Interview with Smedley Ambler, Berkeley, 12/05

….So I was alone in New York, without a job, and I called my parents and they helped me cross the country by plane back to Berkeley. That was winter of 1969. I spent 1969 in Berkeley’s counterculture.

What were you doing in the counterculture?

What was I doing? I wasn’t really doing anything! I was just being. Hanging out. Then Mother got a bequest from our uncle Harold’s estate, and she referred to it as a kind of nest egg, and I suddenly had the idea, why not use that for a bookstore? Because we as kids had always hoped to have a bookstore, and this little bit of money would be enough to start a small bookstore. I proposed this in December 1969 to Mother, and told her that there was an empty store on Haste street near Cody’s books that I thought we could afford, and I proposed that the way to determine what we should carry was that half of all the books should be by women and half should be by men.

How did you think of that?

Well, 1969 was really the beginning of the women’s liberation movement, in New York and the East Coast, and it was spreading to Berkeley and I was very interested in what they were doing. It seemed to me righteous. It was a righteous movement. So Mother agreed – Mother was an accountant, and she knew how to keep the books so that we wouldn’t spend ourselves out of existence, so in January of 1970 we opened Up Haste, on Haste Street up from Telegraph, and I was in charge of selecting the books. I went to the local book distributors and selected half books by women and half by men. And we had an immediate audience in the young women at the University of California, which was only three blocks away.

I quite consciously collected books for the store along the line of women’s liberation, and then filled it in as much as I could with other work by women. It ended up that we were carrying almost anything by women, no matter what the subject matter. Since women at that time were looking very generally toward a woman-based polis, they were interested in almost anything women had done. For instance, I remember finding books on immigrant women. Now that wasn’t a major preoccupation of the women’s movement itself, but it meant that individual women could come in and find something that intrigued them in our store.

Less than 6 months after we opened -- we had been carrying a women’s underground newspaper called It Ain’t Me, Babe, run by several older women, and they used to come in and we had long talks about lesbians in the women’s movement. It Ain’t Me, Babe found some money, I don’t know how, and opened up a bookstore just over the city boundaries in Oakland. After that we no longer had the full focus of the women interested in the women’s movement because some of them moved toward It Ain’t Me, Babe and their bookstore. But we had a good solid base in women’s reading, and they would come – women’s studies was just beginning to be taught at the university and I would purchase boxes full of books that were used in those courses and sell to the students. That kept us going.

Cody’s bookstore set up an independent section of women’s books in 1970 and also began to take away some of our customer base. In the beginning we had the market entirely. But of course it was always confusing because I was there, and I was the one selecting the books by women, and some women were aggravated by that. They were the ones that moved toward It Ain’t Me, Babe, and their store, because they were all women without any male adulteration!

Did you argue with them about your right to run a women’s bookstore?

No, I remember being afraid -- there was a movement suddenly in the spring of 1970 saying that women should beat up men that take advantage of women. I don’t remember if anyone actually did that or if it was just talked about, but I remember being afraid that some of these women would attack me for being involved in the women’s movement! Because I myself am gay, I was also interested in the gay liberation movement, and when Up Haste opened I was living with a young hippie named Wally, who convinced me to go to these dances that the Gay Liberation Front was putting on in a local church. So I began to connect with the Gay Liberation Front, and Up Haste carried – there wasn’t much literature in the beginning, but I carried about a shelf full of literature on gay rights for men, which was another thing that aggravated many of the women.

Was there no sympathy between the women’s movement and the gay men’s movement at that time?

No, there was no sympathy. And I was bothered that the women’s movement was increasingly anti gay men, so I went home one weekend and tried to work out my ideas. That weekend I wrote three -- screeds, you might say, of effeminist writing saying that the effeminist male supports the female in her endeavors to be independent and powerful. I published in Up Haste these three pieces that I called The Effeminist, and they attracted two other men, Jim Rankin and Nick Benton, and we began publishing a newspaper to try to attract other members. I think there were three issues all together. Three or four.

What was the effeminist position?

We experimented with the idea that the ordinary male is homosexual. The ordinary male who believes he is heterosexual is in fact homosexual. And the only men who had real relations with women were the effeminists. An effeminist was a man who saw that his primary allegiance was to women: first his mother, second if he was married his wife. The three of us had all started out with the Gay Liberation Organization, but we felt it was necessary to set up a different group of gay men who saw women as their primary context in society.

