Showing posts with label dyke culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dyke culture. Show all posts
Thursday, April 24, 2014
THROW-BACK THURSDAY: DYKES ON BACK STOOP, BROSNAN STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, 1980/1981
Thursday, April 10, 2014
THROWBACK THURSDAY: COUNTRY EXPERIENCE FOR YOUNG WIMMIN, NEAR WILLITS, CA, 1978
Sunday, March 30, 2014
CELEBRATING THE FIRE OF JOAN ANNSFIRE
(Joan Annsfire -- photo from Aunt Lute)
My first seven years in the Bay Area, I lived in a four-flat building on Brosnan Street where, for much of that time, all the occupants were dykes or bisexual wimmin. Certainly all feminists. We had a communal garden out back, we sunbathed nude on the roof together, we shared meals and gossip and radical politics.
I anchored the tenancy of #73 for most of those years. And my cohort in the next door flat was Joan Annsfire, good friend, comadre in Lesbians Against Police Violence, running buddy and non-stop wry commenter.
I moved into #73 on March 22, 1978. A week later, the dykes in the flat beside us, who shared a long wall with us, moved out. I discovered they were Sandy Boucher and Ann Hershey, already famous to me from wimmin's publications, and I was starstruck. But they were in the process of breaking up as well as relocating, and sensibly focused on their own misery, ignoring my gawping.
They were briefly replaced by a young married couple with a dog named Mahoney who barked all the time. They had spectacular fights, and soon moved out, to all our relief. We inherited some of their living room furniture, as we had none, only the ubiquitous milk crates filled by paperbacks from Diana and Naiad.
By this time I had gotten to known Joan (through Lesbian Schoolworkers? All Age Lesbians? BACABI benefits? it was a wonderful maelstrom of a dyke community at that time) and she then moved into the empty flat with her friend Julie Twitchell. It was Julie, I think, who dubbed us all the Brosnan Gang and persuaded us to get matching T-shirts made. I still have mine, decades too small.
After a year or so, Julie was replaced by Karen Peteros who worked at the brand new Lyon & Martin Clinic. Karen was a young beauty with short, crisp dark looks and an animated manner. She wore baggy overalls to work on her VW bug out front. At that time we were doing constant battle with our slumlord-wannabe landlord Chee Cheung, and Karen was instrumental in organizing our petitions to the S.F. Renter's Council for needed repairs or blocking rent hikes.
After one joint foray to the rent board, having succeeded in thwarting Mr. Cheung once more (a battle we would not now win, but Reagan was only just beginning his destruction of the working class at the time), we celebrated by all going to the Mission Rock Cafe for a bowl of clam chowder. Karen was the only one to beg off, returning to work. We sat at a large spool table on the outside deck, and once we had been served, someone during lunch remarked that she sure did think that absent Karen was a looker. After a pause, we all went round and confessed that each of us had a big crush on Karen (I cannot remember if my roommate/s at the time were Kay Finney, Kathie Bailey, Renee Enteen and/or sharon franklet). Until the circle reached Joan, who blushed beet red and murmured only "Imagine sharing a bathroom with her", which sent us all into roaring laughter.
On the first of April 1980, the two downstairs flats -- mine and Joan's -- collaborated to throw the first-ever butch/femme ball. It was largely sardonic humour on our 70s dyke part, not any actual celebration of what is now understood as butch and femme. We cleared out both flats as best we could, and Renee and I used the photobooth at Musée Mécanique at Cliff House to create stereotypical butch and femme poses.
The invitation we assembled with Joan was intended to be circulated only among our friends and political cohort. However, someone (never found out who) photocopied extra copies and posted them at all the wimmin's bars and gathering places in SF the day before the party.
The night of the party, I hit a roadblock in my planned costume. I had on a bright white men's T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of Dickies, a black leather vest and a matching cock ring on my wrist. I wanted to slick my short hair back, but this was way before mousse, and our holdhold had nothing to give me that greaser look.
I popped next door to ask for help. Joan shook her unruly red frizz and referred me on to Karen. Karen looked blank for a minute, then led me into the bathroom and plucked an enormous tube of K-Y from the cabinet. "This oughta work!" she declared.
I was momentarily distracted by wondering why on earth she had all that K-Y: we didn't use such things in those days, and in my personal experience, had never run across the need. (We had bone-rattling, multi-orgasmic sex precisely because we did not imitate the het model.) But Karen squirted out a big blob and began rubbing it into my buzz, and I gave myself over to the pleasure of cranial lubrication.
