On the Land: MichFest and Camp Trans, Part 3

The end of the end

This is the third and final installment of a three-part series. Part one is here, and part two is here.

On August 18th, 2014, after the conclusion of the 39th annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Lisa Vogel, the festival’s founder and longtime director, took to Facebook to address the increasingly heated controversy over the festival’s trans-exclusive policy. “Many demands have been made of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,” she wrote, referring to a call to boycott the festival issued by the LGBT rights group Equality Michigan. “We have a few demands of our own.”¹

First, Vogel did something completely unexpected: for the first time, she offered an apology to Nancy Jean Burkholder, the trans woman whose ejection from the festival in 1991 led to the creation of Camp Trans. “Over 20 years ago, we asked Nancy Burkholder, a trans womon, to leave the Land,” Vogel wrote. “That was wrong, and for that, we are sorry. We, alongside the rest of the LGBTQ community, have learned and changed a great deal over our 39-year history.” However, the subsequent list of demands presented in her post painted an incoherent picture of where, exactly, this evolution had led. She wrote:

The truth is, trans womyn and trans men attend the Festival, blog about their experiences, and work on crew. Again, it is not the inclusion of trans womyn at Festival that we resist; it is the erasure of the specificity of female experience in the discussion of about the space itself that stifles progress in this conversation.

But what did this erasure entail? Vogel was willing to acknowledge that trans women (and men) were already part of the festival, and she disavowed a policy of barring or ejecting them (even though the festival had in fact done this, and not just with Burkholder), yet she refused to extend a full welcome, instead levying an accusation of discursive erasure, or perhaps betrayal, toward trans people and allies seeking full-throated inclusion.

Many trans women invested in the debate, as you might expect, did not find this cute. In the Trans Advocate, Emmagene Cronin offered a lengthy dissection of the hypocrisies and contradictions embedded in Vogel’s statement; you can read the full thing here if you like. After thoroughly breaking down Vogel’s statement point by point, Cronin offers the following:

I’m sure some of the people reading this are asking what was the purpose of writing all of that. That’s a good question, and it is one I am going to answer. For longer than I have been alive there has been a festival in Michigan that has been like no other. This festival has been revolutionary in many different ways; for better or for worse many of those reasons have helped define herstory. I would love to be able to spend time writing about it because it has been truly amazing, and it is worth writing about, but that will have to come at a later time…For 39 years the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival has turned its back on a group of its sisters – those that are trans…A countless number of narratives have been presented, in many ways much like the one above, that have been used as justify turning away some of the most marginalized women in need of support and the love that the festival has, in many ways, been known for. It has removed trans womyn from the land and abandoned us, though it claims no such thing now.

Cronin then offers Vogel a list of suggestions for how the festival might move forward if Vogel was really serious about her professed desire to mend relations with the trans community, though Cronin is thoroughly skeptical about Vogel’s sincerity. Her first suggestion is to “let us all in if you are truly unafraid, and welcome us among you.” She says that she is prepared to rally a group of 250 to 500 trans women to attend the festival, paying full price, and create workshop programming to dismantle myths about trans women. She suggests the creation of a “sanctuary” space, akin to the one that the festival offered for women of color, for cis women only, and another for trans women only, for women to retreat to from the heat of conflict, though she expects that these spaces would soon prove unnecessary. Finally, she offers to reach out to performers who had joined the boycott of the festival and rally them to make an “unforgettable return.”²

For a few years at this point, it had become clear that the wheels were coming off of MichFest’s self-definition, as was evident in Vogel’s post. The festival’s stated policy of not welcoming but not ejecting trans women, its identity as a safe haven for gender freaks but only those who were assigned female at birth: the incoherence of these stances was becoming untenable. Vogel was reduced to a position of essentially demanding that people stop scrutinizing the policy, and insisting that the continued focus on the policy was in fact anti-feminist.

This incoherence itself became a site of focus. In a 2014 Autostraddle article calling for full trans inclusion, Riese Bernard wrote of her quest to understand the current state of the festival’s policy:

Due to various linguistic run-arounds from Lisa Vogel, there was a lot of confusion about the actual status of the intention amongst outsiders — the festival volunteer who first told me about Trans Women Belong Here, who fight for inclusion “from the inside,” told me trans women were now welcome at the Festival. The full-time staffer who’d reached out to me about attending denounced the womyn-born-womyn intention, but encouraged me to attend and said Festival was home to a diversity of perspectives, including a lot of activism happening on “the inside.” Michfest supporters often talk about “fighting from the inside,” insisting that dissent is welcome on The Land and so if you really truly care about trans inclusion, you’d buy a ticket, show up, and complain about it once you get there.³

Essentially, this was a commitment to processing that had become entrenched to the point of inaction. Riese, like many others by 2014, was skeptical that anything would be accomplished this way.

In April of 2015, Vogel once again took to Facebook to announce that the gathering to take place that August, the 40th annual festival, would be the last. She wrote:

We have known in our hearts for some years that the life cycle of the Festival was coming to a time of closure. Too often in our culture, change is met only with fear, the true cycle of life is denied to avoid the grief of loss. But change is the ultimate truth of life. Sisters – I ask you to remember that our 40 year Festival has outlived nearly all of her kin. She has served us well. I want us all to have the opportunity to experience the incredible full life cycle of our beloved Festival, consciously, with time to celebrate and yes, time to grieve.

There have been struggles; there is no doubt about that. This is part of our truth, but it is not--and never has been--our defining story. The Festival has been the crucible for nearly every critical cultural and political issue the lesbian feminist community has grappled with for four decades. Those struggles have been a beautiful part of our collective strength; they have never been a weakness.

Vogel did not explicitly name trans activism in her statement, and indeed the reasons for the end of the festival were likely complex and included the fact that Vogel herself was aging and had not chosen a successor to take over. The festival had also become less and less financially tenable in recent years; its attendance had dropped from a peak of around 10,000 to around 3,000 by 2014.⁴ This drop-off was surely related to several social and cultural factors, but the issue of trans inclusion was no doubt one of the largest (if not the largest) factor, if you consider that many of the festival’s biggest acts, including the Indigo Girls, JD Samson, Lea DeLaria, Andrea Gibson, and others, had dropped out of the festival in protest of the womyn-born-womyn only policy.

In researching this article, I’ve poured over all sorts of online materials from 2014 and 2015, reflecting a wide range of responses to the end of the festival. A common thread that runs through many of them is a sense of inevitability, from those both inside and outside the MichFest sphere. The musician Jamie Anderson wrote a two-part blog post chronicling her week at the last ever MichFest, noting that she and other women she encountered at the festival “chose to live in the moment and celebrate this amazing event” rather than wallowing in sorrow that this year would be the last.⁵ Her post doesn’t mention the controversies of the last ten years, instead simply noting that Lisa Vogel “is calling it quits and after forty years, she’s due some rest.” Anderson’s MichFest is one of familiar and beloved rituals, sedimented over years: performances by her favorite musicians; distaste for the festival food; the annual “Butch Strut,” at which she applauded for her “first girlfriend, looking dapper in a tie and hat, alongside my current wife in leather chaps, a fedora and tight T-shirt.” Though Anderson is clearly sad to say goodbye to MichFest, her message is one of wistful optimism: “Every August, I’m going to do the Hokey Pokey and think about all you wonderful women. Who knows what comes next? Maybe there is no last dance.”⁶

Meanwhile, on the trans resources website and message board Susan’s Place,⁷ trans women gathered on a thread about the end of MichFest.⁸ “So their response to the withdrawing support due to trans exclusion is to stop doing the festival instead of simply including transwomen in order to get artists and supporters to come back? How petty,” wrote one user. “We have much more critical issues to deal with than a woman's music festival most of us wouldn't have attended even if we had been welcome,” another user interjected, adding that people should take at face value Vogel’s assertion that she was simply ready to retire. “I say good riddance,” wrote another user. “That stupid event and the underlying prejudice that sullies it has cost me at least one valued couple friendship over the years.”’ She explains that she didn’t begrudge her friends their decision to continue attending MichFest, but couldn’t abide the way that each year, the festival became an occasion to relitigate the rightness or wrongness of the womyn-born-womyn only policy. “it's better that it's closing tbh,” wrote yet another user. “We would never have been truly accepted since they have been battling us for so long. now we just need a new more inclusive festival to support female musicians and safe spaces for all women.”

In an op-ed for The Advocate titled “Michfest's Founder Chose to Shut Down Rather Than Change With the Times,” a cis writer named Diane Anderson-Minshall expressed despair that such a space would come to be. She recounts that a friend said to her, “‘Progress for some too quickly turns into progress for none. I look forward to an event that's welcoming of all LGBT** women, we deserve that space and we are worthy of it. Every single one of us.’" In response, Anderson-Minshall muses, “I guess the question is, Now will we get that?”⁹ Her op-ed relays both her mourning for the end of MichFest and a burning anger at Vogel for her decision to shutter rather than welcome trans women into the space, emphasizing the widespread support for trans inclusion within the lesbian community.

These responses to the end of MichFest are all fundamentally understandable to me, and they all share a common belief in the value of distinct spaces for lesbian culture and community. To me, the end of MichFest is tragic, mainly because it was a space where intergenerational connection amongst lesbians lived and thrived on a large scale. While all sorts of intergenerational queer bonds are possible in all sorts of spaces, the type of space that MichFest generated, with its distinctive culture and rituals tailor-made to generate closeness and intimacy amongst thousands of attendees, is rare, and it takes a long time to build. In 2014, Kayley Whalen, a trans woman who attended MichFest twice, reflected on the preciousness of this culture. “I had never been in another space where queer women in their 20s volunteer side-by-side with lesbians in their 70s while building a community,” she writes. ¹⁰ Children, too, were part of this intergenerational tapestry. Whalen recalls:

One of my fondest memories of MichFest was my first all-woman mosh pit. We were thrashing around to delightfully angry music in an aggressive but well-regulated fashion, much like the many women's roller derby bouts I've skated in. One woman showed up with about a dozen kids from the day care. The kids saw people crowd-surfing, and wanted in too. We organized ourselves in two lines, arms ready to receive on-coming children, and whisked them up to the front of the stage. It was crowd-surfing unlike any I've ever experienced. It was gentle, caring and punk-rock at the same time.

Still, there were limitations to these bonds. Whalen came out as trans in the Twilight Zone, the BDSM section of the festival, and was met with warmth and acceptance, but she stayed closeted during her volunteer shifts at the Womb, the festival’s medical treatment area. She was mentored there by an older volunteer who taught her about herbalism, but the older woman wore a red badge, signifying her commitment to keep trans women out of the festival. At the end of Whalen’s second festival, in 2011, she looked around at “all the red badges on display,” and she wept as she realized that she would not return to the land.

When I think about the end of MichFest, there’s one insight that I come back to again and again. It’s from a 2001 roundtable discussion titled “Please Don’t Stop the Music,” published in the queer studies journal GLQ by a group of MichFest workers, including the feminist theorist Anne Cvetkovich. She wrote:

People have the false expectation that somehow the safety of Michigan will mean that they won’t have problems. In fact, what Michigan enables is for shit to come up. For example, one of the things that happened around Camp Trans was that lesbian processing met direct action as these two progressive ways of thinking about how you make change happen.¹¹

Cvetkovich declines to make a judgment here about the relative merits of lesbian processing and direct action in this particular context, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t. The truth was, the processing really had gone on for too long.

Much as many women had hopes for MichFest to be replaced by a trans-inclusive successor, it hasn’t really. A group of women called the We Want the Land Coalition purchased the land in 2017, with the intent to create a space where various gatherings of women could occur. Among these is an annual festival called Fern Fest, billed as “a music festival for women, nonbinary and trans folks, and those that live on the spectrum of the feminine spirit,” which positions itself as a successor to MichFest (though it seems that this year Fern Fest has relocated from the land to a new venue). It’s hard and slow work, though, to build the totemic quality that MichFest held for so many women, and the lesbian feminist networks that originally built the festival no longer exist in the same way.

By 2015, the closure of the festival probably really was an inevitability, but there were many earlier moments where Vogel could have reconsidered, or released some control. We’ll never know what a trans-inclusive MichFest would have been like. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t possible.

1. Facebook post here.

2. Emmagene Cronin, “The Curious Demands Of The Womyn In The Woods: Unpacking The Statement Of The Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival,” The Trans Advocate.

3. Reise, “Michfest Could Change Its Trans Female Exclusionary Intention Only If It Tried, Only If It Wanted To,” Autostraddle, August 13, 2014.

4. Reise, “Michfest Could Change Its Trans Female Exclusionary Intention Only If It Tried, Only If It Wanted To,” Autostraddle, August 13, 2014.

5. Jamie Anderson, “The 40th Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival: Save the Last Dance for Me, part one,” August 17th, 2015.

6. Jamie Anderson, “The 40th Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival: Save the Last Dance for Me, part two,” August 17th, 2015.

7. I feel obligated to note that Susan’s Place is, like, a very old school and controversial website, but I’m not getting into it here.

8. Susan’s Place, “This Year's Michigan Womyn's Music Festival Will Be the Last,” thread started April 22nd, 2015.

9. Diane Anderson-Minshall, “Op-ed: Michfest's Founder Chose to Shut Down Rather Than Change With the Times,” The Advocate, April 24th, 2015.

10. Kayley Whalen, “A Trans Woman on Saving Michfest,” The Huffington Post, August 6th, 2014.

11. Cvetkovich, Ann, and Selena Wahng, “DON'T STOP THE MUSIC: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.” GLQ 7 (1), 2001, page 143.