It was in Boulder, Colorado, and the year was 1972. I was twenty—not old enough to drink, but somehow old enough to have gotten myself married and divorced and fifteen hundred miles from home—if I could call it that. And I didn’t.

I was working on the second floor of J. C. Penneys, in the fabric department. The important thing to remember here is that the second floor of Penneys was where they sold piece goods, baby clothes, and draperies. Everything else was on the ground floor, off the mall. Nobody ever came up to the second floor except women—women who had babies, who sewed, and who decorated. And this is where I saw my first lesbians. Or, at least, it was the first time I identified the experience as such.

They were a couple, I remember—a butch and a fem. The butch was in her forties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her breasts were not apparent. She wore her black hair slicked back in a style left over from the fifties, a “duck’s ass” or “DA.” The skin on her face was leathery and tan, with hard lines around the eyes and the mouth. And her hands were in her pockets.

Her companion was everything she was not—except, of course, a lesbian. She appeared to be at least ten years younger, a blonde—although perhaps not a natural one, and she wore tight blue jeans, but not bellbottoms. These were working-class women, or what we anti-war, student-hippie types would call “greasers.”  She was shorter than her companion, and she wore makeup and earrings. Her hair was styled in a kind of bouffant look that was the shellacked, feminine counterpart of the DA.

The femme was buying fabric, and she was anxious that her purchase be pleasing to her companion. The butch appeared to be very uncomfortable with finding herself on the second floor of J.C. Penneys, and she answered her partner in a surly and self-conscious manner. She told her she didn’t know anything about this kind of “stuff.”

I remember that I shared the fem’s anxiety about pleasing this woman. I wanted her to know that I also cared, that I welcomed her presence in my department—was honored by it, even. I wanted to protect her from my co-workers who might be startled by her appearance, who might make judgments, who might even try to exchange a look with me. I wanted her to know that I would not side with them against her, that I would never be like one of them. I wanted her to smile at me, and, of course, she never did.
 
I think of this butch woman now, and I wonder what she made of the lesbians who must have just been emerging in Boulder—my generation of lesbians—young women in hiking boots with hairy legs and hairy armpits, neither butch nor fem, taking and teaching self-defense and auto repair classes, starting carpentry collectives, and organizing women’s clinics and women’s presses and women’s bookstores and women’s festivals. Lesbians fighting and loving and trashing and marching and mimeographing, smashing the state, taking back the night, giving peace a chance, making love not war. Feminists and Marxists and communists and vegetarians. Lesbians with speculums looking at each other’s cervices, lesbians with vibrators learning how to have orgasms, lesbians with kiwis, with zucchinis, with bananas, with cucumbers. Lesbians in threesomes and foursomes, in marriages, in families, in collectives, in cooperatives, in tents, in tepees, in yurts, in cabins, in dormitories. Lesbians quoting Ti-Grace Atkinson, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Valerie Solanas.

What must this butch have thought of this veritable explosion of latter-day tribadists? What could she have thought? Where in her centuries of oppression could she find any reason to trust women, even lesbians, who were not like herself? With the unerring instinct of the hunted, she would have concluded, and rightly, that the lesbians of the early seventies were dangerous to her.
Had she smiled at me on that second floor of J.C. Penney’s, or shared a look that admitted to her vulnerability or—worse yet—solicited my support, I would have betrayed her, and in a heartbeat.

It was this perpetual knowledge of an ever-present potential for betrayal that had etched the hard, hard lines around her eyes and her mouth. It was this knowledge that the fem was hoping to soften, to erase for just a moment, in the manufacture of some article of clothing for herself, for her lover, for their home, that would signify a kind of normalcy, a kind of belongingness that could never be a reality for a woman who had to run daily a gauntlet of scorn, violence, and contempt that would have killed an ordinary woman. And so her eyes never met mine, because they never missed a thing.

[Originally published in Chokecherries Anthology, Society of the Muse of the Southwest, Taos, NM, 2011]

[Originally published in On the Issues, June 28, 2012.]


As a playwright attempting to reclaim the lesbian lives of historic women athletes like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, I run into a peculiar brand of homophobia.

Writing about women athletes is a joy. Women athletes defy expectations and societal norms. They run their own races. They inspire and they revolutionize. This is why slamming into their closets is such a jolt and disappointment.

Yes, it's true that lesbians in the spotlight have historically needed to disguise their orientation. The penalties for deviance from the heterosexual template have been swift and severe. This was especially true for women athletes, who, by the very nature of their achievements, posed a challenge to the tenets of femininity. (They had muscles and they were competing!) The media, and sometimes even fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate their achievements. For homophobes, uncovering lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not be a "real woman."

But that was then and this is now. Or is it?

I call the homophobia that I encounter in telling about their lives "misguided allegiance homophobia." In this permutation folks insist that these historic figures would not be pleased by being outed posthumously; that honoring their lives requires honoring their closets and perpetuating the fictions they so carefully constructed.

Babe Didrikson was a tomgirl from the get-go, racking up trophies for a variety of sports in high school and even trying out for the football team. Recruited for an amateur basketball team in Dallas, she made such a name for herself that she was invited to try out for the 1932 Olympic track team. In order to get around the three-event limit for individual athletes, Babe's handlers were allowed to register her as a team, all by herself. In two and a half hours, she won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles) and set a world record in the hurdles and javelin. In addition, she tied in the high jump, setting another world record, and finished fourth in discus. She scored eight points higher than her nearest competition -- a team of 22 women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals and took the silver in the high jump. During this period, Babe was too focused on winning to give much attention to her image. She appears to have been perfectly comfortable with herself and her sole concession to "media spin" may have been misrepresenting her age, claiming to be 18 instead of 21. But Babe may have been catering to the public's acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a teen as opposed to the expectations for "young ladies."

Babe's overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. Sportswriter Paul Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, wrote in "The Texas Babe" in Vanity Fair in 1932 that this "strange girl-boy child" would have been right at home in a men's locker room. He used the word "boy" more than a dozen times to refer to Babe, attributing her athleticism to an over-compensation for her inability to attract men.

What Gallico did not mention was that Babe had made a fool out of him. After the Olympics, fellow sportswriter and fan Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. Exploiting Gallico's machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course and Gallico idiotically accepted. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on to win the game handily.

The next year Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Ostensibly a short story, the central character was a butch Texas athlete named "Honey," a thinly-disguised mimicry of Babe. In fact, a full-page photo of Babe sat on the facing page. Gallico imagines the other women athletes trash-talking Honey. They ridicule her Texas accent, comment on her frequent use of obscenities and speculate about her lesbianism. Gallico depicts his character as a genetic freak, filled with self-loathing in spite of her gold medal, sobbing while she smacks her own face and claws at herself -- because she cannot get a man.

Suddenly, Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume and nail polish -- things she used to dismiss as "too sissy." And within five years, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe's biographer Susan Cayleff "was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment." Photographed next to George, Babe, now playing the then-elite sport of golf, did appear more feminine.

So successful was Babe in presenting herself as a traditional housewife that, several years later when Babe entered a long-term relationship with a woman, the press was willing to characterize the woman as Babe's "protégée." According to biographer Cayleff, Betty was Babe's "primary partner." A fellow pro golfer, Betty roomed with Babe on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) circuit and lived in her home for the last six years of Babe's life. Whatever George may have thought of this arrangement, he accepted the situation. When Babe was in the hospital dying from colon cancer, Betty moved in with her, pushing the beds together.

When I wrote the book and lyrics for Babe: An Olympian Musical (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), the show included a love scene and duet between Babe and Betty. The scene marks a turning point in the narrative, as Babe moves from a position of alienation and competition with women to one of intimacy and professional alliance, culminating with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from the first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this "outing" of Babe. Was this respectful? What would Babe have wanted?  And, the "smiling homophobia" of: "What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete." Some critics even felt a need to talk about George.

At what point can we recognize that Babe was bisexual -- or a lesbian whose marriage may well have been a concession to career-busting homophobia? I wish that lesbian athletes -- then and now -- would have time capsules where they can safely store the truth about their lives and the women they love. We should not be left with a closeted record and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of remarkable women who were compelled to live a lie.

In January, African American lesbian writer, poet, essayist, and dancer Donna Allegra died at her home Brooklyn at the age of 67. This blog attempts to commemorate her life and her writing through an exploration of one of her short stories,  “The Dance of Cranes,” which pulls together so many threads of Allegra’s own biography as well as the issues she faced as a black, lesbian, butch, feminist, working-class writer in the twentieth century.

