right there we go now let's try this again so again welcome everyone so what to expect this evening I'm just going to give you a brief introduction to wanderground I know many of you already know a good deal about us but I'll just repeat a little bit of it again uh for those of you who may be new to joining us and then we're going to take a peek into the archives uh mostly every in that that I'll be showing is specifically from the New England region and then I will try to leave enough time at t
he end so that you all may share your stories or memories or ask questions or contribute to the conversation that would be very much appreciative if you would do that so uh basically wanderground is a lesbian focused archive Library so everything that we have in here is got something to do with lesbians um so we have a broader range of Publications and Audi visuals artifacts ephemera personal memorabilia all kinds of things right now mostly it's a private collection most things that I've collect
ed over the last 40 years but slowly I am um getting donors who have been giving us materials Kathy Lewis is here and she's given me quite a bit of stuff that some of it you will see this evening and others have been uh sharing information with me as as well but mostly the collection focuses on the New England region even though there is a fair amount of national and international items in the collection oh my goodness why is this doing this to me uh oh hold on oh dear I forgot how touchy this m
ouse is okay and ultimately we will um have a lot of gathering space right now everything is in the house but we are trying to find a space so that you can visit it more people can come visit it see what we're doing and so that we have some more work space because we have several individuals who have expressed an interest in participating in working with the collection but we work elbow to elbow in a very tight space and we're trying to make it so that more people can come so everything that I a
m showing this evening is actually currently in our collection and I'm hoping that over the course of the evening you'll say where's this where's that tell me and I will want you to tell me where what you know about that I may have missed so I showed this because I'm so I get so excited about talking about this stuff so I'm really going to try like I said to keep it to 30 minutes and leave plenty of time for um conversation and I had a really hard time trying to keep this to uh not show everythi
ng in our collection but to show enough to get you as excited about it as I am so the first section I'm going to focus on is lesbian words and print uh so basically these are Regional contributors because we call it a library and it is because we have a fair number of books and periodicals and printed materials pamphlets and um chatbooks and so on so this basically is uh some of the regional contributions to the women and print movement which is the movement of feminist and lesbian Publishers an
d bookstores who were able to make lesbian words available to all of us who were interested in them so we're going to start off with the Amazon quarterly uh which was in created in Somerville Mass and it it was a publication that included a lot of Art and poetry fiction uh some essays some photos uh they were only active from 72 to 75 and we have in our collection an incomplete set we don't have everything from this particular publication uh but every time I see a new one I grab it but these wer
e a couple of the covers from the Amazon quarterly trivia many of you might have seen that that was also National in scope but they came out of North North ammer Massachusetts from 82 until 95 and I've since realized discovered that they actually have an online version uh the original Publishers ceased creating the essays that ceased creating trivia but someone else had picked it up in 2004 and so you can go to the website that's called trivia voices and see some of the issues that they did they
're only online they're not in print but the original trivia was in print and that was mostly um theoretical opinion essays a lot ofic feminist thought um experimental writing uh some creative other creative writing as well they did book reviews and so on and so forth but it was it it was a very compelling um publication and wander ground has a complete set of that publication there's also a lot of other little periodicals these were also National in scope but um as you can see the seps the firs
t one that's called separatists eroding Patriot they came out of Greensboro Vermont uh for I'm not entirely sure exactly of the years I don't have a complete set of that uh but they they uh were basically handmade you know they typed it up themselves all the pictures are handdrawn there's nothing flashy about it but it's basically a lot of separatist thought a lot of Articles reviews opinions um commentaries so on and so forth dyk's disability and stuff focused on um disability issues primarily
came out of Boston I this is the only issue I have is this volume 3 number one I don't have any more information about them I cannot find them anywhere so if you happen to have copies of this that would be really great to add to our collection if you have them and then lesbian for lesbians this is also um I think they were Radical lesbian feminists for the most part they I put massachus in Vermont because the editors were mostly writing out of Massachusetts Boston various locations out of Massac
husetts but it was mailed from Vermont so I think that was probably a collective who was working on that and as far as I know their years were from 1989 to 1994 again very simply may just uh printed off photocopied basically um I don't know if it was mograph or what but it's you know stapled together sent in an envelope very low cost for this one nothing slick about it at all uh then there's also a lot of periodicals that were also National on scope that had that were not necessarily specificall
y lesbian but had a lot of lesbian influences or editors or writers or articles of certainly feminist um but with a lot of lesbian in influences and so Jer was primarily news so they were reporting news from around the country around the world coming out of Cambridge Massachusetts uh in newspaper format regular newspaper format woman of power was um focusing mostly on feminism and spirituality that one came out of Cambridge also as you can see a lot of these came out of Massachusetts a lot going
