-: Let me tell the tape player.
Today is May 10th, 2013.
This is Rose Norman interviewing Mab Segrest via phone,
and I'm now gonna put it on speakerphone,
and put the phone next to the tape player.
Okay, go ahead.
-: Okay, let's see.
I was looking at your narrative, and it said, in brief,
both Mandy and Suzanne say that SONG came out of
a Creating Change conference in Durham, 1993.
Mandy describes organizing that
at the request of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
which had lost a site recently planned.
This is the first time Creating Change was in the south.
Mandy speaks of anti-Southern bias of attendees
who called us asking questions about Durham.
Is there an airport?
It's where Jesse Helms lived.
She said that that is what led her to organize the workshop
that you and the other SONG co-founders led
about doing social justice activism in the south,
leading to what became SONG.
Let's see.
So, my memories of that, I don't remember,
like, there were lots of workshops organized.
So the workshop I remember
I mean, my part of this, there was,
I don't think any one of us originated SONG
or any one of our works originated SONG.
But it was a conversation,
and it was a conversation that was,
in the context of the times,
it was '93 would've the beginning of Clinton,
it was all those -: Early Clinton.
-: Ballot initiatives all over the country,
homophobic ballot initiatives that were using
rabidly racist language and homophobic language
in black communities to try to stir up
black people, including black church people,
against gay people,
and pulled 'em into a conservative coalition and so forth.
So that was a set of circumstances
that it concerned a lot of us
who had been working for ten years, at least,
if not longer, 15,
in both lesbian, gay, then bi,
and what became LBGTQ organizing,
although those distinctions weren't so important back then.
I think at various parts,
but had been doing organizing in both the left
on queer issues and in LG, et cetera organizations
on broader social justice issues: race, class, gender,
for the men, nationality, and so forth.
So in the south, we were networked with each other, and.
-: Those other organizers were networked?
-: Yeah, I mean, the people who were eventually
the first six in SONG,
but there were also nationally some efforts
to pull together the queer left.
And I think that one happened before Creating Change
that we were somewhat drawing on
because we knew each other from various national formations,
including the Creating Change conferences,
but there had also been a queer left conference
that I think the Funding Exchange in New York
and maybe Australia had helped to organize.
Kathy Acey was one of the key players,
Ellen Grasinski I think maybe had been at Funding Exchange
at the point, but I think Kathy Acey was involved in it,
Scott Makadawa, Amber Hollibow, lots of people,
and for the queer left conferences
we had them two different places, I think.
One was in upstate New York,
and maybe the other was in Florida.
I can't quite remember,
but those were really designed
to let us get to know each other, to consolidate,
to see what kind of issues should be raised and so forth.
So we already knew each other a lot nationally
from those conversations, from the kind of alliances
that were happening within some of the nonprofits,
social movement pieces we were organizing on,
and through Creating Change,
which was a great networking opportunity,
particularly for the kind of left part
of the NGLTF coalition, which is kinda center left;
whereas, what's the other one?
You know the other equal mark,
this is why I give interviews off the tape.
-: The majority of something.
-: Yeah, but anyway, it was much more centrist
and much more wealth-oriented to gay, white donors
to get people elected in high office and to get equality.
So the left of the queer movement
worked in a part of NGLTF
and had access through that to conferences and programs
and things like that.
So those of us in the south who were lesbians and gay men,
but SONG was a lesbian organization,
so I had been in North Carolina,
came to graduate school in 1971 or '72,
graduated '72 at Duke.
Finished my degree in '79
but came out in the middle of that, '76, '77,
and then got involved in feminary
and also very vibrant lesbian feminist organizing
at the time that was contrary to the kind of
identity politics, bad rap
that a lot lesbian feminism got in retrospect.
It was like they were doing prison work
and anti-capitalist work, in solidarity
with women prisoners and doing lots of very radical
local work in the mid-70s,
coming out of the really revolutionary movements of the 60s.
So I was very excited to come out into that
and started doing feminary and helped to shape that,
and worked with the feminary collective into the 80s,
and then left my job at the Southern Baptist College
in probably '83 and started doing anti-Klan volunteering,
and then started working with,
starting putting North Carolinians
Against Racist and Religious Violence in place
with a coalition, very multi-racial coalition.
So with feminary, I had known other,
I started getting into networks:
lesbian feminist networks, lesbian networks, gay networks.
And I think I met Pam McMichael in '85
when she had me, my first book, My Mama's Dead Scroll,
came out in '85, so I did some touring around that.
I had been in feminary for awhile then.
So some of the contacts were from feminary,
from Woman Rights, which we had helped to start,
been on the local, first organizing committees for that,
but I went to Louisville,
and Pam sponsored me there, I think at '85.
