WisCon, the world’s first and probably only fantasy/science fiction convention that focuses on feminist speculative fiction, was born in 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to Joan Nestle at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, an avid f/sf fan, I learned about it and f/sf fandom, including feminist f/sf fandom, before too many years had passed; see “I Discover Women Writing F/SF” for details.
But it wasn’t till February 1990 that I attended my first WisCon, WisCon 14. I got there by a circuitous route, which looks something like this:
I could have sworn this T said “WISCON 14” on it but obviously it doesn’t. Hal Davis gave it to me @ WisCon 14. I’d never met Hal before, and I know all that stuff about not accepting gifts from strangers, but I’m glad I accepted this one. Hal and I are still in touch 34 years later, though my last WisCon was in 2006. That’s some kind of record.
In the late 1970s, having got wind of the wealth of fantasy and science fiction being written by women, I started haunting Moonstone Bookcellar, the f/sf bookstore on Connecticut Ave., near Washington Circle. After a skim through the pages, I’d buy almost anything with a woman’s name on the cover.
While several of us were prepping for my 30th birthday party, in June 1981, Mary Farmer, owner and manager of Lammas, D.C.’s feminist bookstore, asked me to sign on as Lammas’s book buyer. Once I got my bearings, surprise, surprise, I started building up the store’s f/sf collection.
In 1984, Carol Seajay, founder, editor, and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, invited me to become FBN’s first columnist. “Susanna Sturgis on Science Fiction” debuted shortly thereafter. Big perk was that I could now get free review copies from publishers.1
Also in 1984, I attended the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops for the first time. FW3 in those years was held at Wells College in tiny Aurora, N.Y., but was based in Ithaca, 30 miles away. I got to meet Irene “Zee” Zahava, proprietor of Smedley’s, Ithaca’s feminist bookstore, and Nancy Bereano, then the editor of Crossing Press’s great feminist series and about to establish her own trail-blazing Firebrand Books.
Zee was just starting to edit anthologies, often of women’s writing; by now she has edited a gazillion and branched out into offering writers’ workshops. Back then, however, she opened the way for me to edit three anthologies of women’s f/sf for Crossing: Memories and Visions (1989), The Women Who Walk Through Fire (1990), and Tales of Magic Realism by Women (Dreams in a Minor Key) (1991).
My three women’s f/sf anthologies
By the time Tales of Magic Realism came out, my relationship with Crossing had frayed so that was my last anthology. Personalities aside, the real underlying problem was the structural disconnect between feminist publishing and feminist f/sf readers. Feminist publishing and bookselling emphasized the trade paperback format; f/sf was overwhelmingly a mass-market world. Feminist f/sf fans could find their favorite women authors in f/sf bookstores. Only a handful of feminist booksellers knew f/sf well enough to build a feminist f/sf section, notably Karen Axness at Room of One’s Own in Madison and Paula Wallace at Full Circle in Albuquerque.
While at Lammas I had stocked a fine feminist f/sf section, which f/sf fans appreciated but was a hard sell to other fans of fiction by women. The widespread conviction that f/sf was only about spaceships and elves resisted all my attempts to unseat it.2 But my work at Lammas and especially my Feminist Bookstore News column did catch the attention of Crossing Press and others.
Among those who noticed my FBN column was the archivist/librarian for the Boston chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), who was also the East Coast half of fantasy writer J. F. Rivkin. In those days female protagonists had become more common in f/sf, but often they were the only woman in a team of men. If a novel had two significant female characters, they tended to be rivals, not allies. So J. F. Rivkin’s first novel, Silverglass (1986), was right up my alley: sword & sorcery featuring lesbian partners who had adventures together.
J. F. Rivkin/East was also well connected with the women writers in the New England f/sf scene, which is how I came to be included in a group signing at Glad Day, Boston’s gay bookstore, then located on Boylston Street near Copley Square. I’m pretty sure the year was 1990, after The Women Who Walk Through Fire came out that spring and after I had attended my first WisCon in February. There for the first time I met Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Melissa Scott, Lisa A. Barnett, and “J.F./East” herself. Wow.
With WisCon and that momentous Glad Day signing, a whole world opened up, one I’d been only dimly aware of in my feminist bookselling days. Not only did it keep me busy for most of the 1990s, it greatly expanded my T-shirt collection, thanks in particular to the wonderful Ts created by Freddie Baer for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. The Tiptree, for speculative fiction that explores and expands our understanding of gender, was launched by authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler at WisCon 15, my second WisCon, and I chaired the Tiptree jury in 1994. More about that later.
NOTES
I continued writing the f/sf column till 1996, 11 years after I left D.C., so the freebies continued to arrive. Since I was only interested in the ones by women, I’d take the rest down to Book Den East, which sold used and rare books, and sell them. Bookseller Cindy Meisner [1944–2023] told me these were snatched up by young male sf fans who loved getting brand-new books for cheap. ↩︎
Genre fiction per se was never the problem. Mysteries have been huge in the feminist press since they were introduced, and don’t get me started about lesbian romance. Lammas customers would tell me they found fantasy or science fiction too unbelievable then come to the check-out counter with a lesbian romance about a nice lesbian on vacation who falls in love with a slightly older woman who turns out to be independently wealthy and they live happily ever after. ↩︎
Being new on the island and knowing almost no one, I obsessively read posters on telephone poles, devoured the Martha’s Vineyard Times front to back,[i] and studied everything on every bulletin board I came across. Surely there had to be some feminist activity somewhere, and if there was, surely a lesbian or two would be involved?
Well, no. As noted in Adult Child of Theater, my first connection with Vineyard lesbians (and gay men) was through theater. I did, however, find feminism on a bulletin board: several women were organizing a panel discussion on women’s issues for the local League of Women Voters. Contacting them, I learned that not only were they League members, they made up an informal women’s group that had been meeting for several years. I helped organize the panel, and after the project came off successfully I was invited (along with the other drop-in organizer) to join the group. This was my “girl gang” for about 10 years. Would I have stayed on the Vineyard without it? Quite possibly not, but unfortunately I have no T-shirt to show for it.
My early searching also led to the Flip Side, an itinerant performance venue that, as I recall, happened in a tent outside what was then the Ocean Club, an upscale seasonal restaurant, and later became home to the year-round Wintertide. I don’t remember which musicians I first heard there, but it was definitely my introduction to the literary trio known variously as the Poetry Construction Company (because if you weren’t in construction on Martha’s Vineyard, you weren’t taken seriously) or the Savage Poets of Martha’s Vineyard: George Mills, Lee McCormack, and Michelle Gerhard (now Jasny; a veterinarian whose clients have included my three dogs, she’s been writing the Visiting Veterinarian column for the Times for about three decades).
That led me to Wintertide Coffeehouse in the winter of 1986. Back then it was then a weekend thing from January through March, usually one weekend night a week, sometimes two. When I joined the all-volunteer crew, it was held at the Youth Hostel. Donna Bouchard, an experienced concert promoter, was then the coordinator. Not being a techie, I gravitated to the food operation: along with coffee and tea, we offered snack plates with crackers, cheese, salsa, and veggies.
Anyone familiar with Washington Ledesma’s art will recognize this as his work. His Five Corners studio was right around the corner when Wintertide moved into its year-round location.
By this point, Wintertide’s origins were already murky: ask three old hands how it started and you’d get three different origin stories. A few years later, for a 1991 Martha’s Vineyard Times story, I traced a credible line of descent back to 1979. This roughly coincides with a 2021 M.V. Times story (not by me) which located Wintertide’s origin in 1978 as part of Project, a program of M.V. Community Services aimed at giving young people off-season recreational options other than bars. Wintertide’s antecedents were more diverse than the Times article suggests: read the comments for a fuller story. Vineyarders have a long history of entertaining each other after the tourists and summer folk go home, and Wintertide was part of that tradition.
From the Youth Hostel, Wintertide moved to the basement of the Stone Church in Vineyard Haven, where it remained for the rest of the 1980s.
Wintertide performers included local musicians, the occasional touring singer-songwriter, and even musicians with national reputations and recording contracts. I heard jazz musician Stan Strickland at Wintertide when it was at the Youth Hostel, playing with Barbara Dacey, who along with being a musician was also a mainstay for decades at WMVY radio. Among the performers I heard for the first time at the Stone Church were Cheryl Wheeler and Bill Morrissey.
There was no shortage of island-grown talent either: Maynard Silva, Nancy Jephcote, Tristan Israel, Jimmy Burgoff, and many more. It was an ideal place to develop and perfect performance skills.
In a 2010 letter to the Times, I wrote: “The Wintertide I remember was a place where Vineyarders of all ages, old-timers and recent arrivals, came together to entertain ourselves. In the process we learned how to manage the kitchen, run the soundboard, or even perform onstage, whatever needed to be done.”
Inspired by the Savage Poets, I read poems at Wintertide’s regular open mics, and each winter I organized a “Word Wizardry” night featuring Vineyard poets and prose writers. Reading poetry before audiences primed for music taught me the importance of performance. In general I wasn’t a fan of poetry readings, but the likes of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Marge Piercy, and Audre Lorde had shown me that readings can be riveting.
