Recently, I've become a fan of the blog
Card-Carrying Lesbian. It has to be one of the funniest, frankest and most down to earth blogs I've yet read from a gay woman. The writer, delicately teeters along the brink of really revealing huge insights into the life and loves of a gay girl living in Long Beach, CA.
I guess this kinda struck a chord because recently I spent the last 2 days of a California road trip that included 4 nights in SF and the Girlbar Dinah Shore in Palm Springs. To treat myself, I stayed a night on the Queen Mary, moored at Long Beach since her retirement and now a hotel cum historic monument. I really enjoyed the hotel, especially considering I've never been on a cruise ship, so its whetted my appetite for an Olivia cruise, if funds allow of course. Anyway, on my last night, having nothing better to do and not being really interested in negotiating the joys of parking in Long Beach never mind FINDING the many gay bars (I'd earlier driven to WeHo and found myself in a traffic jam reminiscent of my days of living in Ranelagh in the late 1990s - although indeed its hard to say that LA traffic is anything less than appalling), popped up a deck to the Observation bar, where I enjoyed a cocktail over a magazine.
I couldn't help my Gaydar spinning onto full alert at a bunch of girls sitting at the opposite table. A subtle dyke melodrama was in full swing. It was somebodies birthday, and clearly the birthday girl had been put out, by another girl who was out on the deckside having a fag with another smoker girl. Anyway it was clear that something was up, somebody was upset, and something told me all of these girls were "family." Anyway, they eventually pottered off for a night on the town. I'm sure glad I didn't see the outcome, there was all the familiar signs of dyke-drama, not least the passive-aggressive starting point where you will be utterly convinced that this slight bit of pissed-offness is NEVER going to turn into the explosive mayhem which in many cases eventually does occur (unless somebody just turns on their heels or turns off their phone, which happens about 20% of the time). Its all so seemingly friendly and polite, its amazing what catfights actually do emerge from the seeming innocent beginnings of annoyance.
So you see, I'm under no illusion that us ladies in da family are anything unique or special. We catfight. We get jealous. And we are every bit as capable of discrimination, exclusion and a level of bitchiness so subtle its barely perceptible. And nowhere, nowhere, is this more prevalent than in event management, community circles and basically, on the so-called "scene" in general.
Now I'm often bemused by girls who claim to not be on the scene. I once heard this from a woman who actually worked part time in a community resource for gay women - bit rich to suggest this is not the scene, for a lot of women in that place this IS the scene as they know it. And I also feel, such resources have a SPECIAL responsibility to go out of their way to ensure no dsicrimination happens at any level. I don't care if you hide it under a guise of being democratic, inclusive etc, so do the BNP. Majority rules has been so easily used by the far right to justify hate crimes by the state I don't even need to start on how henious it is for such groups to use "democracy" to justify wholesale exclusion. The reality is that any group that organises on a community basis needs to make a special effort to organize in such a way as to prevent the organization being used to advance personal prejudice of any sort. Fears need to be assuaged, efforts need to be made, and the loudest voices cannot be allowed to bully entire communities into submission.
Anyway, I've been partially horrified and partially unsurprised at the spat which emerged on the GayCork forum this week over the "man-ban" at the "Cork Womens Fun Weekend." Basically, WFW is a voluntary group, mainly really built out of women involved in the L.Inc community resource (but not dictated by it), who basically organize a nice little weekend of discos, pub quizes, golf tournaments, and usually an afternoon of talks, debates etc for women. Now I always understood it to be firmly targetted at a lesbian market, but a post on GayCork actually suggests its for "all women" (despite the fact that lesbians are particularly bothered, understandably so, by the huge level of fag hags on the Cork scene). This I find incredible, considering that I've been to the weekend a few times but never once met a straight woman, and aside from the blatantly obvious focus on lesbian-focused events, men are completely excluded from everything from the discos to the small events!
The only thing is of course, is that the pubs that the events take place in don't become "women only" for the occasion. They just "host" the event, without excluding the guys. They can't really and thats a fortunate thing.
