Still Here, Still Clear and Still Lesbian by Peggy A Luhrs
We share this contribution to our book Not Dead Yet in memory of Peggy A Luhrs
Proud. Out. Loud.
RIP April 1945 – February 2022
Does ‘Still Clear’ sound like bragging? It is not. I am aware of my luck. I have lost good friends and a beloved ex-partner before her 60th year to Alzheimer’s. But I want to contest all those damn commercials saying this is not your mother’s/father’s product placement here and the endless jokes about old people fumbling with technology and unreliable memories. I feel unrepresented as an old woman who uses tech with a good memory. My inner voice wells up, I’m not dead yet. I may not be as quick-witted as I was, but I have clarity; vaster and deeper from lived and examined experience.
Time passes swiftly now, yet I move slower. Peers complain I talk too fast and still play rock and roll. My orange and white espresso cup says ‘HAG’. Called an old hag on social media, I posted a picture of myself with the cup: “Yes, I am an old hag and happy to be one.” I am haggard—the archaic meaning is intractable, willful, and wanton. I am still ready to sin big, having faced down mini-inquisitions for heresy. Behind the insults we find the power of words for women. The way cunt, a word used to revile what is hated, is the root of country, cunning, and ken. I know these things in my bones now.
When did I get old? When did lesbian feminism disappear? (Or did it?) When did lesbians get expelled from the movement that starts with our letter L? L for lesbian, love, liking, labia, lovely, luscious and lustful lesbians.
This is not the old age my first lesbian lover and I thought we might live together. She says, “I am surprised you are alone.” I am a little too but also grateful. It’s been a busy life full of women, children, lesbian community and political action. Women, peace and planet have been my political obsessions. Architecture, literature, art and film are major interests.
At 69, I designed and built a passive solar studio and enjoy, when Vermont weather cooperates, a sunny solitude and the pleasure of being surrounded by my own handiwork and a myriad of books. The design process is stimulating—building is harder but I love standing on a roof, seeing the world around me from that perspective. How to lift a sheet of plywood 15 feet in the air is solved with plastic wrapped wire and two C clamps, allowing me to pull the sheet up across the roof while my assistant pushes it into place. It’s as good as reaching a mountaintop.
In my 60s, I went to the University of Vermont to get a graduate certificate in ecological design. I didn’t know I’d see so clearly the university’s role as gatekeeper for conventional and patriarchal wisdom. I made peace with my insecurity as a college drop-out. Educating myself in the deepest, broadest ways with a focus on women was a choice the academy would have curtailed, but it was the right one.
Feminists were excited to set up Women’s Studies. But the struggles the strongest women had in their respective colleges, the subsequent firings and the move to gender studies evidenced academe’s resistance to Women’s Liberation. The women writers, women’s history and other much-needed areas of study disappeared into theories that turned sex into gender and favored an anti-material analysis.
Women continue to underestimate the power and determination of male domination. I hadn’t realized that radical feminism and lesbianism were being buried as fast as Judith Butler could perform her exorcism. We blinked and Women’s Liberation and Second Wave feminists were underground and unseen. Critiques of them were taught. The groundbreaking books they wrote weren’t.
Generations of young women are unaware of what went before and on whose shoulders they stand. Being old adds another layer of disrespect. A young man at a demonstration told a woman I know that he does not speak to old people because they took everything from his generation. This passes for politics now.
I was moved by a detransitioner’s story of redemption through radical feminism and decided to teach it online. To my surprise and delight, I found someone had posted three of my cable access shows on YouTube. My work was started for me. Pandemic lockdowns closed the access studio. Encouraged to find young women anxious to learn radical feminist theory, I plan to shoot new shows from home.
What lesbian feminists built had never existed before. No one but the participants know the power of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The US Army asked to observe how this venue for 4000 to 14,000 women was able to be built anew in two weeks. Every year.
We built rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters with nothing but a fierce determination to address violence against women. Then men who claimed to be women began to co-opt our organizations and institutions. There are no hate crime laws for us to use, but our imitators apply theirs to silence us and shut our spaces.
We built Michfest for us, for the joy of sharing women’s music and to see who we are in an all-women world. Separatist space is a visceral demonstration of how different the world could be. It was jolting to leave the land and go back into malestream culture. When that space was gone, I joined Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. The first year the biannual conference was wonderful but the next one was split, as many groups have been, by disputes over admitting men who claim to be women.
Patriarchy became trickier in order to beat us. It’s axiomatic that oppressive systems find ways to get people to collude in their own oppression. Men are trying the “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em strategy” coupled with trying to control our speech and space. With no idea about women but stale stereotypes, they get it completely wrong. Yet many young women support them and attack old women. And misogynist male violence is quick to flare should you dare to question the mantra of ‘transwomen are women’.
