There are some bitchy bull-dyke type women on the Mudcat - despite them being "breeders" - they appear to be lesbians - it sort of goes with goddess spiritualism and the rejection of Judeo/Christian values.
Queer as Folk New York Times - August 18, 2002
By DAVID HAJDU
At some point in most of her concerts, Christine Lavin goes looking for a man. A singer-songwriter prominent in the folk-music circuit for more than a decade, Lavin is a drolly impish performer with a flair for the theatrical. She affixes a miner's light on her head, steps offstage and roams around the audience in search of the best-looking man in the house. "The interesting thing to me," she says, "is that I'll be looking for a man, and I'll have the light on, and I'll see 20 women, and I'll see one man in the whole section." The audience for artists like Lavin, like that of folk music in general, is predominantly female and increasingly gay.
Lavin is not homosexual, but she welcomes all listeners. "There's no reason that gay women wouldn't relate to the stuff that I'm writing, because relationships are relationships," she says. But Lavin, whose latest record is "I Was in Love With a Difficult Man," has been distressed to see some of her CD's categorized in stores as "women's music" -- the code phrase for feminist and lesbian music, a great deal of it in the acoustic-folk vein. "Once you're labeled that way," she says, "men totally won't set foot in the door, because they think it's not for them."
Folk music has become the sound of lesbian culture. It is to gay women what cabaret and disco have been to gay men or what jazz has been to African-Americans -- in the phrase Duke Ellington coined, a "tone parallel" to a world underexplored in other musics. Resolutely political, intimately personal, unadorned, steeped in tradition and connected to the earth, folk music carries deep-rooted associations with what it means to be a gay woman. "We're seeing the coming together of a way of life and a form of expression that's kind of primary," says Lisa Merrill, a professor of performance history at Hofstra University. "This doesn't happen often."
The rise of gay women in folk music is difficult to quantify; all those female faces at concerts by women folksingers is no more proof of a lesbian phenomenon than arenas full of boys at Metallica shows means that all heavy-metal fans are gay. However, the number of female performers in folk who are openly lesbian, bisexual or actively pro-gay has been rising in recent years and seemingly at a higher rate than in other styles of music. The music festivals, concert halls and clubs have rosters full of artists who are lesbian or widely recognized as gay-friendly: Melissa Etheridge, Ani DiFranco, k.d. lang, the Indigo Girls, Nanci Griffith, Holly Near, Janis Ian, Tret Fure, Melissa Ferrick, Toshi Reagon, Jill Sobule, Cheryl Wheeler, Patty Larkin and dozens more. According to Ellen Friedman, who runs a Boston-area booking agency with her lesbian partner, the proportion of gay women in folk is "much, much greater" than in other musical genres "and expanding constantly."
Lesbians have had such success in acoustic music that more than one female performer has been charged with posing as a lesbian to exploit the market -- and some men in the field have begun to talk of feeling alienated. Others in folk circles, while acknowledging the right of gay women to play any music they like, express concern that folk, by definition the most inclusive of musics, might be becoming too insular, if not restrictive, and it has all happened with so little public notice that some of those at the heart of the matter are struggling to come to terms with it. "I think of the number of gay folk musicians I know, and it's amazing," says Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. "And I think of people like Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco -- they're not gay, but they have a big gay following. What is it about folk music that appeals to gay women? I'd like to know."
Pamela Means, a young biracial woman living in Boston, writes stark, defiant songs about race and lesbianism. On a Saturday evening in July, Means was scheduled to perform in the 9 to 10 o'clock slot at the Living Room, a publike folk venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The room was full. "She has a good following here," the bartender said, beaming. By 9:20, Means had not yet arrived, and the fellow scheduled to play at 10, Carl Mullen, was asked to take the microphone. He sang and played the guitar well, though the house began to thin. Around 9:45, the manager announced that Means had fallen ill and would not be arriving, and nearly a third of the audience, all women, left. Mullen shifted to rock 'n' roll songs in panic. "I don't know what we'd do without the lesbians," the bartender said, watching the exodus. "Without them, I don't know what we'd do."
A few decades ago, things were different. "The folk clubs were nothing like they are today," Amy Ray recalls. "Lesbians were no more welcome in folk than we were anywhere else. Other musicians didn't want us there, and the audience didn't make us feel very welcome."
