Lammas – The T-Shirt Chronicles

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Susanna J. Sturgis

The Road to WisCon 14 (1990)

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).

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. ↩︎

Posted on July 3, 2024 by Susanna J. Sturgis

1991–1994, etc.: ILGA, the Island Lesbian & Gay Association

The early ’90s get slippery for dates especially where the lesbian and gay awakening on Martha’s Vineyard is concerned. Complicating the chronology is that no one seems to have kept copies of Stone Walls, the handsome newsletter put out by Dan Waters and Hal Garneau for the fledgling Island Lesbian & Gay Association. I need to pay a visit to the Vineyard Gazette’s archives and also to find out what the Martha’s Vineyard Museum has in its files, but these things aren’t likely to happen till the worst of summer is over.

In late 2014, I was reminded of the importance of getting this history down where other people can find it. That summer, The Yard, a seasonal dance colony in Chilmark, claimed to have held the first public gay pride event on Martha’s Vineyard. I heard nothing about it through the usual channels, which is to say Facebook, word-of-mouth, or the bulletin board at up-island Cronig’s. No one else I know did either.

This was not surprising. A strange barrier stands between the summer island and the year-round island. It’s porous enough to see through, but only in one direction: we can see it, but it can’t see us. In June 2015 I blogged “Gay on MV” to get some of the history out there. Exactly seven years later, I had an opportunity to do it again, at the ceremonial raising of the “Progress Pride” flag in Ocean Park. “Pride Flag Flying,” another blog post, includes the remarks I prepared for that event.

So please consider this a work in progress.

When I moved back to D.C. in the spring of 1977, I knew where to find the lesbians and the feminists: through Lammas, the feminist bookstore, and through the Washington Area Women’s Center, then housed in the basement of the abandoned-and-falling-into-disrepair Sumner School at 17th and M Streets N.W.

Moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985 — for a year, mind you, just for a year — it was a different story. Where were the lesbians? I read every poster on every bulletin board and telephone pole and skimmed every story in both newspapers, looking for signs of lesbian, gay, and/or feminist activity. Nothing. Most startling was that no one seemed to be talking about AIDS, which by 1985 was a huge issue in D.C.

As recounted in “1985–86 (etc.): Adult Child of Theater,” it was much easier to find a 12-step program for adult children of alcoholics. And through that I found lesbians, gay men, and the island’s vibrant theater scene. As I wrote in “Gay on MV,” the Vineyard’s theater community was “like theater in most other places: a veritable hotbed of misfits and nonconformists, gay, lesbian, straight, both/and, and neither/nor. My people.”

But no one said “gay” or “lesbian” out loud in public. Oh no! If you did, it was assumed you were one, and that was risky. So we said “the L-word” (almost two decades later this commonly used closet phrase was appropriated for a TV series) or used the ASL sign for “L” or (gods help us) substituted “Lebanese” for “lesbian.” The island was just discovering AIDS, but to hear health-care professionals talk, you’d have assumed that HIV could only be contracted from dirty needles and blood transfusions.

The island’s lesbians and gay men knew better. Nancy Luedeman (1920–2010), theater mainstay and recovering alcoholic, created a panel for the AIDS Quilt that was included in the Quilt’s first national display in October 1987. Two of the four Vineyard men it memorialized were identified only by first name and last initial, the other two by initials only.

Around 1990 that began to change. See “Visiting the AIDS Quilt with My Mother” for what I currently recall (and have to further research) about this period. Many island gay men and lesbians realized that the time had come to go public, in part to help clear up the widespread misconceptions about gay people but also so we could find and support each other.

Me and the more discreet of ILGA’s two T-shirts in July 2014. In the early ’90s you could wear this one anywhere and hardly anyone knew what it meant.

The first meeting of what became ILGA, the Island Lesbian and Gay Association, took place in the big room at the Wooden Tent on State Road, Vineyard Haven, which was then owned by Edie Yoder and Kathy Rose. I was there, along with some 25 other Vineyarders, about half of them women and half of them men, nearly all of whom I knew at least by sight. Sitting in a big circle, we went round and introduced ourselves. When the third Kathy introduced herself, people were starting to chuckle, then when Lansing Bailey — a burly gent who was older than most of us — introduced himself as Kathy, we all lost it completely. No one there will ever forget it.

