Susan Saxe, Lesbian Bank Robber

She'll teach you a thing or two about "be gay, do crimes"

Hello friends! <3 If you know me, you know that the only thing I love as much as gay history is the city of Philadelphia. If you’re reading this, there’s a strong chance you are at least somewhat interested in gay history, but I’ve realized that so many of us (especially if we live outside of NY/SF) really don’t know much about the particulars of gay history local to the places we call home. So, I’ve decided to do my part to highlight some of Philly’s incredibly rich LGBT history on this here blog. Some of these pieces will be more deeply researched, and others will just share a fun or interesting story that I think the people should know about. The homepage of my newsletter on Substack now has a header called “Philadelphia Gay History Academy,” and all future Philly gay history posts will be housed there! My post on Cei Bell, the Black trans writer and activist who passed away earlier this year, can be found there - go check it out if you haven’t already.

This post actually stems directly from my post about Cei! I’m working on a piece about Cei for another venue, and I went to the archives at the William Way LGBT Center to do some research for that. While there, I also checked out some issues of HERA, a 1970s Philadelphia lesbian feminist newspaper. And HERA introduced me to a story that truly blew my damn mind!! It’s a Philly story and a Boston story, a lesbian bank robbery story, a story of convicts and conviction. Buckle up!

In 1970, a cadre of radicals and thieves held up the State Street Bank & Trust, a bank in Brighton, Massachusetts. The group consisted of Susan Saxe and Katherine Power, roommates and Brandeis students, alongside three men, all convicts on parole. It was a time when the feeling of apocalypse hung heavy in the air - maybe you can relate? That spring, campuses across the U.S. erupted in anti-war protest. Four students slain by the National Guard at Kent State. Nixon bombing Cambodia, simply to make a statement to North Vietnam. Violence, violence, senseless violence. Saxe and Power, like so many young people, were desperate to make it stop.

The two young women became involved in antiwar activities at Brandeis, organizing a campus-wide strike.¹ That summer, they stayed on campus, and it was then that they met Stanley Bond, a charismatic and possibly somewhat sociopathic twenty-five-year-old convict who was part of an experimental campus parole project. He had been a helicopter pilot in 1965 in Vietnam, and, upon returning home, committed twenty-five armed robberies in three months. Five years later, he was sprung from the Walpole State Prison to Brandeis. Power and Bond struck up a romantic relationship, and the two, along with Saxe, began to conceive of an anti-war robbery plan.

They recruited two other Walpole parolees, Robert Valeri and William Gilday, to help with their plan. That August and September, they traveled across the country, stockpiling weapons and drawing on a network of radical-left contacts for guidance as they successfully pulled off a string of bank robberies in L.A, Philly, and Evanston, Illinois. Their purpose was to remove resources from the financial apparatus that funded the war machine, which they would re-distribute to the Black Panthers, and use to purchase thermite to melt military trains to their tracks.

Returning to New England, the group broke into the Newburyport National Grand Armory and liberated military vehicles and arms, as well as papers that documented the National Guard’s plan for suppressing riots in Boston, which they released anonymously to the newspapers. They considered bombing a Cambridge police station, but decided instead to rob another bank, which would turn out to be their last. Saxe, Bond, and Power entered the bank, while Valeri watched the door. They disarmed the guard, got their cash, and drove off. Minutes later, cops arrived on the scene and entered the bank, guns drawn. Gilday, on lookout across the street, went off script. He drew his rifle and fired thirty rounds, fatally shooting a cop in the back. Valeri, picked up that same day, said that Gilday had simply wanted to shoot a cop.

Saxe, Power, and Bond knew that now the heat was on. They went underground, splitting up with plans to reconvene. Gilday and Bond, seasoned criminals, were both picked up within a week. Bond was captured after picking up a woman seated next to him on a plane; that night at a hotel, he bragged to her about the heist and she got spooked and called the cops on him. The FBI picked him up the next day, and he told the agents that he’d considered killing the woman in the night. He died nineteen months later in prison from a failed bomb that he’d been building as part of an escape plan (or possibly he was murdered, depending on who you ask).

Saxe and Power, two young women who not long ago had been regular students at Brandeis, evaded capture and became the fifth and sixth women ever placed on the FBI most wanted list (to date, there have only been eleven). This meant that, as of 1970, three of the six ever women on the FBI most wanted list were Brandeis students/alums - yes, I’m talking about Dr. Angela Yvonne Davis! This is how Brandeis got its admissions slogan: “The F.B.I. is no match for a Brandeis woman!”

Saxe and Power were now on the lam, hopping from town to town and eventually securing fake identities with social security numbers. They settled for a time in Connecticut, participating in the local lesbian feminist community. Per a 1994 profile of Power in the New Yorker, “they went to consciousness-raising groups, danced at a lesbian bar called the Warehouse, and took part in speculum parties—common events in the seventies, where women rebelling against male gynecologists learned how to examine themselves and diagnose their ailments.” But over the next few years, F.B.I. pressure increased, with the feds running their pictures in newspapers across the Northeast. At some point, the F.B.I. started specifically searching for them within the women’s liberation community. “The Feds had finally figured it out—we were women living among women!” Powers recalled. “About the same time, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, and some of their members were lesbians, so there were grand juries called all over the nation. They were basically free-for-all witch-hunts. The feds would threaten our lesbian friends with exposing them to their families and employers, and then they would carry out their threats.”² Some women cooperated, though at this point Powers and Saxe had again fled, so they didn’t have useful information. Others in the community refused to testify, and three women were jailed for their noncompliance.

