this lesbian world

Chaz, Larry, and Me

2011-09-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

This has been a bad week for trans-butches like me and my friends.
A few days ago, right-wing groups and a psychiatrist warned American families not to watch a trangendered man, Chaz Bono, dance on TV. They say children will be confused by Chaz Bono.

But the children are already confused. A 14 year old young white boy, Brandon, had taken a gun to school and killed classmate Larry, a mixed race boy, aged 15—with a gun he got from Dad. The case ended in a mistrial a few days ago.
The reason: Larry dressed in girl’s clothes.

Chaz dresses in boy’s clothes.
Do conservative parents realize that by stigmatizing queer kids they give permission to their kids to bully and kill—the queer, the mixed race, the effeminate, the butch, the Other?

I’m a cross-dressing butch that has managed to stay alive long enough to write this. No easy trick, since I’ve been assaulted by straight white men several times in my life — for wearing the wrong clothes.

Now Chaz is brave enough to be on TV. Larry is dead. And Brandon may face a retrial and get 50 years — tried as an adult for premeditated murder. The lives of these young people and their famous and not-so-famous family and friends will be forever changed, mostly for the worse, because children hate other children who don’t wear the right clothes.

I wonder who’s really teaching such “values” to their children?
I wear the wrong clothes.

What Happened in Oakland

2011-08-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

To All Butches and our Allies
from Jeanne Cordova

Yes, it was a hard weekend--a tough experience, both sad and joyful. Bittersweet.
Many have written and asked, "What happened?"
Bottom line first -- a big group, led by woman-identified Butches, formally left Butch Voices and formed Butch Nation.

To start at the beginning of the weekend:
What appeared to be about 250 people (butches, femmes, transmasculine, genderqueer, everyone) came to Oakland. Many expressed their disappointment that they couldn’t find any workshops at the BV conference that were relevant to their lives. Others appeared satisfied. Butch Nation members did three workshops not included by BV. On Saturday Sasha Goldberg led “Bulldaggers: For Women-identified, Female Pronoun Using Butches,” sponsored by the Oakland Bulldaggers who played a leading role in Butch Nation, and the topic was discussed by a packed room of some 60 such dykes. The energy was high, tight with butch camaraderie and everyone spoke. On Sunday at the 12 noon lunchtime, I presented my workshop from prior butch conferences, “Exploring Our Masculinities While Keeping our Feminism” –with panelists Angie Evans (the Butch Revival musician) Staci Reed from Bulldaggers (and a co-founder of Butch Nation), and Sky Kral also of Bulldaggers. The room was filled with eager female-identified butches and we spoke about how and why feminism & womanism was important to butch identity. At the same time Butch Nation allies Lynn Harris Ballen & Yvonne Moore called a caucus for Feminist Femmes & Allies who wanted to know what was going on, show their support and air their feelings. About 25 femmes attended this “Femme Couch” in the lobby and were grateful to be together.
After an afternoon of BV workshops about 200 folk went to a BV sponsored variety show Saturday night called, coincidentally, “Butch Nation.” D’Lo the comic emceed, we laughed, talked, ‘shopping’ took place! Some politics didn’t go over so well from the stage but generally we all had a good time. It felt good to laugh!
Then came Sunday’s “Town Hall” sort of awkwardly placed in the middle of BV’s closing plenary. Butch Voices had invited Butch Nation women, so we came. Unfortunately, only about 125 people were still around to attend this. BV chose a not-affiliated with either faction moderator, named Raj Neogy. I thought this was a good idea and said yes to it when asked earlier by BV. Raj had a tough crowd with a lot of tension and intense feelings. Many walked in possibly hoping for reconciliation. The key issues were: the word “butch” being removed from BV’s mission statement and replaced by “masculine of center people.” The 2nd big issue was the Confidentiality Agreement issued by BV in April to all of its organizers and workshop presenters. Pages of this lengthy document were passed around by Butch Nation so people could read it. (on BV’s website, last two pages).
In this Townhall session about 35 people got up to speak. Charges about everything from “the Microsoft tone” of the confidentiality statement to everything but the kitchen sink were hurled about. Lots of tension, sadness, tears, pride, anger, confusion.
But part way through it became clear to people that these were core differences. There was no offer of reconciliation from Butch Voices to Butch Nation. Toward the end B. Cole, and a few other cooler heads, said stuff like, “It’s clear that there are now going to be two organizations. How can our community best support both of them?”
Suggestions were made as everyone tried to calm down and get a grip and look to the future. D’Lo asked, “How we can cooperate? Like the Brown Boi Project sponsors workshops at BV conferences, maybe Butch Nation could do the same at future Butch Voices conferences.” Sasha Goldberg of Butch Nation suggested that we go our separate ways in peace. I agree.

Did the split have to happen? Why couldn't we talk it thru and reconcile?
Please believe that those of us in Butch Nation spent 18 months and hundreds of emails and hours of Board Conference Call Meetings pleading with the Board of BV not to change their mission statement, not to cast off our feminist/womanist and lesbian heritage. BV and BN leaders still have dozens of emails about these talks.

Butch Nation is now in the process of writing its Mission Statement. We will soon pull that together and put it out for feedback. We have begun to pull together a Steering Committee for our Weekend of Butch Culture on the weekend before Halloween 2012. We are writing by-laws. We are recovering from the weekend. Butch Nation avows feminism as a cornerstone of butch identity. But that does not mean only one kind of big "F" feminism, and that does not mean we will exclude butches who may not be feminists. Our welcome card is to; “All who identify as butch and our allies." To me the "B" word includes all those who were welcomed on the main post-card of the Los Angeles butch conference of 2010. That is, "all who identify as butch, boi, genderqueer, tomboy, stud, aggressive, butcha, macha, drag king, jock, dyke, two-spirit, FtM, androgynous-with-a-butch twist, and transmasculine.”
Butch Nation wants also to reach out beyond conferences and be involved in grass roots activism and the world politics of gender discrimination, with particular focus on the oppression of butches.

Was there a generational, or racial, or class split?
Fuck no, not from Butch Nation! Dozens of youth are working in both Butch Nation and Butch Voices. Indeed, youth and women/people of color, and all classes are founders of both.
I see my job as an elder as supporting our daughters (and sons) to continue the social justice work we began with the civil rights movements of the 1960s… to women's liberation… then, gay liberation… then, lesbian nation, then queer nation, now Butch Nation.

Butch is a Way of Life

2011-08-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the hundreds of women, womyn, dykes, Moc people, and gender-queer folk who've written in support of the birth and vision of Butch Nation. (see press release in my last post) My position is that there are no "sides" here; just legitimate political and values differences.

But, there are so few butch events in our country that I urge everyone to go to as many as they can. There is much to learn and lots of butch camaraderie to be soaked up at all such gatherings.

The radical core of being a gender-nonconforming woman means embracing both the masculine and the feminine Self. Butch is much more than a noun. It is a way of life enriched by its painful past and made noble by its authentic present.
Movements grow and change through splits and shifts. They are common. And not harmful so long as they are issue driven rather than personality based.

The Butch Enough blog post – (7/31 - ‘Gender is a Landscape Not a Line’ - http://butchenough.wordpress.com/) accurately details my hesitations with using "masculine of center people" as an umbrella identifier. Find it, read it!