What neither I nor anyone I’ve spoken with so far can remember is exactly when this meeting took place. My best guess is 1991, either spring or fall (because no one has time for organizational meetings in the summer, and what’s more, that was the summer of Hurricane Bob).[2] Fairly early in 1992 I moved into the guest house at the Wooden Tent, and I’m 99% sure that at the time of that meeting I was still living up-island.

You could only wear this one out in public if you were willing to stop people in their tracks. Photo from July 2014.

ILGA’s primary purpose was social — our potlucks were amazing! — but it had a powerful impact on gay and lesbian visibility on Martha’s Vineyard. In the early ’90s you could wear the pink triangle shirt down Main Street, Vineyard Haven, without getting any double-takes or snotty remarks: the only people who recognized the pink triangle were friendly and everyone else thought it was just another Vineyard T-shirt. It took considerably more chutzpah to sport the “No Man Is an Island Lesbian” shirt in mixed company.

For the first time a newcomer or someone just coming out could find the words “Lesbian” and “Gay” in the organizations listing of the Vineyard phone book. Two of us, Robert Cropper and me, were out enough to have our names and phone numbers listed. (I don’t recall ever getting a crank call from that listing.)

Around this time — 1992 and ’93 — a homophobic politician, Ron Beaty Jr.[3] by name, on the Cape took to writing nasty letters to the editor equating gay people with immorality and AIDS, and pushing Gay Rights, Special Rights (1993), a video promoted by the Traditional Values Coalition.[4] A lesbian couple wrote a letter to the Martha’s Vineyard Times rebutting such fallacious fear-mongering. The editor said he’d publish it but only if their names were included. Since this couple had several kids in the school system, this was outrageous and several of us (I was the Times features editor at this point) said so, but it was the editor’s wife who got through to him: “Of course you should withhold their names,” she said, and that was that. The letter was published with the writers’ names withheld.

In the fall of 1993 two Oak Bluffs town fathers tried to get two of the earliest kids’ books about gay/lesbian families pulled from the Oak Bluffs School library: Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay? (1991). This spawned several contentious meetings and letters to the editor. I remember one meeting in particular where the town fathers were joined by a fundamentalist minister and a former marine known for striding around town in his red satin Marine Corps jacket. At one point the minister claimed that AIDS was God’s scourge of the homosexuals (IIRC he used that exact phrase), to which ILGA regular Michele Lazerow pointed out that lesbians had the lowest incidence of HIV/AIDS of any group. This was greeted with much laughter and applause, so I don’t know whether the minister responded.

The heroes of the meeting were the school librarian, Jan Buhrman, and the eighth-grade member of the school committee, Jay Borselle.[5] Their eloquence helped turn the tide, and it reassured me and others that we had allies willing to step up. At the same time, the Martha’s Vineyard Library Association was the only organization that spoke out against the attempted book banning. As a former bookseller, I expected no less — librarians are the best! — but the silence in other quarters was disappointing.

In response I took the lead in organizing a Banned Books reading at Wintertide Coffeehouse in January 1994. I read from Heather Has Two Mommies, Robert read from How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay?, and 18 or so volunteers picked a book from the American Library Association’s Banned Books list and read a short excerpt from it. The Rev. Ken Miner (d. 1997), pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Oak Bluffs, read the David and Jonathan story from the Bible. The place was packed, and we all went home invigorated.

That spring, the short-play festival at the Vineyard Playhouse included Susan Miller’s “It’s Our Town Too,” a poignant riff on Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town in which the parents of the young people who grow up to marry are a gay couple and a lesbian couple.

Several ILGA members marched in Boston’s Gay and Lesbian Pride parade that June, behind a banner created by signmaker (and musician) Tom Hodgson. I don’t remember why I didn’t join them, maybe because I’d ODed on Gay Pride in my D.C. days, but I did get to a “Celebrate Gay Cod” event on the Cape that month. That’s where the button at the beginning of this piece comes from.

NOTES

[1] The AIDS Alliance sponsored the first Crossover Ball on New Year’s Eve 1994. Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and everyone had a blast. These continued more or less biennially till 2005. Can you imagine such a thing happening on Martha’s Vineyard in the ’80s? I can’t either.

[2] Late October of that year brought the equally memorable No-Name Nor’easter, known elsewhere as the Perfect Storm. It delayed the move of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, whose features editor I then was, from Woodland Market to Five Corners. This makes me think that the first ILGA meeting happened earlier in the year, but we shall see!

[3] Gadfly Beaty is nothing if not persistent. For a summary of his antics, see this 2018 call for his removal from his seat on the Barnstable County Council. He wasn’t removed then — the BCC doesn’t have a removal mechanism — but he was eventually defeated for re-election. Now in 2024 he seems to be running again. He has referred to himself as the “Donald Trump of Cape Cod” and once referred to activist David Hogg as a “self-promoting opportunistic rat.”

[4] I procured a copy of this so several of us could see it firsthand. This got me on some pretty disgusting right-wing mailing lists, but eventually the appeals and alerts stopped coming.

[5] By the end of the decade, Jan Buhrman had begun an ever expanding and deepening career as a cook and advocate for locally sourced ingredients: https://www.janbuhrman.com/. Jay Borselle became a journalist and is now the news director for WBZ NewsRadio in Boston.

Posted on August 7, 2023August 8, 2023 by Susanna J. Sturgis · 2 Comments

1985–1986: Morgana Comes on Board

The several seeds planted my first off-season on Martha’s Vineyard sent out tendrils that kept growing for years, often tangling with each other. Where to start, where to start?

It probably doesn’t really matter where I start because I’ll get to where I’m going no matter what, but let’s start with computers.

I acquired this T several years later, almost certainly in my science-fiction-con-going years (roughly the ’90s), but it’s the only computer-related shirt I’ve got so here it is.

My first serious computer relationship was with the TRS-80 that Lammas Bookstore acquired while I was working there, around 1983. The TRS-80 (the T in TRS is for Tandy, the main inventor, and the RS stands for Radio Shack, which produced and marketed it) was a wildly popular workhorse that introduced hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people to what IIRC were then called microcomputers, to distinguish them from the hulking machines that occupied whole rooms at universities and big businesses.

For the first few weeks I was terrified that I’d hit the wrong key and blow something up. It was a little like learning to drive. In both cases, the terror passed. I didn’t have my first real computer disaster till several years later, when I accidentally erased a client’s current accounts receivable file. Fortunately it was only March so it wasn’t hard to reconstruct it from bank statements and paper invoices. And by then my relationship with computers was so solid that one screw-up didn’t do it any damage.

This TRS-80 Model II looks like my memory of Sylvia, except Sylvia’s case was white.

Once that TRS-80 and I got through our shakedown cruise, we became good buddies. I named her Sylvia after my editorial mentor, Sylvia Abrams; my brilliant high school history teacher, Sylvia Sherman; and Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia character. Sylvia had two 8-inch floppy drives in the same unit as the monitor, a separate keyboard, and a word processor called Scripsit. She was connected to a dot-matrix printer.

When I left Lammas and D.C., I was accompanied by the venerable red IBM Selectric I’d bought from a friend some years earlier, but I was ready for a computer of my own. Most participants at the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops that summer of 1985 were still using typewriters, but at mealtimes we talked as much about computers as we did about food.

That fall, I found my way to EduComp, which was then located in a little house set back from the sidewalk on Main Street. Proprietor Pat Gregory introduced me to hard drives. I was an instant convert: with a 10MB (!!) hard drive and one floppy drive, instead of two floppy drives like Sylvia, you didn’t have to keep swapping program disks in and out. This option would add $500 to the cost of a basic system, but even to this chronically frugal New Englander it was hands-down worth it.

I bought my first computer on an off-island foray to Framingham: a Leading Edge Model D (an IBM clone). A Wikipedia article supports my memory of the cost: in addition to the $500 for the optional hard drive, I paid $1,500 for the computer itself (it also had a 5 1/4” floppy drive), $500 for WordPerfect 4.1, and $500 for an Epson LX-80 dot matrix printer. $3,000 was the most money I’d ever spent on anything.

Setting it up I was on my own, but in those days software came with manuals, hardware instructions weren’t hard to follow, and you could actually reach a real person by calling tech support. Once the tech guys (all the ones I spoke with were guys) ascertained that you had plugged the computer in, connected the cables, and turned the thing on, they treated you like someone who was capable of understanding and following directions.

Morgana was named for the Celtic goddess the Morrigan, for Fata Morgana (Morgan le Fay); and for the hero of C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine novels. Her equine namesake was the Morgan horse. The Morgan horse stamp was released that September. I stuck one on Morgana’s case. As the first Morgana was succeeded by Morganas II, III, IV, and V, the stamp migrated to each one as a sign of continuity.

Since in September 1985 first-class postage was 22¢, it was also a reminder that while the price of computers kept coming down, the cost of mailing a letter kept going up. Believe it or not, I’ve still got that stamp, much the worse for wear (see right). After Morgana V, around 2010, I switched from desktops to laptops and started a new naming convention, so since then the stamp has been stuck to a cupboard door above what used to be my computer desk.

Me in my vintage Tisbury Printer T-shirt

As my savings dwindled, I entered the Vineyard workforce as a freelance typist, running an occasional “situation wanted” ad in the Martha’s Vineyard Times classifieds. The Tisbury Printer — with whom I’d established a connection doing PR and other print-related tasks for Island Theatre Workshop (more about that to come), and which I’m pleased to note still exists — referred me to people who wanted cut-rate typesetting for lengthy documents, booklets and even books. I’d type the manuscript on Morgana, then take the floppy disk down to EduComp (which unfortunately no longer exists, and which I miss a lot), which by then was located in the big building at the head of Main Street.

At first EduComp rented out time on its laser printers to the public, but it turned out that most customers needed so much hands-on support and supervision that it was taking up too much staff time. They made an exception for me and a couple of others who were capable of sitting down with a disk unsupervised and getting the job done. My girlfriend in the late ’80s was a graphic artist: she did the layout using my typescript. We produced a couple of books and at least two Nathan Mayhew Seminars course catalogues that way.

Come to think of it, seat-of-the-pants on-the-cheap publishing has been a theme through my adult life, from my antiwar movement days to my evening job proofreading that law weekly, to off our backs and Lammas Bookstore, on to the Vineyard, and right up to the present day. 1980s publishing technology was strictly horse-and-buggy compared to what we’ve got now, but hey, it got us where we wanted to go.

Posted on January 22, 2022 by Susanna J. Sturgis · 4 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 January 16, 2022 by Susanna J. Sturgis

Incomings & Outgoings

Like all feminist bookstores, Lammas was a hub for the feminist and lesbian communities of the D.C. area, but because D.C. itself is a hub for the nation and the world, women from all over sought out Lammas when they were in town for conferences, school trips, vacation, you name it.

The librarians were my favorite. They’d come in from all around the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, especially from small cities, towns, and rural areas with no feminist bookstore in reach. They’d nearly always have shopping lists, gleaned from feminist publications and word of mouth, and often dropped two or three hundred bucks in a visit.

Where did my T from the 14th Women and the Law conference come from? I didn’t attend, though it was indeed in D.C. An attendee might have given it to me, or it might have been left behind at the shop. I like the design: it illustrates how effective black & white can be.

Was the conference still being held? A Google search turned up several conferences with similar names, but none of them dated back this far. off our backs devoted about half of its May 1983 issue (vol. 13, no. 5) to the 14th conference; you can view it online at JSTOR, but you’ll need a JSTOR subscription to download it.

Searching on the full conference name, in quotes — “National Conference on Women and the Law” — yielded paydirt: a 1994 article by Elizabeth M. Schneider: “Feminist Lawmaking and Historical Consciousness: Bringing the Past into the Future.” (Published in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, vol. 2, no. 1, it’s now available as a free PDF download, but the godawful URL is four lines long. Go to BrooklynWorks, “open-access scholarship from Brooklyn Law School,” and you can search for it there.) It’s worth the trip. Schneider writes that the conference, which was held from 1970 through 1992, “played a crucial role in shaping feminist legal history over the last twenty-five years.”

Lammas occasionally went on the road as well, and that’s how I came by “Sisterhood Is Blooming / Spring Will Never Be the Same”: selling books at a women’s conference at West Virginia University in (I’m guessing here) 1983 or 1984. The keynote speaker was Maya Angelou, and my main visual memory of the conference was of being near the back of a vast, packed gymnasium with Angelou onstage at the other end.

I’ve never been comfortable in crowds of mostly strangers, but I did fine when I had a role to play, and it didn’t get much better than selling feminist books and records to women who didn’t have ready access to either except by mail-order. Lammas owner-manager Mary Farmer was far more gregarious than I ever was. As a Ladyslipper distributor, she was often on the road in her big red Olds, visiting record stores or selling records at women’s music concerts. I was just as happy holding the fort at home.

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Susanna J. Sturgis · 3 Comments

Hot Wire & Ladyslipper

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.

