“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.

TBut 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."

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-prize-winning classic, is headed to Broadway… or, at least, it was headed for Broadway.
 
The author’s estate has just filed a lawsuit against the producer, Scott Rudin. At issue is his adaptation for stage. The estate attorney claims that it deviates too much from the novel and that this is a violation of their contract, which specifies that they shall not “derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters.”
 
As a playwright, I find this case fascinating. As a lesbian, I think that both sides are overlooking the obvious.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, was considered radical in its day. The protagonist, Atticus Finch, is a white attorney who stands up to the prejudice in his small Alabama town, defending an African American man who has been falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

Today, however, the book is seen—rightfully—as exemplifying the racist trope of the Great White Savior.  In a silent tribute to their white champion, they rise spontaneously as Atticus leaves the courtroom. His head bowed in defeat, he neither sees nor acknowledges them.
 
This was the book that Harper Lee wrote. It is an artifact of its time. Although African American authors were writing and publishing, the white-dominated mainstream market was not ready to identify with their perspectives. Lee’s book was an immediate bestseller. It’s my opinion that the popular embrace of the book is contingent on the fact that Atticus loses his case and that the defendant is killed in attempting to escape. Like the trope of the dead lesbian, this reification of the status quo invites self-satisfied expressions of compassion from mainstream readers who are spared the more difficult work of embracing an ending that signals social change.
 
Today the Great White Savior narrative is widely acknowledged as offensive, and one not likely to repay the investment that goes into mounting a Broadway production. This is why, in this dramatic adaptation by Aaron Sorkin, Atticus is portrayed at the outset as a man in denial about the racism of his town—an apologist for prejudice, unwilling to believe that an innocent man can be found guilty.  The role of Calpurnia, the African American woman who cooks for the Finch family, has been rewritten as the agent for Atticus’ awakening. Through a series of confrontations with her employer, she manages to win over the white attorney, mentoring him into the reality of Southern rural racism in 1936. By the end of the play, he has become the Atticus with whom we are familiar, the righteous hero standing against the masses for social justice… but he owes it all to a woman of color.

Actor/musician Evadne Bryan-Perkins notes that this rewrite swaps one racist trope for another--that of the "Magical Negro." This trope relies on a supporting stock character coming to the aid of the white protagonists, helping them discern the error of their ways. (This term was popularized by African American film director Spike Lee in 2001, during his lecture tour of universities, where he was criticizing the unrealistic and stereotyped depictions of African American men in Hollywood cinema.)

But Rudin, the producer, is not just responding to the datedness of the Great White Savior narrative. He also knows his dramaturgy. In theatre, the main character needs to have what is called a “narrative arc.” The protagonist must go on a journey of transformation, starting out at Point A and, two hours later, ending up—ideally—at Point Z. (A dramatic trajectory from Point A to Point B is not likely to carry a play with the gravitas of To Kill a Mockingbird.) The Atticus of the book, tried as he is by circumstances, nevertheless begins with sterling character and social conscience and ends in the same state of  grace. He goes from Point A to Point A.
 
As a playwright, I sympathize with the producer.  He wants a play that is going to work. However, as a playwright who is zealous about her own copyright protections, I have to side with the Harper Lee estate: It is clear that, in giving Atticus a narrative arc, the producer has deviated substantially from the character in the book. In rewriting the role of Calpurnia to be a major voice in the play, the producer has essentially created a new character.

As of the writing of this, neither side is making concessions.  Rudin, from his corner, maintains, “I can't and won't present a play that feels like it was written in the year the book was written in terms of its racial politics: It wouldn't be of interest…. The world has changed since then."
 
Attorney Tonja Carter, representing the Harper Lee estate fires back that the new Atticus “is more like an edgy sitcom dad in the 21st Century than the iconic Atticus of the novel.”
 
So that is the current standoff.
 
But I think both sides are missing something. It’s not about Atticus. It’s never been about Atticus. The voice of the narrator in the book is a gender-non-conforming girl named Scout. Atticus is her father. Harper Lee, a lesbian, has created a character that is her alter-ego, telling a story that was inspired by an actual event that occurred near her hometown in Alabama when she was ten years old. The plot and observations in the book are loosely based on her own experience. The model for Atticus was her own father.

Scout has a huge dramatic arc. In fact, Scout’s coming-to-consciousness about the socials evils of the adult world is the point of the book. She goes from being a naive child who has absorbed the prejudices of her peers, to someone who can break away, incorporating perspectives of the under-represented and standing with the outsiders of the world. Scout watches the trial, literally, from the colored section of the segregated courtroom. At the end of the book, she has traveled from fear of a developmentally disabled neighbor, to recognizing him as an ally and friend.
 
Why not make Scout the central figure in the Broadway show?  In the book, she is six, but she was older in the film. If the play is refracted through the adoring eyes of a child, wouldn't that explain her idealized experience of her father? In the book, Scout accompanies Calpurnia to a Black church, where she has a massive awakening as she sees Calpurnia's transformation of status among members of her own community. No need to violate the contract. Just allow the woman the full and radical context of that scene.

Can a Broadway audience identify with a gender-non-conforming little girl. Why not?  It wouldn’t be the first time. Member of the Wedding, another best-seller by a Southern lesbian author, was adapted for Broadway. It opened in 1950 and ran for more than five hundred performances. A historic production, the cast included Ethel Waters and a young Julie Harris. What is significant here is that the author adapted the book herself, and the character of the tomboy, Frankie, remains as central and unaltered on the stage as she was in the book. 
 
Yes, there will be a problem if Aaron Sorkin stays on to attempt a Scout-centric adaptation. Sorkin’s writing credits include the television series The West Wing, and a roster of tough-talking, political films including A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. He has already been questioned about his ability to write dialogue for Harper Lee’s juvenile characters. Asked if they will be expected to “speak Sorkin,” he responded, "Well, they're gonna have to, because I didn't write their language like they were children."
 
As a solution to this author-producer deadlock, I would like to put my name forward as an alternative writer. My credentials include thirty years of creating and performing lesbian roles for the stage, including more than a dozen gender-non-conforming roles for little girls. I invite Mr. Rudin to the webpage for my Butch Visibility Project. I really believe this might work.

