​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.” 

So… Milo Yiannopoulos.
 
I don’t want to spend one second more time on this subject than is absolutely, bare-bones necessary to interject the perspective of a survivor of child sexual abuse who has spent three decades working with the art and culture of other survivors in recovery.
 
In a nutshell, Milo is a British journalist and public speaker.  He got in a lot of trouble this week  when  a conservative website posted excerpts of a video that he made in a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants. 
 
Here is a transcript from that video from the website heavy.com.:

In this interview, he was asked about the charges of pedophilia against Hollywood director Brian Singer. He disavowed any knowledge of Singer, but said he had attended Hollywood parties by other celebrities where he saw things that “beggared belief” where “some of the boys there were very young…  very young.”
 
So that was Milo a year ago. Also last year, he showed up for a college booking wearing a clerical collar and opened with, “Thank you, thank you. Aren’t you kind. I know what you’re thinking. If every priest looked like this, those little boys would stop complaining.”
 
As of this week, he has just he has just lost a quarter-million dollar book deal, his job as a Breitbart editor, and an invitation to speak at a national conference. It appears that his career may be ended. So… here is the damage control from yesterday’s press conference:

What happened to this man when he was a child was an atrocity, but his inability to heal from it stems from a gay male culture in the late 1990’s where there was still widespread tolerance for pedophilia. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), formed in the late 1970’s, was not expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994. Throughout the 1980’s, the controversy over NAMBLA’s inclusion in LGBT coalitions and events raged. At a 1986 gay parade in Los Angeles, iconic gay rights activist Harry Hay wore a sign proclaiming, “NAMBLA walks with me.”
 
NAMBLA’s position was that male sexual predation on male children is integral to the Western homosexual tradition, “from Socrates to Wilde to Gide,” and that this predation was practiced in gay cultures from “New Guinea and Persia to the Zulu and Japanese.”  In NAMBLA’s view, child sexual abuse is central to gay male history and culture.
 
The argument that Milo presented in his 2016 video, that these “relationships” can be enriching and affirming was part of the standard cant in many gay male papers that framed anti-pedophilia activists as sexual puritans bent on denying children their “right” to "sex" with adults. Two of the founding fathers of post-modernism, Derrida and Foucault, both participated in a public campaign in France to abolish age of consent. Abolish, not lower.
 
Milo was victimized by more than just two sick men. He was victimized by a movement and by a community. And, after he came of age with this legacy of abuse and the toxic ideology that perpetuates it, he was further abused by a culture that has and continues to incentivize his dissociation.

And here I am going to step aside and give the floor to Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, a book that has saved the sanity and lives of millions. Here is Dr. Herman:
 
 “Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.
 
But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood―establishing independence and intimacy―burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.
 
She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
 
And…

"The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called 'doublethink,' and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call 'dissociation.' It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
 
And…
 
“By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.”

And…
 
“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.”  (My emphasis.)
 
In an interview last year with Fusion, Milo explained how his media personality evolved: “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character." To the New York Times, he admitted, "I don’t have feelings to hurt.”

Several journalists who spent time with him have noted that he does not actually believe most of the things he says. I compare this with the words of African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara: "I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I've felt them doing it... I'm careful about what I give voice to."
 
A child who is taught that his abuse is empowerment will have great difficulty achieving authenticity of voice--or "freedom of speech," if you will. It follows that the person who is still trapped in a paradigm of protecting his own oppression will have little empathy for the vicitimization of others. The followers of Milo who hold him up as a champion of free speech have been hoodwinked. His is the most censored voice of all, the voice of the child who has internalized the affect of the perpetrator. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose when words have lost their meaning.

So, Milo, if you are entering on a path of recovery as a result of this week's events--and I hope you are,  I challenge you to undertake an action that is authentically dangerous, taking these words of Dr. Herman to heart: 

"Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor."

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 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.

There was so much going on, I honestly don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to start with the National Women’s Music Festival Orchestra. That’s right. “Orchestra.” These are women of all ages, races, and instruments who come from all over the country to the Festival. They have received the music in advance, they arrive, and they rehearse for three days. On Saturday night they play… and the program…  well, here it is:

• “The Juba Dance” from Symphony in E Minor, 1931, by Florence Beatrice Price, the first African American woman composer to have her work performed by a major symphony orchestra.


