DYKE A Quarterly

DYKE A Quarterly No. 2, 1976. Rated XX: Recorded Women's Music. Review by Liza Cowan

 

This article is long and I plan to transcribe and write commentary on the whole thing. I will be adding more in bits, as I get them done. So stay tuned and check back. And, as always, feel free to chime in.-Liza

Rated XX: Recorded Women's Music. 1976. Review by Liza Cowan. Click to enlarge images.

Introduction 1

This article is about my reactions to all the women’s music released on records and tapes to date. I define women’s music as music that is made by, for and about women. What this means, in effect is that women’s music is Lesbian Music. I am always offended to see women’s records for sale in straight stores. I have seen them in movement and “peoples” stores all over the country, and I don’t think they have any business being there. I do not want men to even set their beady little eyes on our culture; the thought of them actually buying or listening to women’s music is nauseating to me; and they most certainly should not be allowed to make money from women’s music. I have also heard stories about musicians from the women’s music community telling the patriarchal press about women’s music, and telling mixed audiences about women’s private business. I consider this to be a breach of confidence. The only women I know who limit their music distribution are Alix Dobkin and Linda Shear. Alix sells Lavender Jane Loves Women in women’s and gay stores only. Living With Lesbians sells in women’s stores only.

 This article has been very hard for me to write because I am writing about so many different women, there is so much to say, and I have had to write about the things that I did not like about each record. There has been a movement dictum that we are not to criticize our ‘sisters’ and if someone does criticize it is called ‘trashing’ and everybody gets mad. I think this is absurd. When Alix writes a song I give her word by word criticism. If something is not clear, or inaccurate, or sounds wrong, I tell her. I think about what se has written, and I respond to it. When I am writing I always go to Alix for her to criticize my work. She tells me which parts are confusing or awkward, or suggests words. If I don’t know how to express something we discuss it until I can get a clear idea of what I want to say. We depend on each other for this. It has not always been easy. Sometimes it hurts, and I want to say, “It’s my writing, butt out!” but later I usually find that what she has said is true. She feels the same about my criticisms of her work. Penny, Smokey, and Mary also criticize our work, and each others’ work. The more we do it, the easier it gets.

Please keep in mind when you are reading this, that for each song or record that I dislike, there are women who love it, and equally, that each one I like has women who don’t like it. There are as many ways to perceive these records and tapes as there are women to listen to them.

 I hope you all get a chance to buy or listen to all of these records and tapes. They are our culture and our history.

 

Aircheck, Electra Rewired, WBAI 1972, Liza Cowan

Introduction 2

I discovered the women’s liberation movement in 1970. That same year I started to do feminist radio on WBAI in NYC. I worked on a program called Electra Rewired which was a weekly live feminist show. At first there were three women working on it, and my job was to find music. Sometimes I would ransack the station record library to find women composers. Pauline Oliveros and Ruth Crawford Seeger are two I remember playing. We would play Joan Baez, Judy Collins and other folkies. A year later I was doing the show alone. I played The Marvelletes, Carole King, Dionne Warwicke, Alice Coltrane, Dusty Springfield, Joy of Cooking, Billie Holliday, Carol Hall, Mary Welles, Denise LaSalle, Laura Nyro. The closest I could find to feminist lyrics was in songs like Natural Woman and Respect as sung by Aretha Franklin and Mama Didn’t Lie sung by Jan Bradley. “The greatest passion in this man’s world is making eyes at every young girl. To have one is how they get their kicks, but not me, because I know their tricks.” Another one was the Honeycones; The Day That I lost You, “you know, men are full of schemes, they’re masters of getting control of our minds and making us dependent on them.” Too bad that in this song she “found identity with someone else”. One of my favorite songs to play on the radio was I Hate Men from the Broadway musical Kiss Me Kate. At this time the only song I’d heard written by a feminist was Tired Of Fuckers Fucking Over Me by Bev Grant, which I could not play over and over on the radio. It was during these years that I first became conscious of the sexism in the lyrics of rock songs.

Mountain Moving Day, Rounder Records, Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, 1972

Mountain Moving Day

In 1972 the Chicago Women’s Liberation rock Band and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band released their joint album, Mountain Moving Day. Each group recorded one side of the album. In the pamphlet enclosed in the record they say, “We didn’t want to write the female counterpart of songs like Under My thumb, Back Street Girl, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, where men say to us, “you’re beneath contempt and we will celebrate your degradation.” As performers  we didn’t want to get off by trashing the people we played for, and we didn’t want to have a star backed up by a squad of secondary musicians. But what did we want, anyway? We knew that we wanted t make music that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we shared. And the lyrics were the obvious place to begin. The field was wide open. Most of the rock songs that woman have sung till now were about the pain men cause u – the pain that’s supposed to define us a women. We didn’t want to deny that tradition (women struggled hard for the right to sing even that much) but we wanted to sing about how the pain doesn’t have to be there – how we fight and struggle and love to make it all change…”