​Dark Matters is Susan Hawthorne’s latest novel. Susan is one of the most prolific lesbian authors and poets I know, as well as one of my favorite “synapsers.” She makes connections between art and history, between the personal and the political, between the mundane and earth-shaking… and when I read her, I feel my own brain building those bridges, expanding and deepening my understanding and appreciation of my own experiences.

The title of the book indicates just how deep Hawthorne is going with her story. “Dark matter” refers to the matter that composes about 84% of our universe. It is not made up of atoms. We know it is there, because we can observe its gravitational pull, but so far, nobody has been able to figure out what it is

​Appropriately, Dark Matter is the story of the disappearance of a lesbian. In a secret dawn raid, Kate is abducted by anonymous government forces in Australia. She is imprisoned and tortured. We hear her story through her own voice in the pages of her prison diary. We hear other parts of her story through the voice of Desi, her niece, who is attempting to make sense of Kate’s life through her papers and by tracking down the history of her lover Mercedes, who was shot in bed with her the morning of the raid.
 
The prison diaries are fascinating and horrifying. Kate narrates the details of her torture, which includes rape, while carefully documenting her strategies for keeping herself sane during the ordeal. Her secret weapon is language. Desi notes how pain destroys language and describes Kate’s ideas of invention of language as a form of revenge against the torturers: “Her way of winning.”

​If language is a way of winning, genealogy may be a way of prevailing. Dark Matters returns again and again to the theme of lesbian genealogy.
 
“That’s the thing about lesbians, it’s a kind of detective story that unwinds in scraps but half of the pages are shredded and the rest are so destroyed as to be unreadable. What we have left are fragments.”
 
Desi calls her discipline “Diagonal Genealogies.” Because, of course, lesbians don’t usually descend from lesbians. I think of my own diagonal lesbian genealogy, my own lesbian aunt. The “spinster schoolteacher” who actually lived with another woman for most of her adult life, raised that woman’s children, and put them through school. And then there are the diagonal lesbian literary genealogies I share with Hawthorne… Sappho, Woolf, Wittig, H.D…  And also her pantheon of goddesses.

I am intrigued by Hawthorne’s exploration of genealogy. She references an emotional genealogy, as well as genealogies of memory.
 
“…those lists are helping me figure out the relationships, order of birth and all the pieces that go missing in family trees where there are only women to pass on the stories. On the most difficult to reach branch of the tree sits the lesbian.”
 
Dark Matters moves from a dystopian fictional “disappearing” of lesbians in Australia to the historical Chilean desparecidos under the regime of Pinochet. Desi, searching for her dead aunt’s lover, travels to Chile and visits the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights). It is estimated that, under Pinochet, tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured and an estimated 200,00 Chileans were driven into exile. Two thousand were executed. Many of these victims were secretly abducted and imprisoned. To the outside world, they simple “disappeared.”

These references to the “disappeared” were especially resonant, because the “disappearance of lesbians” is currently the subject of blogs and magazine articles in popular culture. My friend Bonnie Morris wrote a book about the phenomenon: The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. Is it appropriate to compare this cultural erasure with the murder of the desparecidos of Chile and Argentina?
 
Desi makes connections between what happened to lesbians in Nazi Germany and what is happening currently to lesbians in countries where our freedoms are not protected. She notes how lesbians are called “disposables” in Columbia, and I think of the term “corrective rape,” and how liberally it has been executed against South African lesbians. Desi quotes from poem by Gill Hanscombe: “No one is proud of dykes… Only other dykes are proud of dykes.” 

​I experienced Dark Matters as a kind of deep and swift current that swept me up and carried me along. I am back in calmer waters now, but it has left me in a different place, and with a subtle momentum that was not there before. 

Dr. Bonnie Morris’ eagerly awaited book The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture is out now, and available in paperback. Buy it. It’s (borrowing a riff from Dr. Bon) “pure protein” for the soul… in an age of postmodern and sound-bite carbs. And we need protein, because, sisters, it’s time to build some muscles.
 
Okay. The book. It’s amazing, Amazonian. It does things that are supposedly not possible. Like lesbians. It’s often warm, personal, and personable… and at the same time impeccably researched and documented. She brings “scholarly standards to radical history.”  It’s engaging and accessible, stimulating and inspiring. It’s actually kind of everything.
 
Dr. Morris lays it right out from Page One, stating in her first sentence that she writes “as a woman, lesbian, and feminist; a dinosaur facing extinction in this new queer jungle. I’m writing now to describe what it looks like and feels like to be written out of history.”
 
Bam.

And what a history it was! Lesbian feminists in the late 20th century created a powerful movement, and we did it before the Internet. But as Dr. Bon notes, “By 2000, anything woman-identified had become proof of unthinkable allegiance to a retro gender binary.”
 
This, of course, did not happen to gay men. Why and how did it happen to lesbians? Dr. Bon, influenced early in life by Nancy Drew and Harriet the Spy, invites us to join her in solving this mystery… and she describes her treasure map:

“As cultural capital, the threatened art and music of this recent lesbian past is precious to me.”
 
It should be precious to all of us… not just lesbians, but anyone concerned with the rapidly eroding rights of women. Because, as we are seeing, when they came for the lesbians, it was the prelude for the abasement of all women.
 
Dr. Bon is a professor of women’s studies, and from this vantage point, she has been able to watch the process of erasure. She notes how the terms for identity most popular with her students include “queer, gay, bi, trans, or ally.” What did these have in common? “…they were all either gender-neutral or male-inclusive. These terms embraced masculine possibilities, or relationships with men, in ways that lesbian of course did not.”  In this lineup, “lesbian” is read as separatist, and the ignoring of men is nearly always conflated in patriarchy with hatred of men. This image, of course, is anathema to female activists or progressives.

In the world of Gender Studies and queer theory, lesbian history finds itself homeless. Even studies of girlhood are read as transphobic. In the colorful words of Dr. Bon, “For better or worse, the stereotype of the angry radical lesbian marching with fist raised against the patriarchy has been replaced by the embossed wedding invitation for Megan and Carmen.” As the New York Times trumpeted after the Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex marriage, “Separatism is for losers.”
 
