Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City

By Sinister Wisdom

How do lesbians live in the city, whether they live in the city by themselves or within intentional community? How does the city change what being a lesbian means? Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City explores these questions--and many more. The issue features creative work by:
Srestha Sen
Carina Julig
Roin Morigeau
t pomar
Rita Mookerjee
Margarita Meklina
As well as SPORTS--a selection of work from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, edited by Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom.
Plus a great selection of new lesbian writing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781944981426

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

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Table of Contents

Notes for a Magazine

Lesbians in the City

Notes for a Special Issue

Srestha Sen

The Sonneteer is Too Brown for this Town

Anna Mahrer

Butches and Bears – Being a Young Lesbian in San Francisco

Jessi Baumgartner

Dolce Vita

Carina Julig

Dyke March Road Trip

Tori Ashley Matos

Dancing on Christopher Street: August 23, 2018

Katie Rank

Minneapolis

Roin Morigeau

Past

t pomar

Bushwick Ave

If Only

Pietje Kobus

Dancing Queen

Arya F. Jenkins

Racing Light

Rebecca Herz

Gay Marriage in the Promised Land

Guru 1

Courtney Ludwick

Her

Rita Mookerjee

Tanka Trio for Center City

Kathryn Greenbaum

Untitled

Forrest Evans

Dying with Your Eyes Open

Erika Gisela Abad

City Leaving

Jaemara Phillips

Unsettled

Anna Arnold-Wallen

Welcome back

Amy Lauren

Love on the Brick Streets

Nancy Klepsch

I live in this city: thinking about Thoreau

Margaret Hughes

Appraisal

Margarita Meklina

Mushroom Man

Srestha Sen

my high school nemesis finds me on instagram & messages saying oh shit S, you still like, a fucking lesbo?

Katherine Fallon

DENVER 2006: CHIP, QUEER PROM

DENVER 2007: CHIP, DRAG BALL

Anita Revilla Tijerina

Free

Sports, A selection of work from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project

Merril Mushroom

Sports Dykes

Linda Yates

Hairy Hobbits

Barbara Esrig

Lavender Menace and Gainesville Dykes

B. Leaf Cronewrite and Drea Firewalker

Independent Women Played Softball in Kansas City

Kathleen Corky Culver

Sports and CR Groups

New Lesbian Writing

Batya Weinbaum

Notes from a Proud Southern Jew

Geri Gale

Crying Horror Show

K. A. Freedman

to my future wife: bear with me

Sammy Gibbons

Directions

Ashley Ensminger

To Stay Wild

Corinne Engber

Seraphim

Gloria Keeley

Undercurrent

Gemma Cooper-Novack

Once on a Ghost Ship [3]

Once on a Ghost Ship [5]

Once on a Ghost Ship [13]

Amanda Laughtland

(Im)permanent Ink

Joan Annsfire

When Your Lover Finds Another

Burning Promises

Dust and Disorder

Laura McGehee

Cold Mashed Potatoes

Phyllis St George

Your Hands

Aging Female Poet Attends Writing Retreat

Melissa Cannon

Buddha Belly

The Lovely Tufts

What If I Said?

Nicole Walley

Down Then Out

Marlee Miller

Femmes Loving Femmes (A List of Thoughts)

Even on 150 mg of Lamictal

Kristy Lin Billuni

Finding Roost

Nhung An

My Fingers remember

my mother doesn’t teach me mandarin

Exotic (adj)

Jessica L. Folk

A Recipe for Emotional Abuse

Chocolate Waters

First Rush

Cassie Premo Steele

I Show You How to Get Through

I Kiss you with a Question

Jessica McKenna

In NYC

Rachel Ann Girty

Sleep Paralysis, Accompanied by Hallucinations

Snapshot of Lesbian Love Celebration

Obituaries

Judith K. Witherow

Donna Allegra

Theatre Review

Book Reviews

Contributors

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Credits

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Back Issues

Back Cover

Notes for a Magazine

The final assembly of this issue of Sinister Wisdom is being completed as we enter what is anticipated to be one of the worst weeks of COVID-19. A month ago, I was returning from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, where I had a table for Sinister Wisdom and barked to passersby in the bookfair: Are you looking for the lesbians? When they smiled, I said, You found them ! That moment of light-hearted joviality seems very far away. I hope as this issue lands in your mailbox in July, we are all able to breathe freely, walk about our world, and feel less worried and scared about our collective future.