 For some reason, I never heard this record until last week. As soon as I heard it I fell for it. It is full of turn-of-the-decade sisterhood energy, and, although I didn’t hear it at the time, it clearly brings back all the feelings I had when I realized how thrilling it was to be a woman on the verge of changing my life and my consciousness. In So Fine by the NHWLRB, Judy Miller says, “Now I want to say something about how we got to feel so fine. We haven’t always been this strong, and we’re not as strong now as we

Re gonna be. I takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of pain, too. We used to think that women really were inferior. We used to think we were only good for: pleasing me, having babies, doing housework, having shit jobs, doing volunteer work, and –you know- sex! We didn’t know that women could get together and” play rock music, fix our cars, give abortions, love our sisters, stay single, choose our own lifesyle and – you know – say No!” the WWLRB is really powerful in its lyrics and the way they are spoken and sung. From Secretary by Sherry Jenkins: “Get up/Downtown? Think Ill talk to Alice she may understand? No Trust/Big Bust/ Wonder if the new girls lives along/ men’s eyes/fantasize/Jodi wants to tell the boss to get off/Elevators/See you later’s / Tell all the girls, noon in the lunchroom/ And maybe we’ll all wear pants tomorrow.” The whole album is beautiful, strong, moving and funny. It is excellently engineered by Susan Jenks. The musicians and the arrangements are also excellent. The album was produced and distributed by Rounder Records, which is, or was then, mostly men. It is, to me, the musical equivalent to the book, Sisterhood Is Powerful.

 

 

 

DYKE, A Quarterly No. 2: Who Gets Left Out When The Music Starts? by Linda Shear

 

DYKE A Quarterly, No. 2. Linda Shear, Who Gets Left Out When The Music Starts.

exerpt:

I am not interested in being a WOMAN musician, doing what the “Movement Women Musicians (even, and sometimes especially Lesbians) define as Women’s Music. I have heard myself discussed within the words of “us” and “we”. But you and I have very different views about who “we” are, and who the enemy is.

 We confront a struggle to survive with very different assumptions. As we compute, analyze, judge, and utilize our experiences as Lesbians, musician, and women, in very different ways.

 You want to deal within a broad category because “our lives are so complex”. I say that our lives are some complex because we Lesbians have dealt too long with a broad category. We have Helped build broad categories, and then discover that our Lesbian identities become lost in these universal, patriarchal-motivated, subversive broad categories. And I am bitter about being banned from the “movement concert-circuit” because I will not sing my songs for men.

 

 

 

DYKE A Quarterly No, 6, 1978, Back Cover

We proposed an issue on Lesbian media. It was going to be issue No. 7. The magazine folded before we could publish it, which is a great shame. Irene Young took these amazing photographs so at least we have this stunning graphic.

DYKE A Quarterly, No. 6.1978. Back Cover. Photos by Irene Young. ©Tomato Publications 1977, New York

 

Women's Buttons in DYKE A Quarterly. Send us a button* of a photo of buttons to be used in a photo essay on Women's Buttons in DYKE #7, Lesbian Media.

This issue will feature essays, interviews, resource lists and graphics on different forms of Lesbians communications: magazines, newspapers, letters, posters, buttons, fliers, video, films. We are looking for articles and news for this issue

DYKE pays for everything it prints. Remember we will always print non-theme related articles, so don't hesitate to send other work,

A subscription to DYKE, A  Quarterly costs $8.00 for four issues. A single copy costs $2.25 in women's and gay stores. $275 by mail. Please address all correspondence, submissions and make checks payable to: Tomato Publications, 70 Barrow Street, New York, NY 10014.

*Please send us a button or a photograph of your favorite woman's buttons. Please tell us the size and colors of the buttons if you send us a photograph. Please tell us, if you know, when it was made, who designed it, what is the event, place, group action or idea that it describes. We would prefer to keep the button if you have doubles, be we can arrange to return them to you if you request. We will not return photos. Please send clear, sharply focused, black and white prints. No slides please. Thank you.

Photographs:  Irene Young

 

LESBIANISM IS REVOLUTION

1" purple and white, designed by Denny Covallo for Gay Women's Liberation Front, New York City Circa 1970

 

 

 

 

 

 

DYKE

1" purple and white

circa 1974

 

STARS AND DYKES FOREVER

1" red, white, blue,

designed by Delia Davis & Denise Wong

New York City, 1973

 

AMAZON WARRIOR

1" black and white

drawing from Greek Vase

California, circa 1975

 

 

 

 

TYKES & DYKES

1 1/2" black and white

designed by Tykes & Dykes

New York City, circa 1976

 

 

LESBIANS IGNITE

1" red and white

?Philadelphia circa 1974

Photos by Irene Young. ©Tomato Publications 1977, New York

DYKE A Quarterly, no. 5. Fall, 1977. Back Cover

 

DYKE A Quarterly No. 5, Back Cover, Photo by Irene Young. 1977 @Tomato Publications. T-shirt design by Jymme Golden.

