By Batya Weinbaum
This book is dedicated to “all the sisters who forged a new life in the woods of Michigan.” Available through LisaAVogel.com, the memoir of one of the main producers of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival is a moving read for anyone who ever participated in this home ground for the lesbain feminist movement, 1976-2015. As explained in the prologue, Lisa began to write the stories contained there in (40 to be exact, divided into five parts) because she “wanted something that Michigan sisters could see themselves in, to be celebrated as the ingenious, radical, joyous, hardworking womyn who forged a revolutionary reality in the woods of Michigan for 40 years” (p. iii). There she argues, “we miraculously became one life force” (p.iv), offering “a glimpse into the potential of a world shaped by womyn” (iv).
From the start, there were challenges to the realities of womyn- only if not purely lesbian-only events. In 1976, a few weeks before the first festival, the sound was canceled when a hip man lined up to do it found out only womyn were to be there. As Lisa writes summing up the experience, “no men, no sound“ (1); but this crude reality became the mother of invention, of a festival entirely built by, not only attended by, all womyn.
As Lisa writes, they were swimming in the electrifying energy of lesbian feminism they were devouring in books and soaking up on trips to cities like Chicago, Boston, Lansing and Cleveland. To buy postage, they had a yard sale. They snuck into a university at night to make flyers on a ditto machine. To print a brochure, they had a carwash, ran a kegger, and borrowed small bits of money, $20 at a time.
And the stories go on and on–they stretched the truth, saying everyone who came to the festival and everyone performing were pianists, and handed out flyers advertising a moving company that hauled a baby grand piano for $150 from a hundred miles away.
They spied on an Alice Cooper concert to get an idea about how to build a stage.
They manifested water, dealt with peepers, built showers, encountered pushback in local papers, underwent lewd comments, set up security, found barefoot drunk men in the woods, served simple hippy food,visited remote swimming holes to cool off, interchanged with locals, brought in performers, counted money, hired a garbage company, and successfully pulled off the event. As wonderful as the first festival was, they had no thought of doing another.
But it was a bummer to go back to the patriarchy after the matriarchy, so despite many obstacles, the festival continued to grow for another 39 years.
As Lisa acknowledges, not everything is in this book. For instance, as a new social movement theorist about grassroots women’s organizations, I would have loved to hear more about the we and the collective to whom and which she elliptically refers. As the festival grew and began to hire coordinators for different functions, I would have liked to have learned a little more about the union referred to as the CUNTs, the coordinators union negotiating team. This she fails to mention at all. Since I was involved in its founding, I would have appreciated some insight into how the professional therapist hired to run the emotional support tent Oasis was paid $400 when the coordinators from the alternative healers group that wrote the proposal for the area were initially paid nothing.
Yet overall the book reads like a documentary historical ethnography, replete with details such as how the workers built their beds, how attacks from the left and the right were handled, how sex areas were placed far from the children’s day care areas, and tensions with Women of Color who eventually got their own tent.
A must-read for anyone interested in womyn’s music and the industry.
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