GCCC OFFERS WOMEN'S SERVICES

Contributed by Anita Zakem

On April 1st, the G.E.A.R. Foundation signed a lease for the Gay Community Center of Cleveland. The location of the center is 2795 Euclid Heights Blvd. 3rd floor. (Entrance is the red door next to Tommy's old location.)

The GCCC will be open to the public in the beginning of May. Projected services are the Gay Switchboard, rap groups, and a general drop-in center. Qualified counselors will also be available for individual short-term gay counseling.

The G.E.A.R. Board oversees the functioning of the center and has been instrumental in starting fund-raising campaigns. Two women have been appointed to the planning committee of the GCCC as Co-ordinators for Women's Services. They are Melinda McGeorge and Anita Zakem.

April was spent training new hotline workers and group facilitators. I am happy to annouce that there will be at least four women working the Gay Switchboard regularly. This is the first time in a year that there have been women working the line.

An open house was held at the GCCC on Sunday March 27th. It is estimated that one hundred fifty people attended within a four-hour period. The interest in and need for the center are clear.

To make the center as responsive to the overall needs of the community as possible, we need input from all of you. Anyone who has any ideas on implementing specific programs or groups who need a meeting space should let us know now. Messages regarding the center can be left on the Gay Switchboard--321-6632. Women who wish to speak directly with the Women Co-ordinators should leave a message for Anita or Melinda to contact them.

Ideally the GCCC will be a common facility having office space and serving as a center for gay activities in Cleveland. We of the planning committee are hopeful that some of the old-line factions which have existed within the Cleveland area gay community will dissipate. We realize the need for separatist groups, but in the interest of the broader spectrum of gay politics, it is essential for

all of us to eventually come together if progress is to be made. This also means involvement and awareness on the part of the straight community.

On Monday, May 2nd, there will be a special benefit performance for the center. It is a live musical revue titled "Tavcar at Trinity". The show will include national star Tavcar doing a variety of show tunes. Also appearing will be Cliff Bemis from Jacques Brel. Performance is at 8:00, May 2nd at Trinity Cathedral Hall, E. 22nd and Prospect. Tickets are $3.00 and are available at the door.

There will be other fund-raisers, such as bake sales and theater parties. Please watch for further announcements regarding the center in WSW. Oven Productions has also agreed to announce GCCC news at their concerts.

Donations are needed in terms of money and furnishings for the center (rugs, used furniture, lamps, bookshelves). The center will furnish a pick-up service for such items.

Without Woman Power, the GCCC cannot develop to its fullest potential.

PROGRAM FOR VIOLENT WOMEN OPPOSED

New York (LNS) Massachusetts prison, mental health and women activists have joined together to challenge an "innovative," "new" program for "violent" women now in the works at Worcester State Mental Hospital.

The "Intensive Care Unit for Emotionally Disturbed Women" is a joint project of the state's Department of Corrections (DOC) and its Department of Mental Health (DMH). Attempts to set up such a program date back to 1973 when the DOC illegally sent several women considered "dangerous" from Framingham Prison to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. An allmale institution, Bridgewater's horrors were documented in the movie “Titticut Follies,'

The transfer of women to Bridgewater was finally halted because of public outcry. Then, last fall, a proposal to establish the Worcester special center for "violent" women, by September, 1977, was rushed through the state legislature. At a time when Massachusetts' mental health budget has been severely cut, the legislature appropriated nearly half a million dollars for the first six months' operation of this center, slated to handle ten to twelve women at a time.

The cooperation of the Department of Corrections in planning the program has added a very strong emphasis on "security". At least $100,000 is being spent on remodeling for "therapeutic and security purposes" in the ward, $25,000 alone on special screens for the windows. This tight security is being installed, according to program director Dr. David Finkel, to protect the women from themselves.

The program's planners say that no woman will be transferred to the Unit from either a mental institution or prison for disciplinary reasons. Women transferred there will receive individualized treatment using "virtually every standard accepted treatment modality that is being used in mental health." Finkel has ruled out shock treatment. And as an assurance that the women's legal rights will be protected, program proponents cite the existence of an Advisory Committee of lay citizens and professionals.

The Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence organized last fall to oppose plans for the Intensive Care Unit raise many objections to the prom-

ises made by DOC and DMH. The group includes representatives from a number of prison, mental health, and women's projects, such as the Boston Bail Project, Mental Patients Liberation Front, the American Friends Service Committee, State and Mind Journal, the Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts, and the Cambridge Women's Center.

NOW COME QUIETLY!

Post Amerikan/cpf

"I am against it," said Doris Davis, a member of the Intensive Care Unit's Advisory Committee, who directs a prisoners' rights group at another Massachusetts prison. "I know that there are women that need help, o.k.? I'm not against them getting help. But I'm against the way they're going about it."

The primary objection centers on the term "violent" women how that will be defined, who will do the defining, and how it's likely to be used inside mental institutions and prisons.

"We see it a lot in mental hospitals that women who are aggressive are called crazy,' said Lee Austin, a member of the Coalition and of the Boston Bail Project. "I don't trust that that's not going to happen at this unit. . . . We're afraid that women in mental institutions and women in prisons who don't fit the standard, accepted feminine behavior, who may become angry at the way they're treated, will just get shipped off."

"I don't know how they define a violent woman," said Davis. "Because if I was taken out of my environment and told what to do and separated from my family and pushed around and screamed at and all, I might become violent."

"If I wasn't violent before I went in, I would be

very soon, "Austin elaborated. "The place is really grotesque. At least 4 women are going to live in the same room. They have absolutely no privacy. The only thing that's going to separate them is plastic modular furniture. And if these women have such a hard time adjusting with other people in society, how can they possibly live four in a room?"

According to Austin, the center also features 4 seclusion rooms and 2 cooling down rooms to which women can be sent on the way to seclusion "It's supposed to be a new and progressive concept."

Treatment to be administered within the center is also fuzzily defined and ripe for abuse. For one thing, the Coalition points out, "People in prisons and state mental institutions are overwhelmingly poor and non-white. These are the people who have always borne the brunt of experi mental techniques in medicine. However wellintentioned the proponents of the Worcester facility may be, there will always be the danger that psycho-surgery, shock treatment and psychotropic drugs will be used." And this danger will grow, the Coalition fears, as the initial public attention on the program wears off.

The Intensive Care Unit for Emotionally Disturbed Women also represents a disturbing and relatively unprecedented cooperation between the security-minded Corrections Department and the guardians of mental health in Massachusetts. "You have people who are hired to be mental health counselors, and the other part of their responsibility is security at all costs," observed Austin. "There is definitely a contradiction, and the whole concept is kind of scary."

The Coalition is calling on others who recognize the dangers of a center for "violent" women to exert pressure on Massachusetts public officials in an attempt to stop the project. "We realize a few women a year may need intensive emotional support or counseling," Coalition members have written. "But labelling a woman violent and removing her to a specialized center will only cause a greater feeling of powerlessness and frustration. The philosophy that people who need emotional support will be helped at involuntary institutions is contradicted by the history of psychiatry."

May, 1977/What She Wants/page 5