Lesbian Culture -- Art, Poetry, Music . . .

[Martina]

Please share your favorite cultural things -- dykey or not. Talk about them or post them. It could be the play you went to last night or the concert you attended thirty years ago.

So i never do anything queer anymore. i go to some butch-femme and leather events, but no culture. i live in SF. My friend goes to gay plays fairly often, but i never step out. i was never big into women's culture, but i was there. i read the books, the magazines, heard the music, went to the dances and the meetings and the parties.

But i am old now. The only magazines i subscribe to are The New Yorker and The Nation. Hardly queer.

So, i had to reach into my past to find something. i was looking for a book of poetry on my bookshelf, but it must be in a box or given away (i hope not). Olga Broumas is the poet. Anyone remember her? It took some doing, but i found a poem of hers on the web. I will share. ( i know, i know, a PINK cock, but it's good. )


She Loves -- Olga Broumas

deep prolonged entry with the strong pink cock
the sit-ups is evokes from her, arms fast
on the climbing invisible rope to the sky,
clasping and unclasping the cosmic lorus *

Inside, the long breaths of lung and cunt
swell the vocal cords and a rasp a song
loud sudden overdrive into disintegrate,
spinal melt, video hologram in the belly.

Her tits are luminous and sway to the rhythm
and I grab them and exaggerate their orbs.
Shoulders above like loaves of heaven,
nutmeg-flecked, exuding light like violet diodes

closing circuit where the wall, its fuse box,
so stolidly stood. No room for fantasy.
We watch ourselves transform the past
with such disinterested fascination,

the only attitude that does not stall
the song by an outburst of consciousness
and still lets consciousness, loved and incurable
voyeur, peek in. I tap. I slap. I knee, thump, bellyroll.

Her song is hoarse and is taking me,
incoherent familiar path to that self we are wall
cortical cells of. Every o in her body
beelines for her throat, locked on

a rising ski-lift up the mountain, no
grass, no mountaintop, no snow.
White belly folding, muscular as milk.
Pas de deux, pas de chat, spotlight

on the key of G, clef du roman, tour de force letting,
like the sunlight lets a sleeve worn against wind, go.

* umbilical cord

[AtLast]

River Rushing

(For Rebecca)

Brilliant as the poppies
you picked weekly for me,
our shadows reflect on the water.
My fingers colliding over flesh like stones
skipping intermittently, hesitant,
until finding a quenching river
after a parching drought.

On shore, my legs snuggle around
the strokes of your licking.
My senses rush like the water
erupting to a splintering fall.
Then, finding a compassionate pool
to float downstream within, content.
Steadily, I search your dammed passage.
Finally, your wetness allows me to slide gently,
freely into your core.

Finding a burgundy flume, honeycombed.
Glistening under my tongue next to the water.
Splashing in the water between motions,
the river pours over my eyes
making me feel like
I’m crying with the flood
running from you.
____________________

© 1976 M. Susan Gaye (My pen name of old)

I could not possibly be the butch I am without lesbian sensuality and its mix of the feminine and masculine within.

[Nat]

ooh I am looking forward to this thread. Thanks for starting it!

I have a weak spot for Ferron.



My momma was a waitress, my daddy a truckdriver. The thing that kept their power from them slowed me down awhile. I remember the morning that was the closing of my youth, when I said goodbye to no one and in that way faced my truth...and a walk along the river... and a rain a'coming down...and a girl on a road.

There's a rhythm to a highway to match the rhythm of your fears. My shopping bag possessions scattered with my splattered tears. A string of nights in truck stops and in darkness and in lies and a man they all called Tigerboy...he just had to show me why. He just had to give me something I'd forever understand...as a girl on a road.

Rain upon the water makes footprints sunk in sand. Anger upon angry hurt, take me by the hand. Take me by the heartstrings and pull me deep inside and say I'm one with your forgiveness and separate from my pride.

I don't know what it's like for you but here's what it's like for me... I wanted to turn beautiful and serve Eternity and never follow money or love with greasy hands, or move the earth and waters just to make it fit my plans. My eyes would be the harbor, my words the perfect place for a girl on a road.

I met you in the Summer, I left you in the Fall. In between we did some living...I like to think that's all...but now I see words can be like weapons no matter that they're small, and I used three tiny words on you and then beat it down the hall. Does this road go on forever? Does this terror know no end...for a girl on a road? Would you like to sing it with me? Rain upon the water makes footprints sunk in sand. Anger upon angry hurt, take me by the hand. Take me by the heartstrings and pull me deep inside and say I'm one with your forgiveness and separate from my pride.

You cannot measure what it takes to mend a withered heart. They'll tell you at the onset everybody does their part. I did my best to follow the calling of my soul. But, it's like that first guitar I played...at the center is a hole, at the center is a...longing... that I cannot understand as a girl on a road.

