HUNGRY

(Maggie Jochild at Bean Hollow Beach near Pescadero, California, i980)

HUNGRY

When Liza found out I had lost 85 pounds over the last two years without knowing it, certainly without trying to, she instantly said "No wonder you write about food all the time.' Indeed.


I have been starving in many ways. Fat people are as often malnourished as thin folks in our culture, especially if they are lower income and urban. Post surgery, my electrolytes were persistently abnormal, and they began giving me daily potassium and magnesium sulfate. The surgeon put me on a 2200 calorie diabetic diet -- I don't have diabetes but good insulin control promotes wound healing. I listened to my own cravings and for the first few days of eating solid food I stuck to veggies, cranberry and orange juice, and potatoes plus bananas with every meal. I couldn't get whole grains or avocados, the other items I was jonesing for. The kitchen dutifully limited my carbs but I never reaxhed my calorie limit.

After a week, when I began hard-assed physical therapy, my craving switched to protein and milk, and I ordered accordingly: I was starting to replace muscle. I asked for a comsultation with the hospital dietitian. When she arrived, I told her I wanted to know how to best address the specific malnutrition I had been living with for more than a year, assuming I could afford to buy fresh produce and seriously complete grains as I prefer in my diet. I also asked for a print-out of what I'd ordered through the meal service the past week with nutritional breakdowns I could study.

She had no idea what to do with me. She agreed that living as I had been on a poor person's diet, I should have gained rather than lost weight (my saving habit, I bet, is my inisitence on brown rixe/whole grains). She kept trying to turn our discussion toward calories instead of nutrition. Turns out the kitchen did not keep or report patients' daily meam records, and in the end, she urged me to go on an 1800 calorie a day diet, even after I flatly reminded her that 95% of all weight-loss diets fail and I had only become fat after I began dieting as a young adult.

I told her I loved my body, and after how it had just pulled through for me, ill-conceived calorie counting was not going to be how I rewarded myself for living. She left after giving me a print-out of a diet that relied heavily on white flour and caffeine as "snacks".

Fortunately, just as she was leaving, the Good Doctor came in. He recognized her and asked me how the visit had come about. I explained I'd requested it and gave him a thumbnail of what she'd said. A very nondemonstrative young man, he leaned over me and touched my arm to say "For countless reasons I'd ile to see you thin but PLEASE don't consider dieting, not for months until you are healed." Yet another reason why we call him The Good Doctor.

I stopped dieting during the same general stage of my life when I stopped hurting others via sexual messes. My weight plateaued for a decade, until my orthopedic disabilities drastically altered my mobility and I began living in pain. I gained to another plateau -- partly because in the advice of every expert I consulted, I returned dairy products to my diet. (Kinda need that calcium and minerals when bones are going whackamole.) I'd been the same size for a decade until this recent change.

The second oncologist who saw me this hospitalization, the one called in when pathology of my removed appendix revealed an occult carcinoid tumor, was wise enough to do an exam and take a thorough history of me despite the tumot's clean margins and staging indicating that carcinoma was neither a metastasis nor had it metastasized itself. She understood my level of weight loss, unintentional though probably the result of bowel strangulation and malnutrition, still warranted investigation to consider the idea of cancer elsewhere. In the end, she reassured me that as far as she could see, I had totally sidestepped death. Her face was so delighted: I bet she doesn't get to say that very often.

In contrast, I still remember the sneer on the face of the white gay male physician I saw at the free clinic in San Francisco in 1981 after having been flattened by fever and severe shortness of breath for a week. I was 25, unemployed, and broke, but my roommate Renee finally got me dressed and walked me two blocks to the nearest clinic in the Mission, paying the $12 office visit demand herself rather than let me waste precious oxygen answering their income questions. She also came into the exam room with me, thank g*d, because before even taking my temperature or listening to my chest, that doctor said "So, how long have you been overweight?"

I gaped at him, wheezing audibly. Renee said "She's not here for her weight, she's here because she's burning up with fever."

He turned on her. "Clearly her main problem is obesity, that's what we always see in here." At that point I was at most 25 pounds above the "ideal average" for my height, thick with muscle from walking everywhere.

Renee was slight but a working class Jew who was well-versed in fat liberation. In fact, she was who introduced me to the theory, and I'll love her forever for that fact alone. We shared our household food and she regularly ate circles around me. She stood up and raised her voice to demand that I be examined and treated for what was wrong with me, not given a lecture about obesity. An x-ray revealed advanced pneumonia, and a sputum culture eventually diagnosed me with Valley Fever. Antibiotics cured me and I avoided doctors for a long time after that, until I got insurance and searched until I found physicians I trusted.

Renee and I were in the habit that year of putting Alix Dobkin's latest album XX Alix on the turntable every evening when we got home from our respective jobs or meetings. One of my favorites was the haunting "Separation '78", which begins
Liza, you look more like your mother every day
Counting your calories, my how your body's changed

(Yes it's the same Liza as in my opening paragraph. We were not yet friends, although it's hard to see how we missed connecting back then it seems to have been an inevitability.)

Alix and Liza were lovers who became founding figures in lesbian-feminism, and because Alix's songwriting was frequently autobiographical, Liza's life was very public even when it wasn't through her own art and publshing. Liza was zaftig, buzzed her hair, defied fashion constraints -- including those dictated by dykes -- and had been a role model to me for years by 1981. I understood damned well that if Liza was paying attention to how she ate, it was in no way an attempt to be the kind of slender sex object dictated by heterosexual norms.

