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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1986)
Collective members, dedicated to the revolu tion, and the kind of hustler who could fund raise a meager living. Bea, a firebrand or ganizer who shepherded us into collective formation and kept us like that She was an early mistress of grant writing. Carson, a Yale pre-med student with a musician's dreams. by Lee Lynch. Sara, a straight radical high school teacher who founded one of the country’s first al PA RT 2 — The Collective Phase ternative high schools. Monica, a mother with her head in the clouds who was dipping Frequent moving had become a genera down into all the worlds she could find after tional phenomenon by 1971, at least for the years of marriage. Lillian, her sixteen-year- middle class kids I knew. When I left the mod old daughter, in a constant state of excite em balconied apartment I’d shared with my ment and a pupil of Sara. Goldie, another lover and moved into my own narrow third straight woman, a local who believed in floor flat I was expressing the restlessness of feminism and in living her ideals. And then the highly-mobile baby-boomers, as well as me. The token old gay. 1 quit my secure job seeking my own way in life. But this poet-in-a- and went on alcohol, drugs and unemploy garrett trip was the stuff of my ancestors; I m en t testing the waters of this new freedom, was destined to live the communal experi not at all certain I wouldn't drown in my new ence of our age to its fullest way of life. W hen I hit New Haven that year women Five women had rooms of their own; I drunk on sisterly love whirled in crazed circles shared mine with my stowaway lover who at the women-only dances held in church was finally voted into the collective; two other basements. Radical white women did much women shared the basement This last was a of the legwork needed for the Black Panther terrible idea as both were members of the trials. And the first lesbian-feminist living col New Haven Women s Liberation Rock Band lective was being formed. I and my peers and had to work together in two collectives. I were moving into the Women's Movement My first women’s dance, after seven years ■ w o n't of course, go into who was sleeping or had slept with or would soon sleep with or of isolation from gays in and after college, com e out with — who. It would take all day. exhilarated me. How did one meet these wo Suffice it to say that one’s room assignment men? How did a New York butch unlearn the was sometimes fluid. necessarily one-on-one bump and grind and Except for the diehards in the attic. I can see in retrospect that the sociological pat terns of the household were harbingers of our futures, but back then I was simply proud (and guilty at the same tim e) of the maneuver that allowed Toni and I the luxury of a flight of stairs and an elitist bathroom of our own between us and the others. The others either remained straight or went partly or wholly back to heterosexuality within three years. Toni kept the faith. I met her years later at a ___________________________________________________________ Gay Pride March in San Francisco with her girlfriend And me? Well, there never was any danger that I’d decamp. For that halcyon radical year, though, we all shared responsibilities of the household and were, maybe, collectively cleaner than the sloppiest of us might have been alone. We Spent Time Together, either on individual "Dates” or in group outings (I was always trying to drag the others to gay bars). And we ask two, a dozen, a roomful of women to had a weekly housemeeting on Wednesday dance? nights. The words Wednesday N ight soon As a feminist "old gay’’ I was a unique took on an ominous tone for me. I was terri addition to the community and didn’t have to ble at “Dealing and struggling," much better wait long to learn. Soon after the Gay Wo at withdrawing or forcing humor into deadly m en’s Group crowded into my living room — serious discussions. which was stuffed with bookcases and other All in all, we worked hard to make a go of wise furnished only with a foam pad on the our brave new world. Though I felt betrayed floor and a small rocking chair — I was in by some of the women who laid heavy im vited to join that first living collective. There peratives on the house only to return to safer were already at least two daring heterosexual waters later, that first collective was a rich and female and male collectives inhabiting ram exciting eperience where, though I never felt I shackle old homes around town, beginning could be the dyke I was, 1 could try on other to found food co-ops, but this would be the ways of being. And I’ve always thought, if we only all woman group. Those brave straight did nothng else for the world, at least we women! Risking their reputations and their helped to desegregate the