The intertwining of folk music and lesbian culture was a slow, complex process, the first links subterranean. As early as the 50's and 60's, some of the most popular folk performers were gay or bisexual women. But emerging in less inclusive times, these singers only suggested alternatives to heterosexual norms without being explicitly "out." In the 50's, Ronnie Gilbert, the strong-voiced woman in the Weavers, helped take folk onto the pop charts with hits like "Goodnight, Irene"; although she embodied a deglamorized feminine vigor, Gilbert was not an out lesbian until her later years. Her 60's successor, Joan Baez, the queen of the baby boomers' folk revival, exuded an imperious sexual neutrality that was a key part of her attraction (to men and women); even so, she kept her bisexuality private until 1973.
After its triumph as a full-blown international craze in the 60's, folk music began receding in popular favor. At the same time folk music lost much of its mainstream audience, however, it picked up new fans inside the lesbian community. With the feminist and gay-rights movements in the 1970's and 80's, lesbian culture evolved at an accelerated pace, and it developed new social structures. Weekend music festivals for women -- women's music festivals" -- attracted lesbians and others by the tens of thousands and, with a shift in the weight of the words, spawned a new genre as festivals of "women's music." Men, homosexual or heterosexual, were often banned; one annual event in Michigan even restricted transsexuals. By the end of the 80's, the singer-songwriter Cris Williamson was performing at some 30 festivals per year, and missing at least as many. Record labels specializing in women's music, most notably Olivia Records, were releasing albums by dozens of artists, helping to make a few of them -- Williamson, Alix Dobkin, Meg Christian, Holly Near -- celebrities within their sphere. "The wonderful thing about women's music is that it was the strongest, most powerful organizing force for lesbians in the United States next to softball," says Alix Dobkin, a Greenwich Village folkie of the 60's who pioneered lesbian music with uncompromising, intimate songs about her relationships. "The festivals brought lesbians together, and the music was at the heart of that experience."
Stylistically, the festivals strove to be catholic, including women playing jazz, rock, pop -- any chords, as long as the words rang true to the spirit of the lesbian and feminist movements. Yet the festivals seemed most successful with folk-style singer-songwriters, solo voices telling personal stories to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars. "I started out playing harder music, rock 'n' roll," Tret Fure recalls. "I found that that just didn't work very well with the women's music audience, and I softened my presentation to more of a folk-rock kind of thing. There's something about the folk format, maybe the intimacy, that makes it a very effective way for women to connect with other women."
For Fure, Melissa Etheridge and other gay women of their generation who felt unwelcome in the rock world during their youth, women's music provided career-sustaining nourishment. "That movement was very important to my development," recalls Etheridge, who became famous as a rock 'n' roll singer in the mid-90's but first cut her musical teeth playing folk at women's music festivals. "I would listen to Meg Christian and Alix Dobkin, and I would see these women standing up, saying, 'Yeah, I'm queer, and I'm singing, and everyone's lovin' it.' I was inspired. The first women's music festivals I played were the first large audiences I ever played for. They were very warm and receptive. Since then, I've reached the mainstream, but at that point, the mainstream was not available to women like me."
s lesbians made more political and social inroads in the 90's, the women's-music movement faded -- but its musical legacy was firmly established. The festivals had served as a training ground for hundreds of musicians, including a wave of younger women like Ani DiFranco and Melissa Etheridge, and it had helped countless gay women develop an affection for the sound of women singing with acoustic guitars. Like "jump blues" of the 1940's, a genre music that infiltrated the culture at large in the transmuted form of rock 'n' roll, women's music prevailed through its transformation of the larger folk-music scene.
At this summer's Ithaca Women's Music Festival, several hundred women, along with some children and men, gathered in a field behind a gay center near Cornell. Vendors sold books and CD's, beads, T-shirts ("I like girls"), burgers and vegan snacks. The main attraction was the singer Janis Ian, who is gay. She lounged on a folding steel chair, chain-smoking during the afternoon. About every five minutes, a fan would inch up to her to chat or ask for an autograph. One had a teenage girl in tow. "This is my daughter, Becky," the fan announced.
