XX Marks the Spot 
In the Michigan Woods, Thousands Camp Out to Celebrate the Joy of 
Being Women 

By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 16, 2001; Page C01 

HART, Mich.

At some point along the way, if you're a first-timer at the Michigan 
Womyn's Music Festival, you will find yourself shaking your head -- 
hard -- snapping it back and forth, back and forth, as you think, 
Whoa.

Too much.

Not as in too much of a good thing, necessarily, or too much of a bad 
thing, either. But too much, as in major sensory overload from this 
giddy concoction of music, community and politics, a week-long outdoor 
paean to all things female.

No men. At all. Best to leave those Dave Matthews CDs at home. Here 
you'll hear only women's voices, see only women's faces. (Women's 
bodies, too. More of them, perhaps, than you'd ever care to see.) And 
if you get lost trying to find the festival, wandering hopelessly 
through a Blair Witchian maze of unpaved roads and tangled trees, 
well, that's exactly the point. 

The harder it is to find "The Land," the safer you'll be once you 
arrive, as festival planners will tell you. Here, safe is a mantra.

Safe from violence. Safe from outsiders. Safe from judgments.

Safety is essential, of course, but there's no way to protect the 
newcomer from feeling overwhelmed. Because at first it is indeed a lot 
to take in, 650 acres of too much: The sharp kick to the nose zinging 
off the 259 "port-a-janes" in triple-digit heat, the nude mud 
wrestlers, the tractor-driving bearded ladies, the S&M chicks, the 
earth mamas, the baby-faced riot grrrls flirting, the naked giggling 
toddlers, the primal screams ricocheting through the trees, the order 
and chaos that come only from 5,600 womyn -- women with a "y" -- 
jamming, fists raised, bodies pumping, to the rhythm of their own 
drums.

Did we mention that they've got a lot of drums here?

For 26 years, drumbeats have served as the soundtrack of this 
festival, ever since Lisa Vogel, then a young college student at 
Central Michigan University, drunk on the women's movement, decided 
with a few friends that, yeah, they could build an all-women's 
festival. Why not? She just didn't expect thousands to show up the 
very first time.

They're still showing up, nearly 6,000 every year, according to 
festival organizers, in what has become the big enchilada of outdoor 
events for women only. Every August, women swarm this woody patch of 
land in western Michigan, pitching tents, parking the RVs, drumming 
around campfires. It happened last week. It will happen again next 
year for a few days, same time.

No wonder they've dubbed this the "female Brigadoon."

It's called a music festival, and music is indeed ever present, from 
the ubiquitous congas to the folkie guitars to the punk electronica of 
the mosh pits. But most come for much more: a utopian vision of what 
the world would look like if women, certain women, ruled the world. 
Straight women are welcome, but festival officials make no apologies 
for what many call the "lesbian mecca." This is a place for women who 
love women.

It is said, in festival literature, that the sheer force of so much 
female energy ignites a hormonal conflagration potent enough to bring 
on a collective menstrual cycle for most of the festival attendees.

Interesting things happen when you bring so many women together.

This Is Womyn's Work

This is a woman's world. This is my world.

-- Neneh Cherry, "Woman"



One thing that happens here is organization. Each year a crew of 
nearly 600 women hooks up the plumbing in the outdoor showers, builds 
the stages, books the talent, ferries campers from one edge of the 
festival to the other, works security, does child care, orients 
"festie virgins," conducts workshops and cooks enough vegetarian fare 
(and nothing but) for thousands of women and children.

Some of the workers are paid but most are volunteers. Anyone attending 
the festival is expected to contribute eight hours of labor in 
addition to the $380 entrance fee, good for six days. Festies bring 
their own camping gear and a willingness to rough it: cell phones 
don't work on "The Land."

After the last drum has been pounded, the last guitar put away, the 
crews retrace their steps, ripping up their handiwork, burying all 
pipes and electrical lines, replanting grass where the earth was 
trampled by one Birkenstock-clad foot too many, erasing every trace of 
their presence, as if some giant celestial finger hit "rewind." (The 
land is owned by festival director Vogel, who pays herself a salary 
from the festival proceeds.)