on up there in Massachusetts in New England uh this the woman of power was also this happens to be a black and white cover that I happen to put my hand on but they had a lot of full color very colorful um covers lots of uh mostly I want to say well feminist spirituality but mostly like goddesses or nature ecology peace uh mindfulness those kinds of things they also did Politics as well U but very more of a a spiritual bent to this particular publication rain and th th got started back in 1998 t
hey were coming out of Northampton and they started off uh again a very low um cost stapled uh black and white publication that started in 1998 but over the years they got a lot a lot Slicker they had full color covers they had um I think they had some color inside as well lots of Articles and I'm really this issue that's and we will rise actually featured an interview with me about wanderground that was in uh January of 2023 and uh sadly I just got an email from them about a month ago saying th
at they had ceased publication the thing about that I really liked about rain and thunder is that they had a lot of international news as well as national news and really um having a lot of radical feminist thought as well and then there's the local news so these were a couple of um they weren't they were they were really local uh Publications the lesbian position I want to just say is is the newsletter a lesbian position and they were very clear to say that it was a lesbian position so that the
y didn't want to say that they were the one true lesbian or anything like that but they published for quite a long time they came out monthly the nice thing about lesbian position that I really appreciated is I I do have pretty much a full set of this publication a lot of Articles a lot of letters a lot of conversation but it's one of those Publications where you could really go issue by issue by issue and really see what was happening in New Haven and Connecticut in the broader Connecticut area
during that time period because it was very Lively there was arguments in the print there were ads there were um some stories and articles about what was happening in town and I found it very entertaining to read it every month I look forward to it when it came every month uh folded in half and stapled and sometimes in an envelope but it really if if reading through that you really get a sense of the community at that time and what was the conversation that was happening the third wave um was n
ot a lesbian publication but there were a lot of lesbians who were involved in it but it was the local Rhode Island Paper had a lot of news and politics um in it and other General stories about women and whatnot there there was some lesbian articles in there not very many that I've seen in the few issues I've seen But I do know that it was had a large uh many of the editors or writers were lesbians uh the other at that publication I don't have the dates for that one for some reason but I think t
hat was early 1990s I think they only continued until about 19 1994 or 95 and the reason I put the question mark there is because I'm sure that there were other communities um in various States in New England who possibly had Publications but I'm not aware of them and I would really like to know about them if you happen to know of any that I don't know about now we're going to switch to Publishers so there were several Publishers that were originating out of the New England area new Victoria Pub
lishers actually started as a printer and and you'll see over on the leftand side there where it says new Victoria printers these were women four women who had actually been working for a print shop up in New Hampshire uh but the guy refused to give they wanted a raise they wanted better working conditions and so on and so forth and he refused to give them a raise and they said well we know what we're doing and so they found a printing press and they started their own printing press which was a
lot of what happened in uh feminist lesbian Publishers around the country it happened in Baltimore it happened in Iowa it happened in um the bay area where women lesbian wordss were not getting printed and so women started their own printing presses and new Victoria happens to be one of those examples of a feminist work Collective that started as printers this book from lyan publication was one of the first ones that they printed uh I neglected to write down the year but I think it was about 19
I want to say 77 in that neighborhood um well must be 1975 because they started publishing their own books in 75 so it must have been right around 7475 that they published this this one book and then they became their own Publishers after they started printing other people's stuff they said well we'll start our own printing our own publisher and they printed a wide variety of items poetry hory humor fiction novels Mysteries Stone McTavish some of you might be aware of that was a big um in the da
y a really popular mystery novel um that came out at the time I particularly like found goddesses because it talks about a lot of madeup goddesses um asalta being one of them who I still pray to regularly hail asalta full of grace helped me find a parking place so that's sort of a bit of humor in there the next publisher I'm picking up is Pro which some of you might recognize many of these titles they were this down where it says panie press a lesbian strategy that was actually from a t-shirt th
ey printed that on a t-shirt that you could wear around this bridge call my back was eventually reprinted later on by kitchen table women of color press zi was eventually reprinted by Crossing press but these were the early versions of of these books um and I I these were some of the first ones I got my hands on uh when I was coming out and so they are very near and dear to my heart this particular publisher um and then there's other Publishers around the New England area not as well known and m