If any of you are interested in serving butch community by joining our Board, please write info.butch.nation@gmail.com letting us know this. And friend us on facebook - Butch Nation for updates. We are growing!

In brotherhood and sisterhood,
Jeanne Cordova, feminist butch
Co-founder, Butch Nation

Breaking News -- Prominent Organizers Break with Butch Voices: Butch Nation is Born

2011-08-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

Press Release
For Immediate Release
July 25, 2011
Contacts: see below

Prominent Organizers Break with Butch Voices:
Butch Nation is born

After years of internal strife, four officers of ButchVoices report they have left the West Coast based organization. The four, along with numerous others, announce they will continue their butch advocacy and solidarity work under the name Butch Nation.

The former officers claim they were ousted or forced to resign because the Board of ButchVoices would not address their concerns over issues such as feminism, ageism, misogyny, and internal secrecy. The long-term members include ButchVoices Board member Jeanne Cordova; Program Chair Sasha T. Goldberg; Vendor Chair Yvonne Moore; and Program Committee member Stacy Reed. The four women are long time LBGTQ activists whose experience spans three generations, multiple religions, races, and ethnicities.

Goldberg and Moore were asked to resign last month upon their refusal to sign a newly issued 12 page contract which specifies confidentiality as all “trade secrets, know-how, concepts, processes, ideas, development activities and designs, [and] all information not generally known outside of ButchVoices.” Although the organization lacks legal standing and is not a non-profit, their contract focuses on strict branding requirements, and demands that volunteers relinquish intellectual property rights.

Goldberg and Moore argued that the workings of a volunteer-based organization should be transparent to its constituents, and, given all of the internal struggles over feminism, ageism, and misogyny within the organization, were both unwilling to commit to silence.

Butch Voices is one of a new crop of butch groups organized in recent years. Its self-appointed leadership consists of: Joe LeBlanc, Q Ragsdale, Krys Freeman, and Mary Stockton. Cordova, a fifth member, was asked to join after her keynote in 2009. After last October’s regional ButchVoices L.A. conference, which had unprecedented success, Cordova was suddenly asked to leave the organization.
During its inaugural 2009 Conference in Oakland ButchVoices claimed it wanted to include all butch voices. However, a group of Steering Committee feminists left during the ’09 planning. Internal tension mounted again in 2010 when Cordova insisted upon inserting the words “feminist” and “lesbian” into the official Call-for-Submissions to the upcoming regional conferences. Although invited to serve on the Board as ButchVoice’s “sage elder”, Cordova’s value rapidly decreased when she disagreed with the Board, who proceeded to schedule their retreat during Cordova’s surgery.

Differences culminated when the Board Retreat met, without Cordova, and changed ButchVoice’s mission statement, shifting the original language of “butch women and trans folk” to “masculine of center people.” Cordova and Goldberg argued—unsuccessfully—for equal footing being given to “butch women and masculine of center people.” ButchVoice’s current mission statement says, “BUTCH Voices is a grassroots organization dedicated to all self-identified Masculine of Center people and our Allies.”

Goldberg and Cordova wrote letters to the Board about these concerns on behalf of woman-identified Butches who do not identify as “masculine of center people”--hoping that their own voices might be heard, and taken to heart. The letters remain unanswered.

Cordova, Goldberg, Moore, and Reed, though now unaffiliated with ButchVoices, remain committed to building Butch community. During the Saturday lunchtime slot at ButchVoices, Goldberg will offer her workshop “Bulldagger: For Women-Identified, Female Pronoun using Butches”; during the Sunday lunchtime slot, Cordova will offer her caucus, “Exploring Our Masculinities While Keeping Our Feminisms.” Both workshops will be hosted in a room donated by members of the Oakland Bulldaggers, and will be listed under the name Goldberg. Sessions will be open to conference attendees and non-registrants alike.

The four organizers are joined by members of the Oakland Bulldaggers, The Lesbian Exploratorium/LEX (organizers of the Los Angeles ButchVoices regional conference), veteran LGBTQ activist Ivy Bottini, and others. They plan to continue their activism through Butch Nation. Butch Nation hopes other butch groups around the country will want to affiliate with them to continue work in Butch advocacy, education, and solidarity.

The Nation can be contacted at Info.Butch.Nation@gmail.com.

Additional Contacts:
Jeanne Cordova; Cordova.Butch.Nation@gmail.com 626.791.0665
Sasha T. Goldberg; Goldberg.Butch.Nation@gmail.com 415.689.4712
Yvonne Moore; Moore.Butch.Nation@gmail.com, 310.614.4359
Stacy Reed; Reed.Butch.Nation@gmail.com
LEX/Ivy Bottini; Bottini.Butch.Nation@gmail.com, 323.848.8015

When We Were Outlaws: A memoir of love & revolution

2011-04-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

GREAT NEWS!
My new memoir found a publisher—Spinsters Ink, an old established feminist house.
Outlaws is coming out to bookstores (and Amazon.com), on or about October 18th.
You can now pre-order your copy from Amazon, click here (or from your favorite independent bookstore) and see my author page too.

So we’ve set the date for a big, splashy, and unusual launch EVENT on Sunday, Nov. 6th. Since the book is about my life in the free-love, free-sex era of the early ‘70s—perhaps we’ll find some free pot—just lying around—on Sunday, Nov 6. Do we dare? Come, see, light up! Mark your calendars.

And yes, the backstory—Outlaws was delayed because I was among the “Alyson 24”—the authors whose new books were under contract to be published by Alyson Books last year. If you read the gay literati tabloids then you might know that Regent /Here Media, the owner of Alyson, is being sued by Bank of America/ Merrill Lynch. So, like the other Alyson authors, including Michael Musto, I had to go and find another publisher.
Gratefully, Outlaws has a new home under the watchful editing eyes of Katherine Forrest, editor in chief at Spinsters. She and I will work out the final, final, finally revised draft this summer. And the cover is right now being designed by Alice Hom, that brilliant designer of the GenderPlay in Lesbian Culture art exhibition that many of you saw.

The first 50 folks who buy Outlaws will get your book autographed with a personal message (send me your book), or a personalized, dated and signed Outlaws postcard saying muchisimas gracias for your support! (Email me cordovajj@gmail.com for details & instructions)

During most of 2010 my LEX gang of lesbian guerilla activists and I were organizing the huge Butch Voices LA Regional Conference (see story below).
I was also busy writing an essay, The New Politics of Butch,” for a new anthology about butch and femme culture that is now available. Look for Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme (edited by Ivan Coyote & Zena Sharman) at your bookstore or on Amazon. I’m told the book features great writers and the latest politics about the thorny subject of gender-identity in all its nuances.
On the more personal front I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my collar bone and some ribs, which kept me very inactive for three months! But spring has sprung in sunny California, and I’m looking forward to planning more LEX events for the lesbiqueer community this fall!

Outlaws: The Memoir!

2011-04-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

A sweeping memoir, a raw and intimate chronicle of a young activist torn between conflicting personal longings and political goals. When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s.

Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is “to the revolution” –to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground, Angela Davis; exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement. By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era—ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives—with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the ‘70s, and for those who weren’t around but still ask ‘What was it like?’ – Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today.

With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.