So… that’s where we are. That’s just chapter one. The pundits have drawn an official curtain over three decades of radical, lesbian-feminist social change and a flowering of lesbian and feminist culture unprecedented in the history of the world. But…  Nothing to see here, folks. Let’s move along. Dr. Bon cannily uncovers one of the key mechanisms for our erasure: The lesbian stereotype so aggressively propagated erases our activism.

White-girl music?  The “women’s music” movement had its roots in African American blues, in the protest songs of the 60’s—and earlier, and in appropriation of the male-dominated genre of rock-and-roll. Dr. Bon reminds us of the “Varied Voices of the Black Woman” tour. Diversity? Lesbian feminist festivals and concerts almost without exception offered sliding scale tickets as well as sign language interpretation. Accessibility was a priority right out of the gate.
 
And what about the “women-only” events? What about them…?  Wasn’t anybody noting the men-only offerings of the entire rest of the culture. In the words of lesbian photographer  JEB (Joan E. Biren), “There was nothing in the culture that nourished us.”
 
“… so many women were desperate for positive reflections of lesbian life that just to be at a lesbian-majority event was thrilling; actually enlightening. Joining together to create this temporary  majority at women-only concerts allowed audiences to experience (for the first time) an environment where lesbians were in charge of what was said about lesbian lives.”

The women’s music festivals were all about diversity, community, and family… and, in the pre-Internet days, the political grapevine.  The entire first chapter, “The Soundtrack of Our Awakening” is breath-taking. I felt as if I was leaning over the shoulder of a master archeologist, unearthing cultural treasure after cultural treasure, proving the existence of a time and a place that had become as mythical as Atlantis. Just this chapter alone is worth the price of the book!
 
But wait… there’s more. That’s only the beginning. The second chapter, “By the Time I Got to Wombstock.” This is the chapter about the festivals—the women’s music festivals. As Dr. Bon notes, “Thousands and thousands of lesbians experienced at least one such festival as part of their personal and political awakening in the quarter-century between 1974 and 1999.”
 
I remember so clearly my first festival. It was the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, produced by Robin Tyler. It completely rocked my world. It changed me forever. Later I would attend the West Coast Lesbian Festival, the East Coast Lesbian Festival, Campfest, the Gulf Coast Womyn’s Festival, and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I went to “Michfest” for fourteen years, contributing programming to it for nine.

My experience of these festivals is so outside the context of everything to do with the patriarchy that I am at a loss for words in describing it. What I would say for the last quarter century was just “see for yourself.”
 
But Dr. Bon finds the words:

“Were festivals designed to be lesbian erotic vacation spaces? Or were they reflective, goddess-centered spirituality breaks from rampant sexism and homophobia in society? Or training camps for lesbian political nationhood? …Against this backdrop of recovery meetings and nude partying, hopeful diversity and angry processing, the nation’s best all-female stages evolved over time, a music and comedy performance history  that should be central to any reconstructed narrative.”
 
She cites Robert McRuer in his research on gay and lesbian utopian communities:

“The emphasis for many lesbian feminists had shifted from engagement with, or transformation of, the outside world, to removal from that world and the structures of patriarchy and capitalism that sustained it… despite the fact that it was an outdoor event, the spatial orientation at women’s music festivals was inward.”
 
This subject is so charged for me, I am overwhelmed just attempting to review the writing of another author! All I can say is thank the goddess for Dr. Morris. Seriously. She has chronicled assiduously forty years of the jewel in the crown of lesbian feminist culture, and in this chapter, she presents us with a comprehensive history of the roots of the festivals, the lineups of performers, profiles of the largest one, and an in-depth analysis of the controversies surrounding the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

In the second half of this chapter, Dr. Bon opens up to share her own personal journey with the festivals and how she came to transform her passion for this culture into the archiving of it. As a nineteen-year-old college sophomore, she bought her first ticket to the Michigan festival. The year was 1981, and the festival was five years old.
 
She shares with us the tender pages of her journal of the experience, beginning with the eighteen-hour road trip on a privately chartered Greyhound bus. In spite of the all-night party on the bus and being rained out of her tent, her relationship with festival culture was consummated on that trip: “This is my life choice. I have been silent because so much of what I feel has already been expressed so eloquently by others before me in this movement. But I want to capture it all, for it has captured me.” 
 
O, sweet bird of youth… I wish that starry-eyed nineteen-year-old could have known what awaited her… a hundred festivals, thousands of women, hundreds of thousands of words. By 1986, her graduate school training had put her well on her way to being a professional historian. Her note-taking expanded into tape recordings. Eventually, she began to invite women at the festivals to journal along with her.
 
These journals were so much more than “dear diaries.” In Dr. Bon’s own words:
 
“In creating a longitudinal festival journal before women had computers, blogs, Twitter, or Facebook, I ended up with an archive of how self-worth developed in a marginalized community.” 

What she was documenting was a miracle.

Lesbians, she reminds us, were still outlaws in the Eighties. Lesbian moms lost their kids. Lesbian kids lost their homes. Unlike other marginalized populations, we rarely had families who had or backs, much less shared our identities and could transmit the culture.

And we were not gays. We were lesbians, specifically females. On top of the homophobia, we were combating the ubiquitous misogyny that too often considered  rape, battery and harassment to be our fault. But we found each other, we began to share our stories, and then we celebrated ourselves. These celebrations were not just part of a movement toward liberation. They were an embodiment of the liberation itself. Radical beyond description… except that Dr. Bon was doing just that.
 
Why no coverage?  Aside from the obvious biases against women and homosexuals, Dr. Bon offers and additional explanation: AIDS. She notes how the Radical Faerie movement of the 1980’s, a movement among gay men, embraced separatist retreats in nature as part of identity-building. This generation, however, was ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. The heyday of lesbian culture coincided with the plague years for gay men, and, as a result, many of the men who were in sympathy with this culture and who might have been able to provide a supportive context for it for future historians did not survive.
 
Then, there is the rise and fall of the lesbian-owned businesses, especially the women’s bookstores, which were sanctuaries and clearing houses for entire communities of lesbians.

And… the  Internet… The difficulty of archiving pre-Internet and the great ease of hijacking narratives in the post-Internet era. Googling these festivals, one is most likely to land on websites dismissing them at transphobic, benighted, and historically  insignificant. In Dr. Bon’s words:

“In the realm of social media and political rhetoric, [women born female] lesbians and trans women were cruelly set against one another in the ongoing battle over the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. This has successfully rewritten recent history to portray lesbian cultural  activists as both privileged and oppressive, burying other realities.” 

