By Nicolle Freni
Growing Up a Working-Class Young, Gay, Woman in Brooklyn
You could say that being born into a poor, Italian American family in 1948 with typical immigrant problems and the Catholic religion determining a girl’s behaviour, led me straight to women’s liberation! Rebellious, with a mother who struggled with mental health problems, being overly strict one minute and negligent the next, I felt, and acted ‘odd’ for girls my age. My Brooklyn ghetto was as far from Women’s liberation as the moon. Yet it was the Open Door, that combined with education, paved the way for me to have a rich and full life.
My working-class roots inspired me to want change in a broad way, and from my mid-teens I felt strongly about civil rights, joining the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee) that was a broader church than the Black Panthers but still was partly proscribed; we met secretly in basements and my parents didn’t know. However, my father understood the civil rights movement and supported it, as he had Black and Puerto Rican friends who he liked and socialised with, even though he thought it too risky for me to go to the March on Washington in 1963 at age 15.
My father also had his own scraps with the powers that be. When I was a young teenager, he worked as a butcher for a big supermarket chain, that aimed to cut costs and get rid of the older men in favour of younger, cheaper guys. When the corrupt union in New York framed him for overly charging customers (which he never did), he lost his job, and our security, being forced to work in a non-unionised place six days a week, nine hours a day, with no paid holiday. A sense of injustice got baked into me.
School, which I loved, was my single greatest joy as I instinctively knew it was the ride out of the ghetto, my Route 66, where my oddness, as a girl who struggled desperately with her secret crushes on other girls, could live a life not dependent on men, as every single adult woman I knew, was. Leaving high school, I took a job and enrolled in Brooklyn College night school, looking for a day job in Manhattan. It was there I found an agency that sent me – as luck would have it – to the American branch of the British publishing house, Cambridge University Press. I made British friends, including gay men, who introduced me to another world. The women there were turned on to Women’s Liberation and interested in it. They encouraged me to get myself educated in England – much cheaper – and then return as a trainee editor. Their support was invaluable, as was my father’s. I was the first member of my family to get a BA, and my mother castigated me for wanting to go to college: ‘You’ll never get a man!’ How she helped me that day she’ll never know.
Nicole age 32, at a friend’s wedding in Hackney
In 1968/69 I backpacked to England and Europe, to check out Oxford University where I’d secured a place, via essays I’d sent them from New York. But my very first night abroad I’d gone with my travelling companion searching for Bramerton Street off Kings Road in London: The Gateways! A lesbian club I’d learned about from a Brit I met at Cookies, a mafia run lesbian club in downtown New York – where I always feared running into my mafia uncles. At least the Gateways was 3,500 miles away.
Visiting Oxford soon after, it was evident I would never fit in. My next trip brought me to one of the ‘new’ universities, Essex, a hotbed of radicalism, where I fit like a glove! In 1970 I arrived on campus, immediately getting involved in feminism, gay activism, and socialism, and making lifelong feminist, lesbian, and gay friends. It was not smooth sailing, however, as there were hot battles between socialist groups for the order of oppression – and women’s was at the bottom of the list. The class struggle always came first. The IMG (International Marxist Group) had two women I was really drawn to and we became fast friends; both of them went on to do important work in the women’s movement. One was Judy Lown who taught so effectively at the OU and Marion Prince, from an NHS background, who much later with Judy bought a women’s house in Brighton for older women to ‘retire’ to if as lesbian feminists we ever do retire. (Marion Prince died in Brighton in December 2023.)
Taylor Love Taylor and Val Johnson in London
Leaving uni to teach in East Ham, I became involved in the huge and diverse London scene, from the Essex Road Women’s Centre to the many pubs and clubs that were gay friendly. I fit this around full-time teaching which had begun as a stopgap to earn money, but which I soon loved! I felt I could really make a difference here, and be who I was (until Clause 28, that is). In the meantime, I went to Reclaim the Night Marches, abortion rallies, and CND. All of this was really just a sideways move for me, from activism in New York, to activism here. My then wonderful radical partner, Judy Waldman, and I also attended events for Gays Support the Miners, the film Pride telling a true story I danced with miners’ wives while their husbands cheerily, if a little tipsily, looked on!
Music, Theatre and Feminism
At the Essex Road Women’s Centre in Upper Street, Islington (which ironically then was anything but upper) I went to a meeting of a group of musicians that called themselves ‘Woman’s Liberation Music Projects’ (WLMP), and as I played guitar and sang, not in a band but with friends, and passionately loved music, I was fascinated by what they were saying about control of the music industry by men. Later they were known as Jam Today, a great and extremely talented band, consisting of Deirdre Cartwright, Terry Hunt, Alison Rayner and Josefina Cupido, and later Frankie Green. They were all about seizing that power for us. I also met the wonderful then musician Tierl Thompson around 1975, when she was in a trio with two other women.
At that time, I was saving all my money to boomerang back and forth to California in my school holidays, particularly to see my father, who had moved to join his family in Los Angeles after his stroke. That’s where I discovered Olivia Records, the Los Angeles based record distribution company and lesbian feminist record label. I was totally inspired by my meetings with them, and we exchanged info about what was happening in the States and in England, London in particular, around women’s music. Getting on extremely well, we agreed that I have the franchise to sell their LPs in England! I returned to London fired up and in my sitting room one day, evolved my idea for a women’s record company, dealing with distribution to start with, hoping it could become a label later, and that’s where I invented the name, WRPM – Women’s Revolutions Per Minute! (Everything was records and rpm then, 33 or 78). Tierl and I became involved and in a few months were running WRPM together.
Somehow this did not take away from my work at Plashet Girl’s School in East Ham, where I adored teaching the girls from diverse communities, mostly Bangladeshi, who loved poetry and whom I formed strong bonds with, including with their families (we couldn’t do it these days), a couple of whom I still see 50 years later with their kids and grandkids!
Tierl Thompson age 32 on a trip to California with me
My close London friends were also involved in theatre, and I was invited by Nancy Diuguid and Kate Crutchley, both directors and actors, to create an international arts festival: Women’s Festival ’77, to be put on at the Drill Hall off Goodge Street in Central London. We were joined by Julie Parker who went on to run the Drill Hall (whose great work expanded its remit as a lesbian feminist friendly arts venue). Tierl and I ran our stall selling WRPM records from Olivia, mostly overtly lesbian feminist records with lyrics expressing love for women which would never have become mainstream or been recorded elsewhere. As musical director of the festival, I brought over Meg Christian and Teresa Trull from California, and they joined about 30 other music acts and bands (including Victoria Wood!) from across the UK and Europe. At the festival I came across much feminist and lesbian theatre which drew me as much as the music, and I began to veer towards theatre as a vehicle for change. I was evolving my politics seeking change in an arts framework; it happened naturally, without me thinking about it.
The big fly in the ointment came in 1978, when, having overworked myself to the bone on the festival while teaching, and also while maintaining two competing relationships – one with Tierl and one with a woman, Nandita, who had gone to prison for her beliefs – working in an Indian cult-run women’s centre in Stoke Newington. I became ill with cancer. Soon Tierl and I could no longer sustain running WRPM. Tierl and I sold it and the stock to the dynamic Caroline Hutton from Bristol and Birmingham who ran it wonderfully for many years.
Coping with illness and heavy-duty cancer treatments meant my life slowed down considerably – for a while at least!