This month in Curve Magazine

2010-08-28T09:54:00.001-07:00

What’s in a word?

2010-06-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

Particulars about ‘butch’ lesbians…..

Great Gay in the park! Dyke Day LA, with nigh unto 400 queers of the lesbian variety, was laid back and cool. The atmosphere, complete with whiffs of pot, made me think of our gay-kiss-ins at Griffith Park back in the day.
Fewer lip-locks this afternoon, but now it’s chic (almost legal) to dyke-out in public.

But while handing out postcards there for the upcoming ButchVoices.LA Conference, I did stumble upon some remarks that clearly show education about butch (or femme) needs some brush-up. Like one young person said my lover wasn’t really “femme” because she’s ape-shit watching soccer and the world cup this week. And I overheard another femme say to her friend, “Naturally, the femmes did all the behind-the-scenes work.”

Since when do femmes not like sports, and since when are femmes NOT on stage! Most femmes I know had at least one guitar-carrying butch hauling their shit (oops, accessories) up and down Barnsdall’s grassy knoll. As for my femme, she often asks me, “What’s the point of games with balls in them?” She’s only mesmerized by her country (South Africa) playing against my country (Mexico)! After that she switched the TV back to extreme-architectural-do-over, or whatever.

But a few more words on the topic of butch/femme education; butches are slightly more prone to watching sports on TV, but that’s bro-bonding more than following the ball. Neither the “B” word nor “femme” has anything to do with topping—in bed or out of bed. I know lots of alpha femmes who do both as their calling card. And plenty of “soft” butches who dig it.

Oh, and when I say “soft butch,” I’m not talking not shining your belt buckle or wearing your hair long. Buckles and hair do not a butch make. The “soft” only refers to the emotional “yin” quality. (That’s like in the yin & yang of things.) “Soft butches” (unlike ‘classic’ butches) go with femmes (or other butches) who are alpha: like power femmes, barracuda femmes, some high femmes (but not all), burlesque femmes, or just plain ol’ diva femmes (who hate to be called “plain” or “ol’” anything!)

“Butch” is about your style, presentation, way of thinking, and innate body language. “Butch” should not be confused with your emotionality (there are dominant butches, and plenty of pillow-king butches). And “butch” should not be confused with what kind of job/career path you’ve chosen. I know electrician femmes and Ph.d femmes, and a whole lot of femmes who are not in the “giving” professions. Some femmes I know last “gave” in the Ice Age.

So butches - and ‘studs’ and tombois and genderqueer leaning to the masculine dykes -you gotta be clear about who you are. If you’re not, your femme may just fill in your blanks. Butch dress and presentation is one variable of butch identity, but presentation does not necessarily define a butch’s sexual performance or her emotional comfort zone around dominance (or lack thereof) in a relationship.

All of which is to plug the upcoming ButchVoices.LA Conference in October. Ya gotta come so you can get your shit together around being a butch. If you are not ‘studly’ enough to come on your own, bring your butch-boi buddy, your femme, or any of your genderqueer friends who want to check out the scene and make up their own minds.
You can’t beat the price--$50 (sliding scale) for a whole weekend of best lesbiqueer performers and very smart lesbian speakers from all over the fucking country. Can’t get this at the Dinah!

Check out the who’s who of the butch-world at the conference’s website: http://bvla2010.com/
Kudos to the organizers of Dyke Day in the Park, and both Dyke March nights. Nice job!

Butches and Their Clothes – Still Walking the Gauntlet

2010-04-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

Drag Kings, fashion shows, butches and ties are everywhere, but what’s all the commotion about? Seems like only yesterday it was femmes and lipstick lesbians stressing out about ‘what to wear’ to the next hot event. Now we’ve got the Top 100 Hot Butches List, and the heat is now on us—butches—to toss the t-shirts and rag-ass jeans. Don’t leave the house lookin’ like a washed-up granola dyke with bad hair.
Are there politics behind butches and their clothes, or is this just another reason for lesbians to trend-out meaninglessly? Yes, we got politics. Clothes are an important dimension of the new butch renaissance. Because many of us have been deeply traumatized about clothing.

As a teenager, I hated being dragged to Macy's by my mother. Every trip meant a new oppression by girl things called bras, stockings, slips, shoes that pinch, and other ‘harnesses’ for parts of my body that used to be free. I could not figure out how to get into the bra-thing and was sure my mother had it wrong—it had to be a new sort of football jockstrap. But my teenage voice didn’t count. I was forced to endure five years of daily gender oppression.
In my first year of college and freedom, I was sure I still hated clothes shopping but I had to wear something, so back to Macy's I went. Parking my Chevy in the only free parking spot I could find, I accidentally entered the store by another entrance. What a shock! I found myself in paradise in Macy's—the Boy’s Department. The colors, the styles, real jackets, normal shoes and trousers! I couldn’t believe it! There was nothing wrong with ‘shopping’, I’d just been lost in the women’s sections all these years. Thrilled, I moved on…and had an identity crisis in the Men’s Department! And no, it never occurred to me that I was crossing the evil waters of the gender binary. I hadn’t a clue. My body was just responding instinctively to all the right clothes.

But my lifetime trauma wasn’t over. As my body grew into a woman’s with several butch features—like being so short-waisted that women’s pants crawled up to my breasts, and men’s shirt sleeves hung below my elbows—I spent the next couple of decades running back and forth between the various departments, including petite, looking desperately for an article of clothing that fit without causing havoc within my cross-gendered psyche. The low-waisted fad was terrific, but I went years not buying new socks until the young men’s department—and young men themselves—finally stopped wearing children’s socks. I always buy three of everything that fits because years might pass before I’d find another shirt that worked with my butch wardrobe.
Becoming a feminist helped me understand the politics of clothes—that clothes were made to reinforce heterosexual stereotypes. And to marginalize those of us who didn’t fit the fashion paradigm of “male” and “female.”
That’s when I got angry and started dressing with a political vengeance. I wanted to prove to the world that a masculine-inclined woman could look dapper. I even trained my siblings and parents. When my mother bought me hooped gold earrings on my 40th birthday, my father - seeing my sad face - offered to take them away and bought me a cool black belt instead.

In case you think anti-butch remarks are a thing of the past—I overheard my femme partner having a conversation at the last party we went to. She was talking with two 50-something year old lesbian feminists:

“Butch doesn’t happen anymore,” one of them sneered, as if they smelled rotten veggies.

“Labels don’t need to be prescriptive,” said my femme. “Masculinity doesn’t belong to men anymore. Haven’t you heard?”

“The word ‘masculine’ is still a dirty word to us,” they countered.

“Butch and femme exist in every generation of lesbians,” my woman said."Why don’t we stop trying to tell each other who to be?”

“Well! We don’t need to be men.”

So I see my Sweetheart point to me and my butch bud Pat Aldarete, both in tie & jacket that night. She says, “Jeanne and Pat have no choice but to claim their masculinity. When they walk into restaurants people still stare at them. Like they have a right to ask, “Are you a guy or a chick?”

“Oh, that never happens anymore!” I hear my two same-aged ‘sisters’ tell my lover.
A few hours later, my girl and I go out to a Valley eatery, and I walk the het gauntlet of stares from middle-aged straight men and their wives. But…oh wait! This time it is different. The only ones who didn’t stare was the straight couple under thirty.

