American Chronicles

Lesbian NationWhen gay women took to the road.

By Ariel Levy The New Yorker
Lesbianism in the seventies promised a life of radical empowerment, and women were drawn by ideology as well as by desire

There was a time, briefly, when women ruled the world. Well, their world, anyway. In the late nineteen-seventies, several thousand women in North America decided not to concern themselves with equal pay for equal work, or getting their husbands to do the dishes, or convincing their boyfriends that there was such a thing as a clitoris. Why capitulate, why compromise, when you could separate, live in a world of your own invention? On the fringes, utopian separatists have been part of the American story since at least the early eighteenth century—the Shakers, in New England; the millennial Rappites, in Pennsylvania; the Oneida Perfectionists, in upstate New York—and these women decided to turn away from a world in which female inferiority was enforced by culture and law. Better to establish their own farms and towns, better to live only among women. This required dispensing with heterosexuality, but many of these women were gay, and, for the rest, it seemed like a reasonable price to pay for real independence.

The lesbian separatists of a generation ago created a shadow society devoted to living in an alternate, penisless reality. There were many factions: the Gutter Dykes, in Berkeley; the Gorgons, in Seattle; several hundred Radicalesbians, in New York City, along with the smaller CLIT Collective; the Furies, in Washington, D.C.; and the Separatists Enraged Proud and Strong (SEPS), in San Francisco. There were outposts of Women’s Land all over the United States and Canada—places owned by women where all women, and only women, were welcome. “Only women on the land” was the catchphrase used by separatists to indicate that men, even male children, were banned from Women’s Land (and they often spelled it “wimmin” or “womyn,” in an attempt to keep men out of their words as well as their worlds). Separatists were aiming for complete autonomy, and to that end there were separatist food co-ops—such as the memorably named New York Lesbian Food Conspiracy—separatist publishing houses, and separatist credit unions. “We will soon be able to integrate the pieces of our lives and stop this schizophrenic existence of a straight job by day and radical political work at night,” Nancy Groschwitz wrote in a 1979 treatise called “Practical Economics for a Women’s Community.” Perhaps the most successful separatist venture was the women’s-music-festival circuit, with its offshoot, Olivia Records, started in 1973. (Since the early nineteen-nineties, Olivia has concentrated on the lesbian cruise and resort business.)

“The template for this idea of separatism is black separatism,” Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at Columbia University and the author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,” said. “The coverage of the Nation of Islam gained enormous traction with Malcolm X. Via him, separatism was in the air. Run a few years ahead and more people were estranged from normalcy––and normalcy was looking crazier because of the Vietnam War. The appeal of separatism is compounded. You have all kinds of versions of this; various forms of unplugging.”


There is no reliable record of how many women were calling themselves lesbian separatists at the height of the movement. “I think it’s quite impossible to say, other than thousands,” Lillian Faderman, the author of six books on lesbian history, said. Different groups had different definitions of separatism, ranging from a refusal to associate with men to a refusal to associate with straight women to a refusal to associate with gay women who weren’t separatists.

The most colorful separatists, although they were neither the most influential nor the most ideologically stalwart, were the Van Dykes, a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men unless they were waiters or mechanics, and lived on the highways of North America for several years, stopping only on Women’s Land. The Van Dykes had determined that the world was suffering from “testosterone poisoning,” and they were on a quest: to locate dyke heaven.

They were kind of serious about this, but they were kind of kidding. Or they were completely serious, but they knew it was funny. (They were radical but silly.) When the founding Van Dykes, Heather Elizabeth and Ange Spalding,* first hit the road, in 1977, they wrote a recruitment song to the tune of “Mr. Sandman”:




Would-be Van Dykes

bring us your dreams

make them the clearest that they’ve ever been

give us a sign, like nickels and dollars

and tell us that it’s just a matter of hours

till we find our

land in the sun

with killer dykes there, all having real fun

plantin’ grains and hoeing beans

please turn on and cook up some schemes!

It was ironic that Heather Elizabeth was singing about the joys of agriculture when, actually, she had just abandoned that life and a previous girlfriend, a woman named Chris Fox. In 1976, Heather, Chris, and another lesbian couple had bought a crumbling farm seventy miles outside Toronto, imagining that they’d create a thriving patch of Women’s Land where they could live by their own principles and grow their own vegetables. They had fantasies of gardening naked in the sunshine. Instead, the snow was so high it reached the windowsills. The snowplow passed only once every three days. They had intermittent electricity and meagre insulation. Life was icy and miserable. On a trip into Toronto for supplies in the early spring, Heather ran into Ange Spalding, who was glowing and tan after almost a year of living out of her van in warm places. Ange talked about the anonymity and freedom of life on the road. In Mexico, she said, you could live off the fruit you picked along the roadside. Within a few hours, Heather decided to leave Chris and their freezing, female-only farm behind.

Heather Elizabeth and Ange Spalding became the first two Van Dykes. Ange would be Brook Van Dyke, because she was loquacious: a babbling Brook. Heather took the last name she has to this day. By the time she was twenty-nine, Heather had changed her surname three times, once for each of her ex-husbands. She didn’t want any of their names anymore, and she didn’t want her father’s name, either. Like her contemporaries Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Heather wanted a name that reflected her emancipation, not a reminder of a past as chattel.

Van Dyke was perfect. Not only was it accurate—they were, after all, dykes who lived in a van—but it had grand potential. Perhaps they could persuade every lesbian in America, in Canada, in the entire world, to cast off the slave name she’d been given at birth or taken at the altar in favor of this tough-sounding moniker that proclaimed, “Your eyes do not deceive you: I am a real live lesbian.” They had a fantasy that a maître d’ somewhere would one day call out, “Van Dyke, party of four?” and dozens of lesbians would stand up, to the horror of the assembled heterosexuals.

Anything seemed possible. This was 1977, less than a decade after the Stonewall riots, in New York, which had marked the rise of the gay-rights movement in America. Any sense of gay life as normal life was relatively new and still flimsy. Until 1961, there were sodomy laws in every state, which made gay sex illegal. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders until 1973. (Previously, despite Freud’s belief that homosexuality could not be “cured,” there had been a robust industry in the treatment of lesbianism as an ailment. According to a psychoanalyst quoted in Time in 1956, ninety per cent of homosexuals could be healed—and should be, because there were no “healthy homosexuals.”)

But now lesbianism had been transformed from a criminal activity practiced by the mentally ill into a radical political gesture embraced by the women’s movement. In her book “In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution,” the feminist Susan Brownmiller describes a “coming-out fervor akin to a tidal wave”: “I was bewildered by the overnight conversions and sudden switches in overt orientation by many of the activists I knew.” Many feminists who weren’t even particularly attracted to women were drawn to lesbianism, convinced that it was “not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy,” according to the début issue of The Furies, a publication put out by the separatist collective of the same name.

The feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went so far as to claim that her brand of celibate “political lesbianism” was morally superior to the sexually active version practiced in her midst. Atkinson was not alone in this martyred line of reasoning; a 1975 essay by the separatist Barbara Lipschutz entitled “Nobody Needs to Get Fucked” urged women to “free the libido from the tyranny of orgasm-seeking. Sometimes hugging is nicer.” This argument was never particularly compelling to the lesbians in the movement who were actually gay.

Lesbianism—or the pretense of lesbianism—became so pervasive that Betty Friedan notoriously labelled it the “lavender menace.” In a 1973 article in the Times Magazine, she suggested that the C.I.A. had sent female homosexuals to infiltrate the women’s movement as part of a plot to discredit it. Friedan was right in one way: the Van Dykes and their separatist comrades had ideas that made those of the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy.