Mary Payne of Island Theatre Workshop coached me in reading my own work: “The first rule,” she told me, “is to forget that you wrote it.” Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you can communicate it effectively to a live audience. In fact, it can make it harder. You know what thoughts and feelings inspired the poem. When performing, you have to get your listeners to feel them too.
Tony Lombardi, the sound tech when Wintertide was at the Stone Church, had a vision of Wintertide as a year-round chem-free multigenerational hangout and performance space. He, with much help from others, made it happen: Wintertide opened year-round at Five Corners in January 1991. This momentous move looked like the dawn of a new age for Wintertide, but it turned out to be not just the end of the beginning — the years of being a peripatetic off-season venue — but also the beginning of the end. It was glorious while it lasted.
My story about Wintertide’s big move appeared in the Martha’s Vineyard Times on Jan. 10, 1991.
In my capacity as Martha’s Vineyard Times proofreader and frequent features stringer, I wrote the story about Wintertide’s big move. Later that year I succeeded Eileen Maley as the Times features editor. As I wrote in a 2018 blog post: “Not only was I a Wintertide board member, regular volunteer, and occasional performer, I was the Times features editor. To put it mildly, the roles got blurred. Wintertide had very little money for advertising; I could put whatever I wanted in the paper’s Calendar (arts & entertainment) section.” Once the Times moved to Five Corners that fall, it was right around the corner from Wintertide. That blurred the roles even further.
Backside of the Wintertide shirt
I’ve come to think of year-round Wintertide as, like Camelot, a “brief, shining moment.” The shining was real. I think especially of the Singer-Songwriter Retreats of 1992 and 1993, masterminded by Christine Lavin and brought to life by a cast of dozens, if not hundreds. The resulting recordings — Big Times in a Small Town from ’92 and Follow That Road from ’93 — are still available and still wonderful.
I think also of WIMP, the Wintertide Improv group, a troupe of Vineyard actors whose performances usually included a new installment of Troubled Shores, a serial soap opera about island life. WIMP continued after Wintertide’s demise in various locations. Troupe member Donna Swift started a long-running improv program for young people called, you guessed it, Troubled Shores. (See this 2008 Vineyard Gazette story for some of the details.)
But the brevity was also real, and probably inevitable given the place and the personnel. That prime, central, highly visible location was high rent for the time, which meant attention had to be paid to the bottom line, i.e., income. A local restaurateur was willing and able to take charge of the kitchen, which could have put Wintertide on a firmer financial footing without changing its mission or its vibe. This not only clashed with Tony’s vision of an all-volunteer operation, but it would have put a second person, the restaurateur, at the heart of it. Tony couldn’t have that. He wouldn’t compromise with Christine Lavin either, so after those two glorious years the Singer-Songwriter Retreat dwindled into a strictly local affair.
It was not a good sign that, long before that, I and a few other longtime volunteers had taken to calling the coffeehouse “Tonytide,”[ii] which pretty much sums up the problem.
Then Tony decided (for reasons I don’t know, because I and quite a few others had either left or backed off by then) to move on, and Wintertide began its fast slide into history. Tony’s subsequent projects, usually aimed at young people, happened under the aegis of the then new Vineyard YMCA, which meant access to both space and revenue that didn’t have to be raised through operations. He could have his cake and eat it too: run an all-volunteer operation without having to worry about the bottom line.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, on Daggett Ave. . . .
Daggett Ave. Cafe, another grassroots creative effort, started around 1990 — on, you guessed it, Daggett Ave. in Vineyard Haven, where a friend of musician/artist/eventual web designer Heather Goff was living at the time. As a single mom with a very young child, Heather usually couldn’t go out at night, so she invited creative friends over to entertain each other. By the time I learned of it, it had outgrown the friend’s living room. Most of the ones I attended took place downstairs at the Vineyard Playhouse, emceed by Helen Stratford, but before it moved to the Playhouse at least one Daggett Ave., maybe more, happened in the amazing great hall at Fourway on Franklin Street. It included not only poetry and music but dance and video — I distinctly remember Michael Johnson wheeling in a TV on a cart to show video.
Not all is lost (but things have changed)
Despite the devastation wrought by astronomical real estate prices, the consequent exodus of so many younger people from the Vineyard, and the fact that those who remain are often working two or three jobs and have little time to volunteer, there are signs that the grassroots music and arts scene is reviving, thanks in significant measure to nonprofit support and private funding. Circuit Arts, based at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury, is the relatively new umbrella organization drawing together several arts groups, including the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, the M.V. Children’s Theater Camp (a direct descendant of the Children’s Theatre started by Mary Payne), and Circuit Films.
Another new nonprofit, Stillpoint, got the go-ahead earlier this year to convert a West Tisbury barn into a multi-purpose community gathering place.
Wintertide never seriously sought foundation or corporate funding. It might have survived if it had, but for Tony that was out of the question: it would have meant giving up too much control. It’s just about impossible to imagine a seat-of-the-pants operation like Wintertide getting off the ground today, funded entirely by “sweat equity” and with none of the financial kind. But sweat equity magnified by generous donors and professional know-how? It seems to be having an effect.
Notes
[i] The fledgling Martha’s Vineyard Times, about which more later, was free, which the island’s other weekly, the Vineyard Gazette, was not. Everyone agreed that the Gazette had better photographs, but it was also Edgartown-centric and oriented to “the summer people,” neither of which applied to me, and besides, I was looking for island news, not pictures.
[ii] An infuriatingly inaccurate Martha’s Vineyard Patch story from 2012 suggests that we weren’t the only ones who conflated Tony and Wintertide: Tony did too.
Where to begin? The family I grew up in had upper-crusty antecedents on both sides — New England on my father’s side, Virginia/Maryland/New England on my mother’s — but we looked middle/upper-middle class. My father was an architect. My mother didn’t work outside the home while my brothers, sister, and I were growing up. She talked with such evident longing about having done summer stock theater after WWII (during which she was in the SPARs, the women’s unit of the Coast Guard Reserve) that when I first read Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night my senior year of high school, I connected her instantly with Mary Tyrone, who clings to a belief that she could have been a concert pianist if only she hadn’t got married.
I’ve carried this copy with me since my senior year of high school.
That was not the only connection between my mother and Mary Tyrone: the latter was addicted to morphine, while my mother’s drug of choice was alcohol. She didn’t stop drinking till after a family intervention when I was in my mid-40s. As a teenager I was deep down convinced that if I drank, I would become an alcoholic too. So I didn’t drink.
In my mid-teens, however, I started eating compulsively. Between the beginning and end of junior year I gained 40 pounds and was totally oblivious till spring weigh-in in gym class. It took several years before I intuited the connection. Nancy Friday’s book My Mother, My Self came out in 1977, the same year I did, in case I needed any encouragement.
Alcoholism was no secret in lesbian and gay communities. For many years, lesbian and gay life had revolved around bars, but even in the late ’70s, when we were conscientiously creating “chem-free” spaces and events, it was impossible to avoid. By the early ’80s we were arguing about ways to deal with it. In the feminist and lesbian circles I moved in by then, the 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon was suspect from the get-go for its heavily patriarchal Christian God orientation. I didn’t know how to go about finding meetings that welcomed gay men, lesbians, and/or feminists. Coming up with effective alternatives, however, was a challenge.[1]
Among the first things I did when I landed on Martha’s Vineyard was go looking for a 12-Step program. They weren’t hard to find: both weekly papers included lists of meetings for several programs, mainly AA, Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and Overeaters Anonymous (OA). That first fall I attended a couple of Al-Anon meetings. Most of the attendees were women with alcoholic husbands or ex-husbands. I was a lesbian who had grown up with an alcoholic mother but had left home a long time ago. They were dealing with day-in-day-out reality; I was dealing with patterns rooted in the past.
Since food was obviously my drug of choice, I tried a couple of OA meetings. At the time the few OA options on the Vineyard followed the “Grey Sheet” plan, which looked like, and indeed was, a diet. Not what I was looking for. I wanted to deal with the compulsion part, not control the calories I was taking in.
Then I found an Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) 12-Step meeting in the doctors’ wing of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. There I found my tribe. I kept coming back. I was asked to lead the fourth meeting I ever attended. I didn’t realize at the time that this was highly unusual. Leading the meeting was Mary Payne, who was sure not only that the newcomer was, like her, a lesbian but that she would come out if she had to introduce herself. She had my number: I was and I did. On the Vineyard in the mid to late ’80s, gay men and lesbians lived mostly under the public radar. We knew each other, but no one was, as they say, “flaunting it.” This was my invitation. A door opened up. I walked through it, not knowing what the reaction would be. The reaction in that ACA meeting was pretty much “No big deal” and “Keep coming back.”
Along with being the chair of that particular meeting, Mary (1932–1996), the founding director of Island Theatre Workshop (ITW), was frequently described as “a dynamo.” This is 100% accurate. She was under five feet tall but had the presence and impact of a six-footer. AA’s 11th Tradition says that “our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion.” Mary’s PR policy was the exact opposite: she was a tireless promoter, and in her worldview the overlap between theater and recovery was significant. Come by the theater — Katharine Cornell Theatre, “KC” as I soon learned to call it — during a rehearsal, said Mary. ITW was rehearsing Molière’s The Miser. I could help with PR. (This was probably my introduction to the Tisbury Printer, which printed all of ITW’s posters and programs.)
