News of fromwickedtowedded

Kaymarion Raymond1 Comment

 

My intrepid writing coach just came home from a month in a castle in Scotland and kept applauding  yesterday as I updated her on the last ten weeks in the life of this little fw2w blog. Much, beyond the most visible appearance of five new blogposts, has occurred_ none of it anticipated, and she thought some of you might be interested in knowing of these inner happenings.

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Hampshire Bookshop at the top of Crafts Avenue (Courtesy Historic Northampton)

This is the last week to see in person the Hampshire Bookshop exhibit at Smith College. The display in the Mortimer Rare Bookroom of Neilsen Library closes at the end of February. It was a delight to be able to look at photos of Marion Dodd and others as well as publications of the Shop that I had only read about.  A visit here would combine well with a look at the Kathe Kollwitz exhibit at Smith’s Art Museum. Free parking is usually found along Elm Street.

I say “see in person” because this HBS exhibit is going to be digitized and made available online. It was in regards to this, a request for permission to publish from Smith Library, that I learned that fromwickedtowedded has been included in the show, printouts of the blog post on the HBS displayed as examples of its “Legacy” alongside photos of the Hestia Mural downtown that includes HBS founder Marion Dodd.

Thanks to Mt. Holyoke archivist Debbie Richards regular retweeting of the blog posts to LGBT archivists the post “Intro to the 1970s” reached Dyke, a Quarterly, which reposted it, generating some discussion, new following, and record “views.” Artemis Crow commented, “As queer space becomes increasingly hostile to lesbians, these old lessons on how we organized on our own become so much more valuable.” That fw2w post was also included by editor Judith Sara in the December 2015 online issue of the Valley OLOC newsletter. Thematically focused on Lesbian Herstory, the OLOC newsletter also included info about the blog and a photo and article about Green Street by Kathy SanAntonio.

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On the research front, I found a story about a Springfield gay bar owner who had to go to the emergency room to get eighteen stitches in his arm because he tried to break up an argument in the bar and got attacked with a nail file. Local restauranting historian Jan Whitaker  responded to fw2w’s request for more information on the Springfield bars with a lot of data she found on GenealogyBank, a searchable database that includes the archives of the Springfield newspapers. Thanks to her encouragement I subscribed to this service, handy for those of us with no academic database access, and have been researching news coverage of  the bombing of a Springfield gay bar. I also learned who to contact to (successfully) obtain permission to republish the very first news coverage of the Gay Movement in the Valley.

dojo flyer 1977

More recently, the blog Only in Northampton posted a flyer for the Nutcracker Suite, a 70s lesbian enterprise, asking for information on behalf of a friend of a friend. An out-of-state professor (who has a double-focused doctorate in what we used to call women’s studies and phys. ed.!) is interested in 70s feminism and its connection to women’s self-defense and martial arts. I’ve shared with her the factual chronology I have on this and forwarded her query letter to those I know were part of that history. If you or anyone you know was part of the Nutcracker, student or teacher, please let me know so I can pass on more info to you and the professor, including how she may contact you if you wish.

This little flurry of first time audience feedback, connection with other enthusiasts and the accomplishment of some new publishing procedures has been very exciting and affirming. Did I say surprisingly gratifying? Back to regular posts soon. Coming next;  “T” Is For…

 

Bar Dykes

Kaymarion RaymondLeave a comment

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From the poem Grit by Jacqueline Elizabeth Letalien

This is how Jacqueline Elizabeth Letalien began one of her four story-poems published in the very first issue of Common Lives/Lesbian Lives: a lesbian femininist quarterly in the Fall of 1981. I met Jacqueline at UMass through SHL a decade earlier than this publication. We both had come out in bars and wound up hanging out and working  together off n on until  1979. After she moved to California she sent me a bound sheaf of poems to add to the Valley history, among them these four which begin to express her Springfield working class experience in ways we had not yet been able to talk about.

With her permission they are reprinted here:

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the Girls Club

Kaymarion Raymond4 Comments

Gay women were in the minority, by far, in the UMass Student Homophile League and its 1971 spinoff activist group the Gay Liberation Front. One survey reached twenty four women out of a total of one hundred members attending SHL events. It often felt like many fewer women. One of the first things we did independently of the gay men was take a field trip to The Girls Club, the women’s bar in Chicopee that we had heard about.

I don’t recall who got the directions, but they really had to be specific because the place wasn’t visible from the road or otherwise marked.  In time-fuzzed images, I see us entering at the walk-in basement level from the parking lot at that back of a small building that housed another bar up above. I retain the impression that it was near water, and in an industrial area not well lighted, definitely off the beaten track unless you lived or worked nearby.

