Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation.

Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation * By Karla Jay * Basic Books * $25

In a moving, highly personal sketch of her life, Karla Jay clears the record on the early years of radical feminism and gay liberation. Her recollections resist pining for the way things were, offering instead real insight into the fledgling women's liberation movement, whose lesbian contingent Betty Friedan dubbed "the lavender menace."

Jay moves from a painful childhood dominated by a mentally ill mother to membership among the early movement's principal players, with whom she marched in antiwar and civil rights protests. Her anecdotes and analyses of the radical feminist Redstockings, the Women's Liberation Movement, and the Gay Liberation Front are peppered with sexy queer coming-of-age stories, with no apologies for the frequently naive political tenor of the movement's early agenda.

The book's bittersweet tone reflects the dilemma of a young woman making the transition from Barnard to backstreet revolutionary. Of her attempt to make sense of drag queens at the time, she writes, "Real female heroines ... were of no interest to them. Have you ever seen a drag version of Susan B. Anthony? Case closed...." About coming out on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show in 1976, she recalls, "The following day, [my mother] checked into a mental hospital." And she calls Rita Mae Brown "our Jay Gatsby," remarking that Brown has reinvented her politics and, indeed, her personal history over the years. Beyond the usual history lessons (Jay takes us to the Columbia student uprising of 1968 and, a year later, to the Stonewall riots), we're afforded a real sense of the glamour and danger of being a radical in the late 1960s. Reflective and waggish, this oddly invigorating memoir provides perspective alongside lessons in life, love, and coming to terms with being queer.