At this point, now 1974, Saxe and Power parted ways. Power eventually made her way to Oregon, where she had a child and later married under her false identity. Suffering from depression and the strain of life as a fugitive, she turned herself in to the authorities in 1993, and served six years in a federal prison.

Susan Saxe, meanwhile was determined to continue her involvement in the lesbian community and women’s liberation movement, and she moved to Philadelphia. I don’t know much about her life there, but I understand that she threw herself immediately into feminist and leftist spaces. One day in March of 1975, she was walking down the street hand-in-hand with another woman when she caught the eye of an F.B.I. agent. He had been shown her picture that very same day, and presumably had been told to look out for a lesbian. She was captured, and sent to Massachusetts for trial.

Due to a Massachusetts law that deemed anyone who participated in a robbery in which someone was killed guilty of first degree murder, Saxe was facing the possibility of a life sentence, even though she had not directly participated in the killing of the cop. She pled guilty to federal charges related to the Philly robbery and the Newburyport robbery, but went to trial for the Brighton robbery. Though the state seemed to believe it was an open-and-shut case, the trial ended in a hung jury. The state appealed, with the plan to assign the case to a harsher judge. Saxe decided at this point to plead guilty to MA state charges of manslaughter, and she was sentenced to 12-14 years in prison.

Throughout this ordeal, women from the lesbian communities in Boston and Philly rallied around Saxe, ceaselessly advocating for her. They published a “Susan Saxe Defense Committee Newsletter,” updating their community on Saxe’s case and advocating for the release of all political prisoners (notably including Assata Shakur, who was in prison at that time). In a letter titled “To My Friends” published in that newsletter, Saxe credited the advocacy of dykes for the results of her first trial. "By stressing the political nature of the trial and breaking down the media image of me created by the state, this organizing made a blatant railroad harder to conceal or defend,” Saxe wrote.³ Saxe was also clear that her own decisions around her charges were rooted in a sense of principled responsibility to her community. She made her initial guilty plea on the “condition that the government guarantee never to attempt to compel me to testify against or give information about anyone who knowingly or unknowingly harbored me from 1970 to 1975.”⁴ As part of this agreement, the government also agreed not to go through with an investigation that “could have led to a grand jury attack on the women’s community in Philadelphia.”⁵ Of her final decision to plead guilty to charges of manslaughter, she wrote this:

Meanwhile, the Susan Saxe Defense Fund, which was based in both Somerville and Philadelphia, wrote this about their comrade:⁶

Some articles in HERA published around this same time reveal the radicalizing effect that Saxe’s struggle had on the Philadelphia lesbian community. Women in the community were (justifiably) paranoid about F.B.I. infiltration, and HERA ran articles like “How to Greet Your Friendly Neighborhood FBI Agents,” which advised women in the community learn from efforts made by residents of Powelton Village (a West Philly neighborhood that had a strong countercultural presence and where MOVE was headquartered) to expel F.B.I. agents from their neighborhood. “Their methods are simple and LEGAL,” Judy Mendelsohn wrote:

“Powelton people now also enjoy a renewed solidarity - a benefit the FBI never expected. There is no reason why the Feminist community cannot use these techniques…The Powelton Village people distributed hundreds of photos of agents, their names and their license numbers. They held an FBI Street Fair in which they sold giant photo posters of these agents along with FBI games and paraphernalia. They honked their auto-horns whenever they saw a neighbor being questioned. They ran over and offered assistance, and witness power, to besieged friends. They supported each other instead of being paranoid.”⁷

Another article highlighted feminist organizing against the F.B.I. use of grand juries, and encouraged women to stick with the principles of non-collaboration, even in the face of heightened threats.

When I first encountered Saxe’s story, my reaction was pretty much “omg this is crazy.” However, the deeper I delved into it, the more moved I was by the principles of solidarity that Saxe and her comrades were determined to live by. This story is also part of a larger story of feminist multiracial and coalitional anti-carceral organizing during the 1970s and 80s, which I am planning to write more about at some point in the future. I’ll end with some poetry published by Saxe in prison. The first poem was originally published in her 1976 chapbook “Talk Among the Womenfolk,” which she dedicated to Assata Shakur, and was subsequently reprinted in a 1981 anthology titled Lesbian Poetry. The other poems (which you will probably have to zoom in on to read) were published in the Susan Saxe Defense Committee Newsletter.

“Outside my window, the enemy flag

snaps in the wind, its ropes

clang and whip against the pole.

I cut it down with one stroke of my mind.”

1. Details in this paragraph and the next two are drawn from this 1994 New Yorker article.

2. Lucinda Frank, “Return of the Fugitive,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1994.

3. Susan Saxe, “To My Friends,” Susan Saxe Defense Committee Newsletter No. 5, February, 1977, 11.

4. Saxe, “To My Friends,” 11.

5. Saxe, “To My Friends,” 11.

6. Susan Saxe Defense Fund brochure, from the papers Jeanne Cordova, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

7. Judy Mendelsohn, “How to Greet Your Friendly Neighborhood FBI Agents,” HERA, April-May 1975, 1.