This T isn’t a T at all — it’s got a collar — and it predates my involvement with ITW, but it’s the only ITW shirt I’ve got.
I hadn’t done theater since high school, but over the years I’d often been at least on the peripheries of the performing arts, especially music. Hallowmas, my D.C. writers’ group, had given public readings. I was tempted, but I was also terrified. I envisioned the theater as a cavernous space with tiny figures at the far end, none of whom I recognized and none of whom noticed me.
When I finally mustered the nerve to walk up the outside stairs and open the door for real, what I saw was a cozy, even intimate space, flooded with light from tall multi-paned windows on both sides. Between the windows were four giant murals, two on each wall, depicting scenes from island history and island life.[2] In the mid-1980s the seats were covered in a green vinyl that could emit a sound like flatulence if you changed position. They’ve long since been replaced by a textured blue fabric that remains blessedly silent.
The front of the house, just in front of the proscenium stage, was bustling with activity. Rehearsals usually had two or three dogs in attendance: Mary’s Schipperke, Jenny; Nancy Luedeman’s Lhasa Apso, Featherbell; and Lee Fierro’s Meggie, who was larger than the other two but not by much. Dogs were of course verboten in KC, and equally of course Mary and company ignored the prohibition.
You’ve seen this shirt before, but some shirts keep coming back.
I was quickly hooked. Mary was impossible to say no to, but the reasons for “yes” were compelling. I was still getting my bearings on the Vineyard, still half thinking that I was just here for a year, and here, abracadabra, was a ready-made multigenerational circle of interesting friends and acquaintances, quite a few of whom were lesbian or gay. I got included in potlucks, holiday gatherings, and birthday parties. I got part-time jobs and house-sitting gigs through theater connections. On solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days — the sacred days between the solstices and equinoxes: Samhain (Hallowmas), Brigid (Candlemas), Beltane (May Eve), and Lammas — Mary often hosted witchy celebrations in her living room.
Not surprisingly, all this theatrical ferment affected my writing. I set aside the novel I thought I’d come to the Vineyard to write. What came out of my pen and my brand-new computer was poetry, along with reviews and occasional essays for the lesbian and feminist publications I hadn’t quite left behind. My two first stage-managing gigs, first of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play and then of Medea, inspired work that I’m still proud of, including “The Assistant Stage Manager Addresses Her Broom After a Performance of Macbeth” (see below). I was giving readings and sometimes hosting an open-mic poetry night at Wintertide Coffeehouse (you’ll hear more about Wintertide in a future post). “MacPoem,” as I came to call it, was my favorite performance piece.
Step 2 of the 12-Step Program: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Theater was part of that power for me. While growing up, I had associated theater with addiction, so it was wildly appropriate that it become part of my recovery. Mary’s approach was, to say the least, unorthodox, but it worked.
Notes
[1] This was what prompted me in the early 1990s to write a series of columns for the feminist wiccan journal Of a Like Mind, on working the steps from a pagan/feminist perspective. In keeping with the 11th and 12th Traditions, these were bylined “A Pagan Twelve-Stepper.” They were popular enough to be collected into a pamphlet, which I’ve still got a copy of.
[2] Before long I learned they’d been painted by Stan Murphy (1922–2003), the eminent Vineyard artist.
* * * * *
the assistant stage manager addresses her broom after a performance of “macbeth”
Who am I? Let me tell you what I do. Within these walls I manage time and space, make sure the pitcher’s on its hook before its bearer wants it, warn the messenger he’s on soon, check to see his torch is lit and that the backstage lights are out. Right now I’m cleaning up debris from this night’s show. Is this a dagger I see before me? It is, but split in pieces. I’m the one who tapes it back together after hours. Tomorrow night this plastic dagger turns to steel, honed sharp enough to pierce a haunch of gristly meat — or Duncan’s royal breast. Before each show I sweep the stage. I see green needles strewn where Birnam Wood has come to rest the night before. I shiver, chilled, as if I’d slept and woken centuries hence with all my friends and family dead. And then I sweep them all away. “Out, out, damn trees!” I cry, “You haven’t come here yet! Begone!”
Here, separate ages stream like shimmering strands in one great waterfall, and time dissolves. Mere mortals we, what havoc do we wreak? Elizabethan Shakespeare conjured up Macbeth, medieval Scottish thane, and we invoke them both, in nineteen eighty-six. I watch the people enter, choose their seats, and rustle through their programs. Normal folk, it seems, and yet this gentle summer night they’ve purchased tickets to a barren heath, a draughty castle primed for treachery. Right now the lights are up, the theatre walls are strong, the windows fixed within their frames. At eight o’clock the howling winds begin, the wolves close in, the sturdy walls are gone. These common folk, I wonder, have they bought enough insurance? Have they changed their bills for gold and silver coin? If challenged by a kilted swordsman, how would they explain their strangely tailored clothes?
No loyal lord or rebel threatens me. Between the worlds, or through this velvet curtain, I can move at will. I warn the sound technician, “Ten more minutes,” then I pass backstage to say, “The house is filling up.” The Scottish king is drinking ginger ale; a prince-to-be in chino slacks is looking for his plaid. The Thane of Glamis is pacing back and forth, preoccupied with schemes to win the crown, or trouble with his car. I prowl backstage, alert for things and people out of place. Last night I found a missing messenger outside the theatre, smoking cigarettes. I called him back in time: Macbeth’s bold wife demanded news — What is your tidings?; he was there to gasp, The king comes here tonight!
No phone lines run to Inverness, no news at six o’clock. (Walter MacCronkite’s face appears and says that base Macdonwald’s head was nailed upon the wall, that Cawdor’s fled and Glamis has been promoted; polls predict he might go higher still.) The kingdom’s nerves are messengers who run from king to thane to lady. Take the Thane of Ross, who comes to tell his cousin that her husband’s flown to England, leaving her unguarded; then he takes himself abroad, to where Macduff and other rebel lords are planning war. Macduff’s unguarded lady fares less well. A breathless runner pleads, “Be not found here; hence, with your little ones!” but on his heels come murderers, death-arrows from the king. Two sons, a daughter, and their mother die with piercing shrieks that vibrate in my spine.
With piercing shrieks vibrating in my spine, I contemplate a different line of work; this sending harmless people to their deaths is bad for my digestion, and what’s more, it’s happening much too often. First I let King Duncan in, and he gets killed in bed. Could I have known so soon that Cawdor’s heart was rotten? No. But shortly after, I send scoundrels to the banquet hall; Macbeth himself has called them. Not the kind of guest that Duncan entertained! And then I tell Macbeth’s friend Banquo and his son it’s time to join the party. What about the thieves I know are lurking on the gate road, dressed to kill? But Banquo is a fighting man, well-armed, and Fleance does escape. Not so Macduff’s fair lady, and her kids. Could I prevent their deaths? What if I plied the brutes with Scotch? They might get drunk enough to lose their maps, or drop their knives, or fall asleep. What if I whispered in the lady’s ear, “Don’t go outside today — and bar the doors.”
I doubt she’d pay attention. Each one goes to meet the dagger destined for his breast. Perhaps I’d get my point across if I could speak in rhyme and paradox, the way the witches do, with fair is foul, and foul is fair. The witches manage time and space like me; you could call me the unseen witch. I wonder, are they working from a script? You’ll see: the second sister sweeps the stage as I do, clearing them the space they need to cast their circles. We both summon kings and apparitions out of time, although our methods differ some. “You enter soon,” I warn, “stage right.” Mundane, compared to how my sisters work, with Double, double, toil and trouble, cauldron, fire, and lengthy list of weird ingredients — the eye of newt and toe of frog, the blood of sow that ate her piglets — but we get the same results. Our audience is moved to awe, and then proceeds along its merry way to rendez-vous with fate, or Birnam Wood, or man not born of woman. They get blamed for it. I don’t.
The witches disappear, and one last time prince Malcolm calls his kin to see him crowned at Scone. The set is struck, costumes returned to cardboard boxes, wooden banquet bowls and Scottish flag to rightful owners; kings go home to mow the lawn or fix the car. Where did the blasted heath go off to? I am leaning on my broom again. What stays when all the parts spin off? Just memories of daggers, prophecies, and anguished screams? The air still tingles here. The gates remain but smaller, well concealed. I might reach in and conjure back that knife, that messenger. “There’s knocking at the gate,” the lady says, “Give me your hand! What’s done cannot be undone.” To bed, she says. To bed, to bed, to bed.
I don’t remember how I found my first winter rental — Linda, my father’s former girlfriend, probably had something to do with it — but it couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a walk-up a stone’s throw from Five Corners, the heart of Vineyard Haven, and the main room’s picture window looked out on Vineyard Haven harbor. I could tell time by the arrival and departure of the ferries.
My apartment had no lock on the outside door so there were no keys. It didn’t lock from the inside either. This was so unimaginably different from my D.C. life that I wrote a sestina about it. You’ll find it at the end of this post.
My end of the little parking area was dominated by the busy Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway next door. It was hard to park anywhere without blocking someone in. Since everyone’s keys were invariably in the ignition, getting unblocked usually didn’t take long.