This issue, Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City, is actually three mini-issues. The indomitable Erika Abad approached me about guest editing an issue of writing by lesbians in cities with a particular focus on urban areas in addition to the major metropolises where we imagine vibrant lesbian life. She curated a wonderful collection of voices and images in response to the title.

When it came time to transform the material she had for the issue, there was a little extra space. At exactly that moment, Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom noted that the material they had on Sports from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project was not quite enough for full issue. I created a marriage between the two sets of materials—and then realized that I had excellent material from general submissions. I added that work under the rubric New Lesbian Writing to create this kinky, polygamous collection of lesbian voices. I hope you love every page of it.

The voices gathered in this issue of Sinister Wisdom reflects exactly the sorts of amalgams that I want for the journal. Sections edited by different lesbians, diverse works that reflect various attentions and concerns, and a reminder that lesbians are always turning to language and art to express our understandings of and visions for the world.

When I began editing Sinister Wisdom in 2010, many people regarded it as a quaint relic of a long-gone past, but its vibrancy today demonstrates the continued need for a literary space for lesbian voices. This issue, Sinister Wisdom 117, marks the forty-fourth anniversary of Sinister Wisdom. On July 4, 1976, Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines published the inaugural issue. With Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbian in the City, Sinister Wisdom continues to honor their work and the work of all of the editors, writers, artists, and volunteers who have made the journal possible. With this issue, Sinister Wisdom also imagines all the new work lesbians will create and Sinister Wisdom will publish in the future.

I thank you for subscribing and supporting Sinister Wisdom. Every issue demonstrates our need for these words and these images, collected and bound in these pages. We can only continue with your help and your support. Thank you.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer

July 2020

Corrections: Smart Sinister Wisdom readers noted two errors in A Generous Spirit: Selected Works by Beth Brant (Sinister Wisdom 114). One error is of omission and one error is of fact. Margaret Cruikshank wrote that she published A Simple Act in New Lesbian Writing (Grey Fox Press, 1984) and this citation was missing from the bibliography on page 193. I regret this oversight.

Another reader noted that on page 14 in footnote 6, Winnipeg is incorrectly noted as being in Saskatchewan when in fact it is in Manitoba. Many apologies.

Both errors will be corrected in future printings. Thank you for bringing them to our attention!

Lesbians in the City

Notes for a Special Issue

As the Landdykes issue’s themes show, we don’t need the city to build community. Some of us retreat to communes, to living and caring for the earth without technology. Still, there are those of us—as indicated: who—as much as we love gardening and camping—rely on multi-laned roads, freeways, dyke bars, non-profits, and public transportation as sites in which our love for wommin flourishes. I met some of these wommin in Portland, OR; they modelled a dual landyke and urban queer existence of composting, gardening radicals relying on bikes and public transit to build community. I saw flyers in North Portland recruiting wommin loving wommin to join these communities, a dream deferred for the love I have of teaching, cafes, and books.

While I intentionally aimed to complete this issue earlier, the lack of diversity of cities raised concerns for me. We don’t all live in New York or California. We live in Las Vegas, NV; we live and love in Nashville, TN, Austin, TX. I knew this much as I proposed the issue, having lived in Chicago, IL, and Portland, OR. As I was wrapping up this issue, I came across an article by Amy L. Stone PhD which discussed the disparate concentration of scholarly research in sociology that focused on coastal cities. The title of the article, The Geography of Research on LGBTQ Life: Why Sociologists Should Study the South, rural queers, and ordinary cities, is pretty self-explanatory. Reviewing LGBT research published from 1996-2016 in major journals of sociology, Stone found an overrepresentation on scholarship on East and West Coast cities—New York and Los Angeles specifically—while an underrepresentation of the Southeast and cities smaller than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (Sociology Compass 12.11 (2018). Sinister Wisdom has had a number of issues focusing on the South, one of which was called Landykes of the South: Women’s Land Groups and Lesbian Communities in the South. The spaces we create, though, often become starting points for community members whose identities started off with the L before they grew into others. Some of them/us—another area of research scholars can explore—relied on moving and the city to explore who else they could be.

Several friends, former significant others started off as lesbians. For those who no longer solely identify with the term lesbian, they/we need to think about what kind of introduction to give when it could potentially harm them/us and the people we love. Sometimes the L word is safer for them. Sometimes it is safer to use a word and an identity that can be counted in the census; for many of us, that’s the only we count and/or matter to others. And, as much as we/they recognize that safety, we/they know it’s tricky among those who fought to be wommin loving wommin. Sinister Wisdom’s basic call for submissions has evolved to include them/us, even if/even as members of our community do not recognize them/us as part of their community.

