This week there are lots of folks weighing in on the hearings about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court… political pundits, women’s rights advocates, lawyers, and so on. So I thought I would throw in my two cents as a professional actor. Because it was quite a performance.
 
So, one of the first principles of acting is “Don’t play the problem. Play the adjustment to the problem.”  In other words, don’t worry about impressing the audience with what your character is feeling. Focus instead on solving the character’s problem. That’s what makes a performance believable, because that is what people do in real life… and audiences recognize that.
 
Let’s say you want to portray an innocent person who is being accused by a powerful group of people of something they did not do. That’s a serious problem. It’s a dangerous situation. The innocent party needs to tread carefully, be thoughtful, weigh her words. Because she is innocent, she has the truth on her side, and her best defense is a straightforward presentation that allows the facts of the situation to come through, untainted by emotions or editorializing.

And here let me interject a word about outrage. It can be very, very useful in overriding and masking less flamboyant emotions. Outrage pretty much trumps them all. I learned this hitchhiking. If I was in a car with a driver who began to behave in a threatening manner, I would erupt into an emotionally violent tirade against a fictional boss, and I would keep this rant going until I was able to get away. It kept those icy fingers of fear from making inroads into my psyche. It gave me the floor. It shut down whatever scenario he was attempting to initiate. Let me be clear: a performance of outrage would not work on a Ted-Bundy-type predator, but, at least in my experience  with more garden-variety potential perps, I found it effective.
 
So Kavanaugh played outrage. And so did Lindsey Graham. In fact, Graham’s performance was even more transparent, as he used the display of anger to derail a specific line of questioning that was not going well for Kavanaugh. Because outrage carries the overtones of emotional violence, it disrupts discourse.  People confronted with outrage have a visceral response. Their choices become “escalate” or “appease.”
 
Kavanaugh’s display of outrage worked to solve his problem:  that of a guilty man attempting to defend himself when the facts do not support his case, when he is under oath and afraid to lie, and when he is fending off tell-tale emotions of guilt, shame, and fear. To a trained actor, Kavanaugh's performance of outrage was an admission of guilt, pure and simple.

This week Serena Williams, seeking a 24th Grand Slam title, reached her breaking point with discrimination, and it appears that her breaking point is now becoming a tipping point for the professional world of women’s tennis.
 
She was playing the US Open women’s final, when the chair umpire issued a warning for a code violation for receiving coaching. Her coach later admitted that he was signaling, but that she had not seen him. She and the umpire had a civil exchange, and it seems that Serena understood that he had rescinded the warning. He hadn’t. A few games later, when she broke her racket in frustration over a play, she was shocked to receive a second warning, with a point docked at the start of her next game.
 
She stalked over to the chair, demanding an apology:  “I have never cheated in my life! I have a daughter and I stand [for] what’s right for her! I have never cheated. You owe me an apology. You will never do another one of my matches!” She continued to challenge the initial warning for coaching, accusing him of attacking her character and demanding an apology. She called him a liar, and then she called him a thief. And that was when the umpire issued the third code violation, resulting in the loss of a game.

Serena stood her ground at the post-match press conference: “I’ve seen other men call other umpires several things…I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality… For me to say ‘thief’ and for him to take a game, it made me feel like it was a sexist remark. He’s never taken a game from a man because they said ‘thief.’ For me, it blows my mind.”
 
To put Serena’s outburst into context, she was returning to the game following a harrowing birthing experience. This is something that male athletes can never understand. Here’s a recap on the difficult delivery and the life-threatening post-partum:  After her contractions began, the baby’s heart rate started falling and an emergency cesarean section was performed. Not exactly the ideal scenario, but a common procedure that went smoothly. The baby was born, the cord was cut, and little Olympia was laid on her mother’s chest. Then, in Serena’s words, “Everything went bad.”
 
