Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory 1968-1994

By Sinister Wisdom

Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory 1968-1994
Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom, Guest Editors
Interviews with:
• Byllye Avery
• Pat Hussain
• Calla and Laurose Felicity
• Garnett Harrison
• Founders of SONG

Creative Work By

Corky Culver
Merril Mushroom
Kate Ellison
Gail Reeder
Lenny Lasater

And More!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sinister Wisdom
• Release date: Mar 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781944981556

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

Merril Mushroom and Rose Norman

Notes for a Special Issue

Kathleen Corky Culver

The South

Rose Norman

And So It Begins: Gainesville, Florida: Home of the First

Women’s Liberation Group in the South

Kathleen Corky Culver

Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Memoir

Into the Grueling Duelings of Consensus Dances

Sweet Meditation

Barbara Ester

Inside Miami’s Lesbian Culture

A Trail of Dykes: Miami Daze

Ronni Sanlo

Speaking Truth to Power: Florida [Lesbian & Gay Civil Rights]Task Force (FTF)

Edie Daly

Salon in St. Petersburg, Florida: A Living Prose Poem

Barbara Esrig

The Gainesville Women’s Health Center 1974–1997

Margaret Parrish

Kicking Ass Is the Greatest High! A Founder’s Story

Pam Smith

Our Bodies, Our Empowerment: A Counselor and Director’s Story

Barbara Esrig

A Nurse’s Experience in a Progressive Women’s

Health Center

Robin Toler

Byllye Avery: The Birth Place and the Black Women’s Health Project

Charlene Ball

ALFA: Intersections, Activism, Legacies 1972–1994

Gail Reeder

Reflections on the National Lesbian Conference

Lorraine Fontana

Use Your Privilege: Excerpts from Pat Hussain Interview

B. Leaf Cronewrite

Garnett Harrison: Freedom Fighter in Mississippi

Kate Ellison

Legal Activism in Kentucky: An Interview with Calla and LauRose Felicity

Carla F. Wallace

The Fairness Campaign: Winning LGBTQ

Rights By Building an Antiracist Majority

Barbara Esrig

Shewolf: Making Changes in the South

Kate Ellison

Living Feminism

Merril Mushroom

Dykes to the Rescue

The Womankind Support Project in Nashville

Irene

Drea Firewalker

Lesbian Pride and Sacrifice in Construction Work

Lenny Lasater

Blue Creek #3

Gail Reeder

The Demonstration: North Carolina 1963

Beth York

Lesbians in Upstate South Carolina 1986–2001: The Upstate Women’s Community Newsletter

Phyllis Free with Mandy Carter, Suzanne Pharr, Pam McMichael, Mab Segrest, Pat Hussain, Joan Garner

Southerners On New Ground (SONG) 1993–present

Merril Mushroom and Rose Norman

Womonwrites

Highlights of Lesbian-Feminist Activism in

Southern States 1968–94

Book Reviews

Contributors

Call for Contributors

Notes for a Magazine

It is an extraordinary pleasure to present you with Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory, 1968-1994 . This special issue of Sinister Wisdom, guest edited by Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom, is a profound expression of Sinister Wisdom’ s lesbian-feminist literary and activist traditions.

While a few scholarly works explore lesbian-feminism in the Southern region of the United States, historians and scholars largely ignore Southern lesbian-feminist herstories. In 2009, Womonwrites, a collective of Southern, lesbian-feminist writers that has been meeting every year since 1979, decided to tackle this problem directly; they committed to collecting, gathering, and preserving stories of lesbian-feminisms in the South. This work is extraordinarily significant. Womonwrites unearths and preserves Southern lesbian-feminist herstories for all of us. I am grateful to them for their work—and, as you read the remarkable issue assembled here, you will be, too!

Sinister Wisdom 93: outhern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory, 1968-1994 is one outcome of many from the labor of women through Womonwrites. As Rose and Merril note, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University is archiving the oral history interviews and all of their research notes. Yet, these important materials—and the expanded interviews—are not just for scholars and researchers. We all can be enriched by reading our lesbian-feminist herstories.

For this reason, Sinister Wisdom is pleased to publish not only Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory, 1968-1994, but also a special, web-based supplement at http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/SW93Supplement. The web-based supplement contains extended interview transcripts for many of the women highlighted in this issue. Where supplement information is available online, a special QR code is on the page. You can scan these QR codes with a smartphone, or type www.sinisterwisdom.org/SW93Supplement in your browser to find all of the additional reading online. I hope you enjoy this enhanced issue of Sinister Wisdom; it is our first foray into combining publishing in the print journal with online content.

You will also note that Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory, 1968-1994 is heftier than previous issues. The work assembled by the Womonwrites collective is so inspiring and so important that I agreed with Rose and Merril to expand the usual size of a single issue of Sinister Wisdom. I have the same situation for our final issue of 2014. Sinister Wisdom 94: Lesbians and Exile is a guest-edited issue curated by Joan Nestle and Yasmin Tambiah. Like the issue you hold in your hands, it, too, is an exciting read. I am pleased to share these expanded issues giving you, our subscribers, MORE to read on, to feed on, more writing to satisfy our greedy maws, as Harriet Desmoines wrote in the very first issue of Sinister Wisdom. I can only continue to publish these luscious issues of Sinister Wisdom if you continue to support us as subscribers and donors. You can renew your subscription—or make a charitable contribution—to Sinister Wisdom online at www.SinisterWisdom.org or through the mail.

