Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 3 Comments

Wayward Books & Women’s Glib

When bookstores move, staffers usually pack the books in boxes, load the boxes in a truck, and drive the truck to the new location. When Wayward Books moved, owners Sybil Pike and Doris Grumbach packed the books in grocery bags and volunteers passed them hand to hand along Pennsylvania Avenue SE to the new shop at 325 7th Street., which was practically next door to Lammas. I was one of the volunteers, and that’s how I got this T-shirt.

True, the distance was only three or four city blocks, and as I recall the brigade didn’t quite stretch the whole distance, so cars were called upon to ferry the books across the gap. But the operation was ingenious and fun, and it worked.

Wayward Books dealt in a carefully curated mix of secondhand and rare works, which meant those books had already been around. They probably took their latest move in stride.

Lammas was well represented in the Wayward Books Brigade, and not only because Wayward Books was moving into the immediate neighborhood. Pike and Grumbach had been a couple since the early 1970s, and Grumbach’s novels were regular sellers at Lammas, notably Chamber Music and The Ladies, which was based on the “Ladies of Llangollen,” two 18th-century Irish women who eloped to Wales, set up housekeeping as a married couple, and whose home became a go-to destination for literary luminaries of the time. Grumbach’s books focused on women’s lives, and often women in relationship with each other, which was not all that common at the time, especially for “mainstream” novelists.

Sybil, a retired research librarian at the Library of Congress, was the on-site manager at Wayward Books — I remember her as a strikingly handsome woman who would have been in her mid-fifties at the time — but Doris was also around when she wasn’t teaching or writing. The two shops complemented each other nicely: their inventories didn’t overlap, but their customers did.

A Washington Post story from April 1990, reporting on Wayward Books’ relocation to Sargentville, Maine, that month, notes that the Wayward Books Brigade comprised 70 volunteers and moved some 3,000 volumes from old location to new. The move to Maine involved three times that many books and was presumably not accomplished hand to hand.

The Post story also says the hand-to-hand move to 7th Street happened in 1985. I would have said a year earlier, because I left D.C. at the end of July 1985 and it seemed Wayward Books and Lammas had been neighbors for more than a few months at that point. But memory is tricky, so maybe not.

I just learned that Sybil passed in March of last year, at the age of 91, but that Doris seems to be alive in her 104th year. It sounds as though, around 2009, they moved together to a retirement community in Pennsylvania, where Sybil died and Doris still lives. Anyone with more information, please respond in the comments. If you don’t want your comment published, say so and it won’t be.

This T-shirt has nothing to do with Wayward Books — except that they both have to do with books, and that Women’s Glib was somewhat wayward in that it had to do with feminist humor, which many continue to swear is an oxymoron. Not for the first or last time, those “many” are so wrong.

Women’s Glib and Women’s Glibber, anthologies edited by Roz Warren, both came out in my bookselling days — I think. Amazon.com gives the early ’90s as pub dates for both books but notes in one case that it’s a second edition. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything in either book, although I was the class clown (female) in sixth grade and have been credited with having a pretty good, albeit barbed, sense of humor in all the decades since.

Interestingly enough (to me, at least), this is one of the very few — maybe even only? — Ts I have that features a book. I’ll hedge my bets on that one till I’ve excavated my whole collection. Either few books were featured on Ts or I wasn’t buying (or being given) the ones that were.

My humor tends to be in the moment — I think the word is “situational,” meaning that it arises from circumstances. I’ve never been fond of the other kind, such as stand-up, mainly because stand-up comedy back in the day was so misogynist, even when performed by one of the few women in the trade. Phyllis Diller embarrassed and infuriated me. I could admire Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy while being mortified by her tactics.

As a teenager and young adult I was a huge fan of the Smothers Brothers and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. By the time Saturday Night Live got going, in the mid to late 1970s, I was doing fine without a TV and besides, SNL didn’t seem all that in sync with the lesbian-feminist life I was living.

Humor that was in sync with my life — I loved it. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For strip and the books compiled from it were huge hits with Lammas customers. So were Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia books. They kept us laughing, and they kept us sane.

The first stand-up comedian who made me sit up, take notice, and even buy at least one of her albums was Kate Clinton. I heard her perform live in the early ’80s. What a revelation! The problem with stand-up comedy wasn’t me, it was the sexist, heterosexist comedy itself!

