Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations

By Alexis Clements

Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Sinister Wisdom in 2016. Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations explores different variations of lesbian-feminism. The truth is that women have not stopped loving women, and there is no indication that phenomenon will ever go away, but the language and culture of those women remain as variable today as they were in the twentieth century.
Another truth is that patriarchy and its attendant misogyny continue to drive people of all genders to diminish women and those who align themselves strongly with the feminine.
What remains less clear today is the political piece of the equation--where and how does feminism link up with lesbianism today?
Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations has many voices—old and new—exploring vital questions to our lives today. Creative work in Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations is by Elvis B, Susana Cook, Leah Gilliam, Trish Salah, Stacy Szymaszek, Fran Winant, and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Aug 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944981174

Book preview

FrontCover.jpg

Sinister Wisdom 101 - Variations

Editor: Julie R. Enszer

Guest Editor: Alexis Clements

Copyright © 2016 Sinister Wisdom, Inc.

Distributed by Smashwords

Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Letters to the Editor 

Notes for a Special Issue

Leah Gilliam

Lesberation

Merril Mushroom

In a Manner of Speaking

Erica Cardwell

Excerpt from Delilah

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz

Performing Ourselves at the Center 

Elvis B.

What Does Lesbian Mean?

Clarity Haynes

The Breast Portrait Project

Robin A. níCatháin

Ain’t I a Woman?

Rae Theodore

Me and Gloria Steinem

Judith Masur, Ruth Hurvitz, Corky Wick

Mothertongue Feminist Theater Collective, 1976–Present

Alexis Clements

Reflecting on Rivers of Honey

Barbara Ruth

Womanifesto #27 I Am Waiting

Susana Cook

Porch Sitting 2015, WOW Café Theater, Created by Lois Weaver

Imani Sims

Indicator Lights

BME II

Trish Salah

Halving and Being

Alexis Danzig

Bad Lesbian

Dale Wolf

The Message You Are Delivering

Liena Vayzman

The dyke bar is dead. Long live the dyke bar. Performing

history in Macon Reed’s Eulogy for the Dyke Bar

Fran Winant

A Life of Constant Translation

Stacy Szymaszek

From A Year from Today

Sara Jane Stoner

(After) Sleeping Beauty and the Beast

Ariel Speedwagon Federow and Damien Luxe

Rocky & Rhoda’s Lesbian Past

Book Reviews

Contributors

Advertisements

Notes for a Magazine

Lesbian-feminism. The delicious concatenation of two ideas, two embodiments, twinned theories, dual expressions that together create something greater than what exists separately. Oh, I admit, I am under the spell of lesbian-feminism in its glory and its strife, its love and pain, its present, its memory, its future.

Yes, I believe lesbian-feminism is present today and has a vibrant future. Lesbian-feminism exists in the work of women to find sustainable, environmentally conscientious solutions for human-created problems. Lesbian-feminism exists in theatre and art that nurture and sustain us. Lesbian-feminism exists in politics, in the pragmatic work of people who dig in deep to change conversations and initiate new ones that seek to care for more people in our country. Lesbian-feminism is in the pages of this journal—and in the future we create together.

When I became editor of Sinister Wisdom, my dream was to find and build an audience of young women for the journal while sustaining its devoted and supportive audience, the audience that had nurtured it for then thirty-four years. Some stories about feminism and lesbian-feminism would have us believe such an audience is impossible that generational wars, ferociously ever-present, were the undoing of both feminism and lesbianism, not even considering the revolution that the two united imagine. As usual, reports of its demise were premature and overstated. That dream of a multi-generational audience, of building many entry points to thinking, writing, reading, and engaging with lesbian-feminism? With this issue and other recent and future issues, it becomes a reality.

In Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations, Alexis Clements gathers vibrant and exciting perspectives on lesbian-feminism. Some contributors to this issue have sustained us for many years and multiple generations—for example, Merril Mushroom and Fran Winant—others offer perspectives from a new generation discovering, inventing, and reshaping new forms of lesbian-feminism. Clements combines oral history and testimony about lesbian cultural institutions such as the Mothertongue Feminist Theater Collective with interviews with working artists like Amanda Curreri. Playful, thoughtful, and provocative art by Elvis B and Leah Gilliam works in conversation with poetry by Stacy Szymaszek and Barbara Ruth. Within these pages are wonderful bits of language, art, and thought, all inviting us into a broader conversation about the variations of lesbian-feminism. Alexis is herself an important writer and documentary filmmaker; she has done an extraordinary job of assembling thoughtful and provocative conversations about lesbian-feminism today. If Sinister Wisdom 101: Variations has done it job, it will surprise and delight, provoke and challenge, anger and satisfy.