Serena has a history of blood clots, and because of this, she takes blood thinners. She went off these after the C-section to facilitate the healing of the surgical wound. The day after delivery, she began gasping. Flagging a nurse in the hall, she requested an IV with a blood thinner and a CT scan for clots. The nurse just thought she was confused. A doctor arrived and did an ultrasound. Serena reiterated, “I told you I need a CT scan and a heparin drip.” At this point, the scan was performed, and, indeed, she had clots in her lungs, and the appropriate medication was given. 

Well, her coughing from the clots reopened the C-section wound. She had to return to surgery for the lung clot, and then they found a hemotoma—clotted blood—in her abdomen, from the resumed blood thinner. Another operation, this time to put a filter into a major vein to keep clots out of the lungs. Finally, a week later, she was able to go home. Debilitated from all the crises, she had to stay in bed for six weeks, unable to care for the new baby. She describes the rollercoaster of postpartum emotions: “(The) incredible letdown every time you hear the baby cry ... Or I’ll get angry about the crying, then sad about being angry, and then guilty, like, ‘Why do I feel so sad when I have a beautiful baby?’ The emotions are insane.”
 
So this was just last fall, less than year ago. In July Serena spoke out about the fact she is being drug-tested as much as five times more frequently than any other star tennis player.
 
And then, there was the issue of her tennis outfit. She stepped onto the court at the French Open in a special, full-body compression suit designed to prevent blood clots. Serena explained, “All the moms out there that had a tough pregnancy and have to come back and try to be fierce, in the middle of everything. That’s what this represents. You can’t beat a catsuit, right?” The French indicated she had gone “too far” and banned  her from wearing it. She responded with a one-shoulder-bared, black tutu and compression fishnets.

Serena was aware that she was playing a different game for higher stakes:  “… I’m going to continue to fight for women and for us to have equal. ... I just feel like the fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions, and that want to express themselves, and they want to be a strong woman. They’re going to be allowed to do that because of today.” Her voice began to shake. “Maybe it didn’t work out for me, but it’s going to work out for the next person.”
 
And all of this reminds me of another Black female athlete who was the subject of massive discrimination, and her breaking point—which was, sadly, so far ahead of her time that it did not result in a tipping point. Except for those of us who have used her example to arrive at our own moments of transformation.
 
I am talking about French former competitive figure skater Surya Bonaly. Originally a competitive gymnast, she began skating at the age of eleven. She eventually became three-time World silver medalist, a five-time European champion, and a nine-time French national champion. She was a three-time Olympian.

Bonaly was coached by her mother, who was not a member of the elite world of skating. They were outside of the network. And Bonaly was Black. Throughout her career, Bonaly was criticized for the athleticism of her skating. She was characterized as a gymnast instead of a dancer. One of her critics made this snarky remark: “I’d like to see her stop jumping for six months and learn to skate.”
 
The “jumping?” Practically unmatched in ambition. Surya was the first female skater to attempt a quadruple jump in competition, even though they were counted as triples, because they fell just shy of four full rotations. But the jump that really put her on the map was the “Bonaly backflip,” which is a backflip landed on one blade. Banned in competition, but a huge crowd-pleaser. In other words, Surya was muscular, daring, and athletic. Figure skating evolved in the late eighteenth century in Europe, incorporating elements of the ballet into circles and figure eights. These balletic roots led to an aesthetic that privileges elegance, lithe physiques, and a feminine ideal reminiscent of ballerinas. Surya’s skating is unapologetically powerful. The same kind of body-type prejudices that kept African American women out of classical ballet companies were applied to Surya.
 
Also, her costumes were usually showier than those of her competitors. She favored bold and unusual colors, with lots of sparkle. In spite of the fact that the judges favored tights, Surya skated barelegged. Possibly the tights she needed did not come in her skin tones.