Women's T-Shirts in DYKE A Quarterly. Send us a photo* of yourself to be used in a photo essay on T-Shirts in DYKE #7, Lesbian Media.

This issue will feature essays, interviews, resource lists and graphics on different forms of Lesbians communications: magazines, newspapers, letters, posters, buttons, fliers, video, films. We are looking for articles and news for this issue

DYKE pays for everything it prints. Remember we will always print non-theme related articles, so don't hesitate to send other work,

A subscription to DYKE, A  Quarterly costs $8.00 for four issues. A single copy costs $2.25 in women's and gay stores. $275 by mail. Please address all correspondence, submissions and make checks payable to: Tomato Publications, 70 Barrow Street, New York, NY 10014.

*Sent us a photo of yourself or a friend, or a group of friends wearing your favorite woman-made T shirts. If you know, please tell us who designed the shirt, when it was made, what the event, place, group or idea that it describes, and any other information you consider relevant. The photo should be clear, black and white. We won't be able to return  photos. No slides please. Thank you.

Photo by Irene Young

 

We proposed an issue on Lesbian media. It was going to be issue No. 7. The magazine folded before we could publish it, which is a great shame. Irene Young took these amazing photographs so at least we have this stunning graphic.

 

Inside front cover, DYKE A Quarterly No 5. 1977. Photo by Irene Young. @Tomato Publications

DYKE A Quarterly, No. 4, front and back covers

In issue No. 4 we broke form to publish a poster instead of a magazine. Along with the gorgeous 4-color poster, designed by Debbie Drechsler and printed by Tower Press, we sent a magazinelette, envelope sized, with letters and responses. Our readers were baffled. 

 

DYKE A Quarterly, Issue No. 4. cover. Illustration by Debbie Drechsler.

NOTE FROM THE ARTIST

I was halfway through college, studying graphic design, when I started doing drawings for the New Women's Times, the feminist paper in Rochester, N.Y. It wasn't a conscious decision - I still don't know what I was thinking when I called them, but within six months, I developed a strong feminist consciousness, declared myself a Lesbian and left school. Now, I do odd jobs to make money and spend as much time as possible trying to visually describe what it means to be a feminist Lesbian.

Doing a poster to celebrate DYKE magazine's first anniversary felt as natural as doing more personal drawings. Basically, I wanted to say that any and all of us can be Lesbians, and are. Also, I wanted to show the real strong pride that we should all feel about ourselves. 

Debbie Drechsler.

 

 

Debbie Drechsler is still working as an illustrator. See her website HERE

Flier for DYKE A Quarterly,Wanted: Poster Design. Illustration by Liza Cowan

More about our decision to change format HERE

Side Trip: Alice Austen in LIFE Magazine, 1951

Just a few months before she died, Alice Austen made her second appearance in LIFE Magazine.

Alice Austen Day. Life Magazine, October 29, 1951

"Alice Austen, America's first great woman photographer, had been rescued from the poorhouse and oblivion by the sale of her superb collections of pictures (LIFE, Sept. 24). But until this month the 85-year-old artist had never had a public showing of her work. On Oct. 7, however, the Staten Island Historical Society, custodian of her photographs, celebrated "Alice Austen Day". More than 300 of Miss Austen's old and new friends crowded into the museum to look at her pictures and say hello to her once more. Miss Austen herself was an hour late. Worn out by a television appearance two days earlier, she at first refused to come. But her friends convinced her that she would enjoy herself, and enjoy herself she did. There were speeches and orchids and gifts and refreshments, but above all, there were friends. Some, like Mrs. Charles Barton had posed for her in the old days on Staten Island. Others, like Coapes Brinley of the Staten Island Historical Society, helped win recognition for her work. Miss Gertrude Tate, her closest friend, had lived with her for 27 years at the Austen home until the two ladies lost their money and the home was sold.

The old lady in the wheelchair knew how to get the most out of every moment, although she mostly wept when Mrs. Barton bent over to kiss her hand. As the newspaper and magazine cameras recorded the afternoon, Photographer Alice Austen said proudly, "I'd be taking those pictures myself if I were 100 years younger." When the pictures and the refreshments were over, she went back to the private nursing home where she now lives, a little tired by the festivities but glad that she had lived to see Alice Austen Day."

Alice and Trude, now Mrs. Charles Barton, donned corset covers and petticoats and posed for this wicked picture taken 60 years ago on Staten Island. Alice Austen, LIFE Magazine 1951

Deeply Moved, Alice Austen bites her lips as old friend Mrs. Barton impulsively kisses her hand. Mrs. Barton now lives in New Jersey but visits Alice often.

HIGHLY PLEASED, Alice Austen beams up at Gertrude Tate, who lived in Austen home, took trips to Europe with her, nursed her during arthritis attacks.

