Lesbian Feminism, Grand Juries, and FBI Surveillance in the 1970s

Abstract

In 1973, the FBI arrested Vicki Gabriner in Atlanta, Georgia, for her past involvement with Weathermen. The Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance, which she cofounded in 1972, organized legal fund benefits and raised awareness about FBI surveillance in lesbian communities. In 1975, six gay and lesbian individuals in Lexington, Kentucky, refused to testify before a grand jury about Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, two lesbian antiwar activists. Jill Raymond was imprisoned fourteen months. These cases, the Atlanta One and the Lexington Six, reveal key moments of state surveillance and queer resistance in the 1970s South. Examining them together sheds light on the FBI’s efforts to disrupt predominately white lesbian activist circles and their collective responses. The cases turned FBI and grand jury tactics into important issues and underscored how 1970s movements overlapped. This article uses oral histories and archives to highlight connections to broader struggles for labor, civil, women’s, and gay rights.

Left: Vicki Gabriner, courtesy of Lorraine Fontana.

Right: Jill Raymond leaving a Kentucky jail, November 14, 1976. Photo and documents courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

in 1973, Vicki Gabriner lived in an Atlanta lesbian collective house at the corner of Euclid Terrace and Euclid Avenue. The house in Little Five Points had an ornate glass window on the front door and was one of a handful of neighborhood homes where members of the newly formed Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance (alfa) lived. At seven o’clock on a May morning, there was a knock at the door. Vicki pulled up the shade and looked out. She saw seven men in suits and her roommate, who mouthed, “It’s the F-B-I.” Vicki knew they were coming for her. She had been in Atlanta for three years, during which time she wrote for the Great Speckled Bird, an alternative newspaper, joined the Atlanta Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Front, and helped found alfa. In the 1960s, Vicki did civil rights work in West Tennessee, became part of Students for a Democratic Society (sds), and, for a year, in 1969, joined Weathermen. She was not in hiding, but she knew the government monitored antiwar groups like sds and Weathermen. In 1971, antiwar activists broke into a Pennsylvania fbi office and revealed the existence of cointelpro, a secret counterintelligence program that gathered information on domestic groups via covert, often illegal, projects to disrupt, discredit, intimidate, and infiltrate.¹

Above: Jill Raymond Pin, consigned by a member of the Lexington Grand Jury Defense Committee. Courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

Opposite: Vicki Gabriner, Corinne Smith, and Jaen Black at old ALFA house, Atlanta, Georgia, 1972. Courtesy of Lorraine Fontana.

Vicki cracked the door to try to get her roommate inside, but an fbi agent wedged his foot in and agents entered, asking if Vicki Gabriner was home. This surprised her. Did they not have a picture? But she cooperated, identifying herself and going in for questioning. Between Vicki’s arrest in 1973 and being cleared of charges through appeal in 1978, she lived in Little Five Points, where Atlanta lesbian feminists became the central support of her legal battle.

Vicki’s case, referred to as the Atlanta One, ran parallel to fbi pressure put on communities in 1970s Lexington, Kentucky. In 1975, Vicki wrote a letter of support to the US Justice Department for the release of Jill Raymond, who was imprisoned along with five other gay and lesbian individuals, most of whom were activists, for refusing to testify before a grand jury about two antiwar activists who had lived under assumed names in the Kentucky college town. The group became known nationally as the Lexington Six. These two cases—the Atlanta One and the Lexington Six—illuminate the story of fbi surveillance and queer resistance in the South of the 1970s. They were not singular; during these same years, the Third World Women’s Alliance was infiltrated by fbi informants in California and New York. Civil rights groups, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were under constant surveillance, and socialist organizations in the South experienced long battled inquisitions.²

Studying the Lexington Six alongside Vicki’s case offers a broader view of fbi actions in predominantly white lesbian circles to disrupt and probe, as well as activists’ bold collective responses to surveillance. The cases led feminists to examine fbi and grand jury tactics as a key issue of the day and led to dialogue about how lesbian movements were inextricably connected to the antiwar and women’s movements. As Vicki wrote in 1977, “I see this as one battle in a larger struggle against government repression. And it is around these seemingly unheroic issues that they can easily isolate and pick off activists.” Jill similarly saw the importance of standing up to fbi intimidation and noted that the targeting of gay and lesbian activists was significant. She recalled “understanding that there was a lesbian feminist focus to this that was really critical . . . That focus had to be there.” In Lexington, it took a “fairly unique style” of organizing to build, as she put it, “political opposition to government repression and government investigation [into] all those little details of people’s lives.” Lesbian feminists grappled with movement tactics and state strategies, and in doing so, they created new ways of organizing that drew on movement experience while creatively engaging with emergent gay liberation networks.³