Allegra’s papers are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and this is her biography from their website:

“Born and raised in Brooklyn, Allegra studied theater at Bennington College and Hunter College, graduating from New York University in 1977 with a Bachelor's degree in dramatic literature, theater history and cinema. She worked as a construction electrician to support her writing and dancing, reviewed dance, theatre and film productions as a freelance cultural journalist, and produced lesbian and feminist-oriented radio programming for WBAI from 1975-1981.

Allegra was an early member of the Jemima Writers Collective, the first black lesbian writing group in New York City. The collective grew out of the Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States, and was founded to encourage black women writers to share their creative work with each other in a supportive environment. Fellow members of Jemima included Candace Boyce, Georgia Brooks, Linda Brown, Robin Christian, Yvonne Flowers (Maua), Chirlane McCray, Irare Sabasu, and Sapphire. Allegra later joined the Gap-Toothed Girlfriends Writers Workshop.

A prolific writer of poetry, short stories and biographical essays, Allegra has been published in over thirty lesbian and feminist anthologies and numerous black and lesbian journals and magazines. In 2001, she published her first book, Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers, a collection of twelve short stories and a novella about black lesbian dancers. In addition to her writing career, Allegra is an accomplished African folklore and jazz dancer.”

In this blog, I wanted to share excerpts from her short story “Dance of the Cranes.” This was originally published in the anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction. It’s also included in Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers. “Dance of the Cranes” is about a fourteen-year-old, black, lesbian butch who is struggling with issues of sexuality and gender, and also wrestling with the homophobia she is encountering in her community of dancers. In the story, this girl, Lenjen, finally sees someone who looks like her in her African dance class—an older butch dancer named Lamban, and the two are paired together by the instructor to perform the Dance of the Crane. As the pair demonstrate their dancing, the rest of the class bears witness and celebrates the tribal/familial bond of these two outsiders, and in doing that, Lenjen’s trauma and Lamban’s estrangement are healed.

This intersecting pain of butch-phobia and homophobia, coupled with racism, misogyny, and classism were familiar themes in Allegra’s life.

Writing in the late 1990’s when the Internet was still in its infancy, Allegra was ahead of her time in naming the specific intersecting oppressions that she faced as an emergent lesbian writer of color. Her exposés are exceptional in their candor about how these oppressions shaped her experience. In 1997, her essay, “Inconspicuous Assumptions,” was published in Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write About Class. In it, she ticks off these assumptions:

• One particular cultural base should define universal standards in literature.
• The white male experience is central.
• All lesbians are white and upper-class.
• Writers have money, hence plentiful free time.
• The playing field for publishing is level for LGBT writers.
• Only white males take their craft seriously.

Fast-forwarding twenty-five years, it’s interesting to look at her list of “inconspicuous assumptions” and note how much more conspicuous they are today—thanks to the arduous efforts of writers like Allegra. It’s also interesting to note how many of the changes in the field of publishing have been superficial, especially with regards to working-class writing and lesbian-of-color representation. The lesbian butch voice remains underrepresented in all genres.

Here is Allegra, heartbreakingly candid about how the absence of kindred literary role models impacted her self-image:

"A telling marker of ruling-class viewpoint has to do with whose lives make it to the page and just whose story is told. The upper classes had their dramas enacted as the experience we were supposed to take as “universal.” Shakespeare’s leading characters were court royalty. Well, I’m not exactly the queen of England, but I first recognized myself as a lesbian by name in the story of a British noblewoman. Before I finished Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, I knew my common bond with Stephen Gordon made us sisters. I had all the symptoms of her situation. As a tomboy long past the age when I should have outgrown the “phase,” I waxed romantic over pretty girls; boys were fit companions, but of no interest beyond that. Clearly, I was destined to ride horses across the British countryside and become a champion fencer!

“Dance of the Crane” is set in a community of black women taking West African dance classes in New York. It opens with a teen-aged, gender-non-conforming, lesbian Lenjen accompanying her mother to a class.

“Lenjen wanted her mother to understand how she drank from the current of energy that flowed from the dancing women, that they were the ones who enriched her blood. She wasn’t putting her passion on the floor for some mating game. But [her mother’s] mind was set, and Lenjen didn’t want to whine after her to explain.”

The girl has noticed an older woman at the dance classes, who has been away for a while but is just returning. She finds herself pulled toward this woman who “wore African pants and didn’t hold back from trying the men’s steps."

The older woman, Lamban, is an older version of Lenjen. I suspect that she represents the missing role model in Allegra’s own youth. In Lamban, we see the development of themes just emerging in the teenager and discover the secret behind her long absence from dance classes:

“She’d been through the fire, sorted through the ashes and determined she wouldn’t hurt herself again by denying her lesbian self. She’d tried hiding this truth from anyone who got friendly with her. When she couldn’t pretend anymore, instead of going to class, she stayed home and cried night after night for a week…

Lamban still grieved that being a lesbian could make her an outlaw to a group of people who did the most spiritually sustaining thing she knew in life. She’d needed all those months away to love herself again. The time in seclusion let her grow perspective, like new skin. That’s how lobsters did it—when the old shell became too small for the mature body, they’d go to a protected place where they could shed the old covering safely. In that haven, they could curl naked and vulnerable until a new covering grew in.”

The final dance of the evening is the lenjen, the dance after which the teenager had been named—the Dance of the Cranes. The teacher pairs Lamban and Lenjen. In the description of the solos, Allegra describes a deeply healing ritual between two members of a people who have survived a diaspora, but who are also survivors of a different kind of dispersement—lesbian butches unable to find their people and despairing of a home they have never known:

Female Anatomy Matters. And don’t let anyone tell you different.

From theories of women’s “wandering uteri” to the insistence that womanhood is a purely social construct, and  from the witchhunts to female genital mutilation, female anatomy has been under attack. This anatomy is necessary for reproduction… and patriarchy and capitalism both have special incentives for commodifying reproduction:  It produces the soldiers that either further dreams of empire or guard against it, and it produces a labor force—the larger, the cheaper.  And, of course, our bodies are commodified for the paid and unpaid rape experiences to which a huge percentage of men feel entitled.

In patriarchy, women’s bodies are an asset, a resource, the raw material out of which humans are made. We must be owned, controlled, and—above all—kept from our power. We must be raised to be dependent on males and male approval. We must learn to distrust and fear our mothers. We must be forced into competition with other women at the expense of forming powerful alliances. We must be kept ignorant about our bodies and denied access to resources that enable our control of our anatomy. We must embrace ideologies that dissociate us from our bodies and encourage us to live dissociated identities. We must use language that erases our agency and ownership and pride in our bodies. We must use a language of dissociation that will prevent our sense of an embodied self. We must not be allowed to name our oppression, and especially the modes of attack on our anatomy. We must embrace these misogynist ideologies and become the agents for policing and schooling each other.

How do men get away with this? Well, for starts, raw power. They very blatantly legislate control over our persons. Just in the last two centuries this meant we could not vote, serve on juries, own our own children, inherit, have professional careers, get formal education, get credit in our own names, own our own wages, terminate unwanted pregnancies. We could be legally raped in marriage, sexually harassed with impunity, and a husband could have his wife locked up indefinitely on the recommendation of a doctor, who didn’t even have to examine the woman personally. Raw power.

But they also do it with ideologies: The Biblical original sin of Eve, who dragged all men for eternity down into mortal sin, getting us all evicted from the Garden. Because of Eve, men have to work for a living and women have to suffer the torment of the damned in childbirth. What was her sin? Intellectual curiosity and insistence on her own agency. This stain on our lineage became the excuse for keeping us subordinated. Denying us personhood was ordained by “the Word.”  So were other forms of enslavement. Our Biblical scapegoating does not hold the same Western universality as it did a century ago, but today there is an ideology that insists that womanhood is nothing more than a social construct and that female anatomy can be acquired through surgery. This ideology imposes heavy sanctions against formation of female alliances around shared experiences and/or oppressions associated with our anatomy and its functions. Women are prohibited from speaking the truth of women’s anatomy, and any identification with that anatomy, which is to say, any sense of an embodied self, is dismissed as ignorance and bigotry on our part.

