MY HISTORY OF MY LESBIAN COMMUNITY AND LESBIAN LIFE

By Bev Jo

Lesbians exist and we have always existed. Though we are hated and lied about, assaulted and murdered, erased in every way possible, we continue. We always will.

We should be able to just talk and write about Lesbians, our lives, our loves, our unique creations, our history, but we are under siege in more dangerous ways ever before, in what used to be our own community, by males who literally hate us to death.

Males and the women who keep them going in their destruction of the earth want to take everything we have and are, but they can’t. They have tried in many ways, but the trans cult, which is recent (though they claim otherwise), is the most dangerous attempt yet because they have gotten many or most Lesbians and other women to support them against the few of us who say no. Their con is playing victim and oppressed, though they are primarily the most privileged men with a few self-hating women. They just wait and watch as women police and chastise and threaten us on their behalf. To understand this mess, it’s important to know the history. A very few men identifying as Lesbians invaded our community years ago in the Seventies, but most Lesbians said no to them. (It was well known then that het men said they wanted to be Lesbians, and I knew women whose boyfriends groomed them to become Lesbians.) Then, in the Nineties, they increased their power, and suddenly “T” was added to “Lesbian and Gay” marches, parades, organizations, etc., and soon everything we and even gay men once had. Men identifying as Lesbians began erasing our history and replacing themselves at the center, as parasites do. It is a male supremacist dream come true. This is never just personal, but very political. The Labour Party in Britain actually gave their spaces for women candidates to men claiming to be women. What could be more obvious and glaring? Meanwhile, males identifying as “transgender” have the same rate of violence as other het males, but their rapes, assaults, and murders are now recorded as being by women. And when they are arrested for harming Lesbians and women, they are put in women’s prisons. There is so much more to say about all this, but really, it’s very simple: no one can change sex. No male can become female and no female can become male. Plus, men claiming to be Lesbians will never get what they most demand, by definition, which is willing sexual/intimate access to Lesbians. So they want to destroy us, take us over, and wear our skin, like a trophy.

I feel like I have to record everything that I can about my Lesbian life and community since our history is systematically being erased by the men (and women supporting them) who are trying to take us over. Meanwhile, Lesbians and women who don’t know our history aggressively repeat Lesbian-hating myths. (To figure out the cons, see who benefits from them…)

We had such an amazing, strong, vibrant Lesbian community in the US and across the earth, in so many other countries, and could again, if our enemies stopped trying to devour and parasitize us. What we once had is incredible and must be remembered. (I have to add that the Lesbian community in Aotearoa/New Zealand was the most Lesbian-identified I’ve ever heard of, including having Lesbian only space that was rare in the US. But they are also under terrible siege.) I’m going to talk first about my own story and then about what I saw in our Lesbian community, including what went wrong that I don’t think anyone else ever talks about, other than in the book I co-wrote with Linda Strega and Ruston, Dykes-Loving-Dykes: Dyke Separatist Politics for Lesbians Only (now updated at my first blog. https://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/)

I didn’t think about what my future would be when growing up, but, considering I was born in 1950, it did not look good. Girls and women who loved our own kind were disowned by families and friends, and considered “mentally ill” by the American Psychiatric Association. Some were locked up and drugged and tortured, including with lobotomies. The propaganda was that we were “born this way,” (which I why I will never accept being returned to that), and then Lesbians were portrayed as disgusting perverts, so the result was that all girls’ natural feeling of love for our own kind was stigmatized and most crushed it in themselves. There was nothing – not one book or publication or film that I knew of that in any way supported us. In the few films, and book, The Well of Loneliness, if a Lesbian loves another woman she should leave her so her love can find true happiness with a man. Or she should kill herself. Or a man should kill her. The films I saw as a teenager were The Children’s Hour, The Fox, and the worst, the only film I ever saw with my first lover, The Killing of Sister George, which was disgusting on so many levels. No matter what they do to us, it can never be as bad as it was then, because even if they kill us, they can’t kill our pride in who we are and our love for each other.

