Leeds in 1974. Half a dozen disconsolate men arrive at our house with their sleeping bags and a position paper called ‘Men In Crisis.’ Some are black, some white, some upper-middle class and others working class; their paper explains their common plight - all their wives and girlfriends have left them, either to become lesbians, or to work even harder in the Women’s Liberation Movement, or both. They knew it was their fault.
The group was attending the first UK conference of ‘Men Against Sexism,’ and three of them were staying in our big old house in the inner city. We knew that London, their home, was in sexual and political turmoil, taking down doors and banning monogamy. As members of ‘Leeds Libertarians’ we were sympathetic.
Looking back, it’s easy to send us up, and the Swedish film Together does so affectionately, showing a man wearing my cheesecloth shirt and lecturing people on his own utopian dreams of how collective life should be. Michèle Roberts’ memoir Paper Houses spends many pages, some uplifting, some troubling, in houses like ours, full of men and women in their twenties fervent in their desire to live the same revolution in their personal lives that they were trying to build ‘out there.’ In Roberts’ book we see women who were transforming their emotions and their relationships while most of the men were falling by the wayside.