Lesbianism in the seventies promised its practitioners a life of radical rebellion and feminist empowerment. Separatism was supposed to be an antidote to all the altruism that women had been afflicted with since time immemorial. Now, when the phrase “lesbian mom” is a commonplace, it’s hard to imagine a time when female homosexuality was imbued with a countercultural connotation so potent that women were drawn to it by ideology rather than by desire. Similarly, if you are a young gay woman today, it can be difficult to understand the idea of organizing your entire existence around your sexual preference.

The first time I laid eyes on the last of the Van Dykes, I knew it was her before we exchanged a word. She looked like Johnny Cash but bigger, tougher, sitting in a leather jacket at the back of a bookstore in Seattle, where she has lived since she pulled into town in her van in 1980, fed up with driving, non-monogamy, communal assets, radical feminism, and the name Heather. As a child, she used to say, “I’m Hedy Lamarr, the movie star!,” over and over, because she’d heard the name somewhere and liked the sound of it. She told that story to a woman named Bear when she first got to town, and Bear said, “Your name is Lamar.” She has been Lamar Van Dyke ever since.

Van Dyke is an unusually large woman. People often stare at her on the street. She isn’t fat, but she’s built broad and stands six feet tall. She has an imposing presence. “If you look at me, there’s no question about it: I’m a dyke. I am gay,” she said. “If you don’t think so, there is something really wrong with you.” She has short, dark hair and tattoos winding up and down both arms, some of which she made herself during the eighteen years she owned and ran a tattoo parlor. I was nervous when I met her.

If I weren’t female and gay, I doubt very much that she would have spoken to me. “Your generation wants to fit in,” she said. “That’s your deal: I want to be just like you. The last thing I want to be is just like you.” Nevertheless, Van Dyke took me back to her house, which has a metal placard that says “LADIES” on the front door and is decorated with neon tubing, bowling balls, paintings she made of bird-people, Chinese lanterns, an old-fashioned barber’s chair, a large purple crystal geode with a crown on top, and a huge sculpture of a kimono that she fashioned out of scrap metal after she envisioned it in a dream. “One time, my mom looked at me and said, ‘I just don’t understand how you ended up the way you ended up—you’re just so flamboyant!’ ” Van Dyke said, sitting on a leopard-print couch in her living room. “I said, ‘Mom! Who dressed me up when I was three years old and gave me a Tonette and had me sing little songs for her friends at her parties? Who wanted me to be Shirley Temple? Who took me to tap-dancing classes? What do you mean, you don’t understand? What’s wrong with you?’ And she just started laughing.”

Lamar Van Dyke was born Heather Elizabeth Nelson in Canada in 1947, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. Her mother was a homemaker and her stepfather, a pipe fitter, “was a very staunch, German, patriarchal guy who said, ‘You will not do this, you will not do that, you will not leave the house.’ We were totally at war the whole time I was a teen-ager. It was some kind of Freudian thing: I grew breasts and he lost his mind.”

At nineteen, she left home. She got pregnant after a one-night stand with a Black Panther named Arnell, and went to San Francisco, where the weather was warmer and the culture was looser, to have her baby—a girl, whom she put up for adoption. “I didn’t really have a lot of qualms about that,” Van Dyke said. “I’d helped my sister raise her kids, so I knew what was involved and I knew I couldn’t do that. It’s like, no: this child’s going to have a good life and she’s got to have it someplace else.”

Heather got married three times in the six years after she gave birth. She met husband No. 1 while she was still in the maternity ward, where he had come to visit another woman. But Heather decided, “I’ll have him, I’ll take him.” He was a psychiatrist running a halfway house for ex-convicts, and Heather stayed there with him for about six months. On a visit home to Buffalo, she met up with husband No. 2, a biker named Skip Broome, who was a member of a gang called the Road Vultures. She showed me a faded newspaper clipping from 1968, picturing her with long brown hair, standing with Broome and his motorcycle, both of them looking gleeful and wild. (Broome was eventually imprisoned for selling pot and ended up in Attica during the riots.) In those early relationships, Van Dyke said, “It was about the thrill of catching them. It was the thrill of ‘Hey, you look good. I wonder if I can get you.’ Well, yeah. That’d be yeah. I mean, men’ll stick it in central vacuuming.”

Husband No. 3, Bruce Beyer, was a draft resister and a member of the Buffalo Nine, a group of antiwar protesters who were arrested when thirty-two F.B.I. agents and U.S. marshals stormed their demonstration at a Unitarian church. Beyer was facing serious jail time, so he and Heather fled to Stockholm, where they were married in 1972. “No. 3 was about the adventure and hiding out from the F.B.I. and running around the world using fake names and crossing borders,” Van Dyke said. “I was up for that. I thought that was really good.”

That spring, a young woman from New Mexico who looked like Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde” came to stay with the Beyers in Stockholm; she was there to attend an international women’s conference. Heather decided to go along. She was exhilarated by the brand of radical feminism espoused by the women at the conference, and one idea in particular appealed to her: that you didn’t need a man. That you could be the protagonist in your life, the adventurer at the center of the story. According to these feminists, the ultimate enactment of this new kind of power was to have sex with other women. Heather and her house guest left the conference eager to try. Bruce Beyer gamely suggested that he might play a role in their experiment, but the proposal was unpopular. “I said, ‘Uh-uh. She’s sleeping with me. You’re on the couch,’ ” Van Dyke said. She has a big, mad, raucous laugh. “ ‘For the rest of our lives, you are on the couch!’ ”

Beyer, who is now a carpenter living in Buffalo, told me, “I remember being in the other room going, Um, I’m not so sure I like this. Getting up and walking around and around this park at four in the morning.” For his wife, lesbian sex was a revelation—her new favorite thing about being alive. A few nights later, Heather brought home a pack of “man-hating dykes from England,” as she put it, and it dawned on Beyer that his wife had new priorities. “But at that time in history the mandate in the antiwar movement was to support women who were trying to find their voice,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound heroic about it, but that’s the way it went down.” He added, “I always thought of Heather as the Merry Prankster of the women’s movement—she brought a levity to everything. I really had my heart broken.”

Heather made her way to Toronto, where she’d heard that there were lots of lesbians, and quickly moved in with a couple who were publishing a women’s newspaper and experimenting with separatism and “smashing monogamy.” Promiscuity “was our final act of war resistance,” Van Dyke said, laughing. “We just wanted to not accept anything as fact and to establish what was real for our own selves about absolutely everything. We want to have relationships where we expand! And everything is wonderful! So we’re just going to let anybody do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, and, you know, there’s a certain freedom to that. And there’s quite a bit of drama. When the Van Dykes were running around, everybody was sleeping with everybody. It was chaos.”

As divorced from men and the heterosexual counterculture as separatists considered themselves to be, they did share certain generational tendencies. “It’s so weird that people talk about feminism being anti-sex—as if. As if !” said Chris Fox, who once owned that frost-bound farm with Heather and is now pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Victoria. “People were fucking their brains out.”

Heather Van Dyke, for example, had a knack for getting women to fall in love with her. Almost as impressive, she usually managed to keep them as her friends and sometime lovers even after she had moved on. Some of this loyalty had to do with Heather’s seductive personal power. She expresses ideas that are technically insane with so much vigor that you find yourself thinking, Well, maybe. . . . She was a model as a teen-ager, and, with her shaved head in her nineteen-seventies incarnation, was stunning in an otherworldly way. But she also shared with her girlfriends a sense that liberated women did not limit themselves when it came to love.