For more on Alice Austen see HERE  and also visit the Alice Austen House Museum Website

SIDE TRIP: ALICE AUSTEN: A short video about her and her house.

A short video from the Alice Austen House Museum. 

Remember to vote for them at www.partnersinpreservation.com to help win much needed grant money.

For more on Alice Austen in the DYKE A Quarterly Archive see here and visit the Alice Austen House website here.

SIDE TRIP: The Great American Lesbian Art Show. Los Angeles, 1980. Liza Cowan's Journal

In 1979 The Woman’s Building in LA hosted and sponsored GALAS, The Great American Lesbian Art Show. In addition to the invitational show at the Woman’s building, GALAS was structured to include independent Lesbian art shows in communities all over the United States. One of the shows was in Saugerties, NY, curated by Susun Weed, Billie Potts, Liza Cowan and probably some others.

As part of GALAS,  The Woman’s Building hosted Amazon Ambosia, an event produced by Terry Wolverton and Bia Lowe. I, Liza Cowan, was invited as one of the two guest artists. DYKE A Quarterly had recently folded. This is an excerpt from the journal I kept during my trip to LA for the event.

 

Newspaper notice for GALAS, Amazon Ambrosia, Los Angeles 1980

Monday, Jan 28, Los Angeles

At Terry Wolverton and Bia Lowe’s house

It’s raining this morning and the house is quiet. It’s nine a.m. Yesterday’s event, Amazon Ambrosia, was a huge success. There were about fifty women there at The Woman’s Building for the art sharing. Janet [Meyers] was there which made the event real for me. There were some other New Yorkers, too. Judy Reif who used to be lovers with Fran Winant, who now (Judy) lives in San Diego. Harmony Hammond was the other guest of honor. She has a wonderful haircut, and is, or seems to be, a warm, smart and interesting woman. She had a cold and seemed to be feeling a little out of it. So we all sat around in a huge circle. Terry spoke for a while about GALAS [the great American Lesbian Art Show], then we went around the room and everybody introduced herself. That was good. I had been sort of nervous about my presentation till I knew who everyone was. It made us all somewhat equally exposed. So then I gave my presentation. I spoke about Electra [my radio show on WBAI-FM, Electra Rewired], about COWRIE [magazine] and DYKE and the buttons    [White Mare buttons] and the Archive [white mare archive] and then I showed my portfolio. I explained how to make projector pictures and resist pictures. I explained how my art isn’t ARTY, just homey art, that it is a form of journal keeping for me, but as with all my work, I am quite willing to share the intimate details of my life. I spoke about breaking up with Alix [Dobkin], everybody gasped when I said we’d been monog for 6 ½ years. I showed my self portraits + my cards for Alix and Deb, and talked about the cards. I had a wonderful time. Just wind me up and let me speak. I could have gone on and on, but I only had a half hour so I didn’t even finish showing my portfolio. I showed the Amazons [Amazons On Parade series of paintings done with Susun Weed and Billie Potts] but I didn’t get a chance to show My Golden Pamela, which is one of my faves. Anyway, women seemed to like my presentation. I knew that if I went and was me, exposed myself, told stories, etc. that they would dig it.

Amazons On Parade. Paint on butcher paper. Liza Cowan, Susun Weed, Billie Potts. 1979. Hanging in the living room at 3 Maple Farm, Preston Hollow, NY.

How not to? The feedback was: they loved the cards. “thank you for sharing (big word here) yourself so intimately” “thanx for telling technique” “I really identified with the breaking up experience” “you were charming” I love to be charming. It’s one of my better acts. Not an act, really. A facet.

 We had a one hour break to eat vegetables + cheese, then we danced which was fun. Everybody was dancing in couples but I managed to make it into a circle + more free form. I don’t mind couple dancing but I don’t like it when it’s all there is, esp on a big bright dance floor with only 6 or 8 women dancing. Terry + Bia made a good tape.

  After dancing we all sat down and watched slides + listened to the artists talk. Oh yeah! Before the break Harmony showed slides of work by Lesbian Artists mainly from NY but from some other places too. Some of it was really exciting and it was good to see so much Lesbian art all at once.

 Nancy Fried + Clsuf were my favorite artists. Nancy does wonderful little sculptures – pictures of domestic details of her life + the lives of friends. She’s a Philadelphia Jew + very warm + funny. Her lover Clsuf makes buttons, cards + graphics. I like her work very much. It’s much like my own. Also I like Bia’s work. She showed her portfolio at the end.

 The event was over at six. We cleaned up, went out to dinner then went to Terry + Bia’s spirituality group... I participated fully, of course, but we were all exhausted. Terry was absolutely frazzled.