I’m thrilled to report that Roz Warren and Kate Clinton are still “making light,” as an early Clinton album had it, and you’ve almost certainly heard of Alison Bechdel, if not of Dykes to Watch Out For. I’m not sure if Nicole Hollander is still creating, but it’s not hard to find Sylvia online.

Sylvia — that Sylvia — was one of the namesakes of the TRS-80 that was Lammas’s and my first computer. The other two, as I think I mentioned before, were Sylvia Sherman, my high school history teacher, and Sylvia Abrams, my editorial mentor, without whom I would have had a hard time making a living these last four decades.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

My Only Bread Shirt

During my sojourn in England in 1974–75, I discovered unsliced bread. When I returned to the States in late November 1975, I discovered that sliced bread — at least what was available in the western suburbs of Boston at the time — didn’t measure up. After my Grandma died in February 1976, I moved into her (large) house to take care of it and her Lab, Max. In her big country kitchen I taught myself to make bread. I taught myself out of a paperback book because there were no bakers in my family. As I recall, I caught on quickly. One attempt did turn into the proverbial brick, but that was it.

Apart from almost five years when I was living in an apartment with no oven,1 I have been baking my own bread ever since. Bread is pretty much my only culinary accomplishment. If I don’t bring some form of bread to potlucks, people wonder if I’m OK. For about 25 years in a row I won ribbons for my yeast breads at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society fair. (Full disclosure: The yeast bread categories were nowhere near as competitive as the quick breads, and forget about brownies and cookies.)

Considering how central bread has been to my daily life for so long, it’s surprising that this is my only bread-related T-shirt. Even more surprising, to me anyway, is that I don’t remember how I came by it. I’ve never been to Gladewater, Texas, so someone must have given it to me, but I don’t recall who. A Google search tells me that Glory Bee Baking Co. closed its doors in 2010. Even though I’d never been there, that made me sad.

Independent bakeries have something in common with independent bookstores, and to paraphrase John Donne, the death of any one of them diminishes me and the communities I’m part of. Just up the street from Lammas Bookstore was the Women’s Community Bakery, which (as I just learned from Googling) closed in 1992.

“Just up the street” I say, but Pennsylvania Avenue SE was like a moat and for all the time I spent in the neighborhood I rarely crossed it.2 I had plenty of opportunities to sample their wares, however, with an emphasis on the cookies, muffins, and other non-bread offerings. If the Women’s Community Bakery ever had its own T-shirt, it must have passed me by.

I do still have my copy of Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book, published in 1983, which includes recipes from more than 30 independent bakeries, including the Women’s Community Bakery. It’s a handsome, spiral-bound volume, with each bakery’s section hand-lettered in its own distinctive style, and the introductory pages cover just about everything you need to know about bread baking if you’ve never done it before.

I rarely baked anything from it because so many of the ingredients could not be found in the supermarkets or ethnic groceries near me. Malt syrup? Millet flour? Soy margarine? Turned-down page corners and check marks do indicate that I tried some of them, though. These days exotic ingredients are easier to find, at least on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’m more confident about improvising and substituting than I was four decades ago, so maybe I’ll try again.

What I lack in bread-related T-shirts, I make up for in items related to bread-baking. Not surprisingly, many of these have been given to me by housemates and others with a vested interest in my continuing to make bread. These include my big bread bowl, my green-marble rolling pin, and my copy of Beard on Bread, which is held together with strapping tape. (See photo. My other most used book, Floss and Stan Dworkin’s Bake Your Own Bread, is in three pieces.)

The largest gift is the table I knead bread on. This was rescued from a Mount Pleasant (D.C.) alley by onetime housemate Beverly, she who also made my Feminism Is a Lesbian Plot shirt. Being handy with tools, she installed dowels to stabilize it, and voilà, the perfect kneading table. It’s accompanied me on all my many moves over more than four decades because most kitchen counters are the wrong height for kneading, at least if you’re very slightly over five-foot-four. In between bakings, it masquerades as an ordinary worktable, barely visible under the stacks of files, notebooks, and loose papers piled upon it.

