McFadden, Naj - interviewed by Rose Norman
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Transcript
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- | Okay, I'm gonna say, this is Rose Norman and | 0:00 |
I'm interviewing Naj, do you wanna use a last name or not? | 0:04 | |
- | Oh sure, I don't care. | 0:10 |
- | What's the last name? | 0:11 |
- | McFadden. | 0:13 |
- | Naj McFadden, by phone and we're talking about | 0:15 |
the year and a half that she spent looking for | 0:20 | |
the ideal place to live and it was 19, | 0:25 | |
she started in December of '83 and-- | 0:34 | |
- | Yes. | 0:39 |
- | And ended in January of '87. | 0:39 |
- | No, July of '86. | 0:47 |
- | July of '86. | 0:49 |
- | In about October of '86 is when I went back to | 0:52 |
Fayetteville to Judy's land and was there | 0:58 | |
and my father died, I think it was January 7th | 1:00 | |
or very early in January. | 1:04 | |
- | Well, when I first asked you to respond to what | 1:08 |
Kate had written about how traveling dykes were | 1:11 | |
idealistic nomads who bridged the communication gap | 1:16 | |
during a time before the internet and cellphones, | 1:20 | |
they brought news about what was going on and | 1:23 | |
often controversy or idealistic expectation. | 1:26 | |
You didn't identify with that. | 1:29 | |
Tell how you identified as a traveling dyke. | 1:30 | |
- | Well, I mean, I guess I carried news about | 1:34 |
what women I had met, what they were doing and stuff but | 1:40 | |
in terms of actual land and land dykes, | 1:45 | |
I think, the feeling I got anyway was they | 1:50 | |
were pretty much identified, knew of each other, | 1:58 | |
so it wasn't like I was saying, oh, hey, | 2:04 | |
there's this land group, | 2:06 | |
that I'd be at one Women's Land telling them | 2:13 | |
about another Women's Land, they already knew about it. | 2:16 | |
Now, I'm not sure how that, | 2:22 | |
there's a lot of Women's Land in Oregon and | 2:24 | |
I don't really recall like if they all were aware | 2:30 | |
of the Pagoda, for instance, | 2:34 | |
but I spent time at the Pagoda and attended LeAP and | 2:37 | |
I don't know that I was, | 2:54 | |
I mean, I am someone who is always telling people | 2:58 | |
about what I found and what other people are doing, | 3:03 | |
what's going on other places if I'm aware of that but | 3:08 | |
I think the Women's Land was pretty much connected. | 3:15 | |
That's the impression I have at this point, anyway, | 3:20 | |
from back then, even though | 3:27 | |
there weren't cellphones and stuff. | 3:28 | |
And maybe that's incorrect, I don't know, | 3:34 | |
that's just a feeling that I had. | 3:36 | |
- | Yeah, that's interesting and what gave you that sense | 3:39 |
because I mean, you went to, what, a dozen different, | 3:42 | |
tell about the advertisement you published. | 3:47 | |
- | I'd been planning this trip for about 10 years | 3:54 |
and saving up for it and so, | 3:58 | |
I had some skills that I knew were needed and valuable | 4:03 | |
in the lesbian community and I was a Contact Dyke | 4:10 | |
and Lesbian Connection and had been for, | 4:18 | |
oh, practically since Lesbian Connection started but | 4:21 | |
I wrote this letter about myself, | 4:27 | |
about the skills I had and that I was traveling, | 4:29 | |
looking for the ideal place to live or planning to travel | 4:36 | |
looking for the ideal place to live and that I | 4:41 | |
wanted to work in exchange for room and board and/or money | 4:45 | |
and if anybody was interested in having me come visit them, | 4:50 | |
I included a self-addressed stamped envelope that | 4:57 | |
they could reply to me and also said, | 5:01 | |
if you know other lesbians that might need work, | 5:04 | |
please share this letter with them. | 5:09 | |
- | Where did you work? | 5:14 |
- | I stayed with about 125 different women. | 5:15 |
- | Wow. | 5:20 |
- | During this trip, I never stayed in a motel, | 5:22 |
I just went from one lesbian household to another | 5:30 | |
and a couple of women that I stayed with moved, | 5:37 | |
like moved West and I stayed with them again | 5:45 | |
as I went West and a couple of women, | 5:48 | |
after I stayed with them, said, oh, you know, | 5:54 | |
I have a friend in Oregon and called them up and | 5:57 | |
made arrangements that then when I was there I could | 6:02 | |
stay with them. | 6:04 | |
But that was all after the fact, | 6:09 | |
after I'd met, stayed with various women. | 6:10 | |
So from the responses I got, | 6:18 | |
I sort of, I planned out my route and I let people know | 6:20 | |
what my route was and I said that I would send | 6:29 | |
them a letter when I was a couple of, | 6:31 | |
it wasn't like I'm gonna stay five days here | 6:36 | |
and three days there and a week there, | 6:38 | |
it was all up in the air but I tried to stay | 6:41 | |
in touch with people to let them know where I was | 6:45 | |
with letters and postcards so that they would have | 6:49 | |
some sense of when I would be at their | 6:54 | |
