Reeder, Gail - interviewed by Rose Norman
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- | Okay, this is Rose Norman, I'm with Gail Reader. | 0:02 |
We're at her house in Decatur, Georgia. | 0:05 | |
We're going through papers that she has from, | 0:08 | |
uh, | 0:12 | |
work she did, political activism that she did | 0:14 | |
that we're collecting for the | 0:18 | |
Southern Lesbian Feminine Activist Herstory Project. | 0:21 | |
One thing I'm wanting, I've taken a lot of notes already | 0:32 | |
because she has a very long career in activism | 0:36 | |
that began with, I guess with SDS in Virginia. | 0:41 | |
She was a, University of Virginia, | 0:47 | |
and then she was with the anti-war paper | 0:51 | |
Quicksilver Times in Washington D.C. | 0:55 | |
And eventually wound up in Atlanta in 1977 | 1:00 | |
where she worked in a lot of theater. | 1:08 | |
So two main things we want to talk about on tape are | 1:11 | |
have the Quicksilver Times and perhaps SDS | 1:15 | |
effected what became lesbian activism, | 1:19 | |
and also that's the Quicksilver Times' piece | 1:23 | |
and then how that formed the theater work you did | 1:26 | |
in Atlanta and what was lesbian feminist about that? | 1:30 | |
So start talking. | 1:35 | |
(laughing) | 1:37 | |
Start with SDS and Quicksilver Times | 1:37 | |
and how that shaped what became lesbian feminist activism. | 1:40 | |
- | Well when I got involved with the SDS | 1:44 |
I was at the University of Virginia | 1:47 | |
before it became co-educational. | 1:49 | |
Because they felt that women would be | 1:52 | |
a bad influence and that the school | 1:54 | |
would downhill if women were allowed in. | 1:56 | |
And SDS for, all for their being anti-racist | 2:00 | |
and anti-war were not particularly interested | 2:06 | |
in the fate of women as more than girlfriends, | 2:09 | |
dishwashers, typists, and, uh, caregivers. | 2:13 | |
So there was, I was aware that at that time | 2:23 | |
that bras were being burned as well as American flags. | 2:26 | |
- | So you graduated from Virginia in sixty-- | 2:31 |
- | '68 | 2:35 |
- | Okay | |
That was the year of the America, | 2:38 | |
that was the bra burning year. | 2:40 | |
- | Yeah, yeah it was a good year for burnings. | 2:43 |
And do I remember in the demonstration we were, | 2:46 | |
we had a baby doll that we set on fire | 2:50 | |
well for a Napalm Simulation. | 2:54 | |
And I thought it was interesting | 2:58 | |
that the burning was being used | 3:01 | |
as a political image for more than one thing. | 3:03 | |
But it wasn't until I got out of college | 3:09 | |
and had my first year of teaching high school | 3:13 | |
and went into to writing manuals for the Navy | 3:18 | |
that I became more and more politicized | 3:22 | |
as I realized the attitude of the government | 3:24 | |
towards the people who fought for it | 3:27 | |
and paid taxes that, uh, | 3:31 | |
in particular in one of the books that was a, | 3:37 | |
a thing that said, you know if you have a | 3:42 | |
nuclear war and people are bombed and people are hurt, | 3:44 | |
don't give anyone any pain killer | 3:48 | |
for the first four hours because most of them | 3:50 | |
are probably going to die anyway | 3:52 | |
and you're wasting your painkiller, | 3:54 | |
so basically let them be in agony and uh, | 3:56 | |
because they're expendable. | 4:01 | |
The attitude of the government towards life | 4:03 | |
affected me a lot, and the attitude | 4:07 | |
of the government as far as poverty went | 4:10 | |
and education in the black community, | 4:14 | |
Atlanta, I mean D.C. was primarily a black, | 4:17 | |
a black environment, but it didn't have any, | 4:24 | |
the blacks didn't have any power within the city. | 4:27 | |
And so there was a lot of unrest there. | 4:32 | |
Plus the fact that everybody was always marching | 4:34 | |
on Washington, so, you know, there was | 4:38 | |
Martin Luther King coming there for | 4:40 | |
the March on Washington and I don't remember | 4:42 | |
what year that was, do you? | 4:44 | |
- | I don't. | 4:46 |
I don't have any dates before '68 | 4:50 | |
which is the beginning of Women's Lip. | 4:52 | |
- | The beginning of Women's Lip. | 4:55 |
So, so I was just real conscious | 4:57 | |
of all kinds of injustices and, uh, | 5:00 | |
I worked in Congress in the Special Comity on Aging | 5:04 | |
and I saw how old people were treated | 5:08 | |
in this country because, you know, | 5:11 | |
we were getting letters from people | 5:13 | |
who were being abused in senior care facilities. | 5:15 | |
Horrible things that I had a hard time believing | 5:22 | |
that our government would let these things happen | 5:25 | |
to their citizens and I began working for | 5:29 | |
an underground newspaper in the evenings part time | 5:35 | |
because I could type, my typing was always a big thing, | 5:40 | |
for the Quicksilver Times. | 5:43 | |
I didn't have any power there, | 5:47 | |
I didn't have much input because | 5:49 | |
evidently the issues that I raised | 5:54 | |
were not the ones the paper was interested in, | 5:57 | |
so basically I could come to the meetings | 6:00 | |
but I wasn't allowed to talk. | 6:02 | |
And the paper was, the powers that be in the paper, | 6:05 | |
Terry Becker and his wife, were overthrown | 6:08 | |
by the trash collectors who were having a strike | 6:13 | |
and ended up being supported by the paper | 6:19 | |
being at the paper and then throwing everybody | 6:21 | |
out of the paper and taking over the paper. | 6:25 | |