Listening In

As a queer historian with a personal connection to this story, I think a great deal about the record—as document, through historical truth-telling, and in the act of recording. Vicki Gabriner was a close family friend of my lesbian mothers, a constant presence in my childhood and adulthood, a favorite “relative” to call on a long walk home. When I started graduate school at unc and learned about her alfa years, I was curious. But I also became acutely aware of a “double listening.” Interviewing her for an oral history seminar, I was listening to her, eager to collect, record, and preserve her stories. But the stories were about being recorded and listened to by the fbi. How was I to reconcile these impulses to document and remember while remaining sensitive to Vicki’s history of being surveilled?⁴

In a similar vein, Jill Raymond was protective of her oral history interviews. In 1987, lawyer and political activist Pam E. Goldman recorded thirty-two interviews connected to 1970s Lexington activism. They are housed at the University of Kentucky, digitized and on cassette tapes. Some interviews, including Jill’s, are accessible only with permission of the interviewee. So I began the research process by writing to Jill Raymond and the collections librarian about my historical interests, work in queer studies, and connection to Vicki. Jill granted permission and I was sent digitized “tapes.” In 2017, in my Chapel Hill home—thirty years after recording and more than forty since the events recounted—I began to listen. It was powerful hearing the texture of voices, tenor of the conversation, and pauses, rephrases, and accelerated speech that are part of talking about one’s life.⁵

Great Speckled Bird 7, no. 19, May 13, 1974, 7. Great Speckled Bird Collection, courtesy of Georgia State University Library.

Oral history can uniquely access moments of past activism (and repression), and institutions importantly preserve and house the documents and many hours of audio that tell feminist and queer history. With Vicki, I conducted an oral history in 2014 for unc’s Southern Oral History

Reproduced photograph by Mark Paster of Maria Seymour, Gail Cohee, Debbie Hands, Carey Junkin, Jill Raymond, and Linda Link. Published in an unnamed publication. Courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

Program, housed at the Center for the Study of the American South, four years before her death. That interview holds a moving mix of history, including our relationship, and a desire to preserve movement pasts. Yet, in Vicki’s case, the ties between academic institutions, state power, and preserving activist her stories are unnerving. After her arrest, Vicki wondered how the fbi had landed on her doorstep. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, she learned that it was through academia. In 1972, Vicki was planning an alfa event to celebrate Susan B. Anthony in conjunction with local organizing for the Equal Rights Amendment. She applied to Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute to study Anthony. The person reviewing her application crosschecked her information with an fbi document, described as the “Weathermen Album.” While it is not entirely clear what this “album” contained, it likely held names of Weather participants and an image when the fbi had one. The library staffer shared her Atlanta address, listed on the application, with the fbi, which directly led to her arrest. Although Radcliffe is a leading archive of US feminist history, it is ironic that this is where Vicki chose to leave her archives, given its role in her arrest. Jill donated her materials to the Faulkner Morgan Archive, an independent nonprofit focused on lgbtq Kentuckians.⁶

While the FBI was eager to exacerbate movement fissures, they struggled to “begin to grasp the fine distinctions between radical lesbian, radicalesbian, lesbian feminists, political lesbians, feminist socialists, Marxist feminists, and feminist Marxists.”