I continued loving other girls and dreamed of having a community of only girls like me where we would defend each other and share our lives together. I never dreamt I would find and help create a wonderful international Lesbian community or that it would so quickly be eroded and erased by our enemies. Still, we could stop it if Lesbians would stop betraying each other for men. I don’t believe women who say they grew up not knowing that being a Lesbian was a possibility. I always knew what “queer girls” were, so that when I started grade school at 5, in 1956, I recognized Rosemary, who was 10, as being a Lesbian. I didn’t have words for it, but I fell madly in love with her. When I was 12, my cousin warned my mother to keep her away from me, but luckily my mother liked Rosemary and ignored my cousin. Sadly, around 1964, Rosemary moved out of her parents’ house, looking for other Lesbians, and found a bar community where bisexual women were in charge and her love for another Butch woman was forbidden. When I was 15, my father moved us from Cincinnati to the San Francisco Bay Area, and when I was 16, Ann, the girl I madly was in love with in Cincinnati came to stay with me for two glorious weeks. One night I panicked, thinking I had to tell her that I loved her before she left, so I did, but when we were at a museum the next day, she pointed to the men’s restroom and asked if I wanted to use it. So even in 1967, loving another girl meant I had to be male. I was horrified. I wanted nothing to do with males. When our embarrassed biology teacher had told us about human reproduction and male bodies, Ann, like all the other girls in our class were shocked and disgusted. Part of why I loved her so much was that she seemed to think more deeply than anyone else I’d ever known and was so present and intense. Yet, during her visit, she started telling me that she was teaching herself to be attracted to boys and to flirt, which was clearly a conscious, cold decision. She continued in wanting to be het, got married, and divorced. When I visited with her many years later, she seemed empty and dead inside, the opposite of the girl I’d been so in love with.)

I would not give up and continued falling in love with other girls, so when I was 17, in 1968, I became lovers with my best friend, Marg, and it was ecstasy beyond imagining. Neither of us had been het or actually knew what het sex was, so we didn’t bring any of that sado-masochistic horror or porn or games or boredom into our lovemaking. We just followed our hearts and love for each other and knew exactly what to do, and it was perfect. She wrote me love songs and I wrote her love poems and we just wanted to be together, safely, without fear of discovery and punishment. But our time together was too brief. Marg’s mother and younger teenaged sister watched how we looked into each other’s eyes. Her sister said she saw us kissing in Marg’s room, even though we hadn’t been. Marg had to pretend that that was a disgusting thought. We were constantly afraid, though we glowed with happiness. Soon, Marg’s mother searched her room and found my letters and we were forbidden to see each other ever again (though we continued with the help of a friend, until my next letters were discovered again and Marg was made almost a prisoner.) Desperate, she ran away to me and and turned herself in to a close friend’s mother who was a social worker, hoping someone “official” could help. That woman told us to not start lovemaking or we would never stop. She said she had had a relationship like ours when she was young and if she hadn’t stopped, she would never have had her husband and daughters. She looked incredibly sad saying this and I knew we did not even like her family.

Meanwhile, some of our friends were starting to be het, which put them at risk for getting pregnant and STDs. They also did not seem very happy and told me about how their boyfriends would have them do “dirty” things or pressure them to let them fuck them, with no concern about the consequences. I remember some of these girls had had extremely close friendships with their best friends. But the pressure was on them to be “normal.” One girl I’d just become friends with at our high school brought me to a hippie house where a man she knew put his hand on her belly and she just laid down so he could fuck her right there, in front of me. It was horrifying and nothing about that seemed appealing on any level or like the love Marg and I had for each other. (I didn’t know of any woman, including in my family, who seemed happy with their men.)