But I was talking about her breaking point. It was at the 1994 World Championships in Japan. Surya was twenty-one, and, with three Olympic medalists not competing, she had good reason to be optimistic. Bonaly’s final overall score was equal to that of Yuka Sato, who was skating in her home court. There was a 5-4 tiebreaker decision in favor of Yuka, but Surya was not having it. At the awards ceremony, she stood on the floor beside the second place platform, refusing to mount it. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. One of the officials literally manhandled her up onto the platform, but when they hung the second-place medal around her neck, she immediately took it off again. The crowd began to boo.
 

According to the Los Angeles Times, “It came down to a choice between Yuka Sato’s artistry and dynamic footwork and Surya Bonaly’s gymnastic jumping.” Is that coded racism, or  the favoring the home team… or was Bonaly’s program just not as polished, as some would claim? Reviewing the videos later, it’s not all that clear that she was a victim of discrimination, but, for Surya, suffering through years of biased criticism and personal attacks rooted in racist values and traditions, it was the breaking point. She was sure she outskated Yuka Sato, and she was not going to participate in her humiliation by taking that step up to the second place platform and she could not allow that badge of discrimination to hang around her neck. It was an unforgettable moment. She refused to give a press conference and her only statement after the ceremony was “I’m just not lucky.” They could take or leave the sarcasm.
 
Unlike Serena, Surya’s breaking point had come decades before the #MeToo movement was exposing the institutionalized misogyny in the entertainment industry, and also decades before Black producers began to gain control over the representation of their culture and icons in the media.

But after her breaking point, Surya did get the last word. She entered her third Olympics in 1998 with an Achilles tendon injury that kept her from executing her planned routine. She knew she had no chance of medaling, and she was also planning to retire after the Games… so she “called an audible”—that is, she changed the play at the last minute. Three minutes into her free skating routine, as she was coming in backward for what looked like a jump, she suddenly raised her hands over her head and flipped backward into the air. Her legs flew up over her head, and she landed on one blade.  The crowd went wild.
 
It was totally illegal… and legendary. As one Canadian newspaper put it, it was “the most elaborate expletive in Olympic history.” The Washington Post was even more explicit: “Bonaly was making a statement not only as an accomplished skater, but also as a black athlete in one of the world’s whitest sports.”
 
Here is what I wish for all the underrepresented women in the world: May your breakdowns become tipping points, and whenever your excellence lies off the visible light spectrum of  institutions obsessed with color, may you never be afraid to show off and celebrate your brilliance… because you can, and because history will catch up and remember.

At the age of thirty-five, I conceived the idea of a museum to commemorate the war against women. I was recently “out” and on fire with radical feminist theory, which electrifying my brain with new synaptic connections between previously isolated storage files of experiences and observations.
 
In light of the #MeToo movement, I thought I would dig up the proposal for this museum and work it into a blog. Reading through the documents, I have decided to just put them up, as they were written thirty years ago.
 
So… direct from 1988, The Women’s Rape Museum

I am enclosing a proposal for a project I initiated in 1988, which officially died in 1991.  It was for a national Women’s Rape Museum.  The project was inspired by and modeled after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
 
I feel that we women have allowed men to establish the terms of debate on the subject of war, and in allowing them to define “war” in terms of military campaigns between nationalities, we forfeit our own experience. 
 
Andrea Dworkin points out that in the US, only seven women out of a hundred will not experience sexual assault in her lifetime.  Estimates for child sexual abuse for girls run between 30 and 40%.  Women’s art, culture, history, and spiritual traditions are largely censored in most parts of the world.  Certainly our values are not prioritized by governments who are run by men and tokenized women.  We are, in effect, all colonized by the foreign and hostile culture of men.  We are controlled psychologically by images which show women as perpetual victims of sexual terrorism. 

The literature by male veterans about their experiences at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington stimulated my interest in a memorial for women who have been victims of rape.  We are not allowed to define male aggression in political terms.   This is insane!  Women continue to define each act as a behavioral aberration on the part of some deviant male, when the truth is that our legal system does not seriously go after perpetrators, the entire culture teaches rape, and our economy is based on the appropriation of women’s resources.
 