The Radcliffe moment must be contextualized within J. Edgar Hoover’s investment in surveying the women’s liberation movement (wlm). While the fbi did not officially employ women until after Hoover’s death in 1972, historian Ruth Rosen notes, “regional offices paid dozens— more likely hundreds—of female informants to infiltrate the women’s movement. fbi director Hoover remained adamant that constant surveillance of the women’s movement be maintained, in his words, for the ‘internal security of the nation.’” Hoover’s insistence overrode the skepticism of regional offices, who saw little need to monitor women sharing their “humdrum existence.” After a San Francisco agent questioned whether such surveillance was warranted in 1970, Hoover replied tersely, “Interwoven with its goals for equal rights for women is the advocation of violence to achieve these goals. The wlm has also demonstrated its readiness to support or accept support from other extremists or revolutionary-type organizations . . . sds, bpp [Black Panther Party], swp [Socialist Worker’s Party] . . . It is absolutely essential that we conduct sufficient investigation to clearly establish the subversive ramifications of the wlm and to determine the potential for violence presented by the various groups connected with this movement.”⁷

Female informants attended meetings, consciousness raising groups, and events. They “targeted any ‘collective’ that lived in a commune, created a community childcare center, or helped set up or run a health clinic, all of which seemed suspiciously like Communist institutions.” Hoover, who had investigated US Communists since the end of World War I, demanded that agents track leadership and outline internal structures. Agents were unable to complete this task, however, because of the lack of hierarchical structures, designated leaders, or organizational dues. While the fbi was eager to exacerbate movement fissures, they struggled to “begin to grasp the fine distinctions between radical lesbian, radicalesbian, lesbian feminists, political lesbians, feminist socialists, Marxist feminists, and feminist Marxists.”⁸

The Atlanta One

As a white Jewish New Yorker, the Rosenberg executions that occurred in her youth became a key referent for Vicki’s understanding of state power. Vicki and her alfa peers were keenly aware that the red squads that policed activism and the vice squads that policed gay spaces in the 1950s were the same mechanisms confronting the New Left, feminist movements, and gay life in the 1970s. In 1967, Vicki joined early antiwar actions at the University of Wisconsin. In 1969, she attended the sds conference in Chicago, during which Weathermen formed. She participated with Weathermen in the Second Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, where she cut sugarcane and met feminist activists from Atlanta. While the Weathermen organization is known by its masculine moniker, Vicki was drawn to it because of its female leaders. But after Cuba, Vicki cut ties with Weathermen and moved to Atlanta in 1970.

In the early 1970s, many Weather members went “underground” and the fbi was intent on finding them. When fbi agents could not find Vicki, they marked her as a “missing non-fugitive.” fbi noted a “coverage” problem in Atlanta. As one memo stated, “Informant coverage is always at the heart of an investigation of this nature. However, Atlanta’s problem is multiplied by the fact that the subjects live in a tight knit feminist commune and are apparently lesbians.” The memo also notes Vicki as a potential informant recruit into the Spectar Program, which Hoover established in 1970 to infiltrate “the aboveground fringes of Weatherman.” Spectar stood for “special targets.”⁹

Bar None, a abolitionist publication from Massachusetts, included an article on the Kentucky Six in 1975. Courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

Vicki was arraigned on charges of conspiracy to commit passport fraud through a grand jury in Boston. The fbi was interested in James Reeves, who had committed passport fraud, and they contended Vicki had knowingly provided him with a reference for his fraudulent passport application. Vicki’s charges carried the possibility of five years imprisonment. The fbi probed Vicki for details of the Weather Underground, but no trial date was set, as Judge W. Arthur Garrity was simultaneously busy adjudicating Boston’s bus desegregation orders.¹⁰

In 1974, alfa held a performance benefit for Vicki’s defense and sent out informational mailers. The mailers show alfa members’ awareness of cointelpro and the ironies of Vicki’s case after Watergate. In “A Statement in Support of Vicki Gabriner & James Reeves,” they wrote, “In the past months, Watergate has revealed tremendous governmental misconduct. Sabotage, electronic surveillance, burglaries, and police spies have been used against all those (from the Democratic Party to Daniel Ellsberg to New Left Groups to militant Black organizations) who have ‘dared’ to disagree with governmental policies. Particularly during the late sixties and early seventies, serious attempts were made to infiltrate and destroy all groups which opposed the War in Vietnam and were fighting for social justice.” They ended by writing in capital letters, “in an atmosphere of political repression, no one can feel secure.” For the Little Five Points neighborhood, Vicki’s case was a microcosm of national politics. As one Great Speckled Bird correspondent put it, “The awesome power of the federal government is getting closer and closer to home and the effects of Watergate type activities by the Nixon administration are becoming more and more evident. Just ask Vicki Gabriner.”¹¹