So yes, butches are still trying to express our real selves in a world that still has a het gauntlet and doesn’t make clothes for us. Nowadays there are a few butch fashion lines struggling to break even, and even Nordstrom makes that occasional shirt “for the tailored woman.” So, butch—or some call it “androgynous” –clothing trauma lives on (made only slightly easier by a more unisexed society.) But that’s what all the fuss is about, we butches are still trying to change the world.

*L.A’s next Butch fashion show takes place Friday, October 9, at the BUTCHVoices.LA Conference. Email for more info: BVLA2010@gmail.com

What the Maine Vote Tells Us

2009-11-04T15:48:00.000-08:00

Last night, early in the night, I saw the stats trending down in Maine and called my close buddy, Ivy Bottini to tell her, “We’re losing Maine.”
I added, “The majority never votes positively on the rights of a minority. They will always protect their turf.” (That’s why we invented democracy – so that the majority couldn’t trample on the rights of the minority. )
What Ivy told me in return was an old maxim that we veteran activists know well, “We have to take power. No one is going to give it to us.”

So I called Mark Sullivan, spokesman for Protect Maine Equality, and asked him, “Do you have a back-up plan for tomorrow? Our troops should be staging protests, or a statewide sit-in tomorrow.”
But I could tell, he didn’t want to hear about defeat that early in the evening.

So I get up this morning and see that Maine lost by one full percentage point more than we did last fall in California, 53-47%.

There was nothing wrong with Maine’s campaign and nothing critical wrong with California’s either. Both struggled valiantly and brought our side up from the mid 30% ten years ago to the highs of 47-48%.
Simply put, straight people want to keep their “M” word. If gay people can get married, how can they understand their world? It’s changing too much, too fast, too soon for them. I know these are the comments of older people like my Roman Catholic parents. They don’t understand the subtlety of our argument that civil unions and domestic partnerships are not separate-but-equal categories. They are telling us, “Why can’t you just take your civil rights, since you say your fight is about civil rights, and leave us the M word?”
This sentiment showed clearly in Washington state last night where our winning ballot measure (Yes, we won in Washington!) simply elevate the status of civil unions to grant us all the rights of married couples—without using the “M” word.

What does this tell us? What is the message of Maine and Washington for our gay strategic leaders?

I think the LBGT movement should stop wasting our precious funds and energy on a strategy that leaves 90% of gays and lesbians out of the picture. We have lost in 31 states now, and the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over regardless of feedback. I think our leaders should be more concerned with winning our rights, instead of fighting paper-tiger battles around the “M” word. We should re-focus our efforts on doing what Washington did—winning. Our movement needs to be about winning civil rights for domestic partners in all 50 states. Dozens of states don’t even have domestic partnership (civil union) statues. They have nothing. Where are our big organizations and their purse strings when it comes to fighting for simple recognition of gays as couples in Kansas, Florida, or Colorado?

I say its time to re-direct the gay movement into fighting the real battle for civil rights in all 50 states. Put the “M” word on the back burner for a decade and watch—it will fall into our laps as soon as the older generation stops voting. But during this next decade, our people need REAL rights, not words, in order to conduct their lives as fuller couples, parents and human beings with practical needs.

As a movement we’ve made real progress over the last four decades. But progress means winning battles, not losing expensive wars. We cannot allow the right to define the direction of our movement as we pour millions into their coffers. If we re-direct our efforts towards writing an effective series of laws that gives gay & lesbian couples their civil rights, in much the same way as California legislators like Sheila Kuehl did over the last twenty years, gay couples in dozens of states will profit from this re-direction.

Lesbians Leading the Marriage Fight …I don’t think so!

2009-09-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

A rebel dyke’s thoughts on marriage

I was shocked to read in Don Kilhefner’s last column in Frontiers IN LA, that he believes lesbians are leading the same-sex marriage fight. Part of me wants to say, “And what’s wrong with that? White-gay-men have led almost every fight in our movement for the past 40 years. And the other part of me wants to ask, “Where did you get this crazy notion?”
In his article, “The Same-Sex Marriage Steamroller” Kilhefner says, “Let me respectfully suggest that the same-sex marriage issue is largely a lesbian-led one.” As evidence for this odd conclusion, he cites an article printed in the New York Times that “indicates that nearly 70% of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts are between women.”
I don’t doubt that lesbians are getting married far more than gay men. This is nothing new. Dykes have been more into commitment, home-building together, and nesting than gay men’s more freewheeling lifestyle -- decades before the ‘marriage’ issue wound up on the front burner of our political agenda.
But to cite the fact that lesbians are more inclined toward marriage than gay men as evidence that the marriage issue is “largely a lesbian-led one” is a sloppy and sexist conclusion. It is true that there are lesbians in the leadership of the marriage fight, but for every gay woman in leadership, I cite gay male names and organizations like Geoff Kors of Equality California, Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, Cleve Jones, blah, blah….
And yes, for the first time in our history, some organizations also have lesbian leadership like Torie Osborn, Kate Kendall, and Jenny Pfizer, and our home-grown maverick, Robin Tyler. So, for the first time in the 40 year history of the LBGT struggle, perhaps the marriage fight is truly co-gender in its leadership. And I realize that to some men, equal leadership might feel like lesbian domination but this is not fact.
Kilhefner goes on to say that “if something was so far out of balance in favor of gay men’s issues, our sisters, right so, would and have in the past, fervently pointed it out to gay men.” To that adjudication I say – the LGBTQ movement has almost always been out of balance in its pursuit of issues that affect gay men. In the radical 70s the movement was led by gay men who sought to eradicate laws inhibiting gay men’s sexuality. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the male leadership’s single-issue was fighting AIDS. And in this century the energy-field has been all about the T, as in transition and transgender. So there has never been a decade in which an L word issue has dominated. Until, perhaps now. So please guys, don’t get all hen-pecked over the fact that dykes are co-leading the marriage fight. We lesbians have been with you and supporting your issues for a very long time.

And as to marriage itself, I do heartily agree with Kilhefner and Ivy Bottini’s recent essays that our LGBT movement is in danger, not from lesbians, but from our co-gender leaders who think that marriage is the only issue on the gay agenda. I am a lesbian who does not believe in state-sanctified relationships. And I know thousands of lesbian feminists, like myself, who are not getting married because we believe that the vow we make to each other in front of family and friends IS the most sacred and important.
I do believe that we LGBT folk might be over-narrowing our movement into a single-issued struggle that will not serve us in the future. I saw the Women’s Movement almost die because it focused all of women’s liberation on the ERA Amendment (which never did pass). The Suffragette Movement (for women to get the vote), did disappear from the map with the passage of the 20th Amendment. The Black Civil Rights movement became narrowly focused on the Civil Rights Act (1964) and after it passed, that movement lost much of its steam. So history does tell us, a single-issued movement can be quickly cut off at the knees. Social movements are strongest when they put forth a broad range of goals.
I worry, along with Bottini and Kilhefner, that the over-focus on marriage weakens the broad health of our struggle for full equal rights for every lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer person not just in California, but in the whole world. We should be sending money and troops (organizers) to small towns in America and countries in the world where gender-variant people like us are in jail. We should be in the streets protesting the discharge of women and men from the armed services. We should be right there, with legal defense and money, when people are murdered on the small streets of the Midwest. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be caught up in the luxury of quibbling over which year to return to the California ballot. As long as we are divided, that’s a signal that the time is not now. But now is the time to build and strengthen our political, social service and cultural institutions. Yes, we will win the right to marry one day soon. The real question is -- will we endure as a community long after the last vote has been cast on marriage?

