“If you destroy an entire generation of a people’s culture, it’s as if they never existed.”
— Film trailer for The Monuments Men, 2013
THIS YEAR, as America’s two oldest women’s music festivals—Michigan and National—prepare to celebrate landmark fortieth anniversaries, a number of powerful organizations have signed a petition against the Michigan festival, endorsing an economic boycott of all artists who perform there. Though a life-altering destination for four decades of lesbian artists and activists, the Michigan festival’s legacy has recently been reduced to one contentious issue: the question of trans inclusion. To clarify the policy: the festival does not ban, inspect, or expel transwomen. Its intention is to be a temporary gathering for women to address diverse experiences of being born female. It asserts that being female-assigned at birth fosters a unique identity. And as a weeklong, clothing-optional campout, it’s a trusted sanctuary for the countless women and girls who have survived male violence in a traditionally heterosexual relationship. Many have testified that they can only regain a relaxed sense of physical safety during their annual retreat at Michfest. The last festival of its kind, Michigan has indeed consistently privileged, and celebrated, women and girls born biologically female.
Michigan’s critics view the festival’s impressive survival into its fortieth year as a trans-phobic failure rather than as a lesbian success. Complicating this era of tension between the T and the L is the powerful, still-evolving tool of social media that permits sloppily researched and even slanderous journalism to be recycled as factual, ingraining myth as truth. What I am archiving now, pretty much daily since HRC and glaad initiated a festival boycott in July 2014, is an almost gleeful barrage of name-calling, as well as anti-lesbian violence that has attracted little editorial oversight. Calls for the festival’s destruction resound in anonymous postings (“Burn it down.” “Thank God these dinosaurs will die off soon.” “I can’t wait for all of them to die.”). Smears and stereotypes applied retroactively to any woman who ever camped at a festival also appear in credited political blogs. The reframing of festival artists and folksingers as hatemongers and KKK-like segregationists is being transmitted in cyberspace at a pace no one historian can correct, easily circulated for decades to come, in contrast to the slim historiography of memoirs published by lifelong festiegoers and performers. Thus the actual images and narratives from festival workshops, performances, and dialogues will scatter to private collections like my own without ever being entered into the record of what we know about lesbian lives from recent history; but the newly constructed term “TERF”—Trans Excluding Radical Feminist—will live on as the problematic definition of those who attended festivals in our time.
TERF is an important new slur, emblematic of the unresolved tensions between our LGBT community’s L and T factions. Popularized in recent years by trans rights advocates, the term TERF has enjoyed increasing usage in LBGT journalism, gender studies, and social media. It began as a legitimate means of isolating and critiquing the work of a very few controversial feminist authors, namely Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys, whose published writings clearly expressed a rejection of transwomen as a viable class of women. TERF quickly became a way for critics to separate “good” radical feminists from “bad.” It joined the lexicon of insults progressives call each other, such as PEP (“Progressive Except on Palestine”). Indeed, some Jewish lesbians lament the dubious change from being called dyke and kike to TERF and PEP.
But this is more than just linguistic infighting. As a litmus test, TERF is a unique new insult for non-transgender lesbians by other LGBT activists, and it bears monitoring. Those women relegated to the TERF bin of bad feminism are now being subjected to traditional sexist canards, including charges of unattractiveness, mental instability, and penis envy. Writer Jim Goad, for instance, referred to Sheila Jeffreys as “the British Andrea Dworkin, born with a face that is nearly as objectionable as Dworkin’s.” Babs Siperstein’s August 30 piece in Bilerico, titled “TERFs: All the Rage This Summer,” alleged that real women wouldn’t enjoy camping at an outdoor festival anyway, but that TERFs were “a loosely organized collective with a message of hate” comparable to the Westboro Baptist Church. “It’s pathetic and perverted behavior. Their actions often incite others to discriminate, the definition of a hate group. What drives them—penis envy?”