In this piece, the Bird notes that other defendants who were illegally wiretapped read transcripts and did not hear “the actual tapes.” Vicki’s case was unusual because she heard her surveillance tapes. During the trial preparation process, she went to an fbi office where she sat with a reel-to-reel tape player and listened to wiretaps. In a journey back in time, she heard herself in an sds office five years prior. Reflecting on this experience for the feminist publication off our backs, she wrote, “I was in a time warp. It left me frightened, angry, and spaced out all at the same time.” It was upsetting on political and temporal registers to listen to this recording. It was a confirmation of surveillance they knew existed, but it was also a corporeal encounter. In our interview, she explained, “Somehow there was something very visceral about the experience of sitting, watching the reels go round and round and round. The fbi agent sitting over there.” Floored by the experience, Vicki shared her auditory time warp through feminist print media and reiterated it in our recorded interview.¹²

Headline from the (Louisville) Courier-Journal & Times, Sunday, October 26, 1975. Courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

In her 1977 off our backs piece, “Bugged by the Past,” Vicki recalled she “spent a lot of energy re-thinking my past, wanting to own all of it, both the ‘agony and the ecstasy.’” Her 1960s activism was the root of her 1970s feminism, and Vicki was tasked with explaining this and her Weathermen activities to her peers. New alfa members had not come out of movements of the 1960s and were more engaged in lesbian separatism. Some were critical of activism done alongside men. Atlanta One benefit materials indicate a moment of transmission of movement history between slightly different generations of alfa members. They also show connections between civil rights work and lesbian feminists. Vicki received support letters from Atlantans including Andrew Young, Julian Bond, Panke Bradley, James Bond, and John Lewis.¹³

Atlanta One benefits built community and raised awareness. Events were held in gay bars, such as Sweet Gum Head, a popular drag bar known as the “Showplace of the South,” because that is where gay and lesbian community spaces were. An eclectic 1977 fundraiser at Sweet Gum included performances by dyke theater groups, karate showcases, and folk singers. While Atlanta’s activists awaited Vicki’s trial, gay and lesbian communities in Lexington were beginning to feel the government pressure.¹⁴

The Lexington Six

In the late 1960s, Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, white graduates from Brandeis University, connected with white ex-offenders Stanley Ray Bond, William Gilday, and Robert Valeri, who were studying at local universities through a parole program. Drawn to direct action, the group named themselves the Revolutionary Action Force. They carried out a spree of robberies in 1970 at banks and a National Guard Armory to finance activism against the Vietnam War. After a robbery in Brighton, Massachusetts, Saxe and Power left the scene, but Gilday stayed behind and fatally shot a police officer. Unlike their coassailants, Saxe, who was originally from Connecticut, and Power, who was from Colorado, eluded arrest and went underground. They arrived as a couple to Connecticut in 1972, under the assumed names of Lena and May. They then followed Connecticut friends who were building a rural home in Stanford, Kentucky, and in 1974, they arrived in Lexington. The two found jobs as a telephone receptionist and a cook at Alfalfa, a vegetarian restaurant. They lived in a lesbian collective house and joined feminist book groups. After the summer of ’74, Saxe and Power abruptly left town and went in separate directions. A year later, Saxe garnered national attention upon her arrest in Philadelphia, and Power remained at large until surrendering in Oregon in 1993.¹⁵

As they had in Atlanta, the fbi had trouble gathering intelligence on Saxe and Power’s movements through feminist and queer spaces. They questioned dozens of mostly gay and lesbian people in Lexington, first about the fugitives but then increasingly about the gay community more broadly. They asked, “who was in it, who was involved with whom, who were friends with whom, the tenor of their political beliefs, and the nature of their lifestyles and ‘sexual preferences.’” Many community members refused to answer questions, but five lesbians and one gay man were subpoenaed.¹⁶

