DYKE A Quarterly, No 3, pp 22-25, Coming Out On Celluloid by Janet Meyers. Photobooth still from the film Getting Ready by Janet Meyers.

For the past three years I have been making a movie which I am just now finishing. When I first conceived the idea and started writing the script in 1973 I was straight, although I had stopped related to men long before. Now the film is finished and I am have have been for two years a Dyke.

The long process of working on the difficult project has taken place a the same time as vast changes in consciousness and perspective that go along with becoming a Dyke and getting involved in the Lesbian community. These two processes, working on the film and coming out, have been very much interrelated. At time in an exciting and illuminating way, and times with great conflict and anxiety.

Working on one project over such a long period while my whole personal and political vision was radically altered created a dynamic which as helped me to see some things about Lesbian culture as a spectator and as a creator.

I started out in my first year of graduate film school with the idea that I wanted to make a film about menstruation. I wanted it to be a kind of rite of passage for an experience which men's society treats as both divinely ordained and unmentionable. As I continued thinking about it I came to feel that the best way to do this would be to place the experience in the context of the life of an adolescent girl.

In the past, when I was straight, m films had often surprised me by revealing feelings that I was not aware of having. I would find myself watching the little movies I had made and being shocked at how angry or isolated the women in them were. when I finished writing the script for this film I understood that I had written about the atmosphere of female adolescence of which menstruation is certainly a part, but that mostly the script had come to describe the growth of a relationship between two fourteen year old girls. the self-censorship, the longing and the healing potential of feelings between young girls and the massive and subtle acculturation which minimizes the value of these feelings and separates us from  each other while we're young became the substance of the movie I began to make. Looking at the script I saw the emotional and political implications of the experiences I was describing and the ways in which my own life was still controlled by the same conditioning process I was trying to portray. Without further drama I gradually began identifying as and speaking about myself as a Lesbian.

The integrations of this identification into my work was far from complete. during the months long process of raising the money from grants, scholarships, interested Lesbians, my parents, my own savings, and during the six weeks of shooting, I went through all kinds of difficulties directly related to Lesbian oppression and quite in addition to the regular pressures and agonies everyone goes through during shooting.

The whole ugly process of writing proposals asking for money from various foundations was complicated by the necessity to change the language and tone in descriptions of of what was, after all, a film about friendship. My earlier experiences with foundations had shown me that they feel that intimacy and connections between women, however chaste, as a sustaining ideal is a threatening and inappropriate theme for support. In subtle ways the version I was presenting to the authorities began to creep into my own understanding of what I was doing. The emphasis began changing from the process of two girls moving towards each other back to that of a single girl going through some characteristically adolescent experiences. fortunately I realized what has happening, so that during the actual shooting I went back to my original plan and I tried to avoid situations that would put me in the position of having to explain or justify what I was doing to prob ably hostile people.  for instance, I asked the young girls who acted in the film not ot bring th script home to their parents, who I felt might be upset about some of the specific scenes and general tone. They all felt that was a good idea even seemed relieved, and we continued to proceed in that fashion whenever necessary.

DYKE, A Quarterly. No 3. p 34.  1976. Alice Austen

Alice Austen - Photographs

By Penny and Liza

Alice Austen was a Lesbian born on Staten Island, NY in 1866. She started taking photographs at the age of twelve and continued until the nineteen thirties. She was an enthusiastic athlete, excelling in swimming, cycling, boating, golf and tennis in a n age when women were just being allowed to do any sports at all. She was an excellent mechanic who with her lover, Gertrude Tate, and other friends, took long car journeys in a time when there were almost no paved roads. 

Alice Austen and her dog Punch. Alice leaving for the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Alice is holding the concealed bulb of the remote shutter release. DYKE A Quarterly No. 3 p 37

She thoroughly documented her own life and that of her friends, where were well-to-do young women, both Lesbian and straight, and who wer straining against the last remnants of Victorian morality. She photographed extensively the immigrants and street life of the lower east side of New York City. The style of her photographs was unusually realistic for her time.

