The Disappearing L

Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture

Bonnie J. Morris

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438461762, 9781438461779
• eBook ISBN: 9781438461786
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A 2018 Over the Rainbow Selection presented by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association LGBT Americans now enjoy the right to marry—but what will we remember about the vibrant cultural spaces that lesbian activists created in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s? Most are vanishing from the calendar—and from recent memory. The Disappearing L explores the rise and fall of the hugely popular women-only concerts, festivals, bookstores, and support spaces built by and for lesbians in the era of woman-identified activism. Through the stories unfolding in these chapters, anyone unfamiliar with the Michigan festival, Olivia Records, or the women's bookstores once dotting the urban landscape will gain a better understanding of the era in which artists and activists first dared to celebrate lesbian lives. This book offers the backstory to the culture we are losing to mainstreaming and assimilation. Through interviews with older activists, it also responds to recent attacks on lesbian feminists who are being made to feel that they've hit their cultural expiration date.

1

The Soundtrack of Our Awakening

I seem to have spent my entire life listening to boys talk about music. And sometimes, no matter how smart or untrivial or meaningful the boy might be, the sheer aesthetic presence of a masculine voice in record talk can get on my nerves. Because there are so many males talking, all the time, about everything, on television and on the radio, that I just get sick of men.

—Sarah Vowell, Radio On

We were not the first feminist musicians to sing out, but this tour jump-started a cultural phenomenon that would change the lives of hundreds of thousands of women and men; it laid the groundwork so that a dozen years later, young independent women could dominate the music industry. At the same time, millions of people never even knew it happened.

—Holly Near, Fire in the Rain … Singer in the Storm

Not wanting to identify with women’s music is the same thing as not wanting to call yourself a feminist.

—Kaia Wilson, The Butchies, Co-owner, Mr. Lady Records

For more than thirty years, I’ve collected the work of feminist musicians and comedians who enjoyed cult status as lesbian stage performers in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. These groundbreaking artists, earning very little in return for what they gave to the women’s community, worked tirelessly as local and national activists. Against all odds, they made the subject of lesbian rights into dance music, whether on bass guitar, piano, banjo, drum kit, saxophone, horn, djembe, or flute. They lent a lesbian identity to jazz, rap, romantic ballads, electric guitar licks, African drumming, and stand-up routines. And they demanded that their audiences join them in song, drumbeat, laughter, and action. Their exhortation from concert stages and festival workshops gave countless women the courage to come out, advancing the tide of political change.

Today, however, when I ask my college students to name five openly lesbian role models, they rarely list musicians. They identify speakers, rather than singers: media icons such as Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres, Suze Orman. The lesbian celebrities they enjoy seeing on television every day are millionaires, far removed from the haybale and the sliding scale of 1970s entertainment. Except for the few who grew up with lesbian moms, none of my students know the lesbian stage musicians, comedians, and songwriters who toured nationally between 1974 and 1999—often for $100 or less per gig.

These students gasp when I bring in a hefty three hundred–page index of the lesbian music albums and tapes produced independently through the late 1990s. The Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge quickly stand out as commercially familiar performers, but the class is surprised to learn that other, earlier stars of the women’s music movement are not necessarily dead or retired. In fact, a majority are still touring and selling their recordings—and available for interviews. And the original albums of the women’s music movement are still available (as CDs, now) through their original distribution networks, Goldenrod and Ladyslipper.

Why are so many younger women unfamiliar with the recent songbook of lesbian rock and roll; with the huge heritage of lesbian protest music? How do we understand the context for this erasure? Some of it is due to the myopia of any younger generation: what happened recently is uncool. In this chapter, I will approach the rise and fall of women’s music in several ways: first, by examining its emergence as a radical and primarily nonprofit movement; next, by describing more personally what it was like to enter that subculture as a young activist myself; and finally, by noting which factors permitted the mainstreaming and normalizing of independent women in rock. It is not one but multiple factors that create amnesia concerning a rich performance culture.