I went to USF in San Francisco and kept searching for others like us and learned about the first Lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, founded by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. I went to one meeting, but at 18 was too young to join. I also found some Lesbian bars, but again was too young. Finally, I found a Lesbian group that was formed by Lesbian Feminists fed up with being oppressed both by gay men and het women: Gay Women’s Liberation. We met on alternating weeks in Berkeley at Alice Molloy’s and Carol Vorvolakos’ house in Berkeley and in San Francisco at Judy Grahn’s and Wendy Cadden’s apartment. What I remember was just being with other Lesbians, finally -- no longer the terrible isolation, wondering if something was wrong with me. The first pro-Lesbian article I read changed everything. Nothing was going to stop my love for my own kind, but to actually get support like what Lesbian Feminism gave us was life-changing. (And they can never take that away from us, unless we let them.)

1970 and afterward was an incredibly dynamic and exciting time. At first, our events were usually in the large cheap rundown houses where Lesbians rented rooms (often for $50 a month) and had collectives. (Few Lesbians owned houses, though that changed later with the massive influx of ex-wives coming out who had money and property from their het marriages.) The living rooms and dining rooms were used for meetings and also parties. In 1972, our collective organized one of the first Lesbian Feminist conferences in the world in Berkeley. We had several Feminist newspapers in the Bay Area, and in 1973, I co-wrote and published Dykes and Gorgons, a Dyke Separatist newspaper. (I also drew the cover and some of the art inside.)

There also were Lesbian Feminist and Feminist Women’s newspapers started across the US, with some of the most radical in the Midwest (like The Lesbian Insider/Insighter/Inciter in Minneapolis), which was a way for us to find out what other communities were doing. Women’s (which usually meant Lesbian’s) bookstores were also spreading across the country, and some of those included spaces for poetry and political readings. The Women’s Press Collective in Oakland published Lesbian Speak Out and other Lesbian books, like Pat Parker’s wonderful and powerful poetry about being an African-descent Butch. Our early Lesbian books were not academic or boring or inaccessible, but personal and about our lives. Our community was more class-oppressed than the later community and tried to be as inclusionary to as many Lesbians (and often women) as possible, which meant that most events were affordable or free – “No one turned away for lack of money.” We also were outspoken against racism, anti-Semitism, ableism, ageism, and all oppressions that we knew about. The Lesbian community was one of the first to have American Sign Language interpreters. There were also many more Lifelong or Never-het Lesbians than later, and I think that showed in our culture and writing.

Larger spaces were also rented or volunteered from local liberal churches, so we had amazing women only dances, first, with records, and then with Lesbian bands. I don’t even know how to describe how wonderful that time was. It all felt like coming home. There had always been Lesbian bars in the Bay Area, but there were more after Lesbian Feminism, like Ollie’s and the Bacchanal, that had women only Lesbian Feminist concerts, dances, and plays. (The documentary, Last Call at Maud’s, shows the history of one of our favorite bars in San Francisco. The owner, Ricky Streicher, had another very popular bar called Amelia’s.) There were also women’s cafés like the Full Moon and Artemis in SF and the Brick Hut in Berkeley.), and bookstores, like Old Wives Tales in SF, A Woman’s Place in Oakland, and later Mama Bears in Oakland, and Bodacia’s in Kensington. But all of it is gone, now, even the bars that always had existed. (The few Lesbian-owned bars and cafes that exist now are not the same since they cater to the public and the “queer” community, not Lesbians. I’ve seen some horrific Lesbian-hating in some of them.) Where once we had women’s self defense and martial arts schools, now there are just gyms, that are trendy, but don’t have any sense of community. (So much now seems to be about individual rather than community solutions.) I went to The Dojo, a women only JuJitsu/self defense school for five years that was started by an old Butch and likely Lifelong Lesbian, B.J. Maillette. I also taught self defense to girls and women for ten years for Bay Area Women Against Rape until they stopped funding the space. Lesbians helped start so many organizations that helped girls and women, like the Women’s Health Collective. Jackie Winnow and Joanne Garrett, local Lesbian friends, started the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Berkeley. One of the best things they did was make it possible for women with cancer to talk with other women with cancer to share support and information, but Jackie and Joanne died, and when it became more corporate the Center stopped the “peer referrals.” (A friend who had survived 3 separate cancers, likely iatrogenically caused, and who has so much information to share, would find that her contact card disappeared repeatedly, so those who took over didn’t even tell women how they were changing things.)

