Sinister Wisdom

  Work from the October 2010 Conference
sponsored by theCenter for Lesbian and Gay Studies(CLAGS)in New York City

Sinister  Wisdom  82  In Amerika They Call Us Dykes:
Lesbian Lives in the 70s

82

  
  

Featuring Work by:
Agatha Beins
Evelyn Torton Beck
Cheryl Clarke
Madeline Davis
Tucker Pamella Farley
Myriam Fougère
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Patricia A. Gozemba
Jeri Hilderley
Bonnie J. Morris
Amanda Ream
Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall
Fran Winant$6.00                                                                                                                                                  Spring  2011  And More!

In Amerika They Call Us Dykes:
Lesbian Lives in the 70s

Spring 2011 1

Table of Contents
Notes for a Magazine

3“COME OUT!! Join the Sisters and Brothers of the Gay Liberation Front”
Fran Winant5

A World Wide Conspiracy of Radical Lesbians: Ain’t I a Woman? and Lesbian
Feminism in the 1970s
9
Agatha Beins
Coming Out and Creativity
Evelyn Torton Beck

17

“How Can You, As a Lesbian, Claim To Do Research?”
Tucker Pamella Farley

21

LESBIAN SPACES IN THE 70s
Madeline Davis

31

The Queer Thing: Black Women’s Writing and the Miracle of Audience
Alexis Pauline Gumbs

39

Piecing together Azalea: A Magazine for Third-World Lesbians 1977-1983 43
Renee DeLong
I re-member...
Myriam Fougère

51kara walker on the upper east side
Cheryl Clarke

54

Too much
Cheryl Clarke

55

A song of longing
Cheryl Clarke

56

Jewish Lesbian Lives in the 1970s
Evelyn Torton Beck

59

How Goodly Are Thy Tents!
Bonnie J. Morris

62

Violet Press: Women's Writing and Art Creating Their Own Context in The
1970s

66

Fran Winant
What Will the Neighbors Think? 1977
Patricia A. Gozemba72

2 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

Here We Are Now
Amanda Ream

75

I Was There and I Am Here
Jeri Hilderley78

A Survey of Lesbian Readers: Literature, Identity, and Activism
Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall

87

Searching for Black Lesbian Elders!
Lisa C. Moore and Tiona McClodden

95

Obituary
Frances Ann Day (June 30, 1942 - September 24, 2010)

97

Letter to the Editor

100

Sinister Wisdom Community Distribution Network

101

Where To Find Sinister Wisdom

102

Contributor Biographies

103

Call for Submissions

107

Advertisements

108

Spring 2011 3

Notes for a Magazine
Arriving at Penn Station in New York City on a Thursday
afternoon in October 2010, I was looking forward to the weekend
conference sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies(CLAGS) titled In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbians in the 70s. I was
meeting my friends Merry Gangemi and Mimi van Ausdall for the
conference. We stayed in a spartan (but still pricy!) room across from Penn
Station. The conference was everything I had imagined: lively, energetic,
celebratory, contentious. I knew that Merry and I had made the rightchoice in organizing the next issue of Sinister Wisdom to capture the energy,
ideas, and discussions the conference generated.
Readers interested in knowing more about the conference canaccess the conference website here: http://www.70slesbians.org/, which
includes the complete conference schedule of presentations. Readersinterested in knowing more about the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
can examine the CLAGS website here: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/clags/.
Merry and I both want to express our enormous appreciation to Sarah
Chinn, the Executive Director of CLAGS, the entire conference planningcommittee, and all of the volunteers and staff who helped to make theconference a great success. As event organizers, Merry and I know thatgatherings like this conference don’t happen without an extraordinary
amount of planning and labor and we salute all involved for a job welldone.
Attending the conference and compiling this issue of Sinister
Wisdom, I’ve been thinking about these questions: How do we narrate andshare history between generations? How can we pass on traditions, ideas,
and values to new generations while still giving younger women the space
to experiment and formulate their own traditions, ideas, and values? How
do we honor the past and think critically about it as a way to refine ourstrategies for change? How do we honor the past while still celebrating thecurrent achievements and future dreams of women who have alreadymade extraordinary contributions?
Contributors to this issue of Sinister Wisdom grapple with thesequestions and more. I hope you find this issue exciting to read, engaging,and provocative. Working on this issue has been an extraordinary
pleasure; I thank all of the writers who have contributed to it and I hope it
contributes to a productive and on-going conversation about lesbian
herstory and its meaning in our lives today.
***4 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

