Flashes of Insight

A piece that was excerpted for a book published on Feminist activists of the early 70’s it is written and editted by Barbara Love who wrote Sappho Was a Right On Woman. Might Have been called Women Who Changed the World 1970-75

Their editted version of this article is infinitely more tame.

I entered the Women’s Movement in 1970 from the left, I was very involved with the Anti-war Movement for several years before as well as Civil Rights. I went to Woodstock in ‘69 and I was very much a child of the ’60’s. a child of Woodstock Nation.

However, my politics of peace and love got very radicalized after being teargassed in DC during some Moratorium marches and did major organizing for May Day ‘70. I also participated earlier in the Poor Peoples March when it came through my College.

In 1970, I ran for Miss Trenton State College in NJ as a feminist and blew the doors off the competition. All the papers interviewed me for weeks and the show actually brought together most of the radicals of the day from a tri state area. It was a riot and the Dean tried to arrest me for inciting one but I helped contain the experience to a political event and also made sure that interviewers and other protesters only put down the beauty pageant, not the women in them!

As you can imagine,this event really endeared me to the administration who already hated my guts. I was one of the founders of a militant group called SCRAP, Student Committee For Radical and Activist Politics and entering the Beauty Pageant was an overwhelming victory for the Women’s Movement locally and perhaps even nationally.

The front page of the Trenton Times carried a picture of me saying something like Women’s Lib, Debbie “raises level of feminist consciousness on campus” for winner, see page 2.[yeah I used to be Debbie oops blowing my cover]

I moved to NYC after performing for many local demos and decided to begin volunteering at the NYC Womens Liberation Center in Chelsea back in the day. I wasn’t officially a lesbian yet but I was hopeful and found a home in the arms of the women there. My mother had warned me that if I continued hanging around there that I would become a Lesbian so that is exactly what I did. This was sage advice for me.

Jan 1 1971, I performed at the first Lesbian New Years Eve Party at the Church of the Holy Apostle [or the Holy Ape, as my then lover Joanne Steele used to call it] My band of wild women jammed and rocked after a moving performance by the fabulous Its Allright To Be A Woman Theater Group which I adored.

It was quite a night and I played piano and electric guitar with my left arm tied up in a sling on a multitude of pain meds for much of the night. I had torn up my shoulder earlier that day moving my amp and the show must go on ya know..

From that night on, I helped create the burgeoning Women’s Music scene in NYC with my lover Pandora, Barbara Cobb, Kay Gardner, Nydia Liberty Matta, and many many others. My first band was called Daughters of Witches w/ Pandora and Nydia and we played at Bonnie and Clydes dyke bar in the Village before there was a place totally for women’s music and then with various other permutations of musicians, like Flash n the Pan,Crazyquilt, Sister and finally Medusa Muzic. I performed with these groups with these groups, and as a soloist at many of the first Women’s Dances in the NY Metro area.

I remember playing for Sarah Lawrence’s first women’s dance. Laura Nyro called up Nydia who was her drummer too and wished us well. It was such an honor.

I remember physically battling male intruders who wouldn’t leave our show at Stoneybrook.College on Long Island.

The summer of 1973, was the summer of my discontent and the summer of the kamikaze concerts. What I mean by that is, that I made sure to play places where they didn’t want to hear what I had to say.

Two such instances were the Gay Pride March in June and the Women’s after march party in August.

These were both memorable and a challenge to my courage and commitment to carry a radical lesbian voice into the fray where we were so unwanted.

Gay Pride that year had essentially been taken over by the Mafia bar owners and hence had a huge stage, expensive sound equipment, stage crew,etc etc. unlike the year before when my band Sister, was the ONLY band there.

This was quite the affair and over 40,000 people had jammed into Washington Square in NYC’s Greenwich Village, near the original Stonewall riots.

My sister performers Kay, Kim, and Denisis and I had to go to this town house apartment nearby to check in as this was a very hi-tech system for those days. They had walkie talkies and limo’s and closed circuit TV, this was not your “sister’s march and rally ” When I entered the apartment., Vito Russo[author of Celluloid Closet] greeted me with a very swish and faked hello Flash etc etc meet Bette Midler, meet this one etc etc. told him that we needed to be on stage by 3 PM and it was noon. We had agreed to that and that I would do 2 songs. I would also play lead guitar for my friends 2 songs. We were prepared to wait our 3 hrs like we agreed to do but I began to smell a rat and knew that they meant to keep us off the stage because we were the only lesbian musicians there who were not there with men or some auxiliary of a Gay Male Group. It was going to be a fight and I knew it and was ready

I told my friends that when Bette Midler left, we should grab the limo behind her and in the melee we would get through the few blocks to the stage area which had been denied to us repeatedly. We were being held incommunicado in this apartment while all our lesbian friends waited in vain for something to represent them. As I predicted, confusion reigned and we hijacked a car and all was fine until the guy on the street w/ the walkie talkie recognized us as the ones who were to be kept in the apt until it was too late. He tried to stop our driver but he was bent on seeing Bette and wanted to do that more than to fuck with us so off we went in hot pursuit of the Divine Miss M who was still being accompanied by Barry Manilow at the time.