In 1971 we started a children’s section. Babette came back to Berkeley, and she was interested in children as well as the women’s movement, and we saw a way of adding a new section on children to the store. There was more and more material coming out of the women’s movement about children, and for children, and there was also a smaller group interested in children’s liberation. There were children’s books published by women’s collectives in North Carolina, for example, with a women's liberation perspective. They had published five or six of these books by 1971. Babette was interested in these, and we began to carry them and then to look for mainstream children’s books that treated the children, the boys and the girls, equally. Finally we ended up taking over the storefront next to Up Haste for the children’s material, and Babette was in charge of that. We carried your book – what was it called? Little Funny People by Pam, and so on.

Now, the women’s movement grew and grew, and by 1973 it had taken on the characteristics of a major media organization. It wasn’t mainly communicating through underground newspapers, it was communicating through major newspapers and television. Some women held on to the underground movement, and they continued to be our major customers, because we carried the underground women’s publications from all over the country, from Chicago, from Washington DC --

How did you find these publications?

I would go into all the other bookstores in Berkeley and find copies. Once you found one, you could easily find out about the others. There would be listings about people to meet in other parts of the country, for example, in any local underground paper.

Did you carry a lot of local publications? Did you have a lot of people coming in with stuff for consignment?

Yes. I didn’t carry everything, but I carried everything by women. I was more selective about what I carried by men. I tried to carry gay men actively, but other men, they fill the bookstores. I mean the women’s section of Cody’s was never more than a 10th of all the books they carried.

What was daily life at the store like? Did you have a lot of visitors? A lot of arguments?

That was the most important part of what was going on. It’s very hard to recreate the atmosphere. The very idea that Berkeley could have a bookstore that dealt only with radical movements! And not just the radical movements that were represented by New York publishing houses; the publications of the Trotskyists, who had their own publishing house, sold as well in Berkeley as mainstream New York publications. And there were other radical bookstores in the neighborhood. Just next to us was a Chinese Maoist group with publications from communist China, and down the street on Telegraph on the other side of Dwight way the Trotskyists had a bookstore.

So it was possible to have a bookstore that carried only Maoist books? You could pay the rent?

Within that – it seems just unbelievable, but within that context you could.

How were your relationships with the other bookstores in the area? Did you talk to the other political bookstores? Or the more general bookstores, Moes and Cody’s?

No. All adamantly independent. No communication at all! I didn’t particularly like Moe. The only thing I liked about Moe was that he carried underground publications from all over and I would go in there and find unusual left groups and radical groups. Moe himself – I never felt that he was interested in books. The way the store approached the sale of books didn’t attract me at all. It was the style of the store.

It was a more general store, was that what made it less interesting?

Yes, because at that time the pressure was on to have a perspective. For instance, Marxists – and I was more or less a Marxist -- were programmatically opposed to populists at that time, and Moe was essentially a populist. Populism was just radicalism without a program. Opposed to the establishment but with no program for society. There was no slant to the books, there was no perspective.

I liked the fact that Fred Cody was interested in small publishers of poetry. He carried them right near the entrance to the store: many small publishers of poetry. That I thought was Fred Cody’s perspective.

Did he carry underground newspapers also?

Yes, he did also. Everyone did. That was the whole source of the radical movement. Underground newspapers out of Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Washington DC, New York, Austin Texas...

How did you see the role of bookstores like Up Haste in radical politics?

Well, I was confused, because I accepted the Marxist criticism of the petit bourgeoise, and the strict Marxist groups were opposed to successful radical institutions like bookstores, because they were petit bourgeoise. If they made any money, if they made enough money to survive, they were petit bourgeoise and no longer radical. I never figured it out. I never came to a conclusion as to whether what I was doing was radical or bourgeoise

But what about the role of bookstores in distributing and disseminating these underground newspapers and radical publications? And as meeting places?

Well yes. Without bookstores how would you proselytize? So to me it was a no win situation. The Marxists were just impossible. You could have a bookstore, but you couldn’t make a profit. You couldn’t even make a living.

That doesn’t seem very fair!

Well, that was what it was all about.