|| music ||
A tale of two festivals

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and Ladyfest Midwest Chicago 
shared performers and goals but split on the issue of transgender 
participation

By Jennifer Vanasco 

The Advocate, October 9, 2001

Scene one, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival: The punk band Le Tigre, 
after rocking the night stage, dives out onto the welcome, willing 
hands of the young women below. The band is joined by women's music 
legend Cris Williamson, R&B singer Nedra Johnson, and spoken-word poet 
Alix OlsonÑand Olson's 78-year-old grandmother.

Scene two, a week later, Ladyfest Midwest Chicago: The city's 
crumbling Congress Theater opens its doors, and hipsters in carpenter 
pants and multiple piercings pour out, energized after seeing Le 
Tigre. In the street, the Radical Cheerleaders line up in formation, 
yelling, "Sound off, 1-2-3-4! Shout it out: revolution!"

So similar and yet so different, these two major women's music 
festivals with grassroots origins drew women from across the country 
to the Midwest in August. The Michigan fest, offering five days of 
music, workshops, and performances, is one of the oldest continuous 
festivals for women. It began 25 years ago when Lisa Vogel, then 19, 
and her friends decided they didn't want to drive to Boston to hear 
women play. The first festival drew 2,000, about 1,000 more than they 
expected. This year, attendance was 5,600.

"It was a pretty exciting, radical time," says Vogel, still the 
festival's producer. "Nothing like that had happened for women, for 
dykes, and the spark just took." This year's musical lineup was 
typically diverse, ranging from the dancing rhythm of Ubaka Hill's 
Drumsong Orchestra to the punk anthems of Amy Ray and the Butchies 
(who also played Ladyfest) to the sweet, soulful songs of Dar 
Williams.

On 650 acres of private woods, the Michigan festival admits "womyn-
born-womyn" onlyÑa policy that excludes male-to-female transgendered 
people and has caused controversy since its introduction in 1978. The 
restriction caused a stir again this year when singer-songwriter 
Melissa Ferrick pulled out. "I didn't know about the policy when I 
played last year," Ferrick says. "I don't believe in separatist 
communities." In response to the policy, Chicago transgender activists 
have hosted an annual protest outside the festival's gates. This year 
Camp Trans organizers held gender workshops and put on a performance 
by the Chicago Drag Kings. "We don't want to close the festival down," 
says activist Dee Michell, 19, "but there's always room for change."

Inside the festival, workshops explored the ramifications of the 
policy as lesbians' acceptance of transgendered people grows. The 
chatter from the three stages, though, generally supported the 
festival's stance. The woman-born Animal, of funk duo Bitch and 
Animal, says she made it clear that "I identify as trans, and I don't 
think it's anti-trans for creatures with cunts to get together for a 
week."

Transgendered people were explicitly welcome at Ladyfest Midwest 
Chicago, which was inspired by last year's punk festival Ladyfest in 
Olympia, Wash. The Chicago festival (dubbed "The first! And last!" in 
the program) was started by Marf Wright, 35, an employee of a small 
private foundation, who had no event planning experience. "I really 
felt like I was part of a community at OlympiaÉand I wanted to foster 
a community here that would showcase the work of women musicians and 
performers," Wright says. "At first I thought it would be pretty small 
and we'd have one or two venues. But I never, never thought it would 
get so big." With only nine months to plan, Wright and a core group of 
25 women organized more than 50 workshops, screenings of 40 films, and 
appearances by almost 100 bands spread out over 25 venues. Attendees, 
mostly in their 20s and 30s, numbered 4,000. The festival's profits 
were split between Women in the Director's Chair and the Chicago Women
's Health Center.

LMC had its share of controversy, including allegations that neither 
the committee nor the event was racially inclusive. Wright 
acknowledges that the festival wasn't perfect, adding that planners 
did the best they could within their time constraints. "They took 
culture in their hands and created something that really needed to 
happen," Le Tigre singer Kathleen Hanna says of LMC's organizers.

Wright has never been to the Michigan festival, though she hopes to go 
next year. Even so, she says, she owes the older festival a debt. "
[LMC] was primarily a response to the original Ladyfest, but there's 
no way the original LadyfestÑor any LadyfestÑwould have happened 
without Michigan," Wright says. "There's no way. It all was originally 
inspired from that."

Additional reporting by Jen Earls. Vanasco also writes for the Chicago 
Free Press and the Bay Area Reporter.