Unlike most of those who write on this subject, Dr. Bon was actually there. She was there for nearly forty years.
 
The Disappearing L has a fascinating chapter “Imagining an Eruv,” where Dr. Bon documents the history of Jewish lesbian-feminists in the lesbian culture. She talks about the struggle for a separate “Jewish Tent” at the Michigan Festival, the eventual realization of that dream, and then the permutations of that institution. Drawing parallels between the identities of Jews and lesbians, she compares strategies for preservation of culture.
 
The Disappearing L is so rich in detail and anecdote, so enlightening in analyses, I am at loss to do it justice. This book, and Dr. Bon’s archive, which is at the Schlesinger Library, are treasures.  I feel blessed to have been a part of this time, this culture, and to have walked with so many of these women… and I feel blessed that someone has preserved the record and the artifacts of this “Golden Age.”

From Dr. Bon's website:

A lifetime of teaching women's history.

Q: IS SHE STILL CARRYING THAT NOTEBOOK AROUND?

A: Yes--and still writing in it with a fountain pen.

Q: How many journals has Bon filled by now?

A: One hundred and seventy-nine; they jam the bookshelf my father built for me when I was three. On my table, catching sunlight and moonlight, is a bowl of fountain pens. Come choose your weapon: Sheaffer, Lamy, Watermark.

"My research interests and available guest speeches include women's sports, the women's music movement since the mid-1970s, Jewish women's history, and other female-identified communities across time....

I've traveled the world as a professor and guest speaker. Appearances include both University of Waikato and Victoria University in New Zealand; Reykjavik University in Iceland; the Women's Education, Reserach and Resource Center of University College in Dublin, Ireland; Tel Aviv University in Israel; Queens College in Ontario, Canada; and Anna Daresh Women's College in Madras, India. Bring me in to speak at YOUR next women's history event!"

The Disappearing L can be ordered from the publisher for $22.

And here's an interview I did with Dr. Bon, sponsored by Green Woman Store for their telesummit on the environment in 2015.

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Journal of Radical Feminist Discussion & Activism, Northampton, MA, Winter, 2017.

I just returned from a three-day lesbian conference at the University of Ottawa, “Lesbian Artivisms in the Age of Globalization/ Artivismes lesbiens à l’ère de la mondialisation.”  It was LESBIAN.
 
The organizers—Dominique Bourque,  Johanne Coulombe, and Vanessa Plante—are to be congratulated for their courage and their vision in daring to produce a lesbian-specific symposium in the age of queer.
 
The conference was bilingual and featured over thirty artists, activists, and researchers from a dozen different countries. The two objectives were:

• To promote the sharing of experience, expertise and knowledge.
• To permit the establishment of transnational and interdisciplinary solidarity networks.

I attended with Boston actor Julia Reddy, who was performing my play The Second Coming of Joan of Arc. I was also presenting a workshop on “Interrupting Racism: An Interactive Technique.”  Because of my involvement in these presentations and also because of the need to leave early on the final day, I can only give a report on my personal experiences and impressions of this remarkable gathering.

The opening panel was titled “An ARTivists Round Table: Development of Solidarity through Art and Culture.”  Sabreen Bint Loula, a French immigrant from Djibouti, was one of the panelists. A courageous activist against female genital mutilation, as well as against sexism, racism, and  lesbophobia, Loula spoke poignantly about her struggles with identity as both a lesbian and as an immigrant and woman of color.

The panel was intended to include lesbian artivist Zanele Muholi from South Africa, but unfortunately the US refused to allow her to board her flight. (In order to fly to Ottawa from South Africa, it was necessary to book a flight into the US.) This was a loss to the conference, as Muholi is doing daring and dangerous work, making lesbian lives visible in her country at a time when they are being especially targeted for “corrective rapes” and murders. A documentary by Human Rights Watch about Muholi and her art, however, was shown. The title is “We Live in Fear.”

Muholi founded the collective Inkanyiso, which, in their own words “works to document the lives of black lesbian women around the country; publish the work of their artists: and build skills in the use of art as an advocacy tool within their marginalized communities. What Zanele Muholi does as a visual and gender activist and artist, is to explore black lesbian identities through portraiture.”

The first afternoon featured a panel titled “Historical Contextualizations.”  From London, Ilana Eloit sent her paper via video, which was summarized in English: “Happiness Was In the Pages of This Monthly: Lesbian Press and the Construction of the Lesbian Subject in France (1976-1990).” I had only sporadic contact with the publications in Eliot’s paper, Lesbia and Amazones d'Hier, Lesbiennes d'Aujourd'hui (Amazons of Yesterday, Lesbians of Today), but I certainly resonated with the transformative and life-giving power of early lesbian publications prior to the age of the Internet. Dr. Bonnie Morris was also on this panel, which was timely, because the hardcover edition of her book The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture has just been published. (The paperback version is out in January.) Morris spoke on “The Women’s Music Movement: Documenting Artivism in the Era of Lesbian Erasure.”  She spoke passionately about her work as archivist of the women’s festival culture at a time when this movement is being shunned and stigmatized, noting the irony that, as the women who created this radical and historically unprecedented cultural phenomenon are dying out, there is a near-total failure to interview them/us, to secure their/our papers, and to recognize the significance of their/our lives.

On the first night of the conference, two theatre pieces were presented. The first was a reading by playwright Marie-Claude Garneau of her dramatic poem Lieu(x) possible(s). The work was a monologue based on the writings of lesbian author Violette Leduc.
 
The second was my own play about a lesbian Joan of Arc. This was the first professional performance by Boston actor Julia Reddy, and it was very well received. The French translation by Parisian translator Céline Pomès was read simultaneously by Dominque Bourque and transmitted through headsets to francophone audience members. This was the first time this translation had ever been used, and I was gratified by the positive feedback.
 
