Segrest, Mab - interviewed by Rose Norman
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | Let me tell the tape player. | 0:00 |
| Today is May 10th, 2013. | 0:01 | |
| This is Rose Norman interviewing Mab Segrest via phone, | 0:04 | |
| and I'm now gonna put it on speakerphone, | 0:10 | |
| and put the phone next to the tape player. | 0:14 | |
| Okay, go ahead. | 0:16 | |
| - | Okay, let's see. | 0:18 |
| I was looking at your narrative, and it said, in brief, | 0:21 | |
| both Mandy and Suzanne say that SONG came out of | 0:25 | |
| a Creating Change conference in Durham, 1993. | 0:27 | |
| Mandy describes organizing that | 0:29 | |
| at the request of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force | 0:31 | |
| which had lost a site recently planned. | 0:33 | |
| This is the first time Creating Change was in the south. | 0:36 | |
| Mandy speaks of anti-Southern bias of attendees | 0:39 | |
| who called us asking questions about Durham. | 0:41 | |
| Is there an airport? | 0:42 | |
| It's where Jesse Helms lived. | 0:43 | |
| She said that that is what led her to organize the workshop | 0:45 | |
| that you and the other SONG co-founders led | 0:48 | |
| about doing social justice activism in the south, | 0:50 | |
| leading to what became SONG. | 0:53 | |
| Let's see. | 0:58 | |
| So, my memories of that, I don't remember, | 1:00 | |
| like, there were lots of workshops organized. | 1:03 | |
| So the workshop I remember | 1:05 | |
| I mean, my part of this, there was, | 1:08 | |
| I don't think any one of us originated SONG | 1:12 | |
| or any one of our works originated SONG. | 1:15 | |
| But it was a conversation, | 1:19 | |
| and it was a conversation that was, | 1:21 | |
| in the context of the times, | 1:24 | |
| it was '93 would've the beginning of Clinton, | 1:28 | |
| it was all those | 1:33 | |
| - | Early Clinton. | |
| - | Ballot initiatives all over the country, | 1:34 |
| homophobic ballot initiatives that were using | 1:36 | |
| rabidly racist language and homophobic language | 1:39 | |
| in black communities to try to stir up | 1:42 | |
| black people, including black church people, | 1:45 | |
| against gay people, | 1:47 | |
| and pulled 'em into a conservative coalition and so forth. | 1:48 | |
| So that was a set of circumstances | 1:51 | |
| that it concerned a lot of us | 1:55 | |
| who had been working for ten years, at least, | 1:57 | |
| if not longer, 15, | 2:00 | |
| in both lesbian, gay, then bi, | 2:03 | |
| and what became LBGTQ organizing, | 2:09 | |
| although those distinctions weren't so important back then. | 2:12 | |
| I think at various parts, | 2:15 | |
| but had been doing organizing in both the left | 2:17 | |
| on queer issues and in LG, et cetera organizations | 2:20 | |
| on broader social justice issues: race, class, gender, | 2:28 | |
| for the men, nationality, and so forth. | 2:33 | |
| So in the south, we were networked with each other, and. | 2:35 | |
| - | Those other organizers were networked? | 2:43 |
| - | Yeah, I mean, the people who were eventually | 2:46 |
| the first six in SONG, | 2:49 | |
| but there were also nationally some efforts | 2:51 | |
| to pull together the queer left. | 2:53 | |
| And I think that one happened before Creating Change | 2:56 | |
| that we were somewhat drawing on | 3:00 | |
| because we knew each other from various national formations, | 3:01 | |
| including the Creating Change conferences, | 3:05 | |
| but there had also been a queer left conference | 3:08 | |
| that I think the Funding Exchange in New York | 3:12 | |
| and maybe Australia had helped to organize. | 3:14 | |
| Kathy Acey was one of the key players, | 3:17 | |
| Ellen Grasinski I think maybe had been at Funding Exchange | 3:20 | |
| at the point, but I think Kathy Acey was involved in it, | 3:23 | |
| Scott Makadawa, Amber Hollibow, lots of people, | 3:26 | |
| and for the queer left conferences | 3:33 | |
| we had them two different places, I think. | 3:36 | |
| One was in upstate New York, | 3:40 | |
| and maybe the other was in Florida. | 3:43 | |