And at that point, I tried to participate with them | 6:29 | |
because I was sort of anti-Terry Becker too, | 6:32 | |
but when I ended up going to | 6:37 | |
the consciousness raising groups that they were having, | 6:39 | |
they consisted of a black man sitting in chair | 6:42 | |
and looking like the Black Panther on his thrown | 6:46 | |
with women kneeling at his feet | 6:49 | |
being treated as a very second-class citizen | 6:54 | |
by these people who were supposedly, politically conscious. | 6:57 | |
The paper folded because, and I believe his name was | 7:02 | |
Bob Williams, the guy that took over the paper | 7:07 | |
had no, had no one to write, no one to type, | 7:10 | |
had no one to put the paper out, | 7:13 | |
so the paper dissolved and was later | 7:15 | |
reincorporated by Terry in another building. | 7:19 | |
And I eventually came to work for them | 7:23 | |
and became part of the collective. | 7:25 | |
And one of the things that the collective | 7:27 | |
prided themselves on was that they were | 7:30 | |
putting women in a new image. | 7:34 | |
They felt it was important that the paper | 7:38 | |
was seen as having women in more important | 7:40 | |
positions than just being typists. | 7:45 | |
So they put the women, me, in a lot of | 7:49 | |
forward positions so that we would be seen | 7:55 | |
as representing the paper and that included | 7:58 | |
my learning how to do press photography, | 8:01 | |
and I became a writer, and, uh, | 8:03 | |
I did the truck maintenance so I learned | 8:08 | |
how to take care of vehicles and machines. | 8:10 | |
They sent the women around to distribute | 8:16 | |
the paper to the shops so that the women | 8:18 | |
were seen as a powerful force within the paper. | 8:20 | |
At the same time, I was attending studies | 8:24 | |
at the institute for policy, Institute for Policy Studies, | 8:28 | |
with Rita Mae Brown and a lot, | 8:36 | |
and women from the furies who had a lot of consciousness | 8:39 | |
and their feeling was that fighting against the war | 8:43 | |
was really not the most important thing | 8:46 | |
for women to be doing, that women should be | 8:49 | |
fighting for themselves because | 8:51 | |
uh | 8:54 | |
it was more important. | 8:57 | |
And I had a hard time with that | 8:59 | |
because people were being killed in Vietnam, | 9:01 | |
American soldiers were being sent over there, | 9:05 | |
there was a lot of injustice and | 9:08 | |
the injustice to the women at the time seemed less | 9:10 | |
to me than the injustice to the people of South America, | 9:13 | |
what was going on in Cuba, you know, | 9:21 | |
the killing of Chavez Wavara, Angela Davis, | 9:23 | |
all of that seemed more important than my own liberation. | 9:28 | |
But as time went on, | 9:36 | |
my liberation rose through the liberation of others. | 9:40 | |
It was like you can't have every, | 9:50 | |
as long as one person is not free, no one is free. | 9:53 | |
And women were not really free during that time period. | 9:57 | |
Not only was there so much inequality and | 10:01 | |
well the college I went to, | 10:05 | |
or inequality in the job structures, | 10:07 | |
the jobs that were available to women, | 10:10 | |
the way women were perceived in the media, | 10:13 | |
and as I became more politically conscious | 10:18 | |
I began to recognize this more and more. | 10:21 | |
The paper was a collective and there was a | 10:26 | |
mad cult | 10:31 | |
part of it where | 10:35 | |
because we believe that everybody else | 10:37 | |
was so politically incorrect, | 10:39 | |
we reached a point where we couldn't talk to anyone else | 10:41 | |
because they had nothing to say to us. | 10:44 | |
They couldn't even communicate with us | 10:47 | |
because we were speaking different languages, | 10:49 | |
I became more and more withdrawn from society | 10:51 | |
as a whole and more and more bound by criticism, | 10:55 | |
self-criticism and the fear of being cast out | 11:01 | |
for political incorrectness. | 11:05 | |
But the paper was very hard on us | 11:09 | |
and I eventually, from exhaustion, sadness, | 11:11 | |
madness, and no other kind of life, | 11:16 | |
had to leave the paper on a vacation | 11:19 | |
and drove my motorcycle to California | 11:23 | |
and got out in the world again | 11:27 | |
which was a very healthy thing to do. | 11:28 | |
I don't think that anyone ever really explored | 11:31 | |
completely how the collectives were | 11:35 | |
a sort of cult with their own belief system | 11:39 | |
to the exclusion of everyone else. | 11:45 | |
The paper eventually folded because we didn't have | 11:51 | |
any money, | 11:54 | |
Nixon had been | 11:57 | |
cast out, | 11:59 | |
the war was winding down, | 12:01 | |
and we just, we just went under, we folded | 12:07 | |
and I went back to North Carolina | 12:11 | |
and I was still living a fairly alternative lifestyle | 12:16 | |
but working as a Kelly Girl, not a Kelly Women mind you, | 12:24 | |
but a Kelly Girl, earning my living | 12:28 | |
with my typing doing office management | 12:30 | |
slogging through and I got hit by a car | 12:34 | |
on my motorcycle and was plunged back into society | 12:38 | |
in the form of living with my parents | 12:43 | |
for six months while I was in a cast. | 12:45 | |
I was only supposed to be in a cast for three months, | 12:49 | |
I thought it was gonna be a very short sentence, | 12:52 | |
but after six months I did move out. | 12:57 | |
Now during that time period, | 13:00 | |
