DYKE A Quarterly, No. 2. Linda Shear, Who Gets Left Out When The Music Starts.

exerpt:

I am not interested in being a WOMAN musician, doing what the “Movement Women Musicians (even, and sometimes especially Lesbians) define as Women’s Music. I have heard myself discussed within the words of “us” and “we”. But you and I have very different views about who “we” are, and who the enemy is.

 We confront a struggle to survive with very different assumptions. As we compute, analyze, judge, and utilize our experiences as Lesbians, musician, and women, in very different ways.

 You want to deal within a broad category because “our lives are so complex”. I say that our lives are some complex because we Lesbians have dealt too long with a broad category. We have Helped build broad categories, and then discover that our Lesbian identities become lost in these universal, patriarchal-motivated, subversive broad categories. And I am bitter about being banned from the “movement concert-circuit” because I will not sing my songs for men.