I later heard it had been opened in the late 1940s specifically as a women’s bar, and remained so until at least 1993 though its name was changed to the Hideaway or Our Hideaway. It was a working class bar with pool table (with tournament sign-up sheet and news of the softball team on the bulletin board), pinball machine, and jukebox all handy to the bar and space for a DJ or band in the next room, with tables around a small dance area.

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the small dance floor at the Girls Club, (Michele Faucher photo album)

The clientele was diverse, though mostly white, ranging from regulars who had been going there for decades to “tourists” like those of us from SHL visiting from what seemed like a different planet. From my own experience in the military, there were probably WAF from nearby Westover Air Force Base in attendance as well. This was, as far as I know, the only lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts at the time, and one of the few in New England outside of Boston.

I later met someone who grew up in the area, the drummer Michele “Micki” Faucher, who played the Girls Club as part of an all-“girls” (as they were called back then) rock band the Reflections of Tyme. When not playing the Club, the band made music at weddings and other straight events as the Patches of Blue. I’m guessing that this was late 1960s to early 1970s.

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Drummer Micki Faucher playing at the Girls Club with the Reflections of Tyme (sic) . (Michele Faucher photo album)
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Reflections of Tyme playing at the Girls Club. (Michele Faucher photo album)
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The Patches of Blue, the band’s “straight” guise. (Michele Faucher photo album)

There is a fine novel by Sally Bellerose  called The Girls Club  (Bywater Books, 2011) which accurately includes this very same bar as a not so minor setting. Highly recommended.

Looking for: The names and whereabouts of the other band members, more of the Club’s history.  Recollections anyone? Please comment here or email me (see contact above).

Coming next: “T” is for…

Sources:

__Cercone, G. James. “Survey of 100 Homosexual Members of the University of Massachusetts Student Homophile League (April 1971). For a Sociology 391 Seminar. I only have the pie-chart graph from this.

__Rothenberg, Heather. “Our Hideaway: history and ‘herstory’ of a lesbian bar as a social institution.” Project Proposal. Smith College. September 1998. Project may not have been done, it included interviewing the bar’s owner who had retired to Florida.

__Faucher, Michele. Photo album undated given to Kaymarion Raymond.

It Started In Amherst

Kaymarion RaymondLeave a comment

In the Connecticut River Valley, the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements both began in Amherst. They soon spread to other communities, reaching a unique intersection in Northampton that marks the beginning of the town’s LGBTQ history. It all happened within the context of sweeping nationwide social change also focused around the counter-culture, anti-war, New Left and Black Nationalist movements, all which had local counterparts.

Though the first event of Valley Second Wave feminism may have been the appearance of WITCH at Smith College in 1968, the first group to form was Amherst Women’s Liberation in 1969. Four Amherst women found each other, and found four more, to form the first support (conscious raising) group and spread the word. Within a year, AWL had grown to a hundred women members meeting in support, study, and action groups, as well as in monthly forums. The groups met in the women’s homes and in church space.

In December 1970, AWL rented space over Pierce’s Art Store at 200 Main St. in Northampton and opened the Valley Women’s Center. VWC’s half of the second floor space, shared with a beauty parlor on the other side of the stairwell and entry hall, included a storefront-like drop-in space with couches, bulletin board, reading material, desk, phone, call log, mimeograph machine, as well as a second, smaller room used for counseling. The third floor open loft space was used for larger meetings, including the general membership meeting, and, at one point, a free store.

During the summer of 1970, my partner Susan heard about AWL and joined a support group. What interested me, however, was a personal ad I found in the UMass student newspaper, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, when I returned to school that Fall as a sophomore: “Anyone interested in extending the Boston Student Homophile League into the Amherst area. Contact Jerry 586-1602.”

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Or some version of it, because by the time I saw it and called, Kathy had joined Jerry as another contact person. From my recollection of what she told me, after that initial ad and others, the group met in various places in Amherst, including a church, before settling to weekly booking of space at the Campus Center at UMass. The advertised names were pseudonyms for Michael Obligado and Kathryn Girard, both UMass grad students.

Again, a singular event is noted as the “first gay outing” in the Valley: Roz Shapiro and Cindy Shamban read lesbian poetry in their dorm corridor at UMass in 1968. The first political gay group in the Valley I’ve found evidence of is SHL. Students, mostly from UMass, were the majority of those who called the contact number for more information. Within a year, membership grew to a hundred, and included UMass faculty and staff, people from other colleges, and from local communities.