Posted on November 26, 2021February 3, 2022 by Susanna J. Sturgis

1980s: Sisterfire, Equinox & Sophie’s Parlor

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:

You go out to the kitchen
to get somethin' to eat
I watch you pick your bay leaves from a poison ivy tree
I got a feelin' you're gonna starve to death when I'm gone
Here's a brand new dime
Now you call me if I'm wrong
     © 1977 Willola Calloway Tyson

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.

Posted on November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 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 November 1, 2021July 14, 2023 by Susanna J. Sturgis

1981(?): Annapurna

*Apart* from the cool slogan and great design, this shirt is distinctive for a couple of other reasons. I don’t have any other shirts in this color (what is it? “rust”?), and it’s one of the few I have in what used to be called “French cut” and now seems to be “women’s,” as opposed to “unisex.”

No, I wasn’t on the 1978 American Women’s Himalayan Expedition to Annapurna. I’ve never had any desire to climb anything that required more than the ability to walk upright. I first learned about the expedition when expedition leader Arlene Blum’s gorgeous book about it came out in 1980. Though the story went places I’d never been, it started in instantly recognizable territory: with the sexism and outright misogyny of the male mountain-climbing elite. I also recognized the powerful determination of women adepts in any male-dominated field to show the men that they are wrong.

I bought the T-shirt when Dr. Blum spoke in D.C. What year was it? I don’t remember, but I’m guessing 1981. Where did she speak? I don’t recall that either. Was I already working at Lammas then? I’ll only know that if I can find an exact date for the event, but my memory thinks I attended with Lammas owner Mary Farmer, which would explain how I knew about the event. For sure it didn’t take place at the shop, whose 400 square feet of selling space were far too small for talks and readings. Where did it take place? Once again I’m drawing a blank.[1]

My indelible memory is of Arlene Blum herself, or, more accurately, of my impression of her. In my mind’s eye she has long wavy dark hair, as she does in the Annapurna photos. She is tall, but she seems dressed to look smaller and younger than she is, in a purple and black dress that stops several inches above her knees. She’s trying to look like a schoolgirl, I thought at the time.

Which probably wasn’t her intent, and her dress may not have been purple and black either, but that’s what struck me: this physically and emotionally strong and highly intelligent (she had a doctorate in biochemistry) woman seemed to be downplaying all the traits that made her achievement possible. I’m guessing that she wasn’t nearly as comfortable with the whole book tour routine as she was organizing expeditions, climbing mountains, and doing research — building and leading teams rather than speaking to strangers whom she’d never see again.

By this time, I’d read and devoured Adrienne Rich’s collection The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977. I know this for sure: I wrote my name and “Sept. 78” on the flyleaf of the book, a trade paperback that split along the spine maybe three decades ago from repeated readings. It includes Rich’s 1974 “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” written for the leader of an all-women team that perished in a storm on Lenin Peak in August 1974. Narrated in Shatayev’s voice after death, it includes lines from the diary she wrote while she was living, like these:

Now we are ready
and each of us knows it   I have never loved
like this   I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training   the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love[2]

Visiting Arlene Blum’s website just now, I noticed a link for “Peak Lenin” in the Mountaineer section. The year was 1974. The coincidence of place and year gave me goosebumps, but the accompanying slide show was even more startling: Arlene Blum and her climbing buddies and Elvira Schatayeva and her team, along with other mountain-climbers, were all at base camp at Peak Lenin at the same time. Arlene was almost caught by the same storms that killed the Russian women. The slide show includes images of Elvira, known to her friends as Eva.

A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow   We will not live
to settle for less   We have dreamed of this
all of our lives

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notes

[1] To further confuse my already flummoxed memory, I just Googled Arlene Blum Annapurna Washington Post. This turned up a Washington Post story from December 9, 1980, that had Blum in town for an American Alpine Club meeting. This would have been shortly after the book came out. Did she give a public talk then, and did I attend it? If so, I definitely wasn’t working at Lammas, and it might explain why my sketchy memory of the venue doesn’t ring any bells. Another story, from April 1983, refers to a lecture Blum has just given, but it and the article itself focus on her 2,000-mile trek from one end of the Himalayas to the other. The talk I attended was definitely about Annapurna, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that one.

[2] Both this and the quote at the end are from Adrienne Rich’s “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

Posted on October 22, 2021June 16, 2023 by Susanna J. Sturgis · 1 Comment

Pagans, Witches & Healers, Oh My!

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 Post piece 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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