Anyway this doesn't ever really seem to have bothered most guys. But then apparently last year, a bunch of younger gay women thought it would be fun to bring along a man-friend, a gay guy. So he came, paid his fee at the door of the Silver Springs and the group went about their way. Until somebody kicked up at the presence of a person with Y chromosone and threw what from all accounts appears to have been a hissy fit. It seems that the man in question was then ejected from the event. Now even some of the accounts from staunch defenders suggest this was not well handled. Yet the wishes of the rather bitter sounding woman in question were enforced without so much as whisper? Why is that?
Many of the events use L.Inc as a host resource. About 3 years ago I took a post op M2F friend to the entire weekend, expecting no trouble. There was no trouble. Well not to her or my face. Then about 8 months ago I was at a meeting in L.Inc itself where their own man-ban (maybe a little more justified than the WFW one) was being debated. You can only imagine my horror as some woman started on about arriving there to find what she described as "this person" (spoken in a fairly contemptuous manner as if it was a THING or an IT) had invaded her "space." Now I'm constantly bemused by talk over "womens space." It seems to me that once upon a time, when almost everything on the scene in Ireland was 98% if not 100% male (by accident more than design I think) there was a dire need to combat the almost total dilution of women by creating separate events that would be automatically exclusively female. Most of these struggled to exist and many died because quite frankly, back in the tiger years, what pub or club wanted to keep out 50% of its customers on a prime weekend night? It was not until the first "men-as-guests" parties started occuring around 1998 or so, that things started to change.
The big change brought by the "men-as-guests" policies was not that men came in. Actually they didn't. At least not in big numbers. Really, it was just a handful, friends of the oganisers, some of whom were helping out, gay guys whose best friends were lesbians, straight guys whose best friends were lesbians, and particularly, kindly chaperones to bi and gay women who didn't have friends amongst the other women out there, women who effectively were disenfranchised by the whole ban-the-man movement because they found themselves unable to access such events because in Ireland, there is still a taboo about women going to pubs and clubs alone. And if they do cross that taboo, there is no guarantee anybody will talk to them, and if anybody thinks this is jack shit, please please, go into Loafers on Douglas Street in Cork any Thursday night and look at the 2 or 3 lone women who'll arrive, sit at the bar looking anxious, while the beer-garden crowd simultaneously stare them out of it and ignore them. They are hardly made welcome, except by the bar staff, who with maybe just one exception are good hosts. Usually they've vanished by 9pm.
After the men-as-guests clubs started arriving, I recall somebody saying that they were bringing a "whole different crowd" out on the scene. Indeed they were, they were not just young screaming divas either, but the "invisible" gay women - gay women who really didn't "fit" the ghettoised stereotypes. We got asked questions from bouncers indicating they assumed we were straight. We got asked repeatedly in pubs were we or weren't we? We also frequently got subjected to taunts that we weren't the real deal because we wore heels, frocks, make-up, associated with guys and generally, just didn't fit the expectations.
That was 1999. By the time I arrived back in Ireland after 8 months away in 2002, the whole scene in Dublin was a different place, and still changing. By 2008 Pride, it was no longer acceptable to hire a male stripper for the boys, we got treated to a female one too (ok she REALLY had no idea about how to interact with her audience, but hey, it was a nice thought). One of the nicest thing about the Dublin scene now is that its no longer a taboo to sexualize an event - strippers wouldn't cause the stir they did when one brave promoter had a go 7 years ago. A few Go-Go dancers would be great. Maybe even a cage dancer to start things rolling. I don't know if we are there yet but a lot has changed for the better. Young gay women are no longer cowering in terror of discovery. I meet women whose sexuality is oozing all over the place and they can easily handle the social world of being a gay woman. They are great and I'm so happy for them.
In Cork, we might as well have stopped the clock somewhere around 1998, if not 20 years earlier.
I think the root of the problem is that for some unknown reason, lesbians decided to organize separately from gay men, at some point in the late 90s. I don't believe it was ever so much a case of breaking away from the boys, but to create something specific for girls. Unfortunately this has grown into a divide, not just between lesbians and gay men, but an almost unspeakable rift between a very particular group of gay women and basically, a significant proportion of the rest of the scene.