 For Sat Jan 26

We did errands in the morning, Terry, Bia + I.  Then at two we went to a very nice apartment for a tea party honoring and showing the work of Nancy Fried. It was a most elegant party. All the girls were quite dressed up. The music was calm. Stevie Wonder, “The Secret Life Of Plants” and a woman actually playing flute, live, in the apt. Women sat around and stood around and yapped. I wore my purple skirt, green shirt, orange tights and my new Lady shoes. There were a zillion sweets to eat. Harmony was there in an all purple outfit looking squeezable, which I told her + squeezed her. Joanne Kerr arrived with Kirsten Grimsted. Kirsten + I started to talk shop, but made a date for me to go to the Chrysalis office instead. I have a feeling that the women have a slightly snobby attitude toward Country Women [the magazine, which a group of women I was involved with back in Woodstock were proposing to buy to take over publication from the Catskills] like it’s a hick publication. It’s very subtle, though and who cares. I feel like such a country DYKE here and am glad of it. I said so in my presentation Sunday, too. The city is disgusting. I don’t understand why anybody would choose to live here. I don’t think there’s much that can’t be done from the country. Anyway… Janet arrived and we mainly hung out together which was good because it was so good to see her and talk to her. She’s such a good friend. I’m happy to have found her again. Donna Dietch came in. She and Janet had just had dinner the night before.  It was good that Janet knew some one there too. I always want  everybody to know what a good artist she is. Donna and her lover of many years are just breaking up and she and Janet and I had a satisfying conversation about that, not just party talk...

Nancy Fried, The Woman's Building, sculpture

Phranc was there, a real cute little punker. We first met at the Lesbian History Exploration in ’75. It was good to see + speak to her. After a while I got pretty bored with neck up communication, longed for our Catskill style of disco corners and home made food. I was glad, however, to be with all the LA women. I am homesick, but I do not with to be with my home friends…

 Back at Terry and Bia’s we watched slides of some GALAS artists and looked at Bia’s slides. She has a very interesting vision. Very city, however. I think she’d be happier in the country. I like her quite a bit. I think we could be friends but it is not too easy getting to know her. For one thing she and Terry and quite the couple. They seem to be into couples around here. Not much consciousness about relating as individuals or what ever it is we seem to be working on at home as a community.

 Terry is an excellent publicist. I admire her drive, her ambition, her outspokenness.

GALAS button. Keep Lesbians Busy...making art!

Here’s what’s really nice and also funny: on this visit I am accepted by the LA Women’s art community as a peer and an artist. This seems to include the Chrysalis women, who last visit, seemed to want to have nothing to do with me. This is due to, naturally, changes + evolution. I’m not so snotty + neither are they. Also due to the fact that I invested $2,000 in Chysalis, thanks to Joanne. And Terry also liked me and my work, so included me in Ambrosia, therefore I am sort of a visiting personality. That the event co-starred Harmony (actually everybody was a star, but Harmony and I got publicity) was a help, too. It is nice because I feel good about being considered an artist and respected as such. It’s good for my self esteem and will be good for Country Women.

Harmony Hammond. Hunker Time. 1979. installation photo by Brian Forrest

I spoke to Harriet Bye [former editor at Country Women] last Friday. She’s not on the CW staff anymore but said that she thinks they’d be happy to sell the mag to us. Janet spoke to  Billie the other day. So did Susun and River. According to Arya, Billie still wants to just buy the mailing list, but it’s gotten bigger than just Billie now. I’ll call her one of these days.

Tonight is a dinner party at Arlene Raven’s.  Janet + I are going. I  think it’s a party for Harmony. Kirsten [Grimsted] will be there too.   I’m curious to see the art elite at home. None of them was at Ambrosia.

 Friday Feb 1^st.

I spoke with Helen from Ti farm a few days ago. She said she was afraid that CW would become too dykey under out supervision, She said that she was afraid to read DYKE. So that was depressing. They are going to have a meeting and get back to us. Then yesterday I spoke to Kirsten and Janet about it and I am left with the thought that CW can never be self- supporting. Not the way I would want to do it. My political and artistic vision is too radical. The mag biz is so hard anyway. Then, trying to sell to a group that is unwilling if not unable to support it financially? We would need to capitalize with $50,000 at least. We don’t have it. I won’t give it, even if I could. I don’t think that our crowd has the vision to share with me. Of all of them I work best with Susun and River, but they’re not writers. Don’t have a passion for magazines. B writes but I hate her style + I’m afraid we are not compatible. So if the others want to go ahead + do it, fine. I will help but not run it. I want to focus on my art. A mag could be the place but not now, not CW.

