ME AND MICHIGAN

(Maggie in August 1977, at second Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, wearing the labyris made by Julie Springwater that I'd just bought)

The summer of 1977 began as one of the worst of my life.  On May 1, my lover of five years, "Astrid", dumped me without warning in a particularly brutal manner.  That winter and spring, we had each joined a separate women's consciousness-raising group.  For the first time in my life, I hesitantly began sharing my innermost thoughts and fears with someone besides a lover.  I started the process of unlearning my socialization as a girl, and redefining my self, with the support of other girls-in-recovery.

I assumed Astrid was doing the same in her CR group.  But I was wrong.  She felt extremely threatened by the personal growth offered by this kind of feminism.  She want to be "normal", to have male approval, to be middle-class and nice and closeted.

Unbeknownst to me, one of the women in my CR group had her sights on Astrid.  In the guise of "concerned sisterhood", she began taking various things I'd said to Astrid, telling her in confidence as a form of bonding between them.  Eventually, the weekend Astrid left me, this other woman persuaded her into bed.

Both CR groups imploded when this betrayal emerged, and I had almost nowhere to take my devastating grief.  I was daily suicidal, and only a couple of close friends plus my mother kept me going.  Astrid immediately moved in with her new lover, taking all our belongings and the daughter I'd been helping to raise for five years.  I was 21 years old and had no recourse to whatever Astrid aimed my way.

I turned to feminism in full force, and found answers, empathy, the kindness of strangers.  I wrote anguished letters to Ginny Berson of Olivia Records and Alix Dobkin, and got back personal letters full of encouragement.  Alix wrote me several times.  I read everything I could, I listened to wimmin's music daily, I traveled to more urban gatherings where I could find dyke feminists, and I began exploring the idea of joining a women's land collective.  Eventually, I narrowed my choices down to either a group in Durango, Colorado or the Red Bird Collective in Burlington, Vermont, both of whom extended invitations to check them out personally.

One of the few items Astrid left in our gutted apartment was a poster on the wall of our bedroom showing an amazon riding a horse, a poster for a wimmin's music festival.  In August my best friend Jean told me she'd gotten a dream job in Cincinnati, and offered for me to move with her.  I didn't know what to do:  I didn't want to be a burden she took with her.  Instinctively, I felt I needed to broaden my community, somehow, somewhere.  In the end, we compromised on me traveling with her as far as Michigan to attend the second year of the already famous Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, saying I would decide after it was over in the path I would take.

We caravaned to Michigan in separate small cars, each with a helping-with-the-gas female passenger we'd picked up from Lesbian Connection or some such network.  Mine was a 17-year-old singer/songwriter named Dawna Price.  Somewhere in Missouri we picked up an Israeli hitchhiker named Mikki Gvilli who was not a lesbian but still amazingly powerful.

The minute I set foot on the land, I knew This Was Different.  A space energetically distinct from anywhere I had ever been -- me, who had already traveled around the world.  The variety of wimmin was staggering.  Turns out, the way a woman could look covered the entire range of human expression.

Every single structure and process on this large tract of land had been assembled by someone who had survived girlhood.  All the work was done By Us For Us.  There was nothing we could not do.  Cooperation was instant and brilliantly effective.  Kindness and generosity flowed without limit, and we knew every interaction was with another who had been presented with the lies of what female can be in our culture yet had found her own way through it.

(Maggie about to get her first buzzcut next to the main stage at the second 

Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, August 1977)

The third day, I cut my hair off and shed my clothes.  By the fourth day, I'd decided to go to Durango, to pursue separatism and alternate spirituality and vegetarianism, to continue this route of uncovering and clearing out the damage done by the patriarchy.  I have not deviated from that latter choice for one second since.

And I tell you:  If I had had to deal with male socialization there on that land, I would not have found the freedom to become who I am now.  It simply would not have been possible.  When you grow up behind bars, progressing to light leg irons is not going to free you from the experience of confinement.

Michigan is the product of thousands of grown-up girls deciding to do all the work necessary to create a week-long town where the values left to us by the patriarchy are redefined and blossom into powerful, complete functionality.  Who on earth, besides us, is going to do this job?

I have been to other music festivals where the womyn-born definition is not part of selecting who attends.  They've been fun, enriching, with good entertainment:  But they do not give me a year's worth of survival energy.  They do not offer a solid glimpse behind the heavy smothering curtain of male-defined world view.

