It’s been almost two weeks since Aunt Lute’s well attended event at La Peña: the Simple Revolution reading, and a community dialogue which centered on the topic “Struggle, Then and Now.” After taking several days to digest the ideas presented by the readers, round table participants and audience, I wanted to find a way to [...]

I will begin with my name, Animal Prufrock. When I was fifteen years old, my high school English teacher introduced our class to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. I was a very conscious teen with cosmic interests and an esoteric melancholia of my own―feeling very alone in my deep, while the superficial high school buzz filled the hallways and halftimes with cotton candy and cute shoes. I did have my own pair of cute shoes―the last vestige of butch I could express in the forced catholic pleated uniform that made me be a girl in the skirted way girls must be―even in 1990. I had an Italian Catholic name back then―long letters and lots of a’ & e’s and lli’s. If only I could have erased the last feminizing vowels, I would have been a boy.

This month’s guest blogger is photographer Cathy Cade, who has been publishing and exhibiting her work on LGBT communities for over 40 years. In this set of photos, ranging from 1972 to 2011, you’ll find Dykes on Bikes, Angela Davis, and Bank of America protests from 1972 and, more recently, the Occupy movement (2011). Mouseover “Notes” to view the captions for each photograph. You can view more of her work on her website.

Writing this memoir (A Simple Revolution) puts me back into a time that was very far in the past, when segregation, sexism, homophobia, and silence ruled everywhere. My generation, spurred by brave souls who had gone before us, broke through some walls, made some changes, and triggered off one hell of a backlash that has come to dominate the national scene—in the last decade especially. Thinking about those times makes me want to ask questions of younger people—especially LBGT younger people—who are engaged in today’s problems:

What do you see as your most pressing issues? What in society do you think needs to change? Is it jobs and housing? Is it how to keep a lover? Is it social justice? Is it not wanting to be defined or boxed in? What do you hope for your future? Do you feel a need for community around you or is it enough to have Facebook and Twitter? To have a virtual community? Are cross-generational friendships important to you?

I am genuinely interested in your responses and promise to check back here often. I’m excited to participate in a real dialogue around your concerns.

Guess when each photo of Judy was taken and win a prize!

In my senior year in high school I became fixated on the range of mountains outside our Mesilla Valley town, called the “Organ Mountains” because of their stark spires. My best friend’s boyfriend Skip offered to take me up their steep sides, and my friend Jan came with us. The daylong trip became an initiation [...]

I want to tell you why I decided to call this community website (as well as a section from my memoir), “A Simple Revolution”. This phrase is adapted from my sister poet and friend Pat Parker’s poem, “It’s a Simple Dream”. In her poem, published in 1974, about four years into Gay Women’s Liberation, the narrator asserts that she doesn’t want a revolution that is of the vanguard, or of the masses or that turns the world all over, that she as a black gay woman just wants to walk down the streets holding hands with her lover, go to a bar, use a public bathroom—and not be arrested by the police, harassed by white bikers, beaten by her black brothers, screamed at by ladies (that is to say, straight women) in bathrooms.

We held the first all-women’s dance of our west coast Gay Women’s Liberation movement in Berkeley in 1970, in a very plain green-walled rented, or maybe donated, hall. Several dyke volunteers guarded the doors to make sure men stayed away. All-women’s dances were happening in 1970 in New York and Boston as well, and perhaps other places, indicating that activist lesbians were on a similar energy beam and had moved outside the bar scenes. The guarded, possessive quality of typical gay bar life fell away for a while; we connected with each other in an eroticism of promises and power. A communal erotic and rebellious beat took hold of us; we began to dance with whoever was there, not as a romantic arrangement, but as a flirtatious soaking up and spreading of a new exhilarating vibrational rate. As I remember these were not couple dances, more geometric figures—four, five-sided, or circular—and the dancing was vigorous, interactive. In that first rush of sexual solidarity, we saw each other as a group of warriors, Gay Women’s Liberation’s handsome warriors. We saw each other, and in that first bursting we liked what we saw.