"You like music?" Ian asked the girl.
"Yeah, a lot," she answered.
"What do you listen to?"
"Well, I really like Ani DiFranco."
Ian grinned approvingly, and the mother looked at her and joked, "Ani DiFranco -- she's your daughter!"
For today's generation of lesbian musicians -- young artists like Pamela Means, Toshi Reagon and Lynette Schultz -- gay women simply belong in acoustic music. To be gay and out and to play the guitar seem like common birthrights. As Means says cheerily, "If you're a girl with a guitar, it's definitely a good time to be queer."
Among kindred spirits in folk, young lesbian artists say they feel a sense of community, acceptance and insulation from the demands of the high-pressure pop-music business. "I really feel at home in the folk world," Means says. "My kind of message isn't really going to be embraced by the masses." Means found this feeling confirmed when she performed at South by Southwest, an annual music-industry convention. "I met this hotshot from L.A., and he was like: 'Oh, yeah, I'm going to get you signed. Do you have a boyfriend?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Oh, a girlfriend?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said: 'O.K., no problem -- just don't tell anybody. Every guy in the audience has to think he has a chance with you.' " Means passed on the offer. As she puts it, "I'm embraced where I am, in the folk world."
Another reason folk appeals to lesbian artists is that, in its service to rural, earthy projections of authenticity, it does not seem to objectify women (at least not in the same way) as other kinds of music, especially pop. Jamie Anderson, a North Carolinian who writes buoyant, comic snapshots of gay life, finds this liberating. "The thing I like about the folk scene," she says, "is that it's something that doesn't have a whole lot of glitter and you-gotta-look-like-name-the-diva-of-the-day kind of feeling to it, and I think that's what attracts a lot of lesbians to folk music."
At the same time, the alliance of folk music and lesbianism has created a tricky situation for male artists -- and some women, including several of the most prominent names in the field. Although young male artists like Rufus Wainwright and Jeffrey Lewis are carving out respectable careers in folk, others waiting in the wings have come to see their prospects as limited and accept their place in the folk scene as marginal. "I'm working in a lesbian art form," says one male singer-songwriter. "But I honestly don't have any problem with that. I can still do it, and nobody's telling me not to. I'm just sort of like a white guy who can play jazz. It's what I do, and I love it -- it's just not the art form of my people."
Across the lines of gender and sexual orientation, moreover, there are concerns that the folk scene, in its tightening links to lesbian culture, is becoming exclusionary, limiting its audience and freezing the music in orthodoxy. "The problem is that the gay community -- unfortunately, especially the lesbian community -- can be, in my opinion, extraordinarily phobic itself," says the country-influenced traditional singer Melissa Ferrick, who is openly gay. "There's a real sense of not letting anybody else in." Through its insularity, some charge, the scene is already suffering an erosion of artistic standards. Ellen Friedman, the folk-music promoter, says, "There are women, and I'd rather not name names, but they all come to me -- there are women who have nothing going for them except that they're a lesbian." She pauses. "If they weren't lesbian, they'd have no careers."
Robb D. Cohen
The Indigo Girls, a gay folk duo, once played to the fringe. Now they find themselves icons of a genre.According to the gay folk veteran Nancy Carlen, who served as road manager for Joan Baez: "It's disgraceful. A lot of what I hear out there is just juvenile. It would never cut it if it didn't have a guaranteed audience."
For those women whose sexual identities defy categorization, the strength of the lesbian audience has proved to be a treacherous asset. "I have seen in the business that the lesbian following is a hugely loyal fan base and one that is envied," Melissa Etheridge points out. "It seems like everybody's trying for the lesbian audience, because they're so loyal." In fact, at least a couple of female performers have been accused of "passing" as gay.
Jill Sobule, a quirkily original singer, guitarist and songwriter, is nearly impossible to classify, musically or personally. After her folky pop tune about sexual experimentation, "I Kissed a Girl," became a hit in 1995, "All anyone wanted to know was, What was I?" Sobule says. "It was a weird thing, because there was a part of me that wanted to say I'm bisexual, but I just didn't want to get into that. There was a big debate about me, and people were saying, 'Oh, she's such a closet case -- she won't come out and say she's a lesbian.' And other people were saying, 'Oh, she's a heterosexual woman trying to catch a lesbian trend.' You couldn't win."
