From Burning Butch by RB Mertz, 2022
[Context: Mertz is a tme/afab butch attending a lesbian festival in Ohio, 2019, that claims to be "all inclusive"]
I was hesitant about the whole Lesbian Festival thing. I knew about Michigan, the original women-only lesbian festival, but only through the testimonials of others. Cece had gone every summer for years...She talked about it as this beautiful, liberating part of her life where she got to be naked in the woods in a matriarchy. I’d read all the articles about the original festival dying because the cis women who ran it didn’t want to let trans women on “the Land,” as they called it.
They’d decided to end it rather than let trans women participate. I shifted in my seat thinking about the dykes who’d let that beautiful thing die because they didn’t want to affirm that trans women were women, too.
I felt like it was my body they were breaking in half, into acceptable and unacceptable parts, like straight culture had always been trying to do. ...[T]he whole subject made me realize that even within the safe harbor of queerness, there was sectarianism, prejudice, power-mongering, silencing, and the kicking to the curb of whoever ranked beneath the ones allowed to kick. ...
I’d never been to Michigan, but it had become a ghost of another thing I could never do—maybe because I was more trans than not, or maybe because the older generation of dykes had done what all the male institutions I’d ever known had done: they’d rejected their chance at evolving in favor of keeping things the same.
Lisa Vogel, feminist hero and founder of Michigan, and the AFABs in charge of the festival couldn’t wrap their minds around trans womanhood. They got bogged down in hypotheticals that made no sense. Instead of rising to the challenge, they killed the thing they’d created, the harbor where Cece and many others had found refuge and found themselves. ...
Everyone talked excitedly about how Lisa Vogel was going to be on the stage that evening before the music. They called the feminist legend LV, like they knew her, and I realized that maybe they did. I hadn’t known she’d be here this weekend—Cece had left that part out of her invite. Where did all my new friends stand in the conversation? Had they been at Michigan and kept trans women out? Did it matter, here and now, as I smoked with them and drank a beer?...
...On the stage, there were two living room chairs, and a butch lesbian was introducing LV. LV was full of platitudes and anecdotes, and the crowd of dykes stretched out in the field, on lawn chairs and on quilts, holding babies and each other, and smoking weed but not cigarettes, laughed and clapped and reacted like a gymnasium of Franciscan students hearing about Jesus.
My heart got a little tight. This was supposed to be the place I fit in, but did I? LV talked about a controversy she’d faced in Michigan—not the one we’d all heard of. She wanted to tell us about the negotiations between the BDSM lesbians and the Wonder Bread family lesbians, who’d brought their kids to the Land and didn’t want to walk up on a three-way spank fest with their toddlers in tow. ...
LV didn’t mention why the festival didn’t exist anymore; she just accepted the accolades and smiled big, waving as everyone cheered. Later, I found out there was a small group of protesters in the front row, who I couldn’t see from my blanket. They’d held up signs that the audience couldn’t see but LV could. She’d ignored them the whole time, smiled and laughed through it. ...
As we walked around the festival and I thought about how everyone had cheered for LV, I couldn’t shake the memory of the homeschooler and the zealots at Franciscan. Absent the tits on display, the rainbows, and the sex toys, and absent the absence of men, this could very well be a convergence of homeschooling families. The mood was the same. Everyone smiled like they were only among friends, like we all thought the same thing, like we were free. I didn’t like the idea that the freedom depended on sameness.