A new volunteer has joined the Sinister Wisdom team since the lastissue. Robin Blythe joins us as Book Review Editor. If you are interested inreviewing books for Sinister Wisdom, email Robin at
RobinBlythe@gmail.com.
We are looking for more volunteers. In particular, we need agraphic designer to work with us on a variety of projects. If you areinterested, please email me and let me know how you can help.
We have included two new segments at the end of the journal:
Letters to the Editor and information about where to find Sinister Wisdom.
Please write to us and let us know what you think of the journal—we will
be selecting and printing letters for every issue.
Finally, consider joining our community distribution network.
Merry and I want Sinister Wisdom to grow—to reach more readers andengage a larger community for conversations among lesbians. To do that,
we invite everyone to become involved in getting copies of the journals intobookstores, other retail establishments, and the hands of lesbians
everywhere. We hope you will join us in continuing to build this lesbian
cultural institution.
In Sisterhood,
Julie R. Enszer
March 2011

Spring 2011 5“COME OUT!! JOIN THE SISTERS AND BROTHERS OF THE
GAY LIBERATION FRONT”
Fran WinantThat call would be emblazoned on the 1970 poster created by the
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) with photographer Peter Hujar for the firstgay march forty years ago. Those of us who volunteered to be
photographed were told to run up and down a street as though rushing
forward in the actual march carrying our entire community with us into a
new world of visibility and strength. At the time, coming out was an act ofgreat courage with unknown consequences and those who showed up thatday were making a concrete statement of our willingness to risk our lives tobring about gay liberation. The emotion that flowed from us at the dawnof the modern gay movement, illuminating the poster from that moment to
the present, was a transporting happiness, an ecstasy of freedom that weourselves hardly knew we felt in the midst of our struggles. Although wefilled the frame of the poster, comparatively few of us were there thatday—but in the forty years that followed, hundreds, thousands, hundredsof thousands, millions of our sisters and brothers came out in gay marches
all over the world. The old empty street in the poster's background was
eventually filled to bursting with wave upon extraordinary wave of joyous
faces taking their spark from ours as we, in turn, were the first to carryforward the spark lit in the fires of the Christopher Street Rebellion.
Changes in mass consciousness are difficult to quantify. Whatturned a routine police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar on June 28,
1969 into a people's uprising against our oppressors with all the furynecessary to launch a revolution? Let's go back to the frightening 1969
world before gay liberation and take a look. As I return, in memory, to theintersection of Christopher Street and Sixth and Greenwich Avenues, acentral hub of the village, the first thing I notice is the large number of gay
individuals and couples strolling together on a warm night. Unlike straightcouples, these do not hold hands or touch, preserving an unreal anonymity
for fear of being stared at, jeered at, "found out," or attacked by straights,
even arrested or threatened with arrest should their ordinary behavior,simply between themselves, stray in the eyes of the police into forbidden
territory. There are always policemen with nightsticks here, and our 1969
evening walk has the feel of prisoners passing before their captors in review.
To complete the ominous atmosphere, the dungeon-like Women's
House of Detention, popularly known as the House of D—its site years
later transformed into a park—towers gloomily above us. Incarcerated
women, mostly women of color, stand at the windows calling sadly, angrilyback and forth with female friends and lovers on the street, or shouting