Males and their terrified appeasers stand outside Michigan and demand admittance, assuming their presence can only improve what we are doing every full moon in August.  That assumption is, in itself, woman-hating.  If you want to experience a mixed-sex music festival, there are dozens of options available, go infiltrate those.  But no, it has to be Michigan, because it clearly thrives without male-socialized input and therefore must be STOPPED.  Make no mistake, change its definition, its intent, and it will cease to be.  And make no mistake, those who are obsessed with crashing its gates will be thrilled to see it cease to be.

If you don't need it, fine.  Leave us alone.  Stop the judgment, BOYcotting, death and rape threats, and ignorant proclamations about that which you have never experienced.  Admit there may be mysteries you do not comprehend, and refocus elsewhere.  End the relentless targeting of girls and girlhood.  And stop allowing those who do target us to play at being victims.

Copyright August 2014 Maggie Jochild

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TESTIMONY

In 1980 I entered a period of extreme sexual compulsion that was almost entirely related to beginning work on my childhood sexual abuse but having to invent the healing process every inch of the way -- because it didn't exist yet. Nowhere. A handful of us, working class dykes, put our faith in each other and created theory which, by and large, has stood up to time.


One evening that year I walked with two other dykes in my SF Brosnan Street apartment building, the women/roommates next door, Joan Annsfire and Julie Twitchell, to a potluck on Treat Street near 16th that was being held by a woman we all vaguely knew named Yohimbe. Someone, I bet Joan, gave voice to the largely unspoken truth that most of our gatherings in the wimmin's community those days, political or not, had a real agenda of looking for other women to -- fall in love with, go to bed with, become lifelong devoted companions as Alix Dobkin put it, all or any of the above. The three of us were single, and we laughed about how the only reason we'd drag ourselves to another gathering with semi-strangers to eat badly-made salad and Calistoga was to check out the action. Someone, probably me, suggested we be open about it and make a competition of it: Whoever had the most phone numbers of new women on the walk home would win.

I walked into that party on the prowl, and immediately locked gaze with Michele, who was visitng for the week from Portland. She was fat, pink-skinned, Jewish, with bright yellow hair that had a curl even cropped short. She was wearing purple sweatpants and a faded red Wallflower Order T-shirt. She was making a huge bowl of guacamole, and I immediately went to help her, pressing so much garlic into it that eventually she and I were the only ones who could stand to eat it.

I won the phone number contest, but the only one I remember calling later was Michele. She went back to Portland and we began a torrid correspondence, voluminous handwritten outpourings of confession, treatise, and poetry on the backs of old flyers. We visited each other when we could, which was not often because neither of us had any money. But I began going to Portland every November, a standing date. And it was that first visit, to a bone-cold house she shared with four other lesbians, when I first heard Ferron's album Testimony. Hitting the wimmin's community with the splash of a boulder.

It was sitting in Michele's dank living room, looking at that rose and olive Testimony album cover, when I first listened to

They say slowly
Brings the least shock
But no matter how slow I walk
There are traces
Empty spaces
And doors and doors of locks

I burst into tears and Michele scooted to wrap her generous thighs around me, asking me what was wrong. I couldn't tell her. I didn't know, really. And my despair solidified when I listened to "Ain't Life A Brook." That night in bed, Michele and I kissed but then rolled apart, sleeping back to back for the warmth, staying solo nonetheless. We didn't become lovers, after all. Which for me was an exception during that period, and a good thing.

Michele, like about a third of the dykes I knew, was trying on S/M as a means of dealing with her sexual abuse demons. She had whips on the wall behind her mattress on the floor. In our letters she'd told me what it meant to her, the liberation she felt in assuming roles, and I had said I wanted to try it. I wrote a piece of erotica I sent to her, about overpowering her and making her come against her will, She was a bottom and I imagined myself as a top.

I didn't want to feel bad about the crud that came up inside me when sex entered the picture in any relationship, how out of control I felt. I wanted control. I wanted to have nothing wrong with me.

Instead of pursuing a path that would give me an illusion of control and "safety" with regard to my desire, however, I wound up diving into the abyss and emerging elsewhere. I firmly believe that a lot of us who chose that direction have been labeled as "anti-sex" by our cohort who faced the same demons we did and decided if all they could have was desire with male conditioning defining most of the terms, that was better than no desire at all. I was willing to face a complete loss of sex if that's what it took to undo the imprint I had received as a child. A percentage of us were not willing to take that risk. I know what was right for me, and that's all I can ask for.

