Ironically, June’s politics are what brought them together. June was one of a group of women who, in the late sixties, took over a long-abandoned city-owned building on East Third Street and made it, rather comfortably, a shelter for women and a day-care center. When the city ordered them out, they resisted; the cops dragged them out. Parke was one of the lawyers who went downtown to get the women out of jail. Parke told me how June’s firebrand temperament initially thrilled her; how glamorous she seemed. But Parke’s romance with June’s temperament, and the politics which inspired it, was soon replaced by “nervousness,” which in fact was a fear (which would graduate into paranoia) of June’s drawing fire at the two of them from both the society at large and from parts of the movement June was at war with, which eventually included most of the women June had been with in the Third Street action.
June has been written about frequently, sometimes within the context of warm feminist praise for her fiction and her politics. Once in a while, a few details of June’s life are woven in with discussions of June’s books. It always interests me to find that the writers generally assume that June, with sterling altruism, deliberately turned her back on her Houstonian social rank and discontinued any immoderate personal use of her wealth once she became a feminist and a lesbian-feminist and a publisher of books by women: as if she had pulled herself down by the bootstraps.
In fact, June risked nothing, and lost nothing, when she left Houston for New York and the women’s movement. She had absolute control over her fortune, and very sensibly she never neglected to foster it. She never felt the cost of Daughters, nor did her generous handouts to feminist enterprises ever make a noticeable dent in her wealth. She enjoyed the enviable position of being able to indulge in charity (and buy alliances) without feeling the pinch of self-sacrifice. She once told me that she was always very careful not to give to feminist causes any of the money she meant her children to have. Her mother, she said, would want her grandchildren raised as much as possible as she had been, and well taken care of after her death.
When the partners decided to terminate Daughters, and retreat from New York into Houston, they might have sold the company to other women. That they did not allow Daughters to continue, in new hands, publishing women’s writing which might otherwise never see the light of day, was their revenge, their particular Tet offensive, against women in general and the women’s movement in particular.
As well as money, June brought to a movement determined to create equality not only with men, but among women, a profoundly inbred sense of superiority and a bottomless need to be recognized as an exceptional woman.
Born in South Carolina, October 27, 1926, June was raised in Houston, where she was a debutante; she went to Vassar but after a year transferred to Rice University back home in Houston. According to June, the Vassar girls were “snobs;” they didn’t regard Texans as their social peers. Attending Vassar was June’s first attempt to gain status in the Northeast: where status counted. Leaving Vassar was her first flight back to established, albeit provincial, status. June had all the well-known vanities, and thin-skinned pride, of the Texas millionaires. She often spoke of how “cultured” (despite the fact that they were Texan?) her mother, and her mother’s family, the Worthams, were. The family money was made in cotton and insurance. In Texas, cotton and insurance counted as “old” money. The parvenus were into oil.
After college and a tour of Europe, June married and bore five children, one of whom died in early childhood. She eventually divorced Mr. Arnold because, she told me, he was using up so much of her money in business failures. But not long afterward, according to what she told me, she went to New York and married a “Jewish psychiatrist” whose role as her New York husband, she said, was to give her an excuse to live in New York, away from her mother. June took her second husband down to Houston to meet the family. At the big barbecue thrown to fete the newlyweds, June’s new husband fell in love with all things Texan and refused to return to New York. So she divorced him too. Otherwise, June told me, she’d had lots of male lovers before she met Parke: which is the way it was, she explained, for pretty and popular Houston socialites in her day; she would rather have been a lesbian, of course, but she couldn’t find any lesbians to be a lesbian with.
One of the biggest and loudest fights the partners went through in my presence was about sex. It was bad enough, according to Parke, that June had had sex with men but she also suspected that a woman lover was lurking in June’s past. Parke hated the fact that June had had any lovers, male or female, before her. Sometimes Parke could, in a self-satirizing way, joke about her jealousy. I remember some madcap murderous schemes she came up with to punish June’s first husband for ever laying a hand on her.
I often felt that June, after the honeymoon wore off, was not at all happy with Parke sexually. Parke was a romantic and she had a romantic’s need for June to be the romantic’s ideal of womanhood, the chaste-and-malleable-maiden part of the ideal especially.
Ruinously at work in Parke and June’s relationship was Parke’s enormous need for the kind of security which demands an all-encompassing monogamy, historical as well as current. They joined forces to demand of me “monogamy” with them. Long before they caught me in bed with J. Edgar Hoover, they had more than once heavily hinted that I might be better off without lovers. As I write this, I realize that it wasn’t Louise Fishman’s high school basketball playing that made June attack her, it was because I’d had an affair with Louise, and had been in love with her, and continued to love her.
Parke Bowman was intrinsically shy, passive, and fearful of every kind of rejection. She showed every sign of being deeply inhibited sexually; her personality was the opposite of June’s. Both, however, got a kick out being verbally abusive (they called it “honesty;” what I heard was sadism), and Parke also enjoyed becoming physically violent. I find it probable that Parke felt that beating up a woman was somehow more “decent” than having sex with a woman. She smiled while she was doing it; she seemed orgasmically blissed afterward.
In one blistering scene I was privy to, June argued that any woman—Parke, for instance—of her generation who had not gone to bed with men back in the days when there weren’t enough lesbians to go around wasn’t sexual enough to be a real lesbian. There was a lot of more-lesbian-than-thou one-upmanship going on in the movement then: the fewer the men you’d gone to bed with, the more lesbian you were. But June was not so much regretting Parke’s lack of heterosexual experience as she was marshaling a defense against possible movement charges that she wasn’t lesbian enough to understand and write well about lesbian experience. As far as I know, those charges were never made against June or her writing. But New York feminism was electric with charges and countercharges during the seventies. June couldn’t exactly pretend to be a poor woman, not with her real estate and her publishing company, but she wasn’t about to have her extensive heterosexual past, which included four children, used against her.
With a few well-chosen words (including, “The reason you screwed guys so much is because you’re a slut”) Parke responded to June’s charges that she wasn’t lesbian enough by redefining insanity and sanity: Insanity, Parke said, was a woman with the morals of a slut who thinks that the way to become a lesbian is to go to bed with a lot a men; sanity, however, was a lesbian who controls her animal urges until she finds “true love”: as she had.
I always had a hankering to get into some serious legal trouble so that Parke could win my case in court.
Parke had enjoyed consummated “true love” in only one relationship with a woman before she met June. She was by nature deeply conservative and conventional; she voted a straight Democratic ticket mainly because she hated Richard Nixon’s guts. “True love” meant marriage for life.
But “animal urges” sometimes overwhelmed Parke’s high moral tone. On many occasions, Parke decided that I was her true love. I am reasonably certain that each was preceded by a quarrel with June. Compared