The Beach Road end of the parking area belonged to the health food store next door (where the Martha’s Vineyard Times has been located since the fall of 1991 — much more about that later). The owner would place a flyer on the windshield of any vehicle that blocked one of his customers: offenders were threatened with being beaten with a carrot.
My apartment came with one parking space, at the foot of the semi-enclosed outside stairs. Parking space, you ask? What use had carless I for a parking space? Linda had a hand in that too. She lived in England during the off-season, so she gave me the use of her 1980 Subaru. All I had to do was take care of basic maintenance and let her grown kids, who all lived Stateside, use it when they were on the island. For someone who for years had gotten around by bike, bus, or subway or on foot, this was a windfall.
It was also a learning experience. The very first morning in my new digs, I came out to discover that one of my gift car’s tires was flat. I’d never changed a tire in my life. OK, I thought, the car can just sit there till Linda comes back in the spring.
Fortunately Courtesy Motors was then located right across the street. Owner Larry Conroy did not treat me like an idiot female, which is what I was feeling like. He lent me an air can, showed me how to use it, and, when I’d inflated the flat and driven round to the back of the shop, put the spare on. He’s been my mechanic ever since. Well, OK, his son Jesse is now running the shop, which relocated quite a few years ago to the outskirts of town.
I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to start from scratch in a new place. I’d saved enough to live on for a year if I was frugal, so I didn’t even have a job to organize my new life around. The only year-round Vineyarder I knew lived up-island and wasn’t especially social.
By the early 1990s, this very, very old Black Dog T had been supplanted by the ubiquitous, iconic Black Dog shirt (and sweatshirt and mug, etc.). I don’t have one of those, but I do have two parodies. They’ll be along later. This shirt claims to be a large. That’s a crock. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to fit into it.
Being an early riser, I took to walking around the corner to the Black Dog Bakery each morning for coffee and a raisin bran muffin. After a few days or maybe weeks of this, a bakery worker would recognize me in line, bring me my usual, and take my money. Maybe I belonged here after all?
But what to do after I’d finished my coffee? Before I left D.C., I had started writing what I thought would be a novel about a woman, roughly my age but a graphic designer, who on impulse had moved from D.C. to Martha’s Vineyard to manage a small horse farm that belonged to a family friend. I planned to work on that, but writing 24/7 was not in the cards, and though I do pretty well with solitude, I am not a hermit.
Once I was actually living on the Vineyard, I realized I didn’t know half enough about the place to write a novel about it. What I wrote those first few years was mostly poetry, and book reviews and other nonfiction for feminist publications I already had a connection with: Sojourner, off our backs, Hot Wire, Feminist Bookstore News . . .
I went looking for connections to my D.C. life: singing, bookselling, and, of course, women. If I wanted to keep singing, it seemed I had to join a church choir. No way was I going to attend a church service every Sunday: I put singing on hold.
I struck out with bookselling too: Bunch of Grapes was interested, but only if I would sign on full-time — and they only paid $4/hour, which would go up to $4.25 after a trial period. At Lammas, a comparatively shoestring operation, I’d been making $5/hour, my health insurance was paid for, and the owner paid herself the same amount she paid me. This was clearly not the case at Bunch of Grapes. Eventually I was going to have to buy a car, and I couldn’t see that happening on $4.25 an hour.
I like this shirt a lot even though I had no connection with the original shop. I am a longtime fantasy & science fiction nut, however, and this is one of only two brown T-shirts in my 200+ collection. Why is brown so rare?
Unicorn Tales, which had recently changed hands and would soon be renamed Bickerton & Ripley, never responded to my application, even though my résumé made it clear that I had serious bookselling experience. The new owners were a lesbian couple who may have thought they were in the closet (no one else did). Did they pass over my résumé because “feminist” and “lesbian” were all over it? Maybe they just mislaid it, or weren’t looking for help.
In my D.C. world, “feminist” and “lesbian” overlapped so often I thought they were practically synonymous. Martha’s Vineyard showed me that they weren’t. Women of all ages dressed casual, often in jeans and flannel shirts. To my urban eye, they looked like dykes — until I noticed the wedding rings. I made the connection: many of the lesbians I knew in D.C. and elsewhere, including me, had emigrated from small towns and rural areas because coming out in our hometowns was difficult if not dangerous. Maybe all the Vineyard dykes had left town.
In my wanderings I paid particular attention to bulletin boards, which is how almost everything from special events to Help Wanted got advertised. Here’s my recollection of how I made the connection that played a huge role in my decision to stay on the Vineyard, or at least my decision not to leave just yet. It rings true enough, but is it?
What I spotted was a small announcement that some women were organizing a program on women’s rights for a meeting of the M.V. League of Women Voters. The League was barely on my radar, voting wasn’t a priority, but women? That was a serious draw. I called the number and got roped into the planning of what turned out to be a panel discussion at Katharine Cornell Theatre (remember that name — it will come up again).
Of what we said or how it was received I have zero recollection, but it turned out that the core organizers were not only League members; they were also part of an informal women’s group that had been meeting regularly for some time. As far as they were concerned, the two of us “outsiders” who’d helped with the planning were now part of the group. They asked us to join them. Both of us did.
This is from 1995, but it includes several members of the women’s group that I became part of in (I think) 1986.1995 was the League of Women Voters’ 75th birthday year. We marched as part of the League contingent in the Fourth of July parade. From left: Carol Koury, me, Patty Blakesley, and Ann Hollister.
This, I came to realize, was what feminist organizing looked like on Martha’s Vineyard. All of the other women were straight, several were divorced, and the husbands of those who had them were generally in the background. For about ten years they were my Vineyard lifeline. Two of the group were full-time teachers, another was a therapist, yet another worked for one of the island towns. Year-round island life was far more complex than I’d realized as an occasional summer visitor.
The Key Sestina
My city apartment needed four keys, the mailbox a fifth. Two for each of two jobs, and a tenth for my bicycle chain. A fine rattle they made, a heavy weight in my pocket. There was one key whose lock I’d forgotten. I would not throw it out.
My island friend spends the whole day out, leaves her door open, needs only the keys to her car. My new apartment won’t lock from the inside; I still sleep well. Here too my ten-speed bike leans against the wall, wait- ing for me, sheltered from rain, but not chained.
It’s strange at first, leaving padlock and chain behind, stopping by my friend’s when she’s out to use her phone. I miss the clanking weight in my pack, the rattling of all those keys. Each of them meant commitment, access to home, store, office, women’s center, all locked
against the untrusted. I knew that locks won’t stop everybody. The severed chain remains; the bike is gone. In less than two months my house was robbed three times. We were out at work, we’d locked the doors, we had our keys; the burglar had none but he didn’t wait
for us. Perhaps it’s only custom’s weight that makes a barrier of a door that’s locked. When my mother drank, I’d hide her car keys, not knowing she had a duplicate chain. Once in a muted rage I put them out in plain sight. Did I want her dead? or to
end my responsibility? These two options nag twenty years later, their weight unsettled. I visit, after years out of New England, her house, whose door is locked always. My mother from her extra chain detaches and gives me a front door key.
Says the keeper’s jangling chain, “Just wait, I can split the world in two: danger locked out, comfort kept in — or vice versa.”
I’d been writing for publication for several years before I decided that I needed something more. I was well enough educated, but as a writer I was largely self-taught. I belonged to Hallowmas Women Writers, a group of D.C. poets and writers that I’d helped form. It was a lifeline to my writer self, its members were doing interesting work, but all of us were engaged in other activities and I was discontented with the feedback I was giving as well as getting. As a fledgling editor, I’d benefited tremendously from working alongside someone who knew a lot more than I did and was willing to share. Were there comparable opportunities out there for women writers?
off our backs carried ads for the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops (FW3), a 10-day live-in workshop held every summer in upstate New York. Founder-director Beverly Tanenhaus’s book about the workshops, To Know Each Other and Be Known (Motheroot Publications), came out in 1982. Lammas must have carried it, I must have noticed it, but I don’t think I’d actually read it. My copy has “July 1986” written under my name on the title page, which suggests I acquired it at the workshop that year.
I sent for the workshop brochure on February 5, 1984. Tuition, room, and board was $475, $425 if you applied by March 15. Could I afford it? Could I get 10 days off from Lammas in the middle of July? Where the hell was Ithaca, and how would I get there? I didn’t own a car, and my grasp of upstate New York geography was hazy.
Scariest of all, was I really ready? I didn’t know anyone who’d attended the workshop and could assure me that I wouldn’t be in over my head. The biggest risks I’d taken, like moving back to D.C., applying for that editorial job at the Red Cross, and becoming the book buyer at Lammas, had all turned out well. What if this one didn’t?
I sent in my deposit in time to get the early bird discount. My welcome letter from the director was dated March 16. The stars aligned, the logistics worked out, and I arrived by bus in Ithaca on July 15.
To say that the workshop was life-changing is both a cliché and an understatement. Our introductory session that first night opened with a recording from the first FW3 in 1975, of Adrienne Rich’s prose poem “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” This was already, and has been ever since, the closest thing I have to a bible. It’s about the importance of telling the truth to each other (and, by extension, to ourselves). What better way to challenge us as writers?
