Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis · 3 Comments

Expanding My History: Lesbian Heritage D.C.

It wasn’t till I started seeing things as a woman that I realized how much was missing from history.

Me wearing my Lesbian Heritage T at a D.C. Gay & Lesbian Pride Day, ca. 1983. Photo by Jim Marks.

As a kid I felt included in the history I learned in school. I grew up WASP in the Boston area. The place-names in the history books were names I knew and places I’d been: Boston! Concord! Lexington! Old North Church! My fifth-grade class made a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village, which I thought was very cool, and not just because we got to put the teacher in the pillory.

Also in fifth grade I adapted for the stage a young readers’ biography, Patrick Henry: Firebrand of the Revolution. Patrick Henry may not have been a relative (but who knows?), but the author, Nardi Reeder Campion, definitely was connected close-up on my paternal grandmother’s side. My class produced the play and I got to play the lead. My only distinct memory of the production is that Thomas Jefferson was about twice as tall as I was.

History, especially family history, was important to both my grandmothers, both of whom lived in the Boston area — we could, and often did, walk a mile through the woods to my paternal grandmother’s house — so they were very much part of my life. Both were members of the DAR. Grandma, my father’s mother, was also a Mayflower Descendant. Gran’mummie, my mother’s mother, was a born and bred Virginian — if Patrick Henry was a relative, it would have been through her — who also belonged to the Colonial Dames and (I think) to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

For Gran’mummie, I’m pretty sure this was largely a matter of family and regional heritage — not a celebration of the Lost Cause. She lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the last 50 years or so of her very long life. (Born in 1892, she died in 1997, a week shy of her 105th birthday.) Only within the last 15 years or so have I become fully aware of what those Confederate statues meant, both to the United Daughters who erected many of them and to the Black people who have had to live with them day in, day out.

Still, above the mantel in Gran’mummie’s dining room was the Confederate battle flag. When I visited her as an adult, I was always surprised by how small it was: the longer I was away, the larger it loomed in my imagination, till it dominated the entire wall. Beside her writing desk in the same room was an imposing recruiting poster from World War I. It depicted an avuncular Robert E. Lee, gray-haired, gray-bearded, and gray-uniformed. I FOUGHT FOR VIRGINIA, it said. NOW IT’S YOUR TURN.

To this day it encapsulates for me what “states’ rights” is essentially about.

Gran’mummie’s middle name before she married was Washington; she was descended from Custises and Lees.

The Yankee heritage on my father’s side was less problematic. My Grandma’s original name was Rosamond Thomas Bennett. When she married, and eventually divorced and remarried, she dropped the Bennett and kept the Thomas. That was for Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831), from whom she was descended: printer, Revolutionary, and (I like this part) founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

The Bennett wasn’t entirely lost, however. One of my brothers was baptised Roger Bennett Sturgis, after Grandma’s brother the Rev. Roger Williams Bennett, and yeah, he was named for that Roger Williams. I don’t know how the line of descent works out, but if I can’t be descended from Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams will definitely do. Hutchinson, by the way, had a daughter named Susanna, one of the few survivors of the attack in which her mother and much of her family was killed.

Growing up, I assumed I was part of U.S. history. It was a jolt to realize I wasn’t, or at least not to the extent I’d assumed I was. In the antiwar movement I met veterans of the civil rights movement and survivors of the McCarthy witch hunts. These were nowhere represented in my family tree. Ditto what I learned from union members and labor organizers there and in subsequent years. In fact, men close to if not actually part of my family tree were often clearly on the wrong side: in Charlie King’s great song “Two Good Arms,” about Sacco and Vanzetti, the villain of the piece, Judge Webster Thayer, could well have been a third or fourth cousin a few times removed.

At Penn, where I arrived as a transfer student in the fall of 1972, I took one of the first-ever women’s history courses, offered by women’s studies pioneer Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. But it wasn’t till I got to D.C. a few years later that I became seriously immersed. Those who ridiculed the whole idea of women’s liberation loved to ask where the great female thinkers, scientists, historians, etc., etc., etc., were. One famous poster posed the question “Where is your Shakespeare?” and answered it: “She was a woman, and you burned her books.”

