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Saint Louis Organization for Changing Men

In the late 1970s many feminists were quite skeptical about the wisdom of working with men to better their status and achieve their goals, and with good reason. However, there was a men's organization which participated in the Walk for Charity held on April 20, 1980 and which had considerable credibility with the Lesbian Alliance who published Moonstorm: the Saint Louis Organization for Changing Men. The probable reasons for this credibility provide clues to one strand of energy which went into supporting the Walk for Charity sponsored by the St. Louis LGBT community of the time.

"The profeminist men's movement emerged from the men's liberation movement in the mid 1970s. The first Men and Masculinity Conference, held in Tennessee in 1975, was one of the first organized activities by profeminist men in the United States. The profeminist men's movement was influenced by second-wave feminism, the Black Power and student activism movement, the Anti-war movement, and LGBT social movements of the 1960s and 70s. It is the strand of the men's movement that generally embraces the egalitarian goals of feminism." [Men's Movement, Wikipedia, Jan. 27, 2014]

In 1977 Don Long, a graduate student at Washington University, attended the 4th Annual Conference on Men and Masculininty, which was hosted by local members of NOMAS (National Organization for Men Against Sexism—founded in 1975 in Tennessee). Long was forever changed by the ideas and ideals he encountered there. Long (now Conway-Long) came from a military background, but had already worked for the anti-war movement. This was his first in-depth exposure to profeminist thought and action. As a result, Long became a leader in forming both RAVEN St. Louis (Rape And Violence End NOW) and St. Louis Organization for Changing Men in 1978. Long's attendance at the 1980 Walk for Charity was a natural consequence of his becoming more sensitized to the problems of alternate sexuality.

Right after the 1977 Conference held Nov. 24-27, the St. Louis group of men attending the conference formed the St. Louis Men's Projects. This quote from Don Conway-Long gives some idea of the activities of this group of men.

"[There were] groups for overcoming homophobia, groups for talking about ending men’s violence against women. That group eventually became RAVEN [Rape and Violence End Now], of which I was a co-founder. … And Project continued pretty strongly. We did men providing childcare for feminist events in Saint Louis, … we did a lot of men’s brunches, and then men cooking together in different kinds of ways, a lot of discussion about ending homophobia; there was a lot of fluidity to people’s sexualities at that time, and a lot of the people that did not know they were gay or bi in 1977 eventually came out in one way or the other.… It took … some people longer than others to figure out the attractions of same-sex relations, but it happened to quite a few people, so it was an automatic connection for the politicized masculinities movement to link up to anything going on in the area of gay rights." [Interview of Don Long]

On a more theoretical level, the principles that were guiding this group's actions were clear. They believed that the basic source of many of the social problems of the day was masculine privilege, and they set out to deconstruct the rigid images about proper male and female behavior that had become enshrined in the dominant culture. Whenever possible, they sided with the feminists rather than the masculinists. This even led to some difficult interactions with their proposed allies, the feminists.

A lot of the organizing strength for the battered women’s movement and the anti-rape movement came from strong lesbians, which means that we had to deal with them repeatedly over these issues. My attendance … at the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, NCADV, led to a major confrontation between the women there and the men representing men’s programs to make sure that we were not simply seizing the reigns, [seizing] the direction of the movement to work with battered women by taking all of the funding and all of the orientation toward working with men. Because they figured that all the funding would go to the men … if we got in the way of the funding for battered women. … And we made very, very clear that this was not where we were coming from, and in fact, we would never take money that could possibly go to battered women’s shelters in order to deal with that. … Which is one of the ways we set up an organizational principle in the beginning, that we will be volunteer work, men working to end men’s violence against women. [Interview of Don Long]

Asked if he formally represented the Saint Louis Organization for Changing Men in the 1980 Walk for Charity, Conway-Long wasn't sure there was anything formal about it. "we would have been at everything that was involved with politicizing the issues of sex—gender, sexualities—those kinds of things. It was just what we did." Changing Men worked with and negotiated with lesbian leaders with a clear focus to help them achieve their goals in the two years prior to the 1980 Celebration of Lesbian and Gay Pride that occurred on April 12-20. The June, 1980 issue of Moonstorm—a Lesbian Alliance newsletter published starting in 1973—was strong in its criticism of the general gay male community of the time for not being more support of lesbian causes. However, both articles addressing this topic were unequivocally clear that members of St. Louis Organization for Changing Men were NOT part of that problem. No doubt these Changing Men shared much of Don Long's profeminist outlook.

Asked about who he was reading back in the early 1970's that informed him about profeminist issues and values, Conway-Long identified three feminist books from the 1970's by Nancy Henley, Susan Brownmiller and Del Martin/Phyllis Lyons. The profeminist authors he first read in the 1970s were Robert Brannon and Joseph Pleck, followed later by Michael Kimmel and others. For an overview of the profeminist movement, he identified the 50 page introduction to Rob Okun's book, Voice Mail.

"The 1970s and early eighties were a time of explosive awareness of men's violence against women, and over and over the organizers of profeminist men's projects and founders of profeminism men's organizations reported that the women in their communities were alternatively imploring and demanding that men make men's violence against women their top priority. As Gloria Steinem famously said, 'Women want a men's movement. We are literally dying for it.'" [Okun, Voice Mail.]

That introduction gives capsule sketches of about twenty profeminist organizations across the country and the world. Interestingly enough, RAVEN St. Louis is identified not only as the second earliest such profeminist men's organization for ending men's violence towards women, but also as still existing more than 35 years later, although now, women have mostly replaced the men in both leadership and participatory roles.

Working closely beside Conway-Long in those early days in St. Louis was then Craig Norberg, now Norberg-Bohm. Norberg-Bohm also went on to develop a lifelong effective career as a man against men's violence against women. "Norberg-Bohm went on to lead the Men's Initiative for Jane Doe, Inc. in Boston where he has established a model White Ribbon Day campaign across Massachusetts." Conway-Long is currently a professor at Webster University.

References

4th National Conference on Men and Masculinity Records, 1977 | WUA University Archives, webpage, Jan. 22, 2014.

Interview of Don Conway-Long by Jim Andris on January 17, 2014.

Men's Movement, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_movement

A Brief History of NOMAS, http://www.nomas.org/history

Okun, Rob A., "A Short History of One of the Most Important Social Justice Movements You've Never Heard Of," Voice Mail: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men's Movement, Interlink Books, Rob A. Okun, ed., 2014, pp. 1-49.