When Gail Cohen, Debbie Hands, Linda Link, Jill Raymond, Marla Seymour, and Carey Junkin refused to testify at the grand jury, they were held in contempt and sent in pairs to prisons throughout Kentucky. Plucked from a wider local resistance to compelled testimony and dragnet tactics, the Lexington Six were left wondering, why them? As such, their experiences paralleled that of Terri Turgeon and Ellen Brusse in New Haven, Connecticut, who were also subpoenaed and jailed for refusing to testify about Saxe and Power. Resisters, in the North and South, saw grand juries as vehicles to harass activists, stretch resources, and invade privacy. Turgeon and Brusse argued this went against “the historical purpose of grand juries . . . to protect citizens from arbitrary government accusation.” On the contrary, in Kentucky, grand juries historically had been used to enforce enslavement before the Civil War and to refuse indictments of kkk members after. During the Cold War, federal prosecutions utilized “investigative grand juries,” turning the grand jury’s role from evaluation to discovery. This function continued and expanded in the 1970s.¹⁷

While the fbi tried to frame Lexington as a hotbed of fugitives, it was far from that. Activists were trying to organize a “gay dance” on campus and build connections with other southern lesbian feminist coalitions. For the small group of local activists, the swarm of fbi agents was both difficult and ironic. “Now there were fbi agents telling the local paper that there was a lesbian feminist socialist conspiracy in central Kentucky to overthrow the government,” as one activist observed. “This was a town that couldn’t even support one bar!”¹⁸

In May 1975, the Lexington Six wrote a press release outlining fbi actions:

In the process of investigating this case, the fbi helped itself to telephone records of some of the witnesses, and conducted cross-country interrogations of people the witnesses might have called long-distance. These include one witness’ 78-year-old grandmother, and questioning revolved around the political and sexual life of the witnesses. Some of these people questioned were threatened with subpoenas, and others were offered travel money to come to Lexington to convince us to testify. The fbi is in a bad way right now, particularly when it comes to finding the political people it is after. Now more than ever, they need to catch people whom public opinion may not support, and thereby not only improve their own image, but justify the use of these predatory tactics so that they will be free to use them against everyone.¹⁹

They experienced intense pressure to testify. Sexuality was weaponized and family ties were leveraged. The fbi visited Jill’s grandmother in her Cleveland senior living apartment three times, informing Dorothy Raymond that Jill was a socialist and lesbian. As Dorothy later asserted in court, she told agents, “Jill . . . is a girl of intelligence and integrity . . . I am confident she is innocent of the charges.” Jill’s relatives received nine fbi visits in all. Carey’s Alabama relatives were less supportive. Some, who were known kkk members, threatened to shoot him, and his father had a heart attack during the hearings. Marla’s parents cut her off because of her revealed sexuality. For others, family learned about their sexuality through news coverage.²⁰

Jill stood out as a leader within the Lexington Six and larger movements to counter grand jury overreach. She held out the longest of her cohort—fourteen months—and wrote eloquently about the importance of challenging surveillance of activists. Jill came to Lexington for college from Ohio in 1970 “right after Kent State . . . very much ready to be involved in antiwar politics.” She became active in campus politics from antiwar to student’s rights. During the 1972 elections, she helped found the People’s Party in Kentucky, which ran campaigns for local and national candidates (including Dr. Benjamin Spock). As she put it, there was “a small gang of us who devoted most of our waking hours to [the People’s Party] between class.” She joined the socialist feminist caucus when it formed on campus because “they needed people.” Feminism was initially “unfamiliar ground” and in her campus organizing she worked “exclusively with men.”²¹

While each of the Lexington Six came from different circumstances, they shared a commitment and created a critical space to question state power. As Jill recalled, there was “a multiplicity of experience among people involved. People coming from enough different past political and personal life experiences to push up against each other and not be this fairly homogenous political grouping, but yet enough commonality, enough of that gut-level commitment to opposition to government repression and the reasons for that commitment.” The heterogeneity of the Lexington Six strengthened their activism. They ranged in perspective politically, socially, and geographically, though most hailed from “mainly the South or border states.” And importantly, even as Jill was not supportive of Saxe and Power’s actions in 1970, she had met them and feared they might be killed if found.²²