"The first time I came here," says LaVonne Mangin, a 38-year-old 
mother of three and graduate student from Iowa City, "it was 
absolutely, completely overwhelming. I couldn't believe something like 
this existed on earth. I was amazed. Everything was done by women. The 
tractor drivers were women!

"This is why I bring my daughters here, gay or straight. They come 
away with, 'I can be anything.' "

Exposed to All

Oh, I'm not that petty. As cool as I am, I thought you'd know this 
already, I will not be afraid of women, I will not be afraid of women.

-- Dar Williams, performing

"As Cool As I Am" at the festival

Flesh, female flesh, is queen here. Bare breasts are everywhere, 
sometimes pierced, sometimes tattooed, pendulous or perky, and almost 
always sunburned.

Some women have only one breast to display, a jagged scar giving mute 
testimony to their courage.

On "The Land," outside notions of womanhood are gender-bent into 
oblivion. There is the butch bodybuilder, her thighs and shoulders 
tautly muscled ebony, who sports a cowboy hat and a lacy black bra. 
There are the seriously hirsute who refuse to pluck, shave or wax, and 
there are the gamins who shave everything, choosing instead to cover 
themselves with piercings and paint.

There's the barrel-chested one, all crew-cut, sideburns and swagger. 
And then there is the coquette, all blond hair and see-through micro 
mini, sashaying through the campgrounds, navigating the rocky dirt 
paths in six-inch platform heels.

In the mornings and at dusk, naked bodies, queueing up for the outdoor 
showers, offer an eerie tableau.

Two lines form: A long line of those waiting for the warm shower, and 
a much shorter one for the cold.

A stocky woman points at the shorter line.

"If you were a real lesbian," she tells her companion, "you'd be in 
that line."

Neither woman moves.

Whych Womyn?

I'll birth myself towards resistance . . . on my own time foremothers 
at my sides, sisters as midwives."

-- Slam poet Alix Olson, performing

"Daughter" at the festival



Politics informs everything here, served up with a degree of 
earnestness not normally found in this era of post-feminism. Sick 
festival attendees are nurtured in "The Womb," festival-speak for the 
medical tent. Outside the Womyn of Color tent, there is a smaller tent 
where non-women-of-color can learn about eradicating racism, whether 
in themselves or in others. And in the mini-mall featuring women-made 
crafts, you can pose for a "breast portrait" by a festival artist 
(priced on a sliding scale based on income, not size).

There is a campsite for virtually every persuasion: the clean and 
sober, the fragrance-averse "chem-free" folks, the over-50s, the 
disabled, the RV crowd and the infamous "Twilight Zone," for the "loud 
and rowdy."

This we-are-the-world approach has earned festival organizers a 
certain amount of mockery in lesbian circles.

"The first time I came here, my [lover] and I left early," says Mary 
Boyle, a 40-year-old Chicago police officer who has been coming to the 
festival since 1992. "There was a lot more radical feminism. Too many 
lesbians! There were so many rules. It was like, 'Okay, we need boy 
energy. We're outta here.' "

Says Vogel: "The typical parody of the festival is the granola-eating, 
Birkenstock-wearing, politically correct lesbian feminist. That's just 
a weird stereotype. Once you've been around 26 years, and you make 
decisions based on your politics, that makes you seemingly square. But 
we make decisions based on how people should take care of each other."

And so, in the process of figuring out how to take care of each other, 
there are controversies both large and small: Should the festival sell 
junk food? Should women be allowed to bring their young sons? Is it 
appropriate to sell S&M paraphernalia at an event that takes a stand 
against violence? How do you define what a woman is, anyway? Does a 
women's festival allow room for the transgendered, particularly women 
who used to be men?