In 1978, after a year on the road with Ange Spalding, Heather returned to Canada to sell her share of the farm. On this trip, she found a new girlfriend, Judith. But what Heather really wanted was to be on the road—not so much with a partner as with a pack. The dramatic potential of a van gang appealed to Judith, and she enlisted her friend Nancy, a woman who was just getting out of a bad marriage. Nancy wanted to share the spoils of her divorce with other women and experiment with a new way of life. She quickly transformed from Nancy, a heterosexual with children, into Sky Van Dyke, a lesbian separatist with a van.

The Van Dykes decided that they would meet in Texas and then head to Mexico. Heather was convinced that they would be able to figure out how to locate or create dyke heaven if they would just contemplate the matter on top of some pyramids. Heather would take Judith, Sky would go on her own, and they would send gas money to Chris Fox and Ange Spalding, who agreed to drive together, even though Chris had been hurt by Heather’s departure from the farm, she says, “when Ange showed up with a tan, smoking cigarettes in her sexy way.” Chris and Ange did not think of themselves as jilted lovers following their ex-girlfriend on a road trip. They were convinced that their shared struggle to dispense with the straight world outweighed their bruised egos and broken hearts. “Ange and I melded a little over Heather not being with either of us,” Chris Fox says. (Chris changed her name to Thorn Van Dyke, because she was prickly.) “I packed up my carpenter tools and I was ready to head off with Ange, not as her lover but as a friend. As a Van Dyke, as it were.”

Several months later, Heather Van Dyke sat on the steps of the San Antonio city hall with her new girlfriend (Judith Van Dyke) and watched in awe as her two previous lovers, Thorn Van Dyke and Brook Van Dyke, rolled into town followed by their benefactress, Sky Van Dyke, and a woman she’d picked up along the way—Birch Van Dyke. There were no cell phones then, and no e-mail. It was remarkable that they’d all materialized— “An Affair to Remember” with radical lesbians.

On New Year’s Day, 1979, six Van Dykes drove four vans across the Mexican border and headed south, toward the Yucátan Peninsula. When they got to Chichén Itzá, the women climbed a crumbling ziggurat, took one look at the stone altar on top with its charred marks, and became convinced that they had happened upon a site where women had once been sacrificed. “They were clearly burning women,” Lamar Van Dyke says. The Van Dykes ran down the steps, got in their vans, and drove away.

Technically, the Van Dykes weren’t high, but they were living off the fruit they found in the trees, so there was a general light-headedness in the group. Occasionally, they would camp out in a park and boil a pot of soybeans down to a little piece of tofu or fry up some soysage as a vegan treat. Even thirty years later, the woman who was once Heather refuses to call herself the Van Dykes’ leader—hierarchy was considered patriarchal—but she did have a catalytic effect on the group. “I had slept with them all except for Sky, so, if things were going to happen, they would somehow come at me,” Van Dyke said. “You know how you can say things to somebody you’ve slept with in a way you can’t say things to somebody else? Well, I could do that with most of them. They had relationships with each other, but they weren’t as intimate.” And, in this world of women, intimacy was currency.

In Cozumel, the Van Dykes found themselves adopted by a local woman named Paloma, who ran a jewelry store and had a closeted lover in Mexico City. Paloma had a big house with a thatched roof on the edge of town, steps from the ocean. The Van Dykes thought that maybe they had found their ideal destination, and camped out there for weeks. “We taught ourselves very important phrases, like Los hombres son puercos,” Van Dyke recalls. “We didn’t want to call anybody a motherfucker, because that would of course be wishing something horrible on a woman, so we decided the thing to say would be ‘Go fuck your father.’ I think it’s Chinga su padre—it’s not a phrase that they use.”

One morning, the Van Dykes woke at six to find themselves surrounded by Mexican police. The charges were unclear, but the Van Dykes were escorted to the station, where they waited for hours. “Finally, the police said it had come to their attention that we were acting in ways they didn’t really welcome,” Van Dyke said. “We’re not good for their environment.”

There was an intra-Van Dyke battle when Brook attempted to steer the group to Belize, but Heather prevailed, as usual, and the Van Dykes wound their way back through the United States. “We were everywhere,” Van Dyke says. “We found Women’s Land in North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, a lot of Women’s Land in California and Oregon. You could actually go all around the country from Women’s Land to Women’s Land and you met all these other women who were doing the same thing. You would run into people in New Mexico that you had seen in Texas. . . . It was a whole world.” It was the Lesbian Nation.

During yet another fight among the Van Dykes over who was sleeping with whom, Heather recalls, Judith left in a huff and caught a ride to San Francisco. There she met the sex radicals Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin, who had started a lesbian sadomasochist group that they called Samois, for the house of torture in “The Story of O.” “She hooked up with those women and when she came back she said, ‘You’re going to love this,’ ” Van Dyke remembers. Judith was not mistaken: tofu quickly gave way to leather in the vans. The Van Dykes loved the drama of sadomasochism, the way it gave them license to play power games—which, really, they had been engaged in all along. For Heather Van Dyke, who had been a kind of lesbian Joseph Smith, driving around the continent looking for the promised land with a band of wives and ex-wives and future wives in tow, the idea of being explicitly dominant—a top, in the parlance of sadomasochism—was particularly appealing.

Characteristically, what was going on among the Van Dykes was indicative of what was going on in the women’s movement at large. In “In Our Time,” Susan Brownmiller writes about a phone call that she received in 1981 from the German feminist Alice Schwarzer:

She seemed to be saying that someone named Pat Califia, a pornography writer in California, was launching an important new feminist movement. . . .

“What’s the new movement?” I inquired with interest.

“Lesbian sadomasochism,” Schwarzer replied. I thought I misheard her. “Lesbian sadomasochism!” she shouted into the receiver. “It is sweeping your movement. You do not know?”

Lesbianism in the seventies had been configured as a loving sisterhood in which sex was less important than consciousness-raising. For many gay women, sadomasochism was an antidote to this tepid formulation. It was permission to focus on what turned them on, rather than what was politically correct, a way of appropriating the lust and power hunger that feminist doctrine had deemed male. “We’d been being egalitarian,” Lamar Van Dyke told me. “And suddenly we were over it.”

Fights about S & M overlapped with fights about pornography within the women’s movement, and the issue became wildly divisive. Feminists “insisted that lesbians should permit themselves only those sexual interests that reflect superior female ideals,” Lillian Faderman writes in “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America.” “They feared that the lesbian sexual radicals were not only making a big deal out of sexuality, which should be incidental to lesbianism, but were also deluding themselves and other women into believing that male images, fantasies, and habits were desirable for women too.” And there was something to that—Van Dyke calls this period her “Hugh Hefner and dinner jackets” phase.

The Van Dykes put on the first S & M “workshop” at the 1979 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, to the horror of many attendees. “Festivals offer safe spaces for women in recovery from violence,” Bonnie J. Morris writes in “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “Whips and chains or dog collars in public space don’t suit this goal.” Other festivals subsequently adopted a “pro-healing policy,” banning public displays of sadomasochism which could cause “psychic damage,” in the words of the New England Women’s Music Retreat.

All this whipping and spanking seemed to promote an explosiveness among the Van Dykes: mad fits of pettiness became the norm. One night, Heather became jealous when she heard that Brook and Judith planned to go out dancing without her, so she hid Judith’s dancing shoes. When, later, Judith found her shoes among Heather’s possessions, she retaliated by setting Heather’s van on fire. At least, that’s how Heather remembers it.