When Butchdom Was in Flower

2009-08-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve just had one of the most unusual experiences of my life – being in unknown city surrounded by 400 Butch identified - women, dykes, bois, trans folk, youthful studlets, aged bulldykes, feminist she/he’s, rapper-aggressives, classic and soft butches, and every other kind of lesbian Butch I’ve never seen nor heard about.

Yeah – I was there at the start of a new movement being born within the great family of LGBT people, but here the “B” stands for Butch. Yes, I’m talking about the first ever Butch Voices Conference in Oakland, August 20-24, 2009.

Walking into the grand ballroom of the Marriott up to the stage to give my keynote address, I saw and felt a great wave of power and awe sweep toward me. The power in the surge felt all-woman, yet also mass-culine, a rough-and-tumble, yet strangely elegant surge of love. What is this power? I asked myself as my shoulders coiled in fight or flight mode, the first instinct of growing up butch in a hostile world.

But then I saw Jewelle Gomez in the second row stand up and start clapping. And then the whole room rose up like an old-bull rising to her feet one last time, and I realized that they were clapping for me like I was Achilles returned from a lifetime of war.

And suddenly I realized that this surge was the force of butch-love. And it wasn’t just for me it was for each other. None of us had ever in our lifetime been with a great crowd of our own kind and this was awe, amazement, and wait… I remember the feeling from the 70s, great bands of lesbian feminists gathering and shouting and reveling in ‘sisterhood’, but only this time… it was lesbian brotherhood.

And later I found myself in a workshop led by Sasha T. Goldberg - a room packed with 60 butches who’d come to hear what the hell the workshop title “Bulldagger: For Women-Identified, Female Pronoun using Butches” – meant. And what it turned out to mean was some fear that our kind of butch might be an endangered species. We worried that so many of the young Butches were choosing unusual combinations of mixing ‘butch’ with masculinity. Did that mean that our definition of butch was being cut off at the knees? So we put our fear out on the table and looked at it. We talked about the loneliness of growing up as the original gender-warriors of lesbianism. And out of that shared pain came the realization that we need to re-define ‘butch’ in a post-trans world. And out of this realization we decided that we would not surrender to fear, not even to the fear of extinction. No, that’s not the butch way. We don’t surrender to fear. So we decided, we are not going to cut off our junior brothers who are taking ‘butch’ beyond the binary of male & female. How could we reject them when our own lives are about demanding that the straight world move over and accept the existence of masculine woman? How could we divorce them off when they are only creating a new platform out of the freedom we fought to give to them?

And so it was decided, almost from the very first day, not just in this workshop, but the Butch Voice Conference as a whole declared that we didn’t want to draw a line between female and male identified butches. We didn’t want to cut off the new shadows of what it might mean to be butch. We just said “no” to dividing ourselves along the patriarchally created lines of binary genders that we’ve fought so long and hard to bury.

And in case some dykes are out there saying, so what’s the big news, a bunch of ‘guys’ got together and decided they are guys? That wasn’t the case. When I gave the Conference organizers the title of my keynote, “Keeping our Feminism, While Exploring our Masculinities,” I thought I might be a lone voice of feminism at the weekend. But I was determined to insist that the new generation of butches know the strength of Feminism and don’t grow up without it. So I was shocked and over-joyed when butch after butch, particularly the African American, working-class butches, whose voice was strong this weekend, claimed feminism as a cornerstone of their own ideology of ‘butch.’

And yes, Butch Voices also taught me a lot about class. Things that this other class, privileged, Chicana, feminist, classic-butch never knew. And I had one of the best nights of my lesbian life rocking to the performance night talent called “Butch Nation” which blew the roof off Humanity Hall in Oakland. But these are others stories…more stories about butch voices…that I hope to write about later.

So for the thousands of dykes who missed this extra-ordinary event, tune into http://www.butchvoices.com/ - because the awesome organizers promise ButchVoices2 two years from this summer.

For more from me see my website under construction at subterior.com/cordovajj, moving shortly to www.JeanneCordova.com

PS Title of my blog gives a nod to 1922 book/play/movie 'When Knighthood Was in Flower', about chivalry in the Tudor Period!

PHOTO: Lisa Everly. (seen here, Lynn H. Ballen & Jeanne Cordova, co-producers of the LEX-Lesbian Exploratorium exhibit, GenderPlay, part of the BV art showcase 'Visually Speaking' )

What do Sotomayor and Palin have in common?

2009-07-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

Watching the sexism, 10 white men ‘bullying’ a lone woman reminds me of the worst of Chris Matthews trying to grok Hillary Clinton. And just when I feel my stomach start to settle down one of these guys from The Family of Old White Guys brings up the “wise Latina” quote for the 45th time and makes me feel I was wrong to come back from living in Mexico. As a Latina American, it doesn’t take much to out-wise these good old boys who haven’t swept a floor since they left Mommy, I am appalled by the overt racism of the supposedly wisest men in America – Senators.

I want to paint my protest sign and get out there on the streets for Sotomayor, a feeling I haven’t had since the paint-Anita Hill-as-a-tramp in the Thomas for Justice hearings decades ago. So I can feel the heat from my Latino hermanas across the country. I ask myself -- Why are Republican Senators being so obviously racist? Don’t they know they are loosing thousands of Latino votes by the hour?”

And then it dawns on me! These hearings are not about Sonia Sotomayor, she’s a shoo-in, everyone has admitted that. So what’s this show about? It’s about Sarah Palin’s constituency and who’s gonna be its champion come 2012. Her constituency, the Last White People Standing Party, that’s the LWPS party, not to be confused with the NSWP party – the National Socialist White People’s Party, yep, the NAZIs.

The Last White People Standing party is the last gasp of rural, used-to-be, the ‘real’ America, why are all these people of so many colors taking us over constituency that Palin now represents. And the Last White People are very, very pissed off. And something, I believe, the rest of us have to take seriously, if only to watch them try to take back their disappearing country. That will affect the rest of us.

Obama’s election as our first African American president, and come on, Michael Jackson was blacker than Obama, has tipped the balance of power in this country so much that LWPS might well be that missing third party on the national stage. Remember Ross Perot who at least hid his racism behind his ‘pro-business’ rhetoric? So let’s watch out for the rise of this third party. Oh it won’t be called the Last White People Standing party …no, it’ll be called something very democratic sounding and close to God. Let’s see, the Patriot’s Party, or maybe the National American Party. Yeah, that’s a good catch-all word – American. What does that stand for?

Pop Quiz Question: What will that new Party be called? Best answer gets front seats at the next sold-out LEX event! And, kudos to Angela Brinskele who got the last pop quiz lesbian history question first and right. Still owe Angela that GenderPlay T-shirt! Congrats to Angela!

Rules for Radicals....