I had gone up to D.C. to visit some friends | 13:04 | |
and while I was gone the FBI came to my house | 13:07 | |
looking for me and when I returned from D.C. | 13:10 | |
my dad or my mom called the FBI and told them | 13:15 | |
I was home and they showed up at the door | 13:19 | |
looking for my friends from the Quicksilver Times. | 13:24 | |
Looking for the anti-war groups and | 13:28 | |
frankly, | 13:32 | |
I should be proud to admit it or ashamed to admit it, but, | 13:36 | |
that we were social terrorists. | 13:40 | |
We were promoting | 13:43 | |
dissolving society with anarchy | 13:48 | |
from within in order for the government | 13:51 | |
to look bad and for the people to rise up. | 13:55 | |
It's like if you take away all the people's services | 13:59 | |
then the people will get mad and then they | 14:01 | |
will take control and have their own government. | 14:04 | |
So we were terrorists, we believed in guns, | 14:07 | |
we had secret rooms in the house | 14:12 | |
where we hid things and | 14:16 | |
so the FBI came looking for us. | 14:23 | |
(laughing) | 14:26 | |
It was interesting then when I was at Quicksilver. | 14:29 | |
We printed a great many, I mean we printed | 14:33 | |
bombing manuals, we printed army bombing manuals | 14:38 | |
of how to make simple bombs to encourage | 14:41 | |
people to fight the government | 14:45 | |
by doing what was being done in the townhouse in New York | 14:48 | |
where the weather people blew themselves up. | 14:52 | |
We were in favor of that. | 14:55 | |
We thought it was a good idea just like they did. | 15:00 | |
So the FBI, it was such a scene, | 15:06 | |
the FBI comes to my house, there I am in a wheelchair | 15:09 | |
because my leg is broken and my mother is | 15:13 | |
- | Your leg is very, very badly broken. | 15:18 |
- | Yes my leg is crushed. | 15:19 |
It took almost four years for it to grow back together. | 15:22 | |
And I had bone graphs and everything | 15:27 | |
it was very hard times. | 15:29 | |
But my mother comes storming through the kitchen | 15:31 | |
and the FBI is there looking just like, | 15:34 | |
you know Sergeant Friday from Dragnet | 15:37 | |
in the black suite and the hat, | 15:40 | |
and my mother says, "She's done with those people! | 15:44 | |
She's done with them! | 15:49 | |
(laughing) | 15:50 | |
Leave her alone, they're gone from her life!" | 15:53 | |
So I couldn't tell the FBI where nay of those people were | 15:57 | |
cause they were gone from my life. | 16:00 | |
But as the FBI is leaving the guy said to me, | 16:02 | |
he said, "I hope we didn't make too much trouble | 16:05 | |
and upset your mother too much." | 16:10 | |
(laughing) | 16:12 | |
But, um, the FBI was very interested in Quicksilver Times | 16:16 | |
because not only did we do all these, | 16:20 | |
encourage all these terroristic acts | 16:23 | |
and report on anti-government activities around the world | 16:26 | |
and report things like how we were supporting governments | 16:30 | |
in South America that were torturing their citizens | 16:34 | |
and killing them and then holding them in jail | 16:39 | |
without, without any kind of trial, | 16:41 | |
taking away the rights of anyone who was a descender. | 16:45 | |
There were people that passed through our house | 16:55 | |
that the government was looking for. | 16:57 | |
And they eventually arranged for us | 16:59 | |
to be given a typewriter that had a listening device, | 17:02 | |
they bugged the typewriter and gave it to us | 17:06 | |
like a Trojan Horse so that we would, | 17:09 | |
they could keep track of us, | 17:13 | |
they could find out what we were doing. | 17:14 | |
So there the FBI was in North Carolina | 17:17 | |
looking for me in my mama's house in North Hills, Raleigh. | 17:20 | |
- | Pause a minute? | 17:28 |
I think I'm gonna stop it there | 17:34 | |
and then start a new one cause | 17:35 | |
it's actually easier | 17:37 | |
- | That's Quicksilver | |
- | Yeah, it's one thing that occurred to me | 17:39 |
as you were talking, the fact that you got this | 17:40 | |
military family, your father's retired as a colonial. | 17:44 | |
How does that, I mean, how do you? | 17:48 | |
How did you come out of that? | 17:53 | |
- | Because when I saw what the government was doing | 17:57 |
I almost couldn't believe it was true | 18:00 | |
because I was so pro-government and | 18:03 | |
so pro-United Sates from being... | 18:06 | |
- | So it really was the Quicksilver Times | 18:11 |
experience, not SDS? | 18:14 | |
- | Well it was SDS, but SDS didn't plunge me totally into it. | 18:15 |
I began to believe, and I was, you know, anti-draft | 18:23 | |
and the whole racism, how | 18:29 | |
how racist the government was | 18:35 | |
and how badly they had treated black people | 18:37 | |
and then that they hadn't even given women the vote, | 18:40 | |
the attitude towards women, | 18:42 | |
all of that sort of came out of SDS, | 18:44 | |
but it wasn't til I was in Quicksilver that | 18:47 | |
I really committed to the lifestyle in a way. | 18:51 | |
And Quicksilver let a, let the Washington Post | 19:00 | |
do a story on us | 19:03 | |
which was reprinted in the Smith, | 19:06 | |
in the Raleigh News and Observer | 19:10 | |
and my parents saw it and there we were | 19:12 | |
sitting around this big, our dining room table | 19:16 | |
was a national liberation | 19:19 | |
(soft mumbling) | 19:22 | |
and all that flag | 19:25 | |
and they knew I was not in the picture | 19:33 | |
