A Word of Our Own: Ch 18 My Mother's Daughter
"To my shame, I never asked if the narrative was accurate, never asked if there was another side to the account, the dyke one, which might reveal the conflict in a different light."
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
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CH 17: …Filling the silence around me was disgust and hate, the inkling that a whole “progressive” generation which indulged in hating Hillary Clinton, hating Christine Quinn, hating Hillary again reinforced our habit of hating women. And that this deeply rooted, carefully nurtured hate was shaping the broader LGBT community’s attitudes towards dykes, shaping our own self-loathing until we dismiss lesbians before they (we) even open our ugly mouths. And why not? You only have to look at our pathetic female bodies to recognize the corruption inside.
18. My Mother’s Daughter - MichFest
I’m not immune. My own suspicion of women of mothers of dykes lingers like a virus in the most hidden reaches of my nervous system and brain. I’ll think I’ve got it under control, but then something will come up, like when the organizers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival were accused of being trans-haters, and my first impulse (and second, and third,) was to agree, share, like, heart, repeat the charges, no questions, no qualms. You say something bad, I’ll believe it.
I am my mother’s daughter after all. The one who’d say how glad she was that she didn’t have to work for a woman because she knew for a fact that they were petty and jealous once they got their hands on power. Unlike her own boss at the bank, she gushed, who was smart, kind, handsome, thoughtful, an object of her adoration right up until the second he called her into his office and fired her for being too long in the tooth. “He’s older than I am!” she wailed.
And me, when MichFest was smeared as a hotbed of transphobia, I just knew by osmosis it was true, and in a 2010 article, actually proclaimed it, as “Controversial these days for periodic outbreaks of transphobia.” To my shame, I never asked if the narrative was accurate, never asked if there was another side to the account, the dyke one, which might reveal the conflict in a different light.
Maybe you’ve heard the story, or at least a version of it. About how the festival organizers threw out a transwoman one year because she wasn’t a womyn-born womyn, and then… Yes, and then what? The narrative repeated over and over, both on social media, and even the New York fucking Times, said that the organizers continued in their trans-bashing, that the whole festival was a hotbed of TERFs—Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists— and they deserved what they got. If not, why were all the goody-two-shoes lesbian organizations boycotting MichFest? Why were performers getting blacklisted? Why was everybody trying to shut it down?
Yeah, why were they? If I hadn’t gone to the World Pride festival in Toronto 2014, I might not have asked. But I’d been invited to Toronto to read from my book, do a workshop using materials from the Lesbian Avengers, and saw that I had a chance to catch a performance poet I’d heard about, Staceyann Chinn, reading at the Glad Day Bookshop.
The room was already packed when I got there, the crowd willing to stand in the back, squish together on the floor at her feet. When MichFest came up, maybe during the Q & A, I was close enough to see the tears start to roll down her face as she explained that she’d always supported trans rights, but because she’d agreed to perform she was getting blacklisted anyway. Didn’t people know what that meant? How it hurt people like her who lived close to the bone? My god, she was broke. How was she going to pay her rent? And yet, how could she betray the women at MichFest by refusing to perform? They’d changed her life. She was gang-raped for being a lesbian in college, and MichFest was the first place she felt safe, felt welcome, began to heal.
Most of the people crammed into the room were women of color like her. I watched as they nodded at her story, like her had tears streaming down their cheeks at how rare it was to feel safe in a brown or black or beige female body that the world incessantly objectifies, abuses, judges, controls. MichFest was one of the rare places they could speak freely about their experience. All because there were no men, no males—at least visible ones. No dicks which—whether we like it or not—still threaten, or merely intrude, control, inhibit, assert their presence, the way white skin does.
That was 2014. When MichFest was in the news again in 2015 with a new round of boycotts, many of them supported by lesbian organizations, I finally pulled up a search engine, and started to research the matter like the journalist I was supposed to be.
We tell the story of lesbians all wrong, when we bother to tell it at all. As if it somehow occurs out of time and out of place. As it happens, the impulse towards lesbian separatism that occurred in the 1970’s when the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival began, wasn’t some weird womyny thing, it was part and parcel of the wave of liberation participated in by the likes of black nationalists and the Chicano movement exploding at the same time. They all shared the desire to be physically safe, but also to create a community, and celebrate an identity, a culture, history which the world tried to strangle at birth. This was an especially urgent need for lesbians who were invisible in the world, often outlawed, and could still lose their jobs, their children, their freedom if their families dragged them to the shrinks, especially in states where homosexuality was still illegal. Where could they build community if not in bookstores, bars, tiny musical utopias?
Even now we need separatist projects. Organizing alone is how activists clarify things, focus on them, and can be visible as themselves. It was why the Lesbian Avengers was for lesbians. Why Black Lives Matter which began in 2013 was about Black Lives and not All Lives.
But back to the feminist, lesbian MichFest. Was the soon to be defunct festival really a hotbed of trans-haters in 2015? Or did the activists have a different agenda? I was about to find out.
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