I also knew -- all of us who followed Alix's music knew -- that a couple of years earlier, Liza's beloved parents had been killed together in a freak accident. My own mother was still alive, but I felt keenly the poignancy of Alix telling Liza she looked like her mother. Our generation was mother obsessed, positively and negatively. Even more evocative was the fact that "Separation '78" is a love song written about their break-up, again very public. I wept the frst time I heard Alix sing the chorus, with melancholy and hope interlaced:

Going our separate ways
We're on our own
Trusting that only love will come between us

Thus, you can perhaps imagine my shock when I attended a live concert by Alix that year and from the all-lesbian audience came a chorus of boos when she sang her opening lines above about Liza. Alix was visibly startled but far too professional to drop a note, even when boos broke out again at the next verse

Everyone's noticed your new grey hair
Clearly, my darling, I put some there
And my head is carrying its own share
We're an aging pair

After the concert, I talked with one of the women who had booed (not a friend of mine) who said any reference to weight loss was fat oppressive and the grey hair lines were age oppressive. I argued vehemently that noticing changing bodies is not inherently oppressive, and in particular we had every reason to trust the process of Alix and Liza as individuals. Or, to quote a remark Maria Limon made last week when she visited me in the hospital, "Can we just put down the pitchforks?"

I don't know anybody who thinks completely rationally about eating. Or money. Or sex. Do you?

I'm in mid-stream here. I'm hungry for protein as I write this but probably won't go make the tuna sandwich I really want because my pain pills didn't come and that trip to the kitchen might as well be a hike up Bernal Hill used to be. I'll nurse my cranberry juice and wai till morning. At least Ihave this link to you all, typed in my bed on a netbook Liza bought for me and arranged for Maria to bring me in my isolation. Some empty spaces do get filled with just what we need, sometimes people listen and stick up for you and tumors get found in time and love lasts. Let's keep talking. As they say in the crip community, "Not dead yet."

> (Publicity photo for Dyke: A Quarterly, circa 1976; editors were Liza Cowan, left rear, and Penny House, front second from right; also in right front is Alix Dobkin; photo courtesy of Liza Cowan)

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STRONG PUBLIC OPTION: OUR RIGHT AND PREFERENCE

(Pouring Concrete V, woodcut 2000 by Linda Lee Boyd)

Everybody has to have health care. If you don't get it when you need it, you get sick or sicker. Your productivity drops, and eventually you either (a) go to a emergency room where indigent care is covered but the expenses are exponentially higher, for a condition which might have cost a few dollars if it was treated way back when; (b) you wind up on disability (if you're lucky); or (c) you die.

How can any of these options be called in the common good? More to the point, how can any of these options be called "profitable"?


A well-constructed national study, Medical Bankruptcy in the United States 2007 was recently published in the American Journal of Medicine. It begins "As recently as 1981, only 8% of families filing for bankruptcy did so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem. By contrast, our 2001 study in 5 states found that illness or medical bills contributed to about half of bankruptcies."

The study abstract states (emphasis added by me):

Since then [2001], health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened. RESULTS: Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.

Forget about the stock market, or even foreclosures: The economic threat to working Americans is lack of affordable health care. We do NOT have the "best health care in the world", not unless you are rich or a member of Congress whose government-funded medical plan is phenomenal.

We out here know this, of course. I'm not telling you anything you don't already lie awake nights worrying about. But the debate that is going on is, as usual, full of distortions and "compromises" that are no such thing.

Bottom line: Strong public option or else. This means if a law is passed insisting you have health care insurance (as exists already for car insurance), one of your options is to buy it at an affordable rate from a government-run program, or have it provided free a la Medicare if your income qualifies. You will not be denied coverage for any reason, such as pre-existing conditions, and your insurance will be accepted at any public facility in the nation. It will be completely portable, not linked to a job or living in a particular state.

What Republicans want is to force us to buy insurance from private companies -- the same companies who are already making millions in profits by denying us coverage, cancelling coverage if we get ill, or delaying payment so long we die before we get the care we need. The crisis in health care is currently caused by private insurance plans linked to PROFIT.

Republicans, and Democrats who work as lobbyists for the insurance industry or have major contributions from said industry (cough cough Daschle), claim that insisting on a public option will mean too many people will choose that instead of private insurance. Some of their mouthpieces are pushing a "co-op" option, knowing full well that states with small populations will never have enough clout to create co-ops that survive against private insurance. Other mouthpieces complain about the competition that will force private companies to lower rates and provide better coverage. In other words, they want corporate welfare once again.

They also claim it means a government worker will decide what kind of treatment you get. Well, currently those decisions are being made by cubicle drones for private insurance companies who receive bonuses for denying you care. Your disability and death have no impact on their bottom line. But a "government worker" will have no such incentive to keep you away from necessary treatment, and in the big picture, having more citizens alive and productive is better for the government's bottom line. You tell me which one looks more attractive.

And to help you, check out this video of the Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing on "Terminations of Individual Health Policies by Insurance Companies." Of particular interest is the practice of recission, where insurance companies are cancelling coverage for tens of thousands of patients who developed cancer or other serious conditions, a cancellation which makes these patients liable for medical expenses retroactively. None of the three insurance companies who testified -- Assurant, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint -- would commit to stopping the practice of arbitrary recission unless there was intentional fraud in the patient's application. [Starting at 4:48 in the video.] They all indicated they will go on putting profit ahead of patient well-being. Until we demand the government stops them, of course, or we find an alternative to their own cancerous death-grip on our medical system.




The time to act on this is now, before we get sold out again by so-called moderates who are actually far to the right in many human rights aspects. All it would take is for President Obama to say he will not sign a bill that doesn't include a public option. Speaker Pelosi responded this week to a question from Huffington Post about whether she she would allow a reform package without a public option out of the House: "It's not a question of allow. It wouldn't have the votes."