6 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

epithets, perhaps at the police, or, in moments of particular defiance,
throwing down objects and burning bedding. This area of New York Cityis supposed to be the center of an upscale residential neighborhood andperennial tourist destination, yet it has the look of a police state gone mad.
The Stonewall is a short block away down Christopher Street. Its
patrons, choking on their own suppressed rage while laughing "gaily,"viewed the incarcerated women's expressed rage on their trips to the bar.
Perhaps it was here that the spark of rebellion was passed from these
women to the men of color dressed as women who played a central part in
the events at Stonewall and deserve our gratitude. Could it be that theapparently powerless women of the House of D, their bitter gestures
striking over and over at the compressed gunpowder of our silence, madethe subtle difference that finally lit the explosion of gay liberation at thistime and place? Once in progress, the riots, flaunting authority, attracting
crowds, feeding on their own momentum, began to resemble images ofother protest movements of the 1960s. Gay veterans of militant struggles
suddenly imagined them replayed, but now the issue was one that otherliberation movements had always managed to ignore—gay liberation.
The possibility of a radical gay group had never existed before
Stonewall. It seemed gays could work for others' liberation as long as they
didn't admit to being gay. The wall of antigay bigotry was too high for any
individual or any small gay rights group to scale. Coming out to yourself
meant entering a deadly network of lies and silences inculcated into you
from birth. Gays were effectively terrorized. The tiny gay movement wasstuck at the same place where individual gays and lesbians were stuck:social accommodation.
To me, the most important thing about the Gay Liberation Front
was its energy. The silence was over. GLF had a new message for theworld: “We're a mass movement, loud, visible, we're everywhere, we're
threatening, we're different, we're not like you, we want to change gender
relations and all human relations and become part of a new society wecreate along with all oppressed peoples—we don't want to live like you.”
The concept of a mass, activist movement emphasizing visibility anddifference was GLF's legacy to our spiritual gay children, all those who
would follow us whatever their politics. GLF wasn't simply a leftist
diversion in the otherwise smoothly running mainstream of the struggle forgay rights. We brought with us a vital spark, a radical vitality, that had
never been there before.
When the GLF women broke off to form Radicalesbians I
reluctantly went with them. I felt GLF might ultimately be destroyed bygroups splitting off, but I understood that as women we needed to explore
our own identities and bond with as well as challenge the women'sliberation movement. For a while it seemed many groups were all

Spring 2011 7

functioning at once along with cultural events featuring women's poetry,art, music, film, and theatre. There was so much happening, yet at thesame time people were drifting away.
But the power of lesbian and gay liberation crossed the country
and the world. Whenever it seems about to fade, it reemerges to be moldedby new hands with new force. To paraphrase Lincoln, people may or may
not care to remember what was said by the Gay Liberation Front andRadicalesbians forty years ago, our particular brand of discourse about theliberation of all people, but they will hopefully never forget what was done
here, even if we are only remembered through LGBTQ people's forming
lines thousands long to acquire their marriage certificates, their passports
into the ordinary. For the fact that this, too, can happen is part of our gift
to the people of the future. The light of freedom that illuminated our faces
at the time of the first march continues to shine through all the
permutations of politics.

8 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

Spring 2011 9

A World Wide Conspiracy of Radical Lesbians: Ain’t I a
Woman? and Lesbian Feminism in the 1970s
Agatha Beins
In June 1970 women became acquainted with a new image of
Sojourner Truth. In this striking graphic Truth’s left arm dominates, its fistas large as her head, raised to reach almost the top right edge of the pageand framing the often-reproduced text of the speech attributed to her fromthe 1851 Akron, Ohio, Women’s Rights Convention. This first issue of
Ain’t I a Woman? declared itself to be a newspaper that emerged out of a“need to increase communication between sisters in the Mid-West.”1
Initially, the group publishing it called itself “Publications Collective of the
Iowa City Women’s Liberation Front,”2 but by the tenth issue they were “acollective of 10 women functioning either as a front for a world wideconspiracy of Radical Lesbians or the house cornfield of the Women's
Movement.”3 The shift in the group’s identification reflects the group’s
shifting composition, which is elaborated in a series of reflections titled“Finding Direction” offered by the group in their second year of
publication. The first piece in the series describes the collective’s shift froma group in which lesbians were the minority to a group that is “almost allgay” and explains it as “a result of: 1) three new members being gay, 2)three members realizing they were gay or choosing against theirheterosexual relationships, and 3) two straight women having to moveaway from Iowa City because of job location changes of males they related
to. This evolution has been slow and natural and never occurred as a resultof internal problems or gay/straight disagreements.”4 In this series,
however, sexuality is not the most prominent issue the group grapples with.
Instead, the theme of class—specifically middle-classness and women’sliberation—appears to be at least of equal, if not more, concern.
The way in which lesbianism is made visible in Ain’t I a Woman?
merits a closer look, for, unlike other feminist collectives, this editorial
collective’s public declarations of lesbianism are not accompanied by a
1 “Editorial,” Ain’t I a Woman? June 26, 1970, p. 2. Lesbian Herstory Archives,