Alice Austen Photo. Violet Ward and her lover. DYKE A Quarterly, no. 3 p 36

In 1929 she lost all her money. She and Gertrude supported themselves by selling their furniture, renting rooms in their home, running a tea room, and by the income from Gertrude's dance classes, which she taught until she was in her late seventies. They were finally forced to leave their home on Staten Island in the nineteen forties. They moved into a small apartment, but soon were forced to separate. Alic, 83 years old, suffered from severe arthritis and Gertrude had a difficult time caring for her. Gertrude's younger straight sister, who had long tried to separate the two, took advantage of Alice's ill health and the morality of the time which dictated a two bedroom apartment which they could not afford. Gertrude went to live with her sister and Alice to a nursing home. Gertrude visited regularly, bu they were both very lonely. Alice was kicked out of several different nursing homes for her too independent nature, and at 84 was admitted to the hospital ward of the Staten Island poorhouse.

Her plate glass negatives had been sold to the Staten Island Historical Society, and in 1951 were "discovered" by a photographic historian. He sold some of the photographs to magazines and turned the money over to Gertrude, who moved Alice to a pleasanter home Alice began to be recognized for her life long work as a photographer. A year later, in June of 1952, she died, sitting in her wheelchair in the sun. Gertrude lived on for ten years, and when she died her sister was unable to bury her next to Alice, as they had wished.

Violet Ward and Daisy Eliot. Photo by Alice Austen. Violet was a childhood friend of Alice's. Daisy Eliot was a professional gymnast. Violet, an enthusiastic cyclist, invented a mechanism for bicycles that was universally adopted. Alice took the photographs for Violet's book, Bicycling for Ladies, published in 1896. Daisy was the model.

Bessie Strong's Bedroom. Bessie was a friend of Alice's. One of the special aspects of Alice's work is that she was interested in documenting the the intimate details of young women's lives, where few other photographers were willing or able to do so. Note Alice's photographs tacked up on the walls. DYKE A Quarterly No 3, 1976

 THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Of the estimated seven to eight thousand glass plate negatives that Alice took, approximately one half are known to survive. Alice was a stickler for detail, often making her friends pose for hours and hours until she could get the exact expression, setting and light she wanted. She carefully marked the envelope for each glass plate with the time, date, place, exposure and lens type.

Alice Austen, Newsgirl on NYC's Lower East Side. DYKE A Quarterly No 3, 1976

Alice carried nearly fifty pounds of photographic equipment on her journeys. She always liked t have at least two cameras with her, as each camera could take only one size print. No enlargements were possible in those days.

"Alice luckily was a tall and strong woman, perfectly capable of carrying her own heavy camera, tripod, and box of plates...She spent hours on end in her closet -like darkroom, developing plates and 'toning' and 'fixing' her prints...Because there was no running water in the house when she was young, she carried [the plates] all downstairs and out into the garden to be rinsed in a basin under the hand operated pump, winter and summer. sometimes she changed the rinse water twenty five times, she recalled. Gertrude Tate attributed Alice's photographic success to a combination of artistic sense, the tirelessness of an athlete, and sheer stubbornness of will."

Gertrude Tate, Alice's lover, circa 1900. DYKE A Quarterly No. 3, 1976

"The originality of Alice Austen's work becomes strikingly clear when it is compared to that of other photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women photographers in particular succumbed to the fashion of making photographs to illustrate romantic tales of childhood, and of colonial village life or popular works such as The Rubiayat of Omar Kayyam... Daily American life, if pictured at all, was sentimentalized beyond recognition. The children picked posies of wild flowers in sublime landscapes while their mothers struck classical poses in diaphanous flowing garments of some eclectic style...most photographers of her period did [their] best to prove that photography was a form of art by trying to disguise the fact that [their] pictures were made by mechanical means -the precise fact that Alice enjoyed about photography. Alice's work was out of tune with the fashionable dictates of her time.