This turned out to be not far from the truth, except that burning, either of books or of women, was not necessary to obliterate women’s achievements and contributions. They weren’t being recorded in the first place, because they weren’t considered important and/or women weren’t doing the recording. When they were recorded, they were trivialized, pushed to the margins, and/or forgotten. What women often were doing was making the achievements of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons possible. Judy Brady Syfers’s essay “I Want a Wife,” published in 1971, circulated widely for years, even though most women I know got the point as soon as they read the title.

Feminism had been very much in the air I breathed as a Georgetown University undergrad, from 1969 to 1972. I was introduced to Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (published in 1963 and already a classic), which gave me much-needed insight into my mother’s life; Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics; Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch; Ingrid Bengis’s Combat in the Erogenous Zone; and Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, nearly all of which was new to me. I was the lead writer on an op-ed that appeared in The Hoya, the student newspaper, over the byline “Georgetown Women’s Liberation.” I later reviewed the premier issue of Ms. (January 1972) for the same paper.

After moving back to D.C. in 1977, I learned how much I had missed the first time around.

A major catalyst was Judith Schwarz’s courses in lesbian history, offered through the Washington Area Women’s Center. Judith had an MA in women’s studies from San Jose State and had taught a similar course there. Her focus was on the lives and achievements of women whose primary commitment was to other women.

Artwork by Sudie Rakusin. This is one of the very few baseball-style T-shirts in my wardrobe.

Lesbian Heritage/D.C., devoted to uncovering and preserving D.C.’s lesbian history, grew out of those courses (which IIRC included lesbian literature as well as history). As a result, I learned that, totally unbeknownst to me as a Georgetown U. undergrad, a whole other feminist world had been thriving elsewhere in the city. The feminist newsjournal off our backs got started in early 1970, but I didn’t see my first issue till I moved back to town in 1977. (Oob, as it was usually called, played an important role in my life, and yes, I have a T-shirt to prove it. Coming up soon!)

I had never heard of the lesbian-feminist Furies collective either. Though it lasted only a couple of years, the Furies cast a very long shadow into the future, both for the lesbian feminist theory and culture articulated in its newspaper and for the future accomplishments of its members. Rita Mae Brown is likely the best known to the general public:[1] Her Rubyfruit Jungle (Daughters, 1973; Bantam, 1977) may have been the first mainstream-published novel whose lesbian protagonist didn’t either go straight or die. She’s since become known for some high-profile relationships and many best-selling mystery novels.

For those of us involved in the emerging women’s culture of the 1970s and ’80s, several other former Furies were household names: Coletta Reid, a co-founder of off our backs who went on to establish Diana Press; activist and academic Charlotte Bunch, who started Quest: A Feminist Quarterly; Helaine Harris, co-founder of Women in Distribution (WIND); photographer and author JEB (Joan E. Biren); and Ginny Z Berson, co-founder of Olivia Records, which had its roots in D.C. but relocated to the West Coast in March 1975.

Once a Fury, a documentary about the Furies collective based on interviews with several collective members, was released in the fall of 2020. So was Ginny Berson’s Olivia on the Record, about Olivia Records and the women’s music scene of the 1970s; chapter 2 is a lively account of how the Furies evolved and eventually went their separate ways.

Naturally, drafting this post sent me into the past looking for dates to hang my fuzzy chronology on. The Lesbian Herstory Archives newsletter #6 (June 1980) reprints Judith Schwarz’s introductory letter to the Archives women, dated October 27, 1977. It includes this passage:

“Finally, I am about to start teaching a lesbian history seminar at the Washington Area Women’s Center, which is based on a similar class I taught last spring in San Jose, California. The response has been nothing less than tremendous, and it seems many of us are tired of getting our history from second-hand sources or biographies about famous writers. I am very pleased to see this massive interest and one of the things that I hope will come out of this seminar will be an interest in a regional lesbian archive here in Washington, perhaps affiliated with the Women’s Center.”

So there you are: that’s what happened. Judith soon became part of the Lesbian Herstory Archives collective, and we made at least a couple of field trips to New York City to visit the Archives, then located in the Upper West Side apartment of its co-founders, Joan Nestle and Deb Edel. I count it among the sacred spaces I’ve been able to visit in my life. Browsing the bookshelves, handling the periodicals, looking at the photos, I could hear the voices of the women who created these artifacts. From time to time I could almost hear the voices of the silenced, “the voices we have lost,” to whose memory the Archives is dedicated.

