WHEN IT CHANGED

The Ghost of Sisterhood Past has paid me a startling visit...

In 1977 I moved to Durango, Colorado to join a lesbian-separatist land collective there. It was a brave and heady experiment on my part, and from that choice, I became an intermittent vegetarian, began learning about classism, turned into a children's rights advocate, learned about matriarchies and goddess-based religions, moved from feminism into lesbian-feminist revolution, became trained in peer counseling and the work of undoing my conditioning, and returned to writing poetry in earnest (I wrote over 300 poems in 1978).

A roller coaster of a year.

On March 22, 1978 (just over 30 years ago), I moved with two of my collective members to San Francisco, in search of expanded lesbian revolutionary horizons. (Plus, I was hoping for a new girlfriend.) I've stated in other scraps of memoir that San Francisco was not my first choice (somewhere in the Oregon Women's Land network was), and my persuasion to that eventual location was based on three factors: something I/we read in Lesbian Connection about an anti-rape vigilante group in the Bay Area; something I/we read (perhaps in Lesbian Tide?) about work with lesbian teenagers in San Francisco; and something I/we read in DYKE: A Quarterly. I've been unable to remember the content of the latter influence, only the printed source.

(Oregon Women’s Land Trust Meeting, 1970s, © Ruth Mountaingrove)

Those of you who are reader of my Great American Lesbian Novel Ginny Bates will recognize elements from the book in my life story here.



That year, Lesbian Connection had a story about how a group of women (feminists to be sure, lesbians by intimation though not necessarily) were tracking down men who had committed rapes but gotten off on technicalities of some sort. In the first act of retaliation, they broke into the guy's house, overpowered him, castrated him (and somebody in the group had medical training, because he did not die from it), painted his genitals purple with gentian violet, and dumped him, bound and unconscious, on the steps of the county hospital with "rapist" emblazoned on his chest.

The ensuing hue and cry consumed the city. Far more media attention and governmental outrage was devoted to this than to any rape, however vicious and premeditated.

The second time the group struck, they beat the guy up (focusing on the genitals), did the purple staining and labeling, and again dumped him naked in a public place. The liberal white boys in the area went berserk, and apparently could not think or talk of anything else. (Wonder why.)

(© by the unmistakeable Jill Posener)

The third time they broke into a known offender's house, they were all wearing T-shirts under their jackets which read CASTRATE RAPISTS. When they took off their coats, standing with silent menace in a ring around the guy, he passed out. When he woke up, he was naked in public with a purple crotch and RAPIST on his chest.

Ditto for the fourth guy. Men were beginning to live in terror, especially men who knew they were rapists. (What a wide cast that net covers is up for speculation.)

When my two thinking-about-moving housemates and I read this story, our instanteous reaction was that we wanted to be in that vigilante group. We had all orginally met each other at a major anti-rape endeavor in the Dallas/Fort Worth area called the Kitty Genovese Project. We would not be able to just visit San Francisco and try to hook up with the group, however. Their identify was a deep secret. But if we lived there in the Bay Area, made the right personal connections, maybe we could find a way in.

The second draw for San Francisco was that the city/county had set up a foster parenting program for lesbian and gay runaway teens showing up there without a home or resources. Like a few other major metropolitan areas in the U.S., San Franciso was a magnet for any kid who came out early in a locale where being lesbian/gay was not a safe option (which was most of the country then). A social worker named Sue Saperstein had somehow persuaded a SF government body to fund placing these runaways in foster homes headed by stable, well-vetted lesbians and gays. The three of us talked over providing such a refuge. I had been an out teenager and was a coparent, another was also a coparent, and the third had been a teen runaway who nearly died on the streets. It was an issue close to our hearts.

But the third arrow which had directed me to the Bay Area remained partially obscured to my memory, except that I thought it had something to do with a discussion which arose from reading our household copy of DYKE: A Quarterly. Obscured, that is, until last week.

(Prepublication photo for DYKE -- Liza Cowan is back left; front right is Alix Dobkin and to her right is Penny House; © Liza Cowan)

In the last year, I have become friends with Liza Cowan, one of the founders of lesbian separatism, a major player in lesbian-feminism way back when, and the co-editor of DYKE. We got together online and have burned up the wires with talk ever since. It's ironic that we never met in person, given the crossovers in our community connections. I remembered getting a postcard from Liza and her coeditor, Penny House, at one point when I wrote them a letter to ask a question about why they had named their publication company "Tomato" (I still have the postcard somewhere). I put Liza into my novel, Ginny Bates, before I ever established a personal relationship with her because Liza was a famous figure then in the lives of like-minded lesbians. The relationship of my characters Myra and Ginny with the herstorical Liza Cowan is entirely typical.

