Jeanne Córdova, the lesbian feminist activist, journalist and publisher whose memoir When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography, died on January 10, 2016.
Born Jeanne Robert Córdova on July 18, 1948, in Bremerhaven, Germany, the second of twelve children of a Mexican father and an Irish American mother, she grew up in Southern California. She entered the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in Santa Barbara in 1966, left a year later, and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in social welfare and a master’s degree in social work at UCLA.
In 1970 she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and soon became its president. The chapter newsletter, which she edited, grew into The Lesbian Tide in 1971, and under her editorship it became a national lesbian feminist newsmagazine that ceased publication in 1980. She was also human rights editor and a columnist at the Los Angeles Free Press, founded the Community Yellow Pages and Square Peg magazine, co-founded LEX, The Lesbian Exploratorium, in 2008, and chaired the 2010 Butch Voices Los Angeles conference.
Sexism: It’s a Nasty Affair (1974) collects her columns from the Los Angeles Free Press.
Kicking the Habit: A Lesbian Nun Story (1990) is an autobiographical novel about her convent years. It follows a young woman from the Southern California suburbs who is sent to work in Skid Row and Watts and confronts the unrest of the 1960s, her disillusionment with religious life and her emerging sexuality.
When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (2011), with an introduction by Lillian Faderman, recounts her life as a radical lesbian activist in the 1970s. It follows her work as an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Free Press, where her subjects included the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, alongside the creation of The Lesbian Tide and her struggle to balance her political commitments with her personal life. The memoir won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography and the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for lesbian nonfiction, and was named a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book in 2013.
Córdova also contributed to other anthologies in the collection. Her essays “How to Come Out Without Being Thrown Out” and “What’s a Dyke to Do?” appear in After You’re Out (1975), “Trauma in the Heterosexual Zone” in The Lesbian Path (1980), “My Immaculate Heart,” the opening chapter, in Lesbian Nuns (1985), “Butches, Lies & Feminism” in The Persistent Desire (1992), “Conversation with a Gentleman Butch” in Dagger (1994), “A Tale of Two Brothers” in Tomboys! (1995) and “Camp Fires” in On My Honor. She is also a contributor to Hot & Bothered 2 (1999).
Her later essays include “A Tale of Two Hangouts: Gay & Lesbian Civil Wars in the ’70s” in Love, West Hollywood (2008), “The New Politics of Butch” in Persistence (2011), “Marriage Throws a Monkey Wrench” in Untangling the Knot and “Anita Bryant’s Anti-Gay Crusade” in The Right Side of History (2015).
Complete Bibliography
Memoir and autobiography: Kicking the Habit: A Lesbian Nun Story (1990), When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (2011)
Collected columns: Sexism: It’s a Nasty Affair (1974)
Contributions to anthologies: After You’re Out, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young (1975), including “How to Come Out Without Being Thrown Out” and “What’s a Dyke to Do?”; The Lesbian Path, edited by Margaret Cruikshank (1980), including “Trauma in the Heterosexual Zone”; Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, edited by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan (1985), including “My Immaculate Heart”; The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle (1992), including “Butches, Lies & Feminism”; Dagger: On Butch Women (1994), including “Conversation with a Gentleman Butch”; Tomboys! Tales of Dyke Derring-Do (1995), including “A Tale of Two Brothers”; On My Honor: Lesbians Reflect on Their Scouting Experience, edited by Nancy Manahan, including “Camp Fires”; Hot & Bothered 2, edited by Karen X. Tulchinsky (1999); Love, West Hollywood, edited by Chris Freeman and James J. Berg (2008), including “A Tale of Two Hangouts: Gay & Lesbian Civil Wars in the ’70s”; Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman (2011), including “The New Politics of Butch”; Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity, including “Marriage Throws a Monkey Wrench”; The Right Side of History: 100 Years of LGBTQI Activism, edited by Adrian Brooks (2015), including “Anita Bryant’s Anti-Gay Crusade”
Córdova died of cancer on January 10, 2016, at her home in Los Angeles. She was 67. In a public letter written in 2015 she had disclosed her illness and thanked the lesbian communities she had served. She left a $2 million gift to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, which established the Jeanne R. Córdova Fund. She is survived by her spouse, Lynn Harris Ballen. The Lambda Literary Foundation created the Jeanne Córdova Words Scholarship in her memory, and the journalists’ association NLGJA launched the Jeanne Córdova Award in 2018.