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    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots
    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots
    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots
    Ebook251 pages2 hours

    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots

    By Sinister Wisdom

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    About this ebook

    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots explores the Southern spaces where lesbians gathered and organized during the past forty years. The ways that lesbians came together during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were many and varied. There was no social media, no high-speed communication. Lesbians relied on the US Post Office, telephones, and face-to-face contact. Public advertising such as newspaper ads, flyers, and leaflets, had to be done carefully and discreetly. Learning about events of the past gives templates by which to formulate and support activism in the present and future. Oppression, restriction, discrimination, and disempowerment can take many forms, some more insidious than others, and activism can be especially difficult when one is a member of a despised minority that also is criminalized. Sometimes the most we can do is be ourselves and live the truth in our lives.
    This issue of Sinister Wisdom, fourth in our series of special issues covering lesbian-feminist activism in the late twentieth-century South, focuses on lesbian gathering places and ways that lesbians created community while continuing activism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSinister Wisdom
    Release dateNov 20, 2018
    ISBN9781944981266
    Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots
    Author

    Sinister Wisdom

    Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

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      Book preview

      Sinister Wisdom 109 - Sinister Wisdom

      FrontCover.jpg

      Table of Contents

      Notes for a Magazine

      Sinister Wisdom Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgements

      Notes for a Special Issue

      Kate Ellison

      Weeds

      Merril Mushroom

      Anita Bryant, Florida, 1978

      Woody Blue

      Southern Wimmin Rising, 1987

      Interviews by Barbara Esrig

      Women Unlimited, Gainesville, Florida

      Corky Culver

      Transforming Lesbian Cultural Politics in Gainesville, Florida

      Patti Carnuccio, Amber Waters, and Ruth Segal

      Gainesville Dykes

      Jade River

      Mother’s Brew and Louisville’s Lesbian Feminist Union

      Merril Mushroom

      Knoxville, 1974: the Prom, the Coffeehouse, and the Network That Failed

      The Great Nashville Lesbian-Feminist Organizational Meeting, May 1978

      The Unfinished Revolution at WIT’s End Farm: Three Views

      Diana Woodall

      The Women’s Library: A Community-Based Library in Fayetteville, Arkansas

      Barbara Ester

      Roots and Branches: Miami’s Lesbian Culture

      Charlotte Brewer

      Friday Night Womyn’s Group and the Women’s Preservation Society

      Amani Ayers

      Our Place

      Maryanne Powers

      Outside the Box

      Barbara Ester

      Lu Rivers’ Bars to Bizarres

      Martha Ingalls and Bonnie Netherton

      Mermaid Inn, Lesbian Oasis on Fort Lauderdale Beach

      Laurel Ferejohn

      Organizing Our Own Place: Durham, NC

      Sherri Zann Rosenthal

      TALF—Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists: Recovering a History of Exuberant Lesbian Community in the 1970s and 1980s

      Jaye Vaughn

      Cedar Chest

      Gail Reeder

      The Digging Dykes of Decatur

      Lisa Q. Mount

      The Digging Dykes of Decatur Theme Song

      Pamela Edwards

      Can I Breathe Now?: Stories from the Archives of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance

      Beth Marschak and Merril Mushroom

      Lesbian-Feminist Organizing in Richmond, Virginia

      Interview with Terrie Pendleton by Rose Norman

      Lesbian Women of Color (LWOC) in Richmond

      Sasha Ray

      Finding Sheville

      Pamela Edwards

      Mommas and Falcons in the Reluctantly Southern Appalachian Mid-Atlantic

      B. Leaf Cronewrite and Drea Firewalker

      Kansas City Women’s Support Group

      Bonnie J. Morris

      Inside Mississippi’s Religious Right: My Day as a Lesbian Spy

      Robin Toler

      New Orleans, a Deep South Hot Spot: How Lesbians Formed Community

      Bonnie Jean Gabel

      Conjuring: New Orleans Dyke Bar Project

      Book Review

      Movie Review

      Sharing Our Lesbian Herstory Sinister Wisdom Issues

      Contributors

      Credits

      Subscribe

      Back Titles

      Back Cover

      Notes for a MAGAZINE

      For the first time as we publish an issue put together by the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, I am writing the Notes for a Magazine as a resident of the South. Our previous issue, Sinister Wisdom 104: Lesbianima Rising published when I had moved to Florida, but I wrote the notes before that move was complete. Now I am, or at least am on my way to becoming, a Southerner.

      Maryland, of course, is below the Mason-Dixon line; some may argue that I already was a Southerner. Generally I do not take Southerner as part of my identity. I was born and raised in Michigan. The Midwest seems to be the regional identity that describes me best, even as I now live with the sun of Florida, the humidity of the South.