| I can't quite remember, | 3:45 | |
| but those were really designed | 3:46 | |
| to let us get to know each other, to consolidate, | 3:48 | |
| to see what kind of issues should be raised and so forth. | 3:50 | |
| So we already knew each other a lot nationally | 3:53 | |
| from those conversations, from the kind of alliances | 3:58 | |
| that were happening within some of the nonprofits, | 4:01 | |
| social movement pieces we were organizing on, | 4:04 | |
| and through Creating Change, | 4:08 | |
| which was a great networking opportunity, | 4:09 | |
| particularly for the kind of left part | 4:15 | |
| of the NGLTF coalition, which is kinda center left; | 4:18 | |
| whereas, what's the other one? | 4:22 | |
| You know the other equal mark, | 4:30 | |
| this is why I give interviews off the tape. | 4:32 | |
| - | The majority of something. | 4:35 |
| - | Yeah, but anyway, it was much more centrist | 4:37 |
| and much more wealth-oriented to gay, white donors | 4:42 | |
| to get people elected in high office and to get equality. | 4:47 | |
| So the left of the queer movement | 4:52 | |
| worked in a part of NGLTF | 4:56 | |
| and had access through that to conferences and programs | 4:59 | |
| and things like that. | 5:03 | |
| So those of us in the south who were lesbians and gay men, | 5:05 | |
| but SONG was a lesbian organization, | 5:10 | |
| so I had been in North Carolina, | 5:12 | |
| came to graduate school in 1971 or '72, | 5:17 | |
| graduated '72 at Duke. | 5:24 | |
| Finished my degree in '79 | 5:27 | |
| but came out in the middle of that, '76, '77, | 5:29 | |
| and then got involved in feminary | 5:32 | |
| and also very vibrant lesbian feminist organizing | 5:35 | |
| at the time that was contrary to the kind of | 5:38 | |
| identity politics, bad rap | 5:41 | |
| that a lot lesbian feminism got in retrospect. | 5:44 | |
| It was like they were doing prison work | 5:48 | |
| and anti-capitalist work, in solidarity | 5:50 | |
| with women prisoners and doing lots of very radical | 5:53 | |
| local work in the mid-70s, | 5:58 | |
| coming out of the really revolutionary movements of the 60s. | 5:59 | |
| So I was very excited to come out into that | 6:04 | |
| and started doing feminary and helped to shape that, | 6:06 | |
| and worked with the feminary collective into the 80s, | 6:09 | |
| and then left my job at the Southern Baptist College | 6:13 | |
| in probably '83 and started doing anti-Klan volunteering, | 6:17 | |
| and then started working with, | 6:22 | |
| starting putting North Carolinians | 6:25 | |
| Against Racist and Religious Violence in place | 6:27 | |
| with a coalition, very multi-racial coalition. | 6:29 | |
| So with feminary, I had known other, | 6:35 | |
| I started getting into networks: | 6:39 | |
| lesbian feminist networks, lesbian networks, gay networks. | 6:42 | |
| And I think I met Pam McMichael in '85 | 6:46 | |
| when she had me, my first book, My Mama's Dead Scroll, | 6:51 | |
| came out in '85, so I did some touring around that. | 6:55 | |
| I had been in feminary for awhile then. | 7:00 | |
| So some of the contacts were from feminary, | 7:03 | |
| from Woman Rights, which we had helped to start, | 7:06 | |
| been on the local, first organizing committees for that, | 7:10 | |
| but I went to Louisville, | 7:14 | |
| and Pam sponsored me there, I think at '85. | 7:18 | |
| I can't remember the Louisville organization, | 7:23 | |
| but she and Carla Wallace were working with Anne Braydon, | 7:24 | |
| anti-racist, white woman, | 7:27 | |
| and Anne was mentoring them in a very progressive, | 7:29 | |
| multi-racial, anti-racist movement | 7:33 | |
| that they were integrating LGBTQ issues into, | 7:35 | |
| and at the same time, encouraging the Kentucky, | 7:38 | |
| the Fairness Alliance, I think, | 7:44 | |
| Kentucky Fairness Alliance, I think that was the name of it. | 7:45 | |
| - | I've got that from Pam. | 7:48 |
| - | To take anti-racist stances. | 7:49 |
| So that was a connection with Pam, | 7:51 | |
| and I think she came to Woman Rights, too. | 7:55 | |
| I'm not exactly sure. | 7:56 | |