The reactions of individuals and organizations to the Women’s Rape Museum prospectus was instructive, to say the least.  It is as if each woman has hundreds of examples of domination and terrorism in her memory - each hermetically sealed.  When a woman begins to unwrap these experiences and allow her brain to form synapses between them, she becomes terrified of the conclusion:  This is a war. 
 
It is my belief that until women seize the definition of war and begin to confront it in terms of our own experiences with male dominance and sexual aggression, then the more aggressive expressions -i.e. the military campaigns, phallic missiles, mass rapes, etc. - will continue to increase, while women wear buttons, join male-dominated peace organizations, and in general adopt strategies which have proved ineffectual throughout history.
 
And finally, I want to make a point about veterans.  This is another word that men have appropriated.  According to male definitions of war, there are very few women veterans.  When women redefine “war,” most of us will achieve the recognition and status of veterans.  This identity would require a radical restructuring of our experiences, giving meaning to our suffering and establishing a bond, instead of a barrier, to intimacy between women.  The current vocabulary for rape is one of individual shame and confusion.  When the rape victim understands that she is a veteran, she suddenly has access to a rich tradition of activism, authority, and respect within her community

Exhibits with Practical Information:
 
The Myths about Rape:  This would be the first exhibit to greet the visitor to the Memorial.  This exhibit would challenge immediately the myths about who gets raped and who does the raping.
 
If Someone You Know Has Been Raped:  This is a display of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for friends and family of victims.  Well-meaning attempts to make light of the event or to encourage the victim to get on with her life often result in permanent alienation at a time when the victim needs support. 
 
Reporting Rape: the Legal Steps:  This is a fifteen-minute film about the procedures a woman can expect if she chooses to report the rape.  The film will show a hypothetical rape victim from the time she contacts a friend about the rape, through the process of reporting at the police station, the medical examination, and her return home.

Post-Rape Syndrome: Steps to Healing:  This is a table of steps victims go through in healing, along with a first-person narrative of a victim, describing her reactions.  The steps include her need to talk about the incident repeatedly, her panic attacks and possible agoraphobia, changes in her sexual responses, and disruption of her work activities.
 
Women And Weapons:  This is a display case of weapons which women might choose to carry.  The display carries information about the advantages and the drawbacks to the various guns and sprays, and the laws that pertain to obtaining and carrying them.
 
Self-defense Strategies:  This is a live demonstration/workshop offered at set times during the hours the memorial is open.
 

Historical Displays:
 
The History of Rape Laws in The U.S.: (or other host country) - This exhibit would be a wall mural with a time line depicting the changes in rape laws and landmark cases in the Memorial’s host country.
 
Historic Rape Resisters:  This display would have pictures of women who fought back, physically or legally against their abusers.  Visitors could press a button to hear the courageous accounts of women like Joan Little, Phoolan Devi, Inez Garcia , and Dr. Elizabeth Morgan.

The Burning Time:  This would be a display about the genocide of nine million women in Europe during the Middle Ages. The exhibit would show the implements of torture, excerpts from the Malleus Malefactorum, and trial transcripts and narratives of women who were murdered.

Religion and Rape: Representation of rape in the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. The priesthood child-rape epidemic.

The Medical Profession and Rape: The history of medical misogyny, and especially the misdiagnosis of PTSD in survivors of rape, especially child rape. The cover-up of incest by theories of "Oedipal" and "Electra" complexes, misdiagnosis of venereal disease in children, and pathologizing of victims.

 Slavery And Rape:  This is an historical display about the rape of enslaved Black women in America.  The display includes first person narratives including Linda Brent’s story of hiding in a garret for seven years to avoid rape by her master.  Rape of enslaved women was a special horror in a system where the rapist had rights of legal ownership of the victim’s children.