Me on the boathouse balcony just outside our meeting room. Probably 1987.
Our morning class sessions were held in the second floor of the Wells College boathouse, with Cayuga Lake glittering out the window and lapping gently at the shoreline. Each morning, an hour was devoted to the work of each of two participants. Copies had been distributed the previous day, and all of us came prepared. The guidelines: Comments were to be directed to the director, or to each other — not to the writer. The writer’s job was to listen until everyone had spoken, then respond at the end of the discussion. The power of 18 women focusing entirely on my work, taking it seriously for a solid, animated hour, was a revelation. So was the challenge of being one of the 18 women giving feedback to another writer, overriding the voices in my head whispering things like What if I’m wrong? What if I’m missing something? What if this isn’t all that important?
The rest of the day was open. Most of us gathered for meals in the cafeteria — the luxury of not having to prepare our own meals wasn’t lost on any of us — but the rest of the time we went our own occasionally intersecting ways in ones, twos, and threes, walking in the woods, swimming in the lake, writing in our rooms, sitting under a tree or by the lake to write or read.
During the week groups of us took field trips to the National Women’s Rights Historical Park at Seneca Falls, which had opened only two years before, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame, or into Ithaca, to hang out at Smedley’s, the feminist bookstore (proprietor Irene Zahava had been a workshop participant in the past and has edited many, many anthologies of women’s writing over the years), and of course to eat at least once at Moosewood Restaurant.
Poet-novelist Marge Piercy was the guest writer that year, in residence for a couple of days. We also heard from Elaine Gill, co-principal of Crossing Press, then located in nearby Trumansburg, and Nancy Bereano, who had edited Crossing’s Feminist Series and was just then establishing her own Firebrand Books, which quickly became a major player in the feminist print world.
As the re-entry meeting began on the last night of the workshop, I was feeling sad and euphoric, hopeful and apprehensive all at once. We had created magic; would I ever see these women again? As a writer I felt validated and capable; could I maintain my momentum when I got back to D.C.? We went round the circle, each woman sharing what she was going back to and what she was taking home with her. All of us had taken to heart the words of Adrienne Rich at our very first meeting: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
Almost all of us, as it turned out. About two-thirds of the way around the circle, the workshop blew up. There were four lesbians at the workshop that year, of whom I was one. At the re-entry meeting, the other three charged the rest of us with making them feel unwelcome. They didn’t target me specifically — they didn’t target anyone, and were rather short on specific examples — but I was undeniably on the wrong side of a lesbian-straight split.
After the instigators left the room, most of the rest of us came together to talk about what had happened. We shared our immediate reactions. Most of us tried to identify what we had done to make the three women feel unwelcome. As the only lesbian in the circle at that point, I said I hadn’t felt unwelcome at all. I was a little surprised by this, because I was no stranger to the tensions that sometimes arose between lesbians and straight women in feminist spaces.
The D.C. lesbian feminist community and the national Women in Print network had become my home in a way that my growing-up home wasn’t. They were where and how and why I became a writer: developing my skills, giving me no end of things to observe and think and write about, seeing my words in print, and providing an audience (which I was also part of). So though I did spend time with the other lesbians at the workshop, hanging out with them wasn’t a priority. Connecting with sister writers was. Being taken seriously as a writer was.
Our shared effort that night to come to grips with what had just happened, speaking first-person and from the heart, was rare in my experience — so rare that in the months that followed I wrote a 6,000-word essay (never published) about the workshop experience. I still have the copy I shared with another workshop participant, with her extensive and thoughtful comments on it: she agreed with some of my points, challenged others (sometimes strenuously), and expanded my perceptions of what had happened.
I was willing then, and I’m willing now, to believe that the other three lesbians had experienced lesbophobia at the workshop, even though I had not. My problem then and now was with how they chose to bring it up, starting with the timing. The second-to-last night of the workshop had been devoted to a “creative bitching” session. We talked about what worked at the workshop and what could be improved in the future. Rather than bring their issues up then, the three chose to bring up their complaints at the re-entry session, our last time together as a group. Everyone would be leaving the next day. The three timed their confrontation so they wouldn’t have to deal with its consequences, or even see any of us face-to-face again. Then they walked away from the possibility of expanding truth to include all of us.
In an article about FW3 1986 for Hot Wire, the women’s music and culture journal, I wrote: “Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is that inclusion in community here depends largely on a willingness to risk telling and hearing the truth — a willingness that is, not coincidentally, essential for feminist writing” (Hot Wire, March 1987).
I learned later that the main instigator of the confrontation had lobbied for a position as an assistant workshop director for the following year and been turned down. Was revenge at least part of her motive? I suspect so. As it turned out, the director asked me to be one of her assistants the next year, which enabled me to attend the workshop free of charge. Of course I accepted, and continued as an assistant through 1987. By the summer of 1988 I’d been hired as proofreader at the Martha’s Vineyard Times so taking 10 days off in the middle of July was out of the question.
I still have that amulet bag, but my amulet has long since lost its purple. Tina M., if you read this, I remember you!
Before I left for my annual end-of-summer visit to the Vineyard in 1984, my first workshop year, a crafty (in more ways than one) member of Hallowmas Women Writers gave me an amulet bag she’d crocheted for me. For a while I wore that amulet bag around my neck with nothing in it. Then while I was walking on South Beach one afternoon an oblong bit of white-and-purple clam shell caught my eye. Into the amulet bag it went. When I returned to D.C., I wore it everywhere.
For a long time I liked to attribute my decision to move to Martha’s Vineyard to that amulet. There was, need I say, more to it. For years the lesbian feminist community and my writing had fed each other, confirmed each other, formed a dynamic whole. In the early ’80s fissures were growing just below the surface. In the early to mid 1980s AIDS, a barely identified syndrome with a dismal prognosis, was devastating the gay male community. Meanwhile, the lesbian community was polarizing around the so-called sex wars. The front lines included pornography and s/m, which one side saw as irredeemably misogynist and the other as liberating. Women I knew and admired were on both sides; the accusations were ugly and loud. As a writer I felt caught in a middle that was critical of both factions and wasn’t being heard. Did that middle even exist?
My experience at the 1984 Feminist Women’s Writing Workshop helped clarify and focus my uneasiness. If the community of lesbians and the community of writers diverged, my path would lie with the writers.
Looking back later, I realized that my urge to “get out of Dodge” had plenty to do with the Reagan administration, which altered the feel of D.C. whether you had any connection to the federal government or not. In July 1985, I left D.C. with all my belongings in a rental truck, deposited them in the basement of my parents’ home in the Boston suburbs, returned to the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops for my first year as an assistant director, and by the end of the month was more or less living on Martha’s Vineyard.
Sorry, we had a little hiatus here. I’m blaming it on the blizzard. It was pretty impressive as Vineyard blizzards go — you can see some photos in my Vineyard blog here — but it’s nearly all gone now. So back to work . . .
Long, long before social media, we had memes. We didn’t call them “memes” because the word meant something different then (“an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” says Merriam-Webster) and was too esoteric to be heard often in general conversation. But memes in the social-media sense (“an amusing or interesting item [such as a captioned picture or video] or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media”)?
We had those for sure. We shamelessly took quotations from famous people, often out of context, and spread them widely on T-shirts and posters.
Here’s an example:
Emma Goldman was an anarchist, intellectual, activist, and women’s rights supporter of the sort I admire but have my reservations about. I wouldn’t have wanted to sit down with Emma Goldman for fear that she would talk me into doing something I didn’t really want to do. She was almost certainly an accessory in her lover Alexander Berkman’s attempt to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick — something like that.
So the idea that the fearsome Emma Goldman loved to dance — well, that was irresistible. I loved to dance, though I recoiled at having a male lover or indulging in assassination. My experience in the antiwar movement had pretty much inoculated me against male-lefty adventurism — but Emma, unlike the male lefties, understood that women were oppressed and incorporated that into her analysis.
Getting deported at the end of 1919 by the likes of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, who was then at the head of what eventually became the FBI, was a big plus.
Short version: I liked the T-shirt.
Thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web, I just turned up a 1991 article by Alix Kates Shulman about how this T-shirt came about. (Shulman clearly had the same version I do.) For the TL:DR crowd (don’t worry, I sympathize), the short version is that there’s no evidence that Emma Goldman ever said “If I can’t dance . . .” in so many words. The story does include an anecdote from her autobiography, Living My Life, that suggests Emma might have been OK with it. Confronted by “a young boy” who rebuked her, saying that “it did not behoove an agitator to dance,” she explains her response:
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.
I would not have liked to be that kid facing the wrath of Emma.
So I wear my vintage meme with pride, and honor Emma Goldman as a foremother, even as I find her more than a little bit scary.
December got away from me, as it often does, but I’m back! My last few posts have focused on music, and this one does too.
I was down to the last two music-related T-shirts from my D.C. days and couldn’t figure out how to tie them together. Should each one maybe get its own short post?
Me in my Ladyslipper T in 2021. This design was “vintage” by the time I acquired it, probably after I started working at Lammas.. It’s unusual in my collection both for its long sleeves and its French cut. The long sleeves mean it gets worn regularly in spring and fall.