and obviously as that got, as I got closer to | 7:01 | |
a particular destination, I would communicate more | 7:08 | |
with someone but yes, I didn't have a phone or anything. | 7:12 | |
- | Yeah, well, there were cellphones then | 7:20 |
but not many people had them. | 7:23 | |
- | Yeah. | 7:23 |
You know and I could send them a letter and say | 7:26 | |
and a friend of mine was handling, in Indiana, | 7:30 | |
was handling all my bills and correspondence and stuff, | 7:36 | |
so people could call her and I would | 7:42 | |
always call her when I got ready to leave a place and | 7:51 | |
give her my next destination and then I would call her | 7:59 | |
when I got to that destination so that she always knew | 8:03 | |
where I was in the route and how to reach me | 8:08 | |
because I was staying with people, | 8:15 | |
she always had an address or a phone number. | 8:18 | |
- | That's really well thought out. | 8:25 |
- | Except for when I was driving and that became, | 8:28 |
I hadn't owned a car for many years until | 8:34 | |
I did this trip and when I started out driving, | 8:40 | |
oh, I was terrified. | 8:45 | |
I probably stopped the car five times, | 8:47 | |
of course, I had bought a $500 car too. | 8:50 | |
(Rose laughs) | 8:53 | |
But I probably stopped the car five times | 8:55 | |
before I went 100 miles, pulled off the road, | 8:58 | |
just sure that the car was falling apart | 9:01 | |
and stuff and so when I started out, | 9:03 | |
the driving was just very nerve (audio cuts out) for me but | 9:09 | |
it got so the driving was very valuable time | 9:15 | |
because that was my only time when I had total privacy, | 9:18 | |
when I was alone, | 9:25 | |
otherwise I was in somebody else's home and, you know. | 9:27 | |
I mean, not that I wasn't alone, I mean, | 9:36 | |
sometimes I was in somebody's house and they would go | 9:40 | |
to work or whatever but, | 9:42 | |
yes, I'd be alone in their house but | 9:46 | |
being in the car was like really, | 9:51 | |
like being able to go to my own room | 9:54 | |
and close the door (chuckles). | 9:56 | |
Again, has nothing to do with what you're | 10:04 | |
kind of looking for but. | 10:06 | |
- | That's an interesting observation though. | 10:08 |
- | Yeah. | 10:11 |
- | We're hoping to be able to do a longer book. | 10:14 |
This special issue is limited by what they can publish | 10:18 | |
as the magazine but we may be able to get some funding | 10:23 | |
to go from the magazine to a book and so | 10:27 | |
I'm collecting a lot more than | 10:29 | |
we're gonna publish right away. | 10:31 | |
- | Uh-huh, now I do remember, like Martine and Miriam, | 10:35 |
Martine and Miriam were the two women from Canada and | 10:42 | |
like I said, we kept running into each other | 10:51 | |
all over Florida and that was really neat, | 10:53 | |
I enjoyed that and I do remember us | 10:56 | |
sharing information about, | 11:02 | |
oh yeah, go visit this land or go, you know, | 11:04 | |
go look up this (audio cuts out) | 11:10 | |
outside Gainesville, Florida or whatever and | 11:12 | |
when I was at Sand Hill, they came to Sand Hill, | 11:19 | |
when I came back to Sand Hill before my father died, | 11:25 | |
they came to Sand Hill and visited and | 11:29 | |
I guess the information that I felt like | 11:41 | |
I was really sharing was with other traveling dykes | 11:43 | |
that I'd run into. | 11:47 | |
- | Let me ask, what made you decide to go on the road | 11:58 |
looking for an ideal place to live, | 12:00 | |
you said you planned it for 10 years, | 12:02 | |
what took you there, did you know about, | 12:04 | |
how did you know about Women's Lands and all? | 12:06 | |
- | Gosh, how'd I know? | 12:11 |
I guess probably from Lesbian Connections | 12:12 | |
and also I had, | 12:19 | |
I had worked with Women's Music Festival Collective | 12:29 | |
the second or third festival, | 12:36 | |
I think it was the second one, | 12:38 | |
it was probably in '77, so I'm not sure when. | 12:39 | |
- | Next year's the 40th. | 12:49 |
- | '15 is gonna be the 40th, so it would have been, | 12:50 |
'75 would have been the first one, or '76, I don't know, | 12:54 | |
anyway, second or third one, | 13:00 | |
it was outside Hesperia, Michigan. | 13:03 | |
I went and worked there and I had always been, | 13:05 | |
I'd lived communally, was interested in living communally, | 13:14 | |
had been involved in radical lesbian feminist movement | 13:18 | |
and that's where my heart lay plus I considered myself | 13:24 | |
kind of a country person. | 13:31 | |
I mean, all my relatives are farmers and I come | 13:34 | |
from a long line of farmers and liked living in the country. | 13:38 | |
My first house I bought for $8,250 and I spent | 13:53 | |
three years totally remodeling it | 13:58 | |
and really wanted to do stuff, | 14:02 | |
I mean, I really wanted to build my own house | 14:08 | |
from the ground up and I wanted to do it | 14:12 | |