The Archives women made a trip to D.C. in the spring of 1978 and gave their slide presentation at Women’s Nite Out, at the Washington Area Women’s Center. How do I know this? Is my memory that good? No, it’s not. But my story about the event from the WAWC newsletter, In Our Own Write, for June 1978 is reprinted in the LHA newsletter #5 (Spring 1979). Here’s a paragraph from it:

“While watching the immense variety of lesbian works illustrated by the slides, I was especially struck by the ephemeral nature of our publications and organizations. This and their frequently local orientation make it too easy for them to be lost forever. Patriarchal institutions have suppressed and denied the culture of all women in the past. Now it is essential that we do not by our carelessness cooperate in their efforts. When the womenenergy that sustains a newsletter or a collective dissipates, the recorded evidence of their work must be preserved. The Archives are the instrument by which this can be done.”

I was 27 years old at the time, but I couldn’t have said it better today.

notes

[1] Or so I thought, until my writers’ group members told me that they didn’t recognize the name.

If you don’t see a Leave a Reply block, click on the title of this post and then scroll to the bottom.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

The Cost of Comfort

This Washington Area Women’s Center T-shirt was created when I was no longer even tangentially involved with the center, probably after I started working at Lammas in 1981. At that point my center of gravity moved from Northwest D.C. to the southeast and northeast fringes of Capitol Hill. The old Sumner School was no longer within easy walking, biking, or even busing distance. Just as important, the written word was coming to dominate my life — editing, writing, and bookselling — and to draw me into circles and networks of similarly committed women.

This T is more sedate, easier to wear in “polite company” -‑ that is to say, non-feminist, non-lesbian company — than the first WAWC shirt. The labyris symbol is retained but discreetly: only those in the know will recognize it as the head of an ax, or understand what that ax symbolizes.

What catches my eye now is the line under the center’s name: “Creating Unity From Diversity.” Variations of this slogan have become ever more popular in the decades since. It’s conventional wisdom among feminists, liberals, and progressives. It rolls so trippingly off the tongue that we forget how difficult it is.

Part of the Women’s Center’s mission statement declared our intent “to create a space where all women could be comfortable.” My experience taught me that the achievement of this goal was, at best, a long way off. This was my epiphany:

The rap group, of which I was one of the regular leaders, attracted some regulars who came every week and occasional participants who came for the week’s topic. As with other Women’s Center activities, the majority were usually lesbians, but sometimes as many as half the participants were straight women. (Not every woman identified herself, but if someone bent over backwards to avoid giving any clues, the chances were good she wasn’t straight.) Discussions were friendly, everyone seemed comfortable, but it gradually became apparent that the comfort was conditional.

Often several of us would decide to continue the discussion elsewhere after the center closed for the night. There were several reasonably priced options within walking distance where we could get a drink, or coffee, or a bite to eat and talk. Two of them were frequented mostly by gay men but known to be friendly to women (this was not a given with establishments that catered to gay men).

A pattern emerged: When the group mind settled on one of those gay-friendly places, the straight women who’d been ready to come suddenly remembered they had other obligations, or they were just too tired to go out. When we picked one of what we thought of as neighborhood pubs or cafés, everybody went.

These “neighborhood” venues were considered neutral, but of course they weren’t. They were frequented by male-female couples and straight men. At one, the men would be gathered at the bar watching sports on TV and cheering or groaning loudly as the game progressed.

In other words, the lesbians were willing to put up with the discomfort of being in a place where heterosexuality was the norm, and the straight women weren’t willing to do likewise in a place where it wasn’t. This was not surprising, since lesbians and gay men lived most of our lives in places dominated by straight people, starting with our families; they might not be exactly comfortable, but they were certainly familiar. For the straight women, gay-friendly places were anything but.

Women’s Center volunteers talked a fair amount about how to attract more straight women to our activities, like Women’s Nite Out and the rap group and our various classes. How to make straight women more comfortable at the center. I was coming to the conclusion long since reached by some of my sister collective members: that the only way to make most straight women comfortable in a mixed lesbian-straight milieu was for the lesbians to “tone it down”: talk less about our relationships, disguise pronouns when we did, and so on. To make straight women more comfortable, we had to make ourselves less comfortable. Since our comfort options at the time were so limited, this didn’t look like a great alternative.

A few years later, in her great essay “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” (based on a speech given at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival in 1981; in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith [New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983]), Bernice Johnson Reagon — scholar, activist, and longtime founder-leader of the black women’s a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock — nailed the whole matter of comfort and discomfort, extending it to encompass all the power differentials in our culture: black and white, female and male, middle class and working class, and so on and on. And especially how these categories intersect: Kimberlé Crenshaw didn’t coin the word “intersectionality” until the end of the 1980s, but feminists were already working on it, with women of color generally leading the way.