Then I got it: These two Ts, one from Ladyslipper Music and one from Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music & Culture, both represent the national and international aspect of women’s music, but I had an up-close-and-personal relationship with both of them. I contributed a couple of articles to Hot Wire, including the one about the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus. At Lammas, I shared the upstairs office with Flo Hollis, a full-time Ladyslipper staffer, Lammas owner-manager Mary Farmer was a Ladyslipper distributor, and the code for the Lammas alarm system was Ladyslipper’s PO box number: 3124.
Turns out there was another close connection. Hot Wire has made all 30 of the issues it published between November 1984 and September 1995 available for free as downloadable PDFs, but rather than search each one for articles about Ladyslipper — I was 100% certain they had to have published at least one — I Googled. Imagine my surprise when the story I turned up had been written by me.
OMG. Turned out the date in that citation, May 1985, was wrong — Hot Wire didn’t publish an issue that month — but another reference to the same article had the correct date, March 1985. I downloaded the whole issue and read my own words from almost 37 years ago.
From Hot Wire, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 1985)
No question, it sounds like me. Many of the details came roaring back from my memory; others I’d never forgotten. Some of it I had no recollection of at all. What impresses me the most going on four decades later is the account of how the Ladyslippers dealt with a complete communications breakdown among the three full-time staff members in the winter of 1982–83. “What often happens in such situations,” I wrote, “is that one person leaves, and the level of tension drops for a while.” But at Ladyslipper, as staffer Sue Brown noted, “everyone was too stubborn to leave.”
So they went into counseling as a group. As I wrote, “They were not prepared for the speed and intensity with which issues came to the surface.” In retrospect, Liz Snow described the experience as “shocking.” They continued in counseling for “about ten months.” No one abandoned ship. Ladyslipper did not fall apart; it continued to develop as a major force in the women’s music and culture scene for as long as there was one.
By then I’d had plenty of experience with groups that foundered on their inability and/or unwillingness to work things through. I’d left the Women’s Center collective because the group dynamics were driving me crazy and I had no idea what to do about it. So Ladyslipper’s example was an inspiration: with hard work and, most likely, some help from the outside, we could get through the rough places.*
Fans of Dykes To Watch Out For will immediately recognize the image as the work of Alison Bechdel, who went on to international fame as the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home and other works. We really did know her when.
Which brings me back to those 30 issues of Hot Wire, all available for free download. What a treasure! They’re indispensable, sure, for anyone interested in the stars and rising stars of the women’s music scene of the 1980s and ’90s, but note how many articles are devoted to how-tos and behind-the-scenes movement building. We were starting from scratch in those days, pretty much building the plane as we were flying it, because there were so few experts to learn from.
At the same time, we knew we hadn’t come out of nowhere. Enough others had tended enough fires to leave sparks. It’s a relief to know that the fires are still being tended, and the sparks are still out there, like fireflies on a summer night.
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notes
* I don’t need to say (do I?) that these problems are not unique to feminist groups. After I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, I found no shortage of examples of groups that either fell apart or drove some of their most valuable members out. Not infrequently those who left would start a new group whose purpose duplicated or overlapped with the old. When the Vineyard finally discovered AIDS, around 1990, it became apparent that various complementary organizations either weren’t aware of or weren’t on speaking terms with each other. More about that later.
The story behind this one starts way, way back, long before I moved to D.C. the first time.
My family wasn’t especially musical. My maternal grandmother played the piano by ear, which I thought was cool, but unless Granmummie was visiting,[1] what music there was in our household came via records and the radio.
Not to discount the importance of records, however: When I left for college, I absconded with my father’s Joan Baez album, her first. I didn’t need to take his Tom Lehrer LPs — Lehrer’s first, the one whose cover featured a caricature of the pianist as the devil surrounded by the red flames of hell (see below), and That Was the Year That Was — because most of the songs were embedded in my memory.
I’ve still got that Joan album, and the 10 or so of its successors that I acquired legitimately in the following years, and I still know a ridiculous number of Tom Lehrer songs by heart.[2]
See what I mean? Originally released in 1953, when I was 2.
Like many middle-class-and-up suburban kids my siblings and I took piano lessons with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The teacher wasn’t especially inspired or inspiring. I did learn to read music, but I didn’t learn to pick songs out of the air the way my grandmother did. That was disappointing, but what I didn’t really understand was what all that tedious practice could lead to. If I had, maybe I would have persisted.
Or maybe not.
I did, however, like to sing. Singing was the best part of church, where we went almost every Sunday morning as a family: St. Peter’s Episcopal in Weston, Mass. From fifth grade through eighth I sang alto in the junior choir. After eighth grade, when we aged out of both the junior choir and Sunday school, we could join the adult choir, but the adult choir sang at the 11 a.m. service and my family went to the 9:15. That’s when I left the church.
In my eighth-grade year, Becky B., also an eighth-grader, a soprano who’d been in the choir as long as I had, told me that I always sang off-key. To avoid ruining the anthem, she said, I should just pretend to sing.
No one else — not the choir director/organist, not any other member of the choir, not any of my music teachers in school — had ever told me any such thing. Becky B. didn’t like me and I didn’t like her; she was a goody-two-shoes who was always playing up to the adults. But I feared she was right, that I had been found out.
Somehow I made it through the year. Then I stopped singing. Period. When I entered high school in the fall, the music teacher encouraged me more than once to try out for Glee Club. Since she directed the Glee Club, this should have given me confidence, but it didn’t. I was sure I’d fail and confirm beyond any doubt that Becky B. was right: I couldn’t sing.
It was years before I recognized the pattern: I’d pursue a skill, an instrument, a foreign language — then abandon it when I was on the verge of being able to actually use it. At that point you’re bound to make mistakes. In my family making mistakes got you creamed. My very intelligent and well-read father regularly ridiculed my mother for getting the wrong answer or saying anything he considered stupid. I learned to get my facts straight before I opened my mouth. From an early age I’d been good at words, anything to do with words. I stuck to words, spoken and written, but never sung.
I never stopped listening to music, though, or hanging around people who made music or were somehow in the music biz. Gradually, and usually in fits and starts, I got braver, venturing into territories where I didn’t have all the answers and was bound to make mistakes: taking that first editorial job at the American Red Cross, for instance, or becoming the book buyer at Lammas Bookstore. I did well at both, but note that they both had to do with words: in some ways I was pushing the boundaries of what I was already good at.
The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus was founded in 1978, prompted by a singing workshop led by Holly Near during that year’s Gay Pride celebration. In its early months it was leaderless, with members leading warm-ups and teaching each other songs.
At some point, they decided to engage a director/conductor, and after interviewing several candidates, they hired Deb Weiner. Deb either was already or was soon to become one of my housemates, but this did not prompt me to join the chorus. If anything, it was a deterrent: What if it was your housemate who had to tell you that you couldn’t sing on key and were dragging the group down?
I have an indelible memory of Deb conducting the combined D.C. Area Feminist Chorus and Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington at a holiday concert, in either 1981 or 1982. To be the conductor channeling all that massive sound! I was awed.
How did I come to finally join the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus? Well, I have it on good authority — my own words from 36 years ago — that I set out to write a story about the chorus for Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture “and almost immediately found [my]self singing in the second soprano section.” By then Deb had moved on after several very successful years, Caroline Foty was the chorus director, and I was living on the far northeast fringe of Capitol Hill, subletting a large room from and sharing a kitchen with photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB).
By then, probably in 1984, I had joined the brand-new Gay and Lesbian Chorus of Washington (GLCW). How did I hear about it? I don’t remember. This was a small group, conducted by Tess Garcia, and my most vivid memory was of a performance we gave where Congressman Barney Frank, dressed in a leisure suit, reclined across several chairs in the front row. Most of the homemade cassette tape I have from a June 1985 performance is unplayable, but on the one audible cut, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” we sound pretty good. According to the label, the program also included some P.D.Q. Bach, the spiritual “Soon Ah Will Be Done,” and selections from Annie.
I noted the most striking contrast between my two choruses in that Hot Wire story: “Because the GLCW did not choose to specialize in works by gay or lesbian composers, a chorus member could walk into any music store and be overwhelmed by the available selection.” Not so any Feminist Chorus member: all our music consisted of handwritten scores photocopied or similarly duplicated, because none of it had been published. Director Foty did some of the arranging, and fortunately feminist choruses were thriving at the time, and lots of sharing went on among them through the Sistersingers network. We were breaking ground, pioneers, in the forefront, and very aware of it.
We sang at least two songs from the Balkan women’s singing tradition. I can still fake the second soprano part of “Shto Mi e Milo,” which has been widely recorded.
One of my favorites from the chorus repertoire was a four-part setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Conscientious Objector.” I didn’t realize till about an hour ago not only that Mary Travers had performed it spectacularly, but that she wrote the solo setting and recorded it on her 1972 album Morning Glory.[3] I have a copy of the poem on my fridge: “I shall die / but that is all I shall do for Death . . .” It reminds me of the song.