and to do things like hand carve the windowsills | 14:15 | |
and stuff like that. | 14:19 | |
You'd spend the rest of your life building the house, | 14:22 | |
not that you wouldn't have a frame-up and stuff | 14:26 | |
that you could live in but just making it yours. | 14:29 | |
So, I hate moving, I wanted to find the ideal | 14:35 | |
place to live and live there for the rest of my life. | 14:44 | |
So, that was my motivation, that's what I was looking for | 14:49 | |
and I knew it wasn't in Indiana. | 14:55 | |
Although I may end up dying here (chuckles). | 15:05 | |
- | Oh, wow. | 15:09 |
So, it's been Indiana for the last too many years? | 15:14 | |
- | I told someone the other day that if I die in Indiana, | 15:18 |
while I'm still living in Indiana, | 15:21 | |
I'll consider the single biggest failure | 15:23 | |
of my life (chuckles). | 15:25 | |
- | Oh, so that's the last 25 years of your life | 15:32 |
you've lived there, more than? | 15:35 | |
- | Pardon? | 15:38 |
- | You've lived there, in Indiana, for the last 25 years? | 15:39 |
- | Yes. | 15:43 |
- | 14 months, 27 years. | 15:45 |
- | And believe me, those 25 years | 15:47 |
went really fast (chuckles). | 15:48 | |
- | Okay, okay, so that's how your idealism, all right. | 15:55 |
This project we're doing, | 16:03 | |
the Southern Lesbian-Feminist Activist Herstory Project | 16:05 | |
is about documenting all the stuff | 16:09 | |
that was going on in the South | 16:12 | |
that's not gotten recognized by the historians | 16:13 | |
of the Women's Movement who tend to focus on | 16:17 | |
urban Northeast and Western places and | 16:19 | |
we see the Land Dyke Movement as a form | 16:26 | |
of lesbian feminist activism, partly because they're | 16:29 | |
just creating this alternative world where you could | 16:32 | |
live out the feminist values. | 16:34 | |
So you said earlier, you saw yourself as a | 16:37 | |
lesbian feminist activist, | 16:39 | |
I know you said you were looking for the ideal | 16:45 | |
place to live but did you see it as a form of activism too? | 16:47 | |
I'm talking about your activism. | 16:53 | |
- | What is activism? | 16:54 |
- | When you said you were already a feminist? | 16:58 |
- | Well, I didn't see the traveling as radical | 17:00 |
but yes, I mean, Women's Land and women living on it, | 17:02 | |
yes, I saw that as a radical act | 17:11 | |
to drop out of, I mean, as much as one could, | 17:16 | |
dropping out of the mainstream and creating | 17:21 | |
our own environment and stuff. | 17:23 | |
Now, at the end of my traveling, | 17:26 | |
I was kind of disillusioned about that but yes, | 17:29 | |
my vision originally was, | 17:33 | |
yes, I saw it as a very radical political activity. | 17:37 | |
- | And what was your radical politics before | 17:48 |
you started doing that? | 17:51 | |
- | Well, I'd lived in New York City and I'd been | 17:53 |
a part of New York Radical Feminists and | 18:00 | |
Women's Music Network that put out the record | 18:05 | |
Lavender Jane Loves Women and we were doing dances | 18:07 | |
and concerts with women, you know, | 18:13 | |
with lesbian performers and it was all, | 18:18 | |
at that time, all women and all women | 18:26 | |
played the music and I thought we were | 18:30 | |
doing something very different. | 18:35 | |
I didn't think we were just trying to create | 18:36 | |
a lesbian Mick Jagger but again, I think what's happened | 18:39 | |
with women's music is it's just become mainstream. | 18:49 | |
It's not what I thought it was to begin with but | 18:55 | |
I mean, I was involved in things like, | 19:06 | |
well, I was involved in things beyond just lesbian politics, | 19:10 | |
I was also involved with this group in New York City that | 19:15 | |
organized rent strikes and helped, | 19:18 | |
was much more of a, kind of a Marxist group but | 19:22 | |
the Radical Lesbian Feminists | 19:28 | |
was what was really personal for me and my attitude was, | 19:40 | |
the personal was politically, | 19:45 | |
how we would get things changed, | 19:50 | |
how we would create change was by changing | 19:54 | |
things in our own lives and | 19:57 | |
that being, not an example isn't exactly the right word but | 20:04 | |
that being, as things in our lives changed, | 20:12 | |
for instance, Women's Land, women living on Women's Land, | 20:19 | |
the more women that were living on Women's Land, | 20:22 | |
the more other women could see, | 20:25 | |
well, that's a possibility. | 20:28 | |
Yeah, I could do that too. | 20:29 | |
So, in the sense, an example, | 20:32 | |
and that's how change was created more so than voting or | 20:35 | |
boycotting or whatever. | 20:43 | |
That was my personal political philosophy back then. | 20:53 | |
The staff seemed to have a lot of Women's Land, | 21:13 | |
a fair amount of Women's Land. | 21:21 | |
I kind of felt like, when I left New York City, | 21:23 | |
just about anything or everything you could (chuckles) | 21:32 | |
wanna find, you could find in New York City | 21:36 | |