(Table of contents page for DYKE #6)

Last week, Liza was rooting through her old copies of DYKE, searching for the answer to some other question regarding lesbian-feminist herstory, when she came upon a Letter to the Editor in the last issue of DYKE ever published, the Animal Issue, DYKE #6, Summer 1978. The letter was responding to an issue which had talked about Jewish lesbians and was written sometime earlier, likely the winter of 1978. It was from Meg Barnett in Durango, Colorado. Yep, me. And it's not just a perfect snapshot of who I was at that time (a snapshot which moves me deeply), it solves a mystery. I reproduce it for you here exactly:



Dear Liza and Penny,

What an issue! The best yet. It created a lot of discussion between us here and was read cover to cover by whichever of us could lay her hands on it. In particular, I was moved to alter or form opinions on the subject of transsexuals and Jewish Lesbians. I had categorized being Jewish with belonging to a religion, and I had no more tolerance for it than I had for Christianity (though I spent a lot more time denouncing Christianity because it is so much more pervasive and destructive). Now I see it as a culture, separate from the patriarchal monotheism that bears the same name; and, even more important, I recognize my own ignorance as a form of anti-Semitism that I must correct. Though I certainly don't expect you to have to use your energy in educating me about a culture that has ben denied to me (partly through my own acceptance of that denial), as a result of the patriachy's insistent division of us into enemy forces, still, I'd like to see further articles on how the ways of life non-majority groups has played a role in the development and identity of wimmin from those groups.

As for transsexuality (is there such a state of being?), I haven't given much thought to it. I had lumped it in with faggotry, transvestism, etc. as categories that the patriarchy associated with dykes just because we were all different from Ozzie and Harriet. As part of my refusal to belong to such a collection of categories, I avoided analysis of areas that weren't immediately pressing on my existence as a dyke. However, I am learning that the tiny number of areas that seem unrelated to me grow smaller every day -- what a revolution we are building! Your views were astute and blunt, and have whetted my appetite for more.

I loved the piece on Lesbian hobos. I think it's one of the most significant reclamations of herstory to be written -- it is appropriate that Dyke published it. All in all, it will be very hard to wait for your next issue.

Meg Barnet (sic)


What's most impressive to me about this letter is how clearly I already had my voice then, at age 22. But equally of note is that it marks, definitively, the point at which I realized my profound ignorance about Jewish culture AND my decision to overcome this ignorance. I could not, at that time, name a Jew I knew personally. (Hard for me to imagine now, but it's true.) And when Liza called me to read me this letter, a memory came back to me.

As a result of the Jewish lesbian question sparked by DYKE, I had a long conversation with Sapphora, one of the housemates who was trying to persuade me to move to San Francisco. We had gone to the Chief Diner in Durango, a place where we were sure to not run into any of the other lesbians we knew for a couple of reasons: (1) It was a diner, serving the lesbian-feminist version of tref, and (2) it had a giant neon sign of a stereotypical Plains Indian chief, completely politically offensive. Once a week, we sneaked away for a meal here to talk over things we couldn't bring up elsewhere. We had both been raised poor/working class, so diners were comfortable for us. In addition, we could order from the breakfast menu all day long, and we would each get a minute steak, eggs over easy, hashed browns, and a fountain Coke. In our world, two of those four items were strictly forbidden (meat and Coke), and a third, hashed browns, were not on the generally approved list. A rule-breaking meal for rule-breaking conversations.

(Chief Diner on North Main, Durango, Colorado)

But after that issue of DYKE came out, I now recall confessing to Sapphora my ignorance and my determination to overcome it. She began pointing out how many of the leaders in feminism and lesbian-feminism were Jews. I knew about Alix and Liza. I hadn't realized that many of the Furies and Radicalesbians, founders of Olivia and a whole array of poets and essayists, were also Jews. I can remember sitting in that booth, mid afternoon, sweet caffeine hitting my system and reeling from an entire set of connections I'd never made.

At some point, Sapphora saw her chance. She was extraordinarily good at manipulating me. She said "You know, that woman Sue Saperstein who's heading up the foster program for teen dykes? That's a Jewish name."