“Lamar would say it was the introduction of S & M that sent me off into a much more straight, marital situation,” Chris Fox says. “But I don’t think that’s true. We went on that trip with the idea that we would save the money and come back and start a community that would be self-sustaining and involve other people and do good things for the world. What that trip taught me was that, in the end, people will act more on their personalities than on their politics.”

As Lamar Van Dyke sees it, “I felt like I had been in trouble my whole life for being too big, too loud, too demanding, too bossy, too everything that I am. When I discovered this S & M thing, it was actually a place where people loved me for those things. It was very liberating and quite a treat.”

After Heather Van Dyke moved to Seattle, in 1980, and became Lamar, tattoos and leather became the focus of her life. She was a kingpin in the local S & M scene and, once again, had her own devoted following of women. One afternoon in 1994, the phone rang at Tattoo You, Van Dyke’s shop, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. A young-sounding woman asked to speak to Heather Nelson, which completely unnerved Lamar Van Dyke. “There was no reason on earth for anybody to call that tattoo shop and ask for that person—there was no connection,” Van Dyke said. “I just went ballistic. I said, ‘Who is this? What do you want?’ I thought it was the F.B.I. and I hung up.”

At her office in Oakland, California, Traci Lewis, the daughter that Van Dyke had given up for adoption after her fling with a Black Panther, twenty-six years earlier, hung up, too. She had spent a month trying to find her birth mother. “She was so evil when I called,” Lewis told me. Lewis was raised in an African-American community in Oakland and is very close with her adoptive family. But she always yearned to know the woman who had given birth to her. “I imagined her skinny—in a skintight suit,” Lewis said. “Like she was this uptight businesswoman married to some guy named Bob, and I’m just going to bust in there one day and I’m her little black secret.” A few days later, Lewis called Tattoo You again, but this time she left a message using the name that she had been given by her mother at birth: Cherise Michelle.

“The top of my head just blew off,” Van Dyke said. “It was so emotional I couldn’t do anything. I was in here running back and forth, going from the hallway to the kitchen, holding on to my head saying, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ I called my friend J.C. and said, ‘You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to call her!’ Oh, I was crazed. J.C. said, ‘Pour yourself some Jack Daniel’s and get in the bathtub and I’ll call you back.’ ”

J.C. telephoned Traci Lewis and asked her to state her date of birth and to provide other identifying details. Lewis thought that perhaps her mother was in a witness-protection program.

“Finally, J.C. called back,” Van Dyke recalls. “She said, ‘O.K., this is the scoop. It’s really your daughter. Not only that, but you’re a grandmother! Ha!’ Well, I lasted about thirty seconds. I just called her and said, ‘Hi.’ ” Van Dyke’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We talked on the phone for five hours every night for the next five or six nights.”

A few weeks after that phone call, Van Dyke flew to Oakland to meet her daughter’s family. Lewis’s adoptive mother, Paula, threw a barbecue on her back deck, and Traci’s friends and relatives came to celebrate the meeting. “They were just so excited,” Lewis said. “ ‘Traci’s found her birth mother! We have to get tattoos!’ ” The next time that Van Dyke came to visit, she brought along her tattooing equipment: Traci had got a fish tattoo on her ankle; most of her friends requested stars or flowers. It was a relief and a delight, Lewis said, to find out where she came from. “Growing up, I had my own agenda,” she told me. “You know how most kids care if they get in trouble? I just marched to the beat of my own drum. I did whatever the hell I felt like.”

Lewis, who is forty-two, has never met her biological father. She hopes to find him someday. In 1994, she attended the Black Panthers’ thirtieth-anniversary gathering, in Oakland, where she passed out cards with her story, hoping that someone would be able to help. Nobody remembered the man who called himself Arnell, and it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t really a Panther.

Van Dyke has pictures all over her house of Lewis, who is as tall as she is, and her two grandchildren: Monique, who is eighteen, and Royce, who is eight. Monique is a freshman at the University of California, Riverside, and Van Dyke keeps a photograph on top of her piano of Monique at a prom, wearing a teal dress and holding her boyfriend’s hand, standing in front of a trompe-l’oeil backdrop of a Paris street scene. Traci, Paula, Monique, Royce, and Lamar Van Dyke have been spending the holidays together and going on family vacations for the past fourteen years.

Brook Van Dyke died, of colon cancer, in 1990.** Nobody is quite sure what became of Sky. Judith cut off all communication with her rolling sorority after a fight over a T-shirt business that the Van Dykes had. (The shirts said “Killer Dyke” above Heather’s drawing of Patty Hearst holding a machine gun, and they were a hot item for a while on the women’s-festival circuit.) Thorn Van Dyke went back to being Chris Fox when she settled in Canada after several years on the road. “Now my life is very conventional,” Fox, who is fifty-eight, said. “When I returned from my travels”—in 1980—“within seconds of turning thirty, I started the relationship with the woman I’m still living with and got a job at city hall.” She also resumed speaking to males, as her new partner had two sons.

On a bright afternoon last April, I went to visit the last of the Van Dykes in downtown Seattle, at Speakeasy, an Internet-service provider where she has worked for five years. It is by far the most mainstream employment that Lamar Van Dyke has ever had. It was a few weeks before her sixty-first birthday, and she had just bought the first new car of her life, a black VW bug. Van Dyke also owns her house, but she doesn’t use credit cards. That would cross some kind of line. “I don’t want to be a capitalist pig,” she explained.

She drove me to the Wild Rose, a lesbian bar next door to the former site of Tattoo You, and inside there were fifteen or so women drinking and several children running between the tables. A woman with short hair and waxed eyebrows who appeared to be about fifty came over and tried to get Van Dyke to look at photographs of her grandchildren; Van Dyke had gone on a date with her once, a few months earlier. But Van Dyke was unmoved and the woman walked away. “I don’t want a wife,” she told me. “I want somebody that I can run around with . . . like Batman and Robin, you know?”

Van Dyke works with men now, and even speaks to them. She talks about menopause and her grandchildren and her garden, but she is still wild, a big pirate of a woman. Regardless of the different people of different genders she has chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dyke’s primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure. A woman in her sixties who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by, in movies or in books, or in life.

“Your generation wants to fit in,” she told me, for the second time. “Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?” There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else—an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. “We didn’t sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television—we didn’t sit around looking at screens,” she said. “We didn’t wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted.”



http://www.newyorker.com/

Remembering the Real Ayn Rand

The author of "Atlas Shrugged" was an individualist, not a conservative, and she knew big business was as much a threat to capitalism as government bureaucrats..

By DONALD L. LUSKIN

Tomorrow's release of the movie version of "Atlas Shrugged" is focusing attention on Ayn Rand's 1957 opus and the free-market ideas it espouses. Book sales for "Atlas" have always been brisk—and all the more so in the past few years, as actual events have mirrored Rand's nightmare vision of economic collapse amid massive government expansion. Conservatives are now hailing Rand as a tea party Nostradamus, hence the timing of the movie's premiere on tax day.

When Rand created the character of Wesley Mouch, it's as though she was anticipating Barney Frank (D., Mass). Mouch is the economic czar in "Atlas Shrugged" whose every move weakens the economy, which in turn gives him the excuse to demand broader powers. Mr. Frank steered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to disaster with mandates for more lending to low-income borrowers. After Fannie and Freddie collapsed under the weight of their subprime mortgage books, Mr. Frank proclaimed last year: "The way to cure that is to give us more authority." Mouch couldn't have said it better himself.

But it's a misreading of "Atlas" to claim that it is simply an antigovernment tract or an uncritical celebration of big business. In fact, the real villain of "Atlas" is a big businessman, railroad CEO James Taggart, whose crony capitalism does more to bring down the economy than all of Mouch's regulations. With Taggart, Rand was anticipating figures like Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, the subprime lender that proved to be a toxic mortgage factory. Like Taggart, Mr. Mozilo engineered government subsidies for his company in the name of noble-sounding virtues like home ownership for all.