A third prong of this attempted totalitarian control over women’s anatomy is data bias. Men in the sciences operate under the assumption that “male=human.” The result of this is the skewing of data that erases half the human race. Women must move through a world that favors males. The book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez documents the high price women are forced to pay for this willful erasure of female anatomy

Let’s take a look:

SNOW REMOVAL. Yep. Snow removal. There is an order in which municipal snow removal occurs. The priority is usually the major arteries used by drivers who commute to work. These roads get plowed first, then the bus routes, then the pedestrian routes. But guess what? Women are more likely to take public transit or to walk. Part of this is our substantially lower income, but also because we are far more likely (25%)  to “trip chain,” that is to make a number of stops on our way to a destination: drop the kids at daycare, pick up the cleaning, pick up groceries, etc. And, of course, this difference is rooted in our anatomy. How? Well, 80% of women exercise our reproductive capacity, which results in almost two decades of primary caregiving as young adults, with attendant interruptions in career-building. We make about 20% less than men. And we constitute a sizable majority of the poor and working poor. Not surprisingly, women comprise 69% of the snow injuries from falling on uncleared streets and sidewalks. Is this just theory? No. In cities where bus routes and sidewalks are cleared first, women’s injuries go down. But… the funding priority still remains commuter roads, not public transit.

TOILETS. Studies show that converting men’s and women’s bathrooms to “gender neutral,” with the men’s room retaining urinals, results in men using both bathrooms and women using only the former women’s room. Which means our lines will be even longer. The 50/50 law that mandates equal floor space for men’s and women’s facilities fails to take into account that women use cubicles exclusively, where men use urinals, greatly increasing the number of men who can use the facilities at the same time. And bathroom safety for women and children is a huge issue. WaterAid reports that women and girls around the world spend 97 billion hours a year seeking safe places to relieve themselves. Because of our anatomy and social sanctions, we cannot “go anywhere” when we need to urinate. And, of course, there is rape. Women often will avoid using public bathrooms after dark, for fear of being ambushed and assaulted. Public bathrooms around the world are notorious sites for harassment. To manage this, women often don’t drink enough water, risking dehydration and heat illness. Invisible Women has an entire chapter titled “Gender Neutral with Urinals.” It’s huge.

I really set out to summarize the book, but the examples run into the hundreds, and I am, honestly, overwhelmed. The data bias where the data is not disaggregated by sex is pervasive, and the consequences for women are disastrous. Take crash-test dummies. Yep, modeled on the average male body. But women have different muscle-mass distribution, lower bone density, differences in vertebrae spacing. And don’t even get me started on seat belts and pregnant women. We sway differently. And yes, Female Anatomy Matters. We are 17% more likely to die in car crashes.

Medicine… where to begin? That our heart attack symptoms are radically different from those of men, and for this reason thousands of women, not recognizing them in time to seek emergency services, are dead. Or the fact that colon cancer occurs higher up the colon in women, rendering the do-it-yourself, at-home screening kits less effective for women. Are we told this when considering alternatives to colonoscopies? No. Again, more female fatalities.

I actually did some crowdsourcing for examples of medical misogyny and the examples were too numerous to include. But drug testing has historically been conducted on males, resulting in the horrors of birth defects from thalidomide use by pregnant women. The horror here is that pregnant women were being specifically targeted, because thalidomide was a sedative promoted for use in third trimester sleep disorders. And ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome) is an autoimmune disorder that affects females more than males. Needless to say, it has been treated as psychosomatic: the “lazy/crazy disease.” Also Female Anatomy Matters with Lyme disease. Women tend to have more atypical rashes from the tick bites, resulting in missed or misdiagnoses. Commercial Lyme testing favors men over women, because men have more positive ELISA tests and more positive Western blots.

Mental health? Volumes have been written on this subject. Birth control and birthing practices? Ditto. Menopause and aging? Of course.  

I’m really not doing this subject justice. Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, y’all. It just might save your life.

The point I want to make, as a lesbian and as a feminist, is this: Our LGBT community, in it’s admirable intention to make the world more tolerant, inclusive, and equal has overreached with ideologies that lend themselves to this “Invisible Women” oppression. In a rush to validate trans identities, we have become guilty of contributing to the disrespect toward and diminution of the significance of female anatomy. Disappearing the reality, the historical oppression, and the lived experience of female anatomy will not pave any kind of path forward toward acceptance and equality. Female Anatomy Matters is the way. This does not mean that trans identities and anatomies don’t matter. In fact, understanding why and how Female Anatomy Matters is a touchstone for liberation for all. 

CG: I’m interviewing the amazing Raquel Almazan, a fellow playwright who also an actress, educator, film director, dance practitioner, and art activist. She has been awarded numerous grants and received numerous awards. And she has participated in writing development workshops with such brilliant artists as David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Theresa Rebeck, Charles Mee, Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Morgan Jenness, Julie Harris, Naomi Ilizuka, and Carmen Rivera.

Some of her plays include La Paloma Prisoner, CAFÉ, La Negra, When I Came Home, La Migra Taco Truck, Dar a Luz, Does that Feel Good to you My Lark? A Doll’s House Adaptation, and Cross//Roads: Re-framing the Immigrant Narrative.

From her website:

“Raquel was born in Madrid – Spain, is also of Costa Rican descent and has lived most of her life in the U.S. As an interdisciplinary artist she holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Columbia University. B.F.A. in Theatre from University of Florida/New World School of the Arts Conservatory. She develops work as a writer, director, actor, dramaturge and is also a Butoh dance practitioner. Almazan is the Artistic Director of La Lucha Arts, producing several of her original works, including Latin is America, a play cycle and lecture-performance, a collection of bi-lingual works in dedication to each Latin American country.”

We are talking about her play La Paloma Prisoner, a richly imagined play that is pageant, ritual, crime drama, prison play, and an historical epic that comprises vast sweeps of eras and geography. It’s also a play about mothers and daughters, sisterhood—for better or worse, and goddess archetypes. In other words, it is ambitious and daring and transformative.

In Raquel’s words, “This new play centers on a woman nicknamed “La Paloma” who targets men who rape girls. During her incarceration, male rapists throughout Colombia continue to turn up dead, leading the public to believe La Paloma may have magical avenger abilities. With the spread of the beauty pageant obsession in South American prisons, this group of incarcerated women organize “The Parade of Prisoners,” calling on ancient rituals of adorning the warrior. These women’s stories interweave Colombia’s social, political, and spiritual history. With their newfound power, the women redefine beauty, their own humanity, and their identity as labeled criminals. La Paloma begins to revolutionize not only the women’s lives, but prison society and the world beyond its walls.”

CG: This just an incredible play… Where to begin?  One of the things I love about it, is the recurring themes of mother-daughter love/hate relationships…This is one of the bones I have to pick with the so-called traditional canon, which is, of course, written by men. People defend it by insisting that it is universal in its themes. To that, I always ask, what about mothers and daughters. Shakespeare is filled with father-son conflict and reconciliation, drama often stoked by out-of-wedlock sons and laws of primogeniture that dictated only the first-born would inherit the estate of the father… But where are the mother-daughter scenes? There are some blink-and-you-miss-it ones in Romeo and Juliet, but that’s pretty much it. So I love how much you treat themes about mothers and daughters in this play.

RA:  First, I’d like to deeply thank you Carolyn for the wonderful words in describing the play and for framing the play within this context.
When I first started working in maximum security facilities; there was an immediate mother-daughter bond that happened between the women. It wasn’t just about mentor-mentee, it was beyond the relationships that they had come to cultivate on the outside. Many of us, I think, knew the feeling of a parent rejecting you or having violence associated with one of your parents, so there was a bond there, that someone would take care of you.

Immediately I realized that coming in and doing this work was about forming families very quickly, and realizing “I’m the mother” and other times “I’m the daughter, I’m receiving so much right now, and I’m being held.” So I think that was really the impetus to have so many mother-daughter relationships in the piece. And looking at the world outside of this structure of men to be quite honest, that this was a world in which masculine energy wasn’t penetrating, and so there was this extreme focus on feminine divine energy and feminine healing and for me I looked at that through the prism of mother-daughter relationships.

Women have these instincts, as mothers, that we are going to protect, that we are going to protect ourselves and our communities, yet we’ve normalized seeing that as a masculine trait.

“The love between mother and daughter, the Oro and Diana characters, who are outside of society create their own personal society of righteous crime. To remove themselves from helplessness and poverty they create their own code of violence- of thievery to survive, their code is what serves them. What has been taken from them returns to them by the opportunities of gaining what they need.

When your own mother, biological mother, cannot protect you, who becomes your mother, your guide? That’s the big question for me, who is the person who is going to protect you? In oppressive societies, I look at it through the lens of women, who is going to become my mother, who is going to become my protector, and I think that Paloma takes that role.