War And Rape:  This display will focus on recent and current wars. This display will document the rape of women in Vietnam, the mass rape/suicides of women in Bangladesh, the Japanese "comfort women,” and the rapes of women in Bosnia. Rape as a method of torture. "Ethnic cleansing." Rape in the military and the denial of benefits to survivors of Military Sexual Trauma.

Trafficking and Prostitution: Historical and current. Paid rape.

Pornography: Statistics about the industry. The harm of pornography. The teaching of rape and the propagation of rape culture.
 
The Art of Survivors:  This display would include samples of the work of artists like novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and poet Chrystos.
 
The Culture of Control:  This is a display of articles used for the cultural control of women.  It would include traditional foot-bindings from China, the chador worn by Islamic women, chastity belts from the Middle Ages, high-heeled shoes, boned corsets, and various styles of dress (hoop skirt, hobble, mini-skirt, etc.) that reflect a cultural control of women. This display would also include the implements used to excise the clitorises and infibulate the vaginas of women in Africa.

Resources:
 
Rape Survivors' Library And Resource Center:  This would be a reference library with a reading room for women who want to read about some aspect of sexual aggression towards women.  The librarian could refer visitors to other legal and therapeutic agencies, both in the community and internationally.
 
Counseling Room:  The Women's Rape Memorial would have a trained therapist on staff who could respond to requests for help from visitors who are experiencing emotional distress during their visit to the Memorial.  This therapist would be able to provide references for legal advice or therapy.
 
The Rape Narrative Archive:  Women who visit the Memorial may have the opportunity of writing or telling their story on tape in privacy and leaving it in the archives of the Memorial as a testimony to their own personal courage as a survivor.  They may or may not choose to make the narrative anonymous or to have their story available to other visitors to the Memorial.  Testimonies will be preserved and valued without judgement.  The survivor's story, in her own words, is accepted at the Women's Rape Memorial.

The Ritual Fire: There will be a fire that burns perpetually where rape survivors can bring clothing or other artifacts associated with the violation and throw them into the fire.
 
The Rape Survivor's Memorial Garden:   This will be a quiet garden area where survivors and their friends and family can come and pay tribute to the courage of the women and children who have been raped.  The garden provides a place for leaving poems, photographs, and flowers.

Something significant happened today. 
 
Today a senator resigned because six women who claimed he had harassed them were believed, and thirty-two senators of his own party—the Democratic party—called on him to resign. Thirteen of these were female and nineteen male.
 
Many folks felt that his offenses were mild considering that the current President has bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and has been accused of all kinds of groping, voyeurism, crude remarks, and assaults. This same week there is a Republican candidate running for the Senate who has been credibly accused by multiple women of child sexual abuse.

In this country, women had to wait for suffrage until all men could have the vote. In England, the Suffrage Movement was completely derailed when its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst ordered her followers to redirect their zeal in support of recruitment for the frontlines of World War I. Suffrage could wait. It was not the time.
 
Today, between 9 and 33%  of women in the US military report experiencing an attempted or completed rape during military service. Let me emphasize the word “report.” Consider that this year, 58% of victims who reported experienced reprisals or retaliation. Congress has been holding hearings on this for decades, but nothing changes. Why?  Because the military is focused on the “real” enemy, the “real” violence. These women reporting are disrupting chains of command, generating divisions and distractions, and undermining morale in a time of war. Now is never the time or place to accuse a fellow soldier or commanding officer of sexual violence.

I remember watching Ted Kennedy at the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill was being called on to describe in detail Thomas’ harassment of her. Ted Kennedy who had, according to him, been driving a campaign worker to the ferry to get home after a party… only the worker had left her keys and her purse at the party and Kennedy was not driving on the road to the ferry. In any event, he drove off an unlit bridge into a pond.

He got out of the car, but she did not. He waited ten hours to report the incident to authorities. In the meantime, she was struggling to survive, contorting her body to catch the last pockets of oxygen… no doubt waiting for Kennedy to get help and rescue her. Some estimates say she survived more than ten minutes.  What she did not understand was that now was not her turn. The priority was protecting the senator from scandal.
 