But if music be a boulder, let me carry it a long while. Let it turn into a feather, let it brush against my smile. Let the life be somewhat settled with the life that song has made. Let there be nothing I am longing for in some plan I may have made, in some story quickly written during a long forgotten time as a girl on a road.

[Jess]

we sure are a funny bunch... if you can't laugh, life just isn't worth living... sometimes, I think we get so caught up in the "issues" we forget to laugh at ourselves...

[Jess]

and who could forget BETTY???

HELLOOOOOOO BETTY!!!



http://www.hellobetty.com/

[Jess]

Couple of my fav lesser known authors...

http://www.honormoore.com/about


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanche_McCrary_Boyd


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Larkin

[Kobi]

Have had a need to reconnect with my lesbian things.

Saw "Laughing Matters" a documentary with interviews and show outtakes by comedians Karen Williams, Marga Gomez, Suzanne Westenhoefer and kate Clinton. Was wonderful!

Have been rereading the Stoner McTavish books by Sarah Dreher. Love her humor.

And reading "Hollywood Lesbians" with interviews with Marjorie Mann (Ma Kettle), Patsy Kelly, Nancy Kulp, Dorothy Arzner, Agnes Moorehead, Barbara Stanwyck, Capucine, and Sandy Dennis. Very interesting so far.

[Jess]

Women, Sexuality And The Black Panther Party
Annie Brown | Posted February 2, 2011 filed under Featured, News & Views

Read more: African American, Black, Black Panther, history, LGBT


One of the most prominent female figures in the Black Panther Party was Angela Davis, a human rights activist, professor and cultural icon. Davis is a controversial figure, but she also is an example of a black lesbian leader that deserves to be recognized for her contributions to the African American and LGBT community. Davis announced her lesbian identity in an OUT magazine interview in 1997. She was reluctant to speak about her lesbian identity until then because of harsh discrimination against lesbians of color and her already controversial image.

According to one Panther woman: “Sexuality was a very low-key thing in the Party. It was just natural that women had women lovers and men lovers at the same time. We all were sexually allowed whatever was our wish.”[1] The BPP had an open mind towards sexual expression as well as the roles women could play in social change organizations. The embrace of female empowerment and varied sexual identities within the party allowed for women like Angela Davis, to rise to prominent positions of power within the party while other radical organizations of the time such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) saved leadership roles for men, and forced women to remain in the background. Although the BPP did not chastise Davis for her gender or sexuality, Davis kept her sexuality a secret to the outside world until 1997 because of prevailing stereotypes about lesbians and women of color.

Davis was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. During her younger years, she attended segregated schools, until she enrolled at New York’s Little Red Schoolhouse, a school that became infamous for its communist identified students and faculty. She later attended Elisabeth Irwin High School, an adjunct of Little Red Schoolhouse, on a full scholarship. After graduating from Brandeis University in 1965, she served on the faculty of Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany, and eventually returned to the US where she was appointed a faculty position at UCLA. When her membership in the Communist Party became known to university administration in 1969, she was fired from UCLA. After a first amendment court battle, she was rehired. Davis recalls in her autobiography, “tons of hate mail poured in my office at UCLA demanding I be removed from the university…many threats had been made on my life…”[2] During her time in the US, Davis had also become drawn to the socialist politics of the BPP.

The Black Panther Party is most commonly portrayed to students of history as a militant, hyper-masculine organization that diverged from the non-violent civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s. In many ways this portrayal is accurate.

From it’s inception in 1966, the Black Panther Party explicitly stated its commitment to using violence and the ideas of black power as means of achieving equality within white society. Originally named The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale created ten-point program that asserted, “We want freedom. We want power to determine
the destiny of our Black community.” Point seven of the program declares,

“We want an immediate end to 
police brutality and murder of Black people. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.”[3]

Statements like these are taken out of the context of Black Panther ideology. Also they are quoted without consideration of the support women gave to these statements or the shifts in party politics that occurred in the later years of the BPP.

Portrayals of women as powerful militants as well as charismatic personalities of the movement were crucial parts of Black Panther self-representation. As Historian Robyn C. Spencer writes, “Seale and Newton didn’t exclude African-American women in their rhetoric or in their involvement. The message became: Black brothers and sisters unite for real social action.”[4] Considered “Pantherettes” at this time, as the Black Panther Party was still technically an all-male organization, women participated in the march to the state legislature in Sacramento on May 2nd, 1967 to protest the Mulford Bill. The bill would prohibit the carrying of unconcealed firearms in public and was thought by many to be a direct attack on The Black Panther’s self-defense efforts. In this march and other actions, the Black Panthers “had not excluded women or overtly endorsed prevailing theories about women’s subordinated place in the black liberation movement.”[5] The party’s all-male stance was mostly in relation to prevailing notions that men should be on the front lines of a self-defense group.

