Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (44 page)

Dad blew a fit. As a loyal subscriber to
The Loyolan
, he saw the published article with Mary Jo’s byline.

“
I’m deeply disappointed with your article,” he confronted her the next time she came home. He then opened his copy of
The New American Bible
, turning to Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis. He recited to her Verses 4 and 5, detailing the events that precipitated God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: “Before they went to bed, all the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old—all the people to the last man—closed in on the house. They called to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them.’”

“
What does that have to do with gays?” Mary Jo pointed to the biblical passage. “That’s about rape!”

“
Well,” Dad deflected her biblical revisionism, “don’t you think that if Loyola is allowing the newspaper editors to print this article, it’s condoning homosexuality?”

“
No!” she stood by her work. “They were just printing the facts. This
is
the news. It’s neither condoning nor opposing anything. These are just the cold facts.”

“
But why did they print this in
The Loyolan
?” he persisted.

“
Because it’s the news!” her anxiety mounted.

“
But why did they send you out to talk to these people?”

“
Because they’re the ones making the news.”

“
But why did they put
you
in that situation?”

“
Because I’m taking the class.”

“
They shouldn’t be asking my daughter to write these things and putting them into the newspaper,” he fumed. “I’m going to write a letter to the editor.”

“
NO!” she cried, tears included. “How would it make me look to have my own father criticizing my article?”

That hit home. He knew he had pushed her too hard. He retreated. “I won’t write a letter to the editor, Mary. I’m not mad at
you
. I’m not even opposed to the existence of a gay group on campus,” he told her. “What truly disappoints me is the public dissemination of these heretical points of view in a Jesuit-subsidized newspaper.”

He assured Mary Jo that she was just a bit player: an innocent, well-intentioned communications student—and a girl, no less—fulfilling her assignment to cover the news about mainly male indulgence and excess. “Your personal involvement is not the issue here,” he emphasized.

But college, in its ideal form, is a place to discover oneself, and that’s exactly what Mary Jo was doing. She had stumbled onto the radio station. She had stumbled into her first direct altercation with her father. And she would soon stumble onto an even bigger breakthrough. Characteristically, she found it through the music.

Musicians called Mary Jo at the radio station and invited her to their gigs at clubs around town. They needed her to advertise their gigs, and she needed the musicians for her interviews. The musicians gave her free admission to the shows, and she played her interviews on the radio. For Mary Jo, life couldn’t get much better.

The bands treated her like a queen at The Roxy and The Whisky in West Hollywood and at The Que Será, Será in Long Beach. She began to feel more and more comfortable in those clubs with their motley crews of outcasts: gays, straights, freaks, punks, bikers, drug addicts, musicians, artists, writers, and songwriters.

After one performance in West Hollywood, some of the women musicians invited Mary Jo out to a nearby bar called The Palms. “Rock on,” she didn’t miss a beat.

She looked around the bar. There were no men. She looked around the bar again. And then it hit her.

For years, she had thought she was so unique, a tough cool chick with her own look, the Peppermint Patty of Peanuts. And then she saw a bunch of other women at The Palms who looked and acted just like her. They all had one big thing in common.

“
Oh, my God!” Mary Jo realized. “This is it. I’m a lesbian.”

For the first time in her life, she saw herself in other people. The women in the bar were more playful, more fun, more intense, and more independent than the average girl. They were loud and, well, cocky. When they interacted, they shouted. Some wore stereotypically tough clothing like leather jackets, blue jeans, and headbands. Others didn’t. But their fashion was mostly an anti-fashion. “They didn’t care what people thought about how they dressed. Their fashion came not from a
Vogue
magazine but from within.” Mary Jo didn’t feel any sexual attraction to any of the women in the bar that night, but she felt an instant chemistry with them. The chemistry was more emotional than physical.

“
I finally felt like I belonged,” Mary Jo remembered. At long last, she had found her tribe.

And then it all dawned on her that night why she felt so good when she heard certain kinds of music. It wasn’t just the music. It wasn’t just the lyrics. “It was the feeling of the
musicians
!” she discovered. She realized that a lot of the musicians were either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or otherwise ambiguous. They were men who dressed like women and women who dressed like men. But mostly, they defied categorization, just as she had done her entire life. It didn’t matter so much what they wore or what they sang. What mattered most to her was what they
felt
, because they felt the same way she felt. Alienated. Angry. At odds with the world. Ambiguous about themselves.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a multitude of misfit rockers, punks, gender-benders, and heavy metal bands gathered proudly beneath that great big umbrella of ambiguity: The Runaways, The Pretenders, Girlschool, The New York Dolls, The Violent Femmes, The Eurythmics, The B-52s, Joan Jett, Grace Jones, Nona Hendryx, Melissa Etheridge, Patti Smith, Joan Armatrading, Phranc, Prince, Queen, Culture Club, Bronski Beat, Joe Jackson, David Bowie, and Elton John.

Some of their songs flaunted the ambiguity. When Joan Jett sang David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” at a local club, the crowd shouted their favorite lines:

Other songs vented the anger. Those were the “anthem” songs. They had big sounds, “power” chords, and fightin’ words. When Jett sang about her “Bad Reputation,” she upheld it with a vengeance:

The crowd pumped their fists in the air in salute to their leader, Joan Jett.

Mary Jo cut her hair like hers: a spiky rock-and-roll shag, uneven and jagged. Kind of messy like the music.

Back at the radio station, Mary Jo researched the history of the blues and hosted a blues show on the air. She mixed old blues with new blues and described for her audience the connections between the two. She compared the classic blues of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, and Etta James with the contemporary blues of B.B. King, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Blasters, and The Fabulous Thunderbirds.