but they knew that I was involved | 19:34 | |
with the Quicksilver Times so they found out | 19:37 | |
what the Quicksilver Times was | 19:38 | |
and that was one of the most, | 19:40 | |
I mean I could've been a murderer | 19:44 | |
and been more accepted into my family | 19:47 | |
than that I was working against | 19:49 | |
the US government and the military. | 19:52 | |
It was very hard, it was very, | 19:56 | |
it was the worst thing I could have done | 20:00 | |
in my, you know, in my opinion. | 20:05 | |
- | But you had those things sort of compartmentalized | 20:11 |
until they came out in the paper. | 20:14 | |
- | Right, they didn't know what I was doing | 20:16 |
they were in Raleigh, I was in Washington D.C. | 20:18 | |
You know, and I was working in Congress. | 20:25 | |
- | Your day job. | 20:29 |
- | My day job, right. | 20:30 |
- | While you were working at Quicksilver Times | 20:32 |
you were working on, we gotta get that on the tape. | 20:33 | |
- | Well, I mean... | 20:37 |
- | Go ahead and tell | 20:39 |
- | I was working | |
I was writing those technical manuals | 20:42 | |
while I was working at Quicksilver Times. | 20:44 | |
- | Okay so here's what I want you to address here, | 20:46 |
the incongruity of having been raised in a military family | 20:51 | |
and being very patriotic and then being politicized | 20:55 | |
and the whole time you were working for it | 21:04 | |
you're doing basically government work. | 21:06 | |
- | Right. | 21:10 |
- | How could that be? | 21:11 |
I mean that's incongruous to me, | 21:13 | |
so see what you can think of. | 21:14 | |
- | Well the government, | 21:16 |
my family was a military, are we doing this? | 21:20 | |
(tapping) | 21:24 | |
- | It's going | 21:28 |
- | Okay, so I grew up in a military family | 21:29 |
from the time I was six til I was | 21:33 | |
going away to college | 21:38 | |
my dad was in the army, my parents were both in the army, | 21:40 | |
they met in the army, they got married in military uniforms, | 21:44 | |
I went to military schools, I was very gung-ho. | 21:49 | |
When I was a junior in high school | 21:54 | |
I won a speaking contest about the responsibilities | 21:59 | |
of the United Nations towards world peace | 22:03 | |
and I saw our government as peacekeepers | 22:06 | |
and saviors for the world, | 22:10 | |
and I believed in the flag and the American justice, | 22:15 | |
and when I became aware of the fact that we weren't nearly | 22:19 | |
as just as we perceived ourselves to be, | 22:24 | |
it was quite a political tumble | 22:29 | |
and I think that's one of the reasons why writing | 22:31 | |
technical manuals for the Navy | 22:34 | |
and being exposed to the attitude of the Navy | 22:36 | |
towards the people who are soldiers or citizens | 22:39 | |
it was like if there is a nuclear war | 22:45 | |
then it's acceptable that you're gonna lose | 22:48 | |
30% of the people and oh well here's what you do | 22:50 | |
with the rest of them, but there was no mourning | 22:52 | |
for those 30% that would be lost | 22:55 | |
and in Vietnam we were losing not only soldiers, | 22:59 | |
but we were killing innocent women and children | 23:04 | |
and I don't think I really understood about big oil | 23:10 | |
and big business at the time, | 23:13 | |
but the military became my focus and I went, | 23:16 | |
and then I worked in Congress and | 23:19 | |
Congress didn't, the part of Congress | 23:26 | |
that I worked in didn't talk about the war. | 23:28 | |
I was dealing with the Special Comity on Aging, | 23:31 | |
so that was sort of compartmentalized | 23:34 | |
while I was then working at night | 23:38 | |
for the Quicksilver Times and becoming | 23:39 | |
more and more aware of what our government was doing | 23:41 | |
and the things that were coming out in Quicksilver | 23:45 | |
were so terrible, I almost didn't believe them. | 23:49 | |
I almost thought that we were making them up. | 23:52 | |
That it was not possible that we would support | 23:55 | |
a government that would take a cattle prod | 23:58 | |
to a man hanging from the ceiling | 24:00 | |
and poke his genitals with it and burn him | 24:02 | |
and I just couldn't believe that America would do that. | 24:05 | |
So I did become strangely politicized | 24:13 | |
and the Quicksilver Times published things | 24:22 | |
like the CIA airlifting cocaine and heroin out of Cambodia, | 24:26 | |
I don't know that I really believe that | 24:33 | |
and then Air America and everything came out | 24:35 | |
and oh yeah all that stuff was true. | 24:37 | |
Wiretapping it's citizens, heck we were being wiretapped. | 24:42 | |
When I finally left Quicksilver | 24:50 | |
and got re-entered into society, | 24:53 | |
I went to California and went into business | 25:00 | |
sold the company to a company in Atlanta | 25:03 | |
and came to work for them and began to get in touch | 25:07 | |
with Atlanta's counter-cultural scene. | 25:12 | |
I had already been having some lesbian experiences | 25:17 | |
at the Quicksilver Times and with friends of mine | 25:20 | |
and when, | 25:25 | |
when I was in Atlanta I came out as a lesbian basically, | 25:31 | |
but not to my parents, in fact I didn't come out | 25:35 | |
to my parents until after my mother died | 25:37 | |
and then I later came out to my dad | 25:41 | |
and he was, he was mostly okay with it I guess. | 25:43 | |
He certainly didn't talk about it very much, | 25:46 | |
but I came here and I started doing theater. | 25:50 | |