Women like Davis became public figures of the BPP through their experiences with violence and arrest. Many women rose to power in the BPP, simply because the men of the organization were being systematically persecuted by the US government. Davis became a political prisoner in the eyes of Party members after her arrest in 1972. When the plot to free political prisoner George Jackson went awry, a kidnapping resulted in several deaths, including Judge Harold Haley. Angela was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list because while she was not involved in the incident directly, it was a gun registered in her name that caused the deaths. After her arrest The Black Panther, the official newspaper of the Panthers, featured a large image of Davis yelling into a microphone with the words “FREE ANGELA” above the image. Free Angela signs were a common sight in the seventies, and her large afro, common among Black Panther women, became a trend among young African American women. During this time, Davis was also featured on the cover of Life Magazine, for an article entitled “The Making of a Fugitive”. As a nonviolent person, I do not agree with her decision to supply weapons to the Black Panther Party. However, I will never have the experience of being a lesbian black woman in the 1970s, and could never understand why she or the Party condoned the use of violence in the name of equality.

Davis’ strength during her trial, and her willingness to publicly speak out against injustice encouraged Panther women to demand equal rights on their own terms. Increased female involvement and leadership in The Black Panther Party promoted socialism as a solution to economic problems, but also as a solution to the intertwined oppressive forces of racism and sexism in America. As more women joined the Panthers in the seventies, the elimination of sexism within the Party, and ultimately society, was pushed to become not just rhetoric, but reality. Women used the rhetoric and images that had placed them on equal playing field in the militant years of the past to demand equality in issue representation, and sexual rights. Bobby Seale told the press that Panthers were, “moving on that principle of absolute equality between male and female: because male chauvinism is related to the very class nature of this society as it exists today.”

Panther women used the Party’s socialist rhetoric as a means of achieving the gender equality in their professional lives as activists and their personal lives with Panther men. In one interview, Angela Davis recalled the effects of the 1965 Moynihan Report, in which Daniel Monnihan argued, “Black oppression could be attributed to the matriarchal structure of the Black community.” She goes on to explain that the report, “attempted to exploit and distort the male/female relationship within the Black community, which, while of course it was informed by sexism, was much more egalitarian that in the white community.”[6]

By the late 1970s, the Black Panther Party began to focus on successful community survival programs and more openly endorsed socialism as a solution to the problems of Black people. An article titled “L.A. Pigs Vamp on Free Breakfast Programs,” featured in the Black Panther, the author writes, “We, the Black Panther Party have taken upon ourselves the struggle of not only prepare for the total liberation of all people, but the temporary alleviation of the some of the ills which the great masses of people suffer.”[7] Some mass media did pay attention to the shifts in the Panther’s political style, but usually downplayed it as the Black Panthers giving up on revolution.

In the next decade, Davis would focus more on individual projects and became a leader of the prison rights movement, as well as an advocated for women’s and LGBT rights. In 1980 Davis ran for Vice President of the United States on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall. In the same year, Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize for her work with civil rights in the US. She became a touring speaker at Universities, and two years after coming out as a lesbian in Out magazine, she delivered an address at John’s Hopkin’s “Living Out Loud” event hosted by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance. At this speech, as well as in her activism in the 1990s, she focused on the importance of issues of race and class in the gay rights movement. Sexuality is something Davis is fine with as a political statement. She states,“[Sexuality can] enter into consciousness and become the focus of struggle.”[8]

Davis dedicates much of her time to educating the American public on the inability of the modern prison system to reform criminals, or solve our nation’s social problems. In “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex” Davis states,

“Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color…prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.”[9]

Davis is a voice for the voiceless in a nation where speaking out against mainstream views increasingly puts citizens in danger of discrimination and persecution. Today, Davis is a distinguished visiting professor at Syracuse University.

Annie Brown – Richmond, Virginia

[Jess]

Wonderful singer/ songwriter
Eileen Edmonds

http://www.reverbnation.com/eileenedmonds

[OS Butch]

I will cross post this to a couple other threads.

Lesbian Connection, aka LC, is a magazine I have superscribed to for years.
It arrives quarterly in my mailbox in an indiscreet manila envelope!
It is a quick read with only 50 pages. They are reprinting the series "Dykes to Watch out For"
The subscription fee is sliding scale free to anyone world wide and $42 for those that can afford it. Donations and gift subscriptions are appreciated!
I am not on the staff, I am just worried that without support, this little rag will vanish as has the woman's bookstores that use to be.

Elsie Publishing
EPI
PO Box 811
East
Lansing, Mi 48826
(517)371-5257 (M-F) noon- 6pm ET
elsiepub@aol.com

www.LConline.org

[Jess]

Documentary " I Am" by filmmaker Sonali Gulati, an assistant professor at VCU has recently won Best Documentary at the 10th Annual Asian Film Festival in Dallas. I expect it to win other awards. Here is the trailer: