Praising Bitsy Gomez

I didn’t want to go the Elks Club downtown anymore and deal with the boys and the police riots. I drove up from Long Beach to Crenshaw/Slauson to see Bitsy Gomez, who usually had a butch-girl-trucker solution to everything. She listened to my whole sad tale, took me up on her roof and said, “Let’s light up and shoot my guns.”

My inspiration and friend, Bitsy Gomez, died in April, 2015. I’m reminded of her constantly. She epitomized sisterhood and the wide open spaces of early women’s liberation- she was our Mama Bear, one of the sexiest, boldest, butchest straight women I ever met- a pistol of raw courage and unblinking truth-telling.

The 1970s was not the era of celebrity-feminism, to say the least. There was a working class feminist movement, a feminist movement inside Labor, and inside the Teamsters. We were as outrageous in our way as the punk rock you heard tearing apart your transistor radio.

It makes me laugh now to remember how completely UNWELCOME we were inside the Teamsters. They thought we were all a bunch of dykes who needed to be taught a lesson… blah blah blah… but there were also allies, and the Labor Movement was changing, it had to. The young people coming to work, at new companies like UPS (yes, that was new at the time!) had a really different attitude.