Sweet Honey did an anniversary concert every year. I attended most of the ones when I lived in town. This one has the date on it: November 19 & 20, 1982.

Reagon draws the key distinction between coalition and home: Coalition work, she says, “is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. . . . In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time.” We all need some sort of home, a place we can be comfortable enough to recharge before we “go back and coalesce some more.”

Diversity is more abstract than coalition, but it makes some of the same demands. Don’t expect to be comfortable all the time. Pay attention to who does expect to be comfortable, especially if it’s you, and who’s expected to “tone it down.”

This issue has never been more important. If all of us, especially the more privileged among us, aren’t willing to learn to live with some measure of discomfort, I suspect we’re all doomed.

In practice, the Women’s Center created events where all women could be comfortable as long as they were comfortable in women-only spaces. As expected, a significant majority of these women were lesbians, but not all: some identified as bisexual, some as heterosexual, and some were in transition or uncommitted. The Full Moon Cruise in 1980 was more ambitious than the usual Women’s Center event, which is why it got its own T-shirt. Women’s Nite Out happened regularly on the third floor of the Sumner School, and every so often we threw a women’s dance at All Souls Church.

All Souls, the Unitarian Universalist church at 16th and Harvard, N.W., was then as now a hotbed of culturally and politically progressive activity. It was also a stone’s throw from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, home to multiple lesbian group houses, and easily reached by public transportation. Long before rainbow flags started flying from liberal churches and synagogues, All Souls welcomed our events, at some risk to themselves. D.C.’s human rights act, like many such laws, saw no difference between men excluding women and women excluding men, or white people excluding black people and black people excluding white people: justice may not be blind, but when it comes to power imbalances in society, it certainly is myopic.

The threat of being sued wasn’t strictly hypothetical either. Around this time, I was editing as a freelancer a bimonthly newsletter for a non-smokers’ rights group. Its principal, a George Washington University law professor, brought a sex discrimination suit against a D.C. restaurant for requiring men, but not women, to wear jackets. I had zero doubt that he and other legal eagles would thrill to bring a suit against the Women’s Center for excluding men from a dance, and against All Souls for renting us space to do it.

So we were careful. We created the fiction that these were ticketed events, and tickets had to be purchased in advance. PR was largely by word of mouth or very limited circulation media like In Our Own Write. If a man insisted on coming in, we were supposed to let them in, but I don’t recall this ever happening. What I do recall is our delight in appropriating the men’s room, where there was never a line.

Our best protection was that lesbians weren’t just invisible to the heterosexual world; we were literally unimaginable. Only a few years earlier, after all, I had gone to women’s dances at Penn without registering that most of the women there were, if not lesbians, then not exactly straight. The idea of women voluntarily excluding men from any part of our lives, and especially our events, is still problematic. But the distinction that Bernice Johnson Reagan made between home and coalition is still valid. All of us working in the rough-and-tumble wider world need places to regroup and recharge.

Tellingly, it was in this women-only, mostly lesbian world that I started paying much closer attention to the differences among us, and the other ways we were different from the wider world. We were mostly white in what was then a majority-black city, and the age range from youngest to oldest couldn’t have been more than about 15 years. Class-wise, however, we came from a variety of backgrounds, and some of us had had grueling experiences with the mental health establishment, male violence, and/or the legal system. In this women-only space, we talked about things we had never felt comfortable discussing anywhere else.

I picked up this T at a women’s conference at West Virginia U., where Lammas was selling books and records. Probably 1983 or 1984. (Maya Angelou was the keynote speaker.) We dreamed of a universal sisterhood, of “unity from diversity,” but making it happen in real time was far harder — and asked more of us — than we often wanted to acknowledge.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1977: Back to Washington

Part-time proofreading and political volunteering were great, but I’d finally caught on that full-time employment prospects for a female liberal arts graduate without clerical skills were not good. Male liberal arts grads without clerical skills seemed to wind up in management training programs, but in those days this generally didn’t happen to women without family connections and/or more chutzpah than I had. My public school friends had all learned to type in high school, but my private school had prided itself on its academic focus, which seemed to preclude all practical skills.