Dar Williams, one of the most acclaimed and best established singer-songwriters of the current generation, has always considered herself heterosexual but was vague about her sexual orientation to her sizable gay following -- until her marriage to a man this spring necessitated that she "come out and say: 'O.K. I'm straight.' " She found it difficult. "It was hard to do, because I have so many gay fans," she says. "I had made a point about talking about lesbians at every concert I did, and I was ambiguous about myself. I kept it ambiguous as a way of saying it doesn't matter. Now I hear that people think I was allowing myself to be identified as a lesbian for as long as it took to get a certain following. I never said I was a lesbian, but I was aware that there was a marketing angle -- there was an angle that I had that I wouldn't have had if I were just identified as straight."
Ani DiFranco and Holly Near have both followed mercurial paths in private life, to the detriment of their images as role models in the lesbian community. DiFranco is a highly charismatic and virtuosic musician who wrote with uncommon eloquence about her bisexuality in songs like "In or Out": "To me what's more important/is the person that I bring/not just getting to the same restaurant/and eating the same thing." In 1998, she found herself barraged with charges of betrayal and duplicity when she married a man. "I had to have a lot of really asinine discussions about my big betrayal of the queer community by getting married, and it sucked all my energy for a while," DiFranco says. "I was forced into the position of martyr, representative, mouthpiece for personal empowerment. It's funny -- when people are searching for something in their lives, and you come to represent something to them that turns you into a symbol, not a person, not a changeable, flawed Homo sapiens, you have to become this shiny symbol of something for this individual, and when they realize you aren't that, that kind of adulation can turn very quickly to . . . whatever. And that can be a little intense, a little claustrophobic.
"I have the right to be myself and not be ashamed of my experiences or my inner life. If other people are dying to cry out 'hypocrisy,' as long as I look in the mirror and know that that is not true, I can sleep. The minute you begin to do anything for whatever people think, you're down the wrong road."
Holly Near has found herself approaching that road, struggling to maintain her bearings. A vocal early champion of the lesbian movement, Near takes pride in being one of the first musicians to come out as gay in People magazine, 21 years ago. Since 1986, she has been dating men, a fact that she avoided making public for some time and still prefers to keep a private matter. Her following among gay women has diminished: "Holly's lost a lot of her audience, because she was a kind of icon to gay women," Ellen Friedman says. "When the word got out that she's with a man, a lot of people got angry with her. It's too bad." Paradoxically, Near says that she has played down her current heterosexual relationship out of loyalty to her gay following and a sense of responsibility to her role as a lesbian spokesperson.
"I came 'out' to cheering crowds," Near says. "So I went through an incredible transition that was very, very difficult, after I had been out all over the world. Having been out that much, when I ended up being in a relationship with a man, I kept that quiet for a while -- not because I was ashamed of it but because it wasn't time yet for the lesbian community to lose a representative. There had been so many women who had been outed as gay and then immediately got married and went on "The Tonight Show" to prove that they were straight that the lesbian movement had become very, very defensive about someone ending up back in a relationship with a man and saying, 'Well, it was a phase.' So I kind of kept my relationship with a man in the background. And then I had to go through a process with the lesbian community, because they thought I was disappearing, which is what women always do. But I continue to sing lesbian songs; I continue to sing at their events; I continue to be a part of lesbian culture. I just don't publicize our private life." In the folk world today, hers is the love that dare not speak its name.
"Your personal choices are not really what it's about," Near stresses. "To be a folk artist is about being part of the social-change movement, no matter what your private life is like."
Indeed, just as Near says she feels that change is good for society, change is good for music. In the case of folk, lesbian artists have taken the genre in fresh directions; in order for the form to remain vital, however, new voices must continue to be heard. Musicologists like to talk of the "folk process": the way music takes on new shapes and colors as it passes from singer to singer, group to group, generation to generation. That is, after all, part of what makes it folk music, whomever the folks may be.
David Hajdu is the author, most recently, of "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina."
Sincerely,
GargoyleI made a few cosmetic changes to make this easier to read; for example, closing the unclosed 'italic' and 'center' commands. --JoeClone, 18-Aug-02.