The disputes got particularly heated in 1999, when two festival 
attendees, transsexuals in varying stages of pre- and post-op, whipped 
off their clothes in the showers to reveal . . . penises. This was a 
highly unpopular move.

Organizers then reiterated that the festival was open only to "womyn 
born womyn," and children. (Boys older than 5 are not permitted in 
most of the grounds, but are sent to "Brother/Son Camp," in a remote 
section of the festival.)

Members of the transgender community, who five years earlier had set 
up an alternative event across the street from the festival, pitched 
their tents again in protest, and called it "Camp Trans."

The Disinvited

The boy he thinks I'm damaged goods. . . . I dress like him, I take 
him down . . . He gets embarrassed when his friends come around. . . . 
I'm crossing over what you know. Is it the boy you need in me, or the 
girl that you could be?

-- Festival performers Amy Ray & the Butchies,

"The Measure of Me"



Things at Camp Trans are considerably more rustic than the 
accommodations at the festival. A handmade sign reads "Dogs & Bruce 
Springsteen tapes welcome." The ripe aroma of days-old sweat hovers.

At headquarters, a boombox blasts tunes. Here there are no long lines 
as festies queue up outside the "Kitchen" tent for their meals. Chow 
is there for anyone to grab: scones, doughnuts and gallon jugs of milk 
laid out on a tarp on the ground.

With a name like Camp Trans, you expect to see, well, transsexuals. 
But the campers here are mostly baby-faced girls who want to be boys.

Except it's not quite that simple.

There is Dylan, a University of Massachusetts student sporting a 
"Transsexual Menace" T-shirt and a backward baseball cap. He has, as 
he puts it, "dyke heritage." Now he identifies as "gender queer," 
which is to say, he identifies as a guy, even though he's a biological 
female. In any case, he prefers not to be put in any gender box. There 
is another who calls himself J.J. Bitch; Ryan, the Smith College 
student who found it painful to come out as a "male" at an all-women's 
school; and a young Texas writer with a tall, rangy frame and ponytail 
peeking out from under her kerchief who says her biological status is 
"irrelevant."

Their leader is Simon Fisher, a 22-year-old woman who's a self-
proclaimed "tranny guy" with a row of hickeys decorating his neck. 
Camp Trans, he (Fisher prefers the masculine pronoun) says, has no 
particular mission statement. They're planning to hold a vigil for 
transgendered people who've been murdered, but that's about it. "We're 
just offering people a chance to chill," he says. "We're not trying to 
hide anything. We're glad [festival organizers] know we're here."

Vogel says Camp Trans members who are born women are welcome to attend 
if they have a ticket. 

In many ways this quarrel seems more like a case of generation gap: 
Establishment vs. Young Upstarts. (And indeed, word is that one of the 
festival security workers was alarmed to see that some of the Camp 
Trans campers were her high school students.) The irony is that the 
festival started as a refuge from the Establishment, an up-yours to 
the older generation that Just Didn't Get It. Time changes everything. 
Now it's their turn to be flipped off.

As a "woman born woman," Fisher, a Chicago labor activist, says he 
could easily fit in at the Festival. But he doesn't want to. The 
festival's policy, he says, excludes people whose sexual identities 
are elusive.

"Why do there have to be gender police at the gates?" he asks. 
"They're using biology to determine safety. That's inane, the whole 
separatist logic, 'As long as you [men] stay over there, I'm safe.' "

The Outside Looking In

Welcome, Womyn

-- A sign at the local gas station



This summer, for festival organizers, the heat is coming from the 
other side of the divide: conservative organizations that see the 
festival as anything but Establishment.

Late last year, two such groups, the American Family Association of 
Michigan and the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights, 
charged that children attending the festival were vulnerable to sexual 
abuse because they were exposed to "open displays of homosexual 
behavior" and sadomasochism. 

Gary Glenn, president of AFA of Michigan, bases his accusations on 
what he calls "eyewitness testimony": message-board postings from the 
festival Web site.

