aisle. I said that I was from
him some questions. I was wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and a
press pass with
neck. The man laughed and turned to the woman next to him,
whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the woman next to
her and whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the
woman next to her and whispered in her ear, and so on down the
row of delegates. The man did not turn back to me until the identification had been passed to the end of the line. Some of the women had not laughed; they had gasped.
I asked the man why he was at the conference. He said that his
wife had wanted him to be there to protect women’s right to procreate and to have a family. I asked him if he was a member of the Klan. He claimed high office in the organization. He talked about
the Klan’s militant role in protecting women from all kinds. He
himself was physically rather slight, not particularly tall, wore
glasses; I suspected I was physically stronger than he was. Many
times during the interview I realized that it would take a white
sheet and all that that white sheet symbolized to hide this man’s
own physical vulnerability to attack. He himself was nondescript;
the Klan was not. When I recognized the fear this man inspired in
me, and measured that fear against his own physical presence, I
felt ashamed: and yet I was still afraid of him . *
*Klan and Nazi groups threatened violence at the convention: we were
promised bombings and beatings. Some women were in fact beaten up,
others were physically threatened, and the possibility of being hurt was
considered both real and immediate by all the conference participants with
whom I talked.
He said that women needed the protection of men. He said that
the Klan had sent men to the convention to protect their womenfolk from the lesbians, who would assault them. He said that it was necessary to protect women’s right to have families because that
was the key to the stability of the nation. He said that homosexuality was a Jew sickness. He said that homosexuality was a lust that threatened to wipe out the family. He said that homosexual
teachers should be found out and run out of any town they were
in. T hey could all go to Jew New York. T ryin g to keep up m y end
of the conversation, I asked him w hy he was against homosexual
teachers, especially if their homosexuality was private. He said that
there was no such thing as private homosexuality, that if homosexuals were in schools, children would be corrupted and tainted and molested and taught to hate God and the fam ily; homosexuality
would claim the women and the children if they were exposed to
it; its presence at all, even hidden, anywhere, would take people
from family life and put them into sin. His description was almost voluptuous in that no one, in his estimation, would remain untouched.
Are you really saying, I asked slowly and clearly and loudly (so
that the women delegates could continue to overhear the conversation), that if homosexuality were openly visible as a sexual possibility or if there were homosexual teachers in schools, everyone would choose to abandon heterosexuality and the family? Are you
really saying, I asked carefully and clearly and slowly, that homosexuality is so attractive that no one would choose the heterosexual family over it? He stared at me, silent, a long time. 1 am afraid of
violence and the Klan, and I was afraid of him. 1 repeated my
questions. “You’re a Jew , ain’t y a , ” he said and turned away from
me, stared straight ahead. All the women in the row who had been
looking at me also turned away and stared straight ahead in utter
silence. The only woman whose head had been otherwise engaged
had not looked up except once: she had taken one hard stare at me
in the beginning and had then turned back to her work: knitting
blue baby booties, the Klan’s own Madame Defarge; and I could
imagine my name being transferred by the work of those hands
from the press pass on my chest into that baby-blue wool. She sat