On August 15, Dana Beyer, executive director of Gender Rights Maryland, published a Huffington Post blog titled “TERF Wars: Trans Women and Feminist Extremism in Context.” Presented as a science-informed research piece, Beyer’s column began by declaring, “There is a war raging between a subset of radical lesbian feminists called TERFs,” establishing as factual the idea of a collective group with this name. Beyer defined second-wave lesbian feminists as women who joined the religious right in order to deny health care to transwomen, due to “deep feelings of worthlessness and insecurity,” and that “this generation schooled by Janice Raymond and Mary Daly lives on, fighting a rearguard action and continuing to destroy the lives of people. The generation of radical scholars who believe nonsense and promote hate live on. … I wouldn’t wish that life on anyone.” Beyer and writers on other sites also declare that radical feminists oppose third wave feminism, when in fact a cursory search of women’s studies theorists would show that third wave intersectionality owes its existence to radical feminist authors and activists.
But who wouldn’t disparage old radical lesbians who still attend women’s music festivals after reading these posts, or Salon’s declaration that TERFs are “a hate group masquerading as feminists,” or The Advocate’s that “TERFs followers fundamentally despise other women”? Once attached to social media, these viewpoints reach millions. The TERF definition ends up being pretty much every radical woman from the era of radical feminism, as appearing on the Michigan festival was for decades a very competitive honor. The festival stages played host to artists as diverse as Taiko drummers, indigenous Australian and Hawaiian performers, the Native American trio Ulali, Shikisha (South Africa), Cobra (China), Frank Chickens (Japan), authors Alice Walker, Alix Olson, Dorothy Allison, Sini Anderson, and poet StaceyAnn Chin, who fled sexual violence and homophobia in Jamaica only to be boycotted economically by white women in America for appearing at Michfest.
By now, admitting to working at or attending the festival has become the equivalent of being listed in Red Channels (Are you now, or have you ever been, a participant at Michfest?). I find that I must go abroad to present papers on women’s music as a topic of scholarly history. In the scary ad hominem cyberposts I read every day with a sinking heart, both young and older queer activists are urging each other to ban or abandon the work of black lesbian artists and poets who play Michfest: not just StaceyAnn Chin but other artists with indescribably long social activist résumés, including (to name a few) Toshi Reagon, Vicki Randle, Nedra Johnson, Gina Breedlove, and Shelley Nicole. By default, their choice to ascend the stage at Michfest makes them TERFs.
This trend of beggaring our best recording artists, many of whom are working-class women of color, will escalate before it slows, since no one is stepping up to denounce it. And as lesbian elders who contributed so much to the movement do begin to die off, the backlash has a chilling effect on the collection of their oral histories for posterity. I suggest that making peace with the radical separatist past will be necessary for anyone charting the progression of queer visibility, rights, and power; shaming and silencing every woman who has experienced the Michigan festival effectively erases almost anyone who dipped a toe into lesbian culture in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
I CAME OUT as a teenager in 1980, right at the exciting crossroads of feminism, women’s music, and the gay and lesbian rights movement. Each of these overlapping revolutions called on followers to make lesbian lives and contributions more visible. That they had been kept invisible was a given: no lesbians were identified as such in the history books I read, or in the films and television I watched as a girl-liking teenager.
Once I entered graduate school in the 1980s, I found my scholarly field. I committed myself to studying and archiving lesbian history, activism, art, and culture. I quickly learned that bold foremothers had laid out a path for me to become a professor of lesbian history: not, perhaps, the job my parents had in mind for me, but a lavender door thrillingly kicked open by some of the nation’s most dynamic scholars: Evelyn Torton Beck, Lillian Faderman, Audre Lorde, Karla Jay, Adrienne Rich. I inherited their wisdom with gratitude and awe, poring over their writings. Looking around for a research subject of my own, a slice of history no one else had documented, I settled on the women’s music movement. Concerts, festivals, and album releases were the signature lesbian events of my own coming out into activism, impacting hundreds of thousands of women.