Brooklyn, NY. In order to reflect the content of periodicals as it appeared in the
publication I retain the original capitalization, punctuation, and emphases in myquotations throughout the article. Additionally, all citations of Ain’t I a Woman?
(except for those from the first issue) are based on archival research I did at the
Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.
2 Ain't I a Woman? September 11, 1970, p. 3.
3 Ain’t I a Woman? December 11, 1970, p. 10.
4 “Where We’ve Come From,” Ain’t I a Woman? October 15, 1971, p. 2.

10 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

similar labeling of the purpose and content of Ain’t I a Woman?5 There isnever an explicit statement identifying the periodical as a lesbian-feminist
one. In contrast, just below the name of their eponymous periodical, theFuries (a Washington, DC, collective) added the phrase “lesbian/feminist
monthly” and introduced readers to the publication through a manifestoesque essay by Charlotte Bunch titled “Lesbians in Revolt: Male
Supremacy Quakes and Quivers.” Amazon Quarterly offers the subtitle A
Lesbian Feminist Arts Journal, and the editors of Atalanta prominently list it as
the newsletter of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (they write in their“About Us” statement that frequently appeared in the newsletter, “ALFA
welcomes all lesbians to relate to us and become part of us in whatever way
you can”). Considering the openness with which some periodicals of the
1970s allied their feminism with lesbianism, I wondered about therelationship between identity and content, between the personal and thepolitical, for the Iowa City collective. I wondered specifically, Do lesbians
produce lesbian publications? As provocative as this question has been forme, rather than attempt to provide a definitive answer I want to explore
instead how Ain’t I a Woman? let us rethink the intersections of lesbianismand feminism.
Early in their publishing run, the editors of Ain’t I a Woman? reflect
on the paper’s politics and purpose:
After three issues of Ain't I A Woman? the publications
collective decided it was time for self-criticism. The
politics reflected in the paper have been less than we
hoped they would be but, because we have been so busy
learning the technical end of publishing a newspaper we
had not taken the time to discuss the political meaning
behind the articles we've written and published. We thendiscovered we really didn't know where each other's
heads were at so we went off together to talk about class,the media, The Red Women's Detachment's position on
the Gay Liberation Front, the relationship of Women's
Liberation to the Third World, and what it means to livein the heart of the monster.
Later in the editorial they write:

5 Ain’t I a Woman? was not unique in the lack of an explicit identification withlesbianism. Kate Adams observes that off our backs and It Ain’t Me, Babe, similar to
Ain’t I a Woman?, did not claim a lesbian-feminist moniker although lesbians
contributed to their production in ways that were comparable to the production of
more explicitly lesbian-feminist ones such as Lavendar Woman and Lesbian Tide,
published in Chicago and Los Angeles respectively (1998, 122).