The chorus made decisions collectively, including decisions about repertoire. “Conscientious Objector” almost didn’t make the cut; that was before I joined, so I don’t know what the objections were. As I recall, a couple of chorus members thought Malvina Reynolds’s “We Don’t Need the Men” was too anti-male. For others among us, this was a plus, not least because it was so tongue-in-cheekily Malvina. It was fun to remind people that Malvina wrote it in 1959.
The most controversial song I remember from my time in the chorus was “Sisters, Spring of Vietnam”; it clearly favored the Vietnamese liberation struggle against the French and the Americans, and that did not sit well with some members. Singing along with Lucha’s version I remember the tune, the harmony, and many of the words, so I’m pretty sure we sang it anyway, but some choristers chose to sit it out.
The back of the 1985 Sisterfire T. The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus is about halfway down.
My last gig with the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus was at Sisterfire, June 22 & 23, 1985. By the end of that summer I was semi-settled on Martha’s Vineyard. Music was much easier to find than feminism, and find it I did, volunteering at Wintertide Coffeehouse starting in 1986.
It took a while to find a way to start singing again. My way in turned out to be the annual Christmas performance of Messiah, sung by a large (and ever growing) pickup chorus of Vineyarders, many of whom sang regularly in various church choirs.
I’d never sung Messiah before, and most of the chorus seemed to know it by heart. More, although I could read music, I couldn’t “sight-sing,” sing from a score on first acquaintance. I still regret not having the nerve to audition for Glee Club in high school, where everybody learned to do stuff like that. I worked hard, I learned, and when, in my third year, I made it through the glorious “Amen” without losing my place, I thought I’d arrived.
The annual Messiah sings eventually grew into the Island Community Chorus, which did several concerts a year and with which I stayed until around 2005. I’ve managed to keep singing since then. In the age of Covid-19, I’ve participated almost weekly in Zoom sings (Zings?) with Susan Robbins of Libana, a women’s ensemble whose music I’ve loved since at least 1980, and a bunch of whose recordings I’ve got.
But it was the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus that got me singing again, and though I didn’t sing with it for much more than a year, this shirt is about how I found my (singing) voice again.
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notes
[1] Which was fairly often, because she lived only eight miles away.
[2] This is so common among the political circles I’ve moved in over the decades that if I sing or even hum a line, often someone in the vicinity will sing the next one back to me. A favorite memory from my freshman year at Georgetown U.: As a marshal for the huge Mobe (Mobilization Against the War) march on Washington on November 15, 1969, I was stationed on Pennsylvania Ave. between 6th and 7th. We were close enough together that we could reach out and touch our neighbors on either side. It was sunny but bloody cold, and my winter gear was still back in Massachusetts: I had this idea that since D.C. was a southern city I wouldn’t need it till after Thanksgiving. Wrong. Anyway, while waiting for the sun to get fully up and the march to start, we did a lot of jogging in place and making coffee runs to the nearest drugstore. Eventually one of us — maybe me, maybe not — started in on a Tom Lehrer song. No idea which one, so many of them would have been appropriate — maybe “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” with its lines “I’ll watch the guided missiles / while the old FBI watches me”? We were sure the FBI and who knew what other intelligence agencies were around.
[3] My source for this is a detailed bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay on, of all things, the website for the ABC Oriental Rug & Cleaning Company in Ithaca, N.Y. There has to be an interesting story here, but I’ll have to save that rabbit hole for another time. The page seems to be updated regularly: it includes a reference to the ongoing pandemic and other events.
Me looking stern in my 1983 Sisterfire T. The blue hat doesn’t quite work with the shirt and shorts, IMO. 2018 selfie.
Sisterfire is the only women’s music festival I ever attended. Both my T-shirts call it “an open-air celebration of women artists,” so it wasn’t just about music, but music was the main event. I was never seriously tempted by other music festivals, which were proliferating in all parts of the country in the 1980s. Partly it was that, working in a feminist bookstore and living in a lesbian community as I did, I didn’t need to travel to hang out with other dykes. Mostly I wasn’t and never have been comfortable in crowds of people I don’t know.
Even crowds of all women.
Back of the 1985 Sisterfire shirt. Pretty impressive lineup, no? The D.C. Area Feminist Chorus is in the middle, right above Diane Lindsay & Sue Fink.
I have, however, been known to enjoy myself in very large groups if I have a role to play. At Sisterfire I was part of the Lammas/Ladyslipper team, selling mostly records but some books as well. In 1985, the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus, in which I was then singing, was one of the street performers, so you’ll find its name on the back of the Sisterfire shirt for that year. Chorus members performed wearing the chorus’s own shirt, and you bet I’ve still got mine. It’s got its own story to tell and will get to tell it soon.
Me looking less stern and more color-coordinated in my 1985 Sisterfire T. 2018 selfie.
Sisterfire’s other compelling attraction was location: it took place in the close-in D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. It was founded in 1982 by Amy Horowitz and the D.C.-based production company Roadwork, and the T-shirts testify that I was there in 1983 and 1985.
I left town in a U-Haul truck not long after that year’s Sisterfire, which my T-shirt says was on June 22 & 23, but Sisterfire continued into the late ’80s, not without controversy, not least because men could attend. I don’t remember the male presence being distracting or disruptive. On one hot afternoon, I do remember the announcer asking men to keep their shirts on because thanks to local ordinances and conventions women couldn’t take ours off.*
By the early 1980s, Roadwork was, in community terms, a powerhouse, booking national tours for the likes of Sweet Honey in the Rock and Holly Near and producing such standout concerts as the Varied Voices of Black Women (1978) and Cris Williamson’s appearance at Constitution Hall (1980). Naturally we sometimes snarkily referred to it as Roadhog, and a local graphic artist sported a brilliant parody of the 1983 Sisterfire shirt: it looked just like the official one till you realized the letters spelled out SISTERBLITZ.
Equinox Productions was a grassroots women’s production company — “group” is probably a better word, because they were all volunteers — formed to produce gigs too modest to get Roadwork’s attention.
One major benefit of Equinox and similar groups was the opportunity they gave women to develop skills in areas we’d been generally shut out of, like concert production and sound tech. D.C.-based Woman Sound, owned and managed by audio engineer Boden Sandstrom,[1] was a pioneer in the field and highly professional by the time this article appeared in the June 22, 1981, Washington Post.
By the time I moved back to D.C. in 1977, women’s music’s center of gravity — Olivia Records and the recording artists associated with it — had moved to the West Coast, but D.C. still had a thriving local music scene. Food for Thought, a popular vegetarian restaurant on Connecticut Ave., frequently featured live music; performers got paid by passing the hat. At least once singer-songwriter Casse Culver came down from the upstairs dressing room after her set, bandana masking her face like a Wild West bandit, and conducted pass-the-hat as a stickup. You probably couldn’t get away with that now, but at the time it was hilarious.
My favorite local musicians at the time included singer-songwriter Judy Reagan and the blues duo of Abbe Lyons and Cheryl Jacobs. Church basements and college classrooms[2] were popular year-round venues, and music could regularly be heard at rallies, demonstrations, and Gay & Lesbian Pride Day every June.
Sophie’s Parlor, the women’s radio collective’s show on WPFW-FM, was part of the mix, featuring interviews, books, and more as well as music. I’m pretty sure that this shirt was given to me by my Lammas colleague Deb Morris, who continued in the book biz long after I left and with whom (thanks to Facebook) I’m back in touch.
Sophie’s Parlor still has a weekly show on WPFW-FM. Wow. Its Facebook page says it’s “the oldest continuously running women’s music radio collective in the United States,” which is more than remarkable. The FB page also notes that it was founded at Georgetown University in 1972. I dropped out of GU halfway through my junior year, in December 1971; I remained in D.C. for the next few months, but I wasn’t aware of Sophie’s at that time. Next step is to see if I can livestream their weekly show: Wednesdays @ 3 p.m. EST.
I’ve long had a mild hankering to do a radio show — mild enough that I never sought out an opportunity to actually do it, and no opportunity ever presented itself. The closest I ever came was getting to pick what got played on the Lammas record player whenever I was working the floor. (Often I worked upstairs, keeping inventory on 5×8 file cards, one for each title, and placing orders. This was in the pre-digital age.) This was often how customers first heard the latest Cris Williamson or Holly Near, since they weren’t getting airplay in radioland, and of course we took requests. On Valentine’s Day every year I’d play all the shit-kicking anti-love songs I knew of. Favorites included Therese Edell’s “Winter of ’76,” Judy Reagan’s “Dispose of Properly,” and a whole bunch of Willie Tyson songs. Sample:
This is the back cover photo of Judy Reagan’s album Old Friends. I can name at least three-quarters of the women in it. That’s Judy at the top (you probably guessed this already). Photo by Morgan Gwenwald, used with permission.
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Notes
Curious fact: These four music shirts, all from the first half of the 1980s, are all muscle shirts, i.e., sleeveless. What makes this noteworthy is that I have maybe ten muscle shirts total in my extensive collection, and the others vary in subject: one’s goddess-related (you can see it at the bottom of the pagans post), one’s a dragon, and one’s from Smedley’s bookshop in Ithaca, N.Y. (that one will be along shortly), etc. So why (1) are so many of my muscle shirts music-related? and (2) did they go out of fashion?