In 1980, the first Black Lesbian Conference began in San Francisco with nearly 200 Lesbians. (The Black Lesbian Caucus was created as an offshoot of the Gay Liberation Front in 1971, and later took the name Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc. Collective, which was the first “out” organization for Lesbians and Women of Color in New York. The Sisters are now known as African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change, and is the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States.)

One of the only ongoing Lesbian only organizations in the Bay Area was the NIA Collective, which was created by and for Lesbians of African descent in 1987, “Helping to Empower Lesbians of African Descent.“

And the music! We had strong political Lesbian Feminist and even Lesbian Separatist music, albums and concerts where “Lesbian” was said proudly, and lyrics were about our real lives. Alix Dobkin, from New York, sang “Lesbian” as often as possible in her songs, including singing “any woman can be a Lesbian,” which made it clear being a Lesbian (or het or bisexual) is a choice. (I believe we are all born to love our own kind, but most choose males in order to fit in, be accepted by family, etc.) As Alix traveled, she met other Lesbian Separatists and Lesbian Feminists and brought their albums back to the US, so we could find out about them, like the German Lesbian band, the Flying Lesbians, who sang songs questioning bisexual women using Lesbians and our spaces while still keeping their access to men and het privilege. They also sang about Lesbian professionals betraying us.

The Berkeley Women’s Music Collective’s albums (Susann P Shanbaum, Debbie Lempke, Nancy Henderson, Nancy Vogl, Janet Lampert, and Bonnie Lockhart) might sound dated because they didn’t have money to make more professional recordings, but in retrospect, the lyrics and politics are amazing. “Thorazine,” by Suzanne Shanbaum, described a Lesbian girl incarcerated and drugged in mental hospitals by her parents (as many in our community had experienced). “Janet’s Song” was about being discovered with her lover by her parents and disowned. “The Fury” was about being oppressed as a woman and Lesbian, and how her she uses her anger to fight back. I still haven’t heard another feminist song like Bonnie’s “Class Mobility.” (Bonnie joined for their second album.)

There was also the fantastic dance band, BeBe K’Roche, formed in Berkeley by Virginia Rubino, Jake Lampert, Pamela “Tiik” Pollet, and Peggy Mitchell in 1973. There were Lesbians and bands who never were able to record, which is a terrible loss. Some who did record, like S’irani Avedis, left out their most powerful and threatening Radical Lesbian Feminist songs. (S’irani’s beautiful songs questioned het women choice to be with men who made them miserable.)

In Northampton, Massachusetts, Linda Shear did a Lesbian Separatist album, called A Lesbian Portrait which is still one of my favorites.

But now, if you ask most Lesbians about what they think of as “Women’s Music,” they will name the later bland music with lyrics that could mean anything or nothing, that many of us remember as being what was the beginning of the loss of our Lesbian-identified culture. This diluted “women’s music” drew more privileged Lesbians who were closeted, so they could bring their families and het friends and not have to worry they would be offended by our culture or even have to hear the word “Lesbian.”

Similarly, collectives morphed into organizations with Boards of Directors and hierarchies, with the goal being to get money and status rather than build community. The Women’s Health Collective turned into the Women’s Health Center, and then the Women’s and Men’s Health Center, with nothing Feminist left in it. The Lyon-Martin Clinic went from being a Lesbian clinic to being for everyone, with a male director. (Lesbians still desperately needed help from the medical industry that hates us. In the Nineties, when I went to a clinic with a high fever and white spots on my throat, that seemed like Strep I’d had in the past, a woman doctor refused to give me a Strep test and asked if I had AIDS! This is where our being falsely associated with gay men harms us. That doctor, being het was far more likely to have AIDS than a Lifelong Lesbian.)