Still, most of the heroes of "Atlas" are big businessmen who are unfairly persecuted by government. The struggle of Rand's fictional steel magnate Henry Rearden against confiscatory regulation is a perfect anticipation of the antitrust travails of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. In both cases, the government's depredations were inspired by behind-the-scenes maneuverings of business rivals. And now Microsoft is maneuvering against Google with an antitrust complaint in the European Union.

The reality is that in Rand's novel, as in life, self-described capitalists can be the worst enemies of capitalism. But that doesn't fit in easily with the simple pro-business narrative about Rand now being retailed.

Today, Rand is celebrated among conservatives: Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) insists that all his staffers read "Atlas Shrugged." It wasn't always this way. During Rand's lifetime—she died in 1982—she was loathed by the mainstream conservative movement.

Rand was a devout atheist, which set her against the movement's Christian bent. She got off on the wrong foot with the movement's founder, William F. Buckley Jr., when she introduced herself to him in her thick Russian accent, saying "You are too intelligent to believe in God!" The subsequent review of "Atlas Shrugged" by Whittaker Chambers in Buckley's "National Review" was nothing short of a smear, and it set the tone for her relationship with the movement ever since—at least until now.

Rand rankled conservatives by living her life as an exemplary feminist, even as she denied it by calling herself a "male chauvinist." She was the breadwinner throughout her lifelong marriage. The most sharply drawn hero in "Atlas" is the extraordinarily capable female railroad executive Dagny Taggart, who is set in contrast with her boss, her incompetent brother James. She's the woman who deserves the man's job but doesn't have it; he's the man who has the job but doesn't deserve it.

Rand was strongly pro-choice, speaking out for abortion rights even before Roe v. Wade. In late middle age, she became enamored of a much younger man and made up her mind to have an affair with him, having duly informed her husband and the younger man's wife in advance. Conservatives don't do things like that—or at least they say they don't.

These weren't the only times Rand took positions that didn't ingratiate her to the right. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam war, once saying, "I am against the war in Vietnam and have been for years. . . . In my view we should fight fascism and communism when they come to this country." During the '60s she declared, "I am an enemy of racism," and advised opponents of school busing, "If you object to sending your children to school with black children, you'll lose for sure because right is on the other side."

If anything, Rand's life ought to ingratiate her to the left. An immigrant woman, she arrived alone and penniless in the United States in 1925. Had she shown up today with the same tale, liberals would give her a driver's license and register her to vote.

But Rand was always impossible to pin down politically. She loathed Dwight Eisenhower, whom she believed lacked conviction. And in 1975 she wrote, "I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan," primarily on the grounds that he didn't support pure laissez-faire capitalism. But she endorsed Richard Nixon in 1968 because he supported abolition of the military draft. Rand was especially proud of her protégé Alan Greenspan for serving with Milton Friedman on Nixon's Gates Commission, the findings of which led to today's all-volunteer army.

Rand was not a conservative or a liberal: She was an individualist. "Atlas Shrugged" is, at its heart, a plea for the most fundamental American ideal—the inalienable rights of the individual. On tax day, with our tax dollars going to big government and subsidies for big business, let's remember it's the celebration of individualism that has kept "Atlas Shrugged" among the best-selling novels of all time.

Mr. Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC and the co-author with Andrew Greta of "I Am John Galt," out next month by Wiley & Sons.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Sidney Lumet: In memory

By Roger Ebert

Sidney Lumet was one of the finest craftsmen and warmest humanitarians among all film directors. He was not only a great artist but a much-loved man. When the news of his death at 86 arrived on Saturday, it came as a shock, because he had continued so long to be so productive.

Of his final film, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" (2007), I wrote: "This is a movie, I promise you, that grabs you and won't let you think of anything else. It's wonderful when a director like Lumet wins a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at 80, and three years later makes one of his greatest achievements." Like many of his films, it went on my list of the year's ten best.

Although he was not as widely known to the general public as directors like Scorsese, Spielberg, Eastwood and Spike Lee, his films were at the center of our collective memories. To name only a few of their titles is to suggest the measure of his gift:

"Network." "Dog Day Afternoon." "12 Angry Men." "Serpico." "Prince of the City." "The Pawnbroker." "Fail-Safe." "Long Day's Journey into Night." "The Verdict."

Most of his fims were set in his native New York City. Although he was nominated four times as best director, he never won an Academy award until his honorary Oscar; that may have been partly because he was not part of the Hollywood community but preferred a milieu he understood inside-out.

He was a thoughtful director, who gathered the best collaborators he could find and channeled their resources into a focused vision. He shared his thoughts about that in his 1996 book "Making Movies." If you care to read only one book about the steps in the making of a film, make it that one. There is not a boast in it, not a word of idle puffery. It is all about the work.

To say he lacked a noticeable visual style is a compliment. He reduced every scene to its necessary elements, and filmed them, he liked to say, "invisibly." You should not be thinking about the camera. He wanted you to think about the characters and the story.

Sidney Lumet was born June 24, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of Polish immigrants who were actors in the Yiddish theater. The boy was onstage from his earliest years. After service in World War Two, he began to direct in small New York companies and then moved in on the ground floor in the new medium of television.

Lumet, like such contemporaries as Arthur Penn and John Frankenheimer, was a key director in the golden age of live TV drama. He was an early director for Edward R. Murrow's "You Are There." His first feature was "12 Angry Men," considered the best of all filmed dramas about a criminal trial. It had a visual style (he slowly lowered the POV of view as tension increased), but, typically, audiences were not aware of it.

In 1962 he filmed a historic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," and in 1964 launched Rod Steiger's movie career with "The Pawnbroker." Film followed film, many of them based on ethical issues, although he preferred to deeply embody his messages instead of stating them obviously.

Other strong films followed. In addition to his most famous titles, these had my special admiration: "Daniel," "Power," "Q&A," "Critical Care" and "Gloria." He remained remarkably youthful, and in 2006 was able to see the serious dramatic potential of Vin Diesel, dismissed as an action star, and use it for a remarkable performance in "Find Me Guilty," the story of a Mafioso trial.

Lumet was married four times, to the actress Rita Game; the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt; Gail Jones, daughter of Lena Horne; and, in 1980, to Mary Gimbel, who survives him. He is also survived by Amy and Jenny Lumet, his daughters by Miss Jones; a stepson, Bailey Gimbel; nine grandchildren and a great grandson. Jenny Lumet went into the family business, as an actress and the author of the award-winning screenplay for Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" (2008).

The cause of death, his wife said, was lymphoma. The tears shed at his memorial services will be genuine.

The U.S. Recovery Bucks International Headwinds 
 Irwin Stelzer  Weekly Standard

The jobs market continues to improve: 200,000 jobs were added in March. Corporate profits are exceeding forecasts for about three out of four firms, and the quarter that ended yesterday is the best first quarter for stocks in twelve years. Real consumer spending (adjusting for inflation) is up a bit, and researchers at State Street Global markets report that their index of investor confidence is up, with investors in North American the cheeriest of all. Better still, there is talk in Washington that the politicians are now serious about agreeing to spending cuts for this fiscal year, and to a longer-term combination of plans to rein in deficit spending. That would help to halt the decline in the dollar.