>about Monday Jan 28

Janet and I drove to a party at Arlene Raven’s. There were 12 women there: Arlene, Cheryl Swannack, Harmony Hammond, Lily Lakich, Donna Deitch, Susan Rennie, Dr. Nancy Sabin and a couple of others whose names I’ve forgotten. We had an unmemorable dinner. They were busy snapping polaroids which was fun. They took a couple of real goodies of me which they kept. They gave me this one, which Donna took of the group.  Susan and Nancy had already gone home. Everybody poured on the charm and it was very entertaining Cheryl took us on a tour of the house which has beautiful bathrooms. I told her about my miniature bathroom collection. She said Jane Wagner also collects miniature bathrooms. The first thing Cheryl said to me was how much she loved DYKE. Several other women agreed. That was gratifying. I have heard many compliments to DYKE on this trip. More than ever before. Fits my theory that it is easier  to love it now that it is defunct and poses less of a threat, tho I believe that they all did love it alive also. I wish PMAH [Penny House] could hear the compliments first hand. I try to pass them along but I’m sure its better to hear it from the lips of the women

Party at Arlene Raven's house. Clockwise from Cheryl Swannak (with raggedy ann) Arlene Raven, Harmony Hammond, Liza Cowan, Janet Meyers...the rest I'm not sure. Someone help. Included are Lily Lakich (with rose?) Donna Deitch (in stripes?) Susan Rennie?

Feb 2^nd

Janet drove us to Arlene’s for another party. Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines were there from Sinister Wisdom. I felt a little out of it and couldn’t really focus on the party. One funny thing was that Catherine really nailed Susan [Rennie] and Kirsten [Grimsted] about why Chrysalis isn’t Lesbian identified. It was especially funny because it was a role I would ordinarily choose to take on and though I’m sure I wouldn’t have, I really enjoyed seeing them debate. I only had to add that Chrysalis women are not at all present in the mag whereas PMAH + I were very present in DYKE, and Catherine are in Sinister Wisdom. I personally prefer presence as a tone for the mag.

 

Women mentioned in this journal entry:

Liza Cowan: editor, DYKE A Quarterly, artist

Harmony Hammond. Artist, writer

Terry Wolverton: writer, editor, artist producer

Bia Lowe: designer, writer

Janet Meyers: film maker, film producer

Judy Reif: Activist

Fran Winant: poet, activist

Penny House: editor, DYKE A Quarterly

Susun Weed: artist, writer, herbalist, teacher

Billie Potts: herbalist, writer, activist

Alix Dobkin: singer, writer

Nancy Fried: artist

Clsuf: artist

Kirsten Grimsted: writer, editor

Donna Deitch: film maker

Phranc: Pholksinger

Harriet Bye: writer, editor of Sinister Wisdom

Arlene Raven: art historian

Cheryl Swannak: producer

Dr Nancy Sabin: doctor

Susan Rennie: writer, editor of Chrysalis Magazine

Lily Lakich: neon sculptor

Jane Wagner: writer

Joanne Kerr:

Catherine Nicholson: Editor Sinister Wisdom

Harriet Desmoines [Ellenberger]: Editor Sinister Wisdom

 

 

 

 

 

 

SIDE TRIP: Video interview about Alice Austen with directors of Alice Austen House

 

Alice Austen fans...great news. The Alice Austen House has a beautiful new website and Facebook page, and is proud to be one of the only museums in the US devoted to a Lesbian. Yes, that's right. They are proud of it. As they should be. Here's an interview with Alice Austen House directors Carl Rutberg and  Ann Marie MacDonald on New York City TV show, City Talk. 

You will note that they talk about Alice as a Lesbian, which is great, yay, and that they discuss the first time Alice was "outed" at the 1996 NY Public Library Stonewall Aniversary Exhibit. Now, we know this is not true, because DYKE magazine ran an article about Alice as a Lesbian in 1976. However, they filmed this interview before I posted the Alice article here at the Annotated Online Archive...so we forgive them for not knowing, right? Right. Because Dr. Rutberg got in touch with us immediately, and we have been emailing ever since. He now knows that we had the scoop on Alice. And as he said in a Facebook comment to me,  "We want to make sure the LGBTQ community rallies around Alice"

And we will. 

So go to the website and Facebook page, and if there's still time, you can vote HERE for the Alice Austen House to get a $100,000 grant from American Express.

SIDE TRIP: 1970's Lesbian Separatism, Fashion, and the Women of the Left Bank. Margo Hobbs Thompson

 

1970s Lesbian Separatism, Fashion, and the Women of the Left Bank

by Margo Hobbs Thompson, Muhlenberg College

presented at a seminar at The Modernist Studies Association Conference, 2011

Images here supplied by Liza Cowan, not part of original presentation.

 

Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton propose that fashion spreads break the male gaze’s circuit to allow feminine gazes to linger pleasurably on pictures of women: “Fashion…generates images of women for women, a system of representations that one might suppose to be cut to the measure of female desire” (10; emphasis in original). Liza Cowan analyzed the evolution of lesbian fashion in a series of articles titled “What the Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear” that ran from June 1973 to early 1976 in the lesbian feminist magazines she edited, Cowrie and Dyke. Cowan bucked the tendency among radical feminists at the time to disparage fashion as inevitably an instrument of female oppression, to explore rather its subversive, seductive potential. Fashion spreads, according to several feminist scholars, invite the feminine gaze and also establish “a paradigmatically lesbian viewing position” (Lewis and Rolley, 181). In this paper, I want to sketch my preliminary observations about the interlocking issues of the gaze, fashion, and the representation of sexuality.

