Why I Need Female-Only Space

Michfest was my first experience of being told and shown that I belonged--as a woman, as female--AS IS. I reciprocated by holding the same kind of AS-IS respect for the Festival Intention. The Intention for female-only space was the reason that Fest could show us who we really are in all of our complexity. Why do YOU need female-only space?

[lesbiansovereverything]

This year's Black Lesbians United Retreat was everything. These clips capture some of the joy, dancing, and horniness of the weekend.

[lesbiansovereverything]

At Home With Ourselves: Tee's Home

At Home With Ourselves is an interview series in which we profile lesbian homes. From van life to the suburbs, from self-built cabins to studio apartments, from collective houses to the things that make you feel at home wherever you may find yourself. Wherever and however lesbians live, we want to know about it.

Welcome to our first profile! We are happy to introduce Tee, who wanted to share her home-away-from-home.

Devorah: Hi Tee, thanks for inviting us over! Tell us about your place.

Tee: An important home for me is the one I create when I’m camping, preferably with other lesbians. This can occur in pretty much any place, though setting up on women’s land can make it extra special. The home space I create includes my tent and sometimes a screen house/storm shelter. When I’m sharing the space with other women, I often include decorations to jazz it up a bit and define our space.

Devorah: As someone who has had the benefit of being your neighbor, you definitely make it special! Your decor is beautiful, the screen house is a perfect hangout spot, and your solar pathlights have guided me home many times! How long have you lived here, so to speak?

Tee: My love of nature and camping was inherited from, and nurtured by, my mother. I’ve been doing it since I was a wee girl. In that time my outdoors home has evolved from a tiny canvas pup tent with two wooden poles, no zippers, and no netting (i.e., no way to keep from getting soaking wet and covered in bug bites) to a veritable palace that has enabled me to weather many a storm in comfort.

Continue reading on LesbiansOverEverything.Com

[kittyit]

new series on @lesbiansovereverything!

[nansheonearth]

[Image description: Two smartphone screenshots of a Facebook post by a person named Sheila Toll posted 2 Sep. It is black text on a white background and the post is public. The post reads:

I am a Family Doctor and I want to keep a promise made to a patient. 

Julie was a healthy, post-menopausal woman in my care who came in for a periodic health examination. One of my routine questions, in what is called the “Review of Systems”, was to ask if she had experienced any vaginal bleeding. 

She said “No” but then laughed and added, “Other than when my period came back for a few months last year”. 

All health care professional are taught early on that ‘vaginal bleeding in a post-menopausal woman is Cancer of the Uterus until proven otherwise’. This comment by Julie was, therefore, a red flag (no pun intended) prompting further questions, an examination and an ultrasound of her pelvis. 

Julie was surprised to see me so concerned, especially since the symptoms had not recurred over many months. 

Sure enough, a pelvic ultrasound and tissue sampling confirmed Cancer of the Uterus. 

Julie underwent a hysterectomy and radiation therapy. She is now healthy, cancer-free and is expected to stay that way. 

After all this was done, Julie sat ME down for a talk. She told me she’d had no idea a ‘short return’ of her period after menopause was a danger signal. Furthermore, she addressed the topic with friends over coffee and discovered that, out of 20 women, NONE of them knew this symptom was abnormal! She admonished me to “Tell women this! Don’t assume we know it!”

From that day on, I have kept Julie’s advice in mind when talking with post-menopausal patients. But recently my wife suggested that I should take this to a wider audience. 

So, Julie, this is for you:

If you are a post-menopausal woman and your period ‘comes back’ or you have even one episode of vaginal bleeding, TELL A HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL and insist on having it investigated! 

Wishing you all good health and long lives. End image description.]

[nansheonearth]

Name A Tree: Tianda Mims "Lady T"

Name A Tree is an ongoing project that honors beloved individual women or women’s groups while providing much-needed funding for The Land.

Name A Tree is somewhat like our equivalent of adding a name to a park bench. Of course, we don’t make plaques and hammer them into trees; and no one gets to actually own or keep a tree. There is a virtual tour online with a directory; each named tree has its own geocode and is easily findable on the virtual tour.

[ititledit]

‘We have brothers, sons, lovers – but they can’t live here!’ The happy home shared by 26 women

With residents aged from 58 to 94, New Ground is the UK’s first cohousing community exclusively for older women. Setting it up was an 18-yea

We have brothers, sons, lovers – but they can’t live here!’ The happy home shared by 26 women

With residents aged from 58 to 94, New Ground is the UK’s first cohousing community exclusively for older women. Setting it up was an 18-year battle – but with soaring numbers of people living alone, is this an idea whose time has come?

Chipping Barnet, a leafy suburb of north London, is an unlikely location for a feminist utopia. Yet it is here, at the top of the high street, past the Susi Earnshaw theatre school and the Joie de Vie patisserie, that you will find Britain’s first cohousing community exclusively for women over 50. The purpose-built development is entirely managed by the women who set it up as an alternative to living alone.

New Ground’s entrance, all glass and bold typography, could easily be mistaken for a co-working space, as could the common room I am ushered into. Everything is bright, airy and spotlessly clean. The walls are lined with sleek white bookcases and a cinema-grade TV screen. The only clue as to the residents’ demographic is an unfinished 1,000-piece jigsaw on a table overlooking the large garden.

[michfest-as-is]

[michfest-as-is]

We Can Live Like This - Lisa Vogel's memoir, organized by Lisa Vogel

Greetings Friends, Sisters, Amazons! I have spent the last seven years cra… Lisa Vogel needs your support for We Can Live Like This - L

Please support as you are able!