Gertrude, circa 1920. DYKE A Quarterly No 3, 1976

"Alice Austen...photographed people and places as they actually appeared, focusing her lens so sharply that every small detail of leaf or woodwork, facial expression or lettering on a sign, was recorded. She approached her subjects straightforwardly, without any attempt at the refinement, grace and decorative sense encouraged in the photographic journals of her most productive years...Pictorialists may have portrayed nymph-like young women floating apparently weightless in unruffled ponds and dancing on tiptoe effortlessly through flower filled fields: Alice Austen recorded her friends in the flannel skirts and woolen stockings of clumsy bathing suits calculated to impede the movements of the strongest swimmers, and she showed them doing  their daily gymnastic exercises to develop the strength their daily lives required. Alice Austen's women ride bicycles and horses, work in the streets and market places and are a vigorous and real as Alice herself."

Alice and Gertrude. DYKE A Quarterly No. 3. 1976

Thanks to Ann Novotny for help, information and photographs. All quotations are from Ann's book, Alice's World - The Life and Photographs of An American Original: Alice Austen 1866-1952, which will be published this fall by Chatham press. Quotations printed with permission of the author.

Cover photo. Alice and her friends, Trudy, Julia and Sue formed a cooking and sewing club. "The four girls spent so much time in each others company that disgruntled young men referred to 'the darned club,' a name the members delightedly adopted." Alice is on the left, once again holding the remote control shutter release.

Ann is chairwoman of The Friends Of Alice Austen, who are trying to restore Alice's house and turn it into a museum of her life and work. They plan to have rotating exhibits of women photographers. Anyone who is interested or would like to help should write to Friends of Alice Austen, 315 W. 78 Street, New York, Ny 10024 #1,

Photographs courtesy of the Staten Island Historical Society.

See more about creating the cover for issue No.3. using Alice's photo That Darned Club, here

DYKE A Quarterly, No. 3. Photo That Darned Club by Alice Austen

The Alice Austen House did come to pass. It is a National Historic Landmark on Staten Island. Ann Novotny died of breast cancer shortly after we wrote our story, but her work and passion lives on. Read about the Alice Austen House HERE.

For more on women and photography at the turn of the last century try this wonderful blog, Kodak Girl. Kodak invested heavily in marketing their cameras to women, quite successfully. 

Bicycling for Ladies. ME Ward. Maria Ward aka Violet. See more HERE

How To Coast. Illustration from Alice Austen photo in Bicycling for Ladies by ME Ward.

Frances Benjamin Johnston, American photojournalist, took this self portrait with a bicycle. Johnston wrote What A Woman Can Do with a Camera for the Ladies Home Journal in 1897, a year after Bicyling For Ladies was published. Notice the painted on moustache. The ladies did like to lark about.

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The Alice Austen House Website is gorgeous and filled with great photos and information. Do CHECK IT OUT

And they have a Facebook page too.

Screenshot of Alice Austen House website. April 2012. www.aliceausten.org

OUTCOMES: LGBTQ Stories from the Hudson Valley - ALIX DOBKIN from Joy E. Reed on Vimeo.

Alix talks about coming out. I am grateful that our stories are being recorded for herstory.

For more about the film see their Facebook Page

Good news on the archiving front. DYKE A Quarterly is now housed in two prestigeous institutions. Really...we couldn't ask for more.

An entire set of the magazines, including the poster, are now at The Museum Of Modern Art, in their Library. They are available to scholars and researchers and the general public by appointment. Here's the LINK to the library. 

An entire set of the magazines as well as all the collateral materials - that's the letters, layout boards, mock ups, fliers, and whatever fascinating bits of paper we saved over the years- is now housed at Radcliffe College at The Schlesinger Library. Here's a LINK.

DYKE A Quarterly No. 3. p. 48. Reviews of Linda Shear and The Performance at Grace & Rubies CLICK TO ENLARGE

DYKE A Quarterly No. 3 p. 49. Review of Hysterical Hystoricals, Lesbian Connection, Dynamite Damsels CLICK TO ENLARGE

Hysterical Hystoricals: A Lesbian-Feminist Revue

 Written and produced by: IV Women Productions; Doreen DiBiagio, Chris Larkin, Robyn Lutsky, Joanne Schumann. Directed by Margueite McLaughlin. Music by Robyn Lutsky. Musical arrangements Kathi Sheer. Orchestration by Roberta Kosse. Musical direction by Robyn Lutsky and Kath Sheer. Lighting design by Shelly Blue, Dreen DiBiagio and Debbie Wieser. Set design by Doreen DiBiagio. Costumes by Louise Martinez. Choreography by Murphy Cross. Musicians: Mrj Conn, Robyn Lutsky, Natash Olate, Kathi Sheer, Alina Trobridge. Cast: Kathy Tedeschi, Marge Helenchild, Jan Goldman, JoAnn Starkey, Lillian Engelson, Doreen DiBiagia, Chris Larkin and Robyn Lutsky.