I can't remember the Louisville organization,
but she and Carla Wallace were working with Anne Braydon,
anti-racist, white woman,
and Anne was mentoring them in a very progressive,
multi-racial, anti-racist movement
that they were integrating LGBTQ issues into,
and at the same time, encouraging the Kentucky,
the Fairness Alliance, I think,
Kentucky Fairness Alliance, I think that was the name of it.
-: I've got that from Pam.
-: To take anti-racist stances.
So that was a connection with Pam,
and I think she came to Woman Rights, too.
I'm not exactly sure. -: She did.
-: Suzanne, I met, I think through Creating Change.
I was also on the Board of the National Anti-Klan Network,
which became the Center for Democratic Renewal in the 80s,
and I was integrating work against homophobia, heterosexism,
into a broadly kind of anti-racist
organization and coalition at that point.
Mandy was working out of Durham, as I was,
through the War Resisters League,
then doing various kinds of work in black communities,
organizing black queer communities
and also organizing in progressive black coalitions
against the kind of homophobia the right was trying
to drive the wedge issue there.
Joan Gardner I think at the time was the director
of the Fund for Seven Communities in Atlanta,
and Pat had been a co-chair
of the National Gay and Lesbian March on Washington,
maybe in '87, not sure,
and then had led the Olympics out of Cobb Campaign
for the Olympics, not sure when that was.
It's whenever the Olympics were in Atlanta.
-: We've got an interview with her.
We have an interview with Pat.
Lorraine Fontana interviewed Pat this week.
-: Yeah, so anyway, we were all doing this kinda stuff.
I had never met Pat until
that Durham Creating Change conference.
So anyway, making a long story long,
another one of the structures that we used
was the pre-conference event to Creating Change,
and there was the Thursday event,
and Sue Hodney's been doing this for years.
Sue would be an interesting person to talk to.
She might have a different memory on this, too,
and if you wanted to do it, to archive the NGLTF,
which may be online now, some of this stuff.
But SONG, when Pat, not that would've been later,
I was just saying SONG was doing that.
So it was pre-SONG, but I think Suzanne,
they were Thursday day-long workshops
around progressive issues, anti-racism, and LGBTQ movements.
And the Creating Change archives would say who did that,
but it's my memory that Suzanne did a lot of that,
and she was very well networked. She was the oldest of us,
and if anybody shaped SONG it was Suzanne.
And she was very well networked in NGLTF.
She did those workshops for a long time.
So people would come early to those workshops.
So it was the progressives and the more leftists
in the LGBTQ movement who would show up on Thursday
and hang out and get to know each other and so forth.
So I think that in terms of the Durham event,
I organized, the group that I was working with in Durham,
which was Southerners for Economic Justice,
which became Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network,
was working on issues of kind of globalization,
which by 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union,
capital just went global and started doing lots of
new, strong, weird things like the NAFTA,
North American Free Trade Act, and so forth.
So I had been working in the anti-Klan organization with,
so there's economic justice.
And in 1992, just remembering another event,
was the 500th, the quincentenary, the 500th anniversary
of Columbus' unfortunate advent in the Americas.
So there had been lots of America-wide organizing
around that,
and some of us at Economic Justice had done,
maybe the first or second of many, of a succession
of annual events, gatherings outside of Atlanta
that was quincentenary observance,
and it was attended by people from Mexico and the Caribbean
and people all across the country.
It was translated, as I remember it,
into Chinese and Spanish,
and I had been working for awhile then
to integrate questions of sexuality in that context
into race, class, gender.
So there was a campaign against
North American Free Trade Act.
There's the beginning of globalization
and a new kind of capitalism and so forth.
So we did a workshop, I think, on that Thursday.
When I say we, it was the organizations
that I was working with around Southerners Economic Justice,
bringing that analysis of capitalism.
It wasn't just an analysis of class.
It was an analysis of capitalism.
And I would say, as I remember and winnow out
what contribution I might have made,
it was calling the question on capitalism
that we had been doing in various ways,
but that brought a group of, a very mixed group,
but heterosexual-led, African American-led,
working class analysis and practice
to be shared with the people, I think, on the Thursday,
and then I was invited to give the keynote on Friday,
or keynote on Thursday.
Anyway, I did the keynote, too.
So a version of the keynote is called
The Bridge, Not a Wedge,
in the back of Memoir of a Race Traitor.
-: Right.
-: So I knew that everybody was freaked out
at being in the south who wasn't southern,
and was expecting us to be the most backward kind of folk.