| - | She did. | |
| - | Suzanne, I met, I think through Creating Change. | 7:59 |
| I was also on the Board of the National Anti-Klan Network, | 8:04 | |
| which became the Center for Democratic Renewal in the 80s, | 8:08 | |
| and I was integrating work against homophobia, heterosexism, | 8:13 | |
| into a broadly kind of anti-racist | 8:19 | |
| organization and coalition at that point. | 8:23 | |
| Mandy was working out of Durham, as I was, | 8:27 | |
| through the War Resisters League, | 8:30 | |
| then doing various kinds of work in black communities, | 8:32 | |
| organizing black queer communities | 8:38 | |
| and also organizing in progressive black coalitions | 8:39 | |
| against the kind of homophobia the right was trying | 8:45 | |
| to drive the wedge issue there. | 8:48 | |
| Joan Gardner I think at the time was the director | 8:51 | |
| of the Fund for Seven Communities in Atlanta, | 8:55 | |
| and Pat had been a co-chair | 8:58 | |
| of the National Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, | 9:03 | |
| maybe in '87, not sure, | 9:06 | |
| and then had led the Olympics out of Cobb Campaign | 9:09 | |
| for the Olympics, not sure when that was. | 9:13 | |
| It's whenever the Olympics were in Atlanta. | 9:18 | |
| - | We've got an interview with her. | 9:19 |
| We have an interview with Pat. | 9:21 | |
| Lorraine Fontana interviewed Pat this week. | 9:23 | |
| - | Yeah, so anyway, we were all doing this kinda stuff. | 9:26 |
| I had never met Pat until | 9:28 | |
| that Durham Creating Change conference. | 9:30 | |
| So anyway, making a long story long, | 9:36 | |
| another one of the structures that we used | 9:40 | |
| was the pre-conference event to Creating Change, | 9:43 | |
| and there was the Thursday event, | 9:48 | |
| and Sue Hodney's been doing this for years. | 9:50 | |
| Sue would be an interesting person to talk to. | 9:53 | |
| She might have a different memory on this, too, | 9:53 | |
| and if you wanted to do it, to archive the NGLTF, | 9:56 | |
| which may be online now, some of this stuff. | 9:59 | |
| But SONG, when Pat, not that would've been later, | 10:02 | |
| I was just saying SONG was doing that. | 10:07 | |
| So it was pre-SONG, but I think Suzanne, | 10:08 | |
| they were Thursday day-long workshops | 10:11 | |
| around progressive issues, anti-racism, and LGBTQ movements. | 10:19 | |
| And the Creating Change archives would say who did that, | 10:26 | |
| but it's my memory that Suzanne did a lot of that, | 10:29 | |
| and she was very well networked. She was the oldest of us, | 10:33 | |
| and if anybody shaped SONG it was Suzanne. | 10:36 | |
| And she was very well networked in NGLTF. | 10:39 | |
| She did those workshops for a long time. | 10:45 | |
| So people would come early to those workshops. | 10:47 | |
| So it was the progressives and the more leftists | 10:51 | |
| in the LGBTQ movement who would show up on Thursday | 10:56 | |
| and hang out and get to know each other and so forth. | 11:01 | |
| So I think that in terms of the Durham event, | 11:03 | |
| I organized, the group that I was working with in Durham, | 11:07 | |
| which was Southerners for Economic Justice, | 11:13 | |
| which became Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network, | 11:16 | |
| was working on issues of kind of globalization, | 11:21 | |
| which by 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, | 11:25 | |
| capital just went global and started doing lots of | 11:30 | |
| new, strong, weird things like the NAFTA, | 11:34 | |
| North American Free Trade Act, and so forth. | 11:38 | |
| So I had been working in the anti-Klan organization with, | 11:40 | |
| so there's economic justice. | 11:47 | |
| And in 1992, just remembering another event, | 11:49 | |
| was the 500th, the quincentenary, the 500th anniversary | 11:53 | |
| of Columbus' unfortunate advent in the Americas. | 11:56 | |
| So there had been lots of America-wide organizing | 12:00 | |
| around that, | 12:04 | |
| and some of us at Economic Justice had done, | 12:05 | |