HuffPo states a bill without the public option "would lack the votes because the GOP generally opposes Democratic reform proposals, and the 77 member Congressional Progressive Caucus -- rarely heard from on the Hill -- has been particularly vocal in its commitment to oppose any reform that doesn't include a public option. The public plan's popularity extends beyond progressives and is broadly popular with the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and even two-fifths of Blue Dogs, the conservative Democratic coalition."

Dr. Howard Dean and Democracy For America have created an explanatory video and petition for a strong public option in health care reform, available at Stand With Dr. Dean. On the same page is a list of other actions you can take with DFA.

Senators Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, and Chuck Schumer have created an online advocacy effort to build support for real health care reform that includes a public option. You can read about it and sign their petition at Citizens For A Public Option.

Organizing For America has a Health Care Action Center page where you can enter your address and zip to find your Representative and Senators' phone numbers, along with some calling tips.

We only need 50 votes to get this done, or a President who won't sign a bail-out to the insurance industry. (If he caves on this, you can kiss off the rest of his term.) 76% of the American people want the public option, which is ALREADY all the bipartisan support necessary. Write, call, do your bit. And be well.

ADDENDUM: This issue, what constitutes a human right that should not be determined by profit margins, reminded me of a song by the great lesbian-feminist singer/songwriter and Red Diaper baby Alix Dobkin, written in the late 1970's. I've just received the correct lines from her and share them with you now:

How the patriarchy scars us
From the moment we are born
Heavy hands are interfering
From our mothers we are torn
Everyone's a victim at the hands of men
They've stolen childbirth, they profit on our lives
Through to our earthly end
It's so outrageous to think about it
I have to think about it
I have to think again...

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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MYRA'S FAVORITE SONGS

(Women's Music pioneers: Alix Dobkin's Living with Lesbians, cover photo by Ginger Legato; Meg Christian and Cris Williamson, photo by JEB (Joan E. Biren); and Holly Near's Simply Love, cover photo by Mike Rogers)

Myra plays music often in her study. I've taken the liberty of raiding the songs she plays more frequently and copying them into a Box.net file so you, too, can listen to what Ginny hears from around the wall. Click on this Myra's Faves link and choose your song to play.

The selections include (click on images to enlarge, though not all will enlarge much):

"Sweet Lullaby" by Deep Forest -- sung by an old Solomon Islands woman, the lyrics are part of an essential myth from their culture about the nature of death, sung by an older sister to her younger brother

"Family of Woman" by Linda Shear, originally on her Lesbian Portrait album, but this version from High Risk, a benefit album of performance by Chicago women for the Lesbian Resource Cancer Center

"The Old Woman Song" written and performed by Michal Brody (this was released in the 1970's by Linda Shear on her Lesbian Portrait album, but this version was sung by Michal for High Risk, a benefit album of performance by Chicago women for the Lesbian Resource Cancer Center)

"Summertime" by Janis Joplin (written by George Gershwin)

"Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida" by Holly Near, with Adrienne Torf on piano and Enrique Cruz on zambona

"This Is To Mother You" by Emmy Lou Harris and Linda Ronstadt from the Western Wall/Tucson Sessions album (written by Sinead Oconnor)

"Western Wall" by Emmy Lou Harris and Linda Ronstadt from the Western Wall/Tucson Sessions album








"Having Been Touched/Emma" performed by Holly Near; "Having Been Touched" was originally written and performed by Margie Adam, a women's music pioneer, and "Emma" was made famous by Therese Edell and Betsy Lippitt, but I don't have those versions available and this cover is excellent, with Adrienne Torf on piano and Nina Gerber on guitar

"Here Comes The Sun" by Nina Simone

"Get Right With God" by Lucinda Williams


"Show Some Emotion" by Joan Armatrading

"I'm Lucky" by Joan Armatrading




"The Woman In Your Life is You" -- this was written by Alix Dobkin and used by Liza Cowan as a theme song on her WBAI radio show, but I don't have that version in MP3 format, so I'm using the Holly Near cover of it, with Nina Gerber on guitar

"Testimony" sung by Holly Near, although it was Ferron who made it famous, a women's music classic

"Down to the River" by Allison Krauss (this brings up Myra's childhood religious memories in a good way; Ginny just rolls her eyes when this comes on)

"Waterfall" written and originally performed by Cris Williamson on the biggest-selling women's music album of all time, The Changer and the Changed -- I don't have an MP3 of that, so I'm using the cover performed by Holly Near live at the 1985 Michigan Women's music Festival, with Rhiannon adding her vocals, Adrienne Torf on piano and Carrie Barton on bass

"Russian Song/Ode to Joy" by Pete Seeger (Myra is attached to the "Ode to Joy" version done by Pete)

"How Can I Keep From Singing" by Pete Seeger (this is often sung at Quaker Meeting)

"Mountain Song/Kentucky Woman" by Holly Near -- the "mountain song" lyrics were a staple not just in women's music but as rhetoric in the movement itself; Meg Christian on guitars, Barbara Cobb on bass

"Old Blue" performed here by Cisco Johnson, but Myra prefers to sing this very slowly and mournfully as that's how she heard it growing up

"On Children" by Sweet Honey in the Rock

"Little Potato" performed by Metamora, written by Malcolm Dalglish (Myra sung this to both her children when they were babies)

"A Woman's Love" by Alix Dobkin (originally on Lavender Jane Loves Women -- written about and for our own Liza Cowan)

"Gulf Coast Highway" written by Nanci Griffith, performed by her and Willie Nelson (this song reminds Myra so much of her parents' marriage, it always makes her cry)

"Oregon Mountains" by Woody Simmons (huge women's music hit in the 1970s when dykes were forming land collectives all over Oregon)

"Love Is All Around" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song)

"The Road I Took To You" written and sung by Barbara Keith, but it was the Meg Christian version on one of the first women's music albums ever which Myra and Ginny sang to one another in the Arboretum which helped launch and define their relationship

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LUCK AND SELF-LOVE: SAME COIN

("At the Nile" by Amanda Evassy Tumusiime)

On the wall beside my bed are a number of photographs, hung beads, and a few pieces of paper containing lines or poems important to me. I'm sharing a couple of those today.