Unfortunately, that's only part of the picture. Home sales remain over 9 percent below the level in 2010, even after a bit of improvement in February. Four million unsold homes overhang the market, and four out of every ten homes sold were put on the market by owners who could not pay the mortgage, or decided that the value of the home was so far below the mortgage that it paid to send jingle mail to the bank—an envelope containing the keys and a note, saying, "It's all yours." No surprise that prices continue to drop.

All of this matters so much because the effect of these woes is not confined to the housing industry. Home values make up an important part of total personal assets, and a depressed housing market has a negative wealth effect, cuts into spending, and has an outsized effect on consumers' outlook.

Just as gasoline prices have an outsized effect on consumers' perceptions of the level of inflation. Gasoline is a repetitive purchase; you watch the dials on the pump spin as you fill 'er up; you see signs announcing rising prices as you drive to and from work and the mall; and you conclude that your income will be squeezed.

And you are right. Inflation is rising faster than incomes, leaving consumers worse off. Bill Simon, CEO of Walmart, the world's largest retailer, says inflation is "going to be serious": consumers will pay more for food, apparel, and most other items. The effect of the flood of dollars being turned out by the Federal Reserve Board, and rising wages in China and other Asian suppliers, are likely to hit consumers hard in coming months.

Developments beyond the control of U.S. policymakers are adding to a growing sense of unease. As HSBC Global Research put it in its latest update, "International developments create uncertainties for US outlook." So the bank lowered its growth forecast and raised its guess at the inflation rate.

Periodic oil price spikes seem to have been replaced by an oil price plateau. Even when Libyan production is restored, oil company executives and traders will remain fearful of the increased risk of supply interruptions associated with popular uprisings and rumblings in oil producing countries. Higher risk means demands for higher returns, which in turn means higher prices, especially since it now seems that Saudi Arabia no longer holds sufficient excess capacity to provide as robust a buffer against shortages as it once did.

Add another factor to the oil price equation: bribes. No, not the sort we usually think of when discussing who gets drilling rights, and where. These are paid to the increasingly restive people who threaten the illiberal regimes that control the great bulk of the region's oil production. The Saudi rulers have decided that it is a good idea to share some more of the revenues from the kingdom's oil sales with the people whose money it really is, and have upped benefits of various sorts by about $130 billion. That means that for the Saudi budget to remain in balance, the oil price cannot go below about $85 per barrel now, or below $100 by 2015, according to estimates by the Institute for International Finance. If $100 turns out to be the Saudis' new price floor, the good old days of $50, $60, and $70 oil will become grist for the mills of economic historians, and of no relevance to economic forecasters.

That would be less of a problem for the resilient, flexible U.S. economy but for two policies of the Obama administration. The first is to inhibit the development of domestic oil production, a process that pre-dated the offshore oil spill by BP. The second is to make the shift to other fossil fuels more costly. The administration seems to believe that the wind blows and the sun shines all of the time—and in places where consumers of electricity live—and is therefore placing its bets (well, taxpayers' bets) on renewables that can at best provide energy on a sporadic basis. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has just made it more costly to use coal, which is in abundant supply in America; environmental activists are unhappy with the effect of exploiting shale gas deposits, and nuclear power cannot expect a genuine renaissance so soon after the disaster in Japan. Until some form of carbon tax is imposed, the administration has license to continue to tinker with the energy sector, picking "winners" that in its view will reduce carbon emissions.

The fallout from Japan's stricken nuclear plants further darkens the outlook. Vital links in the global supply chain have snapped, disrupting supplies of vital components, and causing the shutdown of auto factories and some manufacturers of electronic goods. In addition, Bloomberg estimates that over thirty large U.S. companies have been getting over 15 percent of their sales from Japan. Not now, and not soon.

Final proof that the world is too much with us comes from Europe. The European Banking Authority has launched a new round of bank stress tests. If properly done they will reveal that it is not only banks in troubled Greece, Ireland, and Portugal that are seriously undercapitalized. German banks are under-capitalized and are heavily laden with the IOUs of countries and companies that cannot pay them back. Britain's regulators are demanding even thicker layers of capital than are needed to satisfy international regulators, while more relaxed regulators here in America are allowing banks to bite into their capital by paying dividends. Yes, it is Europe's banks that are shakiest, but if we have learned anything in recent years it is that financial disasters somehow fail to respect borders.

So, one cheer for the jobs market, and a second for the politicians if they agree on a deficit-reduction package But hold the hooray in hip-hip-hooray until Japan recovers, the Middle East cauldron and U.S. inflation cool, and eurozone policymakers find ways not to add to America's economic problems.

IRWIN STELZER (Hudson Institute)

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
By DENNIS OVERBYE NY TIMES

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.

“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.

Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.

Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.

Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were “strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us — so we think of all possible alternative explanations.”

Physicists outside the Fermilab circle said they regarded the results, which have been widely discussed in physics circles for several months, with a mixture of awe and skepticism.

“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”

But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.

The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”

The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.

The Tevatron has been colliding beams of protons and their opposites, antiprotons, that have been accelerated to energies of one trillion electron volts, for more than two decades looking for new forces and particles. The bump showed up in an analysis of some 10,000 of those collisions collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of two mammoth detectors at the facility, which is outside Chicago.

They found that in about 250 more cases than they expected, what came out of the collision were two jets of lightweight particles, like electrons, and a heavy-force-carrying particle called the W boson were produced. The team found that in about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts, as if they were the decay products of a hitherto unsuspected particle with that mass-energy. For comparison, a proton weighs about one billion electron volts.

This could not be the Standard Model Higgs, Dr. Punzi and his colleagues concluded, because the Higgs is predicted to decay into much heavier particles, namely quarks. Moreover, the rate at which these mystery particles were being produced was 300 times greater than Higgs bosons would be produced.

If real, it was something totally new, Dr. Punzi said. The result had recently been strengthened, he said, by new calculations of interactions between quarks, which are notoriously difficult to compute. “It is so new, so astonishing, we ourselves can barely believe it,” he said. “We decided we had to let the whole world know.”

Dr. Punzi and his colleagues have submitted a paper that was to be posted on a physics Web site Tuesday night and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

Joe Lykken, a Fermilab particle theorist, said Dr. Punzi’s group would have four times as much data in an analysis later this year. “This would be enough to claim a definitive major discovery,” he wrote in an e-mail, “just as the Tevatron — and perhaps Fermilab itself — is being shut down for budget savings.”

After Rape Report in Libya, Woman Sees Benefit in Publicity
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK NY TIMES

TRIPOLI — Eman al-Obeidy says the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi victimized her twice. First members of his militia kidnapped and repeatedly raped her. Then his state television network attacked her as a thief and a prostitute.

But unlike most rape victims here, Ms. Obeidy, a law student, took her case to the international news media, forcing the Qaddafi security forces to drag her out of a hotel full of journalists as she screamed to tell her story. Thanks to the publicity in her first interviews since then, she may have gotten off easy.

Others in her situation, human rights advocates say, are typically confined for years in so-called rehabilitation facilities, subjected to unscientific virginity tests, deprived of any entertainment or education except lessons in Islam, and subjected to solitary confinement or handcuffs for any sign of resistance to authority.

Ms. Obeidy, who showed severe bruising on her face and thigh when she burst into the hotel, said in the interviews that after she was dragged out she was held for three days in solitary confinement, without medical or psychological help, and repeatedly interrogated by security officials. But her captors were preoccupied with the publicity, she said in an interview with a Libyan opposition satellite channel.

“During my entire arrest period, I was being asked one thing: to come out on the Libyan state channel and say that those who kidnapped me were not from Qaddafi’s security forces; rather they were from the revolutionaries and armed gangs,” Ms. Obeidy said. “That was their only request, and I kept refusing.”

