Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 15, 1993 TAG: 9309150063
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Barbara Brotman
DATELINE: NEAR HART, MICH. LENGTH: Long
Reached through a gate off a dirt road amid luscious farmland north of Muskegon, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, held last month, is an annual gathering of more than 7,000 women who come from across the country and around the world to be surrounded by nothing but women and the woods.
And they are. Every blade of grass is owned by the two women who produce the festival. Every aspect of the festival is run by women. Every stage and tent is put together by women. Every drop of water is brought to a spigot by women plumbers from wells on the land witched by women.
The woods are dense with tents, as if a large tribe has settled in. You hear the sound of drumming and a distant, trilling yell.
Along the dirt road to the music stages, there are women with tattoos, women with nipple rings, women with a single long strand of thread-wrapped hair snaking down their back.
There are women in sarongs, in harem pants, in baggy jeans shorts. There are women in T-shirts reading, "I can't even think straight."
There are a lot of women wearing nothing at all.
"Because there are no men, women realize that to choose or not to choose to wear a shirt is completely about practical considerations, whether it is warm or cold out," Barbara Price, co-producer of the festival with Lisa Vogel, said in an interview.
In the absence of men, festival-goers say, women have the rare experience of walking alone in the dark without looking over their shoulders in fear.
"You're safe here," says Lorry Hansen, of St. Joseph, Mich., who was nonetheless risking serious sunburn while working shirtless as a volunteer in the parking area. "Nobody is going to bother you."
"It's like a whole world where you can just be who you want to be," says another volunteer, Amanda Bradshaw, of St. Joseph.
And if a woman is a lesbian, she is in the majority. The festival welcomes all women, but it has long been a fixture in the lesbian community, where it is treasured as the one place where, for a sustained time, being a lesbian is considered normal and even presumed.
Heterosexual women here thus get a chance to see what it feels like to possess a sexual orientation regarded as unusual.
"You get a sense of what gay people feel like all the time," remarks Cassandra Sea, of Denver, as she watches her 2-year-old daughter play in the sandbox at the festival's toddler camp.
Despite the widespread nudity, there is no leering.
"Women are so often on the receiving end of ogling and being treated as sex objects that we are very careful not to do that to each other," explains Beth Wallach, a psychotherapist from Columbus, Ohio.
For entirely nonsexual reasons, the nudity is an integral part of the festival experience. Feminism rejects the concept that there is a single ideal female form, while all others should be hidden from public view.
So a fascinating range of bodies of all colors are on view - hugely obese women, thin women who almost look like boys, nursing women, women who have had mastectomies, gray-haired old women and little girls wearing only face paintings.
"It's really freeing," says Jan Ferguson, a legal secretary from Minneapolis. The festival, she says, is the only place she can go naked and not worry that people may think she is fat. Thus, she is doing a volunteer work shift in the kitchen wearing only pink shorts, a pink visor and an apron.
Each festival-goer is asked to work two four-hour work shifts - a practice that both provides the massive amounts of labor needed to make the festival run smoothly and allows each woman to participate in the event.
At the Friday night shabbat service - the festival attracts a large contingent of Jewish lesbians - women sing and hold hands as they perform an egalitarian lighting of the sabbath candles: A group of candles is set inside the circle of women, and anyone who feels like lighting one does so.
After the service, one of the women writes "dyke" phonetically in Hebrew letters in grease pencil on another woman's biceps, as other women crowd around for the privilege.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, the largest women's music festival in the nation, began in 1976 as a one-time concert and camping experience organized by a group of women including Lisa Vogel, then a 19-year-old student at Central Michigan University.
From an event featuring a single platform stage, cold showers and minimal food and water, the festival has evolved into the annual creation of a small city.
In five weeks, about 650 women - about 250 paid workers, the rest volunteers - put up tents, build stages and kitchens, reconnect electric and water services and lay plumbing lines on the 685 acres owned by Vogel and Price, the festival's co-producers since 1984.
There are concerts day and night-about 40 performers on three stages. But between the workshops, the crafts sales area, the daily country-and-western dancing and the fire pits for impromptu talking and drumming, the festival feels like far more than a musical event.
Every year, Vogel and Price seek to create a small model society that operates on the principles of consensus and respect for diversity.