Bread baker’s corner, with kneaded dough ready to be cut into loaves

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notes

1. This jumps ahead to Martha’s Vineyard, where affordable year-round housing was in crisis before I arrived in 1985 but denial was epidemic among the comfortably housed and it’s only been in the last few years that most people started to acknowledge that the situation was desperate. Landlords and tenants collude in evading local bylaws on what constitutes an apartment by omitting stoves from the dwelling. I cooked my meals with a hotplate and microwave, which worked fine — but I couldn’t bake bread. This was in the mid-2000s, from 2002 to 2007.

2. Phase 1, aka “the Phase,” one of the few lesbian-friendly bars in D.C. at the time, was also “just up the street,” across Pennsylvania Ave. on Eighth Street, but if I went there more than half a dozen times in my D.C. years I’d be surprised. I’ve never been a bar person. The Phase closed in 2016 (or maybe 2015, according to one website). The area around Lammas was its own self-contained neighborhood, anchored by Eastern Market, which is still there, seems to be thriving in an upscale sort of way, and even has its own website. I was in Eastern Market several times a week, usually looking for either a pulled-pork sandwich or Doris’s hamantaschen.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

Support Lesbian Mothers

I could have acquired this T at Lammas, or at an event. Don’t know. In the 1970s and well into the ’80s — and in plenty of places even now — “lesbian mother” was either an oxymoron or anathema. In my social and political circles there weren’t many lesbian mothers, and virtually all were survivors of heterosexual relationships. Several prominent lesbians who were (almost) old enough to be our mothers had children: Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) had three sons, and Audre Lorde (b. 1934) had a son and a daughter. Singer-songwriter Alix Dobkin (b. 1940) wrote at least one song about the joys and challenges of being mother to Adrian, and in her later years was a happy grandma to Adrian’s three kids.

In the 1980s this was starting to change: lesbians, some in relationships, others single, were “starting families,” as the saying goes, by adoption or by getting pregnant. I don’t remember when the phrase “lesbian baby boom” became popular, but it most certainly did. A landmark documentary about lesbian mothers, Choosing Children, was released in 1985.

In those days, even demonstrably unfit fathers could count on winning custody battles with their lesbian ex-wives. I knew women who’d lost custody after grueling court fights, and I heard of men who, after winning in court, relinquished custody to their exes: they were more interested in winning than in taking responsibility for their kids.

Along with possibly hostile exes, a definitely hostile legal system, and all the challenges that go with raising children, period, lesbian mothers often didn’t get much practical support from their lesbian communities either. There were multiple, interacting reasons for this. We were a mono-generational lot, for one thing: I’d guess that at least 80 percent of us were between the ages of 25 and 40. Most of the white women among us were from somewhere else: we’d left hometowns and families behind, often on less-than-happy terms. As a result, we had to build support networks from scratch, and we didn’t have much energy, time, space, or money available for non-adults — or for elders either. (We did, I think, do an OK job supporting those among us who were faced with serious illness or injury.)

In addition, some of us just weren’t all that interested in children. I distinctly remember an incident when I was about 12: I was in the car with my mother, headed for the next town over, and when we were stopped at a red light I asked her why I, alone of my siblings, didn’t have a middle name. She replied that when I got married, I’d just drop it. In that instant I knew (1) that I was never getting married, and (2) that I needed a middle name.

Kids weren’t part of my thought process, not consciously at least: what I knew for sure was that I didn’t want my mother’s life. Much, much later, like when I was around 30 and had been out as a lesbian for several years, I was mildly curious about what pregnancy and childbirth might feel like, but I had zero interest in raising a child — or in having heterosex, although by then I knew that there were other ways to get pregnant. Turkey basters were most definitely a thing.

Sometimes it was stronger than lack of interest. The phrase “never-het lesbian,” meaning a lesbian with no heterosexual history, was in play, and having kids was taken as a fairly obvious sign of a heterosexual past. And if while growing up a woman had been subjected to heavy family pressure to get married and have children, and perhaps been disowned for not doing so — well, once one escaped that pressure, one might be at least a bit ambivalent about those who seemed to have acquiesced in and benefited from it.