* For more about Sisterfire’s early years, and why it didn’t happen in 1986, see Nancy Seeger, “Sisterfire: Why Did Roadwork Skip 1986,” Hot Wire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4 (November 1986), p. 28. All of Hot Wire‘s 30 issues are available online as downloadable PDFs. You can find this one here. The story notes that in 1985 a petition opposing Sisterfire circulated in Takoma Park. Reasons included traffic and parking, noise, “the smell of marijuana smoke,” and “some women attending the festival wore no shirts.”
[1] Boden, then going by Barbara, is credited as engineering assistant, to veteran engineer Marilyn Ries, on Casse Culver’s 1976 LP Three Gypsies (Urana Records, founded by Marilyn Ries and K Gardner). The June 1981 WaPo story says that Woman Sound was then coming up on its sixth anniversary, which would have put its founding around the time Three Gypsies was being recorded.
While poking around online (I’ve been doing a lot of that while working on The T-Shirt Chronicles), I came across this tribute by Boden for her friend and mentor Tommy Linthicum, who passed away in 2007. In it she explains how she got into biz: Casse was looking for someone to train to run her sound. They eventually became partners.
[2] Particularly at George Washington University, where Lisa C., the office manager for the Women’s Studies department, was a frequent collaborator for both musical and literary events.
Georgetown University is a Jesuit-run Catholic institution, and when I was there, 1969–1971, Catholic undergraduates were required to take four semesters of theology. Non-Catholics could take theology, but I opted for the alternative requirement, a two-year, four-semester course called Comparative Civilizations, aka “Comp Civ.” This was taught by Father Sebes, a diminutive older Jesuit whose academic background was in Far Eastern studies. The course covered Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Taoism, and might (can’t remember for sure) have included some mention of the various flavors of Christianity. We referred to it as Pagan I and Pagan II.[1]
What was my image of “pagan” at that point? Surely I associated “pagan” with the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome, with the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Julius Caesar. The myths were interesting, but they were “back then,” history, and ancient history at that. Besides, the Christians had vanquished the pagans, right?
That changed big-time when I moved back to D.C. in 1977 and came out into lesbian and feminist communities that had been discussing religion, spirituality, ancient history, and related issues for years, and not with academic detachment either. Paganism, loosely defined or not defined at all, was alive, lively, and everywhere. Interest in Wicca, especially of the women-only Dianic sort, had been growing and deepening for at least a decade. (Diana and her Greek counterpart, Artemis, being the very rare goddesses who had as little to do with men as possible.)
Take Lammas Bookstore, where I quickly became a regular customer and eventually, in 1981, the book buyer. Founded in 1973, Lammas was named for the cross-quarter day between the summer solstice and the fall equinox. Before I moved back to D.C., I doubt I knew what a cross-quarter day was.
Someone must have given this to me, but I can’t remember who. This was a popular slogan. It was guaranteed to piss humorless Christians off.
The triumph of Christianity over paganism, considered a civilizational advance by the winners (surprise surprise), had also marked the “triumph” of a solitary male god over a pantheon that included goddesses as well as gods. As it turned out, over the centuries and millennia the goddesses in those pantheons had been losing power and status to the gods. In the myths I learned growing up, Hera had power but Zeus had more. It had not always been so.
I came to see Mary in a new light, as a vestige of the once powerful goddesses. The relentless male supremacists of the early Christian Church hadn’t been able to stamp her out. They co-opted her instead. Paradoxically enough, the intensely sexist and often misogynist Catholicism I’d encountered at Georgetown had a female side that the Episcopalianism I’d grown up with lacked.
The Christians were adept at co-opting what they couldn’t entirely suppress. Many major Christian holidays piggy-backed (that’s a polite term for it) on the old pagan solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days: Christmas is Yule (winter solstice), Easter (spring equinox), and so on. The pagan year began with Samhain, Halloween, which I like most of my cohort learned about as a kid in single digits.[2] Clearly there was much more to it than trick-or-treating.
Getting ready to pop the cork at a Lammas anniversary celebration. From left: Liz Snow of Ladyslipper, Lammas owner Mary Farmer, me, Tina Lunson (printer), and Deb Morris. Probably 1983.
Lammas celebrated its anniversary every year with champagne and a big sale; the ceiling of the Seventh Street store was cork-pocked from those celebrations. Lesbian households might observe the various pagan/wiccan holidays, and often enough there were well-attended public rituals that featured singing, poetry, and lots of candles. We identified ourselves to each other by the jewelry we wore (pentacles, labryses,[3] goddess figures), the greetings we exchanged, and of course our T-shirts.
Pulling off my shelves the books that I devoured then and haven’t let go of, I can’t help noticing how many were published in 1979, just as my curiosity was flowering:
Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance, which introduced me and countless others to the Wheel of the Year and wiccan rituals
Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, a journalist’s in-depth survey of, as the subtitle put it, “Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today” (an expanded edition was released in 1984)[4]
Merlin Stone’s two-volume Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: Our Goddess and Heroine Heritage, a compilation of goddess stories from every continent inhabited by humans
Part 1 of Z. Budapest’s The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (part 2 came out in 1980)
Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, which explored the early texts that didn’t make it into the Christian canon, in which God was seen as both Mother and Father
JEB’s Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, which includes several witchy photos and witchy quotes
Lunar imagery was everywhere, and lunar calendars were popular. The connection to women’s cycles is not coincidental.
The previous year’s crop is just as impressive. Among the feminist essentials with major pagan connections published in 1978 were Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, and the paperback of Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman.
Considering the time it takes to produce a book-length work, from research and writing through to physically producing it and getting it into the hands of interested readers, it was obvious the cauldron had been bubbling for quite some time.
For women awakening to feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the past looked like a wasteland. But once women got to work researching and revisiting, rethinking and rearranging, the desert bloomed. For us coming of age in the 1960s, ’70s, and into the ’80s, as women’s studies professor Bonnie Morris writes, “It became second nature to have to look hard for lost history.” She compares it to “the upbeat excitement of a fierce girl detective searching for clues.”[5]
Among many other things, we learned that men called women “witches” in order to persecute, prosecute, and not infrequently kill them, and that this often had little or nothing to do with religion. Women who used herbs, touch, and common sense to heal were said to be practicing magic — exercising powers that men didn’t have and didn’t understand. As the male-dominated medical profession rose in influence, female healers were marginalized, their wisdom dismissed as superstition and “old wives’ tales.”[6]
The history that could be documented or otherwise proven beyond reasonable doubt was crucial, but so were the improvisations, the mythmaking and rituals, inspired by it. Some of the most-quoted lines of grassroots feminism came from Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, published in 1969 and translated into English in 1971. They describe pretty well what we were up to: “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
Remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères
NOTES
[1] A Google search just turned up this short Washington Postpiece about the course from 1993. It confirms my memory that Father Sebes’s background was indeed in Far Eastern studies; while living in China from 1940 to 1947, he spent part of the time interned by the Japanese. It disputes my description of him as “older”: born in 1915, he was only a few years older than my parents, who were both born in 1922. The author writes that “Comp Civ” was popularly known as “Buddhism for Baptists,” but I never heard it called that — and why Baptists? I couldn’t have told you which of my non-Catholic classmates came from Baptist households. Protestant denominations were all lumped together as “Other.”
[2] Halloween was also my mother’s birthday. I could tell a few stories about that, but instead I’ll tell one that my mother repeated fairly often. Her father (an embittered, said-to-be-brilliant upper-crusty WASP man) would tell her “You were born on Halloween so you’re a witch. If you’d been born a day later, you would have been a saint.” Nov. 1 being All Saints Day in many Christian calendars. Witches to me were Halloween, the Salem witch trials, and The Wizard of Oz. Glinda to the contrary, my associations weren’t positive.
[3] The labrys, a double-headed axe, originated in ancient Crete and has been adopted especially by lesbian feminists as a symbol of female strength. It was all over the place in the 1970s and beyond, on T-shirts and pottery, in jewelry and artwork. There are two classic examples in my Mary Daly blog post, one on a T-shirt and one in Mary’s hands. Mary was a hardcore labrys fan.
[4] One of life’s little synchronicities: Margot Adler and her longtime partner, John Gliedman, had their handfasting at the Lambert’s Cove Inn in West Tisbury when I was a chambermaid there: June 18, 1988, I’m told by this very good biographical article about her. The inn hosted many weddings during the years I worked there (1988 to 1990 or maybe 1991), but this was by far the best. I was just reminded that Adler’s middle name was Susanna, spelled the way I spell it.
[5] In The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). I hope The T-Shirt Chronicles will do its bit to push back against this erasure.
[6] In one of the many, many instances of reclaiming that have characterized feminism, “Old Wives Tales” was the name of San Francisco’s feminist bookstore. An excellent source on the how patriarchal medicine stigmatized women healers is Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. First published in 1976, it’s still in print.
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Three more from my wardrobe. Left: The words say “Buto, Egyptian cobra goddess of protection.” Center: The flip side says “and the moon sees me.” This goes back at least to an English nursery rhyme of the late 18th century, but it and its variations show up in quite a few songs and kids’ books. Right: The image is inspired by prehistoric cave paintings. The theory is that these uncredited artworks were often created by women.
The T-Shirt Chronicles 