There was a lot of defensiveness around, ‘well I don’t participate in the patriarchy, I’m an anarchist, and I don’t believe in that.’
As women organized their own day of workshops before the 1989 San Francisco anarchist gathering, men assembled for a corresponding gender-specific meeting. Despite constituting the majority of attendees to the broader convergence, the men’s meeting was only around a third of the size of the women’s. As some women later pointed out, this was presumably because men felt less need to discuss “men’s issues” than did women. Around 60 men gathered at Delores Park and Fort Funston for a day of workshops and discussions meant both to interrogate their male privilege and to provide support for each other. Despite some promising discussions, the men’s meeting disappointed both its attendees and the women who observed part of it.
Mike E., who lived at the Chaos Collective (the co-op that hosted the women’s conference) and was a core organizer of the San Francisco convergence, helped put together the men’s gathering. He explained to me in an oral history interview last summer that the men were not initially planning to meet but that some key male organizers decided that they needed to “do work around sexism and gender” in solidarity with anarchist women.
Due to a combination of poor planning and defensiveness from some men, things did not go very well. Mike reflects “that to be honest unfortunately we didn’t put the amount of care and work that the women put into their workshops, and so the discussions were not that great. Also, a lot of the men just were not used to having those kinds of conversations. Talking about their role within, you know, the patriarchy. You know, there was a lot of defensiveness around, ‘well I don’t participate in the patriarchy, I’m an anarchist, and I don’t believe in that.’ […] and so, our conversations, honestly, my memory of them is that they were not that productive. There [were] small groups of us who I think had some good conversations, but they were also not that organized.”
In part to try to ease tensions and establish connections, the men broke halfway through the day to have an impromptu soccer game. But, as Mike recounted ruefully, “unfortunately, some of the women who were at their meeting showed up right as the soccer game was going on [laughs], and were like ‘oh really, so we are having conversations about the patriarchy and you guys are bro-ing down, having a soccer game. And this is your way of addressing the patriarchy.’ And that shit busted loose. And so there was a pretty intense confrontation around that, and sort of, you know, um, pretty strong, very pointed and good critique of that. Um, we ended up sitting back down, and sort of having more conversations.”
This confrontation and its fallout did not make it into the official reportback to the Without Borders Chronicle. Instead, they said that “the numbers were somewhat small but many men left the gathering with the feeling of having connected with other men, learning & sharing with each other.” But the report did call out the lack of engagement from men and issued a call to action: “Hopefully more men will plan to attend future mens gatherings. The lack of numbers seems to speak of an evasion or lack of interest amongst many men of the very important topics of men supporting men, men dealing with their own sexism (as well its prevalence in the @ community) and the need to deal with gender issues [that] affects us all.”
The San Francisco men’s gathering was somewhat of a false start. It is certainly easy to criticize its small attendance, the defensiveness of many men, and the ill-fated soccer game. But it also helped to introduce feminist concepts to men who believed that their anarchist politics meant that they couldn’t be sexist. It also built connections and trust between anti-sexist men who would go on to play active roles in promoting feminism in the anarchist movement. The men’s gathering is a good example, warts and all, of the kind of difficult but necessary work that men must do in order to contribute to women’s liberation.