Nonsense, says Vogel: "That's completely fabricated. The message 
boards are not eyewitness testimony, that's Internet babble. It's an 
age-old, unfortunately, right-wing obsession to make allegations of 
child sexual abuse because they can't be [disproved]. The dirty mind 
lives in Gary Glenn, not with anyone over here."

Naturally, Glenn sees things differently.

"Homosexual behavior is medically documented to be associated with 
dramatically higher risks of domestic violence, mental illness and 
life-threatening illness and even premature death," says Glenn.

He presented his claims to the local police, blanketing local media 
and law enforcement officials with an e-mail campaign. Glenn says law 
enforcement officials promised him they'd be on "high alert" at this 
year's festival. 

Local police, however, say otherwise: According to the Michigan 
attorney general's office and the Oceana County Sheriff's Department, 
there is no evidence of any abuse, nor have any victims come forward 
to substantiate the charges. 

"We get all these allegations of wild and crazy things going on," says 
State Police 1st Lt. David Roesler, "but we didn't have anyone coming 
forward. We can't work on anonymous allegations."

According to the conservative Cybercast News Service, the 
International Organization of Heterosexual Rights said it would 
infiltrate the campground with "conservative, heterosexual women" 
working undercover and taking photographs to document the alleged 
abuses. (The group did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Some festival-goers made cracks about the idea of a spy in their 
midst. Others didn't find it funny.

"The next camera I see," one festival-goer told a Washington Post 
photographer, "I'm going to smash."

Lip Service

I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet. She was just like kissing me. I 
kissed a girl, won't change the world. But I'm so glad I kissed a girl 
. . . And I hope I do it again, THIS WEEKEND!!!!

-- Jill Sobule, performing her hit

"I Kissed a Girl" at the festival



There are workshops for everything. You can learn to drum, to write 
memoirs, to nurture your relationships, to adopt, to get pregnant 
lesbian-style, to reclaim your sacred sexuality through clay pottery, 
to meditate, to make your own reusable menstrual pads, to decorate by 
using principles of feng shui, to juggle, to walk on stilts, to raise 
healthy non-sexist boys, to care for aging parents, to "grow young 
with faerie," to make a plaster cast of your breasts.

One of the most popular workshops was a workshop called "Kissing: The 
Oral Majority."

In a sun-dappled clearing dozens of women sat, coupled off, kissing, 
nuzzling and following the instructor, a fortyish woman with a swath 
of brunet hair that swept across her bikini top.

"Kissing is how we introduce ourselves erotically," the teacher said. 
"Ever been hot for someone and you kiss them and it totally wasn't 
working for you?"

Yes indeedy, the congregants say.

"Then it behooves us to be good at this."

Giggles all around, and then silence as they commence to practicing.

Suddenly, the silence is pierced by screams emanating from an unseen 
part of the forest.

The shrieks start, stop, start, stop.

What was that?

One of the onlookers shrugs.

"Some primal-workshop thing."

Splashdown

I wanna spread my dementia, I wanna knock it off the line.

-- Festival performers Le Tigre, "Let's Run"

Thunder and lightning rip through the campground, bringing curtains of 
rain that flood the roads.

Waterlogged souls duck for cover, hiding in tents. Others, stripping 
to bare skin, romp in the downpour. As the rain slows to a whisper, 
some start a game of volleyball, others a fierce round of touch 
football.

It's after 8, but it's still light out, that kind of evening light 
that infuses everything with a blurry golden glow.

Over an extra-large muddy puddle, shrieks of joy fill the air as women 
and children chase each other, slipping and falling and making a 
glorious mess of everything in a chaotic game of tag. 

The kids move out and the night moves on. By now, the mud puddle is 
more mud than puddle, and the game of tag morphs into mud wrestling. 
Women throw each other into the earth, laughing and laughing and 
laughing.

The heat spell has broken, and as the temperature drops, spirits soar.

The mud pit is now a mosh pit. Dozens of women, looking like dirt 
devils, jump up and down, up and down in the rain.

ý 2001 The Washington Post Company