Is it time to pass the torch? At what age might I be unable to be a lesbian feminist?
Research on longevity, on places where people live longest, shows that one consistent thread is storytelling by elders to a community eager to hear them. Our culture severs those threads and encourages intergenerational conflict. Divide and conquer. This generation purports to honor Indigenous people, but has little knowledge of their cultures. Indigenous peoples honor their elders.
What passes for feminism at present is a counter insurgency devoted to men’s desires. Disheartening barely describes my feeling watching young women support the worst ways men want to use women to validate their assumed womanhood, as ‘surrogate’ mothers for their children and of course as sexual objects and in prostitution. It is feMENism. radical feminists are called TErFs and SWErFs, and old women dinosaurs, while transactivists exclude us from Dyke marches and Pride centers.
I am not dead yet nor likely to conform, as an old woman, to taking a back seat and quieting down. Not when there is such a vicious war on women on all fronts including this delusional ideology. “Biology is transphobic” they say, in an attempt to take even basic knowledge from us.
Learning of the vicious murder of two lesbians and their son by a male Michfest CampTrans protest participant, I knew I had to speak out. I am retired with no job to lose. I am used to being outside the mainstream, but it does sting when friends create distance.
I used the educational time at a Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) meeting to explain the conflicts between trans demands and women’s rights. I’d missed the memo that debate is hate. A discussion ensued with as many opinions on the subject as women present. We had been told we could not speak on this topic at the Peace and Justice Center (PJC). We were paid members who found it hard to take seriously this suppression of free speech.
Months later, one of our group was honored by the PJC. I arrived at the venue to be confronted by three police cars summoned by the PJC in a stunning display of non-violent communication. People I had known for years blocked my entrance on the orders of the director. She claimed one of the PJC staff felt unsafe. “By my mere presence?” I asked. “Yes.” My being was too scary for this person so my rights were violated and an ersatz peace center called militarized police to be sure no transperson would faint at the sight of me. All but two of the WILPF members walked out with me. A month later, the PJC tossed WILPF out of the center along with their membership but kept the dues.
Why did an umbrella peace organization call the police to keep me from celebrating a WILPF colleague? Was the left as authoritarian as a fundamentalist group? Subsequent events proved that it was. When members of the City Council learned of a planned meeting of Gender Critical Vermont they denounced us at their meeting as a hate group—with zero evidence of hate beyond dissent from, the now mob-enforced, gender identity orthodoxy.
It seemed a good time to get out of the country. In London I hoped to meet the women taking on this cultural appropriation. I did. It was exhilarating meeting women warriors against the new gender ID law. They were fierce, funny and clear-sighted and working hard to preserve our spaces. I am grateful to Venice Allan for suggesting I come sooner than planned, to be there for International Women’s Day, though neither of us could have known that window would soon close.
I met Venice, Katy, and Kara and Marcia for brunch. Kara, an attorney, warned about the Equality Act in the US and the damage it would do to women’s rights if passed. Then we marched through London with booming drums and women in colorful costumes. Many of us were gray-haired. Next day it was Women Speakout at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. I gave a short speech in this historic spot. These events were followed by quite a lot of singing, with alternative lyrics provided by Julia, in a nearby pub.
Midway through my London stay, headlines on papers hawked at tube stations got ever more frenzied about this mysterious new Coronavirus. My return was booked for March 17th, 2020. I heard the US was closing airports to travel but my flight was still on schedule. I arrived at JFK airport where temperatures were taken as we entered.
I planned to return to my senior strength class, pleased to be in great shape after walking five miles a day in London. I planned to go further with the Gender Critical Vermont group that we had debuted in February. Like everyone’s plans for 2020, mine were derailed by the imminent lockdown.
Now I attend, via Zoom, Feminist Question Time sponsored by the Women’s Human rights Campaign (WHrC) who authored the Women’s Human rights Declaration. Women from all over the world report on women’s status in their countries. Sadly, lesbians are being gaslighted worldwide into transitioning by the worst conversion therapy ever. WHrC sessions are well-attended. We are regrouping. We will not be cowed by the men who want subvert our language and deny our biology, or women who break our hearts by supporting them.
I go back to lesbian feminism. To leaving patriarchy and founding our own spaces even as we must fight like hell for them. Lesbian feminism drew women because it offered a female-centered sexuality. It offered freedom from prescribed roles, deep companionship and fun. Waves of women came out after Holly Near or Cris Williamson concerts. I remember Ova singing about the women who abseiled into the House of Commons in London, the stunning beauty of black women singing and dancing Amazon Women Rise and a fire-tipped arrow shot over a huge crowd of women setting ablaze its target, leaving us all in awe and awakening us to remember ourselves and our ancient and future power.
That is the torch I want to pass on.
Photo credit: Holly Taylor
RIP Peggy
