Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, women’s bookstores and concert events carved out important spaces for cultural expressions of lesbian feminism in North America. During the latter part of that era I belonged to a private lesbian club called Herizon in Binghamton, New York, a community with a large lesbian population and a stellar Ph.D. program in women’s history at the state university, where I was completing my doctorate. The lively mix of academic and bar-dyke ambiance in Herizon’s membership kept us unusually self-aware that what we were doing was important in the historical moment; there were endless discussions about who we were and how to do outreach, with carefully scheduled Board meetings and elections (required in part to keep renewing our license as a private establishment permitted to exclude men). Herizon’s dues-paying membership included, at one point, over 300 women from a radius of 200 miles; we had a rock band, a theatre company, a restaurant, a campout, an annual New Year’s cabaret, and a radical Passover seder that drew dozens of non-Jewish participants—but the everyday tasks of bartending, repair, newsletter preparation, and planning key events fell to a small number of regular volunteers. Not surprisingly, burnout resulted.
Keeping Herizon open as “our” place where a member could drop in spontaneously to find warm sisterhood and cold beer meant a great deal to everyone. Yet by the late 1980’s, rounding up sufficient volunteers to staff the space five nights out of seven became an unrealistic goal. On some cold winter nights, only one woman might show up. We were committing the same few volunteers to hours of overtime when fewer and fewer patrons were making appearances aside from big events or scheduled weekend concerts by visiting artists. So, we devoted one of our big Annual Meetings to discussing this problem.
At that meeting—which I tape recorded for posterity—the members broke into small working groups to brainstorm possible solutions. We were painfully aware of homophobia in our community, and adamant that Herizon should remain a welcome refuge for women just coming out who needed a place to talk. But clearly it was no longer feasible to stay open Wednesday through Sunday nights. In a town snowed under much of the year, heating costs alone for a Wednesday night with no customers were prohibitive. In our small groups, most long-time members admitted that as they had gradually paired off, settled down, bought homes, adopted kids, and/or elected to get sober, they simply weren’t going out as often as they had in their early twenties, nor were they spending as many dollars at the bar. Since New York had finally raised the drinking age to 21, we had also been forced to close membership to the majority of lesbian college students who would have loved to join Herizon; occasionally we held special alcohol-free event nights with the bar closed and covered. These same lifestyle changes that reduced the money spent on alcohol—Herizon’s primary cash flow intake—were the ones that had led our members to new obligations and interests instead of volunteering at the club as workers. Nothing in our bylaws required members to donate their labor. Yet when all these facts were on the table, some women remained insistent that Herizon should be open five nights a week—though they themselves admitted they neither came by on weeknights nor were interested in working any night at all. They simply expected that women’s cultural space would continue to be available to them as consumers, without their taking a role in it as producers.
I flashed on these lessons from twenty years ago during a recent board meeting of Mothertongue, D.C.’s spoken word stage for women, where I volunteer now. With monthly open-mike shows at the Black Cat club and annual poetry slams, all of which yield door profits to local beneficiaries doing important work with at-risk women and girls, Mothertongue carries on the cultural ideals Herizon once offered—with a 21st-century twist. Our spoken word shows welcome men to the audience, and while many Mothertongue poets self-identify as lesbian or queer, others are straight, bi, or transgender. Now in its eighth year, Mothertongue has reached the age Herizon hit in 1988–89. And I’m seeing the same lack of new volunteers, threatening our future.
Here in D.C., everyone likes a Mothertongue show—or, more accurately, the idea of one. Fewer and fewer folks are coming out on that one night per month when we stage a two-hour event thanks to the generosity of Black Cat’s management. The number of board members and volunteers planning and putting on the event every month has dwindled to five, four, three. At some shows I’ve been asked to emcee, read my own work onstage, solicit volunteers, staff a table of products—all while I’m still a paying customer, thank you. The toll on the truly devoted may be read in the complete absence of past board members, even past presidents, in our audiences; where are they? And where’s the new blood that should be giving all of us a break, a moment to get off our feet and listen to the poetry being read?
The fact is, cultural space that is woman-friendly and queer-friendly does not just happen: it’s a product of hard-won compromise with location, labor, outreach, budgeting, and communication. Given the greater range of computer and tech skills available to all of us now, and the interest in gaining experience with non-profit management that has attracted young volunteers to Mothertongue work in the past, the gradual drop-off in interest is probably due to other factors. Many of our founding dynamos have left D.C. for graduate work, law school, or activism on the West coast. Others have shifted their ladies’ night out energy to the roster of theatrical events being staged at another club, Chaos, which offers monthly drag king and burlesque nights instead of poetry.
It takes a certain kind of audience to listen raptly to spoken word, especially the unpredictable open-mike variety, although our shows are always hot—an indication of the top talent in the region. In few other D.C. venues can a young woman stand up onstage and shout truths about sexual identity, dealing with assault, the body and its public manifestations of gender, the heart and its dyke vulnerability. Yet such a space can be taken for granted, its survival teetering on the tired shoulders of the same few board gals. It would be a shame to let that happen here, when, as we’ve seen with the recent closings of D.C. bars and clubs (to make way for our baseball stadium), other forces that don’t care about the flourishing of our culture can all too easily take a thriving space away.
Bonnie Morris, author of Girl Reel and Eden Built by Eves, teaches women’s studies at George Washington University.