We were just talking about how nice it would be to see a Lesbian musical play when the fleer for Hysterical Hystoricals came in the mail. Of course we ordered tickets and went to see the play during Lesbian Pride Week in New York City.

How nice it was to go into the little theater with real theater seats and a real stage. It was exciting to sit and wait for it all to begin, watching the heater fill up with Dykes, all different types of Dykes, some scruffy movement Dykes, some not scruffy movement Dykes, and several women wearing bouffant hairdos and shell tops. I never see these kind of women at most Lesbian events, and it was a pleasure to see them at the theater.

We read the program and then the lights dimmed and the orchestra began the overture. It was great. We had been listening to Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma for months and it was a thrill to listen to the overture of a real Dyke musical. The play began. It was a series of short skits, commemorating the bicentennial, sort of, but mostly commemorating Dykes. Queen Isabella and Christina Columbus are having  lovers spat. Christina goes off to sail around the world with her all women crew. In a later skit, “Sappho’s Hideaway” Christina has discovered the New World in a women’s bar in Flatbush. The year is 1493. “I’m always late” says Christina “We had to start without you” they say. In another skit, Ms. Grossinger negotiates a deal to by Manhattan for Ms. Rockerfeller. In a ballroom scene all ten Dykes in the cast are wearing long ball gowns, singing and dancing with each other. The look terrific, hairy arpits, cowboy boots and all. They give an award to Zero, who does underground work with women. She always leaves the mark of Zero. She is a klutz.

In the old West, two cowbutches are planning a showdown gunfight to see who will wind the femme. The femme becomes disgusted, “You’re a mean and ornery critter, Calra mae” she said. “Neither of you can win me.” And she goes off with another femme.

The skits were all well done & very funny. Sometimes it was a little hard to hear the lyrics to the songs, but we were sitting right next to the drum. The music was well arranged, catchy, well played and hummable. The costumes were funny and funky. Everything was good. The show was entertaining and inspiring as well. It was truly a pleasure to spend an evening at Dyke Theater. By Liza Cowan

DYKE A Quarterly, Issue 1, p. 4, introduction

DYKE A Quarterly, Issue 1, p. 5, Introduction

Text (edited) below in grey. For full text see above. You can click to enlarge it.
 
WHO WE ARE

We are Penny House and Liza Cowan. We are Dyke separatists, Born and bred. We are 26 years old and Jewish. We have known each other since we were four years old. We went to school and camp together, hung out together. Lived together, and fought intensely twice. Once over a boy when we were fourteen and didn’t know what was happening, and once just a few months before  Penny came out...(snip)

  During the past five years Liza produced feminist then Lesbian radio shows at WBAI-FM including a show called "Dyke Salad”  a live five hour weekly series. Later she co-edited COWRIE, a Lesbian-feminist magazine. Penny was at this time going to school, producing Lesbian concerts with a woman’s music group, and working with Alix Dobkin. A year ago, Liza and Alix, who are lovers, moved to a farm with Alix’s daughter, Adrian... (snip)

We both love to read and have always loved to read magazines. We talk about both the form and content extensively. Between us we read: Lesbian Connection, Lavender Woman, Off Our Backs, The Lesbian Tide, Big Mama Rag, Majority Report, Sister, Country Woman, The Circle (from New Zeland) Long Time Coming (Montreal) Moonstorm, The Monthly Extract, New York Radical Feminist Newsletter, Womanspirit, and Albatross.

 From the patriarchal press we read: Organic Gardening, Publisher’s Weekly, Vogue, People, New York, The New Yorker, Interview, Rona Barrett Hollywood, Rona Barrett Gossip, Newsweek, Mainstream, The New York Times, The New York Post, National Geographic, Horse and Horseman, Yankee Pedlar, The New York Horse, House & Garden and TV Guide. It seemed natural for us to create a Lesbian magazine.