A lot of Lesbians still called themselves “gay,” and we were combined with gay men in the media as “Lesbians and Gay Men,” but there was no “LGBTQ” crap. The only “T” I knew about were two men who identified as “transsexuals,” who got into whatever power positions in our community that they could, and no, they were not milder or less dangerous than the men calling themselves “transwomen” are now. I still do not understand how and why most Lesbians seemed to suddenly support the het men posing as Lesbians against us. (Even when the man who has been stalking and harassing me since I was 17 came to a Lesbian event and put my name on his name tag and sat at the table I was at, no one confronted him, but they suddenly found the ceiling fascinating. He has also doxxed me, which could get me killed, but still he is protected.) From what I can tell, African-descent Lesbians and het women are much more courageous in confronting female-impersonators (which is dangerous). They also don’t seem to tolerate Euro-descent women claiming to be “Black” like racist Rachel Dolezal does. Dolezal had sued Howard University for fraudulent claims of discrimination over her being Euro-descent, so her claiming to be Black was even more outrageous. She conned people and got a job with the NAACP as the Spokane, Washington chapter president and made public demonstrations supposedly against racism until she was found out. Then she legally changed her name to “Nkechi Amare Diallo.” (The parallels with men claiming to be women re obvious.)

Instead of equality, our community began pushing mainstream hetero-patriarchal classism, like using academic credentials to dominate and win discussions. Lesbian Feminist wariness of therapy changed to where almost everyone was seeing a therapist, with most of the therapists being megalomaniac narcissists who tried to divide Lesbians from each other. Assumptions of class superiority took over from when our community believed the opposite. A couple of years ago, a class-privileged Lesbian who is vice president of a major Lesbian organization actually said to me on the phone, “You say you’re working class, but you sound intelligent.” How do we even deal with Lesbians like this?

Our community also changed when there was a massive influx of Lesbians who had first chosen men before turning to Lesbians. Some joined us, but others made a separate “community” for Lesbians privileged like they were. Many women came out of love for other women, but then some came because their man dumped them and they wanted a better deal. Some of those brought the worst aspects of het women, including being competitive with other Lesbians, and even worse, porn and sado-masochism. Pat Califia, JoAnn Loulan, and Susie Bright presented themselves as creepy sex therapists and made money and careers off pornifying and betraying Lesbians. (We wrote about this in Dykes Loving Dykes.) I still hear some of the myths repeated decades later, like that being hurt in “sex” helps a woman work out trauma, when it’s the opposite.

The sado-masochistic porn can be seen everywhere now in what was once our Lesbian community. Pat Califia (who now says she is a gay man) was obsessed with gay male culture and brought it into our community with a “feminist” veneer. I hate to think of the damage she caused, including rape (in one of her stories in her book, Macho Sluts, a Lesbian was gang-raped by gay men pretending to be cops, as a “birthday present.) Her “work” is public, for men to read, as was the slick porn-funded sado-masochist magazine On Our Backs, with the name a parody of the excellent longtime Feminist newspaper off our backs. Califia later non-consensually carved a swastika into her Jewish lover’s back, and when the lover’s friends went after her, she had them arrested. Even after saying she was a gay man, she remained the advice columnist for Girlfriends magazine. It’s horrifying how these collaborators associated Lesbians with crap. We wrote a chapter about sado-masochism in our book: https://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/chaptersixleather-sm-bdsm-its-all-still-sadism-and-masochism/

There was so much hatred aimed at Lesbian Feminists that I would have trouble not believing that all this was done by agents except that I know too many of those involved. One of the things we discovered when we wrote our book was the differences in thinking and feeling about being Lesbian from those of us who always loved our own kind and those who chose us as second choice. Even the words we use are often different. Lesbians I’ve known talk about love and are ridiculed by later Lesbians who insist on saying “sex” or even “fucking,” as men do. There is a mind/body disconnect that could be explored and fixed, but few talk about it, and, because of their privilege, ex-het Lesbians, particularly male-identified feminine ones, were and are prioritized as being more “real” women.