CG: And ritual… La Paloma Prisoner is so filled with allegory, sacred objects, song and dance, I felt that the entire play was a ritual of healing and exorcism. Where did that come from? Are you a witch?

RA: Lol… I am absolutely a witch!
In my practice of theatre I seek to create an alchemy of the body, space and spirit. This includes the audience’s participation in this experience. To transform ourselves we must actually change the molecules in the space and this is a conscious effort in how as writers and directors we approach the process and staging techniques of theatre.

The play also has many extended dance/ritual sequences that counter balance this violence with healing. Based on Butoh dance and cultural rituals we take back the body as an anonymous figure that is being processed for a jail sentence in the beginning of the play to the journey of the end of the play- where the woman explore their new bodily identities that take form. The body is the conduit of the holy spirit. We need not be separated but to honor the body in space is to join our heart, mind and spirit.

In the world of La Paloma Prisoner, the play offers a spiritual communication with those who have died. The play has a series of celestial meetings between the women and their loved ones. The wall that closes the women in also creates a need for us to break into this world, when Paloma becomes a celebrity of vengeance for women around the world, physical walls begin to tumble down. A portal opens.

In Colombia, The worshipping of the Guativita Lagoon Goddess by the indigenous Muisca people, involved the beautification of the body, the ritualization of the body, that involves painting the body gold and adorning the body with colorful dress and jewelry. The beautification of the body is also a symbol of health and fertility. I endowed the characters with the agency of honoring their fertility, power and sexual potency that does not need the dependency of men. The ability to call on the spirits with this worship often calls on altering the body and preparing the body for this type of spiritual exchange.

The modern use of makeup in the pageant as a mask is used in this exchange today in order to call on the Patron Saint of Prisoners, The Virgin of Mercedes takes place on Sept. 24, every year at the Buen Pastor Jail.

The use of song was inspired by the opening song of the pageant when I visited Buen Pastor, the women celebrated 200 years of Colombia’s independence by singing the national anthem.

At one of the facilities in South Florida I brought in a piece of fabric, going back to the essentials of theater, that one piece of colorful fabric that turned into all these other literal things, and also expressive things, where you could dance with it in rehearsals. They really were taking to these colors, and they said, “I would like to adorn myself with that, with this feather boa,” and then that became this portal. When we put it on and we did a dance, it was as if they were somewhere else, it was very transportive, and it was just like having that one piece of material that connected them not only to femininity but to identity.

The dove Paloma bird is often a symbol of peace and the animal has the ability to spiritually release the dead. Paloma birds honor the dead by leading spirits to their place in the after life. Paloma in the play leads men to their afterlife as a vigilante figure.

She also transforms the harm done against her and manifests it into a power. Instead of letting the abuse done against her destroy her, she wields a force to help others, and to end the cycle of violence against women by committing her own violence directly against the abusers. This is a revolutionary concept for women to defend themselves against their abusers in their home, work place and societies at large. She can be seen as an anti- hero because of her use of violence- but that is a question I leave for the audience. The supernatural aspects of her power is also a question for how we view our physical reality. Those who can enter the metaphysical world can have the power to travel in and out of supernatural worlds.

I also believe that the dead spirits of women fuel Paloma and aid her power to break barriers out of the jail. Celestial forces transcend the physical world.

CG: Blood. Talk to us about blood. When I look at the classic Western plays in the canon, and especially the epic ones with large casts and huge themes… there is a lot of blood. The heroes litter the stage with bodies. Women’s theatre has always seemed to me to be at a terrific disadvantage because we have not been warriors in the same sense as men, who train to become soldiers and march off to territorial wards. But, of course, we are incredibly warriors in reality… just unsung. In the yin-yang world of patriarchal theatre, we are the bearers of life and  men are the destroyers of life. What I love in your play is that your women get to be both. And they don’t just grab the gun in self-defense and off their batterer. These women kill, with intention, with gusto, without remorse, and with absolute premeditation. Where did you find the archetypes for this… and then the courage to put them on the stage? And how are they received?

RA: Woman as warriors is an ancient concept that is being revisited in the jail of Bogota. The parade of prisoners – the day before the pageant is an event where the women adorn themselves in a variety of wardrobes, costumes and personas. Some include ancient indigenous dress of the people who inhabited the Colombian region before colonization.

There are rules of sacrifice in the world of the play, rules of the ancient world and the roles the modern characters play out in the play- a new cycling. Whether you live in small tribal communities, small towns or a large metropolis, we are all playing roles that make that society function.

Being in an all woman’s jail- Paloma refers to it as a kind of freedom where she is surrounded by the worship of feminine dynamics and re- building of women’s community. But the jailers, reporters, solider, father, and men that were part of the women’s past break in and out of the play- that represents the constant forces that play against women around the world.
Every woman in the play has their own justifications for their crime that is deeply interlinked with their life experience. So when we create a justice system that does not take into account the societal conditions under which people are tried, this will create an environment of retaliation. The crimes committed against women, murder- rape, verbal and physical abuse leaves a lasting mark (that Paloma can recognize) not only on the men who committed these acts but on the world energetically. This physical act of abuse can manifest negative and positive metaphysical forces. Paloma is able to harness these forces, she embodies them, they run through her, transforming her into her animal guide. She both then carries light and dark energies, she is a conduit for all the forces, she opens herself for them to enter her.

Does female vengeance create a balance in the universe, to counterbalance all the violence and hate created by men? This is a question Paloma battles with.

When Paloma thinks there will be a film made about her, it leaves a mark of immortality while she very well knows she could be murdered at any minute. The Greek Gods and myths were scripted, the Kings and Queens of Shakespeare, the historical figures that were wealthy always got their stories recorded and dramatized.

But why not the average person who struggles, the ones that are seen as too small and insignificant? Paloma makes herself into a figure that can not be ignored, made historical, given value to, made into a God, so that no one could claim that she suffered and acted in vain.

CG: So finally… Can you tell us something about the development history of this play? Have you taken it into a women’s prison and if so, how did that go? And where are you going with it?

RA: I was moved twenty years ago when I first stepped into a maximum security facility for women to train as an arts facilitator and was startled, not only because of the stark physical conditions, lack of human contact devised by the system but by the communal history of abuse that the majority of the women shared. I myself being a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault was immediately connected to the necessity to process and stage narratives that needed to be reclaimed by women in the system.
My major catalyst for the La Paloma Prisoner Project comes from my experience as an arts facilitator with Art Spring Organization to incarcerated women at two maximum security prisons in South Florida. This play fuses years of activism in the field and continued work in New York at Rikers Island, Horizons and Crossroads detention centers for youth as well as the Chelsea detention center for women with Dream a Dream Project.

The script has been in development for over ten years, across four countries. Workshop production at The Signature Theatre off-Broadway. (Selected for World Theatre Day: Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary National and Transnational Contexts Conference in Rome, Italy. Tre Roma University reading) (Women’s Playwrights International Conference- Stockholm, Sweden) (The Lark Play Development Reading, NYC) (Labyrinth Theatre Intensive reading) (Staged Reading at La Mama ETC and INTAR). Critical Breaks Residency directed by Estefania Fadul (Hi-Arts). Attendance in Bogota, Colombia at the (Buen Pastor Prison) for the Annual Celebration and Beauty Pageant.

The play and a portion of it’s programming has been accompanied by post-show activities with criminal justice activists, extending audience engagement and citizen action events; including panel discussions, The Impacted women series and tours of the play to facilities.  

(The Impacted women series) was funded by the Arthur J. Harris Award at Columbia University; an initiative that combines women who have experienced the criminal justice system alongside performers to engage with audiences with the themes of mass incarceration. On June 1st 2017 excerpts of the play were performed at Greenhope Services for Women as well as Queensboro Correctional Facility for Men in New York City; in collaboration with impacted women.

This was originally written for and published by Ms Magazine's Daring to Remember: And End to Fear and Shame Blog, 7/19/2018.

My mother underwent two illegal, “kitchen table” abortions in New York City during World War II.  She was in her early 20’s, working as a secretary. These abortions were performed with no anesthetic, and she told me that, when she cried out in pain during one of them, the male abortionist threw down his instruments in a rage and threatened her: “If you do that again, I’m going to walk out of here and leave you like this.” Afterwards, she developed a very serious pelvic infection.

My mother carried enormous shame over these two pregnancies, as well as the trauma of the two dangerous abortions. When my father returned in 1945 to claim his bride and carry her down to his home Virginia, she was too afraid to tell him. At that time, a Yankee bride had a tough time entering society in the South, and her marginalized status only magnified her shame.
 