Volunteers continue to offer their service to Sinister Wisdom. I welcome all volunteers. At the moment, I am looking for people to help with content management on our website and for one or two more copyeditors. If you are interested in working as a volunteer on Sinister Wisdom, email me. Three students from the University of Maryland, Eleyna Rosenthal, Molly Bauman, and Kelsey Moody, provided assistance to create a database of images in Sinister Wisdom. This database will be used in preparing the special fortieth anniversary issue of Sinister Wisdom in 2016. (Yes, Sinister Wisdom will be turning forty! Get in touch with me if you want to host a special party for her!)

Sinister Wisdom is open for submissions. Sinister Wisdom has a number of special issues forthcoming and publishing commitments to writers through the end of 2015, but I am reading and accepting submissions for publication in 2016 and 2017. If you want to submit to Sinister Wisdom, visit www.SinisterWisdom.org/submit for details.

Finally, enormous gratitude to Rose Norman, Merril Mushroom and all of the womyn of Womonwrites for assembling Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory, 1968-1994. Their work inspires me every day.

In sisterhood,

Julie R. Enszer, PhD

July 2014

Notes for a Special Issue

The women’s liberation movement that swept through the United States from the late 1960s through the 1990s t ransformed the lives of women throughout the nation. Historically, however, this movement has been represented largely by the activism of women in urban centers of the Northeast and the West Coast. The achievements of Southern lesbian-feminists have been disregarded. At best, the existence of Southern lesbian-feminists has been marginalized; at worst, Southern lesbian-feminists have been stereotyped as dependent, racist, uneducated, unsophisticated, phony, and slow. We have been the butt of disrespectful jokes: our manner of speaking has been mocked and ridiculed, our culture denigrated, and our sisterhood disrespected. We have not been considered to be capable of independent radical activism by some of the more important lesbian-feminists of the times.

Among our own, however, in the places where we lived, Southern lesbian-feminists were movers and shakers. We organized multistate meetings to build lesbian-feminist support networks. In our individual communities, we worked with both lesbian and straight feminists to organize women’s clinics, battered women’s shelters, coffeehouses, bookstores, softball teams, choruses, land collectives, newsletters, self-help groups, and political demonstrations. We created and organized women’s music, theatre, and writers’ conferences. We worked for civil rights, worked in prisons and peace encampments, worked on women’s issues in general and lesbian issues in particular. We engaged in true revolution, bringing many positive changes to systems and communities in which we lived. We demonstrated lesbian-feminist values and ways of interacting in our neighborhoods and workplaces. We spoke out about racism, sexism, ageism, classism, ableism, and other forms of oppressive behavior. We were good role models; we educated others about issues and worked to create change wherever possible. We were askers and listeners, guides and facilitators, and, in true Southern fashion, friends and neighbors. However, despite the significant work that we were doing, our achievements and even our very existence were largely ignored outside our own communities.

In 2009 a group of Womonwriters undertook a project to fill some of these gaps in lesbian-feminist herstory. (See Womonwrites on page 127.) We committed to collecting, recording, and archiving as many of our own stories as we could find as testament to our processes and activities as self-defined Southern lesbian-feminists, through spoken and written words, photographs, music, and art. Sinister Wisdom 93: Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory is one of the results of our project. We have not included well-known Southern lesbians like Minnie Bruce Pratt and Dorothy Allison—their books are widely available and often taught in colleges and universities. Rather, we wanted the stories of Southern lesbian-feminists that have not been recorded: stories lost in now-defunct feminist newsletters and stories in archives like those at Duke, Georgia State, and the University of Florida, where they are accessed mostly by college professors who mine them and publish academic articles not available to most general readers. By seeking out these stories, primarily through interviews, we intend this project to enrich current lesbian-feminist herstory by filling the significant Southern gap in its current demography through the tradition of storytelling that is the heart of Southern culture.

This special issue of Sinister Wisdom highlights some of the stories we have been collecting. The material published here represents just a small portion of the material we have gathered. We have such a wealth of material that we were unable to include stories of land dykes, musicians, visual artists, theatre, and other forms of cultural activism. In most cases the interviews have been edited from long, wide-ranging conversations to short pieces for publication. Some of the original, full-length interviews are available in their entirety through links to the Sinister Wisdom website. We are archiving all of our interviews at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University (http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/bingham/). The Sallie Bingham Center already has a rich collection of lesbian-feminist herstory, including archives of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) and Womonwrites, as well as private papers of Sinister Wisdom cofounder Catherine Nicholson and a number of authors including Dorothy Allison, Julia Penelope, Mab Segrest, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.

We hope that this special issue encourages other Southern lesbian-feminists to send us their own stories of activism in the South during the women’s liberation movement from 1968 to 1994. We would love to see more representation from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North and South Carolina, Texas, and the Virginias, as well as still more from Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, and Mississippi. We want to hear from you all. We want to know what you have done and what you recall from those years. Nothing is too insignificant; nobody is unimportant; and all material will be archived.

The Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory collection begins with the 1968 circulation of one of the earliest writings of the women’s liberation movement, Toward a Female Liberation Movement, (The Florida Paper) coauthored by Judith Brown and Beverly Jones. Memoirs of this second wave of feminist herstory abound, but they usually leave out Southerners or lesbians, or both, and none of them mentions that Judith Brown identified as lesbian, and left her husband for a woman.

What then do we mean by lesbian? That term, we decided, should be self-defined. All of the women we interviewed for this project identified as lesbian for some or all of the period studied. When we identify someone like Beverly Jones as straight, that means she identified then and still identifies as heterosexual. Some of the women active in the movement came out as lesbian then, but are now heterosexual. One woman we interviewed, who has been in a twenty-year relationship with another woman, said that she still thinks of herself as a heterosexual who chooses to be a lesbian. What it boils down to is that whether you were then or ever have been (even if no longer) lesbian-identified, this project is about you.

Our cut-off date is 1994, the year that ALFA formally closed its doors after twenty-two years of lesbian-feminist activism in