Anything directly organized by such groups have been and remain explicitly women-only. The demographic of attendees is strangely alien to what I've come across anywhere else - its 40-60, mostly parents, separatists, often quite obviously "butch" and a lot seem to have come a route in life that involved coming out late and long term relationships with men. In her book
Money, Myths and Change, Mary Virginia Lee Badgett makes excellent points about the distortion caused by lifestyle surveys about gay people being based on magazine readership stats, which frequently tend to overrepresent young, affluent and childless gay people, living a conspicuously consumerist and hedonistic lifestyle of privelige. A more realistic picture comes from Stonewall's Health survey from 2008 (available from
www.stonewall.org.uk), which indicates, amongst other things, that a hefty 40% of women interviewed reported having slept with a man in the previous 5 years.
Other interesting results from the same survey indicate levels of domestic abuse from female partners quite comparable to hetero women's experience (which I think really throws into question Simon de Beauvoir's claims about women "
turning sisterhood and fraternity into realities"). Another article, published in the
American Journal of Public Health, and somewhat conroversial, published that lesbians were twice as likely to be obese. An interesting thing about researching this document on the OU website (as a part time student I've a lot of access to academic publications), was that it also revealed lots of similar USA based research. I discovered a few surveys, mostly health based, that indicated that on the whole, most most respondees in community centres geared at gay women tended to be 20-49 (63%), about 16% were parents, and maybe a slight overrepresentation of white/Causcasian racial groups (86%). You can find the full summary
here. In fact the mean age of the respondents from the 7 surveys used to pool results was 36. Yet the average age of the typical groups here in Cork would appear to be significantly higher, which to me suggests that someting is distorting the demographic.
Now one of the responses ludicruously suggested that the WFW includes in its target group women "trapped" in unhappy marriages in rural areas which they've been "pressurized" into. Oh and that the WFW events are perhaps their only chance of a shag. And that these women would "never enter a gay bar" - which really makes me wonder would they not baulk even more at the idea of entering a lesbian community center or even a lesbian event (in my own experience of marginalised closeted lesbians, they are far more terrified of what they perceive as mannish-lesbian separatists than they are of gay bars or to be honest, gay men)? To be honest, I don't think hetero women are particularly welcome at these events and I doubt they are sincerely a target for the events.
So the question remains, why maintain a blanket exclusion on men for events like the WFW?
To me, I think the whole thing is based on maintaining a power structure.
This perception is based on my experience of going to previous WFW events, knowing some of the folk involved, having had a degree of involvement with groups using L.Inc and just listening to the views of those involved.
I think the man-ban maintains a dominant, older ex-hetero, largely closeted demographic in the womens "community" groups. This is because younger women, non radicals, feminine women, openly gay women, seem to feel quite uncomfortable in the presence of these groups. I personally found the "welcome" somewhat mixed. Sometimes it was superficial, sometimes it was chilly - only the L.Inc "choir" gave me a warm, warm and loving welcome, and spent about 6 months trying to drag me back! But they seem to be a relatively independent group within the family, one which is more self-identified than others. And as such they seem to have maintained a better level of social diversity.
As for the deliberate targeting of a demographic that appears to be quite unpresentative of the majority of gay women, it seems that by doing so, a strangehold is kept on the reins of power by the clique. Their power has been unthreatened because there is no possible opposite since the wider female demographic is subtly (if even) discouraged from getting involved.
Claims over exclusive "space", "sites" or "territory" is sometimes represented in lesbian feminist writings as lesbian geography. Its a curious concept that emerged from feminist separatism of the 1970s and 80s as an attempt to build bonds and social networks around women. Lesbians in particular continued this as mainstream hetero feminists often failed to respect or address the special needs of gay women. The most curious thing about this period was that from the end of the 2nd world war to the early 1990s there was a profileration of women only "spaces", in particular bars, in various US and Canadian cities, hailing what
Julie Podmore has described as a "golden age" of lesbian territories. While Podmore isn't critical of the actual "loss" of exclusive territories she does question some myths, such as the suggestion that businesses run by (and sometimes for) gay women didn't survive due to financial reasons (in fact she suggests they appeared quite healthy in their heyday).
What Podmore suggests is that in the wake of a move away from identity based politics in the "queer" political movements of the early 1990s, women who slept with other women started to migrate away from exclusively female spaces and into less gender identified "gay" spaces, which eventually resulted in the older style of bar dying out. Most commentators recognise that the evolution of such "spaces" in 1990s was marked not only with a shift to non-gendered spaces, it also marked a diversification of the lesbian aesthetic and class - Podmore's article does point out that much of the bar movement was dominated by the working class butch/femme typification and that many middle class women were alienated from many of the Montreal spaces at points when they were located in red light districts.
This runs a parallel with some of the sentiments expressed in the only woman to put forth any kind of defence of the Cork situation:
I would challenge all 4 assertions below:
- A weekend that automatically has a blanket ban on men and includes discos for women only can only be a weekend for women who sleep with other women. The suggestion that they are far too terrified to enter a gay bar mya be correct but ignores the fact that they are almost certainly even more terrified of entering "lesbian territory".
- The misrepresantation of GLEN is deeply unfair, particularly the assertion that GLEN are "D4", having known some of them for nearly 18 years, I can assure readers that they are anything but. Secondly, the proposals were put forward by the current government, not GLEN, who have consistently advocated a preference for an inclusive model which includes parenting rights. It is deeply divisive to suggest that GLEN proposed excluding childrens rights, however with parents as a minority group within the gay community, should the entire proposal be thrown out simply to cater for that minority? I agree that their concerns are highly valid, but I am concerned that a far bigger number of gay people will be left with nothing.
- For the "this will cease to exist" - is this fear mongering? Or more a fear that the weekend would change irrevocably? Does anybody really know what would emerge? I think resistance to change is the key. As Girlbar promoter Sandy Sachs said when she started the Las Vegas party: "We don't have a huge idea on what the [lesbian] market in Las Vegas can bear. Right now, you can't find them. They have nowhere to go. Where is the market? No one knows where they are because no one has done anything for them. I'm going to sit there and hold my breath and count people. Hopefully we'll start seeing what size it is." If one of the biggest promoters in the USA cannot assess the potential size of dyke parties in Vegas then how can anybody in Cork assess how much bigger or smaller the WFW would become? Judging by the transformation of the womens community from the late 1990s to now (where we basically moved from being less than 5% to closing in on 50% in many cities) of de-gendering of gay territories, I suspect a transformed and less gendered version of CWFW could be anything from 5 to 10 times its current size. Unrealistic? In think not. Look at what happened when P!nk performed in Cork in 2008 - every gay bar in town packed to capacity with lesbians. There is a huge untapped market that is waiting in the shadows for an event for them.
- Words like "safety" and "security" imply a threat, they imply danger. There is serious need for the womens community to start addressing as to why some women seek a "refuge". The implications of "going wild" are crap - this has to be fairly tame compared to a lot of womens events I've been at in the last 18 months, which included women running around wearing nothing but a fig leaf, topless dancers on bars, cage dancers, Go-Go girls and reckless abandon. I think there is a huge need for development of individual self-assertion and confidence in the womens community rather than simply pandering to the "fear", which I suspect is the fear of the male voyeur.
The sad reality is that the image of the WFW and that segment of the womens community right now are rather tarnished. Let me end with some quotes from the
petition:
-
- anything they ever touched they destroyed just look what they did to Loafers
- Our small minded dykes
- and they want people to treat them as normal and they behave abnormal!!!!!!!!!!, thats to put it mildly.
- just who do they think they are like self appointed troublemakers
- As a Cork lesbian all I can say the event is being run by Nazis
- its about time the lesbian community set up a real representative group and leave these old time warriors to fight the shadows
- I can't believe that even after stonewall and how we all fought together for our rights that there are still some in our community who are bigots and bacwards [sic]
Its a sad indicment that in this day and age an old separtist strategy is being allowed to create a power bloc with such a level of hypocrisy, and at such an awful cost to the ordinary gay woman in this region, who remains the real victim.