On the second day of the conference, a remarkable film was screened: Cerveaux mouillés d'orages (“Storm Wet Brains”) by filmmaker Karine Lhémon. The film documents the lives and the love of two lesbians, Hélène et Laurence. Both of these women suffered severe brain injuries in their twenties—Hélène Morvan from a car accident and Laurence Leroy from an incident involving a cerebral hemorrhage that was left untreated for nine hours in the hospital. The film opens with the two lesbians making preparations with friends on their wedding day—a segment filled with the playful details of getting dressed for the occasion, the logistics of transportation, and the service itself.  Later in the film we discover the more urgent and political dimension of this ceremony, as Laurence’s family took aggressive steps to oppose the relationship and to regain guardianship of Laurence.

The two lesbians live in the country, Hélène tending their gardens and Laurence creating her paintings. Both women were present for the conference, joining the filmmaker for the talk-back. I experienced every frame of the documentary as radical, visionary,  and revolutionary in terms of anti-patriarchal values. One of the most radical aspects was the pace of life. Watching the film, I felt the frenetic RPMs of my own life slowing down to match the rhythms of the filmmaker and her subjects, and that was a revelation.

 
On the second night of the conference, Myriam Fougère’s film Lesbiana: A Parallel Revolution was screened. I was attending the conference with longtime lesbian-feminist scholar and activist Dr. Morgne Cramer, and watching the film together was like watching home movies. We kept pointing and whispering, “I was there!” “Oh, look… Bloodroot Café!” “I know her!” “The Pagoda!”  The film is available in both a French and English version.
 
The Women Make Movies catalog describes the film as “... a road trip through the United States and Canada” where Fougère  revisits “the activists of the time who sparked this revolution to define their own culture.... Told through photographs, archival footage, and contemporary interviews, Fougère’s film serves not only as a testament to the politics of the era, but also as a living yearbook and virtual reunion of these remarkable women, who laid the groundwork for generations to come.”

I was unable to attend the final half-day, and I regretted missing a panel that included Marion Page’s paper on one of my first mentors, French author Michèle Causse, and a paper by Delphine Cézard, a trapeze artist who was addressing the political and feminist aspects of being a female circus artist. 

I also regret that I missed visual artist Pamela Dodds' talk about her series of woodcuts, “Memory’s Witness.” These were on display, and although I had viewed images of them previously, seeing the actual woodcuts was an entirely different experience. She also brought several linocuts from her series “Ebb.”

The conference highlighted the incredible richness of global lesbian-feminist history and art, while at the same time shining a light on the ongoing dangers of living a lesbian life in patriarchy, especially where lesbian oppression intersects with other oppressions. Conspicuous in their absence were the dozens, even hundreds, of young women identifying as queer inside and outside the University, for whom the word “lesbian” is anathema. The threats of marginalization and erasure were palpable, at least to me, and the most effective response to these threats is exactly the kind of courage, determination, and pride demonstrated by these organizers.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is a brand-new biography about the lesbian who led the charge for LGBT rights beginning in the late 1950’s, when she organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), through the tumultuous 1960’s when she edited DOB’s The Ladder and walked the picket line protesting the US government’s homophobic hiring policies, into the 1970’s where she worked to bring LGBT liberation to the American Library Association and to the American Psychiatric Association. 

The biography is written by Tracy Baim, who is no slacker herself when it comes to LGBT activism . Baim is the publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, the oldest LGBT newspaper in Chicago—co-founded by Baim in 1985. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books about the LGBT press, about lesbians in the service, about Obama’s relationship to the LGBT community, and about mothers of LGBT kids. In 2014 she was inducted into the Hall of Fames for both the Chicago Headline Club and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. In other words, Baim, like the subject of her biography, is a lesbian force of nature.

Baim brings her insider’s appreciation of the world of activism to her subject, along with her editor’s ear for a good story—and Gittings’ life was full of those. She also brings her journalist’s eye for photography to the (literally) hundreds of photos that are included in the book, which had initially been conceived as a photo album. Fortunately for us, Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, documented their life, and in doing that, she ended up documenting five decades of a movement.
 
Baim has done so many important things in her writing of this book. Here are just a few:
 
She has written a major lesbian activist back into a history of the LGBT civil rights movement that was at risk of looking like a gay male movement. The erasure of lesbians has now, alas, become a “thing.” Advocate writer and blogger Victoria Brownworth has written about it. Feminist scholar Dr. Bonnie Morris has a book coming out this year titled The Disappearing L. Last year Curve Magazine published a story on “Erasing Our Lesbian Dead,” and AfterEllen posted a reminder to the culture at large that lesbians are gay people, too. So, thank you Tracy Baim, for giving Gittings such a solid, cast-in-cement,  gold-star biography in our LGBT Walk of Fame.

Next, there are the photos. These have been carefully sorted into the different eras of Gittings’ long career, and then meticulously captioned with names, dates, associations. They are truly worth a thousands words. One of the radical steps that Giddings took when she began to edit The Ladder was to feature real faces of real lesbians on the cover. Fortunately, Baim includes several pages of these archival covers, and they speak volumes about the courage of both editor and subjects.
 
This same kind of courage is also evident in the photos of those early marches at the Pentagon and the White House. There was no rainbow flag. It was all gray flannel suits and shirtwaist dresses with sensible shoes. These picketers were dressing for the jobs they were not allowed to hold.
 
In many ways, the book is like a family album. Thumbing through it, some names jump out, like "Sylvia Rivera" or "Vito Russo." So that’s what they looked like…  And other times the faces jump out.. Oh, look, there’s Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Karla Jay!

As the pages and eras scroll past, the photos become less crowded, quieter, more domestic. Another side of Gittings emerges. Here she is performing with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus… and here she is announcing the purchase of a house… and sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee. One of my favorites is a photo of her with Lahusen posing on the front steps of Gittings’ mother’s house. Both women are holding stuffed dinosaurs and laughing. Here’s the story: In the 1970’s, a new wave of LGBT activists swept into the movement, and, as new waves are wont to do, they immediately set about eliminating the “old wave." They labeled Gittings and Lahusen “establishment accommodationists”… or just “dinosaurs.” Not fazed in the least, Gittings and her partner rolled with the punches, and began to show up to meetings with stuffed dinosaurs under their arms.