One of the reasons that Atlanta appealed to me | 25:54 | |
was that when I'd been at Quicksilver I had been | 25:56 | |
a cultural reporter, I did the rock and roll scene, | 26:00 | |
I reviewed plays and movies and albums | 26:05 | |
and one of the things I wrote was an article | 26:08 | |
about this group called Earth Onion | 26:12 | |
who were women that did anti-war plays in the parks | 26:16 | |
for demonstrations and things like that. | 26:23 | |
And I just thought that this was the way I wanted to go, | 26:25 | |
I wanted to do political educating through theater. | 26:29 | |
I thought it was great, we're studying now | 26:33 | |
and now had all these troops that were going around China | 26:37 | |
to the villages, educating the children and the families | 26:41 | |
about communism and the beauty of a government | 26:49 | |
really run by the people. | 26:53 | |
And so I wanted to do that. | 26:57 | |
And I heard about this theater | 27:01 | |
called Red Dyke Theater in Atlanta and I was like | 27:04 | |
oh I'd like to go to Atlanta and be in Red Dyke Theater, | 27:07 | |
but unfortunately by the time I got to Atlanta, | 27:12 | |
Red Dyke was pretty much going away. | 27:14 | |
And I started seeing a group called The Sisters of No Mercy. | 27:19 | |
Now The Sister of No Mercy were not really lesbians, | 27:25 | |
they were, in the end about nine women | 27:29 | |
but they were more anti-classism, anti-racism, | 27:34 | |
they were singing labor songs, they were interested in | 27:41 | |
uh | 27:45 | |
I don't know, ain't I a women? | 27:51 | |
And they were feminists and Maria Dolan and I | 27:55 | |
were the two dykes in the group | 28:00 | |
and because we were the writers, | 28:02 | |
we were writing at that time for a publication, | 28:05 | |
it was a gay publication which was both lesbian and, | 28:08 | |
when I say gay I think of men, but everybody's gay now, | 28:17 | |
male and female, Maria and I were | 28:22 | |
the female contributors to Pulse magazine. | 28:25 | |
And then we were writing the skits for | 28:28 | |
The Sisters of No Mercy and we ended up | 28:31 | |
doing a piece that was pieced together over time | 28:33 | |
called The Amazon Broadcasting System | 28:38 | |
and it had a fair amount of lesbian content to it. | 28:41 | |
And later, the group turned around | 28:48 | |
and decided they really didn't want to be doing | 28:53 | |
lesbian stuff because they weren't lesbians | 28:55 | |
and I left the group and ended up going back into | 28:58 | |
well actually, after The Sisters of No Mercy | 29:10 | |
I was in the first Southern Women's Music Festival | 29:14 | |
and that ended badly, and The Sister of No Mercy | 29:18 | |
ended badly, and I decided that | 29:21 | |
I would get away from it all, make some money, | 29:23 | |
and to hell with all of them and I went off | 29:27 | |
to the farm that had been owned by | 29:29 | |
the people from the Quicksilver Times. | 29:32 | |
The farm was a marijuana farm and I had, over the years, | 29:36 | |
gone, worked harvest every year | 29:43 | |
and got some pot to smoke and make a little money | 29:45 | |
and help out and the husband and wife | 29:49 | |
who ran it had broken up and | 29:53 | |
they didn't have anyone to run it | 29:59 | |
so I decided I would go and do that. | 30:01 | |
It seemed like a good idea at the time, | 30:06 | |
I want a computer, | 30:08 | |
and I wanted a trip to Egypt, | 30:13 | |
and I wanted to be able to buy | 30:17 | |
the Highland House for Wayward Girls, | 30:19 | |
and it looked like a good way to earn some money | 30:21 | |
and, you know, I had been going to the farm | 30:24 | |
for nine years or something and nothing had ever happened | 30:26 | |
so it seemed like, it didn't seem like such a stupid thing, | 30:29 | |
but it was pretty stupid cause the farm got busted and | 30:35 | |
I ended up having a choice of running away forever | 30:42 | |
and running away with these political people | 30:45 | |
that I'd been involved with or facing, | 30:47 | |
hoping that I could convince them that I really wasn't, | 30:54 | |
here I was a crippled woman and I was not farming, | 30:57 | |
I was just living in the farmhouse | 31:03 | |
and I didn't know what was going on back there, | 31:04 | |
but that was a good plan, but that didn't work out | 31:08 | |
too well either. | 31:11 | |
But I turned myself in because I did not want to | 31:13 | |
run away forever and if I, see I wasn't at the farm | 31:16 | |
when it got busted, so I sort of had a choice | 31:21 | |
and for two or three weeks I hid out | 31:24 | |
in Atlanta and got money together | 31:27 | |
and looked over my shoulder the whole time | 31:29 | |
and I just decided I really didn't want to live like that. | 31:33 | |
So prison was a very alienating thing for me. | 31:39 | |
Particularly because when you get busted | 31:44 | |
and your community is so afraid of getting busted | 31:46 | |
that they all run away too, so women that had been | 31:48 | |
supportive and seemed to care what was happening to me, | 31:53 | |
once I was in prison, turned their back on me | 31:55 | |
and the only way I even got out of prison | 31:59 | |
because I couldn't even get anyone | 32:04 | |
to say that they would give me a job. | 32:05 | |
I had to set up my own business and hire myself | 32:08 | |
so that I could say I had a job | 32:12 | |
so I could get probation and I had five years of probation. | 32:15 | |
And after I got out of prison, | 32:21 | |