To protect the privacy of those who attended and prevent harassment (which could include violence), the meeting places were not publicized. Providing a safe space to meet and socialize was always a primary function of the UMass Student Homophile League, followed closely by a need for information on a wide range of issues and a place to discuss them. The group quickly added a public educational function. Members advocated for its right to exist and for change in public attitude and behavior toward gays. The pages of the student newspaper, particularly the letters to the editor section, became one forum for advocacy.

Attendance at the Second Christopher Street Liberation Day (June 1971) in New York City was a pinnacle of SHL’s first year, as reported here in SHL’s mimeographed newsletter The Closet Door that I wrote:

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christopher st 197103202015button gay revolution 197103202015

The Northampton meeting of these two streams of activism occurred the summer of 1971. Kathryn Girard and I had previously been invited to an AWL support group to lead a discussion on being gay. That led to an invitation to conduct a similar discussion at the monthly forum in July, attended by about fifty women. This was followed in August by AWL paying the registration fee for me and three other SHL women to attend the first New England Lesbian Feminist Conference in Kent, Connecticut. My secret lover was there with her other primary (and “public”) lover is what I remember most from that conference. Oh, and it was the first I heard of granola or slept on the hay in a barn.

Summer ended at the Tri-County Fair where Amherst Women’s Liberation got a booth and AWL’s Isabel Arnold invited SHL to share the space. That Fall these and other events were reported by me in the SHL’s first(?) newsletter The Closet Door, run off on AWL’s mimeograph machine, as was the flyer circulated at the Fair. I notice in rereading that newsletter that I still referred to us as “gay women” in spite of having just attended a Lesbian Feminist event and also used the pejorative diminutive in referring to Women’s “Lib.” The seeds of ideas were planted however.

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Coming Next: Checking out the women’s bar in Chicopee.
Sources:
____[Raymond], Kaymarion and Letalien, Jacqueline Elizabeth. The Valley Women’s Movement: A Herstorical Chronology 1968-1978. Northampton. Ceres Inc. 1978.
__Massachusetts Daily Collegian, coverage of SHL/GLF starting Sep.24,1970.
__The Closet Door, Student Homophile League, Sep. 1971.

 

1970s Overview: Lesbian Community Emerges

Kaymarion Raymond1 Comment

In the seventies a Lesbian (with an intentional capital “L”) community consciously emerged in Northampton out of the local Women’s Liberation Movement with an infusion from the Gay and perhaps other radical movements in the area. Largely invisible to the general public, the focus of activity was on creating what Lesbians needed specifically for themselves. Places and ways to be together were a first priority.

By 1976, five Lesbian spaces existed in town, each groundbreaking in its own way: a rooming house on Green Street, the Lesbian Gardens and Common Womon Club spaces that functioned as community centers, the Egg business cooperative, and the Nutcracker Suite karate dojo. Within these spaces, new activities, expanded communication, and cultural expression began. Many firsts included a restaurant, weekly coffeehouse night, newsletter, library, bookstore, publisher, and distribution of local lesbian music, writing, and art, as well as a variety of interest and support groups.

Each of these spaces will have their story included in future posts, as well as much more, and I welcome information and guest posts. The rough draft timeline below is just sort of a visual teaser, as well as a way for me to begin to organize the writing topically as well as sequentially.

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an early draft timeline trying to see some order in the decade.                      yes its incomplete . do you have info to add?

Efforts also took place this decade to expand the more traditional gay bar culture to town. Three all-women (lesbian) rock bands playing in the area helped spark a dancing boom. Lesbian space was temporarily obtained at two town bars, the Gala and Zelda’s, and larger spaces were occasionally rented for the new phenomena: wimmin’s (only) dances. Northampton lesbians also helped form what would become a countywide Wimmin’s Softball League. The odd spellings are a story in themselves of the radical reclamation of language.

Many of the initial community organizers were radicals, but there were differences among them in theory and practice. Though there were growing numbers of newly identified lesbians (politicized or not) at both of the spaces that served as community centers, some were excluded for political reasons or became alienated during clashes that came to be called the Separatist Wars. The new elements of a bar culture in town were to a degree more inclusive, with fewer issues to debate.

Though many Lesbians continued to be active in the feminist movement, little energy during this decade was devoted to external political change specifically for lesbians. Creating Lesbian or Wimmin’s space with its attendant culture, though largely hidden from public view, was in itself a form of political opposition to the mainstream norm. This coming out and unintentional visibility did not, however, go unnoticed. A fight for child custody, harassment and violence on the street, the FBI’s incursion into the community, and an eviction were all early warning signs of how society would resist change.

Coming Next: How it began.