| maybe the first or second of many, of a succession | 12:10 | |
| of annual events, gatherings outside of Atlanta | 12:13 | |
| that was quincentenary observance, | 12:18 | |
| and it was attended by people from Mexico and the Caribbean | 12:22 | |
| and people all across the country. | 12:28 | |
| It was translated, as I remember it, | 12:29 | |
| into Chinese and Spanish, | 12:32 | |
| and I had been working for awhile then | 12:35 | |
| to integrate questions of sexuality in that context | 12:39 | |
| into race, class, gender. | 12:43 | |
| So there was a campaign against | 12:45 | |
| North American Free Trade Act. | 12:51 | |
| There's the beginning of globalization | 12:53 | |
| and a new kind of capitalism and so forth. | 12:55 | |
| So we did a workshop, I think, on that Thursday. | 12:57 | |
| When I say we, it was the organizations | 13:00 | |
| that I was working with around Southerners Economic Justice, | 13:03 | |
| bringing that analysis of capitalism. | 13:07 | |
| It wasn't just an analysis of class. | 13:09 | |
| It was an analysis of capitalism. | 13:11 | |
| And I would say, as I remember and winnow out | 13:13 | |
| what contribution I might have made, | 13:17 | |
| it was calling the question on capitalism | 13:19 | |
| that we had been doing in various ways, | 13:23 | |
| but that brought a group of, a very mixed group, | 13:25 | |
| but heterosexual-led, African American-led, | 13:29 | |
| working class analysis and practice | 13:33 | |
| to be shared with the people, I think, on the Thursday, | 13:37 | |
| and then I was invited to give the keynote on Friday, | 13:41 | |
| or keynote on Thursday. | 13:44 | |
| Anyway, I did the keynote, too. | 13:45 | |
| So a version of the keynote is called | 13:47 | |
| The Bridge, Not a Wedge, | 13:51 | |
| in the back of Memoir of a Race Traitor. | 13:52 | |
| - | Right. | 13:55 |
| - | So I knew that everybody was freaked out | 13:56 |
| at being in the south who wasn't southern, | 13:57 | |
| and was expecting us to be the most backward kind of folk. | 14:00 | |
| So I kind of gave a fairly radical critique | 14:03 | |
| of North Carolina, of the landscape there, | 14:12 | |
| of how Jesse Helms in his homophobia fit | 14:15 | |
| into this broader kind of racist and capitalist worldview. | 14:18 | |
| I described going across the US-Mexico border | 14:24 | |
| into barrios there where people were coming to work | 14:28 | |
| in maquilladoras right at the border, | 14:31 | |
| which was really the beginning of structural shift | 14:32 | |
| in the economy, all this kind of stuff. | 14:35 | |
| And I said, here I'm standing on this hill in Mexico, | 14:36 | |
| and I've written about it, | 14:39 | |
| and I look out on this sea of cardboard houses, | 14:40 | |
| and I think what does this do? | 14:43 | |
| What does that do to gay people? | 14:44 | |
| So anyway, it was a call to really look at capitalism, | 14:46 | |
| look at globalization, take stands on that, | 14:50 | |
| understand ourselves in material contexts. | 14:53 | |
| So subsequent to that, what I remember in terms of SONG | 14:57 | |
| was a very intense conversation, | 15:01 | |
| and I can see us, it was me, Suzanne, | 15:04 | |
| Carla Wallace from Louisville, Pam from Louisville, | 15:07 | |
| and Irva Shee, and I think I have pictures, | 15:11 | |
| like the North Carolina Independent took a sequence, | 15:14 | |
| and there's a whole sequence of the conversation, | 15:17 | |
| very animated conversation, | 15:19 | |
| in which the idea of SONG came about, | 15:21 | |
| and Pam had been doing an anti-ballot initiative, | 15:26 | |
| I think in Cincinnati, | 15:30 | |
| and so she wasn't doing that anymore. | 15:31 | |
| So she had time. | 15:34 | |
| She was a very talented organizer. | 15:35 | |
| So I think Suzanne was trying to think, | 15:37 | |
| well what could Pam do? | 15:38 | |
| But also we were just like, | 15:40 | |
| well what can we do in the south? | 15:41 | |
| How can we consolidate the work that various of us | 15:43 | |
| have been doing in the south | 15:46 | |
| around the legacies and remnants | 15:48 | |
| of the civil rights movement and radical organizing there, | 15:54 | |
| the work we've done in queer movements, | 15:58 | |
| how can we consolidate that in the south? | 16:02 | |
| So we came up the idea of a new organization, | 16:04 | |
| and besides Irva Shee, as I recall, | 16:07 | |
| that conversation right then had been all white women, | 16:10 | |
| so it was very clear we would need a set of folks. | 16:13 | |
| So Joan, Mandy, and Pat were pretty easy to come to. | 16:19 | |
| I hadn't known Pat, but I certainly knew Joan and Mandy. | 16:24 | |
| And then Mandy was doing another set of organizing, too, | 16:27 | |
| but that's what to me, | 16:31 | |
| the conception of SONG was in the conversation. | 16:32 | |
| Very soon it spread out from that, | 16:36 | |
| and people brought their various work into it. | 16:38 | |
| But that's my memory of what the origins of SONG were. | 16:41 | |
| - | Okay, and you stayed involved with it for how long? | 16:48 |
| - | Let's see. | 16:58 |
| '92, I don't know, I don't know. | 17:00 | |
| Probably six or seven years, | 17:06 | |
| but I'm not sure. | 17:10 | |
| I was still on the board when Pat dropped out, | 17:13 | |
| and then there were a succession of other people. | 17:19 | |
| We, the original board saw it needed to step down | 17:21 | |
| and allow for rotation. | 17:27 | |
| We had not been a nonprofit organization. | 17:30 | |
| We had only gotten grants through other people | 17:33 | |
| as fiscal sponsors. | 17:39 | |
| So there was a move towards, I think, this could be murky, | 17:41 | |
| Pam would really be the authority on this, | 17:45 | |
| and there should be SONG archives, too, | 17:47 | |
| but 501(c)3 status and bringing in actual board people | 17:49 | |
| who had to then have more responsibility | 17:54 | |
| than we had been able to have. | 17:56 | |
| We could raise money fairly fast | 17:58 | |
| because of our various reputations and contacts, | 18:00 | |
| and it also started to be more | 18:04 | |
| predominantly people of color. | 18:05 | |
| So I rotated out somewhere in there, | 18:09 | |
| and I wanna say towards 2000, but '99, | 18:12 | |
| somewhere around there. | 18:18 | |
| - | Okay. | 18:20 |
| - | But that's pretty murky. | 18:22 |
| - | Okay, I'm not sure if this is gonna be | 18:25 |
| the official history of SONG or anything. | 18:30 | |
| We're just trying to get people's stories down. | 18:34 | |
| And getting, we will have heard from all six of you now, | 18:39 | |
| the different stories, | 18:43 | |
| and it's funny how not so different, | 18:45 | |
| but every story has brought in something new. | 18:48 | |
| So I can fill in, when I type these notes, | 18:54 | |
| I'm gonna fill in some answers | 18:57 | |
| I have from Pam McMichael's interview. | 18:59 | |
| I just interviewed her. | 19:01 | |
| - | Yeah, I would like to go back, I would like to see, | 19:03 |
| another reason I'm reluctant to give interviews | 19:07 | |
| is when it actually gets transcribed it's unintelligible. | 19:10 | |
| I don't speak in sentences. | 19:12 | |
| I write in sentences, but I don't speak in sentences. | 19:14 | |
| So anyway, what have you come up with from notes from mine? | 19:17 | |
| I'd love to see it, | 19:20 | |
| and however it is getting translated, | 19:20 | |
| I also wanna see that, too, | 19:23 | |
| just to be sure I haven't said south instead of north | 19:24 | |
| or up instead of down or something key. | 19:27 | |
| - | What I actually do, | 19:29 |
| we haven't got anybody who's a professional transcriber | 19:31 | |
| so what I've been doing is I just, | 19:34 | |
| I type notes while we're talking, | 19:37 | |
| and then I go back and listen to the tape and edit my notes, | 19:39 | |
| and just keep what I think we can use. | 19:43 | |
| And I do edit it, | 19:45 | |
| so sometimes it won't be exactly what you said. | 19:46 | |
| It might've taken you three sentences to say it, | 19:49 | |
| and I'll just condense it. | 19:51 | |
| - | Right. | 19:53 |
| - | Basically I do what you would probably do | 19:54 |