Win and several other people were doing another videotape | 32:22 | |
about lesbian festivals, | 32:27 | |
a lesbian festival, | 32:32 | |
and so since I already had all the video experience | 32:35 | |
from The Sisters of No Mercy, | 32:39 | |
doing the Amazon Broadcasting System, | 32:41 | |
I started doing camera work and they had two writers | 32:44 | |
that were writing this | 32:48 | |
uh | 32:50 | |
lesbian music festival soap opera basically, | 32:51 | |
it was called Oh Goddess. | 32:58 | |
It had like five issues, they had two writers. | 33:01 | |
And the two writers each created different characters, | 33:05 | |
but the writers didn't like each other | 33:09 | |
so they would not let any of the characters | 33:11 | |
between the two groups interact. | 33:13 | |
Like there was one group of lesbians | 33:17 | |
and another group of lesbians, | 33:19 | |
they're all at the same camp, | 33:20 | |
and they can't talk to each other | 33:22 | |
because the writers won't let them talk to each other, | 33:25 | |
if that makes any sense. | 33:29 | |
So | 33:32 | |
- | This is the play Oh Goddess? | |
- | Oh Goddess, this is the video Oh Goddess. | 33:34 |
Which was very lesbian and it had a lot | 33:38 | |
of different people in it, Pam Martin was in it, | 33:41 | |
I don't know if you knew Pam. | 33:44 | |
So I ended up becoming the writer | 33:47 | |
and I combined the two storylines | 33:51 | |
and brought it together and finished it up | 33:53 | |
because both the writers had left. | 33:55 | |
So there I met Dev Calabria and Dev Calabria was doing | 33:58 | |
work with SAME, the Southeastern Arts and Media | 34:05 | |
whatever that is, fill that in. | 34:12 | |
And we started practicing improve comedy | 34:15 | |
and | 34:21 | |
and we were gonna go out under the off-species of SAME | 34:23 | |
as an improve comedy troupe. | 34:26 | |
But Rebecca Ransom who was the head of SAME | 34:28 | |
and writing wonderful plays and producing them | 34:32 | |
refused to let us go out under the banner of SAME | 34:37 | |
because we could not tell her what our content | 34:41 | |
was going to be since it was going to be improve. | 34:43 | |
We couldn't tell her that we were going to go out | 34:46 | |
and this is what we were gonna say | 34:48 | |
because we had no idea what we were gonna say. | 34:50 | |
So we broke away from SAME without ever really being | 34:53 | |
from them, we all bought SAME t-shirts, | 35:00 | |
we were gonna appear in SAME t-shirts | 35:03 | |
and I think we never wore those t-shirts. | 35:05 | |
And Deb went on to form Funny That Way | 35:09 | |
which was a gay men's and women's political theater group | 35:14 | |
although, it wasn't particularly politically correct. | 35:21 | |
It was more gay and lesbian than | 35:25 | |
political and feminist, if that makes any sense. | 35:31 | |
But we were still doing some very cutting-edge | 35:36 | |
kind of stuff and we performed all around. | 35:39 | |
We performed at Rhythm Fest, we performed at | 35:47 | |
the National Lesbian Conference, | 35:50 | |
we performed in the bars, we performed in the parks. | 35:53 | |
Of all the groups that I've participated in | 36:00 | |
I probably did more theater with Funny That Way | 36:03 | |
than The Sisters of No Mercy which was a fairly | 36:08 | |
small scale, Funny That Way went into full scale production. | 36:13 | |
And Funny That Way, Deb went to get her graduate work | 36:20 | |
at Georgia State, | 36:24 | |
and we did a gay play | 36:28 | |
called Outcasts of the Seven Seas | 36:33 | |
in which the | 36:36 | |
pirate queen and the gay pirate ship | 36:41 | |
fight and | 36:45 | |
and it was jolly good time, | 36:49 | |
it was the biggest production we ever did. | 36:51 | |
It had large orchestration, she began writing it | 36:54 | |
when she was at Georgia State and then we performed it | 36:57 | |
full scale and | 37:01 | |
I think eventually Funny That Way's | 37:06 | |
papers will be given to Georgia State | 37:08 | |
because of Deb's anchor there. | 37:11 | |
Already, Georgia State has excepted all of Funny That Way, | 37:13 | |
oh not Funny That Way, The Sisters of No Mercy's papers | 37:18 | |
and writings and photographs | 37:22 | |
and videos and things like that. | 37:24 | |
Meanwhile, | 37:31 | |
when I was in The Sister of No Mercy, | 37:35 | |
I had a song that we had written at Quicksilver Times | 37:41 | |
called Mamas Gone to Heaven to Sleep With Jesus | 37:45 | |
and I wanted to sing that song in one of our shows | 37:50 | |
so I created Tammy Whynot to sing | 37:53 | |
Mamas Gone to Heaven to Sleep with Jesus | 37:57 | |
and Tammy Whynot was, well she was what they call | 38:00 | |
a Southern Queer honey and that's a homosexual. | 38:05 | |
And Tammy appeared at many Alpha-benefits | 38:13 | |
and when I left The Sisters of No Mercy | 38:17 | |
they tried to take the character away from me, | 38:20 | |
but I kept her and she continued to perform. | 38:23 | |
She performed at the first Southern Women Music Festival, | 38:27 | |
she performed at the National Lesbian Conference | 38:31 | |
on the Evening Stage, she had blonde hair like Dolly Parton | 38:34 | |
and an attitude like Maywest and Sheena Queen of the Jungle. | 38:40 | |
She was quite a character and I still do her sometimes. | 38:47 | |
So that became my own little private theater project. | 38:50 | |
The only bad thing about it was that | 38:56 | |
I would write the material before whatever show I was doing, | 39:00 | |