In the early 1990s, I went back to the Bay Area to visit friends for a week. I drove up to Napa to see my pal Gail, and we went to eat at a little cafe along the main two-lane blacktop through wine country. In the foyer of this cafe, along with many community notices and flyers, was a stack of pink handouts, each one-quarter of regular sheet of paper, on which someone had reproduced the lyrics to one of the chief lesbian anthems of the 1970's. There was nothing on the reverse, no indication of where these had come from, nothing to advertise: It was simply a gift to any who came by.

This song was almost indescribably important to my development as a human being, as a woman, as a lesbian, and (I believe) to much of my sisterhood's generation. Although I know the lyrics by heart, I picked up one of the little pink slips -- how could I not? -- and slid it into my datebook. When I got home, I tacked it up beside my bed as a daily reminder, and it's been there until now. I'll be returned it to its outline on the plaster, having typed it for you below.

Just above it has rested a postcard sent to me by an ex, when we were still in the agony of break-up, containing a poem whose author was not identified. It was a sort of well-wish, and it's been there for 17 years. Now that she and I no longer have anything to say to one another (not well wishes or ill wishes, only silence), it's time for the postcard to come down. But the poem is spectacular, and I'm sharing it with you -- tacking it up here for the world, as it were.

(Alix Dobkin, photo by Carol Newhouse)

THE WOMAN IN YOUR LIFE IS YOU

The woman in your life will do what she must do
To comfort you and calm you down and let you rest now
The woman in your life, she can rest so easily
She knows everything you do because the woman in your life is you

The woman in your life knows simply what is true
She knows the simple way to touch, to make you whole now
The woman in your life, she can touch so easily
She knows everything you do because the woman in your life is you

And who knows more about your story, about your struggle in the world
And who cares more to bless your weary shoulders

Than the woman in your life, she's trying to come through
A woman's voice with messages of woman's feelings
The woman in your life, she can feel so easily
She knows everything you do because the woman in your life is you

And who is sure to give you courage and who will surely make you strong
And who will bear all the joy that's coming to you

If not the woman in your life, she's someone to pursue
She's patient and she's waiting and she'll take you home now
The woman in your life, she can wait so easily
She knows everything you do because the woman in your life is you
The woman in your life, the woman in your life
The woman in your life is you


by Alix Dobkin on Lavender Jane Loves Women


(Louise Glück, by Sigrid Estrada)

THE UNDERTAKING

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.


(by Louise Glück, from The House on Marshland)

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THE ANNOTATED GINNY BATES: CHAPTER ONE

(Value Pack by Robert J. Bolesta)

My novel-in-progress, Ginny Bates, is crammed to the gills with references to lesbian-feminism and other subcultures that will not be noticed or make sense to a reader who "wasn't there, then". We existed in a world within your world, which you knew about only dimly, if at all, but which was extraordinarily rich and interconnected to us (as well as to Myra, Ginny and friends). Below I offer explanations of all such possible asides that occur in Chapter One, listed more or less in the order they appear in the text. I'll offer more of these for other chapters in future posts.



Mom's Apple Pie was the newsletter put out by the Lesbian Mother's National Defense Fund, a Seattle-based organization founded in the early 1970s as a resource for mothers whose children were being legally removed from their care based solely on the fact that they were lesbians. There is now an excellent documentary on this herstory available from Frameline.


Myra's memory about hearing the child of lesbians "Sierra" talking about her notion that lesbianism had to do with what you ate is based on actually hearing a girl raised in the Portland lesbian community make this speech at a women's gathering there in around 1981/82. The child is now playwright Stormy Gale.


Breatharianism is a "concept, in which believers claim food and possibly water are not necessary, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana (the vital life force in Hinduism), or according to some, by the energy in sunlight." During the mid to late 1970s, when lesbian communities nationwide were working on inducing parthogenesis by various means including fruitarian diets, breatharianism was seriously attempted here and there -- I documented it in the Austin dyke community.

(Lesbians Against Police Violence in Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade, San Francisco, 1979)

"Stop the Cops" is a fictional Seattle version of the San Francisco based Lesbians Against Police Violence, of which I was a member and have written about in other posts, Dianne Feinstein, Opportunist and Tania: 33 Years Later.


RC stands for Reevaluation Counseling, a peer counseling mixed with liberation theory movement which began in Seattle but eventually spread world-wide in limited venues. RC attracted large numbers of lesbian practitioners until their anti-gay stance, claiming everybody would be heterosexual if their "distress" was sufficiently "discharged", in the mid 1980s sent gays and lesbians who were solid in their identity/orientation looking elsewhere for community and therapy.

(Alix Dobkin from Paid My Dues, Winter 1978 issue, photo by Toni Armstrong Jr.)

"For they won't defend / a woman who's indifferent to men" is a line from the song View from Gay Head, written and sung by Alix Dobkin on her first album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, in 1973. Lavender Jane Loves Women was the first woman-produced, women's music album in herstory. Here's what Ladyslipper Music has to say about it (and, to my mind, there's honestly no hyperbole here, it really was that Big a Deal):

"Lavender Jane Loves Women, within weeks of its 1973 release, swept women off fences and out of closets. With delight and disbelief, they passed the records from hand to hand, or sent them speeding across oceans and continents. Everywhere women listened, amazed, to songs which actually verbalized the previously unthinkable joy and pride of Lesbian consciousness and identity. Alix's equally wonderful Living With Lesbians soon followed. This appearance of women-centered culture signalled the end of women's historical isolation and silence, and provided structures to voice the exuberant spirit and outlaw perspective of an idea long overdue."

VIEW FROM GAY HEAD (to hear a brief excerpt of this cheerful, rousing world-changer, go to Ladyslipper music here)

I heard Cheryl and Mary say
There are two kinds of people in the world today
One or the other a person must be
The men are them, the women are we
And they agree it's a pleasure to be
A lesbian, lesbian
Let's be in no man's land
Lesbian, lesbian
Any woman can be a lesbian

Carol is tired of being nice
A sweet smile, a pretty face, submissive device
To pacify the people for they won't defend
A woman who's indifferent to men
She's my friend, she's a lesbian

And Liza wishes the library
Had men and women placed separately
Ah, but theirs is the kingdom
She knows who she'll find
In the HIStory of MANkind
But then she's inclined to be ahead of her time
She's a lesbian, lesbian
Let's be in no man's land
Lesbian, lesbian
Any woman can be a lesbian

And women's anger Louise explains
On a million second places in the master's games
It's real as a mountain, it's strong as the sea
Besides, an angry woman is a beauty
She's chosen to be a dyke like me
She's a lesbian, lesbian
Let's be in no man's land
Lesbian, lesbian
Any woman can be a lesbian

So the sexes do battle, they batter about
The men's are the sexes I will do without
I'll return to the bosom where my journey ends
Where there's no penis between us friends
Will I see you again
When you're a lesbian, lesbian
Let's be in no man's land
Lesbian, lesbian
Any woman can be lesbian
Every woman can be a lesbian


At the time this album came out, Alix was lovers with Liza Cowan (the Liza in these lyrics, as well as lyrics elsewhere). Liza appears several times in Ginny Bates, both as an herstorical figure to lesbian-feminism as well as an eventual artist colleague and friend to Ginny and Myra. In my life, Liza has been both. She was kind enough to "parse" View From Gay Head for me as follows (copyright to these memoirs are hers):

'Alix used to talk on stage about the word Lesbian having the power to kill. What if you walked into the Trilateral Commission and just said, "Lesbian" and they all dropped dead.

'VFGH was about Lesbians we knew, and about working through ideas of separatism. The name, View From Gay Head worked on two levels. Gay, because of Gay. Gay Head is a town, or section of Martha's Vineyard where we were staying the summer she wrote it. The actual view from Gay Head is an island called Nomans/No Man's Land. I can't remember if you can actually see No Man's Land from Gay Head, but it is off of the Vineyard, so it's kind of funny and a very deep reference that I'd forgotten until this minute. It may be on the liner notes of the album.

'Cheryl and Mary were the Lesbians who we moved to the farm with. [Note: See Alix Dobkin's second album, Living with Lesbians.] We spent a lot of time talking politics with them and they were both Jewish and Separatists.

'Carol was the woman we started our neighborhood women's group with. We tried to start a women's center but it didn't happen. We did have events, and Carol and I edited and published Cowrie Magazine. The group was called Community Of Women, COW hence Cowrie. (and Cowan, but that's just me)

'Liza is me, duh. At some point soon after Alix and I moved in together I separated all the books in our bookcase into women's and men's sections. I found this to be a great mental and social exercise. From then on for a few years I only bought or read books by women. But you should also know that I've separated books by color, which is how my books are arranged now. It's more visually pleasing, and since I have a very visual memory, it's easier for me to find books.

(Angry Louise by Louise Fishman, 1973)
'Louise is Louise Fishman. Louise was a college - art school - friend of Alix's. She was a dyke in college and a big inspiration for Alix. In 1973 she did a series of "angry" paintings, including "Angry Alix". She went on to become a very well respected and successful abstract expressionist painter. Still going strong. She was lovers with Bertha Harris at the time Alix wrote VFGH.'

Also on this album are two other references in Chapter One. The "Balkan yells" that Alix performs were taught to her by Ethel Raim, and indeed lesbians imitated them across the nation as a powerful expression of voice.
(Ethel Raim of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, New York)

Bearsis -- Allie's cat is named after a word from the song "Little House" which was written by Joseph Berger and Nick Klonaris but was made famous among lesbians when it was sung by Alix Dobkin (and friends, including her daughter Adrian and other children of lesbians) on Lavender Jane Loves Women. You can hear a brief excerpt at Ladyslipper Music here. The lyrics go:

Theirs is a little house, theirs is,
In a pear tree full of pearses.
They’re birds, you see, and they live in a tree,
Where they don’t need ladders or stairses.

They’re happy and free of careses.
They never have to run from bearses.
And pears are free to birds, you see,
‘Round the world or any other whereses.

Theirs is a little house, theirs is,
With little bird beds and chairses.
Did you ever hear of any house near,
As nice a little house as theirs is?

(Audre Lorde)

"Use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house" refers to the line "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." by African-American lesbian poet, essayist and activist Audre Lorde in her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984, The Crossing Press). This essay and its complicated ideas was profoundly instrumental in shaping feminist and especially lesbian-feminist ideology. It is increasingly misquoted (as Myra does) and incompletely understood now. For that reason, I am copying the essay in below:

THE MASTER'S TOOLS WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER'S HOUSE

'I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

'It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.

'The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowlesge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women-identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results," as this paper states.

'For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a partriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

'Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between passive be and the active being.

'Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

'Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

'As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

'Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

'Poor women and women of Color know there is it difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

'In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

'Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other?

'In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women's art out of women's exhibitions, Black women's work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Issue,” and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us—white and Black—when it is key to our survival as a movement?

'Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is it diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

'Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."

'Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.'


Red and Black refers to the Red and Black Books Collective, Seattle's feminist bookstore on 15th Avenue in Capital Hill, which "began on May 1, 1973 as an outgrowth of the Id, an early leftist bookstore in Seattle that was involved in the social upheaval of the 1960’s. The Red and Black name came from the membership of the collective, anarchists and socialists, but early on the anarchists left to form Left Bank Books. Because the collective believed that access to information was critical for empowerment the bookstore focused on politics and providing the community with ideas and information not readily available elsewhere. The store was a vehicle for social change, promotion of progressive perspectives on issues such as feminism, respect for the environment, and alternative lifestyles and families....Faced with mounting debt, the inability to find a buyer, and the emergence of chain bookstores, Red and Black, the oldest feminist independent bookstore in the United States, closed on March 17, 1999."

(Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes -- U.S. Federal Budget, 2009 Fiscal Year -- Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion; MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion; NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion; pie chart from War Resisters League)

War Resisters League has a mission statement which reads "Believing war to be a crime against humanity, the War Resisters League, founded in 1923, advocates Gandhian nonviolence as the method for creating a democratic society free of war, racism, sexism, and human exploitation." It has long drawn a high degree of lesbian participation, but especially during the 1970s and during the Reagan years because of its advocacy of war tax resistance, refusing to pay some or all of those federal taxes that contribute to military spending.

(Bernice Johnson Reagon)
Bernice Johnson Reagon is a is a singer, composer, scholar, a specialist in African-American oral history, performance and protest traditions, a major cultural voice for freedom and justice for over four decades, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock, an internationally acclaimed, Grammy-winning African-American women's a capella ensemble which is a national treasure but was originally embraced whole-heartedly by the women's music community after its inception in 1973. Their album Believe I'll Run On, See What The End's Gonna Be, released in 1993 by Redwood Records (a women's/lesbian music label), contains the song "Fannie Lou Hamer". To hear an excerpt from this (or other Sweet Honey songs), go to Ladyslipper Music here. These are albums worth having.
(Fannie Lou Hamer singing at Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party boardwalk rally. From left — Emory Harris, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] in hat, Sam Block, Eleanor Holmes, Ella Baker)

Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist and Civil Rights leader. Her quote that she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" was eventually used as her epitaph. For her bio, read the Wikipedia entry, her Fem Bio entry, or listen to her oral history at the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive

(Fannie Lou Hamer)


Copyright on notes 2008 Maggie Jochild.

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CLAIMING YOUR PEOPLE: THINK BIG

(Maggie Jochild and daughter, August 1977, Denton, Texas; photo by Mary Austin)

In August of 1977, I was hovering on the brink of major life changes. Since the spring, I had been carried along on a current against my will: My partner of five years left me overnight, brutally, for a woman who had been a family friend, taking our daughter with her. I dropped out of college on the verge of graduation and was rescued from suicide (both direct and indirect means) by my mother and my friends. I was desperate for a solid place to stand as I began my 22nd year.


Out of the floodwaters, a few things emerged as handholds. One is that I wrote Alix Dobkin, at the address on the back of her album, ostensibly a fan letter but it rapidly shifted into a plea for help. True to the ethic of sisterhood, Alix wrote me back right away, a personal letter full of encouragement and advice. She was a superstar in my world, and her caring had a profound effect. I kept her Living with Lesbians album propped up on my dresser, a photo of possibility.


As a result, I wrote to two different lesbian land collectives asking if they would be willing to accept me as a new member. One was RedBird in Burlingon, Vermont; the other was The Wimmin's House in Durango, Colorado. Both wrote me back saying I could come give it a try, see if it worked out.

I was more drawn to RedBird -- it seemed a more radical change, and, I'll be honest, I was very attracted to the fact that their letter was on bright red paper. (It was a novelty in those days.) Plus, Vermont was in the same general region as where Alix, Liza and their kind of dykes were also "living in the country". But I had a bit of a personal connection to Durango: I knew one of the women there, briefly, from shared political action in the Kitty Genovese Project, and my best friend Jean had lived with these women in Durango one summer a year or two earlier. In addition, if my ex ever relented in her obstruction at my seeing our daughter again, getting back to North Texas from Colorado would be much easier.

Years later in San Francisco I wound up living intimately with someone from Burlington and came to know almost all of the women from RedBird. That collective would have eaten me alive. It's a stroke of luck that I went elsewhere.

As I was trying to emerge from my stunned state and make a decision, one of the women from Durango, Mary Szczepanski, decided to come check me out for herself. Working class, from a Polish Catholic background in Buffalo, New York, she suggested we take a trip together: A ten-day trek into Mexico, where she'd longed to visit and was close to Texas. Without knowing her, I accepted.

We each had studied Spanish in high school and college but were not conversationally fluent. We decided that once we crossed the border, we would not speak any English with each other until we were back in Texas. We had a shoestring budget -- in the end, the entire trip cost me $75, of which $15 was the Sanborn's insurance fee and another $10 was a bribe to a cop in Mexico City -- so we planned to camp out and mostly make our own meals.