aybe not as many books um the timely books is actually reprinted pulp novels Paul Christian was writing uh pulp novels back in the 1960s that's a super pudm her real name was yavon mcmanis and she ultimately started publishing other books that were not lesbian in topics but she she published these books as pulp novels originally in the 60s and then she herself created timely books and reprinted them again all with these nondescript titles the pulp novels had real pulp covers um I don't unfortuna
tely have any of those in the collection but um but that's where that one came from a stardy shell did a lot of spiritual books and then Madwoman did some NAD reprints I'm not sure how many titles they ultimately published but on my honor um about lesbians and scouting was one of their most popular books and uh Nancy manahan who was the editor of that book or the writer of that book has recently republished it in the year 2020 this next one is um I call her the Renegade this is giant ass publish
ing hothead pisan the author and the publisher is Diane damassa and she did comic books and it's sort of it's she called it the homicidal lesbian terrorist was her subtitle uh and she it was sort of like working out her anger at men and and so on through these somewhat considered violent type fantasies of of what she would do to men who are abusing women um but she was had a good sense of humor she was a really good cartoonist in many levels and she kind of went all out with doing a button for h
erself the giant ass publishing is the front of the t-shirt and crack a smile is the back of the t-shirt that she created she also sold candy bars for a while I happened this box is the hothead pison secret stuff box actually was in a bookstore and it had candy bars in it I I think these would were the crackle kind she had several different kinds of candy bars for a while the one with her with the bomb in the center that's a Christmas card believe it or not and then I worked with Diane for a whi
le in the uh book wholesaler where I was working for a period of time and she I was getting ready to move and so she drew me this cartoon of me moving uh from one place to another so I I got a big kick out of that she was um pretty good at showing me always with blank glasses and there was another picture she Drew of me that had a t-shirt on it that said Slaughter Department which I didn't really quite get what that was about but anyway so so Diane was was kind of a a lot of fun um so the next m
oving on if you're having Publishers and books and newspapers and uh periodicals you have to have a place to distribute them so Along come the feminist bookstores and New England had quite a few of them uh that were really quite important many of you might remember new words which was up in Cambridge from 74 to 2002 these are some of their early bookmarks um and postcard that they had somebody had drawn for them the the new words postcard and then this photo is of some child sitting in new words
s um reading Wonder Woman so new wordss was a very important place in that Community for a long time uh golden thread book seller was located in New Haven the first owner had this logo with the cat on it this was a books a a bookmark uh from from that time that she owned the store I think she owned it until n she owned it for six years like between 1982 to 88 and then the new owner changed the logo and had a different rebranded the store um and took it to a new location and she had she SP oned s
oftball teams so this actually is a softball t uh shirt from the softball team that um she sponsored during the years that she was the owner and I don't exactly know when the owner of the store was a friend of mine and she doesn't exactly remember when she closed it so that's why I said I'm not sure of the dates and then there were plenty of other feminist women's lesbian bookstores around the New England area uh readers Feast was also um a restaurant or Cafe women crafts is still going on in pr
ovinc toown they have been there since 1976 although I think they've changed locations a couple of times and they've changed their t-shirt design a couple of times this is a really old version of their t-shirt uh visions and voices was in Providence and that one was very shortlived they didn't really last very long lunaria unfortunately that's the only thing in this PowerPoint that I have no I have nothing from L lunaria except the knowledge that they existed as a feminist women's bookstore for
a long time in Northampton and then woman fire also was in North Hamp I'm not entirely sure when they um stopped uh I think around 1987 because I think that's when lunara started so they they kind of bridged each other a little bit uh there and then one of my favorite places in the world is bloodroot a feminist vegetarian restaurant and bookstore located in Bridgeport they just celebrated their 48th anniversary just yesterday actually they always celebrate their anniversary on the Spring Equinox
um usually with a big party but not only are were they a restaurant and book store but they also so the the shirt on the the the drawing on the left is from a t-shirt that they had they also had what was called the gnap historical society and what was important about that was that it was all always met on Wednesday evenings because they were a public restaurant of course anybody could go eat in the restaurant but they were Le they are lesbians and wanted to support women's only space when they
could so they created the gnap historical society that met on Wednesday evenings from 7 o'clock to 9 o' and only women could come in the restaurant you had to be a member of the gnap Historical Society in order to come into the restaurant and sometimes it was a struggle um I have a membership card for them too some from someplace but I don't I seem to have mislaid it someplace but they would do concerts and they would do this this witch the Wild and independent thinking Crohns and hags was a lec
ture series that they did uh noie was a is still a photographer so that's a picture that she took of the eggplants they're making Baba ganush with eggplants all steaming there on the stove and then uh Selma who is also one of the Cooperative owners was really good at fabric arts and so she created this mermaid quilt the tesselated mermaid quilt um and that's a postcard photograph of it that hung in the restaurant many years um and I think it's still there somewhere hanging from the rafters but n
