Three weeks further into my investigations of lesbian land, my attitude has shifted from “Yes, the patriarchy is heinous, and it was even more blatant in its heinousness 50 years ago, but I could never go live in a tipi miles away from civilization” to “Yikes, these women’s commitment to founding an entirely new society took them to some crazy extremes but way to be on the vanguard!”
That said, some of those crazy extremes are wild to contemplate, so let’s cherry pick a few, eh? For history’s sake. (These are gathered from Lesbian Land, a 1985 anthology edited by Joyce Cheney, who was herself a veteran of communal living—her story of her time in Vermont’s Redbird collective is one of the most eyebrow-raising of the bunch.)
I think even Cheney—who says in her introduction that while she wanted the book’s contributors to be honest about their experiences on land, she didn’t want to discourage anyone from moving to rural communities—was a bit shocked by the strictness of one group. As part of her final push to provide as broad a picture of the scene as possible, Cheney did some last-minute outreach to a Francophone community on land at Kebec, outside of Montreal. Unfortunately, she never heard from them. “Later,” she reports, a friend told her, "they reject any part of technology, including the written word!”
The turnover of residents at DW Outpost in Missouri was so rapid that there was almost no institutional memory, which brought serious consequences:
A lack of continuity, of passing it on, was one of the results of so many wimmin coming here and so few staying. No one on the farm knew where the asparagus was: important so as not to dig it up. What were the tricks to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter? What were the financial procedures and debts? We didn't know.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, the exclusion we tend to focus on these days is that of trans people, but in the 1970s and ‘80s, the question of whether to allow boy children on women’s land received much more attention. Here’s a report by a North American woman who spent some time in the Danish separatist community Kvindelandet:
I wanted to live only with women, but I didn't feel it was necessary to give away the male foal born to our horse or to get rid of the rooster. I would have loved to have lived with children on the land. European lesbians don't have as many children as in the American lesbian community. One time a Danish woman came with a boy child and was turned away by two visiting women who didn't even live on Kvindelandet; I was furious, but many women supported their decision.
Pelican Lee, who has written a lot about her long history on lesbian land, said of her experience at OWL Farm in Oregon, “Because we lived so close together, at various times we had scabies, pinworms, staph, and hepatitis, besides the usual illnesses. We learned to heal all of them herbally, without Western medicine.”
This was a time when women were rejecting monogamy, a tool of the patriarchy. Lee described how that sometimes worked out:
During this time, non-monogamy was "politically correct." Monogamous couples felt an undercurrent of criticism of their relationships. Many women had several lovers on the land. It was difficult to get away from relationships one might not want to witness. Sometimes dealing with our feelings around our multiple relationships took so much energy that we had little left for anything else.
As was frequently the case, Redbird pushed things to the limit:
We had total commitment to the collective. We decided to have lovers only within the collective. Outside relationships would disperse energy and make for less commitment. We were also committed to smashing romanticism. We reasoned that one falls in love because of a lot of conditioning (e.g., tall and slender), that everyone is loveable, and that if one focuses on the specialness of each person, one can love anyone. So, we decided to choose lovers (still within the collective) by drawing names out of a hat, and then go about loving that person, until, after several months, we'd redraw, and re-arrange. I wouldn't recommend it. We tried. Oh, we tried. Some combinations were just too hard, and we rearranged pairings.
I’ve gone back and forth about including this next bit, because even though it was written in the early 1980s, it’s hard (for me at least) not to freak out reading it today. Here’s Cheney, once again about Redbird:
We had thought that we were going to be together forever. We even had a politically correct fantasy of how we'd all die. We'd be old ladies, too tired to organize even one more demonstration. We'd be sitting in our tennis shoes, in our rocking chairs on our porch, and decide it was time. Then we'd all take lessons and learn to fly small planes. Then we'd each rent a plane, fill it with explosives, and simultaneously kamikaze into the eight politically correct targets of our choosing: the pentagon, the chase manhattan bank …
RECOMMENDATIONS: I promise this won’t become a BBC Sounds fan newsletter, but I listened to three seasons of a show from Radio Ulster last week that were all outstanding, and you can listen to them too! The show is called Assume Nothing. The blurb explains this means “the teams assume nothing as they examine events through fresh eyes,” and that’s handy if, like me, you have a pretty superficial understanding of the history of Northern Ireland. (I can’t help thinking that Americans of a certain stripe would translate Assume Nothing as No Priors.) All the episodes I’ve listened to are excellent, but the three seasons I especially recommend are “The Handler,” the dramatized memoir of a Special Branch officer who was active at the height of the Troubles; “Breakup,” which tells the story of how the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland came to be drawn; and, my favorite, “The Northern Bank Job,” about what was at the time the biggest bank robbery in British and Irish history. I knew the outlines of that story, but I had no idea of the layers and historical significance. Go listen nie! (The Northern Irish pronunciation of “now” is one of my very favorite words–it’s almost Australian in its simultaneous strangeness and delight.)
LISTEN TO ME: On Working Overtime, Karen Han and I responded to a listener email from an academic who had gone about as far as she could go, career-wise, and wanted us to help her figure out what to do next. On Working, I spoke with Brittani Nichols, a writer-producer on the great Abbott Elementary, about life in a comedy writers room, and how she feels about moving from LGBTQ-focused projects to the “mainstream.” (Also, don’t miss the October episode of Outward, which features a great discussion of Bros, as well as a lovely conversation with an LGBTQ collections specialist at the Library of Congress.)
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. The archives are here. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.
You just read issue #26 of Where Are All the Emails?. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.