She was right about the look: Nailed it. But turns out, K-Y left to harden for hours on hair shafts is reluctant to let go its hold. Took six shampoos the next day to undo my helmet head.
We were soon swamped by strange women in suits and ballgowns arriving at our doors. My roommate sharon at first attended only in a well-worn black leather jacket and sequined red high heels -- nothing else. But the swirl of strangers sent her back to her room for additional attire.
Eventually our flats were choked with over 400 wimmin. I devolved into spectacularly bad sexual antics before the night was over, and we did not clear the place until dawn. It was such a hit that Karen took the idea to Lyon-Martin where it became a huge annual fundraiser. Yep, it all began on Brosnan Street.
In LAPV, Joan Annsfire (along with Joan Bobkoff -- Joan A and Joan B we called them, and yes there was a Joan C but she was not a comedian) wrote the best dialogue, song parodies, and flyer slogans we produced as a group. She was always hilarious to be around, and from her, more than anyone else, I learned the real meaning of Jewish humour, with a dark political twist at the center if you were as gifted as Joan was.
Joan is the one who quipped that the cop who beat up a pair of lesbians leaving Amelia's bar "must've had his moon in Scorpio with penis rising". At a potluck she announced "There's no fu like a tofu". She often said "Kissing a smoker is like licking a dirty ashtray" and I swear it was from her lips I first ever heard the phrase "Die yuppie scum" before it became a bumper sticker.
Joan was famous for being celibate. I, who had no sexual boundaries or judgment, was secretly in awe of her for this choice. I must have been exceedingly tiresome for her to be around, although I can't recall her displaying it. It took me years of counseling after coming out as an incest survivor in 1980-ish to stop using sex as a means of disrespecting others, and not until I was 50 to finally forgive myself.
When Joan eventually got a girlfriend, she did so with smarts and integrity. It lasted a long time, ended well, and she is partnered again with intelligence and retained independence. I could have learned a lot from Joan, I suspect -- but I learned what I could when I could, and my hard path was what it was.
Joan also had a younger sister named Lore whom she tried to look after, and I envied them their bond. Lore was intermittently lesbian, and when she took up with a guy, I shared Joan's disappointment. We disparagingly referred to him as Skippy; cannot fathom why, now.
I felt a solidarity with Joan in the fact that she, too, chose a surname honoring her mother, whom she lost too early. I thought Anns-fire was a brilliant choice. When my own mother died when I was 28, Joan was deeply sympathetic. Even hard-assed revolutionary dykes need their moms -- maybe especially so.
Joan did a lot of our graphics in those days. I especially admired a 3- or 4-part cartoon of "How to eat an artichoke" that she had created and framed on her kitchen wall. In the last couple of decades, however, she has moved on to writing, and damn, she's good, producing poetry, fiction and essays which unroof my/our era in powerful, beautiful language. Check out her blog at Lavender Joan and her winning essay published by Aunt Lute at The View From Capp Street.
All of this is a long-winded prelude to wishing Joan a happy birthday today. I am honoured to have known you, remember you with nothing but affection, and am so extremely glad you have created such a good life for yourself. I am yours in sisterhood, forever.
Friday, March 12, 2010
"TAKE MY WORD..."
In August 1977 I went to the second Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It was my first (of many times) to attend, and the festival's first time on "the new land", which is now the only land in most women's memory since they've been gathering there every August since for 35 years now.
I had been to a Texas women's campout organized by Austin dykes in the summer of 1975, and a women's music festival in Stillwater, Oklahoma earlier that summer of '77. They had been revelatory experiences, but nothing could have prepared me for Michigan. I am who I am today because of Michigan: Because gathering together for four days in a self-constructed town with thousands of other women who have survived girlhood was an experience you can find nowhere else on this planet, or in the known history of humanity.
I was rubbed raw the entire time but in the best of ways. No two women were alike, and the incredible diversity made it clear what a horrific lie we have been raised to believe about the nature of girlhood and womanhood. Escaping overt male-conditioned beliefs about who we "ought" to be, even in a temporary and limited form, reshaped my brain permanently. It was safe to be what "they" said we were not, should not be. The little girls who ran in ecstatic packs had no risk at all from predation, and that experience transformed my daughter as well.