      While I may not yet identify as a Southerner, the work that the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project inspires me. Committed volunteers are recording lesbian, feminist, activist herstory in the South. Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots—Creating Lesbian Space in the South along with the three previous issues assembled by the group represent the best of social history and community engagements with preserving and writing history. Moreover, this work is being done with a focus on herstory that is outside the dominant narratives. The women of the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project preserve lesbian visibility and activism in places where it can be erased easily.

      The herstories assembled in this issue Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots—Creating Lesbian Space in the South remind us that wherever we live and work and build our lives, we can create visible lesbian, feminist, activist communities. I have always believed that lesbian hot spots can be anywhere; lesbian hot spots are not just Provincetown, New York, and San Francisco. Lesbian hot spots are where we live and love openly (in addition to being in that usual place: between our legs!)

      The final reason I love Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots—Creating Lesbian Space in the South and its predecessor ones by the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project is quite simple: these herstories are great reads. I hope that you will delight in these stories as much as I do—and that they will inspire you to make a lesbian hot spot wherever you live.

      During the past few months, lesbian communities continued to energize and support Sinister Wisdom. The response to Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 has been wonderful. With a few interns and volunteers, we have done a lot of writing about Sister Love and promoted it to readers around the country. Thank you to all of the subscribers to Sinister Wisdom who helped to make Sister Love possible.

      As always, lesbians and our allies came out with extraordinary support for our fall fundraising campaign. Thank you! You all continue to grow Sinister Wisdom, helping us reach new subscribers and new readers. Our annual campaign contributor acknowledgments are in this issue. I have thanked personally everyone who supported the fall campaign as donations came in throughout the last quarter of 2017. Now I want to thank all of our supporters publicly. Thank you! Sinister Wisdom continues to thrive because of your belief in the work and your financial commitment to moving the work forward.

      In sisterhood,

      Julie R. Enszer, PhD

      July 2018

      Sinister Wisdom Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgements

      Thank you to all of the supporters of the Sinister Wisdom fall fundraising campaign. We raised over $9,000 to support Sinister Wisdom during 2018. Fall fundraising campaign supporters and subscribers include:

      189846.jpg189805.jpg

      Error in listing? Name missing? I apologize. Please bring it to my attention at julie@sinisterwisdom.org so that I can correct it.

      If you missed the Sinister Wisdom fall fundraising campaign, make a gift online now at www.SinisterWisdom.org.

      Sinister Wisdom remembers Susan Levinkind with great love and affection. Susan's bequest helps to ensure Sinister Wisdom's long-term stability. Sinister Wisdom also honors Elana Dykewomon for her continued support. May Susan's memory be for a blessing.

      Notes for a Special Issue

      In this issue of Sinister Wisdom , fourth in our series of special issues covering lesbian-feminist activism in the late twentieth-century South, we focus on lesbian gathering places and ways that we created community while continuing our activism.

      Looking back to 1970, just after the Stonewall riots, lesbians, along with gay men, were beginning to find a modicum of safety being who we were. We risked losing jobs, family, housing, or standing in the community if we came out of hiding, but at least we no longer were subjected to incarceration in prisons or mental hospitals for crimes against nature. Still, thoughts of social acceptance or legal protection remained pie-in-the-sky dreaming. The politics of feminism had been taking root in the lesbian community, but many feminist organizations, like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and some women’s centers, excluded lesbians. Some dykes worked from inside their closets; others forced recognition, if not acceptance, by being out. Some became separatist in their politics and lifestyles, while others worked within the system. Prior to the 1990s, when lesbianism became trendy, marketable, and thus more acceptable, we still had to be cautious about where we came out and to whom.

      We longed for community; we needed social activities, spaces where we could gather to focus our energy, to organize. The bars had been our only outlet, but they never have been adequate to our needs. As lesbians who functioned in a largely heteropatriarchal world, we began to create more effective and satisfying spaces for ourselves to further the work we had begun in the 1960s in our living rooms.

      Southern cities became networks for lesbian organizing and community, and we are beginning to document many of them here. We found stories about lesbian-feminist groups in Asheville and Durham, NC; Louisville, KY, Gainesville and Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, and Richmond, VA—all places that at one time were veritable hot spots of lesbian-feminist activism, much of it not known outside the Southeast. Some, like the Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists, may be mentioned in passing in queer or feminist histories, but the work is poorly documented. Richmond Lesbian-Feminists still exists and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2015, yet we had never heard of it. We sought out members of these organizations and began looking for others like them that have been hidden from herstory.

      We also report on lesbian-feminist activism we have known or discovered in Nashville and Knoxville, and gathering places in New Orleans, Louisville, and Fayetteville, AR. Lesbians were gathering and creating lasting organizations from the West Virginia/Maryland area to Kansas City, to Ovett, MS.