I just pulled off my shelf the epic volume Our Right to Love: A Lesbian Resource Book, edited by Ginny Vida in cooperation with the women of the National Gay Task Force and published in 1978. It’s a rich and revealing collection, of essays and photos and an exhaustive national resource directory, of where we were in the late 1970s. The essays include “Sharing Your Lesbian Identity with Your Children” and “Lesbian Mothers in Transition,” and lesbian mothers and their kids show up in other essays too.

A quick Google search turned up a scientific paper from 1981: “Lesbian Mothers and Their Children: A Comparative Survey,” in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. In case anyone needed more evidence that lesbian mothers have been around for a while . . .

Writing about lesbian mothers reminded me of a book that came out in the late 1980s: Why Can’t Sharon Kowalski Come Home? by Karen Thompson and Julie Andrzejewski, published by Aunt Lute Books in 1989. I no longer have my copy, so I was thrilled to learn just now that, though it’s not in print, it’s still being read and remembered and copies can be found.

After Sharon Kowalski suffered serious brain damage in an auto accident, her parents refused to let her lover, Karen Thompson, even visit her in the hospital. A long court battle ensued, which Karen eventually won: she became Sharon’s legal guardian. The case was a cause célèbre in lesbian, feminist, and disability circles because it underscored just how vulnerable lesbian and gay relationships were when marriage equality was barely even a dream.

A 2003 book about the case is still in print from the University Press of Kansas: The Sharon Kowalski Case, by Casey Charles. Notes the publisher’s catalogue: “Charles weaves together various versions of the story to show how one isolated dispute in Minnesota became part of a larger national struggle for gay and lesbian rights in an era when the movement was coming of age both legally and politically. His account recalls the rough road lesbians and gay men have had to travel to gain legal recognition, examines how the law is politicized by the social stigma attached to homosexuality, and demonstrates how conflicted the decision to ‘come out’ can be for lesbians and gays who view ‘the closet’ as both prison and refuge.” Charles, a lawyer, English professor, and gay man with HIV, has written several books since.

This August 2018 article in Minnesota Lawyer brings the story almost up to the present day: “The Minnesota Legal Fight That Changed the Course of the Gay Rights Movement.” Karen has been Sharon’s guardian all these years, assisted by her current partner.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1980: Secede Now

I acquired my SECEDE NOW T-shirt on Martha’s Vineyard in the late 1970s, years before I moved to the Vineyard year-round, though I was spending time there now and then. It’s now so historic that mine was recently included in a T-shirt exhibit at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. Here’s the story behind it: In 1977, the Massachusetts House of Representatives reduced its number from 240 to 160. Among the districts eliminated in the reduction were Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, which up to that time had each had its own seat in the House. This provoked indignant threats to secede from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and generated, along with this T-shirt, a striking flag that is still occasionally seen in these parts.

Selfie ca. 2018

My SECEDE NOW story has nothing to do with the Massachusetts legislature, or Massachusetts either: it unfolded in D.C., around 1980. If I had to identify the five most important turning points in my adult life, this would be one of them. It’s about daring to be seen, and it starts with the 1979 publication of JEB’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians.

Eye to Eye was a revelation, an inspiration, a major milestone on the road to lesbian visibility. The local impact might have been even greater than the national one: JEB (Joan E. Biren) had long been a visible mainstay of the D.C. lesbian community — she was a veteran of the Furies collective — and many of the women depicted in its pages lived in and around D.C. I had at least a nodding acquaintance with several of them, and would get to know some much better in coming years. Of course I bought Eye to Eye as soon as it came out, and you bet I’ve still got my copy.[1]

Every woman who appeared in Eye to Eye was unfathomably brave. As a writer in the Unicorn Times, a D.C. alternative newspaper, put it when the book was released: “It is almost impossible to publish photos of lesbian mothers with their children because of the mother’s fears of losing their children in custody cases. Mothers are not the only lesbians who can’t be photographed. Women afraid of losing their jobs, lesbians from other countries afraid of deportment, and lesbians afraid of disownment from their families all had to refuse Biren’s permission to be published.”

The 1979 edition. Could there have been a better cover photo than Kady (left) and Pagan? And no, my copy isn’t going anywhere.