Spring 2011 11

Many of the subjects that we have been discussing in Ain't I
A Woman? were never dealt with by the male left. The
politics of lesbianism has been historically ignored byradical groups until Gay Liberation Front and now
Women's Liberation. It takes a long time to obtain acorrect analysis, if that is ever possible. We have discussed
Lesbianism as a personal solution, because we haven't
known how to begin to formulate a theory on its place inthe revolution.6
Like many women who have been and are active in feminism, Ain’t
I a Woman?’s editorial collective grappled with impact of one’s personal
identity, life, and experiences on one’s political projects. The newspaper’s
editors demonstrate through their actions and analyses that indeed one’s
daily life is intimately intertwined with politics on local, regional, andnational scales. Throughout the paper, sexuality is given critical attention
through editorials, essays from local women, poetry, announcements about
lesbian feminist publications, and reprints from other periodicals.
However, before the conference In Amerika They Call Us Dykes, organized by
the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in October 2010, pushed me tolook at this newspaper for a panel I was a part of, I had categorized Ain’t I
a Woman? as one of the many exciting general-issue women’s liberation
periodicals published in the 1970s. I did not read it as a specifically or evenpredominantly lesbian feminist newspaper.
Although I am not yet sure that Ain’t I a Woman? is in fact alesbian-feminist publication, I want to offer several thoughts about why I
had developed this blindness and also to suggest why it may elude a
lesbian-feminist appellation. First, I want to list some of the collective’s selfdescriptions, the first two of which I listed at the start of this essay:
Ain’t I A Woman? is published by the Publications Collectiveof the Iowa City Women’s Liberation Front. We are agroup of 10 women.
A collective of 10 women functioning either as a front for aworld-wide conspiracy of Radical Lesbians or the housecornfield of the Women's Movement.
We are a collective of eight women functioning as a worldwide conspiracy of Radical Lesbians the Angry
Independent Amazon Women.7
A collective of 8 (plus one travelling sympathizer)
functioning as a world-wide conspiracy of Radical
Lesbians.8
6 Editorial, Ain’t I a Woman? August 21, 1970, p. 2.
7 Ain't I a Woman? March 12, 1971, p. 12.

12 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

In addition to the recurrence of the group’s identification aslesbians, what is highlighted through these phrases is the concept of thecollective. A dominant theme in the U.S. women’s liberation movement,collectivity was not just a descriptive label but became symbolic of a
specifically feminist political praxis characterized, among other things, byhorizontal relationships, decision making through consensus, skill sharing
and job rotation, and sisterhood. Notably, for part of the paper’s lifespan
the editors were not just a publishing collective but also were a living
collective, sharing the same house and commingling their living andpublication spaces. Throughout this lifespan, the group wrestled with the
manifestation and effects of their specific group dynamics, for it issomething that they never quite find peace with. In addition to publishinganalyses about collectivity by women from Grinnell, Iowa, andMinneapolis, the Ain’t I a Woman? collective discuss their philosophies onliving and working collectively, and they express concern about the raceand class privileges that enable and sustain their feminism and the
publication of Ain’t I a Woman?
The collective writes, for example,
We are women who see working together as women,loving and living together as women to hold primary
importance. And to that end we feel it necessary to deal
with our class differences. . . . [Middle class women] say“women find themselves in many different roles with manydifferent problems” but refuse to see that women findthemselves in many different classes and therefore havedifferent problems. To admit this most women would haveto identify with their class which is to admit their own rolein oppressing other women. This is hard and painful to do
but the only way to begin struggling with sisterhood on any
real level.9
In another editorial the group worries that Ain’t I a Woman? “willbe a middle class paper, read by middle class women.”10 Although present
and important—indicated by the phrase “loving and living together as
women” and by the collective’s self-labeling as lesbian—sexuality is not aconcern to the extent that other identity categories are. This is not to say
that, regarding lesbianism, the publishing collective faced no internal
dilemmas or challenges from the broader community; however, I do wantto suggest that controversy and uncertainty claim energy and attention,
8 Ain't I a Woman? January 7, 1972, p. 12.
9 “So Far Our Analysis Labels Common to All Women What Is Common Only to

Middle-Class Women” Ain’t I a Woman? July 30, 1971, p. 8-9.
10 Editorial, Ain’t I a Woman? October 15, 1971, p. 3.