2009-06-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

Righto, haven’t blogged much lately, but now I’m on a run. We’re working on the Top 20 Required Reading for Young Activists list. We’re breaking it up into philosophy, basic classics, gay, lesbian and trans categories.
For now, start with a basic -- Saul Alinsky’s classic, “Rules for Radicals.” It’s small, in paperback, cheapo. Alinsky was The Man in early 70s community organizing and Obama and I both carried the Rules in our back pockets. In 1972 I did my Masters in Social Work at UCLA and wrote my thesis on, “The Organized Lesbian Community of L.A.” The professor gave me a “C” saying, “I don’t believe this exists, but I’ll pass you because I know you’re going to create it. Nice try.”
Alinsky was our guideposts at UCLA School of Social Work for both Chicano and Black Student Alliances, whites too!
So here's a question: Anyone know who Del Martinez is (besides the President of the UCLA Chicano Alliance back in my day)?
That’s the pop-history question of the day. (no googling!)
A GenderPlay t-shirt will be awarded to whoever knows!

Time to Pass The Torch

2009-06-09T00:39:00.000-07:00

Katha Pollitt's recent column in The Nation is about intergenerational feminist conflicts. Read it at this link... & then my response below... http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/pollitt

I write to affirm Katha Pollitt’s view that it is not about waves, it is about power. And to suggest that 2nd wave feminists (and I am one, albeit a youngster of 60) all need to start pass the torch to Generation O, the Obama Generation.
Perhaps we do more action and less hair splitting here in L.A., where this passing of the torch is already well underway. And I am speaking more of the LGBT Movement, which strongly overlaps the re-burgeoning young feminist movement.
Both had their re-birth with the same historical events in 2007 – the campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And in California, at least, Generation O has further earned their stripes on the same Election Day November defeat over Proposition 8, which would have given same-sex couples the right to marry.
For the last eight months, California’s Generation 0, a huge passel of high school, college and post college young kids – often led by young women – have taken to the streets in protest on a weekly basis. They have organized so many new groups that we’ve had to form a coordinating coalition called OUT West that now includes 40 organizations.
I have met these young militant adults at a half dozen history-teach-ins, civil disobedience actions, panels, rallies, marches, and on Facebook. And unlike their parents’ generation – the 40 to 60 years olds who went partying or lip-sticking during the Bush’s dead years - they want to hear from us, their grandmothers of the 2nd wave.

That’s the real news -- that the kids are back on the streets again and wanting us to tell them: what is consciousness raising? How do you get a thousand people to a rally? What are the tricks of the trade?
With a looming defeat on our state’s agenda, and having been radicalized in Hillary’s campaign AND Obama’s brilliant grass-roots organizing, the only thing they want to know is – how do we win?

These young women – and dare I say, young men as sweet and feminist as their grandmothers raised them to be. Their vigor and idealism warms my heart. They are a super-bright, socially conscious lot and I sleep well at night knowing that after the fallow years (80’s & 90s’s) – the kids are back!
And now it is our job to school them, (Our Council of Elders is putting a book list together that covers everything from Simone de Beauvoir to Kate Bornstein), to support them, and turn the power over to them. We need to be pushing them forward, making sure that on every panel of old feminists, there are Gen O speakers too. We need to open our meetings to them, yes the top planning meetings too. And make sure their views and interpretations of the world get air time too.
And now, Robin Morgan, we do need to pass the torch. We had our day and did a hell of a job with it. But now it is time to be mentors to them. They are the future.

LEX... produces GenderPlay Exhibit in West Hollywood

2009-02-07T17:35:00.000-08:00

GenderPlay in Lesbian Culture
Exhibit opening – Saturday, March 14th 3pm - 6pm

With singer & boi-wonder Phranc & emcee Marie Cartier & performance art from Latina trio Butchlalis de Panochtitlan.

L.A.’s first-ever exhibition that explores gender and its boundaries and the changing nature of lesbian identity.

Discover cross-dressers and tobacco-chewers of the American Civil War and the Wild West, stone butches, high femmes, and kiki's of the 1950s through the Lesbian Feminist 1970s to queers, bois, and trans people of today. See how ‘passing’ gave opportunity and language to women’s sexuality – from two spirit to genderqueer today.

GenderPlay challenges our labels, asks us to re-think our stereotypes, and looks at how lesbians define ourselves & what turns us on. All re-mixed with vintage photos, archival docs, film clips, and historic first person quotes.

ONE Archives Gallery & Museum 626 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood CA 90069 (Gallery Entrance on El Tovar)

Produced by LEX - the Lesbian Exploratorium & ONE Gay&Lesbian Archives

co-sponsored by City of West Hollywood & Christopher Street West/LA Pride

For details: thelexinfo@gmail.com

A Letter to "gen O"

2008-11-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

A letter to Amy Balliette (http://www.jointheimpact.com/) & SaraBeth Brooks (http://www.sdequalitynow.com/)
Dear Amy & SaraBeth, and all you new, fantastic “Generation O” organizers:
Thanks for stepping out to finish this revolution! Whew, finally! Heard you on "Feminist Magazine" (KPFK Radio) last night, and saw you at all these rallies and marches everywhere since Nov.4th. You have inspired me --- a retired lesbian community organizer from the days of Prop.6 (Briggs Initiative that tried to throw out gay teachers) and Prop. 64 (AIDS Quarantine Initiative), to come out of retirement! And get to blogging some of my stories and tips as to how we won these ballot initiatives in the 70s and 80s, and how we built the gay civil rights movement. So here’s tip #1 from my life -- and the UCLA Grad School of Community Organizing back in 1970, when I was nineteen or twenty too: 1. Marches/rallies create energy. Energy needs to be channeled towards goals. Goals need to be: *Achievable (within our lifetime) *Clear & specific (not vague) *Bold (pushing the envelope, inspiring -- like Mr. 0). I like the idea of the Boston Tea Party. Especially if you can get Boston gays (and straight allies) to spearhead that day and throw bags of our income tax reports into Boston Harbor. The rest of us can bag them and burn them on the steps of City Halls, or if we want to be polite, just leave them on the s teps with a note to the Major attached. 2. Tip Numero Dos: Tell straight friends we want and need them in our struggle. They can do the same thing we need to do: Dialog with those who don’t understand. I went to the Pasadena rally Nov. 15 and saw, out of 300 people, that half were straight! Was I shocked, and delighted! If all young people merged as One, like you did for Obama, we’d all be equal real soon. If I can be of any help to you organizers out there, write me at this blog & I’ll answer your questions, or find some other activist who knows more than I do.
Jeanne Cordova, M.S.W., is a lesbian feminist community organizer, journalist, author, butch, Chicana, writer, old, wise, pioneering elder of the GLBT community, who first voted for Hill, but swung over to O because Michelle is so awesome.

PS You can hear the Nov 19th radio interview at http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/.

California Dreaming: Lesbians Over 60 Together!