and I left there in '75 but | 21:41 | |
what I discovered and thought was that | 21:47 | |
but incredible, radical things are happening all over, | 21:53 | |
like Lesbian Connection | 21:59 | |
and the Michigan Women's Music Festival, | 22:00 | |
which was different than it is now. | 22:03 | |
For one thing, it was a collective back then and | 22:12 | |
like the Pagoda. | 22:22 | |
I thought the Pagoda was just really fantastic | 22:25 | |
and really exciting but the Pagoda was a rare place | 22:31 | |
because everybody was an owner, | 22:40 | |
whereas most Women's Land, what was defined as Women's Land, | 22:45 | |
except for one or two places in Oregon, | 22:50 | |
really was privately owned land and | 22:55 | |
the owner, whoever the actual owner was | 23:02 | |
really had the right at any point to kick people off | 23:06 | |
and that's exactly what they did at certain points | 23:11 | |
and when I was traveling I found that | 23:16 | |
very depressing and scary. | 23:18 | |
I would have been very hesitant to build my own house | 23:27 | |
on somebody else's land, on land that I didn't | 23:33 | |
really have any ownership in, | 23:36 | |
that somebody could just kick me off | 23:42 | |
if I pissed them off (chuckles) or whatever. | 23:44 | |
- | Yeah, did you know Blue Lunden, | 23:52 |
did you go down there, to Sugarloaf? | 23:53 | |
- | Yes, but I knew Blue from New York City. | 23:59 |
- | Oh, right, of course, yeah. | 24:01 |
- | Yeah but I did visit her in Sugarloaf. | 24:03 |
- | She was dying and they were trying to talk her into | 24:15 |
putting her land in a land trust and she told | 24:18 | |
more than one person that she was resisting it | 24:22 | |
because she's afraid that then they might kick her off | 24:25 | |
if she didn't own it (laughs). | 24:29 | |
- | Well, she did go back to New York City to die, didn't she? | 24:32 |
- | No, she died at Sugarloaf. | 24:35 |
- | Did she? | 24:38 |
- | At Sugarloaf, in that house. | 24:39 |
- | Was she in New York some of the time because | 24:43 |
a friend of mine, a good friend of mine helped | 24:46 | |
care for her and I'm pretty sure she did it in New York. | 24:50 | |
- | Well, she might have had some caregiving in New York | 24:55 |
but a whole bunch of people went down to Sugarloaf | 24:57 | |
to care for her in her last days. | 25:00 | |
- | Well, I need to call Callie 'cause | 25:04 |
I need a recipe from her for a cranberry salad | 25:07 | |
but I'll ask her about that | 25:13 | |
because this particular person I knew from | 25:18 | |
when I lived in Des Moines and so it was neat that | 25:22 | |
someone I knew from New York City and then someone | 25:28 | |
I knew from Des Moines, Iowa, connected up | 25:32 | |
and knew each other well (chuckles). | 25:36 | |
- | Yeah, that's interesting crossings. | 25:39 |
- | Yeah, I had this whole list of what would make | 25:46 |
the place a perfect place to live, for me, | 25:48 | |
and on the top of the list was, | 25:52 | |
well, high up on the list was that it not snow | 25:57 | |
and that's why it was so ironic that | 26:03 | |
every place I went, I got snowed in. | 26:08 | |
- | (laughs) And that was in the South? | 26:12 |
- | (voice drowned out by Rose) the first place, | 26:14 |
I wasn't snowed in there | 26:16 | |
but my car wouldn't start, it was so cold. | 26:17 | |
- | Where was that? | 26:20 |
- | I mean, it even snowed in Phoenix, | 26:25 |
when I was in Phoenix. | 26:28 | |
Again, I didn't get snowed in Phoenix | 26:29 | |
but it snowed in Phoenix, which just doesn't happen very, | 26:31 | |
so the joke was that I was bringing, | 26:35 | |
me, who was trying to get away from snow | 26:38 | |
was bringing it with me everywhere I went | 26:41 | |
but at Sugarloaf, I was working on a ceiling | 26:45 | |
in the guesthouse and it was July, I think, | 26:50 | |
anyway, it was the middle of the summer | 26:57 | |
and I came down off the ladder and it was noticeably cooler | 26:59 | |
and that's when I realized during my trip that | 27:04 | |
yeah, I don't like snow and it's a pain in the ass | 27:08 | |
to drive in and everything but the heat will kill you | 27:11 | |
a lot faster than the cold will (chuckles). | 27:15 | |
So that was, many things on my list changed | 27:21 | |
as I traveled and experienced other realities. | 27:25 | |
- | Can you think of other traveling dykes you met, | 27:37 |
other than Miriam and Martine? | 27:40 | |
- | Oh, gee. | 27:46 |
It's not Mary Ellen, Miriam. | 27:50 | |
- | Yeah, she pronounces it Miriam. | 27:53 |
- | Oh, Miriam, oh, okay. | 27:56 |
- | Yeah, it's a French pronunciation (laughs). | 27:59 |
- | Okay, huh... | 28:02 |
You know, not really, although I should drag out | 28:09 | |
my journals and go through that. | 28:15 | |
- | Well, after I type this up, | 28:20 |
you may be moved to do that because you may wanna | 28:22 | |
play with it and do something with it and I'm thinking, | 28:26 | |
this whole interview, it might inspire you to write | 28:29 | |
