SCUM Manifesto. Valerie Solanas
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Women knew next to nothing about Solanas until she shot and nearly killed pop artist Andy Warhol in June 1968.” Valerie had been to college, but every academic line she writes is followed by something completely potty-mouthed or shocking. It has less stylistically in common with feminist writings of the time and more in common with the absurdist manifestos of art movements, or with punk rock, which hadn’t even happened yet. According to filmmaker Mary Harron, who went on to memorialize Valerie with the wonderful film I Shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto is “deadpan, icily logical, elegantly comical: a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist.” Declares the Special Collections Library of Duke University, “Solanas is not generally considered to be a part of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Who will claim her?
Though she does employ the adjective “groovy” in reference to the ideal SCUM women, Valerie was certainly not a member of the moment’s male-dominated anti-establishment proto-hippie counter-culture. “Dropping out is not the answer, fucking-up is,” she wrote, calling bullshit on what looked like a culture of narcissistic male navel-gazing, but also she’s really not a joiner: “SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to achieve its end… SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil-disobedience basis.” SCUM is a Manifesto written by a criminal—a queer when queer was illegal, a prostitute, a woman who looked like a man, living by her wits, an artist.
In the end, it may be the criminals, the prostitutes, and the artists who claim her. In the 1990s when I was prostituting and writing my own Manifesto in a café, I was approached by a queer woman who looked like a man who wanted to bum a piece of paper off me. I vaguely knew this person—her name was Fiver and she was part of a San Francisco dyke street gang called The HAGS. She was sitting at a table with a few other Hags, all butch dykes and all, for the record, hot. Valerie would not have looked out of place among them.
“We’re making stencils,” she explained. “About Valerie Solanas. You know, she wrote the SCUM Manifesto? We’re going to tag them around the Tenderloin, she died in a hotel there.” That’s how I found out that Valerie had lived and died in my own city, from drug addiction and the poor health that comes with such an affliction, that comes with street prostitution, shitty housing, mental illness, and lack of community. I wanted to join The Hags in their Valerie crafting, but I was scared of them. They were a real gang and pulled crime and did harder drugs than I did then. They loved Valerie, and they lived and died like her. In a few years Fiver and another dyke would be killed by a batch of heroin tainted with flesh-eating bacteria. Another, Johanna, would see her mental illness flare up severely enough to keep her homeless until she died of cancer, struggling with her addiction right until the end. Another member of the gang got sober, transitioned to male, and saved his life.
This is who Valerie stood for, and these are the people who will not just remember her but cultivate a remembrance of her. This past April marked the 25th anniversary of her death, and a performance I had curated to explore her complicated legacy was canceled when an unexpected controversy grew large enough to give me concern about the safety of having such an event (plus sucked the fun out of it). Gay men accused me of giving voice to a person they likened to Hitler, Jim Jones, and Harvey Milk’s assassin, the cop Dan White (all men who I believe would have fallen first to Valerie’s sword). Trans women, understandably traumatized by the trans hatred in so much second-wave feminist rhetoric offered intense criticism on the internet. As time wore on, response to the event grew to a stressful clamor. The woman working the door feared for her safety, as did many of the performers—the ones who hadn’t already canceled. Possibly Valerie, loyal to no demographic but her constructed, imaginary SCUM Woman, would have appreciated the hoopla, but I was frankly too exhausted and bummed out to carry on, and pulled the plug on the event, which was meant to benefit the St. James Infirmary, a free clinic in Valerie’s old neighborhood that serves sex workers and trans people and could have, had it existed earlier, prevented Valerie’s death at age 52.
Instead of hosting the event, I spent the evening of the 25th anniversary of Valerie’s death at an artist’s talk by the photographer Catherine Opie, a butch dyke whose early work documented the sexual and gender outlaws of San Francisco. In another time she could have been Valerie, a disadvantaged genderqueer artist panhandling at the edges of the art world. Today she’s an art star, giving lectures at the Museum of Modern Art. It seemed the perfect start to a night that ended outside the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin, on the street where Valerie made her money. We drew a chalk circle on the sidewalk and stood around it with candles, each reading a piece from the Manifesto. All around us the drug-addled swayed, curious, then darted away, perhaps mistaking us for Christians or something. A woman exited the bar behind us and fell onto the ground, too drunk to walk. We posted Valerie’s picture on the hotel door, and someone handed out tiny women’s symbol earrings. We all put them on, all of us SCUM members whatever our gender, because as she said to the Village Voice in 1977, back in New York after her stint in jail and follow-up incarcerations in mental hospitals, SCUM is a state of mind. And to those of us who “think a certain way,” the SCUM Manifesto will always be a fascinating, confusing document: a product of a place and time that remains sadly relevant; a piece of political literature, pre-riot grrrl riot grrrl, pre-punk punk, prescient and perturbing and revelatory. For all of its enduring controversy, or perhaps because of it, this work will be with us for the ages, to be wrestled with and fought over and never quite figured out. Congratulations Valerie, you made a work that sticks. May you rest in peace.
SCUM Manifesto
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
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