Jay
is the life partner of Karen F. Kerner, an emergency medicine physician
and assistant clinical professor of medicine at Columbia. The couple
officially registered as domestic partners on May 1, 1996 in New York
City, where they reside.

This is the fifty-fourth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

  



As
a young woman, Karla Jay took an active role in the glbtq rights
movement. She has gone on to become a prolific author and editor and a
Distinguished Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at
Pace University in New York City.

The
stress in the household was primarily due to the serious depression of
her mother, Rhoda Berlin, who also suffered from delusions and
hallucinations and made a number of unsuccessful attempts at suicide.
Jay's father, Abraham Berlin, part owner of a company that supplied
lumber for building bins to transport cargo on freighters, made it a
point to work as much as possible to avoid the uncomfortable situation
at home.

When
the Berlins' younger child was born on February 22, 1947 in New York
City, her father consulted a list of freighters that had recently docked
and suggested naming the infant after the Karla Dane. His wife felt
that Jayne would be a better middle name and prevailed in the choice.
Jay adopted a new surname later in life.

Jay enjoyed sports and
showed good ability at them, although her extreme myopia caused her to
be somewhat clumsy. A more serious consequence of her undiagnosed vision
problem was that when she started school, she was put into a class for
slow learners, where she languished for four years.

From the ages
of five to twelve, Jay went off to summer camp, where she had crushes
on her counselors. "It was my first awareness that I was gay," she
declared later.
At Barnard, Jay "felt a boyfriend was a necessity"
after hearing at freshman orientation that two students had been
expelled after a male student from neighboring Columbia University first
used binoculars to spy on them making love in a dorm room and then
reported them. Jay found a boyfriend at a dance early in her first year
and dated him throughout college. She later stated that she was
"convinced, in retrospect, that [the man] was gay and that they were
using each other as cover."
Jay began exploring the lesbian bar
scene, which offered women-loving women an opportunity to socialize,
although one that came at a risk since there was always the possibility
of police raids. She found the venues somewhat seedy and was dismayed
that she was inevitably asked by other patrons whether she was butch or
femme, when she identified as neither and did not want to be forced to
define herself in that way. On the whole, her trips to the bars were
unrewarding: she felt so little sense of community with the women there
that she sometimes wondered if she was indeed a lesbian.

During
her time at college, Jay was opposed to the war in Vietnam and in favor
of civil rights, but she did not participate in any demonstrations until
late in her senior year. Left-wing students at Columbia seized a
building to protest both the university's role in federally-funded
weapons research and its displacement of low-income African-American
residents of Harlem so that the school could put up new buildings. Jay
joined in the occupation and was on the scene when the Tactical Police
Force arrived to remove the students. She was not among the hundreds
beaten or arrested, but seeing the response of the authorities
radicalized her thinking.
Another response that she had seen--to her
dismay--was that of male demonstrators to their female comrades. Jay
declared herself "appalled by the behavior of the men," who insisted
that women should be relegated to a secondary status and should conform
to stereotypical gender roles by doing such tasks as making coffee. The
combination of experiences during the protest spurred Jay to become an
activist in the nascent feminist movement.




 In 1969,
Jay joined the Gay Liberation Front. Never a separatist, she was excited
by the prospect of lesbians and gay men working together for equality.
As it was, the women of the GLF, greatly outnumbered by the men, were
often frustrated by the relatively little attention that the
organization gave to their concerns. While gay men pointed out that they
ran a considerably greater risk of being arrested or becoming victims
of homophobic violence, lesbians contended that they were "doubly
oppressed both as women and as homosexuals" and that they were
marginalized in both feminist and gay rights organizations.

Jay
also addressed specifically lesbian concerns and succeeded in persuading
the leaders of the GLF to hold women-only dances to give lesbians a
place to socialize that was safe and more salubrious than the few
available bars.
A group of lesbians in the GLF formed the Women's
Caucus. In addition to working within the organization, they sought
inclusion for lesbians in the feminist movement. To that end, they
organized a "zap"--an unexpected political action--at the opening of the
second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970. Just as the program was
beginning, one member of the Caucus doused the lights in the auditorium,
allowing approximately thirty others time to take the stage. The
protesters wore T-shirts with the slogan "Lavender Menace," a term that
Betty Friedan, then president of the National Organization for Women,
had used to describe lesbians.



Jay found a calling in
education. She "would spend more than a decade working as a migrant
laborer in the fields of academe, with part-time positions at several
different universities" while pursuing post-graduate studies. She earned
a master's degree in comparative literature in 1978 and a doctorate in
1984.
In 1975 Jay began teaching at Pace University, where she has
risen to the status of Distinguished Professor of English and Women's
and Gender Studies. She has founded and taught numerous courses in
Lesbian and Gay Studies, Women's Studies, literature, rhetoric, and
creative writing, and has received honors including the university's
Kenan Award for Excellence in Teaching (2000) and the Diversity
Leadership Award (2004).

An an author and editor, Jay has made
significant contributions to the field of GLBTQ Studies. Her first book,
Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation (1972), an anthology that
she co-edited with Allen Young, remains in print and was included on
Publishers Triangle's list of "the one hundred most important gay and
lesbian books ever published." The two also collaborated on After You're
Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbian (1975) and Lavender
Culture (1978).


Jay has served on the editorial or advisory
boards of numerous glbtq and women's publications and also on the board
of the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her work for equality has earned her
many awards, including the Medal of Honor from the Veteran Feminists of
America and the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay and Lesbian
Caucus of the Modern Language Association. She has also been chosen as
the Grand Marshal of the Stonewall Pride Parade on two occasions.
In
recent years, Jay has been speaking out on behalf of people with
disabilities. In early 2004 she lost her near vision due to a rare
condition known as choroidal neovascularization. Several operations have
brought no improvement.
To Jay, among the most distressing
consequences was her inability to read the majority of printed matter.
She discovered that very little glbtq material exists in the National
Library Service's offerings of talking books and magazines on tape. She
therefore called upon the Lambda Literary Foundation "to take on
literary accessibility for the blind and visually impaired as one of its
missions."
Jay has been frustrated by the frequent lack of
accommodation in public areas, a common problem for people with
invisible disabilities. "Being a lesbian has helped me in this regard,"
she stated. "I already know what it's like to be different in ways that
others can't see."

Linda Rapp
Selected publications
Books
The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out about Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (Summit Books, 1979)
The disciples of the tenth muse : Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien (Ph.D thesis, 1984)
The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Indiana University Press, 1988)
Tales of the Lavender Menace (Basic Books, 1999)
Edited anthologies
Series editor of The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature
Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, co-editor with Allen Young (Pyramid Books, 1972)
After You're Out. co-editor with Allen Young (Jove, 1975)
Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, co-editor with Joanne Glasgow. (NYU Press, 1990)
Lavender culture (NYU Press, 1978, 1994)
Lesbian Erotics (NYU Press, 1995)
Dyke Life: A Celebration of the Lesbian Experience (Perseus, 1996)