Valerie Solanas Was Right

With the exception of Charles Manson, surely no public figure has ever looked so unhinged in so many photographs as Valerie Solanas (1936-1988). You can actually feel the simmering intensity across time and across the miles. Her anger vibrates. She’s long gone but we’re still receiving her signals, just like the old radio shows hitting the outer reaches of the solar system about now.

Granted that Solanas was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she also rationally and objectively had every reason to be pissed. She’d been sexually abused by her biological father and grandfather. She hated the regime of her mother and stepfather and teachers so badly that she became a homeless teenage runaway, at which point she was knocked up by a sailor and the state took away her baby. An open lesbian, she relied on panhandling and prostitution for long periods in order to survive. Thousands have stories like this, but Solanas had an outlet: she was brilliant. She attended the University of Maryland where she got a degree in psychology (with honors) and had a radio call-in show. She did graduate work at the University of Minnesota, and later took classes at Berkeley.

In 1965 she wrote the experimental play Up Your Ass, followed two years later by the radical feminist SCUM Manifesto. “SCUM” stands for “the Society for Cutting Up Men”; the manifesto argues for the elimination of all males. Confusing to many people, her work is full of a provocative humor that has always reminded me of writers like Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton. She wants to get a rise out of you, and she is frequently very witty, although it could be claimed that her highly original way of writing can be attributed in part to her mental illness.

Solanas’ written work was overshadowed in June, 1968 when she achieved notoriety by another means. By that time she had become one of the many satellites of Andy Warhol’s Factory, perhaps the unlikeliest one of all. She gave him the only existing copy of her play Up Your Ass to read. (If you’re not aware of how Warhol was connected to the theatre, this piece would be good to read). Anyway Warhol promptly lost her play, and told her so with the infuriating unconcern he was famous for. That was when she went out and got a pistol, came back, and shot up the place. Several of Warhol’s organs were damaged, but he recovered. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination three days later swallowed up the event in the larger public’s consciousness, although it certainly had a lasting impact in the New York art world.

Solanas immediately turned herself in to the police, but it was pretty quickly determined that she was mentally ill. Rather than being sent to prison, she was hospitalized. When she got out, she lived pretty much as she had prior to connecting with the Factory. There is evidence that she continued writing during those years, but her mother is said to have burned everything in her apartment after she passed away in 1988.

Meanwhile, the SCUM Manifesto had been published in 1968, and became an influential and celebrated tract among radical feminists. Naturally, mainstream activists repudiated her work, but many embrace her. I confess to being one of them. The confusion in the public mind about figures like Solanas is that they take the forceful and poetic language too literally. Oscar Wilde said many things nearly as outrageous as Solanas all the time, and he too was misunderstood. In my eyes, extreme doctrines like Communism, Libertarianism, Pacifism, Anarchism or for that matter Christianity (as literally laid down by Christ) are prescriptions for Utopia, an ideal state that can only ever live in the mind. And so it is with the idea of a world without peckers. Yeah, I said it. Everyone knows it, including plenty of straight men like me, but few dare say it. What is Puritanism but an attempt to reign in the male member, Quixotically and selectively enforced by savages driven mad by those same male members? That’s the history of humanity. Male aggression was useful for getting food once, and for protection against apex predators. But it’s also a disease worse than those caused by any micro-organisms. War, genocide, domestic violence, rape, slavery, the destruction of the environment — women don’t do that shit. Or maybe one woman in a hundred, as opposed to three quarters of the men, and that’s a charitable estimate. The irony of course is that Solanas, with her manifesto writing, stalking, and assassination attempt WAS that woman in a hundred.

Public awareness of Solonas was raised considerably in 1996 with the release of Mary Harron’s movie I Shot Andy Warhol, with Lili Taylor tearing up the screen as Solanas. Three years later, that copy of Up Your Ass was found in one of Andy Warhol’s old trunks. A theatre company in San Francisco got their hands on it and produced it within months. It came to P.S. 122 in early 2001 and I reviewed it for the now defunct nytheatre.com. It’s the story of an angry prostitute whose rage finally drives her to killing a man. My review’s not online any more but here’s the first sentence: “Let me begin by saying that if I’d written Up Your Ass and somebody lost my only copy, I’d shoot them, too.”

Here’s more, including some of my favorite lines:

At right around the same time, Carson Kreitzer’s Valerie Shoots Andy was produced at the much-missed Present Company Theatorium. I caught that one, too, but didn’t review it.

Six months later, about a mile from both of those theatres, a couple of jet airplanes smashed into both towers of the World Trade Center, killing thousands, upsetting the lives of millions, resulting in a couple of wars in response that did the same only more by an order of magnitude. H’m…how many women in the cockpits on 9/11?

And yet I have zero doubt that the takeaway reaction of many to this post will be, “Oh stop exaggerating about the inherent violence of men!” And after all, wasn’t Valerie Solanas herself violent? Uh huh! The multiply raped, abused, tortured, neglected Valerie Solanas did indeed respond to the violence committed against her by men, using the tools and tactics of men. Warhol himself didn’t deserve THAT, not by a long way, that’s the supreme irony of the tragedy. Perhaps a lawsuit in small claims court for the recovery of her property would have been the way to go? That’s how we do things in a civilized world. And I acknowledge that men played a role (haha!) in creating that civilization, the good and the bad of it. WRITING a murder attempt, as she did in Up Your Ass, that’s the admirable play. But there’s not a lot of wisdom in judging people who hear voices in their head that aren’t there, either.

I’ve just learned that Lena Dunham played Valerie Solanas on an episode American Horror Story: Cult. Today’s the day to check it out!