At one point, Ms. Obeidy told Anderson Cooper of CNN in a second interview, she was even placed before state television cameras with several guns pointing at her from just off camera. She was told to change her story, but she again refused, she said.

Ms. Obeidy said she was now under a kind of house arrest in the capital, prohibited from returning to her family in the rebel-held east. On Sunday, she said she had been kidnapped and beaten for trying to meet again with foreign journalists.

“I was kidnapped by a car, and they beat me in the street,” she said. “They told me, ‘Whenever you leave the house, we will do this to you.’ ” She added, “I had asked to see the journalists, so they beat and hit me and sent me back.”

In a culture where rape can carry a severe stigma, Ms. Obeidy has become an unlikely heroine for her stubborn defiance of the Qaddafi government’s capricious police state. “Pure, courageous and lionhearted,” declared the opposition Web site Libya February 17, named for the start of the revolt. “May God give her patience.”

The Qaddafi government has spun through a series of contradictory statements about Ms. Obeidy since she was forced from the hotel. The government spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, first suggested that she was drunk and possibly insane, later that she was a stable person bringing credible criminal charges, and lastly that she was a prostitute and a thief who had a long history with “those boys.” He later said that her rape charges were dropped because she refused a medical exam and that the men had brought defamation charges against her.

But in her interviews, Ms. al-Obeidy said that she had submitted to a medical examination and that it had confirmed she had been raped. After three days of incarceration and interrogation, she said, she was transferred to a prosecutor who said he would press rape charges against the men but has done nothing so far.

She said her ordeal began when armed militiamen at one of the many checkpoints throughout Tripoli removed her from a taxi. In the CNN interview, Ms. Obeidy said the militiamen had bound her hands and legs, beat her and hit her, and poured alcohol in her eyes to blind her. She said they took turns raping her and sodomizing her with rifles. “They would say, ‘Let the men from eastern Libya come and see what we are doing to their women and how we rape them,’ ” Ms. Obeidy said.

Ms. Obeidy said they bound her tightly in part because she fought back, but a 16-year-old girl who was also a captive was less resistant, Ms. Obeidy said.

“They did not bind her because she gave up out of fear and did not try to resist them or try to fight and hit them,” Ms. Obeidy said. “At about 7 a.m., I was cold and she came to cover me, and I begged her to untie me. She was so scared, but she untied my hands and feet and she refused to escape out of fear of them. She gave me her name and address and asked me to report everything to the police.”

By Monday, supporters of the Qaddafi regime were circulating on the Internet what they said was a pornographic video made by Ms. Obeidy. A state media journalist provided a copy; it turned out to be a relatively chaste homemade video of a belly dancer with little resemblance to Ms. Obeidy.

Like many traditionalist countries in the region, Libyans often treat rape as a crime against the honor of a woman or her family, rather than as an attack on the woman herself. In some families, a girl or woman who has been raped is cast out or shunned.

Under the Qaddafi government, judges hearing rape claims often impose a marriage between the victim and the rapist as a remedy for the woman’s dishonor. In other cases, the victim is sent to a center for “women who are vulnerable to engaging in moral misconduct,” and she is forbidden to leave until she is released by a husband or married.

Women in these facilities, which are called rehabilitation centers, are paired with men who come seeking wives based in part on docile behavior, one woman told Human Rights Watch, which sent researchers to two of the Libyan centers.

Asked why she thought she had been chosen to marry, one woman at a facility near Tripoli told Human Rights Watch, “Because I am not a troublemaker.”

Looking back, Ms. Obeidy said she was determined not to disappear like so many others. She said she had lied to the cabdriver by telling him she worked at the hotel in order to evade the restrictions on meeting foreign journalists, and she refused to be silent even when the undercover security agents among the hotel staff tried to put a coat over her head.

“I knew that they could imprison me and that no one may ever know my story,” she said. “And even when they were hitting me and trying to cover my face so that I would not tell people the truth, I was not afraid.”

“I have reached the end of my tolerance for this as a human,” she said.

Wounded in Crossfire of a Capital Culture War

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and KATE TAYLOR NY TIMES

OFFICIAL Washington breathed a sigh of relief when G. Wayne Clough, a courtly Southerner and respected former university president, arrived in July 2008 to take over the scandal-plagued Smithsonian Institution.

“You’re going to love this guy,” Christopher Dodd, the Democratic former senator from Connecticut, said he remembered hearing from a Republican colleague, Johnny Isakson, who knew Mr. Clough from their home state, Georgia.

But lawmakers may be more skeptical when Mr. Clough (pronounced CLUFF) arrives on Capitol Hill this week to testify about President Obama’s $861.5 million budget request for the Smithsonian. In November Mr. Clough pulled a video from “Hide/Seek,” an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery examining gay and lesbian themes, touching off what some see as a replay of the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Congressional Republicans want to know why he spent tax dollars on the show; Democrats want to put the flap behind them. And after Congress Mr. Clough will face an even tougher audience: the art world, at a public forum here scheduled for April 26 and 27.

The story of how Mr. Clough was caught in a collision of art and politics is in some ways a classic Washington tale: Outsider comes to the capital, crosses power brokers, shifts into damage control. It reflects the difficult landscape for the arts in Washington, where Republicans are ascendant, and arts leaders, nervous about budget cuts, are treading carefully. But it is also a story of how Mr. Clough, a civil engineer with no museum experience, came to Washington with a record of seeking common ground in political disputes and wound up alienating a constituency less powerful than Congress but equally critical for the Smithsonian’s survival: artists, curators and museum directors.

A. A. Bronson, an artist whose work was featured in the Portrait Gallery show, said the Smithsonian must “get rid of” Mr. Clough to restore the art world’s trust. Olga Viso, a former director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and now director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, said she remained deeply troubled by Mr. Clough’s action, which she called “a dangerous precedent.”

Even Mr. Clough’s staunchest defenders are uneasy. Patricia Q. Stonesifer, the chairwoman of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, said in a recent interview that the episode was “a breach of trust,” adding, “We have to explain ourselves.”

Artists hope Mr. Clough will do just that at the public forum. But a Smithsonian spokeswoman said the session would feature panels on broad subjects like “curators’ responsibilities” and “cultural sensitivity.” Mr. Clough will make introductory remarks but not take questions, a posture that is already inflaming tensions.

Christopher Knight, an art critic for The Los Angeles Times, has called the session an “exercise in misdirection, generalized obfuscation.” The liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, which has been deeply critical of the Smithsonian, has issued a report in anticipation of the forum. The title: “How Not to Respond to Political Bullies.”

Mr. Clough, who has stood by his decision to remove the artwork, declined to be interviewed. But Richard Kurin, who as the Smithsonian undersecretary for history, art and culture was one of a handful of officials guiding Mr. Clough, whose official title is secretary, through the controversy, said Mr. Clough was “very mindful” of Congress’s power — and had made a kind of cut-off-the-arm-to-save-the-body choice.

“What if Congress decides to say from now on the Portrait Gallery can only do exhibitions of dead white guys?” Mr. Kurin asked, adding, “People were bandying about, ‘Well, the Smithsonian, we’re going to take away $100 million from your budget.’ That’s like 1,000 people. That’s a lot of scholars and educators.”

With 19 museums and galleries, 20 libraries, 9 research facilities and the National Zoo, the Smithsonian is among the nation’s premier cultural institutions. Its reputation was in tatters when Mr. Clough was hired.