something else or more. | 28:33 | |
It can go, probably, in the book. | 28:36 | |
We're only gonna be able to use a small part, | 28:39 | |
maybe we'll, you know, some quotations | 28:42 | |
from several traveling dykes or something. | 28:45 | |
I'm not sure, I'm gonna send this to Kate | 28:48 | |
when I send it to you and see whether she | 28:50 | |
can think of, I mean, I'm thinking about Blue Jay, | 28:53 | |
do you know Blue Jay? | 28:57 | |
- | No. | 28:59 |
- | She lives out West? | 29:00 |
- | Where does she live? | 29:02 |
- | ARF, I think. | 29:05 |
- | Yes, I've met her, I met her out at We'Moon. | 29:08 |
- | Yeah, she travels a lot. | 29:13 |
She has land but she travels a great deal. | 29:15 | |
She's not Southern but I know she lived in the South | 29:21 | |
and I'm just trying to think of some other | 29:24 | |
traveling dykes we could interview to get | 29:26 | |
some different perspectives on | 29:29 | |
what the experience was like. | 29:32 | |
This is a very good one | 29:35 | |
and the fact that you were so organized (laughs). | 29:38 | |
(Naj laughs) | 29:42 | |
Sending self-addressed, stamped envelopes | 29:44 | |
to people (laughs). | 29:46 | |
How did you get addresses to do that, | 29:48 | |
what did you do? | 29:50 | |
- | Lesbian Connection. | 29:52 |
- | Oh, you sent them to Contact Dykes. | 29:54 |
- | There wasn't email, | 29:55 |
so people had phone numbers and/or addresses. | 29:57 | |
All the Contact Dykes had addresses or a phone number | 30:07 | |
and most of them had addresses because | 30:11 | |
there wasn't email. | 30:15 | |
Now, you know, everybody just has email, | 30:20 | |
maybe a phone number, sometimes an address | 30:23 | |
and it's also interesting that, | 30:29 | |
well, I did the self-addressed, stamped envelopes because | 30:35 | |
I had not had much money, a lot of money in my life and | 30:41 | |
I figured, well, if I want people to respond to me, | 30:47 | |
I should make it easy for them to do that | 30:51 | |
and hopefully if they don't want to respond to me | 30:58 | |
but they could use the stamped envelope for something else. | 31:02 | |
- | Sure, yeah. | 31:08 |
Do you feel like you've said what you got | 31:15 | |
on your mind right now? | 31:17 | |
- | I fell in love with Florida and the women in Florida | 31:27 |
and LeAP, LeAP was very powerful and I guess | 31:32 | |
what I started to say and didn't finish was that | 31:41 | |
women were doing incredible things all over the country | 31:44 | |
and it was something different, | 31:52 | |
some things were the same all over the country but | 31:56 | |
each area of the country seemed to have their own thing and | 32:01 | |
I found that very exciting and I personally | 32:11 | |
really clicked with the women around Gainesville and | 32:16 | |
then Willith Barben and Barbara, her partner, | 32:26 | |
who's still in the Miami area, | 32:30 | |
really clicked with them and | 32:35 | |
we talked about forming community together but | 32:40 | |
the problem was, none of us had any money. | 32:45 | |
I mean, I probably would have thought, | 32:49 | |
before this trip, I probably would have thought, | 32:51 | |
gee, if somebody bought the land and said, | 32:54 | |
come on and live on it, | 32:57 | |
gee, that's great, what more could you ask for and yet, | 32:59 | |
as I experienced it traveling around, | 33:02 | |
that's when I got a whole 'nother sort of feeling about it | 33:05 | |
and realized that usually when land was privately owned, | 33:14 | |
the person who owned it wasn't willing to, | 33:24 | |
well, like Judy's land, men weren't allowed on that land | 33:30 | |
until Judy got a lover that had a teenage son | 33:37 | |
and then, you know, he was allowed there and | 33:43 | |
anybody who didn't like it, didn't need to come to the land | 33:47 | |
and in fact, they wanted the land to be more private | 33:53 | |
and I'm not sure where Margaret Waters is | 33:57 | |
but I've heard that, I'm not on Facebook but I've | 34:02 | |
heard that Sandra's on Facebook, you know Sandra, | 34:06 | |
do you know Sandra? | 34:10 | |
- | Sandra who? | 34:11 |
- | I'm trying to think of her last name. | 34:13 |
She was at Carris? | 34:16 | |
- | Oh, Lambert, yes, yeah, I do. | 34:17 |
- | Yes, Lambert, right, Sandra Lambert, | 34:21 |
so you know Sandra? | 34:22 | |
- | Yeah, in fact somebody in Gainesville | 34:24 |
is interviewing her, we're doing a third issue | 34:26 | |
on cultural feminism with bookstores and stuff | 34:29 | |
and somebody's getting an interview with her | 34:31 | |
about Garris. | 34:33 | |
- | And where is she, I'd really like to | 34:38 |
get in touch with her? | 34:39 | |
- | She's in Gainesville. | 34:41 |
- | Oh, she lives in Gainesville? | 34:43 |
- | Either she's in Gainesville or in one of those towns | 34:44 |
that's not far from Gainesville, | 34:46 | |
you know, like Hawthorne or Melrose. | 34:48 | |
- | Right, right, right. | 34:50 |
- | People in Gainesville had mentioned your name, | 34:55 |