What Was Women’s Music?

Terms and language are instantly contested when we start inscribing any history of the LGBT movement. Encoded in the term women’s music are multiple meanings and legacies. Was it music created by women? By feminists? By lesbian feminists? If white lesbian feminists were one driving force behind women’s music in the 1970s, how and when did women of color also take the stage, entering on their own terms? And how were any lesbian musicians’ contributions to the American music catalog understood, critiqued, or ignored by straight gatekeepers of rock journalism?1

Lesbian music has layered histories. Both Angela Davis (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism) and Lillian Faderman (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) have provided scholarly research on women’s truth-telling blues songs of the 1920s, music primarily performed and recorded by African American blueswomen. From “B.D. [bulldagger] Women” and “Prove it on Me” to “The Boy in the Boat” (with its sly references to lesbian lovemaking), recorded songs acknowledged lesbian realities in the Roaring Twenties, the Harlem Renaissance, and two world wars that left women alone with one another on the home front. In the more repressed postwar era, we nonetheless find creative secretary Lisa Ben penning “Lesbian Lyrics” in one of America’s first lesbian magazines, Vice Versa, which she typed and carbon-copied by hand through her secretarial job in Los Angeles beginning in 1947. Ben later recorded a 45 single for the Daughters of Bilitis organization. Born Edythe Eyde in 1921, her pseudonym was an anagram of the word lesbian. These legacies reveal the inventiveness, humor, and frankly sexual content of lesbian music long before Stonewall.

Interestingly, it seems more gay men than lesbians are familiar with Eyde; her story is kept alive by queer music archivist J. D. Doyle, who was corresponding with her as recently as 2003; and a chapter on Ben titled “Gay Gal” appears in Eric Marcus’s Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945–1990. In the latter, Ben declares that she was inspired to start songwriting after feeling appalled by gay male drag performers who made fun of women and butch lesbians: “I thought, well, I’m going to write some gay parodies, and they’re going to be gay, but they’re not going to be demeaning.” Later in the interview she calls herself a separatist, qualifying that for her, at that time, this meant “I never sang my gay parodies for straight people.”2

The women’s music genre associated with the 1970s drew lessons from the civil rights movement, which revived and relied on the black tradition of freedom songs. What would later be called protest music was often led by women, who did not necessarily identify as lesbians but who, like civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, saw music as a way to take a stand. Reagon (who eventually formed the group Sweet Honey in the Rock) included folk singers Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert, from the earlier group The Weavers, among her earliest political influences: these performers, investigated and banned by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the 1950s, were contemporary white musicians willing to go to jail for a cause. The civil rights freedom songs that Reagon and other women added to the American songbook soon blended with the sound of antiwar concerts and speeches. Holly Near, who toured Vietnam with Jane Fonda and appeared onstage with Judy Collins, became one of many female antiwar artists forced to confront sexism within the progressive movement. Throughout the radical 1960s, political action and theory remained dominated by charismatic male leaders, men who did not necessarily see the wisdom of sharing their microphone time with “chicks.”

In search of original subject matter that reflected women’s authenticity, feminists with roots in the civil rights and peace struggles gradually found one another and began a new musical journey—one that surprised their male comrades. In 1971, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band formed in part to critique the often violent tropes in male rock and roll. The band offered a counterpoint to popular songs that brutalized women. Interviewed for the women’s music documentary Radical Harmonies, musician Jennifer Abod recalls that her Chicago band member Naomi Weisstein was incensed by the Rolling Stones’ hit “Under My Thumb,” explaining “She wanted to get the word out to every fourteen-year-old girl, and the way to do that was through rock music.” Abod, who also played in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, remembers performing on Women’s Equality Day (August 26, 1970) for a women-only audience in New Haven: “We played at the DKE fraternity house at Yale University, which we thought ironic since most of us were dykes.”3