But in 1980, we were at the very beginning of that movement divide. We had Fran Winant in 1970 telling us

eat rice have faith in women
what I don’t know now
I can still learn
if I am alone now
I will be with them later
if I am weak now
I can become strong
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me

By 1975, we had Meg and Holly and Cris and Alix telling us how to cross the desert for each other, how to let ourselves be loved for our crazy eyes and the laughter which loosens our bones. How to stand on the mountain and not let them come here to take it. How to make love with each other, not to or at each other. Judy had assured us we were making love for the best reasons. We had gone forth, and we had even considered how to break up while still allowing only love to come between us.

But in 1980, Ferron reminded us sometimes we break up for good, sell the furniture and put away the photographs. Reagan was embarked on his mission to destroy working-class safety and with it the activist class. What remained of our numbers would be further attenuated by the human immunodeficiency virus entering our brothers' bloodstreams, calling many sisters to become the first AIDS caretakers because (a) gay men didn't know how to do community the way we did and (b) we believed when our turn came, they would come back and teach us. Those of us who had access to trust funds, education money, middle class security were increasingly seduced by a relief from the struggle. If we wanted children of our own, it was time to start having them. Clean and sober arrived as a community need.

And to our utter dismay, we discovered daddy was still showing up in bed with us. Some of us found nothing at all sexy about it.

Ferron sang

But life don't clickety-clack
Down a straight-line track
It comes together and it comes apart

In 1985, Michele lost weight, found a Jewish man to marry, went to work as a manager in Nike, and overnight became critical of what she called my downward mobility. I decided the way to address my need for control was to partner with a woman who took all the initiative and space in our intimacy. Unions had been broken, liberal was now an epithet, and the neocons who would arrive 15 years later to staff Dubya's regime were talking up the idea of a winnable nuclear war. It's a good thing I didn't know how far social justice and women's love would continue to unravel, part and parcel of each other.

However, now 30 years on, those doors and doors of locks have been opened enough to allow a breeze, and there are a great many of us still alive who eat rice and have faith in women. The wheel always spins around to new territory, and I can sing with certainty

But by my life be I spirit
And by my heart be I woman
And by my eyes be I open
And by my hands be I whole

Tuesday is Ferron's birthday. You might mosey over and tell her what she means to you.

[Love to Martha for the conversation which helped me formulate this essay. And thanks always to the Pleiades who saved my life.]

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THE BAKERY GHOST

(Click on image to enlarge.)

In September 1977 I moved to a lesbian land collective in Durango, Colorado. With my arrival, there were five us living in the Wimmin's House, two dykes with goats outside Pagosa Springs, and two more women in another direction on land which had once been a MNS collective. My move had been ardently encouraged by one of the Wimmin's House members, Sapphora, as part of a house power struggle I was clueless about.

I was 21 and combating suicidal feelings as a result of having been brutally dumped by my lover of five years, Astrid. Overnight Astrid had taken our daughter and moved in with a woman who had been in my conscious-raising group and used my confidences there as ammunition to court Astrid. Leaving Texas and my former community had come to feel necessary to my survival.



Sapphora had promised me a job working with her in a Durango bakery and deli, the New York Bakery. After I packed up everything and moved, I discovered the job wasn't actually available. I had been in college for four years (though I took incompletes the final semester when Astrid waljed out and never did get my degree) and had only sparse fast food work experience. Durango is a tourist town, and there simply were no jobs available during the winter months.

Sapphora had run away from home at 14 and survived on the streets, eventually becoming a heroin addict from which she was rescued by a cult. She lost the cult when she came out as a dyke, and she often operated from a base of desperate dishonesty. She was glib, smart, working class, and not concerned with what I might do for income.

Another working class woman in the collective, Mary, sussed out the situation and read Sapphora the riot act, telling her to help me find work or else. Sapphora was head of the night shift at the bakery, which was really just her and a young hippie man. They came in at 10 p.m. and made all the doughnuts and pastries that went out all over Durango. At dawn the bakery owner, Brad, came in and used the same facilities to make bread. Somehow Sapphora got the hippie boy fired and me brought in, lying about my experience. I didn't find out about it until weeks later.