when you said who you were, I immediately recognized | 34:56 | |
having heard your name. | 34:59 | |
I was at that women's gathering last fall too, | 35:00 | |
were you there? | 35:03 | |
- | Yes. | 35:04 |
= Seemed like your name came up there too maybe. | 35:06 | |
- | Yeah, well, what do you look like? | 35:08 |
- | I don't look like a land dyke. | 35:13 |
I look like a narc. | 35:15 | |
- | Like a what? | 35:17 |
- | I look like I'm infiltrating, | 35:19 |
I don't look like a land dyke. | 35:21 | |
(Rose and Naj laugh) | 35:24 | |
I have this problem with not looking like I fit in (laughs). | 35:26 | |
I don't think I'm very memorable looking. | 35:39 | |
- | Where did you camp? | 35:43 |
- | I didn't camp. | 35:45 |
I was staying in Salem, that's how I got to go | 35:46 | |
was I had a friend who was going to a workshop in Salem | 35:48 | |
and I flew out with her and then I drove over to We'Moon | 35:53 | |
Friday, Saturday and Sunday, | 35:57 | |
so I didn't really get to meet people | 35:59 | |
'cause I wasn't camping. | 36:00 | |
- | Okay, so but, where did you sleep? | 36:03 |
Did you drive over there from Salem during the day? | 36:06 | |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 36:08 |
- | Oh, okay. | 36:10 |
- | That's, you know, that's not a good way | 36:12 |
to meet people (laughs). | 36:15 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, I was the one who kept losing my clothes. | 36:17 |
- | Really (laughs). | 36:21 |
- | I was there for a week, | 36:22 |
I mean, if something isn't attached to me, | 36:25 | |
nowadays and one day it was sunny and I took my clothes off | 36:31 | |
and then lost 'em and people were helping me | 36:40 | |
to find them but-- | 36:43 | |
- | They have great thrift stores out there. | 36:47 |
We had some good thrift shopping out there. | 36:49 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, I know, | 36:53 |
I spent two months in Portland last winter and | 36:57 | |
I can't do that kind of shopping much 'cause standing now | 37:04 | |
is difficult for me, for long periods of time but | 37:09 | |
I did go thrift shopping once and got two great jackets | 37:14 | |
and a couple of shirts and a pair of shoes | 37:20 | |
and really made some good scores that I've been | 37:24 | |
wearing a lot lately. | 37:28 | |
So, where are you right now? | 37:34 | |
- | I live in Huntsville, Alabama. | 37:38 |
- | Okay. | 37:42 |
- | Yeah, we have land in Sewanee, Tennessee, | 37:43 |
there's a group of six but only one of us lives on the land. | 37:47 | |
It doesn't have any utilities, you know, | 37:53 | |
the five of us live here in Huntsville | 37:54 | |
within blocks of each other. | 37:56 | |
It just got to be where, | 37:59 | |
nobody wanted to sell their house and move | 38:02 | |
out into the country that far away | 38:04 | |
from where all our connections are. | 38:05 | |
- | Uh-uh. | 38:08 |
- | It's that old story. | 38:10 |
- | You know, now that we're getting older, | 38:12 |
I don't feel capable or have the desire to | 38:20 | |
live out, I mean, I'd love to live out in the country but | 38:24 | |
I don't feel capable of heating with wood and stuff. | 38:28 | |
I just couldn't live out there in Oregon like they do and | 38:35 | |
when I lived in Kansas City for a little over a year, | 38:45 | |
let's see, that was back in '75, '76 and | 38:52 | |
the women there were buying and/or renting houses | 38:59 | |
in this one neighborhood. | 39:04 | |
- | Womantown. | 39:05 |
- | So that was really cool. | 39:06 |
I wish we could organize that kind of thing again. | 39:09 | |
- | Yeah. | 39:13 |
- | Or here in Indianapolis there's a lot of | 39:14 |
buildings that are just abandoned, | 39:21 | |
really neat buildings that I would love to, | 39:24 | |
if I had a ton of money, it's be great | 39:28 | |
to rehab one of them and have it be apartments with | 39:30 | |
a common area on each floor with a kitchen | 39:38 | |
and a big area that could handle meetings or parties | 39:47 | |
or whatever, on each floor. | 39:50 | |
I mean, 'cause nobody, you know, | 39:57 | |
we don't all need our own washer and dryer | 40:01 | |
and stuff like that, we could certainly share, | 40:04 | |
share things but it'd have to be convenient, you know? | 40:11 | |
The sad thing is, what I saw out in Oregon, | 40:22 | |
the younger women nowadays, | 40:28 | |
women's space is not of value to most of them. | 40:32 | |
The land, they love the land at We'Moon and stuff | 40:38 | |
but things have changed so that they don't feel the need, | 40:42 | |
they're definitely not separatists and | 40:48 | |
they don't feel any need to be a separatist and | 40:52 | |
I suppose that's a sign of how rules have changed and | 40:57 | |
society's changed, so I should take that as a good thing | 41:05 | |
although it's kind of, I feel like we're a dying breed. | 41:09 | |
- | Well, we've had some young, a few young, | 41:16 |
like 30s, 40s dykes and one 20-something who lives | 41:19 | |