So I kind of gave a fairly radical critique
of North Carolina, of the landscape there,
of how Jesse Helms in his homophobia fit
into this broader kind of racist and capitalist worldview.
I described going across the US-Mexico border
into barrios there where people were coming to work
in maquilladoras right at the border,
which was really the beginning of structural shift
in the economy, all this kind of stuff.
And I said, here I'm standing on this hill in Mexico,
and I've written about it,
and I look out on this sea of cardboard houses,
and I think what does this do?
What does that do to gay people?
So anyway, it was a call to really look at capitalism,
look at globalization, take stands on that,
understand ourselves in material contexts.
So subsequent to that, what I remember in terms of SONG
was a very intense conversation,
and I can see us, it was me, Suzanne,
Carla Wallace from Louisville, Pam from Louisville,
and Irva Shee, and I think I have pictures,
like the North Carolina Independent took a sequence,
and there's a whole sequence of the conversation,
very animated conversation,
in which the idea of SONG came about,
and Pam had been doing an anti-ballot initiative,
I think in Cincinnati,
and so she wasn't doing that anymore.
So she had time.
She was a very talented organizer.
So I think Suzanne was trying to think,
well what could Pam do?
But also we were just like,
well what can we do in the south?
How can we consolidate the work that various of us
have been doing in the south
around the legacies and remnants
of the civil rights movement and radical organizing there,
the work we've done in queer movements,
how can we consolidate that in the south?
So we came up the idea of a new organization,
and besides Irva Shee, as I recall,
that conversation right then had been all white women,
so it was very clear we would need a set of folks.
So Joan, Mandy, and Pat were pretty easy to come to.
I hadn't known Pat, but I certainly knew Joan and Mandy.
And then Mandy was doing another set of organizing, too,
but that's what to me,
the conception of SONG was in the conversation.
Very soon it spread out from that,
and people brought their various work into it.
But that's my memory of what the origins of SONG were.
-: Okay, and you stayed involved with it for how long?
-: Let's see.
'92, I don't know, I don't know.
Probably six or seven years,
but I'm not sure.
I was still on the board when Pat dropped out,
and then there were a succession of other people.
We, the original board saw it needed to step down
and allow for rotation.
We had not been a nonprofit organization.
We had only gotten grants through other people
as fiscal sponsors.
So there was a move towards, I think, this could be murky,
Pam would really be the authority on this,
and there should be SONG archives, too,
but 501(c)3 status and bringing in actual board people
who had to then have more responsibility
than we had been able to have.
We could raise money fairly fast
because of our various reputations and contacts,
and it also started to be more
predominantly people of color.
So I rotated out somewhere in there,
and I wanna say towards 2000, but '99,
somewhere around there.
-: Okay.
-: But that's pretty murky.
-: Okay, I'm not sure if this is gonna be
the official history of SONG or anything.
We're just trying to get people's stories down.
And getting, we will have heard from all six of you now,
the different stories,
and it's funny how not so different,
but every story has brought in something new.
So I can fill in, when I type these notes,
I'm gonna fill in some answers
I have from Pam McMichael's interview.
I just interviewed her.
-: Yeah, I would like to go back, I would like to see,
another reason I'm reluctant to give interviews
is when it actually gets transcribed it's unintelligible.
I don't speak in sentences.
I write in sentences, but I don't speak in sentences.
So anyway, what have you come up with from notes from mine?
I'd love to see it,
and however it is getting translated,
I also wanna see that, too,
just to be sure I haven't said south instead of north
or up instead of down or something key.
-: What I actually do,
we haven't got anybody who's a professional transcriber
so what I've been doing is I just,
I type notes while we're talking,
and then I go back and listen to the tape and edit my notes,
and just keep what I think we can use.
And I do edit it,
so sometimes it won't be exactly what you said.
It might've taken you three sentences to say it,
and I'll just condense it.
-: Right.
-: Basically I do what you would probably do
if you were gonna edit these notes.
-: Right, well I do have some of this
that I started writing on.
So I can send those to you.
-: Okay, that would be good.
-: Yeah.
-: And I especially want to reference your other books.
We'll reference Race Traitor for the Bridge Not Wedge,
and there may be some other things
that you want to, we're gonna have footnotes,
so might as well mention if there's the story of feminary,
for example, do you tell that somewhere?
There's a thesis about it, but do you tell your story
of feminary somewhere that I could footnote?
-: Well, not really.
There was in the North Carolina Literary Quarterly,
the person who did the thesis did an article.
-: Okay.
-: And I've got the reference somewhere,
and I think I've got the journal at home.
-: I can probably find it by searching.
-: And Minnie Bruce really worked very scrupulously
to get the dates right in all of that and everything.