The bakery was well over 100 years old, a long narrow brick structure on Main Street in the middle of downtown. There was a scrap of empty lot beside it that was used for parking. It had tall, stamped tin ceilings and uneven wooden floors, with a late 1800s feel to it. Sapphora and I had the place to ourselves, but we had to work at a hard pace to get everything done each night, especially since I had no baking skills whatsoever at first.

I was healthy and strong, however, and determined to win Sapphora's approval. We'd show up, turn on the doughnut fryers, don long white aprons, and put a cassette in the dough-flecked boombox we played at full blast in the back room. Every night, over and over, we listened to three tapes we'd made from LPs: One of Cris Williamson and Meg Christian, one of Alix Dobkin's two albums, and one of Fleetwood Mac with a little Linda Ronstadt and Emmy Lou Harris thrown in. I still can't hear "Landslide" or "Blue Bayou" without feeling like I can smell yeast.

I learned to mix 100 lbs of raised dough in the giant Hobart mixer in the middle room, after carrying a bag of flour that weight up the steep narrow stairs from the basement. I rolled it out on a conveyor belt, cut the raised rings, crullers, and bearpaws, and set trays to rise in the proofer while I mixed 50 lbs of cake doughnuts in the Hobart again. I'd fill the hopper over the fryer and pump out three dozen into the vat of oil at a time, turning them with long sticks and burning myself with splashes eevery night. As those cooled, I mixed a second 50 lbs of old-fashioneds and fried them as well.

By that time, my dough had risen. Sapphora had been busy shaping cinnamon rolls, danish, and eclairs from another 100 lbs of raised dough. I began frying my trays while she baked hers in a room-sized rotating oven in the middle room. A massive contraption could glaze four dozen items at a time with confectioners icing, and we took turns using it. All the maple and chocolate icing had to be done by hand, along with sprinkles and filling the eclairs. By the end of the first week, skin was beginning to peel from my hands and arms because of exposure to icing, and I thought I'd never eat another doughnut as long as I lived.

But I loved the muscles I was getting, that $65 a week I took home, and working nights. I slept until noon and had the house to myself each afternoon, when Sapphora left for town to do her schmoozing and everyone else was still at work. I read everything I could get my hands on about lesbian-feminism, classism, wicca, peer counseling, vegetarianism, anti-imperialism, and living on land. I wrote long journal entries, one or two poems a day, and letters to my mama. Astrid, shocked to the core that I had left instead of waiting for crumbs of her attention, actually agreed to let our daughter come visit me for a week at Christmas. I began to think I'd make it.

Sapphora and I would take a break halfway through our shift, firing up the grill and raiding the deli for anything that struck our fancy. The Wimmin's House was vegetarian and I was doing my best to adopt that lifestyle, but Sapphora secretly ate meat whenever she could. We wolfed down prime rib, ham steaks, pork chops or whole roasted chickens every night, along with artichoke hearts and home-fries slathered in sour cream. Despite my gorging, I steadily lost weight, which my other collective members attributed to the quinoa casseroles and sprout-heavy salads we had for House dinners.

Except on the drive to and from work, Sapphora and I didn't do a lot of talking. The music was too loud, for one thing, and we were also very busy at work. The back room where we did most of our tasks was open to the long middle room, and we kept everything but the front cafe area all lit up because it was chilly in there despite the fryers and ovens, and light helped us ignore snow and ice outside threatening our commute back into the La Platas where we lived.

When I noticed a flicker from the middle room in my right peripheral vision as I was chopping out doughnuts on the massive butcher-block table in the back room, I turned to look but saw nothing. It happened again a few minutes later, and again my direct gaze showed an empty middle room. I said nothing to Sapphora and forgot about it. For that night.

But the next night, and the one after that, I kept seeing motion across the middle room, a sense of something moving very fast at an angle from the ovens toward the far wall. It was nothing I could catch in time to get a clear look. By the third night, I had figured out it would stop by the time we took our lunch break at 2 a.m., and it wasn't starting until after midnight. I was scared, confused, and too embarrassed to bring it up to Sapphora.