Spring 2011 13

and within the editorial collective sexuality is not significantly associatedwith either. The lack of struggle around their lesbian identification,
therefore, shaped the content of the periodical. Ain’t I a Woman? is neither adefense of nor a promotion of lesbianism, nor do the editors appear to facechallenges and obstacles within the group in relation to sexuality.
It is worth noting that for the collective lesbianism and feminism
appear to have an unquestioned and inextricable connection and, based on
the content of the paper, the Iowa City collective is able to find aconsistency between their identity as lesbians and their political practices.
That is, their experience of the group’s shift to a lesbian collective (as I
describe early in this essay), was “slow and natural and never occurred as aresult of internal problems or gay/straight disagreements.” A study by Jo
Reger helps me think through this transition and, in turn, the kind of
discussions of lesbianism and gayness in Ain’t I a Woman? Reger looks at
feminist groups on two different college campuses, one that faces arelatively hostile, antifeminist climate and one that experiences more
support from the campus and community. Not surprisingly, the formergroup develops a stronger, more visible feminist identity, for identity, in
addition to being a product of what one believes to be true about the worldand supports as valid political goals, is importantly an effect of how one
sees oneself in opposition to others.
Through Reger, it is possible to understand that the group does
not need to defend itself or struggle with what has more broadly beentermed the “gay/straight split” that marked the U.S. women’s liberation
movement. In other words, because the editors could integrate being
lesbian with being feminist in a relatively seamless manner—the personalaligned with the political, the individual with the collective, the identitywith the practice—sexuality was not a topic that the group felt the need to
wrestle with in the same way they wrestled with issues around class andrace. In an early editorial they write, “We are sure of two things; (1) that
we need nothing short of a revolution to end the oppression of poor
women (2) that the subjects we deal with (day care, lesbianism, karate, etc.)
are not middle class by nature but in our failure to see them inrevolutionary terms, in relationship to all women, in relationship to classand race.”11 Combine this with the fact that the editors did not see
sexuality as their primary site of resistance and for the articulation of theirpolitics:
Basing a revolution solely on the end to your owngroup's oppression is, we feel, incorrect. We may be more
personally concerned with gayness than race, for instance,

11 Editorial, Ain’t I a Woman? August 21, 1970, p. 2.

14 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

because it's a gut issue in the group; but basing a wholeanalysis on gayness is narrow and unrealistic.
Because we are gay women we give weight to the issueof lesbianism in our paper, of course. Gayness and class,economic oppression, health concerns, survival tactics for
women alone, etc.-- all of these concern us too. They areimportant, immediate problems that involve us all andshould be dealt with, because we live in this society andwill have to continue to do so for a long time to come.12
The lack of tension around sexuality coupled with the group’s
struggles with their own class and race identities as well as with their workon local political projects (establishing free, twenty-four-hour daycare
consistently occupied the energy and attention of the larger Iowa City
Women’s Liberation Front) is reflected in the paper’s particular expressionof lesbian feminism.
Yes: an expression of lesbian feminism, despite the fact that
nowhere do the editors assert the character of Ain’t I a Woman? to belesbian feminist. In fact, they specifically describe it as “a movement
paper,” which suggests that they are writing about feminism and forfeminists and not specifically about lesbians or for lesbians. An editorial lets
readers know:
We are a collective of nine women who put out AIAW.
What the paper is and how it changes is a reflection ofwhat the nine of us are, collectively and individually, how
we change and what is affecting us. We never had any set,
easily verbalized purpose for the paper, nor did we haveany particular audience in mind. We are all in the women's
movement so, in a sense, we write a movement paper
because we write about ourselves and our concerns. . . .
We think it is important to write about and analyze ourstruggles at the place we are now; to communicate this to all
women who read AIAW, as well as making things clearer
to ourselves.13
Such a statement helps me conclude that the point(s) of origin of apublication is significant in shaping its character, for the paper did not
begin as an explicitly lesbian-feminist one (as did The Furies and Atalanta),
and the editors never identify it as such. Considering the politics of origins,
Adams writes that “pouring energy into building lesbian-feminist
publishing institutions was often the cause of, or resulted in, fractious
12 “Self-Criticism and Direction” Ain’t I a Woman? February 11, 1972, p. 8.
13 “Who We Are: Carol, Trudy, Linda, Dale, Pat, Jeanne, Vickie, Ann,” Ain’t I a
Woman? April 30, 1971, p. 2.