Even some long time Radical Lesbian Feminists and Separatists never fully became Lesbians. A Fem friend said that she would beat her Butch lovers because she couldn’t get back at her father or ex-husband. Another friend who had fought the porn industry and had written many brilliant books and dedicated her life to supporting girls and women, told me that she never truly opened her heart again after her husband left her, which was in 1974. Yet she proceeded to have many Lesbian lovers (at least 30, she told me), usually choosing Lesbians who were more oppressed than her (she was European-descent and from a ruling class background while her lovers often were Lifelong Lesbians, Lesbians of Color, and class-oppressed Lesbians.) She described how she had broken all of their hearts, including of a much younger Jordanian woman who she had recently targeted and brought out and then dumped for being “boring.” The last time we ate out together, that heart-broken woman was at the restaurant, sitting behind her, stalking her.) This is what men do to women and is not Lesbian. Yet we are told constantly there is no difference between Lesbians who first chose our own kind and this sort of predatory Lesbian. But if we do not explore this and why it happens and try to eliminate it from our communities, then the damage continues and spreads. And yet, this Lesbian was incredibly courageous and did truly devote her life to fighting patriarchy and helping girls and women.

Still, I never sensed from her that she enjoyed hurting Lesbians, unlike some others I knew who reveled in it. A friend says the difference is selfish versus sadistic. The sado-masochists I’ve known truly do enjoy hurting other Lesbians and women. One was even quoted in a history of her previous Lesbian community that she liked to pit women against each other to see what happened. She also announced at a meeting, “We can now reclaim the terms ‘master and slave’!”) I know too many harmed by Lesbian, but she had tremendous power in our community in spite of that.

So What Else Went Wrong? At first there was a strong sense among us of wanting and needing female only space, though many mothers of boys fought that, in spite of girls being assaulted by some of their sons. I still think that was the first breech in our community. Most of these women and a strong sense of entitlement and carried their arguments against their husbands and boyfriends not helping them with their children into our community as if it was the responsibility of Lesbians, including those who chose to never reproduce, to take care of their boys. (One of the myths that is still pushed is that male violence is “socialization” so that if only women would spend even more of our lives on males, we could fix them. Anyone observing other animals will know that male violence is biological and unchangeable. Plus it’s not our job to devote our lives to our oppressors.) One effect of including boys into Lesbian communities was to make the boys become even more entitled. Tobi Hill-Meyer, who was brought to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival each year and decided as an adult to announce he was a Lesbian and a Butch (though being a male-identified “feminine” pornographer who has videos of his prick being wanked off online. He was invited to be on the board of Butch Voices, with power to de-platform real Butches and Lesbians.) At a large Lesbian variety show in Boston, a video was shown of a boy, about 8 years old, who was obviously a darling of his community, sexually assaulting a girl for laughs as she kept yelling “No, stop!” He continued and the audience applauded. How on earth could that have been allowed? Male worship comes in many forms. A het Radical Feminist friend recently wrote about women betraying women for males: Women are the gate keeper of this abuse. The first thing that they think of even as it pertains to rapist and murders is that he could be my husband, lover or son. They never say that his victims could be my sister, daughter, or friend. The next breech was supporting gay men. I’m still amazed at how many Lesbians accept being included in the “LGBTQI” mess when our Lesbian Community was fairly Separatist in wanting female only space, so gay men were not around. Even anti-Separatists agreed with this. In the Eighties, The Bay Times was a local free newspaper that listed events for “Lesbians and Gay men,” which was full of disgusting gay male porn ads. I’ll never forget an advertised pool party for gay men where they actually told Lesbians to not come because we were “dirty.” The irony is that gay men were known for having constant syphilis, gonorrhea, parasites, etc. and were already infected with the STD HIV, so they soon were asking for Lesbian blood, because as their ad said, our blood was the “cleanest.” Yet in spite of the Lesbian-hating history of gay men, plus their massive amount of money and resources that was more than even many het couples had, and their ownership of entire neighborhoods, like the Castro in San Francisco, many Lesbians did flock to help them. All these decades later, when there is no reason to get AIDS, except from rape, Lesbians still donate time and money and do benefits to help gay men with AIDS. They ignore the popularity of “barebacking,” which means gay men using no protection when they fuck. Even worse, a gay man I met at a Lesbian bar who was dying of AIDS said how upset he is that gay men frequently ask him to give them AIDS. (He looked heartbroken as he told me.) He also said that gay men would never have helped Lesbians if we had anything like AIDS. In fact, there is basically no support for Lesbians dealing with terminal illnesses. How many know that the history of the Shanti Project, which was started to help dying Lesbians and gay men, but when the AIDS epidemic started, dying Lesbians were kicked out? I still do not understand Lesbians supporting with money and their own blood the men with so much power who clearly despise us. They have the money and media access to make month-long “Pride” events that pornify or erase Lesbians while promoting the het men claiming to be Lesbians. Even worse, they pretend to show our history as they lie about us in their expensively-made films, which remain in a way that we can’t begin to counter with the truth. An example is a mini-series made by gay men for a major US television network that not only slanders Lesbians we know personally who helped create our community but confuses the Bay Area Lesbian history with that of New York City. (I wrote an article for GenderTrender to try to show our actual history: Defending Our Lesbian Lives and History from Male Erasure –