at We'Moon and there are some who have sort | 41:25 | |
of the same values that we did and they're coming | 41:30 | |
along behind us. | 41:33 | |
Of course, they still don't have any money (laughs), | 41:33 | |
like all of us. | 41:36 | |
- | Who did you interview that's 20-something at We'Moon? | 41:38 |
- | Her name is Eva and she moved out there this summer | 41:41 |
with her partner. | 41:43 | |
- | Yeah, okay, they moved from, | 41:45 |
they were at Twin Oaks for awhile. | 41:47 | |
- | Yeah they were, yeah. | 41:49 |
- | But did you read about, are you on the Grapevine | 41:52 |
or do you get the notices from that? | 41:55 | |
I think it's neat, I've never met her, | 41:59 | |
I really wanted to because I visited Twin Oaks | 42:02 | |
when I was traveling and I was really impressed. | 42:06 | |
Boy, they have it down, I mean, the living down. | 42:10 | |
So I really wanted to be able to meet her and her partner | 42:20 | |
and just talk with them about Twin Oaks | 42:24 | |
and why they left and what they thought of it now | 42:26 | |
'cause it's been 30 years since I was there but | 42:33 | |
did you see the thing she was organizing | 42:40 | |
for summer solstice, | 42:45 | |
maybe it wasn't, I don't know if it was summer solstice | 42:49 | |
but she organized a little festival and brought | 42:53 | |
a performer up from California? | 43:00 | |
- | I didn't see that. | 43:03 |
- | Okay, yeah, it was gonna be like, | 43:05 |
I'm gonna get the figures wrong but she was gonna | 43:09 | |
pay this performer something like $1,500 and so, | 43:12 | |
to come out to We'Moon for the weekend for this, | 43:16 | |
it was gonna be $300 or $400 and I read that | 43:19 | |
and I just thought, wow, I don't know anybody | 43:24 | |
who was at We'Moon who's gonna go to We'Moon, | 43:26 | |
gonna spend three or $400 for a weekend at We'Moon | 43:31 | |
and I thought about several of the women that | 43:35 | |
were involved with the land and said, | 43:39 | |
what do you think and they all said, | 43:43 | |
I'm not going, I can't afford to go. | 43:44 | |
I mean, everything was always, | 43:51 | |
here's the price, more if you can, less if you can't. | 43:56 | |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 44:00 |
- | And I believe in that strongly but I mean, | 44:03 |
the whole We'Moon, I was at We'Moon for 10 days, I guess, | 44:09 | |
and what was it, $40 or something, for food for the week? | 44:16 | |
- | Yeah, yeah (laughs). | 44:22 |
- | You know (laughs), I gave them more money than that | 44:25 |
'cause I could do that but you know, | 44:29 | |
this one was gonna turn around and charge. | 44:38 | |
So she values women-only space? | 44:45 | |
- | She wrote something that, the focus of the piece was, | 44:49 |
it's called "The Ache" and it was about | 44:55 | |
why she's now at We'Moon. | 44:59 | |
She started feeling this ache for lesbian-only space, yes. | 45:02 | |
- | I wondered if maybe that had something to do | 45:08 |
with why she left, why they left Twin Oaks. | 45:11 | |
The thing that amazed me about Twin Oaks was, 30 years ago, | 45:20 | |
was that the men weren't like typical men | 45:28 | |
and the women weren't like typical, | 45:35 | |
the men weren't like typical straight men | 45:37 | |
and the women weren't like typical straight women, | 45:39 | |
so I was really blown away 'cause I could have never, | 45:42 | |
I could have stayed at Twin Oaks | 45:50 | |
and I could have never envisioned me being able | 45:53 | |
to do that being in a mixed community. | 45:57 | |
So I was really kind of blown away by Twin Oaks | 46:04 | |
but there was only one other lesbian there | 46:10 | |
when I visited. | 46:13 | |
I mean, I was visiting her. | 46:15 | |
- | Who was the other lesbian? | 46:18 |
- | You know, I can't tell you her name, | 46:21 |
I'd have to go back and through my, | 46:24 | |
she was a Contact Dyke in Lesbian Connection. | 46:26 | |
She was from California because she, | 46:30 | |
I was very close with my grandmother and | 46:34 | |
in conversations with her, she was lamenting that | 46:38 | |
she had not gotten more information from her grandmother | 46:43 | |
and her grandmother was down in, | 46:51 | |
oh god, I'll think of it, | 46:54 | |
Sherman Oaks or something like that, | 46:57 | |
A Thousand Oaks, California? | 46:59 | |
When I went up the coast of California, | 47:02 | |
I went and spent a day with her grandmother and | 47:04 | |
tape recorded her and sent this woman the tapes. | 47:07 | |
- | Wow, that was great. | 47:14 |
What a great gift to give that person. | 47:18 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, it was neat, it was fun, | 47:21 |
I enjoyed meeting her grandmother. | 47:24 | |
My grandmother was an amazing, amazing woman and | 47:30 | |
unfortunately a lot of things, a lot of the information | 47:34 | |
and knowledge that she had, I wasn't interested in when | 47:38 | |
she was really at the top of her game and | 47:45 | |