When we arrived on the stage, Vito about had a fit and said “You’re not supposed to be here!!” I told him it was 3 PM as we had agreed and we were staying to play. He threatened me and I threatened him right back…long story short. we were going to be “allowed ” to play 1 song each. He told me that if I dared to do more, he would have the sound guy turn me off. I knew that guy from the year before and knew that wouldn’t happen and told him that if he dared turn me off, I would personally kick his ass and the lesbians who hadn’t left out of disgust for this male dominated show would tear up the stage and what was left of him when I was done.

Vito pushed and announced that I would only be doing 1 song and I grabbed the mike saying “I have been bullied by straight men and if you think that I will be pushed around by some skinny fag, you are nuts!” Well the 30′000 plus mostly gay men were loving me but we all played our 2 songs that day,;through clenched fists, but we played.

This was just a warm-up for the Womens March where Betty Friedan had issued many warnings in the NYTimes, that the dykes were taking over the march…and so what could we do but fullfill her fantasies!

A month or so before, some lesbian from NOW [which as I always say is later or never] was told to ask me if I would play for their Gala at the Village Gate but that I shouldn’t talk about IT. She had already asked Alix Dobkin who was new to this scene and Fran Winant. Alix refused to sing and not talk about IT but I decided to take a more deceptive underground route to delivering my message.

I showed up wearing a purple cape and underneath that, was an embroidered lavender tee-shirt with a gold lightning bolt crossing through 3 interlocking purple women;s symbols and DYKE in big black letters… I wasn’t going to talk about IT..AND FLASHED them as I took the microphone. I said” I understand that I was not supposed to talk about IT and wondered what IT might mean and I concluded that IT must be the L WORD! At which point, I chanted LESBIAN,LESBIAN,LESBIAN over and over Lenny Bruce style and more or less emptied much of the room.

There was no well developed Lesbian Politic then and there WOULD BE ONE If I HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT AND WE WOULD NOT BE SHUT IN THE BEDROOM. The Lavender Menace action had occurred several years before in response to an attempted lesbian purge of NOW but still lesbians as a group had yet to find their voice and embrace it.

Not long after that I helped form the Dyke Seperatists which finally articulated a lesbian politic when no one else wanted to hear about us, even lesbians. Within a year, our work and philosophy grew into a more moderate LFL and the NYC Lesbian Movement began to come out of the feminist and gay closets to a place of our own.

I was also the subject of a lot of early Cable TV programs with Sorel David on her Lesbian Family Show. Her logo at the beginning always said’Showing Lesbians as just plain folk!’ Well I was anything but plain in my glitter shoes and wildly patched jeans with Rainbow suspenders.

The Woman’s Coffeehouse on 7th Ave South was the scene of many of my band, Medusa’s concerts and we loved it there. You never knew who might show up. One day Butterfly McQueen came in and bought everyone soup as she was about to do her one woman show there. She told us how she became a vegetarian to protest Hitler and the Nazi’s in WW II and she was an absolute delight.

My spirituality was growing alongside my music and politics and I began teaching the Tarot as well as starting what would be the forerunner to a Coven called a Cosmic Consciousness Group.

In 1975, when Z Budapest came to town on her tour after being arrested in LA for reading Tarot Cards. We met and I was one of a group of women that she initiated on Fall Equinox that year at Kay Gardner’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Kay and Pandora and I were great friends musically and otherwise and spent many magical hours jammin til dawn on Kays funky upright piano while their flutes soared into the night.

A few days later, Pandora and I had a witchy wedding ceremony and good-bye party as we moved south to Melrose, near Gainesville Florida. Kay married us and the musical performers read like a who’s who in the NYC music scene. Edwina Lee Tyler played her Djembe while I jammed with Kay, Pandora, and a host of others…and the rest as they say, is Herstory!

Blessed be
Flash Silvermoon