Cowan returned repeatedly to the French, British, and American women of the Paris Left Bank before World War II as exemplifying a liberated style to which her readers could aspire. Romaine Brooks’s portrait of Una Troubridge, lover of Radclyffe Hall who authored the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, illustrated an article on lesbian designers that also cited bookstore owner Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney, as well-known for her a literary salon as for her own writing. Barney had her portrait painted by Brooks in 1920; in it, her talisman is a horse statuette that alludes to her persona, “l’Amazone” in reference to her repuration as a horsewoman, her striking riding habit, and her identification with the mythical Amazons who like Barney rejected traditional gender roles (Crane 154-5). The centerfold of Cowrie 1, 4 (December 1973) incorporated a quotation from Gertrude Stein’s sensual poem “Lifting Belly”: “Cow come out” played on the title of the magazine. The accompanying illustration from a vintage advertisement depicts a vibrant woman with bobbed hair at the wheel of a car. She is dressed in a cap that rolls up at the brim, a coat with dramatic plaid shawl collar and deep cuffs, and snug gloves: she is the height of fashion and modernity circa the 1920s. The juxtaposition of a fashion plate with the Stein poem is apt: Stein took fashion seriously as a cultural expression, an opinion shared by New Yorker correspondent Janet Flaner (Benstock, 110). The following issue (Cowrie 1, 5, February 1974) featured Suzanne Valadon’s The Blue Room (1923) in a double-page spread. It is a painting of a heavy-set, dark-haired woman wearing a camisole and striped trouser bottoms, reclining on a day bed. Valadon’s model is endowed with a life of the mind as the artist represents her with a stack of books at her feet, an abstracted gaze, and a cigarette that suggests thoughtful absorption. There is a tension between mind and body, masculine and feminine in this painting, whose subject is at once odalisque and intellectual.

Suzanne Valadon.The Blue Room

These references posited for Cowrie’s readers a lesbian history, a self-sufficient women’s community, and a style by which lesbians could recognize each other. Cowan shared her interest in the Left Bank circle with other lesbian feminists, who in the abundance of lesbian periodicals that flourished in the 1970s profiled, pictured, cited, or reviewed Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Brooks, Barney, Troubridge and Hall, Renée Vivien, and Djuna Barnes. Talented and stylish women, living in a self-sustaining society of their own, their fascination for Cowan and her lesbian separatist peers is no surprise. I am interested here in drawing out the implications of this perceived connection: there are provocative similarities in their fashion choices, and these encoded a position with regard to sexuality.

Cowrie Magazine, 1973. What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear

In the Brooks portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge that illustrates Cowrie 1, 3, she wears a charcoal jacket, striped trousers, and a crisp white shirt tied with a black scarf at the neck. Troubridge is very slender and gamine with indistinguishable breasts and narrow hips, and the cut of her jacket accentuates her lean limbs and torso. She sports a short haircut that smoothly covers her ears, with sleek bangs. Her accessories are minimal: pearl earrings, a monocle, and two dachshunds. She fixes the viewer with a fierce gaze and unsmiling rouged lips. This portrait and the reclining woman in Valadon’s Blue Room reflect Cowan’s preference for women who reject feminine fashion. It is a selective view of the Left Bank: as Shari Benstock writes, not all the lesbians in Paris wore trousers and cropped their hair. Colette, for example, did not regularly dress that way, although her lover Missy occasionally did, and she imagined a community of women from which the masculine would be excluded (58-9). Cowan favored Troubridge’s look and Colette’s separatist vision of a women’s world.

In their 2003 analysis of the modern woman, art historians Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer observed that “the lesbian expatriate crystallized much of what it meant for a woman, in 1920s and 1930s Paris, to be modern: uprooted, mobile, urban, enterprising, culturally ambitious, professionally competent, sexually active, intellectually (and often financially) independent, à la mode—and, finally, visible” (14). Troubridge’s mannish style as represented in the portrait signified these qualities, and had a parallel in straight women’s fashion in the 1920s: la mode garçonne. La garçonne was the title of a popular novel about a woman who has sexual adventures, and demands sexual equality with men as her right. La mode garçonne represented liberation and modernity. (Chadwick and Latimer, 7) Coco Chanel was a proponent of the style, adapting clothing from the (male) British aristocracy and laborers alike (Benstock, 111). Thus a woman in masculine clothing read as modern, heterosexually forward, or lesbian depending upon the context and her audience. The inclusion of sexuality was crucial to Troubridge and her peers: it differentiated them from their 19^th century predecessors involved in romantic friendships. Natalie Barney was one who made no secret of her serial romantic entanglements (Crane, 153, 155-6), and sexuality was a crucial aspect of the new generation’s sense of themselves as modern.