Looking back on it, I can only conclude it was my lack of self that made me able to embark on such a challenging adventure. Mary was, in essence, interviewing me for a place in her household, and the divide between us wasn't just that I was several years younger than her, I was also politically naive to the point where I didn't comprehend my own class background. But all this exploration had to take place in Spanish.

We became fluent. Rapidly. After four days, I woke up one morning and realized all my dreams of the night before had been in Spanish. I began writing lines of poetry and haiku in Spanish. The exposure to another language -- not just exposure, but immersion -- gave me a doorway out of the emotional constraints that were choking me.

The third and final breakthrough happened right after I returned from Mexico. I went to the second Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and discovered my compleat identity as a woman. I cut off my hair, I went naked in public, I learned ideas by the fistful, I changed my last name to Jochild (a matronymic) and I came back courageous. As in, with a new heart. I announced I was moving to Durango, and by Labor Day, I was there.

It's only recently that I've linked this series of events and its connection to Spanish with another period in my life. When I was 12 and beginning junior high, we were so poor that I had no hope of new clothes in which to begin the school year. My mother pulled a bolt of blue-and-white gingham from her unused fabric pile, very old-fashioned stuff, and made me a dress from an old pattern. I had to wear it three days a week, the other two days wearing one of last year's dresses that was really too tight on me. By the end of the first week, my public humiliation was absolute.

In that South Texas town was a rigid race hierarchy, silently enforced at school by rules which made speaking Spanish on school property grounds for expulsion. Only perhaps 25% of the population was white, but they controlled the local government and the schools. My family was at the rock bottom of the white pecking order, but we were still a paradigm above all the Latino/a inhabitants.

But my second week of junior high, I tossed my white privilege. When I got to school before they opened the doors to let us in, instead of joining the small cluster of "Anglo" girls in their spot, I walked by everyone to the group of Chicanas who hung out by the back entrance -- the girls who were the smartest, the lippiest, and the most mature of us all. Girls who defiantly spoke Spanish -- in whispers, but we heard them.

They went silent when I approached and did not say hi at first, eyeing me with suspicion. I had on the hateful dress. But then one of them, Alveisa, grinned at me and said "You wanna learn a word in Spanish?"

"Sure" I said. The others began giggling. Alveisa said "Chingao", and got me to repeat it. Now they were all in hysterics. I had no idea what it meant, and I didn't care -- I knew it was a bad word, that was obvious, but I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. After the fun of having me repeat it wore off, Alveisa and then Mariola taught me a few other words, not profanity this time. By the time the bell rang, I was grudgingly accepted by them and had been cast out socially by the white girls.

At the end of that semester, I sided with my father in his quest to have us move and we left for Brazil. In that relocation, I found a wormhole out of class degradation and molestation, but it began with becoming a race traitor. If you're a member of a non-target group, becoming a traitor and losing your "privilege" is extremely easy: All you have to do is stand up publicly for truth and justice. And it will be the making of you. Even if they kill you for it.

(Quote from Ricky Sherover-Marcuse)

I've now lost my fluency in spoken Spanish but can still read it fairly well. More to the point, I understand that when xenophobes rail against the presence of Spanish in American life, they are pushing back against not only racial diversity but also the mind expansion that arrives with bilingualism.

And I'm astounded at how stupid these same people are about English. According to Wikipedia, "English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, when combining native and non-native speakers it is probably the most commonly spoken language in the world." It became the dominant lingua franca (so to speak) partly from centuries of colonialism by the British Empire, but also (to my mind, equally if not more importantly) because as a language it is enormously flexible and nondiscriminatory. America is not the hoped-for beacon to all that Jewish lesbian Emma Lazarus composed her lines about, but English gladly welcomes vocabulary from anywhere, no xenophobia there.

There's no need to force English on populations, or to "protect" it from diversity -- its very strength lies in exposure to other languages. The fact it, the majority of its everyday vocabulary is Germanic in origin. Next in line is Latinate. It has minimal inflection, a hodgepodge of spelling and grammar, and has "developed features such as modal verbs and word order as rich resources for conveying meaning." It's a strongly stressed intonation-based language, lending itself to personal expression across a broad scale. And it has developed in these directions organically, to meet the needs of its diverse speakers, not to fit a political or religious mandate. Boxing it in will destroy what makes it valuable.


So when I read at Pam's House Blend that "two Hispanic surnames are now among the top ten most common in the U.S.", I feel pride and relief. It helps to offset the loss I feel when I read "While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them."

(To get behind the New York Times firewall for the original article about the census finding, check here.)

Further, as someone who studies genealogy, I know full well that surname distribution changes constantly over time as part of the natural order. Hundreds of surnames found on the 1790 census for the United States no longer exist anywhere in the country. Among English surnames, "...no clue can be obtained from the surname alone as to the original nationality or racial origin of a family". Even more to the point, until the last decade or two, all "family names" in America were divested of 50% of their ancestral data per generation (the females), and were culturally meaningless when forced on African-Americans and Indians.

So, let's stay grounded in reality when seeking to claim our cultural identity, because it will assist us in claiming a larger source. I once heard a genealogist who had no use for white-dominated lineage "societies" say he was forming a new group whose membership would be limited to those who were Descendants of Eleventh Century Peasants. (Which includes everyone now alive on the planet.) Yeah, sign me up.

For those of you curious, the two new surnames in the census Top Ten, Garcia and Rodriquez, have the following origins/meanings:

GARCIA: Definition: Surname is of uncertain origin but could possibly have and of the following meanings: 1) From a medieval given name meaning "like a fox." 2) a descendant of Garcia, Spanish form of Gerald 3) one who came from Garcia, in Spain. According to Elsdon C. Smith, the name Garcia could mean either "descendant of Garcia, Spanish form of Gerald" or "one who came from Garcia, in Spain."