And this brings me to one of the most memorable aspects of this book… the stories. Gittings was a valiant foot soldier, logging her hours at the mimeograph machine and the mailing parties, and logging her miles in the picket lines… but she was also a brilliant, creative strategist with a wicked sense of humor. She knew how to turn her enemy’s homophobia against him. One of the most unforgettable examples was an action she planned at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual convention. After years of lobbying, she and her fellow activists were finally allowed to present a panel titled, “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue.” The plan was to put two national, LGBT rights activists,  Gittings and Frank Kameny,  on the panel with two heterosexual, but sympathetic psychiatrists. It was Gittings’ partner who noted that something was missing: Where was the gay or lesbian psychiatrist? The simplest answer was “in the closet.” Being professionally out at that time could actually put one at risk of losing their license.
 
But once Gittings had a vision for an action, she was unstoppable. She located a psychiatrist willing to appear in disguise—and what a disguise! He wore a tuxedo three sizes too large and a huge, full-head, rubber mask of Richard Nixon. His appearance was grotesque, and so was the reality to which he was responding. The panel was an overwhelming success, no small influence on the removal of homosexuality the following year from the APA clinical roster of mental diseases.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is filled with stories, often in Gittings’ own words, as Baim has incorporated excerpts from interviews as well as Gittings’ writings. The stories of her childhood, and especially of her long and rocky road to acceptance of her “difference” make for wonderful reading. It always inspires me when I discover that these super women who changed the world had to wrestle with the same demons that plague us lesser mortals.
 
Gittings is family, and her personal photo album is part of our heritage, too. Her journey, like that of a first generation immigrant, is embedded in our second-, third-, and fourth-generation lesbian DNA. Her traumas are in our bone marrow, and her victories are the legacies on which we build.

Thank you, Tracy Baim, for this meticulously researched, sparkling biography of Barbara Gittings!

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is available in both a black-and-white-photo edition and a color-photo edition! 

I just went to see Suffragette, the period drama about the militant phase of the British Suffrage Movement, and, of course, I wanted to share my thoughts.
 
First, there is a justified viral campaign to protest the complete—and I mean complete—absence of persons of color in the film. In 1913, Britain was coming out of their heyday of global colonization, and, as a result, there were entire communities of color in London. There was an especially large Indian community, including the Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who fought not only for women’s suffrage but for the liberation of Indian women.  It is interesting to note that three decades earlier, a suffragist named Catherine Impey founded Anti-Caste, which has been described as Britain’s first anti-racist journal. In its pages, the editor attempted to speak “with” rather than “about” people of colour, a dynamic with which white political leaders are still struggling more than a century later.

Anyway… with all the attention to historical accuracy about the details of women's tailoring, and with all the photo ops of processions, meetings, rallies, factory interiors, and street scenes… surely central casting could have and should have paid more attention to diversity.
 
So there is that.
 
And then, of course, the perennial absence/closeting of the lesbians. Not surprisingly, there were many lesbians in the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US. One of Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughters, Christabel, was the subject of many suffragist crushes, and had lengthy relationships with Annie Kenney and with Grace Roe. The composer Ethel Smyth dedicated two years of her life to the movement. She wrote openly about her passion for women and had a crush on Emmeline Pankhurst. (See my blog on Ethel Symth.)

But in spite of the a-historical absence of diversity in the film, there is much to admire. It features a working-class heroine. It does not flinch from the subject of rape and sexual harassment in the workplace in an era when women had no legal recourse whatsoever. It dramatizes the consequences of women having no rights of ownership over their own children. The central character is evicted from her home because of her activism, and then her husband, unable to provide care for the child, puts him up for adoption without her knowledge or permission.
 
For me, the most exciting part of the film is the coming to consciousness of the central character. We see her waking up from a deep sleep. We see her beginning to see what could be possible. We see her excitement in bonding with other women and in executing acts of civil disobediance—most notably blowing up the Prime Minister’s summer home.

And, then of course, there is the punishing routine of repeated incarceration, the police violence meted out at rallies, the horror of the force-feeding of hunger strikers. In an effort to shape a concise dramatic arc, the film begins to focus on a cat-and-mouse dynamic between the heroine and the police inspector assigned to neutralize the movement. He has been given the injunction not to allow any of the suffragists to become martyrs.
 
The dramatic climax of the film is the death of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragist who ran onto the race track at the Epsom Derby and attempted to attach a “Votes for Women” banner to the King’s horse. She was trampled to death.

The film ends with the “victory” of the Suffragists having achieved the desired martyrdom. The story went around the world and thousands turned out for the funeral procession. This is presented as the happy ending for the film, the moment that turned the tide. Just before the final credits, text appears to inform us of the historical timeline for women’s suffrage, and for other laws, including women's right to own their children.
 
But here's my biggest concern: The film absolutely implies that the women’s activism, and especially their tactical move to destruction of property, resulted in the granting of suffrage.

This is not true. At the height of the incarcerations and force-feedings, World War I broke out. In what many, including myself, considered a stunning betrayal of not just the suffrage movement, but of feminism, Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to all militant suffrage activism. Emmeline turned her brilliant organizing skills toward recruiting women for industrial production and encouraging young men to enlist. She was a prominent figure in the “white feather campaign” to shame and stigmatize able-bodied men who were not joining up. Later on, she would become a member of the conservative and classist Tory Party.
 
Finally, at the end of the war, Parliament passed an act that would enfranchise women over the age of thirty who met minimum property qualifications. This was specifically in recognition of the fact that women had been pressured into filling men’s industrial jobs during the war and, after that, it would have been ludicrous to maintain the fiction that they were too frail or feeble-minded to be entrusted with suffrage. It was their reward for doing as they were told.

What is my point? My point is that history does not support the theory that women’s escalating activism for the vote brought men in power to their knees. It did not. Women’s abandonment of their own agenda and participation the most patriarchal of patriarchal horrors was what turned the tide.
 
My point is that women’s movements do not follow the same trajectories as men’s movements. If there were no gay men, and the entire queer movement had been composed solely of lesbian and bisexual women, I do not believe that we would have ANY of the legal gains that we have today. In fact, I believe that the movement, as with the Suffrage Movement in both England and the US, would have resulted in increased marginalization and suffering.  Today we are seeing our hard-won abortion rights being eroded by cat-and-mouse games. Today, poor women in some areas have great difficulty in arranging for abortions, because of laws about waiting periods, restrictions on where abortion clinics can operate, and the expenses that these new laws entail.