What followed was an avalanche of lesbian and feminist performers who took the protest music of the 1960s to a new level of politically charged content, with lived female experiences—and oppression—as the focus. During the four years between 1971 and 1975, key elements defining womyn’s music emerged, and they emerged simultaneously on the East Coast, the West Coast, and the heartland of the Midwest. The sound of confrontational feminist rock began with Mountain Moving Day, a release by two bands (Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band) on Rounder Records. It was followed by two provocative lesbian-themed albums, both produced independently: Maxine Feldman’s single Angry Atthis, produced by Robin Tyler in 1972, and Alix Dobkin’s LP Lavender Jane Loves Women, famously taped in one day in 1973 (thanks to engineer Marilyn Ries’s access to a spoken-word recording studio). The following year saw the founding of the two most influential record companies in women’s music: Redwood Records and Olivia Records. Olivia’s record The Changer and the Changed, by Cris Williamson, sold up to eighty thousand copies in its first year, although Judy Dlugacz recalls, “The honest truth is if we knew what we were doing, we never would’ve done it. If we knew what it would take to be an independent record company with this lesbian part to it—with no money and no knowledge of how to do it—it would’ve been insane.”4 Changer, which recently celebrated its fortieth year in print, awakened four decades of audiences to the possibility of owning lesbian-identified music.

Between 1974 and 1975, the growing popularity of women’s music spawned three more significant institutions, expanding fans’ access to the music while keeping control of production in women’s hands. These new elements were women’s music festivals, women-only sound companies, and women-only album distribution companies. Following earlier gatherings at Sacramento State and San Diego State universities, the first full-length women’s music festival met on the campus of the University of Illinois in 1974. It was produced by Kristin Lems (a feminist, though not lesbian herself). Incensed by a recent folk festival that featured no female artists, Lems and her staff ended up institutionalizing lesbian artists as new stars of women’s music. By 1975, Boden Sandstrom’s WomanSound company and the Goldenrod music distribution network were in place (later joined by Ladyslipper), able to deliver the sound and product of lesbian culture to any venue: stage, park, campground, bookstore, church basement, private living room. There was no stopping the tide. One independent band, The Deadly Nightshade, whose members included lesbians and whose music was overtly feminist, released a women’s liberation anthem on Phantom Records that actually enjoyed airplay on commercial radio in 1975: “High Flying Woman.”

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the surest way to meet other lesbians—outside of bars and softball tournaments—was to attend a women’s music concert. Decked out in brocade vests and clean flannel shirts, sporting pins that declared WE ARE EVERYWHERE, smiling women stood in line for performances by Margie Adam, Gwen Avery, The Berkeley Women’s Music Collective, Meg Christian, Ginni Clemmens, Casse Culver, Alix Dobkin, Therese Edell, Maxine Feldman, Sue Fink, Robin Flower, Deidre McCalla, June Millington, Holly Near, Betsy Rose, Woody Simmons, Linda Tillery, Teresa Trull, Vicki Randle, Mary Watkins, Cris Williamson, and dozens of other music and comedy artists. What made this cultural phenomenon so successful? Why did even the most closeted, underpaid lesbians eagerly fork over hard-earned money to sit on a folding chair or a Unitarian church pew at an event where no alcohol was served? On those rows of folding chairs, revolution was brewing: the sound of words affirming women who loved women, and the sight of competent stage and sound technicians who also were strong females. These lesbian role models spoke their truths into microphones onstage, turning woman-identified pride into top-selling albums and event nights nationwide.

