The Land, and a Landing.

In honour of Michfest

By the time I came out as a lesbian in 1988, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Michfest) had been running for 12 years. I learned about it almost immediately. Through the lesbian bar, Ms Purdy’s, in Winnipeg, I developed friendships with other 20-something lesbians, most of them university students and fledgling feminists. We got together for potlucks, and to cook meals together – hundreds of hand-formed perogies, and large pots of soup. We organized marches, like one in 1992 – a small group of about 100 gays and lesbians with homemade placards, demanding safety and our most basic civil liberties, such as job and housing security. The skinheads showed up in black vans, circling around us to intimidate us. A small group of Christians rallied to quietly convince us we were destined for Hell.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I’d grown fond of hippies. My parents had been friends with a few. I still smile remembering one couple who kept chickens in their bathroom and goats in their basement. Their gentleness and creativity always put me at ease and brought me joy.  

As a young adult, inspired by those hippies, a fan of music, and forming a community with lesbian feminists, the Canadian folk music scene was the natural landing place for me. The Winnipeg Folk Festival was my home for one week of each summer, and there, I met women who were a part of the Michfest community, many who travelled the folk music circuit, to extend the community of sisterhood beyond one week a year. I quickly became a soft fanatic of Ferron whose songs are deeply beautiful anthems of lesbian bonds – whose masculine features mirrored my own – and whose moody frustrations with herself, if she forgot a lyric or hit a bad chord, caused her to storm off stage - which I found endearing. I don’t think there was a single woman there who didn’t understand.

I was in an advertising art program at the time, then later worked as a graphic designer for a small in-house ad department. In school, I had male professors make snide comments about how I was lacking a man in my life. My male classmates plastered nude centrefolds of women, ripped from porn magazines, throughout their cubicles. I decorated my own cubicle with a few photos from a calendar which was created as a fundraiser for the lesbian bar, and was told that my beautiful black and white photos of my (fully clothed) friends from the bar were no different than the porn I had to look at every day.

In 1995, I moved to Halifax, to attend the Nova Scotia College of Art. While there, I met a woman at a house party who would become a long-term partner and the mother of our daughter. She was a women’s studies grad student whose thesis was a lengthy and robust analysis of menstruation for which she was runner-up for a Governor General’s Award. We eventually settled in Vancouver together and became fixtures of the Vancouver Folk Festival.

As a lesbian couple, we faced job losses and lost housing opportunities, just because we were lesbians. We found solutions, like, joining a women’s housing cooperative and, at that time, I was content to live a simple and impoverished bohemian life as an artist, as an alternative to working for “The Man”. I taught art classes at a community gallery for a while, later securing a union job as a graphic designer at the University of British Columbia, where my partner also worked. It wasn’t until the birth of our daughter in 2001 that I pivoted to nursing, to provide her with more security.  

The topic of Michfest came up many times in conversations with my partner. She was adamant that transwomen were a part of the heterogeneity of womanhood, and therefore belonged in women’s spaces.

“Trans” wasn’t really on my radar at the time. I’d met maybe one transwoman before, at a house party. She was timid and polite. When she asked to hold my then newborn daughter, she was gentle and did no harm. I didn’t see her as a woman but, I could see her longing to belong among women, which touched the many ways in which I’d struggled to belong with women, as a gender non-conforming lesbian. She was respectful and didn’t disrupt or try to control the space. I didn’t mind having her there. But, I also believed that women should be allowed to have their own spaces. Despite being folkies, my partner and I never attended Michfest, because of this conflict. I should have attended on my own.

Life took unexpected turns. I lost contact with the folk music community. Lesbian spaces started shutting down. My partner was in a horseback riding accident, suffering severe brain damage, which changed her in ways that came between us. Life became difficult again. I eventually took testosterone and became estranged from the very lesbian communities which had given me life for so many years.

Fast forward to this past summer. I was invited onto The Land (the name given to the beloved property on which Michfest once lived) to meet with what remains of the Michfest sisterhood about healing our community from the damage done by many assaults, and how we might start to reintegrate medicalized lesbians back in. The organizers and I knew these would be difficult conversations. It was more difficult than we’d imagined. Masculine, bearded lesbians have always been woven into the fabric of that community but, my face is decidedly male, not just masculine, after 18 years on testosterone - The very problem I was there to discuss. The pain runs deep. I don’t think there was a woman there who didn’t understand. Including me. Though, I don’t think I understood the full depths of it, and made mistakes while there, like a stupid, off-the-cuff joke about being the only woman there who uses a urinal – a joke designed to ease some of my own tension. It was insensitive, in ways I didn’t fully understand.

It was an honour to meet the Michfest high-Amazon, Lisa Vogel, at this event. I walked away with a signed copy of her book. Which I’ve now read.

I read about the first festival – a sheer miracle of faith. About the humble beginnings of yard sale fundraising and feats of seemingly impossible resourcefulness. The skinheads I’d encountered at the 1992 march of 100 homos in Winnipeg now seem like a parade of kittens compared to the Michfest women being treated like terrorists by an entire county, subjected to threats of corrective rape, and seen as more threatening than the Hell’s Angels gang who vowed to teach these women a lesson for daring to come together to create a music festival.

While I’d greatly appreciated the culture of womanhood within the music festival community I’d called my spiritual and social home for years, I’d never really appreciated the intensity with which some women carried the politics. I’ve never really dedicated my attention to fully understanding the theory of radical feminism. I’d been there to enjoy the sisterhood, the music, and the atmosphere of those spaces, and benefited greatly from the resourcing of women in those spaces, without fully understanding the theoretical foundations on which those spaces were built. Nor did I understand the great costs and risks endured by those women, who carved out those spaces, long before I was there to benefit from them.

Michfest had been, by my estimation, one of the most fully realized lesbian utopias to ever exist. A fully functioning city, with a population of up to 10,000 women in its prime, embodying a radical feminist vision of female emancipation.

Over many days of meetings and shared meals, I heard many stories. Some heartbreaking, but mostly I heard about deep, decades-long bonds between women. These aren’t stories I’ll share. I consider them sacred.

I made a commitment to those women, on my final day there, to shave my beard - A small gesture of humility and respect for these women who welcomed me and called me sister. Who sat through their pain with me – pain which I unearthed by being there, appearing no different than the men who invaded their spaces and threatened them with rape and murder.

I went there already certain of the need for lesbian-only spaces. I left with a spiritual awakening, fully committing to my own womanhood and to the sisterhood so generously offered back to me. My beard suddenly felt like an offence against myself.  

Lisa Vogel said it best, when she titled her book: We can live like this.  

We deserve our freedom.