ot only were they a bookstore restaurant but they also published their own cookbooks uh so these are three of the B books that they had published under the name sanguinaria so moving on from bookstores and whatnot let's go to music for a little bit talk about some of the the fun things that we had with music so these were many of the uh musicians who um lived in the New England area or who per mostly performed here the one that's the black and white one sort of in the center is called Mountain M
oving Day and it's hard to read but that's one of the earliest albums um that came out that's from the New Haven women's liberation rock band and also from the Chicago women's rock band that one came out in 1972 uh so that's one of the oldest bits here um K Gardner um was one of the few musicians who did um orchestral music to some extent the rainbow path is an extraordinary piece of music that is for full Orchestra uh she played the Fe her flute herself she was a composer um and she did a lot o
f backup you might have heard her playing on the back of some of Alex dokins Tunes um Maxine and Linda Maxine Felman and Linda Shear those are the only albums they ever did uh and Linda was very quite adamant that a lesbian portrait should be lesbian music for lesbians only and she would not allow anyone to play it on the radio um I think over time that sort of relaxed but um she was pretty pretty adamant that only lesbians should listen to her music uh she played the piano and I think that's a
piano that she reconstructed herself that she's sitting in front of there um but these are some of the other performers that are were from New England as well as these works as well sister love this was the only album they did um that and that one was from 1987 uh Lilith is also a really oldtime one that one's from 1978 that album uh many of you might recognize Tracy Chapman I I don't know that she still lives in the New England area but she was in Boston area when she put this album out so that
's why she gets put into New England here Allison frell is still performing as far as I know La Laura wetzler uh was originally from Brooklyn uh does a lot of traditional Jewish music as well as her own writing but she now lives in Northampton so I've brought her in as a New England representative uh so then the next thing that many of you might be aware of is the New England Women's Music Retreat that happened from 1981 to 1991 1999 and I when it first came out it was New England and so it was
hard to switch to calling it the Northeast Women's Music retreat but partly that happened because even though it started in the New England Connecticut area they started having some of the festivals in New York and so I think that's one of the reasons why it ranched out to Northeast um but Kathy Kathy is the donor of of many of the these things and I like telling the story of if you look at the t-shirts on the left so the first one says 1981 and you'll notice that there's one woman in the mounta
in the second one is from 1982 and you'll notice that there's two women in the mountain and if you look at the third one that's from 1983 and there's three women in the mountain and once they got to that point they said we're keep having festivals but we're not going to put any more women in the mountain so from then on there were only three women in the mountain on their t-shirts um but the files that you see there are files that have a lot of the program books the announcements of the festival
s has a lot of material about the crafts women who um brought their wees to the festival and then that sign crafts unload area I have several um signs that were given to wanderground that were from the crafts area so that's an actual board with paint on it that was hammered up at a few places around the festivals year after year so and then there were other music venues around town um the Harford Hartford Connecticut had a women's coffee house for a while um this one that says concert for women
um B proceeds the women's Pentagon action there were a lot of performers who did a lot of performing at various um activist events peace peace events sto the trient events feminist events um take back the night so on and so forth all of those were places that lesbian musicians in New England were performing um I circled the candlelight bar there at Forbes Avenue in New Ham that was a bar that uh we performed in a group of us uh to do um to raise for the women's Pentagon action and that was one o
f the few times we all came out that night there were a couple of guys who were causing trouble um and we went out after the concert and found out that our tires had all been slashed um that was back in 1981 uh PM by the sea is a lot of fun too these were gals who would invite musicians to come and they'd go down to the beach at uh in Sandwich on the cape and build a bonfire and we'd sit around and sing around the bonfire so that was a lot of fun and then the Expanding Horizons coffee house uh h
appened uh was produced by Mary Devo and some other folks and so th those came out I don't know once or every couple of months I think they did featured mostly local performers um so it's basically a a relaxing evening of whoever was performing that particular night PM by the Sea also sponsored um K Gardner up at the Cape Cod Community College one time so moving forward let's talk about some activisms um this is audre Lord many of you may recognize her and the kehe river Collective statement the
and they they say it different ways and even I heard an interview with Barbara Smith and she was in the collective and she doesn't even remember how they said it but I think it's Ki and they were a radical feminist black feminist organizing group um did a lot of this is a pamphlet of theirs that actually even though the collective existed in Boston from 1974 to 1980 this particular pamphlet was printed by the kitchen table women of color press who actually were located in uh New York but they a