For ten years, my mother was unable to conceive. She was convinced that a non-sterile abortion and subsequent infection had destroyed her capacity to become pregnant. This was her punishment, the judgment on her youthful perfidy. Finally, in her mid-thirties, she found the courage to schedule an appointment with an out-of-state ob/gyn, far enough away to protect her anonymity. Finally, she shared her story with someone. After the examination, he told her that she was perfectly healthy and there was no reason why she couldn’t have a baby. She went home and promptly conceived.

My mother’s marriage was a miserable one. Her sailor-on-leave turned out to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive. Did she stay with him as part of her “punishment?” My mother’s shame spread over the years like blood on a sheet, staining everything in her life. Unable to bond with a female child, she pushed me into an unwanted marriage at nineteen, and I only saw her a few times after that.

In the final days of her life, she talked obliquely about the “terrible things” she had done in her life, forgetting that she had told me told me about the abortions three decades earlier.  I reminded her that abortions are legal today and that she didn’t need to feel frightened or ashamed anymore. There was a long pause before she said, “Well, I will think about that.”

Stop saying, “You have to understand."

Stop saying, "That was just the culture back then."

Stop saying, "It was a different time.”

Stop saying these things to get a pass on the hard work of revising your own history, relearning, making meaningful amends on behalf of victims of sexual predators and institutionalized sexual abuse.

But who in their right mind would give these as excuses? Well, I'll tell you... friends of mine (see Example 1), the Vatican (see Example 2), and, yes, Pema Chödrön  (see Example 3):
 
EXAMPLE 1:  I was talking to a French friend of mine about how two of the most prominent founders of post-postmodernism were pro-pedophilia activists, actually signing a public petition in France to abolish—I repeat "ABOLISH," not "lower"—the age of consent for sex. I was noting how post-modernism attempts to frame childhood as a social construct, and how queer theory has been used historically to defend and actually advocate for child rape. My friend, a citizen of France, became very agitated. She cut me off: "It was the 1960's! Sartre signed that petition! All the major intellectuals of France signed that petition! (not true) "It was published in the major French newspapers!" (true) "One has to understand the strikes of 1968 and the spirit of rebellion at the time!" 

But, no, actually, one does not. A two-year-old in 1968 is just like a two-year-old in 2019. Any idiot knows that.

EXAMPLE 2:  In 2019, a letter by ex-pope Benedict XVI was released, in which he blames the international epidemics of  priest rape scandals on the culture of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s--especially the social upheavals of 1968. Here is what he wrote:

“Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.”

Benedict XVI goes on to talk about the need for school uniforms and a ban on “sex films” on passenger airlines, because of the tremendous risk that these might provoke aggression. 

Well, here's one for you, Benedict... How about taking a bunch of idealistic young men who feel a religious calling, and forcing them to to tie their aspirations of ministry to a lifetime of mandatory celibacy? Benedict's final verdict:  “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” And, again, any adult with a shred of decency, memory of their own childhood, or responsible caregiving experience knows that's crap.

EXAMPLE 3: Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön in 2019, responding to the revelations about widespread sexual abuse of students at Shambhala Institute:

“Recently, someone outside our community asked me if I thought Shambhala had a loose sexual culture. It was such a non-aggressive and straightforward question that I answered without even thinking, ‘it sure does!’ Then reflecting on this later, I had to admit that I had always thought of it this way. I entered Vajradhatu (as we were then called) in the 1970s as a fairly new celibate nun who had been instructed by my teacher Chögyam Trungpa, to keep my vows impeccably but to not be too uptight. I think that it’s no exaggeration to say that at that time the community was famous for being wild … a group that was characterized by a lot of drinking and a lot of sex. I was not put off by this, and it did not seem to me to be a problem. It was the 70s and free love was practically a cultural norm.... Women would come to me or to Judith Simmer-Brown or Judy Lief or other sympathetic women, and we would try to help but found there was almost nothing we could do to address the behavior. There was not what you would call a cover-up but rather the whole situation where complaints were most often met in Shambhala with the attitude of ‘what’s the big deal?’ or ‘oh that’s just what he’s like.’ In other words, this sexual behavior was considered no problem. The culture of looseness was systemic.”

Okay, no, Pema. Just no.  I was there. I was cleaning toilets for the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974, the year it was founded by your teacher. I was twenty-two, a good fifteen years younger than you, and still I knew better. 

I was managing a student rooming house that Naropa rented for their students. I also did custodial work for another rooming house that they leased. It was a total boys' club. It was like Animal House with time-outs for meditation. The founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a notorious drunk and some members of the the faculty had criminal histories. It was a dangerous place for women, whose experiences were not the same as those of the male students. Yes, they were harassed. They were also raped. Sometimes these perpetrations had pretenses of spirituality about them, the perpetrators attempting to mask their agenda with talk of mystical unions and tantra. It was happening in my rooming house. None of the women were calling it a culture of looseness. None of the women were saying, “What’s the big deal?”

I don’t give my French friend a pass on her defense of Derrida and Foucault. I don’t give the Vatican a pass on blaming the 1960’s. And I don’t give Pema a pass on her euphemisms for rape culture.

Look, I grew up with a sex addict for a father. I was exposed to torture pornography as a child. I was raised in a predatory culture. I thought my environment and my role in it were normal. It's called grooming.

But, you know what? I grew up.I remembered. I had to revise almost every single memory of my childhood, and with that revision, I had to change my relationships to my entire extended and immediate family, whose interests were heavily identified with those of the perpetrator. I had to reprogram myself, reinvent myself. It was hard work, it was spiritual work, it came at a tremendous price in every area, and, thank the goddess, there was and there still is a community who support my recovery. You will never hear me say of my experience that it was a "looseness of culture" or "the physiognomy of the 1960's" or "boys will be boys."

I have to work hard every day against the hard-wiring of my childhood. I have to tear up my decades of childhood investment in that rape culture. I have no tolerance for the passive witnesses and bystanders in situations of abuse who indulge themselves in the privilege of refusing to grow up.

Stop saying these ignorant and dangerous things! Stop trying to pass off your enabling denial as some kind of justifiable or even sanctimonious moral relativism! Stop trying to brand denial and enabling as forms of spiritual detachment and transcendence!

Just listen to this moral idiocy: 

Tricycle [magazine]: "You don’t think it would be helpful to name names, to publicize those instances where Buddhist teachers have been repeatedly taken to task by students?" [The interviewer is referring to charges against Shambhala founder Sakyong Mipham for alleged sexual assault, emotional, physical, financial abuse and binge drinking.] 

Pema Chödrön: "That really does feel like McCarthyism to me. I wouldn’t want to see a list of the bad teachers and I wouldn’t want to see a list of the good ones—here are the saints and here are the sinners. For so many of us that’s our heritage, to make things one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong."

Seriously. No. Just no.

Here we see  Pema's dissociation in action: She is clearly able to identify someone, Joe McCarthy, as a dangerous man whose example is to be avoided. McCarthy was a self-styled leader of a cult-like movement for moral purity and spiritual reformation. I don't see any hesitation on her part to reference him as a bad guy who betrayed his own mission. It's only when the perpetrators are members of her own community, when the perpetrators constitute her mentors and colleagues, that Pema remembers to adopt the officially sanctioned position of "zen" neutrality--which, any victim can tell you, is anything but neutral. And, which any victim can tell you, is usually far more incentivized than standing with the victim.

We learn something of Pema's prior playbook from a Buddhist community initiative to expose the Shambhala abuses. In August 2018, this group issued their "Phase 3 Report," which included details of a situation where a woman reported to Pema that she had been raped by a Shambhala Center director and subsequently miscarried. According to the Phase 3 Report, the woman said that Pema told her “I don’t believe you” and “If it’s true I suspect that you were into it.”

Pema, under pressure, later met with this woman and issued a public apology... of sorts: "I hope to be a better listener and not again say such insensitive and hurtful remarks to those who come to me for help.”

Again, no. That is what you might say if you were dismissive of a friend with a bad haircut. This woman was reporting a criminal assault and a traumatic miscarriage. The appropriate amends Pema should have made would include actions taken to better educate herself about rape in religious communities, counseling sessions to understand the nature of her complicity and uncover conditioning and motives of which she is apparently unaware, a public apology to all of the victims she gaslit over the years with similar dismissals before she was finally exposed, and a commitment to supporting future victims in reporting rape to appropriate civil authorities as well as to the leadership of Shambhala. But all she says is that she will listen better and try to be more sensitive. In other words, she will still enable and protect the perpetrators.