Because, let's be clear, the children of lesbians have the lowest incidence of child abuse in the entire world. Statistically much, MUCH lower.
At some point, either on the main stage or the daystage, a lanky blonde dyke got up with her guitar and sang
"Well I went out last week and cut my hair to the boneBy that time we were screaming with joy. Her name was Kitty Barber, and she went on to finish singing what she called "The Pancake Blues":
Suddenty you don't call me on the phone.
Well, that's okay, I got a real good book,
Think I'll stay home and eat what I cook.
"Yes, I wear a leather jacket one night.
And later on, you're gettin' all uptight.
Why don't you just go out and find someone else.
I'm doin' fine right here admiring myself."
"When I make up a batch of pancakesI only heard that song the one time but I memorized most of it. Many times in later years I'd hear dykes drop key lines -- especially "Take my word, it makes no difference in the taste" or "If the package ain't too pretty, it's because I'm not for sale" -- and laugh together knowingly. The next day at the festival, I paid someone with buzzers working from a stump near the front of the main stage to buzz my hair for the first time, "cutting it to the bone". I never looked back from that act of empowerment,
And they don't come out all round and flat and straight;
I eat 'em anyway, because I don't believe in waste.
Take my word, it makes no difference in the taste.
"Yes, I am just what I appear to be.
I'm not trying to be a man, I'm nuch too busy bein' me.
I am who I am and look how I look.
And baby, I eat what I cook.
"Just last night, I tried to fry myself an egg,
But the yoke got broke and it got scrambled anyway.
It looked a little funny, but why throw it away?
It tasted a whole lot like a puffy souffle!
"So tell me, do you think that this is bad?
Then how come it matters to you how I am clad?
If you don't like the cover, do you throw away the book;
Don't you open it up and take a second look?
"Oh no, I'm not tryin; to be a male.
If the package ain't too pretty, it's because I'm not for sale.
I am who I am and look how I look.
And baby, I eat what I cook --
Oh, yes I do --
Baby, I eat what I cook!"
It was devastating to leave the festival, to re-enter a world where we were not full human beings. The car I was riding in stopped at a small cafe in the nearest town that Monday morning, to eat breakfast and delay our shock. The cafe was full of dykes with the same idea, and a few hostile and stunned local men. We shared a table with strangers, one of whom turned out to be Kitty Barber, of all people. We ordered coffee, cokes, sausage, all the addictions we'd not had for four days, but when they arrived, they didn't taste as good as I had hoped. There was a price tag attached, I suddenly understood.
A plate of white bread was set down in the middle of our table, and we stared at it. Kitty Barber picked up a slice, holding it in the air, and said slowly "Wonder Bread: You wonder why they call it bread." We began laughing hysterically as she wadded it into a gummy ball and set it back down on the plate. "Baby, I eat what I cook" was my thought.
I put that song into my novel Ginny Bates, in the chapter here titled More Life With Two Bright Children.
So you can imagine my amazed thrill when last night, as I glanced at the comments on the Michigan FB wall, there was the name Kitty Barber and a photo of her. Looking much the same as then, plus 35 years. I immediately friended her and she wrote me back yes this morning, saying "Wow, what a time we had, eh?"
I wrote about it at Facebook and heard more from Kitty (as well as Liza Cowan, who was also at the festival that summer). Kitty said said she had recorded her song on an album named "Gay And Straight Together", produced by the one and only Ginni Clemons in 1980 for Folkways Records.. I found this online, you can view the album cover here and buy the album for yourself.
Even better, I've now purchased this track and made it available for you to hear! Click on Kitty Barber singing "The Pancake Blues" to listen.
Here is Kitty's memory of the event:
'August '77...I'm a worker at the festival, stayed for weeks and weeks (things were a little looser then) and on Thursday night,, Ginni Clemmons is supposed to open the first night. I'm hanging around the stage, and Ginni's partner runs up to me to say that "Ginni can't go on yet. She wants you to sing a song or two. That pancake song." OK, no problem. Grab my guitar, get tuned up, when LV says to me, "Kitty, can you take these garbage bags out of here?"Baby, we still eat what we cook.
"Sure, but I have to sing first."
I thought she would faint. But it all went off smoothly; I sang "The Pancake Blues", Ginni came up, I hauled the garbage, and a good time was had by all.'
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