“
Those who sang the blues were people who couldn’t follow a conventional path,” Mary Jo told her listeners. “They were people who couldn’t get married right after high school or college. They yearned for something more. They sang like they were crying. But they were healing themselves at the same time. Their music reverberated through you like magic.”

The blues validated her feelings even more than the anthem songs did. When Janis Joplin recorded “A Woman Left Lonely”—a song about a woman whose man takes her for granted—the literal meaning of the lyrics was far less important to Mary Jo than was the way Joplin poured her heart out through her wrenching vocals. Her heart spoke of betrayal, loneliness, disorientation, and yet perseverance.

“
Janis Joplin was an outcast in her Texas high school,” Mary Jo informed her audience. “The other kids berated her as a ‘nigger lover’ and voted her ‘ugliest man on campus.’ No wonder she fled to San Francisco,” Mary Jo quipped over the air.

The music on the radio segued into her home life when her college roommate approached her one day. They were already close friends. They were already living together off campus. They were both girls who yearned for something more than finding a man and getting married right after college. “I like you,” the roommate declared.

Mary Jo had stumbled into her first romance. At first, she thought the situation seemed a little awkward. Then she thought about it again, and it seemed like the perfectly natural thing to do.

Nobody in our family knew anything about Mary Jo’s personal life until she confided in Genie. They were walking along the track around the campus football field. It was early 1980, just as Genie was reconnecting with the rest of the family in the wake of her own excommunication. Of anyone in the family, Mary Jo believed, the brave rebel Genie could understand what rejection felt like and could lend a sympathetic ear.

“
You know my roommate?” Mary Jo asked.

“
Yes.” Genie thought the roommate was kind of pushy.

“
We’re girlfriends,” Mary Jo paused. “I think I’m gay.”

“
No!” Genie stopped in her tracks. Her beautiful little blond surfer girl baby sister whom she’d nurtured since childhood could not possibly be a lesbian. “You’re too young and impressionable to make that choice,” said Genie. Mary Jo was 20. “Your girlfriend is exerting way too much influence over you.”

But that didn’t compute. Here was Genie, the bra-burning flowerchild who had earned her petals in the crusade for alternative lifestyles, flatly dismissing Mary Jo’s most intimate relationship. Here was Genie, who had brought her flamboyantly gay friends from the theater arts department to our house for Dad’s handshakes and Mom’s pizzas, telling Mary Jo that she couldn’t be gay. And here was Genie, who had always known everything about Mary Jo and to whom Mary Jo had looked for guidance her entire life, incapable of lending support in an hour of need. It was the first time that Mary Jo had told Genie something that she apparently couldn’t handle.

“
Are you sure?” Genie inquired as they teetered off the track.

“
Yes.”

“
Do you want to put a nail in Mom’s coffin?”

“
What do you mean?”

“
You better not tell her.”

“
Oh, right. I better not.”

Genie brought the news home to David, who was then her fiancé. “All I can think of is how hard her life will be,” Genie explained to David. “I just want her to be happy. I really have no problem with her being gay. But society makes it so hard to be gay. I don’t want her to have to deal with that.”

“
Gee,” David pointed out the irony, “you’re so worried about Mary Jo, but the hardest thing for her to deal with so far has probably been you.”

Genie and Mary Jo regrouped at the track a couple weeks later.

“
I’m sorry,” said Genie. “I apologize. I was caught off guard. I overreacted. I just wanted to protect you.”

“
I’ll be okay,” said Mary Jo. Then she smiled. “I like it when you protect me.”

They hugged. They patched things up. But it remained difficult for the sisters to shield their relationship from the bruises inflicted by the rest of society.

In May 1980, Genie and David made final plans for their wedding. Genie called Mary Jo to ask a favor. “Could you make a three-hour tape of music for our reception?”

“
Of course!” Mary Jo replied. She concealed what she really felt. “Easy for you,” she thought to herself as soon as she hung up the phone. “How unfair. Screw weddings!” Still off limits to homosexuals everywhere on the face of the planet, weddings exemplified better than anything else in the world the oppression and injustice of heterosexism. At least that’s how Mary Jo felt.

She made a perfectly festive little wedding tape, played it at the reception, and then recorded over it immediately afterward. She wanted to shoot it down.

Back on the air, Mary Jo became the most public figure in our family and the toast of the underground town. Near the end of her college career in 1981, commercial radio stations in the Los Angeles market vied for her talent. They offered her internships that forced her to choose between the money of mainstream top 40 hit songs and “the movement” of alternative music on the social fringe. Naturally, she chose the movement.

She went to work for the “rock-and-rhythm” radio of KNAC 105.5 FM in Long Beach. When the internship led to a full-time job, she broke up with her roommate and moved to Long Beach. She rode her skateboard to work through downtown. She adopted the radio name “Mojo” in reference to her inner groove.

Mojo rose in fame as one of the smoothest deejays at one of the hippest stations in Southern California. She became the youngest music director at any commercial radio station in the country when KNAC promoted her to the job at the age of 23. She had hit the bohemian big time.

The station’s rock-and-rhythm format allowed Mojo to mix black, white, and underground Latin music. She played everything hot at the time: funk, reggae, ska, new wave, punk, surf, rockabilly, and new L.A. sounds from groups like Los Lobos, Los Illegals, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Angry Samoans, The Bus Boys, The Go-Go’s, The Brat, Social Distortion, and X. She encouraged the local bands to mix their styles among themselves, and she promoted the bands that did so. With her voice as the common thread, she was weaving together the frayed social fringes.