This is not some small pocket of myopia on the part of an otherwise enlightened spiritual leader. This is foundational lack of moral integrity, to say nothing of an abysmally compromised capacity for critical thinking. This inability to identify with victims of oppression is pretty much a deal-breaker for spiritual leadership. It may be an asset for rising in the ranks of a religious institution, but, seriously, those who cannot or will not revise their experiences of immersion in toxic rape cultures forfeit their moral authority. Oh, they definitely try to hang onto it for dear life, but it is forfeit, and the followers who give them a pass are likely to upload their guru's systems of denial along with whatever philosophy undergirds their enabling and their perpetrations.

“If your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed… Make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.”--Rebecca Solnit
 
German-Swedish, lesbian painter Lotter Laserstein not only made herself that “small republic of unconquered spirit,” but she created a body of work that documents that Amazonian domain. Most remarkable, she did this in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.
 
Laserstein painted “In My Studio” at the age of thirty. The year was 1928. She had just graduated from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. It was a time of uncertainty and also exhilaration. For the first time, women were allowed to attend public art academies. For the first time, women were allowed to attend nude figure drawing classes. For the first time, women were allowed to sport traditionally male haircuts, the “Eton crop” or the “bubikopf.” They were allowed to wear straight-waist dresses and tuxedo jackets. The “Great War” had opened up employment in traditionally male trades and professions. Women had their own money and began to exercise their autonomy in ways that would have been inconceivable to their mothers.

Laserstein wanted the world to see that she had her own studio, a mark of her professionalism and her success—and that it was an impressive one in an upscale residential area of Berlin, with a panoramic, rooftop view.  She was a brilliant painter, had begun to rack up impressive credentials, and she was not afraid to flaunt it. To be absolutely clear, Laserstein titled the work “In My Studio.” She had, at thirty, achieved not only a room of her own, but a studio no less.
 
And what was happening in this studio of hers? No less than a miracle. Laserstein is painting a female nude, the traditional subject of centuries of male artists. An internet image search for “odalisque” will turn up hundreds of images of reclining female nudes. According to art historian Joan DelPlato, “By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.”

Laserstein was taking one of the most popular tropes in Western art history and subverting it and appropriating it to a lesbian and feminist context. A meticulous and classically trained painter, she executed numerous studies for this painting before settling on this precise position for the model. Fifty years later, Traute Rose could still recall her discomfort: “… the pose was very difficult to hold. Nevertheless, I held on because I saw it develop into a true masterpiece.” Where male painters would lasciviously or puritanically cache the pudendum in folds of fabric or behind a lifted thigh, Laserstein features her lover’s mons in full frontal nudity as the focal point of the painting, locating it at the intersection of two diagonals: one established by Rose’s body and the other by Laserstein’s oblong palette.
 
And what about this model? Her name is "Traute Rose," and was a model noted for an athletic and androgenous physique. Laserstein not only told people that Traute was her favorite model, but their intimacy is the subject of a number of her paintings... paintings that the artist would refer to as collaborations between her and Rose. In a letter to Rose in 1956, Laserstein was describing a painting of a nude that she was then working on, noting that it was “far from being as good as ours.” The relationship between male painters and the female nude models has historically been hierarchical, with the dominance of the painter made explicit in the paintings where they appear together.  Lasertein’s portraits of Rose bear witness to their mutuality and the trust between them. They appear to share an artistic investment in the painting. It is not a commercial relationship.

A year after "In My Studio," Laserstein would paint  “I and My Model,”  where Rose stands in a slip behind the painter, her hand resting with unconscious familiarity on the shoulder of Lasertain as she watches her process of painting. Laserstein is facing outward toward the viewer, presumably looking in a mirror that is reflecting this image of both the women.  The intimacy of their relationship as co-creaters is explicitly the theme in this painting. A year after this, Laserstein paints “At the Mirror” where Rose, naked, is positioning the mirror while Laserstein prepares her palette, again emphasizing their collaboration. Rose is looking into the mirror but not at her reflection.

The term “male gaze” was coined from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1971.  Since then, it has become a well-known and widely discussed theory. In the essay, Mulvaney argues that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in a masculine and heterosexual subject position, where the figure of the woman on screen was depicted as an object of desire. In this era of cinema, the protagonists were overwhelmingly male and audience members, regardless of sex, were encouraged to identify with them... that is, to adopt the "male gaze."  The female charactes in these films  were coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness," objects of male voyeurs and fetishists. This "male gaze" informs most portraits in the traditional canon where naked women are the subject. Laserstein was challenging this head-on, with a "take no prisoner" attitude in these paintings of Rose.

The figure of Rose in "In My Studio" has been referred to by art critics as monumental. She sprawls across the foreground, and there is absolutely no attempt to titillate the spectator with partial concealment with drapery. The model is lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps asleep. There is no "come hither" expression. Her face is turned toward Laserstein, not us. Traute Rose, with her small breasts, her “Eton bob,” her lack of makeup, and her large and muscular hands, defies the expectations of "the male gaze."

Laserstein foregrounds these hands and the gender non-conformity of Rose in her painting "The Tennis Player."

Rose is not the model in "In the Tavern," but the subject is another Weimar "New Woman," sitting alone in a cafe and sporting the "bubikopf" haircut. Laserstein has highlighted the hands of her model, placing them in the foreground, as she unselfconsciously slides one of her suede gloves off her hand. Again the hands are large and muscular. The painting foregrounds the new freedom of women to sit in a tavern unaccompanied by a man. In the background there is another single woman, reading a menu or a magazine. Laserstein painted "In the Tavern" in 1927, and it was purchased by the City of Berlin a year later, presumably to hang in an administrative space. The painting was confiscated by Nazis in 1937 or 1938 as an example of "degenerate art." Long believed to have been destroyed, the work surfaced in 2012 at an art auction, but it is now once again in a private collection. The number 14607 is still visible on the back of the painting, from when it was part of the inventory of outlawed works.

Laserstein also painted "The Motorcycle Driver" in 1929. This painting is assumed to be a portrait of a young man. I challenge that assumption. World War I had created opportunities for young women to learn and practice auto mechanics, and the historical record of that era has noted garages and ambulance corps that were staffed entirely by lesbians. There are enough similarities in facial features to raise the question for me as to whether or not this is a self-portrait by a woman who was clearly pushing all the boundaries of gender presentation.

But let's return to "In My Studio..."  I am struck by the contrast between the sterile, flat rooftops of the boxy buildings in the background and the warm, sensuous curves of the figure in the forground. Clearly, it is a winter day. The trees are bare, the skies are grey and overcast, and snow covers the roofs. The studio walls are comprised of a series of large glass windows… and yet the model is unclothed, relaxed, and luminous. Clearly, the interior of Laserstein's studio generates its own climate and features it's own landscape and architecture--the anatomy of the female. “In My Studio” documents the features of  lesbian-controlled and lesbian-defined space, and in doing so, it establishes a beachhead in Western art for this space. This is a world that has historically been hidden in plain sight. Laserstein brings it out from the shadows and presents it to a world where women, for the first time, have achieved the possibility of financial autonomy that makes this dream attainable. Laserstein is saying, "Look, I am doing it. So can you." The revolution had arrived.

But the freedoms that "In My Studio" celebrated were being increasingly threatened as the Nazis rode to power. Traute Rose is featured in a painting by Laserstein that captures the period of the "calm before the storm," the uneasy uncertainty of the late Weimar period. The painting is "Abend Uber Potsdam," or "Evening Over Potsdam," painted in 1930 and featuring a group of friends having a meal on a rooftop overlooking Berlin. The painting has become an iconic "Last Supper" on the eve of the Holocaust. Rose is the figure on the far left, whose back is to the artist. There is a sense of foreboding, anxiety, and resignation in the work... as if these friends are waiting for the nightmare.

By 1935, Laserstein had been registered as one-quarter Jewish and forced to close her painting school. She was denied membership in the professional art organizations who sponsored exhibitions, meaning she could not longer show her work publicly. She was still able to show her work in London and in Paris, and in 1937, when she was invited to exhibit work in Sweden, she packed up her canvases, including "Evening Over Potsdam" and left Germany forever. The painting was eight feet in length, and her friends had to help her with packing and transporting it.