Washington Area Women's Center T-shirt
The labyris, a double-edged Amazon ax, was omnipresent in lesbian-feminist imagery of the 1970s.

So with my proofreading wages I signed up for the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school’s[1] eight-week course for unemployable female college graduates. We learned typing, a basic shorthand, business writing, and what I can only call office comportment: classes met five days a week during more or less office hours, and we were expected to be punctual and to dress accordingly. The white gloves the school had been famous for in its early decades had long since fallen by the wayside, but no pants were allowed. We were told that if one wore size 16 or above, one should wear dresses, not a skirt and blouse. That would be me, but I didn’t own a dress, so I continued to wear skirts. When I showed up in a wrap-around denim skirt, I was told that if I wore it again, I would be sent home, so I must have had some alternatives.

In the small-world department, my typing teacher was Barbara St. Pierre, of the family that ran the St. Pierre camp in Vineyard Haven for decades. In late 2018, after some $31 million in renovations and landscaping, the site opened as the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on March 13, 2019.

At the end of the course I was typing a respectable 70 words per minute with next-to-no errors. Time to start job hunting in earnest.

This did not go well. On one interview, I stumbled into what had to be a circle of hell: the typing pool of a big insurance company. Row after long row of women sat typing, under a low ceiling with fluorescent lights tingeing everyone a sickly green-yellow. I recoiled. I didn’t want to work in such a place, and I didn’t really want to stay in the Boston area either.

So in the early spring of 1977, I headed back to D.C. to look for a job and a place to live. This didn’t take long. I was hired as a clerical at American Red Cross national headquarters, which occupies the block between 17th and 18th, D and E Streets, in Northwest D.C. — right across the street from the DAR’s Constitution Hall. The workaday offices were mostly in the 18th Street building. I would start as a “floater,” a sort of in-house temp who went to whatever office needed an extra secretary, sometimes for a day or two, other times for longer. Sooner or later this would lead to a permanent assignment. Strange but true, my first permanent assignment was in the insurance office.

Somehow I found what would be my home for the next year: a bedsit in a row house in the 1700 block of Q Street, N.W., that had been converted into a rooming house. The location was perfect: within a stone’s throw of Connecticut Ave. and Dupont Circle, the heart of the (white) gay (male) ghetto and a vibrant arts scene, one of whose anchors at the time was Food for Thought, vegetarian restaurant and community hangout.

My Q Street landlord was Larry, a gay guy, and I was the only female out of five or six tenants. (Larry probably recognized what I hadn’t quite figured out yet.) My spacious first-floor room had a big bay window facing the street. This came in handy because visitors could just knock on my window, bypassing the doorbell. A chandelier hung from the high ceiling; it worked on a dimmer, which did wonders for the decor, which was neo-Student Gothic. The bathrooms were on the second and third floors, and a refrigerator on the third, all shared by the tenants. I cooked on a hotplate.

My Grandma’s Wedgwood pitcher. You see why I don’t dare use it?

I returned to Weston, borrowed money from my father to rent a U-Haul, loaded my stuff, and moved to D.C. Since I was moving from Grandma’s house, some of her stuff came with me. Most of it I’ve still got: a small bureau, a cedar chest, four nested blue mixing bowls, a Wedgwood pitcher too beautiful to use (with a note from Grandma inside, bequeathing it to me), and Grandma’s copies of Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer.

The Persian carpet from her bedroom survived all my D.C. moves before going missing from my parents’ basement after I moved to Martha’s Vineyard. No one knows what happened to it. My derelict uncle Hugh, my mother’s younger brother, who boarded in my parents’ house for a while, may have pawned it. I have no proof, and he’s dead, so that’s that.

How did I find the Washington Area Women’s Center?[2] Considering what a big part of my life it would be for the next several years, I’m surprised that I don’t recall that either. For sure it wasn’t via the Washington Post or the Washington Star (which was still around in those days), or from a billboard, or from a radio or TV ad. Women’s community organizations were shoestring operations. We did PR on the cheap, by flyers and posters tacked, stapled, or wheat-pasted[3] to walls, telephone poles, and bulletin boards, and of course by word of mouth.

Moving back to D.C. was a sort of Big Bang: my worldview expanded so rapidly in those first months that in most cases I can’t recall when and where and how any particular thing happened. I don’t remember how I found the Women’s Center, but I clearly remember what I found when I got there.