A few nights later, I was frying with my back to Sapphora, who was cutting cinnarmon buns from a long roll with a bucher knife, working at her usual clip. Over the music I heard her yell "Son of a BITCH!" I wheeled around and saw her holding one hand with the other, blood dripping onto the floor. "I fucking cut my hand" she said, her pale Irish face even paler. I helped her to the grotty bathroom, where we washed her wound, decided it didn't need stitches (not that we had insurance anyway), and I bandaged it thickly.

She hesitated when it was time to walk back into the middle room. "I saw something" she said, her cheeks going pink. "I been seeing something in that other room. It caught me off guard tonight at the wrong moment."

I stared at her. "I've seen it too" I whispered.

"Don't shit me."

"I'm not" I said. "It darts across the room, right? From the ovens?"

"Yeah" she said, her blue eyes huge. "Right to left, over and over. For the last week or two."

"Not before? Not when you worked with the guy?" I asked.

"Nope. And not when I've helped Brad on the day shift, but then it's a zoo then in the middle room, anyhow. What -- what do you see?"

I swallowed. "Something -- it's not an animal. It's like a person, a short person. But not solid."

Sapphora nodded. "Whitish. And fast, she's really fast."

"She?"

"It's a woman" said Sapphora. "I'm so fucking glad you don't think I'm making this up, everything thinks I lie about everything."

I didn't know enough about her yet to respond to that one. "What are we going to do?"

"Don't tell anyone else" she said emphatically. "I don't want this getting back to Brad. Or the collective."

"It's a ghost, right?"

"I'd say so. Let's do some research about the building, maybe at the library." Sapphora pronounced it as libary. "And try to get a better look at her."

"She only comes part of the night -- shit, my doughnuts!" The smell of burning had just reached me. We went back to work, temporarily cheerful from the relief of a shared visitation. On Saturday I went to the library and dug around but turned up nothing -- I didn't have my research skills yet. Sapphora went to the bakery for her check and chatted casually with Brad, finding out when the building had been constructed and examining a few old photos he had of its interior from the turn of the century. We learned the ovens had not been in place long, another room used to occupy that space, and the far brick wall next to the back door also used to have an opening into a section of the bulding that had now been torn down, where the parking lot was now.

We had verified for ourselves the path taken by the ghost. It was, in fact, a woman, short. older than 40, with her hair tied back in a bun and wearing a dress to her ankles with an equally long apron over it. She was see-through and seemed oblivious to our presence. She emerged from the ovens at a near run, her thin shoulders hunched and her arms in front of her as if she was carrying something heavy, something not visible to us. She scurried across the room and melted into the brick wall.

Sapphora said she thought the ghost had been pulled forth by our "woman energy". She professed to not be scared of it any more. But I sure as fuck was. I didn't go into the middle room without stopping to look at the ovens first, to make sure I wouldn't collide with her. Or whatever such an interception would be -- the idea of her passing through me made me sick to my stomach.

A couple of nights later, Sapphora asked me to mix the custard for the eclairs. This involved carrying a 50 lb bag of yellow "mix" up from the basement, dumping it in the Hobart with a few gallons of milk from the walk-in, and standing at the giant floor mixer to turn it off and scrape down the bowl sides intermittently as the custard congealed. It was hypnotic watching the two-foot-long beaters rotate, and I stood there, leaning against the top of the Hobart, mesmerized and forgetting that the ghost's track went right beside me.

Until I felt a chill and a swish on the left. I was looking down, and I saw her feet, the hem of her apron and dress, pass inches from my own feet. Her shoes had high tops and were buttoned up, presumably black leather although the only color to her was grey-white, semi-transparent. Her apron corner gave a small flip from motion as it vanished into the bricks beside the Hobart.

I stood up, icy from terror. I walked numbly into the back room and said "You have to finish the custard."

"Why?"

"She walked right by me. I'm not going back out there." Sapphora laughed at me but went to turn off the mixer herself.

A week later, disaster struck. Brad announced with the off season, he didn't have enough pastry orders to justify keeping us both on the night shift. Come mid October, he was moving Sapphora to bread-making at dawn with him and I'd have to do the night shift on my own.

"I can't" I told Sapphora, pleading. "I don't know if I can handle the load, for one thing, but mostly I don't want to be alone with that thing."

"The load will be cut in half, no sweat, and she's no threat, she's just doing her job every night. She doesn't know she's dead." As if that was any comfort.