I would go out and perform that material | 39:05 | |
never having put it in front of an audience before | 39:07 | |
and so | 39:11 | |
there ended up being a terrible thing | 39:17 | |
that came down at one of the Alpha-benefits | 39:18 | |
where Tammy's material was trashed | 39:20 | |
by a separatist feminist radical lesbian from California | 39:24 | |
who felt that I didn't have any right to say | 39:30 | |
prison made you fat and the inmates couldn't read. | 39:34 | |
So for a long time, there was this | 39:41 | |
angry dialog between | 39:44 | |
Alpha and myself | 39:48 | |
about, about the content of Tammy's performance. | 39:52 | |
All this time I had been going to Women Rights | 39:58 | |
and bringing Tammy, I would do Tammy at Women Rights | 40:00 | |
and I tried to be as politically correct as possible | 40:10 | |
and to not tell any jokes that were hurtful to | 40:13 | |
disabled people, although because I had been in a wheelchair | 40:20 | |
for so long, honey I was in a wheelchair for so long | 40:23 | |
I'm lucky to be a standup comic at all. | 40:28 | |
(laughing) | 40:31 | |
But I was not a cruel humorist. | 40:34 | |
And I even performed at The Punchline | 40:38 | |
as a lesbian comic and was offered | 40:41 | |
the opportunity to go on the road, | 40:44 | |
but at that time, I didn't think that | 40:48 | |
that was something that I would want to do. | 40:49 | |
Not at that time anyway, now I'm thinking about | 40:53 | |
maybe traveling around performing at old folks' homes. | 40:55 | |
Old folks could probably use a laugh | 40:59 | |
more than most of us. | 41:01 | |
I was writing material for it the other day | 41:06 | |
I went to Linda's birthday party | 41:10 | |
and I came back and I said yeah | 41:12 | |
I bought a three-way light bulb | 41:15 | |
and that's the only three-way I'll probably ever see again. | 41:17 | |
(laughing) | 41:21 | |
So there may be a octogenaric comic in my future. | 41:23 | |
Funny That Way is having a reunion in January | 41:29 | |
so we'll be doing the best of, The Best of Funny That Way. | 41:33 | |
I will appear again as Vagina Wolf. | 41:41 | |
I'm Vagina Wolf and I'm a big bad dyke, | 41:44 | |
never ate a lady that I didn't like. | 41:46 | |
- | Oh God | 41:49 |
(laughing) | ||
So I'll be doing that again. | 41:52 | |
And Funny That Way traveled | 41:56 | |
like we were invited to colleges, | 41:58 | |
we performed at colleges and we were | 42:02 | |
like the gay, cultural input that a college | 42:05 | |
might spend it's money on for a year. | 42:10 | |
They'd have Funny That Way come and perform. | 42:14 | |
- | We should interview Funny That Way. | 42:21 |
- | Yeah you should, especially Deb. | 42:25 |
- | That would be a great group interview. | 42:27 |
- | That would be a great group interview. | 42:30 |
- | I need to put that down somewhere. | 42:33 |
See if you can set that up cause I'm coming. | 42:34 | |
- | Okay, okay, she said it was gonna happen in January. | 42:36 |
Deb's living in Florida now and she comes back here | 42:40 | |
and I have videotapes of all of our performances. | 42:44 | |
Of all of the plays that we did. | 42:48 | |
The sound quality's not great, | 42:52 | |
but you can understand them, it's just not great, | 42:54 | |
nothing you'd want to play on PBS or anything. | 42:56 | |
It wasn't as slick as the Amazon Broadcasting System | 43:01 | |
which we did for The Sisters of No Mercy. | 43:04 | |
And sprinkled in with doing theater and comedy, | 43:08 | |
was my involvement with Southern Voice as a writer. | 43:16 | |
I continued after Pulse magazine closed | 43:19 | |
to write for Southern Voice, | 43:23 | |
I did the calendar and I did cultural events | 43:24 | |
and wrote about the Women's Music Festivals | 43:28 | |
and got involved with Robin Tyler and appeared there, | 43:33 | |
was coordinator for the Southern Women's Music Festival | 43:37 | |
with disastrous results. | 43:42 | |
That music festival was very, to have come to the south, | 43:46 | |
it was very anti-southern. | 43:50 | |
It really looked on the southern women | 43:56 | |
as a bunch of people who were too stupid | 43:57 | |
to put it on for themselves. | 43:59 | |
It associated the southern drawl with a lack of intelligence | 44:01 | |
which is often an attitude that people have I think. | 44:07 | |
And my, my favorite encapsulated moment | 44:12 | |
for the Southern Women's Music Festival | 44:18 | |
that was a plain display of the problems | 44:20 | |
that existed within that group coming down here | 44:27 | |
was, we'd been getting ready for the festival all week | 44:29 | |
and we were so excited, it was opening day, | 44:33 | |
it was beautiful day, I was in the guard house | 44:36 | |
at the beginning of the land where the cars came | 44:38 | |
and stopped and registered and out on the porch | 44:44 | |
in front of the office were two women | 44:50 | |
with a ban- no not a banjo-they had a guitar | 44:55 | |
and a fiddle and they were tapping | 44:57 | |
on the porch and they were playing music | 45:01 | |
and there we were it was so beautiful | 45:05 | |
and one of the New York or Canadian, or California, | 45:08 | |
whoever the women were, the conference women were inside | 45:13 | |
and I was there just thinking oh this is just so perfect | 45:17 | |
and this women said, "God, are we gonna | 45:21 | |
have to listen to this shit all day?" | 45:24 | |
And that just, just, | 45:28 | |
it was like they had no sense of the sound. | 45:33 | |
They came to me because, like, I was one of the few | 45:36 | |