2008-06-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

When they asked me to speak at the Old Lesbians Organizing for Change (OLOC) Gathering - coming up this month - I sucked in my breath. “I’m not old. I’m only fifty-nine!” I protested.
Then I stopped myself, wondering, “What does ‘old’ mean? Wasn’t I forty just the other day?”
Luckily I managed a “Yes, yes, of course I’ll speak,” and politely put the phone down. But the conversation started a week-long identity crisis.
Somewhere along the way I started thinking about that upcoming weekend … old dykes gathering to fight the system … old dykes coming together to have slumber parties in the hotel rooms … Alix Dobkin singing, Sue Fink might holler a rendition of “Leaping Lesbians” … panels and workshops to help me deal with my ‘issue’ … fun … learning … a chance to grow older gracefully… this could be a blast!”
“California Dreaming: Building a Better World for Old Lesbians” will take place right here in L.A. from July 30 - August 3. (http://www.oloc.org/)
This four-day Gathering will bring Lesbians from across the country together, to be with women like ourselves.

We’re going to be entertained by the likes of the Mothertongue Feminist Readers Theater, comedian Robin Tyler, and a reunion performance by the L.A. Women’s Community Chorus.
Three dynamic keynote speakers – all over sixty – will share their wise words: award-winning author Jewelle Gomez, former California State Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, and Blues singer Gaye Adegbalola of Saffire (who will also perform.)
Other highlights include a Saturday night Banquet and Dance and an optional Sunday Lesbian bus tour of West Hollywood sights.
Inspiring workshops will cover topics ranging from well-being to making social change, and from spirituality to belly dancing.
Yes, I am going to speak after all, on a panel on “Activism, Then & Now”; and other workshops will include topics like “Intimacy – More Than Just Coupling”; “Organizing & Coalition Building for Old Lesbians”; “African American Lesbian Activism and Visibility”; “Herbal Medicine in the Second Half of our Lives”; “Housing Alternatives”; and if you’re up for it ….”Line Dancing.”

Lesbians over sixty include the generations who came out in eras of great discrimination, as well as women who built the Lesbian Feminist movement in the ‘70s. It’s the first time that these two generations of Out Lesbians will come together to make their voices heard. And with all this talk of “the graying of America” in the mainstream press, Lesbians know that we are always ahead of the pack in making social change that benefits everyone who comes behind us. Throughout history – from the abolitionists fighting slavery, to the profession of social work, to civil rights and the women’s movement, and even the environmental movement – Lesbians have been leaders in these struggles. Now its time to put our experience to work on the next big issue – redefining what age means.

"Gilda Stories” author Jewelle Gomez says she’s looking forward to the slumber party! “I’m excited because we’re all still here.” She says, “I remember that first rush and thrill of working with Lesbians when I was in my twenties. That we’re still doing that work for change is just as thrilling.”

“I love consciousness-raising and smart old Dykes,” says Alix Dobkin, an OLOC Steering Committee member, “I put them all together and got OLOC. OLOC women taught me how to wear my age proudly, helped me to first accept and then welcome the onset of 60.”

Back to that word… OLD. I remind myself, the younger generation has reclaimed “Queer.” In the ‘70s we reclaimed the word “Dyke.” OLOC is all about reclaiming the word old with a capital O. Not calling ourselves Seniors or Elders – which conjures up pictures of us retiring to knit quietly in a corner. Hell, I use a knitting needle to clean my powertools. So yes, we’re Old & Proud and learning that real life does go on after sixty (or seventy or eighty.) In fact it also gets much sweeter.
And speaking of sixty – some of my young friends are surprised to hear that the OLOC event has an age cut-off of sixty (exceptions are made for lovers, partners and caregivers.) OLOC has boldly said “this is our space.” The e-generation has MySpace on the internet. I’m going to claim my space at the OLOC Gathering.

Mommy, Where Do Lesbians Come From?

2008-06-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

Edited version in:“In Magazine” June'08.
Towards an anthropology of lesbians as a tribe
I believe that lesbians constitute a tribe of our own. Since I was a baby dyke decades ago, I’ve traveled all over the world, to Rome, Mexico, England, and Africa. Wherever I go I recognize my people, lesbians. As an elder lesbian stateswoman, I want to tell my lesbian daughters – yes, you kids on the road to assimilation -- how important it is for you to know who you are. Whether you gather by the thousands at posh hotels in Palm Springs (known as the DINAH ritual), or you’ve been to the great lesbian music festivals of the 1980’s, you have participated in the international lesbian tribe.
What does it mean to be a tribe? Webster’s Dictionary calls a “tribe” -- a group of people, a division, class of people characterized by its own culture, and having a name, a dialect …a political division of a united people … coincident with the founding of new colonies.
What are the characteristics of our lesbian culture? What are those building blocks which transcend centuries and define us as a unique tribe of people?
STORY: One of these characteristics is ‘story.’ Lesbians have a commonly held story of our how our people survived over centuries of oppression. Our story dates back to the beginnings of written history. In our case, our story dates back to 430 B.C. with the legends of the famous teacher, Sappho, and her school of the arts for young girls on the Greek Island of Lesbos. Lesbos is not fiction. Look it up. It’s an island in the Aegean Sea. Sappho is not fiction. You may find books of her poetry, and stories about her and her lover, Bilitis, and their lives as teachers to upper class Greek girls to prepare them for marriage. And even before the dawn of written history, one finds examples and references to Amazon tribes who roamed the forests of Europe before the dawn of patriarchy (rule by men).
LANGUAGE: We as lesbians have a language and a sense of cultural humor that springs out of our story. We see our language in simple cartoons like “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Alison Bechdel, the lesbian creator of this comic, has recently been invited to join the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary because even the heterosexual world recognizes that we lesbians have a language of our own. Now that’s recognizing the linguistic uniqueness of lesbians! We see our language developing in jokes like, What does a lesbian bring on her 2nd date? Answer: a U Haul. We have language, sometimes called ‘gaydar,’ that allows us to come out and define each other on the streets, “Didn’t I see/meet you last year at the Palms?” “This is my partner, Susan.” “Is that your girlfriend, or your girl-friend?” “Is she a ‘sister’?” “Are you a member of the family?”
DRESS: Each generation of lesbians defines itself with slightly different versions of a set of common fundamental style of shoes, hats, hair and accessories. Whether it was the radical chic androgynous drag of the 70s, or the lipstick lesbian salty look of the 80s, or the young queer women of the new century, we recognize each other.
PSYCHOLOGY: Lesbians have a broad range of tools, both learned and genetic, which make us capable of and willing to live on a much deeper emotional plane. It is a place much deeper than most straight people are willing to live on. It is a place defined by the psyche and needs of two women engaged in intimate relating. In my long eight years of living amongst the heterosexuals in an expatriate community in Mexico, one of the things I missed most about my tribe was lesbian conversation. Straights talk about the banality of life. Who you are is defined by your job or your money. How was work today? Where do you live? When will you buy a new house? How are the children? Lesbian life is defined by the emotional news of the day. How do you feel about your job? How’s your relationship (which really means -- what is the nature of your relating and how do you each feel about it)?
When a straight couple goes to ‘therapy’ it’s a secret from their friends and means they’ll most likely break up. Lesbians go to therapy as often as they get a tune up for the car. Therapy is an ordinary part of life’s unfolding.
FAMILY: Lesbians forge familial bonds with a chosen family that is based upon shared values rather than biology. I think it is a blessing in disguise that most of us experienced a sense of alienation from our parents in our teens and early twenties. This forces us to psychologically separate from our bio-fams and go out into the world and find intimate, stalwart friends. Friends with whom we share the joys and grief of relationship, birth, death, job loss – the major difficulties of life. This depth of sharing creates family. When my biological sisters and brothers came to my commitment ceremony I asked them to get in a line for a ritual called ‘the procession of the family.’ This procession would then walk into the marital circle with me. My many siblings were shocked to see five or six people they didn’t know in the line. ‘Who are these people?” they asked me. “Why are they in the family procession?”
“Oh,” I explained, “They are my family of choice. I have two families.”
WEDDING RITUALS: And speaking of weddings, anyone who's ever been to a straight wedding and then a lesbian commitment ceremony can see the awesome differences in how we build this ritual. Women draw on our personal life experiences when planning the words and ceremonies of our partnering. We prefer to write our own scripts and vows. We pick ministers who reflect our political and social values.
RELIGION: Because we don’t find our spiritual home in traditional religions, most lesbians have made a life search of building our own spiritual lives. Many lesbians find it difficult to belong to a religion which defines ‘god’ as only masculine. We know that traditional religions are a by-product of a male dominated culture, the Judeo-Christian age of the last two millennia. Lesbians who chose to believe in a deity need ‘God’ to encompass the feminine as well as the masculine. So we have gone back to goddess centered belief systems, or found New-Age spiritual beliefs, among them Science of Mind, which correctly resurrects the religions of earlier times in which our Higher Power is all things feminine and masculine.
BORN OUTLAWS: Lesbians see great advantage in being born into a minority culture, because as outlaws we are more able to think beyond the boundaries of racial and gender prejudices. It is not an accident that lesbians are primary in the leadership of most social movements in our country -- be it the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, the founding of the profession of social work (Jane Addams was a lesbian), the second civil rights movement of the 60s, the environmental movement, doctors without borders, Amnesty International, or the gender bending movements of today. Wherever you see social injustice, you see lesbians leading these struggles.
I could go on to book length about all the behavioral characterizes of our Amazon tribe. But in conclusion I want to send a message to my lesbian daughters. The challenge of this assimilating decade may be for today’s young lesbian to know her cultural heritage, and figure out how to mainstream without losing it. I want to say to you – We lesbians are not an accident of heterosexual labeling. We are a people with a story to tell. In your drive to be assimilated into the mainstream, be careful not to lose your heritage. My generation of lesbians, and the generation before me, bought your freedom with our careers, our family, and sometimes with our blood. We look at you, the E-generation, with great pride and love. As we pass the torch of Lesbian Nation to you, we assure you that the price of mainstreaming must not include giving up your birthright as citizens in the tribe of women identified women.
(Written: May 17, 2008. Based on my speech at June L Mazer Lesbian Archives, “Lesbian Spaces, Lesbian Culture” -- May 4, 2008)