I didn't have an alternative, I was lucky to be kept on the job at all. I started entering the cold middle room from the back door each night trembling with fear. I made sure I had no reason at all to leave the back room between 1 and 2 a.m., and Sapphora was right about the work, pastry orders were cut in half. I had Alix and Stevie to keep me company, and I began grilling myself minute steaks at 2:30 each night -- never got tired of steak. My not-quite-opaque coworker kept to herself, running her trays across the room during her witching hour.

A couple of weeks later, past midnight, I heard pounding on the back door. It was the two dykes from Pagosa Springs, who had stayed in town for a performance and were going to crash in town because the roads were so bad. They decided to come visit me and cadge some coffee. They served themselves and returned to the back room where I was frosting maple raised with deft twists of my wrist. Pauley stood leaned against a shelf and Sue hopped up to sit on the end of the butcher block table as they told me about their evening's entertainment.

All of a sudden, Sue swore and leaped down from the table. "Somebody's here" she hissed, looking around for a blunt object.

I wasn't sure what to do. Sapphora and I had steadfastly kept our secret. But Sue was a loose cannon, and when she picked up a heavy rolling pin, I said "There's nobody out there."

"Yes there is" she whispered, "they were heading for the bathroom, I think."

"It's a ghost" I said. I told them all about it. They kept waiting for the punchline. Sue began to look wall-eyed, and when Pauley saw the ghost again a few minutes later, they abruptly left. Our whole circle of friends knew about the ghost by noon the next day.

I gained a little cachet among those who believed the ghost was real for my guts at working alone with it each night. I kept to my avoidance and it was just another part of the schedule, like timing the rising of dough.

Until one night in November, when I sat down at the little staff table in the middle room at 2:45 for my usual steak and potatoes. My back was to the ghost's path but I was a dozen feet away from her trajectory and the active hour was past. As I lifted a forkful of food to my mouth, I heard a long exhaled breath directly behind my right ear.

Nothing there, of course. I carried my food to the back room and ate standing up. Before I left that morning, I stood in the middle room and said into cold air "You can't come up behind me. I need this job and I can't do it if you scare me. Find another way to communicate with me if it's absolutely necessary, but really, I'd rather not have anything to do with you at all. Please."

In the spring, after thaw, Sapphora, Jude and I left the Wimmin's House to move to San Francisco. For all I know, the ghost is still pounding the floorboards on her slanted scurry from one non-existent room to another. Or maybe she was released when we stopped playing women's music every night.


Copyright 2010 Maggie Jochild.

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AS GOES IOWA...

(Therese Edell, circa 1978, photo by Toni Armstrong Jr.)

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lesbian-feminist singer/songwriter named Therese Edell toured women's communities and music festivals in the U.S. to admiring crowds. Often, she would stride on stage, her guitar slung over her back, and begin her set by holding up her hands in two O's, then bring her forefingers together in a point, while singing

Do you know what's round at both ends
High in the middle?
When I was a baby child
That was my favorite riddle


We dykes would cheer for Ohio, no matter where we had grown up. We knew Therese was from the Cincinnati feminist stronghold which had given us Crazy Ladies Bookstore, Dinah (originally Dinah Soar News), and which still contains the Ohio Lesbian Archives.

The fact is, much of what was best in the national lesbian/feminist culture of that era came from the Midwest. Also nationally known but originating from Ohio was Womenews, The American Negro Woman, and Working Women Newsletter (all from Cleveland); Women's Studies Review and lesbian mothers organizing in Columbus; plus the Feminist Health Fund Newsletter and waves of Socialist women's theory emerging from Yellow Springs. Michigan gave us the largest women's music festival (outside Hesperia), the annual MichFest; the sine qua non of lesbian news forums, Lesbian Connection (still publishing) from East Lansing; the influential Aradia Collective in Grand Rapids; Moving Out and Sojourner Third World Women's Research Newsletter from Detroit; Daily Dyke, Bridges Jewish Feminist Journal, Leaping Lesbian, Purple Star (from Radicalesbians), and several of the women who later formed The Furies from Ann Arbor. Other known hot spots for lesbian-feminist culture were Madison, Wisconsin (where Amazon, Wisconsin Tribal Women's News Najinakwe, Union Maid, and two women's science fiction journals, New Moon and Aurora, were published); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (home to the Bread and Roses Women's Health Center and Women of Color News); Lincoln, Nebraska (originator of Sinister Wisdom, still publishing); Lawrence, Kansas (publishing Monthly Cycle); Bloomington, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota (home to Maize Lesbian Land Journal, Sing Heavenly Muse, So's Your Old Lady, Hurricane Alice, Women's Braille Press Newsletter, and the Lesbian Insider/Insighter/Inciter); Champaign-Urbana, Illinois (home of the other national women's music festival); Chicago, Illinois (giving us the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, Women and Children First Bookstore, Mountain Moving Coffeehouse, Jane [a safe underground abortion service before Roe v. Wade], and Voices of the Women's Liberation Movement, the first national women's liberation newsletter); and Iowa City, Iowa (home to Ain't I A Woman?, the Iowa City Women's Press, Aunt Lute Books, Better Homes and Dykes, and the standout Common Lives/Lesbian Lives).