      The ways that we came together were many and varied. There was no social media, no high-speed communication. We relied on the US Post Office, telephones, and face-to-face contact. Any public advertising such as newspaper ads, flyers, and leaflets, had to be done carefully and discreetly. Outreach to lesbians who were isolated was especially important, but we had to maintain a balance between openness and safety. Although we often worked and even socialized with feminist women who were not lesbian-identified, we craved space and activities that could be lesbian-only.

      Learning about events of the past can give us templates by which to formulate and support activism in the present and future. Oppression, restriction, discrimination, and disempowerment can take many forms, some more insidious than others, and activism can be especially difficult when one is a member of a despised minority that also is criminalized. Sometimes the most we can do is be ourselves and live the truth in our lives. As lesbians in a multi-alphabetical population, today’s victories have been hard-won and may not be as secure as we might hope. We must be vigilant against backlash, work to maintain our gains, and make common cause/support with other minority groups that are being scapegoated or threatened.

      In this twenty-first century, as lesbianism has become more commonplace, we need our strength in numbers more than ever. As danger and difficulty diminish, so do the triumphs and rewards of overcoming adversity. In these days of rapid-fire electronic communication and overwhelming media stimulation, do we not lose something very real that comes with face-to-face contact? Is there lasting value in gathering together in collective spaces and working together in the very flesh we wear? Just as lesbian identity has been disappearing, diluted by the alphabet soup of nontraditional gender identity and expression, so are we losing lesbian space, lesbian community—both rare and very precious. These stories remind us what it was like, face-to-face, and in the face of adversity.

      We have been collecting stories primarily through interviews with self-identified lesbian-feminist activists who were active in the South during the last three decades of the 1900s. Our interviews generally do not include well-known Southern lesbian writers, musicians, political activists, and other movers and shakers who are already represented in modern studies. Rather, we seek out stories of the unsung sheroes, the women whose names and stories would otherwise be forgotten. Publication space limitations cause us to condense these fascinating interviews into much briefer forms, but the interviews in their entirety are stored and are accessible to anyone who might be interested.

      All of our interviews and materials are archived at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University (http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/bingham/). The Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project intends to stimulate your memories and motivate you to record your own story of creating change and community.

      Barbara Esrig, Kate Ellison, Merril Mushroom, Rose Norman

      July 2018

      Weeds

      Kate Ellison

      We are the dandelions,

      we are the plantain weeds

      growing everywhere

      never eradicated.

      Not pepper spray, not Roundup,

      nor pruning, mowing,

      or mass media mind control

      will stop us from growing

      or keep us from our dreams

      Our roots are deep and strong

      reaching the fertile ground

      of those who went before,

      never tamed, never eradicated.

      Our leaves, our bodies

      ordinary, blending in

      as they bring the sun’s rays

      to meet life-sustaining water,

      the ordinary work of daily life.

      Our flowers emerge,

      bright like the sun

      or gray-green and sturdy

      standing tall on the roadside,

      flowers like placards

      shining out for peace, for civil rights,

      a healthy planet,

      for weeds and for humanity.

      Our seeds, the fruit of our labors,

      fall on rich dark earth,

      richest possible source

      for sturdy flowers that will come

      when we are gone.

      We are the dandelions.

      We are the plantain weeds.

      We resist Roundup and pepper spray.

      We grow where cultivated grasses can’t survive,

      where hybrid seeds fall short.

      We adapt and spread like weeds.

      It is what we do.

      We can be pruned and uprooted,

      but our wild seeds of thought fly

      on the wind currents, the air waves

      beyond the continental divide,

      beyond the digital divide.

      Any ground can be ours.

      We change and grow,

      it is what we do.

      Summer, 2014

      180136.jpg

      Anita Bryant, Florida, 1978

      Merril Mushroom

      Y ou’d be proud of me, my dad said one evening in 1978. I snubbed Anita Bryant in public.

      How so? I asked.

      I stopped into Wolfie’s deli for some lunch, explained my dad, and she was sitting at a table with a bunch of other people. ‘Hello Tommy,’ she called to me. So I went over to the table and looked at her and said, ‘Excuse me, but I don’t think I know who you are.’ I did it for you, because of the terrible things she’s doing to the lesbians and gays.

      My dad was in show business and had worked with Anita Bryant. She was a beauty pageant winner and famous pop singer whose Top 40 hits included songs such as Paper Roses, Little Things Mean a Lot, and Till There Was You. She also was an outspoken homophobic bigot. In 1977, more than a decade after the horrendous Charley Johns investigations ended,*¹the Dade County Commission (Miami) finally saw fit to pass an antidiscrimination ordinance to protect the rights of lesbian and gay citizens.

      Anita Bryant decided

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