What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear Cowrie Magazine.

The most chic straight women adopted male clothing again in the 1970s. Yves St.-Laurent designed a tuxedo for women, called “le smoking,” in 1966. Bianca Jagger wore it in 1972, and Helmut Newton memorably photographed it in 1975 for Vogue. Newton’s image of a woman wearing St.-Laurent’s suit, smoking, in an empty street at night attended by another woman nude but for a pillbox hat with veil, heightens the sexual charge already there in “le smoking.” Other fashionable women of the day, like actress Charlotte Rampling, were photographed wearing clothes purchased from men’s departments or boutiques. Surprisingly for someone so current with popular culture and fashion, Cowan did not make reference to these iterations of contemporary men’s fashion-derived styles. Instead, she referenced historical models who had donned the look of la garçonne and in the process claimed for themselves a sexual identity that was as modern as it was untraditional. Cowrie’s editor promised that by aligning herself with a hidden history of glamorous, sexy, independent lesbians, the reader could discover and represent her authentic self.

The authentic lesbian identity that the historical fashions Cowrie featured did not exclude sexual desire. Contemporary lesbian identities did, when they were aligned with feminist politics. Since 1971, the woman-identified woman had been the model lesbian whose sexuality was downplayed to serve a political purpose: it made straight women activists more comfortable allying themselves with lesbians. Poet Adrienne Rich reformulated woman-identification as a lesbian continuum in 1980, on which any woman could locate herself even if she never acted on same-sex desire. To Cowan’s generation of lesbian feminists, butch-femme role-playing was suspect: butches were taken to be “male-identified” while femmes were gullible narcissists consumed by “the beauty ideal” (Scott, 293). Furthermore, the lesbian butch was a working class identity: it was not only gender politics but class estrangement that made the butch unappealing to a privileged cohort of lesbian feminists (Case, 286). Yet Teresa de Lauretis writes in her theorization of lesbian desire and sexuality that it is difference above all that allows desire to move between subject and object; too much alikeness breeds an absence of desire and, implicitly, lesbian bed death. She observes that the most common sign of lesbian desire “is some form of what is coded as masculinity” because masculinity almost inevitably suggests desire for the female body (de Lauretis, 243). The fetish of masculinity is “the lure of the mannish lesbian,” de Lauretis writes: it resists the loss of the female body, and the prohibition of access to it (243).

By reviving the look of the Left Bank lesbians, Cowan brought sex back to her readers: The man-tailored suits worn by some lesbians in pre-war Paris presented a style that foregrounded the difference so crucial to the expression of desire even as it negotiated butchness. Associating her sense of style with theirs, Cowan promoted her preference for clothes that were both comfortable and expressed creative individuality; she described a suit she had made by a lesbian designer that was made of velour and had a flying horse appliquéd across the back. While eye-catching, it was not designed to attract male attention like the high heels and skirts that Cowan believed literally fogged a woman’s mind and made her uncoordinated (Cowan 1975-6, 21). Garments such as this one were “liberating, physically and psychologically, and…beautiful” (Cowan 1974, 22). The lesbian style, or “dyke fashion” as Cowan preferred, was a sign by which lesbians recognized each other (Cowan 1974, 22).

Style is the preeminent subcultural marker. Referring to fashion, style aligns its wearers with a particular group, distances them from a mainstream trend, and conveys shared values. (Freitas et al., 85) With her articles in Cowrie and Dyke describing the well-dressed dyke, Cowan defined a style that suited her ideal audience. With reference to the Left Bank lesbians, she attributed a history and continuity to that subculture. And with guidelines and exhortations to her readers, whom she imagined to be much like herself, Cowan invited them to participate in a lesbian separatist subculture.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Case, Sue-Ellen. “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.” In Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Ed. Lynda Hart. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.

Chadwick, Whitney and Tirza True Latimer, eds. The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Cowan, Liza. “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear.” Cowrie 1, 5 (February 1974): 21-2.

_______. “What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear.” Dyke 1, 1 (Winter 1975-1976): 20-5.

Crane, Sheila. “Mapping the Amazon’s Salon.” In Gender and Landscape: Renegotiatinig Morality and Space. Eds. L. Dowler, J. Carubia, and B. Szczygiel. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Evans, Caroline and Minna Thornton. Women and Fashion: A New Look. London and New York: Quartet Books, 1989.

Freitas, Anthony, Susan Kaiser, and Tania Hammidi. “Communities, Commodities, Cultural Space, and Style.” Journal of Homosexuality 31, 1 /2 (1996): 83-107.

Lauretis, Teresa de. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Lewis, Reina and Katrina Rolley. “Ad(dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbians Looking.” In Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures. Eds. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Scott, Linda M. Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.