This is all prologue to me saying I'm not at all surprised that Iowa this week legalized lesbian/gay marriage in a matter-of-fact way which will likely stand without reversal until 2012. Common sense and fair play are, in fact, Midwestern values. I don't view any part of this country as expendable, hopeless, or a "fly-over" zone. Like so many other non-conforming people, I fled my home (Texas) as a young adult, moving to San Francisco to be a dyke's dyke for a dozen years, because the urban cities of this continent's margins are where we cluster. But I returned because I love my people of origin and I knew exile is often self-imposed. I've not regretted my choice.

I suspect all those women who created culture in the 1970s and who stayed rooted in the Midwest probably played a large role in making this victory possible. Community is much larger than we progressives often paint it to be. (Don't mistake that for me agreeing with the fractured view of community put forth by conservatism.) In addition, from Suze Orman to Ellen Degeneres to Rachel Maddow, it seems like suddenly lesbians are not just trendy but being viewed as beacons to be followed by the larger world. Honestly, this makes me nervous, but we'll see how it all pans out.

Vermont's passage of same-sex marriage rights seems headed for a veto by their governor, which is like trying to hold back the Mississippi each year with sandbags instead of moving cities away from the floodplain. But I want to make it clear that I don't see marriage rights as the most important issue which should be embraced by lesbians and gays in this country, and I don't view the changes occurring in this arena to be about lesbian/gay rights per se.

If lesbians and gays marry at the same rate as heterosexuals, this issue will directly affect the lives of only about 25% of us. (And let's admit here, it's much more likely to be lesbians marrying than gay men, which is why so many of those "first to get married" photos are of two women.) And of that 25% who might want to marry, there's another solid percentage who don't actually believe in the institution of marriage. I know plenty of hets my age who feel the same way. (Cue Brooklyn Bridge singing "The Worst That Could Happen"...)

Of much deeper consequence, I believe, to the lives of most lesbian and gay people is job protection, freedom from housing discrimination (including for retirees), and safeguarding our youth from violence/misinformation at school. I find it significant that polls indicate much more support for equality and basic rights in these areas, especially the first two, than for "marriage rights". I think it's been a tactical error to focus on precisely where the Right is able to do its best fund-raising, whipping up a frenzy of fear and hate about how we threaten their world.

However, despite that error, change she is a'comin. It will be portrayed, right and left, as a growing recognition that we deserve to have our love sanctified in matrimony. I'm not sure that's true. I think the definition of marriage has been under enormous pressure to change since World War II, and this is only one manifestation of a culture-wide struggle to revise an institution whose role has been crucial to maintaining control by the elite few. Divorce, birth control, refusal to marry, open marriage, reversal of anti-miscegenation laws, and a broad array of women's rights issues are other indicators of this sea change. And the Right stands in opposition to them all, which tells me (should tell you as well) how important the myth of "traditional" marriage is to the patriarchy.

I think government should remove itself from the business of marriage except as a civil contract that people can undertake to derive certain legal benefits such as choosing a coparent to your children, ensuring inheritance and medical decision-making protection, and other financial agreements. Holy matrimony should be left to religious entities and not confused with the legal contract. I think we should push for civil unions only from the state, for everybody, and if you want a church wedding on top of that, fine by me but it should carry no legal standing -- only that certificate you both swear to in front of a clerk will be binding.

I can imagine this kind of practical approach emerging from the Midwest, spreading from town to town like a fervor for the community-building opportunities of boys' bands. But then, some of my best friends are from Iowa. And Nebraska. And Ohio.

[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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