https://keepingreallesbianfeminismsimple.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/defending-our-lesbian-lives-and-history-from-male-erasure/

The in-depth thinking that I saw in the early days of Lesbian Feminism seems gone now, so that everything is compartmentalized. But for those who look, gay men are of course mostly allied with the het men claiming to be trans because gay men often want sexual access to het men, as well as allying with them in their hatred of Lesbians and women. (It’s good if some are against the trans cult, but I am not seeing it and I think it’s dangerous for Lesbians to assume they are our allies.)

And of course het and bisexual women are prioritized by Lesbians, which undermines us and our communities as well. (If really questioned, most het and bisexual women show how much they hate us, including insisting they are not making choices.) One of the problems in the Lesbian community was wanting to support everyone and not let anyone feel left out, but that was taken to extremes where the oppressors are welcomed and their victims exiled, which is the horrific situation we are now in. One of the most harmful things done to Lesbians was the psychiatrists saying we were “born this way” and couldn’t change. But Lesbian Feminism brilliantly countered that by saying who we love is a choice, and of course all females are born to love our own kind, which is something to be proud of. That certainly explained the hordes of women coming out when we made it easier for them, and explained the few going back when they wanted more privilege, including being accepted by their families. I still do not know why so many Lesbians claiming to be Radical Feminists flipped to join gay and het men in claiming we have no choice especially when it’s obvious who this benefits: men and patriarchy, but also het women who would rather not think about their choices (unless they decide their better option is with Lesbians and then they can say, after decades of choosing men, “I was always a Lesbian, but just didn’t know it” – in spite of access to countless books, Lesbian friends, etc.) Women choosing to be bisexual being welcomed into our communities is an extreme of how it is clearly a choice, but they are rarely held accountable and instead pretend to be oppressed when Lesbians say no to them joining Lesbian only organizations. In an effort to protect ourselves from the het men claiming to be Lesbians, some have started groups calling themselves “LGB,” but why not go back to just being Lesbians together? Still, there is one thing ignored in how we could finally have safe, truly Lesbian communities again, and that is if there was enough money. In the beginning, we made community in our own apartments or rented houses, but now it costs a fortune to even rent a room. If we had our own money, we could do what we wanted, but how on earth could that happen? Some Lesbians I know are literally millionaires from having family money or money from their past men, but invariably they leave it to family, including males who are virtual strangers. I will never understand why they do this when they could help Lesbians to not be homeless and for us to have community spaces again. Still, we could start over in a sense, or really just continue with those who do know and care. There is no age divide that I see since friends of all ages still have our Radical Lesbian Feminist politics. But there are two problems, beside the means to have spaces. First, Lesbians need to stop being afraid of saying the truth about who we are and who our enemy is. No more returning to the shadows to hide. No going along with fantasies about changing pronouns or saying men are women in order to not hurt their feelings, as if they care about us at all. No more talk of men having ‘’dysphoria” when it’s girls and women who are dysphoric to where most hate their bodies and mutilate themselves. (Some of this does affect girls and women to insist they are male, but those who reach that level of betrayal are not our responsibility. They already get far more support than we do. If they return to us, fine, but in my experience, the level of hatred and entitlement they have means most want to destroy us, and blame us for the decisions they made, in spite of how we have supported them for decades.) Second, all Lesbians need to learn our actual history and not the myths that keep being spread that erase us. https://keepingreallesbianfeminismsimple.wordpress.com/2021/10/24/please-help-stop-the-erasing-of-radical-lesbian-feminism/