WHAT IS DYKE 

 We want to publish a magazine that fulfills our need for analysis, communication and news of Lesbian culture. We believe that “Lesbian culture” presumes a separatist analysis. If Lesbian culture is intermixed with straight culture, it is no longer Lesbian; it is heterosexual or heterosocial because energy and time are going to men. Lesbian community – Lesbian culture- means Lesbian only DYKE is a magazine for Dykes only! We will speak freely among ourselves. We are not interested in telling the straight world what we are doing. In fact, he hope they never even see the magazine. It is none of their business. If they chance to see it, we hope they will think it is mindless gobbledegook. We are already thinking in ways that are incomprehensible to them.

 INSIDE DYKE

Dyke will carry feature articles on theoretical politics, live events, place, current and past history, media, fashions, music, home economics, literature, animal lore, health, applied sciences and gossip. DYKE will be covering Lesbian culture and straight culture. Straight culture is present in our lives and in our minds. It is violent and perverted. We recognize and analyze it and in this way prevent it from retarding our growth. We believe separatism demands constant vigilance and analysis. DYKE magazine will reflect this." (snip)

To see more about Lesbian and Feminist periodicals of the time check here and here. and here

For an insightful analysis of 1970's Lesbian Feminism, see Urvashi Vaid's most excellent essay, Ending Patriarchy: Political Legacies of the 1970's, published in Trivia, Issue 11, October 2010. Vaid presented this talk on October 9th, 2010 at the CUNY Conference in New York City, In Amerika They Call Us Dykes, Lesbian Lives In the 1970's 

What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear. DYKE  A Quarterly No. 1, pages 20-25

Abridged text in grey italics, comments in black. Click to enlarge page to read it in full.

What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear

By Liza Cowan

 When I was co-editing COWRIE I wrote a series called, “What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear.”  The quotations her are taken from that series.

OPPRESSION

“Women have been forced to dress as objects since the invention of patriarchy. Do you object to my saying that women are forced to wear certain clothing? I know some women will say that no one Is forced to wear anything. If women go along with these social/fashion customs, there are just stupid. But this is not true. If you don’t dress the way you are supposed to, you are a social outcast. If you function in mainstream culture you may be fired from your job, kicked out of school, ridiculed by our ‘peers’ and family. It takes great courage to defy your class and sex taboos.” (February 1974)

Sometimes I forget how different we’re looking these days. My eye has become so accustomed to our short cropped hair, baggy work trousers, vests, boots ad our direct stares. The other day Alix and I went up to town to pick up Adrian at school. It was the first time we had been there since school opened. Adrian usually comes and goes on the school bus. Her class wasn’t quite finished when we arrived, so we hung out in the hall. Several classes were on their way to the cafeteria, and every kid in that hall stared at us as if we had three eyes, and they were not merely curious. Lots of them were hostile, especially the little boys.

Ordinarily we would have let the boys know that it was past due time for them to be castrated. Especially me. I hate little boys and I love to make scenes. However, we were in Adrian’s school. She’s five years old and has no choice about where to live or go to school. We know how heavy the other children in that rural public school could make it for her. At least in the city there are bound to be other children whose parents are weird, but here in the country everyone is pretty much the same except for the Lesbians, and Adrian is the only child in our Dyke community. Clearly nobody in that school had ever seen the likes of us, two stompin’ Dykes, trained in the streets of New York City. So we had to act like “Mommie and Aunt Liza” (or whoever I was saying I was that day.) We were wearing the wrong costumes to play that part. It’s way past time when we might want to pass at Adrian’s school. We’d never be able to pull it off, anyway. The last time we put on Ladies clothes Alix looked like Jan Morris. I guess our solution at school is to keep a low profile and hope for the best.

The following is commentary by Liza Cowan, written for this archive in 2011

Thirty five years later, I'm amazed by how much has changed yet so much has stayed the same.