His predecessor, Lawrence M. Small, a banker, had resigned in 2007 amid investigations into his lavish spending. Ms. Stonesifer said the regents were looking for “a trajectory change.” Mr. Clough seemed perfect. During 14 years as president of Georgia Institute of Technology he established himself as a top-notch fund-raiser, an innovator and a creative thinker who pushed to incorporate poetry, music and art into a tech-heavy curriculum.

He understood that “in order for an engineer from Detroit to compete with an engineer from Bangalore, they have to bring something more to the process,” said Gary Schuster, a former Georgia Tech provost. He said Mr. Clough had another quality essential for a leader: “the ability to foresee issues that are going to become explosive and more often than not nip them in the bud.”

But during Mr. Clough’s tenure he engaged in a long-running conflict with conservative students that, in some respects, foreshadowed the battle at the Smithsonian. The students, members of the College Republicans, argued that the speech code governing campus housing censored them from expressing their opposition to gay rights, women’s rights and affirmative action. Mr. Clough pressed them to tone down their rhetoric; the students sued. The settlement required the university to change its speech code: in effect, a bruising defeat.

“What he was trying to do is find common ground and resolve whatever issues there were — that’s his style,” said a person who worked closely with Mr. Clough at Georgia Tech but didn’t want to be named because it would imperil his current employment.

At the Smithsonian Mr. Clough made finding consensus his hallmark. With his relaxed manner — he grew up in a small town, Douglas, Ga. — he set a different tone than the brusque Mr. Small. He worked to tighten the bonds between the Smithsonian’s central administration — insiders call it the Castle, a reference to its faux-Norman headquarters on the National Mall — and the museum outposts. He prodded the directors, a fractious bunch, to forge what Julian Raby, director of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, called “a common vision.”

That he was a science guy, rather than an art guy, proved an asset when he asked Congress for money. “You’re not going to get Congress to support a museum,” said Mr. Dodd, who was a Smithsonian regent until he retired from the Senate last year, and who pushed for Mr. Clough’s hiring. “But as a research facility, particularly in this day and age, I think you’ve got a better chance.”

“HIDE/SEEK” WAS IN THE WORKS at the National Portrait Gallery before Mr. Clough arrived. Jonathan D. Katz, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and something of a gadfly in the art world, had pitched to 40 museums a show that would break what he saw as a prevailing taboo against acknowledging the sexuality of prominent gay artists. He was rejected by all of them, he said, until 2006, when he met David Ward, a curator and historian at the Portrait Gallery, a museum not exactly known for taking risks.

They were an odd pair: Mr. Katz the hip professor, whose all-black clothes and shock of blond hair made him look younger than his 52 years; and Mr. Ward the gray-haired, slightly jowly historian in the blue blazer and gray-flannel pants. They proposed a show focused on American portraiture from the 1890s to the present, including not only gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, but also artists of complicated sexuality, like Thomas Eakins, and others, like George Bellows, who simply depicted a gay subculture. Among its 105 pieces was an excerpt of a film (transferred to video) called “A Fire in My Belly,” by David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. It included 11 seconds of footage depicting ants crawling on a crucifix, an image that some interpret as an expression of despair about human suffering.

As with any exhibition that might provoke political debate, the show went through many layers of approval. Mr. Clough was not at the final meeting, in May 2010; it was conducted by Mr. Kurin, his undersecretary. Mr. Ward said he knew the show might spark an uproar; he half-expected a backlash over a full-frontal nude portrait of the poet Frank O’Hara. But the Wojnarowicz video, on a small screen that required viewers to push a button to see it, did not enter the discussion.

The Smithsonian talked about how to notify regents who served in Congress in the event of controversy but not about how it would respond if the show came under attack. “I think that people were kind of overly sanguine about it,” Mr. Ward said. “The feeling was: ‘Well, Obama’s president. The culture wars are over.’ ”

THE SHOW HAD BEEN UP FOR A month when CNS News, a conservative Web site, published an article with the headline “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts.” It highlighted several works, including the O’Hara portrait and a photograph of Ms. DeGeneres by Annie Leibovitz, but dwelled on the Wojnarowicz video. A follow-up article reported that the House Republican leadership — Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor — threatened budget cuts and called for the show to be taken down. The president of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, singled out the video as anti-Christian “hate speech” and suggested the Smithsonian should have its federal funds revoked.

As the story went viral, the gallery began receiving irate calls and e-mails, prompting a series of hurried consultations between Mr. Clough and his aides, including Mr. Kurin. “What we didn’t see coming was the issue about the charges — and people’s feelings — that this was sacrilegious,” Mr. Kurin said.

A day later Mr. Clough, who was out of town, sent his emissaries to the National Portrait Gallery with a message for Mr. Ward and the gallery’s director, Martin E. Sullivan: The video would have to go. Mr. Clough’s “main line,” Mr. Kurin said, “was that he wanted to keep this exhibition up, that this was an important exhibition, and that if he had to make this concession, then that was the price he’d have to pay.”

To Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican on the House Appropriations Committee who knows Mr. Clough from his Georgia Tech days, it was a wise move. In removing the video, he said, Mr. Clough “was protecting the cash flow from new members of Congress” who were “looking for an excuse” to cut Smithsonian funds.

But to Mr. Ward it was a huge mistake. He argued forcefully that the Smithsonian should wait out the controversy, and that just as his bosses were “too sanguine” about the possible criticism from the right, so too were they failing to foresee the backlash on the left. “My view,” he said, “was at least we would have a fighting retreat.”

Backlash from the art world was swift. Amid calls for Mr. Clough’s resignation the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which had provided $100,000 for “Hide/Seek,” vowed to cut off funds for future exhibitions if the video was not restored. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation soon followed suit. Dozens of artists demonstrated outside the museum.

FOR MR. CLOUGH, THE BIGGEST problem was that he had failed to notify his bosses, the regents. Officially they stood by him. But they also appointed an outside panel to examine his decision. It recommended that art not be removed from shows that have already opened, a recommendation widely viewed as a rebuke to Mr. Clough. David Gergen, the former presidential adviser who served on the panel, said he came away believing that the Smithsonian should have put “more eyes” on “Hide/Seek” before it went up, so it would have been in a better position to defend the show later. But he said he believed Mr. Clough had acted with good intentions. “I found him to be very straightforward,” Mr. Gergen said, “very honest and a man who was seriously wrestling with how do we as an institution get this right as we go forward.”

Others are not so forgiving. Susan Talbott, a onetime Smithsonian official who runs the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, compared Mr. Clough to John E. Frohnmayer, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who wrote a mea culpa book describing his missteps in dealing with Congress and the religious right. “It’s frustrating to see the same kind of mistakes made again,” Ms. Talbott said, “as if history does repeat itself and leaders don’t learn.”

Tensions were still simmering when Mr. Clough convened Smithsonian museum directors at a private clear-the-air session in early January. During what Mr. Raby, the Freer-Sackler director, termed “a robust discussion,” Mr. Clough conceded he had acted too hastily, and had failed to consult widely enough. He has since established a new advisory panel composed of officials from across the Smithsonian. And he recently installed Mr. Raby in the new position of arts advisor, a kind of in-house arts troubleshooter.

“Hide/Seek” closed in February, but the Brooklyn Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington State are collaborating to revive it, including the Wojnarowicz piece. At the Smithsonian, Mr. Kurin and others say Mr. Clough is not getting enough credit for saving the show and for approving it in the first place.

Mr. Ward agrees. But asked whether he still supports Mr. Clough as secretary, he paused for a moment. Finally, he said he does, barring any future fumbles. “It was an error of political judgment in a period of crisis, and I think the secretary has learned from it,” Mr. Ward said. “He’s learned to slow down, and that’s a big thing in Washington.”