Laserstein's career, which had taken off so quickly and which was gaining so much recognition, was cut short and she was forced to start over in a foreign country where she did not speak the language. To survive, she painted portraits for members of the upper class. Word of mouth spread rapidly, and she became a successful painter who would eventually be able to afford a second summer home. But it came at a price: She had to paint what her clients wanted. The days of spending hundreds of hours painting rooftop Bohemian friends and nude portraits of her beloved Rose were over. Painting was a business now.

Laserstein had a sister, also a lesbian. She was unable to get her out of Germany, and the sister and her partner spent the last three years of the war hiding in a dark and unheated potting shed, where there was no water in the winter. She emerged from the war profoundly traumatized by this experience. Laserstein's mother was murdered in one of the camps.  As for Laserstein, she was embraced by the Jewish community in Sweden and they immediately arranged a marriage for her with an older Jewish man, which meant she could become a Swedish citizen and not be forced to return to Germany.  The marriage was a political expediency and existed only in name.

The war took a tremendous toll on Laserstein, as she struggled to learn a new language, to rebuild a career, and to help family members trapped in Germany. The boldness, ambition, and vision, so evident in her early works are absent from the Swedish years. Her life and her work had become about survival.

Laserstein lived to be ninety-five, dying in Sweden in 1993. Paintings by her continue to surface from private collections, appearing at auctions. Because her work was so original, not belonging to any particular school or tradition, and because she was censored and exiled from Germany, her genius has gone largely unrecognized until very recently. As a lesbian artist, it is important for me to embrace her as one of my greatest foremothers, and to celebrate the record of her lesbian life that she has left to us...  with her butch non-conformity, her radically non-hierarchical relationship to Traute Rose, her artistic resilience, and her resistance to the imperatives of "the male gaze."

My friend Linda J. Smith Koehler has just written and published a really wonderful songbook, One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth. To help her celebrate, I wanted to do an interview with her. I have had the privilege of attending concerts where she was musical director and where her songs were sung, and I have also had the privilege of being part of sacred singing groups she has led. The songs in this collection are affirmations and distillations that focus intention, unite, and heal. "Spiritual vitamins" is how I think of them. Easy to learn, easy to tuck away in your brain, and very accessible any time there is a need for perspective and connection.

One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth is a songbook containing 111 songs and chants, as well as 13 arrangements, AND... Linda' suggestions on how to use the songs in a singing circle, and encouragement for everyone to write their own songs. 

CG: So, Linda… I see in your description about this book that you talk about how these songs and chants are used in “Singing in Sacred Circles.” What does that mean… ? what is a Sacred Singing Circle? You lead the singing in a sacred circle group called Women with Wings in Bangor, Maine. How is a sacred circle group different from a chorus group? 
 
LK: A traditional chorus stands or sits in rows facing the director and learns songs by reading sheet music. Their focus is usually on preparing for a performance. At Women With Wings we stand or sit in a circle with a candle-lit table in the center, lights off. We learn songs through listening, with no written music or lyric sheets. Our focus is on joining together in song and spirit. On an average Thursday night, you might not recognize that I am the music director because anyone can start a song. Our process is organic in that one song suggests the next. Every evening is different within a consistent flow.
 
Singing in Sacred Circle is a term we use when talking about a group that sings with the intention of simply singing songs that build ourselves into our strongest, most loving selves. We sing to lose ourselves in the music only to find ourselves connected as one voice and energy, individually renewed and inspired.
 
Our songs are mostly short, 4-8 lines each, so are easy to pick up by listening. They are affirmational; the lyrics express what we want to be true, in ourselves, in our relationships, in the world. We use the oral tradition rather than reading from sheet music. This allows us to move quickly from thinking about how to sing a song to singing from our hearts with eyes free to see each other or to close.
 
Women With Wings doesn’t gather to “rehearse,” we just sing. We spend two hours every Thursday singing these powerful affirmational songs. We are not a polished performance group, though we do share what we do in public on occasion, usually to support an organization or cause we agree with. We have sung for organizations that support women, equality, social justice, and the environment.

 
CG: How did you get into this kind of music?  Did you come at it from other forms of music… folk music? Religious music?  What was your first experience?
 
LK: I came to this kind of music through Kay Gardner. The women’s community of my church, Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor, hired Kay to lead a workshop at our retreat. Someone asked her if she would start a women’s singing group in Bangor and she agreed. They put an ad in the paper and on our first night in October of 1993, 35 women showed up to sing. We’ve been singing every Thursday since, for more than 25 years!

CG: I think that one of the things I experience with these songs is how “sing-able” they are: short and with memorable tunes.  It’s like having a spiritually empowering soundtrack on tap. As a child of the 1960’s, I experienced the power of inspiring music in the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War movement. I think about how so much of our popular music is obsessively focused on falling in love, or falling out of love… Music can do so much more!
 
LK: Absolutely! The messages we repeat to ourselves can have a powerful impact on our internal landscape. Choose those messages consciously. The songs we sing paint a picture of the world we want to live in, with peace and unity among people, care for our planet, strength, kindness, and beauty within ourselves. The songs help us feel empowered and connected, with a sturdiness that helps us face the world as it is and act to improve it for all. We know hundreds of songs so I often find myself saying, “We’ve got a song for that.”

CG: I’m curious about your process… Can you pick one of your songs and share with us what inspired it, or how you came to write it?
 
LK: My process is organic; I don’t sit down to write a song. I’ll be thinking about a topic while walking in the woods, driving, or in the shower, and a line will come to me, words and tune together. I’ll play around with that, winnowing down the thoughts into their pithiest expression of what I want to say while fitting it to the tune that started with that first line. Sometimes this happens quickly, all in one day, but more often it takes a week or two, and occasionally it takes years. My subconscious mind is in charge. My conscious mind can help but I can’t force a song into being. I have to wait for it to clarify from of natural inspiration.
 
As an example, the song Awe started while I was camping at Baxter State Park in northern Maine in 2012. While gazing up at the night sky that was ablaze with every star that has ever burned, the first line popped into my mind, “Under the sky of a billion stars I am so small.” In the following days I got the next few lines but I couldn’t find the rest. Three years later while floating in the waves on Scarborough Beach in southern Maine, the rest of the song flowed in, ending with, “I am a voice of the universe singing back to itself in awe.”

CG: What would you say to someone who is reading this who might be thinking… “Oh, I don’t think this is for me. I’m not very musical…” or who is thinking, “Well, you really need to have a group to do this…” 
 
LK: We’ve heard a lot lately about the benefits of singing. It calms the mind, reduces stress, lowers heart rate, improves cognition, boost the endocrine and immune systems. People in ancient times knew this as they chanted. Practitioners from many spiritual traditions throughout time have been chanting. The tunes vibrate through our cells, attune our beings with the universe and our highest selves. The chants in this book are in English so they hold the impact of knowing what you’re singing about.
 
To someone who says they’re not musical: Women With Wings and other circles I’ve sung with are full of women who had given up on singing around other people. They thought their voice wasn’t good enough or that they were tone deaf. True tone deafness is very rare; it’s more often a matter of learning. When these women join the circle, after a few months they find they can carry a tune, the range of notes they can match gets wider, and they are no longer afraid to sing in public. This empowerment has spread to using our voices to speak up for ourselves and others in all aspects of life.
 
While singing with a group is a powerful experience, singing these songs to yourself is also powerful. We need to be very selective in the songs we sing so we are filling our hearts and minds with messages that are positive, promote our well-being, and inspire us to make the world a better place for all beings. What you sing to yourself matters. The songs in this book are positive affirmations, calls to get up and do what you can to make things better, and celebrations of the Earth and all her beings. We can replace old messages with these positive, life-affirming, loving ones. These songs, and this kind of singing, color the lenses I view the world through with positivity and light.

"Keep a song in your heart, let it be a key to your soul, let it open you wide, and bring you back to whole."
 
Women With Wings is always open to new women. Join us!

Links:
Women With Wings
Linda's Website
Ordering the songbook
 

 “The story of [American] women’s suffrage has been told in the same fashion for 100 years: it is familiar, repetitive, and overwhelmingly white."--from press release.

BUT... no more! There is a new history book that has just been published, and it is GLORIOUS! 

Seriously. This book is a terrific read, a complete page-turner. I could barely put it down. The only reason I would put it down was that it was 500 pages long, and, periodically, I actually had to eat and sleep. I was really sad to see it end, even if it did mean we finally got the vote.