• “Festive Huapango” and “Pyramid of the Sun,”  pieces by Alice Gomez, a contemporary composer who was resident composer with the San Antonio Symphony and whose works celebrate her Mexican heritage.


• “Symphony No. 3 in G Minor,” 1847, by Louise Farrenc who was on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory—the only woman in the 19th century to hold a chair of such rank. She also compiled a 23-volume anthology of 17th and 18th century keyboard music. 


• “Initiate,” 2016, a commissioned work by prolific African American composer Mary Watkins, who also performed a solo concert later in the festival. “Initiate” had three movements: “Trepidation,” “Dawning,” and “Conversion.”

And these were all conducted by Nan Washburn, a co-founder and conductor of the legendary Women’s Philharmonic (1980-1990).  She has conducted the Michigan Philharmonic for seventeen seasons. She is one of the world’s leading authorities and advocates for orchestral works by women composers.

And then there was Sharon Katz and The Peace Train. The Festival screened a documentary about the origin of The Peace Train, “When Voices Meet.” Here’s a description: “When Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, South African musician and music therapist Sharon Katz joined with singer and educator Nonhlanhla Wanda to form a 500-voice multiracial youth choir. Railroading across the country aboard The Peace Train, they broke through Apartheid’s barriers and became Mandela’s face of the new nation.”  This was 1993. The film included interviews with some of the children who had been on the Peace Train. They talked about how their worldview and their view of themselves were completely transformed by this experience. The film transformed me.

One of my favorite Festival moments was walking into the Performer Care suite to grab some lunch, and finding myself in the middle of an improvised performance of “Wimoweh,” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) led by Sharon. Blues and rock musicians, folk musicians, volunteers, and my little playwright self were all swept up in a Peace Train moment.
 
There was also a film about Barbara Bordon and a performance by this phenomenal drummer, whose work has taken her to Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe in times of civil strife, and to Siberia for shamanic initiation.
 
In addition to the Festival Orchestra, there is a Festival Drum Chorus led by Wahru, a Festival Folk Orchestra led by Kiya Heartwood, and a Festival Chorus led by Rhiannon.

And then there are the performers: Suede (“Adele meets Diana Krall meets Bette Midler”), Nedra Johnson with the Fat Bottom Girls (4 tuba players, a rhythm section, and Nedra!), SONiA disappear fear (“rock to blues to reggae to folk to Latin to Judaic to pop”), Ubaka Hill (master drummer and teacher), Crys Matthews (“Americana, folk, jazz, blues”) Margie Adam (legendary songwriter and pianist)… and so many more!
 
And comedians like Marga Gomez and Vickie Shaw. And Andrea Gibson, poet and activist. And the Sarah Bush Dance Project. And me, with my one-woman show.

And the workshops…  way, way too many to mention. I taught a technique for interrupting racism. I went to a workshop on croning, and also to Dr. Bonnie Morris’ workshop “Writing About Festival Culture,” and a workshop by Toni Armstrong Jr. on the magazine Hot Wire (1984-1994) that chronicled the rise of second wave “women’s music” and the festival movement that it inspired.
 
The Festival is all about building legacy, nurturing younger women, creating and sustaining a culture by, for, about, and celebrating females. They honor an “Emerging Artist” every year. They give awards. I will never forget receiving the Janine C. Rae Award for the Advancement of Women’s Culture. They recognize women’s achievements in philanthropy, in women’s music, in social change, in technical skills, and more!

And then there is the Marketplace, where women sell everything from tee-shirts to custom coffee blends, from tile mosaics to beaded earrings.
 
The Festival is held at a Marriott hotel outside of Madison, with a variety of motel and hotel options within walking distance. It’s a great venue with a saltwater pool and hot tub, and an affordable breakfast buffet for attendees.
 
It’s not too early to clear your calendar for 2017. July 6-9. Bookmark their website!  I will see you there!