From these origins in clubs and college campuses, the women’s music movement of the 1970s grew as a defiant counterpoint to the limited roles and opportunities for female artists in the male-dominated recording industry. It spread to every city where self-taught producers dared to bring in artists. Every region soon had its signature “local” performer: Libby Roderick in Alaska, Lucie Blue Tremblay in Montreal. North America’s remotest provinces hosted romantic and radical lesbian entertainers in a secret subculture known mostly to insiders. Every issue that the mainstream press distorted (or did not report on at all) in the women’s movement was addressed, directly, in speech and song, by lesbian artists. The transmission of a feminist message by women to women included a specific set of practices that were also political: sliding-scale admission prices for low-income women (around the same time that Ticketmaster began making it impossible to see Tina Turner unless one had a trust fund); the naming and unlearning of racism and sexism; sign language interpretation at concerts and up-front seating areas for deaf or disabled fans; and intentionally diverse stage lineups. Holly Near recalls performing openly lesbian music with Meg Christian at the California Institute for Women, a prison concert arranged by women’s music scholar Karlene Faith.5 The initially all-white lineup of the 1975 “Women on Wheels” tour, which featured Margie Adam, Meg Christian, Holly Near, and Cris Williamson, was soon answered by the “Varied Voices of Black Women” tour, which Olivia Records produced and the all-woman Roadwork production company booked. Featuring Gwen Avery, Pat Parker, Linda Tillery, and Mary Watkins, this tour brought poetry as well as jazz, blues, and piano to the women’s music audience. Olivia Records released one of the first-ever spoken word albums, pairing white lesbian poet Judy Grahn with black lesbian poet Pat Parker for the historic poetry recording “Where Would I Be Without You?” in 1976, America’s Bicentennial year. And Holly Near established Redwood Records in order to bring the music of Sweet Honey in the Rock—led by Bernice Johnson Reagon—to a larger audience base.

With in-your-face lyrics critical of patriarchy and male privilege, few artists expected to please male fans or mainstream critics, and the new issue of separatism fueled endless debate: Should men even be allowed at concerts? What about men from the Left, men some women considered comrades and allies? This conflict exploded at the very first festival, National, in 1974, where performer Meg Christian asked that her audience be women-only. Soon, production companies that had formed to promote women’s music concerts developed broadsheets and flyers to explain, in differing ways, the rationale of women-only space.

This concert is for women only. It is important that you understand why. Women must have an opportunity to come together to develop our culture as part of the process of taking control of our lives. … For women who have been raped, beaten, deserted, fired, misled, manipulated, discriminated against, had their children taken away, etc., the man at the concert may trigger pain even if he is the nicest guy in town. … Men can offer support by staying away and encouraging other men not to go. They can offer to do childcare, sponsor an event for men so that men can also build a non-sexist culture. (Oven Productions)

The atmosphere of a women-only event is different. It often allows us to experience a new level of support from other women, and it provides a time to relax with each other without needing to explain or defend our ideas to men. … If a performer requests a women-only audience, to develop and sustain communication and intimacy, we must respect that in deciding to produce her. Feminist and lesbian singers often perform materials that makes them very vulnerable; they have the right to choose their audience. (Lucina’s Music collective, Atlanta)

The political reaction to women’s music depended upon whether one heard its delivery and its stance as pro-female or anti-male. Holly Near, whose own work spanned the debate and called for revolution as well as alliance building, captured the meld of protest and romance in her song refrain “We are a gentle, angry people, and we are singing for our lives.” Her career reflected the rapid pace of change, from a 1973 appearance on The Partridge Family, in which her character’s response to being asked out by a boy was “Now I’m a sex symbol!” to one year later handing out flyers at the National Women’s Music Festival, explaining why “women only space was not discriminatory. I felt absolutely sure about that. … I asked that those men who did not understand or who disagreed take the seats in the back of the auditorium so that women could fill up the front and feel surrounded by women during the concert.”6

In the same way that rock and roll changed the American landscape ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Treasure Hunt
• Chapter 1: The Soundtrack of Our Awakening
• Chapter 2: By the Time I Got to Wombstock
• Chapter 3: Hunting and Gathering: A Literacy of One’s Own
• Chapter 4: Imagining an Eruv
• Chapter 5: Points of Erasure: Remembering Generation Flannel
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover