On The Land: MichFest and Camp Trans, Part 1
You don't have to be a redhead-born-redhead at the redhead parade.
“What do you know about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival?”
The woman (I’ll call her Casey) asking me and Clover this question had short gray hair and a youthful-looking face. Leather wrist cuffs and a denim vest. Her tone was weary. From chatting at the bar, we’d learned that she’d been burned by love. She traveled in her camper van with her dog. She wondered if she was maybe asexual now, or demi-sexual, but she wasn’t sure. She had worked as a professional organizer of women’s events across the country. She leaned back in her bar stool at the Waydowntown in Provincetown. It was Women’s Week, and we were the youngest women in the place.
What did we know about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival? Casey was testing us. She knew that Clover was trans, and she probably thought that we would snap back that Michigan was transphobic, maybe irredeemably so.
As Clover chronicled in our Women’s Week Scene Report, she swooped in and read Casey’s hand, telling her everything else we knew. We knew that Michigan was really important to a lot of lesbians of Casey’s generation and beyond, Clover said. We knew that it was horny and rowdy and exciting, that there were leather dykes and hippies and all sorts of other types of women there. We knew that tits were out. We knew that Michigan was a place where lots of women felt safe, and that organizers and attendees used all sorts of strategies to create this sense of safety. We knew that Michigan was special.
Casey appraised us. We sensed her approval. “Hmm.”
We did know all this. Of course, that’s not all we knew. We knew that Lisa Vogel, who was a co-founder of the festival and its long-running director, instated a “womyn-born-womyn only” policy at the festival in 1991 after expelling a trans woman from the grounds, and that she continued to dig in her heels about this policy until the festival’s last year in 2015. We knew that the festival was emphatically not safe for all women; it was not safe, for example, for Nancy Jean Burkholder, the aforementioned trans woman expelled in ‘91. We knew about Camp Trans, which popped up to protest the festival in the early ‘90s and then was revived later in the decade and into the 2000’s. We knew that Michigan’s festivalgoers held a vast array of opinions about whether or not trans women (and trans people more broadly) should be welcomed at the festival. A lot of women believed that they should. A lot also believed that they shouldn’t. We also knew this: a lot of trans people attended Michigan. Like, more than you probably think. And Michigan, so important to cis lesbians like Carly, was precious to many of those trans attendees too.
As you might imagine, I never attended MichFest. I guess I could have - the last festival was held in 2015, when I was twenty-two and a year out of college. I was out as queer and was in a lesbian relationship, though I can’t remember if I often called myself a lesbian at the time. Lots of my friends were also queer and dykes or dyke-adjacent. They/them pronouns were becoming more common in my social world during that time - I remember several (mostly AFAB) people I knew began using them during that period from around 2014-2016. Those of us who remained basically settled in a cis female identity were not particularly interested in affiliating with the term “woman,” at least any more so than was necessary. Traveling to MichFest (or to Camp Trans) certainly never occurred to me. If someone had suggested it, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have been interested. I would have thought that neither the festival nor Camp Trans were for me. I see now how they both might have been.
MichFest is, to say the least, a rich and vexing cultural object, as is Camp Trans. Michigan has come to stand in as an avatar for all that is (or was) wrong with lesbian feminist culture: TERFy, white, sanctimonious, probably riddled with cultural appropriation. Camp Trans doesn’t have as consolidated of a cultural memory, but the standoff between the two is something of a shorthand for lesbian-trans conflict. The fact that Camp Trans “won,” or at least that MichFest lost, represents a moment of changing tides: a death knell for lesbian separatist culture. Like with the Sex Wars, cultural memory smooths the ragged edges of conflicts. This post is an attempt to examine those ragged edges, to parse the complexities of a cultural institution and conflict that most of us probably have a passing familiarity with. So let’s start at the beginning.
Founding MichFest and the Early Years
In 1975, Lisa Vogel, her sister Kristie Vogel, and their friend Mary Kindig decided that they wanted to throw a women’s music festival. During the mid-70s, women’s music was in the early years of its heyday. Women’s music record labels were being created: Olivia Records had been founded in 1973, and Ladyslipper Records would be founded in 1976. Women’s music concerts and festivals were also popping up across the US, expanding women’s music’s reach from small bar and coffeehouse venues into larger regional events where hundreds and even thousands of women (many of them lesbians) gathered.
Vogel describes herself as a nineteen-year-old “hippie acidhead” in 1975.1 That year, she and some friends attended a women’s camping festival, which didn’t feature any music but did feature lots of ladies walking around topless. Then Vogel and her friends drove the long schlep from their home in Michigan to Boston to attend a women’s music festival, which took place indoors and didn’t have a camping element. On their way back to Michigan, Vogel says, they were “loaded, basically, and thinking what a bummer it was that everyone’d had to leave when the music was over and drive fifteen hundred miles home.” What if they could create an event combining these elements? Despite never having put on a concert, the Vogels and Kindig decided to form the Michigan Womyn’s Music Collective.
The first festival was a decidedly DIY affair. The collective cobbled together a budget from “garage sales, keg parties, car washes, and the like.”2 They agreed that all performers, regardless of level of fame, would be paid the same amount - a practice that endured throughout the festival’s four-decade run. Everything was done on the cheap. They found some local land for sale and convinced the owner to rent it to them for a week for $400. They managed to convince the owner of a local lumber-yard to rent them wood to construct a stage, returning it with just a few nail-holes after the festival, and they stole the stage stairs from a nearby construction site. Vogel claims that she even scammed the US Army into providing them with water and tents by calling into a local reserve office pretending to be a reserve servicewoman calling from a different post, seeking support for a vaguely Christian women’s retreat.
Though over the years the budget would rise and operations would no longer rely on rented lumber and fraud committed against the U.S. military (which, go off), the DIY ethos remained, and was a huge part of what made the festival feel so utopian to many attendees. Tickets were sliding scale, and signing up for work shifts was common practice. The festival structures and stage were rebuilt and then taken down each year by a crew of woman workers. Women were AV tech, security, construction and demolition, sanitation. Meals, included in the ticket price and cooked by a kitchen crew, were vegetarian, and heavy on bread, stews, and tahini (reports vary on tastiness). Women swinging hammers, tits flying free, served as proof that there was no job in society that women couldn’t do; a city was built, run, and inhabited by women only, and it functioned. The romance of this should not be underestimated.
Interestingly, creating a women-only space was not an original goal of the festival. Vogel reports that, when setting up the first festival, the collective hadn’t even considered a gendered admission policy until Boo Price, a women’s music manager and producer who would go on to become a long-running producer of the festival, told the young women that if they were having camping, they really shouldn’t have men there. “It made sense to me,” Vogel recalls. “We wanted to create a safe overnight space, and a safe space for nudity.”3 This became Michigan’s first major conflict, with some lesbians defecting from the festival over the women-only policy.
A lengthy 1980 feature by Tacie Dejanikus in the feminist newspaper off our backs (which I wrote more about here) gives a good picture of what Michigan was like five years in. Already, it had risen to special prominence within lesbian feminist communities. “Whether you have attended the festival joyfully for the last five years or shudder at the thought of four days of vegetarian meals and porta-johns,” Dejanikus writes, “the festival has an importance beyond personal likes and dislikes because of the number of women, predominantly lesbians, who come, the distances they travel, the amount of money involved, the festival’s power to draw distinctly different women, its legendary qualities and its reputation as a healer for patriarchal wounds and as a strengthener for the year to come.” In 1980, 7,300 women attended the festival, although oob reports that only about 100 women of color were in attendance (a number I found shockingly low, even knowing how very white these spaces could be).
In addition to musical performances, the festival featured workshops which anyone could sign up to teach. Workshops offered in 1980 included “Breasts from a Woman’s Point of View,” “Tall Lesbian Dinner and Social,” “Whistling as a Heterosexist Form of oppression,” “Skinny Liberation,” “Bearded Lesbians,” and a workshop on Parthenogenesis that apparently drew a hundred attendees. Interestingly, a workshop titled “Remembering Radical Feminism” included the addendum “No Transsexuals,” which, of course, implies the known presence of transsexuals at the festival.
Writing about MichFest pretty much always foregrounds some controversy or another, and that was true in 1980 as well. On the last day of the festival, a Fat Liberation group marched with signs encouraging women to boycott the festival’s tee shirts, as shirts in extra large sizes were not available. That evening, a group of fifty white women, many of whom Dejanikus identifies as working-class Jewish women, read a statement demanding that the festival’s racism and classism be addressed. Their specific demands included increased numbers of woman of color performers and merchants, creation of a tent specifically for political material, translation of all announcements into Spanish and French, and establishing a closer campground for male children. The festival had struggled since its establishment with what to do about the sons of festival-goers and had arrived at a solution of providing a summer camp for boys over the age of five, but it was fourteen miles away; the group of protesters pointed out that this was particularly dangerous for boys of color.
What I hope is coming through here is that there was no version of MichFest that existed prior to conflict over MichFest, and that the white hot center of that conflict always laid in questions over who should be there and who should not be there. Furthermore, these questions were nearly always centered on axes of sex/gender, race/ethnicity, and ability/disability. This aspect of MichFest did not make it remarkable: it actually made it much like other lesbian feminist institutions, where identity-based conflict over inclusion and exclusion were also endemic. At Michigan, these conflicts found escalated pitches because of the festival’s scale and reach, and because, quite quickly, the festival took on nearly mythical significance in the eyes of many of its attendees.
MichFest in the 90s
Let’s fast forward a little. In 1991, as mentioned earlier, Nancy Jean Burkholder, who was attending the festival for the second time, was ejected from MichFest for being trans. The “womyn-born-womyn” policy was officially established, and the next year Burkholder and her allies formed Camp Trans to protest. I will get into all this in more detail in the second part of this series, including lots of rich participant details about what Camp Trans was like and the (many!) particular conflicts that were internal to Camp Trans. But for now, I mention this as necessary backdrop to understand what it was like to attend MichFest as a (cis) participant in the 90s.
The 1996 book The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian America by Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt4 gives a great glimpse into what Michigan was like in this era and how its larger cultural significance had come to be understood. [Side note: I really want to write an essay at some point about the particular style of 90s pop lesbianism (and “lesbian chic” lol), which then dovetails into the aughts lesbian TV boom (small but mighty). If you have any recs for texts to look at for this, I’m all ears!] The book’s authors position themselves as knowing insider/outsiders: we’re lesbians, but we’re not like those lesbians! They even coin the indelible word “lesbiunatic” to describe the lesbian fringe, who are chronically obsessed with “almost paramilitary political correctness.”5 For their research for the book, the two authors voyaged to Michigan, both for the first time, ready to disavow the festival’s excesses.
By the mid-nineties, the Sex Wars had already ripped through MichFest, and a sort of detente had been reached between the kinksters /BDSM practitioners and the anti-porn feminists. An area of the campgrounds, deemed the “Twilight Zone,” was designated for public sex and kink. Many women never entered this area, and some barely left it. Van Gelder and Brandt elected to camp near this area, in the hopes of avoiding overly-PC types, and found themselves within earshot of a Stations of the Cross party, in which Michigan’s kinkiest dykes flogged, whipped, and pierced each other all night long. “Our sleep is punctuated not only by the sounds of consenting adults getting off in the ‘Whip in the Willows,’” they write, “but by worse, far worse. For instance, we are also victims, consenting or not, of all-night jam sessions by a bevy of enthusiastic, yet profoundly arrhythmic, Canadian drummers.” (If Agnes had been there, perhaps she could have taught them to appreciate the beauty of the lesbian drum circle, but alas.)
By this time, the festival, though officially welcoming to all (cis) Womyn, was very clearly known as a lesbian space. The “political lesbian”/“Lesbian Continuum” mentality that infused many women’s spaces in the 1970s and 80s had begun to change; “lesbian” began to seem more like something you either were or you weren’t. Brandt and Van Gelder cheekily relay their astonishment at encountering that most perverse sexual identity group at Michigan, even just in small numbers: heterosexuals. One married straight white woman was attending for the second time with her young daughter, and she mentioned that being in the minority for once was educational for her. Another woman, a straight Black realtor named Denise who’d first come to MichFest a few years earlier, had brought her nineteen-year-old daughter, who had dated boys but had also had a girlfriend. Denise wanted to support her daughter’s identity exploration and show her that womanhood didn’t have to look just one way. She reported that her daughter had found a group of women of color to roll with at the festival and was “in heaven.” Brandt and Van Gelder informed Denise that she herself was quite bangin’ and would have no trouble getting laid at the festival if she so chose. Denise, whose supportive husband had driven her and her daughter to the festival, said that she would refrain, but that “After being here, I can see how easy it would be to be with a woman. I certainly can! Even just the intensity of watching one woman touch another woman…It’s overwhelming, just something else.”6
In 1994, the year that Van Gelder and Brandt attended, the festival’s big controversy was the presence of Tribe 8. An all-dyke queercore punk band from San Francisco known for onstage dildo antics and songs about incest, Tribe 8’s ethos and sound was VERY different from the classic Michigan milieu of women’s music acoustic folk singers like Holly Near and Max Feldman. Not all attendees took kindly to the band’s presence. Van Gelder and Brandt describe “a dozen grim-faced protesters” who stood along the road to the stages with signs like “Stop Woman-Hating” and “Tribe 8 Promotes Sexual Violence.” At one point onstage, one of the band-members called out that sign and identified herself as an incest survivor to the sign-holder, who declined to shake hands with her.
At the start of the set, Lynn Breedlove, Tribe 8’s lead singer who would later come out as a trans man, walked onstage arm in arm with Alix Dobkin, pioneer of women’s music and virulently devout transphobe until the end of her life. I tell you this because it’s a Michigan Moment that makes my head explode. Brandt and Van Gelder describe Dobkin as “without a doubt early women’s music’s most inflexible P.C. hard-core lesbian separatist,” and, at the time of their writing, women’s music’s “most enthusiastic builder of bridges with P.I. punkettes.”7 In a nod to the festival’s culture, Breedlove, dressed in denim capris with boxers bulging out the top and no shirt, issued a trigger warning. Breedlove and Dobkin began to croon together a capella, “about women’s love being like herbal tea,” and then the guitars kicked in and Breedlove broke into “Manipulate,” the band’s ode to consensually beating up your girlfriend. He proceeded to don a strap-op and then self-castrate with a knife. This actually represented a relatively restrained performance, as it didn’t include chainsaws or fake blood for which the band was known.
In the crowd, the festival’s first-ever mosh pit formed. The next day, the band. held a workshop, titled “So You Got a Problem with Tribe 8.” In Brandt’s and Van Gelder’s account, the workshop mostly consisted of older lesbians expressing that their trepidation about Tribe 8 was all wrong and in fact moshing with the leather dykes had been a healing experience. It was one conflict that, for the time being, found resolution.
On the issue of trans acceptance, however, resolution was nowhere in sight. In 1994, three years after Nancy Burkholder’s ejection, Camp Trans had become an organized event. The year prior, several more trans women had been ejected from the festival, and tensions over the issue were palpable on the festival grounds. Staunch transphobes held their ground, while other cis women were uneasy with how this move toward exclusion conflicted with their understanding of the festival’s ethos. At the “redhead parade,” an annual tradition that invited natural redheads, redheads by dye, redheads in spirit, and lovers and friends of redheads to march through the festival’s Downtown area, the paraders called out: “You don’t have to be redhead-born-redhead! No panty check!”8
After their showing in 1994, Camp Trans would go dormant for five years, reemerging in 1999 under the leadership of Leslie Feinberg and Riki Ann Wilchins. Vogel remained steadfast; she would allow trans women at her festival, in the words of Brandt and Van Gelder, “over her dead womyn-born body.” Perhaps she believed, as the director of the festival, that this decision ultimately rested in her hands, and on some level it did. But here’s the thing about lesbian processing: once it begins, there’s no saying where it will take you, or where it will end.
Next time, I’ll dive into Camp Trans (the culture! the conflicts! the cruising!) and the end of MichFest. Thank you for reading, and thanks so much to everyone who has signed up as a paid subscriber! Clover and I have a really fun movie recap coming your way!
This description and other info in this paragraph is drawn from an interview with Vogel in the 1996 book The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian America by Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt. More on this book later!
Brandt and Van Gelder, 63.
Brandt and Van Gelder, 65.
Available to check out on Internet Archive here! If you, like me, relish rich kooky descriptions of lesbian mishegas, you may enjoy their chapter on Michigan (I haven’t read the rest of the book). Fair warning: they talk about Nancy Jean Burkholder and trans-exclusion-related conflict in a manner that I would describe as ranging from insensitive to exoticizing to transphobic.
Brandt and Van Gelder, 44.
Brandt and Van Gelder, 80.
Brandt and Van Gelder, 70. I’m assuming that P.I. means Politically Incorrect haha.
Brandt and Van Gelder, 74.
I loved so many parts of this but especially: scamming the US military and the Fat Liberation group protesting the lack of XL+ shirt sizes.🥲💖GO OFF!!
v excited to read about camp trans!! it is funny to imagine any kind of lesbian or queer event having some magical time before conflicts and divides - that's part of the whole deal