neighborhood. An very sexuality, as it turned out, to live with Asian family moved in next door while we dykes! lived there, and a mixed-race couple bought Dykes? That’s what they called themselves, the house we lived in. but they were strange creatures to me. Highly The second collective, an outgrowth of the politicized, adamantly opposed to, for starters: first to accommodate new blood, was some couples, monogamy, exclusive affectional what more relaxed. There were more women behavior (others might feel left out), and in it who had been lesbians longer and who washing dishes; I tried to fit in. But I never got remain lesbians today. Or perhaps it wasn’t much further than feeling guilty that I wans’t the gay presence, but a practical need (my revolutionary enough to relinquish my bour primary one at the time) to find a living situa geois propensity to love one woman at a tion that was cheap and palatable. tim e, and to show that love not only by help The problems in this House were as diffe ing her do the dishes, but fondling her in very rent as the old house and the new. (A second exclusive ways as we worked . . . collective now lived across town.) Possibly All eight of us lived for about $40.00 a because of our longer lesbian history we month each in a five bedroom house on an seemed to have more emotional instability. exclusive street in the “better” section of New These women had been fighting for their Haven. The neighbors didn’t know what, to sexual selves a good long time and did not make of our Volkswagen brigade on moving- feel all that comfortable in the world. We had in day, I’m certain, but were liberal enough more problems of self-image, economics, not to hassle us. family estrangement To us the liberation and We began as: Toni, one of the Panther Moving on T H E AMAZON TRAIL Just O ut, August, 1986 pride movements were lifelines as well as optimistic solutions. In any case, there were seven of us on two bedraggled floors of a house whose elderly male owner and part-time girlfriend lived and fought on the first floor. We were a motley emotional crew ourselves. The shepherd was with us again, but she was beginning her conversion to a psycho-theory which advo cated bisexuality. A sometimes surly local dyke who later found contentment as a fore person in a coastal fishery had joined us. There was a woman who'd been out as long as me and was as dependent as me on chemical substances. We caused some up set when we announced an attraction to each other and an intention to act on it The whole House dealt and struggled with that one until the excitement was gone and we retreated. A working class schoolteacher turned band m em ber was possibly the most level-headed of us all. A nineteen-year-old house painter was also in a work collective and struggled on two fronts. Mandy, the sprightly and energetic wanderer, later learned to do light shows at popular discotheques in New York. And I was there again, still, a frustrated writer whose audience had disappeared with The Ladder and not yet regrouped. I earned a living as a professional Girl Scout and you can imagine how paranoid that made me. All four of us in couples had our own rooms. No one lived in an attic or in the basem ent All of us were on a pretty equal financial footing. (Income sharing had been big in the first collective, but here there was no longer anything to share.) Our three band members lived in separate rooms. All these things helped the collective be more livable, but probably most helpful was the fact that by this tim e the thrill had gone. Living as we were was an emotional and economic solution, not a battle in the big war of revolution. I associate the first collective with a New Eng land autumn, leaves brilliantly colored, Yale football crowds cheering at the nearby Yale Bowl, neighborhood children in spanking- new school clothes. At the second house it is always summ er in my memory: pushing aside stored dusty furniture to find space for supper on the porch outside the sweltering house, flea-ridden cats and dogs, a jungly backyard. Then it was over, our enthusiastic young experim ent There was nothing to keep the rest of us together when the other couple moved to Boston. I with my lover the house- painter, found a third floor flat barely wider than my garret and began the next series of moves in the opposite direction: financial and emotional stability. Moving was feeling less like an adventure and more like a chore. I’d be moving on, but now, as I neared thirty, it was with an eye toward staying pu t putting down roots, rooting, resting, anything but re-moving. And as I slowly but thoroughly severed my ties with the Women’s Movement I entered into a new world, with quite different mating and nesting habits: bar women in a medium-sized city. Here was a whole new lesbian geography to learn. 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