| if you were gonna edit these notes. | 19:56 | |
| - | Right, well I do have some of this | 19:57 |
| that I started writing on. | 20:00 | |
| So I can send those to you. | 20:01 | |
| - | Okay, that would be good. | 20:05 |
| - | Yeah. | 20:06 |
| - | And I especially want to reference your other books. | 20:07 |
| We'll reference Race Traitor for the Bridge Not Wedge, | 20:13 | |
| and there may be some other things | 20:18 | |
| that you want to, we're gonna have footnotes, | 20:22 | |
| so might as well mention if there's the story of feminary, | 20:25 | |
| for example, do you tell that somewhere? | 20:30 | |
| There's a thesis about it, but do you tell your story | 20:31 | |
| of feminary somewhere that I could footnote? | 20:35 | |
| - | Well, not really. | 20:39 |
| There was in the North Carolina Literary Quarterly, | 20:40 | |
| the person who did the thesis did an article. | 20:43 | |
| - | Okay. | 20:47 |
| - | And I've got the reference somewhere, | 20:49 |
| and I think I've got the journal at home. | 20:52 | |
| - | I can probably find it by searching. | 20:54 |
| - | And Minnie Bruce really worked very scrupulously | 20:56 |
| to get the dates right in all of that and everything. | 20:58 | |
| 'Cause we're all going back and forth to Atlanta. | 21:02 | |
| It's a bunch of very rich networks from that period | 21:07 | |
| that kind of blur together, | 21:11 | |
| but anyway that would be a source of information. | 21:12 | |
| - | Okay, North Carolina Literary Journal. | 21:15 |
| - | North Carolina. | 21:18 |
| - | Something like that. | |
| Probably if I search on her name as author, it'll come up. | 21:20 | |
| - | Pardon? | 21:24 |
| - | If I search MLA on her name as author, | 21:25 |
| it'll probably come up. | 21:28 | |
| - | Mmhmm. | |
| - | That thesis author. | 21:29 |
| Okay. | 21:33 | |
| - | I'm curious though, like, | |
| are there contradictions or just different pieces | 21:36 | |
| or what's the? | 21:38 | |
| - | Well, I think, | |
| I'm trying to remember who, which one. | 21:42 | |
| It's not contradictions, no. | 21:44 | |
| But what people remember and what sticks out in their mind. | 21:48 | |
| Somebody brought up the movie. | 21:52 | |
| I can't remember who it was, | 21:54 | |
| might've been Joan Larson or Suzanne, one of them. | 21:56 | |
| The movie Gay Rights, Special Rights, | 22:01 | |
| apparently that was being distributed widely. | 22:04 | |
| - | Right, right. | 22:06 |
| - | And that was sort of a touchstone for going out. | 22:07 |
| - | Right, that's the kind of homophobic campaign | 22:13 |
| in the black community, in those anti-electoral campaigns, | 22:15 | |
| and stuff like that, yeah. | 22:19 | |
| - | Yeah, not everybody remembered that. | 22:20 |
| And also, I mean, trying to put in | 22:25 | |
| little autobiographical things, | 22:27 | |
| like I got Suzanne's story about growing up, | 22:28 | |
| basically in an all-white community outside of Atlanta, | 22:31 | |
| farming community. | 22:34 | |
| - | Mmhmm. | |
| - | And of course, you've told that story, | 22:37 |
| your story of growing up in several plays and places, | 22:39 | |
| so I don't need to go back to that. | 22:43 | |
| Although I did wanna see, | 22:44 | |
| I like to ask that aha moment question, | 22:45 | |
| if there was an aha moment when you realized | 22:48 | |
| about all you had to do something, about racism. | 22:51 | |
| I mean I went back to Race Traitor to see | 22:58 | |
| if the Alciella's head story was it, | 23:01 | |
| and it didn't seem to be it so much as part of the struggle. | 23:04 | |
| - | I mean partly, pretty soon, | 23:10 |
| coming out in the mid to late 70s, really coming out, | 23:15 | |
| not just having a closeted lesbian woman-lover, | 23:21 | |
| not necessarily the lesbian lover, | 23:24 | |
| as soon as I could do that and name myself, | 23:27 | |
| then I could go back and articulate a race politics, | 23:29 | |
| and I could locate myself. | 23:31 | |
| Until then, I really didn't have | 23:33 | |
| an explicitly anti-racist politics. | 23:35 | |