"Really?" I said. I wanted to know how she could tell, but I was feeling a little raw about my stupidity.

"There's a huge Jewish dyke presence in San Francisco, ya know. Only place where there's more is New York" said Sapphora casually.

(Inside the Chief Diner, Durango, Colorado)

And that's that did it, sisters and brothers. That's how my course got charted. It may have been a con job, but it was an honest one: I did land in a thick community of Jewish dykes, and I was never happier. I didn't just correct my ignorance, I transformed myself into the next best thing to a Jew, the fiercest ally on the planet, and in turn, those women, my sisters, gave me the remaining bulk of my political and social education. It made me who I am today.

(Sue Saperstein in recent years)

Within a week of moving to San Fran, by the way, I did locate Sue Saperstein at a BACABI event where she spoke. I fell for her, head over heels. She was unbelievably beautiful, and passionate in her sense of justice. She was also ten years older than me, and while it must have been obvious how smitten I was, she managed to gently sidestep all my romantic longing even as I joined every group she ever attended.

(Maggie a year after moving to the Bay Area from Colorado, at Bean Hollow Beach)

So there's the story, morning glory. Thanks, in varying degrees, to Liza and Penny, Sapphora, and Sue Saperstein for getting me from A to B. Thanks to our generation for making connections every way we could. And thanks to me for choosing to never stop growing.

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CABIN FEVER

At the end of August 1977, I moved to a lesbian-separatist land collective outside of Durango, Colorado. The Wimmin's House, as it was called, was situated on the road which ran between Hesperus, the ghost down of Mayday, and an arm of the La Platas that held Parrott's Peak. We had a log cabin with (barely) four bedrooms (one was a converted store-room), a wood stove, our own well, a chicken house and run, and a double garage that was mostly filled with potting wheel and kiln plus our assorted gear.

It began snowing at this elevation (around 11,000 feet) in early October. A snow plow tended to make it down our county road at regular enough intervals to keep us connected to town, but we had to get to the road from our long driveway. Between the five of us living there, we had four vehicles, an old Toyota, an old Datsun, a new Honda Civic, and a small blue Ford pick-up, named respectively Emma, Emily, Amaryllis, and Susan B. Our jobs were in towns 10-15 miles to the west and east of where we lived, and our work shifts sprawled around the clock, so carpooling was difficult. Mostly we used our own vehicles, which meant keeping the driveway clear enough to hold four cars.

Two of the women in the collective, Kathy and Mary, had grown up in the Northeast where snow was a fact of life. The other three of us were Southerners, two from Texas. We sunbirds were also newcomers to the collective. We allowed Mary and Kathy to dominate collective decisions that had to do with the climate, though not without arguing and complaining. They said it would take an hour of shoveling by each of us on a daily basis from October through April or May to keep the drive clear. I was horrified to discover they were correct.

I worked nights and got home around dawn. When I woke up, around 11:00, I'd make breakfast, blasting the stereo because I was alone in the house, then put on a T-shirt and overalls and head outside to do my share of the shoveling. By January, the drifts were almost up to the eaves around the house and snow walls at shoulder height lined the drive. I worked in a T-shirt because I would very quickly work up a sweat.

One of the house rules was no alcohol. Two of the women who lived there came from alcoholic families, and one of them was a recovering junkie. I was 21 and neither mature or well-educated on the subject. I kept a case of Coors hidden in a snowbank behind the garage, and when I shoveled, I'd drink a beer or two, sticking my can in the snow to dig out a strip, then taking a swig, all the way down the expanse.

Mary, if you're reading this, I apologize.

By Christmas, tensions in the house were at fever pitch. One member of the most long-term and established couple was itching to have an affair with a member of the other couple, much newer and unsettled. Our two closest friends in town, another dyke couple, were undergoing renovation and moved into our living room for a few weeks, and I was in hot pursuit of one of them. She was playing around with me but not quite breaking the rules.

In addition, we did total income sharing, and our class backgrounds ranged from blue-blooded Northeastern independently wealthy to raised poor white trash junkie. Discussions about money were, well, almost indescribable. There was a strong socialist underlay -- the collective had begun with women who came out as lesbians from a MNS (Movement for a New Society) commune. We all did Re-evaluation Counseling, and house rules (in addition to no alcohol, drugs or men) were no meat, sugar, or processed foods.