My point is that lobbying men should be a last resort. We should organize ourselves around efforts to provide for our needs without needing to petition men in power. By all means, get women elected into as many positions as possible, but the rush for equal participation in patriarchal institutions is what led to Pankhurst’s abandonment of the movement.
 
And, much as the movement recognized the significance of having a martyr, Emily Wilding Davison died with a ticket in her pocket to a women’s dance that night. She did not plan to martyr herself, but to celebrate her victory in the company of women. That is the movement I want to commemorate.

What does it take to confront a rich and powerful rapist?

It would be easy to think of Andrea Constand as a kind of Wonder Woman who brought Bill Cosby to justice with her Lariat of Truth.

That’s just it. It would be easy. Easy to believe that heroines are born that way, that they have an extra chromosome for courage or fearlessness.

I think of a quotation by Albert Einstein: “It's not that I'm so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

What if Andrea Constand was not Wonder Woman? What if she just stayed with the problem longer?  

Let’s look at the temptations she faced, temptations that face any victim who attempts to confront her perpetrator. Constand didn’t always meet them successfully. Sometimes she wavered, hesitated, fumbled, backed away… but she  always--eventually--came back, and when she did, she came back stronger, with more support, and with greater clarity.

So here are the Seven Temptations of Andrea Constand:

1. The temptation to believe it never happened, to doubt one’s perceptions, to blame oneself.

Cosby was not a new acquaintance, nor was he a date. Constand had known him for two years, since 2002 when she came to work at Temple University as the director of operations for the women’s basketball program. Cosby, a member of the Temple Athletics Hall of Fame was a frequent fundraiser and honored guest. In his sixties, he had positioned himself as a mentor to her, inviting her to dinner parties, and then to private dinners, at his home outside of Philadelphia. He would talk to her about basketball, her career, and spiritual beliefs. He met her family and cultivated a relationship with them. He had groomed her patiently for victimization.

The night of the rape, Cosby  invited her over, to “offer her assistance in her pursuit of a different career.”  She testified that he gave her three pills, claiming they were herbal supplements for stress. He insisted that she take all three.

Constand was drugged. Her memory of the incident was impaired, filled with blackouts, vague impressions, and she experienced enormous disorientation when she recovered consciousness. She remembered  waking up on a couch at four in the morning, her clothing in disarray and Cosby standing over her in a bathrobe. Confused and mortified, her initial response was a kneejerk, socially conditioned one:  She expressed embarrassment over her disheveled state. He gave her a muffin and took her home.

2. The temptation to get on with one’s life, to distance oneself from the episode, to attempt to normalize the situation and/or relations with the rapist.

Four months later, she left her job and career, moved back home to Canada, and began studying to become a massage therapist. She stayed in contact with Cosby, and, several months after returning home, she took her parents to see his show at a casino in Ontario.

3) The temptation not to tell anyone.

Constand did not tell anyone for a year. This is not uncommon. She was in survival mode, in flight. What eventually brought her back to the rape was the emphasis in her massage classes on a code of ethics around touch.

In January 2005, Constand finally broke her silence and told her mother. Immediately after that, she reported the rape to the authorities where she lived. They passed the case on to the police in Pennsylvania. 

4)  The temptation to accept an apology as sufficient.

Three days after the report to the police, Cosby and his people began to call her. Constand and her mother stated repeatedly that all they wanted was an apology. Even Cosby admitted this. According to the filing, he told the police that she had not asked for money, “but had only asked him to apologize to Plaintiff and her mother, which he did.”

He apologized several times. On the phone, not in writing.

5) The temptation to accept money in lieu of accountability.

Offers of money are standard ploys for predators with resources, especially when the victim is not wealthy.  Cosby called Constand’s mother and offered to set up an “educational trust” for Constand to attend graduate school, provided she could prove to him that she was maintaining a grade point average of 3.0. He later admitted he had done this for another accuser.

Constand turned it down.

6)  The temptation to give up when the police refuse to file charges.

The District Attorney, declining to file charges, stated, “I think that factors such as failure to disclose in a timely manner and contacts with the alleged perpetrator after the event are factors that weigh toward Mr. Cosby… Much exists in this investigation that could be used to portray persons on both sides of the issue in a less-than-flattering light.”

Constand’s actions were consistent with choices made by trauma survivors in the immediate aftermath, but juries and judges are rarely trauma literate, and it is easy for victims to feel ashamed for not being better plaintiffs. At this point, many victims give up, and Constand might have done that, except that Cosby began a campaign to discredit her as an extortioner.

After offering Constand an apology and money, Cosby and his reps went to the tabloids with a story about how Constand’s mother had demanded money from him even before Constand had contacted the police. Cosby insisted that the relationship had been consensual. As a second and then third woman came forward with similar stories of being drugged and raped by Cosby, he gave a personal interview to The National Enquirer, in exchange for them killing the story of the third woman.  In the interview, he described Constand in such specific detail there could be no question about her identity.

Six days after the Enquirer story, Constand filed a civil suit in federal court--
under her own name, her anonymity already having been compromised by Cosby’s interview. She accused Cosby of “battery, assault, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, defamation/defamation per se, and false light/invasion of privacy.” Because of all the publicity—much of it propagated by Cosby himself—ten other victims contacted Constand’s legal team to offer corroborating testimony.

Constand’s team requested a protective order to shield the identity of these women from the press. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that the Cosby team also moved for a protective order that would seal not only his testimony, but that of his accusers. This move caught the attention of the Associated Press. What was Cosby attempting to hide? The AP made two separate attempts to force open the court records, and Constand sided with them.

7)  The temptation to say “enough,” to tell yourself that you’ve gotten everything that you’re going to get, to let it go short of full accountability.

Cosby settled with the usual terms: neither party is ever allowed to discuss the case or to disclose the amount of the settlement.

But Cosby continued to defame Constand. When even more women began to come forward, Cosby’s website posted  a statement in clear violation of the settlement agreement, that “decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced. The fact they are being repeated does not make them true.”

Immediately Constand forced him to publish a retraction, which he did: “The statement released by Mr. Cosby’s attorney over the weekend was not intended to refer in any way to Andrea Constand.”