I am grateful for Julie Enszer’s support for this issue. Grateful that Sinister Wisdom acknowledges that not all wommin who love wommin were biologically ‘born wommin,’ and that sometimes, we love other genders in the radical ways that lesbians who aimed to visible encouraged and supported us to love wommin. Some of my friends were reluctant to submit for the same reason one contributor confirmed that I would accept her piece because she identifies as a bisexual. I told that contributor yes. As a woman who loves women, gender nonbinary people, and people who now identify as men, it felt pertinent to put an issue together that allowed them to be in the conversation the lesbian community reflects on how to support individuals who live in a world where gender norms and gender binaries are consistently being disrupted.

There exist queer youth who insist on using ‘they’ as their pronoun before puberty. Educating people, like my editorial assistant Ashley Glenn Smith, about the existence of Sinister Wisdom, I beg the question, where are the institutions built on the premise to promote love, desire and pleasure among similarly gendered people going when young people need different/more words? In what ways, as words and desires and expressions evolve beyond the binary, can we honor the role lesbian as an identity, as a movement, has had in the potential for ways to love, to be seen, and to see one another?

When Katherine Fallon’s poems crossed my path, I knew that they spoke to part of the need for this issue. In Chip, Drag Ball, the narrator’s realization that Chip was not in drag at the ball where they were performing serves as a testament to the ways in which the affirmative LGBT spaces our elders created allow us to push beyond what they imagined possible for us.

The city isn’t perfect, as Mushroom Man, and The Sonneteer is too Brown for this Town, remind us. We still encounter cismen entitled to consume us; cismen often feel empowered by a male dominant society to expose their presumed authority over us. Lesbian, bisexual queer femme, and gender nonbinary people of color still encounter racism among our queer communities in ways we still need to discuss. Not all gay bars include us, even as we lose dyke bars, even as in this political moment, we strive to leave communities that persecute us in search of environments known for our dominance.

Erika Abad

July 2020

The Sonneteer is Too Brown for this Town

Srestha Sen

Across this red rock, I wait

for my cigarette to burn.

I don’t stop

any obsessions here

but I try

not to miss you

too much all the time

a little sometimes.

It works till it doesn’t.

Here, where habits are hard

all brash bodies become

you: swallow & salt.

When I take strangers

home, I am always grateful.

Yesterday, a man told me

I’ve never had Indian before

his friend murmured

Is that racist? Me too & I said

Thank you sir Thank you ma’am

so I could keep walking home.

Butches and Bears – Being a Young Lesbian in San Francisco

Anna Mahrer

In the beginning of 2015, the Lexington Club, San Francisco’s only lesbian bar, closed its doors for good. I was a student at San Francisco State University at the time, not yet identifying as lesbian but definitely identifying as queer, very much pre-occupied with the fervent adolescence of what would soon become my flannel-wearing, masculine-leaning personal brand of lesbianism. The news about the Lex saddened me, but as a college student who felt like an ant dropped into the middle of Times Square and who spent most of my time alone, I didn’t understand the full extent of the loss.

San Francisco: the queerest city in the world. San Francisco, home of the Castro, the land of the gays, a lively and colorful neighborhood where restaurants abound and bars overflow, where folks are free to be as gay as they want in whichever way they please. At the district’s heart is a giant rainbow flag, the iconic emblem representing the varied and diverse members of the LGBT community. And while the community is indeed diverse, it feels to me that the same cannot be said about the Castro.

The Castro is and has been for a long time, a place for gay men. If you are a gay woman you will be welcomed, but will quickly find that you are a stark minority––men fill the streets during the day and the clubs at night, gyrating together to bass-heavy bangers amidst the hairy, sweat-glazed ass cheeks of thonged male go-go dancers. Don’t get me wrong, this is exactly my idea of a great night out, but if you’re a lesbian looking for the company of other lesbians, the Castro is not really the place to go.

So where is the place for gay women? If you are a lesbian in San Francisco, where do you go? The answer used to be the Lex. But when its doors closed, lesbians once again found themselves without a space, needing to find other ways to preserve our already tenuously bound community.

As a young lesbian in the Bay Area I find myself adrift in a sea of queers––non-binary queers, gays, bisexuals, trans folk, pansexuals, you name it. I wouldn’t have it any other way––being in a city filled with queers feels like home. But in a society where queers abound I