lso did um I am your sister conference which happened in 1990 which was a celebration of the works of audre Lord and all of the workshops and everything were based on some of the writing of audre Lord this calendar has a lot of pictures and writings by audre in it um and part of the thing of the conference was that they really and they didn't really call it a conference you'll see it up there it says um Cella conference so Global Cella conference and I think they were trying to say it was about
celebration of audra's work and her words um and also creating strategies uh for the future so this is is a calendar and a bookmark that were from that we also have a t-shirt in the collection um from that um Gathering um another group that was real active in the New Haven area was the spinsters opposed to nuclear genocide um did various actions um so these are the t-shirts couple of t-shirts a postcard other um posters and and political actions that happened the emergency order curfew um we dec
ided that you know the violence against women was getting really um impossible and so this curfew statement it's hard to read on this particular slide but it says women are raped every three minutes one of three women are women are raped at a lifetime violent crimes against women is increasing and women are effectively under curfew because they can't go out safely at night and so we declare a curfew on all men over the age of 12 from 8:00 p.m. until 7 a.m. effective immediately and we had those
printed up posters to look very official and posted them all around downtown New Haven uh one evening so um and then the reason I put that little scrap of yarn there um you'll see a the picture that has the sa you can see the safety bin sort of but one of the things that Spiner meetings is that we were always doing these little mac things you'd be sitting there talking and having these incredible conversations and just about everybody around the room was making old bracelets and we decided as a
group to make a bracelet and somehow or other it came into my hands and I didn't pass it on and that's how unfinished it was but um that was one of the things that we were always doing was making little bracelets uh so some of the other organizations around that I'm aware of are the Rhode Island woms Association that's still going on today they meet um I don't know every month or two have a Dan or something that's a social group um Orioles uh because rwa kept changing their um age limit the old
lesbians in the group got really aggravated with that so they started the organization of Rhode Island older lesbian the Orioles they actually ceased meeting they would go for lunch and whatnot socializing but they stopped meeting when covid hit because they were not and they they haven't restarted themselves again um Olay was out of Boston area old lesbian energy and the slaps senior lesbians at play happily um also started by Kathy and a friend of hers and so these are just some photographs fr
om some of the albums what I have are from these organizations are their organizational papers some minutes some history photo albums uh not a whole lot of stuff they were donated by one or two uh lesbians who were in those organizations not a complete set of anything but at least a a a a sampling of what they do and and how they what they're up to and then finally I just want to talk about some of the lesbians that we love these are lesbians whose items are in the um collection that we have at
wanderground Kate Russian is a poet she's living still in Connecticut but she has a couple of poetry books and she had been one of the co-owners of new words for while while she's the one who wrote The Bridge poem that's featured in this bridge called my back Mary daily many of you may know several books from her radical lesbian feminist thinker philosopher Carolyn Gage who is a playright who's still very active writing plays and producing she lives up in northern Maine um does a lot of work wit
h her plays some of them are in print Julia Penelope who uh created a game that's called Dyke the dyke Game do you know enough it's a Trivial Pursuit game with hundreds of cards with hundreds of questions all pertaining to lesbian history Pam Smith was a DJ it was doing doing the Amazon Radio Show in um new in Bridgeport they they aired out of Bridgeport Connecticut Diana Davies um photographer and Angela Bowen who lived in the Northeast for a long time in the New England Boston and Connecticut
area and eventually moved out um to the West Coast and then that's just a tip of the iceberg of what we have here in the collection I just wanted to give you a taste uh but there's plenty more in the um archives to explore jewelry videos art photos Fabrics greeting cards posters banners letters personal papers and all kinds of other things um this is a handk knit hat that's got labras on it I have three of them in different colors I have no idea who made made them they were given to me um they'r
e quite warm and comfy um and then this goddess cookie cutter which was made by a lesbian metal Smith who lives here in the Rhode Island area and so this also is to encourage you as you are going through your items and you wonder if you have things to contribute to the archive I just want to say it's not only about books and pamphlets and so on but anything that you have that's flyers or posters or letters or journals or diaries or any of the Diaries isn't even on this list but that we have some
Diaries as well um so that's another thing that we want to encourage you to save and think about maybe sending to wanderground at some point um we have a lot of events coming up during lesbian visibility month lesbian visibility day is Friday April 26th but we decided to make a whole month of it um and so you can find these events up on our website if you happen to be in new hover New Hampshire or Pucket Rhode Island or New Haven Connecticut or even if you're in Cranston come to the library and
see our exhibit and now I'm going to turn this off and make myself quiet and listen to all the wonderful things that you have to add or share or ask about or stories to tell or anything that you remember of anything that um I talked about
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