by the time I really realized, wow, | 47:48 | |
she's got information that's gonna die with her, | 47:53 | |
she was not quite so with it to be able to impart that. | 47:57 | |
So I've always been real aware of how valuable | 48:03 | |
that information is when somebody's got it, | 48:08 | |
you wanna get it (laughs). | 48:12 | |
- | Yeah, that's what we're doing, | 48:13 |
that's what our project's all about, | 48:15 | |
all of these old dykes that were doing so much | 48:16 | |
in the '70s and '80s and '90s are dyin' (laughs), | 48:19 | |
so we gotta get their stories. | 48:23 | |
- | Yeah, that's right. | 48:25 |
Well, I read the first thing in Sinister Wisdom and | 48:27 | |
I told Barb Ester, I said, the one thing that | 48:35 | |
I didn't like about, a lot of it was just | 48:40 | |
the chronology of dates and this happened, | 48:43 | |
this happened, this happened and I said, | 48:47 | |
gee, what I really wanted to read was | 48:49 | |
what Corky had to say about the North 40 and Pat, | 48:52 | |
the other woman who was living there full time | 48:58 | |
and more personal, what I personally was interested | 49:00 | |
in reading was people's personal stories | 49:07 | |
and there was some of that in Sinister Wisdom | 49:11 | |
and I really enjoyed that a lot and that's what | 49:15 | |
I hope this brings out more, more of that. | 49:21 | |
- | We do have a lot of personal stories in this one. | 49:28 |
We have Corky talking about the North 40 | 49:31 | |
and we have something about Womantown, | 49:36 | |
which is that Kansas City, the people who started Womantown, | 49:38 | |
that lesbian neighborhood in Kansas City, | 49:42 | |
are part of our project. | 49:46 | |
- | Is Paula Marie Dotter one of them? | 49:47 |
- | I know who that is but no, that's not. | 49:50 |
- | Well, she lives in Missouri or Arkansas | 49:55 |
or someplace like that now. | 49:59 | |
We'Moon Lighthart knows Paula Marie Dotter | 50:02 | |
but Paula lived in Kansas City when I was there | 50:05 | |
and she was a flight attendant and doing a lot | 50:09 | |
of organizing of stewardesses, | 50:15 | |
to get them to be called flight attendants | 50:19 | |
and get them the respect they deserved and stuff. | 50:24 | |
Yeah, she was definitely a big part | 50:27 | |
of that community there. | 50:30 | |
- | We'Moon did write a story about (mumbles) for us. | 50:34 |
- | Uh-huh? | 50:41 |
- | We'Moon wrote something (mumbles). | 50:42 |
- | Do you know Kway? | 50:43 |
- | No, Kway, okay. | 50:46 |
- | She was at We'Moon, the We'Moon Celebration and | 50:51 |
she's at ARF now but she lives very near We'Moon. | 50:57 | |
Somebody on the listserv, not very long ago, | 51:02 | |
somebody was asking, oh, the woman in Iowa | 51:05 | |
that's got the farm, was asking if anybody | 51:07 | |
had Kway's phone number and We'Moon Lighthart | 51:10 | |
wrote in and said, where is Kway? | 51:15 | |
Anyway, everybody got connected up | 51:18 | |
but Kway's out at, she built a house, | 51:21 | |
Kway's a very skilled builder and she built | 51:26 | |
a house near We'Moon Lighthart, | 51:30 | |
so she's in that same vicinity | 51:33 | |
but she travels a lot. | 51:36 | |
She's been going and spending the winter in Florida working, | 51:39 | |
doing a lot of remodeling work for women | 51:44 | |
around the Gainesville area, | 51:49 | |
Hawthorne and do you know Jenna Worth? | 51:51 | |
- | Jenna Weston? | 51:55 |
- | Yeah, Jenna Weston, I mean. | 51:56 |
- | Yeah, she wrote about gathering dirt, uh-huh. | 51:58 |
- | Yeah, Kway has spent two winters | 52:01 |
remodeling Jenna's house down there and outside Hawthorne | 52:10 | |
but Kway might be a good one to write. | 52:19 | |
I don't know what her herstory is, | 52:22 | |
she's younger than I am, | 52:28 | |
how much traveling she did back in the years | 52:31 | |
that you're wanting but she does a lot of traveling | 52:38 | |
and goes around to a lot of different lands and stuff. | 52:42 | |
She might be a good person to contact. | 52:46 | |
Would you like her phone number? | 52:51 | |
- | Sure, yeah. | 52:53 |
- | Let me look it up, just a minute. | 52:55 |
She's a inground swimming pool with two professors and | 53:09 | |
another place I stayed was a dirt floor house | 53:18 | |
with no electricity and an outhouse, | 53:23 | |
so I really stayed in a wide variety of places | 53:28 | |
with a wide variety of people. | 53:34 | |
- | Well, I think if you were to find those journals, | 53:44 |
you might be able to cook up something really, really, | 53:48 | |
even more detailed and interesting out of this, | 53:54 | |
so I'm hoping that sending you these notes will | 53:59 | |
encourage you to go back and (chuckles) think about it | 54:02 | |
and try to take your mind back there and maybe | 54:05 | |
write some of that. | 54:08 | |
- | I'll see what I can do. | 54:09 |
- | Okay, well, I need to let you go now | 54:13 |
but I will be in touch with these notes and-- | 54:14 |
Item Info
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