RODRIGUEZ: Definition: A patronymic name meaning "son of Rodrigo." The "ez or es" added to the root signifies "descendant of." The given name Rodrigo is the Spanish form of Roderick, meaning "famous power," from the Germanic elements "hrod, fame and "ric," power.

Thus, even Rodriguez has a Germanic origin.

I'm reminded of the irony in Elder Lapp's admonishment to the Harrison Ford character at the end of Witness to "Be careful out there among those Englisch!" But -- belonging has a permeable border because human survival depends on it. So, instead, I send you off on your day with the following:

Déme su cansado, sus pobres,
Sus masas amontonadas que anhelan respirar libremente,
La basura desgraciada de su orilla de vertido.
Envíe éstos, el nómada, tempestad-sacudido a mí,
Levanto mi lámpara al lado de la puerta de oro!"

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HELP SAVE TEXAS' ONLY FEMINIST BOOKSTORE

In the summer of 1976, I lived in Denton, Texas, but I got a monthly newsletter from the Austin Lesbian Organization. Austin lesbians were known to be among the most radical in the country at that time, and the only women's bookstore between Atlanta, Georgia and Tempe, Arizona was in Austin. It was called Common Woman Books then, after the series of Common Woman poems by Judy Grahn -- "The common woman is as common / as a common loaf of bread / and will rise."

I'd read about an album of music written by women for women called Lavendar Jane Loves Women, by Alix Dobkin. I wanted to know what women's music might sound like. The only hope I had of getting my hands on that album was in Austin.

(Lavendar Jane Loves Women album by Alix Dobkin)


So one blazing Saturday I drove five hours down from Denton in my 1966 Pontiac LeMans, which had no air conditioning, and managed to find the bookstore on Guadalupe, two rooms over a haircut store. But once parked on the Drag, I faced the prospect of walking from my car to the stairs that led up to Common Woman Books. For a space of a few feet, I would be out in the open, visibly walking toward the entrance of the only known lesbian business in all of Texas. If you weren't a dyke alive then, I don't think you can really know the courage it took to be publicly out. Being a visible lesbian meant risking your life, maybe not in every circumstance but you never knew when the circumstances would be against you. As Alix Dobkin wrote in one of her songs, we "pacify the people for they won't defend a woman who's indifferent to men".

(Logo from the original Common Woman Books, with a line from a Judy Grahn poem)

I was 19, and I had to sit in my sweltering car for over an hour before I found the courage to leave its anonymity and cross that sidewalk to the bookstore. I was soaked through, but it was not just the summer heat. I got my album, and it literally changed my life -- every path I've chosen since was influenced by the information on that album. I've gone on being brave. It gets easier. And when I moved back to Texas in 1989 from San Francisco, it was Austin I settled in -- because that bookstore was still here, renamed BookWoman.

Now BookWoman is in dire trouble. I got the following e-mail yesterday:

(Susan Post, surviving owner of BookWoman, June 2001)

Dear Supporters of BookWoman:

As you know, BookWoman is on a turnaround campaign to keep the doors open and also looking to move to a less expensive space after the first of the year. In the couple of weeks we've been fundraising, the response has been tremendous -- there's been about $10,000 in cash/checks/credit card donations come in-house, and sales have increased by 33%.

That's the good news. Women have come in the store almost in tears at the prospect of the store closing -- so, we've got to find a way to make sure the store stays open -- it's too valuable a women's community resource, for all women and their allies, to shut down. And, we have to make sure that we not only shop now, but also keep shopping after the first of the year, to sustain the store. There is a small committee meeting to work on a long-term sustainability plan, but first things first -- we must raise the capital to pay off the old debt.

Every small or large contribution makes a difference -- there's a website, Save BookWoman where people can donate online. Please send this out to your friends and family and request they make a contribution. Bring out-of-town friends into the store to shop. Send the request to feminists and their supporters you know outside Texas who want to support one of the last 13 remaining feminist, independent-owned and operated bookstores in existence in the US.

The silent auction is up in the store and bids are being accepted. We've got a few events scheduled you can see on the website, including a fabulous event on Sunday, November 18th, "Books We Love" -- be sure and check it out! At least one house concert has been scheduled for December and we're working on a "Turning The Tables" type of event, also for December. More are in the works and we'll keep you posted.

Working together, we can make this happen.

To all of you who are reading this -- I request you take one action right now that will support us in moving the project forward.

Cheers,
Debbie Winegarten
......................
Be a BookWoman!
.....................
BookWoman
918 West 12th Street
Austin Texas 78703
Texas' only feminist bookstore, serving the women's community for 30 years.

You can place orders with them through their website at BookWoman or call them at 512 472-2785 to order in person.

And, as a treat, here's one of the Common Woman poems by Judy Grahn:

(Judy Grahn)

ELLA, IN A SQUARE APRON,
ALONG HIGHWAY 80

She’s a copperheaded waitress,
tired and sharp-worded, she hides
her bad brown tooth behind a wicked
smile, and flicks her ass
out of habit, to fend off the pass
that passes for affection.
She keeps her mind the way men
keep a knife—keen to strip the game
down to her size. She has a thin spine,
swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies.
She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers
if they should complain. She understands
the necessity for pain, turns away
the smaller tips, out of pride, and
keeps a flask under the counter. Once,
she shot a lover who misused her child.
Before she got out of jail, the courts had pounced
and given the child away. Like some isolated lake,
her flat blue eyes take care of their own stark
bottoms. Her hands are nervous, curled, ready to scrape.
The common woman is as common
as a rattlesnake.

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