The Northerners said getting a snowblower was out of the question. It was a waste of gas, horrible on the environment, and there were the five of us, hale and hearty, to do the shoveling. End of discussion.

It was actually a very healing place for me. They were kind and taught me worlds. Still, when the other two Southerners/working class folks began talking about maybe moving on, I felt like my family was breaking up but I knew I'd go with my own kind rather than stay without them.

We discussed our possible destinations over illicit diner meals in town, over hash browns and cheeseburgers and Coca-Colas whenever our work shifts allowed convergence. We were drawn to the West Coast. Articles we read in Dyke: A Quarterly and Lesbian Tide, as well as Lesbian Connection, made us focus on L.A., San Fran, Seattle, or part of the Oregon women on land movement. I was still hoping all the conflict could be resolved, the couples could work out their longings without messing up anything and we could find out what summer was like in our valley.

Then, around the first of March, I woke up to howling winds and no visibility outside. I had to shove my dog out the back door, where she promptly pissed on the step and ran back inside. When the phone rang, it was one of my housemates saying the road was impassable, this was a serious blizzard, and everyone would be staying in town. I was on my own. Not long after I hung up, the electricity went out. When I tried to call for help, I discovered the phone was out as well.

I found candles and lit a few, then, reluctantly, blew out all except one -- I didn't know how long I'd need them for light. I'd be warm enough, because of the wood stove, and I made a pallet on the living room floor to sleep. With the electricity out, there was no running water from the wellhouse, but I could and did melt snow in a pan on the wood stove. I made what meals I could and lived near the stove, reading by candlelight, my dog and cat keeping me close company.

The blizzard lasted almost three days. What finally did me in was the wind, the shrieking incessant wail of it. I wasn't sleeping well, and I began to hallucinate that I was hearing things at the windows. Specifically, sasquatch. I began sitting in the dark so they couldn't see me.

My memory's a little hazy about the sequence of events after that. At some point, I decided to make a break for it. I put on my parka, grabbed my car keys, picked up my dog and began fighting my way through the drifts from the back door to my Honda. I wasn't taking my dog with me because I couldn't leave her behind -- I did leave my cat behind. No, she was going to be my sacrifice if a sasquatch attacked -- I'd toss her to the bigfoot and make my getaway.

I was completely gonzo.

Fortunately, my car was close to the back door. I couldn't get the door open, it was frozen shut, and finally I had to set my dog down in a snowbank -- she screamed in terror -- to bang at the icy door with my gloved hands. When it opened, I did have the sense to retrieve my dog. Once inside the car, her shivering and moaning in the seat beside me, it started right up but wouldn't move an inch, completely packed in by snow. I raged and tried to rock myself out of my stuck spot with violent gear shifting, but no go. I sobbed for a while, then grabbed my dog and, mercifully, found my way back to the house.

Six hours later, the phone rang again -- service had been restored. It was a housemate who worked at the same bakery that I did calling to say our boss had a plow on his jeep and was willing to try to come get me, if I wanted to work that night. After a minute of conversation with me, she changed her mind about my being able to work but kept repeating help was on its way, just stay in the house and wait.

I don't remember being rescued. I do remember winding up in some warm, bright house in town, with people I didn't know, eating real food and keeping the lights on for a couple of days even while sleeping. I wasn't much able to talk about what had happened, and the Northerners I lived with didn't seem to understand why on earth I had broken like that. But someone from Colorado said it was cabin fever, and I could easily have died.

After that, I pledged myself wholeheartedly to the move. We pooled our tax refunds and settled on San Francisco. I drove into the city up 101 on March 28, 1978, taking the Mariposa exit to marvel at flowering trees and clear skies for a few minutes before trying to find the flat my friends had rented that week on Brosnan Street.

A month later, when I called back to Durango, I found out the two left at the house had purchased a snowblower. They also said bears had been spotted in our back yard.

I refused to buy or wear a coat in San Fran. I dressed in removable layers, like any good dyke, and used public transpo which kept my blood flowing. On Christmas Eve, Joan Baez always gave a free concert on the steps of City Hall, and we'd stand in the clear night, arms linking, singing

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario;
Con à l las palabras que pienso y declaro:
Madre, amiga, hermana, y luz alumbrando
La ruta del alma del que estoy amando.

(Maggie at Bean Hollow Beach, south of San Francisco, 1980)

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