The center occupied a big square room on the ground floor of the Sumner School at 17th and M Streets, N.W. Named for Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner, the school had played an important role in educating African American children and teachers, albeit in a segregated public school system. Wikipedia notes: “By the 1980s the building had fallen into disrepair.” This is an understatement. By the late 1970s it was a wreck. The ground floor, however, was reasonably sound. You entered from the side, off M Street, across the cracked-concrete remains of a small playground, and descended a few concrete steps. The Women’s Center was on your right, the Washington Area Feminist Theater on your left.

The WAWC Full Moon Cruise, out of Annapolis, MD, was so special it had its own T.

Yellow walls helped make the center a cheery place, as did the buzz of activity whenever it was open, which at the time was most weekends and weekday evenings. It housed a hotline, a feminist library — small but growing, thanks to the vitality of feminist presses and publications in that decade — and a cozy corner to sit and read or visit with friends. It hosted classes in women’s history, gay and lesbian history, feminist theory, and various practical how-tos. I quickly became a regular leader of the weekly rap group and (of course) part of the team that published the monthly newsletter, In Our Own Write. My new clerical skills came in handy, as did my facility with presstype, Formaline, and publishing on the cheap before digital technology came of age.

Every month, more or less, we held Women’s Nite Out in a corner former classroom up on Sumner School’s third floor. The room itself was in pretty good shape, but the stairs we climbed to get there were both rickety and dark. Whatever fixtures had once lit that stairwell were mostly non-functional, and Women’s Nite Out happened, as you might guess, at night, when no light came in the windows. The performers were homegrown local musicians and poets, most of them quite good and getting better: this was another area where we were learning by doing, how to perform and how to produce performances.

I don’t think I ever performed at Women’s Nite Out; most of what I was writing at the time was nonfiction for In Our Own Write or, eventually, off our backs and The Blade, later the Washington Blade, D.C.’s gay newspaper. But Women’s Nite Out, and what was going on more generally in D.C. and the women’s movement, helped spark the possibility of writing for a live audience.

It wasn’t till I attended a few meetings aimed at establishing a gay community center that I understood what made the Women’s Center and so many grassroots women’s organizations of the time so, well, revolutionary. The gay organizations, being overwhelmingly white and male, had access to skills, money, and political connections that the feminist organizations, especially the mostly lesbian ones, did not. Need legal or accounting advice? The men usually knew a professional who would volunteer their time. Need some carpentry or wiring done? Hire a carpenter or an electrician.

Lacking connections, expertise, and cash, the Women’s Center collective, like grassroots feminist groups around the world, learned to do things ourselves because otherwise they wouldn’t get done. There were women in the community with professional credentials and other in-demand skills: through the Women’s Center hotline, we connected women with women lawyers, therapists, and tradesfolk (who at the time were scarcer than either lawyers or therapists) who were feminist- and lesbian-friendly and who would accommodate clients with limited incomes.

I met my first girlfriend through the Women’s Center, and together we became the core of my first group house, but the Women’s Center itself was my first serious relationship. I’d been involved in groups before, of course, but never this deeply, this intensely, this day-in, day-out. I almost said that here was where my fascination with group dynamics started, but that’s not true: growing up in an alcoholic family made me an astute observer of others’ moods and interactions. At the Women’s Center, I wanted to belong, but I’d long since learned that safety lay in remaining somewhat aloof. The tension between the two continues to this day.

The Women’s Center was the site of a major milestone in my life: I came out as a lesbian in public for the first time while leading a rap group about “the sexually uncommitted.” This still cracks me up. I don’t believe anyone in the group was surprised.

Notes

[1] “Katy Gibbs” has an interesting and feminist history: it was started in 1911, in Providence, by two sisters, Katharine and Mary, who had to support themselves and Katharine’s two children after Katharine’s husband died in an accident, leaving no will. The Gibbs family sold the school in 1968 but it seemed to be going strong when I attended in the mid-1970s. This New England Historical Society story includes some background on how clerical work evolved after the Civil War and became a mostly female occupation.

[2] I recently learned that the WAWC archives are in the George Washington University library. So now one of my projects is to go through my files and boxes and see if I have anything that they don’t. The description of their holdings is rather sketchy, but it does conjure memories.

[3] Wheatpaste is an ancient, low-tech tool for sticking things together, especially appropriate for affixing posters to walls and other surfaces. A quick web search will turn up many ways to make and use it, but the CrimethInc website ably conveys the spirit of the technique.