And Anita Hill was also told that now was not her turn. There was an African American man up for the Supreme Court. That was the priority, not his descriptions of Long John Dong pornography. 
 
But Anita Hill had not waited her turn, and after the hearing that confirmed her harasser (who referred to the hearing--including her participation--as a “high tech lynching”), there was a very serious effort to have her academic career destroyed. Fortunately, a “We Believe Anita” grassroots campaign was birthed to counter the attacks.

Sexual harassment is, like rape, largely an issue of male aggression against women. Congress is predominantly male.  Not surprisingly, they have made their own rules about the handling of sexual complaints against members and staff, passing laws that exempt them from practices that would apply to other employers. Let’s look more closely at this.

Since 1995 a law has been in place allowing accusers to file lawsuits only if they first agree to go through months of counseling and mediation. Counseling?  For “False Memory Syndrome?”  Or perhaps projection of unresolved daddy issues?  Mediation? As in a case where two parties cannot reach agreement?  What would that look like?  She said he did it; he says he didn’t. In mediation they agree that he may have done it, but has amnesia, or she agrees she experienced it, but it might have been a lucid dream?  Fortunately for We the People, a special congressional office is charged with trying to resolve these cases out of court.
 
And, yes, it appears that even with all this counseling and mediation, settlements do occur… but the members of Congress do not pay them from their own office funds. Unbelievably, confidential payments come out of a special U.S. Treasury fund.
 
Actually, this is not unbelievable at all. Again, these are important men, elected by their constituents, to make the laws that run this country. Aides and interns need to understand that now is not the time.

But I have a personal ax to grind. An arsenal actually. I was sexually abused as a child by a man who was an attorney and then a judge, a man who served on boards, taught in a law school. I was sexually abused by a man who, after his death, had a chair named in his honor at his law school, whose funeral service was packed with hundreds of colleagues, and who was honored with a joint resolution passed by his state legislature, mourning his death. When I named him as a perpetrator, I was not believed and I was discredited and disinherited. It was not the time. He was one of the good guys.
 
When I taught at an elite college, one of my students reported to me that she had been raped by a student on campus. Turns out this was not the first, or even the second report for him. But he was still there. He was an athlete. It was his third time, but, still... it was not the time. Obviously he was a credit to the college. Better she should leave.

My housemate was raped a knifepoint by a man who had stopped his car and begged her for directions. His wife and children sat by him in the courtroom, smiling. He was a middle-class man. My housemate was a hippie student. Not the time. He was a productive member of society, a family man. The issue was her boyfriends.

I was harassed by the head of the theatre department at my university. The year was 1970. Sexual harassment laws were six years away from being on the books. I dropped out for ten years. I never even attempted to report it. I absolutely knew that it was not the time.
 
As a teaching assistant, I had a student react poorly to feminist perspectves of Shakespeare. He sent me a pornographic/slasher paper on “Desdemona, the Cunning Whore of Venice.”  I was terrified. I took it to the professor for the course. He met with the man and then removed all the male students from my class. These young men were protecting their right to an education that reflected their perspective. This was not the time for me to make them sounding boards for my pet theories.
 
Well… I could go on. I have worked  almost exclusively with women for more than thirty years, because I was running out of oxygen waiting for my time.

But here’s the thing:

Today, there was nothing more important that the women who were claiming to have been harassed. And thirty-three senators made that clear.
 
This is huge. I know, I know… there are millions across the country who are wringing their hands that this is not the time to lose a senator with his liberal record. There are millions who are trashing these women and their selfish priorities for not realizing that this was not the time. 
 
I know that. But still…
 
Today, a group of powerful women said, “Nothing is more important and now is the time.” And, miracle of miracles, the harasser stepped down.
 
Nothing will ever change for women as long as we keep believing that our pain is not as important as protecting the so-called good guys.
 

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.

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!