What It Was Like When We Were Young & Took Ourselves Way Too Seriously

As a quick aside, I'll mention that I am at the discouraged stage of learning to crochet amigurumi. A month ago, when I started, I was just thrilled to be able to do it at all, and if things came out a little lopsided, well, I didn't mind. Now I am ambitious. I really wanted the Tiny Tornado's hamster to come out well, and it...didn't. (Not that she minds.) I'm disappointed. This is the part where it's hard to stick with it until my skills catch up with my higher ambition.

And now, our feature attraction:

Years ago, when I was a Serious Writer hanging out with many other Serious Writers, I participated in many conversations about what responsibility, if any, a writer had to the people she wrote about in memoir or poetry. In my MFA program, at OutWrite (the Gay & Lesbian Writers' Conference I attended for many years), in casual coffee-shop conversations, we talked about it. And talked about it.

Being queer and feminist, we saw the writing we did about our own lives as important. We were always "breaking silence." People were writing about child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, harassment. About childhood crushes, same-sex experimentation, the hidden homosexuals in our family tree. One year during my MFA program, I swear half the class showed up with stories about their grandmothers' abortions.

All of this felt very meaningful. We saw ourselves as the inheritors of the second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s, of the wild energy that drove the crowd at Stonewall. We thought it was an act of courage to write honestly about women's lives, about lesbians' lives, about children's lives. We thought it mattered to tell these stories. We thought it mattered to us, as we made sense of our lives and grew into our work. We thought it mattered to the broader culture, which had simply chosen to ignore a great deal for a long time and needed a reckoning. We thought it mattered to other women, to other lesbians, to girls and boys who didn't have words for their experiences, and who didn't know they weren't alone. In many ways, we were late to the party: second-wave feminism's mad ferment was already starting to die down, and Stonewall's 20th anniversary had come and gone. But we felt like we were part of it.

On the other hand, we didn't see much reason to be loyal to the people we might write about: mom, dad, the great-uncle with the roving hands, the drunken grandpa, the big brother or cousin who had much to say on the subject of dykes and faggots. My first lover's father sent out word on the family grapevine that he knew we were lesbians and he wasn't upset about it and nothing bad would happen, he just wanted her to be honest with him. So she was, and he suddenly realized he could no longer afford to pay her college tuition or help with living expenses. My own parents responded to my coming-out letter by not saying a word about it (the letter, or the topic) for a good fifteen years. I had one friend who'd been institutionalized as a teen for being bisexual. My David, an only child, lost both his parents in the same year, and was attacked by his uncle for bringing his same-sex partner--who had lived with his parents and cared for them in their illnesses--to his own mother's funeral.

In the realm of bad things that happen to people who are queer, most of our complaints were small. But we were connected, through our broader community, to people much worse things had happened to, were still happening to. We were just old enough to have been a part of the AIDS crisis; we'd seen The Normal Heart in Greenwich Village, we'd volunteered with Gay Men's Health Crisis, we'd viewed The Quilt at the March on Washington in 1987, and stood silent and tearful in front of the panels of friends and acquaintances and loved ones. Sometimes they were panels we'd sewn. We felt--even us lesbians--like we were part of a community that was under attack in a time of grief.

My point is, that when anyone asked whether what we were writing and publishing and reading out loud might hurt someone, we tended to say, "Who cares?" If we were accused of abandoning all family loyalty, well, for the most part they abandoned us first.

When I started writing this, I knew where I wanted to go. But I can't get there from here. I can't seem to get anyplace else, either. I've been banging my head against it for the better part of the afternoon, while the laundry molders and the children run amok. I give up. I didn't want to write a whiny rant; I wanted to start with this thing I'd been thinking about Art v. Relationships and take it someplace more nuanced and thoughtful. But the Muse laughs!

So, I'll just leave this here. Maybe something more will come of it sometime. Or maybe not. Sometimes all you get is a fragment.

When You Are Trying to Write Every Day, They Can't All Be Gems

From 1990 to 1993, I worked for Lesbian Connection--I was an Ambitious Amazon, which means something in certain circles.

For tens of thousands of women, LC was a place to have conversations, to discuss issues, to learn about events and books and musicians. Pre-internet, it was a lifeline for women in rural communities, and for those just thinking about coming out. We used to get subscription requests from women who also had men's names on their checks, and we'd make a note of that with their info. Sometimes, six months or a year later, we'd get a change of address and a donation from a new checking account, with just her name on it. Or her name and the name of another woman. Once we got a letter asking us to discontinue a subscription from one of these women; she was the mother of a lesbian who had subscribed for awhile as a way to understand her daughter's life and community better. She wrote us a nice thank-you note and sent another check.

We got most of our new subscribers by signing women up at music festivals. We'd get a table in the crafts area and sit there saying, "Hi, do you get Lesbian Connection?" to every woman who walked by. Since subscriptions were free, we signed up lots of women. Some of them would drop off the list a year later, but many of them would become donors. I think LC might be the most successful business ever to operate on a "give it away free" model. No woman was obligated to pay anything to have a subscription, ever, but the magazine was so valuable to subscribers that many women did donate, and generously. Because it was free, we reached a lot of young women, poor women, women in temporary financial trouble as they came out. Many of these women became donors as the years passed.