The resistance of the Lexington Six was unplanned and initially ad hoc. Quickly, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild got involved as legal support, and the resisters organized collective statements to express their stand. During their varied 1975 imprisonments, they met cellmates, endured prison food, learned Susan Saxe had been arrested, and slowly, for different reasons, began to individually give testimony. In a statement titled “The Complexities of Lexington,” Jill wrote supportively of others who chose to finally give grand jury statements and get out of isolating imprisonment. She also wrote a response to Jill Johnston, a prominent lesbian separatist who had criticized Saxe for sullying feminism with militant violence, calling her a “liability to the movement” in the Village Voice. In Raymond’s response, she notes discomfort with armed struggle and criticism of antiwar activism as apocalyptic romanticism. While Johnston argued against any organizing with men, Raymond took a more nuanced view by asking what the feminist movement could learn from New Left histories. She asked readers to think critically about their political commitments and consider to what lengths feminists would go to change what they thought was wrong in society. In June 1975, Saxe wrote a statement in support of the Kentucky and Connecticut resisters and argued that they have “shown us the way . . . My feminism does not drive me into the arms of the state, but even further from it . . . Feminism is not collaboration.” The Lexington Six and its lengthy resistance “served as a catalyst” and propelled a national movement of networked defense committees, legal groups, and grand jury awareness projects. It shed light on new state tactics which would be replicated against the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, and the Irish Republican Army in the US. It also initiated the groundwork of organizations that resisted such grand jury overreach.²³

Reflecting on this time, Jill noted that the Lexington Six and its defense committee worked hard to make issues of surveillance real to Kentuckians. Feminist activists had built coalitions during the Brookside Strike with Harlan County miners in 1973 and had participated in local organizing with the Friends of the Firefighters and Friends of the Garbage Workers in Lexington. While a coalition between white socialist feminist students and Black sanitation workers was an unusual connection, because of the small city environment, they were necessary and appreciated collaborations. Such coalitions became vital as grand jury resistance wore on. As Jill recalled, “Beyond abstractions of fighting government surveillance, when things are really discouraging and . . . pointed towards cutting your losses, people felt under siege and [they] also felt committed to each other and to us. It mattered personally to people that I was in jail, that those other people were in jail and that things could happen to us in there.” During Jill’s prison time, there were regular letters to local newspapers by people concerned with the inability of citizens to plead the Fifth Amendment in grand juries. This helped during both periods of isolation and overcrowding that Jill faced during her long imprisonment. When Jill was released in 1976, bank tellers and cocktail waitresses in town let her know they supported her.²⁴

Bumper sticker courtesy of the Faulkner Morgan Archive.

Before Jill’s release, three hundred lesbians from North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Alabama, and a few northern states gathered in Atlanta for the Great Southeast Lesbian Conference in 1975. In a workshop called “fbi Harassment of the Lesbian Community,” the group of mostly white activists discussed the Lexington Six and how to approach fbi investigations in one’s own community. Vicki recalled, “Women who were not sympathetic to Susan Saxe resented the flak that came down on lesbian communities.” On the other hand, there was an awareness that fbi surveillance and grand juries were being employed to gain access to queer life. It was a way for fbi agents to unravel the workings of lesbian networks and radical feminist organizing, deemed dangerous to US institutions. A grand jury, alfa activists noted, “seeks information about living arrangements, traveling, and contacts in other Lesbian communities, political associations, roommates, and family.” The gsl conference was a significant space of lesbian southern dialogue on surveillance, power, and how to build coalitions on such issues, and these conversations continued a few months later at the socialist feminist conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The conference planning committee was based in Lexington and included Jill as a member.²⁵

When antiwar organizations went underground or unraveled at the war’s end, lesbian feminist groups took on the work of supporting queer activists caught up in domestic surveillance. Simultaneously, they used local cases to build national awareness about the nature of fbi harassment and grand jury tactics. Vicki’s and Jill’s stories delineate overlaps between New Left and lesbian feminism. They center southern geographies and show coalitions with local movements for worker rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.

Through oral and textual records, I attended to their stories with an awareness of listening—its responsibilities and its intimacies. Wiretaps and oral history files share a compulsion to capture a moment in time, to preserve, to house, to know. In my research, I have attempted to hold that balance over this decade that North Carolina has become my home. Today, Vicki and Jill’s activisms are held in southern university collections and fbi archives. Through wiretaps and transcription, the fbi created material objects with long afterlives. Through grand juries, the state strategically garnered information about feminist communities and the politics of lesbian life in the South. This new iteration of surveillance, broadened during the Nixon and post-Nixon eras, inform how today’s movements are monitored.