Spring 2011 15

debate about lesbian separatism, among lesbians themselves as well as
between lesbians and the larger feminist movement” (1998, 133). In otherwords, like collective identity, the formation of a paper can be understoodas based both on what the editors desire and want to achieve and also on
what they are reacting to. So if there is a strong community division
between straight-identified and lesbian-identified women or if a groupfinds itself in a particularly hostile social/political climate, then it is likelythat sexuality will be made visible in a way that responds to and reflectsthat context.
Consequently, Ain’t I a Woman?’s feminism and politics do not
become visible as a particular manifestation of lesbian feminism because
moments of origin often come to stand in for the entire trajectory of apaper, both in contemporary and historical accounts. My initialassumptions about Ain’t I a Woman? (based on reading three issues of thepaper, including the first one, published during the first year) reproduced
this narrative. Histories of U.S. feminism similarly characterize thepublication, often adding it to a list of general women’s liberation
periodicals from different cities in the United States or using it as an
example of such “movement papers.”14
Returning, then, to the question, Do lesbian feminists produce
lesbian-feminist publications? The answer must of course be “yes” and“no.” Perhaps on the surface unsatisfying, this conclusion nonethelessencourages me to think differently about identity politics. While drawing
clear connections between their identity and their politics the editors of
Ain’t I a Woman? also demonstrate that a clear sense of identity need notnecessarily be realized in a particular way through a periodical. Charlotte
Bunch’s declaration that “the development of Lesbian-feminist politics as
the basis for the liberation of women is our top priority. In our society,which defines all people and institutions for the benefit of the rich, whitemale, the Lesbian is in revolt. In revolt because she defines herself in termsof women and rejects the male definitions of how she should feel, act, look,and live” are the first sentences of her essay that appears in the first issue of
The Furies, setting both a tone and readers’ expectations for future content

14 There are some exceptions. Alice Echols lists Ain’t I a Woman? as a lesbianfeminist paper, along with Lesbian Tide, Spectre, and Lavender Woman, writing that
Ain’t I a Woman? “was run by a lesbian collective for a while” (2003, 348n118), andKyra Pearson describes the periodical as a “newspaper of lesbian feminism” (1999,
158; see also159). Echols bases her description on the lesbian identity of theeditors—a fairly straightforward correlation reflecting identity politics—andPearson offers no further information about what makes Ain’t I a Woman? lesbian
feminist, leaving it up to readers to come to their own conclusions.

16 Sinister Wisdom 82 – Lesbians in the 70s

in the periodical.15 Ain’t I a Woman? allows us to see that the manifestationof a lesbian-feminist identity will not always be so explicit. My hope is not
only that we then read more closely to excavate the “lesbian” in the
periodical but that we make space for sexuality in discussions of race, class,and imperialism. Just as issues connected to lesbianism are never only
about sexuality, issues such as collective working and living, the Vietnam
War, daycare, and the imminent revolution are part of women’s complex
articulations of their lesbian-feminism.

Works Cited
Adams, Kate. 1998. “Built out of Books: Lesbian Energy and Feminist
Ideology in Alternative Publishing.” Journal of Homosexuality34(3/4):113-41.
Echols, Alice. 2003. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pearson, Kyra. 1999. “Mapping Rhetorical Interventions in ‘National’
Feminist Histories: Second Wave Feminism and Ain’t I a Woman.”Communication Studies 50(2):158-73.
Reger, Jo. 2008. “Drawing Identity Boundaries: The Creation ofContemporary Feminism.” In Identity Work in Social Movements, ed.
Jo Reger, Daniel J. Meyers, and Rachel L. Einwohner, 101-20.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

15 Charlotte Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt: Male Supremacy Quakes and Quivers,”

The Furies January 1972, p. 8. The Digital Scriptorum, Special Collections Library,
Duke University, April 1997. http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/furies/.

Sinister Wisdom

  Work from the October 2010 Conference
sponsored by theCenter for Lesbian and Gay Studies(CLAGS)in New York City

Sinister  Wisdom  82  In Amerika They Call Us Dykes:
Lesbian Lives in the 70s

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In Amerika They Call Us Dykes:
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