Third, truly prioritize Lesbians for once and not everyone else. And have the courage to be public about it. That could change everything. In spite of the Lesbian-hating propaganda and books, we still have way more that supports us than when I was growing up. We can revive our best information and continue to rebuild our community.

Bev Jo's Bio: I’ve been a Lesbian from my earliest memories and am proud to be a Lesbian. Lesbians are my people and my blood. My life’s work has been defending Lesbians and our culture and existence against those who oppress us. I’m working-class, ex-catholic, mostly European-descent (with some Native American ancestry). I’m a Lifelong Lesbian, born near Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950. I became lovers with my first lover in 1968, became part of the Bay Area Lesbian Feminist community in 1970, and became a Dyke Separatist in 1972. (I have always lived in cities. Being a Lesbian Separatist does not mean living on "land.") I helped create Radical Lesbian Feminist and Separatist community and worked on some of the earliest Lesbian Feminist projects, such as the Lesbian Feminist Conference in Berkeley in 1972 (one of the first in the world), the newspaper “Dykes and Gorgons” in 1973, the women’s bookstore and Lesbian coffeehouse, and taught self defense to women and girls. In 1983 our collection made a Dyke Separatist Gathering in San Francisco, and I worked on later gatherings in Wisconsin. I’ve been published in journals and anthologies, including “For Lesbians Only,” “Finding the Lesbians,” “Lesbian Friendships,” “Amazones d’Hier, Lesbiennes Aujourd’hui,” “Mehr als das Herz Gebrochen,” the Journal for Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Ethics, Sinister Wisdom, Trivia, and Rain and Thunder. With Linda Strega and Ruston, I co-wrote our book, “Dykes-Loving-Dykes: Dyke Separatist Politics for Lesbians Only” in 1990. We still have hard copies, but most of our book is also online at my blog: https://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/ My second blog has more recent articles: https://keepingreallesbianfeminismsimple.wordpress.com/ I have enough articles for at least two more books, if anyone would publish them. I’ve been disabled since 1981 with ME/CFIDS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome) or perhaps Lyme disease (who the hell knows) and MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.) I always vote against the nazis/right wing, but I have never been a leftist. I love nature and plants and animals — and especially the animals who are feared and hated and killed by people who don’t even know them, just as Lesbians are. I’ve learned to love rats especially, who I do not consider inferior to humans. I’m a spiritual atheist, but I’ve found out that there is definitely life after death because a little rat returned from the dead for three days to comfort us. In our fight to protect the earth, distrust all “truths” we are taught by patriarchy, including by the “experts.” The true truth is often the opposite.