The festival offers child care, a health-care area, extensive services for the disabled, emotional counseling, a daily support group for heterosexuals and bisexuals, and a Sober Support Tent offering daily meetings of everything from Pagan Alcoholics Anonymous to Leather Sobriety, a 12-step group for devotees of sadomasochism.
All concerts are interpreted for deaf women. There is a "clean and sober" camping area. There is a "scent-free" area for women sensitive to perfumes. At concerts, the right side of the audience is designated "chem-free," reserved for women not using alcohol.
"The kind of systems and services that we think a conscientious community would provide, we provide ourselves," Vogel explained in an interview.
To the outsider, it all is exhaustingly politically correct. Even a trip to the portable toilets is a strain on one's political consciousness. Leafleting the Porta-Janes, as they are called here, is a traditional form of public discourse. During a single response to a call of nature, one can read a flier demanding complete integration of the disabled into all areas of the festival; another flier asking women not to buy drums in the crafts area because their sale represents the robbery of Native American spirituality; handwritten comments that drumming is a legitimate expression of spirituality by non-Native Americans; and subsequent angry comments on those comments.
Nearly every year, there is a sociopolitical issue whose discussion becomes a part of the festival. Previous issues have included the involvement of minority women in the festival, and whether women who enjoy sadomasochism should be permitted to engage visibly in acts that upset women who consider it violence against women.
The resolution of conflicts through discussion and consensus is a point of pride at the festival. The S/M issue, for example, was resolved with a request by the festival producers that demonstrations be confined to camping areas, and by the establishment of a "loud and rowdy" camping area favored by "leather women," as S/M devotees are called.
This year's issues include disabled rights and whether transsexuals should be admitted. Five transsexuals were ejected from the festival, whose brochure says the event is limited to "womyn born womyn." (The alternative spelling of "women" reflects a feminist tradition of using a name based on "gyn" rather than "men".)
Maintenance of the women-only character of the festival is taken seriously, to the point where performers using taped music are requested to refrain from using any that include male voices.
Male children over 3 years old are not allowed in the main festival area. They must stay in an adjacent boys' camp.
This year's musical lineup included the Tiddas, an Australian aboriginal group; and Linda Tillery & the Cultural Heritage Chorus, who sing a cappella black slave-era folk music. There were rock, country, classical, folk and jazz musicians, and a number of comedians.
Holly Near performs, as she has on numerous occasions. She is not the only widely known musician to appear at the festival: Tracy Chapman performed here two years before she crossed over from women's music into mainstream success.
During the day, workshops with titles like "Aging Into Power" and "The Politics of Penetration" are held in clearings in the woods and in the grass of a meadow.
At a drumming workshop under a large tree, a group of women sits in a circle, pounding out a rhythmic beat punctuated by one woman on cowbell. The rich beat escalates in volume, then recedes before finishing in a frenzied finale of drumming and yelling.
"It feels great!" says a breathless Neisha Wright, a first-time drummer from Westbury, N.Y. "These people feel like family! It's nothing like Long Island."
At the next workshop under the tree, "Menstrual Magick and Empowerment," women take turns talking about their feelings about menstruation, which some regard more as a powerful expression of womanhood than a monthly annoyance.
"I really love being a bleeding woman," one woman says.
"I just realized how much our periods and menstruation are denied us," says another. "There's a feeling in the general culture of shame."
Workshop leader ShuNahSii Rose, who teaches classes in female spirituality in Ann Arbor, Mich., nods.
"We need to remake the culture to accommodate ourselves as cycling beings," she said.
And at another site, about 150 women listen as V Langston-Kingsley and her partner, Whitewolf Langston, of Watertown, Mass., give a talk on sadomasochism that includes safety tips on the use of warmup whips and knots that are easily untied.
"If you want to flog somebody on the back, do it where there's muscle," advises Langston, as an interpreter signs for the deaf. "Never hit anybody on bone."
"The weird stuff isn't the point," says Beth Wallach as she waits for the nightly procession of stilt-walker and puppets.
"For the most part, we're people who lead ordinary lives otherwise. But here is an opportunity to experiment with a different kind of behavior."
Wallach first attended the festival four years ago as a married, straight woman. On her third visit, she realized she was otherwise. Now she attends as a lesbian.
Identities can be fluid here.
"Are you a lesbian?" Mayra Dole, a Coral Gables, Fla., woman at the drumming workshop, asks a visitor.
Receiving a negative answer, Dole shrugs.
"Well, maybe next year," she says.
by CNB