| I had sensibilities, I had longings, I had guilt, | 23:37 | |
| I had all that kinda stuff. | 23:40 | |
| So coming out was really crucial to me, | 23:41 | |
| and then, there was a very progressive community in Durham, | 23:51 | |
| integrated, anti-racist | 23:55 | |
| that I pretty soon located myself in. | 23:58 | |
| I do remember when I started to do the anti-Klan organizing | 24:00 | |
| in 1983 when I left teaching at Campbell College University, | 24:03 | |
| I realized that I had left Alabama | 24:13 | |
| kind of running away from racist violence, | 24:15 | |
| and it was time to do something about it. | 24:17 | |
| I mean that's a very big aha moment for me. | 24:19 | |
| But my big aha moment, I call a crack in the cosmic egg | 24:21 | |
| was 1963, which the 50th anniversary is coming up, | 24:25 | |
| of desegregation of Alabama schools, | 24:29 | |
| including my high school, | 24:31 | |
| and kind of seeing the black kids | 24:33 | |
| walking across the breezeway | 24:36 | |
| where I had been walking for the past nine years | 24:38 | |
| of my school life and how isolated they were, | 24:43 | |
| and the sense of identification with them. | 24:47 | |
| So that probably was the biggest aha moment of my life, | 24:50 | |
| like ooh, this is something really, really off here. | 24:54 | |
| - | And you write about that somewhere, I'm remembering. | 24:58 |
| - | Yes, that's both in, it's in Memoir of a Race Traitor, | 25:00 |
| it's in, I come back to it in Point of Belonging. | 25:03 | |
| - | That was 1963 did you say? | 25:11 |
| - | Yeah. | 25:13 |
| - | Because my high school was not integrated until 1966. | 25:14 |
| - | Where was that? | 25:19 |
| - | Lowndes County. | |
| - | Yeah, that's intense, Lowndes County. | 25:21 |
| - | Oh yeah. | 25:25 |
| - | Selma? | |
| Was that Selma? | 25:29 | |
| - | Oh, no, Lowndes County the biggest town is Fortaposit, | 25:31 |
| 1,500 people, that's where I lived. | 25:35 | |
| The county seat is Hayneville, | 25:38 | |
| that's where those people were murdered. | 25:39 | |
| - | Okay, yeah. | 25:41 |
| - | Let me see if I can send you. | 25:46 |
| Well, thank you for persisting on this. | 25:50 | |
| So it's gonna be a history, | 25:54 | |
| remind me again of the focus, whole history of SONG? | 25:58 | |
| - | It's the whole thing is the Herstory Project | 26:02 |
| is recovering memories or memoirs. | 26:05 | |
| We originally wanted people to write their stories | 26:08 | |
| about their lesbian feminist activism | 26:11 | |
| in the south in that period. Can't get 'em to do that, | 26:14 | |
| so we're interviewing people. | 26:16 | |
| And mostly we're not trying to interview people | 26:18 | |
| who've published things about it | 26:19 | |
| because it's a recovery project, | 26:22 | |
| but I was originally only gonna interview Mandy and Suzanne, | 26:25 | |
| and they all said, oh no, you gotta get the story from. | 26:30 | |
| So we've done all six of you now. | 26:32 | |
| So this is just a chapter, | 26:35 | |
| and we really have a big, book-length project here. | 26:38 | |
| It's over 100,000 words. | 26:43 | |
| So I'm not sure exactly what | 26:45 | |
| Sinister Wisdom is gonna tell us | 26:47 | |
| about how much and in what form they wanna publish it. | 26:49 | |
| Like the Landikes chapter, we might just publish that | 26:53 | |
| with May's or something. | 26:57 | |
| They've offered to publish that separately. | 26:59 | |
| But we won't know until the summer. | 27:03 | |
| But I wanna be able to send them somewhat edited versions | 27:05 | |
| of what we have. | 27:10 | |
| Now I'm gonna work on this immediately, | 27:12 | |
| as soon as I hang up, I'm gonna start work. | 27:14 | |
| - | I just sent you the file, so. | 27:16 |
| - | Excellent, okay. | 27:19 |
| - | Okay. | |
| - | Well I will send you what I have this afternoon. | 27:20 |
| And we'll just stay in touch over email. | 27:23 | |
| - | Okay, thanks a lot. | 27:27 |
| - | Okay thank you. | 27:28 |
| - | Uh huh, bye-bye. | 27:28 |
| - | Bye bye. |
Item Info
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