So how did Sally Roesch Wagner turn the history of women’s suffrage into the best beach read of the summer?  I’ll let her answer:
 
“I was inspired by nearly 50 years of learning from my students. They taught me what stories they shared with their friends; what information impacted and empowered them; what made them angry; and, most importantly, what they had never been told.”
 
She gives the reader what she wants!  And she also does not give her what she doesn’t want:
 
“I also had to avoid the impulse to replace the ‘great-men-great-wars’ narrative with a ‘great-women' one—not a task for the faint-hearted or the perfectionist.”
 
Sally Roesch Wagner has widened the lens of Suffrage history and refocused the narrative to include the women of color whose presence has always informed the struggle. She does not minimize or excuse the racism of white women, and this is one of the reasons why the book is such a page-turner: The divisions, the issues, the strategies of appeasement vs. radical action are heart-poundingly relevant to the divisions, issues and strategies of today. The major players find their counterparts in today’s Black Lives Matter and across the spectrum of Congressional leadership. In the words of Susan B. Anthony: “Every generation of converts [to feminism] threshes over the same old straw.”

The book is packed with fascinating, complicated, passionate, flawed women practicing radical and visionary politics—and also engaging in abysmal, good-old-white-boy deals-with-the-devil. Roesch shows us the backroom trades, the rhetoric, the scandals, the pernicious impact of mixing religion with politics, and the cautionary divisions that historians have attempted to hide.
 
And the men! Many women have been caught off-guard by the recent tsunami of misogyny that appears to have arisen from nowhere.  Well, it wasn’t “from nowhere” at all! The Women’s Suffrage Movement plunges us deep below the surface of this present wave to experience the historical, bottomless ocean of men’s hatred of women and compulsion to dominate every single aspect of our lives. There are no Sith or Terran Empires, no Necrons, Tyranids, Weeping Angels or other sci-fi villains who can compare with the fiendish forces of white men arrayed against women, and especially against women of color, in the struggle for women’s liberation.
 
So how does this book work?

It works because it is so user-friendly. Wagner pulls us in with her first two “I-did-not-see-that-coming” chapters: “Women Voted Before the United States Was Formed” and “Women Organized Before Seneca Falls.”
 
Just one example. There was an informal meeting of five women on Sunday, July 9, 1848 in Waterloo, New York. History books might tells us that this was where the idea for the first women’s rights convention was birthed. *yawn*
 
Wagner puts us in the room with the women. Four of them had just come from a Quaker meeting. Possibly they decided to meet in the home of the woman with the two-week-old baby, because she was still nursing. A newcomer to the meeting was a mother of five children who lived at the end of a dead-end road, two miles from her nearest neighbor, with an often-absent husband. The four Quaker women all lived in homes that were on the Underground Railroad. Even as they sat there sipping, they were breaking the law. One of these abolitionist activists had traveled all the way to London to attend an abolitionist convention, only to discover they would not seat her because she was female. WOMEN WITH ISSUES.
 
And… one of the women had just gotten home from a month-long visit with the Seneca Nation near the Pennsylvania border, as these indigenous people debated whether or not to abandon their traditional clan-based government and replace it with with a US election system. It was not lost on her that the indigenous women had more voice, dignity, and respect under their own form of government. As they sit in the room with the new-born and her mother, they most likely discussed how the Haudenosaunee people had a visionary provision that all treaties had to be approved by three fourths of all the mothers in the nation.  This provision appears to me to be an acknowledgement of the unique and very physical connection and investment that mothers have with their offspring, connection and investment that incentivizes them to priorize long-term consequences with regards to dispensation of land. And here we are today where female biology is not just considered irrelevant, but taboo to reference!  I often have wished that our government had a Cabinet position, “Secretary of Long-Term Consequences” from the Department of the Future. The Haudenosaunee were on it a thousand years ago.

ANYWAY… The old history books would simply reel off the five names. Wagner puts us in the room with all of those multicultural, multi-generational, trans-European, multi-issue cross-currents swirling around our heads. THAT’s how it’s done, women. Personal frustrations, political indignities, humble acknowledgement that indigenous people have more evolved systems of government, and white women putting their freedom on the line for the liberation of people of color. Given a context like that, almost anything could be the flashpoint for revolution.
 
So then, after these eye-opening chapters, Wagner devotes each chapter to a decade, from the 1850’s up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally passed. Bonus: At the end of each chapter, Wagner includes riveting, primary-source samples of speeches, reports, editorials and other documents from that decade. Why? As Wagner says, “Primary sources take us onto the field where we watch the action, listen to the players, and figure out for ourselves what is going on.”
 
One of my favorite examples of the value of primary resources are the editorials debating dress reform. There is an obnoxious editorial by a master mansplainer, informing Suffrage women that they are forfeiting their right to all respect and credibility in his eyes (oh, no!), because they have abandoned wearing the Bloomer costume. He, of course, never wore anything in his life that would cause threatening mobs of people to follow him down the street, to throw horse manure all over him, and to subject him to endless catcalls and threats of rape everywhere he went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton cleans his clock quite handily and I savored every word she wrote.

Well… I don’t want to give too many spoilers… but in terms of relevance, there is domestic worker Hester Vaughan who either miscarried or aborted a child borne of rape, and who was given the death penalty. What saved her?  Women who organized.
 
There is a 19th century #MeToo moment when Victoria Woodhull, slut-shamed as a "Free Love" advocate, calls out the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher on his adulterous relations with a married parishioner.
 
There is Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, rising to the podium and throwing out the most radical challenge of her career: making the same demands of religion that the movement has made of the State. She is an utter badass and her speech is a complete barn burner. And I am sure that half the women who had baked the cake and put up the party decorations where offended as hell. Because that's how it's done when you are eighty.
 
There is Alice Paul, radicalized by the militant Suffragettes in England, who wants to have a ton of parades and protests. The by-then conservative movement says, “Fine, sweetie. Just raise your own money, because we won’t give you any.” She does, and she hosts rallies and protests that are wildly, insanely successful in terms of attendance and PR… so they kick her out of the organization. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am thinking of you so hard.
 
There is the “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” melodrama of the Tennessee vote to ratify the 19th amendment. It’s the final state vote that will make it law, and it comes right down to the wire, with a senator racing the clock to cast the vote and still make it home to attend the dying of his child. He’s escorted there by the women, who then have to race back to get him. He jumps from a moving train… Dirty tricks, last minute reversals, women staying one step ahead of their enemies. Really, someone needs to make a film.

One of the strongest through-lines of the book is white women’s betrayal of women of color in the movement. The pivotal moment happened in a midnight session of a national conference. It happened with a non-representational body of that organization. It was a dirty trick. But the groundwork for the division had been laid by complex grids of historical, social, and political matrices. 
 
There had been the “divide and conquer” tactics of the 14th amendment. Ostensibly granting citizenship to former slaves, the amendment introduces the word “male” into the Constitution... as a qualifier for voting rights. Should the Suffrage Movement oppose this amendment, so critical to spelling out citizens' rights to African Americans, if it was going to come at the expense of women's suffrage rights... including women of color?  Not surprisingly, women of color in the movement had a very different perspective from many of the white women. 

And then there was the temperance movement. Their organization had twice the membership of all the suffrage parties combined. Why? As Lucy Stone put it, “It’s so much easier to to see a drunkard than it is to see a principle.” The temperance movement has been framed today as a movement made up of Miss Grundy-type Puritanical school marms. In fact, in an era when women had almost no rights, it was a movement to stem domestic violence and especially rape. It was a movement filled with battered women and victims of sexual abuse, including incest. And it was a deeply religious movement, where women were reaching for a higher power than their human lords and masters, to legitimize their claims.

Susan B. Anthony wanted their numbers, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to join forces with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The price was an unholy alliance with organized, conservative, deeply racist religion.

And, finally, there was an appalling level of pandering to the racism of the Southern states. Women's suffrage was sold to them as a way to counter the rising political voice of African American men in the South.
 
In a conversation with Sally Roesch Wagner, she is asked, “What do you think are the most important takeaways from the women’s suffrage movement for social justice movements of today?”
 
Here is her answer:
 
“Eschew expediency. I’d like to see that on a big poster on every activist’s wall, and especially on the wall of organizations. When you abandon principle in order to win, like the later suffragists did, you may indeed win the battle, but you lose the war for justice. You create a legacy of division that continues for centuries.”
 
This is the best reason of all the many reasons to buy and read and treasure this delightful, intrepid, RELEVANT, page-turning, truth-telling book. It offers clarity and vision for our future. Eschew expediency right now and go out and get it.