Millett stories Inspired by the TIDE COVER

2008-05-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

It's Ang talking here: Okay so I thought the retro GIANT glasses of today came out of nowhere! Who knew Kate Millett started the trend. She was a trend setter in many more important ways, almost too many to count. One thing you might not know about her is that she was one of the first women to make a film using an all women crew. She did it back in 1971 (Three Lives). But a more personal story sticks in my mind whenever I hear her name.
I was a 16 year old lesbian convinced I was "the only one" on earth. I went to the Anaheim, CA public library every day after school and scoured the shelves for anything resembling me. Nothing in all the thousands of books... until one day, I found Sita by Kate Millett. Kate wrote about her affair with an older woman. I couldn't get enough. How many any other personal Kate Millett stories are out there?
I'd love to hear them.

Bird Watching at the Dinah Shore - a sociopolitical field trip

2008-04-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

I used to go to the Dinah Shore lez-forget-about-the-golf weekend in Palm Springs way back in the 80s, before it became the largest lesbian hang in California. I thought I’d seen it all. But a new young friend told me, “It’s waaaay different now, ya gotta stay relevant. Check it out!”
So I dragged me and my blog-mate, Lily B. Wit, out to Palm Springs to see what the gen X, eGen, queer, lipstick forever, whatev, young lezbianas (that’s the Latina plural for lesbians) are doing these days.

The sun was shining but the wind-chill at Club Skirts on Sunday was bold enough to make a thousand nipples stand out. That didn’t bother the huge crowd hanging at the pool, half naked and bouncing, listening to “Betty” sing their theme song from The L Word. The trio – Alison, Amy & Elizabeth -- also has a new song, “Did You Tell Her?” with lyrics about things you don’t want to tell your lover.

But me, I was checking out the dozens of hairdo’s the young lesbians were sporting. For butches, futches and bois wearing shirts that hung to their knees, I could see that their pride was their HAIR. And for the ladies, femmes, and the feminine – HAIR has always been god.
And no-one wanted to mess up their hair by jumping into the pool.

So I went. I saw. I took photos.

And here’s a look at ........... HAIR AT THE DINAH

2008-04-09T23:19:00.000-07:00

Photography by Lynn H. Ballen

Next week's post… tune in for “What’s in a name?” – I’ll explain all the new L-words that different generations are using to describe ourselves.

from our Archives

2008-02-22T16:28:00.000-08:00

The Lesbian Tide had very colorful covers even when they were in monochrome. Doesn't this cover make you want to read what's inside - even today ... and be one of the 2,000 women who showed up on the campus of UCLA, April 17, 1973?
Posted by ANG

from our Archives

2008-02-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

If you ask the average feminist of 2008 if the world has changed much in the past 30 years she will likely say, "No." When it comes to violence against women, not much has changed as all.
These women could be marching just like this today and they are.

Violence against women and girls continues unabated in every continent, country and culture. It takes a devastating toll on women’s lives, on their families, and on society as a whole. Most societies prohibit such violence — yet the reality is that too often, it is covered up or tacitly condoned. — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, 8 March 2007

Posted by ANG

Jeanne at the Gay Woman's West Coast Conference, L.A. 1971

2008-02-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

Margie Adam Said ...

2008-02-15T17:38:00.000-08:00

"The first invitation I ever received to perform in public was made by Jeanne Córdova of The Lesbian Tide magazine in Los Angeles after she heard me sing at an open mike at Kate Millet's Sacramento Women's Music Festival. I told her I wasn't a performer. I told her I wasn't political. She said just come and sing your songs at our benefit. Come and sing your woman's life for us. I went to LA. I sang songs about my life at a benefit for this lesbian feminist magazine." Margie Adam

Jeanne Córdova and The Lesbian Tide

2008-02-15T17:22:00.000-08:00

The Lesbian Tide

Jeanne Cordova, lesbian feminist activist and organizer, was the founder of The Lesbian Tide magazine in 1971. Cordova was one of twelve children born in Germany to a culturally conservative Catholic family. After coming to the US with her family, she attended Catholic High School, where she was involved in sports and the student body organization. After graduating, she entered the convent, fulfilling the desire she had from the age of seven to be a nun. Her exposure to poverty, homosexuality, drugs and the peace movement during her work in the convent led her to seek a career in social work. After leaving the convent and getting her BA in social work in 1970, Cordova became involved in the gay rights movement. She was active in the Gay Liberation Front, Lesbian Feminists, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), and the Crenshaw Women's Center and was one of the organizers of the first Gay Women's West Coast Conference.

Source: http://salticid.nmc.csulb.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/OralAural.woa/wa/interview?pt=109&bi=1&col=a1000&ser=a1004&prj=lafn101