southern women involved, they came to me and said, | 45:38 | |
okay, so we're doing chicken for the festival, | 45:41 | |
do you think that the southern women would prefer | 45:45 | |
lemon or butter chicken, or teriyaki chicken? | 45:48 | |
And I said, we'll they would probably like | 45:52 | |
barbecue chicken. | 45:54 | |
(laughing) | ||
And that had never occurred to them | 45:59 | |
that I guess in California they have that | 46:01 | |
lemon or butter chicken and teriyaki chicken. | 46:05 | |
A southern woman would've never been exposed to that. | 46:09 | |
- | In Europe this was, I think, 1980? | 46:13 |
- | I don't know. | 46:17 |
- | I have it. | 46:18 |
- | Yeah let's see it was the year before I turned, | 46:21 |
no-huh it was '80, it was the year before I turned 40, | 46:26 | |
so I was 39 in '46 is '85! | 46:31 | |
Maybe? | 46:37 | |
I could be wrong. | 46:39 | |
- | I'm looking. | 46:43 |
'84 | 46:46 | |
- | '84, yeah '85, '84 | 46:47 |
- | I want to, sorry something else. | 46:49 |
- | Hold on. | 46:51 |
- | It was still '84. | 46:52 |
- | Close enough. | 46:54 |
Cause it was the year before I turned, I was 39 | 46:55 | |
and Tammy performed on the Souther Women's Music stage | 47:02 | |
on Saturday night with ISIS and she sang | 47:08 | |
Tired of Fuckers, Fucking Over Me. | 47:12 | |
(laughing) | 47:14 | |
Much to the delight of the crowd, | 47:17 | |
but, and Funny That Way performed at Rhythm Fest. | 47:21 | |
Without the men, the women took over all the roles | 47:25 | |
and there were no men cause of course | 47:28 | |
they couldn't be on the land anyway. | 47:30 | |
So I was caught up-- | 47:37 | |
- | Wait, why not? | 47:38 |
- | W-H-Y dash N-O-T, Why-Not? | 47:41 |
Yes I believe how we spelled it. | 47:48 | |
- | They performed at, Funny That Way performed at | 47:53 |
the first Rhythm Fest which would've been 1990? | 47:55 | |
- | No Funny That Way performed at, yeah Rhythm Fest, | 47:57 |
I don't know if it was 1990 or not | 48:01 | |
to tell you the truth, it was after | 48:03 | |
the National Lesbian Conference so it had to be after '91. | 48:06 | |
- | So that was a convent in '91, '92 I guess. | 48:10 |
Or they probably wouldn't have been booked | 48:14 | |
until after that, so probably '92. | 48:16 | |
- | Right | 48:17 |
And I think that from my early being so impressed | 48:22 | |
with the Earth Onion to now, I still believe | 48:29 | |
that the best was to educate people | 48:33 | |
is while you're entertaining them | 48:36 | |
because it doesn't hurt so much. | 48:38 | |
You can | 48:42 | |
open people's eyes more when they're listening | 48:46 | |
than when they are closed to what you're saying. | 48:52 | |
That didn't make much sense, but | 49:00 | |
but now I just, what do I do now? | 49:07 | |
I'm not doing anything very much, | 49:11 | |
I'm working on slam poetry, that's my next frontier. | 49:12 | |
That I think slam poetry is by far | 49:17 | |
the most progressive theater that's happening. | 49:21 | |
That slam poetry has become tiny vignettes | 49:27 | |
of oppressed people because the most powerful | 49:32 | |
of the slam poets are writing about how racism | 49:37 | |
affects them, how their | 49:42 | |
trans-sexual experience | 49:47 | |
has made them stronger or hurt them or, | 49:52 | |
or writing about their lesbian lovers, | 49:56 | |
or their relationship with their children, | 50:00 | |
and the slam poetry is the most personal, intense theater | 50:04 | |
that I have seen and it's sort of like a theater | 50:13 | |
that you can perform, but you don't have to go to rehearsals | 50:16 | |
with people all the time because for two minutes | 50:19 | |
the stage and the idea and the word is yours. | 50:24 | |
And if you grasp it fully, you can turn | 50:29 | |
the audience on a dime. | 50:33 | |
And it is one of the few, | 50:41 | |
one of the few things | 50:48 | |
that I can think of offhand and it's maybe | 50:48 | |
because I haven't been exposed to it, | 50:51 | |
where women of color hold such a strong position of power. | 50:53 | |
The voices of women of color that come out | 51:01 | |
in the slam poetry events are just amazing. | 51:03 | |
Teresa Davis | 51:07 | |
is just incredible. | 51:13 | |
And she writes about everything from | 51:15 | |
the burning of books to, | 51:19 | |
you know, anti-nuclear power stuff, | 51:24 | |
just, just, I mean she's just amazing. | 51:26 | |
I'm just, ahh, I think she's one of the, | 51:29 | |
well she's one of the people on the slam team | 51:32 | |
from Atlanta, along with Malika who was a, | 51:35 | |
Malika and Karen G are also on that team | 51:43 | |
who were the coordinators for Women Rights. | 51:45 | |
But slam poetry has gone, | 51:49 | |
you know, | 51:54 | |
it was featured there on Home Box Office for a while, | 51:55 | |
so the country is being exposed to an extremely radical | 51:58 | |
train of thought on Home Box Office, | 52:03 | |
a very true and open, very black experience, | 52:08 | |
a very Asian experience, Native American, Hawaiian, | 52:13 | |
disempowered people taking their power back | 52:21 | |
on stage with slam poetry. | 52:25 | |
So I'm thinking about doing that. | 52:28 | |
They don't have any old people doing it, | 52:31 | |
somebody needs to talk about being old and powerful. | 52:33 | |
(laughing) | 52:37 | |
What else do you want me to talk about? | 52:39 | |
- | Oh let's see, let's stop it | 52:43 |
Item Info
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