When I worked at LC, we not only made a halfway decent wage (which was the same for everyone), but we had pretty good health insurance and a very modest retirement plan.

Although our subscription database was computerized by the time I began to work at LC, we maintained the archaic index-card system the original Amazons had started with. I wonder when, and if, they ever stopped doing that? I used to see it as a tremendous waste of time, creating and updating all those cards by hand every time someone subscribed or unsubscribed or moved. At the same time, though, I imagined those hundreds of thousands of index cards as a rich data source for some future scholar trying to understand the lesbian community of the time.

Each woman's index card had her name on it, of course, and a six-digit code made out of her name and address. This is where we also wrote notes like, "man's name on check." When a woman sent us a change of address, we made her a new card, and on the new card we also included her past zip codes. So it might say:

Su Penn
326 Livingston Ave.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

old: 48103, 48107, 48430

And then, on her old card, we'd write on the edge: "Moved to 08901, 5/15/87."

The old card would go into the old card room, and the new card would stay in the active file once its info had been entered into the database.

With a little time and effort, you could, if you wanted to, trace a woman's movements and relationships. Two women might move in together, and their cards would merge. Two years later, their cards unmerge again, and we could tell you not only that one of them moved in with someone new, but which one got to keep the house. We could tell you that so-and-so's relationships usually lasted about three years. We could tell you every address a woman had lived at for the last 15 years.

Of course, by "a little time and effort" I mean "an extraordinary amount of both."

If you could somehow aggregate all the info on all those cards, you could have a remarkable picture of lesbian mobility and the pattern of lesbian relationships during the time the Amazons maintained the index card system (perhaps right up to today! I left LC almost 20 years ago, but the Amazons were a very slow-to-change kind of people). I still imagine some archivist someday sitting down to this incredibly daunting task and making an extraordinarily rich study out of it.

That was a digression, and not what I planned to write about. But I'm too far in to write about what I meant to. If this was an essay I was grading, I'd be writing, "Intro too long, get to the point!" in the margin.

*thinks a bit, hums a little tune, taps fingers on desk*

OK.I find I can't stick with the "when I worked at LC" theme because I have nothing else to say about it just now. And I can't move on to the other thing because it really needs its own post. So, hmmm.

Well, many of you have heard me say this before, but working at LC led directly to me working at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I had only been to festival once as a "camper" when I started the job, and for the next four summers I went to Michigan--and to the National Women's Music Festival, and to Rhythmfest (the one where Melissa Etheridge always made a "surprise" appearance on the night stage, where she would spend the evening being coy about whether she was a lesbian or not--ah, the old days!), and to the Ohio Lesbian Festival, and the National Lesbian Conference...

You would probably not be surprised that many of the big performers at these festivals were the same in any given year. Jamie Anderson hits what passes for big in the world of women's music, or The Washington Sisters come out with a new album, and they get booked everywhere. You might be more surprised to learn that many of the women in the crafts area, and even a surprising number of the women who are giving workshops for free, are also making the circuit.

I finished up my time at LC by working Michigan in 1993. By this time, I had seen every singer/songwriter many many times; I'd browsed the crafts area until I knew every labrys earring and every tiny crocheted crystal pouch and every double-womoom-symbol coffee mug; I'd drummed, learned to read Tarot cards, and engaged in serious discussions about whether straight women really existed. I could not imagine keeping myself occupied at Michigan as a camper.

Also, I was spoiled. When you're a craftswoman, you come in the day before the festival starts, and you get to drive your car onto the land to unload. I found the prospect of having to unload in the parking area, take one of the festival shuttles in, and then carry all my stuff into the woods enervating.

So I applied to work. And I did, for the next 5 or 6 years. It feels like more, because I loved working at festival and it was a very important part of my life, but my first year must have been 94, and my last year on crew was 2000, about a month before I got pregnant with the Lego Savant.

I didn't know I wouldn't be back. The worker area was full of dirty half-naked little kids, and I expected mine to be among them. But when I was ready to go back, in 2002, the festival had enacted some austerity measures. When I was working, moms of young children worked reduced shifts, and the worker camp had its own childcare area. This was eliminated as the festival got smaller. Moms were expected to work a full shift, and child care was integrated with the general childcare for campers. I could not imagine working a 9-10 hour shift while being responsible for a toddler in my off hours, nor did I think the Lego Savant would do well away from me for so long. (Also, he didn't like to get dirty.)

So I didn't go back.

I did take the kids a few years ago. The boys loved Brother Sun, the boys' camp, and the Tiny Tornado and I wandered around the land. I found that I am still not all that interested in the music, the crafts, or the workshop. I still love the festival. I just don't want to be a camper.

For some reason, I was thinking about this yesterday and realized that there is no good reason the Tiny Tornado and I can't go next year. I wouldn't be able to work my favorite crew, Security, because it does 24-hour shifts. But there are lots of other options. And the Tiny Tornado will not mind being away from me in childcare, and she will not mind being dirty, and she will love sleeping with me in a tent. I only wish I had thought of it for this year.