For the next thirty years, I spent every dime I had and every summer attending, working at, documenting, photographing, and collecting the material culture of as many women’s music festivals as I could. Throughout those pre-digitized decades, I dragged two cameras, three notebooks, and a battery-operated tape recorder to Campfest, Sisterfire, the National Women’s Music Festival, the West Coast Music and Comedy Festival, the Gulf Coast Women’s Festival, the Heart of the West Fest, the Virginia Women’s Music Festival, the North East Women’s Music Festival, the East Coast Lesbian Festival, and, of course, the biggest event of all: the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
Like a fine wine, this research slowly matured, allowing me to publish dozens of articles and at least one award-nominated book. Now I’m sitting atop a golden egg of rare material, my city apartment crammed floor to ceiling with neatly organized files, drawers, scrapbooks and boxes of festival field recordings and images. I have interviews, speeches, and performances by Dorothy Allison, Judy Chicago, Laura Nyro, and Alice Walker. These tapes and notes reveal the arc of a cultural activist movement led by lesbians of every race and class, age and viewpoint; women who used their own vacation time to attend tough “unlearning racism” workshops or to build access stage ramps for women in wheelchairs.
Forty years after all of this began, both the performers and the audiences of women’s music festivals are national treasures. Collectively, these women are the cultural producers that helped make same-sex marriage possible, that first introduced ASL interpretation as a standard feature at any public event, that nursed the ill and dying AIDS generations, and that marched on Washington for contraceptive rights they’d never need as lesbians. Two generations of women who found their voices via festival culture helped the LGBT movement win its key victories.
But instead of being thanked or celebrated (or written into history), America’s festival artists are being attacked, threatened, and boycotted; they’re being depicted as the enemy within by LGBT institutional leaders. If this trend continues, the pipeline for transmitting accurate historical information from living lesbian elders to younger students and activists will be broken—not by homophobes, but by LGBT social media.
IT HAS NEVER BEEN an easy task for cultural historians to preserve women’s history in a woman-hating world. Ideally, we should be able to collect narratives and document lives without being called names like TERF. Even the most informed and mainstream LGBT blogs and columnists now employ this dismissive slang term, which has rapidly acquired the weight of an Oxford English Dictionary definition. Popularizing the slur “trans excluding radical feminist” serves multiple purposes, but getting lesbian history right sure isn’t one of them. Too many progressives are simply reintroducing old right-wing attacks on lesbians as ugly, outmoded man haters. In generational terms, this looks like the annihilation of the cultural mother by her liberated children: “We don’t need you any more.”
I don’t recall employing these methods when I came out. Sure, I found plenty to disagree with in some classic lesbian texts; I had my share of difficult encounters at festivals. But I still wanted to sit at the feet of my role models and learn. Boycotting events that I felt left out of was the last thing on my agenda. In fact, what I learned at my first Michfest was that I wasn’t going to be included in every workshop and space—not in the women of color drum circle, not in the Deafways gathering. That didn’t mean I was not their ally, or that my own life experiences were inauthentic, but rather that some support groups were designated by affinity.
So, this is the view from a frustrated working scholar. We are witnessing an almost cheerfully flippant erasure of recent, late 20th-century lesbian achievement and art, the legacy of a specific performance culture through which bold ideas about same-sex love were transmitted via song, speech, and the written word. Women’s music festivals created a culture every bit as unique as drag, and no more violent or hatemongering in their separatism than the gay male subcultures and institutions that we now historicize as significant to men’s self-identity, such as bathhouses, Fire Island parties, and Radical Faerie events.
My charge to every responsible editor, journalist, feminist scholar, and LGBT historian is to please stop recycling the acronym TERF; it is defamatory. Blaming an imaginary cabal of old women for stalling progress—and calling for old lesbians to be wiped out—is no better than blaming the Jews or “Pinkos” among us, or evangelicals shouting about secular humanists undermining civilization. Ultimately, critics of festival culture must understand that they are not the appointed custodians of this heritage. That role belongs to the participants and performers, whose paper trail is at risk of being expunged from the record.
Postscript: On April 21, 2015, festival producer Lisa Vogel formally announced that this year’s 40th anniversary celebration will be the final Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
Bonnie Morris, who teaches women’s studies at George Washington University. is the author of Eden Build by Eves.