'Cause we're all going back and forth to Atlanta.
It's a bunch of very rich networks from that period
that kind of blur together,
but anyway that would be a source of information.
-: Okay, North Carolina Literary Journal.
-: North Carolina. -: Something like that.
Probably if I search on her name as author, it'll come up.
-: Pardon?
-: If I search MLA on her name as author,
it'll probably come up. -: Mmhmm.
-: That thesis author.
Okay. -: I'm curious though, like,
are there contradictions or just different pieces
or what's the? -: Well, I think,
I'm trying to remember who, which one.
It's not contradictions, no.
But what people remember and what sticks out in their mind.
Somebody brought up the movie.
I can't remember who it was,
might've been Joan Larson or Suzanne, one of them.
The movie Gay Rights, Special Rights,
apparently that was being distributed widely.
-: Right, right.
-: And that was sort of a touchstone for going out.
-: Right, that's the kind of homophobic campaign
in the black community, in those anti-electoral campaigns,
and stuff like that, yeah.
-: Yeah, not everybody remembered that.
And also, I mean, trying to put in
little autobiographical things,
like I got Suzanne's story about growing up,
basically in an all-white community outside of Atlanta,
farming community. -: Mmhmm.
-: And of course, you've told that story,
your story of growing up in several plays and places,
so I don't need to go back to that.
Although I did wanna see,
I like to ask that aha moment question,
if there was an aha moment when you realized
about all you had to do something, about racism.
I mean I went back to Race Traitor to see
if the Alciella's head story was it,
and it didn't seem to be it so much as part of the struggle.
-: I mean partly, pretty soon,
coming out in the mid to late 70s, really coming out,
not just having a closeted lesbian woman-lover,
not necessarily the lesbian lover,
as soon as I could do that and name myself,
then I could go back and articulate a race politics,
and I could locate myself.
Until then, I really didn't have
an explicitly anti-racist politics.
I had sensibilities, I had longings, I had guilt,
I had all that kinda stuff.
So coming out was really crucial to me,
and then, there was a very progressive community in Durham,
integrated, anti-racist
that I pretty soon located myself in.
I do remember when I started to do the anti-Klan organizing
in 1983 when I left teaching at Campbell College University,
I realized that I had left Alabama
kind of running away from racist violence,
and it was time to do something about it.
I mean that's a very big aha moment for me.
But my big aha moment, I call a crack in the cosmic egg
was 1963, which the 50th anniversary is coming up,
of desegregation of Alabama schools,
including my high school,
and kind of seeing the black kids
walking across the breezeway
where I had been walking for the past nine years
of my school life and how isolated they were,
and the sense of identification with them.
So that probably was the biggest aha moment of my life,
like ooh, this is something really, really off here.
-: And you write about that somewhere, I'm remembering.
-: Yes, that's both in, it's in Memoir of a Race Traitor,
it's in, I come back to it in Point of Belonging.
-: That was 1963 did you say?
-: Yeah.
-: Because my high school was not integrated until 1966.
-: Where was that? -: Lowndes County.
-: Yeah, that's intense, Lowndes County.
-: Oh yeah. -: Selma?
Was that Selma?
-: Oh, no, Lowndes County the biggest town is Fortaposit,
1,500 people, that's where I lived.
The county seat is Hayneville,
that's where those people were murdered.
-: Okay, yeah.
-: Let me see if I can send you.
Well, thank you for persisting on this.
So it's gonna be a history,
remind me again of the focus, whole history of SONG?
-: It's the whole thing is the Herstory Project
is recovering memories or memoirs.
We originally wanted people to write their stories
about their lesbian feminist activism
in the south in that period. Can't get 'em to do that,
so we're interviewing people.
And mostly we're not trying to interview people
who've published things about it
because it's a recovery project,
but I was originally only gonna interview Mandy and Suzanne,
and they all said, oh no, you gotta get the story from.
So we've done all six of you now.
So this is just a chapter,
and we really have a big, book-length project here.
It's over 100,000 words.
So I'm not sure exactly what
Sinister Wisdom is gonna tell us
about how much and in what form they wanna publish it.
Like the Landikes chapter, we might just publish that
with May's or something.
They've offered to publish that separately.
But we won't know until the summer.
But I wanna be able to send them somewhat edited versions
of what we have.
Now I'm gonna work on this immediately,
as soon as I hang up, I'm gonna start work.
-: I just sent you the file, so.
-: Excellent, okay. -: Okay.
-: Well I will send you what I have this afternoon.
And we'll just stay in touch over email.
-: Okay, thanks a lot.
-: Okay thank you.
-: Uh huh, bye-bye. -: Bye bye.