This memoir is going to be amazing and a much needed antidote to the libel and slander that Lisa, personally, and the Festival community collectively, have endured for too long.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Lisa read some of these stories in their draft form and can't wait for the book. Personally, I'm gonna need a hard copy for the photos and the tangible thingness and also an audiobook to hear her say it all out loud.

[poniatowskaja]

Fundamentally, if you’re against female separatism, you’re against women being able to choose with whom they associate and on what terms. You’re against women choosing to organise their time around other women. You’re against the existence of any space without a man in it. You feel that men have an entitlement to force their company on women. That’s it. That’s all it is. Female separatism isn’t all about women’s land; it’s women choosing to make groups and spaces just for women. 

[prarthanaprasad]

Based on a 1970’s guide published by a Feminsit Lesbian Newsletter from Atlanta which is MY NEW FAVOURITE thing on the internet

[michfest-as-is]

a work buddy became disidentified following an incident of men behaving very very badly and i know it’s because she realizes that she would be a better man than any man and she’s right…if you want a job done right you have to do it yrself. but i still hope for a world where women realize we just don’t need there to be that many men. Sally Gearhart was right about the future being female. they don’t need to be this much of the population, they’re all happier being Very Special Boys, and the ones who can demonstrably live in a society without creating havoc through violence are probably only about 10% of them anyway. all the math and collective experience points to women just not creating this many males. i'd rather if women were on a thing of limiting the number of males produced, than a thing of socially transitioning to manhood to do a better job of it than males. but i get it.

funny how "the future is female" slogan became very popular but this part of its meaning got lost along the way. more womyn should read Sally Miller Gearhart's essay called The Future--If There Is One--Is Female. It's published in Reweaving the Web of Life and maybe other places.

[lesbiansovereverything]

2023 Lesbian Visibility Day Call for Submissions

Every year on Lesbian Visibility Day, LesbiansOverEverything.Com puts out a list of “real life lesbian adults who are living their best lives.” The women we feature usually write 1-2 paragraphs about their careers or passions and submit a picture of themselves to go along with that.

The point of doing this every year is to promote positive representation of lesbians and to highlight lesbian achievements.

Submissions for this year are open until Friday, Apil 21st. If interested, please send a pic and 1-2 relevant paragraphs to [email protected]

Visibility Day articles from previous years: 2022, 2021, 2020

[michfest-as-is]

[permutational]

Sharing a peaceful moment from last summer. I configured a set of MyNoise sound generators to go with it. Works best at a lower volume with headphones. Depending on your browser, you may need to scroll the generators and press ‘Play’ on each.

It’s a late summer night, camping in the woods with women gathered from all over. I’m sitting at a campfire with a friend, enjoying the stillness.

The fire is near its end; the smoldering, glowing embers are dying down,  shrinking in brightness, making way for the deep darkness to envelop everything. There are still small, flickering orange flames, casting just enough intermittent light to see the feet of the chairs and women around the fire.

I’m bathed in the scent of woodsmoke, bug spray, moss, and ferns. Looking up, I’m encircled by trees towering overhead, with distant stars twinkling in between branches and leaves.

The silence is so grand that I can hear the tallness of the trees: I hear the leaves gently rustling in the tiers of branches overhead, quite a ways from the fire crackling at my feet. Echoing in the treetops here and there, complimenting the comforting hiss and pop of the fire, I can hear women and girlchildren laughing and singing in merriment and celebration. Despite being in pitch-black darkness, the aural landscape gives me a sense of being centered in space and location, as if I’m in a very large dome or house. A forest sanctuary, perhaps?

An old woman approaches our campsite and joins us around the fire. I don’t know her, I can’t see her face in the darkness, yet she is familiar and belongs.

She sits on the ground, padded by soft tufts of moss, warming her hands and feet around the fire. We all sit in silence.

After a while, the woman sighs in relief. “I could sit here forever.”

She removes her sandals and plants her feet into the outer edge of the fire pit. She digs her feet down into the warm ashes, rooting herself near the radiant embers. Her toes wiggle under the dirt in delighted, unrestrained comfort.

[womynwhostirsthepot]

These are some “vintage” shots of me at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, circa 1994.  The first Festival I’d attended was with my girlfriend at the time (the cute, short, butchy one) who couldn’t believe I’d grown up in Michigan and had never heard of “Festival” before.  She insisted I come with her and she paid for me.  We went Thurs-Sun.  I thought that was just what one did until I found out it was actually a week long.  Then I always went for the whole week.  I returned to Festival about 10 times over 20 years.  Always with a different girlfriend, until finally, my first wife and I returned together several times and I told her we “broke the curse”.  I mostly ran around in shorts and a bra when I wasn’t wearing other under-clothes like homemade bloomers, cotton nighties and vintage aprons.  I LOVE talking Festival so please get in touch if you would like to know more about what it was like!   Do you see the photos on the lower left?  I’m there in a white nightdress and the woman I’m talking to with the blue shirt and brown hair is the FIRST LESBIAN I ever met.  I went to Michigan State Univ for a year when I was 18.  She was a couple of years older than me and an artist.  When there was open studio, I’d go and hang out near her.  We weren’t really friends or anything but I heard her talking about her girlfriend and I was like, “can I ask you a question? What’s it like to have a girlfriend?” She said it was really nice!  Then 4 years later I run into her by the Acoustic Stage at Festival. And of course there’s seriously a woman walking by naked with just a fanny pack on.  SO MICHIGAN!  

[lesbianfeminists]

A Passion For Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, Janice Raymond. 1986.

[michfest-as-is]

my lesbian sep cat when i am on a call for work: no men voices allowed here please    im amb serious   i mean it serious business    im will complaint until this end