Those sentences were quoted in Paul Moakley’s excellent (I’m serious about this. Read it!) interview with JEB for Time magazine in February 2021, when Eye to Eye was reissued in hardcover, the original intact but expanded with new essays. In 2021 it may be as pathbreaking, as revelatory, as it was in 1979. Lesbians are on TV these days, we can get married, and so on, but we’re submerged in the LGBTQ coalition (in which G has been dominant from the beginning) and erased by supposedly inclusive words like queer and gender-nonconforming. We’re invisible in a whole new way.

In 1979 I did notice an absence in Eye to Eye, however: women who were fat like me. The absence wasn’t total: Dot the chef is what I’d call zaftig, but she was also middle-aged, which to my 28-year-old mind let her off the looks hook; and one of the quintet gathered around the National Lesbian Feminist Organization banner at the 1978 ERA march might have been around my size. But none of the women photographed bare-breasted or naked were anywhere close to zaftig, never mind fat.

I got it, or thought I did: a powerful stereotype at the time (which hasn’t entirely gone away) was that lesbians turned to women because they “couldn’t get a man,” and being fat got you sorted PDQ into that category. I took for granted that being fat made you a liability, that Eye to Eye would be taken more seriously if we weren’t in it. I felt petty for even noticing our absence. Of course I didn’t mention it when I reviewed the book. I doubt I ever even said it out loud.

Then Beth K., a D.C. photographer whom I knew from my Washington Area Women’s Center days, announced that she was planning a show of lesbian portraits. Each image would be accompanied by the woman’s own words. Rather than choose her subjects, she was soliciting volunteers from the community. Words coupled with images! I was a writer, after all — wasn’t this right up my alley? My written words went out in public all the time. Writing short was a challenge (still is), but I could do it.

But–but–but . . . Being a fledgling editor as well as a writer, I could control my words; often I even had some say about how they appeared in print. I would have zero control over how I appeared in a photograph, or of what people would see when they looked at it. If people could see what I looked like, would they still take my words seriously?

My ruthlessly rational feminist self went up against against my own muddled assumptions. Fat lesbians were a liability — did I believe I was a liability? (Yes.) Did I see the connection between believing my physical appearance made me a liability and railing against a misogynist culture that valued women according to their physical appearance? (Uh . . . yeah. Sort of.) What was this really about? (I’m terrified.) Of what? (Seeing what I really look like.) So if Beth asks if you’d like to be in the show, what are you going to tell her?

And that’s where I choked. My “reasons” flourished in the privacy of my head,[2] but if I said them out loud to someone else, even I would have to see what crap they were. By asking for volunteers, Beth had given me the opportunity to say yes. If I didn’t say yes, I better shut up about the absence of fat lesbians from books and photo shows. So I said yes.

Here’s the photo, which I just had reframed. I chose the location: a stone bridge over Rock Creek behind the National Zoo, not far from where I lived, which I biked over several times a week going to and from work in Alexandria. I wore my SECEDE NOW T-shirt as a personal declaration of independence.

I don’t have a copy of what I wrote for the show; I might have lost it, or it might be buried in one of the file drawers I have from before “files” were saved on disks or hard drives or in the cloud. I remember comparing being a lesbian to being a writer: nature and nurture — potential — had something to do with both, but decisive in both cases were the choices I kept making over time. The choice to say YES to being photographed was a big one.

What I see when I look at that photo today is a young woman who, despite being uncomfortable in her own body and uneasy about being seen, is standing out in the open. She hasn’t partially concealed herself behind a tree, or at a typewriter. She’s meeting photographer and camera eye to eye.

Forty-plus years later I meet her likewise and salute her courage.

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notes

[1] I’m not the only one. In the Time interview cited above, JEB says: “For years I would go into my local gay bookstore to their secondhand section. It was never there. Never! Today people are all telling me they still have the one they bought in 1979. . . . I gave a copy to my college library (Mt. Holyoke), and it was stolen—maybe like seven times. Eventually, they had to lock it up in the stacks, where they had this cage with all the rare books from the Middle Ages.”

[2] Pete Morton hadn’t written “Another Train” yet, but he nailed it (and a few other things) in that great song: “Imagination plays the worst tricks.” When I first heard “Another Train” — covered by the Poozies in the mid-1990s — I was sure Sally Barker was singing to me, her invisible arm around my shoulders in some bar somewhere. That led me to Pete Morton’s own version, and a whole slew of his CDs. I’m still hoping to hear him live some day . . .