Exactly forty years ago, the founding editors and publishers of Sinister Wisdom, Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson, released the first issue of Sinister Wisdom on the United States’s bicentennial, July 4, 1976. They wanted to initiate a new, sinister conversation about lesbianism and feminism and separatism, and the philosophical, the metaphysical, and the material. They did not know how women would react to their first issue, their second issue, their third issue, but they promised to publish three and mail them to anyone who sent money for a subscription. The next year the re-upped their promise. Each year since then Sinister Wisdom publishes a few issues and mails them to subscribers. It is now a forty-year conversation. Thank you for being part of it.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

July 2016

Correction: I inadvertently omitted Jeri Hilderley and Janet Mayes from the list of Sinister Wisdom contributors. I apologize for this oversight and thank them for their support.

Letters to the Editor

Dear Julie R. Enszer,

In response to the package and letter you send me with apologies for adapting my painting for the 100th issue of Sinister Wisdom.

What a shocking surprise. I am happy to see my painting. This image brings me joy and strength every time I see it again. I painted it from life at the Instituto de Allende in Mexico in 1966. As I looked for my name under credits for cover art I realized that it was omitted. You have discredited the creative act of art, the image you chose to visually represent Sinister Wisdom. My signature appears on the right side of the painting in the original size. But your shrunken version renders it unreadable.

This woman, who stood in front of a large student-body inspired me. She was strong and beautiful. She stood rooted to the ground, secure as if growing right out of the earth as the trunk of a tree. I was happy to do her justice and I was happy to live up to my talent that morning. Catherine and Harriet loved this image.

After Catherine Nicholson resigned from UNCC, she and Harriet Desmoines envisioned a lesbian magazine. It became a reality when Sinister Wisdom was published out of Catherine’s home in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1976. At Catherine’s plea for cover art I was moved to donate my painting to their effort to launch Sinister Wisdom. Of course I was credited for my cover art. We found a printer with some-ones help. Catherine asked me to accompany her to the printer. Was it fear of rejection of a lesbian magazine or was it the naked women on the cover? I don’t remember. But the printer took the job and we went to print.

I was in my late thirties when I took my children to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where I studied life drawing, painting and stone lithography. They learned Spanish, made silver jewelry and made wonderful papier mache art. At the end of our semester each summer, my husband joined us for a vacation.

I am now 89 years old. I have published my memory Aftershocks, my story of persecution, my art and my family whose mystery turned out to be a relentless but gratifying search for me. In the end I prevailed and discovered the hidden truth.

I would appreciate if you would print my letter with your apology in your next issue. It will help me celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the painting of 1966 that launched Sinister Wisdom in 1976 and was used again on the 100th issue of Sinister Wisdom in 2016.

Greetings, Marianne Lieberman, April 22, 2016

P.S. Volume 1, issue 2 of Sinister Wisdom also has my art on the cover and a drawing on page 19 for the section of Aesthetics.

Editor’s Note: I extend my sincerest apologies to Marianne Lieberman for not securing advance permission to use the image and for not crediting it appropriately. These actions were a terrible mistake on my part; I apologize profusely to Marianne Lieberman. I am grateful to Marjorie Larney for emailing me about the image and connecting me with Marianne Lieberman.

Dear Julie,

We Lesbians, in our amazing diversity, find different subjects interesting—or not. I’m grateful for the recent focus on specifically Southern Lesbian-Feminist activism during the 1970s, because very little in this area has been recognized or recorded. Lesbian-Feminist activists of this time, even from the South, even separatists, have influenced our positions today. Their names are important, as are their stories. Unless these are told, their work will not be known, and this part of our herstory will be lost.

Over the decades, Sinister Wisdom has published on a wide range of topics. The editors have been willing to consider any ideas suggested by readers and are wonderfully supportive of those who undertake the work of putting together a special issue. I am looking forward to the next forty years.

Warmly, Merril [Mushroom]

Editor’s Note: Thank you, Merril, for your note and kind words. I look forward to the next

Notes for a Special Issue

Lesbian feminism is not easy to figure out today. I wasn’t there, but I gather it wasn’t the clearest thing back in the 1970s either.

Over and over in conversations with women who were there in the 1970s or a bit after, I hear people saying or implying that lesbian identity is being erased. For many of those women,