dreams. This collection became the basis for the first Mary Poppins book. On November 13, 1926, the Christchurch Sun published “Mary Poppins and the Match Man,” a short story about Mary Poppins’ day off with her boyfriend Bert.

Eight years later, Travers published the first Mary Poppins book, and the most significant change between the 1926 version of the famous nanny and the 1934 one, had to do with Mary Poppins’ relationships with men. Bert is no longer a boyfriend, but a buddy… or, more accurately, a groupie. Mary Poppins has become what one writer calls “untouchable and distant,” but I would use the word “exalted.” She is morphing into archetypal forms. Æ suggested the goddess of destruction and empowerment, Kali—and Travers did not disagree. By 1934, the proper nanny of her earlier stories had begun to supercede the ineffectual mother Mrs. Banks. No one except Mr. Banks, according to Travers, could understand her.

I believe what we are dealing with here is a lesbian butch. A guardian/ warrior archetype who combines military discipline with a Gurdjieffian mysticism that enables her to ascend to the stars and commune with the animals. A lesbian butch who cannot identify with a haplessly subordinate mother-figure and who identifies more solidly with the bread-winning father who must brave the rigors of a collapsing financial world.

Disney, by the way, turned Mrs. Banks into a "Suffragette," because in his mind, this was synonymous with bad mothering. PL Travers, no doubt aware of the heavy lesbian butch presence among the ranks of women militating for equal rights, was baffled and unhappy with his choice. Truly, her flighty and uber-feminine Mrs. Banks would have been terrified by the Suffragists.

But back to Mary Poppins. I know this archetype. I have been working with lesbian archetypes in my writing for thirty years. I find them in the writings of other lesbians, in their biographies, in our spiritual traditions and rituals, and in the lives of the women I love. And they are completely invisible—censored—in mainstream culture. Where they do surface, they are wildly misinterpreted, ridiculed, or demonized. As is the character of PL Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. Which is more like "Saving Mr. Disney."

Disney comes off like “Father Knows Best” in the film, but, in fact, he was a heavy-handed union-buster who, according to documents that surfaced under the Freedom of Information Act, served from 1940 until his death in 1966 as a secret informer (read “spy”) for the FBI.

And he was a misogynist, a fact reflected in his hiring practices...  as well as his need to ridicule the movement for women's suffrage.The letter below spells out the Disney Studio's  policy:  "Women do not do any of the creative work..."

And then there was the animation. When Travers signed her agreement, she never dreamed that Disney would be sneaking animation into a film with live actors. Technically, it was not an animated film. He was sticking to the letter of the agreement, but not the spirit. The animated dance sequence took up a remarkable fifteen minutes of screen time. Was he just rubbing it in?

Not surprisingly Travers raised hell.

No, Disney did not invite her to the opening. This was a professional insult. Resourceful dyke that she was, she shamed another Disney executive into sending her an invitation. Yes, she wept at the premiere, but they were tears of frustration and disappointment. The animation! At the after-party she confronted Disney. According to Richard Sherman, who co-wrote the music, she declared in a loud voice, “Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney looked at her coolly and replied, “Pamela, the ship has sailed.” (She had asked him to call her Mrs. Travers.)

Most of the world would now equate Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews’ characterization. Travers' radical revisioning of parenting outside the box of traditional gender roles had been domesticated. And even the Suffragists had been trashed. Mr. Banks was saved. Mrs. Banks was saved. Bert and Mary were saved. And the lesbians were safely back in the closet, banished to a shadow world apart from the nuclear family and disallowed contact with the children.

I feel for Travers. I feel for her pain in fighting so hard for the real Mary Poppins, but lacking a language and a literature of archetypes to which she could point and say, “No, this is not that! Here is the frame of reference!” But that literature was as censored as her identity. She insisted on being called Mrs. Travers, but there was no husband. There never had been. "Travers" was her father’s first name. How could “Mrs. Travers” possibly, in 1960,  advocate for all of the attributes, affinities, mythological referents that belong to our culture?

Short answer: She couldn’t. But she did not pretend to be happy. She did not go gently into the heterotopia of Disneyland. She raised as much hell as she could, but she was outflanked, outmaneuvered, and outnumbered by the strike-breaking, Red-baiting, rabid McCarthy-ite spy who was dictating the so-called family values that would enshrine the patriarch and ensure the compliance of women.

Italian feminst Carla Lonzi has said, "Men use myth; women don’t have sufficient personal resources to create it. Women who have tried to do so by themselves have endured such stress that their lives have been shortened by it." But Travers beat the odds, living to be nearly a hundred. I submit that her fighting spirit, the very spirit so vilified in the movie, had a great deal to do with her longevity. Well-behaved women rarely make centenarians.

Saving Mr. Banks is a witch-burning. Make no mistake about that. Give me a film company and I will show you a film about a powerful, visionary, immanently reasonable lesbian fighting off an evil army of propagandists who are hell-bent on breaking the spirit of one of the greatest lesbian archetypes ever set on paper… a liberator of children, a goddess to the natural world, a harbinger of a new order in the wake of the collapse of capitalism. I invite you to imagine and inhabit that scenario, because, sisters, I promise you that it is the real story.


Like this blog? You'll probably enjoy my blog  "Stealing the Herd" and the Butch Visibility Project.