Clothing

When I wrote these essays in the mid seventies, I didn't have the vocabulary to write cultural  theory about clothing. I hadn't been to college yet, but more than that, cultural studies didn't really enter the academy until the late seventies.  The idea of reading clothing as text was barely developed, and an interest in clothing was considered feminine i.e. devalued.  It's no wonder that my theory was simultaneously rudimentary and passionate. That said, I'm proud that my colleagues and I understood that examining clothing in the context of power was a worthy endeavor. We believed the feminist credo: the personal is political. Our readers, for the most part, found our interest in clothing superficial, classist and apolitical. 

From Our Right To Love, Ginny Vida, Ed. 1978

"This visually enticing quarterly magazine abuses valuable news space by filling it with trite meanderings on such superficial subjects as dyke fashions and interior decorating. Lacking political analysis(even of dyke separatism) or the talents to express the written word, DYKE, fortunately still a baby in the lesbian publishing world, unfortuneately displays the temperment of a spoiled brat"

These days there are some excellent  blogs about clothing and theory. For example, see Worn Out, a scholarly and beautiful blog. Universities offer cross disciplinary classes and conferences on the politics of fashion. We wer just ahead of our time.  

Daily Life Of a little Dyke family in rural New York circa 1975

Alix Dobkin, her daughter, Adrian, and I were living on a farm in the tiny hamlet of Preston Hollow, Schoharie County, New York. Partly back-to-the-land, partly Lesbian Separatist, we had  moved there from New York City in 1974 with another Lesbian couple.  There were a few other Lesbians who lived somewhat nearby. Penny lived there in the summers. We were the only Dykes with a child. We were the only Jews. None of our neighbors were even divorced. We were in a new territory without much of a map.  We were terrified that our neighbors would be vicious. The first time it snowed I cried. We had never lived outside of New York City.

We did try to be good neighbors; we kept our place tidy, waved to folks on the road and chatted with people at the hamlet's one market and post office. It turned out that the neighbors liked us well enough. They thought we were strange, but likable. They cared less that we were Lesbians, and more that we kept our property tidy and we were friendly, so word got out that we were OK. Or OK enough for them to be neighborly. We were Lesbians, but we were their  Lesbians. Some became friends.

At age five, Alix's daughter Adrian was in kindergarten. Maybe first grade. She took the bus from Preston Hollow to Middleburg every day. It was a 45 minute ride. None of the other parents knew usexcept by town gossip.  Sociable by nature, Adrian nevertheless only made friends with a few of the children who lived down the road.

Adrian remembers that her teachers singled her out to be mean to, and the other children, but for a few, were not allowd to play with her. But it wasn't only the rural parents - the ones from the city could be just as bad. It was, in fact, a city friend's mom who was the most homophobic and vile to little Adrian, who came home one after one weekend in the city with her Dad, crying, "Andrea's mom says we can't play anymore because you are hobos."

"What??"

"Hobos. Andrea's mom says you're hobos and I can't play with Andrea?"

"Do you know what a Hobo is?

"No, but she thinks you're bad."

It took us a few minutes but we figured out that we were homos. Homos. We explained to Adrian that homo was a word for same sex couples like us. And that Andrea's mom was an idiot. But our theories and explanations didn't make Adrian's life any easier for her. She longed to be treated as if she were normal. Her moms were happliy not normal. All The choices were fraught with consequences.

In a year or so Adrian moved to New York city with her dad, then subesequently they moved to Woodstock, NY an hour's drive south of us, soon followed by Alix, then by me. We had separated as a family, but only in the traditional heteronormative sense. In the Lesbian sense we remained very much an enlarged and engaged family. And Woodstock was full of weirdos: artists, hippies, musicians...so being a Hobo wasn't such a big deal.

Adrian grew up into a wonderful woman: smart, talented, kind, beautiful. She has a terrific family; a husband, three gorgeous kids, doting Grandmas Alix and Nancy down the road, and a bevy of faithful long - term friends. She's the best.

The comment about little boys: I was being dramatic. I hated how boys were raised with the assumption of gender power and it showed all over their bodies, their posture, their clothing, their play. Castration? We lived in farm country, and it was an easy metaphor. It was a castration of the Phallus=symbolic in the Lacanian, theoretical sense, not the actual body. Castration in fact? No. Of course not. I was angry - not delusional.