And, finally, as the AP continued to push for disclosure of the court records of her civil suit, a federal judge ordered the deposition unsealed. He stated that Cosby, in posturing for years as a “public moralist,” had forfeited his right to privacy. The world could read for itself Cosby’s admission that he had obtained nine prescriptions for Quaaludes to be given to women with whom he wanted to have sex.

Constand is now urging the unsealing of all of the testimony from that trial, and there are several civil suits pending, as well as a criminal investigation. It’s all over for Cosby. He may even go to prison.

All because Constand just stayed with the problem longer.

And here allow me a little ironic digression. It is likely that Amy first saw Ada in the role she created of Mrs. Wiggs from the play Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Believe it or not, the play was an adaptation of a book that was the second best-selling novel of 1902... an inane melodrama about how wonderful it is to be poor, with the widow Wiggs elevating optimism to the level of lunacy. ("My but it's nice an' cold this mornin'! The thermometer's done fell up to zero.") I wonder if the irony was lost on Amy Lowell...? (A digression from the digression, there is a hilarious Youtube clip from a filmed version of the play with Zazu Pitts and W.C. Fields... )

ANYWAY... history gives us no answers, just clues. We know Ada turned Amy down more than once. We know that Amy was persistent to the point of bullying, and that when Ada did eventually agree to move in with Amy on her Boston estate, Sevenels, she insisted that it be for a trial period of six months, and that she would work and be paid as Amy's assistant, receiving the same amount of money she would have earned had she continued to tour as an actor.

Baby You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars and Theology Before Stonewall
Acumen, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-84465-649-3
Dr. Marie Cartier
Price $74.14

[Originally published in Sinister Wisdom, July 2014]

“The Catacomb Culture of Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights History”

Baby You Are My Religion is a fascinating book in which Dr. Marie Cartier, a historian and theologian, argues her case that the pre-Stonewall lesbian bars, especially the 1950’s bars, constituted a form of sacred space. She makes repeated comparisons between the bars of this era and the catacombs in Rome, where early Christians met in secret, underground venues, practicing a form of civil disobedience necessitated by their taboo beliefs and rituals. This comparison appears less hyperbolic in light of the stories of the women interviewed for the book.

One of Cartier’s interviewees, Falcon River estimated that she was raped—vaginally, anally, and orally—at least once a month during the five years  that she patronized the bars in and around Roanoke, Richmond, and Norfolk, Virginia. In the words of Falcon:

There was not one other place that I could fit. That’s why I went back after the police raped me. Over and over they raped me and over and over I went back. There was not one other place that I existed; or that my gay friends, the queens, could exist. It took all the courage I had to walk as a butch from the car to the bar…(p.14)

Psychologist and Dachau survivor Victor Frankl stated, “Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.” The pre-Stonewall lesbians risked arrest, rape, battery, public exposure, loss of family, and loss of career when they walked into these lesbian bars, but it was worth it, because the bars were the only place where, in the words of River, they existed. The bars were where they found identity, community, love… meaning. And this is why Cartier names the bars sacred ground.

For bar culture women then, I believe the gay women’s bar was that proverbial mountaintop—the place where they began the search that would lead to self-definition. (p.195)

This is a radical and significant reframing of an era of lesbian history that was rejected in the 1970’s lesbian-feminist construction of lesbianism as “the rage of all women condensed to an explosion,” rather than the “persistent desire of butch-femme.” (P. 106)  The masculinity valorized in the butch-femme relationships of bar culture was not welcome in lesbian-feminist communities, nor was it welcome in mainstream feminist organizations.

The reality, however, was that, in 1961, the national membership of the Daughters of Bilitis was 115, but lesbians by the tens of thousands were flocking to the bars.

Cartier makes the case that not only did the bars constitute a form of sacred space, but that this era marks an important missing link in lesbian history. Cartier contends that the women who were publicly out in bar culture from 1945 to 1975 were the actual mothers of contemporary lesbian-feminism:

I believe however that the missing historical link between the past and the 1970’s is the butch-femme couple, the true “point of connection” between the two. ( P. 115)

Throughout the book, Dr. Cartier practices “deviant historiography,” an intriguing double-vision approach to history that combines a contemporary perspective with a respectful deference to the historical realities of the population being considered… in this case, the women of the bars.

For the book, she interviewed ninety-three self-identified gay women who attended the bars between 1940 and 1975. Her book devotes a chapter to each decade, and also includes a chapter on the 1980’s.

Before Stonewall, the great majority churches rejected homosexuals and homosexuality, and, according to Cartier, the bar was the only place where gay women could find the community and the recognition of friendship that made self-identification. In order for one to envision God as “friend,” it would be necessary to have friends and to be a friend. Not surprising the organizer of the first LGBT church, the Metropolitan Community Church, began by recruiting from the gay and lesbian bars in the late 1960’s.

Cartier examines how feminist theologians challenged the hierarchy of traditional theology, positing a “thealogy” rooted in experience as the source of insight into the Divine. But even this feminist thealogy was inaccessible to gay women in the mid-twentieth century. Only in the bars could they exist in relation to others as homosexuals, and not be cast as criminals, sinners, or mentally ill. And, as Cartier notes, the women’s spirituality movement was not welcoming of butch-femme.

Cartier creates her own word for the spiritual experience she discovers with her informants. The word is “theelogy:

A new word or house is needed to articulate what these women were doing for each other. I call this new word theelogy, in honor of the concept of friendship, and friendship’s ability to see the humanity, or the sacred, in each other and in our shared community members.(p. 190)

As a lesbian who came out in the era of lesbian-feminism, I found Cartier’s ideas did provide me with a missing link. I agree with her that bar culture was not “proto-political,” but political and revolutionary. Certainly these women were practicing freedom of assembly.

Baby You Are My Religion is packed with fascinating first-person narratives, a radical reframing of butch-femme history, and a fascinating contribution to evolving LGBT spiritual and religious history… but there is more than that. I am reminded of the words of African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara:

I’m entering my forties with more simplistic criteria—anyone with a greater capacity for love than I is a valuable teacher. And when I look back on the body of book reviews I’ve produced in the past fifteen years, for all their socioideolitero brilliant somethingorother, the underlying standard always seemed to be—Does this author here genuinely love his/her community?

And in the case of Dr. Cartier, the answer is a resounding yes.