June 1976

HIGH GEAR

FOR MOTHER

Page 25

by Leon Stevens Like many, (soon most) American parents, my mother and father were divorced early in their marriage, when I was in kindergarten and my two young brothers were not yet of school age. As is traditional in cases of divorce, my brothers and remained with our mother who was compelled to sell our farm in Bedford. We relocated in a four room shack next to a railroad track in Cleveland's industrial sector. Within relatively short time, alimony father payments from my evaporated, whereupon my mother consulted a magistrate to secure sufficient funds to sustain herself and her boys. My father insisted that he had not been regularly employed and could make payments only sporadically.

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With this, my mother found herself trudging to the welfare line with her three sons and millions of other Americans. At the welfare office, her application for relief was denied because she owned her own home, the welfare official asserting that she would have to sell or mortgage the $4000 shack which was her's as a result of the divorce settlement. Only two of our home's four rooms were heated in the winter and our bathroom did not have a flush toilet (We had to fill a bucket of water at the kitchen sink and pour it down the bowl). The plumbing was laden with tape, rags, and string to patch cracks and holes in the piping and the second floor swayed as much as three inches in a heavy wind. My mother refused to sell the house. For all of us, it was a symbol of stability and security, no matter how austere.

My mother made repeated appeals to the courts and other public servants to secure some form of sustenance for herself* and her family. Although some news coverage was given to her plight, local bureaucrats turned a brick ear to her entreaties.

Unskilled and with free day care unheard of in the early Fifties, and with the nation having just undergone one of its perennial recessions, my mother found work an unreachably distant alternative. As years progressed, my mother's

subsistence economy finally managed to elude her genius. With my school water colors she emblazoned a large piece of cardboard with the words, "THE RECESSION IS NOT OVER FOR US PLEASE GIVE." She then printed the word "Give" on three porcelain cups. The four of us piled into a bus, got off at Public Square and marched up and down Euclid Avenue. After many surprised and sympathetic citizens filled our cups with shiny cash, several news people descended with clicking, flashing cameras, followed by a squad car which whisked my mother to the county jail and my two brothers and me to the Children's Receiving Home.

When the story appeared the next day on the front pages of Cleveland's two largest newspapers, many citizens and public figures, including news commentator Dorothy Fuldheim, expressed outrage over country's failure to meet our needs. An embarrassed and vengeful Judge Woldman, backed up an equally incriminated welfare

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department, pronounced that the environment which my mother provided was too full of controversy and too spartan to raise three boys successfully. The judge ordered that the three of us be taken from our mother and be placed in the care of Cuyahoga County.

My brothers and I remained at the Receiving Home for close to three years. When I entered the Receiving Home, I was nine. After the passage of the three years, my father had become gainfully employed, remarried, and had children by his new wife; whereupon the court determined that my siblings and I should be awarded to my father who had, by then, created a "healthy" nuclear family. My. brothers and I did not know our father and were fearful and skeptical of the proposed new surroundings.

County Welfare caseworkers initiated a program to indoctrinate us to the virtues of living with our father and his new family. Although my mother had been a free thinker (officially Protestant), my father was Roman Catholic and the three of us were ordered to attend a Catholic church and

participate in Catholic religious ceremonies. I refused. My brothers who were too young to grasp the implications of these new events complied. As can be expected, we were eventually coerced to live with Dad. The three of us resisted firmly, in spite of the fact that my brothers had

consented to religious conversion. At this, Judge Woldman ruled that my brothers

should be placed in a Catholic orphanage in Nebraska called Boys Town. I was exiled to a Protestant orphanage in Michigan called the Donald Waley Memorial Home.

The Home contained orphans, neglected children, and America's youngest political prisoners.

Pro-paternal propoganda ensued again, and my resistance campaign began anew. Social workers at the Home who had never seen my mother attempted to create for a vilifying portrait of my mother as a "deceitful, radical bandit" using elaborate, insulting, and denigrating terms which would embarrass even a CIA filing clerk. (My mother in

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the meantime was teaching herself shorthand and drafting, looking forward to the day when she could support us after our captivity.)

Although the children at the Waley Home attended public schools, it was difficult for us to interact with children on the outside. Special permission was necessary for outside activities which discouraged spontaneous

and casual encounters with school mates and neighborhood children. As there were only two other boys at the Home of my own age, I spent my four years there (almost until the age of 16) in a sort of intellectual isolation, full of bitterness, anticipation, and rebellion.

Finally, the Juvenile Court in Cleveland decided to divide myself and my two brothers among our parents, mailing me. to my mother and a year later, my two brothers to my father their (against will). Our stepmother turned out to be a character from Hansel and Gretel and, true to the tale, harangued and persecuted my brothers in deference to her own

children. My father soon found the situation morally and emotionally unbearable and sent my brothers to live with me and my mother without nitifying the civil authorities.

I've related this life sketch for two reasons. The first is that people often ask why I have been able to come out politically as a gay person and as an activist. My individuality formed early as a survival technique which later complimented and supported my gay life-style. I find it difficult to impune closeted gays who have everything to lose when, thanks to my turbulent life experience, I virtually could not help coming out. It required little heroism on my part as homosexuality was merely an accessory among many facets of my nonconformity. (In my life, I have been a Royalist, a Communist, a Jew, a shaman, a Buddhist, a Jehovah's Witness, a saboteur, a pacifist, a scoundrel, rogue, and martyr)

The second reason is that although feminism is currently in vogue, in the early Fifties it was rare and an incredible liability. It is not only lesbians who lose their children! Straight women like my mother have endured such terrorism in countless under-reported instances.

Of course, many people cannot resist asking whether the "trauma" of my young years did not contribute to or even induce my homosexuality. It did not. Although I rank myself a proud 6 on the Kinsey Scale (exclusively homosexual), my brothers who are only a year apart from me in age have shared my same. experience are now happily and actively heterosexual.

1 also resent the abrasive. scorn of some feminists who

imply that I as a male am immune to suffering as a result of the oppression of women in this society. Like countless other women, my mother has not written extensively on feminism, nor has she demonstrated against Ellen McCormack, nor is she a lesbian. But we ought not forget that acts of survival are often some of the greatest acts of revolution.